Newsom? Oldsom, more like

 um, Joanna, I think you have some 'splainin' to do. 

Resemblance especially apparent with this first track on the LP, "The Squirrel Is A Funny Thing"

Sitting in on the sessions for this 1978 Dorothy Carter album was the experimental musician and instrument-builder Robert Rutman, also known as U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble

Some of the spidery metallic shimmers produced by the weave of her dulcimer and psaltery with his  contraptions remind me a tiny bit of A.R. Kane's "The Sun Falls Into the Sea"

This interface between experimental music and an interest in pre-modern music, folk, traditional music, Early Music etc is a syndrome worth pondering...

See Folkways's unexpected line in tape music and electronic composition (which I wrote about here) or Laurie Spiegel's doubled interest in Appalachian shape-note music and computer music. There's many more examples. 

Possibly something to do with an antipathy to the present? Delving deep into the past, plunging into the future = ways of getting away from NOW. 

Both involve an exoticism of time...  distance of either kind entails an imaginative projection which distances oneself from the contemporary... the ghostly lost and the unimaginable unknown-to-come beckon, their allure luring you from the topical, the mere here-and-now

I suppose it's no different from the way that aged 9, I wanted to be an archaeologist, but within a few years I was obsessed with science fiction

Or equally, being a music writer who bangs on about DA PHUTURE endlessly, while also feeling the romance of the olden days (reviewing reissues, profiling legendary cult bands from yesteryear, writing history books). 

postscript: somehow escaped my notice, this snippet via Wiki! Not so obscure a figure as I'd thought

In the 1990s Carter returned to London and founded the all-female revival group Mediæval Bæbes with Katherine Blake of Miranda Sex Garden. The group's 1997 debut album, Salva Nos reached #2 on the classical music charts.

More on Mediæval Bæbes!

As of 2010, the group had sold some 500,000 records worldwide, their most successful being Worldes Blysse with 250,000 copies purchased....

 Undrentide, (co-produced by John Cale)...

Each album features traditional medieval songs and poetry set to music, mostly arranged by Blake specifically for the ensemble, alongside varying numbers of original compositions. They sing in a variety of languages, including Latin, Middle English, French, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Scottish English, German, Manx Gaelic, Spanish, Welsh, Bavarian, Provençal, Irish, modern English and Cornish. Their vocals are backed by medieval instruments, including the recorder and cittern, played by the singers or fellow musicians.

The Bæbes' musical pieces run the gamut from extremely traditional, such as their version of the "Coventry Carol" on Salva Nos, to songs that feel traditional but are much more modern, such as their rendition of "Summerisle", a song written for Robin Hardy's 1973 cult film, The Wicker Man. John Cale added non-medieval instruments, including saxophone and electric guitar, to some of the arrangements on Undrentide, although with subsequent albums the band returned to more traditional instruments. 

In 2005, the Bæbes contributed Mediæval Bæbes music to the soundtrack of the BBC period drama The Virgin Queen, which portrays the life of Elizabeth I of England, including the title music, which is a poem written by Elizabeth set to music by Blake.

.... In 2023, the Baebes collaborated with Orbital on the latter's single "Ringa Ringa", a version of the children's rhyme "Ring a Ring o' Roses" referencing the COVID pandemic. The song appeared on Orbital's album Optical Delusion which released February 17, 2023

Dorothy on lead vocals on this track from Worldes Blysse

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The other Bono

You used to see this chap's books a lot in the 1970s  - Edward de Bono

Pioneer of what would be later called "thinking outside the box" but what he dubbed "lateral thinking".

This was the big one:

But he milked the idea over the course of God knows how many books - below is just a small sampling. 

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He even branched out into illustrated children's books (at least that's what I think this is)

Actually, it's not quite a children's book as in a book written for children - it's a book created by children: 

"Children aged four to fourteen were asked to design.a dog exercising machine. This unique book is the result: a collection of extraordinary and wonderful designs incorporating every inconceivable device--from a special vibrating loop to exercise the tail to a twenty-foot electric bone." 

Damn, now I wish I'd picked up the copy of the edition above I saw in the Berkhamsted branch of Oxfam. 

This Penguin incarnation also attractive.

In fact de Bono wrote 85 books, translated into over forty languages - and he carried on doggedly churning them out into the 1980s and beyond, almost right up to his death in 2021. Not all of them about lateral thinking, but the majority in the vicinity of that idea. 

I vaguely associate de Bono with a genre of popular non-fiction that I'm rather wistfully fond of - the social malaise identifying paperback blockbuster  (The Organisation Man, The Hidden Persuaders, Future Shock et al). The middlebrow discussion point and bone of contention, thousands of copies of which lurk yellowing and forgotten in middle class basements across the world, or go cheap in charity shops. Sometimes I think of taking in these orphaned best-sellers of yesteryears with their obsolete overviews and diagnostic prescriptions for reform and giving them some kind of home. (There's an upper middlebrow left-leaning / progressive intelligentsia equivalent - Neither Jesus Nor Marx, the Marcuse books, Erich Fromm, The Female Eunuch, etc etc - collecting these also appeals).

But probably this is a mis-categorisation, as the lateral thinking books - while designed to work against sclerotic habits of mind and inertial procedures within institutions - should really be filed alongside self-help literature, motivational books, positive thinking etc. Or business world texts that facilitate problem solving, conflict management, negotiation, etc. 

 For all the technocratic sheen of the presentation (mind-as-mechanism, potentially superlubed and turbocharged) it's not far off those ads you used to see in the newspapers talking about how to boost your memory or techniques for speed-reading. The pitch is "here's One Thing, easily learned, that's going to totally transform your life, increase your productivity, make ambitions achievable".

The emphasis on non-linear thinking, and the polemic against rigidities of all kinds conceivably makes Bono-ism a bit like a managerialist, non-utopian counterpart to the flux and mutability anarcho-politics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Sidestepping the step-by-step deductive thinking of what de Bono called "vertical logic" - that sounds akin to the D&G opposition of the rhizomatic versus the arborescent. 

Fun fact - de Bono was a famous Maltese-r

Bizzare sense of humour

 

There's a good - if fearfully obscure, minority-interest - joke craftily secreted in this Stewart Lee Observer column about the death spiraling Tory government. 

See if you can spot it in this zoom to the relevant paragraphs

It must have tickled him no end to work that into the piece! I picture Stuey sniggering and spluttering to himself periodically, for days after, mystifying his companions. 

What? You don't know what I'm talking about?

Well, it's a reference to this, of course. 

Pretend you don't Nomi

 

Saw this in a second-hand record shop in London and was struck by the Nomi-ness - The Manhattan Transfer's 1979 album Extensions. 

It's also very New Wave graphic design with its angular blocs of primary color. Shades too, on the back cover, of Kraftwerk's Man Machine.

In 1979 Klaus Nomi  - although a couple of years away from releasing his debut album - was active on the Manhattan downtown scene. And at some point during that year Nomi appeared on Saturday Night Live with David Bowie alongside Joey Arias, another downtown performer type. 

Still, this would be a somewhat recherche thing to be ripping off by a group as nostalgia-oriented as the Manhattan Transfer. 

Presumably the idea came from the designer and the Transfer went along with it, perhaps hoping for access to the New Wave market. 

The team behind the design, costuming and photography is quite stellar:

Art Direction and Design – Tako Ono

Front Cover Illustration – Pater Sato

Back Cover Photo – Matthew Rolston

Costume Design – Jean-Paul Gaultier

Hair – Pascal

Make-Up – Koelle

From the Manhattan Transfer website: 

Visually, the group wore futuristic costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier that gave them a distinctive look onstage (as well as on the back of the album cover.) The audiences loved it, and the album tour was widely successful at home and especially in Europe.

Here's the group looking back to hooking up with Gaultier

And here's a video for the lead single off the album, which is techno-jazz-disco - vaguely pointing towards the likes of Landscape.  Very retro-future - harking back to The Twilight Zone. 

The ultra-crisp smoooov sound and retro-jazz melody also remind me a bit of Donald Fagen's The Nightfly - which came out several years later. Even the thematic (The Twilight Zone - end of '50s, early Sixties - sci-fi, the New Frontier) is Nightfly-esque. 

Of course the big tune off Extensions was the Transfer's cover of Weather Report's "Birdland" (with lyrics by John Hendricks added to their version).

 A back-to-the-source / forward-to-the-future homage to the foundational bebop club.

5,000 light years from Birdland

But I'm still preachin' the rhythm

Long-gone, uptight years from Birdland

An' I'm still teachin' it with 'em

Years from the land of the Bird

An' I am still feelin' the spirit

5,000 light years from Birdland

But I know people can hear it

Bird named it, Bird made it, Bird heard it, then played it

Well-stated! Birdland--

It happened down in Birdland

In the middle of that hub

I remember one jazz club

Where we went to pat feet

Down on fifty-secon' street

Everybody heard that word

That they named it after Bird

Where the rhythm swooped and swirled

The jazz corner of the world

An' the cats they gigged in there

Were beyond compare

Down them stairs, lose them cares - where?

Down in Birdland

Total swing, bop was king - there

Down in Birdland

Bird would cook, Max would look - where?

Down in Birdland

Miles came through, 'Trane came too - there

Down in Birdland

Basie blew, Blakey too - where?

Down in Birdland

Cannonball played that hall - there

Down in Birdland

Yeah---

There may never be nothin' such as that

No Mo' - No Mo'

Down in Birdland, that's where it was at

I know - I know

Back in them days bop was ridin' high

Hello! 'n goodbye!

How well those cats remember

Their first Birdland gig

To play in Birdland is an honor we still dig

Yeah---that club was like--

In another world, sure enough--

Yeah, baby

All o' the cats had the cookin' on

People just sat an' they was steady lookin' on

Then Bird--he came 'n spread the word--

Birdland

Yes, indeed, he did

Yes, indeed, he did

Yes, indeed, he did

Yes, he did, Parker played at Birdland

Yes, he really did

Yes, indeed, he really did

Yes, he really did

Told the truth down in Birdland

Yes, indeed he did, Yardbird Parker played in

Birdland

Everybody dug that beat

Everybody stomped their feet

Everybody digs be-bop

An' they'll never stop

Down them stairs, lose them cares - yeah!

Down in Birdland

Total swing! bop was king - yeah!

Down in Birdland

Bird would cook, Max would look - yeah

Down in Birdland

Miles came through, 'Trane came too - yeah!

Down in Birdland

Basie blew, Blakey too - yeah!

Down in Birdland

Cannonball played that hall - yeah

Down in Birdland

Most U.K. people of a certain vintage associate Manhattan Transfer with this atrocity, which was number one and whose chart run felt like an eternity

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Rock 'n ' Ravel

Beggars belief that this was considered a giant leap for rock guitarism. 

 When Bo Derek's character in 10 avers that Ravel's  Boléro was the most erotic piece of music ever, I don't think she had this Prince Buster rip off "Wreck A Pum Pum" in mind. Quite astonishingly raunchy and graphic for 1968.

Whereas Tomita's treatment is subdued and almost sedate 

Mostly though it's proggers and then metalloids who've taken it up

Crikey - well I guess Jim Lea had proggoid potential, having been in jazz youth orchestras and such 

A very early 'rock' version

There's a guide for anything and everything on YouTube!

Well, obviously this below is by infinite distance the best use of That Rhythm: 

Then again, the video claims that "School's Out" by Alice Cooper  is a Boléro 

It seems to pop up quite often as a momentary passage - like the middle-eight or the bridge bit - an intensification of rhythm... bammity-bammity

The idea that the Ravel piece is about sex is not an invention of Bo's character in 10 

postscript: 

Ed in comments points out that Buster's "Wreck A Pum Pum" is a rip-off of "Little Drummer Boy" rather than "Bolero". Which plain fact (the paruppa pum pum bit!) eluded me somehow! On the other hand, the two tunes / rhythms have a proximity such that people have combined them 

Indeed a webzine tracking all the versions of  "Carol of the Drum" aka "Little Drummer Boy" (there are many, many - and this list doesn't even include the Pentatonix take) says this:

"Written already in 1941, loosely based on a Czech fairytale. In one of Martin Luther's christmas carols, children play as little drummer boys near newborn Jesus. The tune is related to Spanish song Tamborilero and to French song Le Jongleur (Middle Ages), it also somewhat reminds Ravel's Bolero (1928)."

Here's a female answer song / counter-cover of the Prince Buster tune - the lyrics are just as raunchy - slackness before slackness

Never heard the Trapp Family Singers

I always wonder if Bing respected Bowie as a singer, or just did this because the bookers on his show thought it would be a "with it" move. I think they sound just wunnerful together. Bowie is clearly chuffed at ascension into the Showbiz Pantheonic Heights (much like he was mega-chuffed round about this time when he signed on to do Just A Gigolo, thinking that he'd be acting face to face with Marlene Dietrich)

If ears could puke... 

Scritfolks Door (RIP RM)

When I was first rediscovering postpunk and feeling inklings of a book-to-come, back at the start of the 2000s, I came across this really intriguing piece on Scritti Politti and The Desperate Bicycles. Written by a bloke called Richard Mason, whose name rang a vague bell, and published at Jason Gross's webzine Perfect Sound Forever. 

What particularly snagged my fascination was a single sentence in a paragraph about discernible pre-punk influences on the early Scritti sound: 

... the guitar on both "Skank bloc bologna" and "Is and ought the Western world" reeks of Martin Carthy's electric playing on the early Steeleye Span records. 

This blew my mind - I had no idea that folk-rock and traditional English music was part of Green & Co's DNA. 

So I went out in search of Steeleye Span, buying a bunch of their 1970s LPs (going pretty cheap - the records had been widely available major label releases in America) before finding one that had Martin Carthy on it: Please To See The King. And sure enough, on the very first track "The Blacksmith", the timbre and tonality of Carthy's guitar (playing electric rather than his usual acoustic, but playing in a totally non-rock way) is uncannily close to Green's up-spiralling runs on "Skank Bloc Bologna". 

"The Blacksmith" became a favorite song, as much for Maddy Prior's plangent vocal and the heart-breaking tale of true love betrayed, as for McCarthy's crystal contributions. I would play it often around the kids as they grew up, vaguely hoping that its immemorial sorrow might harrow their little hearts and reawaken some kind of  latent dormant Englishness. Alas, no...

Then researching Rip It Up and also interviewing Green for the Early compilation in 2005, I pieced together the story of Gartside the young folkie....  He told me about how prior to punk he had learned to play a few jigs and reels and Morris dances on guitar...  Elsewhere he has described himself as a Martin Carthy stalker -  going to gig after gig, trying to discover the secret of the guitarist's unusual tunings. In this Peter Paphides interview with Green, there's a story about Carthy kindly going "out of his way, on occasion, to drive his teenage fan home." Legend has it that Green used to do Morris dancing and still had bells on his ankles when he went to see the Sex Pistols in Leeds on that fateful Anarchy Tour  night  - the Damascene moment that led to the formation of the group known first as The Against (how punky!) and then, swiftly renamed, Scritti Politti. 

                                                    Morris Dance supergroup led by ex-Steeleye Ashley Hutchings.

                                                                    New York Times 2023 article on a hipsterized revival of Morris Dancing!

Clearly the enthusiasm for the music and the years of listening to it, along with all the Canterbury scene stuff, infused Scritti's sound. For instance, I noticed that a track on the Peel Sessions EP,  "Scritlocks Doors" is very close melodically to "Lucy Wan", a traditional ballad Carthy reinterpreted on Byker's Hill.  

But while he talks about it happily now, during the postpunk era and on into the New Pop phase, Green never mentioned the folk thing in interviews. 

I guess folk rock would have been completely unfashionable then. Indeed, it would never have occurred to me, someone getting into music from about '78 onwards, to check out Fairport Convention or anything of that ilk. "Folk" - you would just picture beards and whittling and real ale and a finger in one ear. Bands with names like Hedgehog Pie. 

Yet clearly it had been a thinking young person's, a serious young person's, option in the first half of the 70s. All kinds of people-you-wouldn't-suspect had a folk past - Squeeze, Robin Scott (as in McLaren's friend and the guy behind M / "Pop Muzik").   Having once been into traditional music wouldn't seem to sit well with Green's Eighties ideas about music,  but in terms of an intellectual / political evolution, it actually makes sense: start with a somewhat crude Communist cluster of associations and equations  ("the people's music" / protest / authenticity / anti-commercialism), then go into the more complicated Gramscian Marxism phase of demystification,  and then from that into the confounding convolutions and undoings of deconstruction. 

But yes, hat tip to the writer who alerted me to this unexpected connection: Richard Mason. 

Who, it turns out, I must surely have rubbed shoulders with, since his circle overlapped with my circle in Oxford and he was in various bands with people I knew. Don't recall ever speaking but who knows what transpired on those long-ago, cider-laced evenings. 

Sadly, I learn also that Mason died recently. 

At Perfect Sound Forever, there is a sweet tribute, a gathering of memories from his friends and musical accomplices on the Oxford scene. At the end, there's a listing of and linking to all the pieces RM wrote for PSF, among them articles about John's Children, Captain Beefheart, Neu!, Annette Peacock, and Alternative TV. 

Thanks also to RM for the piercing beauty of "The Blacksmith" as enduring presence in my life  - who knows if I would ever have come across it otherwise... 

"The Blacksmith" has been widely covered - and was in fact done twice by Steeleye Span, with another earlier version on their debut album Hark! The Village Wait, before Martin Carthy joined. Don't like this rendition nearly as much as the Please To See the King version (their second album - I guess they must have agreed, otherwise why revisit the tune so quickly?).

Maddy Prior returned to it solo and a cappella on her album Ballads and Candles. 

Notable versions

Jah Wobble has one on his 1996 album English Roots Music - not something he'd have been likely to do in the PiL days. 

BBC light entertainment regular guest Barbara Dickson was always audibly a folkie - that ringing clarity of tone. 

Planxty on their debut album

Shirley Collins's version of "A Blacksmith Courted Me"

On this eerie wavering version, it's credited to Shirley and Dolly Collins - the melody is rather different and some of the lyrics are changed

Lyrics could be reworded into an ode to a Young Communist - "with his Hammer and Sickle in his hand / He looked so clever"

Steeleye on an ATV show called Music Room, in 1970-   Carthy looking newborn luminous. Endearingly earnest middle class and conscientious about their craft and custodianship of these ancient songs.

Other Steeleye delights

This was a hit single, would you believe? #14.

It was a Christmas single in fact, a traditional carol whose Latin lyric is about rejoicing at the birth of Christ, and the B-side was a version of "The Holly and the Ivy" 

No clips of them doing on TOTP, just this image

The kids may never have taken to "The Blacksmith", but they did enjoy jigging around the room to this even bigger Steeleye hit - Top 5 - and  which has a bit of a Status Quo boogie feel to it. 

On Top of the Pops, I remember it well

The album, produced by Mike Batt of Wombles fame, and with a migraine-inducing cover. 

Wuh--

Whuh-

Odd collision of the bygone and bang-up-to-date technical in this catalogue o' gear

Snippets from a 2000 interview with "Miss Tonsils" herself

"We’ll steal from anywhere, we’re not fussed. The tradition has always been a whore in that sense, they’ll take it from anywhere. This vision of purists is an illusion. It’s never been pure, it’s always taken from anywhere. It’s like if you listen to any of the Top Twenty in any year, there’s the most ridiculous combinations of songs. You think, “that wasn’t around at the same time as that,” some crass novelty piece and some wonderful song that soars and rages, and loads of stuff you’ve forgotten that’s just rubbish. Well, traditional music’s like that. It’s all there. There’s novelty, there’s rubbish, it really does reflect people. The tradition has no taste whatever, you know....

"Each generation finds its own version and picks out different sorts of songs and finds different sorts of songs interesting. Eventually, you usually come back to the big ones. Nic Jones was great, he found these odd 17th-18th century songs like “Noble Lord Hawking” and whaling songs. He was an ornery bugger. His material was quite different from what everybody else was doing at the same time. For me, he was the Ry Cooder of English music. Ry Cooder did all that “one more cigarette,” Franklin D. Roosevelt, all that stuff from the Thirties and Forties which was kind of like “What is that? What’s that about?” It’s kind of old but not old enough to be interesting, and it’s not blues. Billy The Kid and all that weird material that nobody else was doing. And Nic did that."