"1973 - Five musicians, collectively named the Global Village Trucking Company, decamp to a house in Norfolk to focus on their music, supported by girlfriends, roadies and a baby – fifteen people in all. But was it to be an idyllic, natural life, or one of stressed, cramped arguments?
This was an episode of documentary series By Way Of A Change, and it captured the public’s attention so much that a follow-up documentary aired thirty five years later, in which the band reconvened for one last gig."- BBC Archive
Bonus Old Wave
Tractor and this lot surprisingly raw and rudimentary despite the Old Wave look
Hearing this next one was when I first got an intimation there might be more to the Old Wave than I'd reckoned
This would have been in 1988 on a tape made for me by Gerard from the Blue Aeroplanes, with the express aim of turning me on to the treasures of the pre-punk 1970s. Some of it I had actually heard already and in a few cases liked, but there were plenty of revelations. I even liked the track by Al Stewart. But "Burlesque" was the stunner on this C90 - it got me heading out to pick up some Family records. Never heard anything else I liked as much "Burlesque" and its Beefheartian lurch. A hit single, would you believe? Another song by them went Top 4. Different times...
First heard the name Family a year or two earlier when an older bloke I got friendly with mentioned them and was incredulous that I'd never heard them / heard of them. "One of the most important bands on the Underground", he noted with a trace of indignation.
Perhaps this was his first premonitions that the world he'd grown up inside was slipping away, slipping out of popular memory? I get these regularly - almost weekly - now that I'm teaching 20 year olds...
Strange Band is a fine song, lurching between truculence and melancholy
ReplyDeleteI´m very intrigued about what those twentysomethings ignore. Recently heard a very hardcore kraftwerk fan talking with indignation about a DJ that didn´t knew kraftwerk. How about a list? "Things a twentysomething may ignore"
ReplyDeleteI don't know if they actively "ignore" things, so much as it just never enters their consciousness. A lot of what our generation would assume to be common knowledge - a map of music in which Kraftwerk had an even bigger eminence than they did in their own lifetime, because of all these things they inspired or influenced - that map is not something that exists for very young people, even those who are very hip and know about e.g. Arthur Russell. If you think about it, what would have drawn their attention to Kraftwerk or led them to it?
DeleteSomethings have dropped away and other things, really objectively marginal in their own time and in subsequent history, might be more prominent. Like Queen are now considered a canonical group, right up there close behind Beatles or whoever.
Yes that Queen thing is weird, I remember talking with two friends in junior high when they released radio gaga and we agreed Queen was over. I recently bought a music / fashion magazine, a mexican magazine trying to be hip that featured rappers, pop and reguetón acts and I was very surprised to see they consider legacy acts not some rappers or international pop groups or anything hip from anywhere but groups that are very mexican, not even properly latin, that used to be the opposite of hip, lower than guilty pleasures, and now are hip. Nobody could have told.
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