Britrockers in a bad way

One thing that really tickled me that I read in the last few years was from a Guardian profile of Pete Doherty. He's moved to rural Normandy and apparently given up hard drugs in favour of....  cheese and butter. The libertine has become a gourmet-gourmand - not an untypical trajectory, I suppose, for a young person becoming a middle-aged person, Eros gradually giving way to the Epicurean.

This was the quote that really made me chuckle: 

“The cheese in this area – the brie, the camembert. There’s something special in the grass, you can taste it in the milk, it’s different here, it’s so creamy. I drink it by the pint. And the butter, and the bread, and the saucisson..." 

Despite the apparently cleaned-up lifestyle, Pete looks just as sickly and sweaty as before. But now it's French farm produce rather than urban chemicals that are being ingested. There's a sallow, waxy tinge to Pete's complexion, as if it's composed out of rind from a particularly ripe camembert. 

In one of the photos, Doherty's got some kind of cape around him, hiding his portly girth, and with the walking stick and the cravat, there's a resemblance to Orson Welles in his sherry commercials era.  

Or maybe the look he's going for is more like Gustave Flaubert?

I was reminded of the dotage of Doherty when yesterday I came across this ticklesome snippet about Richard Ashcroft, affectionately nicknamed "Captain Rock" by his good pal Noel Gallagher: 

On 19 June 2006, Ashcroft was arrested in Wiltshire after bursting into a youth centre and asking to work with the teenagers present at the club. He began swearing and refusing to leave so employees called the police, resulting in Ashcroft being arrested and receiving an £80 fine for disorderly conduct.

More delicious details from the Wiltshire Times's report: 

Rock star Richard Ashcroft was arrested in Chippenham on Monday for disorderly behaviour after he burst into a youth centre and offered them £10,000. The former Verve frontman stumbled into The Bridge Centre, in Bath Road, at 8pm and announced to a group of 60 youngsters, who were all under 12, that he was Richard Ashcroft from the band The Verve and he wanted to give them money. Bemused children looked on as the star, who was looking scruffy and dishevelled, offered them money and volunteered to work at the centre....  Ashcroft, 35, who was apparently drunk, began shouting and swearing and refused to leave so staff were forced to call the police.... When he was arrested, Ashcroft started singing songs to officers from the back seat of the police car.... Ashcroft was taken to Melksham police station and left to cool off for a couple of hours before being issued with an on-the-spot fine of £80.

This must be a first for rock 'n' rollers - causing a disturbance through an uncontrollable urge to  commit community service. 

The proper rock'n'roll thing to do would surely be to burn down a youth centre, or at least smash in its windows. 

Any more for any more? Bizarre tales from the downward arcs of Britpop godstars of the 1990s? 

Let's keep in that zone between Madchester and the new whatever-it-was in the early 2000s. NME shite. 

Bear in mind, I haven't lived in the UK for decades so a lot of the stories that wash up in the tabloids, I will have completely missed. 

February 1 update: 

BRITROCKERS IN A BAD WAY:  SUGGESTIONS FROM THE COMMENTS BOX

William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut

Phil Knight feels we should piling on Captain Rock aka Richard Ashcroft (while also conceding that A Northern Soul was a good record... I'm quite partial to the early shoegazey stuff actually, or was at the time... and who can deny "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work")

Matt M finds amusement in Justine Frischmann's post-musicking career: 

Television

In 2003, Frischmann co-presented a series called Dreamspaces for the BBC Television about modern architecture. In 2004, she presented The South Bank Show and was a judge for the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.

Art

In 2005, Frischmann moved to Boulder, Colorado, to enroll in a masters program in visual arts at Naropa University, a small, Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, and "become a nobody". In 2012 her work was shortlisted for the UK's Marmite Prize for painting, and she has been included in The Amsterdam List of 1000 Living Painters.

In a 2016 interview regarding her art career, Frischmann stated, "I don't really have any desire to make music, to be honest."

Frischmann has said, "The themes and ideas I am working with are in direct relation to an ongoing personal narrative; the big questions are reflected in the choices I make in my art ... [including] my ever-evolving relationship with my spiritual faith. I think my approach and aesthetics reveal internal struggles and speak to my family origins and history."

Personal life

... In the spring of 2000, Justine took up competitive fencing. She married a meteorologist, Professor Ian Faloona in 2008, and lives and works in the United States.

This odd, motley aftermath-to-fame relates to something I have been meaning to blog about, a sequel (more like a twist) to Wiki-Fear. But I will save those thoughts for a later juncture. 

Phil, just getting warmed up, zeroes on in another televisual moment of awkwardness, this time involving Bobby G. 

Stylo swipes Jarvis 

Phil points to another example of the indie/cheese interface - "what we've got here is proto-cheese" says Alex from Blur. 

Straying off topic really, but a couple of examples of indie / Britpop parody, from Tyler and that man Phil again

After I expressed mild amazement that the words "Ian" and "Brown" had not been mentioned, people came with the goods

Strangeways, there he went (Stylo)

bizarre Welsh nationalist monkey protest (Phil)

Phil piles on the Libertine again, with this story about another associate who met a sticky end. 

Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes 

"The photographer and film-maker, had spent the past few years making Road to Albion, a documentary following Doherty after he left The Libertines. She had become the unofficial photographer of Doherty's new band, Babyshambles, and was reportedly working on another film about the singer in recent weeks.

"She is the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, and great-niece of the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith.

:Her mother, Dido Whitehead, is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, and her father is the 1960s film-maker Peter Whitehead" - the latter most known for his psych-era Pink Floyd-soundtracked film Tonight Let's All Make Love in London. 

Another example of the entanglement of the upper classes with the counterculture / bohemia... 

A Certain Grace-io

 

I can remember getting really excited by this when I read it in the NME in the last dying weeks of 1980. Even though all I knew of A Certain Ratio at that point was "Flight" and "Shack Up", as played frequently on Peel, and all I knew of Grace Jones was "Private Life", her medium-sized hit.... it seemed exciting.  And covering a Talking Heads song, "Houses In Motion" too - a three-way conjunction of postpunk postfunk cool.

I was also taken by the arrogance of ACR's claim "We're gonna do a Talkin' Heads track an' do it properly". As a Talking Heads fan, very soon to get hold of Remain In Light as my Christmas present, and who had already heard a bunch of tracks from it on the radio, including "Houses in Motion", to me this seemed quite the ballsy statement.  

But the collaboration never came about - the A Certain Grace-io "Houses In Motion" never materialized. (Talking Heads did release their original version as the second single off Remain In Light, though).  

Then decades later ACR finally put out their instrumental version of "Houses In Motion" - the one they did with Martin Hannett in readiness for Grace to incant over. Near-instrumental, rather, for it features the guide vocal laid down by Jez Kerr for Grace to sing along to. 

Doesn't exactly eclipse the original. 

Now I feel like I have read somewhere or other, certain claims from ACR that it was them that propelled Talking Heads in a funk direction. This was supposed to have happened when ACR supported Byrne & Co on their UK tour in 1979. Byrne supposedly watching their shows very intently, listening and learning.

But Talking Heads had already released the ultra-funky More Songs  About Buildings And Food the previous year.  Indeed you can hear funk tendencies germinating on the album before that, their debut Talking Heads 77. Plus, Byrne and Weymouth and Frantz lived in New York City, they hardly needed to go to Manchester to learn about da funk - it was streaming out of the radio, seething in the streets.  Seems a bit of wishful thinking there from the ACR boys! 

Update: looking into it more closely, I see the chronology makes even less sense: the dates ACR played support to Talking Heads were in December of 1979, months after Talking Heads had recorded and released Fear of Music. So that's three incrementally funkier albums Byrne & Crew had made before supposedly being shown the Way by ACR. (Fear of Music starts with the Fela-influenced Dada-disco of "I Zimbra").  Meanwhile, ACR's debut single in 1979 was the drummerless dirge "All Night Party". 

"All Night Party", released September 1979

"I Zimbra", opening track of Fear of Music, released August 1979

"We're gonna do a Talkin' Heads track an' do it properly" - typical Manc-wank bluster 'n' bull! Talking of which, looking up ACR I see that Anthony H. Wilson proclaimed them, upon the release of the debut single, to be "the new Sex Pistols".  

I've had the raw ingredients for this post sitting for a month or two (got a bit of a backblog - I always do, on all of these blogs -  things started but not finished). The spur to finally poop it out came today when I saw the amazing news about a whole book  entirely concerning this abortive encounter between La Jones and A Certain Ratio. A short book, admittedly, but a book! Titled Strawberry and the Big Apple: Grace Jones in Stockport, 1980, it's written by Dave Haslam and it's the finale to the Art Decades series of  attractively designed monographs on esoteric subjects that he's been doing. (I have All You Need Is Dynamite, which is about the Angry Brigade and its links to the Manchester counterculture magazine Mole Express). 

 

Release rationale: 

In ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’, the eighth and final short-format book in his acclaimed Art Decades series, Dave Haslam explains a seemingly unlikely scenario: the day in November 1980 when Grace Jones – a spectacularly glamorous jet-setting singer living and working in Paris and New York, and recording in the Bahamas – pays a visit to Stockport (a post-industrial town seven miles south of Manchester, with crumbling infrastructure and rising unemployment). Her quest that day? To meet A Certain Ratio, a group then signed to Factory Records.

This tale of worlds colliding includes Tony Wilson’s fascination with New York; an intriguing portrait of the early life of Grace Jones; a twist in the tale, and more than a couple of mysteries; plus walk-on parts for 10cc, Robert De Niro and Jerry Hall. ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’ is the latest (and last) work in the Art Decades series by writer and former Haçienda DJ, Dave Haslam, exploring a variety of subjects rooted in cities, in recent history and lived experience, and a love for music, literature, and art.

Publication date: 11 April 2024. All pre-ordered copies of the book will be signed by the author.

I wouldn't say this is a story that NEEDED to be told, but I am quite intrigued. 

The Strawberry in the title is Strawberry Studios, where 10cc made their records (one of the band was a co-investor in the studio). 

What about the reference in the NME news story to Grace Jones as "infamous sparring partner" to chat show host Russell Harty? What, you've not heard about this legendary live-on-TV fracas?

Funny how things soar and dip and soar again in one's estimation over the decades - in 1980 I thought "Flight" mesmerizing....  ACR seemed like this fascinating shadowy apparition of a group... so much so that I sent off for The Graveyard and The Ballroom cassette (mail order, something I never did then) and listened to it over and over... 

but the promise dissipated with drab dessicated debut To Each.... flickered again with "Knife Slits Water" and "Guess Who" and a couple of other singles.... but then faded as they plugged away and chugged on. 

Caught them live in March 86 and they seemed like a pallid shadow of whatever they might have promised once... slick yet gaunt

In 1995 - when I was given these reissues to review for the Wire - my estimation of them was at its lowest probably

But by the early 2000s, as fascination for the whole postpunk Zeitgeist took me over, ACR again seemed like a tantalizing proposition

measured assessment: they never quite became what they seemed to portend 

a recent thought:

ACR's cold-fever funk was never better than on “Flight”, released in 1980 as a 12-inch single. The format testified to ACR’s awareness of  club culture: the deeper vinyl grooves offered deejays penetrating bass and a bigger sound.  Vivid but rather wintry, “Flight” didn’t light up too many real-world discotheques. But its swimmy spaciousness, ghostly vocals, and restless drums make for an immersive headphone experience.  

Prototypes for ACR

Bonus bit on "Houses In Motion" from an interview I did

“Houses in Motion” – Talking Heads (Remain in Light, 1980)

This is an interesting song. It was a single in England but it wasn’t a hit. It followed “Once in a Lifetime,” which was a big hit in the UK but not in America. “Houses in Motion” was sequenced on Remain in Light to follow “Once in a Lifetime,” which is about someone who’s suddenly estranged from his routine, his life, his possessions, his family, his wife. He’s estranged from it and it all seems absurd, yet that realization hits him with this sort of a cosmic force. It’s almost like a blinding, mystical epiphany: the idea that you cruise through everything without connecting with reality. And then, immediately, it goes into “Houses in Motion,” which is back inside alienation. It’s based in the same musical ideas as “Once in a Lifetime” but whereas “Once in a Lifetime” is a kind of mystical, oceanic funk, “House in Motion” is a sort of eerie, neurotic funk. The protagonist in the song is back inside neurosis. The key line is: “He’s digging his own grave.” He’s trapped in routine, going round and round, just working for these goals and missing life. So it’s almost as if the two songs are sister songs. In the first one, the guy sees through everything and grasps the oneness of existence, in an almost mystical way. In the second song he’s like a prisoner. He’s blinkered. He’s working for ambition and goals, digging his own grave, going nowhere.

Strangely I don't mention one of its most salient elements, the amazing Jon Hassell trumpet

"transplendent!" (the ghastliness of rock, #2 of ?)

Loads of suggestions of rockhorror lampoons in the comments box of the previous post on the ghastliness of rock. I'll get to those in a sec, but first, a couple of doozies that came to mind. 

Here's Woody Allen, or his Annie Hall stand-in, Alvy Singer, encountering rock culture in its full mid-70s pomp, via a date with a Rolling Stone reporter.

Exaggerated for comedic effect, but reflecting Allen's true feelings about the fatuousness of rock and the rock generation.  He's such a fogey, he's into the previous generation's music, jazz: but not even bebop, it's pre-WW2 jazz, as used incessantly on his soundtracks and which he even plays, in a jazz revival band. 

(C.f. that other fogey, Terry Zwigoff, who makes his own poke at rock with the Blueshammer scene in Ghost World) 

Also possibly counting in this category, the scenes involving Annie Hall and the Paul Simon character, the record producer, in a nightclub and then at the oh-so-LA party. 

And then another rockphobic scene - from Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody's Mickey goes on a date with Dianne Wiest's Holly (Hannah's directionless, trend-hopping sister) and is exposed to punk rock.  

Are there any other scenes like these in the Allen uuurv? 

Okay onto the suggestions: 

Phil Knight points to this 

But isn't Richard O'Brien a genuine fan of rock'n'roll?

Phil also points to this scene as an example of the outsider wandering befuddled into the mystifying youth culture 

Ah, I know people who could discourse - have discoursed - at length about the significance of that one scene! (Funnily enough I'm reading a whole book about Blow-Up at the moment).

I'm not sure that is exactly what is happening there - after all, the photographer is pretty with-it (he plays a jazz record in the scene with Vanessa Redgrave at his pad but he's right in the thick of the young culture, fashion, etc). One of the things the scene does is some character-revealing: how competitive and predatorial he is by nature, so that he has to fight for the broken remnant of the guitar, eventually wresting it out of the hands of the Yardbirds fans... but once he's got it and got it outside the club, he loses all interest....  drops it in the street. The other thing is the idea of society breaking up in micro-cultures that are completely unfathomable to the rest of society: the talismanic aura of the electric guitar fragment means nothing once outside the club... it's just a bit rubbish in a London street. 

But Blow-Up as a whole, probably does fit the syndrome - not so much "rock ghastliness" but the whole Swinging Sixties, mod Britain moment viewed with an outsider's cold eye, seeing only emptiness, meaningless pursuit of sensation, decadence, a society breaking apart. (Antonioni was a Marxist, if hardly a crude one). 

But Blow-Up is also about 6 or 7 other things.  It's probably my equal-first favorite film alongside Performance and Walkabout.

Phil also digs up this amazing encounter between Norman Wisdom and The Pretty Things and assorted pretty things of the psych Sixties

And he also mentions The Tubes - who probably satirised rock and rock-values in multiple ways and points ("White Punks On Dope") but most famously lampooned the excess of peak-pomp Brit rockstardom with the character of Quay Lewd

The Tubes also had a punk spoof as well, if I recall right. Ah, Stevee finds a latterday version of it

Stevee suggest this Quincy episode for punk piss-taking 

and an episode of CHIPS for similar 

And also brings up Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias - they were part of the hippie bohemian scene in Manchester, if I recall right, and took the piss out of everything, from Status Quo denim boogie to reggae to punk with the Snuff Rock EP (and also stage play?)

On the subject of punky piss-takes there's a whole episode of The Goodies, "Punky Business"

Ed remembers Not the Nine O' Clock News having a go at the New Wave

And also this

And the Comic Strip's metal spoof Bad News, which I always thought came a poor second to Spinal Tap 

One of the problems with metal parodies is that metal is a genre that advances through self-parody. 

Also, no matter how silly or excessive or preposterously posturing and theatrical you make the parody, there is always an actual real example of a metal band that surpasses that..  It's a bit like wrestling, maybe. 

Tyler points to this episode of Dragnet, not so much about rock per se as about acid and hippies

and to this film I never even heard of - Otto Preminger's  hippie satire Skidoo (entirety watchable here)

There's probably a load of hippie-satirising scenes in movies, or at least scenes that have a movie-world outsider's simulation thereof. This one from The President's Analyst sprang to mind (another of my favorite films): 

Ah, well, in a way, the entirety of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is a kind of outsider's spoof on the music industry and groovy rock bands of the late Sixties.  Yet another of my favorite films. 

Stylo offers another piss-take of Old Grey Whistle Test, from later on than the Rutland Weekend Television lampoon

And this brief Brass Eye send-up of glam rock 

That reminded me that Mighty Boosh is full of this kind of thing (as was Noel F's terrible solo follow up series). But it's done affectionately, there's none of that visceral feeling of distaste and contempt that you get with the Woody Allen types. 

the ghastliness of rock

 

This clip of a rock festival from a Soviet cartoon must surely be anti-Western-decadence propaganda....  It couldn't possibly be meant to be attractive and exciting? Could it? 

It's from Sergey Yutkevich and Anatoliy Karanovich's "Mayakovsky Laughs," which also has a scene involving drugs and hallucinations 

The rock festival bit reminded me of Lemmings by National Lampoon - a 1973 stage show as well as a record, mocking the mindless squalor of the mass gatherings of the era 

Also reminded tangentially of this Whistle Test spoof from Rutland Weekend Television 

Then there's this, which actually rocks, despite the parodic intent 

Any more for any more? 

Yes there's Neil the Hippy, and there's Rock Follies - particularly interested in Old Wave excess recoiled from with a crypto-conservative squeamishness

c'était demain (RIP Francis Dhomont)

Aloysius on Dhomont:

"When he was asked to create a work celebrating musique concrete’s 50th anniversary, Francis Dhomont was uniquely qualified for the job. He’d experimented with a kind of proto-concrete before the term existed, and had been quietly present for all the discoveries and conflicts that arose along the expedition led by Pierre Schaeffer. One of the central recurring motifs in “Cycle of Sound” is a sequence lifted from the opening seconds of Schaeffer’s “Etude in Objects”. What’s striking is how Dhomont takes these sound objects, now rusty ancient museum pieces, and enchants them into a shimmering material which casts unpredictable trails of light in its wake. It’s a beautiful effect which elevates the original sounds to a higher plane. The cycle is dedicated to “musique concrete’s unfortunate creator”, which itself is a quotation… it’s how Schaeffer, the burningly curious yet forever disappointed explorer, once referred to himself. With this context in mind, Dhomont’s magician tricks with Schaeffer’s sounds feel like a touching rebuttal to the latter’s pessimism, a way of saying, “Don't despair! Look how far we’ve come, thanks to the possibilities you opened up!” The work is rich with other allusions, like the spooky recurring presence of medieval choral music (probably related to Dhomont’s contention that musique concrete was the Ars Nova of the 20th century), and a drone passage interrupted by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks to classic works of concrete—ephemeral yet potent phantoms. A former student of Nadia Boulenger, Dhomont absorbed both the aesthetics of the “old world” and European modernism through lived experience. While the initial impression that “Cycle of Sound” generates is one of blinding futurism and alienness, the work's inventiveness is inseparable from the cultural erudition and lived memory that went into it."

 

97!

Coiner of the term "Cinéma pour l’oreille" 

French, but sometimes described as Canadian, as he lived and worked in Quebec for a long period

Interestingly, in this 2006 interview with Computer Music Journal, Francis Dhomont says that he independently arrived at musique concrete techniques at the same time as Pierre Schaeffer, quite unawares. And both of them used other methods before adopting tape as the medium: 

"One can produce musique concrete with any medium; despite the fact that it's made with computers, it's still musique concrete. It used to be tape recorders-it was always done with a support medium. Pierre Schaeffer used the flexible disks with needles . .. that was the first thing. I started around the same time as him - without knowing him - but I worked with a Webster sound recorder (an American brand) with a magnetic wire. It was a wire made of very thin steel. I had a roll of it. It sat over at the side, I would pull some out, and then I would record on it. Magnetic wire had been invented a long time prior by Valdemar Poulsen, and this Webster was meant for businesspeople - an early kind of Dictaphone. I found it in the years just after the war; the Americans came over not only with guns but also with recorders! The uncle of one of my friends had one; he worked with an American firm. I experimented a bit with it and thought it quite fantastic. So I started working with one, making musique concrete, without knowing that musique concrete already existed.... It would have been between 1946 and 1948. I would have been 20-22 years old."

So he was doing stuff with wire-recorder at nearly the same time as the chap in Egypt, Halim El-Dabh.  

Fragments from Dhomont's write-up for  “…et autres utopies” –

"these aural mirages...  creatures of illusion... these  aural ‘non-lieux’, these chimeras of perception, resulting from treatments and made from unlikely parts that are losing their identity... are fictional beings born out of a dreamer’s nomadic invention. … attempting to avoid traditional music codes, disregarding their imperatives, and offering a stream of mental images to our psyche.... ”

A literary dude, like so many of these French concrete types, e.g. 

this track, inspired by the "Old Ocean!" section of Lautreamont's Chants du Maldoror!

A detailed fan breakdown / evocation of that album here, with Dhomont quotes

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