The Dropped Away

I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular moment, but then their reputations dip precipitously and never recover... such that no young person currently emerging into the condition of  informed, well-listened  fandom would bother to check 'em out, in some cases simply because they don't even know of that group's or artist's existence...  

So here's the New Musical Express's critics consensus of the 100 All-Time Greatest Albums from June 1st 1974. Let's look at the charting artists who've subsequently Dropped Away largely or utterly. 

 

12. Layla – Derek & The Dominoes

Debatable, but I think in terms of young listeners today, this would be the highest-placing album / artist in the list that is completely off the menu

Followed probably by this...

17. Bridge Over Troubled Water – Simon & Garfunkel

And then (the curse of Clapton again)

20. Disraeli Gears – Cream

Debatable but I feel like your average becoming-hip youth would be more likely to have heard Les Rallizes Denudes than....

29. Back In The USA – MC5

Pretty certain that the eminence-with-critics held by this next chap during the early '70s (even more so in the States - where the likes of Marcus and Bangs thought he was some kind of saviour, a ruffian poet) is completely non-existent... not just with Gen Z but millennials and Gen X too 

32. Gasoline Alley – Rod Stewart

34. Every Picture Tells A Story – Rod Stewart

 

37. In The Court Of The Crimson King – King Crimson

Possibly pockets of interest in this lot among neo-prog and math-rock types, but generally dropped away I'd say

40. The Soft Machine – Soft Machine

Utterly voided

41. Hot Rats – Frank Zappa

I do have a student who is a Zappa nut.... but generally, off the table for anyone after punk

Now we get into the seriously gone-gone, dropped away zone ....

42. Traffic – Traffic

44. Music From A Dolls House – Family

50. Stand Up – Jethro Tull

54. Taylor, James – Sweet Baby James

Despite singer-songwriterism having returned with Lana D-R and Phoebe B et al 

Zappa again

58. Mothers Of Invention, The – We’re Only In It For The Money

60. Beck, Jeff, Group – Beck-Ola

Absolutely mystifying to anyone who came to consciousness after punk = the Great Stature of this axe-bore.

68. Mothers Of Invention, The – Freak Out

Zappa yet again. Apart from the Beatles, Stones, and Dylan, Frank & crew have the most placings on this chart, I think - and are the most annulled, whereas the Other Three are more impregnably canonic than ever.

70. Stills, Stephen – Stephen Stills

His daughter once took my photograph, on our porch, just feet from where I now type. Once tried to listen to Manassas but had to give up after 5 minutes. 

71. Winter, Johnny – Johnny Winter And

The whole blues-god, new prodigy of blues rock guitar thing... it's one of the most unreconstructable phenoms in rock history. Supposedly Johnny Winter's record deal was the biggest advance in history to that point, for a new act. 

72. Cocker, Joe – With A Little Help From My Friends

Alongside Joplin, surely the least-listened to Woodstock-era artist among all subsequent generations. 

75. Rundgren, Todd – A Wizard, A True Star

Despite influencing Prince and anticipating Ariel Pink in his recorded-it-all-on-his-Todd DIYness, Rundgren has not endured. I once spent an evening in the company of some Norwegians and Mr R and a succession of incredibly pricy vodka sours (this was during an Oslo music festival). He had bitter tales of recording with XTC and the intransigence of one Andrew Partridge. Did not respond well to my soused suggestion that he play Nazz's "Open My Eyes" at his concert the next night.

77. Jefferson Airplane, The – Crown Of Creation

Quite unrecoverable, I should think. I'm surprised this gets the nod and not After Bathing At Baxter's, my personal favorite in their most curious, trapped-in-time discograpy. Amazing how many albums they recorded after the famous hits...  they even had their own label, unhappily named Grunt.  Then the delta of solo albums, offshoots, Jefferson Starship...  almost a landfill in its own right.

81. Country Joe & The Fish – Electric Music For The Mind & Body

An absolutely forgotten group - for the longest while I myself had no idea they recorded this piercing psych rock mini-classic, having only ever heard the folksy protest ditty "Fixin-To-Die". I think the only reason I checked it out was I read that Tom Verlaine had been influenced. Psychedelia is obviously enduringly hip, if going through up-phases and relative dips, but this group - and acid rock generally, a different animal to psych  really - is not on the listening-list. See also Kaleidoscope (the US one not the Brit). 

85. Mayall’s, John, Bluesbreakers – Bluesbreakers

More Blues Boom boredom. Or so I assume. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the turntable  - or to Tidal - to give this a fair listen.

86. Traffic – Mr Fantasy

Traffic again. Very well respected once - their second album gets in Greil M's list at the back of Stranded, he says it's a British Music From Big Pink. I like the psych hit singles well enough. John Barleycorn is a particularly trapped-in-time listen.

90. Moby Grape – Moby Grape

Another one that makes the GM Stranded list (compiled around 1978 I should think so a post-New Wave lingering-on of Old Wave taste). I've tried but I can't find anything distinctive or memorable about the Grape. 

91. Big Brother & The Holding Co. – Cheap Thrills

San Francisco and all that made deep inroads into hip British taste - the magazine ZigZag was almost completely built around wistful West Coast longings among those just too young to have experienced it in real-time, let alone real-place.... Quicksilver Messenger Service epigones.... Hot Tuna hold-outs.... People who held their breath and waited and waited until the Grateful Dead would do their sporadic  live concerts in the U.K.  

(The first - and only, still - person of my own generation to suggest Big Brother might be worth listening to was J. Mascis...  in one of the several interviews I did with Dinosaur Jr, he was going on about a recent influence on his playing  being BB & THC's guitarist James Gurley. That gave me a right revisionist frisson, that did).

93. Doctor John – Gris-Gris

Dropped away utterly!

97. Newman, Randy – 12 Songs

I know a writer of the generation after mine who loves Newman (Mike Powell of Stylus / Pitchfork etc) but I would wager that His Gruffness's standing has plummeted precipitously. But in the early '70s he was the very definition of sophisticated and discerning rock taste, such that Marcus devoted an entire chapter of Mystery Train to his uuuurv, jostling alongside Sly Stone (!), The Band (!) and Elvis Presley (!!).

98. Spirit – The 12 Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus

More ZigZaggery.

I've tried with this group, this record, a bunch of times over the years but it's never stuck. My former MM colleague Paul Lester is a huge fan of Spirit even to the point of loving obscure Randy California solo albums. A fan of Rundgren too. (I think some of this may index to having grown up reading NME writer Max Bell, an Americanophile who wrote a riposte to Mick Farren's famous Titanic piece about the decadence of rock (the one that is said to have helped precipitate punk). Bell was - in early 1976 no less - like, "No, there's all this great music coming out of the U.S.A. Rock's getting every more sophisticated. It's just the UK scene that's a shithole. Start buying imports". )

99. Miller, Steve, Band – Sailor

Even more ZigZaggery. Children of the Future makes that back o' Stranded list. For those who know him only for "The Joker", "Abracadabra" and all those affably rockin' AM radio staples of the mid-70s, it's something of a head-swerve to learn that Miller was once revered as one of the finest blues-rock guitarists of his day and that the first couple of SMB albums are considered psych-era classics by some. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So that's 30 albums that have Dropped Away - almost a third of the list. Which is not that bad, I suppose. It means that 70 percent of the music esteemed in 1974 still has some kind of standing in today's taste-schema - fifty years on. 

However I would wager that if there's an equivalent list that the NME did in 1979 or 1980 - and there may well be - the Dropped Away proportion would be larger, possibly considerably larger. And that subsequently there's been some canonic readmission, a bit of Dropped-Away-But-Steadily-Stealthily-Climbed-Back.  Revisionism and rehabilitation. Restoration.

For most of the Dropped Away here would have originally Dropped Away within four years of this list being compiled. It was the catastrophic Transvaluative Event of New Wave that caused all these artists to suddenly become utterly irrelevant, indeed in many cases actively repugnant to young ears. It happened almost overnight. 

Of course, many of the usurping upstarts have themselves suffered subsequently from the dreaded Drops Away Syndrome ... for who of the young generation listens to, or has even heard of, Eddie & the Hot Rods, the Motors, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Boomtown Rats, Eater, Mink Deville, Tom Robinson Band, the Vibrators, the Damned, the Adverts...?

two kinds of avant-electronic

There's two kinds of early electronic composition and musique concrete type that I really really love, and can't get enough of... 

First is the kind I associate with the late '50s and the 1960s, with this echoey, heavy-reverb sound, and a sense of sinister space

This is a later-than-that example, it's actually from the end of the 1970s, so consequently a bit cleaner sounding - less misty - but it does have the quality of sound-blips receding into the recesses of the cosmos 

This one from 1964 by the same composer is a bit more like it

As is this, again by Andres Lewin-Richter, but this time in collab with opera singer Anna Ricci

Quite a lot of Radiphonic type stuff has this vibe, also Matsuo Ohno's work, the Dutch chappies at the Philips studio, and some of the Columbia-Princeton lot

 With the early stuff, a lot of it is down to plate reverb,  I think - vibrations off sheet metal

And the second type of avant-electronic / tape-magic I really dig, can't get enough of?

That is a kind that peaks a little later on, in the 1970s. The soundspace is drier - and brighter (almost shadowless).  Hard to describe, but it really feels like a totally new language for music is being invented - yet it's oddly palatable, not grating or dissonant.  There's a slippery, trickly way to how sounds distribute themselves in space.  The plinks and blips and labial plops, it's like the language of  an alien lifeform. Here's a good example - the entire album, tracks by both Bulent Arel and Daria Semegen. 

More Semegen crinkletronica

This piece by Iván Patachich also coming from the same place

As is this - actually much earlier (1959) - example by one of the Dutch chappies, Henk Badings. A bit clunkier but has some of the 'alien language' properties and that shadowless sound-stage

Yet another example, more glowing and less clearly contoured (although the Ann Southam I would really like to play here is actually "The Reprieve" - which you can hear here)

And this by Morton Subotnik is kind of in the same zone as Arel / Semegen but more sproingy and percussively agitated 

Now this piece by Edgardo Canton has qualities of both "types" - it's foggy, murky, but it also has the trickly alien-language quality

Edgardo Canton, Andres Lewin-Richter, Matsuo Ohno, Iván Patachich, and Arel / Semegen are all in the Creel Pone canon, although Electronic Music For Dance I came across independently, on vinyl, before it got  Creeled. 

Both types, I seem to have a bottomless appetite for...

Now I wonder if I can distinguish any other strands... 

I know what I don't have a bottomless appetite for - and that I find a bit ear-chafing.... It's when composers -including some whose 1960s-1970s work I love - enter the digital age. There's a sort of common sound-palette, an over-arching macro-texture, that every composer seems to succumb to, because of the nature of the technology. Lots of sibilant, wispy, high-frequency sounds. A glassiness too. Too much detail, too much miniaturized motion in the soundscape.  Too much to take in. It's exhausting in the same way that CGI and post-Pixar animation is. But mostly it just tickles the ears, all that wispiness - and it feels samey, like everyone has the same basic palette.  

But not samey in the way that the Two Types stuff is samey-but-good. 

Examples of digi-wispi-tronika

This one especially from about 9 minutes in 

This from Bernie P especially from about 12.30 mins in

This too

Here's what I wrote some years ago about the evolution of Parmegiani from the tape-snipping phantasmagorias of his early work to the digital-superpowers phase: 

"Some of this Rabelaisian rawness seems to fade as Parmegiani's work enters the digital era. He was among the first at GRM to embrace the new technology, but admits that although the shift from "scissors to mouse" involved huge gains on the time-saving and hassle-reduction fronts, there were also obscure losses. 

"Listening to "Sons-Jeux", a piece whose original 1998 version was made to commemorate musique concrete's 50th Anniversary, there are spectacular effects in terms of the transformation of material: insect sounds turn into human voices and a babble of agitated male speech gets whisked into an iridescent foam of voice-cellules

(like molecular gastronomy if human souls were its raw ingredients). 

"Yet permeating the seemingly infinite variety of textures is a hard-to-put-your-finger-on homogeneity, like garments that are wildly different in shape yet cut from the identical fabric. For some reason, digital technology seems to exacerbate concrete's already-existing bias towards certain sound-textures--plinky liquidity, slithery sibilance (perhaps because these sorts of sounds least resemble those of acoustic instrumental provenance?).

"Returning to the earlier analogy [with Parmegiani's pre-composer work as photomontagist), you could say that digital sound parallels the advances in animation made by the likes of Pixar (plus all those action thrillers so CGI-riddled they are virtually animations incorporating human actors). Massive increments in terms of mindblowing verging-on-3D effects, microscopic detail and sheer density of simultaneous events are offset by the loss of analogue grain, an insidious seamlessness and sameyness. 

"Whereas the Sixties and Seventies Parmegiani regularly provokes the I-can't-believe-my-ears of a true sound-sorcerer in action, some of the latterday pieces approach numbing overload."

! Ai No Corrida !

 

It really tickles me, it does - Quincy Jones having this discofunk hit with a cover of a Chas Jankel song named after the original Japanese title of a triple-X rated film of extreme erotica - known in the West as either In The Realm of the Senses or Empire of the Senses.

 And there's everybody in the Top of the Pops studio dancing away completely oblivious!

Spoilers alert (should you wish to watch said film), this is the plot:  

In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner Kichizo Ishida molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Sada. Sada becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates until Ishida finds that she is most excited by strangling him during lovemaking and he is killed in this fashion. Sada then severs his penis. While she is shown next to him naked, it is mentioned that she will walk around with his penis inside her for several days. Words written with blood can be read on his chest: "Sada Kichi the two of us forever."

It's a bit like if Earth Wind and Fire had done a boogie-down version of Story of the Eye. 

Ai No Corrida actually translates as "Bullfight of Love"

Now here's a slice of Japanese audio erotica that's far more sonically compelling 

With an animation to go with it too

The relationship between disco and pornography is pretty direct - "Love to Love You Baby" as sexMuzak, Patrick Cowley's Moogy sideline in gay porn soundtracks and the eroto-spiritual inspiration he drew from San Francisco's bath houses 

“Patrick was all about sexually charged atmospheres, places where rituals could happen. It was about mythologizing, really dramatizing the experience””  - Jorge Socarras, musical collaborator. 

“When Patrick wasn’t at the studio, he was at the bathhouses” - Maurice Tani, business associate

Disco often evokes a “future-love paradise” redolent of sci-fi films like Barbarella (with its rapture-inducing Excessive Machine) or Logan’s Run (with its Love Shop) or Woody Allen’s Sleeper (with its Orgasmotron)

New Wavest #2

When I first started getting into music, this chap was all over evening Radio 1. Particularly Peel, but all the homework-shift deejays. 

His gimmick, which doubled as shoot-your-own-career-in-the-foot gambit, is that each year he would change the group's name to a new variant involving the word "Spizz" 

Spizzenergi, Athletico Spizz 80, Spizzles, Spizzoil, I'm probably missing one or two.

Spizz being his own personal alter-ego. 

(Jim Thirlwell did the same thing with all the Foetus-based aliases, but it didn't seem to undermine his rise to renown to the same extent). 

What makes All That Spizz so archetypally New Wave - alongside the daft name + various musical attributes (choppy damped-strings rhythm guitar in some songs; the not-conventionally-good-voice-but-high-energy singing), is  this thing where the song-subject or song-scenario is absurd / inane / kitsch, but the urgency of the vocal delivery lends a certain intensity. Thinking of B-52s songs like "Planet Claire" or "Rock Lobster"... Lene Lovich...  

Moments in "Where's Captain Kirk?" remind me of Tenpole Tudor, another singer who threw himself into the rousing idiocy of his song-scenarios with a fanatical commitment. 

Perhaps Adam and the Ants in both pre-pop and smash hits phases fits here too. 

A not-bad-at-all stab at "Virginia Plain" finds the proto-punk in the original. 

interview with Spizz in Bongo News fanzine 1980

Never Mind the Ballards (Themroc + Weekend) (+ La Grand Bouffe)

 "Themroc (1973) - Claude Faraldo’s subversive satire lacks any intelligible dialogue or music, with a screenplay composed entirely of gestures, grunts, gibberish, moans, and screams. Themroc, a factory worker played by the late Michel Piccoli, goes about his daily existence between his job and the apartment he shares with his mother and sister, until an incident at work pushes him over the edge, causing him to regress to primitive behavior and tear down the wall of his living room—virtually transforming his home into a cave, open to the public." - e-flux

"This is mainly noted for having no intelligible dialogue throughout: given its considerable length (105 minutes) and essential plotlessness, though, the series of grunts, growls, groans and other gibberish uttered by all the characters involved does become wearying after a while. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the risks that film-makers were willing to take (and generally manage to pull off) during this most creative era in World Cinema; curiously enough, for being virtually a Silent film with barely established characters, this has one of the longest cast lists I've ever seen! THEMROC revolves around a laborer (Michel Piccoli) who goes berserk after getting the sack from work: he sleeps with his sister and destroys his apartment and, after the initial astonishment, his neighbors get the same anarchic bug. This streak of non-conformism also extends to sex (with plenty of non-graphic nudity on display), as Piccoli contrives to elicit uninhibited behavior from many of the females (be they nubile or frustrated) around him including the secretary, Marilu' Tolo, he had been caught unwittingly peeping on and subsequently seduced. Despite the occasional brutality, police intervention in the matter largely proves ineffectual. Though the point of it all is obscure unless it's that one needs to revert to some form of primeval state in order to survive the exigencies of the modern world  a handful of situations which crop up are definitely amusing: Piccoli and policeman Patrick Dewaere engaging in a tit-for-tat routine while the latter is rebuilding the façade of his apartment; feeling liberated, a victimized wife tries to assert herself and finally escapes her husband's tyranny through the window when he's not looking; a man spends practically the entire film lovingly washing his car but, then, at the very end he joins in the chaos by nonchalantly taking a sledge-hammer to it. Still, when all is said and done, the best thing about the film is its extraordinary fragmented editing." -- reviewer at imbdb

Watchable here!

Feels like a potential favorite film!

Strangely, this is the second French art film I've come across in a week where I've wondered whether J.G. Ballard saw it and was influenced. In this case, I'm thinking High-Rise, which was published in 1975. The other film is Weekend, by Jean-Luc Godard - I managed to get half way through, before taking a "pause", making it the nearest to watching a whole Godard I have ever got. Weekend came out several years before Crash. 

I have come across a quote from Ballard where he says that Godard completely misunderstood the phenomenon of the eroticized car crash: the film represents it as something to do with late capitalist decadence and soulless materialism, whereas for Ballard it's something both more primal and more humanly sophisticated (the libido creatively adapting to a hyper-technologized environment). Still, that could be a defensive warding off, a bit of "anxiety of influence". The bourgeoisie, bored, smashing things up for the nihilistic thrill of it - that would be a scenario that he would return to several times in his later career, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, etc. 

Weekend would make a good double bill with Hulot's Trafic, maybe. Or you could have a whole season of twisted films to do with automobiles - Two-Lane Blacktop. What else? 

Andrew Parker points to The Cars That Ate Paris (1974; directed by Peter Weir). "The small town of Paris, Australia deliberately causes car accidents, then sells/salvages all valuables from the wrecks as a means of economy."

And I guess the Max Max films would fit nicely. 

Duel, by Spielberg, would make a great inclusion.

Started watching Vanishing Point but didn't feel grabbed. 

Repo Man, another good one. 

Back to the amazingly titled Themroc....

It reminds me a bit - in spirit - of the anarchic satirical spirit, the grossness and grotesquerie, of La Grande Bouffe, which also came out in 1973, and involves a bunch of bored bourgeois middle-aged men who decide to eat themselves to death. 

 As a student I saw this listed in the programme of upcoming films at Oxford's Penultimate Picture Palace, a shabby cinema that specialized in foreign films and art movies, and knew I had to see it. And I was not disappointed. One character dies from a bout of flatulence. 

This was my season of seeing things like Fellini's Satyricon and Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a stab at becoming a cineaste that was never quite followed through (hence the not having seen a whole Godard... the only recently having watched my first Fassbinders). 

A few years back I got Bouffe out of our local excellent DVD rental store Videotheque (recently moved further away to Highland Park, sob) and while the leisurely pace of films made in the 1970s can be  disconcerting compared to contemporary movie norms, it's still a boggler What were they thinking, what was Marco Ferreri trying to say?  

Thomas Marks in Apollo magazine, tells the story: 

"In the wake of its premiere at the Festival de Cannes... audience members who had stayed the course booed and heckled the film’s director, Marco Ferreri, as he took to the stage with the cast..  Ingrid Bergman, president of the festival jury that year, is said to have been physically sick after the screening.

"Ferreri had unveiled a nihilistic fable, in which four jaded middle-aged men... gorge and screw themselves to death in a decrepit villa in Paris, assisted by three prostitutes (who eventually depart in disgust) and a libidinous school teacher (who does not). To the film’s defenders it was a caustic satire on the hedonistic dereliction of the bourgeoisie: ‘we handed people a mirror and they didn’t like seeing themselves in it,’ said the actor Philippe Noiret.... To its detractors it was nothing more than a pageant of perversity, a procession of feeding and farting and fornicating – and sometimes all at once. The moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared it ‘the most revolting film I have ever seen’.

"Ferreri certainly knew how to offend. He had persuaded four stars of French and Italian cinema – Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi – to play against type as grotesque characters who shared the actors’ own first names, as though they were performing as themselves....  All the characters remained obstinately motiveless in their mission to scoff themselves into oblivion. The film’s length, at over two hours, seemed designed to exhaust the comic momentum of its inaugural feasting scenes.....  the unfading torture of sitting through its concentrated, repetitive excess, its continuous forkfuls of pasta and purée and breast-shaped blancmange, its fanfares of flatulence. As the critic Roger Ebert wrote on the film’s release, La Grande Bouffe is ‘more of an experience than a treatise’.

"... Film-makers had revelled in the theatre of food in the past – think of the roast pig that discharges its stuffing of cooked meats in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) – but none had fastened on it in such detail. Perhaps that is why the chef Fergus Henderson describes La Grande Bouffe as ‘the greatest food film ever’ – citing a scene in which the protagonists slurp on marrow bones as the encouragement for his serving them at his St John Restaurant in London.

"Ferreri was himself both gourmet and gourmand, a man so fond of food that he had sought help for his overeating from a specialist clinic in Switzerland in the early 1970s. The inspiration for the film was a sybaritic dinner with actor friends, including the skilled amateur chef Tognazzi, who would play the chef in the film. 

"... The vast quantities of food required for the shoot were supplied by the high-end Parisian delicatessen Fauchon, with vans arriving early in the morning – as they do on screen – to deliver for the day’s filming.…’.

"The actors ate as they filmed, stuffing themselves every morning before the food spoiled under the lights. Noiret alone spat it out between takes. For the four men and their ringleader, at least, it must have been fun – until it started to feel like too much...."

Get out your Harraps French to English dictionary - or AI simultaneous translation software - for this mini-doc on Bouffe scandalizing Cannes 

Britrockers in a bad way pt 2 - selected by the commentariat

William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut

Phil Knight feels we should keep on piling on Captain Rock aka Richard Ashcroft (but he also concedes that A Northern Soul was a good record... (Personally I'm quite partial to the early shoegazey stuff, 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 motley aftermath-to-fame relates to something I have been meaning to blog about, a sequel  to(more like a twist on)  Wiki-Fear. But I will save those thoughts for a later juncture. 

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

I dunno - I feel Bobby was caught between a rock and a hard place here. How else was he supposed to negotiate this moment of absolute idiocy? Join in? (And what the fuck is that record and the dance that went with it? Was this some kind of UK-only Macarena craze I completely missed?)

Stylo swipes Jarvis Cocker (I think you have to scroll in a ways before you get to the embarrassing bit, JC's imitation of Rolf Harris)

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

I dunno - cheese is pretty incredible stuff, really, I can sort of see it as a new vocation in life...  At least he's not done the typical rockstar with lots of spare time on his hands thing i.e. picking up a paint brush and having vanity exhibitions in galleries. 

This below (suggested by Stylo) is some kind of nadir-al convergence of ShitBrit, though - circumstances here

Creator of The Big Feastival - for food, music and drink enthusiasts, hosted at his Cotswolds farm - and of a Britpop cider. 

I suppose the Feastival is the logical corollary of expensively-priced vinyl being on sale in Whole Foods. The embourgeoisifcation of rock.  But also only a slight extension of the family-friendly and foodie-friendly evolution of Glastonbury and other summer festivals. 

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 come up yet, 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, drugs-related as opposed to tumbling off a balcony in cloudy circumstances. 

Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes extreme wealth and arty bohemia. 

"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...