Dial-a-Disco

An advert in Sounds, April 1983. Love the drawing of the punkette with her piercings and badges. 

"Outside London, 24 hours a day, except during the season's major cricket matches, when it's available at the end of play"

Even without the summertime disruption caused by cricket, this doesn't seem the most compelling of offers to the pop-loving public: "all your favorite singles" but that translates to "four different songs" during the week, going up to five at the weekend. 

How much did they charge per minute? 

Easy to picture parents up and down the land with steam coming out of their ears when they opened the  phone bill.  

I could find very little information about Discline online.

But in the 1960s a service called Dial-A-Disc was offered by what was then known as the GPO - General Post Office . 

Same issue with the cricket competing for limited phoneline bandwidth!

Excerpts from a Retroscoop post about Dial-A-Disc:

"Dial-a-Disc was trialed first in Leeds, springing to life at 6 pm on the 7th July 1966. It ran for just under a month, before being hailed as an outstanding success! The service was started again on the 8th December 1966, again only in the Leeds area, but it was rolled out to the rest of the country gradually over a four year period.  On-demand music streaming had arrived. But Hi-Fidelity it wasn’t.

"Transmitted in Mono, with the bandwidth heavily squeezed, the music was accompanied by the obligatory background crackle and static hiss generated by sending the audio down miles of copper cable. But despite its shortcomings in musical quality, it was a truly magical experience – and one that had an indefinable charm about it....

"The service ran during the ‘cheap rate’ hours from 6 pm in the evening to 6 am the following morning every weekday, and all day on Sundays.  Initially only the top 7 records in the charts were played on the service, with a new record being played every day. This was soon increased to the top 8, with two records being played on Sundays. Eventually, the service expanded in its latter years to include the whole of the top 20.... 

"People who used Dial-a-Disc have fond memories of the quirkiness of the service.  Some individuals recall that on some occasions they could sometimes hear other people talking on the line during the gaps between the end and start of the records. This appears to have been more of a problem when listening to Dial-a-Disc via public phone boxes. In some inner-city booths, youths would dial into the service specifically to chat to other local users during the quiet spots. One woman from Birmingham claimed to have met her future husband in this way!"

Like fiddling the lecky or your gas meter, crafty kids found a bunch of different ways of getting to hear the pop tunes for free. 

However this one doesn't sound very satisfying: 

"Listening to the record in installments.  The GPO allowed users to listen to the first 10 seconds of the recording for free before you had to insert money into the coin box. Users would ring the service multiple times until they had managed to listen to the whole disc. Tedious, but achievable."

But wouldn't it just replay the first 10 seconds of any given song again and again? 

Another juicy, yet also somewhat puzzling and unconvincing snippet:

"There was another problem caused by the service that particularly affected small towns and villages that only had one public phone box. Clusters of youths began to hold what the press began to term ‘telephone-a-gogos’, where dozens of teens pooled their pocket money and hogged call boxes for hours on end listening and dancing to the same record over and over."

Hmmm... look,  I know people in the sticks were culturally deprived - I can remember what it was like living in a smallish town in the semi-country in the 1970s  - but really, would kids cluster around a public telephone to hear pop music? What is the broadcast strength and range of a phone receiver not held to the ear but aloft for a group of people to hear?  Fairly feeble, I'd say - and then the level of fidelity would be barely existent. And talking about capacity - "dozens of teens" were squeezing themselves into a phone box, were they? 

For a moment there I started to wonder if this blogpost was made-up.

"Telephone-a-gogos" is good. Alernative pun: dial-a-disco party. 

The second half of this also strained credulity:

"My ‘love affair’ with Dial-a-Disc occurred during the summer of 1979, where I would often dial in to hear the latest sounds. However, the first quarterly bill brought my happy ‘affair’ to an abrupt end.  I did attempt to call from a Phone box on one occasion, but a bunch of local yobs ran round the box with a roll of masking tape and sealed me in. Luckily, a passer-by spotted me and managed to get me out."

Yeah, pull the other one, pal.

Ditto for your story about the mate who, heading home drunk from a party, got in a phone booth and dialed up "I Will Survive", then fell asleep. Only to wake in the morning and find a long, irritated queue of people in the morning waiting to use the phone,  but too typically English and polite to disturb the occupant. 

Ah, so -  as the reference "the summer of 1979" indicates -  Discline would appear to have just been a rebranding of Dial-A-Disc, which had carried on through the 1970s  and under its new name would make it to the other end of  the '80s,  finally winding up in around 1991.  

 

vinyl mysticism

At Washington Post, an interesting video-illustrated feature on how vinyl records are made today 

Interesting, even though I have almost no interest - and zero participation - in the Vinyl Revival

Can't remember when I last bought a new LP ....  and buying a second-hand, from back-in-the-long-ago elpee has become a vanishingly infrequent occurrence too.  

I've almost fully shifted over to streaming... the logic of ultra-convenience has vanquished me...  the sound is good enough for most situations....  It's so much easier than having to sift through my collection, which is not as well-organised as it should be.

And so all those LPs I hunted down over the decades, the CDs I got sent or bought... they mostly just sit there. 

Still, even though it's all in the past for me now, the vinyl record remains one of the things that makes me feel a little bit mystical... even after having the production process demystified in that WashPost article.... because even after seeing all the stages of the manufacturing, I still don't have a rational understanding of how vinyl records work.... and consequently continue to find it more than a little magical. 

This applies to any record in any genre really, but for some reason particularly stands out if I play an LP of avant-garde electronic music, something I bought back in my second-hand record shop haunting days... or in recent years, that I've borrowed from the amazing record library at the place I work, so I'd be playing it in on my turntable in order to burn it onto a CD-R.  

These avant-electronic / musique concrete recordings are radically spatialized, teeming with minute textural details, sounds darting around the stereofield....  

Their almost glossy sound jumps out of the speakers.  

And I'm always like: "how do they get that into these narrow grooves... engrave all that information and space into these tiny furrows gouged into slabs of petrochemical matter?"

"How can all of that sound-and-space get extracted on demand via what - on the face of it -  would appear to be a crude electro-mechanical process: the friction of a stylus - this pointy shard of mineral - dragged through that incredibly constricted furrow?"

It still seems magic to me....  it defies comprehension...  it's a real "can't believe your ears" situation.

A mundane miracle.

And then to realise further that my decent but quite old hi-fi is extracting a tiny portion of what a record is capable of releasing, if it were to be put through some really advanced, superior, high-end equipment. 

When I did a piece on the revival of interest in '70s underground disco that was going on in the 2000s with Body & Soul and so forth, I interviewed David Mancuso. After  a plate full of pasta at a local restaurant, he took me round to a friend's apartment in the East Village, where this old Loft believer had allowed Mancuso to stash his ultra-expensive stereo. 

He had to assemble parts of it and also let it warm up before playing a record. 

The stylus alone cost something like $5,000, a multiple of my entire hi-fi's cost.  The cartridge even more.

Memory is hazy, but I believe the turntable's platter was suspended in some kind of special cocooned space, held in place by springs maybe, so as to protect the playback from the effect of external vibrations.  

The speakers were large, chest-height things. 

I thought how generous and loyal and self-sacrificing it was of Mancuso's friend to allow such a large part of their apartment - which wasn't huge - be so dominated by this musical machinery. 

Finally, he was ready to play some records - one was Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, a favorite of mine, rather than a disco record. And it truly was incredible, the shimmering, fluttering depth and detail in the playback, the sheer sonic presence. 

I started to see how you could go down that path (which can become a tragic obsession as with this story of an audiophile fiend, who more or less ruined his life in pursuit of perfect sound) 

Anecdotally, over the years I've noticed that most music critics I've know have had a fairly crappy hi-fi - sometimes I'd be surprised by the poor quality of tapes they'd do for me. Probably it was the case that all their money was going on records, rather than the mechanism for releasing their musical content - they were greedy for new sounds. 

Conversely, the people I've known who were obsessed with hi-fidelity often had really small record collections - and distinctly square, conservative taste. 

There's been some examples recently of lifelong vinyl fiends shedding their lifetime's accumulations, or preparing to do- perhaps sensing that time is running out, "you can't take it with you"

Maybe it's time for me too, to divest - or at least, to undertake a radical thinning down. 

Practically speaking, I'm not getting use out of this stuff. Someone in Japan or Argentina would get more buzz of owning such-and-such a techno 12-inch or postpunk obscurity.  Maybe it's time to strike while the iron is hot. While the demand is out there still.

But the idea of the effort involved - the expenditure of time and energy - makes me all weak at the knees and I put it off again. 

Perhaps I will end up interred in a gigantic burial mound...  shelves lining the vaulted interior, crammed with LPs and box sets.... my mummified body draped across a huge pile of unsleeved vinyl - like Smaug lying on his treasure in The Hobbit... 

More demystification of the process

snippet on the vagaries of vinyl science, from Kevin Shields, interviewed by Taylor Parkes for tQ

"So when you're making a record, it's a hard thing... different cuts of the record sound different, the kind of vinyl has an effect.

"I mean, what the needle looks like is a snowplough, because there's always dust in the air and the grooves have all got shit in them, and the needle just throws all that out the way, ploughing through it. 

"So depending on the vinyl and how heavy it is and how dirty it is, the needle can be dancing and jumping as it goes... so you get all those variations in the sound. "

do the hokey cokey (hell / heaven)

 

Of the three, Arthur Brown is perhaps the least hokey

It must have been genuinely alarming for parents and middle-of-the-roaders to see this witch-doctor prancing in the Top of the Pop studio, fringed with flames.  

Taunting the squares in their sitting rooms: 

"You fought hard and you saved and earned

But all of it's going to burn...

You've been living like a little girl

In the middle of your little world

Also, this is 1968 - riots and sit-ins and disorder in the streets. "Burn baby burn!"

It's like a frightfully English mummer show / Medieval carny type version of the Doors's Dionysianism (keyboard-dominant sound too)

That strange, hip-dislocating jive Arthur B does at one point! The demonic laughter! 

Of course those three do not exhaust the rock thematics of Hell, the Devil, Satan, etc

Huge amounts more in the metal area

Hmmm, doing the Stones or Sabbath seems too obvious

What else? 

I was about to say Killing Joke were an genuinely infernal band (before they shlocked out)

And then saw that actually have a song on this topic, or near it 

Revelations is the ungodly peak 

I assume "pandys" is some kind of reference to pandemonium in its original / literal meaning 

Probably crops up a lot in soul and country and reggae and such

Ah, how could I forget?  Not hokey at all this, absolutely terrifying. I tried to listen to this album in the dark when I first got it, but had to turn the lights back on. 

Had a very pleasant conversation with La Galas in, I think, late '86, interviewing her in cafe in Queensway. 

esto era mañana / música electrónica femenina

These tunes appears in a playlist + commentary at The Wire of mind-bending works by Latin-American female electronic composers, among them Vânia Dantas Leite, Beatriz Ferreyra and Nelly Moretto .... the playlist is compilated and annotated by Alejandra Cardenas, co-editor of Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women.  

Published by Contingent Sounds out of Berlin, the  book represents a double decentering of the received narrative about electronic music history: it focuses on the Latin American contribution, and further focuses on the role of female pioneers such as Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Jocy de Oliveira, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet  among many others

Co-edited by Luis Alvarado of Buh Records, a Peruvian label that specialises in reissuing Latin American avant-garde and experimental music, including works by Jacqueline Nova and Oksana Linde

.

Release rationale: 

"The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain.... 

"The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves....

Edited by: Luis Alvarado and Alejandra Cárdenas

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: 

Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sagüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O’Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

YouTube Playlist 

the original Metal Boxes

"The album was originally released on vinyl in a circular novelty package of a metal replica of a giant tobacco tin, inside which was a poster created with five connected paper circles with pictures of the band members. This proved too expensive and not successful as the tins tended to roll off of shelves and it was quickly followed by a paper/card replica with a gatefold cover."

Talking about this, of course

The bit about the tins rolling off shelves tickled me, I must say.

I don't remember having that problem with Metal Box myself, though. 

I was amazed when reading up on Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake  to discover just how hugely successful it was - six weeks at number one in the UK.

"Lazy Sunday" was a #2 hit in the spring-summer of 1968

 

"They make it very clear they've got no room for ravers"

But verily tis something that hast Droppeth Away Unto Nothingness

I can't think of Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake ever having been a reference point for groups, even though it's Peak Psychedelia, or the last gasp of it. 

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

Another anticipator of Metal Box would be this release

Not metal, admittedly - but the concept is the same: a drab-looking utilitarian style of packaging... in this case, reinforced cardboard

Inside the carton, the album itself has a whole other cover with the band as sailors on the town (possibly a nod to the musical On the Town) and about to get up to debauched malarkey  (outcome depicted on the flip)

And then there was even more on the inner sleeve

The record's theme was sex (hence the idea of the plain brown wrapper) and it was supposed to be a return to a music-first direction after the ultra-theatricality of the Billion Dollar Babies tour.  Alice here submitting to the rest of the band's desires

Nobody was convinced or interested. 

Now John Lydon was a huge fan of Alice Cooper, although I doubt he was a fan of this record, as it's utterly denuded of inspiration. He did describe Killer as the greatest hard rock album of all time.

He was also a fan of the Small Faces - or at least the Sex Pistols were, they covered some of their tunes if I recall correctly.

The idea of the metal canister apparently came from Dennis Morris, their photographer friend, though. 

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

There's probably other earlier examples of canister or chest-like containers for recordings - monumental box sets in the world of classical music, for instance. 

Later examples of tinned records? 

Chain Reaction issued 'career round-ups' of their artists's vinyl-only output on compact disc, encased in finicky metal containers. Some purchasers complained that this packaging damaged the disc. 

Feel like I got sent something by Merzbow in this sort of packaging. 

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

Going back to where we started - Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake

Never quite got on with the Small Faces - there's something off-putting about them - the voices, even the look of Steve Marriott. Even the name of the band! 

But I love the combination of heaviness and groove on this tune, with the phased drums and colorized bass and the warm psychedelic keyboard. 

Another Small Faces song I adore is "Itchycoo Park"

Now, where did that religious-y, choirboy-like quality come from?  

The Who went into that high, pure zone with their singing as well.

It seems to be a uniquely British contribution to rock. 

Well, there was The Byrds, I suppose. "Eight Miles High".... some of the songs on Younger Than Yesterday and Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Perhaps it's the resort to folk and country vocal styling, as opposed to rhythm-and-blues. Neither folk nor country do sex, as such. There's no carnal heat. 

But the English psychedelic era stuff has a distinctly churchy quality, almost Anglican.

Psalmic. Monkish even.

The "she was a virgin of a humble origin / she knew of no sin" section of this 

Think of the vocal tonality in "Rain" by the Beatles - this sort of pulsating awe. There's nothing like it in rock prior to that, which the exception maybe of "Eight Miles High"

It seems to relate to  a certain kind of LSD-triggered ascesis, or at least an above-it-all fleshlessness -  rock becoming disincarnate, its mind on higher things.... no longer this-worldly.

Apparently Ronnie Lane got into Sufism. 

Actually there is also the Beach Boys, to be fair. "God Only Knows" etc.

Now Phil Knight's a big fan of Marriott's next venture, Humble Pie. Completely different vibe - earthy, sweaty, rutting. Following the lead of Canned Heat.

I have never been able to summon the intestinal fortitude to try the Pie, I confess.

Newly recovered footage of the Pie playing at Biba's, of all places - the glam-rock-aligned retro-boutique turned department store. 

Reg Presley, World President