replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Nils Lofgren - one of the critics's pet artists of the 1970s. On both sides of the Atlantic.
Tasty licks. Rockin' - but not heavy. A guitar hero - without all the phallic strut and willy-symbol wand-waving. Intelligent - but not overtly prog or sophisto.
Praised to the heavens by Greil here in Creem - compared to Buddy Holly - but oddly absent from the 'greatest records of all time' at the end of Stranded - only five years later
One of the worst names for a group ever, I think - Grin.
A thematic of "toughness" belied by the rabbit-punch palatability of the music.
Transitioning to New Wave
Richard Hell style tears in the T-shirt - in 1981!
Perhaps analogous to Tom Petty as an Old Wave / New Wave alloy of undecidable composition.
(Or maybe Mink Deville?)
But unlike Petty, never made it and then became subsumed into Springsteen's E Street Band.
I mean, he's a good guitar player 'n' all - but the total package don't add up to anything really essential, do it? Splits the difference between Crazy Horse and Rick Derringer and I don't know what. Determinedly nondescript if impassioned "honeyed rasp" vocals, songs that don't quite make the grade, lyrics that miss the mark...
A little film about Bruce Conner and the making of a promo film for Toni Basil's 1966 single "Breakaway" (which is apparently a Northern Soul classic)
Toni Basil, genius choreographer, had another intersection with the avant-garde - her work with a bodybopping crew called The Electric Boogaloos influenced Byrne & Eno in the early stages of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Byrne - who dated Basil for a while - told me that initially he and Eno imagined the music as the soundtrack to a film she was making with the dance troupe.
I tried to interview Toni when I did the big piece on Eno and his New York years but no luck.
The Electric Boogaloos appear in this Basil-directed-and-choreographed video for Talking Heads "Crosseyed and Painless", a US single off of Remain in Light - a song in which Byrne essays a stilted WASP-y form of rapping in the middle.
Basil also co-directed the "Once In A Lifetime" promo with Byrne
Here's a whole BBC special of avant-tinged dance fun she did in the 1980s
Here's her video album which starts with a fun Noo Wavey version of Bacharach + David's "My Little Red Book" as also covered by Love
Of course mostly she is known for this
Is "Mickey" - the intro at least - part of the continuum of Diddleybeat?
I suppose it's more rightly considered a post-"My Sharona" move
Round about this time, Jaz Coleman ran away to Iceland, didn't he? Got up to all sorts of necromantic malarkey. When Killing Joke went on Top of the Pops to do"Empire Song", they had to have a stand-in, wearing a deep sea diving suit.
From nearby Greenland, the story of a mysterious seismic hum that lasted 9 days.
"Seismologists picked up a deep hum oscillating at 10.88 millihertz.... By the time the hum decayed, after nine strange days, a variety of experts, including tsunami researchers and deep-Earth geoscientists, had gathered into an expansive chat group on an open-source platform called Mattermost. They debated all sorts of possible explanations, from the routine to the avant-garde.
"The seismic signals didn’t match the signature of an earthquake. Perhaps an ice sheet, disturbed by the rockfall, was ringing like a bell. Maybe the landslide had forced a chunk of ice to melt, and that water slipped through a natural piping system in a glacier, turning it into an instrument and creating the geological equivalent of music. Or could the Greenlandic hum be the work of some incognito volcanism?
"No evidence to support any of these ideas was forthcoming. People started jokingly wondering if it was aliens, or maybe dragons, having a rave or a tantrum."
"The geological equivalent of music" !
Worth reading the Atlanticpiece for the solution to the mystery.
Reminded me of this quote:
“The violence that Killing Joke is about is not violence on the immediate level but the mass violence, the violence bubbling underneath your feet, the violence of nature throwing up. And we become that violence” - jollyman Jaz,speaking to NME, early '80s
Ooh, another Joke-ish bit further down the Atlantic piece:
"The difference with the Greenlandic pandemonium is that, luckily, it caused minimal damage and zero casualties. Instead, Earth presented scientists with a riddle—and they went all in to solve it, simply to satiate their curiosity."
I assume that's what Jaz & Co mean by "pandys" anyway.
One of my favorite bands, the only group of that era I saw twice, but somehow the idea has got out there that Killing Joke are undervalued and sidelined in Rip It Up. "They should have a whole chapter!". Only PiL get a chapter to themselves, and PiL are PiL. Everybody else has to share.
Bathetic side note: one of my Mum's favorite sayings is the somewhat quaint use of "hum" to mean "strong odor". Of an unventilated bedroom, one might say "oooh, it dunnarf hum in there". Of a ripely authentic French cheese brought back from a daytrip to Boulogne, that then stank out the train compartment on the journey back, "it really did hum". Upon taking off one's shoes after a hot summer day's trudging around London.... you get the idea.
I like this expression for its synesthetic drift, the cross-contamination of sense boundaries. It makes me picture those stink-lines that cartoonists would draw in theBeano or the Dandy. Stench so potent, so thick, it becomes vibrational - but also something you can almost see.
Ah, I see I have distorted this is in memory - it's not a deep sea diver's outfit (I always do picture something out of a Tintin story) but something somewhere between an astronaut's suit, a biological warfare scientist's protective gear, and a beekeeper's helmet.
How amazing that after over four decades of unhealthy obsession with pop music, you can still come across astounding oddball songs from your own lifetime and your own country that you never heard before!
Another version
This though is my favorite - the one I encountered first - while wading masochistically through an absolutely atrocious, nearly completely barren episode of Top of the Pops from 1976, the unchallenged nadiral year of British pop... at least until the 2000s.
The performance is at 27.32
Freaky-freaky sounds the guitarist wrenches out of his instrument in "the solo"!
It actually reminds me a little of this astonishing avant-guitar release
Followed by a performance by Twiggy. Singing country and western.
Nadiral it was.
Johnny Wakelin was a fellow from Brighton and amazingly "In Zaire" isn't even his first hit single about Muhammad Ali. Before the Rumble in the Jungle inspired "In Zaire", he had a Top 10 hit with "Black Superman (Muhammad Ali)".
He was initially almost monothematic, song after song about boxers and boxing.
This made me think about other songs about boxers and boxing, Or that take boxing as an allegorical framing device.
LL Cool J, "Mama Said Knock You Out" - the single greatest rapping performance of all time?
That one by Simon & Garfunkel.
Survivor, "Eye of the Tiger"
This garage rap oddity, uploaded to the commonweal by yours truly - specifically the second song, "K.O."
Didn't Guns N'Roses have a song about music journalists called "Get in the Ring"?
I have had my doubts for quite some time now whether "punk" is any kind of thing to believe in, once you are past the age of 25 at the very latest. Doubts voiced here and there, sometimes subtly
Just the other day I read something that bolstered the doubts even more. A review at Louder Than War of a memoir by Steve Diggle, who nowadays essentially = Buzzcocks
The book is called Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock. The reviewer is Dave Jennings.
"Autonomy is one of Buzzcocks greatest songs and maybe one of
the songs that best captures the essence of what Punk was, and still is, all
about. Be who you are, take no shit and, as far as possible, control your life
and live it the way you want to....
"Diggle believes he was born to be a Punk, relating a tale of when, as a
seven-year-old, he was part of a gang that literally smashed up one of their
nan’s house. This independent, untameable streak continued through being
expelled on his final day of school and avoiding work like the plague...."
Hang on, wind back a bit there: your foundational self-mythos is that you and a bunch of fellow untameables went around to one of the gang's granny's place - no doubt full of cherished keepsakes and mementoes of a life nearing its end - and you smashed it to pieces? I know the Damned, ludicrously if irresistibly, sang about "gonna smash it up til my dying day", but making a lovely old lady cry is something to be ashamed of, quietly repented of in the sleepless small hours... not something you'd foreground in a memoir...
But wait! There's more:
"Diggle’s life of autonomy veers into some uncomfortable areas such as heavy
drug use... and the difficult to comprehend fact that
he drove away from his girlfriend, who was holding their baby and begging him
to stay, rather than suffer the constraints of a relationship and being a
parent."
Yes, difficult to comprehend... and yet so commonplace... bog-standard shit bloke behaviour, nothing especially punk rock about it
Except in a certain sense it is pure punk rock.
"Life as a Punk Rock icon gave him what he feels he needs, the omnipresent sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As Charlie Harper would say, “Born a rocker, die a rocker”."
I know, I know, there are otherideas of punk - DIY, collectively run performance spaces, all ages shows, Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, Crass, riot grrrl, etc etc - anti-authoritarian, concerned, altruistic, committed to causes - wholesome, earnest, idealistic... But I suppose what I am saying is that actually the real punk, the true punk, is the "and we don't care"/ "got no emotions for anybody else... I'm in love with my self" element. That's the the core of it - and it's why it appeals to boys aged 15 to 17 above all...
In a funny twist, of course, if ever there was a thing as "gentle punk" then it was Pete Shelley, who appears to be the opposite of Diggle.
Although apparently there's some tell-all stuff in Autonomy about Pete....
