Quintessence of Old Wave (1 of ??)

Who knew Roy Harper took a turn at acting? Playing a young rising musician in what the director admits was "a mess".

This film / trailer gets extra Quintessence of Old Wave points on account of actually featuring Whispering Bob Harris of Old Grey Whistle Test renown in it - presumably playing himself more or less as Harper plays himself more or less.

Amazing how many movies there are out there that one has never ever heard of - big budget efforts too. I guess the miss to hit ratio in the motion picture game is as poor as in the music industry. And unlike with records, they don't stick around in solid form, circulating in second-hand record shops and junkshops and car boot sales and charity shops. There must still be many many films that never made it to DVD. 

Now there is a Roy-in-the-bath scene in this trailer, which reminded me that while he's one of my favorite singers, I'd rather he hadn't taken his kit off at every opportunity

Was Harper in fact some kind of sex symbol? The Harvest marketing department certainly seemed to think so. And presumably Roy did as well

"Flashes", "flashing" - geddit?

Lost the beard in the '80s, kept the hair

Watch out Sex Pistols, how about this for EMI shareholders-upsetting controv? This is 1977 and whatever the album (Bullinamingvase?) that Roy did that year

Originally the album contained the song "Watford Gap" which contained somewhat disparaging lyrics concerning the Watford Gap service station, a motorway service area situated between junctions 16 and 17 of the M1 motorway, near Watford Gap, in Northamptonshire, England.

Just about a mile from where the motorways all merge

You can view the national edifice, a monumental splurge

It's the lonesome traveller's rotgut or bacteria's revenge

The great plastic spectacular descendant of Stonehenge

And the people come to worship on their death-defying wheels

Fancy-dressed as shovels for their death-defying meals

It's the Watford Gap, Watford Gap

A plate of grease and a load of crap

Harper claimed the food was "junk, absolute junk. I tried to get the media food commentators of the day interested, but none of them would help me because they were all kind of bought off in some way, they were in the pockets of the corporations. I got a reply from Bernard Levin – he agreed with me but wouldn't go public about it".

Subsequent pressings omitted the song at the behest of an EMI board member who was (also) a non-executive director of Blue Boar (the owners of the service station). Under duress, Harper replaced the controversial track with "Breakfast With You", a song he himself allegedly described as "pap".[citation needed] In 1996, "Watford Gap" was finally restored to the re-issued CD, with "Breakfast With You" now the closing track.

Controversy of another and more unsavory type stirred - retrospectively, not amazingly at the time (they were different times)  by the song "Forbidden Fruit". At the time, Harper claimed the song was just a fantasy, one he shared with Lewis Carroll...  

C.f. his mates Jimmy Page and Johnny Peel

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

 This is pretty amazing - studio songscapery that takes the peaks of Stormcock to a whole other dimension

This is his "Starsailor" I guess

Optical Sound

 

(via Andrew Parker)

New Wavest (#3 of ??)

Clock DVA  -  a name one associates with industrial music. 

Well, they were actually on Industrial Records, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them, White Souls in Black Suits. 

Then Clock DVA were on Fetish, an imprint started by TG associate and ultra-fan Rod Pearce (he rereleased Second Annual Report and various other Gristle records). 

On Fetish, DVA were label mates with 23 Skidoo. 

DVA singer Adi Newton was into Burroughs and Gysin - cut up, dream machines. 

So all told, archetypally industrial. None more industrial. 

However, if you listen to their best-known tune, "4 Hours", from 1981.... 

... beneath the shrill wail of the horn and the doom-boom baritone (Adi bridging the gap between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch), the song sounds like the Cars or The Undertones, something of that ilk

It's got that damped-strings (or is the term palm-muted?) rhythm guitar chug.

The breakdown couldn't be more archetypally New Wave. 

The lyrics, though, have something to do with the four hours of dream sleep, lucid dreaming, etc - i.e. typical industrial-style esoteric research. Sexual entanglements, stained sheets, etc.

After Thirst, Clock DVA actually briefly went New Pop, signing to Polydor for the album Advantage - an episode that seemed to embarrass Newton later.

The outcome somewhere between Lexicon Of Love and Floodland

After that Newton went back to the industrial left-field with The Anti Group

....  and then from 2011 a reformulated Clock DVA. 

They are still going strong - indeed they put out an album this year. 

sugared hiccups (UK rock 'n' roll 1 of ??)

 

"He didn't have much of a voice either, he was all nose and tonsil, a poor man's Buddy Holly. What he did have, though was... a certain persistent oddity, a real individuality. His first number one, What Do You Want?, was one continuous hiccough, a dying fit, agonized and agonizing, the words contorted almost beyond recognition. He spewed up the word 'baby' as 'biybe', choking horribly on each vowel, and that was the major hook... it was catching; it made him. One word mispronounced and he had his whole career going for him" 

- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom. 

. 

Arrangement by John Barry!

Adam Faith's singing style - seemingly composed out of multiple speech impediments - is the ancestor for both Steve Harley and D Double E.

"Natch, he flogged it hard, spluttering and expiring like a man inspired, and he did very nicely. In retrospect, his big hits - Poor Me, Someone Else's Baby, How About That? - stand up as the best, most inventive British records of that time, the only truly POP music we were producing then."

- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom. 

"But the most important thing he did was to introduce the concept of Pop Singer as Thinker, now so popular in documentaries and the Sunday Papers"

- Nik Cohn, AwopBopaLooBopLopBamBoom

Sitting in the hot seat - still warm from Carl Jung and Edith Sitwell -  Adam Faith, interviewed by John Freeman for Face to Face, wowed parents across the land: what a thoughtful, well-spoken, courteous and candid young man.  No hooligan he: reads books, listens to classical music.

Went on to a successful career as an actor.