The CAMRA never lies

I am taking refuge from the political-social horrors of the present by paying attention to the political-social woes of yesteryear - YouTube's ancient episodes of World In Action are particularly diverting.  

Like this 1970 one - which docufiction style recreates the recent misadventures of a young man who left his hometown for London and almost instantly became homeless. The young man, now safely reintegrated into the fabric of society with a job and a place to live, reenacts his own experiences sleeping rough, bathing in public bathtubs, doing heroin, etc. Learned a cool word watching this - "derry" - short for derelict, as in a derelict house, rather than unhoused person.

Or how about this one from the late '80s about the Docklands redevelopment scheme and its deleterious effect on local residents? This is an issue I would have been aware of in vague terms at the time, but not with this concrete detail and vivid grimness. And I would not have seen this program then partly because I didn't own a telly or have ready access to one, but mostly because I was out and about seeing bands or just being young. 

An earlier program on the decline of the Docklands, from 1976

This is the opposite of how nostalgia usually works. Generally, nostalgia involves fixating on the "fun" bits of the past, like music or other forms of entertainment, fashion, maybe sport, or just something quirkily of its time - and screening out the shite: urban blight, political strife, racism-sexisim-homophobia, mass poverty and the sheer impoverishment of the look of things in run-down post-WW2 Britain....  The backdrop, the context, drops away, and just the redeeming or charming or daft bits are focused on: the escapism rather than the things that necessitated escape. Which then creates a completely distorted, unfaithful sense of how fun and cool the past was. 

But what I'm doing is finding distraction and even relaxation in the bad bits of the living-memory past.  It's not even warts-and-all retrospection - I'm zooming in on the warts and nothing but the warts. 

But there is also lighter fare on offer - via the bonanza that the BBC Archive has recently been offering  up, here's a 1977 program on the brewing industry in U.K. and the Campaign for Real Ale.

Fascinating stuff, from the space-age control room of the gigantic industrialized brewing works to the struggle for control of the drinking map of the country between the different cartels of beer makers (whose tentacles also extended into spirits and wine, many well known brands)  and then finally to the earnest activists of the pressure group CAMRA, with their conferences and drably written and drearily delivered speeches, not to mention their clothes (lots of sweaters and sideburns). Surprisingly there are actually some women visible at the meetings, if not on the podium. 

I feel like this information came up in some recent blog comment, or perhaps I just saw it on someone else's blog - but CAMRA put out a record. A selection of beer themed tunes, performed  for some reason in a lite jazz-rock mode, as performed by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. One of the tunes is by the great Neil Ardley. 

To be honest, even if I didn't direly crave relief from the present, I'd probably happily spend all my TV-time watching these old currents-affairs programs and investigative reports from the 1970s and 1980s.  Joy's patience for it, though, is limited.

Then there's the light entertainment fare of the time, astonishingly bereft and often outrageously reactionary. 

But that's a whole other story - indeed there's a blog post I have been hatching for a while now, working title New Faeces. 

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

Suddenly occurred to me this blog has basically become a 1970s blog - or 70s / 80s blog (if factoring in the Bad Music Era postige). 

Bit like a cross between those decades blogs of yore and Found Objects.... 

P is for Paladin.... and also for Picador

  

Paladin - second only to Picador as a publisher's name to set the arty-intellectual bibliophile's heart a flutter...   

Radical, countercultural, polemical, esoteric, transgressive, avant-garde, youth culture ... a feast for the hungry young mind, portions selling at a reasonable paperback price. Eye-catching design.

I have six of the above Paladins - and in the the same covers as shown.

These are the ones

Dig the inclusion of negative quotes about Playpower on the back cover - "the book they're all talking about!"

Not all of the above were bought at the time, though. 

Back in the day, Picador and Paladin titles were usually displayed in spinners.  

You know what I mean, those rotating wire-metal things with basket compartments that hold about 4 to 6 paperbacks.

One of those commonplace things that were totally part of the bookworm's life, but no one seems to have seen fit to take a picture of one.  At least one crammed with Paladins and / or Picadors. 

They still use spinners in Oxfam but they tend to be crammed with vintage Penguin + Pelican non-fiction. 

Well, after searching online for a goodly while, I did find an example and it seems to be contemporary too: from a Chorlton charity shop - a Paladin spinner, a Picador spinner and a Virago spinner, all in a row. Not the wire basket type though. 

The Paladin and Picador designs aren't nearly as characterful and grabby as back in the day though.  Nor do the books themselves seem be as cool or esoteric. 

(On second thoughts - maybe they just repurposed the spinners and have crammed them with books by sundry nonaligned publishers?)

Now this was the sort of typical Picador paperback that greeted the eye back in the day

This below is probably the more "iconic" Gravity's Rainbow cover though

Owned that edition for years and years ... never read it! Eventually the pages got so dingy yellow-brown I had to chuck it out.

Did finish this slimmer effort though  (following the same principle of reading Notes from Underground but getting only so far into Brothers Karamazov)

I owned and read a Koestler but not this one.... 

Was it this one? I don't remember the cover. 

Or perhaps a primer selection of his works? 

(I remember his theory about laughter - which was convincing. He had a good point about how it's impossible to tickle yourself. And also that being tickled only works with someone you know - if a stranger came up and tried to tickle you, it would not be funny, you'd be alarmed. Tickling works as an oscillation between fear and trust). 

Picador must have done about half-a-dozen of Koestler's... a completely forgotten figure now (although "ghost in the machine" lives on as a sourceless cliche)... Unsavory chap, in his personal life (Wiki-Fear alert)

Had all the Ian McEwan's up to and including Comfort of Strangers 

Read the story collections and Cement several times each....   jejune and creepy in their shock-tactics, maybe, but much more compelling than the mature McEwan (with the exception of On Chesil Beach, which is almost a throwback to the early taboo-tweaking mode in its subject matter but has a more pained adult take on it.... ) . I read them all quite recently again, the short stories and the novella, for the first time in decades, and they still stand up.

Now Brautigan never appealed, nor even really intrigued....  the whimsied titles warned me off. As did his mustache.

Had this Burroughs primer and also Cities of the Red Night... now he's an author that doesn't do much for me

Now I'm wondering if Picador did any non-fiction in those days.... everything I can recall having on the imprint (some DeLillo, a Vollmann.... what else?) was a novel or short story collection. 

Ooh, the amount of hours in my life I spent rotating those Picador and Paladin spinners.... ogling the  offerings, the opportunities for mind expansion. 

(One of the great thrills in my life - to be published by Picador, who originally did Energy Flash)

Now what is it with UK publishers and the letter P? 

Panther

Pan

Picador

Paladin

Penguin

Puffin

Pelican

Peregrine

Pluto

Palgrave

Polity

Quintessence of New Wave (1 of ??) (Rockstars in the Nuddy - slight unsightly return's return)

It wasn't just an Old Wave thing, clearly - getting the kit off - it was  a New Wave thing too

Or perhaps just a Sounds  thing. 

I don't remember NME or Melody Maker ever going in for this. 

Jape continued on the inside spread with this Two Virgins parody I'm assuming.

 

The Damned's career is quintessentially New Wave through and through -  entertaining second-rank punk, utterly unthreatening 

This one's my favorite (not the lyrical first bit so much as the single version proper, the jolly punk-it-up part) (although the lyrical first section is wonderfully unexpected)

Harmless fun innit. 

Rebranded as Sixties-epigones

Vanian's look - which comes out of Rocky Horror Show - is said by some to be antecedent to Goth.

Meanwhile Captain Sensible dwarfs the parent band's success

Allied with the mimsy Dolly Mixtures.

Capn Sensi should have formed his own political party, a la Monster Raving Loony and Screaming Lord Sutch. Stood as an MP. 

Maybe he did? 

Altern-8  - who belong in this lineage assuredly - did.  A platform of free raves for the under-10s, subsidized Vicks - something along those lines. It's in E-Flash, I can't be bothered to look it up.

He looks a bit like Harpo Marx. 

I should do Max Splodge next. (Bushell placed Slodgenessabounds at the head of a phenom he called La Punk Pathetique).

Then Tenpole Tudor.

Old Wavers in the Nuddy (slight unsightly return) (unidentified flashing object)

 

Phil Mogg, frontman of space rockers turned metal outfit UFO

From Sounds, 1979.

Is that his hand on the other side of his lower torso, or his actual knob, or side-ball? Anatomical experts adjudicate!

This is a photo that Sounds would recycle whenever the opportunity arose. 

Reference in the blurb to UFO being on Old Grey Whistle Test last week

Sounds really did seem to have a thing about displaying Phil Mogg in the near-buff

UFO got a lot of support from Sounds in this era and it wasn't always conditional on being unclothed

UFO - a band whose early records I would like to have liked more than I actually did. 

Bit like with Hawkwind. But with less of a toothsome framing. 

I have the first couple of albums, when they were UK space rock festival stalwarts. Cool logo. 

"One Hour Space Rock"

The title track "Flying" is nearly 27 minutes long.

The thematics are very Hawkwindy

As they drifted towards hard rock, UFO became a classic fourth from the top of the bill, Knebworth, Reading, sort of band. 

From the later metal-tending phase this is reputedly their stone classic. 

Are they a bit like the Hawkwind / Motorhead branch-off/de-evolution, except it all occurs in the same band and under the same name? 

Actually the evolution is exactly the same as The Scorpions, whose first few albums, I'm told, are actually pretty good space-rock. 

Indeed Michael Schenker left Scorpions and joined UFO for a while

When they were no longer post-psychedelic, UFO started having album titles combining puns and sexism. Hipgnosis covers. Songs with titles like "Highway Lady"

More nuddy business for ya - a New Waver's arse akimbo this time.. 

Force It / Faucet, geddit. "New Wavers' arse akimbo"? See the cover models are Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti earning a bit of dosh on the side. Talking about gristle throbbing, eh? 

Sleazy Christopherson worked at Hipgnosis, you see. Yet another case of Old Wave / New Wave blurring / secret continuity.

UFO kept slogging away and then Mechanix was their biggest success, got to #8 in the UK albums chart. 

Kept slogging on and on - original members dropping like flies - and then the farewell tour, set for 2022, was cancelled, on doctor's orders (Mogg had had a heart attack).

There'd been been plans for the final show to be a "rock legends cruise, a five-day event in early 2020".

I wonder what Mogg's arse looks like now. 

Married to a page 3 girl!

Nephew Nigel Mogg played bass in The Quireboys, staples of The Intrepid Fox and favorites of Melody Maker's hard rockin' Carol Clerk. 

Classic desultory blowjob in a toilet stall at the Marquee bizniz.