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
fascinating BBC Archive dig up of a program made in 1963 looking back just a few weeks to the early wintry months of 1963 and the Great Freeze . The UK was brought repeatedly to a standstill, rivers froze over, even the sea froze up a bit in certain coastal places, people got trapped in remote villages and having to huddle in the school hall for shared warmth, helicopter rescues of people whose cars had been snowdrifted.... beautiful images of frozen waterfalls and brooks in mid-babble cryogenized crystalline
I was safe and warm in my mum’s tum for the duration (born June 19). I asked her about it and she said she did remember it being challenging getting to the shops sometimes but had forgotten about all the rescues and frozen rivers (people skated to work along canals, the roads being impassable, train tracks smothered… also skied and sledded through the streets)
I initially misheard the lines as "I'm a hot retard!" "Marquis de Sade!"
Like an iD fashion spread turned to music
Only in the UK could such flimsy nonsense prosper and become Successful Pop
But Haysi Fantayzee had two fun hit singles - this one and "John Wayne Is Big Leggy" (is that a penile innuendo?)
And there's something about the brazen McLaren-copyism that is likeable. Fake-folk. Nostalgy de boo. Hip-to-be-square-dancing.
The lisping feebleness of Kate Garner's voice is sort of endearing
They are better than Wide Boy Awake, at any rate.
A direct graft off Adam and the Ants, and thus off McLaren
In my Rip It Up researching, did I listen all the way through Battle Hymns for Children Singing? I don't think so.
Kate Is Big Leggy, if anybody is round here. Certainly worked those gams at every opportunity,
Whereas pint-sized Jeremy Healey is a sort of Bolan-esque goblin crossed with Dickensian urchin.
The Artschool Dodger.
Apparently he went as Jeremiah Healey at one point.
Wait, there's more - two less successful singles
First is imitative of Duck Rock's Soweto stylings
And this one is more in the "Buffalo Gals" vein - at least until the flaccid chorus
Healey went on to be one of the superstar deejays, jetting to gigs and earning inordinate fortunes for a few hours spinning, especially at New Year's Eve.
Before that though he was a selecta on the supercool warehouse scene of the Eighties - The Dirtbox, right?
The improbable existence of this book of scholarly essays on Deep Purple fer fuck's sake made me re-contemplate this band's deep uncompellingness.... how they run a distant third to Led Zep and Sabbath....
And then to wonder what other examples of this clustering and ranking could be found across music history...
The obvious one is Beatles and Stones with The Who trailing some distance in achievement / charisma
In baggy, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays out front... with The Charlatans far behind (and funnily enough their big hit "The Only One I Know" owes more than a little to DeePurp's "Hush")
(although the Inspiral Carpets could also be a contender for Distant Third)
Britpop is slightly different as there's a Top 3 - Oasis Blur Pulp - with Elastica trailing at fourth (but I prefer them to Oasis and Blur)
Does it work with IDM? Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and (for me at least) Autechre trailing in third.
For a true parallel with the Led Zep / Sabbath / Deep Purple relationship, there would need to be a sense of redundancy - that there is no function for the #3 band, since whatever it is they are bringing to the table, it's done better in one or others of its facets by the top two preeminent bands.
In other scenarios, the ranking is based less on this idea of overlap-induced redundancy and more about a level of quality and consummate achievement. e.g.
Manchester postpunk - The Fall and Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio coming in third (as a largely unrealised proposition, based on the recordings at least....
Postcard - Orange Juice and Josef K, with Aztec Camera far behind
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There must be "Deep Purples" of funk, of reggae...
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Of course fandom and taste being quirky, you can find yourself perversely more taken with or invested in the bands that are objectively much further down the rankings.... John's Children and The Eyes mean more to me than The Who ever will... Budgie, with just two songs ("Whisky River" and "Hot as Docker's Armpit"), have given me more pleasure than Deep Purple
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Rainbow - as once discussed here I vaguely recall - are a whole other order of inessentialness - no sense of a vacuum being filled, a need supplied
Very much a case of "if they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent them"
That said I vaguely recall someone here asserting value and interest for the first two Rainbow albums
And someone else piping up in favor of "Since You've Been Gone"
The origins of the metal magazine name? Barton-birthed in the headline for a Ritchie Blackmore cover story....
I used to have a Deep Purple box set (sent unsolicited by a big record company in those days of major label largesse). And one thing of mild interest gleaned from the sleeve note essay was that Deep Purple were a singles band, unlike Sabbath and Led Zep (who never released a single, right?). Consequently they had a large number of hit singles and appearances on Top of the Pops. And their stuff is quite catchy and also quite groovy - metal as dance music.
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It was the scholarly tome that made me think of the mysterious nullity of Deep Purple (one of those names that you saw scrawled on desks a lot, growing up in the 1970s.... and one of the names that first puzzled me as rock-innocent child... another was Bread... I used to be transfixed by the cover of a Bread album which was in one of those spinners full of LPs in an electrical goods shop on Berkhamsted high street... )
But something else swam into my ken recently that was Deep Purple related... one of the YouTube programs I've been slamming into my veins to keep me sedated through the last crazy weeks...
I don't know why it's Ritchie Blackmore Presenting this on his YouTube channel - since he's not in it, it's Jon Lord repping for DeepPurp.... but what a pleasant laidback sort of conversation on some long ago cable TV rock chatshow .... love the mustachioed ultra-chill presenter... Speakeasy, wot a title!
Ritchie Blackmore is considered one of the Great Guitarists, isn't he? He's included in this book Big Noises by the late Geoff Nicholson, a very entertaining collection of short essays on loud, flashy guitarists
I just can't hear it.
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As mentioned in the comments, Deep Purple have a higher stature in Japan
