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
When I first started getting into music, this chap was all over evening Radio 1. Particularly Peel, but all the homework-shift deejays.
His gimmick, which doubled as shoot-your-own-career-in-the-foot gambit, is that each year he would change the group's name to a new variant involving the word "Spizz"
Spizzenergi, Athletico Spizz 80, Spizzles, Spizzoil, I'm probably missing one or two.
Spizz being his own personal alter-ego.
(Jim Thirlwell did the same thing with all the Foetus-based aliases, but it didn't seem to undermine his rise to renown to the same extent).
What makes All That Spizz so archetypally New Wave - alongside the daft name + various musical attributes (choppy damped-strings rhythm guitar in some songs; the not-conventionally-good-voice-but-high-energy singing), is this thing where the song-subject or song-scenario is absurd / inane / kitsch, but the urgency of the vocal delivery lends a certain intensity. Thinking of B-52s songs like "Planet Claire" or "Rock Lobster"... Lene Lovich...
Moments in "Where's Captain Kirk?" remind me of Tenpole Tudor, another singer who threw himself into the rousing idiocy of his song-scenarios with a fanatical commitment.
Perhaps Adam and the Ants in both pre-pop and smash hits phases fits here too.
A not-bad-at-all stab at "Virginia Plain" finds the proto-punk in the original.
"Themroc (1973) - Claude Faraldo’s subversive satire lacks any intelligible dialogue or music, with a screenplay composed entirely of gestures, grunts, gibberish, moans, and screams. Themroc, a factory worker played by the late Michel Piccoli, goes about his daily existence between his job and the apartment he shares with his mother and sister, until an incident at work pushes him over the edge, causing him to regress to primitive behavior and tear down the wall of his living room—virtually transforming his home into a cave, open to the public." - e-flux
"This is mainly noted for having no intelligible dialogue throughout: given its considerable length (105 minutes) and essential plotlessness, though, the series of grunts, growls, groans and other gibberish uttered by all the characters involved does become wearying after a while. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the risks that film-makers were willing to take (and generally manage to pull off) during this most creative era in World Cinema; curiously enough, for being virtually a Silent film with barely established characters, this has one of the longest cast lists I've ever seen! THEMROC revolves around a laborer (Michel Piccoli) who goes berserk after getting the sack from work: he sleeps with his sister and destroys his apartment and, after the initial astonishment, his neighbors get the same anarchic bug. This streak of non-conformism also extends to sex (with plenty of non-graphic nudity on display), as Piccoli contrives to elicit uninhibited behavior from many of the females (be they nubile or frustrated) around him including the secretary, Marilu' Tolo, he had been caught unwittingly peeping on and subsequently seduced. Despite the occasional brutality, police intervention in the matter largely proves ineffectual. Though the point of it all is obscure unless it's that one needs to revert to some form of primeval state in order to survive the exigencies of the modern world a handful of situations which crop up are definitely amusing: Piccoli and policeman Patrick Dewaere engaging in a tit-for-tat routine while the latter is rebuilding the façade of his apartment; feeling liberated, a victimized wife tries to assert herself and finally escapes her husband's tyranny through the window when he's not looking; a man spends practically the entire film lovingly washing his car but, then, at the very end he joins in the chaos by nonchalantly taking a sledge-hammer to it. Still, when all is said and done, the best thing about the film is its extraordinary fragmented editing." -- reviewer at imbdb
Strangely, this is the second French art film I've come across in a week where I've wondered whether J.G. Ballard saw it and was influenced. In this case, I'm thinking High-Rise, which was published in 1975. The other film is Weekend, by Jean-Luc Godard - I managed to get half way through, before taking a "pause", making it the nearest to watching a whole Godard I have ever got. Weekend came out several years before Crash.
I have come across a quote from Ballard where he says that Godard completely misunderstood the phenomenon of the eroticized car crash: the film represents it as something to do with late capitalist decadence and soulless materialism, whereas for Ballard it's something both more primal and more humanly sophisticated (the libido creatively adapting to a hyper-technologized environment). Still, that could be a defensive warding off, a bit of "anxiety of influence". The bourgeoisie, bored, smashing things up for the nihilistic thrill of it - that would be a scenario that he would return to several times in his later career, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, etc.
Weekend would make a good double bill with Hulot's Trafic, maybe. Or you could have a whole season of twisted films to do with automobiles - Two-Lane Blacktop. What else?
Andrew Parker points to The Cars That Ate Paris (1974; directed by Peter Weir). "The small town of Paris, Australia deliberately causes car
accidents, then sells/salvages all valuables from the wrecks as a means of
economy."
And I guess the Max Max films would fit nicely.
Duel, by Spielberg, would make a great inclusion.
Started watching Vanishing Point but didn't feel grabbed.
Repo Man, another good one.
Back to the amazingly titled Themroc....
It reminds me a bit - in spirit - of the anarchic satirical spirit, the grossness and grotesquerie, of La Grande Bouffe, which also came out in 1973, and involves a bunch of bored bourgeois middle-aged men who decide to eat themselves to death.
As a student I saw this listed in the programme of upcoming films at Oxford's Penultimate Picture Palace, a shabby cinema that specialized in foreign films and art movies, and knew I had to see it. And I was not disappointed. One character dies from a bout of flatulence.
This was my season of seeing things like Fellini's Satyricon and Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a stab at becoming a cineaste that was never quite followed through (hence the not having seen a whole Godard... the only recently having watched my first Fassbinders).
A few years back I got Bouffe out of our local excellent DVD rental store Videotheque (recently moved further away to Highland Park, sob) and while the leisurely pace of films made in the 1970s can be disconcerting compared to contemporary movie norms, it's still a boggler What were they thinking, what was Marco Ferreri trying to say?
"In the wake of its premiere at the Festival de Cannes... audience members who had stayed the course booed and heckled the film’s director, Marco Ferreri, as he took to the stage with the cast.. Ingrid Bergman, president of the festival jury that year, is said to have been physically sick after the screening.
"Ferreri had unveiled a nihilistic fable, in which four jaded middle-aged men... gorge and screw themselves to death in a decrepit villa in Paris, assisted by three prostitutes (who eventually depart in disgust) and a libidinous school teacher (who does not). To the film’s defenders it was a caustic satire on the hedonistic dereliction of the bourgeoisie: ‘we handed people a mirror and they didn’t like seeing themselves in it,’ said the actor Philippe Noiret.... To its detractors it was nothing more than a pageant of perversity, a procession of feeding and farting and fornicating – and sometimes all at once. The moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared it ‘the most revolting film I have ever seen’.
"Ferreri certainly knew how to offend. He had persuaded four stars of French and Italian cinema – Noiret, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi – to play against type as grotesque characters who shared the actors’ own first names, as though they were performing as themselves.... All the characters remained obstinately motiveless in their mission to scoff themselves into oblivion. The film’s length, at over two hours, seemed designed to exhaust the comic momentum of its inaugural feasting scenes..... the unfading torture of sitting through its concentrated, repetitive excess, its continuous forkfuls of pasta and purée and breast-shaped blancmange, its fanfares of flatulence. As the critic Roger Ebert wrote on the film’s release, La Grande Bouffe is ‘more of an experience than a treatise’.
"... Film-makers had revelled in the theatre of food in the past – think of the roast pig that discharges its stuffing of cooked meats in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) – but none had fastened on it in such detail. Perhaps that is why the chef Fergus Henderson describes La Grande Bouffe as ‘the greatest food film ever’ – citing a scene in which the protagonists slurp on marrow bones as the encouragement for his serving them at his St John Restaurant in London.
"Ferreri was himself both gourmet and gourmand, a man so fond of food that he had sought help for his overeating from a specialist clinic in Switzerland in the early 1970s. The inspiration for the film was a sybaritic dinner with actor friends, including the skilled amateur chef Tognazzi, who would play the chef in the film.
"... The vast quantities of food required for the shoot were supplied by the high-end Parisian delicatessen Fauchon, with vans arriving early in the morning – as they do on screen – to deliver for the day’s filming.…’.
"The actors ate as they filmed, stuffing themselves every morning before the food spoiled under the lights. Noiret alone spat it out between takes. For the four men and their ringleader, at least, it must have been fun – until it started to feel like too much...."
Get out your Harraps French to English dictionary - or AI simultaneous translation software - for this mini-doc on Bouffe scandalizing Cannes
William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut
Phil Knight feels we should keep on piling on Captain Rock aka Richard Ashcroft (but he also concedes that A Northern Soul was a good record... (Personally I'm quite partial to the early shoegazey stuff, or was at the time... and who can deny "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work"?) )
Matt M finds amusement in Justine Frischmann's post-musicking career:
Television
In 2003, Frischmann co-presented a series called Dreamspaces for the BBC Television about modern architecture. In 2004, she presented The South Bank Show and was a judge for the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.
Art
In 2005, Frischmann moved to Boulder, Colorado, to enroll in a masters program in visual arts at Naropa University, a small, Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, and "become a nobody". In 2012 her work was shortlisted for the UK's Marmite Prize for painting, and she has been included in The Amsterdam List of 1000 Living Painters.
In a 2016 interview regarding her art career, Frischmann stated, "I don't really have any desire to make music, to be honest."
Frischmann has said, "The themes and ideas I am working with are in direct relation to an ongoing personal narrative; the big questions are reflected in the choices I make in my art ... [including] my ever-evolving relationship with my spiritual faith. I think my approach and aesthetics reveal internal struggles and speak to my family origins and history."
Personal life
... In the spring of 2000, Justine took up competitive fencing. She married a meteorologist, Professor Ian Faloona in 2008, and lives and works in the United States.
This motley aftermath-to-fame relates to something I have been meaning to blog about, a sequel to(more like a twist on) Wiki-Fear. But I will save those thoughts for a later juncture.
Phil, just getting warmed up, zeroes in on another televisual moment of awkwardness, this time involving Bobby G.
I dunno - I feel Bobby was caught between a rock and a hard place here. How else was he supposed to negotiate this moment of absolute idiocy? Join in? (And what the fuck is that record and the dance that went with it? Was this some kind of UK-only Macarena craze I completely missed?)
Stylo swipes Jarvis Cocker (I think you have to scroll in a ways before you get to the embarrassing bit, JC's imitation of Rolf Harris)
Phil points to another example of the indie/cheese interface - "what we've got here is proto-cheese" says Alex from Blur.
I dunno - cheese is pretty incredible stuff, really, I can sort of see it as a new vocation in life... At least he's not done the typical rockstar with lots of spare time on his hands thing i.e. picking up a paint brush and having vanity exhibitions in galleries.
This below (suggested by Stylo) is some kind of nadir-al convergence of ShitBrit, though - circumstances here
I suppose the Feastival is the logical corollary of expensively-priced vinyl being on sale in Whole Foods. The embourgeoisifcation of rock. But also only a slight extension of the family-friendly and foodie-friendly evolution of Glastonbury and other summer festivals.
Straying off topic really, but a couple of examples of indie / Britpop parody, from Tyler and that man Phil again
After I expressed mild amazement that the words "Ian" and "Brown" had not come up yet, people came with the goods
Phil piles on the Libertine again, with this story about another associate who met a sticky end, drugs-related as opposed to tumbling off a balcony in cloudy circumstances.
Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes extreme wealth and arty bohemia.
"The photographer and film-maker had spent the past few years making Road to Albion, a documentary following Doherty after he left The Libertines. She had become the unofficial photographer of Doherty's new band, Babyshambles, and was reportedly working on another film about the singer in recent weeks.
"She is the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, and great-niece of the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith.
"Her mother, Dido Whitehead, is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, and her father is the 1960s film-maker Peter Whitehead"
One thing that really tickled me that I read in the last few years was from a Guardianprofile ofPete Doherty. He's moved to rural Normandy and apparently given up hard drugs in favour of.... cheese and butter. The libertine has become a gourmet-gourmand - not an untypical trajectory, I suppose, for a young person becoming a middle-aged person, Eros gradually giving way to the Epicurean.
This was the quote that really made me chuckle:
“The cheese in this area – the brie, the camembert. There’s
something special in the grass, you can taste it in the milk, it’s different
here, it’s so creamy. I drink it by the pint. And the butter, and the bread,
and the saucisson..."
Despite the apparently cleaned-up lifestyle, Pete looks just as sickly and sweaty as before. But now it's French farm produce rather than urban chemicals that are being ingested. There's a sallow, waxy tinge to Pete's complexion, as if it's composed out of rind from a particularly ripe camembert.
In one of the photos, Doherty's got some kind of cape around him, hiding his portly girth, and with the walking stick and the cravat, there's a resemblance to Orson Welles in his sherry commercials era.
Or maybe the look he's going for is more like Gustave Flaubert?
I was reminded of the dotage of Doherty when yesterday I came across this ticklesome snippet about Richard Ashcroft, affectionately nicknamed "Captain Rock" by his good pal Noel Gallagher:
On 19 June 2006, Ashcroft was arrested in Wiltshire after bursting into a youth centre and asking to work with the teenagers present at the club. He began swearing and refusing to leave so employees called the police, resulting in Ashcroft being arrested and receiving an £80 fine for disorderly conduct.
More delicious details from the Wiltshire Times's report:
Rock star Richard Ashcroft was arrested in Chippenham on Monday for disorderly behaviour after he burst into a youth centre and offered them £10,000. The former Verve frontman stumbled into The Bridge Centre, in Bath Road, at 8pm and announced to a group of 60 youngsters, who were all under 12, that he was Richard Ashcroft from the band The Verve and he wanted to give them money. Bemused children looked on as the star, who was looking scruffy and dishevelled, offered them money and volunteered to work at the centre.... Ashcroft, 35, who was apparently drunk, began shouting and swearing and refused to leave so staff were forced to call the police.... When he was arrested, Ashcroft started singing songs to officers from the back seat of the police car.... Ashcroft was taken to Melksham police station and left to cool off for a couple of hours before being issued with an on-the-spot fine of £80.
This must be a first for rock 'n' rollers - causing a disturbance through an uncontrollable urge to commit community service.
The proper rock'n'roll thing to do would surely be to burn down a youth centre, or at least smash in its windows.
Any more for any more? Bizarre tales from the downward arcs of Britpop godstars of the 1990s?
Let's keep in that zone between Madchester and the new whatever-it-was in the early 2000s. NME shite.
Bear in mind, I haven't lived in the UK for decades so a lot of the stories that wash up in the tabloids, I will have completely missed.
February 1 update:
BRITROCKERS IN A BAD WAY: SUGGESTIONS FROM THE COMMENTS BOX
William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut
Phil Knight feels we should piling on Captain Rock aka Richard Ashcroft (while also conceding that A Northern Soul was a good record... I'm quite partial to the early shoegazey stuff actually, or was at the time... and who can deny "Bittersweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work")
Matt M finds amusement in Justine Frischmann's post-musicking career:
Television
In 2003, Frischmann co-presented a series called Dreamspaces for the BBC Television about modern architecture. In 2004, she presented The South Bank Show and was a judge for the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.
Art
In 2005, Frischmann moved to Boulder, Colorado, to enroll in a masters program in visual arts at Naropa University, a small, Buddhist-inspired liberal arts college, and "become a nobody". In 2012 her work was shortlisted for the UK's Marmite Prize for painting, and she has been included in The Amsterdam List of 1000 Living Painters.
In a 2016 interview regarding her art career, Frischmann stated, "I don't really have any desire to make music, to be honest."
Frischmann has said, "The themes and ideas I am working with are in direct relation to an ongoing personal narrative; the big questions are reflected in the choices I make in my art ... [including] my ever-evolving relationship with my spiritual faith. I think my approach and aesthetics reveal internal struggles and speak to my family origins and history."
Personal life
... In the spring of 2000, Justine took up competitive fencing. She married a meteorologist, Professor Ian Faloona in 2008, and lives and works in the United States.
This odd, motley aftermath-to-fame relates to something I have been meaning to blog about, a sequel (more like a twist) to Wiki-Fear. But I will save those thoughts for a later juncture.
Phil, just getting warmed up, zeroes on in another televisual moment of awkwardness, this time involving Bobby G.
Stylo swipes Jarvis
Phil points to another example of the indie/cheese interface - "what we've got here is proto-cheese" says Alex from Blur.
Straying off topic really, but a couple of examples of indie / Britpop parody, from Tyler and that man Phil again
After I expressed mild amazement that the words "Ian" and "Brown" had not been mentioned, people came with the goods
Phil piles on the Libertine again, with this story about another associate who met a sticky end.
Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes
"The photographer and film-maker, had spent the past few years making Road to Albion, a documentary following Doherty after he left The Libertines. She had become the unofficial photographer of Doherty's new band, Babyshambles, and was reportedly working on another film about the singer in recent weeks.
"She is the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, and great-niece of the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith.
:Her mother, Dido Whitehead, is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, and her father is the 1960s film-maker Peter Whitehead" - the latter most known for his psych-era Pink Floyd-soundtracked film Tonight Let's All Make Love in London.
Another example of the entanglement of the upper classes with the counterculture / bohemia...
I can remember getting really excited by this when I read it in the NME in the last dying weeks of 1980. Even though all I knew of A Certain Ratio at that point was "Flight" and "Shack Up", as played frequently on Peel, and all I knew of Grace Jones was "Private Life", her medium-sized hit.... it seemed exciting. And covering a Talking Heads song, "Houses In Motion" too - a three-way conjunction of postpunk postfunk cool.
I was also taken by the arrogance of ACR's claim "We're gonna do a Talkin' Heads track an' do it properly". As a Talking Heads fan, very soon to get hold of Remain In Light as my Christmas present, and who had already heard a bunch of tracks from it on the radio, including "Houses in Motion", to me this seemed quite the ballsy statement.
But the collaboration never came about - the A Certain Grace-io "Houses In Motion" never materialized. (Talking Heads did release their original version as the second single off Remain In Light, though).
Then decades later ACR finally put out their instrumental version of "Houses In Motion" - the one they did with Martin Hannett in readiness for Grace to incant over. Near-instrumental, rather, for it features the guide vocal laid down by Jez Kerr for Grace to sing along to.
Doesn't exactly eclipse the original.
Now I feel like I have read somewhere or other, certain claims from ACR that it was them that propelled Talking Heads in a funk direction. This was supposed to have happened when ACR supported Byrne & Co on their UK tour in 1979. Byrne supposedly watching their shows very intently, listening and learning.
But Talking Heads had already released the ultra-funky More Songs About Buildings And Food the previous year. Indeed you can hear funk tendencies germinating on the album before that, their debut Talking Heads 77. Plus, Byrne and Weymouth and Frantz lived in New York City, they hardly needed to go to Manchester to learn about da funk - it was streaming out of the radio, seething in the streets. Seems a bit of wishful thinking there from the ACR boys!
Update: looking into it more closely, I see the chronology makes even less sense: the dates ACR played support to Talking Heads were in December of 1979, months after Talking Heads had recorded and released Fear of Music. So that's three incrementally funkier albums Byrne & Crew had made before supposedly being shown the Way by ACR. (Fear of Music starts with the Fela-influenced Dada-disco of "I Zimbra"). Meanwhile, ACR's debut single in 1979 was the drummerless dirge "All Night Party".
"All Night Party", released September 1979
"I Zimbra", opening track of Fear of Music, released August 1979
"We're gonna do a Talkin' Heads track an' do it properly" - typical Manc-wank bluster 'n' bull! Talking of which, looking up ACR I see that Anthony H. Wilson proclaimed them, upon the release of the debut single, to be "the new Sex Pistols".
I've had the raw ingredients for this post sitting for a month or two (got a bit of a backblog - I always do, on all of these blogs - things started but not finished). The spur to finally poop it out came today when I saw the amazing news about a whole book entirely concerning this abortive encounter between La Jones and A Certain Ratio. A short book, admittedly, but a book! Titled Strawberry and the Big Apple: Grace Jones in Stockport, 1980, it's written by Dave Haslam and it's the finale to the Art Decades series of attractively designed monographs on esoteric subjects that he's been doing. (I have All You Need Is Dynamite, which is about the Angry Brigade and its links to the Manchester counterculture magazine Mole Express).
Release rationale:
In ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’, the eighth and final short-format book in his acclaimed Art Decades series, Dave Haslam explains a seemingly unlikely scenario: the day in November 1980 when Grace Jones – a spectacularly glamorous jet-setting singer living and working in Paris and New York, and recording in the Bahamas – pays a visit to Stockport (a post-industrial town seven miles south of Manchester, with crumbling infrastructure and rising unemployment). Her quest that day? To meet A Certain Ratio, a group then signed to Factory Records.
This tale of worlds colliding includes Tony Wilson’s fascination with New York; an intriguing portrait of the early life of Grace Jones; a twist in the tale, and more than a couple of mysteries; plus walk-on parts for 10cc, Robert De Niro and Jerry Hall. ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’ is the latest (and last) work in the Art Decades series by writer and former Haçienda DJ, Dave Haslam, exploring a variety of subjects rooted in cities, in recent history and lived experience, and a love for music, literature, and art.
Publication date: 11 April 2024. All pre-ordered copies of the book will be signed by the author.
I wouldn't say this is a story that NEEDED to be told, but I am quite intrigued.
The Strawberry in the title is Strawberry Studios, where 10cc made their records (one of the band was a co-investor in the studio).
What about the reference in the NME news story to Grace Jones as "infamous sparring partner" to chat show host Russell Harty? What, you've not heard about this legendary live-on-TV fracas?
Funny how things soar and dip and soar again in one's estimation over the decades - in 1980 I thought "Flight" mesmerizing.... ACR seemed like this fascinating shadowy apparition of a group... so much so that I sent off for The Graveyard and The Ballroom cassette (mail order, something I never did then) and listened to it over and over...
but the promise dissipated with drab dessicated debut To Each.... flickered again with "Knife Slits Water" and "Guess Who" and a couple of other singles.... but then faded as they plugged away and chugged on.
Caught them live in March 86 and they seemed like a pallid shadow of whatever they might have promised once... slick yet gaunt
In 1995 - when I was given these reissues to review for the Wire - my estimation of them was at its lowest probably
But by the early 2000s, as fascination for the whole postpunk Zeitgeist took me over, ACR again seemed like a tantalizing proposition
measured assessment: they never quite became what they seemed to portend
a recent thought:
ACR's cold-fever funk was never better than on
“Flight”, released in 1980 as a 12-inch single. The format testified to ACR’s
awareness of club culture: the deeper
vinyl grooves offered deejays penetrating bass and a bigger sound. Vivid but rather wintry, “Flight” didn’t
light up too many real-world discotheques. But its swimmy spaciousness, ghostly
vocals, and restless drums make for an immersive headphone experience.
Prototypes for ACR
Bonus bit on "Houses In Motion" from an interview I did
“Houses in Motion” – Talking Heads (Remain in Light, 1980)
This is an interesting song. It was a single in England but it wasn’t a hit. It followed “Once in a Lifetime,” which was a big hit in the UK but not in America. “Houses in Motion” was sequenced on Remain in Light to follow “Once in a Lifetime,” which is about someone who’s suddenly estranged from his routine, his life, his possessions, his family, his wife. He’s estranged from it and it all seems absurd, yet that realization hits him with this sort of a cosmic force. It’s almost like a blinding, mystical epiphany: the idea that you cruise through everything without connecting with reality. And then, immediately, it goes into “Houses in Motion,” which is back inside alienation. It’s based in the same musical ideas as “Once in a Lifetime” but whereas “Once in a Lifetime” is a kind of mystical, oceanic funk, “House in Motion” is a sort of eerie, neurotic funk. The protagonist in the song is back inside neurosis. The key line is: “He’s digging his own grave.” He’s trapped in routine, going round and round, just working for these goals and missing life. So it’s almost as if the two songs are sister songs. In the first one, the guy sees through everything and grasps the oneness of existence, in an almost mystical way. In the second song he’s like a prisoner. He’s blinkered. He’s working for ambition and goals, digging his own grave, going nowhere.
Strangely I don't mention one of its most salient elements, the amazing Jon Hassell trumpet
Loads of suggestions of rockhorror lampoons in the comments box of the previous post on the ghastliness of rock. I'll get to those in a sec, but first, a couple of doozies that came to mind.
Here's Woody Allen, or his Annie Hall stand-in, Alvy Singer, encountering rock culture in its full mid-70s pomp, via a date with a Rolling Stone reporter.
Exaggerated for comedic effect, but reflecting Allen's true feelings about the fatuousness of rock and the rock generation. He's such a fogey, he's into the previous generation's music, jazz: but not even bebop, it's pre-WW2 jazz, as used incessantly on his soundtracks and which he even plays, in a jazz revival band.
(C.f. that other fogey, Terry Zwigoff, who makes his own poke at rock with the Blueshammer scene in Ghost World)
Also possibly counting in this category, the scenes involving Annie Hall and the Paul Simon character, the record producer, in a nightclub and then at the oh-so-LA party.
And then another rockphobic scene - from Hannah and Her Sisters, when Woody's Mickey goes on a date with Dianne Wiest's Holly (Hannah's directionless, trend-hopping sister) and is exposed to punk rock.
Are there any other scenes like these in the Allen uuurv?
Okay onto the suggestions:
Phil Knight points to this
But isn't Richard O'Brien a genuine fan of rock'n'roll?
Phil also points to this scene as an example of the outsider wandering befuddled into the mystifying youth culture
Ah, I know people who could discourse - have discoursed - at length about the significance of that one scene! (Funnily enough I'm reading a whole book about Blow-Up at the moment).
I'm not sure that is exactly what is happening there - after all, the photographer is pretty with-it (he plays a jazz record in the scene with Vanessa Redgrave at his pad but he's right in the thick of the young culture, fashion, etc). One of the things the scene does is some character-revealing: how competitive and predatorial he is by nature, so that he has to fight for the broken remnant of the guitar, eventually wresting it out of the hands of the Yardbirds fans... but once he's got it and got it outside the club, he loses all interest.... drops it in the street. The other thing is the idea of society breaking up in micro-cultures that are completely unfathomable to the rest of society: the talismanic aura of the electric guitar fragment means nothing once outside the club... it's just a bit rubbish in a London street.
But Blow-Up as a whole, probably does fit the syndrome - not so much "rock ghastliness" but the whole Swinging Sixties, mod Britain moment viewed with an outsider's cold eye, seeing only emptiness, meaningless pursuit of sensation, decadence, a society breaking apart. (Antonioni was a Marxist, if hardly a crude one).
But Blow-Up is also about 6 or 7 other things. It's probably my equal-first favorite film alongside Performance and Walkabout.
Phil also digs up this amazing encounter between Norman Wisdom and The Pretty Things and assorted pretty things of the psych Sixties
And he also mentions The Tubes - who probably satirised rock and rock-values in multiple ways and points ("White Punks On Dope") but most famously lampooned the excess of peak-pomp Brit rockstardom with the character of Quay Lewd
The Tubes also had a punk spoof as well, if I recall right. Ah, Stevee finds a latterday version of it
Stevee suggest this Quincy episode for punk piss-taking
and an episode of CHIPS for similar
And also brings up Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias - they were part of the hippie bohemian scene in Manchester, if I recall right, and took the piss out of everything, from Status Quo denim boogie to reggae to punk with the Snuff Rock EP (and also stage play?)
On the subject of punky piss-takes there's a whole episode of The Goodies, "Punky Business"
Ed remembers Not the Nine O' Clock News having a go at the New Wave
And also this
And the Comic Strip's metal spoof Bad News, which I always thought came a poor second to Spinal Tap
One of the problems with metal parodies is that metal is a genre that advances through self-parody.
Also, no matter how silly or excessive or preposterously posturing and theatrical you make the parody, there is always an actual real example of a metal band that surpasses that.. It's a bit like wrestling, maybe.
Tyler points to this episode of Dragnet, not so much about rock per se as about acid and hippies
and to this film I never even heard of - Otto Preminger's hippie satire Skidoo(entirety watchable here)
There's probably a load of hippie-satirising scenes in movies, or at least scenes that have a movie-world outsider's simulation thereof. This one from The President's Analyst sprang to mind (another of my favorite films):
Ah, well, in a way, the entirety of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is a kind of outsider's spoof on the music industry and groovy rock bands of the late Sixties. Yet another of my favorite films.
Stylo offers another piss-take of Old Grey Whistle Test, from later on than the Rutland Weekend Television lampoon
And this brief Brass Eye send-up of glam rock
That reminded me that Mighty Boosh is full of this kind of thing (as was Noel F's terrible solo follow up series). But it's done affectionately, there's none of that visceral feeling of distaste and contempt that you get with the Woody Allen types.
This clip of a rock festival from a Soviet cartoon must surely be anti-Western-decadence propaganda.... It couldn't possibly be meant to be attractive and exciting? Could it?
It's from Sergey Yutkevich and Anatoliy Karanovich's "Mayakovsky Laughs," which also has a scene involving drugs and hallucinations
The rock festival bit reminded me of Lemmings by National Lampoon - a 1973 stage show as well as a record, mocking the mindless squalor of the mass gatherings of the era
Also reminded tangentially of this Whistle Test spoof from Rutland Weekend Television
Then there's this, which actually rocks, despite the parodic intent
Any more for any more?
Yes there's Neil the Hippy, and there's Rock Follies - particularly interested in Old Wave excess recoiled from with a crypto-conservative squeamishness
