songs to bring out your inner Saxondale

 

Not dissing Saxondale 

No indeed - I'd go so far as to say that I'd be suspicious of anyone (or anybloke let's say) (it's A Bloke Thing) who didn't identify just a teensy tiny bit with Saxondale...  recognise a glint of affinity  

It's a top tune, any road. 

I wonder what Aaron Copland made of it. I checked and he was still alive when this was a hit. 

Now this - Mussorgsky Moogified - doesn't sound nearly as good but the visuals are mad

"Groundbreaking cinematic techniques" said Richard Williams, the presenter of Old Grey Whistle Test when they played a clip (at 8.02)

But it's just the same howlround plastic-fantastique FX used on Top of the Pops whenever they had a glammy groop on. 

And a barrage of comic strip Pop Arty images in garish hues overlaid.

I don't know why they turn the FX off half way through - after that, who wants to look at Emerson Lake and Palmer au naturel? 

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

What are the other Saxondale jams? 

"Jessica" by the Allman Brothers? 

 (Aka the Top Gear theme tune)

Noel wearing his Raincoats

 

my own personal Blow Up

So I was watching an ancient episode of Revolver, from 1978. 

Boomtown Rats closing the show with a buncha boppy hits, including "She's So Modern"

Modern girls getting down to the New Wave sounds

Hang on, who let this chap in?!

In his white collar shirt, his tie and mustard tank top!

 Looks twice the age of the kids around him - like Roy Kinnear, or a Tory backbencher.

Still, he seems really into it

Letting loose, caught up in the frenzy, eyes scrunched, feeling the music, 

Who was this mystery mustard man?

Here it is in videomotion

 

you Ladbroke Grovers turn me on

 

Now I thought this lot were one of those typical hairy Grove 'n' Gate freedom fighters in the vicinity of The Deviants and Edgar Broughton Band. Fuzz freakout. Kings of oblivion. 

But this here "War Girl" is gorgeous, lyrical and dreamy - the guitar-tone closer to I dunno Manuel Gottsching. Love that hovering slide in the back of the action, like a cloud canopy shot through with sunset.

It's a Twink song so maybe that's why it twinkles.   

This other Pink Fairies tune is quite dreamy too

Overall they're a lot mellower than I imagined

Taking bearings from Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love maybe, or the ambient guitarscapes on Electric Ladyland. West Coast stuff too.  Spirit? 

Were they all on Mandrax at this point? 

See, this is what I imagined they were like - MC5-ish.  Rock 'n' roll guerillas. 

Although even there the guitar tone is quite reverb-spacy and delicate.

Or like this - a less outer-spacey UFO maybe. 

Bigging up their area

A Pink Fairies tune makes Single of the Week in Sounds, 1976.

Released on Stiff -  Old Wave / New Wave cusp equipoise. 

I was under the impression that this Fairy went fully punk, or at least, pub rock, with this 1977 single on Stiff. But no, it still sounds more 1968. 

It actually sounds a bit like the wimpier things Radio Birdman did. 

Conceptually linked B-side by Larry Wallis is a bit more pubby-rocky

The hair also looks like 1968. These guys all wanted to look like the lead fellow in MC5. See also Mick Farren, who backed the wrong Ann Arbour band.

68-in-77.

Farren gets with the punky program - giving the Lurkers a good run for their money, but still refusing to trim his barnet.

 

Rock critics without much of a voice, pt 48 (cf Lester Bangs efforts)

"We thought, "oh my God, if the whole of society could react in this different way, wouldn't it be lovely - fairyland, in fact'. It was kind of a rude awakening when we realised that fairlyland didn't exist" 

- Farren looks back to the utopian dreams of the late '60s. 

"There was this fairyland... Someone was trying to build a six-foot jelly... There was a new world brewing. " 

- Farren recalls electrifying happenings at the Roundhouse, 1967  

Farren kept his frizzed out hair until the very end. Still articulate too. 

Recurrent use of the word "fairyland" suggests tall tales told and once believed, that now have to be put away like childish things. 

Farren moved into science fiction, like many of the '60s utopianists (Hawkwind, Jefferson Starship). 

Fairy tales for older kids. 

This one, which I own but have not yet read, combines rock and s.f. 

Jacket blurb:

"In the wilderness of Britain little of civilization remains. Decadence and division have overtaken the huddled people of Festival. And faith in the texts of the old gods - Dhillon, Djeggar and Morrizen - is fading fast. Beyond the city walls the tribes are massing, united in evil intent. Hill savages fired by ritual superstition to pillage and slaughter. Satanic horse riders inspired by drugs to rape and defile. And crystal-crazed Iggy at the head of them all - a despot in search of territory. A territory like Festival."

another back jacket blurb

ALL ROADS LEAD TO FESTIVAL

In the Great Hall of the capital city called Festival, the magic ritual of Soundcheck prepares the ancient loudspeakers for tonight's Celebration. It is the distant future, when all that remains of the ancient ways is a collection of sacred black discs which contain the words and music of the great prophets who lived before the disaster: Dhillon, Djeggar, and Morrizen, the fabled lizard-king.

But in the hills and valleys surrounding Festival, a threat builds. An outlaw army, wasted by spirits and speeding on 'crystal,' works its way toward the dying city, raping and pillaging, gathering strength and weapons as it goes. In Festival, the population continues its preparations for the Celebration, unkowing, unsuspecting...

In his first novel, Mick Farren, a leading writer in the underground press, combines the color and excitement of the finest fantasy writing with his own keen vision of a time to come when the Counterculture of today ascends to a whacked-out, chemical-crazed pre-eminence."

Talking of fairy tales and then more adult-oriented tales, Farren was also involved in Nasty Tales, a comic strip for "adults only" (supposedly prosecuted for obscenity)

Farren's work at the New Musical Express includes these pieces said to have ignited punk. 

Julie Burchill's memoir I Knew I Was Right has cameos of the battered-but-beautiful Farren, claims that he initiated her in certain arcane practices

More on Watch Out Kids

Brexit-vomit, or, the politics of puke

Some years ago - I think after the Brexit result, but not long after - I was in Hemel Hempstead (Old Hemel to be precise)  to have a meal at the Cochin, this great little South Indian restaurant. And just over the road, in the window of some kind of bric-a-brac place, I saw the poster above. Although I disagreed with the sentiment, I couldn't help admiring the eye-grabbing cleverness of  it as agit-prop.

Fast forward to this year and I come across this bit o' Banksy.

My thought: how clever, Banksy's detourning the Leave campaign art. 

Then I realised the image is a twist on his own famous "woman vomits hearts" image - the iconic anti-romance statement.

But where is the pro-Brexit image in the sequence?

Is it a Brexiteer riposte to Banksy's anti-Brexit twist on his own work?

Or did the Leavers do it first, twisting on the "vomiting hearts" work with their vomming up the European flag stars? 

Then causing Banksy to counter with the UKIP-upchuck image?

Here's another well known Banksy image about the UK leaving the EC

But wait, there's more - another twist to the tale

Banksy has long been rumored to be Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack fame, aka 3D - a well-known graf artist back in the 1980s.

Now Massive Attack's Protection tour had a whole European supranational mega-state theme that was oddly congruent with the Leave viewpoint. From my 1994 interview with Massive:

"... A Levis-sponsored, free exhibition is to accompany Massive's tour this autumn, displaying computer-generated art, screenprints, 'aerosonic' paintings and fibre-glass sculptures of the Eurochild.  The latter is both the band's "corporate logo" this time round and a somewhat cloudy symbol of something or other (shades of Pink Floyd's flying pig, anyone?).

    "On the last album we had the industrial symbols on the sleeve," explains 3D. "This time round we've come up with the Eurochild, a cartoon image based on the concept of European consumerism and fascism. I originally did it for The Face, this kid with a swastika and a knife and fork and a crown of thorns made out of the European stars. The Eurochild is a character that represents the parts of Europe and the fact that the parts will eventually attack the whole.   

"See, the unification of Europe is only gonna serve those already on the top of the pile, enabling them to trade more easily. Those who are disadvantaged aren't going to benefit from being unified. In fact they'll probably lose their livelihoods cos no one's gonna buy their local cheeses in the supermarket.  The statement we're making isn't anti- EC, it's just that--as with America--when you've got a lot of cultures brought together in one geographical zone then you're gonna get a lot of chaos and violence and panic.That's why you're getting the resurgence of racism. It's the panic-merchants stirring up all the anxieties people have that are economic at root. We're just asking what it means to be 'European', what difference unification is going to make?"

At very least it's bizarrely prophetic about what ensued.... 

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

Must say, I'm not much of a Banksy fan - as one-liner street art, it's amusing enough, and occasionally acerbic .... the logistical ingenuity of pulling off any given piece is impressive.... but as something to look at, as line and colour and the rest, nah... 

Nils by mouth (Old Wave / New Wave cusp)

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...  

The Let's Active of the 1970s?