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Post by petrolino on Nov 27, 2020 20:41:04 GMT
Björk Guðmundsdóttir : 'Afterbirth Of A Notion' {Anarcho-Punk, Cyberpunk Anime, Biotechnology & Nanotechnology | Iceland & Japan}
Spit And Snot
Exodus JAM80 Tappi Tíkarrass Rokka Rokka Drum
Kukl The Elgar Sisters
The Sugarcubes
 Now Playing : Tappi Tíkarrass - Dúkkulísur + Hrollur - Rokk í Reykjavík (1981-1983) {5:25}
'Bands called Spit and Snot and Exodus were among Bjork‘s early musical experiments, each bearing the out-there chills and quirks that’s since become a staple of her solo sound.'
- Emily Barker, New Musical Express
'Bad Taste (known as Smekkleysa in Icelandic, literally Tastelessness) is one of Iceland’s most important record labels; located in Reykjavík and known worldwide for being home to The Sugarcubes, it also publishes poetry books, short films, greeting cards and Icelandic gifts. Bad Taste should not be confused with Bad Taste Records, a distinct record label based in Sweden.'
- Wikipedia
Bjork
'Um Urnat Fra Bjork' (1984) by Bjork (a collection of hand-coloured poems & fairy tales)
Fairy Tales
'Considering that most Björk fans seem to know that she began her recording career at the ripe old age of 11, and that she was once a member of The Sugarcubes, it’s curious why more attention hasn’t been paid to KUKL, the group she was in prior to joining Sugarcubes, especially since much of the membership of the two bands overlaps.
KUKL (which means “witchcraft” in Medieval Icelandic) was a sort of Icelandic super-group, comprised of members of several noteworthy bands and formed, at first, to perform on the final episode of a radio program in August 1983. The following month, KUKL played on the same bill with Crass in Reykjavik, at a punk festival that was the largest crowd that Björk had performed in front of at that point, and made a lasting connection with Crass.
KUKL released both The Eye, their Georges Bataille-inspired first album and the Penny Rimbaud-produced Holidays in Europe (The Naughty Nought) through Crass Records. Although their personal politics, in the main, were sympatico with the UK anarcho-punk movement’s ethos — the Icelanders remained dedicated meat eaters — their music was dissimilar, owing more to acts like The Cure, Killing Joke or Siouxsie and The Banshees and incorporating primitivist ethnographic and free jazz-influenced elements. Like Throbbing Gristle, KUKL took to the stage infrequently, preferring to wait until the time was right and their energy was at its fullest potential, with each show having an element of magic intentionally thrown into the mix.
During 1985, KUKL occasionally played at higher profile Europe concerts, opening for the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten and Psychic TV. Along with The Virgin Prunes, The Mantis Dance Company, writer Kathy Acker and others, they performed at Psychic TV’s “Feast of the Flowering Light” event at the Hammersmith Palais, but in 1986 KUKL split with most of the members going on to reform as The Sugarcubes a few months later.'
- Dangerous Minds
"Nick Evans has his dad to thank for bringing one of the world’s most famous singers to Penarth — he just didn’t realise it at the time. It was August 1984, there was a war raging in the coalfields of the south Wales Valleys between striking miners and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which was causing turmoil for communities torn apart by the ongoing dispute. Earlier that summer, Thatcher had been heckled and egged by protesters outside the Wales Conservative Conference in Porthcawl, where she had addressed the audience. Anti-Thatcherite feeling was growing and manifesting itself in a series of miners’ benefit gigs around the UK. One of the shows, at the Paget Rooms in Penarth, was promoted by a politicised schoolboy, whose politics were forged in the background of the prevailing rise of the National Front and racism that was endemic in the UK at the time. The youngster in question — Nick Evans — had found his ideals at an early age.
“I saw the Clash when I was 11 at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff in 1980 on the 16 Tons Tour,” he recalls. “I remember Mikey Dread supporting and people spitting at him. I couldn’t understand and then The Clash played Rock Against Racism and it all made sense. I remember going to an Anti-Nazi League gig in Penarth. My parents were working-class left wing people. Animal rights also became a thing at that time and I found myself getting into the anarcho punk scene.”
A pivotal moment for the young musician came when, aged 15, he staged his very first gig at the Paget Rooms. He had little idea that 35 years later people would still be talking about that night. Now aged 50 and working as a yoga teacher in Holland after a successful career in the music industry, he looks back fondly on a gig that was very much of the time. It not only provided him with his first taste of putting on a gig but, unbeknownst to him, the audience that had packed out the venue in the seaside town near Cardiff saw one of the first appearances in the UK of an idiosyncratic performer who would rocket to worldwide fame and fortune with one the most distinctive voices in music.
Björk was 18 years old when she took to the stage in Penarth with her band Kukl (“Sorcery” in Icelandic). The singer was something of a child prodigy having had her self-titled début Björk recorded and released in Iceland in December 1977 when she was just 11 years old. She had been in a succession of bands after this, but Kukl gave her a step up to an international stage, which she would use to distinction with the band that would follow — the Sugarcubes — and as a hugely-successful solo artist. Kukl’s first big performance was at a festival in Iceland which was headlined by English anarchist punk band Crass, whose record label Crass Records offered the band a record deal. Their album The Eye was released in 1984 and was followed by a two-month tour in Europe, which included the date in Penarth.
“Crass were an extraordinary mouthpiece for the anarcho punk movement, but through Crass Records they put out very interesting records, not straight-up punk bands,” says Nick. “Kukl were one of those bands.”
The Icelandic outfit were one of the bands on the line-up for the miners’ benefit that included anarcho punk mainstays Flux Of Pink Indians, alongside D&V and Nick’s band Slaughter Tradition. Also on the bill were Chumbawamba, who would go on to have a hit with Tub Thumping in 1997 and would famously get into a spat with then deputy leader of the Labour Party John Prescott, after they soaked him with a bucket of water at the BRIT Awards.
“Through getting into the scene I knew a lot of the bands at the time and actually went on to live in Leeds where Chumbawamba were based and sang on one of their records,” recalls Nick. “But for the Penarth gig everybody on the bill pretty much stayed at my parents’ house and in the garden. There were sleeping bags all over the house. I remember Kukl pitched a big tent in the garden and they all slept in there.”
He also has one very distinct memory from the day when Kukl descended on his home.
“My one abiding memory is of Björk, who was very small, very quiet, spending a lot of her time crocheting with a single needle.”
- David Owens, Wales Online
Anarcho-punk environmentalist Chris Packham (guitarist in Titanic Survivors)
Electric Bjork
Big In Japan
'An intriguing new exhibition, Kimono Roboto brings together sound and motion to present an artistic exploration of the kimono from its early beginnings to present day. Thirteen kimonos will be on display in a circular space. At its centre stands an animatronic robot wearing one ‘hero’ kimono. Around the walls of the exhibition, which was conceived by fashion show specialists Bureau Betak with creative direction by Remi Paringaux, are a series of images and films created for the show.
Nineteentwenty’s Duncan Horn worked closely with directing duo Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones on the film elements of the exhibition. Commissioned by Melco, the exhibition reflects the kimono’s trajectory from attire for everyday life in the late 16th century, to its status as a living work of art, and its powerful influence on 21st century fashion and popular culture.
Bespoke robot models, designed by Warren and Nick with Tom Blake and Gavin Coetzee and created by renowned animatronics builder John Nolan Studios, will wear the kimonos. The films for the exhibition will explore the dichotomy between the soft folds of the fabric and the hard, golden surface of the robots. According to the team, each kimono is presented as a new ‘chapter’ which dictates the colour and mood of the film.
“The films are going to be shown on a large scale about four metres high and 24 metres wide, so they will really impact and fill the gallery space. They have been shot to entwine with specially composed music, immersing viewers in a new sensory experience. As each kimono explores a different style and time period, we have honed the look and feel to react in a different way to the new surfaces, designs and styles,” comments VFX Supervisor Duncan Horn.
To capture the films, the exquisite kimonos were flown to London where Warren and Nick shot them on their robot models in West London.
“The models are animatronic but there were some elements of rigging we wanted to completely remove in the final films. Because of the size of the films, we made sure to get a lot of footage that we could experiment with in the edit,” adds Duncan.
Icelandic singer Björk also partnered in the exhibition. The music video for her track Utopia will be screened at the exhibition. The film was also directed by Warren and Nick with CG by Analog Films. The team also brought Duncan Horn on board to finalise the look of the singer in the video.
“It was an incredible project to be involved with, Björk has such a distinctive style and an incredible artistic vision. It was a pleasure to be a part of the team that helped bring some of her ideas to life,” says Duncan Horn.'
- Press release for the 'Kimono Roboto' exhibition held in Tokyo, Japan (published December 4, 2017)
"Bjork is the anime alien here to save us from ourselves."
- Eric Sundermann, VICE
Erotica photographer Nobuyoshi Araki gets the drinks in with Bjork
'Back To Nature' : Bjork in conversation with natural historian David Attenborough
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Post by petrolino on Nov 28, 2020 23:07:30 GMT
Kevin Rowland : 'An Emerald In The Rough'
'They all dedicate lines to you,
Thin lines, easy seen through.
Of course they do to be like others, who, all feel something I wont pretend to feel just for you because Ive never ever wanted anything from you.
Ive watched them marry up their wives and lives with ties and lies,
Ive seen them fuck infatuation,
And call it you so they feel safer,
I hope you'll stay with them forever,
Let them sit back and never dream thoughts like mine ...
Scared hearts running from you,
Take longer to prove,
They can sit back and laugh while others do,
But still they hold you in awe ...
Am I the first to ever question you exist?
Why do I throw up when she says she gives me herself only for you, or her belief in you is only for me ...
Sometimes I almost envy the need, but don't see the prize ...'
- Kevin Rowland, 'Love Part One'
Celtic Roots
'The Killjoys were a punk band from Birmingham, England, formed in 1976, with members including Kevin Rowland and Kevin "Al" Archer, who would later form Dexys Midnight Runners, and Ghislaine "Gil" Weston, who would later join Girlschool. Although their releases while still together were limited to one single, subsequent interest has seen an album of their recordings released.'
- Wikipedia
Gil Weston & Kevin Rowland
'There, There My Dear' - Dexys Midnight Runners
Kevin Rowland : Man Of A Thousand Berets
"IN OCTOBER 1986 I had the fortune to meet The Smiths as they prepared for a concert in the small northern English town of Carlisle. On the surface we had little in common. I was a quiet 15-year-old with a school notebook in my hand; they were the hippest band of the decade, exuding a special confidence after the success of their album The Queen Is Dead. But I felt we had at least one thing in common, for, like Morrissey and Johnny Marr – and many of England’s other major pop figures, including John Lydon of the Sex Pistols and Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners – I had grown up in an Irish family in England.
What my interviews and archival work came to show was that although the musicians pursued very different sounds and styles, from pop to punk, and from soul to folk, they share a sense of the role of Irish ethnicity, as both a creative wellspring and a burden, in their lives and work. Marr, for example, explains that as a second-generation Irish youth he had been steeped in Irish culture. Recalling the weekly musical events in his parents’ house, Marr says, “As the night wore on, invariably the music got sadder, and that time was a really magical time for me, because the music got really interesting”, taking on what he calls an “other-worldly” or “spook-like” quality. He says the melodies from these “sad Irish tunes” and the often morbid mood of this migrant culture “definitely went into [him] and The Smiths”.
When he was writing music for The Smiths Marr would often reflect on his Irish upbringing, sensing that it offered a creative source. “As I started to write more and more music, and then go to Ireland with The Smiths, I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s a thing that I do here, an aspect that is coming from that place that I had as a kid that is pretty powerful and that is a part of what I’m about,’ so I drew from it, and I wanted to acknowledge it,” he says. “There are certain things in The Smiths’ music that nail that emotional place and that evocative time for me. The best example of it is Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want, which is very much a case of me missing my home when I was living in London and almost writing this sort of musical letter to my mother.” In the song, which was originally called The Irish Waltz, Marr expresses his homesickness by echoing the sound and mood of his Irish-immigrant childhood.
Morrissey’s lyrics, on the other hand, sought to evoke the marginality he had felt as a second-generation Irish youth in Britain, such as in the opening lines of Never Had No One Ever:“When you walk without ease / On these / streets where you were raised.” “It was the frustration I felt at the age of 20,” he says, “when I still didn’t feel easy walking around the streets on which I’d been born, where all my family had lived. They’re originally from Ireland but had been here since the 1950s. It was a constant confusion to me why I never really felt, ‘This is my patch. This is my home. I know these people. I can do what I like, because this is mine.’ It never was. I could never walk easily.”
That calls to mind the comments of other creative Irish-English, such as Brian Keaney, a second-generation Irish writer who grew up in England at the same time as the Smiths frontman. In 1985, the year The Smiths composed Never Had No One Ever, Keaney said his semi-autobiographical short stories sought to address “what it feels like to be growing up slightly at odds with your surroundings”, noting that “as a boy, I felt not entirely at ease with either my Irish parents or my English companions. I think this is something that a lot of children of immigrants feel.”
OTHERS ENGAGED MORE directly with Irish issues. Kevin Rowland used Dexys Midnight Runners’ debut single, Dance Stance, to debunk the myth of the “thick Paddy” in British culture, offering an unadorned litany of Irish authors as a riposte to the Irish jokes of the 1970s. Rowland would go on to draw on Irish sounds and styles on the band’s second album, Too-Rye-Ay(despite being advised against this by his management, who felt it would not prove popular). The band’s upbeat Irishry was an attempt, Rowland says, to show Irish culture to the British, so as to “correct the misunderstanding” about the Irish in the UK. But Rowland was dissatisfied by this slightly anodyne “Celtic soul” project, and he began to visit Belfast and Derry in 1983 to “find out what was going on”. After these trips Rowland went to Irish political demonstrations in England. “I started going on marches in Birmingham, in 1983, ’84. I contacted Troops Out and started going to their meetings, going on marches. There would be other people on these marches; there’d be Sinn Féin . . . there’d be Troops Out. I got to know a few of those people, and one of the Sinn Féin guys contacted me and said, ‘Do you want to come and have a chat?’ and he said, ‘I heard you’re going on marches, but be careful: one extra person on a march isn’t really going to make a massive difference, but your face . . . [could make such a difference].’ ”
Rowland was then invited to Belfast with a view to performing a concert. “The Sinn Féin representative said, ‘The leadership are wondering if you might do a gig for them.’ So me and a mate went over for a weekend, and we met with a guy, Richard McCauley, who was the press guy for Gerry Adams, and also we met with Danny Morrison, who was head of communications at that point.”
Plans were soon hatched for a Dexys concert in west Belfast to raise funds for an Irish- language school. This show didn’t go ahead, because of financial problems on the band’s next tour, but Rowland’s experiences in the North set the tone for Dexys’ final album, Don’t Stand Me Down. The album’s key tracks, Knowledge of Beautyand The Waltz,offered an introspective and often oblique account of second-generation life. “I’ve denied my beautiful heritage, gone away from my roots,” Rowland sings in Knowledge of Beauty(later renamed My National Pride) before stating his desire to “come back home again”.
This assertion of Irishness was not well received by the British press, and Rowland’s claims to Irish ethnicity were routinely challenged, as shown by an exchange that appeared in Melody Maker :
Melody Maker : “Do you go back there [to Ireland] much?”
Kevin Rowland : “Yes.”
MM : “Family?”
Rowland : “Yeah.”
MM : “Are you British or Irish?”
Rowland : “I am an Irish citizen. I am an Irish passport holder.”
MM : “But you were born in England.”
Rowland : “Just because you were born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse.”
IF ROWLAND’S WISH to express Irish issues had precipitated problems with the British press, Shane MacGowan’s work with The Pogues, which fused English punk with Irish folk, aroused controversy in Ireland. After launching The Pogues in London MacGowan had become a figurehead for second-generation Irish in England. Cait O’Riordan, the band’s original bass player, says The Pogues provided a cultural pressure valve for second-generation youth: “Being London-Irish at that time was a kind of a soul-bending experience that could break you if you couldn’t let it out. And that’s why our audiences were so amazing, because it was cathartic.”
In Ireland, where the band were dismissed by some high-profile figures, The Pogues were invited to appear on The BP Fallon Orchestra,on RTÉ radio, in 1985. Journalists, musicians and members of the public were also on the show. A key issue in the debate was the band’s Irishness. They were asked to account for their precise volume of Irish blood, and to ponder if their not being “thoroughbred” – Irish born – should exclude them from making Irish music. The traditional musician Noel Hill pulled no punches: the style on which The Pogues drew, he said, was “a terrible abortion” of Irish music.
O’Riordan says Hill’s attack was down to a misconception in Ireland about second-generation Irish. “We had to think that we weren’t Irish, we were London-Irish, so why should some Irish guy [such as Noel Hill] be any more receptive to us than some English person? It was so far beyond anything he could grasp. It was new. And why would he know what it felt like to be London-Irish?”
Perhaps with such events in mind, the band’s guitarist, Philip Chevron, says The Pogues were reviled in Ireland. “Nowhere in the world do people ‘get’ The Pogues less than they do in Ireland,” he says.
Whether or not this is true, it’s clear that many second-generation Irish have held an in-between status in Ireland and Britain. As Morrissey says, “I had the best of both places [in Dublin and Manchester] and the best of both countries [in Ireland and England]. I’m ‘one of us’ on both sides.”
Similarly, Marr says, “I don’t consider myself either Irish or English. I hate nationalism of any kind. I feel absolutely nothing when I see the Union Jack except repulsion, and I don’t feel Irish either. I’m Mancunian-Irish.”
The second generation are, it would seem, the ultimate in-betweeners."
- Sean Campbell (author of 'Irish Blood, English Heart : Second-Generation Irish Musicians In England)
'Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire It Doesn't Apply' - Dexys Midnight Runners
Dexys Midnight Runners : 3 Cinematic Albums of the 1980s
'Kevin Rowland’s Birmingham soul gang were named after the drug Dexedrine which was used by fans of Northern Soul – for many, that would speak volumes before a single note was heard. On “Searching For The Young Soul Rebels” they delivered on the promise of the three incredible singles – “Dance Stance”, “Geno” and “There, There, My Dear” – which had preceded the full-length debut in July ‘80.
Grabbing your attention right from the start, the album opens with the sound of a radio dial being turned, tuning from station to station and finding (amongst other things) “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, “Holidays in the Sun” by Sex Pistols and “Rat Race” by The Specials, underneath a noisy crackle which would’ve been familiar to listeners of Radio Luxembourg. Rowland then leads his group with shouts of “Jimmy… Al… for god sake burn it down” whereupon they begin their young soul rebel assault with a stupendously fresh and brassy re-recording of their “Dance Stance” single of late ‘79, here retitled “Burn It Down”. As a self-assured statement of intent, the intro couldn’t possibly be any more perfect.
The album is a treat throughout, and works brilliantly whether in the mood for the upbeat scorcher or the introspective ballad. Like many bands in this innovative era, Dexys were brilliant to listen to because there was no-one else like them; they had style in abundance.'
- The Jukebox Rebel
"Yeah, I was born in Wednesfield. The truth of it is I lived in Wolverhampton until I was 11 and then we moved to London. When I got to London I had this broad Wolverhampton accent. I'd lived in Park Street South, in Blakenhall. So when I got to London I had the 'p' taken out of me mercilessly. I had to learn to be a Cockney quickly to get by. I moved back to Birmingham when I was 20 and had a few months in Wolverhampton around that time too. We formed the band then, you know, in Birmingham. That's when Dexys started."
- Kevin Rowland, Shropshire Star
Dexys Midnight Runners - 'Keep It'
Anglo-Irish Blues
"British pop music has been celebrated around the world for decades and rightly so. Rather less attention has been paid to an almost invisible strain of Irishness manifested in the work and characters of several of its leading proponents. A number of these icons, particularly those born of postwar Irish parentage, shared certain characteristics. They were often angry, awkward, polemic personalities whose music or lyrics challenged and subverted. Ironically, many were considered English to the core, but scratch deeper and a different picture emerges. Tracing their stories takes you spiralling through four decades from Merseybeat through psychedelia, punk, Britpop and beyond."
- Johnny Rogan, The Irish Times
Kate Bush
Morrissey
Shane MacGowan, Cait O'Riordan & Elvis Costello
Kevin Rowland
'Tell Me When My Light Turns Green' - Dexys Midnight Runners
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Post by petrolino on Dec 4, 2020 22:43:51 GMT
New Age Romantic : The Cult Of Morrissey {Boxing Clever ¬ Glamour Punks, Sophisti-Pop & Literary Allusions}
'How Soon Is Now' - The Smiths
Steven Patrick Morrissey (/ˈmɒrɪsiː/), known mononymously as Morrissey, 'Moz', or 'Mozza' to his fans, is a singer, songwriter and author whose early career in the arts runs through the first, second and third waves of England's punk era. Violence permeated the underground punk scene that emerged in Manchester in the mid-1970s. Morrissey was a glam rock fan and local scenester who wrote a fanzine about the New York Dolls. His first band's name, The Nosebleeds, was a comment on this hostile environment. The Nosebleeds' line-up boasted two of the finest young guitarists active in the north-west of England, Billy Duffy (the Cult), and Vini Reilly (the Durutti Column) who'd work with Morrissey years later on his critically lauded debut solo album 'Viva Hate' (1988).
'Ed Garrity was a roadie for the Wythenshawe group Slaughter & The Dogs — also on the bill that night — and ‘it all kicked off. "I got hit on the head with a bottle. There was blood everywhere. Someone said “there’s that headbanger with the nosebleed” and that’s where my name came from.” Garrity was a member of the band Wild Ram; thereafter it was renamed Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds.
For Garrity, his injury was a badge of initiation: "After spilling our blood for the punk cause, damn right we regarded ourselves as true punks. But we still got labelled bandwagon jumpers."
The accounts of music gigs in Manchester around this time are littered with stories of violence, vandalism and (mostly) men behaving badly, for example: At the Mayflower club, Gorton, in July 1979, Adam and the Ants “played to a seriously antagonistic crowd who, though less than 50 in number, managed to smash every chair and every table into the band’s PA stack before the lone bouncer bundled them on to the pavement”.
And now, the first line of the current (2013) website of Slaughter and the Dogs sounds almost like a macho boast, saying that they hail from “the notoriously tough Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe.'
- Band On The Wall
Steven Patrick Morrissey
-
Swing Sister Swing : The Electric Circus & Eric's Club
The Electric Circus was a punk venue opened in Manchester in October 1976. The compilation album 'Short Circuit : Live At The Electric Circus' (recorded in 1977 and released in 1978) captures performances by several bands that performed there including Buzzcocks, the Drones, the Fall and Warsaw (who later became Joy Division).
Factory Records became the dominant independent record label recruiting in the local area. Some of the bands signed to the label were also part of the Manchester Musicians' Collective which promoted local talent and secured venues for bands to perform at. One of the groups on the collective's roster, the Frantic Elevators, would go on to become overlords of occupancy within Manchester's fast-developing music market.
'When the idea of a Manchester Musicians Collective first emerged, it was expected that the participants would be from the exploratory end of the music spectrum, free improvisers perhaps and committed experimentalists, possibly mixing music with performance art. This expectation was based on the involvement with other collectives of the two original protagonists, music graduates Trevor Wishart and Dick Witts — Trevor in York, Dick in London. But soon after the Collective got going in April 1977 it was obvious that Manchester’s version would be very different: much more rock’n’roll.'
- Band On The Wall
'This Charming Man [Instrumental Track]' - The Smiths
Over in Liverpool, Eric's Club was another small punk venue that opened its doors in October 1976, sparking the north-west's usual violent rivalry between the region's two most populous cities. The club was co-founded by Ken Testi, manager of art rock troupe Deaf School. It became a catalyst for local musicians looking to explode on the national scene, but in this instance, they took longer to make their mark than their Mancunian cousins.
I don't think the Crucial Three recorded anything but band members Julian Cope (the Teardrop Explodes), Ian McCulloch (Echo & the Bunnymen) and Pete Wylie (Wah!) went on to bigger and better things. Cope and Wylie were briefly in the punk band Mystery Girls with Pete Burns (Dead Or Alive) who became a close confidante of Morrissey in the mid-1980's.
The keynote act to emerge from Eric's was Big In Japan whose membership included David Balfe (the Teardrop Explodes), Ian Broudie (the Lightning Seeds), Budgie (Siouxsie & the Banshees), Jayne Casey (Pink Military), Bill Drummond (KLF) and Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes To Hollywood). Fortunately, they did lay down some studio tracks within their brief creative lifetime.
"Punk has become many things in the 40 years since it went overground.
It has become acceptable, stripped by time and familiarity of the ability to shock. It has become common place – punk fashion and influence can be seen pretty much everywhere. It has become an exercise in nostalgia; punk bands still play gigs to the same crowds who saw them decades ago, cosy gigs reliving a collective youth.
And it has become commodified, a trend that in truth started worryingly early. These days, Ramones and Joy Division t-shirts can be snapped up in Primark, extravagantly dyed hair, ripped jeans and multiple earrings are mainstream and raise not a single eyebrow.
But it was not always like this. Oh no – once upon a time,Punk was a dangerous, exciting thing to be involved with. Questions were asked about it in the Houses of Parliament and just looking like a punk could get you chased, beaten and worse. In those far off days, this shocking new phenomenon was news! Music papers particularly couldn’t get enough of it, devoting almost whole issues to its rise. But, John Peel aside, it was almost impossible for young teens to actually hear the music itself. Thank God then for Roger Eagle being, not for the first time in his life, in the right place at the right time. And, more importantly, with the right attitude.
Following on from creating successful and influential nights at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the Stadium in Liverpool, Roger, along with Pete Fulwell and Ken Testi, opened Eric’s in 1976, just in time for punk to spread out from London to Manchester and then to the provinces.
The first band to appear at Eric’s were The Stranglers, followed a week later by The Runaways and then The Sex Pistols. Eric’s had clearly tapped into a rich vein of exciting new music with punk beginning to explode. Not that it was ever a punk club per se, also featuring gigs from such diverse artists as Steve Hillage, Van der Graaf Generator, B.B. King and many reggae artists such as Prince Far I and Inner Circle.
Roger Eagle was one of the rare breed of people who were more interested in the art of what they were doing rather than the finances, so the more popular gigs by the likes of The Clash and The Damned funded gigs by artists less likely to pull in a large number of paying guests, but Roger would rather spend time and money showcasing wonderful music for a smaller audience than have it ignored. His legendary enthusiasm for music and for turning other people on to bands he loved was undoubtedly one of Eric’s best assets."
- Banjo, 'Eric’s – A Personal Journey Through Liverpool’s Original Punk Club'
'From Y To Z And Never Again' ~ Big In Japan
London, Manchester and Liverpool all attracted punk hopefuls from Birmingham which was still in the grip of a heavy metal revolution. The draw of ska music was also strong across the midlands and attracted potential punk musicians to enlist. Fortunately, there was one major rock venue called Barbarella's that was only too happy to book punk bands and this provided a boost to the local punk scene.
"The ultimate classic rock venue – Barbarella's. When Mothers shut its doors, the baton passed to this city-centre joint, which had been a nightclub and disco. You stuck to the floor, but the place had two bars, both with excellent sight lines. Not only was the place, like Mothers, a who's-who for a new generation of rock bands, but they ran a decent local night on Sundays, and opened up a punk room where everyone played – from the Pistols and Buzzcocks to The Jam. Before Judas Priest broke big in the US, they headlined Barbs – but rather overdid the pyro. You couldn't see them for the first half an hour. Sadly, this is all that's left – a salvaged street sign, roughly where Cumberland Street used to be."
- Robin Valk, Time Out
'Let's Make This Precious' - Dexys Midnight Runners
Morrissey enjoyed a short stint as singer with Manchester's punk mainstays Slaughter & the Dogs but once again his personality proved to be a hard pill for some band members to swallow, leading to another swift exit. He took his fountain pen out and documented the foibles of scenesters for several years, earning him a reputation as one of the collapsing punk scene's most feared gossip merchants. Then, in 1982, Morrissey formed the Smiths with guitarist Johnny Marr (the Paris Valentinos & Electronic), bass player Andy Rourke (the Paris Valentinos & the Adult Net) and drummer Mike Joyce (the Adult Net & Buzzcocks).
“I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives.”
― Morrissey
New York Dolls fanatic Morrissey
I recall seeing Morrissey performing with wilting daffodils inserted into his bottom on more than one occasion and he appeared to revel in his own animalistic scent on stage. With his nose frequently upturned and his nostrils stood to attention, the image he projected was not one that I warmed to. But boy, did I love the music of his bandmates Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce. Regardless of my own misgivings, it was certainly a striking image that Morrissey projected and he fired up the imagination of a hungry music press who saw in him one of their own. I believe it's no exaggeration to suggest that Morrissey redefined the role of the inanimate hipster through his dancing. His "poseur" aesthetic was carefully sculpted and expertly cultivated across a number of years and he bloomed before the very music writers he'd once rubbed shoulders with. England's powerful critical establishment garlanded him with flowers, praising the traditionalist frontman for his wry witticisms, clever use of symbolism and highly marketable brand of self-indulgent angst. His pronounced air of arrogance was underlined by a princely pop pomposity that would influence some of the biggest bands of the "Britpop" era to follow. Morrissey was anointed indie spokesman for a generation, declared the greatest poet of his generation, celebrated as a great humourist as well as being the voice of England's brooding bedsit populace.
'I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.'
- William Wordsworth (the Casanova of Cockermouth)
'Now I know how Johnny Marr felt, Now I know how Johnny Marr feeelt ...'
Morrissey's vocal style is often said to be an amalgamation of his favourite female voices (Timi Yuro, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Lulu). I think he may have adopted his yelping croon from Edwyn Collins, frontman of the original Nu-Sonics, a punk band that morphed into Orange Juice. The Scottish music label Postcard Records produced albums by Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera, bands that directly influenced the "sophisti-pop" movement of the mid-1980s. With regard to Scottish music, it's long been suggested that the Smiths' song 'William, It Was Really Nothing' is about Morrissey's relationship with Billy Mackenzie (the Associates) but I don't know if this is true or not.
“In England, pop music seems now to be exclusively for children. If an artist is no good, why is it necessary to have that artist repeatedly rammed in our face?”
- Morrissey, The Telegraph
Pete Burns & Morrissey
'This Is What She's Like' - Dexys Midnight Runners
Two songs are said to have exerted a considerable influence over the young frontman who harboured an unusual obsession for muscular, bare-chested boxers sweating under lights. Morrissey was moved by the Drug Addix' punk anthem 'Gay Boys In Bondage' and he asked the group's backing singer Kirsty MacColl to work with him a few years later (MacColl recorded backing vocals for the Smiths' song 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' but they were discarded and replaced by Morrissey's own additional wailing).
Another song that scored a home run with Morrissey was Madness' comic cut 'Mummy's Boy' from their debut album 'One Step Beyond ...' (1979). This track was composed by the band's bass player Mark Bedford (Voice Of The Beehive) who worked with Morrissey on his critically acclaimed solo album 'Kill Uncle' (1991) which was produced by Clive Langer (Deaf School) and Alan Winstanley, a production team whose work up to this point in time had included albums with Madness, the Teardrop Explodes, Dexys Midnight Runners, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.
“Life would be so colourful if only I had a drink problem.”
- Morrissey, New Musical Express
Morrissey & Kirsty MacColl
'They Don't Know' - Kirsty MacColl
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The Smiths
Bassing to 'Cemetery Gates'
Johnny Marr was a fan of the independent music label Cherry Red Records and their output. Their roster included Felt (who were musically inspired by the punk band Television), Lemon Kittens (a vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Danielle Dax) and the Monochrome Set. Also at Cherry Red Records were the d.i.y. punk band Marine Girls and multi-instrumentalist Ben Watt. When the Marine Girls split up, Watt and Tracey Thorn formed Everything But The Girl who became pioneers of the experimental "sophisti-pop" movement (they were later joined by drummer Jane Miles-Kingston of the Mo-Dettes). Marr plays harmonica on 'Native Land' by Everything But The Girl.
"We meet in his studio, a converted warehouse just outside Manchester. Marr is in skinny jeans and a polka-dot shirt, looking fit and clear-eyed. He says he loves the title of his book because it sounds like a famous song. But it isn’t – it just came to him. As a little boy (and he was tiny, growing up) it was music that set him free from the mundanities of everyday life. He was brought up in a working-class family in Ardwick Green, Manchester, by Irish Catholic parents who were also mad about music. His father, “a strong, brooding presence”, laid gas pipes in the road; his mother, one of 14 children, cleaned at a hospital.
There was nothing unhappy about his childhood, but there was something stultifying about suburbia. “I was looking for something – transcendence.” He looks embarrassed. “That sounds a bit pretentious, but common transcendence that everybody can relate to. I really like the word free. It has a sense of energy, and idealism, which I’ve always felt.”
He was a bright boy, and went to grammar school. Like all guitarists, he says, he was good at English and art. But beyond that he didn’t care much for academic work. He was obsessed with music: girl groups the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles, glam rockers T-Rex and Roxy Music, and most of all with guitarists.
By the age of 13, he was playing in bands with people four years older. “Fashion, culture, rebellion, drinking, girls: I was learning so much, doing 16-year-old stuff. It felt like an apprenticeship for the only thing I was going to do – be a rock guitar player.” Marr was already a star in the making, obsessed with mod haircuts and Crombie coats, spending every spare minute perfecting his guitar technique. He was a talented footballer and had a trial with Manchester City, the team he supported. But nothing could compete with his passion for music. Football fell by the wayside.
Marr says he couldn’t stand the strutting braggadocio of “cock rock”. His guitar heroes (Rory Gallagher, Keith Richards, Nile Rodgers, James Williamson from the Stooges) didn’t want to steal the show. So, rather than playing lead guitar, he devised a new way of playing for himself – using the rhythm guitar to replicate a whole band or orchestra. The technique was influenced by Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” and refined over the years in the studio. It often involved numerous guitar overdubs, and Marr referred to it as the Guitarchestra.
When he got the idea for the Smiths, which he formed at 19, it was already his fifth serious band. This time he knew he didn’t want to front it. “The few occasions I had to stand in front of a bunch of local kids at youth clubs, it was terrifying.” As far as Marr was concerned, all the great bands were based on a partnership: Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards. That’s where Steven Morrissey came in.
Marr was looking for a singer for his new band. One night he watched a South Bank Show on the great songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Leiber said he had heard that Stoller wrote songs, liked the sound of him, found out where he lived and knocked on the stranger’s door. Marr decided that that’s what he would do; he had been told Morrissey was a good vocalist, so he would find out where he lived and knock on his door.
They talked about music, and listened to Morrissey’s rare Tamla 45s. Marr raved about Dusty Springfield’s Little By Little; Morrissey played him Sandie Shaw’s Message Understood. When Marr left, Morrissey gave him some of his typed lyrics. After that, they were inseparable. “Everything that was obsessive, excessive and poetic, all the big visions I carried around inside me, were also in him. The love of pop culture, and the pure dedication, was mirrored in my partner. I’ve never seen it in anyone else before, and never in exactly the same way since. And the desperation. He was looking for someone like me and I was looking for someone like him. And we liked each other straight away. We really liked each other.”
What was the desperation? “If it wasn’t going to happen for us, all that unfulfilled ambition was a hell of a lot to carry around. We weren’t the sort of people who at 28 were going to be able to say, ‘I was in a band; it didn’t work out. That’s why I’m working in an estate agent.’ The two of us knew that we were too into it to survive that.”
Were they as intense as each other? “In different ways, yeah. Mine comes out in physicality, exuberance. My mother used to say I’m a cross between really intense and really laid-back.”
Marr says his relationship with Morrissey was as close as is possible without being lovers. Was he in love with Morrissey? “No, because I was in love with Angie [his then girlfriend, now wife], but we definitely loved each other. I think we all did.” His old school friend Andy Rourke (who had played in his first band, the Paris Valentinos) joined on bass, and Mike Joyce became their drummer. The four became good friends, but Marr says it was always clear that he and Morrissey were the leaders.
The second Morrissey lyric Marr put to music was the ghoulish Suffer Little Children, about the victims of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady (“Lesley Ann, with your pretty white beads/Oh John, you’ll never be a man/And you’ll never see your home again/Oh Manchester, so much to answer for”). Didn’t the words spook him? Well, at the time, he says, they were so besotted with each other, the lyrics were secondary. “It was, ‘We like each other. You look good, I look good. I write music, you write lyrics. We’re gonna do this.’” He smiles. “When I saw, in the first songwriting session, my new group had a song about the Moors murderers, it was very much, ‘Fucking hell!’ But I went on instinct.”
Did he always think of the Smiths as his? “In a way that is protective, I did, yes. I wasn’t old enough to be paternal, but it was kind of paternal.” Marr looked like a young Keith Richards – and had the swagger. Morrissey was famously introverted, so Marr was marketed as the arrogant one. While he says he was 90% true to that image, there was always 10% that was terrified.
The Smiths were always political, not in the campaigning way of Billy Bragg or Paul Weller, but in their frame of reference – the writings of Oscar Wilde, Irish Catholic life, their album titles (Meat Is Murder, The Queen Is Dead), the daily grind of life. Growing up in working-class Manchester, Marr says, being political was instinctive. “It was just part of your mindset, because you felt you were up against it, and the right wing was the minority but controlling everything. Somebody gave me Arguments For Socialism by Tony Benn, and I discovered that what I just thought was decency was a political position. You look after people who are less fortunate, and anyone who does otherwise is just fucking ghastly. By definition, being an alternative musician back then, you were political.”
Did he and Morrissey have similar politics? “Yeah, we did back then.” And now? “I wouldn’t expect so. Probably not.” In recent years, Morrissey has made headlines for suggesting that immigration is compromising British identity; he sued the NME (successfully) for defamation, releasing a statement that “racism has no place in our society”. In a 2010 interview with this magazine, he described the Chinese as a “subspecies” when it came to their treatment of animals. Marr prefers to talk about the days when Morrissey reserved his bile for Margaret Thatcher.
Success soon began to take its toll on the Smiths. Rourke had a heroin habit; Marr survived on a diet of cocaine and booze. His weight dropped to seven stone, but he didn’t worry because all his heroes had been slight. “George Best was small, Marc Bolan was small, Bruce Lee was small. And they were cocky and hyper, so I related to that, and played up to it. When it got really unhealthy it was just part and parcel of being in the Smiths in 1986. I wasn’t thinking, ‘This is great.’ I just never ate.”
- Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian (article published October 29, 2016)
Andy Rourke, Morrissey, Johnny Marr & Mike Joyce
'Crabwalk' - Everything But The Girl
There are several other groups associated with the sophisti-pop movement that had strong punk roots. Kevin Rowland (the Killjoys) formed Dexys Midnight Runners who engineered a more sophisticated audio-visual pop template in the mid-1980s. The Dick Diver Band mutated into Prefab Sprout. Alison Moyet (the Vicars) joined forces with Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode) to create Yazoo. Paul Weller (the Jam) formed the Style Council.
Towards the end of the sophisti-pop movement's first wave, musicians Andy Connell (The Immediates & A Certain Ratio) and Martin Jackson (Freshies & Magazine) formed Swing Out Sister, which pleased Marr no end; a diehard supporter of Manchester City Football Club, Marr enthusiastically embraced the band's compositions 'Forever Blue' and 'Blue Mood'.
"Johnny Marr has dismissed rumours of a Smiths reunion after a fan asked for clarification about a rumoured 2020 tour. The rumour, posted on the forum Morrissey Solo, came from a “trusted source” who claimed that concert promoter Live Nation had won the rights to the band’s reunion.
In response to the fan, who said they needed to know the truth “pretty sharpish so I can get a loan and sell everything I own to go to every date”, Marr replied: “Nigel Farage on guitar,” appearing to rubbish the gossip by alluding to the incompatibility of his and Morrissey’s political beliefs. The Guardian has contacted representatives of Marr for comment. In recent years, Morrissey has made explicit his support for the rightwing, anti-Islam For Britain political party. In June, he reposted a video from a rightwing YouTube channel to Morrissey Solo, which argued that the British establishment was using Stormzy to promote multiculturalism at the expense of white culture. He has expressed his approval of the Brexit referendum result, and blamed immigration for the loss of British identity. He recently performed in Los Angeles wearing a T-shirt that read: “Fuck the Guardian.” Billy Bragg has said it is “beyond doubt” that Morrissey is spreading far-right ideas.
Marr is leftwing. On his most recent album, Call the Comet, he imagines an alternative society that “resets the ridiculousness of the last few years”, he told the Independent in 2018. Last year, he joined musicians including Ed Sheeran, Jarvis Cocker and Neil Tennant in signing an open letter to then prime minister Theresa May railing against the effects of Brexit on the creative industries.
He is generally tactful on the topic of his former bandmate. In May, he told NME that he wasn’t worried about the impact of Morrissey’s political views on the Smiths’ legacy. “It’s got nothing to do with my world or my life. The songs are out there for people to judge, relate to and hear,” he said. In June 2018, he told the Independent: “All anyone needs to know is that I oppose those views from Morrissey or anybody else.” The Smiths split in 1987. Morrissey and Marr have consistently said that they do not want a reunion, and have allegedly turned down million-pound offers to do so. They contemplated the matter during a rare meeting in 2008, though nothing came of it.
In addition to the incompatible beliefs of the group’s two best-known members, the animosity stemming from a 1989 court case in which drummer Mike Joyce sued his bandmates for a greater share of profits would also appear to impede a reconciliation."
- Laura Snapes, The Guardian (article published November 7, 2019)
Johnny Marr & Morrissey
'Breakout' - Swing Out Sister
There's a biopic of Morrissey that I've not seen. It's called 'England Is Mine' (2017) and is directed by Mark Gill.
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Post by Zos on Dec 5, 2020 12:26:09 GMT
The Smiths were the ultimate "Emperor's new clothes" in music for me.Absolutely hate them. Then again i love the Fall whom many hate. That's the beauty of music.
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Post by petrolino on Dec 5, 2020 12:34:07 GMT
The Smiths were the ultimate "Emperor's new clothes" in music for me.Absolutely hate them. Then again i love the Fall whom many hate. That's the beauty of music.
A lot of people love the Fall too, especially music critics. I used to have a friend (drinking partner) who'd seen them about 30 times and knew every record they'd released inside out (including side projects). Weren't they John Peel's favourite band?
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Post by Zos on Dec 5, 2020 16:05:57 GMT
The Smiths were the ultimate "Emperor's new clothes" in music for me.Absolutely hate them. Then again i love the Fall whom many hate. That's the beauty of music.
A lot of people love the Fall too, especially music critics. I used to have a friend (drinking partner) who'd seen them about 30 times and knew every record they'd released inside out (including side projects). Weren't they John Peel's favourite band? Probably overall, although Peel adored The Undertones and The Wedding Present as well.
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Post by petrolino on Dec 5, 2020 17:45:11 GMT
A lot of people love the Fall too, especially music critics. I used to have a friend (drinking partner) who'd seen them about 30 times and knew every record they'd released inside out (including side projects). Weren't they John Peel's favourite band? Probably overall, although Peel adored The Undertones and The Wedding Present as well. Actually, now you mention it, I do recall every time I used to see the Undertones' song 'Teenage Kicks' come up in British punk articles, John Peel seemed to get mentioned.
I like the Fall. I think their albums from the late 1970s through late 1980s all have their moments. I also like the group Adult Net, Brix Smith's musical collective that included three former members of the Smiths (Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke & Craig Gannon) within its ranks.
I tried to be brutally honest in what I wrote regarding the Smiths. I included a bass cover and an instrumental version of a song they'd released with good reason. I always enjoy their music and 'The Queen Is Dead' (1986) is one of my favourite albums for that reason. In particular, the playing of Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke. I just never liked Morrissey. I don't like his "la-de-da" bits, his sneering intonation makes my skin crawl, he sometimes gets too "clever-clever" and I've never found him to be half as witty as some people do. Sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to listen to the Smiths because I can't hack Morrissey.
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Post by Zos on Dec 5, 2020 20:48:15 GMT
Probably overall, although Peel adored The Undertones and The Wedding Present as well. Actually, now you mention it, I do recall every time I used to see the Undertones' song 'Teenage Kicks' come up in British punk articles, John Peel seemed to get mentioned.
I like the Fall. I think their albums from the late 1970s through late 1980s all have their moments. I also like the group Adult Net, Brix Smith's musical collective that included three former members of the Smiths (Mike Joyce, Andy Rourke & Craig Gannon) within its ranks.
I tried to be brutally honest in what I wrote regarding the Smiths. I included a bass cover and an instrumental version of a song they'd released with good reason. I always enjoy their music and 'The Queen Is Dead' (1986) is one of my favourite albums for that reason. In particular, the playing of Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke. I just never liked Morrissey. I don't like his "la-de-da" bits, his sneering intonation makes my skin crawl, he sometimes gets too "clever-clever" and I've never found him to be half as witty as some people do. Sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to listen to the Smiths because I can't hack Morrissey.
Peel has "Teenage dreams, So hard to beat" from "kicks" on his grave stone. Outside my family he was the most influential figure of my and many of my generations life. I listened to every single show from early 77 for about 10 years and many more until his death. He is unsurpassed in his influence on British music. He taught me the greatest lesson, never say modern music isn't as good as it used to be, that's just because you are too lazy to seek it out.
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Post by petrolino on Dec 14, 2020 23:54:10 GMT
♫ Ska Punk | Vinyl Revolutions ♫
{: The Cultural Impact of 2 Tone Records (~ established via Chrysalis Records)}
2 Tone Records was one of the most influential English music labels to emerge during the rock 'n' roll era. It was founded by musician Jerry Dammers (the Specials) in 1979. Its headquarters were in Coventry, Warwickshire, about 21 miles east of Birmingham. If you visit Coventry today, the 2-Tone Village is an area located just outside the city centre that's dedicated to celebrating the city's ska punk heritage. Attractions include the 2-Tone Café (& Simmer Down Caribbean Restaurant) and the 2-Tone Shop.
"The Specials started in Coventry in the late 1970s, a mixed-race ensemble playing a thrilling mixture of ska, reggae and punk, with pointed, politically sharp lyrics. Originally, there were seven members – the three here today (singer Terry Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding, bassist Horace Panter), plus band founder/songwriter/keyboardist Jerry Dammers (creator of the 2 Tone record label, to which the Specials were signed), as well as singer Neville Staple, guitarist Roddy Radiation and drummer John “Brad” Bradbury. Much of the Specials’ impact back then was collective: a group of street-tough individuals, the band as gang. Their gigs were raucous, confrontational affairs, occasionally marred by far-right elements wanting to cause trouble with a group that had both black and white members.
In 1981, after their scorching single Ghost Town went to No 1, Hall, Golding and Staple left to form the Fun Boy Three. The remaining Specials added more members and continued as the Special AKA, before splitting in 1984 (though Dammers was held in a record company contract until 1987). Since then, there have been various Specials reincarnations."
- Miranda Sawyer, The Guardian
"Because of bands like UB40 and the Beat too, we were doing something that wasn’t in London. It was a sense of pride in where we were and wanted to make some sort of change. Lyrically, I think what we were doing was all very similar. We were all in the Midlands, and the only band I remembered from the Midlands was Jigsaw, who blew it all sky high [chuckles]."
- Terry Hall, The Guardian
Jerry Dammers
Charley Anderson
'Concrete Jungle' - The Specials
2 Tone Records was backed by Chrysalis Records which was significant. This arrangement came about as Chrysalis had tried unsuccessfully to sign the Specials. Jerry Dammers cut a deal with Chrysalis in order to start his own label.
It was around this same time that Chrysalis broke new ground with their distribution of Blondie's complete video cassette album 'Eat To The Beat' (1979), a move reflecting the label's stated philosophy that innovation spurred creativity. For 'Eat To The Beat', Blondie shot music videos for every song on the album, becoming one of the first groups to do so (they are the earliest I know of). Chrysalis were also home to Generation X.
"We were very minimal when we started, very rough-edged. So, in that respect, we fit in. But I think every band was totally different and that was kind of curious for the scene. I don’t think that the punk sound really became the punk sound until much later. The punk era wasn’t really just one musical sound. There are a lot of differences among Television, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads. And Blondie maybe wasn’t as fully developed as those bands were. But we all had the same kind of philosophy, and that’s more what the punk period was about — wanting change, having a more urban kind of sensibility and some weird kind of wit. We got out of that overly serious, pompous, big, guitar-band sound. Lyrically, we got into some crazy stuff. It was more about some kind of antisocial mood. Because we had a lot of personnel changes in the beginning, we were more of an experimental or exploratory kind of group. We really changed personnel quite a few times. And at each time it was a collaborative ensemble situation. It wasn’t like Chris (Stein) and I were telling everyone exactly what to play. We were trying to incorporate whatever a musician or a person brought to us to create a sound. And, finally, that jelled. Then we had a specific sound.
Although, I know Chris has always been very interested in worldbeat — at that time it wasn’t really called that — and of creating crossover, which at that time was really new. So that’s why we did some of the things that we did — to try things: “Let’s do this experiment. Let’s mix up a little bit of disco and techno sounds with a rock beat. Let’s do it with reggae. Let’s try some rap.” It was just things that we liked and things that were around us. We were truly a New York City band in that respect. We had ears open to all the influences that were around us."
- Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol's Interview
Debbie Harry, Chris Stein & Lynval Golding
Chrissie Hynde, Pauline Black, Debbie Harry, Poly Styrene, Viv Albertine & Siouxsie Sioux
'My Clone Sleeps Alone' - Pat Benatar
In the 1980s, Chrysalis Records found themselves at the forefront of the video revolution and their strengthening roster included Spandau Ballet and Ultravox. They also stepped up efforts to enhance their American distribution wing by securing deals with Pat Benatar and Toni Basil, musical artists who became noted for having expansive videographies that showcased inventive art design and finger-hopping choreography.
'Toni Basil’s debut album, WORD OF MOUTH, was released in the U.K. in late May 1981, and “Mickey” was released as a single, but was not a hit at that time. The album also features covers of the David Essex classic, “Rock On,” and three Devo covers — “You Gotta Problem” (a reworked cover of “Pity You”), “Be Stiff” and “Space Girls.” And as a bonus, Devo performs on the songs (she was also involved with Devo co-founder and bass player Gerald “Jerry” Casale at the time, and she was a fan of the band)! WORD OF MOUTH would be released in the U.S. in April 1982, nearly a year after its U.K. release. Though not immediate, the success of the album and first single “Mickey” would rely on word of mouth (and a whole lot of cheering) that would get Toni Basil onto the music map.
“Mickey” debuted unsuspectingly on the BILLBOARD Hot 100 at No. 83 in early September 1982. Five weeks later, it made its debut in the Top 40, and took its time climbing up the chart, until exploding into the Top 15 in mid-November 1982. The following week, it leapt into the Top 10 on the Hot 100, and in mid-December 1982, it spent a week at No. 1, and would have stayed on top longer, had it not been for the huge hit by Daryl Hall & John Oates (who had a number of huge hits around the holidays in the 80s), “Maneater.” “Mickey” would go on to spend over half a year on the Hot 100, sell over two million copies in the U.S. alone, and finished the 1983 American singles chart year at No. 36. Word of mouth got out about “Mickey” around the globe, too, and it spent five weeks at No. 1 in Canada, two weeks at No. 1 in Australia (the sixth biggest hit of 1982 there), plus it reached No. 2 in New Zealand and through a re-release in the U.K., No. 3 in Ireland, South Africa and BILLBOARD’s Dance chart. After “Mickey,” Toni Basil released three more singles from WORD OF MOUTH, and the final single released from the album, “Shoppin’ From A To Z,” reached No. 77 on the BILLBOARD Hot 100 in March 1983.'
- 'Forever Young : My Life Stuck In The 80s'
Neil Giraldo & Pat Benatar
Toni Basil, Martha Davis, Grace Slick & Cyndi Lauper
'Shoppin' From A To Z' - Toni Basil
Major 2 Tone acts included the Specials, the Beat and the Selecter, spiritual leaders within the ska punk movement. The Bodysnatchers were a seven-member ska troupe formed in 1979 that disintegrated and reassembled as the Belle Stars, with five bodysnatched members still remaining. There were other acts signed to 2 Tone Records in the early days including the Higsons, a musical vehicle for author and comedian Charlie Higson.
"I was born in Saint Catherine, Jamaica. This man was crippled and he sat in front of this house in the village, where I come from, this brownstone house, on a mat. He died and I went down to the river with my sink pan on my head to fetch the water. It was broad daylight. I’ve got the water, I’m walking, then suddenly there he was, sitting in front of his house on his little mat. My mind just went, “Wooah, wooah,” and the sink pan of water has gone off my head. I just run. And often now, I don’t believe that I saw him, but I saw him. I still can’t grasp it."
- Lynval Golding speaking with Diane Morgan on the subject of ghosts, The Guardian
Jerry Dammers & the Rude Girl Aerobicisers
Amy Winehouse & Terry Hall
Charlie Higson (The Right Hand Lovers / The Higsons) & Paul Whitehouse (The Right Hand Lovers) speak about their background in music on John Peel Day
2 Tone intended to release a single by Elvis Costello & the Attractions, but 'I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down' was blocked from release for contractual reasons; new pressings of the single were distributed by the record label F-Beat which had been recently set up by Jake Riviera, co-founder of Stiff Records.
2 Tone did get to launch the showcase single 'Dance Craze' for ska variety act Bad Manners, which was designed to coincide with the release of Joe Massot's documentary about the 2 Tone movement, 'Dance Craze' (1981). Massot's film was largely shot on the road in 1980 and it features tour footage of Bad Manners, the Beat, the Bodysnatchers, Madness, the Selecter and the Specials. In 1980, the Beat created their own record label, Go-Feet Records. To gain a footing in the United States of America, the band struck distribution deals through their own label with the record labels Sire Records and I.R.S. Records.
"By 1976, Pauline Black was singing in local pubs, earning £10 a gig. Then one day in May 1979, she went to a rehearsal with a group of friends and left as the lead singer with the Selecter. A few months later, the band had their first hit, On My Radio. Within seven weeks of being a fully formed band, the Selecter were supporting the likes of Madness and the Specials and Pauline was being hailed as the Queen of Ska.
It was around this time that she changed her surname from Vickers. The name Black came to her after a session with the band – she was naming the elephant in the room, she says: "I thought, that is just absolutely amazing! My family, for the first time, will have to say it," she says.
"[The term] coloured was still used in those times. Black was still an underground thing, and to actually name yourself Black, as far as my family was concerned, was quite a big bone of contention. I don't think I've ever been fully forgiven. If I'd changed my name to Smith, that wouldn't have been quite so bad," she says.
If changing her surname to Black was radical for the time, so too was her androgynous "rude-girl" uniform of a sharp black and/or white suit with a grey fedora.
Though never quite as successful as Madness and the Specials, the Selecter had their own loyal following and a string of UK hits after On My Radio, including Too Much Pressure and Three Minute Hero. What made them different from other bands on the 2-tone scene was not only the fact that they had a black female singer, but there was only one white member, out of a line up of seven. "Madness were all white, there were only two black people in the Specials. And then there was us," says Pauline.
It was a time of racial tension in Britain and it was not uncommon for rightwing skinheads and National Front supporters to launch into sieg heil chants during 2-Tone gigs. Wasn't Pauline disheartened when the music she loved was appropriated by "bonehead skins," as she calls them? "It was never appropriated, they were just there. In Top Rank clubs and Tiffany's, and all those kinds of places, you would have 2,000 people in there and 40, possibly 50 people who sieg-heiled at you that particular night," says Pauline.
How did she deal with it? "I rather naively thought they could be shown the error of their ways. That didn't happen, but we tried. We'd ask the audience: 'Do you want these people in here?' Sometimes that would shame them into shutting up," says Pauline."
- Hannah Pool, The Guardian
𝄞 > 'The Ska EP' ~ Lily Allen < 𝄞
𝄢 > 'The Ska EP' ~ No Doubt < 𝄢
𝄜 'The Ska EP' ~ Amy Winehouse 𝄜
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Post by petrolino on Jan 1, 2021 2:14:42 GMT
The Berlin Wall (1961 - 1989)
I touched briefly upon punk in Germany in a previous post on this thread ('Strict Punk Principles, Shifting Political Landscapes And International Film Markets'), mentioning the crossover in the work of punk musicians, cabaret artists and filmmakers associated with the 'New German Cinema' movement. Creative collaborators Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ulli Lommel brought a clear punk aesthetic to some of their work. Lommel had been a member of Andy Warhol's Factory and he remained an associate of Warhol throughout the punk era. It's during this time that Lommel directed 'Cocaine Cowboys' (1979) and 'Blank Generation' (1980).
Another member of Fassbinder's stock company, actor Roger Fritz, directed the disturbing drama 'Frankfurt : The Face Of A City' (1981) which became a symbol of urban punk alienation and dislocation.
Wim Wenders and Uli Edel also held connections to the emerging punk movement and this was most clearly reflected in some of their casting choices. Edel directed 'Christiane F.' (1981) which appears in many lists of the greatest punk movies to this day.
"What an unlikely mix. Here is Hanna Schygulla, one of Europe's most acclaimed movie stars, who has been directed by R. W. Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Ettore Scola, Andrzej Wajda, Volker Schlondorff and Wim Wenders. She has chosen to make her first film in America with a little-known Israeli who happens to be the son of Jerusalem's famous mayor and has only two rather quirky movies before this to his credit. Working beside Miss Schygulla are two women rock stars, one known as a ''punk Garbo'' and the other a former lead singer for a band called The Shirts.
Miss Schygulla is in virtually every frame of ''Forever Lulu,'' which Amos Kollek, the son of Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem, wrote and directed and has just finished shooting on location in and around New York. Her co-stars are Deborah Harry, the blonde of the ''Blondie'' band, who is the Lulu of the movie's title but barely utters a word in it, and Annie Golden, who plays Miss Schygulla's nymphomaniac best friend.
On this particular day, Miss Schygulla, West Germany's most famous screen face by far, star of 18 Fassbinder films including ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' Mr. Scola's ''Nuit de Varennes'' and Mr. Wajda's ''Love in Germany,'' is bobbing up and down on a floating chair in the sky-high pool of the United Nations Plaza Hotel. She emits a tinkly laugh from time to time, but never fluffs a line.
Crew members in swim trunks circle her like waterbugs, slapping the surface to make little ripples. Mr. Kollek fidgets near the pool's edge behind his cinematographer, Lisa Rinzler. The temperature is in the high 80's, intensified by glaring white lights; the humidity reminds one of New Orleans in July. A drop of sweat hangs from the tip of Mr. Kollek's long, melancholy nose, and his T-shirt is sopping wet. Miss Schygulla, however, looks as dainty as a May morning in her pink bathing suit shot with gold. Every hair of her bleached blonde beehive is in place."
- Nan Robertson, The New York Times
Nastassja Kinski & electric cabaret artist Hanna Schygulla in Wim Wenders' 'Wrong Move' (1975)
One of the things that interests me is the mythology around punk culture and its part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on all that I've seen, heard and read over the years, I think this has sometimes been exaggerated, but it's true that punk was embraced by pockets of agitators in all the nations that came under direct Soviet influence, or at least the idea of punk was adopted as a form of free rebellion. One filmmaker who straddled the late 1970s and the late 1980s is Wolfgang Buld. Here in the U K, we know Buld well as he's spent a significant amount of time working here. Like Ulli Lommel, he's perhaps best known as a horror filmmaker, but he's tackled a variety of genres in his time (we shouldn't forget that Lommel even directed a homoerotic arthouse take on the classic Bavarian sex comedy, 'Yodelling Is Not A Sin' (1974), which has recently been restored on dvd).
Buld shot a lot of raw footage on the English punk scene and conducted interviews with various musicians based in London. He ended up creating the documentaries 'Punk In London' (1977), 'Punk In England' (1980) and 'Women In Punk' (1981), a rather slapdash set of scratchy documents that have been released and re-released under a variety of different titles.
Upon his return home to Germany, Buld directed the musical 'Hangin' Out' (1983) which showcases pop singer Nena (Gabriele Kerner), frontwoman of the "Neue Deutsche Welle" band Nena. He then co-directed the documentary 'Berlin Now' (1985) with Sissi Kelling, which is significant as it was made with the musical collective Einsturzende Neubauten. They are one of several German groups whose career trajectory runs from the punk era through the rise of industrial dance music. Another is Rammstein, though I believe members of this band were in different groups early on (and also got involved in German filmmaking).
"American journalist and author Tim Mohr admits that when he first arrived in Berlin in 1992, he was clueless to the reality of what the post-Wall city would look like. “I thought all of Germany was Oktoberfest basically,” he told punk writer Legs McNeil at Brooklyn record store Rough Trade last week to celebrate the release of his new book Burning Down the Haus. “I was shocked when I got off the plane and everyone wasn’t wearing lederhosen and holding giant beer steins.”
Rather than a Teutonic cartoon landscape, he ended up in the gray high-rise blocks near the old East Berlin zoo. “You could hear animals howling at night,” he says. “They were shockingly grim surroundings to me as a newly arrived American.” Soon, he discovered the nightlife scene, the squats and clubs and met many of the East German punks who had created a progressive DIY world. Working as a DJ in that almost-mythical realm until the end of 1998, Mohr befriended many of the people who had been interrogated by the Stasi and imprisoned by the GDR. Their stories stuck with him so much that a decade later, he returned to begin researching what would become Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world."
- Jerry Portwood, Rolling Stone
Blixa Bargeld & Nick Cave
Wolfgang Buld scored a commercial success when he directed the car comedy 'Manta, Manta' (1991). Around the same time, filmmaker Peter Timm directed 'Manta - Der Film' (1991). Automobiles became a powerful symbol of the German reunification movement. Timm also directed 'Go Trabi Go' (1991) in which a family go on holiday in a Trabant vehicle. Buld co-directed a sequel, 'Go Trabi Go 2' (1992), with Reinhard Klooss.
The character Jacqueline Struutz (Claudia Schmutzler) in the 'Trabi' cycle is looking to gain freedom and independence. She became a reference point for punk icon Alina Lina in Jochen Taubert's comic horror 'The Pope's Daughter : We Come In The Name Of The Lord' (2020). The makers of the 'Trabi' series drew inspiration from Dutch film director Dick Maas' popular 'Flodder' trilogy which helped launch the career of Croatian singer Tatjana Simic.
"In 1977, a 15-year-old German girl called Britta Bergmann kickstarted a movement that ultimately helped bring down the Berlin Wall.
Bergmann, who lived in East Berlin, discovered the Sex Pistols in a teen magazine acquired by her older half-sister from West Berlin, and became entranced by their spiky image and rabble-rousing sound. She began mirroring the trailblazing band’s aesthetic, chopping off her hair and adorning her clothes with rips and epaulets of safety pins. She soon decided that punk was the thing for her, becoming acquainted with the politically-minded zeal of British groups like X-Ray Spex and relaying the rebellious messages she heard on western radio back to her peers. Earning herself the nickname of ‘Major’, a small scene grew up around her. In less than a year, the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police agency) had opened a file on Bergmann and she was considered an enemy of the state.
A stream of homegrown DIY punk bands formed in the years that followed, giving a voice to the repressed and creating a vehicle for resistance. This under-the-radar movement thrived against the odds; there were no legal venues to perform in, artists couldn’t get into studios to record, and materials like photocopiers were nonexistent. Bands staged illegal concerts in churches – one of the safest spaces in East Germany at the time – and would record these concerts and circulate the tapes. East Germany’s underground punk network quickly became a dangerous source of political dissidence and a magnet for Stasi surveillance; even stepping out in punk garb was viewed as an oppositional statement.
“One reason that punk became such a threat was that it quickly became something uniquely Eastern”, explains journalist Tim Mohr, the author of a recent book chronicling the movement, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. “When they started putting these bands together, they were doing it all in German and it was all about their own lives. British punks were singing about their futures and socio-economic conditions, while the problem in East Germany was almost the direct opposite; they had too much future. There was no unemployment in East Germany, and their lives were scripted by the party.”
Key bands like Wutanfall (which translates to ‘Tantrum’), Planlos (‘Aimless’) and Namenlos (‘Nameless’) became symbols of anti-authoritarianism. In their lyrics, they criticised the Stasi and sung about uniquely East German issues, like trying to regain control over the big decisions in their own lives. Jana Schlosser, singer of the band Namenlos, was sent to Stasi jail for two years after comparing the Stasi to Hilter’s SS. Punks served longer jail sentences than any activist group in the 70s and 80s, and they were also blacklisted from jobs, having to take work as gravediggers or hospital waste operators.
Punk musicians defied the state to make art and were banned from public spaces in 1981. “These are the people who really fought the dictatorship and paid a price,” says Mohr. “The punks were detained and interrogated and kicked out of school and conscripted into the army. They paid with their bodies to bring down the dictatorship.” Major later spent a year in Stasi prison."
- April Clare Welsh, Dazed Digital
Marie Gruber, Claudia Schmutzler & cabaret artist Wolfgang Stumph pose for a publicity still for the 'Go Trabi Go' film series
There are other examples worth looking into. I've not seen Heiner Carow's drama 'Coming Out' (1989) which addresses homosexuality in East Germany where far-right groups had taken hold. There was an animated film made called 'The Little Punkers' (1992), based upon the work of punk illustrator Jackie Niebisch. It's really only since the Wall came tumbling down that films from the former East Germany have started surfacing in the U K. I like the work of Peter Timm that I've been able to see and I hope to see more of his work in future.
"Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police regarded punks as the most dangerous youth element in the country and ‘the leading force’ behind anti-government activities. These unnamed police mugshots from the former DDR demonstrate the lengths to which the security services would surveil, harass and detain punk ‘adherents’ and ‘sympathisers’."
- Tim Mohr, 'Punk Persecution : How East Germany Cracked Down On Alternative Lifestyles'
The Little Punkers
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Post by petrolino on Jan 16, 2021 22:19:32 GMT
French Art : 'Cause De Scandale'
Punk's second nation is the United States of America's oldest and greatest ally, France. With a cultural history as rich, experimental and diverse as France undoubtedly has, it's difficult to assess the impact of French art upon punk in a single post. I can only mention some individuals, groups and movements I feel were essential to the cause. They were also influential on British punk which the English held up as being "the only true original punk", though this remains open for debate.
![]() "The story of punk rock has become a decidedly British affair, through its many retellings, with the Sex Pistols providing its Anarchy in the UK strapline as well as its chief emblem - the Queen with a safety-pinned face. Sure, the Americans got in first musically with their scene at venerated New York punk club CBGB - where bands like Blondie, Television and The Ramones were on stage from as early as 1974 - but the social impact of British punk was more profound and its ramifications more lasting.
There is, though, another essential part of the story that has been forgotten by all but the staunchest connoisseur, and that is the contribution of the French.
The French? Mais oui.
"Punk rock would have happened in the UK without France," said Andrew Hussey, head of French and Comparative Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. "But without the French, without their big ideas and their politics and fanaticism, punk rock in the UK would've been nothing more than growly old rockers with shorter hair." He believes the confrontational attitude and much of the thinking behind punk came from across the Channel rather than the Atlantic. "The real influence of French punk rock lies in the ideas, the style and the ruthless elegance - they never produced a (British bands) Clash or a Sex Pistols, but what they did was introduce the real politics in punk."
The roots of those politics, Hussey said, were to be found in a movement of intellectuals and rebels who became known as the Situationists. These characters, led by rebel extraordinaire Guy Debord, were dead set on cultural subversion, changing the world through art and ideas. They enjoyed their most notorious moment by providing the philosophical muscle to the Paris riots of May '68, when students and workers took to the streets to attack the state. This was disorder versus authority, youthful zeal versus a sclerotic status quo, and it was a direct inspiration of punk.
Now deified as arguably punk's most important individual, Malcolm McLaren, who went on to become the Sex Pistols' manager and helped cement punk style, was then an impressionable young rebel looking for direction. The Francophile dashed across to France in the aftermath of the riots and was seduced by Situationist posters and slogans like, "Be realistic, demand the impossible" and others that would later feed straight into Sex Pistols lyrics, "Cheap holidays in other people's misery" and "No future". Situationist thinking, McLaren said, "was bleeding from Paris into England", and others soon caught on."
- Geoff Bird, The British Broadcasting Corporation
Fury & Aphrodisia (members of L.U.V.)
The Damned perform at Mont De Marsan Punk Festival in 1977
The influence of symbolist poets on the New York punk scene has been well-documented. Tom Verlaine took his stage name from Paul Verlaine whom he resembled physically, Patti Smith was a disciple of Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Hell directly quoted the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Debbie Harry spoke of Stephane Mallarme's old haunts in Paris. The symbolists were inspired by novelists of the age, notably Gustave Flaubert, mentor to Guy De Maupassant. Authors such as Stendahl, Honore De Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo provided a framework for these poets. Their direct contemporary was Emile Zola which is significant due to the cheek he often displayed in his writing. For example, the spanking in Zola's novel 'L'Assommoir' (1877) impacted upon punks in much the way the bathing did from 'Germinal' (1885), in terms of creating heightened, sensory imagery. One way to look at this is through the lens of French theatre.
"If the punk movement is considered to have originated in the United States and developed in the United Kingdom, relatively little attention has been paid to the scene in France from 1975–78. Yet several factors point to the need to address this oversight: the first major punk rock festival was held at Mont‐de‐Marsan (France) in August 1976 and the first release on the legendary British indie label Rough Trade was by the Parisian punk band Métal Urbain.
Key figures such as Malcolm McLaren (manager of the Sex Pistols), Bernard Rhodes (manager of the Clash), and Tony Wilson (of Factory Records) were avid readers of French and other European intellectuals, whose thoughts on personal freedom, the individual, and the consumer society were a major influence on the British punk scene. But was there more to the French punk movement than an early festival, some intellectual concepts, and the handful of bands who crossed the English Channel, only to meet with limited critical and public acclaim? In this article, I examine the areas where French punk exerted significant international influence while also discussing how the music itself failed to take root both at home in France and abroad."
- John Greene, Online Library
Jeanne Moreau in Luis Bunuel's film 'Diary Of A Chambermaid' (1964), based upon Octave Mirbeau's decadent, oft-filmed novel 'Le Journal D'Une Femme De Chambre' (1900)
'Toi Mon Toit' - Elli Medeiros
The farce is an essential and intrinsic part of French stagecraft. Pierre Corneille and Moliere both wrote comic farces of an absurdist nature. Even hardened dramatist Jean Racine contributed a single comic farce to the French 17th century stage repertoire. When Belgian playwright Alfred Hennequin established the conventions of the bedroom farce, French playwright Georges Feydeau filled in the templates during the Belle Epoque.
Feydeau influenced playwright Jean De Letraz whose play 'La Fessee' (1936) caused a sensation in southern Europe (it's been filmed several times). De Letraz had researched the history of French art and discovered paintings and carvings that displayed Frenchmen spanking their disobedient wives, which inspired his writing.
"The man behind the Manchester punk scene, Tony Wilson, went on to name his club the Hacienda after a Situationist text, while arguably punk's most important artist Jamie Reid became a master of detournement, flipping images directly against themselves and subverting them so they became cultural weapons. Perhaps the most famous example was his cover for the Sex Pistols' famously banned single, God Save the Queen.
One of the natural products and great evils of Western life was boredom, according to the Situationists, and punks felt very much the same. Eric Debris from Parisian band Metal Urbain said: "Everything was black and white - the TV was in black and white, the streets were in black and white. "Everyday life was extremely boring, you felt people needed a push so they'd feel alive - the idea was to stir the pot and see what happened and of course people in England were doing the same."
In New York, the US proto-punks looked further back for Gallic inspiration. US punk "godmother" Patti Smith obsessed over French writer Jean Genet and the poet Arthur Rimbaud, while guitarist Thomas Miller became Tom Verlaine (in honour of the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's lover) and set up the band Television with Richard Hell, whose cropped hair and torn clothes became an influential look and similarly nodded towards fin-de-siecle poets.
But it was not just a story of influence, either. France's very own punk scene was taking shape if anything slightly earlier than the UK's. French bands like Metal Urbain and Stinky Toys began performing in 1975 and the likes of Marie et les Garcons, Asphalt Jungle and Gazoline soon followed. Europe's first punk festival took place at Mont-de-Marsan, Aquitaine in 1976, and was organised by Marc Zermati.
Zermati said the French felt close to the US scene: "The real punk movement started in New York and Paris came before the UK because we were really connected to New York... it was exciting because we thought we were conspiring against the establishment." He said it was in his record shop in Les Halles, Paris that he persuaded McLaren to call the movement punk rather than New Wave, which McLaren preferred for its overtones of the French "Nouvelle Vague" movement of the early 60s."
- Geoff Bird, The British Broadcasting Corporation
Betty Boop working in Paris
'Beauty And Pride' - Stinky Toys
The French and Italians consider themselves to be cousins and both nations have been at the forefront of erotic art. If you consider the work of writers like Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Restif De La Bretonne, Marquis De Sade, Choderlos De Laclos, Sophie De Renneville, Octave Mirbeau, Guy De Maupassant, Anais Nin, Pauline Reage, Simone De Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Boris Vian, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Emmanuelle Arsan and Joy Laurey for starters, you see the rapid evolution of erotica in French culture and its importance to the development of French art. Erotica, like punk, has been the art of objection, subversion, individualism and revolt.
"Like so many other pieds-noirs (the name given to people of European origin born in Algeria under French rule) the family fled to la métropole in 1962, when the country gained independence. Marc Zermati would always entertain a conflicted relationship with his new homeland, which he deemed backward-looking and inimical to youth culture. Lest we forget, the 1968 student uprising was sparked off by a protest against single-sex halls of residence at Nanterre – France, at the time, was not all nouvelle vague flair and post-structuralists zooming around in sleek Citröens.
It was in fact often very conservative – socially and culturally – and pop music from the US or the UK was frequently met with xenophobic contempt. In interviews, Zermati recalled how the police would constantly harass, and sometimes even arrest him on account of his long hair, and how he would escape to London, where he felt free, as often as possible. In recent years he bemoaned the “Toubon law”, introduced in 1996 to compel radio stations to play at least 40% francophone songs, singling it out as yet another instance of Gallic insularity – further proof that France and authentic rock music were incompatible.
It was not all bad, though. He joined the ranks of the fabled Bande du Drugstore, fashion-conscious members of Paris’s jeunesse dorée who hung out on the Champs-Elysées and were notorious for their hard partying (referenced by Jacques Dutronc on his 1966 hit Les Play Boys). These minets, as they were mockingly called, had a great deal of influence on the mod look across the Channel. This week, journalist Nick Kent wrote on his Facebook page that when he first met Zermati, in 1972 (when the New York Dolls were in town with their then manager, Malcolm McLaren), he was the “hippest man in Paris bar none”. Along with Yves Adrien, Patrick Eudeline, Alain Pacadis and a few others, Zermati – whose idea it was to dress the Flamin’ Groovies in sharp Fab Four suits – belonged to a typically French line of anglophile dandies, who would go on to shape the punk and post-punk years.
In the mid-60s Zermati worked in an art gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where he rubbed shoulders with Joan Miró and Henri Michaux, and befriended Max Ernst – the German surrealist encouraged him to explore the burgeoning American counterculture. His first taste of LSD (in Ibiza, where he stayed for a year) was a turning point in his life, and he always claimed to be able to tell people who had experienced its mind-expanding properties from those who had not, however cool they attempted to appear. L’Open Market, the record emporium he opened in 1972 was originally a head shop, where people congregated to peruse the international underground press and smoke dope. The records on sale were few but carefully selected, and it was this loving curation that outlined a rival tradition, bypassing the progressive cul-de-sac and leading straight to punk. Kids who came in asking for the latest Yes or Genesis were shown the door unceremoniously. Lester Bangs, Lenny Kaye, Jon Savage, Chrissie Hynde, Malcolm McLaren and all the local punks-to-be ranked among the customers. Nico could often be found cooking in the apartment above the shop, while bands such as Asphalt Jungle would be rehearsing in the basement.
Zermati’s taste in music, as well as clothes, was always impeccable. The first release on his label was a wild jam session between Jim Morrison, Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix (whom he had met in London and venerated), followed by the Flamin’ Groovies’ legendary Grease EP. You would be hard pressed to start on a higher note. As early as 1974, he set up the first independent distribution network in partnership with Larry Debay; alongside the two Mont-de-Marsan festivals, he organised three nocturnal punk gigs at Paris’s Palais des Glaces in April 1977, with an unbeatable lineup featuring the Clash, the Damned, Generation X, the Jam, the Stranglers, Stinky Toys and the Police (still with their French guitarist, Henry Padovani). At one stage in the 80s, he even became the Clash’s de facto manager.
Following a spell in prison, he co-launched another label, Underdog, and went on to promote gigs in Japan (where he took Johnny Thunders). His greatest achievement, however, will always be transforming Paris, for a few short years in the run-up to punk, into what felt like the capital city of the rock world."
- Andrew Gallix, The Guardian
A can-can dancer rehearses backstage in Paris
'Repetition' : Marie Et Les Garcons perform in a garage in 1977
Some painters exerted a considerable influence upon early French photography and with good reason. This is reflected within punk imagery and its exploration of mooning and planetary motion. The framing and figure-modelling of Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir has been justly cited for its influence on early French cinema. The figure paintings of Francois-Edouard Picot, William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Alexandre-Jacques Chantron were equally influential to early French photographers, whose subjects of choice were often feminine sensuality, exhibitionism and shapes thrown by the female form. Inventor Louis Daguerre's "daguerrotypes" became the format of choice for early photographic explorations of the feminine figure, which Frenchmen often delineated as "rounds and curves". In Paris, photographer Jean Angelou became a figurehead for an underground movement dedicated to the photography of female nudes. Polish photographer Julian Mandel produced erotic postcards that were sold on the streets of the French capital. In America, E.J. Bellocq worked New Orleans' red light disctrict; a photographer of French-creole heritage, Bellocq's photographs of prostitutes working in Storyville have influenced poets, songwriters and filmmakers.
"In 1977 in Los Angeles, Claude Bessy, co-founded Slash magazine, the bible of LA punk. Thus did Bessy, writing as Kickboy Face, become a chronicler of that generation. In 1978 the magazine launched its record label, with the Germ's Lexicon Devil. Later signings included Los Lobos, Faith No More and the Violent Femmes. And in 1981 Slash and Bessy's band, Catholic Discipline, featured in Penelope Spheeris's film on LA punk, Decline Of Western Civilization.
He was born in Normandy. In the 1960s, he followed the trail to Afghanistan, visited LA and studied at the Sorbonne - leaving Paris to return to LA in 1968 before the events of that May. He studied film, featured as Frenchy in The Hardy Boys TV series and, in the mid-1970s, set up a reggae fanzine, Angeleno Dread.
With his partner Philomena Winstanley, Bessy moved to England in 1980 and became press officer for Rough Trade Records. The Fall, Virgin Prunes and Cabaret Voltaire could testify to his effectiveness. He also championed LA bands like X, the Gun Club, and the Blasters.
In 1982 he became video DJ at Tony Wilson's Hacienda club in Manchester and went on to become a music video producer, releasing work by the Fall, Virgin Prunes, the Birthday Party and William Burroughs. He later worked for the London comic and sci-fi shop Forbidden Planet, wrote record sleeve-notes - and his distinctive voice featured on records by Sonic Youth, Howard Devoto, Wire's Graham Lewis and trumpeter Marc Cunningham."
- Richard Thomas, The Guardian
Sculptors Camille Claudel & Jessie Lipscomb at work in the studio
'La Brune Et Moi' - Les Lou's
The visual capturing and erotic projection of the heaving female form can be extended to design and sculpture, cartooning and comic book design, as well as everything in between. Illustrative of this fact would be the controversial work of modern artists of the 20th century who worked across different mediums, be it Suzanne Ballivet, Robert Hugues, Lara-Marie Ostrowski or Esparbec. There are, of course, many other artists whose ideas have contributed to the creation of punk art, be it the Surrealists in Paris, Georges Bataille's 'Acephale' collective, the Dadaists, the Situationists ... so, as a wise Italian woman once said, "... let the French be French, let the French create".
"For Marie-Pierre Tricot, this sad misadventure is nothing but a ransom for the glory: in the French cinema, she holds the impressive title of a ‘horror queen’: she plays, in fact, with a lot of brio, the vampires, the witches, the monsters of science-fiction, and other “typical” characters.
This title is even more impressive, since Marie-Pierre does not absolutely owe it to her physical appearance. Her blondness is that of a young ingenuous girl, and her size seems to devote her forever to the role of Alice in Wonderland. She is petite, even very petite — 1.56 m. [5.12ft] — and thin like a wire. Her big blue eyes reflect much rather the innocence of a newborn than the machiavellianism of a bloodthirsty vampire or a seasoned witch.
— "I believe in the opposite, that my physical appearance is an asset", affirms Marie-Pierre; "as the viewers are surprised to see such a not classical “evil woman”; I must change them, pleasantly, I hope, the tall and slender witches, with the eyes of ember and the dark hair of Gorgone." —
Marie-Pierre doesn’t have, in fact, the classic “beauty” of horror queens. She doesn’t have anything from Raquel Welsh, in One Million Years B.C., from Ursula Andress, in She or from the beautiful English Barbara Steele, who, in The Pit and the Pendulum, explodes on the screen with her 1.72 m. [5.64 ft], her dark hair, and her green eyes of a feline.
Her type of a woman places her among the antipodes of the vamps of the pre-war horror films such as Elsa Lanchester who was the Bride of Frankenstein and Kathleen Burke, the panther woman from Island of Lost Souls. No, her own kind is the one of a small kitten who we like to hear purring near a fireplace.
Probably, only two French women of the small “format” had managed to establish themselves before her in the world of horror: Danny Carel, in The Hands of Orlac and Mill of the Stone Women, and, around the war, Simone Simon, who had managed to lend with success her young and fresh face — as round as the one of Marie-Pierre — to the feline from Cat People by Jacques Tourneur.
The physical appearance of Marie-Pierre is not, however, misleading: in real life it’s a young and wise girl who doesn’t smell neither ashes nor sulfur; she likes to watch the television — especially westerns — and to take care of her interior between the reading of two scenarios."
- Sophie Majeur, 'Marie-Pierre Tricot : So Young And Already A Vampire'
'Splendour In The Grass' : Psychedelic clown runaway Marie-Pierre Tricot of the twin infinities
'Pepe Gestapo' - Stinky Toys
Fun Fact : Jodie Foster was adopted as a cultural symbol of rebellion by French punks as well as American punks. Foster spent time in France and Italy in her youth and speaks French beautifully. Punk outfit Electric Callas played a gig that was attended by French girls dressed as Foster's Disney characters. Satirical punkers Ludwig 88 recorded the anthem 'Jodie Foster' as part of their "prophets of culture" recordings.
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Post by petrolino on Jan 22, 2021 21:12:11 GMT
Rhine Lands : Low Countries & Alpine Nations
'Boatsong' - Kleenex
If you find yourself in France or Germany one of these days, you may decide to take a trip through the Low Countries (aka Benelux nations : Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). Alternatively, you might prefer a trek through the Alps, the highest and most extensive mountain range system that sits entirely within Europe.
Low Countries of Europe - TimeMaps (2005)
The Low Countries are bordered by Germany to the east, and France to the south. The Alps stretch across eight countries : (west - east) France, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and Slovenia.
Slovenia was once a part of Yugoslavia and it was the punk capital of the nation. This tells you everything about how music has the ability to cross borders. One of the most famous Slovene bands, Laibach, has its roots in the Slovenian punk scene.
In a number of the Low Countries and Alpine nations, French and German are common languages spoken on the ground. In some cases, they are also official languages of the countries concerned.
Central Europe - TimeMaps (2005)
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Belgium & Netherlands
The earliest Belgian punk group I know well is Hubble Bubble who formed in the mid-1970s. They recorded the albums 'Hubble Bubble' (1977) and 'Faking' (1979) which are considered punk classics on the continent. Bassist and songwriter Daniel Massart died shortly after the release of their debut album which left the band shaken. Drummer Roger Jouret (Roger Junior) rechristened himself Plastic Bertrand and recorded the punk staple, 'Ca Plane Pour Moi'.
'Fascist Cops' - The Kids
Also on the punk scene were the Kids, Raxola, the Razors, X-Pulsion and the Scabs, all of whom were formed in the late 1970s. Poesie Noire brought a heavier gothic sensibility to Belgian punk in the 1980s.
'Matchbox Car' - The Scabs
Dutch punks felt a kinship with ska punks in England and were similarly influenced by reggae. Minny Pops and the Ex were bands formed in the late 1970s; the Ex would collaborate with celebrated English anarcho-situationists Chumbawumba.
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Switzerland & Austria
The Swiss gave the world one of the great punk groups, Kleenex / LiLiPUT.
'Eisiger Wind' ~ LiLiPUT
I don't think I know of any Austrian punk groups from the 1970s but Kitty Casket's group Kitty In A Casket are one of the brightest punk bands to materialise this decade.
'In Offense Menser' - Kitty In A Casket
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Post by petrolino on Jan 22, 2021 23:05:39 GMT
Nordic New Wave : Scandi-Punk Anti-Social
The Nordic nations are often at odds with each other over cultural matters, though they are the best of friends. Sweden and Norway are cultural powerhouses situated on the Scandinavian peninsula. Hungarians tell me they are the distant cousins of the Finns, which seems plausible as Finland is noted for its eccentricity. Denmark is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries and provides a different gateway into mainland Europe.
Martin Miguel Almagro Tonne, Ragnhild Fangel Jamtveit, Ola Djupvik & Jonas Krovel
'Leg Day' - Pom Poko
I think of Iceland as one of the nordic countries too. I posted about this rather small (relatively speaking), fun, inventive nation previously on this thread ('Björk Guðmundsdóttir : 'Afterbirth Of A Notion' ~ Anarcho-Punk, Cyberpunk Anime, Biotechnology & Nanotechnology | Iceland & Japan').
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Sweden
Sweden had an active punk scene in the late 1970s that was eclipsed internationally by her contributions to disco and the rise of pop titans ABBA. Bands like Ebba Gron, KSMB (aka Kurt-Sunes Med Berit), Asta Kask and Kriminella Gitarrer ruled the roost, dominating a punk scene that was noted for its satirical swipes at suburban anxieties. Anti Cimex and Mob 47 pushed Swedish punk into hardcore territory.
'Tomheten' - Tant Strul
My favourite Swedish punk bands are sister groups Tant Strul and Pink Champagne. They consisted of sharp, innovative instrumentalists who played with crack timing, contained ferocity and purpose.
'Godnatt Lilla Mamma' - Pink Champagne
Denmark
I come up short when asked about punk in Denmark so I need to do some research. I can talk about many great Danish films of the 1970s but can only name one punk act and that's Sods. Interestingly, Sods mutated into Sort Sol and were much in demand. In the mid-1980s, they collaborated with Lydia Lunch.
'Dunkar Varmt' - Tant Strul
Finland
My introduction to Finnish punk came through the work of independent filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki. There's actually a punk band called Stalingrad Cowgirls who are named after Kaurismaki's road movie 'Leningrad Cowboys Go America' (1989). Kaurismaki was connected to the comedy troupe Sleepy Sleepers who parodied different styles of rock 'n' roll. They sent up punk aggression in the late 1970s and new wave stage antics in the early 1980s; you can see clips of this all over youtube. Members of the punk band Motelli Skronkle also worked with Kaurismaki. First-wave Finnish punk acts include Eppu Normaali, Rattus and Hassisen Kone who were all formed in the late 1970s. One group I like on today's punk scene is Masquerade who are led by gothic multi-instrumentalist Suzi Sabotage.
'Frenzy' - Suzi Sabotage
Norway
Norway was home to popular punk outfits like Elektrisk Regn, the Aller Vaerste and De Press. These bands were promoted by influential English disc jockey John Peel. Norway also has some exciting punk groups active today. I like the musical collective Broen who perform in a wide range of styles and are hard to pigeon-hole. They're signed to Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde's music label Bella Union Records which is also home to Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfor.
Broen perform at Old Granada Studios in Manchester, England
Another group signed to Bella Union Records is Pom Poko. Members of the band also play with musician Birgitta Alida Hole (Lumikide). Tim Burgess (the Charlatans) is one of their biggest fans.
Pom Poko perform at Radioeins Parkfest in Berlin, Germany
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Post by petrolino on Feb 14, 2021 2:36:11 GMT
Balkan Banzai : Enter The Slovenian Gateway
It seems logical to surmise that Slovenia was the punk capital of Old Yugoslavia due to its westward, geographical positioning, giving it borders with Hungary and Austria, as well as Croatia, the gateway to ancient Italy. Inevitably, punk music in Yugoslavia was prone to being heavily politicised, due to the outlandish reign of President Josip Broz Tito, the deep economic crisis of the 1980s and the prolonged destruction of the nation during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.
The punk scenes that drew international attention were located in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, on the Adriatic Coast of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, and in the war-torn city of Belgrade, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Belgrade was also the capital city of Yugoslavia from its creation in 1918 to its dissolution in 2006.
Yugoslavia has been described as "a state concept among the South Slavic intelligentsia", which is significant. Its brazen punk politics have been filtered through the lens of the nation's complex politics, similar to the interpretation of punk dissidence in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and that of her chief allies, such as Romania and Bulgaria.
Among the Yugoslav bands that broke through were KBO!, KUD Idijoti, Niet, Pankrti, Paraf, Patareni, Pekinska Patka, and my personal favourite, Boye, who formed in Serbia in 1981.
"It seems completely unfair from today’s perspective that Novi Sad’s Boye were not the ones rewarded with the first record for a Yugoslav all-women band. Starting in 1981 as a quartet and going strong until the late 1990s, Boye have probably been the most influential and inspirational all-female band in the region, even though they, after mid-80s, regularly kept company with one or two male musicians. After their synth phase, which resulted in several brilliant, yet obviously unreleased demos, and after their f*ck off to the Jugoton label that had wanted to turn them into a sleazy pop group, Boye’s first single from 1987 brought forward their rockish indie side. The cover announcement read “The First True Female Sound” and – as it still feels – rightfully so."
- Gregor Bulc, 'Boye, Oh Ye(s)! A Rough Guide To (Post-)Yugoslav All-Female Bands'
Boye
'Kafe Na Dnu Okeana' - Boye
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Post by petrolino on Feb 19, 2021 23:21:43 GMT
The Druids Of Gaul : How Zeuhl Rock & The Motorik Beat Impacted Punk
Motorik Musik : Punk Solidarity In The Industrial Cosmos
In the late 1960's, an art movement began in Germany known as "kosmische musik", or cosmic music. It was later dubbed "krautrock" by the English music press when artists like David Bowie, Peter Hammill (Van Der Graaf Generator) and Dave Brock (Hawkwind) outwardly displayed the movement's growing influence. Many English punks were in thrall to Bowie so this influence inevitably became pervasive. Many of the German musicians creating this music were followers of 20th Century American music, be it indeterminacy and minimalism, free jazz or psychedelia. The musical roots of the group Can, for example, can be traced back to a significant time spent by keyboardist Irmin Schmidt in New York in the mid-1960s, where he eagerly immersed himself within an arts scene that at the time was being dominated by Andy Warhol's entourage.
“I came from jazz and played free jazz for two years. In the mid-’60s I was the first free jazz drummer in Germany. But I stopped that because, to my mind, I couldn’t develop any further in that genre. In free jazz you just weren’t allowed to play anything that was harmonically or rhythmically structured. It’s a paradox, but within free jazz there were too many limitations for me! After two years I couldn’t stand that anymore. Repetion or doubling something is a basic element in music.
With Can I was finally allowed to do what I wanted. Repeating rhythms and grooves over and over again very consciously was a whole new thing at the time — even though this is an old idea: You find repetitive patterns in every culture of the world. In Europe during the ’60s this wasn’t understood at all. But the truth is simple: Without any repetition there is no groove.”
- Jaki Liebezeit, Modern Drummer
Can
The rhythmic experiments of Can, Amon Duul II, Faust and Metropolis built complexity through exploratory grooves. If you listen to 'Moving Away From The Pulsebeat' by Buzzcocks, or 'Cut-Out Shapes' by Magazine, you can hear the direct, driving influence of Can.
Minimalists Neu! mastered the art of simplicity by vigorously exploring the 4/4 "motorik" beat with their music, creating an in-time touchstone for first-wave punk bands on both sides of the Atlantic. The ambient, electronic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Popol Vuh became instrumental in the development of new wave electronica and synthesiser pop.
"When I founded the group I was a classical composer and conductor and pianist making piano recitals, playing a lot of contemporary music but also Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven and everything. And when we got together I wanted to do something in which all contemporary music becomes one thing. Contemporary music in Europe especially, the new music was classical music was Boulez, Stockhausen and all that. I studied all that, I studied Stockhausen but nobody talked about rock music like Sly Stone, James Brown or the Velvet Underground as being contemporary music. Then there was jazz and all these elements were our contemporary music, it was new. It was, in a way, much newer than the new classical music which claimed to be 'the new music'."
— Irmin Schmidt speaking in 2004
'The Motorik Drum Beat' | Off Beat
Magma Tentacles : Space Refugees In The 6th Dimension
French music in the late 1960's was less celebrated, though musicians like Elton John and Willy DeVille became advocates for France's avant-rock scene. One group that exerted a considerable influence on all aspects of punk music is Magma. They're perhaps best-known nowadays for having invented "zeuhl" music, which has spawned wave after wave of imitators in Japan.
Magma developed and explored a far-reaching historical space concept across a string of unusual albums that frequently pitted the musicians against each other. They invented their own language known as "Kobaian", which was spoken by inhabitants of the planet Kobaia, where Earth's refugees were looking to settle. I've done some basic research into rock 'n' roll bands who've created their own language and it seems to be something that's extremely rare, especially across entire musical suites.
"There are plenty of bands who simply feel more relevant to a larger number of people in 2019 than perhaps they did in their heyday. Take for example Joy Division. Like Magma in the 1973 to 1975 period, it's not like the Macc/Salford post punk four piece were massively unpopular or received with total incomprehension - they were NME cover stars in 1979 and 1980 - but it's fair to say that they are far more prominent in the British pop cultural consciousness today than they were at the tail end of the 70s. There are multiple reasons for this (not least that copyright free, meme magic creating, image of the CP 1919 pulsar that has formed the basis of a million and one T-shirts).
40 years on they have achieved the kind of permanence that very few bands can even pretend to let alone achieve. To understand why you have to look at the duality of cultural impulses brought to bear on the group’s aesthetic. Their outlook and lyrics were as much informed by an obsession with the horrors of World War 2 as they were by smart speculative fiction written by the likes of William Burroughs and JG Ballard. As WW2 approaches ceasing to exist as something that anyone now living can actually remember, the band’s stark modernism and brutalist futurism have taken primacy in their aesthetic. They created a soundtrack for an imaginary dystopia; one which has slowly and darkly effloresced as we have drifted into it. Put simply, Joy Division actually make more sense today than they did in 1980. Their chilly euphoria, their crawling horror, their cosmic bleakness, their radical anhedonia are no longer the recherche affectations of the arty post punk elite or the voice of a traumatised and sensitive few, who revel in the convincing inner monologue of a tortured Macc Iggy Pop wannabe who tragically just wasn’t cut out for success. Unknown Pleasures is now the sonic diagnosis of a generation. Somehow Joy Division successfully read the room 40 years in advance.
There's something similar to be said about Magma. While I doubt they're a much bigger a live draw now than when Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh or M.D.K. came out - their debut UK show in December 1973 was at the 700 capacity Marquee Club, while earlier this week they played at the 900 capacity Islington Assembly Hall - they have certainly gained a new found respect and resonance which only seems to be growing. First of all, their science fiction aesthetic is even deeper engrained. Founding member Christian Vander, created, not only an ecologically driven mythos but also a crypto-language called Kobaïan in which most of his lyrics (both in Magma and solo projects such as The Offering) have since been delivered.
This language plays a stunning trick on the imagination of the listener. Ostensibly, the use of Kobaïan fulfils a similar role to scat singing (Leon Thomas was a clear influence) in that it is a semi-improvised rhythmical counterpoint but because there are loose meanings attached to what Vander writes, even though, on a word by word basis, it is phonetic and not semantic (i.e. there will never be a direct lyric sheet translation to all of their albums as in most cases they don't exist, the obvious exception being M.D.K.), it fulfils a different, more complex role than merely using the voice as another instrument. Really, the suggestive lyrical sound of Magma, combined with extensive sleevenotes, provides a loose framework for the listener to create their own precise narrative on top of, inviting them to feel, subconsciously either like a co-author or as if they are being addressed directly. And also, due to the themes of ecological collapse, the slide towards autocratic politics, the dream of a new planet where we can start again - leaving the destruction we've wreaked here behind, fundamental questions of nature versus nurture when it comes to mankind's apparent inability to keep its finger away from the self-destruct button, these narratives, where the listener can consider themselves a psychic co-author, have much more resonance in 2019.
Also, the use of multiple styles feels less chaotic today in a post music landscape where playlists have made all of us eclectic, the authenticity of staying in one's genre lane is less necessary than ever and streaming culture has given everything equal weight to more adventurous Generation Z listeners. (If this sounds fanciful, then perhaps consider this year's most hyped break through guitar band, Black Midi and their berserk, magpie list of influences which are, mainly, defiantly uncool. Where once NME and other inkies ruled the discourse around music with an iron rod, they have either disappeared entirely or struggle on almost invisibly in the background as a heritage brand with a shallow monthly list of unclicked on descriptive reviews, almost entirely lacking in criticism. Perhaps it's unfair to lay into just NME when their nearest print competitors, DIY and Dork are so anaemic and utterly lacking in opinion that they make the Argos catalogue look like The Anarchist's Cookbook by comparison. Of course this is an environment where a band can claim early 80s, slap bass King Crimson as a sincere influence with impunity - there are no longer any cloth-eared hacks to tell them that they're wrong.)
As well as creating a mythos, as befits any great rock band, a mythology has sprung up around Magma which is second to none. I won't go into it here but anyone who doesn't already know their full story should buy a copy of Julian Cope's Repossessed to read about Christian Vander's lengthy psychic battle with bass player/arch- magical nemesis, Jannick Top, conducted from neighbouring castles on either side of a Spanish river valley. A battle that ended, apparently, with a distraught Top trying to rip his own heart out with his hands."
- John Doran, The Quietus
Magma
Magma perform in Toulon, France on November 10, 1976
Magma have spawned some notable bands including Zao, Weidorje and Space, as well as their own musical disguises, Univeria Zekt and Utopic Sporadic Orchestra. Members of Magma have collaborated with musicians from Schizo / Heldon, Clearlight and Gong. Art Zoyd and Etron Fou Leloublan both opened for Magma in the 1970's.
Magma's influence can be heard in the music of Television, Pere Ubu, Joy Division and Material, while enthusiastic fans of the band include Debbie Harry, John Lydon and Jello Biafra. Their forceful rhythmic interplay, complete with undulating sound dynamics and creative linguistics, finds its mirror in the pioneering work of American industrial band Chrome.
"In 1972, I was introduced to "Carmina Burana" by Carl Orff. There I discovered similarities in the melodies I composed at the time, for example, MDK, composed in 1971. I was surprised and I even thought, "this is exactly the orchestration and formation I would like to have in Magma." Unfortunately, we lack the means, as is still the case today.
With John Coltrane it is the energy, the fury of playing, construction, the "sound", the long-term vision that inspired me. The music of John Coltrane is an inexhaustible source, a force that wins. There is something else in his music that goes beyond. If John's music was only music, it might have made me weary. He certainly opened the door to a world we did not know. It's probably this unbridled spiritual quest that led him there. For these reasons, I listen to John regularly. He accompanies me in every period of my life, I always hear his music differently, I re-discover him every time and it always fascinates me."
- Christian Vander, The Rocktologist
'Zombies (Ghost Dance)' - Magma
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Post by petrolino on Mar 14, 2021 0:51:38 GMT
Charlemagne Palestine : The Electronic Pincers Of Punk Minimalism
Minimalist composers Phil Niblock, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are all in their mid-80s now. Multimedia audio-visual artist and multi-instrumentalist Charlemagne Palestine is another of the founders of the New York School of Minimalist Music, and like Reich, he's a New Yorker.
Palestine's a good few years younger than these men the music press often calls his contemporaries, but his contributions to art and music began during childhood (he became one of Tiny Tim's sidemen at the age of 12). If you read about his life, he's done some extraordinary things. For example, from 1962 to 1969, he was carillonneur for the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Manhattan, and during this time he composed a piece of music that consisted of 1,500 15-minute performances.
"Born Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine (or Charles Martin) to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, Charlemagne Palestine is a musician, filmmaker and visual artist whose contemporaries include Tony Conrad, Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich, but who playfully defies the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. After singing in synagogues as a young man, he became a carillonneur in the Saint Thomas Episcopal Church across the street from the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It’s a sonic and visual pairing that feels apt, considering the interdisciplinary breadth of Palestine’s work and the fact that he’s known to prefer the term “trance music” to “minimal”; in his own words, “a kind of fundamental transportation to leave the ordinary.” Despite this, Palestine’s most well-known work, 1974’s “Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and String Ensemble,” is regarded as a benchmark piece for modern minimalist composition and performance."
- Hanna Bacher, Red Bull Music Academy
"My uncles and my cousins say, that I was in perpetual motion. You couldn’t stop me. The story goes that I was such a nuisance that my father and my uncles would give me little glasses of whiskey to calm me down. I was three or four years old. That’s the beginning of my love of alcohol."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Red Bull Music Academy
Charlemagne Palestine & Seth Horvitz
'7 Organism Study' (1968) - Charlemagne Palestine
Palestine's worked with a lot of great poets, musicians and artists across the decades. This includes people connected to the New York punk scene, such as Michael Gira (Swans) whom he's recorded music with. One of the things that inspired punks who saw him perform live was his "body music", often performed in rooms that look like asylum chambers. You can see him performing body music in 1973 on youtube.
"There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse. I hung around hippie-ish kind of people and, first of all, they never made any money. If you never make any money, you never have to declare any profession! It's not like they'll call you up every day and say 'Are you a plumber? Are you a carpenter? Are you a musician?' I never made any money from my music. Even to this day, I don't make that much; I make it flip-flopping between five and ten different disciplines. I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific."
- Charlemagne Palestine, The Quietus
Art installation in Antwerp
Another factor that drew punks to Palestine's compositions is that his minimalist works would sometimes build to virtual crescendos, or conjure loud passages from within the instrumentation, leading Palestine to describe himself as a "maximalist" rather than a "minimalist".
"My piano music came about when I was a ringer in a Bell Tower in New York (2a,b). Also, I was using synthesizers around that time, with the oscillators making pure tones (3, 4, 5) and I had decided that the piano was finished for me. I enjoyed Debussy and jazz but as an instrument it was no longer interesting for me until I started to use a Bosendorfer Imperial piano (6a, b, c, d) that I had the possibility to play in 1969 and I could hear a fantastic instrument full of overtones, resonances. Also, you could hear so many things inside it, like the sounds of the bell tower and it inspired to me to do piano music again.
My first piano music resembles impressionists like Debussy or Ravel but it's played through four or five hours including some little arpeggios and played over and over again in thousands of different ways ... for many hours. Later on, I began to see that I played the piano like a "flamenco guitar", that many overtones could change and the music that came out had a density and verticality - thanks to the overtones - which was extraordinary. I started to do my strumming (7,8) technique which is basically a kind of "flamenco" playing of the instrument but by holding down the sustain pedal while playing in this way, it can bring out an enormous amount of different textures within the same tones. It's become more and more complex in the last few years. Since the Bosendorfer has an octave lower - nine tones - than any other piano, I've played these nine tones and it's possible to hear it like an airplane engine, or like some sort of "extreme machines" from an inferno (9, 10)... and so, that's my piano!
With the organ … I also started that a very long time ago. I love the instrument, it's big, it's monstrous and it's (used and heard) in fantastic spaces like churches. That's also if you see the churches not only as religious places and if you don't see the churches as places only to make sounds. These instruments with enormous pipes - sometimes with thousands of pipes- interest me so much: having the thousands of pipes as oscillators. You have thousands of sounds at the same time! In an organ, you can play many tones at one time without a problem. So this was an instrument that was interesting to me and I made many pieces with sustaining tones.
I realized that if you keep the tones down and you have many different pitches that were slightly different, "out of tune" with each other, they start to beat and shimmer and you hear it as if someone else is playing the organ. You think that you're hearing someone playing incredible melodies, harmonies and rhythms but they're not! It's the organ playing itself!
I developed music especially for the organ. I chose the tones but the organ plays itself and it's fantastic. People think that they are hearing or seeing hundreds of hands moving across the instrument and playing melodies, harmonies and rhythms but nothing is being played by hand ... it's played by the air, the pipes and the tones in that place. It's an incredible phenomena and that's my "organ story"! (11, 12, 13)."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Perfect Sound Forever
The Divinities
'Negative Sound Study' (1969) - Charlemagne Palestine
Palestine moved to Europe in the mid-1990's and as far as I'm aware he's never left. He spent some time in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but Belgium has become his home; I think he's now living in Antwerp. Interestingly, Phil Niblock's institution for music in New York has a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. On a final note, Palestine's thankful to the punks that helped him get back in the saddle ... that much I know.
"People came around and started to bother me. A guy from Holland who knew Sonic Youth and people like Glenn Branca, who I had met. They were young whippersnappers when I stopped playing music. They were the new punks and junks and doing a lot of violent music. When I stopped at the end I started to be very violent. In this sort of minimal continuum, that didn’t exist much yet, violence.
I was frustrated – even my pianos had blood [on them], and I was breaking strings. They were youngsters coming to my studio in what would become Tribeca and hearing me, because I used to play regularly. They were even bringing little tape recorders, cassette players. They would eventually become punks. As they became famous 10 years later, they started to look back and I was one of the people on their radar. They found out I was in the middle of nowhere in France, living in an old silk factory with an Italian girlfriend, sort of incommunicado, and a whole bunch of people started to bother me.
They began to bother me and bother me and bother me. Then they realized that I hadn’t any money, I had lost a whole lot of my confidence and my self-esteem, and so they set up very important events at Royal Festival Hall, Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Akademie der Künste in Berlin. I had very important projects and a bunch of money. They brought me out of the boonies."
- Charlemagne Palestine, Red Bull Music Academy
The Quiet Room
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Post by petrolino on May 15, 2021 0:54:48 GMT
The Go-Go's will be entered into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Class of 2021 : "Go, Go, Banana!"
"We knew that, for whatever reason, we weren’t one of the popular kids in class when it came to this whole Rock & Roll Hall of Fame thing, for a long time. And so I just didn’t think about it ever. I was like, “For whatever reason, they just don’t like us and they never will.” And then everything shifted and there became this possibility that it might happen. I was pretty afraid to be hopeful. I don’t like to get my hopes dashed. And when we found out it actually happened, I was dumbstruck. I was afraid to hope; I really was. And then it happened. It’s hard to express how exciting it is to be induced in the cool kids. It’s amazing."
- Jane Wiedlin, Rolling Stone
The Go-Go's | 'It's Everything But Partytime'
They'll join the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the Police, Blondie, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, the Cure and their old pals Green Day in the Hall.
"Pat Smear called me yesterday. We were discussing the punk-rock roots of the Foo Fighters and the Go-Go’s. At that time, he appeared to not know that he was in. I guess we’ll all be there. I guess we’ll have to play an original Germs song, or something. [Laughs] Let’s do “Forming.” It’s got two chords."
- Charlotte Caffey, Rolling Stone
"I guess everybody will say pretty much the same thing, but we’re extremely excited about this. I feel like we’re getting the Academy Award of Music. It’s like a Lifetime Achievement Award. I’m extremely excited and very grateful."
- Gina Schock, Rolling Stone
'Beneath The Blue Sky' _ The Go-Go's
Congratulations - you deserve it!
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