This blog now closed because of problems with the feed - archive remains here but posting resumes at Shock and Awe 2
Thursday, September 22, 2022
really?
Rosie O'Donnell talks about her pal David Bowie...
For sure I can totally see someone absolutely seething about having been tricked into seeing Rent, godawful as it is. But David Bowie "hated musicals"? Erm, you sure about that, Rosie? He started out modelling his career and, well, his voice on Anthony Newley, who not only performed in musicals but wrote a bunch. Before Bowie decided rock was a surer, swifter route to fame, that's what he wanted to do - be on the West End and Broadway, as an all-round entertainer, an actor-singer-writer, just like his revered (but unreciprocated idol-model) Tony. And stages of DB's career are pretty much the merger of rock and musical theater.
Of course someone who once loved musicals might very well have come to loathe the ghastly travesty they'd degenerated into by the '90s and even more so thereafter (made extra repulsive by the unexpected undead-artform-rises-from-the-grave-to-command-the-centre-stage-of-pop-culture zombie omnipresence that happened with La La Land , Hamilton, etc).
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Glamour Mix
Siouxsie and the Banshees have at least two Glamanifesto Songs - two singles released within two years of each other.
"Fireworks", a national anthem for the emerging and then as yet unnamed tribe soon to be known as Goth
"Dazzle", which I only just realised (courtesy Simon Price) came with a Glamour Mix on the 12-inch.
Here's the single version and its incandescent video.
Fountains = a symbol of aristocratic extravagance from time immemorial - command of the vital elements, and squandering thereof, at a time when the lower orders had to lug it by the bucket out of the ground from wells or carry jugs full of it on their heads for miles and miles.
"Fireworks" is much the better song I think - the orchestration and stampede-y beat on "Dazzle" make it a bit overbearing and stiffly strident.
And he crackling in our colours
With teeth of gelignite
When he sighs his song and pirouettes
Thro' a dance of dynamite
We are fireworks - slowly, glowing
Bold and bright
We are fireworks - burning shapes
Into the night
Twist and turn - burn, burn, burn
Twist and turn - burn, baby, burn
Tempting to roll out the Bataillean reading here...
"Painted Bird" is also something of a Goth Nation rally call and war song.
Confound that dowdy flock
With a sharp-honed nerve
Because we're painted birds
By our own design
There's other Siouxsie songs in these regions of self-worship / demand-to-be-worshipped and exhibitionism / voyeurism - or that speak of a morbid excitation of the eye.
"Red Light" and "Peek-A-Boo", as discussed earlier on this blog.
"Regal Zone" - I had always fondly imagined this as another song in this zone of Star Solipsism / Siouxsie as Untouchable Idol enthralling her fan-vassals... But it appears to be a political comment - if I remember right, something to do with the Iranian Revolution, the fall of the Shah, the Ayatollahs... File alongside The Stranglers's "Shah Shah A Go Go" then...
Coronets rest on a death's head mask
No-one is safe while the curfew lasts
But crusted orbs glitter, sceptres gleam
While helmets of blood fill the screen
They look away
And then they say:
"For the good of the land
For the love of the man"
Standing alone sitting alone
On the throne of the regal zone
Old limbs hang in the torture room
While old kings hang in the portrait room
Their noble eyes gaze on the uneasy dance
Of the squirming body on the marble plate
They look away
And then they say:
"For the good of the land
For the love of the man"
Standing alone sitting alone
On the throne of the regal zone
"Icon", likewise, is no self-deification exercise but something to do with organized religion, about a Polish priest who burned himself alive if my memory serves.. sitting alongside "The Lord's Prayer" on Join Hands.
Still, imposing regality drips off of all these songs and vocal performances, so it is temping to take isolated lines like "standing alone... on the throne of the regal zone" or "icon in the fire" and see them as imperious proclamations of Siouxsie's self-regard. Especially as she once described herself as a fascist, in the sense of wanting things absolutely her own way.
Likewise, who the fuck really knows what "Dazzle" is about - all you really come away with is the lines
Dazzle it's a glittering prize
Before your eyes
- and the self-goddessing hauteur of Siouxsie's voice.
Friday, September 9, 2022
"Plastic is the material of the future, after all..."
A piece from, I think, 1989, that is a kind of rehearsal for Shock and Awe, or maybe it's a flash-forward. At any rate, there's a kernel here.
I wish I knew where the demo tape that got me all excited was stashing and I would digitize it for you and you could tell me if I'm absolutely barmy.
LAST FEW DAYS
A little over a year ago, a demo tape turned up in the post, from the now-defunct Product Inc*. The group's name,Last Few Days, stirred faint memories of a shaven-headed, vaguely totalitarian outift, with a single on the Touch label: a spartan electro work-out with the apocalyptic title "Too Much Is Never Enough". So I popped the tape in the machine, expecting something collectivist/constructivist, and out of the speakers leapt this crazed glam bubblegum apocalypse. "Soul Destroyer" and"Yes I Would" were all shockadelic attack and dead-eyed riffs, apoplectic menace ("I don't know what I want/I blow you apart") and brutally vacant intensity. "Wild" sounded like the missing link between Glitter's "Rock 'N' Roll Pt Two"and Cool J's "Rock The Bells". "Kix" was like Southern fried Spiders From Mars. And "Hot Tonite" was deliciously rubberised pulp funk, all bass squelch and spandex swank.
Raw raunch; self-preening vocals; rebellion in a void, without rationale, context or content; a kind of enflamed artifice. Last Few Days seemed to have found their way to the absence at the heart of glam. Their music suggested all manner of reference points - Alice Cooper, Glitter, The Sweet, Hello, T. Rex, KC and The Sunshine Band, Billy Idol - whose common denominator was an enormous instantaneous impact that burned out leaving nary a singe mark on the "official" history of pop. As '89 proceeded, and the noise extremists began to run up against definite limits, Last Few Days stragegy - updating the emptily sensationalist gestures and effects of Seventies glam - began to seem like an exciting option. After all, the early Seventies was the last time that extremity and pop had co-existed, as the norm.
Since then, I bided my time til Last Few Days got their shit together. Eventually they signed to Phonogram, with the single "Kicks" b/w "Hot Tonite" announcing a new, groovier direction. Finally I got to talk to Keir and Si, the core of LFD, over afternoon tea at Fortnum and Masons.
How did they come to make this massive leap from avant-gardism to trash pop?
Kier: "What we did back then was part of its era, that period after punk had killed everything off. It was a black couple of years, and that kind of soundtrack just seemed appropriate. There was a feeling around of the End of things. The late Seventies and early Eighties felt like music and culture in the death throes, really. Hence the obsession with noise and the darker side of things."
When did all that extreme noise terror become invalid for you?
“It wasn't a conscious decision, just that the times changed. As the Eighties wore on, we felt the music needed a more positive feel."
How did you come to reawaken to Seventies music? What's been lost from that period?
"A naivety, a sort of joyous expression, before punk and the late Seventies made you look at things twice, look at things harder. But you can't separate your experience of those things from your mentality at that time, and we were young. So the memory is tinged with innocence."
What Seventies groups in particular appealed to you?
"It was more that the whole area of mass music, commercial music, suddenly seemed interesting for the first time after a long period. It suddenly seemed like it was possible to express yourself within those confines. We started to listen to Radio One, and just got more into regular music, after years of extremism. We had been playing to three hundred people, and you don't feel like you're achieving very much. When we did this thing in Eastern Europe, we sometimes played to three thousand people, and that felt more real. We visited Poland and Hungary and Yugoslavia, playing with Laibach. The intention back then was total culture clash. Especially in Eastern Europe, we wanted to leave people with brain damage. We were trying to do shows that people would never forget."
Maybe the connection between what you did then and what you do now is that the early Seventies was the last time that shock rock could be chart pop. Even bubblegum groups like The Sweet and Sparks had a perverse hysteria to them.
Si: "They also had such a massive sense of fun, and wackiness, and I think that's really missing. We're trying to inject a bit of that. That real monster irreverent vibe."
I throw some of my thoughts at the pair. To me, it seemed like LFD had taken all the pinnacles of pop at its most inauthentic - glam rock, Bowie's plastic soul and plastic funk phase ("Fame", "Golden Years", "Fashion"), even the honky superstar pseudo-disco of Rod Stewart and Rolling Stones during their most discredited, mid-Seventies trough - and aggregated their most fabricated aspects.
"Plastic-y," nods Si. "Yeah, we're into that."
Kier: "Plastic is the material of the future, after all..."
The lyrics too aren't authentic or torn from the heart, but more like a string of fantastical buzzwords and fizzy doggerel.
"Fantasy and the fantastic is more inspiring to us, than that 'dear diary' approach to songwriting."
When I listen to "Hot Tonite" I imagine this rock star, wrapped in a fur stole, cruising around in a limousine from discotheque to discotheque, hustling for chicks and action. The new Last Few Days seems very pleasure-principled and hedonistic. The songs are all about kicks, getting down, groovin', "flying high". A stark constrast to their early days of shaven austerity and severity. New songs like "Work" and "Satisfy" are very much in the groovamatic "Hot Tonite" vein. Have they dropped the shock rock of that early demo tape?
"At the moment we're not really into the rockier stuff. It was kind of a bridge between the old Last Few Days and where we are now. Dance music and electronic music: there's a kind of purity to them. Perfect beats and clean noises**. Music is moving towards that cleanliness and plastic-ness. The Nineties are more about that purity."
But your groove is much more dirty and lowdown and from the hip, than House, which, as brilliant as it is, is pretty sexless.
"I think it's a different ... sort of sex, maybe. But dancing is never gonna be sexless, is it? I just think that the technology of pop is dragging music kicking and screaming into the machine age. People just can't match machines, can they? The sort of things we were into, extreme frequencies that affect people in ways they can't help, I'd like to do that to people in their living rooms rather than in some sleazy cinema."
Si: "I'm not sure I agree with all these notions of music being subversive and all that."
Kier: "Music on a mass market scale is an expression of the unconscious of the society, and it's a challenge if you're a musician to see to what extent your creative urges can fit in with that. And see if something new and the masses can coincide."
What might be jarring about Last Few Days if they charted is that their music is juvenile and ego-centric in a way that's been disallowed by the post-Live Aid consensus that pop should be adult-erated with altruism.
"A lot of that is just shallow guilt after having made a lot of money."
Like all successful capitalists, it's an attempt to to legitimate their domination with philanthropic acts.
"But it's inevitable that the generation that grew up with pop should want to start to shoulder responsibilites, rather than growing old disgracefully like the Stones. But you're advocating irresponsible pop music?"
I think that pop has lost touch with both its drive (the self) and its domain (the present tense). Pop is about burning up like there's no tomorrow.
Si: "Doesn't that make the caring pop more of an innovation?"
Historically, maybe. But I think the music's weakened because it's less ruthless, less carnivorous... But how will Last Few Days be live?
Si: "A big party, lots happening. Mayhem. Which is what we used to do. Going to see a band is such a boring thing, in a way."
Will you dress up?
Kier: "I think it's your duty. Don't you? I've got my eye on some nice yellow fur suits. Fake fur."
How does something as foxy and neon as "Hot Tonite" spring out of your everyday life? Is it a reaction against your life?
“It's more like a dislocation. I think every person is complicated, has lots of parts to them, and music is a way of giving voice to some of those parts."
So your secret self is a raver?*** Fey but rampant?
"I feel quite schizophrenic about it. When I get in a vocal booth, I feel I can let anything out. Fuck knows, what I do, you'd have to be there. Everybody has a greater potential, I think. The old Last Few Days had a much more group expression, where we presented a flat, aggressive, emotiveless front. We were provocateurs, and some gigs in East Europe got stopped by the police. We were never out to entertain people. We were out to provoke them, or upset them. Now we're trying to caress them. Tantalise them. I can't really imagine what we were trying to do before. I suppose it must have felt good and right for us then, but looking back it just seems perverse. Nasty. But it's hard to separate that from how you feel at 21. You feel the need to get a reaction, you feel negative towards the world. Now, all that seems black, nihilistic, heavy. You can generate just as much energy through having fun."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
hindsight thoughts and annotations, originally done on Blissblog
* Product Inc -- affiliated to Mute if I recall right; vaguely similar to Blast First; seemed quite a crucial label for a moment there (their roster included World Domination Enterprises)
** After the debut single Last Few Days misguidedly went “house”, their second single was really disappointing, shedding everything that made them seem exciting, and they faded away completely. I think they never even got to record an album.
*** “raver” used here not re. the contemporary E culture but in the Sixties sense--nympholeptic fan
^^^^^^^^^^^
I guess this Last Few Days piece is almost a manifesto for my own personal brand of POPISM, rooted not so much in New Pop as Nik Cohn’s SuperPop.
(I’ve sometimes wondered what Cohn would have liked in the ‘70s if he had not lost interest in pop not long after Sgt Pepper’s when everything went bearded, self-serious and concepty. Would he have been into Bowie and Roxy, or found them too clever-clever and art-school? Surely he’d have dug Marc Bolan and T-Rextasy--although maybe the music itself wouldn’t have been LOUD enough for Cohn the Spector fan. Slade? Alice Cooper? He fell for disco obviously and even had a role in inventing its mainstreamed version with the fictionalized "report" on Brooklyn nightclubbers he did for New York magazine that became the source for Saturday Night Fever).
C.f. “camp sublime” as used later in the World of Twist reviews, which I think is either something I nicked off Fredric Jameson, whose thick tome on postmodernism and late capitalism I’d just read/reviewed, or a concept reached with his help, as it were.
The “sublime” is the rockist tinge to SuperPop: the craving for shock, sensation, having your eyes blown, pop as a force from above that leaves you rapt and raptured. And it’s that element (thoroughly absent in yer actual chartpop of that era, e.g. Stock Aitken Waterman’s brand of mild ‘n’ perky) which gives the Neo-SuperPop proposed here its bygone quality, that sepia-tint of epigonic yearning.
Because those were different times.... and when bands materialised with similar ideas.... WoT, Denim, Saint Etienne... they would all fail. A failure that indicted the times maybe (in what godless universe does "Avenue" not become #1 for six weeks?!?!?!?), but so what…
Of them all, only Pulp would make it.
Friday, September 2, 2022
Mirror Star / Mirror Freak
Where punk has glam running through it like jam in a Swiss Roll - anti-fashion is only glamour turned inside out - New Wave seems to me the actual anti-glam backlash - the reign of the ordinary bloke and blokette. A parade of only-a-mother-could-love faces (sometimes only-a-mother-could-bear voices too) in clothes that often seem to mock the idea of style or elegance, whether scruffy or showbiz-parodic. Facially, instead of alien beauty, it's the genre of geeks and speccy gits. Kooks and inadequates. Spudboys. People who ought to have never had the remotest chance of being in pop music, actually finally got their chance to be in pop music.
Lyrically likewise, there's a relentless emphasis on the mundane and the quotidian... Routine, office work, commuting, suburbia. The Members's "Sound of the Suburbs" and "Solitary Confinement", Jona Lewie the unsmooth operator hiding in the kitchen at parties, The Chords singing about English commuter belt drones who swallow their dreams like their beer.... Madness with their "Grey Day"s and "Cardiac Arrest"'s happening to briefcase-wielding commuters on the double-decker bus. Emotionally, the registers are bathos and pathos (Madness again - "Embarrassment"; the sheer genius of a song about the awkwardness of a teenager going to the chemists to buy his first packet of rubber johnies ("House of Fun"))
And all of that is what's good about New Wave. The bubble of fantasy punctured. The plodders and the mis-shapes get their moment. No more heroics. Anti-stars.
Here's a song from a bunch of Noo Wavers (whose record covers I must have flicked past a hundred times) that's actually about stardom and being a no-mates loser.
Fabulous Poodles turn out to sound less pathetic than I'd always imagined from the name and the look - vocally a little bit Wreckless Eric, which I like... violin that's a tad Doctors of Madness.. , tiny bit of talk box which makes me think of "S-S-Single Bed" by Fox - but still falls some way short of making me want to investigate further
I mean look at these album covers
Here's a late-glam era group with a song about in-the-mirror play-acting wannabe-stars, supposedly inspired by Bolan, a friend of Steve H's
Here in this American Bandstand clip, the Fabpoos are done up in ironic "entertainers, we" outfits.
"We're all losers on the dating game" says the singer.
I suppose that look is coming out of Deaf School maybe (a group on the edge of late glam / New Wave) (shades too of Sailor or Kursaal Flyers)
In this FabPoo clip singer's got a sparkly jacket - to be taken as a kind of anti-theatrical joke, I think, indicating the mutual discomfort between band and audience about the very idea of performance. "It's showtime!"
Thursday, September 1, 2022
Menthol Dan
I thought I had heard literally everything Bolan had breathed into a microphone but someone this eluded me until now.
Thursday, August 25, 2022
glamour versus glamour
Geoff Dyer contrasts two kinds of glamour in this Guardian piece from 1999 about the fluoro aesthetics of the psychedelic trance scene:
Sometimes two quite separate events, incidents with no connection, snag in the mind. They seem related to each other in a way that remains tantalisingly out of reach. It is only when they are joined by a third element that their relationship becomes clear.
Rummaging through a box of odds and ends in the attic of my parents' house, I came across an old alarm clock, made by Westclox. Faded to a dull green, the hands and numbers had once been fiercely luminescent. As a boy I loved shining a torch on to the clock face, after which the green would blaze more brightly in the darkness. Holding the clock in my adult hands I vaguely remembered that, in the seventies, the factory making these clocks was closed down because the luminescent paint was radioactive.
A few weeks later, I was flicking through a book of Helmut Newton's photographs. I've always loathed Newton's work but this time that visceral personal response had mellowed into a more generalised appraisal.
Newton's take on women seemed as obsolete as James Bond's. It wasn't just Newton himself: an entire vision of so-called elegance, an elaborately contrived construct of glamour - lipstick, cigarettes, stilettos - was extinct, as alluring and vital as a pub on a Sunday morning.
These two objects - the old alarm clock and the shiny new book of Newton's boring old photos were linked. I couldn't say how. . .
Not until I went to a party given by the Dreamspell Collective in San Francisco. From the outside there was just a grey door; inside, the space was ablaze with psychedelic fluoro. Every room, even the lavatory, was bedecked with glowing Goan drapes. Everyone was wearing some kind of fluoro-ethnic adornment. The women had their hair tied with fluoro beads, or were wearing fluoro earrings or bracelets. We were, to put it briefly, in the fluoro world.
For all I know, everything about the trance aesthetic is passe, but what does it matter if, from a fashion point of view, lapels are being worn an inch wider this year? Who gives a toss? You think of the trance community - hippies and crusties, according to people decked out in the allegedly fashionable blacks and greys of famously dreary designers - and are filled with something like wonder. The striking thing about the Oscar ceremony, by contrast, is how horrible everyone looks in their finery.
The purpose of black- tie events like the Booker Prize is, similarly, to render the men repulsive - red-faced and bloated - and the women ghastly. The international trance scene, on the other hand, is radiant with enduring loveliness.
At another party, in Wales, I remarked to a friend's wife on the stunning beauty of one of the women there. 'You don't say that kind of thing at a psy trance party!' came the reply. This seemed an unnecessarily stern rebuke but, from her point of view, I was imposing what might be termed a Newtonian vision on proceedings. That vision, that prerogative of the male gaze, is anathema to the fluoro world, to its (sometimes rather hackneyed) spirituality, its beauty, its evident eroticism.
A paradox is at work. Characterised by a refusal of all the constraints of glamour, by an unequivocal rejection of stylised lechery, by a complex etiquette that is at once ultra-democratic and highly sophisticated, the trance world is, nevertheless, the apotheosis of glamour, one of its two last preserves (the other, to be found in cities such as Naples, is the glamour of poverty).
This quality, at once Edenic and millennial, is conveyed by Yeats in one of the poems from his 'A Woman Young and Old' sequence. 'If I make the lashes dark/And the eyes more bright/And the lips more scarlet. . . /No vanity's displayed:/I'm looking for the face I had/Before the world was made.' In the dream-space of trance all the jaded merchandise of glamour - even lipstick! - is re-charged, like that old Westclox alarm, and purified by black light. Fluoro is glamour incarnate: an ultra-violet illusion.
A dream is made real, the real is rendered insubstantial, oneiric. Domestic dance culture, apparently, is dying on its feet. In this deep twilight, fluoro - whatever its standing in the temporal hierarchy of fashion - represents an unsurpassable peak, glowing, iridescent.
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
antitheatricality + politics round up: main character energy, show trials, morality plays, theater of humiliation, mainlining jolts of drama
via Twitter
context: Andy Biggs is circulating a letter calling for hearings into debunked election fraud allegations featured in “2000 Mules” — the same day that 1/6 committee revealed how Trump’s election lies incited a mob to attack the Capitol. Also previews probes to come in a GOP House.
Comments Teri Kanefield:
"People like Andy Biggs look at today's hearing and think, "That was a good show. We need to put on a better show.
"For people unhinged from the truth, it's all a show. And the person who puts on the best show wins."
"Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals. His Republican base is both the audience for them and the instrument of them. But to those outside the subculture excited by these rituals, they look demeaning and ridiculous. Everybody else wants jobs, homes, cheaper prescription drugs, and bridges that do not collapse—not public performances in Trump’s theater of humiliation"
"The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office....
"There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.
"What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.
"Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character....
"I spoke with one of the original Never Trumpers over the weekend, a man who has lost friends and family because of his opposition to Trump, and he told me that one of the most unsettling things to him is that these same pro-Trump family and friends now say that they believe that Trump broke the law—but that they don’t care. They see Trump and his crusade—their crusade against evil, the drama that gives their lives meaning—as more important than the law....
"When enough Americans decide that a cult of personality matters more than a commitment to democracy, we risk becoming a lawless autocracy. This is why we must continue to demand that Trump and his enablers face the consequences of their actions: To cave in the face of threats means the end of democracy. And it would not, in any event, mollify those among our fellow citizens who have chosen to discard the Constitution so that they can keep mainlining jolts of drama from morning until night."
"Returning to Washington, D.C., for the first time since he left the White House in the aftermath of the violent assault on the Capitol, Trump gave a speech last Tuesday to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). It was billed as a policy address on public safety. But everyone knows that policy doesn’t interest Trump in the least. What he cares about is the performative part of politics, inflaming people’s passions, creating chaos and conflict. Politics is a stage on which his disordered personality plays itself out.
"Like every Trump speech, it was undisciplined. The former president stayed on script and went off script, sometimes reading from his prepared text and other times riffing on topics including tent cities for homeless people, transgender athletes, and election lies. (The riffs are what most charged up the crowd.)"
Michael Gershon, Washington Post
"As it stands, the FBI action has confirmed public impressions, not transformed them. Remember that Trump secured the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 by dominating the news cycle. It barely mattered if it was good news about him or bad. He had a remarkable ability to shove everyone else off center stage while crooning “My Way.”"
Sunday, August 14, 2022
Friday, August 5, 2022
Friday, July 29, 2022
Horror of Glam Rock
"In January 2007, Bernard Cribbins had a guest role as glam rock promoter Arnold Korns in Horror of Glam Rock, a Doctor Who audiodrama...."
Arnold Corns being "a band formed by David Bowie in 1971. Bowie played on the guitar and did most of the vocals, although his costume designer Freddi Burretti was considered as a lead vocalist. Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, Mick Woodmansey on drums and Mark Carr Pritchard on guitar, Arnold Corns was one of Bowie’s side projects at the time, and something of a dry run for Ziggy Stardust."
That's Buretti on the sleeve right
Somehow I don't think this was the dream fusion of glam and hauntology and pulp modernism that Mark K-Punk was dreaming of...
There's probably more glam - in the lumpen-glitter Sweet / Slade sense - in this Cribbins turn from The Good Old Days... . "I was feeling rather queer", "the barmaid she was six feet two and every inch a gent"... nostalgia / retro, English-all-too-English-ness, music hall as unacknowledged root of the Brit tangent-mutant form of rock'n'roll...
Drag too
(Cribbins appears again, at 32 minutes)
RIP Bernard C
Monday, July 25, 2022
uncharacteristically glam 3 of ???
Actually, I don't know if "uncharacteristic" as I'm not familar with their usual self-presentation or output, but I'm shoving it in here.
(Hat tip to Julia)
Saturday, July 23, 2022
uncharacteristically glam #2
This Graun piece a bit more revealing
“Can you believe it? That people got so worked up about what someone was wearing?” he says today. But they did, and even those sympathetic to Rowland’s vision seemed baffled. One marketing guy at Creation sent him a bunch of material about cross-dressing. “And I was like, no, I don’t wanna wear a wig! I had sideburns on, a male haircut. I just wanted to wear a dress.”
He sighs. “Someone else at the label thought it was about sexuality. It may have been a bit. But I remember having to write something, saying it’s not a gay thing, it’s not this, it’s not that. I kind of defined it through people misinterpreting it. Because I’m not the kind of guy to go, ‘This is a statement and it means this.’ It was all intuitive.”
... Even today, Rowland says people just don’t get it. “Irvine Welsh, who is a friend and I respect him, put a tweet up recently saying it was an amazing album but the cover was a mistake. He doesn’t understand me! It was a lifestyle choice, not a fucking career move. That’s what I was wearing, that’s what I was into, that was who I am. All of my looks, everything I do, is like that. It’s not a gimmick.”
Perhaps the peak of the criticism came during his infamous appearance at Reading and Leeds festival where he performed a short guest spot dressed in a white dress and stockings.... The Leeds leg he admits was trickier. “I was about to go on, and then a woman called Hobbs … Mary Anne Hobbs? … introduced me. She said, ‘Here’s a legend in his own lingerie!’ And I thought, ‘What the fuck?’ It threw me, to be honest. I think Alan [McGee] thought the confrontation would be punk rock, but I didn’t want that. I’d done all that 20 years earlier.”
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
the space of glamour
As a few people have noted, the universe - as revealed in greater detail and depth than ever by the new Webb Telescope images - looks a bit glitterball disco-rama.
In fact what it reminded me of fairly instantly is the staging for this TV rendition of "Fame" by David Bowie. The lighting struck me before as a fabulous evocation of the space of celebrity itself. Hats off to the Cher Show lighting director and crew!
Saturday, July 2, 2022
psychedelic protoglam #2
"Exploding out of San Francisco’s vibrant late-60s counter-culture, Luminous Procuress is a psychedelic odyssey of unabashed hedonism. The only feature film by artist, mystic and polymath Steven Arnold, the film celebrates gender-fluidity and pan-sexuality in a voyeuristic phantasmagorical journey towards spiritual ecstasy."
Electronic OST by Creel-god Warner Jepson (whose work I reviewed here).
(via Andrew Smith via John Coulhart / { feuilleton })
"Often compared to the works of Fellini, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, and featuring the outrageous talents of the avant garde drag troupe The Cockettes, as well as artist ruth weiss, Luminous Procuress was an underground sensation upon release but disappeared from circulation for many years. Now fully restored in all its sensuous glory, Luminous Procuress’s subversive delights are ready to be discovered anew."
Along with Jack Smith/K.Anger I also am minded of Ze Whiz Kidz, Pink Narcissus, the Angels of Light, Les Petites Bonbons, a less abjection oriented Ridiculous Theatre, etc etc. A queered counterculture. The Underground but without the macho adventurism and Rousseau-esque back to Nature fantasies. An urban and urbane Underground, in love with plastic, glitter, neon.
Further proof that glam of the Roxy / Bowie type was not such a total break from the Sixties, that there was continuity as well as rupture - the pandrogyny and polysexuality and freak-out excess shifting subtly in tone towards decadence and nostalgia, the melancholy palette and bygone evocations of Biba
Also a hint of Zardoz in there, as well as the psychedelic-camp decor of Avengers/Prisoner/The Final Programme
In-depth appreciation of Luminous Procuress by Steve Seid.
"The creation of a personal dream-world in cinematic terms seems to have been the aim of film maker Steven Arnold. Mr. Arnold studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and received an M.S. in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970. His short films have all been beautiful, visual experiments in color and mysterious settings where mythological creatures are given a celluloid life of their own. Mr. Arnold’s medium-length film, Messages, Messages, attracted a great deal of critical attention when it was shown during the New Directors section of the Cannes Film Festival, and it was linked by the French critics to the fanciful, cinema reveries of Cocteau or Fellini. If Steven Arnold admires the work of these filmmakers, his work does not imitate them, and his first feature, Luminous Procuress is an altogether extraordinary, individualistic phantasmagoria. It was filmed entirely in San Francisco over a two-year period, and describes the adventures of two wandering youths in San Francisco who visit the home of a mysterious woman, the Procuress. She is an elegant emblem of sorcery, her vivid features glowing under bizarre, striking maquillage, and one is not certain who she is or where she intends to lead the protagonists. Although the language she speaks is vaguely Russian, it appears that the Procuress has psychic powers. She discerns a sympathetic response to her on the part of the youths, and by magical means, conducts them through fantastic rooms, on a psychic journey. Through strange passageways, one voyages with the Procuress and her charges, glimpsing hidden nightmares and panoplied chambers of revelry, where celebrants, ornately festooned, dance and make love before unseen gods. The youths are soon drawn into the sensuality of the Procuress’ spellbound kingdom, and one is reminded of the sorceress-neighbor to Guilietta in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. Only here, in Arnold’s film, the spectator is a willing participant in some unspeakably attractive but menacing ecstasy. The sexes become androgynous and one remains entranced by the wonder of such a film as Luminous Procuress."
Thursday, June 30, 2022
psychedelic protoglam #1
It is a doxa among a certain sort of Roxy Music admirer (P. York, M. Bracewell, etc) that before Roxy, rock was just a smelly grotscape of denim and cheesecloth, long greasy hair, beards and bumfluff and BO.
So for instance, in Vogue magazine last week, Bryan Ferry opined of the Time Before Roxy - meaning 1960s rock - that "it's interesting to note that the worlds of art, music, and fashion were all distant from each other at that time."
With respect, Bryan - bollocks!
Exhibit 1 - Julie Driscoll, the It Girl of Swinging (late) Sixties London
In this video, Driscoll is wearing a glittery-fabric top and a feather-boa-ish scarf - looking like the distaff Eno avant la bleedin' letter, virtually!
This next one is less glittery and more spooky but Joolz has androgynous hair and it's quite a theatrical, stylized performance to boot
Oh yeah things were very monochrome and unshowy before glam came along...
Exhibit 2 - Kevin Ayers
Another clip from 1968 - sonically Soft Machine is about as unglam as imaginable, but hark at Kevin's eye make-up and general pretty-boy dandiness
Exhibit 3 to 222 - literally scores of Brit performers who pranced about in extravagant gear
For sure, bands like the Stones didn't put credits for hair and make-up on their album covers. But they and many other Brit groups had relationships with tailors, trendy boutiques, hair stylists, photographers.
They put a huge amount of effort and expense into their appearance (The Who's weekly clothing bill was ridiculous).
Not that image-consciousness was unknown among the Americans either (Jimi Hendrix, in his garish finery.... Grace Slick, who had modelled before singing .)
None of these groups looked like they put on the first clothes they found in the morning.
They might well have done, but their regular gear was the same as what they put on to go onstage. Everyday life for them was costumed and flashy.
So yeah, the supposed distance between pop music and fashion pre-Roxy - couldn't be wronger, really.
But equally off is the idea of a distance between pop music and art.
A huge proportion of UK groups had been at art school and quite a few of them applied ideas they picked up there.
Like The Creation, who had action-painting done behind them onstage (and canvases set fire to, if I recall right).
Who did a song called "Painter Man" about art school.
You had Crazy World of Arthur Brown and The Move doing proto-glam theatrics and stage stunts...
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Here's an early effort by me to defend Roxy from their celebrants, or at least complicate the picture a bit, this idea of Roxy as a total break with the Sixties Gestalt
ROXY MUSIC
The Observer, September 2, 2012
The Perfect Guitarist’
for Avant Rock Group
Original, creative, adaptable,
melodic, fast, slow, elegant, witty
scary, stable, tricky...
‘Roxy’ 223 0296
- Musician wanted advert, Melody Maker, 1971
There’s a certain sort of glam fan who never ceases to be blown away by the fact that Bowie played a character , the imaginary rock star Ziggy Stardust. That same certain sort of glam fan never stops being thrilled by the nerve and verve of Roxy Music giving a credit on their debut LP to the person who did their clothes, hair, and make-up. Supposedly this was a dissident blow against rock’s anti-fashion stance. Cutting through the stale dope-smoke fug of the hippie hangover, Roxy were “the first true band of the Seventies”. But they also prophesied the Eighties, their celebration of posing and artifice anticipating postmodernism, the New Romantics, The Face, pop video, and self-reinventing superstars like Madonna.
Which isn’t untrue, but isn’t the whole truth, either. It’s hardly the case that Roxy or Bowie invented the idea of image or were the first rockers to have close relationships with designers and stylists. Most 1960s British bands took rather an interest in clothes and hair. Nor were Bowie or Roxy’s Brian Eno the first flamboyantly androgynous figures in rock. On the record sleeve and in the promo film for “Have You Seen You Mother, Baby”, the Stones wore women’s clothing four years before Bowie put on a frock for the cover of 1970’s The Man Who Sold The World.
Still, it is true that around 1970-71, rock got awfully drab looking, with countless denim-clad blues-bore and boogie bands, dressed-down singer-songwriters and country-rock outfits, and virtuoso players too wrapped up in their endless soloing to bother with stage craft. “Everything went flat,” recalls Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera. “A lot of musicians were getting strung out on heavy drugs. They were out of it, so they weren’t even bothering to wear kaftans or other hippie stuff, which had been stylish in their own way.” Then, with the emergence of Roxy Music and Bowie in 1972, “suddenly there was colour and exoticism and the spirit of rock’n’roll again. We supported Bowie at the Greyhound in Croydon, in June 1972: Bowie in his full Ziggy Stardust gear and us in all our regalia, performing to just 150 people in this little upstairs room. It was a tiny stage but it had theatrical lighting, so you had to wear make-up, because that’s what theatre people do, otherwise you look washed-out.”
John Lennon once quipped that glam was just rock’n’roll with lipstick. Glam historians tend to emphasize the lipstick at the expense of the rock’n’roll; they focus overly on the gender-bending rather than the genre-bending. In Roxy’s case, the attention paid to the group’s fashion world connections, Pop Art allegiances and other extra-musical credentials threatens to overshadow their achievements as a rock band. In truth, Eno’s feather boas, Bryan Ferry’s gaucho look of 1974... they really haven’t aged that well. It’s hard to believe that wearing a white dinner jacket was ever a big deal. Even the celebrated covers of the first five albums, with their lingerie-clad models, look cheesy and chauvinist these days (well, apart from the still-edgy sleeve of For Your Pleasure, a perversely stylized shot of Amanda Lear walking a panther). The music, though, remains timeless in its weirdness and wildness.
What gets swept under the carpet by the “first true band of the Seventies” argument is that the Roxy of the first three albums is a post-psychedelic outfit: as much progressive rock as glam rock. Phil Manzanera, the guitarist who responded to Ferry’s “Avant-Rock” ad and eventually got the job, recalls listening recently for the first time in ages to “The Bob (Medley)”: the six-part song-suite on 1972’s Roxy Music, a sort of “mini-movie” concept piece about the Second World War. “This guy is remixing our debut LP in 5.1 surroundsound, so I was listening to ‘The Bob” and I was laughing. It’s pure prog. The whole of that first album sounds so weird. It’s such a mish-mash of stuff. Roxy just wouldn’t get signed today.”
Those who view Roxy as pioneers of surface-deep postmodern pop regard the band as radically opposed to the earthy earnestness of what was then known as the Underground: long-hair, beardy bands like The Soft Machine and Family who played the college gig circuit, recorded sessions for John Peel, appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, got written up in Melody Maker. But Roxy’s earliest champions were, in fact, John Peel, who invited them to record a session for his show; Melody Maker’s Richard Williams, who got the hype ball rolling; management company E.G., whose other clients included King Crimson and ELP, and who hitched Roxy up with Island Records, the leading progressive label of the era. At one point Ferry actually auditioned to be King Crimson’s singer. And before Manzanera got the gig, the group’s guitarist was David O’List, formerly of The Nice, the original prog band.
Early on, Ferry went along with the progressive scene’s disdain for chart pop, declaring: “We’re not a singles band, really. I certainly don’t want to find myself sliding down the Slade/T. Rex corridor of horror”. Even in hindsight, he recalled that Roxy “didn’t think we were as commercial as what other people were doing.... When we started, I think we thought we’d be a kind of art student band, and that’s as far as it would go... King Crimson were one polar extreme, and Bowie was the other, and we were in the middle... I was astounded when we had a hit record.”
Over half the band–Manzanera, Eno, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson--came from experimental music, trippy-proggy, or heavy rock backgrounds. “We had some weird things that other bands didn’t have, like someone playing oboe,” Manzanera says of Mackay, who was classically trained and whose keen interest in the avant-garde later resulted in the fine book Electronic Music. Manzanera’s previous band was Quiet Sun, an outfit influenced by Zappa, Pink Floyd, and Soft Machine, while drummer Thompson worshipped Led Zep’s Jon Bonham. A fan of minimalist composers like Steve Reich, Eno was a non-musician who supplied Roxy with irruptions of abstract synth and tape effects: things that were “part of experimental electronic music,” recalls Manzanera, “but we used them in the context of songs.”
The songs themselves weren’t exactly conventional either. Some, like “The Bob” or “If There Is Something” were more like several songs concatenated together. Others, like the first two singles “Virginia Plain” and “Pyjamarama” would be judged unfinished by the standards of hit factories like the Brill Building or Motown. Neither has a chorus, just a single verse melody repeated.
This minimalist aspect to Roxy came from one of the motley crew’s few shared passions: The Velvet Underground. But there were also upsurges of maximalism, acid rock flashbacks like the second half of “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”, with its phased drumming and gaseously billowing guitar. “That was my chance to vent my inner psychedelia,” Manzanera laughs. Even more far out is the title track/finale to For Your Pleasure, especially its hallucinatory extended coda of pointillistic piano trills, like the Milky Way going down the cosmic plughole. The product of the strong bond Manzanera formed with Eno, “For Your Pleasure” is comparable with Hendrix circa Electric Ladyland or Tim Buckley’s “Starsailor” in its use of the studio and recording tape as a canvas for sound-painting.
In late 1973, looking back at the first two Roxy albums not long after he was pushed out of the band, Eno enthused about the music’s “insanity... the element of clumsiness and grotesqueness”, the “terrific tension”, caused by the group “juxtaposing things that didn’t naturally sit together”. Even after Eno’s departure, Manzanera continued to pursue the absurdism and studio-boffin experimentation on the third album, Stranded. “Amazona”, for instance, is split apart by an indescribably strange guitar solo midway between a fire storm and a gigantic bubble machine. It sounds like the work of several guitarists, but it’s just Manzanera playing through a complex relay of of distortion, repeat echoes and vari-pitch using a specially built contraption that worked just once. That first and only take is what you hear on the album.
“Amazona” was the first song on a Roxy long-player for which Manzanera received a credit. Because music publishing operates according to an antiquated, pre-rock conception of composition that rewards those who write the top line melody and lyrics, the vast majority of Roxy tunes are credited solely to Ferry. “It’s very old fashioned, it goes back to Tin Pan Alley and the 1930s,” says Manzanera. “Eno’s synth part on ‘Ladytron’, Andy’s oboe parts—that came from them. Each member was contributing to the music and to all the arrangements. I like to think that we produced the musical context for Bryan to put his vision into. But that’s not reflected in the publishing.”
It’s all the more unfair because, according to Manzanera, from about half-way through For Your Pleasure and onwards through the remainder of Roxy’s career, the band would write “the music first—all the music, including the solos. Then Bryan would listen to it and try to write a topline tune and words. When it worked, it was absolutely brilliant. Because none of us knew what the song was going to be about until he recorded the vocal. Imagine, you’ve been working on ‘Love is The Drug’ for absolutely ages, with no idea that it’s even going to be called ‘Love is the Drug’. Then Bryan turns up, saying ‘I’ve been all night’, and he sings it, and we’re like, ‘bloody hell, we’ve got a single.’”
Rather than the players “backing” their singer/leader, then, it would be more accurate to say that Ferry fronted them: many of Roxy’s greatest songs would never have been written in the absence of what had been generated first by the musicians. Which is not to downplay the importance of Ferry’s “completion” role. Stranded’s high point “Mother of Pearl” would be a fabulous instrumental, but it would not have a fraction of its emotional power without Ferry’s words or his incredible vocal performance, where every line, every word even, is delivered with a deranged archness of emphasis, suffusing the entire song with bitter, poisoned campness. In purely musical terms Ferry’s greatest invention is his voice on the first two albums, the reptilian vibrato that paved the way for neurotic New Wave mandroids like Gary Numan and Devo. As much as the jarring and jolting music, Ferry’s grotesquely stylized singing contributed the aspect of “insanity” that Eno valued in early Roxy.
There’s no doubt that Roxy was Ferry’s “baby”. He formed the group, formulated its overall vision and framing. But curiously, what becomes apparent, as you follow the band’s arc through the eight albums (plus one double CD of B-sides and what-not) corralled in the new box set The Complete Studio Recordings, is that as Ferry gradually asserts total control over the band, the music becomes less characterful. The individual character of the players, that strange “mish-mash”/mismatch Manzanera speaks of, starts to fade, but so too does the collective character of Roxy as an entity set apart from the landscape of pop.
This smoothing-out begins to set in circa 1974-75 with Country Life and Siren. It’s in full swing with the reformed Roxy of Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, where Roxy are playing the game of pop according to the radio and dance-floor rules of the disco/New Wave late Seventies and early Eighties. And playing it well: there’s no denying the grace of “Oh Yeah” and “Over You”, the shimmer ‘n’ shiver of “Same Old Scene”.
Oddly, the same syndrome affects the lyrics: the verbosity and over-ripeness of the early albums goes, but so too does the imagistic vividness, the unclassifiably mixed emotions. “Songs like ‘Mother of Pearl’ had masses of words,” recalls Manzanera. “In Roxy’s first five years, there’s a lot more witty metaphors and wordplay. But it got more serious gradually and by the end you had a bunch of haikus, virtually.”
By Avalon and its big single “More Than This”, the sound is all patina, glistening with professionalism and perfectionism. The words sketch the barest suggestion of mood; the voice, once so blood-curdling and startling, has become a debonair croon, evokes just a faded and jaded gentility. Ferry has not just annulled the personalities of Manzanera and Mackay, who might as well be session players like the other hirelings credited, he’s erased himself too. Immaculate background music, Avalon could be seen as Ferry’s own version of ambient music: an “I can do that too” riposte to Eno’s reputation as doyen of the cutting-edge. A triumph, in its way, but also a tragic inversion of everything that made Roxy so arresting.
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Interesting to see how Bryan F defined Roxy's manifesto in this recent piece at Vulture:
"It’s trying out different things — experimenting and exploring sounds and textures. Trying out combinations of instruments and so on. With writing in particular, trying to go to different places and creating a body of work that’s interesting to perform. So when we do the anniversary tour, we will hopefully be representing different aspects of the band and periods from all the albums. But at its core, it’s experimenting with musical styles. We didn’t want to be a one-trick pony."
That's pretty progressive rock / art school modernist
In the same piece, asked his most endearing memory of Eno, Ferry offers this:
"It’s the first time I met him, really. He came to the place we were rehearsing and working, when I was putting together the band. He came along to record what we were doing there. There were only three of us in Roxy at that point. We didn’t have a tape recorder, so Andy Mackay said, “I know this guy, Brian Eno who’s got a tape recorder.” So he came to my place where we were rehearsing. He brought this huge tape recorder called a Ferrograph. It was a reel-to-reel thing. We got on immediately. Just the sight of him. I still remember him coming through the door, carrying this huge recorder. He recorded us and then officially joined the band that night."
That's a pretty freaky detail that I've never seen more that - the tape recorder was called a Ferrograph. Presumably from ferric tape but still Ferry-o-graph is the first thing that sprung to mind.