TG on Celluloid

Another French connection, this time an unsavory one… pictured below, my copy of Throbbing Gristle’s D.o.A album on the French Celluloid label. Celluloid earned the wrath of Industrial Records when the label put out unauthorized copies of the Second Annual Report and D.o.A. I’m unaware of the exact circumstances of the fallout – a quick flick through Simon Ford’s book doesn’t offer any explanation, but TG (or perhaps Genesis P-Orridge) outlined their position in no uncertain terms in the 1982 RE/Search book William S. Burroughs/Brion Gysin/Throbbing Gristle. I picked up my copy of the Celluloid D.o.A in the early 90’s, a few years before I discovered it was a counterfeit but I’ve never felt inclined to “Destroy all copies” as the RE/Search book advises. Interestingly, Celluloid also put out Industrial’s Thomas Leer & Robert Rental album The Bridge in 1979 (to little controversy it seems), and what’s more, Celluloid’s website, which includes the label’s complete discography omits the two TG albums, the crime airbrushed from history so to speak…

J’adore Sordide Sentimental !

Office chit-chat about winning the lottery always sends me cruising eBay for things I could never afford, and this morning, I’m looking at some highly coveted singles released by the Sordide Sentimental label, typically a numbered, limited edition 7” single packaged in an A4-sized sleeve containing various inserts and idiosyncratic French/English liner notes. Three releases in particular are holy grail objects for me: Throbbing Gristle’s We Hate You (Little Girls) / Five Knuckle Shuffle, Joy Division’s Licht Und Blindheit and Tuxedomoon’s Une Nuit Au Fond De La Frayere / Egypt, the latter two in particular for the great artwork by French fantasist Jean-François Jamoul. The 1980-issued Licht Und Blindheit single (which contains Atmosphere/Dead Souls) is interesting to muse on, Jamoul’s illustration of a figure descending into a netherworld seems to echo Anton Corbijn's famous 1979 photograph of Joy Division at the staircase of Lancaster Gate tube station. More significant still is the beautiful painting inside the Licht Und Blindheit package, depicting a mysterious hooded figure - a predominant feature of Corbijn's 1988 video for Atmosphere... As for those lottery winnings, a German seller is selling what looks like an excellent edition for a cool €1,000 which is a good price – I’ve seen lesser quality editions on sale for almost double that price (any copy going for less will surely be a counterfeit).

More stunning artwork courtesy of Jean-Louis Dupré (Throbbing Gristle) and Jean-François Jamoul (Tuxedomoon). No obvious links emerge between TG and Tuxedomoon but interestingly the collage inside the Tuxedomoon package, designed by Sordide Sentimental co-founder Yves Von Bontee recalls similar work by Genesis P-Orridge, while the photo of indeterminate origin could pass for a COUM action. The TG single is the more collectible of the two and contains impenetrable Jean-Pierre Turmel liner notes and a collage that would be best described as NSFW. Incidentally Jean-Louis Dupré is the brother of Lawrence Dupré who designed TG’s camouflage uniforms.

Throbbing Gristle Heaven

Pictured below, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge at Heaven, December 23rd 1980. Photo courtesy of Akiko Hada... My thanks to the TG FB group for sharing a link to artist and videographer Akiko Hada’s website showcasing 20 years of music photography – well worth a visit. And with that in mind I’m listening to the Heaven show this afternoon, one of the finest of the late-era concerts. Rough Trade issued the show on cassette as Beyond Jazz Funk, and the title is not as wry as one might expect, with Cosey and her trumpet trying to get away with as much jazz as possible on this particular night. But mostly, the Heaven show is TG at its most rhythmical, and abrasive - perhaps as a consequence of the lo-fi recording which lends Chris Carter’s beats a real crunch. Dossier put the show out on CD in 1993 with sleeve notes by Gen, stating that “…this is essentially the last, unified performance by TG. Internal Tensions and transitions took an irreparable toll shortly hereafter”.

As 1980 rolled over to 1981, the group’s days were numbered, the mission close to termination, and performances were increasingly patchy. The Lyceum show in February sounds particularly listless, and while Heaven lacks the white heat improvisation of earlier TG concerts (the set is similar to San Francisco 6 months later), it makes up for it with sheer energy, the psychic youth responding in kind, with enthusiastic cheers, whistles and calls for the hits – one audience members requests Hamburger Lady throughout, but to no avail. Derek Jarman filmed a portion of the concert for his abstract Super8 short T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven (with some cuts from the Second Annual Report for the soundtrack). Incidentally, a few lines of dialogue from Alan Clarke’s theatrical version of Scum can be heard at one point, I’m guessing it was a favourite of Sleazy’s…

Voodoo Macbeth

I’m on a Shakespeare binge at the moment with all the programmes and events to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death tomorrow. I rounded off some bedtime reading last night with the passage from Simon Callow’s Road to Xanadu covering Orson Welles’ 1936 production of Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project. The so-called "Voodoo Macbeth" has always held a special fascination for me, the production’s all-black cast and its transposition to Haiti mark this out as one of the more unique adaptations of The Scottish Play. 4mins worth of footage from the production’s climactic scene is available but it doesn’t quite do justice to Callow’s vivid and exciting account – the riot of colorful costumes, the striking jungle castle set, the innovative, eerie lighting, and the cacophonous voodoo drumming.

Macbeth (right stage) meets with the Three Witches (centre stage)

Callow indulges in some terrific anecdotes too, my favourite, Welles just 21 years old, enjoying some bacchanal nights in Harlem’s bars and fleshpots with his Macbeth, Jack Carter, a man with Underworld connections, memorably described by John Houseman as “the most furious man I ever knew”. Macbeth productions are steeped in bad luck but Houseman remembers the production as one of the few occasions where Welles didn’t break a leg or suffer a similar calamity, but one dismissive critic evidently felt the touch of evil – when his review appeared, one of the cast members, said to be a genuine witch doctor, placed a hex on the critic who took ill the following day and was dead by the end of that week... Wikipedia has an excellent overview on the production here

Mellow Earth

Pictured below, a memorable shot from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hitched to the sleeve of Earth's debut long-player... I'm currently listening to Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version and looking at the CD I wonder did Dylan Carlson have that memorable shot from Tobe Hooper's film in mind when selecting that image. I didn't hear Earth 2 when it first came out in 1993 but I remember well the puzzled reaction to the album, such was its radical minimalist take on Metal, not to mention the fact that Earth emerged from Seattle at the height of grunge. Sub Pop evidently knew it, and in what looks like a desperate sales pitch, the CD's rear sleeve has a handful of gushing blurbs from listeners tuning-in and turning-on to Earth's soporific sound - "Forget drugs and alcohol, I am now very, very mellow". Gazing at these giant blue skies I am too.

Designing McCarthy

I posted something about Stalker yesterday, and last night I noticed that the cover of the book I’m currently reading, Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, has a pleasing similarity with Tarkovsky’s film - the image of the lone wolf at the river echoing the abandoned dog wandering the water-logged Zone. It’s a tenuous connection at best, but always a treat when an interest in one medium intersects with an interest in another. Cormac McCarthy’s books have seldom enjoyed eye-catching cover designs, his novels were frequently issued with the blandest of images, mostly generic Western landscapes or second-rate pulp thriller photography which offered little clue to the extraordinary writing inside.

Picador, McCarthy’s UK publisher have been as guilty as Vintage, their Stateside counterpart, but in recent years have made great improvements – the cover of my aforementioned copy of The Crossing at least makes reference to the story, and I really like 2010 reprints designed by David Pearson which dispensed with imagery altogether in favor of big, heavy, distressed looking typefaces.

First editions of McCarthy’s books command high prices these days, in the years before the Coen’s adaptation of No Country For Old Men, hardback editions of McCarthy’s books didn’t sell terribly well and have become very collectible. A beautiful clean copy of Random House’s first edition of Blood Meridian (which features Salvador Dalí’s 1933 painting The Phantom Cart on the cover) is currently on sale at eBay for $1,550.00…

Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker

With the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster inching closer, I plan to revisit Tarkovsky's Stalker, a film that seems indelibly twinned with the catastrophe, and to preface this screening, I watched the 2009 documentary Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of Stalker, at the w/end, a long and engrossing film about the troubled production of Tarkovsky's great work. Georgi Rerberg who photographed Mirror and was originally assigned to shoot Stalker was sacked from the production when the footage he shot was deemed unsatisfactory. Worse still, Rerberg was blamed for not adequately testing the film stock when it was discovered to be unusable, resulting in the scrapping of Stalker draft 1. Tarkovsky burned thru a second cameraman and a second abandoned version of Stalker before completing the version released in 1979, but Rerberg’s reputation was destroyed by the experience, compounded by Tarkovsky’s snide and harmful comments made about Rerberg in the French edition of his diaries.

Georgi Rerberg on the camera platform with Tarkovsky and actor Alexander Kaidanovsky to the left

Igor Mayboroda’s documentary is a harsh rebuttal of those diary entries and unsurprisingly Tarkovsky doesn’t come out of it particularly well, the director placing the blame for the disaster of Stalker on his cameraman, after Tarkovsky himself pushed Rerberg beyond the limits of what the film stock could handle. Tarkovsky’s wife Larissa actually emerges worst from the film, the consensus was that she was an arch manipulator, bitter about not landing the role of the Stalker’s wife. Having watched the documentary, I feel like Margarita Terekhova from Mirror, sitting on the fence. Rerberg was treated terribly by Tarkovsky but I can’t take the leap of faith that Rerberg was a genius, a reputation which rests by and large on his extraordinary work in Mirror. Ironically though it’s the finished version of Stalker that earns the shoddiest treatment, the film is all but dismissed along with Alexander Knyazhinsky’s stunning camerawork, apart from one singled-out shot of Rerberg’s that survived the reportedly 19 final cuts - the memorable pan across the scummy toxic lake. Still, for Stalker and Tarkovsky fans, the film is required viewing and can be seen here  (with excellent English subs).

England’s Hidden Reverse

Finished reading England’s Hidden Reverse over the w/end after a marathon 4-day read - that’s fast for me - but the book is rare among biographies of experimental musicians in that it’s compulsively readable, packed with stories of rampant drug-taking, unbridled sex and occasional bouts of ritualized violence. Highly recommended of course but I think I would have enjoyed the book even more had Keenan substituted Current 93 for Psychic TV - every time one of David Tibet’s lyrics was quoted, my respect for Current 93 eroded just that little bit more, while some of the best passages in the book were about the activities of TOPY. I can appreciate Keenan’s decision to concentrate on the triumvirate of Coil-C93-Nurse With Wound but I wished he had brought his text up to date to include Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown’s work in Cyclobe, and it’s a shame that The Hafler Trio and :zoviet*france: two other major players on the 80’s Underground didn’t earn a mention. Still, it’s an excellent chronicle, brimming over with terrific anecdotes and I especially enjoyed reading about Steve Stapleton’s legendary record collection, Clive Barker’s fruitful friendship with Coil, and the dreadful circumstances of the Dispatches witch-hunt. Needless to say this is essential stuff.

Diary of a Lost Girl

A radiant Louise Brooks from Diary of a Lost Girl, proof that some things never go out of style... I watched G.W. Pabst's great 1929 Silent drama earlier today and it struck me that the film has a particular Irish resonance to it, specifically when Louise Brooks' character Thymian haven fallen pregnant, is packed off to a correctional institution for "wayward" women, very much like the thousands of women that were banished to the Magdalene Laundries here in Ireland. It's ironic then that Pabst's film was most likely not seen in Ireland, had Diary and indeed Pandora's Box played here, censor interference would have left both films incomprehensible. Seeing it again today, it remains a remarkable film, it's tough and downbeat yet powerfully erotic and the film features a trio of striking looking villains - the vampiric Lang regular Fritz Rasp, Valeska Gert whose jerky mechanical moments anticipate Elsa Lanchester's Bride, and the towering dome-headed Andrews Engelmann who might have had a terrific career at Universal's Horror unit had he headed west...

Taxi Zum Klo

Since returning from Berlin, I've been revisiting the city through my film collection and last night I managed to steal some time to watch Frank Ripploh's 1980 film Taxi Zum Klo, a terrific, bittersweet and riotously explicit look at gay life in West Berlin. Young gay Londoners must have thought Berlin a tremendous open city when the film was seen on the club circuit in 1981 (in and around the same time as Christiane F. no less). At least Frank Ripploh's schoolteacher gets laid with much more ease and less frustration than Ken Robertson in Nighthawks, and watching the film again last night, I hadn't realized the many interesting parallels between Taxi Zum Klo and Nighthawks - the nocturnal neon ambiance of both films' respective cities, the minimal electronic scores, and the two lead characters sharing the same profession, and both lifting the lid on their lives in the classroom. Ripploh turns in one of the most committed and fearless performances on film (he's no Bobby Kendall that's for sure) and the film is often very witty - when a horny Ripploh goes cruising in the Tiergarten, a very erect looking Victory Column looms in the background. Incidentally, I couldn't resist grabbing the frame capture below, taken from the excellent Peccadillo DVD, of Bernd Broaderu and Frank Ripploh's first encounter before a poster for The Crazies of all things !

Night Of The Succubus

Just watched Night Of The Succubus... No, not a cheap re-titling of Jess Franco's 1968 film but a 40min film documenting a noisy and chaotic Factrix and Monte Cazzaza performance in San Francisco in 1981. Night Of The Succubus might be best described as a cross between Recording Heathen Earth and Sogo Ishii's Halber Mensch, complete with tape glitches, Super8 footage, random inserts (Manson, Sharon Tate naturally), and an appearance by one of Mark Pauline's bio-mechanical bastards (pictured below), summarily eviscerated and later bludgeoned by a freaked-out audience member wielding a folding-chair. The music is fantastic of course, Factrix' corrugated improv-noise anticipates The Dead C by several years and Monte Cazzaza brings along his collection of creepy tape loop cut-ups (one of which would feature predominantly on Psychic TV's Themes 2 album). Incidentally, I thought I spotted Tuxedomoon's Winston Tong milling around in the background, but I'm not so sure, the Tuxedos had probably relocated to Belgium by the time the film was shot. Night Of The Succubus is available as a supplemental DVD to the essential Factrix/Monte Cazzaza CD California Babylon. Industrial cabaret of the highest order.

Berlin Atonal

Berlin has not relinquished its grip on me just yet, I’m currently listening to Throbbing Gristle’s two consecutive nights at the SO36 Club in November 1980. Both concerts were heavily bootlegged over the years, most famously by the German Zensor label as the Funeral In Berlin LP featuring Val Denham’s great sleeve artwork. This was another album I was checking for among Berlin’s vinyl dealers but no luck. Of the two nights at the SO36, the November 8th show is the best and remains one of TG’s last great concerts, highly visceral and full of great invention with definitive readings of An Old Man Smiled, Something Came Over Me, and Discipline which I believe had its first performance on this night. The second appearance at the SO36 is less vital, the performance sounds frustrated and lacking focus but as on all TG nights there are moments of terrific psychick magick. Perhaps the group’s energy had been spent sightseeing in the dreary weather seen in the pics of TG at the Berlin Wall. The fantastic picture below is from one of the SO36 nights, courtesy of Richard Gleim and shared by the TG FB group.

Berlin IV - At the Wall / Holocaust Memorial

No trip to Berlin is complete without a visit to the Wall, and here is the longest surviving section of the outer wall at Niederkirchnerstrasse, adjacent to the Topography of Terror museum. The Wall itself is tattooed with fading graffiti and is pockmarked throughout, with some parts of the wall more distressed than others. In some places the granite has been chipped away to expose the steel cables, while other sections of the Wall have holes big enough to stick your head through. Running the expanse of the Wall as part of the Topography of Terror museum is an excellent outdoor photo exhibition detailing the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It's quite a powerful experience to stand before the Wall and read about Nazi crimes and I was particularly moved by a photo of a frightened young girl named Hildegard Martins who suffered from epilepsy and was murdered under the Euthanasia program. Standing there at the photo exhibition there's a particular charge knowing that the site was once a much feared Gestapo headquarters. The building was blown to bits during the war but the walls of the cellars which functioned as torture chambers remain intact...

*****

The following two photos are from part of the Topography of Terror museum which runs parallel to the wall on a lover lever

A striking poster directing residents to quench their lights during Allied aerial bombing raids. The caption: Der Feind sieht dein Licht - Verdunkeln! translates as The enemy sees your light - black out!

Six-year old Hildegard Martins who suffered from epilepsy was diagnosed with "idiocy" and murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. It's almost impossible to grasp the full extent of the Nazi murder machine but looking at this picture of Hildegard, a frightened little girl whose life was so callously rubbed out, the horror of it all becomes extraordinarily vivid and shocking.

*****

From the Wall, it was onward to the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate... From the sidewalk, the Memorial looks like rows of 2001-style monoliths lying flat but once inside the grid, the floor under your feet dips and the concrete slabs or stelae suddenly grow tall. It's a disorientating effect but the Memorial's abstract design is powerful without being sentimental - inside the maze I had that frisson of being lost and separated. The picture taken below is lifted from my wife's collection, Irene's shot of the canyon effect is better balanced than mine and it's worth saying that this was the trickiest photograph of the weekend to get right as fellow visitors were constantly passing in and out of view...

Berlin III - At Hansa

This unassuming building found on a side street off Potsdamer Platz is none other than Hansa Studios or Hansa By the Wall, the legendary studio that is home to some of my favourite albums. Bowie recorded parts of Low, the entire "Heroes" album and the Baal EP here, Tangerine Dream cut Force Majeure, a faulty Hansa mixing desk resulting in the famous bass distortion effect on Thru Metamorphic Rock, Einstürzende Neubauten made a racket with Halber Mensch, Nick Cave recorded the Mutiny EP with The Birthday Party and later returned with the Bad Seeds, and Depeche Mode mixed the great trio of albums Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration at the Hansa. The building's facade has remained largely the same as when Bowie recorded here but the neighborhood no longer has that grim Cold War atmosphere that fed into the writing of "Heroes", and that view of the illicit rendezvous Bowie saw Tony Visconti make with a German girl standing by the Wall is now gone. Studio tours are available but require advance booking, unfortunately I only got as far as the door...

Berlin II - At Mauerpark flea market

Meeting some Berlin Residents (via San Francisco) at the Mauerpark flea market this afternoon... The majority of shops in the city, from huge department stores to small boutiques are closed on Sundays so Berliners head to the dozen or so flea markets dotted around the city. The Mauerpark market had plenty of vintage vinyl dealers (and not a CD in sight at any of them) but prices were very much in tune with what you might pay on say Discogs. If the term Krautrock is now considered rather derogatory, the dealers at Mauerpark had no such concern, every stall I visited had prominently named "Krautrock" sections, with lots of Tangerine Dream, Can, Birth Control, Guru Guru, Agitation Free, La Düsseldorf, and endless copies of the German Rock Scene compilation series. I was reaching for my wallet after finding copies of the ever elusive Kraftwerk 1 and 2 and Ralf and Florian but on closer inspection these were not the original Philips issues but very good facsimiles pressed in more recent times. Sadly, the one thing I was was prepared to hand over the cash for, a copy of Bowie's Helden 7" (with picture sleeve) was not to be found...

Berlin I - At the Victory Column

Today’s entry comes from Berlin, and we’ve spent a wonderful day strolling around the city taking in the sights. This afternoon, we left the teeming masses (and a jubilant wedding party) swarming around the Brandenburg Gate and made a pilgrimage to the Victory Column, which might be better known as the monument where Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander hang out in Wings of Desire, perched on the shoulder of Goldelse. The column sits on an island amid swirling traffic but is accessible by four tunnels. After paying the €3 entry fee, we made the trek to the top of the column which spans 285 steps, via a narrow winding staircase. The views from the top are spectacular but the climb is best recommended for folks who are physically fit. Still there are seats along the way to catch your breath so it’s entirely do-able at a leisurely pace. Incidentally the walk down to the Victory Column is rather splendid, the majestic wide tree-lined avenue takes about 20mins at a nice pace and I could imagine Kraftwerk’s side-long Autobahn would make a most satisfactory companion.

One quick note on this picture, which is a little self-consciously arty. I’m rather fond of photographing things with the sun behind them such is my love for Monique Froese’s photograph that adorns the cover of Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet album, so I couldn’t resist grabbing this one!

Rembrandt

Below Rembrandt's great painting The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild... The Dutch master's 1662 painting has been on my mind this week after I made a slightly embarrassing slip-up at the weekend. I was leaving a car inspection center and unwittingly stepped into a staff canteen rather than taking the adjacent exit door. As I popped my head in the door a gang of mechanics attending to their morning coffee looked at me with bewilderment before I made my apologies and a beeline for door number two. Thinking about the blunder afterwards, Rembrandt's painting came to mind with its suggestion that some interloper has intruded upon a meeting of a Clothmakers Guild. I love the dynamism of the painting, the figure, third from left, seated at the table with his hand open as if to demand an explanation for the intrusion, and more dramatic still, the gentleman second from left who appears to be getting up perhaps to eject the unwanted visitor. I was lucky enough to see this wonderful (and large) painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago, and if you're in town I'd highly recommend spending an afternoon browsing the museum's Rembrandts, but failing that Wikipedia has a very good collection with some impressively large scans including The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild

The Well-Tuned Piano

Listening to the first hour of La Monte Young’s magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano - four hours left to go so my morning’s listening is laid out before me… This is another huge favourite of mine that is crying out for a CD re-issue, although I won’t hold my breath given Young’s disinterest in issuing his work on CD or any other format. Fortunately I have an excellent quality mp3 rip of the album but I miss out on the album’s liner notes and the beautiful cover photo taken at the Lower Manhattan Dream House building draped in Marian Zazeela’s signature magenta lighting and featuring La Monte Young at the piano. The Well-Tuned Piano was last issued on CD way back in 1987 on the Gramavision label, packaged in a 12” box housing the 5 CDs and a large 24-page booklet. Copies of the set are out there but are prohibitively expensive to buy and more often than not the boxes are beaten up from shelf ware. The best copy currently for sale on Discogs is going for €746. Just once I’d like to wander into a used record store and find this in the racks of the unsellables for a few quid...

I very much like Marian Zazeela's calligraphy which adorns the front cover of The Well-Tuned Piano. A quick google search has led me to gallery of Marian Zazeela posters designed for Dream House events, and featuring her distinctive and beautiful calligraphic style. I rarely write anything by hand these days apart from the odd bit of paperwork that needs to be filled out so these designs are something to savor. Some examples... and more here

Tuxedomoon revisit Blue Velvet

Winding down my day listening to Blue Velvet Revisited, Tuxedomoon and Cult With No Name's instrumental soundtrack to Peter Braatz's forthcoming documentary on David Lynch's masterpiece. Collaborative albums are often fraught with danger, but the marriage of Tuxedomoon's cinematic moods with Cult With No Name's electronic textures works remarkably well. All this has given me a fierce urge to see Lynch's film again but I've resisted pulling my DVD of the shelf and instead have ordered the US Blu. I'm always slow to upgrade my DVDs but the Blu's 52mins of deleted footage has swung it for me. In the meantime, in lieu of the Blue Velvet Revisited documentary I'm trying to track down the director's earlier study of the film, No Frank in Lumberton. Be sure to catch the trailer for Blue Velvet Revisited here

Twenty-Four Hours

Tape porn courtesy of Industrial Records and the original 24 Hours boxset briefcase from 1980 comprising 24 cassettes of live Throbbing Gristle music plus 2 additional cassettes of the group interviewed for radio (circa 1978 I suspect).

From the Discogs page: "Initially offered for £77 for the UK, £80 for Europe and £82 for the rest of the world. By the time of the 1980/81 mail order catalog, each set retailed for £88 (for UK and Europe) or £99 for the rest of the world (postage paid)"

In January 2015, a complete set with the inserts and signed ephemera sold on eBay for £1,131.00 (+£48.80 p&p)...