Not me at all

Reading an old issue of Uncut (#148, Sept 2009) over breakfast this morning and the centerpiece of the issue is an article celebrating The Beatles influence on culture in the form of 69 fascinating and sometimes fanciful factoids. I generally consider Uncut writers to a reliable bunch of scribes, but shame on the usually reliable David Cavanagh for reprinting that old howler that David Bowie recorded a cover of Penny Lane for the cut-price Music For Pleasure label in those hungry pre-fame days. I think I first read about the Penny Lane rumor in Nicholas Pegg’s excellent 2002 Complete David Bowie compendium (found in the Apocrypha section), so clearly Uncut dropped the ball on this one. I was debating on whether to post the offending cover version here - God forbid someone might skim over the post and shrug “Bowie covered Penny Lane ? That’s interesting” and propagate the myth further, but for the sake of completeness, you can listen to it here. David Cavanagh seems to have been thoroughly hoodwinked by this, writing "Note the hilarious out of time trumpet and Bowie's northern accent..." - as you will note, the vocalist, identified by Record Collector's Chris Groom as one Tony Steven, sounds nothing like the Deram-era Bowie. The Penny Lane cover first appeared on the Hits '67, one of those innocuous budget compilations that were designed squarely for the indiscriminate listener and his pitiable portable picnic player (12 Top Hits Superbly Recorded promises the front cover Can you tell the difference between these and the original sounds ?)

Incidentally, the album's entry over at Discogs includes a comment that explodes the myth, which is just as well - a seller is currently offering a copy of the album for the king's ransom of £15...

Alien: Covenant

There’s a scene in Ridley Scott’s latest film where a couple are making out in a shower unaware that the alien creature is closing in for the kill, and watching this scene I had a momentary flashback to those Alien knock-offs that New World put out in the early 80’s – Forbidden World or Galaxy of Terror, take your pick. I can’t recall with certainty if such a scene exists in either of those Roger Corman productions, but that feeling of deja-vu is indicative of the problem of Alien: Covenant – watching the film last night I couldn’t escape the sense that I’d walked this ground many times before. Perhaps it was the side-lining of Giger’s alien for Prometheus that prompted the screenwriters of Covenant to get the series back on track so to speak, and while the face-hugger and xenomorph return in all their slithering, salivating glory, the film is simply content to fall back on familiar plot lines and ideas from the earlier films – lest we think we’re not watching an Alien film this time round. In fact the first hour of the film is essentially a remake of the 1979 film - an awkward and disorientating deux ex machina in the opening reel has the Covenant crew finding their way to the derelict spacecraft, where the film plunges into similar territory mined, unlikely as it seems by David Fincher’s much maligned sequel, while the climax, shamelessly lifts Ripley’s rescue from the infernal processing station in Aliens. Even the power loader makes a cameo of sorts. Ultimately the film feels like a disposable greatest hits package, or at one point, greatest misses - the first appearance of Michael Fassbender’s mad scientist David, draped in a monastic cloak put in mind Vincent Ward’s rejected concept for Alien 3. Perhaps most disappointing though is how underwhelming the visuals are. I made a rare excursion to the cinema to see the film (I regretted not seeing Prometheus on as large a screen as possible) but there’s little touch of the epic that made the preceding film so enjoyable, flawed as it was. Apart from one large impressive Roger Dean-style vista, the landscapes are surprisingly non-descript. One final note – the film has a sting in the tail that sets up yet another sequel, but if you know your Star Trek The Next Generation, and the S1 ep Datalore, you’ll have figured it out long before the denouement is revealed...

Bless the rains down on Arrakis

Listening to the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune and musing on Toto’s unlikely involvement with the film. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a satisfactory explanation how Toto got this gig, although the group’s chief songwriter David Paich suggests in the liner notes penned for the 1997 PEG Recordings edition of the soundtrack (which contains only Toto music), that he essentially auditioned for the scoring job when he visited David Lynch in Mexico and handed him a demo tape of proposed music, the deal finally sealed over a mutual love of Shostakovich’s 11th symphony. I had a plan to listen to some of Toto’s early albums in preparation for this post, but I balked at the idea of listening to anything cut from the same cloth as Rosanna or Africa. And yet, the music Toto wrote and recorded with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra is frequently stunning, far removed from the slick, soft rock the group is largely known for, from epic brooding orchestral passages to short synth driven numbers, and quiet introspective atmospheres, which mesh very nicely with Brian Eno’s Prophecy Theme, an excellent leftover from the Apollo albums sessions which I believe is not available elsewhere. It’s interesting to note that Toto never worked in the soundtrack field again and I wonder was it due to the critical mauling the film received ? Listening to the Dune Desert Theme, which could easily fit the heroics of Top Gun, the group might well have had a second day job á la Tangerine Dream…

The Art of American Unease

The fact-of-the-day on my desk calendar informs me that on this in 1869, the First US transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory, Utah, and it's reminded me of a favorite piece of artwork from my DVD collection - the Masters of Cinema edition of John Ford's Silent masterpiece The Iron Horse, which re-stages the driving of the "golden spike" that joined the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States, connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. The beautiful Masters of Cinema sleeve modeled on one of the original Fox film posters from 1924, depicts an Indian warrior perched on a cliff top gazing at a locomotive journeying through the valley below.

What I find interesting about this artwork is how the meaning has changed over the years. In the film the sympathies of Ford and his screenwriters lie squarely on the side of the railroad workers who come under frequent attack throughout by marauding tribes of Indians, and the artist of the poster captures well the sense of action and spectacle - within the context of the film the Indian Warrior in the picture could well be a lone scout, part of a war party preparing to ambush the locomotive and claim its spoils (such a raid is seen in one sequence in The Iron Horse). But when I look at the image through the long lens of history, to me it suggests something more disquieting - the arrival of the railroad not just as an instrument of progress, growth and expansion, but rather an unstoppable force of displacement and destruction. Whether the Indian warrior depicted in the sleeve is aware of the unconquerable power of the railroad is uncertain - at one point in The Iron Horse, a train driver cheerfully recalls an Indian trying to lasso a locomotive - but his posture, the cautious vantage point, the weapon he's clutching all suggest unease or fear, perhaps he's seeing this iron horse for the first time. Interestingly, Masters of Cinema opted to use one of the more stylized variations on the more well known Fox poster, and with it's psychedelic arrangement of colors, the boiling molten landscape, seems to accentuate this sense of foreboding.

I wonder had the unnamed artist at the Fox art department seen Herman Schuyler's 1880 oil painting The First Train which depicts a similar scene. In this painting three Native Americans observe a train crossing a prairie. At first glance the painting suggests a tranquil pastoral panorama - but the juxtaposition in the picture of the distant train and a swaddling baby reveals something more profound - the beginning of a new generation, but one that would herald a cataclysmic change for the lives of Native Americans. The laying of the Transcontinental Railroad tore up territories Native American tribes had occupied for generations, land that was deemed sacred was seized by the US Army and more and more European settlers headed west depleting buffalo herds and further displacing the indigenous people. In 1883 William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army of the United States, reflecting on the problem of Native American insurrection wrote that the completion of the railroad “has settled forever the Indian question".

Star Wars Holiday Special

So today is Star Wars Day for no good reason (May the Fourth be with you, groan) but happily I'm reminded of the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, truly one of the most embarrassing moments in SW history. Lucasfilm has effectively banished this to a galaxy far far away but youtube as ever comes to the rescue. A word of caution - if you're allergic to Wookies, the Holiday Special might send you into anaphylactic shock. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been The Star Wars Halloween Special what with the grotesque looking grandfather Wookie, and the scene where an Imperial troopers smashes up Chewbaca's kids' toys which might disturb sensitive younger viewers. And the constant braying from Chewbaca's family is genuinely distressing. Still it's not all bad - look out for a nice bit of intergalactic sleaze when the grandfather Wookie enjoys some virtual reality R&R - the intergalactic babe in the program offers: "I am your fantasy, your experience, so experience me". Fans of Star Trek: The Animated Series will enjoy a very 70's animated segment starring Boba Fett, there's a song from a fully stocked creature-factory Cantina, and a bizarre instructional video with lots of Max Headroom style video ef-ef-ef-effects. Odd. This is the sharp edge of exploitation and CBS who probably couldn't see past the advertisers lining up for airtime like audiences lined up around the block for the film, got what they deserved. I'd like to think that Lucas learned something valuable after whoring out his creative vision to people who didn't care or understand, but I remember being deeply disappointed when I saw The Ewok Adventure in the mid-80's, something I would consider another Star Wars mishap. And now that the Holiday Special is back in unofficial circulation, I must assume it is persona non grata among staff at Lucasfilm. Someday we will see the return of the original versions of Star Wars I've no doubt, but I'm positive this one will forever languish at the bottom of the Death Star's trash compactor.

Mona Lisa

“Sometimes they fall for what they think I am” - Cathy Tyson offers a word of caution to Bob Hoskins which sadly falls on deaf ears… I treated myself to a screening of Mona Lisa this weekend and what a fantastic job the Arrow production team have done on the Blu-Ray edition, the film is a dazzling sight for sore eyes after so many tired-looking home video editions. Seeing the film again after an absence of a good few years, I can safely it’s Neil Jordan’s finest work (alongside End of the Affair), although I found myself irritated by the scenes with Robbie Coltrane (which regularly bring the film to a halt), and I think the film might have been more satisfying had it ended on Brighton pier. I suspect Hoskins’ character is so endearing that Jordan and David Leland just about get away with what is a gratuitous happy ending. I imagine Neil Jordan became thoroughly sick of the Taxi Driver comparisons, but one can’t help but think he invites them at certain points in the film – one scene even has the camera bolted to the bonnet of the car during one of Hoskins' nocturnal tours of the city’s underbelly. Still, the film is warmer and kinder than Taxi Driver and while not a superior picture to the Scorsese, it’s more inviting, perhaps even more watchable. I don’t know what those mean streets of London looked in the mid-80’s but I must assume Jordan went for a stylized view of the city – at one point I thought of Satyricon, as shadowy figures huddled beneath an underpass, momentarily illuminated by flickering fires. And there’s a pleasing intersection of Hoskins’ character George with his Long Good Friday counterpart Harold Shand when George expresses his disgust for the multi-racial neighborhood, much like the scene where Shand pays a visit to Erroll the grass…