Piper at the Gates of Dawn

“Jennifer Gentle you're a witch. You're the left side, He’s the right side. Oh, no!”

I’ve been listening to Piper at the Gates of Dawn this evening, rotating the mono and stereo mixes, packaged together for the album's 40th anniversary, and despite the general consensus by Pink Floyd fans that the mono mix is superior, I find the stereo far more satisfying; the separation between instruments lends the album a scale and grandeur the mono lacks (Flaming, the best song on the album feels like black and white in the mono version to the stereo’s Technicolor), and there’s a greater depth to the “little instruments” scattered throughout the album. Still, there are moments when the mono mix surges ahead - Rick Wright’s organ is far more present on the mono Interstellar Overdrive, and there’s far more bite and attack to Syd Barrett’s guitar and Nick Mason’s drums. On my second pass of the mono version, I actually turned the volume up past my own comfort level, and the album felt genuinely abrasive, perhaps an approximation of what the band sounded like when it was playing small club dates at deafening levels. Listening to the album again this evening, the level of invention for a debut is outrageous and there’s the excitement of hearing a new language being forged (which found its greatest expression in the German avant-rock bands that followed). I’m not sure if Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a better record than Sgt. Pepper, probably not - The Scarecrow and Bike are too whimsical for their own good, but either way, stereo or mono, it’s an astonishing album...

Dario and David

David Bowie and Dario Argento photographed for the May 1995 issue of Italian culture magazine Sette... This momentous meeting of two great icons took place in London during promotion tours for the Outside album and The Stendhal Syndrome. I don't have my 3 or 4 Bowie biographies at hand right now, but I don't recall Argento earning a mention in any of them, so I wonder will this great summit (and indeed Bowie and Argento's first meeting over in Berlin in 1978 at a dinner with Fassbinder) feature in the forthcoming English-language edition of Argento's 2014 autobiography Paura ? I was initially tempted to pre-order the book when it was first announced, but I've read a few awkwardly translated Italian reviews of the book and they suggest there's nothing terribly revelatory for seasoned Argento scholars. We'll wait and see...

The Dead Pit (1989, dir. Brett Leonard)

That sinking feeling when a film favourite from the past no longer cuts it... Not that it was ever a favourite even when I first saw this on VHS back in the early 90's, but I did once have great affection for Brett Leonard's 1989 debut The Dead Pit. I decided to revisit the film at the weekend courtesy of Code Red's 2008 DVD. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour when it finally went on (well after midnight, never a good time), but I found the film a bit of a slog to get thru, at 100mins, it's far too long, and despite some enthusiastic gore (including a brain-tweeking pre-Hannibal lobotomy), the film features some of the most laughably spastic zombies I've seen in a long time, hamming it up to absurd levels. Cheryl Lawson isn't quite up to the task of playing a character in near constant hysteria but at least she looks gorgeous running around in a skimpy vest and cotton panties (?) I've always felt the film had something of a European sensibility, perhaps a dash of Lucio Fulci here, a pinch of Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue there, but on this viewing, the film might be better enjoyed alongside Zombi 3 and After Death. Code Red's DVD badly needs an overhaul as well, the transfer looks just a little too soft in this day and age. It would make a fine addition to Vinegar Syndrome's roster of remastered late 80's Horrors, and perhaps then it might warrant another viewing...

Hills Have Eyes Italian style

Italian poster art at its most visceral courtesy of The Hills Have Eyes (one of two versions created by distributor Titanus)... I've seen many examples of outrageous Italian poster art over the years (one of the posters for Bruno Mattei's 1977 Nazi exploiter SS Girls is jaw droppingly sleazy) but this poster recently caught my attention for its sheer brutality. I've yet to discover the artist responsible, but it's interesting to see the different approach Titanus was taking in selling the film to Italian audiences, as if it were a Western about a family travelling in a covered wagon who are set upon by marauding cutthroats. This is a genuinely disturbing piece of art, you can almost feel the violation of the gun forcibly stuffed into the mouth, and it's worth remembering that it was this scene that the British censors took exception to when the film was classified for video in the latter half of the 80's...

Music of the Spheres

#nowlistening Starting off the morning with one of the finest albums of the 70's, Fripp and Eno's second collaboration, Evening Star. I'm on my second pass of the album now, and I can't help thinking that the perfect music for Al Reinert's film was already put down some 8 years before the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album, with Evening Star's side-long piece An Index of Metals. Listening to Robert Fripp's eerie, elongated guitar lines, it seems the perfect music to accompany the sequences of the Eagle descending to the strange, pot-marked lunar surface...