A Dismal Orb

It's not terribly obvious from the picture below, but I was sad to discover my copy of The Orb's Live 93 CD has succumbed to disc rot. This was not entirely surprising, considering the CD matrix bears the dreaded "Made In UK BY PDO" etching. It was discovered in the mid-90's that CDs manufactured largely between 1988 and 1992 at the Philips and Dupont Optical (PDO) plant in Blackburn (“4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire!") were beginning to exhibit discoloration on the playing side of the CD due to, and I'm quoting Wiki here, "lacquer used to coat the discs was not resistant to the sulfur content of the paper in the booklets, which led to the corrosion of the aluminum layer of the disc " I had seen the telltale signs on the Orb CD a few years ago but inspecting the CD yesterday, the rot had spread right around the edge of the disc and caused skips, splutters and drop outs on playback. No big deal, I simply bought a later repressing of the album yesterday, but I'm looking now at other discs of mine known to be affected – two Warp CDs - first pressings of Autechre's Incunabula and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol 2. Happily, neither discs show any signs of deterioration, and both can be replaced easily enough. The one I'm most worried about is my copy of Coil's Unnatural History, which is not so easy to replace but luckily, the disc is so far unblemished. But considering the amount of optical discs I own, CD, DVD, BR it was a sobering moment to discover the Orb disc is no longer playable…

Fakes and Fakery (Marlon Brando and Films and Filming magazine)

A follow-on to my previous post about the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon... I was amused to see this murky, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Brando appearing on an issue of the long running English film magazine, Films and Filming. I've been a collector of the magazine for many years now, and I can say with absolute certainty that this particular magazine cover was mocked up for the documentary - no great crime in that but I'll take some satisfaction in calling it out. For the record, Brando made the cover of Films and Filming six times, most significantly he graced the inaugural October 1954 issue with On the Waterfront and made further appearances with the January 1956 issue (Guys and Dolls), March 1957 (The Teahouse of the August Moon), March 1958 (The Young Lions), December 1962 (Mutiny on the Bounty), and then perhaps as a sign of his decline, sat out most of the sixties until his last cover appearance on the September 1972 issue with The Godfather...

Listening to you Marlon

I watched the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon at the weekend, and thought it a fascinating, absorbing piece of work, and quite a refreshing departure from the usual talking-heads biographical format. I’ve read two chunky Brando biographies over the years – Peter Manso’s 1994 book, and more recently William Mann’s 2019 biography, so there were no great revelations along the way, but I was surprised to hear Brando’s vexed comments about Francis Ford Coppola in the wake of Apocalypse Now: “Francis Coppola, he's a prick, a card-carrying prick, the cocksucker, how could he do that to me ? I saved his fucking ass, and he showed his appreciation by dumping on me". One deficiency of the documentary is the lack of onscreen dates for the snippets of audio heard in the film, and I wonder when Brando recorded those comments ? I suspect it might have been when Brando was working on his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, published in 1994, some three years after the release of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness which revealed the full extent of Coppola’s struggles to get Apocalypse Now made, and presented Brando as a sort of brilliant but wayward force of nature that Coppola had to valiantly wrestle with to complete the film. One could hardly blame Brando for feeling so raw about it.

Interesting too to hear Brando say he re-wrote “the entire script” which sounds on the face of it rather fanciful but according to Peter Cowie’s 2000 book on the film, Coppola was having discussions with Brando about the film as early as February 1976, just a month or so before filming began in the Philippines. Like so many great films, the precise authorship of Apocalypse Now is perhaps unknowable, but if I had to choose a side, based on everything I’ve read about the film over the years, I’d credit the bones of the film to Coppola and John Milus, with Brando’s contributions confined to shaping the Kurtz character. Still, it’s pleasing to note that Brando’s first appearance (if you could call it that) in Apocalypse Now is as a voice on a tape recorder…