Once Upon A Time...

I caught some discussion on Facebook yesterday about the paintings of Roger Dean, the great English fantasist, and it jogged a memory of a West German Lou Reed/Velvet Underground compilation LP I own which features the kind of sci-fi artwork that would be better suited to a prog rock outfit. I first thought the sub-aquatic adventure pictured below might be a Dean painting but on closer inspection it falls a little short. Unfortunately no artist is credited on the album sleeve but opening the gatefold, it seems the album was part of a Polydor compilation series called appropriately enough, Once Upon A Time which also included Cream, The Who, Eric Burdon & The Animals and James Brown, all packaged with similarly fantastic artwork showcasing surreal and primordial landscapes. It's not terribly visible in the blow-up of the gatefold sleeve, but the James Brown edition of the series must rank as the strangest covers design ever to grace a James Brown album. Despite the obvious fantastic flavor, the unknown artist gave this a sly political bent, with the image of a black panther stalking an urban landscape...

Front cover

Inside gatefold - James Brown edition second row, far left

Bowie RCA

The forthcoming Bowie boxset Who Can I Be Now 1974-1976 (due September) has me obsessing over album mixes again and I’m reminded of an excellent blog post which details the production of RCA’s CD series in 1984/5. Bowie’s RCA CDs are highly coveted these days, despite their 30 year vintage, the general consensus among audiophiles is that the RCA discs remain superior to the subsequent Rykodisc and EMI re-issues and best reflect the sound of the original LPs. The Steve Hoffman audiophile forums has many discussions on the merits of the RCA CDs, and while I don't indulge in the kind of obsessive compulsive nit-picking of that forum, I can say that I hated the Tony Visconti mix of the Ziggy Stardust Motion Picture album, I remember being quite appalled by the 2010 30th anniversary edition of the album, which simply sounded wrong. And the All Saints (Collected Instrumentals 1977-1999) album is marred by a particularly horrible sounding Subterraneans. The RCA CDs do not come cheap though – a NM copy of Aladdin Sane, purportedly the finest sounding of the RCA discs will cost you the equivalent of the Five Years boxset…

The majority of my Bowie CDs are the old Rykodisc issues from the early 90's, so I was curious to see what's emerged since... I see one of more recent CD re-issues of Space Oddity has had the George Underwood painting Depth of a Circle which first appeared on the original 1969 Philips album (when it was simply titled David Bowie) restored - it wasn't included in previous issues (at least it's not part of my Rykodisc CD), but it's nice to have it back in again, as it forges an interesting link between Space Oddity (the song) and Ashes to Ashes (the video). Look to the left hand side of the Underwood artwork, there is an illustration of a Pierrot type figure walking, presumably, with his mother, a la the coda of the Ashes to Ashes video...

Einstein on the Beach

Listening to Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach to mark the 40th anniversary of the opera’s premiere which took place on July 25, 1976 at the Avignon Festival in France. I’m disappointed the four and a half hour performance filmed in 2012 at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris has yet to find its way to Blu-Ray. This record of the opera, the only time it’s been filmed, was available to view online at one point but has since been taken down. (There’s a 4.77 GiB pirate copy doing the rounds but it’s a little too much data for my limited set-up). Brilliant as Glass’ music is, Einstein on the Beach would be best appreciated accompanied by Robert Wilson’s visuals - I’m currently on the second disc of the 3CD Nonesuch edition (the pic below of the 1978 4LP Tomato edition is window dressing only), and it is admittedly a demanding work. In the absence of the Theatre du Chatelet film, the 1985 documentary Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Face of Opera is still the best place to get an idea of Wilson’s large Metropolis-like sets and innovative lighting. This excellent hour-long film can be viewed here:

Live Suicide

I've been contemplating Suicide these past few days, re-visiting the first two albums, and the real job of work, the mammoth 2008 boxset Live 1977-1978 which features 13 complete live shows spread across 6 discs. A bruising year in the life of Suicide, the concerts, taped in NYC and various cities across Europe (supporting Elvis Costello and The Clash), include 23 Minutes Over Brussels, the iconic show which ended in complete disarray - after 23 minutes - when one audience member grabbed the microphone from Alan Vega while the crowd chanted Elvis! Elvis! Elvis! The Brussels concert is the only performance that ends with an ambush but the mood is confrontational throughout these sets, with much of the hostility frequently directed at the audience. "C'mon, I'll kill you, you fuck" screams Vega at some pissed up punks demanding three chord thrash at a show in Paris. At a show in Germany, he calls the crowd "a good bunch of Nazis". What's most revelatory about this collection though is the music which is tremendous despite the abysmal lo-fi sound quality. Suicide played the same set on most nights but no song was ever performed quite the same way, and there are thrilling renditions of Frankie Teardrop and astonishing throat-shredding Harlem's. Incidentally, at these shows Vega frequently introduces Suicide's cover of 96 Tears with a certain offensive racial slur, which been bleeped out for the boxset, at the request of Vega himself, according to the accompanying liner notes.

Blast First have lavish considerable love on these recordings, with the six CDs housed in a sturdy clamshell box and accompanied by an excellent 40 page booklet containing liner notes and all sorts of ephemera, including a reproduction of the group’s memorable cover appearance on a 1978 issue of Time Out magazine…

Incidentally, I was reading issue 156 of The Wire (February 1997) recently, and chanced upon a review of an Alan Vega album, and in the piece, Edwin Pouncey recalled seeing Vega (or perhaps Suicide, it's not clear) supporting the horrible Pop Will Eat Itself, and Vega getting pelted by a hostile crowd - so hostile in fact that, one audience member broke a window in a toilet and hurled a large piece of glass at Vega who carried on the set unfazed. I've tried to corroborate this account by the usually reliable Pouncey but so far I haven't come across any evidence that Vega or Suicide crossed paths with the Pop Will Eat Itself non-entities...

Throbbing Gristle at the AIR Gallery

Listening to Throbbing Gristle's live debut which took place 40 years ago today... On the 6th of July, three months before the group's official launch at the "Prostitution" show at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti performed for the first time as Throbbing Gristle at the AIR Gallery on Shaftesbury Avenue. The AIR Gallery itself is worthy of a mention. Located near St Martins College Of Art and the Slade, the AIR (which stood for Artists Information Register) was a space for new artists to display their work, the gallery positively encouraged artists "whose work breaches traditional boundaries". Prior to TG's performance, Cosey Fanni Tutti performed a highly visceral solo COUM action entitled Woman's Roll. The group's debut was witnessed by about 30 people although witness may not be the correct term as TG performed in one room, with the sound relayed to an adjacent room where the audience was gathered.

As for the music itself, the AIR Gallery concert is one of the group's most minimalist sets, an entirely instrumental 38mins of dark brooding, low end bass-guitar noise, sheets of distorted electronics, heavily amplified plucked violin strings, and layered throughout with pre-recorded tapes of chugging rhythms and eerie synth lines. The quality of the official recording is murky (reminiscent of bootlegged Les Rallizes Dénudés shows), the cassette recorder sounds far removed from the source which may well be an accurate facsimile of what the audience experienced. Incidentally, 8min or so of the AIR Gallery show was included as part of the Best of...Vol 1 tape and much later, a lengthy and significantly cleaner sounding excerpt from the performance, appropriately titled Raw Mode of Life, was included on the unofficial 1997 Dossier CD release Kreme Horn.

Psycho a Go-Go

Currently reading Robert Bloch's Psycho novels as part of my Hitchcock season… Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho is pretty much business as usual, the film stick so closely to the original text that apocryphal stories of Hitchcock buying up paperback copies of the novel might well be believed. Unfortunately Bloch’s writing is rather pedestrian and has little of the black comedy of Joseph Stefano’s screenplay, but there are some interesting details which didn’t make the transition from page to screen such as a peek at Norman Bates’ library which includes girly mags, De Sade’s Justine and surprisingly, an occult bent courtesy of Aleister Crowley and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1891 novel Là-Bas…

Bloch’s novel Psycho II is a far more eventful read, having nothing to do with Richard Franklin’s film. Instead the book begins like a re-thread of Halloween (complete with a guilt-ridden psychiatrist) and mutates however unlikely into something akin to Scream 3, with Norman Bates relocating to Hollywood to terrorize the cast and crew making a film about…Norman Bates. The sequel is a breezy and entertaining read, very much in the yarn-spinning style of Stephen King. What emerges most strongly from the novel though is Bloch’s obvious loathing of slasher movies and what he once referred to as the “bloodbath tactics” of Hollywood - the novel was first published in that epochal year 1982. Interestingly Bloch wrote the director of the fictional Bates biopic as an Italian and I had to wonder if this was a dig at the outrageously violent Italian Horror films that were washing up on American shores at the turn of the decade ?

Dispatches

"...you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' Which wasn't at all true of me. I was there to watch.”

Currently reading the Vietnam War memoir Dispatches to mark the passing of its author Michael Herr who died on June 23rd. The book is filled with extraordinary accounts of life during wartime and I was particularly taken with the passages depicting superstitious combatants. Such was the omnipresent contact with death and injury, soldiers experienced bad vibes everywhere. Air Cav gunners felt the presence of dead soldiers in their choppers, long after the bodies had been airlifted out of combat zones. Even the toughest fighting hombres were easily spooked. One marine nicknamed Day Tripper so disliked the nighttime he would volunteer for the most dangerous day patrols to stay in after dark. Marines carried talismans into battle and stuck close to members of their platoons considered indestructible, soldiers who emerged completely unscathed from the fiercest fighting seem to offer a supernatural protection - one marine was awarded this status after he vowed to survive the war and return to Tennessee to kill his unfaithful wife. When Herr penned the narration for Apocalypse Now, he included this line about Colonel Kilgore: "He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here."

Throughout Michael Herr’s memoir there are scenes and dialogue that would later re-appear in Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. One interesting passage had me thinking not of Vietnam films but of Joe Dante's 1978 film Piranha…

"Once I met a colonel," writes Herr, "who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death." 

I had to wonder if this eccentric notion had found its way into Richard Robinson's original story or John Sayles successive drafts ? Dispatches was first published in 1977 so the timing is perhaps too tight. I don't own a copy of Piranha on DVD, but does anyone know if the story's Vietnam angle is mentioned on the DVD supplements ? Incidentally, in 1965 US Marines and South Vietnamese forces launched Operation Piranha, which had nothing to do with killer fish but worth noting for the sake of full disclosure...

Scientist Wins The World Cup

I’m not a sports guy at all but I can appreciate a momentous win when I see one, and Ireland’s triumphant advancement to the knock-out stages of Euro 2016 has inspired this morning’s listening - one of Dub’s greatest engineers, Scientist and his 1982 collection Scientist Wins The World Cup - “Ten dangerous matches played by The Roots Radics Squad with Referee Junjo. Rhythm tracks laid at Channel One. Mixed at King Tubby's by Scientist”. First half kicks off here. I love the LP artwork by the Greensleeves label’s in-house designer and Oldham Athletic fan Tony McDermott, which has, in the best tradition of the Roy of the Rovers annual, the Jamaican team beating England 6-0. A nice blow-up of the artwork can be viewed here. Tony McDermott sounds like he has a bit of Irish in him somewhere, I wonder is he available for a kick-around on Sunday ?

The Lost Voice of Anny Ondra

One more Hitchcock post for today… A short screen test shot during the production of Blackmail featuring Hitch and actress Anny Ondra speaking with her own voice. Ondra’s Teutonic tones were the first casualty of talking pictures, when Blackmail was reconfigured for sound, Ondra who plays the daughter of a Cockney newsagent, was re-voiced by an actress standing offscreen. Ondra’s lip movements are actually quite synchronous with the disembodied voice although her pantomime gestures don’t quite gel. Anny Ondra appeared in two Hitchcock pictures – before Blackmail, she appeared as a sultry temptress in The Manxman, and should be considered Hitchcock’s first great blonde. Her brief stint in English Cinema ended with the demise of Silent pictures but she continued to appear in European productions up to the mid-40’s. Glancing at her filmography I see she made a film in 1928 called Suzy Saxophone, a great film title and one that would not sound out of place as a sexy female spy caper as directed by Jess Franco.

Early Hitchcock

I finished off the first stage of my Hitchcock season yesterday evening with the completion of Studio Canal’s 2007 Early Hitchcock Collection boxset which contains 9 films made between 1927 and 1932, a whirlwind period of activity which saw Hitchcock make the transition from Silent to Sound and direct some of his most uncharacteristic films. Among them the genuinely bizarre and delightful 1931 sound film Rich and Strange (pictured below), a picaresque tale about a bored married couple who take a sea voyage from Marseilles to Singapore and encounter exotic strangers, Chinese pirates, and cat stew. What’s more, the film includes ill-matched stock footage, jolting jump cuts, and witty intertitles (Jean-Luc Godard was probably an admirer).

The Studio Canal set has some omissions from this 5 year run of films - the 1928 Silent, Easy Virtue, the 1931 German language version of Murder! (re-titled Mary), and 1929’s Juno and the Paycock, a very early sound adaptation of Sean O'Casey's great Dublin play. I’m particularly interested in seeing Juno and the Paycock, not the most fondly regarded film of the director’s British years, but the long takes that Hitchcock devised for his run of play adaptations makes the film as near a record of what the play might have been like on the Abbey stage in the mid-twenties. There’s several public domain DVDs to choose from but all reports suggest the film looks and sounds like it was taken from a ragged 16mm print. The next Hitchcock on the list is the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, where the Master finds his mojo…