It was sometime in 1984 when The Velvet Underground first made a notable impression upon me. I had probably heard the odd song here and there before, but was mostly familiar with Lou Reed as a solo artist for his song, Walk On the Wild Side, which had featured in the "punk" movie soundtrack of the film, Times Square (1980). Other than that, I didn't know a hell of a lot about the group. I just recall one summer Sunday morning, after a long night of warehouse partying when the last dregs of us were lounging around the space that the song, Sunday Morning, came on and it was such a perfect expression of the moment that it burned the groups essence into my mind and I started to look more closely at them and what they had achieved.
I didn't actually get a copy of The Velvet Underground and Nico album (on CD) until sometime in the early 1990s, but I would become very familiar with it from copies owned by various friends and acquaintances. I'd also become well aware of the scene around the group at the time of its creation; the Factory crowd, Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia live extravaganzas and the auteur of the scene, Andy Warhol. It was all a big influence on us in the mid 1980s as we were looking to create our own little version of it in Vancouver, occupying disused warehouse spaces and filling them with mind altered denizens of the night, dancing to strange electronic sounds amid whatever setting we could manage to concoct with no money and scraps of whatever.
It was another case where I understood that the revolution in music and art we were seeing in our times was inspired and influenced by something from the past and that it wasn't all happening in a vacuum. The sounds the VU managed to create became massively influential to the most extreme examples of new music we were seeing from our generation. When you understood the connections and heard the linkages, you could appreciate the continuity of culture being expressed through the decades that separated these artists.
Learning about the VU also put their era in a completely new light. Having lived through it, albeit as a child who was only impressed upon by virtue of the media of the day, namely the TV, my biggest sense of culture for the late 1960s was often the caricature of hippies which had managed to permeate the popular shows of the day. Even at that, the hippies were much more subversive in their core, and I'm talking about the Merry Prankster branch here, than what was seen on the small screen. But there was another, much darker tangent to those years which remained hidden and obscured until you took the time to brush away the detritus of popular representations and explore below the surface.
In this regard, The Velvet Underground represented the ultimate "hard core" of the most significant artistic influence to emerge from the decade. While groups like The Beatles would have admittedly massive influence on popular culture in the decades to follow, The Velvets would prove to be far more insidious, perverse and persistent in terms of providing a foothold for subversive evolution within the arts. Personally, I continue to consider them "ground zero" for the most original and alienating strands of artistic expression within the realm of experimental and alternative music.
It was the summer of 1992 when my partner and I began cohabiting in my modest one bedroom West End apartment in Vancouver. When he moved in, one of his main contributions to our home was his expansive CD collection, accumulated by virtue of working for a major music retailer. This also facilitated numerous CD gifts thanks to his staff discounts. One of my favorites being the landmark 1959 Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue.
My partner's musical tastes are quite significantly different from mine, but I always appreciated that divergence as it allowed me to discover some music that I'd never have ventured into on my own. The world of jazz is someplace I'd been hesitant to explore, mostly because my conception of it was primarily based on the kinds of flashy, technique driven big band stuff that was often featured on programs like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. That sort of thing simply never appealed to me as it only felt like it was about cramming as many notes into a performance as possible.
I'd seen Miles perform on TV several years earlier when he appeared on an episode of Saturday Night Live. It was a rather baffling performance as he spent most of the time shuffling around the stage like Tim Conway's old man, not playing anything. Occasionally he'd blap out a few notes and then back to the shuffling. I didn't really get it. Listening to Kind of Blue was an eye opener, however, as it clued me into the aesthetic of proper "cool jazz". This was something I could dig because it didn't try to beat me over the head with virtuoso musicianship. It was more focused on creating mood and ambiance. It was an album I could put on and chill with and let it sink in around me. It was elegant and lingered like cigarette smoke in a Film Noir.
It was examples like this that opened my mind up to the reality that jazz was a much larger arena than I had considered and that there were examples within it which jived with my own musical sensibilities, and that they had a lot in common with the improvisational techniques of experimental performers like Throbbing Gristle. When TG used the term "jazz" in their album title, yes, part of it was ironic and tongue-in-cheek, but it was also a very serious statement at the same time that there was common ground here, but in a different form.
This was not the only revelation I'd find in my partner's music collection. There were many other artists I learned to appreciate who I'd never have bothered with if I hadn't had access to this "alternate universe" music collection. Miles Davis was the one that had the most impact in the end. He put in place a principal which guided my musical journeys going forward, that being that musical styles are irrelevant to enjoyment and that any style can hold artists of depth and imagination, regardless of how many other practitioners may seem only superficial and unoriginal.
From 1974 until 1981, legendary singer and actress, Dinah Shore, had a daytime variety talk show called Dinah! One afternoon in1978, while I was home for one reason or another, my mom was watching the show and the musical guest that day was this dashing young Frenchman by the name of Jean Michel Jarre. He was discussing his music and how he made it using all these electronic instruments and then they played a promotional video for one of his compositions from his most recent album, Equinoxe. The piece was Equinoxe Part 5 and was a sweeping instrumental with a driving, pulsing rhythm underpinning some majestic synthesizer swells. The video features various shots of Jarre wandering around while this odd looking graphic character featured on the cover of his album kept popping up. These binocular viewing blue men were positioned in various odd locations and the resulting effect for the video was something rather humorous, though also a bit unsettling.
At the time, I was just starting to get into electronic music and I think I'd just picked up my first Kraftwerk LP. Jarre was a bit different, however, because there was something of a classical leaning to his music. Not too surprising, I suppose, given his father was famous film score composer, Maurice Jarre. There was a more romantic and picturesque quality to Jean Michel's music over the overtly mechanical, robotic vision of Kraftwerk. Equinoxe plays out very much like a film score, seamlessly shifting through each movement, only interrupted by the separation of sides on the album. Otherwise, every piece segues into the next with remarkable precision and fluidity. The album is a journey through an alien electronic landscape, brimming with dynamics which completely belie the assumption that electronic music was incapable of expressing such emotion and dexterity.
Unlike a lot of the music I'm prone to enjoy, this work represents something meticulously crafted and composed rather than the more spontaneous and improvised genres that normally dominate my musical preferences. The proof of this is in the fact that Jarre has replicated it, note for note, in live settings, utilizing the exact equipment employed during its original creation. It's a bit of indulgence which is very familiar to Jarre and to fans of his work. He can be, at times, rather overtly a "showman" with his live presentations, and while this often is a bit much for me, there have been times when his excesses have been constrained enough for me to find certain works endearing and enduring far beyond their genesis. This is one of his best, for my money.
As a child of the 1960s, I was privy to sampling the golden age of easy listening music, courtesy of my parent's record collection. My mom was the primary collector in the house, but my dad had his favorites too and while mom favored the likes of Elvis and Johnny Cash, my dad was more drawn to the exotica realm, sometimes with Polynesian influences, but more often with Latin & Mexican flair. Though this music was well represented in our home, I don't recall any Martin Denny albums on the shelf.
It wasn't until 1984 that I was finally turned on to Denny and his "Exotica" albums. This happened squarely because of my interest in Industrial music, principally that of Throbbing Gristle. TG had been proponents of the work of Denny for some time, playing his music after their live shows and dedicating albums to him as well as doing stunningly convincing parodies of his infamous LP covers. This was a long time before the 1990s revival of the whole genre of "bachelor pad, space-age, exotic & easy listening" music.
Back then, collecting Denny recordings was only doable when you could find them in second hand bins in record shops and thrift stores. Mostly they were in pretty rough shape, so you'd be lucky to find one that wasn't beat up too badly. At first, putting them on was a bit of hipster irony to some extent, but we soon dropped the pretense when we noticed how much we were legitimately enjoying this music. There was real innovation going on here and it turned out Genesis was right about there being a kinship in Denny's approach to arrangements with that being pursued by the modern experimental musicians. You could definitely hear the attention to detail in the creation of "ambiance" between the two. Using odd vocal effects was just an early precursor to some of the more extreme sounds eventually used to create atmosphere in the contemporary arena.
This music remained something of a cult among the underground for several years until RE/Search publications started putting out their Incredibly Strange Music volumes in the early 1990s. The two books in this series became touchstones as they ventured into the record collections of the artists who were influenced by music on the fringes. The books were directly inspired by the alternative music underground's obsession with the strange. The dissemination of this information then kicked off a massive revival of retro music throughout the remainder of the decade. By the mid 1990s, there were special club nights and nightclubs entirely dedicated to the old "swing" music or exotica or space-age pop. People were dressing up in retro clothes and record companies were reissuing everything they could dig up from their vaults on CD, usually wonderfully remastered from the original tapes.
While the mainstream has moved on from its nostalgia fads of that decade, enough of a support base has remained that we continue to have access to this music in the modern forms of streaming media and digital distribution. The music has returned to its cult status, somewhat, but at least it still survives in our modern media landscape for new generations to discover its charms.
Recorded 50 years ago (May, 1970), The Stooges sophomore LP was not my introduction to Iggy Pop, but it was the album that got me to turn my gaze to the past for challenging music and not just look forward. I'd read about Iggy and his antics in various music magazines like CREEM and Hit Parader a couple of years before I bought any of his records, but it was his 1979 appearance on The Midnight Special that got me ready to pull out my wallet in a record store. I think it was the episode hosted and curated by The Cars where they played two of his latest promo videos for his recently released New Values LP. Both Five Foot One and I'm Bored were aired that night and that was all I needed to become a fan of Mr. Pop.
At the time I bought New Values, my attention and interests were firmly forward facing in terms of looking for new music. I wasn't at all interested in what had come before. The zeitgeist of the times, with "punk" and "new wave", was to blast away the past and focus on the future. That said, when I kept reading references to The Stooges and how they were the "first punk band", my obsessive collector nature kicked in and I decided to roll back the clock 9 years and dip my toe in with The Stooges second album, Fun House. I decided to start there because I wasn't quite ready to abandon the current decade and step into the 1960s with their debut, though that would come to my collection soon enough.
Fun House appealed to me, at least superficially, thanks to the insane looking album cover. Iggy looked like he was on a slide, heading into the bowels of hell. The fiery color pallet and posterized graphic style gave the album a look of intensity and the contents didn't disappoint. Within its grooves was a kind of raw rock & roll which was nastier than any heavy metal, and sleazier than what I'd found to that point within the punk/new wave sphere. This was pretty scary music made by disreputable people who probably did questionable things in seedy places. Definitely not the kind of fellows the parents would invite over for dinner. It was stripped down and bare and edgy and way ahead of its time. It also took chances, like the manic finale freak-out of LA Blues, a song that felt like it left your turntable in ruins.
Once I heard this music, my mind was opened up to the reality that challenging music wasn't only happening in the present, but that there were precedents for it in the past and that it was worthwhile for me to turn at least some of my attention in that direction and understand some of the roots of the music with which I was obsessed. From this vantage point, bands like The Velvet Underground, CAN, Silver Apples and many others became fair game for exploration and helped expand my understanding of the way the past influenced the present. It helped me understand that these new bands I was falling in love with were standing atop some pretty impressive shoulders and those needed to be appreciated as well.
David Bowie first caught my attention in November of 1977 when he appeared on the now legendary final Bing Crosby Christmas special, recorded only weeks before Crosby's passing. Along with singing counterpoint with Bing on Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy, the special also aired the newly released video for Bowie's single, Heroes, from the album of the same name. To say the inclusion of this video in a Christmas special was incongruous and anachronistic would be an understatement. That didn't hurt its appeal to me, however. It only made me pay closer attention and I immediately fell in love with the song.
One would think that would have been all I needed to grab the album, and indeed, I picked it up and pondered it in the record shops over and over, but it wasn't until well over a year later that I finally took the plunge into the world of Bowie with the release of the album, Lodger, in the spring of 1979. While I was just starting to get curious about "new" music in 1977, by 1979 I was fully engulfed in anything that was on the cutting edge and everything about Lodger seemed sharp and ready to slice.
While Bowie's Berlin triptych of Low / "Heroes" / Lodger is now frequently looked upon as the apex period of his career, creatively if not commercially, I find that Lodger is often overlooked among these three and not really given the kind of acknowledgement I believe it deserves. Perhaps this is due to the perversely obtuse sense of violence that underpins so much of the album, from the shocking cover image, where Bowie looks like he's been smashed up against a wall like a squashed bug, to the admonition to "Johnny" in Repetition, "Don't hit her". The album flirts with these kinds of themes throughout.
One of the things that sold me on it was the two videos which were produced for DJ and Boys Keep Swinging, both of which were aired on the NBC late night music program, The Midnight Special. The latter video, in particular, offered up a pretty disturbing yet humorous sort of drag fashion show, decades before drag culture would be embraced by the masses thanks to the likes of RuPaul. In Bowie's hands, the implied violence appears again as each of his three characterizations ends the video by ripping off their wig and smearing their lipstick. It's this sort of edge that pervades the entire album.
But song by song, the album is built out of stones of perfect proportion and purpose without a weak track among them. From start to finish, it races forward with an urgency that leaves you feeling a bit outpaced as it rushes ahead of you. It's music that doesn't wait for the listener to catch up with it and perhaps that's why it's a bit alienating. Regardless of that, it has remained my favorite Bowie album from the day I brought it home and only surprises me all over again every time I listen to it.
It must have been some time in the early 2000s when I was introduced to the music of Bob Log III. Though I'm focusing on his third CD, Log Bomb, for this, mostly because it's got some of my favorite songs, his first three albums hit me pretty much at the same time and I didn't really differentiate them until I'd managed to pick up actual copies for myself. What I found with Bob's music was something I'd been thinking was due for a post-modernist updated for quite some time, the blues.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of the "one man band". Nash the Slash had worked that vein with his one man shows and I loved the idea of someone working it all in one go. Bob struck a decidedly idiosyncratic figure with his motorcycle suit, helmet and old-style telephone receiver fused into his visor and used as a distorted, tinny sounding microphone for singing. Coupled with his manic slide guitar playing, some foot percussion and a cheap drum machine, Bob managed to fill up the sound in a way that had urgency and presence. He had succeeded in bringing the "blues man" into the 21st century in a way that sounded completely modern, but also fully authentic to the source material. So much of what tries to pass itself off as "blues", to my ears, only sounds like a white bread imitation, lacking any true feeling or spirit. It mimics the form without comprehending the feeling. Bob wrote songs that came from someplace more original and more believable. It wasn't just a rehash of broken heart sob stories. He was singing about drunk strippers and ragging hard-ons.
His range could go from sickeningly groovy funkiness to this sort of wild mayhem that made me feel like pounding back hard liquor and busting up a bar. I mean, this stuff really did make you feel like becoming a juvenile delinquent! It's music that got me thinking about the blues in a modern context and with a contemporary edge. He managed to capture that in songs like Boob Scotch, an entirely ludicrous concept which he managed to turn into a crowd pleasing ritual while somehow managing to not come off as sexist.
I got a chance to see Bob twice, but it was the first time when he played Richards on Richards here in Vancouver, on Sept 13, 2006, that will always stand out in my memory as one of the best live shows I've ever seen. He played a double bill with the late, great blue-funk superhero, Blowfly, who put on an incredible show himself. Between the two acts, I literally danced my ass off to ever single song they played. That's not an exaggeration. That's a fact. It was a night where I was possessed by the boogie bug from start to finish, and was mesmerized watching Bob do his thing. Between the Boob Scotch audience participation to his crowd surfing in an inflatable raft to simply marveling at the furious intensity of his playing, he blew my mind. And seeing him off stage was so bizarre because, out of uniform, he was such an unassuming, slight, diminutive man. You'd never put the two personas together.
Bob Log III is very much responsible for influencing me into exploring some new directions with my own music, specifically when I went into looking for ways to bring blues sensibilities into contemporary experimental music making, but not just as an academic exercise, but as an expression of FUN and MISCHIEF!
1984 was the year that I became deeply infatuated with all things Throbbing Gristle. Thanks to a few all night "altered states" listening sessions, my perception of their music and how it was created was completely reconfigured. With this neural rewiring in place, I was able to appreciate aspects of their sound and techniques I was never able to perceive before. But TG were more than just a band, they were the architects of a movement and used their independently operated corporate identity, Industrial Records, to help give other artists exposure and a leg up on getting their products out in the market as well. I wasn't really aware of the full extent of this aspect of their activities until Illuminated Records issued the retrospective compilation album, The Industrial Records Story, in 1984.
The album collected together several singles and a selection of album tracks from the various artists who had been released by Industrial Records in the last few years of its initial phase of activity, ending in 1981. As well as a couple of TG singles, the LP featured Monte Cazazza, The Leather Nun, Robert Rental & Thomas Leer, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Elisabeth Welch, Clock DVA, Dorothy & William S. Burroughs. With the exception of Cabaret Voltaire, this album was my initial exposure to pretty much everyone else present. And it was much more than just a collection of "industrial" noise. There was an astonishing variety of music and sound on the album, demonstrating quite clearly the range of interests within the label and the people behind it.
Though the LP kicks off with TG at their most abrasive, blaring forth with the infamous, We Hate You (Little Girls) and then serves up a nightmarish junkie fever dream for Mother's Day from Monte Cazazza, things start to diversify with the dirge of burn victim post-punk from The Leather Nun. Next up is the synth-pop dreaminess of Rental & Leer, but the biggest shifts are saved for the arrival of Elisabeth Welch and her heartbreaking version of Stormy Weather. The single was released because it was used by experimental film maker, Derek Jarman, in his film, The Tempest. Recorded in 1933, the song is a stark contrast to the rest of the album, yet still manages to work in context with its mood of gloom and loss.
The album concludes with a section from William S. Burroughs' album, Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. On its own, this track became my introduction to his works and represented a sample of something which had never been given serious consideration before. It was a concrete example of the "cut-up" theory in its earliest incarnation. The story behind the manifestation of this album is worth an entire book on its own as Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson were the first to be given access to this material by Burroughs, who considered the experiments of no real consequence until he was convinced otherwise by Gen & Sleazy. It was a critical introduction to a vital and expansive technique, easily adaptable to nearly any medium.
The album has never been reissued since its initial release, though all the material contained on it has been reissued separately.
The scene surrounding the Sex Pistols was a complex patchwork of different crews and a lot of them ended up spawning their own bands, whether it was Siouxsie and the Banshees form the "Bromley Contingent" or The Slits or any of the dozen bands that popped up from Manchester. Closest to home, the scene behind Johnny Rotten was primarily John's close friends and his brothers and their mates. First to emerge from this crew was 4" Be 2", fronted by Jimmy Lydon and featuring occasional contributions from Martin "Youth" Glover and alleged production assistance from Rotten himself. The other main character involved in this was Jock McDonald, a somewhat disreputable scallywag of a character who would go on to form The Bollock Brothers as a side project, which eventually became his main outlet.
I'd previously come across some singles by both 4" Be 2" and The Bollock Brothers based on this supposed production involvement of John Lydon. As it turned out, slapping his name on the records as producer was little more than a sales ploy. Some of it was pretty good, however, but in 1983, McDonald concocted his best "swindle" of all, his 1983 complete reinterpretation of the entire Sex Pistols debut LP, Never Mind the Bollocks. Titled, Never Mind the Bollocks 1983, this was one of the first times I'd ever encountered a complete cover of an entire album, so my curiosity was immediately piqued as soon as I spotted it in the new releases bin at my local import records shop.
What Jock had done with the Pistols music was tantamount to sacrilege by using very early digital sampling technology to electronically recreate the album in a kind of robot-punk style with snappy, machine-like drum machines and digitally deconstructed guitars. He even took the liberty of reworking some of the lyrics as another level of disrespect. The thing was, this utter and complete disregard for the sanctity of the source material turned out to be the best way to approach it as the album still screamed with a legitimate "punk" attitude because of this stance. In truth, punk should never be treated with too much reverence as so much of it was about blasting away those edifices of rock hero worship.
When I put on the record for the first time, I was immediately displaced by the cheap sounding fake digital stomping signalling the intro to Holidays in the sun. It was like a shoddy computer version, a pathetic imitation. As it went on, however, the consistency of the production and it's singularity and commitment to its vision drove home its secret power. It was the ultimate subversion of the subversive, making a comment on the commodification of the movement while recasting it as rebel robot music.
McDonald and the Bollock Brothers never managed to hit this height again on subsequent albums of his own original material, but the fact that this desecration of punk's sacred cow exists at all is good enough to remind us not to be too precious about what we put on pedestals.
I first heard about The Shaggs reading a little article about them in a 1980 issue of CREEM magazine. The article, written by Robot A. Hull, described...
"...Betty, Helen and Dorothy Wiggin, lonely sisters losing their minds in Squaresville in the limbo years of 1969-72. Sheltered by their parents as if they were porcelain figurines, the Wiggin sisters never had a chance to date, never were allowed to taste of the delicious sins down at the local Tastee-Freeze. So they went up to their rooms, cried their eyes out, and formed a rock band, the self-destructive and chaotic Shaggs."
The article left an impression, but it wouldn't be until some dozen or so years later that I'd actually get a chance to hear them while going through my partner's CD collection after we moved in together. He had a copy of a CD reissue of The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World, but it was coupled with bonus material from a 1982 album of unreleased early 1970s recordings (released then as "Shaggs Own Thing") and the CD was simply called The Shaggs.
In the interim between reading that article and discovering that CD, I'd come across numerous other references to them, all falling somewhere between ridicule and reverence. By the early 1990s, I was more than a little acquainted with "difficult" music, but nothing in my musical vocabulary could have prepared me for what I heard from these three sisters. At first, I reacted as I'm sure most people do, by contextualizing it as a joke, some kind of prank or simply the product of such profound musical ignorance that it was merely laughable. Over the years since that first listening, however, I've come to appreciate it's idiosyncrasies as far more than an accident of ineptitude.
Yes, ignorance does play a critical role in this music because it sounds like these girls were raised in utter isolation from the world and had to invent the very concept of music all on their own without any points of reference to guide them. That means that this music exists with its own internal logic and rationale. It's not like they're incompetent at playing regular music. They're actually quite precise about how they play THEIR music THEIR way. In that regard, one simply has to acknowledge that these sounds are not the result of stupidity or incompetence. They're the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity forced to function in a vacuum.
The proof of the above proposition rests in the fact that Dot (Dorothy) Wiggin has continued to tour and perform this music with a backing band of professional musicians who have been able to replicate the nuances of the original recordings with the guidance of Dot. They have personally verified that she is completely cognizant of the intricacies of the arrangements and their function. In the same way that Don Van Vliet was able to transcribe his abstract, angular vision into the music of Captain Beefheart, the Wiggin sisters were able to do the exact same thing for the music of The Shaggs.
If there's a lesson to be learnt here, it's that "music" can be defined as any organized sound provided that there is an organizer. The structure, method and techniques of this organization are, however, completely up to the individual doing the organizing.
Sometime around the late 2000s, probably 2007 or 2008, I was watching TV late one night, channel surfing after having smoked a bit of good weed and looking for something chill for nighttime viewing. At the time, I was a big fan of TCM (Turner Classic Movies) and was partial to exploring the classics of the golden age of Hollywood. This particular evening, I happened to land on TCM just as this odd, haunting movie was starting. Something about it immediately transfixed me and I couldn't take my eyes off its dreamy, strange interplay of light and shadows. All the way through, I kept wondering what it was I was watching, but it was only at the end ,when the title and credits played, that I found it was called Portrait of Jennie.
I immediately looked it up online and found it was available on DVD and ordered a copy. Once I got it, I watched it again (and again a while later) and just gave it another viewing last night to share it with my partner, who'd never seen it before. I still find it holds its charms quite firmly, as much as it did that first viewing.
Portrait of Jennie was released in 1948 and stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton. It tells the tale of a lonely painter who meets this charming yet ghostly young girl. She seems to be from another time and another life and each time they meet, she has aged much more than the span of time which has marked the space between their meeting. Cotton's character is not sure if she's real and the whole relationship unfolds like a Twilight Zone episode. In essence, it's a love story, but it's also an allegory about life and death and eternity. Time and space twist and enfold around each other as their star-crossed paths entwine through spans of years or days, depending on your perspective.
Technically, the film is notable for some rather innovative and novel production techniques, utilizing scenes where fabric has been placed over the lens to give the image the texture of a painting canvas and mixing black & white film stock with splashes of scenes in tinted monochrome and full color. The film's cinematographer, who tragically died after the film's completion, was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award. The score of the film also uses a Theremin in the soundtrack during the segments with Jennie, to lend an air of dreamlike ambience. There are times when Jennie is shot to look like she's almost transparent, nearly fading into the background. There are also several striking exterior shots, done on location, such as those done in New York City's Central Park. among other places, which utilize natural lighting of sunrises and sunsets to magnificent and striking effect with the surrounding architecture.
The film also supplies an excellent supporting cast, most notably the legendary Ethel Barrymore as the owner of an art gallery who takes Cotton's struggling painter character under her wing to help nurture his talent. Veteran character actor, David Wayne, also turns in a lively performance as the best friend of the struggling artist.
Portrait of Jennie is a film which may be a bit old fashioned in its idealism and a bit naive in its belief in "true love", but it more than transcends these issues by its sheer commitment to its vision. It believes in itself so much, you just can't refuse its persuasions. And that's really the key theme as it shows an artist finding that the most powerful inspiration there is when creating is love.
In 1994, Future Sound of London (FSOL) released their sprawling double CD opus, Lifeforms. At the time I first heard it, I thought that I'd never heard FSOL before, however, I would later discover that they'd cracked my sphere of perception as far back as 1988 with the Stakker Humanoid single, released under the Humanoid alias.
Coming from the UK Acid House explosion of the late 1980s, Brian Dougans & Garry Cobain were on the forefront of pushing electronic music into the far reaches of deep space experimentation. Along with the likes of Autechre, they had their sights set far beyond the familiar balm of 4x4 dance grooves. With Lifeforms, FSOL cast off from those shores and set the course of their synthesizer spaceship off into the nebulous galaxies of the sweepingly ethereal.
Lifeforms took electronic music well away from the rigidity of fixed beats into something much more organic. Like the title suggests, these sonic creatures are alive and amorphous, another term they'd put to use with another alias. There's nothing static or rigid about these sounds. They all seem to grow and twist like exotic flora & fauna. Songs don't start and stop, they emerge from the jungle and then slink back into the murk after having weaved their spell. Everything from start to finish hangs together as a single, expansive landscape, populated by any number of strange beasts. It's an album that fully exploits the capacity of the medium of the day, the CD. I know the vinyl purists out there may scoff at this, but this really is an album properly enjoyed on compact disc, mostly because you don't want to have to keep getting up every 20 minutes to flip sides. You want to sink into this environment and soak in it, undisturbed.
Though it wasn't always explicitly apparent, there was always a connection between the UK Acid House movement and the preceding experimental, "Industrial" scene. The fact that Psychic TV were one of the premier early adopters of the Acid House genre should be enough of a clue, but FSOL sort of took the flow of influence back to complete the circle with this album, pulling in Industrial's more dark ambient aspects and often directly sampling sources such as Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey. This album is a vital link in that chain.
Lifeforms also makes the psychedelic facets of the electronic music of the day most fully realized, doing more than paying lip service to the experience by virtue of the graphics and design aesthetics. This really is music for serious tripping, well off the grid of the dance floor. Dougans' & Cobain's commitment to this culture would become much more explicit in later years as they dove headlong into full on psychedelic "acid-rock", sometimes to the dismay of fans more committed to electronic music.
In the long run, Lifeforms still stands up to serious listening to this day, sounding just as alive and organic as it did the day it was released.
On the 40th anniversary of the death of Ian Curtis (May 18/1980), it seems fitting to share some thoughts on what is, perhaps, Joy Division's most iconic album, Unknown Pleasures. Not that there's a lot of records to pick from, given the short lifespan of the band, but even from the perspective of the cover graphics, when you think of this man and the band he fronted, this is likely the first image that comes to mind.
I discovered Joy Division in the latter half of1980, by which time Ian's "deed" was done and the band had already become something of a myth in the alternative music press. I just recall hearing about this band that was so dark and depressing, their singer had topped himself, so there was this morbid curiosity shrouding the band. If I remember correctly, I ended up getting this in the little import bin at the Thunder Bay, ON, Records on Wheels outlet. At the time, I was in full fledged PiL mania and was still playing Second Edition at least once or twice a day, but I was also on the lookout for something that could compete with the brutal hardness of what was coming from that camp. "Post Punk", as a genre, was still fleshing itself out, but Joy Division soon established itself as the next front line.
When I got the album, obviously the first thing that struck me was the packaging. Not just the starkness of the cover graphics, but the texture of the sleeve as well. I'd never seen a cover like that before. Just holding the album was a tactile experience. The overall aura of it all seemed so very dark. This is a few years before Spinal Tap, but even with the white squiggly lines breaking up the darkness, this seemed like there were "none more black".
Putting on the album, the next thing that strikes is the weird production, especially Stephen Morris' drums and the way they were recorded. I didn't quite comprehend it at the time, but this was all down to the genius of producer Martin Hannett. He's somehow managed to take the thrash of this pseudo-punk band and turn it inside-out on itself. Everything sounded like it was in the wrong place, but in exactly the right way. Peter Hook's bass was played up high, most of the time, with the kick being used to hold down the subs. Bernard Sumner's guitars seemed to be off in the distance, jangling and grinding away in a corner. And the whole thing was wrapped around with this foggy ambience of strange electronic ghosts.
In front of it all was Ian's voice. I have to say it was a bit jarring at first. It wasn't like any "rock" vocalist I'd ever heard before. Maybe, in a pinch, there was a bit of Bowie about it, but only vaguely. Honestly, there's more Bing Crosby about it than Bowie. For the most part, it was its own thing and took a bit of getting used to. There was no escaping the knowledge of his fate either. Listening to the words, you couldn't help but look for clues, reasons why he'd decided to end it all. It was a somber listening experience, not really something you'd put on and party with, but it was completely engrossing. It sounded like an entire universe into itself and each player was a million miles away from the others, but it all came together into this expansive whole.
It's a record which has taken on incredible proportions over the years. It still sounds futuristic and beyond the times. It's ageless and timeless. I can only speculate on what might have happened to it if it hadn't been framed by such personal tragedy.
As a child, some of the more captivating series of programs I was exposed to were the shows created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Beginning with their “Supermarionation” spectacles like Thunderbirds, Stingray, Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet, my affection for their work would reach its zenith with their mid 1970s science fiction classic, Space 1999. However, it would not be until later in my adulthood that I would really appreciate who these people were and that they were responsible for all of these shows.
The appeal of the marionette shows, for me, was primarily down to all the models and vehicles they used and their mid-century modern sense of futurism. A lot of that came from Sylvia’s sense of fashion and design, something else I’d learn to appreciate later in life. As a little kid, it was the appeal of the spaceships and ultra-modern cars that drove me to covet those old diecast Corgi Toys. Once I got older, however, I started to appreciate the more adult and sophisticated stories of their most acclaimed series, Space 1999. However, what I’d missed out on, in this equation, was the live action series which preceded Space 1999, the single season, 1970/71 series, UFO. Because it never aired in any of the local markets I lived in during its initial run nor in subsequent syndication, it’s only very recently that I became aware of it, who produced it and how it set the stage for Space 1999. I recently had the opportunity to watch the entire series on YouTube, at long last, and found it more than a little fascinating to compare and contrast UFO to the series which would follow it.
There’s a lot of very striking evolution that goes on between the two, but you have to back up a bit to the “puppet” shows to understand how a lot of these dynamics played out. Watching these shows in close succession, you can see how lessons and techniques from the past had to be modified for the present or redeveloped entirely. Things that worked in the small scale world of marionettes for a children’s show didn’t necessarily translate to the full scale landscape of flesh and blood people with an adult audience. The same things applied to scripts and characterizations and all these learning curves played out in UFO. There was also a cultural breach as the producers attempted to adapt their work from “kid” focused to something engaging for adults. In this regard, there was a certain overstepping that occurred, particularly in terms of gender relationships and sexuality, but I’ll save that for a bit as it deserves some special attention.
Space 1999 Medical Eagle
UFO Interceptor
Let’s start with the overall look and feel of the UFO series. As mentioned, there were issues in coming to grips with the scale and proportion of things. Models and set pieces which were perfectly acceptable for a puppet show just didn’t carry enough weight, literally, for interacting with humans. One of the most egregious examples of this is the actual UFO spacecraft in the series. The scale of them looks completely off, like they’re no bigger than a tin cup. The rapid spinning action of the model also undermines its appearance and contributes to a sense that they lacked substantiality. That horrible, high pitched screeching sound they make doesn’t help things either. The same thing applies to models like the SHADO moon base and Skydiver submarine. Then there’s the absurd design of the Interceptors, with their ill-proportioned nose missile. It’s still aiming towards a child’s toy rather than a serious looking fighter spacecraft.
Space 1999 Moonbase Alpha
UFO SHADO Moonbase
Contrast this with the model work done on Space 1999. In the context of the times, the improvement is vast and impressive. The ships are a much better, more mature design with the Eagles looking and feeling like they’ve actually got some mass to them. Exterior shots of them landing on planet surfaces or on the pad at Alpha are done with a much better sense of scale and substance, using high speed frame rates to create a feeling of mass. When it comes to the look of Alpha, the exterior is crafted to give a look of something large and sprawling rather than the little golf ball pods of UFO. The interiors are another massive leap forward as well. Compare the somewhat clunky, cobbled together look of UFO’s SHADO underground HQ or the moon base interiors with the interior of Space 1999’s Main Mission in Moonbase Alpha. There are a few nice design elements for the UFO sets, but the scale and scope and the coherence of design for the Alpha interiors, at least in the first season, are astonishingly well rendered. Everything looks like it’s all part of a singularity of fully integrated aesthetics. The curves, the colors (or lack thereof), were much more updated and appropriate for the mid-70s times. UFO was released in 1970, but a lot of its look seemed dated by then, belonging more to mid 1960s mod fashions, something that worked great with the puppet shows, but seemed a bit out of touch by the end of that decade.
UFO Moonbase interior
Space 1999 Alpha Main Mission
The fashions underwent a similar evolution from the wacky one piece jump suits to the more streamlined, efficient look of the Alpha uniforms. There’s some notable changes in terms of how men and women dress between these shows. In UFO, the dress for the female cast is uniformly skewed towards overtly sexualized fashions, with tight fitting catsuits, belted and form fitting and made to enhance the figure. For the first season of Space 1999, the uniforms were essentially identical between the men and the women. The women, overall, were given far more equal footing to the men in Space 1999 than in UFO. Lord knows what they were thinking with those ridiculous purple wigs for the moon base female uniforms on UFO. Why they had to wear them was never explained, even though they showed the crew not wearing them on Earth. It may have made for a fab & kinky look, but it made taking the actors seriously an impossible task. I should note, however, that Space 1999 took a bit of a step backwards in its second season, introducing some differential elements between the male and female attire and also some scenes, like the recreation area, where bikinis could be flaunted for a bit of a flesh parade.
Beyond the wardrobe, there’s a huge disparity between the two shows in terms of how the female characters are treated on UFO vs Space 1999. As I mentioned earlier, it seemed like an assumption was made that, for UFO, in order to make the show more appealing to adults, the producers decided to insinuate all sorts of sexual innuendo into the interactions between the men and women. It was fairly common to have men leering at and engaging in vaguely inappropriate touching and suggestive remarks with the women. This is the kind of stuff that gets you sent to HR these days, but it was par for the course at SHADO HQ in UFO. On Moonbase Alpha, however, these kinds of shenanigans were nowhere to be found. Women were treated as professionals and professionally. Side glances at passing booty were not to be found!
This leads me to the general area of character development, which was virtually nonexistent on UFO. It was as if they forgot that they weren’t working with puppets anymore and just assumed human actors would just be as stiff and lifeless. The only character who ever managed to get some sort of a backstory was commander Ed Straker, played with appropriate gravitas by Ed Bishop. Initially, Straker comes off as cold, detached and efficacious, but there are a number of episodes which delve into his failed marriage and the tragic fate of his son which manage to show how tormented he really was and how torn he was between his personal life and responsibilities with SHADO. Keeping the planet safe from alien invaders is a pretty big burden for anyone, even more so when you command a secret organization and can’t be honest with the people closest to you in your personal life. Other than that, however, the rest of the cast are no more than mannequins doing things for some reason or other that you just don’t care much about. And the antagonists of the show are never developed beyond being mere bogeymen who fling their tin cup UFOs at Earth each episode mostly to be blasted out of the sky, unceremoniously, and without ever delving into their motivation, nature and objectives beyond the occasional glancing blow. The only exception to that is one episode which strikingly mirrors the plot of the film, Enemy Mine, as it attempts to give some sense of “humanity” to the aliens, though this is never pursued again in any other episode.
SHADO commander Ed Straker
Despite all that, UFO is still a fun show to watch if for no other reason than for the kitsch and camp of it all. It’s got some wonderful silliness to sink your teeth into if you’re interested in retro science fiction cults. Space 1999, however, manages to craft a much more thoughtful series with characters that have actual personalities and behave with real emotions. It’s not light years ahead of UFO, by any means. It’s still a bit stiff and heavy handed at times, but it manages to be a show that can, occasionally, be taken seriously with its attempts to examine human nature and the meaning of life. Either way, they’re both shows that are worth watching, not just for historical significance, but because they can be damn entertaining. And I’d be happy to drive Straker’s car any day.
diecast model of official SHADO car driven by Commander Ed Straker
May 16th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of DEVO's third and most successful LP, Freedom of Choice, released this day in 1980.
For me, this album represents DEVO achieving the perfection of their final form. Everything they'd been building towards and carefully crafting came into exact alignment on this album, from the song writing to the balance of instrumentation between guitars and synths to the image to the politics. In a way, it's almost too perfect because I never found any subsequent album as compelling. It's those first three albums which encompass the totality of the DEVO journey for me and, after this, it was pretty much just "more of the same".
Prior to this album, DEVO were a curiosity for most people, oddballs on the fringe in funny suits doing wacky robot moves. They'd been around for a good many years before this, forging their vision in underground clubs and managing to gain some attention with their first two albums within the burgeoning "New Wave" scene. I was an early adopter of the DEVO vision as soon as I saw them on SNL that first time performing Satisfaction and Jock Homo in 1978. The future was clear and it was obvious we were all slipping backwards down the evolutionary slope. As anyone can see by the current state of our planet, DEVO were more than musicians or artists, they were profits.
Freedom of Choice, in its very title, lays out the conundrum of human civilization as we struggle with the our sense of self and the desire to give up responsibility. "Freedom from choice is what you want" and all you have to do is look around to see humanity abdicating its responsibilities as the absolute worst of us flood into that vacuum of power and assume control over a system they never build and have no idea how to operate. The US is currently in the hands of a president who is the quintessential manifestation of the theory of "De-evolution". Booji Boy is all grown up and he's got his finger on the button. No one could more perfectly represent the corruption of our civilization and no one more precisely predicted this than Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale.
Freedom of Choice managed to take DEVO out of the shadows of obscurity and thrust them into the mainstream zeitgeist, particularly with the iconic single, Whip It. The song and its refrain to "whip it good" have become permanently ingrained in the collective consciousness of western pop culture. The domed red plastic hats have equally become fixtures when it comes to identifying the band. If you're looking for the pure stuff, there's no other record that's more DEVO than this.
