CAN - MONSTER MOVIE @ 55

Released on August 16th, 1969, the debut studio album, Monster Movie, from German Krautrock pioneers, CAN, turns 55 years old today.

The band had formed the preceding year in Cologne, with founding members Holger Czukay (bass), Irmin Schmidt (keyboard), Jaki Liebezeit (drums) and Michael Karoli (guitar). Czukay and Schmidt were both from academic backgrounds and students of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and were fascinated by the possibilities of rock and roll. Before the year was out, the quartet would add a fifth member with the recruitment of American vocalist, Malcolm Mooney. Together, they'd record their first album, Prepare to Meet Thy Pnoom, under the band name "Inner Space", but attempts to sell the record to any label were universally rejected, so the album was shelved and the group went back to the drawing board with a mind to craft something a bit more accessible. That first album would remain in the vaults until 1981, when it was finally released as "Delay 1968".

After abandoning their first recording attempt, the group accepted an invitation from a friend to move into his castle, Schloss Nörvenich, and use it as a recording studio. They also decided to change their name, with Mooney coming up with the suggestion to call themselves "CAN" because of its positive meanings in various languages. "Inner Space" wouldn't be abandoned completely, however, as it would become the official name for the band's recording studio, in its various incarnations, going forward.

While they were set up at the castle, they recorded their second album, which would be their debut release, Monster Movie. The LP brought together elements of psychedelic rock, blues, free jazz, world music and the influence of the Velvet Underground, for starters. It also introduced the band's distinctive approach to editing, with its side long track, You Do Right, being distilled to its 20 minute version from a jam session that originally ran for 8 hours. The end results were good enough for them to snag a contract with Liberty Records, and the LP was critically acclaimed upon its release. The image on the cover is a retrace of Galactus, as originally depicted by Jack Kirby (inked by Vince Colletta) in Marvel's Thor #134 - page 3, released in 1966.

Mooney's tenure with the band would be short lived, after the release of the album. He ended up suffering from e mental breakdown at one of their gigs when he began repeatedly shouting "upstairs, downstairs" for three hours, even after Can had stopped playing. On his psychiatrist's advice, he left Can and returned to the US at the end of 1969. He'd eventually return to the group, briefly, for their 1986 reunion album, Rite Time, though the group would disband again after the release of that album.

In terms of its legacy, Monster Movie established CAN as one of the leaders of the German experimental music scene of the 1970s, with their influence playing a major role in the development of post-punk aesthetics and styles in the wake of the punk rock explosion. Public Image Ltd's mammoth masterpiece, Metal Box, could be seen as a direct homage of sorts to their influence, especially with it being packaged in a metal canister. It's an influence and impact that continues to resonate through the outer reaches of contemporary alternative music to this day.

PSYCHIC TV - UNCLEAN (12") @ 40

 

Released in August of 1984, Psychic TV's 12" EP, Unclean, turns 40 years old this month. It was the first title issued by Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth's own label imprint, Temple Records, which was inaugurated following the acrimonious demise of their relationship with Stevo's Some Bizzare label, who released PTV's first two LPs, and the single, Just Drifting. Unclean is also the group's first release following the equally conflicted departure of co-founder and former Throbbing Gristle partner, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and his then romantic partner, Geoff Rushton (aka John/Jhon Balance). They departed principally due to their concerns regarding Genesis P-Orridge turning TOPY into a "cult of personality" and would go on to form the widely influential project, Coil.

Without the backing of a major label, leaving the group owed significant sums from their previous releases, budgets for production and studio time were limited, but the founding of an independent label meant that all the proceeds from record sales would belong to TOPY/PTV, and creative control of the product would be entirely under their purview. Given P-Orridge's experience with Industrial Records during the TG days, this was not unfamiliar territory. It would ultimately provide the group with a great latitude when it came to the diversity of their output, from the most bizarre experimentation, to a charting pop single that would help finance a planned film production, though these plans would be eventually derailed by their manager absconding with the single's profits. Still, their own label would help them bounce back from this by virtue of the live series of LPs.

Getting back to the Unclean EP, side A's title track kicks it off with an extended, near ten minute long sluggish dirge that is not too far off from Metal Box era PiL in terms of its repetitive drum loop, throbbing minimal bass and piercing, atonal guitar(?) feedback. Genesis wails atop the cacophonous musical backing with a diatribe against Christianity, declaring its "Saviour" to be a perversion of morality and "obscene". The run-out groove etching on the vinyl exacerbates the blasphemy of the song by declares the record to be "CURSED BY GOD". In comparison to the relatively accessible and tuneful music contained in their first two albums for Some Bizzare, Unclean is nearly a full return to the aggressive bite of TG at its prime, landing comfortably in proximity to something akin to Discipline as far as rhythmic assaults go.

But the mood changes abruptly for the flip side of the record, which includes two ambient compositions that seem to feature P-Orridge as the principal performer. The first is a soundtrack from a Derek Jarman short film, Mirrors, which may be one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces of music PTV ever put to record. It is built from a meandering kaleidoscopic collage of gentle piano improvisations that seem to reflect and refract off each other, perfectly representing the abstract mylar dancing lights of the 8mm film for which it was created. The piece bares a striking resemblance to the fifth and closing movement of the final TG studio album, Journey Through a Body. The section titled, Oltre La Morte / Birth And Death, is also an improvised piano meditation, and likely an early rendition of this conception that now finds its full flower in the PTV recording. I also seem to recall coming across an old COUM era recording of Genesis on the piano performing what sounded like an even more primitive rendition of this theme, so it's likely it was lurking around in various incarnations for years before this most complete realization of its intent.

The third piece, Unclean Monks, is a vocal choral piece created by Genesis repeatedly singing the word "Jesus", layered on multiple tracks to create a sombre, sacred sounding choir reminiscent of medieval monks performing Gregorian chants. As sacrilegious as the A-side is, it's as if Genesis is seeking salvation and repentance with this closing composition, or else and more likely, codifying his curse upon the iconography.

The cover for the single featured the striking graphic template that Temple Records would utilize for many of their "Library" series releases, with it's black and grey primary layout accented by an eye catching red banner. Seeing these releases pop up in the shops was a great way to inspire collectors as aficionados like myself were eager to ensure a complete set of these matching releases. As the label built up its catalogue, seeing all these coordinated artifacts together engendered a kind of satisfying sense of accomplishment in their acquisition. Rather good marketing, I must say. Unclean has remained one of my all time favourite PTV releases, showcasing the group at both their most extreme and confrontational and seductively alluring states.

TALKING HEADS, FEAR OF MUSIC @ 45

 

Released on August 3rd, 1979, the third LP from Talking Heads, Fear of Music, turns 45 years old today. While being one of the bands darkest and most introspectively paranoid albums, it also signalled a change in direction towards a more rhythmically complex and engaging form of dance music.

At the time the band started recording demos for the album, they were working without a producer and conscientiously focusing on more dance inspired rhythms from disco, Afro-beat and funk influences. However, their initial recording attempts proved unsatisfactory, sending the group retreating back to their home base at Chris & Tina's NYC loft, where they'd previously rehearsed before they were signed to their record deal with Sire. It was at this point that they brought producer, Brian Eno, back into the fold to help them get focused, especially after his successful work on their previous album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. Eno came up with the idea to take advantage for their home base sense of comfort and booked a mobile recording facility so that he could wire up Chris & Tina's loft, which is where they recorded the basic bed tracks for the album. The remainder of the album was recorded at a variety of NYC studios in the area, including the Record Plant and Hit Factory.

Eno played a crucial role in helping the band to push their more experimental leanings, crafting unique processing effects throughout the album's songs and bringing in guest musicians like Robert Fripp to add some flourishes to the instrumentation. As previously stated, they were moving into a much funkier groove, with tracks like I Zimbra telegraphing where the band would head on subsequent albums with their Afro-centric sense of poly-rhythms.

Thematically, the lyrics were very much focused on a kind of dystopian alienation, with song lyrics portraying characters racked by paranoia. Songs like "Air" even took that rebellion against existence to the point of rejecting the very atmosphere that surrounds us. Other tracks explored other states of discomfiting separation, like "Drugs", which perfectly captured the sense of disconnection from reality when someone's had a little bit too much of some mind altering substance or another. Even "Heaven" literally had "nothing" happening in it. Everything was out to get you on this album. "Animals" couldn't be trusted and even the musician's companion, the "Electric Guitar" was an adversary you should "never listen to". It's perhaps the band's most neurotic album ever. The album's packaging reinforced this bleakness, coming as it did in a plain black sleeve with an embossed pattern that resembled metal plating used in factories.

Critically, the album was extremely well received and has continued to garner accolades, often being referred to as one of the group's best and most adventurous records. Commercially, it also did well, though its singles weren't quite as successful as those that preceded and followed the album. This was my gateway into the world of Talking Heads and it has remained my personal favourite of their catalogue ever since I picked it up when it was originally released. It's one of those records that never seems to lose its charm and constantly rewards repeat listening, revealing new details with each encounter.

THE FLYING LIZARDS @ 45

 

Marking its 45th anniversary today is the debut eponymous LP from The Flying Lizards, which was released on July 28th, 1979. It became an underground hit as a sort of novelty post-punk album, driven by the success of their cover versions of the songs, Money & Summertime Blues. Like Public Image Ltd at the time, the group took the essence of dub style production and applied it to the realm of eccentric pop music, creating an art-house experimental collective of musical subversion.

Formed and led by record producer David Cunningham, the group were a loose collective of avant-garde and freely improvising musicians, including David Toop and Steve Beresford as instrumentalists, with Deborah Evans-Stickland, Patti Palladin and music journalist Vivien Goldman as the main vocalists. Based on the surprise success of their broken down versions of Money and Summertime Blues, which were recorded in Cunningham's living room, Virgin Records extended their contract and financed the production of their debut LP. With label backing in hand, Cunningham proceeded to fill out the rest of the album with a pastiche of odd, incongruous and inexplicable variants on the principal theme established with the album's preceding singles, of warping familiar pop tropes into bonkers, inside-out re-contextualizations of what a pop song could be. As a continuous listening experience, the album evolves from the strangely familiar into the utterly alien, as progressively more dense dub effects are slathered onto the mix. In terms of sheer weirdness, perhaps only The Residents were colouring as far outside the lines as The Flying Lizards at that time.

The album was a modest success in the UK and other markets, but subsequent albums under the Lizards moniker proved to be much less successful. Two follow up albums came in its wake, but it was an unreleased album of pure dub reggae, The Secret Life of the Flying Lizards, recorded before this debut, that was the only release to eclipse this in terms of artistic achievement.

PSYCHIC TV - TEMPORARY TEMPLE @ 40

 

Recorded at a guerrilla performance on July 28th, 1984, Psychic TV's Temporary Temple turns 40 years old today. Released in January of 1988 as volume 9 in thee 23 live album series, it included the final voucher necessary to send in to Temple Records in order to receive the free 10th album, which turned out to be a studio album picture disc, colloquially referred to as "Album 10", or "Psychedelic Violence".

The Temporary Temple recording itself was captured as part of a Temple ov Psychick Youth tribal ceremony conducted at a squatted derelict circular building in Drayton Park, London. The event nearly didn't take place as police were spotted in the area prior to the attendees setting up for the performance, but the coast was eventually considered clear and gear and facilities were set up for the show. Musically, the material captured for the record encompasses purely improvised extended instrumental jams, with the LP only identifying each side with a symbol rather than a title. The music is essentially tribal ambience, with percussion and guitar tonalities interwoven across the side long pieces. Nothing approaching recognizable songs is included in the release. Its intent and purpose were entirely ritualistic in nature, functioning as a rallying call to TOPY members in the area to gather and celebrate their community.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD - THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT... THIS IS WHAT YOU GET @ 40

 

Celebrating its 40th anniversary today is the fourth "official" Public Image Ltd. studio LP, This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get, which was released on July 6th, 1984. I use the qualifier "official" due to the fact that the unfinished and aborted Commercial Zone album was surreptitiously released by jilted former founding member, Keith Levene, in January of that year on his own independent label imprint. His version of the album contained the original recordings that had been created throughout 1982 & 1983 at Park South studio, NYC, up until his unceremonious dismissal from the band by John Lydon following a dispute over an alternate mix of the single, This Is Not A Love Song. Following his departure, Levene spirited away master tapes from the session to release on his own mix, leaving remaining members, John Lydon and Martin Atkins, holding an empty bag when it came time to produce an official version of the album for Virgin Records.

Lydon and Atkins returned to the UK after their 1983 Japanese mini tour, for which they'd hired a trio of New York lounge musicians to fill out the band's empty slots vacated by Levene and bassist Pete Jones, who departed of his own accord immediately after Keith's sacking. Once in the UK, they set up at Maison Rouge Studios and began to rebuild the album from the ground up. Five of the Commercial Zone songs got a reboot, including "Bad Life" (originally titled "Mad Max"), "This Is Not a Love Song" (originally titled "Love Song"), "Solitaire" (entitled "Young Brits" on the second pressing of Commercial Zone), "The Order of Death" (originally titled "The Slab"), and "Where Are You?" (originally titled "Lou Reed Part 2"). Two new songs were recorded from scratch: "The Pardon" and "Tie Me To the Length Of That", with the latter being improvised in the studio with Lydon and Atkins playing all the instruments. For most of the rest of the album, the NYC lounge musicians, plus a few others, worked as session players. The track, "1981", was actually an outtake from the Flowers of Romance sessions, though some minor overdubs were added to bring it up to snuff for the current LP.

Though PiL had scored a hit with the single version of This Is Not A Love Song, using the Park South recordings with Levene and Pete Jones, the album was received with a large degree of ambivalence, feeling like the soul of the band had been supplanted by the use of faceless studio musicians. Only "Tie Me To the Length of That" really offered any sense of proper PiL music, principally because it lacked the sterile presence of studio hired guns. Still, the album's version of "The Order Of Death" has popped up in numerous soundtracks over the years, including the 1990 science fiction-horror film, Hardware, and on the soundtrack to the 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project. It was also featured in the Miami Vice episode "Little Miss Dangerous", the Mr. Robot episode "eps2.7_init_5.fve", and the Industry episode "There Are Some Women...". It also appears in Season 2 Episode 6 of The Umbrella Academy when the Hargreeves siblings take the elevator to the Tiki Lounge to meet with their father. Finally, it appears in the 2023 remake of System Shock, as the music for the end credits.

When it came out, I was at the tail end of my obsession with the band. After the stunning artistic breakthroughs of their first three albums, Commercial Zone felt like a bastard echo of what might have been, while its troubled twin felt like a synthetic imposter version of the band. The release of the Live In Tokyo album, which sounded even more shallow and perfunctory as an imitation of the band, had driven the sense of demise further into the ground. In a sense, TIWYW...TIWYG feels like a capstone to the PiL story, at least as far as the project being a real band. After that, it seemed more like a Lydon solo project, and the sense of musical innovation felt like it had left the building. Without the presence of Keith, Wobble or Martin, who left after touring to support this album, the game had changed and the rules were all different, so I was pretty much out as far as following the band, at least to the degree that I'd been enraptured by them during their heyday.

THE B-52'S @ 45

 

Released on July 6th, 1979, the eponymous debut LP from The B-52's turns 45 years old today. At a time when "punk" had broken rock music back down to its basics and "new wave" was looking towards a more adventurous and experimental future, The B-52's offered up an anachronistic slab of nostalgia for an era of polyester beach parties and piled high hair-dos, with hyped-up teens twisting in the dunes with aliens from other worlds and creatures crawling up from the surf. Like The Cramps, who evoked a vintage, retro-kitsch obsession with B-movies and trash culture, The B-52's were a throwback to another era, with their twanging surf guitars, teeny wheezing organs and infectious back-beats. But where The Cramps offered up a soundtrack for lascivious late-night back-alley bar crawling, The B-52's were an upbeat party band, born in a beach hut and destined to make you dance.

The group came together in Athens, Georgia, in 1976, emerging at the dawn of the punk revolution, but rather than building their aesthetics from safety pins, leather jackets and spiked hair, they went to the thrift store and raided the leftovers of '60s hipster party dregs, snapping up the towering wigs that gave the band its name. They popularized the introduction into youth culture of the queer inspired "trash-couture" that had been festering in the midnight movie screenings of the films of John Waters. He and his cohorts had set the tone for the band with their pink flamingo lawn ornaments and other trailer trash accoutrements. It was all done for pure fun and was impossible to resist once you got a taste of it.

The band recorded their debut at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell producing. His approach to recording was to capture the band as cleanly and closely as possible to their live sound, so there was very little use of studio effects or even overdubs. The result was a bright, spacious sound that captured all of the dynamics of the group with no frills or distractions, creating an immediacy that pushed the impact of their music to the fore. It was a perfect approach to take as you get to hear the band in a completely unadulterated presentation where the listener can connect as directly as possible for a studio recording.

The album became an immediate commercial and critical success, catapulting the band into the spotlight, with appearances on shows like SNL helping to secure the group's spotlight. I have a very clear recollection of spotting the album on the new release display wall of my local record shop back in 1979. I was all over anything new and weird looking, being a 16 year old on the prowl for anything odd and "out there". Seeing that bright yellow cover with the cutout photo of this wild looking, big haired band was an instant eye-catcher, and I had no hesitation about plunking my hard earned money down for a copy. And I was most definitely not disappointed when it hit my record player. The twang of those surf guitars, the cheesy organ, the whip smart drumming and the kinky vocals were all so fresh sounding, though also bizarrely nostalgic. They definitely had a sound that was all their own. It's still an album that holds up after nearly half a century of listening. It can't age because it's so perfectly preserved in its own amber.