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.
I can't quite pinpoint when this music came into my life, but it must have been sometime in 1985 when I first became aware of Cocteau Twins, most likely their third full LP, Treasure (1984). For several years in the mid 1980s, Cocteau Twins were THEE go-to band for all your "come-down" needs. After a long night of freakin' & tweakin' on your favorite party favor, when your senses were getting fragile and you needed something soft and dreamy to drift back down to earth, there was really only one choice for that descent back into reality.
Cocteau Twins quickly became the flagship band for the 4AD label and helped to establish its aesthetic of luscious production values and elegant packaging. What the trio of Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie & Simon Raymonde brought together was the opposite of a "power trio". Softness and sweeping beauty were their hallmarks and no other band made me appreciate the potential of a good, spacey reverb like these folks.
Musically, backed by only restrained drum machine, Robin & Simon spun a web of shimmering guitars and soothing bass, a tapestry which seemed to fade off into infinity, gliding and glittering like angel wings. This aesthetic became hugely influential for me and many others as we all pounced on the wave of new digital reverb units which began flooding the music production gear market at the time. BIG echo and endless reverberation were a MUST for the burgeoning "dream pop" aficionados. But as vast and ethereal as this music was, there was a presence floating and flying atop it all which took something wonderful and alchemically transmuted it in to spun gold, the voice of Elizabeth Fraser.
Nothing was a better balm for a sensitive brain during a drug induced dawn than the voice of miss Fraser. Most of the time you didn't know what the fuck she was singing. It often just sounded like gibberish, but what magnificently beautiful gibberish it was! I didn't know at the time, but she, as it turned out, suffers from a great deal of social anxiety and this shyness became a key ingredient in creating her style on record. It was all turned inward, afraid to enunciate the words clearly. Instead, they became a phonetic code language, a symbolism of emotional triggers where the words faded from relevance and it was only the sound of that gorgeous, fragile voice leading you into that inner space of self reflection. It was a friendly, guiding hand as you came to terms with the world resolving back into itself while your head started to clear (and probably ache a bit).
Listening to this music, for me, brings back so many memories of facing a sunrise after a long strange trip and feeling like it's all going to be okay.
Early in 1983, I was living in a house in Vancouver, sharing the main floor with some band mates. The property was managed by this odd older fellow who lived in another house a couple of doors down. All three houses in this row were owned by the same person and managed by this dude, who happened to be an avid record collector. He had a little garage in the back of our house which was stuffed from top to bottom with records. There were shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling with all these LP's neatly stored inside. We got friendly enough with the guy that he eventually gave us the green light to have a dig and borrow any records we wanted to check out. This is where I first discovered Lou Reed's most iconoclastic release of his career, Metal Machine Music.
Released on the heels of one of Reed's most commercially successful periods in the early 1970s, 1975's double LP monolith of noise came screaming out of the gate to the immediate confusion of fans and critics. Assumed to be no more than a contractually obligated prank on his record label, whom Reed was about to terminate relations, few suspected Reed's earnestness in delivering this slab of apparent antisocial discord.
At the time of its release, the idea of "noise" music was virtually anathema within the commercial record buying markets. There may have been some obscure fine arts conceptual dalliances throughout the 20th century, but it was strictly academic stuff for students and art snobs. It was never dropped headlong into the midst of a mainstream record buying public.
Prior to unearthing the record in that garage, I'd only come across a few references to it in the music press and most of it was either dismissive with the occasional glancing comment indicating some form of reverence. I recall one review by Lester Bangs of another LP where he referenced MMM as a form of antidote for the horrible album he'd just reviewed. Given that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I dove into it. It didn't take long to discover the reality of the impenetrable wall of noise I would encounter.
I can't say I "enjoyed" listening to this album, but across those 4 sides of brain cell shattering treble piercing frequencies, something got lodged in my consciousness. Without any chemical augmentation, my brain chemistry changed. At the time, I couldn't put it into words or describe what process had occurred and I still don't really know how to give it a proper description, but I do know that the idea of "noise" and the concept of using it creatively was firmly lodged into my consciousness by this record. It also impressed a sense of personal determinism upon me in the manner in which Reed had put this product out there in accordance with nothing more than his own desires and with no concern for the judgements or reactions of anyone else.
It wasn't until years later that I finally got a CD copy of it and I don't listen to it often, but I do find it necessary to listen to at least once a year. The day Lou Reed died, it was the first recording of him that I had to listen to and I played it from start to finish. I don't find it a chore to listen to either. I find it is, as Bangs noted, a cleansing experience. It's like sandblasting all the gunk off your brain. It's a way to give your mind a bit of a reset. Reed's motives for creating the album have, since its release, become more understood as a tool for meditation rather than as a "fuck you" to any record label. It is, perhaps, the most fundamentally useful record he ever created in terms of practical application.
The Residents were one of the first indie bands to create their own corporate infrastructure for producing their products. Between Ralph Records and The Cryptic Corporation, they set up a system for recording, pressing, promoting and distributing the most idiosyncratic collection of vinyl on the market at the time. Soon after I started buying Residents albums, it became apparent to me that Ralph had other artists on offer and one of my first forays into these side roads was the 1981 sophomore LP by Swiss experimental trio, Yello, Claro Que Si.
Though they are now known as a duo, their first LPs were done by a trio consisting of Boris Blank, Carlos Peron & Dieter Meier (Carlos left by 1983). I think my initial attraction to this album came directly from the cover art, depicting a couple of very stylized, mid-century modern looking robots. The retro-futurismo of it all triggered some sort of latent nostalgia switch, even though I was only 18 at the time the album came out. It also just looked like a fun record and it definitely delivered on that.
While I was maybe expecting a Residents clone at first, I should have given them more credit because Yello turned out to be something distinctly their own from the start. It was equally as weird and alien sounding in a lot of ways, but also more accessible with its "pop" sensibility than anything from the eyeball wearing four. One could imagine most of these songs on some alternate universe radio station, someplace where good taste was the driving factor instead of profits, perhaps.
One of the most striking aspects of Yello's music was Dieter's vocals. He was an odd presence for fronting a "pop" band, being mature looking even then and not at all like the sorts of fellows generally behind the mic. And his vocal range and character were unlike anything I'd ever heard before. He could put on all sorts of strange personas and incarnations. From raspy growls to silky baritones, he was a distinct presence on each composition.
Musically, the album introduced me to a lot of very state of the art electronics and offered up an extremely sophisticated production. It was the kind of punchy, crisp production which was to set that bar for electronic music. It still incorporated some traditional musical elements, but it all sounded very modern and the arrangements were unique and full of unexpected dynamics.
As slick as this was, I still wasn't expecting Yello to become as iconic as they did in the next few years, particularly with the Oh Yeah single becoming a staple in cinematic soundtracks in the latter half of the 1980s. But this album was my introduction to the group and remains my sentimental favorite.
I know they've become the poster boys for cultural capitalism and I suppose they always were, but I do have to still acknowledge their influence on my musical journey considering Kiss' 1976 LP, Destroyer, was the foundation stone of my record collection. Not that I didn't have a couple of records in my possession before this, but this was the first one I bought with my own money of my own volition. The few I had prior to this were childhood gifts of one sort or another and were mostly novelty records like Super Bloopers or Goofy Greats.
It was pretty hard not to be exposed to Kiss in 1975/1976 as they had become THEE teen band of the era thanks to their Alive double live album from 1975. My cousin had that album, which I thought was great. My record collection began after a somewhat tense negotiation with my parents to get a raise in the monthly allowance my brother and I were granted. It started as a mere pittance and barely enough to buy some candy and a pop or two. I was desperate to start buying records and you needed at least $7 for one of those back in those days. Dad was incensed that we wanted more money and put up a tough resistance towards any increase, but we finally managed to get an agreement to something like, I think, $20 a month, enough to buy 2 or 3 records at least. It was my first experience with collective bargaining.
With that in place, the next order of business was to put that hard won chore money down on some vinyl. Weirdly enough, my first choice was not this record, but the LP, More More More, by The Andrea True Connection. I just liked that song and went to Zellers to buy it and brought it home to give it a spin on my shit box record player. It was just one of those things that was a box with a turntable and speakers built into the back. Total garbage. So much so that the heavy thump of the disco beat was too much for it and, when I went to play the record, it just skipped all over the place. Infuriated by this skipping damn record, I figured it was defective and took it back the next day for an exchange. I wasn't going to take a chance on another copy of the disco record, so my backup choice was the Kiss album.
Back then, Kiss seemed like a dangerous band. Reading the letters to the fans on the inside gate-fold off the Alive album, Gene's letter came off real evil and demonic, so he was pretty cool for us kids. It all felt like something we should not be listening to. Putting on the Destroyer album, that sense was reinforced by songs like God of Thunder. For a 12-13 year old, just discovering the world of adult preoccupations, it was very alluring and definitely gave you some street-cred in the playground at junior high.
Of course, it wasn't long until I started to pick up on the commercialization going on with it and how it was getting more and more "kid friendly" as time went on. By the time Love Gun and the comic came out, my suspicions of the latent "uncoolness" of Kiss started to mount. Then that horrible movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom, hit the TV screen and it was game over for my interest in the band. There was also the emergence of the punk & new wave scenes starting in 1978 which soon knocked my attention completely off mainstream bands like Kiss and onto far more interesting paths. I should also say that Queen came along in 1977 and blew Kiss off the map in terms of style, versatility, talent and sophistication.
I should conclude, however, by saying that Kiss did, ultimately, leave a key impression which informed my own musical path going forward. If there's one thing I took away from them, it was the importance of showmanship! The idea that a band should put on a bit of a show if they're going to be on stage remained with me from then on. I never liked going on stage in street clothes. I never liked a lot of bands that did that either. I always appreciated a band who gave me something to look at while they were up there, whether it was in the staging, visuals or simply having personality and attitude enough to be interesting to watch. This, I have to put down to Kiss setting the standard in terms of offering some stagecraft while playing music.
I just finished watching Hulu's recent adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. I have never read the book and am only familiar with the 1970 film adaptation. Now, from what I've gathered after checking out a few reviews online after finishing the mini-series, I think your enjoyment of this is going to be heavily dependent on what you're familiar with. Fans of the book seem pretty universally harsh on both the film and this 2019 mini-series. However, without that background, I'm only comparing this to the film, which I saw on several occasions in my youth. Despite the critics, I'll also note that on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, this series still gets very high average scores all round.
I've always liked the film and found that this six part TV adaptation worked even better for me in terms of fleshing out the story. If you're not too familiar with it, this is NOT a story about WWII, even though that is the setting. What it's really about is the incompetence of bureaucracies and the sociopathy of capitalistic systems, using the war as an allegorical device to explore these themes. It's a straddling of satire and trauma illustrating how these systems create irreconcilable personal conflicts when social structures are engineered such that expectations are untenable, where the goalposts of success are constantly being pushed further away, just out of reach. It shows how power and authority often end up in the hands of those least capable of coping with them, engendering sadism and cruelty as tools to protect those in authority from being exposed for the frauds that they are. It's a story which, while originally published in 1961, deals with themes that are strikingly relevant to the present day.
The issues, if you have any, may come with the degree to which the series is faithful to the book. Critics who are fans of the book complain that its message has been diluted or "dumbed down" for mainstream entertainment. That may well be true, but from my own subjective standpoint and judging it solely on how engaging I found it, I'd say it's rather an excellent series.
To begin with, the overall production values are top notch. It looks authentic and period accurate. The cinematography looks great and the action scenes are rendered very believably while avoiding gratuitous flamboyance and gore. The cast all worked very well for me and delivered what I found to be poignant and appropriately humorous characterizations, because this is driven by satire, wicked at its best.
Now, I may very well one day read the book and then look back on these interpretations as faint and feeble, but on their own, judged on their own merits, they still have something valid to say. Having the time delve into it over the course of six 45 minute episodes gives it a lot of room to breath and I found myself very much engrossed in the story and moved by both its highs and lows.
