A poster design by Yusaku Kamekura. More here, via A Journey Round My Skull.

First of all this week, there’s a new interview posted which I gave last year to Crows ’n’ Bones magazine. The replies skate around the usual subjects (Cthulhu et al) and you also find out why I don’t think design and illustration for music is going to vanish as soon as some people think.

• A Journey Round My Skull has announced The Raymond Roussel Illustration Contest which is open to all.

• Cover designs: David Pearson on redesigning Cormac McCarthy’s UK covers, a huge improvement on the previous Picador series. Also, The Robert Lesser Pulp Art Collection.

• Last year I discussed Teleny, Or the Reverse of the Medal, the novel of gay erotica attributed to Oscar Wilde, giving a mention in passing to Jon Macy’s comic strip adaptation of the book. That adaptation has now been published and is available via his website.

The Kiss (1896) by Will Bradley.

• More Art Nouveau (because too much is never enough): Will Bradley’s work at Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Can’t understand how I missed this one.

• A discussion: The Magic Mystery and Melancholy of Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake.

• Sandi Vincent’s Flickr pages overflow with Graphis Annual goodness.

• A new edition of the Arthur Radio Voyage is available to download. And Trunk Records’ Jonny Trunk has a mix of obscure vinyl for you.

• Song of the week: We Want War by These New Puritans. Slow motion shots in the video are a plus.

Will at A Journey Round My Skull turned up this hand-coloured picture from Ronald Balfour’s illustrated Rubáiyát some of whose other drawings were featured here recently. That distant volcano is a curious detail. Related: Golden Age Comic Book Stories posted plates from Willy Pogàny’s edition.

• Authors on authors: China Miéville on JG Ballard; Rodrigo Fresán on Jorge Luis Borges; AS Byatt on Lewis Carroll.

• Events: Alan Moore & Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley present Simultaneous Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room at the Laing Art Gallery on March 13th, 2010 (via Arthur); in October Weirdstone will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

• New blogs: Wonder Kabinet / Wunderkammer, “curiosities, ephemera, and fragments from The Cutting Room Floor and Evan J Peterson”; Pencil Tool, a Tumblr by Charity Pomaybo; and another Tumblr from Mountain*7.

• Perversity Think Tank is a new book from Supervert. Download it for free or order the delicious limited edition.

• The Casual Optimist lists 10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.

• Via BibliOdyssey: 400 woodcuts by Eric Gill.

• “At least in self-abuse / There’s a little dignity…” Song of the week was Hands 2 Take by The Flying Lizards from their second album, Fourth Wall (1981). I bought this when it came out but hadn’t listened to it for years. Thrilling, urgent stuff with the fabulous Patti Palladin on vocals. Play loud.

It’s a curious feeling when a drawing which is nearly 26 years old makes it out into the world. The image above is the cover of a new 7″ single release, Dominion of Avyaktam by metal band Orator, the picture being something I drew in 1984 entitled Mahakala after the Tibetan deity which it depicts. The inspiration was the cover of another recording, a Nonesuch Explorer album, Tibetan Buddhism – Tantras Of Gyütö: Mahakala, and also the track Mahakala by 23 Skidoo from their 1983 album The Culling is Coming. The skull is drawn from a real one I was given. Looking at this today none of the elements seem to work together—and the landscape stuff looks like a lazy way of filling in space—but it’s nice to see it find a home. Dominion of Avyaktam is out now on the Legion of Death label.

• Surprise of the week: two books I’ve worked on were nominated for Nebula Awards, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand whose interior I designed.

• More music: a recording of Paul Schütze’s Third Site played live in 1999 (with Clive Bell, Raoul Björkenheim, Simon Hopkins & Thomas Köner’s voice) is now available as a free download on his website. More Schütze: Paul Schütze & Simon Hopkins playing a set at the Horbar in Hamburg on December 28, 2009.

• The incredible pinscreen animations of Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker are finally available on DVD. Also new to DVD, Alan Bennett at the BBC, a four-disc set of some of his TV plays including a particular favourite of mine, his Kafkaesque drama The Insurance Man.

• More Ghost Box business: Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle has a blog. And Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp was interviewed recently by Peter Bebergal at Mystery Theater. Related (forgot to mention this last week): The ASDA Mix, a great mixtape of spooky retro weirdness by Moon Wiring Club available for free at The Wire.

• The trailer for Mellodrama, a documentary about the Mellotron by Dianna Dillworth.

• The Parajanov Festival will be screening some of the director’s films in London and Bristol.

• Lots of weird and wonderful exhibits at the ~Wunderkammer~.

A picture for embittered lovers.

Among other things this week I’ve been working on the design for another CD featuring photos by Liz Eve, a photographer whose pictures are always a pleasure to use. (Our earlier encounters can be seen here, here and here.) The latest set have this anti-Valentine for an eye-popping cover image. I’ll be posting the finished layouts once everything is approved by the label.

• Crash: JG Ballard’s artistic legacy. Iain Sinclair on Ballard and a new art exhibition inspired by the author’s fiction.

• More art: Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog is essential reading. Lots of insights into his beautiful work.

• Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges will be released in an expanded edition on April 27th with outtakes, documentary, book and other extras.

• Sonic Youth dude and fellow Arthurian Thurston Moore has a blog.

• “That’s all it comes down to in the end, though, isn’t it? Put it in and jiggle it about a bit.” Alan Bennett & John Fortune discuss sex. A hoot.

• “I wanna walk through Sodom with a boy on my arm / Who’s so damn pretty I don’t know where I am…” A song from 1984 for Valentine’s Day: I, Bloodbrother Be (£4,000 Love Letter) by Shock Headed Peters.

Good things come in fours: the mighty Kraftwerk performing Numbers on the Minimum-Maximum DVD (2005).

Yes, the day between Darwin Day and St. Valentine’s Day is this blog’s birthday. I continue to be surprised that I’ve kept this going for so long since I never managed to keep a diary. Doing work that chains you to a computer is a help, although the past year was so busy that many entries were little more than picture posts. 2009 saw this site receiving more traffic than ever with the result that the server resources are now regularly overloaded for a couple of hours each day. I’ve been intending to move to a new webhost for a while but doing so is a time-consuming and technically complex business over which the current hectic workload continues to take priority.

The three most popular posts of the last twelve months were the following:

• The gay artists archive. Always a popular page but now it’s the most popular destination by a long margin, helped by continual visits from Stumbleupon users.

• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar. Links on Boing Boing, Trendhunter and elsewhere helped make this year’s calendar a big success. My thanks again to everyone who bought a copy, I’ll be doing a Through the Looking-Glass follow-up in September.

• Alan Moore interview, 1988. Another Stumbleupon hit, this magazine interview was one of my earliest posts and it remains curiously popular, more so than the very long Watchmen round table discussion which followed.

As always, thanks for reading and for all your comments!

John x

• Two covers from a new range of Penguin reprints for the Aids awareness fund (RED), all of which are based around quotes from the books in question. Non-Format’s stylised extract concerns the blazing red of the Count’s eyes while Coralie Bickford-Smith plays some Tom Phillips games with the text of The Secret Agent. The random circles no doubt relate to those which the doomed Stevie Verloc occupies his time in drawing. More at Caustic Cover Critic.

• Artspeak? It’s complicated. Jon Canter at The Guardian makes a blazingly obvious point which few in the art world would ever admit: that the specious pronouncements of many galleries and contemporary artists are the worst kind of bullshit.

• I helped judge the Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition whose winners were announced last week.

• Designer Jonathan Barnbrook enjoys Neu! and Wendy Carlos.

• Nuit Blanche, a short film by Spy Films.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Giant Squid of the Newfoundland Banks. From a painting by Herbert B Judy.

Today’s Giant Squid comes to you courtesy of the University of Washington’s Digital Collection and their Freshwater and Marine Image Bank. This book plate is from Sea-shore Life; The Invertebrates of the New York Coast and the Adjacent Coast Region (1905) by Alfred Goldsborough Mayor, and Archive.org happens to have copies of the entire book.

Which facts have nothing whatsoever to do with Ken Hollings’ photos of the Strange Attractor Salon which is in its final week at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. I was pleased to see the picture above which shows my pieces on the same wall as work by Julian House whose covers for the Ghost Box CDs I’ve enthused over in the past. Strange Attractor curator Mark Pilkington has posted further photos on his Flickr pages as has artist Ali Hutchinson whose beautiful work is also featured there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Readouts
• Welcome to Mars
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• SAJ again
• Strange Attractor Journal Three
• Ghost Box
• The Major Arcana

Pathways (1973). A slightly reworked version of the original painting.

“Science fiction is unfortunate in having a most unsatisfactory framework of existence—it’s considered literary kitsch. I believe it should be the mainstream of literature because all the books that have become important down the generations of civilisation have been books about ideas. Superficially, science fiction would seem to offer the most scope for idea content, but the promise is unfulfilled. Good ideas and good writing rarely coincide. All too often the medium is used for entertainment alone and its potential beyond this should be obvious to everyone. I don’t just mean in the sense of fantasy technology. The potential for anticipating human evolution is there and perhaps the means to bring it about and definitely the means to bring about a social evolution.”

Roger Dean, interviewed in Visions of the Future (1976).

If popularity is often a curse as well as a blessing, it’s been Roger Dean’s curse to see his work dismissed along with many other products of a decade with more than its share of cultural heroes and villains, the 1970s. Music journalists in Britain have for years given the impression that the arrival of the Sex Pistols in 1976 swept away all that preceded them, in particular bands such as Yes whose album covers had helped raise the visibility of Dean’s art to an international level. This is not only a lazy assumption, it’s also wrong. When Yes released Going For the One in 1977 it was their first studio album in three years yet despite the punk explosion it went to no. 1 in the UK album charts, while a rare single release from the band made the UK top ten. Yes were playing sell-out tours in Europe and the US in 1977 and 78, as were Pink Floyd whose The Wall was massively popular worldwide in 1979. Punk didn’t sweep prog away, what happened with its advent was that progressive rock and everything associated with it—Roger Dean’s art included—became critically disreputable almost overnight, such that no journalist would dare say anything good about it. That disrepute has persisted for thirty years despite a lasting and indelible influence; this is an old argument but certain facts often need restating anew. *

Views (1975).

I was 13 in September 1975 when Roger Dean’s first collection of his illustration and design work, Views, was published. At that time, I hadn’t heard any of the music to which his paintings and drawings were attached, and I didn’t even see a copy of the book until February 1976 when I happened to be in London on a school trip and found a big pile of what I guess was the second edition in Foyle’s book shop. This appeared at exactly the right moment; I wasn’t listening to the music but I was reading a lot of science fiction and was starting to notice and imitate the work of various paperback artists. I recognised many of the pictures in Views from the covers displayed in the window of our local record shop, Cobweb, whose shopping-bag logo was a cowled magician figure à la Dean or Rodney Matthews. It’s difficult to say what struck me about Dean’s work at the time since you rarely articulate your preferences at that age. I think I liked the consistency of vision and the invention which blended the organic and mechanical, the architecture which looked at once ancient and futuristic, and the flat landscapes which put lone pine trees into rocky terrain familiar from Japanese and Chinese prints. For a teenager his style was also relatively easy to imitate if you forgot about basic things such as imagination and finesse, and I spent a year producing a lot of badly-drawn reptiles posed against lurid watercolour skies.

Motown Chartbusters Vol. Six (1971).

Dean was packaging many different kinds of bands and styles of music throughout the early Seventies, most notably Yes, for whom he also helped design stage sets, but also various folk rock artists on the Vertigo label, turgid rockers like Uriah Heep and Budgie, and Afrobeat groups like Osibisa and Assagai; he even did a cover for a Motown compilation. But he remained resolute throughout in using the album cover to explore his own obsessions and design concerns. It was this latter aspect of his work which surprised me when I finally got my hands on a copy of Views late in 1976 and discovered that these weren’t mere illustrations but were often coming out of his explorations of furniture and architectural design. In that respect, his work is a lot less like the artists he’s usually grouped with—fantasists such as Rodney Matthews or Brian Froud, or the popular sf illustrators of the decade like Chris Foss—but is closer to the speculative industrial designs of futurist Syd Mead. The outsized reptiles and surreal moments in Dean’s pictures tended to obscure the architectural speculation, whilst being the very elements which made him so popular. That popularity coincided with a boom in poster art which made him easy to dismiss later on as part of the reprehensible hippy froth of the era. What people missed then, and continue to miss when he’s branded as merely another illustrator, is the obsessive reworking of vistas and visual motifs—dragons, Asian rock formations, pine trees, floating islands—whose origin is the same psychological impulse which birthed the internal landscapes of the Surrealists or the jungles and deserts of JG Ballard. Dean’s landscapes are frequently depopulated and appear dream-bright, awaiting the arrival of a new breed of colonists for their porous architecture. It’s no surprise that his work in recent years has caught the attention of filmmakers and games designers.

Yessongs (1973).

The success of Views had one lasting benefit in that it launched the Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger publishing imprints which made the work of many science fiction and fantasy illustrators available in lavish book form. Among the early run of titles was the first proper study of album cover art, The Album Cover Album (1977), produced in collaboration with Hipgnosis, and a Syd Mead collection, Sentinel (1978). When I started hanging around the Savoy bookshops in Manchester in the 1980s I was surprised to see Roger Dean’s autograph on the wall of what used to be Bookchain in Peter Street. His scrawled name and accompanying dragon head had been left there in 1979 when he turned up to sign copies of Views along with three of the artists from the Dragon’s Dream volume The Studio—Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson and Jeff Jones—who also signed the shop wall.

Dean’s 1969 logo for Harvest Records, a division of EMI.

Dean’s art has been out of critical favour for so long that it’s difficult to discuss it positively without sounding overly defensive. While many other shunned aspects of the pre-punk era have been rehabilitated—folk music, psychedelic drugs, flares—I’ve yet to see anyone mount a serious reappraisal of Dean’s artwork despite his furniture and architecture designs having been exhibited at the V&A. There’s a certain kind of critic, usually male and British, who finds the exercise of a Romantic imagination to be a suspect and unwholesome activity. That suspicion often sees a single “story” being told in art history which skips from Impressionism to Cubism and ignores the Symbolists and Decadents; it dismisses Dalí’s work after the 1930s and won’t even look at the paintings of HR Giger, Ernst Fuchs or Mati Klarwein; it’s a suspicion which marginalised Mervyn Peake almost to the year of his death in 1968, which scowls at genre fiction and ignored JG Ballard (always a proud science fiction writer) until his Booker Prize nomination in 1984. Minimalism and restraint is favoured over exuberant invention, and a blokey cynicism is favoured over any kind of visionary impulse which is seen as tasteless or kitsch, with “kitsch” in this context almost always meaning “whatever I dislike”. For every Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker or China Miéville who assert and promote the value of the imagination, you’ll find a vocal crowd who find the whole thing to be unpalatable and juvenile. It’s an older argument than punk versus hippy, going back at least to the nineteenth century debate between Realism and Romanticism. It’s also a peculiarly joyless English attitude; the French have shared the debate as far back as Zola but are generally a lot happier for serious intellectual dialogue to sit side-by-side with comics, movies, science fiction and fantasy.

Blue by John Dummer featuring Nick Pickett (1972). One of Dean’s die-cut sleeves for Vertigo Records.

I’d argue that it’s the perceived “bad taste” quality of Dean’s work, and his guilt-by-association with a disreputable period of music, which has delayed any reassessment of his art and cover designs. Barney Bubbles was a great graphic designer exactly contemporary with Dean—both worked for Vertigo in the early Seventies—but as an illustrator Bubbles’ work is nearly always playing riffs on styles or motifs borrowed from elsewhere, and is less original as a result. Bubbles escaped the wrath of punk dismissal by being personally evasive, dropping the hippy elements from his work and becoming house designer for Stiff Records in 1976. Roger Dean, meanwhile, simply carried on being Roger Dean and the powerful illustration side of his art continued to overshadow his design interests. Since design critics are nearly always the ones who write the histories, they tend to favour graphic design over illustration; design is the intellectual component, it’s functional and has a job to do. Illustration, on the other hand, is often treated as mere decoration. The attitude of writer and designer Jon Wozencroft, discussing album cover design in The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (1988), is typical:

Work done by Roger Dean for the group Yes cannot really be counted in this category, for although his cover design posters adorned many bedroom walls in 1973, their content was no more challenging than an airbrushed greetings card.

I wonder whether Wozencroft has seen Dean’s 1971 sleeve for Motown Chartbusters Volume 6, whose beetle spacecraft certainly challenges expectations for how a pop/soul compilation should look? As for challenging the form of the album package, there’s the elaborate die-cut sleeves which Dean was creating for Vertigo at this time, and his design for Dutch band Earth & Fire which had some of the artwork printed on the inside of the sleeve envelope and therefore largely hidden from view. With a few rare exceptions, graphic designers usually only influence other graphic designers whereas the influence of a good artist or illustrator permeates the wider culture. Singularity of vision counts for a lot, whether it’s HR Giger’s creations for Alien or Syd Mead’s work on Blade Runner and Tron. I happen to rate Dean as a graphic designer in his own right, for his beautifully simple Harvest Records logo, for those die-cut Vertigo sleeves, and for his elegant and futuristic extensions of Art Nouveau lettering and the typographic stylings of the San Francisco poster artists. But it’s the body of his artwork which has the lasting influence. Nearly every review I’ve seen of James Cameron’s Avatar has referred to its visual character as resembling a 1970s album cover, by which they mean it looks like a Roger Dean painting. Accusations of plagiarism have proliferated once people realised that Dean’s floating mountains, looped rock formations and flying reptile fauna predate Avatar’s by many years. That Dean’s work can represent an entire decade is a measure of its significance even if the theft of his landscapes and the use to which they are put—a backdrop for more of Cameron’s simple-minded belligerence—is something the artist wouldn’t want.

Morning Dragon.

Dean’s influence will continue not least because new generations don’t care about the old battles and unexamined prejudices of the punk era. With the wholesale fragmentation of popular culture, artists today curate their influences based more on their own interests and obsessions than on the dictats of critics, and what critics there are have become smaller voices struggling to be heard in a global discussion. Views sold over a million copies and is still in print along with Dean’s subsequent books; his work is easy to find even if few care to examine it seriously. The writings of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick gained widespread popularity when the world began to more closely resemble their fiction. In Roger Dean’s case, technology is now better able to bring his imagination to life. Over the past decade we’ve seen the creation of buildings which resemble his organic designs while his holistic approach to architecture and the environment is more widely accepted than it was when Views first appeared. Hollywood and games designers have the means to create the kinds of worlds Dean was imagining thirty years ago but as the technology accelerates in scope and power the visions it might render remain in short supply, hence the recourse to a Dean or a Giger or a Syd Mead whose Tron designs return in a sequel later this year. Dean’s art was never intended to épater le bourgeois and he wasn’t aiming to be the El Lissitzky of the 1970s; to berate him for failing this not only misses the point but ignores the singularity and lasting quality of his work.

* Progressive rock’s disrepute has been so ingrained that it’s taken Alan McGee over thirty years to admit that it might be okay to listen to some post-Barrett Pink Floyd. In a similar vein, The Wire is the most open-minded of all the current music mags but the King Crimson and Yes reappraisals in their December 2009 issue were the first substantial pieces they’ve run on either band.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002
• Guy Peellaert, 1934–2008
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

A reminder that the Manchester District Music Archive’s Queer Noise event (for which I designed posters and flyers) takes place this Saturday.

Join us on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at The Deaf Institute for a one-off celebration of gay music in Manchester.

The line-up includes:
DJs: Dave Kendrick (Paradise Factory) • Jayne Compton (Club Brenda) • Philippa Jarman (Aytoun/Homo Electric) • Wes Baggaley (Terrorist)

Live Music: (hooker) • The Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus

Discussion: Jon Savage • Dave Kendrick • Liz Naylor • Jayne Compton • Gerry Potter aka Chloe Poems

Tickets are £6 are now available from Piccadilly Records.

ONLINE EXHIBITION
We will follow this event with an online exhibition scheduled for March 2010, curated by Jon Savage. If you have any flyers, posters, photos, footage or info relating to gay music in Manchester from the 1940s onwards, do get in touch at: info@mdmarchive.co.uk

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Queer Noise and the Wolf Girl

A satellite view of snow across Great Britain on January 7, 2010.

Walking the snow-laden streets this week felt like a considerable novelty when we rarely have snowfalls of any depth here and what there is never lasts much longer than a day. The current low temperatures which began just before Christmas may be inducing a national trauma but the genuinely wintery weather makes a change from the dreary weeks of rain and cold which usually prevail until April.

Whilst trudging through the crusted ice I found myself remembering favourite films which make the most of winter landscapes. Here’s a short list to follow the earlier winter-themed posts.

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)
Several Westerns before this one had featured winter scenes but I think Robert Altman’s was the first to be set at the height of winter in a snowbound town. Memorable for Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography, Leonard Cohen’s lugubrious songs, Warren Beatty’s doomed businessman stomping around wrapped in furs muttering “Pain, pain, pain!”, and the finale when he’s hunted down by a trio of assassins.

The Shining (1980)
Has anyone not seen this film? Despite the artificial snow, Kubrick’s direction and John Alcott’s photography communicate authentic chills, both meteorological and metaphysical.

Yes, it’s a genuine Christmas postcard from Oregon’s Timberline Lodge which became the model for Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. Writer Tom Veitch sent me this some years ago.

The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter’s grisly Antarctic horror is the film I still find to be his best. Like his earlier Assault on Precinct 13, this is another siege situation borrowed from Howard Hawks only this time the enemy is within. Until someone films At the Mountains of Madness, this is the closest you’ll get to Lovecraft’s polar nightmares.

Runaway Train (1985)
Few people know this: escaped convicts Jon Voight and Eric Roberts find themselves on the titular train with rail worker Rebecca De Mornay, and it’s a long ride through frozen landscapes as they try to escape the law and the train itself before it crashes. Andrei Konchalovsky directs a story by Akira Kurosawa rewritten by Edward Bunker (who has a cameo) and others. The result is a strange blend of hardboiled drama and existential symbolism with a great score by Trevor Jones.

Fargo (1996)
One of the Coen Brothers’ best. Watching this again over Christmas along with many of their other films, it was amusing to see Steve Buscemi transform from Fargo’s vicious and splenetic kidnapper to the mild-mannered character he plays in The Big Lebowski. Despite the statement at the beginning of the film, Fargo isn’t a true story but its existence became tangled with some curious real-life events.

Update: I was reminded on Twitter about Altman’s bizarre future Ice Age drama, Quintet, which I should have mentioned above. Not as successful as the earlier film but its setting certainly suits the weather.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bruegel in winter
• Winter panoramas
• Winter music
• Winter light
• Kubrick shirts
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Images by Robert Altman

The Firebird, a costume design by Léon Bakst for the Ballet Russes/Stravinsky production of the same name which had its premiere in Paris on June 25, 1910.

02010? Read this.

Happy new year!

The final post of an exceptionally productive year arrives with 2010 already shaping up to be just as busy and stimulating work-wise. In 2009 I designed at least 12 books (or was it 13? I’ve lost count…), 8 or 9 book covers, several CDs and many one-off commissions, as well as producing that calendar. If the precise details are vague it’s because the year has passed in something of a blur.

A number of the books I’ve been working on have yet to be published, among them The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer which will be appearing soon from Tachyon. This is a small hardback whose humorous nature should be self-explanatory but if you need further details, Jeff can tell you more. And one of the major tasks of next year will be work for another VanderProject, The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, a sequel to the acclaimed Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. The new anthology will be a HarperCollins title due for publication in 2011; once again, Jeff has further details.

Finally, the good people at Innsmouth Free Press talked to me recently and their interview is now posted. Given the nature of the site, the discussion mostly concerns matters Lovecraftian but I also talk a little about how I ended up doing all this stuff in the first place. And if you read to the end you’ll discover which Lovecraft character I’d prefer to be. I decided to stick with the human cast; choosing from among the Great Old Ones seems far too presumptuous, even for an inflated ego like mine.

The Düsseldorf maestros are treated to some animated illustration in this 1979 film by Roger Mainwood which takes Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as its soundtrack. Mark at Strange Attractor provided the tip and he compares the animation style to René Laloux and Roland Topor’s Fantastic Planet (1973). The purple humanoid floating through surreal landscapes is certainly reminiscent of Laloux’s film, but Autobahn also reminds me of Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro non troppo (1977) and, given that Mainwood’s animation comes a couple of years later, it may well have been inspired by it. Bozzetto’s film is a feature-length “adult” response to Walt Disney’s Fantasia which takes the Fantasia format—well-known classical themes illustrated by animated sequences—but does so in a slightly more grotesque or risqué fashion. Much of Bozzetto’s film seems less daring today than it was in 1977 but the best sequence still works well and happens to be as science fictional as Mainwood’s Autobahn, an entire cycle of planetary evolution set to Ravel’s Bolero. Follow the links below.

• Roger Mainwood’s Autobahn pt. 1 | pt. 2
• Ravel’s Bolero from Allegro non troppo

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sleeve craft
• Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?
• Old music and old technology
• Aerodynamik by Kraftwerk
• The genius of Kraftwerk

Kjendalskronebrae, Nordfjord, Norway (c. 1900). From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wood s Lot.

Are you suffering list fatigue yet? I certainly have been, especially from the apparently endless “best ___ of the decade” catalogues which would have you believe that the significant cultural products of the past ten years have been thoroughly sifted, reviewed and appraised. So yes, there’s a degree of hypocrisy in adding to the list surplus but, as with the Halloween music lists, it’s difficult to write about an area of listening without compiling something like this. As it happens, my Halloween playlists proved briefly popular this year when they were noticed by Stumbleupon users so someone appreciates them.

The present selection is music to complement the season and its chilly weather which in our part of the world has been colder than usual and laden with snow. It might also serve as a suggested alternative to the dreary plague of Christmas songs. This isn’t definitive, of course, and I could have added more than ten. I kept the choices in the electronic spectrum but there’s a whole other list which could be made of winter-themed folk songs, folk music of all kinds being sensitive to the changing seasons.

Sonic Seasonings (1972) by Wendy Carlos.
Between her electronic transcriptions of Baroque music and the score for A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos released a collection of four long pieces of electronic atmospherics blended with natural sound recordings, with each track dedicated to a different season. The album may not have had the formal intent of Brian Eno’s ambient albums but ambient it certainly is, preceding Eno’s Discreet Music by three years whilst predicting much of what would become over-familiar during the 1990s. The Winter track is the one which concerns us here, a droning Moog landscape of echoed notes, tinkling ice, distant wind and Rachel Elkind’s lupine howls. Carlos and Elkind carried the synthesised chill into their opening music for The Shining a few years later, and Carlos returned to the theme with the digital improvisations of Land of the Midnight Sun, included as a bonus on the Sonic Seasonings CD.

Eskimo (1979) by The Residents.
A conceptual masterpiece, and an album which still sounds as strange and timeless as it did when it first appeared. Eskimo is the first and (one presumes) only example of what might be labelled “Eskimo exotica” since the whole work is more Eskimo-esque than an authentic musical rendering of the world of the Inuit people. Like Wendy Carlos’s Winter, these are shifting soundscapes augmented by ritual chants and synthesised animal sounds. For those who found the album to be musically inaccessible the group released Diskomo, a segue of the musical themes matched to a thumping dance beat.

Iceland (1979) by Richard Pinhas.
Another far north concept album and the third solo release from the Heldon guitarist who subdues his Robert Fripp impersonations in favour of synth arrangements. The CD version includes a 22-minute bonus, Winter Music.

Victorialand (1986) by Cocteau Twins.
Much of the Cocteau Twins’ chiming and reverb-drenched output would suit the colder months but Victorialand in particular takes its title from a region of Antarctica, and many of the track titles—Whales Tails, How to Bring a Blush to the Snow—point in that direction. Another timeless work.

White Out (1990) by Johannes Schmoelling.
Schmoelling was a member of Tangerine Dream in what I consider to be their last worthwhile incarnation from 1980 to 1986. His third solo album also takes Antarctica as its theme and while some of the music tends to a jaunty blandness at its best it manages to evoke the isolation of the continent through lengthy synthesiser pieces. When the Polydor release went out of print, Schmoelling re-worked the album slightly for reissue on his own label.

Songs from the Cold Seas (1995) by Hector Zazou.
Many of the late Hector Zazou’s albums were concepts of some kind, often involving a roster of guest artists. Songs from the Cold Seas follows this pattern with singers from around the world delivering a variety of songs from the world’s colder regions. For a contrast to the Residents’ ethnological forgeries, Song of the Water is a chant by Inuit artists Elisha Kilabuk and Koomoot Nooveya. Among other highlights there’s Björk who restrains her vocal gymnastics for once with a delicate Icelandic lullaby, Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu.

Polar Sequences (1996) by Higher Intelligence Agency & Biosphere.
A collaboration between Bobby Bird of HIA and Biosphere’s Geir Jenssen, recorded live with sounds sourced in and around Jenssen’s home town of Tromsø at the Arctic Circle. I much prefer this to the other HIA releases which lack its detailed textures. One track, Meltwater, sounds just as you’d expect, all running water and crackling ice.

Substrata (1997) by Biosphere.
Still one of the finest Biosphere releases (although Nordheim Transformed is probably my favourite) and included here for its chilly and mostly beatless atmosphere which includes further samples from the far north.

La Marche de L’Empereur (2005) by Emilie Simon.
I still haven’t seen La Marche de L’Empereur (March of the Penguins) but the soundtrack for the original French release is a fantastic collection of songs illustrating the survival struggles of the film’s penguins. Emilie Simon is frequently described as “the French Björk”, a lazy label which only connects the pair because they’re female singers who also happen to be “foreign” and users of unorthodox electronic arrangements. The recordings here feature glitch-inflected rhythms and glass instruments which means they were far too interesting for the American release of the film. The Hollywood version dropped the songs in favour of a traditional orchestral score.

Alaska Melting (2006) by Monolake.
The latest album from Monolake, aka Robert Henke, was released earlier this month. Silence has a winter scene on the cover and a track entitled Infinite Snow but winter isn’t a predominant theme. While the music is up to Henke’s usual high standard, it’s a lot less urgent than Alaska Melting, a one-off release on 12″ vinyl with two slices of vibrant techno that foreground Henke’s environmental concerns. The most uptempo and abrasive work on this list.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween: Voodoo!
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• A cluster of Cluster
• Fragment Endloss by Robert Henke
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Thomas Köner
• A playlist for Halloween

Two recent pieces of work which were being created at the same time so they share some similarity of style (and the same baroque flourish). Queer Noise is a music-related event taking place in Manchester (UK) next month. Music journalist Jon Savage will be leading the discussion and some may recognise the event title as relating to his Trikont CD compilation Queer Noises 1961–1978: From the Closet to the Charts. There are further details about the event at the MDMArchive.

Designing for gay content can be a fraught business since it’s almost inevitable that someone will disagree with your choices. Best then to abandon any thought of trying to please everyone and follow your own instincts. Making this a riot of pink seemed like a good way to offset the fetishised figure as well as making an eye-catching design. My first impetus had been to try an arrangement of pink and black on white similar to that used by Barney Bubbles in one of his Ian Dury designs. In the end this evolved away from that idea but it was a useful starting point. And while we’re on the subject of pink, there’s a growing backlash against the way the colour is forced on young girls:

Back in the 1800s, most children were dressed alike. Gender differences weren’t really apparent until they could walk, or later: boys and girls both wore dresses or skirts until they were six or so. By the end of the century, as the Ladies’ Home Journal noted, boys’ and girls’ clothing styles began to diverge. According to Professor Jo Paoletti of the University of Maryland, pink emerged as an appropriate colour for boys because it was “a close relative of red, seen as a fiery, manly colour”. Blue was considered better suited for girls because of its associations, in art, with the Virgin Mary. (More.)

Curse of the Wolf Girl is a young adult title by Martin Millar about which I can tell you very little at the moment other than I’ve finished the cover and the book will be out some time in the new year from Underland Press. More about that when it happens.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Coming Out Day
• Over the rainbow
• Queer Noises

It was a shock this weekend to hear of the sudden death (heart attack, apparently) of American guitarist Jack Rose. I think I saw him perform four times in all, the first occasion being at Spaceland in Los Angeles, 2005, where I snapped this photo which I used for a poster design when he played in Manchester a few months later. His shimmering extemporisations on blues and folk themes that evening were simply stunning and I rushed to buy his Kensington Blues CD as soon as he’d finished. There’s no need to attempt futile descriptions of his talent when you can go to YouTube and discover it for yourself. He was only 38. A great loss to family, friends and music.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Golden Apples of the Sun
• Jack Rose returns
• Jack Rose in Manchester

Salome (1918).

You can’t keep a bad girl down… Attempting to gather all the painted representations of Salomé would be a foolish enterprise, there are far too many especially when you reach the 19th century, an age whose misogyny found an ideal expression in the emasculating temptress. Searching through 20th century adaptations yields some interesting works, however.

Theda Bara’s film pre-dates the more flamboyant Nazimova version by five years, and since I haven’t seen it I’ve no idea how it holds up today. But from the look of the stills and posters it seems far closer to the usual historical fare than the stylised version which followed.

Salomé (1923).

I’ve written about Nazimova’s silent adaptation of Wilde’s play in an earlier post so there’s no need to go into detail here. Back then I didn’t have a credit for the very Beardsley-esque posters and lobby cards which it transpires are the work of Eugene Gise and Natacha Rambova, the latter being the film’s costume and set designer.

Salomé (1923).

Salome (2002).

Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera adaptation of Wilde’s play receives far more performances than the play itself, and this poster is one of four created for a recent Canadian production.

Salome (2006).

And this isn’t a poster but it brings us back to Beardsley with an attractive cover for a Taiwanese (?) book. Impossible to tell whether this is a libretto or something else since its page is in Chinese but the colouring works rather well (although that gold streak of blood should be red) and the lettering almost takes Beardsley’s drawing back to its Japanese inspiration.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Salomé scored
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

You need this, boys and girls, yes you do. Dodgem Logic is the first worthwhile independent culture mag this country has produced since the sorely-missed Strange Things Are Happening. Perhaps significantly, both those titles featured Mr Alan Moore, being interviewed in Strange Things and presiding over the new title as resident magus and eminence gris-gris.

“…we’ve tried to resurrect a spirit of the 60s underground papers, but without the look or ambience or some of the oversights. There were a lot of very good ideas that emerged from the 60s underground. It was the first place I heard about women’s liberation – as we used to call it then – or gay liberation. They were fanatically anti-war. Many of their most extreme political statements, such as the fact that sometimes the police kill people, or that sometimes we make deals with dictators and criminal governments that we keep quiet about – these things are pretty much standard stuff of conversation these days and not reserved purely for bearded wild-eyed burbling radicals (chuckles).” (More.)

Among other delights, there’s a page of Alan’s where he returns to cartooning (below) with a paean to my favourite drawing pen, the Rotring Rapidograph, Melinda Gebbie writing on feminism, Kevin O’Neill with a WTF of cosmic proportions, and much more, including a smart feature on how to reclaim local land which the council won’t use. All this and a free CD! Who says we can’t have good things?

Update: I should have noted that Americans can order Dodgem Logic through Top Shelf.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• International Times archive
• The Realist
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• Oz magazine, 1967-73
• Alan Moore interview, 1988
• Strange Things Are Happening, 1988-1990

Poster by Barney Bubbles for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! (1980).

Adelita, the publishers of Reasons To Be Cheerful: the life and work of Barney Bubbles, announced this week that Paul Gorman’s essential collection of BB graphics has been named Book of the Year in Mojo magazine:

Reasons To Be Cheerful – the acclaimed study of the life and work of the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles – has been declared Book Of The Year by the UK’s leading rock monthly Mojo magazine.

Described as “fascinating and definitive” by the Sunday Times and “moving and lovingly researched,” by GQ editor Dylan Jones in The Independent, Reasons To Be Cheerful was written by Paul Gorman (author of style bible The Look and Straight with Boy George) and published by British independent popular culture imprint Adelita (sales and distribution through Turnaround Publisher Services).

Mojo will name Reasons To Be Cheerful Book Of The Year in its January 2010 issue (published November 27) with an exclusive interview with Factory Records designer Peter Saville praising its publication.

A quarter of a century after he took his own life at the age of 41, Reasons To Be Cheerful has transformed Barney Bubbles’ cult status by elevating him into the pantheon of graphic design greats. Among fans of the book are such prominent musicians as Paul Weller, Jah Wobble, Mick Jones, Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is the first and definitive exploration of this important visual artist’s body of work, with more than 600 images including student sketchbooks, private paintings, product, brand, underground and music press and examples of the hundreds of record sleeves, posters, adverts, promotional items and music videos he created for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Hawkwind, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Depeche Mode, The Specials and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful has also spawned a spectacular online presence featuring fresh interviews, information and rare and previously unseen images (see http://barneybubbles.com/blog) and has been well received in the UK and US (where it is distributed by D.A.P). Author Paul Gorman will also curate a Barney Bubbles exhibition to be inaugurated at London’s Chelsea Space gallery during Design Week in September 2010.

By coincidence, two days after Mojo appears the All-Day Barney Bubbles Benefit Memorial Concert will be staged at the 229 Club, Great Portland Street, London. Bands featured include various members of the Hawkwind/Hawklords family led by Nik Turner. There’ll also be the return of Turner’s post-Hawks outfit Inner City Unit, for whom Barney created some of his last designs, and the resurrection of the Imperial Pompadours, a one-off rock’n'roll collaboration between Nik and Barney. That’s happening on 29th November and Turner’s website has all the necessary details.

The Elvis Costello poster above comes from a feature about the Get Happy!! album at Paul Gorman’s BB site. I was never a great fan of Costello’s records but the designs Barney created for those early releases were outstanding and represent the peak of his career. (See the Armed Forces sleeve design for a real eye blast.) Paul’s post shows how much work went into creating a range of integrated graphics for the album, singles and promotional material, and he also has some exclusive material which didn’t make it into Reasons To Be Cheerful. The BB book has been a continual treat to look through this year, and the book design I happen to be finishing has not only been inspired by Barney’s example but also manages to make passing reference to him inside. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hawk things
• Who is Heeps Willard?
• The Sonic Assassins
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 3: A Barney Bubbles exclusive
• More Barney Bubbles
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, California, Composite (1954).

This portrait of a dashing Kenneth Anger juxtaposes the filmmaker with an engraving by Gustave Doré for Paradise Lost. Like his contemporary Emil Cadoo, photographer Edmund Teske (1911–1996) often concealed the homoerotic nature of his pictures by rendering them “artistic” through double-exposure. Teske was friends with rock group The Doors, and a number of his studies of Jim Morrison and co. are very familiar from histories of the band.

Via Bajo el Signo de Libra.

Nude, Davenport, Iowa, Composite with Leaves (1941/46).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Emil Cadoo
• The art of Robert Flynt

Ralph Koltai’s contrasting of panels of corroded metal with smooth objects makes for some attractive combinations, reminding me of similar rough and smooth juxtapositions by artist and designer Russell Mills, notably on one of his Samuel Beckett covers and his design for Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Pearl. Koltai’s site also includes a gallery of his designs for theatre. Digital rust infiltrates my own work now and then via some photos I took of a Manchester railway bridge, the most recent use being in the background of the cover for Finch.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch posters
• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills
• The art of Jo Whaley

Stalker (1979).

Among the new documentary films being shown at the Sheffield (UK) Doc/Fest is Igor Mayboroda’s Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side Of “Stalker”.  Behind the unwieldy title there lies an exploration of the troubled genesis of one of my cult artefacts, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, a personal adaptation by the director of a Russian sf novel, Roadside Picnic, by Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky. Tarkovsky’s production suffered from technical calamities, illness, artistic disagreements and, worst of all, location work in a polluted area which (allegedly) caused the early deaths of a number of the people involved, including the director and leading actor, Anatoli Solonitsyn. All of which makes the completed film seem both miraculous and chilling for reasons beyond its uniquely sinister atmosphere.

When the British Film Institute launched a survey on “the film you would like to share with future generations”, behind Blade Runner in first place was a surprise second place entry: Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction film Stalker, in which a guide leads two clients to a site known as “the Zone”, which has the supposed potential to fulfill a person’s innermost desires. This creative documentary tells the remarkable story behind the making of Stalker, including the series of conflicts which led to crew members, most notably celebrated director of photography Georgi Rerberg, being left off the credits, leaving careers in tatters. Far from your standard making of doc, Director Igor Mayboroda has woven an engrossing “documentary cinema novel” which not only stands as a tribute to Rerberg’s career but also as a delight for cinephiles interested in how the creative process can flourish even under the most difficult and ultimately devastating of circumstances.

Stalker as it currently exists on DVD has a couple of interviews about the making of the film but nothing as substantial as Mayboroda’s documentary which sounds like essential viewing. Those in the Sheffield area can see a repeat showing on November 8.

Also at the Doc/Fest is a new film for the BBC’s long-running arts series, Arena, which will no doubt be screened on TV in due course. Eno is directed by Nicola Roberts and—needless to say—its subject is musician, producer, artist, etc, Brian Eno. Arena has always used Eno’s short piece, Another Green World, for its theme music but I believe this is the first time he’s been profiled in the series. Roberts also directed the excellent 1994 Arena doc, Philip K Dick: A Day in the Afterlife, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing this one as well.

• Danger! High-radiation arthouse! | Geoff Dyer on his own Stalker obsession.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brian Eno: Imaginary Landscapes
• The slow death of modernism
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• The Stalker meme

Alla Nazimova as Salomé (1923).

I wrote a while ago about Alla Nazimova’s luscious silent film production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, a suitably Decadent affair with an allegedly all-gay cast, and costume and stage design based on Aubrey Beardsley’s celebrated illustrations. The film is currently touring England and Wales with a new score for four musicians by composer Charlie Barber, an extract of which can be heard here. I like the Middle Eastern sound of this, a shame the film isn’t coming to Manchester.

By coincidence, artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins sent these photos of an impressive Duncan Meadows and his equally impressive sword as additions to the burgeoning Men with swords archive. Meadows is shown as the executioner in a Royal Opera House production of the Strauss opera, appearing at the end of the drama bearing the head of John the Baptist. Given the way that Salomé’s body has always been the focus of attention in this story, Meadows’ appearance makes a striking change, one which Wilde himself might have appreciated.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Equus and the Executionist
• Beardsley’s Salomé
• Peter Reed and Salomé After Dark
• Alla Nazimova’s Salomé

Two experimental films by British filmmakers. Berlin Horse (1970) at Ubuweb is a hypnotic piece of minimalism by Malcolm Le Grice who subjects found footage of exercising horses to a series of loopings and filterings that push the degraded images to a point of textured abstraction. Of note with this film is the equally minimal and repetitive score, a piano loop created by Brian Eno. This was before he gained prominence as a member of Roxy Music but the slight piece of experimentation points the way to his post-Roxy career and his ambient investigations. Berlin Horse is available on DVD from Lux, with a selection of Le Grice’s other shorts.

Marvo Movie (1967) at Europa Film Treasures is a typically frenetic work by Jeff Keen, four minutes of heavily cut-up sound and vision with collage, animation and multiple exposures throughout. Despite the year of its creation, the effect is less psychedelic and more like an amphetamine rush.

• Malcolm Le Grice at YouTube
• Jeff Keen at YouTube

The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave (1967).

More psychedelia as Paul Gorman at The Look alerts me to an exhibition of work by Pop artist Dudley Edwards running this month at 3345 Parr St, Liverpool. Edwards was a part of the Binder, Edwards & Vaughan design collective in the 1960s, renowned for their light shows and psychedelic murals. BEV were Beatles favourites for a while, the photo below shows Edwards painting the piano upon which Paul McCartney wrote Getting Better. They also painted vehicles, including a Cobra sports car for doomed Guinness heir Tara Browne whose crash death was immortalised in A Day in the Life. And their Million Volt Light & Sound Rave event at the Roundhouse was distinguished by a unique Beatles sound collage, Carnival of Light, which McCartney was talking up last year, saying it ought to be given a proper release.

A Journey Into Vision & Sound will focus on Edwards artistic output from this halcyon period and will feature a selection of images that have been archived for over forty years including photography by Lord Snowdon and the mural Edwards painted for Ringo Starr in 1967. (More.)

A Journey Into Vision & Sound runs until November 30, 2009. There’s more about the work of Dudley Edwards and BEV at The Look.

Dudley Edwards painting Paul McCartney’s piano.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Through the Wonderwall
• Psychedelic Life
• Psychedelic vehicles

It’s become a tradition here to post a playlist for Halloween so here’s the one for this year, a collection of favourite “voodoo” music. Most are these pieces have as much to do with real voodoo as Bewitched does with real witchcraft but I like the atmospheres of Voodoo Exotica they evoke.

Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi (1958).
Beginning with some ethnographic authenticity, this is one of many recordings of genuine (so they claim) voodoo drummers from Haiti, and was probably released to cash-in on the Exotica boom of the late Fifties. For the genuine article, the drums here sound less dramatic than the pounding rhythms familiar from Hollywood rituals, but that’s still a great cover. Voodoo Drums in Hi-Fi has been deleted for years but a worn copy of the vinyl release can be found on various mp3 blogs. For a more recent recording of voodoo rhythms, there’s Spirits Of Life: Haitian Vodou on the Soul Jazz label.

Voodoo Dreams (1959) by Martin Denny.
This, meanwhile, is the genuine kitsch from Denny’s Hypnotique album, a slow arrangement of a syrupy Les Baxter tune. More drums and bongos than usual for a Denny piece, and a suitably spectral chorus.

Voodoo (1959) by Robert Drasnin.
When composer Drasnin was asked by the Tops company to get hip to the Exotica craze the result was an album entitled Voodoo (with unconvincingly exotic white people on the cover), from which they released a single, Chant of the Moon, and this track as the B-side, one of the best pieces on the album.

I Walk on Gilded Splinters (1968) by Dr John.
Mac Rebennack was working as a session musician in Los Angeles when he recorded his debut album in an atmosphere far removed from the swampy New Orleans miasma which the music conjures. Gris-Gris owes a great deal to Robert Tallant’s book, Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), a popular recounting of the city’s occult legends from which Rebennack borrowed not only his new persona (chapter 5 concerns the history of the real Dr John, a 19th century voodoo practitioner) but also many of the transcribed chants which he set to music. In chapter 3 we read this:

A song given to a reporter of the New Orleans Times-Picayune was printed in that newspaper on March 16, 1924. Probably a very old one, it reflects the dominance of the queens in New Orleans Voodoo and boasts of their tremendous power. Originally sung in the patois known as Creole, it is given here in English:

They think they frighten me,
Those people must be crazy.
They don’t see their misfortune
Or else they must be drunk.

I—the Voodoo Queen,
With my lovely headkerchief
Am not afraid of tomcat shrieks,
I drink serpent venom!

I walk on pins
I walk on needles,
I walk on gilded splinters,
I want to see what they can do!

They think they have pride
With their big malice,
But when they see a coffin
They’re as frightened as prairie birds.

I’m going to put gris-gris
All over their front steps
And make them shake
Until they stutter!

Anyone familiar with Gris-Gris will recognise the lyrics of I Walk on Gilded Splinters (misspelled “Guilded” on the sleeve) which Dr John did a great job of fashioning into a classic voodoo song. The entire album might be ersatz, then, but it remains one of my favourites by anyone, and for me it’s still the best Dr John album.

Mama Loi, Papa Loi (1970) by Exuma.
Gris-Gris was too weird to be a success when it first appeared but Dr John’s music and extravagant stage presence were very distinctive and helped Blues Magoos manager Bob Wyld recast singer Tony McKay as “Obeah man” Exuma for Mercury Records. Exuma’s self-titled debut album is ersatz stuff again but manages to sound even more deliriously swampy and sorcerous than Gris-Gris, with jungle sounds, zombie gurgles and a clutch of enthusiastic voodoo-inflected songs. “Mama Loi, Papa Loi / I see fire in the dead man’s eye” he sings here, and while the album lasts Tony McKay is Exuma.

Zu Zu Mamou (1971) by Dr. John.
After Gris-Gris Dr John gradually pared away the voodoo songs but saved one of the best until his last occult outing, The Sun, Moon & Herbs, which includes contributions from Eric Clapton and, somewhere in the bayou distance, Mick Jagger and PP Arnold on backing vocals. Zu Zu Mamou is the spooky highlight which made a fleeting appearance in Alan Parker’s 1987 Satanic noir, Angel Heart.

Voo Doo (1989) by the Neville Brothers.
Of all the songs I’ve heard which equate falling in love with a voodoo spell, this one from New Orleans’ Neville Brothers is the most evocative, a track from their marvellous Yellow Moon album.

Invocation To Papa Legba (1989) by Deborah Harry.
Yes, it’s Blondie’s Debbie Harry singing a very authentic-sounding voodoo chant, arranged by Chris Stein. This was a one-off which appeared on a Giorno Poetry Systems collection, Like A Girl, I Want You To Keep Coming, along with a William Burroughs reading (a staple of GPS albums), New Order playing Sister Ray live, and others.

Litanie Des Saints (1992) by Dr. John.
Goin’ Back to New Orleans, like Gumbo before it, saw Dr John revisiting the musical history of his native city. Most of the songs are old jazz and blues covers with the notable exception of this opening number, another voodoo invocation. A great string arrangement and vocals from the Neville Brothers; I’d love to hear a whole album like this.

Zombie’ites (1993) by Transglobal Underground.
Zombies are a voodoo staple despite their current degraded status as the cuddly monster du jour, a development which has made me tired of seeing the word “zombie” in almost any context. A shame because I used to have a lot of time for films such as White Zombie (1932), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and the later George Romero movies. White Zombie was the first zombie film and stars Bela Lugosi in a weirder and more effective piece of horror cinema than the stagey Dracula which made his name; I Walked With a Zombie was one of Val Lewton’s superb noirish collaborations with Jacques Tourneur; both films have their voodoo chants sampled on this track by Transglobal Underground from Dream of 100 Nations, with the opening chant from White Zombie forming the pulse that drives the piece. Along the way there’s another invocation from Voodoo in New Orleans—”L’Appé vini, le Grand Zombi / L’Appé vini, pou fe gris-gris!”—samples of Criswell from Plan 9 from Outer Space, and a moment of pure bliss at the midpoint when singer Natacha Atlas rides in on a magic carpet made of Bollywood strings.

Happy Halloween! And don’t forget to feed the loas…

• Vampire-hunting in New Orleans

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voo-doo: Hoochie Coochie and the Creative Spirit
• Dead on the Dancefloor
• Another playlist for Halloween
• Exotica!
• White Noise: Electric Storms, Radiophonics and the Delian Mode
• The Séance at Hobs Lane
• Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
• A playlist for Halloween
• Ghost Box
• Voodoo Macbeth

It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of Rutles-imitators from Manchester. The story is so slight it would have barely sustained an hour-long TV film: absent-minded scientist (Jack MacGowran) becomes intrigued by his glamorous neighbour (Jane Birkin playing “Penny Lane”; yeah, right…) and knocks holes in the walls of his flat in order to scrutinise her modelling, partying and frequent undressing. Unlike Blow Up (1966, and also featuring Jane Birkin) and the later Performance (1970), both of which attempted to accurately pin down some of the modish aspects of the period, this is a very kitsch piece. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was entertaining kitsch like, say, Smashing Time (1967), but Massott has to resort to scenes of limp comedy and some rather dull dream sequences in order to pad the thing out. Between the handful of actual dialogue scenes there’s a lot of gloating over Ms Birkin’s flesh which no doubt satisfied one half of the audience but by today’s standards is hardly thrilling. Iain Quarrier plays Penny’s duplicitous boyfriend (with a fake Liverpool accent) in his last screen role before he quit acting. Quarrier and MacGowran had appeared together in two of Roman Polanski’s British films, Cul-de-sac (1966) and Dance of the Vampires (1967). In the latter, MacGowran again plays an absent-minded scientist while Quarrier is cinema’s first (?) gay vampire.

An interjection from The Fool.

Of chief interest for me in Wonderwall was the decor and title card decorations by Dutch psychedelic collective, The Fool (who appear in the party scene), famous for their earlier Beatles associations including the inner sleeve for Sgt Pepper and designs for the short-lived Apple Boutique in London’s Baker Street. I was also curious about the distinctive decor of MacGowran’s flat which contrasts with the psychedelia next door, all dark green walls embellished with Victorian murals and a Tennyson poem—very fittingly a piece called The Daydream—which circles the room.

The professor prepares to attack the wall.

This was particularly interesting in that it made another connection between the psychedelic era and Victorian arts movements, especially from the Aesthetic/Arts & Crafts end of things, but it wasn’t at all obvious whether the connection was an intentional part of the film’s production design or an accident of location and budgetary convenience. Aside from the old-fashioned appearance of MacGowran’s rooms there seemed no reason why his otherwise cultureless character would have any interest in decorating his living space in this way.

The street corner then…

…and now.

The building itself is equally distinctive and an exterior shot conveniently shows a street sign placing the location in Lansdowne House, a Victorian apartment block on the corner of Lansdowne Road and Ladbroke Road in the Notting Hill/Holland Park area of London.

Lansdowne House.

What did the building look like today, I wondered? Google Earth proves indispensable at times like this and it was easy to find, in a street which looks more cramped than it does in the film. The presence of a blue plaque on the wall proved intriguing, a sign that the place once had famous residents. Googling for that revealed this photo which was a real surprise: Lansdowne House at one time contained studios for artists who included Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a gay couple and leading lights of London’s fin de siècle art scene (also friends of Oscar Wilde), and another artist, James Pryde, who with William Nicholson worked as The Beggarstaffs. So my suspicion about the Arts & Crafts decor was correct, which means that MacGowran’s flat may have been decorated that way originally and remained untouched since the 1890s. I haven’t seen Rhino’s special edition of Wonderwall which contained additional information about the making of the film, so have no idea whether the history of the building is mentioned there. If anyone does know, please leave a comment. For now I’m quite happy to have stumbled upon another minor link between two of my favourite art decades.

For more visuals, this page has a host of screen grabs from the film as well as some gif animations, all of which manage to make Wonderwall seem more interesting than it is when you’re watching it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Charles Ricketts’ Hero and Leander
• Images by Robert Altman