{music} – Page 170 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 264

Stonehenge Suite, No.10 (1977) by Malcolm Dakin.

• “Part of me always wanted to write a teatime drama. That’s something that I wanted to get out of my system,” says director Peter Strickland. The results may be heard here. In the same interview there’s news that Strickland will be adapting Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape for radio later this year.

• “He was, as one obituary stated in terms unusually blunt for the time, ‘not as other men’.” Strange Flowers on the eccentric and profligate Henry Cyril Paget (1875–1905) aka The Dancing Marquess.

• “Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.” MC Escher rebuking The Rolling Stones. The artist is the subject of a major exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland from June 27th.

Often mentioned in the same breath as works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Ó Cadhain’s novel is, in some ways, even more radically experimental. For starters, all the characters are dead and speaking from inside their coffins, which are interred in a graveyard in Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast. The novel has no physical action or plot, but rather some 300 pages of cascading dialogue without narration, description, stage direction, or any indication of who’s speaking when.

Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin on the newly-translated Cré na Cille (The Dirty Dust) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

• Paul Woods examines “10 Edgy Properties No Film Producer Dared To Touch
(Yet)”. No. 2 is David Britton’s Lord Horror.

• Mallory Ortberg ranks paintings of Saint Sebastian “in ascending order of sexiness and descending order of actual martyring”.

• The Sign of Satan (1964): Christopher Lee in a story by Robert Bloch for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

• Sympathy For The Devil – The True Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment.

• At Dangerous Minds: Paul Gallagher on the seedy malevolence of Get Carter (1971).

• Mix of the week: Sonic Attack Special – Earth by Bob’s Podcasts.

• Sanctuary Stone (1973) by Midwinter | The Litanies Of Satan (1982) by Diamanda Galás | Sola Stone (2006) by Boris

TV Wipeout revisited

TV Wipeout, as detailed in an earlier post, was a one-off “video magazine” compiled and released on VHS by Cabaret Voltaire in 1984. This was the fourth title on the Cab’s own Doublevision label which was easily the best of the UK’s independent video labels at the time. Many of the other Doublevision releases have either been reissued on DVD or can be found online but TV Wipeout has remained elusive, in part because it contains material that would offend YouTube’s copyright restrictions. Cabaret Voltaire’s deal with Virgin Records enabled them to pad the running time with music promos and trailers for some of the films on Virgin’s own video label.

Back in 2012 I was able to find some of the more popular items but not the obscurities, a situation that’s now resolved by this YouTube playlist which has uploaded the entire cassette as a series of separate items. Most of the previously missing pieces will only be of interest to completists—some of them are scratch-video creations that look very dated today—but if you’re like me, and have waited over 30 years to see this thing in its entirety, it means your curiosity can now be assuaged. ~~A couple of items by Cabaret Voltaire and Japan are still missing but they’re easily found elsewhere.~~

Update: As noted in the comments, the Japan clip was missing due to an oversight, and is now in place. I’m still getting a message saying the Cabaret Voltaire video is “blocked in your country on copyright grounds” so that must be UK-specific.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cabaret Voltaire on La Edad de Oro, 1983
• Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• European Rendezvous by CTI
• TV Wipeout
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
• Network 21 TV

Rock shirts

Arriving in the post at the end of last week was this T-shirt for British Doom band The Wounded Kings. The Shadow Over Atlantis (2010) was the band’s second album, and they asked permission a while ago to use my Cthulhuesque De Profundis piece on this limited edition shirt. Permission was granted happily enough, my only concern was that the fine detail and dark tones might not reproduce well on black fabric. The printing is remarkably good, however, and the circular design and type layout works very well. The shirts are on sale here.

All of which reminded me that I have a couple of shirts from the Hawkwind era in the 1980s. I’ve not aired these designs before, mainly because the Earth Ritual design is one of my many pieces of Hawk-art that I find amateurish. I used to put considerable effort into the cover designs (some of them, anyway; a few were pieces of art sent to Dave Brock as samples that were later used as official covers); but much of the art I produced for the tour programs and merchandise was done in haste, and should have been a lot better considering it was being used for costly souvenirs.

Earth Ritual was the title of an EP released in 1984 that was notable for having Lemmy as guest bassist, his first appearance on a Hawkwind record after being sacked from the band in 1975. I did the cover for that one but I don’t like it very much. The 1984 tour was named after the EP, hence the shirt, although the show was nothing remotely like the elaborate Space Ritual concept. The triangle with a bar on the skull is the alchemical symbol for Earth, a detail the band used in their stage set. I’ve never liked that skull which is very badly drawn, I’d have been better off using a photocopy of the skull on this drawing from the same year. The design was drawn in black ink on white paper; I had no say in the colouring which was done by the merchandise company. From the same drawing they also made small enamel badges (where the skull looks even worse!), and a sew-on patch which looks much better since they dispensed with the skull.

This was the shirt design for the 1985 tour, one of the final designs for the Chronicle of the Black Sword project, and one of the very last pieces I did for Hawkwind. The design of this one is a little more successful although once again the colours weren’t my choice.

These aren’t the only shirts I’ve done for the music world, in addition to other occasional work for metal bands I produced many exclusive designs for Cradle of Filth from 2001–2005 but they never sent me any of those. To return to De Profundis, I ought to note that the artwork is available as a print from CafePress.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Cosmic Grill
• Void City
• Hawk things
• The Sonic Assassins
• New things for July
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Weekend links 263

Dancing Horse (1972) by Tadashi Nakayama.

• The Wounded Galaxies Festival of Experimental Media takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, on October 7–11, 2015. The event is an offshoot of the earlier Burroughs Century, and the phrase “wounded galaxies” is one of Burroughs’ own. It’s also the partial title of Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window, the most recent album by Cyclobe who will be performing at the festival. Cyclobe’s Stephen Thrower will be in London later this month for the launch of his new book, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco, and a screening of Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971).

• Gallery sites showcasing erotic art are often coy about the details of the work they’re exhibiting. That’s not the case with Artists Space, NYC, whose Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play is running from June 14–August 23, 2015.

• “I just loved the songs, and I didn’t mind the age in their voices, and I didn’t mind the fact that they were unaccompanied, it didn’t matter.” Shirley Collins talking to Ben Graham about her love of English folk music.

The more important question is what do we do with psychedelia now? I think the drugs themselves and the experiences they produce in individuals and for society are too important and vital to be pigeon-holed and taken hold of by a bloodthirsty media that always aims to reduce all experience to a few simple straplines for improved consumerism.

Dr Ben Sessa talking to Barnaby Smith about psychedelic drugs. Breaking Convention 2015, the Third International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, takes place at the University of Greenwich next month.

• “…if someone opens a door or if sunlight falls on them they shoot off the grid and suddenly you have a roomful of what sounds like sick bagpipes.” Will Gregory on the physicality of Moog synthesizers.

• Mixes of the week: The Necromancer-Queens of Neverland, an exotic collection by SeraphicManta, Secret Thirteen Mix 156 by Asusu, and an Ornette Coleman playlist.

• “In 2015, the thought of anything as incendiary as Scum or Made in Britain turning up on TV just seems bizarre.” Danny Leigh on the great Alan Clarke.

• More psychedelia: ‘Art That Transcends‘, my article for Communication Arts, has been posted on the magazine’s website.

• Phantasmaphile recommends Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo.

• Earth filmed playing live in Brooklyn, NY, September 24, 2014. The full set, and a great performance.

• At Dangerous Minds: “How Far Will You Go?” Meet Smokey, the outrageously gay 70s cult rockers.

• Peter Strickland on six films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy.

• Things I Found In Records

• Christopher Lee sings!

• Polly On The Shore (1970) by Shirley & Dolly Collins | The Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood (1972) by Sandy Denny | The Banks of Red Roses (1988) by June Tabor

The Cosmic Grill

Design and illustration by Barney Bubbles.

The past week’s music listening has alternated between the back catalogue of Seattle band, Earth (who I recommend highly), and the early recordings of my erstwhile employers, Hawkwind. The latter were reissued recently in a 10-CD box, This Is Your Captain Speaking…Your Captain Is Dead (The Albums And Singles 1970–1974) which I also recommend, it’s very good value, and packages the albums in those facsimile card sleeves that now seem de rigueur for album reissues. A swathe of my rare Hawkwind vinyl got sold off circa 1990, and I’ve never replaced any of the albums or singles so this was a good opportunity to catch up. If you like this period of the band there’s the added bonus of the complete Greasy Truckers concert from the Roundhouse in 1972, a ramshackle performance that nonetheless sounds pristine (my Greasy Truckers vinyl—which I do still own—was ruined by a previous owner with a spillage of tea on the Hawkwind side); there’s also the entirety of the 1999 Party concert from Chicago which I’d not heard before.

Listening again to Hall Of The Mountain Grill (1974) had me thinking about the origin of the album’s title. Hawkwind never took themselves as seriously as many of their contemporaries, but naming an album of ostensible space rock after a very mundane café in the Portobello Road was one of their more eccentric moments. The humour is compounded by Barney Bubbles’ cover design which for the title uses the kind of typeface (Palace Script) that you see on menus; on the inner sleeve there’s a photo of the fabled restaurant flanked by a pair of Barney’s futuristic towers. The verse beneath the photo (“from the Legend of Beenzon Toste”) refers to nearby Ladbroke Grove, and, of course, to Notting Hill Gate which in 1974 was still a haven for counterculture freaks, the very antithesis of that film. The verse was probably the work of Robert Calvert who explained the attraction of the restaurant in Pete Frame’s Hawkwind family tree:

The Mountain Grill was a working man’s café in Portobello Road—frequented by all the dross and dregs of humanity. Dave Brock always used to go and eat there—which is how I first met him…because I used to eat there too, when I worked on Frendz magazine. It was a kind of Left Bank café/meeting place for Notting Hill longhairs—a true artists’ hangout…but it never became chic, even though Marc Bolan, David Bowie and people like that often went there to eat lunch.

Photos on Flickr show how the place looked in 1977 when the sign from the album sleeve was still intact, and also in 2003 shortly before the restaurant closed down. The premises are a very different kind of eaterie today, remodelled and upmarket as befits a gentrified area.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Void City
• Hawk things
• The Sonic Assassins
• New things for July
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer