Hawkwind – { feuilleton }

Pin culture

In the mail this week, a pair of new pins from the pin-maker and seller who made the exquisite Future Days pin. (eBay shop | Etsy shop) The Ege Bamyasi pin isn’t as effective as the earlier Can design but I feel compelled to encourage the effort, especially when most of the designs from this maker are for punk or post-punk bands. I also enjoy the novelty of seeing things like this at all. The years when I was discovering German music via secondhand releases (late 70s, early 80s) coincided with a period when I spent a lot of time scouring local shops for unusual badges. Growing up in a holiday resort gave me access to a greater quantity of cultural ephemera than you’d find in nearby towns, yet during this time I never saw any badges related to the German groups, not even Kraftwerk. As for prestige enamel items, you seldom saw these outside concert merchandise stalls where hardcore fans could be relied upon to pay more for their memorabilia.

Official pins from Hawkwind, Magma and Ghost Box Records.

The recent emergence of a cottage industry devoted to enamel pins means that these aren’t the only such items you’ll find on eBay or Etsy, but most of the others I’ve seen are either substandard (like another attempt to rework the Future Days cover) or are from North American sellers who want you to pay £25 or more for postage. Nein danke. But wherever the pin makers are located they all face the problem of how to create something related to groups who didn’t have a graphic identity that can easily be converted to metal and enamel. Where Can are concerned you could at least do this with their name as it appears on the Tago Mago cover. (Maybe such a thing exists already?) And I was amused to see that one pin maker has managed to reduce Manuel Göttsching’s chessboard cover for E2–E4 to pin size. What I’d really like now is a Neu! pin in black and white like the design on the cover of Neu! 75. Here’s hoping…

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Can pin
• Rock shirts

Weekend links 726

Verticals on Wide Avenues from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) by Hugh Ferriss.

• Megalopolis, the futuristic epic written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, now has a trailer and a handful of mixed reviews. I recall Coppola saying years ago that he was the kind of director who would happily make films in any genre, science fiction included. I’ve wondered ever since what a full-on Coppola SF film might look like. (Captain EO and Peggy Sue Got Married don’t count). Now it seems we’re about to find out. Given his previous missteps I remain sceptical yet curious about this one. I’ve avoided his output since Bram Stoker’s Dracula but I’m still happy to see him being so ambitious while retaining his independence.

• And RIP Roger Corman who Coppola remembered as “my first boss, task-master, teacher, mentor, and role model. There is nothing about the practical matter of making movies I didn’t learn by being his assistant.” Related: It rained on the Sunday: a career interview with Roger Corman by Matthew Thrift.

• At Retro-Forteana: Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal. A difficult subject for a such short post, as the author admits. I’m amused to see one of my Hawkwind album covers in the list although the album itself doesn’t seem very Fortean to me.

• “Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg?” Oliver Wainwright on architecture that might have been.

• At Cartoon Brew: A closer look at great animated title sequences. I deplore the omission of Richard Williams’ titles for The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).

• At Public Domain Review: Love Spells and Deadly Shrieks: Illustrations of Mandrakes (ca. 650–1927).

• At Wormwoodiana: “That Strange Little Book”: Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare.

• At Unquiet Things: The latest collection of Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2024 by Ambientblog.

• Mandrake Root (1968) by Deep Purple | Mandrake (1975) by Gong | The Mandrake’s Hymn (2019) by Earth

Weekend links 718

Chatting Cats (c.1960) by Tomoo Inagaki.

• New/old music: Follow The Light by Broadcast, a song which will appear on Spell Blanket—Collected Demos 2006–2009 in May. The album will be followed by another collection, Distant Call—Collected Demos 2000–2006, in September, with both releases being described as the last ever Broadcast albums. This was always going to happen eventually but I thought there might be a final collection of all the tracks the group recorded for compilations which have never been reissued.

• “Cats are all over Turkey. In Istanbul, which I visited before traveling to eastern Turkey, cats are welcome not just in cafes but in houses, restaurants, hotels, and bars.” Emily Sekine on the cats of Turkey.

• “El Shazly’s music is like a rush of new energy, a link between the past and present of Egyptian music that is fresh and vital.” Geeta Dayal on Egyptian singer and composer Nadah El Shazly.

• More werewolves: A trailer for Wulver’s Stane, a contemporary refashioning of werewolf lore. Director Joseph Cornelison is a reader of these pages. (Hi, Joseph!)

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Ghost Stories by EF Benson.

• At Colossal: Sacred geometries and scientific diagrams merge in the metaphysical world of Daniel Martin Diaz.

• At The Quietus: What does dying sound like? Jak Hutchcraft on music and the near-death experience.

• At Unquiet Things: Languid Dreams and Unsettling Poetry: The Art of Jason Mowry.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Ronald Firbank Caprice (1917).

• Ashkasha, a short animated film by Lara Maltz.

• New music: Chimet by Mining.

• I’m The Wolf Man (1965) by Round Robin | The Werewolf (1972) by Barry Dransfield | Steppenwolf (1976) by Hawkwind

Very tasty

StudioCanal’s blu-ray of The Final Programme seems to have been out for a few months but I only spotted it this week on a visit to Fopp, a welcome upgrade for my old Anchor Bay DVD. Not everything labelled as “cult” would go on my cult list but the term is warranted for this one, still the only feature film based on any of Michael Moorcock’s novels. Moorcock has been persistently vocal about his dislike of Robert Fuest’s adaptation but his readers continue to fly the cult flag. Some films deliver a unique thrill when they present an incursion into the cinematic world of an uncommon cultural component, the less likely, the better: Frank Maxwell in The Haunted Palace intoning the names “Cthulhu” and “Yog-Sothoth”; Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh appearing as a blind piano player in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser; the credit at the beginning of The Final Programme: “starring Jon Finch as Jerry Cornelius”.

Jerry Cornelius meets his maker, with what appears to be Stacia from Hawkwind gesturing in the background. StudioCanal has many more such stills, most of which I hadn’t seen before.

Cult, yes; perfect, no. If you’re familiar with the Cornelius novels the film doesn’t capture the spirit of Moorcock’s barbed ironies (although it hits the mark in places), but we live in a world where you wouldn’t expect a Jerry Cornelius feature to exist at all, especially one with such an extraordinary cast: Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith, Patrick Magee, Sterling Hayden, Ronald Lacey, Harry Andrews, Graham Crowden, George Coulouris, etc. I always wish that Fuest had let Hawkwind perform at least one song in the arcade scene (or even let us see the group for longer than half a second), while also doing more with some of the settings. But Hawkwind in 1973 were too heavy—sonically, visually, politically—for a film intended for a general audience, and the budget was paltry by today’s standards (£222,000) which makes the existence of the thing seem even less likely. Given this, it’s amazing it looks as good as it does.

Above and below: panels by Mal Dean from the first UK edition of The Final Programme, 1969.

The main highlight for me among the disc extras is an interview with Kim Newman which I’m looking forward to seeing. I don’t usually listen to commentary tracks but I did listen to the one on the DVD where Fuest mentions that the score by Beaver & Krause was prompted by his hearing the second side of the pair’s Gandharva album. Gerry Mulligan’s lugubrious sax playing doesn’t really suit a Cornelius story but the lineage is another factor that adds to the film’s cult value.

• Watch the trailer

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Adventures: a film list
• Moorcock: Faith, Hope and Anxiety
• Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds
• Into the Media Web by Michael Moorcock
• The Best of Michael Moorcock

Weekend links 679

All this and the best tunes. Via.

• As noted last month, Space Ritual by Hawkwind turned 50 this year so here comes the inevitable reissue which in its most lavish edition will run to 11 discs. This isn’t as immediately attractive for me as the recent Calvert-era collection—I already own four different copies of Space Ritual, including the original vinyl—but I may feel differently a few months from now.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine explores The Prophecies of N’Gai, something which sounds like a story from Weird Tales but isn’t.

• “Is function in the eye or mind of the beholder?” Steven Heller on Jacques Carelman’s Catalogue of Impossible Objects.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Yoko Tada began painting in her 80s. At 100 she’s publishing her first book.

• “The Magnificent Ambersons: rebirth for ruined Orson Welles masterpiece that rivalled Citizen Kane.”

At Wyrd Daze: Disco Rd 3: 23 pages 23 minutes. Free PDF, music mix, Discordianism, etc.

• A (brief) conversation with Milena Canonero, Wes Anderson’s costume designer.

• At Public Domain Review: Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869).

• New music: Móatún 7: Tetsu Inoue by Various Artists.

• Arik Roper’s favourite album artwork.

• RIP Peter Brötzmann.

• Table Turning (1973) by The Upsetters | Forever Turning (1995) by Scorn | Turning Towards Us (2008) by Redshift