Category: [Music]

The dental work of the Crimson King

Found this on Facebook: Robert Fripp with a somewhat disconcerting facial expression. I’m not actually shocked by the body hair, I’ve seen other 80s-era images of him flaunting that, but… smiling is a new one, I don’t recall ever seeing him do that before. Not a full, non-ironic smile anyway. However, a bit more looking through Robert Fripp pictures then turned this up:

And this:

And the latter is identified as the Lizard version of the band, so I’m assuming the previous picture has to be of similar vintage. So there you go, three photos of Bob Fripp smiling when I’d never seen even one before this… and as a bonus you also get Andy McCulloch and Gordon Haskell in the last shot pretending they’re happy to be part of the band.

Ten

According to Facebook memories, we had apparently reached the point in Covid lockdown three years ago where there was some meme going round of what your ten most influential albums were… being me, I decided to post them all in one hit rather than over ten days like other, more sensible people were doing; and, being me, I thought it might be interesting to repost them here. In no particular order.

The 1998 box set expansion of the legendary 1972 compilation Nuggets. I always loved mid- to late-60s music when I was younger, but I think this was when I really started going down some of the more obscure by-ways of that era.

The Beatles Box (which we had on cassette, still do somewhere). As good a Beatles best-of, all eight vinyl records or six tapes of it, as you could still hope for.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid. Probably my first heavy metal album when I was 17? Probably. The weird thing is, even though I considered myself an atheist already by that age, I still found myself unnerved by the whole Satanism thing, something seemed dangerous about it. Took me years to realise how silly it actually was…

Edgar(d) Varèse, going back to first year of university. I did first year music at UNSW and one part of the course was the many listening examples we were expected to be able to identify in the tests… and M. Varèse’s Ionisation was one of those in the last part of the course when we were doing twentieth century music. The UNSW library had it on a somewhat crusty old 1959 LP, so I got that out and… boom. After months of not being terribly excited by what I’d been hearing in class, this… thing just suddenly spoke to (or screamed at) me in a way most of the other stsuff we’d been doing hadn’t done. Varèse kind of blew the 20th century open for me, and I must say, most of what I do now enjoy from earlier centuries I like in spite of, not because of, that class. I was delighted to find this very album on CD a few years later (alas, I’ve never seen the follow-up album on CD).

The Doors, Classics, which I now realise is a truly perplexing collection (I mean, look at that track selection). What sort of Doors best-of would leave out “Light My Fire”? This one. But I was 15 and I’d suddenly become obsessed with that song (thanks Triple M) and wanted to hear more by them, and this was what Brash’s at Eastgardens (yeah, that‘s how long ago it was) had immediately available and I didn’t know any better… and, strange as the track choices are in hindsight, a lot of them are actually still some of my favourites by them.

Brian Eno, Music for Airports. I remember the local library having this on cassette (again, that‘s how long ago this was). It took a surprising amount of effort, but it became one of my favourites eventually.

Glenn Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations. Much like how the Varèse album opened me up to “modern” music, this kind of opened me up to much earlier music, a lot of which I’d frankly found quite dull before this. You cannot accuse this of being a “historically informed performance” in any way, but I felt there was more music in this than in most of the “informed” period instrument recordings I’d heard by that time. I’ve come around to HIP recordings as I’ve aged, of course, but I still find this vital.

Sex Pistols, Bollocks, Baby’s first punk album.

Pink Floyd, Relics. I recall one of the postmen at Matraville Post Office when Mum was there (yet again, that‘s how long ago this was) giving me a loan of this on cassette (it had that particular cover, too)… a slightly odd collection of pre-1970 stuff, singles, B-sides, a few album tracks, one unreleased song, and I loved it. You never heard anything on radio at that time which predated Dark Side, so this was my first exposure to any of that early stuff.

Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert. Another library find I remember taking a random punt on (this time they had it on CD, not tape), I don’t know why but good thing I did. I spent a certain part of my late teens and early twenties trying to get my head around jazz (which is something I’m only really starting to succeed at now) and I’m glad I found this as my first Jarrett album; I soon discovered I only really like him when he’s doing solo piano improv (I make an exception for Hymns/Spheres, which is solo organ improv). If I’d picked up one of his standards albums or other ensemble works or other instrument works (again excepting Hymns/Spheres) and not liked that, I might’ve been put off trying this afterwards. My loss.

Simple Minds: the Arista years

Lately I’ve rediscovered the early albums by Simple Minds after several years of not having played them, which has been quite an interesting experience; for one thing, it’s taken me until now to realise the first three albums came out on Arista, not Virgin as I always thought (that would be a little later), and I see now Arista’s handling of the band was… somewhat different to theirs. Anyway, let’s go back to early 1979 to start off with this:

I’ve thought for a long time that 1979 was a truly phenomenal year for music, after the initial wave of punk had started burning out and the post-punk movement in its various shapes started to assert itself in response to that. Some great albums came out of that year… not including this one, alas. I mean, it’s not really bad as such, I think they picked the best two songs for single release (could’ve done the same with “Sad Affair”), Jim Kerr’s lyrics aren’t as obtuse as they would get later, but I get a sense of a band that hasn’t yet escaped its influences (or its own immediate past as Johnny and the Self Abusers, with one song on the album dating from those days), and whose ambitions were still out of its reach. Cf. the two long songs that close each side. They rapidly became unhappy with the finished product, and Kerr later said that just after the recording was finished he heard Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and wanted to re-record the entire thing but the label said no… I’m not sure how that worked given that Joy Division hadn’t even recorded UP at that point, it’s not like he could’ve even got an advance cassette of it, but whatever; a few months later this happened:

I’ve seen the difference between Life in a Day and Real to Real Cacophony described as being like Radiohead going from The Bends directly to Kid A but in seven months rather than six years. I always found this to be a kind of gross overstatement and this recent re-listen has made me think there’s actually a bit more continuity between the two than I used to think. Still, no denying that there is quite some progression from one to the other, and side one at least is a markedly more angular beast than the first album was (side two is less obviously off-putting). Apparently Arista shat themselves when they heard it and complained that there was no obvious single like “Chelsea Girl” from the previous album (I presume they’d forgotten the latter actually bombed when it came out as a single)… Given the band recorded this in something of a hurry to get a new album in shops to try and displace the one from just a few months earlier, the end result is actually pretty good and they started getting critical respect, but I don’t think it’s quite on the same level as other post-punk hits of 1979… though they weren’t too far off:

Third time’s the charm? Well, maybe it would’ve been if it weren’t for Arista, who for some reason decided it would be fun to ignore the actual growing demand for Simple Minds product and do a run of just 15000 copies, wait for it to sell out then do another run of 15000, let that sell out, etc. So much better, apparently, than having the album available in shops in adequate numbers when people were looking to buy it… The album itself is the sound of a band with more experience and touring under its collective belt, and accordingly their ambitions are a lot more in their reach now. I feel like “Twist/Run/Repulsion” was a hangover from RTRC that doesn’t work here (might not even have worked there), but so much of Empires is so good; I remain astonished that “I Travel” wasn’t the hit that it obviously should’ve been, and there’s just something implacable and ominous about the whole thing. Not perfect, but a kind of peak of the post-punk era nonetheless.

But once all was said and done, the band were so sick of Arista they nearly broke up just to be finally done with them; happily Virgin Records actually wanted Simple Minds on their books and bought them from Arista, and everyone was happy and Simple Minds went on to be the veritable pop stars they weren’t yet. Whereupon things did kind of start to melt down for them, but therein lies another story…

Off the beach

While browsing Tumblr recently, I sighted this somewhat curious variation of Neil’s once-elusive 1974 classic:

This cassette version reshuffles the running order considerably, for reasons I can only assume were about trying to make the running time of both sides nearer to each other (remember when that mattered with tapes?), otherwise I don’t see the point…

I actually just listened to it in this form to see how it works in practice, and, well, I’m not 100% sure. To be honest I’ve never been thrilled by the placement of “See the Sky About to Rain” as track 2, it feels a bit oddly situated there, but I don’t really know how else you’d redo it, cos side 2 is fine as it is on the original album. In this version, though, “Ambulance Blues” just doesn’t seem right to end side 1, and “Motion Pictures” similarly doesn’t seem like it should end the whole album… Maybe if you took this running order but flipped the two sides? Cos I read, too, that this was Neil’s original plan and so the cassette is actually nearer what he intended… but the version that ended up on the album feels (mostly) like the right one in a way that this cassette doesn’t. Or maybe it’s just familiarity that makes it feel that way. I don’t know. Must say I do like the cover font, though.

Teeth sind Krieg

So 2023 marks 30 years since this happened:

And no, I don’t mean Dave Mustaine pissing and moaning about being kicked out of Metallica

If Kerrang were shitting their pants about those Norwegian kids and their wacky antics at this point, things would of course go further south a few months later… I think it is important to remember how young most of the black metal crowd were when the Norwegian scene began, even the guys from Mayhem were in their teens when they started in 1984 and so were a number of the bands that followed in their wake (a few are even younger than me, including Ivar Bjornson from Enslaved and quite a few of the rotating cast of Gorgoroth and most of Dimmu Borgir). I think that explains at least some of the idiocy that some of them took part in (it wasn’t all burning churches and killing each other), but also, frankly, some were kind of disconnected from reality on some level.

The scene has, I think, mostly grounded itself as its participants have aged and even come to realise there was and is something absurd about black metal’s theatrics and posturing. The documentary Until the Light Takes Us kind of drove the final nail into the coffin with its revelation that the Helvete shop crowd would be all “trve kvlt” and “Satanic” while other people were in the shop, but when the customers were gone they would talk among themselves about how they enjoyed their cornflakes at breakfast and that sort of thing. It was always posturing except for a few with even less sense of irony or self-awareness than the rest who took it too seriously and didn’t realise how much of it was just show (and some arguably still don’t; looking at you here, Gorgoroth/Infernus)… And with hindsight, the posing all looks sillier and sillier. I mean… for fuck’s sake, how were we supposed to take this sort of thing seriously:

Honestly? I gather this is someone called Heimvik from a band called Ofryskje which released one demo in 1997, apparently he was the vocalist and he had no nose, an amusingly elliptical mouth and a thing for gardening tools. I mean, black metal has been rife with ridiculous imagery, like this iconic and, well, immortal photoshoot for Immortal:

“Boo!”

And Dimmu Borgir feared no nonsense either:

“Yeah, they used up all the black facepaint, I had to make do with the hat… No, I don’t think Shagrath is compensating for anything here”

But really I think Heimvik and his dental work are underappreciated in the annals of silly black metal visuals, which are extensive and only get sillier as the years pass. It’s the sort of picture that’s probably better in this sort of mediocre quality, the sort of washed-out contrasty photocopy look is exactly how it should look and why would you want to see any more detail anyway? And it’s definitely the sort of thing that makes me wonder how we were ever supposed to take black metal seriously, which I say as someone who does enjoy the stuff…