Category: [Music]

Dub housing?

I’ve been listening to this tune a fair bit lately:

“Invasion” by King Tubby from 1975’s Dub From the Roots. You may agree with me that this thing starts off in quite striking fashion with that synth sequencer thing going off, and what it initially put me in mind of the music from Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagous (WARNING! You will see scenes from a Joe D’Amato movie):

But it’s clearly not actually that despute the similar skittering synth bass noises, and in any case the record predated that film by about five years. And so, in order to satisfy my own infernal curiosity because I am cursed to want to know about these things, I decided to try and find out more even though I suspected that might be near impossible…

…though I could’ve been wrong about that. This rather helpfully observes the original is this:

However, as you can see, the version on the B-side here is actually by Augustus Pablo, not Tubby. So I’m guessing Tubby’s version was specifically made for his own LP? What complicated things was checking Discogs for more information, which turned up a single by Jackie Edwards called “Invasion” on which Tubby is credited for the dub, but it’s not the same as the one on the album… but whatever. That just left the mystery of the “title card sequence”…

…which, implausibly but evidently, is THIS thing, a “special report” by CBS News from 1967 about homes of the future and what 1967 thought 2001 would look like. Apparently they thought computers would be common by then. That synth thing or whatever it is must’ve seemed suitably “futuristic” to serve as the opening titles music; what I wonder now is, was it conjured up specifically for the program or was it library stock? And none of this explains how Tubby got his hands on it or why, but I may have to leave that mystery unanswered… at any rate, there are a few other tracks on that album deploying these “sci-fi” sounds, so it wasn’t just “Invasion” he was being peculiar with.

RIP Mr Stewart

Sly Stone, pioneering funk and soul musician, dies aged 82

Sly Stone, the American musician who lit up generations of dancefloors with his gloriously funky and often socially conscious songwriting, has died aged 82.
“After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a family statement reads. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.” […]
Among those paying tribute to Stone was musician Questlove, whose documentary about Stone, Sly Lives!, was release earliest this year. “From the moment his music reached me in the early 1970s, it became a part of my soul,” he wrote on Instagram. “Sly was a giant — not just for his groundbreaking work with the Family Stone, but for the radical inclusivity and deep human truths he poured into every note … His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.”

I’ve got to say, the timing of this news is kind of hilarious, given that it comes only a few months after Sly Lives!, the title of which was supposedly a dig at people who, understandably, could’ve sworn the artist formerly known as Sylvester Stewart had in fact ceased to be with us many years ago. Well, he’s definitely not now… The amazing thing about him dying now, of course, is that somehow he lived long enough to do so; given the amount of drugs he was hoovering up during the 70s (which I suspect contributed to at least some of those undefined “underlying health issues”), I’m surprised he made it out of the decade, never mind this far into this one. The band itself was probably doomed to a short life, especially once the drugs took over, but that was a mightily bright flare-up while it lasted… by way of an example, here they are on TV in 1968 before things started to go downhill:

Hope I die before… oh. Fuck.

Pete Townshend in flight

Happy 80th birthday to the artist occasionally known as Bijou Drains! What a shame Pete had to spoil his big day by announcing that Zak Starkey had been fired again from The Who’s drum seat, just a month after they sacked him then rehired him a few days later… there was something really odd about that situation, but I never bothered writing about it cos once they rehired Zak that seemed to be the end of it. Clearly there’s been more “communication issues” than Pete was letting on. Zak is evidently and understandably kind of pissed; having been their drummer for nearly 30 years—much longer than the band had been around before their initial split in 1983—and then being let go so close to the end of their apparent last tour, he’s entitled to be. Still, happy birthday to Pete in spite of all that; 80 is a respectable age for anyone to achieve, but especially in his line of business. And in a way it’s kind of reassuring to know The Who is still as dysfunctional as it was 60 years ago…

Grateful when you’re silent?

So this was interesting viewing. I was dimly aware at the time of a certain fuss surrounding the band Kula Shaker, something about their singer Crispian Mills holding some kind of dubious political positions, with that fuss not helping their career prospects, and the band splintering in 1999 after their second album did markedly less business than their first had done. I was never into them as such (really liked “Tattva”, though), and they fell so far off my radar that I was astonished to discover not that they had reformed, but that they’d actually done so in 2004. Good grief.

Anyway, our host Mr Hargreaves goes into the details of the affair, few of which I’d known about before. Brother Crispian did himself few favours by saying thing about having flaming swastikas on stage; he was and I presume still is deep into Hinduism so he has a particular relationship to the swastika as a result, and I understand that, but… well, if you talk about how great the swastika is to a primarily Anglo-European audience, they’re probably not going to consider that point. And so a Jewish journalist called Matthew Kalman, working for the Independent, decided to take Mills down.

So while KS were touring the US, Kalman wrote to him and asked him to respond to the accusations of him being kind of unsavoury. And Crispian sent back a long fax clarifying himself… whereupon Kalman chose to ignore what Mills had written and went ahead with the hit piece he’d evidently intended all along. But Hargreaves actually shows us the content of the fax and what Mills actually wrote, and the latter is pretty concrete about repudiating the far right; here are some screenshots from the video that you can enlarge:

Basically, therefore, Crispian Mills was a dickhead in the way he expressed himself, and he essentially admits as such. Of course, this assumes he was in fact being honest here and not just lying about abhorring the far right (I remember reading somewhere that even Ian Stuart Donaldson denied being a Nazi a few years before reforming Skrewdriver as an overtly Nazi band; someone evidently had his number well before that)… but I feel like he is, cos if he was stupid enough to say the things he did in press interviews, he probably would’ve been stupid enough to admit it in this fax if he were into Hitler. I’m willing to be charitable and assume Mills chose his words poorly at the time, and I think if he or the band in general were Hitler-happy, they wouldn’t have got away with coming back like they did; maybe their second phase has been less starry but it’s certainly been more enduring. (I can’t see that chud from Tau Cross bouncing back in any similar fashion.)

Interestingly, Kalman’s hit piece announced that it was drawing on the work of a small journal called Open Eye, citing its co-editor John Murray, without acknowledging that Kalman himself was the other co-editor of the thing (curiously, his Wiki entry also completely ignores it)… from what Hargreaves presents, it appears to have been a somewhat cranky left-wing conspiracy mag, and I just found that interesting, cos Kalman obviously wanted to expose Mills as a crypto-Nazi, but these days magazines of that alternative/conspiracy/counterculture sort seem more to lean right to varying degrees… indeed, I remember reading somewhere that Uncensored from NZ had actual Nazi-aligned funding behind it, which I don’t know if that’s true but I do find believable when I look at the front page of their site and see the Holocaust referred to with inverted commas around it. Also you can find them a lot more easily in newsagents now than you ever could’ve done with Open Eye and its apparently two-yearly publication schedule…

Also, David Icke gets referenced a few times, on account of Mills saying at one point that he doesn’t want to turn into him (a noble ambition, of course), but James Hargreaves keeps pronouncing his name as “David Ick”. And I love that. Not only had he somehow had the good fortune to remain ignorant of Icke until now, but “ick” is actually a pretty fair response to him as well…

THERE’s a shock

Fyre festival 2 ‘postponed’ just weeks before it was scheduled to start

Fyre festival 2 has been “postponed”, according to messages sent to ticket holders, just weeks before it was scheduled to start.
The event, advertised as a luxury music festival, was supposed to take place in Mexico from 30 May to 2 June. It was intended as an improved followup to the failed Fyre festival in 2017, which experienced problems with security, food, accommodation, medical services and artist relations, resulting in the festival being indefinitely postponed and eventually cancelled.
“The event has been postponed and a new date will be announced. We have issued you a refund. Once the new date is announced, at that time, you can repurchase if it works for your schedule,” read a message sent to ticket holders, ABC News reported. […]
Despite descriptions about the location of the sequel festival on the website, Mexico officials had previously confirmed that no event of that name was planned to be held there.
“We have no knowledge of this event, nor contact with any person or company about it,” Edgar Gasca, from the tourism directorate of Isla Mujeres, told the Guardian. “For us, this is an event that does not exist.”

Yeah, when your advertised location calls bullshit on you like that, you’re probably fucked. This, I’m sure, comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention. I fear, however, this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Fyre Festival 2, not least because I will be surprised if those refunds turn out to have been real, and there’ll probably be a whole stack of other legal issues arising…

Stop Making Sense (1984)

This indeed aint no Mudd Club or CBGB; by the time Talking Heads had reached this point in their career, they were way beyond those trifling spaces. Stop Making Sense found director Jonathan Demme at a bit of a low ebb after the nightmarish making of Swing Shift, and found the band finally having an actual hit record for the first time; combine both forces and this is what you get. Demme makes a great and varied film out of four nights of performances at the Pantages Theatre, and the band gives him plenty to work with. Need I say much more? It’s them at their peak, pretty much, on what actually wound up being their last tour, it’s great and you don’t need me to sell it much more. I just really want to draw attention to this other poster for the film. Normally I try and illustrate these posts with the proper original poster where I can (there’s a couple of instances where I couldn’t do so), but there was no way I couldn’t not also use this astounding creation by Ghanaian poster artist Nana Agyq. I don’t know how a bit of City of the Living Dead made it onto here, but let’s be glad that it does:

NEW PULP

HOLY SHIT there’s a new Pulp album coming out!

I really don’t know how I feel about the use of AI in this video, but I think they’re using it to kind of rip the piss out of how crappy it can be, so I’ll take it. I’ll be damned. That article notes they’ve been playing new songs on tour in the last year or so, but this is the first they’ve acknowledged there’s a forthcoming album. Well, THERE’s something to look forward to about this infernal year at last…

RIP Elvis Ramone

News just coming through now indicates Blondie drummer Clem Burke has lost the quiet battle he’d been fighting with cancer. He had a pretty extensive career outside Blondie, including a brief stint with the Ramones, and was apparently a large part of why Blondie didn’t break up almost as soon as they’d formed (having rather quickly lost both Ivan Kral to Patti Smith and Fred Smith to Television), and was with them to the end.

Bill gets the bus

Well HERE’s something remarkable, on multiple levels, William Hartnell on record in 1931 (hence why I’m filing it under music even though there is none, cos “film & TV” feels wrong)… a “one-act thriller” first broadcast on the BBC in 1927, then re-recorded four years later. I never knew until literally just a few minutes ago that this was even a thing; I knew he was in films from the early ’30s on, but I’ve never seen any reference to this until now. So that’s remarkable enough, and probably so is the fact that it survives, but, well, so is the fact that it was even made in the first place. Cos… why was it made? Was there a market for this sort of record? Cos I can’t imagine there being much of one somehow, and yet it was clearly a commercial recording, not just something pulled from the BBC archive or some such. I wonder who was buying this sort of thing.

As for the author, well, “Martin Hussingtree” actually turns out to be a place rather than a person… but the person using the name turns out to have been interesting, assuming there wasn’t another “Martin Hussingtree” out there. He appears to have been Oliver Baldwin, son of British PM Stanley Baldwin, and one of his other literary works was a book called Konyetz, which is described thus:

Konyetz is a dystopian science fiction novel written by UK politician and author Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin, who used the pseudonym Martin Hussingtree. Baldwin, the son of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, adopted his pseudonym from a small village in Worcestershire near the Baldwin family ironworks factory in Wilden. The novel was published in 1924 and reflects Baldwin’s profound experiences during World War One, which transformed him into an avowed socialist.
The title, Konyetz, is Russian for “end” or “termination.” The novel depicts a series of social upheavals leading to the invasion of Britain by a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. This invasion triggers a worldwide future war that culminates in the apocalypse and the end of civilization. The story combines elements of apocalypse, plague, and political turmoil, capturing Baldwin’s disillusionment with contemporary English politics and the global situation.
Baldwin’s novel is summarized by some as a strange yet striking forecast of the end of Western civilization, where a Labour-governed Britain faces bombing and gassing by the invading forces. The novel’s grim depiction of societal collapse and global conflict was undoubtedly influenced by Baldwin’s wartime experiences and his political views, which led him to become a Labour Member of Parliament in 1929.

I don’t know about you, but a dystopian novel about a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” destroying civilisation doesn’t suggest to me at least that the author of said book might be an “avowed socialist”… and yet Baldwin Jr was, very much, an avowed socialist. Mind you, per his Wiki entry, he also had an unfortunate run-in with Bolsheviks in Armenia during his post WW1, pre-parliamentary career (after which he was jailed in Turkey for spying for the Bolsheviks), so perhaps he was fine with socialism, just not a fan of the Soviets (and/or Jews)? I don’t know.