One of the great voices of Hollywood (I mean, with all due respect to Dave Prowse, George Lucas was right to redub him as Darth Vader with Jones’ voice), and one I who didn’t know until now was afflicted with a stutter so bad he was effectively mute for several years of his childhood, even into high school; he just refused to talk cos he knew people would just laugh at him.
Full credit to you, sir, cos you surely overcame.
One of the 70s’ favourite session men has left us with… well, hundreds of recordings to his credit. And what recordings, too. He’s probably most famous, of course, for Mr Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”…
…in which he plays both electric and acoustic double bass because, as he said later, he got paid two session fees because he played two instruments. The really cunning trick, though, was playing the electric bassline one tenth above the upright bass, thus producing that very particular bass sound. He did a similar trick with this…
…where he doubled the bass parts again (as well as his session fee!), only an octave apart this time, but the slapback echo applied here makes all the difference, and the bass really is the main instrument, almost serving like the whole rhythm section by itself (I’m not even sure if there are actual drums on here or not). Genuinely stunning production even 50 years after the fact, manages to sound completely like 1973 but also like the future still to come. But then there was this which came before either of those two…
…which I’d never actually given a proper listen to before last night, until I saw someone mention it on Threads and they said something about the detuning solo. And holy shit they were right; not only does brother Herbie kick off proceedings with a truly mean and great riff, there’s a bit where Flowers detunes his bass while playing it and just… goddamn. (Parenthetically, what a cast list on this recording, Chris Spedding and Klaus Voorman on guitar, Jimmy Webb on piano, that tragic unfortunate Jim Gordon on drums—how good is he here?) Hell of a career young Brian had.
Alain Delon died the other day, and that made me realise that I knew practically nothing about him other than his having been an actor. Obviously I’d seen some of his films, but didn’t really know much otherwise. So I thought I’d look him up on Wiki, and, well, YIKES. Man was a piece of work. And of shit. Those pretty-boy looks got him places but they hid something fantastically unpleasant too… anyway, this story came out today:
The late French actor Alain Delon’s wish that his pet dog be put down and buried with him has been rejected by his children after an outcry from animal rights campaigners.
The actor, who died aged 88 on Sunday, had said he wished the animal, a 10-year-old Belgian malinois called Loubo, to be “put to sleep” and laid in his grave in the cemetery of his home in the village of Douchy in the Loiret.
On Tuesday, after activists expressed dismay at the prospect of a healthy animal being put down and offered to find the dog a new home, it was announced Loubo would live.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation said Delon’s daughter Anouchka had confirmed the family would keep the dog.
“I’ve just had Anouchka Delon on the phone and she has told me that Loubo is part of the family and will be kept. The dog will not be put down,” a foundation spokesperson said. […]
“He’s my end of life dog … I love him like a child,” Delon told Paris Match in 2018. “I’ve had 50 dogs in my life, but I have a special relationship with this one. He misses me when I’m not there.”
He added: “If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet to take us away together. He’ll put him to sleep in my arms. I’d rather do that than know that he’ll let himself die on my grave with so much suffering.”
After that interview, the animal association 30 Million Friends condemned what it called the “convenience” euthanasia of a perfectly healthy dog, saying it hoped Loubo would be adopted.
I’m genuinely flabbergasted by this. Some fucking animal lover, eh? At that age, I’m guessing Loubo doesn’t have a lot of time left to him anyway (Malinois apparently live 10-14 years), but unless he was as terribly unwell as Delon was, I don’t see any need to accelerate his ending like that just to satifsy his owner’s ego. So yeah, fuck Alain Delon. Like I said, I didn’t know much about him before he died, and I think I was better off…
One of Australia’s most famous characters is gone… whatever his name was.
The man who immortalised the phrase “this is democracy manifest” while starring in what has been described as the pre-eminent Australian meme, Jack Karlson, has died aged 82.
Karlson – although there are debates as to whether this was his real name or one of many aliases – was a serial prison escaper and small-time crook who shot to fame in 2009 after a news clip of his arrest at a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1991 was uploaded on to the internet.
“What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” Karlson theatrically boomed as his bear-like frame resisted a string of police officers.
Chris Reason, the Channel Seven journalist who reported Karlson’s arrest 33 years ago, paid tribute to Karlson on social media site X, tweeting that “Mr Democracy Manifest has died”.
Karlson died surrounded by family at 6.31pm on Wednesday.
“He walked a full and colourful path and, despite the troubles thrown at him, he lived by his motto – to keep on laughing,” his family said in statement.
Niece Kim Edwards said Karlson spent the last few weeks of his life in hospital, where he “had a few attempts to escape and pulled his cords out a couple of times and asked us many time to sneak in his pipe”.
Edwards said her uncle was “battling many ailments but what got him in the end was [systemic inflammatory response syndrome]”.
“As a final send off, we gave uncle a last taste of red wine through his drip just before it was removed,” she said.
Alas that a succulent Chinese meal evidently wasn’t an option. This news comes not long after I read that a documentary about him was being made; it looks like the director, Heath Davis, got him just in time. Alas again that Jack, or Cecil, or John, or “The Hun” won’t get to see it.
A very belated RIP to David Freel from Swell; I only rather randomly discovered this tonight, nearly two years after the fact, after discovering an old video by them on YT and reading some of the comments thereon. Goddamn. Hadn’t heard anything from Swell in a long time—it appears that he retired from music-making about ten years ago to run a vinyl pressing plant—so this is the first I’m discovering the news. Too Many Days Without Thinking is still a favourite of mine from the later 90s, and I offer you the tremendous lead single therefrom:
Can’t honestly call myself a fan of The Chills as such, I don’t really know much of their music and I probably should explore it further than the ’90s best of I bought years ago but also haven’t listened to in years, but the news of Martin Philipps’ passing (which, for some reason, I’m finding a bit less unexpected than other commentators; they’re not saying what the cause of death was but I did know he had years of health issues including hep C and liver problems) prompts me to post this. Godhead stuff, really, lives up to its title perfectly. Sometimes it only takes one song to justify a whole career, and I think this is one of those cases.
Cathy knew what Thatcher was about. Vale.
Well this is fucking shit. If I ever wanted someone from Doctor Who to make it to a full hundred, it was him. So close. Immensely glad now that Russ got to make one final appearance, however brief, in Jodie Whittaker’s last episode. I think this person on Bluesky summed up his importance:
Very important point. Hartnell’s Doctor is very much in antihero mode for those first few stories; I think it’s notable that, halfway through “The Daleks”, he would’ve abandoned the Thals to their fate had he not discovered the Daleks still had that fluid link. It’s Ian who actually convinces the Thals to put up a fight and solve the issue. I’ve often wondered what happened to the Doctor before the series began to make him like that…
Kabosu has left the building. Much unhappy. Very sadness. Alas. But also so immortality.
This one hurts. I know that, in his own way, Corman was as much of a production-line churn-’em-out factory as any of the actual Hollywood majors, and frankly the quality of the movies he oversaw was generally probably questionable at best, but so many people in the American film industry from the 60s onwards started out in the “Roger Corman Film School” that the face of Hollywood would’ve looked vastly different without him. I mean, some of those figures may have made it by themselves, but what if they didn’t? No Coppola, no Scorsese, no Jack Nicholson, no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Robert Towne, no James Horner… lots of Big Hollywood just never happens. So yeah, this is a sad one; Corman was just there for so long—in a bit over a week’s time it will, in fact, be 70 years since his first film (as producer), Monster From the Ocean Floor, came out—that, even though you knew he couldn’t last forever, it’s still a shock somehow. Still, no one will ever accuse him of not having lived his life to the fullest… this is Dark Corners Review’s look back at that life from about a year ago:
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