So Edolf’s latest Starship test went… poorly, and, as you can see, the cult is already trying to downplay it; somehow the fact that it blew up before launch is apparently less bad than it blowing up once it was in the air. And I know they always try and spin these cases as “well at least now we know what needs more work so it was still useful”, but you still can’t call it successful. Rockets shouldn’t blow up on the launch pad, nor indeed at any other point. By this point the company should know what the fuck it’s doing, which it apparently still doesn’t. I present you with the explosion itself…
…which has been compiled in this video from multiple angles, including slow motion at one point, and just keeps getting funnier with each new change of camera position as it repeats. It must be said, the explosion is pretty great; if only they’d been testing to see just how well the thing could blow up before launch, then this would’ve been a spectacular success.
Meanwhile, Honda—a company better known for vehicles of other kinds—just successfully tested a reuseable rocket of their own without much fuss. Fairly simple test, obviously, I’m guessing rather less complicated than SpaceX’s stuff and it obviously wasn’t going all the way to space, but it actually worked, which is kind of the important thing. And it’s kind of delightful to watch the thing go up and down again from the onboard camera, too.
And just a few hours later it’s goodbye Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb… no word on what took him out, but he was apparently diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver last year so I’m guessing alcohol caught up with him at last. A damn shame, whatever the case. I was shocked to discover he wasn’t even 60 yet; apparently he was just 15 when Nitzer started, so only 18 when the first single came out.
I never saw Nitzer Ebb live, but I gather they saw me; back in 2006 they were one of the main acts at the Under the Blue Moon festival, performing upstairs at Newtown RSL while I was downstairs with the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we were part of the DJ lineup, and also we played a short live set (friends of ours were also playing support upstairs that night), and apparently Douglas and Bon came down to witness our semi-musical shenanigans and enjoyed whatever the hell it was we were doing. So there you go. Lift up your hearts:
And, with rather more hair, here he’s guesting with Alan Wilder’s side-project (as it still was at that time) Recoil on a cover of Alex Harvey’s “Faith Healer”:
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…
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.
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:
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…
Uncle Brian’s got new music for us, this time in collaboration with Beatie Wolfe, about whom I know nothing other than what her Wiki entry tells me… but hot damn the two are clearly a great combination. This is gorgeous.
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…
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.
So Sydney was blessed by this aerial visitor last night. This was caught by this webcam overlooking the harbour and the bridge from somewhere on the north side of town (parenthetically, there’s a remarkable amount of traffic going over the bridge for this time of night), but the clip was uploaded to Facebook separately by someone else and then a friend reposted it, and I accordingly grabbed it to share here. Said friend made a crack about it being SpaceX’s latest experiment coming back to Earth, but it’s not quite as drawn out as that. And I think even Edolf might try and stop his failures hitting a major international city…
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.
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