I've referred to this before, but couldn't find an embeddable clip of it.
Just to set the scene: in 1979, Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the UK's Liberal Party, went on trial for attempted murder. It was claimed that he had arranged for one Andrew 'Gino' Newton - an airline pilot - to shoot his (Thorpe's) alleged former lover Norman Scott. Newton shot the Great Dane which Scott was walking on the moors, but the gun apparently jammed before he could follow up on the intended target.
There were other matters involved as well, particularly involving financial donations from wealthy businessmen.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the court case was the summing-up by the trial judge, Joseph Cantley. It was so obviously dismissive - contemptuous, even - of the testimony given by the prosecution witnesses, and so obviously partial to Thorpe that an acquittal was almost a foregone conclusion. Despite this, the jury initially deadlocked at 6-6 before finally coming down on Thorpe's side. Thorpe's career was, however, ruined (he had lost his parliamentary seat a matter of days before the trial opened), and he never held public office again.
The evening of the acquittal, the first of Amnesty International's Secret Policeman's Ball productions was being staged in London. The reviews for the first night were less than effusive, with more than one citing a lack of new satirical material in the show. This prompted Peter Cook (whose fortunes were at quite a low ebb by that time) to compose a one-man sketch for the second night's performance based on Cantley's extraordinary performance the day before.
Bear in mind that the sketch was written in scarcely twenty four hours, and was still being amended right up to the time that Cook took to the stage in wig and gown to deliver it.
What followed was almost certainly the zenith of Peter Cook's career as a satirist, and one of British comedy's greatest moments. There is scarcely a superfluous word in its seven and a half minutes, and almost every line contains a veritable dagger.
Below the clip, there is a short explanation of the names Cook uses.
Bex Bissell = Peter Bessell, former Liberal MP and failed businessman, who gave evidence against Thorpe in return for immunity from prosecution. 'Bex Bissell' was the name of a model of mechanical carpet sweeper.
Norma St John Scott = Norman Scott, Thorpe's alleged ex-lover. The extra joke is the oblique reference to Norman St John Stevas, a particularly camp Conservative MP.
Olivia Newton John = Andrew 'Gino' Newton, previously convicted of shooting the dog.
Jack Haywire = Jack Hayward, millionaire businessman and major donor to the Liberal Party.
Nadir Rickshaw = Nadir Dinshaw, businessman, philanthropist and friend of Thorpe.
Miriam = Marian Thorpe, Jeremy Thorpe's second wife.
This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the release of record which probably changed my life more than any other:
(Yes, them again. I know, it looks like an obsession. But read on (dot, dot, dot)).
I'd been interested in electronic music before, having heard (and had bought for me) Hot Butter's rendition of Gershon Kingsley's Popcorn, and noted the early work of Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte with Chicory Tip. Not forgetting, of course, the output of the BBC's famed Radiophonic Workshop; not just Dr Who, but its contribution to many another television and radio programme.
I may have been set in the right direction by two other sonic presences in my life. In the house I was born and brought up in, my bedroom window faced out in the direction of the steelworks, and so I was particularly used to hearing the hissing and clanking coming from there at all hours (even in the winter, when the window was - theoretically - closed, but was in such a poor state that it was as airtight as a lace doily). It was, in a strange way, comforting to hear it, and not just because it meant work for my father.
There was another element, slightly less easy to deal with. On Saturday afternoons, I would go to the football with Dad, and we'd often walk through the middle of the electricity substation at Penrhos (you could walk through the middle of it in those days, rather than go around the outside as you have to do now). Because the substation was stepping down from the grid voltage to something more usable, it contained a number of transformers. These gave off a rather disturbing humming which, quite frankly, gave me the willies.
So I had some sort of a background for what followed. I suspect I first heard the single of Autobahn on the radio, as there were no other available outlets for music at all in the late spring of 1975. As soon as I heard it, and having already developed an embarrassing penchant for 'novelty records' (all of which I still have, and have cringed through lately whilst digitising my vinyl), I knew I had to have it. My birthday was coming up so it went straight onto my presents list, along with The History Of The Bonzos, to which I'd been introduced by Roddy Williams.
When I got the single I marvelled at the sounds, and not just the traffic effects panning across from right to left and back again (stereo was still quite a novelty itself to me at that time). It had an immediately sing-along-able hook (even though it was in German).
My father, being the musical one in the house, wasn't entirely impressed, but I do have a clear memory of him borrowing the record one evening to put on his trusty old Grundig stereogram (of which more here). Unfortunately, he put on the B-side, the six-minute, slow, ambient Kometenmelodie I. To his credit (he was in his mid-sixties by this time) he sat through it all (albeit with a puzzled expression on his face) and, when the autochanger (remember those, kids?) clicked off, said, "I was waiting for it to start!"
But who were the people behind this strange delight? The label told me that the tracks were written by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, but I had no more idea about who they might be than I had of flying to Germany with a pair of wax wings. The label also told me, however, that the single was a 'highlight' from an LP. That sealed it; that was one LP that I just had to get my hands on.
Finances being what they were, however, that meant a wait of over six months until Christmas. Finally the day dawned, and I got my hands on the album. I delighted at first in the effective simplicity of the sleeve itself (the UK release had a unique design (see the picture above); other 'territories' ended up with an Emil Schult painting on the front and a montaged photograph on the back. OK in their way, but never as iconic to my mind as that roadsign (which was on both sides).
I dashed upstairs to put it on my record player. There was the next moment of pleasure; not the record itself, but the label! I'd never seen that famous Roger Dean 'spaceship' label before; it seemed entirely in keeping with what I was about to hear:
A note to the unknowing: the single of Autobahn was just over three minutes long (the US single - a different edit - was about thirty seconds longer). The LP version was over twenty-two minutes in length. So it was that I settled down to listen.
I was not in any way disappointed. I was bowled over (or perhaps 'run over' would be a more fitting description), especially by the second section which followed the first vocal part. The BUM-di-dum, di-DUM-di-dum bass line was something in itself, but with beautifully melodic flute and guitar lines over it (this was just before Kraftwerk abandoned 'traditional' instruments altogether) it rose up above the asphalt and soared above the landscape much like the spaceships on the label. In short, I was entranced.
It corrected an important false impression as well. Those who didn't know better (and one or two who should have) would dismiss electronic music at that time by claiming that it was cold, inhuman, sterile. I might have agreed with them until I heard Florian Schneider's flute wafting over the motorway of synth bass and Ralf Hütter's understated but highly effective guitar work. No, this was most emphatically not soul-less. It lived and breathed. The ambience is certainly stark, but in the sense of being clearly outlined, like a sunny day in winter; all is sharp and clear.
I sat there, and knew that my musical tastes were never going to be the same again. It was music I had been waiting for all of my short life.
Turning the LP over (yes my little ones, you had to do this to play the other side - and you only got twenty-odd minutes to a side as well if you were lucky; or unlucky if it was Emerson Lake And Palmer), I was reunited with Kometenmelodie I from the single, but now it had a jaunty companion in Kometenmelodie II, a faster, brighter version of the same theme. This was followed by two atmosphere pieces which (although I didn't know it at the time) were more typical of Kraftwerk's earlier output; the dark and dank Mitternacht (the five-note motif of which now turns up - slightly incongruously to me - at the end of live performances of Showroom Dummies); and the cheerfully pastoral Morgenspaziergang, with its electronic birdsong blending with Schneider's flute and gentle piano melody.
I missed out on Kraftwerk's next couple of albums, as my adolescent experimentation took me slightly elsewhere, but I have the DJ Mark Radcliffe to thank for my picking up on them again. In 1981, he presented a weekly programme on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester called Transmission, which went out early on a Saturday evening. I just happened to be listening one summer afternoon when he interviewed Kraftwerk, who were over doing some gigs. He played Neon Lights from the Man Machine album, which had come out all of three years before, but which I hadn't heard. Straightaway, I knew that I had to have it, and blew about Ł5 of my dole money on it at Cob Records in High Street, Wrexham the next week. Once again I was hooked, as Man Machine is, as a concept, a more complete entity than Autobahn. And so I found myself back on the road, where I've been more or less ever since, especially once I got enough money to buy the whole back catalogue. I'm on my third vinyl copy of Autobahn by now.
Almost as if to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of that crucial step forward, Kraftwerk have now released re-mastered versions of their last eight albums, beginning with Autobahn. They're available individually or as an eight-disc box set. I wonder if you can guess which version I've bought, boys and girls? Yes, I have; I'm waiting for it to be delivered any day now.
I won't get rid of my vinyl, though. For one thing, there's a different feel to the sound on vinyl as opposed to CDs; and for another, the vinyl copies are an integral part of the trail that has been My Life In Music, and trashing them would be the grossest of betrayals to these signs which have pointed me down this road.
Actually, I'm going to be frightfully naughty. If you click on the record label above, you'll hear that very same second section of Autobahn which captivated me when I was thirteen. It's from my vinyl digitation project (hence a few clicks and crackles which I haven't been able to get out without compromising the sound in other ways). Enjoy!
Update (17/11/09): It's here! Here I am with my copy of The Catalogue:
All I can say so far is that if the sound quality equals the quality of the packaging, I'm in for a real treat!
In one of those examples of 'thread-drift' on alt.fan.pratchett, an old rock'n'roller from Tulsa (yeah, Rocky, we've all sussed your new ID!) expressed the thought that 'Tentative Hypothesis' would be a good name for a rock band. Lesley Weston in Vancouver then suggested they could open for 'Scientific Method', before John Wilkins in Australia came up with the idea that the set could finish with 'More Than A Theory'. This prompted another antipodean, 'SteveD' to come up with the following filk (*).
Unlike most filks, this isn't funny as such (allowing for the fiction that most filks are funny), but it is very well done, and indeed the last verse is extremely moving. I'd like to dedicate it to the memory of Carl Sagan, one of the great communicators of science, who would have been seventy five next Monday. Take it away, SteveD:
"I woke up this morning and the sun still shone
Bath of neutrinos to start my day
The spectrum's light was a familiar song
Now analysed, and the maths all say
It's more than a theory (more than a theory)
When the data lines up that perfect way (more than a theory)
I begin dreaming (more than a theory)
Of a world where pure science holds sway
I want my science world ruling the day
"By noon I wandered through Nature's wilds
So many lifeforms to marvel at
All a wond'rous now as when a child
This jackpot we've won, just observing that -
It's more than a theory (more than a theory)
When the data lines up that perfect way (more than a theory)
I begin dreaming (more than a theory)
Of a world where pure science holds sway
I want my science world ruling the day."
"When I've retired and gotten old
My life wasn't wasted, regret no day
My dream still unfurls, and ever grows
I built my part, and they'll always say
"It's more than a theory (more than a theory)
When the data lines up that perfect way (more than a theory)
I begin dreaming (more than a theory)
Of a world where pure science holds sway
I'll have my science world ruling the day."
(To the tune of More Than A Feeling by Boston, of course, just in case you didn't know)
(*) Filk: originally from the world of SF/fantasy fandom, it now denotes parodies of popular songs to reflect the interests/obsessions of a particular 'in group'. Or something like that, anyway.
Instant justice is not usually a good idea: what is needed is cool, calm deliberation of the facts before reaching a judgement.
Just sometimes, however, 'natural justice' fits the bill perfectly.
When a couple of standard-issue drunken arseholes started harrassing some apparent transvestites in Swansea city centre one night, they ended up getting the worst of it when the cross-dressers (according to some reports, a group of cage-fighters on a stag night) struck back.
You can see the yobs in question getting into rucks in the early part of this clip, but the good bit comes at about the 1 minute mark:
The piss-heads were given a community order, electronic tagging and a curfew, in addition to a severe case of embarrassment. I can't imagine they'd want to go out on the town again in a hurry, though.
I hope I'm not writing a cheque with my fingers that the rest of me won't be willing to cash, but I maintain that not even 'waterboarding' (and how repulsive that term is, making torture by drowning in instalments sound like a day in the waves off Newquay) would make a monarchist out of me.
I view the existence of monarchy as a sort of infantile disorder and an insult to democracy and justice and all who have fought (and all too often died) for them.
It is rare to see the English monarchy exposed in the UK media; that is the place where the cloying deference of less enlightened times merges with the whoring scandal-worship which keeps the press profitable and its readership compliant, docile and unaware of what is being done to them by those who wield power (political, economic and legal).
That is why this piece in today's Independent by Johann Hari is so welcome.
Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon always struck me as being like an animatronic troll, and it is no surprise to anyone who has shown any genuine curiosity that she was in reality a deeply unsympathetic figure, with some very nasty political and ethnic sympathies, as Hari makes manifest.
How ironic that someone we were propagandised into worshipping for her 'leadership' during the fight against Nazism should turn out to have been as obsessed with 'bloodlines' as anyone who attended the Wannsee Conference!
And how ironic that the pretence has been kept up for years about the paternity of certain members of the current crop of mediocrities masquerading as superior to all the rest of us solely on the basis of whose vagina they slithered out of! See this document from the ThroneOut website for further revelations.
Just to balance out the fawning from last month, some warped individual has had the idea of turning Kraftwerk into a sit-com, based on actual Kraftwerk videos (although - to enter robotic pedant mode, he's mis-spelled Wolfgang's surname):
Update: I dunno, you wait months for a Kraftwerk spoof, and then two come along at once. Here's Bill Bailey:
Update update: Or, rather, here was Bill Bailey. Apparently, he's had an attack of the precious and forced the clip to be pulled.
There's an awful lot of bollocks talked about so-called 'assisted suicide'. The bollocks - largely (though not exclusively) inspired by superstition and fashionable paranoia - has so far prevented the laws of the UK from being changed to something more humane than the present situation, whereby someone helping a loved one out of an impossible existence faces prosecution and up to fourteen years imprisonment.
We have no choice about our arrival in the world. We have far less choice than we are led to believe in our passage through it. We should at least have the decisive say in the mode and timing of our departure from it.
With this in mind, please take the time to read this piece by someone who is facing just such a prospect.
Unfortunately, we may have to wait a while before this piece is released on CD, but here is the composer rehearsing it in preparation for the world premičre I was lucky enough to attend at the start of this month:
For an advanced civilisation, we really are snowed under with unproven superstitious bollocks. Homeopathy is just the latest in a long line of crocks of poo with no scientific validity, like palmistry, 'healing crystals' and feng shui.
(I know of someone who - in a spirit of mischief - went into his local branch of Waterstone's, calmly told the girl behind the counter that all the shop's books on feng shui were lined up in the wrong direction, then calmly walked out again).
Here are Mitchell & Webb with an example of what would happen if we let this woolly thinking take over:
A screenshot from BBC2's The Culture Show last Wednesday night:
In the highlighted bubble are Tez, me, Wendy, and Tez and Wendy's friends Carol and Rob.
I did have another capture of this, but it was a few frames earlier, I was to be seen face on, and it made me look like Mr Euphoric Peanut, so I wasn't going to put that up here. If I had, you'd understand why I tend to avoid mirrors.
I first heard this around the start of the year after it featured in the 9 Lessons And Carols For Godless People in London in December 2008, but now Australian comedian Tim Minchin has put it up on his YouTube channel. It's very funny, very sharp and slightly Not Suitable For Work. Oh, and there's no video as such - it's in sound only, but this means you can concentrate on the words:
Last night, I hied me the sixty-odd miles to the Manchester Velodrome for a unique double-bill. For not only were my beloved Kraftwerk playing one of only two UK gigs they're scheduled to do this year, but the 'support act' - if they can be given what is usually a term denoting inferiority or insignificance - was New York's Bang On A Can All-Stars giving a world premičre performance of 2x5 by the legendary Steve Reich.
So how did I, with my notorious aversion to travel (although it's more an aversion to all the hoop-la and arrangements you have to go through to do it) end up going to this gig? Well, my friends Tez and Wendy have been trying to get me to a gig for over a decade. They'd seen Kraftwerk at the 'Stop Sellafield' gig in Manchester in 1992, then again at Tribal Gathering in '97 and then in Manchester once more around the start of the current decade, and very much wanted me not to miss out.
They finally figured out that the only way they would ever succeed was by buying the tickets first and then telling me. They managed to do this because, for once, they knew about the gig before I did.
That was over three months ago, and so it was a long countdown to late yesterday afternoon, when we set out for Manchester. The weather was horrendously hot and humid. Horrendous for me, that is: once both the temperature and humidity go over 70, that's it as far as I'm concerned.
We arrived at the venue over an hour before the gig was due to start. Or, rather, we arrived one of the car parks at that time. It's a fair step from there to the venue itself, and I nearly passed out by the time we got to the Velodrome.
Manchester Velodrome is built on derelict industrial land on the eastern side of the city, and is the shape you would expect from a cycling arena. It is also - so I discovered the other day - built on the site of a former power station. So why put a gig on there, of all places? Well Alex Poots, Executive Producer of the Manchester International Festival, had been trying to get Kraftwerk to the city for ages, and then finally realised that - given Ralf Hütter's passion for cycling - this was the carrot to dangle before him. He got a positive response within a few days.
Having got inside, we went looking for the merchandising stalls. We found one on the south-west corner, but I have to say that the range they had on offer was quite disappointing. There was another stall down on the floor of the venue, but there was no way we could get down there from where we were, so we were left to get whatever refreshment we could before going to find our seats. These turned out to be at the start of the home straight to the left of the stage. Wendy apologised for the location, and wished she had got us tickets for somewhere with a better angle. They were fine, though, and gave us a good view of the stage.
Walking into the arena, we saw that the stage had been set up in front of the south curve of the track, with most of the remainder of the central area set aside for those who preferred to stand. On the stage stood a grand piano, a drum kit, a couple of electric guitars and a bass guitar, along with five chairs and some music stands.
Steve Reich's new piece, 2x5, was written for either two groups of five musicians - each group doubling the other - or one group of five musicians doubling a recording of themselves. This latter setup was clearly what we were going to be getting. Sure enough, at about 7:50 (somewhat later than the '7:30 pm prompt start' stated on the tickets), the five members of this incarnation of the Bang On A Can All-Stars emerged onto the stage to polite applause from a venue which was little more than two-thirds full at this point, sat at their instruments and then, with no ceremony, launched into the piece.
I lack a sufficiently in-depth knowledge either of Reich's music or of musical terminology to be able to give you any useful description of 2x5. All I can say is that it appeared to comprise four main sections (the first quite fast, the second slower, followed by another fast section and what seemed to be a recapitulation of the first), with the transitions between them managed by vamping from bass and the lower end of the piano, the rhythm being carried as much by these instruments as by the drums. The melody lines are played almost entirely on the high treble strings of the guitar and punctuated by clawed clusters of notes (the guitarist responsible for these played them with almost Townshendian flourish and then, after each, smoothed down his frizzy hair with his picking hand), and reminders of Reich's earlier Electric Counterpoint were never far away.
The piece - although not showing any major progression in Reich's composing style (and why should he bother at 73?) - is nonetheless a pleasing addition to the canon, and was played with great attack and confidence, and it was a shame that a large proportion of the audience then present seemed to prefer talking through most of it.
But where was the composer? We had been told that the ensemble would be "directed by Steve Reich" himself, but he had not appeared. All became clear as the group took its applause. They pointed to the very back of the standing area. There - wearing his distinctive cap - stood the great man, who waved to acknowledge the extra burst of applause which met him.
Some of us then took the opportunity to get out of the heat of the auditorium (if the Velodrome has any air conditioning, it wasn't apparent) back to the outer ring of the building, where at least there were some windows open to allow what little breeze there was to percolate in.
The audience demographic (if I must use such a word) appeared to be 65 per cent male and concentrated around the 35-45 age range. Perhaps many of these people were like me in being what they now call 'early-adopters', but I suspect most of them had come to the band in the early 1990s thanks to The Mix.
We returned some seven or eight minutes later to find the stage closed off on all three sides by a grey curtain, rather like the Kaaba at Mecca, only this was plain grey and some small coloured spotlights were shining on it. There was a brief cheer as we saw the shadows of pairs of spindly legs appear projected onto the bottom of the curtain. Could it be that Our Heroes were really aliens after all, and midget ones to boot?
As ever, there was no formal warning that the set was about to start; just the sets of swooping tones which can be heard on the front page of their website, only lower and slower. After a couple of minutes of this, there then came the familiar robotic announcement:
"Meine Dammen und Herren...Ladies and gentlemen...Heute Abend...Die Mensch Maschine...Kraft...werk!"
The ticking beat of Man-Machine started, causing a roar from the audience (which had increased in size during the interval, although there were still empty seats to be seen). Gradually, the curtains pulled back from the front and back along the sides to reveal the four cybernauts. Each man - wearing a dark grey shiny zip-top - stood behind his laptop in the familiar order: Ralf Hütter, the remaining founder member, on the left; then Henning Schmitz and Fritz Hilpert; with new-boy Stefan Pfaffe taking the place of the now-departed founder member Florian Schneider on the right. These were on a slightly raised dais in the centre of the stage, the dais having a strip of light around its lower edge which changed colour a number of times during the evening.
The first thing which struck me seeing them standing there was that Fritz was a short-arse. I realised after a while that he wasn't much shorter than Henning or Ralf, it was just that Stefan - standing next to him - was a great deal taller than any of them.
The second thing which hit me was a sense of disbelief that - thirty four years after I got my first Kraftwerk record (the 7" of Autobahn), here I was actually seeing them. OK, times and technology have moved on, but this was the band I had carried a torch for back when they and their music were being dismissed as cold and inhuman and a likely cause of The End Of The Musical World As We Know It; the band I had championed in the face of the amusement and bemusement of my denim- and leather-clad contemporaries; the band which I knew to be significant long before the self-styled smarties had cottoned on. And there they were, just metres away!
No-one with any sense would go to a Kraftwerk gig to see animated performances from the band itself. As they have made their music out of a sense of economy of expression, so too is their stage presence devoid of extravagance of movement. Even from the angle I had, it was difficult to ascertain exactly what it was that they were doing on those consoles. We speculated whether they were sending funny messages to each other, or whether Ralf was sending a snarky e-mail to Florian Schneider to tell him what a nice time they were having in a cycling stadium.
And so it is the visual aspect of the performance which attracts the eye. There was a large main screen behind them, with a much smaller one set off to either side of the top of the main screen. These subsidiary screens sometimes showed the same as the main one, but often showed some complementary images or concentrated on the logo which represented each track. For the opening track, the images concentrated on displaying the lyrics in the familiar red-and-black Chyelovek font.
The second track was Planet Of Visions, which grew out of the jingles the band had done for Expo 2000 in Hannover. As usual, they did an arrangement of the faster version, and this led to an unprecedented amount of foot-tapping and knee-bending on the part of the band. In fact at one point, Ralf - who appeared to be enjoying himself hugely all night - seemed to be having intimate relations with his laptop.
This was followed by Homecomputer - a track whose theme was ahead of its time in 1981 - with Ralf doing the lyrics first in English, then in German. I say 'doing' because not even the man himself would claim that he was a singer. Furthermore, he was hampered all evening by a volume problem with his call-centre-style microphone which left him all but inaudible unless he physically moved the mic closer to his mouth each time he needed it.
So far, things were going as expected, with the set list following the same patterns as in their recent gigs back home. They started with the familiar melody to their classic Tour De France. 'Familiar' too to anyone who knows Hindemith's sonata for flute and piano, from which the melody was undeniably 'borrowed'. The backdrop showed vintage black-and-white footage of the cycle race itself. This then segued smoothly into Tour De France '03 from the band's 'soundtrack' album for the centenary of that event.
It was at this point that something absolutely remarkable happened. Suddenly from the back straight on the far side emerged one...two...three...four cyclists in full racing order. These, Ralf informed us as the house lights went up, were the Great Britain cycling team (of Olympic gold medal fame) and, as the astonished crowd roared and clapped its approval at this astonishing appearance, Jason Kenny's boys began circuit after circuit, ascending and swooping, climbing and diving (one of them at one point trying that peculiar thing that cyclists do in trying to stay motionless for as long as possible), in turn egging on and being egged on by an audience which was beside itself with delight. It was A Perfect Moment.
(The video screens just showed decibel bars at this point. After all, nobody was going to be looking at them)
Eventually, the cyclists wound down off into the pit lane on the far side again, to what was probably the biggest cheer of the night.
The next item on the agenda was Autobahn. I speculated briefly that we might see a repeat performance but with VW Beetles, but enough was as good as a feast. There were Beetles on the screens, though, along with other nostalgic black-and-white footage from the Golden Age of German Motoring. Ralf sang (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here) the lyrics live, and this was the first point where the bass really kicked in. Indeed at times during the gig it was practically visceral, going down right into your guts; this was no time or place for a weak bladder. I'm glad that in recent years the re-working of this piece has included the second section of the full work, with that delightful "DUM-di-DUM, di-DUM-di-DUM" bass line.
Before the next number, Ralf said that they were going to do it with the lights off...
(Update: no he didn't. The only knock against the sound all night was that Ralf wasn't clearly audible when speaking. What he actually said was "Next time, we bring our bikes!")
The next number was Computer Love, another song from the Computerworld album which saw the future way before even those who were to make the future saw it.
This was then followed, with a count-in of "Eins, zwei, drei, vier" nicked from Showroom Dummies (q.v.), by their Number One smash (one week in 1982), The Model. The video backdrop was familiar to old hands, so I tried to make out who was doing what on stage. It seemed to me that Henning was playing the instrumental break manually, but I could deduce nothing more than that.
Then we came to another favourite of mine, the divine Neon Lights, with Ralf once again giving us the vocals in both languages, and an instrumental coda which could have gone on a lot longer as far as I was concerned.
Next up was the aforementioned Showroom Dummies, in which Ralf, Henning and Fritz seemed to give us a verse each. The backdrop for this was based around the very scary photograph which appeared in the centre spread of the concert's programme (see below). This made them look either (as Wendy put it) "straight out of the window at Top Man", or - more sinisterly - like recent patients at the Niki Lauda clinic. It ended with something that only us veterans of early Kraftwerk would have recognised - the five-note motif from their 1974 track Mitternacht.
No tour of Kraftwerk's repertoire (which is what their gigs have become) would be complete without Trans Europe Express, here in its complete triptych form. During the central Metal On Metal section, during which the backdrop of elegantly-designed trains changed into a collection of images of carriage buffers clanging into one another, Ralf got animated again to the point where he seemed to have gone back to his long-suffering console for 'sloppy seconds'.
During the final Abzug section, the curtains began to close as this first part of the concert came to a close. They came along the sides and towards the middle all right, but the left-hand curtain gave up about six feet short of its intended destination and - after a few moments of indecision - had to complete its journey with manual assistance, to ironic cheers.
There was then a short intermission, but we knew what was coming next. Sure enough, the slow whirring and bleeping of the intro to The Robots was a prelude to the opening of the curtains once again to reveal, well, The Robots of course. There they were, the real automata, each standing behind its own console and commencing the hand and body movements which are - in turns, and depending on personal taste - balletic, comic and slightly sinister, done as they are by non-sentient beings with pedestals for legs.
When Florian Schneider decided to walk out late last year, the band quickly arranged for his simulated head to be removed from the fourth robot and replaced by one of Stefan Pfaffe. However, the backdrop video still shows Florian's head rather than Stefan's, although it seemed to have its head in its hand as if in some sort of symbolic gesture.
The automatic choreography having concluded, and the curtains having closed - fully this time, which attracted another ironic cheer - we were ready for the newest part of the set. Not new in musical terms, but in presentational ones.
As were entered the venue, we were given our programmes (which were used primarily as fans, cooling, for the use of) and a set of 3D specs. "Put them on at 9:30!", we were told. The evening having started late, this meant about 9:50 (although Wendy put hers on at 9:30 anyway, just in case we were missing something). This was the part I was most concerned about: due to an uncorrected childhood squint, I have poor binocular vision and 3D has never worked for me before. I also have glasses with very thick lenses, so there was a certain amount of prestidigitation involved in getting the 3D bins on over them.
Up came the music again, and back went the curtains to reveal Our Heroes in what have come to be known as their 'Tron' suits. This time, although the suits were the familiar electric green, the faces of the band were an rather unflattering bright magenta. The set kicked off with Numbers, at which figures danced and whirled on the backdrop. I think I got some of the 3D effect, but I'm sure others were getting more out of it. I left the glasses on anyway, because without them the display was blurred in order to produce the desired effect.
Radioactivity then followed. The spoken 'Sellafield' intro being repeated in text on the backdrop. Except that the last part of it was missing, indicative of one or two problems they had with the video throughout this number, although looking at the side screen nearer to us gave a good idea of what should have been happening. From where we were, we could see the video control console in a pit on the opposite side to the stage. The technician operating it probably wished at that point that Pfaffe was still doing the job rather than him.
We moved on to Vitamin, and the backdrop changed to cascades of pills and spinning tablets, followed by Aérodynamik where the cycling motif again showed itself in the visuals in the form of abstract graphics.
Finally, the sound of "Boing, Boom, Tschak!" heralded the closing number, Music Non-Stop, which featured not just leg-moves from the Boys, but synchronised leg-moves! As the end neared, Stefan's face changed from magenta to blue, he was then completely blacked out. This was his cue to leave his console, move to the front of the stage on the far side from us, take his bow and exit stage left.
(I have to admit that I missed this: I looked at the backdrop for a few moments, and when I turned my attention back to the stage, there were only three of them there).
Fritz's head then turned blue, and about half a minute later he too faded out and took his bow. Then Henning went blue in the head, shortly afterwards taking his leave in the same manner. This left Ralf on his own for another half minute or so, before he said his customary, "Good night! Auf wiedersehn!", moved to the front, made a rather flamboyant bow (with, I swear, a broad smile on his face) and left an empty stage.
The music itself continued for a minute or so more, of course, as we clapped and cheered and stamped and called for a "More!" that we knew would not come - such is not The Way Of The Robot. And so the house lights came up and we made our way out, Wendy remarking that - of the four times she'd seen them - this had been the best.
We made our way back to the distant car park in the post-dusk, passing the dodgy-looking blokes selling unofficial shirts (the same blokes who had been ticket-touting before the gig, by the looks of them; perhaps because of them, the venue wasn't full), got into the car and set off home at the end of an evening of all evenings. If you'll excuse the understatement, I will simply describe it as "fucking awesome". A combination of man, machine and music operating (curtains excepted) in perfect unison.
Footnote (the first): Writing this has been difficult. I had intended doing it once I got home, shortly after midnight. But there was a thunderstorm about, and I had no intention of risking a fried PC by powering it up. I was afraid that by the time Friday rolled around I would have forgotten a lot of it. But no; if anything, it was still too strong in the mind. More than once (especially when describing the surprise appearance of the cyclists) I have had to go away for a time to recompose myself; more than once I have had trouble in saying exactly what I intended to say.
Footnote (the second): You'll notice that no photographs accompany this piece. I didn't bother taking my camera because, a) neither it nor I would have been up to the technical challenge; b) it would have been a distraction for me (it was enough hassle writing down the set list with some very brief notes to jog my memory, something which I find I have to do as middle-age progresses); and c) the tickets said that photography was not permitted. That did not, of course, stop the venue looking like an arc-welders' convention for much of the evening, and a search on the net in a few days' time will probably find dozens of pictures from the night. Below are a few mementoes from the occasion.
Footnote (the third): This piece is dedicated with affection and gratitude to my dear friends Tez Burke and Wendy Lacey for giving me the chance to be present at a unique and unrepeatable event; and with respect and admiration to the boys from Klingklang themselves. Liebe Herren, long may you ride!
The front cover of the programme.
The centre-spread photograph from the programme. Even by their standards, this is scary stuff!
Marina Hyde is gaining a reputation as a 'must-read' columnist, and justifiably so on the basis of such pieces as today's kicking of the inept and thuggish Home Office. The whole piece is here, and I urge you to read it. A small taste may entice you further:
"And it is headed up by dear old Jacqui Smith, who took a while to emerge as the Brown government's breakout halfwit, but has been making up for it ever since with a series of blunders so blatant that you could be forgiven for assuming she is in the pay of a far-east betting syndicate."
(Only very light blogging at the moment, 'cos I'm not well and don't have the energy)
Carrie Fisher is one hell of a woman.
When the American Film Institute gave George Lucas a Life Achievement Award, one of the people they invited to speak was old Danish-pastry-head herself.
Classic Track - New Musik - "This World Of Water" (1980)
I'm aware of the fact that this section hasn't seen anything new for nearly a month, so I thought I'd introduce you to one of my all-time favourites.
(Oh, and by the way, in contrast to the last entry, this band really did exist)
I'd been interested in electronic music for quite a few years; Hot Butter's Popcorn and Giorgio Moroder's hits with Chicory Tip had started it off, and then I found Kraftwerk's Autobahn, and Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's I Feel Love came along a little later.
But what came to be known as 'electropop' wasn't hip in the seventies, especially when Punk and New Wave were in full snarl. It copped it from the other side, too. I well remember the MU (Musician's Union, although some have suggested that the letters really stand for "Money Up-front") at the time going so far as to suggest that all synthesisers should be banned because they were taking the bread out of the mouths of poor, struggling, 'real' musicians.
By 1980, however, the objections of the Luddite tendency had been swept aside by disco and by the emergence of such as Gary Numan and Joy Division.
In contrast to these purveyors of dark soundscapes, there were some who promoted a rather more upbeat, poppy style. New Musik were one of the prime suppliers of this sort of material. It's therefore a bit of a mystery why they weren't a lot bigger than they were. A handful of minor hit singles and three albums, and that was it.
I remember enjoying the singles, and bought a second-hand copy of This World Of Water from Cob Records' Wrexham branch not long after it came out (picture sleeve, too!). The other singles apart, I heard nothing more of them until 1985 (some time after they had split) when my University housemate Tim Cappelli played us the whole of their first LP From A To B.
I was impressed, but lack of finances precluded me from adding it to my collection until some years later, when I picked up a slightly tatty second-hand copy in Phase One Records in Wrexham. I loved it immediately all over again, and later got their other two albums Anywhere and Warp, although I didn't think those were as good as the debut set.
From A To B has remained a firm favourite, though, and This World Of Water is, for me, the standout track. The transition from the 'bridge' into the last verse at about 1'33" is a shiver-up-the-spine moment for me even after a hundred hearings.
So click below and enjoy New Musik at their best, with a video which comes from a Spanish TV show (hence the closing credits - I can't find a 'clean' copy of the video on YouTube), and see Tony Mansfield (guitar, vocals - and writer of the song), Tony Hibberd (bass), Phil Towner (drums) and Clive Gates (keyboards and hamming it up like a good 'un) enjoying themselves by the sea.
The Green Room - "Any Other Animal" (Core Audio Records CAR008, 2007)
This, the second album from the Rhode Island-based five-piece The Green Room seeks to build on their 2004 début Not What It Seems, which came close to winning a number of awards. However, whereas that effort seemed to be all sharp edges and attitude, Any Other Animal has a more streamlined feel to it.
That is not to say that it is in any way bland, however: the same off-kilter mashup of styles is to be found in abundance, along with singer/guitarist Benny Carandini's waspish lyrics. So the album begins with KDBR, a sidelong look at a country music radio station out in the wilds of the rockies which manages to include mentions of trucks, trains, farms and prisons alongside Carandini's rather artless attempts at pedal steel guitar.
This is no more than a whimsical prelude, however. The second track, Rock The World is where Any Other Animal really kicks in. On the face of it, this is just another "put your hands together" stadium-type anthem, but a listen to the lyrics quickly dispels such an image, as Benny snarls out his contempt for rock-stars who want to be Messiahs. "How can you change the world", he asks, "When you can't even change your underwear?". Fun is also to be had by spotting the 'quotes' from various rock classics which are slotted in at various points - can you spot references to Wishing Well, Smoke On The Water and (somewhat incongruously) Mull Of Kintyre?
We then have an instrumental interlude (the first of three) in Inactive Volcanoes Of The Philippines, in which Gordon Otak's synths combine with the band's solid rhythm section of John Richard Chamberlain (Bass) and Dave Connolly (Drums) to produce a track which might be termed 'banging ambient', but which becomes dormant at the end under the wafting flutes and oboes of fifth member Blake Reid.
This is followed by a diptych of songs about towns in New York State. Putnam Valley, NY is about a nearly wholly white middle-class town where, despite the veneer of respectability, dark deeds lie awaiting discovery behind the colonial-fronted houses. Carandini's sneer widens further, as one would expect, only for him to become much more exuberant in the second song, Rochester, NY, about a town with a population divided almost equally between black and white. This is obviously more to the singer's liking as his lyrics praise the liveliness and authenticity of the place and its people: "There are no closets here to keep your secrets hid"
After a long silence between tracks (a device perhaps intended to throw the cross-fade between the two preceding songs into sharp relief, as if some true and essential rupture has taken place), High Definition is a song about watching and being watched, where Carandini jabs at those who spend their time watching TV, not realising that - in a very real sense - TV (or rather, the people who run it) is watching them.
There follows the second instrumental, Acadia, in which Reid's woodwinds dominate along with Connolly's ethnic percussion, to form a pleasing break from the dark cynicism of the previous track.
Normality, as far as The Green Room is concerned anyway, is re-established with Right Of Conquest, the band's summing-up of Bush's America, where the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is juxtaposed with a USAF bombing raid on Fallujah. There is nothing glib about the lyrics, however: "Where your Desert made our Storm", emotes Carandini, "Nature's storm has made our desert". Strong stuff.
The penultimate track, The Delta, is another instrumental, but here is where the album loses its way somewhat. The seascape ambience created primarily by Otak and Chamberlain is pleasing enough on the ear, but at eleven minutes plus it never really goes anywhere except up its own waterspout.
The album closes with a song to bookend the opener. WBAZ is a tribute to the contemporary rock station in New York State which was the first to play the band's demos in 2003. For this homage, even Benny's scepticism deserts him, and the whole song - well-played and well-arranged as it is - smacks of an uncharacteristic eagerness to please which doesn't sit well with the rest of the album and provides a disappointing end.
Overall then? A good set, but that old curse of 'the difficult second album' seems to have struck. They need more fire and a bit less water. Nonetheless, I would recommend you go out and buy it...
...except that you can't.
Confession time, folks. You have just wasted five minutes of your life reading (and I have just spent an hour or more of my life writing) a review of an album which doesn't exist, by a band which also has no reality.
This wanton act was sparked off by this piece in The Guardian today. I did something slightly along the same lines here almost exactly a year ago, but the Guardian blog encouraged me to go further. The band name was generated by a random entry in Wikipedia and the album title from the random quotation generatorThe Guardian's piece recommended, then the photograph (selected by going here rather than just to Flickr) came up by sheer wonderful co-incidence (and a proper acknowledgement here to the Flickr user going by the name of Wine me up whose photograph of the cat came up). After that, a bit of work in Paint Shop Pro and I had the cover. The track titles and names of the band members are combinations of various Wikipedia entries as well.
Once I had all that, of course I had to review it, just to add to the air of spurious authenticity.
Perhaps, in some parallel universe (of which there may be an infinite number) this album exists. If so, I hope they leave off the first and last tracks and tighten up The Delta a bit...
Back in the days when Channel 4 was the place where you could find intellectual sustenance, they showed a film presentation of a Russian musical - or perhaps it could just about be called a 'rock opera', although that term had become one of derision by that time.
It was called Juno and Avos', and told the story of the love affair between Nikolai Petrovitch Rezanov, Chamberlain of Tsar Alexandr I of Russia, and Maria de la Concepción Marcela Arguello, daughter of the comandante of the Presidio of San Francisco (then ruled by the Spanish). On his way back to Russia to arrange their wedding in St Petersburg, Rezanov fell ill and died. On hearing this, Concepción took the veil, dying in a Dominican convent some fifty years later. The full story is here.
The musical, whatever, was composed by Alexey Rybnikov from a libretto by Andrey Voznesenskiy, and was first staged in 1981 at Lenkom in Moscow. It became a huge hit and the cast album sold millions.
I only saw the programme once (it was subtitled, which enabled me at least to keep up with the plot), and on the whole I forgot about it. Except for one song. It was the finale, "Alliluiya", and its melody has stayed with me for over twenty-five years.
It occurred to me a couple of hours ago to go looking for it, and I found it on YouTube. Here it is, in what I think is the original production. I haven't been able to find a coherent translation, except that I know that the repeated line, "Alliluiya lyubvi!" means "Hallelujah for love!".
Sentimental old Hector that I am, I'm sure you can guess my emotional state after watching this. Because I don't think you have to understand the lyrics to be affected by it.
Update (15/05/09): The clip I originally linked to has since been removed by YouTube for "terms of use violation". Luckily, I found another version.
Yes, I know: if I were any more obsessed with Steve Tilston, I'd be a stalker. But you can't deny quality when you hear it.
I admit that I've been a bit slow off the mark with this, Steve's twelfth solo album (not counting live, collaborative and compilation releases), and his first collection of new original songs since 2003's Such And Such (reviewed here). I can only plead temporary senility followed by interminable wrestling with Firefox's security settings to enable me to buy the disc online.
Now it's here, and now that I've listened to it a couple of times, what then?
I'll save you waiting until the end by saying it now: this is a magnificent album. Things had gone quiet (apart from the Reaching Back box set a couple of years ago - reviewed here), and it seems that Our Hero was suffering from a case of writer's block. Then, one day, a song came unbidden to his mind and another stream of creativity was released from its reservoir. That song, Madame Muse, appears here.
To start off, however, we have the inevitable reaching back which occurs once you get to a certain time in your life. The Road When I Was Young incorporates a lot of things, but mostly about how Steve started out as a songwriter and performer (I also bought the CD reissue of his first LP An Acoustic Confusion (1971), and listening to them back to back was interesting in that it showed both the contrasts and the common threads through his output).
We then turn to a couple of songs which link the past and the present. A Pretty Penny is a scathing ode to the parasitic money men of our time, complete with the line,
"They push too far, we bail them out."
And this was written before the 'Credit Crunch'. But then he, like many of us, could see where it was all heading.
This meshes in with another song which I feel sure will join that list of Tilston's songs which will be mistaken for a traditional one by and by. King Of The Coiners is about 'King' David Hartley and his gang who operated in West Yorkshire in the late 18th century. English coinage was so unstandardised that the edges of the coins could be clipped off and melted down for new coinage which, although illicit, would nevertheless pass muster.
We now pass to an actual traditional song, and the point where it gets personal for me. I first came across The Rambling Comber in one of Cecil Sharp's collections a few years ago, and sang it to varying degrees of success in the days when I used to do Singers' Nights at Wrexham. I'm delighted that I can now claim some common ground of repertoire with Steve Tilston, even if my version completely lacked the exuberant playing of his take.
Speaking In Tongues tells of the writer's love of England, but of a particular kind of England; the England of people such as Tom Paine, the Levellers and the Lollards, upsetters of the applecarts of conformity and power who - as a direct result - have been all but airbrushed from the official histories. Tilston's attachment to this idea of progressive Englishness frees him from the confines of the hackneyed Empire and all that flag-waving guff, and enables him to embrace the wider Europe and the wider world.
After Summer Rain is a pastoral interlude which is as bright and clear as the scene which it describes.
In-between Years tells of the reflections of Steve's father upon his youth on Merseyside, as he passed on his family anecdotes during his final illness.
This is followed up by another overtly political song. The Spoils Of War is a contemporary driving blues about Iraq, the arrogance and stupidity of those who ordered the war upon it, and the damage it has done not just to those fighting, but to the monuments, history and culture which have been (and are still being) damaged and destroyed by it. Heard alongside, say, Richard Thompson's 'Dad's Gonna Kill Me, nothing much more need be said.
Madame Muse, which I've already mentioned, is the song which broke up the log-jam which had stopped Tilston from writing new material for about two years. The song is in turn resigned and defiant, especially in its final verse, which begins:
"One day I will turn my back On Madame Muse and send her packing on her way."
There follow two shorter songs, the first (Fairweather Love about the tentative nature of new love) features some very fine slide guitar playing which lends it a 'Deep South' feel, and the second (Jacaranda) is an exuberant evocation of the blue blossoms which filled the view when Steve visited Australia some three or four years ago.
The Devil May Care is a song about someone who had once been a friend of his, but with whom he has long since lost touch, and it asks the question whether their paths would ever cross again. I'm sticking my neck out here, but I can't help wondering if the unnamed person is the recently-deceased John Martyn. I say that because of the last verse, which begins:
"I heard that you've been under the knife. An overdose of far too much life. One foot in the grave..."
(John Martyn's life was one troubled by booze and drug use, and he had to have a leg amputated after a serious infection. Oh well, I'm only guessing...)
The album is rounded off by further evidence of Steve Tilston's talent as an interpreter of the tradition with his rendition of The Fisher Lad Of Whitby, and by the captivating Archipelago (which first featured on the box set), a song for his wife set to a melody taken from a Chopin prelude.
Taken all in all, this is a collection of fine songs sung and played with conviction and verve, and backed, arranged and produced to show them all off to their best advantage. If Such And Such showed that Steve Tilston had reached the peak of his powers, Ziggurat amply demonstrates that he is still at that peak and is likely to remain there.
Ŕ propos of nothing in particular, a clip from my favourite television programme QI.
Here Stephen Fry talks about horror film actors - some of whom he had worked with. Contributions from Alan Davies and - magnificently - Dara Ó Briain, as Phill Jupitus and Bill Bailey just listen and enjoy one of the funniest couple of minutes I've ever seen:
Indeed, the dialogue from this clip was made into a cover version of the song Alan Davies was talking about:
And while we're at it, here's a video featuring the original version by The Jellybottys:
I'm afraid that since John Peel died, I've not kept up with new music very much. I think middle age has finally come to claim me, and I now tend far more to seek out material which I remember from the dim and distant or stuff which passed me by at the time.
I seem to have a particular 'thing' about the late 1960s. I have the slight advantage of having been around at the time, but not being of an age to appreciate what was going on. I think, however, it was the most exciting and open period in the whole history of popular music. Rock'n'roll had come in a few years before and really flung the doors wide. R'n'b (and I mean real r'n'b, not the over-produced posing bollocks they try desperately to dignify with that title today) followed, along with fusions of rock with folk, rock with orchestral music, rock with just about anything, in fact. The cross-fertilisation of styles and genres was rampant. I find this very attractive.
Oh, and before someone goes, "What about punk? What about dance? What about...?", etc., well those phenomena I insist either merely reassembled existing parts in different combinations or went 'back to basics' to what was a modification of the origins of the whole. The period between 1965 and 1969 - which I bookend chronologically if not stylistically by The Mothers Of Invention's Freak Out! at one end and Led Zeppelin II at the other - was the origin, was where the parts originally came together. So, yah boo to you!
As a result of this pseudery, I've spent a fair bit of time and money down the years collecting the classic albums of that period. Freak Out! I've already mentioned (and what a shock that must have been to a still-conservative America in '65!), but we also have The Beatles' Revolver (which was where the big change in their music happened, not Sgt. Pepper) and The Doors' first LP to name but a few.
These are merely the best known, however. There were others at least as worthy of appreciation which went largely or wholly unregarded at the time which have now taken on the aura of lost treasure. Love's Forever Changes, for example, with its hinting at the darker, more cynical side of the California of its time, combined with an (at the time) unacknowledged Herb Alpert influence; The Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow, which was really the first 'rock opera' and would have long been seen as such but for the stupefying idiocy of EMI in delaying its release (especially in the US, where they eventually released it two years late and on Tamla Motown!); even the first Genesis LP has its place, as the songs show considerable maturity for a bunch of teenagers and would have been better served without Jonathan King's grandstanding over-production.
Today, brothers and sisters in the Mysteries, I wish to bring to your attention another album which I feel to be worthy of consideration:
Ark 2 by Flaming Youth appeared in 1969, at the tail end of the period I've been talking about. It's a curious album: the packaging was quite extravagant for a début LP by an act which had acquired what support it had by heavy gigging (a gatefold sleeve with a front cover illustration which used cellophane to create a 'stained-glass window' effect); there were no songwriting credits featured; the whole album was developed around the concept of Man leaving an Earth on the verge of being destroyed in order to find a new home (this was The Space Age, y'know!); and the album's premiére was held at London Planetarium.
There was a sound reason why the songwriters chose to remain anonymous. They were none other than Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who already had a long track record of writing hits for the likes of The Honeycombs, The Herd and - most notably - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Despite the fact that those hits were well-crafted and adventurous in both style and substance - three-minute epics, many of them - they felt that they didn't want their latest concept to be burdened with preconceived notions on the part of reviewers and listeners.
If you know your Sixties music, however, you could guess who was behind Ark 2. The musical styles are suitably various, the lyrics are in turns heartfelt, witty or delightfully bonkers, and the production and orchestrations are lavish without being destructive of the overall desired effect.
So, what about the music, then? Well, the opening tracks, Guide Me, Orion and Earthglow tell of the departure from Earth and the sadness it invokes. A brief instrumental interlude (Weightless) leads us to the Ark's passage through the Solar System, accompanied by a suite of short pieces which takes the concept - though not the music - of Holst's The Planets and gives it a series of contemporary twists in which, for example, Venus is represented by sexual libertinage, Jupiter by a drug-fuelled party, Saturn by the story of a man who is a hundred and thiry four years old as a result of transplants and prosthetics but who has lost his mind, and Neptune by a list of fads and cults.
Side Two begins with Changes, a track whose jaunty 6/4 time signature means that you can't get it out of your head. This is followed by the driving power of Pulsar, which is where you might really twig who wrote the album, and the balancing tender and gentle hope of Spacechild, which reminds me a great deal of that first Genesis album. The infectious In The Light Of Love is a joyous romp with what would now be called 'World Music' connotations, and leads us into the finale From Now On (Immortal Invisible), in which the old hymn is counterposed and descanted upon with a new philosophy: "Praying as we used to pray won't be enough from now on:/
Faith that guided us before won't be enough from now on./
Find another way, find another way, from within, and not without./
In the loneliness of space gather strength from yourselves."
OK, those are the songs; what about the performances? Well, they are on the whole very strong; all four band members were not only capable musicians by this time, but they were also all able vocalists with the scope to provide the variety of styles required by the material. The arrangements are sensitively handled (unlike the Genesis LP referred to above, the orchestra never drowns out the band) and enhance the experience rather than get in the way of it.
The album is not without its flaws, and it would be unreasonable to expect perfection in connection with something which was very much out on a limb. Some of the vocals are a bit weak, and the humour in The Planets is somewhat hit-and-miss, although much of that track also provides us with some sharp observation on the 'swinging scene' of its time.Taken all in all, though, these are minor faults for what should be seen as a major achievement.
Should your appetite have been whetted by all this, I'm glad to say that there is website dedicated to the album. Click on the picture of the sleeve and you'll be taken there. You can even listen to the album there and judge for yourself!
Sadly, although the album garnered many favourable reviews, it found little room on the airwaves in a period when the BBC was the near-monopoly provider of pop radio in the UK. Ark 2 didn't sell (copies of the original vinyl go for upward of Ł40 a throw, and it's had only one CD release to my knowledge, so it's hard to come by in any form now) and the band split up not long afterwards, when its drummer went off and joined another struggling proto-prog outfit which has already been name-checked at least three times in this piece.
Take a look at that picture again. See the luscious, pouting, long-haired boy in the bottom photograph? Well, he hasn't got much hair at all nowadays. He has got a lot of money though, and a CV in music and cinema which is as long as your arm. Yes, Ark 2 marked the recording début of one Philip David Charles Collins LVO. Listen to the album and you can hear the drumming and vocal style even back then, long before they became sufficiently ubiquitous as to become annoying.
This is a great album, and a critical re-appraisal of it is long overdue.
(Dedicated to William, aka eBay trader rnrguy251, who sold me the CD last week.)
I've remarked before (and confidently expect to remark in future) about the Régime's obsession with MBA-Bollocks-Speak, spin and cheap gimmicks. The latest is the lamentable idea (if one may lower that noble word to describe something so footling) exuded by Health Minister Ben Bradshaw that a government website should be set up to enable 'customers' to rate their doctors. This would no doubt cost a lot of money - most of which would go to yet another bunch of crooked outsourcers - and would serve no purpose other than to allow people to think that they actually have some real power; which, of course, they haven't.
Raves Archive 2009
