Big furry head

Sorry - that is NOT a meaningful climate change deal!
Thom Yorke's take here

The Clash - White Riot Tour: Harlesden Colosseum, London (Nick Kent, NME, 19 March 1977)

NICK KENT comes out of hiding to offer himself as a

'punk' sacrifice to the ritualistic 'beat' of THE CLASH,
THE BUZZCOCKS, THE SUBWAY SECT and THE SLITS...and hangs around to join in the ceremony himself. Well, sort of...

London this week has been witnessing dramatic new developments in the so-called 'punk' youth movement currently sweeping the country. From his secret headquarters, last thought to be a cupboard situated somewhere in the Clapham South area, Chairman Mal "The Mug" McContent wrought mighty changes in the system when, in a message to his party, he informed all concerned that from now on the 'punk' ethos could only be attained not, as previously was the law, by 'gobbing' on pedestrians anywhere within the Kings Road district, but by beating rock critics over the head with rusty bicycle chains and running away.

In a detailed manifesto, "The Mug" drew up the exacting rules by which all interested parties could achieve the ends of this "offensive". First he claimed 'punk' predators needed to search out these "scumbag jewboy hypocrites" (as the rock critic element was to be referred to thenceforth) in places like the Roxy, the Marquee and the Nashville.

They should then "irritate" their victims by means of quick kicks in the shin, "accidentally" pouring beer over them while passing by, etc, .and, eventually, when the victim is aggravated enough to retaliate, they should bring in a mate who will "pacify" the critic by brandishing a large knife approximately two inches from the latter's face, and start swinging the chain directly against the cranium of one's victim until stitches are thought to be necessary. The predator should simply "run away".

The manifesto adds that, as a bonus, anyone causing "the critic" to "get what he deserved" could expect to join members Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious in a reconstructed Sex Pistols. The first direct consequence of this latest dramatic occurrance, after a surprisingly lethargic immediate response to the call-to-arms, has been the counter-ploy  announcement from one Nick "Judas" Kent (considered by Mal McContent's collective to be one of the most desirable craniums amongst the 'rock' critic' crowd to shatter) that he was willing to be the first official sacrifice to this 'new order'. "Well, it's cheaper than a lobotomy, innit?" quipped the ageing 'hack' from his bomb shelter/bachelor pad below a massage parlour in Kilburn. "No, but really...you've gotta dig it," he continued. "These kids are where it's at, you know. Heavy duty destruction, the breaking down of the old way. I mean, Johnny, Sid, those guys...they're so soulful, so honest.

"I'm truly touched they even mention my name at their press conferences these days. 'The biggest hypocrite walking the face of the earth' – that's pretty heavy, right – and I'm flattered, 'cos, dig, I'm hip to the trip. It's like the same as when me and Iggy Pop used to..."

KENT WAS later seen down at the Colosseum in Harlesden, a Pakistani cinema that has suddenly allowed the New Wave to 'do their thing' at the premises on a trial basis. Friday night saw The Slits, Subway Sect, Buzzcocks and The Clash performing to a 50/50 crowd of fanatics and mongoloid impersonators whose usual habitat is the Roxy Club. Kent had arrived early to check out the basic geography of the place and see where the best spot would be to have his 'lobotomy' executed. Despairing somewhat at the timid lack of 'activity', he'd disappeared to the pub, thus missing all-girl 'punk' band The Slits, who had been performing their sound check when he left.

Mildly fortified, Kent returned just in time to witness

The Subway Sect. Ah, this is more like it, he thought, looking down at the bunch directly in front of the stage. There was this one guy, see, who looked, exquisitely like a vole sniffing glue, squirting globules of the stuff into the hair of his 'mates' when not falling around or pushing people over, or else getting his four or five cohorts to chant something along the line of "Boring old farts – sitting down" to all those comparatively disinterested souls behind them.

Monsieur Vole, Kent was duly informed, actually ran a New Wave fanzine. Heavy, he thought – and how suitable! He was quite ready to descend from the circle to let the ritual commence...until he noticed a disturbing lack of weaponry being openly brandished. What, no chains, no knives, no...steel combs, even!

His heart sank.

And the band would have been just right, too. They were absolutely godawful. Drawing together what shards of logic and perception he hadn't discarded specially for the occasion, Kent realised that unless one had a hernia or something equally debilitating, it would be quite impossible to dance to The Subway Sect's music. Such planned obsolescence, so resolute a 'blankness' of attitude...such crappy instruments...and such a determined inability to finger even the most mundane chord shapes imaginable...

And then there were The Buzzcocks, who certain factions of the crowd knew beforehand, because they were shouting "Breakdown! Breakdown!" – which turned out to be the title of this band's only record so far. This duly was churned out as their first song and, sounding exactly like a cheap, sloppy Ramones workout, set the precedent for every other 'toon' to come. Trouble was, though, this lot come from "up t'North, lahk", and t'singer looks and sounds unerringly like some punk Wee Georgie Wood who's just swapped his old ukelele for an electric guitar. Also, excepting the singer's puckish frame all swathed in black; the other bully boys in the group all chose to wear these quite grotesque pop-art shirts which even The Who wouldn't have worn for publicity shots circa 'Anyway Anyhow Anywhere'. They looked and sounded dreadful, anyway, and Kent quite firmly had decided that their presence onstage to coincide with his 'scalp graft' was so simply not on. He laid low in the 'gods', waiting for The Clash to providejust the right moment.

THE CLASH eventually came on, to be faced with immediate equipment problems: "And it's all new stuff," moaned the guitar player aggressively, in his special bright red outfit resembling 'pop star' army fatigues. He and the other two frontmen had obviously already seen a bit of 'geldt' from their reputed six-figure deal with CBS. The old paint-flecked jumble sale duds, for example, once so defiantly modelled so that the 'kids' could easily copy the band's style and attitude, had been dumped for custom made threads: extravagant space cadet uniforms – or at least that's what they most resembled – with big lapels and all manner of seamstress embellishment. They looked like pop stars (albeit rather subversive ones), glamorous enough to be comfortably slotted into some suitably futuristic scaffolding on the Supersonic set. It made Kent remember the previous afternoon, when he'd heard 'White Riot', The Clash's single, at the NME office – and at first had been disappointed at its patent lack of 'menace' until he realised that the chorus had been made insidiously catchy enough to become a sort of football chant. That it was commercial enough, in other words, to be truly subversive. Anyway, sod the new clothes and new quipment! They looked and sounded good, and were probably eating regularly. Starvation, after all, doesn't always enhance commitment; it more often than not brings malnutrition and makes one listless and low-energy irritable. When the band kicked into 'London's Burning', Kent also recalled the first (and only previous) time he'd seen The Clash – when they were battling hard against shoddy equipment, with out-of-tune guitars constantly threatening to destroy the intense energy level but never quite succeeding. There was a tension to their sound then which set them apart from all the other bands simply because it was really was tainted with all the desperate industrial rhythms of their native environment. Nothing, mercifully, had been lost.

'London's Burning', as performed in Harlesden, stiff smouldered with equal quotients of rage and the sheer exhilarating rush of speeding down the Westway. Kent settled back to watch this band. He suddenly felt involved in this music. Of course, the kids in the front were going apeshit now. Pushing each other over, tossing beer every-whichway... living on zombie-time, as ever. Suddenly Joe Strummer stopped between numbers, "Stop throwing beer at me! I don't like it," he stated in a decisively no-bullshit way. Kent dug that. After all, even Iggy hadn't told the arse-wipes at Aylesbury, involved in said activity, to "quit it". A cool guy. this Strummer.

The three-pronged Clash visual was great too. Guitarist Mick Jones pushing himself physically to the limits, bassist Paul Simenon like something straight out of Muscle Beach Party, succeeding on bass exactly like the Richard Hell of Television days when Patti Smith wrote of the latter, "his bass playing is total trash but he has this way of approaching the instrument that is so physical it comes off sounding real sexy."

And Strummer dead centre, very, very authoritative.

Strummer's stance sums up this band at its best, really: it's all to do with real 'punk' credentials – a Billy The Kid sense of tough tempered with an innate sense of humanity which involves possessing a sense of morality totally absent in the childish nihilism flaunted by Johnny Rotten and clownish co-conspirators.

That is what Eddie Cochran had, what Townshend had...not some half-baked feelings about anarchy or any of that other jive.

"To be outside the law you must be honest" isn't just some hip piece of rhetoric: it adds up perfectly and always will just as long as human beings need to take up a rebel stance.

The Clash's music is taking on other dimensions as the band moves on, too. It's no longer just a Ramones-ish adrenalin spitfire rush, there's a rock steady readjustment here and, like I said about the single, a sharp commercial bite to the numbers that, combined with the best new wave lyrics/sentiments currently in town courtesy of songs like 'Janie Jones', '1977', 'Protex Blue', 'I'm So Bored With The USA' (the only recent I'mso-bored rock declaration Kent could even halfway stomach), and the new 'Garage Land', that makes for truly subversive rock.

As they left the stage, Kent thought The Clash took up exactly where Ian Hunter's Mott The Hoople left off, anyway – a perfect rock critic analysis, that.

He was just leaving the cinema, thoughts of selfsacrifice conspicuous by their absence, when he noticed some yob approaching. "I'm Bruce Lee's son – what are you going to do about it?" he muttered.

Nothing happened, of course. It took him at least a minute to remember he'd heard the line coming from Joe Strummer's lips only half an hour earlier.
I caught this tour in Edinburgh (as it was banned in Glasgow by the council) with the added bonus (?) of The Jam all for one pound fifty pee! 
Followed by a long sleepless night at Waverley Station in the company of Tony D & Skid Kid from 'Ripped & Torn'. 
One of the best night's of my life. 

Bonus Audio:

The Clash 
Live Edinburgh Playhouse 
7th May 1977

NQ - Like Styrofoam Bleeding (mp3/FLAC)

As Autumn creeps in, we have a stunning album for you from Cologne, Germany based artist Nils Quak. This album is a lovingly crafted blend of pulsating drones, distant field recordings and repetitious minimalism. Nils has also chosen to include with this album, his own custom made Max/Msp application. The app is included in the zip files, in both standalone Windows and Mac versions.

1. Leaving Town
2. Dalmond
3. Drip
4. Grin
5. Farewell To A Ghost
6. You Will Never Be Home Again
7. Highwires And Stardust Memories
8. If It Would Be Different At All
9. Trainyards
10. Pachinko Depression
11. Autobahnkreuz München Nord
12. Wet Sunshine And Moving Cars
13. Like Styrofoam, Bleeding 
    

Written and recorded in 2009 by Nils Quak at The Space Without A Name.

HERE

MLZ Mix 1 by modernlove

   

New MashUptheTown podcast

Podcast 36 - Dreadlocks Returns to the 36th Echo Chamber

This podcast contains:
Artist; Song; Album

1. King Tubby: The Roots Prophet; Balmagie Jam Rock
2. Niney featuring the Soul Syndicate; Smile Dub; Present Dub
3. Solomon Jabby; Rootsman Dub; Revolutionary Dub Vibrations Chapter 1
4. Lennox Miller/Jah Coller; Better Must Come/Speaks His Mind; Jack Ruby Hi-Fi
5. Dennis Alcopone; Segregation Is Wrong; The Good Old Days of the 70's
6. Dubmatix; Dub in Me Hand, Rengade Rocker
7. Oneshot; Rotten Town; 1st Shot
8. Dub Killer Combo; Balistica; Root Boy
9. Big Joe, Natty All in a Row; Keep Rocking and Swinging
10. Jama Sound; Rapido Sol; Superpanorama
11. Ring Craft Posse; Waterford; St. Catherine in Dub
12. Crystalites; Undertaker's Burial; Blow Mr. Hornsman: Instrumental Reggae 1968-1975
13. King Tubby and Soul Syndicate; Great Stone; Freedom Sounds in Dub
14. Herman's All Stars; Nightmare; Blow Mr. Hornsman: Instrumental Reggae 1968-1975
15. Midnite; Frequency; Infinite Dub
16. Charlie Chaplin; Chaplin Chant; Bushyard Telegraph
17. Phil Pratt; Danger Ubx; Dial M for Murder in Dub Style
18. Brad Osbourne; King Zion; King of Dub

This podcast was initially just about the reggae, and that it is a global phenomenon now, much to the pioneering efforts of the late Bob Marley, but it is also about the continued musical explorations and initatives of many other musicians, initially in Jamaica, and now the world. It is also about the message, that the world needs to be shared, that the colonial mentality of the past should be a thing of the past, and not something daily rekindled by corporations and armies.
I reference in particular here the plight of the people of West Papua, and their ongoing struggle against the oppression of the Indonesian military, who pay their soldiers in seized properties, and the neglect of governments' around the world on the West Papuan's struggle for their own independence. The large corporations intent on stealing, with assistance of corrupt officials, is the modern colonialist plague that was meant to be left for the scrapheap and the history books, instead it is OUR modern history of the world.
Reggae has always been about the struggle against oppression, and one hopes that the New Year will bring the changes the world needs, that people's lives and lands will be respected before and after any contact with government and corporation, there are too many living daily lives of destruction, violence and horror solely to feed the greedy pockets of a few, the struggle continues, hope you like the mix...

 @'Pod-O-Matic'

Once again my friend Paul has surpassed himself (!)

Do also check out his previous podcasts, some of the best compilations currently doing the rounds of the interwebbythingy
PS: Was indeed a drag that we didn't catch up last week, have a good hexmass and we have to catch up soon
Regards/

Guerrilla Handbell Strikeforce

Monsieur et Madam Kent (and a hanger-on)

Laurence R

"That drives a lot of The Dark Stuff. Another thing that drives it is the thing that we were talking about: the big hard man, the tough man. Keith Richards, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iggy Pop: big tough men. Let’s see how tough they really are. What is a real tough man: is it someone who goes out and can drink and drug more than anyone else, but who doesn’t really look after their own children?

Or is it someone like Neil Young, who has two children — one in particular — who suffers chronically from cerebral palsy. And he has devoted his life to making his son the centre of his life; to making him as loved and as wanted as possible. He’s tried to create things to help his son communicate with other children. There’s a big difference. That’s what a man is, to me; that’s what a fucking man is.

And Neil Young also goes out and he does the stuff. Every show he plays. He’s not going to turn up and be too drugged out to perform. Now that’s what a man is; it ain’t this guy that goes out and is completely in the bag all the time. And whoopee, man: wow, you can drink more than everyone else, you can take drugs more than anyone else. But, look at his family life: that’s where it counts for me."

(Nick Kent on 'manliness')

"For me, the bane of the seventies was white guys trying to play funk music — and that includes the Rolling Stones — and white guys playing reggae music (and that also includes the Rolling Stones)."

(Nick Kent on the seventies)

Robert Kirby RIP

Heard about Robert Kirby's sad passing  a month ago & completely forgot to post anything...

Born in 1948, Kirby met Drake at Cambridge University in early 1968 and put together a string section to accompany the singer-songwriter at live appearances.

When Drake recorded his debut album, ‘Five Leaves Left’, in the summer of 1968, producer Joe Boyd had already lined-up another string arranger – but the singer rejected his arrangements and insisted Kirby was brought in.

He then returned to arrange the strings on 1970’s ‘Bryter Layter’ and during the following decade he arranged the strings on more than 40 albums. Many of them were by folk artists such as Ralph McTell, Al Stewart and Vashti Bunyan, but he also worked on Elton John’s ‘Madman Across The Water’, David Ackles‘ ‘American Gothic’ and John Cale’s ‘Helen Of Troy’.

Kirby also spent three years playing keyboards in The Strawbs in the mid-1970s, but at the end of the decade opted for a career in marketing.

He made only occasional returns to the studio in the 1980s, most notably on Elvis Costello’s ‘Almost Blue’. However, as Drake’s cult status grew in the 1990s, he returned to the limelight.

Paul Weller invited him to arrange the strings on several tracks on his 2000 album ‘Heliocentric’. Further invitations followed to work on albums by The Magic Numbers, Linda Thompson and on Vashti Bunyan’s comeback, more than 35 years after their previous collaboration.

Kirby also added new string arrangements to several tracks on ‘Made To Love Magic’, the compilation album of Drake out-takes and remixed tracks, released in 2004.

Here from the 1969 debut album “Five Leaves Left” is a prime example of both their work.

“River Man” – Nick Drake

Betty came by on her way
Said she had a word to say
About things today
And fallen leaves.

Said she hadn’t heard the news
Hadn’t had the time to choose
A way to lose
But she believes.

Gonna see the river man
Gonna tell him all I can
About the plan
For lilac time.

If he tells me all he knows
’bout the way his river flows
And all night shows
In summertime.

Betty said she prayed today
For the sky to blow away
Or maybe stay
She wasn’t sure.

For when she thought of summer rain
Calling for her mind again
She lost the pain
And stayed for more.

Gonna see the river man
Gonna tell him all I can
’bout the ban
On feeling free.

If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows
I don’t suppose
It’s meant for me.

Oh, how they come and go
Oh, how they come and go

Much, much more

@'The Helpless Dancer'

Robert Kirby 

(16 April 1948 - 3 October 2009) 

I have always loved Nick Drake's work since discovering him on an Island Record compilation: have it in my head that it was 'Time Has Told Me' on 'Bumpers' but...

This would have been about 1974 or so and obviously I never saw Nick Drake perform but I do remember an Elvis Costello gig at 'Festival Hall' in London in the early 80's where a lot of his work had been orchestrated by Robert Kirby and it was sublime...

...& now

British rock journalist Nick Kent being interviewed at the Crossing Border Festival 2009 in The Hague.

@'Flickr' 

Syd Barrett obituary by Nick Kent

Crazy diamond ... Syd Barrett

Syd Barrett's musical career lasted barely seven years - from 1965 to early '72 - and the past 32 years saw him resolutely refusing to record new music or venture near a concert stage. But Barrett, who died of cancer last Friday at the age of 60, will go down in history as one of the most uniquely inspired creative talents to have sprung up from the pop revolution that gripped Britain in the late 20th century. More specifically, he was the golden boy of the mind-melting late-60s psychedelic era, its brightest star and ultimately its most tragic victim.

Like many other questing spirits who came to age in the mid-60s, he was inspired by taking LSD to create truly daring, other-wordly music - first for the original incarnation of Pink Floyd, then as a solo singer/songwriter - but the drug ended up fatally fracturing his psyche and turning him into a solitary recluse unable to function within the music industry and society in general. The story of his personal meltdown has been told and retold as a cautionary tale for indiscriminate druggies to the point where Barrett's status as rock's most illustrious casualty often threatens to outweigh his actual creative contributions to the form. This is not as it should be.

Barrett started making music in his early teens, not long after the death of his father, an esteemed doctor. He became a regular fixture at Cambridge folk clubs but was generally more attracted by music involving electric instruments. He played in several amateurish blues bands around Cambridge until he won a scholarship to a prestigious London art school in 1964. The following year Barrett started playing with a former Cambridge schoolfriend, Roger Waters, who was studying architecture at London's Regent Street polytechnic, and two of Waters' fellow students, Richard Wright and Nick Mason. Although he was the youngest member of the group, Barrett quickly became its leader and key driving force. He wrote the songs. He sang them, too - as well as playing guitar. He even came up with the name: Pink Floyd, taken from a blues album he owned involving two obscure musicians known as Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Live, Barrett's Floyd quickly earned a reputation as London's most radical musical experience. The four-piece invented a new way for a rock band to express themselves, with eccentric pop songs suddenly melting into long, spaced-out improvisations that would directly open the door first to the UK psychedelia movement and later to the oft-derided form we now call prog-rock. Barrett's guitar-playing was singular enough, always opting for spine-tingling "eerie noise" over virtuoso string-bending, but he was most gifted as a songwriter.

This became abundantly clear when the group released their first single at the outset of 1967. Arnold Layne was a Barrett composition that was both light-heartedly mischievous and creepingly sinister, evoking a figure from his Cambridge past, a disturbed individual who often stole women's underclothing from local washing lines. David Bowie - then a struggling singer/songwriter - was just one among many who found Barrett's groundbreaking blending of "light" and "dark" subject matter in popular song lyrics deeply liberating for his own personal muse. Last May, Bowie took the stage with David Gilmour, Barrett's Floyd replacement, to perform Arnold Layne as a homage to Syd -and also a personal thank-you for the considerable influence Barrett's music has had on him.

Barrett continued his masterful marriage of light and dark emotions on the group's next single, See Emily Play, and also alchemised the whimsical new bohemian spirit of the summer of love into an entire album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But the dark aspects of his art soon eclipsed the light and euphoric side of his vision. In the late summer of '67 he wrote several disturbing new songs, one of which, Jugband Blues, appeared to be a stark autobiographical cry for help from a man desperately struggling with schizophrenia. The rest of the Floyd refused to release the other compositions and stood on horrified as they watched their guiding light turn int a catatonic human train-wreck. In early 1968, they booted him out of his own group.

This should have been a wake-up call for Barrett, but instead he sank even further into a world of drug-induced dislocation. Yet he continued to write songs that more and more sounded like open psychic sores, as this illuminated but desperately isolated soul struggled to make sense of his condition. He made two albums from this material - The Madcap Laughs (1970) and Barrett (1971) - with considerable assistance in the studio from his ex-Floyd cohorts Waters, Wright and Gilmour. But neither record sold many copies when released and Barrett returned to his mother's house in Cambridge to live like a hermit. He briefly played concerts with a local band called Stars in early 1972 but a negative review of one show caused him to jettison any further musical ambitions and become a full-time social recluse.

Yet his ghost has continued to exert an ever-more potent fascination over rock musicians of all generations. That Pink Floyd themselves were haunted by the tortured spectre is confirmed by Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, their three most momentous post-Syd recordings. David Bowie re-channelled Barrett's dislocated, quintessential English style of vocal projection into songs such as The Bewlay Brothers. In early 1976, just before John Lydon joined the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren tried (unsuccessfully) to convince the band to perform a couple of Syd's songs in their repertoire. The Damned, meanwhile, attempted - in vain - to get Barrett to produce their second album. Then came the new-wave bands such as the Soft Boys who feverishly appropriated the Madcap's surreal take on the modern pop-song aesthetic. He became a spiritual pied piper of 80s indie rock and by the 90s his madly spellbinding music was being referenced by everyone from Blur to the Brian Jonestown Massacre. In the new millennium, one needs to look no further than the recorded works of the Libertines and Babyshambles to hear that Syd's crazy diamond music is still bewitching and informing the creative choices of rock's latest generation of bohemian spirits.

A private funeral is apparently being planned that will pointedly exclude all Barrett's past musical compadres. No matter. All of us who were ever deeply touched by his unique gifts and his tragic life story should bow our heads and offer up a minute's silence to this remarkable individual for the way he enriched our lives. And pray that he is finally fully at peace.

@'The Guardian'

For those of you unlucky enough to not have been readers of the music press back in the late 1960's or early 1970's  there were some astonishing pieces by people like Lester Bangs and Nick Kent and it was a time when you could 'dance about architecture'.
(My tuppence worth: It was actually Eno in the seventies who said it first.)

I would suggest that 'The Dark Stuff' would make a wonderful present to yourself. 
His original article in the NME on Syd written at the time of his death is one of his best pieces.

Nick Kent interview regarding the reissue of 'The Dark Stuff'
'Diluting the Essence'
@'3A.M.'

Icon

Hermine Demoriane

 'Veiled Women' / 'Dub'
Written with Nick Kent. The Subterraneans version
HERE