Saturday, 3 January 2015

John Lydon: 'You find the truth by ridiculing yourself'

12 lessons from Colorado’s first year of legal pot

The Clash - London Calling/Train In Vain/Guns of Brixton/Clampdown (Live on Fridays 1980)

Thirty days, 30 albums: how I fell in love with the Fall

PJ Harvey Recording in Progress from 16 January at Somerset House London

Recording in Progress is a project conceived by PJ Harvey, in collaboration with Artangel and Somerset House, for the Inland Revenue’s former staff gymnasium and rifle range in the recently opened New Wing at Somerset House.
Harvey has chosen to record her ninth album inside an architectural installation designed by Somerset House-based Something & Son. The structure, a recording studio in the form of an enclosed box, has one-way glazing, displaying PJ Harvey, her band, producers and engineers as a mutating, multi-dimensional sound sculpture.
Visitors experience exactly what is happening at a particular moment in the studio, as Harvey and musicians, together with her longstanding producers Flood and John Parish, go through the creative process of recording an album of songs
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PJ Harvey’s glass studio will put ‘energy of the recording process’ on view

Alan Suicide/Vega: Art-Rite Special #13 (1977)

"We dedicate this issue to the average American searching for exitement. The images, punked out from the ambient culture, are the touchstones of a new sensibilitity, icons of the dissipations and strenghts of the modern spirit. Let the way of life idealized in these pages bring into your home the romance of the underculture - horse racing, white-trash smut, geasy rock'n'roll, muscles, motorcycles and the end of civilization." - the editors

Iggy Pop

Ghost Rider

Willy & Toots DeVille

Edit deAk and Mike (now Walter) Robinson were the co-founders of Art-Rite magazine, a cheaply produced newsprint periodical, that covered the newest directions in art. Issue #13 was a collaboration with Alan Suicide who selected an assortment of images reflective of his view of the modern spirit. Edit and Mike along with video artist Paul Dougherty also created a film to accompany "Frankie Teardrop," an 11-minute song by Suicide. Done before the advent of the cable television program MTV, the film is an early example of the music video genre. Both Mike and Edit became influential art writers: Edit atArtforum; Walter at Art in America and Artnet.

The film is death oriented. The Thanatos instinct instead of the life instinct. Instead of being overt there is the use of end-of-civilization symbols like the corpse and sunsets.
- Mike Robinson
Frankie Teardrop" is a homicidal Punk epic. It's a working-class ballad about Frankie who's working from nine to five and can't survive. His solution is to kill off his family and then himself. But it's not done in an angry way. It's done in a frustrated way so the film implies this frustration.
- Edit deAk
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The Clash - New Year's Day '77

Built around the earliest, until now unseen, footage of the Clash in concert, filmed by Julien Temple as they opened the infamous Roxy club in a dilapidated Covent Garden on January 1st 1977, this show takes us on a time-travelling trip back to that strange planet that was Great Britain in the late 1970s and the moment when punk emerged into the mainstream consciousness.
Featuring the voices of Joe Strummer and the Clash from the time, and intercutting the raw and visceral footage of this iconic show, with telling moments from the BBC's New Year's Eve, Hogmanay and New Year's Day schedules of nearly 40 years ago, it celebrates that great enduring British custom of getting together, en masse and often substantially the worse for wear, to usher in the New Year.
New Year's Day is when we collectively take the time to reflect on the year that has just gone by and ponder what the new one might hold in store for us. Unknown to the unsuspecting British public, 1977 was of course the annus mirabilis of punk. The year in which the Clash themselves took off, catching the imagination of the nation's youth.
As their iconic song, 1977, counts us down to midnight, we'll share with them and Joe Strummer, in previously unseen interviews from the time, their hopes and predictions for the 12 months ahead

Friday, 2 January 2015

One fer you Bill XXX

Worst French actor's name EVER

Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo - Day After Tomorrow

A couple of years ago I srsly fuct up a message to the wonderful Helen (ex of this parish) by Emily and I at a local Northcote pub. Hey but hopefully I will learn by my mistakes eh?

Loosen up (Frank Sinatra to George Michael)

(Click to enlarge)

September 9, 199
Dear Friends,
When I saw your Calendar cover today about George Michael, "the reluctant pop star," my first reaction was he should thank the good Lord every morning when he wakes up to have all that he has., And that'll make two of us thanking God every morning for all that we have.
I don't understand a guy who lives "in hopes of reducing the strain of his celebrity status." Here's a kid who "wanted to be a pop star since I was about 7 years old." And now that he's a smash performer and songwriter at 27 he wants to quit doing what tons of gifted youngsters all over the world would shoot grandma for - just one crack at what he's complaining about.
Come on George, Loosen up. Swing, man, Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we've all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments
And no more of that talk about "the tragedy of fame." The tragedy of fame is when no one shows up and you're singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint that hasn't seen a paying customer since Saint Swithin's day. And you're nowhere near that; you're top dog on the top rung of a tall ladder called Stardom, which in latin means thanks-to-the-fans who were there when it was lonely.
Talent must not be wasted. Those who have it - and you obviously do or today's Calendar cover article would have been about Rudy Vallee - those who have talent must hug it, embrace it, nurture it and share it lest it be taken away from you as fast as it was loaned to you.
Trust me. I've been there.
(Signed, 'Frank Sinatra')
© 1990 Frank Sinatra
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