John Eden: BM Box 3641, London, WC1N 3XX, England UK
Archive for the ‘misc music’ Category.
Agit Disco 20 by Neil Transpontine « A G I T D I S C O
Neil is involved with the Transpontine and History Is Made At Night blogs.
Agit Disco is Stefan Szczelkun’s collaborative series where people make a compilation of their favourite political music and then write a commentary.
Neil’s contribution is great: lots of interesting ruminations on his own political history and culture in general. And some cracking tunes to boot.
previously, on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”
18. Butthole Surfers, Loop, The Shrubs. University of London Union, 26th February 1988.
This gig was sold out. A few weeks before there had been a mini-riot outside the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden when a bunch of people were refused entry. So clearly the Buttholes had moved on from being the band that two freaks in every town liked to something larger. I had to buy a ticket off a tout, for fuck’s sake! I think that’s the only time I’ve done that – and luckily it wasn’t stupid money or anything.
I’m pretty sure this one was a solo mission. I remember pre-loading with vodka. I’d started keeping a half bottle hidden at the bottom of my wardrobe, which I drank neat – presumably because I was trying to kid myself I was some kind of hard-bitten decadent libertine or something. In my rush to get to the venue and secure a ticket I skipped dinner. Which is obviously about as rock ‘n’ roll as it gets, right?
So I was probably a bit wasted, which I think you’ll all agree is the optimum condition for seeing the Butthole Surfers. And yes, the irony of coming up to London to go to a gig at a University whilst I was stuck retaking my ‘A’ Levels wasn’t lost on me either.
Loop were like the noisier brothers of Spacemen 3. Wal mentioned this to one of the Spacemen at a later gig and they went a bit mental and derided Loop for ripping them off. A point I can kind of relate to, but it’s not like the various influences were particularly obscure or anything. I was well toasted by the time they came on anyway. Lost myself in the wall of psych-droning, eyes closed. Very cathartic and much needed.
I was feeling a bit wobblier by the time the Butthole Surfers took to the stage. I’d probably filled up the time by having a few beers and still not bothering to eat. The blast of strobes and smoke was initially very welcome, but I started to wobble further when the film reels started. A penis reconstruction video shown backwards on a 30 foot high screen is actually a film of a 30 foot high penis being taken to bits, right? It suddenly seemed very hot in there…
I staggered out of the auditorium and collapsed on some steps, blacking out momentarily. I came round to see a girl with her head in her hands next to me. I asked her if she was OK, more out of trying to overcome my own embarrassment than any genuine concern. She was OK, or at least OK enough to get the message across that she didn’t want any more attention from some pissed teenager who had just fallen down next to her.
I can’t remember much after that, I guess I got some water and went back in to catch the rest of it.
The “inky” music papers like the NME and Melody Maker ran gossip columns at the time. I remember cringing when the next editions came out and one of them included something along the lines of “several people were sick and one bloke fainted at the ULU Butthole Surfers gig last week”. I should have kept that cutting – definitely one for the scrapbook. Of course, at the time I felt acutely awkward about it all and didn’t tell a soul.
There was also a review of the gig in the Daily Telegraph which made my dad laugh a lot, so he stuck it up in the kitchen. My Mum made him take it down. An all too rare bit of cross-generational bonding in our house, which proves that stupid band names can create harmony!
19. Spacemen 3. Dingwalls, 28th March 1988.
I made sure I had me tea this time. Kentish Town is about six stops down the line from St Albans so I was there well early and just walked in.
The venue was pretty much deserted, so I sat down and looked unobtrusive. I prepared various scenarios in my head in case my presence was challenged: fanzine writer, friend of the band, meeting someone, not speaking any English, all that stuff. None of that was likely to work, but luckily I didn’t need to test my Jedi skills of persuasion at all. It was a simple case of waiting around – and being in Dingwalls with various people setting up was much better than being at home.
The venue slowly filled and Spacemen 3 were amazing once again. At some point during their set I looked around to see two pissed blokes fighting, which was a bit of a surprise given most of the turnout was floppy-headed indie shoegazer types.
No ticket for this one, obviously. Blagging into gigs, fainting at gigs, not exactly acquitting myself with honour at this point…
previously, on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”
On the 1st of January 1988 my family had a discussion about our new year’s resolutions.
Mine was that I wasn’t going to go to church any more because I didn’t believe in God.
I had, to all intents and purposes, been living something of a double life for at least the previous year. Immersing myself in all this counter-cultural stuff most of the week but then going to church regular as clockwork on a Sunday morning. Even taking the plate round for the collection with a Psychic TV t-shirt underneath my Sunday best.
It had all become untenable. Anglicanism was more central to my family life than politics, and there had been enough rows about that already. So I wasn’t looking forward to breaking the news of my heathenism. My initial plan had been to slope off to University and then slide quietly into a life of decadent secularism, but I’d cocked that up with the exam failures. I couldn’t face the pretense any more.
To be fair to my parents, they took it reasonably well. My Dad recognised I’d been thinking about it all for a long time. My Mum went very pale. They told me that they thought I might find life very lonely without God. Fortunately I have since found things to be the exact opposite.
For me this was all a huge relief and I have never looked back. But 18 years of the Church of England is hard to shake off and remains one of my major influences for good or ill.
Martin is bang on when he describes me as “resembling a vicar”. I used to enjoy the singing but was pretty bored for the most part by the doctrine. I guess I still have a drive to do good work and not to be hugely decadent. I’ve spent the second half of my life so far working for various charities.
Feeling that there was a subculture of people out there who had thrown off the shackles of religion was very useful in helping me to strike up the courage to do it myself. A lot of those anti-religious punk songs and comments in fanzine interviews seem pretty trite now, but they certainly played their part at the time.
So that was the context for the beginning of 1988…
17. Glenn Branca: Symphony no. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven). Queen Elizabeth Hall, 30th January 1988.
I don’t think I told my parents what the title of the performance was, it just wouldn’t have helped. I probably played up the neo-classical aspects of the gig and the auspicious venue. Eighteen and off to a Glenn Branca gig: fucking cred or what?
Say what you like about eighties electronica and industrial but it was a fantastic “gateway drug” for all sorts of avant garde ideas, art, music and people.
I’ve written before about chasing names dropped oh-so casually in interviews, or sending SAEs away for fanzines, but it cannot be overstated how important that little information network was to me. It gave me an appreciation or an inkling of all sorts of stuff which I then rejected or sucked up like a sponge.
Some of it existed solely as ideas for me, untainted by actual experience. So my mind was blown by the idea that Stravinsky (or was it Stockhausen?) would be able to compose a “Symphony For Metal Hammer”, but I never managed to track a copy down in the eighties and I don’t really want to these days because I doubt that it would live up to my expectations. (The work was referenced by industrial journo Dave Henderson once and has stayed with me ever since).
Unlike today, opportunities to check stuff out were very rare. I remember being transfixed as a teenager by an edition of the South Bank Show dedicated to minimalist music one Sunday night. We didn’t have a video recorder, so I knew that I would never get a chance to see it unless I checked it out right then. It gave everything an extra urgency.
The local library’s NMEs and Melody Makers provided some other context and gave me my way in to the whole New York avant/noise scene.
The library also had a copy of Experimental Pop: Frontiers of the Rock Era by Billy Bergman and Richard Horn which I devoured. Loads of mad stuff in there about Laurie Anderson using a violin bow made of cassette tape (with a tapehead on the violin, natch) and bits on hip hop, Eno, Neubauten, etc etc. So Branca would have been referenced in some Sonic Youth piece in the NME or MM and then there’d be a bit more mention of him in Experimental Pop. Slowly but surely more pieces would be added to the jigsaw which became my personal mythology.
The library also had records by Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Run DMC, Neubauten and a host of others to borrow. People generally treated them well. I still have some C90 cassettes of things recorded from the library – it was my 1980s Google. Say what you like about the Manic Street Preachers, but that first line of “Design For Life” is bang on.
Glenn Branca did orchestral works with up to one hundred electric guitars and had some involvement with Sonic Youth. And he was coming to London.
My college mate Martin came along with a friend of his who commented sagely “Looks like there are two types of people here tonight. People who like art, and people who know this is going to be REALLY FUCKING LOUD”. Sure enough the audience was evenly divided between well dressed couples and scruffs like us in leather jackets.
We all sat respectfully in the QE2 while a bunch of people onstage tinkered with horizontally placed electric guitars and built up this unbelievable wall of sound. Events like the Test Dept gig and even SWANS had opened my ears to what I can only call the transcendental properties of noise, but this was on a completely different level – not least because there were nothing like “songs”. I remember it being quite ordered, not like a jam session or anything. I just zoned in and out of it, transported by sonics.
It was one of those performances which left you a bit speechless. They were selling posters in the foyer, but one wiley leather-jacketed punter noticed a load blu-tacked up near the exit and got his own souvenir. We followed suit along with a dozen co-conspirators – simultaneously bolstering the avant garde and sticking it to the man.
I had a lie-in the next morning, a further pleasant side-effect of coming out of the closet as an atheist. While my family were at church I stuck my stolen Glenn Branca poster up on my bedroom wall.
previously, on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”
16. Suicide, Spacemen 3, Into A Circle, 999. Town & Country Club, 13th December 1987.
It was cold. Sign on the door of the T&C: “Unfortunately 999 will not be appearing tonight”. The general consensus in the queue was that this was fine by everyone. I associated 999 with the uncreative dregs of punk, purely because their logo (a raffle ticket) appeared on the back of leather jackets alongside the Anti-Nowhere League, Exploited and all those other bands I could never be arsed to check out.
So an odd choice for the lineup, but perhaps not as odd as Showaddywaddy supporting Einsturzende Neubauten around the same time. Which I missed out of guilt at my exam fuck ups. Bah. I suppose this gig was like an early xmas present to myself. I think I probaby went along with either Chris (an old school mate) and/or Martin (a mad Ramones fan I had hooked up with doing resits).
Into A Circle were on a psychedelic/pop/goth tip. They had evolved out of Getting The Fear, who had in turn spawned from Southern Death Cult. Bee, their singer, had some connections with Psychic TV which obviously piqued my interest. Their single “Forever” had been on the Chart Show and was pretty good. They had some nice collages as projections and tapes of flowing water between songs.
I picked up some leaflets from the stall and found you could order some demo tapes and collage artwork off them. They also had a pseudo-TOPY magickal group associated with them called “The Game” if I remember rightly. I ordered some tapes and a collage. The former was pretty good and even had a recording off them at the end talking about financial arrangements for a gig. The collage arrived in a clipframe which smashed into a million pieces in the post (it was just in a regular jiffy bag).
There was buzz about In To A Circle, but they didn’t really get anywhere. Bee was rumoured to be the source of PTV’s “why don’t you just enjoy your own fucking body” vocal sample, taken from an answerphone message. (The other story I heard was that it was the bloke from Bomb The Bass.)
“1987 and all I want to do is get stoned
All I want for you to do is take my body home.”
Spacemen 3 were excellent. I’d first heard them on Peel (he’d faded a 25 minute track of theirs in and out a few times in between other records). I suppose the Spacemen were the flipside of the Butthole Surfers in the eighties psych revival. Dreamy gentle drones and some almost-pop songs with choruses vs the Surfers balls-out chaotic rock. I saw Spacemen 3 a good few times and they were always completely brilliant. They often finished up by taping down several keys on their synth and leaving this huge cavernous drone running. I’ve never really bothered with Spiritualised, though.
As I pointed out in a previous episode, I spent a large chunk of the summer of 1987 rinsing valve casings in paraffin:
To help pass the time I’d think about the records I was going to play when I got home. It only helped a bit, I was completely isolated without anyone to talk to and was probably going a bit mental. Possibly the actual records I was listening to didn’t help very much. “Industrial Music For Industrial People” sounds very evocative if you’re on the dole or in an office, I guess.
One of the records I was caning was the first Suicide LP:
“Frankie teardrop
Twenty year old Frankie
He’s married he’s got a kid
And he’s working in a factory
He’s working from seven to five
He’s just trying to survive
well lets hear it for Frankie
Frankie Frankie”
I probably tried to kid myself that I was having a really hard time of it like Frankie but the reality was that I was living with my Mum and Dad and was spending virtually everything I earned on records and gigs. But that Suicide LP is perfect – from the lush ambience of “Cherie” to the timeless astro-rockabilly of “Johnny”, it really has it all. The debut has been a staple of my late night listening for the last 22 years. In fact it is so perfect that I have studiously avoided hearing anything else by Suicide in case it detracts from my enjoyment of them.
They were awesome live. Martin Rev (basically Dr Teeth from the Muppet Show in a squatted space station) and Alan Vega (one of them androids out of Blade Runner channeling the ghost of Elvis) ruled the stage like they were a 32 piece ensemble. I’m not sure if Suicide or Sparks can claim to be the first synthpop duo but Rev held it tight, barely moving from his minimal equipment, yet conjuring up walls of incredibly rich sound. Vega prowled the stage, every inch the superstar.
Such was the iconic minimalism of the Suicide schtick that Vega decided they’d make up a song for the encore. How cool is that?
This was a Sunday night gig, so I think the place was half full. That didn’t stop me getting completely immersed in it all…
Previously, on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”
I ended up signing on at the local Higher Education College to study for ‘A’ Level resits a year later. Having done a round of visits to Universities and Polys I’d had a taste of student life and was all the more keen to get my head down and escape work and my parents for another few years.
Physics had been my worst failure – a “U” grade (Unclassified) indicating that I was now worse than when I’d passed a physics ‘O’ level two years previously. I tried to swap it for Philosophy, but nobody else wanted to take that, so I plumped for Psychology instead.
My other two subjects were retakes of Maths and Chemistry. On reflection I should have torn everything up and started from scratch.
College was a breath of fresh air after school – there were girls there and the staff mostly treated you like adults. My classmates were in the same situation as me – people who had screwed up their exams and were giving it another go. People who had learnt a bit of humility.
I responded quite well to all this regime initially and got my head down. This meant less gigs, not least because everyone I used to go out with had fucked off to a better life somewhere else. Wal had headed for Manchester, Peter had jammily managed to set himself up in Vienna. And so on.
I can’t really remember, but I might have gone to this by myself:
15. SWANS, Dave Howard Singers, The Sugarcubes. Town & Country Club, 14th October 1987.
Something of a dream line up, really. The Sugarcubes were of course “Bjork’s band”, evolving out of Icelandic anarchopunks Kukl. There was quite a buzz around them and I think this might have been their first or second London gig.
They were pretty upbeat and poppy and odd, especially in terms of banter. I guess it seemed obvious that they weren’t going to remain a support band for very long.
The Dave Howard Singers were most famous for their indie chart hit “Yon Yonson”. I have previously written about them here and the Yon Yonson backstory here.
To quote myself: “Much madness ensued as Dave ran around the stage with his acetone on a wheelchair. He also dragged some unsuspecting guy out of the audience to do a keyboard solo.”
SWANS had just released their “Children of God” double album. This was a turning point for the group as it combined the brutal sludgy minimalism of their previous work with the more folksy material which was to come.
I’d been fed tidbits of gossip about their previous live shows – people running out with hands over their ears, lots of stuff getting thrown, that sort of thing. This was also really really LOUD. Apparently some poor punter kept falling over because the sound messed up the balance control in his inner ear. The noise aspect has inspired some wimp at Uncut to rate this as one of the worst gigs ever. Pah!
It was pretty intense. Pounding. Gira was possessed. And he had a rug. A large rug covering most of the stage, which allowed him to pace up and down barefoot, wearing a thong. Intoning balefully. He stuck his arse in the first few rows of the audience. I don’t really know why.
It was hot and sweaty and a crowd surfer managed to dislodge my specs, which then got trampled under the feet of other audience members. I managed to retrieve them. They needed some serious attention from an optician the day after – she seemed pretty impressed with my account of the gig. As was I.
You used to be able to buy “Time Is Money(Bastard)” t-shirts in Carnaby Street. They were grey shirts with the text and iconic dollar sign in purple if I remember rightly. Not wanting to antagonise my Mum and more than I had already, I plumped for a “Greed” one instead with a nice gold dollar sign on it.
Peter went one better by acquiring a “Public Castration Is A Good Idea” shirt which caused our boss some consternation when we worked alongside each other in some shit temp job at a warehouse.
I don’t think I fancied any of the shirts at the gig, though, possibly because I was skint or more probably because I didn’t want to be wearing anything with “Children of God” written on it. I do seem to recall having this poster on my bedroom wall at some point, though:
Nice rundown – not the obvious stuff. Lots of mp3s to check out also.
New address! Update your bookmarks and check the latest entry on Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
< Drumz of The South >: Sonic Life Cycles.
Georgina has posted the film she created for our contribution to the UCL’s Creative Edge workshop on (sub)urbanism.
It’s essentially a broad brush look at the development of musical genres and the interplay between the urban and suburban. It is also, as she points out, slightly tongue in cheek – and captures the energy and humour of those movements really well, I think.
It was great collaborating with Georgina (not just because she did most of the work, ha ha!) and the day proved very interesting. I suspect many of the academics in attendance were a bit mystified by our contribution and Blackdown’s, but this was mutual… sometimes it’s good to stretch out a bit and broaden your horizons.
Hollow Earth: Social Trends 1950-2010.
Matt comes correct with some hard data (and kittens).
Everything Must Go! « Speakers Push Air.
Help a man out and get yourself some bargains as well.
Lots of good stuff which is suitable for everything from “secret santa” to soundtracks to your xmas shopping sprees.
(Obviously I’ve snagged a few things myself before posting this!)
