Friday, April 25, 2008

Lamé













I asked Marco some questions about Lamé and the b side Inseminator.

Me: When did you and Adam write Lamé?
Marco: After "Wonderful", the same time we did Dandy in the Underworld.

How did the recording come about?
We had a few ideas and we decided to go into the studio with our
friend John Reynolds just to see what would happen.

It was used on a promo cassette for Drop Dead Rock along with the b
side Inseminator...
Was it? (Yes! See pic)

When was Inseminator recorded?
I did that in New york one night as a favour to the director of Drop
Dead Rock.

Who is on the recording?
I never knew the other guys on the session.

Why was it not released anywhere properly?
I don't know.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

New Songs added to Ipod Player

I have added:

Wide Boy Awake 8 songs
Ants July 14th 1979 and Ants live May 14th 1978.
May 14th 78 was Mark Bivouac's final gig with the Ants, and Jordan's too.

Set lists:

May 14th 1978, London Roundhouse: (This is all one file again. Listen out for the guitar on Puerto Rican!)

Plastic Surgery
Puerto Rican
B -Side Baby
Deutscher Girls
Physical
It Doesn’t Matter
Hampstead
Lou
Bathroom Function
Dirk Wears White Sox

Fall In
Red Scab
Jaunito The Bandito

14th July 1979, Birmigham Digbeth Civic Hall:

Cartrouble (pt. 1 & 2)
Animals & Men
Nine Plan Failed
Day I Met God
Family of Noise (cuts in)
Cleopatra
Never Trust A Man
Kick!
Digital Tenderness
Tabletalk
Catholic Day (cuts in)
The Idea
Zerox
Lady
Hampstead
Fall In
Press Darlings (cuts)

Also, this just in: A new blogpost by the Systems of Romance blog on Rema Rema's Wheel in the Rose Ep, and files to download.

Send A Letter To Jordan....

Sex 430 Kings Road London

History

It first began when Malcolm McLaren opened at what was called Paradise Garage, which had a small shop behind it where Mclaren sold records and eventually Teddy Boy clothes: this evolved into his own store, which he ran with Vivienne Westwood, called Let it Rock, selling Teddy Boy clothes. They later moved further down the road to open a rubber and leather fetish wear store which they named SEX. Famously, the Sex Pistols auditioned Johnny Rotten in the shop.[1]

SEX was by no means the only boutique of its kind on the King's Road and by the time British punk rock developed a larger following, there were competitors including; Boy, Granny Takes A Trip & Beaufort Market. SEX received many famous visitors, including Adam Ant, The Sex Pistols, Bromley Contingent; and had their own little following such as Helen Wellington Loyd, store workers like Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, Debbie Juvenile and others. This store became very famous in the punk rock scene and produced such famous clothes as the Cambridge Rapist T-shirts, the shirt featuring cowboys drawn by Tom of Finland, "Destroy" shirts, "venus" shirts, "tits" shirts, fetish wear and others.

From SEX the store then became Seditionaries which sold mainly the same clothes but with more of a music aspect and gradually drifted away from selling leather gear. Goods sold by the two stores are still on sale, many second-hand or reproductions.

"I wanted a major, major, major change. I thought we can't keep selling these old remnants and things, we've got to do something tougher and harder: it's all too sweet, and the store, for fuck's sake, is too goddamn popular. So it's got to close, no question about it. No more brothel creepers, no more drainpipes, no more of this rock 'n' roll clothing and get rid of that fucking jukebox (1)" ~Malcolm McLaren

External links
  • Only anarchists are pretty Photos and information.
  • Sex & Seditionaries Clothing designed by Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren circa 1975-1979.
  • Punk Pistol Seditionaries tribute site to clothing designed by Westwood & McLaren.

  • 1 The sex behind the pistols . The Times (September 6, 2003). Retrieved on 2007-12-17. “‘The idea was we were the Pistols from the SEX shop,’ recalls Matlock. ‘In the Kings Road we were near to Granny Takes a Trip and Anthony Price’s shop. You would see the Faces and Bryan Ferry going there to get their clothes. Malcolm told us they were a bunch of w*****s and we agreed with him. Even though they were all loaded and we didn’t have a pot to p*** in it was a good attitude to have.’”
Located Here

it now looks like this

Ants Family Tree


Click the picture for larger version.

Opinions

I would really like to know what you're opinion of this blogsite is.
I have been thinking lately that I want to post and write about stuff other than The Ants, but at the same time stuff that is kind of related if not directly related.
Therefore I would post/ write about Punk 1977, pop in the 80's, and bands/ things that both Adam Marco and the other Punks were interested in and influenced by. Hence David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper, all of that would be included..........

Please email me your thoughts, do you like what you've seen so far? Do you have any suggestions? Any complaints? Any ideas? Any requests?
It's hard to know when you get no feedback whether anyone is reading (I know that you ARE because i get statistics that tell me a lot of people have been reading!) but I only get a couple of people ever post any comments at me, so it's a little like talking to yourself!

Anyway, email me at stevehorwood@yahoo.co.uk OR leave a comment if you want to remain anonymous!

Thanks

Steve

"I was there really early on, I'm cool, You're not"

Marco is in the latest edition of The Word Magazine, and lucky you, thanks to AntRap Admin Monk, I have the scans for you to view here!







































Saturday, April 12, 2008

Post Punk blog Ant related posts


Here this cool blogsite has a list of "On this day in the 80's" posts on Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow and Malcolm McClaren.

Included is this post on Dalek I Love You - Heartbeat:

On this date in 1981, Dalek I Love You released their fourth single, "Heartbeat". The B side was "Astronauts (Have Landed On The Moon)". Neither track appeared on an album. The band, at this time, was officially only Alan Gill (ex-The Teardrop Explodes) though he brought in musicians to help record this song. Merrick (future Adam and The Ants) played drums for these tracks. The Liverpool post punk/new wave band with a constantly changing lineup called it quits in 1990.

More on Dalek I Love You and music files here

1977 The Year Decency Died (PopMatters Article)

Two really good articles about Punk from the PopMatters Website. I'm widening the scope of what I post on here from now on, Adam and the Ants 1977-82 are related to a cultural change (Punk) and changes in pop music in Britain and the US, so I am going to post items about all of that too. After all, it's Music For A Future Age, and music from 1977-84 is precisely that, music that with hindsight was a lot more innovative than today's pop music, and post-punk music that was full of a whole lot more ideas and experiments in sound than much of today's music.
See Simon Reynold's book Rip It Up And Start Again to read more about this and visit his excellent website.




Channel Crossings:
1977: The Year Decency Died - Part I

[9 April 2008]

"I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting."

by Raphaël Costambeys-Kempczynski

Instead of identifying a contemporary sociological problem, the headline of a March 2008 issue of Time, “Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control”, could well have been the definition of the punk-led youth of England just over 30 years ago. The year 1977 began with the International Monetary Fund lending Britain £2.3 billion in order to stay the decli

ning value of sterling. The Labour Party’s popularity was falling in the polls. A dynamic Conservative opposition leader was putting James Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, in difficulty; only a pact with the Liberal party would postpone the eventual demise of his minority government.

Although Labour was suffering in Parliament during those first few months of 1977, media interest was turning its attention to the nostalgia-fuelled Queen’s silver jubilee scheduled for the weekend of 4th June. But not everyone was caught up in the bunting and flag waving. A shadow was being cast. Writing in his essay ‘The English People’, George Orwell suggests that “England is the only European country where internal politics are conducted in a more or less humane and decent manner”, the English people he claims “are not good haters”.


Ten years after the Summer of Love, 1977 had it s Summer of Hate. This is how Jon Savage summarises the jubilee celebrations in his seminal punk history, England’s Dreaming (1991):

Out of the morass of mid-1970s pluralism emerged the old spectres thinly disguised with a fresh lick of paint. Here was the blind superiority that had characterised the English world-view after the Second World War; here was a concentrated dose of all the unappealing traits—snobbery, insularity, xenophobia—that rendered England’s continued claim to be a world power meaningless.


England's Dreaming

(St. Martin's (Revised);

US: Jan 2002)

Savage’s insistence on England rather than Great Britain suggests that the Silver Jubilee was an English moment—the United Kingdom had no Empire, Scottish devolution was a burning question, Welsh nationalism was high, and the IRA campaign had spread to the mainland. As if the Establishment needed reminding of England’s social frailties, at 7.30pm on 7th June a boat called the Queen Elizabeth sailed down the Thames with the Sex Pistols onboard. The Sex Pistols were banned from playing on land and so a water-bound performance of the song “God Save the Queen” must have seemed like a good idea.

Except that the self-congratulatory act of performing to a captive audience put John Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, the vocalist and lyricist of the Sex Pistols, ill-at-ease. Neither was Lydon quite comfortable with sharing the stage with Richard Branson his hippiesque record label boss. Lydon’s performance was spiked with added resentment and when the boat docked there was a stand-off between the audience and the police. As night fell tensions increased and the police lost patience.

John Varnom, an associate of Richard Branson’s at Virgin, recalls:

We reached a high point, from which short steps descended to the pavement. It was at precisely this point that Malcolm [McLaren] raised his fist and, in full view of about five or six police, screamed: “You f**king fascist bastards!” It was a direct invitation, and it was not declined.

The release of the single was itself fraught with difficulties. The original release date had been decided as 27th May so that the single would reach the top ten by Jubilee week. But workers at the CBS pressing plant protested against the single’s content, downing their tools on various occasions. Once released, the promotion of the single was equally difficult—the Independent Broadcasting Authority deemed the single to be in direct contravention of Section 4 (10) (A) of the IBA Act, i.e., “against good taste or decency, likely to encourage or incite crime, or lead to disorder.” The commercial television stations and radios were instructed not to broadcast the single and the BBC banned the record altogether. Regardless of these efforts, or perhaps because of them, the single sold 150,000 copies within five days of its release sending it to number 11.

You would think that three decades on, the antics of the Sex Pistols would be viewed favourably; John Lydon bestowed the doubtful status of being an ‘institution’. And yet the Silver Jubilee seems to remain a touchy subject. After 30 years the secret government files of 1977 were taken to the National Archives in Kew and released to the public. Of the six files covering the Silver Jubilee, however, only two have been opened. The others have been held back under Section 40 ‘Personal Information’ and Section 40 ‘Information Provided in Confidence’. As Martha Kearney put it in her BBC Radio 4 documentary, UK Confidential, we may never know how the Queen felt about being “gobbed at by Johnny Rotten”.

In English popular musical terms, 1977 began at 6.15pm on 1st Decem

ber 1976. This was the day of the infamous interview of the Sex Pistols by

Bill Grundy on the Thames Television Today programme.

Goaded by a drunken Grundy, within two minutes punk, as a liberal socially complex phenomenon, was reduced to a flurry of four-letter words. So it was that 1977 was set up as the year decency died. Punk would still prove to be violent and political, but it had already been subsumed by the Establishment as bad boy rock. What had been an underground musical development was transformed into a media circus typified by the front page of the Daily Mirror published the next day.

Councils began cancelling tour dates, the record company EMI was urged to take action. Neither the group’s manager, McLaren, nor EMI had condoned the behaviour of the Sex Pistols on the Today show. This was the media condemning a scandal of their own making.

Was this a reflection of the age-old fear of a rebelling younger generation? or perhaps the indication of yet another moral panic sweeping the country? This then appears as an example of what Jurgen Habermas says about Late Capitalism and its propensity for crisis tendencies where policy becomes the management of these crises, a management which contains in itself the possibility of further crises, rather than the resolution of the fundamentals (see Habermas 1975). The fundamental issue in 1976 and 1977 was not punk but that great negator of common public decency: unemployment. As the Clash sang on their début album: “Career opportunities are the ones that never knock / Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock.”

As the closing comments of Steve Jones during the interview with Grundy suggest, it is the journalist, the broadcasting institution, and his proposition directed at Siouxsie Sioux that were seen as being indecent. Writing in the fanzine Bondage shortly after the interview, the singer of the punk band the Nipple Erectors and future member of the Pogues, Shane MacGowan, immediately identifies the vagueness of the notion of decency and projects it as a heuristic fiction:

Since when did EMI or any of those old c**ts put “public duty” before their precious money or the security it gives them. What it really is is they feel that security is threatened just by what the Pistols represent. And how could anything that appears on ITV offend public decency. There isn’t any public decency—people only know what’s decent by being told by ITV and the rest of the media and EMI too. (Shane McGowan in Bondage, N°1, December 1976)

Though placing the Queen at the head of a fascist regime in a song is defendable as the right to free speech in a democratic country (although there is no constitutional guarantee of this in the United Kingdom), this may not have been useful to the Sex Pistols and their anti-establishment stance. The message may have been one of decency, but the medium had to consistently be indecent to ensure the vibrancy of that message. Even this, however, would prove difficult to sustain as Lydon later admitted when talking about Public Image Limited, or PiL, the band he would form after the demise of the Sex pistols:

I formed PiL because I got bored with the extremist point of view that I’d had with the Sex Pistols… I attempted to move toward a liberal point of view and see if that could slowly but surely change society into something more decent… (Lydon 1993)

The Sex Pistols as “the poison in the human machine”, to quote from “God Save the Queen”, ensured that they would enflame the stereotypes of middle England they were reacting against, all those that the song “Liar” claimed to be in “suspension”. One such candidate was Bernard Brooke-Partridge, chairman of the Arts Council who had banned the Sex Pistols from performing in London. Writing in Rolling Stone Charles M. Young recounts his exchange with Brooke-Partridge:

“I will do everything within the law to stop them from appearing here ever again,” he says. “I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting.”

“Doesn’t the question of who should decide what’s disgusting in a free society enter in here?”

“I am the person who decides,” he says. “The electoral put me here. My power is not in question. If the Sex Pistols want to change the system, they are free to stand for election from my district.”

“In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution says the government is not allowed to make such decisions.”

“We have our own way of doing things here. The Sex Pistols are scum trying to make a fast buck, which they are entitled to do under the law. I am entitled to try and stop them. We’ll see who wins.” (Rock Is Sick and Living in London, 20 October 1977)

The Sex Pistols with Bill Grundy - Today show excerpt


Image (partial) from Blair Air Brushing.com

Channel Crossings: 1977: The Year Decency Died - Part II

[10 April 2008]

If punk’s message was ‘destroy’, then inevitably wrapped up in its own scream of existence was its dying breath. No sooner was 1977 declared the year of punk than the death of punk was in the cards.

by Raphaël Costambeys-Kempczynski

1977: The Year Decency Died - Part I “I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting.”

The year of the Sex Pistols was punctuated by the Grundy interview, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the troubled release of their album Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. On 5th November 1977 WPC Julie Dawn Story informed the branch manager of Virgin Nottingham that the word ‘Bollocks’ on the record cover was in breach of the Indecent Advertising Act of 1899. Pivotal to the subsequent court case was the witness account of Reverend James Kingsley, professor of English at Nottingham University and former Anglican priest. In Kingsley’s account of the etymology of ‘bollock’ he argued:

The word has been used as a nickname for clergymen. Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense… They became known for talking a great deal of bollocks, just as old balls or baloney also come to mean testicles, so it has twin uses in the dictionary.

Calling upon a sense of pride in the English language’s Anglo-Saxon inheritance, this line of defence was enough for the magistrates to find in favour of the Sex Pistols although the senior magistrate stressed this was done “reluctantly”.

The battle ground between the Sex Pistol-led English punk movement and the Establishment was that of decency. The punk events of 1977 were driven by a need to re-appropriate decency as the domain of the subject, to inject responsibility back into a notion too long left in suspension. The claim of English punk music in 1977 was about empowering the social actor through responsibility with subjectivity.

There should be no mistake, however. Punk’s English dream of decency, to play on a line from the song “God Save the Queen”, was itself a construction. If the Sex Pistols were the unadulterated voice of the working class, or the unemployed class, this could only sit uncomfortably with their fame and money. The class issue would fuel the artist’s age-old struggle of how to remain authentic to the artistic endeavour and the message.

Margaret Thatcher Che Guevara Revolutionary T-Shirt© image (partial) from Red Molotov.com - Revolutionary T-shirt Designs

Margaret Thatcher Che Guevara Revolutionary T-Shirt© image (partial)
from Red Molotov.com - Revolutionary T-shirt Designs

The direct attack on the social realities of 1977 would lead to added attention, better record sales, increased wealth and greater distance from the class struggle within which the music knew its genesis. Critics have therefore argued that a popular musicians view of contemporary reality is fuzzy, distorted by the pull between the utopian message of production and the capital gain of consumption.

Ultimately what we need to bear in mind is that beyond the performance of punk bands of this period, whether on stage or in the media, many of the band members did not have working class backgrounds. Of the Clash, Joe Strummer’s father was a diplomat and Mick Jones went to art school. For the Sex Pistols with such figures as Situationist Malcolm McLaren and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood pulling the strings from their Kings Road clothes shop, it is difficult not to peer at this working class subculture through the microscope of art school filtered postmodernism. Katrina Irving may argue that what differentiates US punk from English punk is that the Americans considered themselves artists, quoted Genet and played concerts in arts centres, but we must not forget that McLaren, if only briefly, had managed the New York Dolls.

Not only this, but, John Lydon, the mouthpiece of the dole queue, had never been unemployed for any particular length of time himself. Lydon had an ambivalent relationship towards class. He appears to have a nostalgic association to the English working-class community of his youth and yet his Sex Pistols persona, Johnny Rotten, an imagined alternative identity born out of his extensive cultural capital, a product of an intellectual construct, firmly rejects this wistful vision of the past.

To attack the generation of World War II, however, it would be necessary to demonstrate the suffering experienced at the hands of post-Empire inertia characterised by the Silver Jubilee. Perhaps the most violent aspect of “God Save the Queen” is not the attack on the “mad parade” itself (the song was written about a year before the jubilee celebrations) but the songs mantra that there is “no future / in England’s dreaming”.

With the seeming impossibility of prospect, all that was left was the immediacy of a present perceived as the apocalypse –- The Sex Pistols sang “I am an antichrist” in “Anarchy in the UK”, The Clash sang “London’s Burning”, X-Ray Specs sang “Oh! Bondage Up Yours”, The Stranglers sang “Something Better Change”.

Heavily defined by its class system, English society in 1977 had a voice for its alienated bored working class youth. With the Labour government hanging on to power by the skin of its teeth social order seemed in turmoil. The vicious sound of these English punk bands reflected the destruction around them: the dissonant snarling singing voice, the raw guitar wall of sound, every beat of every bar accented and the percussive high pitch of continuous crashing symbols makes listening uncomfortable.

Richard Middleton argues that teenage rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s, though set against the backdrop of growing liberal ideology, was articulated to safe musical patterns with little subversive content. Punk offered a more testing musical and message-driven assault at a time of more critical socio-economic unrest. One could argue, however, that the various moments of youth culture are self-regulating revolutions as the actors of one generation necessarily grow older and therefore normalise any sense of fracture. In the meantime the social realities of economic failure persist.

It would appear misleading then to suggest that punk helped shape the politics of the time, but these punk groups did project themselves as the voice of the English underclass, the Everyman voice of “Another Country / Another council tenancy” to quote from “Anarchy in the UK”. This is the little man against the big man mentality seen as a defining characteristic of Englishness -– as the sociologist Krishan Kumar puts it, the English have always “championed the good sense, resourcefulness and courage of the ordinary ‘little chap’”. Indeed, with such direct implications in movements like Rock against Racism, punk groups like the Clash, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and Sham 69 did more than symbolic resistance.

Class differentiation was also identified along musical lines, notably in the polarisation of punk and progressive rock. Prog rock was the genre of popular music seen to be indulgently arty, intellectual, Romantic and middle class by punk. It lacked authenticity whereas punk was purer, had more street credibility.

Contrary to many of its predecessors, at the musical core of punk—from its conception to its performance—lies the action of protest. Instrumental solos, seen as superfluous to this and a sign of slickness, were to be condemned along with the banks of electronic keyboards so revelled in by the progressive rockers of the time. The lack of rhythmic variation made punk undanceable but added a sense of urgency. The simplicity of the riffs was the stance of individualism and allowed the anger of the voice to stand out.

Protest song in the form of folk or hippie music had been plaintive, punk, however, was declamatory. The Clash and the Sex Pistols confronted their audiences often provoking them into a violent reaction. The sense of confrontation is then worked on in the studio to reproduce this live feel. No sense of artificiality must come between the band and the audience, and though it may be difficult to make out the message because of the sneer, the snarl and the slur, the sincerity of that message must not be brought into question.

Often criticised for being out of tune one need only listen to a song “Pretty Vacant” to here how Rotten aggresses the listener with his political message sung out of key during the verse but then neatly falls into key for the rabble rousing chorus inviting us to sing along, to answer his call to arms. In this way punk positions itself against the music that had preceded itself—breaking away from rock ‘n ‘roll, from hippie music and prog rock, and expressing a real disdain for disco. And yet punk reworked rock ‘n’ roll in a pub rock guise, and inherited the rhythms of reggae. These articulations went some way to guarantee the bands’ commercial success, pointed at their mainstream bent.

Some writers, however, still see punk as fundamentally changing the nature of popular music. Ian Chambers for instance believed punk created a breach in the sequentiality of pop which would lead to “a proliferation of margins rather than a predictable return to a renewed ‘mainstream’ and subordinated ‘alternative’”. Today we can deplore the fact that sanitised Euro pop is still fed to us by such television programmes as the X-Factor where contestants churn out over-produced songs of the past, but television itself is becoming a marginal medium in the face of the Internet, which offers on demand access to an almost infinite possibility of marginal existences. Chambers is perhaps right, but is this down to punk or the digitalisation of the audio medium that would begin just five years later, in 1982?

Perhaps the public uproar over punk reflected a real threat to public order, but cultural theory teaches us well. Although much of the media attention focused on the public displays of violence that characterised punk—the imagery of bondage, the aggressive musical snarl, the lyrics of desolation and oppression, the public goading—there was also a commodification of this violence. After the Grundy incident, small retailers began to take notice of punk’s apparent individualist ethos and started setting up independent record labels. Added to this were the ‘one stops’—firms that bought bulk records from the major labels and then sold them on to independent record shops but without the small order surcharge imposed by the major record labels—in effect decentralising the chain of distribution.

This was the Do-It-Yourself drive of punk, though one should eschew all temptation to call this democratisation of the English record industry. If anything this was the transformation of the punk from consumer to producer, from the unengaged to the socially responsible subjective agent. Moreover, you no longer had to feel frustrated by lack of talent as this image from the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue demonstrates.

The Sex Pistols and the Clash had both originally signed to major record labels, increased exposure promising larger audiences and the wider communication of their message. But commercial pressures would call into question the authenticity of punk. Technical pressures of trying to reproduce the emotions of a live concert would also eat at the heart of the authentic punk experience.

And then there was the gimmick. Soon it was difficult to escape the coloured 12-inch or the limited edition. Post-punk would come to embrace the commodification of authenticity and leading the way would be John Lydon post-Sex Pistols with his new band, Public Image Limited, the name of which conjures up the notion of privately-owned limited liability companies.

As with many English bands since, the straw that finally broke the anarchist camel’s back was the Sex Pistols’ attempt to break America. The positivistic attitude of Americans did not appear to be a comfortable bedfellow for nihilistic apocalypse. And so often nihilistic apocalypse did not turn up, as Savage puts it “There was no murder, no vomiting, no mutilation: just four 20- to 21-year-olds”.

Reflecting the attitude of their manager back at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee when McLaren had aggravated the situation with the police, on 7th January 1978 John Lydon at a concert at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonia decided that this was his moment of hubris and shouted: “You cowboys are all a bunch of f**king faggots”. Needless to say, the concert had to be interrupted for several minutes. Just ten days later the Sex Pistols were no more.

It would be all too easy to conclude with an image of the stereotypical Sex Pistols, leaving us with an ironic sense of the commodification of authenticity. But punk was the voice challenging the original generation of teenagers as they were turning into parents. The Sex Pistols were also the enemy within, willing to expose the record industry to show their authenticity as they sung on the track “E.M.I.”: “and you thought that we were faking / that we were all just money making / you do not believe we’re for real”.

If punk’s message was ‘destroy’, then inevitably wrapped up in its own scream of existence was its dying breath. No sooner was 1977 declared the year of punk than the death of punk was in the cards. The release of “God Save the Queen” and the publicity stunt on the Thames were accompanied by the Sex Pistols’ sighs of regret and the prerequisite boredom. Within the space of a year the proliferation of generic punk bands with the formulaic snarl had turned punk into a conservative mode of musical expression. Ironically one could see the symbolic death of punk as the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.

The wave of post-punk bands would push the Clash to sing in June 1978 “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”: “The new groups are not concerned / With what there is to be learned / They got Burton suits, ha you think it’s funny / Turning rebellion into money.” Indeed, 1977 was the year decency died. Social decency suffered from the political upheaval of that year, public decency could no longer be stabilised by its hypocrisy, and musical decency in the form of punk was commodified by post-punk before even the first punk album had been released.

Perhaps the most indecent thing of 1977 was that an ex-Beatle, backed by the music of bagpipes, topped the charts singing “Mull of Kintyre”.

Paul McCartney - Mull of Kintyre

Friday, April 11, 2008

Wolfmen one-hour radio session coming soon...

Listen out for a Wolfmen special on Red Bull Music Academy Radio coming soon, featuring brand new songs, classic singles that have inspired the band, and a new interview with Chris Constantinou, who put together the tracklist:

Marc Bolan & T-Rex - Ride A White Swan 2:12
Jimmy Hendrix - Cross town traffic 2:14
The Wolfmen Jackie Says 5:00
The Wolfmen Cecilie 3:31
The Wolfmen Needle In A Camel's Eye 2:56
The Wolfmen Up All Nighter 3:08
Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues 2:17
Velvet Underground - I'm Waiting for the Man 4:48
Johnny Cash - I've Been Everywhere 3:17
Warren Zevon- Werewolf In London 3:40
The Modern Lovers - Pablo Picasso 4:22
Dahler Mendhi featuring The Wolfmen 2 Eyes 3:38
Dahler Mendhi featuring The Wolfmen - Thieves and Liars (radio edit) 5:16
Leonard Cohen - Bird on the Wire 3:27
X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents 3:11

Since the launch of Red Bull Music Academy Radio in Nov 2005, RBMA Radio has been streaming 24/7 – with over 120 new hours of music per month. Red Bull Music Academy Radio is now available on demand, offering daily updates and unlimited access to its holy archives. Along with hundreds of exclusive guest mixes and special shows it also boasts 20 regular shows, bringing you the latest tracks on CDR as well as those undiscovered vinyl treasures. Like all the people invited to take part in the Red Bull Music Academy, hosts like the Soul Jazz Soundsystem, Morgan Geist, Maurice Fulton, Marco Passarani, Wax Poetics founder Andrew Mason, Kirk Degiorgio or Bugz In The Attic's Daz-I-Kue believe in sharing their knowledge as well as sharing a serious passion for an eclectic range of music: all the while challenging people to look even deeper. Each host is given free creative reign: resulting in very unique monthly shows encapsulating the kind of vibes that our favourite radio shows were always about.

Ipod Player

Thanks to an anonymous commenter, the ipod player has now been fixed, the gigs will play again now, I have no idea what happened there.
I will add 2 gig2 from 1979 (Digbeth and Electric Ballroom New Years Eve) later!
And a few other songs.... watch this space!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Needles Video, Word Magazine and Chris Online Interview

First off Chris is interviewed here.

Marco is in the May issue of the Word Magazine, as previewed below


Don't forget that the Wolfmen are playing Live again on 17th April- details in the flyer below



And finally the video for Needle in the Camel's Eye is below!
Enjoy!

Monday, April 07, 2008

PopMatters article on Gene Vincent

Subversive Rock Humor: Gene Vincent: A Caricature Portrait of the Artist as Rebel Rocker

[28 March 2008]

Nostalgic craving for the iconic Gene gene still burns bright, as look-alikes (young and old) exaggeratedly hiccup their way through “Be-Bop-a-Lula”.

by Iain Ellis

“White face, black shirt, white socks, black shoes,
Black hair, white strat, bled white, died black.” “Sweet Gene Vincent”, Ian Dury.

“[Vincent’s] a myth, a dream, an idea, a concept, a fantasy.” Race with the Devil: Gene Vincent’s Life in the Fast Lane , Susan VanHecke.

Caricatures are commonly known to us as the grotesque portraits produced by newspaper and magazine sketch artists; they aim to capture the perceived essences of their subjects—usually the rich, famous, and powerful within our popular culture—through deliberate exaggerations, by making mountains out of their molehills. Though the pictorial image itself calls attention to physical peculiarities, the most perceptive caricatures simultaneously equate visual idiosyncrasies with equally recognizable personality traits.

These comedic representations rely wholly upon generally agreed-upon criteria and our shared cultural understandings of the subject at hand. Caricatures are not ends or conclusions in themselves, but are signals for us to take a ride to an ultimate destination we have all once visited or envisioned.

So what does any of this have to do with the concept of the rebel rocker or with our principle case study, Gene Vincent? The answer is that by 1956, the image of the former had become clearly codified into a series of caricature features, while the latter stepped up—in timely fashion—to the rock ‘n’ roll stage as its most illustrative embodiment. With its predilections for the outlandish, the imitative, and the extreme, rock has long courted its caricatures and vice versa.

Its spectacular subcultures—rockabillys, teddy boys, rockers, mods, hippies, punks, Goths—are all essentially caricatures, distorted sartorial and attitudinal signposts reconfigured into striking cultural mélanges. Within their associated musical genres, too, central caricature characters arise and reside as archetypes of form, as overstated personifications of essence.

One thinks of metal’s dark master, Ozzy, his eyes piercing and teeth glistening with satanic glee; or punk provocateur, Iggy, his middle finger in salute, slashing his naked torso with a broken beer bottle. Whether acting or acted upon, these are the exaggerated, uninhibited icons of primitive rock savagery, the comic grotesques that mark rock rebellion. In their extreme public spectacles they embody the “loaded portraits” (in so many ways) of caricature art.

If a sketch artist was commissioned to draw a caricature of the classic 1950s white rebel rocker, (s)he would likely produce something resembling Gene Vincent. From his sweat-soaked, bad boy stage persona to his exaggerated “hiccup” vocal style to the primal, echo-fueled sound of his gang-band, The Blue Caps, Vincent emerged from the mid-’50s as the quintessential rockabilly rebel, becoming the poster child for subsequent admirers and would-be copyists both on and off the stage.

It was Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps that the Stray Cats and others most emulated during the early ‘80s rockabilly revival, and when Ian Dury sang “There’s one in every town” in his 1979 tribute, “Sweet Gene Vincent”, he was alluding to Vincent’s enduring influence as an emblematic subcultural role model for rockabilly singers and fans around the globe. Though a second-tier rock ‘n’ roll figure during his heyday in the US, Sweet Gene’s fundamental caricature features served him well in translation and transference, as Britain and other nations elevated his finely crafted myth into an archetype, such that today our distorted memory of him survives as one of the principal images of the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll bad-boy rebel.

As image and idol, Vincent was always as much illusion as reality, a Warhol-ian replica of the Elvis mold. Indeed, in 1956, when major record labels realized that Presley was in the process of revolutionizing the popular music industry (or, from their perspective, selling a lot of records), many went shopping for their own Elvis clone. For Capitol Records, Vincent, from Norfolk, Virginia, appeared to have the requisite résumé.

The 20-year-old Navy veteran suffered chronic leg pain by virtue of a motorcycle accident, but this played well to the James Dean dare-devil image; his sharp looks, slick hair, and leather attire cast him as a model juvenile delinquent of the Marlon Brando/Wild One type; yet, he also had all the Southern charm and good manners—as well as the smoldering sexuality in sound and look—that made Elvis so amenable and attractive. Indeed, Vincent’s debut release, “Be-Bop-a-Lula” (1956), was initially heard as so imitative of Elvis’ then-patented vocal and musical style that Presley’s band were reportedly perturbed that their leader had not told them that he had recorded the song without them.

Disturbed as well by the ensuing flurry of confusion, Vincent even apologized to The King himself, explaining that he had neither intended to be a copycat nor a caricature when recording the song. Later, while inducting Vincent posthumou(r)sly into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, inductor John Fogerty offered a final nail in the coffin on this association when he stated that “Be-Bop-a-Lula was Elvis’s greatest record.”

Elvis comparisons would plague and irritate Vincent for much of his career, but without them he would likely not have survived the boom and bust of the mid-‘50s rebel feeding frenzy. Always seen as more dangerous than The King and just as manic as The Killer, Vincent was able to exploit durable fascinations with the rebel rocker while establishing himself as the form’s most extreme and threatening representative.

Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps

Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps

Thus, when the rough edges of the first rock ‘n’ roll uprising were smoothed by late ‘50s corporate controllers—the primal rockers replaced with well-manicured pop innocents—Vincent stood (almost) alone as the last troubadour, the enduring rebel proclaiming “no surrender” as all around the tidal waves of sterility subsumed all. Although Vincent ultimately had to relocate to England to find a rowdy port in this sanitized calm, his career and legacy as the Elvis that Elvis once was served him well entering the ‘60s and has since established him as the pre-eminent caricature emblem of bad boy rebellion.

Initial recordings certainly revealed Vincent to have been well cast as an Elvis duplicate, though he separated himself from his peer’s model by pushing vocal parody to new caricature levels. Whereas Elvis’s dynamic vocal swoops and dramatic pauses were always cut with gentle fun, Vincent pushed the humor of these techniques into uncharted territory in songs like “Be-Bop-a-Lula”. The slow rockabilly bounce of this song sets up perfectly the angst-riddled tension and melodramatic excesses of Vincent’s measured delivery. In essence, a quaintly simple song of desire to the “queen of all the teens”, Vincent belabors the alliteration and nursery rhyme quality of the words, regressing into child-like innocence, pleading in his Southern drawl for his “baby doll”.

The desperation and slow urgency of the delivery do not so much express desire as parody it. Drummer Dickie Harrell adds periodic screams to the soundscape, creating an overall atmosphere that comically signifies the uncontainable hormones of the frustrated sexualized male. This parody of the primitive, inarticulate, and guttural was the same means by which Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Little Richard were expressing youthful sexual awakening; as with them, the protective mask of the inherent humor enabled the censors to be kept at bay and other observers to be fully en"gross"ed.

Loading parody (and perhaps patronage) upon parody, Steve Allen lampooned “Be-Bop-a-Lula” by giving it a dramatic recitation on his TV talk show, while Paul Simon was both wry and perceptive when he once answered a journalist’s question, “What’s the smartest thing ever said in a rock song?” with the curt response, “Be-bop-a-Lula / She’s my baby.”

The onomatopoeic noises, alliterative nonsense, and slang terms of the new youth rock ‘n’ rollers all provided what Peter Guralnick has called “a secret language for the young seeking to break away.” This youth-specific coded style was exaggerated into a manifesto of separation and defiance via the lyrics and delivery of Vincent.

“Blue Jean Bop” (1956) and “Bop Street” (1956) drew subcultural caricatures of the “cat” culture, providing principles of dance rituals and hang-out conduct. In “Cat Man” (1957) Vincent literally spells out the requisite rebel traits for the self-discerning rockabilly: “C is for the crazy hairdo that he wears around…/ M is for the mean things that this mean man does.”

Subsequent songs like “B-I-Bickey-Bi Bo-Bo-Go” (1957) and “La Den Da Den Da Da” (1964) further played to the “Be-Bop-a-Lula” youth-slang-as-non(-)sense formula (as well as underscoring the old adage that “a caricature is worth a thousand words”), while a glance across Vincent’s back catalogue finds such youth-speak markers as “cat”, “bop”, “street”, “wild”, “baby”, and “blue” arising with repetitive ubiquity in the titles. Gene and the band would perpetuate these blueprint lyrical images with a series of single and album cover shots that presented the gang as ready for any action.

These faux-rebel poses were precisely choreographed, and the style finely detailed from the quaffed hair to the upturned collars to the blue suede shoes. Some, hilariously, even cast a scowling Gene wielding a bashed-up acoustic guitar (no doubt giving ideas to the pre-teen Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix).

As much as the dumbed-down, slang-infested lyrics and stuttering, melodramatic vocals played to caricature stereotypes of the primitive street tough, it was Vincent’s performance and visual charms that made him the cardboard cut-out rebel rocker of our imaginations. And despite his general aversion to involving himself in the movies, it is in this arena where some of Vincent’s most enduring imagery has been cast in celluloid (and on posters) for the ages.

Riding the wave of juvenile delinquency films that had horrified parents and magnetized restless youths throughout the first half of the ‘50s [The Wild One (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955)], Vincent arrived in ’56 as a naturally typecast rebel when this filmic trend continued unabated into the decade’s later years. Surrounded by a gang of gum-chewing Blue Caps, Vincent cut through the screen with a trembling, clench-fisted performance in The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), and despite the band’s segment lasting only a minute in length, this filmic breakthrough explosively captured the wild, untamed side of the rockabilly phenomenon for all to see.

In the later Hot Rod Gang (1958), Vincent added further brush strokes to his caricature portrait of the rebel incarnate when he garbled his way through the following stylized slang dialogue: “You know, we’ve got the shaggy mane and the shivering spine and the rubbery legs. Why not dress him up in a cool set of shrubbery and some real class threads, you know, like one of those Greenwich Village cats who’s on cloud nine?” Young wanna-be’s flocked to these movies, embracing Vincent as they once had Presley, and his poster-ized image emerged with caricatured permanence, serving as a vicarious fantasy portal into romantic adventures, respite from boredom, and rebellion visually sanctioned.

Particularly enamored with style, look, and image in their most extreme manifestations, British fans placed Vincent high on their rock hierarchy pecking order. Hence, when Vincent’s career fell into a slump in the late ‘50s, Britain rolled out the welcome mat. Arriving in England in 1959, his new handlers spruced-up his bad boy biker image to even more elevated levels of caricature, in the process jump-starting his career into the early ‘60s.

Though he would never re-ignite the hysteria of his mid-‘50s glory years, Vincent sparked an enduring love affair with a new generation of British fans and bands. The Beatles were so infatuated with the Vincent caricature that they copied wholesale his leather-clad, greasy-haired biker look throughout their early Hamburg years, at the same time that they were learning their own songwriting craft by covering a number of their hero’s numbers.

Subsequent British rockers have, likewise, expressed and lived out their dream-adulation of Vincent, Jeff Beck recording the tribute album Crazy Legs in 1993, Adam Ant creating the stage-play Be-Bop-a-Lula (1992) about Gene’s friendship with Eddie Cochran, and, most recently, Carl Barât, the ex-Libertine, playing him in the up-coming Nick Moran film, Telstar. At fan-level, too, the Vincent caricature lingers on in all its excesses. A visit to any 1950s rock revival club in the UK today will reveal that nostalgic craving for the iconic Gene gene still burns bright, as look-alikes (young and old) exaggeratedly hiccup their way through “Be-Bop-a-Lula” as though 1956 to ‘58—the core years of the white boy rock rebel—had been forever frozen in time.

The above essay is an outtake from a forthcoming book about subversive rock humorists to be published by PopMatters and Soft Skull Press (Counterpoint).

Gene Vincent - Be-Bop-A-Lula