anti-theatricality in rock (slightest of returns)

 Spencer Dryden on the Jefferson Airplane's stage act, 1968: “It’s disorganized. We never know what’s going to happen. It’s different every time. We have no stage presence.”

via Michaelangelo Matos

vamp in sunlight

 

Rare sighting of a Goth at the beach - shield your eyes from the pasty white glare!

Still, sensibly, Sioux seems to be applying sunscreem

Can you imagine the Ice Queen burned and raw? Wouldn't be very a-peeling. 

Judging by the quality of sand, and a faint memory of the caption when I stole this, it's a LA beach, not the kind of gravelly job you get in England.  Possibly Venice Beach. (Well I suppose it could be somewhere Mediterranean)

Goths - and industrials - are a big subculture in LA (hence the Cruel Worlds festivals) and I think it's got something to do with dissent against the Sun itself - and the attached culture of tans and muscles and blonde hair and surfers.

McLaren was making a film - or trying to make a film - about Nazi surfers. Can you imagine a Goth on a surfboard? 

anti-theatricality in rock (slight return's slight return)

 Continuing from the previous post.... 

The title of Paul Stump's excellent book on prog rock The Music's All That Matters captures the idea expressed in the anti-punk letter to NME - - we don't put on a show, we leave that to commercial bands, we don't go in for image, we're all about the music and nothing but the music... 

But then again, one of the things that prog bands, or some prog bands, explored was, well, showmanship: theatrics, costumes....  Jethro Tull and Gabriel-era Genesis being only two of the most glaring examples 

There is a good bit in Philip Auslander's excellent, unusually-angled study Performing Glam Rock, where he contrasts the hairy Underground's gestural language onstage with glam performers.  He talks about how your prog or blues-heavy or acid-jam type band would project inwardness - as if totally absorbed in making music. Minimal eye contact with the audience, no banter....  at times almost acting as if the audience wasn't there. Eyes closed. No strutting or guitar poses or even much moving about on the stage.  A fairly static, concentrating-hard-on-the-job sort of stage presence. Distance maintained between rock-as-art and pop-as-entertainment.

Interestingly, Wendy Fonarow in her excellent anthropological study of British indie rock Empire of Dirt talks about "gaze strategies" - how bands similarly project inwardness,  a "lost in music" aura, almost obliviousness to the audience's existence.  This suggests that as much as it comes from shyness and from the need to look down at all those foot pedals, the gazing at shoes is an instinctive re-irruption of  the Underground era approach of anti-performance.

Slowdive did talk about how they were more influenced by Pink Floyd than Sex Pistols. 

anti-theatricality in rock (slight return)

 

New Musical Express, 

December 18 1976 

The title of Paul Stump's excellent book on prog rock captures this idea - we're all about the music, we don't put on a show, we leave that to commercial bands - but then again, one of the things that prog bands, or some prog bands, explored was, well, showmanship: theatrics, costumes....   Jethro Tull and Gabriel-era Genesis being only two of the most blatant examples 

There is a good bit in Philip Auslander's excellent, unusually-angled study of glam rock, Performing Glam Rock, where he contrasts the Underground's gestural language onstage with glam artists.  He talks about your prog or blues-heavy or acid-jam type band would project inwardness - as if totally absorbed in making music. No eye contact with the audience, no banter....  almost acting as if the audience wasn't there. Eyes closed often. No strutting or guitar poses or moving about.  A fairly static, perpendicular, concentrating-hard sort of stage presence. 

Interestingly Wendy Fonarow in her excellent study of British indie rock Empire of Dirt talks about "gaze strategies" - how bands, particularly shoegazey bands, similarly project inwardness, "lost in music", an obliviousness to the audience's existence.  This suggests that as much as it comes from shyness and from the need to look down at all those foot peals, the gazing at shoes is an instinctive re-irruption of an Underground era mode of anti-performance.

Slowdive did talk about they were more influenced by Pink Floyd than Sex Pistols. 

RIP David Johansen

 

By way of second-hand tribute, what I believe is the very first serious piece on the New York Dolls - by a Brit (Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth).  

Roy makes the case for the toppermost of the verdicts in that Creem poll based advert as well as anyone ever had.  (There's a second piece below that does the job even better), (More on who exactly Roy was, at the bottom)

This is from July 22 1972!.

bonus piece Roy Hollingworth does a preview of the Dolls tour of the UK 

Melody Maker, November 24th 1973

This is the story of the last rock and roll band. The New York Dolls. There won't be another. They are the last of propellor aircraft. What follows will mean nowt.

For the Dolls… Well, I would travel to Sydney, Australia — for they are the remnants of what it was all about.

Holiday Inn, Atlanta, Georgia. Clarissa was 19 when she first saw the New York Dolls. That was last night at Richards, Atlanta. Now she is 27, and knows everything about everything.

"They were like taking a legal drug man. I thought rock and roll was the Allman Brothers. It ain't. It's the New York Dolls."

After breakfast, and a cup of Chivas Regal whiskey which spread the tongue like acid, I wandered to the hotel bar.

Slaves

Two Georgia musicians sang scenes from Sgt. Pepper. The lead singer sang "How many moles in Blackburn. Lancashire." I laughed, and told him later that they don't have moles in Blackburn but holes.

"Why? said the singer, scratching his checked cowboy/John Wayne/Gene Autrey/Shirt.

"Because moles were banned from Lancashire in 1887 by Henry Plimsoll of Derby, who also invented white painted lines to put around the hulks of ships so they would not sink under the weight of slaves."

Ah! Slaves. Georgia. Where the main percentage of people who serve upon other people are Black. Some civil war!

"I want a slave" said David JoHansen, lead drinker of the Dolls.

It is 3.15 AM and I am stood on a street corner in Atlanta, and it is pouring. I am very wet. But as I wait for a cab, I am very happy.

Happy 'cause I just danced my thighs three inches thinner for the Dolls.

They crawled on stage. Arthur "Glib" Kane, Johnny "Nine Legs" Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Jerry Nolan, and Mr. Ego 1984 David Jo Hansen.

You know, my chums, this band makes Alice Cooper looks like the Bronte Sisters.

In other words, they are awful — in the truest and most beautiful sense of the word. Johnny Thunders left the stage in Chicago the other night and retched into the dressing room table of flowers. Now that is rock and roll.

Bombed

Audience seated sipping large drinks of vodka, mixed with pills and other luxuries.

"The critics really bombed us in Chicago," said David Jo Hansen, lead singer. "But we love criticism. We're not just masochistic about being put down. We're something else."

Lights on. Arthur Kane, bassist, mild as the very finest washing up liquid, stands. Arthur. Blond. He looks like a mutated Marlene Deitrich. But he plugs in and goes blmmm... blmmm... blmmm...

Sylvain Sylvain plays just one bloody chord and the blood runs. And that club moves.

Jo Hansen singing like a newspaper seller. He rips his shirt open and there is a white waistcoat and skin, and he bites the top off a bottle of California wine, and drinks it down, froth, bubbles and all.

And then he sucks the bottle. "WOW" say the girls close to the stage.

But I thought we were all singer songwriters now? I thought rock and roll was over? I thought when John Lennon sang 'All I Want Is The Truth' that it was the end and we'd all start singing Tom Paxton numbers again?

But nay. Here on this stage battles a baggage of balls and trousers and high-heeled shoes; and drunkeness and unwashed hair; and untuned guitars and songs that musicians would call a mess.

But a rock and roll child would say "God Bless You — You are so necessary!"

Rock and roll is sex. And the Dolls played on. And they played sex. Non-stop.

They scratched and broke picks and played licks that were sick and copied and had been played before. But never like this! Never like the Dolls played it.

And then there was the lovely looking lady who shook her lips and danced 'Personality Crisis'.

Robbery

She dances, and falls, and the guys around her laugh. It wasn't funny. I picked her up. The Dolls jive on. Jive like there was never, ever again to be a tomorrow. And in this case there wasn't.

My head aches, with enjoyment. 12-bar boogie, chords struck like a lumberjack struck a tree. Who are we?

There was a television in the lounge. There was a bank robbery this very evening. And you know — this was the worst bank robbery ever. There was a live film of it.

They — the Georgia State Police — put 48 bullets in that robber. And when his body started to fall apart they stopped shooting. We heard the shooting. We saw the body.

Ever and anon, like a cigarette smoker takes a cigarette to his lips, we went back and danced to The Dolls. The Dolls. Now a pigsty of sweaty smell and stale alcohol. But they still play.

No! No messages. No instructions through song! Nothing to think about. Nothing to admire. Few words rhyme, or for that matter mean anything.

But when spewed by David Jo Hansen — then they are rock and roll. No! No protest songs that mean anything. Just... Just... Protest.

The hottest thing I've seen. Hotter than 12 pokers thrust in your eyes. Hotter than Marlene Dietrich — is the New York Dolls.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

images heisted from Kristian Hoffman, original superfan who is much quoted in Shock and Awe

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Who was Roy Hollingworth, apart from being the first writer on either side of the Atlantic to claim huge things for The New York Dolls? 

Richard Williams, his colleague at Melody Maker, in an obituary, pegs him rightly as Nick Kent before Nick Kent: 

Roy Hollingworth, 1949-2002

Richard Williams, The Guardian, 22 March 2002

Several years before a group of New Musical Express staff writers began presenting themselves to their readers in the guise of auxiliary members of rock bands, the Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth became the first English rock critic to look and behave in a way that made him indistinguishable from the musicians who peopled his articles.

Lesser writers adopting such a strategy often made themselves appear fools. But Hollingworth, who has died aged 52, was one of the most colourful and engaging writers employed by the pop music press in the early 1970s. His reviews conveyed a love of the music, while his interviews with the people who made it were often amusing and usually sympathetic to the characters who crossed his path.

Like many writers of that era, he saw his task as one of spreading enthusiasm for music that caught his imagination, and did it with flair. If a more urgent mission to become a rock star himself was less successful, despite occupying significant parts of the past 30 years, undoubtedly he saw it as a more fruitful way of spending his time.

I met Hollingworth in 1965, when we were both in our teens and attending a day-release course in various journalistic skills. Born in Derby, he was educated at Henry Cavendish grammar school.

We were junior newspaper reporters: his the Derby Evening Telegraph, mine the Nottingham Evening Post. When matters involving shorthand, the law for journalists and other elements of tradecraft had been dealt with, it was time to settle down in a coffee bar and discuss the latest visits to the east Midlands of the Who or Jimi Hendrix. Before long, both of us were pestering our editors to allow us space to write about such events.

Early in 1970 we were reunited at the Melody Maker, where half a dozen writers had been engaged by the editor, Ray Coleman, to replace defectors who had left to form a rival weekly, Sounds. The new talent helped boost the paper's circulation to the brink of 200,000 copies during the next few years, and Hollingworth became one of the paper's most distinctive and influential contributors.

An instinctive affinity for a life of hanging out until the early hours at the Speakeasy or the Revolution and of going on the road with bands across Europe and America eased his entry into London's rock society. For a while he and the MM's gifted photographer, Barrie Wentzell, shared a flat above a Soho pizza restaurant. Their convivial instincts and the flat's location, a few steps away from such musicians' hangouts as the Nellie Dean, the Ship, La Chasse and the Marquee, meant that it became a rendezvous for a bunch of rock eccentrics, notably Viv Stanshall and Legs Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

A posting to the Melody Maker's New York office broadened Hollingworth's friendships; it also increased his carousing, in a way that did him few favours in the longer term.

His tastes reflected his personality. The English whimsy to be found in the work of Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan appealed to his slightly fey, hippie-ish side, while the south Wales band Man, and the Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher satisfied a fond ness for unpretentious blue-collar boogie. And his writing, which was loose-jointed, warm-blooded and sometimes joyously surrealistic, in turn reflected the music.

He also cherished the moodier type of singer-songwriter, whose ranks he aspired to join. Leonard Cohen was a particular hero, and during an often-quoted interview in 1973, having discussed the manifold faults and wickednesses of the music business in a mood of gathering gloom, Hollingworth was astonished to hear the Canadian poet suggest: "Make this your last interview. And let's both quit together." Hollingworth took the opportunity to announce Cohen's retirement to the world – somewhat prematurely, as it turned out.

It was during a conversation with John Lennon quite soon afterwards that he began to believe that he could take Cohen's advice seriously. "Cut your hair," the former Beatle allegedly said, "and get a record deal, Roy."

Before long Hollingworth had left the Melody Maker and relocated in New York, where he appeared at the Mercer Arts Center, cradle of the New York Dolls, in front of an audience including David Bowie and Lou Reed. He later formed a band, Roy and the Rams, which included Lenny Kaye, another former critic, who later became Patti Smith's guitarist.

A few years later Hollingworth returned to London, where he eventually released an album, In Your Flesh, produced by his old friend Martin Turner, formerly of Wishbone Ash. He made several tours of Germany and occasionally performed in the back room at the Half Moon in Putney, a renowned rock pub not far from his last home.

Much loved by women, he had many relationships, the last of them with his wife, Anthea, who survives him.

• Roy Hollingworth, musician and journalist, born April 12 1949; died March 9 2002.

Roy on the left with the long hair

Roy at the front with the fake short legs (this whole MM staff shot needs to be wheeled out again for an Old Wave post)

More evidence suggesting that Roy's head was turned around by reading Bangs in Creem -  he suddenly saw Light, the Way and the Truth  (whereas for instance before the Damascene revelation there is a wrongfooted in real-time review of the Stooges debut by Roy, dismissing it as horrid inept noise)

Here it is in fact

The Stooges

Fun House 

(Elektra).

Melody Maker, 26 December 1970

Next to Grand Funk Railroad, this is the worst album I've heard this year. In truth it's a muddy load of sluggish, unimaginative rubbish heavily disguised by electricity and called American rock.

I've heard a few tales about the Stooges. Singer Iggy Pop (that's daft enough) apparently spends evenings throwing himself into the midst of audiences and getting beaten up by the aforesaid tribes of poor people. Well, maybe that's about the best thing you could do to the guy.

Ron Asheton on lead guitar sounds as though he badly injured both hands. There's really no excuse for turning out such bloody rotten stuff.

I'm trying desperately to think of one good think about it — maybe the bass of Dave Alexander offers a little fluent power. But again, in truth, this album only goes to show up the gullible efforts of record companies, and the people who raise such groups to an absurd status.

I'm willing to believe that the stage act is a gas to watch, but on record, EEeecchh!

who's a pretty boy then

One moderately intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if John McKay and Kenny Morris had not quit the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop

For sure, you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the John McGeoch and Budgie version of the band generated.

But equally a bit more of the severe (yet pop punchy, often) early sound would also have been nice.

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

I inadvertently left on the subtitle function when playing this video and before the lyrics start it says "intense postpunk music" - quite!

Well, look, here's a turn-up: some music made by McKay (who, like Morris, more or less disappeared from music after their abrupt departure) - a "lost album", Sixes and Sevens, made not long after leaving the Banshees. You can hear a track now but the whole release is not out until May. 

Release irrationale: 

"The Scream", Siouxsie & the Banshees' first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of 'punk' lingering) and enough hints of what had come even earlier to be, paradoxically, new.

Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, with her unique vocal style and lyrics, but the real star, we've always known, was John McKay, who wrote most of the album's music (as well as singles like "Hong Kong Garden"), creating a wholly new guitar sound - harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating . . . best articulated by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini years later ". . . only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs".

McKay's influence lives on; many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credit him as a major influence - Geordie from Killing Joke, Jim Reid of The Jesus And Mary Chain, U2's The Edge, Thurston Moore, Johnny Marr and even the two guitarists - The Cure's Robert Smith and Magazine's John McGeoch - who followed him in The Banshees. 

McKay's burgeoning status as the anti-guitar hero was halted when he and Banshees drummer Kenny Morris - at odds with Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin - fled the band just after the start of a tour supporting the group's second album, Join Hands. It was a weekly music paper scandal, later the subject of a BBC documentary, and Siouxsie's vitriol working its way into the lyrics of a later Banshees b-side, "Drop Dead / Celebration". Aside from a solitary single on Marc Riley's In Tape label nearly a decade later, no music was heard from McKay again.

So it comes as a major surprise to learn of a pile of excellent recordings made in the years just after he left The Banshees, unheard by all but a very few, some of which feature drummer Kenny Morris, plus Mick Allen from Rema Rema, Matthew Seligman of the Soft Boys and longer-term collaborator Graham Dowdall and John's wife Linda . . . the latter three of whom are now sadly deceased.

Sixes And Sevens is an historic lost album. Brazenly genius and bearing fair claim as the lost treasure of the post-punk era, the album collects eleven studio tracks, carefully mastered from original tapes. It's a masterpiece which best speaks for itself. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Severin's good looking and Siouxsie of course is a forbidding goddess, but in many ways, if you were going to point to a potential pin-up in the original Banshees it would be McKay. 

 

Those lips, that chin, the intense gaze, the Byronic hair. Moody and magnificent. 

If not pop, then - if he'd had more of a voice - McKay could probably have given Pete Murphy or Ian Astbury a run for their money in Goth's idol-atrous stakes.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

from an argument I had with someone about the Banshees: 

....in many ways it's as much sense to see them as a second-wave glam group as it is a postpunk group. 

In that perspective, the Banshees's real peers would not be PiL or Joy Division, but Japan and the John Foxx-era Ultravox - what could be called "late glam". And also Adam and the Ants.

Siouxsie and Severin are intensely invested in the visual and theatrical sides of music. 

I's also interesting that Siouxsie has on at least occasions situated herself in a larger tradition of glamour and showbiz - with the brassy cover of the Mel Torme standard "Right Now" in the Creatures, and then with "Kiss Them For Me" with all the Hollywood glamour goddess references.

.... The two core members met at a Roxy Music concert; their second B-side was a cover of a T. Rex song. When they did Through the Looking Glass, several of the songs covered were from glam-aligned artists. Glam was at their core.... 

tres debonAyers

Some people have compared Kevin Ayers's debonair image to Bryan Ferry - the genuine genteel article as opposed to the faux. Some even see him as a prototype, glam just a little too early

Not sure about that, the music in the first three or four solo albums is nowhere near glam. But I am struck by the use of eye make-up in these Soft Machine appearances

There is another intersection with glam: the theme of decadence, broached by name in this double-edged tribute to Nico, and implicitly in the apocalyptic hedonism of "Song from the Bottom of A Well" - capturing the disillusion / dissolution / dissoluteness of the post-hippy backwash

Watch her out there on display

Dancing in her sleepy way

While all her visions start to play

On the icicles of our decay.

Fading flowers in her hair

She's suffering from wear and tear

She lies in waterfalls of dreams

And never questions what it means.

And all along the desert shore

She wanders further evermore

The only thing that's left to try¡

She says to live I have to die.

She whispers sadly well I might

And holds herself so very tight

Then jumping from an unknown height

She merges with the liquid night.

Lovers wrap her mist in furs

And tell her what she has is hers

But when they take her by the hand

She slips back in the desert sand.

But what she leaves is made of glass

And lovers worship as they pass

Each one says - now she is mine

But all drink solitary wine.

(drink it to Marlene)

This is a song from the bottom of a well

There are things down here
I've got to try and tell;
It's dark and light at the very same time,
The water sometimes seems like wine.

I learned some information way down here
That might fill your heart and soul with fear;
But don't you worry, no don't be afraid
I'm not in the magical mystery trade.

My imagination begins to purr
As things don't happen, they just occur.
Softly crackling electrical smell,
There's something burning at the bottom of this well.

Sitting here alone I just have to laugh
I see all the universe as a comfortable bath;
I drown my body so my mind is free
To indulge in pleasurable fantasies.

There's something strange going on down here
A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear.
A vast corruption that's about to boil
A mixture of greed and the smell of oil.

This is a song from the bottom of a well
I didn't move here, I just fell.
But I'm not complaining, I don't even care
Cause if I'm not here, then it's not there.

Glam can be nutshelled as "illusion and disillusion"....  a reversal, an inside-outing of the Sixties's belief in truth and revolution 

"Oh! Wot A Dream" captures that slide from Sixties inordinate hopes to 70s atomized numbness   - it's an elegiac tribute to friend Syd Barrett but also an entire era. Barrett being the decade's prime casualty, someone who had "too much to dream" 

Oh! you pretty thing - a pop star that should have been but never was....  and in the career slide twilight, he puts out a single titled "Star"

Not to be confused with the earlier much more stellar-sounding 1971 tune that was absurdly thrown away on the B-side of "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes"

"Feel like a million sparkling stars"

More thoughts on our Kev