anti-theatricality in rock (and a little bit of pro-theatricality in rock)

(from Viv Albertine's memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music, Boys. Boys. Boys.)

 

Dennis DeYoung of Styx, early '80s NME interview

Oooh talking about Mr Roboto's

Numan actually had giant robots on stage in one of his superstar-era tours, didn't he? 

fragments from Rip It Up and the research: 

Critics, possibly disconcerted by the way Numan had bypassed the music press en route to the top of the charts, unjustly pegged him as a Bowie Xerox. They sourced Numan’s image in Bowie’s aristocratic alien from The Man Who Fell To Earth and his sound in Low. But what he actually derived from Bowie was less specific: the art of creative synthesis, or as Numan put it with characteristic and admirable frankness, “plagiarism”--weaving together an original identity out of pilfered bits and bobs. He also inherited glam rock’s penchant for theatre and spectacle. Punk’s “anti-hero thing” and back-to-basics simplicity were   “against everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Numan told NME. He didn’t believe in “being the same as the audience”;  he liked distance, a literally physical gulf between the stage and the crowd. His tours featured stunning lighting, set design, and even robots. “Showbiz for showbiz’s sake more than anything…”  Numan told Sounds. ”I think I’m just taking it back to cabaret.” 

He even does a version of ‘On Broadway’ in his set. 

Numan doesn’t like venues without seats - likes a gulf between stage and audience, an orchestra pit preferably.

Numan on leaving behind punk:

“The anti-hero thing could never happen because this country has always had the heroes, it always will do-- I think it’s a very English thing to make heroes… I never agreed with coming on and being the same as the audience, I never liked that side of it.” 

“I very rarely write about ordinary things”

“I don’t see the point in singing about things which are happening every day. I don’t want to go out and listen to a bloke prattling on about how terrible it is living on the dole”

"I don't mind contrived things. cos if something's contrived it shows that someone has gone out and thought about something and worked for it.... Commendable, isn't it?"

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 and politics : MAGlamA + K-pop

Interesting piece titled "In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA" by Inae Oh at Mother Jones.  It's about plastic-surgery trends among Republican politicians - the rise of what's been called Mar-a-Lago-face.

She starts by looking at a piece of political theater from January 29, an ICE round-up of undocumented immigrants in New York. A clip of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem talking tough in the Bronx was widely circulated. "She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings.... Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a 'spectacle''.... Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd."

Inae Oh notes that Noem is just one of a number of women - and the occasional man - who on entering Trump's orbit underwent "striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.” 

And then there's the cosmetic surgery, the veneers, fillers and Botox-style injectables.   "What distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face... is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon... described it"

It's a reversal of the trend for plastic surgery that is subtle and barely perceptible: here, you want the work done to be glaringly visible. "The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt."

Quoted in the piece, a professor of art history, Anne Higonnet, diagnoses the trend as "a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters... These women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor, is also quoted arguing that the hyper-femininity reinforces the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity....  It reaffirms the femininity of women even if they have power” in the form of a cabinet appointment, administrative power within the Republican Party, or an influential media position. (Although Laura Loomer went too far for even Trump in terms of her worked-over appearance).  The trend thus magically reconciles empowering ambition and  conformist submission in a grand American conservative tradition going back to Phyllis Schlafly.

Horrorshow graphic accompanies the piece, combining the fleshiness and the laceration into a single arresting image. The face shards themselves become the knives. 

The pleased-to-meat-you quality of this collage reminds me of this stuff Americans call "headcheese"  (what an offputting name!) and what we Brits know as "brawn" -  discarded meat bits suspended in jelly, like a paperweight you can eat. 

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Incidentally the writer Inae Oh has Korean ancestry and winds up the piece  with talking about her visits to hyper-capitalist South Korea, "the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things."

This inevitably reminded me of K-Pop, which I wrote about in S+A as a form of digi-glam:

South Korean group GLAM – it stands for Girls Be Ambitious - release their third single “In Front of the Mirror”. They’re just one of scores of K-pop acts whose sound mashes together elements of R&B, rap, and Euro club sounds. Video-wise, there’s a similar whirl of decontextualised signifiers: dance-moves and clothing and fetish-objects from skateboarding, Goth/emo, Disney, ballet, ghetto fabulous, dystopian science fiction, fetish wear, retro-vintage, and a dozen more style dialects.  Luxury rubs against the militaristic, American sports juxtapose with Japanese imperial uniforms.  Androgyny is a big element in K-pop – but only for the boys, whose already-perfect skin is digitally sanded to a ceramic glisten. The girls are as hyper-femme as Nicki Minaj’s Harajuku Barbie (probably inspired by K-pop or its Japanese counterpart, J-pop). Perhaps the most intriguing thing about K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters is its lack of exoticism. Barely perceptible quirks of cultural distance creep in here and there, but for the most part it’s a mirror image of Britney and One Direction type pop, a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. Half-sweatshop, half sweetshop, South Korea’s audiovideo industry churns out the ultimate in digiglam:  eye candy /ear candy so denatured and ultrabrite it’s hard to hold onto the idea that there is a “real” behind the pixie-dust pixels flickering over your eyeballs. Watching G-Dragon or 2NE1 miniaturised on a phone or hand-held, it feels even more like transmissions from some fairy tale world.

Talking about "K-pop’s cachet with a select bunch of Western hipsters"

It struck me that getting into K-pop is really the crack stage of poptimism. 

You started with a few sneaky white lines of Spice Girls and Britney Spears.

Then you're freebasing all kinds of boybands and girlgroups hatched in the managerial lab, choreographed to within an inch of their lives.

And then crack - that is K-Pop.

And perhaps hyperpop (blank as it tries to be, there's meta-intent lurking in there behind the faces - it's simulation pop, there's that tell-tale whiff of art school). 

Whereas K-pop is art-less -  just a hard hard hit of plastic-surface thrill-power, purely mercenary in its motivations, and as devilishly targeting the pleasure centers as the makers of soft drinks and crisps engineering "bliss points" and super-crunch into their products. 

Just as cocaine users (and the same applies for most other drugs, to be fair) don't care about the means by which the powder reaches their nostrils...  narco-cartels and gang warfare, mules and exploited coca peasants, likewise your K-Pop addict doesn't think about how the sausage gets made (high-pressure, suicides, discarded lives). 

Beyond crack? That would be anime popstars that have no physical existence at all. Vocaloids and whatever AI is coming up with next. 

Make-up with no face behind it, motion retouching without anything there in the first place to retouch or tint .... 

It's less exploitative because there's nobody there to be exploited. 

 

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.

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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!