Deux interviews avec le Joe Strummer filmed for French television’s Rapido from 1988. Each clip has different interview footage with Strummer, but the same archive and performance material.

Strummer enthuses about Shane MacGowan and The Pogues (and is seen performing with the band in concert on “I Fought the Law” and “London Calling”); explains why he writes (like Paul Simon) for his generation; why each young generation should have their own musical revolution; and why Hip-Hop / rap is for “yuppies”.
 

 
Interview part deux avec Mnsr. Strummer, after le jump…
 

 
If you’re new to Dangerous Minds then let me give you a little heads-up: I love all kinds of music and I promote a diverse bunch of bands and artists on this website. But I do have favorites - Nick Cave, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Leonard Cohen, The Clash, Joy Division, Bad Brains, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Arthur Lee, Roky Erickson and The Velvet Underground, are all lovingly and neatly stacked in the mausoleum of my DM archives - along with many unsung, forgotten or once-vilified bands,

Despite the somewhat “classic” collection of bands listed above, I do dig a shitload of new music. But the latest hipster top ten comes and goes as quickly as atrial tachycardia, suddenly accelerating the rock n’ roll heart before the thick bloody muscle kicks back to its old familiar rhythm.

New bands, new music, glide across my digital windshield, linger for a split-second, before the jittery wipers of my ADD thrust the whole sonic mess to the margins of consciousness, to join an ever-growing tidal pool of abandoned one-hit wonders and lost geniuses awash with the splintered wreckage of the good ship Adderall, where nervous little sailors once sang songs by Yeasayer, Interpol and Vampire Weekend.

You can take or leave what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs, it’s just a bunch of linguistic horsehit that writers spew when they talk about rock and roll. If you’ve read Lester Bangs, then you know the sentiment, an intellectual finger fuck leading up to the real fucking deal: the music of an artist that excites by just doing what artists do: being fearless, reckless and challenging themselves. The beauty about rock and roll is no one really took it seriously, so those of us who do have a huge latitude in which to fail. PJ Harvey rarely fails.

PJ performing at Les Eurockéennes Festival in Belfort, France, on 3 July 2004.

01 Uh huh her
02 The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
03 Who the fuck ?
04 The letter
05 Dress06 Evol
07 Perfect day elise
08 Victory
09 You come through
10 The darker days of me and him
11 Down by the water
12 Life and death or Mr. badmouth
13 Good fortune
14 Meet th monsta
15 Cat on the wall
16 Harder
17 Taut
18 Big exit
 

 
Ian Dury looked like he could have been your Dad. Well, that is if your Dad was cool enough to front a band, and write songs that stuck in the head like a needle in the groove. I suppose it was because he looked like an old geezer and sounded like a cab driver that made him look like your Dad, but in truth Ian Dury was the Poet Laureate of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The Cor-Blimey Bard of Pop Poetry, whose exuberant lyrical dexterity at writing short memorable couplets, made him one of music’s best loved and most respected writers and performers.

In 1977, it seemed everyone had or had heard a copy of New Boots and Panties!!, the album that gave Punk and New Wave its very own T S Eliot, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Lear or W H Auden. We went in-and-out of class rooms reciting “Clevor Trever”:

“Just cos I ain’t never ad, no, nothing worth having
Never ever, never ever
You ain’t got no call not to think I wouldnt fall
Into thinking that I ain’t too clever
And it aint not having one thing nor another
Neither, either is it anything, whatever
And its not not knowing that there ain’t nothing showing
And I answer to the name of Trever, however.”

Or, singing “Billericay Dickie”:

“I had a love affair with Nina
In the back of my Cortina
A seasoned up hyena
could not have been more obscener.”

It made a change from singing “Sha-na-na-na-sha-na-na-bop-de-diddle-de-bop, baby.” And if there had been an O’Level in the lyrics of Ian Dury, then we all would have passed ‘A’ band one. It wasn’t just that The Blockheads’ songs were the bollocks, it was Dury, who was the most literary thing that had happened to music since Ron and Russell told us about “Khaki-colored bombardiers…” over Hiroshima, or, Vivian sang “Sport, Sport, masculine sport. Equips a young man for society.”

Here is Ian Dury and The Blockheads with ex-Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson in the line-up giving it their all and then some in Paris 1981.

01. “Wake Up (And Make Love To Me)”
02. “Sink My Boats”
03 “Delusions of Grandeur”
04. “Dance of the Crackpots”
05. “What a Waste”
06. “Hey! Hey! Take Me Away”
07. “Hit Me (With Your Rhythm Stick)”
08. “Sweet Gene Vincent’
 

 
Journalist and author Fiona Russell Powell has uploaded a treasure trove of interviews, which she conducted during the 80s, to her website, and they make for some fascinating reading.

Featuring a host of musicians, writers and actors, many of these interviews were originally published in the British style bible The Face, which ceased publication in 2004. Among them are Andy Warhol, Irvine Welsh, Simon Le Bon, Marc Almond, Martin Amis, Oliver Reed, Mick Jagger and many more. While they’re all people who have made an impact on pop culture in one form or another, they’re also people who are interesting for more than just their fame.

This is my favourite so far, an interview with August Darnell, aka Kid Creole, with a preface that states:

The night Fiona Russell Powell joined August Darnell for a late late dinner date ran into the morning of the Kid’s 32nd birthday and the day the Kensington Hilton caught fire.

Here’s a (relatively) brief taster:

At 9.30 sharp, as a hot August evening begins to cool down, enter the heroine in a Monroe dress. Temperatures rise, voices subside, the ravishing reporter wiggles her way across the not-so-plush lobby of the Kensington Hilton Hotel, a structure unaccountably situated in Shepherd’s Bush and presents herself to the discreetly non-camp manager filing his nails behind the reception desk. The rendezvous, a dinner date for two, has been arranged with our hero Kid Creole, the pseudonymous alter ego of the 32 year old Bronx(ian) showman August Darnell.

Room 5068. Fiona knocks and waits. No response. She can hear a telephone ringing unanswered inside. The Kid is not at home. Ill-tempered, she returns to the foyer downstairs. The Kid is paged but fails to show. Fiona waits, and waits some more, deciding not to hang around this joint any longer when, out of the corner of a Fabulash-ed eye she sees Taryn, of the Coconuts or more specifically The Babes, cruise across the parquet in full war paint.

Before long our reporter is in the Hilton’s mock baroque dining room, in the company of a small, curl-haired Negro-esque gentleman in turquoise trousers and chinoise t-shirt who is introduced as Greg Ward, tour manager, aide de camp and personal bodyguard to The Kid.

” Hey babe, sorry we’re so en retarde.’ says this former captain in American Intelligence. “The Kid’s just got back from a photo session that took us all goddam day and he’s upstairs changing his suit. How about a drink in my room while we’re waiting?”

...

[Eventually she does meet the Kid, and the interview proper begins]

...

What was your reaction to the Falklands War?

The Falklands War is a fairy tale actually. The most unfortunate thing about it is that people had to die. If you can forget for a moment that people died. I think it was the most ludicrous thing that I have witnessed in the last 20 years. I think it was an event which should have been prevented. As for my opinion on what side was right—I will restrain from voicing any opinion until I’ve seen the video tape of the war.

On your travels so far, which country have you enjoyed visiting most to date?

It has to be Switzerland because it’s the antithesis of America. It’s everything that America isn’t. I really like England, it’s great every time I come here I always have a good time. If New York were to blow up tomorrow and I had to move, it would be to London for sure. The worst place that I’ve been to, or rather the place where I had the worst experience was in Copenhagen because some asshole broke into my hotel room and tried to molest my wife. This was during the last tour.

You can read the rest of the interview here. To read more of these, visit Fiona Russell Powell’s interviews archive on her website.

Thanks to Simone Hutchinson.

 
This is a post from our guest-blogger, Peter Choyce of KXLU radio in Los Angeles

I’m surprised how few people nowadays (well, Americans anyway) have heard the ROCK OPERA version of War of the Worlds. The timeless classic, penned by HG Wells over a century ago and adapted by Orson Welles into a radio play in the late 1930s that drove people on the east coast bonkers, also enjoyed a life on vinyl, double vinyl, even, before becoming a musical play.

Orchestrated by Jeff Wayne (Not ELO’s Jeff LYNNE as I once thought) the piece has its base in prog rock stylings but with a classical string section, too. Recorded in 1977 and released in ‘78, the album boasts such talents of the day as Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues, David Essex, Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, and even featured a deep-throated narration by Richard Burton.

The lyrics are by Gary Osborne (who wrote a lot for Sir Elton) and lets not forget to mention contributions from Chris Spedding, Manfred Mann’s Chris Thompson and Evita’s Julie Covington as the damsel in distress.

AOR radio stations in the US played the single from the LP, “Forever Autumn,” back in the day and rotated it respectably like it was a new single from the Moody Blues. Hayward’s number was pleasant enough but it was really the anomaly, having little to do with the album’s narrative and deep, haunting theme. “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one…but still, THEY COME!” was heard all over the LP but was not part of the “pretty” song—the only song anyone here really remembers.

However, the LP sold hundreds of thousands of copies in other countries and spend a mighty 290 weeks in the UK top 100, a feat surpassed only by Dark Side of the Moon. It had a snazzy booklet with artworks by Peter Goodfellow and others that propelled the story along. I ripped the book apart so I could hang the pictures of the aliens on my wall in my teenage room.

David Essex, best—and perhaps only—known stateside for his “Rock On” hit, does a good job acting in the dramatic scenes and also sings lead on many of the tracks. Essex has always been popular in his homeland, a one-time member of the Royal Opera who recorded a number of pretty cool records that never really made it out of the UK. Most of the songs clock in at more than eight mins. All good prog rock need to take their time ‘specially when there is so much going on with the whole world to burn up and conquer before ultimately succumbing to Earth’s atmosphere and dying oh-so-ignominiously.

Perhaps the best part of the record is how the Martians are embedded into the score. Using a decidedly Wagnerian technique, they appear as leitmotifs, which in this case are synthesized repetitions of key sounds. Their musical voice is anguished and misunderstood. The arrangement is real spooky and way scarier than that old radio broadcast that allegedly drove a few gullible New Jersyites to suicide.

Like Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar before it, in 2006, War of the Worlds was turned into a live musical spectacular that has toured the world, and also a video game. An updated release will surface later this month under the title War of the Worlds “The New Generation” with a couple of new songs, more attention paid to the script and Liam Neeson taking over for Richard Burton as the narrator/journalist.

For now I encourage you to clicky the linky below. You’ll be glad you did.  It’s the original LP from 1978 in its entirety.  The whole thing.  Quite scrumptious.
 

 
This is a post from our guest-blogger, Peter Choyce of KXLU radio in Los Angeles

 
A bootleg of an early version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s groundbreaking 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts can be downloaded at the My Wall of Tapes blog. Note that his boot has a different track listing from the “Ghosts” bootleg that has been in wide circulation since the early 1990s.

Interestingly, the blogger there mentions that his source for this tape was none other than David Byrne himself:

it is a pre release version of david byrnes first solo album, which was given me by david, when i stayed at his place in alfabet city, in 1981, i distinctly remember that there were two ukrainian funeral homes in the street.

There are several other tapes of Talking Heads studio and live rarities (and much more) at My Wall of Tapes, so maybe the provenance described is accurate.

I wonder if the neat-freak printing on the card below is David Byrne’s?

In any case, I’m still downloading it. My Wall of Tapes has some amazing stuff, check it out.
 

 

 
Manchester mouthbreathers Candy Flip flirted briefly with stardom when they released this excruciating version of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Brain-addled ravers turned this into a hit in 1990 - proof that anything sounds good after ingesting a fistful of ecstasy followed by a strip of blotter acid and a vodka and Red Bull chaser.

When the Madchester lads sing “let me take you down” they fucking mean it.

More tambourine, please.
 

 
Radiohead’s entire set at this year’s Bonnaroo fest.

01 Bloom
02 15 Step
03 Kid A
04 Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
05 Staircase
06 The Daily Mail
07 I Might Be Wrong
08 The Gloaming
09 Separator
10 Nude
11 Morning Mr. Magpie
12 Identikit
13 Lotus Flower
14 There There
15 Karma Police
16 Feral
17 Idioteque
18 You And Whose Army?
19 House Of Cards
20 Supercollider (dedicated to Jack White)
21 Bodysnatchers
22 True Love Waits / Everything In Its Right Place
23 Give Up The Ghost
24 Reckoner
25 Paranoid Android

I suggest you watch in 720p.
 

 
Wim de Bie wants to fuck you…and then give you a deep tissue massage with his ears.

“I will fuck you in the backseat
Of my newest car
I will fuck you in the toilet
Of a well-distinguished bar”
 

 
John Boswell, the musician and producer behind the Symphony of Science, a musical project devoted to educating people about science through music, has put a psychedelic spin on Mr. Rodgers in this trippy little video.

Rogers’ cosmic perspective finds the magic in the ordinary.