John Peel’s record collection, described as “one of the most revered record collections in the world”, will soon be made available as part of an interactive online museum, funded by the BBC and the Arts Council. The John Peel Center for Creative Arts and its project partner Eye Film and Television have been granted funding for the project and given exclusive access by the family to Peel’s personal record collection, which includes over 25,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and many thousands of CDs.
Frank Prendergast of Eye Film and Television said in a press release:
“The idea is to digitally recreate John’s home studio and record collection, which users will be able to interact with and contribute to, whilst viewing Peel’s personal notes, archive performances and new filmed interviews with musicians.”
Sheila Ravenscroft, Peel’s wife and Patron of the John Peel Centre for Creative Arts said:
“We’re very happy that we’ve finally found a way to make John’s amazing collection available to his fans, as he would have wanted. This project is only the beginning of something very exciting.”
The project will run from May to October across PCs, smartphones, tablets, internet connected TVs and will also be available as a red button, video on demand service via Freeview HD. Read the full press release here.
While we look forward to hearing Mr Peel’s fine collection of discs, here is a little something he made earlier, Rock Bottom, a short and horrifying music show on the worst records/songs ever performed on Top of the Pops. Made as part of the BBC’s TV Hell night in 1992, this show reveals the horrific truth that these ghastly records (Jimmy Osmond, The Wurzels, Black Lace) represent the public’s taste in popular music more than Peel’s favored Captain Beefeheart, Frank Zappa or even his beloved Undertones ever did. O, the horror, the horror.
In 1987, the B-52s produced an incredible public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) with the late NYC-based video artist Tom Rubnitz (best known for the “Strawberry Shortcut” and “Pickle Surprise” videos) and several of their closest famous friends. The colorful tableau vivant recreated the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover with the flowers spelling out “Be Alive”
Along with the B-52s, you’ll see Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik, Allen Ginsbeg, Dancenoise, “voguing” pioneer Willi Ninja, Nile Rodgers, Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, Mink Stole, ABC’s David Yarritu, “Frieda the Disco Doll,” John Kelly as the Mona Lisa, Lady Bunny, performance artist Mike Smith, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne and then-wife Adelle Lutz, model Beverly Johnson, NYC “It Girl” Dianne Brill and Quentin Crisp among many others.
If this isn’t eighties enough for you already, note the presence of “Randee of the Redwoods” (comedian Jim Turner) the acid-fried MTV “presidential candidate.”
This soulful 1963 documentary directed by Dietrich Wawzyn and shot in gorgeous black and white for German TV takes us to the roadhouses, churches, pool halls and streets of the American south where something deep, powerful and poetic found expression in the blues, jazz, gospel and rock and roll. If one were to look for the spiritual core of the USA, direct your eyes and ears to the music and artists presented in this film.
On The Road Again reminds us of a world familiar and yet distant, a place that will never exist again but persists at the edges of our consciousness like the insistent memory of an old lover stuttering in the sprockets of memory’s dysfunctional machine, an America vaguely recalled which has been buried under a tacky facade called “America,” composed of viral shopping malls, endless interstates and cookie cutter suburbs that cover our land like a scab made of plastic and plywood.
The movie moves with a grace, energy and rhythm that echoes the music it documents. We follow the camera eye as it captures…
[...] Mance Lipscomb singing “Goin’ Down Slow” on his front porch in Navasota, then follows piano player Buster Pickens as he leads the film crew through Houston dives and pool halls looking for other musicians. They locate Lightnin’ Hopkins in a garage partaking in a game of chance, and Hop Wilson playing bluesy steel guitar in Miss Irene’s Tavern. In Dallas-Fort Worth piano player Whistlin’ Alex Moore whistles along to a rolling boogie woogie, and B.K. Turner, who recorded in the 1930s as Black Ace, plays his signature tune on lap top National steel guitar.
In San Francisco, Lowell Fulsom, one of the foremost shapers of West Coast blues is filmed, then across the Bay King Louis H. Narcisse, the spiritual leader of the Mt. Zion faith, at his Oakland temple leads his congregation in stirring gospel rockers like “Let It Shine.” Heading east, Rev. Louis Overstreet brings the gospel to the winos, gamblers, and the down and out on the streets of Tucson, Arizona.
In the shadow of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, the Blind James Campbell String Band, one of the few traditional black string bands ever filmed, plays “John Henry.” At the easternmost point of the journey, J.E. Mainer and his family band play the fiddle breakdown, “Run Mountain” in Concord, North Carolina.
Celebrated New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis is filmed at the newly opened Preservation Hall playing “Royal Garden Blues” and a plaintive version of “Burgundy Street Blues,” which is enriched by images of French Quarter street life. Piano player Sweet Emma Barrett gives a rough barrelhouse treatment to “I Ain’t Gonna give Nobody None of my Jelly Roll,” and the Eureka Brass Band plays at a funeral in the New Orleans tradition.
We need to keep the connection to the richness of our cultural traditions. Without them, what we call America is a projection of what corporations want us to see…an advertisement for our lesser nature, a culture composed of instant obsolescence and the lust for things we don’t need. Without music, art and a sense of the sacred, we are doomed to an existence as one dimensional as the reflection staring back at us from the flat screen TV in a dead man’s bedroom, where desolation and spiritual deprivation cast their shadows against our flesh like the wings of giant phosphine bats.
Forget the naked lunch that progress has placed on your plate and feast on this:
The Kraftwerk shows (April 10–17, 2012) at The Museum Of Modern Art are completely sold out and fans of the band are pissing and moaning about the shortsightedness of the shows organizers. The general consensus is that the performances should have taken place in a much larger venue than the museum…Madison Square Garden, for instance. In addition, a computer glitch made it impossible for people to get tickets online.
Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition.
People who tried to obtain tickets via the Internet were stuck in computer hell.
Fans hoping to score tickets to one of Kraftwerk’s eight performances at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in April have, by and large, found themselves flat out of luck. The site hosting the ticket sales, Showclix, seems to have experienced a massive technical fail – with users reporting the site failing to load, experiencing time outs and keeping them trapped in an unmoving queue.
Someone with a wicked sense of humor responded to the debacle with the following video.
“You know you talk so hip man! You’re twistin’ my melon man!”
Although, of course, they are still well-loved and known as one of the two defining bands (along with The Stone Roses) of the so-called “Madchester” rave era in the UK, for the majority of American rock fans, Happy Mondays are seen more as early 90s British one-hit-wonders for “Step On” and just that. For a brief spell they looked set to breakthrough here, too, with their incredible third album, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, but that never happened. Today, in the US, Happy Mondays are no better recalled than, say, the Soup Dragons or Jesus Jones, something you might see flipping past Vh1 Classics.
I had the good fortune to see Happy Mondays do one of the greatest live sets, like, fucking ever, at the Sound Factory in New York in 1990. The Sound Factory was a legendary dance club catering mostly to black and Latino gay men. Hallowed House music DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez spun there and the place was known the world over for having one of the most insanely powerful, bass-heavy sound systems that you could ever possibly experience at top volume while tripping your face off on Ecstasy. It was the sort of place where the bar sold mostly bottled water and the crowd spilled out into the streets as the sun was coming up. Although not generally thought of as a live music venue, the Sound Factory seemed to be THE place where all of the British “Acid House” and rave-related groups wanted to play when they came to New York in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
Dee-lite were the (perfect) opening act and they killed it, as they always did (I saw them dozens of times during that era), leaving the E’d up crowd good and energized for the headliner’s set. The Mondays came out and absolutely blew the roof off the place. From the minute they walked onstage, hundreds of joints were lit up and with that crazy Sound Factory BASS moving the crowd as one, it was a high-energy, you had to be there to believe it experience. It was you might say, a memorable evening of music being made for people on drugs by people who were on drugs themselves. A crazy good time was had by all and this was on a week night!
As far as rock shows go, their druggy, trippy, shamanistic set was a triumph by any standard and the Happy Mondays must’ve felt like they were the kings of New York that night. They were! From low-level Manchester hoodlums and drug dealers to the top of the pops at home and being welcomed as heroes in New York City? What an experience that must have been for them.
But it didn’t last long. Singer/lyricist/ringleader Shaun Ryder—whose surreal wordplay Factory Records boss Tony Wilson compared to W.B. Yeats—was deep into a heroin habit that turned into crack addiction in Barbados as the band recorded Yes, Please! the follow-up to Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads. The idea was to get Ryder to a place where drugs would be difficult for him to find… like Barbados?
Chris and Tina usually get the blame for Yes, Please! but believe me when I tell you that when I saw Happy Mondays around the time of that album’s release—I think it was at the Manhattan Center that time—they were but a hollowed-out shell of the scrappy, confident to the point of being arrogant group from just a few months prior. In contrast to the Sound Factory gig, this time The Mondays performed what could barely be called a perfunctory set, standing under a large neon sign that said “DRUGS” in chunky letters. To say that they seemed “tired” or “uninspired” would be too kind, they were like burnt-out ghouls. They were fucking horrible! The best thing about the show was that neon sign.
Nevertheless, through tabloid drama, drink, drugs, reality TV, more drink, more drugs and a guest spot on the classic Gorillaz single, “Dare,” Shaun Ryder inexplicably lives on. A few weeks ago it was announced that the band’s original line-up would reform for some UK tour dates in 2012.
For those of you who might’ve missed out on their charms back in the day, here’s a sampling of classic Happy Mondays from, uh… when they were peaking…
Chris Jagger presents a short film on Michael Joseph and his famous photo-shoot of The Rolling Stones’, for their Beggars Banquet album at Swarkestone Hall Pavilion, in 1968. Though Joseph’s photographs are now considered “among the best ever” taken of The Stones, a dispute between the band and their record label saw a plain R.S.V.P. invitation card used for the cover, which was later replaced by the infamous photograph of a graffiti-covered toilet.
A selection of Michael Joseph‘s Rolling Stones photos can be viewed here.
Drag superstar Alexia Twister recreates Madonna’s entire Super Bowl spectacle in Brazilian gay club Victoria Haus - a rather amazing feat considering this show was probably produced with less money than the cost of Cee Lo’s dressing room deli tray.
Neil Young sitting on a sidewalk in Glasgow back in 1976 singing the “Old Laughing Lady” and playing his banjo as people file past him with little clue as to who this longhaired hippie is.
When Dangerous Minds’ contributor Paul Gallagher shared a shorter version of this video last year, he wrote…
[...] Hoots mon! Rare film of Neil Young busking in Glasgow city center, April 1 1976, prior to headlining at the city’s legendary Apollo Theater later that night.
Mr Young performed outside Glasgow’s Central Station, on Gordon Street, where he sang “Old Laughing Lady”. Because of the date - All Fool’s Day - it has been suggested that Mr Young was carrying out his own practical joke for the benefit of those lucky denizens of the Dear Green Place.”
The photo above of Kraftwerk popped up on my friend Justin Strauss’s Facebook page. I loved the energy in the picture, the mix of uptown, downtown, black and white, and was curious about its history. So I asked Justin if he knew anything regarding the genesis of the photograph. He did indeed.
A deejay, musician and producer (he did a dance mix of one of my songs back in the 80s), Justin describes the night Laura Levine snapped the picture :
Everyone in New York was buzzing about this show. Krarftwerk had not played in the city since an early tour in the 70’s, and by this point, in the summer of 1981, their influence was huge.
I was lucky enough to be one of the main dj’s at the Ritz club. Night after night, the most amazing talent played in that place and I would dj before and after the shows. I mean everyone from Prince, U2, Depeche Mode, Human League, Public Image Ltd (I dj’d at this legendary show as well), Tina Turner, on and on. I had the best seat in the house, the dj booth at the Ritz.
When it was announced that Kraftwerk would play two shows there in support of their newly released “Computer World” album, I flipped. So excited to be able to see this show.
It did not disappoint. I invited as many of my dj friends as I could over the course of the two nights. Afrika Bambaataa, Francois K., Ivan Ivan, Larry Levan all hung out as we watched Kraftwerk’s amazing performance.
It was the first tour they used the Kraftwerk “dummies”, and the whole theme and set design was some sort of U-Boat feel to it if I remember correctly. When they performed their song “Pocket Calculator” Florian came out to the audience and let the crowd press the buttons on the small keyboard he held in his hand.
The show and the music were ground breaking and anyone who was there could not help but be totally mesmerized and influenced by what they saw and heard. I"m glad I was one of them.
Levine’s photo and Justin’s remembrance ultimately led me to the documentary Krautrock - The Rebirth Of Germany. Did Walt Whitman imagine a future world where machines and men would blissfully merge when he joyously exclaimed “I SING the Body electric?”
Nina Simone was born 79 years ago today, on February 21st 1933. Next year will mark the tenth anniversary of her passing, but for now let’s remember one of the greatest artists of the last century with her jaw-dropping performance of Morris Albert’s “Feelings” from her controversial set at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976. Nina looks stoned here, and apparently she didn’t feel the crowd at this show were reacting appropriatley, explaining some of the tense spoken word interuptions. Still, if any doubts exist about Nina Simone’s skill or talent, watch this clip then tell me she is not one of the great artists of modern times:
Nina Simone “Feelings” Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, 1976
, but that never happened. Today, in the US, Happy Mondays are no better recalled than, say, the Soup Dragons or Jesus Jones, something you might see flipping past Vh1 Classics.
