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Halloween Jack was a real cool cat: New Bowie books for the holidaze
12.01.2023
05:42 am
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This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg.

(Authors note: This feature was meant to be accompanied by an interview with the artist Mark Wardel, but sadly, due to ill health, this has not been possible. We wish him the speediest of recoveries.)

Doubtless, there are naysayers who may wonder whether the world needs yet another book dedicated to David Bowie, a man whose many lives and multifaceted career have been exhaustively, though not always accurately, scrutinised over the past six decades. The Bowie shelf in the Rock and Pop Hall of Records is as prodigious as any, and it’s tricky to find a new angle on an artist who was a genre unto himself or discover any unexplored territory that hasn’t already been charted.

For the faithful, there remains a vain hope that his dutiful personal assistant, Corinne “Coco” Schwab, may one day share her memories of the man she devoted her life to. But, as the years pass, this looks unlikely to happen. Still, two new book releases underscore why Bowie remains such an endlessly fascinating and eternally elusive subject. A one-man cultural revolution whose protean influence impacted all the creative arts; whose sway cut across all strata of society: from gutter punks to members of European royalty.

For new/latecomers, David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980, by Jérôme Soligny, presents a comprehensive guide, concentrating mostly on the decade Bowie musically, artistically and creatively owned; when the release of a new album by him was treated as a cultural event. As a veteran journalist for the French music bible Rock & Folk, Soligny interviewed ‘the Guv’nor’ many times over the years, and, as a fellow recording artist, he developed a friendship not only with his subject but with Tony Visconti and Mike Garson, too, who both provide flattering forwards.

Soligny sets up each chapter with an authoritative opening salvo from the Duke himself regarding each era, and then, in a workmanlike fashion, proceeds to document the year each landmark album was recorded, as well as all the creative offshoots, groundbreaking spectacles and social-cultural shockwaves that sprung from them. He then hands things over to the musicians and cohorts, famous fans and influencers who contributed to or were inspired by them, in an oral history that fleshes out the details.

For long-time disciples, this is already well-trodden ground, but there are nuggets sprinkled throughout including several surprising revelations. For instance, the book claims the look of the Droogs in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was inspired by a photograph the director saw of The Riot Squad, the beat combo Bowie joined for a short-lived spell in 1967, which, if true, provides a neat slice of sartorial symmetry considering the Droogs inspired the early attire of Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars.

Hermione Farthingale, Bowie’s first great love, talks expansively about their time together and finally breaks her silence regarding the two bittersweet ballads he wrote about her on the Space Oddity album. Liverpool poet and Scaffold member, Roger McGough, is chuffed to learn that his poem, ‘At Lunchtime—A Story of Love,’ may have partially inspired ‘Five Years’. Ed Sanders is equally touched that Bowie was a Fugs fan and included Tales of Beatnik Glory in his list of 100 favorite books. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/01/11/david-bowies-top-100-books

We hear about the real-life inspiration for the feral ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.’ Donovan (who covered the Diamond Dogs cut, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me’) recounts the improbable time Bowie successfully negotiated with local union officials to allow the ‘Sunshine Superman’ singer to play a concert in Boston in 1974. Mary Hopkin admits she always hated the “twee” intro she sang on ‘Sound and Vision,’ but concedes it’s become “iconic” now. And there’s also a little more info regarding the momentous occasion when Major Tom touched base with Hendrix.

Charges of plagiarism (which Bowie freely copped to, outing himself as a “tasteful thief”) are given when the author highlights the glaring similarities between the Bowie-scored Iggy number, ‘Tiny Girls,’ and the late 60s French chanson, ‘D’aventures en aventures’ by Serge Lama.

But his further assertions that the main two-chord motif in Billy Swan’s ‘I Can Help’ inspired ‘TVC15,’ and the “Heroes” closer, ‘The Secret Life of Arabia,’ is derived from ‘Cokane In My Brain,’ by reggae artist Dillinger, are a stretch and sound far less persuasive.

On the critical side, Soligny’s Gallic-tinged prose can sometimes veer into the purple, and he issues several statements that beg to be disputed. For example, Bowie’s responses to Dick Cavett during his wired TV interview are most certainly not “gibberish,” as he contends, and describing Aleister Crowley as “The father of modern Satanism,” is equally questionable. (On that same subject, the two Only Ones tracks Soligny cites as “Crowley-inspired,” ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Whole of the Law,’ have, in reality, nothing to do with Old Crow himself other than their titles.) And, despite what’s written, ‘Look Back in Anger’ was never part of the setlist on The Glass Spider Tour. 

But most egregious of all is his completely cockeyed claims that, between 1979-1984, Bowie left behind his “poster-boy image” and pointedly underplayed his physical beauty, and that the eighties “would not be his decade.” This flies in the face of the fact that in the wake of the huge commercial successes of Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance, Bowie only reinforced his status as the most glamorous pin-up on the planet, with an unprecedented, new-found popularity, bolstered by an entirely new generation of fans who’d come of age and latched onto his music, even though, unlike his previous work, both albums were now front-loaded with the best material.

One thing that will seriously disappoint the diehards is the photographic selection, as most will already be over-familiar with it, but that certainly isn’t true of David Bowie and Cracked Actor: The Fly in The Milk, a sumptuously illustrated behind-the-scenes account of the greatest rockumentary of them all.

Filmed by Alan Yentob for the BBC’s arts programme Omnibus, in August and September 1974, Cracked Actor remains a riveting study of Bowie as he breaks America wide open while performing in the guise of his elegantly wasted persona, Halloween Jack, during his celebrated Diamond Dogs Tour of that year.

Those familiar with the documentary will know the subtitle of the book alludes to one of the many quotable lines uttered by Bowie throughout the film. Asked by Yentob how he feels, submerged in the idioms of America, Bowie gazes down into the milk carton he’s holding and amusingly relates his situation to that of “a fly floating around in my milk. It’s a foreign body in it, you see, and he’s getting a lot of milk (chuckles). That’s kind of how I feel: a foreign body here, and I couldn’t help but soak it up.”

The idea for the book was suggested by the artist Mark Wardel to his co-author, Susan Compo, as a prequel to Earthbound, her 2017 study on the making of The Man Who Fell To Earth, which he contributed to. This made perfect sense considering one rapt viewer of the documentary was that film’s director Nicholas Roeg, who realized he’d found in Bowie the perfect entity to portray the lead in his next picture.

Wardel has been obsessed with the documentary ever since it was first aired, and the book showcases his portraits of Bowie from this era, which are as soigné and fierce as the man himself. It also boasts over a dozen never-before-seen concert shots, and the project was given a decisive boost when Yentob came on board and opened his archive up to them, revealing interviews and backstage scenes that never made the cut.
 

What you like is in the limo! Bowie captured by Mark Wardel.

For Bowiephiles the book is an absolute treat, and, among its many highlights is the full transcript of the combative TV news interview that opens the film, which not only confirms that the reporter, Wayne Satz, was even more dickish than the excerpt shown suggests, but underlines just how alarmed—and alarmist—mainstream America was by Bowie at the time. Mind you, as the book later details, some members of a BBC viewing panel were equally aghast, particularly after watching Bowie snogging a skull while embodying the Hollyweirdo-meets-Hamlet sleaze-meister from Cracked Actor.
 

 
One intriguing unused scene featured Bowie and Yentob watching a private screening of James Dean: The First American Teenager, in the presence of the film’s producer, David Puttman, and its director, Ray Connolly. Bowie saw definite parallels between himself and Dean, especially their shared sexual mystique, and was touched when Elizabeth Taylor told him he reminded her of her Giant co-star. And, in the documentary, she’s captured arriving at the Diamond Dogs concert in Anaheim, keen to enlist Bowie to play her leading man in the ill-fated dud, The Blue Bird. (Bowie would go on to model Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause garb and haircut during his epic, one and only appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1980, which brought the house down.)

A transcript is then shared of a remarkable conversation between Bowie and Puttman who relays how the actor James Fox recently quit the business having been dealt a personal blow following the death of his father. Bowie empathises and admits his own father’s passing had a similar effect on his career (which may help explain why he failed to follow up ‘Space Oddity’ with another hit for several years). Bowie then makes the bombshell claim that, back in the late 60s, he visited the Kray twins in Brixton prison, accompanied by Fox, who wanted to draw upon them for his gangster role in Performance.
 

Halloween Jack in profile, by Mark Wardel.

August provided a month-long break for the tour, during which Bowie decamped to Sigma Sound Studio in Philadelphia, to record the first sessions of what would become Young Americans. When the second leg of the tour reconvened in September, with a series of shows in Southern California, Bowie included a selection of his new Philly Soul-inspired songs that didn’t go down too well with some of the glam rockers in the audience.

Still, when he opened for a week-long residency at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, the show attracted a starry crowd, including such famous faces as Britt Ekland and Raquel Welch, who admitted to the press afterwards that she hoped to make a record with Bowie. The Dame’s teenage role model, Anthony Newley, also attended, accompanied by another Bowie connection, singer Peter Noone, but left his front-row seat midway through due to the racket caused by Earl Slick’s guitar playing! Nevertheless, he subsequently conceded that his former emulator was “…madly elegant and very, very original.”
 

Bowie floats out over the audience, sitting on the end of a cherry picker crane, as he performs ‘Space Oddity.’
 
Author Tosh Berman has written how his artist father, Wallace Berman, took him to see that LA show, where they sat behind the TV personality Steve Allen and his vivacious wife, the actress Jayne Meadows. And an impressionable 16-year-old Michael Jackson (and his brothers) attended on consecutive nights, where he witnessed a masterclass in showmanship, including Bowie’s take on the moonwalk (which dates back to the ragtime-era) and that leg waggle move (taught to him by tour choreographer and The Lockers dance troupe alum, Toni Basil) that he would appropriate a decade later.
 

Bowie with MJ and the Jackson family (and a bearded David Gest!) at the Jackson’s Hayvenhurst home in Encino. In the 2022 Janet Jackson documentary, it was revealed that Bowie generously offered Michael and brother Randy a snort from his coke stash, but they turned him down.

Though not often cited or discussed enough, Bowie would remain one of Jackson’s major influences throughout the rest of his life. During the eighties, he channelled the rock star’s otherworldly mystique and overhauled his milquetoast image in a studied effort to make himself an object of fascination, à la Bowie, even taking his ‘Jean Genie’ lyric about “sleep(ing) in a capsule” to heart. Then, for much of the nineties, he adopted Halloween Jack’s powdery pallor, dark suit and black Borsalino fedora look. One of Jacko’s biographers has even disclosed how the pop superstar kept a shrine dedicated to Bowie at Neverland. (Bowie performing ‘Panic in Detroit’ on the Diamond Dogs Tour. At the 1:35 mark, he does the leg waggle move that Michael Jackson copied a decade later.)

Halloween Jack’s orange-blonde ombré hairstyle and stylish wardrobe are really the first iteration and template for what would become Bowie’s greatest-ever look as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth and the Thin White Duke alter ego that followed. But as well as capturing his epicene beauty (during one interview Bowie looks disconcertingly like a proto-Princess Di) and the entrancing effect his music and stagecraft have on his audience, Cracked Actor also betrays the obvious signs of his drug use, although he actually appears more loaded when he’s on stage than when he’s off.
 

Halloween Jack’s orange-blonde ombré hairstyle was the template for what would become Bowie’s greatest-ever look as the Thin White Duke. Image; Mark Wardel.

You can taste the cocaine in his voice as he rasps through his repertoire. Curiously, back in 2008, a furtively filmed clip of Bowie huffing the devil’s dandruff from a baggie in his dressing room, mysteriously found its way online, but the authors haven’t been able to verify whether this is an actual outtake or if it was sourced from elsewhere.

But most dishearteningly for fans, the authors do confirm that the hunt for the missing Diamond Dogs concert footage, filmed by the BBC team, has gone cold since Yentob announced the search at a screening of the film in 2017. Adding an extra dollop of misery, they further reveal that all the footage from the Iggy Pop concert at the Santa Monica Civic in 1977, featuring Bowie on keyboards, and filmed by a professional four-camera crew, has gone missing, too.

Plans to bring the Diamond Dogs Tour back home to the UK proved too financially prohibitive, so when the documentary aired in January 1975, it was the only chance for Bowie’s British fans to see what he’d been up to since he left British shores, having only read about the extravaganza in the weekly music papers. Thanks to the film and the Young Americans album that followed in March, an entirely new subculture was born in Britain: The Bowie Soul Boy.
 

The documentary was trailed prominently in the Radio Times.
 

RCA ran an advert to promote ‘Cracked Actor’ and Bowie’s catalogue.

Wardel was seventeen when the film was transmitted, and one of that multitude of British Bowie fans whose life was changed irrevocably after watching him sing ‘Starman,’ albeit not the famous Top of the Pops version, but the performance given a month earlier when Ziggy and the Spiders appeared on Lift Off with Ayshea, a kids TV show broadcast in the Midlands and the North of England.

In June of 1978, the aspiring artist moved from his seaside home town on the Wirral to London and watched Bowie perform at Earls Court on his first night in The Big Smoke. With an impressive portfolio under his arm, he walked straight into a job at a design studio in Soho and became a portraitist to the alarmingly glamorous luminaries of the heavily Bowie-inspired Blitz Kids-New Romantic-Synth Pop scene. He palled around with Boy George and David Sylvian and earned some extra kudos from them due to the thank you letter he received from their hero in Berlin after Wardel sent him one of his pieces as a present. In the missive, Bowie proffered a couple of book recommendations: Brain of the Firm: The Managerial Cybernetics of Organization, by Stafford Beer and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by the Princeton psychologist, Julian Jaynes, which also made Bowie’s list of favorite books.

Wardel then gained some national prominence when he was interviewed about his artwork twice by Paula Yates on The Tube, once while Hazel O’Connor sat for her portrait.

In recent years, he has become as famous for his stunning Bowie masks. The V&A commissioned 300 of them for their blockbuster Bowie Is exhibition in 2013 and a set of six was purchased by the man himself:

Naturally, his work continues to pull in people from the Bowie vortex, and last year he crafted the cover for Dana Gillespie’s 73rd album. He was also recently interviewed by the songstress, during which he gave a summary of his work and life.
 

Artist Mark Wardel and one of his pieces.

You can order a copy of David Bowie Rainbowman: 1967-1980  here.

You can order David Bowie and Cracked Actor: The Fly in The Milk from Red Planet Books here.

And you can discover more about Mark Wardel’s creations here.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.01.2023
05:42 am
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‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 2’: Ongoing ‘visual history’ of the Residents reaches the ‘80s and ‘90s
08.11.2023
10:18 am
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‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 2,’ now available from Melodic Virtue

Arguing for the timelessness of the Residents’ music in the introduction to this book, Penn Jillette claims that the Faceless Four were the soundtrack to Madonna and Sean Penn’s star-crossed love.

I first met and worked with Madonna during the time this book chronicles, and the very first thing she talked to me about was The Residents. She was in awe that I had met and worked with them. It’s a mistake The Residents fans make over and over again. We often think that we’re the only ones who understand the brilliance of North Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo, but all anyone has to do is hear them to know there’s something different and wonderful there. Madonna explained to me that the other Penn, the Sean one, had rammed The Residents down her throat and she swallowed it greedily.

It sounds preposterous, but then you picture them on the set of Shanghai Surprise, smoking cigarettes in their trailer with “Sorry” emanating from the hi-fi, or maybe tearing up PCH past Paradise Cove in Sean’s 1987 Buick Grand National, windows down, with the live-in-Holland “Cry for the Fire” cranked loud enough on the tape deck to overcome the noises of traffic, wind and surf, and it sounds even more preposterous. It must be bullshit.
 

The Residents at sea with Jefferson Starship and Huey Lewis, June 2, 1984

Or must it? Weigh the evidence on the other side of the scale. The Eye Guys appeared in the music video for Jefferson Starship’s “Layin’ It On The Line.” David Byrne, Andy Partridge and Lene Lovich sang on Commercial Album. The Residents met James Brown. They had a hot tub. And their members were uncredited, so for all anyone knew, Miles Davis, Ukulele Ike, Charo and Del Shannon were under those eyeball heads. Would Sean and Madonna really have risked missing that band? If they weren’t listening to the Residents in 1985, what were they listening to?
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.11.2023
10:18 am
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The Baker Street Regulars: The Obscure ‘70s band that featured former members of Big Star
07.25.2022
05:53 am
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Big Star
Big Star’s original lineup. L-R: Andy Hummel, Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, and Jody Stephens.
 
Listen to the second part of my appearance on the Discograffiti podcast, reviewing the Big Star catalog, at the end of this article. Part one is here.

The following post was first published in 2018; it’s been lightly edited.

Being a big fan of Big Star, I was excited to receive an advance copy of the oral history book, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star (HoZac Books). I started flipping through it and was immediately drawn to the story of the Baker Street Regulars. The band existed for a brief period in 1976, and featured two former members of Big Star, Chris Bell and Jody Stephens. Considering this was a seldom discussed part of the Big Star story, I asked HoZac Books if we could run the Baker Street Regulars passages in the book. They not only said “Yes,” but provided us with the majority of the images here—many of which have rarely been seen before. There Was a Light author, Rich Tupica, has even written an introduction just for us.
 
Chris Bell in Ardent Studios
Chris Bell in Ardent Studios, pre-Big Star.

Often overshadowed by his iconic Big Star bandmate Alex Chilton, the genius of the late Chris Bell wasn’t truly uncovered until years after he was tragically killed in a car wreck in December 1978. The 27-year old remained in obscurity until 1992, when I Am the Cosmos, his posthumously released solo album was finally released to much praise.

Today, Beck and Wilco cover the enigmatic songwriter’s works, while members of R.E.M. still praise his work when asked about their favorite bands—yet at the time of his death, Bell was anything but a rock ’n roll legend. After the release of 1972’s #1 Record, Big Star’s debut LP on Ardent/Stax Records, Chris suffered a bout a clinical depression and heatedly exited the Memphis-based group—the band he masterminded from the ground up. He also had a falling out with Ardent Studios owner and Big Star producer John Fry. His life was in shambles and he realized his dream of breaking Big Star into the mainstream wasn’t going to happen.

 
Chilton's bedroom
Big Star in Alex Chilton’s bedroom, posing for a ‘#1 Record’ promo photo. (Courtesy of Carole Manning)

With Bell out of the picture, Alex Chilton and John Fry took the reins and kept Big Star going for two more equally acclaimed albums, Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers—but with little financial successes, the band fully dissolved.

Meanwhile, Bell not only became a devout born again Christian, he also attempted to launch a solo career. He even moved to London with his older brother David Bell for much of 1975 and pitched his reels of solo material to any A&R rep who’d meet with them. They were ultimately turned down by every label. By 1976, America’s Bicentennial, Chris was back in Memphis living at his parent’s upper-class estate in Germantown.

For money, Bell flipped burgers at his successful father’s fast food chain, while in the evenings he played as a sideman guitar slinger alongside fellow Memphians Van Duren in a short-lived band called the Baker Street Regulars. The band would never record a single track, but its short list of dates at low key Memphis bars would be the only time a full band would ever play Chris Bell’s solo material in front of an audience.

 
Chris Bell on stage
Chris Bell on stage during a Baker Street Regulars gig. (Courtesy of Van Duren)

The following excerpt is a portion of Chapter 20 from There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star (HoZac Books), which details this period of Bell’s life.

Chapter 20: Baker Street Regulars: 1976
Within weeks of his return from England, Chris connected with Van Duren and promptly formed the Baker Street Regulars—a Memphis-based bar band named after the Sherlock Holmes characters. The group—which also comprised former Big Star drummer Jody Stephens and guitarist Mike Brignardello—played Van’s and Chris’s original tunes along with some semi-obscure covers. For the first time since his pre-Big Star days, Chris played music just for fun.

Mike Brignardello — Bassist, Baker Street Regulars, Nashville session player: I grew up in Memphis, then hit the road immediately after high school in the early ’70s. I was in a little club band and learning about being a musician, then I came back in the mid-’70s. Big Star had come and gone in my absence, but I heard about them when I got back. They were local heroes, already a semi-cult band. One of the first guys I met when I came back to Memphis was Van Duren. We hit it off and started playing together. He was the guy who hooked us up with Chris and Jody.

Van Duren — Musician, songwriter, solo, Baker Street Regulars: The Baker Street Regulars was the name when the band first started—Chris thought of it. In December of ’75, we started to get together and rehearse, but we had been kicking around the idea of forming a band for months before that. The first time I went out to the Bells’ house, Jody took me over there for our first rehearsal. We turn off down this street and it turned into this winding driveway. You couldn’t even see the house from the street, the property was so huge.

 
1977
Chris Bell poses in front of his parents’ home, Christmas 1977. (Courtesy of Bell Family Archive)

Mike Brignardello: Chris lived in, to my eyes—at least back in the day—a full-blown mansion. I remember turning down the driveway and driving, and driving, and driving and thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me! He lives on this estate?” I had grown up as a poor kid in Memphis. He had us set up and play in the living room because his parents were overseas for like a month. I was like, “Who goes overseas for a month?”

Van Duren: Chris was different, obviously upper crust. I come from a blue-collar background, so that was a new world for me. He was from privilege and he acted that way sometimes, but he could also be quite humble. He always had a twinkle in his eye, much like Alex in a way. Sometimes you couldn’t tell if he was putting you on or being serious.

Mike Brignardello: We practiced in a corrugated-metal storage room—it wasn’t insulated or anything like that. We’d just roll the door up on hot, humid Memphis days and rehearse. My girlfriend got that photo of us in there. I thought it perfectly summed up where we were at. We were hungry to play. We sweat through those rehearsals.

 
The Baker Street Regulars
The Baker Street Regulars in the metal storage unit. L-R: Chris Bell, Mike Brignardello, Jody Stephens, and Van Duren. (Courtesy of Beverly Baxter Ross)

Van Duren: It was pretty miserable in that twenty-foot-by-ten-foot mini storage—those things were brand-new in 1976. It was on Lamar Avenue and was the first of its kind in Memphis. One day, Chris showed up two hours late for rehearsal out there. He walks in wearing these tennis togs with the sweater wrapped around his neck and says, “Sorry I’m late, Tommy Hoehn and I had a vision on the tennis courts.” I didn’t know if it had to do with his religious beliefs, or if I was supposed to take him seriously or not. I was a little bent out of shape, but I just laughed when he said that. It wasn’t the first or the last time he was late. He operated on Chris time. Even so, by January of ’76, we were out playing.

The Baker Street Regulars landed shows at now-defunct venues, like Aligahpo’s on Highland Street by the University of Memphis, Procapé Gardens in Midtown on Madison, and the High Cotton Club, just south of Overton Square.

Van Duren: We played those three clubs about three times each, but the first gig was in the springtime in Oxford, Mississippi at Ole Miss at a fraternity party. We did originals and some cover material—but the covers were Beatles, Bee Gees and a lot of fairly obscure things at the time, like Todd Rundgren. We played things nobody had picked up on yet, especially in Mississippi. We threw in my songs, some Big Star songs and a few of Chris’s songs. We’d do “I Am the Cosmos,” “Make a Scene” and “Fight at the Table.” We learned Chris’s songs by listening to what he was calling demos—what later emerged as his solo album. It was a wonderful experience, even though when we played gigs we were pretty much ignored. That’s probably why we didn’t play much in the six months we were together.

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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07.25.2022
05:53 am
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You can now own your own ‘Red Right Hand’ & other cool ‘Cave Things’ designed by Nick Cave
02.21.2022
01:20 pm
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Stickers featuring Nick Cave in his famous ‘Suck My Dick’ t-shirt.
 

“It’s the obsessive and dangerous end of granny-core. Fetishistic and deranged.”

—Nick Cave describing his newly launched Cave Things online store in 2020.

Nick Cave’s online store Cave Things has been offering up material possessions designed by Cave since 2020. This is good news if you, like us here at Dangerous Minds, are all about all things Nick Cave. Why use boring old No. 2 pencils when you can use Nick Cave’s Sex pencils? While I’m not sure when I might actually need to use a pencil these days if I had to, Nick Cave’s Sex Pencils would be the ones I’d want in my collection. If Satan is more your speed then Cave’s red Devil pencils with printed quotes by Cave on them should be more than evil enough for you. Do you still have hair and are in need of a fashionable comb? Look no further than Cave’s specially-designed Warren Ellis’ “Pure Exploitation” comb, named for Cave’s long-time contributor, the multi-talented Warren Ellis. There are so many ultra-cool items in the Cave Things store, from small delights like Nick Cave stickers (!!!), greeting cards designed by Cave, a dog sweater modeled after Nick’s famous “Suck My Dick” t-shirt, and even wallpaper with Cave’s illustrations of The Hyatt Girls. If you’re not familiar with The Hyatt Girls, here’s Cave explaining them to one of his fans via his Red Hand Files site:

“Just so that everyone knows what we are talking about, The Hyatt Girls are a group of beautiful and very naked women who live in my imagination and perform pornographic acts with each other, provided I stay at a Hyatt Hotel. For years I have drawn them, to the best of my ability, on the hotel’s notepaper whenever I have stayed at a Hyatt.”

Of all the covetable things in Cave’s store, if I had the money to blow, I’d be proudly wearing one of two necklaces designed by Cave—his eerie Red Hand chain and charm (in honor of his 1994 single “Red Right Hand”),  or his “Little Nick” necklace and charm, featuring a shirtless Cave flexing. So let’s take a look at some of the cooler Nick Cave things that could now be yours. You can see everything in the Cave Things shop here.
 

Little Nick charm (comes with necklace). Extra Cave points for the red right hand detail. $122 USD.
 

Devil pencils.
 
More Nick Cave merch, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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02.21.2022
01:20 pm
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New ‘visual history’ book celebrates 50 years of the Residents! Sneak peek and exclusive premiere!


‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.15.2021
05:18 am
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Barry Adamson: Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars
11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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Photo of Barry Adamson by Mark David Ford

Multihyphenate musician-soundtrack composer-photographer-filmmaker (and former Bad Seed and member of Magazine) Barry Adamson has now added “memoirist” to that list.

Certainly no moss is growing under the feet of the Moss Side, Manchester-born Adamson. His incredibly evocative, highly detailed and sometimes frankly shocking autobiography, Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars was recently published by Omnibus Press, he’s got a new digital EP, Steal Away, just out and has completed a soundtrack for an upcoming documentary about London’s legendary arthouse cinema, the Scala Cinema.

Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars is an extremely well-written book, one of the best things I’ve read in ages. And I would be remiss in my duties here not to inform the reader that Adamson is either playing on, or created no fewer than six albums that would easily be in my top fifty: The first three Magazine albums, the first two Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds albums, and his own soundtrack for an imaginary film, Moss Side Story.  The man is a living legend.

I asked Barry Adamson a few questions via email.

First, your memory! How are you able to recall such vivid details about your life? It’s extraordinary!

Thanks! Some things are best forgotten, as the saying goes but throughout most of my life I’ve collected snapshots and angles on my own and the lives of others and stored them, committed them to memory like an archive and I never knew why but perhaps now I do. I thought everybody did this and I think to some extent they do. The amount of people I’d say I was writing a memoir to and then suddenly, they would find things stored away in there own archive. There’s also the noir style which helped me put them into a particular context as well.

There’s a very cinematic quality to so many of the anecdotes recounted in the book. Will you be developing this material further, say, writing a script?

I’ve not thought about that but sometimes, borrowing from Dennis Potter, the scenes in the book become ‘film-like’ to almost thrust the sense of that cinematic quality. I needed (in the same way I do with music) to be able to clearly visualise each sentence, so maybe that’s a factor in how the book’s overall filmic structure formed. It was a gamble to try and write it that way but one I think that paid off.

As far as autobiographies go, this one is a very, very nakedly revealing memoir indeed. I don’t get the sense that you’ve held much of anything back. What made you decide to do this?

I put myself as the central character in my life and decided that if it were a film or perhaps a novel, then you would see all the sides of this character; their challenges, struggles, conflict (on many levels) and light and dark and crap decision making and sitting with him throughout the story, so, difficult as it was at times and I make no bones about it, it really was, I knew that holding back would weaken ‘the story’ and that the filmic arc that I wanted to create around those first thirty years of my life could flatten out to a possible blandness which I didn’t want.

You’ve done a soundtrack to a documentary about London’s legendary repertoire moviehouse, the Scala. I’ve been there a few times myself. One time I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and I was the only one in the cinema when it started, but by the time it was over several homeless people had camped out around the room. It seemed like a fairly sleazy place, did it widely have that reputation?

Well, for me, it was a place of refuge where you were fed this… art, art that you didn’t come across anywhere else. Sleazy. Yes. Glamorous. In it’s own way, yes. The all-nighters were events like no others and the fact that those films imprinted themselves so ferociously into my brain is to me, a sign that what was happening there was something special. Interesting that you remember so clearly what film you saw and the homeless scenario. I was possibly one of them!

Below, the video for “The Climber,” the lead track from the new Steal Away EP

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.10.2021
03:06 pm
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The Loudest Band in the World: The epic story of Motörhead gets the graphic novel treatment


The cover of the upcoming graphic novel, ‘Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World’ due in September 2021.

When it came time for author David Calcano to pen the graphic novel take on Motörhead’s illustriously loud, 40-year career, he, the folks at Fantoons, and illustrator Mark Irwin (fittingly a former art director for Heavy Metal magazine), took the project very seriously. You may recall that Calcano has authored various other music-related graphic novels on artists such as Billie Holliday, and a few eclectic coloring books featuring Frank Zappa and Marillion (!). Calcano’s latest graphic novel, the 144 page Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World, (due on September 7th, 2021), begins Motörhead’s debaucherous story with Lemmy (as it should) back when Kilmister was working as a tutor/instructor at a horse riding school in North Wales. At the time, the teenager and soon-to-be-hellraiser thought working with horses was what he would do for a living. It was, after all, according to Lem, a great way to “get along with women.” To back up this legend about the legendary Lemmy, here are a few shots of Lem and his horse friends.
 

Lemmy: “I used to ride horses a lot, there wasn’t much music then, rock and roll and that sort of thing.” Image via Twitter.
 

Lemmy’s former Hawkwind bandmate Dave Brock also recalls Kilmister’s fondness for horses. The photo above shows Brock alongside Lemmy sitting on a “spirited” horse named “Dynamite” at a ranch in Kansas. This photo is so metal it makes my hair hurt.
 
Thankfully, after his ears were exposed to artists such as Little Richard and Elvis (specifically the jam “All Shook Up”), Lemmy’s work with horses was history, though equines would continue to be a part of his life, for nearly all of his life. Here’s a look at some of the illustrations from Motörhead: The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World which wouldn’t be complete without a few panels of Lemmy clutching a large bottle of his beloved drug of choice, speed, and a naked chick. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
HT: Metal Injection

Posted by Cherrybomb
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06.14.2021
04:45 pm
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‘Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation’ and the hidden history of modern art
01.04.2021
04:40 pm
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It is extremely difficult to republish a long out of print book. I know this because I have actually done it myself. First off, a pre-computer era book was typeset by hand, so the text will not often exist as a digital file. This presents the option of either rekeying in an entire book, or else scanning in each page individually. Doing it with some sort of image-to-text OCR program only makes for introducing new problems. It’s a time consuming process and a pain in the ass. Anything beyond text such as illustrations and photographs need to be handled differently.

Which is why this exquisite recreation of the 1901 Theosophist publication Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation is so noteworthy. This isn’t an example of merely putting out a new version of a book, but the complete recreation of the original object as it was 116 years ago. It’s beautiful. Although long out of print in its original form, and nearly forgotten, Thought Forms can be seen as an influential but overlooked link between esoteric thought and modern art. Certainly there’s been no other book like it, before or since.

The volume explored the ideas of the occult society as they related to art, specifically the notion that certain people—clairvoyants—could sense and see energy and emotions in the auras of human beings. A person of high character would have a “clear” aura, whereas a selfish, insensitive brute’s aura would be cloudy and so on. Theosophist leaders Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater dictated their clairvoyant “thought-forms” to a group of followers who created the beautiful and unusual 58 illustrations seen in the book.

Published by Sacred Bones Books, an imprint associated with the Sacred Bones record label, the principals involved originally set the project up on Kickstarter which was a resounding success:

We learned of Thought Forms a few years ago and it completely took us by surprise. This one book totally challenged the classic art history narrative that had been taught to in school. Not like we fundamentally believed that story, abstraction is found in all cultures—not just in western 20th century painting, but the genesis story of a few male painters “inventing” abstraction does have its truths.

In this narrative of Modernism, Wassily Kandinsky is widely viewed as one of the most important founders of abstraction, and his manifesto “On the Spiritual in Art” is mandatory reading in art school.

What was never mentioned to us in school however, was that Kandinsky was a member of the Theosophical Society, and had acquired a copy of their book Thought Forms a few years before he abandoned conventional ways of painting. Learning that Kandinsky didn’t just come upon these ideas on his own as previously thought, totally changed our understanding of his work. It’s worth mentioning that Piet Mondrian was also deeply influenced by Theosophy and later on, Jackson Pollock was as well.

Last year the Guggenheim held the first US retrospective of Hilma af Klint’s paintings. She was a member of the Theosophical Society and was undoubtedly influenced by the spiritualistic currents of the time. Theosophy was the first occult group to open its doors to women, and it deeply questioned gender roles, many of these ideas are also in Af Klint’s paintings. This show was one of the first times the all-male origin story of abstraction was challenged within the ivory tower. Af Klint, made these paintings before Kandinsky, and she was a woman. Thought Forms came out before Af Klint began her abstract paintings and it is certain that she must have come across this book.

We’re republishing this beautiful, overlooked book, so that it may be widely accessible and no longer omitted from the past. Thought Forms offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written.

Theosophy’s motto seems as appropriate today as it did in 1880, “there is no religion higher than truth.”

The new publication of Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation was edited by Lucy Lord Campana, with introductory essays from renowned spiritualism expert Mitch Horowitz, art historian Dr. Victoria Ferentinou of the University of Ioannina and Troy Conrad Therrien of the Guggenheim Museum and Columbia University. A few of the book’s illustrations follow.
 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.04.2021
04:40 pm
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What if Derek Raymond’s violent, bleak crime novels were made into a 1970s TV show?
11.20.2020
12:19 pm
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Author and filmmaker Adam Scovell—whose second novel How Pale the Winter Has Made Us was published earlier this year to great acclaim—sent me this wonderful trailer that asks “What if there was a gritty 70s UK TV series based on the black novels of the notorious crime author Derek Raymond?”

Adam writes:

“For some time now, I’ve daydreamed about adapting for the screen Derek Raymond’s Factory series of novels, following the unnamed sergeant at A14 or the Met’s Department of Unexplained Deaths. Raymond’s work was adapted twice in film, both in the 1980s by French directors. For a quintessentially London writer, his work didn’t quite translate to Paris no matter the qualities of those films. Equally, even if a modern adaptation was possible, it would still have to contend with the vast shifts taken place in London itself since the novels were written. The shabby, industrial vision of the capital, so essential to Raymond’s work, would be difficult to recreate authentically. Instead, I wanted to imagine a “what-if” vision of Raymond’s brutal but beautiful Factory novels, looking to British Television produced a decade before he wrote the first in his series, He Died With His Eyes Open. Finding a range of material in a number of London Weekend Television and Thames Television dramas, it was clear that there was enough to make a trailer. In my daydream, I cast Tom Bell as the intrepid sergeant, and found a wealth of villains, from Brian Glover to William Marlowe. Archive television of the 1970s is replete with work that deals with the themes that Raymond would pursue and push into the realm of the transgressive, so I see a natural fit between programmes and dramas made in this era and the relentless novels he would produce in the following decade.”

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.20.2020
12:19 pm
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Warriors On The Edge: When Lemmy got booted from Hawkwind
10.14.2020
02:20 pm
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Cover by John Coulthart

1975 was a watershed year for Hawkwind – it marked the release of what for many fans is the band’s finest album, but also saw them lose their most famous member… In an edited extract from Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia, Joe Banks revisits its tumultuous first few months.

In the first week of January, Hawkwind enter Olympic Studios to record two songs for their next single: ‘Kings Of Speed’, a co-write with Michael Moorcock, and ‘Motorhead’, a Lemmy-penned paean to amphetamine abuse. The Drum Empire are pleased, particularly with the first of these. Alan Powell tells Sounds: “It’s very powerful – it’s got two drums on it and it sounds fucking great. It’s like a Phil Spector thing.” Simon King more accurately says, “It’s the same as ‘Silver Machine’. Well, near enough, anyway”.

Amid a flurry of music press front covers, Hawkwind get back on the road again. In February, they play four shows in London in quick succession: the East Ham Granada Cinema, twice at the Hammersmith Odeon, and of course the Roundhouse. Melody Maker editor Ray Coleman’s Hammersmith review contains an eye-catching assertion: “Their music sounds like good, solid punk rock to me.” And the headline is ‘Hawkwind: Punk Masculinity’.

‘Punk’ is a term initially popularised by US writers such as Lester Bangs to describe a stripped-down, no frills approach to rock – and it’s telling that Hawkwind are now being tagged this way. Coleman describes audience and band as “creating an intensely private event”, and being “members of a secret society.” In other words, the UK’s biggest cult band, a gathering point for those still committed to the values of the underground, but also the crucible of a new type of anti-establishment feeling, as some in the audience prepare to cut their hair and embrace anarchy.

For Dave Brock, it’s like a war. After a show at the Birmingham Odeon, Melody Maker’s Allan Jones describes him as shell-shocked, “an exhausted counterfeit of his dramatic space warrior stage persona.” Touring has become a ceaseless military campaign – he’s conflicted by their level of success, but also worries that they might have peaked. Like Nik Turner before him, he’s concerned about losing contact with the community that spawned them. Unlike Pink Floyd’s middle class audience, who “sit there comfortably”, Brock says, “ours is a predominantly working class audience, and we want to keep tickets as cheap as we possibly can. We want to get close to the audience.”

It’s not a complete surprise then when the final British dates are cancelled. A spokesman explains that after two UK and three US tours in 12 months, everyone is physically and mentally shattered: “Matters came to a head at London Roundhouse last Sunday when about a thousand people who had been unable to get in tried to burn down the side entrances, and the police had to be called.” Even Turner accepts there is no alternative. He apologises for the cancellation, but “there was no way the band could continue without time for a rest.”
 

 
After time out to recuperate, they return to Rockfield Studios to record their next album. While they’re away, the ‘Kings Of Speed’ single is released, but it fails to set the charts alight. Speaking in April, King seems sanguine enough – “I didn’t like the number anyway” – but gives an insight into how Hawkwind are becoming increasingly alienated by the mechanics of the music business: “We had to do a single to fulfil our record contract… People kept on saying to us that it had to have this, had to have that. In the end, the band didn’t want to know.” He’s more satisfied with the album though, despite only having three and a half days to record at Rockfield, and three days to overdub and mix at Olympic. Why the rush? “We’re soon to tour America. Atlantic, our recording company over there, needed an album to coincide with our visit”.

Peaking at number 13 in the UK charts, Warrior On The Edge Of Time is the highest placed of Hawkwind’s studio albums, and the last to feature on the US Billboard chart, at 150. Not only does it confirm Hawkwind’s ongoing popularity, it also consolidates and reinforces their position as musical flag bearers of a thriving science fantasy subculture. Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings became required reading for heads everywhere, the counterculture has been drawn to both the imagery and philosophy of fantasy literature – its portrayal of alternative societies locked in battle with the forces of darkness chimes with a new generation banging its head against the strictures of the straight world. The likes of Led Zeppelin may have amped up Tolkien’s romantic, ‘mystic macho’ vibe, but Hawkwind are drawn to Michael Moorcock’s more nuanced treatment of order and chaos.

Predictably, certain critics can’t wait to put the boot in. Melody Maker’s Allan Jones, a man seemingly condemned to write about a group he has little time for, makes concessions about the album being their most professional yet. But the main thrust of his antipathy is that he simply doesn’t like the idea of Hawkwind – they’re not what he thinks a rock band should be. The partisan Geoff Barton at Sounds is more positive – but concludes, “Even the band’s publicist admits that you can’t really expect too many people to enjoy the band’s albums.” Presumably said publicist was given their marching orders soon after.
 

 
While UK fans dig into Warrior, a drama is unfolding overseas. On 11 May, crossing from the US into Canada, the band are stopped and searched. As a long-haired rock band with a reputation for narcotic indulgence, this is an entirely common occurrence and they’re used to ensuring that all vehicles and personnel are drug-free. But this time, their luck runs out: Lemmy is found in possession of two grams of white powder. Believing it’s cocaine, the border police arrest him and cart him off to jail. The rest of the band make it into Canada and apply for Lemmy’s bail. But they have a gig in Toronto scheduled the next day, and Brock instructs band manager Doug Smith back in London to put ex-Pink Fairies guitarist Paul Rudolph on the first plane over.

The charges against Lemmy are dropped when the powder proves to be speed rather than coke, and he arrives in time to play the show. But at a band meeting afterwards, Lemmy is sacked. His arrest is the final straw, grievances having built against him due to his constant lateness and continued enthusiasm for amphetamines. “They must have wanted me out,” Lemmy surmises glumly. He claims that Turner declared he’d leave if Lemmy returned, though Brock does ask him back – but by then, Rudolph has taken his place, and Lemmy has decided to form his own band instead.

Lemmy’s departure is arguably the most significant personnel change to occur within the band so far. A firm favourite with both fans and media, and a defining presence during Hawkwind’s rapid ascent from the underground, his playing has had a profound effect on the group’s sound, injecting both rhythmic drive and unexpected melody. If not the heart and soul of Hawkwind, he’s certainly been their guts, the low-end throb that Brock has relied upon to provide a flexible backbone during passages of improvisation. And of course, he’s forever the guy who sang ‘Silver Machine’ and encapsulates the band’s anarchic outlaw spirit.

For many fans, this marks the point where Hawkwind’s ‘classic era’ ends…

Hawkwind: Days Of The Underground – Radical Escapism In The Age Of Paranoia by Joe Banks is published by Strange Attractor Press
 

The incredible promo film made for the “Silver Machine” single.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.14.2020
02:20 pm
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