“Stunning Debut Album” 7-inch, 1991

If you’re into Stereolab, you’re almost certainly aware of the odd, grinning cartoon character who stared out accusatorially at the viewer on the cover art of many of Stereolab’s early releases. That weird little dude—gal?—was featured on Peng!, the groop’s first album, and the two important early compilations Switched On and Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) (Refried Ectoplasm is the best thing Stereolab ever put out, IMO) as well as a bunch of early singles.

Indeed, if you were following Stereolab in their first couple of years, that character constituted almost all of the band’s visual image up until the 1993 release of The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music”, which cannily repurposed the cover design of a series of Vanguard releases of “stereophonic demonstration discs” featuring French conductor Vladimir Golschmann interpreting the works of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, among others.

The Stereolab gang apparently referred to the little fellow as “Cliff,” as was revealed in a super-early interview with the band that Chickfactor did in 1993:
 

Chickfactor: where did you get the image of the guy with the gun? what made you give it up on space age bachelor pad?

Tim Gane: “cliff” (as well call him) was taken from a swiss political comic from 1969. he’s a figure of the establishment who is eventually shot by the forces of the revolution (peng!). the recent mini LP [the Groop Played etc.] was based on a hi-fi stereo sound effect record of the early/mid-60s. the record doesn’t sound like that but I just like that kinda cool image shit. all of the next records will be based on the sleeves of hi-fi/stereo effect records. it’s a juvenile thing. I like themes running through the records, things that connect them together so that we can have our own “blue” period and “op art phase.”

 
Not surprisingly, the Stereolab gang were up on their shit. “Cliff” indeed was derived from a cartoon by Antonholz Portmann that appeared in a 1970 issue of Hotcha, an underground newspaper that was based out of Zurich. Most of the sources I’ve seen say 1970 instead of 1969, but there’s rather little out there on the subject, so anything’s possible. Hotcha looks incredibly cool, actually, similar in spirit to the International Times and Oz and a hundred other independent periodicals from the period. Here’s a typical cover, featuring Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs:
 

 
Hotcha was founded in 1968 by a writer named Urban Gwerder with the subtitle “Fun Embryo Information.” It lasted until 1971, and during its brief existence more than 60 stimulating issues were published. Hotcha was a major player in the international independent press movement, publishing original material by Kupferberg, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Gary Snyder, Ed Sanders, and Frank Zappa, among many others. This page has some excellent scans of Hotcha issues.

Sometime in 1969 or 1970 Hotcha ran a single-page comic called “Der tödliche Finger” (The Deadly Finger) by Antonholz Portmann. It’s worth pointing out here that “Antonholz” is a made-up name, it’s a combination of the German version of Anthony (Anton) and the German word for “wood,” which is Holz. So clearly Portmann used it as a pen name. Here’s the comic—the translation provided at the bottom is perfectly serviceable:
 

 
As you can see, the image of the grinning face hardly changes, but the accusing finger slowly mutates into a loaded pistol, which goes off (Peng!) in the last panel. Gane’s words quoted above imply that the character is the so-called “figure of the establishment” who is executed at the end of the strip, but the way I interpret the cartoon, that establishment figure is off-screen, the figure Gane calls “Cliff” is the youthful judge, jury, and executioner representing the ‘68 generation staunchly opposed to militarism, conformity, bourgeois values, and so forth.

Stereolab used the final panel for Peng! and Peng! alone, for obvious reasons, and occasionally used the first panel, with the naked finger, but the image used most often was the third panel, I think (it’s actually hard to tell sometimes).

Some years later Portmann was contributing to another Gwerder-run zine called Hot Raz Times, as this page attests.

Just for the record, here’s a thorough accounting of all the variations of “Cliff” Stereolab went through over the years. The main period for that image is 1991 to 1995, although he does pop up on a Japanese sampler in 1998.
 

”Super Electric” 10-inch, 1991
 
More Stereolab cover art after the jump…....
 

 
You may never listen to Stereolab in the same way ever again…

Not a lot to add to this, although it did occur to me that Primal Scream’s “Higher Than The Sun” has a lot of potential in the BJ soundtrack department as well.
 

 
Thank you kindly, Nick Abrahams!

 
More Nineties nostalgia to round out the weekend. Growing up as a kid in that decade I was subjected to huge ignominies in the name of yoof TV. “Yoof TV” was the British expression for television programs made by people in their thirties and forties for people in their teens and early twenties, trying hard to represent the energy and anarchy that being young supposedly represented. YEAH!  Like down wiv ver kids anthat?! Yoof!! Energy!!! Rissspekt!!!! YOU KNOWORIMEAN?! It was baaad (meaning just bad). MTV built an entire channel around it, but the biggest, smelliest turd lurking at the bottom of the yoof barrel was undoubtedly The Word.

The Word was Channel 4’s first stab at a concept called “post-pub” television, and as the name would suggest it had a rowdy, boozy, “anything goes!” atmosphere, though I think the show’s primary audience were still too young to go to the pub. Launched in 1990, it was presented by the annoying Manc Terry Christian with a rotating cast of inept co-hosts, most famous of which was probably the ex-model/whatever Amanda De Cadanet. She lives in LA now, and you can have her. Fans of River Phoenix, watch this clip and prepare to have all your romantic illusions about the best and/or best looking actor of his generation (and his crappy band Aleka’s Attic) shattered.
 

 
The show certainly was ground-breaking, paving the way for reality tv and the general circus-of-humiliation we now take for granted on the goggle box. One popular feature was called “The Hopefuls” where people would do anything (literally anything) to get on TV. Giving a homeless person a toe-job, drinking a pint of puke, licking an obese man’s bellybutton sweat, yeah these crazy yoofs will do ANYTHING man! Like putting on a pair of sandals filled with dog shit?! Yeah they’re so desperate it’s KERRAZY!

There were moments of genuine unscripted tension too. The best of the co-hosts, Mark Lamarr (currently a dj for BBC Radio 6) famously took issue with Shabba Ranks over his homophobia. Oliver Reed was secretly filmed getting drunk in the dressing room (a very classy move by the producers). The British riot grrrl group Huggy Bear and their fans were forcibly removed from the studio for protesting over a segment about a couple of porn star twins, and funniest of all was an altercation between Snoop Dogg (then just emerging with Doggy Style) and the British kids TV host Rod Hull’s puppet Emu, which had a reputation for violently attacking guests.
 

 
There’s a piece on the Guardian’s website by The Word’s creator Charlie Parsons called “How The Word changed televisiion for ever” that would be funny if it were not so depressingly true.

The show provided a glimpse of the future of television – some would argue a horrifying one. No longer could celebrities be treated with total reverence, as on The Des O’Connor Show or Wogan. Five-minute videotaped pieces tackled subjects that would these days be given whole series on ITV – dog plastic surgery, fat farms, child beauty pageants.

Yet, while Parsons only mentions it in passing at the start of the piece, 20 years later The Word does have one lasting positive legacy - the live music. Sure, they went for what was then currently popular, but this ensured a diverse range of bands and lead to the television debuts of both Nirvana and Oasis (Nirvana’s spot including the infamous moment when Kurt declared that Courntey Love was “the best fuck in the world”). The tone may have been jarring (see the fluffy bra podium dancers gyrating to Stereolab’s kraut-punk!) but the energy was real. This was one of the very few places on TV you could see bands whose shows you had only read about, and if you were lucky they gave good show too - like L7’s Donita Sparks dropping her pants. Charlie Parsons, speaking as someone who WAS a lonely teenager in a bedroom at the time, THIS is why we watched your towering pile of faeces of a show. Not for “The Hopefuls”, not for the interviews, the wackiness, the innuendo, the edginess, the supposed rule breaking, the sticking-it-to-the-man-down-wiv-yoof-culcha-yah - we watched your show for THIS: 

L7 - “Pretend We’re Dead” live on The Word
 

 
After the jump: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hole, Stereolab, Blur, Daisy Chainsaw, Pop Will Eat Itself with Fun-Da-Mental & Huggy Bear