The other day I came across an entertaining Iggy TV segment from the ‘80s that I had never seen before. The clip had recently been uploaded to YouTube, and as I couldn’t find an instance of it streaming anywhere else on the web, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a rarity.
This Iggy profile aired on the French music program Les Enfants du Rock (The Children of Rock). It includes interview footage with Iggy that was shot in New York City during the time he was living there. This comes at the end of a period that, thanks to royalties earned from David Bowie’s hit version of one of their collaborations, “China Girl” (from Bowie’s hugely successful album Let’s Dance), Iggy was able to take a break from the album/tour cycle and reassess his life. He subsequently got sober, moved to Manhattan, and got married. The Ig was happy and healthy—and it shows in the interview.
Les Enfants du Rock aired this piece in 1988, though the interview footage was taped well before that. I would guess it was recorded in the fall of 1986, as there is talk of Iggy’s upcoming tour for Blah-Blah-Blah—his first album in four years—which would begin in late October.
German picture sleeve for a ‘Blah-Blah-Blah’ era single, 1987.
Iggy is his usual charming self here, totally comfortable in front of the camera. The questions are presented in French, but I don’t think it will matter to non-French speakers (and that includes me). Subjects covered include coming to the realization that he was turning into a rock star phony—thanks to drugs and other vices—and what helped change all of that; writing with David Bowie and how he thinks Bowie views him; and whether or not we’ll see him vomiting and bleeding on stage this time around.
The non-interview bits might be the best parts, as they include shots of Pop merrily frolicking through the streets of New York, mocking the staged b-roll shot for TV pieces like this.
Some witty and likable folks with art school credentials and/or graphic design skills presumably residing in the British Isles recently started a Twitter presence for those of you out there who unaccountably are interested in both rock and roll music and athletics. The presence is called Bands FC and I urge you to go check it out, it’s very amusing.
The account’s geezer-ish slogan runs thus: “How it works. Bands as football teams. Football teams as bands.” There’s a lot of visual punning going on that requires some basic knowledge of Premier League Football logos. Every now and then they throw up an entry with the text “This is how we do it” that explains the concept to newcomers. Here’s one of the only ones that I actually understood without the help:
The logos are often quite clever, but they’re not afraid to go obvious when it suits them, as with Spinal Tap’s three “goes to 11” knobs or Nirvana’s smiley face.
The knowledge of the conventions involved in football logos runs deep. Sometimes the names of the band members are listed (“SIXX NEIL LEE MARS”), sometimes not. Sometimes there’s an “EST. 1967” (Fleetwood Mac) thrown in for fun, sometimes not. All in all the person or people who made these understood that the goal of a sports logo is to foster worship among the masses, and also the colors have to lend themselves to expression in the form of a garish winter scarf.
Below are some of my faves but there are lots more at the source.
Although they never really seemed to quite enter the posthumous pantheon of great late and lamented post-punk bands like, say, the Gun Club, and are unlikely ever to inspire any sort of critical reappraisal, the Lords of the New Church—a “supergroup” formed in 1981 by Dead Boys vocalist Stiv Bators, original Damned guitarist/songwriter Brian James (he wrote “Neat Neat Neat,” “New Rose” and most their first two albums) and the insanely tight and powerful rhythm section of former Sham 69 bassist Dave Tregunna and ex-Barracudas drummer Nick Turner—are, in my opinion, pretty worthy of it. Well at least their first album is.
The group’s rhythm section originally consisted of Generation X bassist Tony James (later of Sigue Sigue Sputnik) and two-time Clash drummer Terry Chimes (he was a member of the only band that matters both before Topper Headon joined and after his sacking) and the Damned’s Rat Scabies had also played drums for a single gig before Turner replaced him. The classic line-up of the Lords, a brash, trashy punk tornado of a band in the mold of the Stooges and the Dolls had all the subtlety of a flame thrower. I saw them live on their first tour and they were utterly awe-inspiring. Their messianic revolutionary street gang warlord “message” was original for the time and spoke to kids like me who were tired of their parents’ religion during the early Reagan years, an epoch that felt like the end of the world was just around the corner from a nuclear attack launched by a senile Republican president…
Perhaps sniffing something similar in the air, the first Lords of the New Church album was re-released by Blixa Sounds Records last week as a deluxe two CD edition along with a blistering 1982 live set included. I’ve had a review copy for about the past two months and I must say, hearing that album again for the first time after… what… 36 years… every single note and every word was still etched in my memory like something by the Stones or Led Zeppelin. That album—practically every single song—is fuckin’ catchy. These riff-heavy songs stick in your craw like the catchiest things on the Nuggets comp and indeed they cover Balloon Farm’s “A Question of Temperature” so this isn’t exactly a coincidence that one might note this. After all those years, it sounded really really good to me and once The Lords of the New Church went into my car’s CD player several weeks ago, well, I still can’t find any reason to hit eject on it. It’s a short album—just over 30 minutes and a frantic burst of energy from the start to finish—and I’ve played it over and over and over again and I’ve yet to grow tired of it. If you fondly recall this album like I do—I mean, to be honest I had practically forgotten that it had ever existed—or even if you’ve never heard of it, I highly recommend it to you either way. It’s an unsung classic and it’s really fucking good…
After that first one the Lords got a bit too Billy Idol meets Hanoi Rocks for me and I stopped following them.
Now here’s a tale about the end of the band: The Lords were dropped by their record label, IRS, in 1986. They got a new drummer and continued gigging around England and Europe sporadically for a few years. During one show at London’s Astoria Theater, Stiv—a physical performer who once became unconscious and nearly died after a theatrical onstage “hanging” went awry—badly injured his back. The band was set to play another show at the Astoria on May 2nd of 1989, but Bators was apparently not being very cooperative and Brian James placed musician wanted ads in various UK music papers to find someone to replace him.
Bators heard about the “NAME BAND” help wanted ad and he was furious. With a black felt-tipped marker he reproduced the ad large on a white tee-shirt, and agreed to perform with the band at the Astoria not letting on that he knew about the move to turf him from the group he led.
During the encore, Stiv comes out with the tee-shirt on, making sure that both the audience and his fellow band members can clearly read it.
Forty-years-ago, like a gazillion other kids, I was smitten by the sounds of New Wave. The needle had worn out on punk and there was a need for a newer sound, a bigger sound to hit the decks. And lo, yea, there came unto the local record store, venue, and radio station, New Wave.
New Wave was really just a catchall term used/devised by NME writers like legendary scribe Charles Shaar Murray to describe a diverse range of bands who often had little in common other than their unique sound like the glorious Blondie and the pantomime horse of the Boomtown Rats. By this definition, New Wave bands weren’t considered quite punk though they may have been inspired by punk, or indeed, were in fact maybe just a little bit punk, or even garage, but were at the time only just coming to the attention of a bigger, far more appreciative audience circa 1978.
So, there I was, dear reader, a young teen living with his parents in a two-up/two-down in the nether regions of Scotland’s capital. Of course, you have to remember, we Scots were still in our penitent sack cloth and ashes for the ignominy inflicted on the world under the name of tartan by the Bay City Rollers and nauseating bands like Slik who had the appeal of stale cold porridge on a hangover morning. Only the Rezillos had pointed the way to a new Eden—though few Scots were actually paying attention. And then, lest we forget, the UK charts were hideously blistered by pustules of horror like Brian and Michael (“Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs”), the Brotherhood of Man (”Figaro”), and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, all of whom made the #1 spot with last duo staying there for a staggering nine weeks with “You’re the One that I Want.” This was the music, the audio track against which New Wave competed and why, for many, New Wave offered a hope that everything wasn’t Andy Gibb, Father Abraham and the Smurfs, or even on the march with Andy Cameron and “Ally’s Tartan Army.”
In the UK, there was an anger and an edge to the native New Wave sound from bands like the Jam, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and 2Tone’s the Specials, most of which stemmed from the political failings of the Left who were then running the country. Mass unemployment, a devalued currency, high taxes, IMF loans, endless strikes, and urban deprivation inspired high musical passions. These youngsters wanted change—-but into what? as the only alternative to the Labour government was the Conservatives Margaret Thatcher, and even then, there were those who knew how that would end. These bands were fine, but one can only keep that level of anger up for so long without recourse to beta blockers or an unenviable sense of ennui.
Therefore, dear reader, like gazillions of other kids, I was very quickly smitten by the sounds of bands lumped together under the heading of American New Wave—bands like Blondie and Talking Heads. Blondie was love at first sight. Talking Heads was love from the second album More Songs About Buildings and Food on. Not that I didn’t like their first album Talking Heads: ‘77, it was just I didn’t hear it until after I’d bought the second.
Unlike UK New Wave, Talking Heads and Blondie wrote songs that were clever, smart, ironic, and coded with a delightful upbeat tempo and a scintillating charm. Let’s be honest, if ever given the choice of being trapped in an elevator for hours on end with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz or Joe Strummer and Sham 69, I know who I’d rather choose…the former, obviously.
Talking Heads formed in 1975 around the triumvirate of David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth. Byrne and Frantz had previously had a band called the Artistics. Weymouth drove the boys to-and-from gigs. Needing a bass player, Byrne and Frantz asked Weymouth to join the band—admirably so, indeed, Weymouth is one of the great unsung heroes of modern music. The Talking Heads played their first gig as support to the Ramones at CBGB’s in June 1975. Two years later, Jerry Harrison, ex-Jonathan Richmond’s band Modern Lovers, added his considerable talents and the Talking Heads were complete.
For a couple of years now, a Twitter account dedicated to unappetizing stills from cookbooks dating from my childhood has ranked as one of my favorites—I refer of course to 70s Dinner Party.
This may have been inevitable but that account has recently been one-upped by a new arrival, the hilarious and eternally puzzling account 70s Adult Titles.
According to the account’s mission statement, the images, which consist entirely of screenshots from the covers of decades-old porn magazines, are
the mostly safe-for-work and sometimes surreal titles of stories and photosets in hardcore porn magazines of the 1970s & 80s.
Well….. SFW, maybe in a technical sense; still, a large image trumpeting “Boulevard St. Fuck” might not necessarily be appropriate cubicle décor in every setting.
I reached out to the “70s Adult Titles” guy, who declined to offer his real name but goes by the porny sobriquet “Dick Hardman.” Saying that he was currently based “somewhere in Europe,” he divulged that approximately the same is true of these magazine covers, which come from publications featuring interior text in “English, French and German.”
Hardman wittily touts his account as fodder for lovers of typography; it’s certainly true that there’s much to like about the use of fonts here. After I noted that the “Barking Up the Wrong Twat” image must have come from the same imprint as “Reluctant Hamster,” Hardman revealed that “it looks like the same typefaces were used in rotation over several publications (which were probably all owned by the same publisher).”
The insouciance of these bizarre snippets of text are a sign of a more innocent time when widespread porn was first gaining a foothold in Western culture. “Anything was possible back then,” says Hardman. “Sexual liberation quickly took a depraved nosedive.”
Enjoy these ridiculous images and subscribe to 70s Adult Titles on Twitter for more of the same.
Did you know there was another 1960s group called the Velvet Underground? The American Velvet Underground are now pretty much a household name, but for years, the Lou Reed-fronted group from New York was an obscure cult act. Formed in 1965, they were named after this lurid 1963 paperback. Considering the stateside VU weren’t well known in the ‘60s, and that the book’s name and what it represented might appeal to another rock band, it should come to know surprise, really, that another group—a world away—might settle on the same moniker. There’s also the possibility that it had been selected by this other Velvet Underground because they thought the American group would be quickly forgotten.
The Australian Velvet Underground first got together in Newcastle during 1967, the same year The Velvet Underground & Nico was released. The five-piece band were quite popular and gigged frequently in the area. At the conclusion of their shows, the group’s Jagger-esque frontman would dose himself with lighter fluid and put a match to his clothes. The fire would usually extinguish quickly, but on at least one occasion it didn’t—he was burned so badly that he required medical attention. VU setlists consisted primarily of covers for much of their five-year existence, which was partly due to the fact that they had trouble agreeing on how to present original material.
I recently interviewed David Schofield, the original bassist of the Australian Velvet Underground.
When/where did the band form? Who was in the original lineup?
David Schofield: The band formed in Newcastle in 1967. I was visited at home by a couple of the members of a band called the Ouebbe (Web) and Steve Phillipson who had just arrived in Newcastle from Zillmere in Queensland. I don’t know how they found me other than the fact I had been playing in a little-known band called the Trend.
The first rehearsal was at a community hall in Tarro. It’s still stuck in my mind’s eye. It appeared that there had been a party there the night before and Steve was doing his very original moves on top of broken beer bottles glass. First impression was that wow, this is so bloody different to what’s going on in Newcastle at the moment. Steve had been the president of the Queensland Rolling Stones fan club and his moves were like Jagger’s but with his own interpretation. Obviously, we took on some Stones songs but there was a very strong contingent of Small Faces stuff. Hendrix, Steppenwolf, the Who and the Doors made up the rest of the repertoire.
The original lineup was Steve Phillipson (v) Russell Bayne (g) Mark Priest (k/b) Herman Kovacivic (Kovac) (d) myself (b) . Russell left after me in 1968 and joined Pyramid in Sydney. He was replaced by Les Hall.
How did the band come up with the name Velvet Underground?
David Schofield: We were living in a house in Islington. Various names were tossed around with Steve staying unusually silent. He waited until we had rejected everything and then suggested Velvet Underground. At this time the original VU were not heard of in Australia. We thought it was bloody amazing for him to come up with something so unique. My theory is: Steve bought the muso paper the New Musical Express and he may have noted a small reference to the original VU thinking that they may not go too far.
Your singer set himself on fire on stage. How was the stunt executed?
David Schofield: The fire stunt was usually performed during “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix. Steve had a very thick leather bomber jacket from an op shop [a thrift store, ala the Salvation Army]. He put lighter fluid on the arms and lit it while homemade smoke bombs (firecracker powder) were ignited behind the amps.
Circa 1991, the house of hip hop welcomed an honored guest. Accompanied by his longtime shrink, Dr. Eugene Landy, the gifted harmonist Brian Wilson shambled through hip hop’s laundry room into its spacious two-car garage, where he blessed the microphone with this still-unreleased ode to “Smart Girls.” Over a drum machine and a Frankenstein medley of Beach Boys hooks said to be produced by the late, great Matt Dike of Dust Brothers and Delicious Vinyl fame, Wilson spat about how he used to glorify stupid women in his songs, but lately had turned to celebrating “you brainy babes with your attitude.”
The project to which “Smart Girls” belonged was among the final straws in the Landy-Wilson relationship. According to Peter Ames Carlin’s biography Catch A Wave, Landy was, by this point, calling himself Wilson’s creative and business partner rather than his therapist. (A shrewd move on Landy’s part, because the Man soon came for his license.) In the Pico Boulevard HQ of their company, Brains and Genius, which included a recording studio, the pair were hard at work on the follow-up to Wilson’s self-titled comeback album: Sweet Insanity, co-written and co-produced by Landy. Carlin writes that “Smart Girls” was the result of Landy “pushing Brian to try his hand at rapping.”
Since the first solo record had been a success, Dr. Landy wanted me to go right back and make another record. We started one that was going to be called Brian and then was going to be called Sweet Insanity. The title wasn’t exactly the best. It was supposed to be a comment about the way that mental illness could turn into something beautiful, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a title like that. I had spent a lifetime proving that point, but why did we have to say it straight out like that? Plus the way Gene was trying to force me to make the record wasn’t a good scene. He kept on me all the time. He asked questions about every part. It was the strangest and worst way to make a record, with so much pressure and so much interference.
Brains and Genius delivered Sweet Insanity to Sire, who excitedly forwarded it to the trash can.
Last week’s screening of The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound and The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards at the Egyptian Theatre was my idea of heaven. While Symphony of Sound has long been available (watch it!), so far as I know, Tarot Cards has never escaped into the wild. Screenings of the lone existing print are about as common as showings of Cocksucker Blues, Chelsea Girls, Eat the Document or, for that matter, California Raisins II: Raisins: Sold Out!
Warhol apparently intended to project Tarot Cards behind the VU at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but the film has a vérité soundtrack nonetheless—mostly indistinct a-style chatter, no VU music (other than whistling). In it, the VU, Nico, and assorted Warhol superstars gather in an apartment and have a rave-up. Meanwhile, a dispirited Tarot reader is dealing Rider-Waite cards on the sheets of newspaper covering the floor and trying to make the Velvets’ fortunes heard over the din. A new copy of Pet Sounds is sitting out; almost everyone is young and gorgeous. I’ve already forgotten who pours beer on Mo Tucker’s hair by way of greeting. Eric Emerson?
But when I got home, there were no Celtic Crosses on the floor, no cans of Schaefer and Rheingold Extra Dry being passed around, no dancing Susan Bottomly, so I reached for the hypnotic effect of this “Fluxfilm.” John Cale shot Police Car in the middle sixties (the George Maciunas Foundation gives the date as “1966?”) with an 8mm camera he borrowed from Kate Heliczer. Cale describes the film in the biography Sedition and Alchemy (as quoted in Richie Unterberger’s White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day):
I was interested in getting dim pictures with flashing lights from a street repair trench near the Chelsea Bridge. The film was left with someone in Fluxus who then included it in a box of Flux-stuff, which I totally forgot about until I got a call from someone saying my “movie” was mentioned in the New York Times review of the box.
Cale’s referring to Flux Year Box 2 and its mention in “Art Notes” in the June 16, 1968 issue of the Times. After reporting rumors that the Venice Biennale would be postponed or cancelled due to student protests, the Times’ Grace Glueck—who, in ‘66, described the Velvet Underground as “a combination of rock ‘n’ roll and Egyptian belly-dance music”—turned to the contents of George Maciunas’ $50 box set:
It contains such playthings as a squeezable rubber pear (anonymous); a “Flux Jewelry Kit” by Alice Hutchins (a spring necklace jumps out when you open it); a “Total Art Matchbox” by Ben Vautier (“Use the matches to destroy all art”); some rather strange card games. There are also 20 8mm film loops, by Stan Van Der Beek, Yoko Ono, John Cale, etc. Seen through a lorgnette-like hand viewer, the films include a run of bare bottoms (Ono); an underexposed sequence of blinking lights on a police car (Cale).
If you like the first part of this very short movie, in which only a single light appears, just wait until you get to the second part, where—but don’t let me spoil it for you…
If one tried to concoct a mystique around a mercurial artist, one could not dream of doing better on purpose than Patty Waters did just by living her life. If you’re not familiar with her or her work, there is one and only one place to start. Be advised, you’re probably not ready for this. Almost nobody is, first time.
A literal Iowa farmgirl, Waters was gifted with a breathy, coolly expressive singing voice. She began singing for audiences at age three, and toured with regional orchestras before finishing high school. Touring brought her into personal contact with the likes of Miles Davis and Albert Ayler, and her association with Ayler brought her into the orbit of Bernard Stollman, owner of ESP-Disk, a pioneering free jazz and freak-rock label that released crucial works by Ayler, Sun Ra, the Fugs, the Godz, and Ornette Coleman. And for that label, Waters recorded, in 1965, Patty Waters Sings.
The album cover is remarkable for its plainness—it’s a black and white photo of Waters, all of 19 years old, not particularly engaging with the camera, not really quite smiling, and looking for all the world like a blandly pretty, utterly average corn-fed Midwestern girl. At the drop of the needle, though, the listener was immediately in the grip of chilling, compelling, emotionally-charged and deeply lonesome songs, revealing and personal but very nearly amelodic original compositions that were clearly in the realm of conventional “vocal jazz,” but with an unpolished starkness that lent immense weight to her lovelorn-teenager lyrics. But there was still another surprise to come—Side B sported only one song, the take on an 18th Century folk song called “Black is the Color of my True Love’s Hair” that we linked for you above. After Nina Simone began performing the song in 1959, many subsequent versions of it stayed more or less within her template. But Waters’ rendition, only a few years later, subverted that newly-set standard—it’s disorienting right out of the gate, opening with ominous, discordant piano swirls. It goes on for fourteen minutes, turning from a creepy but still low-key jazz standard into a cathartic, howling cyclone of inchoate anguish that flattened everyone in its path and made it her defining song. Downbeat compared her vocal performance to Ornette Coleman’s sax playing, and The Village Voice called it “The most perfect realization of jazz song as siren song.” They were both right, of course, and it is no exaggeration to say that without Waters to open the doors to such primal, immediate expressiveness, Patti Smith and Diamanda Galas would have lacked a pivotal template.
In 1966, she released College Tour, her second and final album for ESP. The cover photo suggested a stark transformation—gone was the girl-next-door with the mysterious half-smile, replaced by a dead-eyed, opaquely hippie-ish mystic wearing a slightly demented expression and a forehead adornment that combine to foreshadow Charles Manson’s disciples. College Tour is every bit the unsettling must-have that Sings is. Standout tracks are opener “Song of Clifford,” the title a reference to Sun Ra drummer Clifford Jarvis, who fathered Waters’ son; the original composition “Wild is the Wind,” on which she again thrusts her ability to voice transcendent madness squarely into listeners’ faces; the Nelson Riddle/Frank Sinatra standard “It Never Entered My Mind”; and two damn spooky transformations of the Southern lullaby “Hush Little Baby,” another song that had a place in Nina Simone’s repertoire.
Waters soon left New York for Northern California, not only bailing on the New York jazz scene, but inadvertently making herself mythic by pretty much dropping out altogether. Her albums were reissued, and her reputation grew among outré types after she was singled out for Nick Tosches’ unrestrained praise in Rolling Stone in 1971 (”... one of the best fucking singers alive”), but she didn’t release another note of music again for thirty years. Though her reputation as a recluse has endured, it’s not really justified. Her life’s story since her late ‘60s disengagement has beenthoroughlytold, so there’s no need here to try to penetrate the mystique. In fact, Waters has lately returned to public performance, reuniting with Burton Greene, her pianist on Sings. Among her most recent performances were a two-night stand in London which was recorded for the digital-only release Patty Waters 6.12.17, and a Blank Forms show in New York which saw her and Greene teamed up with bass god Mario Pavone (Thomas Chapin, Anthony Braxton) and legendary free jazz drummer Barry Altschul, a lineup that played another show in Houston.
And it is via NYC’s Blank Forms that we are able to show you some AMAZING lost footage today. According to Jazz Times, Waters performed only two shows in all of the 1970s. I am unable to determine if that count includes a solo performance she gave to a class at San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College in 1974—a performance that was filmed, but it has never been seen by the public until today. The performance footage is cut with interview segments shot in Waters’ home later the same day—an incredibly intimate look at the life of an artist whose veil was once thought impenetrable.
We are very grateful to Ms. Waters for being so kind as to take some time on the phone with us to fill in the blanks on the circumstances of the film’s creation, and why it stayed buried for over 40 years.
In 1970, I moved from New York City with my baby boy to quiet, peaceful Marin County. We lived there at various locations, first in Mill Valley, then Fairfax, then Stinson Beach for a summer, during which time I raised my son nearly through his high school years. In 1986, we relocated to Santa Cruz. But there was one brief time when I lived in San Francisco, behind a coffee shop called Blue Unicorn on Hayes, near the corner of Masonic. Richard Dworkin lived on that corner, and he knew I lived there and that I’d recorded the two albums for ESP-Disk, and he thought I could be a subject for his film class. So he introduced himself and took me to Lone Mountain College for one of his film classes. I did the three songs, there were probably 10 or 12 people there.
The footage was never seen because the sound wasn’t good, Richard gave it to me and I kind of tucked it away. It resurfaced in the last ten years or so, and I told Richard I found it, and he was glad to hear I found it, but he didn’t know how to fix the sound. Just about a year ago Eric Terino offered to clean it up digitally. Before that, it was hopeless! [laughs] So now the sound can consistently be heard. It’s still not perfect, it has lots of flaws, but before there were lots of places where you couldn’t understand what was going on.
I thought it was interesting, because it is the only time I played piano for myself and sang. As I recalled it, I played all of side one of Sings, but as we listen to it, I’m only playing two from side one, and the middle one was released in 2003 as track 8 on the You Thrill Me CD. The interview segments were shot after the performance, in my apartment behind the Blue Unicorn with my son and his dog, as a rehearsal was going on in the coffee house.
In their 1973 occult cookbook The Third Mind, novelist William S. Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin discuss the notion that when two like-minded individuals are harmoniously tuned to the same creative task, a ghostly “third mind” will arise during the proceedings, almost independent of the original two participants and take everything to a higher level. It’s not just that two minds are better than one, they’re better than two minds, too:
“The third mind is the unseen collaborator, the superior mind constructed when two minds are put together.”
One plus one equals three in creative matters, in other words. It’s all very mathematical obviously and therefore cannot be disputed.
And so it was that one-time Jesus and Mary Chain drummer (and then absinthe importer) John Moore teamed up with the leader of the Auteurs, Luke Haines. Both were participating in a folk ensemble called Balloon—Haines on guitar, Moore on electric saw—and they decided to write some songs together. The initial results were promising and after the pair had composed a ditty titled “Girl Singing in the Wreckage” they needed a girl to sing it naturally and so enlisted another Balloon participant, vocalist Sarah Nixey.
Now Sarah Nixey happens to be the owner of one of the very, very best British female voices of all time (Nixey should be doing all of the voiceover work for British Airways and Jaguar. They ought to declare hers the official voice of Great Britain by royal decree or something, it’s just that perfectly English-sounding.) There is no one in pop—not one singer I can think of—who has her precise and exacting command over her instrument. Not only are her almost whispered gossamer vocals as resonant as Tibetan glass singing bowls, her diction is so astonishingly crisp and well-enunciated that it leaves her, frankly, without peer, as an archly ironic sprechgesang-singing posh girl rapper with one raised eyebrow.
With Nixey’s advantageous addition to what was already the working “trio” of Moore and Haines, this meant that the three of them together were now as good as seven or eight lone musicians, perhaps even an entire orchestra. Burroughs and Gysin never explained what came after two minds equalled three and math was never really my strong suit, but to be able to compose music knowing THAT VOICE would be interpreting your material must’ve spurred Moore and Haines to give it their all as songwriters. Writing to the strength of a chanteuse with the talents of Sarah Nixey would have an exponentially positive effect on any musical endeavor and thus was born Black Box Recorder, already greater than the sum of its thoroughbred parts before the project even gets out of the gate.
With Nixey fronting the group this meant that the two cynical bastards writing the music had to channel the perspective of a female of about her age (early twenties) in the lyrics she’d sing and so over the course of their three albums, a sort of morbid, spoiled, narcissistic Sloane Ranger character develops while the lush minimalism of the music reminds one of Air or Portishead. Black Box Recorder’s darker lyrical preoccupations—Ballardian musings on car crashes and “The English Motorway System,” police digging up bodies in a trendy neighborhood, swimming with the ghosts of murdered Victorian-era children—could be seen as representing evil Cousin Serena to Saint Etienne’s sunnier Samantha Stevens.
As a remarkably assured debut album England Made Me compares favorably to something like Please by the Pet Shop Boys: cynical, funny, intelligent with sonic invention and arrangements of the highest caliber. (England Made Me is also as perfect a soundtrack to the Tony Blair era as the PSB’s first album was for Thatcher’s final years in power. I fully expect that future filmmakers producing period pieces about pre and post millennial Britain will ransack BBR’s discography song by song.) Here’s their first single, “Child Psychology,” a catchy number about a world-weary six-year-old girl who simply stops talking:
“Child Psychology” was blacklisted for radio play by most UK stations and MTV and it was released as a single in America just one week after the Columbine massacre, ensuring its quick demise on the US pop charts as well. If you found yourself wondering “How did I miss this?” just watch the video and you’ll instantly know why.
