Eartha Kitt giving a dance lesson to her dear friend James Dean
 
It’s fair to say that actress, singer, and dancer Eartha Kitt never stood on ceremony, and fairer still to say she always gave a very blunt accounting of the facts, no matter how gauche the topic.
 
In her brutally honest autobiography, I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten,‘Kitt gave every detail of the torrid love affairs that became such a part of her public persona.

The CIA kept a fat file on her romantic life after she made Ladybird Johnson cry. When invited to the White House to discuss President Johnson’s plans to combat crime, Kitt spoke so vehemently against the Vietnam War as to bring the First Lady to tears, saying, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot…and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

After that, it’s really no surprise when her CIA file refers to her as a “sadistic nymphomaniac.” But really, knowing Eartha, they could have just asked.
 

 
OK, so this instalment of Cocaine’s... might not have the epic freak-out-ish-ness of last week’s John Cale performance, but to me this sums up the spirit of the cocaine age perfectly.

Godley & Creme were once part of 10CC, of course, and video directors of quite some renown in the 1980s, but they also delivered a string of haunting, emotional electro pop hits like this one, a tale of tragic spousal abuse as overheard on a commuter train.

What that has to do with sliding down a fake window while clenching your fists is anyone’s guess. But, like I said, cocaine’s a helluva drug.

This performance is epically camp, and was undoubtedly inspired by some of the finest marching powder. Kevin Godley tosses his mullet and gurns as if trapped in a lost Douglas Sirk classic, while all around bright shiny lights create a vaseline-heavy haze that will have you checking your eyeballs for cataracts. The tune is rather lovely, with synths that sound more like vintage 60s electronica than early 80s electro, but I can just hear the producer now, frothing at the mouth and screaming that what this needs is “MORE DRAMA!!!”

Godley & Creme “Under Your Thumb” Top Of The Pops, 1981:
 

 
Musician B.B. (Blake Baker) Cunningham Jr. was shot and killed Sunday in Memphis. Cunningham was a member of Jerry Lee Lewis’s band and the vocalist and keyboard player for 1960s’ rockers The Hombres.

The Hombres’s 1967 hit “Let It All Hang Out” has particular significance for me because my band The Nails covered it on our debut album and it was released as our first single for RCA records.

I grew up with “Let It All Hang Out” and always loved its indelible hook and surreal lyrics. Written and sung by Cunningham, the tune clearly pokes fun at the music of Bob Dylan and Cunningham’s sly vocals really makes it work. His laid back drawl with its southern twang delivers the Dylanesque lyrics with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to be funny without being stupid. Far better than your average novelty song, “Let It All Hang Out” has stood the test of time, endured and inspired guys like me to attempt to replicate its punk charm. But nobody will ever nail it as well as B.B Cunningham.

Cunningham was shot while working as security guard at an apartment complex on Memphis’ southeast side. He was 70 years old.
 

 
The Nails cover “Let It All Hang Out” after the jump…

 
‘We seem to attract quite a bit of it,’ Mick Jones said about the interest of the local Bobbies in Dundee, in this short film of The Clash on the road across Scotland, from February 1980.

Joe Strummer joked The Clash were giving the Tayside police a change from the usual drunks, giving them the opportunity to have some fun with some lads from down south. ‘And we could do well without it,’ Jones added.

An hour before their concert in Edinburgh, Strummer preps his voice with some honey and lemon. Outside young fans, some without tickets, have been waiting since 2 in the afternoon just to get a glimpse of their idols. Later, the band will let in a few of these youngsters into the concert for free.

This is The Clash when they were still living a precarious existence, hand-to-mouth, constantly on the move.
 

 
With thanks to Nellym.
 

 
They say House music is a feeling, and I am inclined to agree.

For too long House music has been defined by a rigid beat pattern that, almost 30 years after its birth, has barely changed. In fact, it has changed so little as to make this hallowed genre seem stale and insignificant, the opposite of how it appeared the first time round, when (ironically) it wasn’t the beat that defined it so much as the attitude.

I remember hearing House music for the first time as a child of about 9 or 10 and asking my siblings to buy me a compilation of this strange, funky music. They got me a two-cassette release, called something like Hits of House, and unexpectedly opened my ears to a whole new freakish world of camp men from Chicago stuttering over a hard and dark music unlike anything I had ever heard. Sure, I had been obsessed with S’Express already, tuning into late-night radio on my headphones hoping to hear “Theme From S’Express” and “Hey Music Lover,” while also hoping not to get busted by my parents in the next room. But Hits Of House was like nothing I had ever heard. It’s hard to explain to younger generations just how fresh House was when it first appeared, just as it is hard for the listener to recapture the thrill and joy of hearing it for the first time.

But that’s where Ynfynyt Scroll comes in.

YS is a young, Austin-based producer who takes the best elements of house music from the 80s and 90s and squeezes them through the post-crunk filter to create something eniuinely fresh. You know, as opposed to what most of the magazines and websites sell House fans as being “forward-thinking”. Ynfynyt Scroll makes music that actually sounds like it comes from 2012, not 2002 or even 1992.

So blown away was I on first hearing Ynfynt Scroll that I immediately asked Rodrigo (his real name) to do a remix for me, which he thankfully agreed to. I am very happy to report that his remix of “Work It” doesn’t disappoint, coming on a bit like Junior Vasquez draged to a deep south R&B club, but even that pales in comparisson to his own releases, such as the Let Me See It EP on the #Feelings label. I also emailed him a few questions, that he gratefully replied to:

THE NIALLIST: Who are you and where are you from?

YNFYNYT SCROLL: My Christian name is Rodrigo Díaz. I was born in Lima, Peru, but I’ve lived in Dallas nearly all my life. My assumed name is Ynfynyt Scroll, which since 2010 have I used for production, DJing, visual art and as an excuse to be a cunty brat with heavy Islamic fundamentalist undertones.

TN: Describe the YS sound to me.

YS: It’s all about scroll scroll scrolling. Just keep scrolling on to the next thing until your brain goes “ugh, ya,” whether it’s listening or producing. I have almost no intentions when setting out to make a track, I just gravitate toward certain sounds that lend themselves to certain genres, but I don’t think in terms of genre.

TN: Who and what are your biggest production influences?

YS: I am very influenced by bedroom rap producers of the American south, mutli-layered trance pad chord hits, men who love dancing without making physical contact with anyone else, Afro-Peruvian rhythms, breakz and very early house.

TN: I hear the club scene in Texas is hot - is this true?

YS: Well Austin does a pretty good job of bringing talent through. Groups like Elevater Action, Broken Teeth and Peligrosa consistently throw good parties, my Freshmore buds in Houston do a good job too, and in Dallas there’s Track Meet, of which I am a part. We’ve thrown some pretty neat, all-out, immersive parties with movie-quality glowing slime and exotic set designs and neat/fun stuff like that, but haven’t had the frequency of guest that the folks in other cities have had up to now.

TN: What can we expect from a YS DJ set?

YS: You can expect me to be all over the place, to ignore genre and sometimes tempo, to play a lot of really abrasive and tinny, trebley Ha tracks, and to play as much amateur music as possible. You can also be sure you’ll hear your fair share of American southern rap, something that has been a part of every DJ set I’ve ever played.

TN: If you could have written any song in the history of music, which one would it be?

YS: Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”

 
There’s lots more to be heard and downloaded at the Ynfynyt Scroll Soundcloud page.
 
You can find The Niallist on Twitter.

 
The cult Italo/synth disco label Italians Do It Better have just re-released a remastered version of their classic 2007 compilation After Dark, featuring music by Chromatics, Glass Candy, Farah, Mirage and Professor Genius, for free through Soundcloud.

Label boss Johnny Jewel explains why IDIB decided to give the remastered re-release away for free:

Over 5 years ago we released a slow-burning label sampler at midnight on my birthday. The original pressing was a demo CDR that Ida No colored with markers & glued cutouts of my hand spraypainting our names on the world. It was supposed to be a limited edition of 237 copies meant for the merch tables of Texas & California. It exploded overnight. 77 minutes of analog electronic music mutating through Italo Disco, Krautrock, Electro, Giallo Cinema, & Pop. By now, After Dark seems like it’s in its thousandth pressing…(we lost track a long time ago). And as we prepare for the release of After Dark 2, we wanted to share with you where it all began.

The last 5 years seem like a beautiful blurry dream. Since the October 15th release date was announced back in July, everyone has grown increasingly anxious for the hard copy. At that time, we didn’t know Karl Lagerfeld was going to commission Chromatics to choreograph 27 minutes of music for the Chanel runway. We also couldn’t have known that Symmetry was going to be asked to score a top-secret motion picture for 2013. There is so much music we can’t wait for you to hear. For the diehard fans, we’re going to start leaking tracks next week.

After slowly chiseling away at it since the spring of 2008, After Dark 2 is finally right around the corner. Thanks to everyone for being so enthusiastic & patient. I promise it’s worth the wait. In the meantime, download the fully remastered version of the first After Dark here. I blended it together at 5 am this morning. Enjoy!

I really can’t recommend this compilation highly enough, it’s a treat for all those who love dance music of the past and the present, even those who prefer their “dance music” to be enjoyed in a distinctly horizontal position, perhaps with some herbal refreshments. And if you’re a fan of Ariel Pink and John Maus’ lo-fi, retro sounds, there is much here to savor:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:

‘Kill For Love’: Chromatics glacial take on synth disco (and Neil Young)

Haunted Retro part 2: Nite Jewel, Desire & Italians Do It Better

 
On a farm in Newbury, a camera crew set-up to film a scene from Dennis Potter’s latest drama series Pennies from Heaven.

Potter was a controversial dramatist, who was praised and loathed in equal measure. His previous single drama Brimstone and Treacle had been banned outright by the BBC for depicting the rape of a disabled woman by a strange, young man, who may or may not have been the Devil. Potter said of Brimstone and Treacle:

“...I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated my view of the world and the people in it. I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God.

“...I was engaged in an extremely severe struggle not so much against the dull grind of a painful and debilitating illness but with unresolved, almost unacknowledged, ‘spiritual’ questions.”

Set in the 1930s, Pennies from Heaven told the story of a sheet-music salesman Arthur, played by Bob Hoskins, whose life and fantasies were reflected through the prism of popular songs of the day. Potter said of the Arthur:

“Lacking any sense of God or faith, he literally believes in those cheap songs to the depths of his tawdry, adulterous, little lying soul.”

When Hoskins first read the script he thought it “lunacy”. A second-reading convinced him it was something very special. He was right, Potter had written a brilliant and original series, which proved to be an enormous success when first broadcast on the BBC. It went on to win a BAFTA for “Most Original Programme”, and earned Hoskins and his co-star Cheryl Campbell best actor and actress nominations.

The series was remade (badly) by Hollywood (no surprise there) with Steve Martin in the lead, in 1982. Hoskins went on to international success with the gangster classic The Long Good Friday, while Potter returned to his mix of drama, fantasy and song with his acclaimed series The Singing Detective in 1986.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Cast and Crew: The making of ‘The Long Good Friday’

 
With thanks to Nellym.
 

 
Pablo Fanque, today best known for being mentioned in The Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” on the Sgt. Pepper’s album was the first black circus proprietor in Britain.  For over three decades, his circus, in which he himself was a featured performer, was the most popular n Victorian-era Britain. Circus historian George Speight wrote that Fanque’s big stunt was leaping on horseback over a coach “placed lengthways with a pair of horses in the shafts, and through a military drum at the same time.”

From the Smithsonian website:

While true Beatlemaniacs will know that Mr. Kite and his companions were real performers in a real troupe, however, few will realize that they were associates of what was probably the most successful, and almost certainly the most beloved, “fair” to tour Britain in the mid-Victorian period. And almost none will know that Pablo Fanque–the man who owned the circus—was more than simply an exceptional showman and perhaps the finest horsemen of his day. He was also a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years.

The song that lent Fanque his posthumous fame had its origins in a promotional film shot for “Strawberry Fields Forever”—another Lennon track—at Sevenoaks in Kent in January 1967. During a break in the filming, the Beatle wandered into a nearby antique shop, where his attention was caught by a gaudy Victorian playbill advertising a performance of Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal in the northern factory town of Rochdale in February 1843. One by one, in the gorgeously prolix style of the time, the poster ran through the wonders that would be on display, among them “Mr. Henderson, the celebrated somerset thrower, wire dancer, vaulter, rider &c.” and Zanthus, “well known to be one of the best Broke Horses in the world!!!”—not to mention Mr. Kite himself, pictured balancing on his head atop a pole while playing the trumpet.

Something about the poster caught Lennon’s fancy; knowing his dry sense of humor, it was probably the bill’s breathless assertion that this show of shows would be “positively the last night but three!” of the circus’s engagement in the town. Anyway, he bought it, took it home and (the musicologist Ian MacDonald notes) hung it in his music room, where “playing his piano, [he] sang phrases from it until he had a song.” The upshot was a track unlike any other in the Beatles’ canon—though it’s fair to say that the finished article owes just as much to the group’s producer, George Martin, who responded heroically to Lennon’s demand for “a ‘fairground’ production wherein one could smell the sawdust.” (Adds MacDonald, wryly: “While not in the narrowest sense a musical specification, [this] was, by Lennon’s standards, a clear and reasonable request. He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.”) The Abbey Road production team used a harmonium and wobbly tapes of vintage Victorian calliopes to create the song’s famously kaleidoscopic wash of sound.

Guaranteed to raise a smile, the 1843 letterpress-printed circus poster from 1843 that John Lennon owned has been recreated using antique wooden and metal type and wood engravings.

Each print is hand-pulled on a Victorian press and individually numbered in a limited edition of 1,967 via the artist behind the project, Peter Dean, who writes:

As a lifelong Beatles fan I found myself simply wanting to hang a copy of this poster on my wall. As a designer, however, I couldn’t accept the many poor imitations I found – all of which use jarringly incorrect fonts (like Futura and Helvetica) and low-quality copies-of-copies of the illustrations.

So I set about doing it properly. What I thought might be a few weeks of work became several months, where sometimes the prospect of one day owning this poster seemed far away. But we got there in the end and I’m truly delighted with the end result.

I can see why he’s so happy, this looks amazing.

It’s worth pointing out that “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” was one of three songs on the Sgt. Pepper’s album to be banned by BBC radio. The lyrics referring to “Henry the horse” were thought to be slang for heroin. Clearly this was not the case. Imagine writing and creating such an amazing piece of childlike music only to find some small minds ready to ban it.

Filmmakers Nick Esdaile and Joe Fellows made a great short film about how it all came together. You can win a copy of the limited edition “Mr. Kite” print yourself by signing up for the Kite newsletter.
 

 
Via Kottke

 
Nope, this isn’t an undiscovered song by the 20th Century Boy recently unearthed here in the 21st: “Childlike Men” is the first track from Tony Visconti and son Morgan Visconti’s “T.Rex Regeneration” project.

They’ve taken the multi-tracks from some vintage T.Rex recording sessions from 1970-72—which, of course, Visconti Sr. produced—to create an entirely “new” song. (Well entirely like a new—and highly enjoyable, don’t get me wrong—fusion of demos for “Jeepster,” “Diamond Meadows” and “Ride a White Swan” with a spoken word poem section, strings and an unrelated guitar solo or two, I guess is more like it).

A few years ago Visconti mixed a barnstorming version of Electric Warrior in 5.1 surround, and took great care that it still sounded sonically like what it is, an album from the early 1970s. I didn’t expect this to be as good as it is, but I really, really love it.

Marc Bolan’s would have turned 65 on the September 30, 2012.
 

 
Well-spotted, Niall Connolly!

 
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s highly-stylized trailer for the upcoming—and long-awaited by fans—Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch is a fascinating glimpse at the album’s unorthodox creation in the recording studio and Walker at work. It was a big deal for Walker to let cameras capture his creative process like this.

Watching the short film, the thought that came to my mind is that it’s a pity Scott Walker and Samuel Beckett never had a chance to collaborate on something… The creative terrain Walker’s music occupies has much in common with that of the author of Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame, but the eerie “internal monologue” nature of the vocal performance seals the deal for me.

An excerpt from a much longer essay about Bish Bosch from Rob Young, contributing editor of The Wire:

“I was thinking about making the title refer to a mythological, all-encompassing, giant woman artist.” Scott Walker

A Hieronymous Bosch painting can’t be apprehended in a single blink of an eye. The Garden of Earthly Delights is made up of panels in parallel, with scores of tiny actions and allegorical representations teeming in every square inch of canvas. The painting is big enough to encompass heaven and hell.

Perhaps we should listen to Scott’s music in the same way we’d approach a Bosch canvas. You probably won’t understand it after one viewing, but you can become obsessed with one corner detail another until you eventually come to some understanding of how the different parts fit together and complement each other.

“It’s moving on a bit each time we go. Hopefully it’s getting nearer and nearer the kind of thing that’s in our heads. Little things are improving, a bit more focused. The style is improving.”

Since the 1960s, Scott Walker has scaled the heights of pop superstardom, produced some of the most revered solo albums of the late sixties, coasted on his laurels during the seventies, then metamorphosed into something very different. The music he has been making at his own pace since the early eighties might be utterly estranged from the songs that made him a household name, but they stem from the privacy he requires to write this complex and hugely inventive music.

Bish Bosch is the latest in Scott’s discography to pursue the line of enquiry he began back in 1978, with his four devastatingly original songs on the Walker Brothers’ swansong, Nite Flights, and continuing through Climate of Hunter (1984), Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006). He has continued to mature and develop in a late style utterly at odds with the music that made him a superstar, a lifetime ago, but which is totally honest, uncompromising and transcendent.

Scott began writing his new material around 2009, and recorded it sporadically over the following three years, while he was also involved in composing a work for the ROH2 ballet Duet for One Voice, chorographed by Aletta Collins. Unsurprisingly for a long-term exile from his native America, Bish Bosch is a great melting pot of clamouring voices and languages, swift scene-changes (the album’s geographic reach covers Denmark, the Alps, Hawaii, the ancient landscapes of Scythia, Greece and Rome, and Romania), time-travelling jump-cuts, and metaphors from medical science and molecular biology that seize you by the throat.

If The Drift was a dark place, full of scorching orchestral textures and ominous rumblings, Bish Bosch is a tauter but more colourful experience, with greater emphasis on processed, abrasive guitars, digital keyboards and thick silences. Scott’s regular co-producer Peter Walsh, and his regular core of musicians, Ian Thomas (drums), Hugh Burns and James Stevenson (guitars), Alasdair Malloy (percussion) and John Giblin (bass). Guests include trumpeter Guy Barker and pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole, who worked on three of Scott’s mid-seventies LPs. Musical director Mark Warman plays a prominent role, both as conductor and keyboardist. “If I use the big orchestra I’m using it for noises or textures, or big pillars of sound, rather than arrangements,” Walker explains, adding that the sonic richness was achieved by means of a novel recording technique. “What we did was record the drums, bass, percussion, strings and vocals in digital and analogue simultaneously. Because we knew there were a lot of silences in it, especially in something like ‘Zercon’. And in the endings – the ending of ‘Tar’, where you don’t know what’s going on. So in those spots we just cut off the analogue, and where we had the silences we just used the digital. And then we turned on the analogue again when everyone was playing together. Everything was recorded that way, so it’s about eighty per cent analogue.”

Bish Bosch will be in stores on December 3rd from 4AD .