After a decade of relative silence, Cathal Coughlan returns later this month with a terrific new album, Song of Co-Aklan on Damian O’Neill’s Dimple Discs label (O’Neill was the lead guitarist for the Undertones, and played bass in That Petrol Emotion.) It feels like there’s a deserving buzz around the upcoming release—and Coughlan’s return—as no doubt inspired, in part, by the well-received Microdisney reunion shows of a few years back. It’s about time. He’s earned it.

The loosely conceptual album is, to an extent, based around the cut-up, quaquaversal persona of “Co-Aklan” who is more than happy to explain to you why everything feels so fucking crazy these days. It’s an extremely high quality piece of work that should appeal to intelligent people with sophisticated taste in song. (That might even include you, dear reader.) The record features his longtime backing band the Necropolitan String Quartet, augmented by Luke Haines (Auteurs/Black Box Recorder), Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney/High Llamas), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti), Aindrías Ó Gruama (Fatima Mansions), Cory Gray (The Delines) and Dublin-based singer-songwriter Eileen Gogan.

I asked Cathal some questions via email.

The obvious question, why ten years between albums?

Well, it certainly wasn’t a plan, at least not in the way it’s turned out now. After the Rancho Tetrahedron album, for which I’d really knocked myself out and from which I received little/no response, I thought the actual format had perhaps had its day. I really enjoyed doing The North Sea Scrolls, but that was more in the nature of a documented live show, which had the added attraction that, on stage, I could just be a sideman on Luke Haines’ songs, for a good part of it.

I was lucky that people in Ireland and France, mainly, offered me the chance to perform in various live shows after that, where my contribution was mainly that of vocalist. That’s what I most enjoy doing, especially when the musicians are really good, and there isn’t any stress for me outside my own contribution. Also, a couple of those productions, one in tribute to WB Yeats and the other to Bertolt Brecht, got me immersed in high-quality and radical work made by others, which I also really enjoy, when kicked into having to do it. It carried no baggage of concern about Silicon Valley, or the post-2010 young-versus-old columnist ‘wars’, etc..

Around 2016, I realised I was amassing quite a bit of material (including some unused songs I’d written for the Yeats show), and felt that it was time to really give the writing some energy, to perhaps make some digital EP’s. But the material came quite easily, and I resolved to play it live, first. Things developed from there.

Does this feel like a comeback for you? There seems to be a lot of buzz around this album, and I’ve noticed that you’re doing a lot of promotion and interviews.

It’s a strange thing, I’m doing more promotion than at any time in decades. But we’re all existing in this bizarre flux, which even predates the pandemic. So there’s no clear quid-pro-quo in this, for me. I’m glad that a lot of people will have heard about the record, because I thought I was making a record which might deserve a hearing but probably wouldn’t get one. But who knows where this will lead? The old rules do not apply.

The barriers, if you will, between your last album, in the form of a CD that had to be manufactured and wrapped in cellophane and shipped someplace, and the intended audience actually finding it don’t exist anymore. It was The North Sea Scrolls that got me interested to find out what you’d been up to, and I could just dial up Black River Falls on TIDAL without even having to walk across the room. It’s piped into people’s homes now—your music, I mean—so now it’s a matter of convincing people to click play, which is still a hard enough task in an attention economy isn’t it?

It’s in another dimension entirely, to be honest. Things were well on their way to the present dispensation in 2009/10, but for one reason or other, it wasn’t possible to achieve any purchase on social media, etc. I’m looking on the streaming services as a set of social networks, whose contribution is purely promotional, and can potentially get the music heard in ways that other avenues can’t, especially without playing live. You’re of course right that the ease of global access is there as never before, as long as listeners know they might like to hear the music.

I may be kidding myself about that mental model, but there’s no other way of remaining motivated, that I know of, when the future need to survive inevitably heaves into view. I’m glad some people still buy physical media, is all I’ll say! I’ll still purchase anything I’ve come across on streaming services, that I like, even if as just a download, which I know is a dying format…

Was Song of Co-Aklan recorded before the pandemic, or in the midst of it?

Before and in the midst. A bunch of the songs were performed live in 2019, and I had intended that to be stage 1 in the rollout of Co-Aklan, hideous golem of post-globalisation retrenchment.

But various personal stuff intervened, and more live work was off the agenda, so I began recording (at a very convivial studio also used by people I admire, like Charles Hayward and Daniel O’Sullivan—run by Frank Byng, himself a very fine drummer who has played with the above, as well as with Kev Hopper’s group Prescott, and many others).

Through some freak of luck, despite my stop-go work pattern, Nick Allum got all his drum tracks down, some guitar, some bass and cello were done, and a few mixes had been completed, before the pandemic really kicked in. I also got Sean O’Hagan’s parts on a couple of the songs done.

Things got weirder after that, but it was clear that an old-school ‘album’ was at hand…

Did you do it (or any of it) remotely over the Internet, or were you always in a studio?

Well, it then became a mixture, in effect. James and Audrey (guitar/cello) recorded a number of their parts remotely. Rhodri Marsden recorded a lot of his signature Zeuhl bass guitar remotely, and some bassoon (me to RM: “I want this to sound like Henry Cow playing ‘The Laughing Gnome,’ can we do that?”). And then there was Cory Gray in Portland, and Eileen Gogan in Dublin.

I wasn’t sure whether I could produce actual mixes for myself, outside of a studio, with no pro engineer, so that’s where a lot of time went, but I’m glad I persevered with that. I can actually be quite methodical with sound, I was astonished to find! The ceaseless skittishness of yore has…altered a bit, if not departed. One song does have an atonal trap coda, with a robot singing aspirational multi-level marketing gibberish.
 

 
I’m someone for whom how music “sounds” is a big part of the enjoyment, and I appreciated the title track’s staticky white noises that come in about a minute into the song, and that killer lead bass line played by Luke Haines. There’s a lot of air around each instrument, and your voice. Now that you have the home recording skills under your belt, do you intend to be more prolific moving forward? Another barrier removed, right? You just need a laptop.

I’m hopeful that it will, but as always, it can break out into some fairly basic deciders, such as (big one): do I need live drums on this, and what does the drummer need to hear in order to give a good performance? Since the album was finished, I’ve been getting a bit synthy with some new solo stuff, but it’s important to retain the ‘pro-noise’ disposition there, the way I hear it in current work by Gazelle Twin or older work by This Heat or Suicide, all of which still inspires me. It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but electronics can sound antiseptic, and unless that’s your actual schtick and intention, today’s technology does mean you have no excuse for ending up there unintentionally.

The “Song of Co-Aklan” chorus is a pretty ideal combo for me - the guitars jangle like The Byrds, while alongside that the synths crackle like a post-air raid fire. You can’t really plan for these things.

I’ve read that Co-Aklan is meant to be an alter ego, how so?

Well, when contemplating releasing recorded music again, I was once more reminded that tagging records with my limited-feasibility birth name has always (since 2000) felt a bit sappy and by-rote, though I’m far from being ashamed of my family or where we originate. So I decided to start a process. Then, a friend of mine did this chaotic cut-up on one of my old song lyrics, using online translation and re-translation, and out popped Co-Aklan.

I thought - perfect! It’s phonetic from the off, it isn’t pretending to be a Latin word for ‘trustworthy money’ or some neoliberal liturgical shit like that, and could readily be transliterated into other alphabets in order to secure new markets. Had one the slightest interest in that kind of thing.

A lot of the songs relate to shaky, misremembered and contested identities, and the fear and rage which can result from them, so Co-Aklan and his advent provide that resonance, on a semi-conscious level, though semantically, it’s just another trading name.

Will you keep using the Co-Aklan moniker?

Yes, I will gradually ramp up its usage in the coming couple of years. I think Cristabel Christo’s and Greg Dunn’s totemic cover image for this album give me the ideal platform for saying, “Look, here he is, and he’s staying for a while.” Like the ‘pagan idol’ on a Martin Denny sleeve, only he sings! Wish I’d done this sooner, but it’s taken years of limbo to get this confident, weirdly.
 

Front cover painting by Cristabel Christo, based in part on photos by Gregory Dunn/Stoneybutter.
 
What else have you been up to during the COVID-19 lockdown?

Hiberno-theocratic synth-pop is a genre all but shunned by the modern world of arts and culture, and hence it’s in this zone that Grammy-winning producer/musician Jacknife Lee and I have chosen to celebrate our being back in regular contact. We first became acquainted under the generous umbrella of Dublin punk/arts magazine Vox in the early 1980s. The monochrome consciousness and ethics of the Ireland we both grew up in has been hitched to a stark and sometimes intentionally degraded electronic palette to produce an effect which is often poignant but sometimes brutal. Forward to the hit parade! in short. The collaboration was masses of fun. Never in recent memory have I dared reference Thomas Leer’s 1978 single “Private Plane,” only to have the respondent say, “That’s the first single I owned”

Other than the Telefís album and the various monochrome pagain things we’re hatching for that, I’ve been working as part of a collective effort on a project called Bring Your Own Hammer, wherein musicians with Irish links have teamed up with a group of historians to create musical work based on the historical record of crimes and other lowlights which occurred in the Irish diaspora, mainly in Britain and the US, mainly in the 19th century. It’s going really well, and one thing I’m working on is a collaborative track with Sean O’Hagan. Probably a vinyl release next year, and some online work around that.

Also, there’s been the recurrent episodic search for new spaces in and around our small house in which to “film” myself for each next video extravaganza - sometimes in a robe, wearing one boxing glove, sometimes bouncing lamely around outside the shed. Looks like the SoCA album will have given rise to FIVE videos, before we call a halt. they vary from the sketchy to the conceptual to the beautiful. We’re of course not talking glossy 80s epics here, but it’s a strange realisation for me!

Preparatory work for the next Co-Aklan instalment and the second Telefís album are also in hand.

Song of Co-Aklan is available from March 26th.
 

“Owl in the Parlour,” the album’s second single.

 
Most people would probably be surprised to find that Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons recorded a musically ambitious concept album in 1969 that was inspired by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s. The Jersey boys were all about a doo-wop meets big band Motown sound and songs about girls, so no one expected an album of bold social commentary, complex vocal arrangements, long songs and quirky Van Dyke Parks-esque musical arrangements, but this is exactly what they got when the group released The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.

The opening fanfare is the provocatively titled “American Crucifixion Resurrection”:

Unbound slaves stand outside the gate
With lengths of broken chain they wait
Empty stomachs filled with hate
No-one told the heads of state, the Prince of peace is sleeping late
Who will wait on the lords and ladies, who will cry when they lose their crowns?
Sleeping through the years of error, waking in a reign of terror

Yes, folks, that’s from the same fellas who sang “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”!

The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette was released in a fold-out cover with an extra inner page, containing an eight page ‘‘newspaper’’ insert. Bob Gaudio co-wrote the album’s songs with Jake Holmes (who actually composed “Dazed and Confused” not Jimmy Page, and the “Be A Pepper” jingle for the Dr. Pepper soft drink with Randy Newman). In the mid-70s, Gaudio was told by none other than John Lennon that The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette was one of this favorite albums, a claim bolstered by the fact that John and Yoko (not to mention Jethro Tull) stole the newspaper cover idea for their 1972 Sometime in New York City record.

Bob Gaudio later said of the album:

“One of the disappointments of our career for me on a creative level was The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette album. It was just something that I had to do at that time. It got wonderful reviews, but obviously it was not an acceptable piece from us. Everybody was expecting Top 40.”

The album did well with critics, it was really the group’s fans who rejected it. The lavish, over the top approach used on the album was abandoned for the group’s next records, the straight ahead Half & Half and Chameleon, their Motown album. Still, it wasn’t a total flop, selling over 150,000 albums, but by Four Seasons standards it was a disaster, making it to just #85 in the charts.

Even if The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette isn’t quite as legendary as Pet Sounds, it is in the same “big league,” literally, as both groups, the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys are among the top selling vocal harmony pop acts that America has ever produced, each selling in excess of 100 million records. It certainly deserves to stand alongside of something like The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle as a somewhat lesser-known example of this brand of lush, elaborately orchestrated vocal psych pop. Brian Wilson wasn’t the only one capable of making music in this style.

Below, some more examples of what the insert newspaper looked like. Some label needs to do a full-on re-issue of this puppy, pronto. It’s even long out of print on CD, with Amazon dealers charging exorbitant prices for what can still sometimes be found for a dollar in used vinyl shops. Crate diggers, hear me: If you see an original copy of The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette album with the insert, grab it.
 

 

 

 

 

 
After this record, the creative partnership of Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes went on to another brilliant—and similarly ill-fated—project, Frank Sinatra’s haunting 1970 Watertown. Note “Watertown” reference in the above detail from the insert newspaper.
 

“American Crucifixion Resurrection”

“Mr. Stately’s Garden” (in which The Four Seasons do their best American Kinks approximation)

More Four Seasons after the jump…

A nineteen-year-old Phil Lynott photographed for Irish magazine Women’s Way in 1969.
 
In 1969, Thin Lizzy vocalist Phil Lynott was already singing with his fourth band, Orphanage, following his dismissal from the band Skid Row (featuring guitarist Gary Moore). Lynott was pretty laser-focused on making rock and roll his primary profession from a very young age after forming his first group, Black Eagles—a cover band, and his second, Kama Sutra, when he was fifteen. In 1969, during his short time with Orphanage, from which Thin Lizzy would soon spring, he was interviewed by one of the most popular women’s magazines in Ireland at the time, Women’s Way, for a column called “Beat Up” by journalist Heather Parsons. During his youth, Lynott had gone through more than his fair share of difficulties. His father was absent, and the young Lynott was subjected to relentless racially-motivated verbal attacks because of his mixed heritage. The racism was so bad in Manchester that Lynott’s mother Sarah sent him off to live with his grandparents in Dublin. All of these experiences, as well as others, made a deep impression on Phil, which he articulated in the interview in a rather profound way. Here are a few of the insights he shared with Women’s Way when he was just nineteen and about to become the biggest rock star in Ireland, and later known worldwide as the charismatic, cock-sure vocalist for Thin Lizzy. Let’s start with my favorite moment from the interview, when Phil was asked what he disliked the most:

“I’ll tell you what I dislike the most of all—those superior types who look down on any girl who hasn’t got the same views. What right does anyone have to be so critical? We’ve all got our own lives to lead and different ideas on how to do this. The place money has in people’s lives annoys me too. Okay, I know it’s essential, but at the moment it’s all-important to too many people. Another thing is social injustice. No. I’m not going to say anything about racial discrimination because people just say, ‘Oh, another coloured fella with a chip on his shoulder. Take all the things Bob Dylan writes about though—housing problems, people starving and dying, wars. I sometimes get very frustrated because I feel so strongly about these things and can’t do anything about them. I’d like to put all the oppressors into the oppressed position.”

If you just high-fived your laptop screen, congratulations. You, my friend, are on the right side of history along with Phil Lynott. Here’s a little more from Phil on the desire to have a child and be a good father, unlike his own father:

“Do you know what else I’d like to do? Adopt a kid. Now, why can’t single people do that? I’d like a kid, and I’d be good to him and look after him and give him a good life—better than he’d have in an orphanage. No pun intended!”

Of course, since this is a nineteen-year-old burgeoning rock star we’re talking about here, Lynott does give some insight into the stuff you’d expect a nineteen-year-old dude to be interested in. Such as girls with strawberry blonde hair, cars (especially if they are “kinky”), and not being the marrying type because he’s too much of a “flirt.” (He would marry Caroline Crowther eleven years later on Valentine’s Day.) You can read the entire interview here.
 

Phil Lynott giving a spoken-word performance of the song “Shades of a Blue Orphanage.” Lynott wrote the song as a tribute to his grandmother Sarah who raised him with her husband, Phil’s grandfather, Frank. It is taken from the television special ‘Me & My Music’ recorded in 1976 (but broadcast in 1977).
 
HT: Brand New Retro

 
This month sees Cherry Red releasing the first expanded edition re-issue of Marc Almond’s The Stars We Are since the album’s original release in 1988. The Stars We Are is Marc Almond at his most commercial, but that is in a no way a slight. Marking the singer’s final collaboration with his musical partner Annie Hogan, the lush balladry of The Stars We Are—Almond’s 4th solo album proper (if you don’t count his Marc and the Mambas side project)—is also one of his very best, an all-killer, no-filler affair that spawned five singles, two of them international hits.

There are three amazing duets on the album that I want to call your attention to. First is “Your Kisses Burn,” an astonishing number performed with Nico, in her final studio recording. Being a big Nico fan and a big Marc Almond fan, I was awestruck by the infernal power of this song when I first heard it. It’s scary! I can vividly recall playing it over and over again at top volume the day I brought the CD home. It cannot be said that Nico didn’t go out on a high note, but according to Almond, interviewed by The Quietus, she had difficulty singing that day:

“Nico was a mysterious figure, enigmatic with that great musical and artistic connection to The Velvet Underground and Warhol, which were things I was obsessed about at school. And of course that wonderful intriguing voice, icy and remote yet warm at the same time. She made a sound I’d never heard before - maybe some sort of a gothic punk Marlene Dietrich. The first time i heard her music was with The Velvet Underground, but I bought Desertshore, The Marble Index and The End and liked them more. There was also her musical association with Brian Eno, which made her more intriguing.

“When I became a musician, she was always at the top of my wish list for a duet of some sort. I was so nervous to contact her and EMI were not really for it at all, as you can imagine. I wanted to make sure that she was treated like the legend and the star I felt she was. EMI balked at her demands, but I was insistent. It turned out she was lovely if fragile, and we played pool and drank tea and talked for ages. The song was a problem, it turned out to be a bit too complicated, too orchestral for her and she began to deteriorate as the day went on and the methadone took effect. She still managed to deliver that wonderful Nico voice. We left on warm terms with plans for a better track more suited to her.

I think this one is fucking incredible. You be the judge. PLAY IT LOUD:
 

 
And then there is the album’s BIG HIT, “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” Almond’s duet with Gene Pitney on a remake of Pitney’s own top five song of 1967. The Stars We Are was originally released in late 1988 with a solo Marc rendition of the number, but the duet—with the same backing track—went to number one on the UK pop charts and stayed there for an entire month. Marc really gives it his all here, while Pitney’s vocal takes the song to a new height. There were TV appearances galore—the pair were even invited to be on Wogan—and this charming music video shot in Las Vegas.
 

 
There’s more after the jump…

Lemmy and his trusty Rickenbacker bass and his pal Wendy O. Williams with her chainsaw. These marionettes were made by Canadian artist, Darren Moreash of Darrionettes.
 
If there is one thing I have learned as a contributor to Dangerous Minds for the last seven years is this—you can always count on the members of this collective to bring things to your attention that you perhaps did not know existed. I’ve done this many times myself here, including when I wrote about the fact an anatomically correct GG Allin marionette exists, poop stains, and all dubbing him the “Masturbator of Puppets.” I still get a kick out of that wordplay because I am, as far as you know, a fifteen-year-old boy. Also, my DM colleague, the always intriguing Paul Gallagher posted about these gorgeous marionettes fashioned after rock and roll royalty last summer, and boy, did you all dig that (as you should).

Anyway, as people do, I recently spent too much time scrolling through my social media feeds and looking at old photos of Alice Cooper from the early 70s and BOOM. Suddenly there was a photo of Alice holding an Alice Cooper puppet by its little paddle control that pulls its strings, and the search to find out more began.

This brings us to Canadian artist (and stand-up metal fan, I might add) Darren Moreash—the self-dubbed “Geppeto” of Harrietsfield, Nova Scotia. And Moreash’s efforts have brought him good fortune. Apparently, when he was still dating his soon-to-be wife, he gifted her with an Alice Cooper marionette. In 2012, Cheap Trick used puppets Moreash made in their images for their video “I Want You For Christmas.” Of the countless marionettes Moreash has produced during his lifetime, he has been able to gift them to many of his childhood heroes like Lemmy Kilmister and Stan Lee.

Now, I have to say that my kid went through a phase when he was a little kiddo, during which he became quite enamored with marionettes. And I gotta say, they were a lot of fun to play with once you got the hang of making them move the way you wanted. If I had known about Moreash during that time period, I would absolutely be the proud owner of a David Bowie marionette that I would lie to people about, telling them it’s really for my kid. In the past, Moreash’s marionettes have been auctioned off for charity fetching as much as $500. Anyway, as it’s the photos you came here for so, I’ll stop jawing so you can keep scrolling and see some of Moreash’s marionettes. If you are curious, yes, it does appear that you can get in touch with Moreash and have one of his wooden creations for your very own, such as his latest, a marionette in honor of the Bernie Sanders mitten meme. More info on that, here.
 

Feel the BERN!
 

Booji Boy!
 

Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO wearing his red energy dome.
 

Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman.
 

 

Peter Gabriel.
 
Many more of Moreash’s marionettes after the jump…

 
While it’s true that nearly 100% of the articles and blog posts that you read—like this here very blog post—about Cathal Coughlan compare his voice to that of Scott Walker’s, would everyone say THAT if it wasn’t true? High praise indeed, but hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

I was a big fan of Microdisney, the band Coughlan fronted in the 80s—and I did come at them as a Scott Walker fan wanting more of ‘that.’ One of the very, very best bands that Ireland has ever produced, the lush music of Microdisney sounded instantly classic to my ears—like Burt Bacharach’s stuff does—when I first heard it. Songs like “Loftholdingswood,” “Birthday Girl,” “Singer’s Hampstead Home” (allegedly about Boy George), “Are You Happy?” and my favorite by them, “Mrs. Simpson,” have that big, epic, cinemascope thing going on that the voice has no choice but to live up to. Coughlan’s trenchant lyrics were fascinating and emotionally evocative, but still open to interpretation enough that I could make them all about whatever woman I happened to be in love with or whatever was going on in my life at the time.

Admittedly I lost track of his post-Microdisney output until I became obsessed with a song of his called “Witches in the Water” that was part of The North Sea Scrolls, a whimsical alternate history lecture/musical made in collaboration with Luke Haines and Australian journalist/rock critic Andrew Mueller. (I won’t go off on a tangent about this album, but trust me, it’s a minor masterpiece and you really need to hear it. On Spotify and YouTube.)

Have a listen to “Witches in the Water,” and then get back to me. I’ll wait.
 

 
That song has everything, doesn’t it? Separates the boys from the men. I immediately made up for lost time with Fatima Mansions and Coughlan’s solo work, and I am happy to report that for the first time in a decade there will be a new Cathal Coughlan solo album coming out later this year, heralded by the release of this new video—which gets around COVID-19 lockdown music video cliches in a quite creative manner I thought—for the title track, “Song of Co-Aklan.”
 

 
If you’re an Iggy and the Stooges fan, you’ve surely heard their infamous live album, Metallic KO (1976). But did you know that, due to a technical error, the record was issued at the wrong speed and was off pitch? It would be decades before anyone noticed and the blunder was righted, but the tapes of the two shows that were edited down for the LP didn’t receive the same treatment. That’s all changed, and for the first time the full recordings of both gigs, including the Stooges’ tumultuous final show, can be heard in all their speed-corrected glory.

In the spring of 1973, Columbia Records released Raw Power after a long delay. The album justly received critical acclaim, but failed to sell. Also during this period, Iggy and the Stooges were dropped by their management company, Main Man, so things were not looking good. In July, needing money to survive, the guys hit the road, touring heavily, leading to what turned out to be their final show in February. By then, the Stooges’ contract with Columbia had been terminated.
 

Getting near the end: Opening for Slade in Cleveland on January 18th, 1974.

During the February 9th, 1974 gig at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, the crowd threw all sorts of objects at the Stooges, including ice cubes, lit cigarettes, coins, beer bottles, light bulbs, and eggs, all the while egged on by a defiant Iggy. Pop, incidentally, was dressed in a leotard and wearing a shawl fashioned as a skirt. They closed with an X-rated version of “Louie Louie,” leaving the stage as projectiles continued to fly towards them.

A burnt-out Iggy would soon leave the group and the Stooges were no more.

Metallic KO contains two shows that took place at the Michigan Palace. Side A has three songs from an October 6th concert at the venue, with the remaining three on Side B from the riotous February 9th gig. Both were taped on a four-track cassette recorder by Michael Tipton, a fan and friend of bassist Ron Asheton. Ron had a copy of the last show, which guitarist James Williamson borrowed and got to British rock journalist Nick Kent, who in turn put in the hands of Marc Zermati of Skydog Records, a French label. Scott Thurston, who played piano for the Stooges in their waning days, was the source for the October 6th tape. Metallic KO was released by Skydog in September 1976, with Iggy’s nihilistic, taunting banter and the Stooges’ savage songs influencing the burgeoning British punk movement. Lester Bangs famously wrote, “Metallic KO is the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings.”

Continues after the jump…

 
I’ve posted here before about Luke Haines’ excellent Righteous in the Afternoon show broadcast every Tuesday on Boogaloo Radio. It’s a fun time for rock snobs and I highly recommend it. Anyway, tomorrow he’s got something special planned, not the usual record spinning he does, but an original radio play.

From the press release:

“A man can only see clearly when he has been blind drunk for 30 years.” – Lord Reith.

This is not the story of a man at the top of his game. This is the story of a man at the end of his game. Let’s call him Endgame Man. Endgame Man is aged somewhere in his 50s. Success has dabbled with him and has long been dabbling elsewhere. The last chance saloon closed on Sunday night and it’s now a nothing Tuesday afternoon. The action begins on a bench in a scrubby enclosure in front of an estate in North London. Endgame Man’s’ daily trip to the Costcutter makes Captain Willards journey down the Nung River look like a gentle punt down The Cam.

‘Test Driving The New Prius’ is a 35 minute radio play (with sound effects) written and performed by Jim Fry (Earl Brutus, Pre New) and Luke Haines. (The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof ) Just as that other modernist masterpiece Ulysses depicted a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, Test Driving The New Prius follows the life in a daze of Endgame Man. In this tale of derring-do our hero acts out a perilous adventure in the 400 yards between his home, his local pub and the off-licence. With nervous system reduced to a series of involuntary twitches and reality reduced to a background hum of decades of half absorbed mindless daytime TV wittering. Can Endgame Man get home and make it through to Wednesday with only his spirit familiars – an endless trail of 75cl bottles of Glen’s vodka to guide him? Tune in to Boogaloo Radio at 2pm (9am EST) on the 8th December to find out.

Cast:

Jim Fry
Luke Haines
Scott King

With cameos from* Jayne MacDonald, Brian Eno, Martin Degville and the cast of Blankety Blank (1980).

*Sort of.

Broadcast on Boogaloo Radio at 2pm and 3pm (9am and 10am EST) on December 8th, then afterwards available to buy on cassette tape via Industrial Coast.

“Smash the System” from 2016

 
In April 2017, we told you the incredible story of the talented singer/songwriter Richard Goldman and the LPs of his material that were put out without his knowledge. Both records were released as part of tax shelter deals in 1977. The albums are testaments to his knack for writing and performing clever, catchy songs, but in addition to not being asked if his works could be used on those records, Richard received no financial compensation. Forty-plus years later, these injustices are finally being righted with Numero Group’s issuing of Sweethearts Deluxe, the first authorized collection of Richard’s recordings that were included on tax shelter albums.
 

 
To celebrate the release, which is out today, we’re reposting part one of our 2017 article on Richard Goldman and the shady world of “tax scam records.”

*****

“Tax scam records” is a term that was coined by collectors to identify albums that are believed to have been manufactured for the sole purpose of—get this—losing money. From around 1976 until 1984, a number of record labels were established as tax shelters, with investors putting their money into albums. A financier would invest, say, $20,000 in an LP, and if it tanked, the backer could claim a loss on their taxes, based on the assessed value of the master recording. Technically, the practice was legal, but to maximize the write-off, the appraisal was often grossly inflated—as high as seven figures.

The I.R.S would come to question the legitimacy of some of these labels, and accuse those promoting shelters that focused on tax benefits—rather than the music being bankrolled—of perpetuating fraud.

Anything was seemingly fair game for a tax shelter album, including LPs previously issued as private press records, demo tapes by aspiring artists, and studio outtakes by name acts. Some labels were so brazen, they released albums using material by groups as big as Led Zeppelin and the Beatles.
 

Album of Beatles Christmas messages, 1981

Another issue that caught the attention of the I.R.S., was how little to no money was put into marketing these releases. Over time, collectors came to realize that relatively few copies of individual tax shelter albums had made it into stores. It’s believed that most of the LPs went directly to a warehouse or were simply destroyed. Many of these records are so scarce that only a handful of copies are known to exist.

Sometimes the artists knew about the release and were compensated, but more often than not, they had no idea. The singer-songwriter Richard Goldman is an artist in which the latter applies. Though getting ripped off isn’t unusual in the music business, his story is a fantastic one—even in the strange universe of “tax scam records.”

In late 1970, with dreams of making it in the music business, a 20-year-old Richard Goldman moved from his hometown of New Rochelle, New York to Los Angeles. “I wanted to be Jimmy Webb,” Richard told me recently (other inspirations include witty songsmith, Harry Nilsson; alt-country pioneer, Gram Parsons; and pop titans, the Beatles). His goal was to be a behind the scenes figure, thinking he would have a longer career as songwriter, rather than as a performer, as they tended to have shorter lifespans. But he wasn’t averse to playing his songs in public.
 

 
Richard became a fixture of the weekly open mic night at the Troubadour, then the hottest venue for singer-songwriters. After one such a set at the club, he was approached by an impressed member of the audience, Sam Weatherly, who became Richard’s manager and producer. Weatherly paid for demo sessions, which enabled Richard to record studio-quality versions of the songs he had been writing. For a session that took place at Sunset Sound, Weatherly brought in a musician by the name of George Clinton to play piano on a few tracks. Yep, the George Clinton.
 

 
Weatherly, who was older, “wasn’t just my manager,” Richard says today. “He was like a parent.” Richard would head over to Weatherly’s house often to have dinner, watch football, or play the board game Risk. Weatherly and his wife were like Richard’s west coast family.

In 1975, Richard recorded at the famed Sound City Studios. He’d actually recorded there a couple of years prior, and was invited back by one of the owners, Joe Gottfried. The engineer for the sessions, Fred Ampel, had taken on the managerial role in Richard’s career. By this time, Weatherly and Richard had drifted apart, though the circumstances are now unclear. Richard was thrilled to be recording again at Sunset Sound. “You knew you were in a very cool place.” Fleetwood Mac were right across the hall, and Lindsay Buckingham caught a playback of one of Richard’s songs, “Sinatra’s Car.” Buckingham expressed his admiration for the tune, noting that the bridge sounded Beatlesesque. He even lent a hand, overdubbing a bit of bass for a particularly tricky section of the track. “It was a thrill to watch,” remembers Richard. “He was ripped on pot but absolutely flawless on bass.”
 
Continues after the jump…

Portrait of Brian Eno by Cecily Eno

Brian Eno was creating soundtrack music for films even before he joined Roxy Music in 1971. His first project was a repetitive, proto-ambient score for Malcolm Le Grice’s experimental short “Berlin Horse” in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1976 that his music appeared in another film, Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane. Since then Eno has worked with some of the world’s finest directors, including Peter Jackson, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dario Argento, Jonathan Demme, Danny Boyle, animator Ralph Bakshi, Al Reinert, and several others. The fruits of these several decades of work—which has seen hundreds of his songs used in films, TV shows, documentaries, advertisements and of course the Windows 95 startup sounds—has been collected together on Film Music 1976 – 2020.

The lead track from the album, “Decline and Fall” originally featured on the soundtrack to 2017’s O Nome da Morte, (AKA 492: A Man Called Death) and that film’s director, Henrique Goldman, was personally commissioned by Brian Eno to make the song’s promo video.

Goldman says of the piece:

“Our video juxtaposes two cinematic narratives set in Brazil, one of the main frontiers in the final battle between Man and Nature. The first comprises fragments of a drama about the tortured soul of the assassin portrayed in O Nome da Morte, and the second depicts a magical natural phenomena – the Invisible River of the Amazon – a meteorologic process on a colossal scale, whereby rainforest trees continually spray billions of gallons of water into the atmosphere.

The video is foreboding and suspenseful. Somewhere in the vast Brazilian landscape, something momentous lurks in the background. An unforeseen, greedy and merciless force disrupts the divine stream of life. The same force drives the hitman, who stealthily steps out of the shadows to kill for money. As rain and fire, fiction and science, birth and death, nature and civilisation, art, love and greed continually juxtapose each other, we become aware of the delicate natural balance that is being severely disrupted by our civilisation.”

Brian Eno’s Film Music 1976 – 2020 is already out in the UK on double vinyl and CD, with the US release coming on January 22nd.