Photo by Francesco Scavullo.

Via No Good For Me / With thanks to Niall!

 
My old friend, film composer and musician Adam Peters, came back from London a few years ago raving about a musician he’d just met there named Vashti Bunyan. Adam and I tend to agree about most music and I think he’s a musical genius himself, so when he’s enthusiastic about something new that I just have to hear, well, I just have to hear it.

What made his enthusiasm for Vashti Bunyan’s music even more compelling was that he’d been in London working as the musical director of that big Syd Barrett tribute concert and had been playing with the very cream of the crop of the rock world, including Damon Albarn, John Paul Jones, the great Kevin Ayers and of course, the Pink Floyd.

So this was exceptionally high praise indeed.

Now referred to as the “Grandmother of Freak Folk,” in the mid-1960s, Vashti Bunyan was a pretty London-born flower child who discovered Bob Dylan on a visit to New York and decided to becme a singer upon her return home. Like Nico and PP Arnold, shy-looking Vashti was spotted by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who had her record the Jagger/Richard’s composition Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind in 1965.

She recorded a few more songs, but nothing really stuck. She did the hippie thing for a while, traveling, living in communes and writing songs which eventually ended up on her album, Just Another Diamond Day, produced by Joe Boyd (Pink Floyd, Nick Drake) and recorded with members of the Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band in 1970.

The results were haunting, as delicate as cotton candy, but the album was not a success. Bunyan turned away from a musical career, raising her three children on a farm. But it was not the end of her music. For years the reputation of Just Another Diamond Day grew steadily, trading at the very highest end of record collecting prices, often selling in excess of $1000, a fact Bunyan herself remained blissfully unaware of.

In 2000 Just Another Diamond Day was reissued on CD with bonus tracks. Bunyan’s ethereal music was embraced by a new generation of musicians such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective. The title track was used in a memorable T-Mobile advertisement. Her follow-up to Diamond Day, titled Lookaftering came out in 2005, a mere 35 years after its predecessor and was critically well-received.

A documentary film about her life, tracing the journeys that inspired the songs on the Diamond Day album, Vashti Bunyan: From Here To Before was released in 2008.
 

 
Vashti Bunyan performs Nick Drake’s “Which Will.”
 

 
“Epizootics!,” from Scott Walker’s new album Bish Bosch, showcases the artist working at the peak of his powers. Hard to believe that the enigmatic recluse will be 70 years old next January. The voice, lyrics and attitude are more powerful than ever. Simply amazing.

The video directed by animator Olivier Groulx does a marvelous job of integrating image with sound in a rare and artful way that expands rather than diminishes the song. Future collaborations between Walker and Groulx is an exciting prospect.

Bish Bosch will be released on December 4 and is available here.
 

 
I do love Sparks, those delightfully talented brothers Ron and Russell Mael, whose music has made the world so much better. They arrived in my life at the moment The Bonzos left, and offered a similar wit and sophistication with a syncopated beat. This documentary is made from found footage, for a journalism class in 2010, by jedenobel. It’s seems somehow right that Sparks should have a homemade fan documentary, and this one doesn’t disappoint, being both entertaining and informative, and with plenty of clips.

The fab image of Sparks above comes via the lovely Lady Is Lingering site.
 

 
The joyful hedonism of the 1960s was in part a response to the trauma to the Second World War. The same way the twenties swung after the first great conflagration. And like that decade, it was primarily the white, upwardly mobile, metropolitan, middle class that enjoyed the sex, the drugs and the rock ‘n’ roll.

London may have been swinging in 1967, but for the rest of the country not a lot changed. It would take until the 1970s for most of the country to get a hint of what London experienced. The most important changes, apart from pop music and American TV shows, were the legalization abortion and de-criminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults - both of which set the scene for bigger and more radical changes in the 1970s.

Yet, as so many of the media are Baby Boomers, the love of all things sixties ensures TV fills its schedules with documentaries on that legendary decade. 1967: The Summer of Love is better than most, as it covers the cultural, social, and political changes that the decade brought. With contributions form Germaine Greer, Donovan, Nigel Havers, Bill Wyman, John Birt and Mary Quant, together with some excellent color archive, this documentary is a cut-above the usual retro-vision.
 

 
On the cusp of stardom, a young David Bowie models a Michael Fish dress on the cover of Curious - the ‘sex education magazine for men and women.’ He wore the same outfit on the cover of his 1970 album, The Man Who Sold The World.

Bowie stands next to clothes designer Freddie Buretti, who would design some of the early Ziggy Stardust costumes. Bowie tried to make a star of Buretti with his side-project band Arnold Corns, recording a version of “Moonage Daydream” with Buretti. The band failed, Buretti returned to designing clothes, and Bowie recorded Ziggy Stardust.
 

Arnold Corns - “Moonage Daydream”
 

 
Erik Satie’s A Day in the Life of a Musician:

Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities.

Get up: 7:18 am; be inspired 10:23 to 11:47 am.

Take lunch: 12:11 pm; leave table at 12:14 pm.

Healthy horse-riding out in the grounds: 1:19 to 2:53 pm

More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07 pm.

Various activities (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, swimming etc.): 4:21 to 6:47 pm.

Dinner is served at 7:16 and ends at 7:20 pm

Then come symphonic readings out loud 8:09 to 9:49 pm.

I go to bed regularly at 10:37 pm. Once a week on Tuesdays I wake with a start at 3:19 am

I can only eat white foods: eggs, sugar, scraped bones, fat from dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, rice, turnips, things like pasta, white cheese, cotton salad and certain fish.

I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite, but never talk while eating, for fear of strangling myself.

I breathe carefully a little at a time.

My sleep is deep but I keep one eye open. My bed is round with a hole cut out to let my head through. Once every hour a servant takes my temperature.

I have long subscribed to a fashion magazine. I wear a white bonnet, white stockings and a white waistcoat.

My doctor has always told me to smoke. Part of his advice runs “Smoke away, my dear chap. If you don’t someone else will.”

- Erik Satie

If only that kind of routine would work for me…

The poster of Erik Satie was made by The Keep Calm-O-Matic.

The following clip of Erik Satie and Picabia is from Rene Clair’s Entr’Acte, filmed in 1924.
 

 
With thanks to Sig Waller
 

 
The Alice Cooper Certificate of Insanity (issued by the School for the Hopelessly Insane) was a limited edition document given away free with Cooper’s album From the Inside, in 1978. Whether this was a recommendation or, a comment on the quality of the record, was never made clear. What is known is that rather like the source for Malcolm Lowry’s excellent novella Lunar Caustic, Cooper’s album was similarly inspired by the singer’s stint in a New York sanitarium for his alcoholism.

From the Inside was co-written with Elton John’s song-writing partner, Bernie Taupin.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Through a Glass Darkly: Malcolm Lowry, Booze, Literature and Writing

 
Here’s a clip of the infamous 1977 episode of What’s Happening!! where Rerun gets busted by the Doobie Brothers for trying to record their concert.

There’s even a Facebook fan page dedicated to it called That Episode of What’s Happening!! Where Rerun Bootlegs the Doobie Brothers. 
 

 
With thanks to Todd Phillips!

 
Let There Be Rock is a film version of one of AC/DC’s greatest concerts. Recorded during their Highway to Hell tour, at the Pavillon de Paris, France, on December 9th, 1979, this concert contains a great selection of some of the band’s best known early numbers (“Highway To Hell,” “Let There Be Rock,” “Whole Lotta Rosie”), together with stunning performances from an unstoppable Angus Young (only pausing for some oxygen) on guitar, and blistering vocals from Bon Scott.

Track Listing:

01. “Live Wire”
02. “Shot Down in Flames”
03. “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be”
04. “Sin City”
05. Interview
06. “Walk All Over You”
07. Interview
08. “Bad Boy Boogie”
09. “The Jack”
10. Interview
11. “Highway to Hell”
12. “Girls Got Rhythm”
13. “High Voltage”
14. Interview
15. “Whole Lotta Rosie”
16. “Rocker”
17. “Let There Be Rock”

Tragically, 2 months after this concert, Bon Scott died, his body found in the back of car outside a friend’s house in London.  His demise started the version of AC/DC we know today, with former Geordie singer, Brian Johnson on lead vocals.
 

 
With thanks to Miles Goodwin