Parisian Bernard Fevre released some exceptionally cool electronic music in the 1970’s under his own name and as Black Devil. His sound was way ahead of its time and is echoed in the music of Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and LCD Sound System. Hard to believe this was recorded over 35 years ago. Visionary. Fevre composed these sonic bits of loveliness using synths and occasional tape loops and a drummer, but no computers.
“We were in our own world,” writes Fevre of Black Devil’s original incarnation. “There was no electronic disco scene in Paris at that time and strangely we somehow invented the Italo sound.”
Most reggae and ska fans have heard Price Buster, the 60s Blue Beat king’s wonderfully offensive and comically misogynist “Ten Commandments”—it’s been a staple of my record collection and a perennial mix tape favorite for 25 years:
But what I did not know, until today, was that there is an answer song from “Princess Buster”—listen below as the cocky street tough of the earlier song gets kicked to the curb by his better half:
In their February 28, 1974, issue, Rolling Stone magazine paired up Beat generation godfather, William S. Burroughs with glitter god David Bowie for a dual interview. At the time of the talk, Burroughs had only heard two of Bowie’s songs and Bowie had only recently read Burroughs’ Nova Express novel, knowing the writer through his reputation more than his actual work. Famously, Bowie went on to use the literary and magical “cut ups” technique developed by Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, when he soon afterwards began working on his stage musical based on George Orwell’s 1984, what later became known as Diamond Dogs.
Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.
Bowie: The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ‘cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the young dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.
Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.
Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.
Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.
Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.
Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!
Scottish art punks Fire Engines produced a handful of singles, a couple of which were modest hits in the UK, and one album in the early 1980’s. Clearly influenced by New York No Wave bands like The Contortions and the neurotic Jersey jungle music of The Feelies, Fire Engines were still very much their own beast. The band consisted of David Henderson on vocals and guitar, Murray Slade on guitar, bassist Graham Main and drummer Russell Burn. Dissonant, funky, angry, sweet and ahead of its time, you could drop their tunes into a mix with The Strokes, Of Montreal and TV On The Radio and they’d be right at home.
No Wavy ‘Get Up And Use Me’ sounds like The Raybeats knockin’ heads with Tom Verlaine. Nervous and twangy with a Verlaine whine. Recently covered by Franz Ferdinand.
A compilation of Fire Engine tracks is available here.
An old pal, the writer Tommy Udo, alerted me to 1970’s Soviet Jazz Funk, which led me to check up on how Jazz developed in the USSR from the 1920s-70s.
Since its beginning in the 1920s, Russian Jazz has been in constant flux between prohibition, censorship and state sponsorship - dependent on who was leader and their domestic, foreign, economic and political policies. Jazz came to Russia via Valentin Parnakh, a musician who caught the jazz bug when he saw the Louis Mitchel Jazz Kings, while in exile in Paris in 1921.
On 1st October, Parnakh returned to Moscow and performed his own October Revolution with his newly formed jazz band, Pervyj v RSFSR Kscentričeskij Orkestr džaz-band Valentina Parnakha. Their first gig was slated, but that didn’t count for much as Parnakh had imported Jazz into Russia at just the right time, as the State’s New Economic Policy (NEP) encouraged “private initiatives into Soviet economic policies,” which meant a sharing of both cultural ideas and finance. This openess led to a Russian Jazz boom through the 1920s, which the government attempted to regulate and “professionalize,” even sending a cultural delegation to America.
This incredibly fluid cultural exchange ceased when Stalin (prior to his radical Five Year Plan) enforced a Proletarian view of the Arts and Culture, that was “anti-modern, anti-Western, anti-jazz and often also anti-classical.” Stalin feared outside influence, in particular music, which he believed could undermine the revolution. For a time, Jazz was tolerated, and became a focus for heated debate; but when Maxim Gorky returned from Fascist Italy, at Stalin’s invitation, the writer penned a controversial essay that “equated jazz with homosexuality, drugs and eroticism,” and the music was slowly forced underground.
Jazz and other forms of popular music became the signature tune for the dissident and liberal intelligentsia. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jazz was making its reappearance, with recordings made in secret, usually at night amongst like-minded musicians, keen to adopt and experiment with other musical forms and influences, especially Funk and Soul from America. Few of these Soviet Jazz-Funk recordings remain from the vast number of recorded, but a selection of great tracks can be found here.
Keith Richards’ raunchy and thoroughly entertaining autobiography ‘Life’ is the best rock memoir I’ve read since Dylan’s ‘Chronicles’. Shambling and shameless, ‘Life’ stumbles along like an elegant drunk, feet in the gutter and head in the stars. Lock the doors and hide the children.
I came across this video from 1985 of Keith sitting in with David Johansen (Buster Poindexter) at NYC bar Tramps. For many years Tramps was my second home. Its owner Terry Dunne is a dear friend and former manager of my band The Nails. Back in the 80’s, Tramps was one of the hippest joints in Manhattan and arguably the best blues club in the country. Legends like Big Joe Turner, Lightening Hopkins and Esquerita played its hallowed stage. I played the Joker Poker machine, wired to the gills.
In this truly rare video, Delbert McClinton joins David and Keith. Joe Delia is on keyboards.
The person who uploaded this to Youtube goes by the moniker fxpope. I’m wondering if that’s the same F.X. Pope that directed new wave porn film Nightdreams and The Nails’ first video. Mr. Pope is also known by his birth name Francis Delia, Joe’s brother. Francis, is that you?
