Who are these masked men? That was the question many people were asking when a video popped up on their timeline four years ago featuring band called Orkestra Obsolete covering New Order’s “Blue Monday.” Who indeed?

Little was revealed about this talented bunch of musos other than they were performing “Blue Monday” to illustrate what a classic synth song would sound like without synthesizers. The man behind this classic piece of promo is the immensely talented Scottish musician Angus McIntyre, who is better known as a highly successful TV producer and director.

McIntyre recently uploaded the original uncolorized version of the Orkestra track to his YouTube page where he explained something of the film’s background:

A few years ago I was asked by a BBC producer to make a short three minute film about the synthesiser, and then I thought it might be interesting to do a “what if there were no synthesisers?” scenario. Or something. I roped in my pals Graeme Miller - a skilled theremin and musical saw-ist, and Sven Werner - an amazing artist who has a fantastic studio space. Sound artist and film-maker Nicola Reade and myself worked together on the overall style and approach, and I arranged and directed it using a few tricks I’d learned making Gugug videos.

Gugug videos? More on that later.

For the recording of the Orkestra’s version of “Blue Monday,” McIntyre played drums, ukulele-banjo, tongue drum, piano strings, effects, lap steel, harmonium, clavioline, and sang vocals. He’s a talented little fucker. And an all-round good guy. Also, playing/involved but uncredited on the original were Michael Pappas (camera) and Richard Anderson (double bass).
 

 
More from Angus McIntyre and Gugug, after the jump….
 

George Melly (1926-2007)
 
I have a hard time picturing the Dangerous Minds reader who wouldn’t fall in love with the rakish, bisexual jazz singer and surrealist George Melly, a bon vivant who spent his life playfully defying authority, rationality and good taste. The Telegraph’s obituary included this telling incident from Melly’s career as an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy:

... in 1947 he was dropped from a Royal Naval Command Variety Performance after Warrant Officer Perkins discovered a pile of anarchist leaflets in his locker. Since the number he had been intending to perform before the King was his own highly suggestive rendition of Frankie and Johnnie (a song that became a standard in his repertoire) it was probably as well.

 

The Stranglers c. 1977
 
When London’s Hayward Gallery held the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed in 1978, the show was the ostensible subject of BBC2’s George Melly in “The Journey” or The Memoirs of a Self-Confessed Surrealist. Demonstrating that surrealism was not an “artistic movement,” in Melly’s phrase, but a wish to transform everyday life, the TV documentary follows Melly as he walks from his North London digs to the Hayward, reminiscing about his Dadaist and surrealist comrades along the way. He shaves, eats breakfast, enters phone boxes (to dial numbers at random and declaim surrealist verse), pisses in a urinal, and bumps into the Stranglers, who happen just to be hanging around, as if it were their full-time job to stand on the street, hating the Queen. Recognizing kindred spirits, Melly salutes the band: “Long live the Stranglers!”
 

George Melly (and is that harmonica player Lew Lewis?) on the back of the Stranglers’ “Walk on By” single
 
The five musicians hit it off so well that the Stranglers invited Melly to record a song with them. It’s fun to imagine the louche session that produced “Old Codger,” a blues number about the joys of pederasty which the Stranglers released on the B-side of their Doorsified “Walk on By.” From the irritating, unreliable, and official Stranglers biography No Mercy:

‘Old Codger’ was sung by Liverpudlian jazz maestro and hep-cat, writer and broadcaster George Melly, who had recently featured the Stranglers prominently in a BBC2 documentary on the impact of surrealism on contemporary art. Suitably flattered that their activities had been endorsed by the cognoscenti (his 1972 book Revolt Into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain was one of the most influential of its day), the band asked Melly down for a spot of brandy-drinking and crooning, and he obliged with a great vocal for the ‘Old Codger’ track.

And Hugh Cornwell’s autobiography includes this scene:

Alan Yentob is making a BBC2 documentary about Dada, and George Melly asks for us to be in the programme. We appear as the inheritors of Dada, and I write a song for George to sing with us, called ‘Old Codger’ about an ageing man with an obsession with a choirboy. I show the lyrics to George and he says, ‘Very nice.’

Keep reading after the jump…

 
You may not have heard of Edward James, but you will certainly recognise the back of his head from the painting Not to be Reproduced by René Magritte. This was one of two portraits the Surrealist artist did of James, the other was The Pleasure Principle.

Edward William Frank James (1907–1984) was a poet and a patron of the arts, who used his vast wealth to publish writers (like poet John Betjeman), commission theatrical productions most notably Les Ballets and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s last work together The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933. He also supported individuals, communities in Mexico and financed artisan workshops, but James is most famously known for his patronage of Surrealist art, in particular the artists Magritte, Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí. He also bought works by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Pavel Tchelitchew, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux.

Being rich and aristocratic usually meant James was described as a great “English eccentric,” though he was never fond of the term claiming he was like “the boy with green hair,” just born that way. According to James he was the illegitimate son of King Edward VII, which may have indeed been possible as his mother was said to have been one of the royal’s many mistresses. When he was five, his father (or at least his mother’s husband) died leaving James the sole heir to his fortune and the 8,000 acre family estate of West Dean House in Sussex. James eventually gave away the family estate, financing its reuse as a college. He created his own Surrealist home in Monkton, and then in Las Pozas, Mexico, where he used his money to support its community employing villagers to build houses, a hotel, Surrealist sculptures and architectural follies.

This delightful film The Secret Life of Edward James made in 1978 was narrated by the late jazz singer, art critic and writer George Melly. James and Melly were good friends, united by their passion for Surrealism. Melly was a wonderfully outrageous and much loved performer whose exuberance for life was often matched by his attire. He also wrote three highly entertaining volumes of autobiography and released a whole bag of recordings. If you haven’t heard of George Melly he is worth investigating.
 

Magritte’s other portrait of Edward James ‘The Pleasure Principle’ (1937).
 

 
More after the jump…