Category: General

Like Glue

uncarved.org blogginess: “Paul’s work in the essex jazz-funk clubs of the 80s has clearly paid off big time and he will now forever be known as Paul ‘Mr Mover’ Meme round our way. Status!!!”

“That’s why they call me… The Mover”.

Too fucking right! As Norman Wisdom might have said, Look and learn, son! I should say that after the third J John was on his feet and trying to give it some but he was a bit unsteady. I however have been keenly practicing them for the last week, they’re GREAT for your hips.

Oh, one last thing… I bet you whining hipsters out there whingeing about the next big thing or hardcore futures prices or whatever piss poor excuse for a topic of conversation is hot this week not only CAN’T and DON’T DANCE, but also SQURIM IN EMBARASSMENT AT THE IDEA OF SOMEONE ACTUALLY WRITING ABOUT DANCING — not just about dance music, but actually dancing. What a miserable life you must lead.

Still Preening Myself

uncarved.org blogginess: “I suppose the time has come for me to listen to ‘Space Ritual’ if anyone can sort me out with a copy?”

The thing about Hawkwind — and I think it applies to the Grateful Dead as well — is that they make much more sense as an idea and as a live experience than they do as a record. I wouldn’t bother with Space Ritual — in fact I wouldn’t bother with any Hawkwind record other than Silver Machine, which is, yes, the sonic though not the spiritual forebear of Nag Nag Nag. As ever, it’s when noise goes POP that it is most interesting. Similarly, I have never found a good Grateful Deal record, though maybe I could try harder… I mean, I LOVE Mickey Hart’s percussion pieces on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack (which I heard on a very expensive surround system last year, very nice).

But if you didn’t like them live, you probably just plain don’t like them. I helped put them on once and aside from helping organise the event I ran the door and the money (quelle surprise!). It was an entertaining experience. Lots of really mad 40-year old bikers with runic tattoos on their cheeks and foreheads (it’s illegal to do facial tattoos in the UK) offering to swap a hundred tabs of acid for a ticket before threatening to spike my drink with a hundred tabs of acid when I declined. Absolutely packed with vast wet trade on the night. They were quite good, fairly muscular acid rock.

Interestingly the support was a rather good reggae band though I never did find out who it was — too busy. To my mind this shows they had taste.

And there’s always the time I played on the same stage as them — not exactly supporting them — when I was in a folk band. That was at the Stonehenge festival in 1988. But I won’t tell you that story now — you wouldn’t believe I could run eleven miles! — I’ll just mention that I put the Woodentops on when I got back.

Preening myself in a glow of self-satisfaction part one

blissblog: “Someone could/should do a book on that post-psych/pre-punk zone, Pink Fairies Gong Here & Now etc. Hawkwind: A big influence on Chrome, and there’s definite parallels with the more guitar-driven Cabaret Voltaire. Hawkwind: definitely one for Tres Hot in the next year’s Uberhipster Index.”

Not so much because of a love of Hawkwind — I might deal with this in future post — but just to see Eden squriming.

tufluv///: “The perception of broken beat being wildly freestyle and all over the place is misleading. Like early jungle, if your question is ‘How do I dance to it’, the answer’s ‘don’t’.”

Not too sure if Luvvie-Darling has actually been out and danced to broken beat. I have, in its spiritual home — Glasgow, at the magnificent night run by Tom Churchill and Andy Pirie. Over a gfood sound system, broken beat is, simply, funkier than funk, with enormous hip-wiggling swing. If you can’t dance to it, it’s probably because you simply won’t.

tufluv///: “Tuff Jam (actually just Tuff and some other bloke) aren’t doing anything new here – it’s exactly what they were doing seven years ago, yet it’s wicked stuff and somehow all the more timely.”

Quite right. All this gutter-obsessed hipster carping about how previous strains of garage are irrelevant compared to the click-whoop tedium of SO MUCH gutter garage is just more knee jerk conservatism. The dullard lust for novelty is just jaded self-destructiveness. Planned obsolescence. And these people say they like reggae! Even a cursory examination of reggae shows that the desire for linear progress is wrong-headed at best and politically suspect at worst, inevitably driving music into cultural dead ends. The continuing popularity of 2 step and 4 beat — yes not a lot of it is made, but it’s still listened to a lot — is not something to be ethnically cleansed. It’s simply a part of the ongoing, evolving musical ecosystem, the DRIFT, that centres on hardcore but brings in elements of everything else.

The same is true of mid-nineties techno, which for ages has been beyond the pale of hipsterdom despite being, frequently, fucking ace music which was written out ofthe script because it wasn’t hardcore. Well, now’s the time to admit that most hardcore was shit while lots of funky techno was great. As predicted the hipsters are getting into it now as part of their ongoing market speculation but the attitude still sucks.

blissblog: “Uncarved = Hawkwind”

A spectacular come-uppance for Eden which I will treasure forever.

Of course being terminally afflicted by hipsterdom Reynolds goes far too obscurantist on us with his take on TWANBOC’s positioning of late 2003 blogdom as its “seventies phase”. A more comprehensible, if ultimately less /meaningful/, set of comparisons might be:

blissblog: Led Zeppelin (the original behemoth)

TWANBOC: Deep Purple (the young pretender… and the student who overtakes the master. Soon to become David Coerdale’s solo career though! hahaha!)

Heronbone: Queen (all tht florid poetry… oh alright then, Roy Harper and a bit of Led Zep III)

K-Punk: King Crimson (mucho erudition around a solid rhythmic base. But any more Dr fucking Who and you’re The Enid, got it?)

Church of Me: Elton John (should be obvious… oh alright then, Nick Drake)

Pillbox: Frank Zappa in his Mothers of Invention guise (not really seventies, but who’s keeping score? Oh you are, Ingram…)

Uncarved: Still Hawkwind! Oh alright then, C.R.A.S.S. Still, Steve Ignorant considered himself a “beatnik”, did he not?

Shards, Fragments, Totems: probably the Tubes or Greasy Truckers… something derivative, self-indulgent, badly produced and irregular…

Or from a different angle…

blissblog: James Brown. Easy peasy.

TWANBOC: Bootsy, solo (not Clinton, for the reasons below)

Heronbone: Gil Scott Heron (after two pipes of crack too many)

K-Punk: George Duke (never forget, Duke played with Zappa)

Church of Me: Bill Withers (again should be obvious)

Pillbox: Augustus Pablo

Uncarved: Althea and Donna (oh alright, Joe Gibbs… no I don’t care I’m not playing this game by the rules!)

Shards, Fragments, Totems: George Clinton (TWANBOC’s not getting it cos he doesn’t like Hardfloor, and when it comes to funk, anyone who doesn’t like Hardfloor has no pulse and no brain. There, that should keep him going for a month or so!)

k-punk: “If anything is happening somewhere, it must be a centre.

He’s quoting Luka BTW. Well, au contraire. If something is happening, it is not at the cente, it is reaching terminal velocity and is spinning away from the centre

k-punk:If you a priori re-define centre to mean that, well, obviously centres are, necessarily, where it’s at…..”

K-Punk is right. But… it’s as if no-one ibn this discussion has read John Michell’s At The Centre of the World… my god, do you really think they haven’t? Wow! Ahem. Anyway, the whole point is that all cultures, and to a degree all individuals, seek to orient themselves around a local locus. To attempt to impose one on everyone is wrong-headed and somewhat fascistic. But as the builders of omphaloi at, for example, Sancreed, or on the Isle of Man, well understood, there is a case for an associational world-centre.

Which of course is what Simon and Luka are going on about: London as hallucinatory centre. OK. But with the smooth comes the rough: London as overlord.

k-punk: “I love Simon’s ‘pipe dream’ (appropriate name for so steampunk a conception) documentary on the London overground railway system. (When Luka, Oliver and I last met up, Oliver took us to one of those anomalous slightly off-centre zones near Waterloo which was just under an elevated railway track). Following that railway around would be as fascinating an investigation of London’s interstices as Sinclair’s footsore treking around the M25 was an exploration of the capital’s limits.”

Well yes, and I’ve been meaning to follow up this particular shard. I had in fact thought that Simon was channelling the late 8Ts / 9Ts chaonic / qliphthophic weltenschaung where IIRC this was discussed at some length.

Talking less elliptically, I remember working in Rivingston Street (off Old Street) in the early 9Ts and regularly seeing urban explorers pacing the tree-and-shrub-infested walkways of the abandoned railways. Some of the most evocative views of my life were out the back window of that building and over the roofs of Shoreditch and Hackney. Talk about secret London.

One thing that is quite obvious when you do finally move out of London is that these exciting, liminal spaces are under enormous pressure in London and that is why it is so fulfilling to discover one. Wheras, outside of London — and yes I do know that Sheffield is a particularly special case in this regard — these spaces are far more widespread. They seem somehow to breathe more easily.

It is of course interesting to speculate about the relationship between this phenomenon and the northern origin of so much chaos thinking. Especially Leeds… with its natural migration path to Stoke Neewington…

k-punk: “including (semi-ironic?) paeans to Sheffield.”

EH? The only thing ironic about Sheffield is the whippets.

😉

GUTTERBREAKZ: “Okay, here’s a dozen reasons why Sheffield is the Uk’s musical capitol….”

… and whoevercompiles such a list and leaves Moloko off clearly didn;t see their amazing tour-opening show at the octagon and have a long chat with Richard H Kirk there ;-).

Oh, and, Do You Like My Tight Sweater is a work of genius. Seriously.