Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

(Serpent’s Tail) £14.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

In 1949, whilst running a lottery machine on the pier at Clacton-on-Sea, in eastern England, the 24 year old Anthony Quinn met a man working at a nearby funfair who had once been part of a variety mind-reading double act. After paying the man £25 for a trunk full of all the prerequisites of the act, Quinn changed his name to Paul Raymond, employed a female assistant, and took the act on the road as, The Modern Man of Mystery. Though he struggled to find bookings as a mind-reader, his purchase of the act and his name change foretold the career that was to follow for Raymond, in which he demonstrated an high level of prescience in his acquisitions, in judging the zeitgeist, and in always giving, as he maintained, “the public what it wants, not what I think it should have.”

The die was further cast, when in 1951, seeking bookings for a follow up to a successful touring variety show he had produced the year before, having moved to London and moved from performer to producer, Raymond was told by the manager of the Queen’s Park Hippodrome in Manchester, that he would only book the act if  it contained a nude act. Rather than lose the booking, Raymond offered the two tap dancers he had already taken on for the show an
extra ten shillings if they agreed to pose topless.

Seven years later in London’s Soho Raymond opened the Raymond Revuebar, the strip club which, with its ‘Festival of Erotica’, was set to become internationally famous, and over the 45 years (40 of which with Raymond at the helm) it was open its famous neon sign became a London landmark. Fittingly, given Raymond’s first foray into a theatrical career, The Beatles filmed a segment of the Magical Mystery Tour at the Revuebar, and during its heyday the venue attracted a famous and infamous clientele, including Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Peter Sellers, and The Krays.

The success of the Revuebar quickly afforded Raymond the opportunity to not only buy the premises but also other venues, such as theatres, along the way becoming a successful theatrical impresario, and in 1971 in buying and turning around the fortunes of the ailing top shelf magazine, Men Only, adding a highly profitable pornography publishing business to his portfolio of companies. Astutely, throughout his career, Raymond used the lion’s share of his the profits he made to invest in property. Most notably buying up the freeholds to large parts of Soho when very few other people could see the worth of the area. Though his property holdings also spread to commercial properties in Chelsea, Kensington, Notting Hill, and Hampstead. The value of which was underlined three years before his death in 2008, when Forbes magazine listed him at number 13 in their list of British billionaires.

But such a placing only tells of the glitter, and unsurprisingly for a career that a large part of which was based in pushing at the boundaries of what was legal, a career which had nightlife as its epicentre, not only is ‘all human life here’ (as the News of the World advertising slogan used to have it) in Willetts’ fascinating biography, but also quite literally a lifetime of trials and tribulations. Not only as a result of his near constant monitoring in the first few decades of his career firstly by the Clubs Office of the Metropolitan Police, and then by
Obscene Publications Squad (which would itself be the subject of a widespread corruption investigation), but also via libel cases and as the target of an extraordinary extortion campaign. His personal life was similarly riven with complexities, that lead him to be largely estranged from his extended family. Save for his daughter and protégé, Debbie, whose death at the age of only 37
in 1992, engendered him to lead an increasingly reclusive life until his own death at the age of 82.

Through his assiduous research for Members Only, Willetts interviewed friends, relatives, acquaintances, and employees of Raymond, and a number of former Metropolitan police officers, amongst this roster, even now, intriguingly there  are many who would only agree to talk if Willetts undertook to preserve their anonymity. His printed sources also include many documents only just released under the Freedom of Information Act, including witness statements, police files, and the transcripts of telephone taps. All of which he has marshalled to present a very balanced, fascinating and richly evocative insight both into Raymond’s life and the changing face of a notorious square mile of London’s West End which has mirrored the nation’s changing views towards sex and pornography over the last half century.

Links

Serpent’s Tail
www.serpentstail.com

Selected and translated by Sárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová
With a preface by John Carey

(Faber and Faber) £12.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

‘The greatest belief would be to believe in people,’ is the quote from the Czech writer, Karel Capek, which opens this collection of his journalism and letters which has been selected and translated into English for the first time by Sárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová. The line is taken from his 1922 novel, A Factory to Manufacture the Absolute, his vision of consumer society, which alongside a number of his other works, is seen as an early example of, though the terms had not then been coined, of science fiction and speculative fiction. Which include, probably his best known work internationally, RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play which premiered in 1921 and gave the world the word, ‘robot’, inspired by the Czech word, ‘robota’, which relates to feudal forced labour. Though Capek was keen to point out, as an article from The People’s Paper included in Believe in People states, that it was his brother the artist, writer and poet, Josef Capek, who created the word.

Capek’s belief in people, his avowed humanism, remain undiminished throughout Believe in People, which instil the writings with both a wonderfully inspiring positivity and also an increasing poignancy, as the chronology of each section leads the reader through the all too brief life of the first, liberal democratic republic of Czechoslovakia, from it’s birth in 1918 to the Munich Agreement which sounded its death knell in 1938.

Even in the face of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s radio address infamously labelling Czechoslovakia as “a far-away country” made up of “people of whom we know nothing”, which pre-empted Britain’s signing of the pact with France, Germany, and Italy, in Czechoslovakia’s absence, Capek remained optimistic and as the final piece in the collection, Greetings, demonstrates he continued to believe in, and hold no malice towards the peoples of the signatory nations of the Munich Agreement, and counter to Chamberlains’ words, he found it all too easy bring to mind images of ordinary people in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, going about their day-to-day activities.

“Indeed,” he writes, “one is cross with many, and keeps saying to oneself , what has happened can never be forgotten: how can we possibly communicate with one another in the midst of this unprecedented distance and alienation? And then you think of, say, England, and suddenly you see the little red house in Kent before you. The old gentleman is still trimming the bushes and the girl is pedalling away swiftly and straight. And see you’d like to greet them. How do you do? How do you do? Nice weather, isn’t it? Yes, very fine. So you see, that’s it, and you feel lighter.”

Very sadly, the same day that Greetings was published Capek died from pneumonia, though his friend Dr Karel Steinbach, who was present when died, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová quotes in her introduction, wrote, “As a doctor I know that he died because in those days there were no antibiotics and sulpha drugs, but those who say that Munich killed him also have a great deal of the truth.”

Though had he lived, as a critic of both fascism and communism life would have been very difficult for Capek in the years that followed. Indeed, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová states, when the Nazis arrived in Prague on 15th March 1939, “he was said to be number three on the Gestapo list, and they arrived at his house that same day to find that he had been dead for nearly three months.” His brother, Josef, who had also criticised fascism and Hitler, was arrested, and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

It would be another fifty years until Czechoslovakia could return to being a liberal democracy through the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, lead by Václav Havel. Karel Capek was a key inspiration on Havel, for whom, as he is to many Czechs, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová writes, “he is not only a master of the word but a moral example.” Believe in People is a wonderfully engaging collection, reflective, funny, inspiring, and philosophical. It provides a fascinating insight to the excitement and joie de vivre inherent in the birth of nation, and the devastation at its loss and betrayal, whilst also bursting with insight and wisdom that is as relevant to peoples of  all countries today as when the words were first written.

Links

Faber and Faber
www.faber.co.uk

(Portobello) £12.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

“Imagine what it is to be rejected by the most sophisticated and casually stunning place in the world. A place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans. To not be welcome in the City of Love is tantamount to being rejected by love itself. Why couldn’t I have gotten thrown out of Akron, Ohio? City of Rubber.”

Though the French authorities have never “formally banished” Sloane Crosley, the sequence of adventures and misadventures that have befallen her in their capital city, as she recounts in Le Paris!, one of the nine essays in How Did You Get This Number, including out of loyalty to a Protestant friend, making a confession at the Catholic cathedral of Notre Dame, despite being Jewish and speaking little French, to a French/Japanese speaking priest, have lead her to feel that she “will not be ‘asked back’ anytime soon.”

Sloane Crosley

Crosley has a magnetic attraction to, come mischievous delight in pursuing, happenstance and circumstance that often leaves her out of step with accepted mores, but in falling out of step she observes and spotlights the absurdities all too common in following the pack and the path of doing something just because that’s what everyone else does. Whilst, with the same wickedly spot on humour and terrific insight, she also navigates and highlights the complexities and perplexities facing a just-turned-thirty New Yorker, both in her home city, following on from her 2008 debut collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, and also, as above in Paris, in an SUV in Alaska with a ‘hen party’ wearing bear bells on their pony tails, and in Lisbon in an open air bar with three amateur Portuguese circus clowns…

Smart, sassy, subversive, with a Noir edge - not least in Crosley’s trip to McGurk’s Suicide Hall whilst searching for a new appartment - How Did You Get This Number is a terrific mix of funny, reflective, and revelatory.

Links

Sloane Crosley
neverrockfila.com/crosley/

Portobello Books
www.portobellobooks.com

(Sceptre) £14.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

From the vantage point of last year’s Margate Meltdown, the Ace Café’s annual Spring Bank Holiday charity motorcycle ride-out from North London to the Kent seaside town, Travis Elborough, whilst wryly observing the promenade juxtaposition and proliferation of black leather jackets and Mr Whippy ice cream, also reflects on the contemporary, happy camaraderie and intermingling of the Ace Café Rockers and a group of Mods from the nearby Deal Scooter Club. A far cry, he notes, from the violent clashes between Mods and Rockers in the town over Whitsun 1964, which lead local magistrate, Dr George Simpson to not only hand out punitive £50 fines to all those arrested, but also infamously to decry all those involved as, “petty little saw-dust Caesars.”

A speech which served the headline writers very well in stoking moral outrage of the, young people are uncontrollable, it was never like this in my day, variety. As ever it was, as Elborough reveals, “rowdy teenagers had, in a sense, been menacing Bank Holiday festivities since their inception in the 1870s,” and in following this line of research he has uncovered a wonderful article from the Bournemouth Times in 1938, reporting events from the August Bank Holiday and “frothing at the mouth at the mere arrival of ‘groups of youths, some wearing gaudy paper hats with inscriptions such as, ‘Come Up and See Me Sometime’, parading along the Drive singing the latest dance hits.’”

The seaside allure for youth culture is only one component, Margate but one stop along the route of Elborough’s hugely enjoyable exploration of the full English - be it served up by an eccentric landlady in a B&B, dished up en masse in an holiday camp, or under cling film on a paper plate and entirely fashioned from rock - seaside experience, from Brighton to Blackpool, Skegness to Scarborough, New Brighton to Bexhill-on-Sea, and all the people, architecture, and entertainments that give it such redolence, and which has proved such a successful international export.

Travis Elborough © David X Green www.davidxgreen.com

But his Quadrophenia-tinged chapter does serve to highlight the facets that make Elborough such an engaging cultural companion, mixing astute personal observation with gems that only the most assiduous research uncovers, informed by a breadth of sources all of which he approaches with the same informed passion be they historical document, literary text, pop cultural reference, or beach hut conversation, both his erudition and enjoyment of his subject are always to the fore in Wish You Were Here, as they were in his two previous books, The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster, and The Long Player Goodbye: The Album from Vinyl to iPod and Back Again.

As with the two latter titles, Wish You Were Here is not an exercise in nostalgia, Elborough is adept at choosing cultural subjects to examine and contextualise at points after periods of decline when they prove that the final words in their histories have not been written, in light of the London mayor’s competition to design a new Routemaster, the resurgence in vinyl record sales, and the renaissance that is gathering pace in even the most rundown English seaside towns, which lead Tatler to dub Hastings the ‘Notting Hill of the South Coast’ three years ago, and which makes Wish You Were Here as much a snapshot of the here and now and a penny in the slot telescope view of where we are heading, as it is a postcard of where we have been.

Read an exclusive article by Travis Elborough, A Postcard From Brighton’s Colonnade Bar, written whilst researching Wish You Were Here,  in the Brighton Focus section of issue 5 of the print edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick, which also includes contributions from Biba founder, Barbara Hulanicki,  and Brighton based poet, Abi Curtis. FOR MORE DETAILS

Links:

Sceptre
www.hodder.co.uk/sceptre

(Optimum Home Entertainment)
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

First broadcast between 1965 and 1966, with series 4 The Avengers entered the era for which it is best remembered and which was also its most influential, as
Diana Rigg, in the role of Emma Peel, took over from Honor Blackman’s Dr Cathy Gale, as sidekick to John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee. Emma Peel’s name, so the story goes, came from ABC’s (Associated British Pictures, the programme’s production company) press officer, Marie Donaldson, saying that the character need to have ‘man-appeal’, which became abbreviated to ‘m-appeal’… Emma Peel.

The crackling sexual tension that had already existed between Steed and Cathy Gale, was ramped up to become far more overt in Steed and Emma Peel’s relationship. Equally the use of leather and PVC costumes, which had been introduced in series 3 for Cathy Gale, particularly for the fight scenes, was continued and became more body conscious and more markedly fetishistic, with zips and buckles. The fetishism was taken even further in the episode, A Touch of Brimstone, when she is dressed as the ‘Queen of Sin’, in a leather corset, knee-length stiletto heeled boots, and a dog collar studded with six inch spikes. All of which played up the vaunted man-appeal of the character, but Emma Peel also, as with Cathy Gale before her, equally and importantly subverted stereotypical roles for women combining not only brains, beauty, and independence, but also physical prowess; she dispatches her male, whip wielding adversary in A Touch of Brimstone in very short measure. Emma Peel became just as much an icon for women as she did for men. Though the dominatrix look proved too much for the American censors, and the episode was banned in the US.

With her striking op-art clothes designed by fashion designer, John Bates, Emma Peel also became a key fashion influence. Under the label, Avengerswear, Bates also licensed his designs to a number of manufacturers, and they were available in shops around the country from the moment series 4 aired. Bates’ geometric designs were also groundbreaking in that before their use in The Avengers it had been considered they would not work on the film cameras of the day. Both reflecting the times and setting the times, Emma Peel’s Mod style, replete with Lotus Elan and Vespa 150 scooter, juxtaposes pleasingly with the continuance of Steed’s bowler hatted and furled umbrella, dandy-edged, vintage Bentley driving, English gentleman.

Sexy, stylish, witty, and inventive, this first series of the Emma Peel era of The Avengers remains as influential and enjoyable now, extraordinarily 45 years on, as it was first time around.

Links:

Optimum
www.optimumreleasing.com

360 Degree Music
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

That Roses Kings Castles’ new single, One Born Every Minute, hooks you immediately with a rhythm section that, like bright sunlight preceding louring storm clouds, mixes the catchiest pop with a darkly alluring rockabilly edge, should come as no surprise, since RKC is the creation of former Babyshambles drummer, Adam Ficek. Though to purely classify Ficek thus is to fail to highlight that he is also a gifted multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and, as his RKC lyrics and his blog show, an erudite writer, all of which One Born Every Minute ably clarifies. Whilst also demolishing any generic stereotyping of drummers! The tabloid outplaying of Pete Doherty’s life sometimes threatens to occlude the fact that his musical collaborators have been as talented as they are.

Ficek began RKC as a side project in 2007 as a way to release the songs he was writing during the long periods on the road whilst on tour with Babyshambles. The extraordinary journey, in all senses, that he went on both within and without Babyshambles has also inspired One Born Every Minute, as he says, “the song is mainly based around the characters I have met over the past few years in this crazed whirlpool of an industry. It takes all sorts…. some nicer than others.”  Through Ficek’s vocals, which pleasingly mix shades of Deram period Bowie via Anthony Newley with a rawer modernity, One Born Every Minute presents snapshots of the knife-edge of success and hype, the steep drops that lie either side, and the people that all too often gather around someone whose life is lived in the public eye, when they are at their most vulnerable.

All things are possible with One Born Every Minute. One can choose to project upon its lyrical allusions, to unravel who might be who, or one can choose to be swept up in its rhythmical and melodic insistency, or like all the best singles one can choose both. Choose the latter, and just as the best singles always do, the joyousness of One Born Every Minute will propel you into feeling that all things really are possible.

Links

Adam Ficek
www.adamficek.com

360 Degree Music
www.360degreemusic.com

Second Sight Films
DVD On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

“I shall be severe, but show affection occasionally,” says fifty-something, professional hitman, Victor Meynard (Jean Rochefort), outlining the terms of the ’stage’, or internship, he offers to an artless, young messenger, Antoine (Guillaume Depardieu), rather than killing him, after Antoine inadvertently witnesses one of Victor’s hits. Motivated by the fact that is unmarried, and has no heir to whom he can pass on the family business of killing, the perks Victor offers as part of his proposal to train Antoine in the ways of assassination include a Carte Orange (the unlimited travel pass for Paris, which has just been replaced by the ‘Navigo’).

But it seems that Victor’s midlife crisis is gathering pace when he not only fails to carry out his next assignment, to kill a beautiful art forger and petty thief, Renée Dandrieux (Marie Trintignant), who has duped a gangster into buying a fake Rembrandt, but also begins to fall for her, as the seemingly ill-assorted trio go on the run from the gangster.

Wild Target (Cible émouvante) is a masterful black comedy, with a wonderful mix of impressively realised knock about farce, subtle comedic moments, and a gripping thread of menace, which earned its writer and director, Pierre Salvadori, a César nomination for Best First Work, when it was originally released in 1993. Rochefort’s performance is superlative, indeed all three lead actors give superb performances, and the crackling interplay between them, and also with Madame Meynard (Patachou), Victor’s gloriously batty and utterly ruthless mother, creates a thoroughly enjoyable film.

Both the now octogenarian Rochefort, whose career spans five decades, and nonagenarian Patachou (aka Henriette Ragon), are and continue to be much loved and legendary figures of French cinema and theatre. Trintignant and Depardieu, both born into famous French acting families, became favourite actors for Salvadori to work with, taking roles both in his next film, Les apprentis (1995), and again sharing the lead roles in White Lies (Comme elle respire, 1998). Very sadly, both subsequently died at an early age. Trintignant died in 2003, aged 41, of a cerebral edema as a result of being punched by her boyfriend Bertrand Cantat, lead singer with the French rock group, Noir Désir, and  Depardieu died in 2008, aged 37, after contracting severe viral pneumonia whilst filming L’Enfance d’Icare on location in Romania.

A British remake of Wild Target, starring Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, and Rupert Grint has just been released.

Links:

Second Sight Films
www.secondsightfilms.co.uk

Xtra Mile Recordings
Released 24th May 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

“Critics,” announces an answerphone message at the beginning of War is Noise, “you probably got this album for free, so please don’t trouble yourself with clever analysis, music is for listening to, not writing about, so why don’t you cut your hair and go and get a real job.” I did receive the album for free and although I am quite attached to both my hair and job, in the spirit of compromise that is abroad I will respond rather than analysing, whilst also heartily exhorting that you both listen to Jaakko & Jay’s debut album and also go see them live.

The Finnish duo, like their label mate, Frank Turner, for whom they have also been a support act, have maintained a near constant tour schedule, playing live with one microphone, an acoustic guitar, and a single snare and ride drum. The vitality and exuberance of their stripped back live sound has translated exceptionally well to the record, aided and abetted by harmonica, banjo, trumpet, and fiddle, to create fourteen punk folk tracks, underscored with an insistent and infectious rockabilly edge that propels you to your feet, whether you are dancing to save the world, to free your soul, or just because it’s a fantastic beat. Fuelled with shouts and harmonies, rattling riffs and drifting melodies, humour and insightfulness, through songs that protest, satirise, and wear their hearts on their sleeves, War is Noise leaves you in an excited spin, with a broad smile on your face, energised and wanting to engage (or reengage…) with life!

Links:

Jaakko & Jay
www.myspace/jaakkonjay

Xtra Mile Recordings
www.xtramilerecordings.com

(4AD)
Released 24th May 2010

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Despite their name, Stornoway came together not on the islands of the Outer Hebrides but in Oxford. Though it was a shared passion for the Scottish band, Teenage Fanclub, that united founder members, singer and principal song writer Brian Briggs and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Ouin, during Freshers’ Week at the university. In common with Teenage Fanclub, vocal harmonies, guitar, string, brass, and organ sections which reference 1960’s folk-, surf-, and psychedelic rock/pop, such as The Byrds, Beach Boys, and Love, abound on Stornoway’s debut album, Beachcomber’s Windowsill. Five years in the making, the album and the re-released first single, Zorbing, coincidentally share release dates with Teenage Fanclub’s first new album and single in five years.

But interwoven with their acute pop sensibilities, the songs on Beachcomber’s Windowsill are also imbued with sounds and images that evoke both the historical and the elemental. The layers of history and tradition set against the beauty of Oxford’s cityscape, seen at first light or under moonlight, echo through the inspirational mix, with the use of traditional instruments, bell chimes, and choral singing; an essence of Magdalen College Choir continuing their 500 year old tradition of singing in the dawn from the top of Magdalen Tower on May Morning. Though Stornoway also channel folk song traditions that have their feet more firmly on the ground, or on the deck, with both elements of Bluegrass and sea-shanties layered into a number of the tracks. It must be added that the band are also not averse to creating new instruments to supplant the traditional, such as turning carrot chopping into percussion.

The elements course through the album’s lyrics, but not unlike an Hebridean island the force of storms and tornados can abate almost as soon as they’ve begun, leaving sunlit or starlit stillness and reflection in their wake. Beachcomber’s Windowsill’s tumult is love, and all the vistas through which a heart may be swept by passion and love requited, unrequited, lost, and tenderly remembered. From “zorbing [rolling along in a transparent plastic orb] through the streets of Cowley” in the single of the same name, to anthropomorphizing into a seabird in The Coldharbour Road, via an heartfelt exhortation to disengage people from a life of screens and return them to “free range” on We are the Battery Human, it’s a fantastic, surprising, and beautiful journey through an album that is an enchanted island in a sea that is all too often awash with mediocrity.

Links:
Stornoway
www.stornoway.eu

4AD
www.4ad.com