Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

(Laurence King) £17.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

Like surfing and skateboarding, there is an highly addictive and compulsive edge to fixed-gear (or ‘fixed-wheel’ in Britain) riding, often veering into the obsessional, as photographers and filmmakers Mike Martin and Gabe Morford interviewed in Fixed state, “track bikes are a gateway drug to all forms of cycling.” Martin and Morford’s documentary, Mash SF, explores the riding techniques, to say nothing of tricks and hill bombing, developed by 13 San Franciscans in the face of the challenge of riding track bikes without brakes, multiple gears, or the ability to freewheel, around the city, and since its release in 2007 has been highly influential in the global subculture which has grown up around the adoption of track bikes for urban streets. Fixed is the first book to examine both this rising subculture and its sporting and historical antecedents, and provides a fascinating overview.

Chris Boardman breaking The Hour record in 1996 © Gary M. Prior/Getty Images

Across three sections Racing, Track to Street, and Beyond Riding, Fixed explores the development of the fixed-gear style. The earliest bicycles were all fixed-wheel, but from the turn of the last century the style was predominantly reserved for sports use and has developed through ever greater quests for speed, characterised not least in recent years by Chris Hoy in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and in the 1990s the duelling between, and radical designs employed by Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree, both of whom are interviewed in the book, to win the record for The Hour time trial. From the early 1970s a parallel street culture has developed, initially through the adoption of the style by bicycle messengers in New York, spreading to messengers in other cities worldwide through the 1980s and 1990s.

Keo Curry performs his signature trick, the Keo spin © Kyle Johnson

Whilst in recent years with fixed-gear becoming, as Edwards and Leonard write,  a “wider phenomenon in urban culture, boutiques, and galleries,” designers, artists, and brands including Paul Smith, Ben and Oscar Wilson, Cinelli, Vans, and Nike, have created their own interpretations of fixed-gear bicycles and attendant clothing and accessory ranges.

Riders on the London Fixed-Gear & Single-Speed Tweed Run, January 2009 © Roxy Erickson

Links
Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Laurence King) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

100 Years of Menswear begins and ends with suits; from the accession of Edward VII in 1901 and his influential lead towards a greater informality in dress codes, to Thom Browne whose collections are a direct riposte against the informality of ‘business casual’ and motivated New York magazine in 2006 to declare him the “cutting-edge men’s designer who’s going to save the suit from extinction.” Though with nearly three and half centuries of adaptation and reinvention behind it, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s oft borrowed line, the suit’s death-knell may well be exaggerated. The very dapper Twain also features in the book in a great photograph from 1900 in which he is wearing one of his trademark white serge lounge suits of which, as Cally Blackman writes, “he had 14 made so he could wear a fresh one every day.”

John Hazel, Harold Wilmot, and John Richards arriving at Tilbury docks aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 © Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Though men’s fashion over the last 100 plus years has not been purely about suits, and has also been subjected to a myriad of influences, which means that any book attempting to cover it enters, as Blackman underlines in her introduction, a “minefield” because “the categorisation and classification of looks and styles is notoriously difficult; they are interwoven, overlapping and slippery.” To plot a clearer path through this, Blackman has divided the book into two parts, 1900-1939 and 1940 to the present day, and subdivided each part into six sections through which she explores, for example the impact of uniforms, manual work wear, sportswear, and Hollywood films.

Marc Bolan at home c1975 © Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This works well, particularly as the book is 95% pictorial, enabling changes and developments to be not only clearly illustrated and plotted, but also highlighted through juxtaposition. Which is supremely aided by the quality of the picture research which has resulted in the book, from Terry O’Neill’s fabulous cover shot of David Bowie onwards, being packed with many wonderfully evocative and rarely seen photographs and illustrations.

Links
Laurence King
www.laurenceking.com

(Optimum Releasing)
Released on DVD 11 January 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

During the Second World War both Britain’s deteriorating canal system and the declining number of working boats plying its waterways enjoyed a brief period of revivification. This fascinating, evocative, and beautifully shot Ealing Studios gem, which is available on DVD for the first time, is part drama and part documentary and was filmed along the Grand Union Canal in the summer of 1944, though not released until September 1945. The film centres on two families, the Smiths and the Stoners, who have lived and worked afloat for generations and the love story that unfolds between Mary Smith (Jenny Laird) and Ted Stoner (Robert Griffiths). Whilst also documenting and trumpeting not only the revival of the inland waterways for the war effort but also the history of canals from the eighteenth century onwards.

Tradition versus progressiveness is also at the heart of Painted Boats, in common with a number of Ealing Studios films and not least with director Charles Crichton’s later film The Titfield Thunderbolt. With Painted Boats this is encapsulated by the juxtaposition between the Smith’s horse-drawn barge Sunny Valley and the Stoner’s diesel-powered Golden Boy, and the extra hardships that refusing to change brings to the Smiths, not least ‘legging’ Sunny Valley loaded with thirty tons of coal through tunnels. Though mechanical horsepower does not inure the Stoners from change either as the increasing dilemma as to how long they can continue on the canals or whether they may have to move ashore hangs over them as it does over all their contemporaries.

In fact, post war the decline of commercial canal traffic was phenomenally rapid, until by the 1960s only a token number of working boats remained. Of course we are now very familiar with the leisure based reinvigoration of canals, but Painted Boats provides a wonderful insight into the closing chapter of a way of life, and is made all the more evocative by the poetic commentary written by Louis Macneice.

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Optimum Releasing)
Released on DVD 11 January 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

From the Hammond organ to the fore title track, to the introductory panning shot across the deck of the tramp steamer  Corita taking in a surreal mix of characters, from medieval Spanish conquistadores and hessian robed monks, to twentieth century uniformed merchant seaman and a 1960s white roll-neck jumper-ed blonde siren, it is clear that this 1968 Hammer film is not only particularly redolent of that stable and of its times, but also has all the makings of a cult classic. Compounded by the original trailer which is included on the DVD and wonderfully proclaims that viewers will see “monster weed attack helpless beauty,” to say nothing of “giant molluscs, see them fight to the death.”

Though in no way as scary as it might possibly have been 40 plus years ago, The Lost Continent, which was adapted by the director Michael Carreras from Denis Wheatley’s 1938 novel Uncharted Seas, is still a very watchable and enjoyable film, not only with a retro loving, tongue in cheek. The film divides neatly into two halves and two genres, the first a thriller on the high seas as the captain of the Corita, played by Eric Porter, embarks on one last trip from Freetown to Caracas, not only smuggling a cargo of highly dangerous explosives, but also with a whole host of passengers with something to hide and a mutinous crew aboard. A hurricane brings all the secrets to a head and also throws the ship and the film into a world of sci-fi horror, a lost continent in the Sargasso Sea, replete with man eating seaweed, enormous killer crustaceans, and the equally murderous descendants of a Spanish Galleon marooned 500 years earlier.

Of course, as with any film originally released four decades ago the special effects are phenomenally dated, but in this case the datedness adds to the charm of the film. Whilst the release on DVD also affords renewed attention for the soundtrack, not only Gerald Schurmann’s great psychedelic score, but also the theme song by The Peddlers, two thirds of whom were part of Joe Meek’s ‘house band’ The Saints, and who have been recently sampled by genre busting producer, musician, and innovator Luke Vibert.

Links

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Thames & Hudson) £24.95

By Guy Sangster Adams

There is an amazing photograph in 70s Style & Design that wonderfully encapsulates a number of the key strengths of the book. A shaven haired girl wearing a beret, cat’s-eye specs, and a t-shirt which has had its collar roughly hacked away, slashed to expose her breasts, and is held together with a safety pin. Described thus, one would assume it to be a punk image and one thinks of Ray Stevenson’s shot of Johnny Rotten in a beret, shades, and Seditionaries jacket. Though the image also appears to allude to the early 1980s both in the geometric shapes in primary colours on the t-shirt, but also the shaved head, shades, cover girl perfect heavy blusher and red lipstick, and the contradictory mix of overt femininity and androgyny which evokes Jean Paul Goude’s styling of Grace Jones at that time. But in fact the photograph was styled by Pru Walters in 1973, and the t-shirt is made from a Duggie Fields ‘Kandinsky-inspired’ fabric.

Inherent within this is not only that 70s Style & Design contains a host of brilliant photographs and illustrations, many of which are published for the first time, but also the difficulty in appraising the fashions of any fixed period. They do not neatly begin and end with the calendar proscription of a decade, nor was punk as hermetically sealed from what had gone before, despite the proclamation of Malcolm McLaren and Bernard Rhodes’ ‘You’re going to wake up one more morning…’ proto-punk manifesto t-shirt which listed Duggie Fields firmly in the opposite camp to the then Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols.

Guy Bourdin’s 1979 advertisement campaign for Charles Jordan ©The Guy Bourdin Estate/Art+Commerce

Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop have resolutely fulfilled their stated intention to overturn the threadbare “platforms and polyester flares”, time that taste forgot  approach to the 1970s. But over and above this, in their celebration and mapping of its rich diversity and multifarious parallel and often overlapping inspirations and influences from across the breadth of culture, including street fashion and high fashion, architecture and interior design, activism and politics, and the arts, and the through flow from the 1960s and flow on into the 1980s, they have pulled off a feat that the majority of other books of this type on this or any decade rarely manage. Which is to unpick what can appear a Gordian Knot and to present the threads (in all their finery), to spot the links, and to chart how they weave back together with a straight forward clarity that is never simplistic, but is always engaging, highly informed and researched, and acutely well observed.

Steven Behrens necklace chosen for 1979 De Beers Diamond Collection ©De Beers

In this way, for example, it becomes clear that the D.I.Y ethic which is a fundamental and celebrated facet of punk, was also present in the craft revival from the early 1970s, which promoted self-expression though the ideals of “made by hand with heart,” the craze for customisation (celebrated by Jean Paul Goude in a photo story in Nova magazine in 1970, in which the denims of each model have all been individualised through being ‘cut-off’, bleached, or with the addition of fringing, fabric patches, and button badges),  and also the ‘flat-pack’ furniture pioneered by Habitat. Whilst Lutyens and Hislop also parallel the rise of army surplus and utility chic from the late 1960s into the 1970s, which in turn inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s high fashion pea coats and safari jackets, with the High-Tech interior design style. Which at first utilized genuine reclaimed industrial materials, and was used to great effect by Roger K. Burton in his highly influential design for the boutique PX in 1978, before being appropriated by Habitat in their Tech range in 1980.

Helen Robinson in PX photographed by Sheila Rock ©Sheila Rock

Over recent years the influence of Biba and Barbara Hulanicki, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren have been increasingly well documented, and as they should  feature here, but placed within the widespread contemporaneous currents their influence and inspirations become yet more fascinating. It is also great to see the less well documented influence of Mr Freedom and the Pop Art, 1950s Americana, and comic strips that it brought to the rich 1970s mix, along the way inspiring Yves Saint Laurent and Elio Firroucci, restored to the prominence it deserves, with the  attendant verve, elegance, and fabulous high colour, with which this book explodes throughout.

Links

70s Style & Design
www.70sstyleanddesign.com

Thames & Hudson
www.thamesandhudson.com

Guy Bourdin
www.guybourdin.org

Art + Commerce
www.artandcommerce.com

De Beers
www.debeers.com

Sheila Rock
sheilarock.com

(Dogwoof)
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

“Andy Warhol was wrong, his view was that people wanted 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, our view is that people want 15 minutes of fame everyday,” proclaims Josh Harris, the subject of Ondi Timoner’s fascinating, absorbing, and unsettling film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (a prize she also won in 2004 for Dig!, making her the only director in the festival’s history to win the award twice). In the midst of the current cultural dominance of social networking and video sharing websites, interactive talent contest and reality television programming Harris’s proclamation seems an apposite statement of fact. But the fact that he first said it in 1999 imbues his words with the prescience about the internet and the media for which he has been renowned, despite being, as the caption at the beginning of We Live in Public states, “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

Harris founded the highly regarded internet consulting firm Jupiter Communications in 1986 and then in 1993 founded pseudo.com, the first internet ‘television station’, and to the incredulity of terrestrial broadcasters predicted a time when people would watch their favourite programmes online.  Increasingly through the 1990s Harris moved away from the conservatism of the business world to explore the ways in which new media could and would shape society and fundamentally alter social interaction. His increasingly avant garde, experimental, and conceptual programming and events lead New York magazine to dub him “the Warhol of the Web” and reached their infamous, and highly influential apogee with Quiet: We Live in Public and weliveinpublic.com.

Josh Harris beside the toilets at Quiet

Quiet, which lasted for the duration of December 1999, involved 100 people living in a ‘pod hotel’ in the basement of a disused textile factory in New York, in which all notions and structures of personal privacy were removed. Each pod was equipped with its own video camera and monitor so that everyone could watch everyone else constantly, the only shower was in a transparent, geodesic dome in the middle of the living space, the toilet walls were taken down, and a neon sign constantly reminded the participants ‘we live in public.’ Fittingly, since it pre-empted the cultural shifts of the following decade, it was closed down by the New York Police department on 1st January 2000. They were concerned that it was in reality the headquarters of a cult; for recreation there was a firing range and an extensive armoury of automatic weapons - something which Big Brother has yet to try! But by the time of its closure the behaviour of the participants had become increasingly aggressive and erratic and despite the constant interaction with others many spoke of feeling acute loneliness.

Quiet 'pods'

Following Quiet, for six months in 2000 Harris moved into a flat with his new girlfriend Tanya Corrin which was equipped with motion and sound sensitive cameras covering every conceivable angle - including one in the toilet bowl - so that every part of their life together and every bodily function was under constant surveillance and broadcast on a 24 hour live web feed, with viewers also able to interact with the pair via internet chat rooms. The experiment began with Harris stating that viewers would ultimately watch the couple conceiving their first child live, but ended with Corrin walking out and Harris suffering a metal breakdown.

What Harris was discovering ten years ago, increasingly holds true today, as more and more people trade privacy for intimacy with virtual friends, and the  desire for recognition and celebrity are seen as the gateways both to happiness and to feeling loved, and CCTV surveillance is seen as the key way to create a better society. Both Harris’s projects provide, as does Timoner’s film, a tragic indictment of the price that can be paid for the ever increasing ways in which we live in public. As Harris warns, underscoring this cautionary tale, “The more you know about each other, the more lonely you become.”

Ondi Timoner

Links

We Live in Public
www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com

Dogwoof
www.dogwoof.com

at the Roundhouse, London, 15th October 2009

by Guy Sangster Adams

Ian McCulloch ©Alex Hurst 2009

As the dry ice that completely obscures the stage at the beginning of Echo & The Bunnymen’s set feathers out through the audience it is as though it makes manifest all the highly charged thoughts and emotions, memories and expectations of all those gathered. There is quite literally something in the air tonight, a very tangible sense of right time, right place. Touching shoulders, touching souls, sending involuntary shudders around the architectural majesty of the Roundhouse, weaving about the iron pillars, before swirling up to the domed roof. Where, up lit from the stage, it highlights the suspension of belief that has gripped the auditorium.

Is it a dream? It is still impossible to make out anyone on the stage, but the sound majestically echoing the building coalesces with the dry ice, reaching everywhere it reaches and further. It is surreal, as though one is hearing long cherished memories for the first time, whilst the heart sores the head is trying to compute whether it can be real. Did Echo & The Bunnymen always sound so phenomenally good? My confusion is furthered having read some very disparaging reviews of the new album, The Fountain, earlier in the day saying that Ian McCulloch’s voice is shot and that the middle-aged band are just going through the motions. It won’t be until later in the set that they play Bring on the Dancing Horses and McCulloch sings the line “shiver and say the words, of every lie you’ve heard,” but by then, indeed from the word go, they have resolutely trounced those criticisms.

Three songs in the dry ice has cleared to reveal that the iconic scene one’s mind’s eye has been imagining is real: McCulloch is centre stage, sunglasses and overcoat on, periodically clutching the stand and rolling his forehead over the microphone, like Jim Stark and his milk bottle; the loner played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. He looks out, he looks back to drummer Nick Kilroe and keyboard player Jez Wing, he looks left to Gordy Goudie on guitar and Stephen Brannan on bass, but he never looks to his right,  where in splendid isolation stands Will Sergeant, who in turn plays head down, only looking up to change the succession of different guitars, whilst at the back of the stage a myriad of projections filmed by Sergeant play across the screen, from clouds, to religious statuary, to psychedelic oil patterns, harking back to The Roundhouse’s brief tenure as home to the UFO club in 1967.

Ian McCulloch & Will Sergeant ©Alex Hurst 2009

The venue and all the references it is imbued with thoroughly suit Echo & the Bunnymen. “It’s great to be at The Roundhouse,” announces McCulloch, “The Doors played here!” before introducing their cover version of People Are Strange. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek played keyboards on The Bunnymen’s recording of the song for the film The Lost Boys, and has remained a fan, and the sweeping grandeur of McCulloch’s vocals, akin to Jim Morrison in his ability to mix rough edged rock with mirror finish croon, is in full force tonight.

Reporters of the demise of McCulloch’s voice should be here; if it’s shot, it’s shot through with power, drama, and emotional intensity and the ability to propel one out of oneself. Indeed, as the set draws to a close with a phenomenal rendition of Killing Moon, the first time he sings the line “Fate, up against your will”, “fate” rockets beautifully to the roof and spines tingle, the second time he sings it, the word again goes to the roof taking the whole auditorium with it, the third time we are through the roof running the rings round Saturn.

Twenty-five years after Killing Moon was first recorded, indeed 31 years after Echo & The Bunnymen first played, you might be forgiven for, as Michelle the girl next to me says, “expecting less, but this is more; how have they become more?!” She is spot on; to appropriate the line Morrison sang at the Roundhouse in 1968, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” Cascading around McCulloch’s voice like a Catherine wheel, Sergeant’s innovative, highly influential, and much emulated guitar playing is equally on perfect form, ascending and transcending the space in the most beautiful, kaleidoscopic spirals and dazzling shimmers.

Ian McCulloch ©Alex Hurst 2009

The furthest reaches of their back catalogue, Rescue and Villiers Terrace, are played with the panache, verve, and excitement more normally associated with showcasing new songs. Whilst the same adjectives equally fit the first single from The Fountain, Think I Need It Too, with which they encore, followed by an outstanding Nothing Lasts Forever segueing into Walk On The Wild Side, which McCulloch amusingly concludes with “take a walk on Merseyside!”

With the two concluding dates of this tour in Liverpool sold out - a third has just been added - the band’s home town clearly already knows what everyone at the Roundhouse discovered, from the fifteen year old girl with saucer eyes breathlessly clutching the set list to her chest in the foyer, to the fortysomethings excitedly asking for autographs outside, that in the grandest style Echo & The Bunnymen are both igniting the rites of passage of a new generation, whilst reconfiguring the formative years of previous generations. For whom, it is as though the band reclaimed our memories for an hour and a half before handing them back Collagen enhanced, Stardust encrusted, with an extra gloss of new inspirations, leaving as sweet a taste as the last track of the night, Lips like Sugar.

Kiss whoever you must to do so, but go see Echo & The Bunnymen on this tour!

Echo & The Bunnymen are currently playing dates in Canada and the USA, before returning to England in December to play Oxford, Newcastle, Leeds and Liverpool. For more details:

www.bunnymen.com

www.myspace.com/thebunnymen

Mercury Records
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Shooting straight out of the sleeve and grabbing one simultaneously by the neck and the heart with such a passionate intensity there is no time for fear nor love, but only to release one’s soul to the last gasp climatic thrill, by rights the single Sometime Around Midnight should already have been as big a hit in this country as it was in the US. Originally released in the UK in February, this re-release remixed by Cenzo Townsend (whose extensive discography of collaborations includes Bat For Lashes, Babyshambles, Kaiser Chiefs, Primal Scream, and U2) magisterially reinforces a great song that showcases these Californian indie rockers’ diverse influences and talents.

Named after the second section of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, TATE founder Mikel Jollett (vocals, guitar, keyboard) also writes fiction, recently contributing a short story to McSweeneys, and in the autobiographical Sometime Around Midnight he brings his literary articulacy to lyrics that recount a chance meeting with an ex-girlfriend who although she has moved on he realises just how much he is still in love with her. Jollett creates an everyman tale, capturing how men feel gripped with a welter of passion and aggression, abject hurt but still with the need for reassurance from the lover who has spurned them, and how often they are happiest to express those feelings against the background of a fist in the air Springteen-esque “last chance power drive.”

Jollett’s voice which is capable of being at once brooding and seductive, vulnerable and menacing, in the manner of Brandon Flowers, and TATE’s musical cohesion of the classically trained Anna Bulbrook (viola, keyboards, tambourine, backing vocals) and the jazz schooled bassist Noah Harmon with the more traditional rocking combination of Steven Chen’s lead guitar and Daren Taylor’s drums, propel a lyrical journey that might be headed for melancholy or introspection, into a sound that makes one want to love again, and again, like one’s never been hurt. Sometime Around Midnight is almost a call and response to The Killers’ When You Were Young and should indeed be similarly lauded.

Links:
The Airborne Toxic Event
www.theairbornetoxicevent.com

(Howl Records)
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Beginning with a crescendo that immediately disorientates, is this a finale without an overture? Or as Chris Constantinou sings in a voice cut with the ages of rock, “Jackie, is it my birthday, or am I dying?” Marco Pirroni’s backwards guitar sideswipes like a pendulum across a drum beat so solid it might be an ionic column, but still you wonder am I looking down or looking up? Is this my future, or is this my past? Until Sinéad O’Connor enters the duet with a clarity so sharp, sculpted from the whitest marble, you  suddenly imagine you can see the geometric beauty of individual snowflakes, as she pitches question against question, “Do you ever feel like you’re posing, posing like an angel?” Whilst Pirroni’s now spiralling guitar throws you willingly from your pedestal into an helical orbit that scintillates and inspires. Fuelling an iconic sound that puts the sea back into ionic as the fixed point becomes a lighthouse and Constantinou and O’Connor’s revolving vocals merge as though you are simultaneously  illuminated and cast into darkness, doubts are dispelled, as in a moment you know all, but in the same moment you forget everything.

Surreal, transcendent, glamorous pop; as the track fades the need for another fix is immediate, repeat upon repeat.

The Wolfmen © Tina Korhonen

Links:
The Wolfmen
www.thewolfmen.net

Kevin Cummins
(Faber & Faber) £30.00

By Guy Sangster Adams

Beneath the title, Morrissey in silhouette standing on a ledge against a grey sky looks down on a view unseen, though in one’s mind’s eye one sees a Manchester skyline. Cummins’ photograph evokes Bruno Ganz’s Damiel, one of a group of trench coated angels who listen to the tortured thoughts of mortals and try to comfort them (which does sounds like an allusion to Joy Division and The Smiths…) in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. Shot by the Rochdale Canal in 1989, industrial architecture looms over Morrissey’s head and his shoulders are hunched as though he carries Manchester’s past, present, and future upon them; never to escape his oft repeated refrain from Suffer Little Children, the closing track from The Smiths’ debut album, “Oh Manchester, so much to answer for.”

If there is a charge to answer in being a key component in establishing and iconicising both the first wave of highly influential Mancunian bands from the mid 1970s into the mid 1980s and then from the late 1980s until the present day doing the same for the second wave (who had been inspired not only by the music of the first wave but also by his photographs of them) then Cummins must plead guilty.  He has been at the centre of the story since witnessing the two Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. Gigs whose audiences also included Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Mark E. Smith, Morrissey, and gave rise not least to The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, Magazine, New Order, Factory Records, and The Smiths, all of whom feature in this book. As the music and the drugs changed, Cummins stayed on it photographing The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Oasis, whilst also capturing the divergent splinter projects Electronic, Black Grape, and solo Morrissey.

The story that Cummins’ photographs document, along with essays by Paul Morley, Stuart Maconie, John Harris, and interviews with Johnny Marr, Peter Hook, and Mark E. Smith conducted by Gavin Wright, is as contradictory and contrary as the city and its citizens; elegiac and uproarious, as full of braggadocio as it is introspective, as given to high flown erudition as it is acerbic to perceived pretension, as serious as it is funny. Ian Curtis angular in performance, broods, and reflects in repose, but stays forever young; Shaun Ryder from clutching a giant E of the rooftop signage of the Hotel Subur Maritim in Sitges, Spain at the height of the Happy Mondays, seems to have aged 20 years photographed in a barber’s shop in Havana in 1995; The Stone Roses awash with paint as though brought in with the melting tide from John Squire’s Jackson Pollock-esque cover for their eponymous album; the Gallaghers never crack a smile; Morrissey stays handsome.

Ian Curtis, Joy Division, Futurama, Queen’s Hall, Leeds. September 1979 © Kevin Cummins

Cummins’ work continues to inspire new generations; two cutting edge examples of whom are Darren Wall, whose Wallzo design studio designed the book, and Richard Milward, who wrote the Foreword. Wall spent his teenage years pouring over Peter Saville record sleeves, and the book has the uncluttered elegance of a Factory artefact, whilst the sky blue of the Manchester City FC home strip of the section separating pages and cover, both looks great and adds an extra layer of association. Whilst Milward captures the chord that Cummins has struck in so many, “For years now, Kevin’s photographs have watched over me and my pals, like debauched religious figures, inspiring us to get intoxicated, wear parkas, pick flowers, and listen to records. Their familiarity is blissful.”

Manchester during the period covered by the book has gone, for better or worse, from post-industrial, post-Blitz dereliction reenergised by Punk, into the international buzzword of Madchester, to regeneration into Manhattanchester. Much has been gained, much has been lost, much has stayed the same; the opening photograph in the book is of a mural painted for a 1977 Silver Jubilee party in a cobbled street of bricked up terraced houses, whilst the closing photograph is of a razor wire topped wall spray painted with a Union Jack slashed with the slogan: ‘There’s no future in England’s dreaming: John Lydon of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here fame.” The latter is preceded by a photograph of Ian Curtis’s crave inscribed with his name, the date of his death, and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and is followed by the equally, achingly poignant, blank white page where Tony Wilson’s Afterword would have been, should have been. Whilst on the facing page the message he left for Cummins three days before he died: “Kevin, sweetheart.  Sorry I haven’t sent the piece to you yet. I’ve just had to go back into hospital. It’s all in my head though, darling. I’ll download it as soon as I come out.”

Gallagher brothers, Oasis Sly Street, East London 21 February 1994 © Kevin Cummins

Much has been gained, much has been lost, but what remains is the spirit of Manchester. One of the last performance photographs is of Noel Gallagher alone, presciently as it would now seem, playing at Teenage Cancer Trust gig in Manchester in 2007, possibly playing The Smiths song that he covered that night, which perhaps acts as a far better response to the title and a refrain for Cummins’ portrait of the city and its people; through the pouring rain, There is a Light that Never Goes Out.

In short, Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain; the pleasure and the privilege is ours.

Links:

Kevin Cummins
www.myspace.com/kevin_cummins

Faber & Faber
www.faber.co.uk

The Autobiography of Jah Wobble
Music, Mayhem, Life

(Serpent’s Tail) £12.99

By Guy Sangster Adams

Jah Wobble, as he has been dubbed since Sid Vicious’ drunken slurred attempt at saying John Wardle, is one of the infamous ‘four Johns’ who met at Kingsway College of Further Education in North London in 1973. The other three were John Lydon¾meeting whom Wobble describes as one of the few “Stanley/Livingstone moments” in his life¾Vicious, whose own transformation from John Beverley had come courtesy of Lydon who in turn became Johnny Rotten, and John Gray.

Of the three that became defined by their nicknames, Wobble has been happiest within the skin of his, “the ‘jah’ was  perfect because I was such a big reggae aficionado,” he writes, “I thought that it was perfect, it stood out, and I knew people would never forget it.” Whilst post-Sex Pistols, Lydon’s right to use the name ‘Rotten’ became part of a protracted legal battle with Malcolm McLaren, which was only resolved in Lydon’s favour in 1986, and it could be argued that it was Vicious’ submersion into the character of his nickname, of which Wobble writes, “in terms of twentieth-century iconography Sid’s cartoon-like image is right up there,” that contributed to his untimely end.

Which is not to suggest that the first 50 years of Wobble’s life covered in this book have been plain sailing, as the subtitle underscores they have been full of music, mayhem, and a life very much lived oscillating between the highest highs and lowest lows. The key formative trigger for Wobble to play bass guitar, for which he is most well known, was seeing Bob Marley & the Wailers at the highly influential gigs at the Lyceum in London in 1975, and in particular the rhythm section of Aston and Carlton Barrett. Wobble bought his first bass in 1977, but it was a telephone call early the following year that instigated his musical career when Lydon asked him to join his new band, Public Image Ltd.

Martin Atkins, John Lydon, Jah Wobble at Lydon's Gunter Grove flat (c)Janette Beckmann/Redferns/Getty Images

He played on the first two PiL albums, First Issue and the highly innovative and continuingly inspirational Metal Box, before leaving the band in 1980 to embark on a prolific solo career which has included his bands The Invaders of the Heart and the Human Condition, the album Rising Above Bedlam which was nominated for the inaugural Mercury Music Prize in 1992, losing out to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. Though Wobble had also played on the latter as part of an equally extensive and eclectic list of collaborations he has undertaken including Sinead O’Connor, Can, Bjork, Baaba Bal, and Brian Eno.

Over the last thirty plus years performing, recording, and writing as a bass player, singer, composer, poet, music journalist, and also through founding his own record company 30 Hertz Records, Wobble has been for better and at times for worse exposed to every facet of the music industry and Memoirs of a Geezer is as much an insider’s story of the seismic changes the industry has been through from Punk to Rave to digital downloads, as a cautionary tale as to how to keep your head above the water of its whirlpool. Which isn’t to say there haven’t been moments when the tide has engulfed him - though he’s been sober now since 1986, his alcoholism contributed to a suicide attempt and the breakdown of his first marriage.

Jah Wobble (c)Graham Jepson

Burnt out by the music industry and in attempt to stabilise his life in 1986 Wobble worked briefly as a cab driver and a courier before getting a job on London Underground - amusingly announcing to a packed rush hour platform at Tower Hill, “I used to be somebody, I repeat, I used to be somebody.” An allusion to the film that is both a favourite and one that he draws parallels with, On the Waterfront,  and Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy a promising boxer who is forced to take a dive, and ends up working as a docker surrounded by corruption on all fronts. As this book illustrates Wobble has always stood his ground when faced with anyone or anything with whom he disagreed, in younger days he did not pull his punches and though in later life the punches have become metaphorical they are no less iconoclastic in Memoirs as he tells it exactly as he sees it from Punk, Sex Pistols, McLaren and his PiL band mates through a host of other music and literary figures including Richard Branson, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Iain Sinclair.

It is not only the reverberations of Wobble’s passion for the bass guitar that flow through Memoirs of a Geezer, but also London, and more specifically the East End, his birth place.  Which for forty years, despite a few forays ‘up West’, was not only his home but also provided him with inspirations, challenges, and wake up calls in equal measures, and despite the dramatic changes that it has undergone since the war, which Memoirs vividly charts, a point of stability until eventually that too was irrevocably hindered and he moved to Stockport with his second wife and children. There are flashes throughout Memoirs of a Geezer of another great documenter of London and, if one likes, another dandy geezer, Julian Maclaren-Ross, and in its sense of place and reflection of both sides of the coin of Maclaren-Ross’s most well known and influential writings, Memoirs of the Forties.

Memoirs of a Geezer is an engaging and salutary tale of taking the knocks but refusing to be cowed, a reflection both on the creative processes of making music and the inherent battles in getting that music to wider audiences, and a fascinating and highly evocative cultural history, of people and places many of whom and of which have now changed beyond recognition. But part of the book’s strength is that it is written by a man whose intention is not to document the past and sit back with his pipe and slippers, but whose life has already been so full, that in order to embrace the next half century he needed to download the last, in order to give him a blank canvas, free reign, or what you will, for whatever comes next, which is certain to be just as full of music,  mayhem and life.

Links

Jah Wobble
www.30hertzrecords.com

Serpents Tail
www.serpentstail.com

(Xtra Mile Recordings/Epitaph Records)
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

The promo video for The Road, the rousing first single from Frank Turner’s third studio album, records his successful attempt to play 24 gigs across London in 24 hours and wryly underscores his relentless and extensive worldwide touring schedule over the last two years, supporting The Gaslight Anthem and The Offspring, his numerous festival appearances, and his headline tours which have seen him playing ever larger venues. Predominantly filmed performing in the homes of fans and friends, the video also highlights not only Turner’s amiability and accessibility but also the camaraderie and affection that his nigh on perpetual touring has brought him.

Though, judging from the lyrics of the first half of the album, the success and acclaim that both Turner’s talent and sheer hard work are quite rightly bringing him, are also bringing him criticism from those who feel that he has betrayed his ‘punk’ roots (he was originally the vocalist for hardcore band Million Dead) or negate his right to champion the common good. For me, Poetry of the Deed, as it would released on vinyl, divides into two sides; such is the accomplishment, strength, innovation, of tracks 7 through 13, and such is the rush that one gets listening to what is effectively side two, that it made me need to backtrack as to why the first half did not quite match. In part it is because the lyrical thrust is to angrily rebuff his critics by directly addressing their criticisms, which though that may be valid, doubters are so firmly blown out of the water by the songs of the second side which have a far broader and inventive lyrical sweep, that I cannot help thinking that there is far more mileage in silencing criticisms by, in the words of the title track, “putt[ing] our art where our mouth is.”

Sons of Liberty and The Road are glorious rebel marching songs, exhortations to deconstruct the unreconstructed, and unlock personal freedom by being open to the widest vistas of not only your own but the experiences of others, and not to give up; as the mandolin backed reprise of The Road has it, “I face the horizon everywhere I go, I face the horizon the horizon is my home.” Of course, depending on which way one looks the horizon can be as much where one’s come from as where one’s going, and the James Taylor-esque, Faithful Son is a  beautiful and poignant reflection on living up to, or turning away from, the dreams and designs one’s parents put on one’s life, and in turn those that one puts on one’s own life; a song that is surely set to become a standard. Richard Divine is a real stylistic surprise - but one that definitely works - darkly gripping flash fiction, that joins the canon of third person songs; Eleanor Rigby, Arnold Layne, David Watts… Whilst the allusion filled Our Lady of the Campfires, and Journey of the Magi, which close the album equally underscore that when Turner’s passion, erudition, and musicality coalesce, it is poetry indeed, broadening all our horizons.

Links
Frank Turner
www.frank-turner.com
www.myspace.com/frankturner

Xtra Mile Recordings/Epitaph Records
www.xtramilerecordings.com
www.epitaph.com

(Optimum Home Entertainment)
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Predominantly due to the reputation smearing advertisements organised by the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth (a coalition of Vietnam veterans formed entirely with that objective) and John Kerry’s delay in responding to their allegations, the lead in the opinion polls that he had enjoyed over George W. Bush throughout the campaign for the 2004 US presidential elections had been completely eroded in the closing months. With five weeks left before polling day filmmaker Michael Moore, fearing four more years of the Bush administration, set off on the Slacker Uprising Tour. Through which, with events on college campuses in 60 cities across 20 key battleground states, he aimed to motivate as many of the 50% of the electorate who do not normally vote to register to do so, and in particular 18 to 29 year old Slackers.

With his well judged promotional tool of giving out packs of Ramen Noodles (Slacker sustenance) and Fruit of the Loom underwear (for Slackers too slack to do laundry) to anyone registering to vote, Moore’s tour not only quickly hit the headlines but also lead the Republican party in Michigan to attempt legal action against him, alleging that he was attempting to bribe voters; a lawsuit that was thrown out by the District Attorney’s office as they decided Moore was encouraging people to vote, not telling them who to vote for.

But the serious heart of the tour, and by extension this film, is Moore’s desire to reaffirm, reassert, and protect the rights enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution - freedom of belief, of the press, of speech, and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Which he felt that in the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration had seriously undermined, not least with the Patriot Act, as he evocatively explored in Fahrenheit 9/11: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns. As Moore passionately declares in Slacker Uprising, there is a “reason why the founders of this country called it the First Amendment, because without an informed public the democracy ceases to exist.”

In seeking to redress the balance, Slacker Uprising is also rich in impassioned and poignant erudition from the array of musicians and actors (including Steve Earle, Eddie Vedder, REM, Joan Baez, and Roseanne Barr), diplomats, military personnel returning from Iraq, and the families of those who did not return, who joined the tour. As the tour gathered momentum it is fascinating to see just how troubled the Republican Party became by it (but then the Bush administration had been stung by Farenheit 9/11); Republican businessmen in various states attempted to inhibit the tour by offering colleges anything from $25,000 to $100,000 to cancel Moore’s events.

Watching Slacker Uprising now, even though one knows that as Moore says it “is the story of one filmmaker’s failed attempt to turn things around,” it is impossible not to get caught up in the momentum of the battle - to really believe that Bush would be voted out of office in 2004. Though undoubtedly some of the ability to relax whilst watching the film stems from it now being less than a year since Obama ousted Bush, and hope reignited remains largely intact. Equally it is clear that although Moore terms it a failed attempt, the Slacker Uprising Tour played a large part in engendering the beginning of the end by motivating disillusioned sectors of the electorate, and highlighting that change was achievable; 54 of the 62 stops on the tour went to Kerry, a record 21 million young people voted, and the Republican victory was the smallest in US history: one state (Ohio) and one hundred thousand votes.

But Slacker Uprising carries a message that should be borne in mind not only across US politics, but also by other nations, most eloquently expressed in the film by actor Viggo Mortensen: “When we as Americans see ourselves as different and superior to peoples from other nations as George W Bush with his go it alone agenda would have us do, we are not freeing ourselves or anyone else, we are not respecting ourselves or anyone else, we are rather enslaving ourselves by willing building the wall of our own prison one ignorant brick after another. It’s not a question of being liked by the world, it’s a question of belonging in the world.”

Links

Michael Moore
michaelmoore.com

Optimum Releasing
www.optimumreleasing.com

(Faber & Faber) £25.00
By Guy Sangster Adams

Liberation is an hugely emotive word and one that for British or American readers when attached to the D-Day landings, the subsequent release from occupation of the western European countries, and the defeat of Nazi Germany, is generally imbued with an overarching sense of triumph and patriotic pride. Whilst William I. Hitchcock, Professor of History at Temple University, USA, does not seek to denigrate the allied military achievement, he does seek to illustrate the often “grim realities”, by drawing on the voices and experiences of both the liberators and the liberated to, as he writes, “show that for every triumph at arms, for every act of heroism on the battlefield, there was also a home set alight, a child without food, a woman cowering in an unheated barn amid filth and squalor.”

In restoring an humanitarianism to the history with all it hardships, ambiguities and contradictory emotions, Hitchcock explores the collective act of ‘memory loss’ that America and Europe have undertaken in promotion of the blanket image of liberation as the joyous crowds thronging the streets of Paris and Brussels, which although very much part of the story are perpetuated at the cost of forgetting, just by a way of small example, that the liberation of Normandy involved the nigh on complete destruction of city of Caen, many smaller towns and villages, and the death of 20,000 French civilians, whilst the Allies’ decision not to attempt to liberate most of Holland in favour of pushing forward to Berlin, left the occupying German force and their deliberate starvation policy in situ until April 1945, by which stage hundreds of thousands of people were suffering starvation related illnesses, having been left with nothing to eat but tulip bulbs, and 16,000 people had died.

In addition, Hitchcock presents many cases in which British, American, and Russian soldiers abused their power through profligacy, theft, looting, sexual assault and murder, leading the liberated to often fear their liberators, borne out by the plea from a Belgian town liberated by the US Army, “Deliver us from our liberators”. Whilst the act of being liberated also released a complex personal emotional response in the liberated, as the writings of Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish Auschwitz survivor, which Hitchcock draws upon, encapsulate, “liberty [...] filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean [...] face to face with liberty, we felt ourselves lost, emptied, atrophied, unfit for our part.”

Liberation is an important, elegantly written and exhaustively researched book, that makes one question everything one has known, or thought one knew, about the liberation of Europe, and in so doing fills one with a growing sense of alarm that no matter how independently minded or inquisitive one feels oneself to be, it is all too easy to accept constructs of history, and also with sadness that in so doing one may well have failed to consider the plight of millions of ordinary people, civilians and soldiers alike. In readdressing suppressed memories, Liberation, uncovers the essential core to modern European relations, whilst also presenting important historical parallels to contemporary events such as Iraq.

Above all, Liberation should also be celebrated for its humanitarian aims, in which, as Hitchcock writes “there’s surely room enough in our histories of WWII for introspection, for humility, and for an abiding awareness of the ugliness of war.”

(Faber & Faber) £12.99
By Guy Sangster Adams

Pausing at a crossroads, Tom Waits casts a glance of displeasure, or so it appears, over his right shoulder in Jill Furmanovsky’s great photograph on the cover of Lowside of the Road. Though perhaps the look is one of challenge, catch me if you can, as there is a distinct element of Holly Martins’ pursuit of his old friend Harry Lime in The Third Man, in the subplot of this absorbing and affectionate unauthorised biography. Hoskyns, who was turned on to Waits whilst spending a Waitsian sounding “long wet summer with Nick Cave, who often played Small Change, Foreign Affairs, and Blue Valentine, in the druggy crashpad we shared in Paddington”, has interviewed the man himself twice in person, in 1985 and 1999, and a number of times on the phone. The first time they met, in speaking of how he is perceived, Waits quoted his huge inspiration, collaborator, and one of a line of surrogate father figures that Hoskyns identifies (including Francis Ford Coppola and William Burroughs), the writer Charles Bukowski, ‘People think I’m down on Fifth and Main at the Blarney Stone, throwing back shooters and smoking a cigar, but really I’m on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watching Johnny Carson.’

The intriguing couplet at the core of Lowside of the Road is Hoskyns’ quest to both locate the real Tom Waits behind the carefully constructed “Tom Waits” persona which the performer has presented to the world throughout his 40 year career, whilst also promulgating and in many ways seeking to perpetuate the enigma. Allied to another duality that plays out through the book, like a thriller, as a host of friends, collaborators, and acquaintances at first agree to Hoskyns’ interview requests and then rescind after Waits requests they do not co-operate, which leaves Hoskyns feeling both frustrated and offended whilst also entirely appreciative “that it must be a little like being stalked, or just being loved by someone you wish would go away.”

Wherein lies the nub, as Hoskyns is not engaged in a Wildean killing of the thing he loves, rather he has combined phenomenal research and highly erudite critique to create a fascinating exploration of every facet of Waits’ extraordinary career over the past four decades, which includes 20 studio albums, and as many acting roles in films from an evocative list of directors including Jim Jarmusch, Robert Altman, Tim Burton, and Terry Gilliam. Lowside of the Road is a celebration more than worthy of this soon to be sexagenarian.

(Hodder & Stoughton) £20.00
By Guy Sangster Adams

In so far as inspirations may be counted as vested interests, I ought to declare mine from the outset: the tale of Willie Harcourt-Cooze’s quest to produce his Venezuelan Black cacao from bean to bar, as it unfolded with all its highs and lows through the series Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory screened on C4 a year ago, was a key motivating influence in the development of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick. Retold in the first part of Willie’s Chocolate Factory Cookbook, with the addition of a contextualising back stories of Harcourt-Cooze’s equally extraordinary childhood and he and his wife Tania’s romantic courtship and wanderlust, in a mere 100 pages the tale which is already an heady mixture of Boys Own adventure story, love story, exhortative lesson in never foregoing one’s dreams, and instruction manual for starting a business, becomes even more compelling and potent in its fast-paced form; its primary ingredient is after all 100% cacao!

When Harcourt-Cooze was three years old his father, in pursuit of his own dream, bought Horse Island off the South West Coast with the intention “to create a self-sufficient idyll” for his family. “I spent most of my childhood in Ireland smoking fish, milling flour, making cheese and pickling fruit,” writes Harcourt-Cooze, “I was reeling in sea trout even before I had learned to ride my first bicycle.” Thus the seeds were sown, and skills learnt, at a very early age that would stand Harcourt-Cooze in very good stead when he and his wife put everything on the line in 1997 to buy and farm the Hacienda El Tesoro cacao plantation in the lea of Venezuela’s Cloud Mountains in pursuit of the dream to grow, and then import to Britain and produce their own chocolate, and in so doing be amongst the very few who have done so since the Cadbury family.

The second part of the book takes the ingredient and runs with it from breakfast to lunch to dinner using cacao in an eclectic mix of over 60 recipes including Huevos Rancheros, Bloody Mary, Sticky Chocolate Ribs, Porcini and Chocolate Risotto, and Cloud Forest Chocolate Cake. All of which reinforce Harcourt-Cooze’s campaign for cacao to become a widely used condiment “alongside the salt, pepper, chillies, and garlic that sit by the side of the oven.”

A hugely engaging and inspiring book with the added attraction that rarely has inspiration tasted this good!

(Manta Ray Music)
On Release
By Guy Sangster Adams

It is no surprise that this urgent surge to the stage slab of euphoric indie rock both hot wires The Tunics live sets and was a primary motivation to their signing by Manta Ray. The troubled urban poet Joe Costello of last single Cost of Living is cast aside in a welter of unreconstructed rock swagger and braggadocio as he declares himself both Messiah and freedom fighter, and with an uprush and magnetic pull Shine On declares the stage and the moment to belong well and truly to The Tunics.

Costello’s voice, lyricism, wit and fervour are increasingly reminiscent of Tim Wheeler and Feargal Sharkey, just as Shine On bears witness to Girl From Mars and Teenage Kicks - both equally killer live tracks - and The Tunics’ revitalisation of golden eras of heart filling, breath grabbing singles as they join a lineage of bands including Ash, The Undertones, and The Jam. Heed the call, rip out the seats, pull down the fences, but get yourself a slice of this band and give yourself up once more to the 3 minute dream that a song might change the world.

(Salty Cat Records)
On Release
By Guy Sangster Adams

Galloping rhythms riven with fast funk, melodic sunshine treble over guttural, self-confident 1977 riffs, tether slicing soaring vocals and ascendant backing vocal harmonies, contradict these narratives of lost love, unrequited lust, lonely disillusionment, and life wrecking decisions. This boys have feelings too introspection so upbeat one can dance all over it, evokes pre-Goth The Cure and in particular Boys Don’t Cry. Though the holistic post-Punk redolence of Everyone Loves a Scene is more akin to Postcard Records’ early eighties ‘Sound of Young Scotland’ bands, especially Orange Juice and Aztec Camera. Incongruously, New Rhodes are from Bristol by way of Hackney, East London… though to continue the projection of a Scottish theme, with echoes of the late, great Billy Mackensie, James Williams is possessed of a supremely powerful pop voice with a great range from punk choirboy, through rough edged rock, to Rat Pack swing, contemporarily analogous to Brandon Flowers. Indeed The Killers are one of the key acts that New Rhodes have supported since the release of their debut album Songs from the Lodge in 2006.

New Rhodes appear to be a band at a crossroads on Everyone Loves A Scene. The album, as is Williams’ intention divides into two sides, to this end it is also available on vinyl in a gatefold sleeve in a very limited edition of 500. Side one, save for the recent single The Joys of Finding & Losing That Girl which fuses a great mix of stripped back urban troubadour with an electric guitar and a pre-amp verses, with terrace rousing choruses, and the gloriously eccentric slow sea-shanty doo wop of The Bells of St John, sets a course bound for a potentially overblown power pop in which the manifold talents of New Rhodes are in danger of being lost in the multi-layered production mêléé. Whereas side 2 contains the wonderful sequence of four key tracks in which less is definitely more as the bands strengths and scope are given their freedom and the pursuit of experimentation and originality pays off: the relentlessly edgy and driven A&E—a rebuff of London’s aura of perpetual emotional detachment— and Is This The Life You Want, the fabulously bonkers torch song to a girl on the 254 (the London bus from Aldgate to Holloway’s Nag’s Head) , and the melodramatic finale and resplendent showcase for William’s voice, You Can Have it All. A title which, if these tracks signal the direction to come, predicts New Rhodes’ future.

(Angular Recording Corporation)
On release
by Guy Sangster Adams

Like a girandole lighting a witching hour jaunt through a hall of mirrors, Alight of Night’s spinning cluster of fireworks illuminates, distorts, and delightfully re-imagines a host of influences on its journey.

Opening song The Dazzled instantly seduces as Andy Adler’s infectious bass, with equal shades of Steven Severin and Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, propels one into this eleven track tarantella. Through which Brad Hargett’s gloaming vocals lead one into the dark corners, whirling past reflections of Joy Division and Bauhaus, though any desire to stand in the shadows is perpetually pinball paddle-swiped back into an hybrid danceability mixing psychobilly wrecking crew and 1960s Mecca ballroom, as the shivery jangles and zingy treble of JB Townsend’s guitar counterpoint Frankie Rose’s portentous Shangri-Las drums. With tambourine shimmer and rasping harmonica also in the mix, the wall of sound interconnections are bonded by Kyle Forrester’s keyboards uprushing 60s surf and psychedelic pop via the Beach Boys and The Zombies.

The whole eclectic and contradictory mixture is most gloriously realised on Departure and Prismatic Room which formed the forerunning single released in early February, and the fusion of coruscating shards of sonic majesty that is Shattered Shine.

Given their shared musical references, Crystal Stilts are most often paralleled to the Jesus & Mary Chain, a band they equally cite as a key inspiration, and in fact the song Crystal Stilts is in many ways an homage to Just Like Honey. Underlying both bands, of course, is The Velvet Underground, and Alight of Night’s last track The City in the Sea transports one with the spine tingling beauty of Sunday Morning.

But Crystal Stilts are no hand-me-down hobbledehoys, they twist and swirl with a lustre all of their own through this album of sparkling titles  to create a fabulous refulgent  fractal.

(Boisko Bezdomnych)

(Tor Film Studio)
Showing as part of Kinoteka
By Guy Sangster Adams

Battered, bruised, and wearing a Father Christmas hat, Jacek Mroz (Marcin Dorinciski) comes to in Warsaw Central Station. How he plummeted from being an hotly-tipped young footballer on the cusp of a glittering career down to Noclegownia Hades, the evocatively named subterranean hostel to which he is taken by a group of the station’s other rough sleepers, unfolds through the film in parallel to the story of the group’s precipitous climb to become the Polish team in the Homeless Football World Cup.

Just as in a match players are left offside as they become out of step with play, The Offsiders have, through accidents, addiction, mental illness, and trauma, been isolated by the play of life and become out of step with society, much to the confusion, hurt and frustration of their families; as the cliché goes the offside rule is notoriously hard to explain to non-footballers.

Kasia Adamik has delightfully subverted the genre of oddball teams coming together to pull off audacious goals, with its long Hollywood lineage through The Magnificent Seven to Oceans Eleven, and with her own measure of audacity in only her second feature and with a tiny budget has created a highly assured mix of poignant drama, wonderfully observed comedy, and sharp satire which sweeps one up with such cynicism demolition that one ends up unabashedly and wholeheartedly cheering on the ‘Homeless Eleven’ to triumph. Whilst within the ultimate feel-goodness of the film, Adamik has very successfully woven a thought provoking depiction of modern Poland, a country that for so long was left offside through war and politics, and the contradictions inherent in its journey to reclaim and promote an independent national identity.