Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

(Salvo) 3CD & 1 DVD box set anthology
On release

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Through a rainy and misty dusk on London’s Westminster Bridge, the lamplight reflecting on the tarmac between the cars, black cabs, and Routemaster buses, the unmistakeable silhouette of the Houses of Parliament looms majestically over the traffic. It might be the past, the present, or times still to come, but it is unmistakeably and evocatively London, whether viewed from the city’s streets or internationally. Over this image on the back cover of the 72 page booklet accompanying this excellent Madness anthology floats the track listing spanning 30 years and beyond…

All aboard for a guided tour of Madness across three CDs and one DVD, 94 tracks, including singles, from 1979’s The Prince/Madness to 2011’s Le Grand Pantalon (released on CD for the first time), favourite tracks from their nine studio albums, from 1979’s One Step Beyond… to 2009’s The Liberty of Norton Folgate, and the first DVD release of the band’s performance at their inaugural Madstock festival in London’s Finsbury Park in 1992.

Madness One Step Beyond ©Cameron McVey

To accompany this journey the back cover of the booklet unfolds through fantastic 1940s/50s Boys Own style illustrations of derring-do and suspicious goings-on in and around the capital’s bombed out streets and docks to reveal a ‘Sightseers’ Map of Madness’ with locations of import to the band highlighted by a pointing finger and a red dot. Although ostensibly ‘Madworld’, it is explained, is located within “a short stroll from Camden Town”, over the last three decades Madness have become a cipher for the capital as whole.

“We are London…” is the announcement with which the map’s legend begins, which is exactly who Madness are, unmistakably, evocatively and majestically. Listening to the tracks chosen for this anthology, none of which have been diminished by the passing years, it is clear that like the silhouette of the Houses of Parliament, Madness now instantly encapsulate London historical, London contemporary, London timeless. But although the majority of the songs may be London rooted, such is the strength of the songwriting, the storytelling, the shared experience of characters and situations, and the accessibility and irresistible panache of their presentation that they are and have become universal.

Madness ©Michael Putland/Getty Images

The joy of A Guided Tour of Madness is that one can plot one’s own route through the anthology: take the complete, chronological journey from start to finish, start in the era of the band’s work with which one is most familiar or indeed unfamiliar, or hop on and off along the way and see what one discovers. Either way it’s accompanied by a rush of emotions. With so many landmark songs and a career spanning so many years, the words and music are entwined, consciously or unconsciously, with so many stages in one’s own life instantly evoking, with a welter of back of the neck tingles, associations with people and places.

But their power is not purely nostalgic, in listening to the earlier songs again, in many instances for me they appear to have gained extra layers of resonance in the intervening years that I had been oblivious to before. A primary example being Michael Caine, which I realised I had rather dismissed at the time as being more of a ‘novelty’ song, but have completely rediscovered it now in all its perfectly paced and placed sonic and lyrical splendour. Madness’s acute talent for combining the seemingly contradictory elements of humour and poignancy, melancholy and joie de vivre, the wonderfully observed day-to-day with an equally insightfully created surreality, are all to the fore in the song which, depending on your point of view, could be the simple love of a fan for a star, or a far more sinister stalking confession, a cautionary tale of a celebrity being consumed by his public persona, the lost script of a Harry Palmer film… or all those at the same time and more!

The enduring strength of the songs allied to the degree to which they have entered the vernacular was underlined last year by the reworking of two tracks for television advertisements. Virgin Media’s campaign, More Exciting Place to Live, used the lyrics of Our House narrated over the music of Dan Black’s HYPNTZ, whilst as part of Kronenbourg 1664’s Slow the Pace advertising campaign, Madness themselves rearranged Baggy Trousers, slowing the song right down to create the highly reflective and Francophile, Le Grand Pantalon. The track closes the anthology’s chronological journey in wonderfully surreal style, as though the life of Madness has been reimagined by Amelie director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, raising a glass of cognac and, as the repeated vocal refrain of Le Grand Pantalon has it, “baggy trousers to the days/To the days/To the days…”

A glass of cognac, and indeed any baggy trousers, should also be raised to Salvo because A Guided Tour of Madness continues their fantastic catalogue of box sets, put together with fantastic and celebratory creativity, insight, and passion. Each part of the concept for the Madness anthology works wonderfully well from the track selection, to the booklet which also includes an essay by Paul Morley, new interviews with the band and key personnel, and a reproduction of the first issue of the Nutty Boys Comic (1981), to the overall look and feel of the packaging… a wonderful celebration of the days: past, present, and still to come.

Links:
Madness:
blog.madness.co.uk
www.myspace.com/madnessofficial

Salvo: www.salvo-music.co.uk
Union Square: www.unionsquaremusic.co.uk

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(Avon) Paperback: £6.99; ebook: £4.49

Reviewed by Dave Collins

Taking the codes and conventions of classic ghost stories and positioning them within a contemporary setting, Syd Moore’s debut novel, The Drowning Pool, is literally a tale of two dimensions. Sarah Grey, a young widowed mother, appears to be receiving signs, visions and visitations from the spirit of a long dead, although still unsettled, 19^th century sea witch, also named Sarah Grey. But is it stress, illness or something genuinely supernatural that’s behind the hauntings?

The novel’s threads of historical wrong doings and teaser glimpses of horrors-to-follow have the long shadows of H. P. Lovecraft cast across them, while the serial style chapter closers draw on Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker, with the veil of local myths and mysteries stirring memories of Thomas  Hardy and The Withered Arm.

Bringing us into the present day, Sarah Gray and her network of female friends and family are a compact circle of extended sisterhood - almost an allusion to unwritten coven bonds for modern times - reclaiming the ‘Essex Girl’ image as an East Anglian archetype rather than a tangerine-tinted stereotype.

Taking its base, build and background from the area’s tradition of witchcraft, witch hunters and cunning men, keeps the fantasy rooted in reality but also brings a fresh perspective to the sexual politics of ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins’ 17^th century hate crusades - particularly in Essex.

Like Hardy’s studies and sketches of ‘Wessex’, the book’s topographical map is also Syd Moore’s home town, Leigh on Sea, a Thames-side fishing village terraced between its neighbours, Hadleigh and Southend-on-Sea. If you are a Southender (or familiar with the area) you’ll click and connect with the micro-local references immediately. If not, you’ll want to visit and root around the town ticking off The Drowning Pool locations: Old Leigh, the Library Gardens, or St Peter’s Church, looking for sword marks on the Mary Ellis grave (yes, they really are there) and similar historical reminders of a hidden past.

One of the most accomplished debut novels I’ve read, The Drowning Pool’s now-wave narrative, historical story arcs and subtext of gender politics through the ages presents a fully formed, confidently voiced entrance into the world of fiction of any genre. With none of the style finding Bambi-steps and plot-wobbles that usually dilute the early works of established authors. It is a pitch-perfect read for a wild, wind-whipped, wintry evening. A black Jackanory, that at its ghostliest moments will trace a line of grave-cold fingernails down your spine, and one of the few books-at-bedtime that has genuinely given me a fidgety night’s sleep.

Tuesday 6^th December 2011: Syd Moore will be in conversation with Dave Collins on the Radio Podrophenia programme on Chance Radio (www.chanceradio.com).
Listen live from 9pm or catch up with the programme after broadcast on iTunes.

In addition to being a regular contributor to both the webzine and print editions of Plectrum-The Cultural Pick, Dave Collins is editor of the blog, Planet Mondo, and also presents the programme, Radio Podrophenia, with co-host, Piley, on Chance Radio every Tuesday from 9pm. Following the live broadcast each episode of Radio Podrophenia is available on iTunes (search under, ‘Podrophenia’).

Links:

Avon is an imprint of Harper Collins:  www.harpercollins.co.uk

Chance Radio: www.chanceradio.com

Radio Podrophenia: www.facebook.com/Podrophonia.co.uk

Planet Mondo:  planetmondo.blogspot.com

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(Ghost Arc Records) On release
Reviewed by Dave Collins

Warmed only by a Motown backbeat and some woolly fuzzed-up guitar Dirty Lakes, the latest transmission from Tynesiders Let’s Buy Happiness is fitted around the neat, clean lines of a Scandinavian design school with a hand-stitched folk-art finish. It’s entirely the style of a midnight lullaby that’s a ready-to-run storyboard for an animated Eastern European short film. The delicately textured ghostly guitar washes from James Hall/Graeme Martin and Sarah Hall’s pixie-voiced skipping gives Dirty Lakes the close-mic’d intimacy of a fireside confessional from Kate Bush’s pen pal.

Links
Let’s Buy Happiness:  letsbuyhappiness.com

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(Decode) On release

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

The revolving opening rhythms that draw one into the ‘original mix’ of the highly atmospheric Turn 2 Dust suggest a police helicopter hovering above city streets; the sound of spinning rotor blades overhead make one wary on even the most familiar streets, bring an edginess to the happiest evening out, as all too often one can only hear the sound, and see neither the helicopter, nor what it can see, perhaps just around the next corner.

Emotionally and politically charged, Turn 2 Dust, which has now been released in a nine track remix package (including mixes by David Jones, Bootik, and a great ‘lovebox’ mix by Kris de Angelis and Sam H), is the second single from Ordinary Alien - The Kinky Roland Files, Boy George’s first artist album in nine years, on which it is the opening and particularly stand out track. Beginning with the homophobic pejorative, “Chi Chi man everywhere you turn”, the song is an exhortation to remain strong and proud in the face of growing intolerance and hate crimes directed not only towards gay men and women, but towards anyone who is different, or stands out from the crowd.

Within weeks of Turn 2 Dust’s first appearance, with the release of Ordinary Alien in March, the song’s message was brought even closer to home for Boy George, after one of his oldest friends, Philip Sallon, the always flamboyantly dressed, 59 year old, gay socialite and club host, who founded the Mud Club in the 1980s, was left unconscious, with a fractured skull, and many broken bones, after being attacked in London’s Soho; streets with which he is very familiar and on which he has been a familiar figure for over 40 years. Speaking after the attack, for which no one has yet been arrested, Boy George said, “It’s hard to say and you don’t want to jump to conclusions, but it must have been something to do with the way he looked.”

Listening to Turn 2 Dust on the back of August’s riots in London and other English cities, watching footage, much shot from helicopters overhead, of violence and flames, familiar streets made unfamiliar in an instant, brings another layer to the song.

Portentous and powerful, lyrically and musically Turn 2 Dust is an highly evocative collage of urban life: edgy dance beats give way to the sweet release of floating melodies, one both relaxes into the moment and stays watchful, not knowing what might be around the next corner, pleasure and pain are co-existent on these city streets. Turn 2 Dust is a great return for Boy George, that both channels resonances of all that has gone before, whist also resolutely setting off in a fascinating new direction.

We would all be the poorer if everyone was the same. Long may he continue to celebrate difference.

Links:
Boy George: www.boygeorgeuk.com
Decode Records: mn2s.com

Further reading:
Recent music reviews in Plectrum - The Cultural Pick
Miracle Worker - Superheavy (Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, A.R. Rahman)
Elephant Room - Channel Cairo
Different Story - Wolfette

Or click on the tag Music Reviews to browse all the music reviews in the webzine edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

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(Universal Music) On release

Reviewed by Dave Collins

How do fidgety rock stars busy themselves during their downtime? By forming a supergroup with similarly loose-ended friends. SuperHeavy is a tag-team which at its heaviest-hitting end stars Mick Jagger, Dave Stewart and Joss Stone. Buffed up with international swish from Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman (composer of the Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours soundtracks).

It’s a collective whose debut single dips a toe into the shallows of extra strength reggae. The ‘extra’ being soul vocals with rock guitar. However - music that may pump with muscular dub ‘n’ thump during a high end studio playback, can, on standard issue home audio sound, well, overcooked and/or sterile.

Certainly there’s enough ’song’ and substance buried under the gloss, but an over polished production positions Miracle Worker at the wrong end of the reggae spectrum, leaving the backing track uncomfortably close to the white bread dynamics of UB40.

The irony here is SuperHeavy aren’t actually heavy enough. The single lacks the thick rhythmic fug and touches of Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One output or some dubbier dynamics. Hinting-at, but never quite hitting the genre’s heady textures.

As a song it’s a fine enough piece of pop built on a solid body of workable raw material and nippy top lines. As a production it’s in need of a snappier remix. To these ears, SuperHeavy should tighten up the loose Lovers Rock grooves and let Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry loose on the tune to wing in some vintage grit, shuffle and skank.

Dave Collins is editor of Planet Mondo and a regular contributor to Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

Links:
Superheavy: www.superheavy.com
Planet Mondo: planetmondo.blogspot.com
Universal Music: www.universalmusic.com

Further reading
Recent music reviews in Plectrum - The Cultural Pick:
Turn 2 Dust - Boy George
Elephant Room - Channel Cairo
Different Story - Wolfette

Or click on the tag Music Reviews to browse all the music reviews in the webzine edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

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(Beautiful Books) Hardback £15.99; ebook £12.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

At first one is struck by the sheer beauty of the words. Words that combine poetically and often with seemingly abstract imagery into sentences that feel like the most delicate threads that should be reread and savoured for their own protection. The story seems secondary to the desire to maintain the feeling they engender, but the only way to do that is to keep reading. In so doing, one is almost unaware of the degree to which one is being drawn into the narrative, so gently and sensuously do the sentences envelop one.

However, when tragedy befalls the characters half way through the book, following the anger one feels with Simon Van Booy for not only turning the lives of Rebecca, George, and Henry upside down, but also one’s own, realisation dawns as one picks up the book thrown to one side in an effort to break the skein in which he has enmeshed you, that he has you well and truly caught on the hook at the end of those threads. The desire to keep reading is underscored by the fear of how it would feel to go cold turkey at that point such is one’s addiction to the book. Thankfully, although sadness does remain, as the second half of the story unfolds, hope is restored so fully to both the characters and the reader, that like them one does feel better equipped to embrace the future.

Haunted by events in their childhoods, the three lost and lonely protagonists have come to Athens, Greece, from three different countries and ostensibly with three different intentions: French artist, Rebecca, to paint, American expert in ancient languages, George, to translate, and English archaeologist, Henry, to dig. As their lives intertwine, their love for, and dependency upon each other grows, and in the streets of modern Athens and amidst the ruins of Ancient Greece, to further that love they begin to excavate and make sense of their own pasts, ultimately creating the means for independence and redemption.

Van Booy’s debut novel wonderfully and exhilaratingly compounds the promise, talent, and acclaim inherent in his two collections of short stories, Love Begins in Winter (Beautiful Books, 2009), which won the 2009 Frank O’ Connor Short Story Award, and The Secret Lives of People in Love (Beautiful Books, 2010). Beautiful, innovative, devastating, delightful, Everything Beautiful Began After is everything and more.

Links:
Simon Van Booy: www.simonvanbooy.com

Beautiful Books: www.beautiful-books.co.uk

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(Laissez Faire Club Records) Released 29^th August 2011

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Opening floatingly with a piano like sunlight crested waves, and harmonies that gently build the swell, the debut single by Channel Cairo, Elephant Room, quickly becomes a bracing walk along the beach of a seaside town, as layers of fascinating and atmospheric refrains, vocals, piano, guitars, and rhythms, fleetingly and enticingly reach one on the ebb and flow. Or perhaps the allusion is to AM radio waves and the fluctuations of reception and interference, creating a sonic collage. Either way, as all the disparate threads evocatively coalesce with complete and rousing clarity for the song’s epic, climactic crescendo, one is already hooked and on the strength of this refreshingly original single determined to stay tuned to Channel Cairo.

The intriguing multi-layering also extends to the band’s name and, in its evocative combination of kidnapping and hieroglyphs, brings an extra suggestion of a thriller or film noir title. Cairo is a city that has haunted lead singer and keyboard player, Josh Bowyer, since he was kidnapped there, albeit very briefly, at the age of nine. But it was only when he put together the band with old friends Hamish Murtagh (guitar), Joe Cross (bass), James Gardiner (drums), that he discovered that Gardiner’s great, great grandfather was the preeminent early - mid twentieth century Egyptologist, Sir Alan Gardiner, who in 1927 published the important work, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs. Whilst ‘channel’ is a reference to the Anglo-French line-up of the band, as a few weeks after the old friends got together they met a French guitarist, Luke Saunders, at an open-mic night and asked him to join the line-up.

The cover of the single includes the imprint of a letter written by Howard Carter to Sir Alan Gardiner, discussing the former’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt. But don’t wait for the sands of time to settle before you unearth Channel Cairo… discover them now with this excellent debut single.

Links:
Channel Cairo:  www.channelcairo.com

Laissez Faire Club Records: laissezfaireclub.com

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(Each book published by Quartet Books)

Reviewed by Sam Burcher

Simon Astaire ©Simon Astaire

Simon Astaire’s loosely woven trilogy of novels is an attempt to free himself from his past and become a respected writer. No longer content to manage the lives of other people, he has come a long way from being the best friend of Sting, the squire of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Ulrika Jonsson, and the personal manager of Princess Michael of Kent.

By his own admission, Astaire began writing because his therapist suggested it after they hit upon the fact that he had been so emotionally unavailable in his relationships. This is something that he relates directly to the experience of being sent away from home at a very young age to Harrow School.

The first two books, Private Privilege, And You Are…?, are his rites of passage, whilst Mr Coles is an extension of that exploration and written with extraordinary darkness.

In Private Privilege, Astaire’s alma mater is thinly veiled as Montgomery House, and it is through this medium that I found myself vicariously returning to a world of Sunday exeats, black tails and boaters, and bumpy rides on the Metropolitan line to Harrow-on-the-Hill, on London’s outermost margins, for Speech Day.

Reading this book has helped me to understand what happened to my brother Julien during his time at Harrow, which was concurrent with the story told here.  Astaire’s peripatetic take has undoubtedly demystified some of my private perceptions of public school education.

The books central character Samuel Alexander, note the initials match the author’s, is sent away from home at 13 to begin a life at Montgomery House. From day one he is greeted with an oppressive regime of fagging, toshing, and bullying by older boys as the norm. Calculated acts of rebellion such as graffiti, theft, truancy, and drug taking intensify to arson and even suicide, all of which are hushed up by the school.

In empowering Sam in whichever ways he can against this dysfunctional backdrop, Astaire is giving a respectful nod to Lindsay Anderson’s powerful film, If, which is about a schoolboy lead revolution in a public school. From this forms surreal images of the shape shifting and shamanic psyche of a schoolboy torn from his roots and situated in a conditional culture where loneliness and abandonment reign and, fortunately, Matron is the only succor.

The task of raising public consciousness about the sticky subject of adolescent boys from an insider’s view of an ‘establishment’ institution is a tricky one. But the author manages it by using a literary camera obscura that allows him to entertain, whilst asking questions that go beyond mere survival.

Astaire’s second novel, And You Are…?, follows seamlessly and swiftly on the heels of Private Privilege. Sam, the central character, has graduated with dishonour from his emotionally deprived public school, and is ready and willing to face the challenges of young adulthood.

A former agent to stars, Astaire draws deeply on his own experience of Hollywood to entertain us.  He cleverly plays with time to measure just the right amount of reverie for the grand days of a Hollywood past to balance the book’s present.  Indeed, this mix of fact and fiction acts as a powerful stimulus to the reader’s imagination.

There are plenty of laughs, as well as an eclectic coterie of friends, acquaintances, a snake and Telly Savalas. On the other hand, the emotional darkness of the first novel remains. Only this time, the grief of a boy’s separation from everything that is familiar to him is disguised as the death of his older brother.  His grief finds company with the lonely Hollywood actors, who despite their fame, drink alone at the bar.  Perhaps no one is as lonely as the stars.

The second novel demands a second love affair, which comes in the form of the free-spirited February, who is the conduit for the author’s detailed and sensuous descriptions of nature.  She is the muse guiding the juxtaposition between the smog on the Scaletrix streets of Los Angeles and the scented forests high above the Hollywood hills. Such attention to the natural world would make the Pre-Raphaelites proud.

As I read this book one afternoon at Kentish Town station, I couldn’t help but notice a railway worker flapping a pretty grey and white pigeon off the opposite platform. After much wafting with the lid of a large cardboard box she succeeded.  I had just got to the part in the book where Sam is imagining his own death during lovemaking with his first love. I was reading about death, thinking about death and suddenly death was imminent. I looked up from my reading.

A shrill whistle meant that the worker had not finished tormenting the pigeon, which was now perched upon the track.  Its body convulsed with the electric current as the 18.30 to St Albans collided into it.  In one motion, the bird fell to its own little death and as the train departed there was no sign of it. I dared to believe that the pigeon had flown away like an angel, or a Magi. Then, from beyond the track, I saw a white wing rise once, twice, and then no more.  A railway worker looking on flashed me a cynical smile as he made towards the opposite platform with a pair of plastic litter pickers at the ready.

This book has strange ways of connecting with the reader through different mediums. As with the previous novel, music is used as a channel. So too is food, place and smell.  But it is the celebration and the tribulations of youth in search of identity that connect you to its core. Ultimately, Sam’s story is about the ambitions, with sensitive limits, of a boy who will not be broken by systems that don’t always care, be it the public school system, or Hollywood.

Mr Coles is Astaire’s third novel, published this year.  It picks up the theme of private school, this time from the perspective of a teacher in a boys’ prep school in Norfolk.  But this is no ordinary teacher; this is Mr Coles, pederast and fantasist. Written in the first person narrative it takes the reader intimately into the lurid depths of the daily machinations of an alcoholic child sexual abuser.

Lyrically beautiful, tighter and more multi-textural than the previous two novels, it is a compelling read rather than a comfortable one.  A book of two halves, we fast forward twenty years after Mr Coles has tricked the family of his most desired pupil into being invited to their summer retreat in Cannes, and is eventually found out. But who tells?

Comparisons can be made to Thomas Mann’s novella and film, Death in Venice.  However, Mr Coles is not merely a voyeur.  His sweaty desires are actualized and when not in the act, he is a lone predator prowling the dormitories sniffing the sheets of little boys.

The three novels demonstrate just how successful Astaire has been in his stated mission. All three books have enjoyed critical and commercial success. Private Privilege is a bestseller and Astaire has recently adapted Mr Coles into a screenplay for a film which begins shooting in Norfolk, in the East of England, early next year. He has also received a lot of feedback from Old Harrovians who similarly found it hard to commit to a relationship or communicate with their partners. Although equally, he has also heard from those who said their time at Harrow was very happy and the best start to life they could have had.

Links
Quartet Books: www.quartetbooks.co.uk

Sam Burcher: www.samburcher.com

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(Lavaland Records) Released 1^st August 2011

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Sublime pop from the equally stunning singer-songwriter, Wolfette, and her co-writer and producer, the multi-talented, multi-instrumentalist, Gisli Kristjansson, who together have cleverly and triumphantly melded a reimagined Hi-NRG, by way of ZTT’s take on electronica, with 1990s alt rock - Shoegaze, Britpop, and something altogether darker and heavier - to create an immediate, swirlingly anthemic song, which is perfect for the now, and to which resistance would not only be foolhardy, but most probably futile.

Different Story tells of impasse in a relationship on the verge of rupture and the spirited eleventh hour refusal to forget the love that first brought the couple together, or to forgo hope for reconciliation and passion reiginition. Wolfette’s wonderful vocals evocatively colour the light and dark, from the breathy, brightest of bright choruses, to the more sinister, stiletto sharp, edginess of the bridge. All of which adds to the very welcome stylistic echoes which imbue Different Story, from Kim Wilde’s Kids in America, to Lush’s Single Girl, and shades of Shirley Manson and Debbie Harry, intriguingly bringing to mind two Blondie tracks from opposite ends of their discography, One Way or Another and Maria.

Lyrically and musically Different Story urges, infectiously so as it transpires, to dance all over deadlock, and in so doing embrace hope and the promise of brighter things to come. Different Story also highlights the promise of a bright future with which Wolfette abounds, whilst also providing a fantastic, hope inspiring moment to enjoy right now!

Link
Wolfette:
www.myspace.com/wolfettemusic
www.facebook.com/wolfettemusic
twitter.com/wolfettemusic

Gisli Kristjansson:
www.gislikristjansson.com

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(Beautiful Books) £20.00

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

One could perhaps extrapolate that a defining formative moment for Wilma Johnson was the afternoon that she arrived late for a date with Joe Strummer, the legendary frontman of the equally legendary band, The Clash, to find he had already left and she never saw him again.

As she recounts in Surf Mama they had originally met in Camden Town, North London, whilst she was still a pupil at North London Collegiate School, when she chatted him up in a bar by asking, “‘Hello, are you Joe Strummer? Do you want to buy me a drink?’” To which, she writes, “‘I already have,’ he said with the coolest smile in the history of rock ‘n’ roll and handed me a can of Colt 45.” After which he would always put her on the guest list for gigs The Clash played, one of which coincided with her favourite day at school - the day she left! - when she hitchhiked to Aylesbury, a town to the north west of London, to see them.

Johnson had already begun her degree in Fine Art/Painting and Photography at St Martin’s School of Art in central London when Strummer took her out to lunch in nearby Soho and also bought her a present of some fabric from Berwick Street market. They arranged to meet the next day to go to an afternoon rockabilly gig, but she got stuck in a photography lecture and arrived late to find the gig had been cancelled and Strummer had left, and was heading off on tour soon after.

Housewife of the Year (J'accuse) © Wilma Johnson

The what-might-have-been has stayed with her, and continued to irk her, and one could make the case that the lesson she learnt by staying in lessons that day and conforming to a timetable placed upon her, and by extension conforming to what external powers would consider the best choice for a girl at her age and stage, to put classes before “a date with my favourite rock star”, was a lesson hard learnt. Particularly brought to bear twenty plus years later when she had turned forty and was living the life of a self-professed “earth mother” with her husband, three young children, and ducks, on the west coast of Ireland. One day looking out to sea on the “westernmost beach in Europe” reflecting on her long held desire to be a surfer, she edged into the initially comforting thought that now being a woman, a mother, and over 40, no one would expect her ever to do so, and admitting to herself that no one had probably expected she would, or could, anyway.

But her comfort was immediately submerged, as she writes, “as if an icy wave has crashed over my head. What does this mean? That I will never learn to surf? That it’s too late? That I’m too old?” She resurfaced with the revelation that she did still want to become a surfer and a voice in her head repelling the dictates of convention with ever greater force: “‘NONONONONONO!’ the voice shouts. ‘I cannot be too old, I will become an extreme sports heroine if I choose to.’”

Though I am wary of underplaying the power of Strummer, and The Clash per se, challenging convention was in Johnson’s blood long before she met him. Her motorcycle riding grandmother was one of the first women dentists in the 1920s, and when she was growing up her economist, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, father would “wander around the house in a kimono at the weekends singing along to the soundtrack of The Jungle Book”, and took up windsurfing in his fifties. Equally, after Strummer’s departure from her life, Johnson turned away from punk to New Romanticism, of which her generation of St Martin’s students was the epicentre, and also, with Christine and Jennifer Binnie and Grayson Perry, in 1979 she founded the Neo-Naturist Cabaret, a ‘performance based live art practice’, whose idiosyncratic, body-painted, naturism took night clubs, galleries, festivals, public places, and even the stage of London’s Royal Opera House by storm.

Après Surf at the Naturist Beach © Wilma Johnson

All of which, to my mind at least, creates an eccentrically perfect set of ingredients for not only taking up surfing in one’s early-forties, but also becoming an accomplished surfer! Although the ingredients did not begin to really blend until a few years after her epiphanic moment on the Irish beach, by which stage she and her husband had split up and she was living with her children in a village near Biarritz, the Atlantic coast city in south western France, which has become internationally renowned for surfing since the late 1950s. In addition to her own determination not to be beaten, Johnson’s surf chefs de cuisine came in the form of two friends she made in Biarritz, Johanna Matsson, a former professional free-skier, with whom she hatched a plan to form the Mamas Surf Club, a women-only surf club with the motto, ‘Out of the kitchen and into the surf’, and Matsson’s partner, Christophe Reinhardt, a former French surf champion, who became the Mamas’ instructor.

Now in her fifties Johnson is more than an accomplished surfer, she is a “surf addict”, her blood does more than stream, it crests with waves:
“I paddle down the face, then I stand up as the board becomes weightless and starts to accelerate. I can hear the white water breaking behind me and see the glassy blue curve stretching out in front of me. The spray blows into my face, flickering with prisms in the sunlight. In a moment I might be underwater swallowing seawater and small jellyfish, but right now I am an ancient princess of Hawaii, I am a bikini model, I am a goddess before the crest of a monster billow.”

Surf Mama is an exceptional memoir. Exceptional both in the story told and the storytelling. Exciting, funny, touching, revelatory, so completely does Johnson draw one in that one gets knocked for six when she wipes out, one dances for joy when she eventually hangs ten. Equally in all the exceptionality, in all Johnson’s brilliant upending of age and gender proscriptions and stereotyping, Surf Mama is a tale to which everyone can relate and take inspiration from. Because it is also a book about love and family, dreams and ambitions, and how one responds to, or more appropriately, rides the waves of, the changes that getting older brings to them all. Surf Mama is also a beautifully produced book, the publishers, Beautiful Books, very much living up to their name; the text is complemented and interspersed throughout with Johnsons’ wonderfully evocative paintings… writer, surfer, mother, she is also an internationally exhibited artist. Ultimately, Surf Mama is an highly inspiring, thoroughly enjoyable, and heartily recommended book.

Links:
Wilma Johnson: www.wilmaweb.com

Beautiful Books: www.beautiful-books.co.uk

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(Jonathan Cape) £16.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Originally published in France in 2008, A Taste of Chlorine won the prestigious Essential Révélation prize, awarded to the most outstanding new talent, the following year at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême, Europe’s largest festival of graphic novels and comic book art held every January in the town in south west France. At the time Bastien Vivès was just short of his 26^th birthday and the book was his third published work. All of which adds another layer to the accomplishment of this beautifully realised book.

Finally giving in to the repeated requests of his chiropractor to take up swimming, a teenage boy, suffering from curvature of the spine, begins going to his local pool every Wednesday. At first he finds not only the exercise hard going but also the environment to be just as hard, cold, anonymous, and uninviting. But then he meets an enigmatic, pretty girl, whose Arena swimwear, he rightly deduces, signifies that she has been a competitive swimmer. Their friendship develops hebdomadally, with few words, predominantly through touch and demonstration as she helps him improve his swimming technique. As they get closer and his prowess increases, so the swimming pool becomes a softer, more intimate space, with the other users fading into the background.

But when he seeks to find out more about his muse, she is evasive to his questions, finally mouthing something to him underwater, which she promises to elucidate the following week, only to then not show up that week, or the week after…

A Taste of Chlorine is a wonderfully engrossing book, with few words, Vivès’ artwork, in ripple-edged frames and a muted palette, predominantly of aquamarine, draws one in, almost imperceptibly until, in parallel to the closing underwater scenes, one finds one has become completely submerged by the characters and their simple story beautifully told. And, like the boy, completely desirous to know more about the girl and as desperate to decipher what exactly it is she said underwater.

Links
Bastien Vivès: bastienvives.blogspot.com

Jonathan Cape is an imprint of The Random House Group: www.randomhouse.co.uk

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(Trolley Books) £14.99

Reviewed by Delisia Howard and Chris Price

We really like this book… It’s a wild and poetic history which, while hanging on by white knuckles to the facts, stirs up a dark potion rushing through the stygian channels of London - the ragamuffin gangs of ne’er-do-wells and resurrection men, Coney catchers and bawdy bastards. The book itself, beautifully produced, is stained by a ‘dish o’ tay’ thrown in the mists of time, seeping into the type like unconscious memory. There are also very nice pictures, well-spaced and by human hand.

Baal touches the dead hand of Hardy as a young man working for the railway as an engineer, moving the rotting dead cadavers from the St Pancras bone yard, with the help of Jerry Cruncher look-alikes and gin and porter soaked navigators, and the gilded dustman admires his seething heaps against the fire of a Mad Martin sunset. Magically their stones are girt around a huge tree like a ruff on a Danish Lutheran proclaiming the Day of Wrath.

Hardy’s dark world - the whispering Egdon Heath, the hanged children in Jude, his miskatonick Fates weaving their cold logic as it guides lost souls to destruction from Casterbridge to Christminster - this book explains it all.

When St Augustine preached from old St Pancras Church, the Angles had already been identified as angels in their chains, with golden hair and milk white skin… The pale kings and princes too stalk this marvelous place… All England stretched out on a once rural hillock…  Here lay Bristol’s Marvelous Boy, Chatterton, leaping out of a sarcophagus months before expiring in that lonely attic in Brooke’s Market, Holborn, a small blue vial and a fragment of forged Saxon verse falling from his 17 year old hand…   Here reigns, in his Portland stone telephone box, Sir John Soane, dreaming of a London in ruins, the ragged manacled gates of Newgate opened at last… Blake and Fuseli chatting to Augustine’s angels and Charles Dickens summoning up the marsh gas as it rises above the image of a man with a spade…

Iphgenia Baal has created a spectacular panorama, a thrilling breath of fresh air, crackling with life, as well crafted as a Flaxman bas-relief, even if it is about the lives of the dead…

Read Delisia Howard and Chris Price’s regular column in the print edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick.

Links:
Iphgenia Baal: iphgeniabaal.wordpress.com/
Trolley Books: trolleybooks.com

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Four track EP: Until You Come Calling/Your Reasons Have Escaped Me/The Longing/Change Your Story
Revtone Records
Available from iTunes

By Guy Sangster Adams

Ben Clarke’s debut solo EP is an absolute pleasure. Its sunlit, ethereally melodic pastoralism interwoven with the irrepressibility of urbanist swagger and momentum is equally evocative of the sheer breadth of experience, inspiration, and excitement of Clarke’s progression over the last six years from, as the title has it, Field to City.

After growing up surrounded by endless fields and infinite skies deep in the countryside of England’s second largest county, Lincolnshire (a particularly rural county in which the land is predominantly given over to agricultural use), in 2005 aged just 17 - having left school at 16 to pursue a musical career - Clarke co-founded the band, Littl’ans, with Andrew Aveling.

Within months of forming they were not only the main support act on Babyshambles’ sold out tour, but had also released their debut single, Their Way, featuring Pete Doherty. The single reached number 2 in the UK Indie charts, and by the end of the year Littl’ans were headlining their own Club NME tour. The following year they collaborated with French fashion designer, Hedi Slimane, to provide the soundtrack for the Dior Homme Spring/Summer 2007 catwalk show. Their debut album, Primitive World, which had been recorded in New York, was released in 2008 and their tour dates took them around the world, and included playing 2009’s South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, USA. But late in 2009 Clarke left the band to concentrate on his own material.

Ben Clarke photographed by Sarah Thompson ((Gig Junkie: gigjunkie.co.uk)

The first released fruits of which are the four tracks on Field to City, which were once again recorded in New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly as Clarke was the drummer in Littl’ans, the rhythm section is very much to the fore in each of the tracks which, as alluded to above, creates a fantastically charged upbeat inner city rock contrasting to great effect with the more bucolic or folky elements of the mix. This brings a welcome suggestion of both The Kinks and Love. Indeed, Clarke’s vocals and harmonies which by turns are wistfully reflective or soaring to meet the swallows flying high above, have shades of Ray Davies and Arthur Lee, and throughout Field to City there is, carried in the light summer breeze across from Lincolnshire’s neighbouring county, Cambridgeshire, a note of Syd Barrett.

In addition to singing all the vocals and backing vocals on the EP, Clarke also proves himself to be a talented multi-instrumentalist, playing not only the drums on all the tracks but also the rhythm guitar, tambourine, and cabasa. Whilst Ian Everall from The Albertans plays bass guitar on all the tracks, Federico Zinelli lead guitar, and David Brandwein, who was also the record’s recording engineer, plays an extraordinary sounding 1960s Haggstrom Futurama guitar on the EP’s closing, and far heavier sounding track, Change Your Story. The particularity of the guitar sound was added to, as Clarke recounts, by Brandwein, “putting it through an old battered 15 watt Fender amplifier”.

Ben Clarke playing at the Plectrum Live Editon: Brit Bitz December 2010, photographed by Emma Jane Clarke

For me, all of the elements come together most strongly on the second track, Your Reasons Have Escaped Me, which though implicitly of the now, would sit wonderfully well as a contemporary reworking of Forever Changes period Love, but that is not to take away from the other three tracks on Field to City. Taken as a joyous whole it is the richest colours even on the greyest day, a captivating smile from a passer-by which melts the concrete and steel of a city street and uplifts even the most jaded soul.

Links
Ben Clarke:
Field to City EP on iTunes

Ben Clarke Myspace

Ben Clarke Facebook

Ben Clarke Twitter

Sarah Thompson/Gig Junkie

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FURTHER READING
Music reviews in the webzine edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick:

Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK) - The Wolfmen/ The Corridor - Youri Blow/ One Born Every Minute - Roses Kings Castles/ War is Noise - Jaakko & Jay / Beachcomber’s Windowsill - Stornoway/ Sisterworld - Liars/ Nintendo EP & Love Is Not Rescue - Chris T-T/ Sometime Around Midnight - The Airborne Toxic Event/ Jackie, Is It My Birthday? - The Wolfmen feat. Sinéad O’Connor / Poetry of the Deed -  Frank Turner/ The Cost of Living - The Tunics/ Reasons Not To Be An Idiot - Frank Turner/  Singles - The Long Blondes/ Echo & The Bunnymen at the Roundhouse, London, 15th October 2009

With an introduction by David Lynch and an afterword by Geoff Cox
(Jonathan Cape) £25.00

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

‘The one that scares you is Donnie,’ is the smudged, handwritten annotation on the deckle edge mount of the fading photograph of three boys, of different ages, perhaps brothers, playing on the swings in the yard of a weather-boarded, municipal looking building. From the clothes and the hairstyles it is probably the 1950s, though it might be ten, or even 20 years earlier. The youngest of the trio wears a grotesque mask which makes his head look out of proportion to his body. As do the handmade, decorated, grocery bag masks, with cut out eye- and mouth holes, over the heads of five little girls, photographed against the white weather-boarded side of a school or church or court house, wearing their best dresses and shoes, the stockings of each wrinkled at the knee. Maybe it’s these juxtapositions and the allusion to executioners’ hoods, belied or perhaps reinforced by their homemade-ness, but to appropriate the opening line of this paragraph, it is these butter wouldn’t melt girls of the scaffold that scare me.

All manner of costumes are here, from the expected witches and their black cat familiars, ghosts and skeletons, to pierrots, policemen, and a woman with dress intriguingly decorated with spoons and the legend, ‘won’t you come spoon with me’ emblazoned on her chest, all made gruesome with the addition of a mask.

Photograph from Haunted Air by Ossian Brown (Jonathan Cape)

Like the contradictory emotions of autumn leaves that bring fun and satisfaction when walked or run through, but also sadness that after a blaze of glory they are detached from the tree that bore, often to be thrown into the blaze of a bonfire, leafing through the pages of Haunted Air brings a mixture of fun, fascination, and melancholy. As Geoff Cox recounts in his afterword, the photographs in Ossian Brown’s collection were “torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.” These costumed portrayers  of lost souls are now lost themselves, the hands that took the photographs now as anonymous as the subjects, detached from the family trees that bore them. But in this beautifully designed, cloth bound book, Ossian Brown has restored them to an album that not only celebrates these celebrants, but also provides an invaluable record of cultural traditions and photographic history.

Links

Jonathan Cape is an imprint of The Random House Group Ltd: www.randomhouse.co.uk

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Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK) (Radio Edit)
b/w
Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK)
Is That Earth Down There?
(Howl Records)
To be released 29th November 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

Loaded with the danger, excitement, edge of a precipice moment of a jet plane in run-up at the airport that now bears JFK’s name, the melody of the verses swirling concentrically with Chris Constantinou’s seraphic higher register vocals  irresistibly draw one into the charged expectancy of take-off. When that moment arrives, with each chorus, it doesn’t disappoint. Marco Pirroni is in blistering form with combustible riffs that go beyond mere take-off into vertical lift-off heading super stellar, that leaves one breathless and never wanting to descend, hoping and relying on Preston Heyman’s infectious beat to keep the blood pumping at the speed one needs it, whilst Constantinou roughs up his earlier celestial choirboy with a suitably rockin’ rasp.

With some Suffragette City returned with love and panache, this is a pop art gem of beauty and tragedy, seen through Roy Lichenstein and Andy Warhol lenses, adroitly and lovingly mixed and polished by a Dandy Warhol, in the form of Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK) is a real blam blam!

The video for Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK) will receive its premiere screening at the Plectrum Live Edition: A Night at the Rockabilly Revuebar on 27th October 2010 at The Horse Hospital, London WC1. Videos for previous singles by The Wolfmen will also be screened. For more details click here.

To read the Plectrum - The Cultural Pick Review of The Wolfmen’s Jackie, Is it my Birthday? Click here

To watch Guy Sangster Adams, editor  of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick talking to The Wolfmen’s Marco Pirroni and Chris Constantinou go to the Plectrum Broadcast Player by clicking here.

Links

The Wolfmen: thewolfmen.net
www.facebook.com/The-Wolfmen

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Wild House Blues Records
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Water is key to Youri Blow’s highly atmospheric second album. En route from its source in Dijon to Le Havre where it meets the English Channel/La Manche, the river Seine flows through Troyes in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France, where Blow was born. Now his home is the port of Brest, which lies in the Finistère département in the extreme west of Brittany, amidst the dramatic landscape of the Rade de Brest, into which five rivers flow and which opens onto the Atlantic Ocean, the waves of which crash spectacularly along Finistère’s wild and rocky coastline. Whilst on the other side of the Atlantic, the area between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, The Mississippi Delta, and the Delta Blues that originated there, were a formative influence on Blow.

Though this influence is very apparent on the rasping vocals and rougher edged sound of the tracks Muddy Streams and Strange History, the album is a confluence of influences informed by Blow’s travels, gathered under a genre tag of Psyché Blues. The beautiful Ever Love, with backing vocals by Lucie T., fittingly as it is the album opener and therefore stepping off point for the journey, is rooted in his current home. It has a Celtic heart, Brittany being one of the six Celtic nations, and softer melodies and vocal styling more reminiscent of Nick Drake and John Martyn. Whilst Autour du Templier, titularly at least, pays reference to the Order of the Knights Templer that was officially recognised in Blow’s birthplace at the Council of Troyes in the 12th century.

But over and above this The Corridor is also inspired by Blow’s expedition to far further and more isolated shores, namely the phenomenal land- and waterscapes of Lake Khövsgöl in the north west of Mongolia. He spent two months in Mongolia, travelling with a back pack and a guitar, a large part of which was spent living in a tipi by the lake with members of the Shamanistic Tsaatan reindeer herdsmen, whose social and material culture  has remained unchanged since the Ice Age. Understandably his time in Mongolia had a profound effect on Blow, specifically inspiring three tracks on the album, Khovsgol Lake, Tsagaan Sar (which is the Mongolian lunisolar New Year festival), and Ulan Taïga (a mountain range in Khövsgöl).

Blow’s talent is to meld all the power and diversity of all these dynamic and elemental horizons into an album that works wonderfully well holistically. A multi-instrumentalist, throughout The Corridor he plays a variety of guitars, acoustic, Dobro, and electric Fender Stratocaster, whilst also mixing in violin, and instruments from his travels such as a Mongolian fiddle, Peruvian flute, and Vietnamese jaw harp, to which he also adds overtone singing, a polyphonic style traditional in Mongolia.

The Corridor is an highly enjoyable sonic travelogue, through vistas both real and imaginary, an evocation of the broadest horizons, and as the closing track, L’Eveil de la goutte d’eau, recognises, if you let it, the rhythm of rain drops can transport you wherever a river of imagination may take you.

Links:

Youri Blow

www.youri-blow.com

www.myspace.com/youriblow

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(Prestel) £19.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Throughout the pages of Horst A. Friedrichs’ photographic exploration of the Rocker subculture in the first decade of the new century, there are some wonderfully evocative juxtapositions created by the images on facing pages. One of which that particularly stands out for me is the pairing of the photographs of Kenneth, taken at The Pavilion in 2009, and Sammi at Rhythm Riot, the annual 1950s music, dancing and vintage lifestyle weekender at Pontin’s Holiday Camp at Camber Sands, also in 2009. Kenneth has a Marlboro Man look about him, his face weather-beaten and etched with the lines of many miles in the saddle, though his steeds have been two-wheeled and resonantly British marques - Royal Enfield, BSA, Norton, Triumph, and the hybrid Triton. His hair though grey and thining, is still quiffed, his sideburns long. From his lips hangs not a mass produced cigarette but a roll-up, over the fraying collar of his faded denim jacket. Rendered in grainy halftone, his portrait contrasts strikingly with the high colour, glossy image of Sammi. She is a beautiful pin-up girl with an edge, very much in the manner of an Angelique Houtkamp heroine. Everything about her is flawless and immaculate, from her curled under Bettie Page bangs, pencilled eyebrows, long, long eyelashes, and red, red lips, to her high waisted indigo denims, and short sleeved black and white striped top, showing off her Houtkamp-style tattoos.

Sammi at Rhythm Riot ©Horst A. Friedrichs

The juxtaposition is both aesthetically striking and also encapsulates the strands that run through Or Glory. Though Friedrichs took all the photographs between 2001 and 2010, in the faces, the places, the clothes, and the motorcycles (to say nothing of the music that you’ll swear you can hear as you turn the pages), is the progression of a subculture from the Ton-Up Boys of the 1950s, to the Rockers of the 1960s, which then proliferated via a myriad of black leather rebel stances through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and now in the 2000s, as Friedrichs documents, crosses over with the wide breadth of the Rockin’, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s Vintage Lifestyle, Kustom Kulture, and Burlesque, scenes, and more besides. But be they 59 club veterans, or new converts from around the world, at the core of the Rocker subculture remain the British motorcyles, the ‘A’ road landmarks of the Ace Café (lovingly restored by Mark Willsmore, who is interviewed in the book) and Jack’s Hill Café, and the Lewis Leathers jackets, which from studded, painted, bedecked in badges, and battle worn through to pristine, the pages Or Glory inherently portray 60 years of history of this iconic 118 year old British company, the owner of which, Derek Harris, is also interviewed in the book. Or Glory presents a multi-layered visual narrative that is as fascinating as it is stunning to look at.

READ THE ICONIC HISTORY OF LEWIS LEATHERS IN ISSUE  2  OF THE PRINT EDITION OF PLECTRUM - THE CULTURAL PICK. FOR MORE DETAILS AND/OR TO BUY A COPY CLICK HERE

Links
Horst A. Friedrichs:  www.horstfriedrichs.com
Prestel:  www.randomhouse.de/prestel_eng/

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Mr Bongo Films
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

One year shy of half a century since its original release, Jacques Demy’s first feature film remains an enchanting cinematic experience. Starring the exquisite Anouk Aimée as the eponymous heroine, Demy dedicated the film to Max Ophüls, in whose last film, Les Amants de Montparnasse (1958), Aimée had also starred, and which is also dedicated to Ophüls as he died whilst it was being filmed. Though Lola also references Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, in which Marlene Dietrich plays Lola Lola, a singer at the titular cabaret. In Demy’s film, Lola is the name under which Anouk’s character, Cécile, performs, primarily to audiences of sailors, in a cabaret in the French Atlantic coast city of Nantes. In a stylistic reference to Dietrich’s character, Anouk’s Lola at times crowns the corset she performs in with a top hat.

Separate from her cabaret persona, Cécile is a single mother who yearns for the return of her first love, Michel (Jacques Harden), who she first met when she was fourteen and who is also the father of her son, but who left her just before she gave birth, promising to return when he had made his fortune. Demy explores his theme of first love and love lost, love requited and unrequited, and the element of chance that is present in love stories, interweaving the characters of Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), whose chance meeting with Cécile, with whom he was close when they were teenagers, reignites his sense of purpose and also his love at first sight for her, Frankie (Alan Scott), an American sailor, and Cécile Desnoyers (Annie Dupéroux).

Anouk’s Cécile shares her bed with Frankie because in his uniform he reminds her of the first time she met Michel, who was also a sailor, at the fairground in the city. When the paths of Dupéroux’s Cécile and Frankie cross, and they two go to the fairground, it carries a wonderful timelessness, as though this could be a flash back of Cécile and Michel, the present moment with Cécile Dupéroux and Frankie, or a flash forward to the ‘first love’ that the burgeoning romantic Cécile Dupéroux is on the cusp of meeting. Wistful timelessness is key to the film as a whole and is part of the fantasy world that Demy created in his films, drawing inspiration from fairytales and musicals.

Music is also key to the film, from the opening frames of the film with the intentional old style Hollywood glamour of Michel’s return to Nantes in white Cadillac, white suit, and white Stetson juxtaposed with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, to the original music and songs composed for the film by Demy’s  lifelong collaborator, Michel Legrand.

But in honouring the beauty of this film one must also credit its superlative and legendary cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. Whose work two years earlier on the first film of another Nouvelle Vague director, Jean Luc-Godard’s À bout de souffle, was both ground breaking and has proved enduringly influential. Just as Paris became another character in Coutard and Godard’s first collaboration, Nantes and the French Atlantic coast of Demy’s childhood, become an entrancingly well observed ‘character’ in  Lola. Not least the fluted columns, openwork balustrades, and cherubs of the Passage Pommeraye, a shopping arcade built in the 1840s.

At the end of Lola, three of the characters are on their way to Cherbourg, and one, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) would reappear in Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), which became the middle film of an informal ‘romantic trilogy’ which began with Lola and concluded with Les demoiselles de Rochefort in 1967.

Links
Mr Bongo: www.mrbongo.com

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Mr Bongo Films
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

Casanova ‘70 is a notable entry in the lineage of Commedia all’italiana, or Italian-style comedy, the genre which its director, Mario Monicelli, initiated with his film, Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), and which draws its name from Pietro Germi’s film, Divorce Italian Style (1961). The iconic, and always wonderfully watch-able, Marcello Mastroianni, starred in the latter, as he does in Casanova ‘70, which was produced by another heavy hitter of Italian cinema, Carlo Ponti.

Mastroianni plays Major Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, an Italian officer on secondment to NATO, and the film follows his picaresque and increasingly desperate attempts to triumph over his idiosyncratic libido that renders him impotent with women unless his life is in danger. Adventures which lead him from Paris to the Swiss Alps, and along the length of Italy, from the cage of a lion tamer, to posing as doctor to verify the virginity, for which read seducing, of a Sicilian bride to be, with her family just the other side of the door, to climbing into ever higher bedroom windows, culminating in his being tried for the murder of the jealous husband of one of his potential conquests. Conquests who all gather in the court and who are played by a fabulous line-up of Italian actresses including Virna Lisi, Marisa Mell, Michèle Mercier, and Liana Orfei.

The film, which was released in 1965 and earned a nomination for the following year’s Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay, is very much of its time, and all the more enjoyable for that; super stylish and super fun.

Links
Mr Bongo Films: www.mrbongo.com

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(Serpent’s Tail) £14.99

Reviewed 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

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