LIVE: LOVE WITH ARTHUR LEE, LEEDS, 2004

‘HE SPOKE OF

LOVE’S SWEETER DAYS…’

Gig Review of:

LOVE WITH ARTHUR LEE

at ‘The City Varieties’, Leeds

‘This show is going to be dope. You know what I’m saying?’ announces Arthur Lee. Well no, not exactly. But then, of course, this is not exactly Love. Not the same Love that began recording ‘Da Capo’ on 27th September 1966. Nor the Love that recorded ‘Forever Changes’ on a budget of just $2,257. In fact it’s LA band Baby Lemonade, who have almost served as a Love tribute-band since early 1998, their dexterity and precision supernaturally honed to an eerie magic in replicating those antique time-lost select-Electra grooves. But then again, the tall lanky guy with the bandana round his head, his black hat and dark shades, cream shirt hung loose outside his grey pants, is Arthur Lee – the only credible survivor of the psychedelic era. The guiding intelligence and deranged genius behind those albums, the guy who inked quotable lyrics about ‘the news for today is the movies for tomorrow’ – and they are, they are, or anthemic slogans urging ‘write the rules in the sky, ask your leaders why’, which still need saying today. And Love was always a fluid concept anyway. Names like ‘Snoopy’ Pfisterer, Johnny Echols, Bryan MacLean, then Jay Donnellan and Frank Fayad drifting in and out. Yet as soon as he opens “Live And Let Live” with ‘the snot has caked against my pants, it has turned into crystal’, arching from low acoustic strum to violent electric scream, all doubts dissolve like a sugar-cube on the tongue. The hauntingly surreal “Alone Again Or” follows, then “Seven And Seven Is” with its full-tilt crackling acid colours flickering, so tightly compressed that it’s warping and buckling time-space, updrafting towards that explosive count-down, only to emerge back out the other side, into stillness again. Next, the complex collage that is “Your Mind And We Belong Together”, then “Signed DC” – an explicit drug-song with its cellular ache still intact, all following in its immaculate dayglo train. You could say, whatever line-up Arthur Lee happens to be fronting becomes, by definition, Love. Even though this Arthur is separated from that original oddball visionary Arthur Lee by long wilderness decades of narcotic craziness, and even a five-and-a-half year prison-spell on .44 Magnum firearms charges. But hey, we’re all different people too. That past is gone forever. And – like Brian Wilson recreating ‘Pet Sounds’ or ‘Smile’ on stage in 2004, this is something we’ve never seen before. The original Love never toured outside California. It occurs to me – a thought, in my head, I think – that just possibly those original acid-pilots would have been nowhere near as good as this one either, too stoned all-over-the-place ego-driven and problematic to pick out all the little intricacies and inflections you pick up on here tonight. This is the Love that played last year’s Glastonbury, did the Jools Holland ‘Later’, and have a live CD of much of the music they played tonight. I delayed a long time. This, after all, is a band I’ve loved since Arthur was 22, and I was 18. How could it possibly live up to all that? How could this deliver on all those power-to-amaze expectations? But this Love delivers. A brilliant night, no dope, you know what I’m saying…?

Song-by-song it goes like this, all from

‘Forever Changes’ (recorded from 11th August 1967 on)

except where specified:

“Live And Let Live” Mike, guitarist with white dreads and a big white Gibson unspools the solo as Arthur finger-snipes gun-shots at the audience, close proximity only emphasising its strangeness, an everlasting first

“Alone Again Or” Arthur plays crystalline white guitar break, no Tijuana horns, but still hauntingly surreal… covered by others as diverse as the Damned and UFO, yet this remains the definitive take

“Andmoreagain” Wistful whimsy, the first album had a track called “And More”, this is the sequel, now a guitarist with check tie, glasses and a big red Rickenbacker shivers and ripples out all those precise nuances

“Bummer In The Summer” Garage Folk-Rock, with Arthur dropping into a frenzied knee-crouch for the charged riff-rhythmic Bo Diddley middle-eight bridge sequence

“Old Man” Originally a Bryan Maclean song and vocal (he died of a heart-attack 25th December 1998), so Arthur uses a music-stand to read the evocatively mystic lyrics

“Orange Skies” (from ‘Da Capo’) Arthur’s shimmering red maracas punctuate its acid-baked fluidity, you wonder where such ectoplasmic other-world sound-images come from, and to reside in what sort of mind?

“A House Is Not A Motel” Dazed guitars and blood-soaked imagery, Arthur punches out the ‘you can call my name’ with white tambourine, Mike’s solo is piercingly expressive

“Signed DC” (from ‘Love’) A drug-song that still hurts, an incorrigibly strange epistle of explicit addiction, losing elements of its acoustic fragility live, but compensating with Arthur’s razor-edged wailing harmonica. The ‘DC’ is usually taken to refer to early-Love drummer Don Conka, but an elsewhere Arthurly quote credits the ‘District of Columbia’

“My Flash On You” (from ‘Love’) A molten, Byrds/Stones energy-blast that’s sharp and acid-punk short

“Your Mind And We Belong Together” (1968 single, now part of the expanded ‘Forever Changes’) It took 44 takes to perfect this single, tonight it’s full time-change jump-cut collage and harmonies are recreated in 3:30 minutes of compressed liquidity

“The Red Telephone” A skewed stand-out in a set of stand-outs, acting out the ‘I don’t know if the 3rd or the 4th or if the 5th is to fix’ line with a hypodermic mime, lifting his shades for the ‘look in my eyes’ lines, inhabiting an exultation close to fear, from moribund despair and social paranoia to surreal ecstasy – this, remember, comes from the time of nightly-TV Vietnam-atrocity with nuclear annihilation a button-push away, as the chanted ‘they’re locking them up today’ refrain delivers its appropriately dark menace

“Message To Pretty” (from ‘Love’) ‘As unprofessional as this might seem – wrong song’ he comments, sounds right to me, volume, flaring colour, movement, catching light and electric sparks...

“Rainbow In The Storm” (new song) ‘This may not be special to you, but it’s special to me, after all the shit I’ve been through’ he comments, and it has all the familiar Lee mannerisms, even opening with the ‘Alone Again Or’ “yeah”, into lyrics that run ‘does it matter that you are born, do you have to be right or wrong...?’ ‘Rainbow In The Storm’ is also the title of Arthur’s projected autobiography

“Seven And Seven Is” (from ‘Da Capo’) The closest Love ever got to a US hit single, as Electra 45605 it peaked on ‘Billboard’ at no.33 – 10th Sept 1966, later collected onto Lenny Kaye’s vital ‘Nuggets’ box-set where it resides alongside Electric Prunes, Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watch Band gems

“You Set The Scene” ‘At my request, I ask for nothing’. Another set stand-out
“Singing Cowboy” (from the disappointing new line-up 1969 ‘Love: Four Sail’) Full late-vision ‘unedited version’ elongating into an extended ‘coming after you’ call-and-response, allowing band-member solos and introductions, until ‘have you enjoyed tonight?’ spake the spontaneous good-humour-man ‘I’ve enjoyed tonight’, then he go slip-slip away…

“Maybe The People Would Be The Times, Or Between Clark And Hilldale” Back in black-shirt, Jazz-slippery, dropped-lyrics, saved for the encore… worth the wait

Published in:
‘SONGBOOK no.3 (Spring)’ (UK – May 2004)
Full version featured on the website:
www.song-book.co.uk/extra (UK – May 2004)

BOOK REVIEW: 'ARTHUR LEE & THE BOOK OF LOVE'

"FOREVER CHANGES:

ARTHUR LEE &

THE BOOK OF LOVE"

by JOHN EINARSON

(JAWBONE)

ISBN 978-1-906002-31-2

Softcover. 334 pages

www.jawbonepress.com

The first three Love albums stand up there with the greatest trilogy of the Rock era. Their debut gifts the Byrds folk-rock template a hard garage-band edge, ‘Da Capo’ adds restless experimentalism, taking the group into the lush lyricism of ‘Forever Changes’. When, after his long decades of darkness, Arthur Lee played live at Leeds’ City Varieties, he confided he was working on his memoirs. That he died before they were completed is generously ameliorated by John Einarson’s access to the manuscript-in-progess, drawing italicised fragments into this first fully authorised biog. Young Arthur ‘picked up on music faster than an ape can peel a banana.’ Born Arthur Porter Taylor in Memphis, he became Lee through his LA stepfather. Of mixed-race heritage, ‘too light-skinned to be black and too dark-skinned to be white’, he was indulged as a kid, and something of the schoolyard bully. He met Johnny Echols at school where they formed LAG, the LA-group in the same way that Booker T’s band was the Memphis Group, and they cut a debut single – ‘The Ninth Wave’, at Phil Spector’s Gold Star studio, for Capitol, Nat ‘King’ Cole’s label. Then the owner of Revis Records brought in a young guitarist on a Little Richard tour stop-over to play on Rosa Lee Brooks’ sessions for Arthur’s song ‘My Diary’ in 1964. Although the single was a regional hit for which he ‘never received a penny’, the session was a useful connection to James Marshal Hendrix, a ‘false start’ on their way to ‘the everlasting first’. It’s tempting to ramble such intriguing detail. There’s plenty here. About why Love’s unwillingness to tour stalled their career. About the subsequent lesser line-ups. Then Lee’s personal crash. Until his wonderful renaissance probably saw his back-catalogue played live with greater fidelity than the classic personnel could ever have mustered. It was a privilege to be there. This wonderful book captures it all, chord on chord.

LIVE: SWEET BLITZ UNITY HALL, WAKEFIELD, 1981

‘SWEET BLITZ UNITY HALL...!’

Sweet & The Steve Lynton Band

Live at the Wakefield ‘Unity Hall’

11th March 1981

Love Is Like Oxygen. You get too much it makes you high. Get too little you wanna die. A lyric as perfectly shaped as a haiku. Playing around inside my head. The stage blackness strangely focuses the mind, ghosted by spectral roadies fenced in by barriers of paint-peeling amps and curly-wire flex-connections. Sweet are due to emerge from that blackness, that cross-stage chiaroscuro of shadows, that murkily infested zone of half-shapes and furtive imaginings. Sweet, even their sugar-rush name tastes crazy after all these years. Seems like an eternity of nothingness has elapsed since that name was on high-rotation radio, on people’s lips, in the press. An imageless void haunted by squirming rumours, laid over somewhat battered memories of the Chinn+Chapman seventies, Glitter-Pop posturing and the intense immolation of tacky stardom. Should I even be here? How can they possibly measure up? Now, in the hard cold relentless striplight glare of the eighties, washed up in the outer reaches of Yorkshire on the revamp-circuit that so recently infused a degree of credibility into those other walking wounded’s – Slade and Gary Glitter.

W-H-A-A-A-M!!! A sudden light-deluge synched exactly to smoke-bomb ignition and a wall of “Ballroom Blitz” volume that simultaneously rapes eardrum and eyeball. As tight a theatricality, as brash a sense of attack, and as forcefully aggressive a presence as anything this side of ‘Hill Street Blues’. It momentarily dismantles your lurking doubts brick-by-brick, assails and lays waste to your critical logics and critiques in a breathlessly euphoric assault of pure ‘Sound & Vision’. Sure the teen fan-mag back-issues flicker like an insistent strobe in the cobwebbed inner recesses of your head throughout the set, but that’s an additive, and by no means the only commodity on offer. Check the faces. ‘Are you ready, Steve? Aha. Andy? Yeah! Mick? OK. Alright, fellas, let's go!’ Andy Scott on guitar. Steve Priest on bass, with no flirty make-up. No Brian Connolly either (‘you better beware if you got long blonde hair’). Brian quit around May 1979 when his life-style issues turned bad. And in truth, they need his Pop edge. But there’s still Mick Tucker on daunting double-Ludwig drum-kit, monolithically high and chrome-gleaming, demanding seven mikes and a full four-kilowatt p.a. of its own. Plus Gary Moberley co-opted for keyboard chores and spiralling synths (lead-in to “Fox On The Run”), and second-guitarist Ray McRiner. They’re tight and fast. Scott and Priest trading a mike for lead vocals, and then the full three-piece front-line zoning in on exact harmonies, with little loss of momentum as they blend the new with an uneven hotchpotch of the old.

These guys – or at least a fair percentage of them, formed the blueprint for the first five-year plan of the previous decade, through which controlling-svengalis Mike Chapman & Nicky Chinn designed their aural cash register. For the first half of the seventies the writing-production duo formed what Howard & Blaikley had been for the sixties (Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, the Honeycombs and The Herd), and what Stock Aitken Waterman would be for the eighties, and they used the untested Sweet as a dry-run for their emerging Pop empire (Suzy Quatro, Mud, Smokie, Racey). Shunting backwards into the charts as early as March 1971 with a flimsy lightweight “Funny Funny” and other awkward bubblepop prototypes designed to test the water. Who now remembers “Alexander Graham Bell”? Then a solid grounding in nudge-nudge novelty hits – “Little Willy” and “Wigwam Bam”. How dare they, how very dare they? You want funny clothes? puerile pubescent double-entendré? lurid drag? you got them with a vengeance. Until the squeaky-clean hit machine up-gears into overdrive with the power-Pop Glam of “Blockbuster”, opening with a siren-wail that gets it restricted-airtime on Radio 1’s Tony Blackburn or Dave Lee Travis shows due to its habit of setting off panic-alerts when played over factory pa’s. Followed into the Top Three by full-on “Hellraiser”, “Ballroom Blitz” and “Teenage Rampage”, their percussive aggression modelled on the Who, their appeal tempered by Brian’s prettiness. If David Bowie made androgyny dangerously subversive, Sweet on ‘Top Of The Pops’ gave it Pantomime camp with vamping sequins and fluttering eyelashes. The ‘Pure Pop For Then-People’ didn’t stop until ChinniChap quit for America with visions of dollar signs, with Knack and Blondie adhered to their retina. By which time Sweet had outgrown their limitations anyway and were striving to write and produce their own sides, seeking credibility. Come the Punk freeze-out of 1976, England forgot, and Sweet were also exiled to tread exclusively on American stage-boards where audiences knew little about the band and didn’t prejudge them on their baby-steps hits. Sweet were rewarded by three massive highly-regarded American hits, “Fox On The Run”, “Action” (‘I was suicidal ‘cos you was my idol’) – which would later be reactivated by Def Leppard, and the aforementioned “Love Is Like Oxygen” which arrived with a complete Prog-Rock extended twelve-inch version. Such late-career vindication must have been very… er, sweet.

Here and now they attract a curious motley of tribal identities drawn from those who first hit adolescence when “Co-Co” first hit ‘Top Of The Pops’. Plus those confused and cut adrift by post-Punk Industrial-bleakness, alienated by the self-idolatry of New Romance, and abandoned by the Pop-wise ‘U’-turns of Antmusic (‘even when you’re mindless / and your braincell count is low / Antmusic gives illusions / that you got some place to go’). They watch bemused as support act – the Steve Lynton Band, go through sub-Hendrix guitar visuals, but find real comfort in the clean harmonies and clean nostalgia of Sweet, remembrance of times when choices and allegiances were simpler. But Sweet have cut the camp and the rabble-rousing, they’re now more ‘Level Headed’. Musically they’re better than either Glitter or Slade. The sound-mix is contemporary with a bass-heavy foundation, Tucker’s percussive arsenal achieving more aural GBH than any other two drummers on raised drum podiums I can think of. They trade on their past, sure, they’d be daft to do otherwise, but they’re not drowned by it. Whether their audience is as equally able to grow is another matter entirely. But to anyone still tuned to the glorious absurdity of Rock, how sweet it would be!

Sweet performed their last live show soon after this appearance in Wakefield, at Glasgow University on 20 March 1981, before breaking up. There would be subsequent partial re-unions with different line-ups, but this was essentially the end of the original Sweet story-arc.

'Primal Leaks: For Julian Assange'

PRIMAL LEAKS

FOR JULIAN ASSANGE

‘as to the evil which results from a censorship,

it is impossible to measure it, for it is

impossible to tell where it ends…’

– Jeremy Bentham

at 14:55 Johannes Gutenberg goes online
with the first PDF, portable document format folio
in individually cast icons of lead, tin & antimony
transmitting explosively subversive technology that
will snatch control from monarchs, popes & emperors
from the exclusive hands of priestly cabals
who exercise power through incomprehensible
incantations of contradiction & hypocrisies by
disseminating information through print-viral replication
inconvenient truths accessed cheaply for the first time
democratising radical opinion fit to transform worlds
blowing apart old hegemonies forever
in codes without borders, beyond censors
leading to wars, revolutions & modern science,
it’s not Gutenberg’s intention to uptilt authority
he doesn’t anticipate the Reformation
can’t envisage the shock of modern science
or the rise of new dissident classes and agendas
not he, nor anyone else at the time, ever dreams
just how profound the new media will impact
he just moves type, that’s all
yet unleashes everything, a database of
more books published in 50 years from
multiple servers than in a previous 1000,
paradigms shift & will not be unshifted
what’s invented will not to be uninvented,
new lines will not be undrawn
new accommodations will be made…

Captain Beefheart At The 'Unity Hall', Wakefield

THE CONTAGIOUS

CORRUPTIONS

OF

DON VAN VLIET

(CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AT

‘UNITY HALL’, WAKEFIELD)

Event Inputs: 16th November 1980

The Captain drinks Perrier water
during savage copulations of the moon
inspires horizontal illogics that slither
feral in conceptual proliferation.
He farts in ‘B’ to the sound of
falling piano’s, fractured public image of
spasmic-vomiting honks, and howling wolf
lunar-light fucks, vowels furtive,
slinking razor-cuts fearing immolation
of blood, until teeth ache with amplification pulse,
and Pentax-lenses claw detail-precision cuts,
slicing noise into neat permanences.
Such rationalisation is obscene.
Moondog bassman hair bubbles in
cartoon thoughts of huge exclamation marks,
a maze of Assyrian equations, a tangle
of limbs in dark sequential frames,
a jugular discord sucking in the circular
terror of drowning in exhalations
of Perrier moisture. Spurt by spurt.
The Captain hurtles at impact,
comes through splintered
but idiot-dribbling wise…


Don Van Vliet (15th January 1941 – 17 December 2010) doesn’t much like Punk. At least, not this night he doesn’t. Throughout the performance he snipes barbed scorn at what was then-happening in music. Which is disappointing, in a way. You’d imagine he’d recognise a certain congruence of strategy between what he was doing, and at least the provocative mischief that lay at the roots of Punk. Particularly as ‘Doc At The Radar Station’ – the album he was promoting, is his most raw and abrasive in a while, with stunning onstage attacks of “Run Paint Run Run”, “A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To A Diamond” and “Making Love To A Vampire With A Monkey On My Knee”. But ‘hippie music’ was suddenly uncool, and the tour was poorly attended as a result, which is probably more what his vile bile is about. The guitarist mentioned is long-term Magic Bander Jeff Moris Tepper. Beefheart wears voluminous white pants with immense baggy pockets crammed lumpily with mysterious artefacts. From the depths of his pockets he produces felt-tips, and sketches surreal cartoons which he passes out to people in the audience… unfortunately, I’m not swift enough to snatch one. Damn! It would’ve made legendary cover-art for my ‘zine…!

Published in:
‘STOMP’ (UK – January 1984)
‘MINOTAUR No.21’ (USA – July 1990)

Robert Silverberg 'Across A Billion Years' review

THE SEARCH FOR

‘THE HIGH ONES’

Retro Book Review of:

‘ACROSS A BILLION YEARS’

by ROBERT SILVERBERG

(Victor Gollancz, 1977. Magnum

Paperback edition, 1979 – ISBN: 0-417-03150-5)

Robert Silverberg wears many faces. Because the one he wears for ‘Across A Billion Years’ is playful doesn’t mean this book’s not a serious contender. Where it gives the impression of being produced quickly, enjoyably, with little revision or polishing, it’s inventive energy is formidable, it’s use of language is often hugely entertaining, and the ideas it throws away in passing are sufficient to keep lesser writers in novels for years to come. Even when he’s operating on cruise-mode, Robert Silverberg can still be startling. His High Ones are not exactly a new concept in the SF multiverse. Ever since fantasists first devised expeditions to Mars there have been extraterrestrial archaeologists excavating the lost cities of extinct alien civilisations. Then there’s the teasing evidence of ancient visits left by extra-solar races, such as Frederick Pohl’s luminous Heechee tales initiated by the discovery of incomprehensible star-sourced artefacts found within the swirling superheat of Venus. Alien meddling in antiquity is also an idea integral to the ‘Stargate’ TV-franchise, or the mysterious ‘Shadows’ of ‘Babylon Five’. Inevitably, Silverberg adds new aspects and angles to this continuum, researching back ten-million centuries into ‘a past so distant we could barely comprehend its remoteness’.

Set in 2375, the novel is conversationally related by archaeologist Tom Rice into a message cube intended for twin-sister Lorie back on Earth. Although paralysed and permanently confined to a hospital bed, she is telepathically hooked into the galactic network of telepaths that provides the only instantaneous communication grid between star systems. As Tom explains to her, his vocation is all about finding what is hidden. Archaeologists fight ‘the force in the universe that nudges everything towards chaos’, they are the ‘enemies of entropy’ who ‘struggle to recapture everything, back to the beginning of creation’. As such, he’s part of an expedition to bleak planet Higby V where remains of the so-called High Ones have been discovered, ‘separated from us by a billion-year gap’. It’s the twenty-third site, or outpost, to be discovered, although no home world has so far been identified. The High Ones’ culture dates from 1,100,000,000 years back, and seems to have survived a quarter-of-a-billion years. No-one knows where they came from, or what became of them. The party is made up of a deliberately comic collection of the diverse races encountered and linked into a more-or-less friendly community alongside the expanding human presence. Some species are relatively older, some younger, but none have histories stretching as far back as the time of the High Ones. Kelly is a ninety-year-old android with the body of a nineteen-year-old, focussing Tom’s confused feelings for despite a very sexy penchant for nudity her lack of navel betrays her vat-origins, so extinguishing any desire he may otherwise have felt for her. He’s also more than a little disturbed by the prospect that inter-breeding with androids might actually improve the human genetic stock. Merrik from Dinamon IX is a cross between a bulldozer and a blue-tusked rhinoceros, he recites love poetry and gets euphorically drunk on pollen. Dr Horkkk from the Rigel-system world Thhh has three bulging eyes on the top of his head, two mouths – one for talking, the other for eating, and he’s so thin that when viewed sideways he’s invisible. Pilazinool of Shilamak is a Borg-type man-machine who spends a lot of time polishing his artificial implants. He worries about getting grit in his gears, and at times of stress he unscrews his limbs into a pile. There’s also a yellow octopus called 408b, and others, but you get the point. Dr Milton Schein is the Marsport University paleoarchaeologist who first excavated High Ones artefacts near Syrtis Major.

The ‘racially balanced quota’ is part of the novel’s sly humour, early satire sniping at a kind of political correctness in which ‘liberals must have their way’. Tom also mentions in passing that Cairo, Syria and Baghdad are all part of Israel! There are Soap-Opera three-way attractions by way of diversion and distraction, while Silverberg also introduces a slang-vocabulary, somewhat in the Anthony Burgess’ ‘Clockwork Orange’ tradition of nadsat. People are ‘vidj’, and a conversation about the origins of the High Ones progresses through ‘Nonsense’ into ‘Feeby foolery’, then ‘unscientific blenking’ and ‘a lot of silly fission’. There’s an accusation of ‘idiotic slice’ and then ‘intellectual nilliness’, which all adds to the quirky oddness and – after all, language will not remain static. It will change, if not necessarily in this way, then in some similarly unexpected unpredictable directions. So this playful invention stands in for such changes.

On Higby V they excavate familiar High Ones’ artefacts, inscription notes, plaques, puzzle-boxes, ‘broken bits and rusty scraps’ until the game changes with the discovery of a sphere that projects images of the six-limbed dome-headed humanoid aliens and their aerial city of suspended teardrop dwellings. Observing a sequence dated to 941,285,008 ago, in which a robot is sealed into an artificial vault on an asteroid, they determine to find out if it’s still there. Lunar City Observatory identifies the revealed star-formation with billion-year compensation-adjustment, pinpointing what is now the Black Dwarf star GGG 114591. Despite Galaxy Central misgivings they set out through the twisty-twisty of ultradrive to go there. So that ‘a species only a million years or so away from apehood’ arrive, as in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, like ‘travellers from an antique land’ into the dead star-system. The hibernating robot is still there. 408b is vapourised by its protective lightning field, but once it has established they are essentially ‘friendly organsisms’, with them unable to decipher its ancient language, it simply learns theirs. He is Dihn Ruuu of the Mirt Korp Ahm, the true name for the High Ones. But the ‘dismayed and confused’ robot reveals that its creator’s home-star can no longer be seen. It’s not there. Instead it redirects and accompanies the expedition to the High One’s colony world on McBurney’s Star IV, although abandoned by its creators a mere eighty-four-million years ago it’s still a fully-functioning self-sufficient planet run by self-repairing, self-lubricating, virtually immortal robots. They reveal that the High Ones constructed a Dyson sphere around their own sun, hence its invisibility. ‘What about the laws of physics?’ protests one of the team. ‘Repealed, I guess’ suggests Tom.

The Galaxy Central Navy sends an ultradrive cruiser, first to arrest them, then to transport them to the Mirt system. They enter the sphere through a portal the size of Ohio, to witness the tragic melancholy fate of the ancients they’d sought. For here, the ‘hairy primitives that we are’, the story of the High ones explodes up out of archaeology into the real dazzle. The story has two endings. One downbeat, the other transformational. The civilisation of the High Ones reached a plateau of achievement, only to become sterile and static. Retreating from the universe that no longer interests them, into their sphere, as ‘empty creatures rotting in crystal cages’. They are here, ‘hideously frighteningly old’, the last of the dinosaurs, or a system of mummies come to a semblance of death-in-life. ‘I wish we had never been allowed to see this’ grumbles Tom. But inadvertently, through trying out Mirt technology, he – and all of the allied sentient races of the galaxy, acquire telepathic powers. A racial, no, a galactic transfiguration. He merges with twin-sister Lorie back on Earth, and realises it was he who has been the cripple all along. The High Ones were an evolutionary dead-end, the new races will not be. Tom warns that ‘it’s unhealthy to gulp down a surfeit of miracles, it gives one indigestion of the imagination.’ If so, for those about to read this novel, prepare for over-dose! If it’s playfulness is due to its targeting accessible tweenage readers, then that’s not to denigrate it. Robert Silverberg can be startling, whatever lit-face he happens to be wearing. Within its own vocabulary, to read ‘Across A Billion Years’ is to be truly ‘croggled’. It gives you the dizzies, eh?

'I Was Elvis Presley's Bastard Love-Child' Interview

ELVIS PRESLEY’S BASTARD

LOVE-CHILD - THE FULL

SHOCKING TRUTH

by

TRISTAN TROTSKY

Frank Zappa said ‘writing about music is like

dancing about architecture’. ‘I WAS ELVIS PRESLEY’S

BASTARD LOVE-CHILD’, collects eighteen music

interview features, revisiting highlights from twenty

years of on-the-road journalism, including

conversations with THE BYRDS, LEFTFIELD,

THE STONE ROSES, LED ZEPPELIN, THE KINKS,

GRACE SLICK (of JEFFERSON AIRPLANE / STARSHIP),

SIOUXSIE, CABARET VOLTAIRE and many more...

this is the sound of dancing architecture

‘False-colour photos from the dark side of Uranus. A switch-back of black rings no unlensed eyes have yet seen, a dance of ten new unpaced black moons in lost frigid orbits, beautiful and complex... but what the hell FOR? For whose benefit? If those moons, those rings, didn’t exist would it REALLY upset some vast eternal cosmic plan? The system runs in total impersonal isolation, according to its own illogics and for the apparent benefit of no-one. A Wonderful and Frightening World... like the Fall. Ring-systems of black vinyl noise across some ten albums, a spatchcock of LP’s with tracks not so much posed or even composed – more decomposed. A more extensive back-catalogue than that racked up by either Velvet Underground or the Doors. But a band hermetically sealed off in its own space-time continuum run on its own devious motives. As real, and as irrelevant as Uranus. The Fall are something of an enigma, and one worth probing...’ (extract from the chapter interviewing the Fall’s Mark E Smith)

‘Music is like acne. Zits. Teenage spots. In the vast eternal cosmic scheme of things, it’s not very important. But if it touches your life, if it affects you, if it alters your relationship with the world and with other people, then it’s important. If it’s important to you, then it’s important.’ Andrew (on the book-jacket, Andy in the flesh) Darlington’s current book is called ‘I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Love-Child’. Published by the ‘Critical Vision’ imprint of Manchester’s fiercely independent ‘Headpress’ it’s a glossy package made up of eighteen revised music interviews, personally selected highlights lifted from over twenty years of Music Journalism, and a life-time of slavery to the rhythm. And these are brain-biting, body-popping, paradigm-morphing, genetically-modifying, phase-realigning, gravity-neutralising, gender-reassigning, semantics-defying, shape-shifting, DNA-tingling pieces of Sex, Speed, and ‘See-You-Later-Alligator’ jive. ‘Andy is a poet, but he is also an intrepid pioneer at the edges of all things creative and life-affirming’ enthuses SF writer Michael Butterworth in his full-on foreword, ‘he is editor, publisher, journalist, writer of fiction, promoter /entrepreneur, Poet-for-Sale, often simultaneously’.

But ‘I was essentially a fucked-up adolescent,’ Andy confides in person, here and now. ‘I was wrecked on trashy Rock ‘n’ Roll, cheap Science Fiction, and masturbation. When I should have been doing homework revision for Algebra and French, I was memorising chart positions, B-sides, matrix-numbers. Compiling my own charts. There’s this thing now of saying ‘better than sex’. Football is ‘better than sex’. A movie is ‘better than sex’. For me – nothing is better than sex. But music – and books, have been more profoundly life-changing to me than any other artificial stimulant I’ve ever encountered. Even now, whenever I’m feeling bad, down, depressed, I whack on the Ramones, the Electric Prunes, Flamin’ Groovies, Prodigy, turn the volume up to eleven, and it gets me high. It never fails.’

‘What I’m essentially doing now, with this book, is sending a message back through time to that fucked-up kid that I was then, a message to say – hey, it’s alright. What you did then kind-of worked out OK.’ So what truth is there behind the title? The genetic lineage to Elvis Presley? ‘OK – I admit it. This book is based on a lie. It is not true. There was no Elvis Presley sperm involved in my conception. Sorry – does that mean I have to give the advance back...? But no, there’s enough truth there to exaggerate into reality. Which is what you do when you write these things. A story. A feature. You take an element of yourself, and you exaggerate it until it becomes a kind of focal point. The first chapter of the book is the most directly autobiographical. It’s all autobiographical in the sense that this is the music that has defined my life. Each chapter embodies as essential part of my life. Each chapter takes another little piece of my heart.’

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll is the ‘Schoolboy Crush’ you never grow out of. When Little Richard said ‘Awop-Bop-A-LooBop-A-Bop-Bop-Bop’ it was a shining truth expressing everything that later – more articulate, poets like Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Eminem never could, containing all you really need to know about Life, the Universe and Everything. It by-passes the logic centres of the brain and homes in direct at the non-verbal universal core of truth. The man don’t know, but the little kid inside you understands.

‘But the first chapter – the Elvis one, is the most directly narrative one. It’s true that I didn’t meet my ‘biological’ father until I was sixteen, and even then we didn’t really hit it off on any meaningful level. And – particularly during the mixed-up confusion of adolescence, you’re trying to interpret sexual behavioural codes through whatever role models you have available. And I was picking up twisted warped encryptions of it. As part of what was essentially a single-parent family in the early 1960’s, all my influences tended to be overwhelmingly female. Which is not necessarily bad. It gave me a heightened awareness of the feminine perspective. Which is no bad thing. But at the same time it came into direct conflict with other elements that I was already encountering, attitudes and gender double-standards which contradicted a lot of that. In the Elvis Presley chapter I use the mock-comic example that Elvis presents through movies like ‘King Creole’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – simple, one-dimensional images, as a way of getting through it. So no. It’s not true in the absolute sense. But sometimes truth can come in strange disguises. And there’s enough truth it there to fabricate what I hope is a comic-absurdist and not-unperceptive feature. But there is an accidental Elvis theme to other bits too. In the dressing room at the back of the Irish Centre in Leeds, Ian Hunter (of Mott The Hoople) relates this long anecdote about how he was in Memphis doing a gig, and how after the concert they drive out to see Gracelands – Elvis’ mansion, and when they’re refused admittance, Ian climbs over the wall and breaks in anyway. Then Robert Plant explains how Led Zeppelin got to meet and duet with Elvis in a Las Vegas Hotel suite. How I shake Robert Plant’s hand. The hand that shook hands with Elvis. So how – by proxy, I get to shake hands with my REAL father.... ‘

‘And, as we speak backstage at the Wakefield ‘Pussycat’ club in the lost wastes of West Yorkshire, it is EXACTLY twenty years to the month (22nd June 1965) that the rarefied stratospheric harmonies and janglipop Rickenbacker guitars of “Mr Tambourine Man” peaked on the British chart at no.1, over the likes of the Yardbirds (“Heart Full Of Soul”), Elvis Presley (“Crying In The Chapel”) and Joan Baez (with Phil Ochs’ “There But For Fortune”). It stays there two weeks, to be deposed only by the might of the Beatles’ “Help”. In those far-off time-lost days a 45rpm single costs a precise 6s 8d. And on a personal note – I get stranded in the Hull city centre with just enough carefully hoarded pocket-money either to go to ‘Hammonds’ Record Department with its luring listening booths to make the purchase I ache to make, or to pay for the long and winding bus-fare home. So – inevitably, I walk all the miles back clutching that orange-labelled CBS Byrds single tightly in my hand. For the Byrds – their harmonies carried on the futuristic mystique of Dylan’s methadrine-fuelled poetry, horizons seem infinite. The epitome of Beat Hip with Mod(ernist) Cool. In their first promo shots they are five immaculately aloof fringes posed ‘WITH THE BEATLES’-style out of the black. Superior. Articulate. As cool as every promise of tomorrow. A band of awesome vision and wondrous innovation, who opened the dayglo floodgates to all things West Coast esoteric and ultra-Hip, the Byrds personified, and made flesh, a seismic shift in popular culture that still reverberates now, across decades, up – to the Stone Roses, down – to Travis and Teenage Fan Club. Pop seldom came better ...”
(extract from the chapter interviewing Byrd Gene Clark)

So how did you get into Music Journalism? ‘Well, I was always writing. And I was always listening to Music. As far back as I can go. But essentially, through the 1960’s, I was a consumer. I was living in Hull. And I saw all the big bands who came through. It was odd in the sense that other kids I was hanging out with would go to dances or whatever to pick up girls. And while I was always up for that when the opportunity arose, I was primarily there to see the bands. The shiny guitars. The curly leads. The red lights that glow on the amps. The Cuban heeled boots. The volume. The riffs. I saw the Beatles when they played the Hull ABC Theatre. I don’t remember much about it. But I saw them. I saw the Rolling Stones in – what must have been around 1964, at the Bridlington Spa. With Brian Jones. There must have been about fifty people in the audience. At Hull Beverley Road Baths they used to put flooring over the pool and put bands on there, I saw the Animals and Manfred Mann with the floor juddering precariously all the time. I hitchhiked down to London to see bands on a fairly regular basis. Saw the Who three times. Went to Leeds to see the Beach-Boys play the Odeon on the Headrow, missed the last train home, and spent the night just walking around the city. But my own real involvement began when I started writing for what was called the ‘Underground’ Press, ‘IT (International Times)’, ‘Styng’ and others. I interviewed Genesis P Orridge of Throbbing Gristle – badly, around that time. But I got better. I’ve always been semi-autonomous. There have been regular magazines I’ve written for – I’ve been a contributor to ‘Hot Press’ for over twenty years, and ‘Rock ‘n’ Reel’ too, but I’ve never been exclusively tied to one in particular. This means that they ring me up and say do I want to interview this band, and more-often-than-not I’ll do it. They know the areas I specialise in. ‘Hot Press’ arranged the Kraftwerk and Can interviews after I’d first done Cabaret Voltaire and other electro-bands in Sheffield. But it also means that I go out and do the pieces I want to do, then market them. So in that way, it’s a personal thing. I’ve never gone into an interview with the intention of mocking or ridiculing. I’ve always taken the attitude that these are creative people doing interesting things. And I’ve seldom been disappointed.’

For the Kinks interview you speak to Dave Davies, not Ray Davies. ‘Yes. And it’s weird. What you’re dealing with, in an interview, is the totality of people’s lives. And I’ve got something like 5,000-6,000 words to explain it. Any one of these people deserves a full book. Many of them have full books written about them. So Ray – yes, obviously. He’s been analysed, his work, his songs, his role in British Rock. But Dave has an equally intriguing story to tell. He was there throughout, a provocative presence at the centre of some of Twentieth Century music’s most seismic decades. And think – Don and Phil Everly. Liam and Noel Gallagher. Sibling love, and sibling rivalry is part of Rock history. And the strange combination of hurt, affection, pain and jealousy that comes across during that interview is very affecting.’

Favourite interviews? ‘For this book David Kerekes, of Headpress – who was astute and perceptive enough to first suggest doing it, asked to see a list of all the interviews I’d done, and from that we selected the contents for the book. There was some trading. He suggested putting the Fall piece in. That’s fine. I rather wanted to put the Moloko piece in, because that also ties in with a continuity angle, I’d already interviewed Mark Brydon in his earlier band – Chakk, and some kind of two-way synthesis of the pieces would have been nice. But Moloko went a bit quiet around that time so it got shelved. There are masses of other things that could have gone in – Deep Purple, Shamen, Erasure, Saint Etienne, ABC, Throwing Muses, Chumbawamba. But the Cabaret Voltaire piece in the book is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. For lots of reasons I love the Grace Slick piece. It was incredible for me to finally get to interview her. But some of my favourite pieces are not necessarily the most obvious ones. Everyone says – yeah, the William Burroughs interview must have been great (not in the current book!). And it was. But I have an equal affection for things I did with now-neglected bands like Clock DVA, who were incredible... I mean, this book starts out with the 1960’s, but it’s not about the sixties. Probably my best time, as an interactive participant was the Eighties electro-industrial scene. That was an amazing time. But it goes on through the Stone Roses and Skunk Anansie. Until last year I saw Oasis, Prodigy, Sneaker Pimps, the Chemical Brothers. And the spirit is the same. At any given time 99% of what’s happening is shit. But it’s that remaining percentage that validates it.’

Where next? ‘Where it all goes from here is anyone’s guess. The next book might be a sequel to this one – called something like ‘I Was Charles Hawtrey’s Movie Body-Double’. Or it might be a Science Fantasy epic novel. Whatever – this book is like a definite punctuation. I’m obviously going to continue doing music journalism. But I’m also going in other directions too. Throughout the years I was doing all those interviews, hanging around soundchecks, watching gigs, doing clubs and festivals, I was also writing fiction and prose things for other areas. At the moment – now, I’m trying to concentrate on doing more fiction. Catching up on that. And that is happening. And that will continue happening. But Martin Amis was interviewed not too long ago about his vision of his own relevance, and he came up with something about ‘if my writing is still read and valued in a hundred years (or was it fifty?), then my work will be validated’. And I think it was Nick Hornby who said that being valued by posterity is less important than reaching a wide and responsive audience in the here and now. What I’ve got is this stupid vision of perhaps in ten or fifteen years time some messed-up kid might come across something that I’ve written stashed away in the chaos of some second-hand bookshop, and – not knowing a damn about the name, he’ll be mildly interested enough to buy it – 20p or 10 Euros or whatever it is then, and he’ll read it and think ‘that was quite good’. I like that idea. I’d be happy with that... perhaps it’ll happen with this book?’

‘A nervy subtlety. A sound like biting steel nails. The shock of the newer. Mal takes a bassline for a walk, a low-rider in a contraflow of rhythms with a low low drag factor. He’s leaving after-images of nervous shock and mind-games of terminal disorder hanging in the air, doing wheelies over your braincell tissue. Ideas sometimes disguised as sound, sometimes as a geometry of moving pictures. Watch the sounds. Listen to the pictures. Mal’s face is made up of vertical, planes and angles, sparse and economical. Richard’s is made up of curves, flourishes, and flowing lines. Richard chain-smokes and watches the wrap-around screens. Extracts from Japanese TV. Aerial shots of the Toyota / Xerox buildings. The screens overlap, overlay. A Harrison Marks nude housewife comes down the stairs... comes down the stairs... comes down the stairs, trapped in trick-frame repetition. A Blue Thunder whirlybird slides out behind skyscrapers into the sun. Over and over. Over and over. Cabaret Voltaire is a multipack of projects. Better. By lack of design...’ (excerpt from the chapter interviewing Cabaret Voltaire)

BY TRISTAN TROTSKY

Published in:-
‘THE SUPPLEMENT no.28’ UK – May 2006