MICHAEL MOORCOCK: 'The Final Programme' Book And DVD

‘A VERY TASTY WORLD’: 

MICHAEL MOORCOCK AND 

 ‘THE FINAL PROGRAMME’ 

 ‘The Final Programme’ was the novel that introduced 

Michael Moorcock’s multidimensional counterculture 

antihero ‘Jerry Cornelius’. It was also made into an 

intriguingly-flawed movie…

 ‘THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER, PROGRAMMED BY 

THE MOST TERRIFYING EVIL GENIUS 

 IN ALL OF SCIENCE FICTION!’ 

Jaunty caper music plays as nomads trek across the moody unfriendly Lapland landscape, almost as though they’re hardly on Earth at all. A Priest reads Latin as the coffin on the pyre they’ve constructed catches fire and begins to burn. This is the funeral of Dr Alexander Cornelius. Jerry leaves by helicopter. He drinks ‘Bells’ cream whisky from a plastic cup as he steers his Rolls through JG Ballard M-way structures back in England. In the Michael Moorcock novel he drives a Cadillac Convertible. In the short story he introduces himself as ‘I am a self-employed fratricidal maniac.’ One of the great character inventions of the Sci-Fi multiverse, Jerry Cornelius is a multidimensional chameleon, beyond race, gender or temporal fix. Here, he’s a foppish Nobel prize-winner, with shirt-ruffles and calf-leather gloves worn over varnished fingernails. Jerry Cornelius, as incarnated by Jon Finch, talks to Professor Hira in the magnificent ruins of the Khmer city Angkor. The Brahmin physicist tells him of Kali Yuga, the ‘eternal cycle’, in which our present long dark age – which began in the afternoon of 18 February 3102BC, is ‘about to end.’ A New Age will follow.

There are stacks of autowrecked cars in Trafalgar Square. Amsterdam has been accidentally nuked. Jerry enters through metal gates. The chandelier has been lowered to the floor. He strolls across a giant pinball machine where Go-Go Dancers and clowns cavort within transparent bubbles, to a guitar soundtrack. Nuns play the one-armed bandits in a huge Pop Art absurdity. His dead father left a microfilm. Jerry knows that sister Catherine is under the spell of brother Francis – ‘Frank’, both siblings are in his Father’s lavish stronghold. Jerry – Jeremiah, intends to rescue her, and revenge himself on Frank, before he napalms the house.

‘Where will you go afterwards?’ he’s asked.
‘Somewhere with a bit of sun’ he muses, ‘Cambodia, I fancy…’

 This is a mad nerve-burning film with all the correct style signifiers, from brutalist Shock Art to surrealism. It teeters on the brink of a greatness illuminated by the fading nuclear glow of Swinging London. With a bigger budget, and a more visionary director – a Ken Russell perhaps, maybe it could have achieved yet greater things? For Michael Moorcock, although it was his first novel to feature Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius, it has a more conventional narrative structure than the deliberately fragmented volumes that will follow. It first featured as a trio of short stories in ‘New Worlds’ magazine, where Moorcock – who was editor too, warned readers of its anarchic approach, ‘all we ask is that you take it in the spirit the author intended and don’t take it too seriously’ (in no.153, August 1965). Not only would the polymorphic Cornelius be reincarnated as an ‘It: International Times’ comic-strip, but other writers would be drawn into the gravitational maw of the growing mythology, with contributions from Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, M John Harrison and Langdon Jones… to myself. There’s also a thesis to be written about the way this first Cornelius book retells the origin-tales of his other great fantasy antihero Elric Of Melnibone, with Jerry as Elric, Catherine as Cymoril, and Miss Brunner as runesword Stormbringer!  

Moorcock throws off ideas like an angle-grinder throws out sparks, brief illuminations that detonate, some will survive through multiple rewrites, others are discarded on whim. A paragraph in the original short story, deleted from subsequent versions, suggests that Jerry had joined the Jesuits ‘after his father had found him with Catherine,’ suggesting an incestuous relationship. How readers of those first short stories reacted to their inclusion in Britain’s erstwhile premier SF-magazine must be left to conjecture, but there was certainly confusion and outrage among traditionalists, as well as raw excitement from those more attuned to its innovation. To Brian Aldiss, a co-conspirator in the literary insurrection, Moorcock ‘set out to prove to the world that we had arrived in the future’ (in his ‘The Twinkling Of An Eye’ (Warner Books, 1998). And Moorcock did that. But Aldiss also points out (in his foreword to ‘Space Time And Nathaniel’, 1966, Four Square Books edition), that ‘whatever it may pretend to do, SF is essentially a reflection of its own day.’ And Jerry Cornelius is very much that, too.

The film more-or-less follows the novel’s strange convolutions. Jon Finch who plays Jerry, had debuted on TV’s crime-drama ‘Z-Cars’, gone on to play Simon King in the BBC-TV SF ‘Counterstrike’ series, then played in two Hammer Horror movies ‘The Vampire Lovers’ (1970) and ‘The Horror Of Frankenstein’ (1970). He also worked with Alfred Hitchcock (in ‘Frenzy’ 1972), as well as on Shakespeare adaptations. Jerry Cornelius is an impossible role to play. To Moorcock, he resembles doomed young fin de siècle poet Algernon Swinburne, a decadent intellectual with a blasphemously ascetic appearance. In the novel he’s ‘a young man, with long, fine black hair that flowed to below his shoulders. He wore a black, double-breasted car coat and dark grey trousers. His tie was of black wool and his white shirt had a high collar. He was slim, with large, dark eyes and large, long-fingered hands.’ Cornelius is an amoral hipster, with vampiric tastes in that he feeds off energies and narcotics as well as confectionary. Faced with such a demanding template, Finch acquits himself reasonably well.

South African-born Jenny Runacre – who is Miss Brunner, had appeared in the original stage production of the controversial ‘Oh! Calcutta!’, she worked with both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in ‘The Creeping Flesh’ (1973), but could also list Pier Paolo Pasolini (‘The Canterbury Tales’, 1972) and Michaelangelo Antonioni (‘The Passenger’, 1975) on her CV. There is a scattering of familiar supporting faces elsewhere, including a scene-stealing cameo from Sandra Dickinson, and they’re all decked out with Ossie Clark and Tommy Nutter design credits. The novel’s music-references to Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and the Beatles “Baby’s In Black” were ahead-of-the-game in 1965. Although Hawkwind had been Moorcock’s natural choice to furnish the movie’s soundtrack, the director’s preference, the Beaver And Krause duo, had a background in early electronic music, promoting the Moog synthesiser from their stand at the ‘Monterey Pop Festival’, before signing to Warner Brothers for a series of critically well-received albums, including ‘Gandharva’ (1971) with musicians Mike Bloomsfield, and Gerry Mulligan – who plays tasty sax over the end credits here.

Freelance computer-programmer Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) wears long white furs. In the novel she’s an ‘attractive young woman with the look of a predator,’ a programmer ‘of some experience and power.’ She also has cannibalistic tendencies. Cornelius becomes the ‘random factor’ in what she terms the ‘Ultimate Joke’, which is also the Final Programme, ‘the programme for immortality’ that will form the bridge between science and Hinduism. She’s read the self-published and self-destroyed book that Cornelius wrote – ‘Time-Search Through The Declining West’, with its own built-in obsolescence, and she sees him as the ‘New Messiah born out of the Age of Science.’

There are pulse-flashing pseudo-epilepsy-inducing stroboscope psychedelic colour-effects as the party approach what the novel specifies as the ‘fake Le Corbusier Château’ off the Normandy coast, which is the Cornelius house (events sketched in the short story “Further Information” (‘New Worlds’ no.157, December 1965. ‘Michelson’s stroboscope (Type 8)’ is credited courtesy W Burroughs and J Colvin – ‘James Colvin’ is another Moorcock alias). It is a house armed with strange weaponry. Jerry’s palm-print scan admits them, and Brunner accompanies him up the lift to the main hall. A chessboard code from a Cornelius-composed music score opens the security door for Mr Smiles and his two colleagues (‘Mr Smiles smiled a satisfied smile’). There are electronic ‘Dr Who’ sound-effects, faintly-yellowish hallucinogenic LSD-gas, and a huge maze like a lethal ‘The Avengers’ puzzle (Robert Fuest had directed ‘Avengers’ TV-episodes, as well as set-designing for the 1971 ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ movie). Catherine is a Sleeping Beauty with hypodermic puncture tracks in her arm – ‘she is well turned on,’ as Jerry pursues Frank with his pressurised Sci-Fi needle-pistol. Jerry shoots at a figure glimpsed through a draped curtain, only to discover that he’s shot Catherine in error. ‘Catherine with a dart in her heart.’ Miss Brunner forces Frank to open the safe vault where the microfilm is secured – but he escapes with it. ‘See you in the next time-phase’ mocks Frank.

All is entropy, collapse, flux, with even the continuity of time itself disintegrating around them. ‘Jerry no longer had any idea whether the world he inhabited was ‘real’ or ‘false’; he had long since given up worrying about it.’ Miss Brunner muses that, for Jerry, ‘it seemed that the mind behind cried forward while the mind in front cried back.’ It’s a vision embedded in the apocalyptical New Age feel pervading the late-Sixties counter-culture, redolent of nuclear ‘Eve Of Destruction’ superpower uncertainty. It did seem to be a time of great impending change, in Pop culture, it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. There is no new morality. There is no morality. There are no values. But Jerry looks forward to further positive disintegrations of the vanilla norm. He recognises that ‘the true aristocracy who would rule the seventies were out in force: the queers and the lesbians and the bisexuals, already half-aware of their great destiny which would be realized when the central ambivalence of sex would be totally recognised and the terms male and female would become all but meaningless.’

Michael Moorcock as 'James Colvin' reviews Michael Moorcock as EP Bradbury

Following the assault on the chateau, Jerry wakes in the ‘Sunnydales Nursing Home’. He meets Brunner again in a nightclub where he attempts to buy napalm, and there is whitewash mud-wrestling bouts going on in the background (Moorcock himself, with members of Hawkwind can also be glimpsed there), they drink industrial waste from the Beaujolais district – ‘from the right bank?’ enquires connoisseur Jerry. Then they go back to Jerry’s apartment where there’s a ‘Rare Rainbow’ poster on the wall, and a fridge-full of chocolate digestive biscuits, ‘do expect the Spanish Inquisition’ Jerry quips. There’s the louche Mick Jagger ‘Performance’ loutishness as he strides across the couch, although without the novel’s androgyny. ‘I have a plane, and a chopper’ he tells Brunner. ‘Tell me about your plane’ she counters. ‘Sod Frank’ says Jerry. Jenny (Lumley) plays the electrified piano nude, then appears to go down on Brunner. The following morning Jenny is gone. ‘Strange chick. How did you find her?’ he asks. ‘Delicious’ says Brunner.

Brit-Blues guitar plays as Jerry and Brunner locate Frank at a rail-siding, they follow his car in an acid James Bond sequence. Frank intends selling the microfilm to Dr Baxter, but Jerry pursues him through junk and vineyard, stone ruins and along the rocky sea edge, set to brittle drum solos. Jerry shoots him. Frank falls. Gulls cry overhead. Baxter talks to Brunner, ‘of course, the inevitable happened.’ ‘It frequently does’ she agrees. She retrieves the microfilm from Frank’s pocket and screens it from a small projector. ‘Where’s Baxter?’ enquires Jerry. ‘He’s inside’ says Brunner. ‘Inside who?’ says Jerry.

Moorcock’s writing is at its most effervescent, bubbling with playfully irreverent invention impossible to transfer to the screen. So they don’t try. Jerry seeks ‘The Testament Of Major G Newman, USAF Astronaut’ which consists of 203 neatly-numbered manuscript pages each filled with columns of ‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’ The guest-list of people who attend Jerry’s months-long Holland Park party reads like an absurdist poem, ‘the late great Charlie Parker just in from Mexico under his alias Alan Bird,’ Pop groups Les Coques Sucrés and the Deep Fix (Moorcock’s own group who record the ‘New Worlds Fair’ LP, 1975), plus ‘Turkish and Persian lesbians with huge houri eyes like those of sad, neutered cats’ and on. From ambisexual to multi-sexual. Omitted from the film, the party assumes the same lavishly pointless hedonism found in Moorcock’s later ‘Dancers At The End Of Time’ tales. It’s a narrative that contrives the intricate shock of an Aubrey Beardsley sketch, with the visual assault of a Rick Griffin psychedelic poster. A soft-focus social comedy with only the most tenuous links to SF. As London is abandoned and begins to stink, with power-failures and people mutating into amorphous masses, as the seat of government relocates to Edinburgh, and ‘something is wrong with time,’ the party goes on. ‘This was a gift-wrapped throwaway age’ comments Brunner, ‘now the gift-wrapping is off, it’s being thrown away.’

 

‘Moorcock’s liquid-tongued epic of a world camping towards apocalypse becomes a fatally stiff SF tale’ says ‘Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia’ edited by John Clute (Dorling Kindersley, 1995). It goes on to note that ‘the film is glossily done. But the story is almost incomprehensible on screen,’ in which ‘Jerry Cornelius meets Miss Brunner, they quarrel over an Earth-threatening computer programme, have sex, and give birth to a smirking ape creature that inherits the Earth.’ John Brosnan calls the film ‘an example of style triumphant over content,’ with the multi-faced multi-purpose ambiguity and ironies of the characters reduced to ‘a series of knowing winks’ (in ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’ edited by Peter Nicholls, Granada Publishing).

‘I hate long goodbyes’ Jerry tells Brunner ‘so piss off.’ Yet they ascend in a Hot Air Balloon together, and he’s soon munching chocolate digestive biscuits in the film’s closing location, Laplab, North of Uppsala in Sweden, NW of Kvikjokk, a small village beyond Kiruna. ‘Daddy’s Summer Place’ is a lapsed underground wartime bunker complex, complete with rusting submarine, and geodesics in Lapland. Perhaps a relic of Nazi attempts to locate evidence for the Hollow Earth theory? The flip bantering dialogue continues – ‘the twilight of the gods, or humanity?’ And Jerry explains that ‘the third world war has been going on for years, but everyone’s been so busy watching the bleeding commercials they haven’t noticed.’

In the novel the setting is more elaborate, in a way that only digital imaging technology could do justice to. But in all versions, ‘DUEL’ is the ultimate computer, the most complex computer in the world, because it is fed on ‘the best brains in Europe’ which are suspended in liquid tanks. A brain-drain. The intention is to feed that ‘sum total of human knowledge’ back into a single – or dual human brain. A ‘G-Day’ process powered by solar energy stored during Lapland’s long six-week day, for what is – as Brunner explains it, a scheme to create ‘an all-purpose human being, a human-being equipped with total knowledge, hermaphrodite in every respect, self-fertilising, and thus self-regenerating, and thus immortal, re-creating itself over and over again, retaining its knowledge and adding to it.’ The Cornelius microfilm forms the enabling link.

Experimental subject Dimitri, who has a more prominent role in the novel, is the man in the isolation cube reading ‘World Mythology’. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’ says Brunner, ‘but the two should never be confused’, before she scrawls ‘Goodbye’ in lipstick on the transparent curve of his chamber. She first attempts to kill Dimitri in his incubator, and then she shoots him. Because Cornelius will be the preferred choice. A fusion of diaphanously-dressed Brunner and naked Cornelius. ‘Can’t you feel our bodies merging?’ says Brunner as their naked bodies roll together, devoured by yellow rippling colour-drenched effects. The movie does its best to portray consciousness-expanding supra-dimensional events on an inadequate two-dimensional screen. The equipment shatters. The scientists and suspended brains are dead. There are choral voices over the distorted visions. The original short story – which is a kind of compressed version of the novel, ends with the same fusion, ‘a tall, naked, graceful being stepped out. It had Miss Brunner’s hair and Mr Cornelius’s eyes. Miss Brunner’s predatory jaw softened by Jerry’s aesthetic mouth. It was hermaphrodite and beautiful.’ The movie also loses its nerve in failing to portray the vast lemming horde of celebrants who sweep across Europe to their own suicidal destruction, as in the ‘Acid Head War’ stories of Brian Aldiss’ ‘Barefoot In The Head’ (Faber, 1969).

‘See you around, sweetheart’ the shambling beast that is the fusion of it all lumbers off into the future. ‘The New Messiah? The end of an Age. Time to start building a new one.’

It turns to deliver the final quip to camera, ‘a very tasty world.’

TERMINAL DATA 

‘THE FINAL PROGRAMME’ (October 1973, US title ‘The Last Days Of Man On Earth’) Goodtimes Enterprises, Gladiole Films. Directed and screenplay written by Robert Fuest, from the novel by Michael Moorcock. Producers John Goldstone and Sandy Lieberson (with Nat Cohen, Roy Baird and David Puttnam). With Jon Finch (as Jerry Cornelius), Jenny Runacre (as Miss Brunner), Derrick O’Connor (as Frank), Sarah Douglas (as Catherine), Hugh Griffith (as Professor Hira), Patrick Magee (as Dr Baxter), Sterling Hayden (as Major Wrongway Lindbergh), Ronald Lacey (as Shades), Harry Andrews (as John, John Gnatbeelson, Jerry’s old servant and mentor), Graham Crowden (as Mr Smiles, the bearded banker), George Coulouris (as Dr Powys, who lives off an inheritance left by his mine-owning great uncle), Basil Henson (as Dr Lucas, casino owner), Sandy Ratcliff (as Jenny Lumley), Julie Edge (as Miss Dazzle, hermaphrodite Pop singer of ‘Big Beat Call’ hit, Mr Crookshank is her agent), Gilles Millinaire (as Dmitri), Sandra Dickinson (as night-club waitress). Music by Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause. (94-minutes). ‘A confused novel… becomes an even more confused movie, as if James Bond had ventured into fantasyland’ says ‘The Ultimate Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction: The Definitive Illustrated Guide’ edited by David Pringle (Carlton Books, 1997)

The novel ‘THE FINAL PROGRAMME’ by Michael Moorcock (March 1968, Avon Books (USA, a censored version), then October 1969, Allison And Busby hardback (UK), then 1973 Mayflower Books paperback, ISBN 0-583-11822-4, with cover art by Bob Haberfield and interior art by Mal ‘Malcolm’ Dean. ‘Preliminary Data’ originally a short story in ‘New Worlds’ no.153, August 1965, in which Jerry has a Swedish wife called Maj-Britt, the story voted no.4 best in issue. ‘Further Information’ in ‘New Worlds’ no.157, December 1965, edited by Michael Moorcock, illustrated by Douthwaite ‘The conflicting time-streams of the twentieth-century were mirrored in Jerry Cornelius’ in the assault on the Cornelius chateau. ‘Phase Three’ originally a short story in ‘New Worlds’ no.160, March 1966 in which Jerry and Brunner first travel to the Lapland caves – the issue’s lead story is ‘The Evil That Men Do’ by John Brunner (!). The short stories include sequences that are not included in the novel.

John Lee Hooker 'Simply The Truth'

…AND NOTHING 

BUT THE TRUTH 

Album Review of: 

‘SIMPLY THE TRUTH’ 

by JOHN LEE HOOKER 

(1991, Beat Goes On BGO LP40) 

‘I was born with the Blues, 

I eat with the Blues, 

I sleep with the Blues, man, 

I know it’s just simply the truth’ 

Blues Singers live tough lives, tougher than Music Journalists. John Lee Hooker is even scared to sleep beside his woman ‘cos she’s packing an ice-pick ‘neath her pillow. Perhaps she’s a Trotskyist? But unlike – say, BB King, whose Blues are all power, flash and verve, John Lee operates on an altogether more modest, more human level. His Blues have a beauty that’s more than skin deep.

The British Blues Boom was always something of an absurd concept, replicating prized vinyl in ways that its precursor – the 1950s Trad Jazz scene, had done with an identical sense of missionary zeal welded to obsessive purism. Yet Cyril Davies, John Mayall, Alexis Korner and Peter Green hijacked black rhythms to their own devices and took their adopted American style in intriguing directions, until when the British Invasion began exporting the music back to its homeland the original artists were more than gratified by new ripples of enthusiasm directed onto their neglected back-catalogues. Young black record-buyers weren’t interested in the Old Guys, they wanted James Brown or Marvin Gaye. The story of the Rolling Stones finding Muddy Waters painting the Chess studio walls is probably apocryphal, but Keith Richards’ informed quizzing about the quirks of their scathing guitar technique, combined with the cash-flow royalties accrued by opening up new white market, rescued the career of a number of artists. That is true of John Lee Hooker.

A share-cropper’s son from Clarksdale, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, after playing in Memphis during his teens, Hooker became not only the biggest name in Detroit Blues but the one singer who broke out beyond the confines of its ghetto, with his big 1940s sides for the Modern label. His R&B no.1 hit “Boogie Chillen” – cut in 1948 and leased to Modern, is a seemingly spontaneous fusion of spoken-word and sung verses with sharp guitar gear-shifts. Then, it’s said, that his slight speech impediment inspired his 1963 “Stuttering Blues” hit, and – as that tale suggests, his profile is more subtle, less spectacular than the more grandiose guitar greats with whom he shared record labels. The ‘Hook’ was acoustic for the Folk-Blues revival – playing the Newport Festival, but electric since he signed to Chicago-based Vee Jay records with Clarence Carter producing. His raw erratic sometimes musically-illiterate playing and talk-singing made him a difficult proposition for sidemen to work around, they were frequently thrown by unplanned guitar fills and his growling disinterest in sticking to form. But when it gels, with the right rhythm section, with Eddie Kirkland or Eddie Taylor, it’s as good as Blues gets.

In the rare window of Blues-boom opportunity he grabbed a UK Top Twenty single in his own right with “Dimples” in June 1964. The Animals scored with his “Boom Boom” around the same time, while Hooker’s own charcoal-voiced original, what ‘NME’ called a ‘dirty, snatch-and-go story of carnal heat’ – when used to soundtrack a 1992 Lee Jeans TV-advert, returned him to the singles chart. The Doors based their “Crawling King Snake” on Hooker’s version. The ‘Boogieman’ shared vinyl with white Blues archivists Canned Heat on the 1971 double set ‘Hooker ‘n’ Heat’ (Liberty LST-35002), he scored a cameo role – playing himself, in ‘The Blues Brothers’ (1980) movie, and long-time admirer Van Morrison guests on Hooker’s 1982 MCA album ‘Tantalizing The Blues’. But John Lee’s REAL genius is for a more wilfully personal and wryly humorous bag of Blues. This album, ‘Simply The Truth’ – a pristine BluesWay reissue from 1969, illustrates to perfection why his rambling oddly-constructed irregular chord-sequence songs work so hypnotically. His minimally stark, near-atonal ‘hammering’ guitar style has Delta roots as deep as the Civil War, his loose – often autobiographical lyrics are spontaneously improvised with scant regard for bar structure.

Whatever – it works, in the studio, the dark sombre story-telling instrument of his voice deftly reshapes vintage rural Blues tune ‘One Thousand Miles From Nowhere’ into a haunting slow-crawling “One Room Country Shack”, after which he trend-jumps a rumbling up-tempo electric “(Twist Ain’t Nothin’) But The Old Time Shimmy” with ‘grandma did it way back in olden days,’ then he loads “Mini Skirts” with swaggers of salaciously sly insight – his talking introduction chuckles infectiously about ‘tight skoits… so tight they can hardly wriggle, big legs too, you know,’ then he grabs the Protest Movement by its coat-tails on “I Don’t Wanna Go To Vietnam”. Instrumentation is raw and sparse, a deep slur of sound, with rhythms punctuated by heavily accentuated foot-beats. His deep talking growl is rich and explicitly expressive. His twelve-bars rarely consist of twelve bars. He even moans an early archetype for the Van Morrison duet called here “Tantalizing With The Blues”, over swelling organ and harmonica.

Blues Singers live tough lives. Hooker – ‘Mr Lucky’, lived long enough to enjoy the rewards of his celebrity. Defining classic Hooker is tough because his back-catalogue is so extensive, the ‘House Of The Blues’ (MAL 663) budget-price compilation which charted for Marble Arch in 1967 is still as near-definitive as it gets, just as the subsequent early-eighties Charly packages ‘This Is Hip’ (1980, CRB 1004) and ‘Everybody Rockin’’ (1981, CRB 1014) are as indispensible. As Tony Russell wrote in his obituary, ‘where other singers rhymed, he sang in blank verse; where other guitarists might skip through the changes, he would play entire songs on one or two chords; and where other blues veterans were fortunate to be rediscovered once, he bounced repeatedly from obscurity or semi-retirement back into the limelight’ (‘The Guardian’, 23 June 2001). But then, they don’t come much better than this album either, and that’s the truth – simply!

‘SIMPLY THE TRUTH’ by JOHN LEE HOOKER
(1969, US Bluesway BLS 6023 gatefold, UK ABC SSL 10280)
Recorded in New York City during 17 and 18 September 1968 with Jazz-producer Bob Thiele
With ‘I Don’t Wanna Go To Vietnam’, ‘Mini Skirts’, ‘Mean Mean Woman’, ‘I Wanna Bugaloo’, ‘Tantalising With The Blues’, ‘(Twist Ain’t Nothin’) But The Old Time Shimmy’, ‘One Room Country Shack’, ‘I’m Just A Drifter’ musicians include Hele Rosenthal (harmonica), Ernie Hayes (piano, organ), Wally Richardson (guitar), William Folwell (bass), Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie (drums) 

‘You can’t write the Blues, 

you just feel the Blues… 

It’s a talent and you 

got to be able to 

produce it with 

heart and soul. 

You can’t write it.’ 

– John Lee Hooker (22 August 1917-21 June 2001)

Poem: 'Side-Stepping The Ghouls'

SIDE-STEPPING 

THE GHOULS 

gravity is a friendly force 

that draws me down 

towards home, 

the rope is a loving chord 

that arrests my fall 

with a ligature 

around my neck, 

the air is a tender gas 

that vacates my lungs 

to flood in the darkness, 

the mob are a caring people 

who applaud and jeer me 

as I’m released from this life 

into the next, 

beneath the mushroom forest shade 

where once I was spore-keeper 

and warden of insects 

in the fog of aromas 

both disturbing and narcotic, 

my knife was the merciful blade 

that excised them of life 

in deeds for which 

I’m being justly celebrated, 

I know this vicious love 

with due gratitude…

Published in:
'BIG HAMMER no.21’ which is an amazing anthology
of incandescent words with cut-&-slash images
from Dave Roskos at: iniquitypress(at)hotmail.com
It’s wonderful to be a part of this
celebration of art-creativity

Science Fiction Magazine: 'DREAM SCIENCE FICTION'

A SCIENCE FICTION DREAM: 

‘DREAM’ MAGAZINE 

 At a late-eighties time when British SF was going through 

 something of an identity crisis, the neat semi-prozine ‘Dream’ 

 proved to be a healing force, reconciling old and new, 

 tradition with innovation, across twenty-nine fine issues. 

Andrew Darlington traces its history

The pensive robot sits on the edge of the Moon’s rim, in an attitude recalling Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. Immersed in electronic dreams, it ponders the conundrums of Life, the Universe And Everything. The image – with variations, was used for the later covers of ‘Dream’. At a late-eighties time when British SF itself was going through something of an identity-crisis quandary, this neat semi-prozine proved to be a healing force, reconciling old and new, tradition with innovation. It looked back over its shoulder to the simpler John Carnell period of ‘New Worlds’ by publishing new work by its respected writers ER James and Sydney J Bounds. While simultaneously turning its fictional gaze to the future with early tales from Stephen Baxter and Peter F Hamilton, who were yet to make their massive mark on the genre.

One of the most consistently inventive and entertaining writers currently at work within the genre, Stephen Baxter’s fiction retains the ability to re-charge that SF ‘Sense Of Wonder’ with its immense sweeps through time and universes. Yet he started out more modestly. He entered ‘Dream’ with “The Bark Spaceship” (November 1987, no.14), published as by ‘SM Baxter’, at a time when he’d only recently debuted in ‘Interzone no.19’ with “The Xeelee Flower” (Spring 1987). Then his “The Eighth Room” was featured in ‘Dream no.20’ (Summer 1989), a story that already displays all the classic wide-screen SF elements in a concentrated form, with Teal as the young discontented rebel, impatient with the repressive restrictions of his teepee community. As the seeker after truth he becomes part of a trope already familiar from characters such as Alvin in AC Clarke’s ‘The City And The Stars’ or the thief in Walter M Miller’s “Big Joe And The Nth Generation”, a protagonist who strikes a sympathetic chord with the kind of adolescent misfits who are drawn to SF. For Teal, Home is linked to Shell by a slender sky-line. Although exiled, with the help of sympathetic grandfather Allel, he searches through blizzards for the secret of the world, accompanied only by his genetically-bred mummy-cow companion Orange, whose ‘song’ leads them to the dimensional-maze cube that allows him a glimpse of the stars beyond the protective shell in which the world is isolated. For ‘Dream’ it is one of a number of contributions, a further Xeelee story – “The Tyranny Of Heaven” follows in no.24 (Summer 1990).

While, although Peter F Hamilton – born 2 March 1960, made his first sale – “Deathday”, to Horror glossy ‘Fear Magazine’ (no.26, February 1991), he’d already been strongly featured in ‘Dream’ from “Bodywork” (September 1990, no.25). In ‘Dream no.28’ his “The Seer Of Souls” takes an uncharacteristic trip into the louche and effete realm of art with vampire art-dealer Tobias hoarding lifetimes of old masters to barter onto the market when he feels the time is right, speaking fluently of Goya and Picasso. There’s sycophants and devoted acolytes, with conjectured new sculptural forms in ‘essence nuroplaque cells’, all conveyed in rich descriptive passages, ‘Tobias saw the souls of the city as a galaxy of red dwarf stars. A glory nebula, pulsing with bright organic energy, alive and expanding.’ It’s as though he’s intent on impressing the reader, by also playfully suggesting ‘Hoyle’s theories as the explanation to their (vampire’s) condition. A space-born virus from ancient comets, a product of evolution hundreds of millions of years older than Earth’s.’

 If the story is an unusual entry in his bibliography, Hamilton’s “Major’s Children” (in no.27) is more recognisably located within his hard-SF style with starship ‘Voidhawk’ – illustrated in Alan Hunter’s sympathetic artwork with its ‘thermo-dump panels’ extended like ‘sprouting silver dragonfly wings’, as it emerges from ‘her jump singularity’s pseudo-boundary four-million kilometres’ from Ladell, planet-sized moon of gas-giant Major of an insignificant G3 primary star. Kendal is a charter-pilot taking bereaved Gilbert and his seventeen-year-old daughter Jannine to the world where life-forms exist on a nine-year cycle before being killed off by Rama storms set up by unique planetary alignments. The wise native Ly-Cilph avoid this periodic extermination by a form of ‘ascension’ to spirit-form, a metamorphosis through which Gilbert hopes to be reunited with Kirsten, his dead wife. It is a tight well-wrought story. Yet from such modest beginnings his ‘The Night’s Dawn Trilogy’, the ‘Void Trilogy’ and the ‘Commonwealth Saga’ would establish him as the leading current exponent of galaxy-spanning Space Opera. But for followers of his novels, the stories Peter Hamilton contributed to ‘Dream’ would prove an unexpected revelation. 

Publisher and first editor Trevor Jones was ‘a firm believer in the value of storytelling and was a fan of the ‘New Worlds’ style of fiction under John Carnell’ according to SF historian Mike Ashley. ‘He felt that British SF had fallen victim to the New Wave and its aftermath and wanted to restore some traditional values whilst also recognizing new talent.’ In his own words, his intention had been to ‘start producing a ‘different’ type of SF magazine, one that represented and applauded the traditional values of good story-telling and lucid narrative that the overblown pseudo-literary and ‘experimental’ markets of that era seemed, in the main, not to offer.’ That ‘we want to work, together with our writers and readers, to change the perceptions of British magazine Science Fiction or the nineties.’ That he was able to bring this ambition together into twenty-nine regularly-spaced issues is no small achievement. 

Both Sydney J Bounds and Earnest (ER) James had been a consistently active part of the pool of writers that Carnell drew upon with the confident expectation of strongly-plotted action tales with Outer Space settings. Both of them had fallen out of favour as SF evolved away from that style. But they embodied the ‘traditional values’ that Jones was seeking. Based in Kingston-upon-Thames, Bounds offered a number of fine tales to ‘Dream’, followed by James – a former postman living in the picturesque Yorkshire town of Skipton, who also seized upon the opportunity of reaching a new audience. While their story-telling skills remain as sharp as ever, both writers had impressively upgraded their styles to include the computer-tech paraphernalia of the new time. Set in October 2172, James’ “Second Century Koma” (‘Dream no.13’) has L-L’s (Long-Lifers) granted longevity by treatment in their mid-twenties, who begin to enter a coma-state prior to their two-hundredth birthdays. Is there a cellular life-limit for humans? No, it’s just information overload that needs a computer plug-in access to accommodate the additional data flow. Voted no.1 story in the issue, it was reprinted in the ‘A Book Of Dreams’ anthology (1990) edited by Trevor Jones and George P Townsend. 

Above all, emerging writers need a reliable forum in which to experiment with their craft, measure it against their equally-struggling contemporaries, and exchange ideas in a sense of virtual community. Jones, in partnership with co-editor Townsend was able to provide this forum, fairly rapidly developed a growing stable of writers, numbering Gerry Connelly with “Draco” (January 1986, no.3) – his later story of a believed UFO abduction, “The Rzawicki Incident” (July 1987, no.12) was voted the all-time most popular story in ‘Dream’! There was also Peter T Garratt, who had debuted in ‘Interzone’ the year before, with “The Angel Of Destruction” (September 1986, no.7), Ian G Whates with “Flesh And Metal” (March 1987, no.10), and Keith Brooke with “The Fifth Freedom” (Winter 1988, no.18). As Mike Ashley points out, ‘most of these writers went on to establish themselves in ‘Interzone’ and elsewhere, but it was ‘Dream’ that gave them space to fledge.’ 

Not all of them went on to write more. There were also intriguing one-offs, author Marcin P Sexton who has a single entry in the ‘Internet Speculative Fiction Database’, which is “Reich” from ‘Dream no.21’ set during the Nazi occupation of vast tracts of Russian territory, with Carl Konigsberg answering a Top Secret communiqué from the Berlin Museum Of Anthropology to investigate alien remains discovered in a remote village of women. It’s an occult rewriting of history with the closing paragraph, ‘since the alien was delivered to be included in the Fuhrer’s own personal collection of curiosities, the Fuhrer’s mental state has worsened. It must be the pressure of the war. Today he declared war on America without reason, except to say he was destined to rule the world. Where will it end?’ Other writers, such as Jack Wainer – the pen-name used by David Bell of Melton Mowbray, had debuted in the ‘Thirtieth Pan Book Of Horror Stories’ (1989) followed by a dozen magazine appearances, which included the Living Doll ‘Chucky’ tale “Miss Blood” (‘Dream no.27’) in which the teenage protagonists appealingly role-play their fantasy lives of being artist and Rock star. 

Wedged somewhere in-between there’s my own story “Matrix”, which had originally been sold to NEL’s ‘Science Fiction Monthly’, which folded before getting around to publishing it! Uncertain about the copyright situation I delayed resubmitting it elsewhere until I was reasonably sure there would be no negative consequences. Indeed, I received only positive feedback from its appearance it ‘Dream’. My next story – “The Carnivorous Land”, appeared in the second, and final issue, of ‘New Moon’, the ambitious sequel follow-up publication to ‘Dream’. Matched to line-illustrations of astonishing quality by the very talented Kevin Cullen, I’m proud of, and greatly value this association with the magazine. 

For the artwork embraced the same wide diversity as its pool of writers, with work by the prolific Alan Hunter (19 February 1923-1 August 2012) who had been appearing regularly within the genre since his early 1950s covers and distinctive interiors for ‘Nebula’ and ‘New Worlds’ as well as for a host of fanzines for which he received little or no payment. His was an instantly recognisable style, with a near-woodcut quality that made him a familiar part of the scene, and there are some fine examples of his work in issues of ‘Dream’. Yet there was also John Light, Dreyfus and Dallas Goffin, who would go on to take fantastical art into new realms. 

It was printed in a consistently neat pocketbook A5 format, initially of forty-eight pages but some later issues running to seventy-six or more pages. Initially published and edited by Trevor Jones (1944-1993) from his address in Godmanchester, Huntingdon, ‘Dream’ was in some ways a revival of an amateur ‘zine that he and George P Townsend had produced between November 1967 and December 1978, which had grown steadily more ambitious during that period. The revived version, though typed, was neatly reproduced (by Kilby Duplicating Service) and showed Jones’s conviction and commitment to producing as good a quality magazine as he could. This was not just in its appearance, which further improved with computer typesetting from issue no.17 (Autumn 1988) but in the content. It became a Weller Publication from issue no.10 (March 1987), the imprint of Townsend, who took over as editor from no.18 (Winter 1988) when he dropped his own magazine ‘New Moon Quarterly’ (which ran for five issues 1987-1988). ‘Dream’ was bimonthly until no.14 (November 1987) then quarterly, as ‘Dream Quarterly’, from Spring 1988, with the last two issues appearing irregularly. There were some good SF-poems, even if they were used as space-fillers, alongside reviews, and several nonfiction features including – from issue no.16 (Summer 1988), an astronomy column by Duncan Lunan.

Yet the ever-ambitious Trevor Jones, despite his increasingly poor health, decided in 1991 to upgrade ‘Dream’ into a fully professional magazine. Perhaps that was a step too far?, because as ‘New Moon’ – in an impressive glossy colour A4 format, it survived for no longer than two very powerful issues. It was able to draw upon the loyalties of Stephen Baxter and Peter F Hamilton who were by then already establishing themselves with novels, but even their strong cover-blurbed stories were unable to ensure the magazine’s long-term survival. 

So what conclusions would the pensive robot sitting on the edge of the Moon’s rim finally decide upon? What cybernetic dreams were sparked within its impassive visage? That because of its regularity and reliability, and its strong stable of authors, ‘Dream’ developed a personality and a strong following unusual for British Small Press fiction magazines. That it served as a bridge uniting the old-guard ‘Ted’ Carnell SF with the post-New Wave. And that, although it may never have acquired the reputation or longevity of an ‘Interzone’, it should be celebrated as a key forum, and a market for British SF in the 1980s. That is no small achievement

DREAM: THE BEST 

OF THE UNUSUAL 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.1 (September 1985, 50p) editor Trevor Jones, with ‘Rave On’ essay by Sam Jeffers, ‘Keeper Of The Peace’ novelette by Harry Logan with Herbert Marchant, with short stories ‘Relic’ by George P Townsend and ‘Proof’ by S Stein 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.2 (November 1985, 50p) with novelette ‘A Planet Named Victoria’ by Charles Luther, plus short stories ‘Danger Sign’ by Geoffrey Talbot, ‘Love Story’ by BK Lascher, and ‘In The Dream Cell’ by John Townsend (pseudo-religious tale by brother of George Townsend, he also has a story – ‘Thirty Degrees Of The Scorpion’ in ‘New Moon no.3’) 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.3 (January 1986, 50p) with novelette ‘The Chessmen Of Rorn’ by Steve Worth, plus short stories ‘Draco’ by Gerry Connelly, ‘Calcified In Death Like Shining Stars’ by John Townsend (John emerges from the dark cellar into a series of increasingly strange alternate worlds, at first his altered office relationships with secretary Susan and the Colonel, then into nightmare landscapes, never explained or resolved), ‘Cute’ by Sydney J Bounds and poem ‘Saturday Afternoon Reflections’ by TE Wood 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.4 (March 1986, 50p) with ‘Rave On’ essay by Sam Jeffers, short stories ‘High Noon’ by Martyn Taylor (voted best story of the issue), ‘With Malice Aforethought’ by Nik Morton, ‘The Miniatures’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘Cloudgoddess’ by Bruce P Baker (Bruce Pelham O’Toole), and ‘Omega Legacy’ by Justin Meggitt, plus poem ‘Obituary’ by TE Wood 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.5 (May1986, 50p) Steve Steed becomes assistant editor, with short stories ‘Cherchez Les Femmes’ by Charles Luther (Bruce P Baker ‘thought it saucy, suggestive and highly moral!’), ‘Last Act’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘The Sound Of Gunfire’ by Sadie Shuttleworth, ‘Unprofessional’ by John Purdie, ‘The Cross’ by John Fraser, ‘Birdman’ by Alan Denman and poem ‘Autumn’ by TE Wood 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.6 (July 1986, 50p) with novelette ‘Lost In REM’ by Christopher E Howard (‘the longest story we’ve yet published… no doubt you have heard the expression ‘the girl of my dreams’ on many occasions, well, the hero of Howard’s novelette becomes obsessed with the girl of his dreams – only question is, what can he do about it?’), ‘Matrix’ by Andrew Darlington, ‘Stress’ by PD Footfold, ‘Gone For A Spin’ by Sadie Shuttleworth. ‘The Melting Pot’ readers letters and ‘The Dream Quiz’

DREAM MAGAZINE No.7 (September 1986, 50p) with ‘The Angel Of Destruction’ by Peter T Garratt, ‘A World Of His Own’ by Gerry Connelly. ‘Earthquest (second Dr Sebastian Dimmock-Browne story, ‘just suppose that you were an alien with a nice sinecure in a galactic bureaucracy, you wouldn’t want anything to disturb your peaceful existence. But if your political opponents were closing in on you and threatening that nice cosy life, desperation might drive you to action. And – if the answer to your problems was on Earth then it might not be all that strange if you decided that’s where you had to go… of course, with the evil warlock Pendlebury K Wackett hovering in the background it might just turn out to be not so simple’)’ by Bruce P Baker, ‘Team Work’ by Rhoda Bevin Worrert 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.8 (November 1986, 50p) with ‘A Turret In The Fury Eternal’ by Michael Cobley, ‘Oh, When I Joined The Eagles’ by Peter Reffold, ‘Killing Machine’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘The Sins Of Billy Shane’ by Mark Iles, ‘Brave New Hamburger’ by Philip S Jennings, ‘Stranger In The Night’ by John Fraser 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.9 (January 1987, 75p) with ‘The Arson Plague’ by Charles Luther, ‘Misplaced Person’ by Sadie Shuttleworth, ‘Fire Of The Dragon (second ‘Draco’ story)’ by Gerry Connelly, ‘Green Magic’ by Bruce P Baker 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.10 (March1987, 75p) with novelette ‘Vassals Of Rorn’ by Steve Worth, short stories ‘Flesh And Metal’ by Ian (AG) Whates, ‘Suggestives’ by Arabella Wood, ‘Earth Fleet Rising’ by Mark Iles, ‘Tiger By The Tail’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘Audience Participation’ by BK Lascher and poem ‘Coral’ by RB Leader 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.11 (May 1987, 75p) with ‘Three Fingers In Utopia’ by Philip S Jennings (voted no.1 in issue, a poignant tale of a spaceman’s search for a perfect planet), ‘Rosemary’ by PD Footfold, ‘The Kondtratieff-Monroe Solution’ by Martyn Taylor, ‘Now You See It’ by Steve Sneyd, ‘The Forgotten Town’ by John Fraser, ‘My Home Towns’ by Gerry Connelly, and poem ‘The Yellow Sea’ by Kerk Tyme 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.12 (July 1987, £1) with ‘The Rzawicki Incident’ by Gerry Connelly (ranked as the no.1 story of 1987, with anti-hero Johnny and his low-life reprobate cronies defeating the UFO-nauts at their own game), ‘A Time Of Giants’, by Arabella Wood, ‘A Dream Of Earth’ by Alan Denman, ‘Claudia The Goddess; by Peter Reffold, ‘Verdict Of History’ by Duncan Lunan 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.13 (September 1987, £1) with John Townsend as assistant editor, with ‘Dark Pegasus’ by Bruce P Baker, ‘New Life’ by Tim Love, ‘Good Morning, Mr Bradley’ by Christopher Howard, ‘Second Century Koma’ by ER James (voted no.1 in issue), ‘Living In The Starships Shadow’ by Mark Iles and poem ‘From Hell To Heaven In Three Weeks by Michael J Hearn. ‘The Melting Pot’ readers letters and ‘Jeff’ comments by Sam Jeffers 

DREAM MAGAZINE No.14 (November 1987, £1) with novelette ‘Company Man by John Purdie (a ‘strange, enigmatic story about a man displaced from his working environment, as a disc jockey on a satellite-based radio station, who comes face-to-face with some hard questions about the nature of reality’), short stories ‘The Bark Spaceship’ by Stephen (SM) Baxter, ‘Estelle’ by N McIntosh, ‘Butterfly’ by Dorothy Davies, ‘A Flash Of Lightning’ by Ian (IG) Whates, plus poem ‘Never Go Back’ by Steve Sneyd

Alan Hunter artwork

DREAM QUARTERLY no.15 (Spring 1988, £1.35) editor Trevor Jones, with ‘Voices Of Other Times’ by Peter T Garratt, ‘Green Troops’ by William King, ‘An Old, Old Story’ by Charles Luther, ‘Sea Changes’ by Graham Andrews, ‘The Judas Tree’ by Mark Iles, plus poem ‘Sunside’ by John Francis Haines, and interview ‘Writers Talking: Charles Luther’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM QUARTERLY no.16 (Summer 1988, £1.35) with novelette ‘The Huntress’ by Peter Reffold, short stories ‘Friable In Fragramento’ by John (S) Townsend, ‘Final Contact’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘Perilous Greetings’ by Ian (IG) Whates, poems ‘The Dark Beyond The Firelight’ by Janet P Reedman and ‘Ghost Runner’ by Michael Newman, and interview ‘Writers Talking: John Townsend’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM QUARTERLY no.17 (Autumn 1988, £1.35) with editorial ‘Towards The Twenty-First Century’ by Trevor Jones, novelette ‘Time Of Uncertainty’ by Gerry Connelly, short stories ‘The Habitat’ by Stephen (SM) Baxter, ‘Red Garden’ by William King, ‘The Air Was Full Of Musics’ by John Light, ‘Dance, Zirillion Dance’ by Dorothy Davies, and ‘The Spacehopper’ by Arabella Wood, and interview ‘Writers Talking: Gerry Connelly’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM QUARTERLY no.18 (Winter 1988, £1.75) first issue edited by George P Townsend with editorial ‘Gazumpers Beware! Townsend’s Here!’, short stories ‘Jammers’ by Neil McIntosh, ‘The Fifth Freedom’ by Keith (N) Brooke, ‘Dreamgames’ by Phil Emery, ‘X+IY’ by Mike Maloney, ‘The Children’s Crusade’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘Fireflies’ by Philip J Backers’ ‘Dr Wiacek’s Regeneration Machine’ by Nik Morton, ‘Future Tense’ by Gerald Blank, ‘Carefree’ by Linda Markley, plus poem ‘The Room’ by Michael Newman, and interview ‘Writers Talking: Peter Reffold’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.19 (Spring 1989) with editorial, ‘The Landlock’ novelette by Elizabeth and Erin Massey, ‘we ran no less than eleven stories, several of which were very short’ – ‘A Robot Handbag’ by David Gomm, ‘The Mage’s Meal’ by M John Deller, ‘The Fracturing Of A Steel Worker’s Faith’ by D Gill, ‘Tetragrammaton’ by Philip J Backers, ‘The Hand That Fed Him’ by DJ Lightfoot, ‘Uforia’ by Bruce P Baker, ‘A Tale Of Two Settees’ by Jenny Randles, ‘Welcome To The Dance’ by Dorothy Davies, ‘That Man Downstairs’ by Mark Iles, ‘If Music Be’ by BB Pelham, ‘Word Grid’ crossword and ‘Winter Stars’ poem by John Light, ‘About The Authors’ feature, ‘The Sky Above You’ essay by Duncan Lunan, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, and interview ‘Writers Talking: Bruce P Baker’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.20 (Summer 1989) ‘Bumper Anniversary Issue’, with novelette ‘The Eighth Room’ by SM (Stephen) Baxter, short stories ‘The Roaring Sixties’ by Peter T Garratt, ‘You Are Old, Father William’ by Graham Andrews, ‘New Genes For Old’ by JP Gordon, ‘The Abreaction’ by ER James, ‘Angles’ by John Purdie, ‘Life Is A Four-Letter Word’ by Michael Cobley, plus ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, ‘The Sky Above You’ astronomy by Duncan Lunan, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers (reviews of other magazines, ‘Interzone’ and ‘Crystal Ship’), ‘Pets Corner: Cyberpunk – The Comics Connection’ by Kevin Lyons, ‘The Melting Pot’ readers letters from Alan Hunter, Gerry Connelly, Peter Tennant and Keith Brooke, and interview ‘Writers Talking: Trevor Jones, George and John Townsend’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.21 (Autumn 1989) with ‘Two Great Novelettes’ ‘Do Det Ike’ by Gerry Connelly, and ‘The Suggestion Form’ by ER James (voted the issue’s no.1 story), short stories, ‘Sparkle’ by Charles Luther (art by David L Transue), ‘Reich’ by Marcin P Sexton, ‘The Memoirs Of Intern Zone’ by Peter T Garratt, plus ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, ‘The Sky Above You’ astronomy by Duncan Lunan, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers (news and reviews of other magazines), ‘Pets Corner: Keyboard Reptiles’ by Philip J Backers, ‘Melting Pot’ letters. Ad for ‘The Edge’ 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.22 (Winter 1989) with Trevor Jones editorial, novelette ‘Kismet’ by Keith (N) Brooke, short stories ‘Wheeler Dealer by Neil McIntosh, ‘The Sound Of The Sea’ by John Light, ‘The Birds’ by Tim Love, ‘Cities’ by Arabella Wood, ‘Time For Change’ by Mark Iles, poems ‘Just Visiting’ by John Francis Haines and ‘R And R In The LMC’ by Steve Sneyd, features ‘The Expanding Universe’ by Rod MacDonald, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, ‘The Melting Pot’ letters, and interview ‘Writers Talking: DF Lewis’ conducted by Emmanuel Escanco 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.23 (Spring 1990) with George P Townsend editorial, short stories ‘Feminine Intuition’ by Lyle Hopwood, ‘The Dinosaur’ by Brian Rolls, ‘The Moral Consideration’ by GM Williams, ‘Murder By Magic’ by Sydney J Bounds, ‘Love Kills’ by Timothy Hurt, ‘The Watcher’ by AJ Kerr, poems ‘The Lilies Have Dried’ by David C Kopaska-Merkel, ‘Poems’ by Dave Ward (as David Greygoose), ‘Watcher At The Window’ by Janet P Reedman and ‘Permutations’ by Gaynel Thorold, features ‘Back In The Dreamtime’ by PC Feirtear, ‘The Neptune Encounter’ by Duncan Lunan, ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, and ‘The Melting Pot’ letters 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.24 (Summer 1990) with George P Townsend editorial, short stories ‘The Tyranny Of Heaven’ by Stephen (M) Baxter (voted no.1 story in issue), ‘The Grof’ by Philip Sidney Jennings, ‘The Last Space Opera’ by Peter T Garratt, ‘Zonk!’ by Gerry Connelly, ‘Blues In The Night’ by Bruce P Baker, with features ‘About The Authors’, ‘Earth Mission 2000’ by Duncan Lunan, Book Review, ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, and ‘The Melting Pot’ letters 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.25 (September 1990) with Trevor Jones editorial, novelette ‘Last Shreds Of X-Space’ by Mark D Haw, short stories ‘Bodywork’ by Peter (PF) Hamilton, ‘Bugs’ by Christopher (Chris) Amies (voted no.1 story in issue), ‘One Born Every Minute’ by Steven J Blyth, ‘San Diego Deadline’ by David E Slater, poems ‘The Gift Of Life’ by Ann Keith and ‘Vision’ by Ed Jewasinski, with features ‘Space And Art’ by Duncan Lunan, Book Review by Stephen J Wood, ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, and ‘The Melting Pot’ letters 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.26 (November 1990) with Trevor Jones editorial, short stories ‘Away An Old Dusty’ by Keith (N) Brooke, ‘The Singularity Man’ by Graham Andrews (reprint from ‘Focus no.2’ Spring 1980), ‘A Scent Of Heaven’ by David Gomm, ‘Dear Mum’ by DF Lewis, ‘Cut Price Bargain’ by Dorothy Davies, ‘Starlove’ by Christopher Howard (voted no.1 story in issue), poems ‘Cold Warrior Melting’ by DA Warne, ‘Song Of The Old Heroes’ by Wrathall Wildman, ‘The Messenger’ and ‘Hidden Secrets’ by Janet P Reedman, with features ‘The Year Of The Space Rescues’ by Duncan Lunan, Book Review, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers, and ‘The Melting Pot’ letters 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.27 (January 1991) with George P Townsend editorial, short stories ‘Major’s Children’ by Peter (PF) Hamilton (with Alan Hunter art) (voted no.1 story of issue), ‘Miss Blood’ by Jack Wainer, ‘Goddess Without Love’ by John Light (art by David L Transue), ‘Mr Pemberton’s Butler’ by Rik Gammack, ‘An Honourable Estate’ by Stephen J Wood, ‘Thoughts Of Rachel And An Overwhelming’ by AM Smith, ‘Word Grid’ crossword by John Light, Book reviews of Keith Brooke, Geoff Ryman, Ray Bradbury (by Peter Tennant) and Raymond E Feist (by DF Lewis), ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ by Sam Jeffers (reviews of ‘Exuberance’, ‘Peeping Tom’ – with advert, and others), ‘About The Authors’, ‘The Melting Pot’ letters from Mike Ashley, Stephen J Wood, Ernest (ER) James, John Francis Haines 

DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.28 (April 1991) with Trevor Jones Editorial (about launch of ‘New Moon’), short stories ‘Surviving The Night’ by ER James, ‘The Seer Of Souls’ by PF Hamilton (voted no.1 story in issue), ‘Dreamsense’ by Gerry Connelly (art by Tim Hurt), ‘Mother Love’ by John Gribbin, ‘Quintasextahuple Wow!’ by Charles Luther, ‘Jason’s Tale’ by Duncan Adams, ‘Waverider’ by Duncan Lunan (art by David L Transue), ‘Books Of Interest’ listing and reviews (Robert Rankin by Stephen J Wood, Diane Duane by Peter (PF) Hamilton, David Eddings by Bruce P Baker), and ‘Melting Pot’ letters from Adrian Hodges, Gerry Connelly

 DREAM SCIENCE FICTION no.29 (July 1991) with Trevor Jones Editorial, novelette ‘The Retributor’ by Mark Haw (art by Alan Hunter), short stories ‘The Cyvernian Way’ by Andy Smith (art by Kerry Earl), ‘The Healer’ by Peter Tennant (one-and-a-half page short), ‘Saturday Night’ by John Duffield (voted no.1 story in issue), ‘Across Infinity’ by John Light (art by David Transue), ‘Chipwrecked’ by Andy Oldfield, plus John Light’s ‘Word Grid’ crossword, Book Reviews (Sheri S Tepper by Gerry Connelly, Barry Hughart by DF Lewis, Stephen King’s ‘It’ by Matthew Dickens, Bruce P Baker, Stephen J Wood, and PF Hamilton), science feature ‘The Weather On The Planets’ by Duncan Lunan, ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ (Sam Jeffers reviews ‘Fear’, ‘Interzone’, ‘REM’, ‘BBR’, ‘Exuberance, ‘Works, ‘Peeping Tom’ and others), the ‘Melting Pot’ letters from Peter Hamilton, Peter Tennant and Alan Hunter, with ads for launch of ‘New Moon’ 

A BOOK OF DREAMS (1990) edited by Trevor Jones and George Townsend, an anthology of the best SF from ‘Dream’ and ‘New Moon’ 1985-1987, with comments by Sam Jeffers, 80pp ISBN 1-873326-00-9, ‘The Angel Of Destruction’ by Peter T Garratt (from no.7, art by Alan Hunter), ‘Butterfly’ by Dorothy Davies (from no.14), ‘Tower Of The Kings’ by John Light (from ‘New Moon no.1’), ‘The Rzawicki Incident’ by Gerry Connelly (from no.12), ‘Three Fingers In Utopia’ by Philip Sidney Jennings (from no.11), ‘Second Century Koma’ by ER James (no.13), ‘Cloudgoddess’ by Bruce P Baker (from no.4), ‘Horse With A Roof’ by David Gomm (art by David Transue) (from ‘New Moon’), ‘Estelle’ by Neil McIntosh (from no.14), ‘Calcified In Death Like Shining Stars’ by John Townsend (from no.3)

NEW MOON no.1 (September 1991) ‘Britain’s Alternative SF Magazine’, edited by George P Townsend, ‘A Weller Publication’ with Trevor Jones Editorial, novelette ‘Sonnie’s Edge’ by Peter F Hamilton (part of the ‘Confederation Universe’ series, hard and brutal Gladiatorial contests in post-Global Warming flooded Peterborough, ‘Beastie-Baiting’ between avatar-controlled genetically-modified Turannor versus Khanivore), short stories ‘Before Sebastopol’ by Stephen (M) Baxter, ‘Desdemona’ by Matthew Dickens, ‘Green Soldier’ by John Duffield, ‘A Breaking Heart’ by Philip Sidney Jennings, plus John Light’s ‘Word Grid’ crossword, ‘Science Revisited’ feature by Duncan Lunan, and the ‘Melting Pot’ letters by Peter Tennant, Keith Brooke, John Francis Haines, Bruce P Baker 

NEW MOON no.2 (January 1992, £2.50) with guest editorial by Trevor Jones, short stories ‘De-De And The Beanstalk’ by Peter F Hamilton (Alan Hunter art), ‘Two Over Seventy-Four’ by Keith Brooke, hitching a ride from Deimos to Callisto, Ray Stakopoulos becomes curious about the vain Tenant, only to get framed for his murder by his two clones (Kerry Earl art), ‘Crystals’ by Eric Brown (Tim Hurt art), ‘The Carnivorous Land’ by Andrew (Andy) Darlington (with Kevin Cullen art), ‘The Tree’ by ER James (Dallas Goffin art), plus ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ pull-out section with ‘Master Of The Universe’ interview with Stephen Baxter conducted by Matthew Dickens, John Duffield magazine reviews (‘Interzone’, ‘Far Point’, ‘Peeping Tom’, ‘Scheherazade’ etc), Book reviews (Stephen Baxter’s ‘Raft’ by Matthew Dickens, Samuel R Delany’s ‘The Motion Of Light In Water’ by Peter Tennant, and others), John Gosling ‘Stripped: Comic Book Reviews’, ‘The Planet In Sagittarius’ science feature by Duncan Lunan, and ‘The Melting Pot’ readers letters from Peter Tennant, John Francis Haines

JANIS JOPLIN: 'Little Girl Blue'

ME AND JANIS JOPLIN 

 DVD review of: 

‘JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE’ 

(2016) Fusion Media Sales Ltd DOG340, Sony DADC

My daughter teases the question, in the DayGlo San Fran psychedelic swirl, why is it I prefer Grace Slick to Janis Joplin – because Grace is prettier? Well – Grace’s piercing laser-bright beauty makes for a persuasive argument, but no. Grace wrote. Janis – largely, didn’t. She’s merely an awesome force of nature. But in 1966 ‘chicks’ were not supposed to act that way, hoarse and sweating, insistent and foot-stamping, demanding and whisky-rough, frantic and erotic, but on her own terms. It was Janis who faced the contradiction of the gender-defying chanteuse, redefining the feminine stereotypes, while embracing the traditional female Blues persona of the eternal loser. A reinvented woman, for the new era.

This DVD investigates the reality behind the image, using a blood-trail of archive clips – photos from her scrapbook, letters and clippings, illuminated by new interviews with musicians, and family members – younger siblings Laura and Michael. Telling how Janis was born in Port Arthur, Texas at 09:45 on 19 January 1943, and spent her first seventeen summers as an awkward misfit outsider, a trouble-prone Beatnik in the repressed uptight 1950s, compensating for her homely ugly-duckling social exclusion by acquiring a love of the Blues, listening to Lead Belly 78rpms, Odetta, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. She sang in Austin hootenannies for free beer. Then hitchhikes to San Francisco as part of the great proto-hippie Haight-Ashbury exodus, doing solo floor-spots in Bars and North Beach Folk clubs on her first visit, retreating home a meths-freak. Until, on her second trip she joins Big Brother And The Holding Company.

There was a Big Brother before Janis, and after Janis. Formed in 1965 by country-blues guitarist turned bass-player Pete Albin, with jazz-literate lead and rhythm-guitarists Sam Andrews and James Gurly, then drummer Dave Getz. Before Janis they were jamming around the Chet Helms Family Dog commune, ‘riding the same wave’ as Quicksilver Messenger Service or the Dead. Her confrontational vocals force tighter song-structures onto their loose improvisations, while their electric amp-battery forces her voice to compete, to strut and move like another instrument. Self-taught ‘primitive’ musicians, what their raucous Rock-Blues amalgam lacks in conventional dexterity is collectively balanced out by their tuned-in freedom, and by their links to the New Generation consciousness for which it was created. Magnified into Bay area gurus, it’s within this kaleidoscopic bohemia that Janis found the community she’d been seeking, audiences readjust their mindset to hers, accepting her non-judgementally on her own terms.

As journalist Lillian Roxon notes ‘she lopes about, dressed like a dockside tart, funny little feathered hats, ankle bracelets, sleazy satins. Her hooker clothes, she calls them with a hooker laugh. And she drinks. Drinks – think of that – in a drug generation. She drinks Southern Comfort; a twenty-four-year-old chick singer with the habits of another decade.’ Janis is curses, tequila and sex, to watch her growling and stomping live is to mainline on aphrodisiacs direct through the gut. But, of course, there were narcotics too. Unhappy, in conflict with herself, she was scared of drugs, yet drawn to them.

Released in the 1967 August ‘Summer Of Love’ ‘Big Brother And The Holding Company’ (Mainstream) neatly catches the vibe of the time with each group-member’s face framed in the stylised petal of an ornate flower. Although the album illustrates their best work together as a solid unit – despite the Columbia reissue adding a ‘featuring Janis Joplin’ cover-flash, it was re-mastered from an acetate the group were less than happy with. There are two songs credited to Janis, but the biggest – “Down On Me” (lifted as a single that hit US no.42), is a trad freedom song she adapts with depoliticised more upbeat lyrics, ‘believe in your brother, have faith in man, help each other, honey, if you can, because it looks like everybody in this whole round world, is down on me.’ Not that adapting trad songs is necessarily bad, everybody from Bob Dylan to the Animals was doing it, and using the template helps reinforce her familiarity with Folk-Blues roots.

But there’s a weird interview-clip of early Pink Floyd. Before the internet, news travels slow. The Floyd imagine their free-form playing is influenced by the LSD-laced West Coast scene, as it was news-reported in the music press and hyper-inflated by underground magazines. Yet when they finally get to the West Coast and see those groups live, they find ‘Big Brother And The Holding Company were just a Blues band!’ Which they were. But she makes for a mean Blues singer and looks the part, with her extravagant hats, trailing draperies, tangled hair and glasses, while their debut album shows a rolling roughness around the obvious excitement of her voice, which Columbia – who subsequently sign them, are twitchy about chancing on record again.

With its counter-culture sleeve-cartoon art by Robert Crumb, despite its musical flaws, ‘Cheap Thrills’ (Columbia, 1968), catches Janis at her peak. “Ball And Chain” and “Piece Of My Heart” display her power both as singer, and as radical symbol. When Elvis recorded “Hound Dog” he was taking a woman-centred song that Leiber and Stoller had penned for Big Mama Thornton, but he stripped away her sophisticated innuendo and retains only the volcanic wildness. With “Piece Of My Heart”, writers Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns’ song had originally been cut by Erma Franklin, and was never bettered. Like Elvis, Janis takes the emotional edge to tantrum-level extremes, while losing the emotional fluidity. Sam Andrews adds the distorted guitar solos that give it a sufficient psychedelic touch to shove it up to no.12 on the US Pop chart, but it’s a slight trade-off. Erma Franklin lived long enough to see her own track vindicated when its inclusion in a Levi’s TV-ad propelled its reissue to no.9 on the UK chart in 1992.

Janis’ Blues is screaming three-octave primal energy, shrieking pleas for love and security, desperate for delivery from some terrible, urgent, but not entirely unpleasant, physical pain, until – transcending subtlety, the emotional therapy of the performance transforms itself into self-willed triumph. Compared to previous white artists – say, Dusty Springfield, her rawness is stunning. But she loses out against – say, Tina Turner’s dynamism with the Ike Turner Band. And if Janis is the ‘white Aretha Franklin’… why not simply listen to Aretha? The Rolling Stones take Bobby Womack’s Valentino’s song “It’s All Over Now” and completely reconstruct it, tightening and rearranging it unrecognisably, in the same way that they reinterpret Arthur Alexander’s “You’d Better Move On”. “Ball And Chain” was both written and originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton. And while Janis’ respect and admiration for the artist is obvious – guitarist James Gurley recounts how she saw Big Mama performing the song in a San Francisco bar, she was doing her best to replicate, not reinvent that buzz. Yet she realises her own limits, ‘all I’ve got now is strength’ she admits.

The group first do a histrionic “Ball And Chain” at ‘Monterey Pop’ – where they perform twice, and are featured doing the song on the 1968 festival docu-movie. The version they do on ‘Cheap Thrills’ was recorded live at Bill Graham’s ‘Fillmore East’ 8 March 1968 – or possibly at the ‘Winterland Ballroom’, where Janis milks the song into dramatic overkill. Although the album adds dubbed audience noise, this is the only track truly recorded in a live setting. On the DVD there’s also studio footage of them doing George Gershwin’s jazz standard “Summertime”, with back-chat, laughter and re-takes. It’s a song most usually associated with Billie Holiday’s beguiling interpretation, while Billy Stewart’s bizarre over-the-top vocals took it to a US no.10 as then-recently as 1966. Again, Janis takes it at full rev, crumpling and extemporising it into nine-minutes of exaggeratedly tortured shapes.

 Her sole writing contribution to the album – “Turtle Blues”, is a convincing piano-led bar-room twelve-bar Blues, with the autobiographical reveal ‘I guess I’m just like a turtle, that’s hidin’ underneath its hardened shell.’ Saying that beneath the bravado, Janis was emotionally fragile, needy and vulnerable. It closes on the positive ‘I’m gonna take good care of Janis, yeah, honey, ain’t no-one gonna dog me down.’ Unfortunately, in this instance she’s unable to follow her own advice. For hers is not a cool intellectual art-appraisal, what’s in her voice is also in her feet, hips and gut. 

Janis couldn’t quite believe her own celebrity, until she saw herself on the cover of ‘Time’. So that in late 1968 she quit the group, perhaps unwisely persuaded she’d outgrown their collective potential. ‘She’s hot shit. The band is sloppy’ she jives. Instead, they record ‘Be A Brother’ (1970), with the original members augmented by Nick Gravenites and David Schallock, achieving a smoother sound-structure that suffers from a Joplin-shaped hole. While she goes on to work with admittedly more competent musicians and a Stax-style horn-section – in the Kozmic Blues Band, and then the tighter Full Tilt Boogie, where, although her vocal technique displays finer control, the old euphoria is never quite recaptured. Both ‘Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again, Mama’ (1969) and posthumously-released ‘Pearl’ (1971) are fine records, but they lack the joyous intensity of Big Brother’s lurching bite.

She has a unique vocal talent, but it’s one that’s also allied with ambition. Part-fuelled on revenge at the hometown small-minds that plagued her first seventeen summers. There’s a touching sequence where she returns to Port Arthur to attend her school reunion. Intended as a triumphal ‘look at me, I’m a big star’ in-your-face to all the cruel tormentors of her teenage years, she finds her gold disks mean nothing in shifting their perception of the Little Girl Blue, flouncing in her feather boa and flamboyant hats, she’s once a freak, always a freak.

The history of the Blues is littered with casualties. It comes integral with the job. As a solo star, Janis found herself the focus of greater expectations while deprived of ‘Big Brothers’ close family life-support system. When the press attacks her – even the counter-culture press, she’s wounded. Timelessly both vulnerably young, used and world-aged, she howls back at what she sees as ‘NME’s betrayal when they dole out a poor review. There’s a post-gig heroin fix after her Albert Hall show. And she’s shoved onto the ‘Woodstock’ stage lost in a narcotic high.

Leonard Cohen’s song “Chelsea Hotel #2” – ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street’ is about his encounter with her. David Crosby tells how Janis attacks Jim Morrison with a bottle at a Calabasas party, after she’d had one-off alcohol-fuelled sex with the Lizard King. She had friends and lovers of both sexes who cared about her. The Dead’s ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, Country Joe McDonald, David Niehaus – an American she met in Rio de Janeiro, Peggy Caserta (who wrote ‘Going Down With Janis’, 1973), and TV chat-show host Dick Cavett who talks wistfully about her. But when forced to choose, it’s narcotics that win out every time. A lethal combination of emotional and commercial pressures that wreak a terrible toll, and she died of heroin OD 4 October 1970, in Hollywood’s Landmark Hotel.

‘Pearl’ became a no.1 album, spawning a no.1 single with “Me And Bobby McGee”. The narrative self-destructive love of two hippie wastrels meshes her DNA, and her mature interpretative ability is flawless, evidence of an artistic growth that promises so much more, but again – it’s a Kris Kristofferson song. Although it might now be most associated with her version, it had previously been done by its author, as well as by Roger Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Kenny Rogers’ First Edition, and later by the mighty Grateful Dead. Yet the acapella “Mercedes Benz”, the last track she ever recorded, was her own song, written with Michael McClure.

If Janis Joplin is Rock’s first wild woman, she’s far from the last. Comparing Janis Joplin to Grace Slick is like comparing Amy Winehouse to Adele… a false analogy. You can’t really balance Adele’s in-control three well-written well-constructed album’s against Amy’s arguably cleverer more jazz-literate single mature CD. Comparisons are odious, but sometimes helpful.

‘JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE’ (May 2016, DVF Fusion Media Sales Ltd Dogwoof DOG340) Director: Amy J Berg. With Janis Joplin, Cat Power (Chan Marshall, narrator), Kris Kristofferson, Juliette Lewis. Bonus features include ‘Female Lovers’, ‘Home Life’, ‘Influences’ and others. 103-minutes

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