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Fanny: The Right To Rock

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I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how much more there is to say about Bob, Paul and John, Mick and Keef, David or Elvis. Docs on them are increasingly microscopic or PR-led. I’m much more drawn to those about the b-listers, the never quite made-ers. This is why the Anvil film, or the Disco series recently, are so engrossing. So it is with Fanny. Perhaps the first all-female group to play their own songs they presented the mid-sixties music industry with a triple threat: women who play their own instruments and wrote their own songs, Filipina-Americans who wrote their own songs, and lesbians to boot. Despite all this they were the first all-female band to be signed to a major label, recorded four albums and toured the world. It never quite happened in terms of top tier success, and I’ll leave you to think about whether they were geniuses done down by the man, a band with good but not great songs, or something in between.

Fanny: The Right to Rock is on the iplayer.

The framing device is a reunion thirty-five years after Fanny broke up, in which June, Jane and Brie re-assemble to » Continue Reading.

Disco: The Sound of A Revolution

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In the ongoing repeats repeats repeats approach that is the Beeb’s current music programming they can occasionally still knock it out of the park. Disco: Sound of the Revolution is a three-parter tracing the rise and fall of one of the sounds of the seventies. Like all such programmes it sets out why said sound has been criminally under-appreciated and why said sound was more important than you ever thought.

Episode One in particular is one of the most insightful and entertaining hours of music television I’ve seen in many a year. The makers have rounded many of those who were involved in the New York gay club scene of the late sixties, the ground zero of disco as it evolved from soul and funk. Because this is music that grew out of dancing at clubs – and the footage of The Loft or The Gallery is wonderful. It roots disco in two wider social developments: the post-Stonewall emergence of clubs where same-sex dancing was allowed, and the catastrophic state of New York itself, which meant that there were abandoned buildings that could be repurposed as clubs. Uptown black promoters were using just about anywhere people could meet as discos: » Continue Reading.

The Searchers

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Year: 1956 Director: John Ford

New Year – so rather than tackle anything new it’s another film from the Sight and Sound 2022 critics poll of the best films of all time. If Meshes of the Afternoon, a 15 min black and white silent short, was one of the most obscure then the film one spot above it in 15th place, The Searchers, is one of the most familiar. John Ford’s 1956 Western stands in that period where the genre was in transition, from the straightforward studio films with its reliable cast of heroes and villains to the cynical and nihilistic spaghetti westerns of the sixties.

John Wayne made a career playing the cowboy hero, and provides a magnetic central focus as an ex-confederate soldier who returns to the home of his brother. The opening action sees the menfolk lured away from the house by Native Americans, enabling another Comanche raiding party to loot, kill and most significantly kidnap Wayne’s two young nieces. Wayne and the adopted brother of the family Martin spend the entire rest of the film looking for these missing girls.

No need to rehash the plot further but instead talk about what Ford does in » Continue Reading.

Why did The Clash not write a song called The Clash?

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In an ideal world every band would have side 1 track 1 of their debut album as a manifesto song. This is who we are, this is what our vibe is, and this is what we’re going to do to the world. So your manifesto songs please. The name of the band must be the name of the track.

Motorhead by Motorhead is pretty much perfect, even though actually written by his previous band.

‘Motorhead, remember me now, Motorhead alright’.

Again,

Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees and people say we monkey around But we’re too busy singing to put anybody down

Just about nails it.

You don’t have to be a band, individual artists can join in too – but it’s a bit more of a style statement to record a song with your own name as the title. One of course comes to mind straight away in the comments.

Cahokia Jazz

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Author:Francis Spufford

A literary writer venturing into crime fiction for the first time. An alternative history featuring a heavy dose of First American vs African vs Caucasian ethnic struggle written by a white Englishman. A novel over 500 pages. All these are true, and all are reasons to think that Cahokia Jazz might fall flat on its face.

There’s also a lot to get to grips with upfront: two detectives, Native American Barrow and his sharp and wily senior partner Drummond. There’s a gruesome symbolic murder that requires investigation, and there’s the city of Cahokia in an alternative twenties North America, one in which money, religion and politics are all negotiated between the three races.

Spufford’s alternative history – based on the idea that the smallpox which wiped out 95% of the original inhabitants of North America arrived in a less venomous version, leading to a continuing mass population of Native Americans – is dense at first. Though he can’t avoid the narrative dumps completely, on the whole he shapes his narrative so that the reader finds out how and why Cahokia came to be the way it is, as the detectives search for the conspiracy that lies behind the » Continue Reading.

Meshes of the Afternoon

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Year: 1943 Director: Maya Deren

If there’s a prize for least-seen film on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll then number 14 I am sure would be in with a shout. Meshes of the Afternoon is a 14-minute black and white silent film from 1943, made by avant-garde US/Ukrainian film-maker Maya Deren. Deren plays the protagonist, a young woman who returns home and sees a mysterious hooded figure. She falls asleep in a chair and in a series of dream-like replays of her return home a number of actions are repeated: she sees a mysterious hooded figure with a mirrored face. She opens the door with a key, and later on the key reappears from her mouth. She goes up a flight of stairs and lifts the needle from a record playing on a portable phonograph. There are telephones around the house off the hook and bread and a knife. Later on a doppelganger of her appears, and a man who she attempts to injure. In the final scenes she appears again in the chair now dead. If David Lynch had never made films perhaps this film would not have the current prominence it has, though clearly a film that » Continue Reading.

Cleo from 5 to 7

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Year: 1962 Director: Agnes Varda

Cleo from 5 to 7 is number 14 on the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll, another big climber from 207 in 2012. Another female directed film, after Jeanne Dielman at 1 and Beau Travail at 7. It’s (almost) a real-time film, following French pop singer Cleo around Paris from 5pm to 6:30pm as she awaits the results of a medical test.

And what a breeze this film is. Florence, Cleo is her stage name, is first seen at a tarot reading, where the predicted results of her test are not seen by the cards as good. She meets her maid (a fabulous channeling of Lynn from Alan Partridge energy) in a cafe and goes hat shopping. This first third is fabulous flaneuring – streets, cafes, taxi rides, shops, pavements all crammed full of interest. Director Varda was a cinematographer and each shot is immaculately framed, despite a loose and dynamic feel to the camework.

The energy drops in a long scene at her bijou flat – who wouldn’t want a swing and a coterie of kittens in their living room? – as firstly her older lover and then her Rogers and Hammerstein drop by » Continue Reading.

Give Time To The Lemons

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Pochettino keeps a bowl of lemons in his office to absorb negative energy. He was asked when Chelsea will start to feel the benefits. “They started to work after two years at Tottenham,” Pochettino said. “Give time to the lemons. It is a thing that we all believe. If you want to have good energy you need to implement all the things that you believe. “I believe in the lemons but at Tottenham they started to work after one and a half, two years. They need a long time, they are not magic, but more than ever I still believe in them.

“Today in my office I have yellow ones, green ones, different types. From Spain, from Italy. I don’t want to lie, there is a big box of lemons. I always thought the yellow lemons worked much better than the green but now I believe in any colour – any colour can help. If I could get a blue lemon it would be even better.” A debate broke out over whether a green lemon is actually a lime. Pochettino said: “A lime is not a lemon. It is a brother, maybe with a different mother or different father.”

What I actually need a personal assistant for…

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1. Compile me-friendly ‘all you need’ lists for artists I can’t be arsed compiling my own Spotify lists by listening to all their albums. Looking at you 1975 for example. 2. Transferring new stuff onto my fiio and taking the old stuff off. 3. Ensuring all playcounts up to date. 4. Listing all rejected CDs on ebay (two late era Nanci Griffith recently purged). 5. ‘Obtaining’ good-quality mixes from soundcloud to run to. 6. Doing the research on new headphones as boy the tyranny of too much choice applies here. 7. Logging on at the specified time to obtain concert tickets..(see the thread on ‘what did you do to obtain tickets’) 8. Trawling Music Magpie on my behalf as they’ve trashed their saved list function, almost as if they’re not bothered about music anymore now they sell a bajillion iphones.

So which far future utopia floats your boat?

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So we can all agree that the world around us is not without its challenges. What better time to contemplate what could be, if only we lived 11000 years in the future. If you could choose any future society to reside in then, which one would it be? For me…

In third place Peter F Hamilton’s confederation – perhaps life as an itinerant spaceship captain owning a twenty-year old junker playing an uncertain trade between the star systems. I’d have a small flat on a chichi converted asteroid and maybe a ranch on a frontier world. Shameless romantic adventuring. Either that or joining the Confederation Navy.

In second place William Gibson’s sprawl from the Neuromancer trilogy – where the sky is the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. Being a console jockey, riding an Oto-Sendai deck to infiltrate corporate ice deep in cyberspace. Hanging out in dive bars with burned out ex-hackers, chatting away with eccentric AI’s and riding the shuttle up to an orbital hab on a decaying orbit.

But…way out in front is Iain M Bank’s Culture. Waaay in the future there’s humanoids across thousands of stars across the galaxy. Bank’s anarcho socialist post-scarcity » Continue Reading.

Man With A Movie Camera

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Year: 1929 Director: Dziga Vertov

Numbers one to eight on the Sight and Sound 2022 poll are – diverse in time, language and theme – broadly feature films. Scripts, actors, costumes and sets telling a story. Number nine is a different beast altogether – a hour-long documentary film chronicling urban life in twenties Soviet Union – AKA The Man With a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929. Arising out of techniques developed in his earlier ‘kino-pravda’ newsreels in the twenties, Vertov’s hour-long silent film sought to create a completely new film language without any reference to other art-forms like literature, theatre or painting.

The structure of MWAMC is fairly straightforward: there’s a very ‘meta’ opening in which we the audience in the cinema see the audience assemble in the cinema, the band tune up, the projectionist fire up the projector and so on. Sadly no DVD version in which we assemble on the sofa, Pringles and beer to hand, while someone feeds the disc in and tries to sync up the sound bar.

Then the film itself follows the rhythm of a day in the life of a Soviet city – compiled from shots in Mosow, Kiev » Continue Reading.

Slowdive klaxon

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Album out this week and tour Feb 2024. Tickets onsale tomorrow Manchester Bristol Birmingham Liverpool Cardiff London Glasgow Edinburgh. Latest stage of one of the best comebacks.

A new gold standard in Australian wildlife that is trying to kill you

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Paging @Junior-Wells, can’t believe he’s not already been on this one. I think I might suffer depression and forgetfulness with an 8cm worm lodged in my brain. The surgeons’ WTF face in the video tells you everything about his case.

Warning: contains images of worms. And brains.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-66643241

Mulholland Drive

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Year: 2001 Director: David Lynch

There’s been a slight hiatus in assembling the watching party, but last night we sat down to enjoy the eighth best film ever made – which according to the Sight and Sound 2022 poll is Mulholland Drive (or Dr). It’s place as the apex of the Lynch canon appears now unquestioned, above Blue Velvet and er Dune. All the more mysterious that this was his last film that in any way could be called a mainstream feature film. Inland Empire, his next, was shot on digital film and independently distributed.

The basic structure of Mulholland Dr. is straightforward: after a car crash a nameless young woman wanders through LA in shock, eventually ending up at new-actress-in-town Betty’s flat. Staring at a poster the amnesiac calls herself Rita and the two women investigate the circumstances behind her crash. In a parallel plot, maverick film director Adam is trying to prevent a mysterious gang taking control of his current movie, including insisting that an unknown actress called Camilla Rhodes play the lead.

As ‘Rita’ and Betty follow the trail, there are a host of familiar Lynch tropes, including the small man who spoke backwards in Twin Peaks » Continue Reading.

What have you done for tickets?

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With the recent stories of multiple screens, pre-regs and so on around Taylor Swift what’s the most you’ve put yourself out for tickets. Last Friday I had to reschedule an optician check-up as it clashed with the onsale for Sasha (legendary dj) at the Hare and Hounds. I was right, hitting refresh and so on on strong wifi was vital. Sold out in about 20 seconds flat. Going back 40 years I can remember several trips to the Ardwick Apollo to queue up for tickets in the early eighties, when I possibly should have been at sixth form.

Berlin – Your Holiday Suggestions Please

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One of the nicest aspects of this place is the crowdsourcing of things to see, do, drink and eat in places you’ve never been to. Family Moles are off to Berlin next week for a week. We’ll do Brandenburg Gate/Reichstag (tour booked)/Holocaust Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall, Museum Island and the DDR Museum, model village (a family obsession). Music is taken care of by a visit to the Staatsopera for a summer concert – classical being the safest joint option, and it looks like a great building to visit. Sadly the half that would enjoy Berghain or Tresor are too old. Hansa Studios do do a tour, but I don’t think it’ll mean enough to half of us, ditto the Bowie Berlin walks. so….over to you. Places to eat and drink also. ps You can get there by train in a day from London – Eurostar at 8am, several changes, into Berlin around 9pm. Trans Europe Express! (though wrong city for Kraftwerk)

Your worst Sitar Mangling please

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One of the many bad things the sixties has left us with is the sound of the artists ‘going full maharishi’ in desperate searches for relevance.

I am no fan of Within You Without You and would happily see it erased from history. The HJHs are far from the only – or worst – act to indulge in crimes against this instrument during the sixties ‘sitar boom’. Here’s a quite brilliantly awful version of ‘Hi Heel Sneakers’ by Elvis from 1967 in a ‘chuck it all in’ arrangement with sitar, harmonica and horns fighting it out. Any sitar classics from the Hump? Ol Blue Eyes.

It can of course occasionally go right, as in Paint It Black, so I guess you can throw in your hits tho obviously the enjoyment is chiefly in the incongruity of say Peter, Paul, Mary and Ravi

Aubrey and Maturin klaxon

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The first eight novels in the Patrick O’Brian seafaring stories are 99p today on Kindle. I am not a historical novel fan, but make an exception for Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell and Patrick O’Brian’s perfectly realised sequence of Napoleonic navy tales. If you only know this world from Russell Crowe’s uber-macho frockcoat action in Master and Commander, the novels are so much more vivid, detailed and complex. You only have three hours left probably, sorry, been out and about.

In The Mood for Love

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Year: 1999 Director: Wong Kar-Wai

The fourth watch from the Sight and Sound 2022 poll is at number 5. I am a bit of a Wong Kar-Wai fan – Chungking Express and 2046 are both very fine films, while In the Mood for Love is one of my very favourite films.

Set in Hong Kong in the early sixties it is first and foremost a stunning exercise in visual style. Outrageously beautiful HK film stars Tony Leung and Maggie Chung play a pair of neighbours in a crowded apartment block. Both are married to often-away spouses we never see(in one of the film’s many bravura touches), and whom each suspects the other’s better half of being unfaithful. Chung works in an shipping business, Leung as a journalist. Leung asks her to help him with a martial arts serial and gradually their loneliness and familiarity grows into a mutual attraction.

Like Chungking Express, this film takes place almost exclusively indoors or at night. Kar-Wai is a poet of the pool of light cast by a streetlamp, the overhead lighting of a late-night restaurant or the jumbled claustrophobia of a bedsit. Maggie Cheung’s staggering array of patterned silk dresses are worth » Continue Reading.

Tokyo Story

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Year: 1953 Director: Yasujiro Ozu

After Citizen Kane and Vertigo Tokyo Story is the fourth greatest film of all time, according to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. It was third in 2012, and fifth in 2002. The plot is simplicity itself: an aged mother and father (68 is seen as a venerable age) from western Japan visit their grown up children in Tokyo for the first time. Neighbourhood doctor Koichi and beauty salon owner Shigi both regard the parents visit as an interruption to their busy lives with their own children and jobs. Noriko, the widowed wife of another son posted missing in WW2, is far more selfless with time and trouble. An effort to pack the parents off to a seaside resort in the guise of treating them is a complete failure, and the parents are practically hurried out the door back home.

The first half of the film sets out an entry point as a generational comedy, but the story pivots on two parallel scenes resulting from the parents return from the resort. The father hooks up with some former colleagues, and they get steaming drunk in a geisha bar, proclaiming their disappointment with their offspring. Their » Continue Reading.

CD/NoCDswap – Desire

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Here’s a final bump for the latest round of the CD/No CDs required Swap. On the original thread there is a lively and helpful discussion about how actual IRL objects like CD burners and blank CDs are no longer required though of course still very much allowed. You will still need some WAV/mp3/lossless whatever music files but with the aid of mp3 tag and wetransfer you can now take part from anywhere in the world, and without relying on the mailman.

If you are still not clear what we’re on about then the rules of CD/NoCDswap are in the original post. In a sentence we set a theme, you burn 12 anonymous tracks around this theme, you send them to some people. They send you theirs, you review theirs here and they review yours. Tons of fun especially with the reveals.

Two new and essential pieces of information: deadline if you’ve not signed up is this Sunday (30th). From then on @kid-dynamite will be putting you all into groups and the selecting and burning/drop-boxing can begin.

Secondly: we have a theme! Desire.

It could be a girl, or a guy, but also maybe » Continue Reading.

Beau Travail

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Year: 1915 Director: Claire Denis

Beau Travail is like Jeane Dielemann another recent film to leap up the Sight and Sound survey. In 2012 it was a lowly 79. In 2022 it’s number seven and second in my odyssey through the 2022 poll. I did say I was not watching these strictly in order, next up will be In the Mood for Love (no 5). Nobody surely needs another review of Vertigo (2) Citizen Kane (3) or Space Odyssey (7). It’s a tight 90 minutes and doesn’t waste a second.

The story is loosely derived from Melville’s Billy Budd (as the Britten Opera, which appears in the soundtrack, is too). In place of the ship our closed institution is the barracks of an elite French troop of foreign legion troops based in Djibouti. The time of the film is not specified, but as Djibouti became independent from France in 1977 I am guessing sometime in the early seventies.

Sargeant Galoup has decades of exemplary military service, and rules his troop like the perennial drill sergeant figure by being the most masculine, hardest, fittest man amongst them. His bond to the captain is challenged by the arrival of new recruit Sentain » Continue Reading.

Jeanne Dielman 23 Rue du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles

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Year: 1975 Director: Chantel Akerman

If only there was a musical equivalent to the Sight and Sound once in a decade poll of the world’s greatest films. Imagine 1,639 music critics, academics, curators and archivists from across the world submitting a top-ten poll. If nothing else it creates a list against which all others can be measured. No chance.Sigh.

So, anyway onto the Sight and Sound greatest films of all time list. The 2022 list delivered a thunderbolt by proclaiming Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23, Rue Du Commerce, Bruxelles number one. Vertigo, the top one last time, falls to two and Citizen Kane is at three. Surely no-one needs a write-up of either of these but Jeanne Dielman I hear you say. What on earth is that. Take this as the start of an impromptu series working its down the films on the list newer to me, and probably to you too. So no 2001 (no 6) or The Godfather (12) but absolutely yes to Beau Travail (no 7). Can’t promise they will all be in strictly rank order as some are as short as 14 mins, others weigh in at over three hours.

We have a brand new » Continue Reading.