Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Can anyone help out? When Simon Reynolds published his superb Rip It Up And Start Again he also made available two extensive discographies as downloadable PDF’s. In the great computer outage that took down my itunes playcounts my copies were also nixed, and after a bit of googling the links are all now broken. From memory there was a ‘core curriculum’ and a ‘further listening’ – the latter being particularly vast. Would be very grateful.
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“Rig, Rip, and Panic”, VERY big in student discos about 1981, popped up on my ITunes. Christ, it was irritating. As well as music in search of a tune and key, I still have visions of guys who looked like “Rik” from the “the Young Ones” being wild and creative but strangely failing to impress girls with Crazy Coloured hair and tops from Deptford Market.
Pigbag, “The Pop Group”, RR&P … what was all that about? Thank goodness proper dance music returned.
Wire have a new mini-LP coming soon with the intriguing title: Nocturnal Koreans. Here is a taster track and very good it is too. Wire are getting close to their 40th anniversary, they have largely avoided becoming a punk nostalgia act which would have been lucrative for them – instead they make music they like, put it out and play it live (and indeed if you see them live most of the set will be new or relatively new stuff) –
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In the miserable 1970s, when many people had to make do with cashing a giro, cold porridge and a single-bar electric fire, The Fine Art Department at Leeds University encouraged its students to indulge in fierce debate. Right in the centre of a working-class northern city, the “fookin’ stewdents” lounged around in the Fenton pub, discussing Marxist theory and spending their grants on copious amounts of alcohol. The spirited arguments were often settled with a fight.
It was this environment that spawned The Mekons, Gang of Four and Delta 5. They thrived on friction, their music was a product of their ‘theory’ and their purpose was to be ‘ideologically sound’. They knew they were out of step with the people around them but they didn’t care if they were provocative.
The Mekons were a shambolic, loose collective based on the theory that anyone could do it. People wandered on and off stage. One gig descended into complete chaos, as opposed to routine chaos, because each band member had been given a different set list. They should never have made a record but they did and the NME loved them.
Delta 5 included Mekon girlfriends. Their songs depicted sour relationships » Continue Reading.
