Is that a year already? Blimey, Jings and Odds Bodkins! I have a thousand excuses for not osting anything for so long, but I won't bore you with them.
Stand by for some new posts soon. Meanwhile, to keep you occupied, here are some classic women's punk clips I've found recently,
Featuring Viv Albertine
Au Revoir...
"Yeah Yeah ... Uh, No: Exploring the Audiovisual Phenomenon of Beatles-Lookalike Long Playing Albums"
Entertaining and informative, I think you'll agree. So we can forgive the huge gaff about Capital's Meet The Beatles being the first US Beatles album, when any fool can tell you that Vee-Jay's shoddy Introducing the Beatles hit the shops a full ten days earlier, on 10 January 1964. Tut.
Where the hell have I been?
There's nothing more shameful than the Neglectful Blogger's Hat that I've been wearing for tha last few months. I have no real excuses. Even worse, I'm only posting this so that I can tweet — and, erm, 'book? face? Is there a single-syllable put-it-on-facebook verb yet? — this bit of video.
I promise I'll be back soon with some posts of substance.
Fame is fickle, and history is fickler. More fickle. Ficklest. Anyway, what role will people think of when they hear the name Rita Moreno, in a thousand years time?
Will it be Anita, in West Side Story? Zelda the snitch in Singing in the Rain? Googie Gomez ("Hot Bitches") in Dick Lester's 1973 bath-house farce The Ritz? Compassionate Sister Peter Marie in Oz?
So Lilly Gave to Solly, just what Billy gave to Molly.
No of course not. Here's the performance that will last a thousand years. Here is a touch of distilled musical genius. Here is her crowning achievement: playing Lilly in the Electric Company's Billy Lick A Lolly. Got a hangover? Turn the volume right up: this will burn right through it, pal.
Blossom Dearie is no more: http://tinyurl.com/bs2zj6
Here's her wonderful I Walk A Little Faster:
Hey Fred! I fixed it!
This blog’s getting a little too valedictory. Goodbye Blossom. I walk a little slower.
Lux Interior 1948–2009
Well when I die don't you burry me at all,
Just nail my bones up on the wall,
Beneath these bones let these words be seen,
“This is the bloody gears of a boppin’ machine”
—“Rockin’ Bones”
Here’s an old documentary on the Rezillos I found on Google video.
I was a big Rezillos fan back in the late seventies, and I've seen them a couple of times since they reformed. If anything, I'd say they were now even better: Faye & Eugene's singing voices are certainly more powerful, and richer, too. And I'd forgotten what a good guitarist Jo "Luke Warm" Callis is, in that lead-and-rhythm-together style of, I dunno, erm, Mick Green? Wilko Johnson? (music journalism hat falls off).
And —swoon— I got to stand next to Faye & Eugene in the audience at the last Bis Christmas show at Oran Mor. Too starstruck to actually say anything, though.
Anyway here they are being interviewed in 2001, before they reformed, talking about the band's history, including their intermediate "Revillos" project. With some hard-to-find archive footage.
To watch in a bigger window, or download it, go to Google video here.
Go Raj!
I reckon the death of the Mighty Oliver Postgate will be all over the web for the next few days: or at least the Blighty Web. I couldn’t let the occasion pass without comment, but I don't want to just repeat what everyone else is saying: “Blah blah Bagpuss blah blah great loss blah blah distinctive voice blah blah narrator of our collective childhoods blah blah grandson of George blah blah soup dragon blah blah Peter Firmin blah blah Nogbad the Bad blah blah.”
So instead here's his cousin, Angela Lansbury, on the George Gobel Show in 1956.
Why have I posted this inconsequential stuff? Well I actually wanted to post a long and fascinating interview with Angela which is available chopped up into chunks on YouTube, but embedding's disabled, so you'll have to click here to see it.
And if you want to experience Oliver’s powerful, magical voice, here's the start of the BBC's Alchemists of Sound, a documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, narrated by the late, great Mr. Angela Lansbury’s Cousin.
The whole programme is on YouTube, in chunks. And Don’t get me started on the blessed Delia...
I went to a double birthday last Saturday night (Hi Bryan! Hi Alison!), and as I often do, made up a mix CD to give as a cheapskate-but-personal present to both parties. No discernible theme here: it's a catholic mixture of stuff I've found and liked recently. Mostly cheesy soundtrack instrumentals, with some hillbilly rock, country, calypso, and so on.
In the past, I would make up a couple of dozen copies of my mix CDs for distribution among friends, but I'm doing it via the WibblyWobblyWomb this time for various reasons:
So here's Hippy Bardot via Rapidshare
Download ZIP archive (79.7 MB).
Track list
The cover and title are a variation on the classic “Hippo Birdy Two Ewes” birthday card, with my own mix of pictures. I used a Photo of Bryan himself on his copy: but I couldn't get my hands on a picture of Alison, so had to substitute a picture of the most famous Alison I could think of: Ms. Goldfrapp. That's the version included here.
I don't have the time or inclination to make every track available in playable form on this page, but I had to give you at least one: here's the gloriously, monotonously daft The Mechanical Man by Bent Bolt & The Nuts:
Listen:
Download Bent Bolt & The Nuts – The Mechanical Man MP3 (rapidshare)
Thanks to all my various sources (mostly in the I Don’t Hate list on the right).
Note for Bébé and Alison Goldfrapp fans, who might have googled there way to this article: no material from Brigitte or Alison is included.
“Maybe it wasn’t very good, but it was awful loud, wasn’t it?” — Jean Shepard.
The gateway Trio are an example of American mainstream folk music in the early sixties, before Bobby, Joan and their bath-avoiding beatnik buddies stormed the citadel. It's the sort of clean-cut, button-down, blue-eyed balderdash that is parodied so, – I dunno, what's sweet and sour at the same time? Sour Gums? – so tartaric-acidly, by Christopher Guest and troupe in A Mighty Wind.
It's from the same cheap & cheesy movie (Hootenanny Hoot) as my previous Johnny Cash Clip. The plot is the eternal movie musical standby: putting on a show. In this case, the show is a Hootenanny Circus. Which I suppose should go some way to explaining why the Gateways are performing... while gently bobbing on a trampoline. have a look:
Download The Gateway Trio – Foolish Questions AVI (rapidshare)
If, for some unaccountable reason, you want to know more about them there's a pocket biography here. Looks like they're still going, too (probably not on the trampoline, though) if the old geezers on this site are the same band.
Johnny Cash? Yes, I've been a big fan of the man in Black for decades. I'm in a tiny minority of Cash fans, though: I really didn't think much of the Rick Rubin American Recordings period. The whole project struck me as a mixture of novelty ("Listen to this old guy sings songs written by young guys!") and car-crash ("Listen to how frail he's getting! How much longer can he last?"). "Hurt" I particularly detested. Lyrically, the song is soaked in egotistical self-pity, expressing a young man's callow emotions, full of self-regard, but without the maturity and reflection to realise that this self-regard is the main obstacle to the resolution of his pain. Such callow words sound frankly grotesque in the mouth of an aging, reflective man like Cash.
So enough of this: time for a bit of vintage Johnny, singing "Frankie & Johnny" from Hootennany Hoot!, a frankly farcical let's-put-a-show-on-right-here musical made in 1963.
Download Johnny Cash – Frankie & Johnny MP3 (rapidshare)
The magic number is
