From: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org (seven-seas-digest) To: seven-seas-digest@smoe.org Subject: seven-seas-digest V4 #208 Reply-To: seven-seas@smoe.org Sender: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org Precedence: bulk seven-seas-digest Wednesday, June 22 2005 Volume 04 : Number 208 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 14:53:38 +0100 (BST) From: "Anne Ronan \(nee Gleeson\)" Subject: Re: seven-seas Festivals I still haven't made it to Glasontbury - maybe some day.... But I don't really mind festivals - you make them what you want, really. I remember the Fleadh one year in California - it was absolutely perfect weather and my best friend and I found a quiet little corner of grass just outside the tent where Richard Thompson was playing. We lay on the grass, Guinness in hand, and listened to the set in the sunshine and it was just pure bliss.... I'm not one to be in the middle of a throng whether it's 300, 3,000 or 30,000 - I just like to take in the atmosphere in my own little way. :) Anne xxx - --- Raj wrote: > There are festivals and then there's Glastonbury, a > totally unique event. > It's not just about the music and who's playing and > if it's going to be a > muddy or hot. It's the atmosphere that is conjured > up with the special > location and history of the place. You literally > feel the weight of the > world lift from your shoulders as you walk in. > > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-seven-seas@smoe.org > [mailto:owner-seven-seas@smoe.org] On Behalf > Of Red > Sent: 22 June 2005 13:35 > To: seven-seas@smoe.org > Subject: RE: seven-seas Will Sergeant Interview [1 > of 2] > > At 08:28 AM 6/22/05, you wrote: > > >Thanks for that, K.S.. I may be wrong, but if that > doesn't give you > >goosebumps, you're in the wrong place. > > > I hate festies...........but if there were only 300 > people there > then I wouldn't exactly call that a 'festie' in the > terms of today's > standard. ;-) I'd never go to one of those 75,000 > people things. > That doesn't give me goosebumps! No. What Will > described sounded > great tho! > > Red > > > > ===================================================================== > Bunnymen Online Presence: > http://www.bunnymenlist.com * > http://www.bunnymen.info > * > http://www.bunnymen.com * > http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ > * > http://bunnymen.nexuswebs.net/ * > http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ > * > http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 > * > http://www.neonhalos.blogspot.com > > ====================================================================== > > > > ===================================================================== > Bunnymen Online Presence: > http://www.bunnymenlist.com * > http://www.bunnymen.info > * > http://www.bunnymen.com * > http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ > * > http://bunnymen.nexuswebs.net/ * > http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ > * > http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 > * > http://www.neonhalos.blogspot.com > > ====================================================================== ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://bunnymen.nexuswebs.net/ * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * http://www.neonhalos.blogspot.com ====================================================================== ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 09:53:55 -0400 From: "Zap" Subject: Fw: BOUNCE seven-seas@smoe.org: Message too long (>7000 chars) Received: from carmela.hpnx.com (carmela.hpnx.com [65.100.84.3]) by smoe.org (8.12.10/8.12.10) with SMTP id j3QL2U6V002462 for ; Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:02:30 -0400 (EDT) Received: (qmail 1398 invoked by uid 89); 26 Apr 2005 21:02:24 -0000 Message-ID: <20050426210224.1397.qmail@carmela.hpnx.com> From: "Kristin Smith" To: seven-seas@smoe.org Subject: [2 of 2] post-punk history article Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:02:24 +1200 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; format=flowed X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on jane.smoe.org X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Virus-Scanned: clamdscan / ClamAV version 0.60 X-Greylist: IP, sender and recipient auto-whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-1.5.8 (smoe.org [199.201.145.78]); Tue, 26 Apr 2005 17:02:34 -0400 (EDT) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by smoe.org id j3QL2Z6V002481 [2 of 2] For a few millennia after the Big Bang, the universe was dense, turbulent, and unimaginably hot. Post-punk was a bit like that too, seething with activity and dissension. This overheated atmosphere owed a lot to the UK music press. It was almost a structural condition, an inevitable by-product of the competition between the four weekly papers - New Musical Express, Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror - to find the Next Big Thing, along with the equally fierce competition within each magazine between writers looking to make their messianic mark. This greenhouse effect resulted in things like the Pop Group getting on the cover of NME in late 1978 before the punk-funk 'beatniks of tomorrow' from Bristol had even released a single, purely because they'd become emblems of the way forward, ciphers of total possibility. If rock criticism was born in late Sixties America, in the late Seventies it was reborn in the UK. NME, in particular, recalled the original Rolling Stone in the way that it treated rock as the key element in a much broader oppositional culture. The British weekly made connections between music and other artforms (cinema, literature, comics), and between music and politics. Along with features floridly burnishing the mystique of the dead saviour Ian Curtis, or heralding some esoteric outfit currently in heavy rotation on the John Peel show, you'd also find lengthy profiles of Rock Against Racism and its sister organisation the Anti-Nazi League, interviews with politicians like Tony Benn, and investigations of inner-city decay in places like Liverpool. During the late Seventies and early Eighties NME also ran a regular column called Plutonium Blondes about the deployment of US cruise missiles in Britain, along with other nuclear-related issues. There was a palpable sense abroad that nuclear annihilation was a real and impending prospect. This dread was stoked by the renewed frigidity of the Cold War following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 'Evil Empire' rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, as echoed by Margaret Thatcher. She had come to power in May 1979, after a winter of industrial strife that convinced many that the UK's social fabric was disintegrating. The resulting swing to the right was hugely demoralising to the post-punks, who tended to lean to the left of Labour (at that point still home to concepts like the nationalisation of the banks!) and now felt like exiles in their own country. The anxious tenor of the time can be gleaned from a three-part series, 'The Consumer's Guide to 1984', published in NME in late 1980. Written by the late, great Ian MacDonald, the essays undertook a panoramic survey of all the dystopian trends paving the way for the emergence of a police state in Britain. Yet in a weird way, certain aspects of post-punk can be seen as totally in tune with Thatcherite entrepreneurial ideals. Rough Trade, de facto leaders of the independent label movement, wanted to build an alternative culture of music and fanzines free of major label control. Although it was a privately owned company, in its day-to-day operations Rough Trade functioned as a co-operative, with each staff member having equal pay and equal say. Beneath the collectivist patina, Rough Trade and their fellow independent labels were exemplary self-made businessmen to warm the cockles of Maggie's iron heart. Indeed McLaren, who despised the indie ethos, dismissed Rough Trade and their ilk as mere 'grocers' a slur that deftly connected the 'hippie capitalists' in Ladbroke Grove with the 'grocer's daughter' at Number 10 Downing Street. Actually, if the indie labels had politics they were at base neither socialist nor conservative but autonomist. Punk's call to self-empowerment, unleashed an avalanche of self-released music: seven-inch singles with hand-stamped labels and covers folded on the kitchen table, albums released only on cassette and sometimes disseminated gratis on receipt of a blank C60. What Green called 'the squattage industry' unleashed a heap of self-indulgent, sub-Dada drivel and horrible hapless din, of course. But it also generated innumerable one-off strokes of inspiration, too. Some barely-known-back-then figures are currently the focus of cult worship, groups like the Homosexuals and Storm Bugs - neither of whom, despite being a fairly avid consumer of the obscure, I ever heard of, let alone heard, at the time. It is time the story of several thousand of the most pretentious people on the planet at one time was told. Pretentiousness, of course, being a good thing, in my book. Far better to over-reach than to aim low; as Adam Ant sang in 'Prince Charming', ridicule is nothing to be scared of. B7 'Rip it up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984' is published by Faber at B#12.99. Miranda Sawyer The author and critic recalls that era as the time of Shalamar, Howard Jones - and Kajagoogoo 'I can remember watching Top of the Pops in summer 1982, when ABC performed 'The Look of Love', and Martin Fry wore a gold suit. I thought they were great. But on the same show, Shalamar's 'A Night to Remember' played, and the group's Jeffrey Daniels, in pointy fringe and suit with nothing underneath, gave the nation's teenagers their first demonstration of body-popping. He was absolutely, unbelievably fantastic. 'These days, it's okay to appreciate ABC's pop wit and charm, but to say you like Shalamar's soapy soul is unacceptable. But 1978-1984 was just as full of rubbish pop as any other time, and its younger fans (I was 11 in 1978) were no more discerning than they are today. At different stages, I worshipped the Specials, Frankie and Orange Juice. But I also loved Howard Jones and Kajagoogoo (pictured). I heard 'Too Shy' on Timmy Mallett's show and thought, 'That's brilliant! Definitely a Number One!' Gordon Moakes The bassist in Bloc Party, 2005's hot punk-funk quartet, on the Fall, Gang of Four - and even early Simple Minds 'There was something a lot more subversive about the bands that appeared after punk. In fact, post-punk had implications more wide-reaching than punk, in the sense that it shaped pop music. And while people think of post-punk as a very particular kind of thing - dance punk music - all of the bands involved were trying to do something different, from the Slits and Joy Division to the Fall (pictured) and Talking Heads. 'I was a huge Simple Minds fan as a teenager - I loved their trad rock years at first. But then I heard their early work, records like Empires and Dance, and I was astonished by their freshness. 'Then, of course, there's Gang of Four. My brother got me into them, like, 10 years ago when they weren't cool. I was really intrigued. Strangely, though our percussive guitar sounds are kind of reminiscent of Gang of Four, our guitarist (Russell Lissack) knew nothing about them until recently.' Post-punk's best albums The Slits, Cut With Ari Up's wonky warble stapled to itchy guitars and skanky bass, this should have proved to be the birth of a genre. PiL, Metal Box Death disco and dread dub encased in a grey film canister that made it tricky to remove the three vinyl discs without damage. The Fall, Early Years 77-79 The Fall at their sulphate-scorched peak, from the rockabilly-ish 'Fiery Jack' to the eldritch 'Rowche Rumble'. Scritti Politti, Early The group's self-deconstructing, 'scratchy-collapsy' music deliciously complicates Green's gorgeous way with melody. Gang of Four, Entertainment! Stringent funk + unsentimental dissections of the mysteries of love = post-punk landmark. Talking Heads, Remain In Light From the jerky 'Psycho Killer' to the funkadelia of Remain..., no post-punk band travelled so far so swiftly. Orange Juice, The Glasgow School Sparkly guitars midway between Chic and Loaded-era Velvets jostle with Edwyn Collins's schoolboy warble. Cabaret Voltaire, The Living Legends From Yorkshire garage punk to Eastern Bloc dub, this compiles the Sheffield trio's classic singles. The Associates, Fourth Drawer Down Glam reborn: Roxy's For Your Pleasure meets Bowie's Low for a tour de force of glacial yet torrid Teutonica. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Once Upon A Time - The Singles Glam reborn #2: The icy Siouxsie rides a sound indebted to the Velvets and Psycho's shower scene. ===================================================================== Bunnymen Online Presence: http://www.bunnymenlist.com * http://www.bunnymen.info * http://www.bunnymen.com * http://www.fotolog.net/sgtfuzz/ * http://bunnymen.nexuswebs.net/ * http://www.angelfire.com/wy2/discog/ * http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-887128-89-6 * http://www.neonhalos.blogspot.com ====================================================================== ------------------------------ End of seven-seas-digest V4 #208 ********************************