Ducklings at Red Rocks

 

Try to hurt no-one as you wouldn't hurt yourself

Thursday music corner: Ken Boothe (b. Kingston, 1948) and Joe Higgs (b Kingston 1940, d. Los Angeles 1999) recorded A Message Of Old for a single release on the Coxsone Records label operated by Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd in 1967, as the flip-side of the single Run Boy Run by Dudley Sibley. This powerful ska gospel track appeared on the 2005 compilation Studio One Roots 2, alongside tracks by Cedric 'Im' Brooks, Willie Williams & The Sound Dimension and Count Ossie & The Zion All Stars.

Ken Boothe would later go on to chart success with the number 1 UK hit Everything I Own in 1974.

Joe Higgs & Ken Boothe - A Message Of Old (1967)

See also:

Music: Ken Boothe - Everything I Own (live on TOTP, 1974)

Music: Joe Higgs - There Is A Reward For Me (live, 1977)

Music: Dudley Sibley - Run Boy Run (1967)

Disappointed by the present, but knowing there's no going back

Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require [...]: that when forward motion became impossible, ambitious culture was going to have to take another shape. [Amy] Winehouse, as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered: "She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: 'Listen to this, listen to this.... "") She was living through, and channeling into "Back to Black," the initial dissolution of history into streams of digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further from the present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those fragments but never indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the present but knew there was no going back. And at enormous personal cost, she created something enduring out of it, showing how much harder it would be to leave a real mark amid fathomless data - to transcend mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.

If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or "history of spirit," as the German idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and it is possible after. The most ambitious abstract painters working today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something akin to Winehouse's free articulation: drawing from diverse and even contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects. Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, "Flights," as a constellation of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last century's novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a mosaic than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads of trap, reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix aggregations of small pieces, like "Back to Black," that are digital in every way that matters. All of them are speaking out of parts of the past in a language that is their own.

- Jason Farago, 'Why Culture Has Come To A Standstill', New York Times, 10 October 2023

Johnny thinks the world would be right if it could buy truth from him

Thursday music corner: Robert Palmer (1949-2003) was an English rock singer who achieved success both as a solo artist and as part of the Power Station, and was best known for a brace of highly popular 1980s pop singles, Addicted To Love, which topped the US pop chart in 1986, and Simply Irresistible, which was just kept from the top spot in 1988. He spent his childhood until the age of 12 in Malta, and first came to prominence co-fronting the band Vinegar Joe with Elkie Brooks.

Johnny & Mary appears on Palmer's sixth studio album, Clues, which was released in August 1980. Its synth-pop / new wave style fits well with the album's collaboration with Gary Numan - a cover of Numan's own I Dream Of Wires - and Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz, who guests on the album's first single, Looking For Clues. Johnny & Mary reached the top 20 of pop charts in Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany, and it topped the charts in Spain.

Robert Palmer - Johnny & Mary (1980)

See also:

Music: Robert Palmer - Looking For Clues (1980)

Music: Tom Tom Club - Under The Boardwalk (1982)

Music: Joe Jackson Band - I'm The Man (live, 1980)

Louise Brooks on working with Pandora's Box director GW Pabst

Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead. Most Hollywood directors did not understand that, any more than they understood why an actor might be tempted to withhold the rapt devotion to the master which they considered essential to their position of command. When I went to Berlin to film Pandora's Box [in 1928], what an exquisite release, what a revelation of the art of direction, was the Pabst spirit on the set! He actually encouraged actors' disposition to hate and back away from each other, and thus preserved their energy for the camera; and when actors were not in use, his ego did not command them to sit up and bark at the sight of him. The behavior of Fritz Kortner was a perfect example of how Pabst used an actor's true feelings to add depth and breadth and power to his performance. Kortner hated me. After each scene with me, he would pound off the set and go to his dressing room. Pabst himself, wearing his most private smile, would go there to coax him back for the next scene. In the role of Dr. Schön, Kortner had feelings for me (or for the character Lulu) that combined sexual passion with an equally passionate desire to destroy me. One sequence gave him an opportunity to shake me with such violence that he left ten black-and-blue fingerprints on my arms. Both he and Pabst were well pleased with that scene, because Pabst's feelings for me, like Kortner's, were not unlike those of Schön for Lulu. I think that in the two films Pabst made with me - Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl - he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object of conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work. He was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.

- Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, New York, 1982, p.97-8.

We're afraid of everyone, afraid of the sun

Thursday music corner: John Winston Ono Lennon (1940-80) released three experimental album collaborations with Yoko Ono in 1968 and 1969, but the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album released in December 1970 was his first solo album proper. The album's only single, Mother, was released just after Christmas 1970 and reached number 43 on the US charts and number 12 in Canada. (It didn't chart in the UK). The album was a companion piece to the experimental Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band, released at the same time.

Isolation is the closing track of side A of John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band. Its lyrics explore the vulnerability and uncertainty affecting Lennon as he emerged from the world-straddling fame of the Beatles and attempted to devise a new life with his wife and muse, Yoko Ono.

John Lennon - Isolation (Raw Studio Mix, 1970)

See also:

Music: John Lennon - Watching The Wheels (1981)

Music: Sean Ono Lennon - Isolation (live, 2020)

Music: Julian Lennon - Love Don't Let Me Down (2023)

Milo, king of the jungle

 

I came prepared for absolution, if you'd only ask

Thursday music corner: Boygenius are a trio of well-known female indie singer-songwriters, who joined forces in 2018: Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, who between them have issued eight solo studio albums. Their initial release together was a self-titled 2018 EP comprising six tracks, three of which were issued as singles: Bite the Hand, Me & My Dog, and Stay Down. 

Cool About It, here performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, is co-written by all three band members and appears on their first full-length album, The Record, which was released on 31 March 2023. The band has recently played northern hemisphere music festivals Coachella, Pukkelpop (Belgium), Connect (UK) and Rock en Seine (France). Bridgers has also been opening for Taylor Swift on her 2023 Eras Tour.   

Boygenius - Cool About It (live, 2023)

See also:

Music: Phoebe Bridgers - I Know The End (live at Glastonbury, 2022)

Music: Lucy Dacus - I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore (2015)

Music: Julien Baker - Funeral Pyre (2017)