Du venin qui me fait mal au cœur

Thursday music corner: French avant-garde pop duo Les Rita Mitsouko burst onto their national pop scene in 1985 with their number 2 single Marcia Baila, the video for which featured exemplary 1980s choreography and a myriad of stunning costumes from Jean-Paul Gaultier. Their stylish, jagged 1980s art-pop was augmented by another impressive video for 1986’s hook-laden single C'est comme ça ('It's like that'), which later won Music Video of the Year for director Jean-Baptiste Mondino at the Victoires de la Musique. (Mondino's other well-known music videos include Don Henley's Boys of Summer, Open Your Heart by Madonna, and Neneh Cherry's Manchild). C'est comme ça was the second single from their second album, The No Comprendo, which was recorded with legendary producer Tony Visconti in both London and Paris. It reached number 10 in the French charts. Les Rita Mitsouko played together until the death from cancer of member Fred Chichin in 2007; his partner Catherine Ringer then continued with a solo career.

Les Rita Mitsouko – C'est comme ça (1986)

Mangere Mountain

 

Ruapehu summer

 

Mt Ruapehu from south of Waiouru, 24 December 2021

When you come back home and you find me waiting there

Thursday music corner: Don McGlashan and Harry Sinclair's The Front Lawn was a musical theatre duo formed in 1985, and who released two albums, one in 1989 and the second in 1993. By the time their first album was recorded they had been joined in the group temporarily by Jennifer Ward-Lealand. 

Their first album, Songs from the Front Lawn, features the classic New Zealand single When You Come Back Home as its opening track. The album also features the ebullient Tomorrow Night, which featured in a karaoke scene in the Wellington pool-playing caper film Stickmen (2001), and Andy, which was written in memory of McGlashan’s late brother. Andy appears in the APRA ‘Top 100 New Zealand songs of all time’ list. In the 1989 New Zealand Music Awards the Front Lawn won three awards for Most Promising Group, Best Film Soundtrack/Compilation, and International Achievement.

Don McGlashan, formerly of punk outfit Blam Blam Blam, went on to found the Muttonbirds, which achieved great success in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has performed solo since 2003. Harry Sinclair has directed three feature films: Topless Women Talk About Their Lives (1997), The Price of Milk (2000) and Toy Love (2002). He directed the TV series ‘90210’ in 2009 and 2010, and in his acting career gained a place in history as the ancient king Isildur in the opening sequences of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Front Lawn – When You Come Back Home (1989)

No longer riding on the merry-go-round

Thursday music corner: John Winston Ono Lennon (1940-80) moved to the US in 1971. In 1980 he released his fifth album with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, which was his return to recording after five years on hiatus in New York, spent raising his son Sean. The album featured Lennon numbers (Just Like) Starting Over, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), Woman, plus the track Watching the Wheels as the opening number on Side 2. Yoko Ono’s compositions also featured, alternating with Lennon’s. He had started writing Watching the Wheels in 1977, and over the years its title evolved from Emotional Wreck, to People, and then to I’m Crazy, before settling on the final title. Three weeks after the album was released in November 1980, Lennon was murdered outside his Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. Watching the Wheels, which had coalesced into a proudly sweet statement of familial self-content, was released as a poignant posthumous single. It reached number 10 in the Billboard chart, and number 30 in the UK singles chart, but only number 44 in New Zealand.

John Lennon – Watching the Wheels (recorded 1980, released 1981)

See also:

Blog: The last time Paul saw John, 20 September 2015

Blog: There was a kind of mischief about her, 5 December 2013

Blog: John, your little friend is here, 10 February 2010

The itinerant life of a tramp steamer

By contrast with liners, tramps were the maids-of-all-work among steamships. They made up two-thirds of the British merchant fleet - and perhaps of all ocean-going steamships. By the end of the [19th] century, the vast proportion of bulk goods that travelled by sea would have crossed the ocean in tramps. Liners ran to a schedule with fixed ports of call. Tramps went wherever they could find a freight contract. A large proportion of British-owned tramps plied in the 'cross-trades', returning but rarely to Britain. Their freights were usually 'rough cargo' of the kind avoided by liners: coal, rails, grain, rice, metal ores. They had to accept the great fluctuations in freight rates as the price of sailing with a holdful of cargo.

The voyage of the Bengal in 1880-81 was not untypical. It sailed from Cardiff in September 1880 for Port Suez at the head of the Red Sea with a holdful of coal. From there it went on to Jeddah (the captain having wisely obtained a chart of the Red Sea), carrying pilgrims for Mecca. There it took on returning hajis bound for Penang and Singapore, where it stopped to refuel. By February 1881 the Bengal was at Yokohama and then Kobe in Japan for a cargo of tea to New York. Rather than sail home round Cape Horn, the captain looked for additional freight, calling first at Shanghai and then at the emigrant ports of Amoy and Hong Kong. There he found a 'cargo' of 'deck-passengers' heading for Singapore, the great migrant destination in South East Asia. By late March the Bengal was at Aden, whence it sailed for Gibraltar via the Suez Canal, and from there to Halifax and New York to deliver its tea. It finally reached London, loaded with American grain, June 1881.

- John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalisation in the Age of Steam 1830-1930, London, 2020, p.148-9.

See also:
Blog: And after shipwreck driven upon this shore, 7 October 2015
Blog: Repairing the Kaitaki, 23 June 2013
Blog: The lifeblood of a young colony, 12 June 2009

It's gonna take patience and time to do it right

Thursday music corner: Youthful R&B artist James Ray first recorded as Little Jimmy Ray because he was just five feet tall. After a period of poverty and homelessness, he attained his first success in 1962 with his release of Rudy Clark’s waltz-timed song If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody, which was a top 10 hit on the Billboard R&B charts and made number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts. That song would soon enter the Beatles’ repertoire after Paul McCartney heard it playing in Brian Epstein’s NEMS store in Liverpool; it later charted in the UK thanks to a version by Freddie and the Dreamers.

Got My Mind Set On You, another Clark composition, was first heard by Beatle George Harrison on his 1963 solo visit to the US, six months before the band’s culture-redefining Ed Sullivan Show appearances. During a visit to his sister in rural Illinois Harrison discovered Ray’s album, which features the song. Ray’s career was sadly cut short by his death in New York from a drug overdose in 1963, aged only 22. (Rudy Clark would go on to write The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss), a major hit for Betty Everett in 1964 and Cher in 1990).

Twenty-four years later Harrison recorded his own version of Got My Mind Set On You, which became his third and final solo number-one single on the US charts. Harrison’s cover also topped the pop charts in Australia, Belgium, Canada and Ireland, and in New Zealand it reached number 4. The song was kept from the number-one spot in the UK charts by T’Pau’s China In Your Hand. Reflecting its ubiquity, Harrison’s version was parodied by Weird Al Yankovic’s 1988 song (This Song’s Just) Six Words Long. Ray’s version returned to prominence in 2021 with its inclusion in Edgar Wright’s soundtrack for his swinging-London horror film, Last Night in Soho, featuring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Dame Diana Rigg.

James Ray – Got My Mind Set On You (1962)

Baby don't you know it makes me blow my mind

Thursday music corner: Los Angeles band Fenwyck recorded this Keith and Linda Colley-penned, genially psychedelic pop gem for the Challenge label. Fenwyck’s recording failed to trouble the charts when it was released in the northern summer of 1967, but the song did attain greater prominence when it was covered on the B-side of The American Breed’s hit, Bend Me, Shape Me, which reached number 5 in the US charts in early 1968, and topped the Listener's pop chart in New Zealand.

Challenge Records was most famous for The Champs' 1958 hit Tequila. One of Challenge's two co-founders in 1957 was cowboy singer Gene Autry, although he sold his share the following year.

Fenwyck – Mindrocker (1967)

The Traills of Stewart Island

On the island of Rousay [in the Orkneys] there were interpretation boards about the Traill family: unjust Victorian lairds, imperial military adventurers, emigrants. Among the family's many destinations was New Zealand. In 1900 one of the furthest travelled of the Traills, Charles, finished up in Stewart Island/Rakiura, at the opposite extremity of the British imperial world, after trying his luck in the Californian gold fields and in Australia. He must have been another isle-o-phile, having travelled the span of the globe to make his home on another island, off an island, off a continent.

His half-brother Walter, who grew up on the Fife coast, retired to join him there after a life at sea catching seals. Another Orkney islander, Arthur Traill, was the local schoolteacher and Justice of the Peace.

Some years later E. and I made it together to Stewart Island, following an eighteen-month journey, by motor cycle, that began in Orkney. The resonances in the landscape between the northern and southern extremities of our journey were profound. As we sailed south from the ferry port of Bluff, albatrosses swooped over the waves around the ferry. There was a park there named for the Traills, in the settlement called Oban.

Like that albatross in Unst, it felt as if the Traills were in search not just of an island to call home, but an island climate brutal enough for their comfort; the names of the settlements reflected not only Orcadian influence, but that of Shetlanders. 

- Gavin Francis, Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession, Edinburgh, 2020

See also:

Blog: The influence of Chinese sage Lao Tzu on Scottish League One football, 11 December 2014

Blog: The character and attachments of a Scotchman, 3 November 2012

Blog: Campbell Island & the transit of Venus, 25 July 2011

In walked the village idiot and his face was all aglow

Thursday Music Corner: Eleven-time Grammy winner Linda Ronstadt emerged from the folk music scene to broad appeal in the 1970s across the country, rock and pop genres with hits like Blue Bayou and the chart-topper You’re No Good. Here she performs one of her Warren Zevon covers, Mohammad’s Radio, live in Texas. The song, which is about the redemptive power of music, appeared on Ronstadt’s ninth studio album, Living in the USA. Released in 1978, it was the third of her run of three albums in a row that topped the Billboard album charts. Now aged 75, due to a degenerative condition Ronstadt has been unable to sing since around 2011.

The much-loved Warren Zevon died of cancer in 2003, having never achieved breakthrough success as a solo artist, but having long impressed with his inventive, wry rock writing. His one legitimate hit was the witty Werewolves of London, but other well-known tracks included Poor Poor Pitiful Me (also covered by Ronstadt), Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner and Excitable Boy.

Linda Ronstadt – Mohammed’s Radio (Live in Houston, 1978)

Film Festival 2021 roundup

A second Film Festival affected by Covid-19, but it's been a relief to be able to enjoy seeing the cinematic offerings in the cinema here in Wellington, rather than at home on-demand. Social distancing may have meant the Embassy Grand wasn't as full as in a normal year, but at least it has meant a reasonable number of people were able to see the festival in the way it was meant to be enjoyed. 

As with last year, I didn't aim to match my usual target of seeing 20 films in the fest; instead, we selected a highlights package of eight films. By accident rather than design, four were by women directors. With the recent resignation of the festival director, it will be interesting to see what changes if any emerge in the 2022 festival; perhaps there won't be many, as a year of consolidation will be needed to recover from the financial losses brought on by unavoidable disruption and a dearth of headline titles to screen. My only wishlist item is that the new director should consider bringing back the much-loved tradition of the festival programme cover art, which was a highlight of each year's programme release. 

===

Miss Marx (dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli, Italy, 2020)

Romola Garai is on good form as always in the lead role as Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, a lifelong socialist and feminist activist in the second half of the 19th century. Susanna Nicchiarelli's European co-production is an excellent companion-piece to Raoul Peck's 2017 The Young Marx, in that it adeptly depicts both the political and the personal trials of a 19th century socialist, agitating for social change against a backdrop of severe social strictures, and as Eleanor discovers, the stifling hand of patriarchal hypocrisy that meant nearly all women without independent means were beholden to their husbands for their place in life, or in Eleanor's case, her 'husband', because the unfaithful and untrustworthy Edward Aveling never married her. With flashes of intentionally anachronistic punk energy, and carefully-chosen yet pointed monologues to camera, the director avoids the pitfalls of strict faithfulness to a simple recounting of life events, and offers an informative depiction of a trailblazing, and sadly too-short, life.


Bergman Island (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, France/Sweden, 2021)

A rumination on the experience of film (and filmed) tourism with an engaging cast and beautifully shot in Ingmar Bergman territory near the Swedish island of Gotland. It's not a criticism to say that there's a certain lack of resolution to the narrative, but writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve retains the viewer's interest offers some appealing glimpses into the frustrations of the creative process, particularly when presented with the pressure of an ostensibly 'inspiring environment' in which to work, in the shadow of a genius. I suppose for me the main limitation of the film is it's not clear if Chris' film-within-a-film is actually a good idea. We presume so because we like Vicky Krieps and Mia Wasikowska; but is this giving the idea too much credit? And the age difference between Krieps & Tim Roth is 22 years; she's only one year older than his Hefner Age. I accept though that this indicates I'm totally missing the point.


Zola (dir. Janicza Bravo, USA, 2020)

This is a film that makes all the Florida jokes in The Good Place feel like documentary reportage. A raucous burst of rude energy and a deft blend of mounting peril offset with genuine hilarity, Zola is a too-good-to-be-(mostly)-true recounting of a Florida long-weekend gone wrong, replete with unreliable narrators and wry asides. Aside from the performances of the central cast, cinematography by Australian Ari Wegner (Lady Macbeth, The Power of the Dog, True History of the Kelly Gang) and music by Mica Levi (Under the Skin, Jackie, Monos) are particular highlights of this giddy ride through the sleepless nights of sultry, sleazy Tampa.


The Hand of God (dir. Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2021)

A rambling, amiable slice of 1980s nostalgia set amongst a Neapolitan family, focusing in particular on the youthful Fabio and his attempts to find a purpose in life and deal with unimaginable loss. Lensed with a real sense of affection for the city, and framed with a metaphysical device (the visitation of a saint manifested to do cryptic good deeds) and the real-life historical earthquake in which Diego Maradona was famously bought by Napoli from Barcelona for an enormous sum, thereby revitalising the team. This divine intervention theme isn't developed thoroughly, and some of the film feels baggy in places, as if the writer-director is loath to discard any remnants of his autobiographical memories. But the ride is still thoroughly enjoyable with its clan of bickering relations, warring neighbours, and amidst it all, a teenager trying to find his place in the world.


My Salinger Year (dir. Philippe Falardeau, Canada, 2020)

A pleasant if occasionally predictable autobiographical tale of a young woman's entry into the New York literary publishing scene in the mid-1990s, intersecting with JD Salinger's plans to release long-awaited material after years of seclusion. Margaret Qualley does well in the lead role without much to work with, and the script's interludes with her character's entertainingly self-centred boyfriend offer some rueful comedic diversion. It's also nice to see Seána Kerslake, who gave such a strong performance in the title role of 2016's A Date For Mad Mary, and Douglas Booth (Percy Bysshe Shelley in Mary Shelley) in this Canadian-Irish co-production.


Snakeskin (dir. Gillian Ashurst, New Zealand, 2001

Great to see this again after two decades and to enjoy writer-director Gillian Ashurst's cross-cultural road movie, in which the ever-engaging Melanie Lynskey's adventure-hungry Alice, who is bored rigid by New Zealand's peace and security, finds mysterious (and broadly cliched) American traveller Seth (Boyd Kestner) offers thrills and danger in spades. Along for the ride are a likeable supporting cast including Dean O'Gorman as Alice's clean-cut would-be boyfriend, the never knowingly under-acting Oliver Driver as a frankly histrionic skinhead with a mile-wide grudge, and a crew of somewhat amateurish pot dealers including Taika Waititi (then Taika Cohen). It all gets a bit silly in the end, but given how hard it was to get local films made around the turn of the century, this is a credible and entertaining addition to the canon; file alongside Topless Women Talk About Their Lives (1997), The Price of Milk (2000) and Stickmen (2001) as titles worthy of greater profile.


Written on the Wind (dir. Douglas Sirk, USA, 1956)

A spectacular visual feast on the big screen, and a hefty shot of wardrobe porn for the frustrated housewives of mid-1950s America, Written on the Wind is a genuinely entertaining slice of melodrama, and an object lesson that in 1956, the consequences of a woman who shags around is obviously a mini death-wave sweeping across Texas as everyone expires from sheer disgust. Also, when you make a short trip to the cigarette shop, make sure to come back with at least a few hours' worth of ciggies, so at least four packs. Aside from the glamourous, dead-serious cast (Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, and the Oscar-winning Dorothy Malone), who are all doing good work with the frothy material, I'd like to put in special mention for two simply amazing sportscars that signify the uber-wealth of the film's Hadley oil clan: Stack's bright yellow 1953 Allard J2X deathtrap coupe, and Malone's fire-engine red 1955 Woodill Wildfire convertible, which is obviously ideal for picking up dodgy toyboys in.


Hit the Road (dir. Panah Panahi, Iran, 2021)

A charmingly bittersweet Iranian family roadtrip whose consistently expert cast, including the services of a remarkably irrepressible yet naturalistic little boy, excel with both the wry, low-level bickering of a long cooped-up car journey, and pathos once it becomes clear to the viewer what the journey is actually for. Think a Middle Eastern Little Miss Sunshine, with an even greater dramatic heft alongside the genuine delights of familial quibbles and niggles. Even the family dog looks like it's having a wonderful time. The film is also replete with a Kiarostami-like reverence for the beautiful Iranian countryside, pleasing touches of well-judged whimsy and a painterly command of framing and composition.

See also:
Blog: Film festival roundup 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 part 1 / part 2, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009

The Royal Pavilion at Brighton

The Pavilion, which had been built for the Prince Regent by Mr Henry Holland, occupied a frontage of four hundred and eighty feet, and stood in ten acres of ground. It had been designed in accordance with a vague idea conceived by the Prince upon being sent a present of some Chinese wallpaper, and startling and original was the result. At first glance the sight seeing visitor might well imagine himself to have strayed into some land of make-believe, so gorgeous and unconventional was the palace. The Greek, the Moorish, and the Russian styles predominated. It was fronted by an Ionic colonnade and entablature; a succession of green-roofed domes and minarets rose above a running battlement that surmounted the upper line of the whole building; and two cones, equal in height to the central and largest dome, crowned each wing. The pinnacles and the minarets, which were placed at every angle of the structure, were made of Bath stone, the rest of the palace of stuccoed brick. In front of each of the wings was an open arcade composed of arches, separated by octagonal columns, and ornamented by trellis-work. The entrance was upon the western side, but the principal front, which Mrs Scattergood and Miss Taverner were gazing at, was to the east, and opened on to a lawn, which was separated from the parade by a low wall, and a dwarf enclosure. A captious critic had once remarked, on first seeing the palace, that it was as though St Paul's had littered, and brought forth a brood of cupolas, but no such profane thought crossed Miss Taverner's mind. If the Pavilion had not been conceived with quite that simplicity of taste which was proper, it was not for her to cavil; she was not to be setting up her judgment in opposition to Mr Holland's.

- Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck, 1935

You're kissing cousins, there's no smoke, no flame

Thursday music corner: British musician Joan Armatrading has released 20 albums in her musical career, and has had three mercurial UK top 40 singles, spanning soul, new wave and pop-rock genres: Love And Affection (1976), Me Myself I (1980) and Drop The Pilot (1983). The joyous, ebullient pop nonsense of Drop The Pilot reached number 11 in the UK charts, and was an even bigger hit in Australia and New Zealand, reaching number 6 in both countries. It also made the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 78. In 2003 the song was covered by Mandy Moore, which will have done wonders for Armatrading's mortgage.

The indefatigable Armatrading, now aged 70, has been nominated for three Grammy Awards, and twice been nominated as Best Female Artist at the BRIT Awards. She was awarded an MBE in 2001 and was appointed as a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2020 for services to music, charity and equal rights.

‘Dropping the Pilot’ is a famous British political cartoon, well-known in both Britain and Germany, published in the satiric magazine Punch in 1890. It depicts Chancellor Otto von Bismarck departing the German ’ship of state’, with the young Kaiser Wilhelm II remaining aboard, looking decidedly unconcerned. The Kaiser had requested the veteran statesman’s resignation 10 days earlier.

Joan Armatrading – Drop The Pilot (w/ the BBC Concert Orchestra, 2021)

A nation cloned by someone else's poetry

Thursday music corner: Englishman Francis Dunnery founded the rock band It Bites in 1982, which released three albums and had a UK top 10 single in 1986 with Calling All The Heroes, before disbanding in 1990. After several years of fast living in Los Angeles Dunnery returned to the UK to work in former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant’s band, including participating in Plant’s Fate of Nations world tour. In 1994 Dunnery released Fearless, his second solo album, with American Life in the Summertime as its opening track, its lyrics referencing the hollow decadence of the Los Angeles music business. Dunnery is still active in the music scene and has released 14 albums to date.

Francis Dunnery – American Life in the Summertime (1994)

The cut sublime

To CUT. (Cambridge.) To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King's College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

- 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 'a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence'

Everybody wants a piece of the action

Thursday music corner: English glam-rockers The Sweet formed in 1968 and achieved major success with hits like Block Buster (1973), The Ballroom Blitz (1973) and Fox on the Run (1975). Action, their 13th UK top 40 single, was released in July 1975 as the follow-up to the no.2 smash Fox on the Run, with lyrics referring to the band’s disgruntlement at their treatment by the British music press. Action later appeared on Sweet’s fourth studio album, Give Us A Wink, which was released in February 1976 and was the first of their albums to be fully written and produced by the band, after previous efforts had relied heavily on songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who wrote hits for many other artists including Suzi Quatro (Can the Can, Devil Gate Drive), Mud (Tiger Feet), Racey (Some Girls) and Smokie (Living Next Door to Alice).

As a historical footnote, The Sweet were not impressed by the strong similarities between their guitar playing in this track and parts of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which was released four months later. And this July 1975 Top of the Pops appearance, in which the band mimes to their single, illustrates the style of the programme at the time, in which bemused young audience members are cheek-by-jowl with the performers and often obscure the camera angles, while the band simulates a live performance, albeit without the guitar and bass being plugged in. Action was the opening performance of this episode, hosted by Radio 1 DJ Noel Edmonds. Other songs performed that evening included Get In The Swing by Sparks, It’s In His Kiss by Linda Lewis, plus children’s novelty act The Wombles with Super Womble. Illustrating the breadth of the show’s family viewing demographic, the episode also featured songs by Bing Crosby (aged 72) and Roger Whittaker (aged 39). Dance services were also provided “for the dads” by the lissom Pan’s People troupe, undulating to Hamilton Bohannon’s funky Foot Stompin’ Music.

The Sweet – Action (1975, ‘live’ on Top of the Pops)

Regency wits

Wit was nowhere more in demand than at fashionable dinner parties. In England, "the agreeable man gets more reputation, more eating, and more drinking, in return for his talk than anywhere else," observed Lord John Russell in 1820. Much of this humour belongs to the "you had to be there" moment and has long since gone stale, especially when read on the printed page, but at its finest it still reveals the kind of intellectual agility and esprit so highly prized by Regency men-about-town. Byron thought Scrope Berdmore Davies "one of the cleverest men I ever knew in Conversation." Beau Brummell once bought a grammar book to help him learn French, and when Davies was asked what progress his friend had made in his studies, he replied that Brummell "had been stopped like Bonaparte in Russia by the Elements." Walter Scott praised Henry Luttrell as "the great London wit." When Thomas Moore commented on the dark complexion of a former hatmaker named Sharpe, as though "the dye of his old trade... had got engrained into his face," Luttrell responded, "Yes... Darkness that may be felt." The poet Samuel Rogers was among many who especially relished the wit of the bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith. "Whenever the conversation is getting dull, he throws in some touch which makes it rebound, and rise again as light as ever," Rogers recollected. Of Luttrell, Smith declared: "[His] idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie to the sound of trumpets." Of his friend Mrs. Grote when she entered the drawing room wearing an enormous, rose-colored turban: "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque." To that same Mrs. Grote: "Go where you will, do what you please, I have the most perfect confidence in your indiscretion." Smith could be scholarly: when he heard two women shouting at each other across an alleyway, he observed that they would never agree, for they were "arguing from different premises." He could also be crude: if the name of his friend Miss Alcock was translated into Latin, it would be "Domina omnis penis."

- Robert Morrison, The Regency Years, New York, 2019, p.99

Tauru Rd, Rahotu

 

Mt Taranaki from the west, 26 October 2021

Dollar in the Teeth

Thursday music corner: Lee "Scratch" Perry, who died aged 85 in August, issued an enormously productive and pioneering wave of what would become known as reggae from his Jamaican studio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The instrumental Dollar in the Teeth is a B-side of a single Return of Django from his sixth studio album with his house band, Eastwood Rides Again, which was part of a hugely prolific sequence of albums he released in 1969 and 1970, many of which featured ‘spaghetti western’ themes. Return of Django / Dollar in the Teeth was the Upsetters’ only UK charting single, reaching number 5 in October 1969.

The Upsetters – Dollar in the Teeth (1969)

Don't be ashamed to say

Thursday music corner: Australian singer Renee Geyer has been singing professionally since the early 1970s, and scored six Australian top 40 singles between 1975 and 1984. The lead single from her 1981 LP So Lucky, her seventh studio album, Say I Love You reached number 5 in the Australian pop charts and number 1 in New Zealand. The song topped the New Zealand charts for five weeks. Geyer was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005.

Say I Love You was written by British reggae artist Eddy Grant, and originally appeared on his 1978 album Walking on Sunshine (the title track of which is a completely different song to the 1985 hit by Katrina & the Waves). Grant had two major smashes in 1982-3 with I Don’t Wanna Dance and Electric Avenue, the former of which also achieved number 1 status in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Renee Geyer – Say I Love You (1981)

The classical film style of self-restraint

As much as I admire filmmakers with the ambition and technical virtuosity to pull off such bravura pieces of cinema as The Shining, I've come to be just as much in awe of those directors with a willingness to virtually erase their artistic signature in favour of restraint and self-effacement - the classical style of no-style, if you will. This kind of film-making has virtually disappeared in recent years, but it harks back to Hollywood's Golden Age, when directors like George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks made films in which the camera observed from an objective, discreet distance, never moving or cutting away until absolutely necessary. The action was to be found in the words and emotional interaction of the characters, their interplay so rhythmic and dynamic that the films never felt static or overly stagy. The skill here lies in knowing which stories will be enhanced by the style of no-style.

If there was a masterpiece of such cinematic understatement, it was Alan J. Pakula's 1976 film All the President's Men, which looked simple but amounted to a masterfully conceived and well-calibrated collection of canny staging and a wealth of visual detail and bravura - if not obvious - camera moves. For instance, when an overhead camera, observing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they slog through book slips at the Library of Congress, soars high to reduce them to the size of needles in the haystack they are searching, it invests this quiet scene - one that could have been deathly dull - with verve and visual interest in the subtlest way possible. "A story is told as much by what you don't see, what you don't show, as what you show," Pakula explained. "If you show everything, nothing has importance."

- Ann Hornaday, Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies, New York, 2017, p.224

See also:
Movies: The refreshingly brutal candour of The RKO Story, 27 July 2021
Movies: The dream factory of old Hollywood, 17 February 2021
Movies: Technicolor fragments from the 1920s, 30 April 2018

It's only me, trying to fly

Thursday music corner: In 1968 American jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery released Down Here on the Ground as the title instrumental track of a jazz-chart-topping US album. The track, New Zealand-born Canadian singer Gale Garnett's interpretation of Lalo Schifrin’s theme from the Paul Newman-starring 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, was soon covered by fellow jazz guitarist Grant Green on his 1970 live album for the Blue Note label entitled, appropriately enough, Alive!, recorded at the Cliché Lounge in Newark, New Jersey. Growing in momentum as a modern jazz standard, it also appeared with lyrics on George Benson’s hugely popular, platinum-selling 1978 live album, Weekend in L.A., the year before Green’s death at the age of 43. 

Distinguished Detroit-born, Denver-raised jazz singer Dianne Reeves interpreted the track with great verve in 1996 as part of a Blue Note recording artist remix programme that led to the album The New Groove: The Blue Note Remix Project Volume 1. This version used Green’s impeccable guitar work as remixed by hip-hop music collective The Ummah, which included members of A Tribe Called Quest. 

Some of Reeves’ career highlights include performing at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, and winning her fourth Grammy award for her jazz soundtrack to George Clooney’s 2005 Edward R Murrow biopic, Good Night, and Good Luck.

‘So if you hear a sound from way down here on the ground
Don’t you know it’s only me, trying to fly’

Grant Green – Down Here On The Ground (feat. Dianne Reeves) (1996)

Elizabeth Cook's loss & legacy

On the life of Elizabeth Cook, wife of famed explorer Captain James Cook, after his death in Hawaii in 1779:

'More tragedy followed: she was to see all her surviving sons die in succession. Nathaniel was lost at sea aged sixteen in 1780. Her youngest, Hugh, destined for the church, caught scarlet fever at Cambridge University and died in 1793 aged seventeen. James, her eldest, drowned aged thirty-one in 1794. His boat overturned as he was returning to his ship. He had been advised to wait for calmer weather but the achievements of his father put pressure on him to act boldly. At this point, Elizabeth burned all Cook's letters. Some thought it was because nothing else could efface painful memories. Yet perhaps she was determined to keep something of her husband to herself; she had already lost so much to public service. 

Elizabeth went to live in Clapham, sharing a house with her cousin, Admiral Isaac Smith, who had sailed with Cook on his first voyage. The admiral retired from the navy in his fifties, having contracted hepatitis in the East Indies. Later he inherited property in Merton [Merton Abbey], after which the two of them spent winters in Clapham and summers in Merton. Elizabeth lived in an age when the tittle-tattle of provincial ladies could break a reputation. She guarded her respectability. Every Thursday at 3 p.m. she held a sedate dinner party for her friends; she fasted on the anniversaries of the deaths of her husband and three sons, spending these days meditating and reading the Bible. She lived to be ninety-three and always wore mourning and the ring with her husband's hair in it. She treasured the coffin-shaped memento containing locks of his hair that the crew of his final voyage had made for her. She hoarded the curiosities that Cook had brought home, but in old age gave many items away as marks of esteem. Her physician of later years received the superior edition of Cook's second voyage awarded her by the Admiralty.

To the end, she guarded her husband's reputation. When pressed to comment on reports of him being severe and reserved, she always emphasized his benign qualities as a husband and father. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried in Great St Andrews, Cambridge, near two of her sons. In an eleven-page will, she bequeathed £60,000 to relations, friends and charities. Cook's gold Copley medal went to the British Museum. She left money to the Royal Maternity Charity; she knew about childbirth in difficult circumstances. In some ways, her life was typical of women who married sailors - seeing her husband at rare intervals, having (and burying) children in his absence, and outliving him after his sudden death in service. In other respects, she is highly unusual a diffident public figure who became wealthy, pensioned and a resource for folk who wanted to know about Cook'.

- Margarette Lincoln, Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook & Nelson, New Haven Conn., 2018, p.132-3.

See also:

History: A cure for scurvy, 16 June 2013

History: The tyranny of distance, 1 February 2011

History: Nauticalia in Plymouth, 12 April 2007 

Goes to show what a little faith can do

Thursday music corner: Pulled Up is the final track on the 1977 debut album of legendary New York band Talking Heads. One of David Byrne’s deranged odes to conformity, it appears on the album’s Side B immediately following the album’s breakthrough hit single, Psycho Killer, and it was the album’s third and final single release. At the time of its release Rolling Stone reviewer Stephen Demorest (who later became an award-winning US soap opera writer) used a chemical analogy to describe Pulled Up as ‘a real champ [and] a fiercely exhilarating rush of aural amyl nitrate’. The album, Talking Heads: 77, was listed as the seventh best in the end-of-year critics’ poll in The Village Voice.

Talking Heads – Pulled Up (1977)

The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite

In 1980, the year following the demolition of Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead, the German architect Walter Segal wrote about the effects, on both communities and individuals, of building housing on a mass scale. "To humanise huge structures by architectural means is an unrewarding task,' he commented. The loss of identity, the divorce from the ground and the collectivisation of open space pose dilemmas that cannot be disguised by shape, texture, colour and proportion. A good view over landscaped spaces compensates only a few. The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite.' 

Oak and Eldon Gardens, which replaced an area of back-to-back terraces in the dock side north end of Birkenhead, suffered from their size and scale, as well as their poor design: the dank stairwells leading up to each floor invited vandalism and required a level of maintenance that was unplanned for, either by the council or the architects themselves, therefore help and repairs were not always available when needed. Tenants were, indeed, 'divorced from the ground' by means of stilts, under which their cars would be parked and passers-by would thread through on their way to other destinations. The flats showed English council tenants how it felt to live like bees in a honeycomb: as nuclear families in isolated, identical modules, collected together in a building that overwhelmed them with its size. Its scale, and the principles behind it, suggested an experiment in communal living, but people were not truly living together. At the same time that they sensed a loss of control over their private identity, tenants also had to deal with the consequences of communal services - such as lifts, postboxes and rubbish chutes - being damaged or put out of service by individuals whom they could rarely identify.

It was with equal elegance that Segal pointed out that Britain's targets for housing density that is, the number of households on each hectare of land - could just as easily have been met by building two-storey terraced houses, and that the cost of planning, building and maintaining two flats in an average tower block was roughly equal to that for three or four houses. Time and again council planners were warned of the difficulty and expense of creating new communities from scratch, by sociologists who had studied the effects of slum clearance on the interwar generation, when close-knit towns people were first 'decanted' from back-to-backs into suburban cottages. Such flats seemed to divide and rule over, and to make faceless, the people who lived there.

- Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, London, 2007, p.115-6.

South Waikato

 

You're just a bubble-blowing boy in trouble and annoyed with me

Thursday music corner: Young garage rockers from South Wales, The Bug Club are a three-piece who cite amongst their influences the sounds of Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman and Mike Bloomfield. The Fixer is sub-150-seconds chock-full of Supergrass-channeling glam-punk energy, and was released on 19 August. It's taken from the band’s upcoming mini-album, Pure Particles, due out in November.

The Bug Club – The Fixer (2021)

Priority of choice for the town sections of New Plymouth

SETTLEMENT of NEW PLYMOUTH, under the Plymouth Company of New Zealand.

The Directors of the Plymouth Company of New Zealand hereby give notice, that the priority of choice for the whole of the town sections (2,200 in number) having been decided, 600 numbers of choice, ranging from 46 to 2,199 have been selected from those which have fallen to the Company: and 100 of these choices, added to 100 50-acre rural sections, are now offered exclusively to colonists who depart with the first expedition, or within four months: second set of 100 to colonists who depart with the second expedition, or within six months; and a third set of 100 to colonists who depart with the third expedition, or within eight months from this date respectively.

Each separate set of purchasers will draw for priority of choice as between themselves, and the first set will first choose at pleasure out of 600, then the second out of 500, and lastly, the third out of 400, of the numbers above referred to.

The range of choice offered by the directors will enable purchasers drawing consecutive numbers to choose town sections adjoining, in many instances to the extent of an acre, and in some of an acre and a half. The rural sections may in all cases be chosen adjoining, to any extent, in the order of presenting the land-orders in New Zealand.

The price of each double land order for the united sections is £75, a deposit of £20 to be paid on application, £25 three days before the order of choice is drawn, of which 21 days' notice will be given, and the balance on delivery of the land order, or on embarkation. An addition has been made to the Emigration Fund, from which liberal passage allowances are made, and a special fund is set apart for extra allowance to capitalists. Printed particulars of the allowances in detail, with the numbers open for choice, and other requisite information, may be had on application to the Secretary: to John Ward, Esq., New Zealand House, London: or to any agent of the Company.

The Board have suspended sales, except to colonists, until further notice. By order of the Board, THOMAS WOOLLCOOMBE, Sec. Office of the Company. 5, Octagon, Plymouth. Aug. 31.

- The Times, 10 September 1840

[The first Plymouth Company settler ship, the William Bryan, had not yet departed Plymouth for New Zealand. It sailed from Plymouth in November 1840, arriving in New Plymouth at the end of March 1841] 

See also:
History: The last sight of old Plymouth, 6 April 2009
History: Old New Plymouth, 9 February 2014
History: Writing to the New Plymouth colony, 28 November 2015

I b'lieve she done lose her mind

Thursday music corner: Sonny Boy Williamson (1912-65) was a Mississippi-born blues harmonica player who began recording in 1951 and attained popular success in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with his blues standard Help Me (1963), which is in turn based on Booker T & the MGs’ famous 1962 instrumental, Green Onions. Much about Williamson's background is murky, including his name and date of birth. Born Alex or Aleck Ford, he later appropriated the Sonny Boy Williamson name of another popular Chicago blues harp player (1914-48). At various times he claimed his year of birth ranged anywhere from 1897 to 1912, perhaps to stake an earlier claim to the older Williamson’s name. 

Touring Europe in the early 1960s Williamson fell in with the British blues explosion and recorded with both the Yardbirds and the Animals. He was also something of a gourmand; according to Led Zeppelin biographer Stephen Davis, ‘while in England Williamson set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator’. Williamson died of a heart attack in Arkansas in 1965, aged 52. She’s Crazy appeared on a 1991 Williamson compilation album, Goin’ in Your Direction, and features marvellously circular reasoning in its final line, ‘She musta been crazy; if she hadn’t’a, she wouldn’t’a lose her mind’.

Sonny Boy Williamson – She’s Crazy

The No.2 to Seatoun

 

Sell my past for a way to sing and have something left to say

Thursday music corner: Labelmates Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen collaborated on this song first released as a single on 20 May 2021, which arose from a collaboration request Van Etten first made in 2020. Happily, it turned out they'd both long wanted to collaborate with each other. This acoustic version of the single was released in August 2021. 

Van Etten and Olsen have each released five studio albums, with the most recent from each artist being Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow from 2019 and Olsen’s Whole New Mess from 2020. The song was produced by John Congleton, who has also worked with many artists over the past 20 years including Amanda Palmer, Antony & the Johnsons, Bill Callahan, Blondie, Erykah Badu and St Vincent. 

Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – Like I Used To (Acoustic version, 2021)

[H/T to MF for the acoustic link!]

Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences

From a 1954 BBC radio broadcast commissioned while actor Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) was working in America, on the anti-communist witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57), which were wracking Hollywood:  

'To the outside observer there is nothing particularly striking about the Senator - there is no fire, no perceptible fanaticism, and curiously no oratorical powers. Words come more easily to him than juiceless sentences, which is normal; but even words fall grudgingly from his lips - his eyes, meanwhile, having all the dispassionate intensity of a lion who is having his own private troubles gnawing a knuckle. His voice is plaintive by nature, and trembles obediently when a particularly emotional tone is ordered by the brain. On other occasions, it tries the elusive intonations of sarcasm, sounding much like a car with a dying battery, and even attempts the major key of jocularity when bonhomie is called for, but it is a sad laugh, and one which does not invite participation.

It is as though he had cheated the physical restrictions placed on him by nature, and had trained the very shortcomings of his equipment into weapons. His own evident lack of wit makes him impervious to the wit of others; his own inability to listen makes him immune to argument; his own tortuous train of thought wears down the opposition; his crawling reflexes, his unnaturally slow and often muddled delivery force quicker minds to function at a disadvantage below their normal speeds. And yet, cumbersome as is the Senator in action, his changes of direction, like those of the charging rhinoceros, are often executed with alarming ease. A mind trained in all the arts of tactical expediency urges the ponderous machinery on its provocative way.

Whenever he is compelled to admit that he doesn't know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that it isn't worth knowing. When ever he says he does know, he does so with an inflection suggesting that others don't - and won't. This then is the outward face of the man who has heard voices telling him to go and root out Communists and this is the face of a man who recognizes his potential enemy in everyone he meets. Like a water-diviner, he treads the desert with a home-made rod, and shouts his triumph with every flicker of the instrument, leaving hard-working professional men to scratch the soil for evidence.

No one who has enjoyed an argument, no one who has entertained challenging doubt, no one who relishes an unfettered view of history and of the current scene, could possibly be a communist. But anti-communism is no creed - democracy is no creed - it is a vehicle for the enjoyment of freedom, for the ventilation of thought, for the exercise of mutual respect, even in opposition. This is the heritage which has given debate its laws. This is the heritage which is traditionally so near the heart of this immense republic, and for which so many of her sons have died.

When anti-communism attempts to become a creed, it fights with the arms of its enemy, and like its enemy, it breeds injustice, fear, corruption. It casts away the true platform of democracy, and destroys the sense of moral superiority without which no ethical struggle is ever won.

This majestic land, these United States, know by instinct in fact they have often taught us from more venerable parts that democracy can never be a prison - it is a room with the windows open'.

- Peter Ustinov, Dear Me, Harmondsworth, Middx., 1977, p.248-9

One vast and magnificent flood of rosy and half-fiery light

This week was the 162nd anniversary of the strongest recorded geomagnetic storm to have struck Earth. Known as the Carrington Event after one of its discoverers, a coronal mass ejection caused major disruptions to world telegraphic systems. In New Zealand, however, electric telegraphy had yet to be introduced - this would not appear until 1862 - so the effects of the Event and its associated solar activity were instead witnessed in a spectacular auroral display, as recorded by the newspapers of the day, particularly the Taranaki Herald:

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All lovers of nature were charmed last Monday evening by the rare occurrence of the Southern Lights. This mysterious phenomenon, commencing about half-past six p.m., bore at first the singular appearance of daybreak. Extending to an elevation of about 30 degrees, the gradually increasing light was seen to quiver at intervals, and then vanish from the eyes like a dissolving view. The rays emitted, at first almost indistinct, afterwards formed themselves into coruscations shooting up from the south and south-western horizon. These becoming after a little time still more clearly defined against the evening sky presented the shape of luminous bars with an (apparent) edge plainly marked on the western side. In the meanwhile a reddish tint was observed to be spreading almost imperceptibly over the southern portion of the heavens, and gathering a deeper colour about 7 o'clock, was seen to sink, and as it were to change its position, but only to rise again with equal brilliancy by the snow capped head of Egmont. But the crowning sight was to come. After little more than a quarter of an hour the red light was observed to shift again towards the south-west — the glow became brighter and brighter — and at last the Aurora poured forth one vast and magnificent flood of rosy and half fiery light, sometimes hiding sometimes only faintly concealing as with a gauze veil the stars around. Lasting apparently about 50 seconds it gradually sunk down, and the same glorious effulgence was seen no more. The white light still continued to brighten the sky but became totally extinct before 9 o'clock.

- Taranaki Herald, 3 September 1859


The beautiful phenomenon called the Southern Lights or Aurora Australis has frequently been visible of late. Last evening the spectacle was peculiarly attractive, the vivid lights at times shooting in rays and pencils across the southern heavens, and again spreading over almost the whole sky, dyeing the atmosphere of a bright roseate hue.
- Lyttelton Times, 3 September 1859


August 29. [Wind] S.W. ; a.m., heavy rain; evening, brilliant aurora.
- Daily Southern Cross, 2 September 1859

Morbid beauty, the skull of the school, the apple of Daddy's eye

Thursday music corner: psychedelic rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, originally of Auckland and now domiciled in Portland, Oregon, have released five studio albums, mostly on the Jagjaguwar label, which also features Sharon Van Etten, Dinosaur Jr, Okkervil River, Bon Iver and Angel Olsen. 

Released on 4 August 2021, 'That Life' is the second UMO single released this year, and its off-kilter puppet-themed video by Lydia Fine and Tony Blahd is a particular highlight. UMO lead singer Ruban Nielson has described 'That Life' as an attempt to channel Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ in the landscape of America, ‘somewhere on holiday under a vengeful sun’. To date, all UMO albums have been released on cassette as well as the more conventional CD, LP and digital formats.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – That Life (2021)

The roots of New Zealand urbanism

[F]or much of the nineteenth century living conditions in cities were primitive, with muddy streets, rickety buildings, bad drainage, mounds of filth and high rates of infectious disease. For some settlers this was encouragement enough to go onto the land. As city streets were paved, eliminating putrid mud and blinding dust; pipes put down, delivering clean water and removing disease causing waste; and frontier-era buildings demolished, making room for more permanent and elegant piles, cities became more modern and alluring. This was enhanced by their richer and more diverse cultural and social life, and the wider work opportunities available in the cities' secondary and tertiary industries. The perennial cry that work was going begging in the country belies any assumption that country dwellers were flocking to cities because there was no work on the land. It was more the case that the attractions of city life meant that, for some workers at least, it was better to be out of work in the city than in work in the country and removed from civilisation. The ethos for these people was less 'rigidly rural' (after Fairburn) and more obstinately urban.

In a last-minute effort to hold back the tide, the Attorney General, Dr John Findlay, warned in 1911 of 'national decay' if urbanisation continued. Enlisting the urban degeneration theory, he proclaimed not only that country folk were stronger and healthier than townspeople, but that city life made women both unfit for and disinclined towards motherhood. He asserted the birth rate in rural districts was a third higher than in cities - official statistics show otherwise - and that much more should be done to 'draw people to the land'. It was to no avail. The April Census showed two demographic milestones had been reached: New Zealand's population had passed the one million mark, and a few more Pākehā lived in urban than rural areas. (If the Mäori population had been included in the count, New Zealand became an urban society in 1916, but the official transition date has remained 1911.)

- Ben Schrader, The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840-1920, Wellington, 2016, p.395-6.

Crystal clear

 

The bronze bell incident

As detailed in Karina Longworth's book cited below, movie mogul Howard Hughes (1905-76) was an expert in manipulating the women in his life, and kept them constantly at his beck and call. He was also furiously possessive and abusive when he thought they were seeing anyone else, which was of course the height of hypocrisy given all his myriad affairs. But few of his girlfriends were as brave as Ava Gardner (1922-90), who was determined not to be anyone's punching-bag and retaliated with gusto:

Ava had never seen Howard angry. Now he got really angry. He swung at her, and the next thing she knew she had fallen back into a chair. Then, she recalled, Hughes "jumped at me and started to pound on my face until it was a mess."

Ava, stuck in the chair, couldn't fight back. Satisfied that he had made his point, Hughes gave up and started to walk away. Then, Ava recalled, "I looked for some weapon to attack him." She spotted an ornamental bronze bell on the mantelpiece. Knowing the partially deaf Hughes wouldn't be able to hear her coming, she followed behind him, and just as she caught up, she shouted his name. He turned, and she struck him down the front of his face, splitting his forehead open and knocking loose two teeth. Livid at what he'd done to her, Ava couldn't help but continue the beating while Howard was down. She grabbed a chair and started hitting him some more. Finally her maid walked in and put a stop to it.

"I thought I'd killed the poor bastard," Ava later said. "There was blood on the walls, on the furniture, real blood in the bloody Marys."

- Karina Longworth, Seduction: Sex, Lies & Stardom in Howard Hughes' Hollywood, New York, 2018, p.248

See also:
Movies: The refreshingly brutal candour of 'The RKO Story', 27 July 2021
Movies: The Aviatrix, 21 December 2009
Movies: The greatest vampire film ever, 28 October 2009

Now I want you try to tell me how I look

Thursday music corner: William Onyeabor (1946-2017) was a Nigerian funk musician popular in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and a crowned high chief in Nigeria’s Enugu state, where he lived and worked as a businessman when not making music. Fantastic Man was one of the five tracks on his 1979 funk album, Tomorrow. In 1985 he became a born-again Christian, refusing to speak of his music career ever again, which contributed greatly to the air of mystery (outside Nigeria, at least) surrounding his music. The 2013 compilation album Who is William Onyeabor?, released on the Luaka Bop label, spurred greater interest, followed by a 2014 documentary and a supergroup tribute tour including such artists as David Byrne, Damon Albarn, and Malian music legends Amadou and Mariam, which brought his old music to greater prominence in the West. Even broader appeal also resulted from Fantastic Man being used in an Apple iPhone 7+ commercial in 2017. I first heard this track playing in Everyday Music in Portland, Oregon, in June 2018 - so, thanks for the find, Oregonian tune-merchants!

William Onyeabor – Fantastic Man (1979)

The Masked Ascender

Makara Peak panorama, 22 August 2021

 

Oh will you take me as I am, strung out on another man

Thursday music corner: The second single taken from one of Canadian folk legend Joni Mitchell’s most critically acclaimed albums, Blue, California was written in self-imposed exile in Europe as she recuperated from her break-up with Graham Nash, and evokes a wistful, playful longing for the creative atmosphere of the laid-back Pacific state that was then the centre of the global counterculture. Featuring Mitchell on dulcimer and guitar, the recording also benefits from Mitchell’s then paramour James Taylor’s guitar-work, although their relationship would soon break down when Taylor attained global fame. In 2020 Blue was rated third-highest in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Joni Mitchell – California (1971)

Written, of course, by the mightiest hand

Thursday music corner: Sparks are Californian brothers Ron (b.1945) and Russell (b.1948) Mael, who have been making experimental art-pop music together since the late 1960s, and are gaining new fans in 2021 thanks to the loving and comprehensive portrait of them in director Edgar Wright’s recently-released music biopic The Sparks Brothers. 

Following their breakthrough 1974 single This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us, which reached no.2 in the UK pop charts thanks to an electrifying appearance on Top of The Pops, Sparks went through a variety of supporting band-members and musical styles. By 1979, they were struggling for relevance until they became intrigued with the newly-emerging opportunities of electronic music spawned from the disco scene. Enlisting the maestro producer of the disco oeuvre, the Italian legend Giorgio Moroder, they created The Number One Song in Heaven to act as the title track of an album of innovative, boundary-pushing electronic music that helped usher in the new wave/synth explosion. 

Most recently, Sparks collaborated with French film director Leos Carax to write the music for his film Annette, an intensely operatic musical melodrama featuring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. The soundtrack to Annette is Sparks’ 27th album release, if you include FFS, their 2015 ‘supergroup’ collaboration with Scots band Franz Ferdinand.

Sparks – The Number One Song in Heaven (1979, single version)

See also:

Music: Lo-o-o-o-ng songs, 11 June 2008 

Taking in the dawn

Brooklyn wind turbine, 7.23am, 7 August 2021

 

Along about ten, I'll be flying high

Thursday music corner: Rock ‘n roll pioneer Little Richard (1932-2020) was one of the first black artists to cross over into mass appeal with white audiences in the US pop scene, and was a major driver for the popularisation of high-energy rhythm and blues that became global less than a decade later with a little bit of help from the Beatles. Tutti Frutti and Long Tally Sally b/w Slippin’ and Slidin’ were his breakthrough singles in 1955 and 1956, and the classic Rip It Up emerged in June 1956, becoming his second US R&B chart-topper and fourth Top 40 single. The track also appeared on his March 1957 debut album, Here’s Little Richard, which holds the distinction of having nine of its 12 songs making the US Billboard Hot 100 charts. 

Further afield and a couple of decades later in 1977, when Murray Cammick and Alistair Dougal established a new music magazine in Auckland, they borrowed this single’s name for the title. Rip It Up Magazine was distributed free in New Zealand music shops until 1991, when a cover price was instigated. It played an important role in New Zealand music history until its last issue was published in 2015.

Little Richard – Rip It Up (1956)

Saucy

Thursday music corner: The title track of a 1965 album by prolific American Latin jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader (1925-82), the popularity of Soul Sauce drove what would become Tjader’s biggest commercial success. It’s a cover of a 1949 Dizzy Gillespie B-side, originally called Guarachi Guaro.

Cal Tjader – Soul Sauce (1964)

The refreshingly brutal candour of 'The RKO Story'

On a recent trip through Palmerston North I stopped at the excellent Thorndon Books second-hand bookshop near the city centre (533 Main St). I was lucky enough to find in the film section a hardcover book from 1982 called The RKO Story by Richard B. Jewell. This was a treasure trove of history and reviews listing all of the hundreds of movies produced by RKO Pictures from 1928 until the end of the 1950s when megalomaniacal studio owner Howard Hughes brought the company to ruin.

What quickly became obvious was the particular editorial approach of author Jewell, who worked at RKO for almost 50 years. Seemingly encyclopedic knowledge and excellent research are evident in Jewell's reviews of RKO's pictures, which were often B-movies such as cheaply made westerns, detective stories or Tarzan pictures, or remakes of their own titles such as umpteen versions of Seven Keys to Baldpate, but ranged as high as the incredible King Kong, Citizen Kane, It's A Wonderful Life and Notorious in occasional feats of dramatic excellence. But despite working at the studio for nearly half a century, he is brutally honest about the remarkably low quality of many of the films RKO put out, which makes for highly entertaining reading for film buffs.

Below are just a selection of some of the more pungent, and at times rampantly score-settling analyses Jewell offers in his sweeping summary of RKO film output:

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Pity the poor viewers who had to suffer through The Lady Refuses (1931), an unsavoury melodrama directed with contemptuous indifference by George Archainbaud... Wallace Smith's screenplay, based on a Robert Milton-Guy Bolton story, made for a gruelling 72 minutes, with the going especially painful whenever tongue-tied John Darrow... was on screen. 

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Panama Flo (1932) was such a rampant disaster that only one question seems relevant: how did this picture ever come to be made? Producer Charles R. Rogers and his associate Harry Joe Brown must have noticed the narrative weaknesses that ran through Garrett Fort's script, but they never bothered to rectify them. The most damaging of the incoherencies was the sudden transformation of Charles Bickford, the obvious heavy for much of the story, into the romantic hero, and the concomitant flip-flop of Robert Armstrong from apparent champion to deceitful murderer. Perhaps the filmmakers (including director Ralph Murphy) expected the steamy jungle atmosphere and heroine Helen Twelvetrees' unbridled histrionics to defuse the audience's critical sensibilities; instead viewers were confounded and angered by the degree of pictorial ineptitude which they witnessed in this absurd story of a honky-tonk girl stranded in Panama, who ends up as housekeeper to a man who will otherwise send her to jail for fleecing his pocketbook. 

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Rockabye (1932) was an out-and-out disaster that damaged David Selznick's credibility precisely when the renewal of his RKO contract was under consideration. The studio bought the rights to Lucia Bronder's teary paean to mother love from Gloria Swanson, then rushed it into production because of certain commitments to exhibitors and to Constance Bennett, its star... George Fitzmaurice, who had directed several Greta Garbo films, as well as Rudolph Valentino's triumphant Son Of The Sheik, was borrowed from MGM, and Selznick negotiated a deal with Paramount to use Phillips Holmes as the leading man. The finished film was so wretched that George Cukor was summoned to direct two weeks of retakes, with Joel McCrea taking over Holmes' role. The salvage job was eventually deemed worthy of release, though it was still one of the year's most abysmal efforts. Bennett was criminally miscast as an actress who forsakes her lover rather than disrupt the twin spiritual harmonies of family and motherhood. The only hearts broken by this weeper belonged to RKO executives. 

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It is sometimes said that a film is so bad that it's good, meaning that the sheer ineptitude of the undertaking may have a perverse entertainment value. Down To Their Last Yacht (1934, GB: Hawaiian Nights) would very probably qualify for such a description by today's campy standards, but in its own time it came to be regarded as the worst film ever produced by RKO. The basic idea of millionaires forced to live on their yacht and work for a living had possibilities, but this plot soon disintegrated to be replaced by a South Sea island story full of nonsensical pandemonium. At the end, the yacht is blown to bits so rich and poor can live together and think about nothing but love. The film had a number of amazing ingredients: loin-clothed natives behaving like gangsters, a blonde queen (Mary Boland) who enjoys feeding her guests to the sharks, and hula dancers who obviously learned to shimmy in a Broadway chorus line (dance director Dave Gould) - but there was little humour, less social comment and no intelligence to be found in the surreal production. The other bewildered performers who struggled against the tidal wave of inanity included Sidney Fox, Polly Moran, Sidney Blackmer, Ned Sparks, Sterling Holloway, Marjorie Gateson, Irene Franklin, Charles Coleman and Tom Kennedy. One would think they had all wandered onto the set one day and tried to make up a Polynesian musical as they went along, although the credits (director Paul Sloane; screenplay Marion Dix and Lynn Starling; story Herbert Fields and Lou Brock) belied this possibility. The film's biggest loser was Lou Brock. Much can be forgiven an indulgent producer if his efforts are successful. Brock was renowned around the RKO lot for his tendency to allow pictures to overrun their budget estimates and for his sanguine disregard for proper authorizations. Since both Melody Cruise and Flying Down To Rio had been hits, his carryings-on were tolerated until he completed this appallingly bad picture. In short order, Mr Brock was pounding the Hollywood pavements, looking for a new job. The (also wretched) songs included: 'South Sea Bolero' May Steiner, Ann Ronell: 'Tiny Little Finger On Your Hand' Val Burton, Will Jason; 'Malakamokalua' Cliff Friend, Sidney Mitchell; 'Funny Little World', 'Beach Boy' Ann Ronell.

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A remake of a 1930 Conrad Nagel-Lila Lee vehicle, Second Wife (1936) was unquestionably the worst RKO film of the year (Sylvia Scarlett notwithstanding). Audiences in theatres everywhere hooted its trite story, platitudinous dialogue and extended histrionics. Thomas Lennon's dehydrated script (based on a play by Fulton Oursler), aggravated by Edward Killy's meat-axe direction, left the actors between the proverbial rock and hard spot. Walter Abel played the husband who is faced with a choice between journeying abroad to comfort his ill, 10-year-old son or remaining at home with his new wife, who is about to have their first child. An intelligent decision would have been for Abel to stay out of this picture in the first place. 

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If RKO executives had had any choice in the matter, Scattergood Survives A Murder (1942) would have had a different title and denouement, for the brass was anxious to be rid of Coldriver's leading citizen and his consistently third-rate pictures. But the Pyramid Pictures Corporation contract called for one more Scattergood picture, and one more there had to be. Michael L. Simmons' screenplay, directed by Christy Cabanne, was an enervated whodunit requiring the protagonist (Guy Kibbee) to shed his guise as a storekeeper and have a go at amateur detective work. The strange deaths of two spinsters who leave their fortune to a house cat is his provocation and, after determining that the old ladies' demise was not accidental, he baits a trap which snares the murderer. 

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The first mistake RKO made with Mama Loves Papa (1945) was to pay Paramount $8500 for the rights to such a property. The second mistake occurred when the studio assigned Charles E. Roberts and Monte Brice to prepare an original script that would use the aforementioned title. And the third mistake was to put said screenplay into production. A dreary fable about a mollycoddled clerk who becomes a playground commissioner and gets involved with a crooked manufacturer of recreational equipment, it featured Leon Errol and Elisabeth Risdon as the title characters... Leon Errol toiled extra hard to bring the movie to life, but it was clearly a corpse from the start. The producer was Ben Stoloff, the executive producer Sid Rogell and the ineffectual director Frank Strayer.

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Made in garish Technicolor on the largest budget thus far expended by RKO ($3,200,000), Tycoon was a full-blown stinker, hamstrung by a ridiculous plot, artificial conflicts, romance without passion and atrocious acting. Borden Chase and John Twist's screenplay, adapted from a novel by C. E. Scoggins, concerned a feud between engineer John Wayne, who is attempting to build a railroad through the Andes Mountains, and his haughty employer Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Hardwicke played the tycoon of the title a financial big shot who objects to Wayne's methods and, even more so, to the roughneck's romance with his daughter Laraine Day. As the film unfolds, Wayne's mad obsession with his dangerous job sends everyone diving for cover, including his associates and the beloved Miss Day. And yet, the star's overblown performance never succeeded in making the character either titanic or believable, a feat he would accomplish magnificently when portraying similar individuals in Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Since the other characters were also generally unconvincing, the finger of guilt pointed in the direction of the writers, and of director Richard Wallace, who must have been concentrating on the spectacular action scenes while every thing else siphoned down the drain. RKO's money went along as well; the final loss was $1,035,000. 

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Purchased by RKO from Prominent Pictures for $131,250, Destination Murder (1950) was an appalling programme-filler featuring Joyce MacKenzie, Stanley Clements and Hurd Hatfield. When a gambler is killed, his daughter (MacKenzie) becomes irritated at the police department's casual attitude and decides to find the killer herself. She takes a job at the nightclub run by the man she suspects, managing to become romantically involved with Clements, Hatfield and Albert Dekker, all of whom had a hand in the murder. Don Martin's screenplay was so lamely executed that it never even bothered to explain why Miss MacKenzie's father was knocked off in the first place.

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She Couldn't Say No (GB: Beautiful But Dangerous) sank to depths hitherto unexplored by the worst of RKO's 'A'-budget comedies. The D. D. Beauchamp-William Bowers-Richard Flournoy screenplay (story by Beauchamp) had wealthy but foolish Jean Simmons advancing on the small town of Progress, Arkansas, with a plan to repay the villagers who had donated money for an operation which saved her life when she was a child. The material rewards she bestows anonymously on the locals attracts all sorts of con artists, parasites and other avaricious interlopers to Progress, thus upsetting the town's delicate bu colic harmony. Practically every joke in the film landed with a deadening thud. The atrocious script was largely to blame, though director Lloyd Bacon might have salvaged something out of the fiasco by playing it as a black comedy - an alternative style that he clearly never even considered. Miss Simmons and physician-cum-fisherman Robert Mitchum were completely wasted, as were all the other players except Arthur Hunnicutt, who provoked a chuckle or two as the town lush... Note: This picture was the last of three releases made back-to-back to fulfil contractual obligations to Miss Simmons. Angel Face and Affair With A Stranger (both released in 1953) were the other two.

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Susan Slept Here (1954) was another astonishingly dreadful major-budget comedy, produced by Harriet Parsons (her finale for RKO) and directed by Frank Tashlin. The story of a man-about Hollywood (Dick Powell) and a girl of 18 (Debbie Reynolds, borrowed from MGM) began on Christmas eve when a policeman, knowing Powell wants to write a serious script about juvenile delinquency, deposits teenage hellion Reynolds in the bachelor's apartment as a boon to his screenwriting research. Soon enough, a triangle develops, with green-eyed Anne Francis (borrowed from 20th Century-Fox) completing the threesome, and storyteller Powell labouring to clear up all the loose ends in a plot light years beyond his comprehension. The actual author Alex Gottlieb, who developed his script from a play by Steve Fisher and himself, intended the Technicolor production to be both sexy and humorous. In the event, it was about as attractive and amusing as an afternoon in the dentist's chair. The fickle finger also points toward Leigh Harline, who composed the nearly continuous and always awful background jazz score.

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Wayne & Hayward in 'The Conqueror'

The Conqueror (1956) receives prominent mention in a popular book listing the 50 worst films of all time. It deserved this brand of recognition for its casting and dialogue alone. John Wayne topped the acting contingent as Temujin, the Mongol leader who captures Bortai (Susan Hayward, borrowed from 20th Century-Fox), the tempestuous daughter of a Tartar king. 'She is a woman - much woman,' Temujin observes. She, of course, hates him until he is captured by her father and tortured. Then she loves him, as he had predicted ('I shall keep you, Bortai, in response to my passion. Your hatred will kindle into love'). Bortai helps him escape, and soon he and his warriors conquer all of the Gobi Desert tribes, at which point he becomes known as Genghis Khan. There was no denying the sweep and spectacular production values of this $6 million epic which was made in CinemaScope and stereophonic sound with prints manufactured by Technicolor. There was also no way around the astoundingly ridiculous characters, bad acting and laughable writing, or the total inaccuracy of the film's treatment of Asian history... The prime mover behind the film was Howard Hughes, who took a presentation credit and later bought the picture and all available prints from RKO so he could have The Conqueror completely to himself.

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And as a mild antidote to all that entirely legitimate cinematic snark, here's a heartening tale to close on a high:

Miracles do happen in Hollywood, despite what the sceptics say. Dorothy Wilson, an RKO secretary, was chosen to play the lead in The Age of Consent (1932), turned in a pleasing performance, and earned herself a studio contract. Director Gregory LaCava teamed Miss Wilson with Richard Cromwell (on loan from Columbia) in this interesting (and inexpensive) study of college life.

(Wilson went on to appear in a total of 20 films between 1932 and 1937. In 1936 she married scriptwriter Lewis R. Foster, who went on to win an Oscar for his script for Mr Smith Goes to Washington).

See also:

Movies: The dream factory of old Hollywood, 17 February 2021

Movies: Rich pickings at the Regal Cinema, 10 February 2020

Movies: The Paramount Theatre, 25 September 2017

Movies: The remarkable impact of My Forgotten Man, 1 May 2016

Movies: Great are the marvels of living photography, 28 September 2015