Doing all right, but you gotta get smart

Thursday music corner: This November 1975 A-side of crystalline funk was more in keeping with the Philadelphia soul jive of Bowie’s previous Young Americans album than the album it was the lead single release from, the darkly serious Station to Station. Bowie appeared miming Golden Years moderately accurately on US TV show Soul Train amidst his emaciated, orange-haired L.A. cocaine blizzard phase. The performance helped the song reach number 10 in the US charts, whereas in the UK it did two spots better, reaching number 8. (In the New Zealand pop charts it made it to number 18). 

Bowie scholar Nicholas Pegg describes the Station to Station album, Bowie's tenth release, as ‘the precise halfway point on the journey between [Bowie albums] Young Americans and Low. There are enough finger-snapping grooves to keep the American market buoyant, but elsewhere the album prefigures the glacial mechanisation of David’s imminent “European canon”’ [his three Berlin-recorded albums, Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger].

David Bowie – Golden Years (1975)

See also:

Blog: David Bowie is..., 22 September 2015 

Blog: Sukita / Bowie exhibition, 16 September 2012

Blog: In the lair of the Goblin King, 12 July 2009

Charlemagne's passion for education

[Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne] borrowed from Roman architecture in the design of churches and palaces such as his main palace at Aachen. Mindful of the Byzantine ban on icon painting currently in force, he promoted representational Christian art through frescoes, the first Christian sculpture, and above all the production of illuminated manuscripts containing realistic depictions of Bible stories.

This touched Charlemagne's foremost concern: education. Low rates of literacy plus a fragmentation of Latin into regional dialects in the centuries following the fall of Rome created problems both for the spread of church teaching and the administration of an empire. Medieval Latin needed to be standardised into a common language for western Europe.

So to Aachen Charlemagne brought scholars from across western Europe. He funded the copying of all surviving Latin texts and the development of monasteries as centers of learning. The driving intellectual force behind Charlemagne's program was Alcuin of York, adviser at Charlemagne's court, then abbot at the monastery of Tours, which he made the foremost training ground for the clergy. Abbey schools such as Tours were not oases of contemplation but engines disseminating Christian learning to the reaches of the empire, and with this came a newly uniform Latin as lingua franca for Europe's educated classes, together with a new and quicker way writing it down using lowercase letters - the way the words are printed in this book.

- Peter Davidson, Atlas of Empires, Chichester, 2018, p.85

See also:
Blog: Precious vessels, 28 February 2011
Blog: 96 hours in the Eternal City, 16 October 2010

Blog: Popes & anti-popes, 5 November 2009

Tonks Grove, Cuba Quarter

Tonks Grove

 

When my feeling stays out my sunshine comes out

Thursday music corner: The impeccable connections of singer and actor Dana Gillespie – who rejoices in the birth name Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie – resulted in enduring collaborations throughout her long career, including this single. Recorded by Gillespie for her first album Foolish Seasons in 1968, the song was written by Donovan and amongst the musicians who performed on the album was Jimmy Page, who also produced the record.

Gillespie was renowned for her many famous lovers in the 1960s and ‘70s (Bowie, Dylan, Jagger, Caine, Page, Moon, Connery). David Bowie originally wrote his song Andy Warhol for her, before recording it himself for his groundbreaking 1971 album Hunky Dory. Bowie and Ziggy Stardust guitarist Mick Ronson produced Gillespie’s 1973 album Weren’t Born a Man. She was the original Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

In addition to recording Indian devotional music, Gillespie now mainly performs as a blues artist, and she founded the Mustique Blues Festival in 1996. She released her 72nd album in 2021, and in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian's Garth Cartwright in August 2021 she noted, “A chap from Universal was just around as they are gathering my first two albums and all the songs I demoed for Immediate Records into a box set. A new hip, and then I’ll get on with life.”

Dana Gillespie – You Just Gotta Know My Mind (1968)

Querida Becky, soy yo, tu mama muerta

Followers of Rose Matafeo's excellent Starstruck sitcom would do well to consider the work of her onscreen and formerly IRL flatmate, actor-comedian Emma Sidi. In particular, her brilliant 2020 short film La Princesa De Woking, a note-perfect homage to Mexican telenovelas set in glamorous northwest Surrey. Sidi stars as the much-put-upon and never-knowingly-out-acted Becky Hello, who has just tragically lost her mother in a freak chandelier accident: 

Elsewhere, you might find her in 2017 exercising some Spanish melodrama in Melbourne, or illustrating her formidable contemporary dance skills in 2015. And perhaps in the 'sketch project with Rose' she mentions in her February interview above, that might emerge some day soon. 

See also:

Comedy: Bill Bailey, 25 October 2016 

Comedy: James Acaster, 14 May 2016

Comedy: Josie Long, 6 May 2013

Comedy: David O'Doherty, 5 May 2012

Comedy: Dylan Moran, 23 April 2006

I've got everything I want until this little moment's gone

Thursday music corner: Teleman are a three-piece English indie band formed in London in 2011, and named after the 18th-century German classical composer GP Telemann. They have released three albums: Breakfast (2014), Brilliant Sanity (2016) and Family of Aliens (2018), the last of which scraped into the UK top 40. The soaring, wistful and uplifting Right as Rain was the first track on their five-song 2021 Sweet Morning EP. For those with long memories, lead singer Thomas Sanders' vocals have a pleasing likeness to those of Karl Wallinger of World Party fame.

I swear that we’re gonna make a universe in our own way
Don’t be knocked if it falls down, we start again

Teleman – Right As Rain (2021)

"There's nothing in life like leading a company in action"

Guy returned a day early to see that everything was well with his company's arrangements. Walking through the almost empty camp at dusk, he met the Brigadier. 'Crouchback,' he said, peering. 'Not a captain yet?'

'No, sir."

'But you've got your company.' They walked together some way.

'You've got the best command there is,' said the Brigadier. "There's nothing in life like leading a company in action. Next best thing is doing a job on your own. Everything else is just bumf and telephones.' Under the trees, in the failing light, he was barely visible. 'It's not much of a show we're' going to. I'm not supposed to tell you where, so I shall. Place called Dakar. I'd never heard of it till they started sending me 'Most Secret' intelligence reports, mostly about ground-nuts. A French town in West Africa. Probably all boulevards and brothels if I know the French colonies. We're in support. Worse really - we're in support of the supporting brigade. They're putting the Marines in before us, blast them. Anyway it's all froggy business. They think they'll get in without opposition. But it'll help training. Sorry I told you. They'd court-martial me if they found out. I'm getting too old for courts martial.'

He turned away abruptly and disappeared into the woodland.

- Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms, London, 1952, p.274-5.

See also:
Blog: The dhobi technique, 12 October 2020
Blog: Putting El Alamein into perspective, 15 April 2020
Blog: Meet the gang 'cos the boys are here, 15 December 2014
Blog: If all else fails, we can Pee-at them, 15 July 2012

When the sexiest thing on earth was being an English rock star

There was a golden period of about three years, roughly between the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers and Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, when - thanks to a magical conjunction of their hairless chests, their chiselled chins and their rent boy trousers, with music that was an unapologetically lubricious, tail-dragging reinvention of rock and roll, all stamped with the charm of their native unwillingness to take anything wholly seriously - it was widely agreed that the sexiest thing on earth you could be was an English rock star.

Between the two aforementioned groups, plus the Who and Bad Company, it seemed for a while that the impossible had been achieved. The nation of back-to-backs and cobbled streets which had brought forth George Formby and Gracie Fields, the homeland to which Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne had fought their way in order to catch a Test match, the battered old island which had been kept safe for democracy by Kenneth More and John Mills, the diamond set in a silver sea which for years had considered the most excitement its small children could take was Muffin the Mule, the country which even at this late date still had a grand total of three television channels all of which closed down before midnight, was suddenly, unaccountably, thrillingly seen as sexy. 

As these hollow cheeked heroes, whose ages were still under the thirty-year mark, who had no need of the personal trainer or special diet to stay in trim, were pictured tripping on and off monogrammed planes - wreathed in chiffon scarves, their coltish old ladies on their elbows, being wafted from one American city to the next, being delivered by limousine down the goods ramp of one sports arena or another while knots of high school kids looked on enthralled - they seemed like members of some new, impossibly glamorous tribe. There is a picture of Keith Richards snapped in 1972, at the precise moment that he achieved peak Keef. He is leaning on a wall at the American border, no doubt as a pack of dogs go through his luggage. He is festooned with scarves. He is wearing mirror shades. He is exquisitely bored. The photographer has asked him to stand next to a sign which says, 'Patience, please. A drug-free America comes first.' It seems to represent the moment at which the classic image of the rock star was perfected and, what's more, it was perfected in the shape of an Englishman.

- David Hepworth, Overpaid, Oversexed & Over There: How a few skinny Brits with bad teeth rocked America, London, 2020, p.164-5.

See also:
Blog: Rolling Stones Rock 'n Roll Circus, 14 July 2020
Blog: Denmark Street, 18 January 2010
Blog: Almost Famous, 3 March 2009

Every look is a truce and it's written in stone

Thursday music corner: Aimee Mann first garnered attention as the lead singer of 1980s pop group 'Til Tuesday, which had a top 10 hit in the US with the 1985 single Voices Carry. As a solo artist she achieved breakthrough success with her 1993 album Whatever, which featured guest performances by ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn and veteran session drummer Jim Keltner, and was praised by many including Elvis Costello and author Nick Hornby. Her music inspired director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia, and she was nominated for an Oscar and a Grammy for her work on the film soundtrack. From it, she played her song Save Me at the 72nd Academy Awards in March 2000.

Mann’s ninth solo album, Mental Illness, came out in 2017 with its lead single, Goose Snow Cone, inspired by a photo of a friend’s cat’s brush with minor surgery and the resulting ‘cone of shame’. The album won a Grammy (justifiably) in the folk category (inexplicably).

Aimee Mann - Goose Snow Cone (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhThS-PJOFE

See also:

Blog: Aimee Mann live in London, 27 July 2007

Welsh Fargo

Former Goon Show legend Harry Secombe (1921-2001) wrote two novels in his career - Twice Brightly (1974) and Welsh Fargo (1981). I've not yet read the former, but the latter was a mainstay of my teenage reading. 

My paperback copy probably came via my grandmother because she lived in Rotorua at the time and the book was a remainder copy from the Rotorua Public Library (price 30 cents). Most likely she will have sent it my way due to the Goon Show pedigree of its author. As it happens, I didn't really know about the Goons at the time, apart from an odd visit to a primary school classmate's house where he played me his dad's record of The Ying Tong Song, which I found completely mystifying. 

I ended up reading Welsh Fargo so many times because it was a) short, b) funny, and c) my go-to insomnia read for my entire teenage years.

It was probably my first exposure to anything by a Goon, perhaps excluding Michael Bentine's Potty Time, and wouldn't really hear their material properly until many years later. But this sliver of Goon offshoot literature I certainly devoured, wholeheartedly. It also provided me my first exposure to Welshness, which was in relatively short supply in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s: 

Now, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty three, there was a surplus of coal and the Depression bit as deeply into the lives of the people of Panteg as the drills which had carved up their valley. Old young men stricken with coal dust in their lungs walked slowly up the shabby streets, stopping for breath every few yards, whilst others lay coughing their lives away in front parlours on beds brought down from upstairs to save them the impossible climb, Mothers prepared meals they were ashamed to serve, pretending to their families that they had already eaten.

And yet there was love in abundance; a clinging together in adversity, and always humour - the sly Welsh humour - and, of course, there was the singing. In Ebenezer Chapel the walls shook with the sheer volume of sound produced by choir and congregation, and there was power in the plainsong at St. Peter's. (Welsh Fargo, p.8-9)

The nature of Welsh Fargo was admittedly not complex. It was aimed squarely at being a knockabout farce, in the style of a Hollywood or Ealing caper, with a wide and varied cast of Welsh oddballs set during the Depression. The main character was the much-put-upon, and rather down on his luck, bus-driver Dai Fargo, who ran the only bus service to the isolated, but thoroughly ungrateful, village of Panteg in the hills north of Swansea. Dai's nephew James Henry, a callow youth of twelve, was clearly a proxy for the author, who was roughly the same age in 1933. The village of Panteg is richly populated with a large cast of busy-bodies, gossips, and trenchant critics of public transport service disruptions, of which Dai's ancient and decrepit bus generally generated many.

With Dai's bus service struggling to make ends meet, the main engine of the plot is the one job he has that attracts any reliable money, which is transporting the wages of the nearby colliery once a fortnight. As Welsh Fargo is by design a madcap caper novel, the two-and-a-half thousand pounds are both destined to be the subject of a heist attempt, that heist attempt will be perpetrated by a singularly incompetent gang of Welsh criminals, and the entire process will be finely-tuned to result in a big finale of a nature as ludicrous as is singularly possible. A finale that would be virtually impossible to film on a UK film studio budget of the 1980s, sadly - HandMade Films' Beatles money included.

The large cast is given plenty of double-crossing, vindictive back-biting, rampant moral hypocrisy, general carping, and a multitude of varieties of incompetence to deal with. In the spirit of 'everything including the kitchen sink' there's a would-be Chicago gangster, a philandering manager, a punch-drunk boxer, an actual Welsh Zulu, and a sympathetically-written character that in contemporary 1930s terminology was known as a 'nancy-boy' and at the time the book was published was referred to as a transvestite. It's not a work of gifted literary prowess, but it's big-hearted, has a nostalgic affection for the Wales of its author's childhood, and it's genuinely entertaining writing in the way comedy professionals with decades of experience are able to offer.     

See also:
Wales: Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, 4 February 2022
Wales: The Bug Club, 23 September 2021
Wales: Aberystwyth, 12 September 2008

The Nickelodeon boom of early cinema

As films grew in popularity, the venues they screened in also developed. Early films were projected in halls, cafés and any venue that could be darkened and had space for an audience. Thomas Edison opened the first dedicated cinema, the Vitascope Theater, a venue in Buffalo, New York in October 1896, but site-specific venues would remain rare for another decade. As the sensation of a new experience wore off and audiences became more familiar with film, screenings would appear as part of an evening's entertainment in theatres and music halls. Audiences were still unused to spending too long watching moving images on a screen, so these films benefited from being part of a mixed programme. However, as they became longer, they required their own venues. In June 1905, businessmen Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened a small venue in a storefront in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Referencing the nickname given to some dime museums - entertainment venues regarded as lowbrow distractions - in the late 19th century, these venues became known as 'nickelodeons'. They screened films on a continuous loop and audiences initially attended not to watch a specific programme, but to be entertained by whatever was screening at the time. The popularity of nickelodeons saw their numbers increase to almost 10,000 venues within five years. They ranged from makeshift operations with little more than a projector, screen and benches, to locations whose capacity ranged from 200 to 1,000 and were accompanied by live music.

The nickelodeons attracted entrepreneurs who saw a gold mine in this nascent entertainment. In 1906, German émigré and future owner of Universal Pictures Carl Laemmle opened his first cinema in Chicago. He was followed in 1907 by Louis B. Mayer, who purchased the Gem theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetts and converted it into the Orpheum theatre. He soon owned the largest chain of nickelodeons in the region. In 1910, Marcus Loew joined forces with future film moguls Adolph Zukor and siblings Joseph and Nicholas Schenck to turn the Loews cinema chain into a major franchise. By 1913, they owned the majority of the venues in New York. At the time, more than a quarter of the US population was attending film screenings every week. Production companies were coalescing into larger conglomerates and films themselves had progressed from one- and two-reelers to features. In 1914, the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York opened its doors. It seated an audience of 2,989. Five years later, the 4,000-capacity Capitol Theatre also opened on Broadway. Then, in 1927, another New York cinema, the Roxy Theatre, known as the 'Cathedral of the Motion Picture' became the world's largest cinema, holding an audience just shy of 6,000.

- Ian Haydn Smith, A Chronology of Film, London, 2021, p.40

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

It's a cup of black coffee that a working man needs to see

Thursday music corner: Humble Pie were an English rock group formed in 1969 from members of other groups. Lead singer Steve Marriott (1947-91) had attained fame as a child performing Lionel Bart’s smash hit stage production of Oliver!, and as an adult hit the pop charts during the 1960s Beat Explosion as the lead singer of the highly successful mod pop group the Small Faces, whose hits included Itchykoo Park and Lazy Sunday. Marriott was joined in Humble Pie by Peter Frampton (formerly of the Herd), who would later achieve huge solo fame in America in the 1970s with his mega-selling album Frampton Comes Alive!, plus Greg Ridley (Spooky Tooth) and Jerry Shirley (Apostolic Intervention).

Black Coffee was written by Tina Turner and originally performed by Ike & Tina Turner on their 1972 album Feel Good. Humble Pie covered the song for their seventh album, 1973’s double album Eat It. While the song didn’t chart strongly, it became a staple of their live sets. This video clip is from the band’s March 1973 performance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test programme featuring backing vocals from the Blackberries. It’s introduced by BBC DJ ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, who was one of the co-founders of Time Out magazine and still broadcasts on BBC Radio 2.

Humble Pie – Black Coffee (live, 1973)