Revolution in Abbey Wood – White Panthers on the Prowl

International Times #127 (April 6, 1972)

The revolution will be dressed by Levi’s.

We bring our music to our communities with revolutionary, high-energy bands like the Pink Fairies. Our life style becomes our politics, our politics our lifestyle.

Who are these well-dressed young men?

Norbert Nowotsch has identified John Carding, second from the right, who he met in 1971 when Carding was touring with the Irish band Fruup and used the trip to spread information on the Party and to support its German chapter, which was short-lived. Carding was the report’s author as co-ordinator White Panther Party UK.

Photo by Phil Stringer

My thanks to Norbert

Jiving at the 2i's with the Cosh Boys

Cosh Boy (1953) is among the new dual format sets from the celebrated BFI Flipside series and its another terrific addition. Like so many Flipsides, the attraction is as much with the extras as the main feature. Of especial interest for me was the 1956 8 minute report from ITV’s This Week programme on the Teddy Boy. Before R ’n’ R had corrupted Britain’s youth, working-class Mike Wood from Hounslow showed a fondness for jazz and a hair style called ‘be-bop’. The cut and perm made a nice set with his barely formed goatee.

With hair done just right, Mike takes his girl to the Flamingo where they dance to The Tony Kinsey Quartet.

Filmed 5 years later, the 22 minute short film by Robert Hartford-Davis, Stranger in the City tracks around London from morning to night. To modern eyes, the Big Smoke seems uncannily empty but as night falls the streets begin to fill up with cars and pedestrians. Outside the 2i’s coffee bar two teenagers jive to the new rock ‘n’ roll they hear in their heads.

Like the images of the Soho strip clubs seen earlier in the film, juveniles loitering in caffeine joints are now firmly part of the city’s attractions. Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo had put both into mainstream cinema two years earlier.

Who are these jiving cats illuminated by the 2i’s window? One is instantly recognisable as Paul Raven, Decca recording star. He was born with the name Paul Gadd but we know him as Gary Glitter. He looks like Sid Vicious before the drugs hollowed out his cheeks.

Who’s the other, better looking lad? Vince Eager maybe? I dunno. Whatever, a great little film and a great find by Flipside.

Addendum

Rob Finnis got in touch and identified Paul Ravens’ mate: as the ‘one hit wonder Lance Fortune, who scored with 'Be Mine' in late 1959. His real name was Chris Morris and he hailed from Liverpool. Incidentally, Hartford-Davis discovered and managed Paul Raven and got him his first record deal in 1960 which, I guess, is why he makes an appearance in the short.’

Thanks Rob.

From the Underground: Joy and Mick Farren

Published in early 1969, Queen magazine ran a set of interviews conducted by Jenny Fabian with the leading lights of London’s underground. Among the contenders who answered her questions and sat for photographer Clive Arrowsmith was designer John Goodchild, DJ Jeff Dexter, dancers Mimi and Mouse and, advocate for those incarcerated on drug charges, Caroline Coon. She was also the issue’s fabulous cover star. Offering a leather clad contrast to this small gallery of hipsters are Joy and Mick Farren;

‘We don’t really know why we got married,’ says Joy, ‘because neither of us really believes in marriage.’

Mick, twenty-five, is leader of the Deviants, an extreme underground group who specialise in revolting. ‘We’re a nasty group, and now we’ve started to make a bit of money we’re getting nastier.’

 Held against the image of Jeff Dexter in his satin robe, Farren really does look like he lives and loves in the shadows. He couldn’t sing for shit (he called it ‘weird-ass atonal’), but he looked every bit the part.

Clive Arrowsmith is running the images from the shoot on his webpages [here] including some beautiful shots of Caroline Coon. Amusingly he doesn’t recall who the couple are – ‘a rock musician guy and his girlfriend’ who ‘epitimised hippy style of the moment’.

Trevor Hoyle 'Rock Fix' (1977)

Trevor Hoyle Rock Fix (Futura, 1977)

I’m no expert but this has to be among the best rocksploitation novels of the seventies. Hoyle was author of Rule of Night (track down to May 9th 2019 entry to see what I have to say on that) a novel that puts weight without pretension on the boover boy cycle of pulp originals. Rock Fix effortlessly aims to do the same with the pop exposé.

 This is the story of The Black Knights, five northern lads on an endless grind of working men’s watering holes – Hanlan’s Drop Forgings’ Social Club among the more memorable –  whose fortune changes for the better (or maybe not) when they meet the pint-sized Phil Martins who helps them get hit records, adulation and drug addictions.  The price of fame is high and payment is not long deferred.

 Hoyle has an easy almost invisible style to his writing, he’s unobtrusive with a sharp eye for detail, especially the everyday. Past midnight at the Dornan Hotel, Scarborough, the band try getting something to eat:

 ‘Would a sandwich do?’ the woman said, placing two keys attached to numbered blocks of wood on the desk.

‘Yes. Thank you. What kind have you got?’

‘Cheese,’ the woman sad, and stared him out.

‘I’ll have cheese,’ Ric said.

‘Make mine cheese,’ Dave said.

‘Can I have cheese?’ Andy inquired.

‘Cheese for me,’ Johnnie said.

‘What about you?’ the woman said.

‘Pardon’ Dice said.

‘Do you want a sandwich?’

‘Yes.’ Dice said. He fixed upon her a beautiful smile.

‘Cheese.’

The sandwiches are made of sliced white bread, Stork margarine and Kraft cheese slices and there’s not even a tin of Tartan bitter to help sluice it down.

 When the band cut their first record they undergo a name change – God’s Gift – are restyled – white suits – and given a marketing angle to match the theme of their single about a northern girl in search of the bright lights who ends up working the streets. A promotional film and the problem of getting such material on TOTPs is discussed:

 It’s time they did something with a bit of gut feeling instead of all those films of pooves walking through forest glades with sunlight in the branches,’ Norman Fowler said. He sat forward. ‘That’s the tack we’ll take. Social realism. A band with something important to say, a moral viewpoint. Get clean away from all this glam-glitter crap and hit them with a social statement. I can see it coming together – a Dylan-style approach but relevant to the ‘seventies. Social problems. Social statements. Social commitment.

No doubt written before punk had claimed any public attention, Hoyle puts the politics of the Edgar Broughton Band into the pop mainstream but then reveals the shallowness of the conceit when the band confect a four part concept album and their management talk of an American tour supporting Jethro Tull.

 In keeping with the cover image, there’s lots of sex talk (and some action). Most of it takes place in the back of the band’s van, sometimes in an alley. It is always coarse and desperate stuff, no love, no romance, no sentimentality. Hoyle captures the group’s casual misogyny and racism, which he never overtly condemns, but leaves the reader with little doubt where he stands on such commonplace matters.

 There’s no rock ‘n’ roll flash on display here, no Bowie or Bolan stars in the making, just working-class lads bonding together on stage and at the bar in the Sunderland Boilermaker’s Club who almost get what they wanted.

Strange Days – 'The British Rock Paper'

While browsing through the incomplete holdings of Friends/Frendz in the British Library I found an advert for the new ‘British Rock Paper’ Strange Days. As luck would have it the library did have the entire run, which unfortunately only amounts to 4 issues that were kicked out at the fag end of 1970. The paper promised to give serious coverage fo the rock scene, offering an alternative to the just launched Sounds, funded by Rupert Murdoch, and the dreary MM and NME. Mimicking the fold over cover of Rolling Stone, the first issue put Elvis in gold lame suit on the front and ran with the first of two lengthy features on the IOW festival. Alongside whatever band was currently in the frame, The Who, Humble Pie, P.J. Proby (one for Nik Cohn), The Pretty Things, Eric Burdon, and the Mighty MC5, it also so covered things like god-rock, kids-rock, black rock and white soul, and reggae as the true underground music. Other aspects of youth culture got a good shake, most especially motorbikes. In the first issue you can find out where to get your bike chopped, 2nd ed has an article on speedway, and in the last issue the distaff side of things is given space with a photo essay on ‘Sister in Leather’:

Supplementing, a no doubt, meagre return on sales and advertising space, the editorial team also ran a m’cycle despatch company. Editor Mark Williams had previously looked after the rock section MusicIT at International Times, he later wrote the first book on road movies: ‘the complete guide to cinema on wheels’ published by Proteus in 1982, which I bought back in the day and have had ever since. In the author’s blurb he describes himself as having rode Harley-Davidsons all over the place, having seen Two-Lane Blacktop six times and once owned the same model Mustang as McQueen drove in Bullitt. He lives, it is written, mainly in airport lounges. A tip of the old chapeau to Mr. Williams for being so cool and for being well ahead of the curve with Road Movies and Strange Days.

Given that the politics of the rock festival loom large in the editorial content it was no surprise to see the thoughts of Mick Farren given space. After all he had had a hand in the organising of Phun City and did help pull down the fences at the IOW. What took me by surprise was the picture that sat above the article’s headline. Here was Farren and a motley crew having just raided a theatrical costumers (or maybe Ron Asheton’s house). I’ve not seen this picture before, but would be interested to know if it has circulated much since and just what the story is.

Th einside story of the paper’s demise . . .

Bert Weedon - 'Rockin' At The Roundhouse' (1970)

The early seventies rock ’n’ roll revival threw out some unexpected contributions to the trend, but none more strange than Bert ‘Play in a Day’ Weedon’s Rockin’ At The Roundhouse. The music is a so-so set of instrumentals, covers of Duane Eddy, Johnny Kidd, Elvis, and some originals. Nothing here to get the Roundhouse freaks moving. By way of explanation for this bit of exploitation of the youth scene the cover notes tell us: ‘A few months ago Rock gradually started to come back into the pop scene, and a big Rock Revival show was put on at London’s Roundhouse - the mecca of pop and beat music. All the rock stars were invited to appear, and the concert was a big success, but the hit of the show according to the press was not surprisingly guitar star Bert Weedon.’ At which point Fontana get him to put this album together. Sticking Weedon on the cover would have blown the ruse so they went for this blonde model in a superb Hell’s Angels t-shirt, and a studded leather jacket draped over her shoulders. The bit of dog chain she’s pulling on adds a touch of violent frisson to her display, well that’s the pose anyway: Altamont via The Bath Festival . . .

‘Keef’ gets credit for the photograph and album design. I’m guessing he’s Marcus Keef, aka Keith MacMillan (1947-2007) who was responsible for a slew of Vertigo label albums. See here and here

The album was twice reissued on Contour, once with the original art work and the other time with a moustachioed Bert kicking out the jams – you can see why the original went for the blonde . . .

In the words of Duane Eddy: ‘Bert is a great guitar man’ but not much of a looker . . .

I can’t imagine the East London chapter of the Hells Angels would have given their approval to Bert’s Rockin’ at the Roundhouse as they did to Mick Farren album Mona – The Carnivorous Circus, also released in 1970, which featured an incoherent Angel telling it like it is . . .

While we’re on the subject of East London Angels, it’s time to give this 1973 Paladin edition of Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils & Moral Panics a showing. Punk DIY ethos on full display here . . . as it is on NEL’s 1971 publication of Chopper by Peter Cave where the biker dress-up box is filled with their dad’s war souvenirs

Where’s the original from? Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, 1970? Isle of Wight? Weeley? Wherever, those are superb homemade patches, 666, 13 & 1%er.

My thanks to Eddie who tipped me off to this album and for the gift of the Cohen book

screen grab from BBC Man Alive ‘What’s The Truth About Hell’s Angels and Skinheads’ (Dec. 1969) – smells like teen spirit

Fallin' Again: Steve Took – Ladbroke Grove's James Taylor

Falling over (again), Frendz #17 (December 23, 1971)

Third World War interview in Friends (January 1971)

Friends #22 interview with Terry Stamp and Jim Avery: ‘this is class resentment, class rage, class anguish . . . The Third World War is a London group virulent with London resentment’. It’s Hammersmith v Knightsbridge, says Avery. Their ambition is to stir things up, they don’t expect to sell, but they do want to influence the next generation: ‘young musicians who haven’t got anywhere, and who are not even musicians, and who are going to to say “You are just saying what we want to say.”’ And all said while playing Monopoly.

Ascension Day w/ Third World War (1971)

What with the dire state of things out here in No Deal Poundland my music of choice has hardened and nothing fits the bill better than Third World War’s ‘Ascension Day’. You can hear it here. Chopper guitar ahoy!!

Where does the wood cut, if that’s what it is, of the woman being protected from a beating by a cove come from? It’s used in the booklet that came with the 3rd Deviants album (see previous posting)

The Deviants have a Secret to Share

The third and final Deviants’ album lacked any track or personnel information on the sleeve and came supplied with a chapbook of sorts.

Accompanying the credits was a short rant from Mick Farren that included a manifesto of a kind:

For the past 13 years Rock & Roll has been the secret language of a generation, despite lapses into gibberish and side-tracks into academic obscurity. Rock & Roll is a secret language that the rulers cannot understand.

Which raises the question of how well kept was that secret?

Scans of the complete text and some background on the album can be found on Richard Morton Jack’s blog, Galactic Ramble . I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off the three I’ve used.

Red Lightnin' – blues reissues – J. Edward Barker

letterhead, circa 1972, for Sippen and Shertser family of labels

Like the Union Pacific releases (see below), Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser’s collections of postwar blues wore their underground credentials on their sleeves.

I’m guessing the early releases were all unlicensed, certainly the first issue on Red Lightnin’, Buddy Guy’s In the Beginning (RL001), looks like a bootleg with its cheaply printed monotone matt image pasted onto a blank sleeve.

Later pressing of the label’s early titles were treated to slick upgrades. OZ’s Felix Dennis was responsible for the design of the first four volumes: Little Walter (RL002), John Lee Hooker (RL003) and Albert Collins (RL004). Denise Brownlow was credited for the design work on the five issues released by Syndicate Chapter and for the various artist compilation Blues in D Natural (RL005). The two subsequent Red Lightnin’ releases employed the graphic talent of J. Edward Barker, Mick Farren’s pal and illustrator at large for International Times and Nasty Tales.

Barker’s design for the label’s 7th release, Junior Well’s In My Younger Days, uses a photograph that looks as if it has been cropped from a minstrel scene in a Hollywood movie, though not one known to me. Whatever its provenance, it pulls in the same direction as the ‘Three Ball Charlie’ image on the front of the Stones’ Exile album. Both albums were released in 1972. The double LP anthology When Girls Do It (R.L.006) also sports a Barker design.

The three panels are fair summations of his interests and art: the mirrored picture of monks with pasted on devil’s eyes in the gatefold; montaged found images clipped from erotica and porn (lesbian, school girl and a Weimar-era nude) that surround a photograph of the Daughters of the American Revolution (with Abe Lincoln glued over the face of the sitting dowager and the open palm placed like a cockerel’s crown on her head) are in keeping with the aesthetic of the period’s underground publications: male adolescent salaciousness at the apparent service of political satire. On the sleeve’s rear you get a feast of backsides; this 1930s fetishism plays to the album’s title – the posterior posturing as gratuitous as anything on the front. It also echoes figures used on Barker’s sleeve for the Pink Fairies’ What A Bunch of Sweeties, another album from 1972. Fair enough?

The conjunction of rock’n’ roll revivalism, blues resurrectionism and the freak underground is fascinating in itself, but it also had me searching for some kind of appreciation, book or webpage on J. Edward Barker. I haven’t found much yet. Until then, there is always his and Farren’s Watch Out Kids, also from 1972 (a productive year)

Barker to the left, Farren to the right

Raves from the Grave – Blasts from the Past

A recent bit of deep digging uncovered Transfusion: Rave from the Grave – Blast From the Past Vol.1 (Union Pacific, UP004).  The compilation features the Del Vikings, the two Ronnies – Self and Hawkins – Conway Twitty, Nervous Norvus, Everly Bros, Al Downing, John Greer, and Vince Taylor and the Playboys with ‘Brand New Cadillac’ – a great collection. What sets it apart from, and at odds with, other early 1970s compilations is its sleeve featuring a typically salacious panel from a Robert Crumb comic. No Teddy Boys in the company of a Bardot-like leggy model and a late-sixties styled custom chopper, nor fifties convertible outside a diner, not even a Rock-Ola jukebox. Pasted together in 1972 by Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser, the album connects the period’s rock ’n’ revivalists with the British underground culture of the day as represented by the likes of International Times, Mick Farren and the Pink Fairies.

Volume 2, Loose Ends (UP005) is an all-instrumental collection bookended by Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and The Fireballs. In between, Duane Eddy battles it out with the Fenderman, Jerry Lee Lewis and a half-dozen other contenders. The sleeve continues the graphic connection with the underground, featuring a tattooed greaser mauling a hot chick in a state of dishabille who threatens to stab him in the ‘puddin’. The panel is given a context of sorts by the incongruous tag-line: ‘Sexism is out! If you like pussy: treat it equal.’ It’s culled from the back page of George DiCaprio and R. Jaccoma’s Greaser Comics (New York: Half Ass Press, 1971), which suggests a transatlantic counter-culture mirroring of interest in rock ’n’ roll.

‘A new exciting label featuring oldies but goodies, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll’

Sippen and Shertser were Jewish East End Mods who made a name for themselves on the scene as The Firm. They ran in the same circles as the likes of Miles at Better Books and IT fame, and Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman, later Pink Fairies roadie and manager of Dingwalls dance hall. The Firm were involved in the UFO club, helping Mick Farren to keep out ne’er-do-wells when they weren’t pulling pranks on John Peel. With such connections, and a deep love of American rhythm and blues, the duo helped to produce and distribute The Deviants’ debut album. They sold the LPs’ American rights to Seymour Stein’s newly formed Sire records and then acted as talent scout for him, the results of which included an album they recorded in 1968 in London with Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton and another in 1969 by psych blues rockers Sam Apple Pie.

Shertser is a singular contributor to Jonathan Green’s pop-vox history of the sixties underground, Days in the Life (1988), which is where most of the references to him and Sippen are drawn from, including Clinton Heylin’s Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (1994). The Firm were responsible for the first tranche of illicit Dylan, Stones and Beatles albums in the UK. The two volumes of rock ’n’ roll obscurities and hits are essentially bootlegs; there is nothing to suggest these tracks were licensed. Other releases on their Union Pacific label included collections of Eddie Cochran, Link Wray and Little Richard rarities.

Ian Sippen went missing, presumed drowned, in Morocco in April 1973. Shertser continued to run Red Lightnin’ and associated labels (Syndicate Chapter), which he and Sippen had set up in 1969.

You can read Greaser here. The hard-on in the pop corn seen in Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) gets an earlier recounting. Perhaps, like the filthy lyrics in ‘Louie Louie’, this courtship ritual is part of American teenage folklore.

Depending on which version you’re looking at, the Pink Fairies debut 1971 album, Never Never Land, has the legend ‘Long Live Rock and Roll’ on either its inside sleeve or on its rear cover. The illustration that adorns the front is about as rock ’n’ roll as Robert Crumb’s fedora.

Mick Farren in International Times #161 (August 1973)

. . . and in Peter Shertser’s own words to Roy Carr, NME (May 25 1974)

Trevor Hoyle, 'Rule of Night' (1975)

‘Come on, let’s drift.’

Despite being republished in 2003, Hoyle’s novel about a Rochdale bovver boy is still little known and even less written about. Originally published as a pulpy paperback by Futura, and though lacking the requisite exploitation imagery used by NEL on their Skinhead series, you would have thought it would have at least rated a mention in Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette’s estimable Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press, 2017). Fact is, Rule of Night is anything but an exploitation title. It is by far the most convincing portrait of disaffected youth I have read; its depiction of working-class school leavers who lurch from one unskilled job to another is nuanced and subtle. Hoyle plots their endless drift around the town and excursions to Manchester and Luton, watching them getting drunk and blocked between the chance encounters that give vent, in spasms of gratuitous violence, to their balled-up anger.

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980

The central character, Kenny owes nothing whatsoever to the romantic renderings of teen life essayed in S. E. Hinton or J. D. Salinger novels, and Hoyle shows little interest in the pop sociology approach taken by the authors of Amboy Dukes or Blackboard Jungle. Rule of the Night is devoid of sentimentality, Hoyle never patronises, nor sensationalises, he doesn’t explain motives; he just shows how it is. His teenagers are barely formed, grasping for a maturity that constantly outflanks them, and so search for it in beer, fags, obscenity strewn language and violence:

He says sneeringly into the face of the man, ‘Did you get a good look or do you want a photograph?’ And then says, ‘Cunt’, and goes on repeating, Cunt. Cunt.’

Fucking Jesus, he wants to hit the man. Fucking Cunting Christ, the man’s pale frightened face sickens him so much that nothing would feel better than kneeing him in the bollocks and seeing that awful fear he loves and despises turn into pain.

 And that search for maturity is also there in the kids’ desperate longing:

Skush is the quiet one; he drinks his pint slow and calm and waits for the others to make up their minds. He’s never been out with a girl, never had it . . . and now wonders if it’s possible to get his end away without the acute pain and torture of having to approach a girl, talk to her, make easy conversation while all the time his lips are numb and his throat squeezed tight and dry.

Beyond the rich and varied characterisation, Hoyle makes a number of sharp observations on youth cultures; a small gang of Bury yobbos dressed as figures from Clockwork Orange infiltrate a Rochdale v Blackburn game; away from the terraces greasers and bike boys take their turn to fight with Kenny and his gang. On a trip into Manchester to sell stolen prescription drugs they encounter a motley crew of Teds at the Bier Keller on Charlotte Street, behind the Piccadilly Plaza Hotel:

Down the green steps and into the dark smoky warmth where the Teds are gathered in sullen groups listening to Gene Vincent and Fats Domino and Elvis. . . The three lads don’t respond to this kind of music: to them it seems crude and obvious . . . But there’s a market and a good sale to be had here for blues and black bombers; the Teds won’t touch acid or grass but rely on lager and pills to give them a charge.

A page earlier they are trying to off load their pills at a northern soul night. The momentarily empty dance space is described as ‘a sacred patch of territory which can only be invaded when the time and circumstances are judged right . . :

Almost precisely on the stroke of nine, a boy with short back and sides and dressed in an open-necked shirt, blue and yellow striped pullover, a pair of baggy trousers with turn-ups, and brown leather shoes with hard soles begins to dance alone . . . looking down at his feet, intent on the movements and rhythms, as though what comes next is as much a surprise to him as to the people watching.

That image of the lad in a state of surprise is unsurpassed in writings on northern soul dancing.

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980

The Loveless - special edition (Arrow Video)

Dvdbeaver and Amazon.com have the details for the July blu-ray release of Monty Montgomery and Kathryn Bigelow’s film. The special edition features a new essay from me and a mass of video extras. I’ve not yet seen the 2K transfer but it is certain to enhance what is anyway a great film with a boss soundtrack to boot . . . Get some!

McCabe & Mrs MIller: This Is Not A Soundtrack LP (part 7)

Robert Altman’s turn of the century north-western, McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), reached back all the way to 1967 and pulled in three tracks from Leonard Cohen’s debut: ‘The Stranger Song’, ‘Sisters of Mercy’ and ‘Winter Lady’. The trio of tunes are the sum total of the non-diegetic music in the film. In the film’s story a good deal of fiddle music is featured, including a lovely scene of a guy dancing on a frozen river, a large music box with interchangeable discs, which looks like a proto jukebox, is heard, and unaccompanied singing all add to the soundtrack. Against the anachronism of Cohen’s music, Stephen Foster’s ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ gets at least two outings; by my ready reckoner it is a song heard in westerns more than any other tune.

For a set of pre-existing songs, the fit with the film’s themes is remarkable, but then Cohen always dug deep into exploring emotional attachments that last just a small moment in time and that’s what the film covers too. ‘The Stranger Song’ is given to McCabe, the character played by Warren Beatty, ‘Sisters of Mercy’ accompanies images of the hamlet’s prostitutes, and ‘Winter Lady’ follows around Mrs Constance Miller (Julie Christie). It is said that Altman originally played around with at least 10 of Cohen’s songs before deciding on these three. He clearly worked to put song and image together in an arrangement that was mutually beneficial. In this he succeeds; it is impossible to imagine the film without Cohen’s sonorous odes to fleeting love. But the songs also fix the film to 1967-1971. It cannot escape that history any more than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid can leave behind B. J. Thomas and ‘Raindrops Keep Falling’, or High Noon can forsake Tex Ritter, such is the genre’s relationship with the past and the present.

Three songs and some incidental music was obviously not enough to fashion an OST from, or to repackage Cohen’s album, but CBS in the UK did see potential in offering the market an EP.

This concise artefact is part of the same series that featured Kris Kristofferson’s tunes used in Cisco Pike (see earlier entry). Where there anymore in the set? Do tell if you know . . .

Mick Farren, Armageddon Crazy (1989)

Mick Farren

Armageddon Crazy

DelRey-Ballantine USA, 1989/Orbit-Sphere UK, 1990

‘2000AD. The year of America’s ultimate special effect . . .’ The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Religious zealots, fanatics and Elvis believers control the USA, and rock ’n’ roll is banned. But the show that never ends is just refashioned by the God Botherers to mount ever more impressive demonstrations for the brethren. The latest planned extravaganza, sponsored by the White House, is to put giant holographs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse above Manhattan. Are you ready to testify?

A member of the revolutionary Lefthand Path is working deep undercover at the Deacon’s HQ, an old-school cynical police officer walks the street between loyalty and insurrection. As he climbs higher, an ambitious Deacon looks to pull them both down. The outcome of the impending confrontation is uncertain and then complicated when a key figure in the establishment turns out to have a Machiavellian disposition for intrigue and is about to stage coup. Which side are you on?

Very much a post-William Gibson cyberpunk novel, with cowboy hackers, a matrix which jockeys can jack into through implants behind the ears, but it is also an old style story of the underground rising up to fight the good fight. I give nothing away when I tell you that the smart and beautiful fifth columnist ends up in bed with the hard-bitten cynical cop. A formidable team beneath the sheets and on the streets.

 This is my first encounter with Farren’s fiction. It all moves along at a speedy pace, I never got bored even when the exposition felt laboured and the, sometimes, clunky dialogue made me wince. His heroes are all counterculture surrogates, all born to lose but smart enough to survive to fight another day. Motorhead bootlegs are the new currency and The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Farren and Wayne Kramer’s musical, wins a Tony. There’s a future worth holding out for. . .

Jeff Nuttall on Teddy Boys & Elvis

The teddy boys were waiting for Elvis Presley. Everybody under twenty all over the world was waiting. He was the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip. Unfortunately he had to be white. Otherwise one of the Chicago blues singers, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf, would’ve done. He had to have the cowboy/Spanish element. He had to have the Adonis profile. He had to have the overtones of the queer boy’s pin-up, the packed jeans, the sullen long-lashed eyes, the rosebud mouth, the lavish greasy hair and gilded drag.

Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (1968)

Forget the Chicagoans he lists, over Elvis, Nuttall prefers Jelly Roll Morton as his choice of Romantic primitive American export to fire up his jaded post-war loins. His hipster subtext comes straight from the mouth of Norman Mailer’s White Negro, but I love that line about Elvis as ‘the super-saleman of mass-distribution hip.’

He later writes that Dylan was the ‘first sign popular music was transcending its commercial situation.’ His opinion being based on the broad acceptance of the ‘profound sourness’ found in the singer’s delivery. Capturing in two words what others have struggled, and failed, to achieve in the course of a book.

This Is Not A Soundtrack LP (part 6)

Against all convention, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) plays out the course of its drama without a supporting music track. No piano, guitar, french horn, piccolo, jaw harp, nothing at least after the story proper starts at the closing of the working day. For the first 5 minutes of the film over a montage of city scenes, a New York summer, Elton John’s ‘Amoreena’ plays in its entirety. The skip beat of the performance gives a rhythm to the edits of scenes of dogs nosing garbage bags, Bowery bums, Coney Island’s beaches, ferries, car jams, construction workers, tennis courts, commuters, and Manhattan skylines seen behind a roof top swimming pool and a cemetery. There’s a familiarity in the images echoed in numerous other New York set movies of the period, but Elton John’s recording is by any reckoning a strange choice. Neither contemporary, it was released 5 years earlier on Tumbleweed Connection, nor in anyway a pop city symphony. Just about anything by Bruce Springsteen from his first two albums would have made a more thematically appropriate choice.

Tumbleweed Connection was John’s 3rd album and one deeply in thrall to the Americana of The Band. Bernie Taupin’s lyrics evoke images of the antebellum South, Western gunfighters, and mission houses. The sepia sleeve and accompanying booklet provide a panoply of supporting illustrations and photographs, even if the actual English location of the heritage steam train station depicted on the front of the gatefold, with all its enamelled adverts for the most British of goods - Cadburys, Rowntrees, Ogden’s tobacco - seem counter to the album’s particular tale of the New World; from Bushy, Herts, Reg Dwight’s own Atlantic crossing.

‘Amoreena’ is about a lover fussing over his absent muse who he imagines in the cornfield’s brightening daybreak in days gone by. Taupin’s lyric offers up the strange conjunction ‘puppy child’ and the absurd idea of a sycamore tree ‘playing in the valley’ among the most hackneyed of romantic imagery - dreams of crystal streams. Elton John’s performance is strong enough to hide all the bad poetry, but it doesn’t make it anymore of an apposite choice of a song to use as a place setter in the film for the drama that follows. I’ve heard it said the producers were using Elton’s persona to make an off-hand comment on the sexuality of Pacino’s character, but then why this track? It’s many things, but Gay themed or camp it is not. What it also isn’t is funky. Beside the Van Morrison mannerisms that Elton channels, the song is far removed from soul music or from any black contemporary musical idiom. Issac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Womack with Shaft, Superfly and Across 110th Street defined the 1970s city soundtrack, unlike them Elton John is not American and he is not black. Maybe that’s the point of why he was used, a means to signify that Dog Day Afternoon is not a blaxploitation picture. I think that might be the case but, even if I’m right about that, the choice of ‘Amoreena’ itself remains utterly obscure to me. Perhaps Sidney Lumet just liked the tune. For myself, I’d have chosen Springsteen:

‘The cripple on the corner cried

out, “Nickels for your pity”

Them gasoline boys downtown

sure talk gritty

It’s so hard to be a saint in the city.’

Andrew Loog Oldham Says . . .

‘. . . music was life-confirming, problem-resolving, and everything that mattered started with a count-off and a look.’

You’d not be surprised to find exactly that sentiment in something Nik Cohn wrote, I think.

Beatles 'Rock 'n' Roll Music' (1976)

Illustration by Ignacio Gomez

There’s no doubting the fine rockin’ sounds on this 1976 compilation, though mono is to be preferred to these stereo cuts, but that sleeve is something which would disgrace the cheapest of mid-1970s rock ‘n’ roll compendiums. Apparently the Fab Four hated it, and Lennon even offered to redesign it himself, but Capital in the US and Parlophone in the UK stood firm on a sleeve that said nothing about The Beatles and a great deal about how cliched the 50s into the 70s had become when lit by the tail lights of American Graffiti.

The poster for the album, I quite like, in so much as it looks British, and there is at least some attempt at art direction . . . The expresso machine dominates like an engine block from a hot rod placed on a gallery pedestal. The Rockola jukebox provides warm illumination, and the girl looks like Jordan, if she worked at Let It Rock before Sex. The boy in his leather jacket and pants, knit tie and cigarette, looking directly into the camera, is both surly and camp. Not as cool as The Beatles in leather in Hamburg, but then who is . . .

Addendum: that is Jordan and the story of the shoot can be found here on Paul Gorman’s essential blog