what a load of cobblers
overwraught and over-wrought
i've listened to the whole album... overall sound-wise it's like Chinese Democracy produced by David Sitek... torrid sterility...
Also, a concept album about nuclear war!
come off it guvnor
the theme of nuclear war is even more retro than doing a concept album
Reminds me, the other day I asked Kieran (eleven now) if he knew what nuclear war was, because it occurred to me there's really no reason he'd ever have come across the notion, and sure enough, he had no idea what it referred to. Didn't know what a nuclear bomb was.
What a weight off young minds's that must be, to grow up without thinking the world's going to get blown to kingdom come. Of course they have other stuff to worry about.
(One of my school projects when I was about 15 was on World War Three including if X amount of megatonnage got dropped on London, then what the blast radius would be... concluding that in Berkhamsted, while we wouldn't get the firestorm, we would get house-flattening 500 miles-per-hour winds followed in due course by the radioactive fallout. I don't think the nuclear winter effect was widely known about at that point (1978-ish), or at least it wasn't in the CND type literature I consulted. But it did featur in one of those early Eighties made-for-TV films about the aftermath of nuclear attack (famine, plagues of insects, etc) and on the back of "Two Tribes" where you have the breakdown of causes of mass death by category.)
I should have posted this on the 70s blog really.
Actually that reminds me further, my brother Tim had a proto-hauntological interest in nuclear shelters. It went back to the discovery of an abandoned one in a cow pasture just up the road from us in Berkhamsted. We actually climbed down in it as boys (accompanied by adults I hasten to add). Bunk beds, sandbags, kinda what you'd expect. Investigating this as a grown-up, Tim discovered that there was a circuit of similar small underground shelters located in the countryside on the outskirts of insignificant-seeming towns, stretching across the country, built during I guess the 50s/60s, for local government figures to shelter in presumably, or military personnel--whoever would form the skeleton of an administrative structure following a full-scale nuclear attack on the U.K. But by the early 70s, when we went down it, this particular one had fallen into disuse and seemed to have been completely forgotten about. The manhole-like entrance was surrounded by thistles and cowpats.
