reading matters 2: keeping it in the Family

Our Kid with a Rabbit Holed about the wacky world of the Young Wikipedians who are frenziedly  writing the second draft of music history.  (The first draft being the journalism that these shadowy aliased individuals cite and source).  Kieran's piece takes you inside the sausage-making process of how decisions get made on what is "real" and who deserves an entry.....

This reminded me of my own peek behind the curtain, when I was tipped off about in camera deliberations on whether hauntology was a real music genre or not: a discussion led, unbelievably, by someone whose Wiki-editor moniker was PhantomSteve, and who steered the cabal towards "consensus is to delete". 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Over at the sporadic L.S. Trackhead, the mysterious blogger takes a rich 'n' ripe delve through the dense discography of Family. 

First time I ever did hear the group's name was from the lips of a recently acquired friend. Quite a bit older than me, Martin was incredulous - perhaps perturbed, or maybe offended -  that I had never heard of Family. Probably it felt like a whole world that he'd once inhabited as a young man and that was super-important  to him - it was disappearing, thanks to a new generation of ignoramuses indoctrinated to believe unquestioningly that the early '70s had been a virtual wasteland. 

So Martin snorted something scornful along the lines of "only one of the most important U.K. Underground bands of the late '60s,'early 70s'".  This was 1987, though, and I wonder now how could I have come across the name? Family =  surely one of the most spectacular examples of Dropped Away Syndrome, even more so than The Edgar Broughton Band, who in the Eighties still trod the boards and flickered in the corner of your eye as you perused the gig guide with its adverts for upcoming concerts. 

I promptly forgot about Family again until about a year later, when a musician friend made me a cassette, a guide to the lost treasures of the pre-punk era. And there they were: Family, represented by the off-kilter boogie of "Burlesque", which had actually been a modest chart hit I discovered much later (no doubt thanks to Wikipedia). 

I loved it and picked up the parent album Bandstand...  and then a few other records. 

But I never found anything quite as appealing as the hairy-palmed lurch of "Burlesque". Roger Chapman's voice is an acquired taste and especially in its psychedelic-era incarnation on Music In A  Doll's House, the phlegm-y rattle of that juddering vibrato is too pungent for my palate. L.S. Trackhead does write alluringly -  almost aromatically -  about the records, though. Enough to make me entertain another attempt on the urrrrv. 

This got to #4 in the hit parade during that pre-glam lull 

Family decreed not family entertainment, with a concert at the Coliseum banned

This is a period, before glam really takes over completely, when the Underground and pop music overlap....  "Burlesque" is in the charts. So even a teenybopper oriented publication, as New  Musical Express still was then, put artists like Family, Jethro Tull, Curved Air, and Hawkwind on their front cover.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Another post from "abstract cinema" fan John Coulthart of { feuilleton }, this one pointing to Doodlin', an old documentary that's resurfaced on YouTube about "visual music" pioneer Len Lye. 

Visual Music being a subject I recently posted on at Dreams, Built By Hand - resurfacing a lecture I did at the Tate Modern wouldyafuckinbelieve (a mixed anointing, in the event)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Impostume a.k.a. Carl Neville has a really interesting conversation with Claude about the sensory impoverishment of AI.... the way it works with language without any somatic experience of  language's referents.... and the assymetry of the exchange between embodied and disembodied entities that then ensues:

"You can't generate from pure linguistic interpolation, and I can't generate from a body...  I am language without world, talking with someone who has world, and the exchange takes place across that gap."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has further reflections on the work of Mark Fisher - now turning to the big fat K-punk collection of bloggige, and looking initially at my preface and Darren Ambrose's introduction.

Stephen has just added another post about how, with some of the central writers in K-Punk's Pantheon, he's never read them or doesn't get on with them - and then the mystery of why some books touch us, some writers attract us, and but others don't. (Same here re. some Markfaves:  never read Spinoza, only read about 10 pages of Kafka, and am currently reading for the first time Margaret Atwood (specifically her Fisher-favored Oryx and Crake). (Which is  really absorbing but I'm not quite seeing as yet how it fits the K-punkian vision. Will have to go back to his chapter on it in The Weird and the Eerie, after I've finished the novel).  (I've also never quite seen the Kubrick-worship thing, despite the excellence of specific films. The Shining in particular elicits a big shrug from me. But each to their own god, eh?).

And another K-punk post from Torpedo the Ark, this time on Mark's enduring sense of wonder. 

Earlier in the year, Stephen extended a similarly generous gaze towards Retromania, starting here. I always meant to blog some annotations to his annotations, but the moment escaped me.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Circling back within the extended family to my own scribblings.... I did a liner note for the Superior Viaduct vinyl reissue of Flipper's debut album Generic Flipper. 

Despite buying the record at the time and playing it a great deal, I had never noticed the running joke of the pharmaceutical packaging until doing the essay....

Here's a review I did of the second album Gone Fishin' in 1987... I think the record had already been out a year or two by this point, but perhaps had only just become available in the U.K. for the first time as a domestic release. Who knows, and who cared - I certainly was not going to miss the opportunity to rave on account of a technicality like the record's release date. 

(Several months after the Flipper review I gushed about Saint Vitus's Born Too Late, unaware that it had come out a couple of years earlier - Reviewed Too Late, more like! . Except it was totally timely, given the massive surge in Sabbath-influence within underground rock.). 

Again, talk about not seeing what is right in front of your eyes, but I never fully clocked that the album packaging is designed so that you can cut out and assemble a cardboard model of Flipper's tour van, along with figures of each band member.  

Yes myopia aside, I was pretty fucking keen on Flipper. On my first visit to America, earlier in '87, I picked up a Flipper T-shirt. Here I am wearing it to that year's Melody Maker Party. 

And here is the T-shirt itself, looking a bit dingy.  I wonder if it is worth anything? 

Alas am no longer skinny enough to wear it. 

Years later I finally saw Flipper in the flesh, when they played New York during the tour for their Def American comeback album American Grafishy. 

x