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". 

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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.

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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)

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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."

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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.

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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

"the ultimate in being uncool"

Amid the gratifying response to the Kate Bush piece, some people voiced doubts about my contention that during almost her entire creative prime, Bush was never hip.  The most indignantly disbelieving seemed to think I was talking about an inherent property of the work and the person, when of course I was discussing reputation and perception -  the image and standing of an artist from the perspective of a particular population: informed opinion during the postpunk period, 1978-1984. But  even those dissenters who did grasp that it wasn't a aesthetic judgement but a historical observation about the sociology of taste, still disputed the idea that Bush was ever not cool.   

Two star review for The Dreaming from Sounds.

My sense that  this was so came from memory, as confirmed by various vintage reviews and interviews I'd looked at while researching the piece.  But since the sceptics were insistent, I got to thinking about how you might measure such a thing. An inexact science, even at the best of times, but one metric might be to look at the most influential and respected  power-base of critical opinion at that time and see how often the magazine made the artist its cover star.

So, the New Musical Express: the U.K.'s biggest selling weekly rock paper during that entire period, the one most widely taken as the arbiter of what was relevant and what was irrelevant. 

How many times did Kate Bush appear on the NME"s front cover during her imperial phase of pop fame and escalating creativity - "Wuthering Heights" to Hounds of Love?

Starting with 1978 and scrolling through the years with mounting disbelief, I discovered that the answer was in fact zero times. 

Even in 1985, when those who had once dismissed her started muttering about how glorious "Running Up That Hill" was (Morley described it as "thick", a passing morsel of praise in a Blitz piece on something else), the NME did not put her on the front of their magazine.   

But just look at some of the female artists they did put on the cover from 1978 to the end of 1985:

Pauline Murray of Penetration, Toyah. Jayne Casey of Pink Military. Claire Grogan of Altered Images.  Laurie Anderson. The Au Pairs. Virginia Astley. Nena. Girlschool. Kim Wilde.  Bananarama (twice).  Alison Moyet (twice).  Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins (twice). Grace Jones (twice).  The Mary Jane Girls. Tracy Thorn of EBTG. Nena.  Sade. Annie Lennox. Tracie.  (That's not an exhaustive list of women who got the NME cover by any means, but the point is made). 

Certainly most, perhaps even all, of these deserved to be on the front cover of the NME. But more deserving than Kate Bush - creatively autonomous, a mass phenomenon, such a curious figure?  Virginia Astley? Toyah? Pink Military? The Mary Jane Girls?! Tracie?!?

NME's attitude to Kate Bush is also captured in the standfirst / dek to a feature from October 15th 1983, written by some anonymous editor and thus, I deduce, representing something akin to a collective voice for the writership of the NME and probably most of its readership too:

Kate Bush has moulded herself in an icon of pop erotica — so much that suburban couples claim her breasts stimulate their love making. Yet to like her voice and music is the ultimate in being uncool. Jane Solanas decides to give Kate the benefit of the doubt. 

Formerly  Jane Suck of the punk-era Sounds, Solanas took her re-name from S.C.U.M. Manifesto monger Valerie Solanas, and was overtly feminist in her writing. So I imagine her being quite peeved by the patronising, creepy introductory text that frames her article, further dubiously headlined "The Barmy Dreamer". But the piece itself, is tinged with apologetics for this misunderstood and underappreciated artist ("but among a younger generation, the school of thought seems to be that liking Kate Bush is about as hip as owning a set of Melanie albums") while Solanas also says she herself only got interested in Bush circa "Sat In Your Lap" and The Dreaming:

"Kate Bush hit her artistic peak on The Dreaming album. Yet sadly it wasn't recognised as an important or courageous album, and caused more confusion than fuss.... She blew away that MOR 'Wuthering Heights' image by changing her voice (lowering it) and injecting aggression into the music. There's a note on the bottom of The Dreaming album instructing you to play the record LOUD! Before, Kate Bush as a flaming great noise would never have occurred to anyone."

(Solanas's gradual awakening to the Wonder of Bush pretty much parallels my own arc as a postpunker with very limited spending power. Intrigued by "Breathing" and its bizarre Top of the Pops appearance...  beguiled enough to tape "Army Dreamers" off the radio... but the first Bush record I actually coughed up cash for was the single "The Dreaming") 

(In the just-aired BBC doc  Running Up That Hill, Brett Anderson outlined a similar trajectory -- arguing that it took Bush a while to find her style, that the first two albums were a bit "am. dram." - a nice insight in a program otherwise rather dense with platus *)

On through the late Eighties, past NME front covers for Cilla Black, Paula Yates, Samantha Fox, and T-Pau.... and finally, in 1989, on October 7th,  Kate Bush makes the cover of NME. Perhaps understandably, she looks a little browned off at this point.

Of course, NME didn't have a monopoly on the arbitration of cool and uncool. But looking at other rival sources of opinion at this time, as far can I ascertain The Face did not place Bush on its cover during her imperial phase, despite being so very, well, face-oriented -  a sucker for beauty male and female.  Instead they bestowed this honor upon such as Blue Rondo A La Turk and Carmel.  

What of the other music papers?

Melody Maker and Sounds had her on the front at least once each.  Not sure this indicates that they took her much more seriously, though - it might be simply that, chasing the NME's way-in-the-lead circulation figures, they were looking for a sales boost from random pop fans. 


                                                   

But what's most revealing is the case of Record Mirror.  Of the four UK weeklies, RM was the closest to the territory that Smash Hits would make its own.  A pop paper, with extensive coverage of disco (including James Hamilton's cult-beloved column), the magazine had a younger audience than the other three papers, and I suspect, a less masculine one. In the mid-70s, long after his teenybop star had faded, they had Marc Bolan  pen a weekly column. 

Record Mirror put Kate Bush on its cover about half-a-dozen times. 

That to me indicates how Kate Bush was seen by the after-punk rock press - at once as pop and as Old Wave. And then by the time New Pop comes along and makes pop itself cool, she's too prog, too pre-punk,  too rockist (ironically!) to be seen as the fellow traveler to Japan, Associates, Kiss in the Dreamhouse Siouxsie, that she really should have been. 

Of course nowadays, what passes for the NME goes along with the received wisdom, the rewritten history  , and recently placed Bush at #8 in its 100 Most Influential Artists Currently Working Today: “Kate Bush pretty much created the archetype for mysterious singer-songwriters everywhere. Turn on the radio these days and you’ll hear echoes of her in the overblown production of Wild Beasts, the electro-celt inventions of Björk and PJ Harvey, the expansive wafts of Zola Jesus and in the dolphin-lunged vocals of Florence + The Machine or London Grammar.” 

* "platus" - see also platulence. The quantitative plural of platitude. i.e not a number of discrete inanities but a supply, resource, reserve) 

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More on Kate Bush as the quintessence of Old Wave

More on the "dropped away" phenonemon

https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-dropped-away.html

https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2024/03/dropped-away-part-2-1985-consensus.html

https://hardlybaked2.blogspot.com/2024/03/dropped-away-part-2-1985-consensus.html