interesting book (a series) #1

kicking off a new, sporadic series, about interesting books, mostly but not exclusively music-related :



All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Matters by Mark Dery

Boing Boing's first-ebook, this fascinating 8000-word monograph uses Mott the Hoople's Bowie-gifted signature anthem to unpack the meanings of glam, ranging from the etymology of the term "dude" to the "20s-style cover" of Mott's album and its evocation of " the coded homoeroticism of the ‘20s magazine illustrator J.C. Leyendecke", and all sluiced through the memories and p.o.v. of an Anglophile "growing up glam in  in ‘70s San Diego". Get it here.

On which subject, check out also Mark Dery's recent  e-book treatise for Thought Catalog on the history of American Anglophilia: England My England: Anglophilia Explained.

 

tickling my fancy







got a piece on the Fred Judd and Daph Oram archival issues in the next Frieze



would have bunged this solo project by Radiophonic mainstay David Cain in the Frieze-r if i'd known it was coming -- sterling archeology by the indefatigible Jonathan Trunk Esq



and this one too ( although it doesn't quite fit, being American, plus Suzanne Ciani shortly after the bleepy early phase captured on this CD headed into outright New Age)



new collection of essays by the great Mark Dery, out April on University of Minnesota Press, foreword by the great Bruce Sterling



last year was the first year in years when i didn't have a Ghost Box LP in my end-of-year... that Advisory Circle album never quite clicked me with i must admit... wondered sometimes if maybe just maybe JB done spread himself too thin (three great Cafe Kaput releases in rapid succession end-of-2010/early-2011) but in truth As the Crow Flies probably just hit me at the wrong time... i will go back to it.. at any rate this new Belbury P gets me back on the GBox program... a new, "live"-r sound, with guitar and what sounds like real drums and a real-seeming sense of space. yet also quite techno-y in places

and here's an interview with Jim Jupp at FACT on the "mood board" that makes up the new record (think ploughman's lunch meets Turkish psych) plus a Belbury Poly mix



got a piece on legendary photographer/Basement 5-er Dennis Morris and John Lydon's Jamaican Holiday in early 1978 in the next issue of Another Man magazine -- this is a photobook from his days as court photographer at Gunter Grove



often thought how striking it is that so many of the great "British" singers and musicians -- John Lydon, Lennon/McCartney, Morrissey/Marr, Van Morrison, Kevin Rowland, Elvis Costello, Ian McCulloch -- are actually Irish. Well here's an interesting book on this very topic and the "double consciousness" that Morrissey caught so plangently with the title "Irish Blood, English Heart" (if not the actual song, which is pretty nothing-y)



The Bad Music Era gets its day! Let's get down to Work (to borrow a genre-coinage off Mr Kid Shirt). Trevor "Playgroup" Jackson inches into the mid-to-late Eighties with this double comp of Goth-dance, Cold Wave, EBM and dancefloor oriented second-wave Industrial. (And he's not alone, not at all: Blackest Ever Black/Raime, Prurient/Vatican Shadow, Gatekeeper, Perc, et al). How weird to find oneself, in 2012, grooving to the Executive Slacks!