KAREN BETH - Nothing Lasts

(MS)

In Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting "Christina's World", his subject is settled on the prairie peering longingly towards a homestead in the near distance. 

A disconnected barn signals isolated farm-life, the great outdoors and a world hidden from the grinding cogs of men. There is a heavy atmosphere of entrapment and … something unsettling in the air. And the subject of the painting and clue to the title reveals all, for the woman was crippled with a muscular problem and preferred to crawl than use a wheelchair. The portrait literally frames the frontiers of her world, physically endured through the palms of calloused hands and legs, dragged torturously over needles of sheared corn. Years later the subtle tragedy of the image was gloriously defiled by the makers of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre in an eye-catching poster that explicitly connected the otherworldliness of backwoods life with schlock horror. And such is the dark continental interior of gothic Americana.

 

This all comes to mind as I find myself immersed in a listening cycle of late 60s female singer songwriters of whom the mysterious Karen Beth was one. The mystery is not so much the performer, she was recording well into the 1980’s, but more where this recording came from. We have an early record sleeve where she comes over as a girl who may have sang harmonies in a church harmony group that got a slot on the Pat Boone Show and who was then pushed into the studio to try a folk-pop song when everybody was desperate for another Sound of Silence. And then we have her first LP “The Joys of Life” with her standing in a tree, kinda blurry, her features enmeshed in the branches, the camera a strange distance away from her face. It’s almost as if she didn't really want to be recognised. And scoring the LP was a veteran of Peter, Paul and Mary sessions, suggesting a middle of the road conservatism gently letting loose. And finally there is her voice. It doesn’t sound like a voice that spent time honing these songs in smoke-filled city folk-cellars. Its reticent, repressed almost. There is something being held back in her delivery which enhances the mystery.

In an act of sublime sequencing (the much neglected root of auteur album construction) the song Nothing Lasts is preceded by an acapella piece of Xian-folk Shepherd of the Mountain where she invites the afore-mentioned to spiritually enter her body. In the context of the preceding sweet yet mournful songs it lands like a celestial visitation and echoing as from a cave, heavily sets up the blissful Sermon from the Mount that follows. Nothing Lasts oozes into the ears with sweetly strummed acoustic guitars and an amplified upright bass bubbling around the soundscape. The piano seems to be deliberately underplayed dancing like spiders on velvet drapes and half-way through delivers the most minimal and devastating eight note solo ever heard. The lyric is wise and impressive, “Forget the past, nothing lasts” repeats throughout, each time seemingly delivered with an ever so slightly enhanced fervour. It’s all things must pass-forever changes mantra is both life affirming and humbling. During the recording George C Scott was filming “Patton” with its famous line “For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honour of triumph…A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting”. It could have been used on billboards to promote this record. It should be used on billboards now.

Some wish.

 

(JS)

 

The penultimate track of singer songwriter’s Karen Beth’s debut. A saddish song accompanied with a mixture of folk and electric guitar, with a voice that’s not quite as strong as the material demands. This essential mismatch is the foundation of the artist's appeal. Strong musical arrangements, sad detectable, but ambiguous lyrics, not ambiguous enough to be universal, but appearing to detail some personal romantic tarmac, but recorded in a sufficiently diffuse style to negate voyeurism. But the voice is a church voice, not a rock voice, she evokes emotion but not necessarily empathy. This is one of the sadder songs on the collection The Joys of Life, and is presumably intended as some kind of counterpoint to the happier themes explored in the other songs presented.

 

(PS)

After a few listens of Karen Beth I can’t quite make up my mind whether I rather like her or find her faintly irritating.  

On the one hand, there’s something about her music which makes me think of one of my folk heroes, Nick Drake: the gentle caressing feel of the nylon strung acoustic guitar; the all-too-subtle double bass softly bobbing around (actually this echoed Astral Weeks for me a bit too); the simple piano chiming which made me think of One of These Things First from Bryter Layter; the wistful lyrics which suggest melancholia and optimism in equal measure… 

And then there’s the marmite voice, which reminded me of a friend from years ago who couldn’t abide Drake because of his singing style – something I could never understand – but I do get a sense of that here. At times the melody seems to get stuck in a recess of Beth’s throat, then it almost sounds like someone attempting a feeble Bee Gees impression. 

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the song structure, with its simple strummed chords; although the chromatic arpeggios on the piano halfway through add drama and interest. 

I may well find myself changing my mind after further listens and this could turn out to be a bit of a grower; but at the moment I can’t quite get past that voice.  

WIRE - Heartbeat

 

(JS)

My entry into the world of popular music was not an arrow hitting a target, it was more of a nervous meandering, a rejection of that that was old and a desire to be kissed by something new. In 1979, golden age prog was dead (“The Wall”), rock gods Zeppelin floored by the death of their drummer and my brain was going somewhere else. Flushed with too many hormones I was assaulted by the Clash, the Talking Heads and Joy Division, whilst I consciously turned my back on Queen, Bowie and Rainbow, bands like The B52s, Magazine, Gang of Four, XTC, Public Image genuinely captured my musical attention by actively trying something new. Aided by Oldham record library, the cassette/walkman revolution and the Old Grey Whistle Test my horizons were tested almost daily with something new. 

Wire came from a random pick based on the arty cover of “Chair’s Missing”. It was taped and not listened to for months because the band appeared to ignore the music publicity cycle. I caught a bleak performance of this song where a dark stage unleashed a particularly starkly underlit, twitchy Colin Newman on me. Earlier that evening I had been listening to Shine on you Crazy Diamond, which by contrast seemed over done compared to the drama and simplicity of Heartbeat. I particularly love the gentle crescendo as the rest of the band join in and the gentle fall to the end of the song

Lyrically the song is as ambiguous as it gets,

I feel icy

I feel cold

I feel old

Is there something here

behind me?

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I'm sublime

I feel empty

I feel dark

I remark

I am mesmerized

By my own beat

Like a heartbeat

Like a heartbeat. 

Its simple purity is what has made the song a comparison piece to many future songs I have heard. Is this song better than Heartbeat?  Some have been, but to be honest not many.

(PS)

An intriguing post-punk song released on the progressive EMI Harvest label, with a lo-fi DIY ethic alongside a healthy dose of that prog inventiveness; especially when comparing it to the cover version by Big Black from 9 years later which seems to miss the whole point of the song, cranking it up way too much and losing all of the suspense.

Heartbeat is an atmospheric song which starts down low and draws you in with the expectation of a huge climax, building and building - but then holds back and dies back down like an aborted resuscitation. It's touted as a love song, but it's surely unrequited (or at least unconsummated) if so. 

It sounds like the missing link between Wreckless Eric and the Cure and held my attention for way longer than a song with just two chords and no chorus had any right to. There's also a flute in there somewhere apparently, but it's so far down in the mix I can't pick it out. Maybe a further spin on vinyl is required, but unless it's languishing in a bargain bin I shan't shell out too much for it. 

(MS)

 

It seems that by the time the Wire finally made it to the party the only thing left in the Aftermath was the rotting corpse of The Stones' monotonously chugging rave-up-wig-out "Goin' Home". Carving off a slice from the mid-section, the song's carnal grunts of sweaty expectation were eschewed for something altogether colder and abstract and angular. It was all neon strips and breeze-block brutalism, broody, teutonic. But not the exotica moonscape of Bowie's Berlin, this is the sound of the Corbusier-inspired shopping plaza ennui of the rain-drenched radial towns where shaven-headed men were purchasing pin-stripe shirts from Burton's with irony. Behold the New Wave.

KEITH HUDSON - Michael Talbot Affair

(CG)

As sound clashes developed in Jamaica in the 1970s, the dub plate, where the popular reggae tunes were stripped down to rhythm and drums providing the sound systems with the space to lay down their own sounds as well as the toasting and improvised toasting of the DJs that were invited to perform against each other, took on an energy of it's own. This intense competition between sound systems and the need to deliver to exclusive versions to match and outplay the rival sound systems led to an intensively creative period in Reggae music with the reworking of tunes using the sound studio to weave or drop in musical and vocal phrases over the drum and bass, often accented by dub or other effects before fading out. Each sound system developed its own highly prized style to attract large followings as well as outplay rivals in the musical duels as it revealed new dub plates that offered original reworkings of tunes and innovative dub sounds to dazzle. The originality of sound engineers meant that their studios and output became as famous as the sound systems, musicians and vocalists, singers and toasters. Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock and “Lee Scratch” Perry were key to these developments and their fame spread far and wide, including the UK where British sound systems in its metropoles, such as Sir Coxsone Sounds (named after the famous Coxsone Dodd sound system in Jamaica), Jah Shaka and Chanel One (a little later) in London as well as many others in London and the UK, set up and imported the latest dub plates to acclaim.

In the mid-1970s in central London the two places to hit were Colombo’s where Sir Coxsone played and the Thursday night reggae session at the 100 Club where virtually every single reggae artist played when they passed through London, including Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minot, Lone Ranger, Cedric Myton and the Congos among a plethora of other great Jamaican musicians. Daddy Kools sound system from the reggae vendor Daddy Kools in Hanway Street off Tottenham Court Road played the sounds at the 100 club and people would bring in the latest dub plate from Jamaica for them to play, including one week in 1976 the classic King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown by Augustus Pablo that had been circulating as an exclusive dub plate. The next day I rushed round to Daddy Kools to buy a DJ white cover copy from their fast diminishing stack of King Tubby’s which they had bought the previous night. King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry, with his Dub Blackboard Jungle are perhaps the two most recognised dub originators with many classic dub records to their names but another who is much less well known as a dub originator is Keith Hudson, whose song The Michael Talbot Affair was part of his dub album Pick-a-Dub. This was the first thematic album in dub released in 1974 and was the first dub album to be released in the UK.

One of the truly great dub albums it presented a seemingly austere focus on drum and bass but reworked classic tunes with Aston and Carlton Barret (from Bob Marley and the Wailers) laying down bass and drums that opens up to repeated hearings while Keith Hudson, Big Youth and Horace Andy add vocal phrases. However the Michael Talbot Affair is for me the apex of the album and I listen to it on a regular basis right up to the present day. It has a complex interweaving of melody lines by a range of instruments, including Augustus Pablo’s melodica, that shape the dub rhythm and as it plays, its different interposed elements and phrases enrich each other while the progression of both the rhythm and the melodies offer a satisfying resolution by its end. It is a classic and truly great original cut that can match any comparable example in other genres.

(PS)

I have to admit, I’m a total novice with regard to Dub. I’ve since done a small amount of reading up about it online, and I can’t believe I never knew what a crucial role toasters played. I do now. 

I’ve always found it hard to get into the laid-back groove of Dub though, always preferring the more upbeat stylings of Ska; but this instrumental based on House of the Rising Sun had a bit more to it for me. Being largely in a minor key it has a mournful feel to it, which seems to tally with one youtube poster who says that it’s “In memory of Michael Talbot from Bristol who lost his life in a racist incident in the '70s”.  

The twinning of the guitar & sax after the stripped down introduction works really well and the melodic lines merge nicely: the guitar seeming to take Eric Burdon’s vocal line from the original and the sax playing a variation alongside it; but the guitar is lower in the mix so it’s not necessarily the first thing you hear.  

The guitar repeats this melodic line afterwards, with the sax comping alongside it – and that’s where the hook became more obvious to me. Then the sax takes over for the last half of the song, which reprises its earlier theme in a very unassuming, discreet fashion – occasionally drifting out completely to allow subtle piano & organ to quietly fill the gaps. The only thing which jarred ever so slightly was the errant C in the fadeout, but it’s such a tasteful solo – and I rather like it when the occasional bum note is left in. 

Given the dedication mentioned above, this song seems to me like a hugely dignified response to a tragic incident in a racially charged period of our nation’s history, and I’m grateful that I’ve been made aware of it now. 

(MS)

I went looking for a coffee table the other day. A small coffee table. I’d just moved flat and realised I’d reached the point where all was in place except this, a place for my mug of tea. So with impending national restrictions on my shopping options in the air I ventured out in search of said item with headphones on bleeding the works of Keith Hudson into my ears. A cold heavy rain set about the streets around Olympia where nearly a hundred years before Oswald Mosely had entertained a monster gathering of British fascists and where in December 1967 the psychedelic underground had its final fling with the Christmas on Earth Continued event with Hendrix, Soft Machine, The Move, Pink Floyd, Traffic et al elbowing each other out of the way on their mad dash for overground success. I was heading south as Shepherd’s Bush had surprisingly offered nothing at all in the shape of second-hand furniture. That seems odd doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what happens when the largest Shopping mall in Europe sets itself down on a locale like some gleaming spaceship. “What is this thing called dub?” I thought to myself, as I carefully stepped over puddles that I judged may engulf my Jermaine Genius-style white sole trainers, recently repaired via stick-on-soles from Timpsons. With it’s booming bass-lines and echo-treated drums it struck me it’s just another colour on the great aural palette of mind-altering music intended to achieve the Rimbaudian disordering of the senses. It also struck me that the great Westfield shopping centre could possibly have been accommodated within the confines of the Olympia exhibition hall, maybe leaving Shepherds Bush with more space for crazy alleyways of bric-a-brac shops and…second hand furniture. Wasn’t Steptoe and Son set in Shepherd’s Bush? I think a certain music fan always reaches out for stuff that promises an other-worldly sensation. Music as a drug perhaps for those of us who prefer a pint of beer than dangerous meetings with shadowy figures in Camden doorways. When I was young in the late 70s and 80’s I can see the path had been pre-destined for me to term this sort of musical quest as psychedelic; the dry vacuum of the 80’s could do nothing but half-remember more colourful days. It was a catch-all phrase for the way-out which I soon applied similarly to my enjoyment of jazz with it's Pollock abstracts on the Ornette Coleman gatefold sleeves. The long soloing passages of Coltrane clearly inspiring the improvisational efforts of the 60s guitarists and keyboard virtuoso’s to come. I thought of this as I crossed Gunterstone Road where Hendrix was first deposited from the newly christened Heathrow Airport in 1966 and where he jammed with Andy Somers, later to find fame in The Police, and from where he set about dismantling the London psychedelic movement. Hendrix was fond of the echoed guitar sound drifting away into the background, like his B52 bomber raid solo during the Star Spangled Banner. Interesting to hear the same effects adopted by Jamaican studio freaks just a few years later. Down North End Road I finally found a coffee table small enough to carry home. I held it over my head to keep off the rain and darted down a side street maze back home. The Michael Talbot Affair came on just as I turned down Beaumont Crescent where I found a plaque to the home of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. And speaking of coincidences the last time Hendrix played it was at Ronnie Scott’s in the company of Eric Burdon the vocalist on The House of the Rising Sun. I like the way London can send my thoughts adrift in kaleidoscope patterns and this thing called dub is a welcome addition to my palette.

 

(JS)

As instructed I’m going to ignore the monumental contribution this recording offered to the music industry spawning the commerciality of remixing. Creating the notion that everything that had ever been recorded could exist in multiple commercial editions is perhaps the greatest contribution Dub made, together with opening the door of aesthetic intellectual pretensions normally reserved for the jazz set to descend to lesser technicians of the musical fraternities. Dub also bestowed musicality status to the mixers and studio engineers who had been silently building greater reputations in the industrial production cycle of popular music.

The Michael Talbot Affair takes the Animals standard “House of the rising sun”, strips the lyric about brothels from the piece. Drops the chord structure down two tones to a G Sharp tuning, and speeds up the rhythm from 125 BPM to 143 BPM. The chords are Dbm / Ebm / Gb / Abm / Db / Bbm / Bd / Eb

The mix favours the drum and bass end. Pleasing but the vocal is missed, being too recognisable to the original.

THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION - Flower Punk

 (PS)

It’s impossible to adequately characterize the music of Frank Zappa: it’s rock, blues, jazz, classical, doo-wop, vaudeville, satire, avant-garde and more, all rolled into one (and often, all rolled into one song). I remember my first feeling of listening to Zappa: through chunky old, industry standard headphones in a small booth in my uni record library, I thought “this is incredible, what the fuck is it?”. 30 years on and I still get a similar rush of discovery, even though the LPs are familiar to me now.  

People at the time maybe saw Zappa as counter-culture because he wrote weird music and had unkempt hair like all the other freaks, but that’s only a bird’s eye view of the man and his work. Look at the disdain he shows for the ‘institutionalized hippiedom’ (as High Fidelity referred to it) and its burgeoning commercial appeal on We’re Only In It For The Money and on Flower Punk in particular, and you’ll see him calling out all the fakes and the Johnny-Come-Latelies: the ones jumping on the corporate-approved bandwagon with the hope/expectation of making some coin and getting laid. 

Flower Punk sets the scene with the choice of cover, ripping off the cliched standard Hey Joe (there was also a taste of this on Absolutely Free, with the cack-handed opening chords of the already hackneyed Louie Louie on Plastic People) but this time played in 7/8 to cock a snook at the non-musos, and sped up twice as fast on Zappa’s Variable Speed Oscillator. 

The lyrics nail all the Scott McKenzie stereotypes one by one: Hey punk, where you going with those beads around your neck/ that button on your shirt/ that flower in your hand/ that hair on your head – with the responses as shallow as the image drawn: I'm goin' up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band/ to the love-in to sit & play my bongos in the dirt/ to the dance to get some action, then I'm goin' home to bed. As he says calmly to the enraged punter screaming at a “uniform” at the end of Little House I Used to Live In from Burnt Weeny Sandwich: “Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, and don’t kid yourself.” 

For me, the real cynicism is in the spoken musings of said Punk though: in the left channel, sped up, Zappa is talking about how he’s just learnt the guitar, can strum some chords pretty well and hopes a girl in the audience will notice him and hook up with him; in the right channel, regular speed, he’s wondering what he’ll buy with all his imagined future royalties – a bike, no - a car, no - a boat, no – real estate… and then hopes that girl in the audience will notice him and hook up with him. Tellingly, the song ends and both left and right channel voices have to ask the band if it’s finished. Ouch. 

Zappa deliberately made music that was awkward, disjointed, askew, out of step with the regular beat; commercial or critical acclaim weren’t even a consideration. Ironically, We’re Only In It For The Money was Zappa’s most commercially successful LP of the early period. Maybe the twisted Sgt Pepper parody cover - complete with alternative celebrities on the inside gatefold and band members in drag on the outside - helped gain some notoriety.  

His music is challenging, complex, original, genuinely funny, indulgent, shocking, thought-provoking, infuriating at times – but never compromised. Maybe the best way to categorise Zappa is that he was exactly what everyone else wasn’t. If you don’t get it, that’s your problem. 

(CG)

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were always striking for their versality in playing and often switching genres in mid-song on record and in live performance. Their musicianship live was impressive if under the tight control of Frank Zappa. Zappa himself was a gifted guitarist which was most apparent in live performance as some You Tube recorded performances highlight. For me his best albums were Cruisin with Ruben and the Jets (1968), Hot Rats (1969)  and Weasel Rip my Flesh (1970) where his artful genre explorations appeared to veer between enjoyment of the music. Thisis exemplified in Cruisin with Ruben and the Jets where he explored and celebrated surfing music and the heritage of rock and roll which contributed to it, such as bands like the Coasters with their consummate lyrics written by Leiber and Stoller that documented (as did the songs of Chuck Berry, “the poet Laureate of Rock and Roll”) teenage life in the 1950s. We Are Only in It for the Money  where Flower Punk featured was recorded in the same year as Cruisin with Ruben and the Jets in 1968. It along with Hot Rats and Weasel Rip my Flesh shift Zappa’s attention to the explosion of rock as the emergent rebellious music of a new generation. As an inventive composer Zappa always played with the genres he explored often verging on parody and pastiche, if wittily done. He seemed caught between the desire to have a major world wide hit in each genre he encapsulated and a contrary desire to show his total mastery of a genre by outdoing songs that were already highly successful. Such is the case with We Aare Only in it for the Money whose cover parodied the Beatles innovative album cover for Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band created by John Haworth and Peter Blake and ridiculed the values of the psychedelic hippie movement with its emphasis on all things free, including love, as response to the conservatism that had preceded the early sixties as well as the ongoing power of the corporate institutions to dictate the lives of its employees. Flower Punk parodies the track Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix and for good measure to show Zappa’s mastery throws in riffs from Wild Thing,  while ridiculing the flower power advocated by the hippie movement with its rejection of the Vietnam war and the enforced draft of those without political connections to evade its call up (such as ex president Trump). The lyric mercilessly targets Scott Mckenzie’s popular if gentle hit If You Are Going to San Francisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair) as Haight Ashbury in San Francisco was then regarded as the epi-centre of this emergent counter-culture, if already in decline. Zappa visited London in 1971 to play at the Rainbow Theatre and notoriously was pushed offstage by an irate fan, breaking ribs and suffering other severe injuries. I saw him play on his next visit to London where he seemed, for obvious reasons, wary of the audience. The musicianship was impressive and Zappa’s skill with the electric guitar was of the highest order but constant switches of genre in mid song became irritating and the quality of musicianship lacked heart, rendering it for all its sometimes bizarre yet impressive changes of tempo to this viewer an academic exercise. 

(MS)

I can see a teenage Zappa and the even stranger Beefheart sucking back on their root beers at the Drive-in. Snickering in unison with feet on the dashboard, peeking through their toe-gaps at the giant clicking ants in the cold war B movie flashing before their eyes. A block away the looming antennae shapes casting shadows across the walls of the Mojave Army installation where “Pop” Zappa earnestly mixed batches of experimental mustard gas. Over the course of time perhaps the leaking chemical clouds escaped over Suburb-a-ville into the school rooms and general store and maybe mutating down at the Hop it sent the assembled straights writhing and frothing to music that was an unholy mix of doo wop pap, Lenny Bruce rap and free jazz scapings. But no it was just Zappa Jnrs deep-seated despair of the world around him that created this music. A provocateur so frustrated and angry with everything around him that he tore up the rule books from the start and tore into the heart of a Great Society on its inevitable manifold destiny towards Trumpism.

 

On Sunset Strip Zappa trooped in behind Brian Wilson, the only two genius' (other than Phil Spector) allowed to conduct the Wrecking Crew. On his “Lumpy Gravy” composition these long in the tooth paid by the hour Pro’s mocked him but once he'd made them follow his sheet music it seems they kinda revered him. Zappa was a very intelligent musician and writer.You can hear him thinking in the space of a song, which was part of his problem. Maybe he was too clever. Where Wilson was a doomed romantic so Zappa was prophetically nihilistic and in retrospect it makes perfect sense why he and The Monkees were not so strange bedfellows.

 The Mothers Zappa dragged out of this fault-line to play the music, had the genuine look of recidivist sex-offenders discharged from a Peckinpah Bordello scene. Tex-Mex scary hippies long before Manson made that idea a going concern. I mean they looked like the only band that could have possibly recorded "Brown Shoes Don't Make it". A song that to this day makes me feel very uncomfortable. (“What would you do Daddy?”). There was a conscious effort to surround himself with freaks (Beefheart Wild Man Fischer, Flo and Eddie) it was part of a grand surreal plot to jolt the normal world. I makes me think of Vic and Bob’s employment of Uncle Peter et al. (ED.I note the one in the middle is currently incarcerated for sexual offences with minors) 

 

By the end of the decade he'd already moved on, pushing his band towards jazz-rock breaking point with long complex instrumental movements which set the template for many others to follow such as the Soft Machine (listen to “King Kong” and then Soft Machine II). Behind he left three complex pop oratorios that matched Wilson's cut and paste “Smile” ambition in both scope and multi tracked over-dubbed execution (and I mean over). Freak-Out, Absolutely Free and We’re Only in it for the Money turned the flashlight on a riot torn racially divided America, where teens idiotically fucked up on their way to becoming dad whilst dad fucked up on his way to becoming dead. They're complex records worthy of multiple re-play, crammed full of hidden movements and jokes and snatches of ideas that most other bands would have milked a whole career out of. 'Flower-punk' gives a taste, inverting a garage staple into a gently humorous satire of the Plastic Frisco-bound.

 

If you’re so inclined, try Uncle Meat next up to the end of '69's Hot Rats. Then switch back to Beefheart. Then stop.

(JS)

I must confess I never really ever got Frank Zappa. I have been aware of him. I have been told he’s worth listening to. I think because I haven’t found my own way to his music I have an appreciation block that I’ve never been able to shift. 

“Flower Punk” is described as a parodic reference to Hendrix’s Hey Joe that lampoons the hippy movement, whilst at the same time deliberately exploiting it by encouraging the counter culturals to consume it whilst explicitly dissing them. Zappa was a jazz musician who evolved a formula to represent his less structured music as mainstream. Musically I found the sped-up track with the tape speed variation lyrics unimpressive in 2020. I have heard the same analogue experimentation performed to greater effect and more obvious musical purpose. Culturally I can see a musician defiantly trying to stay one foot in front of his marketeers without losing access to the golden goose that feeds him. Maybe this was the sound of the death knell of 1968, or at least a reverse echo filtered through several valve based distortion units before being reverted to nonsense. The moral of the story being don’t complain about being a cartoon if you want to be a grand master. Be a grand master, even if the cartoon pays more. This is what Zappa did in his later career, but at this stage he’s still fumbling around.

NIRVANA - Black Flower

 (MS)

I think of the Black Flower as some sort of benevolent mushroom cloud ballooning over the Kensington rooftops. It’s purpose somewhat obscure. Like something out of a pulp Sci-fi novel, Aldiss and Ballard. “Black Flower grow, easy, easy take it slow”. The scarlet chimney pots lined up like soldiers on parade amongst the spidery branches of the trees in Holland Park all pointing upwards. Upwards like the skeletal hand on the cover of the “Dedicated to Markos III” album sleeve, caressed by the disembodied red finger-nailed hand. Something like an Amicus film poster, something full of portent and gloss. Like the song. It’s beguiled me for thirty years and it refuses to let go. I bloody love it.

It came from the back-streets of those glorious 60’s. Hidden away in the rehearsal rooms, of songwriting teams hammering away at pianos with scratch backing bands formed in the queue on the stairs, waiting to pitch their weekly offering to the men with the golden ears. A time when David Jones was studying Scott Walker and Freddie Bulsara, was doing the same with Barry Ryan and somewhere above Oxford Street Reg Dwight was practising on being everyone to anyone who'd listen. The collective known as Nirvana were at their core an Irish rocker and an exotic Greek living la vie Boheme along the length of the Uxbridge Road. If Pat Campbell-Lyons voice was fey then Alex Spyropoulos’ was even feyer. (on this selection he's like a lounge Donovan). Songwriters first and foremost they briefly dallied as a baroque in-concert group assembled from the classical music students they stalked hanging around outside the Royal College of Music. It was all kaftans and harpsichords for a spell with a repertoire of ethereal morsels such as “Pentecost Hotel”, “I Believe in Magic” and “Tiny Goddess”, the latter memorably covered in French, German and Italian by the highly erotic Francoise Hardy. Incongruously they became the first band signed to Island Records and hot on the heels, their phased ”Rainbow Chaser” charted as a minor hit in the UK and a major one on the continent. By 1968 it was almost over, they’d scaled down to a duo and were promoting the record across Europe, clutching only their string charts and the assistance of whoever the record company had arranged to meet them at the airport. But along the way they filled out the soundtrack to the bizarre “The Touchables” film and took a trip to Rio to help launch the international singing career of Jimmy Cliff. There was also a naked appearance in front of teenage girls on Belgian TV save for angels wings and underpants. And in Paris one memorable Sunday afternoon they appeared on a TV happening with Salvador Dali where a couple of Bengal tigers prowled around a studio filled with paint pots and expensive chocolates.

 

And the muse propelled them on and on and like the Black Flower it grew and grew …until inevitably Island Records rejected the new album. The title sounded too much like “Black Power” and the music sounded too much like Un Homme et Une Femme and not enough like "All Right Now".

But that’s just history, it was done and its with us now. Over 3 days at Pye’s Marble Arch studios in the Spring of 1969 with a cavalcade of arrangers clocking-in and out including Mike Hurst, Tony Visconti, Mike Vickers and Johnny Scott, they gathered to score the new batch of  euro-pop sounds. There were songs about the blind and the beautiful, about Aline Cherie, about Island boss Chris Blackwell, a duet with Lesley Duncan and a Webb-like western about Illinois (not Wichita). And against Skis on Sunday strings they nailed the perfect anglo-chanson "The World is Cold Without You" and capped it all off with the monumental "Black Flower". 

It starts like the opening of a movie with Spyropoulos softly enunciating obscure couplets …

Pick a black flower

Girl in the supermart

Holy man in the monastery

With all your mystery

It's simplistic and strange and floats about in an ambience of easy strings that sit on the edge of a larger orchestra that promises something far more disruptive. And then it comes with the rush of a an unexpected wall of sound chorus,“Black Flower grow, easy easy take it slow…” The skies darken - think Jean-Pierre-Ferland’s “Le Chat du Café des Artistes” (c’mon you know the one) and then a press of the switch and the candelabra is turned back on, the mood restored and all is well again. And back we go into this mysterious lyric that with closed eyes behind tinted specs could be coming  en direct a L’Olympia ou Bobino:

Paradise found

The world is breaking up

Now the devil can spread his wings

And everybody sings…

The devil indeed.The ending is devastating. It just breaks out into a long raucous multitracked guitar solo over jittery military drums that stutter and collapse like grenadier guards tottering in the heat at Horse Guards Parade. On it goes, on it goes like a curtain falling over the whole Nirvana project. The summit of their blink and you'll miss it moment in the sun. It could have ended the album. When I taped it in 1990 from Stoke-on-Trent Public Library it was on a compilation that started with it and that really worked I have to say. Label stable-mates Spooky Tooth were on the sessions for this album but I don’t think this is the work of Luther Grosvenor. The other guitarist cited is Billy Bremner who went on to play with Dave Edmunds Rockpile in the 70’s. So take a bow. I think.  

Nirvana carried on in various guises and someone needs to do some intensive work gathering their 70's output together. It's a very mixed bag but chock full of interesting items taking in prog-rock, jazz-piano noodling, Xian-pop, odes to John Conteh, session work with Diana Dors offspring, songs for Demis Roussos and Frankie Vaughan and of course the theme tune to childrens TV's Cloppa Castle. 

As I said "Black Flower" really was their towering glory. 

 

(PS)

My first experience of Nirvana was in the late 80s when as a teenager I bought the Back On The Road prog compilation, including their most famous song, Rainbow Chaser. At the time the song was a little too twee for my taste, it didn’t sate my hunger for loud guitars, strident Hammond organs and nonstandard rhythms – a hunger which persists today, albeit to a slightly lesser extent – but as a piece of pleasant psych pop fluff (as I saw it then) it was still a worthy inclusion to the collection. 

I’ve since tried to get more into their sound and have been frustrated by the patchiness of their LPs. The Story of Simon Simopath was interesting and had some great moments; All of Us likewise had its high points, but both were let down by too many cutesy, childish tunes and throwaway, overly-simplistic song ideas. To Markos III had a slightly darker feel to it, but suffered from the same problem as the previous two LPs – evidently enough for Chris Blackwell to call time on their Island tenure and the album tip-toed out on Pye records instead, to little fanfare. It featured the typical Nirvana setup of many hired hands to provide a heavily orchestrated sound, fronted by regulars Campbell-Lyons and Spyropoulos.  

Black Flower is the best song on the album by far, transitioning from easy listening to psych pop to freak out rock rather well. After the dramatic intro, the listening is so easy it could’ve been warbled by Charles Asnavour (ED.That is criminally mispelt!) on a Saturday afternoon variety show; very middle of the road, nothing special at all (unless you happen to love Charles Aznavour ).(ED.I managed to correct this one!)  

Then the psych chorus comes in and it all gets much more interesting… I start getting hints of Donovan with the melodramatic refrain “Black Flower, grow – easy, easy, take it slow!”, and the chromatic descending chords lend a hint of threat and menace to disrupt the tranquillity and calm of the verses. There’s a brief return to that calm, then another dark chorus until a twittering-flute-and-staccato-strings palate cleanser, which sounds like it’s going to resolve to an easy verse again to fade but no… 

POW! Searing twin tracked psych fuzz guitars come in over the repeated descending chorus motif, and the effect is mind blowing. It’s such a contrast to the easy listening verses, but because the familiar chorus chord progression is kept, it absolutely works within the structure of the song. Simultaneously sticking out like a sore thumb and blending in with the structure is no mean feat… and it sounds fantastic. Freak out to fade and I’m reaching for the repeat button before it can finish. 

In revisiting the Nirvana catalogue I’ve also developed a new-found soft spot for the follow up LP Local Anaesthetic, released on Vertigo a couple of years later – an album I had previously dismissed as crap but evidently I was wrong, as a complete LP it might even be their best (further listenings required to confirm this…)  

But Black Flower deserves to sit alongside Rainbow Chaser as an essential ‘in’ for new listeners, it’s a cracker. 

(JS)

This song is the tombstone of the Nirvana project that lasted as a musical collaboration between London-based songwriting partnership of Irish musician Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Greek composer Alex Spyropoulos. It formed the centrepiece of their third album, an album their mentors at Island declined to release. The band were melodic, symphonic, marked with lush productions, performed by an Asgardian selection of session musicians. Campbell-Lyons has a distinctive strut to his voice, which despite being slightly too thin for the material he is draping over Spyropoulos’ orchestrations, is pleasing from an aesthetic point of view, but it lacks the passion shared by his contemporaries who sold better. This is the same year as Bolan’s Unicorn, Fripp’s Court of the Crimson King, Townshend’s Tommy and Beefheart’s Trout-Mask Replica who all score higher for cerebral conceptualisation not to mention raw sexuality.

(This song) has a lovely verse and a lovely chorus, it’s beautifully orchestrated and confidently performed, but I don’t know who it was for when it was made and I suspect that was the problem all along. I guess calling your ex- boss Lucifer doesn’t help your long-term recording relationship either, even in free and easy 1969.

(CG)

Hats off for an esoteric submission that I had never heard of. I have to state that this is not my type of music, in part from having heard too many records in this style with lyrics making a nod to Donovan (but not to Dylan, please note) and in the music evoking a very English scenario of pleasant chord progressions souped up in the production to show it has expanded horizons (but not to the psychedelia of Hendrix or the acid of early Grateful Dead, please note). For me it evokes that part of John Major’s famous quote that “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs and dog lovers”, something that is perhaps less solid than it seems. This record gives me the same ambivalence, especially to warm beer, and is not my cup of tea

(ED. Here is a very interesing clip of the band around the time this song was recorded. We see PC-L  attempting to hang up his coat, a very awkward interview and a great moment capuring the limited cuisine back then at La Giaconde on Denmark St (London's Tin-Pan Alley).