So sad to hear that Rik Mayall passed away today, so many of his characters kept me and my mates laughing through school in the 80’s. Mayall and the Comic Strip were our equivalent of the Pythons with episodes replayed on video and recounted word for word in the playground the next day.
Many of his lines are still used around our house to this day (‘hands up who likes me?’ ‘answer that and stay fashionable’, ‘get down and groove, we dance all day in this house’) and characters like Rick – the People’s Poet, Colin Grigson (in Bad News) and Lord Flashheart (in Blackadder) are timeless.
Bad News Tour and More Bad News are two of my all time favourite musical comedies so I’ve dug out their records in his honour, scanned some sleeves and will be listening and watching tonight.
More Trunk TV. Quick, before it gets taken down like EP.1!
Nice to run across a little plug for The The’s ‘GIANT’ 12″ I share billing with in the latest issue of Classic Pop magazine (issue 11, Kate Bush cover). For all those who remember Smash Hits from back in the day and yearn to break free of the endless rehashing of the Beatles/Stones/Who/Dylan/Zeppelin pop/rock mafia in the other music monthlies – this is the mag for you. Not as lightweight as Smash Hits but not as nerdy as Record Collector, it finds a fine balance between in-depth interviews, retrospective pieces, current reviews and where are they now and what have they been up to news.
In other The The news (try saying that when pissed) it’s only 3 weeks until I get to quiz Matt Johnson about the making of ‘Soul Mining’ over at Rough Trade East on June 30th. The same day sees the release of the 30th anniversary edition of the album of the same name. You can find out more info here.
Last Sunday I was lucky enough to see the 1992 work print of Richard Williams‘ life’s work, ‘The Thief & The Cobbler’ at the BFI on the Southbank. To make the occasion even more special, the man himself was on hand to present it and answer questions, something he’d been reluctant to do for over 20 years since the film was taken, unfinished, from him by the studio and bastardised into not one but two flop versions of his great vision. It’s a long but fascinating story which ends in tragedy and is best told via the Wiki article here or Kevin Schreck‘s documentary ‘Persistence of Vision’.
In conversation with film critic David Robinson after the showing Williams was in fine form, laughing and joking about events during and after the film’s premature end. Several animators and people who worked on the film were present in the audience and he was at pains to mention as many of them as possible. Sadly because of the time that had passed since the film’s abrupt halt, several of the more elderly animators had died and Williams himself is now 81. There was a sense of closure about the showing, with the audience all willing a visibly moved Williams to shakily get through his list of thankyous before the film commenced.
The film itself was incredible to see on the big screen and at a fairly decent quality even though certain scenes were unfinished and shown via basic pencil animations or even story boards. The sound was also unfinished but most of the voice work was in place even if the music featured placeholders or rough drafts. You got a sense of the story and there were several new sequences that I’ve never see before in the various different versions floating around the web.
The incredible war machine sequence near the end was just breathtaking to behold, surely one of the greatest long-form animated sequences ever created. The pace of a lot of the animation was far slower than would be acceptable in today’s ADD world but this added to its charm and the humour was light but cutting. Had it of emerged at the time, after the spectacle of William’s other great work, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, it would have looked like little else seen before. Since more than 20 years has now passed you can see that ‘inspiration’ had been very liberally taken from it for the animated version of ‘Aladdin’ that Disney released some years later.
After the showing and a rather large applause, Williams took to the stage with Robinson and went through a number of anecdotes connected to the film before engaging in a Q&A with the audience. He was at pains to point out that this version of the film was only the last version they had before all the footage was repossessed, and not a very good quality copy at that. He revealed that his wife had sent the film to an overnight copy house to get a dub of the footage they had in the order that was assembled at the time. In this interview with London Calling he expands further on how the showing came about:
“The Academy wanted to screen my cut of the not quite finished ‘The Thief and the Cobbler’. With their help we reconstructed the work-print as it was on the day we had to abandon the film in 1992. Which is why we’ve called this version ‘The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time’. The whole film is there in good working order with all the amazing voices including Kenneth Williams and Joan Sims from the ‘Carry On’ films, and the legendary Vincent Price.”
During the session he recounted some of his battles with the studio and how it had affected him afterwards. When asked about why he hadn’t spoken about it he replied that, “when that happens to you, the last thing you want to do is talk about it”. Talking about surrounding himself with the best people in the business so that he could be sure they could be relied on to get on with the job he told a story he’d heard concerning a jazz musician with a drunk guitarist. On finding the inebriated player shortly before a show and realising that he wouldn’t be up to the job he hissed at him, “Don’t fuck with my hustle”, and this appeared to be his attitude to anyone who worked for him who couldn’t pull their weight.
Best of all was a seemingly throwaway comment he made when talking about the control studios exert over their charges once the finance is in place. Summing up probably a lifetime of experience at the hands of the moneymen and relevant to virtually any area of the industry where creativity is involved: “You know what the Golden Rule is, don’t you?” he asked the audience, “The one with the gold, makes the rules”…
Many thanks to Mark Nicholson (aka Osymyso) for not only getting me a ticket but for taking these photos during the event. For more behind the scenes info on the original production of ‘The Thief…’ take a look at this blog, written by some of the original animators and creatives involved in making it.
This sculpture by Luke Jerram – the man responsible for public pianos and a huge waterslide – has just been installed on Platform 3 at Bristol Temple Meads station. It’s a commentary on children in the digital age (she’s holding a phone) and was made by scanning the artist’s daughter and rendering her in 3D form as a pixelated image.
Pixelated Sculpture from lukejerram on Vimeo.
From a distance she appears as a normal child but as you move closer the illusion becomes apparent. For more info and a short film of the sculpture visit the BBC News site here.
Top photo by DJ Moneyshot, bottom photo by unknown.
Here are some concepts and designs from what would have been the Hollywood version of Akira, proposed several years ago (and in various forms years before that too). It would have starred Chris Evans as Kaneda and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tetsuo amongst others. These images are taken from the moviepilot.com site, go there for more concept images and info.
My 360º fulldome presentation, ‘The Search Engine’, returns to Dome Club at a new location this summer – the Q Club Complex, Birmingham. There will be three showings – all playbacks, I won’t be present – during July, August and September.
Tickets are £10 or £8 concessions and this will be in the new portable dome they have acquired which means viewers can lie on the floor for the best experience.
Dates and ticket links: 18th July / 15th August / 19th September
Beautiful artwork on the new Dead Cert release which is another Clone record taken from a tape of instructions for birthing! Image and text taken from the Boomkat mail out:
“Utilising the ARP 2600, ARP Odyssey, Polymoog, harmonica/synthesiser interface, Eventide Omnipressor, Roland vocoder and genuinely bizarre narration imploring the listener to “push…” over a background of retro-futuristic space-age progressions, these recordings edge the concept of extreme American outsider music to its furthest reaches.
Originally broadcast as a one-off transmission for electronic harmonicist Gary Sloane’s Import Hour show on Anchorage radio station KGOT FM, it’s one of the rarest recordings in the very limited line of Clone breadcrumbs released to date – the audio discovered by Sloan in his own time capsule of C60 compact cassettes used to document the unlikely synthesised wing of an untravelled North American micro industry.”
At 10 and 12 minutes a side it’s debatable whether this should qualify as an ‘album’ but it’s certainly one of their most intriguing releases recently. Listen and buy here.
The Electric Hoax Pt.23 by Pete Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. This strip appeared in the weekly UK music paper, Sounds, in 24 parts sometime between mid ’78 and ’79. Click image for larger version
The Frankie Goes To Hollywood deluxe 30th anniversary edition of ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ I designed is now 83% funded after less than 2 weeks. Here are some more images of some of the contents. You can pledge for a set or separate elements here.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood‘s ‘Two Tribes’ – one of the greatest pop singles of the 80’s and certainly one of the greatest 12″ mixes of all time – was released 30 years ago today. June 4th saw a 7″ and 12″ finally burst the bubble of expectation that ‘Relax’ had inflated after its 5 week run at the no.1 spot despite a BBC ban.
Six days later on June 10th ‘Two Tribes’ was also sitting at no.1 and would remain bedded in for another nine weeks with ‘Relax’ returning to the no.2 spot for a couple of those too. The 7″ and 12″ would be joined by three further 12″s, all sporting remixes of the title track or its B side, a cover of Edwin Starr‘s ‘War’, as well as 7″ and 12″ picture discs and a cassette compiling excerpts from all.
Add to that the phenomenon of the ‘Frankie Say’ T-shirts that swept the nation that summer and you had a roller coaster of pop product that no one could have predicted. Over on my ArtofZTT blog I’ve been adding sleeves, posters, adverts and picture discs daily to celebrate along with various quotes and info about the releases.
The ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ box set I helped design is looking good at 83% funded over on Pledge Music and I’m waiting on the go ahead to post more photos from it. Over on his Failed Muso blog Rob Puricelli has written a great piece about the anniversary of ‘Two Tribes‘ and how it impacted on him as a teen in the 80’s, so much of it rings true to my experience too but he puts it so much better.
This looks incredible – a restored print of a little-known documentary of old early 80’s NYC. ‘Stations of the Elevated’ (1981) Directed by Manfred Kirchheimer.
“The first ever filmed document of graffiti, Manfred Kirchheimer’s richly chromatic 16mm tone poem sets images of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn to a soundtrack that interweaves ambient city noises with the gutbucket gospel sound of jazz titan Charles Mingus. Long regarded by cinephiles and hip-hop heads as an obscure cult masterpiece since it premiered at the 1981 New York Film Festival, Stations of the Elevated is a celebration of a quintessentially urban art form—at a time when it was largely dismissed as vandalism. With lyrical shots of tagged trains, desolate rail yards, and other details of the urban landscape, it remains a priceless portrait of a bygone era of New York City culture. World premiere of a new restoration”
Released by Artists Public Domain/Cinema Conservancy
World Premiere New Restoration Friday, June 27 BAM Harvey Theater for BAM Cinemafest 2014
Tickets: HERE More information on Artists Public Domain
I’ve just been combing old discs for archived artwork for various Beat Delete reissues, forget vinyl, this is the new digging – byte digging. The first Herbaliser LP sleeve (‘Remedies’, 1995) and labels takes up just 5.4 MB of space, madness.
Above and to the right are unused designs for the first Cinematic Orchestra album and singles. Neither are for anything in particular, more playing around with the typeface I had created for the band and exploring different textures.
The top version was done by colour copying the logo at different sizes onto sheets of tracing paper which were then ripped, crumpled and overlaid under a scanner. The bright light of the scanner shone through the layers and the resulting scan had various filters applied to bring out the colours in the paper. No Photoshop layers there though, real layers of paper in one scan.
To the right is more playing with letter forms than anything else. The image behind the type is one of the photos from the Colourscape that later got used on my ‘Kaleidoscope’ LP. Below is a typeface I designed in college – check me out with my Fuse fonts, must have thought I was Neville Brody or something…
This original 2000ad cover by Mike McMahon recently sold on eBay for over £4000 after being in a collection for 20 years. You don’t see one of these very often, I only wish I could have afforded it myself.
‘Project 2501’, a short homage to Shirow Masamune‘s Ghost in the Shell is directed by Ash Thorp and stars freelance model Christine Adams in the role of Motoko Kusanagi. Thorp’s tribute to the classic anime masterpiece crowdsourced the skills of filmmakers across the globe, in San Diego, Poland, and Singapore. It couldn’t be nearer the anime version and is also timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the original. Apparently Dreamworks are making their own version, it already has a benchmark to live up to here. More info on this version here with some beautiful poster design too. *Warning* Nudity.
The Electric Hoax Pt.22 by Pete Milligan and Brendan McCarthy. This strip appeared in the weekly UK music paper, Sounds, in 24 parts sometime between mid ’78 and ’79. Click image for larger version
The Herbaliser finally release the remix companion album to their ‘There Were Seven’ LP with a cover remix by yours truly. ‘There Were Seven Remixes’ actually contains 16 of the buggers and a host of instrumentals if you get the digital version.
Unfortunately the original idea of having seven 7″s in a box has gone by the wayside because there is so much material and now they have a handy catch-all CD coming out on June 30th via their Dept. H label.
Remixes come courtesy of Gigabeatz Bonson, Coleman Brothers, Soundsci, Jenome and more. Pick of the bunch for me are the 2econd Class Citizen, No Sleep Nigel and the excellent Lopez remix, the latter of which you can hear below after the T-Power mix.
I bought this the other month because I liked the art, it’s a very quick ‘read’ being that there’s no text and it’s more of a portfolio / sketch book with no context to the images inside. I know nothing about the artist , Raymond Lemstra, but I like his level of detail and the way he flits between different styles.
His voodoo / totem pole / robotic faces are my favourites for their clean lines and 3D appearance. You can find his site here and the book is available from Nobrow Press and other good comic shops.
No doubt they will have a stall at ELCAF – the East London Comics & Arts Festival – in a couple of weeks, their books are always interesting with great art and different formats.
