Love the cover of the ‘Epiphanies’ collected from The Wire‘s back pages. A simple concept: an artist is invited to recall an epiphany in their life, these used to run (maybe they still do) as the last feature in the Wire before the back cover, effectively the end of each issue. The cover illustration in by Reuben Sutherland who is the graphic half of Sculpture who will be playing tonight, April 10th at the Yard in Hackney Wick.
Solid Steel will be rolling out a series of gigs this summer for no reason other than we feel like it. For these two in Paris, France and Ghent, Belgium DK and myself are joined by Om Unit and Illum Sphere. If you want to book a Solid Steel night then please contact Ben Coghill at Elastic Artists.
Sticking with the advertising theme for the month of March we have our third guest post in the Flexibition, this time from Pete Issac – he of Jelly Jazz fame and 45 Live co-conspirator alongside Boca 45. He’s chosen a rather groovy flexi from Smiths Crisps by Howard Barnes & Cliff Adams, ‘When It Comes To The Crunch (It’s Smiths IT IS!)’ / ‘Rhythm And Crunch’ (Lyntone Lyn 1021) from 1966. I’ll let him do the talking…
“Do you crunch? You don’t? Well you should. Just send in 3 empty bags and receive your Crunch disc!” So says 60’s radio jock and TV host Simon Dee on the Ready Steady Go-style TV slot from 1966, featuring hipsters of the day throwing what is likely to be ‘The Crunch’ dance moves. A swinging up-tempo mod groove on both sides with the B-side being an instrumental with tight drums and with an even tighter Carol Kaye-esque bass line, in keeping with 60s flavoured bass sounds like the Pete Moore Orchestra‘s ‘Cat Walk’, London Jazz Chamber Group‘s ‘Mae West’ and so on. Completely on point for the period, Smiths Crisps are tapping into youth culture in exactly the same way as marketeers will use pop to sell everything today.
Side 1: ‘When It Comes It The Crunch’
Advertising records were pretty common at the time, and the producer of this, Lyntone, released a bunch of Flexi discs for the likes of Action Man, Ford, Heinz and Cadbury. They also released some Beatles records, which is pretty odd. And the collecting of empty packets to get the record was also common, one of the first records I ever got myself as a youngster in 1972 was by collecting empty Wotsits Crisps packets to get a copy of ‘Wilburs Collection of Childrens Favourites’ (sadly thrown away years ago).
Side 2: ‘Rhythm And Crunch’
This is not a particularly rare/expensive flexi, I picked it up years ago in Plymouth for pennies, and you could easily pick one up on Discogs for a few quid now. But what it is is an evocative promotional piece of music that perfectly illustrates the advertising industry tapping into a relatively newly found audience; young people with disposable income and cultural awareness.
With ‘vinyl’ appearing in almost every TV advert these days, I wonder how long it is before a company rekindles this concept and asks you to send in 30 empty yoghurt pots or wot-not to get a flexi-disc or standard 7″ of ‘Send in The Girls’, or a Mark Ronson ditty or indeed a specially commissioned piece of music. I say to these advertisers ‘hurry up!’.
Smiths Crisps TV Advert featuring the track:
DJ Cheeba, Moneyshot and I are putting our 4 deck, 3 DJ reconstruction of the Beastie Boys‘ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ album to bed for the foreseeable future on April 17th at the Funk & Soul Club in London. We feel that it’s done it’s job and we want to end it 18 months after it’s premiere and just 2 weeks short of the anniversary of MCA’s death on May 4th. We’ll have the full AV set up for this gig and Moneyshot’s other group, The Allergies, are also on the bill amongst others with Mixmaster Morris playing the second room as well. It’s at the Electric Ballroom, Camden and tickets are £8 advance.
Tame Impala‘s third album sleeve, not sure who the designer is but would hazard a guess at Leif Podhajsky as he’s done all their sleeves in the past. *UPDATE – and here’s the single cover for ‘Cause I’m A Man’ and the artist is Robert Beatty not Leif. Thanks to 50 Watts for posting his new site.
Grasscut – Curlews from grasscutmusic on Vimeo.
Love this simple but beautifully realised video for Grasscut‘s ‘Curlews’ by ‘silent partner’ Pedr Browne. It’s taken from the duo’s next album, ‘Everyone Was A Bird’, which will be released on May 18th on Lo Recordings (they also plan to make films for the whole album). I saw them live late last year playing some of the material for the first time and fans will not be disappointed, their way of making and presenting music is very unique. They’ve also just started a radio show called Cut Grass which you can listen to here. And if you can’t wait until May 18th then check out the first single, ‘Catholic Architecture’ – a Robert Wyatt cover – that they released earlier this year with this beautiful sleeve.
A couple of discs from one of my comedy heroes today in the Flexibition – Kenny Everett – a legendary figure in the British broadcasting landscape from his days on pirate radio to the BBC, making the jump to the small screen on both the Beeb and ITV but never quite making the transition to the big screen. Kenny was one of the most creative disc jockeys on the wireless in the 70s, making endless tape montages of radiophonics, sound FX and song megamixes to intersperse with his wacky comedic range of characters and voices. He was genuinely hilarious and his on-air persona was probably his greatest character of all.
He was no stranger to voice-overs and regularly made jingles for many of the DJs on Capital Radio in his time there. In 1973 he voiced a promo flexi disc for Pepsi’s famous “Lipsmackingthirstquenching…” advert which basically entailed him filling time whilst playing the eight second fizzy drink commercial as many times as possible in four and half minutes. The ad is the gem here rather than Kenny and the disc is notable for having a nicely designed cover which has aged remarkably well graphically and was apparently distributed to retailers of Pepsi to further boost sales.
The second of the featured flexi’s is a double act of Kenny and Michael Aspel ruminating ‘On Love’. Aspel of course has to play the straight man (as did anyone who teamed up with Everett) reading from a script but gets in a good few jibes as cuddly Ken shoehorns in as many freestyle double entendres as possible but mainly cracks up. The pair once hosted shows that were the antithesis of each other on the radio, endlessly goading one another on air during the handover between their respective slots, eventually forming a lasting friendship and admiration. Kenny adored the sound of Michael’s voice and he, Kenny’s ability to make him “laugh like a drain”, regularly giving him the giggles on what should have been a serious show.
The intro to the flexi is slightly NSFW and there’s a very odd remark from Aspel in relation to his daughter… It does, however, end with a Rod McKuen-esque dialogue / song that builds to a somewhat unexpected but hilarious crescendo. Dating from 1974, I’m uncertain where this was from or what it was for as there seems to be no information about White Elephant Publications on the web. The disc is backed by Dick Emery with a version of his signature catchphrase, ‘You are awful, but I like you’ transposed into song form. This was also released as a regular vinyl 45 and even made the UK charts at one point that saw Emery making an appearance on Top of the Pops. Much like it’s title, it’s awful.
Two things that I didn’t know about Kenny that I found whilst researching this piece:
He was sacked from Radio 2 in the early 80s for reportedly saying, “When England was a kingdom, we had a king. When we were an empire, we had an emperor. Now we’re a country, and we have Margaret Thatcher.”
He was the voice of the cat in the famous ‘Charlie Says’ commercials.
and one for Dick Emery:
He voiced several characters in The Beatles‘ 1968 animated classic Yellow Submarine including “The Nowhere Man” Jeremy Hillary Boob, the Mayor of Pepperland and Max, one of the Blue Meanies.
RIP Kenny Everett & Dick Emery
My new Future Shock 2 mix is getting a lot of love on this week’s Solid Steel and now I can reveal that I’ll be premiering the AV show that goes with it at Videocrash at Koko, London this May 23rd. *UPDATE – Soundcrash cancelled this gig after changing the line up four times in two weeks. It has since been rescheduled for another date in December at a different venue.
Had to watch the new Mad Max 4 trailer frame by frame, some beautiful shots in there.
This must be film of the year…
Several items from my collection of Savage Pencil / SavX aka Edwin Pouncey‘s advertising for the Slam City Skates shop. (Above) A rare Slam City Skates bag from 1990, the reverse had a similar image but advertised the Rough Trade record shops, one of which had a space in the basement below SCS’s Covent Garden branch.
(Below) Several adverts by Savage Pencil for the Slam City Skates shop from 1986, 1984 and 1987. The 1976 – 1986 flyer is a Battle Of The Eyes production by SavX and Chris Long.
A new mix I did back in January has finally come to the top of the pile for Solid Steel. ‘Future Shock 2’ is the follow up to last summer’s first outing of retro electronica and future beats. This was completed just as Edgar Froese passed away at the end of January and I went back to it to include a track and interview snippets in tribute to him. Sadly it’s been waiting in the queue for a spot on the show for two months so the moment has gone plus we’ve lost other greats or equal importance since but that’s what comes with popularity and the show has been going from strength to strength over the last couple of years.
The first 10 minutes of this took an age to get right but it’s one of the most satisfying slow build intros I think I’ve ever sequenced, the pacing and layers unfold in a way that’s hard to engineer often. From then it’s a measured climb into harder and heavier waters until we hit Mark Moore & William Orbit‘s remix of ‘The Future’ by Prince. In fact there are many builds and breakdowns in this mix but of the slow burn variety rather than the euphoric kind, I’d imagine it’d be pretty good to drive to at night.
I just ran across these alternative film posters by Janée Meadows on the web, love how she’s transplanted the painterly style of the late 70s and 80s onto contemporary films and games. See more excellent work here.
Apparently this was released 20 years ago this week – how time flies. Above is my computer file for the Black print that went to the printer before the silver was applied. Below is what it came back looking like if you can imagine the grey as being silver. It didn’t come back with exactly the look I was hoping for in terms of a silver-toned image but back then I was learning the print side of things as I went along.
Below is an alternate version of the turntables featured on the cover in colour at last. These were my decks and mixer and the photos weren’t actually Polaroids, just normal photos made to look like it by adding a white border. To the left you can see the back of the Jungle Brothers‘ first album with NWA‘s second just peeking out and on the left deck is a Steroid Maximus LP – already subliminally flaunting my love of Foetus‘ music back in 1995.
On the wall are a collection of flyers from the day, the Brain, Passion, Talkin’ Loud and the edge of an Archaos poster on the right. This was only my second ever sleeve design for Ninja, not a design classic by any means but an album that many people hold dear it seems. You can still buy it in digital form online from the Ninja shop too.
I found this lovely tribute image for Moebius last night by akenoomokoto86, it’s been over 3 years since he passed away now but I see his influence in all sorts of thing most days.
The 10th anniversary issue of Modern Drummer magazine, dated January 1986, came with a free flexi disc containing lots of studio recorded drum beats all mic.ed up differently. An announcer (Andy or Jimmy?) talks you through numbered patterns with various sounds achieved by either mic placement or effects, presumably gone into in detail inside the mag.
Being that this is the mid 80’s the gated reverb technique is in full effect on some of these breaks and it’s sad to say that most of them lack that all important funk that such a disc ten years earlier might have contained. As there was no audio on the web I’ve encoded this and cleaned it up a bit so you can pretend to be Phil Collins or Duran Duran circa ‘Wild Boys’. There were copies of this on eBay recently and it’s listed on Discogs so can’t be hard to find.
My man DJ Cheeba recently performed his live rescore to Ed Wood‘s infamously so-bad-it’s-good B movie, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ at the Watershed in Bristol. He’s just put a mixtape version online for all to hear as well and, even though I’m biased and it features two tracks of mine, it’s excellent.
During the live show he uses two decks, a third QFO turntable and even Coldcut‘s VJamm software to remix live. He’s also looking for shows to perform it at and you can get more info about it here. Book him, he’s one of the most forward-thinking DJs utilising new technology out there today as well as one of the most creative.
Plan 9 From Outer Space (music that inspired the BFI re-score) by Dj Cheeba on Mixcloud
Finally got round to checking out Pond‘s new album today, not bad, some nice bits on there including this track which looks like it’s been taking styling tips from Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy. Particularly love some of the album graphics, the cover of which reminds me of Robert Crumb‘s turn for Big Brother & The Holding Company crossed with Celyn Brazier‘s work for Wagon Christ.
Sometimes you take a punt on a record and it works out even better than you could have hoped. Perusing the racks of Casbah Records in Greenwich a few weeks ago I chanced upon a 7″ with a Julian House-designed sleeve that looked rather fetching. The band was one I hadn’t heard of – Cavern of Anti-Matter – but a quick glance at the credits on the reverse told me that ex-Stereolab leader Tim Gane was involved so I took a gamble and shelled out for the 45.
I liked what I heard upon dropping the needle when I returned home, an instrumental mixture of drums, electronics and guitar with a motorik groove and just enough of that melody that the ‘Lab made their own to lift it. Next port of call was the web to find more of course and I’d missed two 12″s and an album, all on different labels, over the past two years. The LP, ‘Blood Drums’, is available to listen to from Grautag Records but the vinyl isn’t available for love nor money anywhere on the web it seems, please let me know if you find one because it’s even better than the single. I can’t even find anywhere to buy it digitally! A mail to the label has resulted in nothing and their online shop just has a (soon) sign. I guess they aren’t that fussed about selling once the physical product has run out.
An initial ultra limited 12″ that predates the album is also long gone but available from iTunes and features three tracks from the LP (inexplicably listed separately) in different versions – also essential. There’s also another 12″ with two side-long improvisations although this seems to be sold out in most places or expensive on the secondary market. I look forward to hearing more.
