#3: BABYLON ZOO
"Spaceman"
Since advertising is by most of its nature involved in sleight of hand - selling you things you didn't know you wanted, more often than not things you find out you don't want too late
But it’s too late to know that now. Advertising killed us. Wrecked lives and real aspiration. Encouraged us to covet our neighbour’s goods and even to clone and perhaps replace our neighbour because it was a naturalist kickback from the Papal doctrine that it wasn’t enough to have faith but that you had to be seen to be faithful, to demonstrate active faith, hence no fucking fun or life ever, just like it’s not enough to do your job, you have to be SEEN to be doing your job, because we never progressed beyond primary visual judgement and never will, oh you’re doing a great job BUT HOW ARE YOU DOING IT I understand how he felt and because humans are not breathing cassocks they revolt against that and do what the Bela Fleck they like anyway, and wouldn’t you know it there’s the Sidney James Corporation smiling, ready and waiting to entrap them forever and finally make them millennia more miserable than if they’d just been a true son or daughter of the fucking parish, in other words, human society is a Bunco booth where the card-holder always wins for heck’s sake
- there is a nice irony to the entryism of Jas Mann, stimulated when Levi's approached him to use "Spaceman" for their New Year's campaign of 1996.
christ isn’t that the dreariest bit of music writing you ever read, don’t readers have Google and brains and not in that order, but you see it doesn’t matter because today’s pretend solvent consumer wants everybody who isn’t them to be their butler, oh why didn’t Blur play “PARKLIFE” in Hammersmith last night, where does this bus go driver even though there’s a big sign on the front of the bus telling you exactly where it’s going and a recorded voice announcing the stops and a bloody timetable at the bus stop but oh no people are too lazy and entitled why should they be interrupted from scrolling down and finding out what Caitlin Knight said about India Moran last Thursday, fuck it how did Dickens and the Brontës manage to go for long walks and do all that writing and still have time for tea in those lovely pre-technology times, ah get back to the days of half a century ago where you got straight reviews of records and everybody liked everything ON WHICH SUBJECT
because we can’t ever get back to those days before history existed.
THE UK TOP 20 SINGLES IN ASCENDING ORDER WEEK ENDING 29 JULY 1972
20. Mary Wells – My Guy
A reissue and there were so many of them in confused 1972 Britain but this would be a pleasingly pulsating beginning to any meaningful radio show; everything swings, nothing’s imposed on the listener except the Aquarian songwriter’s natural genius.
19. Hot Butter – Popcorn
At school in 1972 I met Alex Swanson, just up from Middlesex I think, who quickly, if grudgingly, became my best friend for the next nine years. In the basement of his house in Douglas Gardens was a playroom containing inter alia an enormous train set and a junior chemistry set. Back then we thought of science and dreamed of a shiny, streamlined future. He probably likes what’s happening now.
18. Elvis Presley – An American Trilogy
Tacky and imperial, grandiose and intimate, confidential and bombastic. He thought he could embody the whole of the United States and still had the Jordanaires there, as well as most likely Charles Lloyd, who knew Elvis and his family and came over to their house for dinner when he (Elvis) was still a teenager and driving trucks, playing the elegiac flute. I only realised this record’s gummy emotional brilliance when Tracey Ullmann played it on a special she did for Radio 1 in late 1982. There are many live versions of this but the version on His 50 Greatest Hits is the one I know and shamefully cherish. Its solemnity imposes like a Marxist iceberg amidst this pop Pleasure Beach.
17. The Supremes – Automatically Sunshine
New Motown unsurprisingly resembles old Motown – the same seductive swing as “My Guy.”
16. Slade – Take Me Bak ‘Ome
Rock swings but Dave Hill’s guitar glides towards song’s end in ways which must have impressed nine-year-old Kevin Shields.
15. Stylistics – Betcha By Golly Wow
14. Love Unlimited – Walkin’ In The Rain With The One I Love
Two extended studies of paused ecstasy; neither song proceeds in any hurry, because it takes time and patience for true love to become apparent. They vanish, smiling, absorbed into their own worlds, which as we know in our gut should also be our worlds.
13. The Who – Join Together
Remember us? The ship is sinking and we are all aboard it. What the fuck does it matter who the greatest band were; it isn’t going to save anybody. Only we can do that.
Moreover, what you heard on the ad soundtrack wasn't necessarily a clear guide to what you got on the purchased record. The soundtrack itself was a remarkable procession of electroblips, 78 rpm David Seville voices and hard, post-hip hop beats; the revelation that Arthur Baker produced confirmed the link between "I Hear A New World" and "Planet Rock."
Why is everybody including me just HIDING????
12. Hawkwind – Silver Machine
The loops of white noise, Joe Meek, saucers seen vaunting over the Westway, but it’s all still Sheb Wooley and quite fucking right Syd could and should have come up with it BUT HANG ON A SODDEN MINUTE
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
JOE MEEK AT 75
“I could afford to be arrogant if I wanted,” chuckles an impossibly youthful-looking Sir Joe Meek, gazing out from the top floor of his recently refurbished Triumph plc Studios in Holloway, “but I realise that a lot of what I’ve achieved in my career has been down to luck as well as my skills, such as they are. I’ve had a lot of bad breaks followed by an avalanche of good ones. Most people buckle under the bad ones. I ought to know – I nearly did.”
Looking back at Sir Joe’s remarkable career, it’s easy to forget how close he came to a nervous breakdown in early 1967. His run of pop hits had dried up and he was in imminent danger of eviction and bankruptcy. “God it was depressing,” he reflects. “I’d wake up every morning and argue myself into existing for another day. That is if my landlady didn’t start the arguing first. I didn’t feel I was getting anywhere. The money from ‘Telstar’ was tied up in a court case, money wasn’t coming in elsewhere because I wasn’t getting any hits, I was doing drugs – I really felt like packing the whole thing in, and I don’t just mean the music business. Everything seemed dead or in the past to me.”
As everyone knows, salvation came in the unlikely shape of Kenneth Williams, with whom Meek was in the tendency of socialising in the Holloway area around that time (“Don’t forget, it was only made legal towards the end of ’67…”). Impressed by his performance in the 1963 Home Service production of Gogol’s Diary Of A Madman, Columbia Records had asked Williams whether he wanted to turn this into an album.
“They had strange ideas,” remembers Sir Kenneth, now 78. “I think when they heard the original BBC broadcast they were interested in the sound design as much as, if not more than, my actual performance of the text. So Columbia wanted me to come into the studio and redo it as a record, but they wanted to update the background – ‘make it more psychedelic,’ I was told at the time, though of course then I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. But it seemed as though they wanted the sound design to be a bit more far out, to mirror the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration. When I asked about who was going to oversee the production of all this, they suggested Joe, whom I knew vaguely from the gay scene of the time, as someone who was good at producing interesting noises. I was sufficiently intrigued to say yes. And I’m glad I did because that experience really opened a door for me – before then I was going nowhere in all these farcical comedies, Carry On and what have you, and I was getting pretty frustrated about it I can tell you. I was just past forty and just about ready for the scrapheap, or at least that’s how I felt. But after doing Diary Of A Madman with Joe, I felt less pent-up about trying new and different things and I came out of it with a determination to improve my skills and develop myself as a proper actor, not just some lard-faced raconteur. Hard to know where I’d be today if I hadn’t taken the chance and done it.”
11. The Sweet – Little Willy
Williams’ career – including the surprise 1973 Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in Death In Venice – is of course well documented. And, on Diary Of A Madman, Meek also enlisted the musical aid of a group of Cambridge art students who would become as closely identified with him as the Beatles with Lord Martin – Pink Floyd.
“They were a fairly standard blues band of the period,” recalls Meek, “but Syd in particular was interested in stretching the music out. He was listening to Stockhausen, Coltrane, all sorts, and that was very much the direction in which he wanted to push the group. In particular he was very interested in sonic manipulation – getting weird effects out of his guitar, the use of pure feedback, etc. – which I suppose must have been a consequence of Hendrix coming over here. It took a while but the rest of the band slowly followed his lead. And when I was looking for musicians to work on Diary Of A Madman, Pink Floyd sprang immediately to mind.”
Diary Of A Madman caused a sensation when it was released in March 1967. Hailed as the first true British psychedelic album almost by default, it notoriously sent the Beatles, then ensconced in Abbey Road recording Sgt. Pepper, into a tizzy. “Our mouths dropped open when we heard the playback,” remembers Paul McCartney. “It was like, how the hell are we going to top this? We’re sitting here doing jolly little songs about traffic wardens and old age pensioners – clarinets, if you will – and we knew immediately that that wasn’t the way forward.” Thus the astonishing Sgt. Pepper album which emerged, and which blew virtually all of pop music apart in that summer of 1967 with its extraordinary tracks such as “Carnival Of Light,” “A Day In The Life” and “Revolution #9.”
It certainly caused Meek’s shares to go up. Soon afterwards, he and Pink Floyd locked themselves away in the Holloway Road studio to record their classic double album debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with side four given over to the 25 glorious minutes of “Interstellar Overdrive.” Says Meek, “It pretty much gave me a kick up the arse; I knew that I didn’t necessarily have to stay with pop, that I could go and explore different and new territories and that somehow I’d still find an audience. I think the experience was good for the band as well. I was very old-school strict with them; no drugs, no booze. One day Syd came in with some funny-looking pills which he said some German mates had given him. I took one look at them and immediately flushed them down the toilet. Syd was just about ready to take a swing at me, but ever since then he’s thanked me for doing that, almost on a daily basis.”
Further extremes were to come. In 1967 Pink Floyd shared management with the then already notorious improvising collective AMM, and it was on the direct recommendation of Syd Barrett that Meek was approached to produce AMM’s second album for Elektra Records. Remembers AMM percussionist Eddie Prevost: “Joe didn’t just produce it, he effectively became our fifth member. The nuances of his production – done live, on the spot – gave our music a new dimension in which to move, more sounds to manipulate and nurture.”
The Crypt became a surprise bestseller, the essential record to be seen with in every student bedsit, a Top 3, gold album in the UK, and a declared influence on Hendrix’s approach to production on Electric Ladyland. Suddenly Joe Meek gained the reputation of the most happening, avant-garde record producer in Britain, if not the world. And while he was busy breaking sonic boundaries with Pink Floyd and AMM, he was continuing to produce equally extraordinary pop hits, including “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Scott Walker’s groundbreaking number one hit of February 1969, “The Electrician” (“Scott was screaming for my services! Joe’s the only one who will understand where I’m going with this! He probably could have done the job just as well himself, as he’s proved on his records since then”).
With the “Telstar” court case finally resolving itself in his favour in July 1968, Meek’s royalties were unfrozen and he received a welcome flow of several million pounds into his bank account. “Nothing could stop me then,” he recalls. “It was the ideal opportunity to upgrade the old Holloway studios. I was able to buy the whole building outright – as well as pay for a nice cottage for my long-suffering landlady to retire to! – whereupon I gutted the place, completely refurbished the studios and made it as state-of-the-art as I could. I think I had the first polyphonic Moog synthesiser in England.”
Among the lengthening queue of musicians queuing up outside his doors for a touch of that Meek magic was David Bowie.
10. Starman
“David was at a bit of a loose end by ’69,” says Meek. “He’d been knocking around the fringes of the scene for so long, no one was taking him seriously any more. He had this song about being an astronaut, and having heard songs I’d done like ‘Sky Men,’ thought I’d be the ideal person to arrange and produce it. He was very worried about turning into an Anthony Newley for the ‘70s, with the working men’s clubs but without any money or career to speak of. He didn’t want ‘Space Oddity’ to be a cheesy novelty.
“So I really worked on it for him, put everything I could think of into the pot. I got Keith Rowe to play that amazing guitar line which sounds like 20,000 pods exploding in gravity-free silence. Echoes, backward phasing…as far out as it was possible to get in 1969. And it got to number one. He trusted me after that.”
In fact, Bowie trusted Meek enough to let him oversee most of his classic early albums – 1971’s Ziggy Stardust, for instance, with its startling number one single “Boys Keep Swinging.” And all the while Meek continued to develop his close relationship with Pink Floyd, culminating in their record-breaking 1972 epic Kid A – a pioneering album which ran the gamut of sonics, involving the participation of a 190-strong line-up of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra on one track, and the entirety of side two being performed by the band on household objects. In the grey autumn of 1972, Kid A struck a resonant chord, giving Meek a double albums and singles number one, as it topped the album chart the same week as Lieutenant Pigeon’s “Mouldy Old Dough” – virtually a throwback to Meek’s Tornados days - made it to the top of the singles chart.
When punk came along, Meek was immediately sought out by Malcolm McLaren to produce the first Sex Pistols records. However, Meek got on particularly well with John Lydon – who admitted that his “I Hate AMM” T-shirt was ironic – and as such was instrumental in the startling personnel changes which saw Steve Jones and Glen Matlock replaced by Keith Levene and Jah Wobble (Meek: “I mean, I turned down the Beatles in ’62, silly fool that I was – why would I want to produce them again?”) and even more instrumental in the era-defining first Sex Pistols album, Metal Box (1977), with its songs like “God Save The Queen” (which, as number one in Jubilee week, kept another Meek production – Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love In Me” – off the top), “Death Disco,” “Poptones” and “Submission” which forged a decisive way out for the cul-de-sac which punk was then already becoming.
Work with the Damned, Alternative TV and Magazine followed – how different would the latter’s “Permafrost” have sounded without Meek’s inspired input? – and he was also responsible for producing the original RCA demos of Joy Division, though the band demurred from using him as producer of their debut album (“too much fookin’ Kraftwerk and Moroder, not enough Iggy!”). Trevor Horn, a session bass player on some of Meek’s mid-‘70s hits (for example, Tina Charles’ 1976 number one “Search And Destroy”) and later a studio apprentice of Meek’s, certainly took many of Meek’s lessons to heart when embarking on his own production career (Meek was the arranger on Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart” and Propaganda’s “P.Machinery,” and judging by his epic work on the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” Meek later seemed to have learned something from Horn in return).
In recent years Sir Joe has concentrated on recording contemporary classical and improvised music (“Those royalties have to be put to some use; you can’t shove all of it up your nose!”) though in 2003 made a surprise return to his early ‘60s roots with his production work on the White Stripes’ Elephant album (“they came to me and asked if we could make it exactly as I would have done in 1963. Naïve pair – I had to explain to them that it wasn’t quite that simple, but I think they were more than satisfied with the results”). However, of his recent work he will probably be best known for his astonishing sound design for the films of David Lynch – he won an Oscar for his innovative “score” to Blue Velvet (Lynch: “I’d been listening to I Hear A New World quite a lot and wanted the bones of the music to be re-gutted, like a candle, only middleweight”) and his seamless fusion of abstract sonics and pure song for Mulholland Dr. has rightly been adopted as a template for future development, although, as Meek says: “It was only the logical development of what I’d started with the KLF when they asked me to produce their Chill Out album. It was a bizarre experience, trying to resuscitate Acker Bilk…” Living in domestic harmony with his partner of twenty years, the playwright Lord Orton of Leicester, one suspects that the best of Joe Meek is yet to come.
The full, five minute-plus Baker remix - "Spaceman - The 5th Dimension" - did appear on the 12", cassette and CD copies of the single, and though admirably and unbendingly hardcore is markedly less in the pop neighbourhood than the soundtrack might suggest. So elements were skilfully edited to form an intro and outro to the main 45 mix - making Baker's work sound even more unworldly - with the initial trompe l'oeil being the track mechanically slowed down to the point of stasis, out of which seems to emerge an entirely different song, a post-glam rock grind more in keeping with 1972 Bowie (or more accurately 1973 Steve Harley) filtered through 1993 Suede
Oh just LISTEN to the fucking thing and forgo my tensile tedium.
Unlike the eighty million people who claimed to have watched it, I actually did watch that Top Of The Pops “Starman” performance, on a crappy old black-and-white portable TV in a self-catering boarding house on Warley Road in Blackpool. It was raining that Thursday evening (6 July, two days after my father’s forty-first birthday), as unfortunately it had done throughout most of our 1972 Fair Fortnight, and there was nothing more depressing than Blackpool in the can’t-go-anywhere/do-anything rain. Tony Blackburn presented the show, and “Starman” appeared in between Lulu (performing an excellent, if commercially unpopular, song entitled “Even If I Could Change”) and The Sweet doing “Little Willy.” I can’t say I was particularly aroused or inspired by it, but it was in black-and-white and I was only eight at the time. Coming within the context of its parent hit parade, however, it is admittedly quite startling, at the very least jogging while everybody else was waiting for a bus. Well, nearly everyone.
But Jas Mann, who effectively was Babylon Zoo, had a further trapdoor down his sleeve; a young Wolverhampton-based Asian (and thereby providing the first of the key trilogy of number one singles by young Asian musicians in the second half of the nineties), his "Spaceman" was at once a throwback to the metaphor of space travel-as-exodus familiar from the Hendrix of "Third Stone From The Sun" and "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" but also an uncomoromisingly contemporary denunciation of institutionalised racism with what sounds like a clear clarion call to overthrowing and revolution - "It's time to terminate the great white world," he hisses at the beginning of the second verse, while reeling in confusion and panic over what that world is thrusting at him "beyond the black horizon" - the "pungent smells" which "consummate my home" may be a reference to racist smoke bombs being thrust through Asian letterboxes (a not uncommon occurrence in the West Midlands); the refrain "the sickening taste of the morbid jokes/Images of fascist boats" leaves no room for ambiguity, though Mann himself is torn between wanting to burn the whole edifice down or leave it behind altogether - "I can't get off the carousel/I can't get off this world" - and the "space" may only be achieved with the aid of drugs; the conflict is summed up in the recurring couplet "There's a fire between us/So where is your God?"
9. Bruce Ruffin – Mad About You
Aptly the “maddest” record in this list. Morbid jokes, fascist boats – Britain paid reggae music such little respect that it thought it couldn’t sell without sobering string arrangements or gimmicky effects. Basically a finely bouncy Jamaican love song overrun by a vaudeville muted trombone and, eventually, Mr P*nch from Willesden bleating all over the record’s final minute. This is what your hosts thought of you. They were mad about you, but not in a good way.
8. The New Seekers – Circles
Soundtrack to the digestive biscuit of infinity.
7. Johnny Nash – I Can See Clearly Now
That apocalyptic middle eight (a blue sky as hallucinatory as the one under which The Weeknd momentarily passes in Vegas), the Cajun/Pet Sounds accordion, the nagging synthesiser punctuations which threaten to turn the song into Neu!’s “Hallogallo.”
6. Alice Cooper – School’s Out
Destruction of thou-shalt-notisms.
Finally, the song dissolves and speeds back up to its original helium-fulled alien environment; on Top Of The Pops (not the performance on YouTube, which was Babylon Zoo’s second appearance on the show) a literally faceless DJ in white bowler hat and white face-obscuring circle manipulated the turntables while Mann looked at the camera, at us, at an angle, his face half-grinning and half-threatening. An extraordinary and still undervalued record - largely because Mann never managed to follow it up - which in its incitement of fire through the medium of capitalist advertising is the exact reverse of what ended up happening to Thunderclap Newman’s "Something In The Air,” which pleaded with its listeners to join together with the band.
5. Terry Dactyl and The Dinosaurs – Sea Side Shuffle
Reissue of a 1970 song which got buried beneath the Mungo Jerry rubble. Nobody acknowledges the record’s payoff, which features wind and rain. It was all a hallucination, a forlorn dream. Mary Bradley waits at home.
4. The Partridge Family Starring David Cassidy – Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
What if Barbie had been Ken’s mother?
The top two were pained ballads, both of which featured the lead singer bursting into tears, perhaps because people already knew that the bottom was already beginning to fall out of the capitalist boom, the slack money which allowed freedom and experimentation – “Sylvia’s Mother” by Doctor Hook and the Medicine Show at number two, and “Puppy Love” by Donny Osmond at the top. What’s wrong with teenagers being in love, the song at number three was “Rock & Roll (Part 2)” is what.
Bowie gets possibly over-venerated because we can no longer talk about or even mention the other guy, and nobody is to blame more for that than…the other guy. Nostalgia messed up by behaviour and historical progress, to a point.
All I’m saying is that these are disjointed, discontinuous snapshots of an extremely obscure life which began as a mediocre retort to The Philosophy Of Modern Song – everybody knows who Dylan is; why should they give a toss about me? – documenting elements of a life distorted beyond rational salvation by a deeply-rooted sense of self-hatred, instilled in me by you know full well who, so much of my fucking life wasted because of it, a life which, by all rational criteria, doesn’t have very much longer to go, and before reading the final two chapters of this book – which at the time of writing I have yet to write, though have roughly planned out both - I would recommend that you watch the "12 Days Of Christine" or “Deadline” or "CTRL.ALT.ESC" episodes of Inside No. 9, if hospital nightmares are what you want. Perhaps follow it up with the Al Pacino “Dunkaccino” commercial because you’ll most likely need cheering up afterwards. Or listen to some Howard Keel or James Last. The lightness might save you, and therefore us, from interminable darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment