Topics | Dangerous Minds (2024)

05.13.2016

11:11 am

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The one good thing about music show Top of the Pops was the chance of eyeballing something special, something new, something you might not get the chance to see anywhere else. This could be David Bowie, or Motorhead ripping through their latest number, or Public Image Ltd. or Blondie or Siouxsie and the Banshees throwing pocketfuls of confetti onto the studio audience.

Sometime in early 1981, I was very fortunate to catch a new five-piece band from London called Department S who made a damned fine impression on me with their debut single “Is Vic There?” The track had been played a few dozen times on the radio but I was none the wiser to the who, what, when, where, why of the band.

Taking their name from a cult TV series, Department S looked assured, interesting, had a catchy first single and an iconic lead singer in Vaughn Toulouse. Their music was different to many of the angry disillusioned post-punk bands clogging up the charts—they were upbeat, thrilling, with an almost John Barry Bond-like riff countered by Toulouse’s vocal delivery.

Department S. came out of London’s punk and ska scene. Toulouse had been with a band called Guns For Hire. Guitarist Mike Herbage joined the band and wrote their only single. The group then evolved into Dept. S and was joined by Tony Lordan (bass), Stuart Mizon (drums) and Eddie Roxy (keyboards). In one early interview they described themselves as “not just a bunch of silly cults”—a reference to their crafted individualism.

There’s no particularly dominant member of the band, although Vaughn writes all the lyrics and mostly steals the limelight “Cos I’m the best lookin’ I s’pose.”

“We’re not a group as such,” he continues. “We’re five individuals that make Department S. It’s like a closed-circuit business-sort of a PIL set-up.”

“Is Vic There?” seemed to hang around the chart for ages—as if the public weren’t quite sure about the group, the song, or what to make of the strange attractive Gene Vincent allure of the lead singer—before eventually (thankfully) making it all the way to number 22.



Come summer: Dept. S were playing support and headline gigs around London and working on an album (Sub-Stance) when they released a second single “Going Left Right” on glorious 12-inch. While the B-side “She’s Expecting You” sounded like the same band who had recorded “Is Vic There?” the second single almost sounded like a completely new and different band. It led some music critics to describe Dept. S as “a tricky band to pigeonhole” while giving “Going Left Right” two thumbs up—calling it “far superior” to “Is Vic There?”

More from the Department S. file, after the jump…

05.13.2016

10:06 am

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Skaters from the 1967 U.S.A.R.S.A. (the United States Amateur Roller Skating Association) competition.

Although I was an avid roller skater in my youth (as were both of my parents), I had no idea that the the United States National Amateur Skating Association (or U.S.N.A.S.A.) existed. Had I known, I would have immediately run away from home with my brown suede skates (with sweet orange wheels and stoppers) to pursue my dream of being an Olympic Champion roller skater. Regrets, I’ve had a few.


USARSA Senior Dance Champions of 1961, Jay & Janet Slaughter of Illinois.

In 1937, a Detroit-based group comprised of seventeen roller rink owners formed the RSROA (the Roller Skating Rink Operators Association). The creation of the RSROA didn’t go over that well with the Amateur Athletic Union (or AAU, a national amateur sports organization formed in 1888 who worked with amateur athletes all around the country, helping many on their way to the Olympic Games) as the membership of RSROA included the rink owners themselves and professional skaters. So, in 1939, the United States Amateur Roller Skating Association (USARSA) came to be and became a part of the the good-old AAU.

There were so many competitive categories within the USARSA, ranging from skate-dancing, novice, a curious sub-novice category, and a few for “tiny tots” that could skate (photos from which have been cataloged over at the site USA Roller Skaters), that I can only imagine the competitions themselves were long, grueling events not only for the skaters, but for the fans in attendance. The images in this post provide a fun and fascinating look back in time. Some remind me of the beautiful awkwardness that is the obligatory (and dreaded) senior prom photo. Your good-times roller skating flashback moment, begins now!


Hugh Devore 3rd Place (the outfit is 1st place material all the way), USARSA Senior Men’s Singles, 1956.


USARSA Junior Dance contestants, 1953.

More after the jump…

05.13.2016

09:16 am

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One of my favorite bits of Sun Ra lore is this story from the bandleader’s 1971 trip to Egypt. John F. Szwed’s biography Space Is The Place recounts how customs officials, perplexed by Sun Ra’s passport (“To be named after the sun god twice was really a bit too much”), held most of the Arkestra’s instruments and luggage after letting the band into the country.

But jazz drummer Salah Ragab, “the head of military music in the Egyptian army,” came to the rescue, lending the Arkestra his gear and assisting them at some personal risk. Their shows in Egypt generated material for a trilogy of live albums, since collected on the CD releases Nidhamu + Dark Myth Equation Visitation and Horizon, and a dozen years later, during a subsequent visit, Ra collaborated with Ragab on an album with the truth-in-advertising title The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt.



At some indeterminate time, Ra, who could see the pyramids from his hotel outside Cairo, had decided that during the trip he would invoke his divine namesake in one of antiquity’s most sacred places. In an undated interview with Atlanta’s WREK, Ra gives his version of the Egyptian space theurgy:

...while I was there, I went in the [Great] Pyramid, up in the King’s Chamber, and I said, “Now, this pyramid was made for the name Ra. And it hadn’t been said in here in thousands of years, so let’s say it nine times and see what’ll happen.” So we said “Ra” nine times and all the lights went out in the pyramid. So I had a psychic experience there.

Ra says the guide then led the party in darkness along a dangerous path with a twelve-story drop and through the narrow entrance to the Queen’s Chamber, where the lights miraculously came on again.



With the evenhandedness that is one of his biography’s strengths, Szwed at once casts doubt on Ra’s version of events and adds a strange detail that seems to confirm his supernatural powers:

They climbed the staircase, crawled through the low entrances, and slipped through the narrow corridors in order to reach the King’s Chamber, and as they did the lights suddenly went out. Sun Ra later said that he had chanted the name of Ra nine times when it happened, although [eyewitness Hartmut] Geerken remembered only Sun Ra saying, “Why do we need light, Sun Ra, the sun is here.” Whatever, they managed to walk back out through the darkness. (When Sun Ra recounted this story to writer Robert Palmer in 1978 at the Beacon Theater in New York, the lights went out in the theater, leaving a dead spot in the middle of the tape recording as evidence.)

After the jump, candid footage of the Sun Ra and his Arkestra visiting the pyramids…

05.13.2016

09:10 am

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Oh, the wonders of the Internet. Somehow this one is only now hitting my radar, but boy-oh-boy is it good. Kentucky’s Norma Lee ticks off every check box on my list of what makes an outsider artist truly great: creative use of the form, provocative content, and a complete and utter lack of self-awareness. Like the Shaggs or Wesley Willis before her, Norma Lee is trying her darndest, seemingly oblivious to her own lack of talent in a traditional sense—but all the while being incredibly entertaining.

I adore her Kentucky hills accent. She sounds a bit like a brain-damaged Loretta Lynn when she sings in “He’s Swapping His Boat” about her husband being “retard from a factory.” “He’s Swapping His Boat” is Norma’s big hit. It’s essentially about giving up on every bit of joy in one’s life—specifically her poor husband who had to sell his boat to buy a tractor to clear six acres of land. If you only hear one Norma Lee song in your life, IT MUST BE THIS ONE.

He’s a middle-aged man who needs a hand to help him work his land… he’s just a swappin’ all that fun on that boat, ‘cause he done sowed his oats… now it’s time to get down to earth and put his hands to work.

Forget emo or goth. You want monotone music extolling the bleak reality of absolute depression? Here it is.

Your dreams are dead, get to work:

After the jump, hear how Norma Lee feels about Paris Hilton, and more!

05.12.2016

04:30 pm

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In a past life I made documentaries for television. These were mainly hour long arts films on artists like Francis Bacon and Virginia Woolf, or what was then described as “factual entertainment” shows on celebrities, their obsessions and misdemeanors—these ranged from Peter Sellers to Freddie Mercury. One of the many tabloid tales was a romp through the stories of four BBC presenters and their unfortunate dabbling with a Class A drug.

Called Snorting Coke with the BBC this documentary is small fry compared to the scale and horror of recent scandals that have engulfed the BBC since—see DM passim. The program focused on four highly successful presenters whose lives were unraveled by a liking for the sherbets.

These four men were:

Frank Bough—a likeable, avuncular, seemingly very, very ordinary breakfast time host who had a secret life enjoying the pleasures of drugs, cross-dressing and S&M dungeons.

Richard Bacon—another highly likeable, pleasant, young children’s presenter who was grassed up about having a snort after a night out with friends.

Angus Deayton—an acerbic, witty, actor-cum-quiz show host whose private life almost destroyed his career.

Johnnie Walker—a legendary radio DJ who was ensnared by a fake sheik journalist in a very underhanded sting.

Like most—or at least many—of the people who work in the media, this quartet had sampled the delights of powdered goods. Unfortunately for them—they were caught out in lurid and rather unfair tabloid exposes.

By being caught, these four individuals placed the BBC in a very difficult position. In many respects, the Beeb was being led by the nose (ahem) on how to respond to their stars’ misdemeanors.

The names may not be well known outside of the UK—but that honestly doesn’t matter as the stories are interesting, well-explained and still have a certain relevance to today.

This is how broadcaster Channel 4 described the program on its release in August 2003:

Snorting Coke with the BBC takes a wry look at some of the most highly publicised cases of BBC TV and radio celebrities caught using drugs and examines the attitude of the media towards their behaviour, their subsequent fall from grace and, in some cases, their rehabilitation. Frank Bough, Johnnie Walker, Richard Bacon and Angus Deayton are the stars featured as the circumstances surrounding their dismissal from the BBC are examined. Along with their cocaine use, Frank, Johnnie and Angus were caught in various sexually compromising positions, raising questions about the connection between drugs and sex.

The programme looks at the reaction of their employers, their colleagues and the press to what happened, asking if their response was at times an over-reaction, or if there were inconsistencies in the way that they were dealt with.

Amongst those interviewed are journalists, presenters and media commentators (including the now ubiquitous Piers Morgan and current CEO of the New York Times, Mark Thompson) who all discuss the BBC, the media and their relationship to drugs.

More after the jump…

05.12.2016

04:24 pm

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This poster was included with the LP.

In 1975 a folk singer named Bill Clint released The Crying of a Generation. Seldom has an album had an apter title.

This album is about crying—it is seriously, and deeply, about the act of shedding tears. For instance, the refrain of the third song, “Christmas in July,” is “No one’s gonna hear you if you cry.” But we’re just getting started.

The undisputed centerpiece of the album is “Angels Don’t Need Friends,” an 11-minute song in which Clint actually bawls about the evanescence of life (I’m not kidding) for a full couple of minutes. Here are some of the song’s lyrics (if I couldn’t make a line out, I just skipped it):

Where’s the little boy that I’m lookin’ for?
That I used to be? Where’s he gone?
And are the teardrops dry? Can I cry once again?

I was told that angels don’t need friends.

Where’s the little house I’m lookin’ for?
I used to live? Where’s it gone?
I came runnin’ up the front door
I don’t live there anymore

I was told that angels don’t need friends.

Where’s the little family that I’m lookin’ for?
Used to be here and now we’re gone.
And I just want to see the faces and why’d we have to die?
To live in different places

I was told that angels don’t need friends.

Where’s the little world that I’m lookin’ for?
Used to be here, locked away inside.
And I’ve forgotten all the pain, and now I’m lost
And I just want to be Billy again.

And I was told that angels don’t need friends.

It’s at this point that Clint commences a session of tearful mourning of his lost childhood that lasts a couple of minutes. To be clear, Clint didn’t spontaneously start sobbing in the studio—it was undertaken consciously, as an artistic strategy. You don’t think of an actor crying as necessarily not in control of what he or she is doing, and something like that is what’s happening at the end of “Angels Don’t Need Friends,” even if it is a bit unusual.



If the first side is about regression into childhood, side B plunges headlong into infancy. The first two tracks on side B, which are called “Babe Is It Easy” and “Mama I’m a Baby,” take up the crying motif again—there’s an interlude in which Clint himself cries, only this time it’s the way an infant would cry, and the song rapidly segues to a snippet of an actual baby crying. At least I think that’s what’s happening.

Oh, and somewhere in there are these remarkable lyrics:

I just want your nipple, the bottle’s cold and dead
Plastic isn’t fleshy, the needle’s in my head

To be honest, I admire the hell out of Bill Clint. This album could so easily be ridiculous—it is a little ridiculous—but to Clint’s credit, the album remains fairly listenable and shows no small amount of craft. And for a male in our society to be that in-your-face about crying takes a huge amount of guts.

More after the jump…

05.12.2016

11:07 am

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It all started about a year and a half ago, a person or persons stabbing trees with meat-wrapped knives in Leavenworth Park. The park is located in Omaha, Nebraska and residents of the area are totally freaked out as to why this keeps happening.

“It is very strange,” said John Costanzo with the Leavenworth Neighborhood Association. “Probably for about the last year, year and a half, neighbors have been finding steaks or other various pieces of meat pinned to the tree with knives.”

Via KETV:

Costanzo said neighbors have called in dozens of these incidents. Police reports have been filed and the crime lab has visited the scene. But the mystery of the meat-wrapped knives continues.

Apparently, people in the area not only find it fucking weird, but worrisome as well. Police have confirmed the meat is not human (whew!).

If you know anything about this mysterious “knife stabbing meat tree person,” you’re encouraged to call the police.

via Arbroath

05.12.2016

09:59 am

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A single for The Church’s 1981 track, ‘The Unguarded Moment.’

I don’t think that Australian music television show Countdown could have picked a better backdrop for The Church to perform in front of for one of their most memorable songs—“The Unguarded Moment” from their 1981 album Of Skins and Heart—than a stage rigged with lighting that resembled church-style stained glass. The 35-year-old footage is really quite surreal.


A shot of Steve Kilbey on the churchy-looking stage of ‘Countdown’ in 1981.



In his 2014 autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar, Church vocalist Steve Kilbey, (who also hosted Countdown himself a few times) recalls how that very performace on made such an impact overnight that people were turned away at the door of at their gig the following eveing, as the venue was quickly (and quite unexpectedly) packed to capacity. Kilbey also fondly refers to the early days of The Church’s career as his “halcyon days” thanks to the rather sudden fame the band experienced back in 1981 (as they had only formed the year before). I saw The Church (along with The Psychedelic Furs) last year and can personally vouch that Steve Kilbey’s voice is still as swoon-worthy as it was to my ears back in 1988 when I wore out my cassette copy of Starfish listening to “Under the Milky Way” and “Destination” over and over again. If you missed your chance to see one of the 2015 Church/Furs’ string of gigs, you’re in luck as the two bands are set to embark on a new fifteen-show tour of the US on July 15th, 2016.

Keep reading after the jump…

05.12.2016

09:39 am

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Louis CK seems to have an inordinate appetite for risk, and his remarkable TV series Horace and Pete, a self-financed, ad-free project Louis uploaded to his website with zero fanfare from the end of January to early April, is a noble attempt to introduce a little fiber into the diet of the American television consumer.

Having put his FXX show Louie on hiatus for a time and with a new contract ready to be signed at that same network, Louis developed an appetite for a TV project that just could not possibly appear on FXX—or anywhere else in the current TV landscape, for that matter. So Louis developed Horace and Pete, a grim, uncompromising 10-episode filmed tragedy of sorts that wouldn’t feel out of place on New York’s Barrow Street. Set in a bar that has seen better days, Horace and Pete was to feature bracing racism, characters that were stubbornly difficult to warm up to, and a dogged insistence on forging its own very stagelike rhythms.

If you haven’t seen the show, it’s worth paying for an episode or two at Louie’s website to get a notion of just how bracing Horace and Pete is. The show features a lengthy roster of America’s top TV actors (Alan Alda, Edie Falco, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange) doing some of their best and most serious work in quite some time.

It’s well known that Louis CK put himself in a bit of a financial hole with the Horace and Pete project—such are the ramifications of dispensing with advertising—but CK will probably be OK. The guy seems to function best without a safety net, and he knows it.

At the end of every show, Louis stuck the names Mike Leigh and Annie Baker in his terse list of thank-yous. Baker recently won the Pulitzer for play The Flick and actually assisted with Horace and Pete, but Mike Leigh’s role was more broadly inspirational.

As Louis recently explained on Marc Maron’s WTF? podcast, the whole idea for Horace and Pete came when Louis happened to see a televised version of Leigh’s jaw-dropping 1977 evisceration of suburban banality, one of the classics of British drama of the 1970s, a play called Abigail’s Party.



Horace and Pete is a long and tangled story centering on a bar that has been in existence for 100 years—Abigail’s Party is far more direct, depicting a single disastrous gathering for drinks in some bland suburb of London. Here’s Louis on WTF? explaining how the play sparked his creativity in such fruitful ways (this starts about 14:30 in; I’ve edited out a few superfluous comments for clarity):

I watched a thing called Abigail’s Party. ... Michael Leigh, the filmmaker from England, amazing filmmaker. Largely an improvisational filmmaker. ... like Secrets and Lies, incredible movies. Even Mr. Turner, the more recent one that nobody gave a shit about. ... Naked.

So he was a playwright in the 1970s. ... He wrote a play called Abigail’s Party, and all it is is about four people in the suburbs of London or wherever in England. They’re neighbors, don’t know each other, and they have drinks. Two hours of one scene—four people having drinks. ...

They did a TV version of the play, and this was 1973, and it looked like All in the Family—any show that was shooting back then, Maude or something? ... It looked like a sitcom in that it was shot with multi-camera, you can tell there was somebody live-switching the cameras, and you have four characters talking. ... No audience. That was the thing, and it was funny! I was laughing out loud, and there’s silence. But it’s not silence, it’s a sound stage, there’s a living feeling to it. ...

So when I watched that, I was like, “This doesn’t exist in the American TV diet. It doesn’t exist anywhere.”

And Louis set out to rectify that, post-haste. As he says later, Horace and Pete was to be a “hybrid” in that it would be “episodic like television, but the medium feels like a play, and yet also like a sitcom, in that it will look robust ... multi-cameras, a decent set.”


Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh premiered Abigail’s Party in April 1977, and in November of the same year—two cheers for government-funded television—a recording of the play appeared on the BBC TV program Play for Today. The stage play and the TV play had the same cast, so both centered around a remarkable performance in the key character of Bev, played by the brilliant actress Alison Steadman, who also happens to have been Leigh’s wife at the time (she has appeared in several of his films; the couple got divorced in 2001).

Continues after the jump…

05.12.2016

09:20 am

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It’s one of those odd quirks of fate why sixties beat group The Move never became as big as say The Who, Kinks or the Dave Clark Five or even (crikey!) The Beatles or The Stones. There are many reasons as to why this never happened—top of the tree is the fact The Move never broke the American market which limited their success primarily to a large island off the coast of Europe. Secondly, The Move was all too often considered a singles band—and here we find another knotty problem.

The Move, under the sublime writing talents of Roy Wood, produced singles of such quality, range and diversity it was not always possible to identify their unique imprint. They evolved from “pioneers of the psychedelic sound” with their debut single “Night of Fear” in 1966—a song that sampled Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—through “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” and “Flowers In The Rain” to faster rock songs like “Fire Brigade”—which inspired the bassline for the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”—to the chirpy pop of “Curly” and “Omnibus” to sixties miserabilism “Blackberry Way” and early heavy metal/prog with “Wild Tiger Woman,” “Brontosaurus” and “When Alice Comes Back to the Farm.” Though there is undoubtedly a seriousness and considered process going on here—it was not necessarily one that brought together a united fan base. Those who bought “Flowers in the Rain” were not necessarily going to dig the Hendrix-influenced “Wild Tiger Woman” or groove along to “Alice Comes Back to the Farm.”

That said, The Move scored nine top ten hits during the sixties, were critically praised, had a considerable following of screaming fans, and produced albums which although they were considered “difficult” at the time (Shazam, Looking On and Message from the Country) are now considered pioneering, groundbreaking and (yes!) even “classic.”

The Move was made up from oddments of musicians and singers from disparate bands and club acts who would not necessarily gravitate together. Formed in December 1965, the original lineup consisted of guitarist Roy Wood (recently departed from Mike Sheridan and The Nightriders), vocalist Carl Wayne who along with bass player Chris ‘Ace’ Kefford and drummer Bev Bevan came from The Vikings, and guitarist Trevor Burton from The Mayfair Set. Each of these artists had a small taste of success—most notably Carl Wayne who had won the prestigious Golden Orpheus Song Festival in Bulgaria—but nothing that was going to satisfy their ambitions for a long and rewarding career.

It was David Bowie—then just plain David Jones—who suggested Kefford and Burton should form their own band. They recruited Wood onto the team sheet and decided to follow another piece of Bowie’s advice to bring together the very best musicians and singers in their hometown of Birmingham. This they did. And although technically it was Kefford’s band, Carl Wayne by dint of age steered the group through their first gigs.



The Move’s greatest asset was Roy Wood—a teenage wunderkind who was writing songs about fairies and comic book characters that were mistakenly believed to have been inspired by LSD. This gave the band their counterculture edge when “Night of Fear” was released in 1966. They were thought to be acidheads tuning into the world of psychedelia a year before the Summer of Love—but as drummer Bev Bevan later recalled:

Nobody believed that Roy wasn’t out of his head on drugs but he wasn’t. It was all fairy stories rooted in childhood.

Young Wood and Wayne may have been squeaky clean but the rest of the band certainly enjoyed the sherbets—with one catastrophic result.

After chart success of “Night of Fear,” The Move were expected to churn out hit after hit after hit. Though Wood delivered the goods—the financial rewards did not arrive. Ace Kefford later claimed the pressure of touring, being mobbed by fans, having clothes ripped—and once being stabbed in the eye by a fan determined to snip a lock of his hair—for the same money he made gigging with The Vikings made it all seem rather pointless.

But their success continued apace. By 1967, The Move had three top ten hits, were the first band played on the BBC’s new flagship youth channel Radio One, and were touring across the UK and Europe. They also caused considerable controversy with their live stage act which involved Carl Wayne chopping up TV sets with an axe. While the golden youth were wearing flowers in their hair and singing about peace and love, The Move were offering agitprop political theater.

Then they were sued by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

More of The Move, after the jump…