Blog closed until further notice…

December 31st, 2009

I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008.

Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily). That said, at exactly a year long, this season was also quite a bit shorter than the first. While the comments remained an integral part of the blog, there were considerably fewer than during the first season. I’d view this as a consequence of hosting season two on my own site rather than a social networking platform, and also because I didn’t concentrate on replying to comments as much as I did during the first season. That said, I appear to have more readers here than when Mister Trippy was hosted at MySpace, but far fewer of them commented and those that did made less comments than on the first season of the blog. From a conventional media point of view, upping both the number and percentage of lurkers is probably a good thing, from a full-on committed to Web 2.0 perspective it probably isn’t so good, although it does make life easier! That said, there have still been loads of great comments containing both solid information and some really way-out humour on the season two blog!

A few facts and figures. Mister Trippy season two ran from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009, during which time I posted 193 public entries (including this one). As I write this there are 5,007 approved comments split across these posts. Likewise, between myself and the Askimet anti-spam software 10,207 comments were blocked or removed. All the blocked or removed comments were of a commercial nature. Obviously the number of approved and blocked comments will increase as time goes by, although probably not at the same rate as when I was posting on a regular basis.

I’ve found this blog and the main website to which it is attached a good way of alerting people to information I’m seeking. It has enabled me to locate individuals, unearth facts, and in particular extend my knowledge of my mother Julia Callan-Thompson and her bohemian social circle – as well as my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones (a legend for audacious Robin Hood-style thefts from the rich and famous, as well as a successful 1958 prison escape with a subsequent two years on the run). That said, while – for example – I now know that Francois Raymond who exhibited photographs of my mother in 1967 is dead and I have contact details for his brother, I’ve drawn a complete blank in my attempts to nail down the fate of Malcolm ‘Grainger’ Drake.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do on this blog, as well as the main site to which it is attached, is put information online that wasn’t previously available via the web. The pieces I’ve posted about my mother’s circle and Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones are good examples of this. When I began researching my mother’s life there wasn’t a single entry about her online. It is because of my efforts that a search engine request now brings in more than 15,000 results for Julia Callan-Thompson, rather than none (which was the result I got from my early web searches for her). There was material about Ray The Cat on the web before I started blogging about him, but by locating a primary source in the form of Ray’s testament about his life and going back to contemporary press coverage of his exploits, I’ve expanded the range of material available online and shown that recent retellings of his escape from Pentonville Prison completely distort the facts (and that the confusion appears to begin with inaccuracies introduced by Mad Frankie Fraser and his ghost-writer James Morton). However, to see this you’d need to read through all my blog entries on Ray The Cat. My research is ongoing and I revise what I have to say on the basis of what I discover. Putting material online is important, there is unfortunately a growing trend (particularly among the young), to look for information on the web and if it can’t be found there then to assume it doesn’t exist.

My research methods appear to confuse some of those I’ve spoken to, since I’ve had the odd email complaining I’ve not written up a story as the person recontacting me originally told it. I always try to find as many sources as possible for what I write. Sometimes these provide me with conflicting information, and some people even provide more than one version of the same story over a period of time. Using archival records where they are available, and all the oral history I am able to collect, I try to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. This can result in a specific person’s recollection of events being discarded; not because I necessarily think the individual in question is lying  – memory can play tricks and the person concerned may simply be mistaken about what happened. Someone claiming to have direct knowledge of something does not automatically make them a reliable source for the subject. I work from all the evidence available to me and sometimes this will indicate (or even prove) that a particular individual’s memory of a specific incident is faulty or fraudulent.

Moving on, I trust that the interest of media professionals in blogging is waning, since it has had a deleterious effect on the activity. There are individuals who take up blogging in the belief that it might make them famous. Although this is unlikely, it doesn’t stop people trying and thus producing narrowly focused blogs with very limited subject matter, or else simply going in for egoblogging. One of the elements of this blog that proved particularly popular with a large swathe of readers were my reports of London art world openings. It would not be difficult to construct a blog around nothing but reports of this type, but for me it would become boring and is therefore to be avoided, despite – or rather because of – the fact that it would lead to me being viewed as a greater conventional ‘success’ than is currently the case.

Likewise, most newspapers seem to have given up on investigative journalism, or even research, and at a time when we need much more of it; clearly it is those with particular interests and specialised knowledge who are far better qualified to do this than so called media professionals, and blogging is a cheap and efficient way for the ‘real’ ‘experts’ – in other words, amateurs like you and me -  to gather and disseminate information. I’m not seeing as much research based blogging or other web reportage as I’d like, but hopefully there will be more of it in coming months and years – and far fewer blogs being updated via Twitter feeds. I’d also like to see the majority of bloggers trying a little harder with their writing. While splurging something out is a great way of getting it down, you do then need to rewrite and revise. I’ve always tried to compose my blogs the night before I posted them, so that I could give them a final rewrite in the morning. Too many blogs look like their author hasn’t read through what they’ve posted even once! If you’re not prepared to read your own writing, you shouldn’t expect anyone else to do so either!

In conclusion, while I wouldn’t rule out a third season of the Mister Trippy blog, I’m not committed to doing  one either. I’ll just see how things go. For now I’d rather concentrate on other pursuits. I will continue to update the main website to which this blog is attached – check the new additions page if you want to see what is being added. Wow, this may also be one of the least humorous blog I’ve written over the past year, so I obviously do need a break from Mister Trippy!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in Web 2.0 | 30 Comments »

The real Christopher Lee – tall, dark and an airhead!

December 29th, 2009

Having recently read Phil Baker’s The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, I was moved to revisit the Hammer film adaptations of Wheatley’s novels – The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) and To The Devil A Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976), both of which ‘starred’ pseudo-aristocratic plonker Christopher Lee. The first flick is an ultra-conservative thriller with some occult trimmings that looks absolutely pathetic when compared to what was happening in horror cinema at the time. It is of the same vintage as early post-modern classics like Succubus (Jess Franco, 1967), Rape of the Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1968) and Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968), but looks positively antediluvian in comparison.

With To The Devil A Daughter, Hammer finally caught up with what had been happening cinematically in the late-sixties; they may have been a decade behind the times but the result was still a groove sensation! Just before giving up the ghost, Hammer had finally made a film that rather than being plot driven was based around atmospherics and didn’t rely on a stupid climactic end scene to ‘please’ its audience. There was even some full frontal nudity, albeit very brief . Being arch-reactionaries (and literal Tory party supporters from over-privileged backgrounds) with absolutely no sense of taste or style, Lee and his chum Wheatley loved The Devil Rides Out and disliked the infinitely superior To The Devil A Daughter (which took enormous and much needed liberties with the half-baked novel on which it was based).

Lee’s contributions to the featurette accompanying To The Devil A Daughter in The Hammer Collection DVD box set, reveal him to be an unbelievably vain and pretentious twit. He has a movie career simply because he is tall and can look menacing (he is chiefly famous for his ‘non-human’ roles as Frankenstein’s monster and the ‘undead’ Dracula), few people beyond Lee himself could possibly suffer from the delusion that he can act. Despite this, he witters on about how his Wheatley movies fulfilled the serious function of warning the public of the dangers of the occult. Lee himself is enough of a half-wit to take ‘black magic’ and related hucksterism seriously. It should go without saying that the main danger ‘black magicians’ pose to the wider public is that their attempts to part fools from their money tend to be so ham-fisted that they sometimes make people complacent about the ability of more sophisticated con artists to pull a fast one.

Having had the misfortune to see Lee’s brainless performance on the featurette accompanying one of his best films (although it isn’t quite up there with Beat Girl,  directed by Edmond T. Gréville in 1959), I found myself thinking that if this B-movie blockhead really wishes to distance himself from the villains he’s portrayed onscreen, then he really ought to stop behaving like one of the ‘undead’. I therefore leave him and you with the following question to ponder: Christopher Lee, why aren’t you dead? Isn’t it about time he did himself the huge favour of popping his clogs?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film | 57 Comments »

69 years of press coverage for Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones…

December 27th, 2009

Over the past year I’ve devoted a number of blogs to my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones. Having talked to various people about Ray and located assorted print references to him made after he’d retired from being the greatest cat burglar in the world, I thought it was time to dig back into the past. Old newspaper reports of Ray’s court appearances verify much of what he had to say about his life, clarify various matters, and show that more recent accounts of his famous jail break have been distorted by those retelling the tale. Doing a quick search through national newspapers, I found no reports of Ray’s boxing career, and the earliest press coverage I could locate was dated 8 March 1940. The Daily Mirror put things this way:

“Thief Celebrated With 21 Suits

“A man living on the proceeds of house breaking once had so much money that he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pockets. And for two years his fists kept him free.

“The police stated this at the Old Bailey yesterday when Raymond Jones, 23, described as a labourer of King Edward Walk, Lambeth, London, was sentenced to two years imprisonments for causing grievous bodily harm to a constable who tried to arrest him at the Marble Arch in December 1937, and for attempted theft from a car.

“He was arrested in Lambeth last month.

“A detective said Jones admitted assaulting numerous police officers to escape arrest in the last two years and he had been living on the proceeds of house breaking.”

There was an equally biased report in The Times also of 8 March 1940:

“Caught After Two Years. Labourer’s Savage Attack On Policeman.

“After being at liberty for over two years a man who twice escaped from police in 1937, on both occasions leaving a police officer unconscious on the ground and was not recaptured until early this year at Lambeth Walk, appeared in the dock at the Central Criminal Court yesterday.

“He is Raymond Jones, 23, a labourer of King Edward Walk, and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for causing grievous bodily harm to one of the two constables, and attempted theft from a motor-car.

“Detective Hope said the prisoner admitted assaulting several police officers in order to escape arrest in the past two years. He had been living on the proceeds of house-breaking. On one occasion he had so much money he bought 21 suits and had £50 in his pocket.

“Judge Beazley, in sentencing Jones, said he had been guilty of a savage attack.”

On the basis of these reports, the press should be in the dock, charged with spreading unctuous bullshit. As I hope I’ve made clear in my earlier blogs, Ray was not guilty, he was fitted-up. The papers, taking their cue from the Old Bill and a slimeball judge report him as being guilty of numerous assaults on cops, but he was found guilty on just one count! And in this instance, he acted in self-defence after being violently assaulted by a bully dressed in blue.

Ray’s 1952 appearance at the Old Bailey was also widely covered by the press under headlines such as Alleged Complicity In Fur Coats Theft (Times April 25 1952), £4000 Fur’s Theft, Six And A Half Year Sentence (Times 24 June 1952), and Police Kept Watch From ‘Q Van’ He Says (Daily Mirror 21 June 1952). This need not detain us, although the swiping of guests’ coats during a swanky New Year party thrown by Colonel Martin Charteris for his upper-class chums is an amusing tale; and it is also worth noting that in his evidence Ray mentioned a feud between his family and notorious 1950s gangster Billy Hill and that to defend his brother who’d been stabbed, Ray punched out the Mister Big of the London crime world. But let’s move on to Ray’s famous jail break. The Times of 18 October 1958 described it thus:

“Two Escape At Pentonville. Others Fail In Attempt.

“Five men took part in an escape attempt from Pentonville Prison last light. Three were recaptured, but two others got away. They were the first men to break out of the prison since it was reopened in 1946. A full scale search of the area was carried out.

“The men who got out of the prison were Raymond Jones, aged 42, serving 8 years preventative detention, who Scotland Yard said might be violent, and John Rider, aged 28, serving 5 years imprisonment.

“The escape was made during the period given over to evening classes. Jones and Rider found ladders being used during the repair of the prison roof, and took them to scale the 20ft wall of the prison.

“Once on top of the wall, they jumped into an alley that skirts the side of the prison and one turned left, the other right… Tracker dogs, police cars, wardens, uniformed and plain clothes police with torches toured streets around Caledonian Road.”

The Daily Mirror (18 October 1958) used Gaol Break 2 Men Hunted as its headline, and this front page story contained the following information not provided by The Times: “Two of the other three men perched on the top of the wall then dropped back into the goal yard. The third fell and was injured.”  Rider enjoyed just 24 hours freedom, as The Times reported on 20 October 1958:

“John Rider aged 34, one of two men who escaped from Pentonville Prison, London, on Friday night, was recaptured on Saturday while he was asleep on a sofa in an unoccupied home at Antler Hill, Chingford, Essex.

“The search continues for the other prisoner Raymond Jones aged 42, who was serving a sentence of eight years preventative detention. Scotland Yard issued a warning he might be violent.”

The idea that Ray was potentially violent was just a cop smear designed to justify the filth’s 1940 fit-up; Ray never carried weapons, although he would defend himself with his fists if attacked. Ray also knew how to run and hide, having spent the whole of 1938 and 1939 on his toes… When he was finally recaptured The Daily Express (24 November 1960) put the story on the front page and reported it this way:

“Two-Year Escaper Caught

“Pentonville’s record escaper, Raymond Jones, was recaptured in Staines, Middlesex, last night.

He went ‘over the wall’ two years ago – the longest time a fugitive has been on the run from the jail.

“A tip-off at lunch-time sent the police to Staines. They waited six hours to seize him at a house.

“Jones, a 42 year old Welshman, was serving eight years preventative detention.”

So there you have it, plenty of contemporary documentation to confirm just why Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones is a legend! And this is also why as recently as November this year Wales On Sunday devoted yet another page to this famous criminal, the closest thing the 20th century ever produced to a new Robin Hood!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in True crime | 74 Comments »

Porno Galore II: Orgy of the Xmas Blogs

December 25th, 2009

Greetings pop pickers! I figured that this being the time of year when people go nuts for lists, mainly of presents for “Santa” admittedly, then I might as well take part by giving you my Christmas album Top Ten. I hope that I’ll be only one of many bloggers to do this, so that just about justifies my “Porno Galore II: Orgy of the Xmas Blogs” header at the top of this. Moving on, here’s my top ten Christmas albums, please add your top ten or top five or top one or why you don’t like Christmas albums as comments.

1. “A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector”. Okay this is so completely obvious it is embarrassing, BUT actually this is a great album. I don’t usually go for alleged “classics”, but there simply isn’t a better Christmas album! Dating from 1963, for me the standout tracks are The Crystals doing “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and the great Darlene Love covering “Winter Wonderland”. But it also works as a brilliant whole. Me rating this as “number one with a bullet” also gives you an excuse to add comments about the Phil Spector murder trial and stuff like that (what a scumbag, never forget Lana Clarkson…).

2 “Funky Christmas” by James Brown. Yeah this is a CD repackaging of two different Christmas albums by the Godfather of Soul; you get all of the 1966 “Christmas Song” long player and highlights from the 1972 “Hey America, It’s Christmas”. Like 17 heavy weight soul tunes – some original compositions, some covers of Christmas r & b tunes, and even some messages like “Let’s Unite The Whole World At Christmas” (and as was the case back in the sixties, an end to American led imperialist wars would still be a good start towards that today…).

3. “In The Christmas Spirit” by Booker T. & The MG’s. More like in the spirit of southern soul; the MGs doin’ their soulful instrumental take on Christmas standards ( “Jingle Bells”, “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, “Winter Wonderland”, “White Christmas” etc.). If you like the MG”s “Green Onions” then you’ll love this album, which was recorded way back when in 1966, and makes Memphis sound like the funkiest place to spend Christmas (outside of Atlanta anyway).

4. “Christmas With The Miracles” by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. Like the Phil Spector Christmas album this dates from 1963 and is easily the best of the many Motown Christmas releases. No surprises here, just standards (“Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, “Winter Wonderland”, “White Christmas” etc.) but brilliantly arranged and soulfully sung; if I could warble like Smokey I sure would be one happy bunny….

5. “Tiny Tim’s Christmas Album”. This is another “star” (of sorts) who made his reputation back in the sixties – but this here super dumb and sleazy release was actually recorded in Australia in 1995… Probably the craziest Christmas album you’ll ever hear. There are the obvious standards like “White Christmas” and “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” but you’ve never heard them done quite like this… My favourite tracks are “All I Want For Christmas  Is My Two Front Teeth” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. If this doesn’t make you laugh like a hyena then you must be dead!

6. “Merry Christmas” by Diana Ross & The Supremes. Diana Ross didn’t exactly have the best voice in the world (or even in the Supremes) but she was shagging Motown record boss Berry Gordy, so she got pushed out front to do the lead. Miss Ross sounds pretty awful on the opener “White Christmas” but the backing is a groove. However things improve vocally and the backing remains great right thru the album. Ross somehow manages to belt it out on the more rocking tracks like “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” (I wonder how many takes that took???). I like The Supremes despite the endless put downs they get from soul and blues purists. Sure they recorded more dross than most Motown acts but how can anybody not dig their hits? Of course, my favourite Supremes song isn’t on “Merry Christmas” because it is the theme tune to the Vincent Price vehicle “Dr. Goldfoot & The Bikini Machine”, but what you do get here is a gas.

7. “Christmas On Death Row” A compilation of the obvious standards (okay so material like “Santa Claus Goes Straight To The Ghetto” by Snoop Doggy Dog isn’t an obvious standard if you grew up on Bing Crosby, but it won’t come as too much of a surprise to those who prefer screaming for the James Brown style). Death Row boss Suge Knight (in particular) and gangsta rap (in general) suck big time from an ideological perspective, but there is no denying the power of the grooves on this 1997 release. So great booty shakers, but they remain slightly marred by the fact that those producing them obsess about guns and gold…

8. “A Soulful Christmas With Jackie Wilson” Yeah, I can get stuck in a bit of a sixties groove at times, but what can you do? Standards like “White Christmas”, “Deck The Halls” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” sung by Jackie Wilson. It’s great, nuff said!

9. “The Christmas Album” by Shakatak. Christmas in a funky disco groove, the usual standards (“Winter Wonderland”, “White Christmas” etc.) mixed with some original festive compositions by Shakatak. Dating from 1993, this is a late outing from the band since they’d peaked as an act many years before; but still makes my top ten; it’s good not great but then I can’t actually think of ten “great” Christmas albums. Maybe you can help me out in the comments….

10. “The Electrifying Eddie Harris”. Okay so this ain’t a Christmas album, it’s just an old favourite of mine that I’ve been playing frequently recently, but I’m already completely sick of hearing Christmas songs…. Just gimme a break and accept this as my break from the Christmas album as a genre….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in music | 32 Comments »

Martin – or where it all went wrong for George A. Romero

December 23rd, 2009

Martin (1977) was the film that revealed director George A. Romero’s desire to emulate the middle-brow success of ‘horror’ author Stephen King. It is the tale of a teenage boy who believes he’s a vampire. Obviously, and as Romero confirms in a making of documentary you’ll find on the Arrow’s ’2 Disc Special Edition’, he isn’t; in ‘reality’ he’s just an alienated psycho. The central character comes from a dysfunctional family who believe they suffer from a vampire curse. Despite this, Martin can eat garlic, attend church and walk about in sunlight. His main problem is he is confused and the only way he can get laid is by drugging women; he also murders his rape victims by slashing their wrists with a razor, and then drinks their blood. Eventually he meets a bored housewife who is just gagging for it and whose double entendres are laid on with a trowel.  They get it on and Martin’s urge to rape and kill lessens, and when he does murder he switches to male victims.

Although there are a few jokes and the odd stab at satire, essentially this is a straight and serious film with one-dimensional characters and a terrible soundtrack; and because it isn’t particularly trashy – like say Jess Franco’s Female Vampire – it quickly turns into a snore fest. I really hate movies like Martin, films that go out of their way to project themselves as being better than exploitation efforts but at the same time are so desperate for an audience that they steer well clear of genuine cinematic experimentation.

All the films Romero made before Martin are interesting, afterwards he made nothing of worth seeing apart from the curious but flawed Knightriders (1981). With Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Romero reinvented the zombie movie. He went on to wreck the genre with various re-cuts and remakes of his first film, not to mention the tedious follow-ups. Romero’s sophomore feature There’s Always Vanilla (1971) is a perfectly watchable second-rank attempt at an underground movie; it’s about guy who doesn’t really know what he wants to do but lands a top advertising job to keep his girlfriend happy. It isn’t as good as Hi, Mom! (1970, Brian de Palma) or David Holzman’s Diary (1967, Jim McBride), but it is a lot better than The Wedding Party (1969, Brian de Palma).

George Romero’s third flick Hungry Wives AKA Season of the Witch (1972) has at its centre a bored housewife who gets into witchcraft as a way of spicing up her life. In the middle of Hungry Wives there is a beautiful montage of the main character purchasing magical implements cut to Donovan’s song Season of the Witch. This is the best single sequence in any Romero film, and the movie is perhaps his finest too. With The Crazies (1973), Romero successfully returned to the horror genre. This time a virus that turns people into psychotic killers leaves those without the disease fighting for their lives against the swelling ranks of the infected who have it. And that’s that, after The Crazies Romero turned into a bore obsessed with appealing to middle-America. Post The Crazies, even his zombie films suck!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film | 33 Comments »

The best of ‘Beat Beat Beat’ – as incoherent as the 60s will always be!

December 21st, 2009

The label tells it like it is – “Beat Beat Beat was a German music programme that ran during the sixties. Not to be confused with the other well known German pop programme Beat Club. Beat Beat Beat was broadcast out of Frankfurt commencing in 1966.” Well you wouldn’t want to confuse the two programmes as far as getting the DVDs of material from them is concerned, coz while the Beat Beat Beat (ABC Entertainment) disks give you classic mod, British Invasion, freakbeat, pop and even soul performances, on the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 (Eagle Vision) you apparently get Deep Purple,  The James Gang, Johnny Winter, Santana, Procol Harum, Nazareth, Free, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Kiki Dee Band, Johnny Rivers, The Hollies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Doobie Brothers, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. So while a mixed bag, the The Best of Beat Club vol 1 & 2 will appeal more to headbangers and others of that ilk; whereas Beat Beat Beat is a groovers kinda thang! That said, there were earlier year by year compilations of Beat Club and those for 1965, 1966 and 1967 look a lot better than the more recent ‘total overview’ disks… But I’ve only seen them listed online, I’ve not actually viewed them.

There are Beat Beat Beat DVDS running to about 10 minutes each devoted to The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, The Spencer Davis Group and The Hollies. Performances by these acts are not particularly rare and I’ve certainly seen enough footage of them to know the Small Faces totally rock onstage, whereas the Kinks or The Yardbirds (both of whom made records I love) tend to look too static and overall not that great. With more tunes and some groovy but less well known acts, The Best of Beat Beat Beat compilation disks are a better option, despite a really odd selections of talent.

At 41 minutes The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1 offers the longest running time. There’s Barry Ryan (Eloise), Cat Stevens (Granny and Matthew & Son) and Chris Farlowe (Out Of Time and Ride On Baby) lip-synching really badly to pre-recorded tracks. Farlowe in particular looks completely uninterested in what he’s doing, but remains compelling in a train wreck kinda way, especially as he is one sad and ugly motherfucker who had an obsessional interest in Nazi memorabilia (fortunately it was illegal for him to wear his fascist uniforms on German TV). There’s straightforward sixties pop from Herman’s Hermints (No Milk Today and My Reservation’s Been Confirmed) that while adequate need not detain us. By way of contrast, Casey Jones and The Govenors (Come On And Dance and Don’t Ha Ha) are a bit of an oddity.

In the UK Casey Jones AKA Brian Casser is known to music fans (but not the general public) as the bloke who booked The Beatles as his support act and briefly had Eric Clapton as his guitarist, but not really for his music. In Germany he had a huge hit with Don’t Ha Ha, hence his inclusion here. And if you like primitive beat sounds then you’ll dig the two Casey Jones and The Governors tunes on the The Best of Beat Beat Beat volume 1. It is probably unnecessary to add Don’t Ha Ha was a Huey ‘Piano’ Smith song. Volume 1 also gives us two tunes from The Trinity featuring Julie Driscoll (Save Me and Road to Cairo), with keyboardist Brian Auger’s theatrics totally upstaging his singer Julie Driscoll (who sounds great, albeit not as good as Aretha Franklin when covering her, but doesn’t have much stage presence). The best is saved for last, The Easybeats doing Loving Machine (incorporating the Batman Theme) and that old stomper Friday On My Mind. As prot0-punkers The Easybeats completely outflank Casey Jonees and The Governors.

Volume 2 is shorter but better. The Minderbenders do a Wilson Pickett medley in the form of Land Of A Thousand Dances/In The Midnight Hour and their big hit Groovy Kind Of Love; and also Don’t Cry No More and a medley of C. C. Rider/Jenny Jenny Jenny. P. J. Proby’s What’s Wrong With My World provides another spectacular train wreck; his lip-synching is terrible and the old rocker looks both off his box and down on his luck – he has to be seen to be believed! The disk winds up with two total class acts, P. P. Arnold and The Creation. A former Ikette (an Ike and Tina Turner backing singer) and session vocalist for the likes of The Small Faces, Arnold is diminutive but her voice is 100% pure soul and her two tracks here (Speak To Me and The First Cut Is The Deepest) are just fabulous.

You’d think there’d be nothing in the Beat Beat Beat vaults that could credibly follow Arnold, but The Creation are up for it! Aside from being a truly awesome song writer and musician, their guitarist Eddie Phillips also had the greatest haircut of 1966, just look at the shape of it around his ear in the footage of The Creation doing their cover version of I’m A Man! The Creation look fabulous in their dark trousers and button-down shirts with contrasting white details (buttons and belts). The shame here is that on the same edition of Beat Beat Beat (their first TV appearance) they also did That’s How Strong My Love Is and Makin’ Time, but they ain’t included on the DVD. Still you do get to see Eddie using his innovative technique of playing his guitar with a violin bow, something much imitated by lesser talents like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. What you also see here is The Creation doing Painter Man a year later, with their hair a little more grown out; the band still look really stylish but a little freakier. When I was a teenager back in the 197os I was on the lookout for some Creation vinyl for a long time, and when Raw Records stuck out Makin’ Time and Painter Man on either side of a 45 in the latter part of that decade, I grabbed a copy as soon as it came out. I really love this band, Makin’ Time in particular. And, of course, we should never forget the famous Eddie Phillips quote: “Our music is red with purple flashes.” Incidentally, after The Creation broke up, Phillips joined P. P. Arnold’s backing band.

Volume 3 of The Best of Beat Beat Beat features solid sixties pop from The Searchers (Love Potion No. 9, Sweets For My Sweet and C. C. Rider) and The Tremeloes (Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever, Silence Is Golden and Here Comes My Baby). Then there are the more psychedelic sounds of The Move (Walk Upon The Water and I Can Here The Grass Grow). However, the real highlight is The Smoke doing My Friend Jack, a song banned by the BBC in the sixties because it is about LSD! My Friend Jack is a psyche classic and everything else on this particular disk looks second-rate in comparison…  so surely we could have had more than one track from The Smoke!

I’ve also spotted but haven’t acquired a two band Beat Beat Beat DVD compilation featuring The Troggs alongside Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. I love The Troggs but I figure the DVD ain’t worth getting coz there won’t be enough of ‘em. Likewise, any disk you see in the Beat Beat Beat series will probably feature gawky looking teenagers dancing badly to groovy sounds… You can also see most of this stuff and much more for free on YouTube, although it comes and goes and the image is obviously heavily compressed- whereas on these disks both the audio and visual quality is really top-notch. Weird how you can see and hear so much shirt now that just wasn’t available to those of us based in London back in the old days, but I ain’t complaining! It’s like time travel for ravers…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film, music | 23 Comments »

Peter Plate and the off-line ‘revolution’…

December 19th, 2009

San Francisco based novelist Peter Plate came up in conversation the other night. I was at the launch of the Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge edited tome The Form of the Book at Art Words new Broadway Market shop, where I ran into some people I hadn’t seen for a while and we started rappin’ about mutual friends. None of us had been in contact with Peter Plate for a year or two and he became the focus of our conversation. While we were still in touch with him, he refused to do anything on the internet: he seemed to see it as a vehicle for police surveillance. Although it can be and is used in this way, it also has other functions and possibilities. So what happens when a contemporary writer not only refuses to use social networking platforms like Facebook and doesn’t have their own website, but won’t communicate by email? Does this give them an overview of the world as it is today, or leave them out of touch with their contemporaries? It’s probably impossible for us to judge that objectively right now, so I’ll leave it hanging… Without forgetting, of course, that Plate may not be ‘in love with today’, and might believe that being out touch with the contemporary world makes him a better writer!

What I can say is that a web search for Peter Plate didn’t turn up too much of interest: a page about Plate and his books on the site of his publisher Seven Stories, the odd review and the inevitable web book retail operations selling his stuff (plus a lot of results for other individuals who share his name). So Plate hasn’t quite disappeared, but he looks like he might join the ranks of the reforgotten. That said, I’m sure I could get a message to him via his publishers and I could almost certainly get his current home address and phone number from someone I know in London, but he isn’t easy to locate and right now doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. That said, there are other authors with several books to their name who are active on social networking sites and elsewhere on the web, but who aren’t currently represented on Wikipedia (such as Barry Graham whose entry was deleted in September 2009 for being ‘self-promoting’). My own view is that both Plate and Graham merit Wikipedia pages, but then we all know that particular platform works in mysterious and often non-rational ways….

I haven’t read Peter Plate’s more recent books, but I admire him for his hardcore stance against the net. One thing this certainly does is provide him with is more time to concentrate on his fiction. That said, personally, I enjoy engaging with the twenty-first century world and I appreciate the new horizons the web opens up, while simultaneously recognising that in its current form it certainly has some serious downsides. Does anyone know of anyone else currently active in the culture industry who has never used email or the internet?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in Web 2.0, books, culture gossip & parties | 19 Comments »

My ‘moment of truth’ – MP3s have some advantages over CDs….

December 17th, 2009

The other day as I was eating out (and no I wasn’t with my girlfriend Tessie Talk), Gang Starr’s Moment Of Truth album was playing in the background. I find Gang Starr’s earlier work a mixed bag but there are some good tracks among it. That said, by the time they made this 1998 album they were so self-obsessed and up their own arses that their rhymes were a shower of shit. It should go without saying they wouldn’t have recognised a ‘moment of truth’ if it had hit them on the head with a brick.

There are a lot of rappers I prefer to Gang Starr, but Moment Of Truth remains an excellent example of how the CD rather than the MP3 ruined the pop/rock/rap album….  Coz let’s face it, once the CD was established as a format, people started thinking they had to make albums that were around an hour long, rather than a coherent collection of songs that lasted somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes. On a platter like Moment Of Truth, everything is just stretched out to make that CD length ‘album’, which isn’t really an album at all but a fucking train wreck. Far better to focus on fewer beats and tunes and produce 25 minutes of great music rather than 70 or so minutes of crap. Pop life is supposed to be about fun, and fun should come in small intense doses.

Likewise, Gang Starr’s obsession with their own ‘authenticity’ is pathetic, and if they’d had any suss they’d have got ‘real’ and realised they live in a plastic world of corporate simulations where being completely fake is really where it’s at! As that swinging daddio Karl Marx pointed out way back when in the nineteenth-century, under capitalism we all reproduce our own alienation (and implicit in this is the insight that there can be no ‘authenticity’ in a commodity economy). So getting real means being unreal and demanding the impossible!

Returning to my opening theme, it was the CD that killed the album, while the MP3 takes us back to the classic pop focus on individual songs. Okay, so most people wanna cram so much onto their MP3 player that they compress the shit outta their tracks and what’s supposed to be music sounds like sewage rattling through a drain – and stuff is now mixed with this sad fact in mind too! But since most people ain’t gonna go back vinyl, let alone mono (and don’t forget that scumbag Phil Spector is rotting in jail for murdering Lana Clarkson), they really need to be convinced that they shouldn’t go for quite so much compression on their tunes.

Quantity is quality but it ain’t necessarily hi-fidelity! The future was always and already digital (tenderness)… and that has its upsides as well as its downs. So it’s time to boycott those motherfuckers who make platters longer than about 45 minutes and recognise that in the old days any really great album could have been fitted alongside its follow up on a single CD! And like Henry Flynt says: “Demolish Serious Culture!”

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in dreams, mass media, music | 27 Comments »

Terry’s Taylor’s cult novel ‘Baron’s Court, All Change’ is a classic – official at £238!

December 15th, 2009

Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. As I write, Repton Readers are offering a copy of Barons Court on Amazon UK Marketplace for a whopping £238 plus postage.

So how does a hard-to-obtain title go from being offered for sale for a few quid to an asking price of hundreds of pounds? Obviously, it is a combination of buzz and a bookseller chancing it with a high price. Baron’s Court is a far-out drugs novel that fell through the cracks and disappeared for forty odd years – the main problem being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. That said, it only needed a handful of relatively ‘young’ hipsters to realise that the book described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and that the author Terry Taylor had a quite incredible life story, for interest in it to rocket. Since my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) was a friend of the author, when I started researching her life at the turn of the millennium, I came across Baron’s Court and once I’d obtained copies for myself I started talking the book up. I not only wrote about Baron’s Court, I was so knocked-out by this novel, I mailed photocopies of it to key contacts – and after receiving a Xerox from me, Andy Roberts even bigged it up in his recent history of British acid culture Albion Dreaming.

If you want to know why Baron’s Court is so hard to find,  you have to understand both publishing and the used book trade. It is the difficulty of obtaining a title like this that leads dealers to asking an exorbitant price for it. I don’t know the print run of the hardback edition of Baron’s Court, but I’d guess it would have been between two and five thousand. It seems to have generated some coverage, but not massive interest – after it was published Terry Taylor was invited to do some reviewing, but the paperback rights didn’t immediately sell. Taylor’s follow-up, which drew more explicitly on the literary experimentalism of figures like William Burroughs, was rejected by his publisher. So Taylor has been to date a one-shot novelist, and was thus unable to draw readers to his earlier book through the publication of further tomes.

The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback four long years after the appearance of the MacGibbon & Kee hardcover edition is probably best explained by the burgeoning drug culture. By 1965 ‘with-it’ publishers were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject. The Baron’s Court paperback was published by Four Square (later New English Library) who by the late sixties/early seventies did first printings of their books in runs of 20,000 and they only reprinted if this first run sold quickly (see my interview with NEL editor Laurence James as an example of background research I’ve done in this ares). If we assume the company worked in the same way in the mid-sixties, then 20,000 seems a reasonable guess for the print run of Baron’s Court in paperback. We can conclude that in its two editions to date possibly as many as 25,000 copies of Baron’s Court were printed. Most of them will now be destroyed. I don’t know exactly how the book sold, but since it clearly wasn’t like ‘hot cakes’ (if it had there would have been more reprints), it is possible some copies were pulped by one or both of the publishers. I have yet to properly determine the initial reception of the book, and if anyone can point me in the direction of contemporary reviews I would be grateful.

Mass market paperbacks put out by companies like Four Square are cheaply made – perfect bound rather than sewn and printed on pulp papers that deteriorate quickly – after being read a few times this type of book tends to fall apart and get thrown away. Although the paperback will have been printed in a far bigger run than the hardback, my guess would be that far fewer copies of it survive than of the first edition. That said, I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about many copies of the first edition surviving either! It is likely the majority of hardbacks sales would have been to libraries, and library books are often roughly handled and suffer damage – before being either sold off or thrown away at the end of their lending life.

But what about those copies of Baron’s Court that were offered to secondhand dealers over the years? Since the book had no buzz about it until recently, few dealers would have wanted to buy copies even if they had recognised the title or author (and very few would have done so); and if they did acquire copies in job lots of books, they may have simply thrown them away or used them for fuel. Owners of copies of Baron’s Court who were unable to sell them to dealers may have treated this once hard-to-sell tome in an equally caviler fashion. Precisely because until recently there has been little to no market for Baron’s Court as a novel, the overwhelming majority of copies will have been destroyed.

Now there is some buzz about Terry Taylor and Baron’s Court, the remaining copies of the book have a greater potential value than many other out-of-print titles precisely because its earlier lack of popularity makes it rare. Baron’s Court is also, without a shadow of a doubt, not only a cracking good read but of considerable historical significance. So fingers-crossed that some clued-up publisher puts it back in print, and rather than having to shell out hundreds of pounds for a used copy, you can buy it new for roughly the same price as any other mass market tome. And if there are any interested publishers out there, I’d be happy to put them in touch with the author who still controls the rights….

Terry Taylor’s story is one with a relatively happy ending for those who like to believe fairy tales about ‘literary immortality’, but don’t let it blind you to the fact that the vast bulk of books published every year are very quickly forgotten!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in books, counterculture | 24 Comments »

The sinful nuns of St Valentine meet the Marquis de Sade at the Borders closing down ‘sale’….

December 13th, 2009

Watching capitalist corporations fail is a groove sensation, and it takes me right back to everything from the three day week to the ‘winter of discontent’ in the 1970s. All those who love power cuts will recall that the mid-1970s was a real peak for this type of fun in London. As a long-term fan of this great anti-tradition, you can’t keep me out of shops that are closing down. The last 12 months has been a real bonanza for entertainments of this type: first there was the closure of Woolworths, then there was Zavvi, now there is Borders (UK)! Okay, so the flagship Borders store in Oxford Street has already gone, but the sense of chaos and anti-climax in the still just hanging-on-by-a-thread Charing Cross Road branch really gives me the horn. The stock is in disarray, with books and DVDs spilling off half-empty shelves, the toilets (for me what was once the main attraction in the shop) are closed, and there are mugs and other breakable crap – rather than bestsellers – at the front of the shop. The place looks like the set for a disaster movie, which is why for as long as it remains open I’ll continue to goof around in this wrecked ‘retail’ space…

That said, now Borders is closing I only go for the ambiance (rather than ‘Toilet Love’), and to laugh at those buying goods that after being marked up to more than twice their market value are currently being sold at between 20% and 50% ‘discount’. One of the things that caused me to chuckle on the ground floor of Borders while I was enjoying the chaos there on Friday was a display of Redemption DVDs. These were priced at £7.99 minus 30% discount (i.e. £5.60), and there were some Eurosleaze classics among them including a whole bunch of Jean Rollin lesbian vampire movies… But you can buy many of these on Amazon Market Place for around £4 (including postage), or if you can’t wait for them to arrive by mail, all the titles in Borders and many more are sold in Lovejoys a couple of minutes walk down Charing Cross Road at £6.99 each or 2 for £12 (i.e. £6 each when you buy two – not greatly more than the Borders sale price). Likewise I’ve seen these Redemption titles around in secondhand shops at about £3. Which means, of course,  that even in the Borders sale, these items (like most of their discounted stock) still pan out as being more expensive than picking them up elsewhere. So don’t bother with the sale, just dig the collapse…. or go in dressed in an over-sized coat….

And talking of Redemption, I read a truly bizarre story by Lucy Tobin about this company in The Evening Standard on Thursday 10 December, entitled Film firm that made Koo a star collapses: “The cult movie empire whose back catalogue includes the risqué films of Prince Andrew’s former lover Koo Stark has collapsed into administration. Redemption Films, based in Wigmore Street, Soho, was set up by Nigel Wingrove, Britain’s answer to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Administrators were called in today at the distributor of gothic horror movies, whose past titles range from Sinful Nuns Of St Valentine to Ms Stark’s cult 1977 hit The Marquis De Sade’s Justine….”

There is a lot of misinformation to unpack in this story, but let’s start with the headline, since Redemption Films did not make Koo Stark a star. Redemption was set up in the 1990s and Stark became a minor starlet on the back of a couple of mid-seventies movies -  Emily (1976) and Cruel Passion AKA De Sade’s Justine (1977) – and then briefly a media celebrity in the 1980s when she dated inbred British royal brat Prince Andrew (“The Duke of York”). All Redemption did was acquire some of Stark’s back catalogue as a film actress and issue it on VHS tape and then DVD long after she’d become a household name in the UK.

Likewise, I find the idea of Redemption being a soft porn ‘empire’ on the same scale as Larry Flynt’s American Hustler operation risible (it is about on a par with suggesting that ‘Boris Johnson is Britain’s answer to Barack Obama’). During the 1990s my friend Nik Houghton worked for Nigel Wingrove and I went into their office on the odd occasion; at that time the business consisted of Wingrove and his part-time assistant Nik in a moderately sized room. Wingrove’s operation may have grown a bit since then, and it has definitely moved to a slightly more upmarket address, but it is still closer to a cult-film one-man band than a porn empire! However, as ever with The Standard, the point of the piece seems to be to pack in as much gossip as possible, rather than to report news. Therefore it should surprise no one that Wingrove’s professional involvement with Georgina Baillie – ‘the granddaughter of Andrew Sachs who was at the centre of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand telephone scandal’ – gets a passing mention too.

For anyone who has looked into the ways cult films and music are milked for profits, I’d see Redemption going into administration as business as usual within this sector of the culture industry. Cult means niche and there are usually very few buyers for operations in really specialist areas like Oi! music or Eurosleaze films; therefore a businessman (or woman) who knows their way around one of these ‘cult’ areas will often run their limited liability company into bankruptcy while paying themselves a hefty salary. This is a way of writing off debts, because the ‘former’ owner can buy up the assets of the concern they’ve deliberately run down for less than a song: they use another company they’ve set up for this purpose and then proceed to do the same thing again, and again, and again! And what’s more, given that we live in a capitalist society, this is more or less legal! It is precisely the sort of thing so called ‘wealth generators’ do for ‘a living’ and illustrates why businessmen and bankers should not be allowed to reward themselves with anything above an average workers’ wage, let alone ‘bonuses’. I don’t know if this is how Nigel Wingrove operates, but I am familiar with other individuals working in the cult sector of the culture industry who do business this way.

If Wingrove was planning to write off his debts by buying himself out, The Standard story could be bad news for him, since it might stir up interest from other ‘wealth generators’. That said, Wingrove is also a film-maker himself, so perhaps he just wants out…. Moving on, if you believe what you read in The Standard, you may well have been hoaxed into thinking I wrote the Belle de Jour blog and books, so it isn’t exactly surprising their Nigel Wingrove and Redemption Films story is so inaccurate!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in culture gossip & parties, economics, porn | 37 Comments »

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