from across the rooftops of my derelict and sometimes troubled mind i can see the horizon, and the horizon is grey.
i asked joe what he thought i could fill this space with this week, he harangued me with fifty billion greys of pure, untreated negativity. no turn was left unstoned, every social irriitant was touched on, from council tax to the endless recession, all covered with a big thick layer of grey. joe's nineteen, what his problem? surely when you're nineteen every day is pretty much disneyland, an endless succession of fascinating events to go wooooh! and aaaaah! at at every available opportunity. maybe not, it's some time i myself was nineteen, and if i take the rose coloured spex off for a moment, i can see myself as an awkward, hyper-active soul with too much on his mind. all coated with a thick layer of grey.
i guess the world in which we lived -in 1981- was slightly more overcast, the early daze of thatcher, pre-falklands, was a bleak and unloved terrain, waiting for the next ice age or for the bomb to finally drop, whichever came first. but it never felt that bad, maybe we resigned ourselves to our fate early doors, set out our stall and parked a bus across the goalmouth of misery. nothing goes in, nothing goes out. if that's not the case, it's one fuck of an analogy.
the media's to blame, of course. in 1981 we may have been perfectly aware of the grey and chose to ignore or do nothing about it. in joe's world of media saturation, every last insignificance is ground to powder by a voracious rolling juggernaut that never lets a thing go away, in a very 1981 way, the news today will be the movies of tomorrow. a great philosopher once wrote 'so, when i can only see the grey, of a very sad and lonely day. that's when i, softly sigh.'
don't fight it, feel it. immerse yourself in the grey. shapeshift, become a part of what everybody is trying to escape. a window of sunshine is all well and good but the same sunshine will fry your mind, there's gotta be a little rain. sometimes. treat yourself to the seasons, buck your own trend, the grey is a temporary situation that is very much maligned and misunderstood. be good to yourself, you deserve the other side of the coin, every day of your life. and most of all we can't let the sunshine nazis win.
this week: it's been a long time comin', but a change gonna come.
WE WILL NOT SHY AWAY FROM POP MUSIC.
rapper's delight.....sugarhill gang.
new moon rising (yacht remix).....wolfmother.
watch her ride.....jefferson airplane.
aidy's girl's a computer.....darkstar.
soul makossa.....manu dibango.
from the underworld.....the herd.
jela.....cold pumas.
israel.....siouxsie & the banshees.
check yourself.....the intruders.
lights out.....jerry byrne.
have you seen my baby?.....the flamin' groovies.
freaks for the festival.....rahsaan roland kirk.
olympians.....fuck buttons.
rainbow chaser.....nirvana.
assembled in liverpool by bernard and sike. same as it ever was. audio duck. quack. happy birthday, sike, sir. x
thirty odd years, man and boy, i still love gaye advert. x x x
anthem for doomed youth - wilfred owen (1893-1918)
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
TOO MANY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE DYING AND NOBODY SEEMS THAT ARSED. DO WHATEVER YOU CAN, WHEREVER YOU CAN. HISTORY WILL JUDGE US ON WHAT WE DID TO STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER.
tv eye.....the stooges.
willie & the hand-jive.....rinder & lewis.
clap beep boom.....dorian concept.
july july july.....billy paul.
party time (extended mix).....the heptones.
lonesome george.....yeti lane.
konk party.....konk.
blue rondo a la turk.....dave brubeck quartet.
so watcha sayin'?.....epmd.
killing time.....moon duo.
why are we sleeping?.....the soft machine.
not made for love (leo zero remix).....metronomy.
private plane.....thomas leer.
efusculated by bernie connor. refirtled by sike o' delick. bespoke audio types.
To imagine a modern world without the guitar is akin to imagining a world without one its major components. It is such a huge part of the entertainment industry that to remove it from the equation would pretty much bring about its complete collapse. Although it has been around in various forms for some 4,000 years it is in the last 100 years that it has established itself as the cornerstone of modern music. Its ability to alter its sound from a gentle bird like chirrup to the apocalyptic wind of torturous destruction sets it miles apart from even its nearest competitor. Its adoption as one of the construction tools of the American dream coincided with the birth of the modern recording and entertainment industries. It offered low cost, portable accompaniment to every style of music imaginable, but where it really came in to its own was the instrument of the folk singing troubadour. From there it took off skyward and remains in orbit today. It was there calling the tunes at the Little Big Horn, the Somme, Woodstock and the fall of the Berlin Wall; it will no doubt still be here after the smouldering ash of the apocalypse has blown away to create the soundtrack to the new new-world.
Songs About Plucking
We,ve become so engorged in this non-stop, politically unstable, nearly-new century that the blight and often challenging circumstances of the last one seem like a distant, fading dream. It’s hard to believe the cold war ever existed, apart from a few comical remnants –lead-lined bunkers, checkpoint Charlie etc- dotted about the globe there’s little long lasting physical evidence to suggest it existed. Having said that, there’s still enough nuclear weapons in existence to destroy our entire solar system a zillion times over, but until Iran starts allegedly rattling its provocative sabre it’s pretty much assure that they will remain in their collective holsters out the way of very itchy fingers.
The long arduous road that was the 20th century produced many advantages and benefits, many of which we hold dear to our hearts in this heathen, godless world we inhabit today. Despite the international turmoil and unrest great things were extracted from the social and political mess that permeated every strand of the accepted world order. A lot of what we take for granted was struggled and fought for by our mothers and fathers so that we wouldn’t have to. The defeat of fascism and the tyranny of the third reich was, without doubt one of the single greatest achievements of the past few hundred years. The cost at which it came is still a sobering thought over sixty years later; the carving up of sovereign lines still causing consternation in some quarters even as I write. It produced a world so unstable that for over forty years we were held over the barrel of global annihilation and systematically butt fucked for a laugh by both sides in this sorry disagreement. Every day. Then, as if by magic one side in the argument decided that their point of view was somewhat flawed, that they may have been wrong for the previous seventy years and the concept of all out mutually assured destruction was wrapped up and put in a box for a number of years while we all pretended to love each other.
The trauma and untreated wounds of ww2 produced a very different peace-time, in Europe the battle scars ran deep and wide, vast areas were laid waste and millions displaced creating the one of the largest mass migrations of humans in history. Conversely in America it was boom-time, the fruits of the war creating an economic miracle and boosting a burgeoning economy. Whilst Europe smouldered in the wreckage, Americans partied like it was 1949 and ushered in a new age of prosperity placing themselves at the top of the super power tree and the chief inspector in the new world police.
And so America exported its new shiny culture to the world, tons of stuff, stuff that appeared rich, exotic and unattainable to the starving, food rationed, war-weary Europeans. Along with atom bomb, bubblegum, Marilyn Monroe and household appliances, one of the most enduring and exciting was the concept of popular music as we know it today. There had always been popular music of course, but post-war American music had a different set of rules and a whole new look. Some of this so-called music was unlike anything else that had ever existed, it was sexy, ambiguous, morally corrupt and potentially dangerous, and, through the better distribution of gramophone records, if you knew where to look, it was available. The expansion of the post-war American economy meant that young people had access to amounts of money and leisure time that would have been unthinkable to their parents, money spent with reckless abandon.
The big star of this new wave of music was the guitar; relatively cheap, portable and, compared to other instruments, relatively easy to play at beginner level. The guitar had been waiting in the wings for almost a century for its spot, and in the post war years it saw the curtain raised and was pushed out to begin its eternal moment in the spotlight. As accompaniment to the urban noise of America’s great industrial expansion the guitar in its acoustic form had pretty much soundtracked the growing prosperity and poverty and unrest from the Mississippi delta to the production lines of Detroit simultaneously.
Played in church, cottonfield and gin-juke, it revolutionised the way people listened to music, played music and thought about music. Along with the atom bomb and the misuse of LSD, the guitar and its electric sibling were the greatest developments of the last century affecting more people’s lives directly or indirectly than any other cultural force. The far reaching effects of these very disparate items touched lives in a way that nothing previously had ever done. In the guitar it gave those on either side of America’s deeply segregated lines the chance to glimpse over the hedge into their neighbour’s backyard and see –maybe for the first time- that they were not that unlike, no matter what the preacher man said.
Elvis Presley would never have happened sitting at a piano, no way. Part of Elvis’ instant appeal was his dubious relationship with his guitar. The guitar was used as a prop to stun his audience, a metaphor for his raging torrent of sexuality that fifties America was just not ready for. Take the guitar out of the equation and he could be just another crooner, Perry Como, Al Martino. Armed to the teeth with the most beautiful voice in Christendom and acoustic guitar he single-handedly dismantles the pent-up frustration of young white America and turns it into an incendiary stage act that not only changes the music biz forever, but in doing so ushers in a radical change in the way the young behave, think, walk, talk and live. Forever. Thank god.
But people had done it before, of course, but these musicians were the wrong colour in prosperous, 1950’s Apartheid USA. In the juke joints, jazz clubs and honky-tonks guitarists had been blowing up a storm for decades playing ‘race music’ to a predominantly black audience. This was a mutually exclusive industry to the white bread schmaltz of Tin Pan Alley, guitarists like T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins and to a lesser extent Chet Atkins were stars within their own community, very rarely given the opportunity of crossing over into the world of real showbiz, national television and multi-million sales.
The rise of the popularity of the guitar came with electrification of this once humble instrument. The advent of the electric guitar from the late 40’s onwards charted one of the most celebrated examples of musical artistry of the last couple of centuries. Virtuosos who once played but could never be heard were picked up at the back of the hall, on the far side of the bar, outside your church, anywhere. Amplification brought with it a whole new generation of players who could work a fretboard and have their artistry heard. It was a boomtime, coupled with advances in recording technology it afforded musicians the luxury of approaching their craft in a completely different way. The new instruments sounded different, looked different and had instant appeal to the myriad of blues guitarists who’d made the journey from their rural southern homes to the ear-splitting, industrial conurbations of Michigan and Illinois. It made sense, unless you plug in, ain’t nobody gonna hear you play on the noise polluted streets of Chicago, it was that simple.
Within a few years of its introduction the electric guitar was a mainstay of virtually every band on the ever-growing circuit, it had encouraged a new generation of musicians to pick it up and use it a radically different way to what was accepted a decade earlier. It was loud, aggressive and a radical departure from the accepted norm and unbeknownst to the universe it was about to blow the world right open.
The rush of musicians in the 1950’s held up the electric guitar as a symbol of the new freedom, a portable party that could be set up just about anywhere with a mains supply. The bursting banks of the rhythm ’n’ blues/rock ‘n’ roll deluge churned out such a welter of supremely gifted and soon to be highly influential not only in their immediate environment but the world over. From Memphis to Liverpool, Soweto to Melbourne a whole new breed of prodigiously talented –mainly- young men came out of the woodwork to alter the industry’s perception of what entertainment really meant and claim the future as their own. Names that in certain places are household names today, sonic pioneers like Cliff Gallup, Muddy Waters, Eddie Cochran and Hubert Sumlin became the inspiration for the next generation of music fans to take the seeds and spores of rock ‘n’ roll and in turn create a new music that within a decade would as far removed in style from Rock Around The Clock than anybody on the planet would ever have imagined.
The mania travelled a great distance in a very short time, the same instrument that had been used by the likes of Gene Autry to serenade America through the depression would forty years later be used by Jimi Hendrix as an instrument of sexual torture to terrify the known world and introduce a new wave of moral panic. And if Magic Sam was the starting point for Jimi’s pyrotechnics, then he himself would be the launch pad for musicians like Glenn Branca who fifteen years after Hendrix would create electric guitar orchestras playing dangerously loud music (?) and trying to destroy buildings in a crumbling New York City through sound alone.
The guitar is such an integral part of modern life and culture it would be hard to imagine a world in which it had not existed. Without the romantic –and sometimes dangerous- allure of the humble guitar John Lennon would never have met Paul McCartney, and that is just one example of its incalculable contribution to our lives. We are all only too aware of the impact guitar based music and musicians have had on our lives since Heartbreak Hotel, Scotty Moore himself being a master of a trillon different styles, often on one record. Less than ten years after Elvis had parachuted into our lives and invented youth culture, graffiti appearing around London was declaring ‘Clapton Is God’, this example of youthful fanaticism was just one indication of how far the guitar and its music and musicians had come, from its rural share cropper roots to the white middle-class suburbs of Surrey. We now know that Eric Clapton isn’t god, he’s just a bloke. Bo Diddley is god, he’s a proper deity.
to be continued................
an expanded version of this note appears on the viper label release, 'hot guitars.'
this week: we found we know too much about knowing too much. too soon.
WE WILL NOT SHY AWAY FROM POP MUSIC.
misty blue......dorothy moore.
seventy-two nations.....dadawah.
nanny goat dub......king tubby/larry marshall.
back street luv......curved air.
tell that girl to shut up......holly & the italians.
and the hazt sea.....cymbals eat guitars.
it is what it is.....rhythim is rhythim.
due matrosen......liliput.
blessa......toro y moi.
flying saucers rock'n'roll.....billy lee riley & the little green men.
mustelmia.....vladislav delay.
where were you?.....mekons.
sally go round the roses.....the jaynettes.
cockroach......rubberrom.
ghost town......kode 9 & the space ape.
hand carved from the finest audio imaginable by bernie & sike. the bespokers you love.
from across the rooftops of my derelict and sometimes troubled mind i can see the horizon, and the horizon is grey.
anthem for doomed youth - wilfred owen (1893-1918)
To imagine a modern world without the guitar is akin to imagining a world without one its major components. It is such a huge part of the entertainment industry that to remove it from the equation would pretty much bring about its complete collapse. Although it has been around in various forms for some 4,000 years it is in the last 100 years that it has established itself as the cornerstone of modern music. Its ability to alter its sound from a gentle bird like chirrup to the apocalyptic wind of torturous destruction sets it miles apart from even its nearest competitor. Its adoption as one of the construction tools of the American dream coincided with the birth of the modern recording and entertainment industries. It offered low cost, portable accompaniment to every style of music imaginable, but where it really came in to its own was the instrument of the folk singing troubadour. From there it took off skyward and remains in orbit today. It was there calling the tunes at the Little Big Horn, the Somme, Woodstock and the fall of the Berlin Wall; it will no doubt still be here after the smouldering ash of the apocalypse has blown away to create the soundtrack to the new new-world. 
