Category Archives: Music

Tangerine Dream – Phaedra

0

Posted on by

Facebook Twitter Email

phaedra_cover

I started reading science fiction round about the same time I got into music, and so being a fairly literal minded so-and-so I immediately embarked on a quest to find albums I could read Asimov, Heinlein, and Moorcock, to. Of course there were a few attempts to write directly SF-inspired music. Who can forget The Carpenter’s Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, which I have on my iPod running playlist at the very end? This is because it always inspires me with a last burst of speed so I don’t have to listen to too much of it.

Science Fiction Monthly helped out with an article on SF-inspired rock in one of its early issues, though in retrospect this was more of a trawl through the writers’ record collection. Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire left me cold. It just sounded like hippy folk rock and even now I have difficulty separating it in my head from Benson Arizona, the theme song to Dark Star. Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets was completely ruined by the Kazoo riff in Corporal Clegg despite the vaguely spacey noises in the rest of the album. Hawkwind, on the other hand, became one of my favourite bands of all time (though only up until their Moorcock-inspired album Warriors on the Edge of Time).  I was still several years away from appreciating just how much SF, and particularly New Wave SF, soaked through David Bowie’s work.

Tangerine Dream

Tangerine Dream

What the article didn’t really touch on was Progressive Rock, and particularly the soundscapes of Mike Oldfield, Yes and Tangerine Dream. I’ll talk about Oldfield another time, but it’s enough to say here that listening to Ommadawn for the first time was my Keats On looking into Chapman’s Homer moment.

This post is about Tangerine Dream, and in particular their album Phaedra which is perhaps their purest work. At this time the band consisted of Edgar Froese, Chris Frank and Peter Baumann. They produced soundscapes by programming enormous analog sequencers and oscillators. They found out that temperature changes caused the music itself to shift, producing what became a characteristic signature of their music.

Tangerine Dream‘s early works build up hypnotic layers of sound over repeated phrases. It’s hard to put into words, but a typical live concert in the mid 1970s consisted of an initial ten minutes of Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba Wubba laid over a sweeping synth background. After a while a valve would go pop or a coil would overheat and expand and the music would go Wubba Wubba Wubba WOBBA WOBBA WOBBA – at which point the audience, stoned and lying on their backs  on the floor of whatever cathedral the band were performing in, would erupt in applause, shrieks and whistles of delight.

Peter Baumann at the controls

Peter Baumann at the controls

You get the idea. Yet the music is genuinely hypnotic. Whether you have it on in the background when reading or not, it really does evoke alien, cosmic spaces. Of course the problem nowadays is that anyone with a £199 keyboard from Argos can create an entire Tangerine Dream album by pressing two buttons and leaving them on repeat for twenty minutes. Yet at the time Phaedra was released the musicians performed with temperamental machinery fifteen foot high and spent their time running back and forth between bakelite control panels like the desperate factory workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The classic Tangerine Dream albums are, for me, Phaedra (1974), Rubycon (1975), Ricochet (a wonderfully dark live album from the same year),  Stratosfear (1976) and their magnificent live double-album Encore (1977). After that they changed direction, moving away from their abstract sweeping soundscapes to more easy-listening short-track electronic albums with (shock horror) singing. Listening to post Encore stuff is often painful, although to be fair they redeemed themselves with the wonderfully odd Madcap’s Flaming Duty (2007) which includes the German singer Chris Hausl singing the poetry of William Blake and mispronouncing half the words.

By modern standards, and compared to people like Blixa Bargeld and Alva Noto, Phaedra can sound a bit passé, but only because Tangerine Dream have influenced so many people since they started. I would recommend anyone to stick their headphones on, forget all bourgeois notions of melody and harmony, lie down under a starry sky, turn Phaedra up to 11 and let their brain gently sizzle away for forty minutes.

Nemesis the Warlock – Shriekback

0

Posted on by

Facebook Twitter Email

The anarchist demon alien Nemesis battles the fascist minions of Torquemada

In the mid 1980s England was ruled by a right wing conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. Like Cameron’s Tories and New Labour under Blair they espoused the values of liberty and justice while simultaneously suppressing free speech and clamping down on Trade Union rights and minorities. It was the first time in the 20th century that a British government had deliberately divided the population using ‘Them and Us’ rhetoric. In the wake of the Falklands War Thatcher famously referred to striking miners as ‘The Enemy Within’, an Orwellian divide and conquer strategy used by every oppressive government since the dawn of time. With the trade unions on the run, and traditional socialist opposition in tatters there emerged a new politics of dissidence. Essentially if you create a Them and Us mentality in society and label Them as ‘deviants’ and ‘outsiders’ they, more often than not, will respond with ‘Wahay’ and then set about exposing the cracks in the dominant world picture by making lots of noise. The new discourses of protest coalesced around feminism, LGBT movements and the politics of race, which moved in to fill the gap left by the disappearance of traditional union-based protest against Thatcherite capitalism and all its ills.

Nemesis the Warlock

At this time the comic 2000AD was at the height of its popularity. 2000AD grew out of an earlier comic called Action, which itself had created controversy with its brutal, anti-authoritarian story lines and sparked a brief moral outrage similar to the Horror Comics panic of the 1950s. The main character in 2000AD was Judge Dredd, but perhaps the strip that most closely captured the spirit of the times in Thatcher’s Britain was Nemesis the Warlock, written by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill. The first strip was based directly on the song ‘Going Underground‘ by The Jam, and described the anarchic alien rebel Nemesis being chased through a transit system on a future Earth ruled by the fascist overlord Torquemada and his hooded minions. Subsequent tales made it absolutely clear that the Grand Master Torquemada’s fascist state was the direct outcome of Thatcherism. In one episode the villain channels for previous rulers like himself, including the leader of a British right wing government in the late twentieth century. The essential creed of Torquemada’s state is one of racial and ideological purity, combined with eternal vigilance. His code is summed up by ‘Be Pure, Be Vigilant, Behave’. By definition all non-human aliens are deviants who must be expunged from the galaxy. Nemesis, the demonic alien, leads the resistance against the forces of Torquemada, a battle that played out through ever-increasingly complex story lines.

Kevin O’Neill’s artwork bordered on the hysterically surreal

The main difference between the comic strips in 2000AD and those of, say, Marvel, was the constant current of Pythonesque humour that ran through the stories. Nemesis the Warlock is often very funny, with constant in-jokes and references to the joys of living in 1980s Britain. “Here comes my nineteenth nervous breakdown” says one citizen staring out of the window in the giant planet city of Termight. The style of the series became more extreme and violent as it progressed. Kevin O’Neill really went to town on Torquemada himself, often illustrating him surreal, hysterical detail that added to the overall feverish quality of the strip. The series finished in 1989, with a sequel volume appearing in 1999.

The 80s Indie band Shriekback were huge fans of 2000AD, especially Nemesis the Warlock. Their album Oil and Gold alternates between belting post-punk anthems to reptilian evolution, anarchy and decadence, and eerie ballads describing a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Shameful and naked, out there in the great cold outdoors we have to learn these things again” are the lyrics to the haunting track ‘Faded Flowers’. The single ‘Nemesis’ is a direct tribute to Nemesis the Warlock, with its bizarre refrain “Big Black Nemesis, Parthenogenesis, no-one move a muscle as the dead come home.” In the video to the song you can see Nemesis the Warlock himself hovering in the shadows at the back.

Shriekback

You can view the video for Shriekback’s Nemesis on YouTube

The complete Nemesis the Warlock series is available from Rebellion in three volumes, though sadly the first one appears to be out of print.

Space Ritual

2

Posted on by

Facebook Twitter Email

In the mid 1970s New English Library published the magazine Science Fiction Monthly, a huge format magazine which reprinted book covers by the likes of Chris Foss and Bruce Pennington for teenage boys to stick on their bedroom walls. Interspersed with these were short stories and articles, including one about science fiction in music. This was just before punk and the UK music scene was dominated by Glam Rock and the tag end of Progressive Rock, mixed up with some of the most horrendous rubbish that has ever been pressed to vinyl.

Out of all the various bands and singers who occasionally nodded in the direction of SF (David Bowie, Gong, Yes etc..) Hawkwindstood out as a band who, through their links with Michael Moorcock, deliberately set out to write music about their Acid-addled vision of a dystopian future. By this time the personal rot was well embedded and I was consuming anything to do with SF at a rate of knots. The article went on at great length about Hawkwind’s live album Space Ritual so I dutifully saved up the princely sum of £4.00 and toddled off to W.H. Smiths in Harrogate to buy the cassette.

Now up to this point my experience of modern music consisted of mainly Sérgio Mendes & Brasil 66, The Beatles and singing along with my dad to 8-Track cartridges of Sinatra on the way to school. I was too young to be into bands like The Who, and it would be another four years before my brain would be irrevocably fried by the sight of Kate Bush rising vertically out of a bank of mist to screech Wuthering Heights at the nation, and the sound of The Clash hammering out Tommy Gun.

So the first time I put Space Ritual on it seemed like the most unholy din, especially as it begins with what sounds like a cat being forced down a toilet. However, being a persistent little so-and-so, I kept playing it in the background until one day something clicked and I realised just how brilliant the album is.

Space Ritual is essentially one massive heavy metal jamming session combining guitar, drums, synthesizer, saxaphone etc and interspersed with short pieces of poetry describing the experiences of a spaceship crew flying through the universe in a state of suspended animation. I’d heard nothing like it then, and nothing like it since. To my unprofessional ears it sounds like the strangest combination of hard rock and jazz, lacking in all of the stupid posturing that characterises most heavy metal, and without a lot of the pretentious artiness that plagued other Progressive Rock bands like Yes and Genesis. It’s interesting to note that Punk bands like the Sex Pistols, who were openly contemptuous of prog rock, liked Hawkwind, probably for their raw energy and anarchic delivery.

I regret never seeing Space Ritual live. According to the BBC 4 documentary the band were out of their heads most of the time, which helped their music no end, and were often accompanied by the dancer Stacia who one night climbed on stage, took all her clothes off, added her own interpretation of the band’s lyrics to the show, and thereafter became a semi-permanent fixture.

Hawkwind produced two more studio albums: Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974) and Warrior of the Edge of Time (1975) (in which Michael Moorcock reads poetry based on his Eternal Champion novels). In 1975 Lemmy was kicked out because he was wrongly arrested by Canadian border police for drug offences. (a bit of a hypocritical move given that the rest of the band relied on Acid for much of their inspiration). The departure of Lemmy, who later formed Motorhead), was, in my opinion, a musical disaster. Everything after 1975 seems tame compared to the sheer free-form energy of Space Ritual.

I realise that this kind of music’s not to everyone’s taste but for me Space Ritual is one of the very rare albums I’ve never tired of, even after 36 years.

Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: