The Andy Warhol Diaries & A Space Age Love Song

Posthumously published at the tail end of the 1980s, The Andy Warhol Diaries has just been adapted into a six-part TV docuseries by Netflix.

Directed by Andrew Rossi, it’s been picking up some rave reviews, Ireland’s Sunday Independent touting it as ‘a brilliant and penetrating portrait of a genius whose influence is still felt and who predicted so much of modern life’, while for Edge Media Network it was ‘a monumental event’.

I wouldn’t go that far. A big problem with it is that Warhol didn’t start on his diaries until November 1976, by which point he was extolling ‘Business Art’ rather than Pop Art. ‘Being good at business is the best art,’ he claimed. Whether or not he was being serious is hard to tell but as his aphorisms go, this was maybe the dumbest.

In the 1960s, Pop Art Andy was shooting esoteric underground movies with titles like Blow Job and promoting The Velvet Underground, while surrounded by drag queens, speed freaks and mad, bad and dangerous to know hangers-on and hustlers. In the 1970s and 1980s, Business Art Andy was making MTV friendly videos for The Cars and Curiosity Killed The Cat, and if any art collector fancied a portrait, then he was more than happy to immortalise their mugs on canvas, as long as the price was right. He even agreed to appear on The Love Boat and delivered the kind of performance that would have made Tommy Wisseau blush.

You can’t blame him for dropping most of his mid-’60s entourage. After being shot by the maddest, baddest and definitely most dangerous to know of his hangers-on, Valerie Solanas, things were never going to be the same again.

Andy is seen here publicly denying that the incident changed his life, but you’d have to be truly gullible to believe him. Wildly insecure, Warhol saw himself as ugly and a freak, and the heavy scarring and puncture marks on his torso must have horrified him. And served as a daily reminder of the downside of his days walking on the wild side.

Jed Johnson, a much younger man who Paul Morrissey had hired to work at the Factory due to his striking good looks, became Warhol’s live-in carer as he recovered and the pair became involved romantically even though Andy still liked to pretend to the world that he was asexual in line with his public ‘I want to be a machine’ persona.

Shy but a social butterfly, he was drawn to the sex, drugs, and disco world of Studio 54. Jed judged that he was wasting his time there with ‘the most ridiculous people’ and during this time, the older man comes across as more voyeuristic than visionary.

The two grew apart and Jed eventually dumped him. Not one to heed the commonplace advice that going on the rebound is never going to mend a broken heart, Andy immediately decided to woo Jon Gould, a preppy New Englander who worked as a bigwig exec at Paramount. Like Jed he was a twin with a twin brother called Jay. The odds on that? Pretty damned high I would guess.

Episode two ends with archive footage from New York’s 1981 Hogmanay bash, this celebration and the end credits soundtracked in a completely on the nose fashion by a synthpop/guitar track that, as my toes tapped, I soon identified as A Flock of Seagulls, a band most famous nowadays for being namechecked by Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in Pulp Fiction and for the utter ridiculousness of the singer’s hairstyle.

For a brief period, the Liverpool band must have been credible enough. They’d hoped to pick up a deal with local independent Zoo Records but instead, former Be-Bop Deluxe frontman Bill Nelson released their debut 45 on his own Cocteau label, producing it into bargain. He also took John Peel along to see them play in a Yorkshire boozer and the DJ was impressed enough to offer them a session on his show.

Nowadays, some even consider them the least cool band of the 1980s (which would be a real feat given that Kajagoogoo, Level 42 and The Thompson Twins were all on the go at the time). In his book Mad World, Jonathan Bernstein put the boot in: ‘In my U.K. homeland, they were seen as a joke act, like a band formed by a bunch of oafish characters in a British soap opera.’ This, their fifth single, is about as ’80s as a rah-rah skirted Molly Ringwald attempting to solve a Rubik’s Cube, a bunch of bangles dangling against her Swatch watch as she does so. Space Age Love Song is also a delicious slice of sincere and optimistic pop. Paul Reynold’s nimble guitar work is dazzling and you’ve got to love those synthy laser gunshot whooshes which accompany the whole song.

Released in Britain forty years ago come May, here it is:

More on The Andy Warhol Diaries soon.

Archangel Thunderbird & The Nearest Thing To Kate Bush Before Kate Bush

Being only a young ‘un in the spring of 1970, the release of Amon Düül II’s second album Yeti was way off my radar. I was more Archies than Amon Düül II. They might have been pure bubblegum but were at least preferable to much of what was then on offer in the British charts: Lee Marvin croaking out Wand’rin’ Star? No thanks. Likewise the efforts of England’s World Cup Squad, Sacha Distel, Dana and Des O’Connor. Even worse, there was (spits) Rolf Harris’s Two Little Boys.

Let’s move on. Before Amon Düül II, there was not surprisingly, a plain old Amon Düül. They’d holed up together in a radical Munich commune and music began playing an important part of life there.

Just as German performance artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys liked to air his slogan ‘Everyone is an artist’, the commune believed that everyone is a musician. You wanted to join in, then you could join in. They even attempted to get audiences involved, handing out bongos and tambourines to them, so they could join in the fun and play along. As John Weinzierl told author David Stubbs in his book Future Days: ‘You didn’t go along to the concert and watch the band; you came to the event and were part of it.’

This was an idea later embraced by some British bands like The Mekons and in some ways it’s a commendable idea. But a flawed one. Have you ever attended a live show and thought: ‘This is pretty good but I bet it would be even better if some random punters were given the chance to tap away on a little drum or bash a tamby?’

Two factions emerged within the band. One specialised in sitting around playing extended and aimless improvisatory jams, which might have been just about tolerable to listen to after a few tokes of Red Leb or a handful of magic mushrooms but otherwise would be an headnipping bore. The others, who took on the name Amon Düül II, wanted to progress musically. Not that they were aspiring towards the virtuosity levels of an ELP or Yes.

Even big fan Julian Cope conceded in his Krautrocksampler that ‘they’ve certainly recorded their fair share of shit,’ but Amon Düül II went on to produce far better music than Amon Düül and enjoy a more interesting career.

For starters, they found fans from John Peel (who booked them for a session) to some leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (who were sent packing from the commune by singer Renate Knaup while attempting to hide from the cops); they managed to fit in a date at the Cavern in Liverpool shortly before it was closed and appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 film The Niklashausen Journey. Or to give it its German title Die Niklashauser Fart.

Archangel Thunderbird from Yeti might be their finest moment, a lysergic Louie Louie that sounds like a life or death struggle. It’s gloriously off-kilter, the result of a curious clash of time signatures and Renate Knaup’s soaring Yoko meets Nico vocals, which also look forward to Metal Box era John Lydon.

You could even argue this is where 1970s music truly kicked off.

‘Where,’ you might be asking after that sonic maelstrom, ‘does Kate Bush fit into all this?’

Okay, by the time of Amon Düül II’s seventh album, 1973’s Vive La Trance, precocious young Kate was already composing songs and had even penned an embryonic version of The Man With The Child In His Eyes. She was listening to Bowie and Roxy, American singer-songwriters like Laura Nyro and Judee Sill, as well as a range of folkies from Anne Briggs to The Incredible String Band but she’s such a unique artist that any concrete influences on her work are difficult to detect.

I’ve never read of Kate being a Kosmiche fan but if you listen now to Vive La Trance, you’ll almost inevitably wonder if the teenage singer had been aware of the track Jalousie. It’s certainly a whole lot closer to the kind of material on her early demos and albums than it is to Archangel Thunderbird and if there’s one song that sounds like Kate Bush before she’d ever made a record, this must surely be it.

For more on the band, click here.

So It Goes & So It Goes

Presented by Tony Wilson, the first series of Granada TV’s So It Goes ran from early July to late August in 1976 and was only shown on three of Britain’s regional ITV networks, none of these being my local channel STV, although I suspect it might have inspired that station to launch Sneak Preview, a late Friday night mix of conversation, film clips and bands early in 1977.

According to Paul Morley’s From Manchester With Love, the title of So It Goes was supplied by Wilson’s then girlfriend, Jane Buchan, via Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that includes the three words every time a death or deaths occurs. Given that it’s partly set during WWII’s Battle of the Bulge and Dresden bombings, this isn’t uncommon.

So far music-wise, the series has been a little bit pub rock, a little bit hippy and a little bit proggy. You know, Graham Parker and The Rumour, Stephan Micus performing music he’d composed on Afghan rubabs and first up on the final episode, some awful jazz tinged proggers Gentleman, whose bassist thought it was a good idea to take to the stage wearing red dungarees.

Something new and exciting was clearly required.

The pre-Factory Tony Wilson is a bit of a smoothie and looks rather self-satisfied too, but hey, he deserves to be self-satisfied by his coup here. Not only has the debut Ramones album just been recommended but now viewers are about to get their first ever glimpse on TV of an unsigned act who Wilson has already seen live twice in Manchester. Or at least claimed to have seen twice, some disputing his presence at the first Lesser Free Trade Hall show.

They’re led by a young man with severely chopped hair, a razorblade earring and writing scrawled on his torn jacket, which is also adorned with chains. He starts the song with an anti-hippy tirade and looks furious with the world. And then he begins singing about Anarchy in the UK.

Something new and exciting has clearly arrived.

Nick Lowe’s So It Goes also took its title from Slaughterhouse-Five and the single kicked off the Stiff label in the middle of August 1976, just two weeks before The Sex Pistols’ shock of the new television debut.

A press release explained of the song and B-side Heart of the City: ‘Both are under three minutes, use less than three musicians and less than three chords.’

This isn’t the version that appeared on the single but it does have a video shot by David Mallet, who went on to direct a bunch of promos for Bowie, including Boys Keep Swinging and Ashes To Ashes, so here you are:

If it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck. So went the slogan.

The Members’ Solitary Confinement, therefore is very much worth a fuck. Released by Stiff in May 1978 as a one-off single, this is a little tribute to singer Nicky Tesco whose death was announced yesterday.