You May Be A Lover But You Ain’t No Fucking Dancer

It’s quiz time at For Malcontents Only, though there’s only one question. And no prizes. So, it’s not a very good quiz.

Okay, the question: Who is this pictured above?

A) The Utilities, a post-punk band from Bo’ness near Falkirk, who twice supported the very young Cocteau Twins and turned down the chance to sign to Rough Trade in 1981?

B) A tutor and three female students from a German arts & crafts school in Dessau in 1927?

C) Four members of Italian political commune Rossa Vita (Red Life) who carried out a bombing campaign in Bologna in the late-1950s that influenced the future actions of the Red Brigade?

The answer? It’s at the bottom of the post.

This year, what might loosely be termed goth has been enjoying an unusually high profile. By a coincidence, John Robb and Cathi Unsworth’s books on the subject (I’m flipping between both at the moment) were published within weeks of each other, with Lol Tolhurst’s take on the same subject, Goth: A History, out in September on Quercus Publishing.

A solo Siouxsie Sioux opened Glasgow’s Summer Nights annual series of concerts at Kelvingrove Park at the tail-end of July and her face adorns the cover of the September edition of Mojo, while Cathi Unsworth recently featured on the front page of the Herald magazine, meeting up for an interview with journalist Teddy Jamieson at the Glasgow Necropolis, where she located the headstone of Robert Smith, a long dead local merchant and presumably no relation to the Cure frontman.

I did think about heading along to see Siouxsie and had a wee gander at the ticketing details and saw £85 for one being mentioned, I believe dynamic pricing was in operation. That price was way too dynamic for me despite being a long-term fan.

Here’s a photo of the Kelvingrove show taken by Calum Buchan for The Scotsman:

I first heard Siouxsie and The Banshees through sessions on John Peel’s show. They were not even signed at this point but were already legends in my mind, due to the story of their show at the 100 Club Punk Special, with Siouxsie blagging her way onto the bill and her hastily assembled band taking to the stage with only the most rudimentary musical skills and letting rip with an unrehearsed twenty-minute version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ that incorporated some other songs such as Deutschland Über Alles and Twist and Shout, the latter famously covered by The Beatles and bought for the very young Susan Janet Ballion by her parents.

Anyone can do it!

Actually, it took me decades before finally hearing a recording of their set. It was absolutely awful. And I’ve just discovered via Robb’s book that apparently they did fit in a rehearsal the day before they played, albeit it only lasted ten minutes before temp drummer Sid Vicious decided he’d rather troop off to a boozer.

Anyone can do it, but what they do might not necessarily be worth listening to.

Those Peel sessions from late 1977 and early 1978, though, lived up to expectations. One highlight from their February 1978 sesh was their take on the McCartney composition Helter Skelter. Perhaps the choice of song had been inspired by the two-part 1976 TV mini-series of the same name based on the Manson atrocities. A version of Helter Skelter by a band called Silverspoon made its way onto that soundtrack when The Beatles refused point blank to give their permission to use their song recordings for the show.

Live, Siouxsie would dedicate the song to Roman Polanski and the association with Manson imbues The Banshees’ version with an unnerving quality. Hearing the song on Peel for the first time was maybe the most uncomfortable listen I had yet experienced. It kicks off with some sinister bass and piercing guitar, icon and iconoclast Siouxsie joining the equation by icily intoning the lyrics like an incantation, as if channelling some malevolent force – is it just me that can imagine the Manson girls chanting out the song in a similar style before embarking on one of their murder sprees?

Around the minute mark, the music changes tempo, with pounding toms and swerving, dervish guitar, before that abrupt ending, as opposed to The Beatles’ psychedelic coda. Utterly thrilling. When they played the Glasgow Apollo in 1978, this was their opener. Would I break my Ticketmaster boycott and willingly give them a big fat booking fee to relive that experience? Yes I would. Gladly.

This is the take The Banshees recorded for The Scream:

Okay, if you didn’t already know, and want me to tell you, tell you, tell you the answer to the quiz question, it’s B.

Snapped by Erich Consemüller at the Bauhaus School of Design during the great German hairbrush and comb shortage of 1927, from left to right we have: tutor Marcel Breuer, his wife Marta Erps-Breuer, architect Katt Both and Ruth Hollos-Consemüller, the wife of the man who took the picture. They don’t look as if the photo was taken almost one hundred years ago, do they? Amazingly enough, even today, some are still taking inspiration from the look and you can follow an online tutorial on how to dress like a Bauhaus student here. Alternatively, create your own version.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. The influence of the Bauhaus is apparently endless. And obviously music hasn’t been immune to it. Only a few days ago OMD released the title track from their upcoming album Bauhaus Staircase. More significantly, the band Bauhaus not only took their moniker from the School but also nicked their logo and typeface for their releases and promotional materials.

In The Art Of Darkness, Robb vividly recalls the first time he heard Bela Lugosi’s Dead played on Peel’s radio show. ‘For 9 minutes and 36 seconds, this mysterious and entrancing sound filled the airwaves and made time stand still. It was a song that married the adventure of post-punk with the space of dark dub.’

He goes on to note that ‘With its new sense of theatrics and its powerful textures, it sounded like it was breaking away into a new musical territory. The ghostly, mesmerising song was a daring and powerful debut statement and, arguably, one of the most groundbreaking musical manifestos of the post-punk period.’

I’m not as big a fan but do admire the band’s desire to create something new, just like the institution that was finally shut down by the Nazis in 1933.

Also published recently is The Line Between The Devil’s Teeth And That Which Cannot Be Repeat: Peter Murphy Lyrics 1980-2014. Find out more here.

For more on The Art of Darkness, here you go.

And for more on Season of the Witch click here.

Huan Huan & Lush (The Third and Final Shoegaze Saturday)

If I don’t say so myself, I’m reasonably knowledgeable about Taiwanese cinema, certainly by Western standards. Well, at least from the 1960s swordplay movies by King Hu and the kung fu years of Joseph Kuo and others through to the New Wave era of the 1980s. If asked to name my ten favourite living directors, one name definitely on the list would be Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Until yesterday my knowledge of Taiwanese music, though, amounted to hee-haw. Then yesterday I discovered Huan Huan.

Hee-haw, if you’re not Scottish, is slang for nothing or very little. Hey, I’m still no expert but at least know the basics of Huan Huan, or 緩緩 to give them their name in Mandarin (it translates as Slowly Slowly).

They formed in Taipei seven years ago and their current line-up consists of singer/guitarist/songwriter Coco Hsiao, Myles on soaring guitar, Paul on bass and drummer Yi Jen. They’ve been described as the ‘one-time best-kept-secret of the Taiwan indie scene,’ and according to their Bandcamp page, they are ‘singing for uncertainty’ and ‘making sound for healing,’ although so far they’ve failed to heal my increasingly dodgy knee or tinnitus, not that I’ll hold that against them.

On the track below they come over like Molly Rankin of Alvvays fronting a shoegaze band, although this isn’t entirely typical of their sound, which is often more mellow and folk influenced. They also have a song called Indiepop, which could be described as indie pop. No shit, I hear you say.

From 2019, this is Charlie:

Just out yesterday on 4AD are remastered versions of the three albums released by Lush. Spooky, Split and Lovelife haven’t been available on vinyl this century apart from being part of a 2016 deluxe RSD career retrospective boxset.

Hypocrite from Split was first released in 1994 on the same day that Lush also issued Desire Lines. In her book Fingers Crossed, singer and guitarist Miki Berenyi dismisses the idea as ‘a kind of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot ‘fuck the charts’ gesture.’ The gesture worked and neither made the top forty.

Here is Hypocrite:

Fingers Crossed, incidentally, is a recommended read and gives non-musicians like myself an insight into what being in a band is really like. Not all sweetness and light, you might say. And as much as I’m usually not a big fan of the linear autobiography with details of the family tree, this had me pretty much hooked early on.

The singer does have an fascinating background. One example: Miki could have ended up Taiwanese. Her grandfather Sanji was a doctor who once treated the last emperor of the Qing dynasty and later Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China. As the latter’s government and army retreated from the advance of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Red Army, crossing to Taiwan in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek offered Sanji and wife Tamiko the chance to move to the island but Miki’s grandmother insisted the family return to Japan.

For more on the Lush remasters: https://shop.4ad.com/release/403729-lush-lush-2023-remaster-reissue-bundle

And for more on Huan Huan: https://huanhuantw.com/