The Temptation of Victoria & Bizarre Love Triangle (‘I don’t believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit!’)

Following on from the last post, here’s another ‘official’ New Order video made years after the song’s release. Shot fifteen years ago by filmmaker Michael Shamberg, this came with the title The Temptation of Victoria and the sticky-fingered Victoria here – who I really think should work on her technique – is played by Victoria Bergsman of The Concretes.

Although Temptation marked a real shift away from the Joy Divisionisms of Movement, some have speculated that the video was inspired by Ian Curtis having admitted to stealing records in his youth.

And I reckon with that long raincoat of his, he would likely have made a better job of the schnaffling game than Victoria, who with that pixieish hairstyle kinda reminds me of Annik Honoré when she was discussing Curtis in Grant Gee’s 2007 Joy Division.

Re-watching that documentary, it’s strange to think how many of those closely involved in the Joy Division story are now no longer with us. Ian himself obviously, Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson and most recently, Annik Honoré.

And now Bizarre Love Triangle. This was shot by Robert Longo at the time of the track’s release as a single in 1986. An American artist, Longo established his reputation with a series of massive monochrome charcoal and graphite drawings Men In Cities, where men in suits (and sometimes women) were depicted while moving – writhing, tripping, stumbling, falling – against a white background.

He began expanding his artistic range and filmed some videos for bands, REM’s The One I Love being the best known of these. Like fellow NYC based artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Longo then progressed into cinema. He directed big budget cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic in 1995. The film failed to recoup its budget, critics mostly disliked it and Keanu Reeves found himself nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actor albeit he didn’t ‘win’. Maybe not surprisingly, Johnny Mnemonic would be Longo’s first and last feature film directing credit.

Rewind. Since Temptation, New Order have continued on a roll with their singles and the roll would continue until 1990, at the exact moment John Barnes was allowed to rap on World in Motion. I digress but hearing a snatch of that awful new Euro 21 track last night reminded me of a rule that should always be adhered to – football and music should never mix. While I’m at it, I’ll let you into another crucial rule: Bono and music should never mix either.

If you’re wondering about the title Bizarre Love Triangle, according to Peter Hook while in conversation with Vic Galloway in Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre, it came from a headline in the News of The World, a scumbaggy former Sunday newspaper that specialised in sex scandals involving mainly celebrities. And vicars. This triangle involved a vicar, his wife and one of his parishioners. Oh err.

Anyway, Bizarre Love Triangle is the band at their infectious best with jaunty riffs, headrush (synth) strings and another sharking Peter Hook bassline (absolutely triumphant in those final twenty seconds). It’s very 1980s even though the ‘Every time I see you falling / I get down on my knees and pray’ chorus could have come from a northern soul obscurity. The video is even more of its time with the kind of rapidfire editing beloved by MTV. Longo also inserts a couple of lines of dialogue (partly quoted in the title of this post), the relevance of which escapes me though I refuse as well to come back as a bug or a rabbit. Maybe a panda, because even though all you do is slob around munching bamboo all day long, everybody loves you and thinks you’re super cute. Saying that, you could argue that a rabbit would have a better sex life. I digress again.

Okay, let’s play the ‘this is now X years old and guess what was happening X years before it came out’ game. Released in 1986, Bizarre Love Triangle is now 35 years old. 35 years before, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally repealed at Westminster, Churchill was re-elected and King George VI gave his Christmas speech on the BBC, the country’s one and only TV station. Big hitters in the charts? Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como and Nat King Cole..

These things rarely work, but here’s an entirely unofficial fan made video that uses existing footage taken from Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express.

Maybe I’m biased as this is one of my favourite films but I reckon the images and music work really well together in places, especially when Faye Wong’s character (with another pixieish hairstyle) is fooling around.

For more on New Order: http://www.neworder.com/

For more on Peter Hook: https://peterhookandthelight.live/

Age of Consent & Candidate (Two For Tuesday)

‘Have you seen the new video for Age of Consent?’ a pal asked recently, as we got to talking about New Order just after the release of the super-dooper deluxe, definitive and expensive as hell version of Power, Corruption and Lies which contains the video above, filmed by rising Danish talent Tine Reingaard.

‘Seen the new video?’ I wasn’t even aware there was an old one.

This not so terribly old one had been shot by Amos Poe in 2011, by which time the band had become Hookyless, an event that saw my interest in New Order nosedive, albeit it had been slowly declining for some time before.

The Godard of No Wave cinema, over the past 45 years, Poe has made many lo-fi independent films featuring the likes of Debbie Harry, John Waters regular Cookie Mueller and even Robbie Coltrane. His 1991 crime movie Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole gave Philip Seymour Hoffman his screen debut back when he was plain old Phil Hoffman. Poe’s also directed cult cable TV show, Glen O’Brien’s TV Party. He’s produced films. He’s written screenplays. He’s taught film.

In his book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes, John Pierson tells an anecdote about a visit that Poe made to the cinema where the author worked in 1981, angling for a retrospective of his work. ‘He didn’t just want to make movies in New York: he wanted to make a movement in New York like the French Wave – a whole “film generation” of cheap, 16mm, black-and-white features.’ Pierson thought he was ahead of his time but couldn’t offer him a retrospective. Poe’s comeback took him by complete surprise.

‘Well, if you’re not going to show my films, could I be an usher?’

Now, there’s a man with a passion for cinema.

Poe is likely best known for Blank Generation, the music documentary he co-directed with Ivan Kral in 1976 and which I covered here. Since that post, due to a long running lawsuit over profits from licensing fees for screenings of the film, Poe has legally lost his co-directing credit for the documentary together with his ownership of several of his other movies.

Worse still, the ending of Blank Generation has been changed and the directing credit reassigned to Cindy Hudson, the wife of the now deceased Ivan Kral, which strikes me as being wrong, wrong, wrong. You can read more about the case in this New York Times report.

Anyway, here’s Poe’s visual interpretation of the opening track of New Order’s 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies. Simplicity itself. Shoot a girl dancing (she’s namechecked as Betty Kelly) in grainy, washed out Super 8 and edit together ever more frantically as the song reaches its conclusion by which point the images are almost blurred to abstract shapes in places.

More recently – about a year and a half ago – Poe was commissioned to film a video for Joy Division’s debut LP as part of a project titled Unknown Pleasures: Reimagined. This aimed to give ten different directors the chance to shoot a ‘filmic re-imagining of the music in 2019’.

This is Poe’s take on Candidate:

I think this might be a pretty good promo. For some mainstream modern day act that’s maybe hoping to appeal to, say, the Lana Del Ray fanbase. But not for any song ever performed by Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris.

For more on Amos Poe: http://www.amospoe.com/

For more on New Order: http://www.neworder.com/

The Chicken Won’t Stop: Stroszek (New Waves #6)

May 17, 1980. Britain has only three TV channels and one of them, BBC2, is screening Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. I can’t remember what I was doing that night but as it was a Saturday and I was in my late teens, I would likely have been out drinking or maybe seeing a concert. David Lynch, working in London on The Elephant Man, did tune in. So too, more famously, did Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.

It would be the last film he would ever see before hanging himself.
When this fact emerged, it made me search out Stroszek. I wasn’t disappointed when I finally got to see this unforgettable 1976 release by one of the most important German New Wave directors, Werner Herzog.

As the central character Bruno Stroszek, Herzog chose Bruno Schleinstein (styled here as Bruno S.), a man who had spent the bulk of his early years in mental institutions and had been perfectly cast two years earlier in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, at which point he had no acting experience of any kind.

The script was penned in just four days. According to Herzog anyway, who you might want to believe or not on the matter. The film had been written specifically for Schleinstein – partly due to Herzog’s guilt at ditching him for the lead role in Woyzeck in order to accommodate Klaus Kinski at the last minute.

Stroszek would have a huge biographical element. The messy Berlin flat with the piano and glockenspiel was Bruno’s. The bar he drinks in was his local at the time. The courtyard where he plays his accordion is where he would often busk.

Bruno Schleinstein is the most fascinating actor to appear in any films of the New German Cinema era. He was the illegitimate son of a prostitute, who hit him so savagely that he had problems with his hearing. At one point he even lost the ability to communicate. The beatings did eventually stop. But only when she dumped him into an asylum. The young Bruno was then subjected to a number of Nazi experiments and punishments. He recounts one of these ordeals, about being caught bed-wetting, in the only improvised scene of the Stroszek.

It’s almost inevitable that Joy Division fans will speculate that Bruno must have reminded Ian Curtis of at least some of the individuals that he helped find employment or access benefits when he worked as a Disablement Resettlement Officer in what was then known as a labour exchange. Not that I’m pointing any blame in the direction of Herzog and his film for the tragic end of Curtis’s life.

‘I wish this singer was still alive and hadn’t seen Stroszek at that moment,’ Herzog told Jason Parkes in a Q&A for BBC4. ‘Deep at the bottom of my heart I do believe that Stroszek was not the reason that he killed himself. I do believe that he must have had some very, very serious deeper other reasons and he may have, and I’m very cautious, he may have used the film as a ritual step into what he was doing.’

Bruno prepares to leave prison and is warned by a well meaning warden to avoid alcohol and, if he should enter a bar, to order coffee and cake instead. Once free, he heads straight to Beer Himmel (Heaven) where he doesn’t order coffee and cake.

Eva Mattes (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant & Effi Briest), a future wife of Werner Herzog, was given the role of Eva, a prostitute beaten and humiliated by two thuggish pimps whenever her takings drop below their expectations. She takes up Bruno’s offer of refuge at his flat and begins an undefined relationship with him. Additionally, she befriends Bruno’s neighbour Herr Scheitz, a frail and elderly man with a passion for offbeat science, played by early Herzog regular Clemens Scheitz.

Herr Scheitz’s nephew Clayton has invited his uncle to join him and live in Railroad Flats in Wisconsin, and he has agreed to the idea. When Eva takes another brutal beating from her pimps, the trio hatch a plan to move together to the States. Clayton soon sources work for both Bruno (working in his garage) and Eva (who can become a waitress). Considering they are currently in Berlin, one of Europe’s biggest cities, they seem strangely excited about a move to the Midwest.

This exodus of eccentrics arrives with their soon to be confiscated mynah bird and spend a day sightseeing in New York City. Using guerrilla style methods, Herzog managed to get arrested three times for filming without a shooting permit. Later, he became adept at forging this kind of thing.

They buy a wreck of a car to drive to Railroad Flats, a truck-stop town that is in reality called Plainfield. It’s no coincidence that this is the hometown of the serial killer Ed Gein, the man who inspired both Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

There are many scenes in Stroszek that will likely sear into your memory and never leave, like when a sympathetic doctor takes Bruno to visit a ward for prematurely born babies and demonstrates the astonishing strength of one baby’s grip. It’s almost disturbing and then oddly beautiful.

Then there’s the foreclosure sale where the auctioneer doesn’t just motormouth his way through proceedings but launches into some kind of bizarre hyper-speak that has a touch of Mongolian throat singing about it. Apparently he was a real-life world livestock auctioneering champion.

What makes this even weirder is that the auction is for the repossessed mobile home and belongings of Bruno and his friends. Ian Curtis is shown watching this scene in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control.

Most memorable, though, has to be the legendary final scene, shot in a Cherokee run tourist trap in North Carolina. I’ll have to warn you at this point that the following paragraphs may include spoilers.

Here Bruno causes chaos. He vacates his truck and leaves it turning round and round in circles as it catches fire. He visits a very odd animal arcade with performing pets in metal exhibition cages. There’s a drumming duck, a rabbit fireman, a piano playing chicken and a dancing chicken who displays some nifty footwork as it tidbitts across its tiny circular stage, accompanied by some tinny and repetitive arcade music.

Next, Bruno takes a chairlift up to the nearby steep hill carrying a gun that until recently had belonged to Scheitz. As he ascends, Herzog pans his camera upwards. With Bruno below the frame, a shot is fired and presumably, he kills himself.

The last dialogue we hear is from a Cherokee officer who radios into his headquarters: ‘We’ve got a truck on fire, I have a man on a lift, and we are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off. Can’t stop the dancing chicken. If you send us an electrician, we’ll be standing by. Over.’

Words that inspired the run-out grooves on the 1981 Joy Division double album Still.

‘The chicken won’t stop’ (A1); Chicken tracks across the grooves (sides A2 & B1), and ‘The chicken stops here’ (side B2).

Herzog then cuts back to the dancing chicken and its epileptic little stomps soundtracked not only by the arcade din but by a manic version of Lost John by whooping bluesman Sonny Terry. With the rabbit’s fire brigade siren, the other chicken pecking its piano and the rabbit’s random drumbeats, this builds into one truly delirious cacophony.

What the significance of this final section is I cannot say for sure. It’s utterly preposterous but absolutely works. In his audio commentary, Herzog claims that everybody on the shoot hated the sequence. He can’t explain it. ‘It contains some part of me that escapes my own analysis. It’s this dream moment, like in soccer, when you score a goal from an angle that is theoretically impossible… I don’t ever regret filming these sequences.’

After both his collaborations with Schleinstein, Herzog ‘demanded’ an Oscar for Bruno. Predictably, the Academy ignored him.

Schleinstein died in 2010 and, in tribute, Werner Herzog remarked that ‘in all my films, and with all the great actors with whom I have worked, he was the best. There is no one who comes close to him.’

If you like Stroszek, then you might also like Fata Morgana. Although you might not.

Shot in the late 1960s and premiered in Cannes in 1971, this is ‘a science-fiction elegy of demented colonialism in the Sahara.’ According to Herzog anyway.

This is one of those obscurities that became popular with the hippy crowd whenever it was shown on the midnight movie circuit or student union film societies in the 1970s. Think Zabriskie Point and La Vallee. And imagine that audience happily puffing away wherever these screenings were taking place. And not all of that smoke being of a legal variety.

Fata Morgana is a near abstract film. Herzog and his three-man crew shot footage with no real idea what this would ultimately become. Interpret as you like.

There is certainly some startling cinematography, particularly of desert landscapes with occasional striking images, often of abandoned vehicles and machinery, and dead and rotting animal carcases. There’s also some narration – reciting Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh – that only served as a distraction.

The most enjoyable aspect of Fata Morgana for me is the music, in particular, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and So Long Marianne, as well as The Third Ear Bands’ Ghetto Raga.

An English Post-Punk Top Ten

Okay, inspired by the Post-Punk Top Ten recently selected by Jeremy Thoms of the Cathode Ray for Louder Than War, here’s my own list of favourites from England with a Scottish post-punk top ten to follow. Yes, this is a lazy post but with plenty of very fine music I’m sure you’ll agree.

Magazine: The Light Pours Out of Me (1978)

Greenock’s John McGeoch was very possibly the greatest guitarist of the post-punk era but – as you will see from this video – not much shakes at miming. This was the opening song played by the reformed Magazine when they played the O2 in Glasgow in 2009, a show where Noko substituted for McGeoch on guitar; the Magazine, Visage, Banshees, Armoury Show and PiL man having sadly died in 2004.

Pete Shelley: Homosapien (1981)

Produced by Pete along with Martin Rushent, who also produced the first three Buzzcocks albums, the first three Stranglers albums and Dare by The Human League. This single stands right up there with all those. Pete, incidentally, is photographed on the Homosapien album cover wearing some dapper threads and sitting in front of a Commodore PET computer, which makes me think how technology has accelerated wildly over the past three and a half decades, while this track still sounds relatively contemporary.

The Slits: Heard It Through the Grapevine (1979)

Do covers of classic Motown tracks count as post punk? Yes, because I say so.

PiL: Public Image (1978)

Based on a book written by Edinburgh author Muriel Spark which John Lydon described in his recent autobiography as: ‘A very small book, but it’s a great storyline, about how the publicity machine turns an average actress into a monstrous diva and she wrecks everyone around her. I didn’t want that happening with me or my imagery.’

The Passions: I’m in Love with a German Film Star (1981)

Written about former Sex Pistols and Clash roadie Steve Connolly aka Roadent, who moved to Germany where – you’ve guessed it – he acted in several films although I’m not sure if he could really be described as a ‘star’. The Passions are often categorised as one hit wonders but they deserve better than that.

Joy Division: Transmission (1979)

If anybody knows of a more intense performance caught on TV please get in touch and let me know about it.

Lori and The Chameleons: Touch (1979)

Bit of a curveball here. Released on the Zoo label as we were getting ready to wave goodbye to the seventies, these Chameleons were apparently Dave Balfe and Bill Drummond but as for Lori, I can’t tell you anything about her although I’m guessing she is still likely mystified why this single didn’t sell a whole lot more copies.

Wire: Map Ref 41°N 93°W (1979)

The best track on an LP (154) that Nick Kent in NME suggested was the album that Bowie and Eno set out to make when they worked on Lodger. Map Ref 41°N 93°W is also the best song ever about a cartographer.

Sad Lovers & Giants: Imagination (1981)

One of the rules of compiling a list like this seems to be that at least one obscurity must be chosen. Who are Sad Lovers & Giants? I hear some of you ask. The Cure influenced Sound of Young Watford, that’s who.

The Cure: All Cats Are Grey (1981)

And finally The Cure themselves, a band that I’ve not followed very closely for decades now but whose first three albums I will always love.

*

On another day these might have been included: Colin Newman: I’ve Waited Ages / The Fall: Lie Dream of a Casino Soul / Mo–Dettes: White Mice / Gang of Four: To Hell With Poverty / Wild Swans: Revolutionary Spirit / Siouxsie and The Banshees: Spellbound.

Confessions Of A Teenage Buzzcocks Bootlegger

 
More Buzzcocks today, folks.

I managed to see the band twice at the Glasgow Apollo back in the late seventies and one of those times I sneaked in with a dimply Philips N2207 cassette recorder, recorded the show on a C90 tape and then made copies of the tape, put an ad in a local record shop and started a very short career as a bootlegger.

This wasn’t quite as easy as I’ve maybe just made it sound. In fact, the sneaking a cassette into the Apollo was a highly risky business as this kind of thing was strictly verboten and two sets of bouncers generally had to be negotiated before you could gain entrance to the concert hall with routine searches taking place. If caught I’m guessing that at the very least the cassette would have been confiscated and I would have been thrown out, not as in escorted out, but thrown physically out onto the pavement of Renfield Street.

The first set of bouncers, though, let me and a bunch of pals past without a search and the second lot actually asked me if we had been searched, a strangely trusting attitude from men never noted for trusting attitudes. Nerves made my mouth feel like it had been coated with pepper but I managed to croak out some words along the lines of, ‘Yeah, we’ve already been searched.’

And to my relief, we were happily waved upstairs.

Whether a basic search would have found my cassette is another matter, as I was wearing a duffle coat, repeat – a duffle coat, and had sewn the cassette into the bottom of the back of it, wearing the coat unbuttoned and loose. I wouldn’t have been the most credible looking member of the audience that night but I was likely the only one to emerge with a tape of the concert, which although the quality wasn’t that great, was good enough to listen to repeatedly and enjoy.

After much trial and error I figured out a way to hook the cassette player up to the family music centre and began making copies, which I advertised in the basement of Listen, which was largely dominated by second hand records and where punky/new wavey types tended to congregate for hours on end, especially on Saturday afternoons, this being a time when record stores (or shops as we called them) didn’t remotely need to have a special promotional day every year because people like me flocked to local independents like Listen, Bruce’s, Graffiti and Impulse on a near daily basis.*

Even stranger as it might seem to some younger readers, at this point in Britain, many families didn’t even possess landline telephones and others, like mine relied on what was known as a party line, which sounds like it might have been fun and possibly even dodgy but it was just short for multiparty line.

This meant that our line was shared with our neighbours from two doors down. Long calls were discouraged in case the neighbours possibly needed the phone to make or receive an emergency call. After six o’clock when I got back in from being a young factory wage slave, I would sit down for a meal and for a few weeks anyway, my mince and tatties or gammon steak with chips would be interrupted by somebody wanting to get their mitts on one of my tapes.

I made a little money and met some new friends but I eventually flogged the original tape after someone made an offer to buy it as a one off. My short career in low level bootlegging was over.

The third time Buzzcocks played the Glasgow Apollo (towards the end of 1979) I was unable to attend as I was living hundreds of miles away working in a seaside town which, since the summer season had ended, really did have the feel of every day being like Sunday. Pity as I would’ve loved to have seen them again especially as Joy Division was the support act. All these years later, I still regret not being able to go along that night to see both bands.

It would be another decade or so before I would get the chance to see Buzzcocks live again when they reformed in 1989 and announced a series of dates including one in Glasgow. Posters at the time claimed that the original line-up would be taking to the stage but this wasn’t actually true albeit you could easily argue that it was the best known Buzzcocks line-up of Shelley, Diggle, Maher and Garvey.

This time around though I wasn’t quite as keen to see them. Even though the band had only formed thirteen years before, after a break of eight years or so their reformation struck me as being dangerously close to nostalgia and nostalgia was something I was determined to avoid so I have to assume that the me of back then might not have entirely approved of everything about this blog.

As David Belcher asked later in his review of the gig in the Glasgow Herald: ‘Wasn’t that punk business supposed to be about burning bright and going up in smoke rather than having a career and gradually fading away?’

Still, most of my pals were going along and I judged that the Barrowlands would be the ideal venue to see Buzzcocks perform in, so I stumped up my £6.50 for a ticket, had a good few drinks in a famous, or should I say infamous, bar across from the Barrowlands and went on to absolutely enjoy every second of the night.

Well, it would be impossible not to enjoy hearing all those classics like I Don’t Mind, Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) and Fast Cars, wouldn’t it?

Tonight Buzzcocks play the Baltimore Soundstage.

For the latest Buzzcocks news and some great links – okay I’m saying this mainly because there’s one to my previous post – head to their Facebook page.

* If you are heading out to Record Store Day you might want to look out for exclusive releases by Alex Harvey, Tess Parks & Anton Newcombe, Django Django, Bis, Honeyblood, The Heartbreakers and N.F. Porter’s Keep On Keeping On, a track that inspired Joy Division’s Interzone, from their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures.