The Last Picture Show & The City of the Dead

No, not Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film, this Last Picture Show is a track on the newly released album Diabolique by L’Épée, a band comprising Emmaunelle Seigner (Ultra Orange), Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Lionel & Marie Limiñana (The Limiñanas).

If you were putting together names beforehand for a band that could make uber-cool droney hypnotic pop and somehow make it all sound effortless, then those four names are the kind that might very possibly have sprung to mind.

Together, according to the Guardian‘s Paul Moody, they’re ‘as seductive as Serge Gainsbourg and as druggily alluring as the Velvet Underground’.

Their album’s title may allude to Mario Bava’s 1968 action movie Diabolik, but I have no idea why this track is called The Last Picture Show, deciphering lyrics not being a strongpoint for this tinnitus sufferer.

If anybody’s wondering about that atmospheric looking old black and white movie featured throughout the promo, you’ve come to the right place. These clips are taken from The City of the Dead, a gothic thriller that inspired the name of the B-side of The Clash’s 1977 single Complete Control.

Scenes from the film were also utilised in Iron Maiden’s Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter video, while he Misfits wrote a song about it called Horror Hotel, this being the name forced on the film by its American distributor for a time. One of the most stupid re-titlings I can think of, albeit you could argue that the film’s setting of Whitewood, Massachusetts, couldn’t really be described as a city.

There’s also a music connection in the actual film. 1957’s top male vocalist as voted by Melody Maker readers appears in a leading role.

That’ll be Dennis Lotis, and no, I have never heard him singing either.

Also starring Venetia Stevenson and Christopher Lee, I’d always assumed this was an American movie but Lee put me right on his commentary on the Arrow blu-ray. It was completely shot in England with mostly British actors. Lee, incidentally, is predictably impressive here as Professor Driscoll, albeit he is absent for a large chunk of proceedings but as he says: ‘There are no small parts. Only small actors.’

Shot in a silvery black and white, The City of the Dead opens as a witch is being burned at the stake in New England – although that’s not how they were executed in reality in that part of the world. As the pyre’s flames draw ever nearer, Elizabeth Selwyn spits at the jeering onlookers and places a curse on the town and its inhabitants.

Fast forward to a university lecture where Driscoll recounts the details of the witch’s death to a class that includes super keen student, Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson). Before long, she is persuaded to visit Whitewood, the village where Selwyn was burned, to research the subject.

There she meets the proprietor of the Raven’s Inn, Mrs. Newless – who looks suspiciously like a prim and proper modern version of Elizabeth Selwyn. And try saying that surname backwards.

The plot resembles that of Psycho in a number of respects, although I’ll spare you from any spoilers. I will mention, though, that shooting started on City of the Dead around six weeks before Hitchcock began work on his chiller. Had the team behind it read Robert Bloch’s novel? Nobody seems to know, but the original treatment for the English film had been penned before Psycho had even been published in America. I’m guessing any similarities were a coincidence.

The City of the Dead has also been compared to another film released in 1960, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. Yes, that man Bava again. It’s not really in the same league as either Psycho or Black Sunday, but it still makes for a very entertaining watch.

Yes, some of the plot doesn’t quite make sense, though it stands up to far greater scrutiny in that respect than this year’s most successful horror, Us, a film that requires far higher levels of suspension of disbelief than I could muster up.

Despite being made on a budget of £45,000, City of the Dead looks fantastic with cinematographer Desmond Dickinson perfectly evoking the atmosphere of a creepy fog-shrouded village with a very dark secret. Most of the performances are convincing too – although hopefully Lotis was a better singer than an actor – and, even sixty years after it was shot, the film still manages to consistently unsettle.

If you want to hear The Clash song, click here.

A 1978 Top Ten

1978 saw the Yorkshire Ripper claim his eighth victim. The Sex Pistols fell apart in San Francisco. Saatchi & Saatchi launched their Labour Isn’t Working campaign and Tory poll ratings immediately shot up. Keith Moon died. Dallas appeared on TV screens for the first time. Over 900 members of religious cult, the Peoples Temple, died in Guyana after drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, in what became known as the Jonestown Massacre.

In Scotland, the World Cup In Argentina helped take people’s minds off all the misery but that feelgood factor didn’t last long. On the plus side, Space Invaders was launched, Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden was published and on the big screen there was The Deer Hunter, Blue Collar, Jubilee, Midnight Express and Halloween.

Best of all there was plenty of amazing new music.

Aged sixteen, I left school and took on a job in a local factory. A lousy labouring job but it provided me with the money to get my hands on a Waltham music centre and a Lucky Hit Phillips cassette player. Home recording, we were warned, was killing the music industry, although I bought a shedload of vinyl that year, more than in any other year before or since. Go figure.

I also reckon I saw more live shows in 1978 than I have in any other year. There was The Clash and Suicide, The Buzzcocks and Subway Sect, The Stranglers, Skids, Magazine, The Banshees, Damned, Rich Kids, Rezillos, Jam, Television, Ultravox, Devo, Eddie and The Hotrods and many, many more.

 
Inventive new bands emerged on a weekly basis. Think the likes of The Cure, Joy Division, Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, The Television Personalities, Gang of Four, Mekons and, of course, The Fall while some old wavers returned and proved they were still very capable of delivering. Lou Reed’s Street Hassle made a compelling case for his continued relevance. The Stones issued their last great album, Some Girls, with nods to punk and disco along the way and The Walker Brothers’ final album Nite Flights proved inspirational to David Bowie and many others.

There were many fantastic punk records released in 1978 including albums by The Buzzcocks, Ramones, Lurkers and The Adverts although, in many respects, you could say that 1978 was the year of Post-Punk with the launch of PiL and Magazine and Subway Sect, The Banshees and Wire helping suggest a whole new way forward for guitar bands.

 
Reggae scored big in ’78 with Althea and Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking securing a UK #1 slot early in the year while Is This Love provided Bob Marley and The Wailers with another big hit that summer. In Britain, Handsworth Revolution by Steel Pulse became one of the best reviewed albums of the year.

Then there was disco. Saturday Night Fever was a phenomenon in Britain at this point. I didn’t go to see it at the cinema but really should have. It’s a very accomplished movie even though the soundtrack does nothing for me.
Disco did tend to suck but the genre could also claim some real artistic triumphs, chief among these being Sylvester’s joyous You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) and the C’est Chic album, where the dizzying marriage of Nile Rodger’s infectious, choppy guitar licks and Bernard Edward’s muscular, masterful and soon to be much imitated basslines created a new blueprint for sophisticated disco.

From that album, here’s Le Freak, a dancefloor filler extraordinaire:

 
Electronic music continued to come to the fore around the globe, occasionally making real commercial inroads. Yellow Magic Orchestra formed that year and issued their self-titled debut; Fast released Being Boiled by The Human League while Midnight Express, Giorgio Moroder’s first commission to compose a movie soundtrack, went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Best of all, Kraftwerk (who were a highly prolific lot back then) brought out The Man-Machine, an album immediately proclaimed by NME as ‘one of the pinnacles of 1970s rock music.’

 
Also worth noting is that this was the year Brian Eno arguably invented ambient music with his Music For Airports. At the very least, this was the first album ever to be specifically designated as ‘ambient’.

And then there was the uncategorizable Kate Bush. Nowadays you can turn on 6 Music and it might not be too long before you hear a female artist like Joanna Newsom or Regina Spektor who obviously possess some Kate in their musical DNA. Back then, Kate Bush was a true one-off and hearing Wuthering Heights for the first time was an extraordinarily odd experience. Could I detect any influences? Not really, maybe a faint echo of Noosha Fox. I may even have wondered momentarily if this was some kind of novelty song.

Wuthering Heights was the big hit but I have a slight preference for this, single #2, written by an insanely precocious Kate when she was a mere thirteen years old.

 
Here’s my complete top ten in no particular order:

Kate Bush: The Man With the Child in His Eyes
Chic: Le Freak
Sylvester: You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
TV Personalities: Part Time Punks
Kraftwerk: The Model
Walker Brothers: The Electrician
Wire: I Am The Fly
Brian Eno: 1/1
The Clash: (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais
The Only Ones: Another Girl, Another Planet

I’ve omitted any tracks like The Light Pours Out of Me and Ambition that I’ve featured before but still feel I have to include honourable mentions for a further ten. Lou Reed: Street Hassle, La Dusseldorf: Viva, The Cramps: Human Fly, The Undertones: Teenage Kicks, Steel Pulse: Ku Klux Klan, X-Ray Spex: Identity, Siouxsie and The Banshees: Hong Kong Garden, The Cure: Killing an Arab, Stiff Little Fingers: Suspect Device & Blondie: Heart of Glass.

‘Too Punk Even For The Punk Crowd’: Part Two (Aberdeen & Dunfermline)

Thanks to Les Clark for getting in touch and sending me his tale of attending the Clash show the night after the band played the Glasgow Apollo, which he originally sent to the letters page of Record Collector magazine.

The Aberdeen Music Hall leg of the On Parole tour seems to have witnessed the same kind of aggro as the Apollo gig although in Glasgow, The Specials did at least go down pretty well. Click on the image for a larger version.

 
Directors Jack Hazan and David Mingay filmed segments of both these shows for the docudrama Rude Boy, footage of The Prisoner, with Joe’s famous introduction, ‘Some of us spent last night in jail, this a song called I don’t wanna be the Prisoner’, being shot in Aberdeen.

The final Scottish date of the tour took place at the Kinema in Dunfermline and unfortunately trouble again flared: later one eye-witness – Richard Jobson – recalled it as being one of the most violent crowds he had ever witnessed, with Suicide receiving their now standard barrage of abuse and Sham 69’s notorious fans known as the ‘Sham Army’ wading into Clash fans once the headliners took to the stage.

According to another account I’ve read of the night, fistfights were breaking out across the entire hall like some bar room brawl scene from an old Western movie, to the point where the bouncers just gave up and let the crowd get on with it.

Joe Strummer did attempt to quell the boxing, although he wasn’t on the whole successful. When fans began clambering onto the stage it was time to end. The cops arrived soon afterwards.

*

Les Clark, incidentally is a graphic artist nowadays and has just designed the artwork for the upcoming release by Suicide’s old NYC contemporaries, The New York Dolls.

 
Butterflyin’ is a rare live recording featuring tracks such as Looking For A Kiss, Trash and Personality Crisis. Available shortly on the Easy Action label, the CD also includes liner notes by Johnny Thunders/Dolls biographer Nina Antonia, who I previously interviewed here and here.

What Presence! The Rock Photography by Harry Papadopoulos

Named after an Orange Juice single from 1984, What Presence! started life as an exhibition in Glasgow gallery Street Level Photoworks late in 2011 and has since toured to Dunoon and Dundee. It opens tomorrow in the Clydebank Museum and Art Gallery, where it will remain until the 26th of October.

What Presence! the book was published in April this year by Polygon with a foreword by Peter Capaldi and an introduction by Ken McCluskey of The Bluebells, a man crucial to the exhibition being mounted in the first place. In fact, it might never have happened but for an electrical problem in his house that required a qualified spark to sort out.

The spark happened to be Jimmy, the younger brother of his old pal Harry Papadopoulos. Ken had lost contact with Harry and was informed by Jimmy that Harry had suffered a brain aneurysm in 2002 that meant he required full time care.

Ken went to visit Harry and, as he wrote in his introduction, ‘It was great to see him again but it was obvious that his illness had had a profound effect.’ During the visit, Harry wanted to show Ken some of his old prints and contact sheets. ‘It was immediately obvious that this huge body of work was in urgent need of physical preservation and cataloguing.’

This proved to be no small task, with McCluskey spending night after night digitising around 10,000 of Papadopoulos’ prints before contacting Street Level’s director Malcolm Dickson, who immediately saw the potential in the work for a major show.

A self taught photographer, Papadopoulos began snapping visiting rock stars at local Glasgow venues and quickly earned a reputation for himself as one of the country’s finest rock photographers. By the late 70s, Harry secured a post as a staff photographer for Sounds and continued working there until 1984.

His photos helped define what could loosely be called the Post-Punk and New Pop era and if you enjoyed Simon Reynold’s book Rip It Up and Start Again, this is maybe the nearest thing that you’ll find to a visual accompaniment: there’s Vic Godard, The Slits, ABC, Scars, Simple Minds, Siouxsie, Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, Dexys, Altered Images, Madness and Magazine to name only some – although there’s also a smattering of international superstars like The Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, David Bowie and even novelist Stephen King.

It really is very enjoyable show and publication – look, there’s a young Alan McGee looking snotty while bass player with The Laughing Apple, there’s a very fresh faced and floppily fringed Edwyn Collins ice skating, Dreamboy Peter Capaldi in his Frank Spencer tank top – what would Malcolm Tucker think of that?

Many of his compositions have a neat but satisfying simplicity about them, Clare Grogan holding a white umbrella diagonally so that its outer tips at both ends divide the photo in two, a little visual trick also utilised for another shot of Edwyn Collins, the singer standing in front of what looks like pages of a Letraset catalogue stuck to a wall and it’s his guitar this time that divides the picture.

Formally many are conventional images, though often with a twist, like some stripes of light playing across half of Bernard Sumner’s face as he plays guitar. Few are overly stagey, although when they are, like Aztec Camera puffing away on pipes, they tend to be comical – three teenagers from the new town of East Kilbride attempting to mimic some old fogeys from the shires.

In his pictures of Vic Godard and Kevin Rowland, Papadopoulos shows a fine appreciation of composition: it’s not just the subject that is important to him, it’s the space surrounding the subject.

Like (most of) the musicians he shot, Harry obviously had a great sense of timing and as another photographer Mick Rock once observed, ‘Photography is about timing, very much about timing’. Both Rock and Papadopoulos certainly had the knack of capturing the moment. One of my own favourites is an extraordinary photo of Mick Jagger pouring a bucket of water over himself on stage at the Glasgow Apollo in 1976 that, by the looks of things, even took Ronnie Wood by surprise.

By all accounts Harry possessed another quality vital to the successful portrait lensman – the ability to put his subjects at ease. As Josef K’s Malcolm Ross explains in the book, their early photo sessions had been ‘tortuous ordeals’ until being shot by Harry (I know the feeling, even stepping into a photo booth is tortuous for me nowadays). Harry, though, put the band at their ease to the point where they would all forget they were even involved in a photo session.

OK, I might be slightly biased and some of the pleasure for me in seeing these photographs comes from the fact that I was part of the audience when a good number of them were taken, like the infamous and very violent Clash gig at the Glasgow Apollo in the summer of 1978; the Rock Against Racism event at Edinburgh’s Craigmillar Park a few months later; Iggy in 1979, again at the Apollo and the1980 Loch Lomond Festival; I think Harry even included me once in one of his photos that thankfully isn’t included here (myself and others behaving rather badly at a Sham 69 gig at Satellite City if you must know) but I’m sure that anybody paying a visit to the What Presence! exhibition or looking through the book would appreciate the man’s fantastic talent.

What Presence! The Rock Photography of Harry Papadopoulos

Clydebank Museum and Art Gallery

Garden Gallery

October 2nd – 26th

Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday – 10:00 am to 4:30 pm

* An earlier version of this piece was published in the e-Fanzine Positive Noises.

 

For Clash Fans Only (hopefully)

Earlier this month, during an interview with John Wilson on Radio 4’s Front Row arts show, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon all agreed that they wouldn’t be getting back together to play live.  Which is fine by me, I’m happy to live with my memories (see below). 
 

It was announced earlier today though, that the guys will be reconvening again for a live interview on Friday the 6th of September with BBC 6Music’s Cerys Matthews, where no doubt they’ll discuss the new super duper deluxe box set, Sound System, a sprawling collection of material remastered from the original tapes by Mick Jones that contains just about everything the band ever recorded before the unloved Cut The Crap album, along with new essays, a DVD with previously unseen footage shot by Julien Temple and Don Letts, badges, reprints of fanzines and lots more – there’s even a paperback book designed in the style of a Penguin classic The Future is Unwritten – which actually consists only of blank pages. It’s out in September and here’s the first review.

For more information on the live interview and the chance to be part of the audience and possibly ask the guys a question: Cerys Matthews hosts an audience with The Clash .

Hopefully the bulk of the audience will be made up of real Clash fans rather than folk who maybe just fancy a trip to see the BBC’s Maida Vale studio and who at best only know a few radio favourites like London Calling or Should I Stay or Should I Go?