Hardcore for Nerds

The Radiators - ‘Johnny Jukebox’ from Ghostown (1978)

If there was a ‘One City One Album’ for Dublin, this would be my prime candidate - it’d be especially appropriate this year for the Strumpet City/Lockout 1913 references (of which I wrote before, on ‘They’re Looting in the Town’) but I also think it’s the best-sounding Irish album, period. A couple of quotes from songwriter and guitarist Philip Chevron on its literary inspirations:

“I loved Ulysses but I never got through the whole thing. I loved the idea of it. Kitty Ricketts is directly out of it. I loved Strumpet City because it was the first novel that manifested, in an interesting way, the people who were involved in the 1913 lockout and how people responded to the Rising.
The Jim Larkin statue was probably a catalyst. It was unveiled in ’77 I think. It was the first ‘real’ person we had in that street. O’Connell and Parnell were all in the ‘pre-history’. The Jim Larking statue chimed with Strumpet history.” (via)

“Johnny’s “ghosts” are a mixture of the real (Jim Larkin, James Connolly, WB Yeats, Joyce, O’Casey, Pearse etc jostle with Jimmy O’Dea, Brendan Behan and Dion Boucicault etc in references or brief quotes) and the fictionally-real (Kitty Ricketts is, for example, a character in Ulysses, though Joyce based her on the real life brothel madam Becky Cooper). I invoked Connolly and Larkin because so much of the pre-1916 struggle in Dublin was rooted not so much in nationalism as in civil rights and the demand for a fair living wage. The 1913 Lock Out, in which several Dubliners died, is detailed in James Plunkett’s great novel Strumpet City and the “They’re Looting In The Town” section of Ghostown is inspired by this and by the looting that took place in Dublin in Easter Week 1916. My own grandfather was a forthright Labour Union man. Bill Graham, the late Irish critic, always believed “Looting” was the most prescient part of the album as it appeared also to uncannily predict the unrest in Dublin which would soon take place again outside the British Embassy. I met James Plunkett not long before he died, at a reception in Dublin honouring the career of Jimmy O’Dea (Plunkett had written, along with Flann O’Brien, a TV series for him in the early Sixties) and it turns out he too found inspiration in the Denis Johnson play: “Strumpet City in the sunset/ Suckling the bastard brats of Scot, of Englishry, of Huguenot / Brave sons breaking from the womb, wild sons fleeing from their Mother”. (via)

(Source: Spotify)

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“ Punk may be about making up life for oneself, but its central figures made up that life out of reference, not out of thin air. It is more an assemblage than a creation.

—

A Heaven of Hell - The New Inquiry

This essay is very good - I should definitely read the memoirs it talks about, by Richard Hell and Patti Smith (the latter first, probably).

punk patti smith richard hell 70s

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The Radiators from Space - ‘Television Screen’ from TV Tube Heart (1977)

It don’t really matter if the future looks bleak

Cos I never see more than a tenner a week

Can’t afford their records so I steal them when I can

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, reading this post by Mark Richardson on people listening to records in the 1970s and earlier for a distinctive experience that wasn’t available elsewhere (such as on TV) reminded me of the above lyrics.

“… when he told me this story, I was trying to imagine it:1969, Chicago, you are in high school, and you’re faking being sick to listen to [Pink Floyd’s] Ummagumma. There is nothing on TV because you only get three channels and TV isn’t very good. “

There would have been I think four channels in Dublin in the 1970s (three of them being British, i.e. BBC One and Two and ITV) but reception of the latter declined as you moved south or west. I put £10 (before 1978-9 the Irish punt was linked at parity to sterling) into a historical inflation calculator and it came out as £56.70 in today’s money (€66 or $85) which isn’t much, obviously. Whether there’s some creative embellishment to the lyrics, or if the Radiators really were in the habit of stealing records, I don’t know (and anyway, we all steal music in digital form now). The ‘their’ in the lyrics presumably refers to the ‘rock’n’roll heroes with the rich man’s blues’ in the preceding lines.

There’s an interesting post here about how the opening riff for this song appears to come from a 1962 blues instrumental ‘Nut Rocker’ by B. Bumble and the Stingers, and the Radiators guitarist chimes in in the comments to point out that the album version (this one) of the song features a toy piano playing the riff at the start. Retromania!?

(Source: Spotify)

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“Punk is obviously not about being angry at all. It’s about being young.”

Fascinating contemporary Radiators review, as much for what it says about punk generally as about the band (neither necessarily accurate, of course):

“12/01/1978 Trinity College, Dublin with The Vipers.

If an alien happened upon a punk gig as his first experience of the human species, he might be temped to jump back in his interplanetary craft and F.O. in his U.F.O.

On the other hand, the alien might see spitting as an involuntary spasm of the salivary function, have a hearing facility to unscramble the muddy sound and best of all a decoding device to understand the lyrics in a welter of noice.

At The Radiators From Space gig in the JCR of Trinity College last week. I felt like an alien without those vital extra senses. Mind you, it’s not the Radiators fault. I’m too old for punk, because I can’t relate emotionally or even instinctively. I honestly believe the Radiators write good lyrics, but what is the point in writting an angry song, if no one can hear the words to know what you are angry about.

I told you I was too old.

Anyway, I went to see the Radiators because in my crystal ball gazing for 1978, I queried the staying power of the Radiators and their lack of a definite charismatic image. An angry Philip Chevron demanded that I go to the gig. I did.

[…]

I can’t knock the music. It is melodic and I heard it all in my time at a slightly slower pace. A random selection of four veterans would produce a tighter sound than the Radiators, but no amount of persuasion would induce the kids to like them. Punk is obviously not about being angry at all. It’s about being young.

The Radiators are relying on Chevron and Pete Holidai to transcend the footlights and evoke the reaction from the crowd. Holidai is smugly menacing and Chevron is almost endearing. Maybe if he wore a leprechaun suit, he could capitalise on an impish presence. In the role of heretic and rabble rouser, he lacks the brash arrogance of Geldof. I don’t doubt for a moment that Philip is as arrogant as Geldof, but that pose is now imitative and dull. So is looking menacing.

How the hell would I know anyway? The kids seem to like the Radiators. I want to listen to their records and decipher the messages. If they find their own special wrinkle which will distinguish them from the rest, they have the songs and the music. I love the punk movement for inspiring kids to form bands. The Radiators are an example of the good by product.”

- Shay Healy, Starlight Magazine (via)

According to his Wikipedia page, Shay Healy was born in 1943, so around 35 was “too old” for punk in 1978. I cut out the more technical part of the review, since another 35 years later we don’t really need to hear about the vocal mix or their new songs, but click through on the link if you want to see.

radiators punk dublin irish 70s

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The Radiators from Space - ‘Sunday World’ (1977)

Are you getting it?

radiators punk dublin irish 70s

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Vanishing Point (1971)

But which direction do we take, maaan? #existentialism

(Source: unaempanadaporfavor)

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Vanishing Point (1971) trailer

Caught this on Film4 a couple of nights ago, and loved it. The trailer predictably makes it out as a more action-packed movie than it really is (according to Wiki, it didn’t do very well on its initial US release, but received a lot of acclaim in Europe, and was brought back as a double feature with The French Connection). It’s still a ‘carsploitation’ film, as I’ve seen it memorably tagged, but most of the crashes are there in the trailer: the rest of the film is considerably moodier. And it has a great soundtrack (more on which perhaps later).

What caught my attention was the opening scene, which reminded me very strongly of the characteristic openings of Breaking Bad episodes. In Vanishing Point, the film begins where it ends - sort of - with two earthmovers rolling along the ground to form a roadblock in a Western town (later revealed to be Cisco, Utah). The camera is a low-angle shot, and initially there is no sound other than the rumbling machinery and caterpillar tracks, while silent townspeople stand around watching intently yet dispassionately. Operating in that same kind of desert or semi-desert landscape of Breaking Bad, the film seems equally content to observe people at its unhurried pace: for a movie that appears to be all about speed, it’s also about distance, and thus time.

It’s also “notable for its scenic film locations across the American Southwest and its social commentary on the post-Woodstock mood in the United States”, although it’s less ‘social commentary’ than conveying a mood somewhere between liberation, apathy and despair. Rather like a less articulate Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (less articulate in that the ‘last American hero’ is moody and mostly mute, although Cleavon Little’s ‘Supersoul’ DJ offers a verbal soundtrack) or the road happenings of Easy Rider, before it all comes crashing down. There’s a strong thread of existentialism (as pretty much every ‘cult movie’ blurb of it states), but hey, that was the time, you know?

The greater tragedy is probably that there was a terrible-sounding TV remake in 1997 starring Viggo Mortensen. It replaced “the lead character’s ambivalent image with a simpler and more palatable, wholesome lead character and motivations, in particular eliminating all references to drug use, rebellion or sexuality, all of which were hallmarks of the 1971 film”, and worse, gave him “a more clear and socially accepted background and reason to drive fast”. (In the remake, he’s driving to his pregnant wife. Which in a way is my problem with Breaking Bad, that its main protagonist’s motivation is a deeply conservative one of “providing for his family”, although to be fair the structure of the show is set up so that it displays the unintended consequences of economic gain. We can’t all be existentialist heroes.)

film 70s vanishing point breaking bad

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“ Perhaps the most widely celebrated object of ridicule was the ‘Eurovision Song Contest’, an annual television competition first broadcast in 1970. A commercial exercise glossed as a celebration of the new technology of simultaneous transmission to multiple countries, the show claimed hundreds of millions of spectators by the mid-Seventies. The Eurovision Song Contest - in which B-league crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged - was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. It would have been out of date fifteen years earlier. But just for that reason it heralded something new.

—

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, ‘Diminished Expectations’, 483

GO JEDWARD!

[edit: Eurovision was first broadcast in 1956, not 1970]

judt europe pop eurovision 70s history jedward

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The Radiators from Space - ‘Head for the Sun’ from Sound City Beat (2012) - originally by The Movement (1968)

[buy here]

This is the opening track of the Radiators’ new album of covers from Irish ‘beat’ groups, between 1964 and 1971. It’s a really good record, that combines the band’s own versatility and musical strengths with a wide variety of styles from their formative era (being a late-70s punk and post-punk band). Indeed, as singer and guitarist Phil Chevron remarks in the liner notes which give a track-by-track guide to the history, of those bands “who got to cut whole albums and not just a smattering of singles…. [t]heir eclectic impulses are often striking, as they used the album format to commit as much of their musical DNA as possible to vinyl.” Yet in turn the Radiators add their own interpretations of what the music should sound like, often drawing on their, later, punk influences in order to bring out the protean character of the music, or simply to have fun - as in the case of this song: “For no better reason than it seemed to work and that we were big fans of da bruddas back in our garage days, our version channels The Ramones in surfin’ mode…” (which is slightly bizarre in the damp Irish context, as I’ve mentioned before in relation to the Undertones’ similar ‘Here Comes The Summer’, but that’s the genius of cultural influences… they’re not limited to the one situation).

So Sound City Beat isn’t an exactly faithful transcription of past music, and all the better for it (it also means you can dig out the originals on YouTube - full list here - and expect them to be somewhat different). Neither is it a rendering of certain ‘classics’ into a single recognisable style - I can imagine the band had a lot of fun working with the various styles on show here, and at its best it echoes the diversity of their own great eclectic masterpiece, Ghostown. The only song I did know before (admittedly my pre-1970s, or non-punk, musical knowledge is pretty terrible) is one of the best, the inestimable ‘Gloria’. Which I first encountered through the Patti Smith version on Horses, but was originally written by Van Morrison in the band Them, in 1965. I like to think of this as rediscovering an Irish treasure - after having it exported back to you in Americanised form - but the truth is it was a UK hit and a global song, so it’s kinda churlish to be too possessive of something just because the author was from Belfast. There’s something simple and effective but inherently transformative, or adaptable, about the song, that seems to suit its role in both proto-punk and Irish rock:

“it was, as it happens, the first song ever played by the Radiators. Taking our cue from Morrison’s own performances - at the Maritime Hotel, he is said to have stretched the song to fifteen minutes or more on occasion - we found it useful for extended arrangements, especially in venues outside Dublin where the standard thirty minute sets favoured by punk bands would have been profoundly frowned upon.”

It’s not all obscurities otherwise, though, at least in terms of authorship - there’s an early Rory Gallagher track from his Taste days, an early Thin Lizzy, and a (literally) lost Horslips debut single. But the real fun is in the miniature Nuggets-like quality of the rest of the album, from excellent band names (Eire Apparent) and predictable song titles (“Yes, I Need Someone”), and sounds expanding to folk and psychedelia, to some thrilling pop hooks. Throughout it’s possible to recognise large elements of the Radiators’ own sound, but depending on the vocals and the style of the cover, it can be sometimes hard to remember that it is all just the one band playing the songs. Or sometimes, bizarrely, to remember that this is music that existed in its own time and place and isn’t totally the reimaginings of contemporary punks - not to deny the adherence in spirit to and difference of the styles used, but hearing this music mostly as a blank slate, the Radiators definitely place their own modern (or at least post-‘77, which is not very new after all) stamp on it.

For example, the atypical “stone solid Mod groove” of showband The Blue Aces (a central theme of the album’s historical revisionism is the distinction between the popular history of 60s, “in which the conventional wisdom habitually depicts the secular pulpit of Gay Byrne’s television show set against a soundtrack of Showband Scene mania”, and the underground of Beat Clubs - although one of my parents describes it as more of a straightforward rural-urban divide between the showbands and the tennis pavilions) is given a take that “acknowledges its kinship with the spirit of the punk bands of a decade later”; but which sounds to me very much like Rancid’s early 90s album Let’s Go. Of course, some bands are always arch-revivalists, but it’s fascinating to hear everything connected on a long line and collapsed together into one asynchronous celebration of a past. To quote an American band (if only because I can’t think of similar lyrics from an Irish one), Drink deep, it’s just a taste, and it might not come this way again…

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2012 60s 70s NO PAST irish punk radiators HFN

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Patti Smith Group - ‘25th Floor/High on Rebellion’ from Easter (1978)

Irish readers should appreciate the irony in the juxtaposition above. Everyone else should appreciate some great late-70s rock. This album isn’t as iconic as the preceding Horses, but it’s still got tunes and psychedelic poetry:

“Stoned in space.

Zeus, Christ, it has always been rock and so it is and so it shall be

within the context of neo rock

we must open up our eyes and seize and rend the veil of smoke which man calls order.

pollution is a necessary result of the inability of man to reform and transform waste.

The transformation of waste

The transformation of waste

The transformation of waste

The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man. man being the chosen alloy, he must be reconnected via shit, at all cost.

[…]

All must not be art

Some art we must disintegrate

Positive, anarchy must exist”

which sounds like it could almost be something out of Yeats’ ‘Easter, 1916’ - or this line:

“the colonial year is dead and the greeks too are finished”

although I suspect that might be a reference to the recent US bicentennial and America’s classical political heritage (even if it is more Roman than Greek).

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