"What's wrong with being sexy?"
I guess SPINAL TAP's Nigel Tufnel would fail to see the point of this short 17-minute long documentary summarizing Blondie's career through a montage of the worst questions asked on repeat by TV presenters ("Why did you dye your hair/take on some weight? How do you compare to Madonna?")... until the band brings a puppet monkey called Minkie to answer in their stead. Debbie Harry's facial expressions as the questions get stupider and stupider are absolutely priceless! Deborah Harry Does Not Like Interviews from Public Interest on Vimeo. Blondie’s Debbie Harry endures years of superficial, tedious, and demeaning questions from journalists until she devises a brilliant way to turn interviews on their head.
Director Meghan Fredrich answers some questions about her movie here:
"During the musical performance at the end of the film, Debbie sings “Here comes the 21st century, it’s gonna be much better for a girl like me.” As the audience now watching this film in the 21st century, we have to ask ourselves: Is it? "
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One of my favourite film music podcasts is back, right on time for Halloween, and I can't wait to listen to this brand new episode! "Featuring a musical candy-bowl of scary soundtracks, classic and contemporary thrillers, synthwave, horror disco, and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4's rap battle." Almost 4 hours of the best Spooktober music out there!
Now it's been shipped to its new owner, my contribution for the latest round of the Metal Punk Tape Exchange was so much fun to make, I feel I should go into a more detailed account of how it came to be, if only to keep a trace of it. The music will probably surface one day in the Mixtapes section of this website, but let's talk for now about the concept itself... First of all, I've been thinking for a long time of how a mixtape would be "deconstructed" or "reconstructed" by some different life forms or a non-human intelligence (yes, I think about stuff like this all the time haha), a bit like French writer Claro did in his 'Black Box Beatles' novel, only in a more prosaic and 'earthy' manner. So this is the package that my recipient for this round got in his mailbox: a C60 mixtape, obviously, and some clippings. The tape in itself is a fairly straightforward Heavy Metal/Hard Rock mix of obvious tunes and the lesser known gems that I always feel like sharing with the rest of the world. Songs I like, solid bangers, the works. Nothing out of the ordinary. But this time, the tape itself is not the be-all end-all of the exchange. On the contrary... Now imagine if the very same cassette tape lay dormant in a time capsule for centuries, millenia, eons... War, plague, pestilence, famine: the human race has come and gone. Earth has some new owners now, a highly advanced race of mutant cockroaches. Sometimes their archaeologists dig stuff up from the ground. Ancient artefacts from the previous inhabitants of this planet: us. But the thing is, they don't know how to make heads or tails of their discoveries, having no clue as to the purpose of the objects they find. The humans worked in such mysterious ways. Our cockroaches are literally obsessed with their predecessors. They write books about us. So what could be the purpose of this new discovery, the "tape", this mysterious plastic rectangle holding a ribbon inside? A top team of cockroach scientists are on the case. They exchange emails and theories, and I included some of their correspondence, public and private, with the clippings. Of course, even if they've found a way of listening to what's on the ribbon, they're lost in conjecture as to the purpose of it all. So they highlight what they know and what they don't on a diagram, which I also included in the package. Like I've said before, I had a lot of fun making all that stuff up. But honestly, in the name of The Great Ootheca, I could have never done it without those guys in the first place... don't know if you remember them? The funky little buggers that live in Joe's Appartment? Who knows, my futuristic cockroach scientists could even be distant relatives of theirs...
I'd totally forgotten how bonkers and utterly bizarre that album is! Perhaps the most quintessentially British album ever this side of Willy Wonka, "Death By Chocolate" (2000) is a concept album by Mike Always who, it turns out, was head of A&R at Cherry Red Records, a label that helped launch bands such as Felt, The Monochrome Set or Everything But The Girl.
In 2001, Always hooked up with some musicians and a 19 year-old hotel maid (!) called Angie Tillett and they set upon recording Death By Chocolate's debut album, which brings elements of freakbeat and 60s psych together with Angie's dry monologues. On most songs you won't hear her sing but recite an endless litany of all the things that were considered sweet, innocuous or innocent in decades past, kind of like a Prevert catalogue of sweet little nothings. The songs on which she actually sings are also really good, very folksy and comforting. The end result is quite surprising and also, truth be told, a bit creepy at times. It almost sounds like a robotic, machine recreation of a long-gone past teenage England that never existed in the first place. The music is more cheerful than all the later "hauntological" bands that would follow but there's a sense of incoming dread that I can't shake off. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this? Another album called 'Zap The World' would follow in 2002 and they briefly returned with a 3rd release much later called "Bric-a-brac" in 2012. I found this delicious interview that was made when the debut album came out and when they were really pushing the whole "sweet teenage chambermaid loner from the provinces" concept very hard. Makes me think of Pizzicato Five's delirious recreation of what made pop 'pop' a decade prior!
Illustrator John Coulthart's journal feuilleton and its weekend links selection is one of my favourite online treasure troves.
Last week did not disappoint with this bandcamp selection of Zeuhl bands, divided into 3 parts: Old School Zeuhl, Zeuhl Goes Global, and New School Zeuhl. "There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres" can be accessed here. More info on this particular brand of music invented by French Avant-Garde pioneers Magma available on Prog Archives, which also includes a long list of bands in that vein and a good definition of what separates Zeuhl from prog rock: Zeuhl is an adjective in Kobaïan, the language written by Christian Vander, drummer and founder of the French band Magma.
While far from being an expert on the genre, here's one of my favourite albums which don't appear on the bandcamp list by EIDER STELLAIRE. This is from their 1981 debut album.
Just found this old flyer I wrote once for my friend DJ Mamazzoni, in the style of the old Marvel Universe handbooks. The artwork is all Mamazzoni's and I think it rules!
So I guess watching The Social Dilemma, in spite of its tacky dramatization and really bad 'fictional' scenes (The Extreme Center!) finally helped me fully transition from "I definitely should do it" to "let's get the fuck out of big tech social media now". This website has lain dormant for far too long and I'm actually *paying* for the damn thing (and I don't mean that in a negative or derogatory way, not paying means you are the one being sold, as we've all learned by now).
So from now on, I've decided to keep my Instagram & Facebook account online only for the Metal Punk Tape Exchange, my eventual self promotion and close friends' interaction. I've had up to here, frankly, with the way my feed was messing up with my head and the documentary really helped me have a clearer view of why it had that effect on me (it's all about Dopamine levels, surpriiiise!) and what needs to be done. So I've deleted most Google apps, Facebook and switched off all notifications on my phone, installed DuckduckGo on all my devices, and decided to move all my written contents here, to this website (which does have a Google tracker on, o the irony, but DuckDuckGo will switch it off for you, presumably).
And while I was busy learning what tools are being used for tearing apart the fabric of society, I started reading a new book by someone very dear to my heart, one of my favourite authors for almost 30 years now, namely Jonathan Coe, which also deals with a somewhat similar theme (Brexit).
Much to my surprise, I didn't know he was using characters from The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle in that one, which made me want to re-read those in the first place. Coe really has a knack for stating the obvious through subtle human interactions and the little things that speak volumes. Anyway, books! We all need to read more books! Stay away from our phones and get some actual reading done, words on paper and all that.
Also while I'm here, I just wanted to immortalize for *ahem* posterity on this blog's first entry this catch up tape I did for someone who got ripped off during our worst round ever of Metal Punk Tape Exchange, AKA the Phantom Tape Round, when so many people and tapes mysteriously vanished into thin air or on their way to the Post Office.
I wish my printer did better justice to the gorgeous Brantonne art I used for this one. He was one of the regular painters doing stuff for magazines like Fiction or Fleuve Noir books and their famous '"Anticipation" series of sci fi novels.
And in case you were wondering, there really was a book called Métal de Mort in French ("The Catalyst", in English), written by Vargo Statten AKA John Russell Fearn who was probably writing pulp fiction novels in his sleep judging from his massive bibliography! I really had fun with that tracklist by the way, aiming for a total old school Voivod/sci fi tech thrash vibe! Check out Transilience and Terrahsphere if you've never heard those bands before, incredible stuff for sure! I played some songs of theirs in past episodes of Poison Beats, and will also push forward some Krakkbrain (killer defunct French band with great musicians who ended up in Misanthrope if memory serves) and that fantastic Jester Beast demo from Italy in the near future!
And last item for today, before I forget, on the trail of that Jonathan Coe I stumbled upon a british experimental film maker/documentarist whom I'd never heard of before, Patrick Keiller, whose work seems absolutely intriguing to say the least! Woops, just realized "London", the first movie in his Robinson series is being distributed by my old friends at ED Distribution here in France. The world is filled with such beautiful coincidences.
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