The GOASTT vinyl LP and new video

Still totally loving this album and the vinyl arrived this week along with their previous outing, ‘La Carotte Bleu’, which, while not as focused as the new album, has plenty going for it if you want to explore the band further. ‘Midnight Sun’ however pretty much falls into the ‘all killer, no filler’ bracket for me, a well-rounded record that has layers of detail which rewards multiple listens.

The LP comes in a heavy card gatefold with a tip-on jacket and inner sleeve housing one of five colour variants (I got purple as you can see). They’ve just released a new video for the opening track, ‘Too Deep’, which is a one take affair that rewards with the final scene. It’s also apparently an homage / rip off (depending on your point of view) of the French short ‘C’était un rendez-vous’ by Claude LeLouch but they cleverly riffed on the end scene.

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Matt Berry / DJ Food Solid Steel mix

I’m very pleased to be sharing airtime with the legend that is Matt Berry on Solid Steel this week – my Magpie Music show that debuted on Altar Ego Radio earlier this year is paired with his trip though gospel rock, soundtracks, spoken word and classic Pop.

Matt has a new album out at the moment on Acid Jazz called ‘Music For Insomniacs’ which mines very different territory from his previous outings. This time he’s channeling Vangelis, Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream and turns in a more ambient, synth-laden set although there are plenty of surprises that spring up in the mix too. He’s currently filming the new series of Toast of London and we’re thrilled to have him on the show. Got to Acid Jazz to buy his album or previous records + tour memorabilia.

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Paul’s Boutique 25th anniversary Visual Companion

Photo © Eilon Paz of Dust & Grooves, taken in my studio April 2013

Yes, it’s 25 years ago today that ‘Paul’s Boutique’ was launched into an expectant world only to be met with a mixture of acclaim, incomprehension and disappointment from critics and fans alike. ‘Licensed to Ill’ pt.2 it wasn’t and was such a departure it alienated a large proportion of their (newly acquired) audience immediately. The Hip Hop landscape had moved on by the summer of ’89 and the militant beats and rhymes of Public Enemy rubbed shoulders with De La Soul‘s newly planted Daisy Age or the emerging gangster rap of NWA. Suddenly the Beasties were back after a two year break in LA, sampling Disco, The Beatles, Psycho and rhyming about throwing eggs, street bums and plastering the album with stop-start skits instead of the Rock Rap they’d become known for.

Of course this was intended but it was largely out of step with what was happening in their field at the time. Hip Hop was still fiercely about looking forward as far as its own history was concerned and here were snatches of Afrika Bambaataa and Lovebug Starski. Also DJs and producers were still in the mindset of the rare and unknown sample, Rose Royce, Chic, The Beatles and the theme to Jaws weren’t exactly obscure yet here they all were. In fact the inclusion of The Beatles drew some discussion as no one had been so blatant before and it was speculated that their signing to Capitol was on the condition that they could sample liberally from the label’s huge back catalogue.

But time and hindsight are a great thing and here we are, a quarter of a century later, with the album acknowledged as an ahead of its time classic. To celebrate we have SM&A from Italy who have put together a‘Visual Companion’ to the album, made from existing videos, film clips, ads and other footage to make a long playing video. This has been a labour of love for months now and we met with Paolo from the team in Italy earlier this year on one of our 3-Way Mix excursions for the same album. I can’t embed it in the site at the moment so you’ll have to go to the link above to watch it.

DerekLangille BB PB

Not only is there a film but now there’s another book from Dan LeRoy – author of the brilliant 331/3 book on said album – this time entitled ‘For Whom The Cowbell Tolls’. I was interviewed by Dan earlier this year for an updated version of the 331/3 book but this new title appeared out of nowhere on several sites last week and is something else altogether it seems. Having come across a huge stash of PB-related memorabilia in his research it seems Dan has now teamed up with a pop archeologist named Peter Relic and written a follow up book that reveals previously lost treasures and info about the album that will also be released on the 25th anniversary. I’m really looking forward to this as it’s come out of nowhere and promises much, it’s available through Amazon as a digital book initially though. In related news, Cheeba, Moneyshot and I continue with our tribute to the album and begin a series of weekend runs at festivals this summer before heading to Canada for a show at the SAT in Montreal on September 19th, our own mix not even 2 years old but having clocked over 150,000 plays.

Posted in Books, Event, Film, Music. | 3 Comments | Tags: , , , , ,

DKW comic by Sergio Ponchione

DKW DitkoThis is an interesting comic I picked up the other week out of curiosity. It’s a one-off ode to the masters of the art – Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Wally Wood – by Sergio Ponchione who’s a new name to me. He manages to give a brief overview of each artist’s career, contributions to the medium and personal life whilst channeling a little of their style as he explains their importance to a budding young illustrator who’s not familiar with their work.

It’s an oddity whose only weakness is its shortness, this could have been expanded to 3 issues easily. As a love letter to the three creators it’s charming though, search it out as I will be doing for his 4 issue comic, Grotesque from Fantagraphics. Annoyingly it seems he was in London at Gosh Comics not 10 days again discussing the comic but I missed it.

Grotesque

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Rewire – a book, vinyl and exhibition Kickstarter

Kofie gammaA Kickstarter campaign to get a book with vinyl made has just 2 weeks left to run. It’s run by the Gamma Proforma guys who do a nice line in the more leftfield artists in their exhibitions. Check out this little film for more info and look at that line up of artists!

Visual: Jerry ‘Joker’ Inscoe, Poesia, sheOne, Nawer, Stendec, Moneyless, Phil Ashcroft, Derm, Robert ‘Tone’ Proch, Sebastien Preschoux, Sat One, Graphic Surgery, Felipe Pantone, O.Two, Roids, Clemens Behr, Christopher Derek Bruno, 108

Audio: Kidghe, Stohead, Luke Vibert, Divine Styler, Mike Ladd, Andrea Parker / Daz, Quayle, Cristian Vogel, Arovane, Einoma, Third Shock, Methodblack, Lyken, Monkphat, Plaster, Clatterbox, GFQ, Quinoline Yellow, Evac, Kero, Dalglish, Bogger, Northburg & Ed Devane.

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Space In This Place podcast

A podcast I took part in with Ben Eshmade, organisor of the upcoming ‘Space In This Place’ event at the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic park in South East London on August 8th. The Anish Kapoor-designed structure will play host to music all night with a definite space theme, from Grasscut, Paddy Steer‘s homemade instruments, to Astronauts and myself, there will be music at different levels. Ben speaks to Paddy and myself about this and more in this podcast themed on the night to come.

The night runs from 6.30pm – 11pm and tickets are £20 – this might seems steep but it’s £15 just to go into the structure with no music so an extra fiver for all this is a pretty good deal. This is actually the first time they’ve ever had music inside, tickets can be bought from here or call 0333 800 8099 to book – and there’s more info about the various lates on at the structure here.

Posted in DJ Food, Event, Radio. | No Comments | Tags: , , , ,

Frankie flick book image restoration

It’s been a bit quiet on here of late because I’ve been very busy tying up the last pieces of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set with Philip Marshall and the deadline is this weekend with the book still to finish. We’ve had some 11th hour changes due to the USM legal dept. getting cold feet over the cassette front cover (there’ll be a lengthy blog post about the cassette one day) but also some higher res images arrived today of one of the Lo Cole gatefold prelims for the interior of the book. These were courtesy of a German fan who went out of his way to get a decent copy of the image from someone who had bought the rough draft painting when it was sold years ago. Now we can have a much larger version of the image rather than the low grade jpegs we’ve had for years.

But the subject of this post is about the Flick book* – maybe considered a throw away item to some, certainly the runt of the litter but getting as much love as the rest in its construction. The book features scenes from the TV advert that briefly aired around the time of the album launch in November ’84 with imagery based on Lo Cole’s paintings – a brief 40 second rampage into the Pleasuredome by the band accompanied by assorted mythical beasts. As pages are limited in the book the original film was broken down into an image sequence – 25 frames per second x 40 to nearly 1000 frames – which were then stripped down to essential frames and made into .gif files to see which few seconds of animation would work best.

*( this is a provisional cover design – it’s changed a bit since this version)

Luckily we can print on both sides of the page with this book so you can view two separate animations depending on which way round you hold the book. In an effort to get the best possible image quality for the book we went back to the sole surviving master copy, a U-Matic tape, and pulled the frames we needed. These were still fairly grubby looking with a dark caste over most, dull colours and lots of ‘noise’ across the image. In Photoshop I set up a series of image filters to find out how best to lighten the images and bring out the vibrancy of the colours without it looking too forced. It turned out that different scenes needed different amounts of filtering as the saturation kept changing so there was no chance to automate the process.

When I was satisfied I’d got the best colour and light balance there was still the subject of the noise and how to remove it, this is when you can see a texture like a grain across an image, usually caused by light or introduced by generations of copies. I use a great Photoshop plug in caused Neat Image (yes, terrible name but amazing results) to remove this. It takes a digital fingerprint of the image and then smooths out all the bumps without blurring the image, something some similar plug ins tend to do. See the process below, at the top is the original as it came to me, then the filtered version with enhanced colours and any dark cast taken away. Finally there’s the denoised version that will end up in the book.

Posted in Art, Openmind designs, Packaging. | No Comments | Tags: , ,

Inky Fingers blog and podcast

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I post original comic art alongside copious amounts of comics news and such. This is because I’ve collected it since the late 90’s, mainly from artists who have drawn for the British comic 2000ad. The original art collecting community is a growing one but the 2000ad-centric one is still small enough that most people know or know of each other.

A couple of collector friends of mine – Simon Beigh and Julius Howe – have started a regular podcast and Facebook page called Inky Fingers that talks about all things related. This can mean interviews with the artists themselves and collectors or musings on pieces currently on eBay and collecting tips. I was recently asked to chat about my collection on their latest podcast and I share time with the great Carlos Ezquerra in another interview. Check it out here...

Posted in Art, Comics, DJ Food. | No Comments |

Originals #30 • Peter Elson ‘Mission To Universe’


Anyone of a certain age who was into sci-fi in the 70’s and 80’s will be familiar with Peter Elson‘s work, if not his name. His highly detailed spaceships and futuristic tech were as recognisable as Chris Foss‘s and I used to seek out the tiny ‘PE’ logo that he hid in most of his work time and again as confirmation that an image was by him.

*Special ‘Originals’ guest post – I don’t own this one* My friend David Rees recently bought this original painting from Peter’s sister (Elson passed away many years ago) and was kind enough to share these images with me. It’s fascinating for me to see the close up details of this piece – ‘Mission To Universe’ – that I first saw in one of the Steven Caldwell Terran Trade Authority books way back when. As far as I know there is only one book of Elson’s work collected, ‘Parallel Lines’, long out of print and shared with another artist of the genre, Chris Moore. That’s a real shame and he deserves wider recognition. The painting is shown next to the paperback which it was painted for below.

PE-7PE-6PE-1PE-9PE-4PE-111PE-2PE-12PE-5PE-8

Posted in Art, Originals. | 6 Comments | Tags:

Dondi whole car

Found this online, no idea who took it, possibly Henry Chalfont or Martha Cooper. Always nice to see one of the classic whole cars from a new angle and in situ to see the scale and surroundings. It must have been incredible to see these running in the early 80’s. R.I.P. Dondo White, a true style master who made his mark and still impresses today.

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The return of Steinski

steinski_headingHis online blog has been dormant for a year now, rumours that he had come into some money and taken up morris dancing remain unsubstantiated, but now, the legend that is Steinski speaks:

“Folks –

I’ve emerged from hibernation to post 2 shows on WFMU.org. They’re streaming online, they’re NSFW, and they emphasize my favorite non-instrumental portion of the musical spectrum: the talking part.

Show #1 (3 hrs.) showcases monologue artists ranging from Ruth Draper and Lord Buckley to Ana Deavere Smith and Danny Hoch. The listenable playlist at WFMU.org is here:
If you want, you can download the show (.zip) in easy-to-listen-to tracks here:

The second show’s title is “Walkin’ and Talkin”; all the tracks are spoken word over music (3 hrs.). Speakers range from The Last Poets, Jack Kerouac and Jean Shepherd to William Burroughs, Jean Grae, and Saul Williams. The show ran once a few years ago and got buried because I never added any information about it. A listenable playlist has been coaxed into existence on WFMU.org here:
Download (.zip) here:

Thanks very much,

Steve Stein”

Posted in Mixes/Solid Steel, Radio. | 2 Comments |

Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary now available in the US

I saw this a few weeks back now and haven’t had time to post about it but I thought it was great. Fascinating, eye-opening and unexpectedly funny, Jodorowsky is an engaging, immediately likeable madman. He was present at the screening for a Q&A session afterward too and held the room enthralled. Some of his stories are so crazy they can’t possibly be true but they make for such an engaging sequence of events that you can’t help but go with his vision.

I can’t recommend this documentary enough and look forward to the Blu-ray with 45 minutes of extras when it gets released. It’s out in the US already and the European release isn’t far behind apparently. Word is that there is also a soundtrack release planned, the film was packed full of excellent synthy sci-fi sounds (maybe too many actually, my only negative comment on the film is that the soundtrack switched virtually ever scene it seemed).

See the Facebook page for locations where it’s playing at cinemas near you.

 

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Mahfood does The Beasties again…

Jim Mahfood comes with the goods two years after he did our ‘Caught In The Middle of a 3-Way Mix’ cover.

This is for SM&A Productions‘ forthcoming Visual Companion to Paul’s Boutique, due online on July 25th, the 25th anniversary of the great album.

They also commissioned Derek Langille to do a poster, he of the Sabotage comic fame.
“Yeah, you can’t front on that!”

Posted in Art, Event, Film, Music. | 3 Comments | Tags: , , , ,

More archival work on the Pleasuredome box set

Another look behind the scenes at some work I’ve been doing on the Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set for the 30th anniversary edition of their ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’ album. Earlier this year I visited photographer Steve Rumney who took a set of photos backstage at the London launch party of ‘Relax’ at the Camden Palace (now Koko) back in November 1983, one of which ended up on a promo poster, cassette and sheet music.

FGTH backstage AOZTT restoration © Steve Rumney

We looked through boxes of negatives and found very little aside from some prints and one badly damaged negative strip. Nevertheless, on that strip was an image that I recognised from the inside sleeve of the original album and he graciously let me take it away. After having it scanned at a professional lab I took the digital files and proceeded to repair all the dust and scratches it had incurred over the years. See above the 5-step cleaning and cropping process, this will then be used on the inner sleeve of the new version of the album. Quite a bit of work for one small 4 x 5.5cm image.

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Space In This Place at the ArcelorMittal Orbit, London

I’ve managed to land myself a gig at the top of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London. I’ll be playing spacey sounds whilst visitors have a great view over the city and various other performers play at different parts of the structure. Visitors can expect views like this (except it will be at sundown). Ben Eshmade of the Arctic Circle is putting on the event, the first ever musical one at the site and it will be limited to 300 people only.

Tickets are £20 which sounds steep but they are usually £15 and you get a whole night of music for an extra fiver. Tickets are also limited because of the nature of the structure and at the moment you can call to book on 0333 800 8099. Other performers will be Transept, Astronauts (acoustic) & ex-Homelife band leader Paddy Steer with DJ sets from Inch-time & Ninja label mates Grasscut.

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The Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger ‘Midnight Sun’ LP


I only just caught on to the new Sean Lennon & Charlotte Kemp Muhl record under the name The Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger (or GHOASTT for short). It was released a couple of months ago, titled ‘Midnight Sun’ and an article on them in the new MOJO made me curious to seek it out. If you liked the last couple of Pepe Deluxe albums and the way they mix up psychedelia with female vocals, strong pop hooks and all manner of vintage electronics and effects then this is for you.

It pushes so many of my buttons, you can hear west coast harmonies, Pink Floyd, heavy drums, Radiophonics, Tame Impala and of course a sprinkling of Sean’s dad here and there. It gloriously references the 60’s both sonically and visually and pulls it off without sounding clichéd, their videos are good fun too with a definite Kenneth Anger homage going on here in this NSFW one above. You can listen to the whole album here and watch another video too.

Posted in Film, Music. | 1 Comment |