MIND DE-CODER 47

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MIND DE-CODER 47

"When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake!!"

                                                                                             Plato’s Republic

                                                                                                                  

ARROWWOOD     UNDER A ROOT A WINDING STAIR

Ethereal loveliness from Chelsea Robb, who releases beautiful albums of atmospheric pagan charm under the name Arrowwood. Under A Root A Winding Stair is the opening track from a her third album BEAUTIFUL GRAVE, released 2013, and an album of serene, simple charm. Robb only uses acoustic instruments to complement her vocals – the reed organ, flute, various string instruments and even a hurdy gurdy add rich layers to her hauntingly alluring songs. It’s really quite lovely.

THE ADULT NET     INCENSE AND PEPPERMINTS

This track – a gorgeous cover of the Strawberry Alarmclock’s 1967 debut single – swept me off my feet when I first heard it, and in some ways I’m still waiting to touch the ground again. The Adult Net were Brix Smith’s side project from The Fall, although the version of the band that recorded this, their debut single, back in 1985 were essentially the entire Fall line-up without Mark E. Smith, to whom she was married at the time. Co-incidentally, this 1985 version of The Fall were pretty much my favourite line-up of the band – their release for this year, THS NATION'S SAVING GRACE, my favourite of the 100 or so albums they seem to have released since 1979. Despite releasing a glossy sugar-kissed album of her own in 1989 featuring just about every psychedelic embellishment ever invented The Adult Net never really caught on, but it’s one of those albums I dust off the start of every summer. I was quite the fan, me.

DEEP FEELING     PRETTY COLOURS

Deep Feeling remain something of a foot-note to musical history, existing just long enough to act as a kind of proto-group for other more popular bands. Singer Jim Capaldi left to join Traffic; Luther Grosvenor went off to join Art, Spooky Tooth, Stealer’s Wheel and Mott The Hoople; Poli Palmer went to Blossom Toes, Eclection and Family, and Gordon Jackson recorded a pleasant enough solo album that wasn’t without it’s pleasures. Deep Feeling managed to record a few records which enjoyed an exotic pre-psychedelic sound – they even supported Hendrix’s first tour - but nothing was released. Pretty Colours, recorded in 1966, with vibes, flute, Middle Eastern guitar and distorted vocals, would have made for a terrific single, but only saw the light of day as a bonus track on Grosvenor’s 2001 re-release of his 1996 FLOODGATES album, which is, I suspect, just a little too much information. As is usual in these cases, someone has anthologised what little they recorded and an album, PRETTY COLOURS is now available.

THE ALAN BOWN!     STORY BOOK

The Alan Bown Set started life as a soul/r ‘n’ b outfit who embraced the summer of love in 1967, changed their name and released one album in 1968, OUTWARD BOWN, generally regarded as something of a lost classic amongst your aficionados of the psychedelic. The fact you've never heard of them wasn’t particularly their fault  – the album is a colourful stroll through some quintessential psychedelic sounds, taking in proto-hard rock with an electric cover of Dylan’s All Along The Watch Tower that got Hendrix all excited, mod soul, and that peculiarly English variety of toy town psychedelia of which I’m so enamoured, represented here by Story Book. Their problem seemed to be that their record company crashed about a week after its initial release and then the same thing happened again following a late 90’s re-release on CD. Nowadays, the very fine Cherry Red label seem to have got their hands on it and have released a definitive version of the album including both mono and stereo mixes, so all’s well that ends well. I think that at some point, a young Robert Palmer (of Addicted To Love fame) was in the band, but that may have been after this record; once again – too much information.

THE CORTINAS     PHOEBE’S FLOWER SHOP

Another slice of toy town pop, this time from The Cortinas, who managed to release just the one single, 1967’s Phoebe’s Flower Shop, before changing their name to Octopus and getting up to whatever Octopus got up to. Once Octopus split half the group went on to Mungo Jerry and two members went on to join Split Enz, which must be of some interest to someone out there. 

THE PICADILLY LINE     ROSEMARY’S BLUEBELL DAY

And in a show seemingly dominated by dainty toy town tunes and whimsical psychedelic pop, here’s The Picadilly Line, essentially a duo led by Rod Edwards and Roger Hand, backed, on their only album, THE HUGE WORLD OF EMILY SMALL, released in 1968, by the cream of British session musicians, including such luminaries as Herbie Flowers; Pentangle’s Danny Thompson; Alan Hawkshaw (he went on to compose, amongst other things, the Grange Hill theme, the Cadbury’s Milk Tray theme and the countdown chimes used on Countdown, and so remains a pivotal figure in the childhood of anyone my age), and Harold McNair (who played flute on the soundtrack to ken Loach’s 1969 drama 'Kes'), and those are just four I recognise from a list of 15 or so, so this is not an album without some artistic chops. What do you get for your money, then (well, my money, anyway)? It has a certain playful feyness to it, filled with an evocative whimsicality with lyrics populated with very British observations about everyday life that places it squarely at the centre of Swinging London, post-Sgt. Peppers. Nobody bought it, of course. This is not so much a lost classic as an album that slipped under the radar on its way back to faerie land. A pity, really, because I think Rosemary’s Bluebell Day is terrific. Edward’s and Roger’s later found some success as Edward’s Hand – George Martin, who produced them, was a big fan.

SROATLY SMITH     WREATHE THE BOWL

I only discovered Sproatly Smith recently but I seem to have been searching for them all my life. Their gorgeous blend of psychedelic folk with touches of early Pink Floyd’s pastoral side (I’m thinking Cirrus Minor from their MORE period here, as much as anything inspired by Syd Barrett) have captured a sound that is at once quintessentially British, yet psychedelic also, immersed in nature, tuneful and evocative of Britain's pagan tradition – I love it. Wreathe The Bowl is taken from their second album, released in 2009 called THE YEW AND THE HARE.

TICKAWINDA     ROSEMARY LANE

This is a ravishing cover of the folk traditional Rosemary Lane by late 70’s folk band Tickawinda, house band for the Rose and Crown folk club and winners of the North West heats of the 'Search for The Stars of the '80's' competition held at the Poynton Folk Centre in a performance described as 'Tickawonderful' in the Manchester Evening News. Sounds unpromising, I know, but their only album, ROSEMARY LANE, released in 1979, despite being neither psychedelic or progressive, is packed full of wonderful tunes, mostly covers by the likes of Pentangle and Steely Dan, that are simply outstanding in their delivery; absolutely gorgeous. The album was limited to 300 copies and for years was considered the holy grail of folk collections.  The nice thing is, when it finally got a CD release in 2001 and people got to hear it for the first time, instead of hear about it, nobody was disappointed. 

YELLOW AUTUMN     THE DRUID

Another folk rarity, the word bucolic almost seems invented for Yellow Autumn, so you can imagine my surprise to discover they weren’t living in a yurt on the banks of some hidden away loch in northern Westeros, but were, in fact, from California. Their only album, CHILDREN OF THE MIST, released in 1977, is steeped in the psych-folk tradition - acoustic guitars, flutes, dulcimers, tambourines, violins, pianos, vibe and bongos abound – and the songs are sung with a rustic lustiness that puts one in mind of stone circles in the mist and picking magic mushrooms at dawn. The Druid actually seems to be a re-working of the traditional folk song Let No Man Steal Your Thyme and is a thing of quiet wonder.

NEON PEARL     JUST ANOTHER DAY

I think this track is marvelous, a stand-out track on this posthumous release by little known psychedelic outfit Neon Pearl, whose only album is as fine an example of experimental British psychedelia, hazy riffs, mild guitar distortions and vocal harmonies as your likely to hear. That being said nobody would touch them with a recording contract at the time, so what few tracks they managed to record in 1967, mostly unreleased demos, never saw the light of day until 2001 when they were given the anthology treatment with an album simply called the 1967 RECORDINGS. All of which sounds a bit underwhelming, but Just Another Day has lovely feel to it that somehow transcends 1967 altogether. Another lost gem.

TEMPLES     SAND DANCE

"We want this to be the one that sounds like Kashmir", they said, "but without that song’s crushing sense of self importance". And that's what they got. From their 2014 release, the very fine SUN STRUCTURES. Hopefully they’re already back in the studio working on the follow up.

I have this track drift off into a little something by Faust from their 1973 release FAUST IV that is probably the (Starts Like That) extended part of Just A Second that found its way onto the CD release, but given that the CD version of the album appears to have been mis-titled, I guess we’ll never know. I have that drift off into very affecting Betty Et Zorg Au Piano bit from Jean-Jacque Beineix’s Betty Blue; still my favourite film ever, still can’t watch it again, still can’t talk about it (but I suspect there’s a lot of people my age who may feel that way about it).

THE DEVIANTS     CHILD OF THE SKY

  

A bit of pastoral loveliness from The Deviant’s 1967 debut release PTOOFF!, an album otherwise characterised by some pretty far-out, but decidedly ugly and un-groovy psychedelia (which I’ll be bringing your way soon, Mind De-Coder fans!) from the mind of Mick Farren, International Times contributor and vocalist who raged with a punk like intensity at both the straight society he’d dropped out from, but also London’s underground hippy royalty whom he considered sell-outs. The Deviants, based in London’s underground Ladbroke Grove community, were unlike any other psychedelic band around, playing a fuck-you barrage of teeth-grinding psychedelic rock, positioned somewhere between The Stooges and The Mothers of Invention – somewhere within that assault they planted Child Of The Sky as their sole concession to Barrettesque/Ayers type whimsy, and very nice it is, too. The cover came in a 6-panel foldout with extensive notes, including a review by John Peel that reads: "There is little that is not good, much that is excellent and the occasional flash of brilliance", which sums it up quite nicely. I’ve taken one of the quotations found on the cover at the top of this track-listing. 

ARROWWOOD     GOBLIN’S MARKET

More weird going’s on with Chelsea Robb’s Arrowwood, with the hauntologically-inspired Goblin’s Market from BEAUTIFUL GRAVE.

JIM WILLIAMS with RICHARD GLOVER     BALOO MY BOY

The hauntingly lovely Baloo My Boy as sung by Richard Glover in the film A FIELD IN ENGLAND. There is something entirely captivating about this rendition; Glovers voice both emotionally charged and vulnerable at the same time - stops me dead every time I hear it.

FAUST     JENNIFER

The sublime Jennifer from FAUST IV, one of Faust’s loveliest recordings; inspired by a country girl who would sneak in and out of the grounds of Manor Studio in Oxfordshire where the band were recording in 1973, apparently. She was red-haired with an aura that glowed golden:

Jennifer, your red hair's burning

Yellow jokes come out of your mind

TEETH OF THE SEA     WHILE WE LIVE IN FEAR OF HELL

Teeth Of The Sea perfectly capture the ambiance of Ben Wheatley’s hallucinogenic metaphysical horror movie A Field In England with the mesmerising Whilst We Live In Fear of Hell, a sprawling epic that weaves in and around Jim William’s original score like a miscast spell. A FIELD IN ENGLAND: RE-IMAGINED, the band’s 2014 Record Store Day release, features three tracks inspired by the original film score and takes them to the no less weird field next door.

PSYCHIC TV     GODSTAR

I distinctly remember watching breakfast telly one morning in 1985, around 8 o’clock I expect, tucking in to my cornflakes and listening to Genesis P-Orridge, Psychic TV and former Throbbing Gristle frontman, tell the hapless presenter that he, P-Orridge, was the re-incarnation of Brian Jones (the one in the Rolling Stones). He said that he’d always found the Rolling Stones to be less interesting after they’d kicked Jones out the band (actually, I agree with him there, although I’ve read that he was impossible to be around by then), and that following Jones’ death in 1969 he’d clearly felt the departed spirit reincarnate inside him, although I don’t remember him adding what happened to his own spirit, now that there appeared to be two of them sharing him. Since then, and with the invention of the internet, I’ve looked it up and discovered that P-Orridge would have been 19 at the time and I wondered: does it work like that, re-incarnation? They allowed to do that, are they, your discombobulated spirits? Only I always thought you had to be born after someone died, not before, in order for them to reincarnate inside you, or did I read that bit wrong? Of course breakfast telly was worth getting up for in the old days. This version of Godstar is the original 7” vinyl version, with a bit of Thee Brian Meets Bryin remix tacked onto the end.

PSYCHIC TV     ABSTRACT REALITY

In fact, so enamoured was P-Orridge of Jones, that he’s been trying to make a film about Brian Jones ever since. Sadly, he’s never been quite able to pull it off, but in 2004 he released GODSTAR: THEE DIRECTOR’S CUT, which claimed to be the definitive soundtrack of the film, made up of tracks originally recorded in 1986 when the project seemed likely to happen, in the order they would have been played in the movie. It is, he notes, a hyperdelic pop experience. He also adds, in the accompanying booklet, that he’s still keen to get GODSTAR: THE MOVIE made, just in case anyone out there fancied financing it; another quick check of thee internet (he likes his ‘thee’s’ and ‘ov’s’, does Genesis) reveals that he’s still waiting. Abstract Reality is one of the avant-garde pieces on the album.

BILL NELSON     END OF THE SEASONS

Bill Nelson’s debut album, NORTHERN DREAM, released in 1971, was originally limited to 250 individually-numbered copies sold from a record shop in Wakefield. It was, as you can imagine, a very low-key affair featuring none of the intricate guitar work that he would go onto to display with his later band Be-Bop Deluxe, but it does enjoy a dreamy, rustic, acid-folk charm all of its own. Once signed to a major label with some cash behind them he was encouraged to re-record it on better equipment, but by then he’d moved on and the album, now available on CD, is what it is. I think End Of Seasons is terrific.

MOON WIRING CLUB     A FONDNESS FOR FANCY HATS (SOFT CONFUSION) (excerpt)

 
 

To accompany the release of A FONDNESS FOR FANCY HATS in 2013, the Moon Wiring Club’s Ian Hodgson, created a 45 minute sibling called SOFT CONFUSION, a tape cassette limited to 150 copies that acts as a sort of lower resolution fancy dress box version of the CD. I was tempted to play all of it but with too many other tracks I wanted to include in the show, I limited myself to the closing 8 minutes or so of Side 2. There’s a part of me that will always wonder whether this was something of a missed opportunity, though.

THE VAN ALLEN BELT     DINNER INSIDE

I don’t quite know how to describe what The Van Allen Belt do – although, essentially they inhabit the kind of world where Burt Bacharach and Phil Spector rub shoulders with ‘Cornelius’s early ensemble Flipper’s Guitar as fronted by Dorothy Moskvitch, chanteuse with Joseph Byrd’s the United States of America’ (© J. Cope) and create pop magic. Dinner Inside is the closing track from their 2010 release SUPERPOWERFRAGILIS (OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP CARING AND LOVE THE DRUG) and seemed the perfect place to end the show. 

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MIND DE-CODER SUSPENDS INCREDULITY WITH SUSPIRIA

Spoiler alert!

Suzy, do you know anything about...witches?

 One is at a loss where to start really; what is there to say about Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA? Well , first time I saw it, on video, late one Saturday night, snuggled up on the sofa back in the 80’s, I was reduced to a trembling wreck as I struggled in vain to process the episodes of mind-bending terror this film revels in. The second time I saw it, however, last year at the Auckland film festival, watching  a restored print, I may have guffawed unwillingly, and, possibly, once or twice, it may have actually been willingly. Despite the blood-curdling warning splashed across the poster – the only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film…are the first 92 minutes – this is not a film that has aged terribly well; but despite this, and like many of the films I’m enjoying at the moment, the film is noted for many of its stylistic flourishes and has much to recommend it.

Directed by Italian director of gore-drenched thrillers Dario Argento and released at the cinema in 1977, the film follows American ballet student Suzy Bannion, played by Jessica Harper, as she experiences terrifying goings-on at a prestigious dance company in Freiburg, Germany. As far as the plot goes, that’s more or less it, because very little of what comes next makes any sense – what you get instead is an eerily stylised, garishly realised, surreal, unrelenting blood-drenched horror film in which various young dancers are decapitated in increasingly unlikely ways, falling prey to Argento’s misogynistic delight in brutally dispatching his young actresses (a predilection that largely reached its apotheosis, or possibly its nadir, in his 1996 thriller The Stendhal Syndrome which features a graphic rape scene in which the unfortunate victim is played by his daughter Asia) until it is revealed that the dance studio is, in fact, controlled by a coven of witches up to no good with diabolic intentions.

Visually the film is stunning – apparently shot in technicolour with an anamorphic lenses (the cinematographic technique of shooting a wide screen picture on standard 35 mm film stock), the production design and cinematography emphasise vivid primary colours, particularly red, creating a deliberately unrealistic, nightmarish setting, emphasised by the use of imbibition Technicolor prints. Think of the kind of colour you got in films like The Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood (the version with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland and not Kevin Costner, or does that go without saying?) and Gone with the Wind, now imagine it turned up to 11, drenching the film in a palette of green and red, enhancing the nightmarish quality of the film. These visual flourishes are echoed elsewhere within the film, either intentionally or unintentionally, with the use of sound, the soundtrack in particular, and editing techniques, so that at times the film threatens to overwhelm the senses (always worth looking for in a film when you’re high, I think). Argento’s directing technique, throwing around shock cuts, coloured lights and peculiar camera angles are disorientating; the soundtrack, provided by cult Italian prog band Goblin, throbs with malign menace, and even the dialogue has ability to create a profound feeling of unease, following the practise common to Italian film making at the time of not properly recording the actor’s voices, but dubbing them in later, resulting in an unsettling sense of dislocation (apparently this was done because the international cast each spoke their lines in their native language – English, Italian or German - and responded to each other as if they’d understood what each other was saying). The overall effect of the film is one of having the senses battered on almost every level, amplified to an almost absurd, hallucinatory degree by the insanely violent deaths inflicted upon the cast in a sustained series of gloriously realised set-pieces.

A young lady peers out a window into the dark, only to suddenly realise that a pair of eyes are staring back. An arm smashes through one window pane, suffocates her against the other with a gloved hand and, with her friend drumming hysterically against the locked door, the owner of the gloved hand repeatedly stabs the girl in hyper-real close-up before graphically disemboweling her. He then ties her legs with rope and in the next shot we cut to the friend running into the lobby of the apartment building for help; she looks up towards a stained glass ceiling to see the victim's head crashes through it in a hail of glass shards followed by her body. We cut to the blood drenched corpse, suspended by the rope dripping blood onto the floor, finally Argento pans the camera to reveal his next horror. The falling glass has pinned the friend to the ground crucifix like, the largest sliver having split her face in half. 

That’s the first 13 minutes of Suspiria, that is, and it kind of knocks you senseless.  Argento, however, is the master of sustained horror – this, it turns out, is just the warm up for what’s to follow. In a particularly sadistic sequence, Suzy’s scantily-clad room-mate Sarah is chased to the attic by an unseen pursuer; thinking to escape him by climbing through a window into another room, she falls into a huge pile of razor wire which entangles her in vicious coils from which she struggles in anguish to escape, working herself deeper and deeper into the seemingly endless barbs. From out of nowhere, the mysterious black-gloved hand of a dark figure appears and slits her throat. First time I saw this scene, I recoiled in horror at the images on the screen, unable to cope with the level of violence I was seeing (or, as we called it in those days, ‘I hid behind my hands’). Last time I saw it my thoughts ran more along the lines of: “Oh, no, she’s fallen into a room full of razor wire, how awful, just when she needed to escape…hang on, why is there a room full of razor wire in the attic of a dance academy and how comes she just fell into it? Surely, sir, you stretch my incredulity too far…and where’d that hand with the knife come from?”, and that was pretty much it as far as mind-bending terror went for the rest of the film. Indeed – the only thing more comical than the first 92 minutes of Suspiria…are the last twelve minutes; in which Suzy discovers a hidden passage; observes the staff of the school forming a ritual in which they plot her death, and discovers Sarah's body nailed to a coffin. You can imagine her fright when a little later the ghostly embodiment of the Black Witch Queen orders Sarah's corpse to rise from the dead to murder Suzy, resulting in Suzy having to stab her through the throat with something handy and sharp which luckily not only appears to kill her (what with her being disembodied and all, she nevertheless fades from view screaming) but also does for Sarah's reanimated corpse as well, while also causing the building to set alight, destroying the academy with the coven inside. And I haven’t even mentioned the academy’s blind pianist having his throat ripped out by his own guide dog (or sock puppet – at times it’s hard to tell), or the infamous scene with the maggots yet. The end. With no explanation or tying up of loose ends, although, in one of my favourite scenes earlier on in the film, Suzy meets one of Sarah's acquaintances, a dashing psychiatrist who explains in a frankly torturous bit of exposition that the academy was founded some 200 hundred ago by Helena Markos, a cruel Greek émigré who was widely believed to be a witch, although what with him being a believer in the material world, and a psychiatrist to boot, he really couldn’t be doing with that sort of thing at all. His companion, however, a white-haired professor of the Van Helsing school of ‘scepticism is the natural reaction to witchcraft these days, but magic is ever present’ variety, concludes with bit of exposition of his own regarding witchcraft and its unnatural goings-on before helpfully adding that a coven cannot survive without their queen. What makes the scene so striking is that it’s filmed outside on an incredibly bright (and seemingly breezy) day (their hair is all over the place but they struggle on bravely), on the plaza of an ultra-modern white office block that works in startling contrast to the lurid claustrophobia of the academy.

So – what’s good about it then? Well, all of the above actually, despite those observations that may have you think otherwise. I’m no fan of slasher movies, me, but in Suspiria, Argento’s use of bold, very fake-looking sets, stark lines, primary colours, distorted camera angles and freaked-out sound creates a world that is uniquely his own. And speaking of freaked-out sounds, no discussion of Suspiria is complete without mention of the soundtrack, created by Italian prog rock band Goblin in collaboration with Argento himself. As one commentator has noted, it sounds as though Hell's demons rented a studio and decided to jam. Screams, wailings, hissing steam and some kind of diabolical didgeridoo are punctuated with the occasional distorted shriek of "Witch!". It's enough to loosen the bowels on its own. It's reported that while filming, Argento blasted Goblin's supremely menacing score to create a feeling of unease in the actors that would ultimately carry over into the psyche of the audience. It’s a monument to tension and suspense, a near experimental collage of whispers, sighs, and various other sounds placed against the backdrop of shivering strings and throbbing bass; Goblin's contribution is as essential to the film's impact as Argento's stylistic and unflinching direction. In fact, Goblin-esque has become a by-word for a particular type of malignant, sinister orchestration. The titular theme, a melodic composition that recalls a childhood lullaby hummed along to by someone with a special fondness for sharp knives and knitting needles, is one of the most effective and unforgettable tunes in horror history. I think it was even released as a single in 1977 though unsurprisingly I’ve never been able to find a chart position for it, if, indeed it ever had one.

 Last year I was lucky enough to hear the reformed band perform the soundtrack live as they accompanied the film at the Auckland Film Festival – one of only three shows they performed that year. They captured the gleeful malevolence of the original score, complete with creepy whispered there’s-something-nasty-in-the-nursery la-la-la-ings, howling vocalisations, celesta and bells, ritualistic drumming, fat synthesisers and, it must be admitted, some fairly funky crazed prog-rock jazz noodlings, all of it entirely un-nerving. They received a standing ovation, of course; despite the disturbing subject matter, you could feel the love in the air, and everyone felt as if we’d just watched something special. The score is as enjoyable removed from the movie as it is attached. Suspiria is quite an achievement, as a scary soundtrack and as a vibe-heavy rock album. That being said, I’ve always been reluctant to include any of it in a Mind De-Coder radio show because the last thing I want to do for someone 'midst an otherwise enjoyable trip is to play something as downright creepy as this. God alone knows what you’d see creeping out of the shadows.

Finally, it’s a good name, isn’t it, SUSPIRIA,? It contains within its sound all the sibilant menace of ‘suspense’, ‘suspicion’, and ‘hysteria’ combined with an edge of raw terror. Strange, then, that it should merely be the Italian word for ‘sigh’. Strano, eh? Ma il film non avrebbe mai avuto la stessa emozione viscerale se fosse essere chiamato Sigh, don't you think? I heard somewhere that there was going to be a remake but thankfully common sense prevailed; this is not a film that can be topped - it is what it is, for good or bad, and you very much have to take it or leave it on its own terms. On a lighter note, I read how there's a Japanese restaurant called Cambiare inspired by Suspiria's art designs which would make for a fab night out. 

The trailer below is less the original trailer and more of a four-minute summation of the entire film. For some that may be enough, but for a film that engages all of the senses, SUSPIRIA works as a good night in snuggled up on the sofa (with the curtains drawn obviously) – and I will never forget that first time I saw it. What a difference 29 years makes though, eh?