MIND
DE-CODER HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 2021
To listen the show just scroll to the bottom of the page
The devil has all the best tunes
Anon.
GOBLIN L’ALBA DEI MORTI VIVENTO (ALTERNATE TAKE)
This recording is taken from the 1998 CD release of the classic Goblin soundtrack, originally released in 1978 to accompany possibly the greatest horror film of all time, George A. Romero’s ‘Zombi - Dawn of The Dead’. This film had quite the effect on me as a youngster. It was the first X-rated movie I ever sneaked into, and found myself alone, as an impressionable 15-year-old, in an empty, cavernous, rat-infested cinema, the seats still bearing the scars of being torn apart by teddy boys in the 1950s, and cigarette butts littering the floor amongst other discarded jetsam of a night at the cinema in 1980, wherein my senses were assaulted by visceral scenes of blood-drenched apocalyptic terror. To say I was emotionally scarred doesn’t go far enough, not when words like traumatized exist to describe the walk home that night. I had nightmares for years afterwards, which only left me when a hypnotherapist taught me a neat little trick to deal with the repeated horror shows which passed for my dreams back then. These days, of course, it seems quite tame, especially when compared to the zombie flicks and TV shows which have followed in its wake. Perversely, at least to my horrified 15-year-old self, I’ve become quite the fan of the genre. Still – back to the music. I chose this version because, if anything, it sounds even creepier than the version that opens the original album release, a soundtrack characterized by Goblin’s proggy penchant for chilling atmospheres, scary synths and bombastic drums.
GLORIA SABBAT MATTERS
By contrast, French band Gloria present a joyous psychedelic choral-pop maelstrom on their sophomore album, the deliriously enjoyable SABBAT MATTERS, released earlier this year. Sounding for all the world like the psychedelic soundtrack to a late-'60s film about sexy vampires, or a ‘Hair’-style rock musical focused on the dark arts, the album is an imaginary pagan festival for your ears, a celebration of minor chords, ominous keyboards, and bewitching harmonies, where debauchery, pop and primitive pleasures are celebrated as gods to fend off the evils of the plague and contemporary puritans. This is Coven’s seminal 1969 release, WITCHCRAFT DESTROYS MINDS AND REAPS SOULS, reimagined as captivating psych-pop. Absolutely marvellous and quite possibly my album of the year.
MAPS OF THE LOST MERRILY DOWN THE STREAM
The first of three spooky tales from the Maps Of The Lost podcast - an audio guidebook, written by Iain Rowan, to the lost places and the secret histories. Its entries show you what hides in the shadows, what stalks the moors, what is coming from under the ground, and why you should beware the last carriage in the last underground train because you may never get off. Be cautious, though - if you follow these maps, you may become lost yourself. Check them out for yourself here
MOONRITE HOUSE OF
GLASS
Another Gallic band, Moonrite is a psychedelic garage-rock duo formed in 2014 by two brothers from Grenoble, France. Leaning towards a mix of gothic psychedelic pop, they play music of a dark and groovy nature which sounds like the soundtrack to a lost 1970’s horror movie, featuring satanic goings-on on a remote Mediterranean island.
NOLAN POTTER’S NIGHTMARE BAND SINGING A SINGLE SONG OF SATAN
This Austen-based eight-piece sound like an army of
bewitching pixies – their debut album, NIGHTMARE FOREVER, released in 2019, is
a wild lysergic prog-trip through the wildest reaches of the psych, an absolute
triumph of tuned percussion, whimsical melody, analog synths, wandering flutes
and surreal, blissed-out psychedelia, the likes of which they just don’t make
any more. This is a magical release, highly psychedelic, visionary, cathartic,
taking you to lost realms of the imagination and altered states of
consciousness, a phantasmagorical LSD-dosed trip through Trump’s America
re-written as a medieval allegory where elves and wizards inhabit a breezy
expansive landscape evoking the spirit of Middle Earth. Mind-bending, to say
the least.
THE VAMPIRE SOUND INCORPORATION NECRONOMANIA
Necronomania is a
groovy little track taken from the soundtrack to 1971 erotic horror film
‘Vampyros Lesbos’, a melange of B-Grade horror and twisted erotica, dubbed horrotica by director Jess Franco, which
starred doomed Spanish seductress Soledad Miranda, who died in a car crash
shortly after the film’s release. The Vampire Sound Incorporation is the nom de plume by which German soundtrack
composer Manfred Hubler and krautrock guitarist
Siegfried ‘Siggi’ Schwab, of Embryo, fame produced kitsch switched-on go-go
soundtracks for Franco’s freaked-out artistic vision. The soundtrack to
‘Vampyros Lesbos’ was released as VAMPYROS LESBOS: SEXADELIC DANCE PARTY in
1995 and consists of film music for three Franco films: ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, ‘She
Killed in Ecstasy’, and ‘The Devil Came From Akasava’ - it was a surprise hit
in the mid-90s when it got taken up by the short-lived lounge and space-age pop
revival of which, I, for one, was a fan.
ROKUROKUBI DEATH
& THE MAIDEN
Brighton-based
psychedelic folk duo Rokurokubi (Rose and Edmund Io) offer up a
patchouli-soaked masterclass in dark, siren-sung acid-folk on their second
album IRIS, FLOWER OF VIOLENCE, released earlier this year. Featuring lysergic,
hypnagogic tales of revenge, fairy-tale wyrdness and catharsis, the album is a
truly gorgeous mix of nursery-rhyme vocals and baroque chamber folk
arrangements, sometimes embellished with truly thrilling blasts of wild
distortion. Death & The Maiden is
recognisably folk rock, more at home to Fairport Convention than the twisted
nursery-rhyme stylings of Comus or Mr. Fox, say, but is, nevertheless, an
understated marvel.
TRAFFIC JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE
...as is this take on the folk traditional John Barleycorn by Traffic, who recorded
the song for their 1970 album JOHN BARLEYCORN MUST DIE. Whilst the rest of the
album leaned towards a certain jazz-rock progressiveness, the title track, an
ode to barley-based libations adapted by Steve Winwood from the old British
folk song (versions of which date back to 16th century Scotland) kept its roots intact while
brewing its own concoction of folk-rock similar to that of Fairport Convention.
Its main character was “cut off at the
knee” with scythes, pricked in the heart with pitchforks and “ground between two stones.” But before
anybody thinks this is an act of brutal murder, “John Barleycorn” is an
anthropomorphized version of barley, and therefore he was being “killed” to
make whiskey and beer. As Julian Cope once said: "John Barleycorn died for somebody's sins but not mine."
MAPS OF THE LOST AVOIDING WOE IN WISTMAN’S WOOD
If you go looking for these eerie
tales of Facebook, you can have them sent directly to your phone. Here’s the link
GRYPHON THE UNQUIET GRAVE
Gryphon
were one of the more unusual of the folk-rock prog groups to come out of
England in the 1970s, mostly because they were able to pull off the trick of
blending traditional Medieval folk, Baroque instrumentation and Renaissance
classicism into their sound. The Unquiet
Grave, an English folk song thought to date from 1400, in which a young man
mourns his dead love too hard and prevents her from obtaining peace, is taken
from their eponymously titled debut album, released in 1974, when people could
get away with that sort of thing a lot more than they can nowadays. Not to everyone’s
taste, but the world is better for it.
HONEY
LTD. LOVE, THE DEVIL
Honey Ltd
were a short-lived girl-band who were briefly signed to Lee Hazelwood’s LHI
record label. However, despite the psychedelic cowboy’s success with
Nancy Sinatra and more, being on Lee Hazlewood Industries was no fast-track to
success. Their sound, which blended social commentary with harmony-drenched,
psych-soul pop should have won hearts and minds, yet they disappeared after
releasing just the one album in 1968, a vinyl rarity that now, as is so often
the case, regularly fetches upwards of $2,000. In 2013 THE COMPLETE LHI
RECORDINGS was released, collecting everything they recorded during this
period, which, in fairness, only amounts to 13 tracks, including this lovely
little instrumental piece Love, The
Devil. They never really had the time to grow, so we’ll never know how good
they could have become, but think of The Mamas and Papas without the Papas, and
that might give you some idea.
CAPTAIN HOOK AND HIS CREW
PHONE CALL
One of those inexplicably weird train-crash Christian
recordings of which I’m so fond, or, at least, morbidly fascinated by, mostly
because there is nothing stranger than this stuff. Captain Hook - Von R. Staum
to his mother - lost an arm and a leg in a motorcycle accident at the age of 17
in 1960 and this somehow led him to God and a Christian Pirate ministry aimed
at kids. It also means that he really had a hook! He seems to have recorded two
LPs with his crew, and he even had his own kiddie TV show, assisted by not one but two pirate
pals (Fish Hook and Seaweed Sam), a ventriloquist doll called Sharkey, and Mrs. Hook, who reminds us that “God is not a child abuser.” ANCHORS
AWAY! appears to have been recorded in 1970 - they don’t maketh them like this
anymore, for which we can be truly thankful, I guess. Amen.
SCREAMING
LORD SUTCH JACK THE RIPPER
THE
MOVE NIGHT OF FEAR
Night Of Fear, the debut single by The Move, is
essentially a litany of supernatural occurrences, such as moving
shadows in a hallway, shifting pictures in a bedroom and chills along the spine
- although it may simply be describing a bad trip. Despite this, it reached #2
in the British charts when released in 1966. Eagle-eared listeners will have
recognised a touch of Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture in the main riff.
MANDY MORTON AND SPRIGUNS WITCHFINDER
Formed as
an acoustic duo at their own folk club in Cambridge in 1972, Spriguns Of Tolgus
were something of a cult act when compared to fellow travellers such as
Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span or even Trees. As other members joined they
took on a fuller folk-rock sound but, unable to find the same level of success
as their peers, they disbanded in 1978 following the release of their final
album, MAGIC LADY, released as Mandy Morton and Spriguns. This was very much
their best album with Morton more than living up to her new top billing with a
beautifully crafted set of songs that focussed on black magic and death - Witchfinder sets the tone quite nicely.
Following the band’s demise, Morton continued her career in Scandinavia well
into the 80s. I think these days she appears to be the author of the 'No. 2
Feline Detective Agency' series of novels about which I know nothing. A quick
Google search suggests that witchcraft doesn't feature in any of them.
FREDDIE JONES THE RED ROOM
An eerie little tale as told by
the superb Freddie Jones on Spinechillers, a supernatural and unabashedly
spooky version of the children’s classic television show, Jackanory, which
broadcast on the BBC in 1980. The Red Room, written by H.G. Wells in 1894,
tells the simple tale of a sceptical narrator who agrees to experience a
terrifying vigil at Lorraine Castle’s famous scarlet haunted room. Expect a
chill up the spine. And possibly down it too.
MOON
WIRING CLUB CATWALK OF THE PHANTOM
BAROQUE
Catwalk Of The Phantom Baroque is taken from THE ONLY CAT LEFT
IN TOWN, quite possibly the sister album to last years’ feline-inspired THE
MOST UNUSUAL CAT IN THE VILLAGE. It features four long-form multi-temporal
compositions that elongate accepted components into a psychedelic baroque
gothic sludge-rock sunken-techno rolling ebb tide of eternal grey-green mist.
Cronky, shonky and beautifully confusing, if you’ve ever attempted to summon up
an immaculate ancestor to facilitate a phantom baroque catwalk in the dead
centre of town whilst malevolent entities gaze on from the other side of the
mirror, then Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club and his wyrd attendant beats are
just the thing.
JOHN
SCOTT SYMPTOMS
A
trifling little piece, but nonetheless delightful for all that. This was
composed by film composer and conductor John Scott for ‘Symptoms’, a British
exploitation horror film released in 1974, which follows the tribulations of a
woman who goes to stay with a friend at her family remote English manor where
‘all is not as it seems’. I don’t believe the soundtrack was ever released, and
the film itself languished on a poorly produced VHS edition for years before finally
receiving a Blu-Ray release in 2016, but I found this on a bootleg album of
rare U.K. horror and sci-fi themes called HERITAGE OF BLOOD which doesn’t
appear to actually exist.
TRACY STRANGE LOVE
The
mysterious Tracy was a UK teen singer from Wembley who may have found fame of
sorts as Anna Hamilton, a young contestant on that stalwart of British talent
shows Opportunity Knocks in 1969 (clog dancing is mentioned at this point, but
the provenance is unclear). If this is indeed she, Tracy, real name Andrea
Gerome, went on to record three singles for Columbia UK record producer Bob
Barratt, none of which appear to have struck a chord with the listening public.
In 1971 she was approached to sing Strange
Love, featured in the Hammer Horror ‘Lust For A Vampire’, which starred the
tragic Yutte Stensgaard (tragic inasmuch as, following the failure of her film
career, and a six-month stint hosting a game show with British king of comedy,
Bob Monkhouse, she emigrated to the USA in the mid-seventies and took up a job
selling air time for a Christian radio station in Oregon). The version of Strange Love that appears in the film,
which I’ve featured here, is a superior mix taken directly from the film’s
music and effects tape - she re-recorded an up-tempo pop version for the b-side
to her 1971 release, a cover of Freda Payne’s Rock me In The Cradle (Of Your Lovin’ Arms), which failed to set
the charts ablaze. After this Tracy, or Anne, or Andrea, returned to obscurity,
a footnote in the history of Hammer Films. I wonder what became of her? The
internet has very little to say on the subject. It took me over two hours of
research to piece together what little is known and tie it all together in this
paragraph. A mystery, then.
MAPS OF THE LOST MERIDIAN
HOLY
TRINITY INFERNO 2
HOLY
TRINITY is an album so at home to the likes of Coven, Sabbath Assembly and the
authentic spirit of occult 1960s acid folk that the band claims this album was
recorded in 1969. In fact, it was recorded last year, and the band, Holy
Trinity are from Russia, but clearly operating in some sort of timewarp wherein
the West Coast sounds of the Doors and Jefferson Airplane were relocated to a
suburb of Moscow under the aegis of a pre-perestroika Kimski Fowleski. Recorded
on vintage equipment from the USSR and beyond, the album is full of folk
overtures, eerie blues scales, psychedelic motives, hard rock notes and the
spirit of Ray Manzarek weaving haunted, trippy keyboard motifs throughout. Inferno 2 is the sound of the heavy-psych
60s passed through a filter of religion, love and Russian folk tales.
Marvellous.
ANTON LAVEY BOOK
OF SATAN - VERSE FOUR
Don’t get me wrong - I’d much rather live next door to a
Satanist than a Christian - but when you sit down to listen to Anton LeVay’s
reading from his own text, ‘The Satanic Bible’, you realise how much of it
sounds like the ideology adopted by the Nazi party. This is because much of it
was cribbed from Ragnar Redbeard’s (made up name) 1896 book ‘Might Is Right’, a
Social Darwinist treatise that posits a hatred of weakness, and that only the
strength of physical might can establish moral right, a position adopted by the
far right, and the Nazi party in particular; although, in fairness to LaVey, he
removed that book’s inherent racism, antisemitism and misogyny from his own
text. LaVey’s reading can be found on his recording SATANIC MASS: THE FIRST
AUTHENTIC RECORDING IN HISTORY OF A SATANIC CEREMONY, recorded live at The
Church Of Satan, San Francisco, California, Friday 13th September, III Anno
Satanas (1967 to you and me). Side one of the album features an audio recording
of the baptism of LaVey's daughter, Zeena, into The Church of Satan. Side two features excerpts from the
then-unpublished book, ‘The Satanic Bible’, recited by LaVey over the music of
Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner and John Philip Sousa - it was never a
runaway best-seller, but remains something of an artefact in its own right. I
can’t be doing with taking it too seriously, what with a personal predilection
towards the ACIM side of things and all, so I include a few extraneous sound
effects in the background. Not that I doubt LaVey’s integrity, but I suspect he
was only in it for the sex, drugs and fucking Jayne Mansfield.
ALL THEM WITCHES
VOODOO CHILE
More at home to The Doors than the Experience, this extended
version of the classic Hendrix track Voodoo
Chile, is given a heavy blues vibe that positions them somewhere between
Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer, and taken from the Nashville band’s self-released
album recorded live at The V Club, called, if you can find it at all,
HUNTINGTON, WV 10/4/14, an album so apparently rare that it doesn’t appear
anywhere on their CV.
