View from a darkened room

Not the person from Porlock

Blogtastic




The great thing about a blog is that I can write a post about how difficult it is for me to find the time to write a post. Next week, expect a post about how I can't find the time to write about how I can't find the time to write anything. This could be an on going series that only ends with the exhaustion of writer and reader (if there's any left0, as I spiral down into a wormhole of insanity. Yet again I'm not finding the time to finish part two of the cliff-hanging serial, chasing revolution, though I'm almost there. Been mainly writing it during the odd quiet moment at work. The problem isn't just the time, or being visited by someone from Porlock, I'm being unusually picky about how it reads for some reason, rather than just banging it out as I'd normally do.

 

 

Mick Farren

The death of Farren is the loss of another iconoclast. Not just a rock n roller, or journalist or any other third thing, he embodied the genuine revolutionary spirit of the Sixties ties unlike the majority of his peers who made their names and money out of the hippie culture.

 

 

His autobiography, Give the anarchist a cigarette, is a really good read as well as stripping bare the bullshit about the period. By one of those synchronistic moments that crop up, I got my copy of his collected writings, Elvis died for somebody's sins but not mine, the day after he died. What is so good about the early writings I've read so far, is his awareness even in the sixties of not just the limits of rock n roll to change the world but of how bands that begin to find fame immediately lose contact with their support base. There's a copy of an open letter from Farren and his co-editors at International Times to Pete Townsend where they criticise the Who for this exact reason. The collection also includes the classic NME piece, The Titanic sails at dawn.

You can buy it here.

 

Listening in...

I've been listening to Routes of Rockabilly - a compilation from Fantastic Voyage Records. Almost everything on the three cds is worth listening to but the track I've listened to the most is this from Arthur Guitar Boogie Smith, Who shot Willie. This is because my 5 year old step son keeps pressing play on it on the way to school.

 

I've also been listeing to a Chess records collection that has Howling Wolf's Smokestack Lightning on it.

 

What isn't there to like about this?

I was inspired by borrowing a compilation of music by Epic Soundtracks from the library to look for Midget Submarines on youtube. C.ouldn't find it so here is ammunition train instead

 

 

Reading matter

I was browsing on Who makes the Nazis when I came across Ben Watson's Music, violence and truth, one of the best pieces about the relationship between noise and (as) music. When I reread it, it just made so much sense in the context of the time since it was first written. Worth reading by anyone who likes noise music and as usual, Watson makes satisfying sideswipes at talentless poseurs. I've also been dipping into the same author's Honesty is explosive, a collection of his music reviews (which also includes Music, violence and truth). Reading collected music journalism is a bit like eating yesterday's porridge but with Watson it is more like biting into a satisfying German sausage. Purely by synchronicity, I'm also reading Esther Leslie's Walter Benjamin which is a very good introduction to Benjamin.