Boyd Rice-Iconoclast

Somebody else I'm very much looking forward to seeing on 13th May at the Mute Short Circuit event is NON(Boyd Rice) as his music and ideas have been a pretty constant companion over the last two and a half decades or more and he's someone whose activities never cease to be of enormous interest. It's also over fifteen years since the only other time I've seen him live, when he played at Club Disobey at The Hacienda in Manchester on a bill that also featured Pan Sonic (then called Panasonic) and DJ Beekeeper (aka Bruce Gilbert from Wire). I feel that I'm in need of a top-up.

Boyd Rice is also the subject of one of the best things that has come my way for a very, very long time, "Iconoclast", a four hour documentary spread across three discs, in which director Larry Wessel interviews him extensively about his life, career and personal obsessions, as well as many of the people with whom he has associated or collaborated over the years, all this being interspersed with music from across this period, as well as archive footage and images. Here's a trailer for it.

On the first disc, titled "Lemon Grove" after the town in California where he grew up, we find out about his background - how his grandmother was born at midnight on Halloween in a graveyard and how his father, Beverley, chose the most male sounding name possible for his son following the trouble he had had with his own - as well as his childhood wherein he realised early on that things were going to be different compared to other people and that joining the rat race would never be an option. School seems to have been rather a bore for Rice - he says at one point that he only started to learn once he had left - and his childhood and adolescent years were spent dreaming up pranks, visiting tiki bars with his parents and absorbing choice aspects of pop culture such as the music of Bobby Sherman (the lyrical content of which which he likens to Charles Manson's "Cease to Exist"), the fashion designs of Rudi Gernreich and Martin Denny records bought in thrift stores. A strong enthusiasm for occult television series such as "Dark Shadows" and "Strange Paradise" and reading a magazine called "Man, Myth and Magic" all added to the coalescing aesthetic, as well as sending him running to the local library to read everything he could on black magic, the tarot and gnosticism.

In 1969, aged 13, he claims to have truly come alive in a year when, aside from the pilot for "The Partridge Family" being broadcast, Anton LaVey's "Satanic Bible" was first published, Tiny Tim was still popular and in the charts and Charles Manson and his Family committed the Tate/La Bianca murders. He says that to understand anything about Boyd Rice you must first truly understand the importance of the year 1969.

Next came Glam Rock which led to enthusiasms for the likes of The New York Dolls, Gary Glitter and The Sweet, as well as visits to Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco on Sunset Strip, a place he describes as Fellini-esque in its decadence. More importantly, though, around this time, Rice discovered Dada, this combining powerfully with his playful wish to destabilise the status quo and a growing belief that nothing need ever be viewed from a fixed point or limited to singular interpretations. As well as providing a philosophical foundation for his pranks – in 1976 he was arrested and made the national news for attempting to present America’s first lady Betty Ford with the skinned sheep’s head that he’d been using as a prop at an anti-abortion demonstration that he’d infiltrated – Dada ideas also largely shaped the form of his early artistic experimentation. As well as producing photographs of things that don’t exist and paintings which can be hung in whatever manner suits their owner, he also hooked up with a group of San Francisco Dadaists and began regularly performing sound pieces live, such as having half a dozen music boxes playing simultaneously (a trick he’d learnt off Unity Mitford, I think) or pushing a television set out of a third floor window so that it smashed on the pavement below. Then, at the suggestion of percussionist Z’ev, he self-released his “Black Album” of 1977 which presented an early example of ambient music before such a term existed. Brian Eno, apparently, was nervous when he found out he had some competition. Although it was a very limited pressing and came housed in a plain black sleeve, the record was a success in that copies found their way into the hands of influential people such as journalist Jon Savage, Mute Records’ Daniel Miller, who reissued the album in 1981, and Genesis P-Orridge, as well as Rice’s favourite artist at the time, Arman.

     

Working under the name NON, initially in collaboration with Robert Turman, the next release was a 7” single, “Knife Ladder”/”Mode of Infection”, which could be played at any speed and using either the conventional hole in the middle or an off-centre second hole to offer maximum playback possibilities. Then came “Pagan Muzak”, a 7” single housed in a 12” sleeve, which took the idea further as, in addition to the aforementioned features, it consisted of seventeen locked grooves, like the closing grooves on a record, which will play continually in a loop until the needle is lifted or pushed on. As Rice says in the film, punk rock music was of no interest to him as it seemed only to offer a harder-edged, faster rehash of what had gone before rather than a radical, ripping apart of all prior conceptions as he was now attempting to do. The first disc ends with NON regularly playing live on the West Coast alternative scene, on bills featuring the likes of The Zeros, Monitor and 45 Grave, Rice playing his roto-guitar which he had built himself. The sound of the electric fan brushing against the strings is described as having been like a bomber taking off in the immediate vicinity.

Disc Two focuses on the decade or so Boyd Rice spent living in San Francisco after relocating in 1978. Working as an alarm agent, he would drive around the city at night dressed in a uniform and carrying a gun and would respond to any security alarms which had been activated, in most cases by rats, he tells us. In addition to this, he made a number of important connections during his time in the city, the first one of these being Ray Dennis Steckler whose 1964 film “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies”, he says, changed his life. Eager to find out some background on the star of a number of Steckler films, Cash Flagg, whom he admired so much, Rice tells us how delighted he was to find out that director and actor were, in fact, one and the same. Not only this, though, Steckler also turned out to be the director behind a number of the scopitone jukebox music videos, like those for the Kessler Sisters, which he’d recently seen for the first time and which had blown his mind, too.

He also became involved with the team behind the RESearch books and proved to be a lively and inspirational contributor to their “Incredibly Strange Films” and “Incredibly Strange Music” publications, as well as others on “Industrial Culture” and “Pranks”.

           

One enthusiastic reader of the “Incredibly Strange Films” book was Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan, who contacted RESearch to find out who these people were who shared his taste in films, this leading, in turn, to a meeting with Boyd Rice and the two developing a close and long-lasting friendship. Not only did LaVey share Rice’s interest in obscure cinema and “the dark side” but it appears he, too, was quite a prankster, this all being an integral part of the Satanic archetype we're told, who would adopt different personas such as the U-Boat Captain, the Chinaman and a gangster character for prolonged periods, as well setting off an electronic whoopee cushion device to disorient his visitors. He even programmed his synthesizers to produce a range of classified fart sounds, as well as playing the instruments, along with his collection of organs, more seriously for Rice and friends on weekly all-night visits. Rice went on to encourage LaVey to record some of his music at home and this was released during the mid-1990s.

       

Another person he met during this period and seemingly helped to release music was Charles Manson and Rice gives some details of his eight hour visits to San Quentin which continued upto the day he inadvertently turned up with a bullet still in his trouser pocket from the firearm training he’d recently received for his job, this causing Manson to spend two weeks in solitary confinement and a parting of their ways.

The final section of the disc deals with Rice’s appropriation of the Wolfsangel and Cross of Lorraine as symbols for NON, as well as his interest in Nazi and totalitarian aesthetics which led to his collaboration with Adam Parfrey on the “Apocalypse Culture” publications. This, combined with some jealousies he perceives on the part of the RESearch team, then led to a section of the San Francisco scene branding him a fascist and the city being sprayed with slogans such as “Boyd Rice go home to Europe”. One can't help thinking that posing for a photograph with Amercian Front leader Bob Heick, both holding knives and wearing the group's insignia, didn't really help his cause, although this isn't mentioned in the film. At the disc's close, he has relocated to Denver, Colorado, lured by its anachronistic feel and then being pleased to find “Carnival of Souls” playing at a local cinema on his first night in town.

The final disc then, moreorless, picks up where the last one ended, focussing on the controversy aroused as a result of Rice's growing reputation as a neo-Nazi. In one scene, we see a group of people picketing one of his gigs, objecting rather single-mindedly to lyrics in one of his songs requesting that Benito Mussolini and Emperor Nero "come back", whilst elsewhere one of his friends explains that he is simply somebody engaged in an empirical study of evil, implying that he is prepared to publicly explore areas of taboo that others are squeamish about touching. In one of a series of conversations we see between Rice and Christian talk show host Bob Larson, a man he seems to get along with quite happily, he explains that a totalitarian aesthetic appeals to him because it offers a degree of order which most people lack in their lives and that it calls upon people to apply strategies to achieve their goals, this again being something not undertaken by most people. In amongst this and an excerpt from a radio show where Rice argues rather uncomfortably live on air with the mother of Sharon Tate, Larson asks him, at one point, if he has ever felt like he's in need of an exorcism. Rice explains, "Bob's been working away at me for the last fourteen years or so. He never gives up." Larson is later delighted to hear Rice explain his approach to social interaction, finding that it echoes the sentiments to be found in The Sermon on the Mount.

More stories of visits to Anton LaVey also appear on the disc, as well as details of Rice's involvement with people like Rozz Williams, formerly of Christian Death, his girlfriend Margaret Radnick and The Partridge Family Temple whose member Sean Partridge spends quite a while explaining their background and philosophy. We also see him working on one of his Unpop paintings, hear tales of further pranks, see him and Death in June performing a live version of "People" from the "Music, Martinis and Misanthropy" with improvised lyrics and take a visit to Tiki Boyd's, the bar he designed in Denver.

       

However, the Boyd Rice I struggle to get along with and which seemed most to come to the fore in the mid-1990s is also present at times on the disc. For example, fired by his experiences at a place called The Lion's Lair in Denver where young girls would, we're told, walk around naked and seemingly sit at his feet, we hear of him sending the younger Gidget Gein a painting of a skull which he'd articulated using the menstrual blood of a thirteen year old girl who we're told he bragged to have deflowered. He also tells us of late night telephone conversations he used to have with Tiny Tim wherein the latter fantasised about Heaven being a place where he could have sex with young girls and of the two of them competing for the attentions of the same girl. He speaks quite admiringly, too, about Tiny Tim's atittude that women are like horses who need steering in the direction their rider wishes rather than being allowed their free will, echoing this with Charles Manson's views that they are like dogs who must be selected and trained from a young age if they are to be truly obedient. Although not mentioned in the film, this is the Boyd Rice who wears a t-shirt with rape boldly printed on it one photograph, who released the single "I'm Just Like You" which skits at the mentally ill under the name of The Tards and who talked of wanting to retreat to a place devoid of "unruly niggers" on his "Hatesville" album of 1995. We do get to see him performing his piece "How God Makes Little Girls" live, though, and much to the delight of a whooping audience but the whole thing comes across as being a bit like something from a school playground and a bit sad. It's one thing wanting to confront taboos and double standards and trying to  get up the noses of hypocritical liberals but it's another acting like an arsehole in doing so.

So, by the end of "Iconoclast", Boyd Rice sems to come across as truly representing all that he says he stands for, a manifestation of both the good and evil natures living concurrently in human beings and also someone with a profound love of popular culture from previous decades and an admirable thirst to explore all areas that interest him in great depth, his frustrations that others do not share his loves and enthusiasms in the same way, perhaps, leading to his misanthropic tinges.

This is an amazingly detailed and fascinating set of discs for which Larry Wessel must be congratulated unreservedly and the fact that so much of Boyd Rice still remains left uncovered, such as details of collaborations with people like Rose McDowall on the brilliant Spell album, Frank Tovey on "Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing" and Coil on the Sickness of Snakes project, his leading role in the 1999 film "Pearls Before Swine", the part he played in releasing records by Johanna Went, Ralph Gean and Little Fyodor, as well as his enthusiasm for sixties girl singers ("The Black Album" apparently features every recorded instance of Lesley Gore singing the word cry and his single "Solitude" sounds suspiciously like it was constructed out of Tammy St. John's "Dark Shadows and Empty Hallways") and people like Abba says more about Rice's achievements and multi-facetedness than oversight on the part of the director. I can't recommend this enough to anyone and it's a snip at $30. Contact him today and buy one.

http://www.iconoclastmovie.com/

Whilst you're at it, I strongly recommend trying to find a link to Boyd Rice's appearance on Howie Pyro's Intoxica Radio show from April last year when he went along armed with a selection of his favourite sixties girl records, playing some brilliant stuff like Dusty Springfield's "The Corrupt Ones", Anita Harris' "Upside Down" and one of Peggy March's fantastic German records.

Chris & Cosey : London Institute of Contemporary Arts

Around the time that I started this blog, Friday 4th February to be absolutely precise, I charged down to London after work to see Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti performing a selection of the material they released during the 1980s and 1990s under the name of Chris & Cosey, this being the first time any of these tracks had been played live in over a decade. As most people will know, the duo now record and perform using a hybrid of their "surnames" Carter Tutti and this "exclusive" event was, no doubt, intended to tie in with the recent re-release on vinyl of four of their best loved albums also showcased in this five minute video clip I've snatched from their website.

4 CHRIS & COSEY ALBUMS IN 5 MINS (1980s' stylee) from Chris Carter on Vimeo.

Anyway, I was extremely glad I made the effort to travel half the length of the country as, not only did it provide me with another opportunity to see support band Factory Floor who I'd enjoyed enormously when they played in Leeds with The Horrors a couple of summers ago, but Chris & Cosey were completely compelling and provided one of my best live experiences of all-time ever. I thought that I'd missed the moment by not writing about it straightaway but watching a couple of clips on You Tube today brought it all flooding back so here goes.

Now, when Throbbing Gristle split up in 1981, it was C&C who took with them and developed the sequenced electronics, gesturing oh-so slightly towards disco and the commercially viable, that was in evidence on tracks like "AB/7A", "Hot On The Heels Of Love" and "Adrenalin", as well as Chris Carter's solo cassette release from 1980 "The Space Between", he being the ingredient in the band most renowned for his techno wizardry and love of the swirling electro dreamscapes of people like Tangerine Dream, as well as the paradoxical phenomena which was Abba's sometimes complex, sometimes seemingly unadulterated ultrapop - often all of this at the same time. Combine this with the bitter-sweet, seductive-yet-commanding vocals of Cosey Fanni Tutti, the foghorns in the night blasts of her cornet playing, both of which are perhaps best exemplified on TG's "Heathen Earth" album, and the double-edged atmospherics of "Hometime" (her solo contribution to the album "D.O.A.") and you're a good way towards getting a sense of the Chris & Cosey sound and aesthetic which then evolved along with the technology and developing tastes, both in Britain and abroad, for rhythmic and danceable electronic music during the eighties and early nineties. Titles like "Synaesthesia", "Pagan Tango", "Musique Fantastique", "Techno Primitiv", "Exotica" and "Trance" are also quite apposite reference points.

When the duo took to the stage in February, somewhere around nine thirty, a lot of people were still at the bar and the black studio-like hall was less than a quarter full, this meaning that the majority of those in attendance missed Cosey's prologue to the performance during which she said a few words about the important place that the ICA holds in their history, it having been the venue for COUM Transmissions "Prostitution" exhibition in 1976 where TG played one of their earliest gigs. She also  took the opportunity to briefly dedicate "the energies we create tonight" to the recently departed Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and "his sense of indulgence and fun." As he would have said, she told us, "don't be sad. Enjoy yourselves," and with that they launced into a rendition of the haunting "Dr. John (Sleeping Stephen)" from 1987's "Exotica" album, the rhythmic slabs of noise, funereal chords and electronic stabs and pulses providing an elegiac and incantatory opening to the set over which Cosey unfolded her "Porphyria's Lover" type narrative of strangulation, followed by the ritual undressing and washing of the corpse. The closing words of "good night" had a particularly apt resonance on this occasion.

From here on, for the next hour and a half or so, they played a set which seemed very carefully planned in its evolution and purpose, as the rich, multi-layered and hypnotic electronics provided by a purposeful Chris Carter, operating a bank of keyboards, sequencers and oscillascopes at the back of the stage, cloaked and seduced the audience in a manner which seemed to possess magical potential. There's an old clip of Amii Stewart somewhere, singing "Knock on Wood" on something like "Seaside Special", whilst all around her a really disparate group of people perform the most frenetic and uninhibited dances, all seemingly lost in their own worlds, as though under the influence of one of those humiliating TV hypnotists and this was the effect the music seemed to be having on a large number of those gathered at the ICA. As you looked around, all kinds of people, seemingly unconnected, swirled, gestured and dipped as though involuntarily entranced whilst others gawped at Cosey who blew and banged a range of complementary instruments and provided the vocals, her voice often adding to the tonal blends rather than being a conduit for verbal ideas. For the most part, she didn't speak directly to the audience, this adding to the sense of it being a pre-meditated aural journey in which to become fully absorbed, although at one point she did say something along the lines of, "do you remember all these songs? It's been such a long time." This was possibly when they did "Driving Blind" from 1983's "Songs of Love and Lust" album with its lyrics of "driving blind to hell knows where" and "and I'm never like this when I'm not with you" which seem to epitomise the atmosphere I'm trying to describe above. This track received one of the largest cheers of the night and some kind soul filmed it and put it up on You Tube.

Then, as a finale, they pulled out their pop almost-hit "October(Love Song)" from 1982, the celebratory nature and sweetness of which seemed to unlock the spell which had been wound over the last ninety minutes or so. As Chris Carter continued to concentrate on the job in hand, Cosey seemed to be having quite a jolly time making sprinkling gestures with her fingers to accompany the cascading synths and bopping backwards and forwards as she delivered her lyrics of unbridled love and passion. There must have been some irony in there - it's all such a long way from "Zyklon B Zombie" and "Slug Bait" - although none seemed evident.

Anyway, there's some reflections on a memorable night. I'm off to see them again in May when Carter Tutti play at the Mute Short Circuit festival at The Roundhouse and am very much looking forward to it.

Jacques Dutronc / Les Surfs

It's all gone a bit too German and artsy on here so I think we'll have somethings French to break it up a bit. I'll dedicate the first of these songs to Nick Clegg and his friends in the Liberal Democrat Party as they begin their spiral into oblivion for the next century or two and the second one to anybody who has lost or is about to lose their job as a result of the spending cuts currently being introduced by our "wonderful" British  Government as they try to finish the work started by the despicable Margaret Thatcher and her cronies in destroying public services and further widening the gap between the wealthy and less well off.

Die Tödliche Doris-Chöre & Soli(1983)

Mention of Die Tödliche Doris in the previous piece about Nan Goldin has made me want to share the joy and excitement I felt when I finally became the proud possessor of their "Chöre & Soli" box set a few weeks ago when it made one of its very rare appearances on Ebay. I don't mind saying, either, that I payed rather a lot of money for it as it's an item I've coveted since the day I read about its imminent release in the 8th October 1983 issue of the NME all those years ago.

This was actually my first brush with the band/art collective who had, by then, been in operation for about three years and had released several cassettes, as well as an album and 12" for journalist Alfred Hilsberg's Hamburg-based Zick Zack label, an endeavour which cannot be praised enough for also bringing us some of the earliest releases by the likes of Einstürzende Neubauten, Andreas Dorau, Die Krupps, Palais Schaumburg and X-Mal Deutschland during the opening years of the 1980s, as well as other fantastic records by less internationally reaching artists such as Saal 2, Wirtschaftswunder,  Abwärts, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Der Radierer.

As well as their musical output, The Deadly Doris had also been busy making films, including the infamous "Das Lebens Des Sid Vicious"(1981) in which sometime collaborator Dagmar Dimitroff's two and a half year old son plays the eponymous subject whose life is distilled into just ten minutes of quite startling footage. A couple of stills from the film, which sees him toddling around in a swastika t-shirt, playing with a rubber knife in a squalid apartment, fighting with and murdering a four year old Nancy Spungen and overdosing on heroin, were included in the article and these, along with talk of the aforementioned box set and a growing fascination for anything to do with the increasingly documented Berlin scene which had brought us Neubauten, Malaria and others, had me hooked. As a twelve year old with quite a limited income, though, the delights of coming into contact with any actual Die Tödliche Doris product were several years away.

A selection of their films, by the way, was on display at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin a few years ago and made for extremely interesting viewing. They also made it over to Newcastle around the same time for a showing at the Star and Shadow Cinema when a tiny exhibition of the band's work was staged at the record shop alt.vinyl in the city. Quite a few of these films can be found on the internet, including the one mentioned above, although not the memorable "John Heys Sings"(1984) which, in the words of Chris Bohn (Wire Magazine, July 2006) features "an American who looks like an animated figure from an Otto Dix painting (and who) croons a theatre song in his pension, accompanied by his landlord, in a style that evokes Isherwood and Weimar". Here's a little selection of what is out there, though:

Das Leben Des Sid Vicious by Saborapie

After the punk inspired, industrial leanings of their outings on Zick Zack, "Chöre & Soli" is much more in the dadaesque spirit of the band which is, perhaps, best exemplified by their performance at Die Grosse Untergangsshow: Festival Genialer Dilletanten, held in a circus tent near Berlin's Potsdamer Platz on 4th September 1981. On this occasion, like the rest of the band, frontman Wolfgang Müller was painted and covered in fur, with the addition of feathers attached to his fingers in order to hamper his attempts at playing the violin. A similar example of these tendencies came when they were asked to perform in front of The Wall for a special Berlin edition of German music programme "Rockpalast" in 1984. Free to choose their spot, Die Tödliche Doris selected a section obscured by a mound of sand and then performed two pieces based on the theme of natural catastrophes. In the first of these, "Naturkatastrophenballet", the three members march and sway on the spot in muddy puddles, performing a kind of dance to accompany Müller's dispassionate account of various natural catastrophes. The "musical element" is provided by Käthe Kruse whose movements rattle the teacups and the like which dangle on threads from her arms, as well as the sheet of metal attached to her back. In the second section, "Naturkatastrophenkonzert", Kruse spits fire onto a microphone positioned in front of the mound and, as it burns into uselessness, first Müller and then Nicholas Utermöhlen appear over the obstruction, approach and perform little ditties, Müller on the violin and the latter on an accordian, the keys of which have been covered with drawing pins. As the microphone eventually gives up the ghost, the reassembled group, now in a line, perform a valedictory dance. Marcel Duchamp, I'm sure, would have approved.

"Chöre & Soli", instead of being a conventional 12" record, came as a greeny blue box, limited to 1000 copies and released jointly by Gelbe Musik (Berlin) and Pure Freude (Düsseldorf), and contained a set of eight two inch coloured discs, a battery operated player, the like of which was usually found embedded inside talking dolls, and a booklet containing lyrics, photographs and other text. Across sixteen tracks, one on each side of the discs and each lasting upto twenty seconds, the band and occasional fourth member, Berlin model and actress Tabea Blumenschein, perform a series of squeaky nursery rhyme like accapela solos and choruses totally suited to the equipment on which they are presented and played, all sung in German except for one performed in English. In this latter track, the lyrics read: "You see, we come as friends. / Don't worry. / We know how to take care of ourselves. / So don't get heroic and try to follow me. / (You see we come as friends, you see we come as friends.)" Other examples of translated lyrics read: "The air is full of light / And I can see you well / My heart, it doesn't hear your laughter / It pumps itself so full of blood" or "(...up in the air) / We are two widows / And we live in the same house / And both lost our husbands on 20th May 1975 / (high up in the light) / We still cry" or "The musician passes you the hand / (white spots on the fingernails and the number seven on the heart line) / The Siamese cat eats grass... / See you in the wedding gear not over". Maybe I got the last one a bit wrong. I'm not great at German. I'm sure you get the picture, though. It might sound a bit silly but I love it and it certainly fulfilled their intention as explained by Müller in an interview: "We want to become the most independent band of all independent bands–even independent from a usual record player. But also independent from music-reviews and critics, which want to put you in her sound- and identity-system."

  

  

As an interesting coda, Die Tödliche Doris performed selections from "Chöre & Soli" live at the Delphi Palast in Berlin on New Year's Eve 1983/4 as part of an exhibition called "The Inclination Towards The Total Work Of Art" by Harold Szeemann. This was then released as a cassette which, like a lot of their output, has since been reissued in a very limited format by the Vinyl-on-Demand label. Here is a film featuring five pieces.

Although Die Tödliche Doris ceased to exist in 1987, their legend lives on and they still remain a source of fascination to me and I cherish everything related to them that I own. This above is just the tip of the iceberg, too.

NAN GOLDIN-Berlin Work

Nan Goldin first came to my attention when “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, her autobiographical film, was shown late one night on British television very soon after it was made in 1996. Luckily, I had the video recorder whirring and I have had the opportunity to watch it over again on numerous occasions and, as time has passed, she’s someone whose work and aesthetic I’ve grown to love, if that’s the right word to be using.

The story goes that Goldin started taking photographs in the late 1960s and during the early 1970s when she documented Boston’s gay and transsexual community, the fruits of which endeavour provided the material for her first solo show held in the city in 1973. Later in the decade, she studied photography at The Boston School of Fine Arts where she moved away from her earlier black and white work to begin producing the richly coloured images with which she is now associated and developing that which has been referred to as “The Goldin Style”. Rarely using natural light, she more usually illuminates her subjects through the careful manipulation of flash and then, using a technique called Cibachrome, she apparently prints from slides in order to achieve the saturation and vibrancy of colour which is one of the reasons her work is so instantly distinguishable from other photographers. I once accidentally bought a slide film in a Munich chemist and then, when I put it in to be developed in Boots back in England, as well as a telling off for potentially messing up their chemicals, I got holiday snaps with a Goldinesque tinge.

Anyway, in 1978, shortly after graduating, Goldin moved to The Bowery in New York and began to photograph and document the post-punk world in which she found herself, hard drug usage, heavy drinking and violent relationships being characteristic of her circle’s lifestyles and, consequently, the resultant work. When people talk about Nan Goldin, they often make the point about her work being highly autobiographical and personal as the subject matter is drawn from her immediate environment and a large cast of friends, some still living, some now dead, who populate her oeuvre. The phrase “snapshot” is also used a lot, too, as the images often have the unposed casualness of a quick snap which captures the fleeting moment rather than the carefully considered and arranged compositions of other art photographers. She, herself, has even said, "My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic...Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history." A connection has also been made here by some to the fact that Goldin’s sister committed suicide when the photographer was fourteen years old and that this has provided a highly personal motivation for wanting to capture and preserve the transient lives of those around her. Certainly, when one looks at her work, the awareness of such loss is never far away, as her photographs often feature “the ghosts” of those who have now passed on, as many of Goldin’s friends lost their lives to AIDS over the last twenty-five years or so. Probably the most famous of these is ex-John Waters acolyte Cookie Mueller with whom the photographer shared a friendship from 1976 to 1989. The series of fifteen photographs “Cookie Portfolio” which I once saw in Amsterdam are particularly moving, as they show the subject enjoying a night out with friends in one image, laughing uproariously in another, then later marrying the Italian artist and jewellery designer Vittorio Scarpati, going on to be captured standing physically drawn beside the coffin of her now dead husband who had succumbed to the disease and then, seven weeks later, lying peacefully in her own casket. Gaunt, hollow eyed men looking hauntedly at the camera or sharing dwindling time with loved ones are also recurrent in her work. The effect, though, is never sentimental, simply glances into life as it is unfolding like stills taken from a documentary.

  

When I was in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I was extremely pleased to find out that a show of her work was on display at the Berlinische Galerie, the 72 works exhibited being the product of several visits she made to the city from 1982 onwards and, in particular, her prolonged stay there when she was provided with a grant to go and work in Berlin in 1991. This was a previously undiscovered aspect of her work for me and what made it a particularly pleasing surprise was that, amongst portraits of people like Blixa Bargeld from Einstürzende Neubauten, the actress Tilda Swinton and other less known friends, were a small number of images featuring members of one of my very favourite bands of all time Die Tödliche Doris. Unbeknownst to me before I saw the show, she enjoyed quite a close friendship with them, struck up during her earliest visits to Berlin, Goldin living for a while with band member Käthe Kruse and going on to collaborate in the mid-nineties with Wolfgang Müller on a work called “Blue Tit”. In one, Nicholas Utermöhlen, who also died of an AIDS related illness in 1996, and a boyfriend are seen drinking at Berlin post-punk hot-spot Dschungel whilst in more intimate pictures Käthe Kruse is seen stepping into the bath in 1984 and almost a decade later posed with her daughter, Edda.

  

Describing the show as “an intimate visual diary” and stating at a press conference that “the best years of my life were here in Berlin”, the images fit thematically into Goldin's more familiar American work with friends out enjoying the city’s nightlife or in quieter moments reflected in mirrors, lying in bed or captured breakfasting. One also sees the demise of her friend Alf Bold, a founder of the Berlin Film Festival, who first brought her to Berlin and exhibited her “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” slideshow there in 1984, as AIDS took hold over him during the early 1990s. There are self-portraits, too, including a particularly striking one of her reflected in the mirror of her blue bathroom and another with bruised and bloodshot eyes after being beaten up by a lover. Empty rooms also figure quite hauntingly, such as a bedroom with a blood spattered wall in a squat she shared in the Kreuzberg district in 1984, as well as photographs taken on excursions to places as diverse as the Marzahn housing estate in East Berlin or trips to Bavaria and Salzburg with friends. Interestingly, the photograph “Edda and Klara Belly Dancing” (1998) which depicts Käthe Kruse’s young daughters and Goldin’s god-daughters, one clothed and the other naked with her legs apart, was on display without any inkling of fuss or hysteria at potential paedophiles getting off on it, as it was when she tried unsuccessfully to include it in a show at The Baltic in Gateshead a few years ago.

 

  

The show is on until the end of the month and, if anyone is in Berlin, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s only relatively small but is extremely powerful and evocative. It’s a brilliant gallery, too, for anyone who hasn’t been before, with an excellent permanent collection on the second floor and a fantastic programme of temporary exhibitions. There was an interesting installation by Ed and Nancy Kienholz called “The Art Show” on when I was there, as well as an exhibition by the photographer Arno Fischer which was excellent, too. I've also seen brilliant shows of work by John Heartfield and Marianne Breslauer there so it's always worth a visit.

I should also mention that I was accompanied to the show by my extremely talented photographer friend Kathrin Ollroge who lives in Potsdam. Why not have a look at her website and buy some of her work whilst you're there?

http://www.gallery-22.com/

John Stezaker

As anyone who knows me personally will know, collage and photomontage are things for which I have quite a considerable penchant. People like Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Georg Grosz, Marianne Brandt, Robert Rauschenberg, Gee Vaucher, Linder Sterling, and the list goes on, really get me going and all rate highly in my pantheon of favourite artists. So, I was delighted when a friend emailed me a link to the John Stezaker exhibition which is on at The Whitechapel Gallery in London until 18th March.

Call me an ignoramus but this was my first brush with John Stezaker, although I have since found a little section about him in a thick hardback book I have on my bookcase entitled "Collage-The Making of Modern Art", something I'd previously, foolishly overlooked. A little research reveals that this internationally famous artist, who has exhibited all over Europe and in America, was born in Worcester in 1949, studied at The Slade during the 1960s and has been exhibiting his work since the early seventies. It seems he also taught for a time at The Royal College of Art in London, the city out of which he works, I believe. Anyway, as I was down in London last weekend, a little gang of us went along and really enjoyed what we saw.

Like most artists who use collage, John Stezaker is definitely carrying on in the tradition of dada and surrealism, the juxtaposition and grafting together of seemingly disparate images combining alchemically to create an often absurd yet affective new entity which defies everyday reason yet transcends it at the same time in ways that verisimilitude often cannot. For the majority of the works on display, a retrospective stretching from the 1970s to the present day, Stezaker has used vintage movie stills and film star portraits as his foundation and then worked over the top of these in different fashions and to varying degres of success, we all felt.

Amongst my personal favourites are a series of glossy, promotional portraits of glamorous stars from yesteryear called "Marriage" wherein two images, usually one male, one female, have been spliced and fused together, the result being a new, androgynous, partly beautiful, partly grotesque entity which now looks madly vulnerable or sinister and powerful, sometimes both at the same time, rather than coolly confident and sophisticated as originally intended. A mismatched pair of eyes, an incongruous mouth or nose or an impossible expression composed of disparate elements now act powerfully to subvert the original intentions of the carefully posed, saleable attractiveness and star quality which lie at their core. Most of these are in the form of full face portraits, although the occasional profile is also used to good effect. It's hardly rocket science - a bit like making John McEnroe out of The Queen and  Charles Darwin on a £10 note - but it is, as I say, quite stimulating stuff to look at.

             

Not dissimilar to these is a series caled "Masks" where similar promotional portraits have once again been used. This time, though, instead of bringing together two images from a similar source, Stezaker has overlaid vintage postcards of dramatic landscapes, often with dominant features such as caves, tunnels, ravines, bridges and so forth. The result is that, with careful positioning, these architectural or geographical features then act as eerie substitutes for those of the face. Eyes, foreheads and even entire faces have seemingly rotted away or collapsed into cavernous receses and holes whereby these beauties of the silver screen are now, for the most part, rather grotesque like rotting corpses or smashed in skulls. However, the effect is not so brutal as this suggests but is actually highly amusing, in the more successful pieces, as the collision of these two coexistant worlds, the contrived beauty and naturally brutal and sublime, have been melded together very wittily. There are also some images in this series which are based on film stills of pairs of characters engaged in dialogue or about to dive into a romantic clinch. However, the drama of their pairings has been stripped of its intensity by the replacement of almost entire faces with natural phenomena, the effect reminding me a little of Serge Gainsbourg's "L'homme a tete de chou" or Dali's images of women with flower-covered heads.

             

Less appealing to me is the "Dark Star" series where characters in film stills or the aforementioned portraits are replaced by a mysterious black void, as the gallery blurb says, "creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity" and other images whereby blank spaces, usually rectangular, replace details in film stills or other images. The effect in some of these, although very simple in execution, can be  either ludicrous or quite sinister and unsettling in places.

       

So, there's quite a bit of variation on a theme in this exhibition but it's well worth taking a look at if you're in the neighbourhood. The Whitechapel Gallery is always worth visiting, anyway, as they have some brilliant exhibitions on there. I was quite taken with John Stezaker, actually, and have gone off and ordered myself a book fom Amazon. It's due to arrive any day now with a bit of luck.

FAD GADGET : Part Seven

Before I temporarily put the lid back on the box, though, there’s still one project lingering in the background unreleased, “Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing”, Frank’s collaboration with Boyd Rice from the summer of 1981, which eventually got its release in November 1984 and seemed to baffle the majority of listeners at the time through its unconventiality. Those who followed Mute would already have been familiar with Boyd Rice’s repetitive, hypnotic and, ultimately, brain confusing loops but for the more pop oriented Fad Gadget this was an enormous departure, as any concept of song structure was thrown entirely out of the window. Many thought the outré ingredient was the American one. However, on the DVD documentary, Rice, who is also known for his enthusiasm for sixties girl singers and saccharine sixties and seventies bubblegum pop, sets the record straight: “Frank wanted to work with me because he had a reputation for doing Fad Gadget and he wanted to do something far more abstract and extreme or harsh and I wanted to work with Frank because I had a reputation for doing noise and I wanted to do something far poppier. So, when the album came out, I think people assumed that all the noisy stuff was my contribution and all the poppy stuff was Frank’s contribution and, I think, at the end of the day, that really wasn’t the case...We’d go into the studio and just bang different stuff together, drag metal across the floor, filling up sixteen tracks. Then we’d randomly, in the middle of this tape, make a loop of this and we’d listen back to all this and pick out the ones that were the most cohesive or, in some cases, the ones that were the least cohesive and mix them together or put them through various effects and electronic devices and we came up with stuff that didn’t sound like anything else. Even though it ended up taking a few years to come out it still didn’t sound like anything else that anybody else was doing at the time.” That final comment certainly hits the nail on the head, too, as, apart from a very small number of emerging artists, such as Coil, Current 93, Nurse With Wound et al, as well as the mighty Throbbing Gristle, there wasn’t much back then with which to have drawn even the most tenuous comparison. The duo even gave their experimentation a live outing, a few months later, when they played on the same bill as Sonic Youth and Manchester industrialists, Tools You Can Trust, as part of the ICA’s “I Want Independents” week of concerts in March 1985. A review in the NME by Agnes Gooch, although not negative, was rather non-committal, perhaps confusedly so: “Fad Frank and Boyd Rice, the La Becque sisters of industrial noise and easy listening for the hard of hearing, performed a highly polished, nicely synchronised piece with a mystery axeman. A kind of radical root-canal rendition of ‘Marathon Man’, in which Fad silhouetted by fairy lights and Boyd in hat would question the silence (is it safe?) then punish it with a jolt of hydrollically(sic) satisfying pulses (viz ‘Ricky’s Hand’). The rest was mute.” Video footage of this event is in existence and one extract can be seen on the Mute video compilation, “Tyranny of the Beat : Original Soundtracks”.

     

What then followed were, for some Fad Gadget fans, The Frank Tovey Wilderness Years, whilst for others they represent the pinnacle of his career. To write about them in detail would, however, lead to this becoming a book rather than an article, so I will gloss over them very quickly, returning only to the tale when the FG name re-emerges from the ashes in a new century. So, meanwhile, a single, “Luxury”, was released in the summer of 1985 and we all went out and bought it because it sounded just like Fad Gadget, only with a glossy sheen - once again, though, it failed to chart - and an album entitled “Snakes and Ladders” came out the following spring, the recordings being populated by a now familiar cast of characters, such that the journey travelled was, initially, not that significant. However, as the 1980s ran out their course and merged blandly into the 1990s, four more albums were released - “Civilian”(1988); “Tyranny and the Hired Hand”(1989); “Grand Union”(1991) and “Worried Men in Second-Hand Suits”(1992) – and the Frank Tovey sound developed enormously. The first two of these albums were released under the name of “Frank Tovey” and adopt a much more acoustic, folky sound but, by the latter pair, he had put together a backing band, The Pyros, formed from amongst London’s Irish musical fraternity and you can sort of guess what the results sound like, although, thankfully, they don’t indulge in that nauseating fiddle-dee crap you hear in Dublin pubs, being much more accomplished and palatable than that. Then, seemingly, there was nothing for almost ten years, the Tovey contribution to mid to late nineties culture being just a few pieces of music composed for plays written by his old schoolfriend, Michael Vale, these sounding like an extension of the sound sculptures Tovey had released as a one-off 12” with Malcolm Poynter and Simon Stringer under the name of Mkultra in 1987 – on Mute, as always.

However, in 1996, Frank Tovey had met a group of Austrian Placebo soundalikes, Temple X, through his girlfriend and, liking their demo, he had agreed to their request that he go into the studio and produce them. Then, as often happens in such cases, one thing led to another and a never stage-shy Frank joined them at some of their concerts to perform slightly rocked-up versions of old Fad Gadget favourites, like the perennial “Ricky’s Hand”. The results were successful and Frank, seemingly, found himself back with the bug. Also, parallel to this, things were picking up musically in certain circles, after the twin bores of Britpop and the tired fag-end of house/dance culture had died away, and events seemed to conspire such that by 2000/2001 the time seemed completely right for a Fad Gadget renaissance, with Frank going on to delight not just the old school but a new and hungry, younger audience.

Consequently, on Easter Sunday of 2001, Fad Gadget made his return to the stage proper, headlining London’s Elektrofest, held at the Astoria 2, his backing band being the catalysts in this adventure, Temple X, and, when news of this performance and accompanying photographs began to appear on the internet, around the same time as Soft Cell’s temporary re-emergence, it felt like a huge, heavy cloud of ennui had eventually floated off over the horizon.

       

Amongst those gathered to see him that night, when they would otherwise have been at home stuffing their faces with over-priced chocolate eggs, were a couple of members of old friends Depeche Mode, now transported to unimaginably dizzying heights of fame and wealth since the Canning Town gig over twenty years earlier, and, evidently, looking for a suitable support band for the European leg of their forthcoming tour. Impressed as they were, Fad was their choice and, in a tables-turned scenario, Frank soon found himself successfully warming up monster-size crowds in vast arenas and stadiums. However, complete disaster almost occurred, as Temple X’s van was involved in a dramatic accident somewhere in Europe, flipping over, apparently, and ejecting their drummer out of the back doors and onto the ground outside. The broken collar bone he sustained in the accident meant that he would be unable to play the final, British, shows at Wembley Arena and Manchester’s MEN Arena and, to further begin closing the circle, Nick Cash was invited back in to fill the gap. This, then, was the line-up I then saw in Manchester a few months later when Fad Gadget went out on a short headline tour in January 2002, taking in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Antwerp and Bielefeld, as well as the aforementioned show. More of this is a moment, though.

In the meantime, a “Best of Fad Gadget” double CD, comprising all of the A-sides and the majority of the B-sides, as well as some 12” versions, was released in the autumn of 2001 to fill a gap for the new audience and also to give him something to promote whilst he was on the road – a similar, although less comprehensive collection had already been released in 1986 – and, in this new context, it all sounded as vibrant and urgent as ever. A four track 12” also came out around the same time to accompany the album, featuring old favourites, “Lady Shave”, “Ricky’s Hand” and “Collapsing New People”, the latter appearing in its Berlin Mix format. However, the lead track was a meaty “Toasted Crumpet Mix” of “Fireside Favourite”, the product of a subtle yet highly effective remix by of-the-moment Sheffield recording artists, I Monster. The potential of what could be done with old Fad Gadget tracks, placed in the right hands, was clear, as well as his relevance in the early years of the decade. A year or so later, the German arm of Mute Records discreetly released another fantastic four track 12”, this time featuring a new mix of “Collapsing New People” by Berlin techno maestro WestBam, alongside the original version of said song and two amazing remixes of “Lady Shave” by John Acquaviva, the “Robo-Sapien Vox” and “Robo-Sapien Dub” versions. These latter tracks, without making vast amendments to the original, captured the zeitgeist perfectly and put Fad Gadget straight back onto the centre of the electro dancefloor, as well as onto compilations such as “Lektroluv 5” where he held his own amongst other contemporary artists such as Bangkok Impact, Polygamy Boys, Solvent and David Caretta.

Anyway, back to Saturday 19th January 2002, when Fad Gadget returned to Manchester University to play in the smaller hall there, which used to be called the Solem Bar but is some Academy something or other now, and played a storming set, whilst engaging in similar antics to yesteryear. The backing to “Ricky’s Hand”, for example, came supported by Frank’s contribution on a handdrill, which span recklessly into the palm of a leather glove; “Lady Shave” came with the pube plucking routine; “Back to Nature” saw him lumbering around the stage gorilla fashion during the opening bars; and for “Ad Nauseum”, a temporarily disappeared Frank Tovey, came back on to the stage with a black bin bag full of feathers which he then tipped over his stickily primed torso. It was a truly memorable night, partly because I’d always been too young to go to his earlier visits to the city and so was seeing him live for the first time but also because he was so energetic, entertaining and engaging whilst performing a host of favourite songs from my youth. Unlike a number of re-formed bands, who appear from time to time, this didn’t feel like a faded re-hash either. A recording was made of the previous night’s show at The Garage in London and, if you watch it, you’ll be able to see for yourself what I mean. I went backstage after the concert in Manchester, too, and had a five minute chat with FT and he was charming and seemed genuinely thrilled that he’d had such an impact on the lives of myself and the person I was with. He also talked of the 1990s having been a bit of a wasteland for him, where he agreed with myself that he’d got a bit bored, really, for several years. However, optimism was in the air now and the promise of the first new Fad Gadget material for eighteen years was on the horizon. If you watch the London show on DVD, you’ll hear him announce to the audience during the latter part of the set, “Even I want more tonight.”

Then, on 8th April 2002, as I’d just come through my front door from a few days in Stuttgart, where I’d been on a bit of an Oskar Schlemmer / Baader Meinhof pilgrimage, I played my answering machine messages back and received the devastating news that Frank Tovey had died of a sudden heart attack at his home six days earlier and, even though I didn’t know the man, the news hit me right in the core of my stomach. In one split second, a few words took away all the optimism of the previous few months, as well as someone who had been a significant companion throughout my most significant years. How his family and friends must have felt, I cannot imagine.

Anyway, time has rolled on, the memory is still well and truly alive, as evidenced by the CD/DVD release and the continued success of the official website, and his legacy and influence, too, continue to be heard in people like the fabulous Mechanical Cabaret, who covered “I Discover Love” on their second album. What a different and dreary world it would have been had Fad Gadget never come out of his closet, as it were.