reviews

Gang Of Four’s Jon King on Fighting Fascism

by

From how bass guitars make excellent weapons to why feminist artists were so inspiring, Jon King tells Elizabeth Aubrey about the things he learned bashing the fash with Gang Of Four

By Elizabeth Aubrey

To Hell With Poverty!, the new memoir from Gang Of Four singer, singer, lyricist and producer Jon King, is an account of his journey from South London slum to recording at Abbey Road with all the twists and turns of navigating the capricious music industry along the way. There are tales of band bust-ups and reconciliation, making the cover of the NME, getting chucked off Top Of The Pops, having their music censored (twice) and crashing and burning in America. At the forefront of the narrative, however, is the political stance of the band that ran at odds with the both the mainstream and far right in late 70s and early 80s Britain. Gang Of Four’s left-wing views often made them the target of The National Front, who’d crash their gigs looking for trouble – and the band made sure they got it. Bassist Dave Allen would wield his guitar at the NF thugs and the rest of the band frequently leapt in to fight them. With rather less punching involved, Gang Of Four also became one of the key voices in the Rock Against Racism movement in the north of England. The book tells stories of bust ups with the police, the racism they witnessed daily and how feminist bands like The Slits were an inspiration. “My ambition wasn’t to make money, but to change the world,” King says, reflecting on the legacy of the band. “Some of our songs are still horribly relevant but I wish they weren’t.” 

Standing up to fascism meant standing up for my friends

In the 1970s, I went to a demonstration in Leeds against the National Front while I was studying art in the city. The council had banned them from marching through Chapeltown in Leeds. My Afro-Caribbean, African and white friends all lived in Chapeltown of course and that’s where they wanted to march: it was intentionally provocative. Despite the ban, the NF managed to get a meeting inside a local hall and I don’t know whether or not they deceived the council, but they decided they wanted to walk down to the railway station together and of course what they were really doing was taking part in the march that was banned in the first place. I remember protesting and shouting ‘The National Front was The Nazi Front’.

The police were our enemy

Things got out of control at the protest: it was entirely on the National Front’s side. The moment it got out of control, the cops reacted. I was truncheoned down by a cop and whacked on the forehead: I dropped to the ground. My interactions with the police at that time were never positive. I have great sympathy with people who are trying to keep the law, but that wasn’t what they were doing. All the ones we encountered at that time were aggressive blokes who liked asserting their authority. The recent trouble in Türkiye really struck me because I was sort of like one of those people in the crowd too.

There were unlikely allies on the streets

The irony of the NF demonstration was that the NF eventually went into the middle of the railway station and met Leeds United fans coming off the train from London. This was in the middle of peak football hooliganism and Leeds United fans at that time were among the most notorious football crews. The Leeds fans just thought they were all cockneys and so attacked them, which I thought was a kind of poetic justice!

Fighting fascists is hard

It was extremely tense sometimes waiting for the next battle with fascists at gigs. There was often a lot of trouble and they’d come along just to cause bother. With Gang Of Four, The Mekons and Delta 5, we sort looked out for each other at that time: we were the first set of bands in Leeds who identified as being of the left. A very good friend of ours had life changing head injuries through the violence. They came into Leeds university at a gig and threw a fire extinguisher at his head: he nearly died and was affected for the rest of his life. It was a very dark period.

Read more

Review: Lost Crowns’ “The Heart is in the Body”

by

Six years in the making, Lost Crowns’ second album is a stunning feat of complex composition that takes their dark folk sound into bold new territory, finds Sean Kitching

By Sean Kitching

Following a pandemic-era Zoom call in which several traditional British folk musicians attempted to play together but fell out of sync, Lost Crowns main man Richard Larcombe was supposedly inspired to pick up instruments he’d never played before – fiddle, harp, tin whistle, concertina and English border bagpipe. The resulting recording stakes a serious claim to being the most exciting, most advanced music of its kind. The caveat being that there are few other artists who have even attempted to sound like this – and some listeners might well consider the entire enterprise a kind of monstrous folly to begin with.

 

The eight songs contained within this album are not entirely without precedent. One might consider Lost Crowns to be akin to a wilder Gentle Giant, had they been inspired by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Conlon Nancarrow, instead of medieval and baroque chamber music. The work of the Henry Cow and Art Bears-inspired American Rock In Opposition groups Thinking Plague and 5uus are also obvious touchpoints, although Lost Crowns use of the darker kind of English folk exemplified by Comus, as well as a propensity for undeniably earworm-worthy riffs and vocal melodies, mark them apart from those bands. Undoubtedly, they will have crossover appeal for Cardiacs fans too, though it’s harder to draw any direct comparison there, with Tim Smith having always had an ear for a certain kind of psychedelic pop. This music will not be for everyone. Accusations of being wilfully difficult or overly composed are often fielded at such music (and are not entirely without foundation).

A friend who I played this to (whose work I am also very fond of) told me that he felt that the main problem with overly composed music is often “unmotivated dissonance” and opined that he’d rather have “a pretty melody grounded in a necessary harmony.” Certainly, there are such bands who would incline me to agree with this assessment, far more so than when considering Lost Crowns. There’s a fine line between originality and simply being wilfully awkward, but equally a ‘pretty melody’ will not be exactly the same for all sets of ears. There is too, the kind of ugly beauty exemplified by Troutmask Replica, which perhaps sidesteps the issue of being too academic in its construction by virtue of its radically ‘primitive’ compositional technique – an untrained composer creating on an unfamiliar instrument. Lost Crowns tread this fine line with aplomb, and the symphonically rendered chaos of their tightly scripted tunes transcends being simply intellectually interesting with a visceral dynamism usually absent from such complex music.

Three of the best tracks on The Heart is in the Body, ‘She Didn’t Want,’ ‘Et Tu Brute’ and ‘Did Look A Fool’, are almost insanely compelling and offer unique delights I’ve honestly yet to find elsewhere. That two of those tracks were among the earliest recorded for the album perhaps hints at a future problem of the band’s own making. After taking this sound as far as they have done on this release, one wonders where there is left for them to go next. Wherever that may be, put me down for a ticket.

Source: Lost Crowns – The Heart is in the Body | The Quietus

This 41-Year-Old British Film Is Among the Greatest Gothic Horror Movies Ever

by
The Company of Wolves

Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves turns a classic bedtime story into a haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience.

By Ria Pathak

From Snow White to Cinderella, the cinematic world has seen many retellings of these fairy tales over the years. Many of these tales, like Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel, crossed themselves to the horror genre with a mix of fantasy. One such film from the 80s doesn’t just retell the tale of Little Red Riding Hood but turns the classic bedtime story into a dark, haunting and unforgettable cinematic experience. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, rather than showing a colorful, happy fairytale, confronts the darker aspects of desire and fear. The film plunges the audience into its subconscious, revealing the unsettling truths hidden beneath the surface. Even 41 years later, this British fantasy film stands as one of the greatest gothic tales ever told in cinema.

The Company of Wolves is a screen adaptation of British author Angela Carter’s 1979 short story of the same name. Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay along with Irish director Neil Jordan, experienced a troubled childhood. She spent most of her childhood with her maternal grandmother and suffered from anorexia, an eating disorder that causes people, especially young women, to obsess over their body image and weight. Hence, Carter used the theme of adolescence and the fears related to it to craft dreamlike to transform the forest into a breeding ground for primal fears. With one of the most iconic and genre-bending werewolf transformations ever portrayed in cinema, The Company of Wolves is a testament to the power of gothic horror.

Read more

Mackendrick and Odets’ “Sweet Smell of Success”

by
The Sweet Smell of Success
The Sweet Smell of Success

By Paul Cronin | The Criterion Collection

In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be taught, only learned, and each man or woman has to learn it through his or her own system of self-education”), he became one of the art form’s most legendary instructors. Aspirant filmmakers from around the world chose to study at CalArts because of Mackendrick’s presence, and even today, copies of his carefully composed classroom notes—which he called “my life’s work”—remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates, who speak of their mentor with veneration.

Though he was reluctant to use his own films in the classroom, one notable exception was Sweet Smell of Success, which served as the basis for one of his most penetrating handouts. In the extract that follows, Mackendrick describes how the original screenwriter on the project, Ernest Lehman, author of the short novel on which the film is based, fell ill and was replaced by Clifford Odets.Odets had been a leading Broadway playwright who, in the thirties, delivered to the progressive Group Theatre collective such works as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy (see Barton Fink, whose title character even looks a little like Odets). As a Hollywood screenwriter, he had worked on the script for Hitchcock’s Notorious and on early drafts of what became It’s a Wonderful Life. Handed Lehman’s script, Odets chose to rework it completely into one that, while structurally based on the original, is a much more densely packed affair, bursting at the seams with expressionistic dialogue.

 

 

Yet for all the genuine sparkle of Odets’s memorable dialogue and the structural reinforcements he made to the story, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Sweet Smell of Success can also be a thoroughly visual experience. Years after the film’s release, Mackendrick would tell students that “cinema is not so much nonverbal as preverbal. Though it is able to reproduce realms of dialogue, film can also tell stories purely in movement, in action and reaction.” When we turn off the sound and let the pictures of Sweet Smell of Success do the talking, we see just how much information is gleaned through the camera, the lighting, and the blocking of the actors. As former Mackendrick student and writer-­director James Mangold explains, “While Sweet Smell is a film brimming with rapid-fire dialogue, it is almost completely decipherable as a silent film.” Assisted in no small part by cinematographer James Wong Howe’s crisp, glistening, high-contrast location photography, his low-angled, smoke-filled framing and technique of washing the walls “with oil to get the glitter,” Mackendrick understood how much of the storytelling’s heavy lifting could be done with blocking, costumes, lighting, props, and the camera.

Read more