JUNE PLAYLIST

Nearly forgot this month’s playlist so here’s a rushed glimpse at ten numbers that have lit the moon in June.

1. Milt Trenier – “Flip Our Wigs” (1953)
Best known for “I Gonna Catch Me A Rat” but “Flip Our Wigs” is bigger and bawdier.

2. Bobby Marchan – “Chickee Wah-Wah” (1956)
Instantly recognisable – if slightly oddball - sound of New Orleans.

3. Lou Donaldson – “Sputnik” (1957)
Lou gets in on the ‘57 Sputnik fascination with a ten-minute bebop master blaster.

4. Dorie Williams – “Tell Me Everything You Know” (unknown, circa 1962?)
Cracking rare single for R&B dancefloors. Can’t find out anything about it. Anyone?

5. Little Jimmy Dickens - ”May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose” (1965)
“May the bird of paradise fly up your nose/ May an elephant caress you with his toes/ May your wife be plagued with runners in her hose/ May the bird of paradise fly up your nose”. A US Country number one, naturally.

6. Gram Parsons – “I Just Can’t Take It Anymore” (1966)
Never paid much attention to Gram’s Dylanesque home recording until the Lemonheads covered it but it’s good.

7. Sugar Pie DeSanto – “Witch For A Night” (1966)
A party poppin’, show stoppin’, wig-floppin’, Hammond and horns rave-up.

8. The Seeds – “The Wind Blows Your Hair” (1967)
So many to choose from. Bless you Sky.

9. The Ramones – “Surfin’ Bird” (1977)
Bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word.

10. Jim Jones Revue – “Princess and the Frog” (2009)
Single of the year.

Bonus track. The Lemonheads featuring Kate Moss – “Dirty Robot” (2009)
An electro funk boogie with vocals by Kate Moss. I’m ashamed and confused. Really like this and have no idea why.

CAF! FRIDAY 10th JULY

Hastings! Huh! Yeah! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing usually but on Friday 10th July you could do worse than pop your head into Bar-Celona for some choice tunes to sip your sangria (or Stella) to.

I’ll be dragging a box of Monkey Magic on the train to join CAF resident DJs Rowly and Southern Sam to spin some summery sixties soul and R&B 45s. All the details you need are above.

Feeling in an up tempo rhythm and soul mood myself, with a splash of danceable fuzzed-up blues and a few ever-faithful Motown monsters. Cool as fuck.

THE FLIPSIDE PRESENTS THE ART OF EXPLOITATION: ANTONY BALCH NIGHT

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me”. It’s a Holden Caulfield line I regurgitate with tedious monotony but the chaps at Flipside are causing me to wobble. Their nights at the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre, specialising in unearthing oddities and obscurities (mainly from the 1960s) are rapidly turning into must-do events. This month “The Art of Exploitation: Antony Balch Night”, showed three films; two he directed and one he contributed filming to.

Balch is best known (to me at least) for his work with William Burroughs and a BFI restored print of Towers Open Fire (above), their eleven minute 1963 cinematic cut-up was shown first. Together they made as close an approximation of reading one of Bill’s more challenging books as you could get. It jumps about, it repeats itself, it layers one image on top of another, it jumbles sights and sounds, it blurs, it bleeds, and it leaves the viewer disorientated. Balch also distributed porn films and would show them in his cinemas along with his experimental Burroughs work as the opening feature. Quite what the dirty mac brigade turning up to see The Kinky Darlings made of Bill shooting up and Balch having a Barclays is anyone’s guess, but for Burroughs enthusiasts Towers Open Fire is an invaluable record covering the people, places, themes and activities central to his creative highpoint during the late 50s and early 60s.

Another 1963 short Kronhausen’s Psychomontage No. 1 also mixes sights and sounds; this time “erotic” scenes and scenes of animals and fish with the soundtrack swopped. Unless I’m mistaken, a stocking clad young lady has sex with a dog in the park.

The nearest Balch came to directing a “normal” film was Horror Hospital (1973) starring Robin Askwith as a struggling pop star who books in to a health farm to get straight. Only all is not as it seems. Cue clap of thunder and lightning reflecting off the twisted face of Dr Storm, the knuckle-clicking, wheelchair-bound, evil scientist played by Michael Gough. Ha, ha, haaa. Storm lobotomises his guests and any trying to escape are decapitated by a sword wielding Rolls Royce driven by a dwarf. You get the picture. The acting is thick ham, the script clunky, the plot thin, the budget tiny, and the special effects stretched to a couple of tins of crimson paint. Yep, great fun. More by accident than design it was laugh out loud funny.

The next Flipside is on Thursday 23rd July with the screening of Joanna a full-on swinging London picture from 1968. “Lovely Joanna, doe-eyed and Twiggy-esque in her groovy gear, descends on the Big Black Smoke to take an education in free love, shoplifting and art at the Royal College, her exploits soundtracked by the great Scott Walker song”. Director Mike Sarne will be there for a Q&A session. And finally, get yourself their DVDs: London In The Raw, Primitive London and The Bed Sitting Room, all highly recommended.

www.bfi.org.uk
www.myspace.com/theflipsidepresents

A TRIBUTE TO SKY SUNLIGHT SAXON

When most of your favourite music was made between 40 and 50 years ago you get acclimatised to seeing endless obituaries for artists that left their mark in hearts and record collections. Without wishing to sound disrespectful, most of these I treat with a shrug as they were getting on, they hadn’t made a decent record for decades, and I never even saw them in concert let alone met them personally.

But I’m genuinely saddened to hear the news today of the death of Seeds supremo, Sky Sunlight Saxon. It’s taken as read those Seeds records are bona-fide garage classics; Daryl Hooper’s organ and Saxon’s unmistakable vocals ensured they sounded like nobody else. But it’s that Saxon was still active recently, gigging and recording, that makes this particular passing all the harder to take. I saw him perform three times in the last six years and loved them all, particularly the first one at the Borderline in London, 2003. It was like he’d been living in a psychedelic cave since 1969 only to come out blinking into the harsh modern age to give an amazing performance of classic Seeds songs and new songs about spiders, aliens and fools on Capital Hill. Take a listen to “Seven Mystic Horsemen” from his 2005 LP Transparency for evidence he could still conjure the magic.

I also had the real pleasure and honour of chatting to him a few times and he was such a lovely, sweet, soft spoken man. He was on a totally different planet though, and trying to pin his brain down was like trying to make water run upstream; you just had to go with the flow and see where you’d end up. One moment of clarity did occur when I asked about the Seeds and said I thought they sounded so unique I couldn’t tell where their sound, his voice, come from? “I was trying to sound like Howlin’ Wolf with a piano”. I’ve always listened to them slightly differently since and he's right you know.

The last word belongs to Sky himself with a quote from March 2009 on his website: “I think you could retire when you die. I don't, however, believe in death, so I guess I will retire when I leave my body. But I plan to continue writing and performing in heaven”.

ORNETTE COLEMAN and THE MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA FEATURING BACHIR ATTAR at the MELTDOWN FESTIVAL

“From the mountains of Morocco, please welcome, the Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar” goes the introduction to the rarefied splendour of the Royal Festival Hall. “Bet they don’t live there now” says some geezer behind me. He’s probably right of course but it misses the point.

William Burroughs described the Master Musicians as “the primordial sounds of a 4,000 year old rock ‘n’ roll band” and Brian Jones navigated his way to their secluded rural village hidden in the Jibala hills, 50 miles south of Tangier, to record them for Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. Brion Gysin - creator of cut-ups and inventor of the Dream Machine - introduced their music to both Burroughs and Jones and used the musicians as house band for his restaurant “The 1001 Nights” in the 1950s to enable him to listen to them every night. As hip patronage goes, that’s some trio.

Tonight the musicians are trimmed down to an eight piece unit; four ghaita pipes and four drums of varying sizes. Whether they actually needed the house PA is questionable and they certainly tested the expertise of the sound engineer. Those pipes squealed and wailed at such a volume I thought my ear drum was about to rattle clean out of my head. Hundreds of hands cupped ears in unison. Was as funny to watch as it was painful to listen to.

Fortunately that soon settled down and they got in their groove. Its clear why they sounded so incredible to those first Western discoverers – they still do, although we’re more savvy to “world music” now so there’s less a wow factor. The musicians, historically, have been supported by the farming toil of their fellow villagers and in addition to playing religious festivals their music is said to cure mental illness. The loony locals are tied up and the music banishes the madness. Although this can take “one month, or if someone is more sick he can stay two months, or three” according to Bachir Attar. Attar is the son of El Hadj Abdesalam Attar (see photo, with the different spelling of JouJouka ), who led the Musicians in the Brian Jones period, and who perhaps controversially has now trademarked the name “The Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar”. It’s extremely hypnotic, trippy stuff (even without the aid of humungous quantities of hashish); repetitive but with subtle multi rhythms. Like ancient shoegazing.

They can play for up to ten hours, which would surely send folk mad not cure them, but tonight it’s a disappointingly short half an hour before they shuffle off to make way for headliner and Meltdown curator Ornette Coleman.

What is it about old jazz dudes? Coleman hunches on, barely inching one foot in front of the other, clambers on to his stool and wheezes something unintelligible into the microphone. Yet stick his white sax in his mouth, or a trumpet, or give him a violin, and it’s akin to pumping him with oxygen and shooting him with speed.

The concert was billed as “Reflections of The Shape of Jazz to Come” so I was expecting a good proportion of the set to be from that groundbreaking album of fifty years ago but Coleman, forever his own man, had different ideas. It was all enjoyable enough in a far out hipster jazz kinda way but as nifty as Coleman is you can’t expect him to be on the top of his game aged nearly 80. It did encourage me to delve deeper into his back catalogue though, so, job done. Patti Smith wandered on unannounced and rapped some crazy free form beat poetry on one number, and the Jajoukas came out for a lengthy jam on another.

Jajouka translates as “something good coming to you”, and it did. Never thought for one moment I'd ever get to see them. Next time - on their turf.

REAL MOMENTS: BOB DYLAN by BARRY FEINSTEIN

It’s a hard rain forest that’s a-gonna fall to provide and protect those that seek to prophesize with their pens and publish Bob Dylan books.

Olympia Press and photographer Barry Feinstein are the latest with the softback edition of Real Moments. As photo books go, it’s a decent one. Feinstein took the front cover for The Times They Are A-Changin’ in 1963 and was trusted by Bobby not to “make him look an asshole”. But this was now May 1966 and it mattered not whether Bob was smoking a fag, walking with his pointed shoes and his curls, speaking to some French girl or coming out the crapper, he exuded an air of having all the answers my friend; the rest of the fools didn’t even know which way the wind was blowing.

Fourteen of these pictures form a small collection at the National Portrait Gallery until 30th August (go downstairs and through the bookshop). The book costs a hefty £24.99, which is more than the hardback last year. How does that work?

DIANE ARBUS at the TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY

Most exhibitions of 1960’s photographs nowadays focus on the pop stars, the celebrities, the historic moments and movements, and the beautiful people. These weren’t subjects that caught the imagination of New York photographer Diane Arbus, so you get a welcome different perspective at her retrospective at the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Arbus’s subjects were the “ordinary” people, or more famously, those that society considered extraordinary: the midgets, the giants, the twins, the triplets, the mentally ill, the downright peculiar and freakish.

Among the 60 pictures are two of her most well known: Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 and Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City, 1962. Surprisingly, it’s Arbus’s portraits of children that, for me, are the most reveling. Seeking to capture “the gap between intention and effect” it’s often in children where this is most strikingly apparent. See for example Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, New York City, 1963 (above). How old are these people? Probably not as old as they’re trying to appear. Their outwardly confident bravado fighting their uneasy self-consciousness, resulting in an awkward pose.

Mind you, the old folk don’t do too well either. Check the hilarious King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, New York City, 1970. There they are, all crowned and cloaked, and rather than looking proud and regal they look humiliated and downtrodden.

Diane Arbus committed suicide via the pills and razor combo in 1971.

Diane Arbus at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place, London, W1 until 27 June 2009. Admission free.