➤ Egan on Bowie’s legacy: ‘It’s not rocket science and it is music’

Posted on 27 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment

Today The Thin White Duke walks tall again — the god, the brand, the signifier — the three-in-one trinity that is David Bowie fired up one of the great transformative albums of the 70s, Station to Station. His 10th in a studio, it is now re-released in special edition 3-CD box set.

Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth, a 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg, based on the Walter Tevis novel about a humanoid alien who crash-lands on Earth. © Rex

This month the German journalist Finn Johannsen interviewed the club deejay and co-founder of the Blitz Club, Rusty Egan for the Nokia blog, Sounds Like Me. He discusses Bowie’s seminal role in 70s and 80s music, describes a typical night out at the Blitz, and what today’s clubbers can take from such an innovative chapter of music-making. Here’s a taster…

Rusty Egan, Blitz club

Rusty Egan at the Blitz, 1980: rare pic of him spinning the discs

FJ — David Bowie was always famous for continuously reinventing his career, but did this phase particularly appeal to you?

RE — Bowie’s Berlin years I believe were the foundation of the Blitz club playlist. Via Bowie I found Kraftwerk, and that lead to Neu!, Can, Cluster and Krautrock, as it was called. Bryan Ferry then led to the work of Brian Eno, and his ambient series … All this music lead to the basis of my collection. If you join the dots Bowie, Eno, Iggy, Kraftwerk, Mick Ronson, Lou Reed.

FJ — It is obvious that Bowie was heavily influenced by German experimental groups like Kraftwerk or Neu! How much of them can be found in Low and Heroes?

RE — Massive influences. Bowie is a SONGWRITER. Without songs you have music. The Germans made amazing music without lyrics. It was experimental because of the instruments used and the long, long tracks. Bowie took the basis of this experimental music and the growing feelings evoked by Möbius, Cluster, Can, Neu! and went into Hansa studios by the Wall and with Brian Eno created the Berlin sound. Heroes sung in German as Helden is a perfect example. Six minutes long, but what were the instruments used? Can you hear guitar, bass and drums? Nothing but a long, long tone changing and changing… It’s not rocket science and it is music.

➢ Read the full Egan interview at Sounds Like Me

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➤ Slashed! Wallinger’s knife demonstrates a 25% cut on a Turner masterpiece

Posted on 21 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
Reckless ,Mark Wallinger, The Fighting Temeraire, Turner ,National Gallery, arts cuts, petition, protest

Reckless by Mark Wallinger. Thanks to Jed Butterfield and Bob Pain at Omni Colour http://www.omnicolour.com and Nicholas Penny at the National Gallery

❚ A NEW WORK BY TURNER PRIZE-WINNING ARTIST Mark Wallinger is released today as part of a campaign supported by more than 100 leading British artists against the government’s proposed funding cuts of the arts.

Mark Wallinger’s work shows a copy of the masterpiece, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner, in the collection of the National Gallery in London. A slash in the painting carries a notice “25% cut” and beneath it a caption reads: “If 25% were slashed from arts funding the loss would be immeasurable.”

Turner refused ever to sell The Fighting Temeraire — depicting the final journey of the 98-gun ship which played a distinguished role in Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 — until he finally donated it to the National Gallery. When the BBC asked the nation to nominate the greatest painting on show in UK museums and galleries, this came first with 25% of the votes.
Turner’s concern was to evoke a sense of loss as the great battleship was towed to the breaker’s yard.

The title of Mark Wallinger’s new work is Reckless. He explains: “I describe the cuts as a reckless adventure. In fact temeraire means reckless in French and by removing the obsolete ship from the scene I am rendering the painting wreckless.”

➢ Click for full petition details at 

savethearts-uk.blogspot.com

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➤ Anna declares McQueen a pioneer of dreams and drama

Posted on 20 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
St Paul’s Cathedral, McQueen, ceremony, Anna Wintour,Hilary Alexander

A hint of gold from the doyennes attending St Paul’s Cathedral for the McQueen ceremony: Anna Wintour, Vogue editor, and Hilary Alexander, Daily Telegraph fashion director. Photographs © Glenn Copus/PA/Getty

❚ WITH LONDON FASHION WEEK IN FULL SWING, hundreds of leading fashionistas gathered in St Paul’s Cathedral today for a ceremony in memory of Alexander McQueen. A taxi driver’s son who grew up in London’s East End, he became Britain’s most confrontational, unfettered and theatrical designer. He died in February aged 40, having been appointed a CBE and named British Designer of the Year four times by the British Fashion Council.

St Paul’s Cathedral, Alexander McQueen, London Fashion Week, ceremony, tributes,

Alexander McQueen: enfant terrible of the runway

The world’s most powerful arbiter of fashion, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, led today’s tributes. Models Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, actress Sarah Jessica Parker, muse Daphne Guinness and designer Stella McCartney were among the congregation, which also included relatives and former colleagues of McQueen.

Anna Wintour is the English-born daughter of Charles — editor of the Evening Standard during the Swinging 60s when his London paper achieved international acclaim. After removing her sunglasses, something she rarely does in public, Anna paid a moving tribute to McQueen: “He was a complex and gifted young man who, as a child, liked nothing more than watching the birds from the roof of his east London tower block.

Bjork, Alexander McQueen, memorial,

Bjork performing Gloomy Sunday

“He had an 18-year-long career of pioneering his dreams and dramas. He cared what people thought of his clothes but not of him. He never appeared at ease with himself and hated to travel away from his beloved London.”

Björk sang the haunting hymn Gloomy Sunday, which reflects on the horrors of modern culture, and there were also addresses from jeweller Shaun Leane, model Annabelle Neilson, McQueen’s nephew Gary Hulyer and milliner Philip Treacy. Composer and pianist Michael Nyman and the London Community Gospel Choir gave musical performances.

➢ Fuller Evening Standard report of the McQueen service, plus gallery

➢ Backstage with Hilary — Cheek and effervescence spice the Telegraph doyenne’s videos and reports of the autumn shows in New York, London and Milan

➢ “My father really decided for me that I should work in fashion” — Anna Wintour in The September Issue. Out this week on DVD, the most gripping movie ever about editorial decisionmaking, OK, on the world’s most powerful fashion magazine, but for that very reason, junking $50k’s worth of photography is a measure of that power. [“Knocks All the President’s Men into a cocked hat” — Shapersofthe80s]

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The 1980s ➤ A new history of that most turbulent of decades

Posted on 20 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
Orgreave, Yorkshire , miners' strike, riot police, ReportDigital

Mounted police attack striking miners picketing the Orgreave Coking Plant, South Yorkshire. Photographed © by John Harris/ReportDigital. The 1984-85 miners’ strike became a bitter industrial dispute and symbolic class struggle that saw picketing miners pitched against police officers, and colleagues — so-called scabs — who chose to return to work. The National Union of Mineworkers was protesting at the government’s plans for pit closures but the year-long strike proved a terrible defeat for the miners and for the coal industry. In 1984 there had been 170 coal mines open in the UK. By 2004 fewer than a dozen mines remained. The British trade union movement has never recovered.

❚ “MORE CHANGE AND MORE CONFLICT were crammed into the 1980s than any other decade in the second half of the twentieth century. Out of political chaos, Britain arrived at a settlement that lasted, for better or worse. The way we live now follows directly from the tumultuous events of the 1980s.”

In his new book, No Such Thing As Society, Andy McSmith, chief reporter and former political correspondent of the Independent newspaper, argues this was the conflict decade, defined by strikes, war and riots. He examines Britain in the decade of Thatcher and the City’s ‘big bang’, from the Falklands war and the miners’ strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to the Brixton riots and Band Aid, from the Rubik’s cube to the ZX Spectrum. He talks about the legacy of the 1980s and how this decade of extremes shaped contemporary Britain.

Margaret Thatcher, Spitting Image

Spitting Image's suited version of prime minister Margaret Thatcher gives a Churchillian V for Victory

“You know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.” — Margaret Thatcher, talking to Woman’s Own magazine, October 31, 1987

 

 

McSmith maintains that “the 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. And yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade, society as a whole was wealthier, money was easier to borrow, there was less social upheaval, less uncertainty about the future.

“Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990, the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century, between capitalism and socialism, was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics and created vast differences between rich and poor, but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve – because as Mrs Thatcher said, ‘There is no such thing as society … people must look to themselves first’.”

➢ Andy McSmith discusses the 80s with Andrew Marr on Start the Week (R4, Sep 20)
➢ No Such Thing As Society: Andy McSmith’s history of Britain in the 1980s is published by Constable
➢ VIEW: BBC audio slideshow on the year-long miners’ strike
➢ VIEW: frontline slideshow of the miners’ strike by photographers from the independent picture library ReportDigital

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2010 ➤ Robinson takes the Cowell shilling — so whose bum is on the throne at Popjustice?

Posted on 13 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
X Factor, X magazine, launch, Kelly Clarkson, American Idol, Simon Cowell

From the makers of The X Factor: a new magazine, edited by the man who toyed with Kelly Clarkson like a cat with a mouse

❚ WE LOVE HIM, THEY LOATHE HIM, the worst of them. One of the most influential and passionate commentors on the pop scene appears to have jumped ship in the direction of Simon Cowell’s entertainment goldmine. Peter Robinson, the 30-something wag and one-man Girls Aloud fanclub, has made his Popjustice blog a compelling read for fans who favour his surreal version of the truth, but a gunk tank for stars who imagine there’s any such thing as an even break.

Yet this morning’s Media Guardian unequivocally describes him as “formerly” the editor of PJ, while announcing the launch of X magazine, whose own website gives him the title of Senior Editor there. Sounds like a golden-handshake welcome to X which is to be the weekly print offshoot of the Cowell TV franchise, The X Factor. A 100-page launch issue appears tomorrow to coincide with series seven of the ITV talent show, and distribution is initially through Tesco supermarkets, price £1.95, even when the show is off-air.

Peter Robinson, Popjustice, previously editor, formerly editor,Senior Editor, X magazine

"Senior Editor" of X magazine: no, not the Peter Robinson who dresses as Marilyn, the other Peter Robinson

A “surprising” level of access to contestants is promised, though Robinson is reported to have feared that X would be “pretty much a glorified fan magazine”. The big cheese at its publisher, Haymarket Media Group, convinced him that the owners were happy for X to “not always toe the party line”. Some might think this a risky ploy. Is the cheese actually familiar with the Robinson technique? Does the cheese know how often his notoriously cringe-making interviews must have turned a star to jelly? In fact, has the cheese read the all-time car-crash sofa-chat Robinson conducted with American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson? In which he provoked her to confess: “I’m not a man and I don’t claim to be.”

There hasn’t been a decent mag purely about pop since the upstart Smash Hits doled out respect and ridicule in equal measure. It ran for almost three decades as a fortnightly, shuffling off-stage only in 2006. Channel 4’s Popworld spin-off died after two issues in 2007. Nevertheless, according to another Haymarket cheese, women’s weeklies are reckoned to be on “vibrant” form, and Robinson is talking up his new title: “Our editorial team is the strongest of any British pop magazine in almost 20 years and this certainly feels like the biggest pop magazine launch in Justin Bieber’s lifetime.”

Robinson was working as a freelance in 2000 when, for the love of it, he founded Popjustice as a music site with attitude. He has overseen its successful monetisation in cahoots with w00tmedia, and bolted on a record label called Popjustice Hi-Fi. The Times reckons PR is one of the music industry’s Top 20 star makers while The Observer rated Popjustice the world’s most powerful music blog. So has he truly relinquished the crown after 10 years? No, of course not! What? Give up the most powerful throne in pop? That was just “a mistake/assumption on Media Guardian’s part” PR assures us. Not for nothing have hacks long dubbed it the good old “Grauniad”! So rest assured that a familiar bum stills sits in the PJ hotseat, while steering the pop universe with his left hand.

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