DJ Food @ Musique Non Stop |  |
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Posted: 10 Aug 2013 10:11 AM PDT
 The now defunct weekly UK music paper, Sounds, had a reputation for championing Rock and Heavy Metal above everything else. Writers Garry Bushell and Jon Savage raved and wrote about Oi and Punk respectively but there was more to the paper. 1977: The Queen’s Jubilee and the height of Punk in the media, right? Not by late November in Sounds it wasn’t, this was also the year ‘Trans Europe Express’ was released. A stark cover featured Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider photographed on the banks of the Rhine in their hometown of Dusseldorf by Caroline Coon, a two page interview leading the first part of a look at ‘New Musick: The Cold Wave’. Interviews or pieces on Eno, Throbbing Gristle, The Residents and Devo all appear by Savage, Jane Suck and Hal Synthetic (love these writing pseudonyms). Not very Rock or Punk. The Kraftwerk interview is fascinating, with Florian almost adding as much as Hutter and the two finishing each other’s sentences. Hutter mentions the term ‘Electronic Body Music’ and they talk about putting together comics detailing the themes of their music, I wonder what happened to them? Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur aren’t even mentioned although they do appear in at least one of the photos in the piece. It’s interesting to note that Ralf and Florian picked the journalist up from the airport and showed him about the city before the interview was conducted inside their Kling Klang studios. That certainly wouldn’t happen today. See more photos from the shoot, including a smiling Ralf & Florian that were not featured in the article, here. The Eno piece is typical, well… Eno, he talks and talks about his ideas, just as he always does, with his sideways looks at subjects ranging from dub reggae to Eskimos engineering US Air Force jets in Alaska. There’s no attempt at cross examination and the ‘interview’ is distilled from five hours of chat into two Eno’s: the non-musician and the theorist. Along with Throbbing Gristle refusing to issue forth any kind of manifesto but the paper giving their ’2nd Annual Report’ a 5 star review and a fairly scathing feature on the Residents, it’s an odd collection. The rest of the paper features things like ads for The Damned’s second album, Kiss’ ‘Kiss Alive II’ and the new Rick Wakeman LP, live reviews of The Jam, Richard Hell and Blondie sit with articles on Pub Rock and The Eaters (no, me neither) and a very early Savage Pencil episode of ‘Rock & Roll Zoo’.   |
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Posted: 09 Aug 2013 07:09 AM PDT
 Ralph Steadman at 77 is a retrospective currently running at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell St., London, WC1A 2HH. Featuring over 100 of his works, most of them originals, from Punch, Rolling Stone, Private Eye and the Observer. His book illustration work is also featured with some of the incredible Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass images (see below), Leonardo, Fear & Loathing and various children’s books.    Seeing the originals of some of these classic (for me) images was amazing, his line work is incredible but it was nice to see the amount of white out where he hadn’t quite nailed it every time too. The real treat though, was seeing some of his earlier 60′s work that I wasn’t familiar with, a few incorporating colour imagery collaged into the background (see top). Another was an illustration of the infamous Rolling Stones drug bust but my favourite of all was a square print from 1967 called ‘Bedlam’. This circular design of what looked like a board game was unlike many of his works that I’d ever seen, tightly (typo)graphic with all his usual unhinged, unkempt flair reigned in.    Seeing original work like this is one of my favourite past times, with a connection in scale and technique that is rarely captured in the books the pieces were made for. The imperfections and corrections, staining, yellowed paper and sometimes pasted-on additions fascinate me in the same way as a making-of documentary. An artist’s early work, his or her formative years, are always the most interesting for me, the style signposts slowly emerging whilst others are discarded as they find their own direction. Steadman found his fairly quickly and has been mining the same vein for decades now but he’s one of the few that have kept pushing himself into new areas, thus keeping the ‘shock’ factor intact. After the satire and bile of the 70′s and 80′s caricatures he and Gerald Scarfe became known for he moved into promotion for Oddbins, the off-licence, and then on into children’s books, neither of which you would ever have dreamed his material suitable for.   The exhibition runs until September 8th so there’s still a month left to catch it. Entry ranges from £5-3 and children are free. The upstairs houses original art from a lot of classic children’s comics at the moment, the Beano and Dandy being well represented but also a couple of pages from vintage 2000ad too: a Mike McMahon Dredd and a stunning Massimo Belardinelli Dan Dare splash page. By coincidence, Dave Gibbons’ ‘Whaat!?’ piece from the Image Duplicator show also currently resides there too at the moment.     |
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