"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
cool interview with Sting the guy who founded legendary hardcore rave jungle club Telepathy and also Deja Vu FM - and is the voice on those Telepathy ads
I've got more Telepathy ads with Sting's voice on various old tapes, digitized but not yet video-ized - soon come (also larger and potentially endless undertaking to do with pirate radio adverts)
Ah! I see somebody has had the same idea as me....
"Darkstar
share the official video for ‘Text’, ahead of release of new record ‘Civic
Jams’ out Friday 19 June. Directed by Alex Shilt | https://warp.net/releases/188614-dark... The experiences of everyday
life and beauty and heartbreak it brings offer an important source of
inspiration for Darkstar. In ‘Text’, this plays out in the vocal snippets that
address the experience of losing a loved one and the unflinching grace that
comes with it. In the accompanying video, Darkstar remind us that our memories
are shaped by those we share them with. Black and white home movie footage
capturing family moments is interspersed with imagery of unforgettable football
moments and iconic raves, which blur together like an ephemeral photonegative. Discussing
the video process, Shilt, the director explains: “Living next to Aiden and
briefly in the same flat with James, I was particularly inspired by the
relationship between the two of them. I aimed to create an abstracted visual
dialogue that embodied their brothership and love for their families through
the various personal clips they’ve sent me. We worked together in exploring
various looks inspired by modern communication tools & tactile graphics to
harmonize a visual language that fit with the tune.” On their most personal
record to date, Darkstar counterbalance observations of their home with those
of the community surrounding it. ‘Civic Jams’ is a photonegative of a dance
record shaped by a dialogue between shoegaze atmospherics and UK bass music’s
‘hardcore continuum’."
"Where "WFL" focuses entirely on the sensation of
being a drugged member of a drugged dancefloor, Flowered Up's
"Weekender" documents both the hallucinatory delirium and the
sociocultural framework that both explains and ultimately contains it.
("WFL" might itself have been intended as a component of such a
broader vision; the Bailey Brothers had originally been approached by Happy
Monday's label Factory Records to work on a movie project about Manchester provisionally entitled The Mad
Fuckers). A 15 minute mini-movie that follows a hard day's night in the life of
a working class London youth called Little Joe, "Weekender" is a
mélange of traditional "gritty Brit" social realism (Joe eats his
dinner while his mother neurotically twirls her wedding ring on her finger and
silently watches TV, its screen reflected in her spectacles; Joe smokes a spliff
in the grim hallway of concrete tower block of flats; the sordid sex-and-drugs
squalor of a nightclub's lavatory, seen in a overhead pass that peeks down into
each cubicle in a row of toilet stalls); trippy dancefloor commotion; heavily
symbolic fantasy/hallucination sequences; and urban derive (Joe, still in the
Ecstasy haze, wandering the deserted metropolis in the grey pre-dawn hours).
Think Ken Loach filtered through the prism of MDMA....
"Like Happy Mondays, Flowered Up were a rock band inspired by
and caught up in the frenzy of British rave culture in its early years; despite
its remix by DJ Andy Weatherall, "Weekender" is therefore more a rock
song about the joys and anguishes of the rave lifestyle than an example of where
dance music was at in 1992. Still, Wiz's screenplay and script preempts the
basic narrative arc of all the clubbing-and-drugging movies and fiction
that followed in the Nineties: having the time of your life and then paying
for it, flying high and crashing hard. The film is both a documentary snapshot of
early Nineties London clubland (listening to pirate radio, going down to Quaff
Records to pick up the new house imports and rave flyers) and a more timeless
statement about British proletarian "weekenderism": the
"workhard/play harder" life-cycle that goes back to the pill-popping
mods of Sixties London, via the Northern Soul fans of the Seventies with
their obscure sub-Motown singles and amphetamine wraps, and the jazz-funk and
soul All-Dayers of the early Eighties. Both song and video pay homage to
The Who's mod movie Quadrophrenia: there's a sample of the film's hero
telling his boss to take his job and stick it where the sun don't shine, and
Little Joe is picked up by a friend driving a mod-style scooter.
"More eloquently than Flowered Up's crudely expressed and
sketchy lyric,Wiz's scripted dialogue lays out both the exhilaration and the
impasses of the raver's lifestyle:Joe's feelings of limitless power and
possibility ("when I'm out with my mates, and we're all one on, buzzing off
our nuts, all together, it feels like we could... like we could do fucking
ANYTHING!") versus the eternal return of Monday "like a jail on
wheels" (to quote The Clash), the comedown to a reality with all its limits
intact and un-altered ("I used to feel like that when I was young, but look
at me, I'm still cleaning windows,"responds Joe's older, wiser, and
wearier workmate).
Unlike his mother and his equally crushed, domesticated
sister, jack-the-lad Joe is determined to out-run his inevitable fate
(mediocrity) for as long as he can, fueled by music and drugs. The most
striking sequences in the video depicts him doing just that--a fantasy set-piece
in which Joe sprints full-tilt inside the grooves of a gigantic 12-inch dance
single, giggling with glee despite the malevolent stylus that is hard on his
heels. Redolent of the set-pieces in Julien Temple's musical Absolute Beginners
(his flawed version of Colin MacInnes famous novel about the early,
just-before-mod days of British youth culture/cult of youth), this sequence
vividly captures the sense of dance culture as both groovy and a locked groove.
Adding to this sense of a loop,a deadening dead-end, is the image that opens
and closes Wiz's mini-movie:Joe--gaunt, pallid, a devitalized ghost of himself,
an ember of the disco inferno--descending the side of a huge office building in
his window cleaner's pallet; literally coming down after the high.
"Focusing on the story of one face in the crowd (a Face
in the Sixties mod sense: a figure "on the scene"),
"Weekender" represents one attempt to circumvent the problem of
techno's facelessness, its lack of a performance model or star glamour..." excerpt from my Oberhausen Film Festival talk / Stylus magazine essay Seeing The Beat: Retinal Intensities in Techno and Electronic Dance Videos (2002) Really unconvinced / turned-off by Flowered Up's first forays into "Southern Baggy"
... but came around to them, somewhat, with "Weekender" Northern sister songs to "Weekender":
