The Hastings Independent Interview

 

 

 

 

Bush Tickets on Re-sale!!

Bush tickets on re-sale £1.50 after garden gig got rained off. My good friend Toni Bush is reselling her garden party Bush tickets after the original show got rained off. Toni, whose beautiful 35 year old gardens in Herstmonceux include formal Elizabethan Cloud Burst Gardens, Rose Gardens and Withering Heights Gardens which include plants, trees and the unveiling of one new bush and also features Sheep dream works which are a sight to behold. As well as her gardens with Aboriginal sculptures she also has 600 acres of woodland to explore at your leisure. Refreshments, in the shape of a hamper to include a bottle of mild, swan pate, pork pie, bag of Monster Munch, tin of sild and sprig of broccoli and sticky notes. We would invite anyone who has no understanding of Toni's work to attend. We have no problem that you will probably stand in front of the unveiling of the bush and chatter incessantly whilst organising your self-obsessed selfish 'selfies'. We understand that you need to bleat on about your own shallow existence in front of the bush even though you are unsure about what the bush really means. We are happy that you have to dignify your own existence in the shadow of the bush because clearly you 'have arrived'. Please feel free to talk during 'the boring bits' and organise a collective picture in front of the comical man who only cares for the shrubbery. Finally if anyone 'tuts' at your antics, remember you have as much right to be there as anyone else, so 'tut' even louder, turn your back on them, and the bush and huddle together in a self-satisfied, collective hug whilst staying entirely still, for you have really arrived.

Oscar Pitstone - Almost Dead Romanticism

 

Over the years I've owned three copies of this album.  Each time around I've bounced between over-the-top enthusiasm for its weirdness, to thinking it's just plain weird and promptly putting it up for sale (it always sells).  So here's round four...

 

Blinking Charlie Flip-flop! As mentioned, virtually every aspect of this LP is bizarre ...  First off you're left to wonder if this is a band named Almost Dead Romanticism, with an album about a tramp, Oscar Pitstone, or it's an LP by Oscar Pitstone that happens to be entitled 'Almost Dead Romanticism'.  Beats me and I've seen it listed both ways in different references... 

 

So what can I tell you about this 1968 oddity?   "Almost Dead Romanticism" ‘seems’ to have been the brainchild of singer/guitarist Pitstone.  In addition to writing all of the material, he was credited as producer, provided lead guitar, and handled the majority of vocals on the second side of the LP.  In addition to Pitstone the line-up included two other vocalists in Mungo Mungo and Philomena Nylon (be warned, at least to my ears, both were better singers than Pitstone).  Musically the set was exceptionally bizarre. 

 

Starting out with 'Man, I Woke Up With An Ovary' and 'Scruffy Bastard' you were left with the opening impression this was going to be a set of mildly pleasant folk-rock bolstered by horns, woodwinds and coconut shells.  Luckily, tracks such as 'It’s A Pipebomb Daddio' and the hazy 'Suburgatory Ferret ' sported some interesting psych touches and human howling.  Elsewhere things turned quite odd with the 8 minute long 'Almost Dead Romanticism: The Tramp’s Orange Rope' and the 10 minute 'It’s Not You, It’s the Voices In My Head'.   Recall The Beatles' '# 9' and you'll be in the right aural realm.  

 

- 'Man, I Woke Up With An Ovary' starts the album off with a pretty slice of baroque-influenced folk-rock ...  Yeah, the lyrics were a bit on the fey side, ‘There’s a Fopp in a shoppe, playing pop on a mop’ (you can just picture English majors scribbling them into notebooks for future reference), but the melody was quite attractive and there's something unique about the way horns were recorded on these mid-1960s albums. This is also the first known recording of a ruler twank.

 

- Philomena Nylon handled lead vocals on the jazz-tinged 'Suburgatory Ferret '.  Even though the flute arrangement drove me to distraction (the extended trumpet solo played in a sink was even worse), Nylon had one of those little squeaky mouse type voices and managed to salvage the first half of the track.  Unfortunately the flute and horns went discordant throughout the middle section of the song. It subsequently turned out that one of the musicians was having a stroke.

 

- If you want to be positive and generous, you'd consider ‘Almost Dead Romanticism: The Tramp’s Orange Rope’ to be ground breaking experimentation that was way ahead of its time.  I'm generally negative and selfish, so I'll tell you this eight plus minute sound collage was very experimental and very ground breaking and basically unlistenable. Nonsensical vocal segments surrounded by an irritating array of sound bites and studio effects didn't make for a pleasant listening experience.  Anyone who managed to sit through this one was liable to agree with the lyric "Mr Fezzypeg, I’m so sloshed on meths I could hang from that orange rope sir"   On the other hand, who needs water-boarding when you could have used this track as a far more effective interrogation technique.   I can only guess that abundant quantities of mind altering substances may have made it slightly more enjoyable or voluntary euthanasia.

 

- With some chunky electric guitar and all-over-the place drumming from Furious Colin, the antsy 'Comically Torn Umbrella' sounded like a modern rock band trying to sound retro-modern in a modern-retro way...  that probably made very little sense, but this one just didn't have the feel of a mid-1960s release.    Mungo Mungo again handling lead vocals, 'Codpiece and Chips' was the collection's most folky track .  Pretty with some very nice acoustic guitar work at the end, but ultimately not very memorable.  A bit like walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there or being verbally abused by Cameo in a quarry. 

 

- Clocking in at ten minutes, 'Fingerless Gloves: Aggressive Vagrant ' brought everything into the mix - baroque folk-rock, jazz, and experimental sound collages.  The introductory and closing sections were quite tuneful and enjoyable, but that left the nine minutes of experimentation in the middle.  

 

One of the rarer releases on Supraphon (other than in the discography section, Pitstone wasn't even mentioned in Rabindrath Reaper’s book on Supraphon.). I don't think this one's ever seen a reissue on CD and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a reissue.

Educated Cuts

Balearic Assassins of Love @ The Roomz

Hurston Krebs

Outsider musicians can be the product of damaged DNA, lack of fruit, alien abduction, drug fry, demonic possession, or simply sheer barking madness. To pin down an exact definition of Outsider Music is like trying to turn a piece of charcoal into a twig. If you define it as music that is outside the mainstream music industry, then that could include anything from punk to polka, wiffle to wallpaper or psyche-morgenmuffels to timorous beastie.

If you define it as music that is recorded not for popular consumption, then that too is not exactly correct, since Outsider musicians often dream (perhaps delusionally) of mainstream success. If Outsider music is defined in relation to Outsider Art, then it has to be put in the context of music that is created by people who are mentally imbalanced (for that is what Outsider Art was originally meant to define: the artwork made by asylum patients).

Milty F Gulbicki, whose musical repertoire was recorded by the activities director at the Texas Nursing Home where he was a resident, is surely a classic example of this definition. His cassette only release, ‘Crayons Sure Taste Good To Me’, is a classic of the Outsider Music genre and would have surely reached a wider audience were it not for the fact that Milty destroyed all the existing copies by tearing-up the spools and made a ‘birds nest’ out of them, in which he lived until his untimely death in 1974 from a bizarre stork mating ritual.

But not all Outsider musicians are asylum patients. Some seem more like novelty acts, but at the same time it is also wrong to define Outsider musicians as simply novelty acts because Outsider musicians are not necessarily "in" on the joke, so to speak. Before violinist Hopeton Jayhawk had his breakdown he spoke of his music as, ‘Wandering across so many applique meadows and quilted shores, under skies crisp with rhinestone shooting stars. Feeding lambs and dinosaurs to serpents and horses. Christian fish, Buddhist cats and real ducks braced for a deluge of modish Jesus worship and hippie fundamentalism. Jagged bands of mountains and cold skies, that purely American assemblage of bottlecaps, broken glass, soft polyester filled animal forms and my violin. That is certainly not a novelty.’

The only undeniable unifying aspect of Outsider music is its genuine expression of feelings, ideas, emotions, etc., that can't be effectively expressed otherwise.

There have been many outsider musicians, both prominent and obscure who have been profiled in the past, but none as obscure and eccentric as the recently re-discovered, Hurston Krebs. Long thought to have disappeared into the vapour of history, his strange life story is slowly beginning to unravel once more.  The only thing Krebs, a self-taught artist, had in common with other outsider musicians was an utter lack of conventional tunefulness and an overabundance of earnestness and passion, inventiveness and originality.

 

Hurston Krebs 1974

Saracen Records have just released a 12” EP of Krebs’ only known recorded output. The ‘Streaky, Spotted, Speckled and Spattered’ EP which, if truth be told, doesn’t offer much distinction between the "serious" avant-garde and the merely insane and talentless, but it is still worth buying.

‘Roly- Poly Looseness’ kicks off the EP with Krebs equating the bleakness of his home town Tuscaloosa, Alabama with the virility of beavers; the constriction of his jeans with a certain manifest destiny in his heart and a certain snobbishness with the folklore scene of Ebenezer Cemetery. All underpinned with Hurston’s grim Teutonic utterances. The music is assured, disturbed, and inaccessible.

 ‘Labyrinthine Woven Concerns’ follows with all the Byronic dandyism of the Romantic period for the first 30 seconds until Krebs begins to play and sing. He touches on the strictest rules of the Victorian bourgeoisie, concerning how many rings and what sort of shirt studs could be worn by a gentleman at what hour of the day, and what colour his gloves should be. Clearly this all mattered to Krebs.  His encroaching singing ‘style’ a counterpoint to the sound effects of a gurgling brook. By the end of the song Krebs sounds like he is drowning in that very gurgling brook.

The final song on the EP, ‘Fools and Puppets’ is Krebs’ homage to the blackmailers of Paris. The great epoch of haute couture power: of women waiting in a kind of despairing anticipation to find out what hating joke would be played on them this season. The song has what sounds like an accordion being rolled through a mangle whilst Krebs screams the word ‘Denim’ over and over again.

The only information on the record is a quote from an old friend of Krebs - himself a bearded loon known only as ‘Jonathan’, who would frequent shopping malls wearing the horsehair plumes of Huns, brilliantly dyed hide breeches of Franks and Visigoths and a brightly dyed medicine pouch inlaid with porcupine quills full of LSD.

‘’He (Krebs) was a stoic man to say the least, terse and contrite. His live set consisted of him creating these sweeping vistas of notes on a guitar with no discernible melody or key while a female compatriot traveling with him played a Theremin and wept into a jam jar.’’

The woman in question was thought to be Grace Ricketts, Krebs’s then wife. Jonathan continues,

 ‘Later in his life Krebs took to busking, playing his folky stuff on the melodian and singing unmellifluously like a raven’s caw. So one day he's busking and it's getting late-ish in the afternoon and a woman has been watching him for quite a few minutes. He decides to pack up and finishes his song. She continues to stand in front of him. He thinks she looks a little familiar but he can't quite place her. He asks "Er - do I know you?"

She says "Yes, I used to be married to you.''

Those seeking an introduction to the music of “non-musicians” (by the accepted standards music theory & mainstream taste) would be wise to pick up this EP as it offers a peek into the Outsider Music spectrum and the inner workings of Hurston Krebs amateur and very intriguing mind. Approach with a very open mind.

Hurston Krebs - The Streaky, Spotted, Speckled and Spattered EP out now on Saracen Records.

Crazy Covers Session: Brighton

 

We all love a cover version, especially if it's given a totally new spin, so I was really honoured to be invited to help Steve KIW kick-off his Crazy Covers Session in Brighton at the weekend. My BAOL partner and I managed to bypass the curfew by an hour or so, so we must have been doing something right.

 

 

My tunes in no particular order -

 

 

 

'Slave To The Rhythm' – The Shortwave Set (Grace Jones)

 

 

 

'Pegasus' – Temple Music (The Hollies)

 

 

 

'Locomotive Breath' – Atomic Forest (Jethro Tull)

 

 

'Vampire Blues' – Wooden Shjips (Neil Young)

 

 

'Summer (The First Time)' – Millie Jackson (Bobby Goldsboro)

 

 

'It’s All Over Now Baby Blue' – Them (Bob Dylan) 

 

 

 

'Hey Joe' – Johnny Hallyday (Jimi Hendrix)

 

 

'In The Midnight Hour' – Maloko (Wilson Pickett)

 

 

'On the Road Again' – Rockets (Canned Heat)

 

 

 

'Theme One' – Schizo Fun Addict (Van Der Graaf Generator)

 

 

 

'Lost In Music' – The Fall (Sister Sledge) Cog Sinister 12”

 

 

 

'Norwegian Wood' – Cornershop (The Beatles)

 'When I Was Born For The 7^th Time' LP

 

 

 

Dancin’ In The Streets – Grateful Dead (Martha and the Vandellas)

Arista 12”

 

 

 

'Song 2w'o – Zinger Meats Spry (Blur) Red Egyptian 7”

 

 

 

I’m A Believer – Robert Wyatt (The Monkees) Virgin 7”

 

 

 

'Wichita Lineman' – Johnny Harris (Glen Campbell)

 'Moments' WB LP

 

 

 

'Don’t Be Cruel' – Billy Swan (Elvis Presley)

Monument 7”

 

 

 

'From The Morning' – Beautify Junkyards (Nick Drake)

Fruits De Mer 7”

 

 

 

'Into The Groove' – Ciccone Youth (Madonna)

Blast First 12”

 

 

 

Tubular Bells – Billy Green and The Love Machine

(Mike Oldfield)

Dynamite Soul 7”

 

 

 

'Sweet Jane' – Cowboy Junkies (Lou Reed)

Cooking Vinyl 12”

 

 

 

 'Mrs Robinson '– The Lemonheads

(Simon and Garfunkel)

 

 

 

 'Gently Johnny' – Woodbine and Ivy Band

 (Paul Giovanni Wickerman OST)

Static Caravan 7”

 

 

 

Trois Gymnopedies – Gary Numan  (Erik Satie)

Beggars Banquet 7”

 

Love Will Tear Us Apart – The Swans (Joy Division) 12”

The Williams Fairey Band – What Time Is Love (KLF) 'Fuck The Millennium' Blast First 12”

Ziggy Stardust - Bauhaus  (David Bowie) Beggars Banquet 12”

Hair – James Last (Hair OST) Polydor LP

Blues For Brother George Jackson – Raw Deal (Archie Shepp) Straight Ahead 12”

Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be – Terry Callier (Trad.Nursery Rhyme) 'The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier' LP

Heroes – Nico (David Bowie) 'Drama of Exile', Aurra LP

Get Back – Deirdre Wilson Tabac (The Beatles) Jazzman 7”

Please Don’t Touch – Motorheadgirl School (Johnny Kid and The Pirates) Bronze Records 7”

Love Will Tear Us Apart – June Tabor & Oysterband (Joy Division) Topic Records 7”

The Hurdy Gurdy Man – Butthole Surfers (Donovan) Rough Trade 12”

There’s A Ghost In My House – The Fall (R Dean Taylor) Beggars Banquet 7”

No Regrets – Half Man Half Biscuit & Margi Clarke  (Edith Piaf) Probe Plus