Umbrellas in the Sun (Disques du Crepuscule / Factory Benelux DVD)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

UMBRELLAS IN THE SUN: A CREPUSCULE/FACTORY BENELUX DVD 1979-1987

(LTM )

The Wire, long ago

by Simon Reynolds

 Founded in Brussels at the dawn of the Eighties, Les Disques Du Crepuscule was operated by a clutch of Belgian aesthetes suffering from an unhealthy infatuation with Factory Records. They swiftly formed an alliance with their Manchester idols and jointly released records by the likes of A Certain Ratio in the Low Countries (hence Factory Benelux).  Now the equally Fac-obsessed reissue label LTM-- not content with echoing the Belgian imprint in its very name, an acronym for Les Temps Modernes--is paying tribute with this splendid DVD of promos and live footage of Crepuscule/Benelux acts. 

Vintage videos can be embarrassingly dated, but the bulk of the material on Umbrellas gives off a sense of “limited means, effectively used.” ACR’s “Back To The Start” is a case in point, juxtaposing murky hand-held film of the band shaking their stuff in a field after nightfall with scenes of children dancing on the edge of an indoor swimming pool. The sallow lighting, oddly angled shots, and strange bodily geometries perfectly suit the group’s dislocated disco, its parched percussion draped with the bled-like-veal vocal pallor of Martha Tilson. 

Josef K--like ACR, Northern punk-funkers with cropped hair and very clean ears--appear here performing “Sorry For Laughing” on a television pop show. The simple but clever twist is that the TV footage intermittently appears projected, bluescreen-style, onto a lump of Gak nestling on a girl’s bare stomach. Manipulating the goo, she distends the images of the band as they bob on her belly.  

On a purely sonic level, Umbrellas’ highlight is  Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sluggin’ For Jesus,” the lead track off 1981’s Three Crepuscule Tracks EP (arguably the group’s peak). Laced with American televangelist prattle, the entrancing Karoli-funk groove is accompanied by light-flickered images of the guys fondling their synths and, in Richard Kirk’s case, scritching away at a violin.  

Close behind “Sluggin’” is the exquisitely plangent threnody for Ian Curtis that is The Durutti Column’s “Never Known” (although, for mystifying reasons, the track is here titled “Marie Louise Gardens”). With Vini Reilly generating such agonizing beauty of sound, all that’s required is the sparest of visuals, and that's what we get:  the “missing boy” alone in a deserted public park at twilight, caressing the guitar strings with his finger-tips.  

In scarcity terms, though, the gems here comprise the fabulous monochrome footage of Malaria! onstage performing “White Sky, White Sea”   Tuxedomoon’s “Litebulb Overkill,” also live, but juxtaposed with Eurail travelogue footage (what looks like France seen from a moving train); and the 23 minute long film of a performance by Belgian funkateers Marine live juxtaposed with arty, kaleidoscopic visuals. Most known for the existensialist Chic of “Life In Reverse”, Marine’s entire aesthetic was based on the debut Benelux release, ACR’s emaciated cover of “Shack Up”. 

This DVD sags somewhat near its end as we enter the undistinguished and rudderless mid-80s phase of Factory output (the sub-Sade café bleu-isms of Kalima, anybody? I didn’t think so). But overall Umbrellas In the Sun is a wonderful document that conveys Crepuscule’s ultra-refined Euro-vision while also capturing captures a lost moment of art-into-pop infusion.

ohmylord, this period of Anthony H. Wislon A&Ring is quite something innit 

Devo - Hardcore Devo - December 15 1990

 

Vermorel / Westwood

 (for Artforum)

Fred Vermorel achieved both renown and notoriety for his unorthodox approach to pop biography and as a theorist of fame and fandom. But 1996’s Vivienne Westwood: Fashion, Perversity and the Sixties Laid Bare was his most eccentric statement yet.  For a start, the book was as much about Westwood’s partner Malcolm McLaren as the legendary designer herself.  Her story was ably chronicled in an imaginary interview weaved together from magazine quotes and half-remembered ancedotes stemming from Vermorel’s long association with the punk couture duo and the Sex Pistols milieu. But the book really came alive with the central section: Vermorel’s memoir of Sixties London, when he and McLaren were art-school accomplices. The longest and most vivid part of the book, it’s packed with fascinating digressions on topics such as the semiotics of cigarette smoking and the atmosphere of all-night art cinema houses. Among Vermorel’s several provocative assertions is the claim that pop music back then simply wasn’t as important as made out by subsequent false memorials to the Sixties, but was regarded as unserious, a mere backdrop to other bohemian or artistic activities.  Posing as a profile of a fashion icon, Vivienne Westwood presents the reader with an outlandish blend of cultural etiology (it doubles as an autopsy on the Sixties’s impossible dreams and analysis of its perverse psychology) and  triangular love story. Vermorel and Westwood emerge as both still besotted with the incorrigible McLaren, despite having each “broken up” with him long ago.    

-          Simon Reynolds

Josef K - The Only Fun in Town / Sorry For Laughing + Young and Stupid (Melody Maker October 20 1990)