JOE BOYD and WHITE BICYCLES

director's cut, Time Out, 2006

  by Simon Reynolds

White Bicycles, Joe Boyd’s riveting memoir of his life as record producer and manager in the 1960s, is perfectly timed. British folk rock is freakily fashionable at the moment, with Boyd protégés like The Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention revered as sacred ancestors by the new breed of beardy American minstrels such as Devendra Banhardt. But the New Jersey-born Boyd’s involvement in music extends way beyond gently-plucked acoustic guitars and dulcet-toned troubadours.

He was the production manager at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 (it was Boyd who plugged in Dylan’s electric guitar that fateful night), he co-founded the legendary London psychedelic club UF0, and he produced Pink Floyd’s debut single “Arnold Layne”. Boyd appears across the pages of White Bicycles as an almost Zelig-like figure, popping up alongside legend after legend: Muddy Waters, Roland Kirk, Eric Clapton, Duke Ellington, Nico, and--most unlikely of all-- the pre-ABBA Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Frida, with whom he spent an evening wassailing in Sweden. He shared a house in Laurel Canyon with John Cale and even dated lovely Linda Peters, the future Mrs Richard Thompson.

Unlike Zelig, though, Boyd was no bystander, but a crucial backroom catalyst and enabler, or as he prefers, “an eminence grise”.  His career really took off when he arrived in London in late 1965. Swept up in the “incredible energy of 1966,” he neglected his day job (setting up the UK branch of Elektra Records) and became a prime mover on the city’s psychedelic underground. With partner John Hopkins, he started UFO. “There were a lot more freaks in London than we’d realized,” he recalls of the club’s wildfire success. “The great golden period of UFO was from December 1966, when it opened, to April 1967, when “Arnold Layne” came out. Then Hoppy and some of his pals at International Times threw the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream rave at Alexandra Palace, the one Hendrix and Lennon turned up too, and there were a lot of cameras there. Almost instantly, UFO was swamped by the curious.” Hard on the heel of these “tourists” came the media and the law, resulting in tabloid horror stories about naked 15 year old girls tripping out of their minds, police raids, and a drug bust for Hoppy.

The idea for UFO evolved as an offshoot of the London Free School, an idealistic “education for the people” venture operated out of a basement in Ladbroke Grove. Renting a nearby church hall, Boyd and Hoppy staged a series of precociously triptastic Pink Floyd sound-and-light shows to raise money for the LFS. “Then, we thought ‘why not raise some money for ourselves?’” chuckles Boyd. “We were both broke--I’d lost the Elektra job, while Hoppy had been a photographer but had given it up for ‘the revolution’. So starting UFO seemed like an obvious way to make a bit of bread”

Among the more anarcho-yippie “heads” of the time, like Grove hairy Mick Farren, the organizationally-skilled Boyd was regarded as suspiciously bourgeois and business-savvy. But in this respect he exemplified a breed of aesthete-entrepreneur who flourished in the Sixties--characters like Chris Blackwell of Island Records (with whom Boyd’s  production company Witchseason forged an alliance), Chris Stamp & Kit Lambert (the team behind The Who and the Track label), Peter Jenner, Giorgio Gomelsky, et al. All of these cats managed to walk the line between art and commerce, the underground and the mainstream. Equally driven by a passion for rock and a love of the hustle, record biz mavericks such as Denny Cordell and Tony Secunda (the producer and manager behind the Move) are as vividly drawn in Boyd’s memoir as far more widely known figures like Nick Drake and Sandy Denny.  Although Boyd similarly managed to balance the demands of music and the bottom line, he says he wasn’t nearly as tough or shrewd as the true players of the era. After recording “Arnold Layne”, for instance, he was maneuvred out of any stake in Pink Floyd’s future.

Ironically, for someone at the swirling kaleidoscopic center of London’s freak scene, Boyd’s own approach to producing records shunned all the trippy tricks that got slathered over music in the late Sixties, opting instead for a warm and luminous naturalism. “I had a horror of making the hand of the producer visible, so all those overdone studio effects like phasing and panning never appealed,” he explains. “I felt it would date the music, whereas I always wanted my things to be listened to in 50 years. For me the task of a producer is to create the illusion of a band in a room playing together live in a real acoustic space.” You can hear the timeless fruits of Boyd’s sensitive approach on the White Bicycles double-CD of Witchseason productions that’s coming out in tandem with the book.

And the title of the memoir? It’s an emblem, explains Boyd, for all those “lovely ideas of the Sixties” that didn’t work out.  It specifically refers to the Dutch Provos scheme of distributing white bicycles around Amsterdam for people to use for free—a utopian plan that worked fine for a while, “until by the end of 1967 people started stealing the bikes and repainting them”. Boyd explains that in his increasingly desperate search for a title, he recalled that in the book he identifies the moment when UFO faves Tomorrow performed their Brit-psych classic “White Bicycle” as the absolute zenith of the Sixties, the peak before the crash into disillusion and disintegration. The pinnacle occurred at “just before dawn on Saturday, 1 July 1967.” If his sense of recall sounds suspiciously precise for someone who surely ought to have been blitzed out of his gourd at the time, Boyd anticipates any objections, confessing “I cheated. I never got too stoned. I became the eminence grise I aspired to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I was there, and I do remember.”

White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s is published by Serpent’s Tail on May 27th. The White Bicycles anthology of Boyd productions is released by Fledgling.

PUNK'S ETERNAL RETURNS
written for Italian Vogue, 2006 ?

by Simon Reynolds

Punk stalks the culture again. You can see this in the success of Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, in which the director stars as a bad mother whose combination of punk, stripper and junkie bears more than a slight resemblance to Courtney Love. Then there’s the return of the Stooges, the group who defined the punk sound and attitude with songs like “No Fun” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” a good half-decade before the movement actually began, and who are about to release The Weirdness, their first album in thirty years.  There’s Lady Sovereign, the UK’s rising rapper, who has recorded a version of the Sex Pistols “Pretty Vacant” for an episode of America’s most popular teenage TV drama, The OC. And there’s also official commemoration of punk’s thirtieth anniversary in the form of exhibitions like Panic Attack! Art In the Punk Years (showing at London’s Barbican Art Gallery this June) and The Secret Public: the Last Days of the British Underground 1978-88, on tour now following its launch in Munich last year.

Punk’s back, then. But when was it ever away? In truth, there has barely been a single year since 1977 when some aspect of punk rock or punk fashion has not been rediscovered or reworked. Punk’s ghost is a perennial presence, serving as both inspiration and reproach to every new generation of musicians, artists, and cultural radicals. Since its near-simultaneous detonation in mid-Seventies New York and London, punk’s shockwaves have reverberated through every corner of the arts and popular culture. It gave us pop icons like Kurt Cobain, Beastie Boys, Morrissey, Green Day, and Bjork (her first band, formed when she was fourteen, was the Icelandic punk group Spit and Snot). But punk also indelibly shaped artists from outside popular music: film-makers like Jim Jarmusch, novelists like Irvine Welsh and Isabella Santacroce, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst, fashion designers like Vivien Westwood and Alexander McQueen. Through the Nineties and into this decade, punk’s legacy has cropped up in the oddest places, from the gritty, stripped-down approach of the Dogme movement in Scandinavian movie-making to the way designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui rifle through the wardrobe of New Wave and Goth styles. John Richmond called one of his lines of clothing “Destroy”, after the last word of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK”--the same place Santacroce got the title of her second novel.

What’s so good about destruction? The idea of clearing away the detritus of tradition and rebooting culture at Year Zero is always attractive to the young, appealing both to their sense of iconoclasm and to their ambition (one way to speed up your career is to discredit your established elders who’ve clawed their way up the establishment hierarchy). Punk’s who-gives-a-fuck attitude of snarling defiance and solipstic self-love is galvanizing (“Anger is an energy”, as Sex Pistol singer Johnny Rotten put it). Like a snort of cheap amphetamine, it gives the insecure-but-ambitious the necessary boost of will-to-power to kick down the door.

Beyond the attitude, there’s two main reasons why punk endures as a reference point:  the unsurpassable extremism of its style, and the contagious potency of its guiding concept of do-it-yourself. As invented by couturiers like Westwood but also, crucially, by the punk kids themselves, punk fashion consisted of  ripped-and-torn clothes held together with safety pins, hair slashed into spiky shapes and dyed inorganic shades of green or pink, and a Marcel Duchamp-style repurposing of lowly readymades like plastic garbage bags into garments. Punks also exploited the shock impact of tweaking taboos, wearing fetish wear associated with sado-masochism (the famous bondage trousers, where a strap connecting the two legs constrained one’s movement), and even using forbidden and offensive symbols like the swastika. The ice queen of this version of style as a kick-in-the-eye to straight society was Siouxsie Sioux, one of the original London punks. Punk’s most abiding fashion legacy is the Gothic culture spawned from the sepulchral sound and visuals she created with her band the Banshees. Goth has been a fixture of popular culture ever since, from movies like Donnie Darko to TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the black eyeliner-wearing misery boys of  emo (short for emotional punk) such as My Chemical Romance, currently riding high in pop charts across the world.

Punk’s do-it-yourself ideal arose out of disgust with the early Seventies emergence of a remote rock star aristocracy, who played stadium shows where they pranced onstage looking like distant ant-like figures to the bulk of the audience and showed off their virtuosity with interminable self-indulgent solos. Aiming to democratize music and open it back up to teenagers, punk was deliberately primitive music, rock stripped down to rudimentary three-chord-or-less riffs crudely bashed out on cheap electric guitars. “ This is a chord, this is another, this is a third -  Now form a band" was the famous cover line of the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue (and zines themselves were a prime expression of the do-it-yourself principle). The ultimate manifestation of this ethos of anyone-can-do-it and irreverent non-professionalism was the cassette underground, where bands sold tapes of their work for dirt-cheap prices via mail order, or even gave the music away for free if you mailed them a blank cassette. But more influential on the wider culture was the explosion of independent labels in the postpunk period. Some were owned and operated by a single band, others by socialistic musicians collectives, and others still by aesthete-entrepreneurs who wanted to support innovative music but also saw a market for experimental and edgy sounds. Almost all of the original punk independents have long since perished, but a handful grew to become enduring forces in contemporary music, such as Mute (home to Depeche Mode and Nick Cave) and Rough Trade (the Libertines and the Strokes).

The independent label concept has proliferated far beyond rock, giving rise to indie publishers, indie movie-makers, every kind of autonomous cultural production you can imagine. But where the do-it-yourself ethos lives largest is on the internet. Today’s blogs and livejournals are the modern equivalent of the photocopied, hand-scrawled, cut-and-paste fanzines of the punk era--sometimes collaborative ventures, but far more often, lone voices yelling out their angry and excited opinions and finding a niche audience of like-minds. And then there’s Myspace, which fuses the independent micro-label with the fanzine to create the ultimate expression of the do-it-yourself impulse: bands uploading their own music to circulate for free. Do-it-yourself is the empowering lesson that every generation, bored and alienated by what the mainstream offers, has to rediscover for itself. In that sense, punk will never die.

THIS HEAT
This Heat
Deceit
The Wire 1992 (?)

by Simon Reynolds

These reissues are mementoes of an unimaginably different
Brit-rock era than ours. Today's indie bliss-rock aims to engulf us
in 'dreamtime', simulates the effects of drugs; back then (1979-81)
the goal was to wake us from our mass culture sleep, rouse us from
addiction to TV and pop. Demystification was the goal; alienation
was both aesthetic strategy and subject matter.

Along with Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti, Pop Group,
Throbbing Gristle et al, This Heat forged the syntax of the
post-punk avant-garde: synth-drones and squelches; hissing,
programmed percussion; tape-loops and found sounds; effects-ridden
guitar; creepy vocals. Rhythms had a ciphered relation to reggae or
disco rather than rock'n'roll, vocals recalled the lugubrious
Englishness of Robert Wyatt; American rockism was stoutly resisted.
Both "This Heat" and "Deceit" are haunted by the standard-issue
spectres of the 1979 worldview: fear and disgust at the amnesiac,
anaesthetic comfort of domesticity; anti-consumerism; dread of
nuclear annihilation. What This Heat and co feared most was sleep:
every element of their music was designed to put you on edge.

Groove was mostly foregone in favour of brittle, fractured tempos;
when it did appear, funk had a foreboding compulsion. Elsewhere,
This Heat made ambient music, but without the flow, without the
repose. "Horizontal Hold" cuts from blistering feedback to arid,
timebomb tick-tock dub to an abrasive funk-scrabble. "Not Waving"
sounds like Robert Wyatt languishing in a dungeon while mice scamper
over Ivor Cutler's harmonium. "Independence" is a mirage of
Oriental reggae, gorgeous and deadly like a jewelled cobra.

In 1979, this music was meant to be the dawning of a brave,
all-new frontier. In truth, the post-punk avant-garde was really a
resumption of the techniques of the pre-1977 experimental fringe
(Henry Cow, Art Bears, Faust, Can, Soft Machine, Residents etc) with
a different agenda and more apprehensive aura. With the world scene
getting more apocalyptic by the day, This Heat's unsettled and
unsettling music seems more timely than it has for a long while.

review of This Heat's debut album reissued for

This Heat
This Heatemusic 2006 

by Simon Reynolds

This Heat are regarded as one of the archetypal post-punk vanguard outfits. Which they were, but the fact is that this South London trio were just as much a post-psychedelic band, with audible roots in the UK's progressive underground of the early '70s. In 1975, even as Patti Smith and the Ramones released their debuts, This Heat's drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward was playing in Quiet Sun, a jazz-rock combo led by Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera. This Heat's slogan was "All possible processes. All channels open. 24 hours alert," and those first two sentiments could easily have been endorsed by proggy weirdos like Van Der Graaf Generator, Gong, or Can. But the third plank of that mini-manifesto marked This Heat as true contemporaries of Scritti Politti and the Pop Group, its totally-wired tone of paranoid vigilance tapping into the atmosphere of tension and dread that suffused the late '70s.

Political anguish — fears of nuclear armageddon, of a right-wing backlash reversing the gains of the '60s, of an emerging police state — suffused This Heat's music, creating a vibe a world away from the whimsical meander of pre-punk noodlers like Soft Machine. Nonetheless, you can still hear This Heat's proggy past come through on their self-titled 1979 debut in the Robert Wyatt-like plaintiveness and Englishness of Hayward's vocals and the undisguised virtuosity of his drumming, as well as in the group's tell-tale penchant for disjointed structures. More post-punk DIY-noisy in spirit and sound are the contributions of Gareth Williams, a non-musican who supplied jarring blurts and abstract smears using broken-down instruments, effects-pedals, and a primitive form of sampling involving tape loops.

This Heat could be propulsively, even convulsively rhythmic: the eerie percussive timbres and frenetic beats of "24 Track Loop" offers an astonishing audio-prophecy of '90s drum 'n' bass, while "Horizontal Hold" cuts from blistering feedback, to a time-bomb tick-tock of Cold War skank, to an abrasive funk-scrabble, But the group were equally effective making a kind of ambient music, albeit of a decidedly non-tranquilizing sort. "Not Waving" sounds like Wyatt languishing in a dungeon where the rats scuttle morosely over the keys of a decrepit harmonium. "Late-prog," "post-punk" — either way you slice it, This Heat is a category-collapsing classic.


SEE ALSO
transcript of interview with Charles Hayward -- an out-take from Totally Wired - as published at the Quietus