Sitting on concrete stairs, starving - even with an epically wretched hangover - can't diminish the glory of Brunch With Bach.

... They hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard. This was in the days when Mapplethorpe didn't have the patience to take pictures, before he became "smitten" with photography; when Smith had no idea she would one day front a rock'n'roll band. They were, as she neatly puts it, "in a fresh state of transformation", about to become the artists they would go on to be. "Patti, you got famous before me," he said a decade later, when they walked down the street and heard her hit record "Because the Night" blaring from storefronts.

"He was teasing me," Smith tells me now, "because I always told him I didn't care if I was famous, I just wanted him to be famous. But Robert wanted people to see me as he saw me – it didn't matter so much to me whether the world saw me or not, but it was very important for Robert that the world acknowledge me. He believed in me."

It has taken Smith 10 years to write the book. Initially, after Mapplethorpe died, she wrote instead of weeping, and came up with a series of linked prose poems in his honour, entitled The Coral Sea. But his death was succeeded by the death of Smith's pianist, Richard Sohl, at the age of 37, the death of her husband, the guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, and the death of her brother, Todd, all in the space of a few years, and though she'd promised Mapplethorpe on his death bed that she would one day write their story, she couldn't return to the first loss in the midst of the others. "Robert was the first great death in a series of great deaths," she says, "and it almost taught me how to grieve. Although you grieve differently for each person, the important part of grieving is to live." ...

I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas
1953



I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
Don't want a doll, no dinky Tinker Toy

I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy



I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you?

He won't have to use our dirty chimney flue
Just bring him through the front door, that's the easy thing to do

I can see me now on Christmas morning, creeping down the stairs
Oh what joy and what surprise when I open up my eyes


To see a hippo hero standing there



I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
No crocodiles, no rhinoceroses
I only like hippopotamuses
And hippopotamuses like me too

Mom says the hippo would eat me up, but then
Teacher says a hippo is a vegetarian

There's lots of room for him in our two-car garage
I'd feed him there and wash him there and give him his massage

I can see me now on Christmas morning, creeping down the stairs
Oh what joy and what surprise when I open up my eyes

To see a hippo hero standing there

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
No crocodiles or rhinoceroseses
I only like hippopotamuseses
And hippopotamuses like me too!

Great shot, great band, great show. Not only does she cutely point her toe half the time she's bowing her cello, she also sits on the kickdrum, puts the cello on her lap and strums it like a guitar during one song.

Government inaction over the exemption of small, live music venues from overbearing licensing laws is putting the future of the live music scene in jeopardy, the head of the UK's music trade organisation has warned.

Government promises two weeks ago to exempt venues with 100-person capacity have stalled with no sign of the proposed consultation, said Feargal Sharkey, the former lead singer of the Undertones and now chief executive of UK Music.

"We have heard nothing more about this other than a brief statement in parliament, which seems devoid of any meaningful intent," he said. "It is very disappointing that the government is constantly and endlessly debating this and seems incapable of dealing with the situation in hand. It is increasing everyone's level of frustration and even anger."

The organisation has sent a letter, seen by the Guardian, to Gerry Sutcliffe, a licensing minister, asking if he has informed his cabinet colleagues about the decision or taken any steps to launch the 12-week consultation that has been mooted.

Musicians and campaigners are concerned there is not enough time before the next general election to change the act and criticised an apparent lack of political will to take the exemption forward. ...

One nation under a Moog

As new BBC4 documentary Synth Britannia shows, the synthesizer first dehumanised then re-humanised British pop, fulfilled the DIY promise of punk, and changed how bands looked forever

Simon Reynolds
Saturday 10 October 2009


Numan nature: "Are 'Friends' Electric?" sent synth-pop overground, changing the face of British pop Photograph: GAB Archive/Redferns

The synth-pop era really kicked off in June 1979, when Tubeway Army's Are 'Friends' Electric? hit No 1. The sound and visuals owed a substantial debt to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and his stranded alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Chuck in some Europe Between The Wars atmospherics and you had the recipe for Visage's Fade To Grey and The Damned Don't Cry; Japan's Nightporter and Ghosts; Ultravox's Vienna And bringing up the rear were the pioneers, the chaps who'd coined the whole mittel Europa/Mensch-Maschine shtick in the first place: Kraftwerk, No 1 in February 1982 with their 1978 tune The Model. But synthesizers in popular music actually go back much further than the mandroid melancholy of Gary Numan. All the way back to the psychedelic 60s, when American groups like Silver Apples and The United States Of America ditched guitars for oscillators. In 1969, George Harrison put out a whole album of Moog doodles called Electronic Sound. German cosmic rockers Tangerine Dream gradually streamlined their Pink Floyd-wannabe grandeur into a minimal, darkly pulsing, all-electronic sound. Floyd themselves forayed into full-blown synth-rock with Dark Side Of The Moon's On The Run, whose brain-searing wibbles anticipated acid house. Other proggers like ELP's Keith Emerson and Yes' Rick Wakeman performed behind massive banks of electronic keyboards, but tended to use their synths as glorified organs, hamming it up with Bach-style variations and arpeggiated folderol. Far more unearthly electro tones could be heard on the telly via science-fiction series like Doctor Who and The Tomorrow People or at the cinema, courtesy of dystopian movies like A Clockwork Orange, The Andromeda Strain and Logan's Run. Black music also had its share of visionaries besotted with the synth's cornucopia of otherworldly tone colours, from fusioneers Weather Report and Herbie Hancock to funkateers Stevie Wonder and Funkadelic. ...

After four decades spent standing guard over one of the most secretive and enigmatic bands on the planet, it seems that Ralf Hütter is loosening up. Kraftwerk, the German quartet who mapped the digital pop future long before digital technology existed, may have gradually retreated behind their carefully contrived anti-image as faceless musical robots, but Hütter is in unusually cheery and chatty mood when we meet.

Still boyish at 62, with a neat crown of wavy brown hair, his face oddly reminiscent of the actor Peter Fonda, Hütter enthuses about Kraftwerk’s latest global adventures: roadtesting their new 3-D video screens and nightclubbing in Chile with Radiohead in March, as well as performing alongside the British Olympic cycling team at the Manchester Velodrome in July. A longtime cycling obsessive, Hütter even managed to secure a spin around the velodrome track the morning after the concert.

He also jokes about Kraftwerk’s plans to enter next year’s Eurovision Song Contest. “Yes, totally naked,” he grins. “That is the only way to do it.” This is Kraftwerk Humour. We both laugh for precisely 4.2 seconds. ...

With the death of Jim Carroll last week, America has lost one of its singular and most under-rated poetic voices. As depicted in his most popular work The Basketball Diaries, Carroll grew up on New York's Lower East Side, the son of three generations of Irish-American bartenders, with the fair Irish looks to match. He was also an unlikely poetry prodigy and a man of contrasts: at the age of 12 he started keeping a diary that documented his dual teenage existence as an-all star basketball player at an elite private school, and his emerging heroin addiction and the street life that surrounded the junkie scene.

Inspired by the likes of Rimbaud and Frank O'Hara, in 1965 he began attending workshops at St Mark's Place and published his debut Organic Trains a year later at the age of 16. Extracts from The Basketball Diaries appeared in the Paris Review - a huge achievement for a 16-year-old, especially one who was also occasionally working as a Times Square rent boy and mugger to finance his heroin addiction.

It was poet Ted Berrigan who took Carroll under his wing, introducing him to the likes of Burroughs and Kerouac, who remarked that "at 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89% of the novelists working today." Carroll's ascension coincided with a cultural explosion centred on downtown Manhattan in the late 60s/early 70s, an era that spawned Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. Carroll was feted by them all - drinking with Bob Dylan one day, fending off the advances of Allen Ginsberg the next. It was a time later documented in arguably his strongest prose collection Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries 1971 – 1973. ...

What a one-two punch of a day. First Henry Gibson, now Mary Travers. My guess is that the music of Peter, Paul & Mary in some way touched the childhood of just about anyone over the age of 25. I don't know if "Puff the Magic Dragon" is still popular among kids today, but it was a staple of my childhood. It took on a different meaning entirely later in life, but that's another story...

Ken's old band, Culture Bandits, used to practice in my basement a thousand years ago.

I found out last night that he is responsible for Polka Floyd and said, "OMG! That's you?!" I turned to the Bandits' bassist and said, "I'd always thought you were the genius!"

He responded, "Nope. It's Ken. It's always been Ken."

"Earworms should not be confused with endomusia, which is a serious affliction in which someone actually hears music that is not playing externally."

Oh, so musicians who hear music in their heads have a serious affliction? Should I have been hospitalized when I was a teenager?

San Francisco electro artist Moldover, like Beck before him, figured out a way to make physical music purchases superior to digital: Embrace the physical. In Moldover's case, that meant cramming an actual working theremin into the CD case.

Moldover really went all-out with this one. The CD case theremin features a headphone jack as well as a speaker, and the wiring on the theremin itself spells out the artist name, track names, and "album art," such as it is. He even includes a tiny pocket-sized version of the theremin so you're never without that odd organic screechy sound. The album costs $50, which actually seems pretty cheap considering it's packaged inside a musical instrument.

My life was wrapped around the circus.
Her name was Lydia.
I met her at the world's fair in 1900,
marked down from 1940.

Ah, Lydia.

She was the most glorious creature
Under the su-un.
Guiess. DuBarry. Garbo.
Rolled into one.

Oooooooh
Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia,
Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.
She has eyes that folks adore so,
And a torso even more so.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopidia,
Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is the Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus, too.
And proudly above waves the Red, White, and Blue,
You can learn a lot from Lydia.

La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

When her robe is unfurled, she will show you the world,
If you step up and tell her where.
For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paris,
Or Washington crossing the Delaware.

La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia,
Oh Lydia the Tattooed Lady
When her muscles start relaxin',
Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopidia,
oh Lydia the queen of them all!
For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz,
With a view of Niagara that nobody has.
And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz.
You can learn a lot from Lydia.

La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

Come along and see Buff'lo Bill with his lasso.
Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso.
Here is Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon.
Here's Godiva but with her pajamas on.

La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

Here is Grover Whalen unveilin' the Trilon.
Over on the West Coast we have Treaure Island.
Here's Nijinsky a-doin' the rhumba.
Here's her social security numba.

{whistles}La la la, la la la, la la la, la la la

Oh Lydia, oh Lydia that encyclopidia,
Oh Lydia the champ of them all.
She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet.
The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat.
And now the old boy's in command of the fleet,
For he went and married Lydia.

I said Lydia
{He said Lydia}
They said Lydia
{We said Lydia}
La La!

August 15, 2009
The Madness's Suggs gives a personal history of London
Behind the cheeky chappie demeanour, there is another side to the Madness front man of the past three decades. In his very personal history of London, Suggs reveals his fascination with the capital’s life and lore, from the bohemian backstreets he discovered as a child with his jazz-singing mother to the legendary pubs that launched his career

... MAD HATTERS

I have always admired Lock’s and that admiration only grew when I discovered that it was here that my favourite style of hat was born. A hat that has never, to my knowledge, caused riots on the streets and only occasionally filled timid Londoners with fear and terror; a hat that became an integral part of the London city gent’s uniform for decades; a hat that starred in movies with screen legends like Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Oddjob; a hat sported by the dashing John Steed in The Avengers and the bumbling Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army; a hat made sinister in A Clockwork Orange and cool by Louis Armstrong; a hat that’s appeared in more than one Madness video over the years; a hat that transcends the class divide; a hat that’s known and loved around the world; a hat they call the “coke”. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it?

You thought I was talking about the bowler, didn’t you?

Which is, of course, the name by which the hat became known over the years. But at Lock’s they called it a coke and they still do to this day (and they are the best hatters in the world – just ask the Post Office).

It all started in 1849 with a customer called William Coke. He was a member of a rich landowning family in Norfolk who commissioned Lock’s to design a new style of hat for his gamekeepers – something strong enough to protect them from low-hanging branches and ruthless poachers. The hatters put their heads together and came up with the design we recognise today. Before they put it into full production, they needed the thumbs-up from the customer himself. At this stage, most of us might have been content to examine the prototype hat and perhaps give it a stiff rap with the knuckles to test its suitability for the job. Mr Coke, it seems, was rather more thorough. Having given the hat the once-over, he exited the shop and placed the hat on the pavement outside. Then he jumped on it. Several times. As his bulky frame descended towards the hat, the unfortunate staff might have been forgiven for harbouring mild anxiety as to how the test might turn out. Had things gone wrong at this stage, this might have been the parallel story of how the flat cap was invented. Happily, as it turned out, any anxieties they may have had were unfounded. The hat survived the impact of the aristo and sat there, gloriously unscathed in all its black rotundity. Mr Coke was satisfied and gave the go-ahead for production to begin.

At Lock’s there’s a tradition that new hat designs are called after the original customer who commissioned them, which is why even to this day the hat is known as a coke. It’s known as a bowler to the rest of us because once the prototype had been given the thumbs-up by the great man himself, production of the hats was farmed out by Lock’s to a firm south of the river, Southwark to be precise, run by Thomas and William Bowler.

The feel of a real bowler is a tremendous thing, denser and heavier than you’d imagine if you’ve only ever come across one of those plastic Laurel and Hardy jobs from a fancy dress shop that only seem to come in size small. If that is the case, I suggest you get down to Lock’s whenever you can and have a feel of the real thing. Marvellous.

© Suggs & Wavelength Films Ltd. 2009. Extracted from Suggs and the City: My Journeys through Disappearing London

Electronic experiments such as A Taylor Kuffner's Gamelatron, featuring a Balinese orchestra controlled by a laptop, could revolutionise live performances ...

...Debelle had touted her songs four years previously to Will Ashon, the head of the label, who had passed, but sent her off with words of encouragement. The same cannot be said for the major labels she had visited as a teenager — or Choice FM, the London hip-hop station, whose failure to play her records was, she speculated recently, because they “weren’t black enough”. “And that’s a black station,” she sighs. “I mean, I knew Choice from the Brixton days, it’s part of my heritage, so it’s upsetting. ...it doesn’t only apply to Choice FM. What I’ve seen of the music business in this country, it’s run by middle-aged white men. There’s been a word created called urban, and that didn’t come from a black person; it probably came from a middle-aged white man thinking: ‘This is too black, but that’s not as black, so it’s not as offensive. Let’s call it urban, then we don’t have to say black any more.’” ...

Yes.

Were I to say any more I'd get an X rating.

My honey's band played here the other night.

There's now one fewer evil rat in our world: how very nice.

Ann Arbor band The Stooges denied Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for 7th time
By BRIAN McCOLLUM and STEVE BYRNE • Free Press Staff Writers • January 14, 2009

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its latest round of inductees today, but many Michigan rock fans will be disappointed by an increasingly familiar omission: the Stooges. ...


Fuck you, rock and roll hall of fame. That whore madge and bob effing seeger are worthy and The Stooges aren't? Go die.