'low income londoners won't be priced out for a while'

says a headline in the grauniad (that's good to know).

horsemouth rose at 3pm (having been up earlier between 10 and 12 to see sean out of the door and off to the bus). having played the gig horsemouth proceeded to get terribly drunk and stay up late and so was hungover and vomitous in the morning. he hopes he was chatty and made sense enough at the gig because he was paying for it the next morning.

by 3pm the hangover had abated and horsemouth began to shuffle round the flat and to check out reports.

horsemouth thanks everyone who came out and commiserates with those who couldn't make it or arrived late. he particularly thanks john smith and andrew minty for singing a song each with him. horsemouth was once again cursed by feedback and microphone placement issues - he opened with the werewolf (by michael hurley) with john smith on backing vocals and then into gentleman john (lyrics by horsemouth, music by rust groat) which went tolerably well excepting that his fingers were being mutinous and he was assailed by feedback issues. really horsemouth lost the audience for a while here and took a while to recover - the mercifully short guitar instrumental went ok as did the golden one taken solo (largely written by john smith but with some input from horsemouth) , as did I still miss someone (johnny cash) wth andrew minty of the duvals singing. but recover horsemouth did with the devil song (entirely written by horsemouth) and worldes blisse dirge (a trad.arr. - a traditional 12th century song arranged by horsemouth - in fact he'd only finished working it out the morning of the gig) and with a first airing of noah (written by john smith and his good self with the aid of book divination). horsemouth fucked up the second line and so had to comp about for a bit until he could repeat the verse again (he hopes no one noticed - john smith noticed but said it sounded good). finally horsemouth indicated the approaching solstice and got the audience to sing in the bleak midwinter (they were really good) with him singing the bass and when he forgot the words again he simply got them to repeat the first verse. by reincorporation we reach the end.

horsemouth wishes he could give you a great helpful blow by blow description of the other bands but he was off getting drunk and talking shite to people - fake teak were good in a heaven 17ish, early Depeche Mode kind of way, monteagle had a good trancey americana thing going on. in between that horsemouth was mostly out in the carpark - he thanks albino for putting him on again.

folk (revivalists) and hippie (nazis) getting it together in the countryside

Sean has been in touch;

'In your blog you recently referred to my comments on the impact of the 1914 on the rural class struggle, which it occurs to me could be misinterpreted. I would like to take this opportunity to make it clear that I do not actually condone inter-imperialist warfare.

Two further points on folk revivalists and hippies getting it together in the countryside -

1. They remind us of the bourgeois holiday makers in the scene from Deliverance http://youtu.be/mpL0Q2OSRwQ - the local yokels are amusing,"give 'em a dollar".

Good on the local proles for their refusal of political economy and not taking it lying down!

2. Consider the cover pic of the Earth Covers Earth lp, in which various post-industrial east London squatter geeks (most of 'em more likely to get a feature in Searchlight than the Wire) strike a pose reminiscent of the classic ISB pic on the back cover of Hangmans...  (both covers can be seen together here). Current 93 and Death in June were, of course, well ahead of the curve, reviving "acid-folk" back in the 80s (at a time when Pentangle fandom was still the love that dare not speak its name, as Horsemouth is doubtless aware) thus providing us with a cautionary tale about where all this stuff leads...

Electric Eden is noticeably silent about DIJ, even though they are a perfect fit for all that "visionary albion dreaming" nonsense.

We might note that Shirley Collins recorded with C93.... (Having said all that, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that I really like Earth Covers Earth...how embarrassing.)'

3. From Electric Eden - " But the naïve freshness of vision which bought it into being began to wither under the darkening skies of the new decade...reflected in the rise of the new urban underground of Mick Farren's Deviants, Hawkwind etc etc Angry Brigade blah blah, blah"

So, ignoring factual inaccuracy - the Deviants were actually one of the first underground bands, but tend to be written out of accounts of the period as, not being beautiful people, they don't fit the script -  behind all the cosmic nationalism, theres that old boomer chestnut the end of the sixties as the end of innocence; or, put another way, after '67 the bloody proles started to get restless. Basically, the same line as the Daily Fail - it was all strikes in the early 70s that ruined everything dontcha know. No wonder Young tries to incorporate notorious strike breaker (and warmonger) Winston Churchill into his pantheon of far out anglo-dudes.

ps. Meant to add - liked Sorrows of Tomorrow a lot. A touch of  Comus in the guitar?'

escape into olomec time

horsmouth has been dreaming of escape - it required the carefully timed crashing of two vans so as to fake the death of one of the protagonists (before the patrol returned). for some reason a mid-period freddie mercury was there with a white switchblade (most stylish). 

the reason for this dream is probably horsemouth's reading of victor serge's unforgiving years, andy says he has read 3 other victor serge novels, horsemouth might have to as well, this one is pretty damn good. the war has ended - the narrative has taken us from stalingrad to dresden (carnage carnage carnage) now the survivors are hiding out in the mexican desert in olomec time. 

this is probably horsemouth's last 'full' week of work - there was a bank holiday monday, he doesn't have to work this morning, he has his normal wednesday off (he knows he's not going to get a lot of sympathy here). 

sean braved the transport hell that is the east of the seaside towns (and their vital infrastructural improvements that will benefit us all) to come and visit - things proceed with life offering up some resistance. in an email he said the following,

'particularly enjoyed the Akenfield/pastoral idyll post. Yes, 1914 war was a great step forward for the rural workers - Horsemouth is current front runner for the feral prole counter-intuitive revisionist theory of the year award.

Seriously! You put the finger on what irritates me about the vogue for all that hey-nonny-no nonsense; like, in that Electric Eden book theres a whole bit where Shirley Collins goes on about the tragedy of how the whole "folk tradition" ended in 1914....Yeah, there are no "folk" outside of quaint rural English villages, which weren't actually quaint at all, but were in fact so shit that even moving to the city to be a factory worker or a soldier on the western front was preferable. Fuck 'em, and their "get off my land" countryside bollocks.'

earlier horsemouth was over at howards (and then a quick pint in the murder mile) the musicians of bremen working season may be over, they need to top and tail the tracks and send a few of them off for mastering (it does make them sound better), they also need to select the strongest tracks and ask themselves if they should be spread out over a range of genres or clustered round one particular sound... and then they need to go and play live. it's been a while. 

at the end of the world

sean has been in touch;

'Fascinated by the souf London slavery case. When I first heard they followed some sort of weird political ideology I thought "oh, let them be Maoists, please...."

Yes! They are indeed Maoists!  - Power comes from a bucket and mop! We sing for the future!

Formerly from a Brixton squat, no less....Isn't that the plot of a novel by Doris (farewell then) Lessing...?'

in the light of the escaped maoists horsemouth went and watched a documentary about the villa road squatters of the 70ies and 80ies. horsemouth broadly liked the people both back in the day and in the aftermath of their commitment to radical politics. broadly it all seemed very positive and horsemouth can only contrast unfavourably with his time among a later generation of squatter punks in hackney. the point (horsemouth supposes) is  that, unlike the maoists, they had had the chance/ misfortune to move on.

as usual horsemouth is horrified by some of the people the media found to interview - this from the bbc website; 

'Professor Dennis Tourish, from the Royal Holloway University of London, said followers of Marxism often committed their lives to their beliefs. "They develop a number of organisational rituals of which communal living is one," in this he is correct. but Professor Tourish is (to quote Royal Holloway's website) 'Deputy Head of the School of Management (Academic) and is a Fellow of the Leadership Trust Foundation. His main research interests are in leadership, leadership effectiveness, leadership development and organisational communication.' horsemouth finds it slightly worrying if a professor of management has been studying maoist groupuscles (what was he hoping to learn there?). but on second thoughts he probably hasn't been studying them at all - he's probably just a rent-a-quote. 

Steve Rayner, on the other hand, a professor at Oxford University, studied the particular maoist group involved for a wider 1979 PhD thesis on leftwing groups (PhD, Anthropology, University College London, 1979  Dissertation Topic: The Classification and Dynamics of Sectarian Forms of Political Organization: Grid/Group Perspectives on the Far Left in Britain), and said the group was the "clearest case of far-left millenarianism which I have encountered".  http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1349448/1/D32160.pdf

once upon a time horsemouth was a rent-a-quote. it is the thing he is probably the most ashamed of having done. on the other hand he found living communally merely annoying - like many of his generation as soom as he could return to living in isolation and alienation he did it. 

the interesting thing was that while some of the ex-villa road-ers continues to call for revolution, many had now accepted that revolution was far away (which is pretty much horsemouth's position).

on the subject of the millenium horsemouth was interested to see an album cover suggesting that  'at the end of the world' there will be keith harris, orville and cuddles. horsemouth suggests this is way scarier.

anyway, let's give the last words to sean,

Kind of surprised Horsemouth rates Fahey more as a cantankerous old git than a guitar player; his prickliness was indeed admirable, but.....  isn't it really his guitar playing that sets him apart? There are plenty of argumentative arseholes out there, many at least as capable as Fahey, but they can't play.... 

astounding sounds albanian music (no sleep til darmstadt)

sean has been in touch with a  correction:

"

    "It goes out of human hearing both ways, right - if it goes out upwards then your inner ear fails...and you fall on the floor and throw up and if it goes below human hearing that way it loosens your sphincter muscles and you shit yourself....we used to have a lot of fun with audiences...." - Lemmy, beeb4 Hawkwind film

     This clearly indicates familiarity with the works of William Burroughs, so my comments about Lemmy and Nova Express were mistaken (mea culpa). Maybe Moorcock was wrong too...for all we know Lemmy could also have been up on Stockhausen, not to mention au fait with the latest developments in lettrist sound poetry, twelve tone serialism, free-improv (highly likely, given the plans for Peter Brotzmann to play with Motorhead) and post-fluxus minimalism....

     

      While its tempting to go on and discuss the post-Astounding Sounds Amazing Show Trials purges - the 57 varities of Hawkwind - and the parallels with the crisis of late 70s Maoism when Cornelius Cardew broke with the Chinese line in favour of Enver Hoxha's glorious workers paradise of Albania (you couldn't make it up!) and the restructuring of the British state around an even more bonkers blend of pseudo-free market economic "theory" and police-state surveillance (we wonder how many of those 1973 Windsor festival heads voted Tory in 79) I'll have to give it a miss as this subject is now closed (the link between the second hit and run driver on the Leytonstone grassy knoll and Robert Calvert's "heart attack" will just have to remain a secret)

     the empire strikes back (Preview)

      Footnote: I see waltham forest council have included Cornelius Cardew in their list of local celebs - in with a bullet at number ten below David Beckham, East 17, a bloke from Iron Maiden, Baldrick from time team .... "

the prairie frogs - dating imperialist decline

horsemouth is back from an excursion to the south of the seaside towns - there he saw'the praire frogs' play - they played an improv set to soundtrack one of lucy's films on the colour red and then played 3 or 4 songs themselves in an improv blues style  (think john fahey's 'fare forward voyager' ) ending with what horsemouth took to be 'bullfrog blues' . it was good, horsemouth enjoyed it, he particularly enjoyed the slide guitar - it tempted him to get one. curiously on their way there horsemouth and howard heard a guy busking what seemed to be a slower blusier version of 'power of soul'.

sean has been in touch;

 "Well Hawkwind may not have been the Scratch Orchestra, let alone the Red Flame Proletarian Propaganda Team (that was a new one on me), but nevertheless......

      "Screw your politicians, harassment and laws" - Marx

      In his Age of Empire, historian Eric Hobsbawm notes the brevity of the British empire, observing that its entire existence - which he dates between the mid 1870s and late 1960s - fell within the space of a single lifetime (like that of Churchill, who he cites as an example). Being a Leninist, he was of course wrong; the British empire existed a lot longer than that. Doubtless he felt obliged to consider imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, but those of us of a more infantile and disordered disposition know that imperialism exists concurrently with capitalism from the start and, in fact, predates it (how else to obtain an initial accumulation of capital?)

      In passing, we note that in his capacity as jazz critic he was also wrong about Cardew and the AMM, slagging them off on the grounds that

      a. what they did wasn't music and

      b. even if it was, it didn't sound like Sonny Rollins.

      It isn't known what he thought about Hawkwind - we tend to doubt he had an opinion.....

      Anyway, while the treaty of Paris may have marked the beginning of a specific type of formality in British imperialism, it wasn't essentially anything new....yet we do understand Hobsbawm's point about the speed at which it declined. 

      When was it finally gone? I suggest the most suitable date to mark the definitive end of the British empire is 25th Aug 1973.

      This is when Hawkwind played the Windsor Free Festival (Preview) ; in 1945 Britain had the largest land empire in human history, yet a mere 28 years later all the forces at the disposal of the state were unable to prevent a few hairies like Brock, Turner, Lemmy, Calvert and Moorcock setting up a PA and making a racket in the queen's back garden, while a thousand or so of the dodgiest reprobates in the country took loads of drugs and did it in the road.

      "You can disappear in smoke" - Marx

      Definitely the end....

Not quite the end of the maoist ritual,,,,

    1.In all the excitement, how could I have forgotten to include the obvious meeting point - erstwhile Scratch Orchestra member and Lucky Lief  producer Brian St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno? All together now - "jonbar-bar-bar-bar-barian"

    2,I also forgot to refer to Cornelius Cardew finally joining the working classes when he was reinvented as an unemployed pipe fitter in comic book werewolf Alan Moore's early 80s ET meets Boys From the Blackstuff serial Skizz (2000AD). 

Aha, found it! From his autobiography Mick Farren describes the moment he decided to emigrate -

     "We were circling Parliament Square, past Big Ben, the statues of Winston Churchill and Richard ! - and drummer Al Powell announced that he was going to vote for Magaret Thatcher.

     "Someone's got to be in charge here."

     "Are you kidding me?"

     Was he winding me up? Apparently not. This was the moment I decided I wanted out.....If Al from Hawkwind could make such a statement  Britain as a nation had surely become

      [completely] demoralised....."

So there you go; perhaps I was wrong, and Hawkwind do serve imperialism after all.....(Although, to be fair, Powell was purged soon after). I just found these  cool pictures of anti-imperialist struggle in 1973 (hawkwind play the windsor free festival and the hairies build geodesic domes) to illustrate that last missive ( that must be Calvert in white, no?)

Dig the newspaper headline in the last colour pic. 'bomb goes off at the bank of england'

Couldn't find any pics of Cardew and the Scratchers playing Grunwicks. Doubtless the workers were suitably impressed (although they probably didn't build any geodesic domes).

the two-toned panther's beautiful daughter

sean has been in touch, the plot thickens:

"So, I thought I'd try and nail some of this stuff down -

 Cardew had some connection with the International Times and Group X/Hawkwind Zoo were Londonsoixante-huitard (French for sixties retard) hairies so perhaps a search of the IT archive would yield details, the exact jonbar point at which they could have met.

( Jonbar point being Brian Aldiss' term for the key moment that could have turned out differently, bringing an alternative universe into being. But I'm sure you know that - I just mention it for the benefit of your blog followers who may be less literate than what we are)

Except  the archive isn't indexed, and even I'm not stupid enough to read through every issue of some old hippy rag (the Jerry Cornelius comic strips are good though). But wait - I just found a different, single pagearchive that just summarises the contents of each issue.

Haven't had much time to take it in yet, but even with a quick glance it turns out that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (or at least idly speculative bollocks)....according to issue 33, Cardew played with the Incredible String Band! Fantastic - you couldn't make it up!

Ok, I think that means they were on the same bill, rather than actually performing as a single unit (which would, presumably have sounded like Japanese band Ghost) but still....not a bad bit of detective work for a coffee break.

The thing to do would be to through every issue in the full archive using the shorter one as a guide.....but even I'm not that stupid. Over to Horsemouth....

Maybe a slight addition to the post - a correction - is in order - a quick bit of research shows that the special branch raid was in fact at the Shaftesbury Ave place Farren moved to after Whitechapel (we pedants like to get the small details right).

The rest of them still lived in the east end, though, so my point holds.

Btw, it turns out that Paul Rudolph was also present, and got pulled along with Farren and Hogg...didn't Nik Turner also get his collar felt over the angries? This has been used as an example of how stupid the cops were - taking urban guerrilla seriously - but bearing in mind Moorcock's association with Stoke Newington 8 defendant (see - east London is where it was all happnin') Stuart Christie we find ourselves wondering if they were onto something....

we sing for the future/ space ritual (marxist-leninist)

horsemouth's friend sean has been in touch;

 "While I realize horsemouth is quite capable of coming up with tunes to cover without any help from me - and probably wouldn't be interested in my suggestions anyway - I'm still going to go out on a limb, and point him toward Cornelius Cardew's (much derided) late period. A version of Fight the Cuts would be very timely.....the music is of course terrible, but horsemouth is probably one of the few musos able to find the poetry in lyrics like - "The monopoly capitalist lackey government/ Lets finance have its way/ To increase their rate of profit/ To make the workers pay/ Fight the cuts/ That's part and parcel/ Of our class strategy/ Of proletarian revolution..." (Brilliant, eh?)

We Sing for the Future is probably the best of his singsong-round-the-old-joanna-like-common-people works, with what must surely be the most mind-boggling lyric ever (tempting to think it must be an exercise in avant-garde surrealist absurdism or something.....but no, he really meant it man). Its interesting to speculate on how Cardew's stuff would have turned out if, when looking for improvisors to work with in London earlier, he'd found the nascent Hawkwind Zoo instead of AMM. Which is not completely implausible - the comparison here would be with fluxus composer Takahisa Kosugi being part of post-68 hairies the Taj Mahal Travellers, who overlanded around Europe and Asia in an old truck playing free festivals, full moon parties and... err..... art galleries (btw, their mates the Rallizes could certainly have taught Robert Calvert a thing or two - their rhythm section famously hijacked a plane to North Korea)

 We might assume that if Cardew worked with the likes of Dave Brock and Lemmy his views on "proletarian culture" might have become somewhat different, but who knows...it could, of course, have gone the other way - Hawkwind's history of splits and exclusions suggests they might have made really good Maoists....

I for one would love to hear Space Ritual (Marxist-Leninist)
  "In case of imperialist attack on your district, follow these rules..." 
 "Cadres of spaceship hawkwind, your helmsman is dead....."

 I could probably keep doing that for a while. Which means - lucky for you - its time to stop (You wouldn't think I actually have things to do, would you.....)
 ----------------------

 horsemouth's response was;

  cornelius cardew in notting hill

 While we can imagine 'variation on 'el pueblo unido jamaserra vencido'' to the tune of 'shouldn't do that'(and it's breaking into a chant of 'there's only one lie and there's only one truth') and lemmy, dikmik, del dettmar, dave brock, nik turner, stacia and simon king participating in 'the great learning', the problem with cornelius cardew, ex-pupil of stockhausen, joining hawkwind zoo in 1969 is that he would ruin their essential innocence, as michael moorcock pointed out they were barbarians, they'd never heard of stockhausen.

'I wish I'd had one of these when I was with stockhausen' remarks cornelius as he views the prototype vcs3 synthesizer, 'who?' say dikmik, and ex-busker dave brock, 'ah-ha' says dave anderson (later to play in amon duul and so already ahead of the game), 'ah-ha. stockhausen eh?' say the ex-bbc synthesizer boffins gone renegade.

there's also cardew's repudiation of stockhausen's mystical kernel to be overcome and his excessive faith in the power of 'pure sound' - would cardew have managed to turn it on its head and stand it on its feet in the sonic warfare of hawkwind? how would he have been welcomed by the prime source of hawkwind's mystical gibberish, nik turner? would they have bonded over turner's improv skronk or split over it. would he have worked with robert calvert or michael moorcock (as the nearest things hawkwind had to an intellectuals) or driven them out.

 practically (but also symbolically) would cardew have commuted from leytonstone, or moved to notting hill? --------------------------

 sean replied;

 "Would Cardew have commuted from Leytonstone...?

 For all the talk about the 70s scene around the grove, a lot of those cats actually lived in east London (yes!). Most of the Deviants/Pinks, for example, lived in a notorious den of iniquity near Whitechapel . Which, as it happens, was where Farren and co got raided by the special branch looking for the angry brigade (before they used up all their magick powers) and Boss Hogg got nicked because he had a badge with a picture of mao on it (allegedly, a lot of resinous substances and chemicals were also found but the cops ignored them because they all hated "those slags" from the drug squad) Hmmm...its a bit embarrassing I know all that stuff. I really have to stop doing this now.....

 Well....ok, the point about Cardew ruining the...er, innocence of Hawkwind Zoo is a good one. Will have to give it a bit of thought, but for the moment two counter points spring to mind:

 1.They could have collaborated, and yet not shared very much.....recently watched Joy Division doc, in which Hook says he had no idea what Curtis was singing about til he started doing JD stuff live a couple of years back and had to read the lyrics. There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing among musicians...apparently, some don't communicate with each other well! (Who knew?) The AMM split in the late 00s might be a case in point - Rowe was booted out for Maoism. Surely this was nothing new, his maoism stretching back to at least Cardew's involvement, yet the others failed to notice for thirty years or so..... Calvert was clearly influenced by Burroughs and Gysin (Born to go, Orgone Accumulator) - and Moorcock definitely was (although you can't really tell from his Hawkstuff!) and yet its hard to picture, say, Lemmy reading Nova Express. Same could go for Stockhausen (especially as Cardew had broken him) 

2."Wish I'd had one of those when I was with Stockhausen" remarks Cornelius..... "Who?" says Dikmik, but completely ignores the reply as he's in a world of his own after being continuously awake for the previous ten days, and is blitzed on mandrax

the 'wide eyed presentation of actualities'

(in last quarter's episode without warning myspace disappeared horsemouth's blog which he had been dutifully writing for a full six years - now read on...)

so myspace will be sending horsemouth his 6 years worth of blogging and kvetching and all in a few short months. it will be arriving as one big html file (are you sure? it may be a bit big). of course it is now ancient history - but it does show unanticipated problem with the cloud storage in the malls of our digital overlords. but also opportunities for negotiation.

yesterday horsemouth wandered down to the beach of self-expression and went mudlarking just north of there. he found two pipe bowls (not complete but in a reasonable state) - one with a relief of britannia on it.  in the afternoon (bored) he snoozed.

the problem with horsemouth's digital life is that (like his real life) it's a bit dull - horsemouth wouldn't share with you the juicy bits (even if there were to be some).  horsemouth is searching for a quote from benjamin about boredom being the thing that hatches the egg of the imagination (or something like that) but it is evading him.

(ah sean has found it - "Boredom is the dream-bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away")

ishi (which just means 'man' proper names being hardly ever used in californian indian society but are endlessly used in modern californian society) is now safely lodged in the anthropology museum. he's even employed as a janitor. mostly he spends his time flint-knapping (he's just about the last person who ever had to do this as a matter of personal survival rather than folkloric re-enactment). next horsemouth will read zola's 'the dream' - a foundling (see otto rank's - the birth of the hero) raised as an embroiderer within the grounds of the cathederal by a childless couple. already we are in the land of myth.