LETTER FROM BRITAIN

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

MUSIC HALL TO MARK ‘84?

Cynthia Rose

by

Hi there, out there! You think you’re tired of bad George Orwell jokes? Well, you should be over here where Nineteen YouKnow-What first met the keys of a typewriter.

Still, I can report that the rock Establishment’s first attempt to capitalize on the date—the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1984 Week — managed to cause a very real riot. That’s right; thinking to be trendy, the ICA booked in Teutonic guerilla gang Einsturzende Neubauten as headliners. (They even erected a gigantic Big Brother visage behind the stage, with headlight-style eyes designed to flash on between the acts).

Through their debut LP on Some Bizzare, Zeichnungen Des Patienten O.T. (“Portrait of Patient O.T.”), Neubauten have actually managed to violently polarize just about all

the listeners in the U.K.’s rock population towards either total espousal or heartfelt hatred. But their real status as a phenomenon still rests on that initial mondo-destructo one-off at London’s Lyceum last year; in which their customized industrial steel drumkit gave the British synthoscape a kick in the teeth it heartily deserved.

With a gig at the ICA (a rather behind-it bastion of cultural correctness), Neubauten obviously decided on similar shock tactics. Lots of friends—Fad Gadget, Some Bizzare shuck-and-jive specialist Stevo, and Martin Sheller of the Bic—were imported, the idea being a “Concerto of Orchestrated Noise.” Sheller was due to conduct, and the stock of instruments ranged from the usual hammers, synthesizers, and drumkit through a concrete mixer, a pneumatic drill, and—wait for this one—a chainsaw.

Results were lively, to say the least, but problems began when cues were dropped and the audience (as galvanized as the steel of Mufti’s drumkit) began enthusiastically to

Rof ° ^au Zeroes into their midst.

ore anyone knew what was happening, ncert-goers were pulling anything and IP c oser f° them. This included the

s giant electrical generator—which was ipped right out of the wall—to become the ° ° a tug-of-war between the terrified

statf and their guests.

he fearless Germans played on—as it jyere began to saw through the stage oor with both pneumatic drills and chainf^-Further frenzies were then elicited from he bouncers, since in several cases the band missed major power points under the stage by only inches, and by the end of the “set” he performance area was totally destroyed. (It had to be entirely reconstructed by the

next evening, when Newcastle’s Kitchenware label’s roster was scheduled to perform.)

By morning,the Institute’s spokesmen had recovered enough to say that the fray was “nothing more than we expected; we do look into the kind of acts we book.” But Blixa, Mufti and friends came closer than they knew to a really blazing finale, not to mention those enthusos who fought so hard to drag a fully operative chainsaw into the sea of flailing limbs. And this sort of theatre is actually closer to Artaud then to the average British heart, despite the glowing devotees of Neubauten, who consistently tell me things like “This is the ONLY band left.”

The average British fan (like the average British gran) cannot have remained untouched by the event of ’83: the ascendancy of Council Flat Camp in the form of Boy George, his ex-flame Marilyn and other bands like Frankie Goes To Hollywood or Alien Sex Fiend. These folks make song safe for all: George’s latest video looks like Judy

Garland made it, and it’s a shtick familiar to familiars of all the drag pubs in London. Plus, as ever, the hairdos, togs of choice and favorite foods of such stars give the press plenty of ammo to divert us from political questions.

Viz: Today every daily featured a frontpage pic of George at Heathrow, safely returned from heathen America into the arms of his home country. And the gossip column of another fag cites Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes etc. as a real decadent: calling the 12”. of “Relax” a “sex mix” for instance, arid claiming that “the life of a heterosexual is dull and boring.” Meanwhile, Holly and George’s couture is nothing compared to the newest street fetish for fruitcake hair-dos. That’s right! The first folks I saw when I ventured back into Soho after Christmas were wearing piles of fake flowers and/ or bunches of fake fruit aboard their tall, teased topknots. Arid lots of lilies, too— sticking out like trumpets. This call to arms seems to have replaced even long fake dreadlocks for the moment, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens when the rains set in.

Back to the realms of Normal normalcy: ex-Special and Fun Boy Terry Hall has just premiered (on TV of course) his new aggregation, the Colour Field. Unfortunately

the NME office is provided with only a small black and white set, so I can’t report on the presence or absence of vital dyes in the famous Hall hairdo. But Terry’s compatriots in song are now Coventry musicians Toby Lyon and Karl Shale. Their sound is very sincere, but a little too monochromatic for yours truly. But then no one should be judged by television and no live dates are planned for the Colour Field until summer, so again time will‘have to tell.

An eminently normal-looking (if once more very over-sized) Elvis Costello wandered into the ICA’s Kitchenware night just in time to check out PreFab Sprout, whose male vocalist exhibits distinct subCostello mannerisms. Unfortunately for the band, both they and label-mates Hurrah and the Daintees suffered so badly in the monitor department that the sold-out house did pretty badly for their three-quid tickets. One thing, however, again made itself obvious to this Yanqui observer: how the British cherish their music-hall tradition.

TURN TO PAGE 61

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30

All three of the Kitchenware acts depended far more heavily on Northern pub humor than on actual music for their rapport with the audience; if they’d been deprived of the word “fucking,” I don’t know what they’d have had to say during those lengthy, seemingly useless tune-ups. Judging by poster and 45 sales at the impromptu Stall set up outside the foyer, the Daintees are the most popular of the three acts.

The Daintees’ music-hall-vaudeville turns have been big with critics, just like PreFab Sprout’s. But a real club’n’pub circuit phenomenon no critic will touch is that of the Hank Wangford Band, based in London. A bizarre combination of professional musicians and enthusiastic part-timers all supported by employment elsewhere, Hank’s province is C&W—of a sort. In “real life,” under a real name, Hank himself is a gynecologist. Onstage he devotes himself to a brand of vaudeville-soaked country burlesque only a Briton could have conjured up.

The premise of Wangford’s pub-country

evenings is a pisstake of the old Louisiana Hayride-style radio shows on which country music’s first stars shamelessy plugged everything from soothing syrups to enriched flours. This outfit hardsells its own line: Sincere Products, which consist of T-shirts, caps, badges, and—my favorite—the “Johnny Ray Audiotronic Ear-Enhancing Hearing Aid Style Device.” The latter is a bit of string which you can insert in ear and pocket respectively, so that “by alerting your friends and business colleagues to your auditory defect you will enjoy the benefits of them shouting at you.”

The musid produced by this large and unwieldy lot (all of whom go by pseudonyms such as “Mable Syrup”) is the most confused mixture of “country” (British perception of) and B-movie imaginable—all filtered through the stand-up, music hall comic stage tradition. It benefits most particularly from the guitar playing of—real name here— Andy Roberts, who among other things, was formerly a sideman with both Pink Floyd and Roy Harper.

Though they’d be canned offstage in Austin or bottled to death within seconds in Biloxi (a fact to which they cheerfully admit), the Hank Wangford Band have become a BIG draw on the pub-club-college scene, and have been for five years. And, personally, I couldn’t resist going along just once to hear “Never Wear Mascara If You Love A Married Man” or “Today You Were Named Correspondent In A Di-Vorce Suit.”

Imagine my surprise, however, when at the very door of the Bull & Cate, Kentish Town, a wild-eyed gent grabs me by the string-tie and yanks me off into a corner, tongue wagging excitedly about rumors of an impending drug bust. As he threw aside the reefer after reefer he was chain-smoking, others Scrambled to pick up the butts. Since sulphate is the British style, I thought I could peg this looney for another Yank—but as the noxious smoke surrounding him cleared for a brief second I recognized with a shock a face I knew all too well.

Here, in a north London pub, was none other than CREEM’s own Edouard Dauphin! There was simply no mistaking those razor legs and sharp togs...or that distinctive paranoid twitch. As it turned out, however, far from being somehow drawn to the B-movie aesthetics of Hank, the Dauph thought THIS was to be the scene of the cement mixer and chainsaw concerto. Or that it was the site of a rib-joint some Parisienne of his recent acquaintance recommended he research in order to find Bessie Smith on the jukebox, singing “My man’s got teeth shine like a lighthouse on the sea.”

I never quite found out which. There was little I could do other than find my compatriot a spot among the liquor-heads, soothe him with a few Real Ales, and trust that Hank would crack out a few good lines between numbers. Before much of this could occur, though, I caught sight of the Dauph disappearing into the dark English night—one sweet young thing on each arm. The blonde had on fishnets and a wet-look mini; the dark-haired tootsie sported that familiar Miranda fruitcake pompadour. And even I, another of their sex, had to admire the four-dimensional surrealist patter I heard the Dauph spinning them as he drifted off into the distance.

Now, that’s the jive I’ll take till ’85.