There has always been plenty of writers who wannabe rock stars, the Beats however, kind of were rock stars before rock stars had been properly invented.What with their obscene poetry and their vulgar prose; their drug taking, their sexual exploits, and their insistence on describing all others as 'squares'; punk seemed a suitable bedfellow.
But Ginsberg was essentially a blues man.
He spoke like a blues man, he looked like a blues man.
Yet Punk, like William Blake, must have spoken to him; and his response was 'Birdbrain'.
Released in 1981, this 7" 33⅓ single reveals Ginsberg in a Jello Biafra mood rather than one akin to Dylan.
The Gluons nicely chug along in a Hawkwindesque kind of way, supplying harmonised 'Birdbrain[s]' as a refrain; but they are really just a backing band and the tune only exists to allow Ginsberg to speak, shout, debunk and pontificate to his potential new admirers.
The Gluons reward is the B Side: 'Sue Your Parents'.
It doesn't feature Ginsberg, and suffers enormously as a consequence - sounding like just another generic new wave number.
Allen Ginsberg and the Gluons (1981)
Birdbrain
Sue Your Parents
Vinyl rip @320kbs here
Speaking of Hawkwind...
Of course the Deep Fix weren't Hawkwind (but with Nik Turner playing sax they didn't half sound like 'em); Michael Moorcock wasn't Bob Calvert (although he wanted to be); but then when you invent people for a living, reinventing one's self seems a natural progression; for Moorcock, reinventing one's self as a rock star was inevitable.
Adopting a bubble gum style with a space rock edge the two tracks zoom by.
Adopting a bubble gum style with a space rock edge the two tracks zoom by.
They sound like classics; nuggets from a bygone age, hits from another dimension.
Somehow familiar, but fresh.
Spacey!
Michael Moorcock's Deep Fix (1980)To end this post I thought I'd make available a fascinating little curio; one that concerns the late Tony Wilson and the late Ian Curtis.
A long, long time ago there was a journalist who worked for a magazine called The Face, his name was Nick Kent, and post Ian Curtis's death, Kent, who was interviewing Wilson, supposedly asked Wilson how he felt about the death of Curtis, the singer of Joy Division, a band Wilson managed.
Wilson supposedly answered: "Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that's happened to my life".
I said 'supposedly' because Wilson claimed he never said it; Kent then admitted that he made it up.
But that didn't stop it being printed in The Face, and many people, especially those who felt particularly empathetic to Curtis, have hated Wilson ever since.
Here is a recording from an experimental arts festival held in London at the beginning of the Nineties (sorry I'm vague - they were vague times...), where Wilson is heard riffing to Kent's original article and morphing the words into a piece of post-modern poetry before a rather subdued and baffled audience.
Here is a recording from an experimental arts festival held in London at the beginning of the Nineties (sorry I'm vague - they were vague times...), where Wilson is heard riffing to Kent's original article and morphing the words into a piece of post-modern poetry before a rather subdued and baffled audience.
Situationists, huh!
Tony Wilson - "Ian Curtis dying on me was the greatest thing that's happened to my life"
Cassette rip @320kbs
Single mp3, get it here
