Epigoners (Honorable and Less Honorable) (not-so-slight return)

In the comments to the previous post about Robyn Hitchcock and his epigonic attempt to perpetuate 1967...  Phil Knight mentioned that there was quite a bit of it - back-to-psychedelia (specifically English psychedelia)  in the early-mid Eighties....  Television Personalities...  The Cleaners from Venus, The Monochrome Set...  

Quite a bit of it - indeed there was, indeed there was.

Focused on the UK Eighties uptake of the UK Sixties vibe, what follows is not even the complete inventory...

First line of this references Rita Tushingham...   Second verse references David Hemmings and David Bailey... the title nods to one of the Men From UNKLE. The entire lyric is a phantasmagoric montage of Sixties references

Patrick Macnee and Twiggy on the cover, not a collage but apparently a shot taken at a fashion shoot dedicated to the Avengers style... 

Then there's the ironically named The Times 

Ripping the lick from "Keep On Running" by Spencer Davis Group at the start... they should have been called The Past Times.

This song by Billy Childish's early band the Pop Rivits might actually just precede the Eighties but I include as a nod to that whole Milkshakes et al scene 

"I know you'll say I'm living in the past / But those Beatle boots were made to last"

  

An Englishy Beatles (psych-era)  flavour crept into XTC's albums from Black Sea onwards and then eructated in Dukes of Stratosphear , a side project that was pure Rutles really.

Then there was the neo-psych DIY loner Nick Nicely. 

From the 1982 album Psychotropia, "Hilly Fields" is the tune that has cult love

Vocal's a bit Buggly for me... 

"Nick Nicely" sounds like the title of one of those character-sketch songs that were rife in UK pop circa 66-67.  Or something off the shit McCartneyfied side 2 of Abbey Road. 

Nicely popped up again in the "nice one, top one, get sorted" era, as part of the breakbeat house outfit Psychotropic who did the classic rave track "Hypnosis" .

Another Nick doing neo-psych in the early-mid 80s was Nick Haeffner who if memory serves I met at a party - a very quiet fellow, who shyly spoke of his music... and who then materialized a few years later with an elpee on Bam Caruso. Paul Oldfield gave it a generous hearing.

The Great Indoors is a good title - indeed I might have nicked that phrase for something or other, now I think of it

Paul mentions Julian Cope in the review and he would indeed have been the great example of a laughing-madcap-wannabe of the English Eighties. 

As Copey put it in an interview I did with him in the '90s, his thinking circa Teardrops / early solo elpees was "the accumulation of all of my heroes would be one hell of god to be" - the heroes being Barrett,  Roky Erikson, Skip Spence, et al, whose heroic intake he tried to match in pursuit of druggy divinity.

Julian did better enthusing about the original punkadelia than trying to bring it back (the solo LPs sound awfully 80s).

Liverpool really was the first of the several New Psychedelias of the decade:  Echo and the Bunnymen and then all the other non-starter groups with daft names like A Shallow Madness. Even Liverpool groups who weren't psychedelic had psychedelic sounding names - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

On the less Cope-ious intake committed to journeying up the road of excess end of things, there was the whole Mood Six / Marble Staircase / Doctor and the Medics scene around clubs like The Clinic and  Alice In Wonderland. Foppish clothes horses and London scene-fabricators rather than real rainbow-chasers. 

Good Lord how undignified - later in their career, Mood Six "guested in the award-winning music video to the Moody Blues' single "Your Wildest Dreams", playing a younger version of the band" 

Soft as runny shite

As is this early release on (re)Creation Records 

A label named after The Creation, freakbeat gods, one of whose song also provided McGee with a band name 

Not far off some of the more overtly retro-psych moments on the first Stone Roses album

Talking of  Barrett-isms

A friend thinks that Creation and The Jesus and Mary Chain were influenced by the Paisley Underground groups in LA, The Dream Syndicate and The Rain Parade

"This Can't Be Today" - no indeed, no indeed

American versions of this back-to-psych tended to be more solid than the Brits but in this case it's only a notch away from The Smithereens

Opal and Mazzy Star were better efforts from Roback. Despite repeated efforts, I cannot hear anything hypno-magical about the The Dream Syndicate, whose inspiration stretches to the astute citation of their well-chosen name.

 As for The Three O'Clock - almost flimsy enough for the Mood Six scene.

The Bangles started out in this scene and here they cover quite fetchingly a song by ex-Soft Boy Kimberley Rew. 

I love the idea that many of its American listeners would have been puzzled by the line "where you going with that UB40 in your hand", thinking it perhaps a snide reference to a record by the Brit reggae group, rather than a form for applying for unemployment benefit 

But I've strayed across the Atlantic - back to Blighty, the main focus here

A loner - a scene-of-one - a true out-of-time underground man - Nick Saloman aka The Bevis Frond  - leaning towards acid rock rather than paisley psychedelia, heavy at times

As noted earlier here, in one song the Frond explicitly addresses the shame of the epigone, semi-exorcising the anxiety of influence (that all these groups don't seem to be afflicted by, particular)

The Legendary Pink Dots - who I rather liked. Edward Ka-Spel had a more expansive conception, informed by Krautrock and experimental music and possibly Hammill and Supersister, as much as by the Barrett side of psych. The track below is from the 1985 album Asylum - as Paul Oldfield, a Dots supporter, pointed out, an ambiguous word, suggestive of sanctuary but also a place of confinement for the mentally disturbed. Madness as visionary state but also estrangement and exile. 

On the mainstream tip and far more superficial - a fleeting fancy - there was Prince with Around The World. Lamentably there was also  "Sowing the Seeds of Love" by Tears For Fears.

Veering away from the flower power moment to something a little hairier and heavier, there was the Cult, conjuring up Steppenwolf and early Led Zeppelin and such like...  much more cock in this rock than the psych boy-men.  But they were bandying around words like "Love" and "Revolution" and even the cult-of-Native-Americans ("Spiritwalker" etc) is rather late Sixties, Jim Morrison's souls of dead Indians jumping into his child's "fragile eggshell mind" etc etc. 

I did quite like this, more for the tingly filigreed intro than the pumping main groove-drive

I was quite won over by the "boogie 'til you blow chunks" of the next album Electric (1987), when Rick Rubin got them to strip the sound right down. 

Astbury has lungs like bellows and the guitarist can screech, but the swing and smoky thickness of sound that Steppenwolf had is completely flattened out - 

Groups like Walkingseeds were referencing Blue Cheer (the title of a song on their 1987 album Skull Fuck... more prosaically they also had a number titled "St. Albans"). 

But I've veered into the American Sixties...

While this was going on you had the label Bam Caruso and the related magazine Strange Things (Are Happening) doing the heavy work of historical excavation: digging (for) freakbeat on the Rubble comp series, John's Children anthologies etc. 

And that reminds me of Richard Norris, who was Bam Caruso's label manager, and who then teamed up with Genesis P-Orridge - Psychic TV already on this tip with their Hyperdelia concept: the Brian Jones tribute "Godstar", the cover of "Good Vibrations" - and together Gen and Richard did Jack the Tab, which was sort of but not really acid house. 

The Shamen also plunged into the techno-house sound, with better results than either Jack the Tab or The Grid. But back in the Eighties - when I saw them about four times, always as the support or middle of the  line-up group - they were total psychedelic revivalists, always performing with Op Art projections. 

"Young 'Till Yesterday" - hark at the 67-reference there.

The guitar are quite nicely overloaded and frazzled - Electric Prunesy, White Noise-y - but the songs and the singing are faint and feeble.

This next one is transitional, when they are starting to get into beats and samples, but it's more industrial in feel than it is house-groovy. The title "Christopher Mayhew Says" is about the Liberal MP who took mescaline as part of a Panorama experiment for the BBC. 

It was their pre-existing interest in hallucinogens that drew The Shamen to the new dance-drug culture.

And it was at one of the Shamen's Progeny events - them plus Orbital playing live but also loads of deejays - that I had my rave conversion experience in the autumn of 1991. 

Good Lord, from "Pictures on My Wall" and "Sleeping Gas" through to the Second Summer of Love (1988) and the Second Second Summer of Love (1989 - getting our heads untogether in the country), the Eighties really was Sixties flashbacks all decade long, from start to finish... 

Even the words "rave" and "raver" are Sixties words 

(And then, crikey, it carried on into the early '90s with baggy and Inspiral Carpets with their pudding bowl haircuts and sub-Seeds keybs.... Candy Flip covering "Strawberry Fields Forever")

Still, I suppose, bringing it back to where this all started-  conceivably this makes Robyn Hitchcock a  pioneer of sorts, the earliest of adopters - with the Soft Boys, the first to go back to this particular moment. 

The advert for the debut Soft Boys single - released in 1977, the New Wave in full swing - bore the proudly untimely slogan: "First Psychedelic Record Release in 10 Years"

The second single's title is flying the phreak flag quite fervently. 

But perhaps the Soft Boys weren't the first "acid-punks" after all.

Wire's Chairs Missing got criticized in some quarters for having gone in the space of less than a year from Pink Flag to Pink Floyd -  not just for the whimsied picture-lyrics, but for the glassy, heavily effected guitars (using delay and flange, which is just a frostier version of 1960s phasing) and - the horror - for using  keyboards.

The Stranglers were all Doorsy with the rippling grandiose organ solos and weird FX on the vocals ("Peasants in the Big Shitty"). In interviews they gruffly stated "we're into acid". 

The Fall were "pickled" (Martin Bramah's word) in shrooms and LSD as well as amphetamines. Indeed Mark E. Smith's vision-thing was a catalytic influence on Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch. For a time they followed the Fall around from gig to gig. 

And then out of The Fall sprouted The Blue Orchids, the truly great and genuinely psychedelic band of the Eighties. 

(Them and Meat Puppets. But we won't go into the all the American acid-punk contenders - Chrome et al)

But I have now thought of something else...

The psychedelic revival was started not by New Wavers after all -  but by a handful of Old Wavers who had lived through it the first time round as participants.

Todd Rundgren

That's 1975

1976 - wholly pointless recreation of the original!

And closer to the English source...

Steve Hillage (who didn't so much return to psychedelia as he simply stuck with it)

That's 1977  and it's produced by Todd Rundgren

Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, with the short lived 801, covering "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 1976

 

Goodness, that's awful.... 

Meanwhile... 

Eno was one of the first, circa his early solo albums, to talk of the enduring influence of psychedelia on him. So (as per Hillage) it's not so much a revival or a return, it's a continuation. Much of the pre-punk scene is post-psychedelic....

Still, doing the cover versions is a retro move. 

Blimey, ahead of the pack in going back, you of course have  David Bowie with Pinups....   That is 1973, harking back to less than a decade earlier, to 65-66.

"Shapes" - or "shipes" as Bowie ridiculously pronounces it - "shapes" not of things to come, but of things that have been and gone.  

Twiggy on the cover too, almost a decade before Television Personalities.

And Roxy, pastiching and parodying everything under the pop sun, also did a psych-era style  "false ending" on "In Every Dream Home a Heartache". With a swirl storm of phased drumming and phased guitar like "Itchycoo Park" and Todd's own Nazz track "Open Your Eyes". That's from For Your Pleasure,  1973.

This experience of "retro" receding deeper into the past is familiar to me from researching Retromania ... as soon as I thought I'd established a hinge point, "the rift of retro", I would realize there was an earlier one.

In rock I managed to trace it (i.e. rock referring back to itself, its own history - not some other earlier sound like music hall) definitively to the Beatles doing the Chuck Berry soundalike "Back in the USSR" and to a 1967 Move B-side that pastiched the Beatles themselves circa "Daytripper"  i.e. two years earlier.  That was the ground zero point of retro and meta in pop music. 

So a kind of Sixties revivalism starts in the Sixties itself... 

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Cherry Red did a whole box set , Losing Touch With My Mind, dedicated to Eighties British resurrections of  Sixties British psych

It extends the scope beyond indie to touch on the free festival circuit (Magic Mushroom Band) and grebo (Gaye Bikers On Acid) along with all kinds of other anomalies

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It occurred to me later  that I had clean forgotten about The Jam - but then they are way more mod than psych. "Start!" is a Xerox almost of "Taxman" off Revolver, a psychedelic album at least in part although that particular song is lean and stark R&B. 

As for the mod revival itself, that is an eve-of-Eighties upsurge of Sixties-ism, but without the psychedelic leap taken by many actual mod bands - it's mod-mod, as opposed to freakbeat (let alone, actual kaftan-wearing hippie which an element within mod went into - from Spencer Davis Group to Traffic, from The Action to Mighty Baby - while the rest became hippie-bashing skinheads).

A covert kind of psychedelia enters post-punk through figures such as Martin Hannett, enthusiastic smoker of dope, lover of reverb and studio-spun spatiality. But Hannett was simply an original hippie who had moved with the times. He and the other Invisible Girls were part of a Didsbury scene of stoners and underground paper types...  John Cooper Clarke was a Sixties survivor. 

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As mentioned in comments, this was a significant moment, signposting the new psychedelia orientation of Kiss In the Dreamhouse. 

Not forgetting Blue Sunshine by The Glove  - Severin and Robert Smith's side project. The album title comes from a fictional type of LSD in a horror  movie. 

The Glove is the Arcadia to The Creatures's The Power Station. 

Then Robert Smith gets into some Incredible String Band-ish whimsy with "The Caterpillar"

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Here's a whole recent article about psychedelic rock in the context of retromania and AI, by Ed Prideaux at The Psychedelics Community. 

The Honorable Epigone (Are You Inexperienced)

 

Saw Robyn Hitchcock doing "Brenda's Iron Sledge" on Old Grey Whistle Test and took against it. Witnessed a support slot for R.E.M. in '87 and that sealed the aversion. Then I'd run into college rock types in America and be mystified by their veneration for his Eighties albums. Even hardheads like Forced Exposure - who usually disdained college radio lightweights like Let's Active -  reckoned Robyn to be some sort of visionary.

But in recent years I have found myself warming to the honest way Hitchcock describes himself as a man out of time, an epigone, someone gleaning up in the wake of visionary pioneers. Viz his memoir part 1...

In a recent Guardian interview around his memoir part 2, Stranded in the Future, he says: 

“Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it. And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67. My influences are all those old dead English blokes, basically....

"I didn’t invent this field of music, but I’ve perpetuated it. I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I’m the opposite. I’m sweeping up after them. It’s like, ‘Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.’”

That's admirably clear-eyed, isn't it?

About his Eighties success in America: 

"It’s funny when people think of me as an 80s artist because I think of myself as a 60s artist. I literally am the last to hatch out, I think. I should be in a museum with Ron Wood. I was never actually a pop star. I was on MTV quite a lot in the States in the late 80s and early 90s, but that’s a long time back. I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I’ve avoided both success and failure. It’s fantastic. And it’s always a bit of a shock when somebody identifies me. Mostly they think I’m Nick Lowe, which is great. But then occasionally people then think Nick is me. I’ve signed an autograph as Nick Lowe once or twice.”

I can feel myself relenting... actually considering listening to the solo albums....  perhaps even "Brenda's Iron Sledge" will get its second chance!

I will say, Hitchcock did record, with The Soft Boys, at least one stone classic. And it doesn't actually sound that 1967, it feels very much of whatever the year it was it came out. 

Talking about wanting to destroy someone... over at Pantheon I discuss the mystery of a missing Soft Boys song, "The Lonesome Death of Ian Penman". 

Going back to this idea of being an epigone, the honesty and even honour of accepting that you are a secondary artist, tilling terrain opened up by pioneers....  

An intriguing thing that emerged in another recent Hitchcock interview, with Mojo, is that although he is an overtly psychedelic artist,  he was relatively inexperienced with psychedelics:

“I hardly took any acid at all. I don’t think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one.”

That adds another dimension to the idea of being a "secondary artist". You skip a stage in the process... 

Instead of "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to" - the mission statement and modus operandi of Spacemen 3 - you absorb it via the sonic encoding of hallucinatory experience in select Sixties recordings.  The music is the drug. 

In a piece on Rock and Self-Destruction in the new issue of Vice, I wonder the extent to which this was widely the case with the Still In A Dream groups...  

A phrase I use in the book for the era is "a second psychedelia". But in quite a few cases, I imagine it was also a second-hand psychedelia. 

Some of the groups were doing acid.  For a few, harder drugs. Spacemen 3 energetically explored the whole pharmacopeia (Sonic Boom even experimented with chloroform!). But I'm guessing that a possibly surprising number were getting it indirect, vicariously, via the records and the records alone.   

Prompted by the way the music was going, I got into using Sixties lingo in my writing - mind-blowing, kiss the sky, blissed out, far out, tripped out  - for quite some time before I could answer Jimi's question in the affirmative... 

Fisher-talk (and a bit of Retro-Talk)

People are constantly asking me for my thoughts on Mark Fisher. 

Only a slight exaggeration.

It actually got a little wearisome and I had to start saying no. 

But then I seemed to get a second wind. Or maybe I just found it easier to comply than to write the note explaining why I couldn't. 

Here's some thoughts requested recently by a European journalist - I have no idea if she used them. Waste not want not, as me old mum says.... 

 1. Fisher seems to have a lot of impact on younger audiences, even among those outside academia. Why do you think his work resonates so much with a generation that were still quite young when he passed away?

I think it’s the way Mark used his personal experience - depression, dealing with bureaucracy in the workplace, etc - as a basis from which to write outwards, as it were, towards larger principles and a systemic and structural analysis. It is very relatable and accessible, it helps readers understand abstract ideas. He was also a stylish, yet crystal clear, writer - it is entertaining as well as illuminating. 

He writes about depressing things but the effect is not depressing - even just apprehending things clearly is energizing. And usually there is some kind of hopeful aspect.

The idea that your depression and anxiety is not the fault of personal insufficiency but caused by systemic tendencies is a liberating message. 

Another thing that makes it relatable to young people is the way Mark used music and popular culture (mainstream films like The Hunger Games) to make ideology and political structures legible.

Another factor is that Capitalist Realism is very short - it’s only about 80 pages long. You can read it in an afternoon.

2. Since Mark's passing, pop music has taken on new paths -- including new chaotic and fragmented genres like hyperpop, rage, etc. Do you think these new genres and cultural phenomenons still have echoes of "hauntology" and "retromania" that was discussed by both of you in the 2000s and 2010s, or do they mark a departure from these frameworks? 

Well, retromania and hauntology are not music genres - they are culture-wide formations, manifesting in quite disparate areas - music but also fashion, TV, film, visual art, literature, videogames etc. 

At the same time, neither retromania nor hauntology apply to the entirety of popular culture, or explain everything that is going on in the culture or society. They are tendencies or currents - structures of feeling that can seem dominant at certain points and then prominent but not dominant at other phases.

I would say peak retromania was from around 2005 to 2013 - I see Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories as the absolute zenith but in some way the swan song of retromania. 

But even during this very retromanic time (conditioned by the emergence of YouTube, then streaming, among many other things) there were things going on in music and the culture that are not retro or that are even anti- retro. A genre like footwork would be one example. ASMR videos is another new cultural form that has nothing retro about it.

Around 2011 there was also a trend for what I called digital maximalism - ultra-bright, crisp, slick, glossy sounds (very different from the sound aesthetic of hauntology which is foggy, soaked in reverb, faded-sounding). Artists like Rustie and Skrillex.  Hyperpop is an extension of that glossy, dry (no reverb) aesthetic but combined with a Baudrillardian simulation politique that parodies consumerism, glow-up glamour,  and influencer culture (InstaGlam, someone called it).

I would say the Auto-Tune trap of late 2010s - Future, Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott - is another formation that has nothing to do with retro. But unlike hyperpop, trap is minimalist and hypnotic. A new kind of woozy psychedelic ambient music with post-verbal vocals chirruping ecstatically. 

3. There's been a lot of discussion about how music criticism has "softened" over the last couple of years. Fisher could be a very rigorous and, sometimes, unforgiving music critic (I remember, as an example, a specific article he wrote for k-punk on Glastonbury). How do you think his writings fit into this new music criticism landscape?

One of Mark’s most potent concepts was nihilation - the idea that music culture is driven by dialectical energy and that critics - but also musicians (who are in a sense active critics) -  operate by opposing the things they don’t believe in or respect, and that their goal is to discredit their ideological foes. He didn’t believe that that everything was equally valid and everybody should get along nicely. He didn’t believe in that “each to their own” idea - he wasn’t into tolerance or acceptance. So yes he was “unforgiving” to things he thought were mediocre or a waste of time or actively pernicious. Like many of us who grew up on the UK music press, he had a bi-polar relationship with music - he thought some things were great, heroic, inspiring, and other things shit, lame, depressing. And he thought there were ups and downs in culture, not a steady state of quality. Exhilarating phases alternated with down periods - crashes that follow the manic collective high.

4. The way Fisher mixed cultural criticism, political analysis, and personal writings about his own mental health was distinctive. What do you think made him such an interesting and compelling writer? 

I think I already answered that in the first reply and then throughout.

But a few other thoughts.

Penetrating clarity of intellect combined with style and a certain savage humour. His stuff is entertaining to read, it doesn’t feel like hard work.

He had an ability to come up with snappy catchphrases - slogans, memes, aphoristic sentences. “The secret sadness of the 21st Century” is a good example and it sounds beautiful in English - all the ‘s’ sounds, the sibilants. 

He could write very well about the details and particularities of a work of art or an auteur’s oeuvre, but his superpower was to extend that to larger abstract principles. You sensed  that he was always taking things to a higher level, building towards a total understanding of culture / politics / existence. The scale of the ambition was thrilling. 

I'm a meme, or at least I'm riding shotgun in a Mark-meme.

I forgot to click on the full caption and so I don't know what exactly contemporary art "keeps" doing... 

RetroTalk 2 - Kieran with a counter-vision to "There Is No Sound of the 2020s" gloom

 

Listen and watch here