Coffee-Table Notes

I’m So Green – Do It Better   The first time I heard Can was when their extended wigout, Mother Sky, soundtracked a pivotal scene in Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 film, Deep End. As John Moulder Brown’s infatuated adolescent Mike stalks Jane Asher’s swinging swimming pool attendant Susan to a Soho nightclub, clips from the track by the German purveyors of inner space give the increasing desperation of Mike’s obsession its pulse.    As Mother Sky plays, Mike moves from the foyer of the club to a hot dog stand to a prostitute’s flat before doing a runner onto the underground with a life-size cut-out of a Susan looky-likey lifted from outside a strip club under his arm. This is accompanied by the track’s screeching guitar frenzy that lends the scene even more urgency, driven even more by the pummelling insistence of bass and drums that go with it.   I was twelve when I first saw and heard all this in Skolimowski’s now cult classic, staying up late one Sunday night in the summer of 1977 for the

It was 40 years ago not quite today when I first saw Edwyn Collins on a stage. That was with Orange Juice, the band who spearheaded Postcard Records of Scotland’s fleeting marriage between Velveteen cool and Glasgow cheek in some mythical pop paradise that arguably invented indie-pop as we know it. It was August 19 th  1981, and Orange Juice was headlining a short lived irregular Wednesday night Liverpool club called Plato’s Ballroom.Plato’s had set out its store in January of that year with its first event at the faded chicken-in-a-basket cabaret dive usually called Mr. Pickwick’s. With New Order playing their seventh or eighth gig ever as headliners, the arty-looking poster for the night also promised ‘film’, ‘performance’ and something called a ‘videoteque’.   This amounted to David Lynch’s film, Eraserhead, and assorted flicks by Kenneth Anger beamed onto the back wall of the stage while a soundtrack of The Pop Group’s She is Beyond Good and Evil, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flas

Welcome to the Bar…   If the past is another country, listening to The Nectarine No.9’s 9.9.99 album is like stepping, not just into last century, but into another world. Released on 2.2.22 on The Creeping Bent Organisation’s Patreon site, 9.9.99’s unearthed live recording captures Edinburgh’s  premiere voodoo beat seditionists (copyright whoever came up with that phrase) in full flight, but also in flux. Recorded at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club on the sort of date that might prompt all manner of numerologically inspired conspiracies, they weren’t alone.   As history tells it, the generation of tech heads and geeks who inherited the earth regarded 9.9.99 – September 9 th , 1999 - as a precursor to Y2K. This,  they prophesised, would be the day the machine stopped and the world went into collective meltdown. As it turned out, two years into New Labour and the Cool Britannia con trick, and the Scottish Parliament a mere four months old, the tech heads were wrong on all counts, and the century

Monica Vitti – Actress   Born November 3, 1931; died February 2, 2022   Monica Vitti, who has died aged 90 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, was an actress who transcended her early arthouse image to become an equally charismatic comic turn. Her enigmatic presence in the former came primarily through her lead roles in four films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. L’Avventura (The Adventure) (1960), La Notte (The Night) (1961), L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962) and Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) (1964) became known collectively in Italy as ‘the quartet of non-communication,’ and made Vitti an international star.    Once she moved into comedy, however, she gave vent to a more expressive theatricality. Where a glance from Vitti could express ice-cool existential ennui and emotional terror in an urban wasteland for Antonioni, many of her films that followed saw her embrace a lighter tone. Vitti spoke of how such seemingly contrary characteristics confused a film world that would rath

Ronnie Spector – Singer Born August 10, 1943; died January 12, 2022    Ronnie Spector, who has died of cancer aged 78, was a singer whose early records fronting The Ronettes defined the sound of 1960s girl groups with something more provocative than some of their saccharine-laden peers. Spector’s euphoric vocals were key to the success behind The Ronettes’s run of hit singles; Be My Baby (1963); Baby, I Love You (1963); (The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up (1964); Walking in the Rain (1964) and more. In a pre British invasion era, these bite-sized melodramas became the soundtrack to teenage yearning.    There wasn’t anything submissive or demure in Spector’s vocal style. She delivered every desire-filled line with pure joy. This was complemented by The Ronettes’ kohl-eyed beehived look and a more assured attitude than some other groups. “We weren’t afraid to look hot,” Spector wrote in her 1989 memoir, Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness. “That was our image.”   While