We're In The 70s Again...

A really great weird list over at FACT on their top 100 LPs of the 70s. It's just one LP per artist. I love how they really don't stick to the rock-crit consensus. I couldn't have predicted that they'd put half of these in their list. I own about 63 of these records. There's no Bob, Neil, Bruce, Pink Floyd, The Clash or even Led Zep! That should rile up a few rock bores. Some of my faves on the more esoteric side of things from the list include A.R. & Machines Echo, Guru Guru's UFO, Libra's Schock, Annette Peacock's I'm The One, Bruce Haack's Electric Lucifer,  Rot by Conrad Schnittzler, Flower Travelling Band's Satori,  Fern Kinney's Groove Me, First Utterance from Comus etc. Hawkwind make an appearance but no Ash Ra Tempel or Amon Duul 2. Funkadelic but no Parliament or Bootsy. Heaven forbid no Big Star what will the indie kids say? Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality over Vol. 4 and Paranoid. That would have been a hard choice. As would the Bowie decision with at least 11 classics to choose from. No T-Rex! No AC/DC! They went wild with their Lou Reed pick Live-Take No Prisoners. Nico in, John Cale out. No Iggy, that's outrageous! The 70s I guess was a peak time for fine albums so really they could have made a top 200. Can's Ege Bamyasi over Tago Mago, Future Days and Soon Over Babaluma. There's plenty of Krautrock, Jazz, Avant Garde, Punk/post-punk and the just plain weird. Not much Glam (That was more of a 7" trip) or Prog, No Country at all (it must have exhausted its hipness).

Of the punk & Post-Punk we've got Wire, The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcock, Stiff Little Fingers, Suicide, No New York, Patti Smith, Cabaret Voltaire, Crass, Pere Ubu, The Slits, New York Dolls, Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Modern Lovers, The Residents (another hard choice, so many classics), Richard Hell, Devo and Talking Heads who all make the cut. Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures is mysteriously overlooked. The Saints (I'm)Stranded is the highest placed punk record, right on FACT!. No Radio Birdman or X(Legendary Australian band not the inferior American one) though, or X-Ray Spex, Dictators, Germs, Gang Of Four (is Entertainment not one the best album of the 70s?), Magazine, Television or The Ramones?! Metal Box by PIL is oddly missing. There ain't no Tubeway Army, Pop Group, Durutti Column, Thomas Leer & Robert Rental, Swell Maps, Minny Pops or Gary Numan solo. Der Plan's Geri Reig would have been my left field pick with its gloriously demented electronic toy town post-punk German stylee.

Soundtracks are thin on the ground. You could make an excellent list of 100 70s soundtracks I reckon. I think there are only 3 OSTs in the list. I'd have probably had Life On Earth, Eraserhead, Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Death Line, Quintet, Wickerman, Enter The Dragon, Shaft, Cannibal Holocaust, The Taking Of Pelham 123, Phantasm, Vanishing Point etc. etc.

On the soul and funk tip Curtis Mayfield makes the grade with his excellent Curtis/Live but Isaac Hayes doesn't. Stevie Wonder in, Michael Jackson's Off The Wall out!? Sly Stone, Gil Scott Heron, Last Poets, Shuggie Otis and Millie Jackson are here. The Meters, James Brown, Bill Withers, Al Green, Betty Davis, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Teddy Pendgrass, The O'Jays, The Isley Brothers et al. are not. My esoteric Pick would have been Lightnin Rod's Hustlers Convention from 1973 which is a proto gangsta rap concept album that is some funky superfly shit man. On the disco tip no Risque from Chic or Donna Summer's Once Upon A Time. But we do get Cerrone's Cerrone 3: Supernature and the aforementioned Fern Kinney.

There's no records from Sweden ie. International Harvester, Harvester or Trad Gras Och Stenar (I'd probably have included an LP by each of those groups even though they're all pretty much the same group). Maybe my other Swedish pick would have been Algarnas Tradgard's Framtiden ar ett Svavande Skepp, Forankrat I Forntiden. That's a nice slice of folky space prog jams. From France you get Serge Gainsbourg, Magma, Ghedalia Tazartez and Heldon. Some other French weirdness would have been good too like Pole's classic meandering electronic psych trip Inside The Dream from 1975. Brazil still seems to be on the hipster map with several entries, however Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges sprawling opus Clube Da Esquina misses out as does Jorge Ben, Edu Lobo etc. On the Yank/Brit folkish tip you get Linda Perhacs, Judee Sill, Bridget St John and Robbie Basho but no Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Dr Strangley Strange, Tim Buckley (losing his hipster cache?) or my fave of the lot John Martyn. It would have been a toss up though for a Martyn LP between Bless The Weather, Solid Air, Inside Out or One World. Only one LP from Japan shows up so there's no Les Rallizes Denudes, Masahiko Satoh, People, Far East Family Band or Brast Burn. Nothing from Turkey at all! I'd have perhaps put in Baris Manco's funky Anadolu psych classic 2023 or LPs from Mogallar, Bunalim, 3 Hur-el or Eric Koray's masterpiece Electronic Turkular. On the Avant Garde front you get Bernhard Palmigiani, Charlemagne Palestine, Gavin Bryars, Basil Kirchin, Harold Budd, Robert Ashley etc. I reckon Taj Mahal Travellers August 1974 would have got my overlooked vote for its eerie deep psych drone goodness. Even maybe something from the legendary Ron Geesin who put out several classics of 70s cult electronics on the KPM label. Where's Delia?

I could go on forever, perhaps I should have made my own list. Klause Schulze's Moondawn gets a guernsey but it could just have easily been 7 of his other 70s classics. Tangerine Dream's Ziet would have got my vote over Phaedra. On The Corner from Miles Davis seems a conservative choice to me. I'd have gone for something like Get Up With It, Dark Magus, Big Fun, Agharta, In Concert or Live/Evil. Cult bands like The Screamers, The Electric Eels and Simply Saucer, I don't think had official LPs released in the 70s, which could explain their absence. On the more rock front The Rolling Stones, Blue Oyster Cult, The Allman Brothers, King Krimson, Dr Feelgood, Thin Lizzy, Steely Dan, Buffalo, Budgie and The Pink Fairies don't get a look in. I guess those bands are for other lists. FACT do things their way and the worlds a better place for it.

Here's ten LPs that haven't been mentioned yet in this or the FACT article that are essential 70s recordings in my book:
Edge Of Time - Dom
No Other - Gene Clark
For Your Pleasure - Roxy Music
Ball Power - Coloured Balls
Tres Hombres - ZZ Top
Split - Groundhogs
If Only I Could Remember My Name - David Crosby
Alien Soundtracks - Chrome
Delta Momma Blues - Townes Van Zandt
Dub From The Roots - King Tubby

Wow this has made me realise once again how rich and deep the music goes in the 70s. I'm lookin forward to going through all my Miles Davis and Klaus Schulze records oh and then there's some I've never heard from the FACT list. I might finally check out Henry Cow, Millie Jackson, Cymanade, Judee Sill or Gary Wilson. I never could get into Stiff Little Fingers, Joni Bloody Mitchell, Genesis or pre-Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits though. But hey any list with Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats at number 1 is fine by me.

RE: Swans

Funnily enough playing at Melbourne's ATP heritage/vintage rock festival alongside the reactivated Swans are a band made up some people who were paying very close attention to Swans in thier final days and copped most of their moves from them in this era, Godspeed You Black Emperor! Do they still exist? or are they a vintage act too? It might get a little awkward around Mr Gira .Godspeed's first couple of records were good until that Skinny Fists one and the one after that I couldn't dig either of those at all and then well I lost track of them. They're probably sepulchral as well.

Anyway the dude from Snog is one David Thrussel and is an interesting guy. His radio show had it all Country and Western, Spaghetti Westerns, Soundtracks, electronic music, conspiracy theory and much more. In recent times he's been running the fabulous reissue label The Omni Recording Corporation. They've put out some good gear including Jack & Misty compilations as well as a series of Moog masterpieces including Bruce Haack's classic The Electric Lucifer and Gil Trythall's Country Moog: Switched On Nashville and many other rippers. Well worth checkin out the catalogue, long lost gems everywhere.



Like Nancy & Lee with wah wah and Moog.
One of my favourite discoveries of the last 10 years.
Recorded between 1967 & 1973.



The Wire magazine. What happened?

1993 was the year. Melody Maker and NME had been slowly starting to shit me from like 91 onwards. There was still good stuff happening over at Melody Maker at this time but it was starting to diminish. Maybe my tastes were changing too.......anyway The Wire was good because it was covering interesting (ie not this weeks fashionable pop group) stuff the weeklies were starting to ignore and they didn't have that kneejerk criticism/create a new scene every other week/backlash the next week blah blah... of the weeklies which was incredibly liberating at the time. The Boredoms, West African Tapes, Edgar Froese, Miles Davis, King Tubby, Mouse On Mars, Gamelan, High Rise, Method Man, Casper Brotzmann, AMM, Jungle, Tricky, Eddie Palmieri, Ambient, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Gunter Muller, Omni Trio, Prog Rock, Nirvana all rubbing shoulders together. This seemed quite rad at the time and perhaps it was. We might be a bit used to it all now in this post everything world. So for many years it was an essential read. All through the 90s it was great, but somewhere in the 00s it became less essential. I guess it didn't matter that much as music criticism on the blogosphere was peaking at this stage. Who needed to buy a magazine made of paper? How archaic!

In the last couple of years it seems to have picked up a bit though and there was always something to make you still at least check every month if there was something good in there. A Simon Reynolds article will get me in every time. Recently they covered Turkish Psych which maybe they usually would have done 10 years earlier when modern Turkish groups like Replikas and BaBa Zulu were making an impact on western audiences. Are they starting to repeat themselves? Scott Walker and Kraut/Kosmiche articles recently which were both covered extensively 15 years earlier. Old school NME narrow mindedness/bitchiness also seems to have kicked in as well as substandard journos who've got no fucking idea.

Nick Cave cops some knee jerk turds criticism for some of the greatest lyrics ever written.

An excerpt from Palaces of Montezuma by Grinderman

Psychedelic invocations of Mata Hari at the station 

A custard coloured dream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen

The spinal cord of JFK wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's negligee 

So Nina Power you look like a fool. In the same issue from September 2010 Nina's colleague Sam Davies calls electronic pioneer Bruce Haack dull. Guess what Sam you're fucking dull. Bruce Haack was a brilliant pioneer. Sam what did you pioneer? Being a dull music journalist pretending you've got something to say but really only being a try hard. Guess what Sammy that's been done before too. Tedious slagging was never part of The Wire thing so this is disappointing. Don't get me wrong I love a good slagging when it's smart, funny and justified. Mr Abusing/Agreeable anyone? Then they pulled the ultimate NME move in slagging a genre/movement they invented or at least identified and named ie Hypnogogic Pop. Time to move on I guess.....Simon Reynolds has an article in the bloody new one though.....