A Shindig! Selection: From Celluloid Hinterlands to Children of the Stones via The Delaware Road and a Sidestep to the Parallel World of él Records

The A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands book has recently been featured a couple of times in Shindig! magazine…

First off it was reviewed by “author, music journalist, poet, cultural historian and performer” Ben Graham in issue 132, which provides a concise, informative overview and backgrounding of the book, A Year In The Country and “wyrd”, hauntological etc culture. It’s another review that, even though I’ve written the book, made me want to go out and read it and discover and watch the films and television programmes discussed in it.

Secondly it was included in the top ten books of the year in “The Shindig Writers’ Poll 2022” in issue 134, where it shares some rather fine company alongside Vashti Bunyan’s Wayward and Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop autobiographies, amongst other books.

If you’re not familiar with Shindig! and have a penchant for vintage psych, pop, prog, acid folk etc from approximately the 1960s-1980s and contemporary music that explores and reinvents similar territories then it’s well worth seeking out. Also, if your tastes run to Radiophonic-esque electronica, hauntology, wyrd otherly pastoral culture, esoteric soundtracks and interconnected work then you’ll also find plenty of such things interwoven amongst its pages.

As a case in point, issue 134 includes an extensive interview by Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation with Jonny Trunk and Alan Gubby, the founders, respectively, of the Trunk Records and Buried Treasure record labels, where they discuss their years long seeking out of the rights, music recordings and accompanying artwork for the unsettling 1970’s TV series Children of Stones, which has recently resulted in Trunk Records releasing its soundtrack.

It’s a fascinating read, in particular in the way that it pulls back the curtain to show just how much work and dedication goes into such releases and it’s also accompanied by a selection of five other “vintage TV weirdness” series produced by HTV, who also produced Children of the Stones, which I expect will be being viewed and/or re-viewed around these parts at some point.

Alan Gubby’s work also features elsewhere in the same issue, in an article by Jon Mills who is one of the magazine’s editors, on Gubby’s newly released and beautifully produced The Delaware Road graphic novel, which continues his explorations of a “very alternative history of British radio and television broadcasting, centred around the evolution and application of electronic sound from WW2 until the early ’70s.”

As a project it is extremely multi-faceted and has also taken in a compilation released in 2014 (which featured work by Gubby working as Revbjelde and numerous musicians whose work interconnects with wyrd and hauntological culture including tape wrangler Howlround/Robin the Fog, acid folk re-imaginers The Rowan Amber Mill etc) and numerous live events, including one that was set in a decommissioned secret Cold War bunker, alongside numerous other releases, artefacts and so on.

Delving into Gubby’s The Delaware Road project you begin to wander when he sleeps… and that’s before you get to all the other archival and contemporary releases on his Buried Treasure label.

Elsewhere in issue 134 of Shindig! you’ll also find an interview with musician, actor, TV and radio presenter Paul Jones, where he discusses the wide ranging strands of his career that has included 1960s chart pop-dom to his covers of Sex Pistols and The Ramones iconic songs (in collaboration with Tim Rice who also worked on the musicals Evita, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Lion King etc, just to add even more surreality to the record) and also his starring alongside iconic 1960s model Jean Shrimpton in the “comedy-drama music[al] science fiction” dystopic popstar film Privelege released in 1967, which has lingered intriguingly in my imagination somewhat since I first saw it a fair few years ago.

And as an aside, seeing the above still from Privelege makes me think it’s time to revisit it…

Returning to “The Shindig Writers’ Poll” it also includes other wyrd and hauntological-esque and/or friendly work, including Broadcast’s archival Maida Vale Sessions album, Ghost Box Records, Finders Keepers Records, Stuart Maconie’s BBC Radio 6 show Freak Zone (which recently included a hauntology special)…

…alongside which, and returning to Bob Fischer’s work, the “Writers’ Poll” also includes his The Haunted Generation Radio Show, in which he explores “TV, film, music and cultural experiences that helped define the ‘haunted’ 20th century childhood”… and flipping through it again, there’s also a crossword where you can win a copy of Kevin Foakes’ (aka DJ Food, aka Strictly Kev) fascinating and rather finely produced book Wheels of Light, that I mentioned in a previous post, and which explores vintage British light show designs.

And (almost) finally, the “Writers’ Poll” also features the BFI Flipside’s Blu-ray release of cultural curio The Ballad of Tam Lin, which I’ve written about at the AYITC site before and in Wandering Through Spectral Fields, and which is described by Vic Pratt of the BFI in the magazine as being “[Planet of the Apes star] Roddy McDowall’s strange, stylish, marvellous mash-up of Hollywood glamour, far-out teenage freak-out, Pentangle grooves and Scots folk-horror”, which both sums it up well and also only just begins to scrape the surface.

It’s another film that’s lingered in my imagination since I first saw it and is a real “Hey, what? Blimey…” cinematic experience.

And all that’s before I even get to issue 132 or delve back into Shindig! issues 32 and 59 and their classic hauntological, wyrd, Radiophonic, giallo, Ghost Box, Broadcast, Emerald Web etc double header “Wanderings Amongst Pop Culture’s Semi-Hidden Reverse”, which I’ve written about previously.

Cheers to everybody at Shindig! Much appreciated and a tip of the hat to you all.

Postscript…

As a further aside, it was interesting to see the Flashback record shop in the Shop section of the Shindig! poll… I spent a fair few hours and pounds in there back when and it was part of a record hunting trail I used to undertake in London’s Islington which included Reckless Records just down the road from it, a record shop sort of round the corner on the street where the market was and which I can’t remember the name of but where I bought a DVD set of Public Information Films a fair few years ago before I started AYITC and a charity shop on the high street where I once found a rare él Records released 7″ which included a cover of The Monkees’ Valeri by The King of Luxembourg (aka sometimes Derek Jarman film soundtracker Simon Fisher Turner) and so was forever fixed in my mind as a good charity shop, despite hardly ever finding anything else I wanted to buy in there.

Hmmm, él Records, now if we’re talking about creating parallel worlds unto themselves, as is often the case at AYITC and is also the case in much of hauntological work, well the original 1980s incarnation of él Records was something of a master of such things in its combining of sumptuously packaged records, a very particular dreamworld, playful, louche British aristocratic dressing up box aesthetic and catchy retro-tinged (or should be atemporal/from an indefinable time?) pop that, while being in many ways left-field, also often wouldn’t have sounded completely out of place on primetime Radio 1 back then (and which in fact very occasionally turned up there).

él has a somewhat large discography but for my mind and money I’d recommend as possible starting points the London Pavillion Volume One compilation released in 1987 accompanied by The Ruling Class: The Very Best of él Records retrospective from 1999, which between them provide a good showcasing of the label’s both more pop and avant-garde music tendencies.

Thinking about it él Records were a fine example of how, to quote Broadcast co-founder Trish Keenan “the avant-garde is no good without popular and popular is rubbish without avant-garde” and also writer and academic Mark Fisher’s discussing of how the functioning of “the circuit between the avant-garde, the experimental and the popular” is an important, maybe even vital, element in the creation, development and evolution of culture.

As a final aside, I can remember having a natter with musician, DJ and relentless cultural/musical explorer and standard bearer Andrew Weatherall about él Records at a night he put on in East London around approximately 2006-2007, if I remember correctly. I wandered over to natter to him after he played the single Shockheaded Peters’ “I, Bloodbrother Be”, which I’d never really expected to hear in a club/nightlife setting and was chuffed to hear it. It was the first ever release on él Records which, while being eminently catchy/accessible, also still sounds thrillingly transgressive even today.

When I was chatting with him about the record he said that he wanted to include the track on a compilation album he was putting together and that he was meeting with Mike Alway, the founder of él Records, to discuss using it. I expect that would’ve been an interesting meeting to be at.

That compilation was Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi Vol. 1 and re-looking at its gathering of the likes of Shockheaded Peter’s transgressive pop “I, Blood Brother Be” alongside mondo mutated rock’n’roll, vintage Medway garage and suave “London after midnight” glam stomp from the likes of The Cramps, The Milkshakes and The Flaming Stars I think it may well soon be pulling on the AYITC purse strings.

Here’s to Andrew Weatherall, Trish Keenan and Mark Fisher. Fallen heroes all. The world’s cultural circuits have a little less current running through them without them being around to crank the generator handle as only they could.

Links at A Year In The Country:

Links elsewhere:

Blimey again, that’s a fair bit to explore, visit and revisit. Looks like my afternoon may already be spoken for…

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