Category: AYITC: Trails and Influences: Year 3 Wanderings

Well, after delving amongst various final series of Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion related finds and ephemera, I was signposted towards a rather fine and fully stocked archiving of related imagery, press, promotional items etc at Professor Bernard Quatermass’ home in the social ether.

Upon arrival there, I had something of a wander around and good old perusal.

Below is a baker’s dozen of things around those parts that caught my eye…

Ah, the classic Conclusion image… “Earth’s dark ancestral forces awaken to a summons from beyond the stars.”

Interest piqued. Count me in…

The Manxman? Well, that’s an evocative way to start your article… It makes me think of, hmmm, Quatermass as superhero or maybe a creature from the dark side in one of his own tales.

And although I’m not madly keen on seeing behind the scenes of things and the possible breaking of the spell… well, this particular image, taken by Martin Wilkie, of working on a prop just seems to capture a particular moment in cultural time.

For fans of all things hauntologically Radiophonic maybe?

And talking of capturing particular things and times… this photograph of Dog Dish and Cat Dish seems to capture a very particular sense of some kind of flipside to the countryside and landscape.


The helmeted security/police in the background seem to place the series much more with traditional science fiction than it actually is… I quite like them, in a 1970s British television/repurposing of day-to-day objects/Blakes 7-esque kind of a way, while also finding them curiously jarring.

While this puts me in mind of later scenes in Zardoz, as the citadel has been breached.

Or possibly a gathering from Jeremy Sandford and Ron Reid’s documenting of the 1970s free festival scene in their Tomorrow’s People book?

And then wandering away from the final Quatermass series…

Well, for the title text and all it implies. Prescient could well be an apt word to use about now.

“You don’t have to ask ‘What’s doing the business?’… If you haven’t booked it, you don’t like money!”… “Let them know they will be chained to their seats!”

Say no more.

…and just what is happening in this from-over-the-seas video cover?

Ah, there’s nothing like wildly inappropriate cover/poster design.

A literal online translation considers the title to be “The Ship Of Lost Beings” but then quickly recognises it and changes it to Quatermass And The Pit.

Modern day technology hey? Innit marvelous (!)…

…and I shall end with a return back to the Quatermass final series, rounding the circle, as it were (or should that be ringstone round?)…

The poster is again from over the seas, in part because I’m fond of seeing what happens with such things when work travels elsewhere and also because it is a wandering back to one of the classic designs/images from the series…

…and then finally, this portrait of Professor Quatermass, as it seems to capture a certain quiet, weary dignity which is so much part of his character at this point.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #177/365: Zardoz… in this secret room from the past, I seek the future…

Day #197/365: Huff-ity puff-ity ringstone round; Quatermass and the finalities of lovely lightning

Week #6/52: Tomorrow’s People, further considerations of the past as a foreign country and hauntology away from its more frequent signifiers and imagery…

Week #7/52: Eyes Turned Skywards; once streaks in the sky, almost futures and reverberations in the ether

Week #45/52: Quatermass finds and ephemera from back when

Elswhere in the ether:
Just in case you missed it, these images were gathered from here.

I recently mentioned about being drawn to certain books, sometimes when wandering the aisles and shelves of second hand bookshops, which “…often seem to be from the 1970s and capture a particular kind of mood, that have a quietly haunted atmosphere, a certain kind of dour British representation of the landscape and which with the passing of time they seem to have come to contain within them an often quite subtle left-of-centre sense of the land, its layers, marks and spirit.“

And I suppose the books featured here may well in part belong to such an area.

Or possibly, if “Often Slightly Dour 1970s Books On Windmills That Have Subtley Gained A Layer Or Two Of Extra Resonance With The Passing Of Time” was a quite long book genre, they might belong there.

(Although strictly speaking, they came from a whole shelf of books marked “Watermills and Windmills”).

I can’t remember the last time I saw a windmill out in the actual, real world. Maybe these books were all published in the 1970s because that was a time before windmills finally gave up the ghost, collapsed or were just cleared away.

So, anyway, if you were to do an image search for something like “people drawn to an imagined past idyll, folk culture, folk rock and repairing windmills in the 1970s”, I expect the cover of The Restoration of Windmills And Windpumps in Norfolk from 1977 may well come up.

It’s a nicely produced, sepia toned, almost pocket book overview of its title subject.

And then we have Whirling Windmills by Althea from 1972, which is listed as being part of the Colourmaster Junior Series and although it’s a fair few years since I’ve seen one, I imagine that if the I-Spy series of books were given a more hand drawn, bucolic makeover then they might well look like this.

One of my favourite pages is this windmill illustration, which I tend to think of as a prototype for say a Maddy Prior and Tim Hart album cover, around the Folk Songs Of Olde England period and featuring at its heart a yearning for a return to that just mentioned folk-ish imagined idyll.

And the quiz spread, which in particular made me think of something like I-Spy.

And then we have The Windmill – Yesterday And Today by R.J. De Little, again from 1972.

Of these books, this is the one that most directly connects with that particular left-of-centre, quietly dour atmosphere and it put me in mind of something like Monumental Follies that I have visited a time or two around these parts.

It seems to particularly focus on/capture a sense of windmills and neglected, tumbling relics from another era.

And finally Windmills and Watermills by John Reynolds, from 1970, which seems to have a slightly more upbeat take on things, a few less crumbling structures in its pages but this photograph I rather liked in a layering of the past and present manner.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #157/365: The Dalesman’s Litany; a yearning for imaginative idylls and a counterpart to tales of hellish mills

Week #5/52: The Right Side Of The Hedge – gardens where (should we?) feel secure and velocipede enhanced long arms…

Week #50/52: Monumental Follies – An Exposition On The Eccentric Edifices Of Britain (to give the book its full title)

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse via: The Restorations of Windmills and Windpumps in Norfolk. Whirling Windmills. The Windmill Yesterday And Today. Windmills & Watermills.

Well, it seems only right that as part of this (still relatively) new spin-around-the-sun, that I would pay a visit to the work of Ghost Box Records and fellow travellers…

…although maybe at a slightly oblique angle.

When I have listened to the sampled cut-ups of The Focus Group, it often makes me think of the turntablism montages of say DJ Shadow around the time of Endtroducing or possibly the more overtly dissonant work of Kid Koala…

While say Moon Wiring Club puts me in mind of mid-to-later nineties, hmmm, not necessarily trip hop or the abstract beats of Mo Wax releases but say the blunted, sample laden beats of Depth Charge or something similar that would probably have been in the record shop racks just next to trip hop and maybe Mo’Wax.

Although in terms of intention and philosophical underpinning Kid Koala/The Focus Group and Moon Wiring Club/Depth Charge may be quite separate or disparate, musically maybe not so much.

I suppose that turntablism and blunted beats took a culture that had many of roots in rap and hip hop and stepped off to the side to form what could be loosely labelled b-boy/breaks and beats culture.

If you took such b-boy things and had them analysed and performed by an Open University professor in a parallel universe or filtered via a woozily hallucinogenic haunted tea room you might well end up with the likes of The Focus Group and Moon Wiring Club.

(And all this stepping from Mo’Wax to Ghost Box Records isn’t really all that much of a step or jump; if you look at The Memory Band vs Ghost Box Navigations release you will find work/remixes by Grantby aka Dan Grigson, who put out releases on Mo’Wax in the mid-90s, while Memory Band chap Stephen Cracknell worked alongside him on releases around that time).

And there is a certain almost scientific, analytical take on music that can be found in both say Mo’Wax releases and Ghost Box Records; with the former I should maybe say “dropping science” and with the latter that should maybe be “study workshopping science”, as it may be in part a reflection of some of related reference points/inspirations – the research like nature of The Radiophonic Workshop and the utilitarian aspects of educational and library music for example.

In an intertwined manner, I’m rather fond of the work of Adrian Younge, who could be seen to be creating a form of hauntology but one that draws from American soul and hip hop music, beats and culture rather than with Ghost Box which in part takes inspiration from the just mentioned largely British education and library music, Public Information films, TV idents etc.

And just as with Ghost Box, he takes original source material/reference points and reimagines them rather than purely retreading previous paths, conjuring up a parallel universe all of his own; although talking of folk orientated culture rather than soul and hip hop I think Rob Young’s phrases imaginative time travel and experiments in consensual hallucation, from his book Electric Eden, might be appropriate here.

And to join these various paths, if The Radiophonic Workshop had happened in 1970s inner city USA rather than over here and if Ghost Box Records had tumbled forth from over there rather than from over here, well the results may well have sounded not a million miles away from his recent(ish) The Electronique Void album.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
In part this has been a revisiting and further exploring of earlier themes around these parts; interlinked considerations can be found via:
Day #199/365: The ether ephemera of Mr Ian Hodgson and wandering from village green preservation to confusing English electronic music…

Almost back to the start wanderings:
Day #4/365: Electric Eden; a researching, unearthing and drawing of lines between the stories of Britain’s visionary music

Elsewhere in the ether:
The conjured worlds of Mr Adrian Younge: Listen to The Electronique Void here. Classy revisitings from an indefinable past via Something About April here (in particular First Step On The Moon and Midnight Blue). Imaginative time travel here.

I expect if you’re reading this you may already know about such things and places in the ether but just in case: The recently(ish) brushed and scrubbed up ether home of Ghost Box Records here. Moon Wiring Club here.

The Memory Band vs Ghost Box / Mo’Wax intertwinings here. Depth Charge encasement archive here. Kid Koala here. Endtroducing facts and figures here.

I recently(ish) came across Sam Mellish’s Roadside Britain photography book on a visit to a nearby library (gawd bless ’em).

Its subtitle is “Observations of traditional roadside services across Great Britain”.

The traditional part is the give away there; this isn’t a study of corporate megalith, franchised stop-offs but rather of generally small, independent roadside caffs; sometimes bricks and mortar but also just as likely to be essentially a shack or repurposed coach/shipping container.

Essentially your good old greasy spoon; the book is a documentation of such places, the food they serve, their locations, customers and Sam’s journey itself.

Within the general realms of hauntology and the related sense of nostalgia or loss of an imagined, progressive, modernist future, there is something of a softspot for the often contentious architecture that has come to be known as brutalist or brutalism.

Looking up definitions for brutalist, one I found was: “(In modern architechture) the aesthetic use of basic building processes with no apparent concern for visual amenity.”

Which I feel could well be appropriate to describe the photographs in Roadside Britain; essentially brutalist breakfasts.

Which isn’t said in a critical manner, I have a great deal of appreciation for a good, friendly, well run, caff and cooked breakfast and I think they can be good examples of a certain kind of artisan like folk art and craftsmanship.

Rather, I think of a brutalist breakfast more in a sense of referring to the efficient, no messing about, “fill ’em up” ethos of bacon butties and the full English.

When I was re-looking through the images, what struck me was how much a lot of the places depicted seemed not just belong to transitional edgelands but to have a real frontier-like feel to them; as though they belonged more to some not yet fully developed part of say the outer reaches of the USA, rather than being just up the road or alongside our motorways (Birney Imes’ Juke Joint work and its depiction of outlying, hand hewn drinking establishments in America comes to mind).

And there’s a romance to some of the images, a sense of the open road and freedom, that again you would possibly more associate with the wide open planes and spaces over the sea than on this relatively small island.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Elsewhere in the ether:
Visit Roadside Britain’s home in the ether here,  its fellow companions here and peruse it here.

Images from Birney Imes Juke Joint can be found here. The book can be perused here.

Although his work seems to exist in a genre all of its own*, Luke Haines has been described as “our most non-hauntological hauntologist” (strictly speaking he has been commented as being such by our good selves).

The evidence? Well, his album British Nuclear Bunkers seemed to involve hidden patterns in TV idents and related ephemera and a surreal/parallel history version of Cold War dread.

Nothing hauntological-esque to see there then.

While previous albums took in a general hauntological sense of “the present being haunted by spectres of the past” (to semi-quote ourselves) and intermingled 1970s pop, marauding skinheads, Asti Spumante, teddy boy discos, the three day week, 1970s and 1980s wrestlers and so forth.

But I think new(ish) album Smash The System both takes the proverbial biscuit and also seems to travel, in his own particular way, to the point at which hauntological concerns meet otherly folklore.

So, for example, while there are all kinds of pop culture titles/references to the album (Marc Bolan, Bruce Lee, Vince Taylor etc) there are also tracks called Ritual Magick, Power of the Witch and The Incredible String Band…

Meanwhile, the album has an archival morris dancers photograph as its cover and the accompanying video shows their contemporary equivalent on a slightly worrying and unsettling bender/borderline riotous fracas in an urban, capital city setting (while also name checking his love of The Monkees and The Velvet Underground).

Oh and also features gas masks and a tray full of shots, which for some reason the latter of which I find the most unruly, unsettling and just a bit wrong.

You know those television programs that show people not being able to handle their drinking/binge drinking in inner city areas as such places are turned into near no-go areas of a Saturday night?

Well, in some alternate universe the traditional folkloric characters in this video are what you would see if you tuned in.

(The arty-laryness of Earl Brutus and possibly even the imagined troublesome youth cult of A Clockwork Orange may also be appropriate reference points.)

I’ve just watched it again and brrr, I’m both entranced and really don’t want to step into the world it shows/creates (and its fiction is only just burst at the end by the more normal smiles of a participant or two).

(Move along, move along. There’s nothing hauntological nor intertwinings between spectres of the past and otherly folk to see here.)

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Previous evidence around these parts:
Day #10/365: The Auteurs – How I Learned To Love The Boot Boys; our most non-hauntological hauntologist…

Week #38/52: Mr Haines – “our most non-hauntological hauntologist” – the evidence mounts

Elsewhere in the ether:
Step through to that other world here. Mr Haines’ home in the ether is here. Often quite witty mucking abouts by him here.

And in a “do yourself a cultural favour” manner, one of his books here (no, not the edition with the cabbage on the front, thank you very much) and the rather classy, unparalleled, seething, now that the Empire has faded, I know what you’re doing in the afternoons, Albionic pop-noir of Black Box Recorder here.

*Would One Time Indie Popstar,  Brief Top Twenty-er, Pantomine Villain(?), Pop Culture’s Reverse Explorer be too long a genre title for the racks of the record stores?

There have been a couple of photography books in recent years that have focused on the folkloric side of British/English costume, rituals and celebrations and I think I expected Merry Brownfield’s Merry England to be along similar lines by the title and cover…

However, although photographs of people in traditional folk costume seems to form the heart of the book with sections titled Straw Bear, The Castleton Garland Day, Holly Man, Mummer’s Plays and Morris Dancers, it actually wanders considerably further afield to encompass pop culture tribes/styles such as mod, people who appear to have tumbled from the page of The Chap magazine in The Tweed Run and Vintage Style section…

…and then it wanders off to include Pearly Kings And Queens, the comic convention-esque costumes of attendees to the World Darts Championship, traditional Billingsgate fish market bobbin hats and a number of possibly more contentious hunting/aristocratic areas.

In some ways it reminds me in both style and breadth of Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive Book/Exhibition – more a sort of “from the people” view of things than specifically what could be considered folk aesthetics.

The book was self-published by Merry Brownfield, who’s home in the ether can be found here. It seems to be out of print but can be found for but a few pence and pound here.

(File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings)

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #19/365: Once a Year – Homer Sykes
Day #66/365: Sarah Hannants wander through the English ritual year
Day #148/365: Folk Archive

Around these parts and over the seas:
Day #69/365: Charles Frégers Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion

Elsewhere in the ether:
Henry Bourne’s Arcadia Britannica: A Modern British Folklore Portrait
Sarah Hannant’s Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through The English Ritual Year

Well, we thought we would start this years set of breadcrumb trails and wanderings with something of a treat.

By Our Selves.

No, not the film by Andrew Kötting but rather the book that accompanies the film.

(If you should not know, to quote somebody else, the film involves “‘Toby Jones, Andrew Kötting (as a straw bear) and their merry men revive the wanderings and wonderings of Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, on a quest “for scenes where man hath never trod’.” Oh and add Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and others to those wanderings and wonderings.)

At the last point of looking, this seemed to be one of those rare items that doesn’t seem to be reviewed, written about, pondered and considered all over the ether.

It only seems to be available via an organisation called The Swedenborg Society (and sold by them at a well known ether commerce site but not actually sold by that well known site itself).

It doesn’t even seem to get a mention on Andrew Kötting’s own site. The film does but not the book.

Hmmm. Slightly curious.

Anyways, it arrived through the letter box a while ago and it’s a fine publication. A lovely, solid, almost slab-in-miniature collection of images, thoughts and notes that sit alongside and intertwine with the film. A “posh” scrapbook in a way.

I think what I am drawn to more than the book and film’s specific dealings with John Clare’s story is the imagery and a more abstract sense of a connection to or exploration of layers and roots of the land’s tales and history…

Oh and the sheer cheek and chutzpah of the whole project, which seems to involve getting together some kind of more than reasonable pile of money through the modern day version of “now, if everybody chips in a bit we can get this done” and more traditional funding organisations, roping in and/or bringing together a reasonably well known, respected, often mainstream actor, a rather well known writer of comic books, a rather well known writer of wandering books and so forth…

…and then putting together something which is sort of fine/experimental art but also that seems just as much to be about a bunch of mates mucking about and having a laugh while managing to delve through those just mentioned layers and tales of the land…

…and coming out the other side full of (I hope) smiles with something that… I can’t quite put my finger on it but as a piece of work it seems to have a certain arty accessibility, to have had a reach out into the world that seems to step beyond the expected well defined routes of such experimental work and in some way to link back (without being retro in nature) to a time/the spirit of a time when independent but relatively mainstream film/television production, broadcast and distribution could include the experimentation of say Derek Jarman and Ghosts In The Machine.

File under: Trails and Influences / Year 3 Wanderings

Intertwined wanderings around these parts:
Day #221/365: A Straw Bear went a-wandering; a once Berberian sound engineer follows past footsteps, other boot filling and less than but two penn’orth worth on a roll of music

Day #225/365: A return to the returning footsteps of a Berberian Straw Bear and companions

Week #27/52: Sapphire & Steel, various ghosts in the machine and a revisiting of broken circuits…

Elsewhere in the ether:
Peruse the book in the ether here and here. Andrew Kötting’s home for By Our Selves here. The flickering’s of the trailer here. The encasers and envoyers of the film here.