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The Forest / The Wald, A Year In The Country and Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone Folk Horror Christmas Special

After its broadcast by BBC Radio 6 on Christmas Day the rather fine Folk Horror Christmas Special episode of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone show is currently available to listen to online:

Light the fire and huddle round for two hours of eerily beautiful experimental music on a dark winter’s night. Telling spooky tales at Christmas time originally became a tradition in Victorian England, as it gave people something to do during the long, dark evenings before electricity, and people didn’t necessarily have to be literate to retell the local ghost story. Stuart nods to this custom of yesteryear with two hours of haunting folk gems from The Wicker Man, Shirley Collins, Matt Berry and more.

And in a  bonus Christmas present kind of a way, the A Year In The Country track “Where Once We Wandered Free” from the 2016 album The Forest / The Wald is included as the final track in the episode. Cheers Santa Maconie, Brooke Telford Scaife and all at the Freak Zone, much appreciated (!)

Thanks also to every body who created work for The Forest / The Wald, including Bare Bones, Magpahi, Polypores, Time Attendant, David Colohan, Sproatly Smith, The Hare And The Moon, Alaska, The Séance, Lutine and Cosmic Neighbourhood and also Rob Young for the inspiration and words.

For the next 27 days the show can be listened tat its BBC website page and via the BBC Sounds app and site.

More details on The Forest / The Wald album can be found here.

 

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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.


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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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Wandering Down Darkened Forest Trails and Amongst Echoes of the Past and Future With Bob Fischer, Electronic Sound and Simple Minds

This was another good thing in a week or so where various good things arrived through the letter box etc, including Cathi Unsworth’s review of the A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands book in Fortean Times which I recently posted about.

Issue 95 of Electronic Sound includes an interview with me by Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation, who has a great knack for making such things entertaining, funny and informative; it wanders from the background and story of A Year In The Country via growing up amongst Cold War warning sirens, Doctor Who, pastoral disquiet, The Wicker Man, The Advisory Circle and Ghost Box Records, TV curio Stargazy on Zummerdown and a whole lot more…

And who would’ve thought that one day I would be sharing magazine pages with Simple Minds? Blimey… The interview in the magazine with Simple Minds founders and mainstays Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill by Push, who is one of the editors of Electronic Sound, is a fine extended read that explores their history old and new, personal and cultural.

The striking artwork for Simple Minds’ new album Direcion of the Heart is the cover image for the issue;  see if you can spot, as mentioned in the interview with Kerr and Burchill,  the “butterflies, a golden Cupid blowing a horn, a bird’s nest with three eggs in it, a scales of justice keyring, a plastic model of a kissing couple, and a ringed planet reflected in one of the eye lenses”. It took me a mo’ or two to be able to see them all, due to them being intriguingly intertwined and hidden in plain sight amongst the main images of the gas mask and the flowers.

And if you get in quick, you can also bundle the magazine with an exclusive limited 7″ of the classic Simple Minds track “I Travel” that was originally released in 1980 and which is backed with “Planet Zero” from their new album.

If you’ve never heard “I Travel” it’s well worth seeking out, as indeed is the Empires and Dance album that it was included on; listening to it today it still sounds like the future and its lyrics are both worryingly appropriate and prescient for present day troubles in the world and, well, I’ll hand over to Bobbie Gillespie of Primal Scream at this point, who on Clash magazine’s site said of the song and Simple Minds:

“Hard as rock cold war Euro-disco, no one did it better. The true European sons of BowieEnoMoroder and brothers of Joy Division, all the way from from Prospecthill circus. ‘In central Europe men are marching’ – ecstatic paranoia. I love it.”

After a rolling drumbeat intro “Planet Zero” seems, particularly in its repeated refrain of “whole world on fire”, to both echo and continue some of the themes of dischord and conflict in the lyrics of “I Travel” and also shares its intertwining of some quite dark lyrical themes and driving, propulsive music or, to re-quote Bobbie Gillespie, “ecstatic paranoia ;  it’s a song that sounds both contemporary and also to contain almost spectral echoes of Simple Minds’ musical past, particularly in some of the layered synths.

Elsewhere in the magazine can be found the usual smorgasboard of potentially wallet punishing synth, book, music etc news, features and reviews. This issue felt particularly dangerous for the health of the old bank balance and included the likes of a £10,000+ reissue of a classic Moog synth from 1971, a rather lovely piece of music studio furniture by Audio Housing, Kevin Foakes’ (aka Strictly Kev and DJ Food) excellent new Wheels of Lights book that collects together and archives the projection disc etc designs for light shows that were released between 1970 and 1990, a particularly reasonably priced “cut your own records” turntable… and, well, that’s before you’ve even gotten past the “Front” end section of the magazine…

Thanks to Bob Fischer and also all at Electronic Sound: Isaak Lewis-Smith, Push, Mark Roland, Mark Hall, Velimir Ilic, Claire Francis, Joel Benjamin, Gill Mullins and Susie Dawes.

Cheers and a tip of the hat to all concerned!


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Explorations of Hinterlands and Enchanting the Cultural Landscape

Well, this was rather nice to see when I was recently browsing the magazine racks in WH Smith…

The A Year in the Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands book is the lead review in the December 2022 issue of Fortean Times… and it’s a fine read and cultural exploration that even though I knew I’d written the book it was reviewing made me want to go out and find the book and read it (!)

Alongside being a review of Hinterlands the piece also acts as a both concise and in-depth investigation and backgrounding of wider “wyrd” and hauntological-esque related and interconnected themes, history etc and wanders from television programmes offering portals into other realms, various incarnations of Worzel Gummidge and “scarecrow magic”, the shadows that the Cold War cast across the world and the “Haunted Generation”, the strife and battles of the 1984-1985 UK Miner’s Strike, the “deconstruction” of the British Post-War Consensus, the archival work of Talking Pictures Television, Rob Young’s “re-enchanting” of the cultural landscape via his book Electric Eden and a whole lot more.

The review was written by renowned author and journalist Cathi Unsworth, who over a long career has been a writer and editor for the likes of weekly music magazines Sounds and Melody Maker (remember them, ah the midweek hope, anticipation and excitement about if your favourite band were included when they arrived in the newsagents) alongside The Guardian, Mojo, Uncut etc.

If you should like fiction that intertwines explorations of hidden histories with atmospheric noir then her novels –  including amongst others The Not Knowing, Bad Penny Blues, Weirdo and That Old Black Magic – are well worth seeking out. In recent years she has also collaborated on a memoir with punk icon Jordan and can often be found giving talks and taking part in events hosted by the likes of London’s Horse Hospital, The Sohemian Society and The Barbican Centre. More details can be found via the link to her site below.

Thanks to Cathi Unsworth for the review and also to Bob Fischer of The Haunted Generation for his help in bringing it about and the Fortean Times’ Book Reviews Editor David Barrett for commissioning and including it. A tip of the hat to all concerned.

Cheers!


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Oss Oss Wee Oss, Joining the Dance Far Away from the City and a Freak Zone Transmission…

Writer and presenter Stuart Maconie recently Tweeted about discovering Alan Lomax’s 1953 film Oss Oss Wee Oss, a documentary which focuses on the ‘Obby ‘Oss folk ritual festival that takes place each May in Lowennac Padstow, via the A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray And Celluloid Hinterlands book in which I write about the film:

“Just discovered this thanks to a fantastic new @ayearinthcountry book. So weird, unsettling and feral and clearly an influence on The Wicker Man” (Quoted from Stuart Maconie’s Tweet pictured above.)

With that in mind, I thought I’d post a screenshot or two from the festivities and processions shown in Oss Oss Wee Oss, which have a distinctive “wyrd” friendly nightmare-like quality…

…all of which brings me to this quote by Robin Hardy, the director of The Wicker Man, taken from the October 1977 issue of Cinefantastique magazine that focused largely on The Wicker Man:

“[In the later 1960s and prior to making The Wicker Man] we were filming in the Cornwall area, and one evening we went into Padstow for dinner. Now that is a village where these festivals are still held, and quite by accident we stumbled right on to it…”

⁣Thanks to Stuart Maconie for posting about the book, Bopcap Books and Sally Feldt for letting me know about the post and William Fowler and Vic Pratt for their writing on Oss Oss Wee Oss in their book The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television, which was a reference point for my writing on Oss Oss Wee Oss.

 

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