There's no question in my mind that Cliff Richard has made a lot of good records, but very few of them have the immediate dance floor appeal of his very groovy version of 'The Girl Can't Help It' as released on his 1970 LP 'Tracks 'n' Grooves'.
The Little Richard cover puts Cliff back in touch with his rock and roll roots, of course, but it's a slightly daring move as the lyrics are ridiculously and comically lascivious, with numerous metaphors for sexual arousal and climax.
To complement the saucy words, Cliff is given a loping, slightly sleazy arrangement to emote over, full of dirty bass and, yes, prominent horns. In an attempt to temper the relentless smut, a middle eight is inserted where a Hammond organ goes all churchy and Cliff suddenly declaims 'OH, HEAR ME NOW!' as if he were a hysterical evangelist working a tent full of gyrating snake handlers.
It’s 1970, and Cliff Richard faces up to the challenges of a new decade and a less than inspiring recent sales record by teaming up withhis old pal Hank Marvin and releasing a single that is not only rockier than his usual output, but also exploits a topical theme: the unstoppable rise of the car, and the damage pollution is doing to the environment.
Written by Hank, ‘The Joy of Living’ features an interesting guitar effect that seems to evoke the grinding futility of a traffic jam, and lyrics that are both deeply sarcastic and rather angry and are redolent of J.G Ballard (who would have thought lots of big, sexy, deadly cars a good thing) or even Patrick Hamilton (who would have thought it disastrous*). In this dystopic version of the future where the motor car is King, man is reduced to living in state appointed high rises, looking down on the world and remembering what it felt like to breathe clean air, like a scene from the credit sequence to 'Soylent Green' come to life.
In the end, however, a strong ecological message and a jaunty chorus were not enough to propel the song higher than number 25 in the charts and the backlash against the dirty bastard car didn’t take place after all. As someone who was stuck in a lovely multi coloured crocodile for twenty minutes this morning, I wish the world had listened to Cliff more closely. He was also right about young ones not being young for very long.
* Hamilton had more reason than most to hate the motor car, having been knocked over and nearly killed by one in the late 1920's. In 'Coleoptera', the last chapter of his 1953 novel 'Mr. Stimpson & Mr. Gorse', he predicts a Britain over-run by cars, created by man to serve but now completely in charge of their inventors and 'pitilessly exacting' in their demands. 'The beetles were not magnanimous in victory', he notes.
To kick off, here's a screenshot from a recently repeated episode of 'Top of The Pops' originally broadcast in 1980. It features the backing singers for a performance of Jona Lewie's quirky electro pop hit 'You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties'.
Left hand lady is the much missed Kirsty MacColl, of course, but I have been unable to identify her co-worker. This task has been made harder by the fact that neither of them actually sang on the record, they were just in the vicinity when needed for the telly. They really remind me of the girls I used to like as a young man: attractive, feisty, not interested.
It’s impossible for me to think about Northern Ireland for
any length of time without hearing the wonderful music of The Undertones in my head. One
of my favourite groups of all time, ever, The Undertones did that supremely
difficult thing of mixing pop tunes with crunching rock music: hard coated,
soft centred stuff filled with life and energy and joy and excitement. I’ve
been in a few bands in my time and tried to emulate this confection,
and haven’t even got close.
If you want to know what being young feels like at its best,
listen to the joyous ‘Here Comes The Summer’ – if you want to know what it
feels like at its worst, then listen to ‘Teenage Kicks’, a timeless razor sharp
pop song filled with yearning. The Undertones simply wrote great songs,
seemingly artless, almost naïve things that, nevertheless, were full of emotion
and profundity. They were clever, too – and funny - they called the
opening track on their second album ‘More Songs About Chocolate & Girls’, after all.
All the best group’s progress, of course, and, with each release, The Undertones’
sound evolved into something more subtle and considered. Their songs became more complex and
layered, and began to be about things other than chocolate and girls, quite often the situation in
Northern Ireland. The band never became self-indulgent, but they did become
slightly self-conscious, and their later records try a little too hard to be
diverse. Surprised by their success and the sort of lifestyle it afforded them, the band lost their unity too soon, and split up (initially) in 1983.
It’s hard (and slightly pointless) to try and pick out The
Undertones finest moment from their marvellous back catalogue but, if pushed, I
would nominate the astonishing garage rock of ‘You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t
You Use It?)’, a jet propelled pop art vignette fuelled by hooks and oomph, as played by brilliant yobs in half mast trousers.
Feargal's red polo neck and shooting jacket combo remains the outfit I'd like to be buried in.
001 Director Jacques Tourneur is something of a hero of mine, having directed a number of film noir and horror films which rank amongst my favourites. Nothing in ‘Cat People’ or ‘Out Of The Past’ can prepare you for ‘Night Of The Demon’, however. Whereas Tourneur normally gets his effects through subtlety and suggestion, shapes in the shadows, here the producer rode roughshod over his tendency to ambiguity and inserted a stop motion demon. Tourneur hated it, but I rather like the way it sets out the stall and lets you know immediately that black magic is real, monsters are real, Satan is real, Hell is a real place and, if you’re not very careful, you’re going there.
002 There’s something very persuasive about fictional worlds where witchcraft and magic are real, everyday things. In ‘Night Of The Eagle’ (1961), for instance, Peter Wyngarde finds that his academic career has been furthered by his wife’s mystical interventions, then finds out that all the faculty wives are doing the same. In ‘Cast A Deadly Spell’ (1991), magic is a mundane affair and people live alongside zombies, demons and other assorted monsters as if it were the most natural thing in the world (Fred Ward plays a private investigator called Philip Lovecraft, by the way. It’s an interesting film, check it out). In ‘Night Of The Demon’ a children’s party can instantly turn into a black magic battleground, just as the good old, cosy old British Library can become a weird, hallucogenic place of great psychic danger.
003 With regard to the demon whose night it is, it may not seem particularly scary now (in fact its face could best be described as ‘goofy’, it’s execution as ‘clunky’) but it is a real demon, not a mental suggestion, a will o’the wisp or trick of the light. The demon may resemble a hairy cousin of the animated monster from the old ‘Chewits’ advert (“He ate the Taj Mahal…”), but he is a supernatural creature who snatches up people and stomps them to death, a stone cold killer, an occult hit man from beyond our ken.
004 I’m all for scientific scepticism, but how long does it take Dana Andrews to cotton on that he is dealing with fanatics not fakers? That his soul really is in the balance? How much proof does he need? Like Brian Donleavy in the ‘Quatermass’ films, Andrews was supposed to have been drunk in pretty much every scene, but it’s hard to tell. What a trouper. The film has a great cast: Andrews, Maurice Denham, Peggy ‘Gun Crazy’ Cummins, Brian ‘Mr. Barraclough’ Wilde, Niall McGinnes, Reginald Beckwith…I’d like to think they were all drunk in pretty much every scene.
005 There is a séance scene in which medium Reginald Beckwith speaks with the voice of a small, dead girl. I have become somewhat hardened to horror over the years, i.e. repeat use has left me difficult to scare. However, all of that means nothing in the face of a middle aged man speaking in the voice of a small, dead girl, which, for some reason, I find terrifying. I would also find a small girl speaking like a middle aged bloke scary. I suppose I just don’t do disembodied voices very well, especially if they sound rather plaintive and confused.
006 The scenes with or about RandHobart have a sickly, oppressive feel, the sensation of dreaming that you are caught in quicksand. Tourneur draws a picture of unspeakable depravity with the merest of suggestions, a brilliant counterpoint to the explicit horror of rampaging Chewit monsters.
007 I will be presenting ‘Night Of The Demon’ at The Showroom Cinema on November 2nd at 7pm in the company of my friend Matt Cheeseman from The University Of Sheffield . The screening will be followed by a DJ set from Adrian Flanagan, one of the electronic warlocks behind the excellent Eccentronic Research Council, whose Pendle Witch obsessed album ‘1612 Underture’ I should have recommended a long time ago. If you do come, come and say hello. I promise not to stomp you to death. More HERE.
To say that ‘Music Machine’ is my favourite British disco film sounds like faint praise but, in actual fact, it’s a film I have a lot of affection for, a bona fide UK exploitation film that is obviously in the thrall of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ but has all the edge of ‘Summer Holiday’.
Ill-fated Gerry Sundquist plays Gerry, a bit of a chancer who is also a bit of a dancer. When his local nightclub holds a competition for a pair of disco freaks to appear in some dodgy film, Gerry decides that this is his moment and goes all out for the prize, enlisting the fabulously exotic daughter of an African diplomat (played by ‘New Faces’ star Patti Boulaye) as his partner.
There’s the usual trials and tribulations on the way to the big night, dirty tricks, disappointments, confrontations, fallings out and flirtations but, for some reason, the only scene I can really recall is Gerry jerkily dancing up umpteen flights of stairs to the high rise flat where he lives with his Mum and Dad. In true ‘pad it out’ exploitation style this takes a long, long time - but does neatly summarise why Gerry lives for disco: his life is shit, his prospects are zero, the lift is broken but, on the plus side, but he can dance a bit and, when he’s doing it, everything else goes away.
We’ve looked at youth cults before, as well as the transcendent qualities of dancing, and the two bump clumsily into each other here. Ultimately, ‘Music Machine’ is a cheap cash in, and the familiarity of the settings and the depressed feel of late seventies Britain is enough strip it of any trace of stardust – but there’s an endearing, poignant, totally understandable truth there in the way that it shows how young people live for Saturday night, and seize the opportunity to go out and get out, to momentarily escape their limited lives and the adult grind that is just ahead of them. You’re a long time grown up, for Christ’s sake, so why not be able to look back and remember that you once wore a white suit and danced like John Travolta?
At the time, Freddie Mercury (who would have been 67 today) always struck me as the archetypal 1970’s rock superstar: arrogant, self-indulgent, out of touch, excessively hairy. I scoffed at him and his fans because I liked new working class groups like The Specials and Madness and ‘middle aged’, University educated Queen seemed like posh dinosaurs, punk dodgers, old top hat.
I was wrong, of course, and I realised this soon after Freddie died. You don't miss your water and all that. Twenty odd years on, I’m still wearing that old hat and loving it, enjoying their early albums and marvelling at their preposterous blend of pomp, speed metal and dungeons and dragons.
Released in 1974, 'Queen II' has a white side and a black side (not literally, it’s an artistic notion rather than a novelty pressing). The white side is okay, but the black side is (literally) fantastic. Written entirely by Freddie Mercury, we are caught in a landslide of multi-tracked vocals, mantelpiece guitar, piano, harpsichord and big drums, all linked together by clever production and lyrics that reflect the 28 year old Mercury’s obsession with fairytales and mythology, and set in his very own imaginary world of Rhye.
‘Ogre Battle’ is a rip-roaring tale that tells of every wizard’s idea of a great night out: a ringside seat at a big old scrap between club wielding giants. One can only hope that elf and safety rules were followed. This segues into the centrepiece of the album, the epic (in scope, not timing) ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’.
'The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke' (1855-1864)
Based on the painting of the same name by Richard Dadd, this remarkably overblown song tells the story of the titular faery, his associated band of dilly dally-o’s, dirty laddios and quaere fellows, and the mighty axe he uses to crack Queen Mab’s walnut. Yes, I know. But it’s as brilliant and as unhinged as the artist Dadd himself, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, killed his father and continued a long career from the confines of various asylums.
The bombast and driving harpsichord of ‘Feller’ gives way to a ballad, ‘Nevermore’ that sounds like its being performed on a crystal grand piano at the top of a very tall tower and could have been done by The Beach Boys if they came from Narnia rather than California.
Anyway, don't take my word for it --
Listening to the black side of this album has led me to revaluate my feelings about Freddie, banishing my image of him as a strutting, moustachioed rock knob and instead revealing a far more sympathetic figure: a somewhat lonely and out of place person who retreated into a fantasy world to find somewhere his difference didn’t matter. & Freddie was different: born in Zanzibar, brought up in India, Parsi, Zoroastrian, buck toothed, gay (or bisexual, he had a long term girlfriend at this point). If the record hadn’t been so perfectly realised, or he didn’t have the rest of the group behind him, he could have been the archetypal outsider artist.
It's holiday season on The Island (and Mounds & Circles). There are other blogs, of course, but they mainly just pinch stuff from us. I'll be back on the 1st September, but I'll leave you in the capable hands of those glorious Scouse femme fatalesTheVernons Girls.
'The Two Faces Of Evil' is a collaboration between myself and the notorious Fearlono of
'Cottage Of Electric Hell'and'Mounds & Circles'fame. From the moment I first heard his warped audio mixes, I knew that this was a ghost train with a groovy guard and a gravy cargo and I wanted to stand on the footplate and help him shovel shit into the firebox.
We met for real, no shit, in person in Sheffield last year and got on like an orphanage on fire, so much so that for a few days afterwards I used to look at my wife and think 'you know, you don't really understand me at all'.
Our bromance (there's nothing sexual, just touching) has culminated in this dark and fiendish mix of music, atmospheres and assorted spooky stuff.
Fearlono, of course, tells a far stranger and more disturbing origin story and, to be honest, he might be right. The fact is, every time I think about how the mix came about I black out, as if something within me doesn't want me to remember...my nose is bleeding as I type this.
The Sweet were still pretty big in 1974 but, even as they appeared in the BBC documentary 'All that Glitters' celebrating their success, they were already beginning their slow descent from the toppermost of the poppermost to yesterday's news. The group come over rather well (with the exception of bassist Steve Priest who reminds me of a less funny Jim Davidson, if you can imagine such a thing): thoughtful, earnest, honest - and with no illusions that their fame will, ultimately, be anything more than fleeting.
It's worth catching the rest of the show if you can, especially for more storming live footage that demonstrates just how good the band were at their peak.
I'm back, metaphorically wielding a big fuck off gun loaded with facts, opinion and stuff I just blatantly made up. And I'm pointing it at you, dear reader*. In a good way.
Lots of amazing things to come, but, to start with, here's a little mix I made for you in the hope that you might like me, maybe go out with me one evening. No pressure. I call it 'Don't Blow Your Cool' but, if you can think of a better title, go for it.
The track listing goes like this:
001 Twiggy: Beautiful Dreams / 002 The Caravelles: Don't Blow Your Cool / 003 The Focus Group: Swinging Phantom / 004 Shaun Harris: Today's a Day / 005 Alan Hawkshaw: Space Probe / 006 Mikr Rozakis: Phantom Visions / 007 Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra: Dance of the Living Image / 008 Lord Rockingham's XI: Fried Onions / 009 Moe Koffman: Comin' Home, Baby / Esa Pethman: Lullaby / Anthony Newley: My Clair De Lune**
* That's not a picture of me, by the way. It's Nelly Benedetti in 'Le Peau Douce'. ** The Anthony Newley obsession is no better, I'm afraid, but thanks for asking.
Pop music is a lot of fun when it is done well, bringing a smile to the face, a warmth to the cockles, a spring to the step or a lump to the throat depending on the tone. But pop music is very rarely profound: the confines of the two to four minute radio friendly hit template generally preclude philosophical debate and, as a result, very few pop records have actively contributed to a wider understanding of the nature of existence: it’s just not something they do.
There are always exceptions to any rule, however, and the exception can often be from an unlikely source. The Sweet had charged up and down the charts in the early seventies in a platform heeled frenzy of alliteration and sexual innuendo, all set to a thumping glam rock beat. Songs like ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wig Wam Bam’ did very little to push forward man’s knowledge of himself and his surroundings, and although classic tracks like ‘Teenage Rampage’ and ‘Blockbuster’ tapped into the prevailing climate of radical politics and violent civil uprising, the focus was on action rather than ideology. After their peak period of activity, however, when hits were harder to come by and the band were older, wiser and bearded, they wrote and recorded ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’(1978), one of my favourite songs, and one of the deepest pop records ever made. ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’ is a song that sums up thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about human emotion in three simple but piquant lines:
‘Love is like oxygen: you get too much you get too high;
not enough and you’re gonna die’
…and sets this lyrical gold to a powerful mix of crunching rock guitar, mutant disco and sweeping analogue synthesisers to create a musical track of highs, lows and plateaus that perfectly complement this important message. I must admit to be slightly less enthused about the verses, which are a little slow and seem permanently on the verge of pan pipes, but the chorus is magnificent and scientifically accurate (another rarity in pop) and I am not ashamed to admit that I have used electrickery to loop it and often listen to it for 10-15 minutes at a time, creating a motorik rock groove that is almost terrifying in its relentless truth.
The Ivor Novello award nominated record was The Sweet’s last Top Ten hit, and they split shortly afterwards. Sadly, singer Brian Connolly died in 1997 in an abject state, a chronic alcoholic wrecked by numerous heart attacks; their excellent drummer Mick Tucker passed away in 2002. It’s my nature to end on the downbeat. Sorry. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some heavy pondering to do. Where did I put that Sweet loop?
Oh, and given the date, no, this is not a piss take, just a slightly gilded lily.
For a long time, from early childhood up until about ten years ago, in fact, I had a recurring dream about the Somerset town of Sedgemoor. In the dream, I simply walked around familiarising myself with the topography of the place: the pub, the cinema (which only showed French films, no subtitles), the zoo, the observatory. I always felt anxious, uneasy, however: as if I was looking for something that was always in the next street, around the next corner - and confused, as if I’d been there before but forgotten almost everything (can you have déjà vu in a dream? It seems like a bit of a neurological cluster fuck.). The dream was unsettling but intriguing at the same time. I always looked forward to the next instalment. I’d never been to Sedgemoor, of course, indeed, I couldn’t have been to Sedgemoor, as it doesn’t exist as a town, being instead an administrative region (which, interestingly, contains the village of Shapwick*).
Sedgemoor Today.
Fantasy Village Not Pictured.
It’s origin was easy explained in that I used to obsessively read my Dad’s ‘AA Guide to Great Britain’ on car journeys and had seen it mentioned there with regard to the bloody Civil War battle that took place in the area in 1685. My Sedgemoor was a combination of pictures in the book, things I had seen on my travels and a distorted, reconfigured version of Colchester, the town I was born in, with its Iron Age earthworks, Roman wall, Norman castle, Medieval abbey, Tudor houses, Civil War bullet holes, Victorian Town Hall and 1960’s brutalist car parks and tax office.
The Castle.
The New Arts Centre.
Balkerne Gate.
North Hill.
As I got older, the dream continued, but the location gradually moved from the town centre to the outskirts, then to the moors and, eventually, to a high and wind-blown vantage point above another, larger and more industrialised town. The dream would end when it started to get dark, and the lights would start to come on in the conurbation below. This dream was less intriguing, and a lot less fun as it seemed to be telling me something slightly unpalatable, and I was glad when it stopped.
So what has this to do with Ghost Box? Well, I suppose the recurring dream (and a myriad of other things) made me inordinately receptive to the hauntology movement (if you can call it a movement - it might also be described as a slow, collective realisation) and I immediately dedicated myself to the cause.
Let’s be clear: I’m not a theorist or a philosopher or a commentator, and my interest was less in the science that underpinned it (something about Derrida, Marx, postmodernism), but in the way it grouped together the real and the imagined, not distinguishing between the two complementary, but contradictory states, but instead creating a third way: a collision of fact and figment filtered through a series of complicated and incomplete emotional responses. That’s a lot of verbiage but, in effect, hauntology took my dream of Sedgemoor (and all the other fragmented pieces of the ever present past which I couldn’t get out of my head) and gave them a context – a framework - and, just as importantly, through Ghost Box, a soundtrack.
Since 2004, my life has been enriched by the existence of Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle and The Focus Group, the original Ghost Box dream team. Their early recordings, beautifully designed and on homemade CDR’s, are masterpieces of time and space warped dream pop: wonderful electronic collages of post-war British life and culture, but seen fleetingly and incompletely, as from the corner of the eye, or through a prism of refracted light.
Ghost Box music perfectly encapsulates the experience of my recurring dream: the always moving, never arriving; the unfamiliar familiar. This music doesn't get worn out, you can't know every note by heart. Instead, it shifts eerily from moment to moment, presenting a different face at each listen. The artists on the label have both distinct and indistinct personalities: they have their own style, their own sound, they are unique - but they make Ghost Box music - melodic, but odd and abstracted; easy listening avant garde.
Belbury Poly are led by Jim Jupp. The first out of the blocks, their 5" CD EP was the premier Ghost Box release and set the tone by making library music that sounded as if it had been captured from VHS tapes of old Anglia TV documentaries. There’s something slightly despicable about the term ‘imaginary soundtrack’, given how many times the idea has been abused, but Belbury Poly work it in an interesting way: you can see the programmes in your head, but the music is the illusion. Like a Rorschach ink blot test ‘Osprey’ is pretty specific for something so nebulous: it’s the sound of a ‘Survival Special’ broadcast to no-one in the aftermath of a nuclear war. It also reminds me of The United States Of America track 'Love Song For The Dead Che', which is about as good as it gets for me.
The Focus Group are chief designer Julian House's concern. The most uncompromising on the label, their music sounds like a photo album of people you don't know in familiar settings (or, conversely, people you do know in places they couldn't possibly be). Their albums are pin boards of sonic invention, a jittery, febrile jumble of ideas and daydreams. I think they’re probably my favourite GB artist. Here's 'Hey, Let Loose Your Love', a marvellous melding of a sample from Scrabble high score John Yvisaker with a ton of general and assorted aural weirdness. Nicely apropos visuals here too, taken from 'Bizarre: Secrets Of Sex', which I must get back to at some point.
The Advisory Circle are led by Jon Brooks. Their output seems the most musically conventional at time, but, as Brooks has said:
‘everything’s fine, but there’s something not quite right about it’.
Brooks is responsible for the first Ghost Box concept album***, ‘Other Channels’, a record about a housewife who can only get through the day by sitting in front of the telly stupefied by a handful of Mogadon. 'Fire, Damp and Air' is simply a beautiful and evocative piece of music that conjures up the best in soundtrack music (Barry, Morricone, Marc Wilkinson's amazing score for 'Blood On Satans Claw') an adds additional unease, the off kilter, the off balance, the 'not quite right'.
.
The dates 2004 to 2009 in the title of this post do not refer to the lifespan of the label, by the way. They are still here - and long may they be so. The dates aren’t indicative of my interest, either, I bought my last Ghost Box release in October 2012, i.e. when the last Ghost Box release came out. Instead, the dates, for me, mark the first phase of GB history, from their DIY beginnings to the magnificent album 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age’(not actually on Ghost Box, ironically, but Warp Records, the home of Broadcast – but this is a mere detail).
This album, with its shimmering and hallucinatory blend of folk, pop, electronics and horror soundtrack, seems to me to be the ‘Blonde On Blonde’ of Ghost Box records, i.e. the culmination of the five year evolution of a sound, a genetically perfect ‘best of breed’ where all the elements are perfectly balanced to create a definitive document. From here, Ghost Box changes, diversifies, spreads out, grows. But that’s another story, another post. Here’s a somewhat dazzling and disorienting trailer for the album which, if you haven’t already got it, is bound to make you want it.
As a postscript, in December 2011 I had to have an emergency operation and had to stay overnight in hospital. I only slept for a few hours that night but I had the dream again, the dream where I was above the town and it was getting dark. This time, however, there was an elephant and a circus tent and a sinister, black faced man in a red coat. When I woke up, I realised the sad, silly truth: my dream had been replaced forever by another fiction - my memory of the closing scene of the second series of ‘The League of Gentlemen’.
* In 2012, Jon Brooks from The Advisory Circle released an album called ‘Shapwick’, a set of soundscapes inspired by his imaginary vision for a very real place. ** Ghost Box themselves are largely ambivalent about the term ‘hauntology’. I’m not particularly convinced by it myself but, to as I’ve said, it gives a single name to a complex concept. ***In truth, all Ghost Box albums are concept albums.
I have made a mix for you all. It has no theme, and is very basically some music I have been listening to sprinkled with the odd unrelated sample. I call it ‘You’re Not Alone’. And you’re not, you’re really not.
The track listing is as follows:
001 The John Barry Seven: Bees Knees / 002 Anthony Newley: Bee-Bom / 003 Jose James: Equinox /004 Francois de Roubaix: Tempo / 005 Roger Roger: Roger Rhythm Number One / 006 The Pyramids: Out Of Limits / 007 Sounds Incorporated: Bullets / 008 The Welfare State and White Noise: Silence Is Requested / 009 Michael Garrick: Return of An Angel / 010 Jack Arel and Jean-Claude Petit: Psychedelic Portrait / 011 Ivor Cutler: Cockadoodledon't
The accompanying image is from the 1970 Francois Truffaut film ‘L’enfant Sauvage’. I don’t just watch British horror and sci fi film and TV, you know. But I mostly do.
