Comments on: from iceberg to titanic, and from titanic to iceberg, and from iceberg to titanic again… https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again Lollards in the high church of low culture Fri, 20 Jul 2018 16:52:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2254001 Fri, 20 Jul 2018 16:52:00 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2254001 A thing I learned from YouTube: Pete Townshend got much better at smashing guitars over the years. In the 60s heyday, it’s like whack, whack, drop it where as some of the pension-era bouts are truly spectacular.

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By: koganbot https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2253809 Thu, 19 Jul 2018 19:06:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2253809 Mark, this’ll be a long-winded response to your questions about the Who’s respectability, but the short version goes: People like you and me and Mick Farren and those who write for Freaky Trigger and The Singles Jukebox and those who back in the day were writing for the rock press/music press help create respectability, we’re a kind of Musical Marginal Intelligentsia that punch way beyond our weight in moving the broader intelligentsia in our direction. And overall in society the intelligentsia punch way beyond their weight in their impact on “respectable opinion.” Furthermore, as far back as 1966 (or so), people like Pete Townshend and Bob Dylan and John Lennon are part of the intelligentsia too.

But even so, the Who are special in that, from 1966 to, let’s say, 1980, no matter which of the various differing areas or nodes or nexuses or social groupings of vaguely rock-related fandom and attention and commentary you’re in, whether intelligentsia or anti-intelligentsia, punk or metal or soft rock, you and the grouping likely respect the Who, whether or not you love them. If it’s a weighted election the Who don’t get more 1st place votes than a lot of others but they win with a lot of 3rd and 4th place votes from all over.

I’m wondering how “Titanic”-era Farren viewed his own social role. He may hate respectability but he’s also trying to get people to respect the contemporary music world less and defiance more, which of course changes what respectability is — though I’d also say that going way back to the birth of romanticism in 1740-whatever, or 1530, or [I don’t know], respectable opinion, on and off, doesn’t altogether respect respectability. In any event “respectable” is a disrespected appellation these days and not just among the intelligentsia, but “respect” isn’t so disrespected.

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250954 Wed, 04 Jul 2018 16:34:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250954 ah i think it’s friends only, that explains why i couldn’t find it — thank you anyway

(i have v belatedly friend-requested, it’s not as if we aren’t)

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250951 Wed, 04 Jul 2018 16:26:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250951 Try this: https://www.facebook.com/david.stubbs.9404/posts/10156773208801807

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250938 Wed, 04 Jul 2018 15:23:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250938 Ed, do you have a link to that? I’ve half-completed my own tribute — I’ll put it up here when I have — but I’d like to point people to other memories as well.

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250813 Wed, 04 Jul 2018 01:16:27 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250813 In a bit of sad synchronicity, I just read David Stubbs’ tribute to Roy Carr on Facebook, where he mentions that the NME’s phones were – allegedly- tapped in the 70s because MI5 or whoever were worried about Mick Farren’s radical affiliations.

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250716 Tue, 03 Jul 2018 13:03:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250716 So, roughly speaking, Mod : The Who :: Hip-Hop : New Kids on the Block?

Maybe later, Mod : The Who :: Hip-Hop : Linkin Park?

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250482 Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:33:40 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250482 a conclusion of earlier comments-thread discussions on this site — with the redoubtable and much-missed andypandy — was that there was a solid core faction of london mod that had no time at all for any of the white-brit imitations of black american music, and disdained all live local music as a consequence. so “the who (and their fans) = never real mods” is a claim you will routinely encounter, and of course in a sense it’s one of pete townshend’s central topics (are you really what you say you are; am i really what i think i am). penny reel’s great memoir of early 60s mod — the young mod’s forgotten story, nme 1979 — makes it very clear how much of it was about competitive performance, and who “owns” who, to deploy the very handy internet term very anachronistically

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By: Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250446 Mon, 02 Jul 2018 07:49:37 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250446 “But apparently for some mysterious reason they were icons for the hated mods.” – my dad was a mod in the mid 60s (Sheffield not London though.) He recently remarked that with hindsight, The Who were ridiculous plastic mods but at the time, he and his mates thought them the epitome of mod cool. (Of course, yer original London modernists would have derided a provincial Who-loving scooter boy like my dad)

“All this made The Who a real puzzler for our crowd.” – conversely, every bit of crit I’ve ever read about Woodstock-era Who is ‘what must their mod fans have thought of this hairy, noisy bunch’ but perhaps some of their mod fan base had moved with the band. Indeed, by the time my dad got to art college, his hair was down to his chest and he was into Zep, Atomic Rooster, Free and indeed, The Who’s 70s rock incarnation.

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250409 Mon, 02 Jul 2018 02:38:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250409 *Speaking* as a former footsoldier in that army… gah

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By: Ed https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250384 Sun, 01 Jul 2018 22:23:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250384 “Where did the denim-clad longhair armies who made up uk rock’s audience from 1970-79ish come from? when did this look begin to prevail?”

Speaker as a former footsoldier in that army, I can tell you it came from the obvious places: Zeppelin, Purple, Sabbath were the holy trinity, and fans took sartorial cues from them. Immediately pre-New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the biggest bands were Motorhead, AC/DC and Whitesnake, and they also dictated the aesthetic: denim and leather, and the kind of self-conscious anti-style that re-appeared with grunge at the end of the 1980s.

Insofar as that look had ancestors, they were the Hells Angels and the mods’ arch-enemies, the rockers. I remember going to a gig by Saxon, one of the leading lights of NWOBHM, in about 1981, where we encouraged to stand on our chairs and shout: “We hate the mods!” Saxon’s great anthem was ‘Denim and Leather’, a mythology of “when the dam began to burst” for the NWOBHM. “Denim, and leather, brought us all together”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgTHwpqCJ0w

All this made The Who a real puzzler for our crowd. Especially on ‘Who’s Next’, they made music that we loved. But apparently for some mysterious reason they were icons for the hated mods. It was a riddle that we never really managed to figure out.

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By: Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250365 Sun, 01 Jul 2018 20:34:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250365 Mark @ 8 – “is this respectability something projected onto them by american writers?” My inference from the crit I’ve read is that mid-60s Who are seen as respectable or cool at any rate (pop art and pop, violence and sharp clothes (Fashion and indie music seem to revive Mod in some form or other once or twice per decade)), late 60s thru 70s Who less so (a hard-sell mix of operatic ambitions and blokey dad-rock)

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By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250305 Sun, 01 Jul 2018 11:22:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250305 #7 I was at the gig linked here – one of the best I’ve been to. Dire Straits a competent pub rock band that appealed to my Deadhead tendencies – Talking Heads gloriously urgent and danceable

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250105 Sat, 30 Jun 2018 11:40:00 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250105 [following exchange re farren reposted from a recent-ish coltrane thread — click to see the entire discussion, which stems from my historical distinterest in the MC5]

KOGANBOT (22 JUN 2018): Just dug into my files to not find Mick Farren’s early to mid ’70s Voice piece in which he identifies the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” as the prototypical or quintessential close-your-fist-and-immerse-yourself-in-the-roiling-metal song for the slow-boogieing metal kids, except none of the vocabulary I’ve just given you is his other than “the,” “who,” “behind,” “blue,” and “eyes.” The term “power ballad” wasn’t yet current. Good and accurate of him to associate the Who with an audience less respectable than the band’s rep.

MARK SINKER (22 JUN 2018): farren’s 60s crew were many of them the pilled-up london-periphery mods* who’d loved the who’s early wild guitar-smashing shows — he wasn’t quite this himself, but he was deep buddies with them and knew how to speak with and for and to them and (sometimes, after a fashion, briefly) to organise them
*and there’s been a reasonably convincing argument in these pages that the foax who liked rockshows at that time (64-65ish) were never actual-real mods, but its chief exponent, andypandy, sadly no longer posts

KOGANBOT (22 JUN 2018): But (or and) I took Farren to be saying that the audience latching onto and immersing into the punch-it-out sadness of “Behind Blue Eyes” wasn’t the post-mod flower children or glam boys or protopunks but more the Uriah Heep / Deep Purple scruffy tough-boy teens. (Again, I doubt Farren specifically said this or mentioned those bands: this is filtered through my own vocab and refs since I can’t find the piece. I’m sure I would have saved it, but that doesn’t mean it’s survived various transitions since.)

KOGANBOT (23 JUN 2018): (I would like to get what Farren said right: Maybe I remember the essence. Maybe I improved it in memory. Maybe I took the guts out of it. Maybe all three. But knowing the exact words, what he actually says, can make a difference. At least, may hold some surprises. Would the piece be in RBP? I’m not even sure I have the right decade for it. Do you have access behind the paywall? Not going to comment on your Farren piece till it goes up on Freaky Trigger. Except that I don’t consider myself “very extremely old,” or just extremely old. Or even, merely, old. But I am slow enough that it might take me weeks or months or years to actually comment on it. I never know. In the meantime, though, I’m going to the Pillars Of Punk thread and post a relevant quote that you unintentionally changed the meaning of, somewhat, when you paraphrased it in the Farren piece.)

MARK SINKER (23 JUN 2018): [checks in the RBP farren archive: doesn’t seem to be there] i googled around in case this village voice piece was up somewhere illicitly on the internet, or referenced: this mentions and briefly summarises a VV/Farren piece from 1982, mainly noting his point that much larger venues had significantly changed the who’s nature — i think an opinion routinely found as early as reviews of “live at leeds” in 1970? anyway, without being able to read this mid-70s piece it’s hard to know exactly what’s being described, but yes, farren was always a small-sweaty-venues man, and was well acquainted with the earliest waves of who fans, from when they were smashing up their equipment in tiny london clubs. i called them mods bcz that’s part of who mythology, as much as anything (for example the plot of “quadrophenia”), but it raises the issue who and what exactly mods were, and when! they changed a lot between 1962-82, and i think always came in a variety of forms. i’m inclined to say they were also always london-based (or london-periphery): and included proto-hippies, proto-glamkids, proto-skinheads, as well as a fair share of savvy london lads who had a sharp eye for the business end of the counterculture

(some of this division comes from drugs of choice, be it uppers or acid or weed or downers or junk or coke or whatever: jon savage’s “1966: the year the decade exploded” is good on the shifts brought about as new waves of different drugs become popular…) (i get the impression that the preferred farren thing wd be uppers and dope and booze but i haven’t been taking notes)

meanwhile the ppl you’re describing, the heep-heads, would not at all have been considered mods or thought of themselves as mods, or (as often as not) come from london: and were not especially apparent in the who’s pre-stadium audience, because they had not yet emerged en masse. where did the denim-clad longhair armies who made up uk rock’s audience from 1970-79ish come from? when did this look begin to prevail?

anyway the point i was making was that farren (given his antecedents) would not have associated the who with respectability at any stage, even if the nature of their audience changed — if only bcz he liked the who and disliked respectablity!

is this respectability something projected onto them by american writers? (dave marsh for example?) or is it an outgrowth of the operatic ambitions of tommy and so on?

[reposted exchange ends]

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By: Tommy Mack https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2250071 Sat, 30 Jun 2018 07:25:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2250071 #5: According to my unlikely Facebook friend David Knopfler, Dire Straits supported Talking Heads on their first UK tour and the critics had them pegged as a sort of British Television which you can kind of see.

Dire Straits jamming with Talking Heads (!): https://www.mk-guitar.com/2012/10/07/talking-heads-live-in-1978-encores-with-mark-knopfler-and-john-illsley/

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249716 Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:58:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249716 cheap trick are great! but they’re a much (MUCH) bigger deal in the US, where i don’t think this dynamic played out at all in the same way

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249711 Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:48:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249711 Hang on, I just edited this…

Weren’t Cheap Trick going to save rock and roll at one point?

[thinks, to be fair, he can remember at least one thing by Cheap Trick]
[ah, no, it was the Kursaal Flyers]
[not that one either, that was Sniff ‘n’ the Tears]
[and that was Dire Straits, I mean obviously]
[blimey, there was a lot of low-wattage after-dinner rock and roll around just after punk]
[I mean, these actually were the kind of people who put creases in their old Levis…]

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249710 Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:46:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249710 ooh i must track that down!

(ps i hunted through my chaotic archive last night and did not locate the lowry or the penman pieces — if i still have them at all they are moved to some forgotten “project to be completed” folder, which then wasn’t completed lol. my *guess* for the date is late 1979/early 1980, when lowry ‘s cachet was high after the clash london calling sleeve and he’d started writing a little as well as cartooning. i couldn’t find mention on the internet: farren’s is the piece with ripples still)

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By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249683 Thu, 28 Jun 2018 08:10:36 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249683 There was a (fairly) immediate response to Farren’s piece by Max Bell which IIRC attempted to offer an alternative narrative where passengers could jump ship onto nimbler more up to date vessels such as Little Feat or Steely Dan. It wasn’t a great metaphor was it?

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249616 Wed, 27 Jun 2018 21:14:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249616 The Lowry piece was some while later, I think — it was confusedly arguing that punk or post-punk had ended up in a bad place, and aimed as much as anything at Paul Morley. It was pretty terrible. I kept a copy of it for years bcz I kept everything, but I think got rid when a cat decided (correctly) to pee on it.

(Ian Penman wrote a response piece, pointing out among other things that “raise the Titanic” was a weirdly terrible slogan. I might actually still have this bcz I am nuts.)

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By: Phil https://freakytrigger.co.uk/hidden-landscapes/2018/06/from-iceberg-to-titanic-and-from-titanic-to-iceberg-and-from-iceberg-to-titanic-again/comment-page-1#comment-2249614 Wed, 27 Jun 2018 20:42:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=31250#comment-2249614 Stray thought 1: Peel is very snarky about Mick Farren in Days in the Life, although it’s one of those times when the mockery mainly succeeds in raising doubts about the mocker. He did play Farren’s (awful) records, though. “BELA LUGOSI! Didn’t know what the HELL was going on!” (NB poss. ref. Plan Nine from Outer Space)

ST2: the first time I used, ahem, bought the NME, which would have been in 1977, I remember being very confused (and rather bored) by a full-page article by Ray Lowry, which I think was advocating that we raise the Titanic(???). I remember they got letters, basically saying “just get on with it and sink the bloody Titanic and shut up about it”, or WTTE. Unless it was the other way round (raise/sink). I guess the whole thing was a response to Farren; I had no idea at the time (like a good pamphleteers, Lowry didn’t deign to identify what or who he was replying to). The main effect it had on me was to push me towards Sounds.

That’s how I remember it now, anyway; I’d forgotten all about it for 40 (ye Gods) years, so the details may be all wrong.

what does it say that that this now reads like every push a tech start-up makes when it’s about to “disrupt” an industry? (What if buses, but not paying the driver?)

Bad example. No biscuit. If I may…

Ever since Milan’s Communist-Socialist government proposed a fare rise for the city’s bus and underground services a constant direct action campaign has been waged against the public transport authorities . . . The campaign, which has attracted support from autonomia groups, Circoli Giovanili (Youth Circles), the Indians and also the highly opportunistic Leninist groups Lotta Continua and MLS, has been organised by the recently formed Lega Libertaria (Libertarian League).

A tube occupation one Saturday in October went like this . . . On arrival one comrade walked through the ticket barrier, to be stopped by the ticket controller. Several others appeared to give support to the first, and this exchange took place: ‘This is a demonstration against the proposed fare increases. It is not a violent demonstration so please stay calm.’ ‘All right, but I must go and report it.’ ‘Look! we said a peaceful demonstration, but not a pacifist one, so just make yourself comfortable and stay put.’ By now other comrades had succeeded in blocking all the ticket machines with bits of metal, plastic and generous helpings of glue. Others were giving out leaflets and others inviting people through the barriers for free.

While the Lega Libertaria recognise many other areas of struggle that need to be fought and won, Milan’s anarchists and libertarians are determined to make these liberatory actions a daily feature of the city’s life until everyone rides for free. (‘Enne’, Zero (‘anarchist/anarca-feminist monthly’), 1977)

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