Jetsam

Enzed Justice

2012-02-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Waitangi Day, something not really that necessary, but old.

This version drawn ooh... 1993 I'd say. A bona fide New Zealand judge never made it into the Judge Dredd strip of course; the best we've had so far has been the odd mention in Oz-themed stories (notably the Chopper epic Oz), and an addition in a rather outdated Dreddworld map from around the same time as the above illustration.

So, what we have here is young Simian's approximation of it, based on an Oz Judge (there'll be one along soon, it was Australia Day last week after all), and a less garish, more localised colour palette. Yes, his legs are too short, although so are mine. One of us has the convenient excuse that the creator ran out of page space while composing the drawing and alredy liked the top half too much to move it!

Oaken's Thirteen: Meet the Candidates!

2012-02-03T12:14:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone (you know who you are) was wondering, my attempts to realise the Dwarves of The Hobbit in 25mm plastic haven't been entirely abandoned! In fact, likely candidates were identified and plans made. They just need to be executed...

But in the interests of science, here's the earlier mugshot of Games Workshops' "Dwarf Rangers" and how they panned out as the future Company of Thorin Oakenshield:

And just to explain things further, the notes I made for each character are below. I made these whilst re-reading the book for key character points and identifiers, the Lord of the Rings appendices, and consulting a few reference guide along the way, observing the work of others (the "Lee" mentioned is Alan Lee, Hobbit illustrator and movie designer)

Right. That's done, now to find the time to put it all into action!

Duntroon - Rocks!

2012-01-16T18:10:00.000-08:00

Time for a brief stop on our trip south. Elephant Rocks, about five kilometres west of Duntroon is one of North Otago’s best kept secrets. It is, however, also a recognisable location for The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Next door is a still standing, but surely crumbling, set for the seemingly-doomed Kingdome Come. It’s an incongruity, sitting as it is among sheep-tracked hillocks, and with a sealed road metres from its boundaries; but utterly vacant and telling a sad tale of bankruptcy, is threatening no-one and impressing few. Much more interesting are the rocks themselves. Limestone shapes erupting from the ground, formed by the movement of earth and water and shaped over thousands of years by wind into grey and cream clouds of calcium carbonate. This far from the Highway 56 they’re wonderfully silent sentinels in some still green pastureland, and an instant reminds of climbing games with friends from years back.

Jet Junior took great delight clambering over the smaller ones, and it was encouraging to see on a late afternoon that the tourists passing through on the Vanishing World fossil trail were content to leave things as they were, to take photos and sit happily atop the giants, becoming part of the landscape for a spell. There’s something restful about being enclosed by so many soft, organic curves of hill and stone face, with only the open air above and quietly grazing sheep nearby. I’ll return here again as soon as I can, I reckon.

Don’t be Afraid of the Dark(ness)

2012-01-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

Before I launch into my 'Manic Phases' thread of too-earnest political Welsh rock, a brief word about:

The Darkness. A band I enjoy.

When I was seventeen I knew everything. I was confident in the beliefs I’d held for the majority of my teenage years, my world view was broadening and my knowledge increasing. I took to school debating with aplomb; and I knew what I liked when it came to music. I liked Alternative Music, whatever that was. The irony wasn’t lost on me at the time, but the sheer exclusivity of my musical tastes were. I’d scoffed at a school mate who once answered my question of what music he liked with “everything”. No, Malcolm, I insisted. What genre of music do you like? His answer was the same. Years later I finally caught up. My tastes have also broadened. I may not like “everything”, but I’m sure I can find something in most modern forms, a few old forms, and, well, so long as there’s a good beat to tap my foot to, I can probably accommodate the rest. Music is supposed to be universal, isn’t it? It’s supposed to find a common ear?

It’s also supposed to entertain. No, really. It was another couple of years and well into my University age that I discovered for myself what really bugged me about the NMEs, Melody Makers and Rip It Ups I’d fussily collected and studiously pored over. Even the Rolling Stones, which, after a brief period of adoration were swiftly consigned to that great Malcolm-styled pile of ‘pointless’ in my still-developing adult brain. What I realised was that every one of these titles were to a man JOYLESS. Indexed and categorised with fickle detail like the Top Gear Wall of Cool, and just as useless. The UK music press was the worst, trapped in a routine of hype-and-destroy with a new indie band the front cover darlings for up to five months before they were met with the indignity of relegation to the sarcastic humour page, buried under the gormless faces of the next indie front page darlings. It was, I found, a depressing cycle to which I had no desire to subscribe or contribute. And I returned to buying comics.

The best thing about all of this, and liking bands like Iron Maiden and The Darkness is that I no longer feel I have to justify my liking them. There’s no cool-sheet to follow when you reach middle age (God help you if you actually find one. Run away!), and the older I get, the more that derisive label Dad Rock(tm) allows me the freedom to exercise that right. It's a win-win for me, and it appeals strongly because the alternative is the inevitable: free jazz. Shoot me if I ever go there, somebody.

I love The Darkness because they eschew those rules, that music can only be of value if it's earnest, boundary-pushing or somehow 'worthy'. Music shouldn't always challenge, and along with moving the heart, the feet and the mind, dammit, it should also move the corners of your mouth from time to time. Their self-funded debut is an absolute cracker. Their follow-up is disappointing, suggesting they'd instead bought into the arguments of their critics and actually produced a novelty album of silly juvenile songs. Their break-up produced two different but also alike bands, Hot Leg and Stone Gods. And - if this is important to some - they've walked a difficult road of overnight success without major label backing, critical scorn (accused a novelty act) sibling fallout, break-up, drug rehab and osteonecrosis (yikes). And now they've re-formed with their original lineup and are touring and recording. It makes me happy.

All music fans owe it to themselves to follow at least one act or artist who isn't there to validate some self (or worse) appointed notion of 'cool'; and remind them why they got into music in the first place. The Darkness are mine. Who's yours?

A Merry Ed-Mas to all of you at home...

2011-12-24T20:59:00.000-08:00

After last year's hard-rockin' yuletide song choice, regular reader/s may well ask: "What of this year?", and "Are there other choices for heavier holiday hymns?"

To which the answer to both questions can only be: Yes, they did.

The Last of the Stuff I Have Dug Out of My Garden

2011-12-17T21:46:00.000-08:00

As far as my Urban Archaeology series goes, this is the unexpected third installment, and will without doubt be the last. Folks, I think my sweep of the section is now done!

Below are the spoils of a last dredge below layers of greywacke and our back deck (recently re-stained). I've officially gone beyond casual finds! But there are some intriguingdiscoveries to be had yet: a plastic cow, an LED, something like a toy car graveyard, and it appears that somebody not only had a plastic flower fetish, but they also had a kitty cat...

Believe it or not, I think there's possibly some useful stuff in here for the Bitz Box. Not the clothes peg bits, obviously, but maybe something... vehicular...

Scots Wahey!

2011-11-30T00:32:00.000-08:00

As far as I’m aware I’m pretty much Scots on both sides, ancestor-wise, with some suspected German thrown in with some distant relations and if you delve back far enough the ‘son’ bit at the end of my surname suggests something Danish, maybe brought over during a Viking invasion. But without either documented (and both families are pretty well covered post-landfall in New Zealand), then Scotland’s my default ‘ancestral home’. Nice culturally, not so great for international Rugby tournaments.

I am observing St Andrew’s Day, a concession I make partly for the above, and partly in defiance at the enduring saturation coverage St Patrick’s Day gets – a festival of a figure of the church perpetually observed by all-day drinking and questionable boasts about one’s ancestry. I’m no hypocrite, so that’s not for me thanks. I am a little sad the holiday isn’t observed as greatly over here or outside Scotland – it’s not as though both countries haven’t had similar stories to tell over the years with internal warfare, repeat invasions, clearances and extreme disenfranchisement leading to great diasporae and desperate journeys abroad to new opportunities, diving families utterly (it's only been in the last fifteen years my Dad has reconnected with relatives in Aberdeen). I do wonder whether culturally the Irish have it over the Scots in the US, and like Halloween we here in the Antipodes defer to the big countries in these observances. The other influence may be the most telling of them all; early last century St Patrick’s Day was made an official public holiday in Ireland, while as recently as the turn of this century my dour brethren back ‘home’ voted to acknowledge their day, but not as a holiday as that would necessitate the removal of an existing day off in its place. Something about national stereotypes plays in my mind here…

Anyway, there was a brief flowering of Scots identity in the Nineties with a spate of celebrated movies based on Scottish stories old and new. Braveheart kicked things off, and Trainspotting brought modern Scotland to the big screen, followed by Rob Roy, Plunkett and Maclean and lesser projects which inspired author Irvine Welsh to lament the trend and dub the movement “Jocksploitation.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly comics got a look in as well, when in the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine new script droid Jim Alexander created his own spin on Mega City One's lawman with Judge Ed MacBrayne in Calhab Justice, a tongue-in-cheek exploration of Scottish identity in a future Caledonia that has become a dumping ground for nuclear waste, its best and brightest lawmen are snapped up by Brit-Cit, and the remaining population have reverted to savage clan-based feuding, while behind the scenes a civil war with CalHab's southern neighbours is formenting. The series is not fondly remembered, and Dredd's 'father' and fellow Scot John Wagner has elected to ignore the whole thing, as did latter writer (and fellow Scot ) Gordon Rennie. Well I liked it - not all of it, but there was a lot more to the story than the wayward tale it wove in its short life. They were fractious times for the Megazine though, and though a trade is still nowhere to be seen, I have the feeling a more flattering collection might change a few minds.

For what it's worth, here's my interpretation from a while's back. Now I'm off fer a wee dram.

A Prologue to History

2011-11-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

Shortly after completing the main run of Talkin' Eds I began looking around my music collection for a follow-up. I was looking for something different this time - something... alternative?

In the end there were about three or four contenders - some local, some from overseas, and of the three Manic Street Preachers made the final cut. Job half done, I set about planning my journey through their discography - and that's where I came unstuck.

Unlike Iron Maiden, I don't have a long history with the Manics. And unlike the Chills I don't have what you could call a local affinity with them - I've never even been to Wales. Or outside London, for that matter. As a band they are still something of an unknown to me, although I first started properly listening to them around fifteen years ago (ouch). They struck me then as they still do now as a little difficult, particularly their early material. Serious - earnestly political lyrics, soaked in intellectual references that are far beyond my pretty mundane arts degree background, and to top it off, blatantly from a different background. They may be my age, but their political and cultural references are in many ways quite a different beast, and so attempting an objective overview of their material output - especially when there are some formidable and scholarly versions of this online elsewhere, seemed like a hiding to nothing.

And yet, at the final hurdle I took a step back and thought about my place as a listener, of the challenge to hear the meaning behind the music, and my reaction to the big events of their long history (the band is 21 years old now.) No matter how much of a challenge it might set, the history of the Manic takes in a lot of my interests over the same time - literature, history, UK culture, popular culture. Taken as a reactionary journal, how hard could it be?

I'm going to find out, anyway. The Manic Street Preachers released their second singles collection earlier this month, signalling an intended hiatus - perhaps a retirement of the group. Right now seems as good a time as any to begin their story (and mine) from the start.

Legends of RPG Art: An Artist Reponds

2011-09-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

During a recent tidy up of the blog (ongoing, alas) I found to not a little embarrassment a comment on an earlier piece on Russ Nicholson by the great man himself. I remain humbled and not a little shamefaced for missing it.

Much of which is to say, it's great to see that not only is Mr Nicholson still working, but he also has a blog!

So you should go there. It's brilliant, believe me.

And just because I enjoy it, here's another shot of one my favourite Nicholson pieces, the title page for Ian Livingstone's guide to the RPG phenomenon, Dicing With Dragons. Great lines again, with some fine muscular rendering and those cool mountains in the background. I always fancied that this was perhaps in part a portrait of Ian himself, sans glasses and moustache!

Blogjam Explained, Exhibit B:

2011-08-22T03:03:00.000-07:00

Jetsam is made from crap I haven't thrown away yet, or am in the process of throwing away, or sometimes bottling out and keeping for a while longer. The significant thing is that it's the stuff I've hung onto. Right now the Monkeyhouse is going through a B-I-G tidy up as we make more room for Jet Jr's growing needs, so more of the third drawer stuff is appearing!

Blogjam Explained, Exhibit A:

2011-08-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

Also why it took me so long to update my Facebook photo.

So it's come to this - a post about snow.

2011-08-17T01:28:00.001-07:00

This is altogether the wrong sort of post for this blog. Late (hah, not so wrong there, then), and nearly off-topic in its topicality; you can’t actually throw snow away, can you? Of course you can reminisce about snow, cherish the memory of it, gloss over the cold and inevitable slush and damp which follows as you wistfully recall the fluffier, warming, magical overtures of that rare winter phenomenon. Of course in Wellington snow is so rare it’s never discussed, unless the Orongorongos and Rimutaka Hill get one of their dustings, or further along, the Desert Road. Not Wellington though. Not good old Wellingtown and its hilly suburbs, they never get snow. That would be silly…

Oops.

So it is for me and my beloved that snow was until recently a distant memory, a keepsake memory of Dunedin winters or the occasional hometown experience (Gorillamydreams actually got stuck in Canterbury’s Big Freeze of ’06, of which more in another post). In fact, GMD was only a fortnight ago wistfully and vocally regretting the capital’s lack of snowability, and now look what’s happened. As it was, we can’t say we weren’t warned. It even had the decency to arrive on a late Sunday afternoon in a startling and surprising flurry of specks, then motes, then great sudsy blobs, rendering Darkest Paparangi the look of a suburban snowglobe. Jet Jr was summarily clad in extra layers and marched out to capture and enjoy the moment, and yours truly gathered wood for the fire. Around us people emerged from their homes and the street took on the sounds of kids playing and older kids and younger adults too – it was really rather brilliant. And it lasted for two days, until after early dismissals from work and frosty bus rides (including a memorable climb through Woodridge during which I glanced up from my cell phone game to wonder where in the hell we were in all this muffled clutter of royal icing houses) the rain finally arrived on Tuesday night and dutifully washed drifts and slurry away. Only the wind and the chill remained, as they continue to do.

Ah, but that snow. For a short while Wellington was a would-be Dunedin, and if you squinted and thought of the southern city then maybe, just maybe you could fool yourself into thinking you were back there. But Wellington under snowdrifts I’ve found hasn’t quite got the charm of its deep south sibling. It might be the size, the narrowness of the streets or the closed-in hills that deprive you of the truly big sky vistas of the mainland that I remember. Maybe the scale is wrong, or the angle is off. And maybe that’s why the snows of winters past in Dunedin, on campus and spreading up the valleys and city rises deadening the drone of traffic and closing off the motorway from Pine Hill to the Kilmog have become the stuff of jettisoned past. You can’t throw snow away and you can’t take it with you, but it never loses its magical ability to transform the places you take for granted.

Two days on it’s probably time to take stock – count the logs under the Monkeyhouse, inspect the pak choi and puka for frost damage and consider a little more weather strip around the windows for next year.

"This item due: measureless eons behind history."

2011-08-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

A slow reboot to the blog, then. And this story from the Dom Post, 5 August. Wellington City Library have kindly eschewed fining the borrower a theoretical $6852, as it was originally due on 12/2/1988.

Of course, they may have been well-advised to do so, given the title novella features the grim consequences of Wilbur Wheatley's own doomed attempt on the closed stack of Miskatonic University's library collection.

Seriously, how many copies of the actual Necronomicon could you buy with that money?

The Doctor is in

2011-08-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

Among a few entertaining coincidences in my reading and listening of late is the appearance of a figure from English history whom I intend to read a little more about, er, at some point soon.

Dr John Dee was royal astrologer to Elizabeth I, and her sister Mary before his skill and persuasion found better favour with the Virgin Queen. Dee seems to have been cut from similar cloth to the genii of his era and the later Renaissance; he was a scholar, cartographer, Hermeticist, military strategist, an astronomer and a mathematician. By forecasting the potential death of Mary he courted his own demise, yet in setting an auspicious date for Elizabeth’s coronation almost certainly retained his station as one of her most trusted advisors. His feats were humanist, yet remarkable – he owned the largest library in England and conceived the idea of a national library in the interest of the preservation of knowledge (Mary wasn’t keen), and for Elizabeth he presented the notion (and thus coined the epithet) of a British Empire. By predicting the approaching tempests off the Dover coast he encouraged his Queen to spare her navy the perilous and precipitous defence against the approaching Spanish Armada, and instead they watched nature perform the task from the safety of land. Alongside the Queen’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walshingham he pioneered the use of espionage and was literally through his own codename the original “007.”

As befalls one who straddles history and mysticism, Dee finds his way into the canon of Iron Maiden songs, with The Alchemist from The Final Frontier:

Dee’s pursuit of mysticism and the occult is presumably what endears him to Maiden, and has helped to ensure the longevity of his name today. He has been described variously as the inspiration for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero; Alan Moore surely also had him in mind in his conception of the latter character for the closing of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, yet it’s curious too that this somewhat late pursuit of his life turns him into an utterly human figure as well. Taking up with mystic John Kelly, an aging Dee and his young wife travelled Europe with Kelly in their pursuit of the supernatural. Communing with angels, Kelly claimed that he had instructions from the diving agents to share a bed with Dee’s wife; Dee reluctantly submitted, and returned to England alone, never seeing Kelly again.

This year’s Manchester Festival of the Arts saw the debut of Damon Albarn’s Dr Dee: An English Opera, from which the following song Apple Carts is taken. Albarn originally was to have worked on the opera with Alan Moore, but the would-be modern polymath and postmodern magician parted company early on, the cause apparently being frustration on Moore’s part rather than the intervention of alleged angels. I love the song; it’s so much that Maiden’s galloping biography simultaneously isn’t, humanist and spiritual, it suggests a twofold narrative, of Dee ordering a new Empire built on the mystical landmarks of England’s past (Silbury Hill), and later returning to “the kingdom of the broken heart”, much beaten and seeking solace beneath its stones, the same man who returned from Europe to a ravaged and looted library and ended his days in poverty, the new monarch James I being the antithesis of his aunt in a morbid distrust of the supernatural.

It’s Dee’s fate to have become one of popular literature’s playthings, portrayed as a spy, a wizard, a necromantic villain or a mystical guru. This side of the story interests me less than his falling in and out with Kelly, of whom the jury is itself still undecided – was it carnal interests that led him to turn Dee into a cuckold, or was his growing fame as an alchemist leading him to some drastic action to divorce himself of a man on the wane? It might depend on what book I eventually read…

The OTHER comic for boys

2011-06-12T03:24:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask me what my formative experience with comics was, I'd tell you without blinking that it was 2000AD. And I'd be lying. There were a few comics I read casually before The Galaxy's Greatest. Usually they were one-offs, because I didn't have the pocket money or the stamina (or the town's bookshops didn't seem to have the get-go for sequential ordering?) for a decent run. One or two disparate Star Wars comics, ditto Ghost Rider, and the one success, a two-shot Blade Runner adaptation which I still have. My actual comic collecting however began in 1982, with Eagle magazine.

Eagle is, was, and was again, a time warp. Initially launched in the Fifties and spearheaded by the still iconic Dan Dare, it was rested a year before I was born, and then was resurrected fresh-faced for my teens. Dan Dare was back, alongside a host of new heroes and topical features, and recalling the title now it seems to me that if the original comic was a naive throwback to more innocent times, the comic of choice to the Baden Powell generation, then the revived title arrived just in time to try to recapture that same innocence. Britain was entering the Eighties, a decade that promised pride and prosperity after the fag end and bleak winters of the latter Seventies. The Queen's eldest son had married his future queen in Westminster, Manchester United - the 'red devils' were top of the FA Cup league, and the Falklands War alerted my maturing eyes and mind to the new generation of battlefield technology - Harrier jump jets, Mig Foxbats, infra-red night vision goggles. This was the flavour of the new Eagle, a mission statement of pop stars (Suggs! Easton! Stevens!), celebrity athletes (Coe! Thompson! Dando!), and the various comic guises of Lenny Henry. It was, to a fault, cheerily British, and I lapped it up as I did Noel Edmonds' Late Late Breakfast Show.

The early revival was a bit of a misfire, though. Photostrips - the style usually adopted by girls' Romance comics, was a prevalent style, with drawn strips the poorer sibling, and this was the model for some time, with only Dare in colour (and drawn effectively in the Frank Hampson style by Gerry Emberton) but rubbing shoulders with darker and more intriguing illustrated fare - Doomlord, The London Mad Max-style Tower King, and the grand guignol of Jose Ortiz's artwork in The House of Daemon. Years later I'd see why these stories appealed - while the straightforward adventure of Tower King was by Alan Hebden, a then-2000AD roster writer, the more tongue-in-cheek and visceral Doomlord and Daemon came from the minds of John Wagner and Alan Grant, creators of 2000AD's titanic Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog. Small surprise then that some twenty or so years later the illustrated Doomlord would see an unauthorised fan reprint, as would Wagner's other serial from Eagle's final years and mingling with ill-fated horror comic Scream, The Thirteenth Floor. All of which would be beyond me by those days, as I'd long since abandoned the earnest but ultimately juvenile Eagle and properly discovered Wagner and Grant's superior stomping ground (along with would-be Dare revivalist Pat Mills) in 2000AD. By 1989 I'd abandoned 2000AD, for a few years at least, and the Eagle had crash-landed.

So far as I can tell the revamped Eagle isn't fondly recalled to this day, though the aforementioned strips do get the odd mention on the forums. I've always felt that the title suffered from an identity crisis - too young and establishment to be 2000AD, and not as polished to even equal sometime 'AD rival (and the true home of Strontium Dog) Starlord. And yet, it's where it all began, and perhaps its time will come again.

Roy Skelton 1931 - 2011

2011-06-10T03:59:00.000-07:00

One of two illustrated tributes to the modest man behind some of the most belligerent characters of Sixties and Seventies children's TV. And George the camp Hippo.

The other notable belligerents will be posted over on Zeus Blog (naturally) in the next few days.

Ten for Ten

2011-06-10T03:47:00.000-07:00

It's the 10th of June, the days are shortening and I'm buried deep in illustrations, work and bashing keyboards with my blunt stubby fingers trying to learn some of the finer points of digital art. It's slow going.

Still, we're mere days away from the midpoint of the year, so time to restock some blog posts. I skipped May and much of April, so I'm going to try something different: ten posts over the next ten days posted once, then re-dated, seeding the weeks I've missed retrospectively, and all done just on the 21st, the Shortest Day.

New topics, new posts, and some stuff that's been sitting in the Drafts folder for a while. Here we go!

Games Workshop - an outsider's view of the Evil Empire

2011-04-30T03:41:00.000-07:00

Originally scheduled for June, this has been kicked into touch via a posting over on Morgue's blog.

Like, I think, a good number of 28mm model enthusiasts (insert height/ribald joke here)I have a love-hate relationship with the output of Games Workshop. Overpriced, saturation-marketed and fiendishly pitched at kids while relying on the disposable income of men twice their age, GW has for over twenty years been a business juggernaut. I was once told by a GW shop employee that it was a popular component in the share portfolios of Scottish bankers, simply because its business model 'could not fail.' From the outset as a resource for roleplaying gamers, to a venture producing its own RPGs, then to a tabletop franchise with its own rules system, lead miniatures line and eventually spin-off fiction and electronic gaming arms, GW combined a disparate range of previously and barely crossover hobbies – roleplaying, model making, tabletop warfare, and reinvented the gaming genre almost overnight. Gone was the old line, and, sadly, the excellent White Dwarf magazine, but in their wake a new product and gaming system that was in itself a revolution within gaming culture as well as niche marketing. And of course, when GW were awarded the rights to the New Line Lord of the Rings movie gaming franchise, those portfolios must have been very fat indeed.

It was, though, proper and right that GW would have the franchise, they being a sound business and a sure bet. Incredibly, the company stretched out a three movie world (the rights excluded references to Tolkien's other literary works, although workarounds mysteriously got in there from time to time) to a product line that was still being added to in 2010, a decade after the first movie. And the tie-in strategy game was clever and sympathetic to the source material, concentrating on the skirmish scenario rather than the big battles of say Helm's Deep or the Pellenor Fields (though those did feature later in the game franchise). The models were, by and large, splendid sculpts in metal and quite reliable in plastic (the former reserved for the heroes and villains, while the latter filled in the ‘troops’ of orcs, men, else, what have you).

Outside the LotR range though is where GW continue to make the money, and it’s this ever-expanding, constantly-revised world which represents the ‘real Games Workshop’. I find it a startling contrast to the studied and mannered world of the Rings models with their serious earth–tone movie palettes and scales just shy of the ‘heroic’ (a distortion of human scale which accentuates faces and detail, ideal for picking out as a hobby or on a playmat, while the Rings figures’ proportions were more natural). GW’s figures and scenery – Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,ooo revel in the grotesque and outrageous. The armour is flamboyant, swords are huge and seemingly unwieldy, and guns too, the imagery is part fantasy, part Fascist state and part Spanish Inquisition (and that’s the good guys!) The colour palette is garish, encouraging the hobby’s painters to push the envelope with light and shade, contrast complimentary hues, eschew the muddy and grimy world of real warfare (though there’s a place for that too, in the hobby) for outrageous, dare I say, camp styling. Its figures Pose, rigid macho posturing that is as much about the wish fulfilment of its target audience as it is about the craft behind some astonishing models. And seemingly throughout, the GW Heavy Metal motifs of blades, spikes, Gothic trimming and totenkopf – there’s no space too small to fit in a random skull. Make no mistake, this is a juvenile aesthetic, but an irresistible one, and the pretenders to GW’s throne (Rakham, for example) have readily adopted many of the same styles, acknowledging their popularity. Independent model makers like Hasslefree and Heretic models make GW-like version of heroes and monsters continuing the aesthetic… and the result to me is one of homogeneity. Games Workshop have become so ubiquitous to the point of dominating the fantasy miniatures aesthetic that I find I’m happy to visit Games Workshop’s product line, to marvel at the design, imagination and flair, to tut over the exorbitant price tags, but I’m glad not to be part of it. And I find it becomes rather repetitive very quickly.

Fortunately I’m not alone. There’s a sizeable community of model collectors and painters who have broader tastes, and gladly support the more unique output of the likes of Hasslefree and their compatriots. On the Lead Adventure Forum, a place I regularly visit, there’s great interest in the model miniatures of the 1980s with their less precise and sometimes wonky mouldings, their less uniform approach and broader influences. There’s sometimes a challenge to bring out the best in those figures with paint that GW’s heroic scale can lack, being so prescriptive with its exaggerated scale. And there’s the look of those figures, a relic of past days in gaming when not everything looked like it was drawn by the same team of artists or based on the same house style. I have a small handful of Eighties figures still with me, waiting for a new paint job and a reinvention, and while my skill levels have been raised greatly by exposure to GW’s hobby literature, they won’t be getting the Games Workshop treatment.

Time to Saddle up that Gorilla.

2011-04-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Decision made!

Well, more to the point, my time is running out for completion of my Company of Thorin Oakenshield miniature painting exercise, becoming a race as it had between me, The Hobbit's filming progress, and my next- er, current- illustration project.
As it happens the miniature painting was going well - I was about halfway through and not far from another burst that would see me about three-quarters through. Most of the major Dwarves were either painted to completion, or being spruced up from the last pass; the remainder were a couple that needed some remodelling before painting, so they would always be left 'til last, despite me attempting to paint the guys in alphabetical order.

That's all rather academic now anyway. In the mean-time the HD Studio Tour of The Hobbit is online and it looks gorgeous - really impressive screen detail and once again I'm lamenting the multiple decisions and missed opportunities that led me away from a career in production design. Oh well. The future beckons, and it's gorilla-shaped.

Mary's Christmas Gorilla is the next story of David Haywood's vying for publication through Public Address Books. Longer than The Hidden Talent of Albert Otter, and with a likely greater illustration load (over 50% of the book), it's going to be a hefty workload. Best get started properly, the nights are drawing in, the TV is getting a little better for watching, and much of the preliminary sketching is done. I'm getting the hang of gorilla faces - they're tricky things, but offer greater opportunity for expression than your actual aquatic mustelid. It's a fun, sometimes chaotic story, and I'm looking forward to getting a lot of it under my belt.

David and I met briefly in March to discuss the likely look and feel of the book and its images, and there was some good stuff to go on from there. So, time to actually get going!

Oaken's Twelve

2011-04-02T02:23:00.000-07:00

Decisions, decisions…

First off, I’ve selected my Company of Oakenshield figures to be the first off the block in completing their painting and adapting. It’s a bit of a cheat because this is the third Spitting Lead project I’ve nodded towards now, but the likelihood of the Hobbit movie releasing (or somebody leaking) shots of the Dwarf actors in costume increases by the week – so it’s a race against time. Not that I’m trying to prove anything. These figures aren’t based on the actors and only have the barest allegiance to the look of the last Middle Earth trilogy, so until Games Workshop get their satanic mills up and running as official licensee this is the nearest I might get. And to be honest, I don’t know if I’ll buy the resulting merchandise once it’s out anyway – the number of LotR figures I have at home actually terrifies me*.

Ahem. So it’s a question then of what to use for ’my’ Company. The text of the book comes first of course. But do I use the colours suggested literally, or drub them down into a more Jackson-esque earthy palette? Tolkien’s description of the Dwarf cloaks and hoods is a veritable rainbow – even one of the Company has a blue beard! Should they be armed, as this doesn’t happen until mid-story (and certainly doesn’t include so many axes)? In the end I’ve chosen to go for colour, but diluted and made a little earthy, lest Thorin’s posse emerge looking a lot like the New Dalek Paradigm. And we all know how well that went down, right kids?

The other consideration I have is the sculpts themselves – I’ve done a fair bit of chopping and replacing of limbs and weapons, I’ve made a hood and fattened up Bombur, even crafted a nose. The plastic figures are great for this sort of stuff, tolerating fine shaving and repositioning far better than the metals. The trade-off with plastic though as far as GW are concerned is in detail – plastic figures just don’t compare to alloys, which is a big reason why you don’t see many plastics among the finalists for GW’s annual Golden Demon competitions. At the time, and as for now these plastics are the closest and cheapest available likenesses to the Company though (of course they’re cheapest – I’ve had them for nearly four years!) so I’m stuck with them and must do my best. Challenges, gotta love ‘em.

The last consideration is pose and style. Nearly every character in The Hobbit is transformed by the quest – it’s a road movie. Some even don’t make it to the end (sorry kids), and as indicated above, the question of what they’re wearing and bearing changes through the story. My solution is the same as I’ve come to with my Doctors Who (also being finished before the next illustration project kicks off) – each character is themselves ‘classic’ – an individualised and (hopefully) sympathetic representation of their greatest looks, rather than a frozen point in time. During my first pass at the Company the figures were painted as though the Dwarves were travelling through Mirkwood, but I’m going to move a little further along the timeline now, particularly so I can add a dragon-hoard element to some of the major characters. *POA. All enquiries welcome!

"How Dare You. How DARE You!!"

2011-03-25T01:40:00.000-07:00

When I was a child I spoke like a child,
I thought as a child,
and I viewed movies as a child.

When I was a student I put away childish things and I viewed movies as a student.

Now I am a man, I realise I can have both things at the same time.

And also

Thankyou, Morgue and the internets!

Charles Burns - Black Hole

2011-03-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

"It's impossible… nnn…never make it out alive"

Adolescence is hell. The flipside of being at our most potent and energetic stage of life is for much of those years a lack of real control; of emotional impulses, our hormones and the development of our changing bodies, and outwardly our social and family groups, and imagined destiny. Charles Burns' Black Hole takes a walk through these dark woods of impending adulthood - the wilderness at night is a recurring location for the stories within, and in its gradual opening reveals a world of repulsion, guilt and questionable decisions. The re-telling of a journey to adulthood as body horror.

This collection was recommended to me by Tim who in turn had had it passed on to him by an enthusiastic friend. Black Hole is the culmination of a decade's work by Burns, and in design it shows. It's a heavy work thematically, but physically its weight may be added to by the sheer expanse of black ink used in the strip's monochrome palette. The artwork is often symmetrical, with panels mirroring one another across page spreads, and the white detail on the literal black hole of the graphics providing startling retinal after-images. It adds to the general trippiniess of the subject matter, and is a perfect visual impression of one of the story's big themes - the claustrophobia and loneliness of the developing teen. Forming the story are the experiences of four teens - stoner Keith, the A-student object of his affections Chris, her boyfriend Rob and would-be artist Eliza as they variously fall prey to the Bug, a physical and sexually-transmitted mutation that offers no special insight or super powers, just the certainty of being ostracised.

I was surprised to read that among the excised material in the anthology edition I'd read is a yearbook quote from an unnamed afflictee set (probably) some time after the story, suggesting that the Bug's outward manifestation is temporary, underlining its association with adolesence and pre-adulthood, but at the same time offering a potentially happier ending for (most of) the protagonists. That this is removed in the later version means that this hope for a happy conclusion is taken away, and the angst of the present, however temporary, remains. I'm in two minds about this; the story is frustratingly open-ended in places - as much as its focus shifts within the narrative anyway, so a likely resolution is welcome. On the other hand this sort of resolution is clearly not what Black Hole is about, any more than reaching the age of true adulthood, however arbitrary, is. If adulthood is personal responsibility and responsibility towards others then the three survivors are severally already there.

As a reader anchored in the Seventies and Eighties I really enjoyed the visual aesthetic of Black Hole, and the painstaking attention Burns gives his page compositions. The artist's work has for along time evoked to me the work of older titles - the EC horror comic covers, hippie-era psychedelia, and retro-rock art (no wonder informed by Burns' artwork for Iggy Pop's Brick By Brick, an album I didn't own but had a lot of time for back at Uni). The story weighs more towards the emotions of its various beats and character moments - not all of the mysteries are really solved, and fittingly there's a large figurative question point at the end of the book. It's an unsettling read - Freudian, Jungian, Proppian; in short, its own dark space I was content to visit briefly, and leave behind afterward.

Postscript: A movie adaptation is currently in development hell, but a very good short distillation can be found here. For obvious reasons, really NSFW.

Video Affects: Everything Must Go, Come Back Around

2011-03-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

When a band – a genuine ensemble rather than a backing group for a front-person, loses a member untimely, the result is often a drawn-out affair. Bands that work well are built on friendship and solidarity, so it’s an unavoidable fact that the death of one of the team has a lasting emotional not to mention creative effect on the band as a whole; sometimes that member is a lyricist or composer, integral to the band’s voice – other times they may play just as significant a role in the instrumental side. The loss, though open to being over-manipulated, is a matter usually expressed publically, if not openly -there are fans and listeners outside the group who might also feel the same emotional blow. If the death of that member doesn’t spell the demise of the band – as that of Kurt Cobain’s did for Nirvana, then the question of whether the group continues – and in what form, arises. Many do – some even continue to find success well after the wake has disappeared.

Two examples here, then. The 1995 disappearance of Richey James Edwards, co-lyricist and rhythm guitarist for Manic Street Preachers is one still (relatively) recent and notable example. Edwards’ story can be seen here, though it’s far from being an unfamiliar one to anybody who followed British indie and pop music in the 90s.

What's your story baby/No control of what I am saying
Winter leaves still make me believe/No vendettas, just a cherry blossom tree
(‘Nobody Loved You’, from MSP’s This is My Truth, Tell me Yours)

Edwards and bassist, co-lyricist Nicky Wire shared a flat in the band’s early days, outside of which a cherry tree grew. That this tree became something of a symbol for Edwards can be seen in the video for Everything Must Go, the second single off the album of the same name, the next release after James’ disappearance. Blown and denuded by wind as the remaining band stage a rending, Spector-like anthem of loss and overcoming, it stands in the video, petals cascading across the faces of the band, and remains the final shot of the clip. With no confirmed sighting of him since that time James was declared deceased ten years later, the popular conclusion being suicide.

The thought of never knowing/can kill me just the same
A solitary blossom/reminders of a friend
(‘Bitter Glass’, from Feeder’s Pushing the Senses)

To another solitary blossom in John Lee, late drummer for Feeder. Lee’s suicide was no less shocking to his fans, and perhaps came as more of a surprise. With an album in the wings, Feeder continued, dedicating their first single Come Back Around to their fallen friend. Though his place was most certainly filled for the recoding, the band went one step further in the video – replacing Lee not with one drummer, but four. All women, all pretty much identical. The reveal is gradual – nothing for the first verse, then gradually as the camera pulls back, the ‘fourth wall’ is revealed to show surviving members Grant Nicholas and Taka Hirose performing not for the camera, but for Lee’s stand-ins, the filming deliberately slowed to ensure all four drummers worked precisely and mechanically. It’s an arresting video, even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the indulgence of the drummers being young, beautiful women being apparently a nod to Lee’s spirit in life, and complaint of no women in their past videos.

I like both videos, particularly as each song provided a proper introduction to their bands for me, though Feeder’s video was discovered long after I was aware of the song. Previously the band had been a well-meaning, fun sounding guitar group, responsible for the cheery Buck Rogers. The post-Lee Comfort in Sound certainly indicated a shift in the band’s sound, continuing to last album Pushing the Senses, where the drummer’s death remains a background concern. In the case of Manic Street Preachers I’d followed them vaguely through early music-press baiting exploits – equal implausible boasts and portentous stunts (Edwards’ 4Real incident included), but it was Everything Must Go that drew me in properly. My induction into the band is based on them as being without Edwards (who was never replaced). I can’t say I’m genuinely a Feeder fan, but I’m definitely a Manics one. Both videos come across as sensitive and not sensational, reverent but not cloying; they’re affirmations of the strength a good band can draw on and build on in the face of tragedy. That both bands had a life beyond the death of a member is a testament to that strength, and a rare thing in modern music.

Talkin' Eds Slight Return: The Number One of the Beast

2011-03-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

Back in the middle era of 2010's Talkin' Eds series I dedicated a Very Special post to Iron Maiden's only UK number one to date, 1991's Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter. You, dear reader, will be cheered to know that there's little more I can add to that post, however Freaky Trigger's 'Popular' series of UK number one singles has just recently reached Maiden's chart summit - and you can read it here.

I do recommend the visit. It's short, sweet, well-argued as always, and the comments field is always worth a browse for FT's usual gang of highly-informed and pop-passionate contributors and readers. Viewing Maiden's chart triumph through the lens of popular music rather than the heavy metal scope would perhaps inevitably garner a measured score out of ten on their own ratings system. In this case I don't think the score unfair - in fact, the number is... not unfitting at all...

Christchurch

2011-02-27T01:13:00.001-08:00

Christchurch, seen from the slopes of Victoria Park, circa 1996
For more years than I care to remember this is how Christchurch and I have related to one another: at a studied distance. Coming from a small town a little under the halfway mark of the mainland the city was unavoidable as I grew up. It was the other big smoke after the nearer and more accessible Dunedin, and it differs from its more southern sibling by being almost the opposite of my overcast, damp, hilly once second home - flat, wide, with dazzling blue skies. In winter it broods with seemingly perpetual rising damp from the swamp land it was built over. In summer it bakes, its centre streets too far from the sea to cool themselves, all the better to maintain its main river Avon snaking its way under willows through suburb and CBD. As a child I holidayed there with my family, staying in the Meadow Park caravan site with visits to the Orana wildlife park, the shops of Cashell and Colombo Streets, or Ferrymead. Usually there'd be a visit to an elderly relative. As a teen I saw it less; Dunedin was where my brother flatted, the bands I liked came from, and was just more interesting, I thought. By my university years, now ensconced in the Edinburgh of the South, Christchurch was even farther away, but reasserted itself as the location of some more testing life experiences: I got hellishly sunburned there one summer with friends, my band toured there several times on equal occasions successful and frustratingly under par, and after hope against hope I got my heart broken there. So for years Christchurch and I weren't friends.

The thing I've realised after all those years is that nearly every time I stayed in the Cathedral City, it was on someone else's terms, or on someone else's time. I've slept there in caravans and motel rooms, on the floors of lounges and church halls, on the sofas of friends' flats and in the spare bedroom of a great aunt. I've never lived there, never explored and got to know the city's inner streets and outer suburbs at my own pace. I've been in the Cathedral but never up its spire, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that now. That same spire is rubble and twisted copper sheeting now, and too many of the city's grand and historic buildings have been destroyed, or are awaiting destruction in the name of public safety. The Avon is grey from liquefaction, the city's heart momentarily stilled. A big part of me wants to visit Christchurch's CBD, perhaps to try and grasp fleetingly what remains of the city centre that will surely be erased by time and recovery. Certainly I want to go there to put the pictures present and past into some context, the scale of the city's destruction being too large for the TV or computer screen, and too vast for my mind's eye to capture it. Only now, for the best and saddest of reasons, Christchurch's inner environs are as closed to me as they are to anyone else whose business isn't to aid in the awful task of recovering its missing citizens and begin the slow and painful process that will be the city's own recovery.

The Christchurch I knew and regarded with mixed sentiment is all but gone, and its future will be built upon the distressing moments of last week and their aftermath. It's also the current home of a good number of good friends and family members. When that future begins to be realised in whatever form, and when the time is right, I feel I owe it to Christchurch to go there, stop and have a closer look, to remember and reflect how it was and be a part of what it might yet be.

More Stuff I Have Dug From Out of My Garden.

2011-02-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

It's been some time since I last posted an updated inventory of the Monkeyhouse's backyard treasure trove, and here it is:

The reason for this is that it's simply harder to find the stuff by accident. So what's here is a canny compilation of foreign objects from our current house and back yard, plus what we found in the garage on moving in, and some more stuff from under the back deck. Oh, and at least one bit there - the lower half of a lead miniature (probably a horsie-riding kerniggit) from our last ever Dunedin flat. Yeah, I indulged in suburban archaeology there too and discovered lots of cool stuff - old bottles, a tin bath that ended up as a planter in my mum's garden (naturally), and some RPG discards that, by pure Otago coincidence, may have belong to a gaming acquaintance of my brother's well before we lived there.

Other items of interest: the aforementioned train/wagon wheel, plastic flowers (we got a lot of those in various states in the soil), two Super 15 hacky-sack things (one of which had an operating voicebox at time of discovery, the other had been disembowell'd) and the round yellow thingy top centre-ish. I think it's supposed to be a haystack as there have been a few agriculturally-themed toys discovered so far (well either that or we had Lilliputian farmers occupying the land before settlement). In my opinion it's headed straight for the bitz box as a future native hut or even maybe a Baba Yaga conveyance.

Oaken's Eleven

2011-02-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

In 2007 Games Workshop, the miniatures wargaming behemoth rumoured to be so profitable it was the darling of Scottish Bankers, began to reach the logical end to its highly-lucrative Lord of the Rings license. Or so it seemed - the movies were well in the past, and the game itself was losing players as those kids introduced to GW through the trilogy connection were either consumed by GW's greater product range, or simply moved on the the next big thing. Those who stuck by the game (and there was a lot going for it) saw some radical redesigns - 'battle companies', allowing true mass army play rather than the skirmish-based scenarios offered to date, and even more obscure models - characters from the novels but not the movies (allowed, under the license), characters based solely on mentions in the book's appendices (also allowed, apparently), and a model for this dude:

But still there was more. Plastic figures to supplement the already classy metal sculpts, armies of 'Wood Elves', 'wandering' Uruk-Hai and a new Ent model. And there were Dwarves - more of them than you could shake a stick at, and certainly more than were ever depicted living or dead in the movie trilogy and book.

Namely these guys:

Oh sure, GW couched their description in carefully-worded snippets, such as "Dwarf Ranger patrol the lands around every Dwarf Hold, ensuring the safety of their homes from the Dark Lord's servants and wandering monsters..." And "...to help them track their foes and blend in with their surroundings, Dwarf Rangers are more likely to wear natural colors than their kin." In White Dwarf game designer Adam Troke claimed:"We know that Dwarves travel around a lot and don't do so in full armour...", but most fans seemed to know what was more likely to be going on. GW had a license for Lord of the Rings and its appendices, but crucially not The Hobbit and not The Silmarillion. And these guys - a set of 24 plastic dwarves in hoods and simply armed for 'travelling', looked for all the world like a way to include the Company of Thorin Oakenshield, of whom we'll be hearing a lot about now that The Hobbit has been kicked off and those same travelling dwarves fully cast.

As it happens I picked up the set - not because I was playing the game, but because I could see how these plastic figures could easily be turned into something approximating Thorin's company - they were halfway there already, right? And so I did - mostly. But not entirely. And so, with the film Company announced and not yet revealed in their screen attire, I thought I might as well finish the job I started, before the Hobbit movies reduce my versions to being either hopelessly naive or just waaay off the mark.

Gary Moore

2011-02-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

A crappy crappy way to start the week. Gary Moore is dead, aged 58.

Moore's music was a passing interest for me, and in all that interest probably didn't outlast my sixth form year. At the time though he was The Man - a very ordinary-looking bloke with a prodigious talent for guitar, evidenced by his very early career start with Thin Lizzy and later on his series of solo albums where his rather decent vocal talents were also employed. Around the time of my interest in his canon Moore shifted genres and became predominantly a blues guitarist. Blues was my brother's music, had an air of superiority and snobbishness in its audience, and so that was enough for seventeen-year old me and that was that. But Wild Frontier - some way into his solo career and perhaps not as good as earlier efforts, is still an important album for me, introducing me to a broader set of musicians after my enthusiasm for heavy metal had waned. Most importantly it introduced me to Thin Lizzy, although the Skids got a not-small look in as well, the three being roughly 'Celtic rock' and therefore to my still in-training ears, a very good thing.

Above, Moore get reacquainted with his former bandmate in a very ropey and over-earnest video for his Run for Cover album (it's Lynnott's last recording before his death the following year). Below, Moore joins erstwhile compatriots Knopfler, Gilmour - oh, and a couple of bassists, in a rather amusing Raw Sex/French and Saunders skit from a little further back in the day.

There, that's cheered me up. RIP Gary.

"One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach... all the damn vampires"

2011-01-24T23:49:00.000-08:00

At the Monkeyhouse we're now up to date with the Twilight movies. Pray for us. Anyway, the beast has been stared down and nope, I still can't see the point of all of this. Same goes for Vampire Diaries which seems little more than an attempt to cash in on the Twiglet phenomenon. There's still a lot of vamptastic media about, even on TV with the (superior) likes of Being Human and True Blood easily the grittiest, gnarliest and earthiest versions yet. But these are all New Vampire media, where the undead leads are beautiful, tortured and sympathetic characters (not such a new idea of course) and the women who love them are steadfastly human. I blame Joss Whedon for that one, but then he did it all so much better, even if he didn’t do it first.

The Nineties were a bad decade for vampire movies with a few exceptions from reliable hands (Coppolla, Jordan, er - Rodriguez?) and they really offered nothing new. If you want the great modern vampire movies of not-so-recent memory, you have to go back another ten years.

The Eighties had the best vampire movies of our lifetimes.

I don't say this lightly, but I know I'm right. For me four movies stand out, each promising something new to the previously tired formula and most of them delivering. Like their Nineties counterparts they boast strong directors (including one Oscar winner), good casts and great pitches. Here's how it breaks down for me, but first two words of caution. Firstly, these movies have not aged well and feature some hairstyles the Eighties have not called to ask for them back. Secondly, the trailers are all available on YouTube, but haven't been included because the trailer cutting for these movies is counter-argument and provides more free cheese than an overstocked fromagerie.

Let’s nibble away, shall we?

The Hunger (d. Tony Scott, 1983)
The Pitch: Ageless vampiress brings her dying lover to town, ensnaring an urban gerontologist in their search for true immortality.
The least of the four films is this one for the story itself, adapted from a novel by Whitley "Communion" Strieber. There are problems with it - characterisation is a little off, and it's s-l-o-w for a horror/thriller, but it's nothing if not stylishly shot providing style over substance in bucketloads. Featuring proto-Goths Bauhaus and their seminal anthem Bela Lugosi's Dead it's become something of a cult hit, and the Goths I knew loved it. File under 'significant' for a modern take on the traditional Eurotrash wealthy vampire set, for Bowie's character's appalling death by waiting-room, and an interesting mingling of the traditional vampire motifs (almost none, actually) with what appear to be some Egyptian Mythos symbolism, the ankh being the most potent. Intriguing.

Fright Night (d. Tom Holland, 1986)
The Pitch: Rear Window with a vampire - and your only ally is a burned out TV show host!
Aimed more at the teen market and therefore lots more fun; in fact, the best of Eighties vampire movies are teen movies, possibly showing the way forward even then. This movie has the least memorable director (Holland went on to give the world Child's Play, so stayed in the genre) and some borrowed SPFX (Ghostbusters, apparently), but is both creepy and irreverent, providing some with a homoerotic subtext that’s also intriguing. Key highlights have to be future Jack Skellington Chris Sarandon and once-Cornelius 'Rowdy' Roddy McDowall in a fun portrayal of a very obvious pastiche (how could he not be with a name like Peter Vincent?) The least said about the sequel and comic sidekick’s later movie career the better. Oh, and hello Marcy from Married… With Children in an early role. Only real let-down: the music. But you can’t have them all.

The Lost Boys (d. Joel Schumacher, 1987)
The Pitch: New kids in town mix with the Wrong Locals. Youth in revolt has a taste for blood, and your mom has strange taste in men!
Perhaps the king of them all, and despite two sequels never equalled. Schumacher brought in a great cast – Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, Jami Gertz, Dianne Wiest, Fred Hermann PLUS Coreys Feldman and Haim and future Wyld Stallyn Alex Winter. Most of them are pretty good, some of them are fantastic, and the least of them at least has the good sense to stay off-camera most of the time. The LA setting with its sorta Santa Monica helicopter opening shot is gorgeous, and the visual nods to teen culture’s immortals (a Jim Morrison mural in the vamps’ quake-devoured mansion) are also very smart. In fact, the soundtrack also deserves a mention, boasting Echo and the Bunnymen’s cover of the Doors, INXS and Jimmy Barnes (well, okay), and ‘Cry Little Sister’, a much-covered non-single that provides the movie with a hugely evocative overture. Too many highlights – everyone has a couple (maggots, rail bridge, first attack, Frog brothers), so I’ll just say “Grandpa” and leave it there.

Near Dark (d. Katherine Bigelow, 1987)
The Pitch: Redneck vampires in a blacked-out winnebago kidnap new recruits in rural America. The Hills Have Fangs? Not really. Iit’s odd to think of this coming from the same year as Lost Boys, being as removed from the earlier movies’ very urban settings and instead heading out to the badlands for what its creators tried to make, a modern vampire Western. As the pitch might indicate, the result is cast very far from the premise, helped (or not) by a score by Tangerine Dream (it also features a flicknife-sharp cover of Fever by The Cramps, bringing us back to the Goth splatter chic of The Hunger). I saw this myself in the early Nineties, so draw parallels with the likes of Wild at Heart that couldn’t have been there at all. Worth a look, though, even if to see what the once Mrs James Cameron managed to do with her ex’s favourite guest spots Lance Henrikson and Bill Paxton.

I ask you – did we ever have it better?

Bonus video: the past reinvented for the present - here's Gerard McMahon aka G Tom Mac performing a fantastic swamp blues version of his Lost Boys theme, inspired by True Blood.

Short - and Sweet!

2011-01-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Being a busy working primate dad I find free time an elusive, slippery sort of banana to lay my hands on. Perhaps I’ve overextended that metaphor – you get the drift, I hope. As Jet Junior grows and moves with the speed of a very fast thing I’ve recently begun to entertain the notion that he might actually be Eating Time. Have we spawned a Chronovore? Was there a mix-up at the hospital?

Projects have been tentatively promised, set aside and some abandoned as a monkey’s errand. I miss a lot of my favourite shows, blessed be our hard drive DVD. But there’s some solace for me in the form of Ferndale's blog over on Throng, which provides succinct, witty, snarky and up to date recaps of The Nation’s Pulse, Shortland Street.

Sample analysis:
"I don't want to over-intellectualise things here - this is Shortland Street, let's not forget - but I'm starting to think Bella basically acts as a Shakespearean fool on the show. Basically she acts like this total dipshit, with weird occasional undertones of meta-commentary on the inherent ludicrousness of everything else that's going on. Maybe."

I may never have to watch the show again! Jet Jr can be bathed at a leisurely pace! On the other hand, having the luxury of being able to follow the show over dates beyond the reach of TVNZ’s On Demand gizbot does mean I must also face up to the crushing disappointment of missing the series’ first ever Zombie episode from just before last year's cliffhanger. Nooo! I missed Christmas Zombie Tracey!

Still, stuff like that’s bound to be out there on the webs somewhere. They wouldn’t throw away TV gold like that.

Video Affects - Irene Cara 'Flashdance ..What a Feeling' (April 1983)

2011-01-20T01:15:00.000-08:00

"She makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class." Garth Agar,Wayne's World

I am twelve and my life is entering the turmoil of adult change. Oh yes, on the inside it's all bubbles, toils and trouble. Thankfully, on the outside things are a little more calm. The nights are drawing in, and my brother and I have jumped on the domestic technological wave and are attending Saturday night computer club at the home of a local man who has a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It's a wonder of technology I think, but though we'll have succeeded in hauranging our parents and will have a Spectrum of our own in our home within a year, the computer is not going to be My Thing. I enjoy the games and have a stab at graphics (Sinclair's BASIC programming is ridiculously intuitive at least), but my problem is a lack of patience and my brain. It's simply not a mathematical one, and is more of your frustrating right-side model. This means, though, that music videos have a profound effect on me. The Human League have released in this same month '(Keep Feeling) Fascination', a brassy continuation of their ascent into pop from those brief and early industrial singles I'd discover years later (I still like Being Boiled!) So for the League it's a move away from the sequenced programming of their early sound and into something more organic and, well, human. The video's good too. Of course it's nothing on Irene Cara's second movie tie-in (her first being for Fame of course.)

Cara's video heroine spends almost the first minute of the video cycling through her industrial city home, back to camera or in silhouette before the camera closes in on a figure welding (or not), androgynous until her industrial mask is raised and there she is - Jennifer Beals in all her striking beauty. It's an easy trick in retrospect, and as much-used as this video has been lampooned in future videos and ads, but it surprised me at the time, as assured as the rest of the piece in its smooth movie-style editing, not greatly different (intentionally so) from the movie it's welded to.

The editing is slick here - the use of a body double for Beals' dance scenes seems so much more obvious to me now, but it's still a stylish package (though Michael Sembello's follow-up soundtrack single Maniac boasts a video that with a smaller source tape cuts and fetishises its subject to an even more surgical degree). To the uncoordinated, the physically awkward or untested - the young adolescent in other words, it's an intimidating spectacle. I felt much the same way seeing (ahem) 'Kevin Bacon's assured floorwork in Footloose - surely also the work of a more athletic double, but that's the illusion of movies, and it fooled and beguiled me. Once I worked out that the disciplined world of dance and movement were as much for me as Human League's early digitised, robotic anthems, as reliant on a small, precise sequential actions as computer programming or music video editing, the writing was on the wall. I stuck with the breakdancing meetings to third form, and that was it shortly afterward. I remember my heart sinking as I read a quote from Sting once: "music is simple, really. It's just mathematics."

There's artiface behind all art. The audience is only hoodwinked when it's made to look easy.

GAZ: It's Flashdance. She's a welder, isn't she?
DAVE: A welder? I hope she dances better than she welds. Look at that. Her mix is all to cock.
GAZ: What the fuck do you know about welding, any road?
DAVE: More than some chuffing woman. It's like Bonfire Night.That's too much acetylene. Them joints won't hold fuck all.
(The Full Monty)

Talkin' Eds - The Final Frontier (2010)

2010-12-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

Music is meant to be a shared experience. My first encounter with the music of Iron Maiden was as a thirteen year old listening to my friend's bigger brothers' tapes, two of us huddled over a portable stereo listening, each track a revelation and needing to be discussed, compared, enthused over. This happened less and less as albums came and went, and I just went. There are other bands whose music I bought on the first day of their release, racing home or to a friend's place to play it in comany and turn the listening experience into a communal one, but it wasn't until this year that I was able to do this properly for an Iron Maiden record. Semi-regular commenter Tim is also, as is obvious, an IM fan, and so on the day of release we raced from our respective work desks to hit the road with the new album in the CD tray, sharing the experience of hearing Maiden's latest (possibly last) album 'live'. We parked overlooking town on a beautiful sunny day, chatting animatedly over the tracks as they played - it was a good lunch hour, whatever the outcome.

The Album
And so this is Album Number Fifteen, reaching the number Steve Harris said not too long ago that he would be aiming for with Maiden. Adding to this the ominous title you'd be hard pressed not to think TFF is the band's last outing. More recent press suggests this might be premature, and sales haven't hurt it at all - going to number one is several countries (including New Zealand). Perhaps there's life in the old dogs yet. In the mean time Frontier is apprpriately a rumination on that most final of frontiers, the death of the individual. It's not a complete overall theme, departing from time to time, but it's unquestionably there. The album opens unconventionally, with a barrage of reverbed drums and a shouted first person narrative by Dickinson about a stranded spacefarer low on life support and drifting towards a nearby sun. In a segue that is shared across the first three tracks (tracks one and two are technically the same) the album's title song kicks in, continuing the story as the man reflects on his lot:

"For I have lived my life to the full/I have no regrets.
But I wish I could talk to my family to tell them one last goodbye"

There's not a lot of space in the song for regret, however, and it's interesting to note that incomparison with earlier narratives of the damned (The Trooper, Hallowed Be Thy Name, Sign of the Cross) there's less of a sense of impending dread and more of peace with one's lot. The voice of an aged yet succesful band against a younger group with debts and dues to pay? Or am I reading too much into this? Certainly the sense of contrast with the past is there with returns to old ideas - the soldier on the battlefield (Mother of Mercy), the historical figure (in this instance Dr John Dee in Janick Gers' lively The Alchemist) and the hero of legend - here it's the original British and, potently, undying king in Isle of Avalon which restarts the album after a slow lapse and introduced a strong troika returning the album's theme. Indeed, its immediate successor Starblind seems in it opening lines to return to the doomed astronaut of the album's overture stil drifting to his doom, but spiritually resigned in a beautiful description:

"Take my eyes the things I've seen/in this world coming to an end
My reflection fades/I'm weary of these mortal bones and skin
You may pass through me and leave no trace/I have no mortal face
Solar winds are whispering, you may hear me call."

Starblind is the highlight of Frontier for me, an easy anchor point with fantastic solos and Dickinson in strong voice. I can't decide however whether the vocals suffer slightly from the singer's age (the higher notes are 'thrown' as elsewhere on the album and Dickinson's 'F's are sounding more wet), or are given greater conviction because of it. This would have lifted the roof back in the days of Number of the Beast but would it have resonated as well amid the bloodthirsty songs of vikings, demons and madness? To Maiden's, Dickinson's and Harris' credit (and not forgetting the other songwriters of the band) strong lyrical compositions matter more in these later albums - technically the band have never dropped in quality despite the singer's voice aging and the drummer being the senior member), so it's heartening to see them being given obvious attention here. Gers returns to writing chores with The Talisman, a (whoops!) doomed seafarer dropping at the last hurdle on his voyage to the New World. It's a good composition and yes, Gers has trod this tale before with Ghost of the Navigator on Brave New World, but he does this stuff so well I can forgive him easily.

The final highpoint of Frontier is Steve Harris' rewrite of Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, closing the album as one of the longest songs of Maiden's repertoire. When the Wild Wind Blows reliably tells the story of an old couple responding to the imending nuclear holocaust around hem by huddling in their shelter, but choosing to end their lives (unlike the unhappy protagonists of Briggs' story). The fact of the false alarm that drives them to it is a cruel trick of fate, but maybe here Harris is having it both ways - individuals facing death with dignity, and all the while death not being the end of the world around them.

If The Final Frontier is Iron Maiden's legacy album, the last release in their name as a group, then it works very well, hitting the notes of the past without falling into the trap of sentimentality of self-reverence. Coming as it did on the heels of the hugely succesful Somewhere Back in Time 'golden years' world tour and album, you could be forgiven forexpecting some of the obvious formulas of the past creeping in either through familiarity or an acknowledgement of what worked in the past. Thankfully for Maiden they haven't done this and haven't needed to - whatever they're doing it's clearly still working. There's nothing shocking or new on Frontier past its overture, but not does it sound tired or rehashed,a testament to the invention and energies of its seven strong contingent. If this is the end, then true to the heroes of the album, they depart in style.

Cover Art

Nooooo! It was going so well! This, believe it or not (and many didn't, and frankly the jury's still out a little) is Eddie. Yup. Space Eddie, hoovering a dead astronaut's brains. Yeah. Whatever floats your boat, buys. Obviously not a Derek Riggs portrait, it comes from the usually reliable Melvyn Grant and for what it's worth the design has stuck, being incorporated into the standard Giant Eddie onstage and on the single artwork by Anthony Dry. As you might imagine, I'm far from sold. It's cartoonish in the wrong way and actually looks really clumsy. There's a back story to the art involving a quest for seven keys (for seven bandmembers?) one of which Eddie has presumably retrieved here, but it's not followed up in the album (just a spin-off game), so we';re really into Ed Hunter territory here. Frankly, a close up of the astronaut helmet with a more classic Eddie reflection would have been preferable, and may have suited the opening track more. In other words, I ain't buyin' the tee shirt for this one.

Album Tracks
Satellite 15... The Final Frontier
El Dorado
Mother of Mercy
Coming Home
The Alchemist
Isle of Avalon
Starblind
The Talisman
The Man Who Would Be King
When the Wild Wind Blows

Ha Ha! He said 'bell's end'!

2010-12-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

One of the few yuletide songs I can bear on a more than yearly rotation:

Season's greetings, one and all!

Roll Over!

2010-12-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

Boo-ya!

Last Sunday saw a test card perfect summer day in the Capital and, as blogged earlier, I was stuck inside almost for the duration of its balmy and later humid length. It wasn’t all bad, though. I, Paul M, Jamas and Meromo played my near-complete D&D game ‘below Barbigazl’, a sequel to the 2007 smash-hit and character-killer that took its PCs (that’s Player characters to those of you not playing at home) into an abandoned Dwarven kingdom where deadly goblins, deadly undead and surprisingly sophisticated and ruthless Gnomes awaited. The original game ended with a rush and was a bit of a fumble due to a lack of preparedness and closing windows of opportunity (read: real-life timetables). Could the follow-up improve things? Well, as it turned out, a little. But not entirely.

The party this time were sent on a mission by the community of the Gnomes they had last ambushed (see Jamas’ description here) and was situated as the title suggests, some distance below the Dwarven stronghold, in strange caverns of giant fungi, a lost city of rock salt, and narrow tunnels inhabited by horrible blind troglodytic humanoids. There were some unconventional steps – the opening monster was no mean enemy – a green dragon with an impressive hoard. The party dispatched him after some puzzle solving and could have walked away then and there intact and rather flush for the experience. But credit to them and their players, they hung on, entering the mountain in search of the ‘missing behind enemy lines’ character they were enlisted to rescue. Then their troubles began, and I’ll leave it to Jamas to describe the story in his blog.

It was a very enjoyable afternoon, situated in an off-the-street art space in the CBD with plenty of room and (a revelation!) a whiteboard which became my favourite tool as Dungeon master – so useful for mapping out tunnels and corridors and spaces, assigning a marching and fighting order for the party, and it became pretty much our fifth member for the game for that. I think the guys enjoyed themselves. We had one character death – not an heroic one, but the guy involved distinguished himself early on so wasn’t without his triumphs before the curtain descended. Everyone made sacrifices – my chief one was sidetracking (and in doing so railroading) some deadly Kobold caves. I’d been reading Tucker’s Kobolds, an infamous and hilarious editorial from Dragon magazine committed to digital form – during my last-minute creation of the module I realised the insanity of the intricate pitfalls and traps I was obsessing over at the expense of the greater game, and stopped, making sure that sections of the game such as this could be closed off if time was short.

As it turned out, time did diminish somewhat, but we were all home before tea and nobody got hurt. The new creatures I created (the mole men) were suitably ooky and threw the party, almost TPK-ing them, as did an encounter with an enormous slug, a traditional monster with surprising advantages, but a rewarding encounter for giving some of the characters ‘beats’ to play out their specific talents. I missed some opportunities along the way – putting in magical items that were either irrelevant or not that useful where another would have been, and failing to get the party to rest adequately between encounters. Their oversight turned into an inability to rest once they were deep inside the goblin lair, and death was sort of inevitable for one character who had been in turn cursed against wielding anything metal, burned by acidic slug spit, afflicted with a leprous disease, and finally shot by a goblin. In the end the last act was eerily like the earlier game – a Mexican stand-off, albeit with short grey-green Mexicans, and a hastily-orchestrated retreat with the party’s rescued Delver and his all-important crosier, back to safety and ready to plan the next adventure.

Will there be another attempt on Barbigazl? I hope so. There may be an opportunity, and there’s certainly enough in the way of loose ends to create something close to what I’d have liked both games to be. But with two attempts down, will the third time be the charm? Roll d20 to see, I guess…

Talkin' Eds - A Matter of Life and Death (2006)

2010-12-14T01:01:00.000-08:00

This is simply one of my favourite Iron Maiden albums – although it may be apparent to some that I have weird choices. It’s also the only Maiden album post-Piece of Mind I never saw in shops at the time of its release, so its content and packaging were a genuine unknown to me when I finally picked it up in the great Maiden back catalogue bargain hunt of 2008. Listening to them fresh opened up the album as a fresh and new, total experience – many previous albums I was able to delineate or compartmentalise by album tracks on either side or following/preceding more familiar singles; but AMOLAD came out even after the most recent video compilation (Visions of the Beast), and so there was nothing on it that was familiar, and nothing to break up the full 70 minute opus.

I’m old enough to still have a vinyl record collection and even a few tapes – so unavoidably my approach to albums of songs is to think of an A side and a B side, a rising and falling structure of an album in two acts – or four if it’s a double of course. CD albums have changed that, or should have, and now that I’m as likely to download individual tracks on iTunes than full albums there’s something to be said also for their role in the album’s status as an increasingly non-linear phenomenon. I suspect though that being prog fans Iron Maiden have that two act structure embedded as much as this listener does in their subconscious, and AMOLAD could be said to follow this pattern. For the most part the whole album deals with one theme; it rises and falls from initial Nicko-voiced martial cry “Aiiiee!” to the final acoustic strum of its closing track, broken up around the halfway point by a track quite unlike the rest of the album in topic – there is an audible A side and B side, to me at least.

The Album
War is the overall theme of A Matter of Life and Death, a subject to which iron maiden are no stranger. In contrast to the blood and thunder of The Trooper and Aces High however, this is late era Maiden’s take on conflict, informed as much as the likes of X Factor’s The Aftermath and notably Dance of Death’s Paschendale were – indeed either song could be a dress rehearsal for this album as a whole. After a fast-paced opener in Different World (seemingly a call-response dialogue between youth and maturity, sounding like Husker Du’s later efforts) the album kicks in with an exploration of war’s personal moments. Here is the signing up of a soldier (These Colours Don’t Run), the first grim beachhead assault (The Longest Day) and the death of comrades (Out of the Shadows). Amid these is the glowering and thundering Brighter than a Thousand Suns, a tried interpretation of Project Manhattan as a Biblical loss of innocence:

“We are not the sons of God, we are not his chosen people now/We have crossed the paths He trod, we will feel the pain of His beginning”

There’s some great imagery in this song (“shadow fingers rise above/iron fingers stab the desert sky”), a highlight of an album where Harris and Dickinson’s writing is well in the ascent, and inevitably popular culture gets its end in (“out of the universe a strange light is born/unholy union, Trinity reborn”) – it’s expertly measured in tone and instrumentation. At the halfway point is a departure from war and conflict in The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg, a confessional narrative from a damned individual whom Harris teased fans with in an “is he? Isn’t he?” online hunt to find the titular antihero. Breeg never existed, and the song (the album’s first single) stands out a little for its length and ill thematic fit, but it never derails the set. The three songs following Breeg close the album, departing from the individual viewpoint of its first half with a broader, accusatory tirade against its subjects – For the Greater Good of God targets the righteous "holy war winner” world leader – unnamed, but you could take a guess, I imagine. It’s the voice of a mind at the end of its tether, followed by Lord of Light, an arresting hymn to the original rebel and father of war, Lucifer. If this came from early Maiden you might dismiss it as Church-baiting rabble rousing - but this is more seductive, more angry, and less provocative, asking the question: if the capacity for destruction is in every man and religion’s good is so misused as a tool of propaganda, why not just submit to nature?

Finally, The Legacy, a Janick Gers collaboration which shows off the style of acoustic intro he's now quite the professional at. A last address to an architect of weaponry ("some strange yellow gas") on his deathbed, it looks to a future legacy the man leaves behind, and it's not a heroic one.

AMOLAD thus carries its theme through to the end, though it's no concept album or even a loose narrative like Seventh Son. The spectre of the Twentieth Century's European wars hangs over albums by Maiden's antecedents (Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Final Cut, The Who's Tommy), and it continues to be fertile ground for Heavy Metal in all its guises. maiden's fourteenth studio album is one of their strongest, perhaps the more for not directing its focus on one event or one time period, but making its references recognisable and also universal: The Longest Day's lyrical "Overlord" mention nods to D-Day, but I found its description of scared men fighting a deadly tide while cliffs explode above them could be any number of locations, perhaps ANZAC Cove. Clever.

Cover Art
A definite improvement on Dance of Death, but again Eddie is almost a backdrop character, posed on a more impressive tank with a literal army of the dead around him. It’s a grim piece befitting the tone of the album, and betrays its computer generated origins a little readily, but tonally you can’t fault it. On the back is a stencilled marine Eddie, a logo which would be used to a fair length on band merchandise, and again as before, some classy shots of the individual band members – monochrome to emphasise the years on their faces and hands, and studio-set. I like the approach, hiding nothing (I’m still suspicious about ‘Harry’s rather sculpted cheekbones on the reverse of the previous album’s cover) and dispensing with a dramatic setting (coughLondonDungeon!cough) or tableaux. In all it’s the look of a band comfortable with its age and expertise.

Album Tracks
As with Maiden's debut album, this release is rare for having had its entirety played live (and indeed was played as a live album for the US tour). Despite this, live versions vary in quality (they really need a DVD), and many many of the fan videos just go too far with the imagery, letting spectacle get in the way of the perfectly adequate lyrics. So for the non-squeamish:

Different World
These Colours Don't Run
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (fan video version also good!)
The Pilgrim (studio version)
The Longest Day (fan video version here)
Out of the Shadows
The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg
For the Greater Good of God
Lord of Light
The Legacy

Back on a Roll

2010-12-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

The further back I look, the harder it gets to find my first encounter with the phenomenon of Dungeons and Dragons. Likely I saw pictures of the game and read about it in books just as I was exiting childhood and entering adolescence, but it might be earlier than that. I had an issue of the Star Wars comic (actually I had two and that’s the sum of my collection!) which had an enticing cartoon advertising the game, and it’s possible that that same issue was also advertising the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings movie, such was its infiltration into popular media of the time. In 1982 the movie ET attempted to show a game in progress (further discussion on that here.)

The Greatest American Hero even pitched in on the trend working in a (very silly) story connected to early misbegotten LARPing games in real life, and later still TSR in relaunching the set for an 80s audience ran a serial advertisement in UK comics (2000AD in my case) to continue the marketing push. All of this served less to explain the game to me than promote more confusion, but with that, it did increase its mystique. It was simply a game I HAD to find out more about! So the advertising worked, due in no small part to my overactive imagination. By my 14th birthday my brother and I had a set – the red ‘Basic’ box rather than the older Advanced D&D rules (they really didn’t name things these well, did they?) and we set to, armed with a couple of handy independent guidebooks to help us on our way. This was the best of the bunch – British in origin and approach, and full of really useful insight into a game our parents were absolutely dumbfounded by and just didn’t understand. Which, in its own way, was rather cool; it made the game all the more ‘ours’, though it didn’t help me accrue many more associated books, modules and game aids because of the fact.

From that age I played the game with school friends, as did my brother with his, and for two or three years it featured quite heavily in my extracurricular life, fitting somewhere between youth group, scouts and venturers, and (thankfully) girlfriends. My characters came and went, as did my playmates, and eventually so did the game – revived over a couple of university summers mainly to recapture some of the old magic when Paul M, one of the old group, returned home from the Navy for the holidays. Things eventually went really quiet; Paul and I moved away for good, we found spouses and he even moved overseas. Before making that move though we had one ‘last’ game, with a few local friends and his brother – Jamas has it blogged here. It went okay – being as we are all grown up with less free time the games were rushed and business-like. For the most part they were okay – some of the old magic was there, albeit framed by adult duties responsibilities – that’s life.

This weekend Paul’s back for a limited time. We have one day set aside to return to the mines of Barbigazl and undo the wrongs committed in the first place. Will righteousness prevail? Can the heroes see it through and triumph? More to the point, can we fit this in over one Sunday before the inevitable call to come home for dinner? We wait to see!

Talkin' Eds - Dance of Death (2004)

2010-11-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

Rock and roll – heavy metal, is a young man’s game. True, there are old men involved, and young women too, but by and large it is a genre consisting of young men strutting their musicianship, singing to other young men visceral songs about the sorts of concerns (or lack thereof) that a male in the prime of life might have. “Getting drunk... having sex… getting drunk and then having sex” in the words of Blaze Bayley. And well it might be – “rejoice, young man, in thy youth’ says Ecclesiastes. Very few uses of this phrase venture any further into the verse, because the cold reality of age and creeping decrepitude become the theme; it’s a bit of a downer, and that’s life. Rock and roll is also a form of escapism from the inevitable, a railing against light’s dying, but when the glory days are in the past and a young man’s pursuits become regarded as trivial, temporary and less than profound, what then for the aging rocker? Fifty years on we still haven’t found the question.

Iron Maiden have been looking though, and having found each other and themselves again with Brave New World, their follow-up Dance of Death is an attempt to continue the search for deeper meaning and something else to sing about besides the devil and history’s bad men. That’s not the theme of this album though – despite the title, DoD has no theme, and that’s an initial failing. The previous effort won through on the large spectacle of the band’s reinvigorated return, and its longevity when all of its comrades from 1980 had dwindled or stumbled off into solo projects (or actually DIED!) Their rejoinder is a hodgepodge of tracks, each technically tight and well-executed, but also a song apart from the rest. The pieces are there, but the places are wrong. Furthermore, this is the workings of older men. While the instrumentation goes undiminished, Bruce Dickinson’s voice shows the first signs of its aging here (although he’s still a formidable talent), and Steve Harris and Adrian Smith are tackling their issues with questionable direction. “I’ve got to organise some changes in my life!” is the opening line to track one Wildest Dreams, a baby-booming paean to hitting the open road on one’s new wheels. Whee! But really, these are hardly the same league as NotB’s longboats, X-Factor’s eleven saintly shrouded men, or BNW’s hand of fate? It’s a self-help manifesto for change – a mid-life crisis in the form of a song that could double as a car ad. Things improve with Rainmaker, another fast-paced high-end foot stomper, and No More Lies, a sort of Masque of Red Death with a chorus that does what it says on the tin and allows some Gatling gun drumming from Nicko McBrain to back the shouted title. All three songs are individually different, yet typical of Dance of Death, being the summation of over twenty years of Maiden doing their thing, but not pushing the boat out too far, and perhaps that’s the album in microcosm. Of all of Maiden’s fifteen studio outings, this is the one I feel the least goodwill towards – even Virtual XI has its moments as much as the two ex-Smith, pre-Bayley records. Dance sounds great, but it’s the sound of not a lot.

There are no classic tracks here – Smith’s Paschendale is the closest to meeting the criterion, but with two albums to come it’s not difficult to see its ideas being better exercised later on – ditto album closer and acoustic number Journeyman. Between these is material which is far from being dross (there’s no repeat of Quest for Fire, for example), but frustratingly misses the mark, even with every band member contributing to the lyrics and composition. Janick Gers provides much of the title track, and it stands out for being a little too much like Number of the Beast in narrative and therefore out of time. Montsegur is the least appealing – a shouty, clanging noise of a song with Dickinson racing to keep up with the meter. Age of Innocence has a reliably excellent solo by Dave Murray, but is spoiled lyrically – Harris railing against the injustices of the world around him with all the insight of a taxi driver. “A life of petty crime gets punished with a holiday/ the victims’ minds are scarred for live most every day” – what, scarred by petty crime? You really think that, Steve? For me it’s uncomfortably close to the over-earnest sound of the late 80s ‘social comment’ song, so many dealing with the plight of the world’s poor, performed by residents of the world’s tax havens. It’s disingenuous, and even if that isn’t the intent, the association sticks, and I’ll never pretend to imagine that the prison system is for anyone a ‘holiday’. I shouted back at the song when I first heard it and still grumble over skipping it now.

But re-listening to the album in full as this blog has required of me has borne some fruit. The lesser-played tracks Gates of Tomorrow, New Frontier and Face in the Sand have each earned a new ear and probably by virtue of not being the title track, the big message, the opener or closer, have been more enjoyable for it. The doom saying Face in the Sand in particular is the album’s highlight for me, and in a pared-down listing should definitely opened Dance of Death, beginning with Dickinson’s upper register and detailing some form of game plan for a collection of songs from a band held together as friends and equals while the world seemingly falls apart around them.

Cover Art
Well, here it is. Despite recent stiff competition, we've come to the worst ever Iron Maiden album cover. It's a tragedy and a travesty - obviously at some point there was a design specification here, a plan of some kind, and then everything went haywire and before everyone knew it the thing was finished before all of the fancy digital artwork could actually be rendered, polished and tested before a live studio audience. At least Eddie's centred - even if everyone else is in cluttered non-solid dimensions land. Fans didn't take kindly to this, some een thinking it an actual joke on the band's part, but it seems the truth is theat someone deicided it was finished before the artist (not Riggsy, not Melvyn Grant) decided it was. The rest is now consigned to Maiden history, save for the artist's name, which he asked to have removed (and fair enough too).

On the other hand, inside the booklet are some of the band's best posed pictures of the guys, surrounded by blurry artistically nude ladies in masquerade masks. Top stuff, made all the more arrestiog for their contrast to the throw-up on the front.

Album Tracks
(taken from the Death on the Road tour where possible)
Wildest Dreams
Rainmaker
No More Lies
Dance of Death
Montsegur
Gates of Tomorrow
New Frontier
Paschendale
Face in the Sand
Age of Innocence (save yourselves! Try Nicko's version instead)
Journeyman

This, That and the Otter

2010-11-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

Last posting on Albert for a while, promise.

Anyway, the book is out and sales are pretty good. At the moment supply is chasing demand, so that's promising too. Oh, and the coverage!

David's blog Southerly kicked things off on Public Address and conversation was plentiful and really positive, even if it eventually turned into a linguistic discussion free of otters. This sort of stuff happens on PA, and that's cool.

A week or so later there was a nice piece in The Press, largely about the author but with some good reproductions of the book's artwork. I'm sure I must have been reading Phillip Matthews' stuff for nearly twenty years now and have dug it for just as long. He can carry on saying nice things about us, frankly!

Then Morgue sent me this hat-tip courtesy of the VUW Psyc department newsletter. Whoah. Didn't see that coming. Nice to see we're in good company.

And finally and most recently, we made Steve Braunias' 'Best Of 2010' column over the weekend in the Sunday Star Times supplement. Unexpected, unsolicited, and very cool, from another writer I could just read and read again.

Result. For any readers out there who've contacted me about copies, hang tight, they're on their way. In the mean-time, I'm crossing my fingers and sharpening my pencil for the next project.

Otter and out!

Talkin’ Eds – Best of the ‘B’ Sides (2002)

2010-11-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

You can tell a lot about a band, judge their character possibly, by the quality of their B sides. Perhaps that’s going a little far – I have a limited experience when it comes to b-side collections and only own a few, being mainly a completist for the bands whose flippers I have collected. Blur’s b-sides I’ve found virtually impregnable, despite being a big fan of their singles. But I do believe that the status of these often lesser-known songs deserve as much attention as album tracks for a given band, if not as much attention as the singles themselves. For the most part from their heyday through to their demise sometime in the last ten years they have been released alongside a band’s crop of their best or most accessible work. Perhaps the marriage isn’t always a happy one, and perhaps management or record company machinations make some pairings of single and b-side something of a shotgun affair, but for as long as the two have been paired we’ve been stuck with them. Artists, choose your b-sides as wisely as your singles, I say.

A prolific band needn’t fear the prospect of a b-side. If lesser songs can’t be added, out-takes included or demos trialled on the spare vinyl of a 45 single, then other options offer themselves: a live track, perhaps, an interview for the fans, maybe? How about a cover of another band’s song? Iron Maiden did all of these from 1980 through to 2000 and the resulting double CD release collects the majority of this output. For the most part there are covers, which shouldn’t diminish the appeal of the title, as they are pretty well chosen and not immediately familiar – in fact, I would venture to say that it’s the more familiar tracks (Who and Zeppelin I’m looking at you) which suffer the most from sloppy execution or poor comparison. For myself I wasn’t aware of a lot of the bands from whose crops Maiden have harvested these songs: Tull I do know of course, plus UFO and Free, but the rest are a new discovery and so the collection offers something of an introduction to those bands who have inspired maiden along the way. I think that’s what the intention was, and it’s a cool gesture. There are some notables here: Reach Out has Adrian Smith singing – a slightly throaty vocal reminiscent of Joe Elliot (in a good way) with Bruce Dickinson providing backing. It’ a good match, and a shame Smith didn’t get any other opportunity to flex his vocal chords. Doctor Doctor is the last cover and the last Blaze Bayley song featured here, but distinguishes itself for being a popular song for the band to play before live shows. It’s actually one of Bayley’s best vocal performances with maiden, and is a standout for that. The other standout I’d nominate is actually absent, and one of my favourite Maiden covers – Thin Lizzy’s Massacre from Seventh Son, in which Maiden speed things up to a tempo that suits them, and Dickinson demonstrates just how much of an influence the voice of Phil Lynott was on his style. Fortunately this is available as a track on the iTunes version of Seventh Son, so it was an easy purchase for me.

I have less to say about the live versions – Maiden is in its element lie and so the quality here is reliable, despite a cheat here and there. Remember Tomorrow is a Di’Anno era recording with Dickinson’s voice overdubbed and it feels less honest for that, but the rest of the selection is very sound – it’s good to hear DiAnno letting loose on Drifter early on and Blaze sounding in good form also. Like the covers the selection ere is not exhaustive, but it’s enough, and Dickinson’s version of Futureal from Rock in Rio (I think) rounds things off well.

Which brings me to the originals. An even more mixed bag, particularly for being something of a pick and mix. Invasion is called a proto-version of NotB’s Invaders, and brings out the early punky side attributed to the band in its infancy, while Burning Ambition wears a few influences – Boston, Cheap Trick, on its sleeve. At the other end of the collection are two of the three X-Factor cast-offs covered earlier. Good for those interested in Blaze’s potential, but almost all of them not absolutely cheated as potential album fillers. Between these poles are the four novelty originals – Black Bart and Nodding Donkey Blues, The Sheriff of Huddersfield and Roll Over Vic Vella. Half of them dedicated to the subject of bedding groupies, the other half about support crew or management. Sheriff (directed at band manager Rod Smallwood) is the funniest and least offensive, and Vic Vella (which as you’d expect takes its musical cue from Chuck Berry) the least intelligible. The other two are indicative of the changing nature of the band and its output – very self-indulgent, throwaway, and not as cap-doffing to musical roots. I’d be as happy to not have these, and perhaps Dickinson’s fourth-form interjections over the closing lines of Juanita and Space Station No. 5 as I would have the omissions listed below, but you can’t have them all, literally.

Cover Art
We’re beyond serious Eddie here, and the technique is rougher for it, as well. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury – in deference to the compilation title Edward the Head presents his very own and decidedly ‘b’ side out of a (tour bus?) windscreen. The CD-label design sketches for Somewhere in Time and Stranger in a Strange Land inside the package may be more to your taste.

Track Listing:
These are out of order in the following list
Originals:
Burning Ambition
Invasion
The Sheriff of Huddersfield
Black Bart Blues
Nodding Donkey Blues
Roll Over Vic Vella
Justice of the Peace
Judgement Day

Not featured: I Live My Way

Live versions:
Drifter
Remember Tomorrow
Prowler ‘88
Charlotte the Harlot ‘88
Blood on the World’s Hands
The Aftermath
Futureal
Wasted Years

Covers:
I’ve Got the Fire (Montrose)
Cross-Eyed Mary (Jethro Tull)
Rainbow’s Gold (Beckett)
King of Twilight (Nektar)
Reach Out (ASAP/The Entire Population of Hackney)
That Girl (As above)
Juanita (Marshall Fury)
All in Your Mind (Stray)
Kill Me Ce Soir (Golden Earring)
I’m a Mover (Free)
Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)
Space Station No. 5 (Montrose)
I Can’t See My Feelings (Budgie)
My Generation (The Who)
Doctor Doctor (UFO)

Not featured: The Massacre (Thin Lizzy)

Whole Otter Love

2010-10-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

Hooray! The Hidden Talent of Albert Otter has now sold out of its limited first edition! This is good news, but there's more to come as a couple of other translations are now completed and a launch of the second print run is imminent.

To mark the occasion, a couple of out-takes (ott-takes?):

Albert as a line-art profile for the front endpapers.

A smaller illustration not intended for publication.

Copies are still available for pre-order through Public Address Books

Otter in a Can

2010-10-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

Some of my more regular readers may know that for the past year or thereabouts my attention has been taken up by many things domestic and creative, and deputy chief among these is this chap here, Albert Otter. I’m delighted to announce that after eight months of evenings and occasional weekends wrestling with a pretty new medium, my illustrations for David Haywood’s wonderful story The Hidden Talents of Albert Otter are now on the eve of publication. The book is rit, the pics are drwnd. I have enjoyed a sleep like no other for a good week or so now.

The project was long in execution and had some build-up. I initially contacted David through his blog after his call for an artist for a previous project, on which we made some headway before the very early arrival of Jet Junior meant my complete attention and energy were needed elsewhere for the foreseeable future. That illustration project went no further, and in the interim David completed his second book, the scurrilous and outrageous NZ Reserve Bank Annual 2010. I missed the Parliamentary launch but gate-crashed his setting up for the signing at Arty Bees to say Hi and (hopefully) reconnect as things domestic had settled down considerably. Gracious and welcoming as ever, David offered me a copy of the book and said he had a new project in mind and would I be interested? A few days later he revealed it was to be Albert (of course it would be Albert!), and we set to work, gradually planning the look and feel of the book.

David was initially interested in an Oliver Jeffers approach (though not a slavish copy of course), while I’d imagined something Beatrix Potter-ish. I think we struck a happy medium, and in the event David’s feedback throughout has been positive, helpful and insightful. Readers of David’s blog will of course know that his home is among those in one of the worst-hit areas of the Christchurch quake zone, so his patience and encouragement are, in my opinion, absolutely heroic. And now, scarping on the good side of a deadline the book is done – hooray!

For a better look inside I urge you to visit the preview pages at Public Address Books.
More details on availability are there.

Thanks to David and his family and of course my family for their patience and stoicism over the last eight months, and to those generous friends who’ve already put orders in!

Talkin' Eds - Brave New World (2000)

2010-10-20T10:32:00.001-07:00

Iron Maiden have reformed, and it’s an interesting thing. Most band reunions take place over a short space of time and are generated around a particular event – a tour, a Best Of album or perhaps an appearance borne from other media – say, a movie appearance. Maiden’s is different, as much as the band itself are different to many about at the time or since. Bruce Dickinson has had a pretty good solo career, and Adrian Smith too has enjoyed collaboration with other musicians and the chance to flex his considerable talent; but over the time of their respective absence from the main band things have changed. The band has got older, the brand itself has aged and music – heavy metal in particular, has evolved. Blaze has come and gone. All of this is evident and has been covered in previous posts, but what bears repeating from those for me is that the writing of Steve Harris, to date still the core and main writer for Iron Maiden, has also changed. His compositions – never simple in the first place, have by and large lengthened, involving fewer tricky time changes and more slow-build; his lyrics have moved on from the Hammer Horror stock of the past and embraced the subjects of a maturing man. There’s much more of this to come over Maiden’s most recent (last?) three full studio albums, but for the moment the band’s ‘comeback’ album has the unenviable challenge of acknowledging the past, and marking time as it looks to a future with the biggest line-up it’s ever had.

I love the fact that despite Smith’s return Maiden have retained Janick Gers. It seems only fair – in 2000 he’d already served more time than Smith had in years and only two albums shy to equalise him. Like Smith he’s had a hand in writing and composing too, significantly changing the sound of the band. Brave New World is as much a product of Gers’ time in Maiden as any of his previous records, although it seems the dynamics of three guitarists on stage at once are themselves a developing thing for live Maiden. Early shows for the reunited band carried reviews that reduced Gers to backing guitar, or class-clown with his now trademark antics of throwing his instrument and dancing with it to fill in the gaps as it were. On the album however the roles change.

Brave New World does open on a tease, mind. The Wicker Man is one of a small number of traditional Maiden songs, and you’d be forgiven for thinking its position in the track listing is as Trojan Horse – all the old Maiden hallmarks are there: fast pace, sing-along chorus, horror movie trappings. It’s a cheat though – Harris’ “Your time has come!” catch cry isn’t directed at the song/movie’s unwilling sacrifice, but the band’s new audience of young listeners accrued in the previous decade and seemingly entering this new millennium at the height of their potential – “hand of fate is moving and the finger points to you/ He knocks you to your feet and so what are you gonna do?” After ten years of railing against a changing world around him Harris is passing the baton to the next generation.

From there on Brave New World settles in, an exploration of the musical developments of the past three albums, with the essential reinjection of two of its greatest assets. This is a good album, and one from a band who know what they are, confident in a very strong fanbase (particularly in Europe and South America, who would be repaid the debt in the monumental CD and DVD Rock in Rio the following year). The songs have greater space and less gallop than Classic Maiden, but are the stronger for this, I think. Oddly, it’s the fillers – The Mercenary, The Fallen Angel and possibly The Wicker Man, which evoke the band of old and stand out as being a little less than the maturer efforts of, say, Blood Brothers and the album’s title track. At risk of repeating myself, the album does slow somewhat towards the end – Iron maiden seem to have an issue with album length and often err on the side of too long. Perhaps it’s the newer slow-build approach that affects the last three tracks, but each of them The Nomad (clunky beginning and dodgy lyrics but a beautiful instrumental section), Out of the Silent Planet and The Thin Line Between Love and Hate show that there’s still time for the band to look again at track arrangement. For the most part the albums are better paced from here, though this is by no means a poor effort. It’s a great return to form, and in that, not an entire return at all, which is all the better.

I bought the previous compilation CD Best of the Beast after chancing across the band performing The Wicker Man on Top of the Pops , of all places. It’s a mimed playback, alas – a far cry from the ragged and punchy live band debut of years ago, but it did the job. The band were older, Bruce had cut his hair and divested himself of the studded gauntlets of his heyday, but my partner and I were suitably impressed.

Cover Art
If you look carefully there’s the ghost of Derek Riggs in here somewhere – or rather, the ghost of his Eddie, the remaining (and apparently unauthorised) use of an earlier mock-up cover he’d done for the Wicker Man single. I’m not enthralled by this album cover, mainly because it’s just not an Iron Maiden cover – it’s static, scenic, and Eddie’s once again pushed to the background. The days of the band mascot being the star feature are now gone. On the back the boys stand in a field of weather balloons (used in the official video for The Wicker Man here). Ooh, haven’t they aged well?

Album tracks
The Wicker Man (Rock in Rio version - non-album intro!)
Ghost of the Navigator (Rock in Rio version)
Brave New World (Rock in Rio version)
Blood Brothers (Rock in Rio version)
The Mercenary (Rock in Rio version)
The Dream of Mirrors (Rock in Rio version)
The Fallen Angel (live in Argentina)
The Nomad (fan video using Hildago footage)
Out of the Silent Planet (album version, official video cuts off the intro)
The Thin Line Between Love and Hate

Brother

2010-10-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

My discovery of Tolkien was chiefly through my brother. Like a lot of younger siblings I suppose, I idolised my elder ones – him in particular, and spent many of my earlier years hanging on his every word. Things changed, as they inevitably do when we both became older and in turn desired more personal space, literally and figuratively. But for five or six years we shared a room and lived in each other’s heads, after a fashion. Second-hand I learned about machines, history (wars, mainly), school ground politics and the exploits of his friends (who all seemed so much more daring and clever and funny than mine). I learned about which music was best and what happened in movies I wasn’t allowed to stay up and watch, and in the dim orange bedside lamplight of our room I learned scarier things too. The "Bomb" that mankind had made which could destroy anything, but couldn’t be disposed of itself (“you couldn’t even shoot it into space”), and of course I was told the story of The Lord of the Rings.

This is the edition we had at home – bought, I think, by him as a school prize in third form. The cover drew me in, seemingly infinite in perspective and possibility – a window into a mountainous and green world framed by arching trees, with strange creatures (Gollum?) playing among their roots. The potted version of the story I was told had Gandalf the Wizard, a Hobbit called Frodo and a creature called Gollum who plotted secretly to himself to steal back the Ring, and a cool Elf called Legolas. And it had Orcs “evil things like goblins, but with faces like a mix of men and animals”, and their shadowy overlord “Soaron”, the real Lord of the Rings who watched over everything in a tower on the other side of Middle Earth. Expressive gesticulating hands casting shadows over the bedroom walls, and increasingly hushed tones after the lights went out; somehow it’s this version which has stayed with me – gripping, imaginative, as full of possibility as that book jacket, far more than the book I eventually read and read again, or the film adaptations I watched. None of them conveyed the same mystery or creepiness or heroism that my brother was able to over those summer nights, not long before we’d move into our own rooms and everything would change again.

In times to come I’d be relayed more stories – synopses of whatever he’d been watching – Monty Python, Rocky Horror, The Who’s Tommy, and after that his D&D games with some of those self-same schoolmates (God how I envied him!) All of them eventually discovered by me in time, but somehow diminished with it. First time is always the best, and so many of them never lived up to those early lights-out re-tellings. I still think he's one of the best storytellers I know, and so this post is for him.

Happy birthday, big brother.

(Another Very Special) Talkin' Eds - Viral XI!

2010-10-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

As mentioned earlier, Virtual XI was a real disappointment to me, featuring some poor song choices, particularly in light of some stronger songs preceding the album in the single Virus and a couple of original B-Sides from The X Factor. Angel and the Gambler kills the album early from its length, and the whole virtual reality inspired name dates it even for 1998. So with no more ado, I present: Viral XI!

No more football theme - this album really has eleven tracks!

And a Derek Riggs cover (taken from the poster for Futureal)!

Angel and the Gambler is still here, but shorter!

Album Tracks

Virus
Futureal
Judgement Day
Lightning Strikes Twice
The Angel and the Gambler (single edit)
The Clansman
When Two Worlds Collide
The Educated Fool
Justice of the Peace
Don't Look to the Eyes of a Stranger
Como Estes Amigo

Talkin' Eds - Virtual XI (1998)

2010-09-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm going to keep this brief. In my opinion Virtual XI is the worst Iron Maiden album so far. Unlike The X Factor I don't think its reputation can be saved by calling it a side-project for Steve Harris and his friends - this one is just not a great collection of material. Collectively it's the sound of five pairs of eyes being taken off the ball, to borrow a football metaphor - and why not, as of course Harris himself decided to here

But first, a matter of catching up. Iron Maiden haven't been idle since album number ten, having put out The Best of the Beast - my re-entry into their canon, as it were, and with it the non-album single Virus. Virus is Harris’ answer to critics of the band’s recent direction and despite a rather rough video is a pretty decent song for this era, recalling bits of Edge of Darkness and Metallica’s One in the intro. The main guitar again has the weird, thin overdub sound referred to in The X Factor, and it returns on Virtual XI, a number of songs from which sadly don’t meet the standard set by Virus or the album before it. Did Harry burn himself out with that one song, I wonder?

XI certainly starts reliably enough, with the pre X Factor quickfire opening track reinstated. Futureal is one of two songs here which survived the Bayley era for a while and still goes down well. It’s an energetic, spiralling song which doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s immediate successor does, however, and is probably the biggest, ugliest nail in the album’s coffin. The Angel and the Gambler is Iron Maiden doing a crowd opening stadium song, years after they perfected such tracks. The result is a plodding, hackneyed and overlong mess with a really really really repetitive filler trio of lines (‘don’t you think I’m a saviour, don’t you think I can save ya, don’t you think I can save your life” – around 21 times in succession). It’s simply too much, and its Superbowl keyboard stabs punctuating the verses kill any attempt at ‘rock’. Oh, its video references the sleeve for Stranger in a Strange Land, by the way. Dave Murray’s Lightning Strikes Twice is mostly good, with the main weaknesses being the verse to chorus leads in and a dated guitar rhythm. Plus the song is about… lightning striking. It’s not asking too much, but in the wake of outside criticism of a new lead singer I’d imagine that a reasonably decent composition like this with a gift of a song title could have had farther reaching lyrics to match – maybe, I dunno, thematically addressing the possibility that another great frontman for the band could be a possibility? Instead it, like Angel, is detached from the album at large – it’s the second filler song in a row. Things pick up with The Clansman, another ‘epic’ song based around the story of William Wallace, probably. Well, based on the recollections of someone who once saw Braveheart perhaps. There’s more lazy songwriting here with harks to ‘the land of the free’ and biscuit tin Highlands ‘they’re taking our land/that belongs to the clans’ – the sort of thing Irvine Welsh called ‘Jocksploitation’. It’s a shame, because Bayley clearly believes in the song and it served him well, as it did Janick Gers’ rather soulful into. Clansman is the second survivor of the album, and has probably aged better as a live song for it.

I’m coming down hard on the lyrics and composition of Virtual XI mainly, but I have to say I’m not impressed by the production either. The album was made using Pro Tools, and it has a shallowness to it that exacerbates the impression that for a lot of the songs there seems to be only one guitar really working. I’m not sure what’s going on, but Maiden’s signature twin guitars have fled the studio by this album, and the result means that these track in particular sound overlong and over linear. I mean absolutely no pretence or ambition in saying they sound like something I could have composed in my band days – and I was a rubbish composer. When Two Worlds Collide is a prime example – maybe the worst song on the album for boneheaded lyrics (it’s about an approaching asteroid, not a planet) and very straight structure that again does Bayley no favours. The Educated Fool is where Harris opens up a little more and has become a highlight for me. It’s still not great in all, but does have a variety in touch that makes you forget the songs before. Don’t Look To The Eyes of a Stranger is a Killers-era theme which could have been shorter and would have been better for it. At last, and the last song of Blaze’s days, is Como Etsais Amigo, co-written again with Gers and after nearly an hour’s inane plodding it serves to end the record on a dignified note. Initially about the Falklands War (though not actually about the war but the need for rebuilding friendship afterwards), I can’t hear it without imagining it as a fitting farewell to Bayley himself as frontman. Probably the best song on the album.

I don’t know much about Virtual XI’s creation, but I’m guessing it wasn’t good. The album was launched alongside a themed video game (never a good idea) Ed Hunter and images from that litter the booklet along with the aforementioned football shots and merchandise offers. We’re a long way away from the young chancers posing in the London Dungeons or in the sun-drenched Barbados. Distracted, tired, and maybe looking for an escape clause, I just don’t think Maiden were trying hard enough here, and it shows.

Cover Art

Mind you, it's not all bad. Melvyn Grant, the artist responsible for the cover art Fear of the Dark does a decent job here is bringing together the disparate elements of 'Arry's shopping list - here's Eddie in blood-red bestial glory, a virtual reality machine (maybe ten years out of fashion but hey ho), and finally some of yer actual football being played. The band feature in the liner booklet also in football strips, so this is an indulgence of the soccer-mad Harris clearly being played out. Interestingly Derek Riggs' name seems to have still been on Maiden's rolodex as he had a stab at the album cover too (look out for it next post), but Grant's does the trick well enough, and while Riggs' is reliably good, maybe it references his past work a little too much.

Album Tracks

Futureal
The Angel and the Gambler (4-minute version)
Lightning Strikes Twice (album version)
The Clansman (album version, bad fan art?)
When Two Worlds Collide (live , and better for being faster!)
The Educated Fool (live, Canada)
Don’t Look to the Eyes of a Stranger (album version)
Como Estais Amigo (album version)

"Which will it be?"

2010-09-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

I reckon that Generation X is to date the last generation to play Cowboys and Indians as children. Lots of elements probably fed the genre's popular demise - urbanisation and the urbanisation of its motifs and archetypes (perhaps most potently in the figure of The Man With No Name turning into Harry Callahan), the emergence of Sci-Fi as a popular cinematic genre in the Seventies, shifting cultural identity in an increasingly mutlicultural United States... and possibly bigger and more obvious reasons than those which occur to me now.

Consequently the Westerns of my childhood were largely from off the TV - shows like Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger and their ilk. There were very few Western movies I recall watching with interest, and few which stuck with me. I properly discovered Westerns in my university Film Studies course, and only then realised what I'd dismissed or simply not seen.

Having said that, I still haven't seen a lot of Westerns, but I do count some of them among my all-time favourite movies. So I was really excited to hear that one of those, which I fondly recall watching around the age of nine or ten, has been remade by the Coen Brothers:

If you've not seen the original, hell, why not just watch its trailer below and have the whole thing pretty much told to you in hilarious style. I'm guessing the 2010 revision will be less on the lightness and a more ponderous piece, which isn't to discount the original at all. True Grit's a great story, and the Duke deserved the Oscar he got for bringing Rooster Cogburn to life on the big screen. Roll on, December...

And seriously, how cool is Wayne in that last confrontation?

Talkin' Eds - The X Factor (1995)

2010-09-20T01:29:00.000-07:00

1995 In Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal is dead. Its Glam and Speed successors have similarly come and gone – Metallica and Anthrax have gone grunge and the future, it appears, is in Death, Goth, Industrial and Nu-Metal. In the same year of The X Factor Slipknot and Korn form, and Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke are also on the scene, also informing some of the mood for Nineties heavy music.

The X Factor, Maiden’s tenth studio album is a reaction to the changing scene, and arguably the last time the band audibly change with the times. On a personal level it’s fed by events in Steve Harris’ own personal life (a divorce and the death of his father) and the world around him. With Bruce Dickinson having left the band, Harris seems to have drawn a line under the band of the past and sought a new sound with the enthusiastic and agreeable (and less fractious) Blaze Bayley as his helmsman. The resulting album is dark, less self-knowing than previous efforts, and inescapably introspective. The ‘X’ moniker is a useful peg on which to hand the whole project, offering as it does many interpretations – X being the Roman numeral ten of course, X the unknown, X the cross of suffering, faith and perhaps salvation. More so than previous albums I get the sense that The X Factor is actually trying to be something other than another set of songs for the band’s fans, and to a degree it works as that, however those same fans received it at the time. I quite like this album, but it’s not a party album, or maybe even one for company. Is it an Iron Maiden album? I still don’t know. It may be that it would have gone down better as a side project under a different name – in some corners it wasn’t received well at all, Kerrang! Magazine going as far as inviting a very real thrashing by Harris for blithely dubbing it ‘a novelty record’. Nevertheless, The X Factor is important Maiden history, and a significant album in the band's canon.

The Album

The album opens strongly, as most Maiden efforts do, but eschew the standard fast-paced potboiler for a long narrative, The Sign of the Cross, wrought around a condemned man during the inquisition and musically recalling the slow build-up of Somewhere in Time's Alexander the Great. As I indicated in that review, this is the version I prefer, with some new and uncharacteristic sounds adding great atmospehere - Gregorian-styled chant for one, with bayley's opening vocals not appearing until well into the second minute. It's an impressive start and an immediate highlight with some of Dave Murray's best lead guitar in the hird acts and, rouding things off, bayley closing the song and the instruments fade around him. It's a fantastic gesture of faith by harris in his new vocalist to allow him to carry the most important track of a new album alone, and it pays off. The following two songs are more traditional in style and tempo - Lord of the Flies once again takes its cue from literature, in this case William Golding's novel, while Man on the Edge is lifted directly from Joel Shumacker's cinematic tour de force Falling Down. And then the album begins.

As said before, if there's an overall theme to The X Factor it's an internal one, Maiden's darkest album to date being far-removed from the cartoon bogeys of Number of the Beast and its ilk, and set most often in the mindset of its songs' protagonists - prisoners, soldiers, doubters, unbelievers and loners. There's melancholy, particularly in the beautiful and simple 2am, outrage in Blood on the World's Hands (informed by the Balkans conflicts), and even horror, as effectively conveyed in the album's clear nod to Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Edge of Darkness.

Throughout Bayley's voice maintains a level growl, an early indicator of his range, certainly, but very much suited to the atmosphere of the album. Compositionally the instruments favour the bottom-end - bass and drums (nicely recorded) are at the fore. Lead guitar is mixed – Dave Murray is strong, but if the rhythm duties are Janick Gers, then the thin, overdubbed treatment given here does him no favours. There's minimal keyboard, and ample use of simple guitar picking - lead-in arpeggios, an indulgent but well-times bass intro for Blood, and the aforementioned 2am's solo by Gers, recalling his work on Wasted Love, providing an effortless and expressive break mid-song. In the first of a couple of notable collaborations Maiden's two most recent members show that they are a great team.

Lyrically the album is a step up as well, with some sensible lyrics in comparison to come of Fear of the Dark's clangers - I particularly like The Aftermath's stab at the likes of Owen or Sassoon, and while Darkness pretty much makes a case for plagiarism from Coppola's script wholesale, it is what it is and isn't pretending to be anything but. In all I find The X Factor pretty strong as an album, despite some limited vocal range and two adjacent intros (Fortunes of War/Look For the Truth) that resemble one another perhaps a little closely. As a Blaze album it's his best - sensitively recorded and playing to his strengths. Sadly, it's downhill from here.

Unusually, The X Factor over-ran in its original compositions, resulting in three extra tracks being released as B-sides, two of which also appear on the Best of the B’sides collection.

Cover Art
A radical departure of course, being a photo of Eddie in verus vita to intents and purposes. But intent aside, this is a deeply unpleasant image both for striving to be lifelike, and in the unrelenting violence depicted. That might seem a slightly overwrought criticism – it’s a model Eddie after all, and therefore a model of a fantasy character; however the attempt to make Eddie ‘real’ succeeds too well in removing the cartoon aspect of the mascot (Eddie doesn’t even have his hellfire eyes, but human ones), and the result is just not nice to look at. Furthermore, I think rather than inviting listening of the album, it puts the would-be buyer off, either because the subject matter is too sensitive, or possibly because despite the aforementioned realism of the piece, it’s still cartoon enough to look juvenile at the same time. What a pity a black album cover had already been done so recently and recognisably by a more successful metal act.

Apparently an alternative ‘wide angle’ shot was made available to satisfy more squeamish markets. It’s the less provocative of the two, and the one I’ve opted for. I like the clouds in that version as well, and the crossed girders behind Eddie’s electric chair carry the ‘X’ theme effectively. Ultimately however, this is a failed cover to my mind – too realistic to dismiss outright as fantasy, yet too tied to its ‘metal’ roots to convey the true sense of departure. In all a painted Riggs-alike cover would be preferable, but that said, The X Factor still doesn’t have the worst Iron Maiden album cover ever!

Album Tracks via YouTube
The Sign of the Cross
(bonus: fan video with Dickinson vocals based on The Name of the Rose)
Lord of the Flies
Man on the Edge
(bonus: fan video based on Falling Down)
Fortunes of War
Look for the Truth
The Aftermath (live B-side version)
Judgement of Heaven
Blood on the World’s Hands (live - Sao Paolo?)
Edge of Darkness
(bonus: fan video based on Apocalypse Now)
2am
The Unbeliever

The Corellian Job

2010-09-14T02:48:00.000-07:00

More than likely this is everywhere at the moment, and thanks to Dave for sharing it with me, but if you haven't already, you must check this out:

It's an animated Star Wars that is true to the originals! The colour palette, the sounds, the music and even the dialogue just sing Seventies Star Wars - and it's a beautiful thing.

I'm not a big Star Wars fan. I'm really not. But aged seven it was the biggest thing in my world, and even this many years later I can see and hear the in-jokes and visual references to the original trilogy and in particular the first movie here. It's not overdone, no-one's trying to push an agenda (the last shot is a bit of fun, and why the hell not?), and you can see how easy it would have been to have taken all the talent here and ruined it by going too far, too fannish. But they didn't, and that's really cool.

Lando has to appear in the next one though, guys!

Talkin' Eds: In the Days of Blaze

2010-09-06T01:35:00.001-07:00

For years I wasn’t aware that Iron Maiden had a third vocalist. In fact, it was only on properly inspecting the booklet of The Best of the Beast that I saw him – a (then) young man with sculpted sideburns and long black hair, named Blaze Bayley.
Blaze Bayley was born Bayley Cooke in 1963 and made his name in music as the lead singer in Brummie (well, Tamworth) act Wolfsbane. Like Bruce Dickinson’s Samson the band had a bumpy history and a few stabs at the big time – a handful of albums, some music videos and promise of US exposure, but their profile wasn’t high, and it’s probable that after Dickinson’s departure Bayley might not have become the new Maiden frontman but for the good fortune of Wolfsbane supporting Maiden on the No Prayer on the Road tour. Here’s what they might have sounded like, a little more polished for international release:

I think I can see why Steve Harris might have encouraged Bayley to audition. Audition he did, and the rest is history, albeit a diminishing part of Maiden’s growing story. Nevertheless, despite his brief time with the band he leaves as his legacy two albums, a handful of original B-sides and a tenure that lasted a good six years; he outlasted Di’Anno and was nearly in the band as long as Adrian Smith’s first term. Granted, his voice doesn’t compare well to Dickinson’s – it’s deeper; deeper than DiAnno’s in fact. But that doesn’t matter if you consider the direction Maiden were taking at the time – longer, more ponderous songs, less of the spitfire Eighties composition. To that end, Blaze was a pretty good fit.

Unfortunately it seems now that the fans simply wanted Bruce Mk II, and more to the point, they wanted an unchanged Maiden. The band’s development continued, but took faltering steps in doing this, with the ultimate effect of giving Bayley one good album for his voice, and one where his vocal limitations could not save struggling compositions. Furthermore both album tours were hampered by an apparent on-stage allergy Blaze suffered from (oddly not to manifest in his later acts), which compromised his vocals and, combined with a pretty static presence unlike Dickinson’s hyper one, gave mixed performances. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. For what it’s worth, I like Blaze Bayley, and I think at least half of his material with Maiden not only has legs but is well suited for the band at the time. Bruce’s return may have saved Maiden’s reputation with the headlines it garnered, but the band’s fall from grace isn’t just down to this one man, at all.

As a final taste, here’s Bayley with the band gamely struggling through The Trooper, a song that few vocalists could do justice to, and which was plainly unsuited to a touring baritone. Performance-wise it’s a near disaster, with a member of the crowd spitting at the singer while he gets more and more worked up by the insult directed at him. Keep watching to the end and you’ll see that bandleader Harris doesn’t leave his frontman to wear it alone but stands alongside him, ready to unleash some serious aggro on the audience himself. Amidst a pretty ugly scene, there’s a solidarity that wasn’t as evident in Maiden’s fanbase at the time.

Bayley’s Wikipedia entry reads as you’d expect it might – a real rollercoaster of fortunes peppered with mismanagement and personal tragedy. His solo career went well enough, and recently he’s toured with a reformed Wolfsbane, seemingly happier and in a better place for it. Good on him, and godspeed, Blaze.

Putting the Fan Film into Fantasy Films

2010-08-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

Not quite in the wake of Judge Minty, here's an earlier stab at the 2000AD-based fan trailer; a mock trailer this time, and in French. I'm sure its writer would approve nonetheless given his work in French press.

Voici Pat Mills' Slaine the Horned God, based on the book of the same name by Mills and Bisley, and reproducing the latter's work with admirable devotion!

I didn't think it too many, etc.

Talkin' Eds - No Fear of the Dying mash-up

2010-08-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

In concluding this month's overview of the last albums of Iron Maiden's great initial push, it occurred to me that with the relative weaknesses of No Prayer for the Dying and Fear of the Dark there's a pretty decent album's worth of material between them. This mash-up album, call it 'No Fear of the Dying', could effortlessly bridge the gap between Maiden of old (raucous, impish, aggressive in places and punchy with song length) with the Maiden that was developing - longer, more studious, introspective yet looking out at a real world rather than a fantasy one.

Then I thought, why weigh one side of an album with the early attempts at the latter, of which only Afraid to Shoot Strangers survives as anything close to a stand-out? So back to the fun stuff it was.

Lads and gentlemen - introducing No Fear - Iron Maiden of old's last gasp before the age of Blaze and the return of Bruce:

No Fear of the Dying

Tailgunner
Holy Smoke
No Prayer for the Dying
From Here to Eternity
Hooks in You
Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter
Be Quick or Be Dead
Weekend Warrior
Wasting Love
Chains of Misery
Judas Be My Guide
Fear of the Dark

Right, now to make up an iTunes playlist and see if this thing will fly!

Judge Minty fan trailer

2010-08-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Dave who also sent me a Fleetway reprint of the original strip a while back, it's the Judge Minty teaser for the forthcoming fan film:

I am really impressed with this. particularly for its devotion to the look of the story - all very faithful to the comic's design with Lawmasters (bike cannon!), the Grand Hall of Justice, Mega City One's Gherkin-like buildings (a Mick McMahon innovation) and of course Carlos Ezquerra's iconic design of the judge uniform. Oh and Dredd of course, played by Dredd artist Greg Staples with nary a smile or removal of helmet - as it should be. So much of this deserves further explanation - it would have been easy for the makers to stage this on an industrial site or warehouse interior with official Termight replica helmets and hardware, but they didn't . It might have been obvious to some to include as Dredd's cameo a strapping 'roid-fuelled stand-in for Old Stony face, but the slighter, leaner Staples is truer to the original, and to McMahon's version as well. I do wonder about the palette and 'look', particularly after seeing similar and less-impressive stuff on Spartacus recently; the digital stage and bleached screen has dated since the likes of 300 and Sin City, but it's not enough to put me off at all. More information here of course, in the mean-time, messrs Garland, Travis and Urban - take note...

Talkin' Eds - Fear of the Dark (1992)

2010-08-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

1992 in Metal

New Albums:
Alice in Chains - Dirt
Body Count - Body Count (features controversial single Cop Killer)
Def Leppard - Adrenalize
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Fear Factory - Soul of a New Machine
Helmet - In the Meantime
Monster Magnet - Tab EP
Nine Inch Nails - Broken EP
Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power
Rage Against the Machine - (self titled)

In other news, Izzy leaves Guns 'N' Roses, Crue fire Vince Neil, and the world is slightly safer with no more activity coming from Europe, Ratt and Stryper. In the year leading up to this Metallica have released their 'black album', and Nirvana and grunge have arrived well and truly; in a year's time Anthrax will throw in their lot with the grunge-ready The Sound of White Noise, and Korn will form.

This is a pretty significant album in some ways. The Fear of the Dark Tour brought Iron Maiden to New Zealand for the first time, although only as far as Auckland. More significantly of course is its place as Bruce Dickinson's last album re-reforming in 1999. In the years leading up to Fear the band had individually explored other avenues and projects, and Renaissance man Bruce spent those years writing, fencing, releasing and touring his own albums, and of course learning to fly. Once again, everything changes for Iron Maiden after his departure, but more on that in another post.

The Album
There are three things going on in this album, really. The group's sound is changing - certainly as much as it was during No Prayer, and added to this is further experimentation with contemporaneous styles - Be Quick rather aptly nods towards the speed/thrash of the lies of Anthrax. The videos have had a ramp up too - Be Quick and Wasting Love both attempt new things, bringing the members in and miming to a soundtrack, and as in the previous album there seems a concerted effort on Steve Harris' part to steer the lyrics away from the fantastic and towards the mundane and the contemporary. It's a delicate balance, particularly as this follows a very late-80s penchant in pop and rock music of the 'public service' or 'social commentary' song. Many bands and artists try it at some stage in the careers and many of them fail, usually stumbling when the demands of addressing big issues within a three to four minute song just can't and won't fit. I do think the attempts on Fear are a fifty-fifty score - Be Quick is a great opener and while not explicitly about the scandal rides on the fall from grace and death of Sir Robert Maxwell (who also meets Eddie on the single's sleeve), while Weekend Warrior is more specific, targeting football hooligans. The latter works for me because of the delivery (Dickinson compliments a rather AC/DC-like composition by singing in a Brian Johnson style) and the simplicity of the thing; the added fact that Steve Harris is an enormous football fan himself adds to the intent hugely - you can imagine him getting worked up about something like this. Compare and contrast with Fear is the Key - a messy affair with awful lyrics and Bruce adopting a Robert Plant vocal style ("liesandliesandlies..") during the double-tempo wig out over a theme of… what, responsible loving? AIDS ("nobody cares 'til somebody famous dies" recalling the recent passing of Freddie Mercury). Childhood's End has a good sound and fierce opening drums but flounders again lyrically with its talk of tyrants, lack of food, love and 'seed's. Lyrically these songs just aren't strong enough to carry the themes through, nor, sadly, does Afraid to Shoot Strangers, Maiden's Gulf War meditation. It succeeds in as much as it adroitly captures the moral confusion in a soldier's mind, but can't bring itself to go beyond that point, even though there's an obvious urge to, unlike wartime songs before it (The Trooper is perhaps closest) and after (Paschendale et al) which work precisely because they're contained in that one moment. So Harris is out of his depth with contemporary social commentary, but that's okay - heavy metal and pop music in general struggles with this anyway, and to Maiden's credit this is really the last we'll hear of this sort of thing for a good while.

Where Fear does work is in looking back to the band's earlier roots and marrying them to new styles. Judas Be My Guide could have come off Piece of Mind, while Chains of Misery, like Hooks in You on Prayer, evokes a more US sound - as if Motley Crue turned up on the day to do the backing vocals for fun. Wasting Love is a second stab at a ballad after No Prayer's title track and it actually works, with a nice lead by Janick Gers added in. The album's closing title track is almost a standout for its subject matter - a return to the supernatural, although Gers' The Apparition tries this too - I think… the lyrics don't make much sense and Bruce's Steve Perry delivery doesn't help. It's telling that subsequent appearances of Fear of the Dark on The Best of the Beast and Somewhere Back in Time have favoured a live performance, and rightly so. The song is fine, if merely reliable, but in a live setting with a huge crowd behind it it takes on a new verve and is a good indicator of how Maiden could turn an okay composition into a crowd pleaser. The second-to-last and least mention of the album is The Fugitive, based on the movie/TV series of the same name. Ham-fisted choruses ("I am the fu-gitive... Being hunted down for game! I am the fu-gitive... But I've got to clear my name!") follow some nice verses, but it's not a keeper, and Maiden have done far better adaptations before and after this. In other news, song number two From Here to Eternity publicly kills off occasional band muse Charlotte the Harlot, the casualty of "a tumble at the Devil's Bend', which goes to show what hazards come from riding a motorcycle with The Beast.

Cover Art
Thankfully the cover art is a distinct improvement, and like its title track has been gathered into the bosom of 'classic' Maiden iconography. Illustrated by Mervyn Grant after a late commission from Derek Riggs proved not to the band's tastes (or perhaps it was the lateness of the commission - the reasons are apparently vague), the scene is of Eddie as a demon in a tree, merging with its trunk and branches, but as the artist states not part of the tree itself. Whatever, it's a nice, sinister and detailed piece with a good composition and rather fetching use of colour and light. It turned my head back in 1993, so it must have worked.

Album Tracks

Be Quick or Be Dead (official video)
From Here to Eternity(official Bad News-esque video)
Afraid to Shoot Strangers (Live in Mexico)
Fear is the Key (album track)
Childhood's End (album track)
Wasting Love
The Fugitive (album version)
Chains of Misery (album version)
The Apparition (album version)
Judas Be My Guide (album version)
Weekend Warrior(album version)
Fear of the Dark (live at Donnington)

Reissue, Repackage - The Meknificent Seven

2010-08-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

And now, for a change, something I actually DID throw out. Well okay, I replaced it, and the story goes a little something like this:

Here is the earliest edition of the collected strips of 2000AD's original series of ABC Warriors, bringing together the escapades of this rag-tag™ unit of war robots on Mars, created and written by Pat Mills and illustrated by a slavering roster of future heavyweights of the UK scene - I'm talking Gibbons, O'Neill, Ezquerra, Brendan McCarthy and of course Mick McMahon, who provided the gorgeous cover illustration for this imprint by early 200AD licencees Titan. Inside are all of the Mars stories written by Mills, plus an introductory strip by Mills and Kevin O'Neill, like the cover, produced exclusively for this collection. Years passed and this imprint was discontinued. I saw it as recently as a couple of years ago in Graphic in Cuba Street - shame I didn't pick it up then.

After Rebellion purchased 2000AD they went into their own reprinting venture, and started things off modestly. The reproductions are pretty good, although suffer from some downscaling due to the original comic's page dimensions not being A4 compatible. This (left) is the cover of their initial run of The Meknificent Seven. The cover is by future ABC art droid Kev Walker in a post-Simon Bisley painterly style. Walker produced vibrant and consistent work during his long tenure on the strip, but the choice of illustration - itself a very post Black Hole era design, is Awl Rong. It's ABC leader Hammerstein, which is fine, but it's a nineties redesign of the robot, doesn't sell the crucial image of the ABCs as a team, and it seems like an afterthought to provide some sort of continuity with the later reprints of the colour strips. I wonder whether the original reprint was a Titan-owned piece, which might explain its absence along with the dedicated introductory strip? Apart from setting the template for future ABC reprints, this is the least-collectable version, and it's the one I replaced as soon as I could (sorry Dave, to whom I gave it to). Moving on…

Here is Rebellion's second stab at the reprint, produced last year. It's a gorgeous cover - not the McMahon commission of course, but it is a reproduction of a contemporary 2000AD cover by the artist in question, and it's just what it should be - all seven Warriors in colour, retro-coloured to fit the Seventies era style. The contents are a step up too - the Titan strips have been included, Pat does a foreword (this aligns the volume with the others in the series published between editions), and as volume two, the aforementioned The Black Hole by Mills and Bisley/SMS is also in black and white, the first recap chapter of that strip is included as a taster. I was deid chuffed when I got this and didn't regret my purchase. The only way it could have been better to my mind would have been reprinting the original gatefold pages from 2000AD in colour, and perhaps included the Steve 'Preacher' Dillon-inked 1985 Annual story Red Planet Blues. As this wasn't written by Mills but by some guy called Alan Moore however, I could understand why Rebellion might have omitted it.

It's now 2010 and Rebellion are keen to have another poke at the US market. Onward to a new edition of The Meknificent Seven! Spine-wise this ties in with the existing collection, although the cover is a radical redesign - a pretty slick composite of a panel of Gibbon's work within, and it looks cool, but not as cool as the Titan original. Inside what do we have? An introduction by Pat, the Titan strip plus single-page strips for the core five Warriors used in their 80s return, the Black Hole teaser is back in its own volume where it belongs and in colour… Red Planet Blues.

I think I know what they might select for the next reprint now.

…

Mongrol smush greedy publishers!!!

Talkin' Eds - No Prayer for the Dying (1990)

2010-08-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Lineup
The first and most obvious change to Maiden since Piece of Mind is the departure of an apparently disillusioned Adrian Smith, keen to go his own way and not happy with the developing retro sound of the band post-Seventh Son. In the intervening years the band has had something of a break and Bruce Dickinson has begun writing books and recording his first solo project, also contributing to a movie soundtrack (more on that next time). Janick Gers, brought on board by Dickinson after providing guitars for his solo album from the same year, Tattooed Millionaire, becomes Smith's replacement for the next four albums. Gers had previously played for Fish (of Marillion) as well as Gogmagog alongside Paul Di'Anno, so already his pedigree is very sound. Previously I referred to him as Dave Murray's understudy which is more than a little uncharitable, although I think the comparison bears scrutiny. Gers lies closer to Murray's technique than Smith's on the spectrum, although his style is different again - newer techniques like shredding are part of his arsenal, and I would suggest his influence lies in helping to modernise Maiden's guitar sound. His solos are competent, with a good sense of space and less flashy than Murray's for most of the time, although these would be accompanied by on-stage stunts like throwing his guitar over his shoulders a la Blackie Lawless from W.A.S.P and dancing while playing. As the last permanent addition to the band his presence by now is well established, and while his work on this album is sound and distinctive, some of his best stuff is yet to come.

The Album
Towards the end of the Eighties the trend of annual Maiden albums stretches to bi-annual. No Prayer arrived three years after Seventh Son, having taken in that album's tour plus a longer hiatus intended for the group to recharge their batteries. Their return reaps this album, a rougher, less intricate piece with fewer nods to fantasy and horror and the beginning of Maiden employing contemporary subjects and influences. Overall the songs' structures are less elaborate and shorter, with introductory guitar leads (Run Silent, Run Deep) which prefigure many of Maiden's tracks from subsequent albums. Balancing out the roughness of guitar and Dickinson's new-found gravelly voice is a heightened sense of mischief - Tailgunner, despite recalling the horrors of Dresden in its opening lines (and Hiroshima towards the end) is too lightweight lyrically to sit alongside the likes of Aces High or Where Eagles Dare ("Kill that Fokker nail that son/gonna blow your guts out with my gun"). As the curtainraiser for the album it seems a willful attempt to expunge the seriousness of those songs and their earnest subject matter. That the title was informed initially by a particular form of home video really drives it home. There's no let up either in the next song, the Quo-like Holy Smoke, which takes the oh-so-topical subjects of religious hypocrites Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Bakker et al to task from the viewpoint of a rather potty-mouthed Christ. Low hanging fruit, surely, but it must have been immensely satisfying for Harris and Dickinson to be given such licence from news media to lampoon their past tormentors and critics so ribaldly. The video sets the tone of both song and album - Maiden never were a band for videos (although recently have adopted the medium a little more - possibly to rely less on their own appearance in them?), and this one takes the biscuit - shot on Harris' farm it's all agricultural equipment, comedy vicars, lingeries ladies, mugging to camera and guitar breaks on a slowly trundling tractor. Glorious.

There's more low hanging fruit in Dave Murray's Public Enema Number One, this time aimed at the baby boomer set of the US and their selfish lifestyles couched in environmental lip-service. Yes, a hard pitch to throw and to be sure the topic meanders with it, as it does in Fates Warning. Accompanying a harder, faster guitar sound and simpler arrangements are 'church' organ sounds in place of something more synthesised (notably in the album's title track), and actual backing vocals. To me and coming from the G'n'R era of pop rock it marks a temporary adoption of a West Coast sound, perhaps; Maiden is no longer setting a style but following those of others, including younger bands (perhaps this is why the album was less well received by fans?) Adrian Smith's last contribution to the album, Hooks in You carries this off most convincingly, and is another favourite. It's stupid and misogynistic, but unable to be taken seriously, and teases with its mention of "keys to view at Number Twenty-two" to be another chapter in the story of Charlotte the Harlot. Myself, I think it's more straightforward in featuring the heroine's abandoned workplace and domecile up for rent, and that's all. We'll see what becomes of her in the next album anyway. After Hooks comes Dickinson's Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter, of which more will be said in a later post. Mother Russia closes the album, a plodding ponderous mess with a leaden chorus and awful lyrics.

Cover Art
This is Derek Riggs' last full-sleeve commission besides a revised version for the 1998 re-release. It's of poorer quality than previous efforts, coming across as alternately sketchy and perhaps rushed. Eddie, streaked green with rot and mould, bursts from his crypt to either thrust at a terrified gravedigger (1990) or out at the viewer (1998). It's possible that the looser style is deliberate, evoking an EC Comics/Tales from the Crypt vibe. In that way it fits the tone of the album well, but against what's been done before it's more than a little distracting. Certainly not Riggs' best cover, though not his least accomplished, and in album cover stakes we're still not at Maiden's worst just yet.

Notable is Eddie's appearance - essentially it's a reboot, with a return to the fright wig and hellfire eyes of the early albums. The parallels to the superior Live After Death are obvious, though in the gatefold illustration Eddie is back on those self-same London streets of albums one and two, ripping into another victim with Kruegerish hook-clawed hands. There's none of the earlier mischief to this Eddie - he's a vicious ghoul, and in his leather jacket and angry snarl it's hard not to read this look as a deliberate attempt to harden up the cartoon character as much as the music and vocals of the album also strive for.

Album tracks via YouTube

Tailgunner (official video)
Holy Smoke (official vdeo - YMMV)
No Prayer for the Dying (Live in Holland, 1991)
Public Enema Number One (live 1991?)
Fates Warning (album version)
The Assassin (live in Dortmund, 1990)
Run Silent, Run Deep (album track)
Hooks in You
Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter (stay tuned...)
Mother Russia (fan made video)

Stuff I've Dug Out of my Garden

2010-08-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

In the course of general gardening, weeding, clearing away vegetation from an imperiled deck, digging new plots, mowing lawn and building a low retaining wall (haarggh!) my backyard activities haven't half revealed some unusual objects unearthed from the loose soil. Our back lawn used to be flowerbeds and all elevated by about a foot of earth and clay, but was excavated by a previous owner to make a play area for her kids - and play they most definitely did. By the time we took possession ofthe property other subsequent owners had a go at reinventing the back section in a rather slip-shod way, really, meaning the detritus of numerous juvenile adventures lay in damp, anaerobic conditions waiting for my trowel, my line trimmer, my reliable pushmower.

Here's some of the crap that's come out of the ground since:

Quite the varied treasure trove we have here: some Star Wars stuff by way of a Happy Meal (I think), lollipop sticks, an Action Man flipper, Kinder Surprise disjecta membra, something I'm informed is a Yu-Gi-O, or Dragonball Z. And bits of stationery of course. Missing from the photo above is a rather careworn Thomas the Tank Engine helicopter (given to the kid of friends of ours before I could fix him up properly - thanks, dear), and a toy wagon/train wheel which has already made it into my 'bitz box'.

Ah yes, the Bitz Box. The amateur modeller's grab bag of off-cuts and model parts, ever ready to be enlisted for further modelling and kit-bashing. Mine is very modest indeed, but there's stuff shown here I have plans for and intend to use in some regard. Most of the other things will be binned, as any sane gardener would do. But I'm a believer in chance meetings and making lemonade while the sun shines, so again, some projects for later in here, maybe. In the mean-time, I think our back section is a little lighter for these having been removed. Doubtless in time there'll be a new crop of things being planted in there by little hands, and I will follow this by wonderng where my car keys got to, or something similar.

(A Very Special) Talkin' Eds - Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter single (1990)

2010-08-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

By 1990 Iron Maiden were playing to a home crowd and were well and truly a diminished pop influence, despite good chart ratings for Seventh Son. Lacking the youth and menace of their early years they were something of a joke institutionally. And crucially this is what they were emblematic of to a new generation - my generation - of artists, as witnessed below, circa 1991 and Blur's emergence as a big hitter in the early 1990s UK pop scene:

From Bit of a Blur by Alex James:

'Andy Ross through it would be a good idea for Damon and me to go and be nice to everyone at the EMI annual sales conference… There were hundreds of people there, including some proper pop stars. The boss of the company, Rupert Perry, made a speech on a little stage and said he wanted to introduce some special guests. Iron Maiden drove on to the stage in a bubble car and started swearing at everybody. Damon had a funny turn and ran outside.
…I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They're devil-worshipping ponces. I said 'The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.' He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.

…I got home back to the squat and Justine said, 'Has anyone seen you this morning?' I said, 'Only Adam Ant.' She said, 'Aren't you clever! Did he mention your nose, darling?' I looked in the mirror and it was bright red at the end. It took days to go back to being the right colour.'

After ten years of blood, sweat and tears Iron Maiden hit paydirt with what is still a pretty routine song from a lesser album. Despite this pedigree, Bring Your Daughter… shares the rare honour of being both a number one single and a winner of the Golden Raspberry Award for worst original song from a movie - in this case A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child. The company it keeps is mixed to say the least; George Michael's I Want Your Sex from 1987 and Beverly Hills Cop 2 was only really huge in the Netherlands, while the USA's Billboard Top 100 and European Top 100 embraced Will Smith's parping ante-millennial Wild Wild West from the cinematic wet fart of the same name. The difference to note in Daughter of course is in versions, and version is as much context as a song being attached to a movie franchise. The solo original is slower, less dense in terms of instrumentation and production, and carries less of the rasping vocal of the later Maiden cover. Dickinson wails unsteadily in places and in general there's less of the thud and heft that Harris and McBrain would later add to the album version - the version that won the real gold. I definitely prefer the latter, but here's both for the sake of comparison...

Original:

Remake:

Daughter's other triumph is also in context - while missing out on the Christmas novelty slot by one week (no thanks, as the CD liner notes claim, to the likes of Radio One), it did oust Sir Cliff Richard's Saviour's Day (his 13th UK number one - unlucky!) from the spot. And that counts for something indeed. Speaking for myself I recall seeing the video and thinking it cheesy, wondering why the over-reliance on old horror movie footage was there (another retro style from Maiden - little did I know then that this has been a tradition going back to Number of the Beast). It was catchy though - but I was over Maiden and had been for years. Why did they bother with such samey and kitschy material?

Thankfully my opinion wasn't king on the day. As has been seen increasingly over the years to the point of lampoon in Richard Curtis' Love, Actually and exercised as recently as last year in X-Factor v Rage Against the Machine the concept of the Christmas Number One is kind of a big deal in the UK. Presence there is as good as media coverage can get - even in 1991, and particularly if Maiden's sneering contempt of the influential likes of Radio One could be taken to have been genuinely mutual. A lightweight single, sure, perhaps teetering dangerously toward self-parody. Shame it couldn't have been a stronger single, but for its secular-cum-occult cheerleading over God bothering earnestness, and because it's for Christmas, it's a thumbs up.

It even got them back in the NME. Who'd have thought it?

Talkin' Eds - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

2010-07-29T01:53:00.000-07:00

1988 in heavy metal

Albums:
So far So Good… So What! - Megadeth
Blow Up Your Video - AC/DC
Savage Amusement - Scorpions
The New Order - Testament
In God We Trust - Stryper
South of Heaven - Slayer
Danzig - Danzig
…And Justice for All - Metallica
State of Euphoria - Anthrax

There are some mentionable omissions here (live albums from Frank Zappa, Motorhead, more of the same slogging from Deep Purple and Ozzy, a reunion of sorts from Pink Floyd), but the list above is evidence enough to show that the scene has changed. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal has passed, and Maiden and their cohorts are beyond being the Establishment and are now rubbing shoulders with younger, faster and heavier acts once influenced by them. Potently, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica are putting out some of their strongest and most enduring work, while the previous year has seen the rise and rise of Guns 'N' Roses. Iron Maiden are no longer the young men of heavy metal, and their sound is dating quickly.

Fortunately Maiden have a strong fan base, still command large audiences, and creatively are strong. Seventh Son is evidence of the band doggedly sticking to their guns in terms of sound, songwriting and influences, while indulging themselves further with their own influences. Prog rock has been a feature of their albums for some time, but this will be the last obvious nod for a few years from the band, and is in some way the last blow-out before a new sound and lineup is introduced. Crucially, it's also Adrian Smith's final album with the band for nearly ten years, and it's a testament to this relative latecomer that his absence will be felt keenly. 'Classic Maiden' as an entity are in the dying days of their first age, and though the band will never break up, its days as a recognisable element in modern heavy metal are numbered. But for now things are still good. Seventh Son is a strong album, and in terms of sales and unity it does deliver. Like the two albums before it at the time I knew it for one single, having seen the video for Can I Play With Madness (below) on Radio With Pictures - and liking it. But I didn't investigate further, seeing the album cover and easily passing it by. For years I didn't know that it was a 'concept album', and so unfamiliar with it that I was, foolishly misheard the Moonchild lyric "Babylon, the scarlet whore" and wondered why Bruce Dickinson was singing about He-Man's nemesis.

The Album
So to the album itself then. It's prog rock. You've had to hear the word 'prog' a fair bit here and I'm sorry, but that's the best description of it. It is prog in inspiration, intention and execution, and by that yardstick it succeeds and fails.

Seventh Son is largely, mind, a success - and commercially it certainly was, garnering great chart scores for most of its four singles and earning the band a headline at Donnington later that year. Where the album falters is where many prog projects tend to, and that is its execution. Seventh Son is a narrative which really only fills one half of an album, in a similar way perhaps to Kate Bush's contemporaneous Hounds of Love. And like that album its greatest commercial successes lie outside the actual narrative and in some very strong singles. That both Bush and Maiden had an audience more accepting of what by 1986 or 1988 was now a greatly dated and laboured album format was a credit to their success, so on that measure Maiden's indulgence isn't the risk that it might otherwise have been for artists working a more mainstream sound. The narrative in question is the story of the seventh son of a seventh son, and his Cassandra-like efforts to convince his mediaeval village home of an approaching disaster and, assuredly, their ignorance and his ultimate fate. It's a bleak tale skipped over lightly with some virtuoso performances and storytelling on the light side. Maiden fans being as fans are have devoted pages of the internet to deciphering the album's lyrics, the sleeve illustrations see below) and lumping in the usual suspects - tarot, Crowley, fantasy fiction (in this instance Orson Scott Card) to try and make sense of it. I don't think there's much sense to be made of it myself. Opening track Moonchild begins threatening to equal Spinal Tap's Stonehenge for cheese but soon evolves into a thumping and addictive piece, and an obvious live highlight. From there however the tale slips, but of the three intervening songs only Infinite Dreams plods - and even then it lurches to a faster tempo and crashes to another stomping conclusion. Madness and Evil are very sound singles and wise choices, the latter being one of my favourite Maiden tracks of all, simply for the rapid-fire guitar work (carried over from the pacier tracks off Somewhere In Time) and Bruce Dickinson in great form behind the mic.

And then the story returns, with the album's longest tracks filling us in. Seventh Son and The Prophecy are not immediately approachable pieces with their length, timing changes and in some places multiple character voices. Of the two I prefer the former, but Dave Murray's contribution to the plodding latter is significant, and his outro is one of the most elegant guitar pieces of Maiden's golden years, in a way a sign of work to come from him and his future understudy. The Clairvoyant is the album's final single, strangely uplifting in its subject matter (the protagonist's death, vaguely alluded to), and as many have said, actual final track Only The Good Die Young is perhaps too short and much underrated, a refrain of Evil's rhythm but a neat summary of the album's themes. If it wasn't obvious that it is the doomed seer's own words in the lyrics, you could be forgiven for thinking them those of Lucifer, mocking witness to the whole tragedy.

Iron Maiden don't get any more fantastic after this in theme or in places in sound. As an unwitting farewell to 'H' Smith's tenure it's a remarkable send-off, and closes the band's Eighties heights well. After this album everything changes, and the seeds of Maiden's future lineup and sound are being sown. It's almost as if you can imagine the fantasy novels and role playing games being packed away as the Stonehenge acoustic refrain arrives to finish things off. A curious album - in many places a really really good one, and certainly worthy of inclusion for the singles alone.

Album Artwork

Simply Derek Riggs' best, last cover for the band, and as much a nod to prog art designers Hipgnosis as the music is to the genre. Gone are the tumultuous and cloudy skies, the mad moons and murderous streets - everything has been thrown aside and onto its icy powder blue palette. Eddie is now ripped apart by his unborn child, his head a mishmash of Piece of Mind's cranial disfigurement, Somewhere in Time's cyborganics and Live After Death's lightning strike, his spine drips like mercury into a glassy sea, while on the back cover icebergs float above a frozen globe and out of their forms the shapes of Eddie's past incarnations - Satan-botherer, lobotomee, pharaoh, loom. And there's a book - but what book? Amusingly, fans have been at pains to interpret this piece and the equally impressive single sleeves also shown here, only to have Riggs freely admit years later that he just winged it, drawing what looked cool to him, and there was no hidden meaning intended, ever. And that's the side of Maiden I like to see most of all.

Tracks via YouTube:

Moonchild (album track)
Infinite Dreams (live video from Visions of the Beast)
Can I Play With Madness (official video - with Graham Chapman!)
The Evil That Men Do (live Maiden England video - great sound)
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (as above - long video, obviously)
The Prophecy (album track)
The Clairvoyant (live Donnington track - great video)
Only the Good Die Young (album track)

The Changing Face of the Dalek Cake

2010-07-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

The despotic and brilliantly twisted scientist Davros spent decades developing the survival vehicle of the mutant Kaled creature to transform it into a ruthless universal killing machine. My good wife took just a couple of birthdays.

Behold: the Mark IV Travelling Cake on 27/7/95:

And its descendant on 24/7/10:

Video Affects - Shriekback Nemesis (1985)

2010-07-05T01:17:00.000-07:00

A rare example of "I know where I was when I first saw this" applied to music videos, my first encounter with Shriekback's Nemesis took place at the house of my friend Derek, during the holidays near the end of 1985. We had been watching his music videos, particularly those of Sting, whom we both were into at the time, and Derek remembered that he'd videoed (ahh, nostalgia) the previous night's Radio With Pictures. So it was obviously a Monday. Probably the first Monday of the summer holidays, a gloriously languid and sun-drenched day as they all were at the time, the air buzzing with wildlife and the footpath outside his parents' architecturally-designed home almost ticking in the heat. I digress. We fast-forwarded idly through the videos - was ZZ Tops' Legs in among them? Unlikely. How about Neil Young's This Bud's For You? Possibly. But the last clip of the night, the last episode of RWP for the year, was reserved for presenter Karen Hay's favourite video of the year, and it was Nemesis. After a few blasts of Synchronicity II we definitely favoured Shriekback's offering in the end, and must have played it until we could remember the whole thing (although it would take years before I could decipher its bizarre lyrics.)

Nemesis represented a curious and infectious collision of worlds in our heads; though I speak for both me and my friend we were very much alike in interests and obsessions. With shaven-headed singer Barry Andrews purring his way through a melange of odd images, looking for all the world like Robin of Sherwood's latter-day villain Gulnar, the clip promised more - a Bacchanalean feast, weird masks of wood and feathers, black glassy eels and most thrilling of all, the Arch-Deviant himself, Pat Mills' comic creation Nemesis the Warlock as a slow-mo phantom swathed in red mist. Shriekback's lyrics are, it turned out, nonsensical, but contained wonderfully arch vocal triggers that caught our young ears - "In the jungle of the senses/Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper"..."We drink elixirs that we refine/from the juices of the dying"…"Call in the airstrike/with the poison kiss". The music itself is harsher than the band's earlier, dreamlike and more avant garde efforts, with guitars and real drums to the forefront, and Sarah and Wendy Partridge's shrill screamed vocals matching the synthetic strings during the choruses. That it makes no sense either visually or lyrically has opened the song up to various interpretations - is it about the comic strip? Probably not. Is it about mankind's destructive urge? Maybe. Is it about the postulated 'death star'? Some (not me) think so. It doesn't matter though, Nemesis is three minutes and forty-three seconds of sensoral wonder set adrift in the mid-Eighties and in one moment changed my musical tastes from pop to something more askew (ironically, its parent album Oil and Gold is regarded as Shriekback's most commercially succesful). I returned briefly to Sting and the Police, but never let go of Shriekback and still have three of their albums in my permanent collection. And every time I hear Nemesis I return to that day when my mind met something quite recognisable and alien at the same time.

Talkin' Eds - Somewhere in Time (1986)

2010-06-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

1986 is a watershed year for heavy metal and its dalliance with popular music. Among the big hitters for this year and some months beyond are strong and commercially succesful entries from the US (Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet) and Europe (Europe's The Final Countdown). As a short reminder to Iron Maiden from their stablemates in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal their friends have chalked up another strong album with Mutt Lange and will be huge as a result - Def Leppard's Hysteria is mere months away. The Powerslave and Live After Death albums and World Slavery Tour have filled arenas and stadiums and spread the word globally for Maiden, but it seems that the sort of teenybopper crossover that the likes of Jon Bon Jovi and Joe Elliott achieved will not be shared by Bruce Dickinson and company. Success will continue assuredly, but for the most part as it has always done - in exchange for hard work.

For myself this album was almost entirely new territory, being like Powerslave more of interest for its cover artwork than songs. I'd gone off Maiden and had moved onto other stuff - poppier stuff, as it turned out. Maiden seemed to be a bit embarrassing by then, and the ownership claimed by the guys at my school into the band and Metal at the time didn't convince me otherwise - they were welcome to each other. It'd be a few years before I'd even hear my favourite song from the album, as I recall.

The album
The first thing that strikes you is the synth, or rather, guitar-synth. Time is the first of Maiden's albums to employ the instrument and as it goes with these things, the instrument is very much at the front of the band's sound for much of this album. The sound itself is BIG. Maybe too big for low volumes, and it seems designed to replicate a stadium experience, as do some of the compositions within. Everything is larger and more echo-ey, as though the band fell into a tank of reverb on the way to the studio. The two guitarists audibly multitrack their instruments so their attack is fuller, and Steve Harris' bass is turned up to match them. Against them Dickinson wails bravely, but some of the songs aren't his best work - the album opener in particular has him wavering in paces with pitch, and introducing his low cackle between songs, maybe to give his throat some variety. He's still absolutely on form, but an album of this sort of approach gets wearying, to my ears.

Opening track Caught Somewhere in Time introduces a loose theme across the album of the passage of time, displacement and isolation. It’s a mixed bag to begin with - the vocals are typical of the problem I note before, but the the guitars are great, buzzing like wasps during the chorus lead-in. What stands out of course are the opening bars and the new instrument brought into the band's repertoire with this album, the guitar synth. It's not entirely a success, although Caught doesn't suffer particularly from their use. What struck me on listening to the track for the first time was that, having put it into the rather sensitive CD player on our home PC, it skipped while playing, but in such a way as to not be entirely noticeable - I thought it was an extra vocal effect and was even more bewildered!

The centrepiece of the album comes early, with track two Wasted Years being the highlight, The Trooper of Somewhere in Time, perhaps. Adrian Smith's song of longing on the road ("I close my eyes and think of home/another city rolls by in the night") and the existential reality of life on tour bookmarks Maiden at their height, but is a troubled piece, recalling not too subtly the pressure of continued international touring, (From the Coast of Gold across the seven seas/travelling on far and wide/ but now it seems I'm just a stranger to myself/And the things I sometimes do, it isn't me but someone else") and potentially nodding to the band's alumni who fell along the way. Just as potently it predates Smith's departure from the band, and though it ultimately exhorts the listener enjoy the moment ("don't waste your time always searching for those wasted years… realise you're living in the golden years") it's hard not to hear the song as his attempt to call time out. Such personal songs - even songs about relationships, the concerns of one's life outside the fantastic or metaphysical, are rare indeed for Maiden.

Following these tracks are Sea of Madness, a reasonably light track with Dickinson's vocals veering toward Ozzzy Osbourne's in the chorus, eschewing any modulation of the notes sung. Its bridge section is a little odd too, using chorused backing guitar effects and Dickinson singing in the upper register, again resembling another artists, in this instance the Police circa Regatta de Blanc... Heaven Can Wait is a live favourite with a great pace and tricksy lyrics, while The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner has great energy, although the aforementioned vocal approach by Dickinson is better used in the verses than choruses.

Adrian Smith returns to write another single for the album, Stranger In a Strange Land, which owes nothing to the Biblical quote (the Apostle Paul, I believe) or the Heinlein novel, but is instead based on a true story of a lost Antarctic explorer and the discovery of his frozen remains decades after his death. After a strong opening the song loses me. I think the synthesiser stabs throughout speak a little too much of their era, reminding me of Rage Hard from Frankie Goes to Hollywood's limp Liverpool of the same year.

Dave Murray's songs are best classed a guilty pleasure for me. Lyrically he's not the best writer of the band by any measure, but his hooks are usually enough to carry these sometimes weaker songs through. De Ja Vu is my favourite of his, a short and punchy song about ... well, examples of de ja vu, I guess. It worked for Alanis Morrisette providing examples (good and poor) of irony, so why not? Surprisingly it's never been played live, which is a shame be cause there are some enjoyably sing-along parts to it.

In closing the album Alexander the Great continues the same trick as the earlier To Tame a Land. It's a 'list' song, this time of a real world hero, and musically it's got some great structure and invention. Against this though the lyrics suffer a little, being precisely what they are. Some of the composition will be revisited some albums down the track, and for what it's worth I prefer the later.

Album cover
As Powerslave put its hero into a historical, global setting, so Somewhere in Time launches him into the future and something more sci-fi. Introducing Robo-Eddie! I groaned when I first saw this, it seemed so so obvious and derivative, but the cyborg design of our hero has truly endured, spawning model kits, a video game character, a revival for the Somewhere Back in Time compilation (of course) and he was the Eddie of choice for the tour of the same name. The artwork's great, but in 3-D he's even more impressive. There's a lot going on here - beyond Eddie visually referencing the contemporary Terminator/RoboCop trend (was someone listening to the album when Torchwood's Cyberwoman was being designed? They should be introduced), in the background is a Blade Runner-styled city made up of around 40 references to past Maiden albums, songs, venues and people. There's even Batman and a TARDIS, and Eddie's posture and the curled hand of his victim would suggest that this is a futuristic revisiting of Riggs' artwork for Killers. Is it the same street corner a century on, perhaps? Notably, the single sleeve for Stranger in a Strange Land puts Eddie in a Star Wars cantina-type future noir bar, an image that would itself be referenced in a future Maiden video.

Tracks:
Caught Somewhere in Time
Wasted Years (official video)
Sea of Madness
Heaven Can Wait
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (album version)
Stranger in a Strange Land (official video)
De Ja Vu (album version)
Alexander the Great (fan made video)

Penny

2010-06-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing beats a sad animal story like a happy animal story, and I have one!

A couple of weeks ago, roughly mid-way between Moses' last day and about now-ish we had a visitor in our back garden. It was, as is becoming depressingly evident, a pretty typical bloody winter's weekend in the Capital with occasional breaks in interminable rain for truculent blasts of wind. A perfect day to be indoors working on the household budget, then.

Was it on one of those blasts of wind that Penny came into our lives so briefly? Maybe it was. We don't own any chickens, so the appearance of a rather healthy-looking one scratching enthusiastically away at our bale of pea straw (waiting for a fine day to go on the garden…) was a bit of a surprise. We watched her for a while, making her way around the garden, dodging the plentiful weeds and seeking out the likely plentiful worms and woodlice among them - both of us were probably hoping the same thing, that she'd move on and we wouldn't have to worry further. But she didn't - we'd made too good a foraging site, I think.

In the absence of any neighbours we were aware of with chickens we decided we needed to collect her before a car, cat, dog or one of the recently-acquired and party-hard neighbours down the cul de sac did. I went outside and gave a half-hearted "chook chook chook" and was surprised when it was pointed out to me that the hen I was looking for in the front yard was already at my feet quietly clucking. I scooped her up with no resistance and in the garage she went; we got on the phone to the SPCA, hoping that a Sunday mid-afternoon wouldn't be too late for them to pick her up.

It was, or rather, it became so after we had a return call around 4:30 to say they had a dog-versus-car to attend to, so could we look after the hen overnight? We guessed so, so I went out to the garage to find the newly-named Penny and tidy the clutter up to make things a little more homely. When I found her she was in a cupboard under the workbench. I wandered around clearing things up while she followed, pecking away at the spaces I uncovered in moving things. Moses' old cat cage was vacant, so I tipped it on one side and lined it with newspaper and a towel over the top for a hutch, left enough bread and water for her to make the Sensible Sentencing Trust proud of me and left her to it.

That night was miserably cold - two degrees with sleet and wind, so I checked in on Penny a couple of times before bed and once in the wee small hours. The first peer through the garage window saw her still moving around and regarding me and my torch through the glass. Later she was in the same place she kept through the night - she'd spurned the coop and was tucked up against an old wardrobe on the concrete floor with her head buried under a wing.

The SPCA collected her by the Monday afternoon and a later inspection and (necessary) tidy-up of the garage floor around her adopted spot revealed a wee parting present - a small brown egg which I should probably finish this story with by saying we ate and found delicious. Penny it turns out is a Red Shaver and therefore a good and constant layer with a quiet temperament, a great addition to any flock. She was also apparently an ex-battery hen which surprised us because her condition was so good, but one of her wings hadn't been clipped, which may have been the catalyst for her escape and arrival in our yard. Talk about your lifestyle changes!

And that's the story! The happy bit at least. Read on if you want to hear some grumbling...

A country-living free-range keeping friend had offered to take Penny if no one claimed her and we encouraged her to leave her details with the SPCA immediately. Which she did, but those details weren't carried through to the vet section and when I called a week later to check on Penny I was told that as nobody had called in (and Penny wasn't advertised on their adopt-a-pet website - we checked), a staff member had taken her home for her own. If we were really wanting to give her to our friend could she call them and they'd bring her in pending an inspection of our friend's property and she was a pretty feisty bird too et cetera… they seemed pretty reluctant to undo what had been done, and somewhat aware that this was not good procedure. In the end we decided we didn't want to be go-betweens and left the parties to sort it out, and Penny's stayed put. We're both big supporters of the work the SPCA do, but this strikes us as being a bit poor, added to the fact that we'd had to call them on the Monday morning to remind them they still had a bird to pick up (a call which turned out to be quite necessary as our details hadn't been carried over...) A communication error or two isn't the worst thing that can happen in an animal's life, Penny the hen was never ours, and in the big picture she has exactly what we hoped she'd have in lieu of her previous (good!) owner collecting her. With our friend she'd have been the first of a new brood and queen of the coop; with her new owner apparently she'll be the first layer in a non-laying flock, so either way she'll be special. But there's a teeny tiny self-righteous part of me that's still saying "bah!" at the wishes of Penny's rescuers being sort of admin-ed out of contention so easily. But a good result for Penny, and whatever her new address, we think good karma after the loss of another animal friend.

Moses

2010-06-12T14:15:00.000-07:00

Moses came into our lives as a small, mewling ball of fluff in 1994, bought at Petcetera, a now long-gone Dunedin pet shop where he hadn't been my girlfriend's first choice (a smoky grey sibling, possibly a girl), but his on-cue dirtbox demonstration sold him to her, proof that we probably wouldn't need to be bothering too much cleaning up after him. He was a pretty good kitten, although as testament to his eventual size when I came home from work nothing seemed to fit on him - he was all paws and ears. 'Spock' seemed a pretty apt name, but I wasn't having that; similarly, 'Boaz' was vetoed because my girlfriend wasn't going to be yelling that from the back doorstep in the mornings. But we needed a good name for him to grow and grow old into, so Moses it was. His first night with us was a noisy one - he was a constant vocaliser, and when his pitiful mews from our laundry became too much I brought him in to bed with me, sleeping at an odd angle lest I crush this purring bundle next to me, and our training - and my eccentric sleeping posture, took off from there. An early vet exam brought up an issue of congenital knee joint problems which would likely need to be fixed at some stage "How much?" we asked, "About two hundred per knee" the vet said. We decided we'd wait until the problem surfaced and it never really did.

Moses stayed with us, seeing off an intended flatmate, 'Oscar', who went to the flat upstairs instead after which they became firm buddies. He survived a fall off a balcony and made a rapid recovery after breaking into a packet of cat treats while under house arrest, and also survived pursuit by a couple of dogs belonging to some particularly ugly squatters down the road. We moved from Canongate to Opoho and he spent his first 'captive' afternoon in the new flat halfway up the chimney. Somewhere I have my favourite picture of him on a macrocarpa stump behind that flat, snow-white against a blue sky with the wind ruffling his fur and his normally large-pupiled eyes looking suitably spooked.

When we moved to Wellington he flew up with us in the plane's luggage hold, looking even more spooked when unloaded on a noisy tarmac. It was an even smaller Hataitai flat that we had our first big emergency, losing him when he got locked in someone's basement laundry for a week. That was a long week. We'd had him for five years by then and he'd become a permanent fixture, his vet visits and bookings into increasingly harder to find catteries for holidays an essential part of the calendar. Two more homes followed and he spent a month in one cattery while we did our bijou-OE (he came back with a different meow, somehow crosser and more irritated), and a couple of nights in the emergency vet's when a run-in with Monty, a psychotic Burmese resulted in an expensive operation and a rubber hose draining his chest for a few days.

For so many years he'd been such a part of our lives that when his health eventually started to become an issue we began to talk about what we would do for him when it needed to be done. He was on various arthritis pills for about three years (possibly his knees eventually catching up with him), and heart pills which likely started to affect his kidneys for two of those. When he gained a human sibling he took it with great grace, keeping his distance bar the odd curious nuzzle, and tolerating his tail being pulled by very enthusiastic and strong little hands. But in the past year that tail didn't stand up as much as it had used to, 'questioning' everything as he patrolled our back yard. He spent more time indoors, and more time sleeping, and though his kidneys had been in very good health for a while, his weight went down and never returned to the six-plus kilograms of his luxuriant prime. When knots started to develop on his belly fur and around his back legs we knew he wasn't able to groom himself as immaculately as he'd done in the past, and a blood test at the vets confirmed he was well into kidney disease. We knew he was fading, but we hadn't realised how little time we had left.

In the end we pre-empted things, and had him put down before he was too unwell and it needed to be done anyway. In the last three weeks of his life he got into a fight and caught a bird, but unusual episodes even in his prime. Having both had other cats who'd deteriorated and become skittish ghosts before our eyes, we were determined not to let Moses go the same way, so we sadly made an appointment and kept it. I wish I could say it was a peaceful end on the day, but it mostly was, and was still preferable to him ending his life in great pain, off his food and no longer himself. And he wasn't alone, slipping away in my arms, his body impossibly limp and sagged under sedation before the last injection that had him just stop, then sigh, and then cease.

Some pets get under your skin in ways that just break your heart in the end. Moses was described by friends as a 'gentleman' and a real character, words that probably get used for a lot of good cats and dogs around the place; but he genuinely was a great companion, noiselessly joining us on our back deck in our quiet moments or appearing as an unexpected lump, rumbling in the dark at the bottom right hand of the bed (always my side, since that first night). We've patched up and reclaimed 'his' distressed couch, and rediscovered to our surprise that it's the most comfortable place in the whole house. Moses meanwhile is in our cold back room, cremated and sealed in a box which seems far too small for all the affection he gave us and we gave him over sixteen years. When the weather clears he'll go under his lemon tree in the back yard along with a few items of his.

Rest in peace Moses. You were the best cat ever.

Talkin' Eds - Powerslave (1984), Live After Death (1985)

2010-05-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

Iron Maiden have conquered the world, and now they intend to enslave it. That may well be the mission statement for this, Maiden's fifth album and second into their 'classic' line-up. We're now a third of the way through the band's discography, including this year's forthcoming (and farewell?) release The Final Frontier.

Powerslave continues a building trend of all the Maiden albums, boosted enormously by the two most recent member's contributions - Bruce Dickinson shares co-writing credits on some of the songs here again, and writes one for himself, while Nicko seriously pounds the drumskins. I don't write that idly - there's a real heft to each hit, and his use of the bigger/louder cymbals in the kit is notable too. Of the rhythm section Steve Harris seem to have turned the volume of his bass up just a tad, perhaps to compensate for the sterling lead work of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith who manage to provide distinct and separate leads for all of the album. Yes, in most cases you can venture a guess as to who is providing which part as both players have a signature style, but there's really no sense of having heard any solo before throughout the eight tracks. This is a band still with a lot of lead in its pencil.

The Album
Thematically Powerslave begins almost as a set of twins - Aces High and Two Minutes to Midnight both deal with the loose theme of war, and after Maiden's last-to-date instrumental Losfer Words (Big 'Orra), Flash of the Blade and The Duellists share the topic of swordfighting. Harris' The Duellists is inspired by Ridley Scott's movie Duel, but it's competitive fencer Dickinson's Flash about a young man's vengeance after his parents' death that is a more fun listen with its tapped intro. Beside it, Duellists owes perhaps too much to the structure and rhythm of the earlier Where Eagles Dare. Back in the Village returns (again, loosely) to Number of the Beast's nod to The Prisoner and is another enjoyable track with a breakneck speed and indulgent "six six six" whispered over the lyric "I see sixes all the way". The title track's a little perfunctory, enlivened by a chugging power chord rhythm and a cod-Middle Eastern chord structure and guitar fill at the end of some lines. Live of course it's added to by Bruce Dickinson wearing a strange feathered mask for God knows what reason. The rest of the album is left to the stand-out track and live favourite, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a devoted re-telling of Coleridge's hallucinatory epic poem. It's… prog. And there's more where that came from, but the construction's sound, it doesn't outstay its welcome even at fourteen minutes in length, and Dickinson carries the vocals off, although his buccaneer rasp in the narrated sections featuring Coleridge's own lines, is a little OTT. On a positive note it probably scored highly for my schoolmate Grant Davies who used it as an example in our high school speech competition defending the intellectual side of Heavy Metal. Grant, what ever became of you, eh?

My first encounter with this album was in admiring its cover art (below), reduced hugely to fit the dimensions of a tape cassette, but enough for me to make out the rude in-jokes in the hieroglyphics, and poring over the lyrics without the benefit of the music accompanying (it was a friend's brother's tape…). Back in the Village made a big impression on me, as did Two Minutes, which boasts some pretty visceral imagery - unusual for Maiden, it must be said, of the casualties of modern war:

The body bags and little rags of children torn in two
And the jellied brains of those who remain to put the finger right on you
As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song
To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun

Strong stuff. Powerslave was the last full Maiden album I remember hearing around the time of its release, and even then it was at a woolshed party, so those aren't ideal conditions. With its boastful title and liner notes cataloguing the vast world tour which followed (New Zealand was promised, but never eventuated to my great adolescent disappointment) it seemed the band was one of the biggest things in the world. Nowadays to me the album stands less on its own and more a second half to Piece of Mind - the band spreading its wings further and enjoying its freedom of expression and experimentation. The indulgence of Village's overdubs, like Piece of Mind's mischevious backwards masking, proof that the band's following was more than enough to allow them some fun amid the hard work.

Album cover
As befits the band's status Eddie is now a god-king in Derek Riggs' best album cover, and a composition he would revisit later in the band's history. Gone is the night sky and wispy clouds, the maniacal corpse-like Eddie grinning over his victims; here he's regal, elemental, drenched in desert sun and reimagined as a figure from the Egyptian pantheon. Rather marvellously the band's logo and album title are in gold. In all it's a confident and assured design from a band (and artist) much in demand and easily picked out from record bins everywhere. Variations of the theme - Eddie as a mummy in two contemporary works by Briggs and some subsequent, indicate the popularity of this piece.

Tracks via YouTube:

Aces High (from Live After Death)
Two Minutes to Midnight (from Live After Death)
Losfer Words (Big 'Orra) (album version)
Flash of the Blade (video montage - never performed live)
The Duellists (album version - never played live)
Back in the Village (album version - never played live)
Powerslave (from Live After Death)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (part one) (part two) (from Live After Death)

Live After Death
A necessary inclusion. Released to capture the enormity and impact of the World Slavery Tour, Live After Death is Maiden's first live album since their debut Live! +1 in 1979. As such, and with the passing of time this is a larger, more accomplished recording with brilliant sound engineering mustering the band's live approach and particularly the twin lead guitars (each has a speaker representing their position on stage - Dave Murray is the left hand, Adrian Smith the right). The tracks are for the most part from the recent three albums, although the longer 1998 reissue CD manages to incorporate some Di'Anno tracks, including Iron Maiden and Running Free. For years this was considered an essential live metal album for its sound and quality of tracks, though I have to say I'm not entirely sold, having come to it from the DVD first, and subsequent performances and therefore somewhat spoiled by the later polish (the most recent live DVD Flight 666 may in fact be better!) In particular Dickinson's in 'tour voice' mode, so to sacrifice vocal range for longevity and volume was probably a necessary evil - the upshot is that the range is contained a little too much in some tracks and he comes across as a bit… barky. That said, Bruce does seem to be saving himself for the bigger shows, if the track order is an accurate representation of the set-list (as it appears to be). Ancient Mariner fares better for him saving his voice, as does the assuredly demanding Hallowed Be Thy Name.

Video Affects - Joan Jett: I Love Rock n Roll, 1982

2010-05-20T22:58:00.000-07:00

At age eleven my music idols are still to really appear. I 'follow' the chart show Ready to Roll along with my older siblings and note the current top ten as it changes over the weeks and months. Over 1981 ex-Runaways singer Joan Jett records this, a cover of the Arrows' original from 1975 with her new band the Blackhearts. In 1982 it reaches New Zealand and it is h-u-g-e. Well, that's the way I remember it, and Wikipedia and the RIANZ website won't tell me any different. It's probably not important, because what this does signify to me is that in the short space of a year my music appreciation has shifted from casual TV chart show viewing and likely acquiescence with my siblings'/parents' tastes through to noticing the tastes of my peers and other adults of significance. My intermediate teacher Miss Watson brought along her new purchase to school and had us write a poem about her favourite track on it. Within a fortnight I had followed suit and bought my first grown-up record, Queen's Greatest Hits but to this day I still ponder the wisdom of setting such a lofty assignment to a class of eleven year olds, based around the themes and lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody (true story!)

I Love Rock n Roll is quite a different song, however. Despite it being roughly the same age as Rhapsody its impact, delivery and video (having made a similar impression on the new new MTV) mean the song will be sung in playgrounds, along with the radio, at school camp and, most crucially, at my school social that year. Which underlines my other discovery of that year, really - girls. The obstacle I have with Rock n Roll is ironic then, in that it's sung by a 'girl'. But no sort of girl I'd see at school, that Ms Jett; and I'd not use that title - the epithet 'Ms' being viewed by my parents as a little suspicious and feminist-sounding. Jett is quite the antithesis of a pop starlet in the song and the video, scowling and sneering her way through the verses, roaring the 'Yaaow!" bits that the all-male Arrows had left to their guitars. The Blackhearts' guitars, for what it's worth, are the stronger in this too - heavier at the bottom and with a great solo. It's not hard to see why the song took on a new lease of life with Jett and is largely regarded as her composition. It was revolutionary to me - the video (the version here starts with a snippet of Runaways hit Bad Reputation) was in black and white, though not originally, as seen in the first version (in colour!) and Jett's onscreen attitude is all balls - leather jacket, spiked hair, getting in the spaces and faces of the young dudes at the bar, on which she'll later dance in a very non-Coyote Ugly way. To the girls in my class this was probably enormously exciting too - a cool chick miles from the sweet and squeaky clean fare we'd had 'til then - the Tina Crosses, Nolan Sisters and Sheena Eastons. This song, its opening line a neat inversion of The Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There (the Arrows had written it intending to address The Stones' It's Only Rock and Roll) is a deliberate role reversal. In my innocence I hadn't concieved that a girl could sing, behave and look like that. But Jett did and she was inescapable, and I soon happily saw the error of my ways, singing it at the top of my still small voice with all my classmates later that year at my school social.

And nearly thirty years on it's still a great song. Jett and the Runaways are experiencing something of a revival at the moment with a forthcoming biopic in production (Jett to be played by Kristen Stewart). A couple of weeks ago she and the Blackhearts made an appearance, looking and sounding in fine form performing Bad Reputation live on Letterman.

Robin of Sherwood - Series One

2010-05-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

It seems timely to be putting this up given that Ridley Scott's new version of Robin Hood complete with our/their Russell Crowe in not-quite Lincoln green has hit our multiplexes. It's a reminder that like Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur seemingly every generation brings to the table their own interpretation of the legend.
For my generation one of the most prominent would have to be Richard 'Kip' Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood, a highly stylised and considered take which, like those before it borrowed from the Sir Walter Scott template of the post-Crusade England mingled with residual Anglo Saxons versus Normans resentment. Uniquely, it also touched on older traditions, particularly a form of forest mysticism and mythology based around the 'Celtic' shamanistic figure of Herne, with his anointed 'son', Robin, an analogue of the very early linking of Robin-in-the-Hood with a nature deity himself. There are layers to Carpenter's version, giving it a resonance and a depth that I haven't noticed in subsequent versions. Carpenter's approach takes in two bites of the cherry in its versions of Robin the man - the yeomen Robin of Locksley and the nobleman Robin of Huntingdon, and through the inspired use of Herne was able to 'regenerate' one into the other, neatly (and by all accounts happily) replacing one lead actor with another when circumstances demanded.

We start with the best-known and regarded, Michael Praed - young, fine featured, dark-haired and with a dancer's build (Praed came to the role through stage work, notably The Pirates of Penzance), and surrounded by a stripped-down band of 'Merries' - the usual suspects of Little John (Clive Mantle), Maid Marion (Judi Trott - another dancer), Friar Tuck (Paul Rose) and Will Scarlet - Ray Winstone reinventing the once-dandyish role into a temperamental and aggressive fighter not too far removed from the roles that would permeate Winstone's wider career. Peter Llewellyn Jones plays Much the Miller's son (and Robin's half-brother) as a young simpleton, and crucially Sherwood introduces the Saracen Nasir, a late addition which was picked up by the Kevin Coster movie and recent BBC series. Mark Ryan's swordsmanship (coached by Doctor Who's chief stuntman Terry Walsh) made the character of Nasir THE boys' favourite while the girls happily got Praed, but it's the combined and considerable talents of Mantle and Winstone that drive the team through the entire series. Mantle's great, Winstone is a revelation. Praed's good though - quiet, measured, stagey in the right way. Another thing that escaped me at the time was the diversity of accents of the Merry Men - a deliberate detail, it appears, from the excellent 6-part DVD documentary that accompanies the Complete Series release. The idea being that these heroes would represent a unified England against the Norman-haired and named Sherriff and Guy of Gisbourne, ever drawing on his old mates from the Crusades to quell the Sherwood rebels. The latter two antagonists are of course played by Nickolas Grace (a spot of camp with a generous side order of ham, surely the model for Keith Allen's recent version) and Robert Addie (downtrodden, thuggish but strangely sympathetic) who died seemingly not long after the original documentary. Grace turns it on with all of his eye-bulging, vein-popping best while Addie skulks, sulks, and out-rides everybody else on screen. It's a credit to the writing that you can't despise either of them, though they (and the Sherriff's brother Abbot Hugo) are reliably despicable men.

Series One sets the myth anew but touches on the recognisable set pieces - the longstaff duel between Robin and John, the archery contest - this time for a silver arrow of Herne's which reappears as an important totem later in the second series, but is never seen thereafter. The enemies of the Merry Men are variously cast as Normans and their powerful allies (a corrupt and venal Church, Phil Davis' King John) and, as a counterpoint to Herne's influence, spiritual enemies pagan and diabolical. It's a strong opening, and the first year's stories are arguably the strongest, being brave enough to take their time introducing the regulars, dispensing with other contenders (Alan A Dale recast as a rather inept minstrel obsessed with a lass called Mildred), and in the absence of the Sherriff's physical prowess and cunning, giving the heroes a run for their money with other interlopers; Seven Poor Knights From Acre is a particular highlight. The performances are still fresh and in places naïve (Trott starts off a bit wobbly), but everyone is young, credible, absolutely looks the part and the whole design and direction making judicious use of camera filters and handy ruins and standing castles make for a really interesting looking and sounding production. Of course at this stage even the Clannad music isn't overused - an aspect that unfortunately does creep in as the series continues.

For the cost of a couple of tickets to see the Ridley and Russ Show I'd suggest getting The Complete Series instead - or even just the first series. I was happy in this case to discover that the memory mostly doesn't cheat - it really was that good.

Legends of Fantasy Art - Frank Frazetta

2010-05-12T01:37:00.000-07:00

Frank Frazetta died this week, aged 82.

For many his name will be synonymous with the pulp fantasy and SF of Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs - his Conan is simply definitive, and his approach to the human form of both genders made him the foremost and most logical artist of Burrough's Barsoom/Mars books. As I mentioned earlier in my Erol Otus piece the works of Frazetta and to a lesser extent Boris Vallejo were probably the leading examples of 1960s and 1970s fantasy art, and Frazetta went on to inspire a host of artists and cartoonists of the next generation including White Dwarf's Peter Jones, and Carl Critchlow (whose style he initially lampooned in his Thrud the Barbarian), and in 2000AD most crucially, Simon Bisley. Bisley was directly influenced by Frazetta's oils as well as his pen and ink washes, and his adoption of those styles, borrowing Frazetta's earthy palette and accentuated musculature both reinvented the look of two key series by Pat Mills. The previously angular and robotic ABC Warriors became heavy metal beefcake (though done in Bisley's earlier line drawing style) and Celtic hero Slaine in the acclaimed Slaine the King
remains a highlight for Bisley's studied and faithful homage to Frazetta (even down to the aforementioned palette) as much as Mills' own stripped-down narrative. Bisley's tribute marked something of a visual homecoming for a fictional hero whose legend-based roots owed as much to Howard's barbarian hero.

I wasn't always a fan of Frazetta, and didn't come to reassess his work until seeing Bisley's work which some at the time and since have called derivative (the irony remains however that for nearly ten years on from Slaine the King 2000AD's pages were cursed with the mud-coloured muscled monstrosities of lesser artists, each bearing the unmistakeable hallmarks of slavishly copying Bisley himself). He remains a colossus in his field, his heroes seemingly hewn from the same rocky terrain they inhabit naturally. Where other artists sometimes use terrain as a backdrop or pagefiller, Frazetta's appear to rise from that chalky earth, his heroines graced with the same watery luminosity of their dungeon environments, or as perpetually buoyant as the Martian gravity around them. It's work in caricature sometimes - the warriors sinewed, biceps and thighs bulging as they pose, crouch and fly in battle, their womenfolk equally underdressed to show off the curves, the flowing locks, the undulating concupiscence. Great fodder, as I mentioned earlier, for album covers, movie posters and panel vans, the pop culture canvases of the Seventies. Small wonder then that as ideal body shapes changed into the Eighties Frazetta's work was seen less, and for a good time the airbrush became the champion of fantasy artists. But Frazetta had flow, the style that oils and brushes demand, the medium being so very unforgiving. His subject matter is visceral and as utterly testosterone-led as the stories behind them, which probably explains more than it needed be said why my earliest brush with the master's work was some sneaky peaks at my older brother's borrowed volume of Frazetta art as a very young teen; each portrait a doorway into older, wilder, savage and erotically-charged worlds. And yet to this day I'd be more comfortable in public with that volume under my arm than the likes of say, Vallejo or Chris Achilleos whose work alongside is endlessly glossier, sleeker, more lurid and less elemental.

They really don't make them like Frank anymore.

Talkin' Eds - Piece of Mind (1983)

2010-05-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

1981 in Heavy Metal

Albums
AC/DC - Flick of the Switch
Accept - Balls to the Wall
Alice Cooper - DaDa
Black Sabbath - Born Again
Blue Öyster Cult - The Revölution by Night
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Dio - Holy Diver
Dokken - Breaking the Chains
Europe - Europe
Girlschool - Play Dirty
Hanoi Rocks - Self-Destruction Blues / Back to Mystery City
KISS - Lick It Up
Krokus - Headhunter
Manowar - Into Glory Ride
Metallica - Kill 'Em All
Mötley Crüe - Shout at the Devil
Motörhead - Another Perfect Day
Ozzy Osbourne - Bark at the Moon
Pantera - Metal Magic
Queensrÿche - Queensrÿche (debut)
Quiet Riot - Metal Health
Ratt - Ratt (EP)
Saxon - Power & the Glory
Slayer - Show No Mercy
Suicidal Tendencies - Suicidal Tendencies
Thin Lizzy - Thunder and Lightning
Twisted Sister - You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll

Newly-formed acts include: Bon Jovi Helloween Living Colour Lizzy Borden Mayhem Megadeth Metal Church Morbid Angel Poison and Queensrÿche

Some obvious picks from fellow NWOBHM-ers Def Leppard, Saxon and Motörhead. Elsewhere the old guard fumble along with the remnants of Sabbath in Dio and Ozzy, some European acts emerging (Accept, Dokken, Hanoi Rocks, Europe!), and the 'future' - glam metal (Poison, Mötley Crüe) and speed/thrash (Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Slayer) making early overtures. Maiden's sun is still at its height, but change is assured. KISS have even taken off their makeup...

The Line-Up

Having Number of the Beast under their belts Iron Maiden toured the album, but lost drummer Clive Burr along the way, seeingly another casualty of the gruelling tour and demands of the band. His replacement Michael 'Nicko' McBrain once again changes the sound of the band - where Burr's drumming is precise and well in line with the rhythm section, McBrain's obvious skills (he's regarded as one of the greats of heavy metal drummers) and innovation lend a more exploratory attitude to his style. There's been much discussion of the opening drum roll to the album's first track - McBrain hits every drum in an extremely tight triple roll, suffice it to say it's an effective and memorable starting volley, and ushers in THE classic Maiden line-up. Technically the album is another masterpiece, although the version reviewed here is from the 1998 remasters themselves, which balances some of the additional sound effects (the machine guns of Where Eagles Dare, for example) further.

For me Piece of Mind was almost an unknown quantity. Prior to The Best of the Beast I’d not heard anything off it, but The Trooper made an immediate impression - the album's other single The Flight of Icarus less so initially, but I've come to enjoy its coda greatly, and its video is notable for actually being something out of the ordinary for Maiden - no live footage, but studio film and other imagery combined. Prior to this the album was a tee shirt worn by a school mate - I think I may have assumed it was based on an EP, as mine (Maiden Japan) had been. Having bought the album proper then I've come to it with some prejudices still intact. I don't think Tim's going to like some of what I'm about to say!

The Album

With Beast having been the greatest success for Maiden to date, Piece of Mind continues the pace of one album per annum, surely the work of young men with energy and drive, and to be sure Piece marks something of a continuation of Beast's sound, with some notable developments. The songs are developed more in places, sometimes incorporating other musical works (To Tame a Land) and attempting new tricks (actual backing vocals on Die With Your Boots On, and some songwriting input by Bruce Dickinson). Lyrically though, the steps forward are marked with a few staggers; for every solid work (Where Eagles Dare, The Flight of Icarus, The Trooper) there's a real clunker (Boots again, Quest for Fire, To Tame a Land). There's no theme to the album again, but the songs largely come from various narratives, whether historical (Sunlight on Steel, Trooper) or from popular literature (er, almost all the rest). Revelations takes chunks of C K Chesterton and Crowley, and Boots nods towards Nostradamus a few times, but this isn't an album you'll listen to for the lyrics, especially in the leaden Quest ("for Fii-yurr!"), a low point for the album and band with its screeching vocals, Neanderthal beat and an opening line ("In a time/when dinosaurs roamed the earth!") coming more from an Amicus movie than the actual novel and film. Quest to me has at least a kitsch quality which helps, but if I must appreciate the album on that level as the sort of thing I'd have been into at thirteen or fourteen with its sub-Dungeons and Dragons imagery in Revelations and Still Life, then I find it also interferes with the stronger, more mature tracks, those being the three mentioned earlier, and Sunlight on Steel which, while it re-uses the Trooper galloping bass a little too soon, fair moves at an enjoyable lick. It's good stuff.

I want to like Piece of Mind though, and in fact a good many people do, regarding it as one of Maiden's finest albums, for some the best. I just find it disjointed - in places a victory lap after the triumph of Beast, but perhaps a little self-indulgent as well. To Tame a Land and Quest simply re-tell the stories of Dune and 'Rosny's original novel (more likely the movie) and indicate the list-making aspects of a few later compositions; Revelations being one man's mash-up of some ropey metaphysics is almost impenetrable and again works for me best as phantasmagoria rather than an attempt to actually say anything deep. Perhaps that's an unfair accusation, some HAVE found depth in the song, but they've clearly had to work at it and I need to remind myself that This. Is. Heavy. Metal. and not really anything more. I don't think that's what we're supposed to be doing with this.

Cover Art

It's a full-bodied Eddie for the first time, and the first of many torments our hero is put through, this being a lobotomy and straitjacket (now get out of that one, my lad!) Derek Riggs provides another iconic cover with more sickly yellow as its highlight hue - he's well on a roll at this point, and his album covers seem to improve exponentially with each release. There's still some continuity with previous covers - that distinctive sky appears on the back cover seen from inside Eddie's ubiquitous padded call although the shape of the opening and the buttoned wall lining make it look a little more luxurious than yer average psych unit - I used to wonder whether he was in some form of aircraft, hence the sky and no land being visible. Perhaps it's a flying panel van?

Album tracks

Where Eagles Dare (album track)
Revelations (Live in Dortmund)
Flight of Icarus (Live in Dortmund)
Die With Your Boots On (Live in Hammersmith)
The Trooper (official video)
Still Life (Live in Ipswitch)
Quest for Fire (album track)
Sun and Steel (album track)
To Tame a Land (Live in Hammersmith - with back story by Bruce)

Legends of RPG Art: Russ Nicholson

2010-04-21T02:01:00.000-07:00

Chances are if you played a UK variant of a roleplaying game in the 1980s you would have come across the work of Russ Nicholson. Nicholson's distinctive line art graced the pages of the Fighting Fantasy game books, White Dwarf, and its contribution to the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the infamous Fiend Folio, among other publications. It's in the Folio that his work shows the greatest range and alongside occasional contributions by Erol Otus and some notable UK contemporaries, Nicholson's linear, pointillistic style is the most prominent. Like Otus his concept for a monster, the Folio's Githyanki (originally for WD) survives and remains the definitive visualisation, imitated by successive artists to be one of the few success stories from the book.

Unlike some others of his time Nicholson's approach brought with it the artist's intimate knowledge of historical war gear, which isn't to say his pictures were faithful to history, rather that they were used sympathetically - armour was often rendered a mismatch combination rather than a full-suit (or worse, the deaded chainmail bikini and its variants). He seems to have eschewed the likes of plate mail for the more visually intricate and interesting ring, chain or scale mail. For small work Nicholson's work is sufficiently detailed that you can get lost in them easily, and it remains the main reason I still admire his style, indeed, he's the first fantasy artist I tried to mimic as a teenager. His approach is rarely static in a form (usually bookplate illustrations or monster portraits) that doesn't always invite dynamic poses or movement - but there's movement of line and of shading evident in his work, and a great sense of weight in his characters - he renders flowing robes beautifully, tongues of smoke curl from his dragons' snouts, the rotted clothing of a zombie barely held together, seemingly shredded with decay. His figures are for the most part contrived to be thin or drawn, his goblins especially having pointed features and long noses and limbs, but Nicholson's work isn't strictly speaking all grotesques, as this rendering of a Houri for WD shows, exotic but unfussy, betraying his confessed admiration for the works of Aubrey Beardsley. Of all his work it remains one of my favourites, a great composition with clever use of line weight.

While Beardsley's fantasy work took in the creations of Poe and Wilde and classical mythology Nicholson's artwork features heavily in the 1980s RPG revivial of that literature, including a stint illustration Puffin Books' two licensed Robin of Sherwood game books. Coming from his later work it's a little less interesting and a little more realistic - I definitely prefer his early Eighties work, particularly that of his Fighting Fantasy contributions, and namely The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Citadel of Chaos. In fact thinking of those books and their hared worl of Allansia, it's Nicholson's artwork that draws it all together for me as the definitive version, an alluring combination of the high, exotic fantasy of, say, the Arabian Nights, and the grimier low fantasy of Lieber and the shabbier corners of Middle Earth. And speaking of which, what could only be a Balrog, the only Tolkien-derived image I could find from the artist, and in colour too.

Edited to add: My sincere thanks to Russ for his comments and clarification below. The above isn't one of his works after all, alas. Thanks for visiting, sir!

Video Affects - Billy Idol: Hot In The City, 1982

2010-04-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

In 1981 William 'Billy Idol' Broad of defunct latterday UK punk act Generation X crossed the Atlantic to carve out a new career as a solo artist. He took with him a version of the band's earlier song Dancing With Myself and an image carefully combining the sneer of Presley, the patois of Iggy, the hair of Sid Vicious and the bleach of Sting. The music was as carefully pruned - Dancing, with its 3/4 beat and "whoah-oh" rejoinders could have been a longer, more commercially-lucrative Ramones track, the guitar work of Steve Stevens was an essential element in hardening an instrumental approach that owed as much to synthesisers, and yet with Hot In The City there's a look back in its pretence of earlier rhythmic trappings, and the inclusion of female backing singers (not an obvious punk ingredient) adds to this. The song's beat isn't dissimilar to Springsteen's Hungry Heart, two years older and also checking the rear vision mirror with its influences. Where Hot differs is the then ultra modern 80s punk look of its singer and the video tailored for the song.

This is the earlier version of two - the second, with a mock crucifixion (Idol being as willing to adopt the cross and rosary that the likes of Prince and Madonna would make emblematic) fell foul of MTV and was censored, but no matter - it's this version that made the impact on me. A girl walks into a record store, sees Idol's single sleeve which (with the aid of a not that convincing vis-mix) morphs into the man himself, and the song begins, Idol's face burned and overexposed with some rudimentary post-production, and some appropriate explosive images key in the background to denote - y'know, hotness and all that. If you've seen the video and on the evidence of my previous post you can probably guess the rest - some of said images are of atom bomb tests with the required infernal mushroom clouds, disintegrating model towns and burning living trees. Striking stuff; arresting images, and though I’d have had to recognise them for what they were I'm convinced that this is the first time I saw those now-ubiquitous film sequences. They freaked the hell out of me given that I was twelve and starting to notice the wider world around me.

The images after twenty years plus perhaps another thirty to forty don't carry the weight they must have back in their day or mine. The regularity with which they've been used counts towards that, as well as their replacement by other, more recent images - I can probably name videos which have include Kennedy's assassination and the destruction of the World Trade Center, for example, but those examples as much as this have affected me in the idle (sorry) way that documented historical footage and images can be adopted in the name of popular entertainment - in the case of Hot the images are in the background, 'filler' rather than focus, simply there to neatly underline a suggestive lyric. But it never left me that on seeing them at the time and some time afterwards their appropriation seemed somehow wrong - this was weapons testing, a show of strength and power and utter annihilation backing a song about feeling a bit 'restless'? Very punk and confrontational, I suppose, though not quite swastika armbands on Bill Grundy's Today show. But then even to twelve year old me Billy Idol wasn't punk, he was pop, and the visual collision of those two worlds shook me and scared me.

Mind you, for what it was worth, Idol's first couple of albums aren't bad, but that third one was a stinker.

The Little Black Book of Atomic War

2010-04-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

I am fourteen and my brother has just bought a new book which we'll both read - he because he bought it of course and me because I am his little brother and still not quite out of copy-cat mode. Plus it has a bewitching cover, all black save for white blade-serifed text and some orange line art. It is The Little Black Book of Atomic War, and even if the cover hadn't been so fetchingly set out I'd have probably sought the book out as soon as I'd heard of it on the strength of the title alone.

I am fourteen and it is 1984, which means that I am a child of the Eighties. Here follows a brief digression:

There's a lot of stuff about these days concerning being a Child Of The Eighties, much of it rather silly and pointless about the silly and pointless - shoulder pads, leg warmers, After School with Olly Ohlsen, Ghostbusters… I'll stop now, my point being that for the most part this sort of nostalgia plays into the reader's warm and fuzzies, or at worst the harmless cringes of looking back - they make great 'blog' topics for newspaper websites because all you need to do is blurt out a few key phrases Mork and Mindy Back to the Future Duran Duran and your target audience will torpedo themselves out of the woodwork for an extended round of "me too!", adding extra do-you-remembers like a Greek chorus with the predicted effect of making said decade look cheesy and ridiculous and hopelessly naïve. We used to do this sort of thing with the Seventies too, and the decades before that, and although it's only ever for entertainment purposes and easy copy for a salaried blogger, I fear the chance of this form of pop culture reflux overwhelming the 'other' side of the Eighties. There were a lot of really scary, bad and depressing things that happened over the course of those ten years, but for fourteen year old me, the scariest was the imminent threat of Nuclear Armageddon. It is 1984 and the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted to three minutes to midnight, the closest setting then (and since) to 1952's two minutes.

Ironically (I think) for the pooh-poohing I make of pop culture burps described above, it’s from that arena that the barometer of the times can be read. The early 80s saw the launch of the Mad Max and Terminator movies, plus Wargames (freaked.me.out) and Red Dawn (never saw it, sounded cool). My comic of choice, 2000AD used Nuclear War as the starting point for two of its most celebrated series (Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog) and the theme ran in other stories as well (Meltdown Man, Rogue Trooper, ABC Warriors). TV mini series were made and celebrated as grim cautionary tales (Threads, The Day After - both pointedly concerned with the aftermath of a war, another sign of the times) and as a whole the mood of these pieces, though sometimes fantastic, bore testament to the prevailing mood - at least, say, from 1981 to 1985.

Marc Barasch's Little Black Book is a curious tome, its title is dead-on, being a sarcastic look back at the hopelessly naïve concerns and enthusiasm for all things atomic in the 1940s and 1950s as equally new wonder product and energy source (Atomic steam shovels! Atomic airplanes!) and device of war ("In Baltimore people will be expected to evacuate the city in sequence according to their zip codes"), and the bleaker realities apparent in 1983. It's a piecemeal, lightweight read - I would dip into it and put it away gingerly when I'd read enough, but its total effect was pessimistic, humour of the blackest kind, as its tagline promised "the last word - and the last laugh - on the war to end them all". Inside are tidbits ranging from the birth of the bomb, eyewitness accounts of the Trinity tests and Hiroshima detonation, infamous near-misses in diplomacy and sabre-rattling, the best 'bland reassurances' of modern nuclear history, and, for 1983 at least, some sobering statistics. Big brother and I got a lot out of it as far as the pencilled-in underlines and asterisks tell - I think he used it in school debating, and I got a pretty decent mark in Biology essentially cribbing a comparison chart between cockroaches and humans in the post-war survival stakes. Re-reading it now the staistics are out, the anecdotes uncited and in general the coverage itself is a piece of history as much as its archived novelty content - quotes on communal survival strategies attributed to FEMA, for example, take on an interesting aspect post-Hurricane Katrina.

I'm glad we still have the book, but in all I don't respect it as much as I did, or fear it. And I'm grateful that to some degree the paranoia of the later Cold War has subsided, even if it's been replaced by something a little more local, a little more global. I was interested to read on Wikipedia that the Doomsday Clock hasn't measured risk according to nuclear conflict for some time, and global terrorism and environmental collapse are among the new parameters. A sign of the times then, just perhaps not that much more comforting.

Talkin' Eds: The Number of the Beast (29/3/1982)

2010-03-12T12:43:00.001-08:00

If you only listen to one Iron Maiden album, then make it The Number of the Beast.

On the face of it that's probably a lame argument to make, but it needs defending - this is only the third album for the band's soon-to-be fifteen album run, and the fact that it's twenty-eight years old could be casue for concern. Are we meant to believe that after this it's a case of diminishing returns?

I don't think so. But Beast remains a landmark for the band, and is justifiably regarded as a landmark British album, moreover a landmark rock/heavy metal album. It's tight, punchy, and it has an energy that still can be felt today. Put simply it's the sound of a band hitting its stride in a new and exciting way, with only one more change of personnel before its 'classic' line-up is ushered in.
In September 1981 vocalist Paul Di'Anno was dismissed and replaced by Bruce Dickinson, formerly of Samson, a band with a promising future, but going nowhere due to serious managerial and contractual issues. Dickinson's vocal performance and ease of place as a frontman will solidify Maiden's place as the forerunner of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, with an operatic, libretto style far removed from the East End bark of his predecessor. Lest we forget that Iron maiden do not 'do' backing vocals or full-band vocals - the lead singer is usually the only singer, so the job is a serious task. Dickinson's range is a young man's, and he seems to possess an innate ability to judge a line's weight, stretching out notes and pushing the accents to do more than simply accompany two seriously talented guitarists and a formidable rhythm section. Exhibit A, the underrated album opener Invaders, written thus:

Longboats have been sighted and the evidence of war has begun
Many Nordic fighting men, their swords and shields gleam in the sun

But delivered stacatto thus:

Longboats have been SIGHT-ed and the EV-i-dence of WAAR - has be-gun! Many Nordic FIGHT-ing men their SWORDS-and-shields GLEEEAAM - in the sun!

Try as I might to avoid Scansion 101 there's an obvious picking out of the internal rhymes in the lyrics and an unconventional breaking up of the expected rhythm of the vocals: the first stress is on 'Sight', not 'Long', and the the carefree way Dickinson teases out the 'glee' in 'Gleam' while the rest of the band drive on behind him is so very self-assured. Di'Anno may have been a front man and a good one at that, but Dickinson is a genuine lead singer where the role hadn't previously existed. Even beyond the obvious change in sound, Dickinson's contribution to the dynamic of Iron Maiden's songs is significant. Vocally he rides over the top of a concrete rhythm, reinforced by the drumming style of Clive Burr, whose characteristic crisp style often follows the rhythm guitar, giving the song's riffs extra weight. The song is fast, too - not quite speed metal fast, but to my mind can be easily grouped into the songs off the album the likes of Megadeath's Dave Mustaine and Anthrax's Scott Ian admit to having pored over in the early days of their respective bands for inspiration.
'Invaders then kicks off what turns out to be a highly British album, covering for the most part subjects close to the band's home; from the Viking invasions to the East End with its tarts and local mobsters, there are literary and pop culture themes from The Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned, The Prisoner and of course the title track, borrowing equally from Robert Burns' Tam O'Shanter and the Hammer Horrors. The obvious exception is the album's greatest commercial success, the Native American clearance Run to the Hills, to my mind suffering a little through overexposure, but by God back in the day was it a scorcher. In all it's a broad sweep of local influences without the threat of being a flag-waver - it celebrates its origins without drawing attention to them, and why not when the real spectacle is on stage?
So much for the fast tracks then, the remainders are Children of the Damned, Steve Harris' nod to the Midwich movies with some lovely and economic arpeggio work by Adrian Smith, and the closer and live favourite, Hallowed Be Thy Name, the testament of a condemned man whose faith is challenged on the scaffold. Charlotte the Harlot follow-up 22 Acacia Avenue is a split-time composition, but the lyrical content was something I used to stumble over (I'm a little more... forgiving now). Genuinely sexist or male rescue fantasy? Perhaps a bit of both, and there are a couple of wince-worthy oines in there, but it bounces along like a mini-musical and lyrics set aside is very strong. Overall the album's work is a great step up from the previous two releases, with better lyrical content and compositions that favour and flatter all members of the group; this is Maiden's first all-band album, and with the possible exception of the 1998 Remaster addition of Total Eclipse there's no filler here, and for the first time no instrumentals.
Thinking of adding an Iron Maiden album to your collection but shying away from a Best Of? I can only quote Patrick McGoohan when called by a star-struck manager for permission to use the star's TV show's opening sequence on his band's record: "What did you say the name was? Iron Maiden? Do it!"

The songs - all live 1982 or studio versions

Invaders
Children of the Damned
The Prisoner
22 Acacia Avenue (vocals low on the mix - they're better here)
The Number of the Beast
Run to the Hills
Gangland
Total Eclipse Hallowed Be Thy Name

Cover Art

Hard to beat, and easily in the top three covers. Here is the now iconic Eddie triumphant in Hell, pulling the strings of a caricature Satan, in turn the master of a puppet Eddie, but we know who's really in charge. It's a deliberate poke at the growing attention the band was getting from religious conservatives (notably but not solely in the US) and it won't be the last. Compositionally it's fantastic - Eddie's long legs (denim or leather-clad?) stretching over a flaming wasteland and spectral sky that Derek Riggs would revisit in a few single and album covers to come; our hero is grinning with his hellfire eyes but you can't believe he's truly evil, and so the transformation of Eddie the lad rather than the bogeyman continues. It's the last album cover where he has his shock wig hair, and the t-shirt and jeans ensemble is also soon to go. The only aberration in the artwork is a weird black overbrushing in the middle left field, highlighted all the more by the original album printing which rendered what should have been a black and grey sky deep blue (this was rectified in the 1998 reissue). On the back the new line-up. They look young. So so young...

Optional bonus decent cover version: Skid Row's Sebastian Bach does Children of the Damned

Lead Time Lords

2010-03-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

So it's come to this - a Doctor Who-related post. Still, there's a cross-interest with this post as it's also about painting miniatures. And here they are.

These Doctors Who are for the most part examples of the range initially made by Harlequin Miniatures around 1998-2000, and subsequently bought and still for sale by Black Tree Designs. Harlequin's range was laudable but eccentric, and remains the pre-eminent version of DW miniatures in 28mm. Almost the entire old series was accounted for plus the TV Movie and two Peter Cushing films by Doctors, companions and other series regulars plus a serious stab at most of the show's best, worst and more infamous monsters. There were strange omissions among these though - no Rani, Meddling Monk or Valeyard for one, and Gallifrey was represented by one figure for the President (so no Borusae or Rassillon, no Chancellary Guard - not even a Maxil or Castellan). But as it went it wasn't a bad range in its time; some sculpts and likenesses were better than others, and the sizes were a bit understudied perhaps, but these factors can be surely overlooked by the range available, including several variants of Doctors Hartnell through Davison plus McCoy (there are three Fourth Doctors counting the deerstalker and cloak 'Talons' version).

Harlequin's/BTD's line ends with a small Paul McGann Era ensemble, and there is no official license for the new series. Eagle-eyed enthusiasts have found some pretty decent likenesses elsewhere though, as shown above. Heresy Miniatures, as part of their Scientists and Civilians range offer a "Dr Hugh McCrimmon", a "Malcolm Ecclescake" and a "Nerd Lord" which are pretty good likenesses for the newer Doctors, and enthusiasts have used figures from Heresy's range as well as Hasslefree Miniatures for a few other recent characters (a generic not-Buffy with some modification becomes Rose Tyler, for example), and for the time being these make-dos are as good as you'll get - if not better than the Harlequin jobs (and certainly better than the 1980s caricatures from Citadel).

So, story over, here's my little army of Doctors which were originally painted in quieter times a couple of years ago, though none are what I'd call complete, needing for the most part some highlighting and work on the faces. The Sixth Doctor's coat is a work in progress (famous last words), as is the Fourth Doctor's scarf. The Eighth Doctor is simply undercoated black, with a drybrush of grey to help the detail along (for some reason Harlequin gave him a perm and a HUGE head); the more recent acquisitions are awaiting even a proper undercoat, just given a thin wash of black for a bit of detail again. The Third Doctor isn't a bad Pertwee likeness, though takes on an air of Winston Peters from some angles - there's an alternative pose I'd like to get and paint in Time Warrior colours to break up the run of Doctors In Black the Terror of the Autons version seems to muster. Oh, and the alternative Fourth Doctor with hat and shorter scarf is a figure with great character and attire fit for a time when you want a touch of burgundy but don't want to go all Season Eighteen.

Miniature painting, I keep saying, is a winter sport and I have the aforementioned Tolkein Grenadier minis to redo as well. Wish me luck!

Video Affects - Split Enz: Dirty Creature, 1982

2010-02-26T00:03:00.000-08:00

Continuing your host's journey through vividly remembered music with pictures...

I am twelve, or thereabouts, and able to watch Doctor Who, Blake's 7, and pretty much most things I'd care to on the family TV without a censuring pair of eyes from adults. In fact that seems rather a childish thing to admit to given that in less than two tender years my musical tastes will turn to heavy metal, by which time I'll have seen Michael Jackson dance with the undead and turn into a wolf-cat creature. But despite a childhood fascination with myths and legends, pulp Science Fiction and monsters in general my viewing has been sensibly monitored by my parents and there are some areas my developing mind haven't yet ventured into.

Music videos are a pretty new thing - maybe a couple of years old as we know them now, specially-shot, sometimes narrative and in the early 80s style brimming with the latest video effects for added interest (q.v. Doctor Who of the same era). Punk has been and gone shaking up the performance angle of bands - where once it was enough to have musicianship and perhaps a charasmatic front(man) to convey the band image now the music video offers a chance for all those other members to get out from behind their instruments and share the limelight. Or not. Certainly the emphasis now more than ever has been on the visual, the arresting image, the fantastic.

Compared to the young Jackson's transmogrific efforts the following year Dirty Creature is small beer, although locally it does pretty well. The song's extremely catchy and has aged pretty well, driven as it is by co-composer Nigel Griggs' seven-beat rhythm and Noel Crombie's crisp percussion: hi-hats and snare for verses, toms for the chorus with just a touch of crash. There's precious little guitar in this song even though Neil Finn their best player has recently joined them and lent his talents to the composition. Instead it's Eddie Rayner's keyboards and piano that provide the fills, with the odd phaser thrown in. On top of it all is a reliable vocal track from Tim Finn, relating a nervous breakdown episode via the metaphor of treacherous water; a common theme in the song's parent album Time and Tide.

As with Baby It's You the song and video go hand in hand, and to my tweve year old self Dirty Creature is a backyard horror with its stagnant lake, sun-bleached jetty and skeletal drowned forest. Filters render the sky a psychedelic maelstrom and I know that at the end of verse two something that will disturb the bejesus out of me is going to happen. It's not the first time a music video will disturb me (welcome to my nightmares Andy Partridge as a scary New Wave clown in XTC's Making Plans For Nigel) or the last one of the Eighties (Er, Headless Chickens' Slice I'd say*, joined by Fetus Productions' Flicker), but thanks to a watery ninja and Tim Finn's decapitated head my taste of 1980s videos is off to an unforgettable start.

(*to clarify, from 2:35 on and Chris Matthews' rarely-unshaded pupils, although that cleavage at 2:22 is pretty disturbing too)

Legends of RPG Art - Erol Otus

2010-02-23T00:15:00.000-08:00

Erol Otus. Eight letters, four vowels, two magic words.

Along with Ellenmoor and Mount Silverberg, the seafaring Elf-king Aerelotus is a name from my old RPG fantasy world based devotedly on a real world counterpart.
To me the art of Erol Otus is 1970s Dungeons and Dragons, as much as multiple polyhedral dice and reaction rolling on village NPCs. Each revision of the D&D rules set has carried with it a distinct fantasy aesthetic - the 1983 Basic rules ushered in the studied sketchiness and painterly cheesecake of the Jeff Easley and Larry Elmore illustrations, while the 2nd Ed AD&D Monster Manual opted for a unified look to its creature catalogue using a block-coloured comic strip style. From the 3rd to the 4th edition the internal illustrations have been more complex, but also more homogenous – their unity and slavish naturalistic palettes I find rather too prescriptive (much like my impression of the revised rules themselves), and would fit in a police line-up with movie conceptual art from, say, the recent King Kong or Narnia movies without standing out - to their detriment. There’s no risk of that happening with the 1970s D&D art, and nobody’s come close to aping the work of Erol Otus.

Seventies RPG art gets a bit of stick for being clumsy, amateurish and cheesy, and to be fair there’s a good amount of it that is, particularly in the old 1st edition Monster Manual, but a lot of that artwork was groundbreaking in a way, coming from a time when fantasy art itself was a genre largely set aside for paperback covers, record sleeves, posters and panel vans. If the titans of that decade’s art were the likes of Boris Vallejo, Frank Frazetta and Christos Achilleos you can understand why their styles weren’t often seen in the pages of RPG literature. In most cases they simply don’t match the rag-tag pick and mix influences of the game – part Tolkien, part Vance, part Ashton-Smith, Leiber, Lewis, Aesop, Swift et cetera. The answer to visualising such a hodge-podge world (not that anyone was asking) worked best by either going down the traditional route (Dave Trampier’s exquisite woodcut-style creatures and tableaux) or farther out - perhaps somewhere akin to the Odd Rods cards of that era. Guess which one Erol Otus was?

It was years before I dug Erol Otus’s style, usually opting instead for some of the more realistic and traditional, clean-cut works listed above, or the smooth lines of Jeff Dee’s comic book figures. But in returning to the game years afterwards Otus’ vivid and lurid paintings are the ones that last and still enthral me. You won’t find many pictures of traditional mythological monsters in his portfolio, and even those you would find carry his signature details – smooth, almost fishlike skin, spines or webbed feet, goggling glassy eyes, grinning maws. His Lovecraft interpretations are borderline goofy, but are all the more unearthly for it, compared to the Gigeresque examples you’ll find elsewhere. His heroes are similarly unorthodox – a blend of heroic Greek, high fantasy and Nordic myth, with no breast unplated and no helmet un-horned, un-winged or un-crested. His pictures of dem-ihumans are rare (except for the Elves and Drow he painted, which surely defined the look of the latter thereafter), and I don’t think he could have drawn a Gandalf-styled Magic User to save himself – his examples look more like Biblical magi. A breath of fresh air. Similarly his boldness with colour and light are arresting, often blending complementary colours like yellow, green and purple to produce skin tones and clothing and even skies that seem to owe more to the hues of marine biology than anything above ground.

There have been hundreds of great fantasy artists working in role playing games over the past forty years, but I can’t think of a world more alarming, horrific, or more vibrant and fun that I’d like to play in than that of Erol Otus.

Talkin' Eds - Killers (2/2/1981)

2010-02-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

1981 in Heavy Metal:

AC/DC - For Those About to Rock We Salute You
Accept - Breaker
Alice Cooper - Special Forces
Billy Idol - Don't Stop (debut)
Black Sabbath - Mob Rules
Blue Öyster Cult - Fire of Unknown Origin
Def Leppard - High 'n' Dry
Gillan - Future Shock / Double Trouble
Girlschool - Hit and Run
Hanoi Rocks - Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks
Judas Priest - Point of Entry
Kiss - Music from "The Elder"
Krokus - Hardware
Mötley Crüe - Too Fast for Love (debut)
Motörhead - No Sleep 'til Hammersmith (live)
Ozzy Osbourne - Diary of a Madman
Samson - Shock Tactics (Bruce Dickinson's last)
Saxon - Denim and Leather
Thin Lizzy - Renegade
Van Halen - Fair Warning
Venom - Welcome to Hell
Whitesnake - Come an' Get It

Notable group beginnings: Metallica, Anthrax, Pantera, Slayer and Mötley Crüe - of which more later. In an important way however Killers is as much informed by 1980's run of metal, as this album is almost entirely comprised of new material (by contrast Iron Maiden's tracks were a good two or three years old by the time they were cut). It's also almost entirely a Steve Harris composition, with some input by Dave Murray and Paul Di'Anno.

Other commentators have tried to find a general theme for Killers, but if there is one it's not really that evident. Certainly the songs have recurring motifs, being either about those who kill, their victims or the wrongfully accused, but it's hard to read anything more into such rudimentary and perennial rock and roll subjects; both 'accused' songs have the protagonist beseeching a mother or other female for sanctuary or support. It's not as if there's anything new being said here, and we're still some way off from Steve Harris' better writing with some ropey rhymes ('bad'/'mad', 'knees'/'please' in Prodigal Son). The opening instrumental, The Ides of March, is as close to prog and the likes of early metal pioneers such as Sabbath as you're likely to get. It stands out once it's done, not for its quality so much as its sound - the drums are really muted, making it sound as though it was performed in a cardboard box. No time to waste though, as Killers properly cranks up with early favourite Wrathchild and one of the first of Steve Harris' classic bass intros. Harris will also introduce later track Innocent Exile making more exploratory use of the fretboard, while in Twilight Zone there's the characterisic 'gallop' in the choruses, propping up the pace of the song from the front as Harris himself would do onstage, one foot on the foldback monitor, bass head machine-gunning the crowd below.

Lineup

(L-R Dave Murray, Clive Burr, Paul Di'Anno, Steve Harris, Adrian Smith)

So it goes with Killers - this is Maiden consolidating their sound and far from the 'difficult second album' syndrome. If anything this release is more about the singles than the first, and as stated above, the prog element is rapidly disappearing (although it would reappear in later albums as the group relaxed into things more), with only Ides of March and the opening bars of Murders in the Rue Morgue offering anything in that vein. Everyone's in good form - the drum fills are better, and Di'Anno's found a new voice - more powerful, confident and with a higher end, perhaps inspired by the likes of Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Steve Priest of The Sweet and Paul Stanley of Kiss, whom Maiden supported in an extensive European tour the year before. Unfortunately it would be the touring and to a greater extent the increasing pressure on the band to keep the momentum up, performing for months on end on the road that would see Paul DiAnno resort to stronger stuff to keep it together. Exhausted, and with the demands of the band's first tour in the US showing no signs of slowing, he was let go by manager Rod Smallwood in September 1981 before the Killers tour, and the rest is fodder for the next post. You have to feel sorry for Di'Anno - in interviews and documentaries he comes across as a genuinely nice guy, a joker and with an easy charisma that would have served him well on stage. It's worth noting that as far as I can see Maiden fans bear him no ill will either, unlike a later more polarising singer and, lest I forget to mention this next time, the arrival of Bruce Dickinson was not universally welcomed by the band's fan base. But when said and done perhaps the fit wasn't perfect, and Di'Anno's dismissal speaks more down the years of the sheer drive to professionalism maintained by Harris and Smallwood. With few opportunities for international success on merchandising and music videos, Iron Maiden's early success was directly down to a tried and true method of almost constant gruelling touring. Of course there would be causalties, and more would come.

But it's not all bad, as Adrian Smith - new guitarist and ex-schoolmate of Dave Murray has entered the room, and the difference in the band's sound again is palpable. For the first time Maiden can reliably be said to have no lead guitarist, nor rhythm - both would compliment each other and share lead breaks, often working in harmony across the same break in another highly distinctive, signature sound for the band. Smith has a different sound to Murray, and they bounce off each other well. It's a muscial relationship that's still to pay off in this album - there are hints here and there (the extended breaks in album closer Drifter for one), but for the most part Smith's contribution is not to balance out Murray's contribution as Dennis Stratton's part had tried to do, but add to it turning a previously weak spot into another offensive wall.

I've been guilty of undervaluing this album, perhaps looking forward more to the arrival of Bruce Dickinson and the more stable line-up that followed, but Killers is a pretty solid and consistent album, aided greatly by Steve Harris' almost sole writing duties and some greater attention paid to Paul Di'Anno's role in the band. Wrathchild is a great single, and a clear standout, but also good are Rue Morgue, the title track, and Prodigal Son. Only Drifter is the throwback, repeating verse and chorus and descending into a lengthy instrumental at the end, but as it ushers in a new sound to the band capitalising on a new second guitarist and allows Di'Anno the last undulating howl of his Maiden voyage, it's still a pass.

Cover
Killers is in a way almost mark 2 of the Iron Maiden cover, but a vast improvement - it's dynamic, makes better use of light and colour, and Eddie is better formed, rather than the head and shoulders of the debut artwork. Standing over an unseen victim clawing away up his cadaverous form (following the loose single sleeve continuity one might get away with suggesting it's a certain UK ex-PM and other iron maiden) he has in his hand a tomahawk - a very 1970s serial killer weapon, and once more he stared devillishly out at the viewer, white pinpricks of hellfire 'blazing in his eyes'. The primary light source is no longer the moon but a street light. Behind him is the East End neighbourhood, not greatly removed from that of Iron Maiden, although the houses are clearly inhabited this time - there's life in the streets, and it's suggested that the 'red light' window with dressing/undressing occupant belongs to a number 22 Acacia Ave, the aforementioned Charlotte the Harlot. As Maiden covers go it's one of the best, and kicks off a winning sequence by stable artist Derek Riggs that become ever more imaginative through to the band's seventh studio album. For the time being and excluding the Twilight Zone single cover this is the last time we'll see Eddie in an urban setting; like his band his destiny lies far beyond London's mean streets.
Tracks via YouTube (live where possible)

1. The Ides of March (instrumental)
2. Wrathchild (live at the Rainbow, 1981)
3. Murders in the Rue Morgue (US tour Bootleg)
4. Another Life (from the Maiden Japan EP)
5. Genghis Khan (live instrumental - enjoy the drums!)
6. Innocent Exile (live Soundhouse Tapes recording)
7. Killers (Harris/Di'Anno - another Live at the Rainbow clip)
8. Prodigal Son (studio version)
9. Purgatory (Maiden Japan track - HUGE bass!)
10. Twilight Zone (Harris/Murray. 1998 reissue bonus track, album version)
11. Drifter (Live at the Marquee)