So true that last bit about curation. I have only recently stumbled across "Peel slowly and see", been playing it since. Especially the demo versions. And I haven't come anywhere close to the bottom of it yet. I wish some curator had told me before.... so many years wasted, again!
Is that the box-set thing? Have to admit I've never tried it, but it does look like it pulls together a load of stuff that were out on bootlegs in the '80s
Yes, the box thing. Came out in 1995 apparently, but I only stumbled across it last year. It is on spotify. And, probably does pull some 80s bootleg stuff together, but I didn't know that then. And it is so much easier to get on the web (or buy the box), even if some of the mystery is out of it.
Yeah, this is the upside, I guess. Instead of poring over liner notes in a second hand record shop to see if this weird compilation contains something you haven't heard yet, you can find it all so easily now. Sometimes. This week I've just discovered that I can't stream the Bugs Bunny classic 'What's Opera Doc' anywhere. One of the great works of animation. Not even obscure. And you can't find it anywhere to watch legally. Insane.
The ways we stumbled onto cultural artefacts were truly random. I traveled to Paris with my family in 1990 when there happened to be an Andy Warhol retrospective on display at the Centre Pompidou. I somehow picked up some tidbit of information about the Velvet Underground, probably from the signs or the pamphlet that accompanied that show. Maybe I saw a photo. I remember my dad being amused that I was so intrigued by this band, which he knew plenty about, but he told me to my dismay that he had sold or traded his copy of the peeling-banana record long ago. I ordered a copy of the cassette from our local record store when I got home and fell in love. I must have put "Femme Fatale" on a hundred different mix tapes in the years that followed. I did the same thing when I read Kurt Cobain name-drop The Vaselines in a Rolling Stone interview, and quickly got my hands on one of their albums. Like little passkeys into coolness.
“You could stumble upon cultural artefacts and not have any context for them: a late-night movie on TV, a paperback with an interesting cover in a spinner rack, a record in a discount bin. If they weren’t already popular or canonised, you could find it extremely hard to discover any more about them. They would exist as a singular, unrelated cultural object, unexplained and unmoored.”
This is such an astute observation. It was very easy to love things but be incurious about them in the 80s. With music particularly, I would be exposed to songs but because of the financial investment required to investigate further, they often remained solo exhibits rather than part of a larger collection. I may have been especially incurious as, having been given a mix tape by a friend in 1989 which included “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies, I only recently listened to the album, “Doolittle” and for years had no idea it was a contemporary song at the time I was given it. (It did play straight after the Smiths so I don’t think I was being particularly stupid.)
Streaming has opened up the world of music, although I agree with your point that curation is now even more important with so much on offer, but I think it has closed down the world of film. It’s so much harder to stumble across things now, largely because we watch so much less terrestrial television and films seem to be scheduled differently. I remember when I was 14, watching a whole series of brat pack films on late night Sunday on BBC 2 that I would never have come across anywhere else. Things like Catholic Boys, The Flamingo Kid and Taps. It was also where I first saw Pretty In Pink, St Elmo’s Fire and The Outsiders. (In our house, if it didn’t have a trailer on Touchstone video, it was unlikely to get rented!) Now, even if you are aware of a film you want to watch, it’s pretty hard to get hold of. We troll through cycles of crap looking for something to watch. It’s definitely taken the fun out of cinema.
The whole "is this a contemporary song or not" thing was very real. My local alternative AM radio station used to play old/obscure songs right alongside brand-new releases, so I am embarrassed to say I was completely unable to distinguish deep Smiths cuts from the latest Morrissey solo singles (all apologies to Johnny Marr).
I bought my first VU LP without ever having heard of them or anything by them but just because I liked the cover - it was White Light, White Heat and it has a strange image of raining WWI soldiers. I had no context for it at all and I wasn’t much the wiser when I listened to it. But I loved it, so I bought the next one I could find, which was the VU & Nico, and then I could see it had to do with Warhol etc. But coming at them the way I did shapes the whole way I think about them (Cale > Reed). I think the serendipity here has to do with the way record shops might not sell the most famous or important record in an artist’s list, but only the cheapest. So you could discover the backlist first. And chance discoveries are the best.
That's a really good point about often discovering the more obscure things first. That Victor Bokris book, for instance, led me to investigate the school library for William Burroughs and all they had was 'Place of Dead Roads', which means I read that before 'Naked Lunch'. Like wise they only had Philip K Dick's 'Flow My Tears The Policeman Said', so I read that before 'Do Androids Dream...'. And, in fact, I only read 'Flow My Tears' because Gary Numan referenced it in the Tubeway Army song 'Listen the the sirens' - that chain reaction of references in action.
So true that last bit about curation. I have only recently stumbled across "Peel slowly and see", been playing it since. Especially the demo versions. And I haven't come anywhere close to the bottom of it yet. I wish some curator had told me before.... so many years wasted, again!
Is that the box-set thing? Have to admit I've never tried it, but it does look like it pulls together a load of stuff that were out on bootlegs in the '80s
Yes, the box thing. Came out in 1995 apparently, but I only stumbled across it last year. It is on spotify. And, probably does pull some 80s bootleg stuff together, but I didn't know that then. And it is so much easier to get on the web (or buy the box), even if some of the mystery is out of it.
Yeah, this is the upside, I guess. Instead of poring over liner notes in a second hand record shop to see if this weird compilation contains something you haven't heard yet, you can find it all so easily now. Sometimes. This week I've just discovered that I can't stream the Bugs Bunny classic 'What's Opera Doc' anywhere. One of the great works of animation. Not even obscure. And you can't find it anywhere to watch legally. Insane.
The ways we stumbled onto cultural artefacts were truly random. I traveled to Paris with my family in 1990 when there happened to be an Andy Warhol retrospective on display at the Centre Pompidou. I somehow picked up some tidbit of information about the Velvet Underground, probably from the signs or the pamphlet that accompanied that show. Maybe I saw a photo. I remember my dad being amused that I was so intrigued by this band, which he knew plenty about, but he told me to my dismay that he had sold or traded his copy of the peeling-banana record long ago. I ordered a copy of the cassette from our local record store when I got home and fell in love. I must have put "Femme Fatale" on a hundred different mix tapes in the years that followed. I did the same thing when I read Kurt Cobain name-drop The Vaselines in a Rolling Stone interview, and quickly got my hands on one of their albums. Like little passkeys into coolness.
Yes! I have to admit I am still doing this now.
“You could stumble upon cultural artefacts and not have any context for them: a late-night movie on TV, a paperback with an interesting cover in a spinner rack, a record in a discount bin. If they weren’t already popular or canonised, you could find it extremely hard to discover any more about them. They would exist as a singular, unrelated cultural object, unexplained and unmoored.”
This is such an astute observation. It was very easy to love things but be incurious about them in the 80s. With music particularly, I would be exposed to songs but because of the financial investment required to investigate further, they often remained solo exhibits rather than part of a larger collection. I may have been especially incurious as, having been given a mix tape by a friend in 1989 which included “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies, I only recently listened to the album, “Doolittle” and for years had no idea it was a contemporary song at the time I was given it. (It did play straight after the Smiths so I don’t think I was being particularly stupid.)
Streaming has opened up the world of music, although I agree with your point that curation is now even more important with so much on offer, but I think it has closed down the world of film. It’s so much harder to stumble across things now, largely because we watch so much less terrestrial television and films seem to be scheduled differently. I remember when I was 14, watching a whole series of brat pack films on late night Sunday on BBC 2 that I would never have come across anywhere else. Things like Catholic Boys, The Flamingo Kid and Taps. It was also where I first saw Pretty In Pink, St Elmo’s Fire and The Outsiders. (In our house, if it didn’t have a trailer on Touchstone video, it was unlikely to get rented!) Now, even if you are aware of a film you want to watch, it’s pretty hard to get hold of. We troll through cycles of crap looking for something to watch. It’s definitely taken the fun out of cinema.
The whole "is this a contemporary song or not" thing was very real. My local alternative AM radio station used to play old/obscure songs right alongside brand-new releases, so I am embarrassed to say I was completely unable to distinguish deep Smiths cuts from the latest Morrissey solo singles (all apologies to Johnny Marr).
I bought my first VU LP without ever having heard of them or anything by them but just because I liked the cover - it was White Light, White Heat and it has a strange image of raining WWI soldiers. I had no context for it at all and I wasn’t much the wiser when I listened to it. But I loved it, so I bought the next one I could find, which was the VU & Nico, and then I could see it had to do with Warhol etc. But coming at them the way I did shapes the whole way I think about them (Cale > Reed). I think the serendipity here has to do with the way record shops might not sell the most famous or important record in an artist’s list, but only the cheapest. So you could discover the backlist first. And chance discoveries are the best.
That's a really good point about often discovering the more obscure things first. That Victor Bokris book, for instance, led me to investigate the school library for William Burroughs and all they had was 'Place of Dead Roads', which means I read that before 'Naked Lunch'. Like wise they only had Philip K Dick's 'Flow My Tears The Policeman Said', so I read that before 'Do Androids Dream...'. And, in fact, I only read 'Flow My Tears' because Gary Numan referenced it in the Tubeway Army song 'Listen the the sirens' - that chain reaction of references in action.
Also, I need to add: Cale > Reed - hard agree. I adore John Cale's music. Just love it.
I absolutely loved this article and found myself mainlining velvet underground for the rest of the day ❤️🥹🙏
My work is done. One of the most enjoyable things about writing it was mainlining VU for days on end.