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Aladdin Sane: 50 Years Exhibition @ Festival Hall

This surprisingly extensive and greatly enjoyable exhibition on the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall is premised on the notion that the cover to David Bowie’s 1973 album, ‘Aladdin Sane’ – the photo of Bowie’s face with the ‘lightning bolt’ drawn across it – was an epoch-making, benchmark-setting, game-changing, epochal work of art. On the wall labels and in the exhibition publicity the curators go so far as to claim that the cover photo is ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Do you agree? This exhibition tries its damnedest to persuade you.

Cover of Aladdin Sane by David Bowie, released 19 April 1973

The album

‘Aladdin Sane’ was Bowie’s sixth studio album, released on 20 April 1973 on RCA Records. The previous albums had been:

  • David Bowie (1967)
  • David Bowie/Space Oddity (1969)
  • The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
  • Hunky Dory (1971)
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

The concept album ‘Ziggy’, creating an elaborate mythology about an ill-fated, fictional rock musician, was Bowie’s breakthrough LP. It sold over 100,000 copies and catapulted him into the realm of real stardom. Concerts sold out, the music press started to treat him as a player, his fan base exploded. It established him as a leader of the more thoughtful, cerebral, art student end of Glam Rock, far more ambitious in his skilful deployment of a persona and concept than rivals like Marc Bolan, let alone the pure pop end of Glam such as Sweet or Slade.

The follow-up, ‘Aladdin’, is closely linked to ‘Ziggy’. Bowie recorded it with the same backing band (led by guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson) and it was recorded between gigs of his extensive Ziggy Stardust tour. The songs were mostly written on the road in the US between shows. This explains why the subject matter is often directly American (‘Panic in Detroit’) and also has a heavier, harder rock feel than Ziggy. The track listing is:

Side one:

Side two:

It contains one solid gold hit, ‘The Jean Genie’, which is a classic of a certain kind of style of repetitive, one-riff rock. It started with Mick Ronson fooling around with a Bo Diddley riff on the tour bus. Back in New York Bowie developed lyrics to entertain Andy Warhol acolyte, Cyrinda Foxe. In fact the way the lyrics describe a certain New York type is strongly reminiscent of Lou Reed, whose album Transformer, full of such portraits, Bowie had just finished producing and playing on. A cursory listen to both shows that Transformer is, quite obviously, much better than Aladdin, more varied, more interesting tunes (‘Perfect Day’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), has stood the test of time far better.

The bassist on the Jean Genie session later claimed it was recorded in an hour and a half flat. It went to number 2 in the UK chart (a chart which, one of the many entertaining and nostalgic wall labels tells us, had recently featured Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ and Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’). But I find most of the other tracks on the album boringly repetitive and too long. And the lyrics?

Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead

It was ‘daring’ and ‘risqué’ at the time to describe blowjobs in a song, 50 years later…not so much. And ‘professing’?

It’s surprising that this contrived performer, this cracked actor, so keen to display a glammed-up, self-consciously theatrical character, should include a Rolling Stones track, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, on the album. He said in interviews it was a tribute to the Stones-inspired feel of many of the songs, but it’s dire, isn’t it? The main difference is Bowie swallowing or snatching the word ‘together’ in contrast to Mick Jagger’s lazy sexy drawl, which is definitely worse, and the spoken ad lib at the end:

They said we were too young
Our kind of love was too young
But our love comes from above
Let’s make love

This sounds like a blatantly commercial play for the adoration (and money) of pimply misunderstood 15-year-olds everywhere.

Who is Aladdin Sane? In interviews Bowie simply described him as ‘Ziggy Stardust goes to America’, where he discovered urban decay, drugs, sex and violence on a scale you couldn’t get in Britain. Critic Kevin Cann is quoted describing him as ‘a kind of shell-shocked remnant of his former self’.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing a contact sheet and blown-up images of Bowie dressed for his performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. Note the red-and-blue colour scheme already much in evidence. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

The album had 100,000 advance orders which meant it went ‘gold’ and to number 1 in the UK album charts, staying there for 5 weeks and in the top 10 for 27. It’s estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies in total, the kind of figures record companies, accountants, and rock music geeks adore.

The exhibition includes an area dominated by a fantastic old-style hi fi system comprising record player, amp and big speakers, on which the album was playing. (For techies, the deck is a Michell Transcriptor, with Celestion 66 loudspeakers and a Rotel RX-1203 amplifier.) Someone must have been continually turning it over or putting the needle back to the start of the side. There are bean bags to slump on. Tellingly I came across someone’s daughter, obviously not very interested in the exhibition, slumped on a bean bag with headphones on, and when I asked her what she was listening to, it wasn’t Bowie.

However, the thing about this exhibition is that it isn’t really about the music. The actual content of the album is barely discussed. The focus of the exhibition is the cover art for the album. This, we quickly discover, was shot by fashion photographer Brian Duffy, was the most expensive rock album cover made to date and, according to the curators, is one of the most iconic rock images of all time.

Brian Duffy

Thus an immense amount of time is devoted to the background and build-up to the famous cover image. I counted no fewer than 84 photos devoted to telling the story. First the context and key personnel. So there are photos of each of the band members with wall labels explaining who they are and their contribution, the largest number devoted to the extremely photogenic Mick Ronson in various rock star poses, but also shots of the bassist and drummer. (The curators speculate that some of these shots were meant to be used in the gatefold of the album sleeve, but the power of the final slash image swept them aside.) There’s photos of Bowie’s producer, Ken Scott, manager Tony Defries, two photos of Bowie’s wife, Angie.

So much for the music. More central to the story of the iconic cover is the extensive section devoted to the photographer of the iconic image, Brian Duffy. We learn about his career before the shoot, that he was one of a trio of young London photographers, what older photographer Norman Parkinson called ‘the Black Trinity’ – the others being David Bailey and Terence Donovan – with contemporary newspaper clippings to that effect.

We learn that Duffy, as he was universally known, was a leading fashion photographer, which is backed up by a wall of 27 of his very impressive fashion photos. These powerfully convey not only the style of the day as found in glossy mags such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, Elle and the Sunday Times, but also indicate the fashion, rock and celebrity figures of the era, such as John Lennon, Michael Caine, politicians.

There’s a cornucopia of 1960s gossip: Duffy’s collaboration with Len Deighton on the 1969 movie ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’, technical influences such as the way graphic artist Philip Castle used an airbrushing technique on the poster for A Clockwork Orange, which Duffy was to ask him to repeat on the Aladdin cover, the way the cover of Hunky Dory was printed as black and white and then hand coloured by Terry Pastor, how the cover photo of Transformer was taken by ‘legendary’ rock photographer Mick Rock, was accidentally over-exposed but Reed liked it that way, and so on.

The shoot

But there’s more, lots more, as the exhibition zeroes in on the creation of the iconic image. We learn about Duffy’s studio manager Francis Newman, and designer Celia Philo. We are treated to photos of the interior and exterior of the Duffy’s studios at 151a King Henry’s Road, Swiss Cottage NW3. where the famous shoot took place.

We learn about the canny strategic thinking of Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries. They shared a vision of how the marketing of a pop performer could be transformed into high art – or at least a good impression of what pop music consumers thought of as art. One extremely practical and canny reason is that Defries knew that, the more they spent on the cover art, the more record label RCA would be forced to cough up to boost sales in order to recoup their investment. Hence he and Duffy agreed on using an extremely expensive seven-colour printing technique which was then only available in Switzerland.

In order to justify the process the image had to be simple and striking. It had to make maximum use of bold colour. Hence the development of a bright red (with some blue shading) against artificially pale bare skin.

This explains why nobody on the shoot saw the final version on the day because the negatives had to be sent away for commercial processing to achieve that hyper-real effect.

Then we’re on to the photo session itself. An immense amount of resources go to describing in great detail how the shoot was conducted and where the idea for the famous zigzag across Bowie’s face came from. Bowie was 26, had hit new peaks of fame, was deeply aware of the importance of image and media presentation. He wanted something striking and new but didn’t know what. The shoot was crammed in between dates on an international tour.

Duffy had never done a shoot for an album cover before. Both star and photographer were in new territory. So the most striking thing about the shoot this whole exhibition is making such a song and dance about is it was all over in an hour,

In fact, rather disappointingly, or maybe fittingly, right at the heart of the story is uncertainty/mystery. Turns out nobody really knows where the idea for the iconic red flash came from. There are several possible sources. Bowie shared his birthday with Elvis and the King had developed a motto, ‘Taking Care of Business – In A Flash’, and accompanying logo:

Elvis Presley’s Taking Care of Business logo

Rather more prosaically, Duffy’s studio had a National Rice cooker and their logo was a red flash. In 1970 the company had created the world’s largest neon sign depicting the logo on the side of an office building in Hong Kong. From some source, Duffy conjured up the idea of painting a flash across Bowie’s face. It took make-up artist Pierre Laroche to achieve a first draft, establishing a pale ground for his face and chest, and then the red flash.

Then the background was brightly lit in order to burn it out or render it invisible. Bowie was positioned against it wearing only his underpants and Duffy started snapping (as the curators carefully inform us) using his Hasselblad 500 EL camera, using a David Cecil ring flash unit on Ektachrome ASA 64 120-format film. Turn to the left, turn to the right, look straight ahead, two rolls, 24 images, all knocked off in well under an hour. Clean make-up, free to go.

The exhibition features a wall of contact prints of the ‘outtakes’ or unused images i.e. other almost identical shots of made-up Bowie which were rejected for various reasons. The decisive factor was the eyes. In all the rejected versions Bowie has his eyes open. Seeing the final version among all the rejected ones makes you realise that the one with his eyes shut is head and shoulders more powerful than the rest. Why?

Aladdin Sane contact sheet by Brian Duffy

The curators explain that using the image of Bowie with his eyes closed broke with all the conventions of portrait photography. Usually there’s some kind of eye contact with the viewer, the eyes establishing contact or rapport. Even if they’re looking away, we get a stronger sense of someone’s character if we can see their eyes. Thus choosing the eyes shut image immediately created an aloofness and mystery about Bowie, exactly the kind of androgynous, alien effect he and Defries were cultivating.

The second big artistic decision Duffy took was to add the blob of mercury on Bowie’s collarbone. It was added by graphic artist Philip Castle. The curators, like all modern art curators, obsessed with sex, describe this blob as ‘phalliform’ i.e. shaped like a penis*. Is it, though? If it’s the shape of anything, I’d pick up on Bowie’s obsession with aliens and interpret it as being a a ray gun. At the time, this kind of special graphic effect was relatively new, and so I think I interpreted it as a sort of science fiction detail, the kind of thing you might get on a Hawkwind or Emerson, Lake and Palmer album.

Anyway, it certainly emphasises the other-worldly, disembodied vibe of the whole image. For the curators, constricted by their framework of gender and sexual identity, the image emphasises Bowie’s gender fluidity. Not being so constrained, I see it as far more playing to Bowie’s alien from another world schtick.

Anyway, any interpretation is equally irrelevant to the actual music which I outlined above, grimy, gritty portraits of New York types, the Jean Genie or Lady Grinning Soul. You only have to listen to half the album to realise that the cover image is wildly misleading as to its contents.

Last word about the lettering. This is Rémy Peignot Cristal with a blue-white-red gradient. It was Duffy who changed the dot over the i of Aladdin into a small flame shape.

Why the fuss? Gender, obvz

Personally, I was never that particularly struck by this album cover because it came from an era overflowing with striking album cover art. At the time it seemed just one among many amazing, imaginative and striking images, so I don’t quite get the fuss.

What comes over with increasing insistence as the show progresses is that the arguable over-valuation of this one image is in part because it is also being considered and valued as an emblem of gender, queer and identity politics. Aha. This explains why the actual music – its composition, production and performance, its lyrics and its value – are more or less ignored by the exhibition. Nobody says whether the album is any good, probably because it isn’t really.

Instead, as you progress into the second half of the exhibition you realise the whole thing is being seen through the lens of contemporary concerns about gender and identity. Seen from this perspective you see its value in a completely different light, namely that Bowie’s poses in the early 1970s, as bisexual, asexual, strange and alien (the aspect of his persona which was foregrounded in Ziggy, Aladdin, Diamond Dogs, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and, maybe, ‘Low’) helped a lot of people who were struggling with their sexuality. It’s made pretty plain in the show’s press blurb:

With a focus on the photo session that gave us Bowie’s ‘lightning bolt’ portrait, this exhibition explores the continuous reshaping of Bowie’s image, and his part, along with Duffy’s, in a reimagining of sexual and gender identity.

It explains why in the last part of the show – once we’ve got past the 80 or so large photos of the band members, manager, wife, and all the contact images from the shoot itself, past the wall-sized blow-ups of Bowie in full glam pose, and past the room with the hi-fi system playing the album – we come to a space with sheets hanging from the ceiling bearing quotes from people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, who struggled with their sexuality and identity, and who found solace in Bowie’s confidence and unashamedness and bravura performance of alternative sexualities.

Personal testimony room in the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead

In a world dominated by macho movie stars and football hooligans, Bowie offered an alternative, an imaginative way out, a refuge. He made a lot of troubled, embattled people realise they weren’t alone. Bowie showed that you could not only feel confused and uncertain and not fit into any of society’s categories, but become a star on your own terms, appear on the telly, pack out concert halls, and make a fortune.

As the curators out it, Bowie’s message for generations of outsiders, not just sexual outsiders but alienated, unhappy teenagers, was:

Ignore what society wants you to be. Be what you want to be – including how you look to the outside world.

This part of the show – and the first-person tributes from young people who Bowie, with his many-changing masks and fluid sexual identity, helped and reassured and inspired – was genuinely moving, but also a bit disorientating. It was weird walking from the world of trash glam throwaway pop hits into quite a more serious and troubled realm, a world of gender anxiety and liberation, freedom but worry, which seems to be with us more than ever.

I doubt if Bowie set out to be sex therapist to a generation but, this exhibition suggests, that was the impact he had, for a lot of people.

Nostalgia

For me, though, being neither troubled by my sexuality (no more than average, anyway) and no particular fan of Bowie’s early music, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition because it is an absolute riot of nostalgia. The opening rooms set the scene for the Great Photoshoot by establishing the social and political and music context of 1973.

Probably younger visitors walked swiftly past the background panels describing Britain in the 1970s, the collage of newspaper headlines from the period, the oil crisis, the four day week, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, the endless strikes, but I lingered long and lovingly, reliving the long-ago days of my boyhood.

Next to the politics was a similar size panel with a collage of contemporary music paper articles, giving an impressionistic sense of who was who in rock music, circa 1973, many of them, apparently about Elton John, whatever Paul McCartney and John Lennon were up to, a new young band named Queen, and so on.

Far more visually striking, though, was another collage establishing the context of classic rock album covers from the period. These included actual vintage copies of Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, Slider by T Rex, early Roxy Music, Music from Topographic Oceans by Yes and many more. This is what I meant by the Aladdin Sane cover image being just one among many. Surely the cover of Dark Side of The Moon is as, if not far more, iconic than Aladdin Sane, is far more widespread in the culture, you’re more likely to see it on t-shirts or spoofed in cultural references.

Album cover of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd, released 1 March 1973, 6 weeks before Aladdin Sane (19 April 1973)

And indeed the exhibition confirms that the Music Week Sleeve Design Award 1973 gave first place to Dark Side (with Aladdin coming a very creditable second). Looking more broadly, a quick internet search for rock albums of 1973 turns up:

  1. Gram Parsons – GP (January 1, 1973)
  2. Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (January 25, 1973)
  3. John Martyn – Solid Air (February 1, 1973)
  4. Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power (February 7, 1973)
  5. John Cale – Paris 1919 (March 1, 1973)
  6. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973)
  7. King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (March 23, 1973)
  8. Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure (March 23, 1973)
  9. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy (March 28, 1973)
  10. Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire (March 29, 1973)
  11. The Beatles – 1962-1966 (April 2, 1973)
  12.  The Beatles – 1967-1970 (April 2, 1973)
  13. David Bowie – Aladdin Sane (April 13, 1973)
  14. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (May 25, 1973)
  15. Steely Dan – Countdown to Ecstasy (July 1, 1973)
  16. Mott The Hoople – Mott (July 20, 1973)
  17. Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Love Devotion Surrender (July 20, 1973)
  18. New York Dolls – New York Dolls (July 27, 1973)
  19. Lynyrd Skynyrd – (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd) (August 13, 1973)
  20. Faust – Faust IV (September 21, 1973)
  21. The Who – Quadrophenia (October 19, 1973)
  22. Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run (December 5, 1973)

Of which you’d have thought the cover art for Dark Side, Raw Power, Houses of the Holy, Tubular Bells, the two Beatles compilation albums and Band on the Run are getting on for being as ‘iconic’ as Aladdin Sane.

And a quick Google also turns up Rolling Stone’s list of top ten rock album covers of all time which doesn’t even include Aladdin Sane.

Consideration of general album covers from the period then moves onto another section focusing on album covers specifically by or closely related to Bowie i.e. the covers of his previous albums, especially the androgynous or sexually ambivalent ones such as The Man Who Sold The World where he’s lying on a divan wearing a dress, or Hunky Dory; and the equally ambivalent, but in a different, far more butch way, cover art for Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced by Bowie, which he and Mick Ronson both played on, and released a few months before Aladdin, in November 1972.

Front and back cover of Transformer by Lou Reed

All this is great fun, to see the great album art and play in your mind all the great tracks from long ago. There’s also a guilty pleasure: off to one side of the ‘classics of rock’ album covers is a montage of ‘square’ albums from the period, to remind us older guys how dire most music and entertainment of the period was. So there are the covers of albums by The Black Watch, the TV show Opportunity Knocks, the musical Godspell, Break-Through, character-based albums by Alf Garnett, Benny Hill and Tony Hancock, by Ken Dodd and his Diddymen and, a bit more acceptably, by ‘pop sensation’ Gilbert O’Sullivan. Half a century ago.

Montage of retro 1970s album covers at the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre

*Camille Paglia

A little further on into the exhibition I discovered the curators’ use of the word ‘phalliform’ is lifted from one of the lengthy quotes from American feminist academic, social critic and renatagob, Camille Paglia which are printed on the walls.

I remember Paglia’s presence on the scene in 1980s TV and magazines, touring her leather-jacketed, spike-haired form of aggressive New York feminism, and churning out page after page of mashed-up, hot-wired Beat prose poetry. The exhibition relies very heavily on her for its central premise, namely that the Aladdin Sane photo:

with its red-and-blue lighting bolt across Bowie’s face, has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced and parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide.

This is the premise of the entire exhibition. Here’s another slice of Paglia’s all-about-everything, showily eclectic, name-dropping prose:

It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price.

‘…and paid the price’ – this is sentimental tripe, a facile, clichéd, pre-modern view of the artist as specially damned and cursed for his gift, the kind of thing that Byron invented in the 1810s, felt a little ridiculous when Baudelaire did it in the 1850s, lived on into the poets maudits (damned poets) of the late nineteenth century (Rimbaud bunking off to Africa, Verlaine crying into his absinthe); was a thorough-going cliché worthy of mockery a hundred years ago.

It’s superficial magazine writing, rewarded for being exaggerated, over-written, sentimental and stereotyped. But, like wearing a leather jacket and having a spiky haircut, it was enough to persuade many people that Paglia was cool and has something to say, back in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. If you like this kind of 6th form showing off, then it usefully underpins the exhibition; if you don’t (and you might have noticed that I don’t) then it undermines it.

Afterlife of an image

But back at the exhibition we haven’t finished yet. There’s more. This really is an exhibition for Aladdin Sane completists, because the exhibition goes on to chart further highlights of Bowie’s career after the album was released, and the long afterlife of the Aladdin image. For a start the curators aren’t backward in pointing out that Bowie himself had long links with the South Bank Centre, from his debut in 1969 in the recently opened Purcell Room, to his curation of Meltdown, their annual contemporary music festival, in 2002.

In the same year that the album came out, 1973, Radio 1 broadcast a series called ‘the Story of Pop’ in 26 episodes, and the cover of the first part of the associated part-work featured the Aladdin Sane image.

As to Duffy, he went on to work with Bowie on two further album covers, namely: Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980).

In 2002 Absolut Vodka ran an advertising campaign which used classic album covers, and one used the Aladdin Sane image.

In 2003 Kate Moss appeared on the front cover of Vogue sporting her version of the Aladdin Sane lightning to celebrate 30 years of its impact on culture and fashion (fourth photo down on this page).

After the 2008 financial crisis some parts of Britain issued their own local currency (news to me). Apparently a currency was issued local to just Brixton in south west London. Since Bowie was actually born in Brixton (at 40 Stansfield Road) the Aladdin Sane image featured on the Brixton £10 note.

In 2013 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged a huge exhibition about Bowie, titled David Bowie Is. it ‘set a new benchmark for immersive music exhibitions’ and was a sellout, going on tour round the UK and then abroad.

Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016. The following year Royal Mail issued a set of ten commemorative stamps for what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday year. Six stamps featured album covers, including Aladdin Sane. The first day cover was franked with a copy of the lightning bolt logo.

All these occasions are lovingly recorded, with appropriate illustrations and detailed captions. Bowie has been turned into an institution. All images have to be licensed by ‘the David Bowie Archive’. To quote the Clash, ‘turning rebellion into money’.

Chris Duffy

Things fall into a place a bit more when you learn that the exhibition is curated by Duffy’s son, Chris Duffy, and accompanies a book of the same name. Ah. And that it was Chris who described his Dad’s work as ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Ah. And that Chris Duffy has set up the Duffy Archive to preserve his father’s work and legacy. Ah.

I loved this exhibition. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a relaxing, easy-going wallow in 1970s rock and pop and social nostalgia, full of nuggets and gossip and factoids. It’s a broad walk down memory lane. Like everything, it’s capable of multiple meanings and interpretations. The curators go heavy on the gender liberation aspect, which I see and understand. I responded more fully to the nostalgia elements. But once I understood the lead involvement of Duffy’s son, I also came to see it as a rather touching act of filial respect.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing Bowie posing in the flash make-up against a flash backdrop. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

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Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains @ the Victoria and Albert Museum

This massive exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’, and debut single, Arnold Layne, way back in 1967. It follows last year’s big exhibition about the 60s (You Say You Want A Revolution) and 2013’s David Bowie exhibition, which broke attendance records. There’s gold in them thar 60s icons. ‘Dad Rock’, my daughter calls it.

Pink Floyd: a brief introduction

You can learn everything you need to know and more from their Wikipedia article or the band’s own website. Nice middle-class boys from Cambridge who met in London art schools in the mid-60s, they formed a four-piece band based round charismatic front man, guitarist and songwriter, Syd Barrett, released a couple of singles and their debut album – dominated by their trademark composition Interstellar Overdrive – and headlined ‘scene’-defining ‘underground’ gigs in the Summer of Love.

But Syd took too much LSD, becoming wildly unreliable, so in 1968 the band gently dropped him and replaced him with their friend and lead guitar supremo, David Gilmour. You can hear the change in the second album – A Saucerful of Secrets. Only one of the songs is by Syd and all the others lack his rackety inspiration. In its way it’s more experimental than their debut, with many more electronic soundscapes – witness the sustained weirdness of the title track, A Saucerful of Secrets. Conversely, other tracks sound much smoother and idyllic, and it’s notable how the lyrics fit smoothly into the songs instead of sticking out at unexpected angles, as they did in Syd’s songs. An example of this smoothness is See-Saw.

Between 1968 and 1973 the Floyd drifted, making a series of experimental albums and soundtracks to films. The film soundtracks are More (1969), Zabriskie Point (1971) and Obscured by Clouds (1972), the last one of which they knocked off in an intense week, apparently.

Ummagumma (1969) was an experimental double album, with one disk carrying a live album and the other featuring four tracks, each written by one of the band, and rarely listened to now.

Atom Heart Mother (1970) was a collection of so-so tracks on one side, including Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, in which one of their roadies is taped mooching about in his kitchen fixing a fry-up. The other side is devoted to the title track, a 23-minute-long piece in which the group integrate their sound into an experimental orchestral work by composer Ron Geesin. I’ve a soft spot for Summer ’68, written by the group’s keyboardist, Rick Wright.

Meddle (1971) follows the same formula with a side-long piece – Echoes – accompanied on the other side by a very uneven collection of songs.

So in the six or seven years of their existence they had morphed from being the soundtrack to 1967, all paisley shirts, purple scarves and Afghan waistcoats – to being long-haired purveyors of 25-minute-long ‘art’ pieces to the stonedocracy of the 70s.

Dark Side of the Moon and after

Then in 1973 they released Dark Side of the Moon and everything changed, big time.

As usual, at a bit of a loss for inspiration, they had the idea to write songs about the Big Issues of Life – like Death, Money, Madness – and link them using the panoply of tricks they’d picked up on their various experimental forays.

The album begins and ends with a (very slow) heart beat, on which are superimposed the sound effects of cash tills (used on the track Money) and snippets of interviews they conducted with roadies and anyone they could find around the Abbey Road studios, which leads into s suite of beautifully and imaginatively linked ultra-melodic tunes. The result is still astonishing, a smash hit ‘concept album’, combining ‘experimental’ features with Weighty Issues which make stone sixth formers feel intense, all on a bed of sumptuously slow and simple songs. It stayed in the charts for decades and still defines an epoch.

Listen to the opener, Speak to Me/Breathe. Isn’t it carefully crafted, with its multilayers beginning with the calming heartbeat (apparently, anyone with a heartbeat this slow, would be dead), then jingly jangly guitar, soporific bass and, beneath it all, the plodding drums continually on the verge of falling asleep at the wheel. Turn the lights out and pass me that joint, man.

1975’s Wish You Were Here is another combination of songs about Important Issues embedded between great swathes of multi-layered keyboards, swishing and swashing over your aural organs. They’re titled Shine on You Crazy Diamond parts one to 9 and remind me of a sand storm in the desert (probably influenced by the image on the back of the album cover of a mannequin in the desert.

Unhappy music

Something was happening to the boys, which became even clearer on 1977’s Animals – they were getting bitter and twisted. Dark Side of the Moon is full of sixth-form angst about poor people and war (unpleasant, apparently) but if you don’t listen to the words (as I’ve discovered over the years, plenty of rock and pop fans don’t) it is sweet and gorgeous to listen to.

Wish You Were Here had the ultimate symptom of rock star ennui, a song about how awful it is being a rock star – Welcome To the Machine – but still has swathes of beautiful music, not least the simple but affecting title track, Wish You Were Here (everybody at school taught themselves how to play guitar by copying this).

But by Animals three things were clear.

  1. Almost all the writing was now being done by Roger Waters.
  2. He was really pissed off. On Animals he has divided the human race into three types, dogs, sheep and pigs and written a ‘track’ about each. Pigs is a virulent attack on the Christian campaigner, Mary Whitehouse. It was Waters who had had the idea of songs about Big Issues for Dark Side and who wrote the jaded songs about the rock biz on Wish You Were Here, but both albums still contained significant contributions from the rest of the band, not least in the linking sections between the songs. Animals feels like pure Waters, in concept and execution, and it’s miserable.
  3. The paraphernalia, the concepts, the marketing and staging of each album had got more and more elaborate.

And it’s this third element which is the basis for this exhibition – the paraphernalia of performance.

Right from the start the Floyd were interested in using lightshows to amplify the trippy experience of their underground gigs. Apparently they pioneered the use of large lighting rigs and special visual effects. As early as 1969 the cover of Ummagumma featured a photo of the kit their roadies had to unload, set up and then dismantle before and after gigs.

By the mid-1970s stadium rock had become well-established, with other groups like Led Zeppelin or Wings crating round huge amounts of equipment, lights, mixing desks and special amplifiers, but the Floyd were always seen as technical pioneers, for example in the use of quadraphonic sound.

But with Dark Side, music, concept, images, design and presentation was brought together. Previous Floyd album covers (Meddle, Atom Heart) had been jokily ‘conceptual’. But the art work on Dark Side, specifically the idea of the beam of white light going into a triangular prism, designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie, formed the basis for the stage show and merchandising.

The art work for Wish You Were Here was also of a new order, something distinctive and unseen before. The original album cover was covered in black plastic which you had to tear off to reveal the image of two men shaking hands in a Hollywood studio vacant lot, one of them bursting into flames – presumably a reflection of Water’s bitter disillusion with the record business.

It was Animals which took this to a new level when the central image used for the photo shoot, a huge pink inflatable pig suspended by a cable from Battersea Power Station, broke loose and caused enough havoc among planes landing at Heathrow Airport to become an item on the news. This pig, along with sheep, dogs and other characters from the songs now made their appearance at the Floyd’s enormous sell-out stadium tours.

The Wall

Waters’ bitterness reached unparalleled heights in 1979’s The Wall, a concept double album (always a bad sign) featuring the adventures of ‘Pink’, an idealised version of Waters’ own life, a baby in the Blitz whose dad is killed in the War, growing up in austerity England, bullied at school and pushed around by an uncaring society.

Just as Genesis’s concept double album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) represented the end of their most creative period, The Wall is a dire, apocalyptic vision of Waters’ unhappiness and alienation. The album spawned the wretched single Another Brick in the Wall, which, God forgive us, made it to number one in the pop charts. ‘We don’t need no education’, yes, easy to say when you’re a multi-millionaire from Cambridge.

In 1982 they made a full-length feature film out of the album, featuring young punk singer Bob Geldof as the wretched ‘Pink’, thus immediately and forever losing any credibility he ever had.

It was with The Wall that the band’s use of props and imagery in their live shows went off the scale. The band commissioned well-known English satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to devise illustrations for the album’s artwork, for its promotion and marketing, for short videos accompanying tracks, and illustrate the characters which infest the storyline. Hence the screaming head, the cartoon schoolteacher, and the menacing hammers which feature albums went off the scale.

The stage show featured enormous blow-up versions of these figures at the relevant parts of the narrative. Early on an inflatable fighter plane screamed along a wire from the back of the auditorium to crash on stage. At the end of the show an enormous wall is built between the audience and the band, which is eventually blown up and knocked down.

What pretentious twaddle. A friend has all the Pink Floyd albums, has been to gigs launching each of the albums, and his wife hates them. ‘They’re just so depressing,’ she moaned. It’s really that simple. If you listen to their albums in order you find yourself being sucked, step by step, into this nightmarish, paranoid, solipsistic soundworld.

Yet the irony is that as the music grew grimmer and grimmer, the scale and ambition of the artwork and the stage shows escalated to gargantuan proportions.

By this stage the band themselves were falling out, Roger Waters’ attitude (which some called megalomania) alienating the others. Symptomatically, Waters wrote all the songs, lyrics and music for the next album, 1983’s The Final Cut. Keyboardist Rick Wright had been sacked from the band. Singer and guitarist David Gilmour performed but had no songs ready. So was it a Pink Floyd album at all, or – as many have commented – essentially a Roger Waters solo album. In fact, it was solo album time for all. Gilmour made a solo album, About Face. Waters, for his part, made and toured a solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.

The band then spent 1984 and 1985 briefing lawyers and issuing writs against each other as to who owned the name ‘Pink Floyd’ and trying to untangle contractual obligations, royalty payments and so on. By 1986 Waters had legally left the band, though retaining rights to perform The Wall (which he has gone on to do extensively, around the world, in sell-out shows).

Now the band consisted of singer-guitarist Gilmour, drummer Mason and keyboardist Wright. The trio released A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987. By this stage most normal people had long ceased caring. In 1994 the trio released The Division Bell and the tour to promote it was the last Pink Floyd tour.

Since then, for the last 23 years, Gilmour and Waters – respectively the singer-guitarist, and the conceptualiser-songwriter-lyricist – have been fending off rumours of a reunion. They were offered a reputed £150 million to tour the USA, but turned it down. The general idea is that Gilmour can’t bear to be in the same room as Waters. In an interview with Mojo magazine, Mason said Waters leaving left the others feeling like members of the Soviet Politburo after Stalin died. Wow.

In 2005 the band members were persuaded to reform to play the Live 8 Charity concert, performing Speak to Me/Breathe and Money from Dark Side, Wish You Were Here from the album of the same name, and Comfortably Numb from The Wall. In 2008 the gentle, often overlooked keyboardist Rick Wright passed away. So no complete reunion is now possible.

The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains

And it is this long colourful journey, from rackety underground psychedelic pioneers, through uneven experimentalism, to producing one of the great rock albums of all time which catapulted them into a series of overblown stage sets and middle-aged rock star angst, which this huge, imposing exhibition chronicles in impressive detail.

It is mainly a collection of hundreds of artefacts, from the venue posters and newspaper photos of the early days through to rooms full of enormous props from the final albums, interspersed with TV screens showing clips of the band performing at various stages of their career, and interviews with the growing group of collaborators, producers, designers, illustrators, cartoonists and so on who worked with them – including illustrator Gerald Scarfe, architect Mark Fisher, engineer Jonathan Park, animator Ian Emes and lighting artist Marc Brickman.

You’re given headphones at the start so you can listen to the hour-long mix of tracks and interviewees’ words. It is a little like walking through a BBC Four documentary on Rock Greats.

Installation view: left, a case about A Saucerful of Secrets; a TV monitor showing Syd Barrett; centre the clever-clever artwork for Ummagumma

Installation view: from left to right, a case about A Saucerful of Secrets; a TV monitor showing Syd Barrett; centre the clever-clever artwork for Ummagumma

Having staggered to the end, I turned round and walked through the show backwards, following the story of a group of squabbling middle-aged men who worked with a wide range of similarly-aged male figures in art, design and illustration to produce vast, overblown slabs of narcoleptic music, but who pared away the amount of equipment, the unnecessary props and the middle of the road rock sound to produce some interesting and experimental work in their mid-period, before shedding all the unnecessary clutter to write lovely songs about lazing around in English fields, and then put all their differences aside to come to late fruition as the hyperactive, guitar-driven soundtrack of a small group of underground hipsters in swinging London.

If only.

Props and shops

It is an exhibition of things, some of staggering size. Big props include:

  • a massive representation of ‘The Wall’ stage with the giant inflatable schoolteacher looming over
  • a house-sized recreation of Battersea Power complete with towering chimneys
  • a room devoted to a pitch-black space containing a holographic image of The Dark Side Of The Moon’s famous prism
  • the inflatable TV and refrigerator used on the 1977 In The Flesh tour
  • band face masks from ‘The Wall Live’, 1979
  • the 6-metre-high metallic heads created for the cover of 1994’s The Division Bell
  • a flower petal mirrorball stage prop, 1973  to 1975
  • the ‘lightbulb suit’ pictured on the sleeve of 1988’s Delicate Sound of Thunder live album
Props from The Wall

Props from The Wall

More discrete pop trivia includes:

  • The punishment book and cane from the Cambridge And County High School for Boys, original guitarist and vocalist Syd Barrett and bass guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Roger Waters were pupils in the late 1950s.
  • Waters’ and Mason’s technical drawings and sketches from the Regent Street Polytechnic where they both studied architecture.
  • Nick Mason’s annotated gig diary from the early years, playing London’s underground music club UFO and touring Britain’s circuit of Top Rank ballrooms and college halls.
  • Roger Waters’ handwritten lyrics for the songs Wish You Were Here and Have A Cigar.

Famously, the band worked with the Hipgnosis design partnership of Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson. There are sketches and early drafts of what became the iconic covers of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here.

Since the band are also a little tiny bit about music, there are also some of their actual instruments, including several of David Gilmour’s guitars, including his famous Black Stratocaster, alongside Richard Wright’s early-‘70s era Mini Moog synthesiser.

Not one but two rooms are completely filled with amplifiers, speakers and shelves full of all the effects pedals and mixing desks in between. It feels like walking into the basement of a guitar shop. Oooh treasure! Visitors are encouraged to twiddle and play with in order to mix your own customised version of Money. There’s a lot here for sound technicians and hi-fi nerds. The final room is ‘the Performance Zone’, where visitors

“enter an immersive audiovisual space which includes the recreation of the last performance of all four members of the band at Live 8 with Comfortably Numb. The track was specially mixed using Sennheiser’s ground-breaking AMBEO 3D audio technology.”

Interviews with technicians who’ve worked with the Floyd over the years bring out the fact that they pioneered a lot of technology which went on to become standard – the trajectory from shaky psychedelic floorshows to flawless stadium theatre, was mirrored by pioneering of musical sounds to be extracted from synthesisers, innovations in recording techniques, new ways of designing and lighting live performances and a minute attention to the quality of the live sound.

Display case of guitars and technical equipment

Display case of guitars and technical equipment

There’s less sex and drugs in it, but there is a fascinating history of the technology of rock music to be written and the Floyd would play a central role as catalysts and visionaries.

Iconic Entertainment Studios

Interestingly, the exhibition is only part-curated by the V&A (to be precise by by Victoria Broackes, Senior Curator, whose previous exhibitions include David Bowie and You Say You Want a Revolution?). The exhibition is presented in partnership with Michael Cohl’s Iconic Entertainment Studios, led by Pink Floyd’s creative director Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell (of the design partnership Hipgnosis) and Paula Webb Stainton, who worked closely with members of Pink Floyd including Nick Mason (Consultant For Pink Floyd). Also contributing are “designers Stufish, the leading entertainment architects and the band’s long-serving stage designers, and interpretive exhibition designers Real Studios”.

In other words, the show is a natural extension of its previous product design, marketing and display. This aspect of it, the way it can be staged without any of the musicians due to their extensive music recordings and interview material, suggests the possibility that bands from this era (and maybe later, but these 1960s bands are the classic ones) will potentially have an endless afterlife, even after all the band members are long dead which is, well… eerie. What was once so full of life and warmth and energy becomes… mummified.

Early and late

An exciting three minutes from 1967 – like os many white men my age, I love Syd’s rackety, scratchy guitar sound:

A very boring ten minutes from 1994, featuring David Gilmour’s trademark, flawlessly soaring sound, sending centrist Dads everywhere into ecstacies of air guitar.

Pink Floyd in photos

Pink Floyd 1967: left to right keyboardist Rick Wright, drummer Nick Mason, bassist Roger Waters and visionary acid casualty Syd Barrett.

Pink Floyd 1973: l to r: Rick Wright, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters. Far out, man. This is how everyone wanted to look in 1973.

Pink Floyd 1985: l to r: Wright, Gilmour, Mason. Snappy 80s threads.

Pink Floyd 1994: Dad Rock epitomised by Mason, Gilmour and Wright.

Pink Floyd 2005 at Live 8: still crazy after all these years: Gilmour, Waters, Mason, Wright.

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by Simon on October 11, 2017  •  Permalink
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You Say You Want A Revolution @ the Victoria and Albert Museum

‘Your generation thinks it’s just bloody immortal… you just want to go on perpetuating your horrible 1960s culture into the next century…’
(teenager Belinda Weber moaning to her environmentally friendly, socialist ex-hippy parents in Bumping Along the Bottom from the Posy Simmonds collection of cartoon strips, Mustn’t Grumble, 1993)

Surround sound

This is the only exhibition I’ve ever been to where the audioguide is compulsory and starts playing while you’re still in the corridor outside the show. Also you don’t have to stop in front of an exhibit and punch in the corresponding number on the device – instead you wander at will through the exhibition and the player senses where you are and automatically plays the relevant soundtrack for wherever you’re standing. Groovy, man!

That soundtrack consists of a non-stop montage of 1960s rock, speeches, TV broadcasts, film clips etc, so that you are hearing tracks by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, speeches by President Kennedy or Martin Luther King (he had a dream, apparently), Neil Armstrong jumping onto the moon or John Lennon at his bed-in at the Montreal Hotel, clips from movies about Swinging London or Antonioni’s classic 1960s film Blow Up, and so on and so on.

Not having to stop and select a track but letting it all wash over you makes for a much more relaxed, surround-sound experience than at most exhibitions – in fact makes it much like walking around with your own headphones on playing a groovy 1960s playlist.

The content

There is absolutely nothing new or unexpected in the show, which amounts to a Greatest Hits of popular culture from the second half of the 1960s. If you had never heard of The Beatles or Beatlemania or their album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, if you didn’t know that The Rolling Stones had a bad boy image and got arrested for drugs, if you didn’t know that Bob Dylan caused a scandal by ditching his folk sound at the 1965 Newport Festival to go electric, if you didn’t know that London was declared ‘Swinging London’ by American magazines or that Twiggy became an emblem of the new waif-look, that mini skirts were popular – if you hadn’t heard of the Oz trial, of Black Power, or know that Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch, that lots of people didn’t like the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon, if you hadn’t heard of hippies or Flower Power or of a big outdoor festival called ‘Woodstock’, then this exhibition will come as a surprise and a revelation to you.

If, on the other hand, you do know all this, have read umpteen books and watched numberless documentaries about the period, as well as having a passing familiarity with the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, The Who, Pink Floyd and so on – then it is a little difficult to figure out what this exhibition is meant to be telling you.

At various points the guide says that the show is trying to trace back to their origins a number of ‘issues’ which are still with us. Well, OK, Women’s Liberation/feminism is still with us, as are problems with race, especially in the USA, whose activists can trace their lineage back to Martin Luther King or the Black Panthers. And environmentalism is still with us, as an ongoing concern for the natural world, which we really do seem to be destroying.

In a more indefinable way ‘deference’ to authority in the form of the police, the courts and politicians was permanently weakened and we are nowadays generally as suspicious of authority figures as most hippies were in 1969.

Again, the way people dress underwent a decisive move away from the formal suits and dresses which had dominated the West for a century or more, towards the casual jeans and T-shirts look which is now pretty much universal.

All of these issues are referenced and described a bit, but not in any great detail.

Art and design

So it’s all sort of interesting, and lots of fun to saunter around ogling the very chair that Christine Keeler sat on for that photoshoot or looking at the very outfit that John Lennon wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, along with alternative photos from that photo shoot and hand-written lyrics for The Fool on the Hill or Strawberry Fields Forever.

But a lot of this is just pop trivia. In the big room dominated by vast screens showing clips from the Woodstock festival and playing rock music very loud, there are also cases displaying a Stratocaster guitar which Jimi Hendrix smashed up at a performance at some London club, along with the battered Les Paul guitar played by the rhythm guitarist in his scratch band at Woodstock. There are some notes scribbled by dazed festival goers and pinned to the noticeboard asking for the phone number of the pretty girl they chatted up by the burger stall. All very chilled, man but… in a major exhibition?

The Victoria and Albert Museum on its website says it is the world’s leading museum of art and design. A major aspect of this is fashion and clothes design so I totally accept that the mannekins displaying outfits worn by Twiggy, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, John Lennon and so on fit into its remit.

But a display explaining the historical roots of the Vietnam War along with a random montage of newspaper cuttings about it, including for some reason a letter about his draft papers written by the student Bill Clinton? This is just social history, and very pop, superficial social history at that.

One of the most consistent threads of the show is the hundreds of LP covers pinned to the wall in almost every room, giving a tremendous sense of the outpouring of fantastic rock, pop, jazz, soul and other forms of music from the era. Apparently, they are all from the personal collection of legendary BBC Radio 1 disc jockey John Peel.

What I would have found fascinating and, arguably, more relevant to the V&A’s remit would have been an analysis of the evolution of LP cover art, giving lots of space to pioneering designs and designers, explaining the movements and trends in what came, during this period, a well-defined art form in its own right.

There was some explanation of the way non-commercial posters – as a form of cheap, mass producible communication which weren’t adverts, newspapers or billboards – could be used by all kinds of groups from underground music clubs to radical communist or Black Power groups. In sections like this I felt the V&A was beginning to fulfil its emit but I could have done with a more coherent explanation of the theory and practice, the origin, development and evolution of ‘the poster’ during this turbulent time.

Fun

But this is carping. No cliché is left untapped, no obvious reference point goes unmentioned, no iconic track goes unsampled, in this hugely enjoyable, big warm bath of nostalgia for a period which most of us didn’t actually experience but which all of us, because of the power of its music, films and iconic imagery, feel like we know intimately.

Images

Just as the music is a collection of ‘Sounds of the 60s’, so are the images a familiar collection of great ‘shots of the 60s’, bringing together many of the most iconic, shocking and memorable images of the decade. Thus: Anti-war.

ARLINGTON, VA - OCTOBER 26 1967: Antiwar demonstrators tried flower power on MPs blocking the Pentagon Building in Arlington, VA on October 26, 1967. (Photo by Bernie Boston/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

ARLINGTON, Virginia, October 26 1967: Antiwar demonstrators tried flower power on MPs blocking the Pentagon Building in Arlington (Photo by Bernie Boston/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Woodstock.

15 Aug 1969 --- John Sebastian performs at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in Bethel, New York (Max Yasgur's 600-acre farm) on Friday, August 15, 1969. --- Image by © Henry Diltz/Corbis

John Sebastian performs at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in Bethel, New York (Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm) on Friday, August 15, 1969. Image by © Henry Diltz/Corbis

Posters.

E.1704-1991 Poster UFO coming; Psychedelic poster entitled 'UFO coming' by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth), published by Osiris Agency Ltd. London, 1967. Michael English (1941-2009); Nigel Weymouth Hapshash and the Coloured Coat; Osiris London 1967 Silkscreen

Psychedelic poster entitled ‘UFO coming’ by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth), published by Osiris Agency Ltd. London, 1967. Silkscreen

The Christine Keeler photoshoot, May 1963.

Photos of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley © Lewis Morley National Media Museum Science & Society Picture Library

Photos of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley © Lewis Morley National Media Museum Science & Society Picture Library

Installations

Swinging London (note the phone box and bus stop at the back). The cat suit on the right was designed specially for Mick Jagger.

Swinging London installation. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Swinging London installation. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band display case.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band display case. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band display case. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Woodstock room with massive multiscreens dwarfing Keith Moon’s drum kits and a selection of costumes worn by performers on the raised platform. Note the display case at bottom left which contains the hand-written notes and messages by festival attendees.

The Woodstock room. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Woodstock room. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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by Simon on October 3, 2016  •  Permalink
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Bill Bruford: The Autobiography: Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks and More (2009)

24 January 2012

‘If the British Prime Minister’s Cabinet could co-operate on the same level as the great Miles Davis quintets, we’d be experiencing a different form of government altogether.’ (page 142)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. It is a rare example of an autobiography by a musician who’s got something interesting to say – about making music, about his own feelings and ambitions in music, about the bands he’s played with, about the enormous changes he’s seen over the past 40 years in the music ‘business’ and wider society – and who says it with intelligence and dry humour. The only comparisons I can think of are Mile Davis’s and Bob Dylan’s autobiographies, but Bill’s has intelligent and thoughtful points to make about a much wider range of subjects. And he’s English (hooray!)

If you’re interested in the music of the 70s, if you’re interested in progressive rock music, if you’re interested in jazz, if you want to know how albums are actually pieced together, how bands behave on the road, how the recording studio works, what managers are like, the cost to a person’s private life of being a working musician doing gruelling foreign tours, if you want tips on how to survive in the music business, or if you’re just interested in the social, political, cultural and economic history of the last 40 years, then buy this wonderful book!

Bill Bruford: The Autobiography: Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks and More

Review

Bill Bruford, son of a vet from Sevenoaks in Kent, was a teenage prodigy of a drummer, as soon as he could taking the train up to London to see American jazz drummers performing at Ronny Scott’s and other Soho jazz clubs in the mid-60s and learning from everyone. By 1968 a series of chance encounters led him to land the gig as drummer in the new progressive band, Yes, his extraordinary technique propelling the band through their first five albums: Yes, Time and A Word, The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1971) and their masterpiece, Close To the Edge (1973).

Yes in concert 1971. L-R: Tony Kaye keyboards, Chris Howe on guitar and Bill Bruford on drums

Yes in concert 1971. L-R: Tony Kaye keyboards, Chris Howe on guitar and Bill Bruford on drums

At which point, just as Yes were about to tour the album round the US and go supernova, Bill left the band to join their rival in progressive rock, the far darker and more experimental King Crimson. Led by guitar maestro Robert Fripp, the Crim had had chronic difficulty keeping a stable line-up since their debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King back in 1969. Bruford’s arrival heralded the third incarnation of the band, much heavier and more guitar-driven and without the pseudo-medieval lyrics and elaborate song structures of Peter Sinfield. This darker sound came to the fore on the albums Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973), Starless And Bible Black (1974), Red (1974) and the umpteen bootlegs and live albums from the time.

Bill Bruford drumming with King Crimson in New York, 1973

Bill Bruford drumming with King Crimson in New York, 1973

At which point Fripp surprised the band by dissolving it, and Bruford embarked on the next 35 years forming his own rock combos, sometimes with former Yes-men, sometimes with a reformed Crim (which Fripp undissolved in 1980), but increasingly moving into the area of jazz which had been his earliest love, forming the groups UK and Earthworks, as well as recording with numerous jazz greats in the US and UK, and a constant schedule of touring across Europe, America and Asia. In 2009, after a long and varied career, Bill announced his retirement and, later the same year, published this, his autobiography.

Format Bill has had the brilliant idea of structuring the book around chapters answering the questions he is most frequently asked at cocktail parties, some of which drive him to distraction: So how did you get started? Why did you leave Yes? What’s it like working with Robert Fripp? But what do you do in the daytime? and 15 others. The chapters themselves consist of stories, anecdotes, thoughts and reflections skipping around in time and place but all relating to the central question.

This is a great format because it’s so flexible: it allows him to focus on luminous moments or funny anecdotes or challenging ideas rather than being tied to a chronological list of his activity since, as Bill emphasises, the working musician’s life often boils down to a pretty boring litany of rehearsals, recording and touring. It is a “best of…” Bill’s thoughts and reflections.

Drumming He leaves the details of drumming until well into the book. Personally, I could have done with understanding more how a drummer decides which of all the available rhythms in a piece of music to pick out, and why, and on which drums or percussion instruments? But there is still plenty about the business of drumming, the setting up and the testing, in the studio or before a performance, as well as lots about the business side – attending drumming conferences, fronting ads for specific manufacturers and so on:

‘When I first pick up the sticks, I feel stodgy and slow. I need to warm up. Simple, powerful strokes eventually get some blood circulating in wrists and fingers, and soon the strokes come more easily. Drummers usually practice the rudiments, a codified set of sticking patterns with colourful onomatopoeic names such as flamadiddle and ratamacue. There are traditionally some 26 of these, mostly derived from military drumming, and it’s like practicing the correct fingering for your piano scales.’ (page 294)

There’s a wonderful meditation on the physical, musical and philosophical differences between rock drumming and jazz drumming on page 172 which sheds light on the purpose and structure of the two different genres.

Bill with Mark Hodgson (acoustic bass) and Tim Garland (tenor saxophone). Photo: Fernando Aceves

Bill with Mark Hodgson (acoustic bass) and Tim Garland (tenor saxophone). Photo: Fernando Aceves

Prog rock Bill has numerous insights into the history and development of the genre music to which he contributed so hugely – after all he worked with the giants of the genre, Yes, King Crimson and, briefly, Genesis. Passages of pure insight like the following are scattered throughout the book:

‘Robert Fripp had stopped King Crimson, rather smartly I thought, in 1974, and we were able to leave the scene relatively unsoiled by the excesses that were fast entrapping the unwary… The history of progressive rock since about 1976 can be divided into two distinct periods. From 1976 to 1982, a watered-down, simpler version limped on as American stadium rock and British symphonic pop, but no new ground was being broken and the older bands started to lose commercial viability… The Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, and Pink Floyd groups of 1972 became the lighter, more consistent stadium rockers such as the Journey, Styx or Kansas of 1978…  By the time John Wetton’s Asia had sold millions of copies of its bland radio-friendly pop in the 80s, the post-hippie extension of the counterculture that was progressive rock, based on the idealistic impulses of the 60s, had finally runs its course. The dream, or illusion, of individual and global enlightenment was over. Progressive rock, like the period that gave rise to it, was essentially optimistic…Perhaps that lasting innocence, a refreshing anecdote to modern times, is where the attraction lies for the remarkably large group of listeners it has managed, over many turbulent years, to retain.’ (page 125)

As someone fascinated by the historical context of all types of art, these passages are, for me, pure gold.

Jazz Jazz was always Bruford’s first love and the book makes clear that, throughout the 70s, he felt like a jazz drummer masquerading as a rock drummer until he felt confident enough to set up his first jazz group in the 1980s. Having experienced both worlds he is uniquely well-placed to comment on the enormous disparity between the two musics:

‘If I threw a party for my greatest 20 musical friends, past and present, the room would divide down the middle with 10 on one side and ten on the other. The ten on my right would be millionaires with salaries so unaccountably large that more time would be spent in charitable dispersal of the stuff than its actual acquisition. The ten on my left would be among the finest jazz musicians in the world, with an average salary approximately equal to that of a supermarket checkout girl. And I would be standing in the middle.’ (page 199)

The music biz Bill describes himself and his band mates in Yes as being astonishingly naive about every aspect of the business when they started out. They were on a weekly wage of £25 well into their period of greatest success. He gives vivid vignettes of the band, memorably recalling Jon Anderson in the band’s communal flat in Fulham, yelling down the phone at promoters and agents, doing everything necessary to keep the band going. Bill’s anecdotes give a good sense of the various managers Yes and King Crimson went through, and an unnerving insight into the chanciness and dodgy dealing which accompanied so many of the ‘business’ arrangements.

Our hero - older and wiser

Our hero – older and wiser

But behind the anecdotes about this or that manager, about the constant squabbling over money (and everything else) which characterised Yes, about the hussling for gigs, the sordid contractual realities which lay behind the making of the albums the fans loved and the tours they sold out – it’s the confidence with which Bill sets his own story within the much broader context of the day which makes the book so rewarding. He explains key facts such as the music business’s turnover tripled each year in the early 70s. Money seemed to be pouring in in uncountable amounts for the successful groups which managed to make it big in America, the platinum albums, the sellout stadium tours, the private jets, the hotel suites which they felt free to trash. The bands, the managers, the promoters and the record companies thought the gravy train (which Pink Floyd sing about with such disgust on 1975’s Wish You Were Here) would never stop, but…

I remember seeing The Song Remains the Same, the epic film of Led Zeppelin live, at the Odeon Leicester Square in October 1976 and being blown away; but then I was an impressionable 14 year-old. Led Zeppelin hadn’t played in England for two years to avoid paying supertax and most of the other megagroups – Genesis, Yes, Supertramp, Pink Floyd – had become similarly rich and distanced from their ‘fans’. Earlier that year a couple of new bands had been touring England creating a grass-roots movement wherever they played. They were The Clash, The Damned and The Sex Pistols. Though they would lumber on into the 80s and increase their turnovers, the era when the prog rockers represented youthful idealism was over. Increasingly they just represented their own need to make money.

New technology Bill’s book sheds fascinating light on the way the music industry has changed and evolved not only during the period he’s been active, but throughout the entire 20th century. Again he places his own personal story in a much wider context:

‘It is an industry for which the  constant stream of technical innovations – phonogram, wireless, recording, vinyl, cassette, long-player, multi-track recording, CD – has been both the lifeblood and a constant source of disruption and disturbance that threaten the established ways of exploiting musical materials to yield a profit. If the music industry was all about banging out bits of black vinyl on an assembly line and delivering to a vast number of retail outlets, then its modern replacement, the music business, is about the never-ending war waged by record companies, composers, and publishers to establish and then protect copyrights on their material and collect royalties for its use.’ (page 181)

I’ve rarely read anything so thought-provoking about popular music, its place in all our lives, in our Western culture, and in the vast tentacular capitalist economies which control us. He sees the big picture:

‘It’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is already enough music in Western society, and Western society tends to point out to the musician through the market – sometimes quite brutally, because the stupid musician doesn’t get it – that it doesn’t really want any new music, that it’s stuffed with the music it’s got.’ (page 181)

Something I think about all the time. I chatted to a student at Pierrot Lunaire the other day, and she told me about a few gigs she’d been to recently, Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Good God, why them, Lou’s first album is nearly 50 years old! People at work are getting excited about a series of gigs we’re staging with Paul Weller, Jools Holland, Blondie and the Human League. The biggest selling music tours of last year were Madonna (first single 1982), Bruce Springsteen (first single 1975) and Roger Waters’ The Wall (1979). Where’s the new stuff?

When everything, all the written and recorded music of the past is immediately available at the flick of a few buttons, anywhere with wifi or 3G, what value does that music have? What meaning? It certainly has lost all ability to shock or subvert or change. I grew up on the Sex Pistols. Ollie Murs doesn’t worry me. And with recorded music so ubiquitous how can the new young performing musician compete? With so many avenues of exploration so thoroughly mined, where can the ambitious musician begin to say something new?

These and lots of other issues, ideas, questions and concerns are raised and discussed by someone who has really been there and done it, in this marvellous and marvellously thought-provoking book.

All quotes from ‘Bill Bruford: The Autobiography’. Used by permission of the author.

A Postscript from Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp has been lovingly remastering, repackaging and reissuing King Crimson’s LPs as well as issuing a host of live recording, and accompanying them with fascinating commentary, on the group and the times. In the notes to ‘The Great Deceiver‘ double live CD (a fascinating record of the group in 1973-74) he makes comments which supplement Bill’s and Paul Stump’s:

‘The record industry in the period 1968-1978 was a seemingly unstoppable growth industry. The early amateurism surrounding the rock business had professionalised by about 1974, although this increased throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Records became ‘products’ and ‘units’ which moved, audiences became consumers whose ‘behaviour patterns’ were charted by ‘demographics’. Something went terribly, terribly wrong in our sense of values. Pragmatics replaced Principle. Quantity demonstrated Quality.’

(Sleevenotes to ‘The Great Deceiver, volume 1’. Copyright Robert Fripp)

In 1978 when I was buying punk singles and albums I still thought music was some kind of rebellion, had something political to say, and could change things. By 1982 I realised the New Romantic movement was deifying the Triumph of Money and the comprehensive defeat of everything the 60s stood for. In the 1990s I got to be series editor of a TV arts programme, and was quietly appalled that the clever 20-somethings who produced the music items for it made their case for who should be on the show entirely in terms of units sold, gold, platinum records achieved or Mercury or MOBO awards. The entire sector had been comprehensively corporatised. The student I chatted to at Pierrot Lunaire said she’d been to see Radiohead at the O2 last year and was disgusted by the cost and the spectacle and the merchandising and the special lifts to the VIP boxes where bankers and property developers could enjoy this so-called ‘subversive’ music in luxury.

Not unlike Bill (though as a humble fan, not a premier league performer) I also abandoned rock music in the 80s for more musically interesting jazz – and then progressed on into 20th century classical music, much of which is still so uncommercial and difficult that it resists corporatisation, assimilation and denaturing to fit the infantilised tastes of the ipod age.

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by Simon on February 1, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 1, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/bill-bruford-the-autobiography/

Close To The Edge: The Story of Yes by Chris Welch (1999)

22 January 2012

The story  of the progressive rock group Yes is they were struggling musos from mediocre r&b bands in the late 60s with a shared interest in Simon & Garfunkel-type harmonies and more advanced playing skills than were common in the pop or rock of that era; they stumbled upon a technique for piecing together short melodic fragments into long 10, 15 or even 20 minute pieces of fiendish musical dexterity; brought this to perfection on the albums ‘Fragile’ and ‘Close To The Edge’; took it too far in the overblown double album ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’; by 1974 and ‘Relayer’, they’d gone from living in a shared flat to owning million pound homes and flying their wives, children and nannies first class on luxury holidays to Barbados, spending money like there was no tomorrow; so when Punk came along in 1976 and made them and their style of music look like dinosaurs, they turned out to be so in debt they couldn’t do the decent thing and dissolve the band, but struggled on into the 1980s, through complex personnel changes and rushed-out albums and immense stadium tours, to make the money needed to pay for the rock god lifestyle they could no longer afford.

Chris Welch’s book includes lengthy quotes from the numerous people who’ve been part of the band over the years and you read on in hope of illumination and insight, about the lyrics, the musical inspiration, the worldview of the band – but eventually realise the book and interviews are overwhelmed by the practicalities of organising another recording session, another tour, negotiating with more lawyers. Any of the hippy spirit I associate with the early 70s and those visionary album covers by Roger Dean is obliterated by the hard realities of the music business.

“They had been a very big band in America and lived their lives in an extreme way. They all had their own limos and in 1979 they were still very much buried in that 1970s rock-star-with-a-big-house image.”

Geoff Downes, Yes keyboard player (p.191)

“I was thrilled to be joining the music business in 1968 with Yes. It was all so exciting and for five years it was heaven. But after five years all progressive rock should have stopped… From 1974 onwards you were left with Yes and Genesis not doing very good versions of progressive rock.All the creative stuff had already been done.”

Bill Bruford, Yes drummer (p.130)

“Tormato [1978] I hated. I just hated it and in a way I had kind of written them off. What happened was the songs were no good any more. Whoever was writing the main themes had run out of steam. The songs were pretty crap and a bit stupid.”

Trevor Horn, Yes singer and producer (p.196)

“Why should I care about Yes anymore? Yes was a big section of my life. How can it come back…? Yes was from a certain time in history. Those first three LPs I did with them were the real golden days of Yes. That was the creative time for the band when everybody was pulling together.”

Steve Howe, Yes guitarist (p.211)

“Yes as ever is guided financially. Most of its musical movements now are motivated by sheer lack of money. In other words, because money needs to come in fast all the time, the shortest possible route to money is taken. It means the quickest delivery of the wrong album, the quickest booking of the wrong tour. Anything to help the renegotiating of a publishing contract to keep the money coming in. So the group is always poorly financed and poorly structured which gives it no artistic freedom.”

Bill Bruford, Yes drummer (p.227)

…which is why I was flabbergasted but then not surprised to discover that the bunch of hippies with their cool album covers which I remembered from my school days are still touring and recording albums. See all the details on the official Yes website.

Chris Welch is a veteran rock journalist, for many years with the legendary Melody Maker music paper. He met the band in their earliest London days and over the years he’s toured with them, interviewed them scores of times, as a band and as individuals pursuing their solo projects etc. He is, in other words, perfectly placed to write the story of one of the most famous and successful progressive rock bands of the 1970s. Except that being so close, and needing to maintain the friendship and trust of individuals who have had so many spectacular fallings-out, personal and professional rivalries and financial disputes, he is obliged to be tactful. Very tactful. There are hints, especially about the role of the players’ wives in the umpteen disputes and personality clashes which seem to have been much more a feature of the band than any kind of “love and peace” – but only hints. Someone more distant from the band might be able to tell the story rather more meatily.

Mr Welch is not an intellectual like Paul Stump whose book, ‘The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock’, is full of theories and ideas about progressive music and its connection with surrounding society, culture and politics. For Welch life is altogether simpler and this is a story about hard-working, prodigiously gifted musicians who persevered through all kinds of financial, managerial and relationship setbacks to create some of the greatest rock music of the century. It reads like an enthusiastic fanzine. Or like a very long version of the kind of profile piece Mr Welch has presumably written about them scores of times. It provides the raw data which you can then combine with Stump’s account of the social changes during the 70s to come to your own conclusions.

For me the story is straightforward: Listening to the albums in order you hear the emergence of the Yes sound in the first two albums, its peak in ‘Fragile’ and ‘Close To the Edge’, its overripening on ‘Topographic Oceans’. And then the sound changes. It contains less and less of the magic of the early songs as the albums became better produced, more studio-bound, more computerised and synthesised and dead behind the eyes – until the disco drums and jazz bass of ‘90125’ announce the complete end of the progressive dream, the arrival of big hair and shoulder pads and the band photos seem to portray the more musically adept but still embarrassing older brothers (or is it uncles?) of Duran Duran. And that was by 1982. The band has carried on for over thirty years since then! Should we be amazed or impressed or appalled – or all three?

Probably my favourite track is ‘Siberian Khatru’ from the ‘Close To The Edge’ album. If you buy into the basic rock sound – dynamic drumming, propulsive bass, screechy guitar solos etc – then there’s an amazing variety of musical ideas here. I stopped counting after identifying 12 distinct musical ideas/riffs/sounds. I think it’s the way one track can contain so much invention and variety, and that so many of the ideas give the kind of visceral pleasure rock is designed for, that I like. Take the ending where guitarist Chris Howe solos over the organ riff – but the first half of the solo goes against all expectations in being very low in the guitar’s range with repeated inelegant phrases flopping back and forth against the organ backdrop – when a cliche rock god like Jimmy Page would have made the solo soar to orgasmic heights. Within the rock idiom, the music feels experimental, unexpected, full of energy and ideas. All the qualities which, sadly, had disappeared from their music by the end of the 70s.

In 1991 the band were strongarmed by their record company into recording an album with a hodge-podge lineup of old members and new, ironically titled ‘Union’. Notorious keyboard wunderkind Rick Wakeman nicknamed the album Onion, because just thinking about it made him weep. If I were sentimental I’d agree in lamenting the utter evaporation of the social, musical and artistic utopianism of the early 70s. For the last 30 years money, and money alone, has ruled the world of music as so much else.

I’ve linked to their albums on YouTube so you can sample the everchanging sounds of Yes and decide for yourselves:

Yes (1969)
Time and a Word (1970)
The Yes Album (1971)
Fragile (1971)
Close to the Edge (1972)
Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973)
Relayer (1974)
Going for the One (1977)
Tormato (1978)
Drama (1980)
90125 (1983)
Big Generator (1987)
Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (1989)
Union (1991)
Talk (1994)
Keys to Ascension (1996)
Keys to Ascension 2 (1997)
Open Your Eyes (1997)
The Ladder (1999)
Magnification (2001)
Fly from Here (2011)

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by Simon on January 22, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 22, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/close-to-the-edge-the-story-of-yes-chris-welch/

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