(A
sort of sequel to an earlier post on Krautrock.)
“It's
not just some sort of scruffy club you can join, you're in or you're
out... it's like being a criminal.”
Okay,
the Sex Pistols song gave the late Seventies a catchier title. But in
the process it's baseless year-zero rhetoric burnt the bridges to an
equally great era of music, for which Britain was an epicentre. Punk
didn't happen as a reaction to this music, punk was more an attempt
to get back to it.
Hawkwind
You
couldn't overstate the importance of Hawkwind if you tried. They're
a credible candidate for the most important band in the history of
everything, ever. Not just through defining the Sixties underground
sound but by heavily influencing punk, post-punk and dance music.
Like
the Velvet Underground they had a huge visual element to their live
performance. But, also like the Velvets, sadly very little from
their classic era was filmed. This is a video they made of their
token hit 'Silver Machine' as an alternative to
having to appear on 'Top Of the Pops'. (You can
tell it's made for TV because Stacia keeps her clothes on.) Lemmy
took the lead vocals, according to him because he was the only one
who could hit the high notes.
Though
covering 'Silver Machine' with the re-united
Pistols, when asked to present a Radio Two show more recently John
Lydon demonstrated his hardcore fan status by choosing the far
freakier 'You Shouldn't Do That' instead. As would I, if YouTube had yielded any
actually visual videos for it. 'Silver Machine'
bears about the same place in the heart of Hawkfans as 'She
Loves You'does for Beatles buffs - you like
it, sure, but you think of it as an entrée at best.
Black
Sabbath
Accept
the linear notion that the Sixties Underground was nothing but prog,
and another bridge burnt is its role in the genesis of hard rock and
metal. Black Sabbath were of course the instigator of Seventies hard
rock (which like all influential bands led to results both good and
ill), but in their early days were very much seen as part of the
underground. This bio is surely right to state “they still are a heavy
underground band.”
Having
gone for the obvious with 'Silver Machine', I
feel obliged to follow up with the scene's other great unexpected
hit - 'Paranoid'.(Which the band always claimed they speed-wrote to fill an album deemed
otherwise too short for release.)
Like
Hawkwind they actually excelled in longer tracks. But unlike
Hawkwind their schtick was not sensory overload so much as
pulverizing force, down-tuned guitars providing riffs so ponderous
and droney they almost stop time in its tracks. If Hawkwind sought
to hurl you up into the heavens, like some shaman cosmonaut, Sabbath
strived to bury you alive under layers of sound.
But 'Paranoid'...
somehow it manages to be more representative than 'Silver
Machine'. Teenage angst writ large then hammered home with
a piledriving riff – isn't that what it's all about? And check out
the video…
Pink
Floyd
it's
a bit like Blake's famous line “did he who make the lamb make
thee?” Is this really the same band who
subjected us to 'Division Bell'?
Well technically
yes, but actually not. 'Set The Controls For the Heart of
the Sun' borrows its title from a Ray Bradbury short
story, and bears about the same relationship to generic rock music
as he did to standard SF. It simply does what it says on the lid. You can hear its influence on trance-out
acts like Om to this day.
Soft
Machine
History
perhaps wasn't kind to Soft Machine. There was a period they were
seen as the central band of the British
underground, the lot that would not just headline the UFO club but
almost define it. They were to London what the Velvets were to New
York. Alas, the candle that blazes twice as bright burnt half as
long. The key members left early and they fell into becoming a boring
proggy jazz-rock outfit, the sort of thing music buffs listen to on
expensive hi-fis.
But
never mind that – let's talk about their heyday! If Faust were the
Dadaists of the Sixties underground then Soft Machine were the
Surrealists, less assaulting music than undermining by infecting it
with strangeness and wry wit. Though of course their name came from
the Burroughs novel it also suggests at the soft, morphing forms of
Dalian paintings.
Above
all, their music's funny, in and of itself - just
as the Magic Band's output was. A humour amply conveyed by this
track being named 'Eamonn Andrews', after the
evening TV presenter. Or by Robert Wyatt's tale (told on the back of their third album) of the first time they
played the Albert Hall. A diligent doorman resolutely refused the
scruffy hippy admission. (“'I've
got to play in there', I said. 'You must be kidding, son', he said,
'they only have proper music in there'. Not that night they didn't.”)
Caravan
As
any fule kno, many Sixties underground bands were actually a huge
influence on punk. But were they just exceptions to the rule? What
for example of Caravan? With their softly spoken laid-back
pastoralism, were they the very thing punk sought to destroy? After
all, their subject matter tended to be sly-wink innuendo about
getting stoned and shagging, neither of which seem terribly
transgressive today.
But
so what? We shouldn't let the battle lines of the past define where
we can go now. And sometimes what you want to eat's a flaming chilli
burger, at other's it's some soft-flavoured home cooking.
It's
clear enough by now that the prog that has dated,
that can just be sealed up and consigned to history, is the
bombastic, technocratic, look-at-me indulgences of ELP and the like.
Caravan, conversely, were made from English understatement, droll
whimsical humour (they sing like they have the permanent hint of a
smile), a love of indolence and (yes really) a fine gift for melody.
Their music sailed rather than being driven by any
kind of engine. And, fittingly for the band that most epitomised the Canterbury sound, what could be more English than their rolling
numbers? A Caravan track always seem so redolent of the soft
undulations of the South Downs I live among.
King
Crimson
This
was the beginning of the end, really. King Crimson were definitely
the start of prog, if more genuinely strange and deranged than that
term normally connotes. But history is never neat and '21st Schizoid Man' from 1969 (supporting the Stones in Hyde
Park) couldn't be a more classic Sixties Underground track – heavy
riffing, sticking it to the man – just delivered by those who were
ending it in that very same moment.
And to
play us out...
The
Social Deviants
...were also known as the Deviants, or the
Pink Fairies whenever the band fell out with singer Mick Farren (he
of the quote up top). They were essentially the British MC5, even
down to the stick-it-to-the-man shock politics, the White Panther
connection and (above all) the wild Afros.
Unlike
the MC5, however, they may be best remembered historically rather
than musically. This one's described by the band themselves as
“fairly long... and loud.” Both are true. It's a fuzzy clip of a
free concert in Hyde Park. (Yes, another one. How did they avoid
double-booking them?) And such a thing probably does sum up the era
best. For better or... you know, the other one. (Skip at the very
least the first minute.)
However,
while long and loud it is, those with enough powers of endurance to
click through to the second part will be reassured to find the thing
ends with the reassuring sight of a British bobby.
(NB
While the 'revolutionary' rhetoric of the times can have a naïve
charm today, it's a bit harder to smile indulgently at the suggestion
that you “grab the tit of the chick next to you”. Not against
that part of the power structure, then, Mick?)
Coming soon! More of this sort of thing...
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