Ghost Echoes

The first Roxy Music album brings together a patchwork of inspirations and influences from across the decades. In the second episode of Ghost Echoes, we stroll spontaneously into the movie theatre of the mind and examine a few of them. Here’s looking at you, kid.

Music and Sound Notes:

All of the Roxy Music tracks heard here for illustrative purposes are from their debut album. They include: “Re-Make/Re-Model”, “Virginia Plain”, “Bitters End”, “Chance Meeting", and “2HB”.

The recording of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto near the start is by an anonymous soloist and symphony orchestra, from Musopen. The excerpt from Brief Encounter itself features a recording of the same concerto by Eileen Joyce with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Muir Matheson. The Noël Coward song heard shortly after is “The Party’s Over Now,” from the musical Words and Music.

The segment on pop art features excerpts from Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” and David Bowie’s “Andy Warhol.” The section about musicians who went to art school features tiny extracts from “All Your Love” by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers; “Imagine” by John Lennon; “Brown Sugar”, “Some Girls”, and “Honky Tonk Women” all by the Rolling Stones; “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin; “Pinball Wizard” by the Who; “Tubular Bells, Part 1” by Mike Oldfield; “Bike” by Pink Floyd; “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos; “The Village Green Preservation Society” by the Kinks; “Seaside Rendezvous” by Queen; “Your Love is King” by Sade; “Common People” by Pulp; “You’re So Great” by Blur; “Man-Size” by PJ Harvey; “Paper Planes” by M.I.A.; “Kiss With A Fist” by Florence and the Machine; and “London Calling” by the Clash.

The recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” used here is by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Uwe Mund. The brief excerpt from the start of Das Rheingold is the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Marek Janowski, and the horn call from Götterdämmerung is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly.

The music that finishes the episode off is from the end of Max Steiner’s score for Casablanca.

Further reading, watching:

The two main sources for biographical information were Michael Bracewell’s Re-Make/Re-Model and Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe. The Brief Encounter section is loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’ essay “Leaving the Movie Theatre” from The Rustle of Language. The list of art school alumni who went on to pop stardom comes from Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox.

The BBC documentary at the beginning of the pop art section is “Pop Goes the Easel,” an episode of Monitor, hosted by Huw Wheldon and directed by the great Ken Russell. The interview clips with Ferry are taken from a Channel Four documentary called This is Tomorrow. - The images in this blog post were the main source for my descriptions of the Roxy Theatre.

Other film and television clips come from Brief Encounter; What’s Opera, Doc?; The Wizard of Oz; Casablanca and Now, Voyager.

We are an optimistic species. Even in our stories about the end of the world, the world doesn’t actually end. In reality, it will. In the season one finale of Ghost Echoes, we study the apocalypse. Ragnarök. The Great Tribulation. The End. Alas, we're not alone -- we're with Nico.

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Music and Sound Notes:

-- This episode contains excerpts from “Femme Fatale,” by the Velvet Underground, and “These Days", “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce”, “Frozen Warnings”, “Nibelungen”, “You Forget to Answer”, “The End”, “Das Lied der Deutschen,” and “Win a Few", all by Nico.

Further reading, listening:

--For biographical information on Nico, see the documentary Nico: Icon and this Guardian story by Simon Reynolds. This episode also contains clips from Susanna Nicchiarelli’s excellent biopic Nico, 1988.

--For more on the 1910 Halley’s comet panic, read Matt Simon in Wired. And for more on the UFO cult Chen Tao, see Encyclopaedia Britannica.

June Campbell Cramer, known to all as Lady June, was one of the greatest party hosts of her day. She was the connective tissue that held whole musical scene together. She was the counterculture’s landlady. And she was also an artist in her own right. On this episode of Ghost Echoes, we crash a house party and do a bit of psychedelic people watching.

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Music and Sound Notes:

--This episode contains excerpts of three tracks from Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy: “Some Day Silly Twenty Three,” “To Whom It May Not Concern,” and “Am I.”

Further reading, listening:

--Details on Lady June’s life were gathered from Marcus O’Dair’s Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time, as well as various online sources. These include her obituary in the Independent, an interview in Facelift Magazine, this feature on a fansite for Canterbury music, these reminiscences from June’s fellow Deia residents, the AllMusic review of Linguistic Leprosy, and Lady June’s own semi-autobiographical poem Rebella.

--The complete story of the wealthy Texan optician and Soft Machine patron Wes Brunson can be found on Aymeric Leroy’s blog about the Canterbury Scene.

--The full text of Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, complete with the prologue he wrote nearly thirty years later, can be found here. Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” is in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

On May 28, 1974, the worst orchestra in the world performed at the Royal Albert Hall. That’s not so unusual. The Albert Hall isn’t Carnegie Hall. It’s not an exclusive, prestigious venue where only the greatest may perform. It is simply London’s most historic gathering place. Many strange and marvelous things have happened there, including militant political rallies, beat poetry, and appearances by celebrity ghosts. In this episode of Ghost Echoes, we present you five extraordinary evenings at the Albert Hall.

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Music and Sound Notes:

-- The episode opens with the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s performance of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. The section on the opening concert of the RAH features the final chorus from Arthur Sullivan’s cantata On Shore and Sea, performed by the soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Imperial Opera, conducted by Michael Withers. The final section on the RAH in the 60s contains snippets from Cream’s performance of “Spoonful” in the hall, and Pink Floyd rehearsing “A Saucerful of Secrets” with Rick Wright on the grand organ, just before the show that got them “banned for life.”

Further reading, listening:

-- A great deal of basic information came from the official Royal Albert Hall website.

-- Information on the suffragette movement’s meetings in the RAH came from this piece by Susanne Keyte in the Telegraph, and History is a Weapon, where you can read Emmaline Pankhurst’s full speech.

-- This contemporaneous account in Time Magazine helped flesh out Arthur Conan Doyle’s seance. The audio of Conan Doyle speaking about spiritualism–as well as the audio of “Conan Doyle” speaking at a seance four years after his death–are from the collection of the British Library.

-- John Bennett’s Krayology was enormously useful for the section on the Kray twins. More detail came from Steve Bunce in the Independent.

-- The International Poetry Incarnation is discussed at some length in the documentary A Technicolour Dream. It is also the subject of the documentary Wholly Communion, which is where the clips of Ginsberg and company come from.

After leaving the Velvet Underground, John Cale split his time between state-of-the-art experimental music and sweet symphonic pop. On his fourth solo album, 1974's Fear, those two sides finally converged. In the seventh episode of Ghost Echoes, we learn how and stumble into a revelation involving Velvet Underground's catalogue.

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