Happiness is a stack of old rock music magazines

Pink Floyd to Score Ballet

The Pink Floyd, long considered one of the world's most advanced rock groups, will take its music one step further when they score a ballet to be preformed [sic] next year by Rudolf Nureyev and a troupe of sixty dancers.

The group will have a 108 piece orchestra at their disposal and "there will be the problem of transferring what we think on to paper and merging with what the other musicians think," said the rather enthused Floyd lead guitarist, Dave Gilmour. "There may be some scope for improvisation but it will be limited," he added.

"We have got quite a lot of ideas but we can't discuss them at the moment," said Gilmour reluctantly. "We are still very much at the beginning of things. We have never worked with a large orchestra before, only small ones."

The original idea came from Rolant Pettit, a French ballet producer who plans to stage the ballet at the Grand Palais in the Champs Elysees next year. Pettit said he was bored with the standard ballet material and had contacted Nureyev then decided to give the Floyd the go ahead on the project. The Floyd's manager, Steve O'Rourke, said, "It is a big step for the group to be working with musicians of this calibre and a big step for the ballet people to approach a group to write their music."

Gilmour, spokesman for the group, had this to say about the project: "It's pretty amazing. It's something we have never done before and no one from our field has ever done. It poses a whole lot of problems but opens up a lot of scope."

The Floyd are now touring America, with a new full length piece which is also on their new Capitol album, Atom Heart Mother.

I have about 15 of these from 81-84, a friend who works at a library gave them to me. I'm slowly giving them away.

Keith Richards 1981
Pete Townshend 1982
Bob Dylan 1984
Everly Brothers 1986
David Bowie 1987
David Byrne 1988

34 in all. Mostly reminiscent stuff.

[...]

Circus: How do you think you'll die?

Morrison: I hope at about age 120 with a sense of humor and a nice comfortable bed. I wouldn't want anybody around. I'd just want to drift quietly off, but I'm still holding out. I think it's very possible that science has a chance in our lifetime to conquer death.

Circus: There are many people who believe in reincarnation and spirits. If medical science were to do that, what would happen to their spirit world?

Morrison: They'd just have to fend for themselves. Leave us poor immortals alone.

Circus: I take it you don't believe in Karma or reincarnation or the occult beliefs?

Morrison: No, not really, but since I don't have anything else to replace it with, I listen to everything. I don't say no.

Circus: What do you believe in then?

Morrison: We evolved from snakes and I used to see the universe as a mammoth peristaltic snake. I used to see all the people and objects and landscapes as little pictures on the facets of their skins. I think the peristaltic motion is the basic life movement and even your basic unicellular structures have this same motion. It's swallowing, digestion, the rhythms of sexual intercourse.

Circus: It's been said that you've been on a superstar, super-ego trip. Has this affected you or your friends, or your relations with the band?

Morrison: That's a complex one. Obviously you don't really talk about those things with people. I don't think it was that bad. I never noticed it too much except when I read magazine articles, but living in a town like L.A. you don't notice those images. People here are pretty blase about things like that.

Circus: How about the magazines?

Morrison: Actually I've always liked the things I've read. Of course it was about me. Usually you are most interested in yourself and people that you know. But . . . they were concentrating on my pregenitive organ too much and weren't paying attention to the fact that I was a fairly healthy young male specimen who also had other than your usual arms, legs, ribs, thorax, eyes . . . but a cerrebellum . . . your completely equipped human being with the head, sensitivity, the full equipment.

[...]

BANANARAMA: True Confessions (London)

It's always seemed to this boyo that the very best girl groups radiate a kind of toughness. The Shangri Las, The Ronettes or even Pearl Harbour always sounded like they were ready, willing and able to take a nail file and skin anybody who got in their way. Bananarama sound more like a pack of chippies who'd run home crying to their mums if their nail polish started to crack. On this record, these namby-pams go so far as to turn Shocking Blue's classic rocker "Venus" into a virtual anthem for the patsy generation. That's a capitol offense, and now that these crybabies have confessed to their complete worthlessness, I say we banish 'em from Woolworth's lipstick counter forever.
Byron Coley

i also love the:
-"it's been said you were on a super star, super-ego trip.."
-"Obviously you don't really talk about these things with people. I don't think it was that bad."

It's generally $5 a pop, though you get cut a deal if you buy many. There are plenty that aren't worth it, but it's good to sift through and find "those" ones. ;)

GQ! so, sooo appropriate.

SHAME: I HAVE NONE. However, some of my interviews, w/the likes of aha or Corey Hart would be cringe-worthy now. Byron Coley wrote many hilarious and warm-hearted reviews for Star Hits despite the ribbing he got from his underground buddies. By 1986 the magazine was winding down as hair metal displaced new wave, the "golden era" was 1984-85. Many articles were reprints from Smash Hits.

When my parents moved out of the house I grew up in, my sainted mom threw away my box of old magazines: Creem from the Lester era and late 70s Village Voice. Tragedy! Somewhere in storage I've got a box of New York Rocker Star Hits and early 80s Village Voice among other obscurities. RIP?

The two issues I've got only have small reviews with your byline, no interviews: A Flock of Seagulls' Dream Come True, Prince's Parade, Brian Setzer live, Bronski Beat and the Communards, The Adrian Mole Diaries. There's nothing terribly embarrassing here, or at least more embarrassing than usual for Star Hits. (Lovely magazine -- luring Europhile teeners into a life of vice -- but chirpy house style, of course.)

Writing, editing, transcribing song lyrics, answering trivia questions under the pseudonym "Jackie" and taking out the trash: I worked there full-time from the launch in late 83 through 1985.

The "chirpy" house style was later appropriated by Sassy.

ah for the days spent opening letters-to-the-editor w/"Sid Lives" scrawled on Garfield stationary. actually nostalgia sux.

recently I unearthed a copy of The Virgin Rock Yearbook 1985 with pieces by Julie Burchill, Robert Elms, Chris Heath, Neil Tennant(uproarious on Billy Idol) yours truly and one Mark Sinker (on world music)! I'll try to post some of the Tennant thing later.

Paraphrasing Greg Ginn, closing the story: "If you don't like us, fine. You can join the massive numbers of people worldwide who don't listen to Black Flag. It's a widespread phenomenon."

Also -- the writing in most old Creem's, TPs, etc really sucks. You have to work a lot harder to make a buck these days.

In September '84 Billy returned to England to promote 'Eyes Without A Face" his first British hit of the eighties. Coming home evidently unhinged him a little, although he had already adopted "rock 'n' roll" standards of behaviour. He made a fool of himself on Radio One's Roundtable show, having to be led out of the studio midway through the broadcast for swearing incoherently. He smashed up his rented flat in Mayfair. He went to visit the Frankie "lads" -- Mark, Nasher and Ped -- and reputedly helped them to smash up their flat as well. He ranted to me when I interviewed him about how he was going to see his father on his sixtieth birthday and "give him hell for the fact that he didn't believe me." He wanted " a certain level of respect," he said, and was pissed off by "the terrible pessimism which is killing music" in Britain. He'll never get the respect he wants in Britian and growling, as he did on Top of the Pops, about how he'd "come here to rock 'n roll" is not going to help. But talking about his obsession with punk and rock 'n roll he becomes quite eloquent.

Rock 'n roll, he has said, "is a type of music that goes beyond whether you can play a guitar or not. That goes beyond synthesizers. It's really a world that exists and it talks about love and beauty. It talks about realness. It talks about suffering, pain, dying, loving things. It's country-and-western music. It's to do with black people and white people. It's to do with a type of soul that England's totally rejected. You hear it in reggae music and I listen to reggae music a lot. You hear it in Jewish songwriters. You hear it loads of different types of cultures which have been repressed. But I don't hear it in English music right now. It's about time that England opened its arms to music and believed."

And the resentment he still feels about not being taken seriously floats to the surface.

"All people did was laugh and I can remember that. I remember people laughing at rock 'n roll -- even when punk was happening. Now I see people laughing at rock 'n roll. But they will learn."

They won't learn anything from him, of course, and in his heart he'll always be the resentful punk. But it'll be a long time till he travels home by bus again.

Myonga was Lester's Exile review positive or negative?

A tabloid, like the ancient Rolling Stone/Creem/Crawdaddy etc. And on closer inspection, I was wrong: It wasn't a Bangs REVIEW of "Exile" but rather a letter complaining about someone else's review! And he appears to be a supporter, judging from these random statements: "[Exile] GETS DOWN more than any other Stones album 'cept Now...steal the album and buy GIN!...The only perso who dug the ineluctable trutch and fire of the Stones album in front and wrote about it was Danny Sugarman."

Don't get me wrong, any ish of PRM is good, but like Creem, they seemed to get in the groove during the earlier part of the decade.

And these are "Free from KDAY" in Los Angeles rather than WBBM.