Friday 26 July 2019

I Feel Liberal


Politics. Haven’t you had enough of politics?

Not only is the Leader of the Free World™ a racist, misogynistic simpleton, Britain now has it’s own Mini-Me Trump in the shape of BoJo the Clown, a man who has successfully lied and cheated his way to the top, aided by a party so desperate to cling on to power that they’d shove their own granny under a big red bus (emblazoned with more lies about where your money goes) to do so. The world is going to hell in a handcart… so we may as well go out singing.

Issued in 1982 and masterminded by one-time hitmaker Jesse Rae, I Feel Liberal (Alright) was an attempt to get Scottish politician and then-leader of the Liberal Party David Steele into the pop charts... and perhaps install him as Prime Minister into the bargain. And it’s horrible. A funky little tune with a stupid chorus and a few quotes from a Steele speech (given, if memory serves, at a Liberal Party conference) stapled on, the song even came with its own dance, the Steel Step, with instructions on the reverse of the sleeve. Steele's profile was at an all-time high: his party had recently entered into an alliance (referenced in his 'vocal') with the SDP, and the two parties would go on to win 25 percent of the vote at the next General Election.

The flip side, credited to Luzuli (the name of Rae’s publishing company), was simply a version of the a-side with Steel’s ‘vocals’ erased. The disc was issued to coincide with the Party Assembly in Bournemouth. Unsurprisingly it did not sell well, making copies quite hard to find these days. David Steel would not become PM, although he would eventually be elevated to the House of Lords.

Rae, who wrote and produced the disc, performed on it and issued it on his own Scotland Video label, had a minor hit in 1985 when his follow-up single Over the Sea, was picked up for national distribution by WEA. In the same year that I Feel Liberal was issued Rae had his biggest success, writing the number three hit Inside Out for soft soul act Odyssey. The self-styled “funk warrior” and former farmer from the Scottish Borders town of St Boswells had a penchant for hanging about in full clan regalia, and his self-funded pop videos, shot in dramatic rural landscapes were alleged to have inspired the look of the Highlander films. A long-time supporter of Scottish independence, Rae ran, unsuccessfully, for the Scottish Parliament in 2007 and 2011. In 2015 he attempted to stand for election to the House of Commons – as an independent, naturally - but wasn’t permitted to take his signature claymore (a traditional Scottish variant of the late medieval two-handed sword) into the polling station. He’s still performing and recording today.

Anyway, here are both sides of this ridiculous record. My thanks to Mr. Weird and Wacky for the sound files, and to 45Cat for the images.

Enjoy!

Download Steel HERE


Download Luzuli HERE


Friday 19 July 2019

Le Freak


I featured the a-side of this disc on my radio show this week, and was horrified to discover that I had never blogged about it – although it did get a chapter all to itself in The World’s Worst Records Volume Two, and Michael was gracious enough to grant me an interview for that. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter.

Welcome to the weird, weird world of Chainmale, the antipodean performance artist, poet, and musician better known to his family as Michael Freeland.

Michael was born in Melbourne in 1952 but grew up in Sydney, his family relocating there when he was four years old. He showed an early aptitude for music and performance, appearing in musicals at the Castle Cove Primary School. Pleasingly, an early musical influence was the murderously brilliant Elva Miller: “My father bought a recording of Mrs Miller, not for her singing quality but for her guts. It inspired him and made him laugh,” he explains. When he moved on to Glenaeon Rudolf Steiner School Michael was introduced to eurythmy, a form of expressive movement originated by Steiner and Marie von Sivers in the second decade of the 20th century. Primarily a performance art, eurythmy is also used in education and for therapeutic purposes. “I later used eurythmy in combination with classical French mime and method acting to form my own school of performance,” he says.
“At the end of 1968, at 16, with ambitions to become an animal collector like Gerald Durrell, I left school to become a zookeeper. On returning from a collecting trip in the Outback and in the far north of Australia I took a second job working at night as an assistant stage manager at The Music Hall at Neutral Bay in Sydney.

“This all happened in 1969/70, when Australia was involved in the Vietnam war and Sydney’s streets were filled with personnel on R and R. There were demonstrations everywhere: I left home and spent several months as a hippy, travelling north and pretending I was Arlo Guthrie, with three chords to my repertoire. I remember going into a pub on the Queensland-Northern Territory border and asking if I could sing for my supper: I got halfway through the first song and a bloke came up and said he would buy me a meal if I promised not to sing another note!”

Michael produced a two-man poetry show specifically aimed at children. Recalled from Childhood featured the poems Michael had learned from his mother, father and grandmother, and it was here that he got his first crack at fame, of sorts, appearing on the Australian TV show GTK (Get To Know) in 1973. “GTK was the first of the rock video type shows in the world,” he explains. GTK “set the pace for all that was to follow. I then went to work in television, at ABC, in staging and floor managing.” He continued to perform, busking around Sydney before leaving ABC to study drama at the Mechthild Harkness Speech and Drama Studios. It was there that Michael’s passion for mime was born.

“I resurrected Recalled From Childhood as a school show, and put together a performance of original poetry at the Stanley Palmer Culture Palace in Darlinghurst. Then in early 1975 I joined the Queensland Theatre Company with their Arts Council Schools Presentation, touring throughout Queensland. I met my first wife while in Queensland, and in late 1975 we returned to Sydney.”
Michael returned to busking, this time incorporating mime into his act. “That worked well and we began to earn a decent living,” he says. “Although it must be remembered that in those days busking was illegal.” Being chased by the police became part of the act and Michael worked his occasional brushes with the law into his routine. “We were invited to perform at the Sydney Opera House, in the lunchtime outdoor venue, and also by the Sydney City Council in their Martin Place outdoor venue. This was very satisfying because the very person who was trying to arrest me a week earlier was now carrying my gear and setting it up!”

Under the name The Modern Mime Theatre he organised a series of performances in schools and won a contract with the Arts Council of New South Wales, which in turn lead to work in other states. “I found that I was booked out for two years in advance with three shows a day, five days a week, with one or two evening shows on top of that if I wanted them.” In January 1977 Michael performed at the first annual Sydney Festival: he would perform there each year until 1983. His act was going down well: that same year reviewer David Rowbotham, writing in Queensland’s Courier Mail newspaper wrote that Michael’s performance ‘speaks volumes for the possibilities of his art. He is a classic entertainer and storyteller.’

“In 1978, with an 18 month and a six week old baby, we headed over to the UK on our way to the Fools’ Festival in Amsterdam. I busked in Leicester Square in London, in Amsterdam, on the steps of the cathedral in Cologne and in front of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. After four weeks we returned to Australia and went back on tour.” As his act, and his confidence, grew he added fire breathing and balancing on a unicycle to his act and The Modern Mime Theatre became a duo in July 1978 when Canadian-born actor and mime artist Bob Eustace joined; the pair had been friends since they first performed together in 1972.

It was when Michael and his family got back to Australia that he created the piece of art for which certain people, me included, will always be grateful: the 7” single Freakout. Released under the name Chainmale (“It just seemed like a cool name,” he laughs) and backed with the electro-boogie track Mean Little Woman, Freakout is one of the most unsettling three minutes ever committed to vinyl: Numanesque keyboards, crying babies, manic screaming and with the words sung and music played in different time signatures to add to the disturbing effect. Odd and disquieting, Michael would incorporate the song into his act, building an uncomfortable and intense mime performance around his lyrics. That performance would later be adapted for use in a video filmed to accompany the single, now available for all to wonder at via YouTube.

“We were driving down a lane in the back streets of Hobart and I was jumping out of my skin. We passed a sound studio and my wife said, ‘why don’t you go in and record one of those songs you’re always making up?’ So, I went in an asked. Nick Armstrong (the studio proprietor) asked what I wanted to record. I went home, wrote out the lyrics, brought them back, and sang them to him with a single beat of my hand on the desk. He looked at me incredulously and said, ‘is that it?’ I said ‘Yeah. If (renowned Australian musician) Billy Thorpe can get away with ‘mashed potato yeah, oh yeah!’ then we’ll kill it’!”

Armstrong asked Michael if he would object to his having his friend Ian Clyne, best known for his keyboard work with the sixties band The Loved Ones, look over his song. “Ian and I met a couple of days later to record it having never met before. He played the sort of thing he thought I would like: it was big, but it was conservative. I said I wanted something with no holds barred; no constraints of convention, just freak out and do what you want. He smiled and said, ‘this is going to be fun’. As we were recording the vocals I got excited: my heart started racing and my tempo with it. He tried conducting me but I was gone.

“When we finished he said to me ‘you started in 8/8 and you ended up in 7/8’. I asked if we should do it again. We hit playback and Ian said ‘no, it works! You sound like you’re freaking out! Hell knows how you’ll ever sing it live’. That was the birth of Chainmale. I was around 30, I already had three kids, and in those days rock stars were around 18! I think Ian was around 14 when he was playing at the Wembley Stadium with the Loved Ones.”

Issued by the independent Candle Records in 1979, very few vinyl copies of Freakout exist: “I think about 1000 copies were pressed, of which only a fraction made it to the stores. However every now and then someone tells me they have a copy,” Michael says. “Did I consider myself a serious singer? I considered myself a serious performer with serious concepts to put forward and humour, confrontation, and sound were the best ways I had of achieving that. I don’t think anyone would come to hear my voice for the musical lilt in it, however they might come to experience the theatrical content of it.”

Chainmale recorded two further tracks, Schizophrenic Breakdown (a jolly little sing-along about crazy people) and the bizarre electro/skinhead anthem Kickback, in 1982. Videos were made for Freakout and for these two tracks: the video for Kickback – which is listed on YouTube as the ‘worst 80s music video’ ever made - features Michael and his young son Joel in skinhead gear, scaring the wits out of anyone who should happen to pass them by. “What we did others got to years later. The subjects of the songs were whatever I was experiencing at the time. The lightheartedness in Schizophrenic Breakdown is the lightheartedness you find in a riot. Everyone participating in a riot is jovial: it’s a release. The rage is only for the cameras, when they are given the opportunity to spout about their cause.

Freakout was the only record issued. The problem with the other two videos was getting TV play. Kickback had drinking and smoking in, which was against airplay policies, and Schizophrenic Breakdown could have upset people who might link it more with the illness rather than with the splitting of the social fabric in the UK into an apartheid similar to that in South Africa. As we already had the videos we put together a pilot for TV by adding some sketches, but I got sidetracked with life and with touring.”

Michael continued to perform until the mid-1990s. More recently he has become an author, penning two well-received satirical novels – 1995’s Pius Humble and The Company (1996) - under the pseudonym Bogan Gate, a name he took from a small village in NSW. 

How does the man once known as Chainmale, whose recorded work (thanks primarily to its resurrection on YouTube) is both feted by people who love it and ridiculed by others feel about his newfound fame? “I think it’s great. At least it’s not mediocre!”

Here are both sides of this exceptional disc: enjoy!

Download Freakout HERE


Download Mean HERE

Friday 12 July 2019

Spelunking

I’ve been listening to a lot of what you would loosely categorise as library music and exotica recently. This is thanks primarily to my friend DJ GeorgyGirl, whose show, High Waisted Modernists, follows my own World’s Worst Records Radio Show on a Wednesday evening (and is an absolute must-listen), and to the recent purchase of a Martin Denny CD collection which pulls together eight of his albums, including Exotica, Exotica 2, Exotica 3 and Forbidden Island.


Today’s disc comes from the world of Exotica, a genre that took its name from Denny’s 1957 album and which is defined by Wikipedia as “the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Amazon basin, the Andes and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as ‘a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though.’ While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the ‘musical impressions’ of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical ‘shangri-las’ dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.” Well, that clears that up then.

Chuck Holden’s The Cave not only encompasses the above, it also adds a wonderful layer of weird, a patina of peculiar if you will. When I found that it was also issued by Joe Leahy’s Unique Records, well I just had to have a copy.

I don’t know a lot about Holden: this is the only disc listed by him at Discogs, and that only appears to exist as promos – no one yet has turned up a stock copy. But it’s an absolute pip: Holden strums his zither (or I guess it could be an autoharp) while some unnamed, dusky sounding maiden shrieks over the top of his rather basic instrumentation. It’s mad and it’s ace! I have unearthed a few details though: as leader of the Charles Holden Orchestra he had a residency at Manhattan’s El Morocco nightclub in the 1950s and ‘60s. Credited as Charles Holden and Orchestra, they released one album, again on Unique, Dancing at “El Morocco”, 25 light jazz arrangements of popular classics including You’re the Cream in My Coffee, Putting on the Ritz and, tantalisingly, The Third Man Theme which I’ve not heard but one has to wonder if Mr. H dusts off his zither for. According to the album’s sleeve notes “the most unique and outstanding characteristic of Mr. Holden’s eight-piece group is its tremendous repertoire which includes the favorite songs of every well-known patron who frequents the club.”

Anyway, make of this what you will. I love it, and it led me down a path of discovery towards more cave-themed oddities, some of which you’ll hear if you tune in to next week’s World’s Worst Records Radio Show.

Here are both sides, The Cave and My Lost Melody. Enjoy!


Download Cave HERE

Download Melody HERE

Saturday 6 July 2019

Bandwidth Exceeded

Just the briefest of notes.

I know many of you have been frustrated, coming here to download the latest aural calamity simply to be told that your request has been denied because we have exceeded the limits of our bandwidth and that you need to try again later.

Well, hopefully, that is now a thing of the past! For today I have started paying for extra space in the ether to store and share our audio horrors. From tomorrow (Sunday, 7 July) you should no longer have any trouble downloading any of the live links on the blog. Ain't I kind?

This blog has been running for 12 years now: the money I'm paying for that extra bandwidth is not enormous, so I'm not asking for any of you to chip in, but please remember that I make no money from this, all of the costs incurred come straight out of my pocket. If you'd like to do something tangible to show support, listen in to the World's Worst Records Radio Show, and join the Facebook page to help grow this community of like-minded mad music fiends. If you're feeling exceptionally generous, check out my books.

Ta!

Friday 5 July 2019

Xylophones for Jesus


On my never-ending hunt for peculiar recordings, I often pick up things that look ‘different’, only to be disappointed. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have purchased a record just because I liked the otherworldliness of its cover simply to find something mediocre inside the jacket.

Today’s disc almost fell into that category, in fact, I had earmarked it for return to a charity shop or some such, but on closer inspection – and a good listening to – it proved to be not only worthy of my collection but also worth bringing to your attention, dear readers. And, as a bonus, it’s autographed by the main protagonist.

Ken Cushing Xylophone with Margaret Veal Pianoforte has to be one of the most peculiar Christian-themed records released in the UK, easily on a par with Marcy Tigner’s trombone albums. Who on earth ever thought that a man hammering away at a bunch of wooden blocks with a pair of mallets was going to lead sinners onto the path to salvation?

Searching for info, I discover that Mr. Cushing originally hailed from Halifax and had been playing xylophone professionally since at least 1942. He was still playing concerts for the Salvation Army into the mid-1970s, having himself relocated to the seaside town of Flamborough. Margaret Veal, a pianist from Abertillery in South Wales, also began her career in sacred music in the 1940s and often played Salvation Army concerts and fundraisers through until the early 1970s.

I also discovered that Ken and Marge had played together in Bristol, my hometown, in 1968. On 27 April of that year, the duo played a fundraiser for the Salvation Army Bristol’s Easton Road Corps, alongside the Bristol Easton Road Band and the Treorchy Male Choir. During the 40s Ken played in Gloucester, the city I was born in (and couldn’t get away from fast enough). Later He became involved with Christian Endeavour, an inter-denominational organisation which trains and equips young people to become church leaders. A woman called Margaret Veal worked extensively as a musical director and accompanist in the 70s and 80s, but I doubt that was our Marge, as her repertoire was decidedly more secular.

Issued by Pilgrim Records in 1964, the Ken Cushing Xylophone with Margaret Veal Pianoforte EP appears to have been Ken’s sole release, although he did appear on recordings by other artists, including the 1976 album by the Cambridge Heath Songsters, May Jesus Christ Be Praised! Ken’s photo appeared on the back of the album sleeve, even though he only performs on two songs. The same year that this EP was released, Ken and Marge played together at the inaugural Festival of Evangelical Mixed Voice Choirs at the Albert Hall, a huge choir festival that would grow to incorporate thousands of voices.

Here are both sides of this oddity. Enjoy!

Download Side 1 HERE

Download Side 2 HERE

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