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THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN gets long-awaited deluxe CD reissue!
It’s no secret that cross-pollination exists all over the musical map, but nowhere are the progenitors so clearly defined as in the history of shock-rock . This lineage is widely acknowledged as beginning with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and his pet skull Henry in 1956; but although Screamin’ Jay is the pioneer of theatrical performance in popular music, shock-rock as we know it is more directly indebted to Arthur Brown. One can easily see how Genesis-era Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, Ozzy Osborne, Alice Cooper, KISS and Marilyn Manson owe a debt to Arthur Brown and his wild vocal style, proto-corpsepaint and theatricality, in use as early as 1965.Arthur Brown is considered the father of all Satanic rockers; his first single “The Devil’s Grip” in 1967 – with backing band The Crazy World - directly inspired the sound and fury of early British metal bands like Black Widow and Black Sabbath. The Devil’s Grip was a flop on the charts, but set the tone for the madness to come – creepy, organ-fuelled dirges, fire and brimstone theatrics, bizarre onstage contraptions and pyrotechnics. In a world where the Beatles were still considered the most far-out thing imaginable, Arthur Brown signalled a musical apocalypse.
It’s no surprise then that Arthur Brown was born during an air raid. East End London, where he spent part of his childhood, alternated between blackouts and rampant fires caused by German bombers. The impact of these early years, haunted by war and insecurity - combined with a love of Keats and Arthurian myth - would have an enormous impact on young Arthur: his psychedelic anthem “Fire” first materialized as “The Fire Poem” when he was still a schoolboy, and experiments with the destructive element would follow. “My brother and I, at a very early age, decided to set fire to my grandfather’s hair while he was asleep - to see if it would burn,” offers Arthur. “It did, and he, poor man, woke in a great state of alarm.”
This incident foreshadowed what would become an iconic image of the 1960s: Arthur Brown in a flaming headpiece, a metallic mask lifted to expose a face crusted black with woad and contoured greasepaint. Arthur’s signature chapeau was affixed precariously to his head, spawning more than a few accidents. “At The Windsor festival in 1967, I caught fire and was put out with pint glasses of beer,” says Arthur, “At one of the London clubs in 1968 I was wrapped in a fire-blanket to put me out - but I didn’t stop the act- I kept on singing and dancing inside the blanket. A lot depended on the state of the person who was fuelling it and lighting it. I soon learned that whoever it was needed to be very much in a focused state, and not stoned or pissed!”
The doom-laden #1 hit “Fire” – wherein Brown coined the epithet “I Am The God of Hellfire!” - accompanied his onstage histrionics; a seminal tune marshalling the forces of what would soon come to be known as heavy metal, with Brown the unofficial flag-bearer of the metal aesthetic. Of course, no one knew this at the time. One must remember that the musical climate in 1965, when Arthur’s stage persona first appeared, was more cool than crazy. It was the most fertile period in British music, but at this time most bands still aped the big four: The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and The Small Faces. There was a sound and a look that dominated pop culture. Says Arthur: “Acid and mind expansion had not yet arrived.” His stageshow at the time conjured a media feeding frenzy, facetiously described as “the greatest single spectacle since the Rape of the Sabines”.
The combination of Arthur’s frightening stage persona (if his corpsepaint didn’t scare you, his frequent disrobing was sure to) and his unsettling lyrical preoccupations – vampires, devils, fire and damnation – changed the way people experienced music. Gone were the simple songs about boys and girls; nothing could touch the occult headtrip laid down in an Arthur Brown song, especially with Brown gyrating all over the stage like a man possessed. Brown was a contemporary of Britain’s other early shock-rocker Screamin’ Lord Sutch, but Sutch himself proffered that while he was a novelty gimmick, Brown was the real deal.
“I must shock,” Brown protested in a 1968 interview, “When a boy comes on stage singing about the boy next door it’s right that he should look like the boy next door. But when I go on singing about putting spells on people, and devils and gods and unseen forces, it’s important that I look like a devil and can do the things I claim.”
He made headlines starring as The Devil in a “black magic” movie called Hex in 1968, and that same year, future horror director Peter Sykes (Demons of the Mind, To the Devil ...a Daughter) cast The Crazy World of Arthur Brown as the demented live act in his subversive morality tale The Committee (a track from which is included in this new set). Through all this, he became the darling of the emerging psych scene with his four-octave wailing voice, flailing onstage boogie and flagrant disregard for any type of authority. Arthur Brown was as punk rock as they came in those days, spitting on/hurling insults at an adoring audience, and getting arrested in various countries for routinely undressing onstage. He was a confrontational artist with the intellect to back up his bravura.
Track Records put out The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s first eponomously-titled album in 1968, now considered to be among the first known “concept” albums. The album told of a soul’s transformation, traversing through confusion, purgation, and hellfire, like a rock-opera of Dante’s Inferno. “The story of the album was a nightmare someone was having involving different deities,” Arthur explains. “It was an attempt to show how both dark and light are necessary aspects of the mind’s appreciation of reality; in other words, the daily mind can only really function in dualities. The dreamer goes down into Hell, but is then granted a vision of heavenly energy. The God of Wisdom then guides him. At the end of side one, we are still in the nightmare. The second side was meant to reconcile this and leave the dreamer with a vision of beauty – but the record company refused to put it out with that on the second side. So only two of the original pieces from the concept made it to side two - Spontaneous Apple Creation and Child of my Kingdom.”
This album is a cornerstone of shock rock history, so pick it up – and don’t stop there. Arthur Brown’s music, from the Crazy World through his early 70s prog incarnation Kingdom Come (whose stage show featured live crucifixions), his collaborations with Ash Ra Tempel’s Klaus Schulz in the late 70s and as a solo act today - plays with primordial concepts to create a demented psychedelic spectacle fuelled by psychotropics and religious mysticism. As such, Arthur Brown’s barely-suppressed dark side recalls those of filmmakers like Donald Cammell or Kenneth Anger , contemporaries of Brown whose journeys into the unknown realms of the psyche were similarly viewed with apprehension, as dangerous experiments.
While Brown has turned away from horror trappings as a method of communication these days, his role as a catalyst for the early 70s British metal upsurge - with both Ozzy Osbourne and Bruce Dickinson citing him as a major inspiration for the emerging Midlands metal scene - must be respected. His fervent spirituality has a strange relationship to his previously violent onstage persona, but he often held that summoning a terrifying image before the audience was a necessary evil that prompted questioning and change, often for the better. In a Belgian TV interview he was asked about his performances suggesting a misanthropic slant, to which he responded, “I like people – but like most people, I’m mad, you know?”
- Kier-La Janisse (from an article written for Rue Morgue Magazine)
Posted by Into the Music on March 10th 2010 in Record reviews | 0 comments | Permalink
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Pics from VAMPIRES in-store!
VAMPIRES rocked the house last Friday (Feb 5, 2010) as part of CKUW 95.9FM’s annual FUNdrive activities - a big thanks to David and Josh and everyone in the audience for coming out in support of listener-driven radio!
Posted by Into the Music on February 10th 2010 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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INGRID GATIN in-store photos!
Some of these are quite blurry due to my lame photographic skills (people always as me why I don’t make movies - here is your answer) but a big thanks to Ingrid and her pal Ivanka Watkin for starting our weekend off the right way. Lars Nilsen’s Dusty Springfield video compilation was also a soulful rumpshaker, with the occasional tearjerker (such as her cover of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” - I had a hard time keeping it together for that one). Overall an amazing night filled with powerful songs and voices. Thanks to everyone who came by for the event!
Posted by Into the Music on January 27th 2010 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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INGRID GATIN on Shaw TV promoting her upcoming in-store!
This is the Shaw TV debut for this captivating troubadour who can play a variety of instruments, including the accordion! With a beautiful voice and haunting lyrics, Ingrid weaves a story that anyone can listen to! Plus you can catch her live Jan. 22nd @ Into the Music along with a documentary film feature on Dusty Springfield! More info on the event HERE.
Posted by Into the Music on January 20th 2010 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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Pics from LITTLE GIRLS in-store show Nov 25 2009
Posted by Into the Music on November 27th 2009 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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Pics of our new store entrance sign!
Our new sign is up on the outside of the door, thanks to Charlie Johnston of C5 Artworks. Check it out!
Posted by Into the Music on November 20th 2009 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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SHEARING PINX + AHNA in-store photos!
Posted by Into the Music on November 13th 2009 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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Donate money to help w/ medical expenses for Nerves/Plimsouls frontman Peter Case!
On January 15, 2009, three-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter-guitarist Peter Case underwent emergency open-heart surgery. The surgery was successful and he is now on a long program of recovery. Peter is not ill and is expected to make a full recovery … but the medical bills associated with this necessary surgery and recovery are and will continue to be very high. And, like all too many talented working artists, Peter does not have medical insurance.Hidden Love Medical Relief is an effort by Peter’s friends, fans and fellow artists to help alleviate the burden of these mounting medical bills so that Peter can recover, get back and focus on what he does best – writing and performing his songs.
I am a big fan of the Nerves and Plimsouls, and I donated money to this myself. You can contribute via: http://www.hiddenlovemedicalrelief.com
Posted by Into the Music on October 26th 2009 in Music Industry | 0 comments | Permalink
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DYNAMO in-store pics posted!
Posted by Into the Music on September 18th 2009 in ITM News | 0 comments | Permalink
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“PLAY MYSELF SOME MUSIC”: The Self-Made Magic of R. Stevie Moore
About five years ago my friend Rodney Perkins - ephemeral researcher, film critic and co-author of the book “Cosmic Suicide: The Tragedy and Transcendence of Heaven’s Gate” - put together a program of public access Tv clips called “Access Denied”, which played at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. Among the hundred+ clips was one of a spiky-haired blonde weirdo doing a kind of lo-fi punk version of the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace”. I never knew who the guy was, and didn’t think to ask at the time, although time and time again I would think of this clip and laugh.
A couple years later I was looking at the Handclaps website (a great source for short-form music films: ), and I came on upon a program billed as an “R. Stevie Moore Video retrospective”. The name still meant nothing to me, until I read the description: “Often referred as the forefather of lo-fi home recording and DIY outsider art, R.Stevie Moore has maintained a remarkably low profile throughout a career which began in the early-1970s. Heavily influenced by the music of Brian Wilson, The Beatles, Mothers of Invention and the British Invasion, Moore’s self-released one-man band music is a virtuoso showcase and best proof for his enormous skill, traversing countless musical forms into nearly perfect pop songs.” Intrigued, I looked him up, only to find that he was in fact the very same spiky-haired blonde weirdo I had been enamoured with years earlier via my friend Rodney’s public access comp.
Now that I’ve spent more time with R Stevie’s back-catalogue (although with over 400 self-released cassettes and a dozen or so LPs and CDs it’s IMPOSSIBLE to catch up or consider oneself well-versed in his bizarre musical universe), I’m convinced that R. Stevie is one of the greatest songwriters of the last half-century. And he’s not particularly humble about it - in interviews he seems continuously shocked that people haven’t heard of him. His father was Bob Moore, famous Nashville session player (most notably for Elvis Presley), so R. Stevie grew up in a musical household, with early access to recording gear. But fame has eluded R. Stevie, who - despite the obvious Brian Wilson allusions in his music and singing style - is a wholly original and unique self-taught musician, who writes, performs and records almost everything himself. And he had an abundance of self-made music videos for his songs well before the advent of MTV. I don’t know where these videos would have played, if anywhere, but now you can find many of them on Youtube, which has resulted in a robust new fanbase for R. Stevie and his mail-order business.
He clearly relates to the obscure, misunderstood artst-type, evident by things like Jandek albums appearing in the background of his early music videos, the toys, dolls and varied pop culture ephemera cluttering up his apartment, his appropriation of political statements for an audience of one (in one video his guitar says on it: “This Machine Kills Fascists”, as did Woody Guthrie’s a generation earlier). And while there’s a weird pathos there in his lonely obsessiveness, there’s also a lot of downright hilarity and silliness. Even my boyfriend thought R. Stevie was pretty adorable.
You can read more about R. Stevie, and order copies of almost everything he’s ever done, from his official website: http://www.wtv-zone.com/rsmko/ , and I would recommend doing this as the money goes directly to him, and he’ll even likely send you a little personalized note with your order. But Cherry Red Records released a pretty great ‘introductory’ compilation called “Meet The R. Stevie Moore” in 2008, which we have on order for the store, so if you don’t like mail-ordering just hang tight and we’ll take care of your R. Stevie fix. But I warn you, it’s addictive! One CD will not be enough! Soon enough you will find yourself trolling his website and clicking that ‘buy now’ button. But he deserves your love, so give it to him in abundance and without reservation.
Posted by Kier-la Janisse on August 24th 2009 in Record reviews | 0 comments | Permalink
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