Songs They Never Play On The Radio (Neo-acoustic and Guitar Pop 1984-98).  Home made compilation CD.

1. Hopkirk & Lee – Free Arthur Lee!
2. The Orchids – Peaches
3. The Boo Radleys – Lazarus (acoustic)
4. The Bachelor Pad – Meet The Lovely Jenny Brown
5. The Doctor’s Children – Me, September 24, 1983
6. The Enormous Room – Melanie And Martin
7. Andy Pawlak – Secrets
8. The Blow Monkeys – I Nearly Died Laughing
9. The Pale Fountains – You’ll Start A War
10. McCarthy – This Nelson Rockefeller
11. The Bathers – Latta’s Dream
12. Bourgie Bourgie – Change Of Attitude
13. Clive Langer – Even Though
14. Felt – Space Blues
15. The Times – Love Like Haze Or Rain
16. Rosemary’s Children – Southern Fields
17. Even As We Speak – Bizarre Love Triangle
18. Biff Bang Pow! – She Paints
19. Peter Astor – Submarine (acoustic)
20. James Young – Songs They Never Play On The Radio
21. The Triffids – Only One Life

I went to Perth today. Perth Scotland.

I was going to learn about Capital Gains Tax at the feet of Professor Alex McDougall – an excellent speaker who just gives it to you straight. There’s no other way to take tax – unlike whisky, it is not mollified by a drop of water. As I headed into the world of the tax collectors, I switched from Radio 4 to Radio 3, increasing audience numbers  by 50% I guess. I didn’t really want to listen to last night’s episode of The Archers (again, I hasten to add) and the afternoon play didn’t sound sufficiently intriguing to make that my material for the remainder of my journey.

Within minutes I was transported back to 1803, recognising almost instantly Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto, which I had heard at the SCO not two weeks ago.

It seemed right for the landscape. Looking beyond the cone universe called the A80 – how many thousands are there? who makes them and how much are the shares? – I could see the gently rolling end of the Campsie Fells as the Mavis Valley came to an end and headed towards Falkirk. Beethoven was right for the moment.

And there they were tall, ungainly tax collectors standing like two eyed triffids, camouflaged in bright yellow so as to blend with the scenery, so that they might not be seen. A job they do better at night I must say when you just can’t see them at all.

They represent all that is good about Britain, stealth tax in action. They are watching you all the time so that you must watch your speedometer instead of focussing on the road: at the cone hazards, the constantly changing lane layouts like the staircases at Hogwarts; the huge trucks waiting to pounce from their works exits into the main carriageway at 2 miles an hour.

Having left the hive of activity that will keep many people employed for years to come, I headed into beautiful Perthshire. And it was today. The sun brightened the russet leaves and in between the clouds there was a wisp of a rainbow – typical, forgot my camera again –  as I passed places and road-ends with mystical sounding names like Findo Gask, Dunning and Bardrill.

The seminar was excellent and my Capital Gains Tax knowledge is now replenished and I am ready to take on the world.

Provided it is cone free…

JohnF

29/9/9

A Man o These Times, Parishioners,
wants not for cake.

nor Powderfinger’s new album,
nor non-animal rennet.

THESE ARE HARDER TIMES!

Bookamarks!
and Trombionés!

Fresh linen

fresh fleurs (‘Tish)
fresh fruits

a walk in the pines

the version performed by Lead Belly [sic] and covered by Nirvana does not differ substantially from other variants of the song

Br Tallis also runs a fine vershun.

This is a true story. Steve started playing music in 1962. Music is his calling.

the apricot/plum fleurs
which herald Spring, ‘Tish

the companionship of a Good Dawg

small beer
after a hard day’s workan

Mister Willie Nelson

Miss Nina Simone

(she pauses, shouts, repeats, whispers and moans)

Oh, and Honourable Mentions to Fuck You, Penguin!

like a Disney character that ends up torturing Bambi’s mother while Bambi watches!

I believed in the band – I wanted the band to live

but

huff & puff & all that stuff

they fell apart around me

I drove, I cleaned, I scored, I refereed, I did EVERYTHANG!

and Bambi watched…

In 1986, the Triffids were on the bill of the Australian Made tour. Australia Made was the largest touring festival of Australian music talent that had ever been attempted to that point. Jimmy Barnes and INXS headlined and the rest of the line-up featured Mental as Anything, Divynils, Models, The Saints, I’m Talking [how did they get in there?] and The Triffids.

Anabasii, couriers of antiquity!

Can a Rev marry himself to the love of his life?  Question asked no definite answer given.

yes, Hexie

yes

An artist's rendition of a Triffid

John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids tells of poisonous bio-engineered plants that can move around freely and, well, kill at will.

Their oil is initially seen as superior to that of other crop plants and they are cultivated widely. They are accidentally released into the wild when a plane carrying their seeds is shot down: cue general mayhem and murder amid post-apocalyptic scenes.

So that’s some sense of humor Canadian  scientists at the Crop Development Centre of  the University of Saskatchewan have then: a few years back they named a genetically modified (GM) flax variety developed at their centre “FP967 CDC Triffid. “

Now we’re used to people in positions of power naming their projects with a dubious degree of tact: see “Operation Glencoe” for London G-8 policing (named after a massacre and resulting in a murder); “Operation Enduring Freedom” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (named for “the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint” and resulting in, well, Abu Ghraib) and… ok, you get the picture.

But in a reminder that life does very often imitate art, CDC Triffid seed has escaped and gone mobile, turning up without so much as a by-your-leave  in cereal and bakery products in Germany, according to the European Union (EU) Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF).

Now, to be fair, as yet nobody has been attacked and eaten by a GM flax seed; but they are nonetheless quite unpleasant things that shouldn’t be turning up in your Vollkornbrot, Roggenbrot or Pumpernickel. Let’s take a closer look.

A field of flax: beautiful but probably contaminated with a non-approved GM variety.

FP967 (CDC Triffid) is not authorized for food or feed in the EU. It was developed to have tolerance to soil residues of sulfonylurea-based herbicides. Although it was initially deregulated over a decade ago in Canada for environmental release for feed in 1996 and for food in 1998, it has not been openly cultivated since 2001, when it was deregistered and removed from the market after pressure from Canadian flax farmers keen to protect their market.

According to the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), Sulphonylurea herbicide resistance was selected for the flax  because that herbicide family is used to control weeds that effect winter wheat — which tolerates the herbicide — but the herbicides persist in the soil preventing crop rotation with broad leafed crops such as flax. (Hence making non-GM flax planting in such fields impossible.)*

As ISIS notes

During the past decade, there has been a lot of pressure to produce pharmaceutical products and industrial plastics precursors in flax so as to avoid polluting ‘major’ food and feed crops. This is being promoted by the usual GM brigade. Such mindless pollution of flax fails to recognize the crop’s natural dietary and medicinal properties. The main objection to the use of transgenic flax to produce industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals is that even though flax is mainly self pollinated it is also significantly insect pollinated (to the order of five percent or more of the pollination). Gene flow from flax occurs to wild and weedy relatives that include several species native to North America as well as feral agronomic flax.

The detection of transgenic flax Triffid in Canadian imports for food and feed in Europe is disturbing because the production of Triffid flax was officially discontinued in 2001. The implication is that the entire Canadian flax crop may have been contaminated by exposure to the genetically modified crop during the five years in which 200 000 bushels of Triffid flax were produced and marketed in North America. The current problems with Triffid flax demonstrates most emphatically that flax is not suitable for producing transgenic industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals.

Worrying stuff which clearly illustrates the ease with which GM varieties end up not just cross-pollinating with their “normal” variants, thereby essentially polluting the food chain, but also how difficult the final result is to contain. Despite being discontinued in 2001 and never once allowed to grow in the EU, it ends up in some Herr or Frau’s Schmidt’s morning Brot.

***

*Incidentally this seems almost more disturbing than the mere fact that the seed has entered the food supply: effectively poisoning the earth for the sake of weed control seems incredible; that the solution to the persistence of such poisons is to engineer other crops to be resistant seems like saying the solution to war is to make everyone bulletproof…)

German bread: Canadian flax. As the phrase has it: "my cock-up, your arse"

While in Adelaide last Christmas, my partner Mardi and I had dinner with Sean Williams and his wife, the lovely Amanda Nettlebeck. Unsurprisingly we got to talking about work, and the projects we were (and weren’t) working on. As usual Sean was working on about fifteen things at once, but the one that he seemed most engaged by was a novel loosely inspired by John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

I don’t think Wyndham is much read these days. While contemporaries such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard have been rehabilitated over the past decade (Dick even gaining entry to the Modern Library of America) Wyndham remains firmly in the dustbin of genre history. Exactly why I’m not sure, but I think it’s fair to say that unlike both Dick and Ballard, who owe at least part of their newfound respectability to their counter-cultural associations, and to their interest in the paranoid surfaces of contemporary culture, Wyndham is seen as hopelessly stuffy and conventional.

It wasn’t always this way. Even when I was at high school in the early 1980s, Wyndham was still necessary reading for Australian schoolchildren (or at least Australian schoolboys). Of course in the 1980s, with nuclear annihilation only a heartbeat away, novels about the end of the world, even the oddly muted, workaday ends of  the world Wyndham specialized in, were an inextricable part of the zeitgeist. Indeed in many ways the books I remember reading as a teenager – A Canticle for Leibowitz, Z for Zachariah, John Christopher’s Tripod novels or The Death of Grass – might equally serve as an introduction to the motif of the apocalypse in young adult literature. But nonetheless it is Wyndham’s novels, and The Day of the Triffids in particular, which seem freshest in my memory.

The plot of The Day of the Triffids is devastatingly simple. The morning after the world is treated to a sudden and unexpected display of lights in the night sky, Bill Masen wakes to silence. Removing the bandages covering his face, he ventures out to find the entire city, indeed the entire world, has been struck blind.

As Masen moves through the city he begins to comprehend the scale of the disaster. The world as we have known it is over, destroyed in an instant. For the blind the future holds only starvation and death, for the sighted – for there are a few others who have, like him, survived unscathed – the only realistic option is to take refuge away from the cities and begin again.

It is a scenario which might well sustain a novel in its own right, and indeed Wyndham offers some unsettling glimpses of the choices facing the survivors. But the book then introduces one further complication: Triffids.

Triffids menace an English garden in Ken Hannam's 1981 BBC mini-series

Triffids are plants, but plants unlike any other. Approximately eight to ten feet tall, they are carnivorous, the trunk which sits atop the muscular mass of roots at their base ending in an extended funnel, or pitcher, filled with sticky fluid which, like the pitfall trap of pitcher plants, serves both to entrap and digest any insect or animal unfortunate enough to enter it.

In itself their carnivorousness is relatively unremarkable, if somewhat repulsive. But unlike other carnivorous plants, Triffids are not passive collectors of food. Rather, concealed in their funnel, they keep a poison sting, with which they lash any animal unfortunate enough to stray into their range.

Yet it is not their carnivorous nature nor even their sting which makes Triffids truly unique. Rather it is the fact that they are – improbably, horribly – mobile, able to use the three stumps that emerge from the rootlike mass at their base to move about in search of mates and prey.

In an age more used to the sleek, lightning-fast horrors of Giger’s aliens, or Spielberg’s Velociraptors, there seems at first something absurd, even ludicrous about the Triffids and their motion. But in fact it is precisely their clumsiness that makes them so repulsive and unnatural, as Wyndham himself understood:

“When it “walked” it moved rather like a man on crutches. Two of the blunt “legs” slid forward, then the whole thing lurched as the rear one drew almost level with them, then the two in front slid forward again. At each “step” the long stem whipped violently back and forth; it gave one a kind of seasick feeling to watch it. As a method of progress it looked both strenuous and clumsy-faintly reminiscent of young elephants at play. One felt that if it were to go on lurching for long in that fashion it would be bound to strip all its leaves if it did not actually break its stem. Nevertheless, ungainly though it looked, it was contriving to cover the ground at something like an average walking pace.”

Discovered only a few years earlier, Triffids have, despite their unpleasant habits and bizarre appearance, spread around the world. Some are kept as ornaments and amusements in gardens, their stings docked for safety, but the vast bulk live in huge plantations, bred for the oil they produce in vast quantities.

Initially the few sighted survivors are dismissive of the threat of Triffids. But Masen, who has spent much of his adult life working on Triffid plantations, understands how quickly they can spread, and how dangerous they become be if left to wander free.

One of the masterstrokes of The Day of the Triffids is its relative lack of interest in the origin of its eponymous creatures. Like the suggestion that the display of lights which blinded the world may not have been the meteor shower they were originally supposed to be, but a space-borne weapon of some sort which malfunctioned, the origin of the Triffids is left deliberately vague. For his part Masen supposes they were created in a lab, possibly by the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko, perhaps as a deliberate result of gene-splicing experiments, perhaps as an accidental byproduct or mutation of some existing species.

Yet this disinterest is of a piece with the novel’s desire to unsettle not by transporting the reader to a world unknown to them, but by taking the world they know and exposing the assumptions at its core. Indeed despite the common criticism of Wyndham’s novels, that they are too polite, too bourgeois, too English (Brian Aldiss famously described them as “cosy catastrophes”) his visions of a ruined world do not suffer because of their muted ordinariness; rather they are unsettling precisely because of that ordinariness.

It is impossible, of course, to divorce The Day of the Triffids from its period. First published in 1951, it operates, like all of Wyndham’s novels, not least The Chrysalids, which takes place in a nuclear wasteland, and The Kraken Wakes, with its alien invaders, in the shadow of the Cold War and its escalating nuclear threat. Certainly the unnatural and misshapen Triffids are close relatives of the mutant and alien menaces that marauded through American and Japanese culture in the same period. Likewise the curiously, even disturbingly matter-of-fact responses of the survivors to their predicament, the ease with which they make the choice to abandon the blind to their fate, seems to speak to a society still hardened by the savagery of the war just ended, just as the shadow of the Blitz hangs over the novel’s images of a silent and ruined London.

Yet these concerns are underscored by the novel’s deeper, and more thoroughgoing environmental critique. Unlike the more fevered dreams of nuclear apocalypse, with their inescapable echoes of Christian fantasies about the end of days, The Day of the Triffids simply allows the brutal, inexorable logic of Darwinian science its head. Despite the suggestion they might possess some rudimentary form of intelligence, if not individually then as part of some larger, hive-like organism (as their numbers multiply it becomes clear the drumming sound they make by beating their appendages against their trunks allows them to communicate), the disinterested, opportunistic Triffids do not overwhelm humanity because they are superior creatures, but by being better adapted, and breeding faster than their human prey.

Compared to the Promethean fantasies of many more high-concept visions of humanity’s fallibility, the Malthusian logic of The Day of the Triffids is notable for its unsentimental bleakness. Yet this does not diffuse or undercut the potency of its critique. Indeed if anything it makes it more powerful, and certainly more prescient.

John Wyndham

As a novel, The Day of the Triffids is distinguished as much by its sheer economy as by the terrifying vision it presents. Although it was his first, and greatest success, by the time Wyndham (who was born in 1903) came to write it he had already been making a living for almost two decades writing science fiction and detective stories and serial fiction for American pulp magazines, usually under the name John Beynon, or John Beynon Harris (although he is now remembered as John Wyndham, he was impressively christened John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris).

This apprenticeship no doubt has more than a little to do with the concision of the storytelling in The Day of the Triffids. Certainly its second chapter, in which Masen’s childhood and the story of the origin of the Triffids is related, is a textbook example of effective deployment of backstory, establishing the fundamentals of the novel’s reality with deceptive ease.

Cillian Murphy in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later

But Wyndham’s apprenticeship in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s is also evident in the novel’s remarkable opening chapter, in which Masen wanders out into a silent London. It is a sequence replicated in Alex Garland and Danny Boyle’s hauntingly visceral 2002 film, 28 Days Later (which also borrows much of its structure and many crucial elements from The Day of the Triffids), in which Cillian Murphy’s Jim awakens from a coma in a London scoured clean by a mysterious virus.

Just as much of the power of 28 Days Later comes from its often eerily beautiful images of an abandoned  London, many of The Day of the Triffids’ most enduring images are of the empty cities and towns of southern England, and, as time passes, of their gradual reclamation by the wild.

What’s interesting, to my mind, is the manner in which these images are identifiably part of an English – or perhaps British – tradition. Since Wells at least, British speculative fiction has tended to imagine our end in similarly muted terms. Indeed the image of an abandoned London has recurred repeatedly, perhaps no more powerfully (or deliberately) than in Ronald Wright’s delightful riff on Wyndham and Wells, A Scientific Romance, and its vision of a St Paul’s over taken by water and the wild:

“Wren’s temple is whole except for the dome, scalped like a boiled egg. Aesthetically ths is not disastrous. Light spills in, splashing on marble and mosaic. The smoked colours and gold tesserae; the angels; Christ in his majesty above the vanished altar – even in decay these give the place a Byzantine glow I had forgotten, as if this were St Sophia’s, and not St Paul’s”.

This vision stands in stark contrast to American visions of world’s end, and their apocalyptic fervour. Whether in the long tradition of post-apocalyptic novels such as The Road, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Z for Zachariah, with their images of a ruined world, or in the destructive spectacles of films such as Cloverfield, or Spielberg’s uneven but often extraordinary and beautiful War of the Worlds, American popular culture and literature has preferred to imagine conflagration and destruction, rather than the gradual ebbing away of human supremacy.

Part of this may be a function of the different media in which each national imagination tends to operate. Hollywood, with its bigger budgets and technological prowess, not surprisingly tends toward the spectacular, just as American pulp fiction tended towards the sensational and the titillating.

But I also suspect it reflects something more fundamental about the culture of the two countries. Perhaps not surprisingly for a country in which religion looms so large, America is haunted by the apocalyptic imagination of fundamental Christianity, a cultural belief that has not been supplanted by science, but simply mutated into the sort of apocalyptic fantasies which are given shape in The Road or even Battlestar Galactica (if you’re interested in this question I’ve posted an article I wrote for The Age back in 2007 here).

By contrast, novels such as Wyndham’s can be seen as part of a larger anxiety about the waning of British power from the beginning of the 20th century on. The end of the world, for Wyndham and his countrymen is more about a larger historical process than the more fervid, religious fantasies of the Americans. Like Ozymandias’ statue in Shelley’s antique land, the silent streets and cities of England speak to the folly of human ambition, and to the British sense of Imperial decline.

It’s also possible, I suspect, to see novels such as The Day of the Triffids as part of the same desire to create a national mythology founded in the imagined past of Albion one sees at work in Tolkien, or even writers such as E. Nesbit. This desire – explored with some potency in A.S. Byatt’s remarkable novel, The Children’s Book – can be seen moving in the margins of even such seemingly unsentimental works as The Day of the Triffids, and their images of the forests reclaiming the “sterile” space of England’s cities and towns, as indeed it can be in the novel’s broader unease with modernity and its creations, and its suggestion in its final pages of the founding of a new, agrarian society, not that different, in its way, from the sort imagined by William Blake two centuries earlier.

Break text

By the way, do people like the new look here?

It was kind of an accident, in that I was looking to fine-tune a couple of minor unimportant things and accidentally deleted some major important bits, so it’s a new look by necessity rather than design.

I like the picture of Millie in the title because it reminds me a little bit of the scary beginning credits of the BBC version of The Day Of The Triffids from 1981.

Not sure why I like that, to be honest, as it’s a pretty unpleasant association to have!

I’m planning on raising smiles in the village with placing a couple of bogus fliers around the place. The lamp posts around here are sometimes plastered with leaflets and fliers despite the village boasting a couple of noticeboards. They’re rather like an analogue Twitter I guess and one which works very well so not wanting to annoy too many people I just settled at this stage for putting a couple up. This ones titled Dealing with Triffids.

Similar to my car stickers I would like to experiment a little with a few army related ideas and stick a couple on the military signs in and around Salisbury Plain.

One of the best of Sci-Fi’s apocalyptic visions of earth’s and humanities near demise must surely be John Wyndhams ‘Day Of The Triffids’.

I read Wyndhams’ original sci-fi/horror novel some 35 years ago…and then re-read it in preparation to reading this fairly recent outing from Simon Clark. I would suggest that to enhance the enjoyment of this new novel, you read the classic original first.

Night Of The Triffids

Clark’s sequel is exciting, powerful and crisp and the narrative rolls along at a fine clip. Simon Clark is a truly masterful writer and I was gripped from the beginning.

 The action takes place almost three decades after the original book concluded, and focuses on Bill Masen’s son, David who decides not follow in his famous father’s footsteps by becoming a Triffid biologist; but instead became a pilot in the small fledgling British Air Force based on the Isle of Wight.

 ‘Night Of The Triffids’ initial events closely mirror the original…David Masen wakes up to find the world is once more blinded…but this time from a frightening dust cloud that appears to have blocked out the sun and has left the earth in total darkness.

 To make matters worse, the Triffids now seen to have gained a rudimentary collective intelligence. They are more organized than ever and have murderously adapted to the new conditions and seem hell bent on killing as many of us as they can.

 Is this the end of Mankind’s rule of the planet…and the beginning of the Triffids?

 In a frantic effort to discover the cause and extent of the dust cloud, David is ordered to take a young meteorologist in a two-seater Javelin jet, fly upwards and hopefully to gauge the full extent of the cloud.

 Disaster follows disaster, the ‘plane crash lands and David Masen finds himself stranded on a huge floating mass of Triffid infested tangled weed; cast adrift from the coast of Britain with only a feral teenage girl for company; a girl who seems unaccountably to be quite immune to the alien carnivorous plant’s venomous stings…unlike David whose likely fate is to be devoured by the relentless Triffids.

 When all hope seems lost, the stranded pilot and his wild companion are rescued by a group of ship borne scientists from America….then the real adventure begins and as the plot boomerangs and David finds himself at deadly odds with his fathers’ old nemesis…

 Mr. Clark slips easily into the style of Wyndham…and you can almost believe that you are back in the originals nightmarish world, where technological progress has been halted for the past several decades and society has not progressed beyond the bland 1950’s.

it’s an incongruous world where the 60’s sexual revolution didn’t happened and this planet was never threatened by the possibility of a nuclear war.

 This book is an excellent read and I would certainly recommend it to any fan either of John Wyndham or apocalyptic sci-fi in general; a fitting continuation and homage to John Wyndham’s original ‘Day of the Triffids’!

F… desc0bri há minutos que David McComb morreu em 1999.Quem?!

Ora deu-me para a nostalgia. Não sei por que carga de água mas lembrei-me dos Triffids, a minha banda favorita de há 2… alguns anos atrás. Naqueles tempos em que não tínhamos dúvidas em que o João Pires era o melhor vinho do mundo (Acho que há por aí quem me acompanha no raciocinio). Pois nessa altura acreditávamos que íamos mudar o mundo ( não liguem.É do Moscatel) e, apesar do risco ao lado dominante, queríamos ser diferentes, queríamos bandas que mais ninguém conhecesse, ou melhor, que só alguns conhecessem (dava jeito ter alguém com quem falar). Partilhávamos cassetes e, quando sobrava algo da mesada, comprávamos os discos. Eu comprei-os todos: primeiro “Calenture”, o segundo album. Depois “raining pleasures”, o primeiro. E ,por ultimo… o ultimo: “the black swan”. Ainda não havia CDs, quanto mais MP3. Ainda não havia a febre nem o pilim para comprar  desenfreadamente (até chegar ao ridículo de fazermos compras repetidas).Ouvíamos os mesmos discos até à exaustão – até sabíamos quem tinha sido o chefe dos electricistas em estúdio!

Hoje lembrei-me dos Triffids, a minha banda favorita algures no tempo, já lá vão uns 2… foda-se, alguns anos. E não é que o David McComb, o vocalista, aquela voz, morreu em 99? Bury me deep in love, cantava ele.Fuck. Brother, where r u?

Rainy pleasures. Intemporal…

Here’s the latest batch of Music Musings and Miscellany’s unapologetically subjective selection of the twentieth century’s best 1000 singles. And here is the first half of the Fs.

OTIS REDDING – Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song) / Good To Me (Volt 138 1966)
MAZZY STAR – Fade Into You / Blue Flower (Capitol 794 1994)
Otis could belt them out when he was in the mood, but he was as good, if not better, at handling a slowy. “Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa” is all minor key contemplation, but actually sounds more sexy than sad. And talking of sexy, Hope Sandoval has the vocal equivalent of come-to-bed eyes. Mazzy Star melded alt-country with smoky jazz balladry to forge a languid, blue, modern day torch sound that was both exquisitely melancholy and suggestively steamy at the same time. “Fade Into You” is full of regret tinged with eroticism. It’s been ages since Hope made a record. What’s she up to?

RAINCOATS – Fairytale in the Supermarket / In Love / Adventures Close to Home (Rough Trade 13 1979)
RADIOHEAD – Fake Plastic Trees / India Rubber / How Can you Be Sure? (Parlophone 6411 1995)
The Raincoats’ name was about as dreary as you can get, which in itself was a statement. “Fairytale in the Supermarket” is a ramshackle, tone-deaf, anti-consumerist tract. And yet, despite its wonkiness, it’s as fresh and zestful as a bag of oranges. Radiohead’s defeated sounding “Fake Plastic Trees” covers similar ground, although it’s not so much about a life lived through shopping as life as an empty facade.

REM – Fall On Me / Rotary Ten (IRS 52883 1986)
REM may not just be the party guest who outstayed their welcome, but who was still there the following morning as you try to hoover up trodden in crisps and dog ends from the carpet beneath their feet. Early on, though, they were a fantastic band. “Fall on Me” might be the best song they ever did – a soaring, uplifting pop nugget of flair and feeling.

SLY & THE FAMILY STONE – Family Affair / Luv ‘n’ Haight (Epic 10805 1971)
It was a long way from the life-affirming bounce of “Dance to the Music” to this. “Family Affair” is a muffled, drug-hazed litany of dysfunction. Am I the only one who thinks that There’s A Riot Goin’ On is seriously overrated? It’s jumbled, messy and sounds like shit. Sure, there are some exceptional songs on it – this being one of them – but there’s a lot of tossed off crap too.

JIMMY RUFFIN – Farewell is a Lonely Sound / If You Will Let Me, I Know I Can (Soul 35060 1969)
It mines the same field of heartbreak as Jimmy Ruffin’s most famous song, but “Farewell is a Lonely Sound” is musically more high-spirited. It’s a typical example of just how good the Motown factory was at constructing pop records. It’s not a major work by any means, but it still has that ability to get inside your head and brighten your day.

PREFAB SPROUT – Faron Young / Silhouettes (Kitchenware 22 1985)
Many years ago I was kipping on a friend’s sofa after a night on the town, when in the early hours a neighbour decided to crank up Prefab Sprout’s Steve McQueen. The irony of being woken up at something like 4am by Paddy MacAloon singing “You give me Faron Young four in the morning” wasn’t one I appreciated at the time. It’s a great, rollicking song, though – almost punk by their standards.

TRACY CHAPMAN – Fast Car / For You (Elektra 69412 1988)
It’s a song whose impact has been dulled by familiarity, but “Fast Car” was a welcome relief on pop radio in an era of excess and consumerist cheese (this was the ‘golden age’ of SAW, remember). It was a brief glimpse behind the scenes of the illusory economic miracle of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. I’ve never been a huge fan of singer-songwriter confessionals, but there is real pain and anger in this song.

PEGGY LEE – Fever / You Don’t Know (Capitol 3998 1958)
Little Willie John’s rhythm and blues standard gained a new identity when Peggy Lee covered it. She sounds like one of those bad-news femmes fatale from the golden age of film noir – dangerous, but irresistable.

TRIFFIDS – Field of Glass / Bright Lights Big City / Monkey on My Back (Hot 7 1985)
The Triffids never lost that indefinable thing that made them great, even when they were making glossy, over-produced records for Island and soundtracking weddings in Oz soap Neighbours (Des and Jane’s wasn’t it? I should get out more). But their earlier records had a rawness about them that echoed the searing heat of the outback. “Field of Glass” is an eight minute long, hectic sprawl of a record that has a visceral thrill more reminiscent of the Birthday Party than their later material.

FALL – Fiery Jack / Second Dark Age / Psykick Dancehall (Step Forward 13 1980)
BEASTIE BOYS – Fight For Your Right to Party / Paul Revere (Def Jam 6595 1986)
It’s fascinating how MES has changed from snotty, spunky young man to curmudgeonly old goat over the years, the same time going from defiant outsider to national treasure. “Fiery Jack” is spit and bile with a thundering cod-rockabilly backing. They just don’t make ‘em like this any more, mores the pity. The Beasties, too, have evolved from braying superbrats into noble elder statesmen. “Fight For Your Right to Party” can still bring out the immature little tosser buried deep down in all of us. But that’s OK – it’s fun. No one gets hurt.

YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS – Final Day / Radio Silents / Cakewalking (Rough Trade 43 1980)
A high pitched tone, a fidgety bass, and Alison Statton’s dispassionate everywoman vocal merely emphasise the horror of “Final Day” and its tale of imminent nuclear annihilation. It’s brief, almost mundane, and yet lingers on like the blasted radiation shadows of Hiroshima victims on ruined buildings.

PERE UBU – Final Solution / Cloud 149 (Hearthan 102 1976)
Pere Ubu somehow managed to be post-punk before punk had actually happened. All four of their singles recorded for the Hearthan label between 1975 and 1977 are masterpieces. “Final Solution” has little of the quirky squonk of later records, but is more an outpouring of bilious rage.

LITTLE STEVIE WONDER – Fingertips Part 2 / Part 1 (Tamla 54080 1963)
This has to be one of the oddest US number ones ever. “Fingertips” was recorded live and split over two sides of a 45, but it was the second half that became the hit. There’s actually very little of the song there. Instead, there’s a call-and-response section, a harmonica solo, a big ending that turns out to be a false one as twelve year old Stevie impishly decides to carry on (you can famously hear one of the musicians frantically asking “what key, what key?”), and it ends in a clumsy fade. But the sheer exuberance is what makes it special. It has incredible energy and that’s partly why it’s so infectious.

EAST RIVER PIPE – Firing Room / Hey Where’s Your Girl (Hell Gate 9301 1993)
There’s something exquisitely downtrodden about Fred Cornog. The guitars shimmer, and the drum machine clips along, but the songs always seem sad and lost. The “Firing Room” is a place that will be all too familiar to many, many people this year. Maybe they should reissue it.

More soon

The Cliffe

In England, they slap plaques on shops where Elton John buys late-night Twinkies. In Western Australia, they’d pull down Shakespeare’s birthplace in the name of Development.

Only two interesting people have ever come from Perth. The one who wasn’t Rolf Harris was David McComb, singer-songwriter with 80s post-punk band, The Triffids. As well as being ARIA Hall of Fame inductees, ‘Wide Open Road’ was recently voted one of the best Australian songs ever.

McComb was born in Peppermint Grove, in a heritage property known as The Cliffe. This magnificent 1894 house has internationally recognition among music-lovers as the place The Triffids started. Check out the cover of their last album, The Black Swan, which was photographed at the house.

The Triffids’ music, composed and rehearsed in The Cliffe, is enjoying a comeback, with a new book and documentary on the band. So, it is completely understandable that the house, as a heritage icon and home of one of Perth’s two famous people, would be protected by heritage legislation.

And it was until new owner, millionaire Mark Creasy, decided he didn’t want it to be, and asked his friends in parliament to unlist it. Which they did. It can only be coincidence that Creasy makes large donations to both of WA’s major political parties.

Peculiarly, the then Heritage Minister refused to defend The Cliffe in parliament. The same Minister who simply declined to list a property she secretly owned.

Now the place will be demolished, and WA will not just lose another heritage building, but the only tangible connection to David McComb, who died tragically young at 36.

But the last word on The Cliffe should go to Triffid’s keyboardist Jill Birt, now an architect. She said:

It’s the biggest jarrah house ever built. Thrown into the pot is the fact that Dave happened to live there and he has been writing there since he was old enough to write. The house is clearly the backdrop to his material. Even in later songs it’s there.

Okay, this is basically just a rough idea of what a bookpost could look like. I’m assuming we’ll decide some guidelines or such in school.

Day of the Triffids is a book about blindness, human-eating monsters and the weakness of the human race. The book was written a while back and I consider it a long way ahead of its own time. It has a very futuristic theme, which for any sci-filover is very readable. And if you’re not into that genre, this book might be a good one to read if you want to get hooked.

The book begins with letting us know that all people in Britain who have been observing a meteor shower, have fallen blind.  Only a few lucky individuals, which did not watch the happening, got to keep their eyesight. One of these is our main character Bill Masen.  We follow him as he observes London and what happens to it and its inhabitants when the ability to see is lost.  It’s basically chaos, and some stronger individuals capture and take advantage of weak people with eyesight.
After some time, the few who are not blind in London organize themselves into a group and leave the city.  We follow them on their trip, fighting murderous triffids and other groups of people.

It’s a very interesting book which is not too long or too difficult to read. And the fact that it was a school related book, which several of us still managed to read and enjoy, says a lot
Just do it

/Siri

‘Save what you can’

I’ve long been a fan of John Wyndham’s apocalyptic science fiction novel Day of the Triffids.  For such a ludicrous concept–giant carnivorous plants, possibly man-made, stalk the earth and leave humanity dead, wounded, or scrambling to fight them off–the book is a gripping read, mostly due to how Wyndham superbly delineates the power struggles between the different gangs of survivors in the waning twilight of civilization.  The relatively mindless terror of the triffids is bad enough.  But with the added pressure of argued, reasoned, collectivized tyranny enforced by a group of soldiers upon our protagonists, it’s difficult to decide what grim fate is worse.

Published in 1951, Wyndham’s novel has influenced everyone from George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (28 Days Later), as well as spawning two direct screen adaptations.  The first one was a 1962 version starring Howard Keel–sort of fun in a Saturday morning movie and cold cereal kind of way–and from what I can remember it’s not very faithful.  The other version, made for British television back in the early 1980s, lacks the cinematic oomph! that the story demands, but its earnest acting and faithfulness to the source material make it essential viewing.

Here’s a clip from it:

Now, 57 years since its original publication, Wyndham’s monstrous veggies are getting a new chance at life with news that the BBC has commissioned a new mini-series from writer Patrick Harbinson (ER, Law & Order).  The show won’t hit television screens until 2009, so if you’ve never read the book… you have plenty of time to rectify that.

I’m not sure if the majority of Americans truly understand how vibrant triffids are to the collective imagination of people hailing from England, Scotland, and Ireland.  It’s sort of like the difference between Dr. Who in England (it’s part of the culture at large, not relegated to cult status) and Star Trek in the States (cult phenom).  Triffids are part of the culture.  Here in Ireland, hidden away in the wilds, I was more than amused hearing people toss out the word “triffid” to describe an overgrown plant or savage looking nettle.  Thank the gods above and below that I haven’t seen any plant(s) actually move around in the jungle of weeds behind our cottage, but there is a rather large and intimidating looking beast of a plant nestled between the back door and the window that distresses me.  The cat seems to like it, though, so I’m not completely ready to burn it down yet.  But at the slightest sign of aggression… it’s broccoli.

You can read more about the allure of triffids and the perverse love of watching the end of the world in films here.

The new incarnation of the Triffids with their fatal sting will be shown in High Definition for the first time.

via BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Triffids returning to television

John Wyndham’s science-fiction classic The Day of the Triffids is to get another reworking by the BBC in a production due to be screened next year.

And I for one am certainly looking forward to watching it.

© 2008 Gary William Murning

Fuck yeah.

Take note, people who made The Happening. This is how you make plants scary.

From Julie Gardner and BBC Wales (the makers of the new Doctor who) comes a remake of John Wyndam’s classic Science Fiction novel Day of the Triffids!

BBC Press Release:

A new television adaptation of classic sci-fi story The Day of The Triffids is being made by the BBC.

The drama, about menacing plants taking over the world, will be shown in two feature-length episodes next year.

Casting for the show, which will be adapted by ER screenwriter Patrick Harbinson, has yet to be decided.

The BBC has made three TV versions of John Wyndham’s classic, the most recent being in 1981. Four radio dramas have also been produced.

The most recent was in 2001, when two hour-long episodes were broadcast on the BBC World Service.

End of humankind

The new incarnation of the Triffids with their fatal sting will be shown in High Definition for the first time.

It is billed as a “fast-paced, futuristic and electrifying take” on Wyndham’s work.

Julie Gardner, head of drama at BBC Wales said: “We’re hoping to attract a legion of new fans as well as give nightmares to a new generation of viewers.”

Set in 2011, millions of people are blinded when they observe a solar storm, leading to a breakdown in civilisation.

The Triffids, a fuel-producing plant crop, escape captivity and begin to breed rapidly and attack people.

It is up to Dr Bill Masen to fight against them to prevent the end of humankind.

The new adaptation is due to start filming in London and the south-east later this year.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

One of the reasons we left our house in the suburbs of Canberra, was that I had unwittingly planted a couple of Jerusalem Artichoke tubers in the garden.  Within 3 years they had formed multigenerational families and had their own bowling teams.  Two years later they were holding organised meetings to plan their takeover of the world before the Winter freezes arrived to cut them down to size.  Luckily for me, their timing was always poor and the 6 foot high monsters would be knocked to the ground, so that I could pull them out and feed them to the chooks, or use them to mulch the vegie patch cum chicken graveyard. 

Seriously, once you have Jerusalem Artichoke in the ground your family will never go hungry….and you will never get rid of them.  The flowers are like smaller sunflowers and are pretty and sunny waving gently in the breeze, a little over the average grown-ups head.  The leaves and stalks apparently make great fodder for stock, and the warty tubers, cooked like potatoes, taste nutty; and creamy when they are stewed and blended for soup.  These tubers are very good for the Type 2 Diabetic diet, as it works as a blood sugar stabilizer.  What’s not to love?  The little buggers are good for you, high in iron, full of inulin, natural, prolific, pretty, cheap, tasty…I could go on.

But beware.
The tubers also make you fart.  My boys used to love them because they don’t make little breathy puffs from your nether regions.  They bring symphonies.  That is the music of the Jerusalem Artichoke.

So, we fled our suburban Jerusalem Artichoke patch much as though they were Triffids…and truth be told…they look eerily similar.  And then you know what I did this year?  I bought some Jerusalem Artichoke tubers at the Farmers Market.  Then I forgot about them in the bottom of the pantry.  Then I found them looking shrivelled but still green.  And because I hate waste.  And because it is three years since we fled the Masters of the Universe JA Committee in Canberra.  And because I have the reflective memory of a goldfish.  You know what I did?  You all know me by now.  You know what I did.

I planted them.

I even justified it to myself by putting them around the chicken run as a windbreak (haha get it?), and as a shelter from the hot Summer sun.  And in my head I was thinking “Now we’ll never go hungry again!”…you have to do it in a Scarlett O’Hara voice to really hear where I was.  Which just goes to show Jerusalem Artichokes have developed mind control, and it’s a POWERFUL weapon!

While researching a paper that I’m writing on the exchange of real and cultural capital in the major Science Fiction awards, I ran across this bit of trivia.  I always considered the Hugo Award the oldest major SF award, but according to Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (1991), this distinction goes to the now discontinued International Fantasy Award.  It was first given at the 1951 British Science Fiction Convention, and it was created by Leslie Flood, John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham), G. Ken Chapman, and Frank A. Cooper.  Unfortunately, it didn’t have a long run, and it was cancelled in 1958.  

Looking through the winners, I found it striking that John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids won 2nd place to John Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights in 1952.  I had to search Google for information on Collier’s collection, because I had never heard of it before.  It’s interesting to find works that win prizes, but are later marginalized–by this I mean marginalized in terms of recognition of the work and the sales of the work– compared to works that don’t win prizes or only make prize shortlists.  

There are some great pictures from IFA ceremonies and more information about the prize on Greg Pickersgill’s GOSTAK website here.