An aeon ago, I was asked to do a thing on BBC Radio 6 and the preparatory stage involved filling in a questionnaire on "Good Day Bad Day" music
First Single You Bought:What was it, where, why?
The Theme From ‘Sting’ aka ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin, as recorded by Marvin Hamlisch
WH Smith in Berkhamsted
Liked it!
First Album You Bought:What was it, where, why?
Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Do It Yourself
Probably the local little record store in Berkhamsted
Loved Ian Dury – New Boots and Panties, along with Never Mind the Bollocks, changed my life.
First gig:What was it, where? Any particular memories/stories?
The Slits, Aylesbury Friars.Not as good as the album Cut (second album I bought), a bit loose they were as a band. But still a big buzz.
Best Gig:What was it, where, why was it your best?
Either My Bloody Valentine at ULU around the time of “Glider” (1990?), or Animal Collective at the Bowery Ballroom, New York in 2004 I think it was. Both transcendent and engulfing.
What you’re listening to now:What music are you currently into?
The new album by Woebot, Hallo. Maria & the Mirrors’s “Gemini”. Traxman’s The Mind of Traxman.
Good Day Record:What and why?
Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”.Wanted to pick something electronic and dance-related as that’s a huge part of my listening. And of course, spoiled for choice there. I could have picked something by Aphex Twin or Ultramarine or LFO or Omni Trio or Wagon Christ or Orbital or…But let’s go with the godfathers: Kraftwerk. Electronic music, groove-based music, is music that I tend use as a pure mood-modifier, the emotions in it are quite abstract. If you’re having a good day, you probably don’t need your spirits elevated that much, but the rhapsodic flutter of this song is the perfect soundtrack.
Bad Day Record:What and why?
When someone really bad has happened in my life music tends to drop away completely, it is inadequate. So I have to rephrase the question in my mind: what songs do I know that contain “healing wisdom”? And one of them would be The Byrds’s “Everybody’s Been Burned” off Younger Than Yesterday. Apart from its beauty, the lyric offers good counsel: don’t respond to set backs or traumas by retreating into yourself, stay open.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text is probably my favoritest. A joy to read, broken up in nice little aphoristic short sections, a mind rearranger for me aged whenever it was (21?). A Lover's Discourse is wonderful too - similar style and structure - but less applicable to other things as Pleasure, as it is so focused on romantic love. Then there's that hardy perennial, "The Grain of the Voice". Mythologies, I still remember certain perceptions - the chapter about the court case against the allegedly murderous farmer, the literary way the prosecution wielded rhetoric against the simple-speaking man.... the stuff about strip teases, about wrestling..
Jean Baudrillard wrote about 50 books (I've not counted but that's what it feels like). Yet - and this is just a hunch - I suspect the kernel of most everything is contained in this fantastic short essay, "The Ecstasy of Communication". Which must have been written in the late 70s or early 80s but in a feat of unintentional prophecy explains the internet and its effect on culture and psychology. (The other things I've read, I found overly abstract - a lot of sweeping assertions ("power no longer exists" - hmmm, you think so Jean?)
One of JB's books in that highly fetish-able Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series of black pocket-sized volumes was titled Forget Foucault - which always tickled me, the French-crit-theory equivalent of a diss track. But I could never forget Michel Foucault - the prose is arid next to Barthes, but the ideas have so many applications. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is not a sexy read, but it rearranged my mind - put out of contention, out of their misery, all those lingering Sixties ideas about Eros as inherently revolutionary. The Archaelogy of Knowledge is tough going - it's extremely abstract, he proffers even less in the way of evidential support than Baudrillard. A grim grinding slog, to be honest - until the final chapter, styled as a dialogue between ice-veined Michel and an imaginary humanist interlocutor whose objections are patiently and remorselessly demolished. It ends with a wonderful flourish of chilling anti-humanist rhetoric. I struggled resolutely through the whole thing during my lunch breaks while working a summer job in a factory, packing aerosols of fly-spray. This final chapter felt like the pay-off.
My brother Jez "riveted" by The Archaelogy of Knowledge
Foucault was a better interviewee than a writer and the anthology of dialogues Power / Knowledge is a very good way in.
Julia Kristeva made a big impression on me with The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection... and a medium-sized impression with Black Sun and the book about love. She's slogging on, does a book every few years, seemingly with zero impact.
Can't forget GillesDeleuze & Felix Guattari - their concepts seemed to have a lot of applications to music and music culture at one point. Now, I'm a little befuddled as to their use value - in any context.
Paul Virilio - Mark Fisher hated Virilio, or found him extremely frustrating. And it's true, there's little in the way of sustained linear development of argument - the text jumps around all over the place. A paragraph ends and the next one is a complete non-sequitur. Sometimes the next sentence is a non-sequitur. Fragmentary and disjointed as it is, though, I found a fair amount to ransack and redeploy in his work, in particular with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Like Baudrillard (and Kristeva), another one of these extremely productive, churn-out-a-book a year almost, types. A lot of reiteration (and self-cannibalism maybe).
Georges Bataille. Got Visions of Excess in hardback - a copy without a dust jacket, going cheap. Mad stuff. It seemed then to have all kinds of applications to what I was listening to at exactly the point of reading, which was the Butthole Surfers! But the one that really has proved enduringly useful is the three volumes of The Accursed Share, his relatively straightforward and analytic book about economics and human psychology. (At one point I had loose leaf pages of all the Acephale writings, I think an advance copy had come into Joy's possession when she was a book's editor. I chucked those out eventually, though. Can't be grappling with an unbound book).
Now I have read some really interesting books in the last decade or so - things that have sent me down unexpected thought-paths - but they tend to be more like obscure scholarly works, discovered through project-oriented research. They don't really fit the category of "Cultural Theory", and nor are they the kind of stuff that is setting the pace in academia nowadays. Things like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Daniel Patrick O'Keefe's Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (that one a Phil Knight tip), Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (which you can see the Woody Allen character suggesting as some light reading for Annie Hall in the scene below - what a dick!), Esther Newton's Mother Camp, Donald Meyer's book about the history of Positive Thinking, Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image....
But nothing hits you quite as hard as when you're young and mind-malleable. You're hungry, then - and an indiscriminate forager for mind-food.
So for me it would be the French lot, largely. In the late '80s, early '90s, it also seemed to work really well with what was going in music at that time. Or at least it was irresistible for me to glom one onto the other, and there seemed to be a fit, or a friction that created a spark.
And it had style as writing - whereas much that has followed in later phases 'n crazes of theory (cyber-theory, postcolonial, queer theory, affect) is dry and often rather tortuous. There also seems to be a common style of taking very particular texts as a starting point- an obscure poem, or a film or a photograph - and using that as a prism from which to zoom out. (As opposed to a macro vision, that sweeps up a lot of evidence to support its sweeping claims). I find this zoom-out-from-something-small approach often feels a tad tenuous; it requires your credence to support itself on something that might just be a rather particular and private obsession. Which is fine for blogs (I do it all the time, obviously - reading massive significance into something minor and obscure) but seems less so for a bound book of scholarly argument.
Strangely though, much as I love all that French stuff still, and if my eye happens to fall on a patch of it I'll slip very easily into being as swayed as ever by it, thinking it Truth... it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power with current popular culture, little in the way of resonance or purchase....
What does? Affect theory, maybe. Although probably in terms of the 'what's hot' stakes in academia, that might possibly already be a bit passe.
Other fave thinkers and theorists:
Harold Bloom, mostly for The Anxiety of Influence - so so useful - but I do like to marinate in his windy locutions about the Western canon.
Susan Sontag, mostly for "Against Interpretation" and "Notes on Camp" and "Fascinating Fascism"
Dick Hebdige, mostly for Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Simon Frith
Norman O. Brown
JG Ballard
Klaus Theweleit
Brian Eno
Nietzsche
Fred Vermorel
Joe Carducci
E.M. Cioran
Oscar Wilde
I suppose I would have to say Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, they had a huge impact on the unformed moi (although as a model for living, or a practical politics - I'm unconvinced, these days. The analysis of boredom and alienation seems perennial up to a point, although the idea that watching TV or films or spectactor sports is necessarily passive and isolated is woefully uninformed - typical snobby outlook that comes from living inside a purely literary culture, there's that disdain for the mass medium and thus an ignorance of the possibilities for sharing that exist in the collective enjoyment of this stuff - all the ways in which we literally make fun together out of this supposedly unilinearly-imposed pablum).
Fredric Jameson (although it's a bit of a slog, a tad arid, as prose - loves a long sentence, loves to use punctuation). (What isn't a slog - and actually is easily my favorite of his things, is the short book on Wyndham Lewis, Fables of Aggression)
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive. Kind of an unhinged book - in a weird way it reminded me of the mindset I'd managed to get into circa Blissed Out, this apocalyptic-nihilistic bliss-as-ego-death mysticism. But reached through a completely different angle: Leo Bersani's radical negativity, opposition to all breeders (aka "reproductive futurism"). (Disappointing to discover that Edelman has been married to a fellow scholar for decades - but then who of us really lives out our principles?)
Talking of apocalyptic-nihilistic I'm afraid I would have to give the nod to N. Land's Bataille-book The Thirst For Annihilation. There's something about the anti-life, anti-human, anti-everything mindspace that has an unleashing effect on the prose.
Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae. One of those books where it's the prose and the force of personality that is utterly swaying in the moment of reading. You get a high off the vehemence.
Recent years:
Berardi's After the Future
A couple of things by Nicolas Bourriaud, e.g. The Radicant
I will say though that an awful lot of the theory and academic stuff I've read over the years - the preponderance of it, honestly - has left no trace whatsoever - no ideas-trace, and no memory-of-pleasure trace either.
So in a way, maybe nowadays I'm "after theory" - I've taken in enough fuel, transmuted and distorted it, that I can now sustain my trajectory, for my remaining years. That has not stopped me, however, from repeat-visiting this site I came across recently and downloading a couple of hundred titles - books that will almost certainly never be read, pdfs that in many cases will never even get opened. So clearly some kind of theory-itch remains, a vestigial limb from those young hungry days.
Overrated
Derrida - I've found little of use to me in there, really. And there's a lot of fannying about and irritating play with words. Spectres of Marx is a disparate collation of meditations on quite far-flung subjects. Each component seem to relate to the other ones only tangentially. It's also extremely short. Now I'm not a believer in length per se - but you definitely get a bit of a "will this do?" whiff from it. Yet equally you also feel it could have been briefer still - vastly more succinct. In terms of actual ideas, it could have been boiled down to a few pages.
Archive Fever - the title is a wonderfully poetic, mind-triggering phrase, but the book (another very slim effort) is actually about something else altogether than what you think (or at least, what I thought it was going to be about). There's stuff about circumcision. And the closing chapter is Jacques having an intellectual tussle with an obscure scholar of Judaism, who's written a book about Freud in which he tries to insinuate that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. Although Jewish himself, Derrida's not having this. Yes, it's that esoteric.
Lyotard - some great phrases ("the desire called Marx") but very hard going indeed. Extracted very little of use for my particular purposes.
Haraway - I suppose the cyborg woman essay is a classic. I tried with the OncoMouse TM one, but had to give up after 8 pages. Same with the one about dogs as companion species. Kinda felt "look, I get it - you're a dog person. But there's no book to write here". (And in fact it's exceedingly short - a monograph). Reminded me a bit of my first girlfriend's dad, who used to talk to his dog when out walking him, confide all his problems and grievances. (Necessarily he was a good listener, this dog). He would pay tribute to his canine companion, say things like "'there's people in this town who aren't fit to lick my dog's bumhole!"
(originally wrote this for purposes irrelevant to go into at this juncture)
Keith Roberts, Pavane
Alternative history/counterfactual set in England where the Reformation never happened, Roman Catholicism dominates the country, and science has been suppressed.
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
Alternative history in America where South won the Civil War, an unacknowledged precursor to steampunk in terms of technological backdrop, very well written and characterized, full of great historical jokes and inversions - e.g. in the impoverished, backwards remnant of the United States of America, the transcontinental railroad was never completed, the Native American tribes never defeated, and Deseret (the original Mormon name for Utah) still has polygamy, while a Klu Klux Klan-like militia called the Grand Old Army fights against the overwhelming economic influence of the Confederate States of America, a/k/a those damn Southrons.
Robert Sheckley, Mindswap.
The exact plot escapes my memory – something involving a guy who ends up in an alien body and his attempts to get home, involving jaunts across many strange planets, each time ending up inside a wildly different lifeform. But Sheckley is that rare thing, the genuinely hilarious s.f. writer.
John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up.
These weren’t quite sequels but more like companion books, both set in an overpopulated future, Sheep I think nearer the present and more polluted and ruined, Zanzibar more about pop cultural overdrive, the pressures of overcrowding. Both excellent.
Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law
Possibly my favorite s.f. book ever - certainly the most reread. Another one set in an overcrowded, ecologically ruined future, this time a world dominated by advertising agencies. Written in the 50s circa Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders but surprisingly not dated at all and probably has renewed interest because of Mad Men and our culture of branding, Facebook ads, micro-targeted propaganda etc. Pohl and Kornbluth wrote a bunch of really excellent books both separately and together – they belonged to this cabal of NY-based, mostly Communist or left-aligned writers who called themselves the Futurians, so the anti-capitalist slant of Space Merchants makes sense in this light. Gladiator At Law, also excellent, is set in a similarly dark, corporate dominated future, where the masses are kept happy by a revival of Roman style bloodsports
Walter Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz
Absolute classic set in the Dark Ages several centuries after world war three, with monks who preserve the lost knowledge and painstakingly copy onto parchment the circuitry diagrams for machines they no longer know what they were for. Beautifully written and wry
Alfred Bester, the Demolished Man, and Tiger, Tiger(also published as The Stars My Destination) Two more classics. The Demolished Man involves a future where telepathy has been developed and so has teleportation ... and to be honest my memory of the plot/scenario momentarily fails me, but it’s.... great! Tiger, Tiger – ditto, I recall more particular amazing scenes. A great stylist, though, is Alfred Bester and generally accredited as a master.
Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!
The book that was turned into Soylent Green but about 10 times superior to the movie. A very grim and gritty, well imagined scenario of overpopulation and resource depletion in New York circa 1999. ‘Soylent’ is not “made out of people” as in the hokey Charles Heston movie but is just one of the dreary processed foodstuff that people subsist on along with krill burgers and weed crackers. The rich go to “meatleggers’ and “meateasy’s” where they can get some dog or if they are really wealthy and connected, a sliver of beef steak.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Things I would obviously add to the list: Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (and a couple of other PKDs), several J.G. Ballards (The Drowned World, High Rise, Low Flying Aircraft, others), an Aldiss or two (Greybeard, Hothouse) Lem's Solaris and Fiasco definitely, possibly Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex.
And I suppose Fahrenheit 451 is undeniable.
As is Neuromancer. And The Difference Engine.
Ooh, how could I forget - most of John Wyndham - particularly The Chrysalids (that should be a movie, I think) and The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky, but you can't deny The Triffids. Out of recent years reading in the genre, I don't think anything would get added to this core list, which was consolidated in my mid-teens - except for Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men and Starmaker - visonary works both. And David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which isn't exactly s.f. (more on it at the bottom).
That said, I was very impressed by Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For the Future. Short stories is a whole other ball game... Dozens by Ballard. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is one that lingers in the memory disquietingly. Ray Bradbury's one about the pedestrian who gets arrested for going for a walk at night.
So many others from paperback collections I got from the local library.
Some major science fiction writers that I have never read: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein (not entirely sure actually that it's zero with him - but certainly nothing has stuck in the memory). A number of other surprising omissions...
Mainstream literati having a go? Well, you'd have to mention 1984, Brave New World, Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (but certainly not Russian Hide and Seek), Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (but certainly not 1985 and nor The Wanting Seed). The Plot Against America. Oh and Nabokov's Ada, although he professed to despise s.f.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A Voyage to Arcturus
One of the strangest novels I've read. By David Lindsay, published in 1920. Not exactly science fiction, nor fantasy, but a tortured religious vision. Absurd, yet with a unsettling quality of reality and gravity that takes it out of that zone of the Marvelous a.k.a. make-it-up-as-you-go-along cobblers.
It starts with a seance or spiritualist type meeting in an Edwardian living room, there are three gentlemen ... but then quickly.... well, it's hard to say what proceeds from that, paraphrase wouldn't quite convey.... Logic and plausibility quickly disappear without any loss of a sense of reality or grim seriousness.. It's a slightly barmy religious vision that you can't shake off. The outer space location (Tormance, a planet around Arcturus) is by the by really...
The attitude to all things worldly, fleshly and pleasure-giving reminds me of peak-delirium K-punk's Spinozist scorn for "sad passions".
Harold Bloom was such a fan of Arcturus (he claimed to have read it hundreds of times!) that he tried to write a sort of an extension of it, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979).His only attempt at a novel. Did I read somewhere that he subsequently tried to get hold of all remaining copies and destroy them? Or perhaps he joked about doing so.
(one side of a chat with Carl Neville aka the Impostume, done in the mid-2000s)
FAVES
Ian Dury
Jim Morrison (but
perhaps only his delivery could get away with some of that stuff)
Robert Wyatt (king
of bathos)
Kevin Ayers
(recently got into into him in a big way... "Decadence" and
"Song from the Bottom of A Well", amazing words)
Bryan Ferry (a
genius of delivery also)
Marc Bolan (best
spangly pop nonsense)
Edwyn Collins
Morrissey (not
after a certain cut-off point which is almost as early as The Queen Is Dead
except there are moments in the later Smiths stuff and one really great later
solo song "I Am Hated For Loving"... actually I just read a really good book on Morrissey by an academic that made a good case for his lyrical genius
throughout, broke down his various strategems etc... I was convinced but
then the music gets to be mostly so pedestrian post Viva Hate)
Roy Harper
Billy Mackenzie
Green (the early
stuff .... Songs to Remember just is too cute and smugly in love with
himself .... some moments on Cupid... the last LP, White Bread Black Beer, very much)
Jarvis Cocker
Martin Bramah
Kristin Hersh
Poly Styrene
John(y) Rotten/Lydon
Pete Shelley
Syd Barrett
(actually there is also one song that was a B-side early on, by Rick Wright --
amazing lyrics, strange fragile emotion i can't think of any prototype for in
rock. 'Paintbox" -- well worth checking out if you have any time for Floyd
at all)
Captain Beefheart
(not always but often)
Lawrence from Felt makes it just for "Primitive
Painters" and some of the Denim lyrics.
David Byrne (not always but quite often --
"Mind", "Animals", side 2 of Remain)
Iggy Pop when he was in the Stooges
further thoughts
Stevie Nicks, in a
funny sort of way
Rapping is almost
like another thing, it doesn't look good written down often, but Jay-Z, LL Cool
J, DMX
SPECIAL CATEGORY:
can't say I adore exactly but you can definitely see why they're so
rated: Lou Reed, Ray Davies, David Bowie
OVER-RATED
it's not that they're bad, they might even be
"good", but just substantially over-rated
Thom Yorke (just
very few really memorable lines)
Manic Street
Preachers (I warm to them as people but the lyrics are just fucking wretched
aren't they! as is the music and the singing come to think of it. Do not see
why Owen and Anwen et al are so into them, guess it might have been a
certain-age type thing)
Ian Curtis (it's
very young, isn't it? Exception: "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is perfect)
Elvis
Costello (used to really like but it's rubbish, okay it's not rubbish but
really masturbatory -- wordplaying with yourself in public heh heh- actually I kind of enjoy it on that level, as grotesque exhibitionism, and also as sensuously sounded nonsense) (see this earlier post, the section on "pubadelia")
Nick Cave (used to
like him a lot but now it seems so posey -- the over-written Birthday Party
stuff is still pretty great I think, but what's worse is when he tries to do
"simple" later on in a sort of King James Bible/Faulkner kind of way, tries to achieve the language of parables and common simple-hearted folk... cod-"timeless").
Mark E. Smith (agenius obviously but his seems to be an
approach where you could get away with murder so I wonder if he does that quite
a bit)
Brian Eno (the
story ones are good, the ones about people marooned on beaches or twilight
states of vegetative indolence... but the other Warm Jets type
stuff is just twee )
Kurt Cobain (some
great one or two liners and the odd verse but…)
J&MC, Primal Scream, Spacemen 3, Spiritualized -- it's like the cooler, slightly
higher brow version of how metal bands write lyrics, like they've gone to the
School of Rock
X, Violent Femmes,
etc -- American wannabe poets
Vic Godard (good
lines here and there, don't completely understand the fuss I must say - like "Ambition" - why is this considered an all-time lost classic?)
Patti Smith (has
her moments, but…)
Joe Strummer and
Paul Weller
The Clash lyrics
pale next to the Pistols (the exceptions here - "Complete Control", "White Man in Hammersmith Palais", "Lost in the Supermarket" and - while overly abstract - "Straight To Hell")
Weller has some moments but ("When You're Young", "That's Entertainment". "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" is great - a 3 minute Play For Today was his goal, he said - but then narrative doesn't make sense - why is travelling by Tube to bring home a curry; midnight is a bit late to be having a curry; how would the muggers work out his address so to be able to use his keys to break in and attack the wife?). "Town Called Malice" makes me wince. Then there's the Style Council...
Donald Fagen (except for The Nightfly, when he's great)
That was circa 2006, who would I add now?
Faves
The chap(s?) in Vampire Weekend but only for the first album
It pains me to say it but Ariel P**k
Florence Shaw, obviously
I should have added The Specials (Dammers, Hall, Golding, Radiation)
Also Gang of Four but only the first album (gets clumsy after that - except for "Paralysed")
Also Joni Mitchell (often)
Also John Lennon (often)
Also Paddy Macaloon except when he's very cloying (which admittedly is quite often)
Also Neal Peart but only for two songs, "The Spirit of Radio" and "Limelight".
Also David Crosby for "Everybody's Been Burned", "Mind Gardens" and "Triad"
Also Peter Perrett
Overrated
Really not sure - I don't seem to listen out for lyrics in the way I once would have, and for a while now quite a large proportion of my listening is music sans words.
But in terms of someone for whom the argument is made very much on the basis of the lyrics, I would say Lana Del Rey.
some publication asked me the best gigs I ever saw, this is what I said in circa 2006
my bloody valentine at ULU
butthole surfers at ULU
orbital at progeny
chemical bros at irving
plaza
animal collective at bowery ballroom
young gods at ULU side room
basement jaxx (somewhere in South London? or on the Frying Pan in NYC? or both)
world domination enterprises in croydon 1987 (possibly still the greatest gig i've ever seen)
throwing muses at africa centre 1987
janes addiction at ICA
zapp at hammersmith (so good i went the next day as well - still good but a mistake to go so quickly in succession)
meat puppets at that really gross shabby venue in Hammersmith (clarendon?)
since 2006?
gang of four that same year or thereabouts
buzzcocks and chris and cosey at Tilburg, Holland festival
scritti politti at bowery ballroom
the go go's at Hollywood Bowl
LCD Soundsystem at Bowery Ballroom
pre-2006 omissions from the first time round
killing joke - twice (Friars Aylesbury and a place in Dunstable)
adam and the ants (Friars)
23 skidoo (Scamps, Oxford)
bad brains (a big venue in London whose name escapes me)
world of twist at astoria
pulp at a venue in Islington in that moment between "Legendary Girlfriend" and "Babies" when they were just starting to take off
stone roses somewhere in London at their very peak
seefeel (unusual venue in North London, Main also good that night)
PJ harvey at cbgbs
a class of their own: kraftwerk
(seen them several times - first at Brixton Academy - the middle one at Roseland NYC might have been best but then I was on one. the most recent, Disney Hall, was spectacular (3D Spex) but the volume was too low)
electrifying for not strictly musical reasons
John Martyn with Danny Thompson at Joe's Pub, NYC, not long before he died
