Duck, You Sucker

“When I started using dynamite, I used to believe in a lot of things. All of it! Now I believe only in dynamite”

Yep, that was the title Sergio Leone originally gave to what we all know as A Fistful of Dynamite. I remember my initial disappointment as a kid when I discovered that it wasn’t another Clint spag western, a disappointment soon relieved when I saw it had James Coburn, Our Man Flint, in it. Coburn was The Man, and the obvious inspiration for Major Eazy, my favourite character from Battle comic. In this one he rocks the tash to devastating effect, not looking the least bit homosexual as he plays an IRA terrorist on the run who teams up with Rod Steiger, fake-tanned to the hilt as a Mexican Bandit, to wreak havoc across a Mexico in the throes of revolution.

The comic elements in the film, more exagerrated than those last seen in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, are tempered by Leone’s earnest attempts to address Hollywood’s bullshit depictions of the Mexican Revolution. It’s the comic elements that made the film a lot more accesible to me as a kid than would have otherwise been the case, not to mention all the massive explosions going off every 5 minutes. Key to the success of the film’s schizoid tone is Ennio Morricone’s score, which taken out of context would be a masterpiece of avant garde weirdness, as it’s markedly different to the famous themes he created for the Clint films.

I wonder what it was that prevented James Coburn from being a bigger star than he was? Certainly his brand of laid-back self-assured masculinity is sorely lacking from today’s cinema, as proven by the endless parade of toothpaste ladyboys foisted upon us now. As an antidote to the insults offered down at the multiplex, do yourself a favour and rent this classic.

 

The Psychedelic Skull

Yeah, this graphic design lark is a piece of piss. Stick it in the computer, press a few buttons, bish bosh. Any Muppet could do it, and judging by what I’ve seen out there, a lot of them make a fairly lucrative living out of it. I wonder how many of them could actually draw a horse that didn’t look like a dog though…

Hocusing For Beginners

Ghost Box, once the brilliant simplicity of their ethos has sunk in, seemed inevitable really. Boards of Canada had already tried to sound the well of disquiet that lurked behind the ‘Spangles & Spacehoppers’ facade of 1970’s Britain, but by trying to shoehorn beats into the mix they interrupted the dust-motes floating in the other side of silence. Ghost Box have resolutely ignored any requirement for mass appeal and have buried their heads under the duvet with a stack of Pelican paperbacks, TV21 annuals and a copy of Arthur Machen’s The White People. If you came of age in the 60’s and 70’s you will take one look at their graphics and already have a pretty good idea of what the records are going to sound like - an eerie meld of Public Information films; soundbites from a half-ignored edition of Nationwide; Open University broadcasts; strange television programmes intended, but barely suitable for, kids; and phantom voices leaking through the radio dial from somewhere between here and Hilversum. For those who were never there it’s going to sound wee-urd, but certain members of my generation are going to be sent off on a drift of half-buried memories. An empty crisp bag , breeze-tossed against the wall of my otherwise silent and abandoned secondary school. Owls hooting in the daylight. Scrawled sigils on the back of bus ticket left in a box of old toys. The wind hissing through a field of barley. Lengthening shadows across the still face of a pool where children once drowned. The Ghost Box records seem to occupy that space between the media signals we received during those decades and the sounds we heard inside our own heads.

Important to the exercise is the collective acceptance that the fictional New Town of ‘Belbury’ actually exists. It’s a place haunted by the lingering fears of atomic war and the faded postwar optimism, where the clocks occasionally strike thirteen and creaking gates move against the wind. The attention to detail by Julian House - in terms of the record packaging, the site images and even their periodical ‘Folklore & Mathematics’ (which goes so far as to hint at a lost TV series called ‘The Moon Ladder’) - is very impressive, and suggests this is the realisation of a long-held personal obssession.

By far their most effective release to date is The Advisory Circle’s Other Channels which draws together everything attempted in previous albums by The Belbury Poly and Eric Zann, and fully realises the potential that might have previously been overlooked in the rush to make this thing happen. The man behind this album is Jon Brooks, previously recording as King of Woolworth’s but now fully engaged in The Belbury Working. His collection of library music and analogue tapes are put to impressive effect, creating a collage of not-always-comfortable moods. It’s all highly evocative of nothing in particular and must sound to younger generations like a broken synthesizer stuck on the ‘muzak’ setting, but for those out there who ever spent long afternoons looking for faces in the clouds or wondering where certain closed doors led to, this will send you back to a place you probably thought you only dreamed.