No point in this not being publicly available is there? Especially as setting it up in Blog format was a bit of a labour of love. Apologies for dead links and inserts. time takes its toll. #

bass = discipline


two very different tracks, but the bass has the same kind of propulsive quality in each

'The Bass was played using an early Roland SH1000 made in the late 70's This was originally designed to sit on top of a Hammond organ so it looked like one! This was a monophonic synth but would play two octaves at once so using a combination
of square and sine waves an octave apart combined with a lot of wrestling with a portamento switch to get the slides this is how the bass lines were done. No sequencer was used at all on the bass lines just a lot of sweat and keeping time which was helped by me also being a drummer! The synth was recorded through a Boss chorus guitar pedal (blue type) and then compressed a lot through a studio DBX160 a really great vintage compressor.The bass was very high in the mix but cut through because of the compression and the split octaves.Just an illusion bass was the best of two different lines recorded over two days on Analogue 24tk before digital came in.' - Tony Swain from his blog tonyswainproducer.blogspot.co.uk   http://tonyswainproducer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/tony-swain-producer-composer.html 

The one I should have posted for Peter Hook

Calling all contributors past and present  Carl and I have had a discussion about whether there could be a Best of the Decades Blog book. The blogs have featured some great writing over the years and it would be nice to give them some recognition. Also, Blogger will stop working at some point, people move onto other things, and it would be a shame to lose so many good posts.
Exactly what form this would take I don't know. We could follow Woebot's example and do it ourselves, or see if a publisher is interested.  But before going any further I would like to hear what other contributors think. So email your thoughts, pro or anti, to: belovedenemies [at] gmail.com
Even if you only posted one piece, I would still like your opinion. Readers who feel strongly are also welcome to express their views. 
Thanks,William

If you are wondering what I am up to these days, I am also over here. #

Right, we are Wetherspooning.
Here from 5
http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-lord-moon-of-the-mall
then I guess
The Rockingham arms at approx 7:30
http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-lord-moon-of-the-mall
then Hipster fun in New Cross at 9:30 ish
http://www.royalalbertpub.com/
and a late nightcap in the Greenwich Wetherspoons from 11-ish
http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-gate-clock
this won't work out of  course. I don't have  a smartphone, Phil doen't even have a mobile so hopefully we will meet up at some point. Bring anyone  you like and remember we like meeting new people and have highly developed social skills. #

Phil and I are going to have a promotional pub crawl for Strangled and No More Heroes on the 27th of March. Quite what it will constitute remains to be seen. I intend to flog my author copies of No More Heroes out of my gym bag and  give the funds raised to Defend The Right to Protest. We will start in Central London around 5 then head south. London Bridge/ Elephant then New Cross/Deptford. We will figure out the exact pubs later. Essentially doing this solves one fundamental problem: the fact that I still like and get on with people who have now fallen out with each other. We will come to you, or somewhere near you, and you don't have to not come for a quick pint through the fear that you'll  bump into that ex-comrade who has turned out to be a psycho/ reactionary/ closet Tory/ leering Troll / treacherous Careerist, etc. If you ever contributed to the Decade's blogs it would be great to see you, but it would be great to see you anyway. This is an open invitation. I'll update the pub location nearer the date, after full consultation with Phil. He's dead fussy.
Facebook page here. #

Extract from No More Heroes? out on Zero, up at the Repeater blog.

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Radical change is possible and necessary but only if alternative thinking has the courage to move out of the margins. Repeater is committed to bringing the periphery to the centre, taking the underground overground, and publishing books that will bring new ideas to a new public. We know that any encounter with the mainstream risks corrupting the tidiness of untested ideals, but we believe that it is better to get our hands dirty than worry about keeping our souls pure.
http://repeaterbooks.wordpress.com/

Looks like this has a publication date of 27th of March. It's "Holding out for a hero" retitled. Phil and I will attempt a promotional pub session for this and "Strangled" around the time. You are all invited.

Massive thanks to Owen Hatherley for converting it from a blog to manuscript form.

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Dear all,

I'm going to start a new project on the films of Alan Clarke. It will be a blog at first [http://belovedenemies.blogspot.co.uk/] and then, who knows? His films have been obsessing me for a while, and there is very little out there about him or his work. So I thought I might as well write the texts I wanted to read etc.

As it goes on any feedback would be welcome. 

Fascinating Horizon documentary on Mondragon from 1980. Not so much for Mondragon itself ( still looming large in the anti-capitalist imaginary 35 years later) as the tone, tenor and underlying assumptions of the piece.


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watched a bunch of Robert Altman films, most of them I think were on the boxset to pad it out really, but damned if this doesn't stick with me the most:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ESzFocBj4

One of the best musical performances I can think of in as unlikely a vehicle as a Robert Altman teen comedy. Unsure of how the band and Altman became entangled but I'm not sure I want to really. #

Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.

 According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article,  I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.

 All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.

Prince videos are few and far between on youtube, but he pretty much owned the 80s with his intros. His biggest, most bombastic album Purple Rain is basically a series of throat-grabbing intros, some of which seemed to have had songs added on later as an afterthought (though to be fair, a good few end rather spectacularly too, especially the epic title track). Love him or loathe him, and despite the various production tricks he used, you knew who it was as soon as you heard the first bar, until his mojo started to slip after the release of the hideous Batman soundtrack. In some ways, he's kind of like Martin Scorcese is to cinema: Even if the song itself is a disappointing dirge, chances are the flamboyant intros will pack a punch at the very least. The calling card of the consummate showman.

Just saying, but the song from where this blog gets its name has a pretty evocative intro.

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Equally killer intro as demarcation of genre move. There's one other song by the The Cult that I like but can't for the life of me remember what it is at the mo. Rain? Goth always felt a bit of a need to announce itself innit, part of its melodrama/pretensions to high art and concomitant desire not to take anyone too much by surprise in case they kick its head in at the bus stop. ludicrous/sublime levels of Steinmania in the intro with this farrago of course... not strictly an intro, more of a foreshadowing/pre-empting #

Really appreciate both those Frankie albums these days too, this is a classic intro innit, especially in terms of the below-mentioned gearing up the dance floor for the big tune back before there was such a thing as rave.
In fact intros were, in a pre-House/rave era (or at least in terms of the uneven geographical development of said genres) a necessary breathing space/ preparation pause/ energy generator/ opportunity to get off the dance floor and have a pint asap. In a sense they fulfilled a myriad structural/social uses.
In fact the dynamics of djing in the now sadly defunct Scorpio 1 in Barrow-in-Furness, the town's main nightclub in say, 1996, when I was a drunk and basically terrified 16 year old goth, (in a Cramps t-shirt), for that rowdy, sexually segregated amalgam of rockers, metalers, mods, new romantics, punks, casuals and soul boys and girls was probably miles more artful and aware than beat matching seven hours of identikit techno for some monged out self-selecting gang of gurners ten years later.
Ah, the lost art of dj-ing.Back then, back there, you would get your fifteen, twenty minutes worth of tribal songs (if memory serves for us it was often The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen that announced our "alternative" slot was coming up, and people used to take records in to have played too, New Model Army's No Rest and The Bolshoi's A Way along with The Sister's Alice being big faves, if I recall correctly). You would be left unmolested to do your thing. U2, The Alarm, The Waterboys, Then Jericho were universals, The Smiths less so, anything disco-y or SAW-y was girl's stuff. Then we had a few hip hop or northen soul specialists in smart suits who really danced.

Funny.

Anyway.


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meanwhile


fairly convinced once you add up the dance, rap, pop, metal, and electronic stuff the 80s tops the best decade for intros by a long way.


unlike riffs, the intro has more of the capacity to be inherently populist - the bit where everyone on the floor clicks and ups their game/where everyone in the pub strikes up. it's also the portion of the song most likely to recieve attention from execs and studios: if you have a great riff it might never be noticed if you opening falls flat, ending up with no units shifted. an intro has little potential for wanking is what i'm saying. #

      

This TOTP performance is usually seen as either a totally naff 'literalist' interpretation, or an amusing joke at the expense of the 'Last Gang in Town'.

However, the aesthetic elements of a whole wing of contemporary pop culture is here. Smut, cages, violence, money - this is the world of Larry Clark, Terry Richardson, Vice and so on. It could be easily up-datable as a Rhianna video.