Concrete Poem / 1973 time machine / Stockhausen's Greatest Hits

RTomens, 2020

Suddenly I felt like creating a more...geometric(?) concrete poem...something with a distinct form, pattern and regularity in type. Not my usual style because I'm simply not given to being so precise...and this is not as precise as some but I'm pleased with the result.

Browsing through the Spectator magazine's vaults I found a column from 1973. It's always interesting to read old reviews of artists who have since become legendary. He makes a good point about Bowie's appeal to 'a cohesive chunk of the population', by which I think he means a cross-class fan base. We certainly weren't sophisticated yet Bowie made profound contact with us proles and decades later we remain in his orbit. Aladdin Sane for £2.29! I had to save hard from my paper round money to buy it too. One of my favourite Bowie albums. 'If the Beatles had come from Jupiter they would have looked and sounded like Roxy Music.' is a funny but absurd idea. Still, such is journalistic license. For Your Pleasure, as you know, is now rightly regarded as a classic. Finally, Stockhausen and at first I thought he was joking, but a Greatest Hits album really does exist. Musical facts can be stranger than fiction.

Here's the column...

Flouncers

 

David Bowie, who is now hugely successful on both sides of the ditch, and the father of flounce rock, is undertaking with his painted troupe of musicians and mummers a comprehensive six-week tour of these islands, which could well be his last for a long time since he soon hopes to he hitting Holly wood or Shepperton. As he takes into the provinces the very latest bizarre products from the dream factory. One wonders how much rubs off on young Tyneside dockers and dolls or is it simply a matter of donning the satinette and snaky sneakers for a Saturday out with Gertie. Yet the manic popularity of performers like David Bowie says quite a lot about the minds of young people, which perhaps even they do not recognise. It is not uncommon to compare the current goings-on with Weimar Berlin. But we are not talking about the divertissements of a sophisticated urban coterie but the musical staple of a cohesive chunk of the population. With widespread, and classless, drug use lending an extra lurid opulence to the images, the future is going to be quite a gas. One thing is certain, the only place to be on May 12, when the tour opens, will be a big aircraft hangar in west London called Earl's Court, you and 18,000 others. New album Aladdin Sane (RCA £2.29). 

The smile on the face of Roxy Music is less lurid than Bowie's and no less colourful. In mid-tour, their music is more deliberately experimental, and the synthesiser operator, Eno, whose photogenic properties Monroe would be pushed to eclipse, is almost the only one I know whose activities on the moog are essential to the fabric of the music, not pure technological frippery. If the Beatles had come from Jupiter they would have looked and sounded like Roxy Music. Their recent LP, For Your Pleasure (Island £2.29), is beautiful and witty. 

 Another record of concentrated interest is Greatest Hits: Karlheinz Stockhausen (Polydor double, £3.70), a selection of the catchiest passages from his most familiar works, Kontakte, Stimmung, Hymnen, Gruppen, Mantra, and something I had not heard before, Opus 1970 (Stockhoven-Beethausen). And just in case you might think this is moving into impenetrably modernistic areas here is a quotation: "1 am electrical by nature. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents." Karlheinz telling us what's what? No. Beethoven speaking to Bettina Brentano.

Duncan Fallowell, The Spectator, April 7, 1973