Uwe Schütte - Godstar: Die fünf Tode des Genesis P-Orridge (2022)

Earlier this year, I received a curious email inquiring about using a photo in one of my reviews for a book. Naturally, I was happy to share it. As I traded emails with Uwe Schütte, I realized that I had seen and photographed the last performance of Psychic TV and Genesis P-Orridge. Of course I had known that P-Orridge died in 2020 just as the pandemic was unfolding, but it hadn’t occurred to me to reexamine their performance history and compare notes.

So, as a result, my picture now graces Godstar: Die fünf Tode des Genesis P-Orridge, released this year via Verlag Andreas Reiffer. I received a complementary copy and it immediately jumped to the front of my reading queue. Schütte had told me that the book is really more of an essay than a biography, and the parenthetical subtitle only found on the inside cover page, which translates to “something of a secret history in pop culture”, alludes to this as well. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant in practice, but it did make me curious.

[Godstar: The Five Deaths of Genesis P-Orridge.]

Indeed, the book is a wide-ranging and wandering essay about a broad range of topics, most notably esoteric magic and Brian Jones, the subject of the song “Godstar”. There’s a lot about Aleister Crowley and Satanism, as well as a few sections about the artist Marina Abramović, presumably because of her similar style of shock-tactic performance art. The Pandrogyny Project comes up, as do the antics of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, and even Coil, Cosey & Carter, and Marc Almond. I could’ve gladly taken even more gender discourse, more about the music itself, and maybe more about what the TOPY really was about, but regardless, few of Schütte’s sidetracks weren’t worth the diversion. They kind of work together to build a picture of Genesis’ environment and interests. There’s plenty of political and general pop-cultural commentary, most of which is sharp. On occasion Schütte might be a little too critical of what doesn’t suit his tastes, but rarely did he fail to make a strong case.

I’m also glad that Schütte didn’t shy away from P-Orridge’s dark sides. He writes plainly of their abusive relationship with Cosey Fanni Tutti and others (and Jones’ and Crowley’s similar behavior), their domineering authoritarianism in their bands and other projects, and their repulsive actions in the name of art. P-Orridge is a complicated person, which makes for excellent material for pop-cultural discourse, but it requires stomaching a lot of rather triggering information.

The legacy of P-Orridge’s “Godstar” project is another one of those things were the truth is hard to find. Schütte presents the book as a sort of continuation of a legacy that Genesis started with a pop song in 1985, continually reworked, and never quite finished. Supposedly they intended to produce a film about the life of Brian Jones, but they never managed due to money troubles. In reality, I suspect that such a film was just such a huge project that they never quite had the focus and perseverance to see it through, and instead they were easily distracted by new ideas and other projects. The closest they ever came to really producing something towards that goal was Godstar: Thee Director’s Cut, a double-disc compilation of songs and remixes mostly originally released in the 1980s on the excellent The Magickal Mystery D Tour EP (1986), the fairly good Allegory and Self (1988), and assorted contemporaneous singles. In truth, it feels more like another instance of “reissue, repackage / re-evaluate the songs / double-pack with a photograph” than any sort of truly newly assembled masterpiece. “Godstar” and a handful of other tracks remain classics, and the rest remains forgettable.

[Godstar: Thee Director’s Cut.]

The book ends up being a great alternative reading of pop culture through the lens of subversive, radical art and anti-establishment religious practice. In fact, I learned far more about esotericism than I ever expected to, and I came away feeling like I finally understand a part of society that I regularly run into but never could quite make sense of. It’s probably still not for me, but the concepts of seeking your true self, making your own forms to suit your individual needs, and living outside of the bounds arbitrarily placed upon us by uncaring institutions all resonate strongly with me. I’ve been literally searching for the same things my whole life.

[The only other picture I took at the fateful concert. See the original review for the picture used in the book.]

Cocteau Twins - The 4AD 80s albums

A couple weeks ago, I reviewed Lullabies to Violaine, Volume 1, a collection of all the Cocteau Twins’ EPs and singles on 4AD in the 80s. Now I’d like to cover the albums from the same period. The first few mirror the EPs and singles quite closely, but starting in 1986, they begin to diverge. The albums tend to be more focused in specific themes and sounds, and as such, they are a bit less wildly exciting, but still they represent thoroughly solid listening experiences in their longer forms.

Garlands was the first ever Cocteau Twins release in September 1982. It’s dark, post-punk, and gothic, and it’s the only album with bassist Will Heggie. The combination of heavy chorus bass riffs, pointed and thickly distorted lead guitar lines, heavy drum machine reverb, and lots of stuttered vocals makes for a rather harsh sound. It sounds strained and raw, and it doesn’t really vary very widely. I like the creative use of guitar delay, though, and the album sort of presages their later exploration, but it’s much more limited in scope.

Head Over Heels (released on Halloween 1983) is still dark and gothy, but it’s somewhat more exploratory. Most of the instrumentation and tone is similar to prior recordings, but with the addition of some keyboards and acoustic guitars. It was recorded as a duo after Heggie left, but there is still bass, presumably recorded by Robin Guthrie. The production is slightly richer and more vibrant. It’s right on the line of the original gothy sound and something new. “Sugar Hiccup” is of course excellent, but it sticks out a bit. (It fits on Sunburst and Snowblind a bit better.) “In the Gold Dust Rush” is also notably a step forward, and “Multifoiled” is surprisingly playful.

By the time Treasure was released in November 1984, Cocteau Twins had hit their stride. Treasure picks up about where The Spangle Maker EP left off, and even if it can’t quite match that level of consistency, it’s their first really good album. It’s also their first album with bassist Simon Raymonde. It finally shows them opening up and really coming into their own; it’s full of great guitar and keyboard sounds, and Elizabeth Fraser really started exploring the full power of her voice. Almost every song has something cool and creative going for it. “Ivo” is perhaps the most remarkable of the lot, and it’s such an awesome opening track. It starts all dark and spooky like their previous work, but then suddenly tumbles into something grand, full, and bombastic. That’s followed up with “Lorelei”, another solid song that starts right off with insistent guitar and bells, hearkening the coming of majestic new heights. It feels so lush, and Fraser’s voice sounds full of hushed anticipation. The album gets a bit weirder starting with “Beatrix”, and a few songs like “Cicely” and “Otterley” are just a bit too dark and dull. But right at the end of album closer “Domino”, they pull a nice trick and refresh themselves anew.

After a streak of incredible EPs, the band changed gears for Victorialand, released in April 1986. As Raymonde was busy with This Mortal Coil, it was recorded again as a duo. This time, though, there’s hardly any bass or even drums at all, but there is some saxophone from Richard Thomas of Dif Juz. Otherwise, it’s mostly just acoustic or shimmering electric guitar and vocals. The result is sparse and open but still pretty, which makes for a very chill and relaxing listen. Opener “Lazy Calm” takes some time to get going, but it expands beautifully. “Fluffy Tufts” and “Little Spacey” are quite pleasant, too. Just a few tracks like “Throughout the Dark Months of April and May” and “The Thinner the Air” are more overcast. The album is a bit short and feels a bit slight, especially after how much they crammed into each of the preceding releases. It feels like a distinct break from everything they’d done before, but it wouldn’t be the last time they’d explore these elements.

Right after the stunning Love’s Easy Tears EP came The Moon and the Melodies in November 1986. With Raymonde back in the fold, this album was also a collaboration with ambient composer Harold Budd. (Strangely it was credited to each of the four contributors as individuals.) Richard Thomas turns up again on sax, too. The result is not at all like Love’s Easy Tears; it’s much closer to Victorialand, but with the notable addition of particularly expressive piano. Most of the album is open, broadly ambient, and instrumental. “Memory Gongs” represents the best of that bunch; it’s just a cool atmosphere, like walking on a frozen pond in the woods, with piano and little synth noises dripping down on the icy splendor. The rest of the album (“Sea, Swallow Me”, “Eyes Are Mosaics”, “She Will Destroy You”) is like normal Cocteaus but chiller, lighter, and more shimmery, but still further on the ambient spectrum than usual. The whole concept feels like a risk, and even if it isn’t stellar across the board, it’s still quite good. “Sea, Swallow Me” is great by any standard. Fraser’s vocals are big and dramatic, and the music swells and shines right in step. The album is not as weird or dark or even as mysterious as their prior work, but the expansiveness and grandiosity can still be found here and there. The latter half of the album is maybe a bit too sparse, but “Ooze Out and Away, Onehow” finally turns it up right before the end.

Cocteau Twins finally took some time off at that point. They stopped releasing EPs for the next seven years, and they took a break from touring as well. Their next release was Blue Bell Knoll in September 1988. If this was the condensed best of two years of work, it shows. It’s refined, complex, and exciting, but also bright, beautiful, and almost entirely upbeat. It would seem the band had access to a modest budget, and they made great use of it. It’s not quite as varied and dynamic as Treasure or their best EPs, but it is a return to the forms of those releases. “Blue Bell Knoll” starts the album off on a high note, entrancing the listener with the rolling harpsichord sound. “Carolyn’s Fingers” is one of their all-time best. The heights of Fraser’s voice are wondrous and the music is gorgeous. “For Phoebe Still a Baby” brings the energy down a notch, but it’s still just as pretty. “A Kissed Out Red Floatboat” might be their first sequencer-driven song, and it presages the full, soft beauty of Heaven or Las Vegas. I love the weird spacey sounds, too. The album might rely on a few tried and true formulas (acoustic guitar strums and delay-laden electric arpeggios), but there’s nothing wrong with that when the results are this good.

Heaven or Las Vegas, released in September 1990, is the peak of Cocteau Twins. It’s dream pop at its finest. It’s full, stunning, and luscious, with a huge sound, excellent production, and an obviously good budget. It’s the best they’d ever do in the album format. The band was starting to fracture, and this was their last album for 4AD, but you can hardly tell. It’s their most accessible, mainstream, and pop-oriented work, yet doesn’t compromise their vision, scope, or grandeur. It’s also their dance-friendliest music. Every song has something of a driving pulse laying the groundwork for the ethereal layers. It’s also notable for lyrics that started to move back into decipherable territory. The influence of a newborn baby is maybe even discernible. “Cherry-Coloured Funk” is a great title, even if I wouldn’t call it funk, but the “cherry-coloured” part seems to fit. “Fifty-Fifty Clown” and “Road, River and Rail” are slightly cloudier and uncertain, but still lovely. “Heaven or Las Vegas” is one of their best, another one of their songs that just keeps pouring down incredible sounds and vocal lines. “Fotzepolitic” and “Wolf in the Breast” manage similar feats without getting repetitive. Closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” starts slow and haunting with the characteristic feedback wails, but then widens into a beautiful chiming chorus. This is the band at the peak of their talents, and unfortunately they’d never quite reach them again.

In their streak of albums for 4AD, Cocteau Twins managed to consistently expand their range, and almost every album was an improvement over the last. It must’ve been magical to see where they’d go next. They ended up in a very different place than where they began, and it’s fascinating to see the progression. It’s also a pleasure to hear how the albums and EPs fit together and show different sides of the band. Heaven or Las Vegas might be rightfully heralded as a masterpiece, but there’s plenty of other good music to be found here as well.

Scores:
Garlands: C
Head Over Heels: C+
Treasure: B+
Victorialand: B-
The Moon and the Melodies: B
Blue Bell Knoll: A-
Heaven or Las Vegas: A+

The Human League - Travelogue (1980/1988)

I first took the Human League seriously when my sister put their song "The Black Hit of Space" on a compilation she made for me. As good as their later hit "Don't You Want Me" and its accompanying #1 album, Dare, are (and they are quite good), I connected more with the comically strange "The Black Hit of Space" and the album it leads off, Travelogue. As it turns out, Travelogue was the second and final album featuring the original line-up of the band – Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware left to form Heaven 17, while Philip Oakey found a new crew to play with and kept the name The Human League.

Artist: The Human League
Album: Travelogue
Released: 1980
Label: Virgin International
Produced by: The Human League and Richard Manwaring

Tracklisting:
01. The Black Hit of Space
02. Only After Dark [Mick Ronson cover]
03. Life Kills
04. Dreams of Leaving
05. Toyota City
06. Crow and a Baby
07. The Touchables
08. Gordon's Gin [Jeff Wayne cover]
09. Being Boiled
10. WXJL Tonight

Bonus tracks on CD versions (1988 and onward):
11. Marianne [Holiday '80 EP, 1980]
12. Dancevision  [Holiday '80 EP, 1980]
13. Rock 'n' Roll / Nightclubbing [Gary Glitter cover / Iggy Pop cover] [Holiday '80 EP, 1980]
14. Tom Baker [Boys and Girls b-side, 1981]
15. Boys and Girls [Single, 1981]
16. I Don't Depend on You [Single, 1979, released as "The Men"]
17. Cruel [I Don't Depend on You b-side, 1979, released as "The Men"]

Analysis:
The album credits proudly proclaim, right after the title and band name, "contains synthesizers + vocals only". They aren't joking. The credits list three of the four members (the ones listed above) as playing "synthesizer + vocals", and the fourth, Philip Adrian Wright, is credited with "slides + films". Despite not even appearing on the record, he is credited nonetheless. How sharing and caring. This is synthpop at its best, no messing around.

"The Black Hit of Space" is without a doubt my favorite track. It starts with a synthetic drumbeat and weird, delayed synthesized notes. Then a thick, distorted swash of noise comes in and doesn't entirely even break once the lyrics start. A high-pitched synth and a bassline make the actual chords. The sound is so eerie and foreboding, with that certain space-age post-punk synth sound. It's great. The chorus vocals have this weird reverb and sound really warbly and weird. The lyrics are so great that I have to reproduce the chorus:

"The Black Hit of Space
It's the one without a face
It's the hit that doesn't fit
You can only see the flip
The Black Hit of Space
Sucking in the human race
How can it stay at the top
When it's swallowed all the shops?"

The next verse explains that the record has made every other record disappear until the Black Hit reaches number one and then continues into "minus figures", but "nobody could understand why". I certainly don't. Then comes a breakdown with a spoken verse, where our narrator explains that he couldn't listen anymore and thus, " I reached for the arm, which was less than one micron long but weighed more than Saturn, and time stood still / I knew I had to escape but every time I tried to flee, the record was in front of me." Genius.

"Only After Dark" is a Mick Ronson cover. Yes, Mick Ronson, who was Bowie's Ziggy Stardust-era guitarist (the one whose guitar Bowie went down on), before Bowie became the Thin White Duke and then starting jamming with Eno. I've never been able to find the original Ronson version of the song, but considering his glam rock roots, there's no way the song isn't an all-out guitar onslaught. The Human League's version is fully synthed up, more akin to something Eno would do than Ronson, only more directly poppy.

"Life Kills" and "Dreams of Leaving" are both very much anti-working-class conformity songs. "Life Kills" is all about the exhaustion of a busy business routine: "Your life is like a schedule / You run to meet the bills / No ones awake to tell you / Life kills". "Dreams of Leaving" is a bit more minimalist in sound, except for the intense synth noise that crops up right before the first verse. A melodica-esque keyboard comes in for a few lines. More layers show up after the first verse, but then fade away into what sounds like the beginning of another song. It begins to build up and then turns into a bass groove, when suddenly the bass drops and a synth wash introduces the second verse. Things get dramatic and then the nearly-six minute epic fades out. The lyrics are rather vaguely paranoid ("Someone's trying to stop us / There is someone in our party") but seem to focus on trying to get out of the mundane life ("I think I'm going North / and now's the time to leave").

"Toyota City" is an instrumental, presumably named to evoke mechanistic, futuristic imagery. After the weird "Crow and a Baby" ("A crow and a baby / Had an affair / The result was a landslide") comes the slightly poppy "The Touchables", a declaration that "People will hide indifference / Just to be touchable", that is, that people just want to be loved. I feel like the song is another voice-of-the-worker's-party sort of thing, just in tone, vocabulary, and topic, which is so very 80s and wonderful. Heaven 17 would follow up on this quite a bit, which might be apparent from their Penthouse and Pavement (1981) album cover, one of my favorites:

God, I love that cover. Look at how successful and happy the bandmembers are! Anyway, side two of Travelogue opens with "Gordon's Gin", an instrumental synth version of a jingle written by Jeff Wayne for a brand of gin. I don't claim to understand, since I haven't heard the original jingle, but most jingles are under thirty seconds and mostly vocal. This song is thee minutes of a fast drumbeat and some synth interplay. It sounds darker than any jingle for gin should be, but I'm not complaining.

"Being Boiled" is a re-recording of the band's first single (from 1978), with a dancy feel that seemingly indicted religious violence: "Listen to the voice of Buddha / He'll say carry on your slaughter". This is weird, however, since Buddha is about the least violent religious figure I've heard of. [Edit 2025.02.26: See the comments for more insight.] The song is followed by the warm, spacy closer "WXJL Tonight". I honestly can't figure out if there is a station with that call sign or not, but the song is a great lament for the passing of worthwhile radio DJs: "The way it was in the past / A long, long time ago / Before staff levels dropped / They used to listen to the radio / And listen to the DJ's talk". But now, "Automatic stations came / And sent them all away / And now I'm left alone". Makes me want to weep. But the music is so good! So many synthesizers!

Then we come to the bonus tracks on CD versions of the album. The first is the trio of tracks from the Holiday '80 EP. "Marianne" is straight synth-pop, but "Dancevision" is a dancy instrumental recorded in 1977 when just Marsh and Ware made music together as The Future. (Note that these are the same two members who later split from the Human League to form Heaven 17). Then comes a medley of Gary Glitter's (!) "Rock 'n' Roll" with Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing". Now, Gary Glitter is about the cheesiest glam rocker ever (I mean, look at his name), and also the sleaziest (he's in jail in Vietnam for child sexual abuse). Nonetheless, my favorite 80s bands seem to love him: Bauhaus would sometimes slip parts of "Do You Want to Touch Me? (Oh Yeah!)" into their cover of T. Rex's "Telegram Sam"; The Cure covered the same wonderfully-titled Glitter song every now and then; and the Sisters of Mercy covered "I Didn't Know I Loved You ('Til I Saw You Rock 'n' Roll)" (another great title) as late as 2001. Anyway, the medley also includes the world's second favorite proto-punker (after Lou Reed), Iggy Pop, who cowrote "Nightclubbing" with Bowie. (Pop is another favorite of the 80s crowd.) Hence, this medley is like a sort of 70s cover wonderland. It's so cheesy it hurts, but it hurts so right.

Anyway. Then comes both sides of the "Boys and Girls" single, which is post-split, so it only features one (not counting the projectionist) common member with the rest of the album, but sound-wise it still fits. The a-side isn't great, but it's fairly good. It seems to deal with youthful maturity, but it feels like the band is finding their direction post-split. The b-side, "Tom Baker" is a great instrumental synth exploration.

The "I Don't Depend on You" single, released in 1979 as "The Men", feels like a pop experiment, since the band was nowhere near as dance-poppy as this single is at that point in time. The title captures the lyrics, which actually kind of predict some of the feel of "Don't You Want Me" from two years later. It's not bad but just unabashedly poppy. The b-side, "Cruel", is just an instrumental dub sort of version. Nothing special.

Review:
The Human League are a quintessential synthpop band. You could call them New Wave or Post-Punk if you want, but they were self-declared electronic and pop music lovers, and to me that reads synth-pop. Travelogue is a straight ten-song wonder, with a broad range of topics (DJs, science-fiction weirdness, working class troubles, religion, sex, more weirdness), just like any good synth band should, and the sound of the synthesizer never grows old. This is perhaps why I (and so many 80s bands) love the synthesizer: it can do anything. Bass, drums, strings, noise, whatever, it's there. The Human League know how to use their synths to perfection, which is good, since that's the only instrumentation on the album. It also helps that the band writes well (although both covers work well after the band thoroughly rearranged them).

"The Black Hit of Space" warrants its own review for how awesome it is, and it's a pity it wasn't released as a single (the less interesting "Only After Dark" was the only real single from the album), since it is the one Human League song I'm most likely to play to friends. The song is so futuristic and paranoid, and the subject matter is just so weird yet captivatingly hilarious. If you can't take synthpop as well as I can, you should at least be able to marvel at the wonder of this song. I mean, there are great songs elsewhere on the album, like the also-weird-and-spacey "WXJL Tonight", but none take the cake so well as the Black Hit. (If only it actually was a hit...)

Scores:
Original release: A
Bonus tracks: C+
"The Black Hit of Space": A+

[Edit 2025.02.26: I don't think I'd rank the album so high anymore. "Black Hit" is still A+, but most of the rest just isn't on that level.]