They’ve got… a Silver Machine May 14, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Uncategorized.trackback
Passing the time, given that I’ve been a bit indisposed recently, what should I stumble across but the following… Enjoy, where you can…
Hawkwind Silver Machine – the original of the species as it were…and still brilliant.
James Last – well, that was a surprise.
Motorhead – sort of muscular, even metallic, natch! I like it.
Hawkwind – Choose Your Masques Version, early 1980s commemorative version. Or so they said.
The Church from A Box of Birds – I like this one too.
The Sex Pistols 2008 – ah yes. Even back in the day this was a firm favourite on the Pistols set list.
Alien Sex Fiend – well… the redoubtable Mr. Fiend produces an interesting version.
Jarvis Cocker – and why not?
My second Silver Machine encounter of the week. Of course you can never have too many Silver Machine encounters. The other came on Simon Reynolds’ Blissblog site as part of a very enjoyable thing he’s running about great riffs of our time. I think WBS would particularly appreciate this site given his excellent and diverse taste in music, in fact I think quite a few people here would. Good old Hawkwind, this song was surprisingly popular on the pub jukeboxes of the West of Ireland aeons ago, I remember hearing it once in the Mayo village of Newport, probably because of the band’s Motorhead connection. Heavy Metal after all was once the musical lingua franca of kids whose parents listened to Country ‘N Irish.
Heavy Metal after all was once the musical lingua franca of kids whose parents listened to Country ‘N Irish.
A Crystal Swing version of Silver Machine would complete that particular circle.
Spacer Rock as opposed to Space Rock.
That’s extremely kind of you EC. Not sure it’s true though. Particularly since a week or two ago I made it to my first live gig in two years, a band with the letter K at the start of its name and S at the end (that too was about metal, lingua franca’s – shared friendships, nostalgia of sorts, etc, etc)… I must post up a report.
Re lingua franca, I think the older I get the more I think that’s true – albeit you could replace C’n'I with any other form you care to mention. But there was a class aspect to this as well, inevitably.
In the mid 80s I worked in a small youth club close enough to Coolock. Out of, say, twenty odd children in their early teens 18 were reggae fans. Two were metal heads. The 18 were solidly working class. The metal fans were more middle class – obviously the definitions are a bit imprecise, but I use the terms broadly.
That’s not an hard and fast rule. Lizzy, Motorhead had broader catchments, but I wonder if it is generally true in the particular in the Irish context. Of course another aspect is the nature of the music and experimentalism…
SoS, that’s the most appalling thing I’ve heard in a while.
Funny enough the opposite was true where I grew up, the most fanatical metallers were the lads from local housing estates, the harder they were the more Ac/Dc and Saxon patches and albums they had accumulated, it was also big among lads who went on to go building in England or worked in garages or as panel beaters at home. Though I take your point about a working class Dublin reggae thing. I remember in the early nineties being in a lock in at a pub in Talbot Street and listening to the customers sing along word and note perfect with every song from the Legend album. Crystal Swing are, of course, the musical equivalent of a senate speech by Terry Leyden or a letter from Frank Fahey to a constituent. I can hear their version of Silver Machine in my head this very second.
I think you’re right actually on thinking about it. That it was a working class Dublin thing rather than more broadly.
Silver Machine by CS. That’s an earworm if ever I heard one.
(raises fist and shakes it at Sonofstan)
Sorry should also add that in England in my experience it was also cross class but with large numbers of people on sites or from the traditional working class.
SoS, that’s the most appalling thing I’ve heard in a while.
You must let me play you some selections from the various ‘interesting looking’ Eastern European records I keep picking up……..
Yes. That would be a treat.
The class/ music divide appears to have intensified since we were kids. Indie music (which, metal aside, now just means ‘Rock’) is now entirely middle-class – both performers and audience – and Hip hop and Rn’B completely working class in audience (here in Dublin I mean).
It’s really noticeable these days in London though, that teenagers pay no attention to white music anymore. In Britain – generalising hugely – ‘rock’ is suburbs and provinces, Hip-hop, Grime, and various sub- forms of dance music rule the bigger cities.
Where though does electronica fit into this? It reminds me of how I always hated the acronym IDM “Intelligent Dance Music”.
The London teenagers are dead right, that’s where the creativity is these days. Grime, Dubstep et al seem to be made by people who are eager to express themselves and experiment for the joy and sheer curiosity of it. The lame sixties retreads which inhabit the indie scene now always seem to have one eye on the possibility of a record contract. The cutting edge of dance is roughly where post-punk, of blessed memory, used to be. I’d heartily recommend London Zoo by The Bug, one of the Burial albums or the Five Years of Hyperdub compilation as an example. Euro Trance, on the other hand, is the revenge of the Eurovision Song Contest on pop music. Though I’d still take it over Oasis.
In think the answer is probably ‘old blokes’ : )
Did/ does anyone ever dance to IDM?
Not that I ever heard.
I think that’s true… although once they were younger.
Trance would be a pretty popular in a lot of working class areas, as would whatever it is one calls that horrible helium voiced dance music.
That’s true, as was rave before it and dance in general.