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Manchester bomb

It was ten years ago today that the IRA exploded a 3,300lb bomb in the centre of Manchester. Pictures below show the destruction in Corporation Street and the way the street looks now after several years’ rebuilding. 200 people were injured as police tried to evacuate the area. I was several miles away at the time but still heard the explosion. The truck containing the bomb was parked just by the postbox which nevertheless survived intact (well, they are made of cast iron).

Despite the devastation, most people now agree that the IRA did the city a favour by forcing large-scale rebuilding of an area spoiled by the bad retail architecture of the 1960s. The city would have changed over time anyway, it always has (and, indeed, still is); the bomb acted as a catalyst that forced the pace of that change.

Exposure by Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp’s 1979 album, Exposure (DGM0601), was intended to form part of a trilogy together with Peter Gabriel’s second solo album and Sacred Songs, by Daryl Hall. Fripp produced all three albums and also plays on all three. As things turned out, the scheme was too much for “dinosaur” (Fripp’s term) record company executives, they regarded Hall’s album as uncommercial then buried its release.

Exposure is (for me) the most successful of the three. Although it mixes styles and vocalists (Daryl Hal, Peter Hammill, Terry Roche and Peter Gabriel singing his own Here Comes The Flood), it manages to maintain a consistent atmosphere very much influenced by Fripp’s life in New York and his connections with the NYC New Wave of the time (he played on Fade Away And Radiate by Blondie). It also forms the bridge between the King Crimson of old and what would become the Eighties’ Crimson. Fripp’s experimental side is to the fore here, with the first showcasing of his “Frippertronics” in a musical setting and many taped conversations being mixed into the music.

The new CD set released this week manages to reinvent the album to some degree, presenting the original album on one disc then a whole disc of different vocal mixes on the other, some of which use different singers, such as Daryl Hall singing on tracks that featured Peter Hammill originally. The sound is also considerably enhanced, making the heavier pieces sound especially ferocious. An album that’s nearly thirty years old suddenly sounds fresh again.

More details after the jump.

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György Ligeti, 1923–2006

Gangsters on DVD

“Gangsters is arguably the most unusual series ever shown on British television. Produced by BBC Pebble Mill between 1975 and 1978, what began as a tough and uncompromising attempt to depict Birmingham’s underworld had by the end of its run become a fully fledged work of…what?”

What indeed… Along with The Prisoner, my favourite British TV series. Patrick MacGoohan and Rover have the edge but Gangsters was still something else, the product of a period when the BBC was actively encouraging experimentation and the pushing of dramatic boundaries. Pulpy, trashy, provocative, thrilling and, in the later episodes, downright surreal… Hard to believe now that this was primetime viewing; British television was a unique place in the 1970s.

• Episode List

• Series Overview

• Interview with writer Philip Martin

Sandy Denny

“We don’t hear Sandy Denny on the radio these days. Her records, few that they are, don’t fit the current formats, don’t send the programmers into paroxysms, don’t have listeners voting in. She couldn’t be considered for Sixties, Seventies hit nostalgia; she never had hits. Rock album stations? Never sold enough albums. Even Nick Drake sneaks into the odd Easy Listening show, the music lulling and deceiving, with its attractive surfaces hiding the pain within, something romantic for a cult to cling to. But where is Sandy’s cult? Where are the graveside vigilants à la Jim Morrison? The colour supplemental cultural dissections? The South Bank Show eulogies, the bad TV- and film-biopics telling us who should be important in our lives? Somewhere the taste gurus have failed the flock, have failed to tell us, after twenty years of hindsight opportunity, that Sandy Denny was the greatest British female artist of her generation.”

Richard Thompson