Roger Dean – { feuilleton }

Occult rock: The Devil Rides In

The Devil rode in at the weekend on three shiny compact discs crammed with Satanic psychedelia and the pentagram-branded rock music of the early 1970s: 55 tracks in all. I’d been hoping for some time that an enterprising anthologist might put together an officially-sanctioned collection like the series of mixes compiled by The Ghost of the Weed Garden. Cherry Red Records are ideal candidates for the task, having distinguished themselves in recent years with a series of multi-disc compilations that mine specific periods of British music: psychedelia, heavy rock, folk, punk, reggae, post-punk, experimental electronics, electro-pop, and so on. The Devil Rides In bears a subtitle that ties the collection to the prime years of the Occult Revival, “Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1966–1974”, a period when the Aquarian transcendence of the hippy world was jostling with darker trends in the media landscape. 1967 was the year the Beatles put Aleister Crowley on the cover of the Sgt Pepper album; it was also the year that Hammer were filming their first Dennis Wheatley adaptation, The Devil Rides Out. The song of the same name by Icarus appears on the second disc of this compilation, a single intended to capitalise on the publicity generated by the film. For all the serious occult interest that flourished during by this period many of the cultural associations were frivolous or superficial ones, either cash-ins like the Icarus single or exploitations by those who followed in Dennis Wheatley’s wake. Serious occultists no doubt abhorred the exploitation but it helped create a market for Man, Myth and Magic magazine, and for all the reprints of grimoires and other magical texts that were appearing in paperback for the first time. I’ve always enjoyed the frivolous side of the Occult Revival, probably because I grew up surrounded by it. Without Ace of Wands and Catweazle on the TV I might not have been so interested in my mother’s small collection of occult paperbacks, or gravitated eventually to the Religion and Spirituality shelves of the local library.

The Devil Rides In was conceived, designed and annotated by Martin Callomon, working here under the “Cally” pseudonym he uses for many of his activities. The accompanying booklet is evidence of a labour of love, the detailed notes being illustrated throughout with Occult Revival ephemera: film posters and magazines (the inevitable Man, Myth & Magic), also plenty of paperback covers which tend towards the lurid and exploitational end of the magical spectrum (the inevitable Dennis Wheatley). Cherry Red always take care with their sleeve notes but Cally’s booklet design has gone to considerable lengths to track down many obscure book covers, some of which I’d not seen before. The same diligence applies to the music, with the proviso that compilations are often restrained by the hazards of licensing law. There’s a track list on the Cherry Red page but this doesn’t tell you that the collection is divided into eight themed sections:

1) Buried Underground
2) Phantom Sabbaths
3) Popular Satanism
4) She Devils
5) Folk Devils
6) Evil Jazz
7) Beelzefunk
8) Let’s All Chant

Many of the selections on the first disc are the kinds of songs I’d usually avoid outside this collection, the lumbering heavy rock that filled the Vertigo catalogue for the first half of the 1970s. But groups that you wouldn’t want to hear at album length become palatable when placed in a context such as this.

Among the immediate highlights I’d pick Race With The Devil by The Gun, already a favourite of mine by the group that launched Roger Dean’s career as a cover artist; Black Mass by Jason Crest, a psychedelic B-side whose subject matter and high-pitched wailing is a precursor of the heavy-metal future; and the perennially popular Come To The Sabbat by Black Widow. A few of the selections have been chosen more for their name than anything else, something I’m okay with so long as the choices are good ones. Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil, for example, is a drum-led instrumental with a musical theme swiped from Jimi Hendrix; it has nothing at all to do with the Devil but it’s still a great piece of music which was also a surprise UK chart hit in 1973. More of a reach is Magic Potion by The Open Mind, a song about psychedelic drugs not witches’ brews. I included this one on one of my psychedelic mixes so I can tolerate its presence here. Less tolerable is Long Black Magic Night by Jacula, an Italian prog band whose contribution features Vittoria Lo Turco as “Fiamma Dallo Spirito” stuck in one channel of the stereo mix where she intones monotonously in very poor English; the cumulative effect is diabolical in the wrong way. And I would have prefered Julie Driscoll’s long, slow version of Season Of The Witch instead of Sandie Shaw squeaking her way through Sympathy For The Devil. But you can’t always get what you want, as Mick Jagger reminds us elsewhere, something which is especially true of compilation albums.

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Eco Del Universo

Eco Del Universo, the ninth album by Mexican band Los Mundos, was released last month on Acid Test Recordings. I designed and illustrated the outer and inner sleeves for an album whose music is described on the group’s Bandcamp page as psychedelic rock. I’ve not seen a physical copy yet but the vinyl disc is available in two pressings that complement the colours of the cover.

The brief for this one was for something based on the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas, an overgrown park with accompanying hotel that Edward James spent many years and a great deal of money building in the Mexican jungle. James was a British aristocrat who fell for Surrealism in a big way in the 1930s, using his inherited wealth to support artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, while creating Surrealist-styled homes for himself, first at Monkton House in West Sussex then at Xilitla in Mexico. James and his jungle resort have been recurrent subjects here so I didn’t need much encouragement to create something based on his constructions. In the past I’ve described Las Pozas as unfinished but this suggests a scheme with a final goal in mind. I don’t think this was ever James’s intention. His creations are more like very large concrete sculptures rather than architecture, even though some of them have a recognisable architectural form. Finished or not, the structures are a unique hybrid of the purposeless architectural folly—a popular indulgence for British landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries—and caprices like the Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval.

My cover art is a fantasy on the fantasy which makes James’s improvisations look a little more planned than they are by mirroring their disposition. I also crowded together several of the constructions which at Las Pozas are in separate areas of the complex. Looking at the artwork again I’m reminded of some of Roger Dean’s views which wasn’t my intention originally. I think it’s the combination of unusual architecture, layered foliage and the treatment of light and shade. If the structures weren’t outlined and the sky was a Dean-like gradient there’d be even more of a similarity. The beautiful stellar photo is from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) whose images of the cosmos are free to use so long as you give them credit. This one was by Stéphane Guisard.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Secret Life of Edward James
• Palais Idéal panoramas
• Las Pozas panoramas
• Return to Las Pozas
• Las Pozas and Edward James

Shusei Nagaoka album covers

Out Of The Blue (1977) by Electric Light Orchestra.

Many different labels may be attached to the 1970s but it was definitely the science-fiction decade as much as anything else, a time when the use of SF imagery became a widespread trend, often superficially applied but there all the same. You see this in the music packaging of the period, and not only in the obvious enclaves of progressive rock. Here’s Motown Chartbusters Vol. 6 (1971) with a spaceship cover by Roger Dean; here’s Herbie Hancock on the cover of Thrust (1974) piloting his keyboard-driven craft over Machu Picchu while an alarmingly swollen Moon seems ready to crash into the Earth.

Out Of The Blue gatefold interior.

The exploitation of SF imagery on the covers of funk, soul and disco albums was much more widespread than the jazz world, and lasted long enough to join up with the emergence of synth-pop and electro in the early 1980s. The meticulous airbrush paintings of Shusei Nagaoka dominate this era and idiom, thanks in part to his covers for two of the biggest albums of 1977: Out Of The Blue by Electric Light Orchestra, and All ’n All by Earth, Wind & Fire.

All ’n All (1977) by Earth, Wind & Fire.

The latter doesn’t look especially science-fictional until you flip it over and its Egyptian scene morphs into a futuristic cityscape with a fleet of rockets heading for the stars. (That pyramidal building is based on one of Paolo Soleri’s hexahedron megastructures.) Many of the albums that followed this pair were jumping on the post-Star Wars/Close Encounters SF bandwagon but there were other reasons for funk and disco artists to embrace the Space Age, as Jon Savage has noted: “Disco’s stateless, relentlessly technological focus lent itself to space/alien fantasies which are a very good way for minorities to express and deflect alienation: if you’re weird, it’s because you’re from another world. And this world cannot touch you.”

Munich Machine (1977) by Munich Machine. (A Giorgio Moroder production.)

Nagaoka was in demand for his cover art even before hitching a ride to the top of the album charts so what you see here is a limited selection. As usual, there’s more to be seen at Discogs although I often wish they’d allow larger image uploads. Future Life magazine ran a feature about Nagaoka in October 1978 which includes a brief interview with the artist together with some biographical details.

Mandré Two (1978) by Mandré.

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A.R.T. art

Some Manuel Göttsching-related graphic ephemera. This 1971 flyer for Ash Ra Tempel seems to be a rare item, the only place I’ve seen it being inside one of the inserts for The Private Tapes, a series of six CDs limited to 1000 copies each that Manuel Göttsching released in 1996. I was lucky to buy these when they were first released. A double-disc selection from the series followed two years later but neither this nor the rest of the set have been reissued since, despite containing a wealth of previously unreleased recordings from Göttsching’s archives, including many live concert recordings of Ash Ra Tempel. The flyer was the work of Bernhard Bendig who also drew the sleeve art for the group’s first two albums.

Not as scarce, but not very visible either, is this painting of another somewhat wonky temple by P. Praquin for a 1975 reissue of two Ash Ra Tempel albums: Inventions For Electric Guitar (which isn’t really ART), and Seven Up, the ramshackle studio jam which is mostly spoiled by the bellowings of Timothy Leary and friends. Discover Cosmic was a short-lived series of double-disc reissues of albums originally released on Cosmic Music, an imprint of Barclay Records that repackaged releases from Ohr and Kosmische Musik for the French market. There were three volumes of Discover Cosmic, the other two showcasing Popol Vuh and “The Klaus Schulze Sessions”, this being the first Cosmic Jokers album plus Join Inn by Ash Ra Tempel. The mysterious P. Praquin was responsible for all three cover paintings of which this is the best, wonky or not, a variation on the church-as-spaceship idea that may have been borrowed from the Roger Dean cover for Space Hymns by Ramases. This is one of those graphic contrivances that I usually expect to find repeated elsewhere, although to date the only other example I’ve seen was a Viennese museum poster. But there are more than enough churches that resemble spaceships to give people ideas, especially recent constructions like the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. If you know of any other steeples blasting off then please leave a comment.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Manuel Göttsching, 1952–2022
• The kosmische design of Peter Geitner
• Raising the roof

Foss, Jodorowsky and low-flying spacecraft

Discovered last week in a local charity shop (and for a fraction of the usual asking price), 21st Century Foss, the Dragon’s Dream collection of Chris Foss paintings from 1978. Foss’s book covers were impossible to avoid in the Britain of the 1970s, often to a ridiculous degree when publishers would stick a spacecraft by the artist or one of his imitators on a book containing no spaceships at all. His ubiquity made him the first cover artist who registered with me as exactly that, an identifiable name whose work suggested that this kind of artistic activity might be something worth pursuing.

I bought a few of the books published by Dragon’s Dream/Paper Tiger in the late 70s/early 80s but many of them weren’t interesting enough to warrant the exhausting of my meagre finances. Ian Miller, yes; Chris Foss, no. Architecture, whether real or invented, was generally more interesting than spaceships, even when the latter were unique designs like the typical Foss behemoth. (There is architecture in many of Foss’s paintings but I preferred Roger Dean’s aesthetics, the fluid and organic buildings, the vehicles modelled on birds, fish and insects.) Foss also suffered from that process of mental evolution whereby you reject an early enthusiasm when you find something that has a more obsessive hold. In musical terms, his paintings were like glam pop, the first music that made a deep impression but which was swiftly displaced by progressive rock and electronic music. Despite the repudiation I still get a weird charge when I see one of his paintings, an instant jolt back to an adolescent mental space. His cover for Midsummer Century by James Blish does this to an excessive degree, being one of a handful of Foss pictures that caused me to attempt some imitative drawings of my own circa 1975. Those drawings, which went astray years ago, caused a minor stir of appreciation among schoolfriends, a reaction that made me realise I was doing something right, however amateurish the attempt.

Ballard’s Low-Flying Aircraft collection is labelled on the rear as “Fiction”, and is spaceship-free, whatever the cover may suggest.

21st Century Foss belies its title by being more than a simple parade of spacecraft designs. There are Foss covers that you never see in internet galleries—pictures of submarines, ships and aircraft from the Second World War—together with a few pieces used on the covers of crank titles. Ballard aficionados may like to know that the cover for the Panther paperback of Crash is reproduced here on a full page. The latter is a good example of the thinking in paperback publishing at the time: “Ballard is science fiction so we need an SF artist for this one!” Foss had earlier illustrated two volumes of The Joy of Sex so must have seemed an ideal match. According to Rick Poynor, the artist hated the novel while the author disliked the cover.

Foss’s book opens with a section about his designs for three feature films: Jodorowsky’s Dune, Superman and Alien. None of his concepts ended up on the screen but it’s good to see the Dune designs in print. This section is also prefaced by two pages of hyperactive hyperbole for Foss and his art from Alejandro Jodorowsky. The same text may be found at Duneinfo but it bears repeating here as a further example of the manic director in full flight. Incidentally, the “English magazine” that’s referred to is most likely Science Fiction Monthly for February 1974, an issue which contained a collection of Foss paintings plus an interview with the artist.

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