The Beach Boys – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!

25 O’Clock (1985). Andy Partridge’s great cover design.

The DUKES say it’s time…it’s time to visit the planet smile…it’s time the love bomb was dropped…it’s time to eat music…it’s time to kiss the sun…it’s time to drown yourself in SOUNDGASM and it’s time to dance through the mirror. The DUKES declare it’s 25 O’CLOCK.

It was twenty-five years today—April 1st, 1985—that Virgin Records released what was supposed to be a reissue of a lost psychedelic album from the late 1960s, 25 O’Clock by The Dukes of Stratosphear. The catalogue number was WOW 1 and the vinyl label was printed with the old black-and-white Virgin logo by Roger Dean even though Virgin Records wasn’t founded until 1972. No one was supposed to know that the album was really a pastiche project by XTC but I don’t recall anyone actually being fooled by this, all the reviews acknowledged XTC as the originators, and band members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were happy to give interviews enthusing about their musical obsessions. As well as being incredibly successful artistically the album was a surprising commercial success which led the bemused record label to ask for a sequel. Psonic Psunspot followed two years later, and the Dukes’ vibe infected XTC’s own work for a while, with their 1988 album, Oranges & Lemons, pitched somewhere between the pastiches and XTC’s more usual sound .

Psonic Psunspot (1987). Design by Dave Dragon and Ken Ansell.

Continue reading “The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!”

The L.S. Bumble Bee

“Freak out baby, the bee is coming!”

The L.S. Bumble Bee, a single by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Decca F 12551, February 1967. Mistakenly included on some Beatles bootlegs in the Seventies, about which Dudley Moore commented:

Regarding The L.S. Bumble Bee, Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was a reference to drugs. The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles. But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us!”

Listen to it here. And while we’re at it, “You fill me with inertia!”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Joe Orton
• The trip goes on
• Albert Hofmann
• Please Mr. Postman
• All you need is…
• Hep cats

California boys by Mel Roberts

The Beach Boys got the California girls but it looks like Mel got the boys…some of them, anyway. Makes me wish I was back in Los Angeles again. More of Mel’s work here. Many of his models look like the “youngmen” of the period (late Sixties, early Seventies) that John Rechy writes about.

Queer Noises

Beyond Bowie and Frankie, there’s a whole secret history of gay pop, reports Alexis Petridis

‘Wilder, madder, gayer than a Beatle’s hairdo’

It was the love that dare not sing its name—or was it? Beyond Bowie and Frankie, there’s a whole secret history of gay pop, reports Alexis Petridis

Tuesday July 4, 2006

The year 1966 is known as rock’s annus mirabilis. It was the year the right musicians found the right technology and the right drugs to catapult pop into hitherto unimagined realms of invention and sophistication: the year of the Beatles’ Revolver, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. But the most astonishing record of 1966 did not emanate from the unbounded imagination of Brian Wilson, or from an Abbey Road studio wreathed in pot smoke. Instead, it was the work of hapless instrumental combo the Tornados.

By 1966, the Tornados’ moment of glory—with 1962 number one Telstar—had long passed; they hadn’t had a hit in three years and every original member had departed. The single they released that year, Is That a Ship I Hear?, was their last. Tucked away on its B-side, the track Do You Come Here Often? attracted no attention, which was probably just as well. A year before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, the Tornados’ producer, Joe Meek, had taken it upon himself to record and release Britain’s first explicitly gay rock song, apparently undaunted by his own conviction for cottaging in 1963. (more)

Tracklist
01. Jose: At The Black Cat 02:09
02. Rod McKuen: Eros 01:42
03. Mr. Jean Fredericks: Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty 03:56
04. Byrd E. Bath & Rodney Dangerfield: Florence of Arabia 03:40
05. B.Bubba: I’d Rather Fight Than Swish 03:16
06. The Kinks: See My Friend 02:40
07. The Tornados: Do You Come Here Often? 03:53
08. The Brothers Butch: Kay, Why? 03:13
09. Teddy & Darrel: These Boots 02:22
10. Zebedy: The Man I Love 03:09
11. Curt Boettcher: Astral Cowboy 02:18
12. Harrison Kennedy: Closet Queen 03:43
13. Polly Perkins: Coochy Coo 03:19
14. Michael Cohen: Bitterfeast 03:09
15. Jobriath: I’m A Man 03:30
16. Chris Robison: Lookin’ For A Boy 03:57
17. Peter Grudzien: White Trash Hillbilly Trick 02:56
18. Valentino: I Was Born This Way 03:20
19. The Miracles: Ain’t Nobody Straight In LA 03:43
20. The Ramones: 53rd And 3rd 02:19
21. The Twinkeyz: Aliens In Our Midst 03:17
22. Dead Fingers: Talk Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay 04:30
23. Black Randy & The Metro Squad: Trouble At The Cup 01:53
24. Sylvester: You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) 03:45

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gay book covers