Amerikaemia

The party stops here

Not so much a country as a state of mind. The FREEDOM to be as fat, stupid and greedy as you wanna be. Everything exists to be exploited and it’s your RIGHT to have it.

It’s nothing that a monumental shift in culture, politics and theology won’t fix.

I thought I would have to take this post down on 10 November, but now that the unthinkable has happened, The Hopkinsville Goblins will leave it up as a reminder that the end of civilisation as we know it is just one bad vote away.

Now there is a killer clown in the white house we really are playing Russian roulette with the future of the world. The equation: ignorance + greed + power = destruction.

The Hopkinsville Goblins have no claim to ownership of any of the material in this download. It is provided as a free community service for horrified onlookers everywhere.

Note this is generally pretty offensive so you've been warned.

Amerikaemia (Documentary sources with added grunch by The Hopkinsville Goblins)

We like it old school, so we’ve thrown in a B side as well.

For those of that might pray for help, a reminder that real divine feeling comes through the raw soul of primal rock’n’roll, no matter how many creeps want to tell you otherwise. And THAT freedom is owned by everyone.

The Voice of God (Iggy Pop/ James Williamson/ Ron Asheton/ Scott Asheton/ Traditional with added ankh by The Hopkinsville Goblins)

Download links below. Your choice to have different file types with artwork or just MP3s.

All files plus artwork

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Prunes are good for you

I once picked up a book in a library sale about a mysterious branch of the arts called process music. I didn’t know anything about it but it looked intriguing and it was only a couple of bucks so what the hell. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reads I’d had for a long time.

Process music, it turned out, is music that is created with a physical or experimental set up to create sounds with a minimum of human input. A primitive example is the Victorian self-playing piano, the pianola, that used punched paper rolls to activate the keys. People have recently programmed robots to physically play entire compositions using a similar principle. The logical modern equivalent of the pianola is techno, using MIDI driven processing to produce sounds with a minimum of active playing by the, umm, musicians.

Early exponents of process music were more likely to be scientists than musicians, like Leon Theremin who invented the instrument that carries his name. Later exponents were the likes of John Cage who physically manipulated conventional instruments like pianos to produce unusual and dissonant sounds. Interesting as it sounds, process music can be as dull as dishwater to listen to (did I mention techno already?). It only becomes interesting when the process used produces sounds that are so far out your mind can’t work out how it is done, or so weird they produce a physical reaction like fight or flight (have you ever seen a dog prick up its ears and sniff the air when it hears a strange noise – that’s what we are talking about). Music isn’t an intellectual exercise – it has to reach organs below the neck as well.

Technology opened up all sorts of new doors to process musicians. Drum machines and delay units, echoplex and tape manipulation. Throughout the seventies these became the tools of the avant garde. I’m sure John Cage would have loved to have got his hands on a synthesizer rather than assaulting pianos with hammers and screwdrivers, (although the synth wouldn’t have been half as much fun). Manipulating sound is now as easy as a quick download and plug in to your sound editing software, and a MIDI keyboard can be made to sound like a brass band. The possibilities are endless right? Well, yes and no. Using technology for technology’s sake is where the edge gets rubbed off. Anyone worth their salt following a process to make music knows that there has to be a human hand behind it, otherwise there is nothing to feel.

This very long intro brings me to the main subject of this post: the industrial music of the early 80’s.

Industrial music gets its name from Industrial Records – the label that was home to Throbbing Gristle in the late 70s – early 80s. Also included under this banner are groups like Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo and (to a lesser extent) the Virgin Prunes, who I’ll get to later.

Throbbing Gristle are the grand daddies of industrial music (or grand trans-gender omni-sexual beings if you believe Genesis P Orridge these days). Their music basically defines the genre. Electronic rhythms splattered liberally with sound effects, warped instruments, snatches of dialogue and tortured vocals producing an overall effect like an analogue computer having a nightmare. Powerful stuff. The uninitiated should check out “20 Jazz Funk Greats” as a starting point. It’s their most accessible work (if accessible is even a word you can associate with TG) and features a few tracks you can even quietly get your groove on to. “DOA” also has its moments, particularly the uber-creepy Hamburger Lady and the almost poppy AB/7A (catchy title, eh). Serious devotees can try and track down the suitcase full of live cassettes they released that document just about every gig they did between about 1976 – 1980. If you dare.

Other industrial acts definitely have their moments, particularly Cabaret Voltaire who grew from a very noisy art assault collective into one of the gruntiest of the early house outfits (Prodigy owed their entire existence in the 90s to these guys). The Cabs largely sit outside process music, so their relevance here is limited to their first couple of albums and their love of using snatches of long wave radio dialogue in their compositions. “Mix Up” and “The Voice of America” are the ones to check out.

I could waste space talking about lesser known acts, but I want to spend the rest of this post talking about my homeboys the Virgin Prunes. My homeboys in a spiritual rather than physical sense you understand. I grew up (a while ago it has to be said) in the South Island of New Zealand. Things were pretty clear cut back then. You were a part a small population, you dressed conservatively, acted stoically and liked rugby. Or you didn’t. If you didn’t you needed to prepare yourself for a life spent on the outside looking in and being treated with the contempt that came with it. Even surviving that kind of shit was a challenge, let alone carving out a life for yourself. The Virgin Prunes came from Ireland, where you were part of a small population, you dressed conservatively, acted stoically and stuck to your creed. Notice the similarities?

For a bunch of artistic, questioning, extrovert freaks like these guys, life was always going to be a bit different. They started life as a group of outsiders that coalesced into a sort of social club, interestingly including Bono and The Edge from that other Irish group. This loose gaggle adopted new names and started a performance group to express themselves (they also came up with the names of the aforementioned individuals – how many of you knew Bono was named after a brand of hearing aid?). The Virgin Prunes (which is Irish slang for a naïve individual) developed several different faces and as such are an unclassifiable act. They sadly got lumped in with the gothic movement by lazy UK music critics based on no more than the fact that they used heaps of hair-gel and wore make up. But then so did Motley Crue, right. The Virgin Prunes were way weirder than the pretense any gothic poser could ever put on. Their stage show was a Dadaist outing complete with props, performance art and cross-dressing. They put on multi-media exhibitions in art galleries. They played a close approximation of rock music on occasion and they made some of the most interesting process music ever recorded.

It’s that process music that I always go back to with them. Their more conventional music (and some of it was reasonably straight forward it has to be said) hasn’t aged so well. It still kicks 10 shades of shite out of almost everything “alternative” these days though so don’t get me wrong. But their in-the-studio creations are adventurous in the extreme, using everything from birds to iron bars to make their indefinable sounds. And silence too. They use silence better than anyone since Philip Glass.

The tracks I’m talking about exist across all their recordings but are mixed in with the more conventional stuff, so you’ll need to make a playlist. The studio half of the “Heresie” album has some seriously ethereal music mixed in with some Irish sing-alongs, noisy primal rock and other demented ramblings. The original box set came out as two 10 inch records with a handful of pamphlets containing surrealistic writing and nasty art work. Good luck finding a copy and no, you can’t buy mine. “A New Form of Beauty” is where the rubber really hits the road. This originally came out as a set again containing a 7 inch single, 10 inch EP and a 12 inch LP with a cassette thrown in for good measure. The whole thing acts as the soundtrack for the art installation that accompanied its release. I paid an absurd amount for it on eBay (sans cassette) before it was re-released on CD a few years back. It has a similar mixture of styles to Heresie, but the overall feel is much more claustrophobic and intense. It ranges from barely-moving, cracked-ambient, inner-space explorations like Abbagal, which are vaguely unsettling, to The Beast, which is as intense as hell and just flat out terrifying. Play that at maximum volume and watch the curtains start twitching in your neighbours place. I’ve done it. It’s fun.

But getting back on topic, for their best process music you have to go to the Over the Rainbow compilation. That ties up a lot of the loose ends and rarities they did as one-offs on long deleted compilations and cassettes. The notion of a group is blown away on these pieces and the creative collective takes over. The CD re-issue excludes the sleeve notes that accompanied the original LP release, so the descriptions of the processes they followed is absent. That’s a real shame because without them the tracks loose some of their wow! factor and they become merely absorbing and interesting instead. The two key tracks are Mad Bird in the Wood and Third Secret.

Since you won’t have the sleeve notes handy, here is what they roughly say about these two. Mad Bird in the Wood was recorded in their ramshackle studio in Dublin that featured a crumbling roof that allowed pigeons in to roost. Some of the pigeons would get inside and fly around the rafters looking for an escape route. The band came up with the idea of recording their fluttering with added ambient noise. So they slung a collection of microphones over the rafters and set them swinging so they would feedback off each other. Next they chased the birds through the swinging mics and rolled the tape. The resulting sounds were then played backwards and mixed with some additional electronic effects. End result – one of the most bizarre and ethereal pieces of music ever recorded. 

Third Secret is equally spontaneous. When they were installing the artworks for the New Form of Beauty exhibition they had to set up a bunch of scaffolding in the gallery to reach the ceiling. One of them came up with the idea of blind-folding themselves and climbing the scaffolding using nothing more than iron bars to feel their way up. The clanking of the bars on the scaffolding was recorded and mixed with some piano chords and whispered prayers. End result – surrealist sacred music serving as a comment on blind devotion. Salvador Dali would have loved it.

Like my homeboys, The Hopkinsville Goblins like playing around with found sounds and processes. They give it to me as a done deal. There’s plenty of it on Posts from Planet Earth. Their favourite instrument is the steel watering can on my kitchen window. It’s the first thing you hear on the album.

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

Who stole the rock'n'roll?

Whenever I can’t find something around the house I usually try to find someone else to blame for losing it. It’s one of those things. It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it. Usually it’s sitting right in front of my nose if I could be bothered to look for it. Through a similar process the media can easily be blamed for the disappearance of artists, genres or even whole aspects of culture. Something is hot property for a while then it loses its mass appeal and it vanishes in front of your very eyes. It’s still there, hasn’t been wiped off the face of the earth, you just need to look beyond the obvious to find it - which is something most people can’t be arsed with. Rock’n’roll disappeared for about five years once in this very way.

Rock history has it that when the empire was being forged there was only one king of rock’n’roll, and that king was one Elvis Aaron Presley. Never mind that rock’n’roll had been around for a good old time prior to his discovery by down-home blues label Sun Records in Memphis. Thanks to this special combination, an underground music played by a segregated race of people in run down across-the-tracks clubs was suddenly on prime time TV and the sight of a white guy playfully gyrating his hips seriously offended middle-WASP America. So it is relayed in the book of Genesis in the bible of rock.

Most students of such tomes know the rest. By the end of the fifties Elvis got drafted, Buddy Holly died, Jerry Lee Lewis turned into a cousin-marrying pariah. The music biz came up with lame and tame crooners to take their place and that nasty rock’n’roll thing was deliberately ignored in the hope it would go away. Everything stateside returned to its pre-rock status quo until the British invasion forced rock back into the media eye again in the mid-sixties. Then rock musicians discovered LSD and things really went west (literally). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The lesson for the congregation today is that, far from disappearing, rock in the early sixties survived and thrived back down in its underground home while Elvis was being paraded around in his uniform and Pat Boon was doing wimped-out Little Richard covers for the masses. And far from just retreating back to its original source, it expanded into a new home in the low-rent clubs of urban white America. It’s a neglected chapter of rock history but its well worth digging into. The original chitlin circuit that produced sensational early rockers like Little Richard and Ray Charles kept on keeping on as it always had and would later in the sixties provide the world with a certain James Marshall Hendrix. The urban white clubs, on the other hand, dispensed with the soul and instead picked up on the beat and the greasy/sleazy aspects of what rock brought to the table.

A taste of what this side of American culture was like can be found in the recent and essential biography of Jerry Lee Lewis by Rick Bragg. Dodgy managers, we-never-close hours, pills, booze, sex and violence. The classic rock’n’roll stew. All in all, the perfect environment for the devil to do his work. Depending on which part of the states you are talking about, the adoption of sleazoid rock pushed country or jazz out, and the evening’s entertainment often included the addition of stage shows featuring strippers and/or stand up comedians. Jazz lived on through the addition of brass to the standard rock line up, and the drums were pushed more up front giving things an even more greasy big band sound. Think Las Vegas and New Orleans, LA and Houston. Anywhere people splashed money, got loaded and looked for a good time. Salt Lake City? Not so much.

It would be difficult to point out any one artist to represent all of this, since so much of it was going on under the radar. People might record a single or three, but the action was centred so much on the live show that the need to do hard work promoting a record was pointless.

There are a few compilation series that focus on this forgotten chapter of rock’n’roll, and you need to check them out, so get googlin’ (there are/were some great blogs around housing them). The Born Bad series, featuring gems like “Funnel of love” by Wanda Jackson, covers the rockabilly ground later popularised by The Cramps. Even better are the six Las Vegas Grind volumes, focussing more of the sleazoid club sounds described above. There are some real turkeys included amongst the gems, but that’s half the fun. This is taken to even wilder extremes by the Wildsville! and Wowsville! compilations that go beyond mere sleaze into certifiable madness. Listen to this stuff and then even try to think of a modern equivalent. Actually don’t bother – there isn’t any.

My little guys bring you a little teasin’ taste on “How much is that bust of Elvis in the window?” on the album. If the above sounds good to you, check it out. Just don’t forget your gigavator.

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

The image has cracked

People do messed up things when they’re drunk don’t they. Most times you get away with it with just a red face and some humble pie. Other times the effects are more long lasting. Take Steve Jones for example. The Sex Pistols gonzo guitarist was always destined for infamy of one kind or another, but the planets really lined up when the band was invited onto the Bill Grundy Today show on 1 December 1976 as a last minute replacement for Queen. Steve and crew were dumped in the hospitality room with free food and booze and no adult supervision. By the time the five minute call arrived Steve was well into his second bottle of wine.

As you can see, Bill Grundy himself was a jaded old windbag with nothing but contempt for the motley crew of urchins that soon draped themselves across his furniture, followed by a gaggle of equally dodgy looking supporters forming a ring behind them. One of said supporters is the soon-to-be-infamous-in-her-own-right Siouxsie Sioux, who quickly caught old Bill’s eye. After a gnarly clip of the band performing No Fun, some brief and fairly mindless banter with the band ensues, before Bill receives some lip from our Siouxsie when he turns his attention the supporter’s way. Not missing a beat he quickly fires a sleazy pass at her as a come back. That's the cue for Steve (who is obviously a gent deep down inside) to come to her aid with a volley of beepable bullets aimed directly at old Bill’s head, abetted by Bill himself giving it the old “is that all you’ve got” bravado. Quality entertainment! But not in 1976. The reaction in the press was just north of completely over the top. People just didn’t swear on the telly back then old bean.

From that moment on the otherwise invisible street phenomenon known as Punk Rock became tabloid fodder and became engraved in the history of the world as Bad Music played by Bad People.

The reality was that groups of young kids in Britain and America had been making music on a DIY level for at least two years prior to the Pistols appearance on the Grundy show, but none of them had a label for what they did. This was probably because each of these groups had quite different approaches to their creative endeavours. You couldn’t throw a net around them all and say “that’s punk rock” like you could two years later. In New York everything was centred on CBGBs where groups as varied as The Ramones, Suicide and Mink DeVille treaded the same boards, with the only similarity between them being that none of them sounded like Linda Rondstat. In Britain the Pistols were in the audience at 101ers gigs where pre-Clash Joe Strummer was playing lumpy R&B, while down the road polio victim Ian Dury was breaking all the rules by singing in cockney slang. Throbbing Gristle were melding primitive electronics with nihilistic performance art while up north Mark E Smith and the Fall were performing poetry pieces over simple Casiotone-and-guitar backing music. None of this was a threat to the established order and it probably would have stayed that way if Steve hadn’t hit the Blue Nun quite as hard in the Thames TV green room.

As Punk Rock had now been labelled as A Risk To Society it needed to be formally identified. The media obliged by defining Punk Fashion so that old ladies would know who to avoid in the street. Punk rockers themselves got into the football crowd mentality by defining their own take on the music, willingly supported by kingpins like Johnny Rotten who threw down the lines of acceptable punkness for everyone punk enough to follow (including members of his own band as it turned out). Anything identifiable as being un-punk was disparaged and banished from the new punk order. Trenches were dug in society around the new stink in town, protests were held, music was banned, letters flew at the editor. The end result on the street was if you were punk you were either in or out based on the simple recipe of having short fast songs with no guitar solos and no fancy words. That was the uniform and badge you wore. That and short hair. It was ironic that a DIY movement initially based on creativity and individuality was overtaken by an omnipresent facism that banished individual creativity in favour of mob rules.

So why are we worried? Well, we’re not really, but the lesson here is that unless you are determined, your attempts at individual expression will be threatened by turdheads with their own barrow to push. Not even muti-national corporate turdheads, but the turdheads in your very neighbourhood (I feel a song coming on, don’t you…).

For those who are interested in recordings made before punk became a dirty word there are a few recordings that are well worth checking out. The aforementioned 101ers and Ian Dury. The Fall. The initial output of The Damned, ATV and The Boys in the UK. Likewise The Ramones, Television and The Modern Lovers in the States. All high energy music providing all important teenage kicks without the unimportant Rules. Don’t get me wrong, all of the stuff produced during the initial punk explosion was vital music, and its impact went far and wide, but it became very derivative very fast and by 1978 was virtual self-parody. Fortunately there were enough creative geniuses in that first wave of punk to move on into completely new territory without getting bogged down. Some astonishingly good music was recorded in the period 1978-1982 in all different corners of the world.

It’s geniuses like those that eliminate the gravity that might otherwise hold the Hopkinsville Goblins down. How high do they fly? Check out the links below and judge for yourself:

Get it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

We have friends on Planet Gong

Aliens have been involved in the rock’n’roll world before. Oh yes. Back in the seventies it was almost fashionable to have some kind of interstellar hook up. But the groups who took it beyond fashion into an all enclosing philosophy were the genius musical collectives of Gong and Parliament. In fact they were so out there they almost came across as aliens themselves.

I am not an alien. Honest. My little guys are though, and they love Gong. They also get down to Parliament when it’s party time, but they thrive continually on the inner/outer space explorations of Daevid Allen’s madcap gang.

I discovered Gong via Hawkwind. I was told by a complete stranger that if I listened to Hawkwind I needed to hear Gong. And they were right. The fact that so much brilliance could be combined with so much lunacy was a revelation. Maybe that’s why my little guys picked on me. I tend to crank up the spacey guitar on occasion to see where it will take me. Who knew, huh?

Gong spread the gospel of the Pothead Pixies to the world over the course of three essential albums in the early seventies. Starting with Flying Teapot, then into Angel’s Egg and finally You they took jazz-rock fusion and turned it into ridiculous spaced out fun. That is an achievement on its own given how po-faced most jazz-rock practitioners were at the time, even those that were already in an alien frame of mind. Sun Ra anyone?

The best of the bunch in my humble opinion is Angel’s Egg simply because of the process followed in its creation. It was largely recorded in the open air at night in the woods behind the French farmhouse the collective was communally calling home. You can sense the herbal and fungal influences, and smell the wine and smoke, in almost every track.

Psychedelia is a much misused term in music, so let’s try a definition: Psychedelic music takes you outside of your conscious self and transports you to places outside of time and space. That’s a starting point anyway.

There are very few genuinely psychedelic tracks, let alone albums, ever recorded. Country Joe and the Fish and Mad River’s minor key explorations. Jimi Hendrix at the wild end of his first three albums. Brian Eno’s Another Green World. You can fossick around mentally and drag out a few more less obvious ones, but Angel’s Egg is the doozey of all psych song cycles. The range of styles on show is as wide as you can imagine, and the kicker tracks define acid rock (The Other Side of the Sky, I Never Glid Before). Pysch needs a balance between light and dark to work best. Consequently this is a comedy show as much as a head trip.

The other two albums in the trilogy cover similar territory, but without the wide range of styles. Flying Teapot has epic length jams and is the most straight ahead of the three. On You the concept is starting to fray around the edges, but the high points are like the peaks of the pyramid on the cover. Master Builder is worth the price of admission alone. The Pothead Pixie trilogy is one set of albums that needs the deluxe package treatment (it probably has but I can’t be arsed googling it right now).

After You the membership of Gong underwent a quantum shift. Daevid Allen left temporarily, followed by first mate Steve Hillage, leaving the rest of the group to drift into more standard fusion territory.

Ironically psych fell out of favour at the end of the 1980s just as technology was making genuine psych explorations more doable. The focus instead went on introversion as the “alternative” to makin’ money and chasin’ celebrity. Call it a sign of the times. Tough times lead to more conservative choices. It’s not a complete shame, but it has made some of the more interesting possibilities in music less likely to emerge. It’s that zeitgeist thing again.

The Hopkinsville Goblins wanted to highlight Gong so their friends could get a bit of attention. You can spot the similarities between them, it’s pretty obvious. The big difference is around the edges. Gong were too gentle for some of the harder sounds my little guys like to produce. My little guys like to work hard and play hard, but they agree with the main philosophy of the Pothead Pixies: it’s all far too serious to be serious about.

Get ‘em all and find out for yourself, starting right here:

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer and Google Play, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

Keep it simple

David Bowie is credited with saying that the 21^st Century began in the 1970s. Looking at the way history has gone that statement is hard to argue with as musicians and producers are still plundering the vaults of 70s and 80s artists well into the second decade of said century, with arguably little if anything original emerging despite the vast leaps in available technology.

With the 70s spawning both the arty creativity of the Roxy Music / Brain Eno school of music and the compulsory boogie of the disco dinosaur it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the early 1980s saw bands combining both in the wake of the initial punk explosion as they sought to ride further on that high energy wave. The need to dance while using your head created a crucial niche in the post punk landscape that was neatly filled by bands like Japan, Gang of Four and the main subject of this post: Simple Minds. That connection was brought full circle by Talking Heads when they enlisted Brian Eno to produce the monumental Remain in Light album, but I digress.

Simple Minds started out as a fairly non-descript punk rock band called Johnny and the Self-Abusers in Scotland’s largest city of Glasgow, led by Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill. Life in Glasgow back then would have been, umm, challenging to say the least, so music was really the only way out, unless you wanted to play football (which Jim is also quite good at apparently).

Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill first met at their local pre-school and have maintained a friendship and creative relationship throughout their lifetime. That’s a remarkable feat in itself, but their peak as a unit came in the short period between 1979-1982 when they included Mick MacNeil, Derek Forbes and Brian McGee in the line-up. The sort of driving futuristic grooves they produced on the four albums they recorded during that time have never been equalled. It was the result of the individual talents of the band members hooking into the zeitgeist of the time, producing music without second guessing themselves. That sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. (You have to have a zeitgeist to start with, but I digress again).

Along with Dave Allen from Gang of Four / Shriekback, Derek Forbes is one of the few British bass players that could swim in the same liquid funk pool as the likes of Bootsy Collins and Tony Fisher in the States. His bass lines were so deep you could dive into them and still not reach the bottom. I’d challenge anyone with a pulse to sit still through tracks like Sweat in Bullet and Love Song off the Sons and Fascination album, but his earlier work on Real to Real Cacophony and Empires and Dance also has to be felt to be believed.

Couple that bass playing with the drums of Brian McGee and you have a rhythm section that functions like a high performance machine. One of their songs isn’t called Factory for nothing. With the epic length of some of their songs, Mr McGee sounds like the sort of guy that could lay down a pounding hypnotic beat forever if he had to. No flash rolls, no solos, just powerfully intricate patterns that eliminate all idle thought processes and make you focus entirely on the rhythm.

Charlie Burchill’s guitar playing and Mick MacNeil’s keyboards round out the sound. To say they found their own sound on their instruments would be a massive understatement. The combination of atmospherics with impressive technique is what separated them so far from the hideous synth-and-over-flanged-guitar pack in the early 80s. And live they had the skills to jam. A Flock of Seagulls anyone? Comsat Angels? The Fixx? Not ringing any bells. That’s because those other groups were shite in comparison. They had more Max Factor than X factor. Musically Simple Minds had the X factor in spades.

The last element of Simple Minds is Jim Kerr. His lyrics and vocals functioned in the space between the guitar and keyboards and acted like another atmospheric instrument. There are no sing along choruses or even coherent verse lines in the songs on those albums. That freed your mind to be the passenger while your body was pulverised into submission by Forbes and McGee. Then Charlie and Mike walk in to tease your imagination and take you to foreign lands mentally. Jim supplied the travelogue, like a half-heard bus tour guide speaking in a foreign language you half understand. Live his presence added to the mystique by stalking the stage like a slightly bewildered time traveller, responding to the sounds in unpredictable ways and generally being spontaneous and magnetic.

That brings us to the albums. Real to Real Cacophony is their second album and it is the raw form of their next two efforts. There are a few dull patches on this album but they simply serve to highlight how brilliant the rest is. There are a few abstract punky pieces to try and process through the first half of the LP and then they suddenly hit you with the pounding grooves of Premonition and Changeling. There is no looking back and you are in totally unfamiliar but enthralling territory. Like a trip through the back streets of a strange city – a wild ride that’s over too soon.

That effect is even more pronounced on Empires and Dance. That album basically is a sonic trip through a collection of interesting European cities complete with soldiers, lonely people and millionaires, all underwritten by a cold and distant feeling of paranoia and powerlessness. This is one impressive album. It’s probably their highest artistic achievement. I Travel is a punishing dance track and is the first indication of the how lethal the Forbes and McGee combination had become in the one year gap between this and the previous album. The epic grooves reach their peak on This Fear of Gods and Thirty Frames a Second. All resistance is now futile.

Sons and Fascination then takes us to the States where things are warmer but the people are just as messed up. Greyhound buses, dangerous strangers and the absence of anything approaching love seep out of the songs, but the grooves pull you into the confusion, they never chase you away. You are up for the fight and by the end of it you are justifiably exhausted but hungry for more. There is a partner album called Sister Feelings Call that is basically an extension of Sons and Fascination. I think of the two as a double LP. This album has a neat connection to the pre-punk creative powerhouse Gong (who are the subject of the next post), in Steve Hillage, who produced these two albums. On paper it’s a strange combination but if you look deeper there are obvious connections. It highlights the point made earlier about groups at this time looking beyond the obvious to expand their musical range.

 The next album, New Gold Dream was the last made by this line up and the writing was starting to appear on the wall. Brian McGee was on his way out and Jim was developing the grandiose sense of self-importance that would turn them into a stadium rock band by the mid-80s. The music was lighter and the grooves more summery. It is still a great record, but it hasn’t aged as well as the others. Too much reliance on synths in the sound, not enough slamming beats. Hunter and the Hunted is one of their best tracks though so don’t get me wrong. There is brilliance included. It just doesn’t transport you in the same way the others do. In terms of looking beyond again – that track features a keyboard solo by jazz giant Herbie Hancock. That should give you an indication of how seriously they were being taken musically at the time.

So how does all of this relate to The Hopkinsville Goblins? The recipe of Sons and Fascination can be heard in places on Posts From Planet Earth. That’s not saying they can be directly compared. My little guys would never be that arrogant. They just do what they like to do. And they do like to draw connections between what they do and earlier sounds to prove that the best bits in music transcend time. Those bits transcend because they dive into what people respond to on a primal level. The Rhythm. Chuck in some extra blues flavour and added guitar spice if you want. Mix it up and see what comes out. Is it Michelin star or fast food? The proof is in the tasting. That’s creativity without second guessing. Chuck away the book and use The Force.

So what are you waiting for? Forget about chasing that Pokemon - just go to one of these sites below and check out the pig friggin’ album already! And while you’re at it get those Simple Minds albums. Your life will be poorer if you don’t.

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

POSTS FROM PLANET EARTH

The Hopkinsville Goblins made their first appearance in rural Kentucky in 1955 and have popped up all over the world ever since. They love people and like to play, but too much contact drains their powers. A close encounter with a backwoods musician led to the formation of a creative bond that has extended out to the writings contained here. These little guys are interstellar nomads that speak the universal language: music. The posts on this blog contain the wisdom gained from riding the pure thrill of sound. They highlight essential emissions, in no particular order, from great musicians past, present and future.

If it's fake it won't fly.

If you like the ideas shared on these pages you should get the first Hopkinsville Goblins album, Posts From Planet Earth. Seventeen tracks of all original intergalactic electro-acoustic punky funk-rock.


This album starts with direct messaging then travels into outer space via some close encounters here on Earth. When it returns we are down south but heading north, until at the we hit the floor with the robots and hacks doing The Imitation.

It was recorded in different basements, living rooms and garages around New Zealand by Alvis Impulsive channelling the Hopkinsville Goblins creative power. In other words they mowed messages in his lawn and told him when to get his guitar out. The result is the musical matrix you can now hear. Use it wisely and often until your subconscious is full. Remember: it’s no game.

We need you to move now.

Find it on Amazon, I-Tunes, Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Bandcamp, or from any of the purveyors of fine sounds listed on this site.

Or try before you buy on Soundcloud or Youtube.

Words, music and production by Alvis Impulsive; (P) and (C) Banzona Music 2016