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Reading about neolithic monuments, folk traditions and the re-enchanting of the British landscape, & Julian Cope appears in the Avebury chapter, so I'm listening to his albums Jehovahkill & 20 Mothers, which have a high quotient of lyrical & musical relevance to these topics. Julian was well into his Modern Antiquarian phase with these recordings, including songs and poems about stone circles, henges and paganism. It's a mood! 🪨🛸
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I'm up to David's 1973 album, Pin Ups, in which he glams up some of his favourite songs by bands from the '60s, some of which had played the same circuit of pubs and community centres he emerged from himself. There's a couple of bonus tracks on this disc, including Bruce Springsteen's Growing Up, which David had seen him play at Max's Kansas City a few months earlier. I love that David respects the songs while infusing them with his own energy ⚡

I enjoyed this chance find of a detective mystery involving government corruption, shady business dealings, cynical emotional manipulation and malignant jealousy. And who knew that train timetables could be so murderously interesting? (Ok, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, etc, etc. ?)
I paired this with The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1964 Jazz Impressions of Japan, as it has a track, "Toki's Theme", the book having a character of this name. ⬇️

I know I'm at risk of making my Litsy feed a David Bowie channel, but I picked up a little bargain from Vinyl Finders yesterday: This box set has a 48-page booklet of rare photos and commentary on David's pivotal year of 1970, and two discs of rare recordings, some of which I don't already have. It's a great soundtrack to the Rainbowman book I'm reading about the recording of Bowie's albums 🤩 A snip for a tenner! 💸
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As well as being a professional storyteller, Lisa Schneidau is an ecologist and environmental lobbyist, all three aspects of which she brings to these retellings of traditional stories dealing with forest lore. Each section is prefaced with a short commentary on what the tales can teach us about the ecosystem and climate change. My only reservation being her advocacy of culling wild deer to encourage forest regeneration - I'm not an ecologist, ⬇️

In 2000, Lou presented a musical, POEtry, based on the works of EAP. In 2003 he released a concept album, The Raven, based on the musical, which I've finally got hold of. It's an amazing amalgam of musical styles: rock, electronic, avant-garde, contemporary classical, soul, with guest artists including David Bowie, Anohni and Laurie Anderson. There are extensive spoken word sections, voiced by Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi and Amanda Plummer.
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"The earth is a tomb,
The gaudy sky a vault,
We but walking corpses"
- Mary Shelley, "On Ghosts"

If this section heading strikes a reverberating knell in your soul, then you'll probably appreciate this selection of gothic fragments. It's certainly apt for the season ???
Oh! No word of a lie: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus just came up on my random playlist! Spooky! ?
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"Poor immigrants, be they eighteenth-century Huguenots or nineteenth-century Irish, are always accused of overcrowding, disease-breeding, and competing against the native-born workman in the labour-market; and, of course, this was the case at the time of the Jewish influx in the early years of the twentieth century."

And, in the early twenty-first century...

If I'd read John Singleton's introduction while picking up this book at the library, I'd have put it down again, as he makes it sound ickyly seedy & exploitative. As it was, I almost didn't bother reading it, but I'm glad I did in the end, as it was better than the sales pitch made it sound. Three interlinked noir chapters advance the violent story from three perspectives, using flashbacks and flashforwards. It's a pretty dark 3.5 ⭐
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"The recording of 'Droolian' in January 1990 acted as a grand Doorway that led me out of the first stage of my career and launched me through a new Portal into a world far more illuminated than anything I had previously experienced."
- Cope Notes #2: Droolian, by Julian Cope (not in Litsy database)

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