'World's Beyond' was a late 1980's anthology television series of tales based on the archives of the Society for Psychical Research and it is perhaps the single most genteel and stereotypically 'English' thing I think I have ever watched.
Moments after hearing what sounds suspiciously like a plane crash terminally ill English rose Jennifer (Judi Bowker) meets an American pilot named Ben (Alex Hyde-White) when he unexpectedly walks into her garden one afternoon. Their decision to marry sparks concern amongst her family and friends who have yet to even see hm let alone meet him - although the vicar thinks he does have a familiar sounding name - but they make plans for the wedding all the same.
It features a cast of rock solid jobbing actors such as Bowker whose earliest acting credits are listed as the unlikely sounding pairing of starring roles in 'The Adventures of Black Beauty' and Franco Zeffirelli's life of Saint Francis of Assisi 'Brother Sun, Sister Moon', Hyde-White who is perhaps most known to bad movie fans for playing Reed Richards in Roger Corman's never released 'The Fantastic Four' and Moray Watson who gets all the best lines here and whose innate poshness means he has a filmography littered with characters listed as 'Major...', 'Colonel...', 'Lord...' and 'Sir...' including as 'Sir Robert Muir' in the fifth Doctor serial 'Black Orchid'.
The final piece is a bit of an oddity. In many ways it feels like a throw back to a very different era which I suppose it is given where the source material came from but it is a gentle little oddity whose ending will leave you with many questions of a practical nature but it has a charm of it's own and it's all so terribly, terribly nice.
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You now those mornings when you wake up wondering why-oh-why didn't that doyen of the brain freeze, Slush Puppie, ever make any public information films? After all, frozen-ish beverage manufacturers are perfectly placed to warn children of the perils of road safety.
Well, you can now rest easy because they did make one. Boy oh boy did they make one.
It features a very creepy clown (is there any other kind?), some balloons, some product placement, a fabulous proto-hauntological soundtrack by Andrew Hellaby (of freak folk legends 'Comus') and the deaths of several children about which nobody seems particularly concerned.
The UK had a great tradition of offing kids in public information films by variously dunking them in dark and lonely water, locking them in abandoned fridges, holding sports days on railway tracks or throwing Frisbees at power stations and this is a fine addition to the canon.
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Matthew, they thought,
was just going through a phase of talking to himself. And, like many
parents, they waited for him to get over it, but it started to get
worse. Mathew's conversations with himself grew more and more intense -
it was like listening to one end of a telephone conversation while
someone argued, cajoled and reasoned with another person you couldn't
hear. Then Matthew started doing things he couldn't do before, like
counting in binary-code mathematics. So he told them about Chocky - the
person who lived in his head.
I have a slight thing about reading certain editions of books. There are quite a few novels I'd like to read but haven't yet because I've not found one with the right cover art. Chocky was one of them until I scored this rather lovely 1970 2nd impression hardback.
I've a long standing love affair with one Wyndham book in particular (the one with the plants) although I like many of them very much. I'm a long time fan of (post) apocalypse literature so those books in his canon - The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes - are the ones that jumped out at me, Chocky less so. A story of a kid with a telepathic alien chatting in his head never really appealed all that much but I always knew I'd get to it someday and despite my reservations I knew I'd probably enjoy it and I was right.
Chocky is very much what we'd now call a YA novel (but without twinkly vampires) which surprised me as I was kind of expecting something more in line with 'The Midwich Cuckoos' but this is a fairly gentle affair. Most, if not all, the action happens off the page and we essentially get a second hand account with commentary from Matthew's father.
It's hugely enjoyable and is a very different sort of YA book that I just don't think would fly anymore which is a real shame because it's kinda lovely.
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For '3 Wyrd Things' I asked various creative types whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.
Kemper Norton is a Brighton based musician with his musical roots firmly planted in the myths, legends and folkore of his native Cornwall. He describes his music using the deliciously ambiguous term 'slurtronic folk' which nicely encapsulates the scope of his sounds that tap into the same vein of hazily arcane arcadian imagination that runs through artists such as Vashti Bunyan, William Blake, Coil, Alan Moore and Current 93 and which in his hands has led to a body of work that has blended elements of all those mentioned along with a wider appreciation of the various byways and highways of modern cultural life into a bewitching and deeply idiosyncratic body of work.
Having recently welcomed a new addition to his family Kemper has been keeping an understandably low profile of late but with appearences at Cafe Oto (with Air Loom) on September 1st, Brighton's The Rose Hill (with Alexander Tucker) on September 7th and the Wyrd Wild West Fest in Yeovil on September 22nd in the offing he seems to be making a return to music. His most recent album, 'Toll', on Front and Follow is available on both disc and digital from the label's Bandcamp page.
Reading
Pat Barker : Blow Your House Down (Buy it here)
Pat Barker is most famous for her World War 1 “Regeneration” trilogy, which is a wonderful examination of masculinity, violence, class and trauma. Her second novel is a dark and melancholy study of the lives of a group of women making a living as sex workers in the shadow of a serial killer.
Warm, humane and empathetic as well as occasionally terrifying and bleak, Barker’s story foregrounds the economic, moral and personal choices and battles her female characters make and go through without judgement or salaciousness. The unnamed cityscape is harsh and haunted, and the fictionalised Ripper is presented as one more threat to add to the ones these women already face and deal with every day on the streets. A fantastic book.
Familiar to many and already highly-regarded, this film only seems to develop in power for me as time goes by. The scene on the beach (fairly early in the film ) is astonishing and repeated viewings have not diluted the feelings of terror and sadness it provokes, or the way it seems to change its perspective and meaning.
It’s maybe the idea of the inhuman observing a human tragedy with a predator’s eye, and how the best of humanity (empathy, courage, love) ultimately means nothing when confronted by nature at its most potent and least forgiving. But I see (and hear) something new in it every time.
Listening Blah Records (e.g Beast Master Swegthousand Lee Scott feat Nah Eeto 2017 )
Blah
Records has produced some of the spookiest, funniest, most inventive
British hiphop I’ve heard in years.
Here’s a prime example, featuring
label “honcho” Lee Scott at his surreal and pithy best and a great
contribution from Nah Eeto. They seem to produce great stuff every week.
Check out Black Josh, Milkavelli, and the rest of the crew.
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain
Also known as 'Horror on Snape Island' this early 70s horror has been credited as an early example of the slasher genre and certainly most of the elements are there, remote location, horny naked teens, lots of stabbing and slashing and a psychologically damaged murderer with a thing for pointy implements.
The film concerns two groups of teens - one group seen mostly in flashback thanks to some Prisoner-esque hypnosis techniques - who find themselves on the remote and rocky Snape Island, the first group for fun and frolics and the second for an archaeological dig. Also accompanying the second group is a detective (Bryant Haliday) hired by the parents of the sole survivor of the first (Candace Glendenning) who is borderline catatonic and accused of her friend's murders.
Like the contemporaneous 'Death Line' ('Raw Meat' in the US) the film shows a definite move away from the gothic creature feature trappings of the Hammer productions into areas more concerned with societal changes and the rise of newer lifestyles which, it seems, will be drenched in blood; an idea that would be returned to again and again in films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a seemingly endless procession of Friday the 13th and Halloween movies and exploitation movies galore. Unlike 'Death Line' though it doesn't have an actor of the calibre of Hugh Armstrong to lend pathos to the murderous maniac.
Despite being derided on it's initial release 'Tower of Evil' has aged remarkably well. It's definitely a product of it's time and it gleefully engages in some, almost, equal opportunity sexploitation as there are bare boobs and bums - of both genders - galore including that of Robin Askwith who (thanks to the 'Confessions of a...' movies) has a bum that's been photographed more times than most people's faces - even in the age of the selfie. But it's well made and in amongst the campier actors there's a strong cast that includes such notables as Jill Haworth, Jack Watson (Llud in Arthur of the Britons) Derek Fowlds (Bernard from 'Yes Minister'), Anna Palk ('The Earth Dies Screaming') and Dennis Price ('Twins of Evil') and a storyline that toys with the supernatural without ever fully embracing it leaving just a suspicion of what, perhaps, lies behind the murders.
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It is only after undertaking extensive research - i.e. typing the band's name into google - and some 35 years after they were already widely known - can the true identities of these campaigning troubadours finally be revealed as itinerant saxophonist Alex Green, guitarist David J (bassist with popular musical combo of a 'gothic' persuasion Bauhaus) and purveyor of menacing magical missives Alan Moore.
Here we'll ask mind-bending minstrel PK Chown to take up the tale of how these reprehensible rapscallions initiated their furore against the feathery fiends...
"They formed spontaneously at an event I used to organise in Northampton called the Deadly Fun Hippodrome. I'd booked some god-awful band called the Bishops to play and when they arrived they turned their noses up at our old wooden stage and refused to play. So Alan,Dave and Alex stepped up and did a completely improvised set, which of course most of the punters hated because they weren't famous then and it was pretty off the wall.....But thus were born the Sinster Ducks."
The artwork for this timely warning against these malcontented mallards was provided by regular Moore henchman, Kevin O'Neill and perfectly encapsulates their perfidy and who also provided a comic strip to further illustrate the degenerate deeds of the gangsters that graced the records flip side.
As governmental and social outcry with regard to these felonious fowl has been lacking of late Wyrd Britain feels that the time is right to revive this rallying cry against them.
Here are the lyrics so you can sing along with the video below...
Everyone thinks they're such sweet little things
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Soft downy feathers and nice little wings
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
But there's a poison I'd like to administer,
You think they're cuddly but I think they're sinister.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
What are they doing at night in the park?
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Think of them waddling about in the dark.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Sneering and whispering and stealing your cars,
Reading pornography, smoking cigars.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Nasty and small undeserving of life.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
They smirk at your hairstyle and sleep with your wife.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Dressed in black jackets and horrible shoes,
Getting divorces and turning to booze.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Forcing old ladies to throw them some bread.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Who could deny they'd be better off dead?
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Look closer and you may recoil in surprise,
At web-footed fascists with mad little eyes.
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
Ducks, Ducks! Quack, Quack! Quack, Quack!
(lyrics copyright to whomever owns them, presumably Translucia Baboon)
The flip side of this masterpiece of audio alarum tells a tale of the human equivalents of those avian anarchists in the shape of the late night jazz of 'Old Gangsters Never Die'.
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
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