The first Futurama reviewed in 1979 by NME's Ian Punman and Andy Gill (RIP)
F2 = the ground zero for Goth in many ways
The second Futurama festival, reviewed by NME's Paul Morley and Adrian Thrills
Both this year and the previous year's reviews have the theme of "squalor" in the headline - apparently they were rather uncomfortable events, with terrible sound... The Queens Hall in Leeds was described by Futurama promoter John Keenan as "a cavernous place where they parked buses by day and held car auctions most weekend". Wilted proto-Goths and Grey Overcoats sprawled and prone on the concrete floors... an outdoor festival indoors .... T
Different venue for the next installment
Sucker for punishment Morley comes back to review the 3
Sounds preview in which Keenan denies that Futurama has anything to do with the Futurists (aka New Romantics)
The Bay City Rollers?!
A gap, and then it flickered back for a moment in 1989
The Sweet?! Odd how there's this sporadic theme of "glam and slam" (F2 had Gary Glitter)... I guess it's the roots, or a root, of Goth. Still '70s nostalgia doesn't seem quite right for something called Futurama.
Well, having said that...
After a very long gap, it's Back to the Futurama - with the festival reincarnated as a nostalgia and "legacy act" oriented event.
Only for the Future to be cancelled the following year
There was talk of it coming back in 2023 but nothing seems to have happened, so maybe that's it.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Bonus postpunk futurism
Was there anything science-fictiony about any of this? I realise it says it was just tokenistic, but even the posters' aesthetics seem antithetical to sci-fi: all scrawled handwriting rather than pixel-derived fonts. Or was photocopying seen as wondrous space-age tech in early-80s Leeds?
ReplyDeleteAlso, wasn't the boom in sci-fi's popularity of the late 70s essentially due to the likes of George Lucas rather than JG Ballard? The bands involved that employed the occasional sci-fi theme do not seem interested in exploiting that particular seam.
They didn't really have a science fiction element at the festival - no readings or films shown. But quite a few of the groups were influenced by J.G. Ballard and that kind of that. And then you have the inclusion of Hawkwind on the first bill - they had a creative relationship with Michael Moorcock.
DeleteStars Wars is really a throwback to much earlier - 1930s really - mode of science fiction - not even s.f. really, more like 'space opera' / fantasy. The Middle Ages set in outer space. Doesn't it start with "long, long ago, in a far away galaxy"?
So serious s.f. fans would not have taken Star Wars seriously - most would have seen it as a regressive development. Some people felt it had a deleterious effect on the genre, killing off the advances of the New Wave of s.f..
Then again within a year or two you had the darker s.f. films like Alien and Blade Runner coming through, and also cyberpunk.
That Artery singer mimicking Ian Curtis's epileptic stage fits is pretty scandalous, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI thought my knowledge of post-punk was reasonably comprehensive, but I'm amazed at the number of bands on these bills that I'd never heard of - The Diagram Bros., The Distributors, King Trigger, Ligotage, Modern Eon, etc. It's like the record shop scene in A Clockwork Orange.
Also how these mayfly-like entities are plastered randomly between names that I do recognise, that had identifiable careers. Makes these events appear like a kind of proton soup, from which occasional life forms randomly emerge.
I had never heard of Artery so I looked them up on Wikipedia and found this classic from the guitarist: "We never listened to Joy Division – they were never an influence".
DeletePerhaps the singer was a Tiswas fan, and he was attempting to do The Dying Fly.
DeleteAndy Gill the NME writer (RIP) who was from Sheffield where Artery hailed from, said they were one of the promising groups of the era who never quite delivered... he compared them to Wire
DeleteAnother promising Sheffield group I',m So Hollow actually did make a good album and single. Postpunk into proto-Goth, cold and severe but tuneful.
I have heard of all those bands except for the Distributors, but Ligotage I only know because I happened to be reading about Beki Bondage from Vice Squad the other day and learned that Ligotage was the band she formed after leaving the Squad. It's the French word for bondage apparently.
DeleteKing Trigger were rip-offs of Bow Wow Wow, The Diagram Bros were Manchester punk-funksters (led by one Andy Diagram) and had some kind of relation to the earlier Dislocation Dance (that name is so very of the era), and Modern Eon.... they were a bit wet, I seem to recall.
There are loads of other names on those bills I've not heard of though, which is odd being a postpunk scholar and someone who pored over old music papers during the research process.
Have you ever come across The Opposition, Simon? I happened upon them fairly recently. They are oddly anticipatory of Disco Inferno. I think they even came from the same neck of the woods (Ilford):
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h5Ugx3lxGU
Never heard them before. It's.... disconcertingly professional and polished sounding. The guitarist, bassist and drummer can really play. They sound like they might have had their heads turned by Comsat Angels. The singer is somewhere between Jaz Coleman and Bono.
DeleteI can see what you mean about Disco Inferno... especially the earlier, pre-sampling DI. That sort of glassy guitar.
Those line-ups... They remind me of Tyler's line recently about the New Wave as a burst of cultural energy that put a cap on the preceding 50 years of popular culture. So many names, so much variety. To take just one day of Futurama 2, there's Soft Cell and U2 on the same bill: wildly different in styles, methods, intents, effects, but both unleashed by the punk revolution.
ReplyDeleteAnd as Phil says, it's great to see all that creativity in a state of flux and possibility, before the settled hierarchies that subsequent generations have imposed. Punishment of Luxury, who seem almost entirely lost to history, on the bill above Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and OMD. The Smiths below the Armoury Show and the Bay City Rollers. Some great evolutionary dead ends, too: I especially liked Acrobats of Desire, who were apparently operating somewhere in the space between the Slits and Slapp Happy.
It's funny in hindsight to read the real-time griping and grousing of Penman, Morley, etc. How many of us who were not around at the time would have loved to go to just one of those shows?
Punishment of Luxury were hot for a minute or two .... the Radio One evening shows played "Jellyfish", the B-side of single "Puppet Life", a lot - to my young ears it seemed incredibly avant-garde in its angularity and herky-jerky motion... signed to big label UA.... they had a theatrical stage show with masks and grotesquerie vibes... some of them had a fringe theatre background
DeleteNever ever even seen the name Acrobats of Desire.
It does sound like a supremely unpleasant experience, just on the level of ambience / sound quality / facilities. But yes PiL, Joy Division, Banshees at their peak....
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jul/17/popandrock.davesimpson Dave Simpson again, revisiting Punishment of Luxury in 2008.
DeleteThanks! That is a great piece. I would take issue with one line, though: the claim that Punishment of Luxury's music was "years ahead of its time". Did that sound ever take over the mainstream, or even the underground? I don't think so.
DeleteWikipedia has an entry for Acrobats of Desire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrobats_of_Desire
DeleteApparently they at times included violinists Vicky Aspinall, later of the Raincoats, and Mary Jenner, later of the Mekons.
Futurama 2 was their last gig.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2006/oct/25/themusicfestivalthatchange1 Dave Simpson on the first Futurama, saying it changed his life (and 50p for a can of coke? It wasn't even that in Spar ca. 2000).
ReplyDeleteCouple of details that jumped out at me - Dave S says the floor of the Queen's Hall came off on your clothes, so everyone ended up looking ashen grey. And he remembers "the smell of glue" - so people were glue sniffing in there?
Delete