Future Rock

 

A rock book I have never ever heard of before, by a writer I never heard of before - until this moment.

Published 1976. 

After this book, David Downing switched to fiction, writing s.f., alternative history, spy fiction, etc

I wonder if Future Rock's any cop? Hard to say from this review by CSM. 

CSM is one of the NME writers (see also Mick Farren) who often wrote about s.f. writers in the paper (e.g. Ballard) and could have made a fair stab at a tome about the science fiction and rock nexus. (Farren of course wrote s.f. pulp novels by the dozen).

Dunning's book reminded me a bit of this cat Lou Stathis who wrote about music for Heavy Metal - not about heavy metal but about a continuum of sci-fi rock that includes Eno, Fripp, Bowie, Roxy, but also Chrome, Devo, Ubu, Ultravox, The Normal, Gary Numan etc. He called it "rok"

How "Future Rock" looked in the late Sixties - from Lillian Roxon's encyclopedia .

FUTURE ROCK

 

From Lilian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, published 1969 -  as rock prognosis (progrockgnosis?) goes, this is pretty good, foreseeing the ability of listeners to remix tracks.

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia is an odd book to read now.

 As an encyclopedia, it's fairly useless; the biographical entries are really short. I suppose at a time when there was no readily accessible repository of information about pop music, it must have been  useful just to have all the records by an artist listed. 

What makes it worth reading now is

a/ Roxon's turn of phrase, the stray perceptions and slivers of humour that peep through the fairly functional nature of the tome. 

b/ as a period document. Like the more historical books that came out in that sudden first surge of rock publishing (1968-1970 -  it went from there being no serious books about rock to over a dozen, almost overnight...  prior to that the only studies of pop and youth culture were sociological, usually with the Problem of Today's Generation framing), the Rock Encyclopedia is interesting for what's included and what's excluded.... entries on things that proved to be transient in the extreme.... entries where the contemporary commentator can be forgiven for having no idea that the group or sound would have far more legs as a historical phenomenon than could have been suspected at the time.... and then just absences (nothing at all on ska, bluebeat, Jamaican pop).

Here's another entry that is date-stamped but an intriguing read for those interested in electronic music and future-pop.

The fact that Lilian's surname was Roxon is freaky - like she was fated to write about rock.

She died tragically young, in 1973, of an asthma attack, aged just forty.