The Prostitutes – A blast from the past

Here is an article sent to me by Kent Morris of the band The Prostitutes. The Prostitutes were am electronic industrial band from Melbourne in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Here is an interview I did with them when I was editor of Beat magazine back in 1990 and 1991.

A prayer for Dave Gahan

Dave Gahan has been sick with bladder cancer, and has had a tumor removed. Mode have canceled shows for a month, and in my opinion should cancel more, so Gahan can rest up.

To me, my favourite band was never The Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin or Dylan. To me they were naive sixties idealists and hippies espousing an absurd and lazy philosophy, their music good… but so 20th century. My favourite band growing as a teenage, and in many respects to this days was/is Depeche Mode. They were something else, something alien. They were the Future, baby. They were my Beatles. And I dare say it, a more profound outfit, and of a longer lasting significance, than those baby boomer 60’s assholes…

Why? Nihilism, proto fascist imagery, dark moody lyrics, sadomasochism, tortured love, technology, perversion, dance music and clubs, leather and sex. This was the world of Depeche Mode. This was my world as a teenager, and later… Gore’s amazing songs, the electronic sound scapes of the band and Gahan’s amazing voice made for a brilliant and long lasting combination. And still Mode are releasing classic albums 29 years into their career. They have been a consistently strong and amazing band, that define the 80’s generation.

So Idea Fix sends out our heart felt best wishes to Dave G. Mode has been the sound track to my life… and if I feel a little Nostalgia… …well, lets allow Dave Gahan himself to say it best…on this brilliant side project track from Mirror… Get well Dave and keep bringing us the ’sounds of the universe’…

Fischerspooner and Fascism

I think this is the official video for a Fischerspponer song, “Happy”. It makes a link between electro, industrial and dance music being inherehtly fascist. The thought has more than occurred to me over the years. Slave to the Rythm, the Domination of the beat, the crash of the anvil at the night club school, etc.

Here is quote from whoever posted the “Happy” clip on You Tube:

“Electronic-Disco rhythm, as a regular repetition, is the purest, the most radical form of the militantly organised rhythmicity of technicist production, and as such the most appropriate means of media manipulation. As an archetypal structural basis of the collective unconscious in a worker mass, it stimulates automatic mechanisms and shapes industrialisation of consciousness, which is necessary in the logic of massive, totalitarian production…”

I agree… and say dance, dance, dance…to the fascist groove thang…

Enjoy the Clip! The new Fischerspooner CD “Entertainment” is out and great by the way. I picked it up in Salt Lake City and bopped all around Mormon town vibing on its cool electro veneer while looking at the legacy of Jospeh Smith and Brigham Young. ‘Infidels of the world Unite’… and remember ‘living well is the best revenge’…

The Horror…the Horrors

I like this clip, and song, The Horrors – Sea Within a Sea. Song produced by Geoff Barrow from Portishaed. Portishaed last album, “3″ was a fucking masterpiece from last year, too. Enjoy…The Horrors.

Lou Reed visits Australia in the 70’s

Aussie director Richard Lowenstein posted this on his facebook page today, and I just had to share it here after viewing it. A classic interview with Reed in the 70’s.

Now its my birthday

I turn 40 on Thursday, and I am having a wee social get together on Friday for some old pals and film friends. If your an old pal, and I’ve forgotten to invite you, there is a very good reason for that. No, it means I’ve forgotten to get in contact and feel free to contact me…you should know how.

Until then, a great song about festivity, Party Fears Two by The Asoociates, from that missed genius Billy MacKenzie, here at Idea Fix, where the 80’s electro never stops.

I’m on a boat Motherfucker…

For all you cunts…

I’m sorry to say it but this message from Jarvis Cocker still applies.

…Ahh, but the takings are down by a third, so perhaps now is our time to make sure, cunts aren’t still running the world…

Great Song. Great message. I like the part about using your right to protest in the street, “yeah, use your right, but don’t imagine that its heard”, cue chorus…

Oh and Jarvis has a new work out in May, entitled “Further Complications”. Tally ho!

A more Feverish Ray

Another Fever Ray clip, “If I had a Heart”. Another Idea Fix analysis.

The lyrics speak of emptiness and heartlessness, two core aspects of nihilism . The start of the clip features a boats man taking children through a scene of calamity (i.e. 20th century fascist Europe’s Gotterdammerung). They glide through a scene of mass suicide (ala Jim Jones) in an old house with fascist iconography, and ‘after strange gods’- T.S Eliot. The suicide emanates from a pool, referenced in the other Fever Ray clip (below), where Karin conjures a primeval power (fascism?).

The meaning of the German Shepard a symbol of Nazi fascist domination and the tribes people who are still alive in the camp are harder to interpret. Though the Shepard fits easily into our hermeneutic. The tribes people could simply represent a religious/political or metaphysical class that survived the holocaust portrayed here, or are spectres of ancient tribal past?

This whole tableau could be a metaphor for the new generation emerging into the 21st century after Nazi Europe’s fall. The song and clip anticipates, and beckons even, a new form of fascism, yet to come…hence the ominous tone, and “this will never end, because I want more”…

The boats person could be taking the children out to Nietzschean ‘new seas’, and a future space beyond nihilism?

Karin Dreijer Andersson conjures up Fever Ray

Oh, and I like this shit, a lot, too. Fever Ray, aka Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of haunting Swedish electro outfit The Knife. Karin conjures some ominous primeval power from a swimming pool, while an old Magus looks on. Something barely hidden beneath the surfaces of her Nordic countenance and ‘her Mother’s health’. You don’t need any further clues, about what that could be, at this site, do you?