No, not a tale about a funny performing animal who can speak. Gef the Talking Mongoose was a poltergeist that haunted a Manx family in their remote farmhouse in the 1930s. As well as making knocks and scratches it also spoke, claiming to be a spirit from India that had come to Europe. Although it made many other claims and hints about its identity as well. When manifesting, it took the form of a small, furry creature. There are photographs of the spook, but they are less than entirely convincing. Its appearance in once photo has been compared to a woman’s fur stole of the type worn in the period. There is a cast supposedly of the ghost’s footprints, and they are unlike those of a mongoose or anything else, for that matter. The front paws are much larger than the rear. The case was investigated by the Hungarian lawyer and parapsychologist Dr Nandor Fodor and the British ghost hunter Harry Price.
Apparently they are making a film of the case to be released later this year. The film is produced and directed by Adam Sigal, and stars Christopher Lloyd as Nandor Fodor, Minnie Driver as Anne, Simon Pegg as Harry Price, and Neil Gaiman as the voice of Gef himself. Lloyd was the mad scientist in the Back to the Future films, though he also appeared as a Klingon commander in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Some of us can still remember him as Mad Jim in the 1970s/ early 80s comedy, Taxi. Pegg has appeared in a series of comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End, as well as the rebooted Star Trek films and Paul, about a Grey alien who really has been living on Earth for all these years. Neil Gaiman is a comics and Fantasy writer, who created the cult Goth comic back in the 90s, The Sandman, co-wrote Good Omens with the late, much missed Terry Pratchett, the BBC fantasy series Neverwhere, and a string of Fantasy novels like American Gods, which I think may have been adapted into a TV series. I’ve a very strong interest in the paranormal and Gef the Talking Mongoose is a fascinating case. I believe there was a radio play about it on Radio 4 a year or so ago. According to the imdb page the film is expected to be released on the 16th September this year.
Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.
It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.
I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.
Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.
David Rappoport is probably a little obscure as an entry in a list of great comic actors. I think he was a graduate of Bristol university’s drama school. He was certainly well known among the local theatre community in Bristol, having his own berth on the Old Profanity Showboat on the local docks. He was one of the O-men in a BBC children’s show but achieved stardom as the leader of a gang of time-travelling dwarves in the Terry Gilliam SF film Time Bandits. So, I’ve drawn him as that character, Randall. After this, I remember him turning up in Channel 4 series in the late 80’s-early 90s as an uptight British businessman, complete with suit and bowler hat, who gradually learns to unwind as he tours America. He was to play the villainous galactic businessman, Fajo, who attempts to steal Data to add to his collection of purloined artifacts in the Star Trek: Next Generation episode The Most Toys. Sadly, he committed suicide before the episode was made, so his role had to be taken by another actor. That’s a pity. Quite apart from the tragedy of Rappoport’s death, I think he would have been brilliant. There are pictures of the makeup he would have appeared in as well as, I think, clips of him in the part on YouTube.
I’m including him here as I think in some ways, he prepared the way for Warwick Davis, another small person, to become the star he has. Davis also appeared in SF, in this instance as the Ewok Wickit in the last of the original Star Wars trilogy, The Return of the Jedi. He was also in the Fantasy flick, Willow, with Val Kilmer. Davis then went on to appear in numerous TV shows, including as the torturer Tybon in the episode, ‘Scream, Satan, Scream’, of Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible, and as the telekinetic dwarf in the comedy horror series, Psychoville. He also guest-starred in a Matt Smith Dr. Who episode as the Emperor of the Galaxy. But Davis has also gone on to become a star in his own right, compering the ITV gameshow Tenable. Davis also toured Britain with his theatre company for similarly height-restricted actors, The Reduced Height Theatre Company. This was a well-deserved success, but unfortunately it didn’t appear in Bristol. Perhaps next time, eh?
Whether Rappoport would have enjoyed similar success had he lived we can never know. But he did have real presence and swagger in Time Bandits. My guess is that his emergence as a star possibly made it easier for Davis do so as well when he made it big rather later.
Incidentally, his costume in Time Bandits may have influenced the costume designers of a one of Duran Duran’s concert videos in the ’90s, as there are a couple of characters who appear in similar dress in .
I was saddened to learn of the death on Monday of Kevin O’Neill, one of the great British comics artists behind many of the favourite strips in 2000AD over here and DC Comics and other publishers in America. O’Neill was the co-creator, with writer Pat Mills, of the Robusters, ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock strips in 2000 AD, the galaxy’s greatest comic. Robusters was about a robot disaster squad, led by Hammerstein, an old war droid, and Rojaws, a foul-mouthed sewer robot, who formed a kind of double act. The squad was owned by the dictatorial Howard Quartz, alias ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, because after some kind of disaster, only ten per cent of him – his brain – was still human, housed in a robot body. The penalty for failure or simply upsetting the boss was destruction, and the pair were always on the verge of being pulled apart by the sadistic but thick robot bulldozer, Mekquake. ABC Warriors was a continuation of Hammerstein’s adventures, first in a world war against the Volgan Republic, and then on Mars and a far future Earth, as the leader of an elite squad of robots dedicated to fighting evil. Nemesis the Warlock was a weird sword and sorcery strip set in the far future. The surface of the Earth had become a devastated wasteland and humanity had retreated underground. Renamed Termight, short for ‘Mighty Terra’, it was a medieval society ruled by an evil order of warriors, the Terminators, that hated and feared intelligent alien. Led by their Grand Master, Torquemada, Earth regarded such aliens as demonic and waged a war of extermination against them. O’Neill’s art, which is angular and geometric, was suitably Gothic and horrific, creating a nightmare variety of alien creatures. His art was so horrific, in fact, that later, when he was working on the Green Lantern Corps, a superhero comic for DC, it put the wind up the Comics Code Authority. This had been founded in the 1950s during the moral panic over comics. It was supposed to judge whether or not a comic was suitable to be read by children. Although it was supposedly voluntary, in fact all children’s comics had to be submitted to the Authority as otherwise the mainstream newsagents over there wouldn’t carry them. The writer, Alan Moore, who also created the cult strip about a future Fascist Britain, V For Vendetta, took the unusual step of contacting the Authority. Would the comic get approved if various changes were made? No, they replied. It wasn’t the strip’s story; it was the artwork. It was totally unsuitable for children. This became something of a source of pride and amusement to O’Neill and the other creators at 2000 AD. So grim was his art that rumours started circulating that he had an occult temple in his basement and drew only at night. These were completely false. On the other hand, a fan once told his fellow 2000 AD artist, Dave Gibbons, that O’Neill’s art gave him nightmares which he could only cure by looking a Gibbons. When O’Neill wasn’t traumatising people with his serious strips, he made them laugh with Dash Descent, a parody of the old Flash Gordon serials. He also drew the Tharg’s Future Shocks strip which a court later ruled had been plagiarised by the film maker Richard Stanley for the film Hardware. This was set in a decaying city in which a scavenger in the radiation deserts finds and brings back the remains of an experimental war robot, the B.A.A.L. His artist girlfriends reassembles it and it then goes off on a frenzy of killing. Hardware is a cult film, which stands up even now, three decades after it was made. Highlights include cameo appearances by Lemmy, as a water taxi driver, and the voice of Iggy Pop as a radio announcer. It’s just a pity Stanley didn’t work out a deal with 2000 AD first. He also contributed in other, minor ways to the comic. He created the look of Tharg, the comic’s alien editor from the star Betelgeuse, and introduced the credit cards telling readers who the writer, artist and letterer were, quite against the publisher’s policy. But this allowed the people, who actually created the strips, to gain the proper recognition and respect for their work.
O’Neill left 2000 AD for work with the American comics companies. He and writer Pat Mills created Metalzoic for DC. This was another robot strip, set on a far future Earth where an ecology of robot animals had developed and taken over, and followed the adventures of a tribe of robot ape men and the human woman they had rescued. It still is one of my favourite strips, but sadly flopped, though it was later reprinted in 2000 AD. O’Neill was far more successful with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, written by Alan Moore. This had the idea that the great figures of 19th and early 20th century SF, Fantasy and Horror – Alan Quatermaine, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo and Dorian Grey – had formed a kind of superhero group. It was filmed with Sean Connery as Quatermaine. Back to causing gleeful mayhem, O’Neill and Mills created the violent, nihilistic Marshal Law. This was an adult comic set in a near future San Francisco. Devastated by an earthquake, the city was renamed San Futuro, and plagued by warring superhero gangs. The superheroes had been created to fight in a war in South America. As a result, many of the survivors had returned to America mentally and physically scarred, some turning to violent crime. Law was the member of a small anti-superhero squad, moved by a deep hatred of superheroes. He uttered phrases like ‘They say I hate superheroes. They’re wrong. Hatred is far too bland a word for the way I feel about them’ and ‘I’m hunting heroes. I haven’t found any yet’. Mills hates superheroes and has very left-wing politics and poured that into the strip. It commented on recent developments in genetic engineering and the patenting of GMOs, insane CIA plans to overthrow Fidel Castro and other South American left-wing regimes and how America trained the sadistic torturers for the continent’s Fascist dictators. There was also an overt feminist critique of the genre and the fictional glamorisation of the real horrors of war. The Marshal’s opponents were vicious parodies of various superheroes. Despite its grim premise, it was a hilarious strip, although the humour was pitch-black. It was too much for one publisher, however, and moved from one to another. It has now been collected into a single album, although sadly without the crossover strip featuring the Marshal fighting Pinhead from Hellraiser.
Outside of comics, O’Neill apparently published his own fanzine, Just Imagine: The Journal of Film and Television Special Effects. I also remember him being credited in Starlog for designing the aliens in the Disney film, Return to Witch Mountain.
I met O’Neill extremely briefly at the UKCAC 90 comics convention, 32 years ago. From what I can remember, he was a short, slightly built chap in a T-shirt championing solidarity with Nicaragua, whose left-wing regime was under attack by the brutal Contras funded by Reagan and Thatcher. He was drawing people’s favourite characters for them on badges supplied by the convention’s organisers. But he was an amazing artist, producing very high-quality drawings in a blur of speed. There are a series of videos of him speaking at various comics conventions about Nemesis, Marshal Law and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he appears as short, jolly fellow with a great sense of humour, chortling over the daft incidents he’s experienced during his career.
In a separate interview, also on YouTube, Alan Moore commented on his art, praising him as one of the greatest British artists of all time. Moore remarks that O’Neill’s celebrated for his robots and aliens, but not for his humans. But Moore considers that he is brilliant depicter of humans as grotesques, and in that sense is one of the best artists since Hogarth. It sounds like something that should go in Private Eye’s ‘Pseud’s Corner’, but in my opinion it’s absolutely correct. Particularly as Hogarth produced sequential art himself as the kind of precursor of comics. I strongly believe that comics artists, or at least the very best, are insufficiently appreciated. I think they can be as good as serious fine artists. Way back in the 90s I submitted a piece to one of the art magazines arguing that comics artists like O’Neill and Jack Kirby were artists, whose styles meant that they should receive the same appreciation as those of the Soviet austere style, Francis Bacon and H.R. Giger. The Nemesis the Warlock strip had scenes of pure body horror. In one of the two precursor strips that launched the character, Killerwatt, Nemesis and Torquemada chase each other down the teleport wires, in which people are transported electrically similar to the telephone. At one point they have to cross the Sea of Dead Souls, a nightmare morass caused when a gooney bird, a massive mechanical bird, sat on the wires. Those unfortunate enough to be there when it happened are turned into a mass of hugely distorted body parts, such as giant feet with eyes. It resembles the scene of the ‘shunt’ in the 80s horror movie, Society, where members of America’s elite class are portrayed as predators who can twist and distort their bodies into any shape whatsoever. The Shunt is an orgy in which they melt down into a similar morass of bodies to feed off tramps and other members of the lower orders. Society’s a great film if you like that kind of ‘orror, but came out a few years after Mills and O’Neill got there first.
There have been a number of great obituaries for him at Bleedingcool and on 2000 AD’s website. These give the reactions and messages of grief and appreciation from the other comics creators. The 2000 AD page gives a full potted biography and examples of his truly amazing artwork.
RIP great man. May your art continue to shock, amaze, amuse and inspire.
Here’s something a bit different and, hopefully, more soothing after the politics. I found a lot of Steampunk music on YouTube yesterday. Steampunk is the subgenre of Science Fiction that imagines what would have happened if the Victorians had put some of their more ambitious and far-sighted inventions into practice, and so had computers, flight, motor vehicle and space travel. It takes its inspiration from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as real inventions such as Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine – a mechanical computer – and Giffard’s dirigible airship, which flew round the Eiffel Tower in 1854, as well as the futuristic drawings of the pioneering French Science Fiction writers and artist, Jacques Robida. Notable books include William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, about a Victorian future in which Lord Byron is now king and Babbage’s Difference Engine is a reality. It’s also produced a milieu of fans, who design and wear clothing based on these futures that never were, and build mock-Victorian technological props, like ray guns. One of the most popular fashion accessories is suitably elaborate, 19th century-style futuristic goggles.
But there are also composers producing works inspired by this type of SF. This seems to be orchestral, but with the addition of synthesisers and other electronic effects, often with an underlying ticking of clockwork or a beat suggesting this or the rhythm of the heavy industrial machines of the period. Its composers include Peter Crowley, who also produces more traditional fantasy music, Landon Zientara, and Shannon Chiang. I’m delighted that someone is still producing music in the classical idiom, and some of these pieces sound like the scores for SF and Fantasy films that were never made. Here’s one piece of Steampunk music, The Dwarven Factory.
I got this email from anti-privatisation campaign group We Own It informing me about their new website and their continuing campaign against the government’s proposed sell-off of Channel 4.
‘Dear David,
What do Armando Iannucci, the Archbishop of York and Siobhán McSweeney from Derry Girls all have in common?
They’re all taking a stand against Nadine Dorries’ plan to privatise Channel 4.
They’re not the only ones. 27 independent production companies, actor Jon Pointing, comedian Jack Rooke, and the Bishops of Ripon and Leeds are taking a stand too.
They’ve come together today to send a message to the divided Conservative Party: Channel 4 ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Conserve it.
Thanks to donations from hundreds of you, today we were able to launch an ambitious new campaign which hit the front page of the Yorkshire Post, the Evening Standard, the Independent, the National and local papers across the country.
Check out the beautiful new website and share it to spread the word! We need YOU to make this big launch even bigger! This is a campaign we can win.
THANK YOU so much for showing this government where you stand.
Cat, Alice, Johnbosco, Matthew, Jack and Kate – the We Own It team
PS Thanks so much to everyone who took part in the day of action for the NHS on Saturday. You were all over the press for that campaign as well!’
I very much support this campaign, not least because Bristol is one one of the various cities in which the broadcaster is located. I’m afraid that if the government privatises the station it will have to close down its offices or studios in Bristol and the other towns, and that these local broadcasting industries will be severely damaged. A little while ago I wrote to my local Labour MP, Karin Smyth, to express my fears about the loss of local broadcasting in Bristol. She very kindly wrote back stating that she also was going to oppose Channel 4’s privatisation.
I think the channel has declined in quality since the 1980s and 1990s, but it has been a vital part of British broadcasting and cinema. There have been a stream of British films made either by, or with the participation of Channel 4 films. And when it was first launched in the 1980s, it offered a genuine alternative to mainstream broadcasting. It showed Indian films in a slot entitled ‘All India Goldies’ as well as an adaptation of the Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. It also provided excellent opera coverage, and really did much to bring it to a genuinely popular audience. It also gave Britain the wit and wisdom of the journalist and TV critic, Clive James, who had his own show on a Sunday night. James published a trio of books of his TV criticism, as well as his travel journalism and an autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs. His writing could be hysterically funny, as when he covered the extremely excitable remarks of over-the-top sports commenters. In one of his articles he described how one of the cars broke down or crashed during a race ‘and Murray Walker exploded’. At other times, when discussing the horrors of the Holocaust and the surviving Nazi and Fascist leaders like Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach and Oswald Mosley, who turned up on British television, he was deadly serious and scathing. As he also was when writing about Stalin’s famine and purges and Mao’s China. He interviewed a number of great personalities on his show, including a very young Victoria Wood and the late, great Peter Cook. For fantasy enthusiasts, there was The Storyteller, a series of tales adapted from folk stories, narrated by John Hurt, with puppet creatures, including the Storyteller’s dog, created and operated by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Henson and Frank Oz were the geniuses behind the Muppets. They also made the fantasy movie The Dark Crystal, in which every character is a non-human creature. In the 1990s Henson’s Creature Shop also created the various aliens in the Australian-American SF series Farscape. I am very much afraid that if Channel 4 is privatised, then this history and pool of great broadcasting talent and skills will be permanently lost.
And it will be lost not because there’s anything wrong with Channel 4, but because the Tories’ backers, like one Rupert Murdoch, want British state broadcasting to end so their own cruddy networks can move in and take its place.
Here’s another fun video for those of us, who grew up in the ’80s enjoying some of that decade’s SF and Fantasy movies. I’m a sort of fan of Bournemouth rockers Muse. I like the way their music and videos include science, space and SF themes. ‘Unsustainable’ and ‘Isolated System’, for example, are about the world running out of energy and society collapsing according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that entropy, disorder, in a system only increases as usable energy is expended and transformed into waste heat. Hence, billions of billions of years from the universe will end as a positron-electron plasma just a few degrees above absolute zero. The tracks and the accompanying video are about the possible collapse of society due to an economics centred on growth which uses up all the available resources, a subject of great concern to the ecological movement since the 1970s.
On a lighter note, their video for ‘Something Human’ contains a number of 80s pop SF references., It features one of the band heading out of a city with a population of 213 million plus in a car carrying a video tape. The sign for the city has ‘Infected’ scrawled across it, which might be a reference to either the Resident Evil game and film franchise, or the later Danny Boyle film, 28 Days Later. He’s pursued by the other two, armed with massive guns. As he races down the road he goes back in time, which is surely based on Back to the Future and the time-travelling DeLorean car. Arriving in the past, he finds an abandoned, delapidated video store. His pursuers arrive behind him in an American phone box, which is obviously based on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Then the full moon appears and he turns into a werewolf, which could be based either on Teen Wolf or An American Werewolf in London. After killing his pursuers, he gets back into the car, the moon passes and he becomes human again as he drives back to the future. I’m sure there are other references in there. The big guns could be a reference to the massive weapons sported by the heroes of the various action movies, especially those starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. But those are the only references I’ve been able to recognise. Still, it’s a bit of fun nostalgia for those of us, who enjoyed 80s movies and the video technology that made the films available to see at home.
One of the big stories today, which isn’t about the military build-up around Ukraine and Boris Johnson and his wretched parties, has been the death of Meat Loaf. One of the things that surprised me in the news items about him was that he was in 65 or so films. I was aware that he played Eddie, a zombie in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d also seen him as a man suffering from testicular cancer who joins the underground boxers in the 1990s film Fight Club, based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk. But I wasn’t aware of any others, and certainly not that he’d been in so many.
He’s best known, however, for Bat Out Of Hell, which is now a Rock classic. I can remember the exciting amongst the rockers and metal freaks I was at school with when it came out. It even got played at a school assembly by one of the teachers. He wasn’t disapproving, just using it to illustrate some point about different moods in music. Bat Out Of Hell, in contrast to other, more soothing pieces, was pure, raw aggression. It was, but not violence. It was loud, fast, melodic rock. His co-writer, Jim Steinman, appeared on a Beeb rockumentary a few years ago. The interviewer commented on the operatic quality of the piece. Steinman agreed, and said that it was because he was listening to a lot of opera at the time.
Bat Out Of Hell came out just as the Satanism scare was beginning, and the real-life modern witch-hunters went to absurd lengths to claim that there was a terrible Satanic conspiracy to corrupt American youth. Dungeons and Dragons was supposed to include real spells and was turning young people to crime, sex, and suicide. I’ve friends who were into it, and that very definitely wasn’t the case. D&D was an imaginary Tolkienesque world of goblins, orcs, giants and wizards, but these were the staple characters of children’s fantasy. For the vast majority of youngsters, it was just a great way to spend a couple of evening with your friends. Rock music was particularly singled out for condemnation. Now there are metal bands, which I think genuinely are aggressively anti-Christian. But for many, it’s just theatre, as Satanic as a Hammer Horror flick. Bat Out Of Hell got some of this, because the album cover showed a motorcycle erupting out of a grave watched by a demon. This was occult imagery. It is, but again, it’s fantasy occult imagery. You could and can see pretty much the same kind of imagery on any genre horror, fantasy or sword and sorcery paperback. And there’s absolutely no mention of the occult or the Devil in the track itself. I bought the sheet music awhile ago and I’ve played it. What it tells me is that Meat Loaf liked the dark imagery of rock, and had a taste for awesome motorbikes. As for groups labelled Satanic, back in the ’90s the accusation was levelled at the American band Ossuary. Or it was until they issued a statement explaining that they were all good children of the Roman Catholic church, and their songs attacked the preachers who were bringing the church into disrepute. Then someone had the idea of checking with their parish priest, who confirmed what they said.
But to me, one of the most memorable of Meat Loaf’s appearances on British TV was when he outwitted Clive Anderson. Anderson had his own chat show, Clive Anderson Talks Back, in which he made light banter poking fun at his guests. Sometimes he went too far, and offended them. He did that to the Bee Gees. There’s a clip of them walking off, one by one, after he told them their music was rubbish. Anderson was left with his mouth hanging open, looking pleadingly at them. Finally only one was left, and as he turned to go, Anderson said to him, ‘You’re not going as well, are you?’ ‘Sorry,’ the pop musician replied, ‘but I don’t do lone interviews.’ That never happened to Meat Loaf, but he did think of a getting a few chuckles from his name. ‘What should I call you – Meat? Mr Loaf? What do your children call you?’ Meat Loaf had answer to that: ‘Mostly they call me ‘Dad’.’ as Jazz Club would say on the Fast Show ‘Grrreat.’
Farewell, Big Guy. You will be missed, and rock is poorer without you.
The sheet music for the album Bat Out Of Hell, which was written and composed by Steinman, arranged for piano with guitar tablature and lyrics, has been published by International Music Publications Ltd. Apart from the title track, it has ‘You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night), Heaven Can Wait, All Revved Up With No place to Go, Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad, Paradise by Dashboard Light and For Crying Out Loud’.
The cover image was dreamed up by Steinman, and painted by fantasy artist and comics legend Richard Corben.
Way back in the ’90s there was a slew of tribute bands – the Bootleg Beatles, Elton Jack and so on. Meat Loaf did not escape. His was called ‘Fat Out Of Hell’.
I found this interesting snippet in the ‘Funny Old World’ column in Private Eye’s issue for 18-31 March 2011, ultimately taken from a CNN item for 26th January of that year. It’s about a recent development or fad in the Japanese tourist industry: visiting factories. I know they do this in Britain, where people tour historic factories looking at things being made, or learning how they were made in the past. A good example is Ironbridge. But this is something different. It’s about appreciating factories as objects of beauty in themselves. This is radically different to previous ideas of beauty, which are centred on the living landscape, either natural or that of the rural village. And from reading the article, it seems to have its origins partly in the beginning of the film Blade Runner, where Deckard’s car flies past a refinery belching fire. The article runs
‘”Kojo moe is an infatuation with factories,” Daigo Yokoto told reporters outside a power plant in the industrial city of Kawasaki, near Tokyo, “and it’s becoming an alternative form of tourism in Japan. The geometric patterns of metal pipes and frames, the eerie smoke and sudden eruptions of flames – it is a completely different world, and it’s less than an hour away from Tokyo, where and my friends live. It’s not what goes on inside the factories that interests us, it’s the moment where the cylindrical smoke stack sends up steam, or a furnace starts belching smoke. That’s what makes us happy.”
Over the past year, kojo moe has grown from a tiny Japanese subculture into a major form of tourism, with 4,000 yen cruises to industrial zones booked out months in advance. “I love taking photos and I love factories,” added photographer Masaki Ishitani from Osaka, “and combining the two gives me an innocent sense of enjoyment. Kawasaki factories are the biggest, the most beautiful, and most wonderful in Japan. Standing here watching a giant power plant billowing out smoke is just like being in the movie Blade Runner.”
There is a similar aesthetic over here as well, albeit to a far lesser extent. I can remember passing a refinery near Cardiff with friends on the way to a re-enactment event in the ’90s, and we were struck by its awesome beauty. It was floodlit and really did resemble the refinery from Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, the film’s director, based that sequence on a factory or refinery he used to pass when he was a schoolboy or arts student. One night as was passing he said to himself, ‘God, this is beautiful’.
I find this particularly fascinating because it’s precisely the kind of aesthetic that the Futurists were trying to promote. They were a reaction to Symbolism and hated traditional, especially neo-classical art. They celebrated instead the new, modern, urban Italy, of youth, speed, violence and the new machine age. The Futurist architect Sant’Elia designed huge modernist buildings representing the new aesthetic, designs which even now, after the horrors of mid-20th century Brutalist architecture, still look futuristic. Kojo moe also interests me because it does seem to be an instance where Science Fiction has altered or set up a different ideal of beauty. I really don’t believe that the Conceptualism that was all rage as the official art of the ’90s really has done much to push the boundaries of art. I think that’s being done elsewhere, and particularly within Science Fiction and Fantasy, in media such as computer games, films, TV, book illustration and comics. And I’d like to see it appreciated by the art establishment.
I found this trailer for the forthcoming Ghostbuster’s sequel, Ghostbusters Afterlife, on the Sony Pictures Releasing UK channel on YouTube. I saw the original film when it came out all that time ago in the early 1980s and was blown away by it. It’s one of the great fantasy comedies of the late 20th century, and I think it’s amazing that it’s still inspiring sequels 30 or so years later. The plot seems to be that the grandchildren of the original ghostbusters discover their grandparents’ old equipment as their town in rural America comes under threat from the denizens of the afterlife. And once again apocalypse looms. There’s certainly a nod to the original movie in some of the creatures as well. In the original film, the Destroyer appears as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. And there’s a scene in this trailer where a bag of marshmallows in the local store come to life as miniature versions of the figure. I think there’s some jealousy surrounding this film already, as there was an all-female version of Ghostbusters that come out in 2016 and flopped. It was criticised for not being very good, and actually unfunny and coarse. This looks much better. Apparently it’s coming out November 18, so that’s another film I’d like to see provided we’re not stuck in a second lockdown.
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