MY TOP 10

BY GEORGE P PELECANOS 1.CURTIS MAYFIELD Freddie's Dead Buddah 2. THE ISLEY BROTHERS That Lady (Part 1) T-Neck 3. AL GREEN Let's Stay Together London 4. SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE If You Want Me To Stay Epic 5. ELTON JOHN Bennie & The Jets DJM 6. THE CHI-LITES Have You Seen Her MCA 7. WILLIAM DeVAUGHN Be Thankful For What You Got Chelsea 8. GIL SCOTT-HERON The...

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THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

In 2003 Mojo magazine published The 100 Singles You Must Own, selected by a team of the world's most respected music experts, including Nick Hornby, Jon Savage, Nick Tosches, Colin Escott, Dave Godin, Lenny Kaye, George P. Pelecanos and many more. The brief they gave their stellar panel was simple: if you had a wheezing old Rock-Ola record machine...

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CULT RECORD: MASSIVE ATTACK:" BLUE LINES"(1991)

Even if the U.K. hadn't just endured three long hard years of acid house and techno tyranny, the 1991 arrival of Massive Attack's Blue Lines, with its measured bass lines, keyboard swells and lover's-rock reggae dreaminess, would have come as a sweet relief. As it was, the group--a shadowy consortium of DJs, rappers, remixers and multi-media dabblers...

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CULT MOVIE: GET CARTER(1971)

Cool, unrelenting and vicious, Jack Carter returns to Newcastle to find those responsible for killing his brother and falls into a world of corruption, seedy pornography and murder. Although Ted Lewis' original work was set in an unnamed steel town, Newcastle-upon-Tyne provides a suitably gritty backdrop for the action( every southerner knows it's...

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CULT RECORD: STEREOLAB:" SWITCHED ON STEREOLAB"(1992)

Most original rock music is created through combining preexisting styles, but Stereolab takes its influences to extremes that border on disseration research. Core band members Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, who both used to play in the politically charged pop group McCarthy, have a fondness for drawing lines between obscure points of 1950's and 1960's...

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CULT MOVIE: THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1972)

"Turn bones and flesh into screaming, savage blood death!" yelped the publicity blurb for this outrageous horror comedy from legendary exploitation movie mogul Ted V Mikels. The plot rotates around the crippled owners of a failing cat-food company who, to spice up their product, employ a couple of grave-robbing maniacs to supply them with dead bodies...

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GOD SPEAKS

God has a reputation, largely deserved, for being a bit deep. But when he speaks in the movies, as you can see below, this isn't always the case. Jesus: What is your name my friend? James: James. Little James. They call me Little because I'm the youngest. What's yours? Jesus: Jesus. James: Ah, that's a good name. Thank you. The Greatest Story Ever...

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TOP TEN: GORDON GANO (VIOLENT FEMMES)

1. HEARTBREAKERS:" Live at Max's Kansas City" 2. TELEVISION:" Marquee Moon" 3.VELVET UNDERGROUND (all) 4. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS:" Blank Generation" 5. SEX PISTOLS:" Never Mind the Bollocks","Here's the Sex Pistols" 6. LOU REED:" Berlin" 7. RAMONES:" Ramones" 8. IGGY POP:" Lust for Life" 9. CAPTAIN BEEFHEART:" Mirror Man" 10. PATTI SMITH:"...

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VIDEO: BEACH HOUSE:"SILVER SOUL"

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R.I.P. JD SALINGER

Jerome David "J. D." Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980. In 1974, in a rare interview given to The New York Times, he said: "I love to write....

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CULT RECORD: PATTI SMITH:"HORSES"(1975)

Black-clad demon spawn of Lautreamont and the Quin-Tones, chanter, ranter, allien succubus, prophet of sex and power and ecstasy, Patti Smith was a sublimely weird rock'n'roll creation, someone who claimed she'd learned how to walk by watching Dylan in Don't Look Back. On Horses, Smith tried to take the spoken voice into the realm of feedback and spillage...

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CULT MOVIE: DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)

Odd, if compelling, story of a young Czech-born mother (Bjork) working in a US factory during the 1960s. She is trying to save money to cure her son from an inherited eye condition, which is causing her own blindness, and escapes from the tedium and stress of her life by pretending she is in a musical. Fans of Bjork's yowling vocal style are most likely...

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CULT RECORD: VIOLENT FEMMES:" VIOLENT FEMMES"(1983)

Hard to believe these days that theViolent Femmes were once part of an august group of post-punk bands. Beyond marginal now, and fairly silly  from its second album on, the trio possess a debut that rests comfortably in an edgy pantheon with works as auspicious as Entertainment!, Los Angeles, and Unknown Pleasures. That record--put out after...

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CULT MOVIE: HAXAN(1922)

Eighty years on, Christensen's use of real life, animation and dramatic sequences for his disturbing documentary about witchcraft through the ages has lost none of its ability to shock. His silent scenes of demonically possesed nuns and friars--and the tortures which they were forced to suffer to extract sorcery confessions--are  made more upsetting...

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CULT RECORD: LIZ PHAIR: "EXILE IN GUYVILLE"(1993)

Liz Phair first surfaced as a member of indie-rock's great indoors, turning her home recordings into a couple of 1991 cassetes under the name Girly Sound. These tapes were strange contraptions, the sound of a mysterious artiste echoing the spidery guitars of New Zealand folk-rock while declaring "I'll fuck you and your girlfriend too", from a protective...

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CULT MOVIE: LENINGRAND COWBOYS GO AMERICA(1989)

Hopelessly crazed and hilarious film about a Finnish rock band that travel to America in search of fame and fortune and aiming to reach Mexico. Resplendent in huge quiffs and clown-like winklepickers, they are possibly the most pathetic rock band ever to tour the States, lurching from one mishap to another, whether it's the village idiot who has followed...

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CULT RECORD: GUN CLUB: "FIRE OF LOVE"(1981)

The Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce ought to be easy to dismiss as a selfstyled bad boy trying to blackwash over his blonde pout with an authenticating devotion to the blues. Yet his intensity, his guitar work, and his persistence within a rarefied cult all indicate heartfelt commitment, no matter how varied the recorded results. Emerging from...

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CULT MOVIE: THE SEVEN SAMURAI(1954)

A rare example of a story where the remake and the original are equally good, if for different reasons. Kurosawa's brilliant tale of a good-hearted samurai who recruits six others to help defend a small town under constant attack from bandits, was trannsplanted to America where it became John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven. The US version is a hugely...

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LOS CAMPESINOS-VIDEO:"ROMANCE IS BORING"

Los Campesinos! are an indie-pop band which formed in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom in 2006. The band consists of Gareth Campesinos! (vocals, glockenspiel, keyboards), Kim Campesinos! (vocals, keyboards), Tom Campesinos! (guitar, vocals, keyboards), Neil Campesinos! (guitar), Ellen Campesinos! (bass, vocals), Harriet Campesinos! (violin, keyboards, vocals) and Ollie Campesinos! (drums). Aleksandra Campesinos! (vocals, keyboards, glockenspiel) left the band in 2009 to focus on her study. She was replaced by Gareth’s sister Kim in September ...

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CULT RECORD: WIRE: "PINK FLAG"(1977)

The Velvet Underground of the seventies,Wire has sometimes been called: for those "What Goes On" fans who finally worship punk most for the dynamic capacities of its outwardly ugly, secretly beautiful sound, English punk produced no finer document than the band's debut, Pink Flag. Art schoolers to the bone, the quartet turned punk rage into one of...

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CULT MOVIE: HARD BOILED(1992)

American producers certainly made the action film into the monster that it is today, but in the 1990s Hong Kong enjoyed its own cinematic resurgence with directors, led by John Woo (see also Johnny To and Yonfan), adding a harder edge to the action. Although Woo claims violence makes him sick ("I get pretty upset. And I'd bring that to screen. Let's...

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CULT RECORD:BREEDERS:"LAST SPLASH"1993

The Breeders began as a side project for Kim Deal of the Pixies, Tanya Donelly of throwing Muses, and Josephine Whiggs of the great British trance-rockers The Perfect Disaster. Lat Splash balances pleasure and conflict with staggeringly high payoffs on both sides, a pop album that couldn't have sounded listener-friendly even a year earlier. Throughout,...

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CULT MOVIE:SCARFACE(1932)

Al Capone liked this disguised story of his life so much he is supposed to have had his own copy.Muni starred as Tony Camonte, former bagman to an old-style gang leader, who sets out to rule the (mob) world. Despite the film's credits stating, "This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the goverment",...

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CULT RECORD:DEVO:"Q:ARE WE NOT MEN?A:WE ARE DEVO!"

Devo, as it would never let you forget for a second, was a concept band. As early formulators of now long-familiar ironic attitudes about the end of progress, the inevitability of electronic instrumentation, and the explosion of genericism, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald V. Casale, and crew were ahead of their time when their Warner Bros. debut appeared...

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CULT MOVIE:THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW(1975)

A newly engaged couple break down on a lonely road and find themselves at the mercy of local weirdo, Dr Frank-N-Futer. The cult musical to end all cult musicals is still packing them in at late-night showings, complete with a costumed audience and alternative script to be shouted at the screen at the right moment. Curry has never been better as the...

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CULT RECORD:PRETENDERS:"THE PRETENDERS"(1979)

More than Debbie Harry (too cold), Kate Bush (too weird), or even Patti Smith (too early and far off the charts), the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde owns the heart of alternative, as the punk-rock mother of us all. Partly, it's her story: self-defined scabby nobody escapes the classic-rock Midwest for mod England just before the scene explodes, buys a...

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CULT MOVIE:BRAZIL(1985)

A bleak yet humorous take on the future. Sam (Pryce) feels suppresed in a world of technology and bureaucracy, and dreams of flying off with his dream girl Jill (Greist) whom he has never met. Gilliam's experience directing this film was almost as nightmarish as the stoty of Sam. He fought with Universal Studios' chairman Sid Sheinberg (as documented...

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PRIVATE SCHOOLING

So you wannabe a private eye?Get ready to be vulnerable on three counts. 1.PHYSICAL You get your nose slit like Jake Gittes in Chinatown, drugged like Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, beaten up twice like Marlowe in The Big Sleep or six times like Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. Them's the perks. 2.EMOTIONAL Is there something phallic about a private dick...

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CULT RECORD:TELEVISION:"MARQUEE MOON"(1977)

Television made self-consciously mythic rock that conjures up steely skyscrapers the way Led Zeppelin conjures up moss-covered stone castles. Despite its garage-band sound, Television never played many anthemic punk riffs. Instead, it specialized in soaring drones over which Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played staccato radar blips on guitar. Television...

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CULT MOVIE:VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED(1960)

More than four decades after it was made in Letcmore Heath in England, this adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos remains astonishingly creepy. One day, everyone in an English village falls asleep during the middle of the afternoon; months later all the women capable of having children give birth to sinister blond tots with penetrating...

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TITLE BOUT

Films where you feel more effort has gone into the title than anything else. CAN HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPEE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS?(1969) What kind of fool am I?Anthony Newley asked. Does this answer the question? I KILLED MY LESBIAN WIFE, HUNG HER ON A MEAT HOOK AND NOW HAVE A THREE-PICTURE DEAL AT DISNEY(1995) To which the only...

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CULT RECORD:TIM BUCKLEY:"STARSAILOR"(1971)

Dead from a heroin and morphine overdose in 1975, Tim Buckley's 28 years were nonotheless packed with some extraordinary accomplishments. His influence on alternative music is rarely felt directly. Buckley was such a distinctive artist and singer that no one, save his biological son Jeff, could ever really sound like him. Yet underground experimentalists...

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CULT MOVIE:MEAN STREETS(1973)

"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets." Charlie (Keitel) and Johnny (De Niro) are two young hoods establishing themselves in the New York mafia. Charlie, quiet, thoughtful and guilt-ridden, runs errands for his uncle, while Johnny is the embodiment of gangster glory. It's less polished than his later works, but many...

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CULT RECORD:UNDERTONES:"THE UNDERTONES"(1979)

While U.K. bands raged about guns in the streets, Northern Ireland was nurturing a bunch of acts who wanted nothing more than to play pop songs about girls. Belfast, a city whose youth grew up under the gun, produced a whole string of pop-punk bands in the late '70s, most of them under the auspices of Terri Hooley's Good Vibrations label. Among their...

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CULT MOVIE:A BOUT DE SOUFLE(1960)

This hugely influential film about a car thief (Belmondo) on the run with his American girlfriend (Seberg) was at the vanguard of the French New Wave, a movement spearheaded by Francois Truffaut (who conceived the story, even though Goddard wrote the script) and the critics of the Cahiers du Cinema. Much looser than earlier formulaic, studio-led films,...

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STARS WHO PLAYED OTHER STARS

THE GOOD Bette Davies as Joan Crawford Her relationship with Joan Crawford was dubbed Hollywood's "divine feud" so imagine Bette's delight when she realized she could play the role of an Oscar-winning actress who refuses to admit that her career was over as if she was Joanie! The character's name changed but this was a better Crawford impersonation...

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TOP TEN:JOSEPHINE WIGGS(BREEDERS)

1.SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES:"The Scream" 2.CURE:"Seventeen Seconds" 3.GANG OF FOUR:"Entertainment!" 4.SLITS:"Cut" 5.B-52's:"The B-52's" 6.PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.:"Metal Box" 7.PIXIES:"Doolittle" 8.BREEDERS:"Pod" 9.LUSCIOUS JACKSON:"Natural Ingredients" 10.BEASTIE BOYS:"Check Your He...

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CULT RECORD:HOLE:"LIVE THROUGH THIS"(1994)

Courtney Love is a liar and a thief--and those are just two of her outstanding virtues. She's a liar in the way all women lie, or rather, she's made it her project to uncover the endless ways femininity requires women to ignore their own insticts, conform to artificial standards, and subsume themselves within definitions that strangle as they fit....

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CULT MOVIE:REPO MAN(1984)

Cox's most original film is a fantastic conflation of every budget sci-fi theme: a dystopian lawless future, a goverment conspiracy, aliens and atomic power. Otto (Estevez in his first and best starring role) is a disaffected youth who meets a car repossesion man (Stanton in the funniest perfomance of his career) and is persuaded to join the agency....

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CULT RECORD:RAMONES:"RAMONES"(1976)

The Ramones built their music around a crass glue-sniffing fantasy: What if you took only the giddiest peaks of your favorite songs--the second verse, which is the same as the first, in Herman's Hermits' "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," or the roller coaster screams in the '60s AM nugget "Palisades Park"--and played them over and over? And what if you left...

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CULT MOVIE:ERASERHEAD(1977)

Lynch's first major film tells the strange tale of Henry (Nance) and Mary X's (Stewart) bizzare relationship when, during a family dinner, they are informed that they are now the proud parents of a helpless, mewling, phallic-necked premature baby creature. Essentially about the horror of procreation, Eraserhead is full of subliminally sexual nightmare...

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THE DIRECTORS CUT

A book 10 times the size of The Bible could be entirely devoted to a discussion of which directors were all-time greats, but space and your valuable reading time means that we are only able to offer a brief taste of a few of the directors whose films are included in our review section. WOODY ALLEN A New Yorker to the bone, Allen developed his very...

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MARLON VS MERYL

If you're looking to become one of the few distinguished luminaries residing in Hollywood, or at least stand a greater chance of filling that display cabinet you bought to house 13-inch gold-plated naked men, you need to do one of two things. You can either specialize in playing disabled characters, (Hoffman as autistic, Pacino as a blind colonel)...

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CULT RECORD:NIRVANA :"NEVERMIND"(1991)

Kurt Cobain had a way of making his I's resonate like We's. Those famous lyrics from "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "With the lights out, it's less dangerous/Here we are now, entertain us/ I feel stupid and contagious," don't welcome an audience at all, but the form of loathing they offered easily became a model for millions to imitate. Cobain was an...

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CULT MOVIE:THE BIG SLEEP(1946)

What movie,apart from Casablanca, has been as mythologized as this version of The Big Sleep? Ironically, the film based on the work of two fine writers (Raymond Chandler wrote the novel and William Faulkner helped write the script) started life as a sequel to To Have And Have Not. Warners didn't really care what the film was about as long as it starred...

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CULT RECORD:PAVEMENT:"SLANTED AND ENCHANTED(1992)

Pavement is the bookish Nirvana, equally the child of postpunk and indie rock, only far more erudite and restrained,indebted to soundscape aesthetes like Swell Maps, Eno, and the Krautrock contingent, not the sloppier Melvins or Beat Happening. In 1989, buddies "S.M." (Steve Malkmus) and "Spiral Stairs" (Scott Kannberg) began recording in a Stockton,...

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CULT MOVIE:MILLER'S CROSSING(1990)

The Coen brothers' terrific tribute to film noir features one of the trademark complex plots about a scheming young political advisor caught in the shifting loyalties between two crime bosses when a war erupts over a bookie who has been cheating one of them. Its plot was inspired by the 1942 film The Glass Key, based on a Dashiell Hamett story and...

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BEACH HOUSE

Beach House is an indie rock/dream pop group which formed in 2005 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The group consists of Victoria Legrand (vocals, organ) and Alex Scally (guitar, keyboards). Legrand is the niece of french composer Michel Legrand. The group has released three albums: 2006’s “Beach House”, 2008’s “Devotion” and “Teen Dream” out...

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5 GREAT GRAFFITIS

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