Children Of Nuggets

Children Of Nuggets is the title of a 4 CDs' box set compiled by Rhino Records, that tries untidily to focus on the so called "second psychedelic era", that is from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties. The real explosion of neo-psych and neo-garage sounds came all over the world in the eightes. I was a teenager fan of that scene, that also helped me to discover many more sixties' music. It's not easy to find some clips, because these bands never really emerged from the underground, anyway here is a couple.
The Fuzztones were the prime movers of the New York scene, they soon became a legend thanks also to their exciting live shows. The leader Rudi Protrudi embodies very well the archetype of the forever-teenager-rock-n-roll-rebel!
Hoodoo Gurus were part of the rich and brilliant Australian scene, I hope many of you remember names like Died Pretty, New Christs, Church, Moffs... They played a powerful and attractive blend of garage-punk and power -pop. This song is included in the album Mars Needs Guitars, a good sequel of the beautiful debut work Stonage Romeos.

Fuzztones - Nine Months Later (1987)
Hoodoo Gurus - Like Wow-Wipeout (1985)

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See you soon

Mirco

In Search Of Space

The simple and effective formula of space-rock has been invented at the dawn of the seventies by the Hawkwind, a band that emerged from the Ladbroke Grove scene in London. With catchy hard rock riffs, hypnotic 4/4 rhythms, long guitar's and horns' improvisations and a background of spacey electronic noise, they have crossed several decades without losing the affection of their many followers. Some of their science fiction lyrics have been written by the underground poet Robert Calvert, or even by the great British writer Michael Moorcock. Silver Machine has been their greatest success, it made them earn enough money to put on a trippy light show that is still typical of their concerts. This clip is from the Top Of The Pop's archives; you'll notice Lemmy, future founder of Motorhead, on bass and vocals, and the handsome dancer Stacia, that used to perform with them in those years.
In the nineties space-rock even "landed" on MTV, with this Ozric Tentacles' clip, a song taken from their 1993 album Jurassic Shift. The Ozric are the most popular among the bands that gave birth in the eightes to a sort of British neo-hippie scene, gathering in free concerts and festivals in places like Stonehenge. Their music is quite complex, they play long instrumental jams with jazzy and ethnic-new agey influences, maybe more similar to Daevid Allen's Gong than to Hawkwind. They also have a mind blowing light show, as you'll see in the video.
I saw both these bands in concert and I have to say that, in both cases, it's been a trip with no need of chemical substances!
My only criticism about Hawkwind and Ozric Tentacles is that they both made too many records, and they all sound very similar, so they ended up being boring. But it's well worth catching these videos to see these freaks in action.

Hawkwind - Silver Machine (1972)
Ozric Tentacles - Vita Voom (1993)

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Bye

Mirco

Krautrock # 2

Hi everybody! The technical break lasted longer than expected, but at least my PC works much faster now and I haven't lost any of the files in my archive.
I like to come back to this blog with two of my favourite videos, from the musical scene that maybe is most fascinating to me. Here we have a couple of amazing german bands from the german TV program we've all learned to love: The Beat Club.
The Can well represents the meeting of pop music with the contemporary avant-garde. At the end of the sixties two Stockhausen's students, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, realized that the rock scene offered the only chance to create something really innovative in music. So they joined a young rock guitar player, the Czukay's student Michael Caroli, a talented jazz drummer, Jaki Liebezeit, and the wild american singer Malcolm Mooney, soon replaced excellently by the japanese busker Damo Suzuki. Taking inspiration from the Velvet Underground, acid rock, funky and ethnic music...and much more, they created an unique style, sophisticated and raw at the same time, so innovative to anticipate somehow the most creative side of new wave. The song Paperhouse is the opening track of their double album Tago Mago, considered by many as their masterpiece.
Kraftwerk appeared at the Beat Club with a very particular line up. As Julian Cope tells in his essential book Krautrocksampler (which has finally been translated into italian too!) this perfomance could have been the death of Kraftwerk, but it wasn't, fortunately. In fact this clip documents the birth of a new memorable band: Neu!
In the summer of '71 the two Kraftwerk's former members Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider were joined by another couple of musicians from Dusseldorf, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, right before this appearance. They gave a totally new direction to the sound...Hutter became so nervous about it that he left the band to perform as a trio. This is the reason why Truckstop Gondolero is an anticipation of the typical sound of Neu!, the band that Rother and Dinger formed a few time later. The "motorik beat" of this long and mesmerizing track easily reminds of some of the best Neu!'s songs, like Hallogallo, on their first self-titled LP.
Kraftwerk soon reformed as a duet too for their album Ralf & Florian, that continued on the path that lead them to become the most influencial electronic band ever.

Can - Paperhouse (1971)
Kraftwerk - Truckstop Gondolero (1971)

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Free comments as usual...

Welcome back!

Mirco

A Technical Break...

I won't have my PC here with me for about a week, so I won't be able to update the blog posting new videos. In the meantime you can take a look at the old posts; I have uploaded 42 clips so far and it seems they are all still available. I will connect from my job when it's possible (though I shouldn't...), so keep sending comments if you wish. Don't forget also to click on the links on my list to check some other cool music blogs and sites.

Thanks to all who have supported Music For Your Eyes, see you again very soon.

Mirco

Fotheringay

As I saw that the Fotheringay's album has re-appeared on the 8 Days In April blog, and it has been mentioned also on hansZUNblog, I thought it was the right time to post this beautiful video. Fotheringay has been a sort of super-group of the British folk-rock scene, formed by the vocalist Sandy Denny after she left The Fairport Convention, with his boy-friend Trevor Lucas, on guitar and lead vocal, and the drummer Jerry Convay (both ex-Eclection), the guitarist Jerry Donahue (ex-Tumbleweed) and Pat Donaldson (ex-Country Fever) on bass. The band lasted for just one short season in 1970 and left us the self-titled album, a little gem of electric folk. As you can hear in this song perfomed live for the good old Beat Club their music had also some reminiscences of American country and west-coast music.

Fotheringay - Too Much Of Nothing (1970)

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See you

Mirco

For Your Pleasure

The name Roxy Music easily reminds of Brian Ferry's "kitch" and boring pop music. But the Roxy have been for a short time, between '72 and '73, one of the most exciting and "unorthodox" musical novelty. Ferry was not the only Brian in the line up, but the mad scientist Eno provided his (no)musical contribution, and there was space also for the inventions of brilliant musicians like Phil Manzanera on guitar and the horn player Andy McKay. The first two albums, Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, are memorable works on which "decadence" is just a pretext to "Re-make/Re-model" impudently rock 'n' roll music.
There are also some footages to prove it because, thanks God, they played at The Beat Club too. So here they are, for your pleasure: The Roxy Music in 1972!

Added on March 09: I just discovered that the Ladytron video is not from the Beat Club but from the BBC program The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Roxy Music - Ladytron (1972)
Roxy Music - Virginia Plain (1972)

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If you like these clips please leave some more comments, I need feedback. Thanks.

See you next time

Mirco

From The Planet Kobaia

I found this video after that someone asked me if there was some clips available by the incredible french band Magma. In fact this a longer and much higher resolution version of a video you can also watch here. It is a cameo from the french movie Moi Y'en A Vouloir Des Sous. I've never seen it but I read it is a sort of satiric comedy. Here they play in a futuristic church in front of some priests (I can recognize the famous actor Michel Serrault) who don't seem too surprised by the weird music. It was 1972 and Magma were beginning to evolve from an earlier progressive-fusion, somehow similar to early-seventies Soft Machine, or Nucleus, to their own unique and very peculiar style, a dramatic, almost disturbing and complex music, with strange and evocative vocal harmonies. One of the strangest thing ever played by a rock(?) band. Headed by the impetuous drummer Christian Vander, inspired by John Coltrane in his tireless search for "music supreme", they have been telling through all their albums the saga of the planet Kobaia and the meeting of kobaian people with the people of the Earth. All of this is sung in Kobaian language, whose dictionary and grammar rules have been conceived by Vander himself.
It's a pity that the actors' dialogue doesn't allow us to hear to the whole song, because it is an unreleased one (the title is unknown) and it sounds, like almost anything that Magma ever played, astonishing.
They didn't wear those strange clothes and glasses just for the movie, this is the way they used to look like...like aliens!

Magma - Clip from "Moi Y'en A Vouloir Des Sous" (1972)

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I hope this will inspire you to leave a comment.

Ciao

Mirco

Nuggets # 2

A couple more of classics from the original garage-punk era. Music Machine and Seeds are fundamental bands, you need to listen to them to catch the true essence of this straight and energetic style, that wrote a great chapter on the history of modern music using only a few chords. Two bands from California, both headed by a charismatic and expressive singer, porpose their two-minutes anthems. Sean Bonniweel's Music Machine appeared on American Bandstand (I'm not sure if it was on '66 or '67...) miming their hit Talk Talk, with their dark look that can be seen on this fotograph, and that fits perfectly with the almost threatening manner of the song.
Sky "Sunlight" Saxon's band, The Seeds, plays the role of The Warts on an episode of the american TV show The Mothers-In-Law, entitled How Not To Manage A Rock Group, broadcasted on '68. They perform the legendary Pushin' Too Hard, published two years earlier, on a living room, in front of a family that doesn't seem to enjoy their noise.

Music Machine - Talk Talk (1966)
Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard (1968)

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Don't forget to leave a comment.

See you soon

Mirco