SydArthur festival

Op donderdag 7 juli 2016 15:09 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Damn, is het alweer een jaar geleden dat Dieter Moebius overleed?

Op vrijdag 8 juli 2016 11:24 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Percy Shelley, dat is wel zo'n persoon die mij verdomd interessant lijkt, maar nog niets van gelezen heb. Moet maar eens verandering in komen binnenkort

Today, if you don’t already know it, search out ‘Looping’ by Agitation Free. To listen to it on heavy rotation is to enter a meditative world of the Terry Riley variety, and it might just change your life. How this band of young Berliners excelled in their brief career! But how much better than anything else that they committed to tape is ‘Looping’. To stumble upon it is to fall down Alice’s rabbit hole out of time itself. It fades in as though it had been playing forever upon some endless gypsy caravan that is only now passing your home – 22 minutes later, that serpentine dance recedes over the horizon and leaves you bereft. The SydArthur Festival is committed to changes of consciousness. Give yourself to ‘Looping’ today and change your own.

Op zaterdag 9 juli 2016 15:13 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Dag 3:

[..]

Agitation Free - Looping IV [Live]

Op zondag 10 juli 2016 15:42 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Dag 4

Take the time to search out and listen to Tangerine Dream’s errant 45 ‘Ultima Thule’. Is this not the greatest post-Syd excursion this side of the Barrett Floyd? That T. Dream’s leader Edgar Froese chose to stray from his band’s regular gargantuan long-playing metaphor into a slab of 45rpm ramalama only goes to show how important he considered this Syd Barrettian statement to be.

Tangerine Dream "Ultima Thule Part 1"

Op maandag 11 juli 2016 10:49 schreef Gehenna het volgende:

[..]

Zoveel Tangerine Dream geluisterd, behalve deze

Onverwachte sound

Op woensdag 13 juli 2016 11:08 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
#TeamTesla

Op woensdag 13 juli 2016 11:20 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

[..]

Tja tesla heeft de grammofoon niet uitgevonden helaas

Toch wel een essentieel stukje techniek in de rock'n'roll

Krautrockers created their own medicines and meditations with which to sooth their tortured souls. How this music has endured. Its pop art ingredients being so all-pervasive – industrial sounds, urban traffic noise, western TV, the weather itself – has ensured that however visceral the genre became, it has by this time in the 21st century continued to serve the musical underground through the sheer powerdrive of its execution. Whether soft or hard, Krautrock is always extreme.

Op woensdag 20 juli 2016 20:45 schreef LompeHork het volgende:
Boh, lekker nummer ook wel, ik ben niet heel bekend met krautrock, maar nu toch maar eens op zoek

Break free from your robot self today by taking an alternative route to or from your daily destination. Make the effort to get a different vista – is there a great view you can reach without making your day too difficult? Bird-watch, animal-watch or people-watch – whichever is most suitable or least likely to get you arrested – make your choice. Today, let’s get as high as we can.

Op woensdag 27 juli 2016 08:56 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Dag 21:

Vandaag moeten we verdwalen op een hoog punt.

[..]

Op woensdag 27 juli 2016 09:49 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

[..]

lekker buurten bij de bovenste buurman dus.

Op woensdag 27 juli 2016 09:55 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

[..]

Goed plan

Op donderdag 21 juli 2016 08:14 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Dag 15: Jap rock van the helping soul

The Helping Soul - Peace For Fools [1969] ソウルの追求

wat een tof nummer

Op maandag 25 juli 2016 09:09 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Dag 19: Cold sun - Ra Ma

Cold Sun - Ra Ma - Dark Shadows 1969

Today let's practice cut-ups. Make Burroughs proud by tearing first a page from the Bible, second a page from the Koran, third a page of Cosmopolitan and finally a page from any appliance instruction leaflet. Cut strips of text and on your kitchen table sort them out into poetry.

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 10:49 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:
Oh. Dit ga ik zometeen doen ja

Edit: online geschikte 3e pagina's van de cosmopolitan vinden is nog best lastig, ga gewoon voor het 3e artikel op de website

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 11:21 schreef Gehenna het volgende:

[..]

Hoeft niet per s� het 3e artikel te zijn als ik zo lees, de derde opdracht is 'een' bladzijde eruit scheuren

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 11:23 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

[..]

Ah ja, ik heb al een leuk stuk gevonden dus of ik afwijk of niet, ik ga die toch wel gebruiken.

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 10:29 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Dat zulke zieke boeken achter zo'n uiterlijk schuilgaan

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 11:29 schreef Gehenna het volgende:

[..]

Moet nog steeds beginnen in z'n boeken, dacht dat ze vooral heel vreemd waren, maar ook nog eens heel smerig?

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 15:38 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

SPOILER
Seek refuge in the option button

Each press of this switches the rule over the day and the night.
The deity with the open door, it’s body used to connect the input source and every living thing that moveth. The Great Hot Air Machine yielding seed te divide the hearts of humankind. The beast of the void creepeth upon the cattle of the nation, others got creative. Called the source a con, press the dimmer button, created settings in their own image.
Oh you, you’re so vain. You probably think this speech is about you.

Dit heb ik er uitgepoept

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 15:38 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:

SPOILER
Seek refuge in the option button

Each press of this switches the rule over the day and the night.
The deity with the open door, it’s body used to connect the input source and every living thing that moveth. The Great Hot Air Machine yielding seed te divide the hearts of humankind. The beast of the void creepeth upon the cattle of the nation, others got creative. Called the source a con, press the dimmer button, created settings in their own image.
Oh you, you’re so vain. You probably think this speech is about you.

Dit heb ik er uitgepoept

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 16:04 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:
Enig idee wel cosmopolitan artikel ik heb gebruikt?

Op dinsdag 2 augustus 2016 16:08 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

[..]

Iets over melania trump?

Op woensdag 3 augustus 2016 10:40 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Nu alweer afgelopen

Had je het programma-boekje nog op tijd binnen gekregen?

Op dinsdag 6 juni 2017 19:56 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

twitter:
OnThisDeity twitterde op dinsdag 06-06-2017 om 19:28:30 @TerminaalVrdwld Yes, we are indeed doing SydArthur Festival 2. 😀 reageer retweet

Op woensdag 7 juni 2017 12:30 schreef Trashcanman het volgende:
Aftrap op zelfde maanstand weer?

Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:03 schreef Grobbel het volgende:
Heeft de band genaamd Syd Arthur zich al ooit eens uitgelaten over dit festival eigenlijk?

Op dinsdag 11 juli 2017 10:19 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
Tof nummer, maar het gaat gewoon als garage rock in mijn boekje

Op donderdag 20 juli 2017 09:55 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
hehe ik vind dat P�rson Sound juist typisch jaren '60 en daardoor lekker nostalgisch klinken

Today on Day 6 of the SydArthur Festival, let us salute the eloquence and robustness of Henry David Thoreau’s still-modern vision with as grand a musical hymn to the frontiersman spirit as the rock’n’roll era, surely, has yet produced: David Ackles’ incredible 1972 epic ‘The Montana Song’.

Telling the tale of a visit to his grandparents’ now-derelict home, Ackles used his big Elektra Records recording budget to hire London’s enormous IBC Studios and a huge orchestra with which to subdue and entrance his listeners. One-time producer of The Teardrop Explodes, Hugh Jones tells of how, as a young IBC tape-operator assisting in the recording of this track, he was entranced by the backwoodsman demeanour of David Ackles himself, who would every day arrive with his handwritten musical charts for the orchestra carefully piled into the back of a knapsack. None of the Elektra executives had a clue where Ackles went at night. A single listen to ‘The Montana Song’ will allow us to imagine him orchestrating by the glow of his Thames embankment campfire.

It’s Day 7 of the SydArthur Festival, the New Moon, and Friday the 13th – unlucky for some. Ah, but for we rock’n’roll heathens stomping in the summer heat, dowsing our World Cup blues in the idiot dance of the moment, it’s time to summon ‘Fire Spirit’ by the Gun Club. ‘Fire Spirit’ invokes the ignis-fatuus, the foolish fire, the Kundalini-esque thrill-spirit that snaps at us and whips us in the rock’n’roll of our dervish dance. Sung and intoned by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, herein his low-key California hillbilly drawl never falls below the buzzsaw ramalama guitar levels of his Gun Club, despite at times barely horse-whispering his lyrics. “I will be cheating, the whole ritual!”

Today on the 10th day of the SydArthur Festival, we pay our respects to the LSD-gobbling, avant-punk vocalist Alan Vega – one half of of the seismic duo Suicide. On this, still only the second anniversary of his death, let’s put ourselves in a suitably sombre mood by listening now to Suicide’s requiem ‘Che’, which closed their self-titled 1977 debut LP. Perversely but typically, Vega chose the opposite side of the fence from the general consensus – “they said you were a saint, but I know you ain’t” – yet even more perversely, invited his keyboard cohort Martin Rev to supply the same phased lounge lizard porn-organ music as he had crooned love songs of near-religious devotion perhaps just two or three tracks before this. The result is dark, claustrophobic, crypt-like and utterly the most real embodiment of all the conflicting emotions that we should feel about such a World Prometheus as Che Guevara. Bravo, Alan Vega.

Happy Birthday, Roky Erickson – how we love you, here at the SydArthur Festival!

Let’s ring in this important lunar day by listening to the remarkable ‘Creature with the Atom Brain’, from Roky’s one-time comeback album THE EVIL ONE. Crack open your own melted plastic brain and mourn and swoon along to Roswell Roky in full Stardust Cowboy mode. “Creature with the atom brain, why is he acting so strange?” Brought up religious and watching too many horror movies as a child, poor Roky fell into a Jungian underworld soup not of his own making. Unlike our own dear Syd Barrett, Roky rose irregularly out of the swamps to bring forth new myths, new fears, new neuroses for this Industrial Age. But hey, when the all-pervasive Christian church destroys your every last temple, divinity and tradition, what’s left but to start all over again? Witchfinder Roky got medieval on our arse…still scared of things we climbed out of long ago. But doesn’t that fear sound good?

It’s Day 8 here at the SydArthur Festival and we’re celebrating the Storming of the Bastille with something French, freedom-loving, cathartic, meta-synchronised, fetish-like and awesome in the strictest sense of the word. ‘La L�gende du Siecle’ by Magma subjects the music fan to a colossal near-Olympian display of avant-Supremes: soul music from the stars. Who would imagine that there could be such a chasm between the haphazard opportunist actions of those Bastille stormers and the Gurdjieffian precision of their freedom-practicing great-great-great grandchildren? Magma trashed General De Gaulle forever with their blazingly futuristic, ardent, post-nationalist, mixed-race, Sun Ra-attitude to a Next World Music. Watch them here in performance, and be astonished.

Today on the 12th day of the SydArthur Festival, we throw our arms up to the cosmos in huge embrace of two colossal outsiders. Dearest Nico, today you sing for Hunter as well. All That Is My Own terminates your marvellous album Desert Shore. Both of you walked at the edges. Nico, you sing where land and water meet. You sing also of the borderline. They who know must pass on…meet me at the desertshore. This blessed SydArthur Festival has thrown the two of you together. What we love so much about you both has probably started some cosmic argument between the pair of you.

If the inspirational heart of this deeply loving SydArthur Festival beats with the psychedelic pulse of the Ur-Ancestors, where then did those psychedelic giants themselves search for their Fountain of Knowledge? For many of those rock’n’rollers, the answer was ‘John Coltrane’. How? No amplifiers, no electric instruments, still lugging about that old wardrobe they call ‘double bass’, and yet by 1961 Coltrane was possessed of an attitude to life that would – within barely half-a-decade – become adopted by every experimental Western musician. Like Percy Shelley, Robert Graves, Henry David Thoreau before him, ‘Trane’, as John Coltrane became known, embodied the high-reaching mysticism that would come to define the ’60s and ’70s. Trane looked to the Hinduism of India, he looked to meditation, he named his son after Ravi Shankar, he looked between the musical notes and w-i-d-e-n-e-d them considerably. His endgame? “I want more of the sense of the expansion of time. I want the time to be more plastic.”

And what Coltrane’s early ’60s band brought forth acoustically, there too traipsed the psychedelic bands of five years hence – the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, etc – but now played on loud electric axes. The antecedents of the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’? Listen to the groove of McCoy Tyner’s piano and Elvin Jones’ drums on Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’. It’s what the Doors aped when club managers insisted they extend their set in the early days. Ah, but even the guitar genius of Robbie Krieger couldn’t hide his devotion to what Coltrane’s sax whips out at 8 minutes, 31 seconds of that track. Doors producer Paul Rothschild, himself so jazz, could not resist its inclusion on the final version of ‘Light My Fire’. Trane’s reputation was rising. So by the time the Byrds recorded ‘Eight Miles High’, it was actually in Roger McGuinn’s interest to confess to his Trane-isms on the song’s unforgettable lead guitar lines. Was it Coltrane’s ‘Africa’? Or was it ‘India’? Performed by McGuinn on a strident and unwieldy electric 12-string no less: his heathen gate-crashing melody channels Coltrane’s off-kilter saxophone magnificently. Free jazz sax permeated performances of the MC5, whose singer named himself after Coltrane’s pianist. Side two of Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia lambasted punks with Coltranean free rock.

When in summer 1982 the Teardrop Explodes passed through San Francisco’s airport, their entourage was approached by members of the Church of John Coltrane, who spoke so lovingly of their divine mentor that three of the band’s five members bought Coltrane t-shirts inscribed ‘Damn The Rules!’ The man himself would surely have approved; interviewed in the early ’60s, Coltrane openly declared his wish to be canonised within 15 years of his death.

Day 13 here at the SydArthur Festival. Let’s take advantage of that mysterious number to unleash a right old pagan onslaught in the form of ‘Raider’. Never off our turntable since 1981, this slab of supercool West Coast barn-dance was a product of the mighty union of two underground stars. Judy Henske was managed by Zappa manager Herb Cohen and a longtime protege of Mr Elektra, Jac Holzman. Teaming up with arranger/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jerry Yester, best known for his orchestral work on Tim Buckley’s GOODBYE AND HELLO, the resulting album FAREWELL ALDEBARAN was released on Zappa’s Straight label. Although too eclectic to really showcase the depth of Judy’s amazing voice, the album still reaches several high points – the monolithic gravel blues of ‘Snowblind’ sounds like Sabbath playing the Plastic Ono Band, while ‘Raider’, today’s choice du jour, is the kind of rustic knees-up that would make Neil Young proud.

Today on Day 14 of the SydArthur Festival, we pay homage to Grandmaster Moebius who passed on three years ago, leaving us with a huge trail of evident musical genius. Difficult though it is to pick one tune to represent M, let’s strike an obvious pose by lending an ear now to ‘Watussi’ – the cyclical, emblematic opening of Harmonia’s debut LP. Brimming over an foaming at the gils with inner beats, outer beats, static beats, pedestrian beats, ‘Watussi’ brilliantly sums up its three protagonists but most of all – for our purposes herein – showcases the impish Moebius at his foppish, glorious peak. But then again, who else in 70s Krautland would have dared portray himself as the co-habitee of his cohort, as did Moebius with Roedelius on the cover of ZUCKERZEIT? As Dennis Alcapone would say, “onwards ever, backwards never!” We love you, Moebius.

Op dinsdag 9 juli 2019 12:05 schreef Gehenna het volgende:
oh hallo!

HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S BIRTHDAY
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
– Henry David Thoreau

Gnostic artists interface directly with their information. The materials they bring forth are through their own research and from their own experiences. Hearsay is taboo. The SydArthur Festival cherishes the kind of pioneers who not only dared to embark on bold quests, but who returned from their journeys and made good account of themselves and their experiences. What makes Henry David Thoreau a prophet for the modern age is that he not only went to the woods to live deliberately but, upon his return, he delivered such a remarkable testament that Walden has become a holy text. Essential. Only time has shown us the long-term truth of Thoreau’s words. But one thing is certain: with this accompanying text to support Thoreau’s advocacy of life in the woods, he became Authority. The Authority is the one who creates it and claims it within themselves.

Thoreau was our first hippie. Preaching self-reliance and personal responsibility, here was an intellectual who dared to roll up his sleeves and try it all out: a Nature Boy standing fast against the onslaught of the Industrial Age. He saw the whole world through the microscopic lens of his local pond where he set out to “front only the essential facts of life”. Such a deep journey within, he maintained, was “essentially revolutionary”, a way to change the world. His conclusions were prescriptive and, to the future counterculture, offered a viable alternative to the enslavement of the conveyor belt of life through a new path of self-determination and simplification. As the modern Anti-Capitalist’s fountainhead, Thoreau not only challenged the morality of over-consumption, but further he believed that it was only when we simplify that we begin to reach our higher potential. While his way to personal elevation might not be the only way, it is most certainly a way available to all. What a beautiful gift! Henry David Thoreau has obtained in our minds the status of a folk hero, his words and message having long been appropriated by every righteous-thinking conservationist, anti-capitalist and by every believer in non-violent resistance. To the woods!

THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE
“Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.”
– Raya Dunayevskaya

If we are in the SydArthur Festival looking for shifts of consciousness, then can there be any greater Forever shift in consciousness than the Storming of the Bastille? The Bastille: that grim and grotesque edifice, that omnipresent symbol of injustice and abuse, whose castellated walls overshadowed Paris since Medieval times. So grim, artists depicted it three times larger than reality. The Storming of the Bastille may have only released six old prisoners and a dog, but it relieved a great strain on the psyche of Parisians. And sometimes revolutions need an incendiary act in order to kick-start proceedings. Power to the People. Just as Ginsberg, Hoffman and cohorts had in 1967 surrounded the Pentagon and chanted “Out Demons Out” in protest against the Vietnam War, the Storming of the Bastille was the great symbolic act that put the fate of the people into their own hands. Power to the People.

The mere fact that we can even think about gobbling psychedelics presupposes that we have full bellies – ingesting the sacred mushroom after you’ve eaten the daily food. These people were starving. Like James Brown, who said himself that he’d been unable to address and sing about black consciousness until he’d guaranteed putting food on the table for his family and his musicians, the French peasants could not advance their own cause without food in their bellies. Their benevolent monarchy cared not: “Let them eat cake.” Until the overthrow of such basic injustices, society could go nowhere.

The Storming of the Bastille was a revolutionary act, a great leap forward in the consciousness of the French peasantry. A Ground Zero moment in French history? No, a Ground Zero moment in Human History. Power to the People. Right On.

JULY 15TH 1947
ROKY ERICKSON’S BIRTHDAY
How moved you are by the recently departed Roky Erickson depends how far up or down you are on the evolutionary tree. Tears can fall in the most unlikely moments, and for any number of reasons. His caterwauling 4-octave Texan shriek made teen dramas out of the 13th Floor Elevators’ extravagant cosmic notions. Roky was the mouthpiece of those psychedelic pioneers, with all the implications of what a mouthpiece is – as in Tommy Hall’s putting words into his mouth, being fed too much acid, biting off more than you can chew. But Roky was the local teen heartthrob boy wonder, and at 18 already in possession of a successful career. He’d written ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (“at 13 or sumthin like that”) and taken the vocal style of local hero Buddy Holly, turning it into an even more caffeinated helium mission. What this son of an arty musical family was not to know was that his poetry – later to be shown in print as a veritable cosmic stew of near-religious declarations – would be, throughout the Elevators’ songs, mostly overwritten by a Gurdjieffian hyperventilator almost a decade his senior. That Roky was struggling, by the recording of the first Elevators’ album, even to score a day-pass out of Rusk mental institution is just about the most unrighteous metaphor for a mostly righteous career.

For someone who was mentally fragile in any case, what Roky endured makes him saintly. Not a martyr, but passion bearer. He did not gorge himself, he was fed – put through these things – a victim of his birthplace, of his family, and of the lofty nature of his band leader. What a role to undertake, what a cross to bear. Who of us upon trying such things would not themselves have turned into a headcase? The story of the Elevators is as on the edge as rock’n’roll stories can get. Up against it in a way no one else was, they virtually erase every other rock’n’roll tale.

FULL MOON
The cosmic structuring of the 28-day SydArthur Festival obliges us to address the very entity that dictates that structure: the Moon itself. That Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee had, ten years ago, the poetic grace to die one full lunar month apart ensures that these great psychedelic artists were righteous motherfuckers even in death. Herein, they become the sacred twins.

Let’s take the cosmic opportunity to take it down an evolutionary notch. Can you see the moon from your home or your place of work? If not, could you search it out? Is there any way in which you could address it with a drink in your hand and stare up at its pulsing, and consider that these impulses dictate our tides, that these impulses dictate menstruation in women? We know how important the Lunar Calendar was to our ancient ancestors. Before egotist Caesars inserted their own months – July for Julius and August for Augustus – our festivals were none of them moveable feasts but fixed in time. The modern industrial world of the 1930s even attempted briefly to ease the lot of workers by returning to the Lunar Calendar. Hidden behind the cityscape, the unseen Moon – whether we heed it or not – still pulses out its influence upon us all. So let us today address that brilliant globe in its fullest phase, and raise our cups to its millennia-long irregular path across the skies of our Solar System.

DEATH OF JOHN COLTRANE
"All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws." – John Coltrane

If the inspirational heart of this deeply loving SydArthur Festival beats with the psychedelic pulse of the Ur-Ancestors, where then did those psychedelic giants themselves search for their Fountain of Knowledge? For many of those rock’n’rollers, the answer was ‘John Coltrane’. How? No amplifiers, no electric instruments, still lugging about that old wardrobe they call ‘double bass’, and yet by 1961 Coltrane was possessed of an attitude to life that would – within barely half-a-decade – become adopted by every experimental Western musician. Like Percy Shelley, Robert Graves, Henry David Thoreau before him, ‘Trane’, as John Coltrane became known, embodied the high-reaching mysticism that would come to define the ’60s and ’70s. Trane looked to the Hinduism of India, he looked to meditation, he named his son after Ravi Shankar, he looked between the musical notes and w-i-d-e-n-e-d them considerably. His endgame? “I want more of the sense of the expansion of time. I want the time to be more plastic.”

And what Coltrane’s early ’60s band brought forth acoustically, there too traipsed the psychedelic bands of five years hence – the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, etc – but now played on loud electric axes. The antecedents of the Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’? Listen to the groove of McCoy Tyner’s piano and Elvin Jones’ drums on Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’. It’s what the Doors aped when club managers insisted they extend their set in the early days. Ah, but even the guitar genius of Robbie Krieger couldn’t hide his devotion to what Coltrane’s sax whips out at 8 minutes, 31 seconds of that track. Doors producer Paul Rothschild, himself so jazz, could not resist its inclusion on the final version of ‘Light My Fire’. Trane’s reputation was rising. So by the time the Byrds recorded ‘Eight Miles High’, it was actually in Roger McGuinn’s interest to confess to his Trane-isms on the song’s unforgettable lead guitar lines. Was it Coltrane’s ‘Africa’? Or was it ‘India’? Performed by McGuinn on a strident and unwieldy electric 12-string no less: his heathen gate-crashing melody channels Coltrane’s off-kilter saxophone magnificently. Free jazz sax permeated performances of the MC5, whose singer named himself after Coltrane’s pianist. Side two of Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia lambasted punks with Coltranean free rock.

When in summer 1982 the Teardrop Explodes passed through San Francisco’s airport, their entourage was approached by members of the Church of John Coltrane, who spoke so lovingly of their divine mentor that three of the band’s five members bought Coltrane t-shirts inscribed ‘Damn The Rules!’ The man himself would surely have approved; interviewed in the early ’60s, Coltrane openly declared his wish to be canonised within 15 years of his death.