Gas Giants

Gav & Tom look back at Iain Banks "Millennium Novel" Dead Air in which the hero is a highly political left-wing Scots shock jock on a London daytime radio station (?) who clumsily gets himself into all kinds of trouble with spelunking gangsters, buffoonish kidnappers, and civil and criminal law.

Gav and Tom bring you another double feature film episode: two films that at first sight don't go together and show how they contributed to where we are now.

1. Liquid Sky (1982) directed by Slava Tsukerman with Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr.

2. After Hours (1985) directed by Martin Scorsese with Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Linda Fiorentino, Catherine O'Hara, and Cheech & Chong.

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Random stuff mentioned….

As I think I say at the start of the episode, the problem here is not finding stuff to put up, but the fact that there is SO MUCH stuff to choose from. This must mean that people coming to Zappa for the first time, perhaps through this podcast, even, is not going to know where to start. I have done my best to include some of the things that aren’t included or aren’t complete in the film.

In the film, a lot of discussion is given over to Frank’s testimony to the senate committee on regulating the lyrics of Rock music. His entire testimony is here and deserves watching.

That 1993 BBC doco

I’m Frank….

Zappa’s music is so diverse that almost everybody can find a track, or even an album, that appeals to them…

Even this guy…but for the rest of you, we have cobbled together twelve of our favourites…

This is a VERY brief overview, not even that really…after selecting these both Tom & I were saying “Oh crap, I can’t believe we left this or that off. Maybe you’ll get the Zappa tennis match after all, but who’s going to judge that?

Interviews…

In the episode, we seem to have made rather a lot of references to various interviews

This podcast, which is often well worth listening to, has conducted interviews with almost all of Zappa’s kids separately, The Dweezil one is linked here because it’s the one that specifically deals with Frank as a guitar player and musical thinker, but the others are also worth a listen…

…like this one, for instance, which includes an interview with Zappa bass player Arthur Barrow.

This amazing film covers many years of Zappa drummers. Watch it whilst it’s still there!

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Tom and Gav try Anthropomorphism on for size in this discussion of Jonathan Lethem's breakthrough debut novel.

It’s difficult to separate Jonathan Lethem from this exhaustive podcast series about Bennington College and it’s influence on American literature of the 80’s/90’s, but this is the episode that deals specifically with the publication of Gun, with occasional music and Motherless Brooklyn. You can dive as deeply as you like…

...and here's Jonathan Lethem talking about his favourite books with a big helping of Non-Bennington Autobiography to go along.

Lethem's article, The Ecstasy of Influence, which he talks about at the top of the above interview.

German listeners will already be familiar with this very successful example of anthropomorphic comedy involving, coincidentally, a Kangaroo.

Metcalf’s world was probably shaped in large part by Flexians, the professional fixers of tawdry privatized and outsourced government policies that meet the needs of the private sector.

Show notes in Substack: https://gasgiants.substack.com/p/praxis-transmutation-mutatis-mutandis

Listen now | Discovering a distress signal from one of the Mother Ship's escape pods, Tom and Gav beam down, having first set their phasers for "Funky".

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Satie’s Vexations… was Meredith Monk there at the 1963 complete performance? Did she stay there long enough to get the show for free?

You never really need an excuse for introducing the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters into the conversation, but could Monk’s vocalising style have anything to do with this?

DJ Shadow’s 1996 track Midnight in a perfect world is one of the better known uses of a Meredith Monk sample

Death will come for all of us, sooner or later, but if it speaks to me like this, I might have a hard time resisting…

Here's a later interview

...and a recent Guardian article

Tom also mentions this in the Podcast.

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* A very detailed article about the book, including some of the locations

* A Guardian article about the book from 2016 which gives a brief overview

* There is a film of Hangover Square, which has nothing to do with the book whatsoever. The best thing about it is the Bernard Hermann score…

Patrick Hamilton was an expert curator of thoroughly unpleasant people. Here’s a short animated extract of a radio play to make your skin crawl.

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Just Another Elephant Boy's Saturday Graveyard Game. Chewin’ the Fat’s brilliant take on gritty 1970’s TV Drama…

...and I managed to find the entire Play on Youtube! Look’s like the drink order wasn’t burned on my brain like I thought, it’s a triple Pernod and Southern Comfort.

There's always space for this wonderful performance of Give My Compliments to the Chef!

...and the power of 80's advertising.

Here's an interesting article that Tom found, about a French photographer pitching up in 80's Glasgow

Don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourselves!

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Some of the cells from Alasdair Gray’s storyboard for the still unrealised film version of Lanark.

Gray reads perhaps the most famous passage from Lanark, concerning Glasgow's unrealised magnificence.

The Gray Day broadcast, which celebrated 40 years since the publishing of Lanark.

I really can’t get enough of these storyboard images…should we crowdfund the film?

Here’s a shot of Tom’s much thumbed copy of Lanark, presented to him by Bandmate Robert Armstrong…

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Rekursiv chip (pretty long), by James Lothian (1993). A beautifully-written story about Linn’s 1980s venture in computing.

Paul Buchannan visits the old rehearsal space and talks about Tinseltown in the Rain

This 1990 Documentary about the band's tour of America was somehow regarded as "lost", perhaps because it's completely infuriating!

For the curious, here is del amitri's 1985 self-titled album, which led to Gav discovering the Blue Nile

You often see the Blue Nile's habit of describing a scene in photographic detail compared to something like this...

Linn records is still going strong, although The Blue Nile's back catalogue is on Virgin now

Win! 's Hi-NRG Banger becomes the world's first anti-capitalist Beer Commercial.

We can't leave without talking in some way about Postcard records. This documentary goes into a lot of detail...

Volume Magazine Compilation CDs (ootoob) and Rob Deacon obit (The Independent)

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