Ghost Echoes

Roxy Music and King Crimson shared a label. They nearly shared a lead singer. And Crimson’s lyricist produced Roxy’s debut album. In this deleted scene from the second episode of Ghost Echoes, we compare and contrast two bands that ought to have been more similar than they were.

In the third episode of Ghost Echoes, the secret rules direct us towards a reluctant radical in Robert Wyatt. The eclectic English musician is in good company, though, and you'll find out why as we twist and turn through a number of historical similarities and coincidences. Along the way, we'll also learn that a revolution is not a dinner party. 

Music and Sound Notes: 

- The music in the first section about Robert Wyatt includes “Marchides” by Matching Mole, and “Alifib” by Robert Wyatt. 

- The following section about Cornelius Cardew includes the first movement from Haydn's String Quartet Op. 54, No. 1 performed by Marlburo Music. 

- “Brandy As In Benj” by Matching Mole starts the next section about Wyatt. Three more songs from Little Red Record close out the section: “Righteous Rhumba,” “Gloria Gloom,” and “Starting in the Middle of the Day We Can Drink Our Politics Away.” 

- The next Cardew section contains "Paragraph 7" of The Great Learning performed by the Scratch Orchestra, a repeat engagement by AMMMusic, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte. The recordings of Cardew’s propaganda songs appear on the CD Consciously: “Song for the British Working Class,” “Founding of the Party” and “The Workers of Ontario.” 

- The following sections contain “Foxy Lady” from a Jimi Hendrix bootleg from a 1967 show in Stockholm. And a recording of Cardew’s Thälmann Variations by Frederic Rzewski. (This recording is all the more poignant considering that Rzewski was a friend of Cardew’s, and a colleague in radical politics, though he did not escape censure by Cardew in Stockhausen Serves Imperialism). 

- Finally, the ending is set to two Robert Wyatt songs: “Sea Song” and “Shipbuilding.” 

Further reading, listening: 

- My two main sources for biographical information were Cornelius Cardew: A Life Unfinished by John Tilbury and Different Every Time: The Authorized Biography of Robert Wyatt by Marcus O’Dair. This piece by Edward Fox was useful for some details surrounding Cardew’s death. 

-Clips of Wyatt speaking come from the BBC’s The Voices Of… and the short clip of John Tilbury comes from this video. 

The first Roxy Music album brings together a patchwork of inspirations and influences from across the decades. In the second episode of Ghost Echoes, we stroll spontaneously into the movie theatre of the mind and examine a few of them. Here’s looking at you, kid. 

Music and Sound Notes: 

- All of the Roxy Music tracks heard here for illustrative purposes are from their debut album. They include: “Re-Make/Re-Model”, “Virginia Plain”, “Bitters End”, “Chance Meeting", and “2HB”. 

- The recording of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto near the start is by an anonymous soloist and symphony orchestra, from Musopen. The excerpt from Brief Encounter itself features a recording of the same concerto by Eileen Joyce with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Muir Matheson. The Noël Coward song heard shortly after is “The Party’s Over Now,” from the musical Words and Music. 

- The segment on pop art features excerpts from Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” and David Bowie’s “Andy Warhol.” The section about musicians who went to art school features tiny extracts from “All Your Love” by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers; “Imagine” by John Lennon; “Brown Sugar”, “Some Girls”, and “Honky Tonk Women” all by the Rolling Stones; “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin; “Pinball Wizard” by the Who; “Tubular Bells, Part 1” by Mike Oldfield; “Bike” by Pink Floyd; “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos; “The Village Green Preservation Society” by the Kinks; “Seaside Rendezvous” by Queen; “Your Love is King” by Sade; “Common People” by Pulp; “You’re So Great” by Blur; “Man-Size” by PJ Harvey; “Paper Planes” by M.I.A.; “Kiss With A Fist” by Florence and the Machine; and “London Calling” by the Clash. 

- The recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” used here is by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Uwe Mund. The brief excerpt from the start of Das Rheingold is the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Marek Janowski, and the horn call from Götterdämmerung is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly.

 - The music that finishes the episode off is from the end of Max Steiner’s score for Casablanca. 

Further reading, watching: 

- The two main sources for biographical information were Michael Bracewell’s Re-Make/Re-Model and Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe. The Brief Encounter section is loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’ essay “Leaving the Movie Theatre” from The Rustle of Language. The list of art school alumni who went on to pop stardom comes from Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox. 

- The BBC documentary at the beginning of the pop art section is “Pop Goes the Easel,” an episode of Monitor, hosted by Huw Wheldon and directed by the great Ken Russell. The interview clips with Ferry are taken from a Channel Four documentary called This is Tomorrow. - The images in this blog post were the main source for my descriptions of the Roxy Theatre. 

- Other film and television clips come from Brief Encounter; What’s Opera, Doc?; The Wizard of Oz; Casablanca and Now, Voyager.

In the inaugural episode of Ghost Echoes, a suffragette reinvents a bawdy theatre, a professor locks his students in a classroom to see what happens, and a piece of avant-garde music with clearly delineated rules inspires a music history podcast with secret rules. 

Music and Sound Notes: 

- The music that starts this episode and recurs later is "Paragraph 7" of Cornelius Cardew & The Scratch Orchestra's The Great Learning. The full piece is a huge work in many parts (“paragraphs”), but this record contains only paragraphs two and seven. 

- The Emma Cons section features the first movement from Haydn's String Quartet Op. 54, No. 1 performed by Marlburo Music (in the section about the Old Vic) and the March from Holst's Second Suite for Military Band performed by the USAF Heritage of America Band (in the section about Morley College). Also, there’s a quick snippet of “Mars” from Holst’s The Planets, plus cameos from Graham Chapman and John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Fawlty Towers, respectively. 

- The strident bit of noise that repeats for comedic effect is not straightforwardly by Cardew—it is an extract from AMMMusic, the debut record by the free improvisation group AMM, of which Cardew was a member. 

- The section about Cardew's classes at Morley College contains cameo appearances by John Cage's Variations I as recorded by the Motion Ensemble, and Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel from the Houston Chamber Choir's 2016 recording. (Cardew's students probably didn't actually perform Rothko Chapel, but they did study music by Feldman and this is a representative example.)

-Later, there's a brief incursion of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen, performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln with three conductors: Bruno Maderna, Michael Gielen and Stockhausen himself (it's a very complicated piece). 

Ghost Echoes is the story of music -- and everything else.