Time for a pulp countdown now, so here's my top 10 book titles that would make great prog rock album titles!
Everyone loves a 10 minute drum solo, right?
At #10: Murdock's Acid Test! Side one is mellow acid jazz, but side two is all stream of consciousness poetry and percussion...
At #9: Into Plutonian Depths! A concept album where Chinese war gongs, the Welsh harp and nine detuned Hammond organs evoke the legend of Persephone...
At #8: Bluebeard's Seventh Wife! Reminiscent of early Soft Machine this album includes an underwater piano AND an electric glockenspiel...
At #7: Thongo At The End Of Time! Trippy free-form eclectic harmonies interspersed with chants from the Upanishads make this album ideal for meditation and/or hot yoga...
At #6: Don't Tempt The Hangman! Old school folk acoustic songs with perhaps more hurdy-gurdy than is strictly necessary or bearable...
At #5: The Light Of Lilith! Unkindly reviewed by Melody Maker as "barely listenable" this album has found a more sympathetic audience recently, and is now rightly hailed as the ur-text of drum & bass lounge music...
At #4: Conscience Interplanetary! Ambient dub soundscapes melding effortlessly with the whispered poetry of e.e. cummings form themselves into an alarmingly intense ASMR cosmic head massage...
At #3: Death Is A Ruby Light! I hope you like post-minimalist interpretive percussion because that's basically all this is, and it's in mono to boot...
At #2: Space, Time and Nathaniel. Recorded live in Antwerp as a War Of The Worlds sequel, the lyrical Moogs and clarinet swirls depict the reawakening of the Earth as the Martian red weed gives way to daffodils and dragonflies...
And at #1: Epitaph For A Dead Beat! A cacophony of jazz fusion harmonies in 5/4 time, undergirded by Mellotron and the bells of St. Oswald's church in Lymington. A classic...
More pulp countdowns another time. Stay cool cats...
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Today in pulp I'm looking back at one of the greatest albums of all time.
What are the chances...
By 1976 Jeff Wayne was already a successful composer and musician, as well as a producer for David Essex. His next plan was to compose a concept album.
War Of The Worlds was already a well known story, notorious due to the Orson Wells radio play production. For Wayne it seemed like a great choice for a rock opera.
Today in pulp I'm looking back at a very popular (and collectable) form of art: Micro Leyendas covers!
Micro Leyendas (mini legends) are a Mexican form of fumetto, small graphic novels normally pitting the everyday hero against the weird, the occult and the unfathomable.
The art of Micro Leyendas is bold, macabre and very funny. The books often tell a cautionary tale of revenge or humiliation, much like a modern folk tale.
Today in pulp: what makes a good opening sentence for a pulp novel?
Now this is a tricky one…
The opening sentence has an almost mythical status in writing. Authors agonise for months, even years, about crafting the right one. Often it’s the last thing to be written.
Which is odd, because very few people abandon a book if they don’t like the first sentence. It’s not like the first sip of wine that tells you if the Grand Cru has been corked! Most people at least finish Chapter One.
The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984: these weren’t the first dystopian novels. There's an interesting history of Victorian and Edwardian literature looking at the impact of modernity on humans and finding it worrying.
Today in pulp I look at some early dystopian books…
Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, was the second novel penned by Jules Verne. However his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected it as too gloomy. The manuscript was only discovered in 1994 when Verne’s grandson hired a locksmith to break into an old family safe.
The novel, set in 1961, warns of the dangers of a utilitarian culture. Paris has street lights, motor cars and the electric chair but no artists or writers any more. Instead industry and commerce dominate and citizens see themselves as cogs in a great economic machine.