Music GLASGOW MUSIC & FILM FESTIVAL PREVIEWS
STRANGE FRUIT Pioneering late 1960s group Silver Apples set the template for the space rock and German kosmische that followed. The sounds are about to come back into orbit at the Glasgow Music and Film Festival, explains Neil Cooper
instruments. Now it’s the other way round.’ Silver Apples colourful history looks set to be captured in Silver Apples: Play Twice Before Listening, a new documentary originally scheduled to premiere at Glasgow Music and Film Festival. With the screening now cancelled for the time being, Simeon will nevertheless play a solo set featuring samples of the late Taylor, who played several dates with Simeon before a car crash seemingly put paid to Silver Apples a second time.
W hen Simeon Coxe III took a 1940s vintage oscillator onstage with him to lively up the psych-rock band he fronted, sparks flew to the extent that half the band left, and, with only drummer Danny Taylor in tow, Silver Apples were born. With their name taken from a WB Yeats poem (science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury had somewhat appropriately already picked up the adjoining line for his 1953 short story collection, ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’), the two Silver Apples albums that appeared in 1968 and 1969 melded Simeon’s primitive sci-fi zaps to Taylor’s busy drum patterns, and set a template for space rock and the German kosmische bands of the next decade.
If such groove-laden future sounds were alien to hippies high on the summer of love’s false promises, it was nothing to what Pan Am airlines made of depictions of their hardware on the cover of the duo’s second album, Contact. The subsequent law-suit grounded Silver Apples indefinitely. Only when a 1994 bootleg of the two albums appeared, followed by a 1996 tribute album and the likes of Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom citing Silver Apples as an influence did Simeon start twisting those dials again.
‘It’s rewarding to me,’ says a zenned-out sounding Simeon from his home in Alabama of the resurgence of interest in Silver Apples. ‘The best thing is I had nothing to do with it. It all happened of its own volition. When we were around the first time, rock and roll bands were terrified of even using the word “electronics”, as though this was a threat to real 84 THE LIST 2 Feb–1 Mar 2012
ITALO-HORROR SOUNDTRACK UMBERTO SWG3, Glasgow, Sat 25 Feb
Horror-score revivalist Matt Hill channels the creepy-ass compositions of Goblin, John Carpenter and Fabio Frizzi in his eerie synthjams, conjuring up a sonic witches brew. A member of drone-merchants Expo
70, Hill has, in his Umberto guise, explored the ever-burgeoning scene of soundtrack composers – see also the Texan sci-fi and synth fan, Xander Harris, who put out his Urban Gothic LP last year on Los Angeles’ Not Not Fun label, or the italo-loving Bristolian, Antoni Maiovvi – who both work outside the medium of film.
Hill writes his own narratives and
creates his own sonic mise-en-scène, illuminating dark corners of the psyche which can be a) left well enough alone, or b) nurtured through a fine diet of slasher flicks and exploitation cinema. Guess which option he chose? Hill’s music creates a heavy, stygian
atmosphere, brooding with a claustrophobic tension and goose- pimply, alone-in-the-dark unease. Great slabs on monolithic synths collide with creepy drone washes and the occasional cathartic relief of chase-scene italo-disco breaks the almost constant knife-edge tension. The ride is equally thrilling and exhausting – like being the protagonist in your own personal celluloid nightmare. Both Umberto’s LPs (From The Grave and Prophecy of the Black Widow) could be plucked from a dusty Dario Argento lost Italian horror classic.
It makes utter sense then that Umberto would play as part of the Glasgow Music and Film Festival, which aims to fuse ‘reverential cult offerings with new, experimental, sonic and visual explorations’. If ever there was a match made in hell, this event is it. Hill is flying over from his home in Kansas City, Missouri to perform a live soundtrack to a mystery film of his choosing (safe to say, you can rule out Love Actually) with support from dirge-jammers Organs of Love. It promises to be scary good. (Mark Keane)
SIMEON AND TAYLOR’S BUSY DRUM PATTERNS SET A TEMPLATE FOR SPACE ROCK
Not until 2007 did Simeon surface again, with solo dates including a spot at the Portishead- curated ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ festival.
While the rest of the world appears to have caught up with Silver Apples, is philosophical about what might have happened next. Simeon
‘If we had continued, I guess we would probably have succumbed to public pressure in order to keep our contract,’ he reflects. ‘It wasn’t easy – and this is a confession – to walk into a room full of people and hear them constantly say things like, “Why can’t you play in tune?”, it eats into you, and just because we’re human beings, we would never have kept that purity. So in a way I’m glad it didn’t happen for us, because there’s a cleanliness about it.’ As for the future, ‘I’m in very good health,’ Simeon says. ‘Nobody can believe I’m seventy-three years old, but right now I’m doing exactly what I want to do, and I’m enjoying every minute of it.’
Mono, Glasgow, Sun 26 Feb
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