Back at the beginning of Cindytalk,there was a photocopied magazine related
to their ideas and inspirations.Its title was "The Perfect Illusion Starts Here".
The contact address for the band that appeared in both vinyl versions of Camouflage Heart and on the CD was also "the perfect illusion".
Video stills from a Freeze/going into Cindytalk track,"Lullaby in Black"
(and "Quietly Burning"?).
Could Plastic Orcadian and Cinder illuminate more all this?
;-)
to their ideas and inspirations.Its title was "The Perfect Illusion Starts Here".
The contact address for the band that appeared in both vinyl versions of Camouflage Heart and on the CD was also "the perfect illusion".
Video stills from a Freeze/going into Cindytalk track,"Lullaby in Black"
(and "Quietly Burning"?).
Could Plastic Orcadian and Cinder illuminate more all this?
;-)
45 comments:
Was this video taken around 1980?
My memory isn't great but here's what I think may or may not have happened, allegedly.
I got a video camera for my 21st birthday so I know for a fact this happened in April 1982 possibly around the 5th. I took my camera up to Gordon's house and I asked him if I could film him lip syncing to some songs. He did Lullaby In Black and I think Quietly Burning and we were going to do From The Bizarre but his brother came home.
The situation was, me with video camera, Gordon lying on floor half naked and big brother taking his jacket off in the hall. I can't recall whether the video camera or umbrella prop (don't ask about the umbrella) got thrown the farthest but both went a good distance.
Now my question to you is, how have you got stills from a video tape me and Gordon both watched burn?
i think it was 1982.it was filmed by the plastic orcadian in linlithgow in my folks front room.i had temporarily moved back home (from edinburgh) prior to relocating to london.i was home for 6 months between january and july that year,david was pre-occupied,finishing up university and i was stir-crazy,desperate to get cindytalk moving.i remember we filmed me lip-synching to "lullaby in black" (the top image) but i don't recall exactly which song the bottom image relates to,possibly "quietly burning".we did a cool one for "crossover" where i'm wearing a really nice long black dress.i also remember some footage of me singing and dancing along to the birthday party's "zoo-music girl" ;-)
Half the world apart and still you speak over the top of me. Tell them about the umbrella drella
Oh,quite simple,the
Barras Market
nah,the tape still exists! we didnae burn it,i just scrubbed some bits off so's i could live in denial that ah wisnae getting fat!!! i still have the tape with most
of the footage okay.well i say okay but it's been in storage for yonks so it might be damaged by now.it might have
been richard hurding (again) who took the stills from the screen for me,or maybe i did them myself but that's less likely,i never liked cameras...
oi,it's no ma fault we were typing at the same time!!!
the umbrella,i still have cause i saw it last year.it was a japanese umbrella and beautiful it was too.given to me by one of my closest friends of that time, joanne mcmahon.like me,she had a thing for japan and she gave it me for my 21st birthday (earlier that year).she eventually disappeared to japan in the mid 1980's and i lost touch with her,sadly.
While we are being nostalgic here's something from a bit earlier - yes I've been meddling with soundforge again (can't see the join(s)). And the editorial? How I love an editorial.
pardon?
that looks suspiciously like a bootleg to me.... i'm on the phone to my lawyer.
that was a good boxing report, Plastic Orcadian...
The polis - yer avin a laugh. I reported the theft of 2 audio tapes in 1982 and they still haven't done anything about it.
"headcase",strictly for neanderthals.strangely enough,we played at kenny macaskills 21st birthday party on the royal mile,edinburgh (sometime in 1979 i think) and that was the song he requested we play specially for him.he always loved it.years later he became a prominent scottish national politician and
was arrested in london on duty with the tartan army,drunk as a skunk.nuff said.
http://www.kenny-macaskill.co.uk/
Where can I buy The Freeze concert on CD please?
You might want to keep an eye on ebay.
Could we squeeze any more references to 21st birthdays into one blog?
we could certainly try...
I think Kennys party was a year earlier because he's the same age as my brother and his 21st birthday was in '78. The Freeze played at his party in Linlithgow bridge.
That was the night I danced to Headcase on broken glass - but I'm not a politician and never have been. I don't understand.
as spaewaif said,the barras market in weegieland might be yer best bet for the freeze live at the boxing cd.the whole event was hosted by ken buchanan and it was on the night of plastic orcadians 21st birthday.it was a great night with jim kerr fighting clare grogan.they were both knocked out simultaneously in the 6th round by a clash of heads.apparently neither recovered but mercifully (?) both went on to become poop starz.funny that.
your brothers 21st birthday party...? was that the night my brother got stabbed?i was talking about that earlier today and i remember that he had come home from edinburgh to see us play out at linlithgow bridge and was walking home with some mates when they got attacked by some well known local scumbags and his hand was slashed up pretty badly.was that pauls 21st?
Ah, the days when you could dress up as a young schoolgirl and go on Top Of The Pops. What were we thinking?
It was precisely the night Wums and A.N. Other carried out that assualt. Incidently I was beaten up by Wums in the Unicorn bogs (knocked out in fact) shortly afterwards when he took a liking to my Sid Vicious tee shirt which I refused to give him.
whaddya mean "dress up as a young schoolgirl and go on Top Of The Pops". how come nobody invited me!!?
ahh wums.he and others still haunt my dreams to this day.i hope they are all living better lives now...
NO im still a compete wast of spase
and I did git the teee shirt of you you lying busterd
that magpie gig sounds chaotic.my throat couldn't handle shouting for two sets in a night.horrible.mind you,that's probably why i tried to teach myself to sing,so i could do the songs and keep my voice intact.didnae fancy the polyps...
you did a good job on the soundforge fancy pants,cheers.
i think it must have been colin "coco" carson wot grabbed the mic and attempted to start the "malcontents chorus" on "psychodalek nightmares".
i saw him and peter mitchell last year in dalkeith.also been speaking to mike pacitti lately as well (on email).good people all.
Alan Rankine was at the Magpie that night just as a matter of interest.
that's a conversation stopper if ever i heard one... toodle pip.
Hi guys, just arrived, what are we talking about, guys... guys... Where has everyone gone. Bollocks.
Erm...well,and what about the magazine?
Most enjoyable reading.
Keep the memories coming on!
the "magazine" was just an attempt to put cindytalk into some kind of perspective.
to draw connections with the ideas that had inspired the transformation from the freeze into cindytalk.
toward the end of the freeze we had travelled up north to play,fort william etc.a reasonably long journey if you're cramped in the back of a transit van...though,
i was diva enough to at least try to colonise the front seat.we would bring along compilation tapes to listen to on the journey and two tapes in particular highlighted the demise of the freeze for me and signalled my desire to take control and drive it in a more specific direction.david clancy brought along his tape which featured the likes of donna summer and phil collins and other middle of the road types,whilst my tape was bristling with the fire engines,the birthday party,the fall,virgin prunes,slits subway sect,pop group,PIL and clock dva (i still have that tape somewhere).apart from taste and music snobbery etc,the dichotomy smacked me between the eyes, and the worst part was the rest of the van seemed to be enjoying david's tape more!!! i realised i needed to think more clearly about the direction i wanted to take the music and whether it would it be possible to do it within this particular line-up of the band.it was beginning to fracture anyway,so i resolved to explode it and mutate it into cindytalk (i already had the name and was beginning to find ways to use it).i wanted to take those inspirations and shape something newer,darker,more experimental and definately more powerful. having thought it through,i knew that despite the musical differences between david and i,he was still the right person to work with in cindytalk.he was a very instinctive musician,not the best at taking his ideas and rigorously shaping them but still my absolutely favourite musician of that scottish scene.what he lacked in "cool" he far outweighed in purity and creativity.i couldn't have done any of it without him.
(i didn't have "cool" either,that must have been an edinburgh thing).
"the perect illusion starts here..." was my attempt to align this new direction with film-makers, artists, favourite musics,writers etc.to try to more clearly define what i wanted cindytalk to be about.there was an article on louise brooks (the same piece i'd written for a pamphlet on her sometime earlier).there was poetry of course,written by myself,murray chalmers (now a big cheese in the music bizz in london,we used to share a house together just off the meadows in edinburgh),peter mitchell and jess hopkins (legendary edinburgh mischief maker,formerly known as paul madbastard).there were lists of favourite films,books and music,featuring the likes of gw pabst's pandora's box and david lynch's eraserhead,ayn rand's fountainhead,herman hesse's steppenwolf,thirst by clock dva and metalbox by PIL.there would have been some artworks/photographs by richard hurding and later in london i did a version with some nice abstracts by john byrne.it was a bit of a conceit,i was just playing around but it was fun putting it all together.
the cover was the picture of the upturned boat in linlithgow loch (by bruce corser) that was eventually used on the label of "camouflage heart".
the name drew it's imagery and energy from my continued questioning and playfulness with gender.
just tell me that 'Cindytalk' has nothing to do with 'Cindy Tells Me' from Eno....
"the name drew it's imagery and energy from my continued questioning and playfulness with gender."
I may have been one of the first to see the name cindytalk written because it was signed on my copy of Celebration \ Crossover - 1980.
I hesitate to quote from 25 years ago BUT when I inevitably said " what is cindytalk" I'm pretty sure I was told "you know those Action Man dolls where you pull a chord in their neck and get an incomprehensible phrase, well it's that on a Sindy doll."
salmon spread,i'm about 95% sure i wasn't intending to reference eno when i came up with the name cindytalk.but the first eno album "here come the warm jets" had such a huge impact on me as a 12/13 year old,who knows if there was a subconscious influence or not.if at that early age i was to be inspired enough to name my band relative to a song from that album i'd be chuffed.it's still a record that fills me with joy and wonder.as a nipper,i used to sit in the corner of our family sitting room,headphones on full tilt,lost to the world,trying to figure out what the bugger was singing about...
plastic orcadian,yes you are absolutely right about the name cindytalk,relating to a sindy doll with random and/or unhinged dialogue.i was interested in creating a false impression with the name.i wanted a female name and probably because of the sindy doll (UK version of barbie) the name cindy had something of a dumb stigma attached to it.i wanted to play with that,give the dolls voice a poetry of questioning.i also needed a hybrid name,after the freeze had so many problems with other bands of the same name (incidentally not from the boston freeze,didn't come across them until we stayed in boston on our 1996 tour).
their was definately a gender mischief with the name cindytalk but in the comment you referenced above,i was talking about the name of the magazine "the perfect illusion starts here..."
Interesting stuff... I've always been (pleasantly) surprised with the lowercase 'd' in CINdYTALK.
cinder - some impertinence from a safe distance.
I have wondered but have never dared ask. cindytalk was fermenting during and possibly prior to Celebration \ Crossover.
Were David, Keith and Graeme party to the thought processes?
Was it envisaged at this early stage that any or all would be members of cindytalk?
Subsequently were Keith and Graemes replacements being groomed for cindytalk?
Was Hollow recorded by cindytalk in essence or was a definitive Freeze last stand.
Please try to answer if you choose to answer as the seed of cindytalk refraining from hindsight if possible.
plastic accordian,
"cindytalk was fermenting during and possibly prior to Celebration \ Crossover."
i'm sure that would be true.as much as i loved being in the freeze,i knew there was something much stronger coming.an idea like cindytalk would have been fermenting long before punk,even.it would have been great to record an album with the freeze but whilst recording "camouflage heart",i recall thinking it was a blessing we never got that chance.it meant that "camouflage heart" had that build-up of desperation to draw from,it both benefited and suffered from that.
"Were David, Keith and Graeme party to the thought processes?"
i'm sure i would have talked about my ideas with them,they were fellow band members.although i
was (am) pretty internal,i wasn't entirely mute.
"Was it envisaged at this early stage that any or all would be members of cindytalk?"
david was always going to be in cindytalk!by the time i'd got a stronger idea of what i wanted to do
keith and graeme had left the band.the fact that they'd already left,implies that they were looking for
something,elsewhere.
"Subsequently were Keith and Graemes replacements being groomed for cindytalk?"
i remember talking with neil braidwood about moving to london to drum with cindytalk.he seemed interested but was uncertain about relocating without a safety net.he suggested we go and find a record contract and then he'd follow on.i was a bit pissed of with him for that but in retrospect i should have been more understanding and said yes!ouch!
i don't think any of the other members of the freeze from that period would have been suitable for cindytalk.
"Was Hollow recorded by cindytalk in essence or was a definitive Freeze last stand."
i think it was definately the last gasp of the freeze.
it was recorded more in the spirit of "angel sand" and "building on holes".it's true that the very earliest
cindytalk stuff still had a residue of that mood in it but by the time we reached "everybody is christ",we had added several layers of dirt, distortion and destruction to our sound and psyche.
nb:a friend of david's from university co-wrote "hollow" with us.he was a bass-player and we wrote two songs together in linlithgow.i have no recollection of his name.i only met him twice or three times.i think we did a freeze rehearsal session with him and neil braidwood in niddrie street (edinburgh) early in 1982.
"Please try to answer if you choose to answer as the seed of cindytalk refraining from hindsight if possible."
an unnecessary comment,unless of course,you don't trust me ;-)
tiny d got lonely.so all the letters shrunk down and now they have lots more fun...
Trust you? That would be one of those rhetorical type questions then, would it?
"Can I borrow those tapes, I'll give you them back on Wednesday." February 1982
Any plans on creating more visual imagery under the cindytalk nomen?
u wot! u wot!! u wot!!?
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