a song for europe (les chiens wouaw dans la nuit)

It’s fun (for middle-aged values of fun; turns out I’m better at being nearly fifty than I was at being nearly thirty or nearly twenty - and I was only so-so at being nearly ten) to search for vinyl in charity shops; Sue Ryder in Burnham had David Bowie, Roxy Music et al by the till for twenty or thirty quid a go which was quite right. But those they hadn’t heard of, your Cans, your Steve Hillages, were in the 50p bin.

So this is how I got hold of a copy Dashiell Hemayat’s Obsolete for maybe a hundredth of its transactional exchange value (and I'm not selling); hadn’t heard of him before but the sleeve notes mention Gong - who’re famous amongst people who care about this stuff; if you’ve never heard of Gong, you must’ve been in it - and William Burroughs. My favourite song over the last few months (though not any more; as with Brexit, the moment’s both passed and will recur endlessly for years) has been ‘Long Song for Zelda’ – an odd, late chanson (and not the first to feature sax and/or onomatopoeic animal noises) about a seriously messy night out, Irvine Welsh via Baudelaire. 

That’s William Burroughs talking at the very end of the track, by the way. He made a whole LP with Sonic Youth, John Cale and others in the late eighties; reads from his own work and from Scripture (the Beatitudes, ad-libbing “this guy keeps repeating himself” over them); sings Marlene Dietrich’s most famous song in the original German ("Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt"); sold it on ebay though, didn’t own a record player at the time, this was nevertheless a mistake.

Googling further it sounds as though Dashiell Hemayat (a nom de musique chosen in homage to the detective fiction writer), aka Melmoth aka Paul Smaïl aka Jack-Alain Léger was a strange, talented, self-destructive man all along the line and not just during the early 1970s. I mean, us British had… Syd Barrett? Viv Stanshell? but it just isn’t the same.

You remember I mentioned taking Krzysztof Jaworksi and David Bowie to Fountain Poets in January? I met Marriott Edgar there among others (A. brought ‘The Lion and Albert’; Stanley Holloway made it well-known, but Marriott Edgar originally wrote it).

I like Pa’s sensible pragmatic man-of-the-world approach; he was the original Centrist Dad. Mark my words (say the centrists): the Labour Party won’t hold office again until working class people can learn to be philosophical about their annoying kids being devoured by wild animals.   

('Eh Mushroom, Will You Mush My Room?'... cosmic-hedayat-rumble and cut-ups; 'as stoned as impossible':
you kind of had to be there).