Metal Boxes

Spider Vinyl

Eight years in a flooded cellar.

Immortality

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Almost every one of these artistes is still performing, at least the ones who aren't dead. And even counting the dead ones, I think only four don't have an official website.
Amazingly still active: Kursaal Flyers, Heavy Metal Kids, Edgar Broughton Band, Babe Ruth...

NME Encyclopedia of Rock

I present this list as a public service. In 1976 these people were so high-profile they were in an actual encyclopedia. Six years later they didn't even rate a historical footnote. Consider it as a meditation on the fickleness of fame, or memorize these names for when you need to show off.

I've ignored entries which are just cross-references, and entries on places, categories, and non-musicians. So no Altamont, no "Blues - British", no producers or DJ's. And no Chas Chandler - his indvidual entry in the first edition must be because of his managerial sucess, so he ain't on the list.

Of course this list is only one angle, and other cross-sections might also be illuminating. You may wonder why Mallard and If weren't dropped for the third edition, why the United States of America were there in the first at all, why Abba and Gene Vincent weren't. It would be interesting to know if anyone was added for the second edition and dropped again for the third, so if you know, please leave a comment.

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Bands and solo artists included in the first edition of the Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopedia of Rock (Salamander 1976), but not in the third edition, simply called the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock (Salamander 1982).

David Ackles
Babe Ruth
Back Door
Banco
Mike Batt
Ronee Blakley
Blodwyn Pig
Brewer and Shipley
Budgie
David Cassidy
Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys
Chapman Whitney (Streetwalkers)
Colosseum
Curved Air
Lesley Duncan
Edgar Broughton Band
John Fahey
Fanny
Richard and Mimi Farina
Michael Fennelly
Foghat
Fruup
Art Garfunkel
Gentle Giant
Dana Gillespie
Golden Earring
Ric(k) Grech
Stefan Grossman
Claire Hamill
Hatfield And The North
Heavy Metal Kids (The Kids)
Hudson-Ford
Isotope
Lee Jackson
Jo Jo Gunne
Joy of Cooking
KGB
Kilburn and the High Roads
Kursaal Flyers
Jim Kweskin (Jug Band)
Lulu
Magma
Harvey Mandel
George Melly
Geoff Muldaur
Fred Neil
Gilbert O'Sullivan
Pavlov's Dog
PFM
Shawn Phillips
Jean-Luc Ponty
Terry Reid
John Renbourn
Rhinoceros
Terry Riley
Jess Roden
Sea Train
Pete Seeger
Slapp Happy
Sons of Champlin
Chip Taylor
United States of America
Van Der Graaf Generator
Vinegar Joe
Clifford T Ward
Howard Werth
Paul Williams
Pete Wingfield
Bobby Womack
Tammy Wynette

Strutt's North Mill, Belper

Perhaps Belper would make a different impression on a sunny day, but today is wet and dark. The Derwent flows as black as the Styx, with the air of a river which has passed through strange territory to get here - the kind of journey which changes you. If it wasn't for the incessant noise of the weir, we'd hear the wailing of lost souls as they flit about the River Gardens.

The mill buildings hulk over the scene, uninviting. Eventually we find a doorway somewhere, and as we enter, we feel we are sneaking in, like the Fellowship of the Ring entering the caves beneath the Misty Mountains.

Inside everything is bone-dry, as dessicated as a mummy's finger. Mills were notoriously flammable, and even here in this pioneering fire-proof replacement for an earlier bonfire, you fear one ring from your mobile could set the lot off.

Upstairs there's a display of textile items and their means of production: spinning wheels, ribbing machines, teasels, mechanical looms, all the paraphernalia of the transition from handicraft to industrialism. When I was a kid, I just didn't get this stuff. I couldn't see a connection to the kind of technology which mattered, the technology of the future, my future. Now the moon-rockets and supersonic planes and jet-packs have all gone, and if you see them in a museum they look like dinosaurs: magnificent evolutionary dead-ends. Whereas here, in this dim room, these drab artefacts shout out loud the endless future of alienated drudgery stretching before us.

We go downstairs, into the labyrinth. The pillars holding up the ceiling are too thickset and too close together, as if an unimaginable weight is pressing down from above us. As we pick our way between them, I'm already thinking of Hellraiser II, even before we see the machine.

It's built into an upright frame, about six feet wide and five feet high; obviously designed for a standing operator. It is old, and covered in a dark patina of rust, but it smells of fresh oil, as if it might be called into use at any moment. The more we stare at it, the clearer it becomes that it has only one possible function: to insert, in the blink of an eye, a thousand hooks into the flesh of any curious fool who tries to puzzle out its working.

We step back, then cautiously poke around a bit more. We come across some other bits of machinery, then we find a door. We hesitate, but we are obviously supposed to open it, and in the end we do.

At first there is just darkness and cold air, then I realise there is a light-switch inside the door, exactly where you would expect it to be. Its very mundanity seems mocking. I switch it on. The room is full of water, smooth and black; the light reflecting on the surface just makes it even more impenetrable. Anything could be lurking here.

It's as if the water stretches all around us, below us. It seems we have come so far down that we have reached the underneath, and this is Oceanus, the sea on which the Earth floats.

There is a click from a timer-switch, and an image of a large wheel is projected onto the wall opposite us. As it slowly rotates, a silent ghost, we become aware of all the absent noise - water slamming into the buckets of the wheel, gears grinding, belt-drives, clattering machinery, footsteps in clogs, shouts. It's like lying down on a closed motorway, or touching the live terminal when you've checked a hundred times that the power is off: the imagination always over-rules the senses.

Outside, looking at the horseshoe weir again, I think of the elegant weir in Bath. The scene here is like a gloomy reflection of the one there, a parody taunting us from the nether regions. Later it occurs to me this one must have been built before the Georgian one; much later I discover the one in Bath isn't Georgian at all - it's concrete, from 1975, more brutalist than rococo. It's as if this dark realm has penetrated into the world above, and corrupted it.