Introducing Elvis on the clouds

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Tales From 500 Songs: Bird Groups

One of the problems that hits the lover of 50s doo-wop music is the tendency for a lot of vocal groups to have the same names, and where they have different names often to be the same people. Partly this can be explained by the natural tendency to copy a successful formula; after the success of the Ravens, one of the first groups to make doo-wop music, a string of "bird groups" followed, usually but not always based in LA -- the Orioles, the Flamingos, the Penguins, the Wrens, the Crows, and many others.

However, it's important to note that these are "bird groups". "Byrd groups" would be groups featuring Bobby Byrd, who was a member of the Hollywood Flames, who were not the same group as the Famous Flames, who featured Bobby Byrd, but the Bobby Byrd who was in the Famous Flames was not the Bobby Byrd who was in the Hollywood Flames (and neither were in the Byrds, who were from LA but were not a bird group and had no Byrds in at all, Bobby or otherwise). The Hollywood Flames also had several members of the Flamingos, but not the famous Flamingos, these were the Flamingos that went on to be the Platters (though by the time the Platters had their hits no Flamingos were left in the group). One of those Flame Flamingos went on to form the Penguins, along with some of the other Hollywood Flames, but not Bobby Byrd -- who went on to form Bobby "Baby Face" Byrd and the Birds, but otherwise wasn't in any bird groups.

We hope this makes everything clearer.

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

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Pay and display

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Scottish Friction 1:
Any Other City (Life Without Buildings, 2001)

In the late nineties the Chemikal Underground bands felt like some sort of alternative. A few different accents, some aggressively soft masculinity, total disrespect matched with a genuine commitment to beauty. 

Fast forward to the 21st Century and what do we have? Crabbit treasures. Reunion tour nostalgia. Reliable culture workers who do their bit for our beleaguered civic institutions. This isn’t all bad, but looking at the torpor of post-indyref public life in Scotland - art that asks us “To see oursels as ithers see us!” in the most incomplete and unthreatening way possible; political forces that are jaded, faded, or blatantly doomed; a press so inept you’re sometimes forced to hand it to The National - the need for art that isn’t part of this matrix seems obvious. 

Can’t say with confidence that Any Other City is different, that it shows another way. It’s the sole studio album of a band who came later and left before everyone had the chance to find them ordinary, in Glasgow or elsewhere. Hardly a fair comparison.

But when I listen to Sue Tompkins’ voice – 

The Leanover

– I immediately understand why the weans are still playing along two decades later. The way that opening “If I lose you” teases several resolutions, the possibilities offered up when you sing along. 

This sense of uncontained energy carries across the album, where Tompkins’ vocals are matched by the equally restless instrumentation. It’s all clean lines, precisely played, but there’s nothing dour about it. It feels like pop music, always moving, always asking you to move with it. 

It’s easy enough to say that another, better world is possible. Neither saying this or believing it will make anything happen, but fuck me - what a thing it is, to feel a little of that charge again in the current moment.  

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Chaos Horror

Chaos Knight, by Ian Miller

Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is terrifying because it is indifferent: vast, alien, unknowable. Humanity is insignificant and knowledge of the truth leads only to madness. The horror of Chaos found in the Blanchitsu style and the work of Ian Miller stands in stark contrast. It’s not the horror of indifference, but of excess; not the alien beyond, but the intimate within.

Chaos emerges from our desires, rages, ambitions and despairs. The divine chaotic gifts of mutation, disease and corruption that see the humble Chaos cultist descend to daemonhood are embodied rather than accessed in some grand alterity of alien knowledge. Here, I can’t resist bringing in Georges Bataille: life, he argued, is not fundamentally organized around utility but around waste, expenditure, and transgression. Chaos exemplifies this principle. Its “gifts” are not tools but eruptions of surplus. They terrify not because they void meaning but because they oversaturate it, offering too much.  

This interiority makes Chaos profoundly orientated towards folk-horror. In Warhammer’s Old World, beastmen, cults, and warpstone demonstrate that apocalypse arises not from beyond the stars but from the earth and the body. They are the twisting foundations of our human edifice. As in Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, structure is always already deferred and destabilised, undermined by the excess it cannot contain. An excess that is integral to it.

Alfabusa’s reading of the Inq28 aesthetic (great video – go watch it) shows how this manifests in the best Warhammer art. Gothic machinery corroding into ruin, cities teetering on grotesque landscapes, hybrid forms of man, daemon, and machine—these depict entropy as an active, inherent undoing. Where Lovecraft presents a void that strips meaning away, Chaos presupposes order only to reveal it as the handmaiden to its own destruction, making horror tragic rather than merely nihilistic.

If Lovecraft’s truth is that nothing matters, Chaos’s truth is that everything does. Everything is the daemon, howling with monstrous possibility.   

(Thanks to Emmy Allen, who laid the groundwork for many of these ideas)

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Back on the SSRIs

It’s probably not a far line from watching videos of insane women gently talking about their crystal collections to others of them promising multiple blessings from one’s Team of Light. They could stand to get a move on frankly as the feeling there’s nothing to live for is pretty wearing.

Probably just ceremonial magic whiplash mate, it’ll be fine

CUSTODIANS OF THE SHIELD

The Superman film is persuasive, eh? I also like the idea https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLr8em7hJ5G/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== expounded here that we all can see that logo at the necessary moment on our own chest. 

However, and this was a tenet in Moore comics for some time, the sort of people who manage these morality plays are… not very? Why for example just recently Mark Waid - a man who will proudly tell a tale of noping out of Man of Steel when he breaks Zod’s neck (I am ostensibly quite sympathetic to this because superheroes don’t kill; antiheroes do, Superman is the LAST one to be that, come on) - sneakily elided the Crimson Avenger out of primary position in the lineage, well why would you do that… unless you edited and a Crimson Avenger title and the artist murdered his wife with a hammer and you made mock in person and print like a horrible little ghoul? 

(thanks to Ben Deep Space Transmissions for bringing this to my attention).

RAPLODE - PENETRATE THE SPECTACLE

I have mostly been listening to the new JID album God Does Like Ugly this week — god I really like the way he says things, even the vocal flexions to deliver some phrases, I think the most exciting pure rapper since Kendrick for multifacility and able to trade fast as fuck verses with Eminem. They are calling it ‘conscious Atlanta’, it is psychedelic and funky - I think this is what fans of human croc shoe J Cole think they listen to.

ODDS AGAINST ME? I’M AGAINST THE ODDS

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The Activationer

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DOOMED SUMMER: Nobody's perfect world 

Caulder doesn’t seek consent. He is a god that plays dice. His group therapy sessions dim acknowledgment that initiation needs ritual but too cold a hierophant they function instead as qualitative data gathering for his experiments. 

They’re happier than the Doom Patrol, the Brotherhood of Dada. Mr Nobody celebrates diversity and recognises his crew’s needs. But like Caulder he’s careless with lives, his great collapse of oppositions prioritises change for change’s sake and you can’t make an omelette without turning policemen into toilets. The painting unveiled to absorb the world promises infinite novelty. Ultimate freedom, without consent. 

The Ant Farm seeks the complete annihilation of the irrational. This is not because they are normal. Mr Jones - embodiment of self-loathing, Valium life repression under fear of observation. Major Honey - super condensed caricature of sublimated sexual violence. Their weapons are the weird. The barbaric justify their barbarism by casting their victims as barbaric. The Ant Farm uses the weird to conquer the weird because the irrational enables existence beyond mechanistic control. The reconciliation of binary opposition through a world without imagination. No quirks. No rebellion. A machine whose purpose is to be itself. No consent. No freedom. 

Danny the Street’s expansion into Danny the World doesn’t touch the Doom Patrol story plane, it doesn’t colonise dreams like the Candlemaker or overwrite like the parasite Orqwith. Danny provides a space for the different types of stories Le Guin wants, stories not rooted in conflict but change. Danny isn’t our world’s paradise, it’s paradise for the DC Universe. A paradise for Comics. For Rebis and Kay, reconciled and harmonised to their multiplicities it offers infinite novelty of wonder and meaning. Danny seeks consent and offers freedom. Dorothy is right to reject it for her ‘real’ world, she has work to do. 

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28 years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

It was screwed into an iron box, which they sprayed shut with gold lacquer. Backfill the hole with concrete, to keep out, they say, any grave robbers who come for the metal chains it would hang from its limbs and fingers.

They lied. It was to keep it in.

It didn’t work. It escaped, and went into hiding. Now you can find it anywhere. 

The censor invokes it to choke the tides of rogue information flowing onto the islands. Its natural habitat, which hid and fed it for so long, is an evil ruin stinking of its taint, broadcasting all its worst values to the world. Its master sits on the throne. His meddlesome princess - who never let the heirs be left alone with it, even for a second - was dealt with 28 years earlier.

Now, it’s been delivered to Boyle to perform the reverse exorcism and bring it back to life, in cellulose triacetate and polyester, cartwheeling around Cheddar Gorge. The shell suits will make a comeback. They were practical. Quick access. 

Then, Boyle had a bigger audience and a tighter brief, in that brief summer between its physical death and public revelation, for the Olympic operation. His masterpiece, more proof of England’s rare expertise in the art of mind control. The weak and foolish were tricked at once, the hijack holding strong, for millions, still taking damage to this day. 

It wasn’t even buried with its gold, oily and smirking. It took just three things from all its lifetime of honours and treasures. Bolivar cigars, thick and heavy, turning everything they touch deep black. And two tokens of the warrior cult: a Royal Marines Commando medal and their coveted Green Beret. It received the initiation after completing their training ordeal, an eight-hour, thirty mile trek across Dartmoor. 

Ever the trickster, it never completed the course. Dragged the final quarter by commandos, then left to finish the final yards alone. Leering for the cameras. A seventh son and born on Halloween. They gave it the medal and beret anyway, for services rendered elsewhere.