On Friday night, while the youthful denizens of most major British city centres were binge drinking themselves into a numbed stupor, Hitch and I went along to the brutalist concrete marvel that is London’s South Bank Centre for the final events of their Ether festival. Ether is an annual celebration of electronics and music that usually mixes some high culture (contemporary composers like Stockhausen or Charlemagne Palestine) with the more hip electronica of today, Apxex Twin or Matmos or their ilk. It was a long and highly entertaining night, so enjoyable that it prompted me to blog about it at length.

First up: Finnish multi-instrumentalist mentalist jazz star Jimi Tenor providing a live specially composed soundtrack to a rarely seen film from the late ‘60s, Mister Freedom.


Tenor’s music has long been part lounge, part swing, part Blaxploitation funk, always a treat when he plays live. (It can be a bit anodyne on record, to be honest.) How fitting a match were Tenor and Mister Freedom? Like Charles and Camilla or fish and chips, that’s how. Made in 1968 as a satire on American political policy and imperialism (apparently) Mister Freedom was directed by the great American photographer William Klein in what has to have been a burst of severe madness, heavy drinking and an attempt to ruin his peer respect. Imagine Henri-Cartier Bresson creating an episode of The Banana Splits and you might be half way there. It’s a gloriously terrible film on all levels, not least in its supposed political aspirations - made in Paris at a period of social revolt and obviously with some kind of nod to French New Wave cinema, it tries to ally it to the camp aesthetic of Adam Ward’s Batman TV series and thereby treads the fine line between so-bad-it’s good and so-bad-it’s fucking-awful. Here’s the plot: Mister Freedom must go from the US to France to stave off the terrible influence of communist culture, which appears in the form of Mr. Red China Man, a giant red snake-like beast lingering in an after-hours Metro station. At some point Jesus and Mary Magdalene make an appearance, and an obviously alcoholically refreshed Serge Gainsbourg presides over the uprising in the superhero lair as the freedom fighters prepare to take to the streets. Made on a quite evidently low budget (the actor playing the lead is wearing mesh underpants in a love scene and the superhero costume seems to be constructed from foam rubber and sporting equipment) it’s a gaudy triumph of absolute nonsense. Every now and again – and this is where it’s hard to gauge just how much Klein is being knowing and arch or just plain stupid and insensitive – he intercuts footage of actual street revolts, black civil rights protestors and rioting Parisian left-wing intellectuals with the staged buffoonery of the main body of the film. Throughout all of this Tenor and his big band performed perfectly synchronised music that played up the absurdity of the whole affair. Somewhow the sum of the parts managed to add up to a hugely entertaining 90 minutes, though I’m not sure that I’d particularly want to sit through William Klein’s ‘lost treasure’ ever again.

Then off to the boxy concrete slabs of the Hayward Gallery to catch the Dan Flavin retrospective. Anyone who knows me even half decently will know by now how much I love the strain of American reductive art that Flavin, along with his great friend Donald Judd, so perfectly embodied. (Actually, they stopped being great friends at a certain stage of their lives, but that’s another blog entry to come…)


As it was Ether festival, the Hayward had installed some cellists and violinists to play a piece by the droning minimalist composer LaMonte Young, ‘Composition 1960 No.7’, a four hour repetition of the same bowed, drawn out note. I don’t know how much this really added to the experience of seeing the Flavin installations - though there was certainly a kind of soothing beauty to the music, it couldn’t help becoming upmarket muzak in this context. But the Flavin pieces themselves were truly wonderful and the show mapped out brilliantly how he refined and built upon his simple motif of arranging prefabricated fluorescent light fittings into glowing shapes and delicate plays of pure colour – complemented indeed by the stark concrete of the Hayward’s own architecture. There’s a lot of guff written about this kind of art that either tries to elevate it into some kind of plugged-in Renaissance altarpiece or totemic corny new age spirituality, and I don’t buy any of it. Like Judd always claimed, it’s just about appreciating the thing itself. What Flavin did was markedly straightforward, using the simple tenets of art – arrangement, composition, how colours play against themselves – and presenting that in as modern a form as he could create. I have to say that you either get it on an instinctive level or don’t, and for me it hits the spot almost every time because I think it looks absolutely beautiful and fresh and modern in the same way that I can listen endlessly to the sounds made by a Moog synthesiser.

Which takes me quite neatly to the band Ladytron. Closing the festival, they curated an evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with an assortment of electronic music weirdos, DJs and the like, among them the video director Chris Cunningham and a machine called 386DX. 386DX is an archaic hard drive that ‘busks’ on the streets of Moscow, and is ‘operated’ by a lunatic man in a tie-dyed Ban & Jerry’s t-shirt with a computer keyboard strapped across his chest in an approximation of an electric guitar.

As the machine proudly proclaimed at the start, everything performed is untouched by human hands and the guy on the stage is supposedly a mere facilitator for the hard drive to do its stuff – this stuff being tinny electronic cover versions of classics such as Light My Fire and Imagine sung with that computerised voice we all now think of as Stepehn Hawking’s. I’m sure it’s a hoot on the streets of Moscow and it’s a good post-Glasnost one-line gag that the computer equipment itself is closer to Atari than PowerBook, but after 15 minutes I’d had enough.


Ladytron hail from Liverpool and are roughly what would have resulted if Kraftwerk had produced an Abba record. Yes, that good. I have to say that it beats me how a group with songs this good can still be such a little known thing. When the day comes that Ladytron’s Greatest Hits (sic) fills the shelves people will surely ask how they could have missed out on them for so long. If they handed any one of their best tracks to Girls Aloud or Liberty X or some such collection of preening mannequins it would be number one for a month. Naturally the crowd just wants to dance – it is getting near midnight after all, and an all-seated theatre is not Ladytron’s natural habitat. Naturally, the obstreperous jobsworth security guys won’t let them, so we have to just stand up and shake about a bit in Row E seats 29 and 30. Of course they end with Seventeen, the most immediate of all their hits-that-never-were, a song with a dazzling flash of minimalist genius that would have made Donald Judd proud (if he hadn’t been such a curmudgeonly old shit). No verse – only chorus, stripped back to the ‘thing that matters’ in a great pop record.
Then into the foyer for a pint to catch up with the binge drinkers on the night bus home. Is that really a DJ playing minimalist techno inside an illuminated wendy house? And did this constitute most people’s idea of a great Friday night out? No matter – Hitch and I go home grinning at the end of a truly memorable evening.