The last time Grotus appeared on a John Peel show, it was with a cover of We’re An American Band by Grand Funk. Now, 18 months later, they were back with their second album, Slow Motion Apocalypse, a title which, with 33 years’ worth of hindsight, appears laughably self-indulgent now.
I’m not crazy about a lot of violence on the screen, unless it’s done with a certain amount of taste.
Well, there’s more violence on the TV news then there is in the movie….
Taken from an interaction between Michael Rupert and Joe Spinnell when they appeared on an episode of The Joe Franklin Show on 27 January 1981. Spinnell was appearing to promote the slasher movie, Maniac.
Spinnell slightly undercut his own argument in the show by warning people not to come to the movie if they didn’t like blood and gore, but his point about the evening news still stands and has been periodically explored by musicians through the years.
Whether it’s over breakfast, lunch, dinner, before we go to bed, or over the course of the last 40 years, on a 24 hour cycle, the news is always out there and ready to give us a daily diet of murder, mayhem, repression, crime and political chaos that would fill a hundred different films. Good Evening comes from a pre-internet world and through its rising collage of jump cuts, backed by an annoyingly chirpy piece of library music, it shows how, each evening, avuncular looking middle-aged men would sit behind a desk, give us a friendly greeting and then tell us all about the awful things going on nationally and internationally. Americans - or in the UK , anyone watching either ITV News or Channel 4 News - would find the catalogue of misery interrupted by commercial breaks selling products that were intended to help with physical ailments before being pitched back into the rundown of awfulness, that could be happening right outside the front door.
It’s pretty unsparing stuff. It doesn’t even include the more light-hearted “And finally…” news items that were designed to ensure that the news programmes always ended on an upbeat note. It’s not a new idea though, by any sense. 27 years earlier, Simon & Garfunkel closed their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album with 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night in which they sang the Christmas carol in counterpoint to a news bulletin from Wednesday, 3 August 1966 which included brief summaries on disputes over the progress of the Civil Rights Act*, the death of comedian, Lenny Bruce, Martin Luther King preparing for a march due to take place in Chicago, disruption at HUAC’s hearings into anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and Richard Nixon calling for more funding for the war effort to prevent it stretching on for another five years, as well as labelling those against the war as a threat to American society. Which shows how intellectually barren MAGA’s appropriation of this crap has been.
Peel let Good Evening run on into The Same Old Sauce, which it was paired with on Slow Motion Apocalypse. I’m not crazy about it, but have kept it here for the sake of completeness and because it is an industrial metal take on the corrosive nature of television on the psyche and intellect. At the end, Lars Fox asks, There’s one thing that I want to know/Were people this stupid before there was TV? to which the only real answer is, well yes, but the population at large probably didn’t realise just how stupid everyone else was before it.
Video courtesy of IJWTHSTD Archives.
Lyrics are copyright of Lars Fox.
*60 years on, Republican Party legislatures seem to be doing everything they can to repeal this.
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