Sputnik on a stick

[imomus]

Comments

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

As I've posted on YouTube, the music in the first part of that wonderful, heartbreaking Post Office Tower film is "Electro Twist" by the Radiophonic Workshop's John Baker. The later music may well be by him as well. There's a double CD out at the moment called 'The John Baker Tapes' which you really need to hear if you're interested in the time when it really did seem as though Britain might become a permanent social democracy, before a multiplicity of factors (including the IRA of course - I'm pretty sure the revolving restaurant had to close after their bomb) did for it.

It says a lot about the unfortunate direction in which British culture went in the 1980s that in my childhood this place was best known for Christmas TV specials with Noel bloody Edmonds.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

(this does not negate the fact that British culture also matured and diversified in some positive ways in that era ... but the thought of smug git Edmonds every Christmas morning, when you remember what the tower originally represented, still churns the stomach)

[harveyjames.livejournal.com]

That was a good column

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I Fought for This (http://vimeo.com/2060473?pg=embed&sec=2060473) from cheapsurrealist (http://vimeo.com/cheapsurrealist?pg=embed&sec=2060473) on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com?pg=embed&sec=2060473).

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, excellent music sleuthing, Robin! It had to be the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (though I'm sure they were pastiching Varese and Xenakis deliberately, evoking the 1958 Brussels World's Fair).

I came to London with my mother in 1968 and really wanted to go up the Post Office Tower, but I think the queue was too long or it was too expensive or something, and we never did. (Instead we went to see boutiques on "swinging" Carnaby Street, which were mostly selling mugs with union jacks on them.)

Yes, the restaurant stopped revolving when the IRA exploded a bomb in the toilets. And it was closed to the public from then on. From 1990 - 1993 (while it was still an official secret) I lived pretty close to the tower, on Cleveland Street. Probably soaked up lots of dangerous microwaves while recording "Timelord" near the base.

[(Anonymous)]

What do you make of this article, Momus:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/be-different-by-being-the-same/2008/10/24/1224351538147.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's column-inch-filling fluff, but I think she's grasped the essential point: that to recognize the signifiers is to be part of the demographic.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Doesn't that lamp look a bit pre-Apple?

superpower rivalry when things melt down and dry up

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed again at how those dreams of space ended up in our faces.I would like to imagine how it all affected post structuralism and post-colonialism. It had an awesome influence on identity, culture and power when the fences where certainly at there highest.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

(Instead we went to see boutiques on "swinging" Carnaby Street, which were mostly selling mugs with union jacks on them.)

So it hasn't changed much then?