Hello! Welcome to the future! Well the retro future actually, as in the vision of the future as seen from the past. This blog will take you on a journey back in time, to a period between the late sixties and early seventies when the two global superpowers fought each other in the race for space and the imagination of the world was fired by lunar landings and interplanetary travel. Oil was cheap and the shiny new technology of plastic allowed designers to innovate new forms to reflect the dreams and aspirations of the new space age. This was also a time when great cultural changes were afoot: rock and roll, swinging sixties fashions and psychedelic drugs fired an emergent youth culture wanting to break free from the dreariness and austerity of the post war years, a time when the whole notion of 'style' became an important factor in the decisions of consumerism, a time when the choice of goods and brands had never been greater.
This blog will roam this feverently creative period of time, bringing you those products and designs which are quintessential classics of the era, to form a kind of catalogue of space age design. From chairs to ashtrays to electronics and architecture, the futuristic visions from the past will be paraded before your eyes. What may surprise you is how futuristic and cool these objects still seem.
While reading why not check out the accompanying podcast of what I call acid lounge - funky psychedelic tracks of sixties / seventies library music. Library music?!?? I hear you say, a note of confusion in your voice - and before you start going on about silent rooms full of learned texts let me disabuse you - library music is music by no name session musicians, sold to the makers of films, documentaries and TV shows for use in their productions without having to pay royalties back to the artists, sold by production companies - or music libraries - with names such as Chappell, Amphonic, KPM and de Wolfe. Library tracks were knocked out all in an afternoon's work by highly skilled musicians such as Alan Hawkshaw, Brian Bennett and Pierro Piccioni, and the albums on which the tracks appeared were only pressed in limited numbers and never released to the general public. They might then feature as the background sound to an advert, B movie car chase, or soft porn flick and were sometimes soundalike versions of popular tunes of the day. Freed from the commercial constraints of having to sell lots of records, the artists were able to experiment and innovate; they embraced the nascent technology of synthesizers producing music that sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago. It is only over the last 10 years thanks to the efforts of dedicated crate-diggers combing secondhand shops and warehouses for undiscovered nuggets, that these tracks have been re-issued on compilation CD and the music brought to a wider audience.
I give you the example of The Incredible Bongo Band. Formed by MGM A&R Michael Viner in 1972 to supplement the soundtrack to the virtually anonymous B film 'The Thing With Two Heads'. The IBB went from loose studio collective to an instrumental pop covers consortium, interpreting classics of the day in their own inimitable percussive fashion. The Incredible Bongo Band's cover of track 'Apache' originally by The Shadows, has become simply legendary in the world of dance music. Not only arguably one of the most sampled tracks of all time and a staple for Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash as they invented the art of DJing at the Bronx block parties of the 70s, it has become an all-time hip hop and breaks anthem. Apache has been sampled by: Missy Elliot, Coldcut, Will Smith, Goldie, Jurassic 5, Moby, Run DMC, Sugarhill Gang, Beastie Boys and Massive Attack and many many more…
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