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Post by dem on May 15, 2008 15:23:01 GMT
Began by Rymer as The Children Of Pan on old board. Here's a cannibalised version. RymerJust been re-reading some old ZigZag magazines and found a 1977 interview with Siouxsie & The Banshees, in which Siouxsie explains the band's ethos:
'We've got a morbid sense of humour. I think everyone finds sick things funny if they're honest about it. When I was young the only books I used to read were those cheap horror paperbacks - the ones by Herbert Van Thal.'
She goes on to talk about 'Carcass', a song which later turned up on The Scream album, and which tells the story of a butcher's assistant who chops off his arms and legs so he can be more like the lump of meat he's fallen in love with. A very Pan-like little tale.
Any other sightings of the influence of Pan Horror?
******
Here's 'Sir' Mick Jagger in 1977:
'The other night I read this thing called "Interview With A Vampire" by this lady. It's really good. Quite strange - very strange.'
Reminded me that when I first read Interview With A Vampire (a couple of years later than this), I really liked it. Together with George RR Martin's Fevre Dream, it seemed like quite a positive development in vampire fiction.
Then Ms Rice turned the tale into an industrial process and I kind of lost track of how impressive the original had been.
demonik Sir Mick has a bit of previous, according to Les Daniels in Living In Fear: A History Of Horror In The Mass Media (Scribner, 1975) Mick Jagger has frequently indicated an interest in occult subjects; he is, for instance, an Arthur Machen enthusiast who cites Novel Of The White Powder in arguing that no drug should be consumed unless its ingredients are ascertained.And a couple of Alice Cooper endorsements: Stephen King and Clive Barker are two of my favourite horror writers. I usually carry a couple of horror novels with me at all times. I'm even a suspect in a horror novel called Ghoul by Michael Slade. (from Shock Rock)
"Reading Michael Slade is like taking an advanced course in psycho horror. Headhunter stunned me. Ghoul convulsed me. This book is terrifying. I couldn't put it down." (cover blurb for Ghoul)****** Muriel Gray, ex- Tube presenter turned horror author, in conversation with Paul Kane at Shadow-Writer: Paul Kane - I read somewhere that you used to go into libraries and get ghost stories out.
I did, yes. And The Penguin Book of Horror was obviously a huge influence. There were some terrible, terrible stories, y'know? But I was a huge fan of horror, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes was one of the writers in there. I thought he was a kind of Graham Greene of horror writing, always wrote about bed-sits and people with big bellies, husbands in cardigans chopping their wives' heads off. In fact I was watching…my husband bought me a DVD set of The Hammer House of Horror, do you remember that - the kind of 1970s, hour-long thing? Zoe Ball's dad's in one. We were watching it the other night, 'The House that Spurted Blood' or something; it's just fantastic. I love all that stuff…I love literary horror too (laughs). There's also a photo of her reading R. C. H.'s Kamtellar! ****** And here's Mark E. Smith again on his horror heroes and villains: Marc Baines - Did your interest in the supernatural peak with "Dragnet"? There's been some recent stuff like 'Bremen Nacht' ...
MES - Yeah, I always wrote a lot of prose bits and I think that's an influence. What you read when you're teenage leaves an indelible mark on you. I left school when I was sixteen and my education was like M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Clarke Ashton Smith. H.P. Lovecraft was a big hero of mine. I don't read them now ...
Marc Baines - Do you read any modern horror?
MES - If I pick up a Stephen King, it just makes me sick. I've read it all before and better written. I'm a member of the Arthur Machen Appreciation Society, one of the only musicians in it. He's f**k**g brilliant.
Marc Baines - What about Poe?
MES - Yeah, especially the poems. The Raven is brilliant. I'll tell you who's a good writer - Isaac Bashevis Singer. I used to read a lot of Yiddish literature, still do. Singer wrote a great story called Satan In Goray. It was a true story about what happened in 1666 in this Polish village called Goray. It's all been covered up in Jewish history but Yiddish people still remember it. All the Orthodox Jews got out of hand, because they were so oppressed by the bastard racist Pole and Russians, that they had to keep to themselves, cut off. All these weird Jewish sects sprang up. One of them believed that if you did evil on the outside, your inside would be good - almost like a Rasputin scenario. They believed that doing evil was the best thing to do, because the inverse maths says your inside would therefore be pure. Can you believe this?! One of these guys vaguely connected with this cult went around with chains on his legs, and became highly respected in this village, regarded as some kind of prophet. He foretold that on the sixth day of the sixth month in 1666, the Saviour was going to arrive. So all the people in the village got ready for this great event when God was going to come down and take them away. They'd been harassed by Cossacks and Ukrainians, pogroms, but the community still stuck together. There was this incredible hysteria - they all started to take the mud off their roofs.
Marc Baines - So they could be taken straight up to heaven?!
MES - Yeah. Even the villagers who are very together people, merchants and craftsmen, they all do it. And nothing happens on that day and their whole life just goes. It's really horrific, really horrible. And the implication is that this prophet is in fact Satan. Yiddish literature is quite fantastic.Escape # 17, SPRING 1989 full article at Fall News |
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Post by marksamuels on May 15, 2008 22:36:39 GMT
Mark E. Smith was in the old Machen Society (he's not joined the new one). I never met him at one of the bashes, though I came close. Apparently at one of the shindigs in Whitby he sang a song called "My Dog Shep" in the pub where the Machenites gathered.
Barry Humphries (of "Dame Edna") fame is in the new Society, and he was the president of the old one. But he's not come along to any of the events I've been to.
The latest addition to the Machen celebrity fans is Stewart Lee, the stand-up comic. He came along to the last but one Machen AGM. Really nice chap. I pinched ciggies from him.
Mark S.
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Post by dem on May 16, 2008 16:20:18 GMT
Not quite in the MES league, perhaps, but that Richard O'Brien who wrote The Rocky Horror Show came to the first Gothic Society meeting. It was in the Reptile House at London Zoo and he was wearing a really nice straw hat. He didn't do the Time Warp but me and the bride got called "punky goths" on Radio 4 so you couldn't really grumble.
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Post by dem on Oct 22, 2009 5:36:36 GMT
His sublime pass to the lurking beachball versus Liverpool on Saturday is a candidate for assist of the century, but could Macken striker Darren Bent's reading habits offer some clue to the secret behind his supernatural powers? Welsh chanteuse Stevie Nicks probably wouldn't know her Daughters Of Darkness from her Shrunken Head, but then she's more at home with horror for grown ups. Ms. Nicks was inspired to write Fleetwood Mac smash Rhiannon after reading Mary Leader's demonic possession/ Three Faces Of Eve novel Triad (Corgi, 1975). Am sure he'd shudder at being thought of a 'celebrity' but no surprise to learn that top Gothic gloomster and punk pioneer Peter Hammill has "read a fair bit of Poe." Guess we might have sussed from early Van Der Graaf Generator albums that he was once something of a Sci-Fi aficionado too. "The '70's, of course, were a great time for science fiction and all of us were enthusiasts for it, especially for those writers who were using the form to question matters of reality and philosophy... Like Philip K Dick." Do you think that science fiction is still a fertile ground as it was then?"No, I think that the golden age of science fiction is passed. In general, it seems to me to be more about hardware than ideology these days, though that element was always present of course. But I'm not much of a reader of sci-fi these days in any case." Full interview on Perfect Sound Forever. |
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Post by dem on Aug 30, 2012 10:33:50 GMT
Two more for the celebrity SF fan club. Wise words from Louis Armstrong ...."I believe The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction appeals to me because in it one finds refuge and release from everyday life. We are all little children at heartf and find comfort in a dream world and these episodes in the magazine encourage our building of castles in space" (Advertisement on back cover of MF&SF, Sept 1963. ..... oh, and here's Sir Cliff giving fair warning of an ambition he partially realised several decades later, albeit on stage and with Sarah Brightman as Cathy. Cliff Richards - The Way I See It (Hodder & Stoughton, 1968) Blurb: Cliff writes: 'Since it got around that I was a Christian - especially since I stood up at that Billy Graham rally back in 1966 and said so openly - I've been deluged with people wanting my views on all sorts of things to do with religion. People write to me, stop me after shows and pin me in corners to find out what I think about God, Christ, the Bible, the Pope, Billy Graham, adultery, drugs, apartheid, Vietnam, the end of the world and just about every other subject.
`In this book I've tried to answer most of the questions people ask me about all kinds of subjects.' Chapter 9: My Favourite Book"I used to say Wuthering Heights was my favourite book. I thought I would like to play Heathdiffe in a film of it! But that was partly because it's the only book I can remember reading more than once: I think I read it three times.
I like science fiction, too - that goes with my love of SF films, I suppose. The best one I have read, if you can call it science fiction, is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I wouldn't say I'm a great reader, but recently I've come across a book that is very much older than Huxley's or Wuthering Heights, and which I can now confidently say is my favourite book. It is the Bible." |
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 30, 2012 10:47:48 GMT
Nice to see Cliff tucking the Bible in amongst the science fiction...
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Aug 30, 2012 11:59:07 GMT
Nice to see Cliff tucking the Bible in amongst the science fiction... The part where he claims that he "recently" came across the Bible left me scratching my head. Maybe he found this obscure tome while browsing through an antiquarian bookstore? |
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Post by Shrink Proof on Aug 31, 2012 16:26:18 GMT
Mark E. Smith was in the old Machen Society (he's not joined the new one). Barry Humphries (of "Dame Edna") fame is in the new Society, and he was the president of the old one. But he's not come along to any of the events I've been to. Mark S. Barry Humphries also wrote the Foreword to "Night Voices", a posthumous collection of stories by Robert Aickman. |
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Post by charliegrenville on Jun 19, 2014 14:23:13 GMT
Many hard rock and heavy metal bands are horror lovers too- after all, Black Sabbath took their name from the Bava film, and in the 80s, the two were practically inseparable. When I was a kid, if you liked 'proper' metal (ie not glam, but i did get into that) then you watched Hammer on telly and rented gore flicks (or got someone's big brother to rent them for you) from shops, and read Pan, Fontana, Armada, Mayflower, Penguin/Puffin, scifi and fantasy anthologies.
Let's not forget also the prog contingent, as represented by Alan Parsons (Tales From Mystery And Imagination, I Robot etc) and the list of sci-fi lovers, beginning with Jeff Wayne, is incredible. At least one 60s psych band and 80s goth band also named themselves after Lovecraft, the Nephilim did the whole Ctulhu mythos thing, Venom named a song after Ersbet Bathory, Anthrax based the songs 'Misery Loves Company' and 'Skeletons In The Closet' on their favourite King stories, and thrash metallers Warfare did a Hammer concept album with sleevenotes by the Cush himself.
But, as pointed out elsewhere, the ultimate band for Pan lovers must be late 60s heavy rock pioneers (reformed since 2004) Leaf Hound, whose name comes from Ray Bradbury's 'The Emissary', and whose titles 'Sad Road To The Sea' and 'The Man With The Moon In Him' will be very familiar to many of us...if any one band showed how far Bertie's influence stretched into the world of rock n roll, it has to be them. Their 1971 album 'Growers Of Mushroom' is also quite like a great horror anthology in nature- rare, difficult to come by an original copy of, and sometimes found tucked away in some obscure backstreet shop run by a strange wizened old man...
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Post by dem on Jun 24, 2014 10:23:23 GMT
For those of you too young to remember just how embedded in the public consciousness the Pan books of Horror once were, I'd like to end with a short illustration. I was recently doing research for a story about Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, and came across a 1977 interview with Sid on YouTube. The interview (audio only) is twenty-five minutes long and divided into three parts. Towards the end of part two the interviewer asks Sid whether he reads. To which Sid replies (and I'm paraphrasing here): "No, I hate books. Books are a complete waste of time." Then, after a short pause, he says, "The only books I like are those horror ones. The Pan Books of Horror. The ones with the short stories in."
The Pan Books of Horror. As endorsed by Sid Vicious. Perfect. - Mark Morris, The Mark Of Fear, Prism, June 2010 Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (1970). "I instantly loved the opening track on the band's first album, with its ominous opening chords and Ozzy Osbourne's amazing voice. Brilliant cover too. I played it to death, read all the Dennis Wheatley occult novels, and started looking for similar bands, but just ended up with the rather corny Black Widow!" - Gaye Advert, Louder Than War com
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jun 24, 2014 15:21:09 GMT
For those of you too young to remember just how embedded in the public consciousness the Pan books of Horror once were, I'd like to end with a short illustration. I was recently doing research for a story about Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, and came across a 1977 interview with Sid on YouTube. The interview (audio only) is twenty-five minutes long and divided into three parts. Towards the end of part two the interviewer asks Sid whether he reads. To which Sid replies (and I'm paraphrasing here): "No, I hate books. Books are a complete waste of time." Then, after a short pause, he says, "The only books I like are those horror ones. The Pan Books of Horror. The ones with the short stories in."
The Pan Books of Horror. As endorsed by Sid Vicious. Perfect. - Mark Morris, The Mark Of Fear, Prism, June 2010 Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (1970). "I instantly loved the opening track on the band's first album, with its ominous opening chords and Ozzy Osbourne's amazing voice. Brilliant cover too. I played it to death, read all the Dennis Wheatley occult novels, and started looking for similar bands, but just ended up with the rather corny Black Widow!" - Gaye Advert, Louder Than War com John Lennon, Sid Viscous - they're all into it. Great find though Dem |
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Post by charliegrenville on Jun 25, 2014 18:41:12 GMT
I also forgot to mention 'Of Arrowe Hill', the London based (yet fronted by a Scouser) psych-rockers who make their obsession with MR James, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Dickens, giallo paperbacks/ movies and all things Pan-related blatantly obvious. Their fourth album (but third on their own label) 'A Few Minutes In The Absolute Elsewhere' even features a mock up Pan Book inner sleeve in the later font used from 13th Book on, proclaiming it as "The 3rd Ouja Board LP, Of Arrowe Hill, Selected By The Herberts Themselves" Talk about laying your influences bare. I actually first met their singer Adam through a horror films website: both he and drummer Ian work for the BFI and are involved in Flipside, which is sometimes horror related.
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Post by Dr Terror on Jun 30, 2014 12:17:12 GMT
Well done, Dem. Gaye Advert is into black metal.
I recently asked Jock from GBH if Colin (the band's singer) had been a reader of the Pans. He said very probably. Jock remembered the books as being good late night reads.
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Post by pulphack on Jul 1, 2014 5:47:49 GMT
Yep, Gaye being a black metal fan was a pleasant surprise - as was the posting of a bit of GBH! Woo-hoo! Back in the day, it was not the done thing to be a Crass fan (  you know what I mean) and admit to liking the spiky gluebag side of punk as well, but good heavens GBH could rock like a bitch (as I believe the phrase goes - bit sexist for a Crass follower, so one might say rocks like a non-gender specific but probably more female than male hound... or something... god, you can tell my 'giving up caffeine' phase has just ended). |
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Post by Dr Terror on Aug 14, 2014 11:49:06 GMT
I can confirm they still do. Absolutely storming set from them at Rebellion this year. Leather, Bristles, Studs and Wrinkles!
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you know what I mean) and admit to liking the spiky gluebag side of punk as well, but good heavens GBH could rock like a bitch (as I believe the phrase goes - bit sexist for a Crass follower, so one might say rocks like a non-gender specific but probably more female than male hound... or something... god, you can tell my 'giving up caffeine' phase has just ended).