Reefian

By Sean O'Keefe

reef1

15 Responses to “Reefian”

  1. punkscience Says:

    Hi Sean, would you consider assisting in a little googlebombing of our genocide-endorsing Prime Minister? Any help would be much appreciated.

    http://punkscientist.blogspot.com/2009/01/googlebomb-gordon-brown.html

    Word.

  2. Joey Ramone Says:

    Don’t they know that the world’s precious reefs are endangered from extinction? Surely they could lay something else at the Cenotaph, maybe… circles of poppies?? ;-)

    Oh and cheers for the link to the Stereophonic LP, nice one! Green vinyl… mmm, I wish my old record player was set up again, don’t know if it works after 12+ years of inertia… have to be CD i reckon.

    Cheers!
    Joey

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      Stereophonic!? I’d just like to clarify that Joey in fact means Electrosonic, the album by Delia Derbyshire and emphatically not anything by those terrible indie plodders.

      I’ve just remembered that you can get a really rather amazing Delia tee-shirt from http://www.apexonline.com/melodybar/cataf~1.htm

      I haven’t worn mine yet, er, because, erm, I want to… erm, keep it pristine. Yes, that’s it. Not because I can’t fit in it. Hell no.

  3. Joey Ramone Says:

    OH MY GOD!!! hahaha! I am just dying with shame, I thought it sounded wrong!!! hahaha :D what a dork!! Mmm, quickly moving on now (bright red face!!), I wonder if I can get Central Library to buy it, or another BBC Radiophonic Workshop CD? You know, it does work sometimes, if you ask really nicely!

    Cheers for the laugh! :D
    Joey

  4. Joey Ramone Says:

    Just looked at the Delia t-shirt, yes you’re right, it’s very lovely isn’t it! I think it shows she has magical hands! :D

    Listening to her music reminds me of Norman McLaren’s “Synchromy” and the music which goes with it…
    http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/animation/watch/v36352639Y37gf4j#

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      She’s a pretty tragic character: Derbyshire was a rarity in her chosen field and years ahead of her time. Her treatment by the dessicated old-school husks at the BBC, whether such behaviour was officially sanctioned or de facto, frustrated and led her to a lifetime of alcohol abuse; witness their refusal to credit her remarkable arrangement of Brian Granger’s Doctor Who theme, for example. Overuse of the word has created a debased currency, but Delia Derbyshire was a genius.

      If you like, I will make you a copy of Electrosonic.

      Thanks for the McLaren hat-tip: I hadn’t heard that before and I very much enjoyed it. Perhaps you’d be interested in the work of the Ghost Box record label? They issue a lot of retro-electronica and library music of much the same type as that which permeated the BBC’s schools broadcasts of the late 1970s.

  5. Joey Ramone Says:

    Poor Delia, she did well to get where she did, but I didn’t know about the alcoholism. I did read somewhere that she was refused employment at Decca because they didn’t employ women!!… she’d get hysterical obviously and menstruate everywhere… good ol’ days…

    Wow, you’d make a copy of Electrosonic, for me??? That would be smashing, thank you! :D Lovely!

    Oh and I haven’t heard about Ghost Box, it sounds very very lovely. Thank you! I liked how they used music of that ilk on the first series of ‘Look Around You’. I find it strangely comforting! :) Maybe because I associate it with being off school, “ill” and watching schools and colleges programmes… nice.

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      You’re welcome, not a problem! :)

      Look Around You is great isn’t it? Reminds me of sitting cross-legged on a dusty classroom floor, whilst a large colour television in a cabinet is wheeled-out and the classroom curtains are closed. Ah, in my world it’s forever somewhere between 1979 and 1984.

      Yeah, the drink did for Delia in the end. A great shame. I love that picture of her in the Radiophonic Workshop. Just beautiful. Hard to believe that the kind of discrimination she encountered was barely forty years ago. I had an ill-fated year at Hull University before I got ill and I recall one Eng Lit seminar in which a young woman commented, “Isn’t feminism just fat hairy women?”

  6. Joey Ramone Says:

    Have you ever seen this:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjbHIKwoXCM

    this is part one of three, the other two parts are on there as well… I don’t think it matters that it’s in Russian subtitled into Japanese, it’s so beautiful and the soundtrack is very haunting.

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      I hadn’t seen that before but it made me think of Kubrick, in the sense that we’re alienated from a dystopian future in which technology is an insufficient replacement for human interaction. Kubrick would echo this theme in Strangelove and 2001, a theme – Mark Kermode would probably call it his leitmotif – I suppose he would examine up to Clockwork Orange, in a way. The soundtrack – musique concrete isn’t it? – was particularly powerful. Quite chilling, actually.

  7. Joey Ramone Says:

    talking of dystopian futures… have you ever seen this?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPPtxyubCoI

    I saw it years ago on Fourmations (when Channel 4 still showed interesting things, before it went to showing only Friends, Big Brother and sensationalist documentaries… ) Very creepy but compelling (to me, anyway).

    Oh, and the central library have BBC Radiophonic Music, i’ve reserved it… :D

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      Yeah, wasn’t it Stewart Lee who described Channel 4 as being similar to sewage flowing unbidden into your living room, whereas choosing to watch E4 is when you’ve constructed a sluice for the purpose.

      I think Charlie Brooker once mentioned Jonas Odell, as I had seen this before but the name escaped me.

      Good work on the Stereophonics. ;)

  8. Joey Ramone Says:

    HIya Sean
    Did you know that we work at the same place??? Well i’m not sure about building, i’m at King’s Court. However, and this is exceedingly cheeky of me, would you be so very very kind to do me a copy of the Electrosonic CD and pop it through the internal mail?? I would send you a blank CD obviously, but would you be happy to do me this favour? Or I could send you a CD of something else?

    Let me know!
    Joey

    • Sean O'Keefe Says:

      Sure, or I could even walk the very short distance from where I sit to where you sit and hand it over personally. :) Unless you’re not the same Joey Ramone. How many of you are there in Sheffield?! I think we have a mutual interwebs bloggy acquaintance – Siansburys? – and I safely assumed we worked at the same place. Don’t recall seeing you at work this week – are you still on Customer Support? I’m the gone-to-seed scrofulous wreck on Tracy’s team. Oh, I’ve started a new blog: http://seanmichaelokeefe.tumblr.com

      Hark at publicity whore boy. Sheesh.

  9. Joey Ramone Says:

    hahaha! It’s a small world, in’t it?! Yes nice one, so are you on level 2 as well? yes i’m over in the corner, still good ol’ Cust. Sup. You obviously know what I look like but i’m sorry I don’t have a clue who you are!!! I have been in work TWICE this week, yes I’m a hard worker, hahaha… I probably know your face but that’s all… yes I know Sian, she’s in Craft Candy too, the newish Sheffield craft group, we’ve got a craft fair in the Millennium Gallery in July, wahey! So if you’ve noticed the craft candy flyers kicking about KC, now you know what nutter’s left them around! I’m in on Monday so feel free to wander over (tho I may be on the phone, that’s what I do you know).
    Cheers
    Joey

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