UBU FILMS and UNDERGROUND MUSIC
Ubu Films connection to underground music of the time started early on, even in the pre-Ubu days of The Theatre of Cruelty they where performing recent pieces by New York minimalist composer La Monte Young, whom at 1965 had not yet reached any international level of noteritory or cultural influence, though to be fair the piece Piano Piece for David Tudor I performed by The Theatre of Cruelty was as inclusive of performative elements as musical elements, calling for the player to feed a piano a bail of heigh and water. Even during the filming of the first official Ubu film, Blunderball, they enlisted the services of Python Lee Jackson and The Id, two prominent bands from the local R’n’B and Beat scene, to improvise along to the film as a soundtrack instead of opting for the services of an instrumentalist composer.
It was through film soundtracks that Ubu formally connected to the underground music scene for its first year and a half of existence. Apart from the aforementioned Blunderball soundtrack Mick Liber from Python Lee Jackson also provided a fittingly compact multi-layered guitar composition to Albie Thoms fifty-second Man and His World. Thoms occasionally performed his own musical accompaniment to his films; Rita and Dundi from 1966 saw Thoms and Michael Orpwood making a scratchy, rambling folkesque soundtrack on homemade instruments that resembled rusty guitar strings and tinny recorders, as well as the soundtrack to the film David Perry from 1968.
Ubu filmmakers engaged in self-created soundtracks in more indirect ways; the hand-made, and hand-scratched films such as Halftone by David Perry saw the filmmaker applying aural equivalences to the visual approach; the magnetic sound strip on the film-stock was punctuated and scratched to create sound when processed by the projector. On Thoms own hand-made, hand-scratched Bluto he explained “I’d look at the picture, imagine what it would look like when it was projected, and then make a sound on the frame to equate to it…the closer together marks produced a higher pitch and the thicker, wider-apart ones were the deeper modulations…It had a lot of guess work and a lot of hope in it. In certain sections there would be higher pitched sounds and in others…grumbly sort of sounds, but that was as subtle as I could get with it,” (28 MUDIE DIALOGE) This approach to sound echoed approaches with concrete music and electronic composition taking place internationally and the sound themselves are akin to sonic gravel that wheezes and hisses along to the erupting imagery, like a microphone being dragged on the ground. Thoms, in collaboration with Gerry Dupal, created an electronic composition ‘proper’ in the form of ‘De Moon Service’ for Gordon Mutch’s film Hallucinagenia, which was subsequently re-edited and incorporated into the sprawling feature length Marinetti.
Ubu had one particular soundtrack mainstay with jazz musician John Sangster who wrote and performed soundtracks for both Aggy Read and Albie Thoms, most notable is his soundtrack for Thoms’ Marientti that saw Sangster leading a group of musicians in an improvisation along to the film that formed the subsequent soundtrack. Sangster went onto to a fair degree of public awareness in the 1970’s and 1980’s with a series of successful albums based on ‘Lord of the Rings’, but at least during the second half of the 1960’s his work had a fairly experimental, improvisatory swing, taking influence from American avant-garde jazz.
The actual content of some Ubu Films directly addressed music of the time; the experimental short Boobs A Lot by Aggy Read from 1968, and two films by Ubu associate Garry Shead; Give Me Your Hand from 1967 and De Da De Dum from 1968.
Boobs A Lot is a kinetic collage of playboy pin-ups, an animated accompaniment to the song by The Fugs from their 1965 self-titled album. Whilst David Stratton passed the film off as lightweight, a “combined experiment with nudity to amusing effect,”(280 STRATTON) its approach is quite prophetic of the direction that music videos would take; found footage, with a decidedly ‘retro’ aesthetic, assembled and reshaped through punchy, rhythmic editing. Boobs A Lot actually remains surprisingly fresh in comparison to other Ubu films that may appear noticeably dated today.
Interestingly Aggy Read and David Perry where also commissioned to produce an actual video clip for commercial pop group The Flying Circus in 1969, though how that compares to the work in Boobs A Lot remains to be seen as the Flying Circus video-clip isn’t available for viewing.
De Da De Dum is an experimental documentary about the beguiling songwriter and poet Pip Proud. Before his fade into obscurity and subsequent revival as a cult figure Pip Proud was billed as ‘Australia’s Bob Dylan’, though lyrically and sonically they had very little in common, and was active — like most other members of the underground — in the anti-war movement. After releasing two albums in Australia he set off for London on the promise of signing to The Beatles Apple Records but nothing eventuated and he seemingly faded away. The film utilises roving, sped up camera work and editing, at the centre is always Pip, wandering through and against his Sydney environment while the soundtrack is Pip playing his abstract, droney tunes. The film remains as an important archive item in Australian underground music.
Meanwhile Give Me Your Hand is more of an informal document of American folksinger Odetta performing in Sydney. Whilst not ‘underground’ in the strict sense Odetta was active in the American civil rights and global anti-war campaigns.
Ubunews was another outlet through which they placed underground music as a concern. When Ubunews switched from a single sheet copy to a coloured broadsheet the publication began to include wider content beyond cinema, and one such subject was music. They highlighted the activities of the underground music scene, and similar in their activities against censorship, brought attention to the lack of avenues and interest that the mainstream had in underground music, one article from Ubunews No. 10, published in December announced:
“Now that the radio stations have discovered underground music filmmakers might find some paying attention being paid to their soundtracks. Not that much of the music played on pop radio underground programs is very underground, but the MOTHERS OF INVENTION actually got air-time on Sydneys 2UW. Kids might like to hire Frank Elditz’s RAGA DOLL which features Frank Zappa & The Mothers doing “The Ritual Dance of the Child-Killers” And perhaps Aggy Reads BOOBS A LOT featuring THE FUGS, might be listened to instead of just being looked at. Vaughn Obern’s FRIDAY featuring the music of COUNTRY JOE & THE FISH is worth hearing as well as seeing. But when is UNDERGROUND RADIO going to play some real underground music like The Fugs “KILL FOR PEACE” or “WET DREAM OVER YOU””
and in Ubunews No. 15 the dramas experienced by Aggy Read and Tully on the set of ABC-TV’s Fusion television show were voiced;
“Connotations of drug-taking in the word FREAK-OUT has screwed up the ABC bosses, and the underground music show featuring THE TULLY is to be called FUSION…The series was conceived to present the incredible sounds of TULLY but each episode has one or two straight pop songs to please ABC bosses and the ‘general public’…the alienation of TV people to multi and mixed media presentations has yet to be overcome within the TV stations…the FUSION crew refused to switch out all studio lighting, hence totally eliminating the effect of the strobe…The series should make a powerful impact on Australian TV…only music and visual stimuli. Nothing but good events can result from this first manifestation of the underground on our TV sets. But from here, where? Will TV, by nature of its own monolithic structure suck all the life-blood from the underground before it hits he airwaves?”
Ubunews carried articles on Australian bands like Tully and the La De Da’s, American blues band Canned Heat, record reviews and reports on the growing underground music scene that they where helping to facilitate through their lightshows.
It was the lightshows where Ubu physically connected and contributed to the underground music scene, participating around seventeen separate multimedia audio-visual events across late 1968 and 1969 including their First and Second Intergalactic Festival Lightshow Concert, numerous Underground Dances, book launches and contributions to happenings hosted by Clem Gorman and the Human Body.
One could make the claim that the Ubu lightshows also helped nurture the underground music scene by providing a space for them to perform without limits, on there on terms away from commercial expectations or restrictions. They also provided a specific space for an attentive audience, and audiences of 500 to 4000 attended the Ubu lightshows, illustrating the popularity of these events and the bands themselves. While in early 1969 John Thompson, writing for Go-Set complained, “Why does the recording industry in this country lag so far behind the trend…still pithily few attempts have been made to capture on record the music of the most exciting (and popular) groups on the local scene,”(168 MUDIE) by 1970 Tamam Shud and Tully had both released debut albums on EMI and Columbia Records, obviously in response to the popularity these groups where experiencing, propelled via the Ubu lightshows. Interestingly later in that article Thompson mentions that Nutwood Rug where preparing an album to be released independently by Ubu, which would’ve marked another interesting facet to Ubu’s already multi-faceted activities.
There where three core bands that became associated with the Ubu lightshows; Tully, Tamam Shud, and Nutwood Rug. Though other artists performed collaborated or performed in accompaniment to an Ubu lightshow; The Id, Black Allen’s Just Human, John Sangster Underground Band, Art Students Pop Orchestra, Oakapple Day, Levi Smiths Clefs, Lindsay Bourke and The Plastic Tears.
These lightshows where giant examples of psychedelic environments, expanded cinema on a huge scale that saw the musicians and the filmmakers collectively creating together an electric audio-visual environment, Thoms described the process, “we used to project the multi-screen films and the bands would improvise to them…the response they’d have to the visual images and the flashing lights…it [was] exciting, that sort of improvisation,”(32 MUDIE DIALOUGE)
Ubu’s work with lightshows did not exist in a vacuum. Their work was mirrored by that of Ellis D. Fogg, an associate of Ubu who was heavily involved in hosting his own lightshows and using experimental lighting equipment, in late 1960’s Sydney, whilst apparently between 1967 and 1968 Dr Kandys Third Eye where creating multimedia music performances that had resonances with Ubu. According to the Who’s Who of Australian Rock reference book, the band was “Probably Australia’s first psychedelic band. Underground r’n’b, soul band which used films and psychedelic lighting to accompany their act,” (141 SPENCER) Unfortunately there is no surviving documentation of this group.
The lightshows also illustrate a local manifestation of what Andy Warhol had been collaboratively creating with The Velvet Underground, among many others, with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in America and the work of the UFO club in London that was associated with Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine.
Ubu’s association with music also mirrored that of Nigel Buesst and Chris Lofven in Melbourne with films such as The Loved One, Approximately Panther, Fun Radio, 806: Part One. Documenting late 1960’s Melbourne scene along with the early 1970’s Carlton scene that included Spectrum, Daddy Cool, Cam-Pact, and the associated Pram Factory milieu.
These connections Ubu did have to underground music seem to be that the members of Ubu where both fans of the emerging music, and that the social milieu they existed within associated with the various musicians of the time. Albie Thoms work, during and after Ubu has had on going concerns with the application of sound and music in film. Thoms viewed Marinetti structure more akin to a musical composition then anything cinematic, Arthur Cantrill in a review for Broadside magazine saw strong affinities between John Cages work with chance in music and the methods being utilised in Marinetti while in 1966 David Perry made a silent, hand-made film Divertimento that was “a montage of found and animated footage designed to stimulate musical improvisation” (247 MUDIE) Thoms also worked on ABC-TV’s GTK programs, and Aggy Read worked for youth-culture / rock magazine Go-Set. Also apart from being, one would assume, fans of each others work, there would have to had been a spirit of collaboration and assistance that existed between the music and movie scene.