SPARKS WILL FLY WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS [226]

Looking through a second-hand shop, I bought a copy of Grace Jones’s 1985 album “Slave to the Rhythm” – the title track is a brilliant, lushly orchestrated song, and Jean-Paul Goude’s cut-and-paste cover, comically elongating Jones’s hair and mouth, is iconic. I was already aware that the album reworks the same song in different ways, but looking up further details later revealed something that left me feeling dissatisfied – the CD copy I bought was an abridged version, nine minutes shorter than the original release.

I thought it would be easy, these days, to find the album on Spotify, or iTunes, or Amazon, to stream or download, but it was nowhere (at least, in the UK) – the title track is on Spotify, but as part of a 1980s best-of compilation, and not listed alongside Grace Jones’s other albums. Therefore, if I wanted to hear the album as originally intended, I would have to buy the vinyl LP, or track down the original US release on CD, from 1987. I saw one copy listed on Amazon as “dispatched from USA,” but did not state version it was – fortunately, it was the right one.

“Slave to the Rhythm” was a concept album produced by Trevor Horn, assisted by Stephen Lipson, and the song was written by them alongside Bruce Woolley and Simon Barlow... yet it couldn’t be more about its singer if it tried, and is credited as such: “Breath, Blood and Voice: Grace Jones.” Knowing this project was originally announced as Horn’s next collaboration with the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, before being recorded by Jones while taking a break from her new film career, doesn’t sound right – I thought Jones had written it.

The two versions of the album I have are as follows: the 1987 CD release by Island Records, (catalogue number 422-842 612-2), and the UK reissue as part of the “Island Masters” series, from 1989-90 (IMCD 65). Both albums have eight tracks, with the nine-minute reduction coming from cutting sections out of almost all the songs. This is done by mostly excising the spoken-word content of the album: fitting the album’s subtitle, “A Biography,” Grace Jones is interviewed by music journalists Paul Morley, formerly of the “NME,” and Capital Radio’s Paul Cooke. Morley asks the more searching questions, and Cooke says to Jones, “I’m sure a lot of people expect you to be very intimidating, but I think you’re great fun” – an enduring image from British television is Grace Jones slapping the TV interviewer Russell Harty for turning his back on her to talk to someone else.

The songs themselves were produced at the rate of once a week, cutting up Jones’s performance into different ways. The lyrics are brief and pointed - “Work all day / As men who know / Wheels must turn / To keep the flow” – almost designed to be cut and pasted in any order. The track closest to the single release known as “Slave to the Rhythm” is actually titled “Ladies and Gentlemen: Grace Jones” on the album, and has the most complete performance of the lyrics. A rockier version, “Jones the Rhythm,” also released as a single, cuts the first verse, but features a spoken introduction by the actor Ian McShane, taken from Jean-Paul Goude’s biography “Jungle Fever” – McShane also reads from this on the track “The Frog and the Princess,” talking about using Jones as “the ideal vehicle for my work” – Jones does not feature on this track herself. In contrast, “Operattack” is only Jones’s voice, sampled and contorted through all the “work to the rhythm / dance to the rhythm” sections, punctuated by a wail of “SLAVE!”   

The tracks were produced at the rate of one a week, and the cost of studio time, and use of an orchestra, was pushed to $385,000 – that may be the equivalent of $926,000 in 2020, but many rappers’ videos have larger budgets. I do not know if the album came as a result of deciding to release all versions as one collection, instead of having to choose one for a single, or if the interviews and spoken sections were used to create a theme. What I do know is that Grace Jones, both as a performer and a personality, could carry a more conceptually challenging work like this, and make it a commercial success too, without having the pressure of breaking the mould with every album, which was expected of David Bowie.

In short, the “Island Masters” removes most of the spoken sections, some of them being printed as liner notes, alongside the album credits – Paul Morley and Paul Cooke are no longer credited for their contribution, as they are no longer heard, and Ian McShane’s sections are cut back. One track, “The Crossing (Ooh The Action...),” is turned into an instrumental by the cuts. Perhaps this is to make the reissue more successful commercially, by making it sound more like a regular album. There does exist an album titled, “Highlights from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds,” which makes the original sound like it was similar in scale to Wagner’s Ring cycle, but hacking away much of Richard Burton’s narration makes the “Highlights” version weaker. Every word on “Slave to the Rhythm” is about Grace Jones, even if it not her saying them.

If it is not clear enough that I consider the original version of “Slave to the Rhythm” to be the full, proper, correct version, it is the most avoidable aspect of the “Island Masters” reissue – the spelling errors. The final track is given the title “Ladies and Gentleman: Grace Jones”, and Stephen Lipson is credited as Steven Lipson, while the Synclavier, an early sampling synthesiser used throughout the album, is confused with fish eggs: “The synclaviar was used extensively during the compilation of this biography: acknowledgement to New England Digital.” The Synclavier would later be overrun by computers like the Commodore Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST, but that’s beside the point.

A POINT IS ALL THAT YOU CAN SCORE [187]

[NOTE: This is a look at the film version of “Protect and Survive” – for my original article about the original UK Government booklet “Protect and Survive,” please see here: link]

“When you hear the attack warning, you and your family must take cover at once. Do not stay out of doors. If you are caught in the open, lie down.”

OK, so if there is going to be a nuclear attack, and I am living above the 5^th floor of a block of flats, I must make arrangements with a neighbour further down the building, so I can build a fallout room there – and, if I didn’t get my booklet from the Government in the post by now, I will have less than 72 hours, from when I saw the message on TV, until the bomb drops.

I know I have covered comedies about nuclear war before, in “The Bed Sitting Room” and “Whoops Apocalypse,” but I cannot think of anything more horrifying than this. It was the threat into which I was born, until the Cold War thawed out at the end of the 1980s. However, games like “Fallout 76” return to the well of satirical laughter. The difference here is how “Protect and Survive,” a series of twenty instructional films about what to do in case of nuclear attack, was the official UK Government advice: its comedy comes from its po-faced tone, the practicality of the advice given, and the fact it would never be needed.

The films, mostly around two minutes each, were made in around 1975-76 by Richard Taylor Productions, an animation company best known for the whimsical “Crystal Tipps and Alistair,” and the “Charley Says” series of road safety films – this time around, the colourful cut-outs are replaced by blueprint-blue backgrounds, wooden models of houses, still photography, rudimentary flashes of hand-drawn animation, and a squelchy theme tune by “Doctor Who” composer Roger Limb. The authoritarian narration is by Patrick Allen, who reprised certain passages for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes,” sounding even scarier than Vincent Price did for “Thriller.”

The shorts are very easy to find online, and on DVD. I wouldn’t recommend watching all twenty in one go, even if they only add up to fifty minutes – they were designed to be shown at intervals, and the bone-dry tone will not allow you to sit back and watch. As bizarre as some of the advice is, such as preparing your fallout shelter’s toilet, and preparing bodies by wrapping them in brown paper and attaching a label with their name and address, this would have been what you were asked to do. Just think about building up the walls of your fallout room with boxes and bags of earth and sand, but also flammable things like books and clothing. However, I did notice you are told you need at least two pints of water each day to live, which has since gone up to two litres.

The only reason the films entered public consciousness was because in 1980, when they were still classified, some of them were leaked, and the BBC broadcast a few seconds of them in an episode of “Panorama,” investigating what civil defence strategy there was in the UK following Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was deemed woeful: the accompanying booklet, also titled “Protect and Survive,” and also classified, was to be posted to all households three weeks ahead of a possible attack, when it would have taken four weeks to print them – the Government put the booklet on sale once enough people were asking questions. Today, the advice seems woeful, and just a way of keeping the public distracted and busy. I assume there are current plans – while they are not public knowledge, I hope they will be more effective than what they gave us last time.

THE AIR ATTACK WARNING SOUNDS LIKE [48]

[Cover for "Protect and Survive" - 2016 reissue by Imperial War Museum]

I count myself lucky that, while remaining vigilant, I live in a place and time that is relatively free of danger. However, seeing the muted colours, strikes and flared trousers in old videos or pictures of the late 1970s, you forget that the average middle-aged couple of the time would have grown up during the Second World War, then live through the ongoing Cold War between the USSR and the West, under the very small, but still possible, threat of a nuclear attack.

You would hope there was plan in place if, or when, something happened - there was, but it had not been published. Previous examples of “civil defence” leaflets date back to 1938, when people needed advice on protecting their homes against air raids, but apart from some public information films in the early 1960s, nothing more was heard. Eventually, word got out that the Home Office had a booklet, already sent to official bodies, titled “Protect and Survive,” to be issued to homes if an immediate threat of attack appeared. Public interest led the Government to publish it for the general public in May 1980, costing 50 pence.

Reading in 2017, the booklet itself is hilarious, coming across as a way to help people busy themselves, distracting them from almost certain death. There are tips on where to locate your fallout shelter, how to build it, what provisions to keep there, and the siren warnings to listen out for. It is the grim side of the Blitz spirit on which we pride ourselves, but carrying on through anything and everything is the game the book requires you to play. I wish I knew how many people bought it on its original release, and what they made of the illustrations: drawing instructions makes them more functional, but I imagine photographs of real people readying themselves may make a hypothetical situation much too real.

Discredited on arrival by anti-nuclear campaigns, “Protect and Survive” was criticised for making nuclear war look like something that could be survived, leading to a second booklet, “Civil Defence: Why We Need It” (1981), explaining why a plan was even needed, likening the keeping safe of the country to wearing your seatbelt in your car.

Images from “Protect and Survive,” and the accompanying set of public information films, also originally meant to be classified, were co-opted in the cultural fight against nuclear arms, including “Threads,” the bleak TV drama depicting a Britain post-attack. Most effectively, the authoritarian voice of Patrick Allen, as used in the information films, was peppered through Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s song “Two Tribes,” with Allen re-reading the original words to ironic effect.

To me, this still feels like history, only just overlapping with my own lifetime, with debates over the UK’s nuclear deterrent submarines a small reminder of the Pandora’s Box that even the idea of nuclear weapons has proved to be. However, the United States Department of Homeland Security’s website, www.ready.gov, still advises that, despite the diminished thread since the end of the Cold War: “the possibility remains that a terrorist could obtain access to a nuclear weapon. Called improvised nuclear devices (IND), these are generally smaller, less powerful weapons than we traditionally envision.” Oh great, thanks for that.