Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Real Voice of English Radical Satire, 2 May 2007
Jon Farmer's SIEG HEIL INCONOGRAPHERS is the latest chapter in the saga of England's most iconoclastic, but neglected, talent on the English cultural scene: Savoy Books and Records. Following on the heels of D.M. Mitchell's A SERIOUS LIFE, this copiously illustrated study of Savoy's achievements for over thirty years represents one of the most insightful and valuable books to have appeared within the past six months, or even before and maybe not after. Influenced by pre-war, wartime and post-war culture, authors and publishers David Britton and Michael Butterworth have done much to awaken a lethargic England to the dark possibilities within mainstream and popular culture than any officially celebrated talent whether past or present.
Forget hacks such as Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterton, as well as Friday night Newsnight gurus such as Mark Commode, and enjoy the alternative radically creative wealth of information in this book. It documents a literary and recording saga in many ways as challenging as Michael Moorcock's Elric novels. As well as Britton and Butterworth, the cast of characters include Lord Haw-Haw, Oswald Mosley, Lash La Rue,Lord Horror, P.J. Proby, Meng and Ecker, Fudge the Elf, Jim Cawthorn, John Coulthart, Kris Guidio, Friedrich Nietzsche, Graham Greene, Moorcock, Jessie Matthews, Ian Brady, Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, Colin Wilson,and the unforgettable Fenella Fielding who may represent Savoy's final bow to a world which has misundersood them rather than celebrating them in terms of the genius status they deserve. David Britton's LORD HORROR was the first book in the post-war era not only to get banned like LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN temporarily was, but to get its author jailed. He received a second sentence by an unjust society and system. These experiences fueled in work by angry, and creative ways that exceeded his early excellent work as an imaginative artist in the tradition of Aubrey Beardsley and the original Savoy publications.
Their achievement represents the challenging post-war influence of American rock and roll at its most demonic where Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Chochran, Sweet Gene Vincent, and the unique P.J. Proby represent satanic majesties at their most highest.
The work of Savoy has always been challenging. Offensive to many, repulsive to others, it actually represents the dark side of English and Western culture at its darkest levels with the real truth recognized by these contemporary descendants of Joseph Conrad and his sea captains who wish (without any form of concealment or deceptive framework) to show their listeners of CDs and writings what real horror means. The work of Savoy is challenging on so many levels demanding deep and constant reading to understand even a glimmer of what its talents have discovered and attempted in vain to promote to those contemporary spiritually dead descendants of Ibsen characters who will never fulfill the title of one of his plays WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN.
Jon Farmer has written a great tribute to Savoy and its many talents whose creative expressions deserve more attention and better distribution than they have so far received. To paraphrase the Reverend Johua's final lines in Sam Peckinpah's THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, "Read them, but don't read them lightly."
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