John Greaves (musician)
John Greaves is a British bass guitarist and composer, best known as a member of Henry Cow and his collaborative albums with Peter Blegvad. He was a member of National Health and Soft Heap, has recorded several solo albums, including Accident, Parrot Fashions, The Caretaker and Greaves Verlaine. John Greaves grew up in Wrexham in north-east Wales. At the age of 12, he was given a bass guitar by his father, a Welsh dancehall bandleader, within six months, he was playing in his father's orchestra, he continued playing in the orchestra for four years, during which time its varied musical styles gave Greaves valuable musician and arranger skills. He was educated at Grove Park Grammar School in Wrexham from 1961 to 1968. In 1968, Greaves entered Pembroke College, Cambridge to study English, at Cambridge he met members of the burgeoning English avant-rock group Henry Cow in 1969; the band had been established the previous year by fellow Cambridge students Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson and had undergone numerous personnel changes up to that point.
They were looking for a bassist and after several months of persuading, Greaves joined the band in October 1969. After juggling his time with the band and his studies, Greaves completed his Master of Arts degree in 1971. By the end of 1971, Henry Cow settled into a permanent core of Frith, Hodgkinson and Chris Cutler. Greaves remained with the band until March 1976, toured Europe extensively with them, appeared on five of their albums. Greaves contributed several compositions to the band's repertoire, including "Half Asleep. Greaves left Henry Cow to work on Kew. Rhone. with Slapp Happy's Peter Blegvad in New York City. Greaves had met and worked with Blegvad during the brief merger of Henry Cow and Slapp Happy between November 1974 and April 1975, their first collaboration, "Bad Alchemy", appearing on the two bands' joint album Desperate Straights. Kew. Rhone. was a song cycle with all the music composed by Greaves and the lyrics written by Blegvad. In addition to bass guitar, Greaves played keyboards and sang.
The album was released in 1977 and credited to Greaves and Lisa Herman, the lead vocalist. It was well received by critics: AllMusic described it as "An neglected masterpiece of'70s progressive rock...". Rhone. Greaves returned to England to work in theatre as a composer and actor. In early 1978 he joined National Health and remained with them until the band split up in 1980, he toured with the band, appearing on the album Of Queues and Cures, for which he wrote the instrumental tour-de-force "Squarer for Maud", the reunion effort DS Al Coda and the archive release Play Time. During this time he performed with a free-improvising group, Soft Heap with Elton Dean from Soft Machine, Pip Pyle from National Health, maverick guitarist Mark Hewins. In the early 1980s Greaves began a series of solo collaborations. Having secured a deal with independent French-American label Europa Records, he recorded his first solo album, Accident in Paris in 1981–82, he moved to France permanently in 1984, formed a touring band with François Ovide, Denis van Hecke from Aksak Maboul, Mireille Bauer and Blegvad's brother, Kristoffer Blegvad.
This line-up featured on Greaves's second solo album, Parrot Fashions. During this time he recorded and/or toured with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the Michael Nyman Band, he reunited with Peter Blegvad again on The Lodge project which produced an album, Smell of a Friend in 1987. For his next album, 1991's La Petite Bouteille de Linge, Greaves retained the services of Ovide on guitar, adding his old mate Pip Pyle on drums and the latter's then-partner, Sophia Domancich on piano. Over the next few years his music took on a more acoustic flavour and Greaves settled on a drum-less line-up comprising Domancich and double bass player Paul Rogers; this resulted in the 1995 album Songs, which consisted of acoustic arrangements of songs from his previous efforts, going back to Kew. Rhone. Greaves himself only handled lead vocals on one track, "The Green Fuse", leaving the spotlight to Robert Wyatt, opera singer Susan Belling, Kristoffer Blegvad and French variety singer Caroline Loeb. During the 1990s, Greaves embarked on one-off collaborations with David Cunningham from The Flying Lizards, on 1991's greaves, cunningham album, Peter Blegvad on 1995's Unearthed.
He played bass in Blegvad's own trio alongside Chris Cutler on drums, which recorded two studio albums. In the early 2000s Greaves chose to divide his time between two contrasting bands, an electric trio named Roxongs with François Ovide on guitar and Manu Denizet on drums, heard on 2001's The Caretaker, an acoustic trio named Jazzsongs, with Sophia Domancich on piano and Vincent Courtois on cello, heard on 2003's The Trouble With Happiness, once again a mixture of old and new songs, but this time with Greaves himself singing all the way through. Intended as a follow-up of sorts to the acclaimed Songs, 2004's Chansons saw Greaves team up with lyricist Chris
Vivian Stanshall
Vivian Stanshall was an English singer-songwriter, author and wit, best known for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, for his exploration of the British upper classes in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, for acting as Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield's album Tubular Bells. Stanshall was born on 21 March 1943 at the Radcliffe Maternity Home Shillingford and christened Victor Anthony, he lived with his mother Eileen while his father, Victor Stanshall served in the RAF during World War II. His father changed his name to Victor in preference to his given name Vivian. Stanshall described this early period as the happiest time of his childhood; when the war ended, his father returned but the young Victor found him difficult and comparatively stern after having been alone with his mother. The family moved to the father's hometown of Walthamstow, where Stanshall's younger brother Mark was born in 1949. With six years between them, the brothers were never close. Stanshall studied at Walthamstow College of Art, where he met fellow students Ian Dury and Peter Greenaway.
About this time, the Stanshall family moved to the Essex coastal town of Leigh-on-Sea. He attended Southend High School for Boys until 1959; as a young man, Victor Stanshall earned money doing various odd jobs at the Kursaal fun fair in nearby Southend-on-Sea. These included working as a bingo caller and spending the winter painting the fairground attractions. To set aside enough money to get through art school, Stanshall spent a year in the merchant navy, he said he was a bad waiter, but became a great teller of tall tales. Stanshall enrolled at the Central School of Design in London, he joined fellow students in forming a band. Innes said of their first meeting: "We first met in a big Irish pub in South London, the New Cross Arms... he was quite plump in those days, he was wearing Billy Bunter check trousers, a Victorian frock coat, black coat tails, horrible little oval, violet-tinted pince-nez glasses, he had a euphonium under his arm, large rubber false ears. And I thought, this is an interesting character."
About this time, Stanshall changed his first name to "Vivian", the name his father had abandoned. This was not made his legal name until 1977; those who knew him from his student days continued to call him Vic. The band was named after a word game that Stanshall played with co-founder Rodney Slater, in which they cut up sentences and juxtaposed fragments to form new ones. "Bonzo Dog/Dada" was one result. The band performed under this name but grew tired of explaining what Dada meant and so it became the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "doo-dah" being a quaint expression that both Rodney's mother and Vivian used to describe everyday objects. Much of the band's original repertoire was based on comedic re-workings of songs from the 1920s and'30s, found on 78 records, bought for pence from local flea markets. For a while the band operated semi-professionally, playing the college circuit. After acquiring a manager they went full-time and were booked on the working men's club circuit in the north of England.
The band dominated their lives, as they travelled to low-paying gigs in an old van crammed with any number of musical instruments, an assortment of props, prop robots. In 1967, they appeared in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour television special, where they played Stanshall's "Death Cab for Cutie" during the strip club scene; the appearance led to a spot as the house band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a weekly children's television revue show, notable for early appearances by most of the Monty Python team. According to their manager/agent Gerry Bron, after a ill-advised agreement that the band should be left to their own artistic devices, Stanshall was allowed several weeks in a hired rehearsal space to write songs for the new Bonzo Dog Band album; when Bron arrived at the location to check the progress of these endeavours, he found that Stanshall had not written anything at all and had instead built a variety of hutches for his pet rabbits. Bron mentioned in a TV documentary that this occurred in May 1968 in a hall in West London.
The actual location is Askew Road Church hall at the start of Bassein Park Road in Shepherds Bush. The date would suggest. During recordings for the album proper at Morgan Studios, wearing just a rabbit's head and underpants, interviewed members of the public in Willesden High Road. On the album track "We Are Normal", one interviewee can be heard to remark, "He's got a head on him like a rabbit."Later in 1968 the Bonzos scored a surprise top-ten hit with a "I'm the Urban Spaceman" produced by Apollo C. Vermouth aka Paul McCartney. Meanwhile, the band toured incessantly and recorded a multitude of radio sessions for the BBC, alongside several albums, they embarked upon two poorly organised but well-received tours of the United States and it was during the disastrously organised second tour that they decided to break up because of Stanshall's growing stage
Centigrade 232
Centigrade 232 is an album and a book of poems by English writer and musician Robert Calvert, recorded in 1986 and released in 2007. The poem Centigrade 232 was set to music by Spirits Burning in 2001; some titles were set to music by Hawkwind and issued as The Brock/Calvert Project in 2007. Calvert had regarded himself first and foremost as a poet and writer and his original involvement with the English rock group Hawkwind from 1971 was as a lyricist and narrator of "space-age poetry" at gigs, it was as a solo performer and his second spell with Hawkwind from 1976 that he had become more recognised as being a singer and front-man of a rock band, but he continued writing poems and plays during this time. In 1977 a collection of his poems were compiled and published by Quasar books, the title being the temperature at which writing paper burns "signifying the writer destroying his rough drafts"; this is an allusion to the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 and the film thereof, 451°F being equivalent to 232 Centigrade.
Some of the poems are pieces he had performed with Hawkwind during the Space Ritual show, such as "The First Landing on Medusa", performed as "The Awakening". Others would be adapted into Hawkwind songs, such as "The Starfarer's Despatch" and "The Clone's Poem" which were combined into "Spirit of the Age"; the poem "Circle Line" won the Capital Radio Poetry Award in 1975. The book received a launch party at Battersea Arts Centre, which featured performances from Cream lyricist Pete Brown and Gong's Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth. In 1986 Calvert started issuing cassette tapes of his work under the imprint of Harbour Publications. One of these tapes was the full recitation of the Centigrade 232 collection. Other releases comprised recitations of the unpublished Earth Ritual poems collection and two music tapes, Blueprints from the Cellar Volumes 1 and 2, which contained home demos of songs, some of which would be released in completed form on the albums Freq and Test Tube Conceived. Calvert's Centigrade 232 tape recitation was first used with music on the second Spirits Burning album Reflections in a Radio Shower, released in 2001.
Don Falcone took the original recording of Calvert reading his poem Centigrade 232 and integrated it into the track Drive-By Poetry. Lines from another Centigrade 232 poem appear on the CD's opening track. In October 2007, Voiceprint Records re-issued Centigrade 232 in a package containing both a reprint of the 1977 book and a CD of the 1986 recitations. Voiceprint Records label head Rob Ayling passed a copy of the cassette tape of Calvert's recitations to Dave Brock and asked him to set some of the titles to music; the music was played by the current line-up of Hawkwind, but some titles were lost at the mixing stage delaying the release until August 2007. The release was credited to the Brock/Calvert Project. All titles by Robert Calvert The First Landing on Medusa"Swing" "Ode to a Crystal Set" "The First Landing on Medusa" "Ode to a Time Flower" "Some Sketches of a Hand" "The Starfarer's Despatch" "Song of the Gremlin" "The Pause" "The Clone's Poem" "Centigrade 232" "Fahrenheit 451" "The Naked And Transparent Man Gives Thanks"Buster Keaton and the Virgin Sperm Dancer"Dance Steps" "Lines for a Conception Card" "Lady with a Looking Glass" "The Siren" "Buster Keaton and the Virgin Sperm Dancer" "Your Time" "A Refusal To Mourn The Removal, By Surgery, Of Two Benign Tumours" "Circle Line" "An Unposted Letter"The Urban Mountaineer"The Clerk" "Cleaning A Rapidograph" "A Letter of Complaint to the Council" "Fly on the Screen" "The Recovery" "Nail Biter" "Mountaineering in Suburbia" "The Last Kitten" "Caterpillar" "Snowfall" "Insomnia" "Storm" "Overslept" "The Day We Hunted Birdsong" "Fountains in the Park" "Coots" "Ragworm in a Rock Pool" "Shell" "Beachcombing"Ragworm in a Rock Pool"Seagulls" "Seagulls" "Recollections of a Seaside Love Affair" "The Drowned Man"The Red Baron Regrets"Churchill's Secret Rock Deal" "The Red Baron Regrets" "John Keats at Margate" "Voodoo Child" "The Legend of Ezra Pound" Calvert appears on two tracks on the CD Reflections In a Radio Shower.
All words by the vocalists and lyricists on the track. All music by all personnel on the track. Track 1: "Second Degree Soul Sparks" Track 3: "Drive-By Poetry" Daevid Allen – track 1 guitar, end vocals' track 3 haiku voice Robert Calvert – track 1 recitation of lines from "Ode To A Crystal Set". All music by Dave Brock, except 9 and 11 by Brock and Jason Stuart "First Landing on Medusa" "The Siren" "Ode to a Timeflower" "Small Boy" "Centigrade 232" "Dance Steps" "The Naked and the Transparent Man Gives Thanks" "The Cupboard" "Long Time Friend" "Letter of Complaint to the Council" "Locked In" "Some Sketches of a Hand" Robert Calvert – recitation Dave Brock – guitar, keyboards, vocals Jason Stuart – keyboards Alan Davey – bass Richard Chadwick – drums Trixie Smith – vocals 1977 – Quasar Publications – book 1986 – Harbour Publications – Cassette tape 2001 – Gazul Records – Spirits Burning Reflections in a Radio Shower CD October 2007 – Voiceprint Records – CD and book August 2007 – Voiceprint Records –
Jimi Hendrix
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American rock guitarist and songwriter. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is regarded as one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music". Born in Seattle, Hendrix began playing guitar at the age of 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the U. S. trained as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville and began playing gigs on the Chitlin' Circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965, he played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after being discovered by Linda Keith, who in turn interested bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals in becoming his first manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", "The Wind Cries Mary".
He achieved fame in the U. S. after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the U. S.. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, before his accidental death from barbiturate-related asphyxia on September 18, 1970, at the age of 27. Hendrix was inspired musically by American roll and electric blues, he favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, was instrumental in popularizing the undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units, such as fuzz tone, wah-wah, Uni-Vibe in mainstream rock, he was the first artist to use stereophonic phasing effects in music recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously.
In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year, in 1968, Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year; the Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Ladyland, among the 100 greatest albums of all time, they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth greatest artist of all time. Jimi Hendrix had a diverse heritage, his paternal grandmother, Zenora "Nora" Rose Moore, was one-quarter Cherokee. Hendrix's paternal grandfather, Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix, was born out of an extramarital affair between a woman named Fanny, a grain merchant from Urbana, Ohio, or Illinois, one of the wealthiest men in the area at that time. After Hendrix and Moore relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia, had a son they named James Allen Hendrix on June 10, 1919.
In 1941 after moving to Seattle, Al met Lucille Jeter at a dance. Lucille's father was Preston Jeter, whose mother was born in similar circumstances as Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix. Lucille's mother, née Clarice Lawson, had African Cherokee ancestors. Al, drafted by the U. S. Army to serve in World War II, left to begin his basic training three days after the wedding. Johnny Allen Hendrix was born on November 1942, in Seattle. In 1946, Johnny's parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix, in honor of Al and his late brother Leon Marshall. Stationed in Alabama at the time of Hendrix's birth, Al was denied the standard military furlough afforded servicemen for childbirth, he spent two months locked up without trial, while in the stockade received a telegram announcing his son's birth. During Al's three-year absence, Lucille struggled to raise their son; when Al was away, Hendrix was cared for by family members and friends Lucille's sister Delores Hall and her friend Dorothy Harding. Al received an honorable discharge from the U.
S. Army on September 1, 1945. Two months unable to find Lucille, Al went to the Berkeley, home of a family friend named Mrs. Champ, who had taken care of and had attempted to adopt Hendrix. After returning from service, Al reunited with Lucille, but his inability to find steady work left the family impoverished, they both struggled with alcohol, fought when intoxicated. The violence sometimes drove Hendrix to hide in a closet in their home, his relationship with his brother Leon was precarious. In ad
Space Ritual
The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London is a 1973 live double album recorded in 1972 by UK rock band Hawkwind. It is their fourth album, reached #9 in the UK album charts and dented the Billboard Top 200, peaking at #179; the album was recorded during the tour to promote their Doremi Fasol Latido album, which comprises the bulk of this set. In addition there are new tracks and the songs are interspersed by electronic and spoken pieces, making this one continuous performance, their recent hit single "Silver Machine" was excluded from the set, only "Master of the Universe" remains from their first two albums. The Space Ritual show attempted to create a full audio-visual experience, representing themes developed by Barney Bubbles and Robert Calvert entwining the fantasy of Starfarers in suspended animation traveling through time and space with the concept of the music of the spheres; the performance featured dancers Stacia, Miss Renee, Jonathan Carney and Tony Carrera, stage set by Bubbles, lightshow by Liquid Len and poetry recitations by Calvert.
On entering the venue, audience members were given a programme featuring a short sci-fi story by Bubbles setting the band in a Starfarers scenario returning to Earth. The original release featured edits and overdubs, the sleeve notes explaining that "We had to cut a piece out of Brainstorm and Time We Left because they were too long", but the 1985 Space Ritual Volume 2 album contains the full unedited versions. A unheard edited version of "You Shouldn't Do That" from this concert was included on the 1976 Roadhawks compilation album subsequently included as a bonus track on the 1996 remaster CD; the full unedited version of the track can be found on the Hawkwind Anthology album. June 2007 saw another EMI 2CD remaster issue with different bonus tracks and DVD-audio - this remaster would be reissued in 2013, minus the DVD-audio. "Sonic Attack" had been written by science fiction author Michael Moorcock, who performed with the band when convenient and Calvert was unavailable. Here it is recited by Calvert and it was scheduled for single release, promotional copies being distributed in a cloth sleeve, but it never did receive a full release.
In the Q & Mojo Classic Special Edition Pink Floyd & The Story of Prog Rock, the album came #8 in its list of "40 Cosmic Rock Albums". The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Side 1"Earth Calling" – 1:44 "Born to Go" – 9:56 "Down Through the Night" – 6:16 "The Awakening" – 1:32Side 2"Lord of Light" – 7:21 "Black Corridor" – 1:51 "Space Is Deep" – 8:13 "Electronic No. 1" – 2:26Side 3"Orgone Accumulator" – 9:59 "Upside Down" – 2:43 "10 Seconds of Forever" – 2:05 "Brainstorm" – 9:20Side 4"Seven By Seven" – 6:11 "Sonic Attack" – 2:54 "Time We Left This World Today" – 5:47 "Master of the Universe" – 7:37 "Welcome to the Future" – 2:04Bonus tracks on 1996 Remasters CD "You Shouldn't Do That" / "Seeing It As You Really Are" – 6:58 "Master of the Universe" – 7:23 "Born to Go" – 13:02 Dave Brock – guitar, vocals Nik Turner – saxophone, vocals Lemmy – bass guitar, vocals Dik Mik – audio generator, electronics Del Dettmar – synthesizer Simon King – drums Robert "Bob" Calvert – poetry, vocals Recorded at Liverpool Stadium, 22 December 1972 and Brixton Sundown, 30 December 1972 by Vic Maile and the Pye Mobile.
Produced by Hawkwind. Mixed by Vic Maile and Anton Matthews at Olympic Studios, Barnes. "You Shouldn't Do That" recorded at Brixton Sundown, 30 December 1972. Released on the Roadhawks compilation album. "Master Of The Universe" and "Born To Go" were recorded at The Roundhouse, 13 February 1972. Released on the Greasy Truckers Party Various Artists album; the sleeve was designed by Barney Bubbles and came in 3x2 panel foldout, the outer 6 panels being colour, the inner 6 panels being monochrome, the discs in psychedelic patterned orange & yellow inner sleeves were folded into this. It made; the outer foldout features an illustration of Miss Stacia flanked by the hounds of King over stage shots of the band. The inner foldout features three panels of a photograph of outer space with three illustrations on each panel headed by lines from a Hawkwind song. Inner panel 1: features a vintage photograph of a naked woman with listed credits. Inner panel 2: chac bacab – features an image of a female nipple as a planet, a legend of the Earth as a living entity.
Inner panel 3: kan bacab – features an image of a foetus suspended in space with the legend "The Universe resounds with the joyful cry I AM. I am the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Naked I came out of my mothers womb and naked shall I return thither." Inner panel 4: Features a mandala with the legend "Everything exists for itself, yet everything is part of something else. The One and the many contain in themselves the principles of space; the way up and the way down are one and the same." Inner panel 5: Features a dedication from Lemmy to John the Bog and Sue Bennett. Zac bacab, tec bacab and bac bacab expounds upon religious and cosmological myths and sciences, starting with the William Blake poem "To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity
Street theatre
Street theatre is a form of theatrical performance and presentation in outdoor public spaces without a specific paying audience. These spaces can be anywhere, including shopping centres, car parks, recreational reserves, college or university campus and street corners, they are seen in outdoor spaces where there are large numbers of people. The actors who perform street theatre range from buskers to organised theatre companies or groups that want to experiment with performance spaces, or to promote their mainstream work, it was a source of providing information to people when there were no sources of providing information like television, radio etc. Nowadays, street play is used to convey a message to the crowd watching it. Street play is considered to be the rawest form of acting, because one does not have a microphone or loud speakers. Sometimes performers are commissioned for street festivals, children's shows or parades, but more street theatre performers are unpaid or gather some income through the dropping of a coin in a hat by the audience.
The logistics of doing street theatre necessitate simple costumes and props, there is little or no amplification of sound, with actors depending on their natural vocal and physical ability. This issue with sound has meant that physical theatre, including dance and slapstick, is a popular genre in an outdoor setting; the performances need to be visible and simple to follow in order to attract a crowd. Street theatre should be distinguished from other more formal outdoor theatrical performances, such as performances in a park or garden, where there is a discrete space set aside and a ticketed audience. In some cases, street theatre performers have to get a licence or specific permission through local or state governments in order to perform. Many performers travel internationally to certain locations of note. Street theatre is arguably the oldest form of theatre in existence: most mainstream entertainment mediums can be traced back to origins in street performing, including religious passion plays and many other forms.
More performers who, a hundred years ago, would have made their living working in variety theatres, music halls and in vaudeville, now perform professionally in the many well-known street performance areas throughout the world. Notable performers that began their careers as street theatre performers include Robin Williams, David Bowie and Harry Anderson. Street theatre allows people who might not have been to, or been able to afford to go to, traditional theatre; the audience is made up of anyone and everyone who wants to watch and for most performances is free entertainment. Performance artists with an interest in social activism may choose to stage their work on the street as a means of directly confronting or engaging the public. For example, multimedia artist Caeser Pink and his group of performers known as The Imperial Orgy staged a piece titled Our Daily Bread that brought performers onto the streets of the New York's financial district to ceremoniously lay loaves of Wonder Bread along the sidewalks, each with an advertisement from Satan offering to buy people's souls in exchange for material possessions.
The performance caused an uproar when police were called out and bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in to inspect the loaves of bread for explosives. Other artists consider a paying, theatre-going public to be unrepresentative of the public to whom they are trying to communicate, performing to'the man on the street' may be considered a more democratic form of dissemination; some contemporary street theatre practitioners have extensively studied pre-existing street and popular theatre traditions, such as Carnival, commedia dell'arte etc. and wish to present them in a situation close to their original context. Whatever the reason for choosing the street, the street is a place with a different set of possibilities than the conventional theatre space. Sue Gill of Welfare State International argues that a street theatre performance is not a lesser form than an indoor performance, nor is it taking what you do on stage and placing it outdoors, but a form with an energy and an integrity of its own.. Many companies use street theatre to combine performance with protest.
This has occurred through the guerrilla theatre of San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Living Theatre, the carnivalesque parades of Bread and Puppet Theatre, the work of Ashesh Malla and the Sarwanam Theatre Group of Nepal. A character-based street theatre which developed in the 1960s and 1970s was developed by groups like Lumiere and Son, John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, Exploded Eye and Natural Theatre Company; the performances were unannounced and featured characters who acted out a pre-arranged scenario, looking beautiful or surreal or just involving passers by in conversation. They did not seek to trick in a Candid Camera way, but rather invited the audience to pretend along with them. No amount of planning or rehearsal could dictate. Another example would be Natural Theatre's Pink Suitcase scenario. A number of smartly dressed people carrying bright pink suitcases enter a set of streets or buildings, they miss their companions. In their search they get on buses, hail cabs, end up in shop windows, etc.
By the time they meet up at a pre-arranged spot with the help of passers-by, perceptions of the area have changed and shopping has ceased for at least a few moments. The humour is universal and this piece has been seen in nearly seventy countries, it is performed by four or five actors, but has been done with twenty-five. Campbell, Patricia J. Passing the hat: Street performers in America, New York: Delacorte Press, ISBN 978-0-385-28773-9, OCLC 7461199 — Discusses buskers
Lockheed bribery scandals
The Lockheed bribery scandals encompassed a series of bribes and contributions made by officials of U. S. aerospace company Lockheed from the late 1950s to the 1970s in the process of negotiating the sale of aircraft. The scandal caused considerable political controversy in West Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. In the U. S. the scandal nearly led to Lockheed's downfall, as it was struggling due to the commercial failure of the L-1011 TriStar airliner. Through the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act of 1971 the Emergency Loan Guarantee board was created to manage federally guaranteed private loans up to $250 million to Lockheed Corporation; the guarantee program would have the U. S government assume the private debt of Lockheed. In 1975 Lockheed did not go into default. In August 1975 the board investigated whether Lockheed violated its obligations by failing to tell the board about foreign payments made to Lockheed. On October 14, 1977, Lockheed and its 24 lending banks entered into a credit agreement, providing for a $100 million revolving line of credit, to replace the Government guarantee commitment.
The Emergency Loan Guarantee Board approved the new credit agreement on October 14, 1977, through a termination agreement that closed the Government Emergency Loan Guarantee Board after issuance of its final report on September 30, 1977. Fees paid by Lockheed and its banks to the Board for administering the program loan netted around $30 million, sent to the U. S. Treasury. No taxpayer money was given to Lockheed. In late 1975 and early 1976, a sub-committee of the U. S. Senate led by Senator Frank Church concluded that members of the Lockheed board had paid members of friendly governments to guarantee contracts for military aircraft. In 1976, it was publicly revealed that Lockheed had paid $22 million in bribes to foreign officials in the process of negotiating the sale of aircraft including the F-104 Starfighter, the so-called "Deal of the Century". Former Lockheed lobbyist Ernest Hauser told Senate investigators that West German Minister of Defence Franz Josef Strauss and his party had received at least $10 million for the purchase of 900 F-104G Starfighters in 1961.
The party and its leader denied the allegations, Strauss filed a slander suit against Hauser. As the allegations were not corroborated, the issue was dropped. In September 1976, in the final phase of the West German federal election, the controversy was re-opened when questions were asked about the whereabouts of the "Lockheed documents" within the Federal Ministry of Defence. Anonymous sources distributed several falsified, documents to the media. According to one of these documents, member of the German Bundestag and its defense council Manfred Wörner accepted an invitation by Lockheed to visit their aircraft plants in the US with the entire trip being paid by Lockheed. In the course of the investigations, it emerged that most of the documents related to the Starfighter purchase had been destroyed in 1962; the whereabouts of the documents were again discussed in a committee of inquiry meeting of the Bundestag between January 1978 and May 1979. An investigation of Lockheed documents by the U.
S. revealed that Wörner's trip had been financed by the German Bundestag, was related to a test flight with the Lockheed S-3 Viking. Only part of the travel costs of Wörner's secretary, Wörner's flight back from the US to Germany was paid by Lockheed: Wörner was accompanied by his secretary and a portion of her expenses were paid by Lockheed. Further, Wörner "lost" his government paid ticket back to Germany and Lockheed "accommodated" him by giving him another ticket; the Italian branch of the Lockheed scandal involved the bribery of Christian Democrat and Socialist politicians to favor the purchase by the Italian Air Force of C-130 Hercules transport planes. The allegations of bribery were supported by political magazine L'Espresso, targeted former Cabinet ministers Luigi Gui and Mario Tanassi, the former Prime Minister Mariano Rumor and then-President Giovanni Leone, forcing him to resign his post on June 15, 1978; the scandal involved the Marubeni Corporation and several high-ranking members of Japanese political and underworld circles, including Finance Minister Eisaku Sato and the JASDF Chief of Staff Minoru Genda.
In 1957, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force wished to buy the Grumman F11F-1F Super Tiger to replace the F-86 Sabre in service, but heavy lobbying by Lockheed of the key LDP figures led to the adoption of the F-104 instead. Lockheed hired underworld figure Yoshio Kodama as a consultant in order to influence Japanese parastatal airlines, including All Nippon Airways, to buy the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar instead of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. On February 6, 1976, the vice-chairman of Lockheed told the Senate subcommittee that Lockheed had paid $3 million in bribes to the office of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka for aid in the matter. Lockheed paid ¥2.4 billion to earn the contract from ANA. ¥500 million of the total was received by the Prime Minister. ¥160 million was received by ANA's officials. ¥1.7 billion was received by Kodama. On October 30, 1972, ANA announced its decision to purchase 21 Lockheed L-1011 Tristars, which cost $5 million each though it had announced options to purchase the DC-10.
In March 1976, in a protest at the scandal, actor Mitsuyasu Maeno made a suicide attack on Kodama's Tokyo home by crashing a light aircraft onto it. Maeno died and two servants were injured. Kodama himself was unharmed. Tanaka was arrested on July 27, 1976, was released in August on a ¥200 million bond, he was found guilty by a Tokyo court on October 12, 1983 for violations of foreign exchange cont
