A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Emphasise difference.
I responded to this with Iggy Pop's journey from 1973 to 1977, from Death Trip to Lust For Life and with The Clash who went from White Riot in 1976 to Death Is A Star in 1983.
Someone pointed out this week when commenting on the race riots in Southampton and Belfast that they didn't think this was the kind of White Riot Joe Strummer was talking about which is indeed true. Joe would have been appalled by the rise of far right politics in the UK. But I digress...
The Bagging Area OS squad came up with some great replies emphasising difference- Martin Carthy covering Slade, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood's very different voices, Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, Cindytalk, Rodney Allen's Happy Sad, Paula Abdul and a cartoon cat...
... Elvis, Propaganda, Donny and Marie Osmond, Tonio K, and Boogie Down Productions. Thanks everyone- Chris, Walter, C, Khayem, Ernie, The Swede, Jase, Al G, Rol and Beerfueled as ever for your considered contributions.
This week's card says this- Ghost Echoes.
Just a few days before I turned the card over I finished Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. It was published in 2010 and I've no idea why I only got a copy recently but I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful, powerful and poetic account of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti promised Robert she'd tell his story as he lay dying from complications due to AIDS. She attempted to do this with The Coral Sea but was often unable to get through a reading of the poem. Twenty years after his death, she felt able to write their story down. Her use of the written word is beautiful, as you might expect- she's a wordsmith if nothing else. The book is gripping, open and honest, with versions of their two childhoods and then their chance encounter in New York. She writes about her move to New York as a nineteen year old, an intense and slightly damaged young woman in love with Arthur Rimbaud, inspired by The Doors and Bob Dylan. Her early life in the city is a life of penury, of living hand to mouth and sometimes sleeping in doorways. Eventually she meets Robert (he rescues her from a predatory middle aged man who has taken her out for a meal and now expects something in return) and they live together as lovers and as artists, a completely bohemian life, inspiring each other. Robert is clearly struggling with his sexuality during this period and eventually they split but remain together. Their move to the Hotel Chelsea and the people they meet there changes both their lives and their relationship and their art. Just Kids tells their story up to the release of Horses, Patti finding her calling as a poet and then merging poetry with rock 'n' roll- and then to Robert's death in 1992.
The copy I have has extra material at the book, and Robert Mapplethorpe's ghost is present there in photos and drawings, in poems and art. He haunts the pages as he undoubtedly still haunts Patti. In a sense though, in the pages that make up the bulk of the book, the story of Robert and Patti, he is very much alive; she brings him (and a lost world, New York in the late 60s and early 70s) to life. In the book, after speaking to a very ill Robert on the phone in 1992, a conversation she knows will be their last, she wakes up a few hours later and intuits his death.
Land (Part One: Horses Part Two: Land Of A Thousand Dances)
There is no shortage of songs with the word ghost in the title- step up The Gun Club, Andrew Weatherall, The White Stripes and Tegan and Sarah, Fine Yong Cannibals, The Fall and R. Dean Taylor, Daniel Avery, Broken Chanter, The Jam, Reverb Delay, Kristen Hersh, The Orb, Burning Spear, The Replacements, The Vendetta Suite, Denise Sherwood, Hollie Cook, Trentemoller and The Style Council among others.... on and on we could go.
This 2019 song from Circle Square though seems the one that has both ghosts and echoes contained within, Richard Norris and Martin Dubka's Ghost In The Machine, a voice trapped inside a machine, echoing on and out for as long as the machine is plugged in.
Feel free to drop your own Ghost echoes into the comment box.
