Monday 24 October 2022

The Weirdest Record Ever Made: The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults

Isn’t it weird? How do they do that with their voices [ululates manically]? There’s a really good documentary called Death Cults or something, and it shows you them digging this enormous bunker, and [Elizabeth Clare Prophet] says: “The world is going to end on this date with a nuclear war”. The bunker’s not finished on time, but they go down anyway, come back out about a week later and the world hasn’t changed [laughs]. She says the master’s order wasn’t right, and that the world will actually be in four or five months. So they all go back down, and it doesn’t happen. It turns out she has brain tumours, which probably explains the entire cult, and then she dies. But it’s still going! They interviewed them a few years later. The women all look like Elizabeth Clare, with their suburban haircuts and clothes, and big smiles! There’s one piece on the album where they’re cursing pop music, and it’s just stunning. Hilarious. We play them at the beginning when we DJ!



“Together,” a man's voice intones. And then an onslaught of voices. Two are in front, a man and a woman; if they’re actually saying words, they're impossible to decipher. It's just syllables rolling together, the sound of lips flapping and tongues rolling over a single note. There’s something insectine about it, its nasality and its density, like a fog of cicadas descending. Occasionally—every few minutes or so—both of the leads stop to take a breath. You can really hear the congregation then: hundreds, maybe thousands of voices droning in a cavernous room, every tone and pitch in the musical spectrum. It is a great, heaving cloud of voices.

I’ve heard mantras and chants before but this sounds different. It’s insistent, for one thing. The energy is turned outward, instead of inward. And the intensity jacks upward every five minutes or so, the voices all become louder together and raise pitch a half-step, like a phalanx of semi trucks shifting up at the same time. After 27 minutes of these intensifications, the chanting is fast, high-pitched, the kind of thing that makes your eyeballs want to jump out of their sockets. The image in the mind is a congregation in the thousands, knelt down, eyes rolled back, filling their lungs with their intentions. What are they asking for? Then, abruptly, it stops. “Please be seated,” says the woman.

I looked it up right after the first time I heard it—on a late night show on WFMU, New York’s venerable free-form radio station—and located it online right away. It’s an old recording of the Church Universal and Triumphant, from an album entitled Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol 14, released by a mysterious imprint called Faithways International. The cover, which had been copied and posted online along with mp3 files, is austere, an obvious homage to the old Smithsonian Folkways releases—a picture of a lighthouse, lime green and pink background. As far as anyone on the internet knew, there were no Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Volumes 1 through 13. The label, according to the internet, had only one other release to its name: a collection of original tunes by Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that killed 12 Japanese subway commuters in a terrorist attack in 1995. History and half-researched mythology blend together in the internet’s accounting of the Church Universal and Triumphant recording’s origins. CUT was a group in rural Montana that was at one time centered around Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who believed herself a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and Guinevere who could channel a pantheon of saints that included Jesus, Hercules, and Shiva. Pictures show a woman with a perm and a dead-eyed grin—perhaps the most homespun-looking doomsday cult leader of all time. It was Prophet's voice I’d heard leading the chant. The recording originated sometime in the mid-80s. No one knew who had made the recording. No one knew who Faithways International was. No one knew where Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol. 14 had come from. I reached out to the DJ who’d played it on his show—they were just some mp3s he’d found online a few years ago, he said.

I downloaded them. The entire recording is plainly amazing. Sitting through the entire 27-minute chant is a rush, consuming and burying, like being swallowed up by human voices. It has a touch of the supernatural; it exists somewhere beyond music. It’s thoroughly of its own making, science fictional. The rest of the recording is maybe even more fascinating: an entire Church Universal and Triumphant service dedicated to “the tackling of the beast and the dragon—the momentum of rock ‘n’ roll.” Mostly, it’s Prophet’s voice, preaching about the sexual perversion of rock music, saying outrageous things that are both hilarious and truly inspired. Chanting alone, she prays for those “subverted by the syncopated rhythm of the fallen ones and the misuse of the 4/4 time.” She “calls on the electronic solar rings of the great central sun.” She plays the music video for Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good to Me." The man, when it’s his turn, "calls forth the sacred fire” in nasally solemnity on a list of 71 contemporary rock and roll celebrities including Michael Jackson, Kenny Loggins, the Alan Parsons Project, “Cyndi Looper,” and “Scooby Dooby Doo." I felt like I’d found a buried amulet. There was something slightly morbid and voyeuristic about my interest—these are, after all, real people’s prayers. I wanted to know what I was hearing; what the room looked like; what they were saying. And who was this shady Faithways International label that put the album out? With slightly nosy intentions—like flipping through the pages of someone else’s family bible—I tried to find where it had come from.

I was joining a group of curious listeners, sound artists, and avant garde music obsessives who have been fascinated by the recordings for decades. The spoken parts of the album—the parts about Tina Turner and Cyndi Looper—had been a hit for years with underground DJs and experimental composers. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle once said they brought it with them every time they DJed. Negativland, dissident sound collagists and copyright crusaders who’d once thrown down with U2, sampled the “sacred fire” rock ‘n’ roll-call on a piece called “Michael Jackson” way back in 1987. Fatboy Slim sampled it in 1996 and also called his piece “Michael Jackson.” Negativland's Mark Hosler said they found the original tape of the Church Universal and Triumphant service back in the mid-80s. It was titled “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé #1,” copyright Church Universal and Triumphant, Inc. This wasn’t the Sounds of American Doomsday Cults CD, but the source material.

"It sure wowed us back then,” Hosler told me. “[It] cried out to be used.” But it wasn’t Hosler who found the tape—he said it was either band members Ian Allen or Don Joyce. Could either of them have been behind Faithways International? We might never know—they both sadly passed away earlier this year—though it doesn’t seem likely. A hard copy of Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol. 14, which was issued by Faithways in 2000, is not easy to find. It’s out of print; every once in awhile, someone puts a CD or vinyl copy of it on sale for $100 (outside my writerly budget). I called Aquarius Records, the oldest record store in San Francisco, the city where everyone who discovered the recording seemed to have found it. But since the CD is out of print, the store doesn’t carry it anymore. And none of the people I talked to there knew where it came from (though one clerk said he still subscribes to new recordings from the church—they still put them out on CD-R and ship through the US Postal Service—because “they’re awesome”).

I eventually found a copy on the internet’s back pages—a guy named Earl Kuck was selling them on his website, Tedium House. He told me he bought a box of the CDs at a record fair in San Francisco ten years ago. He sent it to me in a package along with a wooden snake, the last page of an angry hand-written note, and a copy of Le Carillon by the Autumns. The packaging of the CD is simple—a pink booklet with two reprint news articles about the cult and nothing in the way of credits. Kuck said he didn’t know where the CDs he bought had come from, but he thought someone in Australia had made them. He connected me with another San Francisco friend, a guy named “Seymour Glass” who’d reviewed the “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé” version of the tape for his underground zine Bananafish. “Glass" had an experience similar to mine when he heard it. “The first time I listened to the tape, I sat staring at my stereo with mouth agape for the duration,” he wrote. “I returned to the bookstore and bought every copy they had. I’ve made more recordings of this tape than any other.” I managed to get a hold of “Glass” (the name on his email was “Maria Estevez”) who confirmed he found the tape at a since-shuttered bookshop in San Francisco, which led him to lament "the plague of start-ups and luxury condos” in the city. "I have a long history of exploiting (I guess you could say) these recordings I love,” he wrote me, "and have been told numerous times that I am suspected as, if not assumed to be, the disc's midwife. It's nice to be remembered."

Now, I had it on background that “Glass" and Kuck are the same person and that neither name (surprise!) is real. It would make sense that they/he were the one/s who put together the Doomsday Cults CD from the original tape. Both claimed they didn’t know its origins, which was, of course, in keeping with the tone and tenor of this whole affair. I became convinced—and still am— these merry pranksters were, in fact, the “midwives” of the CD; that they'd taken the old tape and cleverly repackaging it. But they’d never tell me if they did, so I kept poking around for good measure. (I told Kuck I had heard him and "Glass" had never been seen together in the same room. He replied: "He and I are in the same room together frequently. People just aren't observant enough to notice.") Brian Turner was, as far as I could tell, the first WFMU DJ to spin Doomsday Cults 15 years ago, when it was first released by Faithways. He’s also the music director. I was sure he would have some insight. He didn’t know where it came from, but he said that when it first came out in 2000, he’d gotten his own copy in the mail. That’s not that weird for him—he’s the music director at a radio station, after all—but when he opened the package, he was startled to find he was thanked by name in the credits. He ventured a couple guesses about who put it out. "Elizabeth Clare Prophet has been touted by weird sound connoisseurs like [Gregg] Turkington, [Germs and Ariel Pink drummer] Don Bolles, and the ilk,” Turner told me. Otherwise, he had no clue.

Gregg Turkington is famous in the comedy world for creating the Neil Hamburger anti-comedian character. He’s also Australian. I felt like I might have been on the right track. I reached out to him right away, but got only a brief message in reply: "I had nothing to do with that record,” he wrote. “I have no idea who actually was behind it… though if I recall correctly, I'm thanked in the liner notes.” I got a reply back from Don Bolles right after. “No,” he wrote. “But my name was on it.” Elizabeth Clare Prophet laughed at us from beyond the grave.

In 1875, a Russian immigrant in New York City named Helena Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society with her friends. Blavatsky claimed to communicate with a host of spirits, including Jesus. The society sought to unite world religions into a single belief system, and by the time she died in 1891—of influenza, at the top of a growing organization, besieged with accusations of fraud—she’d launched Theosophical Society enclaves in India, Europe, and Russia. Forty years later, Theosophy had made headway in America—including to Chicago, where Guy Ballard, a Blavatsky acolyte, founded the I AM movement in the early 30s with his wife Edna. Ballard, like Blavatsky, believed he could communicate with a spiritual dream team, whom he referred to as the Ascended Masters and expanded to include Buddha, Confucius, and the Virgin Mary. (He believed himself to be the reincarnation of George Washington.) The Ballards led their growing membership through marathon “decrees”—composed prayers shouted out loud by the entire congregation during services. In 1939, Ballard died suddenly, and immediately afterward, Edna and their son Don were both indicted by the federal government for mail fraud (which they fought and won before the Supreme Court in 1946). The I AM movement, like the Theosophy Society, had sprouted many groups of followers.

One of those followers, Mark L. Prophet (his honest-to-God birth name) founded the Summit Lighthouse in 1958. Like Ballard, Prophet claimed to communicate with venerable ghosts (he adds Hercules and Shakespeare and many more to the list). Like Ballard, claimed to have been reincarnated (in his case, Sir Lancelot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); and, like Ballard, Prophet's wife Elizabeth Clare could chat with Ascended Masters, too. The New Age movement of the 70s provided a glut of washed out and disenchanted hippies that swelled the Summit Lighthouse's membership rolls. Like the Ballards before them, the Prophets wrote decrees for the congregation to chant, but with less shouting and more of a controlled drone. During services, the Prophets would specify an intention—for example, the judgment and destruction of rock music—and the congregation believed their decrees, if they were forceful enough, could make the intentions come true. They could turn the tides of history without going outside the walls of their sanctuary. (In other words, what I’d heard as music, church members considered serious prayer.) Sometimes, while the congregation decreed, Elizabeth would swing an actual steel sword over her head, sometimes for hours. The faithful called her “Guru Ma." When Mark Prophet died in 1973, Elizabeth moved the church to Los Angeles and renamed it Church Universal and Triumphant. In 1986, as she amassed members and money, she moved again, to a 30,000 acre ranch just north of Yellowstone National Park she bought from Malcolm Forbes.

In these days, Elizabeth Clare Prophet is on fire. She’s built the Church Universal and Triumphant into a religion with something like 30,000 adherents. She’s leading marathon services to 2,000-or-so believers who live with her in Montana. And she’s starting to get messages from the Ascended Masters about doomsday. She shifts the church into full-on prepper mode. The church commenced building underground fallout shelters big enough to house 750 people, started stocking weapons, and stored thousands of gallons of gas in giant tanks. In the early 1990s, she told followers that Soviet nuclear missiles would fall on the United States at midnight on March 15. Local pharmacies reported being sold out of medicine, Band-Aids, bottles of water; banks said customers were lining up to close their savings accounts. "It's bizarre,” a bank official told the Los Angeles Times in March. "They don't want to wait, they want it now, and they want it in cash."

One night near the apocalypse, one of the church’s members, packing up his things, had his own kind of religious epiphany. It centered on the band Rush. 25-year-old Sean Prophet, only son of Elizabeth and Mark, often helped his mother spread her anti-rock and roll propaganda, but he nursed a secret: He loved prog rock. That night, Sean impulsively put on his headphones and listened to Power Windows—for research, he told himself—and was surprised to find himself moved to tears. He listened to at least five more Rush albums that night. Later, he wrote, "the idea that such talented musicians could be 'fallen ones' as the church taught just didn’t add up. They felt like brothers to me.” The experience changed him. He decided he’d stick around to see if the world did in fact end (never hurts to hedge your bets) and if it didn’t, he was out.

On the night of March 15, hundreds of adherents crouched in the cult’s homemade shelters, amid fetid buckets of human waste (the plumbing wasn’t finished yet). The sun set on the compound that night and (surprise!) rose again the next morning. Devotees started to pack up and go home. Sean and his family cut their final ties with the cult in 1993. (Incidentally, one of Sean's sons, Chris, grew up to play drums in Horse the Band.) In 1999, Elizabeth stepped down from the church—she’d developed Alzheimer’s—and died in 2009. The Church Universal and Triumphant does still exist, albeit diminished both in its scale and mission. I like Sean. He’s affable, doesn’t mind digging into the details of the church, and seems as inspired now, as a radical free-thinker, as he ever could have been the child of a cult leader. We talk about growing up in the cult. I couldn’t wait to ask him about the decrees. “I haven’t talked to anyone about this in years,” he told me. It turns out, Sean is the one who recorded the “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé #1” tape—the one that Seymour Glass and Ian and Don from Negativland found at local junk stores. The one that someone out there had released as Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol 14. In the 80s, Sean had headed a 25-person team that made audio and video tapes to mail to devotees scattered around the world. The team cranked out tapes like “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé" on a weekly basis.

these old tapes—it’s tapping into a world I know nothing about, extracting a 27-minute sample, and burying myself in it like it’s any old experimental recording. There’s a world beyond the recording I'll never grasp; a web of believers who were (and perhaps still are) enraptured, mislead, and manipulated. I feel in some way that it’s unfair to dig into the recording without fully appreciating its origins. It’s a door I’m not ready to open. But I can’t just stop my fascination with the tape, either.

I think back on the conversation I had with Mark Hosler of Negativland—a pioneer of this tape, in a weird way as much an expert as anyone. Hosler and other artists are able to appreciate these sounds as wholly independent—as much a product of the geeks who’ve dubbed it thousands of times as it is of a secluded doomsday cult in Montana. “We have a true love and tender appreciation for all the weird things we have collaged in our work over the last 35 years, this tape included,” Hosler told me. "It's never a patronizing or sneering or hateful thing, though perhaps some listeners mistakenly guess otherwise. It's more like amazement and stunned admiration that humans being can be so incredibly odd and unusual."




Monday 17 October 2022

Ian Curtis & his disturbing 'Epileptic Dance'

 

Ian Curtis the demonic ring master, a man passessed, electrified by his own scowling intense music, lost in his own world, as he marches back and forth like a crazed Wehrmacht sentry, rhythmically clutching at imaginary ghosts. Peer closer, and his eyes are glazed and haunted. It's as if he's seeing something we cant. Maybe he was.

After watching all the video's of his performances cult filmmaker Fabrizio Federico noticed that ''the audiences loved him because he made them gape with astonishment with his unique cataclysmic choreographic style. His brooding haunting vocal delivery was the icying on the cake. Ian was a crooner from a black hole from the underworld, the voice of a dark lord from a terrifying void from centuries past. The phenomenal vacancy and desolation in his eyes as he loses himself to the music is astounding. You can feel the power of the music going through him, but he's not excited, he's terrified. His dancing showed us what the music looked like. There was desperation, anger, honesty and fear in his dancing, with the weight of the world on his shoulders as he danced like a lost marionette. He was mesmerizing and trying to escape from his body, like a helpless puppet on some strings. This style of dancing can be traced back to David Bowie performing Stay on the Dinah Shore TV show. His impulsive, choppy dancing is a strange counter-balance to his lifless eyes.'' 

Ian was possessed by some very strong powers onstage, while his band created emotional, icy magic, his soul-searching performances made him vulnerable and immolated, like he was in another world, appearing both very powerful and very fragile. He'd come onstage looking very shy and quiet, and then he would go inside and take comand, as if he was pluged into a huge electrical voltage, twitching and jerking. This tranced out symbol of a human being. When he shook himself into a frenzy you didnt know where it was gonna take you, like a performance artist who sacrificed a part of them selves. He treated each show as a laboratory experiment, performing each show as if it were his last. With his dancing Ian had tapped into unknown dark forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life. 


Through his lyrics he had powerful psychic abilities, he was a channel for the Gestalt. A lightning conductor. Haunted by the spirits of the past like in the song Dead Souls. Here Ian cast a spell that felt more like an invocation as he spelled it out: ''Someone take these dreams away, that point me to another day.'' It went beyond aesthetics into something undeniable, making the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. There were forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life, and Ian had tapped into them.

Someone take these dreams awayThat point me to another dayA duel of personalitiesThat stretch all true realities
That keep calling meThey keep calling meKeep on calling meThey keep calling me
Where figures from the past stand tallAnd mocking voices ring the hallsImperialistic house of prayerConquistadors who took their share

Or when he alluded to having been reincarnated through many different times, like in Wilderness. Other topics featured: guilt, fear, rage, claustrophobia, disgust, self-hatred, and fatalism. Darkside immersion also included: mass murders, summary violence, radical right wing politics, and Nazism inspired by J.G Ballard, Burroughs, Kafka etc... ''A lot of people think he was on drugs. He wasn’t on any drugs at all. That was just him losing himself in the music.” So said Ian Curtis’ former Joy Division bandmate, Stephen Morris, of his extraordinary dancing. On May 18th 1980, Ian Curtis lost his battle with depression at the age of just 23. 

Ian's expressive, confused vocals croon over recurring musical patterms which themselves mock any idea of escape. Possessed by demons as he danced spastically and with lightning speed, winding and unwinding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him. In his short life, he released two seminal albums, and cultivated one of the most captivating live performance styles of all time. Dubbed, perhaps a little insensitively, his “epilepsy dance” (Curtis suffered from epilepsy, as did the subject of his song ‘She's Lost Control’), Curtis’ twitchy, possessed dance moves are inimitable. 

“When we rehearsed he used to literally just sit in the corner mumbling into a microphone,” said Morris, "and then you’d do a gig with him and he’d turn into this… dervish thing.”

Curtis had held a keen interest in music since the age of 12, and this interest developed greatly in his teenage years, with artists such as Jim Morrison and David Bowie being particular favourites of his, and thus influencing his poetry and art. Curtis could seldom afford to purchase records, leading him to frequently steal them from local shops. By his mid-teens, Curtis had also developed a reputation among his peers as a strong-willed individual, with a keen interest in fashion. Despite gaining nine O-levels at King’s School, and briefly studying A-Levels in History and Divinity at St. John’s College, Curtis soon became disenchanted with academic life, and abandoned his studies to commit himself to finding employment. Despite abandoning his studies at St. John’s College, Curtis continued to focus on the pursuit of art, literature and music, and would gradually draw lyrical and conceptual inspiration from ever more insidious subjects.

Joy Division a name that will live in infamy. This moniker was derived from the 1955 novel The House of Dolls, writen by Ka-Tsetnik 135633, born Yehiel Feiner, which featured a Nazi concentration camp with a sexual slavery wing called the “Joy Division”. The cover of the band’s first EP depicted a drawing of a Hitler Youth beating a drum and the A-side contained a song, “Warsaw”, which was a musical retelling of the life of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.

While performing with Joy Division, Curtis became known for his quiet and awkward demeanour, and a unique dancing style often reminiscent of the epileptic seizures he began experiencing in late 1978. If you watch the Apollo performance the opener Dead Souls, with its progressive, intense build up, it allowes Ian to position himself and read the audiences atmosphere as the band lock in behind him, so he can calibrate himself to see how far he wants to travel in his trance.

Throughout Joy Division’s live performances in 1979 & 1980, Curtis collapsed several times while performing and had to be carried off stage. To minimise any possibility of Curtis having epileptic seizures, flashing lights were prohibited at Joy Division gigs; despite these measures, Bernard Sumner later stated that certain percussion effects would cause Curtis to suffer a seizure. In April 1980, Terry Mason was appointed as a minder to ensure Curtis took his prescribed medications, avoided alcohol consumption, and got sufficient sleep. Regarding the choreography of Curtis’s stage performances, Greil Marcus in The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs quotes Jon Savage from Melody Maker: “Ian’s mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that Deborah Curtis had to cope with at home.” Marcus remarked that Curtis’s performance “might also have been a matter of intentionally replicating fits, re-enacting them, using them as a form of energy and a form of music.” Curtis’s final live performance with Joy Division was on 2 May 1980. This performance was at the High Hall of Birmingham University, and included Joy Division’s first and only performance of “Ceremony”, later recorded by New Order and released as their debut single. The final song Curtis performed on stage with Joy Division prior to his death was “Digital”.

In West Hampstead to honour their commitment to perform a second gig in one evening at this location, although some 25 minutes into this second gig, Curtis’s “dancing started to lose its rhythmic sense and change into something else entirely” before he collapsed to the floor and experienced the most violent seizure he had endured to date.

According to Tony Wilson, prior to his suicide, Curtis had watched Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek and listened to Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. His wife recollected that he had taken photographs of their wedding and their baby daughter off the walls, apparently to view as he composed his suicide note.

It was the band’s performances that got the press going, particularly due to the transparent movements of frontman Ian Curtis. He was like a pale phantom. A dark cloud of sweat starting out small and then moving south along his button-down shirts. His movements on stage were chaotic and unpredictable: a moment of stillness followed by a windmill of rapid arm movements, or his body, twisting and turning into a brief and uncontrolled tornado before settling into abrupt calm again. There are videos online – compilations of these moments that people can watch and marvel at. Through the grainy black and white footage, the small fists of Curtis cut through the darknesses, like he’s fighting some invisible demon, circling the stage. The sight of Ian trembling and alone onstage singing ''dance, dance, dance to the radio...'' is one of the truly iconic sights of the post-punk era. If you watch the Facrory video Here Are The Young Men you can see how Ian could physically wind the music to new levels of intensity. When Ian danced Joy Division became a better band. Flicking his wrists, violent swaying, nodding his head, a backwards shimmy, standing on his tip-toes. No dance instructor would recognize his ferocious movements.


Joy Division’s Ian Curtis’ favourite 32 books:

  • Adrian Henri, Environments And Happenings
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  • Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
  • Antonin Artaud, The Theatre And Its Double
  • Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell
  • Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
  • Dawn Ades, Dada And Surrealism
  • Franz Kafka, In The Penal Colony
  • Franz Kafka, The Castle
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Great Short Works Of Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
  • Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
  • Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
  • J.G. Ballard, High–rise
  • J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
  • Jean–paul Sartre, Nausea
  • John Heartfield, Photomontages Of The Nazi Period
  • John Wilcock, The Autobiography And Sex Life Of Andy Warhol
  • Ka–tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel De–nur], The House Of Dolls
  • Michael Green, The Art Of Coarse Acting
  • New Worlds [British Science Fiction Magazine] Nik Cohn, Rock Dreams: Under The Boardwalk
  • Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
  • Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde
  • Selected Poems By Thom Gunn & Ted Hughes
  • Various, A Century Of Thrillers: From Poe To Arlen
  • William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
  • William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind
  • William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys