Robert Calvert-"The Kid from Silicon Gulch: Theatrespace-London 1981-05-01
An Electronic Musical Play
Cassette tape received in trade in 1988.(2) TDK-SA C90 tapes > Tascam 302 > Sony PCM M-10 at 96/24 Wave files
edited with CD Wave Editor V. 1.98 > Audacity for track breaks > 96/24 and converted to FLAC using Trader’s
Little Helper V2.8.3.182. Tape covertion and editing by Michael Cariola.
****Lineage for 16Bit/44Khz version: 24Bit/96Khz files > TLH > WAV> r8brain (downsample to 16Bit/44Khz) > TLH > FLAC (Level 8) ; new FFP
Acts and Songs:
01_Act 01
02_Living Alone
03_Act 02
04_Silicon Tronic Blues
05_Act 03
06_Why can’t the World be Run by Machines
07_Act 04
08_On the Case
09_Act 05
10_Instrumental Track
11_Act 06
12_Why do you call me a Pig
13_Act 07
14_Stay Cool, Hang Loose
15_Act 08
16_Back It Up
17_Act 09
18_A Day Called X
19_Act 10
20_The Kid from Silicon Gulch
21_Act 11
22_The Legend of Ned Ludd
23_Act 12
24_On the Case (Reprise)
25_Act 13
26_Why can’t the World be Run by Machines (Reprise)
27_Finale
Story, Players and Musicians Edited from web site: The Kid from Silicon Gulch – an electronic musical by Robert Calvert
THE KID FROM SILICON GULCH must be regarded as one of the highlights among Calvert’s rich creative output.
The play had it’s premiere performance on the 28th of April 1981 at the Theatrespace, London.
Let’s face it: Who, in the year 1981, had an idea of how computers work, what a network can – or rather: could do,
what words like mainframe, motherboard or baud-rate actually mean? And even if you’d find those very few –
who on earth would have been able to transform this knowledge into a contemporary, witty and musically-up-to-date
stageshow… on a very low-budget level?
Calvert wrote, co-directed and performed the lead-character BRAD SPARK in THE KID… – accompanied on stage by
Pete Pavli, his (to-become-) wife Jill Riches and a few very minimalistic props, acting as the nasty killer-computers.
The play/musical is actually a persiflage of the sort of Chandler-ish film-noir-like detective story, based in the
milieu of computer hackers – some of them rich, some of them dubious, others highly extravagant, to say the least.
But there’s much more to it – Calvert spiced the story with a wide selection of his favorite topics: telepathy,
conspiracy theories, new technologies, gender-problems in the digital ages…
Brad Spark is the typical lone-wolf Bogart-type of a private detective – only on this case he’s not hunting down any
organic life-form but fighting against some cunning digital computer brain. Or is he not? WHO is BEHIND this killing-WHAT,
or this "Kilo-Watt", as ZYTE – Brad’s own personal computer and main-force for logic and decuction – *jokingly’ calls it
(…all due to that darn second-hand humour-programme that Brad fed into him…)
Whatever this Who-or-What is, it’s de-programming various computers in The Gulch so that they are killing their owners
by vicious and dubious means: automatic cigar-cutters that, instead of cutting the tip off a Romeo-and-Juliet cigar,
rip their users into bits, automatic garage doors that close on the heads of their owners (17 times!) …
Well, who, or rather how are these computers? Remember Kubrick’s HAL? Somehow like that one. Only nastier – and more eccentric.
Brad, aided by his trusty ZYTE, go through a real odyssey of traces, link-up’s and dangerous, at times life-threatening adventures
while being ‘on the case’. And though Spark is doubtlessly the protagonist of this play, he has strong rivals in all the bizarre
computer-characters [they ARE characters, these machines] that he meets and tries to question along the way… at times with the
threatening aid of a screwdriver, pointing at the very heart of these reluctant suspects, their delicate motherboards…
Those scenes, in which Spark tries to press some ‘data’ out of them, are surely among the highlights of the play in terms of the
sharpness and wit of the dialogue, the absurdity of the man-machine and machine-impersonating-man relationships. You have gay
computers, butch-femme computers, highly advanced main-frames that act like just another dumb piece of hardware with a memory-failure,
computers with world-dominance delusions… – and they carry names like JIN, JUKE or ZOOT…:
"Hi, my name is Zoot. Go ahead, shoot. I’ve got stacks of facts. Take your pick, Mr. private Dick."
Apart from the candid way Calvert sets up an up-to-date-and-beyond persiflage of the detective story genre, it is even – or especially
now, after more than 20 years, way more than just astonishing, how precisely Calvert foresaw the possibilities of computer hacking and
all sorts of crimes on a digital basis – AND its most fruitful environment. Although there’s no specific name given to the city (‘the Gulch’)
in which all this takes place, the description given in the play, pretty well paints a picture of the classic Los Angeles / Silicon Valley
area, as it has often been depicted over the last 10 years or so in such ‘trendy’ magazines like ‘Wired’. Well, when they had just started
to ‘envision’ these surroundings, Calvert had already been there some 10-15 years ago. In regard not only to this piece of Calvert’s rich
oeuvre, it’s a damn’ shame that he has – until now – never made the covers of such -and a couple of other- magazines – who believe they have
the copyright on all things digerati and futuristic…
The musical mixes brilliant theatrical scenes [fuelled by Calvert's razor-bladed humour], with 10 minimalistic, extremly catchy and modern
tunes. All songs are based on just 2 or 3 extremly "catchy" electro/rhyhtm loops and are ‘championed’ by Calvert’s ability to crown them with
beautiful, at times haunting melodies.
A credit for the highly original and stylish music must surely go to Pete Pavli. Pavli studied Cello under Rostropovitch, one of the great masters
on that instrument. Later he played in High Tide and The Third Ear Band. During the early 80s he collaborated with Robert Calvert and Mike Moorcock
on various projects and togther they crafted a wide range of pretty avantgarde-ish material…. bound for commercial failures, of course, but still,
after all those years quite an experience to listen to!
On-stage Pavli played the kinda dumb-witted Sergeant Karelli and lend his significant voice to some of those evil computers. Together with Calvert
he produced the backing-tracks for the THE KID-songs.
Unfortunately, as a number of Calvert’s musical projects, THE KID… has never been properly recorded. All the sounds you can hear on the annexed
pages are taken from the only remaining recordings of the original backing-tracks and some quite-crackly audience-recordings. There’s also a
video-recording in existence. Alas, this has been shot -naturally- on early-80s home-video equipment and hence the quality is far from the crispy
digital stuff we are used to nowadays…
THE KID marked one on the most creative parts in Calvert’s career – over a period of 2 years he put out this musical, worked on other demo-tracks
with Pete Pavli and set-up 2 more Cabaret-Shows. And another sign of Calvert’s enormous output: the program-folder already announces the release
of his novel HYPE, another ambituous project, that combined a book, a record and a stage show. All this has been done in just two years….
Some more credits re. the performance:
The third actor besides Calvert and Pavli was Jill Riches, who played ‘The Countess’ and a ‘Hood’. Like Pavli she also sang one of the songs.
All three of them also did the numerous computer-voices, with the aid of Glen Swanborough, who also co-directed the play. Credited for additional
music is Dave Brock – longtime artistic companion in Hawkwind. He recorded the Kid-Song ‘On the Case’ for one of his solo-albums. Stage-Design
and Technics were done by Jonathan Smeeton and Larry Smart, who had already worked with Calvert during Calvert’s years with Hawkwind, particularly
during the ATOMHENGE-stage era.
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