11/15/10



WHO IS DAVID CANDY?
by Ian Svenonius

It's hard to say. Even now, his genealogy is being researched on the internet. What I do know is that Candy lives in a dream, far from the unfortunate aspects of the everyday. He scribbles in a journal like a boy half his age and plays backgammon prominently in public. He can eat copious amounts without the slightest effect on his physique. Ordinary men resent his shameless taste in clothes and shoes. Unusual men affect a similar style. He claims he's been in a number of duels, but he's certainly lying.

In the Candy persona there are also elements of Christopher Jones' Max Frost from 'Wild in the Streets' where a pop singer becomes President and of the Paul Jones character in 'Privilege' where the publicity campaign for a pop star turns him into a religious messiah (hence the inclusion of 'Listen to the Music' and Mike Leander's 'Bad Bad Boy' from those films and the trio of covers is completed by a reading of Komeda's lullaby from 'Rosemary's Baby')

I imagined 'Playpower' to be the record Toby Dammit would have recorded had he made it to Rome in Fellini's psychedelic masterpiece and whilst it is informed by many things the character of Candy is to some extent inspired by Terence Stamp's superbly intense performance.

Under the Work Projects Administration, Mr. Alan Lomax famously trolled around the south, taping farmers, miners and prisoners, in search of the "authentic voice of the American people". His employer was the government, His mission: propagandistic; the construction of a national identity out of the murky, tangled weirdness of the backwoods. The results, called "folk music", were documented on Folkways Records, and are unrivaled for their strangeness and oblique perspective. If Alan Lomax were trolling around the suburban parks of 21st century America, he'd surely stick a microphone under Candy's nose, and who knows? Maybe Folkways would finally have a hit record.

David Candy - Play Power

No comments: