Kinski Hardcore

The Lowest Form - Personal Space
Harbinger Sound. Harbinger 153 LP

Kinski Uncut - The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski
Bloomsbury Paperbacks.


A couple of years back I found a copy of Fitzcarraldo in the chazza and took it home and watched it with ever mounting incredulity. Of all the movies Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog made together Fitzcarraldo is the biggest, bonkers one of the lot. If they’d filmed it in 2016 there’d have been a team of clued up computer geeks making the best of what CGI had to offer but back in 1982 Herzog did indeed pull a three story steamship weighing 300 tons over a 40 degree hill in the Peruvian jungle using nothing but a complicated set of pulleys and the local Aguraruna people. Given the conditions they were working under it was no surprise that Kinski lost his infamous volatile temper, losing it to such an extent that the now increasingly pissed off locals [a gentle and timid people unused to such manic behavior] approached Herzog with the offer of bumping him off. An offer that Herzog must have been severely tempted by seeing as how they were three days in any direction from civilization but which he dutifully refused. This thought no doubt prompted by the fact that he’d already begun shooting Fitzcarraldo once before with the American actor Jason Robards and Mick Jagger as leads only to see Robards go down with dysentery and Jagger bugger off on a Stones tour. He wanted to see his movie finished and he knew he couldn’t do it without Kinski.

Kinski is one of the thee greatest film actors. IMDB credits him with 140 films. Kinski himself professed to involvement in over 200. Some of them are total shite but the ones he made with Herzog are true classics and both their life stories make for interesting reading. If you believe everything you read in Kinski Uncut though you'd have to be the stupidest person on the planet. Kinski Uncut is basically 300 pages of Kinski putting his dick in anything female including his own family. In a pattern that eventually becomes monotonous he meets a woman and three lines later he’s fucking her. In Pakistan [where he’s taken by taxi to meet a seven foot tall giantess], in bushes, on planes, in cars, beds, toilets, you name it he’s fucked in it, name a country he’s fucked somebody in it, if he's some place where he can get his dick out, he’s using it. Then there’s the sleeping rough, the busted marriages, the lousy films he has to make so as to make money to pay the rent, the endless cars [he sells one car after discovering the electric windows don’t wind down fast enough], the numerous houses, the endless parties, the shitty directors, especially Herzog whom he despises more than any human being on earth. The movies barely get a mention.

This has nothing to do with The Lowest Form who I know nothing about barring the fact that Luke Younger plays bass. Luke Younger who you will know from Helm whose ventures into electronic composition are worthy of investigation and whose recorded output I’m the proud owner of. He plays bass in a London based Hardcore group. 

What I know about Hardcore could be written on the back of a postcard using a bingo dobber so this is going to be short. I do like their enthusiasm though. The intro to ‘Star Slammers’ sounds uncannily like William Bennett in late Whitehouse mode and listening to all of this in one go is like having a dose of smelling salts run under your nose. The inner sleeve is heavy duty, the font is all Gothic script and the black and white imagery of a park looks suitably Geneva before the First World War. Kinski would no doubt have hated it.  




Harbinger Sound