This page contains all the articles that were uploaded in June 2009, chronologically sorted, from old to new.
Most browsers have a search function (Ctrl-F) that will highlight the word you are looking for.
Alternatively there is the 'Holy Search' search field and the 'Taglist'.
One of the lesser profane tasks of The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit is
to check the amount of iggybility on the World Wide Web and to
act (or react) accordingly. As the one and only keeper of the true faith
this means that in very grave situations the Holy Igquisition has
to intervene.
Here is such a case.
It came to the attention of the Church that the popular website whodatedwho.com
has got a webpage devoted to Iggy. That is no problem as such, but a
closer look on the page in question reveals that it contains some errors
and some unaccredited links.
The Iggy picture gallery
contains a lot of video-screenshots that have been taken from The Holy
Church, but without referencing it. The Igquisition does not need
any divine intervention to make this assumption as several screenshots
have been taken from an alternative copy of the Syd Barrett home video
that isn’t widely available on the web but that belongs to the Church’s archives.
The Holy Church does not pretend to be the one and only gospel
and anyone is entitled to add his (or her) own interpretations on the
web. On the other hand the Holy Church has the ambition to become the
one and only godspell, god spell as in collection of (good) news,
the one a bit more canonical than the other.
After long consideration the Holy Igquisition has decided that
the true believer will find the Church anyway, so every Iggy webpage,
even considered heretic by The Church, will be beneficiary at the end.
But there is another matter with graver consequences the Igquisition
has to look into...
The Who Dates Iggy page has some limited space to add links to
other websites. The most prominent one links to a forum thread located
at pinkfloydfan.net.
The Who
is Iggy?-thread, dating from 2004, starts with the following remark
‘these are some links to pictures with her (meaning Iggy)
and Mr. Barrett’ and point to 5 pictures located at the pink-floyd.org
website.
The pictures present at this location have been described here and there
as Iggy with Syd, sitting in the back of his garden in Cambridge in
1971. To avoid any rumours of a Syd and Iggy reunion in the Seventies
the Church vehemently wants to contradict this mystification. The woman
present on the picture is not Ig, but Sheila
Rock, Mick Rock’s first wife:
I met my first wife Sheila in 1969 and within about six months we were
married. (…) The images were taken in Syd’s mother’s house to accompany
a small article that I did for Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. (…) By
that time Syd had moved back to Cambridge. The pictures were shot in the
garden. Sheila took the pictures of me and Syd together…
Although all trace of Sheila has been carefully removed from the
pictures in the Psychedelic Renegades book, with the exception of her
hand on Syd’s sleeve on page 132, some uncensored pictures made it to
the fans, probably through Bernard White who issued the Terrapin
magazine in the Seventies. But to settle this matter once and for all:
she is not Ig; she is Sheila
Rock.
The pictures of Sheila Rock and Syd Barrett, taken by Mick Rock, can be
found on the heretic Madcap
page of pink-floyd.org. Please note that the description of the pictures
is wrong and that the woman on the picture is not Iggy.
Notes (other than internet links mentioned above):
Rock, Mick: Psychedelic Renegades, Plexus, London, 2007, p. 98.
The Reverend wants to apologise for the - sometimes harsh - tone of the
above text. It has been written by the Holy Igquisition, and
nobody expected the Holy Igquisition, not even the Reverend...
Ig's close encounters of the photographical kind were not limited to the
Anthony Stern triptych
series alone. She can be found as well on the cover of the Syd Barrett
album The
Madcap Laughs, still available in any qualitative cd-shop what means
that it is a hell of a job to actually find it. But on top of her
picture you get some decent music as well what is a rather nice bargain.
Storm
Thorgerson from the arty farty collective Hipgnosis
claims he shot the cover, although Mick Rock more or less hinted the
same. Both photographers were present at the same place on the same day
for the same purpose. Rock writes that he was asked by Syd Barrett to do
the shoot and that Storm agreed to take him on in the team.
Syd asked me to take the pictures. We had talked about the shoot for a
while, and the day before it happened I told Storm from Hipgnosis, so he
came along because they were putting the package together.
Thorgerson probably was despatched by Harvest
director and Barrett producer ad interim Malcolm Jones and has
stated that another photographer was present as well but that he didn't
know what the fuck he was doing there, although in a slightly more
diplomatic way:
Friend and photographer Mick Rock, later famous for his Bowie photos
amongst many others, also came on this photo session, but I can’t
remember why. I think it was to help me, which seems ironic given his
subsequent lensmanship and success in the rock business.
It surely was one of Rock’s pics that was put - uncredited - on the back
sleeve of the Barrett
(his second solo) album. For the third release, a repackaging of the two
previous ones, aptly called Syd
Barrett, some other shots from that day in April
1969 were used, but it is not certain if these came from Rock's
second-hand Pentax 35mm camera, bought from that other Hipgnosis team
member Aubrey
‘Po’ Powell, or from Storm Thorgerson who also claims he
used a 35mm for the job. (Although his favourite camera at that time was
a Hasselblad 500 c, as used for the Floyd’s Ummagumma cover a couple of
months later).
There will always be an enigma surrounding the cover shoot of The Madcap
Laughs. The 1978 book Walk Away René (The Work of Hipgnosis) contains a
detailed description of every picture in the book, except for… The
Madcap Laughs. Unfortunately Storm’s negatives have been lost,
so there will never be a Psychedelic Renegades from his hand.
Psychedelic Renegades, and then we finally get to the subject of
this blog entry, is the photo book Mick Rock made in 2002. The first
edition, by Genesis,
had 320 copies autographed by R.K. Barrett that are worth a small
fortune nowadays. In 2007 a regular edition was published by Plexus
Books (European edition) and Gingko
(for the USA).
There is a possibility that the Mick Rock photo shoot took more than one
day. The pictures in his apartment were taken, together with Storm
Thorgerson. The outside pictures date (perhaps) from the next day.
Nobody can be really sure and Rock isn’t the most reliable witness to
say the least. On page 18 he writes:
We shot The Madcap Laughs in the autumn of 1969 and I don’t think that
Syd and Duggie Fields had been living in the flat that long.
The above is a contradiction as Syd moved in the apartment end 1968,
furthermore the research of JenS,
who was a friend of Syd and Ig, shows that the pictures were probably
taken in April of 1969. Rock also states that:
Syd’s car was a conspicuously bright pink Pontiac Parisienne convertible.
However the few colour pictures of the car show it was (midnight) blue.
But the Church will no longer go further in this matter, if you want you
can read all about in some previous posts, for instance When
Syd met Iggy... (Pt. 2).
About 20 pictures of the book show us a glimpse of Ig, who is described
by Rock as follows…
Known only as Iggy, the half-Eskimo girl had momentarily made her way
into Syd’s life, and flat, at the time when these photos were taken.
Though not part of the original shoot plan, Iggy was an intriguing
accomplice. With no job and little to call her own, Iggy epitomised the
free natured spirit of the psychedelic underground.
The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit is very proud to announce you 3 new
Iggy galleries: Street
Life, black & white pictures of Iggy in front of the house and
car. Bare
Flat, colour pictures of Iggy, walking around in the nude and
posing on the background in Syd's apartment. Rock
Bottom, black & white nude study of Ig.
Sources (other than internet links mentioned above):
Rock, Mick: Psychedelic Renegades, Plexus, London, 2007, p. 18,
p. 20, p. 23, p. 46. Thorgerson, Storm: Mind Over Matter,
Sanctuary Publishing, London, 2003, p. 204.