Angels
Revolutionaries
Dreamers
John Davies, Woodstock, USA
Mutant Guitarist, Last Days of Mankind Red Mole - John Davies
I gave my life happily.
Red Mole was my forge. Inside this cauldron of artistic experimentation, there was a mission. We taught each other, challenged each other, and together we made a technique. We rubbed against each other, cleaning and polishing. I learned to make things with the mediums of my art and to know from its gritty and sweet interior the joy of artistic collaboration.
We were practitioners of high regard. We lived for the work, travelled incessantly and performed constantly. We had a rhythm, a way we could do it together. It was enormous fun.
Let us pray….for the spirits of Alan and Sally.
Vargos Circus was my first show with the Moles. We toured camping grounds and community halls in the summer of 1976. The show was loosely based on the Henri Rousseau painting The Lion and the Gypsy. In this photo Greta Campbell is the Gypsy and I’m some kind of amorous guitarist. It was an unforgettable summer of playing, romancing Greta and realising that this is what I wanted to do.
Vargos Circus
Ace and Uncle Sam
Wellington Town Hall Concert Chamber Red Mole premiered Ace Follies in the winter of 1976. It was a satirical take on the then prime minister Robert Muldoon’s recent world tour. In this photo he meets Uncle Sam who offers him a drink, a new coat and much else besides. We staged satirical scenes at locations of Muldoon’s visits including The Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, dinner with geisha attendants in Tokyo and at the border between north and south Korea. At this location Ace jumped onto a ballistic missile which blasted off and took him all the way….home!
I leapt and summersaulted about the stage clutching a cardboard rocket bruising myself repeatedly…a bit out of control I was. We would start the performance each of us with an alter ego hand puppet so as we entered from the back of the theatre a range of surreal conversations could be heard between the puppets and the actors who wore and voiced them.
Ace Follies
In the scene set at The Crazy Horse Saloon (infamous Parisian Nightclub) Deborah as waitress would pluck from her black velvet jacket a paper mache breast into which she would pour champagne. In this photo Helen Pankhurst, Deborah and Alan.
Goin To Djibouti
Our first venue upon arrival in New York 1979 was the Westbeth Theatre in West Greenwich Village. The piece was called Goin To Djibouti and was set around the story of a Cuban mercenary who went to Angola to inspire revolution. In the photo below, left to right, myself, a local ring-in, Deborah, Alan and Sally. It was the first soundstage, built for the The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson.
In this cavernous space, an ancient heating system was strapped to the interior walls. At one point, I made an exit into the ducts, crawled to the opposite side of the stage to make an entrance, having changed into the lizard mask and costume on the way. The Lizard disappeared into the duct to reappear once again transformed into Tarzan, who swung from a rope tied to the lighting grid.
Last Days of Mankind
The Last Days of Mankind. Red Mole, Theatre for the New City, April 1979.
At 4 am on March 28th 1979, there was a partial core meltdown in Unit Two of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in the state of Pennsylvania near the city of Harrisburg, 249 kilometres east of New York City. This meltdown was due to equipment malfunction, design failure and worker errors, and remains to date the most serious commercial nuclear accident in the USA.[i]
12 days before this accident, The China Syndrome, a movie about an accident at a nuclear reactor, had been released. The spectre of nuclear meltdown haunted the streets; images of reactor cooling towers glowed from newstand displays, and in the core of the Big Apple, there was suddenly the menace of nuclear rot. Red Mole had been in New York for three months; our opening gambit Goin To Djibouti, seen at the Westbeth Theatre, had won us enough kudos to secure a booking in the basement of the off-off-Broadway house, The Theatre for the New City.
With our visions of mutant nuclear holocaust survivors and deformed victims of dissident herbicide warfare, we descended the gloomy basement steps. I mooched through the stale air of the pokey backstage and turned on a tap. Out gushed in coughs and shudders acrid rusty water, ‘contaminated coolant from the nuclear reactor,’ I thought to myself.
(Read full paper)
[i] US. NRC Website retrieved Feb 4th 2010.
In the belly of the mole
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New York New York. 1980
We had a problem. Chelsea and Bristol have made it clear that although they will pay the rent from their cheap champagne skin trade associations, they will in no way dish out souvlaki and hero money. Continue reading.
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Santa Fe. 1982
Bang!!!
Christ that hurt, right on the point of the hip. Hey here he comes again the trolley swinging free in a wide arc as I turn to avoid (is this an act, am I performing this???) Continue reading.
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The Late Show. 1982
Pyramid Theatre Times Square New York New York.
“Cut!!” This from the Rooster.
Cut Cut Cut!!!
What the hell is he doing? Continue reading.
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The Late Club. NYNY Summer 1983
“What’s on your mind Deborah?”
“Seduction”.
The jukebox had pumped its closing beats and we were walking back to the barroom long bar where gins sat cup by cup. Continue reading.
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Raising Aphrodite. A Requiem.
New York 1983 & Wellington 2002.
Its just gone 9pm as I sidle down the three grimy steps from street level and into Tin Pan Alley, famous name, faceless bar corner 49th and Broadway. Continue reading.
Red Mole on screen
Want to see more? Discover Red Mole - A Romance documentary film by Annie Goldson, Red Mole on the road 1979, directed by Sam Neil for The National Film Unit and Radio With Pictures, Red Mole (Life is a Zoo).
Red Mole: A Romance
Feature documentary by Annie Goldson is now available on NEON, AroVision. Click here for viewing options:
