Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange

February 2017 marks the centenary of the birth of Anthony Burgess. The Manchester-born writer published over 60 books in a prolific career; a man of many and varied interests, primarily known for his mainstream fiction, he also branched out into biography, linguistics and criticism, film and television scripts, and classical music compositions (including three symphonies and a musical version of Ulysses). Burgess remains best known for his powerful work of dystopian science fiction, A Clockwork Orange. 

 
This cautionary tale first appeared in 1962, and follows the leader of a gang of young hooligans, Alex, on a violent rampage through a near-future city, to his draconian punishment (through a form of ‘aversion therapy’ known as Ludovico’s Technique) at the hands of the state. Raising questions of criminal rehabilitation and the freedom of the individual, Burgess explained that what he “was trying to say was that it is better to be bad of one’s own free will than to be good through scientific brainwashing.” These dark themes caused a minor stir, leading to the removal of the final chapter from the American edition; however many reviewers bestowed equal attention on the innovative slang, Nadsat, used by the juvenile delinquents. Drawing on his keen interest in linguistics, Burgess created a language primarily based on Russian, which he was learning at the time for a visit to the Soviet Union, but also incorporated elements of Cockney rhyming slang, Romany phrases and Shakespearian English. Terms such as droog (as Alex refers to his fellow gang members, from the Russian for ‘friend’), devotchka and malchick, razrez and tolchock, subsequently entered the fringes of popular culture.

So taken with Burgess’s linguistic invention was Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, that he paid homage in a lengthy sleeve-note for the band’s second album, released at the start of 1965. The influence of A Clockwork Orange was evident from the opening lines: “It is the summer of the night / London’s eyes be tight shut / all but twelve peepers and / six hip malchicks who prance the street.” Oldham also appropriated the novel’s theme of ‘ultra-violence,’ which brought a foretaste of the controversy to come, as he advised prospective buyers of the record “if you don’t have bread, see that blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and low and behold you have the loot, if you put in the boot, good, another one sold!” The offending sentiments, discussed in the House of Lords, were first hidden beneath a sticker, then excised completely from later pressings of the record, in possibly the first instance of sleeve-note censorship.

A Clockwork Orange may have remained a curio and a cult novel, had it not been filmed. The American writer Terry Southern first planned an adaptation in the late 1960s, working on a screenplay to be directed by Michael Cooper, and starring Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones as Alex and his droogs. When that project stalled, Stanley Kubrick picked up the option and, featuring Malcolm McDowell in the lead role, his version opened in 1972; its amorality and scenes of explicit violence attracted controversy from the first. A whole series of urban myths grew up around the film on its release, seized upon by the popular press, which accused it of inspiring murder and mayhem, with a series of violent incidents attributed to real-life ‘Clockwork Orange’ gangs. The Leeds University campus was long rumoured to have been a filming location, though it was in fact the underpasses of Brunel University, Middlesex, which were used to depict the urban territory of the delinquents. Whilst Kubrick initially defended the film, it was the director himself who instructed Warner Brothers to withdraw it from British screens a year later. Whether he was prompted by alleged threats against his family, police advice or moral misgivings, Kubrick’s decision ensured its future notoriety – it remained banned in the UK until 2000, after the director’s death. Burgess was reputedly unhappy with Kubrick’s treatment of what he described as a ‘very minor work’, and the sensational coverage of the film, which he felt overshadowed his own career – though he himself freely discussed A Clockwork Orange for the rest of his life, and returned to it in 1987 with a semi-musical theatrical version. His ambivalent attitude was captured in a 1973 interview:

Films help the novels they’re based on, which I both resent and am grateful for. My Clockwork Orange paperback has sold over a million in America, thanks to dear Stanley. But I don’t like being beholden to a mere filmmaker. I want to prevail through pure literature. Impossible, of course.

The iconic artwork used for the film and book tie-in originated with Penguin Books Art Director David Pelham. Though he based the design on imagery from the film – the bowler hat and braces of the main character, Alex – rather than the text, it still captured the central theme of de-humanisation effectively. It was used internationally, and also adapted for a later version of the film poster, to accompany the edited cinematic release. A copy of the book owned by Burgess was found after his death in 1993, with the rest of the facial features drawn in – possibly added as an attempt to reclaim his original vision. Another artist involved in the film’s promotion was Philip Castle, whose invitation to create the official poster came after Kubrick saw his advert for illustration work in The Evening Standard; it was accompanied by the uncompromising slogan “Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.” Castle’s design also formed the artwork for the soundtrack album cover. The artist recalls the Director’s keen, almost obsessive, interest in every aspect of A Clockwork Orange’s publicity and visual imagery, from the furnishings of the Korova Milkbar to the creation of a mock newspaper, The Clockwork Times, for which Castle rendered paintings of images from the film. Kubrick’s interpretation of the book has been described as “arguably the last great pop art masterpiece, an apocalyptic consummation of the consumer imagery of modern life”.

Dr Christopher Evans

Christopher Evans (1931-1979) was a British computer scientist who worked, in the latter part of his career, at the National Physical Laboratory in London. His name often crops up in association with J.G. Ballard, a close friend of the writer, and an acknowledged influence on him. For example, in his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard writes:

Chris Evans drove into my life at the wheel of a Ford Galaxy, a huge American convertible that he soon swapped for a Mini-Cooper, a high-performance car not much bigger than a bullet that travelled at about the same speed. Chris was the first ‘hoodlum scientist’ I had met, and he became the closest friend I have made in my life. In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure. Most scientists in the 1960s, especially at a government laboratory, wore white lab coats over a collar and tie, squinted at the world over the rims of their glasses and were rather stooped and conventional. Glamour played no part in their job description. Chris, by contrast, raced around his laboratory in American sneakers, jeans and a denim shirt open to reveal an Iron Cross on a gold chain, his long black hair and craggy profile giving him a handsomely Byronic air.

Important too was Evans' access to scientific ephemera - technical advertisements and pharmaceutical brochures - that were regularly delivered to Ballard in a brown envelope: 'Every week a huge envelope arrived, packed with handouts, brochures, research papers and annual reports from university labs and psychiatric institutions, a cornucopia of fascinating material'. Ballard found inspiration in such material, and referred to it as 'invisible literature', a subject I've written about before on the blog.

However, Evans was also an author in his own right, as well as a successful popular science TV presenter. His book, Micro: The Impact of the Computer Revolution, was turned into the TV series The Mighty Micro, and screened in 1979 shortly after Evans' death.

Here I'd like to briefly re-visit his two fictional anthologies Mind at Bay (1969) and the sequel Mind in Chains (1970), which included short stories by Ballard, M.R. James, John Sladek, Alex Hamilton, May Sinclair and Brian Aldiss. The blurb of the former reads:

In those dim and twisting corridors of the mind, unknown terrors sleep uneasily, needing only the scent of fear to bring them to howling wakefulness. How sure can you be, after all, of your foothold on the perilous tightrope over the dizzying abyss of madness?

Evans was fascinated by the idea of interaction between human mental processes and those of computers and artificial intelligence systems. He was also interested in the ways in which human experiences and expectations could be confounded by SF and horror stories. In the foreword to Mind at Bay, he wrote, 'presumably the world of the interior - and not just the sparking of neurones, or the microbiology of memory - is for all practical purposes limitless, and I think there is little doubt that it is to date poorly mapped'. In a similar vein, in Mind in Chains, he observed, 'adventures of this kind [horror stories] are basically "pleasurable" in an outré and slightly anomalous way - the more so when they are entered into willingly and with the implicit assumption that they can be controlled or terminated at any stage of the game'.

Evans was attentive to the relationship between art and science and the extent to which these realms might productively unsettle one another to generate new insights. Just as Ballard was fascinated by the scientific fictions of medical catalogues and technical manuals, so Evans recognised the importance of literature as a window into 'the phantoms that inhabit our minds'.

Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book - Online Exhibition for 2017

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelmscott Press)

Continuing in the vein of my recent utopia post, next year will see the launch of a new digital exhibition for the University of Leeds Library's Special Collections - Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book.

The centrepiece of the exhibition comprises two significant copies of Thomas More's Utopia, held in Special Collections. The first is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben. The second is an 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image right).

The theme of utopia will be explored through its dialogue with More’s text, addressed directly by Morris in the foreword to the Kelmscott Press edition, and by drawing attention to the production methods and collection histories of both.

For example, the re-printing of Utopia by the Kelmscott Press reflects Morris’s interest in the book as a work of art and his belief in the transformative role of art and culture in social life. In the short essay, ‘The Ideal Book’, he wrote:

The picture-book is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to man's life, but it gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive.

Update: the exhibition was launched in 2018 and is now hosted on the Leeds University Library website.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: The Adventures of Spaceship Hawkwind, starring Robert Calvert and Michael Moorcock

Formed in late-1960s London, Hawkwind were the pioneers of a strand of Progressive Rock known as ‘Space Rock,’ incorporating cosmic themes and musical experimentation in a style which assimilated “repetitive hypnotic beats and electronic/ambient soundscapes.” Their shifting line-up was augmented by the addition of South African-born poet and writer Robert Calvert, who had been involved with street theatre and underground magazines, and occasionally by the English author and editor Michael Moorcock; both shared the same counter-cultural aspirations and background in the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill area as the band, and brought literary and particularly science-fictional inspiration to Hawkwind’s sound.

From their first (and only) hit, 1971’s ‘Silver machine’, with lyrics by Calvert, and on the subsequent album In Search of Space, Hawkwind produced otherworldly music and explored science fiction themes, creating the template for a series of ground-breaking albums during the 1970s. In Search of Space and the follow-up album, Doremi Fasol Latido, introduced the ‘Starfarer’ concept, “a loose story line involving the adventures of Spaceship Hawkwind and its eventual crash-landing on Earth.” Calvert functioned as the band’s ‘resident poet,’ giving spoken-word recitals during concerts, composing lyrics and appearing as lead vocalist on record. Favourites on the UK’s then-flourishing free festival circuit, Hawkwind presented an on-stage spectacular with dancers and lightshow to accompany their live performances – captured on 1973’s Space Ritual, regarded as “the ultimate space rock album.” Lavishly packaged, the artwork was by regular associate, graphic artist Barney Bubbles, who also wrote a short sci-fi story of Spaceship Hawkwind for the performance programme, building on their existing overall Starfarer concept of the band travelling through time and space. Calvert’s manic-depressive condition and the demands of touring took their toll, and he drifted in and out of the line-up, his role on stage and as lyricist intermittently filled by his friend Michael Moorcock as a self-confessed “understudy,” who contributed ‘The Black Corridor’ (adapted from his own 1969 novel) and ‘Sonic Attack’ to Space Ritual.

A prolific author and, from 1964, editor of the magazine New Worlds – where he had published some of Calvert’s poetry – Moorcock found acclaim with the Cornelius Quartet of novels, following the weird and wonderful adventures of central character, Jerry Cornelius, a psychedelic harlequin-secret agent, an anti-hero of the times, picking his way through the debris of ‘swinging London’ and all points beyond. The first of the novels, 1968’s The Final Programme, was filmed in 1973 (though the result was much to the author’s disapproval); Mick Jagger was reputedly approached to play the lead, only to decline the Cornelius role as ‘too freaky.’ The Jagger connection was not coincidental – amongst other endeavours, Cornelius fronts a pop group known as the Deep Fix, a name Moorcock used in turn for his own musical project when he came to record the 1975 Concept Album The New Worlds Fair. In the same year he contributed lyrics to, and was credited as the originator of, Hawkwind’s album Warrior on the Edge of Time – based on his concept of the Eternal Champion, a recurring character found in different guises throughout his work, including Jerry Cornelius. The connection between author and group was further cemented by a series of dubious genre novels attributed to Moorcock and Michael Butterworth (though primarily the work of the latter, Moorcock’s name guaranteed respectable sales), beginning with Time of the Hawklords in 1976, featuring the band as protagonists in a series of sci-fi-inspired adventures.

Once Robert Calvert took the helm on a more permanent basis as lead singer and songwriter in 1976, he oversaw a shift in Hawkwind’s conceptual concerns. Their later-70s output focused more on dystopian and futuristic themes, closer in spirit to the contemporary work of J. G. Ballard than the fantasy territory they had previously explored, in keeping with Calvert’s experimental solo albums. This phase began with Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music (referencing the classic magazines of early science fiction), continued with 1977’s acclaimed Quark Strangeness and Charm and culminated in their final album of the decade, PXR-5, the last to feature Calvert, and released after his departure from the band. Calvert and Moorcock (whose versatility saw him expertly turn his hand to any style within – and occasionally outside – the sci-fi genre) had similar preoccupations, and while Calvert was a captivating, at times eccentric and flamboyant front-man, the pair’s work is complementary. After Calvert left to pursue his own projects, Moorcock continued to perform with Hawkwind on a regular basis and worked with them throughout the 1980s, notably on the albums Sonic Attack and Chronicle of the Black Sword, “all but one of whose songs are based on his Elric saga (the other, ‘Needle Gun’ is about Jerry Cornelius).”

Whilst Robert Calvert sadly died in 1988, Michael Moorcock remains a celebrated and successful author; a variety of splinter groups featuring original or one-time members of Hawkwind (including founders Dave Brock and Nik Turner) continue to tour the UK and world-wide, under a number of related band names. In their various incarnations they are recognised as innovators and prime exponents of a distinctive and enduring style, an influential and widely-respected group whose admirers include such diverse musical figures as Jello Biafra, Julian Cope, John Lydon and Henry Rollins.

A Dream of a Low Carbon Future: New Graphic Novel for 2016

View of York's streets in 2150

In 2013, I wrote a post about the graphic novel project 'Dreams of a Low Carbon Future', coordinated by James McKay, a comic artist and manager of the doctoral training centre for low carbon technologies at the University of Leeds. The launch of the novel was accompanied by an exhibition at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, featuring selected items from Leeds University Library's Science Fiction Collection in Special Collections. Following the success of the first novel, James is now working on a second novel, to be launched at the Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival on the 5-6 November 2016.

Rather than multiple visions, this second novel focuses on one dream of a low carbon future, viewed through the eyes of a young girl in the year 2150. The story unfolds in the form of a history lesson, which goes through the changes to the environment that have taken place in the last 100 or so years, particularly in the northern region of England. For example, the caption for one frame (see above) reads:

Lazing in the sun, the port of York straddles the estuary of the River Ouse where it opens out into the saltmarshes of the Bay of York. Once Caer Ebrauc to the Celts, Eboracum to the Romans, Eoforwik to the Saxons, Jorvik to the Vikings, and finally York, its days are numbered, with scientists predicting it will be fully under water within a century. Already, although a thriving port with floating leisure complexes, large numbers of residents have had to evacuate, to be replaced by Da Hai You Min (Sea King) settlers in kychys (floating communities), gaining a living in the ocean of reeds that line the bay.

The inevitable submersion of York under water (by 2250) is not portrayed negatively here. James's thinking is that our current challenge is to attempt to imagine environmental change positively, in contrast to the dystopian tropes that pervade disaster movies.

While coming up with solutions to the environmental problems humanity faces is no easy task, the novel explores such possibilities, drawing from the contributions of school children, students, sustainability researchers and professional artists. The emphasis is primarily on low-carbon technologies but also on changes to the way people live, and is less a plan or roadmap to the future than an imaginative response to future eventualities. Difficult as it is to think of ourselves living and being otherwise, the project shows how stories and SF narratives can help us to try. 

J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow Book

Following on from the 2014 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time' conference, a new edited volume of essays, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, has been published by Brill. The publisher recently shared an editor interview on their Facebook page, reproduced below:

An interview with Richard Brown, Elizabeth Stainforth and Christopher Duffy, editors of Dialogue 22, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, who answer questions about the volume they recently collected and edited for the Dialogue Series.

1. Describe your interest in J.G. Ballard’s life and art. How did you come to study his writings?

Richard Brown: Personally speaking, I’ve been a fan since I was studying and working in London in the 70s and 80s. It was the experimental Atrocity Exhibition that first excited me. Coincidentally my father-in-law worked in Road Safety which lent an unusual perspective to my early readings of Crash! As a critic of postmodern and millennial literatures I came back to his work in a big way as it matured in new directions around the turn of the century.

Elizabeth Stainforth: I first encountered Ballard’s work as a reader of science fiction and, following on from that, I did my BA dissertation on the The Atrocity Exhibition. Later, I became interested in Ballard’s collaborations with Eduardo Paolozzi in Ambit, which led to an exhibition and essay for the Henry Moore Institute in 2011.

Christopher Duffy: I’ve been a long-time fan, beginning with a teenage enthusiasm for science fiction that steadily matured into an interest in experimental and postmodern literature. Given Ballard’s widespread influence in contemporary British culture – including films, music, and visual art – it seems like he has been a constant presence in many areas during my academic development. Fascinated by textual representations of space, I finally decided to make him the subject of my PhD thesis.

2. Was there a method involved in the selection of essay-chapters for the volume? What were the selection criteria for the work?

As we explain in the Introduction the volume partly emerged from a conference we ran in the University of Leeds on May 4th 2014. Ballardian expert David Pringle had once been a student at Leeds and enthusiasm for his work across the Humanities has grown strongly since those days and entered the curriculum in ways that would have been hard to anticipate back then, partly as a result of the rise of Postmodernist cultural theory and partly, no doubt also, as a result of the successful film adaptations of his work. Contributors to that conference provided the core of the volume. Gradually the Landscapes theme emerged as the focus of a volume and we selected essays and developed them through the editorial process towards various aspects of that theme.

3. How would you describe the current field of Ballard scholarship and criticism, and your volume’s relationship to it?

We chose the Landscapes of Tomorrow theme to highlight significant aspects of emerging research in physical, social, cultural, digital spaces and selected or encouraged development of essays in the light of that theme. One of the great things about Ballard’s work that we hope the volume takes forward is the wide range of academic disciplines that are beginning to register its importance centrally in what they do. Much great work on Ballard has begun to appear and we hope our volume will take this further and with an international dimension for example for North America and for China, areas where Ballard’s work has clear relevance but is not yet fully recognised.

4. How did Fay Ballard’s work come to be included in the volume, and on the book’s cover?

Fay Ballard was brilliant from the start, picking up on news of the conference and contributing fully, though really busy at the time with the exhibition of her own drawings House Clearance, based on found objects from her father’s house following his death in 2009. She was fantastically generous in her enthusiasm for our project and in letting us use a detail from one of her “Memory Box” works, which became our cover image. Her sister Bea was also terrific in her support for our project.

5. What will your next Ballard-related projects be?

Now that Landscapes is out we are having a small launch event together in Leeds and lots of other Ballard related projects are taking place. Chris did a lecture for Liverpool John Moore’s University around the launch of the film of High-Rise, Liz’s invisible library collaboration with Mike Bonsall is ongoing (http://fentonville.co.uk/invisible-library/), Richard is appearing in Rick McGrath’s Deep Ends 2016 and soon speaking at Thomas Knowles’s day workshop on Ballard and the Natural World at Birmingham City University.

About the editors:

Richard H. Brown, Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds, has published widely on the works of James Joyce, among others, and teaches courses in modern, contemporary and millennial literatures.

Liz Stainforth is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Leeds, where she is conducting research on digital culture and memory.

Christopher Duffy earned his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds; his doctoral dissertation was on the writings of J.G. Ballard.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: A Brief Survey of the Seventies, Part Two

II. The Concept Album

The ambitious scope of Rock – as opposed to disposable, chart-friendly Pop – grew in the later sixties from its commercially-driven origins and gradually became the province of Serious Artists, many of whom turned to works inspired by, or adapted, from the rich field of science fiction literature. Accordingly by the early seventies, the album, rather than the single, was firmly established as the ideal vehicle for such explorations. These musicians were often keen to promote the source of their conceptual material, drawing on classic pioneering works by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and the later speculations of Isaac Asimov amongst others, whilst George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remained a staple across musical genres. Thus was born the science fiction Concept Album.

A notable example of literary inspiration is found in Rush’s 2112 – one side of this 1976 album details an anonymous protagonist’s struggle against the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, guardians of a totalitarian regime suppressing individual thought in the interests of a “Brotherhood of Man” with the aid of their “great computers.” Located in “the bleakness of Megadon,” one of the planets of the Solar Federation, this epic is by the band’s own admission indebted to Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, and continues to excite debate about its true meaning.

Of the direct adaptations and interpretations of science fiction works, Rick Wakeman’s undertaking of a musical rendering of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; was one of the more ambitious. No stranger to the grandiose gesture (this 1974 album was sandwiched by his historical epics The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Round Table), Wakeman partly self-financed the project, enlisting cult actor David Hemmings (star of Blow-up and Profondo Rosso) as narrator. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Choir, in its combination of what Rolling Stone described as “pageantry and pretentiousness,” it epitomises a strand of seventies progressive rock which teetered on the edge of bombast and lays itself open to ridicule. Wakeman later revisited the project on its twenty-fifth anniversary in Return to the Centre of the Earth, this time narrated by Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame. The latter effort followed his own idiosyncratic take on Nineteen Eighty-Four as concept album, with lyrics contributed by Tim Rice.

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, as one of modern science fiction’s seminal texts, had already proven influential in a series of re-interpretations, notably the 1938 radio play adapted by Orson Welles, which reputedly convinced a substantial number of American listeners that the Martians really had landed. Composer Jeff Wayne went one better than Rick Wakeman, though, by securing the services of Richard Burton as Narrator, and then-popular artists Julie Covington, David Essex, Justin Hayward and Phil Lynott to record individual songs for his double-album musical interpretation. Its success was immediate, and enduring. Prescient as he was, even Wells surely couldn’t have envisaged The War of the Worlds continuing to be staged in the twenty-first century, in an extravagant theatrical production with a hologram of Burton narrating from beyond the grave...

Following a debut album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, re-telling selected works of Edgar Allen Poe, in 1977 the Alan Parsons Project chose to tackle Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Song-writer Eric Woolfson spoke to Asimov, and found him to be “extremely friendly and enthusiastic about the idea.” Intending to explore the inter-woven narrative of the nine stories in detail, the band discovered that the rights had already been sold for film/television production (although nothing materialised until a 2004 film only loosely connected to Asimov’s originals). With the title’s comma also removed for legal reasons, I Robot the album instead covered more generic themes of man’s tendency to act in robotic fashion “as well as the dangers of uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence.” Its cover depicts the band at Charles De Gaulle Airport, then representing the cutting-edge of futuristic architecture, overlaid with a painted ‘robotic brain.’ Their 1982 album, Eye in the Sky, whilst a title shared with an early Philip K. Dick novel, was another in the long line of albums inspired by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The seventies saw the heyday of the Concept Album; by the end of the decade, changing tastes and ever-fickle fashion decreed that the lofty ambition to marry art forms via the long-playing record was not only folly, but terminally uncool (perhaps especially so if it incorporated science fiction). The idea of literary inspiration was condemned as pretentious in an era when virtuouso musicianship could be safely scorned. Names such as Rick Wakeman and the Alan Parsons Project became bywords for the outmoded pomposity of progressive rock (while Jeff Wayne simply slipped into obscurity). Many years would pass before the first signs of cautious critical re-appraisal - if not yet full rehabilitation - of the Concept Album could be detected.