tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21152588282686047462024-03-15T08:35:13.491+00:00Brush on Drum<i>(mostly)</i>
serious writing
<i>(mostly)</i>
about music and literature
<i>(entirely)</i>
by Philip WardPhilip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-76035693147063126402024-01-12T14:20:00.005+00:002024-01-15T09:56:53.376+00:00Sondheim and Nyro: Putting It Together<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFLd_zey25Jyx8JVwU-ccFV6GaUNs2rJkPI84h9RauNus_ElvDXDdO1qot63GhGUOeDjsFzdEKuwzJQ-lQm6piZyl83uCQAps-0vrV3s8gb026lXBGXXfVhsgDslE1abumc81jCb_J8Gb3li8UgAItr2LL4CiYtLfKkBGDZTaujzBRaiXHQZrJz4gkaA/s1024/DD2F5837-584D-4056-8BEE-50B937B524B3.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="676" data-original-width="1024" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFLd_zey25Jyx8JVwU-ccFV6GaUNs2rJkPI84h9RauNus_ElvDXDdO1qot63GhGUOeDjsFzdEKuwzJQ-lQm6piZyl83uCQAps-0vrV3s8gb026lXBGXXfVhsgDslE1abumc81jCb_J8Gb3li8UgAItr2LL4CiYtLfKkBGDZTaujzBRaiXHQZrJz4gkaA/s320/DD2F5837-584D-4056-8BEE-50B937B524B3.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Photo by Stephen Paley)</i></div></i><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Jamie Bernstein (b. 1952) is Leonard Bernstein’s eldest daughter. Nowadays she describes herself as an “author, narrator and filmmaker” but she started out with ambitions to be a singer-songwriter. It was an arduous choice for someone whose father was such a towering presence in American music. But Leonard was famously open to musical genres beyond the classical (even if the ‘rock’ elements he introduced into his 1971 <i>Mass</i> sound distinctly embarrassing now), so her path wasn’t the route of teenage rebellion that it might have been for others. More surprising is another ally she found in the older generation:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">…I was so bossy, so excitable and loud. Still, I had my fans. Steve Sondheim was, incredibly, one of them. We obsessed together over the genius of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. I learned so much about songwriting by listening to Steve describing what made Nyro’s songs so terrific: how she’d tweak a phrase so it was different the second time it came around; or how, in the closing section, just when you thought nothing new was going to happen, she’d suddenly shift to a new melody in a new key, and make you gasp as if you’d opened the door onto a bright windy day.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(This is from her 2018 memoir <i>Famous Father Girl</i>. She follows up with an anecdote about attending a recording session for Nyro’s <i>New York Tendaberry </i>album, which implies that we’re in autumn 1969 here, when Jamie was seventeen.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) and Laura Nyro (1947-1997) are two of my favourite American musical creators. They worked in very different genres, but I was always on the look-out for any connections between them. How satisfying that would be! And how frustratingly contradictory the evidence is when you put it together. I made a first attempt in my <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Laura-Nyro-Track-Every-Album/dp/1789521823" target="_blank">book</a> on Laura Nyro, but here is a fuller picture…<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">These two musical giants only met on one occasion, in 1969, captured in memorable photos by Stephen Paley, a friend of Sondheim’s. Paley had arranged for Nyro to meet soul-gospel singer Lorraine Ellison. Nyro joined Paley while he photographed Ellison for an album cover in the garden of Sondheim’s Manhattan home. Speaking years later to Michele Kort for her Nyro biography, Paley looked back on that afternoon as “a big love fest”; Sondheim, as he recalls, admired ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, one of Nyro’s best-known songs, particularly the “surry on down” part. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">William Kloman’s profile of Nyro in the <i>New York Times</i> (6 October 1968) had this line about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’: “Stephen Sondheim says the song’s complexity, economy and spontaneity sum up for him what music is all about.” (This seems to be a reported remark; it is not in quotation marks in the original article.) “A genius, pure and simple, a genius,” Sondheim called her in an interview with the <i>Boston Globe</i> on 8 March 1970. Likewise, speaking to the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> on 10 October 1971, he opined: “Most rock I find boring: simple in the wrong way – meaning dull. I’ve enjoyed a lot of the Beatles’ stuff and some really brilliant things by Laura Nyro.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Sheila Weller’s study of Laura’s female songwriter contemporaries, <i>Girls Like Us</i>, includes another Sondheim quote about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ (unsourced, alas): “In economy, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece.” In 2015 I had an opportunity to ask the great man about Nyro: <o:p></o:p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(ME) I’d like to ask you, please, about Laura Nyro, whom I believe you knew? You were once quoted as saying that her song ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ is a “masterpiece”. What do you think is so special about her music? And what are your memories of her as a person?</p></blockquote><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(SONDHEIM) I never said any such thing. “Masterpiece” is a word I use very rarely. Where did you read that? As for knowing her, it was a very slight acquaintance: one afternoon and one dinner.</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">I detected a retreat from the enthusiasm he’d expressed 45 years earlier. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">On 2 May 1971 Sondheim was a guest speaker at the 92<sup>nd</sup> Street Y in New York. His subject was ‘Lyrics and Lyricists’. After a rambling introduction by Lehman Engel, he began his talk by saying: “I mean, I would like to talk for two hours on Laura Nyro, but I can’t. This is all about theatre lyrics” (around 8m55s on the <a href="https://www.92ny.org/archives/lyrics-and-lyricists-stephen-sondheim-1971" target="_blank">archived recording</a>). What did he mean by this? That he <i>could</i> talk for two hours about her lyrics, and he’d like to, but his brief was to talk about theatre lyrics? Or that he wishes he was competent to talk about Nyro’s lyrics, but his specialism was theatre lyrics. Some Nyro fans like to think he meant the first; I’m strongly inclined to the second. David Benedict, who is working on a new biography of Sondheim, concurred with my opinion. This is from an email to me in March 2019:<o:p></o:p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">I think you’re right about your interpretation of Sondheim’s remark at the 92nd Street Y as being closer to: “I’d like to be someone who could talk to you for two hours about Laura Nyro's lyrics, but that’s not my genre, and I can only talk about what I know about.” </p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"></p><blockquote>A year or so ago I asked him about Nyro but he said it was not really his field of interest. Obviously, he has always been aware of music that surrounded him, like the singer-songwriter movement of the 1960 and ‘70s, but he was and always has been a theatre writer. He’s really not interested in songs disconnected from drama. He listens to orchestral/classical music on a daily basis – the more arcane, the better since his knowledge of the standard classical repertoire is genuinely encyclopaedic – but next to no contemporary ‘pop’ (for want of a better term) music, unless occasionally persuaded by others.</blockquote><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In 2010-11 Sondheim published his collected lyrics in two volumes, with annotations and many fascinating sidelines on aspects of his craft and sharp observations on fellow practitioners of musical theatre. Sondheim-worshippers jokily refer to these volumes, the closest he came to writing an autobiography, as the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments. In neither testament does he express an opinion about Nyro, or indeed any other figure from rock or pop music. (A passing reference to The Beatles is actually in the context of music on film, where he praises Richard Lester’s editing skills on <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i>; a reference to Elvis Presley concerns the “faintly ridiculous” plots of his movies.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In an <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Instead-Critic-Essays-Written-Unwritten/dp/1739632206/" target="_blank">essay</a> I published on ‘Sondheim at 90’ I rationalised his preferences as follows:<o:p></o:p></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Sondheim must be the only significant figure still active in musical theatre to have come of age before the rock’n’roll revolution. His musical sensibilities were formed in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. It was an age of professional songwriters and of performers beholden to them. In later decades these separate roles would fuse: artists, generally unversed in musical staff notation, would originate, record and perform their own material, often working it up in the studio (as The Beatles did after their retreat from public performance in 1966). These developments largely passed Sondheim by. Pop or rock has only ever featured in a ‘diegetic’ sense in his shows. For example, in ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ (from <i>Assassins</i>, 1990), he creates a soppy Carpenters-like ballad to characterize ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, would-be assassin of President Ford, because <i>that’s the sort of music she would have listened to</i>. <o:p></o:p></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The elderly titan may have downplayed his enthusiasm in retrospect but it’s clear that the young Sondheim responded to the inherent theatricality and inventiveness in Nyro’s work. It always seemed a surprising departure from his habitual line of interest – albeit a welcome one. In old age he seems to have erased all this from memory. I’m glad if we can set the record straight and put these two figures, Sondheim and Nyro, back together. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><b>Sources<o:p></o:p></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Jamie Bernstein, <i>Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein</i> (2018)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Michele Kort, <i>Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro</i> (2002)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Stephen Sondheim, <i>Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics 1954-1981</i>… (2010) and <i>Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics 1981-2011</i>… (2011)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Philip Ward, <i>On Track…Laura Nyro: Every Album, Every Song</i> (2022)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Sheila Weller, <i>Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation </i>(2008)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘Sondheim at 90’ in Philip Ward, <i>Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten</i> (2022)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(with thanks to Stephen J Grilli for the Bernstein reference)<o:p></o:p></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-83701127497771404902023-11-30T12:04:00.001+00:002023-11-30T12:19:11.416+00:00Yes<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeYdrWW7ZaxTLhvDV97EHJf8imgIO02R8urh563IsN_yTczBeZcsPzwxUMGVH1jZ7Bo3mne0KOeyrYKiLGgvAPt25mFZydGxMc5RjKGcCS3yPH-t5S6JWgpINDPzZokdeT_4WjziW_W7agPUCpJ8Nrisw-b1SKl8g9Rv8_Pj2rF0QBGDjvE96jMUzxkQ/s1600/s-l1600.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeYdrWW7ZaxTLhvDV97EHJf8imgIO02R8urh563IsN_yTczBeZcsPzwxUMGVH1jZ7Bo3mne0KOeyrYKiLGgvAPt25mFZydGxMc5RjKGcCS3yPH-t5S6JWgpINDPzZokdeT_4WjziW_W7agPUCpJ8Nrisw-b1SKl8g9Rv8_Pj2rF0QBGDjvE96jMUzxkQ/s320/s-l1600.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />“Progressive music” we used to call it. There was even a society devoted to the genre at school. Nowadays I see it more often referred to as “prog rock”. “Pompous”, “overblown”, “pretentious” are the adjectives of choice. The standard narrative has it that such ego-fuelled noodling was killed off by the hawking and spitting punks of the late 1970s, just as the prog rockers had seen off the simpering Flower Power of the ‘60s. Revolutions are rarely so cut-and-dried, however. Returning in middle age to King Crimson, Genesis, Yes – the loves of my youth – I find continuity across the decades. As a pre-teen my first enthusiasm was Simon & Garfunkel. How delicious to read in biographies of Yes that what brought founder members Jon Anderson and Chris Squire together in 1968 and inspired the close harmonies that would be so characteristic of the band’s vocals was a love of that same clean-cut New York duo! (This found clearest expression in an extraordinary ten-minute reimagining of Paul Simon’s ‘America’, a bonus track on the <i>Fragile</i> CD.)<o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i>The Yes Album</i>, released in February 1971, was my entry point. Perhaps not Yes’s <i>greatest</i> album. I’d award that honour to 1972’s <i>Close To The Edge</i>. With the elephantine three-disc set that was <i>Tales From Topographic Oceans</i> (1973) they began to lose the plot. A transitional album, then. Their two previous LPs had included cover versions. Now they wrote all their own material and presented it with new-won confidence. This was the age of “getting it together in the country”, so in the autumn of 1970 the band chilled out at a farm in North Devon to develop their ideas before moving to Advision Studios in London, where they worked with trusted engineer-producer Eddie Offord. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The line-up was near perfect by this point, underpinned by a fabulous rhythm section: Bill Bruford’s resourceful drumming locked in with Chris Squire’s propulsive bass. In Steve Howe they’d now acquired a hugely inventive guitarist, versatile across a range of styles. Whether playing his Gibson semi-acoustic or his Martin acoustic, Howe never puts a finger wrong. As someone struggling to master a few chords myself, I was fascinated by ‘Clap’, his solo guitar contribution to the album. Recorded live at the Lyceum Theatre, London, this Chet Atkins-influenced number sits a little askew from the prog-rocking on either side of it, but like his relaxed, jazzy solo in ‘Perpetual Change’ it showcases what he – and the band – were now capable of. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Tony Kaye is underestimated as a keyboard player and his Hammond organ is prominent throughout. He was no lover of the newly fashionable synthesiser. By the time of the next album he’d left, replaced by Rick Wakeman, the caped crusader who would happily play anything with a keyboard – usually three or four of the things at the same time. (Wakeman, I felt, was always better in the band than out of it. His later solo projects, like <i>The Six Wives Of Henry VIII</i>, prioritised fluency and virtuosity for the sheer hell of it.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The frontman, though, in every sense, was vocalist and main lyricist Jon Anderson. Anderson’s enunciation was unusually good for a rock singer, and his purity of tone and distinctive Accrington accent set him apart. (In a video from the 1990s he actually drops into a parody at one point of George Formby, Lancashire’s foremost ukulele-botherer!) So you <i>heard</i> the lyrics on a Yes album, although they weren’t printed on the sleeve or a separate lyrics sheet. I heard them, but I’m still not sure if I <i>got</i> them. On first exposure to ‘Yours Is No Disgrace’, I remember my teenage self thinking, “your <i>what</i> is no disgrace?” Years later I read in the burgeoning literature on the band that the song is “about the Vietnam War”, its lyrics contrasting the suffering of the soldiers in Indo-China with people partying in Las Vegas. I suppose the lines “<i>Battleships confide in me</i>” and “<i>mutilated</i> <i>armies gather near</i>” were a clue. Likewise, keen ears attuned to ‘I’ve Seen All Good People’, the opening track on Side Two, have spotted, about three minutes into the track and buried deep in the mix, a quote from John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Do lyrics matter in this sort of music? These boys were not singer-songwriters in autobiographical vein, despite their early reverence for Paul Simon. Abstract word-painting, sci-fi metaphor, Humpty-Dumpty invitations to polysemy – these seemed, rather, to be their currency. Anderson was very into enlightenment and the search for God: I registered that. It was obvious enough on the ‘Life Seeker’ section of <i>The Yes Album</i>, and I knew he invoked Hermann Hesse on <i>Close to the Edge</i> and <i>Autobiography of a Yogi</i> by Paramahansa Yogananda on <i>Topographic Oceans</i>. But “<i>about</i> the Vietnam War”? Not in the sense that ‘We Shall Overcome’ is “about” the civil rights struggle, surely? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Perhaps, because of Yes’s ambitions to be taken seriously, I imagined they aspired to the condition of “absolute” music. After all, what is a Beethoven string quartet “about”? We “progressive music” fans thought we were a cut above because we knew Brahms and Liszt weren’t just Cockney rhyming slang. A schoolfriend with more classical training and analytic skills than I could muster pointed me to the subtle use of “polymetre” in ‘Perpetual Change’, the album’s final track, where a riff in one time signature is superimposed over a bass pattern in other metres. Clever. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The<span style="font-size: 16px;"> record isn’t without blemish. The curiously titled ‘Würm’, which builds repetitively over a three-chord vamp, is a bit tedious. The use of stereo panning now seems gimmicky. Yet, for an album recorded over fifty years ago, it still sounds fresh and creative. I’m not embarrassed to revisit my younger self when I listen to it anew.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span>[First published in <i>RnR</i> magazine].</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /><br /></span><span face="-webkit-standard"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span face="-webkit-standard"></span></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-45881407808611981332023-11-30T11:45:00.002+00:002023-12-01T14:27:33.035+00:00Ted Hughes and Shakespeare<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz6j_rHls328WCLCA-DvOQAb7MZH6WyB-qHL7E3KykYuZxeIfG-XdwlFdlvDSQ6vPSEdT1-TFEWztrq15SCbngFm5ACR4LGlc0AAydZEYMihsKJiCTLy7M_P9vwRchJKa4W4InqMoUByGXiXnhOcUz_eKBU-Y5fP_lty7Zsg1QO7RV-unDj-fTTr36Rg/s1599/s-l1600.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1599" data-original-width="1066" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz6j_rHls328WCLCA-DvOQAb7MZH6WyB-qHL7E3KykYuZxeIfG-XdwlFdlvDSQ6vPSEdT1-TFEWztrq15SCbngFm5ACR4LGlc0AAydZEYMihsKJiCTLy7M_P9vwRchJKa4W4InqMoUByGXiXnhOcUz_eKBU-Y5fP_lty7Zsg1QO7RV-unDj-fTTr36Rg/s320/s-l1600.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">In a little humoresque on Shakespeare in my volume <i>Instead of a Critic</i>, I made passing reference to Ted Hughes’s monumental study <i>Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being</i>. It wasn’t a flattering reference and I omitted to mention that I never made it past the ‘Introduction’. However, when a friendly reader asked me what I thought of the tome, it prompted me to take Hughes’s doorstop of a book off the shelf and look at it again. I still get no further than page 43. But I admire Hughes as a poet, so he must be saying something worth hearing. No?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The book certainly divided opinion when first published in 1992. ‘Exit, pursued by a boar’ was the <i>Observer</i>’s headline above Anthony Burgess’s mystified review. The <i>Independent</i> declared the book to be ‘egregious twaddle’. For John Carey of the <i>Sunday Times</i> it was ‘appalling nonsense… tedious mythical mumbo-jumbo’. But it found supporters – rather fewer of them – in Tom Paulin, Michael Hoffman and Marina Warner.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The idea goes something like this. Shakespeare’s work is bound together as an organic unity by a single mythic-symbolic structure which Hughes calls the ‘Tragic Myth’. Shakespeare’s early poems <i>Venus and Adonis</i> and <i>The Rape of Lucrece</i> embody two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These themes are then followed through in the subsequent plays and in some way correspond to the conflict in Elizabethan society between the Old Religion, Catholicism, and the emergent challenge of Protestantism, especially in its most extreme – and theatre-hostile form – Puritanism. By tapping into the energy of these myths Shakespeare was able to revivify his imagination (and, we might add – though Hughes doesn’t – by uncovering this formula Hughes was able to reconcile himself to the suicides of two women in his life, Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevil.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">At once I see a couple of approaches that on the face of it are contradictory. One is Hughes’s experience of practical theatre work with Peter Brook and Donya Feuer. With Brook he worked as an ‘ideas man’, first at the National Theatre, later at the Centre for Theatre Research in Paris, providing suggestive dramatic situation for the actors to explore. Feuer’s notion, inspired by Hughes, was to shuffle extracts from the plays into what they called a <i>perpetuum mobile</i> performance, one passage merging into another to bring out their commonality: the evolution of one of the Myth’s figures from play to play. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The other approach, its opposite, is an armchair reading of the Collected Works as plays for the page, not the stage – what the Germans would call ‘<i>Lesedramen</i>’– excerpting them and mingling lyric poems with dramatic speeches. This approach has its origins in Hughes’s <i>Selection of Shakespeare’s Verse</i>, which was first published twenty years earlier.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">What unites the approaches is a habit of selective quotation: ripping from context, treating Shakespeare as a ‘single titanic work, like an Indian epic’ (p43). The justification lies in the epigraph from Yeats – ‘the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought’. Hughes tell us he’s in search of Shakespeare’s myth, but really he’s in search of his own. Which is acceptable, if he were more honest about it. For those of us who use literature to navigate our lives it’s instructive to watch Hughes, a keen intellect and gifted wordsmith, on the job. Just as a stopped clock will show the right time twice a day, so a totalising vision may occasionally bring particular objects into focus. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So what <i>is</i> this loose baggy monster? Is it literary criticism? If one penetrates that far, there are probably flashes of insight, discussions of individual passages that might illuminate the text in the way a good literary commentary does. But the wise commentator, his contribution complete, has the good grace to withdraw and leave the reader alone with the text. Hughes cannot do that, because nothing is so specific, so local; everything must be subsumed to his overarching theory of the ‘Tragic Equation’.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">If not literary criticism, then what is it? ‘Poetic criticism’? Mythopoeia? The bastard offspring of Robert Graves and C.G. Jung? The response of one creative artist to another? The book is full of fine phrases that might qualify as prose poems: even John Carey, in a scathing review, was taken by a footnote on page 11 about the sow, her ‘elephantine lolling mouth under great ear flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production’. Flicking through later pages, I noticed many a felicitous turn of phrase – the sonnets as ‘the vestibule to the bloody temple of the tragedies’, for example (p64), or Shakespeare’s language as ‘a kind of prodigiously virtuoso pidgin’ (p152). <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Yet I sense dishonesty, subterfuge, the ripple effect of obsession. He deploys the tools of evidence-based scholarship, but craftily.<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] </span>The procedure is to decide what you’re looking for, to ‘look’ for it, and to ‘find’ it. QED. In the opening pages, where the Myth is already established as a given, we are told that Shakespeare ‘strips the myth of all identifiably mythic features and secretes his mechanism within his plot’ (p2). Thus we have a sort of conspiracy theory: it’s there but it’s hidden; reminiscent of the way that anti-Stratfordians (those who deny that the man from Stratford wrote ‘Shakespeare’) claim that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford hid coded messages about authorial identity in the First Folio. Then, finding the characters of Helena in <i>All’s Well That Ends Well</i> and Isabella in <i>Measure for Measure</i> unsatisfactory, Hughes has his explanation: it is because these ‘secularised’ characters are ‘inadequately insulated from their mythic roles’ (p3) – mythic roles that <i>he</i> has assigned to them. QED.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Shakespeare is ideal for such approaches because the work is so polymorphous, so open to interpretation that you can assert what you damn well like. The biographical details are so scant as to undermine a biographical reading of the work: not that that has stopped legions from doing so, probing the identity of the Dark Lady, or positing hidden sources of inspiration as Oscar Wilde did – playfully – in ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (My own capriccio was supposed to be a variation on the latter.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">That said, some context is recoverable. Hughes fails to take account of how the plays were written, at great speed, often collaboratively, mostly reworking existing material (either old plays or stories Shakespeare found in books). They were also responses to contemporary taste – revenge drama, the indoor performance conditions of Jacobean theatre, the availability of stage effects (think of Hermione’s statue coming to life in <i>The Winter’s Tale</i>).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘That’s not how it looked on the ground’ would be my verdict. Hughes views Shakespeare from a great height and with retrospect of the Bard’s entire career before him. Even here his sight is faulty. He assumes an order of the thirty-seven plays starting from <i>All’s Well</i> and leading to the great tragedies (pp98-9). The developmental sequence is dubious. In the ‘Conjectural Chronology’ in the front of the <i>New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare</i> (2010), <i>All’s Well That Ends Well</i> is placed <u>after</u> <i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, <i>Measure for Measure</i> and <i>Othell</i>o, not before it.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">‘The ideal reader would regard my idea as a sort of musical adaptation, a song’, we read on page 43 – this has to be Hughes pitching for my sympathy and urging me to saddle up for the next 474 pages. A <i>Ring</i> cycle projected over thirty-seven nights, not just four! As cookshop owner Maria says to Sportin’ Life in <i>Porgy and Bess</i> when he tries to peddle his happy dust, ‘I fears I mus' <i>de</i>cline.’<o:p></o:p></p><div><br clear="all" /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><a href="applewebdata://9F37D01A-9588-45DE-AE22-CD87F830360D#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a> One consequence of reading history alongside literature as an undergraduate over forty years ago was to sensitise me to the need for ‘evidence’. See the divagation on literary biography in my book <i>Encounters with Michael Arlen </i>(2023).<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm;"><i> </i></p></div></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-65317656320201382162023-02-08T10:45:00.001+00:002023-02-08T10:46:59.622+00:00SoundCloud<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEAjTfApUX4LGvaBTlFoNRdXjsX-Bb9bFep6x8vRKHdRL9xwak4vl5LBct7Vxdw0FrYITm0OZPFQhLZJzmoGpZ2J0HwloKR5LHR1oI6HLFxvibSNAgucRqmow_uUrr5TYJhrjuypEwJj0sIEN7zNSrPRuKvVkzyaUWCmtk0vAJP2F46ni5znrP964/s926/fullsizeoutput_20d.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="926" data-original-width="873" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEAjTfApUX4LGvaBTlFoNRdXjsX-Bb9bFep6x8vRKHdRL9xwak4vl5LBct7Vxdw0FrYITm0OZPFQhLZJzmoGpZ2J0HwloKR5LHR1oI6HLFxvibSNAgucRqmow_uUrr5TYJhrjuypEwJj0sIEN7zNSrPRuKvVkzyaUWCmtk0vAJP2F46ni5znrP964/w378-h400/fullsizeoutput_20d.jpeg" width="378" /></a></div><br />You'll find a few of my compositions up on <a href="https://soundcloud.com/philip-ward-6/tracks" target="_blank">SoundCloud</a>. Be sure to pay a visit and let me know what you think. I've also dabbled in video-making:<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ng_cgcMJ4WA" width="349" youtube-src-id="Ng_cgcMJ4WA"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-72518576189879321032022-08-09T10:30:00.000+01:002022-08-09T10:30:48.226+01:00Nancy Mitford<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LWNciYF1NUK0tS2kbdXJssRIpb-oJrKMLkcNCXDHy9kI2mParVpKo7cXQpLXzeJX5STqFHzQo08LQYSBKXDKsHBaMQrdpvT2ydFS3NsrbjugqDUe8djGzSOp-l4ezhXY2TDQd3wPuZ3W_Qe9IwJYa1z_Oev4sE2oVOP27l1hv9PhLT09dY8TvDI/s2169/fullsizeoutput_13d.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1632" data-original-width="2169" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LWNciYF1NUK0tS2kbdXJssRIpb-oJrKMLkcNCXDHy9kI2mParVpKo7cXQpLXzeJX5STqFHzQo08LQYSBKXDKsHBaMQrdpvT2ydFS3NsrbjugqDUe8djGzSOp-l4ezhXY2TDQd3wPuZ3W_Qe9IwJYa1z_Oev4sE2oVOP27l1hv9PhLT09dY8TvDI/s320/fullsizeoutput_13d.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br />‘I suspect there was a neurotic dichotomy between Nancy’s barbed pen and her warm heart.’ Thus wrote Harold Acton in a memoir of his friend Nancy Mitford. The eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, she didn’t hesitate to apply her barbed pen to satirical purposes, often using her own family as raw material. <p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">It would be instructive to look at Mitford’s comic fictionalisation of three deeply serious episodes in the history of the 1930s to ask how much lies beneath the surface frivolity. Was she actuated primarily by a ‘talent to annoy’ or by an underlying compassion?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">Wigs on the Green</i><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">(1935) satirises the British Union of Fascists in a farcical plot turning on the conflict between ‘Union Jackshirts’ and pacifists in a sleepy English village. Although Mitford toned down some elements before publication, the book offended her sisters Unity and Diana, notorious for their fascist leanings, and she resisted its republication later.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">Pigeon Pie</i><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">, written in the autumn of 1939, presents the ‘phoney war’ as if it were a children’s game in which warring nations must pick teams. By the time of publication in mid-1940, hostilities had begun in earnest and Mitford’s playfulness seemed out of step. In private life she threw herself into the war effort on the home front.</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">In</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">The Pursuit of Love</i><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">(1945) she drew on her own experiences of working in a refugee camp at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her heroine’s laughable incompetence at the tasks required of her mirrors Mitford’s own incapacity in such an unfamiliar situation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">In each example I see a determination to ‘tease’, a childish temptation to shock, a high-spirited disregard for consequences – evidence, certainly, of ‘neurotic dichotomy’ but also of a defensive armour she created to protect a sensibility attuned both to political realities and to individual suffering.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">[My photo, taken in 2017, shows Heywood Hill bookshop, where Nancy Mitford worked during the Second World War – note the blue plaque on the wall.] </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm; text-indent: 36pt;"><o:p></o:p></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-62170880173383248492022-07-22T14:51:00.000+01:002022-07-22T14:51:24.697+01:00Instead of a Critic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU96Uz5_64B1lGV4zA-5Vv6HAKCRIaLRfkQZyyzcIrn_4UeojcMa1nSCSsCxgsKAV6tex5ZlVvO4IZEPMJhdUMwTo_8ySc-v-CiEvTNVwZSqrXZdsbGgpNluOHETFOvE_AB0feTnQ7w7A-HbgfafQqHNcg4s9xoMKDTjzcUGaQNmLl2Y7rEzSznVA/s1545/712HVSQ7Q2L.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1545" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU96Uz5_64B1lGV4zA-5Vv6HAKCRIaLRfkQZyyzcIrn_4UeojcMa1nSCSsCxgsKAV6tex5ZlVvO4IZEPMJhdUMwTo_8ySc-v-CiEvTNVwZSqrXZdsbGgpNluOHETFOvE_AB0feTnQ7w7A-HbgfafQqHNcg4s9xoMKDTjzcUGaQNmLl2Y7rEzSznVA/s320/712HVSQ7Q2L.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><p>This is my new volume of essays. </p><p>From the cover blurb:</p><p><span class="a-text-italic" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic !important; text-indent: 19.85pt;">"Instead of a Critic</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-indent: 19.85pt;"> brings together pieces written over twenty years or so in search of whatever links them. The topics range from Anglo-German cultural relations and the refugee flight from Nazi Europe to myth, pictorial art and the ‘Two Cultures’ question. It touches on performance, whether in cinema, dance, ‘straight’ theatre or the American Musical. Above all, it expresses an enthusiasm for literature and what literature can do."</span></p><p><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; text-indent: 19.85pt;">Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten</i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; text-indent: 19.85pt;"> (Minos Press, 2022).</span></p><p><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ISBN-13</span><span class="a-text-bold" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 700 !important;">: </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">978-1739632205</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Available from</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1739632206/" style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;" target="_blank">Amazon UK</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">,</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1739632206/" style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Amazon US</a><span style="caret-color: rgb(15, 17, 17); color: #0f1111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> and other retailers. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;">Table of </span><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;">Contents:</span></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;">Introduction </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"> </span></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Aldous Huxley: Between Art and Science <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rupert Brooke <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bloomsbury <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rosamond Lehmann <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Katherine Mansfield and Germany <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kafka: The Significance of Clothes <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Franziska zu Reventlow <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rilke and Cézanne <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On Translating Poetry <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Three Poems by Hofmannsthal <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hofmannsthals in Exile <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Egon Wellesz <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Gender of Mr W. S. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nancy Cunard Sees Josephine Baker <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hedy Lamarr <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Louise Brooks <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wedekind in English <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sondheim at 90 <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mitford Connections <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Myth: Its Manufacture and Recovery <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Blood for the Ghosts <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Newton and Supermac <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Two Cultures</span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="text-indent: 19.85pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">About the Author</span></span></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; text-align: left; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><br /></i></p><p class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 19.85pt;"><br /></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-5642117062306774002022-07-19T16:51:00.000+01:002022-07-19T16:51:51.903+01:00Lola Kirke<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz7IPO0Rxh3_Jill8Fdhz7sRvuD8Qzh9grGV39Ycx612TnYBdZMINaQ9uu2aRMARjiEtdNg2j5n5tvPlXbKSWy2fXweA5scmKksKPoFwlF4zAvwRsa2eTvMtScHk2uvcmmZNX0ktsO4TH1CLx4vnadC7bhWE33Jj6ddFMW1NzB09B52pbirr97N30/s3100/fullsizeoutput_1e9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3100" data-original-width="2144" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz7IPO0Rxh3_Jill8Fdhz7sRvuD8Qzh9grGV39Ycx612TnYBdZMINaQ9uu2aRMARjiEtdNg2j5n5tvPlXbKSWy2fXweA5scmKksKPoFwlF4zAvwRsa2eTvMtScHk2uvcmmZNX0ktsO4TH1CLx4vnadC7bhWE33Jj6ddFMW1NzB09B52pbirr97N30/s320/fullsizeoutput_1e9.jpeg" width="221" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Lola Kirke</b> was weathering the perils of touring when I caught up with her on a Zoom call to Seattle. She’d just checked into – and quickly out of – the “world’s scariest hotel” and her original tour manager had gone down with Covid. But she was delighted to be out again post-pandemic and promoting a new album, <i>Lady For Sale</i>, her second release following her 2018 debut, <i>Heart Head West</i>. The sound is alt-Country meets 80s/90s disco and rock. It’s a big production. Locked down with producer Austin Jenkins, she had “nothing to do except obsess over music,” she explains: “We demo’d the shit out of those songs!” Despite some upbeat grooves, “it’s actually kind of a sad album. It’s dealing with a lot of doubt and pain and longing. But the narrative of the record does become triumphant.” “Triumphant” surely describes the video accompanying the lead single, ‘Better Than Any Drug’, which finds Lola cavorting around the house as if drunk on a new love.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Though born to a musical family – her English father, Simon Kirke, was drummer with fabled bands Free and Bad Company – Lola is perhaps better known as an actress than a singer-songwriter, having notched up the lead in hit Amazon series <i>Mozart in the Jungle</i> and several acclaimed movie roles. How does she compare the two activities? “At the level I’m at you make no money as a musician – but it feels a lot more creative.” She gets a buzz from making music videos: “I haven’t felt that way on a film set in a really long time!” And then there’s the thrilling realisation when she hits the stage with a live band that “we’re all making sounds at the same time, and they work!”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Early reference points for her music included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Alice Coltrane, but a recent move to Nashville introduced her to another cultural world. “I was inspired in a different way,” she reflects. She’d always listened to classics like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, but Tanya Tucker emerged as a big influence for her recently, alongside younger discoveries like Miranda Lambert. New genres can require using your vocal capacities in new ways. She tells a scary story about acting a film scene with her sister Jemima (also an actress). The script required her to scream at her sister. She “went for it, but not in a healthful way” and burst a blood vessel on her vocal cord. Specialists advised surgery but Lola was too busy with work at the time. Happily, there was no lasting damage to that already smoky voice. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The title track of the new album, ‘Lady For Sale’, distils a theme she returns to several times in our conversation, the need to sell her work – sell <i>herself</i> – in the marketplace. “I didn’t feel I was being validated. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to connect with others and ultimately that’s not going to be possible unless I really try to sell myself.” She’s on a “roller-coaster of self-worth” at the moment, buoyed up by fans’ compliments, buffeted by online abuse about her appearance. She sounds envious of the simpler world her father grew up in, before Twitter, before Instagram: “I don’t know what it was like to live in a world where you weren’t always interfacing with your own press.” Lola’s solution is to “create, like, another self that you’re OK with sharing with others.” She admires Billie Eilish in this regard: “she’s still selling, but there’s something really potent about what she’s selling.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Lola Kirke plays London's Moth Club on September 13th. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">(First published in <i>RnR</i> magazine.)<o:p></o:p></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-67726337891333557022022-06-12T17:07:00.000+01:002022-06-12T17:07:57.322+01:00New book!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41YBVEH6oBL._SX350_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="352" height="499" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41YBVEH6oBL._SX350_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg" width="352" /></a></div><p><br />UK publication date 26 May 2022.</p><p>US publication date 29 July 2022.</p><p>Laura Nyro (1947-1997) was one of the most significant figures to emerge from the singer-songwriter boom of the 1960s. She first came to attention when her songs were hits for Barbra Streisand, The Fifth Dimension, Peter, Paul and Mary, and others. But it was on her own recordings that she imprinted her vibrant personality. With albums like <i>Eli and the Thirteenth Confession</i> and <i>New York Tendaberry</i> she mixed the sounds of soul, pop, jazz and Broadway to fashion autobiographical songs that earned her a fanatical following and influenced a generation of music-makers. In later life her preoccupations shifted from the self to embrace public causes such as feminism, animal rights and ecology – the music grew mellower, but her genius was undimmed. </p><p>This book examines her entire studio career from 1967’s <i>More than a New Discovery</i> to the posthumous <i>Angel in the Dark</i> release of 2001. Also surveyed are the many live albums that preserve her charismatic stage presence. With analysis of her teasing, poetic lyrics and unique vocal and harmonic style, this is the first-ever study to concentrate on Laura Nyro’s music and how she created it. Elton John idolised her; Joni Mitchell declared her ‘a complete original’. Here’s why.</p><p>Published by Sonicbond. ISBN: 978-1789521825.</p><p><br /></p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-82128014311557675692021-12-15T11:42:00.001+00:002021-12-15T12:13:19.701+00:00Sadistic Mika Band <br /><img src="https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fviva-vinyl.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F02%2FSadistic-Mika-band-Black-ship.jpg&t=1639567176&ymreqid=117c274a-5cf2-5964-2f2c-5a0033017d00&sig=R5CTYR_xas9RK4zCmOaBcQ--~D" style="display: block; margin: auto; visibility: visible;" /><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">I’ve never been to Japan – I’m a reluctant flyer, for one thing – but the culture has long fascinated me. In the 1980s I worked for a time in the oriental department of a national museum. Every day we handled the exquisite artifacts of that distant land – the delicate carved clothing ornaments known as</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">netsuke</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">, the elaborately draped</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"> </span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">kimono</i><span face="Calibri, sans-serif">, the beautifully glazed ceramics, the woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige that so influenced the French Impressionists when exported to Europe. For a term I attempted to learn the language but had to retreat, defeated. Instead, I taught English to a Japanese, and she in turn taught me to confront my Englishness.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">These cultural exchanges (and confrontations) occur also in music. The Sadistic Mika Band were one of the few Japanese acts to penetrate British insularity in the 1970s, and I loved them as soon as I heard them.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">At the group’s heart was a marriage, between guitarist Kazuhiko Kato and his first wife, singer Mika Fukui. After they signed to EMI Harvest, their debut album was recorded in Japan. While in London in 1972, Kato had been taken with the extravagance of Glam Rock; he liked the way an art school sensibility was infusing pop. He gave a copy of that first album to Malcolm McLaren, who in turn passed it on to Bryan Ferry. Ferry hooked the band up with Roxy Music’s producer Chris Thomas and the result was a second album, <i>Kurofune</i> (<i>Black Ship</i>), recorded in England and released in 1974.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">They supported Roxy Music on tour in October 1975 – playing to somewhat baffled British audiences – and appeared on the BBC’s <i>Old Grey Whistle Test</i> in the same month. This is where I made their acquaintance. It’s up there now on YouTube, a rare TV appearance preserved in all its spontaneity. They kick off with an instrumental, ‘Time To Noodle’. Mika prances among the boys, snapping them with her polaroid, while they, well, <i>noodle </i>(most expertly). She was probably what caught my schoolboy attention: the pleasingly short dress, the pert headgear. Viewing the clip again now, 45 years after broadcast, I’m struck rather by their harmonic sophistication. As a classical musician friend commented to me, “I think this is the only pop performance I’ve ever heard that exploited the evocative power of the augmented triad.” They perform with tight rhythmic coordination and instrumental dexterity as crisp and squeaky-clean as their immaculately pressed clothes. Then Mika takes the mic for the frenetic ‘Suki, Suki, Suki’. Bob Harris, the show’s compere, seemed particularly impressed by Rey Ohara’s funky basslines at this point, but most male eyes were surely on Mika. Some wag on the studio team had altered the title card behind the band to read ‘Old <i>Gley</i> Whistle Test’ – no doubt the Sadistics had grown used by now to the racial stereotyping endemic to 70s Britain, but it still marks the clip as a period piece. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">So, of course, I had to buy <i>Black Ship</i>, their latest release.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">The cover artwork by photographer Masayoshi Sukita showed the band members, two on the front, four on the back, floating, perhaps flying, as if arriving from afar, emissaries from the ‘floating kingdom’ of Nippon. The original album came with no translations. Having acquired little Japanese in the classroom, I was (and still am) at a loss with most of the lyrics. In part – side one, at least – it seemed to be a ‘concept album’ (they were a thing at the time) about the opening up of Japan to the West. The ‘Black Ship(s)’ of the title track recalled the famous reaction to that day in 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy sailed into Uraga harbour with his powerfully armed ironclad steamboats, thus ending 250 years of feudal stability and international isolation. The extended opening track, ‘Sumie No Kuni E’, began with gentle pentatonic scales, as if conjuring the calm of pre-modern Japan, before developing into a furious jam, perhaps descriptive of the panic aroused by the sight of the ‘foreign devils’. The style here was Prog meets jazz-funk, a <i>mélange</i> of Western styles heard through Japanese ears. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Even on the second track, ‘Time Machine Ni Onega’, a straight rock’n’roll number, the impression of 50s retro was somehow refracted through a non-Western sensibility to sound unmoored. Recently, I found an online translation of the lyric. The words, I now realise, evoke temporal dislocation in rather the same way the music disrupts our expectations of genre. Mika’s frantic vocal skips from the Jurassic era, where ‘<i>we’ll have ammonites for lunch / And walk our tyrannosaurs</i>’, to the Golden Age of Hollywood where ‘<i>girls clad in mink / Went crazy for Bogie’s charms</i>’.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Side two was announced by the percussion battery of ‘Yoroshiku Dozo’ – now we were in <i>Wicker Man </i>territory – before lurching into the singalong pop chorus of ‘Dontaku’. They could do reflective ballads, too, like ‘Four Seasons’, or the concluding track, ‘Sayonara’. Altogether it was a consummate package.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Things fell apart for the band, at least for the classic line-up, during the recording of their third album, <i>Hot </i><i>Menu!,</i> in 1976. Mika became romantically involved with producer Chris Thomas, whom she subsequently married after divorcing Kato. Kato himself pursued a solo career, but sadly took his own life in 2009. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;">Maybe something was lost in translation when Western rock was transplanted to Japan. But equally something was gained. Just as British bands of the 60s pored over recordings of Chicago bluesmen and helped to reawaken Americans to their musical heritage, so the Sadistic Mika Band were part of a two-way cultural exchange that brought us Yoko Ono and Stomu Yamashta. And <i>Black Ship</i> was their finest hour.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hd5ztTz1564" width="320" youtube-src-id="hd5ztTz1564"></iframe></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm;">(First published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk" target="_blank">RnR</a></i>, May/June 2021)</p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-49893983629034687202021-01-15T11:47:00.000+00:002021-01-15T11:47:21.306+00:00Linda Thompson<br /><img src="http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0003/611/MI0003611079.jpg?partner=allrovi.com" style="-webkit-user-select: none; display: block; margin: auto;" /><p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><i>[An interview feature I wrote in 2013 to coincide with the release of Linda Thompson's solo album </i></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Won't Be Long Now<i>.</i></span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"> First published in </i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk" target="_blank">RnR</a></span><i style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">, November/December 2013.</i><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><i>]</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">A new album from Linda Thompson is always an event. As one half of a duo with her then husband, Richard, she made some of the most enduring folk-rock albums of the 1970s. In the 80s, newly divorced, she struck out on her own. Since then, often with long intervals, she’s turned in a number of highly acclaimed recordings which confirm her pre-eminence as a folk-narrative voice. TV talent contests are stuffed with wannabees who can emote, or at least act out emotion; <i>Won’t Be Long Now</i> reintroduces us to a true storyteller in song. </span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Hers is a versatile voice. After cutting her teeth in folk clubs, she first earned a living in the London of the 1960s by singing pop jingles for TV commercials. Over the years Linda has sung rock, country, even cabaret numbers. But the new album feels like a determined return to her ‘roots’ in folk music. I began our interview by asking her whether this was a deliberate choice. “When I started this project I wanted it to be quite trad and simple instrumentally,“ she explained. “Apart from [my grandson] Zak’s blistering solo on ‘As Fast As My Feet Can Carry Me’ it's a pretty acoustic sound.” In the 80s, arguably, she grew a little too enamoured of then modish electronica. <i>One Clear Moment</i>, her first solo album, made in 1985, was awash with synthesisers – no danger of that here. </span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">The opening track of the new release, written by Linda herself, finds her duetting with her old partner, and sounds almost as if it could have come off one of the Richard and Linda albums of the 70s. Was it easy to get back into old ways of working? “Well, trying to recreate our monster hits was never going to be easy! Richard came into the studio in New York, did the session, then we all went to see him do a gig at City Winery. I still think of him as a family member. Is that normal?”</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Actually, yes – working with family is very much the norm in Linda’s world. The Thompson clan are close friends with those other great dynasties, the Waterson-Carthys and the Wainwright-McGarrigles. Apart from Richard and Zak, the new album features her daughters Muna and Kami as well as bassist Jack Thompson (Richard’s son by his second marriage). Her closest collaborator, though, is Teddy Thompson, who shares many writing credits. How does the writing process go, I wondered. Is it a lyrics/music split, or more complex? “It’s a little more complex. We’re mother and son, so we don’t work in the same room – and half the year at least we live on different sides of the globe. He usually does the tune, or I’ll have a bit of a tune, and he does the rest. I email him lyrics and sometimes that works well. Working with your family is quite a folksy thing. I’ve always thought how good harmony sounds when it’s sung by blood relatives.” </span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">As a young woman she used to feel intimidated by the songwriters in her circle. In fact, when asked at parties “what she did”, she’d tell people she was an “interior designer”. Does she have more confidence now in her own writing? “That depends really. I still revere great writers, so I wouldn't say I'm at all cocky in their company.” One younger talent she reaches out to is Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith; they collaborate on a charming co-write, ‘If I Were A Blackbird’. She has also returned to Tony Callen’s setting of a Charles Causley poem, which she first learned over forty years ago from then boyfriend Paul McNeill. “That poem encapsulates life for me. Great tune, too.” She’s pleased to hear that, coincidentally, Jim Causley has just put out an album of settings of his relative’s work (“Ooh, that’s interesting,” she enthuses, “I’ll buy that!”)</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">‘Paddy’s Lamentation’, one of two traditional songs on the album, was used in the soundtrack of Gangs of New York. Although Linda wasn’t involved in the film-making, there was a connection to Martin Scorsese’s people through producer Hal Willner. “I was able to sing very freely on that session,” she recalls, “so I loved it. I have huge admiration for Hal.”</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Another song, ‘Mr Tams’, unites her with Eliza and Martin Carthy, Susan McKeown and legendary fiddler Dave Swarbrick. It evokes a difficult point in her life. Her relationship with Richard had collapsed by the time of their 1982 US tour, the infamous “Tour from Hell” where she was not above kicking her soon-to-be-ex on the shins during performances. She’s always said that, on her return to England, John Tams “saved her life” by engaging her to sing with the Home Service in a production of the medieval Mystery plays. “Tam gave me a job at The National Theatre. Eight shows a week, two young kids and a newborn baby kept me busy, and got me through that time – as did my sainted mother.” The song is her way so saying thank you.</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">It’s often forgotten that acting is in Linda’s blood. When she first moved south from Glasgow in the late 60s, she enrolled briefly at LAMDA, one of London’s top drama schools. “I was there until a teacher told me I’d be good at comedy – then I left,” she laughs. Screen cameos continue to figure in her diverse career, though. In 1985 she sang ‘Isolation’ and ‘Watching The Wheels’ in a BBC drama about John Lennon starring Bernard Hill. How did she get that gig? “I wish I could remember who asked me to do it, but I can’t. I do remember working with Paul Jones. I sang something that I didn’t like and said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ He said, ‘You’re talking about the man I love’. I think he was serious, too. Bless him!”</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">The 1970s were an era of high drama in her life. When Richard converted to Sufism, she joined him in a succession of communes and squats. But the ascetic life, and the subservience required of women in such communities, were not for her, especially with two young children. A low point was when the couple toured with a group of Muslim musicians. The tour consisted of religious-inspired music that she and Richard rarely performed again. When I ask how she regards those songs 35 years down the line, the answer makes me regret asking: “Frankly, I have blocked that time and that stuff out of my mind, thanks very much.”</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">As well as the new album, this year sees the CD reissue of <i>Rock On</i>, a curious one-off project from 1972 which brought together past and present members of Fairport Convention (plus selected friends) in a run-through of their rock’n’roll favourites. I’ve always loved Linda’s work on that album – especially the duet with Sandy Denny on the Everly Brothers’ ‘When Will I Be Loved’, and her solo take on ‘La Bamba’ which is included as a bonus track. It sounds like they were all having a ball, I suggest. She agrees: “We did have a ball, living and working at Virgin Manor, somewhere in the countryside. Lots of Bacchanalian behaviour! Trevor Lucas was at the helm, and I loved him.”</span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">In 2005 she gingerly stepped out in public for <i>Strange How Potent</i>, a fascinating programme of music-hall and vaudeville songs at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Dressed in a battered coat and hat, she proved as effective an ambassador for these sentimental old ditties as they are ever likely to find. Hopes are high that the recording made of that show will be released in the new year. </span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">And yet, for all the high points, her career has its share of might-have-beens. After the split from Richard and the untimely death in 1978 of her best friend Sandy Denny, in whose shadow she’d always felt somewhat insecure, she might have taken the dominant place in British music she deserves but which has somehow eluded her. She made a country rock album for CBS in 1987, which remains unreleased. One reason – it was at this point she was struck down, not for the first time, with dysphonia, the debilitating condition that has prevented her from performing in public for much of the last thirty years. I venture to ask about the current state of her voice. “At the moment, horrible, and my speaking voice is badly affected. I had Botox in my vocal cords some years ago. It helped, but it’s hit and miss, and a scary procedure. I don’t want to do it again.” The happy circumstance for us, her fans, is that she’s able to overcome this in the studio, well enough to lay down the eleven choice cuts that make up Won’t Be Long Now. </span></span></p><p><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">What’s coming up next? Can we expect her autobiography? “Perhaps one day, but if I carry on not talking, it may be my only option!” In the meantime, if Kami or Teddy are playing in London, you’ll generally find Mum in the audience, ever the loyal supporter.</span></span></p><div><br /></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-82716137018838925902020-11-24T11:56:00.004+00:002020-11-24T17:21:03.691+00:00Anne Briggs<div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dpgkx-OswJ8" width="320" youtube-src-id="Dpgkx-OswJ8"></iframe></div></span><b style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><div><b style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><br /></b></div>Anne Briggs</b><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"> (TOPIC, 2019, CD) </span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Anne Briggs was one of the most influential figures on the 60s folk scene. Often mythologised in biographies of friends like Bert Jansch, </span><a href="https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/media-the-arts/sandy-denny/" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;" target="_blank">Sandy Denny</a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"> and </span><a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2011/02/richard-thompson-obe.html" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;" target="_blank">Richard Thompson</a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">, her free spirit still resonates on disc years after she retired from performance. </span><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Though she began under Ewan MacColl’s protective (left-)wing, her uncomplicated delivery, often unaccompanied, free of vibrato or emotional affectation, set a benchmark for traditional singing among her contemporaries, the younger folkies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">So this is a welcome reissue, to mark the 80th anniversary of Topic Records, of her first full-length LP. Originally produced by mentor A.L. Lloyd, with Johnny Moynihan of Sweeney’s Men sharing bouzouki duties on one track, it sounds as fresh and lucid now as it did in 1971.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">Here are definitive presentations of songs like ‘Blackwater Side’, ‘Willie O’Winsbury’, ’The Cuckoo’ and ‘Reynardine’. Helpful sleeve notes by <i>RnR</i>’s Ken Hunt fill in the pre-history of these classics and remind us of Briggs’s importance for successors like <a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2020/10/june-tabor.html" target="_blank">June Tabor</a> and <a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2012/10/emily-portman.html" target="_blank">Emily Portman</a>. Writing of later treatments of ‘Blackwater Side’, Hunt laconically observes: “Led Zeppelin made a different meal of it”. Indeed they did — which just shows how versatile such ingredients can be in creative hands.*</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">[Review first published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk" target="_blank">RnR</a> </i>74]</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sUFCkM-tNUQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="sUFCkM-tNUQ"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">[*Before anyone points out that <i>Led Zeppelin I</i> was released in 1969, let it not be forgotten that Jimmy Page learned this tune via Bert Jansch, who had recorded it on his 1966 album <i>Jack Orion</i>. Jansch, in turn, had learned it from Anne Briggs, who had been singing it for years before she committed it to vinyl in 1971.]</div><p></p></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-17219494675178029952020-11-06T10:42:00.003+00:002020-11-06T11:38:26.907+00:00Helen Mirren<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lJlMe6yvsLc/X6UjqMJGZJI/AAAAAAAAA9U/m9ToMDZ1xCMBHmIVOMTjSW-BbsJEYhzuQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1179/Doing%2BHer%2BOwn%2BThing%2B1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="1179" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lJlMe6yvsLc/X6UjqMJGZJI/AAAAAAAAA9U/m9ToMDZ1xCMBHmIVOMTjSW-BbsJEYhzuQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Doing%2BHer%2BOwn%2BThing%2B1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>In 1969 John Goldschmidt was a young documentary maker in search of his next subject. A graduate of the Czech National Film School and the Royal College of Art, he had already attracted attention with a TV film about Bernadette Devlin, at the time the youngest woman ever elected to the Westminster Parliament. His choice next fell on 24-year-old Helen Mirren, youngest Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Speaking to me recently, Goldschmidt recalled the exact circumstances:</p><blockquote><p>I’d made the film about Bernadette Devlin, partly filmed during the Londonderry riots, which was very controversial. I was looking for something completely different, and my ex-wife had a copy of <i>Vogue</i>. There was an article and photos of Helen Mirren. I suddenly thought that she’d make a good subject for a documentary film.</p></blockquote><p>It was a happy conjunction: one rising talent documenting the rise of another. At the time, ATV was the commercial television company with a licence covering the Midlands and as such felt an obligation towards the Stratford-based RSC. With ATV’s boss Lew Grade on side, the project was set up quickly, in two or three weeks. Lest any viewer complain that they’d never heard of the young thespian, an ATV official assured the <i>Sun</i> that ‘she is very much an up-and-coming Shakespearian actress and a very dolly lady. She’s going places.’</p><p>The resulting film, <i>Doing Her Own Thing</i> (the, now rather dated, title was the company’s idea), aired across the ITV network on 23 June 1970. Long thought to be lost, the master copy has resurfaced recently in the ITV archives. Viewed after nearly fifty years, it’s both a fascinating time-capsule of a distant era and a picture of a hard-working actress at the outset of her career. The impression given onscreen is of someone articulate, grounded and self-aware, even as she expresses in voiceovers the necessary uncertainties of youth:</p><blockquote><p>It's quite impossible to say what’s going to happen to me. I even find it impossible to say what has happened to me […] I don’t know what I’ll be doing in three years’ time, or even in a year’s time. I’ve absolutely no idea.</p></blockquote><p>Although Goldschmidt’s early speciality was what he calls the ‘portrait documentary’, he also harboured a desire to make drama. His compromise in the Mirren film was to capture events from her present life, film her in performance, and get her to re-enact episodes from her earlier life. Thus we see her first ‘starring role’ (impersonated here by a young girl) as Gretel in a primary school <i>Hansel and Gretel</i>. Then, playing herself as a teenager, she whiles away evenings with friends in coffee bars, and secretly dreams of being ‘discovered’ as she walks the Essex seafront. She returns to the Kursaal Amusement Park in her hometown of Southend, where she worked as an attendant on the famous ‘Rotor Wheel’, a giant spinning tub which pins pleasure-seekers to the wall by centrifugal force. By now her taste for the theatrical is developing apace. Without telling her parents – fearing their disapproval – she travels to London to audition for the National Youth Theatre; Michael Croft, the NYT’s cheery, avuncular director, re-enacts his enthusiasm for the young performer as she delivers her audition piece from <i>Henry VI Part 3</i>, the withering ‘molehill’ speech in which Queen Margaret humiliates the captured York (I.iv.66-78).</p><p>Al Parker, veteran theatrical agent, next puts in appearance, recalling how he first signed her to his agency before then launching into a rambling anecdote about Rudolph Valentino. To the soundtrack of Al Bowlly (‘You Oughta Be In Pictures’), a starry-eyed Mirren gazes into shop windows. ‘Suddenly roads seemed to be opening out in front of me,’ she muses. She joins the Royal Shakespeare Company. There follow scenes in a Stratford churchyard filmed late in October (as Goldschmidt fretted about the fading light). Cycling along Warwickshire lanes to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, she recalls days of ‘quiet, calm fun with another actor in the countryside’. This same actor, Bruce Myers, helps her re-enact their amorous horseplay among the costumes of the Stratford wardrobe department.</p><p>Moving to the present, we see what she calls the sheer ‘technical slog’ of working in classical repertory. The learning of lines, the physical exercises (‘<i>Reach… and contract!</i>’), and – perhaps most interesting – one-on-one voice production work with the RSC’s specialist Kate Fleming. At this point Mirren was rehearsing Lady Anne in <i>Richard III</i> for opening in April 1970. These lines seem to cause her particular difficulty:</p><p></p><blockquote>The which thou once didst bend against her breast<br />But that thy brothers beat aside the point. (I.ii.97-8)</blockquote><p></p><p>I asked Ben Crystal, who with his father David has worked extensively on reconstructing Elizabethan speech, whether these lines would have been easier to deliver in Shakespeare’s ‘Original Pronunciation’ (‘OP’) than they were in Mirren’s very proper Received Pronunciation (modern ‘RP’). Ben, himself an actor, thought not. He pointed to the aspiration of the <i>wh</i> in ‘which’ and the pronunciation of ‘once’ as <i>ohnce</i> as distinctively OP features, but found ‘nothing particularly difficult about the line in either RP or OP’ in his mouth. David Crystal, a linguistician, shared my sense that there was a tongue-twister lying in wait here: ‘If she was trying to articulate every consonant, then she could have had a problem with <i>dstb</i> [‘di<i>dst b</i>end’]. In OP the consonant cluster for <i>-st</i> endings would have been simplified, by dropping the <i>t</i>, as can be seen in some spellings of the period.’</p><p>Another scene catches her at a photo session. While she poses winningly for the camera, her voiceover strikes a self-deprecating note: ‘I honestly and truly don’t find myself attractive… I have a basically very ordinary face and it’s not going to make my fortune.’ This was a time when she still relished her anonymity: ‘I wouldn’t be recognised walking down the street or asked for my autograph. I think I prefer it that way.’ She leads an isolated life as a jobbing actress, she tells us, with marriage far from her thoughts, but still she’s a ‘1970 girl’ who feels she should be demonstrating against apartheid. Immersion in Shakespeare has made her all too aware that women in sixteenth-century England led lives far more restricted than her own. ‘They were used very much as pawns,’ she reflects. ‘They had no political say, and I find that I rebel against it.’</p><p>Crucial to the documentary was to capture her in performance, engaging in what she calls the ‘big lovely deception’ of theatre. We see her pacing up and down in the wings, striving to ‘keep the energy going’ until her entrance. There are several extracts from <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> at the Aldwych: Mirren in heavy fake tan; Troilus (Michael Williams) clad in an alarmingly short chiton; Pandarus (David Waller), curly-wigged, the epitome of ‘camp’. In order to secure close-ups, Goldschmidt filmed these scenes in the empty theatre in the afternoon, then intercut the footage with film of the audience arriving for the evening performance and applauding the curtain-calls. More endearing is a recreation of her early Cleopatra. In tight close-up on her face, she gives us the queen of the Nile among her attendants, brooding erotically on her absent lover:</p><p><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span></p><blockquote><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>O Charmian,<br />Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?<br />Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?<br />O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! (I.v.19-22)</blockquote><p></p><p>Reviews were generally favourable. The <i>Sunday Telegraph</i> welcomed a glimpse of this ‘Shakespearian nymph’ with the ‘arresting, tilted profile’, noting that Goldschmidt was ‘refreshingly unafraid’ to use the ‘old-fashioned’ technique of re-enactment. The <i>Daily Mirror</i> was full of praise for the young director’s ‘technical wizardry’, deployed in the service of a rising star: ‘nobody exalts the artist like another one.’ The <i>Daily Sketch</i>’s critic came ‘prepared to be harrowed with the usual heartbreak’ of the showbiz tale, but instead found ‘gaiety all the way’, with Mirren’s ‘a face like a promising new day’. When television shone a spotlight on show business, the <i>Daily Express</i> observed, it usually gave ‘a reflection of an unreal world jangling with highly paid people.’ However, in this ‘affectionate’ documentary, ‘it was refreshing to discover someone of such potential who cared far more about her work than a Rolls Royce.’ <i>The</i> <i>Times</i> admired how the young actress’s ‘honest self-knowledge’ and pointed opinions emerged with clarity from the film but regretted that the extracts from <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> ‘did not allow her to be more than attractive and efficient.’ The <i>Guardian</i> was not alone in spotting that the director seemed more than a little in love with his subject – ‘in another age John Goldschmidt might have written sonnets’ – but concluded that ‘she emerged with considerable dignity from the film’. A rare voice of dissent was the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, for whom this was ‘one of those remorselessly “pop” productions’ seemingly organised by a ‘berserk cameraman, with commentary added later. It scampered frenziedly round the externals of its subject without really getting to grips with the actuality.’ George Melly, writing in the <i>Observer</i>, was also unconvinced. ‘A prettily photographed but empty little essay,’ he announced. ‘What she had to say about her life and profession was the opposite of riveting.’</p><p>Goldschmidt, these days a multiple award-winner with feature films as well as documentaries to his credit, remains proud of this early work. He recalls that it drew plaudits from Trevor Nunn, and Mirren herself acknowledges that it raised her profile at this point in her career. The director found his subject easy to work with, he tells me – an impression confirmed by a surviving set of photos taken during shooting on a blustery Southend Pier in 1970. They record actress and film-maker in relaxed, close confab: two young people, suspended in their time-capsule, little suspecting what the future will bring.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yflB9XexikA/X6UkYujUF6I/AAAAAAAAA9c/bWnoqTQA7wEQRO8DdG9OrTZMeZCWHgAdQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1179/Doing%2BHer%2BOwn%2BThing%2B2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="1179" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yflB9XexikA/X6UkYujUF6I/AAAAAAAAA9c/bWnoqTQA7wEQRO8DdG9OrTZMeZCWHgAdQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Doing%2BHer%2BOwn%2BThing%2B2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>But listen to how Mirren describes this era in an interview with Noreen Taylor a quarter-century later:</p><blockquote><p>Between 18 and 30 were the worst years of my life. I tried never to show it by just getting on with things, but during those decades I cried myself to sleep most nights simply because I felt afraid of what was ahead, of the unknown. I’ve talked about this to other women and found that it was similar for them. Odd, isn’t it, when you consider that at the time you’re at your physical best, in reality there is all the misery and fear of wondering what is to become of you. (<i>The Times</i>, 19 September 1996)</p></blockquote><p>In retrospect we (re)write our autobiographies, placing an interpretation on events that wasn’t apparent at the time. Which is the more valid – how we felt at the time, or how we feel decades later? The <i>joie de vivre</i> radiating from the young Mirren in Goldschmidt’s film, or the sober stocktaking by her older self? Whatever we are in the second half of life will incorporate whatever we were in the first, yet in between lies that long, unpredictable process of ‘becoming’.</p><p>[This is an extract from my ebook, <i>Becoming Helen Mirren</i> (2019), available from <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07Z86ZQY7/" target="_blank">Amazon UK</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Z86ZQY7/" target="_blank">Amazon US</a>, <a href="https://books.apple.com/gb/book/becoming-helen-mirren/id1483939841" target="_blank">iBooks</a>, <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Philip_Ward_Becoming_Helen_Mirren?id=Zh-3DwAAQBAJ" target="_blank">Google Play</a>, <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/becoming-helen-mirren-philip-ward/1134145221" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble</a>, etc. My thanks to John Goldschmidt for the photos used here and for other assistance.]</p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-502933424832083372020-10-02T14:47:00.005+01:002020-10-02T15:03:15.849+01:00June Tabor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://mainlynorfolk.info/june.tabor/images/largerec/ashore_tscd577.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="672" height="286" src="https://mainlynorfolk.info/june.tabor/images/largerec/ashore_tscd577.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In early 2011 I had the privilege of interviewing the singer June Tabor (b. 1947) for a now-defunct music magazine. Since then she has continued her collaborations with Oysterband and as part of the trio project Quercus. But <i>Ashore</i>, which we discuss here, remains to date her last solo album…</div><p style="text-align: center;">********</p><p>“I might be under a bush or making marmalade,” says the voice at the other end, explaining why she doesn’t always hear the telephone. Luckily, June Tabor, gardener, marmalade-maker – and one of the greatest living interpreters of English song – is engaged in neither activity when I call to ask about her new album, <i>Ashore</i>.</p><p>The album, her thirteenth as a solo artist, has its origins in the seventieth birthday celebrations for Topic Records, the label that June has been with throughout her career. Tony Engle of Topic invited her to do a concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and gave her a free hand in the programme. “I like when putting together a concert to bring together songs that tell a story, trace some kind of storyline, songs that are connected in some way, possibly by subject matter, irrespective of where they might come from,” June explains. </p><p>She’d long been thinking about a concert in themed sections on the relationship between the British people and the sea. “That doesn’t mean, as some people seem to think, sea shanties. That’s just a very small part of it. There’s a huge breadth of material which has the sea as its subject matter or its inspiration, both in the tradition and in the hands of modern writers. And if you juxtapose things that haven’t previously been put together but which still have this connecting thread, and in this particular case the sea, it’s amazing what pictures and images, what passions you can stir up amongst us all, performers and audience.”</p><p>After the concert, once she’d got over the “abject terror of doing a whole lot of new stuff in one go”, she realised she had the makings of a complete album. <i>Ashore</i> is the happy outcome. </p><p>On the new release she takes the opportunity to revisit a couple of songs she has recorded before. It opens with ‘Finisterre’, a number that appeared on her 1989 collaboration with the Oysterband. The voice is close and intimate, the arrangement spacious. The track establishes a mood for what’s to follow. These are broad soundscapes opening onto long vistas, like a view of the open sea. Also up for reappraisal is Cyril Tawney’s ‘Grey Funnel Line’, which she first recorded with Maddy Prior in 1976 and has been singing on and off ever since. June still loves the duet version with Maddy but admits her own approach to the song has changed over the years: “It’s got a bit more space. It has room to breathe. The images, I think, stand out very clearly.” </p><p>With time, particularly if she hasn’t sung a song for a while and comes back to it, the meaning of the words changes: “That’s the beauty of a good song, that however well you think you know it, you discover something in it that you didn’t see before. Certainly, ‘Grey Funnel Line’ is a song that speaks so clearly – and I don’t know that I even thought about it when I first recorded it – of that need for anyone who has spent most of their life on the sea to turn their back on it. I’ve been told this by people who served for a long time in the Navy, that if you want a life of your own then you’ve got to leave the sea. And the more I sang it and thought about it, the clearer that became to me. That’s exactly what Cyril was writing about.”</p><p>One highlight of the London concert was a suite of songs about cannibalism at sea. This is a surprisingly virile genre, from the starkly lyric poetry of ‘The Ship in Distress’ to a comic treatment by Thackeray where the cabin boy’s on the menu until he’s rescued in the nick of time by the arrival of the fleet. On <i>Ashore</i> we hear a French song, ‘Le Petit Navire’, where the child is not so lucky. He ends up being eaten, with appropriate garnish. “I laughed so much when I found the words of that,” says June. “How French! They’d run out of anything to eat but they still managed to cook up white sauce and a nice salad! So I can only assume that ‘something to eat’ has got to mean meat!” The incidence of enforced cannibalism must be as old as seafaring, but, intriguingly, the songs about it only surface in the eighteenth century as broadsheets. The modern equivalent would be disaster movies about aircrash survivors. It all stems from our eternal love of horror, June suggests, lapsing into mock-Brummie: “As we say in the Midlands where I come from, ‘<i>we loiks a bit of bad!</i>’”</p><p>‘Le Petit Navire’ is one of two French songs on the new album collected in the Channel Islands. These were still being sung in the mid-twentieth century – the Islands remained French-speaking until the Second World War – and June is drawn to the way they combine a very English sensibility and loyalty to the English crown with their origins in the French tradition: “I love that – and also it gives me an excuse to sing in French!”</p><p>Like its predecessors, the album has a distinct aural texture. “We often get described as chamber folk. That’s a very good way of expressing that it isn’t quite folk music and it’s not classical and it’s a few other things as well.” June works with a regular group of co-musicians drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Huw Warren is a pianist and composer whose jazz-inflected style perfectly complements June’s vocals. “The piano is such a glorious instrument. It’s an orchestra in itself.” The multi-tasking Mark Emerson on violin and viola unites a classical training with a grounding in traditional and dance music. “Extraordinary player of an extraordinary instrument” is June’s comment on Andy Cutting: “Andy does things with the diatonic accordion that just aren’t possible to most other musicians.” The line-up is completed by Tim Harries on double bass, who, I’m told, has “two brains”. </p><p>How are the arrangements arrived at? “I come up with the songs and I have an idea of the direction I want them to go in and, quite possibly, an idea of what the main instrument should be as the basis of the arrangement. I learn the songs and I sing them to the musicians and we sit round and the arrangement evolves. It’s very much input from all of us as to how the finished arrangement ends up. Very seldom is anything written down. It’s carried in everybody’s heads. As far as I’m concerned the songs tell me what they need and I’m just trying to convey everything that I get from a song to a listener in the best way I can.” </p><p>As an example, she quotes the last track on the album, ‘Across The Wide Ocean’, an epic 12-minute setting of a Les Barker poem about the Highland Clearances. “The grounding of that song is piano and what Huw is playing. The musicians are improvising. They know roughly when each instrument should come in but they’re responding to the words and I just sing when I feel like it. It is a long track, it’s just the way we felt that the song deserved to be sung and played to give it that incredible breadth, so that it is a very visual arrangement. Through the music you see the sea, the people being driven from their homes, the dereliction of the island and the burning houses and the ships setting off for America. It’s all there in what the musicians are playing just as it is in the words. It’s one of those <i>film</i> songs – I like those.” </p><p>Despite her enviable technique, June insists she has no musical training. She seems apologetic that she can’t read music: “You’d think at my age I would have learned by now.” I point out that Paul McCartney has the same “disability” but has managed to do quite well for himself nonetheless – which seems to reassure her. </p><p>Martin Carthy always says that the worst thing you can do to folksong is not to sing it, and June agrees with him wholeheartedly. Does that mean she’s a curator? “I’m a teller of stories,” she responds. “I don’t like that word curator. It is part of what traditional music is about but it just seems to me the wrong word. I’m someone who is keeping great music alive. I’m a life-support machine rather than a curator.”</p><p>She first discovered folk music as a teenager. She recalls a couple of religious programmes on TV on a Sunday afternoon where folk artists like Martin Carthy were featured. When a schoolfriend took her to a folk club, she found a “social aspect, a way of life”. It was the start of her own involvement in singing, but the breakthrough moment was a chance purchase of Anne Briggs’s EP <i>The Hazards Of Love</i>. </p><p>“I went to visit my sister in London and she took me to Dobell’s, where they had jazz and folk sections in the basement, and I found that EP. I thought, this looks interesting. So I took it home and I put it on my funny little Dansette record player and I thought, God, this is amazing. Here’s a woman singing on her own, it’s just the voice. I want to do that. So I played it over and over again, I broke it down, slowed it down, cut it up into little pieces and learned how to do each little tiny bit, drove my mother mad, shut myself in the loo – there was a good acoustic in there! – and just taught myself how to sing like that. I was fascinated by the decorated style, the material.”</p><p>A late starter, she didn’t release her first album until 1976 and attributes the impetus to her old friend Maddy Prior. Steeleye Span were at the peak of their stadium-filling power in the mid-70s and their record company, Chrysalis, allowed each member to make a solo album. Maddy announced she would do hers with June, as a duo, the Silly Sisters. “So I actually stepped into a recording study. Oh God, how terrifying!” When she’d recovered from the fright, June got down to making the solo disc of her own that Topic had been pressing for, <i>Airs And Graces</i>. Since then she’s put out a string of accomplished releases, most of them bearing titles beginning with the letter ‘A’ (“It gives you somewhere to start when you’re looking for a title, which is not an easy thing to do.”) </p><p>Her background is somewhat different from many in the folk world. Oxford-educated, she captained her college team on <i>University Challenge</i> in 1968. They lost (narrowly) to Essex, despite “thumping” Bangor in the warm-up round. What sticks in the memory about that experience? “How nice Bamber Gascoigne was. And the other thing I remember, apart from not winning, is that we walked through the set of <i>Coronation Street </i>to get to the <i>University Challenge</i> studio. I got onto <i>Coronation Street</i>, albeit briefly!” Outside music, she’s served time as a librarian and even ran a restaurant in the Lake District for a while. </p><p>She is a remarkably versatile performer who can switch from trad folk to jazz by way of modern singer-songwriters. An earlier album, <i>At The Wood’s Heart</i>, brought a cool reading of Duke Ellington’s ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me’. On the new album she tackles Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’, already covered memorably by Robert Wyatt. Whatever the material, her singing has the naturalness of speech. Where lesser singers merely skate the surface, June is always deep inside the song. </p><p>She ducks when asked if she has any comments on the current folk scene. At first she admits she “hasn’t a clue”, then she speaks in praise of newcomer Emily Portman for “making new songs of old and working folktale and storytelling into songs” – which is, of course, exactly what June Tabor herself has been doing triumphantly for the last forty years.</p><p>[First published in <i><a href="https://issuu.com/properganda/docs/properganda_19_amazon/7" target="_blank">Properganda</a> </i>19, April/May 2011] </p>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-77112967124857356502020-09-14T11:26:00.000+01:002020-09-14T11:31:42.229+01:00Pentangle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PhwjCGLNxHw/X19FGA-RtZI/AAAAAAAAA8g/7sMd4Iiv3QQrP9loaHA9hm3W4cr6SiI_ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1000/basket-of-light-53ef8377a3f16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PhwjCGLNxHw/X19FGA-RtZI/AAAAAAAAA8g/7sMd4Iiv3QQrP9loaHA9hm3W4cr6SiI_ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/basket-of-light-53ef8377a3f16.jpg" /></a></div><p>Well, cards on the table – it didn’t start with a disc, it started with a TV programme. <i>Take Three Girls</i> was an innovative BBC drama series at the end of the Sixties, the first to be filmed in colour, which followed the lives of three young women of different social backgrounds flat-sharing in Swinging London. I was a bit too young to appreciate it – and watching the surviving episodes posted to YouTube by Liza Goddard, one of its stars, I’m surprised how gritty it was – but I appreciated the theme tune, ‘Light Flight’. This intricate composition, with its interlocking guitars, honeyed vocal and unexpected shifts of time signature, was the work of Pentangle. I had to know more; the game was afoot.</p><p>Pentangle began in 1967 with a coming-together of two desperately talented acoustic guitarists – Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. They had a residency at London’s Horseshoe Hotel. Happenstance brought them together with singer Jacqui McShee and a rhythm section comprising Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums. They came from different directions, these individualists: McShee from the folk scene, Thompson and Cox from jazz, Jansch from the British blues revival, Renbourn via a fascination with Early Music. But each was interested in so much more than narrow genre, and they pooled their interests to make a music that could only have emerged at that moment. “An uncalculated synthesis of musical disciplines,” Rob Young calls it in his book <i>Electric Eden</i>, “rock and folk inflated by modern jazz’s zephyr breeze”. The band name, alluding to the sign on the inside of King Arthur’s shield, derived from Renbourn’s interest in the Middle Ages, but also conveniently embraced the five corners of this quintet of equals. </p><p>‘Light Flight’, I discovered, was the opening track on their new LP, <i>Basket Of Light</i>. Released in October 1969 at the very peak of their success and reaching number five in the album charts, this remains for me the perfect distillation of their art. For once, my saved-up pocket money was well spent. By then the career of this most British of bands had been supercharged by a pair of ambitious American expats: manager Jo Lustig and producer Shel Talmy. Lustig got them the gigs and the media exposure (including, I assume, the <i>Take Three Girls</i> connection); Talmy gave the recordings their striking bell-like clarity, thanks to judicious microphone placement and enhancements from the mixing desk.</p><p><i>Basket Of Light</i> mixed the band’s original compositions with folk standards. Even the traditional songs sounded fresh when painted in a new instrumental palette. ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ featured glockenspiel and multi-tracked vocals. Renbourn, swapping guitar for sitar on ‘House Carpenter’, marshalled an improbable but successful duet with Jansch’s banjo. Their voices merged with McShee’s on ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, a chilling rendition of this Yorkshire-dialect threnody, replete with churchy echo effects. ‘<i>If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane / The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane</i>’. Was the soul’s hazardous journey from earth to purgatory ever better evoked than in that threat? I’d no idea what “whinnes” were – thorns, I later learned – but they sounded painful.</p><p>In contrasting vein, ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ was an upbeat arrangement of The Jaynetts’ 1963 hit, evidence of how far the band cast their net for material. Among the band’s own compositions, I always returned to ‘Light Flight’, preferring it to Jansch’s lugubrious lead vocal on ‘Springtime Promises’. But I also liked ‘Train Song’, the closing track on Side One (track positioning really mattered in the vinyl era). A line from the song – ‘<i>Love is a basket of light</i>’ – provided the album title. It was a reference, so Jansch confided to his biographer Colin Harper, to his “first sexual experience with a lady”; how afterwards he remembered “sitting in this flat where the light shade had a basket hanging from it.” The song alternated fast and slow sections, with McShee scat-singing as if to suggest the locomotive wheels turning, before braking gradually until only Thompson’s bowed bass was audible in the mix. </p><p>I only saw them once in concert. Fairfield Halls, Croydon, in November 1970. I was a young teen, new to live amplified music, and I remember how <i>different</i> they were. (Admitted, my formative experience had been seeing Herman’s Hermits blast out a set in the middle of a Christmas panto.) For a start, apart from Thompson, they all performed sitting down. McShee has explained how, in her case, this was a response to the trauma of her first gig during which her knees had been shaking so much she could barely control them. Perhaps there were more expressive singers on the circuit than McShee, women who inhabited a song better, but none whose voice so melded like a fifth instrument into an ensemble. With no strutting front man or woman to distract the eye, you listened to the music and to how these supremely talented musicians listened to each other. Even the folk-rockers had gone electric by then, but although Renbourn sometimes picked up an electric guitar, the key to Pentangle’s distinctiveness was the undertow of Thompson’s nimble acoustic bass and Cox’s restrained use of brushes in preference to sticks.</p><p>Of course, it feels wrong to talk about Pentangle as ancient history. The original band made three further albums after <i>Basket Of Light</i>, split, then reformed in 1981. A Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Folk Awards in 2007 was confirmation of their enduring impact on musical life. But while McShee still leads the band in another worthy incarnation, the deaths of Jansch in 2011 and Renbourn in 2015 mean that the personnel of the 1960s can never again reassemble. We shall not see their like.</p><div><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">[First published in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>, July/August 2020]</span></div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-16381294859780259272020-06-30T15:42:00.024+01:002023-12-29T11:39:26.412+00:00Taking stock<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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With a nation in pandemic lockdown, it felt like some personal stocktaking was in order. What does my writerly self have to show for himself after all these years?</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i>Encounters with Michael Arlen </i>(Market Harborough: Troubador, 2023).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i>I</i><i>nstead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten </i>(Cambridge: Minos, 2022).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i>Laura Nyro... On Track </i>(Tewkesbury: Sonicbond, 2022).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<i>Becoming Helen Mirren</i> (e-book: Matador, 2019).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music</i> (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2011; new e-edition, 2019).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance</i> (Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang, 2002).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Frank Wedekind, <i>Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls</i> (London: Hesperus, 2010). [Reviewed in <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/25/frank-wedekind-minehaha-review" target="_blank">The Guardian</a></i>, 25 April 2010].<o:p></o:p></div>
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François Pantillon, <i>Cries of the World</i> (‘secular oratorio’, libretto, unpublished, 2009) [French-language premiere as<i> Clameurs du monde</i>, May 1986; no known performance in English].</div>
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Ernst Krenek, <i>Heavyweight, or The Glory of the Nation</i> (libretto, unpublished) [Cambridge University Opera Society, premiere, 7 December 2002].</div>
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Alexander Mosolov, <i>The Hero</i> (libretto, unpublished) [Cambridge University Opera Society, premiere, 7 December 2002].<o:p></o:p></div>
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J.W. von Goethe, <i>Erwin and Elmire</i> (libretto, unpublished) [<i>Singspiel</i> with music by Anna Amalia, first performance in modern times, Cambridge University Opera Society 29 January 1999; new production by iOpera, Melbourne, Australia, February/March 2008]. [<a href="https://iopera.com.au/past-productions/erwin-and-elmire-2008/" target="_blank">Photos and programme</a>].<o:p></o:p></div>
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Frank Wedekind, <i>Franziska</i>, adapted by Eleanor Brown; translation and introduction by Philip Ward (London: Oberon, 1998) [premiere, Gate Theatre, London, 13 May 1998; reviewed in <i><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/theatre-review-franziska-gate-theatre-london-turn-of-the-century-girl-power-1157349.html" target="_blank">The Independent</a></i>, 26 May 1998].</div>
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<b>Articles<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="calibri, sans-serif">'The Mystery of Mally Alexandra', <i>Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter </i>46 (December 2023), 35-8.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="calibri, sans-serif"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="calibri, sans-serif">'A Fractured Relationship: Rebecca West and Michael Arlen', <i><a href="https://rebeccawestsociety.wordpress.com/2022/12/01/a-fractured-relationship-rebecca-west-and-michael-arlen/" target="_blank">The Rebecca West Society blog</a></i> (December 2022).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="calibri, sans-serif"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><span face="calibri, sans-serif">‘</span>“Swarthy Syrian” or “Nimble Greek”? Huxley and Michael Arlen’, <i>Aldous Huxley Annual </i>20 (2021).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span face="calibri, sans-serif">‘“A very real warmth”? Hemingway and Michael Arlen</span><span face="calibri, sans-serif">’, <i>The Hemingway Review</i> 41.1 </span><span face="calibri, sans-serif">(Fall 2021).</span><br />
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<span face="calibri, sans-serif">‘A “Comer” or a “Second-Rater”? Fitzgerald’s Encounters with Michael Arlen’, <i>F. Scott Fitzgerald Review</i> 18 (2020).</span><br />
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<span lang="">‘Green Hats and Constant Nymphs Versus Life-as-It-Is: The Unlikely Friendship of Michael Arlen and D. H. Lawrence’, <i>D. H. Lawrence Review </i>44.1 (2019).</span></div><div style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif;">‘Marianne Mitford’, <i><a href="https://themitfordsociety.wordpress.com/2020/12/13/marianne-mitford-guest-post-by-philip-ward/" target="_blank">The Mitford Society blog</a></i> (December 2020).</div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
‘Katherine Mansfield and Michael Arlen: A Footnote (or Two)’, <i>Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter</i> 31 (December 2018), 26-29.<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Egon Wellesz: An Opera Composer in 1920s Vienna’, <i>Tempo</i>, 219 (January 2002), 22-28.<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘“Bacchen des Euripides zu erneuern”: The <i>Pentheus</i> Project of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’, <i>Orbis Litterarum</i>, 55.3 (2000), 165-194.<o:p></o:p></div>
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‘Hofmannsthal, <i>Elektra</i> and the Representation of Women’s Behaviour through Myth’, <i>German Life and Letters</i>, 53.1 (January 2000), 37-55.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Reviews<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">Charlie Louth, <i>Rilke: The Life of the Work</i>, in <i>Austrian Studies</i> 30 (2022).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
‘Egon Wellesz, Symphony No. 4 (Sinfonia Austriaca), Op. 70; Symphony No. 6, Op. 95; Symphony No. 7 (Contra Torrentem!), Op. 102. Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, cond. Gottfried Rabl,’ in: <i>Tempo</i>, 225 (July 2003), 49.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nancy C. Michael, <i>Elektra and Her Sisters. Three Female Characters in Schnitzler, Freud, and Hofmannsthal</i>, in: <i>Austrian Studies </i>11 (2003), 222-223.<o:p></o:p></div>
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George Mackay Brown, <i>Andrina and Other Stories</i>, in: <i>Catholic Herald</i>, 20 April 1984, p. 6.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888-1912</i>, edited by Nigel Nicolson, in: <i>Catholic Herald</i>, 10 June 1983, p. 6. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><b>Poetry</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">'47 Redcliffe Road', <i>Katherine Mansfield Studies</i> (forthcoming).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">'The Bird-Man', <i><a href="https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-06/wolfwords_anthology_website.pdf" target="_blank">WolfWords 2023</a>.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<b>Other<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Numerous features, interviews and reviews for popular music magazine <i>RNR</i>, 2010-present [some republished on this blog]. Occasional contributions on music to <i>English Dance and Song</i>, <i>Shindig!</i> and <i>Properganda</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">‘A Religious Source for Newton’s Science?’ (unpublished thesis, University of Oxford, 1980; winning entry, Stanhope Historical Essay Prize, University of Oxford, 1980).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Several short stories in Oxford University magazines: <i>Isis</i>, <i>Oxford Literary Journal</i>, <i>Envisage</i>, 1977-9.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">Numerous <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/authors/philip-ward/" target="_blank">reports</a> on parliamentary business and public policy issued under the imprint of the House of Commons Library, 2003-2016. Whereas Kafka’s ‘official’ writings as an insurance assessor investigating injuries to industrial workers have been slavishly studied, I doubt my future biographers will be detained long by ruminations on the <i>Horserace Betting Levy Bill</i> or the ownership of air guns in Scotland. <o:p></o:p></div>
Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-27530049718979088522020-06-05T12:05:00.002+01:002020-06-05T13:49:13.251+01:00Shirley Collins<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 16.866666793823242px; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Back to 2015 for this concert review...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="Confident and uncompromising … Shirley Collins." class="maxed responsive-img" itemprop="contentUrl" src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/603f591c6eef57a6d7b4ed6abe4bb73ae1fc88c1/0_446_6200_3721/master/6200.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=eb72a8c392c42e026812d5fc5b85c9fd" /></span></div>
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<b>ALL IN THE DOWNS: SHIRLEY COLLINS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY CONCERT</b><br />
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<b>Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Sunday 5 July 2015</b><br />
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In some countries – Japan and Australia come to mind – they have a system of declaring people to be ‘living national treasures’. We don’t have that in Britain, but if there’s one living Briton who’d qualify (alongside David Attenborough, of course) it’s Shirley Collins. Song-collector, singer and writer, she remains an inspiration across the generations. <br />
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A concert to mark her eightieth birthday brought together three of my favourite young <i>chanteuses</i> of the moment – <a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2010/07/olivia-chaney.html">Olivia Chaney</a>, Lisa Knapp and Lavinia Blackwall: that was promising for a start. The first part of this good-humoured tribute was given over to soloists, the songs drawn mostly from Collins’s own repertoire. Knapp (accompanying herself on fiddle) sang ‘Fair Maid Of Islington’; Chaney, rapt in concentration at the piano, was masterly in ‘All Things Are Quite Silent’. Graham Coxon of Blur served up a neat, Jansch-inspired guitar arrangement of ‘Cruel Mother’. Sam Lee blotted his (usually spotless) copybook by giving a rambling introduction that was longer than the song itself, but Alasdair Roberts saved the day with his unaccompanied ‘Lord Gregory’.<br />
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The second half was a marvellous recreation of the <i>No Roses</i> album of 1971, led by an irrepressible John Kirkpatrick. He being the only member of the original line-up on stage, support came instead from Trembling Bells. I’m not the Bells’ biggest fan, I admit – I find them unsubtle compared to their folk-rock ancestors – but they gave it their all here, and everyone seemed to be having a ball, audience included. ‘Murder Of Maria Marten’, ending with the soloists joined in six-part harmony, was a joy.<br />
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Finally, Collins herself took a standing ovation on stage, positively <i>beaming </i>with pleasure. Stewart Lee, the stand-up comedian who had proved an erratic MC for the evening, suggested a singalong ‘Happy Birthday’, so we obliged.<br />
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Oh, and there were morris dancers.<br />
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[First published in <a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><i>RnR</i></a>, September/October 2015]<br />
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<i> Photo: Domino Records</i>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-53014944502441813462020-05-14T14:04:00.000+01:002020-05-14T14:04:13.694+01:00Rethinking American Music<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aSwbNMu77GQ/Xr1A0VYRT6I/AAAAAAAAA5o/g49Yb2RRkeADXf5TTJj8tJM_cjKJEnBeACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/9780252084102_lg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="755" data-original-width="501" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aSwbNMu77GQ/Xr1A0VYRT6I/AAAAAAAAA5o/g49Yb2RRkeADXf5TTJj8tJM_cjKJEnBeACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/9780252084102_lg.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
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<b>RETHINKING AMERICAN MUSIC</b><br />
Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis (eds.)<br />
(UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS) www.press.uillinois.edu<br />
ISBN 978-0-252-08410-2 Softcover. 355 pp.<br />
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This is a collection of academic essays on American music ranging widely across genres, from classical to jazz, musical theatre and Tin Pan Alley. Although they come grouped into four sections – ‘performance’, ‘patronage’, ‘identity’ and ‘ethnography’ – they’re a miscellaneous bunch, and few will read this volume cover to cover. That said, certain themes recur that reflect disquiet in a nation still troubled by its segregated past, themes like minstrelsy and ‘cultural appropriation’.<br />
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An informative essay on hip-hop compares ‘turntablists’ and ‘mashup’ artists. Both are making new music out of old but while the former are performer-DJs who proudly claim ‘authorship’ of their work, the latter skulk behind the anonymity of the internet, successfully evading copyright litigation. Another chapter considers how the Native American melodies collected by Natalie Curtis played into the European <i>avant-garde</i>’s fascination with ‘primitivism’ in the early twentieth century, using the composer Busoni as example. Another deals with a 1929 benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that defiantly busted the ‘colour bar’ by featuring a multi-ethnic cast. In lighter vein, a diverting contribution by Jeffrey Magee examines the ‘cosy cottage’ trope in the American musical, tracing its evolution from the comforting promise of ‘Tea for Two’ in the 1920s to Mrs Lovett’s dreams of rural retirement on the profits of cannibalism in Sondheim’s <i>Sweeney Todd</i> (1979).<br />
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My usual problem with academic writing about popular music is the mismatch between descriptor and described – too often it feels like improvised music created by self-taught musicians unversed in music notation is being crushed under the analytical tools developed for Western ‘art’ music. A final essay on transcribing a Thelonious Monk solo faces this issue head on. If ‘rethinking American music’ means restoring the precedence of historical and evidence-based research over theory, I’m all in favour.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;">[First published in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 14.666666984558105px;"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>, March/April 2020]</span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-6666624462814587332019-07-18T11:28:00.001+01:002020-11-24T09:31:45.768+00:00Moondog<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-US">It was all my brother’s doing. Some years older than me, already adult while I was still a child, he educated me — without meaning to — in good taste. He and my other brother brought books into the house, where before there were few, and all those discs of shiny black vinyl encapsulating the newest ‘sounds’. As the 60s gave way to the 70s, the record companies hit on a canny marketing tool, the ‘sampler’: budget-price anthologies collecting single tracks from their latest releases. We lapped them up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">CBS’s <i>Fill Your Head With Rock </i>(1970) was an innovation — a double album, a bigger canvas allowing for a loosely thematic arrangement of tracks. By the time you got to Side Three, you were skating the border between singer-songwriters and folk-rock. There were <a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2017/03/laura-nyro.html" target="_blank">Laura Nyro</a> and Leonard Cohen jostling alongside Al Stewart and Trees. But in between was something very weird. ‘Stamping Ground’, an instrumental track for orchestra, by someone — or something — called ‘Moondog’. An insistent rising motif over repetitive percussion, preceded by a man’s voice intoning an aphorism about “<i>men</i>” and “<i>mice</i>”, it wound itself into your brain like a coiled snake and lodged there. So, of course, my brother bought the <i>Moondog </i>album. The marketing pitch had worked. I don’t think he played it much, but I loved it, and I wanted to know where it came from.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">‘Moondog’, I discovered, was really Louis Hardin, an American musician of classical training, born in 1916, who had spent much of the previous twenty years busking in New York. He took his name from a pet dog who used to “”howl at the moon more than any dog I know”. Blinded from his teens after an accident with a dynamite cap, he was a familiar figure around 54th Street in his horned helmet and loose-fitting robes, playing a variety of instruments he’d invented himself. ‘The Viking of Sixth Avenue’, they called him. David Bowie, on his first promotional tour to the US in 1971, encountered him there, a model of self-liberation at a point where, as Bowie later recalled, his own ‘Ziggy’ persona was beginning to gel. Moondog’s earliest recordings are, literally, street art: field recordings with titles like ‘Lullaby (2 W 46th Street)’ made on the thoroughfares of the Big Apple, his own idiosyncratic music-making in competition with passing sirens and fog horns. It was right that Moondog shared Side Three of the CBS sampler with Laura Nyro’s ‘Gibsom Street’, that chilling evocation of backstreet abortion from the ‘Bronx Brontë’: both breathe the spirit of subway vents and tenement fire escapes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">When I was at school, I remember a lot of talk about ‘fusion’. All music was going to come together. Deep Purple and The Moody Blues recorded with symphony orchestras. Miles Davis shared concert bills with rock artists. The Soft Machine played at the Proms. That’s why we middle-class boys loved ‘progressive rock’, with its complicated time signatures and classical pretensions (so brilliantly lampooned by Jonathan Coe in <i>The Rotters’ Club</i>, where one of his schoolboy characters — who just happens to have the same first name as me — labours away at his prog masterpiece, ’Apotheosis Of The Necromancer’). It didn’t quite turn out that way, the ‘fusion’ thing. As the digital revolution made everything available, it makes everything avoidable, too, isolating us within our silos. Instead, we must look for hidden pathways through music, subterranean channels linking one tributary to another. Moondog is one of those. As a child he’d seen the Arapaho Sun Dance; later he’d played tom-tom with the Blackfoot tribe in Idaho and found a route through percussion to jazz, all the while obsessed with the counterpoint of J.S. Bach and the textures of European classical music. Others recognised and taught me to recognise that, somehow, this outsider’s outsider was on the inside track of coolness. I found a song about him on Pentangle’s 1968 album, <i>Sweet Child</i>. Janis Joplin recorded his madrigal ‘All Is Loneliness’ with Big Brother And The Holding Company in 1967. Frank Zappa praised his ‘dada clockwork’. Even T. Rex smuggled a topical reference into 1972’s ‘Rabbit Fighter’ (‘<i>Tramp king of the city he’s my friend / </i></span><i><span lang="NL">Moondog</span><span lang="EN-US">’s just a prophet to the end</span></i><span lang="EN-US">’).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Big label interest peaked in 1969, when Jim Guercio, producer of Chicago and Blood, Sweat And Tears, landed him a deal with Columbia, hired forty accomplished musicians and laid down the breakthrough album, the one my brother would so presciently buy in 1970. Representing over thirty years of composition, it distils into little more than half an hour what Moondog was about. A chaconne in memory of Charlie Parker (‘Bird’s Lament’) and ballet music written for the Martha Graham company (‘Witch Of Endor’) nestle alongside a Swing-style homage to Benny Goodman (‘Good For Goodie’). Everywhere, except beneath the interlacing strings of ‘Ode To Venus’, we hear the driving rhythms of his extensive percussion battery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In later life he moved to Europe and entered on an Indian summer of renewed compositional fervour. Apparently, he left hundreds of unperformed works at his death in 1999. His last appearance in Britain was at the Meltdown Festival in 1995, at the invitation of Elvis Costello, another fan. Sadly, I missed that. Moondog described his music as being about “the art of concealing art: maximum effect but with minimum means”. Not surprising, therefore, that he is held up as a godfather of minimalism — Philip Glass and Steve Reich both revere him, though he disclaimed the accolade himself. The ‘freak folk’ movement of Devendra Banhart <i>et al </i>also owes him a debt (not just for his unconventional dress sense). And I owe my brother. Big-time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[First published in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>]</span></div>
Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-60210408247067156142017-08-17T10:19:00.000+01:002017-08-17T10:44:19.183+01:00David Bowie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OOeExerRG4Y/WZVeMosPu6I/AAAAAAAAAzo/3NLtqC2kYBEkWn5avfQH3RtEUIWzCKrXQCLcBGAs/s1600/zzZiggy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OOeExerRG4Y/WZVeMosPu6I/AAAAAAAAAzo/3NLtqC2kYBEkWn5avfQH3RtEUIWzCKrXQCLcBGAs/s320/zzZiggy.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>UPPING YOUR ZIGGY:
HOW DAVID BOWIE FACED HIS CHILDHOOD DEMONS – AND HOW YOU CAN FACE YOURS</b></div>
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Oliver James</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(KARNAC) www.karnacbooks.com </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ISBN 978-1-7822049-0-9 Softcover. 192 pp.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is a tale of two half-brothers. One of them, Terry,
became schizophrenic and committed suicide. The other, David, reinvented
himself and became one of the biggest rock stars of the last fifty years. There
was a history of mental illness in the family – three maternal aunts also went
mad – and a toxic legacy of shared childhood from which David emerged as the
favoured son and Terry as the emotionally neglected sibling.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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James’s book is part psychobiography and part self-help
manual. The author is a practising therapist and a firm believer in ‘nurture’
over ‘nature’. Genes play little part in determining who we are, he says: childhood
adversity causes psychosis, not genes. Believing his family cursed by madness,
Bowie avoided the same fate for himself by inventing ‘personas’ – Ziggy
Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – and playing them out on the
public stage until he reached a state of psychic equilibrium in midlife and
made peace with himself. This is a model, James argues, for how we can all
develop a dialogue between different parts of the self and reintegrate them,
producing new personas and pushing old ones into the background.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">James began writing his book before Bowie’s
untimely death in 2016, so he cannot be accused of ‘cashing in’. He traces
effectively how Terry’s experiences surface in his brother’s lyrics and how personas,
Ziggy in particular, enabled ‘David Bowie’ (another assumed identity) to
reconnect with David Jones (his birth name). I was less convinced by James’s
efforts to turn Bowie’s psychodrama into everyone’s struggle to keep it
together. Many of us find something to identify with in Bowie – be it the sense
of alienation, the gender-variance, the self-questioning, the restless need like
the whale shark’s to keep swimming in order to stay alive. But there was only
one Ziggy.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[First published in </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">RnR</a>] </span><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-27902085585886727522017-01-23T14:30:00.001+00:002017-01-23T14:35:47.825+00:00John Lennon in Bermuda<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qr3q3nKCw-o/WIYTCmHcz1I/AAAAAAAAAzA/-g8xEmBTZ_Et9RNTw2B-b7Jlt7b_414SACLcB/s1600/zzLennonBermuda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qr3q3nKCw-o/WIYTCmHcz1I/AAAAAAAAAzA/-g8xEmBTZ_Et9RNTw2B-b7Jlt7b_414SACLcB/s320/zzLennonBermuda.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>LENNON BERMUDA<br />
</b>Scott Neil and Graham Foster<br />
(FREISENBRUCH BRANNON) www.doublefantasybermuda.com<br />
ISBN 978-1927750-02-5 Softcover. 120 pp.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The summer before his death, <a href="http://brushondrum.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/john-lennon.html" target="_blank">John Lennon</a> hired a 43-foot
yacht and, with a small crew, sailed to Bermuda for a little R&R. Arriving
after a storm-tossed passage, he rented a house on the island and reconnected
with his muse. The result was his final album, <i>Double Fantasy</i>, named after a freesia he spotted on a visit to the
local botanical gardens.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s hard to believe there’s any cranny of Lennon’s life
that hasn’t been picked over, but journalist Scott Neil has found one of the
less-explored and tracked down those he met in Bermuda. The Lennon recalled by
islanders was not the self-obsessed star they expected. He was polite,
laid-back, into healthy eating and clean living. A generous, companionable man
who returned favours and remembered kindnesses shown him. After five years out
of the limelight, he relished going incognito as ‘John Greene’ and rewarded
those who respected his privacy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The book’s style is a little feverish at the outset, as the “former
Beatle” battles crashing waves, alone at the helm against a “storm of
Shakespearean proportions”. But once the prose settles down, the story is
well-told and the reminiscences deftly woven into a highly readable narrative. It’s
a tale about negotiating celebrity and finding the quietude to write. Songs
like ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Watching The Wheels’ – Neil shows how both were
inspired by events in Bermuda – may not be Lennon’s greatest but they fulfil his
aim of writing for people of his own age group.<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The sensitive artwork is by Bermudian artist
Graham Foster, who also designed the memorial sculpture to Lennon in the
Bermuda Botanical Gardens. Best of all are the scattered photos of the singer,
some with son Sean in tow. He looks relaxed, like a man ‘starting over’ (another
song-title), blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" target="_blank">R2 (Rock'n'Reel)</a></i></span></span><br />
<br />Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-70976332155610777422016-12-05T11:33:00.000+00:002016-12-05T11:33:20.449+00:00Alan McClure<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-as3Waf_QK6Y/WEVOURtmfVI/AAAAAAAAAyk/s5FTz1OW3BYSlcXj4-zLJ7nWuRFTjCpEQCLcB/s1600/zzAlanMcClure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-as3Waf_QK6Y/WEVOURtmfVI/AAAAAAAAAyk/s5FTz1OW3BYSlcXj4-zLJ7nWuRFTjCpEQCLcB/s320/zzAlanMcClure.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>Everything Is Fine (Until </b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>It's Not)</b> (LOST WASP RECORDS, 2014, CD)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.alanmcclure.co.uk/" target="_blank"><br /></a></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.alanmcclure.co.uk/" target="_blank">Alan McClure</a> is a man to watch. A 36 year-old from
south-west Scotland, he first crossed my radar as lead singer and chief
songwriter to quirky combo <a href="http://brushondrum.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-razorbills.html" target="_blank">The Razorbills</a>. Now he arrives with a solo album,
confirming his status as a profoundly <i>interesting</i>
writer. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Here he’s backed by The Mountain Sound Session. According to
the press release, they “comprise some of Hull’s finest musicians”, and I’m
inclined to believe it. Most of the songs sit on a bed of sensitive two-guitar
arrangements, McClure’s own fingerpicking blending with Dave Gawthorpe’s classical
guitar. The arrangements never overwhelm the voice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As ever, McClure’s lyrics take you to unexpected
places. ‘Ugandan Sun’ remoulds a folk motif about forbidden love, complete with
recurring refrain line, to skewer the state-sponsored homophobia of a certain
African nation. The title track is full of his trademark verbal dexterity:
statements are advanced, qualified, withdrawn, forcing you to attend to what
the man’s saying. But he does easy tunefulness as well. ‘The Notion’ has a
relaxed Laurel Canyon vibe, harking back like much of his music to the 1960s,
while ‘Rant’ ironically updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ to the
context of Glasgow dockyards and the ‘empty Highland’.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">First published in</span><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/" style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;"> <i>R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</i></a><span style="font-family: calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 16.8667px;">. </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-1929182616830904572016-11-19T14:37:00.000+00:002016-11-19T14:37:52.905+00:00Peter Gabriel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WMaBMZlSLq0/WDBijat9s9I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/Ft6RCyPrltgUlGPCMnTi7h-qqMALO6jLQCLcB/s1600/zzGabriel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WMaBMZlSLq0/WDBijat9s9I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/Ft6RCyPrltgUlGPCMnTi7h-qqMALO6jLQCLcB/s320/zzGabriel.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Growing Up Live/Still Growing Up Live & Unwrapped</b> (3 DVDs)<br />
(EAGLE ROCK) www.petergabriel.com<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The voice has aged, raspier in its lower register than in
his Genesis days. But as the (mostly young) audiences chant “PETER! PETER!”
we’re reminded that only a couple of letters separate the showman from the
shaman. “<i>My friends would think I was a
nut / Turning water into wine</i>,” he sings in ‘Solsbury Hill’, as he rides
round the stage on a folding bike. Peter
Gabriel may not be a miracle-worker but he is still a hugely charismatic
presence.<br />
<br />
These DVDs (predominantly reissued material) record the tours following the
release of his album <i>Up</i>. The most
spectacular is a 2003 Milan gig, where the band perform on a revolving stage in
mid-arena. Aided by designer Robert Lepage, Gabriel’s love of spectacle is
undiminished. He hangs upside down from an elevated set in ‘Downside Up’,
perambulates the stage in a zorb ball for ‘Growing Up’ as if suspended in
amniotic fluid. Close-ups of Gabriel’s penetrating eyes are intercut with shots
of orange-clad techies toiling like Nibelungs beneath the stage. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The 2004 gigs find Gabriel introducing the songs in French.
The theatricals are toned down, the setlist different. As the previous year, daughter
Melanie joins on backing vocals and there is a touching moment as father and
daughter hold hands in ‘Come Talk To Me’. But the finest cut here is on the DVD
‘extras’: a joyous duet on ‘In Your Eyes’ with Mauritanian Daby Touré.<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The band is tight, with long-serving guitarist
David Rhodes a stand-out, and sound quality excellent.</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a></i></span></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-74697403088816503532015-10-03T10:06:00.000+01:002015-10-03T10:06:39.742+01:00Steve Logan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LhysBaNwc3s/Vg-YexcSrzI/AAAAAAAAAvc/59VQOoMYrpw/s1600/SLogan.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LhysBaNwc3s/Vg-YexcSrzI/AAAAAAAAAvc/59VQOoMYrpw/s320/SLogan.JPG" width="319" /></a></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b>Deliverance </b>(MOONDRAGON, 2015, CD)<br />
<br />
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Steve Logan, a Welsh singer-songwriter long resident in
England, may have lost the accent but not the power to project. <i>Deliverance</i> is his follow-up to last
year’s <i>Signs and Wonders</i>. The debut release
was a pared-down, all-acoustic set, enriched by support from Kimberley Rew
(ex-Katrina and the Waves). On this new album he broadens the sonic palate,
adding a full rhythm section and switching between acoustic and electric guitar
with a dab of harmonica, much like his avowed hero Neil Young.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Logan once fronted a tribute band, Free Again, and you hear
Paul Rodgers in his vocal style. As a songwriter, his tastes are more Laurel
Canyon – clear from the outset on the attractive opening track, ‘Deliverance’. But
Logan’s his own man, a man audibly at ease with himself. Moments of tenderness,
often directed at his “wife and muse” (‘Just The Way Your Heart Beats’), bump
up against hard-rocking numbers (‘Didn’t Even Listen To Myself’). Active as a
poet for the page as well as a songsmith, he turns in a distinctive lyric,
whatever the medium. <o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Welcome as they are, one or two songs outstay
their welcome, clocking in at over five minutes. But that’s nothing that can’t
be fixed.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.stevelogan.co.uk/" target="_blank">www.stevelogan.co.uk</a></span>
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-18253220252120842582015-09-08T12:31:00.001+01:002020-10-23T15:52:06.176+01:00Nick Drake - footnotes<b>
THE PINK MOON FILES</b><br />
<h2>
<o:p></o:p></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jason Creed<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(OMNIBUS)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ISBN 978-1-84938-658-6<o:p></o:p></div>
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Softcover. 230 pages<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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When Nick Drake died in 1974 at the age of 26, he left three
exquisitely crafted albums and a host of questions. So many questions. How to
interpret that death: suicide or an accidental overdose? Just what sort of live
performer was he: charismatic or shambolic? What of his love life?<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the late 1990s, Drake-enthusiast Jason Creed published an
important fanzine, <i>Pink Moon</i>, which
explored these and other questions. Now, gathered between covers here are
reprinted contributions, together with new material. In transcribed interviews
or personal memoirs we hear from producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby,
friends Iain Cameron and Robin Frederick, Island press officer David Sandison,
not to mention his sister and parents. An excellent piece by the late Scott
Appel unpacks his guitar tunings for the specialist reader. There are chapters
on live performances, rare recordings, TV documentaries, and reprints of
original album reviews. (Pity the <i>NME</i>
reviewer in 1969 who compared Drake unfavourably to Peter Sarstedt!) Also
included is Jerry Gilbert’s heroic write-up of the only interview the
monosyllabic Drake ever gave.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s good stuff, handsomely bound and presented. If I have a
reservation, it is that there’s potential for an even better book inside here:
a comprehensive source-book, a book that would be fully annotated, preferably
with an index. As an editor, Creed is rather too hands-off, with the result
that errors and conflicts of evidence are allowed to stand. Using the original <i>Pink Moon</i> as a primary source may be a
constraint. Speculations dating back to 1997 by a third-year undergraduate
about the clinical nature of Drake’s depression might be fine in a fanzine or
discussion forum but sit ill alongside the memories of those who actually knew
the man.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Reservations aside, this is an indispensable resource for
every Drake fan. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in </span><i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/"><span style="font-size: x-small;">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></i><span style="font-size: x-small;">May/June 2011</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />=====================</span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oO7l7osX1gc/Ve6_tVIGznI/AAAAAAAAAvA/Wgu4SlXazeE/s1600/Grantchester.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oO7l7osX1gc/Ve6_tVIGznI/AAAAAAAAAvA/Wgu4SlXazeE/s320/Grantchester.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Grantchester Meadows</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Last year (2014) marked the fortieth anniversary of Nick
Drake’s death. It didn’t go unrecognised, of course. <i>Uncut</i> magazine carried a piece by John Robinson and interviews with
the ‘usual suspects’. For a while I was in discussion with an editor about writing
something myself. Searching for a ‘new angle’, I even did some field work by
visiting Carlyle Road in Cambridge. This is a row of Victorian terraces where the
undergraduate Drake found lodgings after moving out of college for his second,
and as it turned out, final year at the university. According to biographer
Trevor Dann, he soon fell out with his stiff-necked landlady and relocated round
the corner to 65 Chesterton Road. It’s just a short hop, I realised, from there
to The Boathouse pub where modern-day troubadours are to be heard plying their
trade every Wednesday evening. People say ‘River Man’ was conceived around here.
I searched in vain for the <i>genius loci</i>.
Betty, I decided, was more likely to encounter the River Man in Grantchester
Meadows, later commemorated in song by Pink Floyd, amid the white cow parsley
and the plash of oars wafting up from the Cam. But I hadn’t the faintest idea whether
Drake ever strayed this far out of town.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In fact, after thrashing around for a while, I had to admit
I had nothing new to say. “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein was right about that. Actually
– if we’re being philosophically precise in use of language – it’s not true to
say I had <i>nothing</i>. I had some small
footnotes to offer to the Drake industry. And even footnotes to the footnotes. Since
they can’t be inflated to bulk out another unnecessary article, I offer them
here instead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>That breakthrough gig<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In December 1967 our man was on the bill at the Roundhouse
in London. The event was ‘Circus Alpha Centauri’, one of a series of benefits
in aid of underprivileged children, compered on the night of Saturday 23rd<span style="font-size: 13.3333330154419px;"> </span>by Jimi Hendrix (dressed as Father Christmas, according to legend).* No one
seems quite sure how Drake landed the gig, which proved so decisive for his
career, but I have a theory. At the bottom of the original flyer I notice the
production assistants listed as “Victoria and Louisa Ormsby-Gore”. Drake, we
know, hung out with the Ormsby-Gores, a Chelsea set of socialites and debutantes
he had met in his gap year.** Fairport Convention were also on the bill and, at
some point in the evening, Fairport’s Ashley Hutchings spotted Drake. “I
thought he was terrific”, the bassist told <i>Uncut</i>,
“the guitar-playing, the songs. People would later say he had no stage presence
but what partly drew me was that aura.” Hutchings engineered an introduction to
producer Joe Boyd. Well, you know the rest.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>But does anyone <i>really</i> remember his live performances?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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As a teenager, Ian Anderson, now editor of <i>fRoots</i> magazine, came across him at Les
Cousins, the Soho folk venue: “It would be very easy to <i>not</i> remember seeing Nick Drake,” he told me. “I saw him do floor
spots on Cousins all-nighters and most people fell asleep. Whatever you think
of his records, he really was a dreadfully dull live performer with absolutely
nothing memorable about him at all, other than not being very good. I'm sure I
was only awake because I was either MC-ing or waiting to play!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>He was <i>so deep</i>!<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Drake-heads get very excited by the so-called ‘Far Leys
monologue’. It’s certainly a document of interest as being the only extended
record of his speaking voice, a sort of audio letter to we-know-not-whom taped in
the summer of 1967 after his sojourn in Aix-en-Provence. Returning drunk from a
party in the small hours, he switched on the family tape recorder and rambled. Forty
years later, the languid public-school accent defeats some of his unintended
listeners.*** For example, in her book about <i>Pink
Moon</i>, Drake's final album, US critic Amanda Petrusisch turns a platitude into a Zen insight. She
has him say: “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the
doorknob before one goes to bed…” What he actually says is: “I think there’s something
extraordinarily nice about seeing the <i>dawn
up</i> before one goes to bed…” Indeed, anyone unaccustomed to self-deprecating
irony and the studied evasiveness of the buttoned-up Englishman is liable to
hear profundity where there is none; or none on the surface, anyway, where self-revelation
is nowadays expected to lie. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There’s a line in the ‘monologue’ that always stuck in my
mind because it invites earnest over-interpretation of this sort. It’s where he
says, in mock-serious tones: “One forgets so easily the lies, the truth and the
pain”. It felt like a quotation, but I couldn't place it. Then I happened to
reread ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Say, is there Beauty yet to find?<br />
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?<br />
Deep meadows yet, for to forget<br />
<i>The lies, and truths, and pain?</i> . . .
oh! yet<br />
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?<br />
And is there honey still for tea?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2016/04/rupert-brooke.html" target="_blank">Rupert Brooke</a>’s evocation of Cambridgeshire village life was
a staple of school poetry anthologies and would have had particular resonance
for someone about to read English Literature at Cambridge. Big abstractions are
acceptable to the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mind if they’re safely enclosed between
quotation marks. As Patrick Humphries observes in his biography of Drake, there
are similarities between Drake and Brooke, two golden boys born generations
apart who died young. Both were looking for a place of refuge from the risks of
saying too much: Drake found it in songwriting. In May 1904 the schoolboy
Brooke wrote to his cousin:<o:p></o:p></div>
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When I say what I mean, people
tell me ‘O Rupert, what delightful nonsense you talk!’ and when I venture on
the humorous, I am taken seriously and very promptly and thoroughly squashed
for ‘saying such strange things’. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Drake, according to his friend <a href="https://brushondrum.blogspot.com/2014/12/beverley-martyn.html" target="_blank">Beverley Martyn</a>, “would
occasionally say something witty, but very rarely”. I suspect there is a serio-comic
timbre in Drake if we’re attuned to hear it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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=====<o:p></o:p></div>
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*This is the advertised date for Fairport’s appearance at
the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. However, other sources list the band as playing
at Middle Earth (in Covent Garden) on that night. Conversely, Drake’s biographers agree that headlining on the night Drake appeared were Country Joe & The Fish. The ‘stop press’
on the flyer announces them for Thursday 21st.<br />
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**Strictly speaking, not a ‘gap year’ as is conventional nowadays,
but a gap nine months. In those days, Oxbridge candidates generally stayed on
for an extra term in the Sixth Form to take the entrance exams for Oxford or
Cambridge. If successful, they would “go up” the following October. (Drake,
having left school in summer 1966, took the Cambridge exam at a crammer in Birmingham.) For the overlap between ‘Alpha Centauri’ and the ‘Chelsea set’, see this <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150310125447/http://www.mezquitadegranada.com/en/entrevistas/entrevista-shaij-abdalhaq.html" target="_blank">interview</a> with Abdalhaqq Bewley.</div>
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***It’s striking how
his English accent rings through, even when covering American material. On
‘Cocaine Blues’, one of the early home demos, he gives the title word a curious
pronunciation. It sounds more like ‘cockaigne’, the land of plenty in medieval
myth.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2115258828268604746.post-23236119515660153192015-09-07T11:58:00.000+01:002015-09-07T11:58:33.604+01:00Naomi Bedford<div class="MsoNormal">
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“Because I’m quite eclectic musically, I needed some kind of
theme to keep me in check.” <b>Naomi
Bedford</b> is talking about her new album <i>A
History Of Insolence</i> and its subtitle ‘<i>Songs
Of Freedom, Dissent And Strife’</i>. It’s the second in a projected trilogy
which began in 2011 with <i>Tales From The
Weeping Willow: Songs Of Murder, Death And Sorrow</i>. “I’m hoping this one is
a bit more uplifting than the last – it does start with ‘freedom’!” As before,
she mixes traditional songs with new compositions, English material with
Americana. Certainly, the eclecticism shines through in a novel mash-up of
‘Gypsy Davy’, in which Naomi ensures a happy ending for the high-born lady who
beds a commoner. “In every version I’ve ever heard, the woman always seems to get
her come-uppance. But in the Woody Guthrie version she keeps her baby, she
stays with the gypsy. Not only that – the gypsy ends up being a musician, which
I thought was kind of cool!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Brighton-based singer had a hit a few years back with
the band Orbital, which led in turn to a couple more ‘techno’ experiments. But
this wasn’t the real Naomi. Her earliest musical loves were the ballads she
learned from her mother. “I always loved the drama of those big, long
storytelling songs. And I was particularly drawn to the more macabre ones, the
juicy murder ones.” Afraid of being pigeon-holed as a ‘dance’ singer, she
embarked on a series of albums which clearly mark her path back to the roots
music she grew up with. Financing them was tough, though. “I’m just a single
mum working as an administrator on really low pay. I’m not a full-time
musician,” she explains. On the last one, friends helped out for free. This
time, there was a grant from Arts Council England. “It costs so much to do it,
and yet making money from music just seems like an absolute impossibility. It’s
so difficult to get your foot in the gigging scene. But if you can’t help
yourself, if you <i>have </i>to create and
write and sing, then you’re going to do it anyway.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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She’s found sympathetic collaborators in Paul Simmonds and
Justin Currie, members of two of her favourite bands. “When I was a teenager, I
was a major Men They Couldn’t Hang fan. I had posters of Paul on my wall. And
posters of Del Amitri – Justin Currie. And now I’ve been working with them on
the last two albums. It’s like my dream come true!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Simmonds’s contribution as songwriter is prominent on the
new album. The standout track is ‘Junktown’, a scabrous political commentary. Simmonds
hesitantly auditioned this “funny little talking blues song” for Naomi in her
kitchen, convinced that no one else would ever want to hear it. Her reaction
was emphatic: “No way! That’s going on the album! I absolutely fell in love
with it, especially the line ‘<i>Dads go
dogging in the pale full moon</i>’. As much as it’s a hard-hitting anger song,
it’s also quite funny.”</div>
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Valuable celebrity endorsement has come from Shirley Collins: “She’s been really supportive.” Whenever Naomi plays on Shirley’s home turf in Lewes, Shirley is sure to come along, and Naomi had the distinction of being one of five artists personally invited to sing at Shirley’s birthday party last year. </div>
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The final album of the trilogy will be about ‘Love, Passion and Devotion’. Naomi was planning to make that one first, but then “we just thought with the state of the nation at the moment – so much going on in the world – it didn’t seem quite right to be doing the Love album now.” Here’s hoping the right time isn’t far off.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">First published in <i><a href="http://www.rock-n-reel.co.uk/">R2 (Rock’n’Reel)</a></i></span></div>
Philip Wardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10533820381398938569noreply@blogger.com0