Eight Miles Higher

Poem: 'Big Society'

2012-01-29T17:55:00.003Z

BIG SOCIETY/

With Apologies To John Sladek,

Who Should Not Be Held Responsible

please select your preferred Big Society from the following checklist:
Big Society as the new Boy Band winners of X-Factor,
Big Society as a warm puppy with a wet nose,
Big Society through whole-grain organic 7-A-Day health,
Big Society sharing the trickle-down wealth,
Big Society living in fear but sharing the pain,
the fully-interactive red-button e-Big iSociety,
the free enterprise privatise ignobly-savaged Big Society,
the brand awareness celebrity-endorsed Big Society franchise,
the welfare-dependent austerity Inner-City Big Society
on an estate between the flyovers (no care-in-this-community),
the orgone energy Super-Hero Big Society in 3D
from ‘Cocaigne’ to cocaine in the ‘Land Of The Blessed’,
Big Society through meditation, breast-augmentation,
reincarnation, good-vibration revelation pipe-dreams,
the global multi-cultural casino capitalism Big Society,
Big Society as Law & Order, Firm but Fair,
Big Society, the seven-fold path,
Big Society as the dictatorship of the proletariat,
the caring Big Society coalition, with tasers,
Big Society in the hands of a jealous god,
Big Society as the radiant city on the hill, in Narnia,
in the Euro-Big Society, in the lost city utopia,
in the mythic castles in the air, the Happy Valley Big Society,
the El Dorado, Erewhon, aspirational nirvana Big Society,
the genetically-modified heavenly earthly-paradise Big Society,
the post-apocalypse post-millennial special relationship Big Society,
the conclave of immortals Big Society,
the ‘less is more’ the ‘yes we can’ Big Society,
Big Society imposed by sentient extraterrestrials
from vast UFO motherships concealed on the dark side of the moon,
Big Society as a tax-exempt multi-ethnic non-domiciled
hub of not more than 400 financiers, clean-cut good-looking,
of surpassing wisdom & in direct contact with the deity
through their intermediary at number 10…

(radically adapted from
‘The Communicants: An Adventure In Management’
by John Sladek, 1969)

Album Review: Tim Buckley Remembered

2012-01-29T16:57:00.006Z

TIM BUCKLEY:

‘PHANTASMAGORIA IN TWO CD’s’

Album Review of:

‘STARSAILOR: THE ANTHOLOGY’

by TIM BUCKLEY

(Rhino Music Club, 2011)

www.demonmusicgroup.co.uk

Tim was the wild card in the singer-songwriter pack. On album sleeves he’s the angel-headed hipster, with clouds of matted curls protectively tousled around his head. The pay-off line to “Song Of The Magician” from his debut LP invites ‘listen to my magic voice’, and it’s a voice that rises plaintively pure with a vocal range spanning all the way from aching baritone to strident tenor. It’s a waltz-time track, and perfect sixties pastoral psych-Folk rhyming ‘as I walk across the sky’ with ‘the clockwork of your eye’ before offering ‘you will be love and your love will live’. Ideally adapted to the wandering Folk-Poet role, Tim is caught soft-focus in a photo-still rainbow haze, the sweet pretty-boy, sensitive, vulnerable and androgynous. A ‘loving vandal’ both precious and precocious. But, as friend and biographer Lee Underwood insists, he was also a fighter. And before he’d properly allowed time to work himself into the troubadour thing, too impatient and creatively restless to allow audiences to catch up, he was the ‘velocity addict’ too, slanting off into other continuums, bending his sound into alternate dimensions of jazz and avant-garde, hunting purer distillations of musical expression. Dylan was allowed periodic reinvention and career-phases. Soon, Bowie would too. While the other Tim – Tim Hardin, had Gary Burton in to embellish his jazzier excursions. But Tim travelled a long way in a short time. Too far and too fast for many.

Born in Washington DC on Valentine’s Day 1947, he and school-friend poet Larry Beckett formed Rock group The Bohemians and played with acoustic folkniks The Harlequins Three while they were still pupils at Anaheim Loara High. By his late teens Tim had moved on to the fringes of the LA Folk circuit. It was there he hooked up with manager Herb Cohen, and found a record company, Jac Holzman’s ultra-cred Elektra. It was Holzman, with Paul A Rothchild (fresh from working with the Doors) who produced Tim’s first album ‘Tim Buckley’ (October 1966) which – like the three that followed, is firmly Folk-rooted in ways that seem supernaturally suspended above the often harsh world beneath him. No-one would want it any other way. “Song Slowly Sung” is virtually moveless, lustrous slivers of electric guitar, a shimmering wash of cymbals, with bare breaths of motion, as skinny and threadbare as his cover-photo. An impossibly romantic declaration in whisper-quiet intimacy aimed at a vision of fleeting loveliness, of beautiful hair and sixteen years. Of the twelve songs, seven were written to Beckett’s poem-lyrics. Although not the failed single, “Wings”, which defines Tim as ‘flying on wings of chance’. The regular Byrdsian jangle-template is only partially offset by Jack Nitzsch’s irritating strings which Elektra insist on, yet the track is elevated by his distinctive voice.

By the time of second-album ‘Goodbye & Hello’ (August 1967, co-produced by Holzman with Jerry Yester) it’s as though something of life’s protective shrink-wrap is coming adrift, he wears a Pepsi bottle-lid like a prosthetic eye for the gatefold cover-shot. Life is getting at him. He was young, but maturing fast, with something of the beautifully pure choirboy of its predecessor eroding in the process. With ten new songs, five written with Larry, it’s his breakthrough LP – peaking no higher than no.171 on the ‘Billboard’ album chart. Larry’s inner liner-notes form an artful acrostic poem to ‘Tracy’. And his lyrics frame the baroque “Goodbye & Hello” itself, one of Tim’s best early songs – a manifesto of sorts, as much innocence as it is experience, its orchestrated segments forming an ambitiously complex structure of switches from mood to mood. You say Goodbye and I say Hello? Not exactly. It was a goodbye to everything false, outmoded, impure, corrupt, the ‘antique people’, the ‘sexless directionless loons’, and a hello to all the coming age has to offer, the ‘new children’ with the new-generation explanation. A goodbye to speed, to Mammon, to murder and to ashes. A hello to the rose, the stream, the rain, and to a girl. And finally a goodbye to America itself, in favour of embracing the world. It’s a major song.

Elsewhere, for the dream-tale of an elusive phantom-girl on the edge of reality, the unusual extended phrasings of “Hallucinations” mirror the shimmering clattering instrumentation. While the instantly attractive troubadour-image of “Carnival Song” is enhanced by the intelligent use of fairground effect. It portrays ‘the singer’ who ‘cries for people’s lies… and for a while you won’t know my name at all’. A harpsichord intro and Carter Collins’ Yardbirds’ pattering congas lead into “Pleasant Street” with Tim’s high almost female voice becoming increasingly strident, rising into falsetto, then deepening into the suggestive descent ‘down, down, down’ in descending chord progression. Here, the Icarus image ‘you thought you were flying, but you opened your eyes and you found yourself falling’, inhabits a kind of symbolist location of twilight lovers and concrete skies. An eerily unreal ‘Desolation Row’, or a similar alternate-zone to label-mates The Doors’ “Love Street”, a place half-mythic escapism, half geographical reality. His most famous song of this period is also from the album. “Morning Glory” – what’s the story? This was also the first Buckley track I ever owned, as part of the ‘Select Elektra’ sampler-compilation – sleeve-notes by an effusive John Peel, on a raft alongside other esoteric out-there artists, Love, Doors, Clear Light, the Incredible String Band. And yes, I was captivated by its big-choir choruses and repeated beseeching pleas to the ‘hobo’. Although the ‘choir’ actually consists of just Tim & Yester’s multi-tracked harmonies. Tim shared manager Herb Cohen with Linda Ronstadt, and her first group, the Stone Poneys, featured some of his songs (on their ‘Vol III’ LP (1968), “Aren’t You The One”, “Wings” – & “Hobo (Morning Glory)” which also features on her 1974 ‘Different Drum’ compilation). She told ‘Zig-Zag no.65’ that ‘that song was about our house, you know… the first house I lived in when I moved to LA was in Ocean Park – this groovy little beach house, which I really loved. Anyway, after I moved out, Tim moved in… and he wrote “Morning Glory” about it’. Well, maybe. On his live ‘Dream Letters’ album Tim himself introduces the song as being about ‘a hobo beaten up outside of Dallas, Texas’.

Again, “Morning Glory” was written with Beckett, but it was a partnership that continued more sporadically from now on. Tim intended his voice to be more than just a vehicle to carry lyrics. Instead, his head should serve his heart, the better to feed his more Dionysian side. In total, the more cerebral Beckett – ‘The Word’, would remain a presence on all but three Buckley albums. Of course, lyrics are vital. I’ve always related to songs through their lyric content. Does the exact ratio of input matter? After all, Brian Wilson didn’t remotely understand what his lyricist Van Dyke Parks was getting at with all that ‘sunny-down snuff it’s alright’ stuff, but that doesn’t stop “Heroes & Villains” being a great single. Buckley wrote lyrics too, but maybe it was the fact that initially it was Beckett who was responsible for the words that freed Tim up to concentrate on the more musical aspects of the sound. And at last, it was time for Tim to go with what his senses were telling him. After all, it was the richness and variety of his vocal delivery that did much to establish his reputation. Not so much a voice, more an instrument in its own right, an instrument of incredible range and sweetness. To Robert Shelton of the ‘New York Times’ he was ‘not quite a counter-tenor but a tenor to counter with’. Where Tim did write, he wrote with considerable personal power. With the fierce, urgent Stephen Stills-style strummed-intensity of “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” (on ‘Goodbye & Hello’) he portrays himself as the ‘scoundrel father’ vehemently disclaiming responsibility for the wife and child he’d left to pursue his muse. Even though it shares melodic changes with Chet Powers’ “Let’s Get Together”, his drive is assertive and free, combining pathos and transcendent emotion, his voice soaring with new strength, power and grace. So why the marital parting? because, after all, he was young, talented, bursting with music. But, more eloquently and concise, because ‘I can’t swim your waters, and you can’t walk my lands’. She was Pisces, the water-sign.

And if the next LP (‘Happy Sad’, July 1969, produced by Yester with his Lovin’ Spoonful partner Zal Yanovsky) is the product of experience, it’s as if, not much liking the world outside, Tim was opting to retract into the various warmths the Californian life-style had to offer. Commercially, it went further, all the way up to no.81. And there are new influences. A Miles Davis ‘Kind Of Blue’ track directly inspired “Strange Feelin’” with its resonant stand-up bass and sweetly chiming vibraphones. With space for a follow-on to his earlier theme too. The terminally-slow “Dream Letter” is a more apologetic ode to wife Mary Guibert, and infant son Jeff, the lyrics lamenting ‘is he a soldier, or is he a dreamer?’ and ‘does he ever ask about me?’ In fact it would be over five years before Buckley spent time with his son again. While the song-name would be used to sub-title the posthumously issued album recorded ‘Live In London 1968’ (May 1990, Enigma), using much the same personnel, including David Friedman’s chiming vibraphone. Segueing into “Happy Time” the live “Dream Letter” is one of the set’s most moving tracks. Meanwhile, a further album – ‘Blue Afternoon’ (November 1969) took Tim onto Straight, a label set up by Cohen with Frank Zappa, with Tim’s own production, and (like ‘Happy Sad’) all his own songs, untempered by Larry Beckett’s creative input. “Chase The Blues Away” is a meandering Blues with moody bass interplay which dissolves into shade-textured sound beyond lyric or melody, while “Café” is all smoky languid slurred voice offset by Tim’s twelve-string guitar, and a lyric portraying himself as ‘just a curly-haired mountain-boy on my way passing through’. Then a couplet from “Happy Time” encapsulates one of his finest expressions of the carefree creative process, ‘it’s a happy time inside my mind, when a melody does find a rhyme’.

Yet the next phase of his career charts him moving towards John Coltrane-style jazz on ‘Lorca’ (May 1970) and ‘Starsailor’ (November 1970), two albums recorded during the same months and issued within six months of each other. “Lorca” is strange, not easily accessible, downright unlistenable in places – even while you admire his high-wire juggling bravery in performing it. The obvious literary title-reference to Andalusian ‘gipsy-poet’ Federico Garcia Lorca signposts the impressionistic free-form fades into abstraction. Although the shifting chromatics of “I Had A Talk With My Woman” retains an attractive informality, from the ‘alright?’ intro to the conversational fade. He croons ‘I wanna sing it high, and sing it down low’ his voice contouring it accordingly, with his flattened and elongated vocals stretched across his two-octave range. Another long-term associate, guitarist and later Rock journalist and Buckley biographer Lee Underwood, plays on nine of his albums. Older than Tim, it was he who mentored his taste towards Roland Kirk, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus and Olivier Messiaen, as well as Lorca. Moving into what Underwood terms ‘sonic textures above and beyond conventional words and melodies’. With former Mothers of Invention woodwind-player Bunk Gardner on board, and the return of Larry Beckett – absent for the last few albums, ‘Starsailor’ takes it further.

The title-track itself opens with dissonant voices recalling Berio or Gyorgy Ligeti, then shoves conventional song-structure out through the airlock, so the atonal clusters and arrhythmic counterpoints of its flexible tempo are deformed by quantum effects. Here, whirling within its subatomic particle-spins, you glimpse the music of the spheres, a continuum where ‘circuits shiver’ and ‘oblivion carries me on his shoulder’. Yet it’s here, on the same album, that Tim’s best-known piece – the haunting “Song To The Siren” is located, its poignant displaced atmospherics charting spectral Odyssian imagery as his lower-register vocals push bizarre voice-tricks to extremes. Oddly, it appeared in the final episode of ‘The Monkees’ TV show screened on March 25, 1968, but it’s likely through the ethereal This Mortal Coil version etched by Elizabeth Fraser’s remarkable voice-interpretation that it achieved its greatest cross-generational recognition, laying renewed veneers to the Tim Buckley legend. On “Jungle Fire” his voice is deeper, more grittily resonant, interspersed by unexpected vocal swoops. “Come Here Woman” is another exercise in the manipulation of sound and voice-acrobatics. Then listen to “I Woke Up” with its muted Miles Davis-style horn, and “Healing Festival” with a roaring Free-Jazz horn blowing and dissonant backing voices, to appreciate what journalist Lillian Roxon means. She says that ‘nothing in Rock, Folk-Rock, or anything else prepares you for a Tim Buckley album, and it’s funny to hear his work described as Blues, modified Rock & Roll, and Raga-Rock when, in fact, there is no name yet for the places he and his voice go’. In a live context too, his shows were becoming increasingly unstructured, more intuitive. Dropping rehearsals so as to become less pre-conceived, less mind-music.

These free-form scat diversions provoked mixed reactions, and ‘Greetings From L.A.’ (October 1972) saw further metamorphosis, turning Tim towards more accessible urban R&B styles, singing of lust rather than romance. “Move With Me” shifts dubiously into the more fleshy concerns of dirty-sex Funk and infidelity. Adopting this new, less cherubic identity he ambles down to the ‘meat-rack tavern’ with sensual intent in mind. A black woman is drinking alone, ‘what a waste of sin’. Girl back-up vocalists soulfully croon around honking sax as he offers to be her ‘back-door man’. Until her real man arrives, he ‘filled up the doorway’ and bounces poor Tim all the way down the stairs, breaking every bone in his body, but – hey, it was worth every second because ‘I loved me a black woman’. Whether the comic-absurdity of this Bukowski-like low-life tale is what you expect from the romantic promise of earlier Tim Buckley albums is something else entirely. But he extends it into “Make It Right” by pleading ‘beat me, whip me, spank me’. Beyond the scope of this 2CD anthology, ‘Sefronia’ (1973, on another Cohen-Zappa label, DiscReet) is a synthesis of this later hard-edged style with the earlier more lyrical singing, including his well-liked covers of Fred Neil’s “Dolphins” and a maudlin “Martha” from the pen of Tom Waits, another Herb Cohen client. Then ‘Look At The Fool’ (November 1974, DiscReet Records).

But for Buckley his adventuring style-shifts had served only to confound and confuse fans and press alike. In his own words, he’d ‘been out fighting wars that the world never knew about’ (“Dream Letter”), serving only to blur his identity, leading to declining sales and ultimately the heroin o/d snowball that killed him. He died on 19 June 1975 in Los Angeles. It sounds trite to say he never sold out. That he followed his muse relentlessly with scant regard to hits or radio-plays. If chart success had been an option, he’d probably have taken it. On his own terms. There was no shortage of pretenders to the Wandering Folk-Poet role he epitomised so well on his first album-trilogy, yet it was the later extreme-detours that makes Tim Buckley stand out from that crowd. He’d come a long way in a short time. Too far and too fast for many. In “Strange Feelin’” he portrays himself as ‘a lonely guitar-picker with a wicked wandering eye’, one who will ‘make you happy, then he’ll leave’, but once he’s gone ‘there’s a song in your heart, and I don’t think it’s gonna leave’. Well, he’s gone, and the songs are still here. Now, with the advantage of perspective and within the context of this fine anthology, his restless changes make more sense.

TIM BUCKLEY:

HELLO… & GOODBYE

Singles:
“Aren’t You The Girl” c/w “Strange Street Affair Under Blue” (Elektra EKSN45008)
“Morning Glory” c/w “Knight Errant” (Elektra EKSN45018)
“Once I Was” c/w Phantasmagoria In Two” (Elektra EKSN45023)
“Pleasant Street” (Elektra EKSN 45041)
“Wings” c/w “I Can’t See You” (Elektra EKSN 45031)

individual tracks on:
“Morning Glory” on ‘Select Elektra’ (Elektra EUK261) 1967
“Phantasmagoria In Two” on ‘Begin Here’ (Elektra EUKS 7262) May 1969

LP’s:
‘Tim Buckley’ (Elektra EKS74004) review in ‘Record Mirror’ says ‘this curly-headed avant-garde young singer must soon be a rival to both Dylan and Donovan’

‘Goodbye & Hello’ (Elektra EKS74028) review in ‘Record Mirror’ says ‘backing sounds fit well into the comfortable yet slightly disturbing pattern of music. His voice changes from the soothing to the near-falsetto’

‘Happy Sad’ (Elektra EKS74045)

‘Lorca’ (Elektra EKS74074)

‘Blue Afternoon’ (Straight STS1060) review in ‘Zig-Zag’ says ‘he’s been wallowing in a well of self-pity for so long that he seems unable to crawl out even for one song’ Mike Simmons
‘Starsailor’ (Straight STS1064)

‘Greetings From LA’ (Warner Bros K46176)

‘Sefronia’ (DiscReet K49201, reissued on Demon CD-EDCD277) ‘Q’ review ‘squeezing that anarchic voice into straightforward funkrock stylings, sounding like Tom Jones against a Philadelphia soul backing’ Lucy O’Brien

‘Look At The Fool’ (DiscReet K59204, reissued on Demon CD-EDCD294) ‘NME’ review ‘riffs as opposed to songs, constant displays of verbal overkill and a kind of overall obnoxiousness of purpose and attitude. I find parts of this album too offensive to be listened to more than once. Buckley even does a ‘Louie Louie’ spin-off called ‘Wanda Lu’ which is too moronic even for its prototype’

‘Dream Letters: Live In London 1968’ (Demon Fiend 200, Manifesto PT3 40703C) recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Pentangle’s Danny Thompson standing in on double-bass, features seven unrecorded songs including “Hi Lily Hi Lo” which ‘Q’ says ‘is sung like a wayward choirboy testing the limits of a new-found toy’, issued August 1990

‘The Peel Sessions’ (Strange Fruit CD-SFPCD82) recorded 1968, with “Morning Glory”, “Coming Home To You”, “Sing A Song For You”, “Hallucinations/Troubadour” & “Once I Was”, issued September 1991

‘Live At The Troubadour 1969’ (Manifesto PT3 40705) with “Gypsy Woman” & “Driftin’”
‘Honeyman’ (Edsel EDCD 450, 1995) live New York radio sessions recorded in November 1973 of songs largely from ‘Sefronia’ & ‘Greetings From L.A.’, with “Dolphins’, “Get On Top” plus “Buzzin Fly” and “Pleasant Street”. ‘Mojo’ says ‘Tim Buckley was blessed. He had a voice that could burn ice and freeze flames. Put him in a ring with Janis and Otis and he’d’ve whupped them both with one octave tied behind his back’ – Rob Steen

A much-expanded version of a review published in:
‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.31 Jan/Feb’ (UK – January 2012)

Live: Adam Faith & The Roulettes, 1963

2012-01-28T21:30:00.003Z

‘COS IT’S THE FIRST TIME,

I’VE FELT THIS WAY…’:

ADAM FAITH & THE ROULETTES

Adam Faith was one of Britain’s pioneer Rock stars.

Then, when the Merseybeat explosion of 1963 threatened the

established pantheon of Pop, he was smart enough to enjoy

a brief second career by fronting his own Beat Group – the

Roulettes. During the long hot Summer of 1963 they played the

Bridlington ‘Winter Gardens’ Theatre together… and I was there…

The ‘Winter Gardens’ was located a little way north of the Bridlington town centre along the High Street. After opening in 1928, at various times it operated as a cinema and dancehall as well as a theatre for live shows. The summer season for 1963 was a family variety show called ‘It’s A Grand Night’, opening 24th June. We went… as a family. Adam Faith had been around awhile before his big breakthrough. He'd worked with The Worried Men Skiffle Group, done the ‘Drumbeat’ Pop show and issued a series of flop singles. It was only once he was enhanced by John Barry’s pizzicato strings that he exploded onto the Pop scene with “What Do You Want”, “Someone Else’s Baby” and “Poor Me”, hits characterised by his curiously accented phrasing which enunciated the lyrics ‘vat do you vant if you don’t vant mony’. Could it be he was foreign. No. He was Terry Nelhams from Acton in London. His voice was an essentially weak instrument with limited range, but whoever said you needed vocal strength to be a Pop star? Character is more important, and in that respect, he more than compensated.

After that first year of hits, spanning 1960, a little momentum was lost. He toured, did TV, had hits that simmered rather than dominated, and while he remained a star in the Pop galaxy, it seemed his shelf-life was diminishing. By all the logics of show-biz the sudden unprecedented uproar of the Beatles, followed by the deluge of northern beat groups should have confirmed his decline, as it did for so many others. Certainly his first few releases of 1963 seemed to indicate as much – “What Now” got no higher than no.31 in January while “Walkin’ Tall” did slightly better by stalling just outside the twenty at no.23 in July. Yet everything was to change, and it changed around the time I was sitting there in the ‘Winter Gardens’ auditorium watching the summer show. With the contrivance of his powerful manager, Eve Taylor, Adam had recruited his own beat group back-up. They did separate sets, then closed the show together. From Hertforshire the Roulettes were a smartly suited four-piece with all the essential attributes of the new thing. Lead guitarist Russ Ballard wore dark glasses and played a big red guitar, Pete Salt and John Rodgers carried – respectively, their rhythm and bass guitars at chest-high, like Lennon or Gerry Marsden did. Rob Henrit played drums. And collectively, they rocked. Adam’s solo set was well-stocked with hits. He had plenty to draw on, catchy Pop, done show-biz light. Personable, radiating smiles, he sat on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling, to sing “Lonesome” to the front row, investing the slight song with considerable intimacy. He’d always never quite fitted into the brylcreme-slick bouffant template of the pin-up mag Teenage Idols anyway, his blonde hair was combed into a French college-boy fringe long before the Beatles rocked the world by doing the same. And he’d featured in an early British beatnik movie called ‘Beat Girl’ which is now something of a cult curio. The Roulettes set displayed their easy mastery of group dynamics and close harmonies. Even my mother was impressed, ‘they’re just like the groups you see on TV’.

As the summer season ended the partnership’s debut single was unleashed, and – written by Chris Andrews, “The First Time” c/w “So Long Baby” returned Adam to the Top Five and gave the Roulettes their first taste of chart success. Did they perform it the night I was there? Memory tells me yes. They were using the live opportunity to rehearse and test out audience reactions to their joint venture. So it seems highly likely they did. I certainly bought the single soon after. The crashing guitars, the Roulettes raucous interrogation – ‘is it love, that you feel?’, Adam protesting ‘I don’t know-oh-wow, ‘cos it’s the first time, I’ve felt this way’. His thin quavering vocals punched out by their more muscular back-up, provided a reinvention of his career. It proved to be the first of a further run of hits to carry Adam Faith safely through 1964, extending his Pop relevance sufficiently to subsequently launch him into new ventures. “We Are In Love” c/w “Made For Me” in December 1963, “If He Tells You” c/w “Talk To Me” in March, and “I Love Being In Love With You” c/w “It’s Alright” in May – the ‘B’-side bizarrely providing them with their only American hit, caught up in the frenzy of the English Invasion it reached a US no.31 in February 1965.

Chris Andrews later went on to write hits for Sandie Shaw, and launch his own Pop celebrity with “Yesterday Man”. While the Roulettes swiftly spun-off their own recording career as early as 1963 with “Soon You’ll Be Leaving Me” c/w “Tell Tale Tit”, and although they followed it with covers of the Miracles “Tracks Of My Tears” and Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind Of Fellow” the breakthrough hit never happened. Although their punningly-titled album ‘Stake & Chips’ (Parlophone, October 1965) is now highly sought-after by retro collectors, and despite their October 1965 single “The Long Cigarette” c/w “Junk” being heavily air-played on the pirate radio stations, and still working pretty impressively. Bassist John Rodgers died in an autowreck in 1964, but Russ Ballard and Pete Salt went on to work with the recording back-up to Unit 4+2, and toured with later incarnations of the hit-making group… before joining Rod Argent and Chris White as part of the highly-rated 1970’s prog-Rock group Argent. The ‘Winter Gardens’ is no longer there. It was made over into the ‘Leisure World’ water-park. But yes, in balance, the time Adam Faith & The Roulettes played Bridlington was ‘A Grand Night’.

Book Review: Colin Greenland's 'Mother Of Plenty'

2012-01-28T21:15:00.006Z

Book Review of:

‘MOTHER OF PLENTY’

by COLIN GREENLAND

(Voyager ISBN 0-00-649907-4 £5.99, 1998)

‘My name is Plenty, Plenty O’Toole’ says the girl in the Bond movie. ‘Named after your Father perhaps?’ muses 007 suavely. Well – actually, no, this Plenty is an organic Starship resembling ‘the shell of a tortoise, the bun of a hamburger, or a human brain.’ A giant ship built – or perhaps spun from insect spittle, by the alien Frasque. And ‘giant’ as in WOW! It’s directly related to the one used by Channel 5’s bizarre ‘Lexx’ crew, but not quite, and it’s inhabited by a bewildering array of part-comic part-malevolent otherworldly grotesques. Luna-born bargee Tabitha Jute encounters Plenty adrift in Earth orbit, activates it by jacking her modem bio-chip Buddy ‘persona’ Alice Liddel into its stardrive, and thereby crashes the ‘probability fault’ that is hyper-space. ‘Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know’ quips Brother Melodious, quoting Grace Slick, and…

The trouble with trilogies is that they come in three parts. Except ‘Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’, which is famously a trilogy in four parts. Or Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ trilogy – seven volumes and still on-going despite its creator’s timely death. And much of the rich and beautiful chaos of Jute’s idiosyncratic cosmology got partially decoded in Colin Greenland’s first two Plenty volumes (‘Take Back Plenty’ and ‘Seasons Of Plenty’). By book three the Xtasy Crew, the Horde of the Havok Khan (dreadlocked battlebikers), a ‘codehead’ Datapunk called Jone, Iogo the Thrant, Xtasca the rogue cherub, and the Meat Miners who quarry the great purple Star Beast, have all fetched up unexpectedly in the bloated double-sunned Capella star system. And among the on-board menagerie are two main races. The Frasque, who are twiggy six-legged hydrangeas. And the brain parasite Capellans themselves, the self-styled ‘most advanced race in the Galaxy’ who resemble ‘giant blue caterpillars who squat uninvited in people’s heads’. They are ‘dead humans infested by parasite worms. Dead meat that walks and speaks and enforces its speaking with magic rings. It is vile’. ‘You only want us for our bodies’ protests the Priestess Queen of the Seraphim in coy double-entendre. ‘They are the best bodies’ replies Brother Melodious Metz whose blue suede boots float 15 clear centimetres above the ground, and who has a ‘grotesquely enlarged cranium’ due to his Capellan inside-kick. ‘Fucking Worm-Head’ says Jute. But which race predominates? Which one has highjacked Plenty forty-light years and a ‘long bad dream’ from its original intended jump to Proxima Centauri, and why? What of the Seraphim, those strange techno-deities, architects of Autoplastic Metamorphosis and decadent post-human supremacists? What will Grant Nothing do with his new clone-body grown for his severed head? And what happens when the Star Beast wakes?

Colin Greenland’s first book, ‘The Entropy Exhibition’ (1983) was an academic dissertation on New Wave SF, which would infer a preoccupation with innovation, radical prose experiments, and gimmicked-up conceptual games. Not so. Tabitha Jute might be Tank Girl by other means, the predominantly female characters menstruate and have lesbian sex, and at times it’s a gloriously lavish Girl Power Hitchhikers Guide, but the Plenty trilogy has its roots sunk directly into Space Opera’s wide-screen extravaganza, complete with the future-shock absorbers of humour. This is a brightly coloured ‘fractel porridge’ graphic novel of a novel, extravagantly and playfully absurd, sketched in with luminous crayola. ‘Plenty’s garish imagery and decorous dialogue meticulously interact at a leisurely pace in which eyes glisten ‘like dark moist eggs’, cables dangle ‘like mating snakes’, ‘scattered blood clashes unpleasantly with the pink and orange decor’, and Boaz speaks like ‘concrete setting’, but it’s seen from multiply-specied perspectives, so it holds fascination through each gradual procession of incidents. Ideas go off like novas more brilliant than exploding suns. Brethren and Sistren, as Marco Metz would say, in the name of the Lord Elvis Almighty, this is a fiction of fabulously delineated character-sketched weirdness in meticulously skewed mindscapes.

Published in:
‘GIG CENTRAL Vol.6 No.4: Dec’ (UK - Dec 1998)
‘THE ZONE no.7’ (UK - Jan 1999)

Simon Clark's 'Blood & Grit 21'

2012-01-01T19:46:00.003Z

'BLOOD AND GRIT 21'

Short stories by

SIMON CLARK

‘Why is it called Skinner Lane? Why … because

that’s where something called the Skinner lives’

Internationally renowned horror novelist Simon Clark returns to his roots with a new edition of Blood and Grit, the short story collection that launched his career twenty-one years ago. Together with all six original tales, Blood and Grit 21 features the haunting ‘… Beside the Seaside …’, Simon’s first professional sale, while a brand new story takes us back to the iconic ‘Skinner Lane’. In a new illustrated afterword, Simon recounts how the original book came about and reveals the locations that inspired its stories. Last but not least, this new edition includes the original foreword by Andrew Darlington, who also provides a brand new introduction that’s a rousing celebration of Simon’s career to date.

Contents:
Simon Clark: Nailed to the Genre

(Foreword to the new edition by Andrew Darlington)
Blood and Grit
Raising the Chill Factor

(Foreword to the first edition by Andrew Darlington)
Skinner Lane
Out From Under
Over Run
Bite Back
Revelling in Brick
Sex, Savagery and Blood, Blood, Blood
Extras
Twenty-One Years Later – Afterword by Simon Clark
… Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea …
21 Skinner Lane

In Paperback or iBookstore format

Screenshots

http://www.bloodandgrit.com/

Poem: 'Angels Of Anarchy'

2011-12-30T13:47:00.004Z

ANGELS OF ANARCHY /

LEARNING TO LIVE

WITH FRAGMENTATION

“she is standing on my eyelids

...she sinks into my shadow

like a pebble against the sky”

(from “Capitals De La Douleur”

by Paul Eluard - 1926)

watching
the moon rise over the Headrow
with blood caking my sleeves &
hair dark tangles of sweat & scum,
moon coming up from the bottom of the sea
while the sun’s still stitched to the sky,
from double shadows I see gravity
and tides gobbling at the horizon,
an afternoon’s shoplifting and when
I wake crabs are crawling from my mouth,
the smell of dead pigeons hangs in the dust
& all exits are blocked

in the red light from the dashboard
my mistress hands me the knife,
she wears a carnelian in her fly, her
needle extracts the moth from my tongue
where its eggs are laid beneath my skin,
the moon sheds blood over the Headrow
while I dissolve in double shadows

I extract the eggs beginning with
my female parts, & we split the tips,
dragged into marble-white moonlight,
she reaches out her hand to pluck my heart
beating and pumping blood where it’s
grooved by her 6” nails,
I dissolve in her breath

watching
the moons rise over the Headrow
where the street is on fire and
blood seeps under every door,
the smell of dead pigeons
hangs in the dust ...

Published in:
‘NO no.7’ (USA - October 1988)
‘GRUE MAGAZINE no.11’ (USA - Nov 1989)
‘TEMPUS FUGIT no.2’ (Belgium - Feb 1990)
‘POWER LINES’ (Personal Chapbook / Unibird Publ) (Oct 1988 -UK)
‘THE RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY: THE BEST SF POETRY OF 1990 CHOSEN BY THE SF POETRY ASSOC’ (USA - October 1991)
and ‘EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR’ Hilltop Press (UK-Oct 2000)

Live: Blur at Temple Newsam Park, 2002

2011-12-29T15:00:00.003Z

‘A VERY BIG HOUSE IN

THE COUNTRY... WHERE

THE BRIT-BRATS BLUR...!’

BLUR (and friends)

at Temple Newsam Park, Leeds

Perhaps he read the interview too. You know, the one where Noel Gallagher tries to nail the BritPop Wars forever. Oasis, he brags, still play “Roll With It” live. Blur, by contrast, are too embarrassed to do “House In The Country” any more. ‘Nuff said. Perhaps Damon Albarn read that interview. Because tonight... Blur do “House In The Country”, ‘there’s a Big Country House over there, in’it? So it’d be stupid not to do it’. And indeed there is, Temple Newsam’s huge Tudor-Jacobean monstrosity. But if you think you remember Blur first time round, you’re probably wrong. Damon wears a blue M&S shirt with a LATE NIGHTS logo. An anti-statement. Alex James manages an image from Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Hang It On Your Heart’. And they’ve got a horn section too. But Stadium Rock? Naw. Life’s not long enough for songs over three minutes. And together they contrive an endearingly deliberate low-fi ‘if I had a set-list I’d know what was going on...’ dumbing-down clear through to the line of incandescent thunderflashes irradiating the night, immaculately timed to the OOO-OOO’s of “Song No.2”.

Call me a ‘professional cynic’, but it occurs to me that this could, perhaps this should be the Stone Roses on stage tonight. Back in the arse-end of the 1980’s, with Blur as baggy also-rans scraping a chart presence with “There’s No Other Way” (no.8. 18th May ‘91), and Noel Gallagher Roadying for Inspiral Carpets, it’s the Roses luminous harmonies that most clearly define the future. But as Ian Brown / John Squire’s band get hung up in various legal limbo’s, and the Inspirals implode when their ex-Roadie begins selling more records than they do, leaving only a chalk outline in Indie-Pop, Blur merely persevere. Probably all that’s now consigned to the musical equivalent of adolescent fumbling in each others underwear, but long after we’d given up on Blur, they never gave up on us. And, just a thought, but if Noel had offered “Supersonic” to his then-employers instead of to his ‘kid’s’ band, could it be Tim Hingley chatting to Tony Blair at no.10, and ‘Be Here Now’ by Inspiral Carpets? Perhaps not. In the meantime, beneath all that purposeful negative-imagery, it’s Blur that catch the pulse. Their mindlessly contagious Euro-Disco take on ‘Love in the 90s’ is given extra-texture by their seeing it as opportunistic hedonism numbing the ‘avoiding all work’ because ‘there’s none available’ angst. Perhaps they’re not that good, but they’re not that bad either. Like the Kinks, or perhaps Madness, they can sometimes, almost incidentally, freeze-frame the temperature of what it’s like to be English at this exact moment now, in all its dull desperation and raging calm.

Meanwhile, is this the way the future feels? 40,000 people in one field? There’s so much sweat it’s a soakfest. But there’s that English politeness too. Still. That ‘excuse me’ ‘Oh, sorry pardon’ thing even to the height of the crush. Sure – there’s Wayne and Waynetta’s as well. ‘It’s a sign of the times, girl, says the song on the radio’. If we listened to that kind of song. Which, of course, we don’t. Indie fans are obsessive, oddly inflexible and rigid, with peculiar personal habits. They’re a strange, unpredictable and highly tribal bunch. Normal is what everyone else is, and you’re not. Not. So it’s great fun to be rude about them. Earlier, Stereophonics go for sex, drugs and oral hygiene. They do “More Life In A Tramp’s Vest” in three-way stereo, then “A Thousand Trees”, to close with Kelly Jones’ rousing ‘LEEDS UNITED FOR THE PREMIER LEAGUE!’ Er – aren’t Leeds United already in the Premier League, or is that a sly dig implying that their status there is at risk? Not that the assembled Shiny Happy People seem to care. While working that out we watch Hurricane #1, harder than Andy Bell’s former Ride, with their “Faces In A Dream” raging routine power-chord Rock. Then they do “Chain Reaction” – ‘I saw my baby crying / I told her, baby, don’t cry’. Pimple-brained advice direct from the Claire Rayner handbook of human relationships. If the lyrical intelligence quota falls much lower we can plant it in a hanging basket and feed it Baby Bio.

Until Blur open with the hard minimal riff of “Beetlebum”, the sound that dragged them from that strange kind of Old Sit-Com going the way of old Rock Bands retrophilia, into the warped present. Someone says ‘she sucks your thumb / and makes you come’ – why thumb? Because ‘cock’ doesn’t rhyme. If you think you remember Blur first time round, you’re probably wrong. Tonight they’re bitter-sweet symphonies of flavour, a treat and a disappointment at the same time. They do “Stereotype”, “MOR”, “VIP”, then go as far back as “Albert” from an album Damon mis-titles ‘Modern Life Is A Load Of Shit’ (1993), and back even further to an unexpectedly powerful “Sing” from their debut long-player (‘Leisure’ 1991). Until ‘one of those sad love songs’, turns into “The Universal” done with full glitterball effect. And on... “Parklife” might now be Nike-ad TV-Bubblegum with an Eric Cantona walk-on. And you can call me a ‘professional cynic’. But Blur at Temple Newsam? I’ll just say definitely. Maybe.

Published in:
‘CREATIVE TALES no.11’ (UK - July 2002)

Book Review: 'Slow Chocolate Autopsy' by Iain Sinclair & Dave McKean

2011-12-28T20:11:00.003Z

Book Review of:

‘SLOW CHOCOLATE

AUTOPSY’

by IAIN SINCLAIR & DAVE McKEAN

(Phoenix House ISBN 1-861590-88-1

£16.99 - £9.99 p/back)

Fragmentation. Bi-mediality. A spread of forms. These are events in the lives of Norton. Norton or ‘Notron’. As in ‘Not Ron’. The text is spattered and ripped with graphic novel extracts. The graphic novel spliced and intercut with intrusions of text. Norton comes adrift in time. But is trapped by it. He’s there in Deptford (or Debt-ford, as in ‘till Deptford us do part’) for Christopher Marlowe’s death. Then he’s there in the East End for Jack The Hat’s brutal murder. The cover-blurb says so. The plot is less direct. More apparitional. Packed with ill-defined moments caught in entropy enclosures, where ‘a weasel crunching a mouse’s skull is amplified into a collision of icebergs’. And it is self-aware in the post-modern way of things, as Norton rehearses ‘the instructions he will have to write, so that McKean will be able to make a sequence of drawings... a stutter of frames’, or when he puzzles over ‘how to muzzle Anthony Burgess’ (who also did a factional Marlowe). His London is an unedited city, fit only for Comic-Book fiction or Direct-to-Video movies. And he transcribes everything. What he calls ‘the trivia of the real’. The Dysfunks, Petty Crims, Chaos Punters, Sewage Surfers, and even esoteric angles on the Mayans take on football as a ‘fate game reflecting demonic cosmology’. While the text spreads to weave around the lives that intersect Norton’s. Lives that use him as a nexus. For them there is no Last Exit from Deptford.

Norton is also a drug-dealer’s alias lifted from William Burroughs ‘Junkie’. A final collage reproduces a page of the Beat Generational docu-novel as a Lit clue. Other references include the unacknowledged use of Bob Shaw’s ‘Slow Glass’ as ‘light came out of him at the wrong speed’. There’s probably more I’ve missed. Iain Sinclair is a poet. You can tell. He writes lines like ‘each breath is a sucking sound. A criminal thirst drinking roses from the flapping wallpaper of memory bedrooms’. Stuff like that. Dense and rich with layers of multiplicity. He did ‘The Kodak Mantra Diaries’ in London in cahoots with Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Burroughs had some sex together. They’re both dead now. Norton is still a time-surfing echo drifting in and out of texts and decades. McKean, a some-time Neil Gaiman accomplice, has a charge-sheet that runs from Tori Amos album sleeves all the way to Batman’s ‘Arkham Asylum’. And he’s Sinclair’s perfect foil, sampling and sound-biting his art into precision-blurring treated assemblages that dazzle and confuse. Like the prose it interrupts. This is a novel. But it is one of fragmentation. Bi-mediality. And a spread of forms.

Published in:
‘LATERAL MOVES no.22: Camp Issue’ (UK - August 1998)

In The Nursery CD: 'Groundloop' (2000)

2011-12-28T18:34:00.007Z

CD Review of:

‘GROUNDLOOP’

by IN THE NURSERY

(2000, ITN Corp 002/ EFA CD 70122-2

http://www.inthenursery.com/)

‘Groundloop’ is 43:10mins of intelligent Twenty-First Century widescreen sound-sequencing with a blade-to-flesh sensory edge, as far beyond Philip’s Glassy chill-out as it is above William’s Orbit. The stark acoustic neo-classical precision of “Imparator” leads into subliminal cyber-moods and darker things beyond, through the noirishly morbid Left Bank frigidity of “Qui Mal” and the sophisticated diseased decadence of “Hymn Noir”, to the submerged digital abstraction, glacial strings and beautiful desolation of “Synature”.

ITN are survivors of that same Sheffield-industrial Funk circuit responsible for early incarnations of Moloko (as Chakk) and All-Seeing Eye. But since their formation in 1981 – and their debut mini-album two years later, identical twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone have stayed truer than most to their vision, while extending out way beyond its original confines. Coasting technology’s curve they’ve produced multi-layered cinematic soundscapes fusing ambient to dance, through collaborators as diverse as Andrew Weatherall and occult writer Colin Wilson. Produced experimental album such as ‘Lingua’, exploring the universal language interfacing phonetics to sonics, while naturally extending into film trailers and soundtracks for the likes of CH5’s late-night cult ‘La Femme Nikita’, ‘Rainmaker’, and ‘Random Hearts’ as well as Euro-Arthouse projects, BFI commissions and Optical Music scores for Expressionist silent-movie classics (‘Dr Caligari’).

So while their electro-roots seem still discernible behind the fragments of ripped dialogue on “Displaced” in David Elektrik’s swirling Cabaret Voltairesque “Yashar” drum-programming, or the martial percussion and evocative Spanish voice-overs to “Chronicle”, their conceptual glaze of intense orchestral classicism has now elevated its own unnerving beauty on up to the next level. Lushly symphonic instrumentals get augmented by atmospheric vocals from linguist Dolores Marguerite C, with electro strings on the ‘loop and edit in surround’ title-track, and “Allegory” – which sets poems from the ‘Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam, to exquisitely tragic keyboards. While eastern rhythms insidiously infiltrate your brain in silver shivers, they morph into eye-contact with seductive voice-overs soft enough to break your heart, ‘unborn tomorrows and dead yesterdays / why fret about them if today be sweet?’ ITN is an acid-chilling sweetness. Yet undeniably rich.

'Angel Body & Other Magic For The Soul'

2011-12-13T02:21:00.002Z

In case you missed it first time round, the BBR speculative fiction anthology 'Angel Body' is half price on Amazon UK for the next 7 days: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1872588050/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new Described by Paul Di Filippo (Asimov's SF) as "one of the best original anthologies of the year", it contains an introduction by David Memmott, stories by Don Webb, Andrew Darlington, Lance Olsen, Brian Evenson, Thomas Wiloch, Ernest Hogan, Scott Edelman, W. Gregory Stewart, Mark Rich, Tom Whalen, Lorraine Schein, Mark Bilokur, Misha Nogha, Denise Dumars, Conger Beasley Jr, and Bruce Boston, plus poetry by Lee Ballentine, Nathan Whiting, Steve Sneyd, Dan Raphael, Sandra Lindow, and John Noto. Offer ends next Monday 19 December 2011.

Amazon.co.uk: Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul
www.amazon.co.uk

POEM: 'Data Transmission Networks On Heat'

2011-11-30T04:20:00.003Z

DATA TRANSMISSION

NETWORKS ON HEAT

/ FRACTEL IMAGERY :
FRACTURED TEXTS

stairs are psychic,
their cult of violence
disfigures history

telephones ring
only discreetly,
perspire in free fall
and learn new dance steps

japanese cars
are cathedrals
preaching from
luminous showrooms,
their time-lapse photos
show cells of slime-mould

deserted garages
collapse into themselves
where the sunlight is different,
with gobs of tennis,
tides of femalos, and
stretches of beach that turn
pastel in time-lapse photos

stairs in free fall
collapse into themselves,
preaching from
disfigured cathedrals and
cults of telephone violence
which learn new dance steps
through data transmission
networks of
different
sunlight

Published in:
‘PERIAKTOS no.1’ (UK - November 1985)
‘HANDSHAKE no.56’ (UK – June 2004)
‘OMEGA no.4’ (UK –April 2005)
‘TALVIPAIVANSEISAUS SPECIAL no.8’ (Finland – July 2005)
& on website ‘ALTO TRADIMENTO no.5: SOMMARIO’
in translation by Frederico Frezza (Italy - Summer 2002)

Steve Wilson's 'The Lost Traveller'

2011-11-29T13:57:00.004Z

STEVE WILSON:

‘UNEASY RIDERS’

Book Review of:

‘THE LOST TRAVELLER’

by STEVE WILSON

(Macmillan London Ltd 1976, Panther Granada

Paperback 1984, ISBN 0-586-05870-2 – 252pp,

USA St Martins Press, 1977)

‘HOLOCAUST ANGELS…’

Desolation row revisited. Holocaust Alley slight return. A motorcycle grail quest epic, a Science Fiction Western, a ‘Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by the MAN WHO WAS THERE! A gamma-ray Easy Rider. All this, and more. The legacy of the atomic storm – ‘a convulsion, a climax of the energy dance’, has produced the REAL ‘Greening Of America’. Coalescing out of the radiation-debris crawls all of the mythic archetypes of Americana, all of the counter-culture heroes from the hard-nosed free-living bohemian legends. A wino’s crazy midnight fantasy of endless green plains, of Hells Angel legions with ‘the blades of the drug working in their eyes and their blood’, of long-distance interstate truckers working the juice-route across the nuclear dead-lands, of noble visionary Native American tribes in touch with the transcendental pulse of the universe…

Steve Wilson alchemises an intriguing mix – one not entirely dissimilar to the one attempted by inveterate Deviant Mick Farren in his ‘Texts Of Festival’ (1973) and the ‘Quest Of The DNA Cowboys’ (1976/7) trilogy, and there are some this-way-that-way stylistic feedbacks. In Farren’s initial novel, salvaged Rock ‘n’ Roll vinyl – Bob Dylan, the Doors, is revered as mystic revelation by the survivors of World War III. In the Steve Wilson novel there’s a Jerry Garcia quote plus references to the San Francisco hip poetry revival in the person of Gary Snyder, with great gob-fulls of Beat-styled prose and drunken visions of ‘bubbles of saliva between its teeth, the freckles on its glistening gums’. In the Farren novel literates take the names of Rock writers – Nanker & Phelge, while in the Steve Wilson mythology they assume the names of poets, Wordsworth, Eliot and Hemingway.

‘The Lost Traveller’ is Steve Wilson’s first novel. Born in 1943, the son of Sports-writer Peter Wilson, he read Modern History at Oxford and gained a Diploma with distinction in English Literature at London University. Then he took a ship out for Argentina, crossed to Chile, thumb-tripped and bussed it to Mexico City and up to L.A., then spent the psychedelic summer of 1967 on the West Coast involved with the San Francisco Diggers. His group, called the ‘Communications Company’, distributed leaflets in the acid-happy Electric Kool-Aid Haight-Ashbury zone for ‘the survival/amusement of its inhabitants’. It could be said he’s still working in much the same vein, still sees the salvation of America brought about through the traditional-pioneer ethics within its chemistry that are now relegated to its outlaws, its outsiders, its odd anarchistic sub-cultures. It could be that he’s right. ‘Principally’ he writes, ‘a central government which concentrates power and wealth in itself, serves its own preoccupation with control and growth, and ignores the real needs of the communities it subjects. The growth preoccupation automatically leads to abuse of the land and of human resources, and to the creation of phantom enemies – projections of itself’. He contends that ‘if we fear our enemies past a certain point, we take on their worst characteristics, we become them’. See the contemporary relevance’s…?

But this is no barren eco-political tract, it’s all about energy. It may be allegorical, but it’s also vastly immensely readable, with just the exact blend of sex and violence to make it move. Wilson won the 1974 ‘Club International’ short story competition, and went on to text-illuminate the pages of three further issues, and those of its soft-porn stable-mate ‘Men Only’. The sexual charge one would expect from such jazz-mags overflows into ‘The Lost Traveller’ – including a three-way Hells Angel gang-bang session on a riverbank. The novel opens on an almost comic-satiric note when, in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse thermonuclear exchange – BLAM!, the US President is ‘making his drug-fuddled way to the White House West’ only to be rescued from murderous looters by a division of Angels. ‘President embraced President’, and two brief wasteland centuries later the Angels have become an integral part of the independent Fief republic. The quest-proper begins when three of the Angels – Belial, Milt and the pre-cog Long Range John embark on a journey across the devastated continent towards the Empire Of The East, to rendezvous with a scientist who’s about to defect. As the west coast embodies all that is hip, the East embodies all that is straight, is W.A.S.P, is founder-family orientated, tracing its speech modes back to England and its military battledress to grotesque machismo parodies of conformist American Football armour. But as you’d expect, the novel’s premises are not quite that simple, not quite that two-dimensional. The Angel’s freedom is also partially illusory, partially a form of parasitism, or at best a form of interdependence. The Angels ‘group ethos would seem to be stoical. But also unexpectedly conservative’.

The atomic deluge is a cleansing fire, a baptism of flames from which the world is reborn. The Native American nations endured the nuclear-war to emerge as the only wholly creditable group in the entire novel. They ‘felt the coming of a new age. They freed the few buffalo that had survived, like themselves, as captives of the whites, and together they journeyed to the plains, and there they lived, men and animals, and grew in numbers and in spirit. The old ways returned, and there were mighty warriors, for they felt they were living the birth of a new first age, an age of great spirit power. And they remembered how their people had been deceived before by the Wasichu into surrendering their hunting and their lands, and being shut away from the earth’. Long Range John, an outsider among neo-barbarian outsiders hits metaphysical truth with the Lakota tribe halfway across the trek, and emerges from the rituals and incantations as some kind of existential messiah. Yet the novel is not anti-technology, merely against abuses of technology and State Power as typified by the Empire Of The East. Motorcycles represent limitless freedom, it’s technology and power-structures that are inexorable. Faced with the challenge from the east, and with Wilson’s assertion about ‘taking on the worst characteristics’ of a feared enemy, the Fief inevitably must reject the Angels, the Native American tribes must again be decimated. The salvation of freedom, Wilson seems to be saying, must be a personal thing – the inward-looking route as taken by Long Range John.

But Wilson makes the diverse fusion work, carrying the coincidences of the plotline effortlessly (the killing of the father, Badhand, for example). He has skills to conjure the plot-ingredients together, investing its concepts with the power and sensual thumbprints of reality. Science Fiction has never been as amoebically eclectic as it was in the late 1970’s, drawing elements from multiple mythologies to refurbish its idiosyncratically shambling and baroque tradition. ‘The Lost Traveller’ is a first novel, and displays many of the distinguishing characteristics of the species, attempts to rearrange an entire literature through often garish wide-screen techniques, attempts to be instantly significant and profound on as many levels as possible, attempts to create a major tour-de-force through a basically naïve intellectual overkill of concepts and art. But ‘The Lost Traveller’ is unique to the genre in that Wilson has the ability to carry the overkill pretensions and aspirations. From the vast scenario, to the small poetic observation – ‘wind whining and singing through the chinks in the walls, in the corners, by the larger gaps, snow lay where it had blown in, in neat lines, as if it had been poured from a sack…’

Grab this novel!

When this feature first appeared in print Steve Wilson was so pleased to have found a reviewer he considered to so-exactly have caught the full nuances of his writing that he immediately straddled his high-powered BMW motorcycle and revved it clear up the M1 all the way to Ossett to stay over and make direct contact. He’s a great guy. We got on fine. I later published one of his stories in an issue of the ‘Ludds Mill’ magazine from Eight Miles Higher. He gave me a copy of the ‘Twelfth Ghost Book’ anthology (edited by Patricia Parkin & James Hale, Barrie & Jenkins, ISBN 0-214-20216X, February 1977) which includes his fine story “Ghosts There Must Be With Me In This Old House”, plus a motorcycle article from ‘Men Only’ (November 1977), ‘The After Midnight Ghost Book’ (edit James Hale, Hutchinson, 1980) with his “O Keep The Cat Far Hence”, & ‘The Twilight Book’ (edit James Hale, Gollancz, 1981) which includes “My Breath Is Inside You”. He also talked about his projected book ‘The Complete British Motorcycles 1950-1977’ (commissioned for Macmillan) which eventually appeared as ‘Classic British Motorcycles: The Cutting Edge – Road Bikes 1950-1975’ (Salamander Books, May 1998). It also led to me writing about his subsequent ‘Dealer’ novel-series…

Steve Wilson's 'Dealer' Books

2011-11-29T13:47:00.003Z

Book Review of:

‘DEALER’S MOVE’ &

‘DEALER’S WAR’

by STEVE WILSON

(Macmillan hardback, 1978, Granada Paperback

ISBN 0-333-24214-9 & Granada Paperback 1980,

ISBN 0-586-05421-9)

‘This is what we find, this is what we find,

the hope that springs eternal,

springs right up your behind…’

(Ian Dury quoted in ‘Dealer’s War’)

Steve Wilson once pawned his watch to get to see a Doors concert in Frisco. That was way back when he worked on an early incarnation of ‘Crawdaddy’ Rock-zine, dwelling in Haight-Ashbury with the ‘Diggers’, interviewing the Rolling Stones at their most satanic, and FURTHER… A period he scrambled through acid-surrealism into his debut novel (‘The Lost Traveller’), and a series of short stories featuring evocatively-named characters such as Spliff, Dolly Dagger, and Arthur Lee, fuelled on a regular spattering of Rock/Dope culture-references, leading inexorably to these ‘Dealer’ thrillers.

When it’s suddenly vogue for New Age Psychedelicatessens like Julian Cope, Artery, or Miles Over Matter to relate their tales of chemical mind-excursions to and beyond the Outer Limits of consciousness, it’s perhaps worth remembering those of earlier High Times who quick-fried their brain-cells on similar narcotic grail-trails for god, instant karma-satori or a glimpse of ecstasy. While hallucinogenics have been bohemian aids to the creative juices at least since Coleridge, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, it’s pertinent that for every peak experience reached by a stoned Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, or a tripping Jimi Hendrix, there are acid casualties with cerebral cortex’s wiped clean as erased recording tape.

Steve Wilson describes ‘Dealer’s Move’ to me as being about Jack, ‘a dope dealer living on out to Edge City’. Dealer’s way is ‘army surplus, old bikes, deals and highs, quotes and scraps of knowledge like driftwood sculpture’. He lives on Chinese take-aways and amphetamines, while constructing his life ‘out of random and discarded elements, things that no-one values’. The only continuity he holds fast to is ‘a dream of freedom – freedom from moral responsibility’. He’s devious, shifty, unreliable. His attitude to the drugs he deals extends no further than ‘all dope should be legalised. That would be the only way you would get quality control and proper information disseminated to the people who are going to use the drugs anyway’ – with the proviso ‘if it wouldn’t put me out of business’. The books are set now, rushed out as a double-pack by Granada on an adrenalin-rush of flash-reviews, quoting ‘The Times’ and ‘The Daily Telegraph’ no less, who extol their virtues as tense and compulsive Thrillers. Which is true, they are. But for the Rock cognoscenti the time-fix will seem more accurately mid-to-late seventies when the drug-culture ‘left over from the sixties’ is gradually going bad, while being taken over by crime syndicates and the French Connection mob. Dealer himself, self-describing himself as a cross between ‘the mature Eric Clapton, Brecht in the fifties, and Manson in the slammer’, thinks of himself as ‘part businessman, part public servant’, he even quotes Bob Dylan’s ‘to live outside the law you must be honest’ to justify his lifestyle. But inevitably such freewheelin’ naivety, and independence is riding for a fall.

‘Dealer’s Move’ documents his first violent run-in with the Kray-style heavies responsible for brutally murdering his friend, Neil. His revenge is a punishment-scam ripping off a hundred pounds of hashish from the gangster Nutting Brothers – Arnie & Alfie, which results in a high-tension pursuit across France in retaliation, leading to a stunning climax confrontation in western Scotland (in a siege-sequence part-choreographed with poet Steve Sneyd). The climatic stalking game set among the ‘bleak wind-ruffled tarns and sedge-covered boggy bottoms’ of the highland wilderness with eccentric laird Teddy Sirk has elements of John Buchan classicism while remaining wholly contemporary, ‘a shooting match with the London team from which only the two of us walked away’. The geography-hopping chain-reaction repercussions continue through ‘Dealer’s War’ where Jack is first glimpsed entering Heraklion harbour, Crete, still in hiding, on course for Matala. Until he, his girlfriend Julie ‘Jools’ Owens and ex-Vietnam Marine Dan Ericson are forced into a final desperate scam by kidnapping amiable Eddie, the son of Charlie Mondello, an American Capo Mafioso mobster, and smuggling him back to Norfolk, in order to buy off that same retribution. The action comes relentlessly fast, to the shock dénouement, with Eddie blasting his own father to death moment before he’s riddled with a stream of Uzi-bullets. With the Mob beheaded, and power-struggle factions on the loose, Jack is again alone, hiding out, and swearing off the drug-life. As he muses ruefully, ‘I had a lively awareness of the pitfalls attached to hanging out around drugs’. You suspect the aversion will be strictly temporary. The pacing is – no pun intended, addictive. But where Steve Wilson scores hardest – again, no pun, is in his meticulous flourish of detail, Magnum shooters, 350 Matchless motorcycles, and the seedy sub-world of the hazardous sleaze-life which he describes tactile-sharp from first-hand knowledge.

Of course, it’s misleadingly wrong to suggest Dealer’s problems spring directly from the properties of the nefarious substances he deals, rather than from their criminalisation, but the nervous-systems of the two are most likely so inextricably mixed it makes no odds. The end result is the same. Long before the celebrated forays of Irvine Welsh or Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks into the same general terrain, I suggest Dealer stacks up well against the new generation of walking-wounded clients surfing in on more recent psychedelic waves, from which Steve Wilson richly deserves to pick up a host of new readers. You know it makes sense!

The third volume of the ‘Dealer’ Trilogy – ‘Dealer’s Wheels’ (Macmillan, 1982, ISBN 0-333-32232-0), was followed by ‘Thirteen’ (Panther books, 1985, ISBN 0-586-06255-6) – ‘a searing novel of motorbikes and bloody violence…’

WRECKLESS ERIC: Live In Bradford

2011-11-24T16:23:00.003Z

WRECKLESS ERIC:

A DYSFUNCTIONAL SUCCESS

Gig Review of:

WRECKLESS ERIC

at ‘Bradford Alternative Cabaret'

‘DEATH. It comes to us all eventually, so we might as well… take the piss out of it!’ Of the original Punk Packet-of-Three making up ‘Stiff Records’ freak assault on late-seventies boredom, Ian Dury’s hits now come in digitalised CD special-editions, Elvis Costello has become a country-Americana god… while Eric?, he’s back in all-over black, uncoordinated spasmic twitch still as deranged as some terminal disorder of the nervous system. Eric’s a real GONE kid, THE wacko, and superannuated Punks crawl from city-wide woodwork just to come here to Manningham Lane to grovel at the black-shod feet of an ORIGINAL. ‘Bradford tonight’ he muses distractedly, ‘I’m doing Macclesfield tomorrow. And I’m playing PARIS Tuesday. And my car only goes fifty-miles an hour!’ He’s making it up as he goes along, tuning and de-tuning, grinning ludicrously when shimmers of unexpectedly delicious guitar escapes. His set is one-man DIY, a one-off, his amped acoustic lasts two numbers before it’s ‘blunt’, and he switches to electric, screwing the volume up with lewd delight at the sheer physical sensation of pure NOISE. He’s as unpredictable as an earth-tremor, as natural as an eclipse, and irradiates as much energy as a supernova.

Wreckless Eric (aka Eric Goulden) spawned an oddball hit – “(I’d Go The) Whole Wide World” (a highly collectible Stiff BUY16, August), as unique a taster for 1977 as anything from the Pistols/Clash/Damned triumvirate. He does it tonight. Its escalating tensions rise from low insidious strum to shattered flash-walls of power, manipulating splinters of light and shade (in muso-speak) – but giving every impression of total spontaneity in his hands. It blueprints his set from “Swimming Against The Tide Of Reason”, about a suicide pact, through “Young Upwardly-Mobile & Stupid” (both from his 1986 ‘Len Bright Combo’ guise), and even into the brief rhyme “She Destroyed Me Fuck By Fuck” (from ‘Le Beat Electrique’ in September 1989).

Judy Radul, a Canadian poet with William Burroughs credentials and fantasy gardens of sexual politics opens the show. She neatly contrasts Eric’s obsessively English eccentricities – Eric’s “Final Taxi” has a bleak black-humerous Morrissey-Northerness while “Semaphore Signals” (original ‘B’-side of “Whole Wide World”) recalls Ray Davies’ ‘Terry meets Julie’ hard urban romance. There’s pack-a-snack and supermarket checkout girls in quirkily affectionate mock-ups of tacky seaside resorts, cheap TV ‘Comedy Time’ dross, and dead Soap stars. ‘They won’t let me sing that one with my band. They say it’s wet. If you agree you can chuck glasses at me, or summat…’ No-one chucks even a beer-mat…

‘WRECKLESS ERIC’ (Repertoire RR4217) thirteen quirky masterpieces on a CD reissue of his debut Stiff LP, with bonus tracks – includes ‘Reconnez Cherie’, ‘Rags & Tatters’, ‘Waxworks’, ‘Telephoning Home’, ‘Grown Ups’, ‘Whole Wide World’, ‘Rough Kids’, ‘Personal Hygiene’, ‘Brain Thieves’, ‘There Isn’t Anything Else’, ‘Semaphore Signals’, ‘Be Stiff’, ‘Be Stiff (Take 2)’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=graU-CEfgeM&feature=fvwrel

Book Review: 'Earth Abides' by George R Stewart

2011-11-17T01:24:00.004Z

The Last American

George R Stewart’s 1949 book 'Earth Abides'
examined by Andrew Darlington

Although published in 1949, George R Stewart’s sprawling epic Earth Abides was neither the first, nor the last fiction to delete homo sapiens from the world. For Stewart, it is a virus that wipes out the human race. But mass-extinction had been a popular theme for writers at least since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in 1826, in which a viral-plague devastates civilisation, followed by the awful anguish of Matthew Phipps (MP) Shiel’s sole inheritor of a world depopulated by The Purple Cloud (1901). After Stewart’s novel the Cold War thermonuclear confrontation gave atomic catastrophe the added frisson of terrible political relevance, with world-ending cataclysm brought about by a regular arsenal of frightful doomsday weapons. In fact, Stewart alludes to global war as his character – Isherwood Williams, muses on the irony that ‘the trouble you’re expecting never happens’. People have ‘been trembling about destruction through war’, and ‘having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces’, but that ‘it’s always something that sneaks up the other way’. It’s an idea that’s been picked up and re-envisioned numerous times since in various inventive ways, with humanity variously drowned, grilled, frozen, irradiated, crystallised, burned and eaten by perambulating plants. Stephen King acknowledging the influence of Earth Abides on his The Stand (1978, revised 1990), with echoes up to Will Smith’s cinematic last man in New York in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend’ (2007), or the ongoing Twenty-Eight Days Later movie series (2002 & 2007)....

For Full Feature Go To:
http://www.thiswayupzine.blogspot.com/2011/11/last-american.html

Movie Review: Elvis Presley 'Blue Hawaii'

2011-11-16T16:52:00.006Z

'ELVIS PRESLEY &

THE BEACH-BOY BLUES'

‘Ecstatic Romance! Exotic Dances!

Exciting Music! In The World’s

Lushest Paradise Of Song!’

There are two perspectives you can use to look at ‘Blue Hawaii’. The first is as it must have appeared at the time of its release, in relation to what had come earlier. The other is with hindsight, knowing what would come later. Both perspectives are useful. Elvis had a tendency to complacency. With good reason. When he felt challenged, when he felt his status was threatened, he was well-capable of retaliating with work of extraordinary intensity. As with his so-called ‘67 Comeback TV Special’, launched when his career was at its lowest post-Beatles ebb, and designed to vindicate his intensity as a live performer. Problem was that for much of his career his position as the planet’s biggest music-star remained unchallenged. Whatever slapdash dross he chose to inflict sold just as many copies as his best and most groundbreaking work. The unquestioning loyalty of the fans who bought up everything with his name on it meant he had no real incentive to try harder. And because he didn’t have to try, he didn’t try….
Full review and background history of Elvis Presley: ‘BLUE HAWAII’
Go to:

www.videovista.net/reviews/nov11/bluehawi.html

POEM: 'Visions Of St Gerasimos'

2011-10-30T16:13:00.003Z

VISIONS OF ST GERASIMOS

“be peaceful with yourself…”

the Gospel of Saint Gerasimos (1506-1579)

from Mount Athos
an ancient thing,
St Gerasimos hunches hermit in his cave
scrutinising scripture, while
those performing lesser tasks, tilling earth,
caring for families, bring offerings of food
so he can intercede in their spiritual void,
this land where gods
reared up new people
from stones and dragons teeth &
they were strangers without faces
& no-one knew their neighbour,
until St Gerasimos, glimpsing out
over rabbit-island towards Lixouri

now strangers, in shorts & shades
Factor 50 & samaria-water bottles
climb to the church in the cleft
built around sanctified cave,
for jest he lights a candle
sets it before the icon
mimes stations of the cross
leaves no donation, no offering
she laughs & is first outside
sun smote, he’s not there,
she ventures back over threshold
into sacred whispering halflight
no sign, just shadows, candle,
& deep within the icons
a new face, screaming its terror…

(Kefalonia, September 2011)

CD - ROY HARPER: 'Songs Of Love & Loss'

2011-10-30T16:07:00.003Z

CD Review of:

‘SONGS OF LOVE AND LOSS’

by ROY HARPER

(BELIEVE) www.believedigital.com

Well, the MBE he promised to sell to pay the Rentman, never actually arrived. And the hits didn’t exactly flow. There’s been light and shade, highs and lows, peaks and troughs, but the diary-like annual albums appear across fifty years with resolute consistency, and seldom deliver below expectations. All the fractured romance and squalor of a sophisticated beggar chronicling scripts from Beat-bohemia, poems, thoughts and doodles to gnaw on, mad travel postcards from the edge, in near-pictorial storytelling with heart, head and every other organ on sleeve and disc. He’s a weaver of tales, maker of myths. A personal style already intact from the first vinyls. This is not so much a ‘best of’, because it can’t be, some of his most ambitious songs are huge sprawling epics. Instead, this is a series of illuminating thumbnail snapshots, frames from a life-movie, flashes from the archives of oblivion, and an imperfect wish-list. “Davey” is about his older brother (from ‘Flat Baroque And Beserk’, 1970). The heart-wrenching “Little Lady” (from ‘Lifemask’, 1973) is from ‘Made’, the movie he did with Carol White. And there are the Arcadian dreams of his muse making her first daisy-chain ‘as her nipples hung hard in suggestion’, as David Bedford scores the strings for his rich poetry fast and slow (“Commune” from ‘Valentine’, 1974). We know about the Pink Floyd association, Led Zeppelin, Paul & Linda, and Kate Bush. But Ritchie Blackmore guests on some ‘Sophisticated Beggar’ tracks (“Black Clouds”, “Girlie” from 1966). Bert Jansch wrote the sleeve notes to ‘Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith’ (1967) from which comes “All You Need Is”, while Shel Talmy produces. From ‘Bullinamingvase’ (1977) the tune for the reflective “Naked Flame” is modelled on the traditional ‘Lord Franklin’s Lament’ – the same source as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” (from ‘Freewheelin’’), although both may be taken from Martin Carthy’s arrangement. But while other, lesser talents came and went scoring hits and awards in a blur, across a fifty-year career-arc this strummer never played without a tight cult audience there to carry him. Or the critical support of his peers. Something infinitely more valuable than hits or MBE’s.

'Last Exit To Brooklyn' by Hubert Selby Jr

2011-10-29T14:51:00.003+01:00

HUBERT SELBY JNR:

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN/

SLIGHT RETURN

23rd July 1928 – 26th April 2004

Hubert Selby Jnr is dead. His greatest novel lives on.

Andrew Darlington tries to make sense of it all...

‘a book that will explode like a rusty,

hellish bombshell over America…’

Allen Ginsberg’s prediction

for ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’

They never got around to writing the ‘Great American Novel’. So Hubert Selby Junior perpetrates ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ instead. Hefting its title from a highway-sign midpoint Manhattan and Kennedy airport. Onto a huge shambling work vaguely derived from Henry Miller’s darker erotic imaginings speed-wrecked into William Burroughs’ coldly analytical violence. A book at once intriguing… and disturbing. Action orbits ‘The Greeks’, a ‘beat-up all-night diner’. A subterranean world populated by hoodlums, transvestites, Gays, Korean-bound conscripts, urban predators and perverts, racially stereotyped black hipster studs, Italians and Jews, plus the diversity of Peurto Ricans and wino’s who also haunt its Brooklyn environs. Their six mosaic-linked narratives form self-contained vignettes lurching spasmodically from World War II with Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker’s Bebop sax wailing on the radio, to roughly the fifties, and delinquent kids smoking marijuana in the playground. As locations shift from Red Hook to the housing ‘Project’, mapping the various family groups and antagonisms trapped there.

Post-apocalyptic, without the apocalypse having taken place, you can read it as a kind of mutant dystopian Science Fiction. It inhabits the Cold War terror-preoccupations of its time, a desolation-mindset derived from impending nuclear aftermath. Or it’s a novel of some squalid blood-capitalist alternate present, mirroring its alienation and moral corruption – up-dating Cyril Kornbluth, pre-dating Anthony Burgess’ ‘Clockwork Orange’, more bizarre that J.G. Ballard, more pointed and analytically jagged than John Brunner’s ‘Stand On Zanzibar’. While comparison with Harlan Ellison’s feral street-mythology needs little elaboration. Without Selby’s great vomit-back of beautifully tainted disgust, would there have been Lou Reed’s tales of junkie sleaze, New York Doll’s teenage queens, Bukowski, Patti Smith and beyond…? Probably. But there are debts and connections to be made.

Initially picked up and announced by the Beat Generation writers – with Allen Ginsberg declaring it would ‘still be eagerly read in a hundred years’, celebrated for its liberating honesty by the counter-culture press, and championed by the anti-censorship lobby, ‘Last Exit…’ is a novel of ultimate alienation. Alienation from any meaningful relationship, alienation from values, alienation from self. Here, the body is no more than an extension of commodity to utilise, display, arrange, and exploit in the quest for sensation. Love an acquisitive act, the usage ‘scoring’ an exact contextual definition. Violence – random and impersonal, serves much the same purpose (‘…tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerked-off on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying amongst the broken bottles rusting cans and rubble of the lot…’).

Violence is multi-layered, the victim incidental, used as a proxy target in lieu of wife, parent, employer, cop, the city in general… the self? Sex – interchangeable with violence, serves for ego-gratification. A process of catharsis. A route to asserting superiority on the most basic animal level. Then again, violence reignites with the senses – shattering veneers of alienation, breaking through into a kind of hyper-reality. Characters live unreal lives. Permanently high on ‘bennies’ (Benzedrine) and/or booze (‘…spun centrifugally around stimulants, opiates, johns…’). Eating and drinking irregularly, hurriedly and badly. They are under a constant pressure of external hostilities and internal chemical imbalance – an unreality focused by the Drag Queen Ball façade where the ‘Fairies’ are more beautiful and more feminine than real women. Violence is a sensual act, a route back to reality, an act of ego-supremacy. Blood is real. Adrenaline is excitingly real. On an even simpler level, violence is instant fun, an escape from perpetual boredom.

Sure, Selby can occasionally be accused of using violence as a plot convenience too, to round off an awkward passage with fitting finality, to get rid of an unwanted character. Evidence the “Strike” sequence, climaxed by Harry Black being beaten to pulp. There seems no internal plot motivation for this – other than that the theme is exhausted while the character remains unresolved. It could be existential, to emphasise that random violence is a permanent Brooklyn sub-current, without needing logic, or reason, or any form of internal consistency. It just happens without any external stimulus whatsoever.

Selby, a writer of extremis, grew up in Brooklyn’s Red Hook district. He was self-taught, but knew what he was writing about. Yet the purpose of the novel is not to attain realism. Instead, he shoves situations to near-overkill caricature, where – by contrast, violence can serve a crude moral purpose. The “Tralala” sequence in particular (originally published in a 1961 issue of the ‘Provincetown Review’, followed by an immediate obscenity trial!) has the kind of exact moral development of the ‘Rake’s Progress’. Tralala is fifteen, on the fringe of prostitution and petty crime. She rolls sailors and ‘doggie’ GI’s. Goes uptown with an Officer in hope of greater material reward. Screws for money, or to spite other girls. She’s already instrumental in beating up one soldier who attempts to retrieve his ID card from a wallet she’s stolen from him. Until, with a two-dimensional inevitability she degenerates into an ‘Inebriate Woman’ inviting the gang-bang in a wrecked car on a deserted lot which presumably kills her. The moral, apparently – those who live by the cock die by the cock.

This Faustian (anti-)morality is a constant. All are corrupt, all deserve whatever they get by first living the laws that ultimately destroy them with such precision. The “Strike” sequence is pivotal, with the workers caught between venal Union Officials creaming private profits from funds, and a scheming management who engineer and benefit from the strike by tax concessions. Comparisons with the Miner’s Strike in Zola’s ‘Germinal’ are revealing, and parallels between the two writers have already been spun by Prof Frank Kermode (editor of the ‘Fontana Modern Masters’ book series), and by Anthony Burgess. But – unlike Zola, for Selby there are no clear-cut issues. There is, and can be no honour. Society is structured on greed-motivation, drawing its life-energies from hatreds and resentments universal on every social level and class. Workers and union are part of the same cancer. And in the light of subsequently uncovered Mafia connections with the American Teamsters Truck-Drivers Union, the degree of corruption seems hardly exaggerated.

It is relentless. Yet beyond images of disgust and hatred, characterisation is frequently shallow. Pompous Harry Black is sexually rejected by the gay Regina. A well-visioned sequence. But the vindictive Union man’s revelation of his own previously unsuspected orientation seems superficial. In Selby’s ‘macho’ world where sexual prowess is the key-stone to self-identity, there’s none of the trauma, disorientation or confusion it could be expected to produce. There’s accuracy in Harry’s rootless lack of identity. His anonymity. And the lure of belonging to such a sub-culture, identification as part of that minority – could be valuable even if, and perhaps particularly if, that new definition is reviled (and hence reinforced) by those outside its milieu. A fragmenting into ethnic, political and sexual sub-worlds can provoke even more powerful internal allegiances. But surely the initial acceptance of ‘gender deviance’ to as unsubtle a man as Harry Black would not come without some unease? A process of unease that Selby ignores.

The psychology is more effectively mapped in an earlier sequence, where the gay Georgette schemes to seduce the straight Vinnie. Here are passages of tactile description that give first intimations of the novel’s lyrical power. In the first section – “Another Day, Another Dollar”, ‘and the cars still passed and the drunks still passed and the sky was clear and bright with stars and moon and a light breeze was blowing and you could hear the tugs in the harbour chugging and the deep OOOO from their whistles floated across the bay and rolled down 2nd Avenue and even the ferry’s mooring winch could be heard, when it was quiet and still, clanging a ferry into the slip…’ Then, in the “Queen Is Dead” (one of two Selby titles later filched by Morrissey for the Smiths – the other being “Pretty Girls Make Graves”) Georgette observes ‘through a rip in the black shade she saw dancing points of grey and soon light would streak the sky and the shadows would soften and dance, and the soft early morning light would seep through the room pushing the shadows from the now darkened corners and the candles soon would be out’. Here are glimpses of what a 2003 issue of ‘The Guardian’ calls ‘the love buried under all this madness, behind the obsession’.

The book is copyrighted 1957, although it would be 1966 before a hardback edition appeared in the UK. Its publication followed by a protracted Old Bailey obscenity trial (November 1967). The verdict initially went against the book, only to be reversed by a subsequent appeal (July 1968). The later Corgi paperback edition is prefaced by Anthony Burgess who enthuses over its worth, while documenting this eccentric legal history. Selby’s words – he infers, are compulsive, singing with the well-observed beat of Brooklyn street-rap – words that cannon and telescope into each other reading phonetically with little regard to punctuation. It should be read in that same easy conversational manner, without stopping to analyse particularly obtuse conglomerations of consonants and nouns, the chances are it will sound right. Passages of conversation are not mapped by quote marks or acknowledgements – the reader works out who said what from context. Further amusing confusion arises from Selby’s insistence on referring to gays by their chosen, rather than their biological gender, leading to paradoxical statements such as ‘her cock’ (but then again, perhaps it’s saying hang-ups about sexual identity are merely symptoms of macro-social orthodoxy?).

Anyway, Selby’s skill makes it work, and the prose power is undeniable. He, after all, is part of the world he describes. His morphine addiction may have been acquired as a result of painkillers administered during a three-and-a-half year hospitalisation for tuberculosis, but it leads him to a prison spell. And it’s only later – in 1969, following the benefits – and problems of literary celebrity, that he’s able to quit both drugs and booze, although he continues to smoke compulsively until a month before he dies from ‘a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease’.

He goes on to write other books. But ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ is the one that marks him out. And juvenile delinquent Vinnie who provides a casual continuity-thread to its episodic narrative, right into his eventual marriage that makes him part of the ‘Project’. Selby almost manages a grudging affection for this street-punk, while using humour to show how the destructive system he’s part of is self-perpetuating. Yet not once does he attempt to analyse the forces shaping the society he portrays. Without ever stating it, the novel illustrates how raw Capitalism corrupts – and ultimate Capitalism corrupts absolutely to its every visceral level. He never seems to consider that perhaps a system taking ferocious internal competition as its first prerequisite, veneering it with the concepts of voracious expansion and growth for the winners, and the sink-hole ghetto for losers, is pre-programmed to produce something like this. That the Brooklyn nightmare (complete with Harry Black’s ‘Harpies’) is an integral part and parcel of the American Dream.
There can be no Greening for this America. No Exit from this Brooklyn…

HUBERT SELBY JNR:

POET OF DARKNESS

‘LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN’ Novel (Grove Edition 1964 – UK 24th January 1966 through Calder & Boyars Ltd/ Paladin paperback) A book with ‘a studied disdain for the laws of punctuation… not an apostrophe from start to finish.’ Subject of a successful private prosecution for obscenity, brought by Tory MP Sir Cyril Black, at its November 1967 trial Selby himself was too in thrall to drugs and booze to attend, but at its appeal the following year Frank Kermode’s testimony was followed by the editor of the ‘Daily Telegraph’, the future Bishop of Liverpool David Sheppard, and Shirley Williams’ father Professor George Catlin. Movie critic Philip French was the 18th witness. Defence witness Anthony Burgess later admits to not particularly liking the book, but took the stand for the general principle of anti-censorship. Eventually, John Mortimer persuades the Court of Appeal to overturn the initial verdict. Re-issued as a ‘Penguin Classic’ edition in 2011 (£9.99) with new introduction by Irvine Welsh and afterword by Selby himself, placing the novel within biographical context. According to Charlotte Newman’s review its ‘surprising intermittent lyricism making it clear that Selby has some sympathy for his characters… saves what could have been a bitterly depressing book from being truly sadistic’ (‘Observer’ 16 October 2011)

‘LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN’ Movie (Summit Entertainment, 1989 USA, UK premiere 5 January 1990. Guild Video. DVD In-2-Film, 2005. 102 minutes) movie adaptation directed by Uli Edel– billed as ‘The Film That Shocked A Nation’, it features Stephen Lang (as Harry Black), Burt Young (as Big Joe), Peter Dobson (as Vinnie), and Ricki Lake, with a Mark Knopfler score and a Desmond Nakano screenplay. The novel’s extended time-span is compressed down into incidents across a single 1952 summer, and Tralala (Jennifer Jason Leigh) survives her gang-rape to be comforted by Spook. Selby himself cameos as the Taxi Driver who accidentally runs down transvestite Georgette (played by Alexis Arquette). Before the movie restored his celebrity Selby was reportedly living on welfare in a two-room LA apartment, doing menial jobs in gas stations and gift shops.

‘THE ROOM’ (1971) His second novel, a small-time crook in a remand cell has claustrophobic sadistic fantasies. Reissued as a 1988 Paladin paperback as a double with ‘Song Of The Silent Snow’

‘THE DEMON’ (1976 – UK Marion Boyars 1977) Successful tycoon Harry fulfils his dark side through sexual pick-ups, theft, and eventual murders. “Inside the piston beat of madness, he excels… the writing rises from the sludge to the same sulphurous heights as ‘Last Exit’” says Jim Neville (‘Sunday Times’). A Corgi 1979 edition features an atmospherically tacky nude-girl cover.

‘REQUIEM FOR A DREAM’ (1978 – 1979 UK Marion Boyars) Young hoods Harry & Tyrone fantasise about scoring a pound of heroin and getting rich. There’s a movie adaptation directed by Darren Aronofsky (2000)

‘THE WILLOW TREE’ (1998)

‘SONG OF THE SILENT SNOW’ (1986 – UK Marion Boyars) Fifteen short stories including ‘The Coat’ and ‘Of Whales & Dreams’, “dips into scummy urban terror” says Valentine Cunningham (‘Observer’)

‘WAITING PERIOD’ (2001 – UK 2002) A homicidal loner plots a serial murder spree following an aborted suicide, while waiting for his gun licence to come through.

also ‘FEAR X’ (March 2004) Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s original screenplay collaboration with Selby, featuring John Turturro, James Remar, and Deborah Kara Unger. A trail of random clues to his wife’s car-park murder leads a Wisconsin Mall Security Guard (Turturro) to a Montana hotel where vigilantes punish bent cops.

also ‘OUR FATHERS WHO AREN’T IN HEAVEN’ (Widowspeak label – 1990) an LP of readings by Henry Rollins, Lydia Lunch, Don Bajema, and Selby + there are other audio titles such as ‘TOUGH GUYS TALK DIRTY’ and ‘LIVE IN EUROPE 1989’

Further revised from a feature published in:
‘CHAOTIC ORDER no.18’ (UK – January 2005)
which was a much-revised version of an original feature published in:
‘BOGG no.31’ (UK – March 1976)

JUVENILE SF: 'Kemlo & The Zones Of Space'

2011-10-29T14:06:00.005+01:00

KEMLO AND THE

ZONES OF SPACE

He is a boy born in, and perfectly adapted to space.

He lives in Satellite Belt-K, a huge wheel-shaped

‘Spaceworld’ Space Station. He and his pals have a

series of adventures across fifteen novels.

But were they any good…?

Andrew Darlington re-reads them all…

KEMLO – THE SPACE-BORN BOY!

I admit it – even as a kid, I found the stories of space-brat Kemlo slightly indigestible. A review of ‘Kemlo And The End Of Time’ in ‘Authentic no.84’ (September 1957) explains that because he was space-born our hero and his companion Krillie don’t ‘need any sort of helmet or protective device, and all of space is his playground’. Adding ‘if you like logical science in your stories you won’t like Kemlo!’ And yes, even then, when I was part of what was presumably the target demographic for the books, I found the premise they were based around one step too implausible to seriously accept. I was happy to read about Space Kingley bathing in the water-oceans of Neptune. Space Ace using an anti-gravity belt to cross a volcanic lake of molten vibrillium on Jupiter. Jet-Ace Logan caught up in a war between the rival species inhabiting the climatic extremes of Mercury’s opposing hemispheres. Dan Dare conspiring against the Empire of the Nine Moons on Mimas ‘under the blazing heat of Saturn’s rings’. All that, yes, but not Kemlo, the boy who can breathe in space.

The ‘Kemlo’ books were written by Reginald Alec Martin, under the alias ‘E.C. Elliot’. Some few years earlier I had enjoyed the same writer’s Pocomoto western yarns – written simultaneously under the further pseudonym ‘Reg Dixon’. Born in 1900, Reginald Martin was nothing if not prolific. He produced no less than twenty-three Pocomoto adventures between 1953 and 1963, during the years he was also churning out the Kemlo stories. Kemlo debuted in 1954 with ‘Kemlo And The Crazy Planet’ (1954), going on to add ‘Kemlo And The Zones Of Silence’ (1954) and on. Although each novel is stand-alone, and self-contained, the intention is obviously for the reader to compile a full set. And ‘Kemlo And The Space Lanes’ (1955) follows on from his earlier encounter with the ‘Martian Ghosts’ of the previous novel. Kemlo and Earth-born Calvin Lester are charting space lanes for the construction of a new Satellite Belt when their survey is disrupted by the appearance of a fiery zigzag spectrum of light. Although hazardous, no-one believes in the existence of the spectral patterns, and he’s forced to conceal his fears about the danger they represent. There are detailed descriptions of the construction of the new belt, built in the wheel-shape that orbital space-stations were frequently conjectured at the time. Until a patrol ship is crushed ‘like a plastic drinking cup’. Captain Heralgo is now persuaded of the ‘somewhat fantastic danger’ of this ‘new weapon for a new age’. Eventually, the manoeuvres of a space armada, acting on Kemlo’s plan, succeed in first disabling the hostile spectrums in a ‘Battle of the Rays’, then tracking them to their source, an ‘electronic ray impulse generator’ in space, but controlled by the Eastern International powerblock on Earth. So, no extraterrestrial intervention. No nasty aliens with evil intent. Not even a proper confrontation with the villains responsible. Just a gentle reminder of political tensions and espionage on the home planet that Kemlo has never visited.

The books were published by Thomas Nelson, first with lavish colour plates and spot art by RJ Jobson, then with illustrations by sometime ‘Dan Dare’ and ‘Jet Morgan’ artist Bruce A Cornwell, up until ‘Kemlo And The Zombie Men’ in 1958. Later titles – including ‘Kemlo And The Space Invaders’ (1961), featured art by George Craig, although by then the lavish frontispiece had been budgeted away in favour of black-and-white line drawings.

LET ‘EM BREATHE SPACE!

Kemlo’s parents, and his grandparents who had participated in the construction of the orbital habitats, were ordinary Earth-born ‘air-breathers’ who colonised the huge ‘world in the sky’ high above the planet. But the first-generation space-born neatly reverse the situation. Space is their realm, their natural element. Their metabolism is perfectly adapted to survive within it. They need life-support, not in space, but within atmospheres. Even within their ‘Spaceworld’ home they must live in ‘open’ sections segregated from the Earth-born, and from their parents, because too much oxygen will kill them. Arthur C Clarke was called to account for the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ movie-sequence in which astronaut Bowman leaps from the pod to the airlock, briefly exposed to raw space – a stunt replicated in the later film ‘Sunshine’ (2007). Clarke offered scientific justification for such a brief exposure. Two minutes maximum, if properly prepared. Much earlier Stanley Weinbaum includes a similar sequence in his story “The Red Peri” (1935), and Lester Del Rey phrased it as “Let ‘Em Breathe Space” in his ‘Space Science Fiction’ story of 1953. But for Kemlo ‘there’s a special ‘something’ in space that lets us live’ he explains. Depressurisation? they’re protected by a sheen of ‘holding rays’. And breathing? in space he’s capable of living by breathing ‘plasmorgia’. It’s possible to conjecture plasmorgia as some kind of highly tenuous plasma micro-particles. After all, even space is not a total vacuum. But that’s a kind of special pleading. The ability to speed comfortably through the vacuum of space unprotected is the attribute of comic-book Super-heroes, not serious SF. Even as a kid I was aware of the difference, Superheroes are not expected to conform to science. SF should at least stay within touching distance of it. Kemlo’s abilities are certainly a fictional device, nothing more. Elliott cheerfully admits as much when he has Kemlo explain how technical detail ‘takes such an awful lot of explaining and people get bored with it, but you must explain some of these things if you can’. Does it matter? this is, after all, literature intended to entertain children. But if it’s a literary device, a gimmick for the edification of juvenile readers, why should they be subjected to lower standards than adults? Why should it be OK to disregard the laws of physics for children, but not their parents? And even suspending disbelief for that one anomaly, there’s more, arguably worse to come.

With its three-mile circumference and a 15,000-mph orbital speed, Satellite Belt-K is one of a number of alphabetised Space Stations – there’s also S, M, T & O, with the new one under construction in prefabricated sections on Earth. But growing up in space also means that Kemlo can never visit his parent’s home-world. That is, until the later intervention of ‘compressed plasmorgia’ and the assistance of ‘gravity rays’. The orbital space habitat has long been a fixture in SF, clear through to movies such as ‘Silent Running’ (1972). While EC Tubb deals with the readjustment problems of colonists born on Mars having to adapt to the greater gravity of Earth upon their return. Critics similarly demolished ‘Kemlo And The Gravity Rays’ with ‘this one deals with the fact that Earth-born men had been able to travel to space, but till now space-born men had not been able to travel to Earth. As usual, the science is not all it could be, but this lack is more than made up by the action and fast pace’ (‘Authentic no.69’ May 1956). The main characters, Kemlo’s companions on his adventures, are also alphasort coded after the call-sign of their Belt. There is tall gangling pubertal ‘Krow’ Kerowski – much humour derived from the fact that his voice is breaking. There’s Kartin, and curly-haired Krillie, the youngest of them. While Kemlo has a bossy sister called Krinsetta. Quite possibly, when they study the classical music of Earth the Kinks will feature prominently on the syllabus! There are no surnames. For this fiction is a kid’s continuum, a ‘Boy’s World’ with elements common to other literature aimed at juveniles. Similar to the all-male boarding school setting with all its behavioural peer pressure, rivalry and bonding. When he's excited Kemlo exclaims ‘jumping meteorites’ or even ‘great sizzling meteors’, and when angered he threatens to ‘poke you in the snoot’. Then they pause at regular intervals to scoff grub and gulp fruit-juice. Kemlo occasionally wonders how his group compare to their Earth-born counterparts, ‘we don’t know what it’s like to have streets and buildings surrounding us like you have on Earth’ he points out. The space-born are ‘handsome healthy youngsters with the same love of fun’ but with noticeably wider shoulders, deeper chests, and a grace of movement owing to lack of gravity. He wonders if the space-born are more serious than Earth children. They play, but their hazardous environment means they must study hard too.

For Kemlo, there are compensations, ‘life on the Satellite Belt was never dull’. Across the spread of novels, as Captain of the Space Scouts Kemlo and his pals are ‘pretty wizzo’ at travelling on colourful space-scooters powered by self-generating pellets of ‘urania’. His space-scooter goes ‘KREE-OWW!’ and then ‘SHROO-UUSH!’ as it hurtles through the blue void. They cross the vast distances in space that are plotted in Leenas, protected by their canopy of holding rays through a ‘skyful of fantastic phenomena’. They visit the moon – ‘so grim and dead’, they get caught up in magnetic storms on Martian moonlet Diemos, and, when Krillie and Kemlo lose their way, they find themselves on the ‘Crazy Planet’ too. Once there they help the friendly Laughing People fight off an attack by ferocious Wood Beasts, and encounter less-friendly marooned Earthmen. It’s not exactly clear where the Crazy Planet is located within the solar system. In ‘Kemlo And The Sky Horse’ Dane and Lesa – Krilllie’s cousins arrive, and the stories they’re reading determine Kemlo to construct ‘a new-world Pegasus, a horse that can gallop in space’, despite the hazards of the chapter-heading ‘Meteor Menace’. There’s more of a sense of sinister mystery in ‘Kemlo And The Zones Of Silence’ in which Krinsetta is kidnapped by three boys from Belt-S and taken to ‘Dead World’. Again, it’s not exactly clear where the Dead World lies, but it is ringed by the zones of silence, a ‘small dark green necklace’ that ‘hung ominously in the blue void’. The prank goes wrong when the rescuers meet Bat-Men there, and an untypical macabre edge when, while exploring ‘The Mangling Caves’ ‘they knew they had discovered something which was almost beyond their power to understand’, a grotto containing old space-suits, ‘and each space-suit contained a human skeleton and in every case the top of the skull was neatly severed’. They encounter a survivor ‘Sid’, through whom they learn more about these worlds controlled by ‘Thought Transference’.

Then, in another mangling of factoids, ‘Kemlo And The Star Men’ begins as a routine test exercise in which the Space Scouts are sent to investigate a phenomenon described as a ‘wandering minor galaxy’! This is ‘a general term used to describe anything from a gas-cloud to semi-solid spheres or a disc-shaped constellation’. And this wandering galaxy is only ‘several hundred-thousand miles from Satellite Belt-K’ – hence well within the solar system, less distant than Mars! Once near they become snared by its gravitation and dragged into the Star World, a place of ‘weird voices, solid land inside a cloud of stardust, and the usual, extravagant adventures of the boys who live on the Satellite Belt-K’ (‘Authentic no.66’ in February 1956). Krillie provides a diary-commentary as they set down on an organic surface within the pearly glow, beneath a bridge of coloured light. He muses that they might have landed on a star – ‘some stars are really minor planets, and that means they are a substance’. Their radiotronic waves begin picking up alien voices and a spinning flame-spouting circular craft appears, crewed by hostile egg-shaped robotic Humpties. Eventually, trapped inside the alien ship, Kemlo and Kerowski succeed in destroying it. The Space Scouts are finally rescued by the Belt’s special Star Men squad, who reveal that the Humpties craft originated on Mars, and was also investigating the new phenomenon. ‘Our job is to investigate all the minor galaxies which appear and report whether they are likely to become, or have a chance of becoming, a planet’ he tells the boys, ‘it is reasonable to assume that every major planet in the universe began as a minor galaxy millions of years ago.’ Reasonable? Actually, it’s gobbledygook! Such sloppy writing really is inexcusable.

Yet the fifteen ‘Kemlo’ books were so successful that Elliot launched a parallel series featuring ‘Tas’, beginning with ‘Tas And The Postal Rocket’ which lifts off from the Woomera Complex in 1955. Tas was also visualised by Bruce Cornwell. By the time Reginald Alec Martin died of cancer in Sussex, in 1971, his work was enjoying renewed popularity through a reissue series of Merlin paperbacks, even though the cover misspelled his pseudonym ‘Eliot’. Re-reading them now it’s reassuring to find my childhood impressions confirmed. Yes, the Kemlo books are rather poor examples of juvenile fiction. Yet the first SF book Iain Banks confesses to reading is ‘Kemlo And The Zones Of Silence’. Ken Macleod, author of the ‘Engines of Light’ Space Opera series, also admits to reading Kemlo books at the age of eight or nine, something he now considers ‘perhaps best forgotten’. Paul Barnes (John Grant) even claims that discovering Kemlo transformed his life, and that later ‘I discovered that half the writers active in UK SF had gone through the same experience. EC Eliott moulded a generation’. Horror writer Simon Clark read Kemlo. Fellow Horror Writer Peter Crowther ups the ante by claiming he read Kemlo – as well as Patrick Moore’s ‘Mars’ books and Angus MacVicar’s ‘Lost Planet’ series at age six or seven.

FROM THE DOMES OF PICO…

TO THE DOMES OF MARS…!

I recall much preferring ‘The Future Took Us’, a time-slip novel written by David Severn. Although first published in hardback by Bodley Head in 1957 illustrated by Jillian Richards, I bought the three-shilling 1962 Puffin paperback edition at a school book-fair. Lured by William Stubbs’ atmospheric cover-art showing two boys cascading through the rippling vortex of time. Writer David Storr Unwin – who lurked behind the ‘David Severn’ alias, died as recently as 11 February 2010, at the credible age of ninety-two. Snatched into a dystopian post-apocalypse 3000AD his schoolboy heroes only recognise they’re on future-Earth by the continuity of a recognisable pylon. If the denouement was less impressive, in which, through some kind of H Rider Haggard reincarnation twist the religious dictator resembles their old headmaster, and uses a maths primer as his holy book, the book still left a positive impression. As did Hugh Walters’ ‘The Domes Of Pico’ (1958) in which hostile Moon-based aliens with evil intent project neutron streams that disrupt Earth’s atomic installations. ‘Of course, Arthur C. Clarke has done it all before, and so much better’ snipes critic Leslie Flood, while conceding that the novel is ‘far superior to the usual run of juvenile SF’. A verdict echoed by Kenneth F. Slater writing in ‘Nebula no.33’ (August 1958), who adds ‘primarily a juvenile, it should not be overlooked by adult readers’. In fact, ‘Pico’ was the sequel to ‘Blast Off At Woomera’ (1957), in which seventeen-year-old Chris Godfrey, due to his short stature, was first launched into orbit to document the ‘strange unnatural shapes squatting balefully in the midst of the wild lunar scene’. Writer Walter Llewelyn Hughes, who simply reversed his name into the pseudonym ‘Hugh Walters’, ran his own furniture store in the west-Midlands, but was also a member of the British Astronomical Association and the grandly named British Interplanetary Society. The future he portrays is a curious mix of steam trains – presumably coal-fired, and an increasing reliance on nuclear power due to the depletion of coal-reserves! The Calder Hall reactor, subsequently renamed Sellafield – high-profile then due to its recent opening as the world’s first commercial nuclear station on 17th October 1956, is the first installation to be affected by the lunar domes, and to go critical. To be followed by other reactors around the world. Cold War rivals unite in the face of extraterrestrial threat, and Hughes again uses the Australian spacedrome to reignite the escapades of his hero, who must plant a guide-beacon on the moon for the USSR and USA to target. Hughes’ prose is consistently more serious in its approach than that of Reginald Alec ‘E.C. Elliot’ Martin. In a bleaker more realistic take on technical adventure, both the science and the political balance are well-integrated, without becoming intrusive. Over the course of further sequels Chris finds himself stranded on the moon in a stand-off with Serge, a cosmonaut from Murmansk. In a microcosm of global necessities they are forced to reach an understanding that will enable them both to return home. They become long-term friends, joined by the American Morrison ‘Morrey’ Kane and young Brummie Terry in the newly-formed UNEXA (United Nations Exploration Agency), in journeys to each planet of the solar system. The four travel to Venus in an attempt to discover an antidote to an extraterrestrial grey fungus-mould spreading devastation through the African rainforest, then use an ion-drive ship to reach Mars. At the rate of one book per planet – all the way to Pluto, with bonus adventures in subterranean Earth civilisations, the stories continue into the 1970’s, by which time Chris Godfrey has become UNEXA Deputy Director. The books received generally positive press reactions. ‘Excellent plotting and straightforward style tend to overcome the somewhat naïve simplicity for older readers’ opines no less an authority than Leslie Flood – in ‘New Worlds no.97’. While Theodore Sturgeon, in his ‘New York Times’ review opines that ‘reading a Hugh Walters novel fills this old hand with a poignant nostalgia… no kid who reads this can possibly come out of it without knowing more than what he went in with’ (24th July 1974). Unlike the ‘funniosities’ of reading a Kemlo novel.

There were other novel series, the mere fact of their hardback appearance tending to invest often highly tacky literary product with an illusory parentally-approved respectability – licensing plot-lines and scientific liberties that their more trashy picture-strip counterparts wouldn’t be allowed to get away with. Sometimes Dan Dare’s exploits seem almost level-headed by comparison. So – just how scientifically plausible are those novels? The prolific Patrick Moore – already wild-eyed and in ill-fitting suit, wrote a book of critical essays called ‘Science And Fiction’, proclaimed by ‘Nebula no.20’ (March 1957) as ‘the most important book of recent months’. In it he takes space fiction and slips it like a microscope-slide under a scrupulously analytical eye, concluding that the only worthwhile examples of the category are ‘those which are accurate as they can be made in the light of our present knowledge’, allowing only, and grudgingly that ‘a good deal of license must necessarily be allowed’. Moore contributed a regular ‘Sky At Night’ column to ‘The Children’s Newspaper’ which I read week-by-week, and produced his own text-book ‘Guide To Mars’ (Muller at 10s 6d) which I borrowed from the local library. He professed to consider his own fiction to be both educational and agitational-propaganda for astronomy and space exploration. Promoted as an astronomer and hence a ‘credible’ voice, he churned out a dozen SF novels aimed at young readers throughout the fifties. His first novel, ‘Master Of The Moon’, arrived in 1952. While ‘Mission To Mars’ – blurbed ‘THE BOOK FOR BOYS WITH AN EARNEST INTEREST IN SPACE TRAVEL’ (1956), became the first of his ‘Mars’ quintet. When I met Patrick during his 2000 visit to Bradford I passed a carefully-preserved first-edition of the novel, with its childish cover-art, across the table for him to sign. ‘Oh goodness me’ he exclaimed, examining it critically as though a strange alien artefact from before the dawn of time. But there, within those hardback covers, his young heroes were launched from Woomera rocket range, to discover life on the red planet, a creature ‘in the nature of a huge bat, with a body as long as a man’s, and flapping membranous wings that beat against the tenuous air as the creature hovered’. In the sequel, ‘The Domes Of Mars’ (1956), Patrick’s protagonist survives helmetless in the hostile Martian terrain by plunging his head into oxygenating plants. Then, in ‘Peril On Mars’ (1957), his human colonists discover Martian dragonflies, and groves of gas-plants which exhale breathable oxygen. Elsewhere within his fictional solar system, in his 1956 novel ‘World Of Mists’ Gregory Quest provides the heroics while ‘Venus provides the locale of action, with its choking atmosphere and thick fogs’. So, his fantasies, although less extravagant than some, have proved to be just as factually inaccurate. And bearing in mind Patrick’s assertion about SF being useful largely as agitational-propoganda for Astronomy and Astronautics, I asked him, did he believe that such prose presented an accurate portrayal of Mars as it was understood at the time? ‘Good heavens no’ he burbled in absurd amusement, ‘it was just fun.’

‘SUCH WONDERS THAT

NO LIVING MAN EVER SAW…’

Even the mighty Isaac Asimov made a foray into the juvenile fiction zone, beginning with ‘David Starr, Space Ranger’ in 1952, although he felt it necessary to assume the alias ‘Paul French’ to do so. Venus was conventionally portrayed in fifties fiction as a young planet, with primitive swamp and rain-forest jungles beneath its obscuring clouds, which were mistakenly assumed to be composed of water vapour. ‘Paul French’, contributes ‘Lucky Starr And The Oceans Of Venus’ in 1954, equally light-years wrong in his vision of the planet, as even its title indicates. His series, running to six ‘David Starr’ titles, was later republished under Asimov’s own name, on which occasion he seized the opportunity of inserting an escape clause introduction explaining that, although the science in the novels is now known to be ‘ludicrously obsolete’, ‘Paul French’ was writing within the confines of what was known, and what could be extrapolated in the 1950’s. And at that time the solar system was a very different place. It’s tempting to suggest Captain WE ‘Bill’ Johns’ SF novel series for comparable levels of oddness. The creator of ‘Biggles’ died in 1968, so when his ‘Kings Of Space’ books returned to print through Piccolo paperbacks in 1980, he was denied such retroactive self-defence. His stories suffered critically as a result. Yet he’d have no truck with space-breathing youngsters. In ‘The Man Who Vanished Into Space’ (1963) Rex Clinton is travelling in the Tavona spacecraft when they encounter a body in space. ‘Should he himself step out of the ship unprotected, he reflected with a shiver, he would join the corpse already there, dead within a minute, his lungs deep-frozen and the blood in his veins solid ice. Empty space. On Earth, men spoke of it glibly without realising what a fearful thing it really was’. Even as a young reader myself, I could respect the stark truth of such passages where I could not accept Kemlo. ‘It is easier’ W.E. Johns claims in a kind of pre-emptive self-justification, ‘to write a book on a subject about which nothing is known, for then nothing can be denied’, and with the ‘dark spaces of the universe… we know just enough to put a check on over-indulgence in fanciful imagination. But still, a little may be permitted’. After all, ‘theories of today are scrapped tomorrow as fresh information comes to hand… let them scoff!’

Following this logic, his Professor Brane even encounters strange life-forms on the Moon. But Johns, ‘an author who is recognised as one of the foremost writers in the field’ – according to ‘Authentic no.72’ (August 1956), is far from alone in discovering lunar life. M.E. Patchett – whose initials modestly disguise the identity of Australian grandmother Mary Osborne Elwyn, born in 1897! had ‘Adam Troy’ – an Astroman who travels to the Moon as London is threatened by a giant meteor-strike and Kraken-style radiation-monsters begin rising from the ocean depths. She targets the Moon again in ‘Send For Johnny Danger’ as the crew of the first Luna-bound spaceship find themselves stranded there ‘with little air and less hope…’. Naturally, they survive such inconveniences by finding and investigating strange buildings, meeting stranger creatures, and finally arriving home triumphantly.

Mars had already built an incredibly rich mythology by the time Captain W.E. Johns’ spacefarers got there, and his depiction of dead cities beside ancient canals is far from being the most outlandish. Perhaps – in fictional terms at least, as Professor Brane phrases it, planets are better ‘dangerously alive than drearily dead’, and Johns’ conjures an effective ‘sense of wonder’ – ‘unless I am mistaken we are on the verge of such wonders that no living man ever saw’. One which does not neglect the vast melancholy of dead civilisations, evocative ruins from lost antiquity, the ‘eternal desert’ of planetary extinctions, or the ever-present threat of nuclear conflagration with its potential to end life on Earth. ‘Politicians wonder what has gone wrong with civilisation when the answer is staring them in the face’ Brane exclaims in the second novel, ‘the world is sick with fear. It lost its peace of mind when it became possible for one man to destroy it by pressing a button. This they understand’ – sobering and pretty profound stuff to aim at socially-aware 1950’s adolescents, yet this troubling text offers a gravitas and a feel of relevance that those school-age readers were only beginning to grapple with and properly comprehend. The first tremors of a generational unease that would uniquely overshadow their lives in ways that it had seldom touched their parents. This – if only subliminally, John’s readers understood. This ever-present possibility of military misuse is precisely the reason Brane refuses to reveal his secret cosmo-technology to the world. The only real way to judge the worth of such work is within the context of the bizarre myths and morés of the time, and by comparison with its contemporaries. So where space-brat Kemlo fails this literary litmus – Johns emerges reasonably creditably. So be prepared… I’ll return to the ‘Kings Of Space’ at a later date.

COLLECTIBLE ‘JUVENILE’ S.F.

OF THE 1950’s AND 1960’s

BY ‘E.C. ELLIOT’ (pseudonym of Reginald Alec Martin, who died in 1971):

For the Merlin paperback reprints the author name is mis-spelled ‘E.C. Eliot’

(1) ‘KEMLO AND THE CRAZY PLANET’ (Thomas Nelson 1954)
(2) ‘KEMLO AND THE ZONES OF SILENCE’ (Thomas Nelson, 1954/ Merlin paperback – art: RJ Jobson)
(3) ‘KEMLO AND THE SKY HORSE’ (Thomas Nelson, 1954 – art: Bruce A Cornwell)
(4) ‘KEMLO AND THE MARTIAN GHOSTS’ (Thomas Nelson, 1955/ Merlin paperback)
(5) ‘KEMLO AND THE SPACE LANES’ (Thomas Nelson, 1955/ Merlin Books paperback)
(6) ‘KEMLO AND THE CRATERS OF THE MOON’ (Thomas Nelson, 1955)
(7) ‘KEMLO AND THE STAR MEN’ (Thomas Nelson 1955 – 5s/ Merlin Books paperback, April 1968)
(8) ‘KEMLO AND THE GRAVITY RAYS’ (Thomas Nelson, 1956 – 6s)
(9) ‘KEMLO AND THE END OF TIME’ (Thomas Nelson, 1957 – 196pp – 6s)
(10) ‘KEMLO AND THE PURPLE DAWN’ (Thomas Nelson, 1957)
(11) ‘KEMLO AND THE ZOMBIE MEN’ (Thomas Nelson, 1958)
(12) ‘KEMLO AND THE SPACE MEN’ (Thomas Nelson, 1959 – illustrations: George Craig)
(13) ‘KEMLO AND THE SATELLITE BUILDERS’ (Thomas Nelson, 1960 – illustrations: George Craig)
(14) ‘KEMLO AND THE SPACE INVADERS’ (Thomas Nelson, 1961 – b/w illustrations: George Craig)
(15) ‘KEMLO AND THE MASTERS OF SPACE’ (Thomas Nelson, 1963 – b/w illustrations: George Craig)
‘TAS AND THE POSTAL ROCKET’ (Thomas Nelson, 1955, art: Bruce Cornwell/ Panther paperback, 1962)
‘TAS AND THE SPACE MACHINE’ (Thomas Nelson, 1955, art: Bruce Cornwall/ Panther paperback)

BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN:

‘SPACE CADET’ (1948)
‘RED PLANET’ (1949)
‘STARMAN JONES’ (1953) – to British astronaut Mike Foale, ‘on a motivational level it was science fiction that really fired me up’ and he quotes this book as an influence ‘when I was eleven’

BY ‘CAREY ROCKWELL’

(Willy Ley listed as ‘Technical Adviser):
Pseudonymous novels published as spin-offs from the TV, radio, and comic-book franchise, loosely based on Robert Heinlein’s book ‘SPACE CADET’ (1948)

‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: STAND BY FOR MARS’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1952)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: DANGER IN DEEP SPACE’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1953)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: ON THE TRAIL OF THE SPACE PIRATES’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1953)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: THE SPACE PIONEERS’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1953)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: THE REVOLT ON VENUS’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1954)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: TREACHERY IN OUTER SPACE’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1954)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: SABOTAGE IN SPACE’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1955)
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET: THE ROBOT ROCKET’ (Grosset & Dunlap, 1956)
comic-book editions include:
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET’ (Dell Publishing) January 1952-September 1954. Adapted from the 1950-1952 TV series with art by Al McWilliams (nos. 378, 400, 421), John Lehti and Frank Thorne
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET’ (Prize Publications) May 1955-September 1955 numbered Vol.2 no.1-3. Art by Mort Meskin who’s cover for no.2 shows Tom fighting off hordes of dwarf orange aliens emerging from a yellow sphere spaceship
‘TOM CORBETT, SPACE CADET’ (Eternity Comics) January 1990-April 1990. Black-&-white strips

BY M.E. (MARY OSBORNE ELWYN) PATCHETT (1897-1972):

‘SPACE CAPTIVES OF THE GOLDEN MEN’ (Bobbs Merrill Company, 1953) reprinted as ‘KIDNAPPERS OF SPACE’ (Lutterworth Press, 1953)
‘ADAM TROY, ASTROMAN’ (Lutterworth Press, 1954)
‘LOST ON VENUS’ aka ‘FLIGHT TO THE MISTY PLANET’ (1954)
‘SEND FOR JOHNNY DANGER’ (Lutterworth Press, 1956 – 6s 6d)
‘THE VENUS PROJECT’ (Brockhampton Press, 1963)
‘ALEX AND THE HAUNTED MOUNTAIN’ (1963)
‘FROM BENEATH THE SEA’ (1969)

BY ISAAC ASIMOV (originally as by ‘PAUL FRENCH’):

‘DAVID STARR, SPACE RANGER’ (1952)
‘LUCKY STARR AND THE PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS’ (1953)
‘LUCKY STARR AND THE OCEAN OF VENUS’ (1954)
‘LUCKY STARR AND THE BIG SUN OF MERCURY’ (1956)
‘LUCKY STARR AND THE MOONS OF JUPITER’ (1957)
‘LUCKY STARR AND THE RINGS OF SATURN’ (1958)

BY PATRICK MOORE:
(‘…they are jovial, though stereotyped…’ Peter Nicholls ‘Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’)

‘MASTER OF THE MOON’ (1952)
‘THE FROZEN PLANET’ (1954)
‘ISLAND OF FEAR’ (1954)
‘DESTINATION LUNA’ (1955)
‘EARTH SATELLITE’ (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955 – factual history of orbital vehicles)
‘QUEST OF THE SPACEWAYS’ (1955)
‘WORLD OF MIST’ (1956)
‘WHEEL IN SPACE’ (1956)
‘MISSION TO MARS’ (1956)
‘DOMES OF MARS’ (1956)
‘VOICES OF MARS’ (1957)
‘PERIL ON MARS’ (1957)
‘SCIENCE AND FICTION’ (Harrap, 1957 – critical essays, 192pp – 10s 6d)
‘RAIDERS OF MARS’ (1959)
‘WANDERER IN SPACE’ (1961)
‘CRATER OF FEAR’ (1962)
‘INVADERS FROM SPACE’ (1963)
‘CAVERNS OF THE MOON’ (1964)
‘CAPTIVES OF THE MOON’ (1965)
‘THE MOON RAIDERS’ (1978)

BY HUGH WALTERS (WALTER LLEWELLYN HUGHES 15th June 1910-13th January 1993):
All have cover-art by Leslie Wood.
‘BLAST-OFF AT WOOMERA’ (Faber & Faber, 1957 – 15s)
‘THE DOMES OF PICO’ (Faber & Faber, 1958, 196pp – 13s 6d)
‘OPERATION COLUMBUS’ aka ‘FIRST ON THE MOON’ (Faber & Faber, 1960 – 16s)
‘MOON BASE ONE’ (Faber & Faber, 1961 – 15s)
‘EXPEDITION VENUS’ (Faber & Faber, 1962 – 15s)
‘DESTINATION MARS’ (Faber & Faber, 1963 – 15s)
‘TERROR BY SATELLITE’ (Faber & Faber, 1964 – 13 6d)
‘MISSION TO MERCURY’ (Faber & Faber, September 1965 – 16s)
‘JOURNEY TO JUPITER’ (Faber & Faber, 1966 – 15s)
‘SPACESHIP TO SATURN’ (Faber & Faber, February 1967)
‘THE MOHOLE MENACE’ (Faber & Faber, 1968)
‘NEARLY NEPTUNE’ aka ‘NEPTUNE ONE IS MISSING” (Faber & Faber, October 1969)
‘FIRST CONTACT?’ (Faber & Faber, November 1971)
‘PASSAGE TO PLUTO’ (Faber & Faber, February 1973)

… plus many more novels

This feature originally published (in edited form) in the very wonderful:
‘JEFF HAWKE’S COSMOS Vol.6 No.2’ (UK – October 2010)

ALBUM: 'There Will Be Fireworks'

2011-10-28T19:19:00.003+01:00

Album Review of:

‘THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS’

by THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS

(The Imaginary Kind, 2009)

www.myspace.com/therewillbefireworks

‘there will be fireworks, and they will light up your eyes,

and you will feel more alive than ever before…’

The future of Rock ‘n’Roll? or at least the future of a certain kind of arty Indie Rock. Sensitively intense gender-balanced, white and articulately literate, Glasgow-based There Will Be Fireworks do all the variant soft-to-loud bits from acoustic stillness with an emphasis on words, abruptly arcing through near-Proggy frills into throat-scraping power-bursts of fine-spun rage. It’s already all there as opening track “Columbian Fireworks” fades in from barely perceptible insect ticking into spacey scintillation. Stornoway poet-author Kevin MacNeil adds narrative voice-over, a magical realist Latin-American text of a dead sister and the coming festival, leading into crashing waves of controlled distortion. No chorus. No riff. No middle-eight. Just three sharply distinct movements forming two states – ‘water and ice, ice and water’, all in just 3:17-minutes.

The cover photos by Jonathan Pritchard are wild rural emptiness, unpopulated, huge darkening sky over sparse trees. A minimalism in direct contradiction to the musical-density within. “So The Story Goes” has a more conventional song-structure build, barely, over a clattering soundscape that gently condenses into long-drawn-out strokes of muted colour. In “Midfield Maestro”, over an acoustic strum singer/guitarist Nicholas McManus complains his ‘tongue gets tied in knots’ and ‘the words they never stick’. These assertions are delivered in a Fran Healey ‘Travis’ vocal burr, but contradicted by the lyrical structure about how the songs he always plays are the songs she hates. Again, a midpoint switch into reverberating instrumental interplay propelled by Adam Ketterer (drums & glockenspiel) and bassist David Madden as the situation resolves in screams about setting these tapes on fire as she unravels in his arms. In “Guising” the words spill out of his cloudy head while she remains eloquent and elegant, another pair of door-to-door ghosts defined in just 1:26-minutes, it crashes directly into “Off With Their Heads”. A balance of contrasts. Nimble guitar from Gibran Farrah (guitar, violin & piano), pitch and power, painting kinetic movements in pandemonium shadow-shows, before further-seguing into the classy purity of “I Like The Lights”. An alphabet of loss in a language he can’t speak, although it sounds pretty articulate to me!

Recorded at the seventeenth-century Old Mill Studios in Strathaven this album is a continuity of memes, incoherence contrasted with light, no moment that is not considered and premeditated, nothing as cheap as hooks, yet illuminated by lights in the sky, roman-candles, constellations, shooting stars that ignite and collide. “A Kind Of Furnace” is a near-Prog epic that plunders the group’s full rich palate, a work of considerable intelligence, too thought-through for hits, and all the better because of it. Intense and relentlessly serious with moody sweeps and melodic repetitions, a textured blizzard of dynamics, a quote from Ian McEwan read by studio-engineer Marshall Craigmyle, and a sharp false-finish that merges into the more percussive up-tempo “We Sleep Through The Bombs”. Moving track-by-track, “Headlights” is a road-movie of the mind driven by keyboards and chiming guitar, and “We Were A Roman Candle” another anguished romantic bout of over-thinking, riddled with melancholy regrets for a brief and intense encounter done soft, then repeat-screamed against a dense wall of noise, finally closing with Elvis’ ‘wise men say only fools rush in… and I’m no fool’. Three more tracks bring the CD up to its required full thirteen, “Says Aye” starts all ‘cold hand and starry-eyed’ but closes with a bleak radio-news sample of ‘let us face, without panic, the reality of our time, the fact that atom bombs may some day be dropped on our cities, and let us prepare for survival by understanding the weapons that threaten us’. “Foreign Thoughts” recapitulates the theme of ‘words that won’t come out’, ‘the sounds you never speak’ and ‘the words left out’, again repeated at volume. And finally, this all-joined-up album is all tied off with “Joined-Up Writing” with ‘the things I could have said… but you never asked, so they just stayed inside my head’, with again the precise mid-point switch into a second-movement with the subtlely hurtling pulsations of reverse-tapes, and a reprise of “Foreign Thoughts” feeding into the open-ended question first posed by Doris Day, ‘que sera sera’ whatever will be, will be.

This hugely impressive debut forms a continuity not light-years from the Songdog thing, whether an oblique take on the Celtic bardic ‘verse in dusty books’, or just thoughtful poetics, it’s a positive sub-genre worth book-marking among your ‘favourites’. There Will Be Fireworks are currently said to be working towards a second album. The future of Rock ‘n’Roll? Maybe not, but at least the future of a certain kind of arty Indie post-Rock.

Countdown To The Nineteen-Hour Assassination Of David Cameron

2011-09-28T17:57:00.004+01:00

COUNTDOWN TO THE

NINETEEN-HOUR

ASSASSINATION OF

DAVID CAMERON

On the 19th hour…
David Cameron sells off what’s left of the BBC

to a scrap-dealer in Oildrum Lane who melts it down

& recasts it into a million miniature commemorative figurines
of Margaret Thatcher with a Hitler moustache

On the 18th hour…
David Cameron dissolves Parliament &
compels all MP’s to re-stand through ‘X-Factor’

On the 17th hour…
David Cameron deletes the word ‘Socialism’

from Dictionaries and Wikipedia.

The Labour Party protest they already did this

during their last period in government

On the 16th hour…
David Cameron censors books, TV & MP3’s by banning
the ‘F’-word (fairness) & the ‘C’-word (compassion)

On the 15th hour…
David Cameron combines the Conservative Party Conference

with the Glastonbury Festival where 64 moderate MP’s are

found dead on portaloos. Cameron claims there’s no conspiracy.

Morrissey says 64 MP’s is not enough & nothing compared

to the atrocity committed in abattoirs every day.

He becomes a national hero

On the 14th hour…
David Cameron bans burkas as an affront to women,
bans low-slung pants that show the arse-crack

as an affront to decency,
bans tattoos and facial piercing as an affront to taste,
bans hoodies as an affront to law & order,
& bans JLS as an affront to music

On the 13th hour…
David Cameron rests,
looks at all he’s done & pronounces it good

On the 12th hour…
David Cameron introduces the public flogging of

welfare scroungers televised live during the Lottery-show,
& available for catch-up viewing on YouTube

On the 11th hour…
David Cameron legalises fox-hunting,
also the hunting with hounds of the undeserving poor,
single teenage Mums & asylum-seekers

On the 10th hour…
David Cameron withdraws Britain from the EU
& declares it the 53rd State of the USA

On the 9th hour…
David Cameron releases all schools from local &

national government control, while making it

compulsory to teach ‘Intelligent Design’, ‘Creationism’,
the myth of Global Warming, & sexual abstinence

before (during & after) marriage

On the 8th hour…
David Cameron appoints Simon Cowell Minister of Culture,
Spongebob Squarepants as First Sea Lord,

Tony Blair as Archbishop of Canterbury,
Peter Sutcliffe as Minister for Population Control,

Wayne Rooney as Education Minister
& puts Nick Griffin in charge of social diversity

and community cohesion

On the 7th hour…
David Cameron re-launches royalty as a pre-bookable option,
terms include a 20-minute coronation, trooping the colour,
changing of the guard, & waving from the balcony.
All major credit cards accepted.
The Windsors (nee Saxe-Coburgs) seek asylum in Saudi Arabia.
The first 18-years of monarchy are immediately block-booked
by Japanese, Russian, Iranian, Texan & Indian interests

On the 6th hour…
David Cameron replaces Pounds Sterling with KFC,
Macdonald & Starbucks tokens, then makes the Bank of England
a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney Corp

On the 5th hour…
David Cameron declares he’s saved the NHS
by transferring all UK Passport-holder medical needs
to the voluntary sector so releasing hospitals

to fee-paying foreign clients

On the 4th hour…
during Question Time, David Cameron rams his arm up

Vince Cable’s ass, raises him into the air, &,

brandishing him like a grotesque trophy,
screams ‘it’s a puppet, it’s a puppet’

On the 3rd hour…
David Cameron legalises gay marriage
& marries Nick Clegg in a final desperate attempt
to hold the coalition together

On the 2nd hour…
David Cameron sells what’s left of Britain to foreign oligarchs
& conglomerates on a buy-one-get-one-free basis

On the final hour…
with no hope, & nothing left to lose
….BANG!!!

Chemical Brothers: Live In Leeds (1999)

2011-09-28T14:41:00.004+01:00

Gig Review of:

CHEMICAL BROTHERS

and others at READING NORTH /

LEEDS ‘99 FESTIVAL

Temple Newsam Park, Leeds

Hey Boys. Hey Girls. Think the unsayable. Say the unthinkable. I’m watching the original guitar-torturing junkie intensity of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under The Bridge”, but prefer All Saints dance-friendly chart-blandout version. It must go back to those wretched Cock-Sox promo-snaps, because I can never take the Chili Peppers as seriously as some sections of the music press seem to think I should. Isn’t all that sweaty bare-chested mouths-like-catflaps Rock-power just a little too retro? and St Shaznay’s even got a better nude midriff – no contest. But for those who still insist on guitars, Dandy Warhols sharp art-cool New York (out of Portland) irony catches the zeitgeist better, and as dins go, their crisp detonations of Pop-culture shrapnel is a whole bunch more fun too. But for serious techno-retro there’s Add N to X in the Radio One Evening Sessions Tent, radioactive with history. If Roland VK-7’s, Moogs and Korgs mean anything to you, then these electro-primitives are a revelation. A solid wall of electronic noise stripped back to its Kraftwerkian origins – and sometimes even, shit, Hawkwind’s theramin too, inventing or reinventing something as totally unique as it is sonically stunning, with just the conventional drumkit to point and define its shapes. While outside in the unforgiving glare of daylight Apollo 440 jump like Van Halen and dance in syncopated style like Madonna into the Groovy. Too klepto-opportunist to be genuinely cool, they filch a Sci-Fi movie-score here (‘Lost In Space’) while ransacking Pop’s storehouse for Gene Krupa, Prince and Elvis there, then – with a near-blasphemous cheek, they half-inch Status Quo with a wit and energy verging on unhealthy Rockist tendencies.

It’s round-about now I start hallucinating about some monstrous temporal quantum anomaly swallowing this stage and dumping it back in time into... say, the middle of the Woodstock Festival! What would all those tripped-out Hippies make of this? Apollo 440 are white and English, yet come coded in the language of 1980’s black Rap and Hip-Hop. To Woodstock’s children there’d be no tunes, and hey – they don’t even play their own instruments! But while the nineties seldom tolerate anything as boring as song-structures, the technology to do all this cyber-techno pillaging has never before – until now, been possible. With the Chemical Brothers, there’s no human stage-presence either. Just two charisma-free digital-Anti-Stars lost behind massively awesome “Block Rocking Beats” of spectacle – BIGGER, LONGER, UNCUT and loud enough to suck your eyeballs into the back of your head. It starts with “Music: Response”, two barely visible micro-figures waving, silhouetted against exploding deluges of image-storming video dementia. And it intensifies, punctuated by mangled “Out Of Control” Bernie Sumner’s shredded vocal samples. Fuck sensitivity. I want NOISE!!! Hippies once talked-up Electric Music For The Mind And Body, Mixed-Media Total Psychedelic Experience, but lacked a prosthetic god immortalised in machinery capable of achieving it. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ mutual chemistry creates what they were incapable of. Would the Woodstock flower-punks be clued-up enough to recognise that? Probably not. This is an evolutionary thing. Unlike most guitar-Pop, Chemical Brothers unique chipped-up interactions may no longer be precisely cutting edge, but more importantly, their stuff could only exist now. While with “Sunshine Underground” they even move inexorably from near-ambient waves of phased colour into a transcendental... say the unthinkable – well, beauty, as its insistently repetitive ego-loss mantra gains momentum. Hey Boy. Hey Girl, this is still the century’s final and most complete All-Over sensory Mind-Movie.

Billy Fury DVD 'Wondrous Places'

2011-09-28T14:19:00.004+01:00

‘WONDROUS PLACES’:

THE SOUND OF FURY

DVD Review of:

‘BILLY FURY:

HIS WONDROUS STORY’

(2007 – Odeon Entertainment ODNM007)

The tragedy – if tragedy it is, is not only that Billy Fury died so early, at just forty-two. It’s that he’d started out as a songwriter. It was as a songwriter that he first approached impresario Larry Parnes at the Birkenhead ‘Essoldo Theatre’ on 1st September 1958, hoping to interest him in some potential songs for bill-topper Marty Wilde. And his “Maybe Tomorrow” is a powerful piece of early Brit-Rock writing. But, like Leo Sayer or Gene Pitney who also both started out writing hits for other artists, as the former Ronald Wycherley’s career took off he became increasingly reliant on other people’s songs, and allowed his own songwriting skills to atrophy. So that when the music scene shifted and his career became stranded out of time, unlike Neil Sedaka or Marty Wilde who retained the ability to fall back on writing for others, Billy was left reviving antiquated hits such as Bobby Vee’s “Devil Or Angel” or Bobby Rydell’s “Forget Him”. What remains of his recorded legacy is nevertheless a powerful presence that resonates down the decades through the artful poses of ABC’s Martin Fry, Bryan Ferry or Morrissey.

This DVD tells the tale, from Fury’s beginning, as part of the Formby Sniffle Group (sic), made up of the crew of the Mersey tug-boat on which he worked as a deckhand. His brother Albie tells how Billy wrote “Collette” after they’d watched a French movie together – ‘it wasn’t a naughty one’ he insists in his broad Liverpool accent. And how he wrote lyrics on the back of household bills, or on the inside of cigarette packs. He tried out some material at Percy F Philip’s two-track studio-booth at 38 Kensington – where the Beatles also recorded demos, and toyed with the stage-name ‘Stene Wade’. Instead, he took “Maybe Tomorrow”, and another song – “Just Because”, to the ‘Essoldo’ ‘Rock Extravaganza’, where fan-reaction convinced Mr Parnes-shillings-&-pence that his potential lay more centre-stage. Once signed by Parnes’ agency he set out from his Dingle home with his guitar in a pillow-slip, because he had no guitar-case. Parnes put him on a £20 weekly wage, later raised to £50 when the hits started. The moody wistful “Maybe Tomorrow” was used as the theme-song for Ted Willis’ ‘Television Playhouse’ ARTV-play ‘Strictly For Sparrows’, which helped elevate it into the chart (no.18 in March 1959). Later, Decca A&R-man Dick Rowe moved him away from Parnes’ stifling influence, and towards the power-ballad covers he delivered in the kind of heavy-lidded sleepy-eyed sensuality that took him yet higher in the charts. To Paul Gambaccini his breakthrough version of Goffin/King’s “Halfway To Paradise” surpasses Tony Orlando’s American original hands down (and peaked at no.3 in May 1961). Drummer Clem Cattini of the Tornadoes, and John Leyton add tour memories, as Billy was banned from performing in Dublin’s ‘Theatre Royal’ due to his ‘objectionably’ wild highly-sexed stage-movements.

He wrote two more hits – “Colette”, dual-tracked into a kind of Everly Brothers harmony-style (no.9 in April 1960), and “That’s Love” (no.19 in June 1960), which was also included as part of one of the most enduring and sought-after UK rock albums – ‘The Sound Of Fury’ (issued April 1960 as Decca LF 1329). A ten-inch ten-tracks mono LP recorded in a single day, it placed on vinyl the closest to authentic rockabilly Britain had thus far produced, featuring Joe Brown on session-guitar, a production job from Jack Good contriving a kind of virtual low-tech ‘Sun’ sessions sound, and every song a Billy Fury original, some of them written under his curious alias ‘Wilbur Wilberforce’ (an impressive total that stacks up pretty well against the eight Lennon-McCartney originals on the Beatles first album). Yet beneath the Rocker – ‘a cross between James Dean and Elvis Presley’ according to Vince Eager, there was always a genuine sense of vulnerability. Fury was essentially a quiet reserved guy. ‘When I go on stage, it is an act’ he admits in the rare interview-footage he only reluctantly subjected himself too. Long-time partner Lee Alkin Middleton (later partner to Kenny Everett) agrees that on stage he was acting the part of ‘Billy Fury’ – ‘he oozed sex on stage’ but ‘every pose was practised, every angle was practised’, and he was a totally different, more private person off-stage.

At the peak of his British popularity he played American dates, renewing his association with Jack Good. Billy had first made his initial impact on Good’s Saturday evening ITV ‘Oh Boy’ show which sent shock-waves through staid British television, but by then – later in both of their careers, Good had graduated to producing the US coast-to-coast ‘Shindig’ show. Now, Billy guested on ‘Shindig’ too. But visiting Elvis on the set of the ‘Girls Girls Girls’ movie, as ‘New Musical Express’ journalist Chris Hutchins, who was also there, relates the incident, much to Elvis’ bemused reaction, Billy found himself too scared and intimidated to even talk to Presley. Perhaps there had been some initial intention of interesting Elvis in recording some of Billy’s songs – and wouldn’t it have been a revelation to hear the one-time King of Rock ‘n’ Roll singing a composition by the young UK pretender to that throne? But if so it worked out in reverse. Instead, Billy took a song from the movie soundtrack, and charted with his own version of “Because Of Love”. Then went on to star in a low-budget musical of his own – ‘Play It Cool’ (March 1962) as ‘Billy Universe’, the first feature film directed by a tyro Michael Winner. By March 1963, as the Beatles were making their first assaults on the world, the glossy ‘Billy Fury Monthly no.1’ appeared on the newsstands and survived for forty-two issues. His mother Jean speaks movingly about how he bought them a new parental home – called after his 1960 hit ‘Wondrous Place’. No ‘Graceland’ perhaps, but a powerful expression of his show-biz status.

Meanwhile, Billy’s own increasingly infrequent compositions were to be found tucked away on neglected ‘b’-sides, as late as “What Do You Think You’re Doing Of” on the flip of “Like I’ve Never Been Gone” (no.3 in February 1963). The play-in to his next hit “When Will You Say I Love You” (no.3 in May 1963) consists of a vast quasi-classical piano-concerto opening, setting the mood for Fury’s dark vocals which are fully equal to its gravitas, acting out the drama of unrequited love with all the theatricality that Shadow Morton would bring to the Shangri-Las, or Jim Steinman to Meatloaf, yet never for a moment tainted by their excessive bombast. Its levels of romantic angst are spelled out verse-by-verse like the frames of the ‘Love-Stories-in-Pictures’ magazine to which he’d become a regular pin-up cover-star. There’s no knowing post-modern self-awareness, no irony, no hint of a tongue anywhere near the cheek. To all intents and purposes Billy Fury means every word he sings, and at least for the 2:25-minute duration of the song you’re allowed no scintilla of doubt that the hurt and tortured anguish he feels is anything less than real. Within the narrow confines of the 45rpm teen-Pop single, it’s an amazing piece of work.

As the Pop landscape shifted and reconfigured around him, with the old star-hierarchy crashing out of visibility, Billy merely moved onto a new level of popularity. There’s a passing nod towards Mersey Beat – perhaps specifically at Billy J Kramer, in the guitar motif of “Do You Really Love Me Too (Fool’s Errand)” (no.13 in January 1964), but largely he continued in a parallel continuum, as a balladeer. There was even a new movie, ‘I’ve Gotta Horse’ (July 1965), during the filming of which he had a brief affair with co-star Amanda Barrie. But by decade’s end his worsening health, and the onset of yet more extreme Rock fashions, eclipsed him out of visibility. Plagued by chronic ill-health since an attack of childhood rheumatic fever had left him with weak heart valves, a situation complicated by tax problems inherited from his earlier career-mismanagement, he seemed as content to retreat into the semi-retirement of his farm in Wales and his passion for bird-watching, as he ever had been assuming the guise of ‘Billy Fury’ and being a star. Like the Who he’d never scored a no.1, but with a run of 281-weeks with some twenty charting titles, he didn’t really need one. And there were to be sporadic reappearances – a cameo in the ‘That’ll Be The Day’ (April 1973) movie in which – as ‘Stormy Tempest’, he virtually re-played his earlier self. Bringing it all a kind of full-circle. There was the first of a series of big-selling hits-compilations in 1983, followed by a sixty-three-track ‘40th Anniversary Anthology’ 2CD (Deram 844-874-2) set in 1998. What might have been more appropriate would have been a new album of his own songs? But whatever potential he’d once had as a songwriter, had long since passed. In memory, the Billy Fury story must be told in monochrome. He may have guested on the launch edition of the Mod extravaganza ‘Ready Steady Go’, but he performs the high drama of his hits, collar turned up, shoulders hunched inwards concentrating the energy, most perfectly against the elaborate sets of ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, introduced by the precise enunciation of Brian Mathews. As such, he was seldom bettered.

Book Review of 'HOT DOG DAYS' by George Cairncross

2011-09-27T15:13:00.003+01:00

Book Review of:

‘HOT DOG DAYS:

COLLECTED

POEMS 1965-2005’

by GEORGE CAIRNCROSS

(Fiasco Publications, 31 Belle Vue Street, Filey,

North Yorkshire YO14 9HU, £3.50p)

Filey is a Pop Art sort of place. Dark skies. Relentlessly bright spiral-displays of postcards. Gaunt hotels. Warm fish ‘n’ chips. Where oldsters retire to. Where blue plastic buckets-&-spades sway suspended from shop awnings in salt North Sea breeze. And George Cairncross. A kind of Renè Magritte double-take in a Gents Outfitters-cum-Militaria, catering to day-tripper needs. His flat above exploding with pin-up collages, the tang of spirit-duplicator fluid, and poems punched out on a typewriter that perforates ‘o’s into neat round holes. His magazine ‘Bogg’ began irreverent, oft daft, always fun. Not quite how it wound up, guided by other hands, across the Atlantic. In the 1970’s it was a ‘Beano’ among poetry journals. Which is why it worked. Why it reaped contributors and held them with unique gravity. Each issue a party. A raucous disreputable gathering of mates and in-mates, yet ever-welcoming to anyone open to it. A Punk ethic before its time, a DIY everyone-can-do-it that nevertheless sucks in and nurtures fine poets. That’s quite something. George was ‘Bogg’. He was also much more. He splurged out absurdist samizdat novels circulated for the asking. Sure, he could be found between Corgi paperback covers (‘It’s World That Makes The Love Go Round’, 1968), and infiltrates the likes of ‘Gargoyle’ (USA), ‘Next Wave Poets’ and everywhere beyond too. But he’s always an unmistakeably distinctive voice. From page one in, from the first 1965 poem, it’s George Cairncross. Could be no-one else. An aspect more important for a poet than just about anything else. Sometimes you think Adrian Henri, or maybe Roger McGough in ‘the bedsprings sing like a thousand canaries on the mantelpiece disguised as sparrows’. Or maybe wider Mersey-wise references. The economical contractions of ‘silverswept streets’ or ‘smokedust’ sky, added to the Beat phrasing of ‘the mad, bad tumbledown streets of the dawntime city’. But no. Playful humour, wistfully accessible, yes. Words that work live. With punch-lines. But off into his own tangent. I remember these poems. They seem so simple. Yet work like precision ordnance. Try replicating it. You can’t. I know. I’ve tried, and failed. Few, if any, fail here. “I Have Declared War On The Government” is a repeating riff, each verse a Peter Blake assemblage populated by image-snatches from things you knew but never knew you knew. “One Of These Days” starts out hearing the sounds of revolution in the suburbs, and ends up mere short stabbing lines later, sitting in the park, half-fearful, half-exuberant, awaiting its detonation. Elsewhere the revolution is frittered away ‘somewhere between The Black Horse and The Stalwart Grenadier’, in pub-nights spent ‘arguing anarchism with a bunch of Marxists, and not really caring anyway’. But caring, despite it. His poems come furnished with fruit machines and MenMags. Bert Weedon and John Wayne. Jazz and the City Varieties. A flowered bra that swings on the bedrail, like a field of unplucked marigolds. A nightingale dropping acid in Berkeley Square. Simple is the hardest thing. Piling on complex densities of allusion and literary effects is easier. Strip it back to its conversational hub, it works better. He near-stumbles with the sixtiesish ‘flickering fogbeams of my mind’, but retrieves it with the jingle ‘superfine sunshine shines forever’. He sees Aphrodite in a sports car, and discovers she’s just a girl from Birmingham. His Lit-heroes Kelly & Sheets are, of course, a malapropically-reconfigured version of ‘Old-Time Romantics’ Shelley & Keats. Whatever happened to them? like an out-dated Music Hall double-act they’re lost where ‘stanzas are dying of blank verse’ and ‘empty words with vacant signs cannot hide in the mist’. By way of contrast, he sketches himself as the grubby frayed poet with nothing to give ‘but the rainbows in my pen’. Glancing to uncertain posterity he offers up a spoof-prayer to a god who some say is dead, but he says was never alive, a prayer to not forget your old mate George. Give him a fighting chance. Or at least a five-yard start to the pier-head. Yet the final poem finds him the last poet, survivor of the swinging sixties cast up in 2005, obsolete typewriter forgotten in the corner, under a layer of dust. Nothing left to say. There’s plenty said here.

POEM: 'The Closest Thing To Prayer'

2011-08-26T23:12:00.004+01:00

THE CLOSEST THING

TO PRAYER…/ SATURDAY

NIGHT & SUNDAY MORNING

some nights disgourged from dancehalls and
street-corner drifting from dockside pubs
we take motor metallic-screaming bikes down
roads crystal-clear with amber lighting,
then overlooking the moon-crazy estuary
spidered with shipyard cranes and derricks,
past Salt End jetties and chemical plants
to the all-night café where “Twist & Shout”
and “She Loves You” strike the air dumb,
vibrating the huge Wurlitzer jukebox and
pinball tables lit up like neon hoardings

drink acrid expresso coffee in Duralex cups
to kill alcohol swirling around the brain,
watching Honda and BSA in formation beneath
the arc of street-light. Talking trash

then drunk and chasing midnight girls
we pause to see the distant lights of
trawlers throb across the estuary stillness,
off for Iceland or Baltic fishing-grounds

and we pause
for a moment
to watch

Published in:
‘SLOW DANCER no.7’ (UK - December 1980)
‘GREEDY PIGS no.2’ (UK – October 1996)
‘CHANTICLEER MAGAZINE ISSUE 16 (1960’s Theme Issue)’ (UK – March 2007)
and in the anthology:
‘THINGS WE SAID TODAY: POEMS ABOUT THE BEATLES’
edit: Phil Bowen (Stride Publications) (UK – September 1995)

ASSOCIATION: Six-Man Band

2011-08-26T22:39:00.004+01:00

SIX-MAN BAND:

THE NOT-FORGOTTEN

ASSOCIATION

Remembered largely for easy-on-the-ear

Pop anthems “Windy” and “Cherish”, Association had

their moments at the cutting edge of weird…

‘AS SWEET AS THE PUNCH…’

I only ever saw Association once. And that was on TV. It was during their solitary British trip, playing isolated run-down and poorly-attended gigs, plus that one-off ‘Top Of The Pops’ slot. It was 1968 by which time they’d already peaked, but something of the charismatic power that – a short fistful of months earlier had made them the hottest property out of America’s West Coast was still apparent. I’d attempted to follow their ascent, greedily interpreting and assimilating tantalisingly hazy newsprint halftones and two or three-line rumours of their Stateside progress, plus occasional radio snatches of their trailblazing singles, “Along Comes Mary”, “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies” or “Requiem For The Masses”. In the acknowledgement to his ‘High Priest’ book Timothy Leary pretentiously turns ‘our planet over to the young and their prophets’ – listing the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service – and Association in that role.

Such bands didn’t occur spontaneously, but in a series of waves throughout the mid-sixties, each ripple edging the corporate hit-factory a step further from the mass-production machine-mindset. The West Coast of San Francisco and Los Angeles was where this metamorphasis fermented most virulently. America’s ‘Cash-Box’ lists for the 18th June 1966, for example, was dominated by Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”. But way below it, between the forty and fifty positions were two singles destined to spark off mythologies. There was “My Little Red Book”, a Burt Bacharach composition treated as a Byrds/Rolling Stones hybrid by Arthur Lee’s enigmatic Love. And there was a song listing ‘the psychodramas and the traumas’ of “Along Comes Mary”, by the Association. Love’s Elektra-label single, a trailer for their definitive ‘Da Capo’ (February 1967) and ‘Forever Changes’ (November 1967) albums, fell on further stoney ground. But “Along Comes Mary” made the top ten within six weeks.

Written by Tandyn Almer, but accelerated by producer Curt Boettcher, the 45rpm plays-in with distorted organ fed through fuzz-tone blended with Fender bass, while a second guitar tuned like a string-harpsichord complements the build. Jim Yester mouths an ambiguous lyric in a hurtling cascading roller-coaster of internal rhyming onomatopoeic-repetitions – ‘I spend my time in rhyme and verse and curse those faults in me’, into lines that might be praising the hallucinogenic and therapeutic qualities of a girl called Mary, or – as journalist Lillian Roxon tartly observes, ‘aha, said the knowledgeable, the only Mary that does that is marijuana. And sales immediately tripled’! The whole thing climbs into a frenzied handclap-driven climax that is, at the same time, intelligently constructed and executed. A glimpse of Rock things to come. July the 16th saw it nudging Britain’s ‘Record Retailer’ chart at no.39. The following week it fell ten places, then vanished. Most likely due to being ignored by the promotion media, despite favourable, but isolated reviews. London was still in the Mod grip of the Zoot Money, Geno Washington Big-Band Soul thing, despite groundwork done for the new American white music by the Lovin Spoonful and the Byrds.

Association had come together a few scant years prior to their chart breakthrough. With Jules ‘Gary’ Alexander and Terry Kirkman defining its nucleus, playing the LA Folk-centric scene around ‘The Troubadour’ alongside other aspirants, David Crosby, Frank Zappa, Doug Dillard and Cass Elliot. Soon after their November live debut in Pasadena, there was a failed single for the obscure Jubilee label, lifting the traditional “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” from the 1962 ‘Joan Baez In Concert Part 1’ album (c/w “Can’t You Hear Me Call Your Name”, Jubilee 5505). Although revived a few years later to devastating effect by Led Zeppelin for their 1969 debut LP, in fairness it’s likely they by-passed the Association record in favour of homing in on the Anne Bredon original which Joan Baez had used. But then again, Robert Plant is an astute connoisseur of obscure Pop, so who knows? It might just have jolted his interest. It was followed by one previous release for Valiant. Since the Byrds and Turtles hit pay-dirt with “Mr Tambourine Man” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” respectively the Dylan-song route was – after all, routine. But although their take on the ‘Times They Are A-Changin’’ album-track “One Too Many Mornings” was a 1965 air-play hit around LA, it didn’t work its breakthrough magic outside the State, maybe its ‘restless hungry feeling that don’t mean no-one no good’ was a little too austere, despite their vocal sweetening (c/w “Forty Times”, Valiant 730). It was reintroduced into their repertoire in time for a 1970 Live double-album cut at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, a project maybe intended to refute persistent gossip that Association hadn’t necessarily played on all of their hit-tracks! For a while the group was ‘out to lunch’, as the lyrics of ‘Mary’ relate, until she arrives in their life, as ‘sweet as the punch’. A hit, but ‘does she want to give me kicks and be my steady chick and give me pick of memories’? The dilemma is resolved, ‘when the morning of the warnings passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars… the songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars’. It’s a song with wide enough scope to be reinterpreted later by Manhattan Transfer, and – with scant consideration for tune, by Bloodhound Gang!

Following “Along Comes Mary” (c/w “Your Own Love”, London HLT 10054), their second hit reverts to folk-beat roots gently overlayed with the faultless pin-sharp vocal-dexterity soon to become their trademark. Well within the West Coast Mamas and Papas close-harmony tradition, maybe, but focusing its own characteristic freshness around a degree of concise technical perfection seldom equaled since. Written by Gary Alexander “Cherish” was released through Valiant and distributed through Warner Brothers in America, and the distinctive black-and-silver London label in Britain (c/w “Don’t Blame It On Me”, HLT 10074). Yet beneath its lush romance lurks a more lyric-heavy content than most as it explores a semantic quandary, the limitations of words to express meaning – ‘I’m beginning to think that man has never found, the words that could make you want me, that have the right amount of letters, just the right sound that could make you hear, make you see’, near-Wittgenstein as regards most Pop lyrics. It entered the ‘Cashbox’ list on the 24th September at no.43. Three weeks later it topped the chart after jumping through sixteen to four. It remained on the ten for five weeks including two spent at the top slot.

‘ALONG THE PATHS OF DARK AND LIGHT…’

A six-man band, the group then consisted of five-feet-three Gary Alexander – who the press hand-outs skewered with the epithet ‘elf-like’. As well as the alleged leader he wrote “Pandora” and played lead guitar. Terry Kirkman adds recorder, flugel horn and harmony vocals as well as scripting more of the hits. Russ Giguere was lead ‘vocalisator’ and contributed rhythm guitar. Ted Bluechel Junior, drummer and vocalist was a former zoology student and sex symbol of the band according to that same hand-out. Multi-instrumentalist guitarist Jim Yester also sang tenor harmonies. The sixth element was bassist – ‘flexible rhythm generator’, Brian Cole who contrived Association’s ‘Music Machine’ satire. The routine – a wacky attack on the over-commercialisation of the music industry, became an integral part of their act. Performed on the Smothers Brothers TV-show the hosts described it as ‘inventive and witty’. ‘We are musical machines’ they deliver in dead-pan, ‘a machine of our own construction’, against angular riffs and deliberately monotonous mechanical percussion.

Both singles were lifted from the debut album, ‘And Then – Along Comes The Association’ (Valiant, July 1966, reissued by Warner Bros in June 1967), produced in Hollywood by Curt Boettcher (pronounced ‘Betcher’), an enfant terrible fresh from working with Tommy Roe on ‘Sunshine Pop’ hits “Sweet Pea” and “Hooray For Hazel”. A Rock auteur he collaborated with Gary Usher on the ‘Sagittarius’ project, and was a founder driving force behind Our Production Company, a unit later responsible for some highly idiocyncratic psychedelic oddities. He’d been in at the conception of the band. At one time even considered for the line-up. Benefiting from his light witty interventions the album (issued in the UK as London HAT 8305) relies heavily on the headliner singles, plus future ‘B’-side “Standing Still” (flip of “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies”). But once beyond the familiar tracks there’s the generational manifesto “Enter The Young”, an anthem for the New Consciousness which – they claim, had ‘not only learned to think’ but ‘to care’ and ‘to dare’. Then the equally impressive tambourine-rattling “Changes”, with the neat ‘sometimes words don’t make it… so I’ll play’, with a little guitar figure filling in where inexpressible sentiment lies, adding ‘you got the power and the reason for the rhyme’. There’s modest use of innovatory electronic effects on Curt and Tandy’s “Message Of Our Time” giving the set depth and subtlety. For the rest, with understated jazz inflections, they are group originals. Boettcher remembered ‘some of the songs were recorded in Gary Paxton’s (engineer) living room. I recall it was a really hot day, and his wife had left a bucket of dirty diapers in the corner, so I was in a hurry to finish the tracks!’ (to ‘Zig-Zag’ no.48). Others were recorded in a garage, with the recording equipment in a bus parked in the driveway. Surely no punk-band could claim a more ethically humble album production technique!

Although faring well on the American lists a release bottleneck delayed its British issue until the follow-up set was already on the Cashbox charts. An important time-lag that determined it missed out on UK sales impetus. In compensation they spoke to interviewers from the straight press – sent to evaluate their hip/square credibility on Dylanesque send-up mode, of America disappearing beneath the sea like Atlantis. Delivered with an earnest seriousness that bewilders and confuses the uninitiated. For, although the three-piece suits they wear for the album sleeve’s reverse, the matching ties and highly-polished patent leather shoes, seem out of context with their music, the vibe lies like fizzing background radiation permeating all around them. Hinted by liner-notes from ‘Teen’-magazine’s Phyllis Burgess, and the arty double-exposure photo on the upside front of the album. The following year, however, forced a personal and musical rethink. With three chart singles to their credit they were already dangerously regarded as establishment. They even guest on the Andy Williams syndicated TV show! With the definition of hip capriciously redefining itself month by month, week by week, the next wave was erupting from the West Coast – Sky Saxon’s Seeds, hitching a ride on the short-lived Flower Power thing, was auguring great things, Buffalo Springfield, featuring both Steve Stills and Neil Young were in the charts with the foreboding “For What Its Worth”. “Strawberry Fields Forever” was revolutionising the whole concept of what had been known as Pop music – and what was never to be quite the same again. While Association straddle the transition period uncomfortably. It’s not necessarily that they were weird. ‘Cos there’s a definite exploitable niche for weird. It’s not that they were melodic Sunshine Pop. There’s an even greener market for that. It’s that they flip-flop from one to the other without ever properly reconciling the twain.

Oddly, for the second album ‘Renaissance’ (May 1967, Valiant, UK London HAT 8313), they dump Boettcher in favour of Jim’s brother Jerry Yester. Maybe some acrimony was involved? Boettcher later confided his opinion that the group ‘were never able to handle their own success, it really changed them as people’ (also to ‘Zig-Zag’ in 1975). But Yester’s credentials look good. He’d later replace Zalman Yanovsky in the Lovin Spoonful, going on to record the excellent ‘Farewell Albederan’ album with errant Folknik Judy Henske (1969, Straight Records STS 1052). And, working at Hollywood’s prestigious Western Recorders studio – frequented by Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, he got Association its third straight hit record of 1966 with Gary Alexander’s “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies” (London HLT 10098), earning them twenty-second position on the year’s charts point table. Said – wrongly, to name-check the Sunset Strip ‘Pandora’s Box’ Club, their most experimental ‘A’-side, like the Hollies “King Midas In Reverse”, delves into Greek mythology, to find the girl who opens the forbidden chest to unleash evil onto the world, ‘freeing locks, Pandora’s boxes, devils are expended and I’m finally free’. Echoing future trends by utilising strange almost out-of-tune harmonies, combined against what was assumed to be a sitar-driven back-drop (actually it’s a Japanese stringed instrument called a koto, played by Alexander himself), the ethereal lyrics – ‘I have walked along the paths of dark and light’ – take a sideways glance at pseudo-profundity, predating the explosion of acid-based imagery by a year. Telling how ‘when all the tears are finally cried and I’m finally clean inside, the gentle winds will come and they will dry my mind’, until with existential clarity, when he’s seen all that life has to offer, ‘now all that will be left for me to do is die’. Too downright weird for the kind of mass acceptance that carried their previous hits to the top it remains a totally charming and unique artifact of its time. Oblique and risky, brave or foolish. December 3rd saw it enter the US lists at thirty, it rose to 29, then 26 before falling to 32, 41, and vanishing. In Britain the Pirate radio stations became the bands most enthusiastic publicists. John Peel remembered seeing the Association sing “Pandora” at the famed ‘Whisky-A-Go-Go’ and was impressed. He played it later on his ‘Perfumed Garden’ radio show.

The album fared better on the American lists. More imaginative in conception than its predecessor, it’s indicative of the band’s dichotomy, going in two directions at once, into close-harmony work weaving in and around an amazing complexity, and into greater musical adventurism. Gary Alexander penned “Looking Glass” for the next single. Due to lack of reaction, by April 1967, it was flipped and Jim Yester’s softly romantic ‘B’-side “No Fair At All” (London HLT 10118) was promoted. It reverts to the beautifully flowing “Cherish” harmonies. But neither side achieved expected sales despite frequent airplays. Then Gary Alexander – always the most active advocate of their more imaginative path, quit the line-up. The spiritual bent indicated by his questing lyrics sent him on the Maharishi-trail to India. Although he’d later return, he was replaced by the amiable Larry Ramos, ‘stamped Made in Japan’ according to the Music Machine banter. An ex-New Christy Minstrel from Hawaii, he was to become an integral visual part of the act. His presence healing the divisions and infusing the group with a new lease of creative energy. His Hawaiian features allowed him to mis-introduce other band-members on stage, then declare ‘hey, all you white guys look alike to me’.

‘INSIGHT OUT…’

By mid-summer, Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love” had happened, as had ‘Sergeant Pepper’, Timothy Leary and Haight-Ashbury. Yet Association were there at its epicentre, opening the legendary Monterey Festival alongside Simon & Garfunkel, Big Brother & the Holding Company and the first American forays for the Who and Jimi Hendrix. And Association re-emerged with the new line-up, and a bouncy million selling single, “Windy” c/w “Sometimes” (London HLT 10140). Written by fellow ‘Troubadour’-graduate Ruthann Friedman, it entered the chart at forty. Crisply commercial with luxurious harmonies, it was perfect feel-good Pop. Its lyric describing the complete flower-child, the girl with ‘a name that’s lighter than air’ who walks down the street ‘smiling at everybody she sees’. Although it’s difficult to see, in our more cynical age, how a girl named ‘Windy’ could get away without cheap fart-gags. It climbed by degrees through 18, 7, 3 then spent the entire month of July at number one. Although the song “Windy” became popular in the UK – as the kind of thing New Generation dance to on the ‘Cilla Black Show’ – and despite numerous cover versions, it was never a hit.

The next single enjoyed similar success, both produced by Bones Howe, previously noted for his work in the jazz field and for engineering classic pop-trash hits for Jan & Dean. “Never My Love” (London 10157) was written by Dick and Don Addrisi (later of the Addrisi Brothers Band, they’d already contributed “Don’t Blame It On Me” to the debut Association album), and it took the American number one in just six moves. Starting at 27 it went to 11, 6, 2, 2, then by October 14th 1967 it was top. For me, it’s one of the classic sixties singles, irresistibly lush. I’ll forgive Association every blandness they’re occasionally prone to, for just one spin of this delicious single. There’s a delightfully surprising drunken electric piano jazz coda in the fade, supplied by leading West Coast session-man Larry Knechtel. A later member of Bread he also supplied keyboard embroidery for “Windy”, for Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, the harpsichord on “MacArthurs Park” and was featured on the Beach Boys ‘Pet Sounds’ and Phil Spector productions. He points out (in ‘Zig-Zag’ no.55) that guitarist Mike Deasy, drummer Hal Blaine, bass-player Joe Osborne and himself supplied the backing tracks for the band’s two biggest hits – Association supplying vocals only. But this arrangement was hardly unusual, the same musicians also perform on the Mamas and Papas hits. Meanwhile, even the 4:07-minute ‘B’-side, “Requiem For The Masses” made American chart-waves. Developing out of the ‘Renaissance’ mood of eclecticism, Terry Kirkman drew on the Catholic Mass for its framework, just as the Yardbirds had used a Gregorian chant for “Still I’m Sad”. Opening with martial drums and Latin incantation, the metaphor of a dying bullfighter sketches sharp Vietnam comparisons, as with chilling classicism and flowing layers of airy ethereal voices they recite ‘black and white were the figures that recorded him, black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in, black and white was the question that so bothered him, he never asked, he was taught not to ask’. So much so that, according to Kirkman himself, radio-play was killed off by a phone-call to WB from Nixon’s White House office.

The two hits re-establish Association. The US chart points table for 1967 racks them up at eighth position, beneath the Monkees at one, the Supremes at two, and Aretha Franklin at three. Their final project of the year, and their last for London records, was the album ‘Insight Out’ (January 1968, London HAT 8342). Naturally it leads off with “Requiem” along with the two hits, plus “We Love Us”, “When Love Comes To Me” and “Wasn’t It A Bit Like Now (Parallel 23)” with Kirkman’s subtitle referencing the circle of latitude passing through California. Their biggest-selling album, and one of the year’s highest grossing, it’s perhaps their most melodic and carefully crafted set, soaring with intricate harmony arrangements on cuts the Addrisi’s “Happiness Is” and “Sometime”. Sampling the work of other contemporary Folkie’s they do PF Sloan’s lovely “On A Quiet Night”, Tim Hardin’s “(You Got A) Reputation”, and Mike Deasy’s “Wantin’ Ain’t Getting”, glancing back – less effectively, to earlier sitar affectations. Around this time Valiant, the Four Star Television spin-off responsible for the Cascades “Rhythm Of The Rain” and Barry & the Tamberlanes “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight” – which had been bought out by Warner’s and run as a subsidiary, was folded. The Association however, went on. The first two albums were promptly reissued with new label number-designations.

“Everything That Touches You” c/w “We Love Us” (Warner Brothers Seven Arts WB 7163) continues the gentle sounds that had made them one of the most commercially appealing bands in America. Issued in February of the new year it stayed on the Cashbox lists for twelve weeks, reaching a peak on 9th March at number ten (the positions were 47, 31, 16, 14, 12, 10, 10, 11, 14, 22, 31, 34). It trailered ‘Birthday’ (June 1968, Warner Bros WS 1733), the sleeve-art reflecting their growth since the days of their first album. Sharp suits and short hair replaced by a sartorial extravagance heightened by graphic photographic tricks. Yet the charisma, the air of musical superiority and controlled authority remain. There’s a story that during recording, producer Bones Howe brought Jim Webb into the studio and pressured them to do a twenty-four-minute cantata Jim had written which included his “MacArthur Park”. After some wrangling, they declined, preferring to concentrate on their own material. It’s intriguing to conjecture what strange tangents their career might have taken if they’d had the hit version of the song, instead of Richard Harris. Things might have turned out very differently. Instead, there’s the inspirational “Come On In” with Kirkman and Giguere’s joint lead vocals, followed by the delicate if over-saccharine “Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten”. “Like Always” has Ramos’ vocals laid over an intriguingly intricate backing-track, not only innovative, but highly distinctive. “Toymaker” and “Barefoot Gentleman” open side two. It’s difficult to think of another band, the Beach Boys excepted, who experiment as effectively with harmonies at this time. The set winds down competently with “Hear It Here”, and “Bus Stop”.

Their most determined assault on British shores came during a May tour to promote “Time For Living” c/w “Birthday Morning” (Warner Bros WB 7195) from the LP. The theme of taking off his watch, kicking off his shoes, and reconnecting with nature is right in there with Joni Mitchell’s hippie-mainstream ‘got to get ourselves back to the garden’. Their well-rehearsed visual presentation, maybe too damn polite, matched to cleanly executed sound for their only ‘Top of the Pops’ appearance, paling everything else on the show into ineptitude. Professionalism might have become a dirty word excuse for lack of musical discipline in certain areas of Rock, but Association show it can still fight its corner. They manage to extract what’s best from both, fusing them into a single joyous whole. They also guest on the ‘New Musical Express’ Poll Winners Concert, headlined by the Rolling Stones. “Time For Living” with vocals by Giguere and Ramon, enters the British charts on May 25th 1968 at 35. Their only UK hit it climbed through 26 to 25, then a reversal to 28 and back to 26. It peaked at 23, fell to 24 and then vanished. Back in the States it followed a similar pattern. Entered the lists at 34 on 1st June and climbed to a peak of 23 a fortnight later. September saw them back in the American Fifty with Terry Kirkman’s autobiographical “Six-Man Band” c/w “Like Always” (Warner Brothers Seven Arts 7229), which peaks at no.30. There’s a stronger more assertive guitar line, a traveling-band lyric about ‘I’m a California man, my instrument in hand, I’m electrified’, seriously bearded and long-haired in the promo-clip. But there would be little more to come.

‘GOODBYE COLUMBUS…’

For a while they release few, and uncommercial singles targeting neither the charts nor the heavy Rock crowd from which they’d become estranged. A comfortably low-key “Goodbye Columbus” (c/w “The Time It Is Today”, lifted from ‘Birthday’) emerged on WB 7267. Jim Yester wrote the ‘A’-side as title-song for the successful Philip Roth-derived sub-‘Graduate’ movie-comedy directed by Larry Peerce starring Ali McGraw with Richard Benjamin. The flip involves a mildly novel left-channel right-channel dialogue. They also contribute “It’s Gotta Be Real” and “So Kind To Me” to the otherwise instrumental soundtrack (‘Goodbye Columbus’ September 1969, WB W 1786). But any expectation of yielding the kick-back Simon & Garfunkel enjoyed from ‘The Graduate’, were not to be realised. Instead, “Windy” c/w “Never My Love” (Warner Bros 7119) was re-issued in May 1969 to promote their neat ‘Greatest Hits’ (January 1969, WB WIWS 1767) resumè. Charting their development, in sequence from “Along Comes Mary”, “Enter The Young” (an inferior alternate take) and “No Fair At All” trailblazing their formative period, through those singles I once caught occasional radio snatches of. Monochrome might add a certain enchantment to TV performance-clips of those hits now, but watching ‘YouTube’ it’s not always easy to detect the element of hipness there. Sometimes distance – as for me, greedily piecing their story together as it happens from tantalisingly hazy newsprint halftones and two or three-line rumours, adds mystique. Significantly “Pandora” – one of the tracks that still looks good, and their most experimental cut, is missed off the Hits history. It concentrates instead on the distinctive harmonies unifying the development of the concept called Association, through which they’d best-reached commercial heights. Looking backwards now. No longer forwards. Yet harmonies directly in line of descent from the West Coast folk-rock style best represented by the Mamas and Papas, but also characterised by lesser entities such as the Critters, Changing Times, We Five and Beau Brummels.

Sadly, the hits package casts the tired inadequacy of their John Boylan produced ‘Association’ (October 1969, WB 1800) into sharper relief, with only “Look At Me”, “Boy On The Mountain”, Giguere’s “Broccoli” and “Yes I Will” standing above the general level on uninspired mediocrity. Lightweight and aloof, drawing country-tinged elements from the mood of the times, a ballad, “Under The Branches” – is a stab at a kind of sub-“Heroes and Villains” cut-up, which some consider impressive. And Brian Cole got his first writer-credit, in collaboration with Gary ‘Jules’ Alexander for a poor “I Am Up For Europe”. Warner-Reprise promoted the set by including “Dubuque Blues” on ‘Schlagers’ – one of their ‘Loss-Leader’ budget-price double albums available only through the mail. Re-united with the errant Gary Alexander – making them a ‘seven-man band’, and linking back with Curt Boettcher, there was a further single in May 1970, called “Just About The Same” (c/w “Look At Me, Look At You”, WB 7372). It was a Boettcher composition he’d previously done as the final manifestation of his Millennium group, even dubbing their vocals onto the same backing-track. Despite which the title’s maybe a tad too descriptive of its musical content. The vein of originality that once powered them through an arc of hits seemed exhausted. They worked out their Warner’s contract with their seventh, and least visible album ‘Stop Your Motor’ (1971, WB WS-1927). No hits. A lowly no.158 on the ‘Billboard’ chart. Only Jimmy Webb’s song “PF Sloan” attracted favourable attention, despite the intrusion of a drawling talking break. It was produced by Ray Pohlman who’d been responsible for their ‘Association Live’ (1970, WB 2WS 1868), another exercise in summing-up what had gone before.

There was more. More or less. On August the 2nd 1972 Brian Cole, who’d never missed a gig in ten years, was found dead in his hotel room of a heroin OD (although his son Jordan plays keyboards in a later Association line-up). There was a brief revival of interest prompted by Swedish band Blue Suede’s revival of “Never My Love”, and Rod Peters’ heavily air-played resurrection of “Cherish”. Nina Simone did the same Terry Kirkman song, and David Cassidy – no less, headlined an album with “Cherish”. Then Association themselves issued their first single in a long while, via a new CBS contract negotiated by Clive Davis. Their close-harmony arrangement of John Sebastian’s “Darlin’ Be Home Soon” (c/w “Indian Wells Woman”, June 1972, CBS 8062) was a taster for the album ‘Waterbeds in Trinidad’ (August 1972, CBS 65009) which followed. Neither single nor album made any chart headway, but affirmed their presence and technical proficiency over their now-more commercially successful West-Coast contemporaries. Advertised as ‘the most beautiful Association album yet’, the faces on the sleeve look different. The hair is longer. According to the liner notes they’re now Terry (Kirkman), Larry (Ramos), Jules (Alexander), Brian (Cole), Ted (Bleuchel) and ‘Same’ Yester plus Richard (Thompson, replacing Russ Giguere) – with thanks for help ‘in some beautiful way’ to Carole King, John Sebastian, Gerry Goffin, and production chores by Lewis Merenstein. The sounds within the sleeve seem deliberately less disciplined too, with John Stewart’s “Little Road And A Stone To Roll” and Ron Davies’ particularly attractive “Silent Song Through The Land”. Goffin & King’s “Show Queen” comes illuminated by tight harmonies, while “Please Don’t Go (Round The Bend)” is uncharacteristically up-tempo, driven by sax and choppy vocal patterns. “Kicking The Gong Around” extends the pulse almost into the funk-zone. Trace-elements of the old charisma remain, especially in Kirkman’s tragically beautiful “Come The Fall”. Despite inevitable modifications, it’s a vibrant and alive album. Critical reaction was largely positive.

Elsewhere, other stars from the same constellation were still spinning. Curt Boettcher issued his only solo album – ‘There’s An Innocent Face’ (March 1973, Elektra K42124), track-listing evidence that he retained an affection for his time with Association, particularly on “I Love You More Each Day”. Produced with multi-instrumentalist Webb Burrel, the ideas hang together something like Harry Nilsson meets the Beach Boys on “She’ll Stay With You”. While “Love You Yes I Do” is an exercise in instant 1950’s nostalgia that breaks into “The Book Of Love” and “Why Do Fools Fall In Love”, a song-selection perhaps indicative of the deeper roots of Association harmonies? After a diverse career in some of music’s most intriguing configurations Curt died 14 June 1987, following a lung infection. While Association remain, still extremely competent technicians of pleasing harmony and stylish arrangement, even if the third ingredient – innovation, has long since departed. They continued with various line-ups pretty much to the present day, consigned to the nostalgia circuit.

Despite an impressive roster of American hits and some diverting albums they’d become known to British record buyers largely through inferior – and ‘MOR’, cover versions. “Never My Love” from Danny Williams. “Windy” by Andy Williams. Both strong Association originals hallmarked by clear precise vocals that somehow fell on blind British ears during their period of greatest creativity. And then were too readily forgotten. But the six-man band was important, not only for the hits, but as a catalyst in the development of West-Coast Rock. In 1966 it was not only acid-drooling Tim Leary who spoke of Association in the same breath as Doors, Buffalo Springfield and the Airplane.

ASSOCIATED ASSOCIATION TRIVIA:

Larry Knechtel plays on ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ a September 1968 LP by singer-songwriter Marc LeVine (Hogfat HLP-1, reissued on CD Dynamic DYLP36) with Ry Cooder, & on Stephen Bishop’s 1977 debut LP ‘Careless’ (ABC ABCD-954) with Jim Gordon, & on Art Garfunkel’s ‘Fate For Breakfast’ in 1979

Tandyn Almer co-writes “Sail On Sailor” for the Beach Boys

Jerry Yester was an ex-member of both Modern Folk Quartet and The New Christy Minstrels (of which Larry Ramos was also a former member). After his work with Association he recorded two duo albums with Judy Henske, the second being ‘Rosebud’ (Reprise RS 6426). Replacing Zal Yanovsky in Lovin’ Spoonful he played on their final LP ‘Everything’s Playing’

Curt Boettcher produced two albums by his own group, The Goldbriars, before working with Assocation – ‘The Goldbriars (Epic BN 26087) & ‘Straight Ahead’ (Epic BN 26114). After the Association he recorded instrumental albums with session players as Your Gang (Mercury SR 61094), and Friar Tuck & his Psychedelic Guitars (Mercury SR 61111). He was a member and co-producer of Sagittarius (‘Present Tense’ Columbia CS 9644) and Millennium (‘Begin’, Columbia CS 9663). He also worked with the Beach Boys on ‘L.A. (Light Album)’ (Caribou CRB 86081), and appears on Bruce Johnson’s July 1977 LP ‘Going Public’ (CBS)

John Boylan started out as a member of Appletree Theatre (with brother Terence) who recorded the LP ‘Playback’ (MGM 2353). After production-work for Association he produced albums for Linda Ronstadt, Boston, Little River Band and Roger McGuinn

After leaving Association Russ Giguere recorded a solo I-Ching themed LP ‘Hexagram II’ (1971, Warners WS 1910) which includes sidemen Gary ‘Jules’ Alexander (bass), Larry Knechtal (keyboards), Bernie Leadon (future Eagle on guitar), Bobby Womack, Chris Ethridge (of Flying Burrito Brothers), with Jerry Yester, Judy Henske and Merry Clayton providing backing vocal. It includes Judy Sill’s “Range Rider”, Randy Newman’s “Lover’s Prayer” and a John Boylan song – “Brother Speed”, which he’d originally done with Appletree Theatre

Subsequent Association albums include:

April 1983 – ‘New Memories’ (Hitbound Records 51-3022/ HB 1005) largely cover versions of mainstream hits “Dock Of The Bay”, “Oh Pretty Woman” and “It’s All In The Game”

1983 – ‘Vintage’ (CBS Special Products BT-19223)

1988 – ‘Golden Heebie Jeebies’ (Edsel ED 239) intelligent UK compilation of hip earlier tracks selected by Brian Hogg

1995 – ‘The Association ‘95: A Little Bit More’ (Track Records)

also single March 1973 “Names, Tags, Numbers & Labels” c/w Rainbows Bent” (Mums MUM 1300), a previously unissued track featuring Brian Cole

with thanks to Trevor Hodgett (‘Record Collector’ June 1989)

Earlier version published in:
‘MADCAP’ (UK – July 1974)

Stan Barstow: When The Raging Calms

2011-08-23T15:03:00.003+01:00

STAN BARSTOW:

WHEN THE RAGING CALMS

The movie posters announced ‘A Kind Of Loving that knew

no wrong – until it was too late!’ It was a novel which

defined its time. Now Andrew Darlington meets Stan Barstow,

and asks what happens when that Raging Calms…?

‘KINDS OF LOVING…?’

There are no villains in Stan Barstow’s fiction. Only victims. When you think in terms of his working class background, and the outlook you could expect to develop from such roots, that may seem strange. Yet the vehemence and two-dimensional political polemics you might expect from a writer who so obviously retains an understanding of those who did not so escape, is missing. Politically, Barstow’s characters say only what he feels they would say, never what he feels they should be saying. Possibly it’s the legacy of West Yorkshire hard-headedness that disallows such a Barstow Socialist ‘Grand Gesture’? Or perhaps it’s a form of Thomas Hardyesque acceptance? – his stories contain a fine thread of the irony that is so characteristic of Hardy. But the most obvious reason for Barstow’s apolitical style is his interest – not in issues, but individuals.

‘A Kind Of Loving’ – his second novel, but first published novel, came in 1960, and it’s a book that exactly defines its time. Becoming a movie that perfectly catches the realist New Wave Of British Cinema. Book, and film, came as part of a creative Northern Uproar of gritty ‘Angry Young’ writers, including Alan Sillitoe (‘Saturday Night And Sunday Morning’), John Braine (‘Room At The Top’), Shelagh Delaney (‘A Taste Of Honey’), and David Storey (‘This Sporting Life’), each with a strong regional and – by implication, left-political bias. Yet ‘A Kind Of Loving’ is essentially a romance, with all its misunderstandings and uncertainties. Twenty-year-old office draughtsman Vic Brown is infatuated with Ingrid, and finally gets a date with her for Wednesday, ‘…I just don’t know how I’ll live till then’. Everything seems to be going well, until for their third date she turns up with ‘friend’ Dorothy, and they endure an uneasy three-way dialogue until the wary truce breaks down in a vivid slanging match. Is Ingrid trying to finish with him? Is she using Dorothy as an excuse? He overcomes his reservations, and asks her out again – yet she seems to be standing him up. Is it over already? No. She sends him a sweet letter, and the making-up leads to a breathlessly tactile feeling-up on the Ravensnook Park bandstand. ‘Vic… you don’t think I’m common, do you?’ It’s all narrated in Vic’s racy first person ‘historic present’ vernacular (girls are ‘bints’, ‘tarts’ or ‘birds’). A style that talks just the way you do ‘when you’re thinking yourself, I suppose’ he muses while skimming brother-in-law David’s ‘Ulysses’.

The tone is exactly right, each mood-change itemising the fine now-lost nuances of slight class signifiers. ‘The Old Lady doing her impression of Lady Docker.’ The bickering extended family dialogue at sister Chrissie’s opening wedding scenes flowing to-and-fro with a perfectly transcribed naturalism catching the various Aunties and Uncles with the precision of a time-frozen group-photograph. Vic’s house has three plaster geese ‘flying across the wallpaper’. Ingrid has a posh house, ‘two-thousand five-hundred at today’s price, I reckon’. The bantering friction between Vic and ‘the Old feller’ (‘I’m nobbut a collier, y’know, not a mill-owner’). A new generation with expectations higher than their parents ever dreamed of, in transition from blue-collar to white-collar office jobs, growing into comparative prosperity. Yes – you feel, this is how it was. A more morally constricted time. Vic’s feelings towards Ingrid oscillate, cooling from infatuation to ‘passing fancy’ where ‘sex and dream have got all mixed up inside me’, into the obligatory marriage when she falls pregnant (made even more ironic when she loses the child).

‘The Daily Telegraph’ at first compares Barstow – stylistically, to Emile Zola, and the analogy could be more telling than it at first appears. In a particularly indicative passage in Zola’s notes for ‘Germinal’ the French novelist outlines ideas that could be taken as the basis for those of Barstow’s. ‘To get a broad effect’ Zola writes ‘I must have my two sides as clearly contrasted as possible and carried to the very extremes of intensity. So that I must start with all the woes and fatalities which weigh down on the miners. Facts, not emotional pleas… The bosses are not deliberately vindictive… On the contrary, I must make the Bosses humane so long as their direct interests are not threatened; no point in foolish tub-thumping. The worker is the victim of the fact of existence – capital, competition, industrial crises’. As a result of these stated intentions Zola even makes the mine-owner, Monsieur Hennebeau, envious of his striking employees who he imagines ‘went off fornicating behind the hedges, laying girls without bothering about who had done so before’. He has food in plenty, but that doesn’t prevent him ‘groaning in anguish’. The stance is beyond issues. It views all as victims.

To Vic, commenting on a French-language film-version of ‘Gervaise’ seen by colleague Rawley, Zola ‘sounds like a game, like Bingo or Ludo or Canasta’. No, corrects Rawley, he was ‘an excellent writer. Surprisingly modern to say he wrote sixty or seventy years ago’. Not ‘sexy’ – but ‘outspoken for his time’, ‘shall we say ‘direct’?’ Wilf Cotton, the central character of Barstow’s ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’, knows Zola’s work too. ‘He found (Zola) over-blown, but admired his brutal energy in ‘La Bete Humaine’ and the power of his narrative sweep in ‘L’Assommoir’ and ‘Germinal’ ’. Wilf Cotton, a struggling writer, probably reflects many of his creator’s literary attitudes. Barstow, for example, was initially – inevitably, also compared to DH Lawrence, a charge Cotton dismisses with ‘there are resemblances, but I think they’re probably all superficial’.

Stanley Barstow was the only son of a coal-miner, born in 1928 in the West Yorkshire town of Horbury. They lived in Shepstye Road, and he was first educated at the local Council School. To borrow Wilf Cotton’s interpretation ‘he was perhaps a little brighter at school than many, but not as clever as some. When a scholarship at eleven took him to the Grammar School at Calderford he felt little sense of movement away from his class.’ Barstow’s own eleven-plus took him to Ossett Grammar, near Wakefield. He later began his working life in the Drawing Office of a local Engineering Firm (‘Dawson Whittaker & Sons’ for Vic, ‘Charles Roberts Engineering’ of Horbury Junction for Stan). For, although his fiction is never directly autobiographical, there are undeniably autobiographical clues that can be traced through his real-life ‘In My Own Good Time’. His father’s name is Wilfred (as Wilf Cotton), his father plays cornet in the Gawthorpe Victoria Brass Band (as Vic’s father plays trombone in the local band). One of Barstow’s colleagues in the drawing office quits after a row about pay, very similar to the incident in ‘A Kind Of Loving’.

He began writing short stories in his spare time, an event precisely dated to September 1951, soon after his marriage to Connie (nee Kershaw), who ‘put the idea into my head’. ‘I was 23 (he told a 1969 interviewer), I didn’t think for a moment anybody would take me seriously as a writer or that there was anything in me worth taking seriously. I began to regret the years of slacking at school but I was looking for some kind of creative outlet’. Soon, like Wilf, ‘the need to express the throb and quiver of life on the page, had become part of him’. ‘Once I got underway and became hooked, I learned very fast’ (‘In My Own Good Time’). But ‘I sold nothing in that first phase. The envelopes came back’, until eventually ‘I sold four short stories in eight years’, some of them broadcast on the BBC, including the then-popular ‘Light Programme’ series ‘Morning Story’. ‘I’d earned £77 18s 6d’, enough to buy a Remington portable typewriter. ‘Certainly there was no question of my taking myself seriously, of thinking I had anything serious to say, but if there were people making money by writing for these publications, I might as well become one of them…’

Until the publication, and instant success of ‘A Kind Of Loving’ (through Michael Joseph, then the distinctive orange-jacket Penguin paperback). It became the ‘Book Society choice of 1960’, with the sale of movie-rights close behind, enabling him to turn fully professional inside two years. ‘As a miner’s son’ he confessed, ‘I had to think twice about such a step. My mother could never understand how I live and even I’m a bit surprised with myself when I think about it seriously. There’s an idea floating around that I made so much money from the film ‘A Kind Of Loving’ that I never need do any more work. That’s not true, though it did enable me to give up a bread and butter job.’ But ‘I was learning, and the first thing I learned was that even with a reasonably fluent flow of words such as I could command, writing insincerely rarely works. Those who write meretriciously have to believe in it while they’re doing it.’

Meanwhile, Vic is still exhibiting all the feelings of unease that could so easily have been developed by other writers into political condemnation. The disturbing suspicion that there should be more to life than the sordid cycle he’s trapped into. Following a disastrous first period of marriage, he determines to accept the situation. They try again. He sublimates his unease in favour of compromise. He is Zola’s ‘victim of the fact of existence’. Barstow’s characters are continually pressured by circumstances. Buffeted by their feelings of responsibility and reacting to simple incidents of human relationships. They inevitably compromise or acquiesce. ‘The Desperadoes’, a collection of short stories published as his second book features – among others, “The Human Element” (1961). A story featuring Joe, a rather dull, unimaginative youth content to spend his life in the factory, cleaning his motor-cycle at weekends. He’s pressured – unwillingly, into a country outing with his Landlady, her husband and daughter Thelma who he doesn’t really like, but wants even less to offend. On the bus ride to the country, he goes out of his way to make it clear he doesn’t consider himself Thelma’s ‘young man’, but the reader knows that already he’s a marked man (‘this is where my husband and I came courting’ drools the Landlady!). Following a furtive peep up her dress and an unintended – at least by him, feel of her breast, he finds himself engaged to Thelma. As the story closes Joe says he’ll break the engagement, but the reader’s left with the sneaking suspicion that he’s as good as wed. Perhaps here Barstow hints at a kind of Shavian (‘Man And Superman’) idea of woman as the hunter, man the unwilling, but so-easily snared prey? It seems more likely he’s just telling a story about recognisable individuals in a particular situation.

It’s possible to view each of the stories in ‘The Desperadoes’ as variations on this theme. That of the ‘not-so-tender-trap’. Each one develops the ‘victims of the fact of existence’ idea in a slightly different direction. The emotional trap of the predatory marriage-hungry woman. The financial trap of poverty. The trap of remorse, of bitterness, of aging. Each character never quite aware of the nature of their own particular cage. They accept, adding to the irony that becomes apparent as each tale evolves. People are meshed in trivia, an emotional and intellectual wasteland partly of their own creation, partly the result of the corrosive effect of their social environment. A 1950’s atmosphere pervades the collection to a greater or lesser degree, with the directionless violence of the title story’s Teddy-Boys near-definitive of their time. To be fully appreciated their actions should be seen in the context of the Palais Dance, Brylcreme, DA hairstyles, crepe soles and ‘all the latest Pop stuff here for the fans, Frankie Vaughan, Tommy Steele, and Elvis’. Even the protagonist’s name – Vince, perfectly catches cheap Rock ‘n’ Roll pseudo-Americanisms (remember Vince Eager, Vince Taylor…?). Barstow’s rare attempt to make Vince a spokesman for his generation by blaming the Bomb, and the War – the effect of which was still very much apparent, is largely unconvincing. Although the roots of their violence can theoretically be traced to such causes (evidenced by Jeff Nuttall’s excellent ‘Bomb Culture’ history of teenage dissatisfaction), surely it was more intuitive, lacking eloquence or exact motivation? It was ‘felt’, rather than articulated. Yet the story conveys its fifties feel very well. And Vince finds his own particular trap when an explosion of pent-up anger and frustration results in murder. With near-Faustian precision, the violence that is to Vince his means of escape, winds up ensnaring him.

A theme that’s equally well-exploited elsewhere. A wife kills the caged rabbits that – she feels, are alienating her husband’s affection. Thereby further estranging what she’s attempting to salvage. The wife who locks the door on her drunken husband, causing his death, just as he’s won his longed-for Pools Dividend. Lack of personal communication is an emotional trap. The tragedy is not that a wife gets her long hair caught in the factory machinery (another attempted expression of freedom that rebounds horribly?), but that her husband is unable to reach any meaningful level of communication with her. Or the husband who unwittingly despoils the ‘sanctity’ of the couple’s first home, in his wife’s eyes, by trashing the paint-work to spite the next occupants. There are no villains, only victims. Finger-pointing, or Zola’s ‘tub-thumping’ would be too easy. For Barstow is not a political writer. Nor a consciously philosophical writer. The stories, the situations, are the statements. The fact of the working-class economic and cultural deprivation that’s the unspecified spectre behind these ‘traps’ is never stated.

Never prolific – with a total career-output of ‘a dozen novels and forty-odd short stories’, Barstow instead becomes an early-adaptor at maximising the media-spread of his work, from radio and TV versions, to film and stage productions. The next novel ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’, soon also appears as a radio and stage play. Then ‘Joby’ – an evocative story of an eleven-year-old boy’s ‘last summer of innocence’, is adapted by Barstow into a two-part TV series filmed in his Horbury home-town. ‘A Raging Calm’ from 1968 is destined to become a successful television serial too, paving the way for his treatment of the Winifred Holtby classic novel ‘South Riding’, also for ITV. Some of the short-stories from the ‘A Season With Eros’ collection will be adapted for ‘The Cost Of Loving’ TV series. His small-scale character-driven plots are ideally suited to either page or screen. Although the process of transfer – as in his TV-rewrite of “The Human Element” (with Thelma played by Paula Wilcox), can alter emphasis. Where the original closes with Joe’s unfocused doubts about his impending marriage, the extended revision shows the ‘snare’ of the marriage to be more double-edged. There is, he suggests, no alternative but bleak acceptance of its compromises.

Yet, in whatever medium, Barstow writes most convincingly about things he knows. About his West Riding background. About working people and their problems. Cressley, the town that features in so much of his fiction is based, in part, on Dewsbury, ‘a stone town, I preferred the stone’ (‘odd… to find how much sensuality was bottled up behind the respectable exterior in this town’ he comments in ‘A Raging Calm’). One of his characters even takes the name of another local town, Sam Skelmanthorpe. While ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ speaks eloquently of a personal drive to escape from the meaningless cycle of industrial factory-based life-styles. It is probably more autobiographical than any of his other books…

‘WHEN THE RAGING CALMS…?

I first meet Stan Barstow in 1973. By then he was an established literary figure living in Goring Park Avenue in Ossett with wife Connie, plus son Neil and daughter Gillian, in ‘a big old stone-fronted house’ built by a Victorian speculator. With a high local profile, maintaining his interest in Brass Band culture to the extent of introducing concerts at the local Town Hall, and competing in the Inter-pub Quiz and dominoes team at his local – ‘The Little Bull’ (his team lost). As for books, he was sitting with Jeff Nuttall and poet George Kendrick on the ‘Yorkshire Arts Association’ Literary Panel. And most weekends drove some fifty miles to a little writer’s cottage in a terrace of three rented from the painter Lawrence Toynbee in Ganthorpe, a hamlet in a corner of the Castle Howard estate. I’d written about him in a literary ‘underground’ magazine. He contacts me in response to my essay. And invites me round. The house, enforced by his status, is intimidating. I’m suitably intimidated. The bristling beard familiar from the book-jackets and magazine features. Music playing from an impressive hi-fi system, and I recall a character in ‘A Raging Calm’ commenting ‘whether you believed in god or not, a love of this radiant music was surely in itself a passport to whatever heaven existed’ (speaking of Bruckner).

This was my first encounter with the writer who’d begun with Vic’s formless disquiet, and evolved through Wilf Cotton’s literary aspirations. And it was a highly politicised time. Rock vinyl was proclaiming the inadequacies of the political establishment, modern classical composer Hans Werner Henze was premiering his works under the red flag, and Jean Paul Sartre, prophet of existentialism, was distributing radical propaganda at factory gates. Art was expected to be ‘valid’. The artist, the writer, the ‘creator’ was expected to point directions. So it wasn’t difficult for me to make the accusation that, as a writer no longer financially forced to accept the restrictions of working class culture, it was easy for Barstow to eulogise its nobility. It was not difficult to dismiss Barstow’s ‘revolt’ in purely personal terms. Writing, especially novels dealing with experiences and situations so obviously open to political analysis – such as ‘A Kind Of Loving’, could form a potential direct means of attacking the sterility he portrays. Literature can, and arguably should offer a viable alternative to the race for the capitalist ‘plastic carrot’. It can point questions, it can raise doubts – it can offer solutions, it can even use its capacity to release ideas to become the solution. And to be the catalyst of individual change is to be the instigator of social change.

But, having fought his way out of the restrictions of social injustice, perhaps Stan Barstow’s resentment has served its purpose? After all, Wilf Cotton finds ‘the gratification (in writing) came with the knowledge that his people, among whom he so often felt alien, respected achievement even in a field strange to them’. Like so many of his characters who haven’t rebelled against the ‘repressive, inhibiting atmosphere, with Puritanism and philistinism almost oozing out of the stones’ (1969 interview), ‘so much as try to wriggle out of it, until in the end they are forced to live with’ it. It was so easy for me to demand why his youthful personal resentment had not been extended to become a judgement of society…

‘Now then Arthur, that’s enough’ censures Vic’s Old Lady, ‘there’s no need to get arguin’. (He’s) entitled to his opinion.’

‘No man’s entitled to an opinion till he knows the facts. I’m just straightenin’ him out’ counters his Old Feller.

So argue it this way. There was, after all, the example of John Braine who – having attained his ‘Room At The Top’, went on to embrace the right-wing philosophies his early novels satirised. Perhaps Barstow was disguising a similar about-face? Can this switch be substantiated by his novels? ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ defines the lines of demarcation between writers who are ‘creators’, and those who are ‘caterers’. Cotton, and therefore presumably Stan Barstow’s allegiances lie with the former. At the time the phrase ‘pure literature’ was in terminal decline. The idea that ‘creative’ literature could be above life, impartial to social conditions, divorced from any greater reality and concerned only with its own internal logics, was seen as the fallacy it is and always has been. After all, any product of the imagination, just as any selected fact, when communicated through the mass-media becomes opinion. The pulp love story in the woman’s magazine, just as the advertisements that frame it, promote a definition of what is normal, hence defining the standards by which other’s live life, and are made to appear to live desirable or undesirable lives, from which behaviour patterns and standards are assimilated. Shouldn’t the creative novelist take that into consideration? By writing, as Barstow appears to, on the premise of surface reality, by reflecting and thereby confirming those standards, isn’t he helping to perpetuate them?

In ‘Close The Coal-House Door’, an early piece by Barstow’s contemporary – Hull playwright Alan Plater, there’s a more blatant left-wing bias, almost to the point of then-trendy Socialist Realism. It’s a play dealing idealistically with the history of West Riding Trade Union activity, with a ‘message’ that hits you like a thirty-ten Continental super-truck. Yet there’s a nagging suspicion that had Barstow treated the same subject, his observational skill at characterisation could have infused an added humanity, a greater fluidity of issues, making it not only a more convincing illustration of the miner’s grievances, but a more effective vehicle for the ideas too. Yet, time and time again Barstow’s work reflects political antipathy.

‘I’m not going to peddle… propaganda’, declares Wilf Cotton, demanding ‘wouldn’t (the Socialists) let you all stand on street corners if it furthered his ends? With him it’s the cause for the sake of the cause. It’s not the struggle at each stage for the righting of a separate injustice’. He goes on to accuse the novel’s Union activist of working for ‘a complete change of system, for absolute power’. That ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ passage is closely paralleled in ‘A Raging Calm’. ‘The average Labour voter, for instance, is as reactionary as most Tories. He’s a hanger, a flogger, a keeper-down of homosexuals and an advocate of sending the black man back where he came from’. He balances the comments with the observation that ‘the only thing is, there’s a bloody sight more excuse for his thinking that way than there is for the others’. Although the book’s main theme is marital infidelity, a large section of it is devoted to local by-elections. Yet never are issues allowed to interfere with characterisation, except when Simpkins opines ‘every (political) issue was one of conscience’. A stance that seems to reflect the writer’s own. Barstow writes, again through the words of Wilf Cotton ‘we only vote the so-and-so’s in; we can’t do their job for them’. A political philosophy that remains curiously aloof and neutral. ‘I’m not a political animal, just a human being. I’m prepared to see all sides of an immediate question… that’s where the confusion comes in.’ An apoliticisation that only becoming open-ended when he adds ‘in an age of doubt and anxiety isn’t the other side of the coin a healthy questioning of values and standards and an urge towards reform?’

Repeatedly, Barstow’s fiction exhibits this tradition of the ‘total view’. Perhaps he’s saying that where there’s total understanding of the system, black and white politics present only incomplete pictures? That strict lines between ‘us and them’ adopted for the sake of political expediency, are therefore misleading? It’s a stance referring clear back to Zola’s ‘Germinal’ observation, that the class system and its materialist basis enslaves the apparent enslaver as well as the obviously enslaved. That the entire hierarchy of capital is constructed from tiers of dissatisfaction. ‘I don’t like totalitarianism of either the right or the left’ (‘Ask Me Tomorrow’). But is that really enough?

I doubt if any writer could have captured the drab meaninglessness of the factory environment, and its inherent frustrations, as Barstow does in ‘A Kind Of Loving’ without first experiencing those frustrations. And though ‘A Kind Of Loving’ now seems like a time-capsule from another world, it had a momentum of its own, and there were sequels. ‘If someone had told me to leave the first novel on its own, he might have had a case. But once the second was written, a third was needed to finish the story.’ So ‘Watchers On The Shore’, time-fixed by opening with the Cuba Crisis, is the unsatisfactory second instalment of what is now termed ‘The Vic Brown Trilogy’. An adequate novel, defined by a period in which Vic leaves Cressley to squirm and struggle through the pain of infidelity as he waits for Ingrid to join him, it inevitably loses the urgency and concision of its progenitor. When he follows Conroy to Joyce & Walstock in the more anonymous suburban Essex of Longford, the tale losing both focus – what Barstow calls ‘no frame around’ it, and grounding. Although Wilf Cotton gets a walk-on part as a northern writer refocusing south. It continues Vic’s ‘is this all?’ questioning, through to his painful final-chapter rejection of compromise, and determined break with Ingrid. Until the appearance of ‘The Right True End’ in 1976 brings the cycle to a close, with the end of his marriage, Vic is now a divorced man in London, meeting actress Donna Pennyman for a second time.

In the meantime, in the world outside of literature, those who inherit Vic’s direct problems remain, in intensified and complexified forms. Appearances alter during the transition from fifties through sixties, and beyond, but the basic anger stays unchanged. Frustration of potential is as corrosive to both self and society now as then. The suppression of natural creative energies is just as applicable to Barstow’s Teddy-Boy Desperadoes as Anthony Burgess/Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Clockwork Orange’ Droog superpunk of the fictional 1990’s. Or ‘Trainspotting’. Or their counterparts today. The garb, the scale changes, the frustrations remain the same. While Barstow’s sequels shift markedly from the original’s vague dissatisfactions, there’s no discernible connection to the social upheavals of the late-sixties, and no apparent purchase on the 1970’s, only a gradual acceptance of the inevitability of compromise. As time alters circumstances.

Yet Barstow, unlike his creation, escaped the trap. His writing provided the wings to outdistance Vic’s suffocating spiritual vacuity. But he must have escaped with an acute awareness of what he’d escaped from. His writing provides undeniable proof of that. Undoubtedly his position as a writer offers just as many frustrations of a different nature (such as upstart articles in literary magazines?). Yet they are problems concerned with self-determination and creation. Don’t get me wrong – I admire Barstow’s work. There are few living writers who can encapsulate and ‘fix’ the complexity of relationships, particularly within the Northern industrial context, as he can. I’m also happy with the arguments he does advance in his books, that of the ‘victims of the fact of existence’. I don’t expect polemics. Surely the mere exchange of one dogma for another is to be condemned? Yet the niggling feeling remains, that with Barstow’s unique insight, combined with his unparalleled ability to express that insight, perhaps there could be, perhaps there even should be, a little more concern with direct issues.

Ultimately a writer writes as his conscience and powers of creativity dictate. To ask otherwise would be as unreasonable as it would be futile. It could be argued that Barstow captures the reality of a compromise that is far more a facet of life than the revolutionary slogan. That by portraying the compromise – by giving voice to the ‘raging calm’, he’s making a political statement far more effective than blatant sloganeering. A truth made apparent, rather than imposed. Ideas to be assimilated, if unconsciously so, by his readers. He presents the reality of a situation, leaving the reader to decide its implications. And if what was once bitingly current now seems a heartbeat away from costume drama, and Vic’s original preoccupations with pair-bonding and marriage seem inexplicable in today’s easy commitment-free times, his dilemma still prompts you – the reader, to re-examine the choices in your own life, your own compromises and the might-have-beens of your own failed relationships. Is that enough? The answer to that question probably decides the writer’s status as ‘creator’ or ‘caterer’…

Back then, in his front room in Goring Park Avenue, Stan Barstow fields my accusations with good-natured indulgence, arguing back reasonably. At one point he leans forward to assert to me “I’ll tell you what the young committed writer should be doing now, working with the immigrant population, writing about them.” He said that to me over forty years ago. I’ve thought about it many times since. His instincts, of course, were absolutely correct. Decades before Zadie Smith, Monica Ali or Hanif Kareshi. Except, of course, that it was essential for such writers to emerge from within that community, not from outside it.

He closes his autobiography with ‘I have lived by my writing since 1962. I have brought up my children and provided for those it has been my duty to support. That this has been achieved solely through my own efforts, without subsidy, grants, paid fellowships or awards with monetary gifts attached should, I feel, be a cause for some pride. It has all been worked for, year on year. I have been a professional. I have survived.’ Perhaps that’s enough?

STAN BARSTOW (28 July 1928 – 1 August 2011):

DIFFERENT KINDS OF LOVING

Following the original publication of this feature Stan Barstow moved to Pontardawe in South Wales, where he lived with his partner Diana Griffiths. His children, Gillian and Neil Barstow, his grandson Elliot and his wife Connie Barstow, still live in the Wakefield area…

1960 – ‘A KIND OF LOVING’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1961 – ‘THE DESPERADOES’ short stories (Michael Joseph) features “Freestone At The Fair”, “The Actor”, “The Fury”, “Living And The Dead”, the story from which the collection takes its title, and “The Human Element”

1962 – ‘ASK ME TOMORROW’ novel (Michael Joseph), + ‘Twenty Pieces Of Silver’ short story in ‘Argosy’ (Oct), and ‘A Kind Of Loving’ film, John Schlesinger’s debut as director, scripted by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, starring Alan Bates (Vic) and June Ritchie (Ingrid), Thora Hird (Mrs Rothwell), Jack Smethurst (Conroy), James Bolam (Les), Leonard Rossiter (Whymper). It cost £165,000 to make, and grosses £450,000 in the UK alone (DVD Momentum Pictures 2001).

1963 – ‘Estuary’ and ‘Love And Music’ short stories in ‘Argosy’ (July and Dec issues)

1964 – ‘JOBY’ novel (Michael Joseph), + ‘A Kind Of Loving’ BBC radio play, ‘The Desperadoes’ BBC radio play, ‘The Human Element’ ATV-TV play, ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ play written with Alfred Bradley at Sheffield Playhouse, ‘Casual Acquaintance’ short story in ‘Argosy’ (Nov)

1965 – ‘The Luck Of The Game’ BBC-TV episode of ‘Z-Cars’, + ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ BBC radio-play, ‘A Kind Of Loving’ play written with Alfred Bradley at Sheffield Playhouse

1966 – ‘THE WATCHERS ON THE SHORE’ novel (Michael Joseph), + ‘The Pity Of It All’ ABC-TV play, ‘A World Inside’ Granada-TV documentary, ‘Ask Me Tomorrow’ in June 1966 as a play-text by Alfred Bradley (Samuel French)

1967 – ‘The Pity Of It All’ BBC radio play

1968 – ‘THE RAGING CALM’ novel (Michael Joseph), + ‘THROUGH THE GREEN WOODS’ as anthology editor (EJ Arnold), ‘Bright Day’ BBC radio play adapted from JB Priestley

1969 – ‘THE HUMAN ELEMENT’ short stories from ‘The Desperadoes’ (Longman), + ‘An Enemy Of The People’ adapted from Ibsen for Harrogate Festiva1, ‘End Of An Old Song’ short story in ‘Argosy’ (May)

1970 – ‘Listen For The Trains, Love’ musical play for Sheffield Playhouse, + ‘Lines Of Battle’ Granada-TV episode for 52-part ‘A Family At War’ series created by John Finch , ‘The Assailants’ short story in ‘Argosy’ (Dec)

1971 – ‘A SEASON WITH EROS’ short stories (Michael Joseph, an Corgi paperback), + ‘A Kind Of Loving’ play-text (Blackie), ‘The Watchers On The Shore’ BBC radio play, ‘Stringer’s Last Stand’ play written with Alfred Bradley for York Theatre Royal, ‘Mind You, I Live Here’ BBC-TV Omnibus film, ‘Huby Falling’ short story in ‘Argosy’ (March)

1972 – ‘Stringer’s Last Stand’ as BBC radio play, and play-text (Samuel French)

1973 - ‘The Pity Of It All’ radio-play broadcast in Radio Four’s ‘Afternoon Theatre’ series in May
1974 – ‘A Raging Calm’ Granada-TV 7-part drama, directed by June Howson & Gerry Mill, with Alan Badel, Diana Coupland and Nigel Havers + ‘South Riding’ 13-part Yorkshire-TV drama adaptated from the Winifred Holtby novel, directed by James Ormerod & Alastair Reid with Dorothy Tutin, Nigel Davenport and Hermione Baddely, ‘We Could Always Fit A Sidecar’ BBC radio play from ‘The Human Element’ (voted ‘Best Radio Drama Script of 1974’ by the Writer’s Guild)

1975 – ‘Joby’ Yorkshire-TV 2-part drama, with Richard Tolan and David Clayforth

1976 – ‘THE RIGHT TRUE END’ novel (Michael Joseph), + ‘A CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE’ short stories from ‘A Season With Eros’ (Longman)

1977 – ‘Joby’ text of TV-play (Blackie), + ‘We Could Always Fit A Sidecar’ text of radio-play from ‘Out Of The Air’ (Longman), ‘The Cost Of Loving’ seven Yorkshire-TV plays including ‘The Human Element’ with Paula Wilcox

1978 – ‘Travellers’ BBC2 ‘Premiere’ series film, + ‘The Right True End’ BBC radio play, ‘An Enemy Of The People’ play-text (Michael Joseph)

1980 – ‘A BROTHER’S TALE’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1982 – ‘A Kind Of Loving’ 10-part Granada-TV drama covering all three Vic Brown novels, produced by Pauline Shaw, directed by Oliver Horsbrugh & Gerry Mills and Jeremy Summers, starring Clive Wood (Vic) and Joanne Whalley (Ingrid), with Susan Penhaligon and Constance Chapman, + ‘The Vic Brown Trilogy’ single-volume edition (Michael Joseph)

1983 – ‘A Brother’s Tale’ 3-part Granada-TV drama, directed by Les Chatfield, with Trevor Eve, June Ritchie (from ‘A Kind Of Loving’ 1962 movie!) and Kevin McNally

1984 - ‘THE GLAD EYE AND OTHER STORIES’ (Michael Joseph), + ‘The Human Element & Albert’s Part’ two TV-play texts (Blackie)

1986 – ‘JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1987 – ‘B-MOVIE’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1988 – ‘The Apples Of Paradise’ BBC-radio play

1989 – ‘GIVE US THIS DAY’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1990 – ‘Foreign Parts’ BBC-radio play

1991 – ‘NEXT OF KIN’ novel (Michael Joseph)

1993 – ‘The Man Who Cried’ Tyne Tees-TV screenplay adapted from Catherine Cookson, directed by Michael Whyte, with Ciaran Hinds, Gemma Craven and Kate Buffery + ‘My Son, My Son’ 5-part BBC-radio drama from Howard Spring

2001 – ‘IN MY OWN GOOD TIME’ autobiography (Smith Settle) launched 24th October at Bradford ‘National Museum Of Photography Film & TV’

www.stanbarstow.info/bibliography.html

Revised version of a feature originally published in:
‘LUDDS MILL no.9’ (UK – September 1973)

Poem: 'Beautiful Pagan'

2011-07-30T22:20:00.005+01:00

BEAUTIFUL PAGAN /

ON QUANTUM PHYSICS

AT THE EDGE OF CHAOS

in this flame-dark land
my lips are stolen
by wolves

the melding of new
and ancient geographies
from meson and grimoire
opened this passage south
through ice-fields to the
unexpected continent
beneath this cold dark moon

on this nightmare beach
within skulls of eagles
my blood sweats acid

redefining physics
mapping new metaspheres
under strange constellations
we were drawn to this shore
by the dream-sending spores
of monstrous fungi howling
from their forest into my sleep
of gem-encrusted chimera
that breed from the drip of
condensing shadow in glaciers
as chill as death

my eyes extinguish
in pools of bone,
my own and others

we find the empty city
in pirouettes of stone
and chill blue illuminations
that freeze breath and eyes
to tears of living crystal
leaving them locked in dread
of night’s encroaching demon

under ghost moons
we skirt the isle
of weeping statues
fearing its corpse stench, its
horrible miscegenation of form
and the grotesque putrefaction
of each carapace, and
nowhere finding life

beautiful pagan,
you who gnaw my waking dreams,
I tell you this so you may know
of the sunken citadel and
its web of spider’s limbs
that you must fear it, yet
know that somewhere far north
beyond this derelict land is
the world forever lost to me
that they must never reach

in this flame-dark land
my thoughts are stolen
by those who lurk
beyond death

Published in:-
‘STAR * LINE no.16-5’ (Sept/Oct 1993 - USA)
‘THE 1994 RHYSLING ANTHOLOGY’ (USA- March 1994)
‘TEARS IN THE FENCE no.17’ (UK - April 1996)
and ‘EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR’ Hilltop Press (UK-Oct 2000)

Live: Flamin' Groovies at the Fforde Green, 1978

2011-07-30T22:07:00.008+01:00

FLAMIN’ GROOVIES:

SHAKIN’ SOME ACTION…!!!

Gig Review of: THE FLAMIN’ GROOVIES

at ‘The Fforde Green’, Leeds (21st May 1978)

£1.50 admission

‘We’ve played gigs clear across the country’ drawls Chris Wilson, mouthpiece of the Groovies, ‘but this one’s sure the hottest’. ‘Bet you say that to all the gigs’ flashes back quicker than laser light in lunar night. Smart arse! The music lounge of the Fforde Green Hotel – on Roundhay Road, is cavernous, there’s a bar down one side that sluices sound into vicious shockwaves that roll across tables and aisles to make sonic assignations with naked eardrums. Chords and riffs trapped and piling up in corners shattered raw and fragmented. For decades these memories have lain fallow in my atrophied brain cells, now they’re regurgitating LIVE into grey memory chambers. My ears still abuzz with beautiful tinnitus.

First up is the Australian Radio Birdman, playing hard, fast, tight Rock. They’ve been doing antipodean dates around Brisbane for four years. Later, vocalist Rob quotes the Doors and the Stooges as influences to us, but there’s also sharp disciplined changes and a degree of control sometimes déjà vu-ing Lynyrd Skynyrd at their finest. They do mostly riff-orientated band compositions but for a mid-section insertion of memorabilia item “Hanky Panky” which they assert was a huge Australian hit for Tommy James & The Shondells. Birdman do it well too – it would’ve made a fine single for them. Interval. Audience jostling for better vantage-point positions, an odd mix of leathers and denims, slack-jawed retired hippies and last years brave young things, while Bowie ricochettes from the sound system. Roadies in freebee T-shirts juggle amps across an apparently fully interlocking lego-constructed stage made up of red canvas segments, the same self-assembly once stalked by the pre-Grundy Sex Pistols. As girls shunt intricately balanced towers of empty beer-glasses from the tables back to the bar for re-cycling.

Then the Flamin’ Groovies file on. The first jangling guitar-slivers of Gene Clarke’s “Feel A Whole Lot Better” separating out the lines of demarcation. The neglected flip of the Byrds’ “All I Really Want To Do”, they punch-out and sharpen its changes into a realisation of just how fine a song it always was. Then the embryonic Van Morrison garage-band standard “Baby Please Don’t Go” further delineates the musical interface. Radio Birdman have the accessible common reference points that could have resulted – in, say, two years time, in selling out American stadia. The Groovies finely-focused intensity of vision means they’re never gonna make it on that level. They’ve given up even trying. Their reference points are to the trash aesthetics of Rock history. Their reference points are too tied to subtlety and literary interpretation of its artefacts. In an impatient iconoclastic time, they treat vinyl archaeology like other’s savour wine. Not with over-reverence, more an impeccably calibrated hipness. They are five sharply-dressed rock archivists in perfectly observed, perfectly mixed/matched style – Cuban-heeled Chelsea boots, pressed chord pants, waistcoats, tab collars in Bridget Riley monochromatic stripes, reflector shades. Stylish selection right down to key-player Cyril Jordan’s Rickenbacker – and for one number a transparent Perspex model, smouldering cigarettes impaled on antennae-strings, hair slightly more stylishly receded than I remember from the Roundhouse Ramones double-header a few years back. Now, a few dates ago, the ‘partially crippled’ Jordan fell off a Brussels stage onto broken glass – his right hand in pink plastic bondage concealing the resultant severed tendons.

Next there’s “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” and “From Me To You” performed perfect as-the-record – vinyl groove for vinyl groove. The song-source pedigree is pristine, just as the bands own DNA is a self-contained fanzine in its own right. Jordan and bassist George Alexander go right back to the first 1965 incarnation of the Groovies, riding the changes through the ‘Supersnazz’ (1969) and ‘Flamingo’ (1970) albums, through the period when the anarchistic Roy Loney was co-writing the apocalyptical “Slow Death”. Chris Wilson and James Farrell were both grafted onto the band around the early Seventies, with the Groovies surviving through records put out by the Dutch Skydog label and Greg Shaw’s ‘Bomp’ releases. Previously they’d both played guitar with the Charlatans, a band who, according to Rock historian Lillian Roxon, were the first real perpetrators of the San Francisco ‘sound’. The Groovies drummer, David Wright, playing precise forceful pre-cussion configurations to the rear of the stage, entered the band around the same time via a production association with Kama Sutra’s David – husband of ‘Melody Maker’s Lisa, Robinson.

But this band, elegantly crouching, guitars slung low, leaning forward to give the sound an even sharper-edged momentum, have gone a quantum leap beyond ‘Teenage Head’ (March 1971). The band, with its four-guitar phalanx mowing down the idiot-dancers crammed into the space beneath the stage, hemmed in by amps and beery tables, can still rock younger than yesterday, newer than tomorrow. No fetishistic guitar-runs merely preserved in aspic. They concentrate on material from the two Dave Edmunds-produced Sire albums, ‘Shake Some Action’ (1976) and ‘Flamin’ Groovies Now’ (1978). There’s a blend of influences from their own compulsively contagious “All I Wanted”, “Between The Lines”, and the ponderous thundering “Don’t Put Me On”, alongside disinterred obscurities – what other current band even remember boogie-piano thumper Merrill E Moore, let alone play his “House Of Blue Lights” on a humid Sunday night in Leeds? The same band, I suppose, who not only remember Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, but personalised his “Rocking Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu” as their debut single! But no, to re-emphasise the obvious – the Groovies are much more than revival merchants. Their whole fifties and sixties fundamentalist ethos, its nuances and stratifications predating the complications of Prog, are channelled through blistering power-punk 1980’s energy, spun through a twinkling multi-layered sound that perfectly off-sets the occasional lightness and/or lyrical trivia of the older stuff. Eclectic music for the mind and the body, indeed. The set closes with an encore, a mighty “Paint It Black”, churning and pulsating like the beating of huge metallic wings – then the band are gone, with surprising abruptness, and the whole thing breaks up beneath the deluge of house lights.

A niggling set regret would be the meagre selection of their own songs, the Jordan/Wilson stuff that forms the standout portion of their two most recent long-players. They even neglect to include their epic teen-manifesto anthem “Shake Some Action”, despite constant audience demands, ‘shake some action’s what I need, to let me bust out at full speed, I’m sure that’s all you need, to make it all right’. That’s how it felt, that’s what Rock was always about, and what those edgy energies provide. But to demand more is to nit-pick. Instead we wind up hanging around under the stars, gabbing to Rob Birdman beneath the door-awning to the car-park. It was a great night.

A ‘troubled’ venue, the ‘Fforde Green’ eventually closed. It is now a continental supermarket...

Album Download: Cousin Silas 'Complex Silence No.9'

2011-07-28T18:42:00.005+01:00

Album Review of:

‘COMPLEX SILENCE No.9:

FRESH LANDSCAPES’

by COUSIN SILAS

(Treetrunk Records 109, November 2010)

Free download from

http://www.archive.org/details/Complex_Silence_9

Shimmering on the edge of forever. Being and nothingness. A single note. Then another. A cluster of notes. Another cluster. So chilled-out it’s as frigid as the atmosphere of some distant sunless planet. You thought Philip Glass was minimalist? You thought Moby was glacial? They’re nothing compared to Cousin Silas. Future-music was intended to sound this way. The soundscape of ‘Bladerunner’ cities, of spiralling galaxies turning in infinite slowness. Of falling through the tenuous strands of a nebula. Vibrations on the theme of the universe, its atmospherics form the background shadow-radiation remaindered from the Big Bang. “Northcoates Point” is an impressionistic sound-poem that uncoils as still as an exhalation of breath (yet it’s named for a Lincolnshire naturist beach near Cleethorpes!). Tides of stillness swirl around “Pollard’s Moor”. The near-imperceptible hum of sub-atomic particles in incremental flux.

Pause. Once… in a previous lifetime David W Hughes piloted the innovative SF magazine ‘Works’ from Huddersfield. And while there are geographical reference points to that, thematically it’s a continuity linked more into the desolate landscapes of “Vermillion Drift” and “Concrete Island” on his dedicated JG Ballard album-suites. And under his Cousin Silas nom-de-guerre he’s prolific, select from any number, try the anatomical ‘Adrift Off The Islets Of Langerhans’ (Earthrid) found elsewhere among his free-downloadable back-catalogue. Here, “Something Landed In The Forest” buzzes, saws and scratches like mosquitoes disturbed by a settling extraterrestrial organism of wondrous strangeness. “Standege Tunnels Disused” takes it yet further into a disturbed silence as shapes pass by or chatter in the luminous darkness. Actually, ‘Standedge Tunnel’ is on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal overlooking Marsden Moor, although here it’s mixcrafted into elliptical musique concrète zones. Where it provokes words like ‘ambient’. Where it suggests music for installations at pristine white galleries. With its micro-adjusted spacial geometry as a form of soft brain-washing. A contemplative therapy for atheists. But in a good way. A single note. Then another.

LEON ROSSELSON: FOLK SONGS FROM PLANET EARTH

2011-07-28T18:09:00.005+01:00

‘FOLK SONGS

FROM PLANET EARTH’

Gig Review of LEON ROSSELSON

at the ‘Duchess Of York’, Leeds (1 July 1990)

In ‘King Creole’ the sleazy Barfly asks ‘what kind of songs are they you’re singing? Folk songs?’ Elvis says ‘I guess so’. Barfly looks askew for a moment, then comes back ‘that’s what I thought. What planet?’ Leon Rosselson wears a ‘VANCOUVER FOLK FESTIVAL’ T-shirt. The Music Lounge is stark dark. He looks up, and slowly round. ‘Thirty years to reach the ‘Duchess of York’. It’s been a long climb to the top!’ From the adjoining Bar come ‘cries of pain and rejoicing’ from World Cup TV. Leon Rosselson is a protest singer from another planet, another space-time continuum, another age. I first saw him some twenty years ago at the ‘Blue Bell’ in Hull’s dockland where he was a cerebral napalm of righteous raging, his songs too complex, too intelligent for commercial Pop, but articulating the times incisively. Now the times have gone off on some other, some less vital tangents...

The Cold War evaporates. He sings “Where’s The Enemy?” in high straining wordbends, and sometimes the caricatures that once served so well – militaristic Hawks versus Worthy Proles, seem just too simplistic. But when it comes to song subject-matter ‘there’s always the drug war’ he offers, ‘and the cat down the road’. So he sings “The Neighbours’ Cat”, about a ferocious feline neo-recruit to the IRA and hits the humour gas-pedal. While “Free Press” and “Fish Finger” – ‘from my fishy period’, also snipe effectively using that humour to dig sly digs. He’s been sporadically performing “Jumbo The Elephant” for two decades now. Originally, he explains, he saw it as political satire, now as just a song about an elephant. All elephants are called ‘Jumbo’. The satire lies in the subjugated beast’s final revenge on its tormentors. The elephant is also the symbol of the American Republican Party which brought us Ronald Reagan and both President George Bush’s, perhaps that was in there too. Now it’s Leon’s ‘token charming Rosselsong’. After which he reverts to a scathing “Who Reaps The Profit, Who Pays The Price”, prefacing it with a Gaia-conscious Green anti-nuke text, then concedes ‘that’s the trouble with topical songs. They date so quickly.’

Leon Rosselson, dark and tousled, was a protest singer on that other CND, left-of-centre, idealistic, more radical, pre-Thatcher planet. Thirty years. Some three-hundred songs. The Galliards group. ‘That Was The Week That Was’ appearances. Albums like ‘A Laugh, A Song, And A Hand-Grenade’ (1968, with poet Adrian Mitchell), and ‘The Word Is Hugga-Mugga-Chugga-Lugga-Humbugga-Boom-Chit’ (1971, with Martin Carthy), ‘That’s Not The Way It’s Got To Be’ (1975) and ‘If I Knew Who The Enemy Was’ (1979, with Roy Bailey, and snarling synths), and the stark solo ‘Palaces of Gold’ (1975), issued on labels as diverse as Acorn, Trailer, Bounty, Fuse, and performed at Festivals, Rally’s, Colleges, and Folk Clubs like the ‘Blue Bell’ (‘yes, that must have been around the time the Watersons were there’ he accurately recalls to me), clear down to a near-charting single – “Ballad Of A Spy-Catcher” in 1987, setting Peter Wright’s much-banned book to music.

Tonight he’s on cold at the ‘Duchess of York’ following Laurie from local band Little Chief (who does “Cock Of The Shop” and a kind of Folk-Reggae called “Tribal War”), and he’s unequally competing with the World Cup from the adjoining Bar. How can he reconnect through these philistine times? He steps back apace. Takes the long view. Plumbs into a Socialist continuity that’s survived – and will survive, centuries. William Morris dreamed utopian dreams. Leon sings “Bringing The News From Nowhere” which does ‘honour to the man, honour to the dreamer’. Then steps even further back to the English Civil War, 1649, the Diggers, and “The World Turned Upside-Down”. Oddly, it charted recently for Billy Bragg – ‘sung by people even more famous than me’ quips Leon mordantly. And the circle is complete. The vision vindicated. When he writes well, when he performs well, it’s with an incandescence that transcends the times. Leon Rosselson – honour to the man, honour to the dreamer...

LEON ROSSELSON CAN BE CONTACTED
FOR INFORMATION, PHOTOS, OR RECORDS AT:
‘FUSE RECORDS’, 28 Park Chase
Wembley Park, Middlesex HA9 8EH

POEM: 'BEBOP MAN / LESTER LEAPS OUT'

2011-06-29T18:31:00.004+01:00

BEBOP MAN/

‘LESTER LEAPS OUT’

‘there is no ‘what should be’

there is only what is’ – Lenny Bruce

&, finally washed ashore,
playing that same Prez solo
a litany in eerie phrasing,
a skylight room, eaves crazy with birds,
tenor-breath patterns of light
cobweb the window, reflecting
salt-white breakers, & beyond,
sky oozing, dawn gull-flecked &
ghosted melancholy with ‘40’s jazz.
autumn month rates are low, but there’s work,
Bars, Clubs and Music Lounges by the harbour,
thru promenade gardens drift sad snapshots
smiling silences at each other, and
a boy crooked into the wind, leper-pale
black hair misting, like John’s used to…
& he watches, fingering a sax on time’s curve
holding wistful chords that can xerox 1956
& a Ford Pop south from a cellar residency
that curls up and dies with september, John saying
‘Hey, Stockholm, a guy, a club, promise of work’
kerbcrawling down the dissonant A1 with the
rot-stink of tyres, stitching notes at the
traffic-flow, finger-sweat printing the bell,
aftertasting John’s saliva on its mouthpiece
and on his body…

&, finally washed ashore here, he
quits the horn in elegant slouch,
out thru 2 sets of Rooming House doors
into a frosty knife-edge of wind,
crouching deep inside faded anorak
in a numbing void of sensation
following the boy for no real reason,
poignant jazz soundtracking glimpses in his head…
awaiting a ship with Band vacancies that never come
strung out in low-rent Bars, stoned on Espresso and
fewer coins, Hard Bop on Frith St, kissing his nipple
through shadows, ‘Lester Leaps In’ with last few £’s,
huge envious eyes yearning Prez-tones, as options
decay, until John ships out for Tangiers, leaving
only a chord sequence biro’d into the liner notes
& a Bebop man cut loose in the now,
crazy with memories,
watching a boy, and
the wash of ocean thru
the vague discontent of
midday’s frost-white waves…

Published in:
‘SLOW DANCER No.21’ (UK – October 1988)
‘OSTINATO No.2’ (UK – April 1990)
‘YAMMERING TWITS: BEHIND THE FRONTAL BONE/ Spring 1992’
(USA – June 1992)
and personal collection:
‘POWER LINES’ (Unibird Publications) (UK – October 1988)

THE ACTION: EVERYBODY WANTS A PIECE OF THE ACTION

2011-06-29T14:21:00.003+01:00

‘EVERYBODY WANTS

A PIECE OF THE ACTION!

ACTION!! ACTION…!!!’

Album Review of:

‘ACTION PACKED’ by THE ACTION

(Edsel EDCD699, 2001) &

‘ROLLED GOLD’ by THE ACTION

(React-CD-001, 2002)

‘What a day I have seen,

what a scene I’ve been in…’

(“In My Dreams”)

Reg King died of cancer 8th October 2010. Predictably, there were well-intentioned obituary tributes proclaiming the loss of a great English Soul voice on par with Stevie Winwood or Steve Marriott, which is the kind of hyperbole writers tend to reach for on such occasions. But it’s misleading. There was nothing of the raw power or anguished emotional depth of the two Steve’s about Reg King. In fact Zoot Money, Graham Bond, Eric Burdon, or Chris Farlowe are all more deserving of that ‘great English Soul’ tag above and beyond Reg King. That was neither the point of his music, or that of The Action, the career-trajectory with whom he’s most closely associated. The group he fronted roughly between 1963 and 1969. As part of the Mod subculture, the Action were a class act, they looked good, with youth and style on their side. But, as the obituaries fail to point out, rather than mere back-up for some super-charged front-man the Action were a genuine group. They worked together, as a tight unit. And it pays off.

Drop the stylus into the black vinyl play-in groove of “Land Of 1,000 Dances”, the ‘A’-side of their debut single released in October 1965. From the opening low jumpy bass-pulse and tambourine rim-shot finger-pops, the Action take the song closer to, say, the precise Temptations vocal arrangements as they move through the familiar silly litany of dance-craze names such as the Jerk, the Watusi, and the Mashed Potato. As a cover of the Chris Kenner song they retain the ‘na-na-na-na-na’ hook introduced by Cannibal & The Headhunters on their version of the song. But there’s a more easy relaxed groove as King counts in the ‘na-na-na’s before inviting the group-voices into a more call-&-response style with an ‘alright children’, and ‘Pony like Bonie Moronie’, all the while insisting ‘do it real bluesy’ and ‘I like it like that’ until the oozingly smooth vocal fade. It’s nice, restrained, controlled Blue-Eyed Soul, but what self-respecting Mod would choose this UK sound over Wilson Pickett’s frantically kinetic work-out? Not one. Although the Action single actually preceded Pickett’s, every Mod Club I frequented throughout this period favoured the wicked-wicked Pickett as a way to galvanize the dancers. The easy-on-the-ear Action might be good, but in different ways.

While, although produced by the mighty George Martin, the ‘B’-side merely lifts Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “In My Lonely Room” from the Martha & The Vandellas original. It gender-transposes Martha Reeve’s tears-of-a-clown misery so that now it’s his girl’s flirty ways that depress him so all he can do is hide in his ‘lonely room and cry’. Again, it’s a fair dancey shot at the song, but how can it hope to recapture all that Motown chartbusting magic, never mind the elitist rarity value of the label itself? After all, to the self-appointed In-crowd, the original is always the greatest. Sure, all the great UK bands, the Who and the Small Faces, never mind the Kinks and the Stones, started out with debut albums crammed to the sleeve with Blues and R&B covers, but it’s by graduating into their own material that they achieve credibility. After all, there were highly successful home-grown bands such as Jimmy James & The Vagabonds or Geno Washington & The Ram-Jam Band (and Geno himself was an exiled American) who built solid reputations and packed venues, but even at their best they were still stand-ins for the real Stax, Volt, Chess, or Motown originals.

While they were together Action released no LP’s, just five UK singles. Which is bizarre considering that now, check out Amazon, and there’s a bunch of albums, kicking off with the Edsel compilation ‘The Ultimate Action’ (Demon ED101, 1980). First available on vinyl it sports no less a Mod icon than Paul Weller scripting the sleeve-notes to the effect that ‘the Action had it in their soul’. It fleshed out their sparse back-catalogue roster by adding a German-only 1968 single consisting of “The Harlem Shuffle” c/w Goffin & King’s “Wasn’t It You”. For its 1990 CD format only there are also the previously unissued ‘B’-sides of late Edsel singles “Wasn’t It You” (Edsel E5001, 1981), group-composition “Come On, Come On With Me” (Edsel E5008, 1984), plus their take of the Righteous Brothers’ “Just Once It My Life”. The track-listing was later still rejigged and updated into ‘Action Packed’ (Edsel EDCD 699). Then there’s ‘Rolled Gold’, made up of raw demos recorded in 1967 and 1968, but not issued until 1995. Plus ‘Uptight And Outasight’ (Circle Records) drawing together live radio sessions from BBC’s ‘Saturday Club’ and ‘Pop North’ from 1966 and 1967, interspersed with little interview-clips of Reg talking to formal buttoned-up presenter Brian Matthews. It seems there’s cult here that goes way beyond mere nostalgia!

From Kentish Town in north London the Action grew up together, sharing a passion for music, clothes, and football. They started out as The Boys as early as 1963. Alongside vocalist Reginald King was lead guitarist Alan ‘Bam’ King (no relation), Mike ‘Ace’ Evans on bass and Reg’s school-friend Roger Powell on drums. In this incarnation, not only were there early records for Decca and Pye but there are also group originals too. Reg and Evans co-wrote both sides of “It Ain’t Fair” c/w “I Want You” for a November 1964 single, then Reg wrote “When I Get Married” for the flip of “You Really Gonna Shake” – a Decca single from March 1964 issued as by Sandra Barry & The Boys, while they were temporarily backing that popular girl-singer. But with the addition of second guitarist Peter Watson they re-signed to Parlophone as Action. Peter already had a track record. As part of Jack Martin & The Jets he’d toured US army bases in Spain and Morocco supporting the Tony Meehan Combo, where he was exposed to rare American singles.

Following "Land Of 1,000 Dances" the Action hung in there with Motown for the second single (February 1966), re-tooling “I’ll Keep On Holding On” from the Marvelettes back-catalogue. Written by Ivy Jo Hunter (no, not Ivory Joe) with Mickey Stevenson, backed up with ‘a song in my mind I been singing it all day’ called “Hey Sah-Lo-Ney” which hit a catchy groove, the single was critically well-received and became the closest they ever got to a chart hit. It’s fair to say most radio listeners were unfamiliar with the Marvelettes American hit, and the Action have a Power-Pop drive that shifts it into alternate gears anyway, the lyric urging the purposeful pursuit of the elusive object of his desire – ‘waiting, watching, waiting, watching, looking for a chance’. The record was well-familiar and highly-rated around the clubs. It came tantalisingly close. Their window of opportunity was definitely ajar, yet it failed to actually chart. Perhaps it was the high-point, the main chance, the moment at which – if they were going to break through big, this was their time.

Because instead they switched their imported repertoire to Chess for the third single – Maurice & The Radiants “Baby, You’ve Got It” (July 1966), with authentic dancefloor drums and heavy keyboards drawing it into the Northern Soul spectrum, while sticking with the familiar Motown template for the flip – Smokey Robinson’s “Since I Lost My Baby”. And while no-one does Smokey like Smokey, it’s worth teasing out that second side first, because it’s a stand-out performance, one of their finest. Reg is at his most yearning and affecting as he sings of how ‘the sun is cold and the new day seems old’, and while there’s ‘plenty of work and the bosses are paying’ without his lover ‘with money I’m poor’. It comes closest to Paul Weller’s perceptive insight that Action ‘not only capture the Tamla / Soul sounds, but actually shape it into their own style’. A fusion that Reg himself termed ‘Rhythm ‘n’ Soul’. The promo art-work for the single consists of an atmospheric ‘Blow-Up’-themed Nigel Dickson street-photo of Reg brandishing a pistol, moments after shooting down a trendy Mod girl who has just graffiti’d ‘I Hate The Action’ on a brick wall. The paint still dribbles from the final ‘n’ as the bullet took her. The rest of the group stand around in posed casual stances. Like a still from an unmade cult movie, or an incident from a teen-novel never written. I remember it standing out from the monochrome pages of the music press like a burst of energy.

What’s bad for the heart is good for the art. Both sides are strong songs, delivered well. Their artful taste selection is impeccable, with fine-tuned instincts about their chosen field of endeavour. Their love of – and respect for, black American Dance Music is self-evident, propelled by a tight British beat-group curve on those hard driving R&B originals. Yet the group’s singles languish as more useful stand-bys than essential purchases. Live, the Action were always a big deal. With a drive and excitement they’re seldom able to transfer to vinyl. They headline all the sharpest Soho clubs, from ‘The Scene’ and ‘The Marquee’, to Manchester’s ‘Twisted Wheel’, and on down. And their club dates were rammed to capacity. Occasions where every Ace Face had to be seen to be Scene. Hordes of Lambrettas and Vestas flock outside every venue they play.

Yet despite this, and despite being signed to George Martin’s consistently-supportive AIR-productions, their considerable talent remained insufficiently recognised and rewarded outside the strict Mod ranking. Ideal for TV’s ‘Ready Steady Go’ – which was all about hip credibility, they never crossed over to play ‘Top Of The Pops’. Not that it mattered. The Mod combos who did breakthrough big – the Who and Small Faces, were bursting with anger, aggression and impatience, with a desperate urgency to make it. By contrast, the Action, largely, sound pleased with themselves and quite content to be making well-crafted club dance-floor records for a small but devoted cognoscenti. More in an evolutionary line with smooth sartorially-sharp Mod revivalists Secret Affair. Rather than an internal thing, the pressure to succeed commercially was largely applied from outside the group. From the label, and from producer George Martin. It could be argued that Hits can be extinction events for underground cultdom. According to that mindset, the Action never sold out. Action were one of those cliquey names attractive precisely because they were cult, because they were not seen on ‘Top Of The Pops’.

And anyway, from mid-1966 hip was already changing, with Mod going the way of all flesh. There was something in the air that sniffed of new, more esoteric influences. In some ways it was a smooth transition, into a more questioning and conflicted period. A different breed of sharp hipness. A new definition. What had been fairly straight-up in its intentions, with its Soul-heart worn unashamedly on its tailored sleeve, was to be not quite as in-your-ear. In a 1966 ‘Melody Maker’ interview Reg could be found praising, not obscure imported R&B, but the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’. There were ruptures too. A scheduled US tour for August 1966 was pulled, Pete quit the line-up, ill at ease with the band’s shifting taste in chemical stimulants, and in April 1967 they parted company with manager Ricky Farr. Below the radar there were pharmaceutical changes, from Mod Purple Hearts, to LSD, with all the attendant shifts in perception that implies. The two final official singles both emerged within the first six months of 1967. Conveniently re-grouped together for a French EP, to better define a precise career-phase. In February – “Never Ever” c/w “Twenty Fourth Hour” were both group compositions. All four members get credits. A propulsive twelve-string acoustic strum play-in leads into a ba-ba-ba tunefulness, oddly reminiscent of Tony Hatch’s “Call Me” (for Petula Clark), and a forward-thinking lyric about ‘never ever think of bad times, just remember the glad times’. The equally strong flip recalls a kind of 365-days-a-year lyrical take on the Beatles’ “Eight Days A Week”. Then in June there was “Shadows and Reflections” c/w “Something Has Hit Me”. Out-sourcing composer-credits this time, with harpsichord and bouncing rhythms delineating one of Attack’s most attractive sides, Reg sings of returning to the ‘old vacant apartment above the shop in the square’ where the lovers shared their final moments. While the West-Coast vocal bell-chimes of the flip are punched out by strong Rickenbacker lines. The complex middle-eight harmonies are a clear development in one of the best-constructed tracks in their catalogue.

But it was also a time of frantic recording activity. Studio sessions resulted in a one-off German single, where they had a big following, and other material that would periodically emerge over the coming years. Including a highly-unlikely Dance-Craze shot penned by Reg called “The Cissy” – maybe a memory flashback to the Dance-menu listed on “Land Of 1,000 Dances”? which finally emerged in 1980, and “The Place” about being ashamed to show his face in the Mod Club since breaking up with his girl. Yet time was running out. Major labels were more patient then than they are now, but parent-company EMI was becoming anxious to recoup its investment in the Action. They pressured for a more ‘commercial’ approach. If either of those final singles had clicked with the wider audience, chances are, an album would have been issued. As it is, the singles misfired, and so they were denied the opportunity of completing the LP they’d already trailered in the press (in interview to ‘Rave’). Recorded at IBC studios at Portland Place, under the working title ‘Brain’ (tape-spools dated 3 May 1968), the intended album-tracks existed in varying stages of completion, some little more than demos. Georgio Gomelsky stepped in when the Action were finally dropped by Parlophone. Further work was done at Advision and ‘in a tiny demo studio beneath a shop on Old Compton Street’ in preparation for a stalled new deal with Polydor. And when that fell through, the tapes remained safely stockpiled in the archives waiting to be rediscovered and issued some decades later. They ultimately arrived, restored and re-mastered, in 1995, as ‘Rolled Gold’.

Yet the album stands up well as tuneful mildly-psychedelic late-sixties underground Rock. In the spirit, and the chemically-enhanced spirituality of the time there’s a melodic mayhem of ‘new awareness’ about the tracks. Opening with a studio count-in the rousing first track “Come Around” urges ‘let us walk in angel’s footsteps’, until “Look At The View” with its tempo-change nursery-rhyme coda sounds very much like a paean to a newly-stoned perception, as the title is repeated with escalating amazement, as though viewed through suddenly LSD-cleansed eyes. Laced with Ian Whiteman’s flute, “Love Is All” is a regulation love-and-peace message about living ‘in a world of dreams’. Further in, Alan King’s more muscular angular guitar figures on “Something To Say” frames a vaguely Beatles-esque ‘I’ve got something to say that might cause you pain’, while “Icarus” more ambitiously delves into the mythology of flying too close to the sun. All of the songs are group originals, the bizarre title-track “Brain” allegedly ‘made up on the spot’ with Reg spontaneously singing ‘take your brain it’s time to go’. More reflectively thought-through “Climbing Up The Wall” muses with a world-weary wistfulness of loss, ‘sometimes I wish that I was young’. There’s more trendy references to ‘wash my mind, I can see’, in the two takes of “In My Dream” – with its lyric about ‘try to reach tomorrow, but it’s not in sight’, the first take remaindered from a George Martin-produced session, the second a simpler Demo allowing Reg’s lead vocals to shine powerfully. Another highlight, “Really Doesn’t Matter” advocates a laid-back ‘whatever you’ve got to do, do it tomorrow’ attitude. Although ending in a loose percussive jam with what Alan King calls ‘off-the-planet’ backing vocals, there’s few indulgences, with the emphasis on West Coast-inflected harmonies and nice little concise instrumental fills, Alan’s tight ‘Revolver’-era curves and high keening guitar (on “Strange Roads”), plus moments of strangeness – the galloping horse effects on “Little Boy”, but nothing to excess. So, is it the ‘Great Lost Sixties Album’? Well, it certainly has moments as strong as anything from the ‘Nuggets’ or ‘Pebbles’ continuum. Some critics equate the album with the Zombies’ ‘Odyssey And Oracle’ – so, maybe. Potentially, yes. With the final edits and mix-downs it was denied, and a little sonic manicuring it’s not inconceivable.

During their remaining time together, although the original group-nucleus stayed intact, other musicians came and went. Multi-instrumentalist Ian Whiteman joined, quit, then rejoined. Martin Stone was recruited on guitar. There was even a temporary name-change to Azoth, before reverting to Action. Until the musical terrain had shifted too far to encompass the changes, exasperated by the frustrating recording impasse. Reg finally quit after a disastrous gig in Newquay’s ‘Blue Lagoon’ club which resulted in him footing the bill for the damage he’d caused. He went on to become briefly part of BB Blunder. There was also a solo album – ‘Reg King’ (United Artists UAS29157, 1971) with a roster of studio guests including Steve Winwood, Brian Auger and some-time Rolling Stone Mick Taylor. As the ‘Rolled Gold’ tapes were still locked up in the vault, he took the opportunity of salvaging two of the songs. “In My Dream” with its lyric about being ‘stoned all day, night time too’, and the driving “Little Boy” which advocates rediscovering and hanging onto a state of innocence, ‘take your time, learn how to play, and gradually the rules will fade away’. Despite the heavy guest-names, the solid back-up relies more heavily on the other members of Action, now trading as counter-culture band Mighty Baby. Under this new identity Alan King, Roger Powell and Mike Evans with Martin Stone and Ian Whiteman played the ‘Prog-Rock’ circuit and issued a series of fluid improvisational albums. When Mighty Baby ceased Alan King found himself part of Pub-Rock band Ace alongside eternal all-rounder Paul Carrack, ironically finally tasting chart success with the easy-on-the-ear global hit “How Long” in November 1974.

But there was to be a second life for Action. When the post-Punk Mod resurgence washed in on the ‘Quadrophenia’-wave, there was revived interest. The Action became the lost heroes, the name to drop, the code that signified an awareness of credibility. In 1998 the original Action line-up reconvened for the Isle of Wight festival, and played well-received on-&-off gigs for the next six years, a rejuvenation that resulted in a celebratory video – ‘In The Lap Of Mods’ (2000), capturing their history and bringing their story full circle. The Paul Weller connection extended to Reg contributing guest voice – a sweet reworking of “Since I Lost My Baby”, plus “Til I Lost You” to Weller’s bassist, and record-producer Andy Lewis’ solo ‘Billion Pound Project’ album (Acid Jazz Records, September 2005). Proving he was still in top vocal form. Action played a final set as part of the 2004 ‘Modstock’ Festival, but further possibilities ended when Mike ‘Ace’ Evans died 15 January 2010, followed by Reg himself as the same year closed. When journalist Pat Long penned his obituary in ‘The Guardian’ (7 November 2010) lauding the loss of a vocalist ‘the equal of Steve Marriott, Steve Winwood or Rod Stewart’ with a voice that was ‘smooth, unhurried and deeply soulful’ – yes, those who were there across the years know exactly what those words meant.

ACTION: THE FULL STORY

Issues as by SANDRA BARRY AND THE BOYS
(March 1964) “You Really Gonna Shake” c /w “When I Get Married” (R King) (Decca)

Issued as by THE BOYS
(November 1964) “It Ain’t Fair” (R King / Evans) c/w “I Want You” (R King / Evans)

(Pye 7N 15726) Produced by Kenny Lynch

Issued as by THE ACTION
(October 1965) “Land Of 1,000 Dances” c/w “In My Lonely Room” (Parlophone R 5354)

(July 1966) “I’ll Keep On Holding On” c/w “Hey Sah-Lo-Ney” (Parlophone R 5410)

(July 1966) “Baby, You’ve Got It” (McAllister &Vail) c/w “Since I Lost My Baby” (Robinson & Moore) (Parlophone R5474)

(February 1967) “Never Ever” (King / King / Evans / Powell) c/w “Twenty Fourth Hour” (King / King / Evans / Powell) (Parlophone R 5572)

(June 1967) “Shadows and Reflections” (Marks & Almer) c/w “Something Has Hit Me” (King & Jones) (Parlophone R 5610)

(1967) France-Only EP “Shadows and Reflections” / “Something Has Hit Me” / “Never Ever” / “Twenty Fourth Hour” (Odeon MOE 149)

(1968) “The Harlem Shuffle” c/w “Wasn’t It You” (Goffin / King) (Hansa, Germany-Only)

EP ‘ACTION SPEAKS LOUDER THAN’ (tracks recorded circa 1968, released by Castle Music in 1985) “Only Dreaming”, “Dustbin Full of Rubbish”, “An Understanding Love”, “My Favourite Day”, “A Saying For Today” (all tracks written by Whiteman)

ALBUMS

‘BRAIN / ROLLED GOLD’ (Tracks recorded in late 1967 and 1968, but released only in 1995) “Come Around”, “Something to Say”, “Love is All”, “Icarus”, “Strange Roads”, “Things You Cannot See”, “Brain”, “Look at the View”, “Climbing Up the Wall”, “Really Doesn’t Matter”, “I’m A Stranger”, “Little Boy”, “Follow Me”, “In My Dream”, “In My Dream (Demo)”

‘UPTIGHT AND OUTASIGHT’ (Circle Records) CD1 – BBC Radio and Television recordings 1966-1967: “I’ll Keep Holding On”, “Land Of 1,000 Dances / Uptight”, “Mine Exclusively” (BBC Radio’s ‘Saturday Club’, 1966), Reg King Interview (‘Saturday Club’, 1966), “Baby You’ve Got It “ (‘Saturday Club’ 1966), “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A While)” (‘Saturday Club’ 1966), “Going To A Go-Go” (BBC Radio’s ‘Pop North’, 1966), “Never Ever” (‘Pop North’, 1966), “Love Is All” (‘Saturday Club’, 1967), “I See You” (‘Saturday Club’, 1967), “India” (‘Saturday Club’, 1967), “Shadows and Reflections” (‘Saturday Club’, 1967) CD2 – Live recordings from ‘The Boston Arms’, London 1998: “Meeting Over Yonder”, “The Monkey Time”, “Baby Don’t You Do It”, “In My Lonely Room”, “I Love You (Yeah!)”, “Girl (Why You Wanna Make Me Blue)”, “Ooo Baby Baby”, “Crazy About You Baby”, “Heatwave”, “People Get Ready”, “The Memphis Train”, “Since I Lost My Baby”, “Harlem Shuffle”, “Baby You’ve Got It”, “I’ll Keep Holding On”, “Land Of 1,000 Dances”

‘THE ULTIMATE ACTION’ (Edsel Demon LP-ED + CD-EDCD 101, 1980) a compilation vinyl LP made up of The Action’s original UK singles, produced by George Martin: “I’ll Keep On Holding On”, “Harlem Shuffle”, “Never Ever”, “Twenty Fourth Hour”, “Since I Lost My Baby”, “In My Lonely Room”, “Hey Sah-Lo-Ney”, “Shadows And Reflections”, “Something Has Hit Me”, “The Place”, “The Cissy”, “Baby You’ve Got It”, “I Love You (Yeah!)”, “Land Of 1,000 Dances”. Reissued as ‘ACTION PACKED’, CD (ED-CD 699) with extra tracks “Wasn’t It You”, “Come On, Come With Me”, “Just Once In My Life”. There were also four spin-off singles issued using the same material:
“I’ll Keep on Holding On” c/w “Wasn’t It You?” (E5001, 1981)
“Since I Lost My Baby” c/w “Never Ever” + “Wasn’t It You?” (E5002, 1981)
“Shadows and Reflections” c/w “Something Has Hit Me” (E5003, May 1982) a ‘Melody Maker’ review says ‘as the press handout states, a lesson for all Sixties psychedelic revivalists’
“Hey Sah-Lo-Ney” c/w “Come On, Come With Me” (E5008, July 1984) a ‘Melody Maker’ review commends its ‘more timeless, poppy sound’

‘REG KING’ solo album (UAS29157, 1971. CD 2006) All songs by King & Dale: “Must Be Something Else Around”, “You Go Have Yourself A Good Time”, “That Ain’t Living”, “In My Dreams”, “Little Boy”, “10,000 Miles”, “Down The Drain”, “Savannah”, “Gone Away”

THOM GUNN: A SENSE OF MOVEMENT

2011-06-28T16:58:00.004+01:00

THOM GUNN:

A SENSE OF MOVEMENT

29th August 1929 – 25th April 2004

Andrew Darlington pursues the essence

of a life, through the sniff of the real…

‘BLACK JACKETS…’

‘Walker within this circle, pause

although they all died of one cause,

remember how their lives were dense

with fine compacted differences…’

(from ‘Boss Cupid’, 2000)

Be warned. This poetry affects lives. It just does. ‘The sniff of the real, that’s what I’d like to get’ (1). This is the mythology Thom Gunn charts in a restless pursuit that begins with ‘A Sense Of Movement’ (Faber), a collection published in 1957. Some decades later he’d concede ‘although the narrow corridor appears / so short the journey took me twenty years’ (2). A journey magicing him from Hampstead Heath where he watched ‘long convoys of Army lorries coiling down Frognal’, to a Gay parade in New York strolling ‘forty blocks in full leather, freaked out on acid’ (3). From Paris where he worked on the Metros, to the promiscuous hedonism of the San Francisco bath-house scene. To eventually, ‘directed by the compass of my heart’, to a teaching post in California, recognised as the most convincing interpretive thematic link to the ‘Beat Generation’ to emerge from outside America.

Inside that first pivotal volume are powerful pieces such as “Allegory of the Wolf Boy”, “The Nature Of Action”, but especially “Elvis Presley” – about a battered forty-five rpm record on a sleazy café juke-box. A quote from it – ‘he turns revolt into style’, later provided George Melly with the title for his provocative book on music culture. But Gunn’s book also features the much-published genesis of his own future persona, “The Unsettled Motor-Cyclist’s Vision Of His Death”. This, alongside “On The Move”, and the title poem anticipate his best-known piece “Black Jackets”, about the ‘Wild One’ with ‘Born to Lose’ tattooed on his shoulder. The biker seen as symbol of speed, change, escape, and the sub-culture built around it. A transient escapology, an illusory lure into a shoddy and often violently knife-edged life-style.

Later Gunn returned, to conspire the poem “Blackie The Electric Rembrandt” about the tattooist’s cult. Universal now, back then the tattoo implied relevance to working-class culture – the body-art’s ritual barbarity, the masculine assertiveness that also gave it meaning to both Rocker and Hell’s Angel. In that otherwise safe 1950’s consumer society, the tattoo shared the same initiation-into-manhood symbolism as the high-powered chrome-gleaming motorcycle. ‘Youth is power’ (4) is indicative. James Dean’s shadow falling across post-war British austerity, poems from the same fountainhead as Stan Barstow’s ‘juvenile delinquent’ short story “The Desperadoes”. The exaggerated bravado reflected by Presley’s sensual posturing, ‘whether he poses or is real, no cat / bothers to say’ – a quote that extends its relevance to Gunn’s “Carnal Knowledge”, ‘even in bed I pose… / I wonder if you know, or knowing care’.

He explains, lucid about his selected continuum, ‘by movement I mean the sort of actions one is involved in, whether voluntarily or not, all through one’s life – unpacking in a new apartment, riding a motorcycle, writing a poem, murdering one’s Landlady. By sense I mean sensation and meaning. This is the only pun in the book’ (5). Anticipating ‘A Sense Of Movement’ had come the more embryonically formative ‘Fighting Terms’, originally published by Fantasy Press in 1954. Five years later a slightly altered version appeared through the New York-based Hawks Well press, before being eventually issued by Faber in 1962. This collection includes “The Wound”, “A Mirror For Poets”, and – looking back to classicism, “Helen’s Rape”. But, like the Wolf Boy’s lycanthropy – hidden, but genetically imprinted, the balance between staid academicism, and the ‘sniff of the real’ world of the intuitive Black Jacket cowboy is an uneasy one.

His writing is always technically competent, maintaining – more often than not, structure, style and rhyme (‘the hands explore tentatively / two small live entities’ (6)). A way of phrasing certain things in a particularly satisfying way, placed just the correct side of the line beyond which lies literary impenetrability. He avoids the more bizarre manifestations of experimentalism, yet, in the best of his pieces, retains a sense of the tactile, the real, as powerful as the revving of a 600cc Harley-Davidson. His sympathies lie not with academics, but outsiders. The experience and the evaluation are fused precariously. He quotes Baudelaire as the writer who best embodies the fusion – ‘although his ennui has now become democratic – it is no longer the poet’s prerogative’ (5). As though the ill-defined malaise of Sartre’s ‘La Nausee’ has become James Dean’s ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, or Presley’s Danny Fisher in ‘King Creole’. And, just as relevant, the British Angry Young Man movement of working class literary orientation. Infused with a Gay sensibility as natural as sweat.

Be warned. Gunn’s poetry affects lives. It just does. The writing is not always immediately obvious. Not always gettable. Although sometimes it is. Either way, you have to work at it. Think about it. Consider it this way, then that. Half-revelation, and half-confusion. After which, just possibly, the conclusions you arrive at are still off. It’s challenging for those who prefer words to be comfortable. But it’s a worthwhile exercise, a thrill of disorientation. He captures moments of light. But sometimes they are reflections of light, at other times, opaque. He puts an altered spin on the everyday, but without the prissy chin-stroking pretensions of other poets of his time. That’s another reason for reading him. He’s not art-elitist. He doesn’t try on that ‘I’m an artist’ stuff. He takes the reader into account.

Thomson William Gunn was born in Gravesend in 1929, educated at University College School in London. And although he claims to have spent an unhazardous youth in Hampstead, in the north-west of London while ‘my family stealthily crept up from middle-middle-class to upper-middle-class’ (5), in fact his mother suicided soon after his parents divorce. When he was just a ‘skinny’ fourteen. During the Blitz he was evacuated to a school in the country ‘where an enlightened English Teacher taught from the ‘Poet’s Tongue’, a remarkable anthology edited by W.H. Auden & John Garrett’. It’s this book that provides his working definition of poetry as ‘memorable speech’. Gunn’s first real influence was Keats, followed later by Marlowe, Beddoes and Meredith. Another influence from this period re-emerges when Gunn edited the 1975 Penguin Books’ ‘Ben Jonson’ collection (he also edited ‘Selected Poems Of Greville Fulke’ for the University of Chicago Press in 1969). But, although he’d begun writing his own poetry at Cambridge University, laying down his first collection there, he was ‘part of the National Service Generation’, and it was military conscription that shifted his focus from classicism. Following his stint in uniform he found himself retaining its characteristics – ‘lack of concern with religion, lack of class, a rather undirected impatience’.

It was also at Trinity College that he met his long-term partner, Mike Kitay (‘that summer I was twenty-three, / you about twenty-one, / we hoped to live together, as we / (not to be smug) have done’). Mike was American, so there’s perhaps an additional attraction to the San Francisco and New York-based American Poetry Renaissance with its concrete city mythologies and hipster neon-mystic visions of apocalypse. But in the best of his writing such excess gets filtered through a British post-war perception of shoddy bombsite austerity and industrial working class stoicism. Indeed, Robert Conquest selected examples of his work for ‘New Lines’ (1956), the defining anthology of what was termed ‘The Movement’, alongside Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Donald Davie and Conquest himself. Not obvious company. But an indication of his status. Meanwhile, he travelled. Living in Rome for six months, San Antonio Texas for a year, before winding up – with Mike, in Berkeley, teaching in Stanford, California (‘England is my parent and San Francisco is my lover’). Always at ease with his sexuality, even within the claustrophobic illegality he’d left behind him, there – it came as natural as breathing.

The third collection – ‘My Sad Captains’, lifts its title from Shakespeare’s ‘Anthony & Cleopatra’, and appeared through Faber in 1961. It includes “In Santa Maria Del Popolo” observed from his travelling, the powerful “From The Highest Camp”, “Flying Above California”, and the reflective sensuality of the title poem about his peers and influences – ‘the past lapping them like a cloak of chaos, / they were men who, I thought, lived only to / renew the wasteful force they spent with each hot convulsion’. His journey to California, in a sense a pilgrimage to the germination-point of the City Lights mythology, and his subsequent disillusionment with its heroes is perhaps also in that poem. Dark-haired and bearded, Gunn could be seen as the first British intimation of the Beat Poet charisma, most effectively translating its euphoric spirit into a tactile Fifties British context. Despite the contrast between his form – and its content. With the traditional poetic structures he uses, and its keyhole-voyeuristic subject-matter. The mind’s discipline – and the body’s hedonism? Indeed, his contribution to this evolutionary liberation and democratisation of words would not to be equalled until the emergence of Michael Horovitz, Pete Brown, Dave Cunliffe, and other beatific ‘Children Of Albion’ (Horovitz later anthologised Gunn’s compulsive poem “The Bath-House” in the 1975 ‘New Departures Double Issue’).

More publications follow – cannibalising, and taking Gunn’s poems to a wider audience. ‘The New Poetry’, an anthology published by Penguin in 1962 through A. Alvarez (of ‘The Savage God’) includes Gunn’s “The Secret Sharer” and “Lofty In The Palais De Dance”. The latter is another well-observed eulogy to cheap Fifties life-style – the Mecca Dance-hall pick-up, while embodying greater character complexity than such an encapsulation suggests. There’s also the ‘Faber Book Of Modern Verse’ (1965) edited by Michael Roberts with Gunn’s “Innocence”, a poem dedicated to Tony White (‘he ran the course, and as he ran he grew’), and “Consider The Snail” (‘I would never had imagined the slow passion / to that deliberate progress’). Again, the sensual movement, the restlessness – ‘reaching no absolute, in which to rest / one is always nearer by not keeping still’ (7).

Jeff Nuttall described Gunn as ‘a conscious existentialist, Cambridge graduate, poet of action (who) found in the American Midwestern black-leather cowboy a naïve whose method of living provided a way out of the spiritual cul-de-sac in which intellectual life seemed caught… his most well-known poem on the subject… amplifies the pragmatic merits of the earlier hipster with an additional dynamism, the hard edge of will applied to the crucial moment, an aggressive masculinity of principle expressed in the barbaric decorations and the atmosphere of oil and petrol’ (‘Bomb Culture’, Paladin, 1970). Yet, while igniting areas of Gunn’s poetry, this fails to highlight the reason why he was infinitely more than merely an American by proxy. ‘Positives’ (Faber, 1966) has poetry matched to Ander Gunn’s photographs chronicling a working-class life through the terraces, the pubs, the adolescent lure of Rock images, through wrinkled maturity into old age. The drab monochrome illustrations exactly complement and interpret Gunn’s most precise and effective observations. Yet by contrast – and to support Nuttall’s assertion, the sleeve-art of Gunn’s record album ‘On The Move’ captures the poet in black-jacketed sub-Kerouac pose thumbing a ride from the street-corner of an anonymous mid-western town, beneath American road signs.

This duality can easily be traced further back, into the fact that so much of Fifties ‘trash-culture’ – Coca-Cola, movies, bubble-gum, Rock ‘n’ Roll – was either American or an American imitation. The album was recorded on 20th January 1959 in Oakland, and movement is its liet-motif. Predictably there’s “Black Jackets”, followed by “Market At Turk” (Market & Turk are two streets in San Francisco). He reads without exaggerated emphasis or theatrical intonation. Through “A Plan Of Self-Subjection”, “Waking In A Newly-Built House” and “Lazarus Not Raised” so the words are allowed to be naked, delivered in clear and unaffected tone. They stand the test. Hypnotise the listener. Still. ‘It seems to me a specifically contemporary subject’ he comments dismissively, ‘seeking to understand one’s deliberate aimlessness, having the courage of one’s lack of convictions, reaching a purpose only by making the right rejections’ (5).

‘Poems 1950-1966’ (Faber, 1969) anthologises Gunn’s best work from that period including “Flying Above California”. Further collections include ‘Selected Poems Of Thom Gunn And Ted Hughes’ (including the former’s “Wound”, “In Praise Of Cities”, and the tense vignette “Claus Von Staffenburg” about the attempted assassination of Hitler) and ‘To The Air’ (Godine) an anthology edited by Jan Schreibed. It’s obvious that by now America had freed up his style, with the sixties providing ‘the fullest years of my life, crowded with discovery both inner and outer’. There are attempts at free verse, although he soon returned to more formal metre. And fuller expressions of his sexuality, ‘I like loud music, bars and boisterous men’, things that help – ‘if not lose’, then at least leave behind, the self (in ‘The Passages Of Joy’). He sees the period as ‘a Dionysian experiment / to build a city, never dared before’, in which ‘I really wanted to devote myself to going to concerts in Golden Gate Park and to taking drugs’.

‘Touch’, Gunn’s next original work was produced for Faber in 1967, and includes “Berlin In Ruins”, “Confessions Of A Life Artist”, plus an ambitious poem-sequence – “Misanthropos”, which takes up one third of the book and had already been broadcast by BBC Radio’s Third Programme to enthusiastic critical reception (on 8th March 1965, read by Alan Dobie). It was followed by ‘Moly’ (Faber), which even carries references to locations where LSD ‘trips’ have ignited the poems. Critic Julian Webb finds it ‘a journey into light ending with what is perhaps the finest poem he has yet written – “Sunlight”’. He also contributes a section to ‘Worlds – Seven Modern Poets’ (Penguin Education, 1974) edited by Geoffrey Summerfield. With Gunn’s slice of the book illuminated by Abramowitsch’s photography spanning scenes from Hampstead Heath, a flight above California, Gunn in San Fransisco, and a picture of a ‘Berkeley Barb’ street-seller for sub-cultural reference. Its publication happens in conjunction with the screening of a special film shot on the Californian coast for BBC2-TV’s ‘Second House’. While bringing the imagery full circle into the post-hippie culture with brief eulogies of a Jefferson Airplane concert in the Golden Gate Park – ‘the music comes and goes on the wind, comes and goes on the brain’, and a street corner drug pusher – ‘my methadrine, my double-sun will give you two lives in your one’ (8). The Black Jacket mythology had now become the ‘Easy Rider’ cult to which Gunn could have become a minor Guru, in justification of his earlier sympathies. After all, Ginsberg was up in the hills with Ken Kesey choking back massive amounts of LSD and ritual Peyote in a ‘foolish magic’ of midnight Hell’s Angel ceremonies attempting to establish the ‘fellow-traveller’ status that had been Gunn’s preserve since 1957! Talking to Ginsberg at a City Lights reception Gunn was once even mistaken for Jack Kerouac. ‘Thom loves that story’.

Yet subsequent work would be less-well received, with sixties hedonism decaying into the ‘hot convulsions’ of Gay Bath-House culture, to which he became an equally enthusiastic participant (‘power / as beauty, beauty / power, that / is all my cock knew or / cared to know…’ ‘Boss Cupid’). Although the precision is always there, more free, but never entirely free of the self-imposed considerations of strict form, yet tilting across what he calls the ‘luminous intersection’ from intellect towards the senses, towards ‘the disobedient / who keep a culture alive by subverting it’ (‘The Passages Of Joy’). Towards the attritions of sexual love. Such incidents lead to the darker more openly Gay ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ taking its title from a notorious Hampstead Heath cruising location, to the mixed and often confused reviews that greeted ‘The Passages Of Joy’… until the heart-breaking elegies for the plague years’ AIDS victims in ‘The Man With Night Sweats’ returned him to mainstream critical favour. Here, America is a place of loss and elegy. But his lovers aren’t seen as on their way to some kind of epiphany. They’re just trapped in the sexiness of being alive. Gunn just observes what he sees, and then renders it visible. ‘Like Catullus, a poet whom in some ways he resembles’ opines critic Helen Dunmore, ‘Gunn is engaged in an erotic, undercover war against time and death’ (‘Observer’ 28th May 2000).

Be warned. This poetry affects lives. It just does. Thom Gunn lived to be 74, yet the controversialist element remains, it’s still there alongside the ‘sniff of the real’. A poem in his final collection is written through the persona of cannibal necrophile Jeffrey Dahmer. Poems are ‘actions of a sort’ he once declared (5), ‘and by actions I may attempt to define the direction which is not mystical, or political, or necessarily one that has ever been taken before…’

THOM GUNN IN PRINT

‘FIGHTING TERMS’ (1954)
‘SENSE OF MOVEMENT’ (1957)
‘MY SAD CAPTAINS’ (1961)
‘POSITIVES’ (1967) with photos by brother Ander
‘TOUCH’ (1967)
‘MOLY’ (1971) ‘Guruish’ says Martin Amis, ‘in which Gunn seemed to have wandered into the jaws of cryptography’ (‘Sunday Times’ 12th December 1976)
‘JACK STRAW’S CASTLE’ (1976) ‘People behave or misbehave in these places. Intuition and intelligence conspire to describe and judge’ (‘Sunday Times’ 12th December 1976)
‘THE MISSED BEAT’ (Janus Press 1976)
‘THE PASSAGE OF JOY’ (1982)
‘THE OCCASIONS OF POETRY’ (1982) Prose
‘UNDESIRABLES’ (Pig Press, 1988)
‘THE MAN WITH NIGHT SWEATS’ (1992) ‘The poems are fierce keepsakes, written under the pressure of emotion’ (‘Observer’ 13th December 1992), ‘Beautiful and demanding, they remind us of art’s heroism as well as its uselessness’ (Andrew Motion in ‘Observer’ 9th February 1992)
‘SHELF LIFE’ (1993) Essays
‘COLLECTED POEMS’ (1993)
‘BOSS CUPID’ (2000) 115 pages from Faber. ‘He seemed all body, such / as normally you couldn’t touch,/ reckless and rough,/ one of Boss Cupid’s red-haired errand boys / who couldn’t get there fast enough’ (‘The Problem’)

(1) ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHY’
(2) ‘THE NATURE OF ACTION’
(3) ‘MY SUBURBAN MUSE’ – autobiographical prose in ‘WORLDS’
(4) ‘POSITIVES’
(5) Album Sleeve notes issued through ‘LISTEN’, Marvel Press, 253 Hull Road, Hessle,

East Yorkshire. 1962
(6) ‘THE FEEL OF HANDS’
(7) ‘ON THE MOVE’
(8) ‘STREET SONG’

An extended and much revised version of an original profile published in:
‘ARNOLD BOCKLIN MAGAZINE no.5’ (UK – December 1975)
‘STABLE no.3’ (UK – February 1977)
‘GARGOYLE no.8’ (USA – January 1978)

ANNE CLARK does my poem "PSALM" Live

2011-06-08T04:46:00.006+01:00

When I did my poem “PSALM” on-stage at Preston I said it wasn’t available on MP3 - apparently I was wrong! It seems that the very lovely and uniquely talented ANNE CLARK has done a version of it as lyrics on this track from her CD ‘THE SMALLEST ACTS OF KINDNESS’. She’s even done a live version, which you can watch here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CSS7sNM0WI

original album version here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBvpbjs7-Ns

Poem: 'Images From Peter Blake & Claes Oldenburg'

2011-05-31T14:43:00.003+01:00

Are you still worried by that troublesome problem of what exactly to buy

Bob Dylan for his 70th birthday? Well – worry no more, here’s the ideal gift.

‘THE CAPTAIN'S TOWER: 70 POETS

CELEBRATE BOB DYLAN AT 70’

edited by Phil Bowen & Damian Furniss & David Woolley.

Foreword by Ronnie Wood.

With poets including Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGough,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Simon Armitage and... me!

(Seren Books, £9.99 ISBN 9-781854-115607)

www.serenbooks.com

IMAGES FROM PETER BLAKE

& CLAES OLDENBURG (1962)/

THE MANDRAX VARIATIONS

Fingers drum on monochrome streering-wheel
(Dada dit, Dada dit)
with impatience stolen from James Dean,
impatient for the lights to change,
impatient for the lights to swell out,
engulf the air, engulf the supermarkets
where people queue in silent sepia tints,
engulf the drabness of streets,
the emptiness of sky.
Fingers drum on monochrome steering-wheel
(Dada dit, Dada dit)
thinking of half-completed erotic collages
that no-one will exhibit,
thinking of multi-coloured butterflies
leaving muddy foot-marks across
a severed retina,
thinking of carved wooden grasshoppers
crawling out of amphetamine midnight walls.
Waiting for the lights to change.
Waiting for the world to change.
Fingers drum on monochrome steering-wheel
(Dada dit, Dada dit)
open-top American car, wind-tangled hair,
dumb insolence practiced from early Presley movies,
in angular reflecting American wing-mirror,
like a segment of a picture he’s yet to create
overlaid with Monroe, Bikini atoll and CND symbols,
like a jerky sporadic target
on a blaring fairground silk-screen,
like a cut-out on a cereal packet
of Kennedy or Gagarin,
like the photograph of a Pop star
in a locket on a schoolgirl’s chain

DADA DIT, DADA DIT, RED AMBER GREEN, RED AMBER GREEN,
DADADIT,DADADIT,REDAMBERGREEN,REDAMBERGREEN,DADADIT

It is 1962.
Beatles in a Hamburg cellar.
Dylan in a Greenwich Village Coffee House.
I am 15

Published in:
‘HAT No.5’ (UK – November 1977)
‘PIERIAN SPRING Vol.10 No.2’ (USA – May 1985)
‘RIVER RAT REVIEW No.5’ (USA – April 1989)
plus anthologies:
‘JEWELS AND BINOCULARS’ edited Phil Bowen
(Stride / Westword) (UK – October 1993)
‘THE CAPTAIN’S TOWER: SEVENTY POETS CELEBRATE BOB DYLAN AT SEVENTY’
edited Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss & David Woolley (Seren Books) (UK – May 2011)
and personal collection:
‘POWER LINES’ (Unibird Publications) (UK – October 1988)

PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT CD 'LACED'

2011-05-31T14:03:00.003+01:00

Album Review of:

'LACED' by

PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT

(FATCAT FAT-SP21) www.oli-fatcat.com

Mark Tulin of classic acid-punk psycedelicatessens Electric Prunes died 26th February 2011. Bands had dumb names in those days. Not like now. Not like what, for purposes of delicacy, we’ll refer to as Psychedelic HS? Are they the answer to the cultural impasse currently stalling music? – well, maybe. Or just a deranged curio. Laced is a brain-storm of contagious madness about ‘getting lost in space’, which could mean anything – inner or outer space, or even a retro-TV sci-fi clunker. Neolithic percussion. Techno-primitive effects with zero sonic bling. A dark and tumultuous lo-fi four-track sound with visceral analogue tweaks that hit you like a truck. It’s what they used to call experimental electro, the rawest cuts of Cabaret Voltaire spliced with tape-snippets salvaged from the Psychic TV studio-floor. No narrative. No conclusion. No obvious explanation. Just a mounting prankster energy that neither ceases or peaks. "Tropical Vision" even ends with vinyl surface-hiss. And although the hideous cacophony of "I Hate The Beach" lapses into the soothing spacey ebb-and-flow of symphonic "Automatic Writing", the parts do not always cohere into anything as normal as ‘songs’, not that they’re intended to. "Another Side", with its harmonica and treated vocals is almost a song. But as a whole, it’s more a clink-clank sound-lab that deconstructs music, and reassembles it into something approaching ‘caverns of noise’. ‘What you lack is a sense of reality’ complains a sampled dialogue-voice. ‘What’s so wonderful about reality?’ snaps back the retort. Which pretty much sums up the Psychedelic HS perspective. This noise annoys, but addictively so. Matt Whitehurst (guitar, keyboards, vocals) and Rick Johnston (percussion) came together in Columbus, Ohio in 2006. There’s also sometime bassist Jason Roxas whose current status is uncertain. There was a 2007 LP, Magic Flowers Droned (Stiltbreeze), plus a cluttered scatter-bomb of EPs. Now, this comes in CD, digital or vinyl formats. It’s crappy, smudged, fractured and murky, made up of distorted jump-cuts that swoop in from unexpected angles. It uses ‘infinity sirens’. It has no obvious commercial potential. There are outsiders, and then there’s Psychedelic HS. They exist entirely within their own self-contained universe where all this makes some kind of sense. Not so much an alternative dialect to the rest of Indie, as a different language entirely. What Mark Tulin would’ve thought is anyone’s guess, but they said pretty much the same kind of thing about Electric Prunes in their day. This is a frightful warning of the terrible derangements inflicted by the uncontrolled discordant use of noise. Don’t do it kids. Leave it to the experts.

Tracklisting:
(1) Puff (2) Time Of Day (3) French Countryside (4) Laced (5) Tropical Vision (6) I Hate The Beach (7) Another Side (8) Revolution Wavers (9) Dead On Arrival (10) Automatic Writing (11) Making Out

The PR sheet says 'currently existing as the duo of Matt Horseshit (vocals / guitars / drum programming / harmonica / keyboards) and Ryan Jewell (drums / percussion / keyboards), 'Laced' also features a guest appearance by Times New Viking's Beth Murphy, who sings on 'DOA'. Created in Columbus throughout 2010 (with two tracks dating back to almost year before that), the album was recorded in a variety of basements, practice spaces, living rooms, and bathrooms using almost no amplifiers and a beat up 1970's Teac reel to reel. No longer mining corrosive, lo-fi dysfunctionality in two-minute adrenaline hits, 'Laced' is the first record to see them consistently stretching things out and breaking new ground.'

PSYCHEDLIC HORSESHIT WILL BE TOURING THE UK LATER IN THE YEAR.
& a further album, compiling the best of their previous material will be released by FatCat in November. Contact: tones@indian.co.uk or ash@indian.co.uk

CAROLYN CASSADY: Interview

2011-05-30T11:28:00.022+01:00

CAROLYN

CASSADY:

‘ON AND OFF

THE ROAD’

An interview

to coincide with the publication

of ‘Off The Road’ by

CAROLYN CASSADY

originally published by Black Spring Press

(ISBN: 0-948238-05-4, 1990)

Late Spring. Leafy North London, off the main crawl. A dilapidated grey-white block, a gently decay of peeling paint, grass-fringed gutters, and a tall plume of chickweed up from the colonnaded portal overhang. Beat and beat-up…

Typically, Carolyn Cassady’s flat is across the avenue and down apiece, its exterior gleaming slick dazzle-white and clean. She, at the birth, epicentre, and death of the Beat Generation, always stood slightly to one side. A constant presence. A crash-pad. A stabilising influence when the Beatific rat-pack came in off the endless highway.

She’s there on the rear-cover photo of her book ‘Off The Road’ (Black Spring Press, 1990) with Neal Cassady. A shot ‘taken by the kind of street-photographer you usually just kick out of the way. So it was wonderful that this guy happened to get us, and that we happened to have the dollar to give him. For some reason we took that thing and ordered just two prints. Neal carried one around. That was just before we were married, when Neal had come to join me. You can see there all my dreams of the future. I’ve got on my suede jacket with the beaver, my tweed skirt, and my platform lizard shoes. We are outside this fancy store in San Francisco where I bought things. I was looking ahead with great confidence and rapture. I didn’t have a care in the world. Little did I know…’

Neal Cassady is a one-man Chaos Theory.

Carolyn is ‘Camille’ in Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘On The Road’ (1957), married to Neal’s holy goof alter-ego ‘Dean Moriarty’ – ‘his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille’. She and Kerouac are also lovers. She’s ‘Evelyn’ to Neal’s ‘Cody’ in ‘Big Sur’ (1961), and she later cameos in ‘Desolation Angels’ (1965). As Kerouac’s commercial stardom turns to tortured delirium tremens of self-disgust he continues to phone her, long rambling drunken panic-calls, until his death in 1969. It’s all here – this is a book flitting with sad ghosts and mad shadows. There’s William Burroughs, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters (of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Electric Cool Aid Acid Test’ (1968) notoriety) on their trip FURTHER which drives Neal to final destruction, there’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Slim Gaillard, Gary ‘All-Seeing Being’ Snyder…

Subtitled ‘Twenty Years With Cassady, Kerouac, And Ginsberg’ her book is spangled with the restless dreams of the golden crazies whose cries of freedom still echo euphorically through the Nineties – and the decades beyond, although two of the three by-lined names failed to live beyond the sixties end. She quotes one of Ginsberg’s prophetic letters to her, ‘none of us are fast and strong enough to battle society forever, it’s too sad and grey’. Ginsberg himself succumbed to the reaper 5 April 1997…

--- 0 ---

And this is the way it begins.

Denver. Saturday afternoon, and on. March 1947. She meets Neal for the first time. Carolyn is twenty-four. He is twenty-one, and already married to LuAnne. He wears a T-shirt with a suit ‘not authentic zoot’ but closer than anything she’s seen outside the movie screen. He wants to hear Lester Young records. She’s never heard of Prez. Neal has talking eyes. When Neal and Carolyn first have sex, Allen Ginsberg lies feigning sleep on a couch in the same room, ‘not two feet from my feet’. Allen will also become Neal’s lover. Coming home later to the flat they by-now cohabit, Carolyn writes ‘the scene before me stunned my senses as if I’d run into a wall. There in OUR bed, sleeping nude, were LuAnne, Neal and Allen, in that order’. It was only the start of a compulsively recurring pattern.

‘I never got over being shocked’. She shakes her head wonderingly, bemused, amazed still.

After a five-week separation they re-unite in Frisco. He’s already introduced her to ‘bennys’ (Benzedrine), now they share ‘tea’ (Marijuana), ‘he held the joint away from him while he applied a match to the twisted end and waited for the paper to burn off. Then he put it between parted lips and drew in short, noisy, breaths without closing his lips, inhaling more deeply on each gasp until his lungs were fully expanded. He held his breath, becoming red in the face. When he could hold it no longer, he exhaled, very little smoke being expelled. ‘You see? Keep it all in. Now. You noticed I took in as much air as smoke? Too strong otherwise, burns your throat too much and you lose somee – cooo, myyy… this IS good shit!’

To Kerouac, Neal ‘was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convulsed octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rushing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night’ (‘Big Sur’). In much of ‘On The Road’ Carolyn is the wife’s voice on the phone from the far side of the continent, until – when they crash wildly over in San Francisco she throws both Kerouac and Cassady out into the street. Back in New York, Neal’s pregnant model new-girlfriend Diana Hansen (Inez in the novel) phones Carolyn long-distance suggesting she initiate divorce proceedings. Before the annulment is complete Neal and Diana marry in Mexico. Yet by the novel’s end Neal ‘jumped on a bus and roared off again across the awful continent to San Francisco to rejoin Camille and the two baby girls. So now he was three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife’.

To Carolyn, Diana was left in New York – ‘still modelling’, but, she adds tartly, ‘modelling maternity clothes…’

--- 0 ---

The first photo in the book’s insert is a monochrome profile of serene Garbo-esque beauty. ‘Yes, I like that one. It was done by a Denver student while I was there. At the time, he was majoring in photography. He majored in everything else before he was through.’

Looking at the picture it’s not difficult to see why both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady gravitated towards her so inexorably. And it’s still there. She sits now in cobalt-blue knitted top and sweet-wine-coloured slacks. Spectacles hung on blue chain around her neckline. Her radio is tuned to ‘Jazz FM’ – although ‘it’s not quite as thrilling as I’d hoped’. She has the gift of intimacy. The warmth. A sharply perceptive intelligence and wit modulated by infectiously expressive intonation whipped in with artful mimicry and accent. ‘I usually pick up language rhythms, dialects and things fast – but I just cannot get straight English. It’s too complicated. The funny things they do with their vowels.’

She balances odd combinations of attitudes too, while drawing lightly on ‘Mores’, long slender brown cigarettes. One moment she’s talking matter-of-fact about the decadent sexual and narcotic modes and morés of the Beatnik demi-monde she inhabited, then she’s switching to attacks on current ‘Woman’s Libbers and Cigarette Bullies. It’s all so dumb. I HATE Feminism. First of all, they don’t know the real role of the male and female division. And secondly they’ve EMASCULATED all the men. They’ve RUINED all the men!’

And then later, even more bizarrely, ‘I think the greatest pollutant on the planet is foul language…!!!’

--- 0 ---

In the movie ‘Heartbeat’ (Orion/WB, 1980) Carolyn is played by Sissy Spacek, Neal and Jack by Nick Nolte and John Heard. The screenplay is (vaguely) based around her book ‘Heart Beat’, an early draft of an excerpt from her work-in-progress – then called ‘The Third Word’. It’s incorporated into the new work in the chapters covering the idyllic period of ménage a trios the three of them share on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Kerouac assembled ‘On The Road’ there while experimenting with peyote, jazz and outrage. In her biography ‘Kerouac’ (Warner Paperback. 1974) Ann Charters writes ‘later in his life, thinking back to the attic room in Cassady’s small house on Russian Hill, Kerouac remembered it as one of the best places he ever lived in, because it was an ideal place to write – ‘it rained every day, and I had wine, marijuana, and once in a while Neal’s wife would sneak in’. In ‘Big Sur’ ‘for awhile then she had two husbands… we were the perfect family’.

‘Off The Road’ adds Carolyn’s own perspective. ‘I provided for whichever of them was in residence according to his individual preferences… On occasions, Jack and I would make love in his attic if the children were asleep. He’d produce a poor-boy of wine and play host. I think of him now whenever I smell unfinished wood, and remember how the sun sometimes lay across us like a blanket, or, how huddled under covers, we’d listen to the soft patter of rain close above our heads’.

The film arrived in 1980, and ‘it was a DISASTER. Just a travesty. Awful. If they’d not used our names – I’D HAVE PAID THEM NOT TO, I think they would’ve got a pretty little sit-com, visually it’s very pretty, everybody looks great, and nobody has any brains so you don’t have to think. There’s not a lot of real bad violence or sex. So it’s just a lovely little sit-com. You should just call it ‘Tom Dick and Harriet’, and GO with it. Because my criticism is that it wasn’t anything to DO with us at all. Sissy Spacek was a Darling. She begged to do it – but she’d read my original 1,143-page manuscript, thinking that THAT was going to be done. She threw the only temper tantrums of her career to try to get it straightened out, but of course it was no use. She did contribute a lot to making it better. The haunting thing – and worse, is that everybody connected with it was so excited about it and wanted so badly to do it. So it was really sad. ‘Cos it could have been great. It really could have been good. I do have a video cassette of it though’, she points. ‘It’s standing there…’

--- 0 ---

The birds in the foliage outside her window sing now as I replay the interview cassette.

She was born Carolyn Robinson in 1923, the youngest of five children.

Grandad is profusely bearded, a little self-important. His eyes dominate the room from where he’s posed between bookshelves that are crammed like some Dead Poets Society with Beat first editions. ‘That painting has been shuttled all over the States’ she travelogues, ‘my parents were both from English-Scots-Irish descent…’

Kerouac’s first impression of her (as Camille) is of ‘a well-bred polite young woman’. An accurate appraisal. No natural bohemian, she. Her family background is middle-class, straight, Nashville. ‘I was so sheltered. I had no idea that everybody didn’t live the way my parents did. But they gave me such a blind sense of security that I never lost it. Even in the worst times with Neal I never felt panicky or really deprived. I had fun fixing up those little crackerbox places we lived in, and knew things would get better. We were working on it. So I never really felt deprived even though I never knew where the next cent was coming from’. She went to Prep School, a very academic establishment where she took Latin and English Literature. Graduated to Bennington College in Vermont which was ‘totally unacademic – suited me perfectly. That’s the reason for all my future problems. My family never quite got over it. I was the only artist in the bunch, and the youngest. I just kept disappointing them all the time’. She went on to gain an MA in Fine Arts and Theatre Arts from Denver University.

In Denver she met Neal. And even then there was the odd juxtaposition of attitudes. ‘We all wanted a home and a family and a good life someday.’

So – impossible question, how would her life have developed if it hadn’t been totally beat out of frame by her collision with Neal? Marriage. Marriage to Cyril, the parentally approved suitor. ‘But I’d have made Cyril so miserable. I’d have been a BAD girl. I couldn’t STAND that life! Before Neal I had never been in the least inclined to love anyone else, no matter how eligible. And since Neal I’ve never met anybody REMOTELY eligible either.’

--- 0 ---

At one point midway through the hyper-drive GO of ‘On The Road’ Sal Paradise (Kerouac) pauses, ‘I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men’. Carolyn’s title slyly puns along similar lines. While their men were out roaring high on the Bop-crazy madness of the Beat Route, the women waited, off the road. She provides new perspectives on old myths. New dimensions of understanding. The Beats were a Boy’s Gang – to Ginsberg ‘a hazy circle which itself knoweth itself not’. The image is writ, familiarised into cliché, speeding romantic thumb-trip hipsters wired and wild-eyed, drunk on dreams and amphetamines, cruising for kicks and the ravenous zen high, fuelled on jazz existentialism with the gas-pedal fused hard to the floor. But behind the glare, back on Russian Hill, Carolyn and the kids bide their time. ‘The sun had set, and as the sky turned to deeper blue, city lights began to blink on like Midwestern fireflies… with my free hand I dropped the needle onto the turntable beside the couch and let Lady Day say it for me – ‘no good man / ever since the world began. / There’ve been other fools like me / born to be… in love with a no-good maayann’.

Cascades of luminous prose of constant crisis. But why? What’s a nice girl like you DOING in a continuum of intellectual hoodlums like this? ‘In the end, I always had a choice. It was my choice. Other women would have just split. People think that I’m some sort of victim, or that they manipulated me. But they’d be the first to say ‘do what you want’. And I was DOING what I wanted. I knew all the time. I COMPLAINED to everybody, and they said ‘why don’t you leave him?’ And I’d ask myself that, day after day. I could have left. You can always do what you have to do. And I kept wishing he’d do something I couldn’t stand, you know? I’d probably have said if he’d become an alcoholic, or if he’d beaten me, I’d have been gone in a flash. But he never did. He did things OTHER women couldn’t stand, but he never did anything that I couldn’t quite take. I liked to believe every excuse he gave me. And in the end it was a good thing.’

Carolyn’s book tells it ALL in four-hundred-&-thirty pages. It’s an emotional experience to travel through. All the familiar scams, from unfamiliar angles. New glimpses and insights in charged prose of tactile clarity. But ‘Off The Road’ is more, much more than that. It’s Carolyn’s story, her strength and integrity. And it’s part of a post-Feminist sprawl of woman’s-eye flashes on the previously male-o-centric (un)Beat(en) Generation. The Beat Goes On – but with new, feminine voices.

Jan Kerouac, Jack’s daughter, wrote of her brief meeting with the father who originally denied her existence in her ‘novel’ ‘Baby Driver’ (Andre Deutsch. 1982). ‘She writes well. It’s just that she’s good at telling you about what’s going on around her, but you’ll never find out what’s going on inside her. She’s got a coat of armour that’s impenetrable. And no wonder. She USED the name of course. It was HER name to use anyway. And she’s handled it the best way to handle it. She’s a little exploiter from the word go. But you can’t blame her after her childhood. She was a prostitute and a drug addict at twelve, which doesn’t make for a very healthy way to grow. So she comes on very flip and carefree and whatever, but you don’t know what she suffers inside. Unless she’s completely frozen over.’

Then came ‘Minor Characters’ by Joyce Johnson (Collins & Harvill. 1983), a Beat-ette Kerouac sucked into ‘Desolation Angels’ as ‘an interesting young person, a Jewess, elegant, middle-class – sad and looking for something’. ‘Oh – that book was excellent. Joyce Johnson is great. The thing I like is that, not only is she so good at writing about what was going on, but that she doesn’t emphasise or exploit her experience with Jack. Really the book is about Elise Gowan, a girlfriend, and Allen Ginsberg – a terrific thing in itself, and her own sense of humour about herself as a ‘minor character’. Because Jack says some kinda nasty things about Joyce in his books.’

But Kerouac’s attitude to women was always ambiguous. ‘People keep asking me to talk about Jack’s feelings about women, or various aspects of that. But what’s wrong with his books? ‘How about women?’ – most of them are exclusively ABOUT women. What on earth? You ought to be able to find out everything he ever thought about women from reading his books. Yet they somehow seem to feel that nobody knows about that. That’s perhaps because THEY never think about the women in his life. Because it’s all there, surely.’

Yet she describes Kerouac as ‘shy and introverted’. Allen Ginsberg suggests he was ‘inhibited’. When staying at Russian Hill he’d urinate out the attic window because he was too embarrassed to come down through her room to use the toilet! Carolyn even quotes a letter that Ginsberg wrote to her where he says ‘Jack likes you. But he’s afraid of you’. ‘MMMM. Yes – I ran into that again too when I was going through the book. I had to figure that out. Oh – I think it was only…’, she pauses a long pause. ‘It was only, like, women he admired that he was afraid of.’ Another dancing silence. ‘Afraid to make the wrong move as much as anything else. I just can’t think what else I could’ve done to make him afraid.’

He had difficulty treating women as equals? His biographer Gerald Nicosia says Kerouac was ‘never at ease’ with women (in ‘Memory Babe’, Viking 1985), while Joyce Johnson goes further, describing what she terms his ‘woman-hatred’. Carolyn says it’s all in his books! It isn’t.

‘Isn’t it?’

No, the Jack they describe isn’t much in evidence at all. In the books, he’s romancing his situation, he’s writing from very exaggerated angles and perceptions. ‘Well, he did have the Madonna/Whore thing, y’know. He loved and respected all women, as women. But he wasn’t comfortable with those he admired. He was only really comfortable with the whores and the downtrodden. It made him feel better, because he had this Catholic guilt trip. He could never solve that dichotomy. He was ashamed and embarrassed and apologetic making love to women he respected. He wasn’t really all that wonderful. So he only felt worthy with girls who were worse then he was. Because of his terrible shyness he didn’t like it when women were aggressive. He was a real old-fashioned boy. He didn’t always sound like it. But he wasn’t always the man of Neal’s adventures. When he was writing privately in his attic he was a different person.’

Kerouac’s attitude to Carolyn noticeably develops, noticeably softens through the chronological linkage of his books. But even from the beginning a questioning empathy is there: ‘Camille finally went to sleep or spent the night staring blankly at the dark. I had no idea what was really wrong, except perhaps Dean had driven her mad after all…’

--- 0 ---

As I replay the interview cassette, a slow-motion airplane jet burns from speaker to speaker, circling in the skies outside her window. As Allen Ginsberg sneaks in, out, and around Carolyn’s narrative in guises. He’s a love-rival for Neal’s sexual and emotional attentions. And he’s a friend. She lies naked with Allen, ‘we lay about a foot or two apart on the rug in the living room like a couple of innocent children, enjoying the sensual soft breeze that flowed through the French doors and windows open to the starry summer night, the moonlight laying cool white banners across the floor. Allen bellowed poem after poem to infinity, and I found myself relaxing in the safety of being with a man intent only on his own body, not mine.’

‘I ALWAYS enjoyed Allens company. He was a wonderful guest. Gays are always enjoyable because there’s never any sexual threat. They’re usually very creative and artistic and make wonderful friends for women. I had such good times with him in Denver, and then – of course, later in San Jose, before that HORRIBLE day’ (when she unexpectedly discovers Allen giving Neal a blowjob in their bedroom). ‘But I remember him taking me to lunch in San Francisco to show me these murals. We went to this very nice restaurant. He’s wearing his old dirty torn T-shirt and everything, and I’m so embarrassed. All these squares are looking at him, and he’s saying ‘oh they’re just squares, they don’t know, they should LEARN’. And I said ‘Allen, you’re not going to bring them round to your point of view by offending them. You’re always talking about ‘being kind’ to everybody, and that’s very UNkind to dress like that to offend them’. Oh, he just couldn’t take that. ‘Ah na-na-na-na-na.’ So he was behaving like that before he got approval for his radical notions. So when the publication of ‘Howl’ (City Lights, 1956) brought him some recognition – WOW!, so many critics were really let loose and one thing led to a wonderful other. He just rose and rose. Allen was fulfilled by fame. Neal and Jack were destroyed by it. I don’t think Allen has the foggiest idea of what Hinduism or anything above the ground is about. He’s so earthy and materialistic. He never understood a word Neal was talking about. But he did all that meditating and stuff and it did calm down his excitability and defensiveness so he could be serene and calm. He was always kind. But he was much more benevolent after that. But yes – if he’s offended at all he can be just horrid. Yeuch! And very short and superior. Well, he used to be… if you were having an intellectual discussion of some kind and he was losing ground, you couldn’t pin him down or make him go one step further or analyse a little bit more. He’d just take out the finger-cymbals and start linga-linga-linga-ling. And everything stops. Allen just picks up… these…’ She moves to the bookshelves beneath Grandad. Holds up two five-inch copper-hued discs strung together by white tape. Allen Ginsberg’s finger-cymbals!!!

Then she confides that ‘I’m having a terrible time getting through his new biography though (‘Ginsberg: A Biography’ by Barry Miles. Viking). I’d rather think of ANYTHING to do than go back to that book. But I want to read it because I’m sure our memories are so selective in such different ways. But it’s so grisly. I’ve learned far more than I EVER want to know about homosexual love, and I’m only about THIS far through the book. It’s STOP ALREADY, one orgy after another…!'

--- 0 ---

In ‘Big Sur’ Kerouac writes most openly about his love for Carolyn Cassady, and the exact parameters that define their relationship. Neal Cassady is ‘Cody’. Carolyn is ‘Evelyn’. ‘Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say ‘I’ll get you, Jack, in another lifetime… and you’ll be very happy’ – ‘What?’ I’d yell to joke, ‘me running up the eternal halls of karma trying to get away from you hey?’ – ‘It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me’ she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her – I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her…’

Still at the bookshelf she reaches down a red hardbacked copy of Kerouac’s first novel – ‘The Town And The City’ (Harcourt Brace, 1950), old and heavy, limned with light dust. Inside the flyleaf is a dedication to Carolyn. Beneath it, an apology scribed in later – after another frantic Jack and Neal escapade. The inscription is in faded blue ink, large open lettering, although cramping down to the foot of the page, ‘with the deepest apologies I can offer for the fiasco, the foolish tragic Saturday of Neal’s birthday… all because I get drunk… please forgive me, Carolyn, it’ll never happen again…’

‘Jack was shy with everybody. So of course when the fame thing came and they dragged him out to the centre of the stage he was miserable. He had to drink just to get enough courage to even open his eyes. He ABHORRED the way the Hippies behaved, they didn’t have the same values he did anyway, but he got the credit for all those things. He was so misunderstood. He got the blame for all those things he hated. He was a good man. He never ADVOCATED Free Love and drugs and such. Writing in the attic, for friends, and writing letters was very private. But when it was published, it wasn’t private any more. That’s the only reason I can think why the columnists and critics felt so threatened. They couldn’t think of enough vile things to say about Jack. We’d keep saying ‘what are they AFRAID of?’ I suppose it was EXPOSURE. They had to realise that all the skeletons in the closet were about to come out. If he could write all THAT down…?, I guess. So it began all wrong. And that’s what upset him so, the media made it into this ‘Beat Generation’ thing. And then the Hippies acted it all out. It made him sick. That’s what killed poor Jack.’

Jack and Neal were twins. They were symbiotic. Neal lived it. Jack wrote it. Jack envied Neal’s spontaneity, his outrageous energy. Neal envied Jack’s literary and narrative skills. Neal produced ‘The First Third’ (published posthumously by City Lights, 1971), but largely his art lay in his living.

Jack Kerouac died 31 October 1969. A massive abdominal haemorrhage aggravated by alcohol and neglect. He survived Neal Cassady by just twenty months. Neal was found dead beside railroad tracks in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico 4 February 1968. A lethal cocktail of drugs thought to be responsible. In ‘Big Sur’ Jack wrote ‘at least you can write on his grave someday ‘HE LIVED. HE SWEATED’. No halfway house is Cody’s house.’

‘Neal’s father had been an alcoholic. So he wasn’t interested in alcohol. He was interested in marijuana, Benzedrine, and stuff like that, for the ‘highs’. I don’t think he foresaw what it would do. But a lot of that was for mental kicks. It was hard for him, because he was so brilliant, and there wasn’t any place to put it in that odd mind. So I think he felt that drugs were going to help bring him insight that he couldn’t be patient enough to go through himself. Neal was just tortured with guilt all his life because he couldn’t live up to his ideals. So to be glorified for the things he hated about himself was just awful. Poor guy. So in the end he just said ‘to hell with it. I won’t even play the game. I give up’, and he died while he was saying it. Because he was dead – as far as I could tell, when he went off with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. His life supports were removed. He was just trying to get killed as hard as he could. He just gave up trying. He’d worked so hard at self-improvement, spiritual growth, and all that. He was obsessed with it. And he failed and failed and failed. And he… gave up…’ Her voice so soft it hardly registers. ‘It was terrible. So I was hoping that we’d get maybe another little angle on it, and more understanding of Neal as a good man and not just a rowdy irresponsible playboy. I’ve tried to describe what was so impressive about him, the saintliness of him, but I just can’t. Ken Kesey gave up. It’s so obscure, but he gets closest to trying to explain what Neal’s effect was. Because he still had it, even when he was being an idiot and acting the complete clown. That charisma was still there. It affected everyone. It’s so hard to pin down in everyday terms. In the end, probably the only real love and security and sense of peace Neal ever had was with us. So it makes me feel good that maybe it makes up some for the HORROR of his early life. And I feel really good that we gave him that – with the kids and the home that was his. The home that he CHOSE to keep coming back to. His last words that I ever heard when he ‘phoned me from the border of Mexico were ‘I’m coming home…’

--- 0 ---

Carolyn has lived in London nearly ten years. ‘I keep wishing I didn’t have to think about it’ she smiles. She smiles a lot. ‘I’m so sick of the subject. Gosh, I was never very interested in all that degeneracy in the first place. I want to go to Plays and paint pictures and watch Movies and television, I want pleasant things and fun things. But every time there’s a new book or documentary or movie or something. I hear it coming…’

Before I go she hands me a pre-publication copy of ‘Off The Road’ in its saffron photo-spattered slip-cover. ‘Read the foot of page twenty-nine’ she urges.

They’re in Denver. And this is the way it begins. ‘At Jack’s suggestion, one evening Neal, Jack and I went to a tavern. There was a jukebox and a little space for dancing, and since Neal wouldn’t, Jack felt free to dance with me… Jack’s manner was tender without being suggestive, although he did betray some tension. As though he had read my thoughts, he said…’ The next line is missing. Printer’s error. Carolyn is laughing conspiratorially. ‘The line is there in the proof copies. Perhaps we should hold a competition? What DID Jack Kerouac say to me that night in Denver in 1947…?’

I check later with the spiral-bound review proof-copy.

The missing line.

Jack says to Carolyn ‘It’s too bad, but that’s how it is – Neal saw you first.’

POSTSCRIPT

After reading the above text Carolyn Cassady made certain suggested alterations, corrections, and re-interpretations. She writes – ‘if at all possible, there are some changes I would be ever so grateful if you could make. I know I nit-pick, but I’ve a few nerve-endings that have become raw, and anything I can do to soothe, I must try. Also make an effort to quash any mistaken rumours likely to sprout as has so often occurred. I’ll list my changes and objections for your information, and then leave ‘em to you to do whatever. I talk faster than I think, and I exaggerate a lot, so if taken verbatim… mea culpa. These spots were my fault from being so tired of telling the same old tale.’

Her points are as follows (her spellings and emphases):

(1) From the beginning: ‘Coming later to the flat…’ This even happened much later – on the day I was leaving for California – in a flat Neal and I had shared but I had abandoned the night before. This sounds as tho Allen, Neal and I cohabited, which we never did. Allen stayed awhile at my resident hotel room when he first arrived and before he found a place of his own. Then ‘…compulsively recurring pattern’ sounds as tho I frequently found Neal in bed with others!

(2) Neal and Diana married in New Jersey (Alan Harrington in attendance). She had sent Neal to Mexico to get a quickie divorce, but he spent the money on pot. Both of his other marriages were annulled – meaning null and void. He had only one WIFE.

(3) I really don’t ‘hate’ anything or anybody – here I go dramatising and exaggerating. Would it be possible to substitute ‘disagree’?

(4) ‘Heart Beat’ – two words. It amazes me so few people geddit! Barry’s idea with that title was ‘the heart of the beats’, see? The one word is meaningless.

(5) Bennington as ‘all my future problems’ was my parent’s diagnosis, not mine!

(6) All that about the men out roaring around and women waiting – I’ve tried to correct that very myth in my account. They only did that infrequently – Neal was home and working most of our time together.

(7) This about Jan really worries me. I have to say that her early life is hearsay or second-source, and I don’t think that should be spread by me in any case… I never know when a journalist will print what I say when I’m only trying to explain something to him. I’ll get blasted by both her mother and her, and I not only don’t need it, I want to stay on good terms, see? This also applies to the Ginsberg bit. Any chance you could delete ‘But yes – if he’s offended at all he can be just horrid. Yeuch. And very short and superior’. (I’ve told him, if he’s stop jumping to conclusions and TALK to me, these misunderstandings could be cleared up. Nope.) SO PLEASE, if you can cut these two gossipy parts which I have no right to broadcast.

I’ve been such a victim of this loose talk, I abhor the idea I perpetrate it, too.

(8) Back up a bit now: The ‘urinate out the window’ bit I run into all the time (example) I never said it as a fact but as a question to Neal. Yet over and over I’m quoted as telling it as truth.

(9) Jack and Neal never seen (by me) as twins! They were the opposites that attract. The rest of the paragraph bears this out, no? And ‘…to put it in that odd mind’ makes no sense, tho I probably said it, meaning there was no outlet for him to express his brilliant mind.

‘CAROLYN CASSADY: OFF THE ROAD’

Black Spring Press, 46 Rodwell Road, East Dulwich,

London SE22 9LE (Tel: 081-2991514)

(ISBN: 0-948238-05-4, 1990, £16.95)

republished by Penguin Books Ltd (4 July 1996)

ISBN-10: 014015390X

ISBN-13: 978-0140153903

Black Spring Press Ltd (12 July 2007)

ISBN-10: 9780948238376

ISBN-13: 978-0948238376

This Interview Published in:

'HOT PRESS'
‘MOODY STREET IRREEGULARS: A JACK KEROUAC MAGAZINE 24-26 (1991)’