Ode To An iPod

ODE TO AN iPOD

FOR STEVE JOBS

VIA JOHN KEATS

shuffled heard tracks are sweet

but those anticipated are sweeter yet,

the quietness of time expressed in rhyme,

techno-historian, thou canst shape

a smooth glissando, shiny shiny

i would beg to express thee beauty,

O digital lifestyle, deeper than retail,

autotuned in curlicues of sound,

collapsing time pressured into and

recontextualised into a single frame

with each emotional chord striking

the line between past and present

unregulated by any measurable chronology,

only the unbroken line of rhythm connecting,

i think that i shall never see

a thing as lovely as thy symmetry

until the next generation technology

iPod, therefore i am

A literary journalist in ‘The Observer’ was musing thus, about how Poets once wrote odes to things of beauty, but how they no longer do so. John Keats wrote ‘Ode To A Grecian Urn’ he asserts, but no current poet has written an ‘Ode To An iPod’… well, that was a challenge I just couldn’t wimp out of…!!!

'SHE' by H Rider Haggard

‘IN EARTH AND SKIE AND SEA,

STRANGE THYNGES THER BE’:

H RIDER HAGGARD – ‘SHE’,

ECHOES AND FANTASTIC VISIONS

‘SHE’ by H RIDER HAGGARD

(First published 1887, this edition Coronet paperback,

Hodder & Stoughton 1980 ISBN 0-340-15100-5)

‘SHE Who Must Be Obeyed!…

SHE who must be loved!…SHE who must be possessed!’

(Hammer films movie poster)

This is an adventure that defines the term ‘fabulous’. A mythic exploit into weird fantasy that resonates beyond its pages, endures through its movie reincarnations, and has passed into an everywhere awareness. An epic foray across unexplored wilderness on a generational revenge quest. The lost city of an extinct race four-thousand years dead. An eternal heroine as beautiful as she is terrible. Hazards. Conflict. Horror and brutality, with a macabre gothic edge. Yet there’s a deliberately baffled history to this novel, a provenance that both authenticates, and distances us, from its truth. The introduction to ‘She’ is narrated by an ‘editor’ who first questions the veracity of the manuscript that follows. Is this ‘some gigantic allegory?’ he muses. Before expressing his belief that no, ‘to me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face’. But ultimately he defers the question for the reader to decide. He goes on to explain how the document first came into his possession. How, after briefly being introduced to the godlike Leo Vincey and the hirsute ugliness of Leo’s stepfather L Horace Holly, on the streets of Cambridge, the latter entrusts the manuscript to him, to do with as he pleases, as the mismatched pair are leaving to seek ‘wisdom’ in ‘Thibet’. Yet even these scant details, the editor acknowledges, have been deliberately amended to disguise the true identities of the protagonists, according to their instruction. Hence there are layers of imprecision to both establish the back-story of the supposed manuscript, while allowing the possibility that this is more than mere fiction, indeed, that it documents ‘the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men’. This fictional framing device, seldom if ever thought necessary now… when the most outrageous fictions require no justification, was more usual when ‘She’ was first published in 1887. Then it was used to add gravitas to fantasy, to dignify something essentially frivolous, by investing it with quasi-academic credentials. Henry Rider Haggard uses exactly the same technique with ‘Alan Quatermain’ (1887), published the same year, supposedly written by Quatermain himself, with Haggard simply acting as ‘editor’. As if the creation of wonderful and enduring mythic archetypes is not achievement enough.
The cover of the 1980 Hodder & Stoughton paperback edition of ‘She’ is obviously intended to bring the Ursula Andress portrayal of Ayesha to mind, as she appears in the Hammer movie version of what the blurb not unreasonably claims to be ‘one of the greatest, most unforgettable stories of all time’. Although the actress had yet to be born when H Rider Haggard wrote of the ‘wonderful and awful loveliness’ of ‘She’. At the time of writing, large areas of Africa were yet to be explored. Indeed, it was a pivotal period in the quest for the source of the Nile. A time of Richard Burton and John Speake’s 1857 expedition from east Africa to Lake Victoria, of Speake’s second expedition with James Grant in 1862, the husband-&-wife team of Samuel White & Lady Florence Baker who discovered Lake Albert Nyanza in 1864, Stanley meeting Livingstone in 1871, and Stanley reaching the Mountains Of The Moon in 1887 after trekking up the Congo. After such wonders, surely it was not entirely unconceivable that the vast continent could harbour other secrets, hidden civilisations, or the lost remnants of ancient cultures? His six years of colonial service in South Africa had fuelled Rider Haggard’s imagination, providing source material for his fiction while enabling convincingly accurate detail to back it up. ‘A country like Africa is sure to be full of the relics of long-dead and forgotten civilisations’ claims Haggard, ‘nobody knows the age of the Egyptian civilisation, and very likely it had offshoots. Then there were the Babylonians and the Phoenicians, and other peoples.’ To add weight to his argument he specifically cites Persian ruins found near Kilwa on the east African coast, south of Zanzibar, close to ‘She’ terrain.

The West’s fascination with the ancient mysteries of Egyptology had first been stirred by Napoleon’s campaigns on the Nile in 1798. It would receive a further jolt in 1922 through Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhaten’s tomb, leading to the Universal cycle of ‘The Mummy’ films, replicated by Hammer, and then by the exploits of Indiana Jones. Rider Haggard anticipated much of this, capturing all the enduring mystery and menace of the Pharonic age pretty much intact, requiring little by the way of updating for the Ursula Andress movie. There had already been earlier attempts to film the novel, from a silent black-&-white venture with James Cruze in 1911, to 1925 with Carlyle Blackwell, and then again in 1935 with Randolph Scott. But with both Peter Cushing (as Holly) and Christopher Lee (as Billali), and Leo’s part taken by blonde John Richardson (who would appear with Raquel Welch in ‘One Million Years BC’ a year later) the April 1965 version of ‘She’ was one of Hammer’s most ambitious projects. What plot-inaccuracies there are have more to do with David T Chantler’s screenplay compression, and the assumed need to introduce the bumbling comic-element of Bernard Cribbins than with any inadequacies on Haggard’s part. Cribbins plays Job, the ‘respectable round-faced’ Retainer appointed by Holly when he first accepts the responsibility of the five-year-old orphan Leo.

Unlike Peter Cushing’s celluloid portrayal, Ludwig Horace Holly’s physical appearance, as he describes himself in the novel, is enough to convert one woman to ‘the monkey theory’ – Darwin’s recently published evolutionary ‘Origin Of The Species’. Yet the solitary misogynist is made Vincey’s guardian upon his father’s mysterious and apparently suicidal death. Holly is also given a sealed iron chest to be opened on his ward’s twenty-fifth birthday. The sealed box provides evidence of the Vincey bloodline and details the ancient revenge quest the child is to undertake. It explains how the family can be traced back to the Egypt of 339BC, and to Kallikrates, a priest of Isis, of Greek extraction. Fleeing with a princess, the lovers were shipwrecked somewhere along the African coast, where they encountered a powerful white queen of a savage people. It was She who was responsible for Kallikrates’ death. The name Vincey, it seems, passed down from the escaping princess, is a corruption of Vindex – ‘Avenger’, and pledges Leo to seek the revenge that earlier family members had failed to fulfil across the centuries since. Documents are reproduced in pictograms, in uncial and cursive Greek, as well as in Latin and Medieval texts, and a ‘facsimile of the Sherd of Amenartas’. A degree of creative research far more impressive than – say, Dan Brown’s tepidly reheated Papal heresies.
Science Fiction did not exist as a genre when Haggard was writing ‘She’. But many elements of it were already present. Although he was writing adventure fiction Haggard was well-aware of ‘how many things happen in this world that the common sense of the average man would set down as so improbable as to be absolutely impossible…’ Haggard is rightly regarded as a pioneer of Lost Worlds Romance, because back then, it was not necessary to leave the Earth to seek out new worlds. In the years following ‘She’, Conan Doyle would create his ‘Lost World’ of dinosaurs on a South American plateau, then Edgar Rice Burroughs would acknowledge his debt when populating hidden corners of Africa with innumerable strange cultures for Tarzan to adventure into – as well as Lost Civilisations on Mars, Venus and at the World’s Core. With Alan Quatermain, Haggard created his own ‘Indiana Jones’ action hero, and it’s Quatermain who encounters the first of the writer’s lost races – the Umslopogaas, the noblest of savages in the 1887 novel that bears his name. There would be other Haggard lost races, including ‘The People Of The Mist’ (1894). Just as there were also fictional cross-overs, bringing the strands of his mythos together, with ‘She And Allan’ (1921). He wrote straight historical fictions too, but as Science Fiction developed into its own separate literature-form, Alan Quatermain found himself a participant in the emerging genre by being thrown back in time after using a new race-memory drug, to inhabit the body of a palaeolithic man. More Science Fantasy than SF, it was subsequently run in the pulp magazine ‘Famous Fantastic Mysteries’ (April 1947) with fine Virgil Finlay line-art. Haggard also wrote the posthumously published ‘When The World Shook’ (1919) with collaborative assistance from Rudyard Kipling. It envisages the survivors of a prehistoric civilisation 250,000-years ago who awake from the same form of suspended animation described by Billali in ‘She’ as ‘the whole mountain is peopled with dead, and nearly all of them perfect’.

It was Quatermain’s explosive debut in Haggard’s fourth book – ‘King Solomon’s Mines’, which catapulted him to fame. Preceding ‘She’ by two years, it in many ways establishes the pattern. It too begins with a quest based on historical data. There is also a hazardous trek across African terrain to make initial contact with a hidden tribe, through which they progress to the final secret. ‘She’ takes that same structure, expands it, and escalates the fantasy-element. Its publication was announced by a serialisation in ‘The Graphic’ (between October 1886 and January 1887) which aroused anticipations. And it has never been out of print since. Unlike many mainstream novels of the period, it still reads compulsively easy. There is more moralising and philosophical discussion between She and Holly than a modern novel would carry. And there’s antiquated language too, in the ‘dost thou wonder’ style, although that can be excused by Ayesha’s own antiquity. The prose is also powered by the archaic charm of its descriptive prose, after a sleepless night ‘we might both of us have given away all the sleep we won that night and not have been much the poorer’. In the novel, despite Holly’s misgivings, Leo intends to fulfil the family obligation. Holly regards the prospect of good hunting – and killing a buffalo, as rich compensation for what he considers a foolhardy quest. Leo is also soon ‘thirsting for the blood of big game’. Attitudes repugnant to the modern reader. Haggard’s story-telling skill is capable of a sometimes haunting vigour, and in a curiously poetic passage he spies a ‘beautiful buck… limned upon a background of ruddy sky’. Haggard has the narrator rhapsodise on the magical fascination of the moment – after which he abruptly murders the creature! There are similarly visceral descriptions of nature red in tooth and claw, as when a lion is locked in a death-struggle with a crocodile.

On the voyage to Zanzibar the traveller’s dhow is shipwrecked in a violent squall, coincidentally allowing them to happen upon a distinctively shaped promontory mentioned in the manuscript. Described in the unflattering mildly-racist language which was the common usage of the time, the outcrop has been artificially reshaped into the devilish ‘fiery and demoniacal’ face of an Ethiopian. Haggard uses a similar device to identify the location of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ as his protagonists struggle across the desert towards a mountain formation termed ‘Sheba’s breasts’. The adventurers, with Mohamed, the only other survivor of the storm, find themselves trapped on a dry spit of land surrounded by boundless crocodile and mosquito-infested marshes, but discover traces of ancient stonework there. Through the swampy remains of what they take to be an ancient canal they endure days of discomfort before being captured by the Amahagger, tall natives in leopard-skins. These ‘People of the Rocks’ – ‘Ama’ from the Zulu for people, ‘Hagger’ from the Arabic from stone, are led by the bearded Billali. They carry the team in ‘palanquin’ sedan chairs into the fertile crater of an extinct volcano, and into its artificial cave complex. The tribe are a matriarchal lost race, surrounded by and hidden from the world beyond by the impassable marshlands. But Holly’s suspicion of their captors is confirmed when the feast they are invited to participate in turns cannibalistic. Mohamed – the intended victim of a particularly vicious form of ‘hot-pot’, is killed in the ensuing skirmish. Until Billali intervenes to halt the slaughter.

At last the three – ‘the lion, the baboon and the pig’ (Leo, Holly and Job) reach the towering volcanic mass at the centre of what had been the ancient city of Kôr, and are led blindfold into the bowels of the mountain, through into the crater of another yet vaster volcano and the mighty cave complex hewn into it. These catacombs are the ‘dead old shadows of the dead’, the extinct prehistoric race ‘old before the Egyptians’ who had created Kôr. With Leo wounded in the fight and fevered from the long trek through the marshlands, but tended by the beautiful Ustane who has ‘claimed’ him, Holly goes on to meet She alone. The plot-escalation is well-paced, with a rising momentum of dread and a macabre gothic edge, expressed in the severed foot that Billali had retrieved from the burning corpse of his dead love. But leavened with humour too. Holly strides to meet ‘She’ while Billali crawls on all fours ‘after the fashion of an Irishman driving a pig to market’.

‘She’ is both terrible, and beautiful, the ‘Eternal Female’ inspiring awe and devotion in equal measure. A force ‘absolutely unshackled by a moral sense of right and wrong’. Leo’s life is forever changed by their liaison. On the point of his death from fever, Ayesha first glimpses him, and recognises him as the reincarnation of her long-dead lover, Killikrates. Her drugs cure him. Holly also admits his unworthy love for her. ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’ explains that ‘there is no such thing as Death, although there be a thing called Change’. In a poetic metaphor, ‘death is but life’s night, but out of the night is the morrow born anew’. Although essentially a figure of fantasy, she pointedly denies superstitious elements in favour of a kind of science. ‘There is no such thing as magic’ she declares, ‘though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature’. Later, Haggard takes the character of Ayesha, and develops her mythos through ‘Ayesha: The Return Of She’ (1905), placing her origins in a Greek colony planted by Alexander the Great in central Asia. Then he traces her Egyptian origins further in ‘Wisdom’s Daughter’ (1923). Another novel, written with his friend Andrew Lang – ‘The World’s Desire’ (1890), also draws on the pseudo-sciences of spiritualism and reincarnation. Partly a lyrical fantasy sequel to Homer, it tells of Odysseus’ final voyage to seek Helen in Egypt, only to discover that she is an avatar of Ayesha. Haggard’s innovatory ideas would be carried over into subsequent fantasy, sometimes directly attributed, as when Neil R Jones writes in his “The Jameson Satellite” (‘Amazing Stories’, July 1931) about H Rider Haggard ‘who depicted the wondrous embalming practices of the ancient nation of Kôr in his immortal novel ‘She’ wherein Holly, under the escort of the incomparable Ayesha, looked upon the magnificent, lifelike masterpieces of embalming by the long-dead peoples of Kôr’. While reincarnations in media-forms unknown to Haggard were to assure Ayesha of a different kind of immortality. She’s real now, in ways that Haggard would not recognise, through comic-book editions, and movies. Elsewhere the phrase ‘She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’ enters conversations with no regard to its origins, something maybe picked up from TV’s ‘Rumpole Of The Bailey’? Although Rumpole’s creator, John Mortimer, was certainly familiar with H Rider Haggard’s work.

With a vivid cinematic sense of spectacle a savage Amahagger dance is illuminated by the ‘awful and hideous grandeur’ of torches made of burning human corpses, where the rivalry between Ustane and Ayesha climaxes. Ustane defies She. In a mental battle of wills She kills her, with little more than a pointed finger. In a powerful sense of recurring cycles of time this reflects how She originally murdered Killikrates, jealous of his love for Amenartas. The Egyptian princess who is Leo’s distant ancestor. Despite his affection for the loyal Ustane, Leo is irresistibly drawn by Ayesha’s sorcery, ‘as a needle follows a magnet’. She takes him to see the identical body of the dead Killikrates in the chamber where She has slept beside the body of her murdered love for two-thousand years. She plans to make Leo ‘not immortal, indeed, for that I am not, but so cased and hardened against the attacks of Time that his arrows shall glance from the armour of thy vigorous life as the sunbeams glance from water’. She offers Holly this form of immortality too. Initially he refuses, fearfully falling back on a Christian mythology he’s already denied. Flesh, no matter how long it survives, will eventually die, he argues. But the spirit survives for eternity. At the last moment, however, he’s poised on the brink of giving way to the temptation of living forever.

To achieve her desire, so that she and an immortal Leo can return to, and rule Britain, they journey together across the floor of the crater, through the desolate ruins of the ten-thousand year-old city, into the shafts of a tunnel and across a precarious rift into the bowels of the volcano itself. The Hammer movie diverges from the novel in a number of ways. For them, the lost city is called ‘Kuma’, perhaps to avoid Sid James-style mispronunciations of ‘Kôr’? Haumeid (André Morel), the father of poor murdered Ustane, leads the vengeful Amahagger to attack Ayesha’s loyalists in a climactic battle. Then Leo fights Christopher Lee’s Billali – her fanatical priest, who seeks immortality for himself. But Ayesha kills him too! Yet the final death-scene, in which She steps naked into the Spirit of the Flame of Life, only for it to destroy her, remains intact in all forms of the story. And to SF historian David Kyle the ending of Haggard’s story ‘when the immortal heroine withers amidst the strange, previously revitalising cold flame and has her beauty transformed into hideousness, is one of the unforgettable high moments in fiction’ (‘A Pictorial History Of Science Fiction’, Hamlyn 1976). To Holly, her demise, caused by her re-immersion in the flame, is ‘worse than a thousand natural deaths’. So intense that Job dies of shock. After that climatic moment, the ‘wily old barbarian’ Billali assists their escape from Kôr, across the marsh barrier to eventually reach the Zambesi and home. Their lives irrevocably altered by their experiences. At the close of an adventure that defines the term ‘fabulous’, Holly wonders if ‘She’ will return? He’s inclined to believe that she will, ‘a story that began more than two-thousand years ago may stretch a long way into the dim and distant future…’

SHE: THE HIDDEN CODE

References:
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1885)
‘She’ (1887) – serialised in ‘The Graphic’ issues October 1886 to January 1887
‘Allan Quatermain’ (1887)
‘The World’s Desire’ (1890)
‘The People Of The Mist’ (1894)
‘Ayesha: The Return Of She’ (1905)
‘When The World Shook’ (1919)
‘She And Allan’ (1921) - prequel
‘Wisdom’s Daughter’ (1923)

Movies:
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1950) with Stewart Granger
‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1985) in a lively version directed by J Lee Thompson, with Richard Chamberlain taking foxy damsel-in-distress Sharon Stone to seek the fabled diamond mine and help her search for her missing father.
‘She’ (1911) black-&-white venture with James Cruze
‘She’ (1925) silent film with Betty Blythe and Carlyle Blackwell, made with the active participation of H Rider Haggard
‘She’ (1935) with Randolph Scott, Nigel Bruce and Helen Gahagan, an oddity in that it’s not set in Africa – but in the Arctic!
‘She’ (1965) with Ursula Andress, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

Marty Wilde: Live In Skegness

‘BORN TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL…

MARTY WILDE’

Impressions of an evening with MARTY WILDE

Live at ‘The Embassy Centre’, Skegness

A blur of 1950’s Radio voices fading in through the speakers. Ghosts lost in time, swarming frequencies jostling and colliding into each other through imaginary tunings. Jimmy Edwards. ‘Music While You Work’. Radio Luxembourg. Jimmy Clitheroe. ‘Top Of The Form’. The BBC Light Programme… then come the quiffed glaciers of Brylcremed slick-overs jolting this most somnambulistic of decades out of neutral! With Marty Wilde there at its British inception! He’s tall. He was always tall. A full 6’3”. His presence dominates the stage tonight. “Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll” is a semi-autobiographical song that defines the life, and the show’s theme. But there were other pre-Rock influences at work as a young Reginald Smith hit adolescence in those first years of post-War England. The macho western songs of Frankie Laine. As ‘Marty Wilde’, Reg would later have a hit with his rocked-up version of Laine’s “Jezabel” recorded as a deliberate reference. Then – unlikely though it now seems, there was high-kicking Frankie Vaughan. A superstar in his day. And the smoothly swinging Deano Martin. “Volare” is on the chart as Marty himself makes his debut foray up the lists with his doomily macabre “Endless Sleep” in August 1958. Critic Jon Savage says it ‘totally kicked ass… a monster guitar riff, a fantastically quivering vocal, and ambient back-up murmurs all add up to a classic of teenage melodrama’ (‘Mojo’).

But it all really begins with Elvis. He is the ‘guiding light’. Under the age of legal consent, it’s his parents who have to sign on the line when the Man With The Big Cigar – Larry Parnes‘-Shillings-&-Pence’ comes to call, at least – that’s how he tells the story. ‘I think Lionel Bart saw me (perform at ‘The Two I’s’ coffee-bar). I will never truly know, because nobody actually came forward to me. No-one approached me at all, and I went home on the Saturday. I had finished my work there, and the following Sunday it was mind-boggling to come home from Sunday-school – which I did, believe it or not, and there was a chap at my house with a contract with my name on – which was quite incredible. And it was Larry Parnes, the world’s biggest manager in my eyes. He still is. The most incredible signing-up process...’ And although the hits don’t start immediately (I still have a 78rpm copy of his version of Bob Merrills’ “Honeycomb” b/w the Marty Wilde & Lionel Bart song “Wild Cat” on Philips PB750), when they do come they happen huge. Marty Wilde is the face of 1958. The first face of ‘Oh Boy’. Jack Good, who knew Marty when they worked together on ‘6:5 Special’, introduced him to Jody Reynold’s “Endless Sleep”, the dark suicide drama which became Marty’s debut Top.5 hit. Stolen, but then if Marty hadn’t taken it, it would probably never have been heard here anyway. It was on the chart the week the ‘Oh Boy’ show began. He sang Leiber-&-Stoller’s “Baby I Don’t Care”, Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” and Buddy Knox’s “Somebody Touched Me” on that very first show. Tonight, he talks about Jack Good’s spontaneous direction technique – ‘one take, learn the words, hit the mark’ (and later ‘he was our guru, he could see things in us we couldn’t see in ourselves’). And he sings Bobby Darin’s interpretation of Brecht / Weill’s “Mack The Knife” pretty much as he once did on those long-ago monochrome Saturday nights.

Marty was there on the thirty-eighth, and final ‘Oh Boy’ broadcast 30th May 1959, closing the show by duetting the Cliff Richard. He jokes about another of that show’s vital ingredients, Joe Brown. Joe Brown jokes about him too. It’s a long-standing association. They’re both survivors. Both still here, both still doing it. On another occasion, in conversation with Joe, I recalled how Marty had dominated British Rock ‘n’ Roll for some eighteen months, but that when he watched Cliff Richard debuting on ‘Oh Boy’ he must have realised that status was over. ‘I don’t think that’s true, actually,’ argues Joe. ‘I just think it went off in a different direction. I mean, I’d have thought that Marty would’ve made a great actor. We did a film together once, called ‘What A Crazy World’, and he was good in it. I thought he was great in it. But no – Marty’s a good bloke. He’s got the heart… and everything.’ That movie opens with Marty (as hoodlum Herbie) shoplifting from the local street-market. Still a ‘bad boy’, the man behind the counter swears “bleeding kids!” Later, as a record company executive in the David Essex movie ‘Stardust’ he gets to yell ‘are you listening… hey?’ to a dumbstruck Keith Moon. Not many managed that feat. Marty did.

Marty does a Rock ‘n’ Roll medley of full-fat high-caffeine non-organic maximum-strength beats, all the while ranging to both wings of the stage, an oddly compelling presence. Still. One that physically embodies the latent power of the music, revelling in the reactions he’s provoking. He sweats. He gyrates effectively with gently self-mocking asides, sharing each part of the experience with his audience – from the undeniable joy, to the inevitable song’s-end breathlessless. Drawing them in. They shared this when it was new, “so free and so wild / and so full of living”. They share it again now. A self-contained time-capsule poignantly defiant against the years. ‘Film Fun’ magazine dated 23rd January 1960 offered its readers fabulous ‘Free-Gift 3D Spectacles, with a 3D Gift Book to view them with. It features photos of Alma Cogan, radio ventriloquist Peter Brough and his mischievous dummy ‘Archie Andrews’. And Marty Wilde. Now the gold lame comes off. He’s engagingly self-deprecating about his own version of “Rubber Ball” in its chart-battle with Bobby Vee’s U.S. original. But it’s an Orlowski-&-Schroeder song open to artistic interpretation. Who’s to say which is the better? Marty did manage to invest it with an intensity beneath its bubble-gum sugar-coating. And Bobby Vee does tell an amusing story-line about it in his own live show as well (about how it wound up as a TV-ad – ‘my bouncy-bouncy!!!’).

But then, once things take a dive career-wise Marty finds himself able to concentrate on writing his own songs. Buddy Holly showed him the way. Now he does “Peggy Sue Got Married” with the Wildcats providing perfect sound-alike back-up. His own first self-penned hit – “Bad Boy”, happens by accident. He relates how the intended ‘A’-side – “It’s Been Nice”, gets downgraded imperfect for ‘technical reasons’, and the dark blue Philips-label disc is fortuitously flipped to provide one of Marty’s most enduring hits. ‘Well you see now, I got a girl, and we stay out late, almost ev’ry night, / the people just stare and they declare ‘well, well – it just ain’t right’’. He jokes about how daughter Kim laughs at its moral naivette. But this was real. This was December 1959. It was like that then. Until – writing through a pseudonym-of-convenience, in league with lyricist Ronnie Scott, he’s well into a second career scoring chart-hits for a new generation of bands – and to audiences, who’d have sneered had they known. Giving him great satisfaction to watch those bands in their hippie regalia on all those ‘Top Of The Pops’ shows performing the songs he’s written. He does one of the biggest – “Jesamine”. A massive ‘butterfly-child’ hit for the Casuals. He does it with impressive tenderness. He also did several songs for Status Quo’s first album, “Elizabeth Dreams”, “Paradise Flats” – and their second Top Ten entry “Ice In The Sun”. And Lulu. Long before she discovered Take That or Ronan Keating she was benefiting from her association with this Marty Wilde, performing here tonight in Skegness.

In the plush red foyer there’s a stand merchandising his ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’ video priced at just £15. His ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Fifties’ brochure for £3. A ‘Solid Gold 1997’ tour T-shirt for £4. And CD’s ‘It’s Been Nice’, ‘Solid Gold’ and ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’. People browse. Some of them buy. Some of them probably bought his first album – ‘Wilde About Marty’ when it first emerged all those years ago. These loyalties have a tendency to last.

www.martywilde.com

DEAD POETS: ME & EZRA POUND

DEAD POETS:

ME & EZRA POUND

Allen Ginsberg is dead.

Robert Graves is dead.

Basil Bunting is dead.

Thom Gunn is dead.

Geoffrey Grigson is dead.

Adrian Mitchell and Ivor Cutler too.

Christopher Isherwood is dead.

John Betjaman is dead.

Philip Larkin is dead.

Ted Hughes, Auden, Eliot, and Pound,

they’re all dead too…

of course,

Byron, Shelley and Coleridge

are dead. Baudelaire, Verlaine,

Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara,

they’re all dead too…

but me –

I’M STILL WRITING!!!!

Jackie Oates 'Hyperboreans' CD

Album Review of:

‘HYPERBOREANS’

by JACKIE OATES

(One Little Indian / Unearthed TPLP1034CD)

www.jackieoates.co.uk www.indian.co.uk

I know my Robert E Howard. The wild mythical Hyperboreans were a tribe of white-haired, feline-green eyed, seven-foot tall savages, ruled by Witch-Men sorcerers who live to the north-west of Conan’s Cimmeria. A long way from the pastoral decorous beauty of Jackie O’s magical CD. Or maybe not. An ex-member of Rachel Unthank’s Winterset, at first glance Jackie’s third album is a bucolic vision of rakes, haycocks and pitchforks set in some rural elysian fields of “The Pleasant Month Of May”. Her clear high voice matched to sparse traditional instrumentation, a melodeon on “The Miller & His Three Sons”, plus occasional viola, cello and her own nimble five-string viola. But there is mythic darkness too. The dying Miller goes straight to hell, ‘Young Leonard’ drowns while skinny-dipping, the honest Sheffield grinder breathes ‘dust and steel’, and there’s a murder-ballad duet of an inconstant seducer killing his inconveniently-pregnant ex (with Alasdair Roberts on “The Butcher’s Boy”). Moving away from the trad:arr zone there’s an ‘awful wild despairing’ of ‘flood and fever, fire and drought’ in the harrowing desolation of “Past Caring”, a heart-stopping reading of a poem by Australian writer Henry Lawson. While Jackie renews tradition by drawing Bjork’s Icelandic strangeness into the mix, using the Sugarcubes’ “Birthday” as a reassuring outro. Beyond Conan’s River of Death-Ice, even her Hyperboreans have considerable charm, with a ‘love for every neighbour’. Not in Robert E Howard they don’t!

TWO BOOKS BY SIMON CLARK

‘KING BLOOD’

by SIMON CLARK

(Hodder & Stoughton – £16.99 ISBN 0-340-66061-9)

It’s so obvious it barely needs stating. To say that Simon Clark is the best novelist to emerge through the nineties is self-evident. ‘King Blood’, his fourth novel, is labelled Horror, and is being marketed as such. But its scope is epic. Nothing short of the onslaught – not of an Ice Age, but a new Heat Age, a Fire Age, and the geothermal convulsions that this brings about. Simon has simply outgrown genre restrictions. So far the pattern of his novels is to alternate tight small-group hazard plots (‘Nailed By The Heart’ and ‘Darker’), in which nice loving families are first menaced by the Saf Dar in the Sea Fort, then pursued in their car by the Invisible Hammer; with novels of global apocalypse (‘Blood Crazy’ and ‘King Blood’) in which the disaster is total. In the latter two cases the essential supernatural elements are minimal.

Both plot concepts – the genetic evolutionary trigger igniting generational conflict, causing the old to literally devour their children, and the geological heating of the planet’s molten core causing world-wide volcanic disruption with attendant tidal waves and eruptions of toxic gases, are ideas that would fit seamlessly into SF’s ‘School of (un)Cosy Disaster’ cycle. Both are themes that John Wyndham or early JG Ballard (circa ‘The Drowned World’ or ‘The Wind From Nowhere’) would kill for. The horror element is relegated to the lovingly detailed eviscerations and descriptions of rotting corpses. But even here – in ‘King Blood’ there’s a stunningly macabre sequence set in St Lawrence’s Parish Church graveyard where the ‘build-up of subterranean heat was detonating the gases produced by the putrefying bodies’ so that graves literally begin exploding, showering everything in the immediate vicinity with flame-grilled entrails and parboiled body-parts. It’s a passage as unique and as convincingly nasty as anything in the long history of Horror Fiction!

But in some ways the novel’s genre trappings become almost a distraction. Because Simon is determinedly staking out the whole of the 1990’s as his exclusive territory. All the cultural reference points are to ‘KFC’, Buzz Lightyear, Jarvis Cocker, Robocop Masks, Chewbacca, nostalgia for McBurgers, and Ren & Stimpey. There’s an impossibly attractive teenage hero who starts out stacking shelves in the local Supermart while dreaming of being a Rock star. Evidence of a wry appraisal, perhaps, of whichever-the-hell demographic group reads these books anyway? And there’s his charismatic video-jock brother from Seattle who’s called – wait for it, (Stephen) John Kennedy (!!!). It’s a perfection even the expletives can’t dent, in fact they even humanise further. There’s uninhibited sex at closely-spaced intervals, first with the Older More Experienced seductress, then with the school sweetheart. Then there’s the necessity of regular gore.

But the action and pace are relentless. His control of narrative tension is now so honed that he has you leaping ahead of yourself in urgency to find out what exactly is the terrible doom that’s counting down for Caroline, whether Rick has really killed his brother, and what the Grey Men are all about. While each separate incident is well-wrought and impeccably worked-out. The escape from the cannibal tribe that is engineered by igniting methane in a ruptured North Sea Gas pipeline. Or the meticulously described sequence trapped in the submerged Rolls Royce at the bottom of the New Venice Lake of flooded London. Even the final secret of the Grey Men (which I shan’t divulge) which in lesser hands could have proved anti-climatic, Clark uses to generate even more horrific levels of menace. Moving inexorably through to the mystical near-visionary climax with its intimations of absolution-through-sacrifice, couched in prose of near-transcendental power shot through with the kind of symbolism that gets to you on a deep and profoundly primal level.

It’s not often a novel leaves genuine after-images of nightmare. ‘King Blood’ does. Now, forty-eight hours after I read the final words, I still regurgitate vividly troubling images from its pages that not even the strangely compelling last few chapters can erase. With these first four novels Simon Clark is sending out a signal writ huge, and a challenge not only to the entire Horror genre, but to worlds beyond too. Here he’s setting the new benchmark. This is the standard you’ve got to reach to even qualify. And it’s awesome.

‘SALT SNAKE AND

OTHER BLOODY CUTS’

by SIMON CLARK

(Silver Salamander Press c/o 4128 Woodland

Park Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103, USA)

‘... A few crumbs for starters, the meat comes later – you know, the blood, the thing in the graveyard... yeah yeah, the horror. Patience...’ (“Blood For Sex Bites”). There’s an Old Mill House in rural Wales. The mill-race runs beneath it, but it also disrupts temporal expectations by diverting there into an endless sub-mind of dark tunnels, viewed through the imaginative device set into the room above. So that when the narrator-voice sees a drowning woman trapped there, is he seeing a vision of the lost sister, or a premonition of what will happen to Anne with whom he’s commencing an affair? The ring on her finger suggests as much. But we don’t know.

This is part of only the second anthology of ‘the short horror fiction of Simon Clark’. And the first since he broke on through into Waterstones and Ottakers Big-time. But thus consolidated, it becomes obvious that these are what Martin Amis calls ‘voice-stories’, each one carried by the natural contemporary authenticity of the narrative and the validity of its emotional truth. There’s no pantheon of dark Lovecraftian gods. No Demonic rituals or Satanic incantations. Instead these are urban myths of phantom killer-cyclists and glimpses of moving corpses in crematorium ovens. Its new deities-of-choice include Jimi Hendrix – with an ageing Hippie Miss Faversham still waiting for the dead electric god to turn up for his rehab (“Howls From A Blinding Curve”), or the haunting bohemian romance of “Eyes Like A Ghost” with its mysterious Nick Drake/ Syd Barrett fragments.

The evil, when it comes, comes through a kind of magical realism, often unexplained or inexplicable. Yet while the horror is horrible – it’s also metaphorically beautiful in its precision. It arrives wrapped in parental love – as in “Lifting The Lid”, where the narrator-voice returns home to inform his parents that they are dead (while the stranger in his room hints that perhaps he, too, is dead). Or “Gerassimos Flamotas” – set in Kefalonia, where a bitter bankrupt farmer ‘sells’ his mute daughter, only to rediscover her hideously reassembled into a surreal human collage – ‘the arms to the hips, the legs to the shoulders. It gave it the appearance of a four-legged spider. A big fat white spider, belly up on the pebble beach with a head jutting out from its stomach’. But the real human horror lies in the guilt, remorse and self-recrimination when mute Rosa speaks ‘Papa, I love you’, and ‘he would hear those words for ever’.

Elsewhere, in the title story itself, tattooed bikers with names like Spuggy and Viper are just saved from caricature ‘Tom Thug’ nastiness by Clark’s narrative assurance, only to get their bizarre and largely unexplained come-uppance through the accumulating metaphor of a salt sea mist that gradually entombs them in ‘gouts of white’. As he’s transformed into ‘a large white blob’ resembling ‘an insect pupa’ the disturbed eighteen-year-old girl victim who also provides the story’s sexual catalyst, momentarily reminds Viper of his own early childhood innocence. Perhaps the pupa symbolises his rebirth into new a life-form? Perhaps not. Like “Acorn, A Bitter Substitute For Olives” (‘be afraid, be very afraid, because in Wales no-one can hear you scream!’) it suggests more secrets than it reveals, leaving only the voice to carry its conviction. A voice that first convinces with throw-away profundities like ‘I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a houseproud parent’, then stuns with the chill poetry of a word circling in his head ‘like a new moon caught by the gravity of a cold and lonely planet’.

‘Salt Snake...’ collects no less than twenty-five story-bites into 272 well-dressed pages, gathering pretty much all of Simon’s previously scattered stuff – a radio play, a few poems, ‘SFX’ book-reviews and oddities excepted, from sources as diverse as ‘Fear’, ‘Back Brain Recluse’, and ‘Dark Dreams’ – an impressive percentage of which went on to grace various ‘Best Of...’ anthologies. Sometimes his narrator-voice glimpses a vision of paradise beyond death, but gets incinerated in his attempts to reach it (“The Burning Doorway”). Then a brutal “Reservoir Dogs” scenario gets switches on its head by a hideous metamorphosis from cringing victim-drunk to man-eating monster (in “A Biter Bit”). For Simon Clark writes New Urban Mythologies hard where they need to be hard, but never less than accurate. He can do the ‘blood, the thing in the graveyard... yeah, yeah, the horror’ as visceral, as obscene and as nasty as the best of them. But there’s so much more to his fiction than just Blood and Grit. There’s poetry too. And there’s truth.

Vic Chesnutt 1964-2009

Gig Review of:

VIC CHESNUTT

at the City Varieties, Leeds

At the merchandising stand they’re investigating his CD, arguing whether his name is hyphenated, as in VIC CHESNUTT-DRUNK. Or if he’s VIC CHESNUTT. And The album is ‘DRUNK’. Both sound equally unlikely, even when he explains it. The next album – he says, is already in his past. But in our future. ‘I don’t quite know how that works out’ he adds quizzically, ‘I ain’t no physicist’. It’s the kind of nutty Einsteinian relativism he specialises in. Vic Chesnutt splices Leonard Cohen’s DNA with that of The Singing Postman. Loudon Wainwright III with a cracked John Lee Hooker… on wheels! I first glimpse him being manhandled cursing up the theatre’s backstage stairs. The City Varieties’ narrow spiral interstices were never designed for performers in wheelchairs.

Later, he opens his set with the wheezing growl of a song called “Lillian Gish”, dedicated to ‘a beautiful bohemian human being’ (a continuity with “Isadora Duncan” maybe, on his debut CD ‘Little’ in 1990), then he goes into “Supernatural” – an out-of-the-body experience he relates on ‘Drunk’, pausing only to hack out a sputum-rich volcanic cough, complaining ‘I’ve got a snot in my throat’. Vic Chesnutt demands a certain amount of audience indulgence. He sits in a pool of light. A lantern suspended from the mike-stand. He wears a Robin Hood hat, and seems to be inventing his songs as they freewheel. Or at the very least, his songs are mythologising the latest Bar-room gossip. A sprawling Bukowski Beat and Beat-Up poet in a low-life juke-joint. ‘He’s in love with his dog’ one song confides, ‘he hates his life, and he hates his wife, but he loves his dog’. It’s a great story, malevolently slurred.

Vic Chesnutt derives from Athens, Georgia, and inevitably comes with testimonials from the likes of Michael Stipe and Kristin Hersh. Without such recommendations he could be an amusingly quirky turn at your local Folk Club or Fringe Festival. Or the Busker in the pedestrian precinct you pause to watch with a wry grin between shopping at Our Price or Waterstones. His songs are cryptic confessionals. Midway, he hesitates. ‘I’m going out on a limb here. It might be good. But I doubt it’. Then, after an uncalculated pause, ‘am I dying up here, or what?’ Then he’s croaking a song with dialogue like the bitching repartee from a low-rent movie, “I Saw Your Daddy The Other Day (Now I Know Where You Get It From)”. He closes his show with frail and oddly breathless whistling. The audience is still confused. But they investigate the CD with new interest. Yes, it’s called ‘Drunk’ (1993). It’s on the Texas Hotel label. No TXHO 22-2. And – as unlikely as it seems, it’s located in the present.

In memory of Vic Chesnutt,

12 November 1964 – 25 December 2009