Poem: 'The Shortest Light Years'

THE SHORTEST LIGHT YEARS 

she wears a hijab with a
sparkly Merry Xmas jumper…

there’s everything anyone
could conceivably want to chew
at Borough Market, Lebanese,
French, Thai, Caribbean, Polish,
you walk through inhaling
appetising spices from every
culture of world-cooking…
& the June 2017 vehicle-ram
terrorist attack was here too…
across Westminster Bridge they
sit x-legged below the Big Ben tower
playing find-the-lady, taking £20 notes
that reveal only disappointment
with eastern-European shrugs
in speed-sharp misdirection jive
& the March 2017 Hyundai 4x4
attack injures eleven here too…
I’m from the north, possibly Nordic DNA,
Norman, Celtic, Pict, Gaelic… who knows,
England has always been refuge for
migrants, from pogroms, intolerance,
famine, warfare, always sanctuary,
from Windrush, Syria and Sudan, from
the old empire, with the new urgencies
…from Borough Market we cross
London Bridge where Japanese tourists
snatch iPad photos of Southwark Cathedral
& the November 2019 stabbing-attack
was here too… resisted to death,
we mourn, curse stupidity, and resume,
London does what it always does
London continues

where she wears a hijab with
a sparkly Merry Xmas jumper…

BOB MARLEY: KING OF REGGAE

RASTAMAN VIBRATIONS 

 Expanded Book Review of: 

‘BOB MARLEY FAQ: 

 ALL THAT’S LEFT TO KNOW 

ABOUT THE KING OF REGGAE’ 

by BRENT HAGERMAN 

 (Backbeat Books) www.backbeatbooks.com 

ISBN 978-1-61713-665-8 Softcover. 372pp

You never know you’re living a golden age, until it ends. Robert Nesta Marley was the high priest who took the Reggae curveball and lucratively shifted the paradigm. Yet like every pioneer, he transcends the genre, playing things bright and broad, sharply-attuned yet sandpaper-abrasive. Moving away from the toasting sound-systems of Trenchtown he set the Wailers mobile, gigging and touring like a regular Rock band in order to become the Third World’s biggest star. Both Natty Dread political and Rasta-spiritual, ganja natural mystic and troubadour, he caught the fire until you never quite knew where his dub soundscape was going to skank next. In Brent Hagerman’s book, the full story unfolds in a uniquely sub-titled format, under a series of easy-to-find topic-headings, familiar, but with a wealth of unsuspected detail too. About eighteen-year-old Afro-Jamaican mother Cedella ‘Ciddy’ Malcolm, and feckless sixty-year-old white father Captain Norval Sinclair Marley, who at least had the decency to marry her, although he disappeared after the ceremony, and already had other wives anyway. Brought up within the strong female support-network, young Bob nevertheless followed his paternal example, leaving several children by various mothers.

Geographically off-trail, but creatively rich, Jamaica has a musical history worth recounting. Often confused with calypso, Jamaican Mento was a precursor to reggae, popular during the 1940s and 1950s, using humour and double entendre as well as pointed jibes at topical issues. Laurel Aitken was already there, although it was Harry Belafonte who took the style with him when his parents upped and moved from Jamaica to New York, where his enduring stardom and Civil Rights political activism established a precedent for others to follow. There’s a strange story concerning the origins of Ska and BlueBeat. That Jamaican radios could pick up broadcasts from New Orleans R&B stations, and local musicians were attempting to imitate the ‘second-line’ shuffle-jump they heard on early Fats Domino records, but got it slightly wrong, accentuating the one-drop afterbeat rhythm according to instinct and dynamic predilection with offbeat piano and honking saxes. Those who couldn’t afford radio heard imported records on competitive local sound systems, including those operated by Clement Dodd, who took scouting-trips through the southern US States searching out R&B records to give his turntables that vital edge.

Oddly enough, the first UK chart hit to utilise the new rhythm came in the unlikely form of the decidedly untrendy Migil Five, whose “Mockingbird Hill” made the Top Ten in March 1964. But by the same token – historically, the first-ever Jazz record came from the very white Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917, so maybe there was a precedent! The Migil Five were swiftly followed by the more authentic Millie Small with “My Boy Lollipop” which peaked at no.2. She toured on the ‘Lollipop Express’, her infectious energies and youthful appeal leading some adventurous record-buyers to seek out her more obscure Jamaican releases including the “Millie And Her Boyfriends” EP (Island IEP-705) featuring duets with Owen Gray and Jackie Edwards. Chris Blackwell was instrumental in promoting her career, just as he would aid Bob Marley’s commercial potential, and provide a vital bridge through his Island Records label.

While there was never institutionalised segregation here as there was in southern American States, the Caribbean immigrants of what is now termed the ‘Windrush Generation’ were familiar with the brute uninformed racist attitudes and behaviour of the host nation. But human nature being what it is, where cultures clash there are cross-over attractions too. As it ever was. Young Bix Beiderbecke, of 1920s German stock in Davenport, Iowa was seduced away by the sound of Jazz rippling in across the Mississippi from the riverboats. Just as young dirt-poor Elvis Presley tuned into black 1950s Memphis radio stations, loving, memorising and imitating each beat he heard there. 

In the UK, the insidious smiling infiltration of irresistible rhythms loosened up old post-imperial reserve and formalities. The in-crowd Mod soul-boy were early adaptors, sharing the exclusivity of subculture initiation through the immigrant community, with Ezz Reco And The Launchers “King Of Kings” which climbed to no.44 in March 1964. A bigger-personality star, the eminently danceable boxer-deejay Prince Buster charted with “Al Capone” to no.18 in February 1967, on the Blue Beat label, with ‘AL C’PONE’S GUNS DON’T ARGUE!’, a startle of sten-gun fire, a screech of tortured tyres, and then the rhythm. That perfect ooze of sensually loping BlueBeat rhythm… as well as “Judge Dread” – ‘I have come here to whoop you, to try all you Rude-boys for shooting black people.’ His ‘Fabulous Greatest Hits’ LP was a firm fixture on every Mod turntable, while his enduring “One Step Beyond” was instrumental in launching the Coventry 2-Tone movement during the last few years of the 1970s. 

Then there were the Ethiopians (“Train To Skaville” a no.40 in September 1967), and the up-tempo Pyramids with Eddy Grant’s “All Change On The Bakerloo Line”, May 1968, on the yellow President label. The Pioneers “Long Shot Kick De Bucket” on Trojan in 1969, was also making inroads. The Melodisc label roster boasted the more hardcore Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid, Laurel Aitken, Derrick Morgan and the Skatalites (the contagiously jumpy “Guns Of Navarone” from Studio One’s houseband). Until the first credited reference to reggae came from Toots And The Maytals in 1968, with “Do The Reggay”, adapting a word with Yoruba roots, meaning rough or untidy. Describing a music proudly and distinctively native to post-independence Jamaica. With trace-elements spun off from R&B and Rock ‘n’ Roll, but neither. It was something separate. Not US-of-A, or BritPop. Percolated through Jamaica’s unique history and traditions, back through slavery, deprivation and poverty, but driven by a hunger to overcome those things. Fired in equal measure by anger and community. What Hagerman calls ‘the rich cultural heritage of reggae, flowing from what the elites would consider the rough, uncultured people of Kingston’s poorest neighbourhoods.’

It’s often forgotten that skinheads – frequently associated with right-wing attitudes, championed reggae too. Symarip – a reverse variation on the Pyramids, took advantage of this with “Skinhead Moonstomp” – ‘I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet, put your braces together and your boots on your feet, and give me some of that old Moonstomp…’, which also achieved renewed attention during the 1980s 2-Tone eruption. While Desmond Dekker And The Aces rudie anthem “007 (Shanty Town)” took the Pyramid label to a high of no.14 in July 1967 momentously aided by a wonderfully atmospheric monochrome video shot in Kingston by Graeme Goodall. I breathlessly watched that video run on ‘Top Of The Pops’, strangely raw, alluringly alien, mesmerised by the beautifully exotic girl in a white dress immaculately skanking across the street. “The Israelites” followed. Despite its virtually incomprehensible lyrics it dethroned Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It On The Grapevine” to become Reggae’s first no.1, in March 1969, making Desmond Dekker its first global star. 

Meanwhile, born hungry in the Nine Mile hamlet on 6 February 1945, ‘taking Reggae music to the world obviously wasn’t on young Nesta’s mind when he was running barefoot over the green mountains of Nine Mile,’ but Bob Marley served a long apprenticeship as part of the Wailers, ravenous both for escape and for experience. With Peter ‘Tosh’ McIntosh and half-brother Neville ‘Bunny’ Livingstone they record for Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd’s ramshackle Studio One, which had aspirations to become ‘Jamaica’s Motown’. The October 1965 ‘Wailing Wailers’ album (reissued 2016 as Studio One LP-SOR-001) was assembled from previously-issued seven-inch sides, using the Soul Brothers house-band, including the original cut of “One Love”, and early single “Rude Boy” – a ghetto-youth anthem which found instant tribal resonance. There’s also local Wailers hit “Simmer Down”, with the Skatalites providing back-up, which reached the UK through Trojan. 

The Wailers record with Chinese-Jamaican Leslie Kong, before they switch to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry for early classics “Small Axe”, and the loping “Duppy Conqueror” (‘The bars could not hold me, force could not control me, now they try to keep me down’) – patois can be impenetrable at times, and “Trench Town Rock”, which all leads up to ‘Soul Rebels’ (December 1970). Produced by ‘Scratch’ Perry, the LP became not only, arguably, the first ever Reggae album – as distinct from a grab-bag collection of singles, it also established a regional profile, and got issued in a UK deal through Trojan. Until, despite its title, ‘Best Of The Wailers’ (August 1971) is not a compilation – recorded at Dynamic Sound Studios, for Leslie Kong, it includes three Peter Tosh compositions including “Stop That Train” which would reappear on ‘Catch A Fire’ and “Soon Come” which Tosh would rework for his own ‘Bush Doctor’ LP, there’s a reggae take on “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, plus six new Marley songs. ‘Bob Marley, like other innovative Jamaican musicians, always balanced paying respect to the music’s roots with adding something new. He drew from existing songs and created new ones; he borrowed from tradition yet broke new ground.’

The early UK seventies saw a slew of saccharine-Reggae and Rock-Steady singles diluted with strings into marketable commodity, while every desperate Rock band tried ineptly to catch the fire with clumsy Reggae and Dub shots, appropriating and scrambling for relevance. Until the arrival of Bob Marley reset the roots rebel-music paradigm all over again. There was Dennis Alcapone, Burning Spear, the much-banned Max Romeo, ‘Roots Man’ I Roy, and Toots And The Maytals, but it was Marley’s songwriting that was first focused by Eric Clapton, as ‘the black Bob Dylan’. Just as the Byrds cross-over hit with “Mr Tambourine Man” had once brought Bob Dylan to mainstream attention, so Clapton’s lack-lustre retread of “I Shot The Sheriff” did it for Marley. Then the smooth Sam Cooke-tones of good-looking Johnny Nash’s Pop-sweetened version of “Stir It Up” also provides the breach. Militant and uncompromising, Marley’s dreadlocked presence, allied to a Punky-Reggae collusion did the rest. 

Chris Blackwell, through Island, became both the enabling fixer, and a demonised figure, depending on perspective. He overdubbed original Wailers sides with Rock elements intended to make them more palatable to the domestic market. The major breakthrough album, and defining statement, ‘Catch A Fire’ (April 1973), is a case in point. Although recorded in three Jamaican studios, including Harry Js and Dynamic Sound, it was financed by Island Records, with the master-tape subsequently reworked in London, with uncredited Muscle Shoals guitarist Wayne Perkins added. Later that same year, ‘Burnin’ (October) revisits “Small Axe” and “Duppy Conqueror”, with the authentic “I Shot The Sheriff”, plus the confrontational “Get Up, Stand Up”, a defiant call to arms against oppression and social poverty written by Marley in collaboration with Tosh. With Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett of Lee Perry’s Upsetters on bass, and brother Carlton ‘Carlie’ Barrett on drums, it is in some ways the strongest Wailers moment, before Bob emerged with greater frontman prominence. 

With chart Pop getting increasingly teen-silly, and the Hippie counter-culture more self-indulgently introspective, hungry Rock stars who’d fought their way out of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham or Newcastle back-streets were lounging beside their LA mansion pools in a cocaine haze, so it was the Reggae underground in general – and the Wailers in particular, who now provide the frisson of an innovatory edge of radical danger. Renewing, with the raw sniff of the real what Rock and Soul had forgotten. Blood and grit, spiced with that exotic aroma of illicit herbal stimulants, gaining Bob Marley a whole new white middle-class audience.

The first album without Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer – ‘Natty Dread’ (October 1974), is the first to be credited as Bob Marley And The Wailers, the cover shot showing only Bob’s stark full-face image. It retains the Barrett brothers rhythm section, as well as introducing the I-Threes vocal back-up of Rita Marley, Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths – who had chart hits of her own with Bob Andy, as Bob And Marcia, including “Young, Gifted And Black”. From the album’s catchy party celebration “Lively Up Yourself” (originally a 1971 Jamaican Tuff Gong single), to the original studio “No Woman, No Cry” looking back wistfully to his Trenchtown childhood, into the insurrectionary political “Revolution” and “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” – ‘a hungry mob is an angry mob’, the songs offer the spiritual third way with Rastafari. 

Although all written by Marley, for reasons of litigation there’s some author attribution to others, including “No Woman No Cry” itself, which is credited to Vincent ‘Tartar’ Ford, a man who operated a free Kingston soup kitchen from which the young struggling Bob had benefited. A number of ‘Natty Dread’ tracks were carried over into the concert recorded in July 1975 at the ‘Lyceum’ for LP ‘Live’ (December 1975), alongside solid renditions of “I Shot The Sheriff” and “Get Up, Stand Up”. Vital for those with a need to experience the full vicarious thrill of that incendiary performance power by proxy, the album also resulted in the full 7:08-minute live “No Woman No Cry” making Marley’s UK chart debut when edited down to just 4:05-minutes – up to no.22 in September 1975, although it would peak as high as no.8 when reissued in May 1983. 

Next, ‘Rastaman Vibrations’ (April 1976) formed a significant breakthrough into the American ‘Billboard’ Top Ten, with spin-off “Roots, Rock, Reggae” his only release to crack the US singles chart, helped in part by the album’s inclusion of Blues guitarists Al Anderson and Donald Kinsey. “War” borrows heavily from Haile Selassie’s 1963 United Nations speech, ‘until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique, South Africa sub-human bondage have been toppled, utterly destroyed, well, everywhere is war – me say war.’ At last, Bob Marley was articulating Jamaican aspirations from a global stage, spearheading acceptance for other contemporary releases by Peter Tosh – ‘Legalize It’ (Virgin, 1976) and for Bunny Wailer’s ‘Blackheart Man’ which features both Tosh and Marley in its credits. 

Linking up with the Rolling Stones – always astute when it comes to identifying with black credibility, Peter Tosh recorded Smokey Robinson’s “Don’t Look Back” as a duet with Mick Jagger for his 1978 ‘Bush Doctor’ set, briefly achieving a visibility close to even eclipsing market-leading Bob Marley! While Bob himself recorded ‘Exodus’ (June 1977) during his London exile. Alongside standout tracks “Waiting In Vain”, “Three Little Birds”, and “One Love/People Get Ready”, there is “Jamming” spun-off to hit no.9 (c/w the non-album “Punky Reggae Party”), and the “Exodus” single which took him into the Top Twenty in June 1977. Powerfully rhythm-driven, he challenges ‘open your eyes and look within, are you satisfied with the life you’re living?’ then offers the solution, ‘break downpression, rule equality, wipe away transgression, set the captives free’, to escape Babylon with the Biblical echoes of exile and deliverance from slavery, ‘we’re going to our Father’s land.’ Both a protest and a celebration. 

Behind the gaudy red-green-gold poster-image of Bob’s arcing Dreadlock spray, there was a rather more complex human being. There’s a deification process that happens to dead stars. John Lennon gets sanctified as the apostle of loving peace, ignoring his frequent deliberate cruelties. For Bob Marley, although his ‘One Love’ philosophy modified as his fame grew, and he became more media-savvy in interview situations, his attitude to Gay ‘batty-bwoys’ was less than acceptable, just as his mistreatment of women could be offensive. We enjoy Prince Buster’s bombastic “Ten Commandments Of Man” because we assume it to be tongue-in-cheek. Its reality, in patriarchal Jamaican culture, is more grim. Rita Marley would be subsequently demonised as ‘The Yoko Ono Of Reggae’, yet she was part of Bob’s onstage I-Three, a positive strength and fixture during Bob’s life despite his physical and psychological abuse, just as she went on to become the guardian and administrator of his legacy. 

We’re on firmer ground with Bob’s politics of unity, his ‘Smile Jamaica’ concert was intended to reconcile feuding factions, it made his rhetoric more solid than mere platitudes, yet led to the vicious assassination attempt made upon his life. The shooting at his 56 Hope Street base has been variously attributed by conspiracy theorists to the CIA intent on undermining what was seen as Marley’s support for the socialist-inclined Michael Manley’s PNP party, or to fissiparous elements within Jamaican politics itself. It nevertheless led to a self-imposed exile in London, until Bob’s triumphant return with the ‘One Love Peace Concert’ in April 1978.

 When Marley toured with Stevie Wonder, opening shows across America, the Motown star recorded “Master Blaster” in reggae-style, with lyrics celebrating ‘Marley’s hot on the box’, and referring to Bob’s participation in the Zimbabwe liberation concert at Harare’s Rufaro Stadium in April 1980 with an optimistic ‘peace has come to Zimbabwe’, while joyously advocating Pan-African solidarity with “Africa Unite” on the album ‘Survival’ (October 1979), the first result of Bob’s own Tuff Gong studios at Kingston’s 56 Hope Street.

There’s a strange and perhaps patronising attitude applied by the music press towards Marley’s Rastafarian beliefs, treating them with a serious respect they would not display towards – say, Cliff Richard’s espousal of Christianity, or Cat Stevens conversion to Islam. From a sensibly atheist perspective all such beliefs are equally ludicrous, even when they may provide a source of solace and moral structure. Yet Bob obviously draws on deep wells of intense spirituality on the acoustic non-Reggae “Redemption Song” from ‘Uprising’ (October 1980), for my money, one of his finest songs, which incorporates phrases from Marcus Garvey about ‘emancipate yourself from mental slavery… none but ourselves can free our minds.’ This is powerful stuff. Yet it was the final studio album released during his lifetime. By then he’d been diagnosed with the cancer that would end his life, and he was in physical pain during the Chris Blackwell-produced sessions. ‘Confrontation’ (May 1983), is made up of previously unissued outtakes – “I Know” dates back to 1975, with half-finished tracks completed after his death, includes the no.4 chart hit “Buffalo Soldier” about black units active during the American Civil War. Various compilations and greatest hits packages inevitably follow, although the box-set ‘Songs Of Freedom’ (September 1992) includes the 1973 track “Iron Lion Zion” – again drawing on Rasta imagery, which was remixed with Courtney Pine’s horn, to become a no.5 hit single during September 1992, for inclusion on the album ‘Natural Mystic: The Legend Lives On’ (1995).

You never know you’re living a golden age, until it’s over. Even at the end, for Bob Marley, there were racial and spiritual complications. Supposedly, people of colour do not suffer from this virulent form of skin-cancer. Well, apparently they do. Bob was advised to distrust Babylon medicines, put his faith in Rastafari and the curative powers of ganja. Yet, following the metastasising of the melanoma in his toe, spreading to his other organs, Bob Marley died 11 May 1981. Chemotherapy treatments at Miami’s Cedars Of Lebanon hospital even caused his mighty dreadlocks to fall out, only to be stitched together into a wig to preserve his Rasta dignity.

The story is not yet entirely told. Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse and Aswad carried the Reggae heritage forward. It could be argued that all the elements that made Hip-Hip and Rap were already active in Trenchtown with dub-mixing, Ragga (ragamuffin), DJ toasting and Dancehall. It just took the world a time to catch up. While Jamaican music still periodically re-conquers the world with Shaggy, Ini Kamoze (“Here Come The Hotstepper”), Omi (2015’s hit “Cheeleader”) and beyond. There are still rumours, and previously-unsuspected caches of Bob Marley rehearsal tapes to be unearthed, as those from the London Little Venice hotel where the High Priest Of Reggae stayed during the 1970s. 

 But don’t worry ‘bout a ‘ting’, you believe this man can fly. 

An edited version of this feature published in: 

‘R’N’R’ Vol.2 Issue 77 (September-October)’ 

(September 2019)

Movie: Harry H Corbett as 'The Bargee'

‘STEPTOE’S OTHER SON…!’ 

Review of: 

‘THE BARGEE’ 

With Harry H Corbett, Hugh Griffin, 

Eric Sykes and Ronnie Barker 

(1964, DVD Optimum Classic 2010) 

The core irony of ‘Steptoe And Son’ is that Wilfred Brambell and Harry H Corbett’s real-life relationship mirrored their warring onscreen personas. With both incarnations inescapably entwined in a complex psychological bond. Developed from a one-off episode devised by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson for the BBC’s ‘Comedy Playhouse’ (“The Offer”, 4 January 1962) there were eight ‘Steptoe’ series made up of fifty-seven episodes that ran through to 26 December 1974. Which made Brambell and Corbett mutually interdependent in its ongoing success. And resenting that interdependence, just as the Rag ‘n’ Bone duo themselves resent being trapped by their reliance on each other. Harold Steptoe is always portrayed as having ambitions above his station, which will never be realised, due of Albert’s needy interference. Harry H Corbett also had ambitions beyond TV-comedy, which he saw as being obstructed by the success of the character he’d helped create.

Yet at their best, each TV episode is a perfectly observed insightful sketch that could run Samuel Beckett dialogue a close second for its bleak depiction of junkyard derelicts. The four-handed “The Desperate Hours” (broadcast 26 March 1972), is stripped-down grotesquerie at its finest. As Harold and Albert attempt to keep warm in the freezing squalor of their Oil Drum Lane home, it is invaded by two escaping convicts – played by a young Leonard Rossiter, and stumbling oldster JG Devlin. The two convicts mirror the odd dependence of the two Steptoe’s, who exist at a level of austerity way below the prison conditions they’re attempting to escape. The bond they strike up with their counterparts reveals kitchen-sink pathos and dark underclass truth. This black-comic absurdity is probably closer to Corbett’s vision of serious art-drama than anything else he could ever have aspired to.

Corbett had activist Left Wing sympathies, he campaigned on behalf of the Labour Party, and recorded and performed with the Ewan MacColl folk group. He did Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (1955), Graham Greene’s ‘The Power And The Glory’ (1956) and stage-work with Jean-Paul Sartre’s heavyweight ‘Nekrassov’ (1957). Then graduated into the usual opportunistic TV bit-parts – ITV’s ‘Play Of The Week’ and ‘Television Playhouse’, Richard Greene’s popular ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ and ‘The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre’. Until his meeting with Galton and Simpson he’d never seriously considered TV sitcoms, which tended to be bland and inoffensive. Lacking what he termed ‘commitment’. But once he became ‘Harold Steptoe’ he could never be anything else.

Predictably, in box-office terms, his biggest hits were the two spin-off movies – ‘Steptoe And Son’ (1972) and ‘Steptoe And Son Ride Again’ (1973). But he had roles in Joan Littlewood’s ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ (1963) set in a rundown East End with Barbara Windsor, an appearance in Joe Brown’s likeably amiable Pop-romp ‘What A Crazy World’ (1963), and as Detective Sergeant Sidney Bung in ‘Carry On Screaming’ (1966) with Kenneth Williams at his most maniacal. But while Muriel Box’s ‘Rattle Of A Simple Man’ (1964) – adapted from Charles Dyer’s stage-play, came closest to his Working Class ideal, portraying Corbett as a naïve northern football fan who becomes involved with a London prostitute, in truth, his only other starring role – ‘The Bargee’, does little to expand his acting range.

There is an elegiac quality to its record of the dying days of the canal’s water gypsies, and some nicely languid sequences of the barges navigating lost countryside between the picturesque lock-gates of ‘the leafy waterways of Britain’. With the reassuringly soporific drone of Godfrey Winn narrating ‘Music While You Work’ on the transistor radio to act as an instant time-fix. But the canal network had been constructed as a working transport infrastructure by the Victorian entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution, intended to carry goods and raw materials efficiently around the country. By the time of the film, motorways and high-speed rail links were making the leisurely pace of the ‘British Waterways’ lifestyle obsolete. Like some kind of ethnographer, Eric Sykes photographs and tape-records the disappearing way of life of the Canal folk on ‘Britain’s Green and Pleasant Waters’. They are people who see themselves as outsiders, a breed apart. Hemel Pike (Harry H Corbett) refuses to live in a potty little row of houses. ‘I was brought up on the canal. It’s my life. You don’t have to get on. You’re already there.’ He is the Casanova of the Canals, with a girl at every lock, and ‘the only way you’ll get me off the canal is to fill it in.’

Yet it’s as though there’s been a collective loss of nerve following that original sepia-nostalgia intention, because the film is essentially soft-core, operating around mild character-humour. Devised by Galton and Simpson, and with the Steptoe’s TV director Duncan Wood assuming the same role for ‘The Bargee’, it seldom strays far from safely familiar sit-com conventions. Hemel is reliably accompanied by his cousin ‘Ronnie’ (Ronnie Barker) who wears a knitted ‘Benny’ hat. He reads the pin-up magazine ‘Parade’ – or rather ogles at the pictures of ‘June Is Busting Out All Over’, because he’s illiterate. While Hemel is not interested in ‘birds in books.’ He prefers the real thing. ‘Are you expressing an opinion or have your teeth slipped?’ Hemel snipes as Ronnie wolf-whistles at the ‘canal sirens’. And later tells him ‘you are disgusting’ with the same derisively vehement ‘Dirty Old Man’ voice he employs to such great effect on Albert Steptoe.

Their two longboats are tethered together as a ‘butty’, a kind of catamaran to transport their cargo of lemon peel along the cuts from Brentford to Birmingham, via Boxmoor. Although it seldom drifts too far from humour, Eric Sykes provides the most obvious comedy focus, first seen to a music-spoof ‘Rule Britannia’ soundtrack, wearing naval peaked hat and binoculars as his white houseboat drifts on collision course. ‘He won’t be happy until he’s got a wooden leg, that bloke’ grumbles Hemel. Yet he – credited as ‘The Mariner’, represents the future of canals, as they are resuscitated into a leisure industry.

Hemel’s amorous entanglements begin with pure farce as they stop off at the Rickmansworth ‘Boat House’ pub where he evades the predatory overtures of lover Nelly (Miriam Karlin). At the mention of marriage ‘you went paralysed’ the barmaid protests, until Ronnie inadvertently drops the letters Hemel has been writing to other girlfriends, and she jealously chases him along the towpath brandishing a carving-knife, he uses a mop to hold her back as Ronnie hurries to set sail. Next it’s the compliant Cynthia (Jo Rowbottom), who also does his laundry. They bunk-up for a stretch along the canal, after which she contentedly pedals her push-bike all the way back.

He’s a little more serious about Christine (Julia Foster) at their next stop-off point, the ‘Leg O’Mutton’ lock. Unfortunately her fiercely protective father, Joe Turnbull (Hugh Griffith) has other ambitions for his ‘grammar-school girl’. But her eyes light up when she hears the barge. Ronnie provides a diversion. He’s recognisably doing ‘Fletch’ from ‘Porridge’ as he taunts Joe into a drinking competition, an impression compounded by the later appearance of a policeman played by ‘Warden’ Brian Wilde! ‘Where’s Hemel?’ enquires Joe casually. ‘He’s probably in bed by now’ answers Ronnie guilelessly. Indeed he is, with Christine! Joe drinks twenty-nine pints, breaking his own record. He’s the last man standing. Everyone else is laid out around the bar, including Ronnie, who – as loser, must foot the £15.10.3d bill!

‘Do you love me?’ pleads Christine. ‘Yeah, of course I do’ Hemel responds unconvincingly, before narrowly escaping out of the window as a drunken Joe returns. The following morning – once the barges have left, Christine serves Joe a hang-over breakfast of kidneys and Alka-Seltzer, before she faints. Derek Nimmo, in a departure from his usual role as a foppish silly-ass vicar, plays the foppish silly-ass doctor who diagnoses that ‘she’s preggers. She’s very preggers.’ As Joe erupts in fury he squeals ‘I’ve got a strangulated hernia waiting for me’ and drives off at speed in his red mini. Determined to find out who’s responsible for his daughter’s three-month condition Joe sets out with a shotgun. Suspecting the canal-workers he drains the lock and mines the gates with explosives.

After a detour in a Birmingham dancehall with yet another girl, Hemel returns to find the ‘Leg O’Mutton’ in a state of siege, with cowardly Police and British Waterways supervisors avoiding and arguing over who has authority (Richard Briers plays ‘BW’ official Tomkins). When a group of canal-women – including Patricia Hayes and Rita Webb, accuse Hemel of being the father, he’s forced to admit that yes, he is, and does the honourable thing by proposing marriage. Although grudgingly reconciled, Joe blacks his eye anyway. Soon Hemel is living at the ‘Leg O’Mutton’ in brooding silences, in resentful preparation for impending domesticity. He works on a confectionary conveyor-belt, but quits. Then at a bottle recycling plant, while casting longing gazes at passing canal boats. Is Christine trapping him?

But Galton and Simpson provide Hemel with the happy ending they never grant Harold Steptoe, with the tidy bonus closure of a wedding. Ronnie has discovered that all narrow-boats are to be phased out of commission within eighteen-months. So Christine agrees to join Hemel on the barges for that final period. Their wedding cake is shaped like two barges. Their barges are renamed ‘Christine and Hemel’. In a final comedy moment, one of the home-made bombs Joe had used to mine the lock-gates explodes, and sinks Eric Sykes’ white houseboat. Ending an acceptably adequate Elstree film that, with a little more nerve and realism, could have been so much more.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson scripted one more non-Steptoe big-screen venture – ‘The Spy With A Cold Nose’ (1966), after which there would be no more. While a recurring joke within ‘Steptoe And Son’ is that whatever Harold attempts, Albert had already done it, and done it better. Another core irony here is that no matter what Harry H Corbett tried to do, above and beyond ‘The Bargee’, Wilfred Brambell will always be Paul McCartney’s grandfather in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (1964) too!

‘THE BARGEE’ (1964, ABPC/ Galton-Simpson, UK/ Warner-Pathé Distribution, USA) Producer: WA Whittaker. Director: Duncan Wood. Original story and screenplay: Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. With Harry H Corbett (as Hemel Pike), Hugh Griffith (as Joe Turnbull), Eric Sykes (as the Mariner), Ronnie Barker (as Ronnie), Julia Foster (as Christine Turnbull), Miriam Karlin (as Nellie Marsh), Eric Barker (as Foreman Mr Parkes), Derek Nimmo (as Dr Scott), Norman Bird (as Waterways Supervisor Albert Williams), Richard Briers (as Tomkins), Una Stubbs (as Bridesmaid), Rita Webb (as onlooker), Patricia Hayes (as onlooker), Brian Wilde (as policeman), Godfrey Winn (the radio announcer). Music: Frank Cordell. DVD, Studio Canal, Optimum Releasing 2010 (106-minutes)


Published in:
‘THE SUPPLEMENT: Issue 74’ 
(UK – June 2015)

Book Review: 'A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields' by Stephen Prince

GOT TO GET OURSELVES 

BACK TO THE GARDEN 

Book Review of: 

‘A YEAR IN THE COUNTRY: 

WANDERING THROUGH 

SPECTRAL FIELDS’ 

by STEPHEN PRINCE 

 (A Year In The Country) ISBN 978-0-9574007-2-6 

Softcover. 336 pages www.ayearinthecountry.co.uk

Gonna break out of the city, go up the country where the water tastes like wine… we all get that luring pastoral dream. Though Stephen Prince takes a more inner quest than a physical voyage. He divides his book into fifty-two week-by-week chapters, adapted from his blog, charting his own wanderings into arboreal mystique and folkloric roots, following the ley-lines of acid-folk and new wyrd. Spinning off from a series of niche esoteric CDs, and taking Rob Young’s ‘Electric Eden’ (2010) as touchstone, he imaginatively time-travels it all on our behalf, rambling the byways of revisiters, revivalists and otherly souls in new hauntological worlds.

He explains how it’s not strictly necessary to read the entries in order, but it helps to draw strands together if you do, as he considers such odd phenomena as ‘The Wicker Man’, Kate Bush, The Owl Service, Ghost Box Records, MR James and Tony Tenser’s Folk-Horror ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’. Adding spectral misremembered Soviet Lost Futures, alchemical landscapes of recalibrated constellations and transfigured urban mythologies conjured from cult 1970s-TV and trash-movies. He maps possible worlds that never happened, the places society goes to dream. It’s all enduring strange, even though yes, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.


Published in:
‘R’N’R Vol.2 Issue.70: July/August 2018’ 
(UK – July 2018)

Gig Review: Live At The Nashville Grand Ole Opry

AT THE GRAND OLE OPRY 

Live Review Of: 

ALABAMA SHAKES, 

VINCE GILL & RAELYNN 

at the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville

The Grand Ole Opry goes out live on WSM radio, which means each act – no matter how prestigious, gets a fifteen-minute three-song set, before announcer Eddie Stubbs reads out ads for the ‘Boot Barn’ or the ‘Cracker Barrel’ Old Country Store – ‘Stop And Eat, Then Tap Your Feet’. But as opener Connie Smith enthuses, the Opry is ‘a magical place’ with the dust from Hank Williams’ boots ground into its stage-boards. Unlike most other music genres, it reveres its heritage. Mac Wiseman is pushed onstage in a wheelchair – born 23 May 1925, he’s promoting his new CD ‘Songs From My Mother’s Hand’. To standing ovation he does the maudlin bluegrass of “My Mother Called My Name In Prayer” with hillbilly fiddle, stand-up bass and mandolin, before being joined by Vince Gill for his 1951 hit “Tis Sweet To Be Remembered”. Yet he’s followed by bright legally-blonde RaeLynn in tiny black micro-dress, just turned twenty, she teeters back on impossible heels to take a with-audience selfie. But don’t dare underestimate her. Her Girls Just Wanna Have Fun “I’ll Live When I’m Young”, the Pop-catchy “God Made Girls” and parental break-up heartbreaker “Love Triangle” demonstrate intimidating command. And, despite superficials, both artists share an ongoing continuity.

There’s a ‘Dare To Dance’ talent spot, sponsored by Dollar General (‘Save Time. Save Money. Every Day’), Call-outs to US Army Vets, and Linda from Houston competes in a ‘By The Decades’ game – Vince Gill tips her the answers. Then Alabama Shakes close with a politely received jarring set. Less country, more blues and soul-attack with vocalist Brittany Howard stabbing the air for emphasis up against Stax-swamp rhythms and Steve Cropper-style fret-runs. A massively powerful “I Still Aint Got What I Want” is impassioned slow-burn testifying, incorporating extreme volume-shifts. Elvis Presley played the Opry once. He was too edgy for them. He had to wait until 1998 before he was officially accepted into the C&W Hall of Fame. Yet it’s encouraging that the Opry, while honouring its living tradition, is still open to more confrontational acts. Brittany thanks the Opry for the warmth of its welcome. 


Published in:
‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL’ 
Vol.2 No.49 Jan-February (UK – January 2015)

Poem: 'AFTERMATH/ UNIVERSE OF BABEL'

AFTERMATH/ 

UNIVERSE OF BABEL 

give me this chair
where the sunset light falls,
give me loud guitars
in my earbuds,
give me new poems,
give me the soft warmth
of this woman’s skin

to live extremes
crushes the world,
we burn and maim,
leave victims in
bitterness and pain,
I’m beyond that,
don’t need that any more
don’t want to hurt,
or be hurt

give me this ouzo,
this music,
give me this chair
in the corner
where sunset light falls,
give me this
moment of peace

New Wave SF: Graham Charnock's 'First And Last Words'

GRAHAM CHARNOCK: 

 FIRST AND LAST WORDS 

 His new book – ‘LAST WORDS’, is a collection of highly idiosyncratic 

poetry. But Graham Charnock began as part of the ‘New Worlds’ 

 New Wave SF revolution, and recorded with 

 Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix

 ‘Come on, climb into my web, and toast eternity with me 

 as time tick ticks out. Let’s have one last dance together’ 

 (“A Night On Bare Mountain”) 

The deep maroon cover of ‘New Worlds no.184’ (November 1968) is straplined ‘SPECIAL ALL-NEW WRITERS ISSUE’, and it features Graham Charnock’s “Crim”. At just twenty-one, he was the youngest contributor, but of course, he’d already been writing for some time. In his early teens he recalls submitting tyro-texts to the magazine’s previous editor, EJ ‘Ted’ Carnell. ‘There was “Decline And Fall”, a three-hundred-word plotless vignette, which came back with the note, ‘so sorry, our minimum is three-thousand words’. I promptly shot off a three-thousand-worder. That came back too, on a bare slip this time…’ Then Michael Moorcock’s editorial regime set the controls for the heart of change, innovation, and new blood. Robert Holdstock was there, alongside M John Harrison… as well as names such as Brian Vickers who made his mark, then moved on. Yet within a short space of months, Graham Charnock would be co-editing his own ‘New Worlds’ issues.

Born 18 November 1946, after spending time at Greenford Grammar School, Graham was living in Alperton, Middlesex, working as an executive ‘with a large West End advertising agency’. A setting that provides ‘much of the experience and conflict’ for “Crim”, reconfigured into exaggerated metaphor. In accordance with New Wave dictates there are no spaceships or alien worlds, the medium itself is now the message. JG Ballard sets the tone, with less plot or characterisation and more stream-of-consciousness innovative literary experiment. ‘CRIM is a button that somebody pushed and then buried the button. CRIM is an igloo that too many people have crawled into. CRIM looks after its employees and all that shit.’ There are detonations of image grenades that soak the narrator’s body in sepia auras, as tactile as putty. And explosions of wild invention. The coffee-machine is plotting to poison the staff, perpetrating a crime against humanity. Velma Vonay is still having orgasms caused by an illicit air-strike of heat-seeking Sex-film Warheads. In a Total Warfare Area they plan a campaign to counter ‘Pain’, a suicidal religious cult, using military-assault terminology. There is a drop-in paragraph with characters called A and B. In shock-phrases of sexual violence, a Chinese girl has hung herself on a monkey-puzzle tree, ‘Jones fires off a burst at the young corpse. The soft ammunition explodes in the body, pulverizing it into rainbow iridescence.’ Although the story ends in hope, its rhythm is downbeat.

Then, collected into ‘Best SF Stories From New Worlds 8’ (Panther, 1974), “The Erogenous Zone” forms one of what are announced as ‘ten voyages beyond the far reaches of speculation’, yet seems to occupy elements of the same “Crim” continuum. Originally featured as his fourth ‘New Worlds’ appearance – in no.192 (July 1969), the ciphers A and B reappear, but as Craven Image drives his automatic towards Media Assault Limited’s Co-ordination Centre he hits and kills an idiot-kid ‘with hydrocephalic forehead and glazed eyes.’ The text is rifted with confrontation, in ways that twenty-first-century sensitivities might find offensive. The Dresden bombing was an atrocity. In a war against fascism, there were anti-Semitic taunts among the allies. Taken through sense-distorting clouds of hallucinogenic mist to a strange National Hospital, Image has sex with ex-stripper nurse Hedy. ‘Hedy was an automaton whose fingers were scalpels. Her private parts were choked with rust and he could feel nothing for her. She held up a portion of his gut and said, ‘see, I told you I could do it.’

By then, Graham had established the parameters of his continuum. “The Death Layout” (in ‘New Worlds no.188’, March 1969) is another fragmented hand-out from the same campaign, using its William Burroughs cut-up textual techniques. The various fragments compile into sections of a continuous novel, a single work in instalments. It is next level. There were no Spin-Doctors back then, but they were spinning. There were Focus Groups, although they didn’t call them Focus Groups. Compared to today, media was in a state of relative infancy. But Graham was ahead of the curve. ‘Vance’ might have been Vance Packard who delineated the subliminal role of ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ (1957). Marshall McLuhan was furnishing the Global Village with electro-interconnections. ‘This is a TV camera. It writes the history of now. Its moving finger comprises the elementary particles. The mosaic of its cathode ray image is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite numbers of solutions.’ That reality is not so much fixed, as determined by malleable degrees of perception. 

The steady drip-drip-drip of Fake News creates a society in which truth is negotiable. While this is the new frontier that Graham was already charting in 1969, ‘not yesterday’s environment, but the reality of this minute, this second, this nanosecond.’ It has even greater currency now, when Graham tells me ‘the sophistication and ease of modern CGI has a lot to answer for, I fear, when it can seamlessly reconstruct old footage of dead stars such as Audrey Hepburn for chocolate adverts. Soon reality won’t count for much. We will believe anything we see, no matter how unlikely, and our TV myths will go down for future generations as ‘reality’ and ‘actuality’. It might even be possible to reconstruct Donald Trump as a Humanitarian Saviour!’

Is this the fitting subject for SF under its revised guise of Speculative Fiction? Older readers were less convinced. Where is the First Contact encounter with tentacular life-forms on lost asteroids? Oldsters were also less enthused about the seemingly gratuitous loveless sex. But wasn’t there supposed to be a new evolving morality fuelled on contraception, sexual revolution and the expanded possibilities of repealed censorship? Awash with testosterone perhaps, unaware that female-empowerment may have gender-agendas other than as three-hole sex-toys. Yet it’s difficult not to enjoy the passage about ‘her nursing slip was torn over one huge pendulous breast which trembled, recording the MAL bombardment like a fleshy seismograph.’

Pop-culture references are scattered, the Beatles “And Your Bird Can Sing” in “Crim”. Hendrix in “Sub-Entropic Evening” (in ‘New Worlds no.191’, June 1969), and a guitar ‘whereby cells, like crystals, could be made to resonate. The guitar broadcasts a special signal that affects the cells in the visual cortex of the brain in this way.’ Langdon Jones editorialises about Michael Moorcock’s fiction technique as utilised in his ‘Jerry Cornelius’ tales, with ‘his method of construction as being closer in many ways to musical composition… stories are conceived in terms of tone, repeated images, quotes from his own earlier work and the work of others.’ This is also true of Graham’s contributions. The basement dialogue between Jones and Dragon in “Sub-Entropic Evening” has a more conventional structure, although Velma – traumatised and incapable of speech following her father’s repeated reprimands, works for CRIM, and endures a strange interlude with a paunchy over-jowled man who mistakes her for a prostitute. There is an atrocity Arena, Cap-Sul-ads, lizard visions… and the Pain cult.

For the inner coterie of ‘New Worlds’ writers it was an intoxicating year-zero insurrection, subverting and reinventing texts, perpetrating intellectual games in experimental prose and poetry bewildering to outsider non-initiates. Over the decade event horizon, the January 1970 issue no.197 includes Graham’s “The Suicide Machines” set amid an Oxford heatwave, with recognisable characters Velma, Dragon and Jones, plus Felix Apropos engaged in a dialogue about pornography. It is ‘art with none of this capital letter shit… that’s true art, the art of reality.’ Apropos returns to the small dusty room which had been his student squat, there are the names of previous occupants scrawled on the wall – including his own tight controlled hand. As he leaves, he casually tosses a grenade into the room and destroys it. The past exists only to be obliterated. There are unexplained ‘Feedies’, which only the issue’s editorial reveals as ‘totally subservient, humanised robots’.

Beyond stories in ‘New Writings In SF’, Damon Knight’s ‘Orbit’ and the ‘Other Edens’ anthologies, the ‘New Worlds’ connection continues, into its later reincarnation as a thick paperback series edited by David Garnett. The teasing conundrum “On The Shores Of A Fractal Sea” (in ‘New Worlds no.3’) draws on Graham’s close encounters with Rock music, via his contributions to Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix. The fictional deceased Rock-star narrator persists in a virtual Lagoona where ‘the beach goes on forever’, and where he works on his concept-cycle triple-album. Maybe being dead means he’s unaware that Hawkwind’s seventh studio album is also called ‘Quark, Strangeness And Charm’ (Charisma, June 1977)! He talks to shape-changing French, to whom his reality exists as ‘a fragment of cloned tissue… awash with oxy-infused saline.’

Next, “Harringay” (in no.4, 1994) is a curiously ingenious piece featuring a cloned Andy Warhol in a world where viable DNA-relics of historical characters are traded in hard-copy print-outs of ‘Clone And Mart’ (and there is still a BHS store!). Andy shops at a new Tesco, and muses about resurrection-cloned buildings. Then, in “A Night On Bare Mountain” (in the August 1997 edition), Venn addresses Gance in rambling discourse, recalling memories and incidents they’ve shared, allowing the reader in only gradually. ‘The world ends at midnight, Gance. Have you heard?’ as fundamentalist missiles fly overhead. A second speeding gonzo section is both satirical and satyrical, it shifts to a kind of post-apocalypse bayou fuelled on the rush of cyberpunk, with Athene who has needles grafted beneath her cuticles into ‘a walking acupuncture’. There are clever lines such as ‘our history lesson for today is how history lessens,’ and music-savvy fake-news about ‘you heard how Elvis landed on the Moon, right? One small step for a man, one giant leap for King Creole.’ It closes with a neat Arthur C Clarke inversion ‘one by one the stars were coming on.’ Although Venn’s quiz-question about movie versions of Richard Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’ obviously precedes the 2007 Will Smith remake!

 Garnett also brings readers up to date with Grahams subsequent ‘proto-Goth group Smackhead’ and three solo albums of ‘country swamp jazz’ on his own Drop label, presaging his YouTube presence nailing “King Of Stupid”, set to acoustic Blues guitar. As well as ‘Mutant Surgery’, his ‘bi-monthly fetish magazine devoted to body piercing and scarification.’

When questioned about the wide spread of his work, Graham tells me ‘I think I understand you perfectly. I can only say I’ve never been interested in being a one-trick pony, and have always felt strangely sorry for my many successful friends who have knuckled down to one discipline and become very adept at it. In just the way I am not. Like I feel sorry for classically trained musicians who can never step outside the boundaries of their discipline and training. I have classically trained pianists as friends who simply do not understand me when I talk about improvising or free-form music. I have never been bothered by lack of professional success. I have toiled in the book industry most of my working life and it has kept body and soul together for both me and my family, leaving me free to flit from artistic flower to artistic flower in true dilettante fashion. I have no complaints.’

For his ‘Last Words’ (2019) collection, poetry is the language – and weapon, of choice. His poems are songs that become poems or poems that become songs, or simply songs that ‘got ideas above their station’. They’re a dialogue with his neglected guitar about daring to disturb long silences, with plectrums and pencils, but they’re also image grenades, spiky with contrarian indiscretions. A shock-confrontational “Jo Cox” seen through the warped mindset of the Labour politician’s deranged assassin. Stark about Srebrenica ‘ethic cleansing’. Or junkie Elvis overdosing in Tehachapi exile. Words explode like a match bursting into flame, written in napalm image-gel. Spitting phrases like machine-gun bullets. Sometimes they unfashionably rhyme, as songs do, sometimes they are scatological, but they don’t care. They don’t conform to anyone’s preconceptions, and are better because of it.

“Creatures Of The Night” observes ‘what all you humans do’, while “Northern Soul” compares kids dancing in Manchester clubs, those young men who ‘collapse in gutters, and rest their heads on kerbstones’, to salmon ‘singing along to Aretha’ while ‘flaying their bodies through scouring rocks’, Graham finds in favour of the ‘dancing silver of fish.’ Each line is touch-papered with fissionable material, barbed with the stubborn curmudgeonly humour of his ‘Facebook’ posts. Perhaps pretending a fake normality, from dementia, bereavement, and the beach at Dunkirk lost in the endless unfurl of years, where ‘new time lies like a crust on the mantle of the earth’, to the biography of “My Friend Kong” who ‘had anger issues’. Savage with tenderness, twisting hard shapes out of softness. Until the extinction-event asteroid comes. Disclaiming ‘this is what happens when you let rabble words run wild without supervision.’

‘I don’t need any of you any more, but I still love you.’ Graham once said ‘a cynic still has beliefs. He’s a disappointed romantic’. It seems that’s still true.

GRAHAM CHARNOCK: 

STORY BY STORY 

May 1966 – first issue of fanzine ‘Phile’, edited and produced by Graham Charnock. It survives for seven issues until 1968

January 1967 – published letter in ‘Speculation no.15’, a fanzine edited by Peter R Weston

February 1968 – ‘Vector no.48’ book review of Kit Reed’s ‘Mister Da V And Other Stories’ 

November 1968 – ‘New Worlds no.184’ edited by Michael Moorcock and James Sallis. Includes “Crim”

March 1969 – ‘New Worlds no.188’ edited by Michael Moorcock and Charles Platt. Includes “The Death Layout”

June 1969 – ‘New Worlds no.191’ edited by Langdon Jones. Includes “Sub-Entropic Evening”

July 1969 – ‘New Worlds no.192’ edited by Langdon Jones. Includes “The Erogenous Zone”, collected into ‘Best SF Stories From New Worlds 8’ edited by Michael Moorcock (Panther, March 1974)

November 1969 – ‘New Worlds no.195’ edited by Graham Charnock and Charles Platt

December 1969 – ‘New Worlds no.196’ edited by Graham Charnock and Graham Hall

January 1970 – ‘New Worlds no.197’ edited by Charles Platt, features “The Suicide Machines”

December 1970 – ‘Orbit 8’ edited by Damon Knight, includes “The Chinese Boxes”

July 1974 – Pat Charnock produces first 46-page issue of fanzine ‘Wrinkled Shrew’, drawing on members of Ratfandom group. The title survives for eight thick issues, the last dated April 1979

December 1974 – ‘Tree Rot Too’ fanzine edited by Leroy Kettle, includes “The Mind Pebbles”

1975 – ‘New Writings In SF no.27’ edited by Kenneth Bulmer, includes “The Observer” polished crafted prose, even on perfectly worldscaped Jocaster, Klien is uneasy, ‘vast beauty was paid for with vast ugliness’, brutal love-making and the ritual suicide of native forest-people. Graham Charnock recalls that ‘Ken was a good and kind man and supportive of the young writers that we were. I sold him my story and he printed it, but afterwards he confessed to me he didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was about. Well, that made two of us!’

March 1975 – LP ‘The New World’s Fair’ by Michael Moorcock And The Deep Fix (United Artists UAG 29732). Graham writes “You’re A Hero”, “Come To The Fair” and “In The Name Of Rock And Roll”, he also plays guitar and provides vocals. Reissued as CD by Esoteric Recordings ECLEC2026, in 2008

August 1975 – first issue of six-page fanzine ‘Vibrator’ edited and produced by Graham Charnock. No.2 September. No.3 October. No.4 ten-page issue January 1976. No.5 March 1976. No.6 eight-pages, March 1977. No.7 revived as eight-page issue April 2003, with four-page no.8. Relaunched with a vol.2 no.1 September 2013

August 1979 – ‘Seacon ’79 Programme Book’ edited by Graham Charnock, free handout for attendees at the Thirty-Seventh World SF Convention at Brighton, with Brian Aldiss and Bob Shaw fiction plus essays by Harlan Ellison and James White

December 1980 – “Dodgem Dude” c/w “Starcruiser” (Flicknife Records FLS200) by Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix, with Graham playing bass. Single release of Deep Fix original demo

July 1987 – ‘Other Edens’ edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, includes Graham’s “Fullwood’s Web”

November 1988 – ‘Other Edens 2’ edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, includes “She Shall Have Music”

September 1993 – ‘New Worlds no.3’ new series edited by David Garnett, includes “On The Shores Of A Fractal Sea” (vol.62 no.219)

November 1994 – ‘New Worlds no.4’ edited by David Garnett, includes “Harringay”

August 1997 – ‘New Worlds’ anthology from White Wolf Publishing, listed as no.222, edited by David Garnett, includes “A Night On Bare Mountain”

November 2017 – ‘Running Amok In The Fun Factory’ (Ansible Editions), UK Con Reports Collected by Graham Charnock who also writes the introduction and five ‘reports’

April 2018 – ‘The Mysterious Affair At The Hanover Hinckley’ (Wrinkled Shrew Books ISBN 978-1365633225) ‘Two Gentlemen explorers go in search for the ultimate recipes for Wemblesham Pie and other Modern Wonders, little knowing it will lead them to an ultimate confrontation with the Evil Horned Spook’ 98pp

June 2018 – ‘Lost Children’ (Shrew Books), a collection of fourteen short stories, plus three novellas, 302pp http://www.lulu.com/shop/graham-charnock/lost-children/paperback/product-23667207.html 

August 2019 – ‘Graham Charnock Lyrics’ (Lulu Product ID 24217893) ‘a lifetime of inane perceptions condense into a whole volume’, 270pp

September 2019 – ‘Last Words: A Collection’ poems by Graham Charnock (Lulu ISBN 5-800136-006205) http://www.lulu.com/shop/graham-charnock/last-words/paperback/product-24259353.html?ppn=1