Tuesday 31 December 2019

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…



Monday 30 December 2019

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)


Friday 27 December 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)


Monday 23 December 2019

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)


Sunday 22 December 2019

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)