Book & DVD: 'LORD OF THE FLIES' by William Golding

ISLAND OF DARKNESS:

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

Review of:

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

Director: Peter Brook. With James Aubrey,

Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards

(British Lion, 1963, DVD Second Sight Films, 2007)

Anthony Burgess was always slightly peeved that, although in his opinion he’d written much better, more mature works, the novel he’d always be recognised for was one he regarded as a piece of minor playful hackery – ‘A Clockwork Orange’. There’s something similar about William Golding and ‘Lord Of The Flies’, a superficially simple story about a group of schoolkids trapped on a tropical island devolving into tribal savagery. He subsequently wrote highly-regarded and critically well-received literary work, but it’s that first novel his name will always be associated with. It has been twice-filmed, first by Peter Brook in 1963 – ‘an honest but slightly plodding and ‘literary’ rendition of a work that is much greater in book form’ according to John Brosnan (in ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’ edited by Peter Nicholls, 1979), then again in a lesser 1990 version, with director Harry Hook transposing the action to American themes and settings. And, although there have been far more explicitly violent films since, with greater more gratuitous levels of gore, it persists as a strangely unique and uniquely unsettling fiction. The corrupted innocence of children gives it a continuing potential to disturb, one that gnaws away at our self-image and our concept of ourselves as a rational and reasonable species.

First, there’s Ralph, aged twelve and a few months. As the novel opens he’s being trailed along the beach by protesting fat-kid Piggy. The only other sound is the buzzing of insects. Piggy is an asthma-prone (‘ass-mar prone’) orphan brought up by his over-protective Auntie. He later tells the little ‘uns that Camberley is his home. He’s given no other name than Piggy. Ralph’s parents have separated, although he claims his father is a Naval Commander. He’s the only character given anything resembling a back-story – sketched out by his ‘daydream’ of his parents still together in a snow-bound cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. As the chapter proceeds, other child-survivors emerge, and the cast assembles. Boys who hadn’t previously known each other, they’re from different schools, apart from the complete choir in their black cloaks, which arrives as a group.

In the novel, a plane has deposited them on a remote Pacific island via its passenger tube, then it flew on with ‘flames coming out of it’. Elsewhere it’s suggested the plane was ‘shot down in flames’. The details, as understood by the boys themselves, are muddled, and the ambivalence lingers. There’s a passing reference to ‘before the evacuation’. So they were being evacuated? If so, from what? The experience of the wartime evacuee was still current at the time of the book’s first publication. It seems there was an earlier chapter filling in the background, subsequently edited out, explaining the situation in greater detail. As it is, the undisclosed military danger, is left tantalisingly vague. The Peter Brook film economically intersperses the opening credits with a series of story-setting stills matched to a slow percussion-only soundtrack, of stately public schools, choirboys, cricket, then sudden flash-frames of missiles and warfare. An evacuation notice on a classroom chalkboard. Dark clouds gathering. A Pacific map… and a plane downed in a lagoon.

‘Didn’t you hear what the pilot said?’ comments Piggy, ‘about the bomb? They’re all dead’. So it’s a post nuclear-apocalypse scenario? Although this means it’s set in the near future, it’s still their future, which is decidedly our past. Does that make it Science Fiction? No, but it does place it on the periphery of fantasy. As it is, only the enabling frame of the book has this Science Fiction element. It’s not essential. The American movie dispenses with such a context entirely. All that’s necessary for the tale is that the boys are removed from parental control. As in much children’s fiction, adults are conspicuous by their absence. Something to be first experienced as a liberating freedom, enabling unsupervised adventures. Until that reassuring protection is needed. ‘I bet it’s gone tea-time’ complains Piggy ruefully. Without the ‘protection of parents and school and policemen and the law’, with two exceptions, the boys quickly revert to the savagery of Devlish Angels, a process that results in brutal murder. A premise clumsily undermined by Harry Hook shifting the marooned children into military school cadets, who seem anything but innocent, with a discipline-structure and weapons-training already in place. Prematurely overdosed on world-weary cynicism, the cadets bring the barbarism with them to the island. Hook’s intention seems to have been to present the tale as a diatribe against war/militarism, which grossly over-simplifies Golding’s complexity.

Nevertheless, the story’s theme, in book and film, can be interpreted in several ways, as a replay-enactment of original sin, as a variant of HG Wells theme of civilisation as a skin-deep veneer masking what Golding calls ‘the darkness of man’s heart’, a complex utterance about the survival-struggle in an unremittingly savage society, and the shapes our nature assumes when ‘free’ to do as it pleases. As if the boys’ descent into savagery is intended to mirror the mass-atrocity techno-barbarism of World War III which is presumably taking place beyond their island enclave. Or maybe it’s simply an indictment of the British public-school system. The 1950’s period detail is precise. Their clothes mark them out as the product of the safe formalised middle-class Home Counties school system, clear down to the ‘snake-clasp on his belt’ of their knee-length shorts, the differently badged caps, striped ties, grey shirt and the school uniform they wear. They say things like ‘Whee-oh’, ‘Wacco’, ‘Bong’, ‘Wizzoh’, and ‘Doink’. There is even a Billy Bunterish ‘Yaroo you Rotters’ moment when the boys seize Piggy’s glasses to use the lens to light the fire. So perhaps it works best as a metaphor? A refutation of the sentimental idealisation of childhood innocence, as typified by the soon-come flower-power late-sixties? It’s been multiply interpreted in ways that even Golding himself might not recognise.

First, Ralph is voted chief. He uses a conch-shell to summon assembly, and so it assumes mystical status. As a symbol of governance. The choir, led by arrogant red-headed Jack Merridew, forms a rival power-base. They are designated hunters, although their first attempt to slaughter a wild piglet fails. ‘Next time, there would be no mercy’ he promises with dark prescience. Just as the mock play-killing with Robert as the game-victim also rehearses what is to come. While Ralph (played in the first film by James Aubrey) struggles with the complexities of leadership dilemmas, with what is and is not possible. ‘The trouble was, if you were a chief, you had to think, you had to be wise’ he reasons with uncertain resolve. But he’s resented for his attempts to impose some kind of moral order. For trying to think ‘like a grown-up’. Their first collective project, a signal fire, gets out of control and ignites half the island. Then, when a ship is detected on the horizon (a jet-plane in Peter Brook’s film), the signal fire has been neglected. While the plaintive Piggy – perfectly embodied by young actor Hugh Edwards, watches events owlishly, squinting myopically through the single lens of his specs. He functions as Ralph’s wise back-up counsel. Lacking charisma or authority himself he acts as adviser, Piggy could think, Piggy – ‘for all his ludicrous body, has brains’. There’s mutual respect, despite Ralph betraying Piggy’s reluctant confidence and divulging his nickname to the group. ‘You told ‘em’ he accuses, ‘after what I said’. Ralph does not back down or apologise. ‘Better Piggy than Fatty’ he offers, ‘with the directness of genuine leadership’.

Peter Brook’s film is a rough and ready adaptation of the novel, filmed in locations on the Puerto Rican Isla de Vieques and its El Yunque National Forest, on a budget that would now barely cover the cost of a boat-cruise around the island. Although part-improvised by a cast of schoolboys who’d never acted before, it stays remarkably close to the source novel, with chunks of dialogue lifted intact. And there’s a technical rawness about its black-and-white authenticity that still packs a punch far more effectively than the 1990 remake. As they explore, the boys discover that the island is roughly boat-shaped, humped at one end. While their days are one long playtime, spent bathing in ‘a wetness warmer than blood’, nights are scary. It’s the twins who become Sam-‘n’-Eric, ampersanded together as Samaneric, then Samneric who are first to see ‘the Beast’ during night watch. The group’s sense of control is eroding, they’re supernaturally afraid of rumours of a Snake-Thing, a Beastie. A giant squid? A ghost? Despite Ralph’s most earnest intentions, ‘the world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away’. Even he finds himself afraid of these unknown unknowns.

William Gerald Golding was born 19 September 1911 and brought up in the Wiltshire market-town of Marlborough as the son of Alec Golding, an socialist-atheist science-teacher. After taking his BA (Hons) Second Class at Brasenose, Oxford, he wrote a book of ‘Poems’ (1934), but despite such early evidence of literary aspirations, he found himself frittering time away as a creatively-frustrated schoolmaster. A forty-a-day smoker caught up in the fusty habits of homework and cricket at Salisbury’s ‘Bishop Wordsworth’s’ school. His last desperate throw as author was hand-scripted during 1952-‘53 in Stephens ink in standard-issue school exercise books, then typed up on foolscap pages with a manual typewriter. He was already forty-three at the time of the unlikely publication of ‘Lord Of The Flies’ (1954). And it’s not difficult to understand why this weird tropical dystopia was rejected by some twenty potential publishers before finally finding a home with Faber. Discovered and rescued from the slush-pile by publisher’s reader Charles Monteith, the first-draft manuscript then called ‘Strangers From Within’, had verdicts from previous readers scrawled on it – ‘absurd and uninteresting fantasy… rubbish’. On first impressions Monteith was inclined to agree. Until gradually the power of the text made itself apparent. Yet he insisted on substantial rewriting before it could be unleashed upon the literary world. Because realistically, it’s a strange hybrid of a novel in which there are no adult characters, and yet its bleakness determines it is not an obvious kid’s book either (although it’s since become something of a set-text for school English classes).

In form, it’s essentially a twentieth-century reworking of the Victorian boys adventure story, in which the protagonists are all English schoolboys, so there are no mature relationships. The oldest boys are aged around puberty, and ‘littluns’ – like Johnny, as young as six. There are no female characters. Yet despite much casual nudity there’s no sex either (something surely untypical of the British public-school system?). Superficially it’s a traditional castaway tale, familiar in literature at least since Daniel Defoe. Maybe intended as a riposte to the cosy moral lessons of ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’ (by Johnann David Wyss, 1812) in which virtue triumphs and civilised standards are maintained. A repudiation of the schoolboy heroism of RM Ballantyne’s ‘The Coral Island’ (1858), in which there is also a Jack and a Ralph. In fact Golding lists his own reference-points as the marooned boys point out that their situation is ‘like in a book!’ ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Swallows & Amazons’, ‘Coral Island’.

But where high-brow critics point to the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ literary tradition, further down the scale of respectability, the infant Tarzan was shipwrecked and raised by the Apes, only to rise above them to become ‘King Of The Jungle’, the very personification of the Noble Savage. And it was an idea rife in popular culture. Dudley Watkins’ ‘The Shipwrecked Circus’ started out as a text-serial in ‘The Beano’ (1943-1947), later revived as a picture-strip (1951-1958). It’s tempting to see Golding – as a schoolmaster fighting his corner for serious literature, competing for his pupil’s attention against this kind of junk culture. Maybe confiscating a copy of the comic, and idly flipping through the stories. ‘The Kings Of Castaway Island’ portrays another nice middle-class nuclear-family on the pages of ‘The Beezer’, marooned around a similar premise, the survivors of a plane-wreck prospering in adversity, erecting pleasant shacks and overcoming a variety of problems. It was Golding’s novel that draws attention to the flaws in these charming aspirational group-jeopardy tales. Golding who saw beyond the triumph of the human spirit, to the darker psychological hooligan tendencies on its other side, to what he terms ‘a disharmony in our natures’.

If ‘Lord Of The Flies’ uses a microcosm of Prep-school boys to illustrate the fable of the ‘Fall’, Golding’s second novel ‘The Inheritors’ (1955) ventures back into prehistory to view the same process happening on a species-level, with the morally ambiguous triumph of the Cro-Magnon ‘bold hunters and magicians’. The arrival of these ‘new people’ is seen through the eyes of a doomed Neanderthal called Lok. Although sensitive to the external world, because they lack the capacity for imagination the Neanderthals live in a prelapsarian world without awareness of good or evil.

Yet Golding’s increasing preoccupation was with the ‘beauty, monstrosity and mystery of the sea’. He sailed his own converted oyster-smack named ‘Wild Rose’, describing himself as ‘a storyteller and a sailor’. The theme resurfaces in the next novel. ‘Pincher Martin’ (1956), is an experimental hallucinatory account of Christopher Hadley ‘Pincher’ Martin, a torpedoed naval lieutenant thrown up on a tiny isolated rocky islet in the middle of the north Atlantic, one that appears ‘only on weather charts’ and is much the same shape as a diseased tooth he touches constantly with his tongue. Even more radically isolated than the boys of ‘Lord Of The Flies’, his desperate survival struggle seems defiantly hopeful, until the denouement suggests that no, as in Ambrose Bierce’s shock-ending to “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” with which it has been compared, all that has happened is merely ‘a dream of a life’ experienced by a dying consciousness. As Golding later clarified, Pincher Martin dies on page two.

Golding’s closest direct brush with the fantasy genre is “Envoy Extraordinary”, a long tale that places him alongside John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake in the ‘Sometime, Never’ anthology (1956), a tale about an Alexandrian Greek scientist called Phanocles who attempts to interest the Roman Emperor in a variety of extravagant inventions – a steam-engine, gun-powder, a pressure-cooker and a printing-press. In anticipating the social consequences of these innovations, and refusing to accept them, the Emperor proves to be philosophically the wiser of the two. Subsequently adapted as a play called ‘The Brass Butterfly’ (1958), the story also appears in Golding’s ‘The Scorpion God’ collection (1971), along with two other fantasies. Elsewhere, ‘The Spire’ (1964) is an elaborate historical novel about the construction of a 400-foot spire on a medieval church – based on Salisbury Cathedral, a ‘stone bible’ ‘laying its hand on the whole landscape’, which shrugged ‘itself obediently into a new shape’ around it. Its detailed construction involves a good deal of largely improvised proto-science, while the human element evokes the dangers, hubris and joy of undertaking such an ambitious ‘apocalypse in stone’ in the face of its author’s ambiguous sense of divinity. But if Golding had a strange relationship with reality, compounded by his difficulty in separating the imaginative world from the real one (‘it is fiction which is rockhard and history which is a dream or a nightmare’), his concept of the sea as ‘our unconscious’ and the place of our species aquatic evolutionary origins, returns in his epic ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’ (1980, 1987 & 1989). Less metaphorical, less allegorical, his preferred term was ‘mythic’.

Meanwhile, the marooned party on the darkening island has split into two factions, with Jack leading his tribe of war-painted ‘hunters’ to a new ‘Castle Rock’ cave fortress. In a charged confrontation Jack strikes Piggy and shatters one lens of his glasses. ‘We’re not savages’ insists Ralph uncertainly, ‘we’re English’. While Piggy tut-tuts that they’re behaving ‘like a crowd of kids’. Yet dissident Jack shrugs off all responsibility and disrespects the authority of the conch. ‘The rules are the only things we’ve got’ reasons a conciliatory Ralph. ‘Bollocks to the rules’ retorts Jack. To Ralph the rules are a defence against barbarism, to Jack – with his praetorian guard of hunters, they are a convenient excuse to beat those who transgress. In the Peter Brook film Jack watches regally – ‘like an idol’, as a naked boy (named as Wilfred in the novel) is thrashed for such a trespass. Yet the factions unite in a joint expedition to hunt and destroy the unnameable ‘Beast’. They miscalculate distance so that it’s darkening as hey ramble, with Jack and Roger advancing into ‘a kind of dentist’s chair unreality’. They see suggestions of terror, and flee in panic. Instead, in the crude symbolism of a gathering storm, with tribal drums sound-tracking the pig-hunt, Jack’s whooping hunters kill a sow, and set its head impaled on a stake – ‘The Lord Of The Flies’ itself, left as an offering to the beast. Jack’s power-grab coup is complete. He’s both the provider of meat, and his group’s protector from the menace of the Beast.

Innocent blonde Simon is the mystic of the group, a visionary prone to epileptic fits (‘one of his times was coming on’), the only one who dares suggest that ‘maybe if there is a beast, maybe it’s only us…?’ It’s this ‘Simon pure’ who seeks solitude, approaching the fly-crawled pig’s head in a kind of reverent curiosity, only to hallucinate that it is talking to him with the ‘voice of the beast’. It’s also Simon who solves the mystery of the Beast by climbing alone to the island’s highest point, to face it in its lair. In the American movie ‘The Beast’ is Captain Benson, pilot of the original plane, who is then accidentally killed by ‘Larry’, one of the boys unmentioned in any other version. In the novel, and the original film, the ‘creature that bulged’ is an unidentified dead parachutist with ‘the ruin of a face’. Simon hurries back to tell the group, who are partying and feasting on pigmeat around a huge beach bonfire with all ‘the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought’. As he stumbles into the bacchanalia Simon is himself mistaken for the beast, and it is he who is set upon and killed. The stark monochrome night, ripped by whirling torches in jittery ‘Blair Witch’ impressionism, adds to the realistic blood-lust frenzy with their chant ‘Kill The Beast! Cut His Throat! Spill His Blood!’ beating like a steady pulse. ‘With the throb and stomp of a single organism’ driven by hysterical fear, as thunder roars and lightning strobes ‘there were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws’.

With morning, Ralph and Piggy are alone again, with only the Samneric-twins still loyal. Was last night’s terrible event an act of murder, or accident? They daren’t even phrase the question for fear of making it real. And Jack’s tribe come hunting for Piggy’s specs. Ralph calls assembly at Jack’s Castle Rock stronghold in a final attempt at reason, with Piggy carrying the iconic conch. But it only leads to Jack and Ralph fighting. Piggy calls for them all to be ‘sensible’. Beseeching ‘which is better, to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?’ Instead, they loose a rock – as earlier they’d loosed a rock down a ravine in play, this time it falls to smash Piggy. His body is washed into the tide. In the same impact ‘the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist’, their last symbol of rationalism gone. Ralph turns and runs.

Press-ganged into joining Jack’s savages, Samneric manage to message Ralph that their new chief has sharpened a stick at both ends. Ralph’s head is set to join the pig’s head, impaled on a stake. Yelling their ‘Kill The Beast! Cut His Throat! Spill His Blood!’ war-cries the group begin hunting the outcast down. Part menacing game, part pack instinct, part cruel bullying blood-sport, they use fires to burn him out. The island itself burns in a vision of hell. Fleeing in terror Ralph stumbles onto the beach, only to fall on his knees at the feet of a Naval Officer. In Peter Brook’s final sequence the newcomer, with a cutter and two ratings, wears starched tropical white uniforms, with efficient binoculars. Harry Hook’s American version replaces the rescuer with a Rambo-esque marine (played by Bob Peck). Ironically – as was Ralph’s plan all along, the smoke has attracted them. The smoke from the ‘burning wreckage of the island’, from Jack’s fire ignited to flush Ralph out. It’s left to Golding’s novel to add the final damning indictment, as the officer sniffily chides ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys, you’re all British aren’t you? would have been able to put up a better show than that, I mean –’. And the gathering savages revert to being nothing more than a ‘circle of little boys, their bodies streaked with coloured clay, sharp sticks in their hands’. And Ralph cries with a mix of relief, shame and ‘for the end of innocence’.

A tormented, dissatisfied man, despite the Booker and even the Nobel Prize, unsettled and haunted by horrific wartime experiences, Golding remained something of a troubled outsider. His novels selecting the most unlikely subject-matter, too fantastic or too experimental to fit comfortably into the polite literary mainstream. It could be argued that his tangential relation to fantasy is just as uncertain as his relation to conventional mainstream novels, or conversely that he treads an uneasy line between allegory and narrative with astonishingly fruitful results. He mused that ‘there are authors who can see their work numbered by the hundred. Mine are so few! I have just totted them up on my fingers and the grand total is sixteen – not much, you would say, for a man of seventy-eight’. The ‘locusts have eaten’ his years, and he died 19 June 1993. And yes, he wrote many other highly-regarded and critically well-received literary works, but he will be remembered for ‘Lord Of The Flies’. And that’s more than enough.

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’

‘Fortunately for me, I belong among the natural storytellers

in whose gentle mouths the truth is not to be distinguished

from the white lies of fiction’

(William Golding, ‘The Observer’, 30 October 1994)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (1963, Janus Films/ British Lion, Allen-Hodgson Production & Two Arts ) Producer: ‘Lewis M Allen & Dana Hodgdon present…’. Director: Peter Brook. Screenplay by Peter Brook based on the novel ‘Lord Of The Flies’ by William Golding. With James Aubrey (as Ralph, Aubrey later appears in TV’s ‘Bouquet Of Barbed Wire’), Tom Chapin (as Jack), Hugh Edwards (as Piggy), Roger Elwin (as Roger), Tom Gaman (as Simon), David & Simon Surtees ‘The Surtees Twins’ (as Sam & Eric), Roger Allan (as Piers), David Brunjes (as Donald), Peter Davy (as Peter), Kent Fletcher (as Percival Wemys Madison), Nicholas Hammond, Christopher Harris, Alan & Jonathan Heaps. Filmed on location at Puerto Rico at El Yunque & the island of Vieques. Music by Raymond Leppard (with song by Kyrie Eleison). 92-minutes (Premiered at the Cannes Festival, May 1963, DVD Second Sight Films, July 2007)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (Columbia Pictures, March 1990) Inferior American remake directed by Harry Hook, produced by Lewis M Allen, from a screeplay by Sarah Schiff from the William Golding novel, with Balthazar Getty, Chris Furrh, Danuel Pipoly, James Badge Dale, Andrew & Edward Taft. 90-minutes. (DVD, Twentieth Century Fox, 2003)

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (2011) Nigel Williams theatrical adaptation staged at Regent Park’s ‘Open Air Theatre’, directed by Timothy Shader

‘LORD OF THE FLIES’ (1954, Faber, ISBN 0-571-08483-4) novel. Republished in 1962 in a movie tie-in edition with black-&-white photo-stills insert section. The 1973 paperback has a Peter Brook movie-still cover. The 1979 26th Faber impression has a Michael Ayrton Pig’s Head design. The 1984 reprint cover is by Paul Hogarth. The 2011 cover is by Neil Gower, with a new introduction by Stephen King.

WILLIAM GOLDING:

OTHER WORK…

‘POEMS’ published as by WG Golding (1934, Macmillan’s Contemporary Poets) 33-page softback

‘THE INHERITORS’ (1955, Faber) novel, distinctive cover-art by Anthony Gross. A novel described by Arthur Koestler as ‘an earthquake in the petrified forests’ of English literature.

‘PINCHER MARTIN’ (1956, Faber, US title ‘The Two Deaths Of Pincher Martin’ by Harcourt Brace) novel

‘SOMETIME, NEVER: THREE TALES OF IMAGINATION’ (1956, Eyre & Spottiswoode) three tales with Golding’s novella “Envoy Extraordinary”, Mervyn Peake’s “Boy In Darkness” & John Wyndham’s “Consider Her Ways”)

‘THE BRASS BUTTERFLY’ (1958, Faber) ‘A Play In Three Acts’ adapted from “Envoy Extraordinary”, produced in April 1958 at the London ‘Strand Threatre’ with Alastair Sim and George Cole

‘FREE FALL’ (1959, Faber) novel, cover by Anthony Gross. Samuel Mountjoy is an artist, a POW in WWII Germany, isolated and awaiting possible torture, retrospecting his life in hallucinatory flashbacks

‘JOHN BULL’S SCHOOLDAYS’ Edited by Brian Inglis (1961, Hutchinson) includes Golding’s essay “Billy The Kid” about his childhood

‘THE LADDER & THE TREE’ (1961, Marlborough College Press) pamphlet, short story

‘THE SPIRE’ (1964, Faber) novel. Its poor critical reception led Golding to a profound personal and artistic crisis. He also began his private ‘Dream Diaries’ which he would continue writing for the next twenty years and run to some two-million words

‘THE HOT GATES & OTHER OCCASIONAL PIECES’ (1965, Faber) essays ‘and other occasional pieces’, including a reprinted “Billy The Kid” from 1961

‘THE PYRAMID’ (1967, Faber) novel

‘THE SCORPION GOD’ (1971, Faber) ‘Three Short Novels’ including novella “Envoy Extraordinary”

‘DARKNESS VISIBLE’ (1979, Faber) novel. Saintly boy Matty in the World War II blitz

‘RITES OF PASSAGE’ (1980, Faber) First volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’, covering an eventful voyage from Tilbury to Sydney. Cover artwork by Cathie Felstead

‘A MOVING TARGET’ (1982, Faber) essays

‘NOBEL LECTURE’ (1983, Sixth Chamber Press)

‘THE PAPER MEN’ (1984, Faber) novel

‘AN EGYPTIAN JOURNEY’ (1985, Faber) travel

‘CLOSE QUARTERS’ (1987, Faber) second volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’. Cover watercolour art by Paul Hogarth

‘FIRE DOWN BELOW’ (1989, Faber) third volume of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth: A Sea Trilogy’. Cover watercolour art by Paul Hogarth (the three volumes published in a single edition by Faber in 1991

‘THE DOUBLE TONGUE’ (June 1995, Faber ISBN0571175260) an extraordinary short novel, left in ‘penultimate draft’-form at the time of Golding’s death on 19 June 1993, and discovered by his executor and Faber editor John Bodley. It is set in Greece under Roman rule. As Arieka, the local girl chosen to be prophetess, grows old in the surreal confines of Delphi, she looks back over her life as the ‘double tongue’ voice of the Delphic Oracle god Apollo. She becomes aware of the Oracle’s other ambiguity – its political function in an enslaved land, and the real terror of religion. To reviewer Tobias Hill ‘Golding’s last unfinished work is like a found fragment of ancient Greek pottery – clean-lined, patterned and incomplete’ (‘Observer’ 18 August 1996)

WILLIAM GOLDING:

THE CRITICAL STUFF…

BBC-TV ‘MONITOR’ (25th October 1959) Golding interviewed shortly after the publication of fourth novel, ‘Free Fall’, while still working as a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. He talks about the process of writing and the painstaking craftsmanship that he brings to his work, his interest in archaeology and his love of sailing and the sea, all subjects that have found an outlet in his books, and explains his fascination with exploring what lies behind the surface of everyday life (17:16minutes). It can be viewed at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12203.shtml

‘THE SOUTH BANK SHOW’ William Golding was twice profiled by Melvyn Bragg’s TV arts-showcase, first 16 November 1980 (Season 4:2) and again 15 July 1993

‘ARENA: THE DREAMS OF WILLIAM GOLDING’ (BBC2, 7 March 2012) Director Adam Low’s portrait of Golding, balanced, intimate and calmly illuminating. Reviewer Mike Bradley writes ‘most importantly, this is a programme which is likely to inspire many viewers to read lesser known novels such as ‘The Spire’, ‘The Inheritors’ and ‘Pincher Martin’. Unmissable’ (‘Observer’, 11 March 2012). Novel extracts read by Bendict Cumberbatch (who appeared in BBC2 three-part dramatisation of ‘To The Ends Of The Earth’ (May-June 2005)

‘THE ART OF WILLIAM GOLDING’ (1965) by Bernard S Oldsey & Stanley Weintraub

‘WILLIAM GOLDING: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY’ (Faber & Faber) by Mark Kinkead-Weekes & Ian Gregor. The 1967 edition covers Golding’s first five novels. The 1984 revision includes the next three novels. Although Gregor died in 1995 the third edition in 2002 brings the work up to do date

‘WILLIAM GOLDING: A BIBLIOGRAPHY’ (1993, André Deutsch) by RA Gekoski & David Hughes

‘THE CHILDREN OF LOVERS’ (June 2011, Faber) by Judy Golding. A personal memoir by Golding’s daughter of her ‘very pretty’ mother, the fear of the dark she shared with her father, her own breakdown and her brother’s episodes of mental illness.

Career retrospects in ‘Book & Magazine Collector Magazine’ by Katharine Gunn (issue no.24) and by Crispin Jackson (no.114, September 1993). Jackson writes ‘if the modern English novel has largely been able to break free of its obsession with social niceties and love affairs, then much of the credit must go to Golding’

Live: PENTANGLE in Hull, 1969

LIVE PENTANGLING IN HULL

Gig Review of:

PENTANGLE

at Hull City Hall (22 June 1969)

You see the cover-photo of the ‘Basket Of Light’ (1969) album? That’s the way it was. That is the formation they assume. Jacqui McShee seated centre, and to the front. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn seated to her left and right. The imposing Danny Thompson standing adjacent to his double-bass at a slight left-tangent behind them. And Terry Cox centre-rear at the drum-kit. Of course, the album-art was taken at the Royal Albert Hall, not the chill marble environs of Hull’s City Hall, but apart from that it’s pretty much identical. Open up the LP gatefold and it proudly announces ‘All The Instruments Played On This Album Are Acoustic’ – as though that’s some signifier of authenticity. As though that makes it more real, less contrived. But perhaps a little more electricity would have helped in Hull this night. Jacqui sits a space from the mike. Too much space. So that her slight, but pellucid voice gets lost in the huge emptiness of the hall.

People in the rows of seated audience whisper about not hearing her. About her inaudible voice. Even from Seat J38 (which cost all of 10/-). Comments are made to the venue staff. At the intermission – yes, there’s an intermission, a uniformed attendant appears on stage and rearranges the furniture, to a mild ripple of applause. He moves her stool a clear pace closer to the mike-stand. But when the musicians file back on and take their places Jacqui takes pains to gently ease her stool back into its original position, away from the mike. Things are NOT going to get better! Which is disappointing. Pentangle is a big deal. And this tour is undeniably the highest point of their career-trajectory.

Yet the songs cascade like soft rain around us. When they do “Sally Go Round The Roses” it is a dancing interaction between bass and guitars. A complex simplicity. Her voice so ethereal it’s barely there at all, she sings it with hands chastely on her knees, long curtains of hair cascading in around her face. She rarely smiles. Yet the song has the catchy circular quality of a kid’s schoolyard rhyme, or a ‘round’, although it actually originates with the Jaynetts, a Bronx girl-group whose version hit a US no.2 in September 1963 on Tuff Records. A luring combination of strange things seeming familiar, and familiar things suddenly becoming strange.

Then they do a dazzling “Light Flight”. Around this time, ‘Take Three Girls’ was a BBC1 flat-share comedy-drama with Liza Goddard, Susan Jameson and Angela Down as trendy singletons loose in a still-Swinging London (it lasted two seasons from 24 December 1969). There was less ‘Sex In The City’ back then, maybe, but Pentangle score “Light Flight” as its theme-song, which subsequently makes a chart showing – as high as no.43, as a result. Untypical Pop fare, its time signature darts between 5/8 and 7/8, then with nimble agility into 6/4 in the mid-section. None of which breaks the track’s perfect surface. It managed three rungs higher than its predecessor, the group’s first single “Once I Had A Sweetheart”, which harks back to Carolyn Hester, and reached no.46 in May 1969. Performed faultlessly live, this song of sorrowing loss for a faithless lover, ‘my eyes like some fountain with tears overflowed’, chimes with aching precision. But this is a time when Fairport Convention were upsetting the scene with innovatory Folk-Rock variations, taking their “Si Tu Dois Partir” up to no.21 during July 1969, with Steeleye Span and the underrated Eclection waiting in the wings. Pentangle were always a cut above. A Folk super-group.

I’d known Bert Jansch and John Renbourn since their first solo and duo albums. Gazing through the storefront glass of Hallgate Electricals in Cottingham at the album covers on display, not yet quite able to afford the Transatlantic ‘Bert And John’ (TRA144, 1966) album with its chequer-board playing cover (they’re actually playing Wei-Pi-Ki – or ‘Go’), and its enticingly risqué “Soho” ‘come watch the naked dance, that spins before your very eyes, naked like the sun’. Well, it seemed risqué to me at the time. Or the intricately baroque “Angie” and stark junkie “Needle Of Death” on his 1965 debut ‘Bert Jansch’ (TRA125) set. And John snapped sitting intensely playing acoustic Gibson J-50 guitar on a cold flight of steps on the ‘Another Monday’ (1967) sleeve. This was around the time Jansch and Renbourn were flat-sharing and conspiring together, opening the ‘Horseshoe Club’ in Tottenham Court Road, Bert recalling to ‘Q’ how ‘the ‘Les Cousins Club’ was down the road, where people like Paul Simon and Al Stewart went, but we wanted something a bit more experimental’ (May 1991). Their Pentangling grew out of that intention.

Whereas Danny Thompson – who amongst us does NOT know and respect his cv? If only from touring with Donovan and John Martyn, or backing up Tim Buckley for his Queen Elizabeth Hall ‘Live In London 1968’ LP, even before you get to his multiple other virtuoso jazz and Folk incarnations. Adding Charlie Mingus to Pentangle’’s already extensive repertoire resources. An awesome figure. And we know jazz-blues drummer Terry Cox as part of the Michael Garrick Quartet before playing alongside Thompson in Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, replacing Charlie Watts in the drum-chair. With Jacqui, as Pentangle’s fifth instrument. Her recording debut was dueting with Renbourn on three tracks on his second album ‘Another Monday’, including the ragtimey “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”.

Next up, their “Lyke-Wake Dirge” is done in a chilling wrap-around of eerie harmonies, as it was when I heard the Watersons doing it unaccompanied even earlier at the ‘Blue Bell’ club, or the Young Tradition’s skeletal arrangement from their 1965 debut album. Its deep roots are supposedly pre-Christian, but overlaid and adapted to chronicle the starkly austere journey of the soul after death, through the ‘fire and fleet and candle-ligte’ of purgatory until ‘Christe receive thy saule’. In much the same way, there are many variations of the Child-ballad “The Daemon Lover” before Pentangle retool it into the dark narrative “House Carpenter” unfolding on stage this night. Variously done by Joan Baez, Ewan MacColl, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Peter Bellamy to name but several, but that’s the way traditional music operates, by adaptation and reinterpretation. Jacqui’s soprano weaves with icicle clarity in alternating verses with Jansch’s less polished voice. Telling a chastening tale designed to enforce marital fidelity, warning of a wayward wife seduced away from her solidly reliable carpenter husband and baby son by a charming lover who turns out to be the Devil in Disguise. He sails her away to eternal damnation in the island of Hades.

Then, many years later, Kristin Hersh seems suitably surprised when I tell her that “The Cuckoo” – a track on her solo album ‘Hips And Makers’ (1994), had been done decades before by Pentangle on ‘Basket Of Light’. Bert Jansch learned this ‘Somerset’ song from his neighbour’s children, contrasting the perceived fidelity of the cuckoo with yet another false lover, ‘the meeting was a pleasure, though the parting was a woe’. To Kristin it was a traditional Appalachian Folk-ballad. But that’s the way traditional music operates. In Hull it dances and flies, guitar interplay underpinned by resonant double-bass, its lilting melodic trajectory renewed. A flame passed on.

This initial phase of Pentangle cut five albums between 1968 and 1971, with – for the most part, Jansch and Renbourn playing acoustic guitars directly into the studio microphones, although a muted electric guitar was introduced for ‘Cruel Sister’ (1970). Jansch also adds banjo to “House Carpenter”, while Renbourn plays sitar on “Once I Had A Sweetheart”. They switch up from the cult Transatlantic stable to join the more mainstream Reprise in time for ‘Solomon’ Seal’ (1972), but that would be their final album, until the reformations and reunions began some time later. Meanwhile, despite the flaws and failings of acoustic technology Pentangle live is a mesmerising experience.

PENTANGLE: THE

‘BASKET OF LIGHT’ SINGLES

“Once I Had A Sweetheart” c/w “I Saw An Angel” (Transatlantic Big T 124) ‘Record Mirror’ said ‘there is a quiet air of confidence about this traditional and nicely-revived number. Exquisitely sung by Jacqui McShee, it has both charm and feel to it and there is no disputing the group’s tremendous pull in concert. It could miss out, of course, because it is a rather specialist sound, but it’s very good. Flip: Change of pace and style. CHART POSSIBILITY.’ ‘New Musical Express’ said ‘An absolutely stunning little record that cannot be faulted in any department. A traditional folk song arranged by the multi-talented group, the backing is unobtrusive but inventive behind Jacquee McShee’s (sic) oh-so-beautiful vocals. Towards the end the instrumentalists take over and intensify use of sitar and tribal drum rhythms. If I had my way this would be no.1. Available in stereo, though I received only mono for reviewing.’

“Light Flight” c/w “Cold Mountain” (Big T 128) ‘Melody Maker’ said ‘quite a lively performance, compared to their normal concert appearance. A bit of the old jazz and folk mixture, it sounds rather BBC2. Nice though.’ While ‘New Musical Express’ said ‘this is the theme from BBC-TV’ forthcoming drama series ‘Take Three Girls’, written by the Pentangle itself. A fascinating disc, typical of the group’s highly individual concept of contemporary music. The girl lead singer is supported by contrapuntal harmonies and strumming acoustic guitars, and the deft fusion of old and new ideas makes it sound like a jazz-influenced madrigal. One for the connoisseur.’

Poem: 'THE LICHEN MANUSCRIPT / MARS IS A DISTRICT OF SHEFFIELD'

THE LICHEN MANUSCRIPT /

MARS IS A DISTRICT OF SHEFFIELD

as I scratch paths
through lichen circles
on this Yorkshire wall,
a rain of memory
washes segments of
Martian landscape

the 1950’s books I read
said lichen grows on Mars,
as a child smearing dreams
I walked jungles of lichen
beneath violet Martian skies
watching a shimmer of canals
beaded with bright cities set
in a weave of strange forest,
tendrils of vermilion lichen
curling, burning with orchids
and crawling with the eyes
of man-tall insects

now,
as I scratch paths
through lichen circles
on this Yorkshire wall,
I dislodge the ruins
of Martian cities


Published in:
‘MEXICON no.6: THE PARTY – CON SOUVENIR BOOK’
(UK - June 1994)
‘FANTASY COMMENTATOR no. 45/46’ (USA - Dec 1994)
and quoted in
‘FOUNDATION no.68’ (Mars Special / Autumn 1996)
‘HANDSHAKE no.31A: H.G. WELLS 100 YEARS ISSUE’
(UK - Aug 1998)
and in the collection:
‘EUROSHIMA MON AMOUR’ Hilltop Press (UK-Oct 2000)

Cult Album: 'LOVE, HATE, REVENGE' by EPISODE SIX

LOVE, HATE, REVENGE:

THE MANY FACES

OF EPISODE SIX

Album Review of:

‘LOVE, HATE, REVENGE’

by EPISODE SIX

(2CD, 2005, Castle Music CHEDD 894)

EPISODE ONE: INTRODUCTIONS

Episode Six were a Smoothie-Blender of a group. An all-things to all-punters group. A composite of various stylistic devices whipped up together into a sometime satisfying completeness. At one time they seemed well on their way to becoming the go-to group for teen-angled programme-makers. An effectively safe Pop beat-group one minute, adept at covering appropriate audience-pleasers, yet sharp enough to pass muster among the more discerning. Plus they front-lined an easy-on-the eye girl singer in a mini-skirt. Every demographic catered to.

The main nexus of retro-interest now is that two long-term members of Episode Six – Ian Gillan and Roger Glover, evolved into key players in Deep Purple. At the time, that wasn’t the case. Far from it. The focus was on Sheila Carter-Dimmock, in every way the perfect sixties icon, composed and glamorous, big eyes outlined and intensified into blurry oblongs by black encircling eye-shadow, dark hair back-combed, teased, coiffed, and spray-fixed into the style every girl ‘Rave’ reader aspired to. ‘Five boys, and one dishy girl’ as a ‘Record Mirror’ snippet announced them. Female members of Pop-groups were rare enough to count on the fingers of Homer Simpson’s hand. Honey Lantree drummed with the Honeycombs. Megan Davies played bass with the Applejacks. And Sheila played WEM electric organ and fronted Episode Six, while brother Graham played lead guitar and – as the ‘owner of a wonder falsetto’, shared the mike as required. The group were visibly around for some five years, did all the important tours and TV-shows, issued a number of highly-rated singles, none of which actually charted. And yes – they were a ‘group’, or maybe Beat-Group. No-one talked about Bands. Not yet.

Their “Love Hate Revenge” forms the centre prong of a fine trilogy of 45rpm’s, a plateau of excellent Psyche-Pop. Its lyrical ingenuity depends on a hoodoo-voodoo doll called ‘Tanya’. The kind they use in the dark monochrome Horror-movies to hex, punish and kill by Juju proxy. And from the opening declaiming guitar the Six set their sights on revenging their lost lover, ‘if I want you to cry, bet your life you’re gonna cry, when I put two drops of water in this little doll’s eye’. There’s an unsettlingly creepy bowel-shaking intensity about ‘I’m in control of your subconscious mind… all I’ve got to do is break its heart and you’ll feel misery’, making it a serious proposition. In fact, it’s got a lot of what they called ‘the most’…

EPISODE TWO: EARLY DAZE

Episode Six were very much a presence on the scene. Always on the brink of making it big. While never quite breaking on through to the other side, into big-league status. Why? One reason could be lack of clear focus. Even Simon Robinson’s extensive insert-notes to their retrospective double-CD admits his doubts about the group’s struggle to find ‘a real identity’. He also expresses doubts about their ‘ill-chosen covers’. Witness their earliest demos – unreleased until their CD compilation years. These are home-rehearsal tapes from 1964, the tail-end of the first Beat-Boom wave, and it shows. A sing-along run-through of “ZipA-Dee-Doo-Dah” borrowed from Phil Spector’s Bob B Soxx And The Blue Jeans, but already covered by the Big Three. Competent harmony arrangements backed by catchy up-tempo guitar-and-drums, with Sheila soloing the ‘hey Mr Bluebird’ verse. There are two from the Fats Domino canon, an uncertain slow-paced retread of “Walking To New Orleans”, and “Let The Four Winds Blow” fronted by Sheila with the boy’s vocal back-up and inventive drum effects. As a nod in the de rigueur direction of R&B, they do a passable take on Little Walter’s “My Babe”, with harmonica-break and the boys trading vocals. Then it’s back to Sheila for her breezy version of “Cottonfields”, not exactly a classic, but at least five years before the Beach Boys chart with their own arrangement of the same song in May 1970.

At this earliest phase of their collective story they’d just amalgamated from two rival combos based around ‘Harrow County School’, a NW London redbrick boasting earlier alumni Michael Portillo, Clive Anderson, Simon Napier-Bell and old-time comedian Cardew Robinson. The two Carters, with vocalist Andy Ross (aka Tait), were performing as the Lightnings (although, due to the school’s boys-only policy, Sheila wasn’t a pupil!). While Roger Glover – ‘bass guitarist, poet, songwriter’ was with the Madisons, playing school dances and youth clubs alongside guitarist Tony Lander (aka Bareham), and Harvey Shield (aka Schildkraut), ‘Blues enthusiast and beat-layer-down in chief’ (‘Record Mirror’). Both groups competed at the End of Term Concert.

Once their schoolyard days were over – although Harvey stayed on a further year and despite Roger going up to ‘Hornsey Art College’, the two groups fused. Pooling resources to become Episode Six in April 1964, with shared vocals and support-harmonies democratically passed around from Andy, to Sheila and to Harvey. They learned their craft rehearsing in the Carter’s front-room, driven to venues by their Dad, piecing together an impressively wide repertoire. Turned down by Decca, they nevertheless scored a four-week German club-residency, at the Frankfurt ‘Arcadia’. When Andy dropped out, his place was taken by Ian Gillan – another old Harrow-boy, recruited from Wainwright’s Gentlemen, in time for their pro debut at the ‘Oldfield Hotel’ on London’s Greenford Road. ‘I joined Episode Six because they had a recording contract’ he later confided to ‘New Musical Express’ (27 March 1971). Well, not yet they hadn’t, although its first steps would take him into recording. ‘They were very professional’ he went on, ‘everything was very clinical and organised, but I didn’t realise that until later.’ The ‘Record Mirror’ snippet calls Ian ‘lead singer and fanatical Elvis Presley fan’ – well, he did score an October 1980 Gillan hit with Elvis’ “Trouble”!

Another tranche of demos from 1965 are more promising, headed off with the ‘What’d I Say’ chords and Sheila’s lead voice on “Love Is A Swingin’ Thing” with the boys doing the ‘bop-boppa-shoo-wop’ background harmonies (replicating the Shirelles old 1961 ‘B’-side of “Soldier Boy”). But the lyric, on closer examination has something of a prescient sexual liberation frisson to it, ‘I’m gonna tell my tale, I’m gonna have my fling’ she teases, ‘I may be young today, but tomorrow I will be grown’. Then, with piping organ solo, ‘some people say love is always this, that or the other’, all bright and bouncy, but ‘I don’t need a wedding gown, I don’t need a diamond ring’. Unexceptional sentiments today. At the time the freedom she was celebrating attacks the entire safe nuclear family ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’ thing. Before the decade was officially swinging, this was a definite advance tremor. Another track, “Steal Your Heart Away” was penned by Bluesmaster Bobby Parker, the ‘B’-side of his 1961 hit “Watch Your Step”. The Six add a playful vocal interplay. The male-voice vocalist – probably Ian, doesn’t care about her other man, he just ‘wanna squeeze you’. ‘Yes you can’ Sheila responds flirtatiously. ‘Ah – Oh – YEAH!’ he burbles with delight. And this time, when they auditioned for Pye, A&R man Tony Reeve signs them.

EPISODE THREE:

SWINGING SINGLES

There were lots of aspiring Beat-Groups around at the time. Unknown to them, other parts of the future Deep Purple story were working in various line-ups in the same swinging scene. Jon Lord was out gigging with Mod-Soul group The Artwoods. Ritchie Blackmore doing session-work for eccentric producer Joe Meek, he can supposedly be heard on Heinz “Just Like Eddie” no.5 hit in August 1963, while he was playing with the Outlaws. By 1966 Ian Paice was drumming for The Maze, with vocalist Rod Evans. But Episode Six were burning with more drive and commitment than most.

The Hollies were another group very much around. They’d begun as a covers band too, like pretty much everyone did. But were now making concerted efforts to push their own material, which Allan Clarke, Graham Nash and Tony Hicks wrote under the collective alias ‘L Ransford’. A songwriter’s demo of their “Put Yourself In My Place” – destined for their September 1965 LP ‘Hollies’, reached the group. So it became ‘A’-side for the debut Episode Six single issued in January of the New Year, with ringing guitar and tambourine, pleading vocals and harmonica break. Admittedly, the Hollies original does have more bite and tension, compensated for by the cover’s more melodically-smooth ooze. But it’s a strong song, open to creative interpretation. It established Episode Six as a name to watch out for. Flip the record over though, and the ‘B’-side perhaps packs more significance. “That’s All I Want” constitutes Roger Glover’s songwriting debut. Its deceptively light wafting harmonies soften a manipulatively controlling lyric, firmly asserting ‘I want you to show me your love, in every possible way, and every time that you can’. Meanwhile, the group does studio try-outs on a couple of other titles. The standard “The Way You Look Tonight”, and Burt Bacharach-Hal David’s jumpy “My Little Red Book”, most closely associated with Love. Although the songs continue to be a part of their live set, and there would be later studio outtake attempts to record the definitive Episode Six versions, they were shelved.

The Tokens wrote themselves into Pop history with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in 1961, but continued as a creative writing and production unit for outfits as diverse as the Chiffons through to Dawn. Meanwhile they entered the US ‘Billboard’ chart in April 1966 with their “I Hear Trumpets Blow” (BT Puppy 518), which peaked at no.30. Sensing hit potential Episode Six grab studio-time over a fast turn-around 48-hours into Good Friday to get their UK version out first. Not that it does them much good. An attractively effervescent single with a ‘ba-ba-ba-ba’ chorus framing the tale of a poor boy’s love for ‘a fair young maiden’, it’s an adornment to their retrospective CD in decades to come, but was largely passed over at the time. Again, it’s backed by a group original, “True Love Is Funny That Way” – penned by drummer Harvey Shield this time. Fuzz-guitar flashes adding a harder edge to its call-and-response ‘how does it feel?’ – ‘it feels good!’

Where next? Ah yes, the infallible golden ticket into the Top Ten is that magical Beatles cover-song. It always works. Doesn’t it? And there it is, in amongst the strange weirdness’s of ‘Revolver’, Paul McCartney’s soft-focus close-harmony “Here There And Everywhere”. All manner of no-hoper non-entities had broken through with fortuitous Beatles songs – who now cares about the Overlanders, St Louis Union or Truth? It was a means to an end, a utilitarian no-effort guaranteed hit. Except it wasn’t. Ian takes lead vocals. The label is Pye red. It was voted a resounding ‘hit’ by BBC-TV’s ‘Juke Box Jury’ panel. They showcase it live as part of package tour headlined by Dusty Springfield, with the Alan Price Set, Dave Berry, The Settlers, plus Davis & Jonathan. It got heavy rotation radio-play across the Pirates – especially ‘Radio London’, yes. But massive sales, no. Flip it over, sweet-tempered and eclectic, there was Roger Glover’s “Mighty Morris Ten”. Betraying and warping his affection for the West Coast surf and drag-racing scene, by distorting it through a singularly English quirkiness. He’s ‘doing the ton’ in his ‘ninety-six year-old Morris Ten’, burning up the inside lane ‘down the Harrow Road’ (not far from the Gayton Road address of their old school). A diverse, strange incompatibility of tracks. But already a pattern that would continue.

EPISODE FOUR:

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

So far, three strong hotly-tipped singles. Still no major breakthrough. Time for a rethink. A shift of strategy. The label was happy to go along with a little diversification. So Sheila does her solo single. Charles Aznavour – satirised by hipsters as ‘Charles As-no-voice’, does his smoocher “I Will Warm Your Heart (Je Te Rechaufferai)” on his 1965 Reprise-label LP ‘His Love Songs In English’. Sheila wasn’t exactly keen. But Dusty Springfield had been doing fine with big Euro-centred ballads. And with its doomy organ leading into lushly romantic strings, the label insisted it was perfect for her. Others would consider that the ‘B’-side, “Incense”, showcases her vocal range and what ‘Record Mirror’ called her ‘belting-style’ strength to better effect. A deep club favourite written by Jimmy Miller it had started out recorded by Steve Winwood under the now much sought-after alias of the Anglos.

Safely back under their regular nomenclature, “Love Hate Revenge” was laid down immediately prior to Episode Six winging out for eight-week cabaret dates in the Beirut ‘Casino Du Liban’. For its American release via Elektra the Yardbirds-style ‘hey-hey-hey’ clash of gong break is edited out and replaced by the kind of freaky theramin-quaver electro-whine designed to target the newly-emerging Psychedelic scene. Uniquely of its time, again there’s a contrasting flip, borrowed from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers ‘Drivin’ You Wild’ LP (Music For Pleasure MFP 1121, 1966), with a faux-Soul ‘in the midnight hour’ lyric.

Then, “Morning Dew” might just about be as good as Episode Six ever got. The song has a disputed history, with probable trad roots. Although credited to Canadian Folkie Bonnie Dobson it was lifted by Fred Neil, but became most powerfully associated through Tim Rose’s raw intensity. When the Grateful Dead cover it for their debut album, it carries credits to both Dobson and Rose. The lyric is sufficiently evasive to allow all manner of interpretations, but centre around a two-way post-apocalyptic dialogue. A complex simplicity wound around and into the CND anti-nukes thread running through and irradiating the decade. The clean riff picked out semi-acoustic, with the doomy bite of crashing drums. Three Episode Six voices switch in the Jefferson Airplane manner, with haunting effect, most tightly and effectively alternating between Ian’s ‘now there’s no more morning dew’, followed by Sheila’s ghost-response ‘what they were saying all these years was true’. There’s undeniable power here, which captures over into the later live version. This might have been the breakthrough moment. I remember it on the radio. In fact, it climbs the ‘Radio London’ chart, as high as no.6, but the Pirate’s charts were based on DJ’s whims, not hard across-the-counter sales. More vitally, the newly-launched BBC Radio 1 effectively ignores it. Admittedly I bought the Tim Rose single, but rated the Episode Six version too.

But wait. To be convincing, a song like “Morning Dew” requires commitment. And flip the single over and you find…? the cutesy-coy “Sunshine Girl”. It opens with the rhythmic crunch of a stomping great drumbeat some might relate to the Beach Boys “I’m Waiting For The Day” ‘Pet Sounds’ track, before lapsing into the kind of fizzing ‘ba-ba-ba-ba’ Bubble-Pop left over from a Herman’s Hermits or Cowsills session, with soaring West Coast falsetto swoops. Two sides, two different bands!

EPISODE FIVE: DESPERATE DAZE

As the tectonic plates of Pop shift, Episode Six were busy keeping it all in the air, endlessly in play. Into that brief and singularly British brand of freak-beat where all the former Mod-Soul groups overnight discover phasing, fuzz-boxes, beads, and off-the-shelf nonsense-surrealist lyrics. Glorious while it lasted. In a very strange and rare place, it marked the outer limits of the Episode Six style-adventures. When I talked to Jon Lord about his changes with the Artwoods across the same period he laughed ‘at least we never wore kaftans’ – a pointed snipe at Episode Six. Check the psychedelic cover-swirl of the ‘Love, Hate, Revenge’ compilation CD, showing the Six in very Hippie regalia. Not that they were ever totally convincing psychedelicatessens. Their first manifestation came in the guise of a Graham Carter solo single. Sheila had already done her solo project. Graham undertook his through the strange alias of Neo Maya, which determined not only that it escaped notice at the time, but that it was subsequently forgotten – until reclaimed much later by Deep Purple researchers. “I Won’t Hurt You” uses gauzy vocals inviting ‘strike me with your lightning’ against what sounds like stand-up bass, with sudden outbreaks of horns and strings, and a spaced-poetry lyric worthy of Marc Bolan – ‘your mouth’s a constellation’, caught in a spacey-pale blue storm.

Yet the ‘B’-side is stranger. A high-hat cymbal shimmers, drums rattle an accelerating riff as a voice-over narration recites details of unexplained X-Filed “UFO” sightings. A January 3rd Boeing airliner pilot reports a wingless aircraft holding close-formation with them, then veering away at five times their velocity. A conical ‘glowing object’ sighted March 12th over SE England, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey. And three orange discs observed April 7th over New York. Radar reports read negative in each instance. There’s a percussive barrage. But no melody. No song. Almost a great leap forward to the ‘sampling’ fad of Paul Hardcastle’s 1985 “19”. A hugely underrated curio.

While the group itself responds a month later with tunesmith Roger Glover’s first ‘A’-side composition, “I Can See Through You”, a perfectly charming Pop-Psyche single with dancing flute. For the line ‘though you’re living underground’ there’s faint phasing on the last word, then the bassline descends into a fast-switching instrumental sequence over time-changes and drum stomp – until it reduces back down to just woodwind. Although the wistful line ‘you will never touch the sky’ proved prophetic, the track is very much in a groove with Roger’s “Plastic Love” outtake recorded around the same time, but unissued until decades later. Here he’s going to a ‘paper station, riding on a cardboard train’ – no ‘plasticine porters with looking-glass ties’, but we get the picture. And ‘did you hear the dying poet scream?’… well, there are other excursions into oddness. Their live 1968 “I Am The Boss” is a nursery-rhyme populated by ‘Hans Christian Handkerchief’, plus nonsense lines ‘Charlie the chair was sat-upon’, ‘Cyril Celery is crunchable’ and a possible political snipe at ‘Old Wedgewood Benn is a funny chap, he’s a door-stop’? It closes with the other group members chiming in ‘He’s quite mad and you’ve been had!’ The previously unissued “Time And Motion Man”, is a kind of ‘Poor Man’s Son’ which is neither freaky enough to be Freak-beat nor Pop enough to be Pop. And there’s Roger’s self-pitying hard-luck story “Only Lonely People”.

But to offset all that healthy madness, just check the immaculately tailored flipside of “I Can See Through You”… “When I Fall In Love” is pure cheese, the Lettermen via a Beach Boys ‘B’-side, within the same closest-of-harmonies context as outtake “The Way You Look Tonight”. Perfectly executed, sure, but in the repertoire of another band maybe, another career. Is this an exercise in hedging bets? In the group’s curious hodge-podge of styles which takes eclectic – which is good, out beyond the rim of cohesion – which is not. Although the single dragged their Pye contract limply to an end, and drummer Harvey was the first group-member to parachute out of the line-up, there was more to come. On the upbeat, they signed a management deal with NEMS. And there were two one-off singles, the first – abbreviated to The Episode, with the yellow-label MGM, and the second through the personal intervention of Les Reed’s Chapter One Records.

With stand-in drummer John Kerrison (ex of a reformed post-Johnny Kidd Pirates), “Little One” consists of Ian’s lead voice surrounded by light pleasantly-building harmonies that might have worked for the kind of studio-concocted candyfloss confections contrived usually by Rogers’ Greenaway and Cooke, and fronted by session-men like Tony Burrows under such names as Vanity Fair, White Plains, Edison Lighthouse or Harmony Grass (say, “Move In A Little Closer Baby”). Nothing more substantial. New producer Mike Hurst – who had scored hits for Cat Stevens and Dusty Springfield, introduced soft horns and a catchy Fortunes-style ‘You’ve Got Your Troubles’ falsetto hook. It was backed by the first Glover-and-Gillan songwriting collaboration, although “Wide Smiles” is a paradigm shift away from their Deep Purple compositions. Its ‘be-doobie-doobie-do’ is as catchy as a viral TV-ad jingle, or the theme-tune for the kind of youth-trendy TV sitcom that used to feature Paula Wilcox or Richard O’Sullivan. Why are we talking such insubstantial disposable Pop trifles? Because such bright shiny baubles were guaranteed cash-generators. Maybe for Episode Six there was a sense of opportunities missed. Of time slipping away. They’d tried their damnedest with all their abilities set to stun, a row of class singles bristling with fire and energy, and fallen below expectations. Maybe coasting it easy might yet do the trick? Naturally, it didn’t.

Their live set-list and demos hardly inspire confidence either. Take a listen. Grouped for the ‘Cornflakes And Crazyfoam’ compilation CD as ‘The Ultimate Covers Band’, their competent “Him Or Me” perfectly replicates all the Paul Revere And The Raiders harmony-breaks with nothing of the originals energy or urgency. There’s an unnecessary showband take on Simon And Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade Of Winter”. Plus Love’s intricate “The Castle”, as well as other stuff by Bob Dylan (“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”), Moby Grape (“Can’t Be So Bad”) or the Doors (“Light My Fire”). The point, surely, is not how accurately they Xerox, it’s to create something as uniquely original of their own. Even Simon Robinson’s insert-notes concede that ‘their live shows had become an eclectic mix of Pop covers, West Coast songs, comedy turns and originals. This made for a great night out, but left audiences wondering exactly where the band themselves wanted to go.’ A PR promo-blurb from Gloria Bristow management seems equally confused, describing ‘A kaleidoscope of vibrating vocal excitement 8 miles high and 9 miles deep that’s Episode Six live on stage… and in cabaret they’re pure professionalism in motion.’ Despite which, crowd-pleasing ‘YouTube’ clips of “Morning Dew” and “I Hear Trumpets Blow” – salvaged from a 1967 German TV Pop-show, catch them in full off-the-peg Carnaby Street Hippie regalia, with Graham in face-paint and Ian in headband and beads. They retain considerable period magic.

There were ups, downs and knockbacks. As, elsewhere, the first Deep Purple line-up was already firming, issuing its debut single with their heavyed-up take on Joe South’s “Hush” climbing to an American no.4. Episode Six’s live “Slow Down” – Larry Williams via the Beatles, at least shows trace-elements of the same guitar heavyosity. But things were fraying. Although Kerrison was a fine drummer, he’d never quite found his place within the group’s tight-knit loyalties, rooted in their shared schooldays. In July, he was replaced by Mick Underwood of the Herd. His more Rock-solid playing is there underpinning the quasi-liturgical voices of “Lucky Sunday” – written by Johnny Worth under his ‘Les Vandyke’ alias (he’d already written “What Do You Want?” for Adam Faith, plus many more hit-songs), backed by Gillan/Glover’s “Mr Universe”, a howl against god, destiny, or existence personified, asking cosmic question ‘are we just the bubbles in your beer?’. Stronger than recent releases with percussion, keening guitar and Glover’s solid bass foundation, manic laughter and absurd voice exaggeration, even while borrowing a raft of Traffic’s “Mr Fantasy” bass-build to do it. Alone among all the Episode Six back-catalogue it would survive to become part of Ian Gillan’s repertoire, titling the 1979 Gillan LP ‘Mr Universe’.

Finally, “Mozart Versus The Rest” was definitely a last-chance grab at the passing moment. Dave Edmund’s Love Sculpture had charted with a speed-guitar Khachaturian. They could do the same with Ludwig Van? No. Vivaldi? No. Why not… Mozart? It was fast. Nifty fretwork. It was deranged, with Tony Lander’s matching more moody instrumental ‘B’-side. They played it live on the BBC’s ‘Radio One Club’ (16th December). It caught on. Got radio-played to general enthusiastic response. Like so much of what had gone before, it seemed on the brink of breaking out into bigger things. Then it vanished.

“Mozart’ was totally unlike anything they’d done before. But then again, there was never a single Episode Six ‘sound’ – only several identities. This was merely another of their multiple personalities. They never really found their path and went down it. In their grab-bag of styles any one of their singles might have caught on. The close-harmony surf-derived ones. The sharp Pop-Psyche. The Folk-Rock of “Morning Dew”. The deranged instrumental. But collectively they form an unwieldy body of work. A Smoothie-Blender of a group. An all-things to all-punters group. A composite of various stylistic devices whipped up together into a sometime satisfying completeness.

‘In the end, there were two ways of thinking in the band’ Gillan told ‘New Musical Express’ (27 March 1971), referring to the conflicting Pop/cabaret and Heavy Rock tendencies, ‘and for about a year I felt really stagnant.’ Elsewhere he explained how he felt he was treading the proverbial mill, ‘I’d been a Rock ‘n’ Roll singer, then I got into Episode Six and I was really beginning to go downhill a bit, singing-wise. I was writing too, but Episode Six didn’t want to record any of Roger’s or my songs because none of the others were involved’ (‘Melody Maker’ 17 September 1971). If there had been hits it might have been different. As it was first Ian, then Roger Glover jumped ship to shift into the second Deep Purple line-up in mid-1969. There’s talk of negotiations with Episode Six lawyers and manager Gloria Bristow who was looking out for the group, and a release fee being paid, but the new configuration was finalised in time to create the epic ‘Deep Purple In Rock’ (June 1970). Graham Carter took the opportunity of dropping out around the same time.

For a while Episode Six carried on as a four-piece, drafting in Johnny Gustafson on bass, before he split off to form Quatermass – taking Mick Underwood with him. A final line-up centred on Sheila – and alternated as The Sheila Carter Band, with the loyal Tony Lander on guitar, and a rhythm section of Tony Dangerfield (bass) and Dave Lawson (drums, later of Greenslade). It took the name through until 1974. So Episode Six had lasted a decade. Longer than most of their contemporaries. But there would be no more. Not until the archivists and Rock archaeologists began delving into their history, and the first of the LP compilations was pieced together to answer a new ripple of interest in the group’s lost legacy.

EPISODE SIX:

EPISODE BY EPISODE

21 January 1966 – “Put Yourself In My Place” c/w “That’s All I Want” (Pye 7N 17018) Deep Purple’s Gillan and Glover’s recording debut, not the later Isley Brothers song of the same name, but credited to ‘L Ransford’ which is Hollies Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks and Graham Nash songwriting alias. The ‘B’-side is written by Roger Glover.

29 April 1966 – “I Hear Trumpets Blow” c/w “True Love Is Funny That Way” (Pye 7N 17110), cover of US hit by Tokens (Mitch Margo, Phil Margo, Hank Medress and Jay Siegal), recorded in fast turn-around 48-hours on Good Friday, ‘B’-side written by Harvey Shields

19 August 1966 – “Here, There And Everywhere” c/w “Mighty Morris Ten” (Pye 7N 17147) Lennon-McCartney ‘A’-side, Roger Glover ‘B’-side

4 November 1966 – “I Will Warm Your Heart” c/w “Incense” (Pye 7N 17194) issued as by Sheila Carter & Episode Six. By Lees/Charles Aznavour, ‘B’-side written by Jimmy Miller/Fallon, with Ian Gillan on organ

3 February 1967 – “Love, Hate, Revenge” c/w “Baby Baby Baby” (Pye 7N 17244) by Adams/Levin, with ‘B’-side by Jam

9 June 1967 – “Morning Dew” c/w “Sunshine Girl” (Pye 7N 17330), written by Bonnie Dobson/Tim Rose, and recorded 10 and 11 May with Gillan/Shields vocals. ‘B’-side written and vocals by Roger Glover

September 1967 – “I Won’t Hurt You” c/w “UFO” (Pye 7N 17371) Graham Carter’s solo single, issued as by Neo Maya. The song was originally done by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

6 October 1967 – “I Can See Through You” c/w “When I Fall In Love” (Pye 7N 17376) recorded 3 and 4 July, ‘A’-side written by Roger Glover

3 May 1968 – “Little One” c/w “Wide Smiles” (MGM 1409) issued as by The Episode, recorded 20 and 21 February. ‘B’-side written by Glover and Gillan. Reviewed by ‘Disc’ as ‘probably their most commercial release’

25 October 1968 – “Lucky Sunday” c/w “Mr Universe” (Chapter One CH 103) recorded 3 September, ‘B’-side by Gillan and Glover. Reviewed by ‘Melody Maker’ as ‘a glorious sound, bristling with hit potential. Here are a group who have long deserved a hit and look like breaking through at last’

14 February1969 – “Mozart Vs The Rest” c/w “Jack D’Or” (Chapter One CH 104) recorded 20 December, ‘A’-side an arrangement of Mozart’s “Rondo À La Turk” by Tony Lander, and ‘B’-side written by Lander. Produced by David Balfe

‘RRReady… Steady… RRRave!’:

The Albums

1987 – ‘Put Yourself In My Place’ (PRT Records PYL6026) with side one: (1) “Put Yourself In My Place”, (2) “That’s All A Want”, (3) “I Hear Trumpets Blow”, (4) “True Love Is Funny That Way”, (5) “Here, There And Everywhere”, (6) “Mighty Morris Ten”, (7) “I Will Warm Your Heart”, and side two: (1) “Incense”, (2) “Love, Hate, Revenge”, (3) “Baby Baby Baby”, (4) “Morning Dew”, (5) “Sunshine Girl”, (6) “I Can See Through You”, (7) “When I Fall In Love”. Liner notes by Brian Hogg

1991 – ‘Footsteps To Fame Vol.1’ (Repertoire REP4184-WZ) one of a multitude of Sixties and Psychedelic compilations to include Episode Six tracks, this one has “That’s All I Want” and “Put Yourself In My Place” alongside other tracks by Riot Squad, Spectres and the Bystanders

1991 – ‘The Complete Episode Six: The Roots Of Deep Purple’ (Sequel Records NEX CD156) (1) “My Babe”, (2) “Put Yourself In My Place”, (3) “That’s All A Want”, (4) “I Hear Trumpets Blow”, (5) “True Love Is Funny That Way”, (6) “Here, There And Everywhere”, (7) “Mighty Morris Ten”, (8) “I Will Warm Your Heart”, (9) “Incense”, (10) “Love, Hate, Revenge”, (11) “Baby Baby Baby”, (12) “Morning Dew”, (13) “Sunshine Girl”, (14) “I Won’t Hurt You”, (15) “UFO”, (16) “I Can See Through You”, (77) “When I Fall In Love”, (18) “The Way You Look Tonight”, (19) “My Little Red Book”, (20) “Plastic Love”, (21) “Time And Motion Man”, (22) “Only Lonely People”, (23) “Little One”, (24) “Wide Smiles”, (25) “Lucky Sunday”, (26) “Mr Universe”, (27) “Mozart Versus The Rest”, (28) “Jack D’Or”

1997 – ‘BBC Radio 1 Live 1968/1969’ (RPM Records RPM178) Intro: Radio One Club Sheila and lan Interview: “A Hazy Shade Of Winter”. Sheila Picks The Numbers 1: “Morning Dew”, “That’s The Way Life Goes”, “Light My Fire”. Sheila Picks The Numbers 2: “Jesse James”. Sheila Picks The Numbers 3: “Monster In Paradise”, “Slow Down”. Tony and Sheila Interview, lan Gillan Interview: “Mozart Vs. The Rest”. Sheila Picks The Numbers 4: “Rolling Stones Medley”, “Stay With Me Baby”, “The Castle”, “Spanish Caravan”, “I Am A Cloud (take 2)”, “I Am The Boss”, “Orange Air”, “River Deep Mountain High”, “I Am A Cloud (take 3)”, “Can’t Be So Bad”, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”, “Morning”, “Been Such A Long Way Home”, Coda

1999 – ‘All You Need Is Covers: The Songs Of The Beatles’ (Castle 1396 CM000) includes Episode Six “Here There And Everywhere” alongside other Lennon-McCartney songs done by Tommy Quickly, the Truth and Overlanders. The album reissued in 2006

2001 – ‘Pre Purple People’ (Purple Records Ltd) compilation of various groups which included members of the later Deep Purple, with four Episode Six rarities not available elsewhere. “Have You Ever Been There” is a previously unreleased folk-pop ballad by Roger Glover, “Love Hate Revenge” is the American single edit, with the weird psychedelic instrumental break of oscillating sounds, “I Am A Cloud” and “I Am The Boss” are taken from a March 1969 radio broadcast, different from those on the Episode Six compilation ‘The Radio One Club Sessions’

2001 – ‘Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond 1964-1969’ (Rhino R2 76787), with “Love Hate Revenge” by Episode Six, plus other tracks by Creation, Smoke, Idle Race and Tomorrow

November 2002 – ‘Cornflakes And Crazyfoam’ (Purple Records PUR 319D), fifty-two track compilation of largely previously-unissued tracks taken from the group’s 1964-1969 archive of demos, live material and acetates. Includes “Gentleman Of The Park” – previously only available on the soundtrack LP of the ‘Bicyclettes De Belsize’ movie, plus Ian Gillan singing Sandie Shaw’s “Always Something There To Remind Me” and Sheila doing Gene Pitney’s “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”

2005 – ‘Love, Hate, Revenge’ (2CD set, Castle Music CMEDD 894) expanded double-CD of earlier Sequel ‘Complete Episode Six’ compilation, with twenty-two extra tracks, thirteen of them previously unissued. CD1 (1) “Put Yourself In My Place”, (2) “That’s All A Want”, (3) “I Hear Trumpets Blow”, (4) “True Love Is Funny That Way”, (5) “Here, There And Everywhere”, (6) “Mighty Morris Ten”, (7) “Love, Hate, Revenge”, (8) “Baby Baby Baby”, (9) “Morning Dew”, (10) “Sunshine Girl”, (11) “I Can See Through You”, (12) “When I Fall In Love”, (13) “Little One”, (14) “Wide Smiles”, (15) “Lucky Sunday”, (16) “Mr Universe”, (17) “Mozart Versus The Rest”, (18) “Jak D’Or”, (19) “I Will Warm Your Heart”, (20) “Incense”, (21), “I Won’t Hurt You”, (22) “UFO”. CD2 (1) “Love, Hate, Revenge (US)”, (2) “The Way You Look Tonight”, (3) “My Little Red Book”, (4) “Plastic Love”, (5) “Time And Motion Man”, (6) “Only Lonely People”, (7) “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah”, (8) “Cottonfields”, (9) “My Babe”, (10) “Love Is A Swingin’ Thing”, (11) “Steal Your Heart Away”, (12) “Walking To New Orleans”, (13) “Let The Four Winds Blow”, (14) “Mozart Versus The Rest (live)”, (15) “Him Or Me”, (16) “Hazy Shade Of Winter”, (17) “Monster In Paradise”, (18) “Orange Air”, (19) “The Castle”, (20) “Slow Down”, (21) “I Am The Boss”, (22) “Morning Dew (live)”

2007 – ‘This Is Psychedelia’ (Metro Triples METRT CD827) includes Episode Six track “I Can See Through You” plus others by Smoke, Yardbirds, Byrds, and Strawberry Alarm Clock

2008 – ‘Girl On A Motorcycle And Les Bicyclettes De Belsize’ (RPM Retro 840) double-soundtrack CD of Les Reed’s movie scores, includes Episode Six rare track “Gentlemen Of The Park”

2008 – ‘The Sound Of The Sixties’ (EVA 080150), Episode Six track “I Can See Through You”, alongside others by Maze, the Sorrows, Blossom Toes and Creation

Live: 'FELIX DENNIS - Did I Mention The Free Wine...? Tour 2004'

Event Review of:

FELIX DENNIS:

DID I MENTION

THE FREE WINE…?

TOUR 2004

at ‘The Wardrobe’, St Peter’s Square, Leeds

A Lit-Trip into ‘the pull of dreams

where death plays hide-&-seek…’

Can a poet BUY Literary credibility? The ‘Wardrobe’ is one of the nation’s Top Fifty Bars according to an ‘Observer’ guide. A ‘New York’-style Jazz Bar hung with moody monochrome photos of Miles Davis, Francis Bacon, Bobby Darin, Roland Kirk and John Lennon, frequented by the likes of Brian Auger, Marc Ribot, Sam Rivers… and me. And tonight it’s been subsumed into hosting a unique literary launch. Most poetry publishing means a visit to the nearest Mall instant-print, followed by kitchen-table collating and stapling, or perhaps – more ambitiously, that pile of five-hundred litho’d booklets you can’t get rid of stashed under the bed. But when you’re ‘maverick’ publisher Felix Dennis – listed no.65 on ‘Business Age’s ‘Rich 500’, your ‘Lone Wolf’ (Hutchinson, 2004) collection gets the full lavish print-job plus CD and tour-DVD insert, promoted through a full high-profile international tour, helicoptored to venues, with (‘Don’t Forget The…’) free wine and canapés. That don’t necessarily make the poems any better. Or – by the same token, any worse. After all, wasn’t his previous volume – ‘A Glass Half Full’ (Hutchinson, 2002), the best-selling poetry book for forty years? Sure it was. Nothing to do with the sixteen-piece road-crew, support-team audio-visual people, or the promo tour T-shirts.

He slumps down now in a grey frizz of hair and beard, saffron shirt and brown waistcoat, intoning ‘never go back, never return to the haunts of your youth’. A poem to his mother. Affectionately, and effectively attacking his parents’ generation who ‘murdered what was decent, for respectability’. Then whiplashing ‘perhaps YOU’D like to tell them Madam?’ at some lone woman who has the temerity to whisper as he reads. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, by age fourteen he’d already been expelled from four schools (‘I was a failure at everything except cross-country running and English literature’), he drummed Howlin Wolf covers with R&B no-hopers The Flamingos (remembered in a poem that rhymes ‘Charlie Watts’ with ‘acne spots’), and worked as a Harrow County Council grave-digger. His poem “Snakeskin Boots” remembers seduction, sex, and ‘her streaming flesh aglow’ in Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1964.

He wasn’t in at the start of ‘Oz’, but – broke, and needing cash to fund his girlfriend’s abortion, he joins as a street-seller around issue no.11. To Richard Neville he was ‘younger than me, longer-haired, scruffier, with a rough-and-ready London charm’. To Felix “we were clappy-happy, we were hippy-dippy / we were building Eden by the mighty Mississippi” (a poem he shamelessly pipes through the ‘Dennis Pbl’ phone-stacking system as you await your connection). Another poem finds him on the Kings Road, 1967, in wolfskin coat, loon flares, with a snake-hipped eighteen-year-old girl by his side. Part of a revolution where ‘we talked a lot… but I’ve forgotten what we said’, and where their ‘ladies’ made the tea. By edition no.17 he was fully on-board, writing reviews and recruiting music ads for his ‘mOZic’ section, even setting up a Jimmy Page interview. As Company Director he accused Richard Neville of editing ‘for your mates with degrees’, suggesting that by not going ‘over the heads of our readers we could… triple our circulation’ (in practice 50,000). Two things are at first apparent from this. His feel for the popular touch. And his instinct for commercial possibilities. On 5th August 1971, Judge Argyle sentenced him to nine months for his involvement in the ‘School-Kids Issue’, less than his co-editors because he was ‘younger and very much less intelligent’. Yet after capitalising on the trial by lampooning it in his ‘Cozmic Comics’ he jumps the interactive CD-Rom boom with ‘Personal Computer World’ and ‘MacUser’, the next step up in building a publishing group with an estimated value of £155 million with ‘Blender’, ‘Stuff’, ‘This Week’ – and his flagship title, ‘Maxim’. Today, publishing is all about focusing demographic profiles, niche marketing, consumer-group targeting to maximise advertising spend – perhaps we’re all too fragmented and post-modern aware to launch on naiveté and enthusiasm as ‘Oz’ did. With ‘Maxim’ the radicalism extends no further than a 2005 calendar of photo-elision nudes – Margaret Thatcher, Cherie Blair and Diana Spencer. Not that he’s looking back.

He champions science, but fears its potential in “23 Roads To Hell” about Crick & Watson’s DNA, “Where Knowledge Falters” for Darwin, a “Sonnet For H2O” about life’s origins as a sea-borne ‘weeping fuse of slime’, then attacks the make-over cult of plastic surgery as ‘mad greedy fools with steel scalpels’. He even gets to rhyme ‘know not’ with ‘robot’. Because his poems all rhyme, they use traditional verse and metre structure, they are direct and narrative. They can be effective, in “White Vase” about Hitler’s suicide, ‘two figures on a sofa side by side’ (delivered with an electronic pulse soundtrack), and “Who Was The Better Man” – a competing dialogue for dead friend and fellow ‘Oz’ veteran Jon Goodchild. You might have reservations about his forthcoming customised Nursery Rhymes project, until he reads “The House That Crack Built” about his period of cocaine dependency. Less convincing are the poor little rich boy regrets, of sacrificing ‘the fawn’ of love for ambition. The mansions with room enough to lose yourself in. The pain of firing staff (in “Downsizing”). This is the man who once turned up at Marylebone Magistrate Court dressed in a school uniform. A man whose genitals have been sketched by David Hockney. A man who once chanted ‘die die’ to David Frost and then shot him live on TV – with a waterpistol. A man once articulately defended at the Old Bailey by John ‘Rumpole’ Mortimer QC. Now his poems spoof ‘all the young dudes, grown old,/ hair a whiter shade of pale,/ memories a purple haze,/ getting limp instead if laid’.

Can a poet BUY Literary credibility? Felix Dennis sings, he shouts, he emotes, his voice dips into a curiously Ben Elton gruffness for emphasis. But take away the choice of French red or white wine, the four screens (two live blow-ups, one running tie-in video, another scrolling the poems line-by-line), the podium decked out with his own lyncanthrope image, the mike and spots, the name-drops to Melvyn Bragg, Sean Bean, Courtney Love, beam him down to read a twenty-minute slot to thirty people in a grimy room over a pub… and there’s stuff here that would still work – his ‘Friends Reunited’ poem “On Attending A Reunion” written just four hours earlier, his Blues For Robert Johnson (‘I sat last night in Soho / blues falling down like hail’). Perhaps – unlike the Sancerre Blanc 2003 Domaine Vacheron, it’s only sour grapes that makes you suspicious. Perhaps, in an ideal world, new poetry would be promoted with all the razzamatazz of a Pop CD. Just that you leave wondering, how much of that good response is really down to the free wine…?

Visit:- www.felixdennis.com for more insights, and
details including video-footage of the tour

Published in:
‘TEARS IN THE FENCE no.40: Spring’
(UK – April 2005)
visit the excellent
‘TEARS IN THE FENCE’ at  http://tearsinthefence.com