CD Reissue: FLUX OF PINK INDIANS

‘I LOVE TUBE DISASTERS…!’

Album Review of:

‘STRIVE TO SURVIVE CAUSING LEAST

SUFFERING POSSIBLE + NEU SMELL’

by FLUX OF PINK INDIANS

(One Little Indian TPLP 1172, August 2013)

‘Punk belongs to the Punks, not the businessmen,

they need us, we don’t need them…’

                                              (“Take Heed”)

If you were there, if you were part of it, you already know this. If you weren’t… well, there was a time, before the Boy-Bands won. A time when there was more to music than just celebrity status. Although there was mischief aplenty, Flux Of Pink Indians’ strivings were always at the service of their radical politics causes. Which were the regular Anarcho-Punk short-fuses of anti-nukes, veggie Animal Rights, anti-sexism, anti-religion and anti-closed-mind bigotry. A litany of values pretty-much consistent throughout sub-culture protest in general. But nevertheless urgently delivered with painful sincerity. Those concerns, always off the mainstream, are even more distanced now. So it’s all the more important that these voices should be reignited, heard again, compelling you to wonder just what we’ve lost out on over the intervening years.

As the first wave of the primal Punk ‘Big Bang’ bifurcated, some into mainstream New Wave chart celebrity, others – the more politically focused groups, gravitated into the more considered ground-level ethos expressed through the messy fanzine underground. Formed out of the ashes of The Epileptics in 1980, in the unlikely environs of Bishop’s Stortford in sedate Hertfordshire, Flux Of Pink Indians (‘Flux’ for change, ‘Pink’ for Gender Politics, ‘Indians’ for marginalised and victimised Native Americans) were contemporaries of Poison Girls, and more especially of Crass – with whom they shared bills many times.

In fact their devastating debut EP ‘Neu Smell’ was produced by Penny Rimbaud and originally released in 1981, on Crass Records. Supported by John Peel radio-plays the first side consists of a stunning suite of three linked tracks, intro’d and outro’d by short poems. The first sound is of crows. A distant dog barks. Then a gnarly accent voice, ‘Can ye smell the neu smell, travelling through the air?’ it enquires, ‘Aye, I can lad, it’s a-coming from over there’. The strange dialogue continues ‘over the hills, down in’t valley, there’s no buildings there, there’s a nuclear dump-site there...’ with the punch-line kicking in ‘Parliament says it’s safe, so why not dump it THERE?!?’ An explosion. A nagging bass figure. Rim-sharp drums. Crashing guitars. Hoarse razor-tongued vocals. ‘I love tube disasters, I wanna marry a tube disaster, I wanna ‘nother one like the last one, ‘cos I live for tube disasters’. The short sharp Punk-dumb Ramones-minimalist absurdist lyric delivering the exact counterweight necessary for the book-ending spoken-word bits. Is it gratuitous shock for shock’s sake? Or a metaphor for society hurtling towards disaster? Either way, it closes with tube-train noises. Then a more considered poetic dialect piece with apocalyptical visions of existential bleakness, ‘and oh, as yes the sky did turn to night, I shield my eyes and hide from the bright of day’. Daringly iconoclastic, a brilliantly luminous noise, this brief sequence is just about as perfect as anarcho-Punk would ever get.

The second side of the EP consists of “Sick Butchers” and “Background Of Malfunction”. Both scathing attacks on meat-eating, the first lending voice to cows who end up as car seat covers, giving ‘my soul for your soles of shoes’, the second extending to the hypocrisy in which there’s public outrage when a menagerie lion kills a zoo-keeper in ‘cold blood’, while humans tuck into a ‘lovely steak’. The full story explained in the typewritten text of the full fold-out EP-sleeve manifesto. Adopting an exaggerated ‘Posh’ voice to caricature the safe middle-class diners, “Background Of Malfunction” is carried on a ‘Pretty Vacant’ forward-drive. While “Sick Butchers” is all high guitar squeals, insistent tom-tom drums, and an impassioned ‘meat is murder’ howl of protest. ‘You may like my taste. It might say in the Bible that you can kill me…’ (yes, it does) but ‘I don’t want to die.’ Told from the animal’s POV, I ‘used to graze in the field. Used to breathe. I used to be alive. Now, sold in supermarkets’, ending with a cow’s plaintive mooo drowned out by electronic whines. Sonically, the 2013 re-mastered reissue reinforces the songs’ uncompromising message – angry punk rock, spine-cracking backbreaking riffs that smite pomposity and corruption, played hard and fast without unnecessary polish, a visceral reminder of just how fiercely politicised the underground music and sub-cultural landscape of the time could be.

The ‘Neu Smell’ line-up consisted of Colin Latter (vocals), Derek Birkett (bass), Andy Smith (guitar), Neil Puncher (guitar) and Sid Ation (drums). Yet by the time of their 1983 debut LP, ‘Strive To Survive Causing Least Suffering Possible’ – issued according to their DIY ethos, on their own Spiderleg label (1983, SDL8), just two of that original line-up survived – Latter and Birkett. Reasons are up for grabs. Ation was also gigging with Rubella Ballet, and quit Flux to play with them full-time. Simon Middleton (who replaced Andy Smith) and drummer Dave ‘Bambi’ Ellesmere both returned to the Insane from whence they’d come. In a fanzine interview (in ‘No Class’) the break was blamed on the group shoutily espousing veggie issues, whereas two members were still carnivores. Well, maybe. Meanwhile, guitarist Kevin Hunter who had been a part of the Epileptics – who name-changed to Epi-X after bad-taste accusations from the British Epilepsy Association, re-emerged, and re-joined. The reconfigured line-up was completed by Martin Wilson (drums).

If the album doesn’t quite serve up the aural variation promised by the EP, falling short of its concise compressed perfection, that’s more within the nature of the format. When extended and multiplied, something is lost and something gained. Greater consistent emphasis. With no personal dimension, and every fibre given over to vibrating disgust and insurrection. Thuggish riffs, gleefully wrathful rants, and guitars drenched in Molotov cocktails. It could be accused that maybe their sometimes inept strivings are in the cause of their sometimes poorly-understood issues, but don’t tell me they don’t mean it, and each track has the saving grace of at least one clever line.

The first of its twelve tracks, “Song For Them” is a straight serious poem read over a background of scatological inter-band dialogue, taking just forty-nine seconds to attack the global imbalance of wealth coexisting alongside extreme poverty. Exclaiming how it’s ‘hard to believe their plight is accepted, while money so wasted could be redirected’, that those in drought and famine are ‘not some race that don’t feel pain’ and that ‘starvation is something you don’t become immune to’. “Charity Hilarity” extends the theme, its speed-thrash making the neat point that ‘the money we donate to charity is too small to be of real consequence, but large enough to ease our conscience’. “Some Of Us Scream, Some Of Us Shout” makes the same point, with the chanted equation ‘feed starving people: fuck your bombs’ (partially recalling Allen Ginsberg’s ‘go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’ in his poem “America”), while expanding the scope to militaristic social conditioning, with ‘they shove toy guns on impressionable children, their future soldiers of war’ as guitars squeal in pain. It closes with Colin’s exasperated ‘fuck off’ howled from an air-hungry throat.

With the general ideological terrain of uninterrupted invective established, in dead earnest, “Myxomatosis” focuses on a menu of ‘experimentation, vivisection, devastation, starvation, torture, war’, balancing the equation ‘animals feel pain: people feel pain’. Jostling, squealing with dive-bombing guitar runs, there are dual voices, one high and ranting, vocal chords strung as tense as clotheslines, the other adding low commentary like a manifesto, ‘to live in peace, we must reject all oppression on all levels… there can be no compromise’. With solid near-Sham 69 vocal attack, the track preceding it concerns those victims of animal testing who are deliberately “Blinded By Science”, by having chemicals dripped into their eyes. And those who look the other way in the hope it’ll go away. The slow bass of “Tapioca Sunrise” re-mangles John Lennon’s sloganeering into ‘war does not pay’, its ‘Road-Runner’ scratch-riff perforating down the fret aimed at the then-current Mutual Assured Destruction madness of Cold War superpower posturing. There are atom bombs on land, in the air and at sea, threatening innocent animals and people (animals first, people second!), using military might as proof of what is right. More manifesto than song, but none the less potent for that.

Throughout the album there’s few concessions to any kind of Green Day-style melodic song-content, with everything reduced down to high-impact high-velocity urgency. But it’s never less than energising fun, and always immensely enjoyable. Two further tracks face up to the dilemma of voicelessness in the face of structures of power, with the guitar jangle of “They Lie, We Die” – a title that’s stubbornly chanted over and over again, a slogan, a street-chant, an anthem, addressing the suspect implementation of nuclear power to generate electricity, pointing out ‘don’t wait to be asked, no questionnaire will come’. While opting out (or in hippie-speak ‘dropping out’) is the only meaningful response to “Progress” – ‘you want to devastate… all I want to do is breathe’, propelled by Martin’s double-drumming. Modern life, it seems, is rubbish.

In the absolute certainty of their anger the targets that Flux attack are religion, the State, patriotism, monarchy, capitalism, career politicians – all the manipulative social elements that distort human behavior away from the simple truths of the mutual co-operation of free and equal peoples. With the egalitarian group-structure offered as the perfect self-sustaining alternative model. An assertion that “Take Heed” clarifies, a detailed virtual analysis of the way the idealism of the original Punk-movement was sabotaged by the monetising greed of the music industry. An appropriately jerky dislocated noise, the voice is mixed well back, from which hectoring phrases emerge and submerge, before tailing off into haunting slithering feedback. The lyrics were nevertheless printed on the album inner-sleeve, making their stance clear. With no possibility of missing the agenda. Anti-materialist. No time for hesitation. No space for compromise.

There’s none of the open-ended uncertainty of earlier generations of protest. Nothing is blowing in this wind. Yet there are two tracks that admit the possibility of questions. Accumulating in spiky mass, the accelerating twittering and rasping of “Is There Anybody There” verbalises a crisis of faith in its ‘I’ve worked hard, lived in fear of judgment day’, before appealing ‘is religion really true, or just another tool used to control and manipulate the things we do?’ While the stately rhythms of “TV Dinners” – a longer more structured piece, comments on the diet of media violence through which ‘we’ve all learned to love to hate’, which ‘isn’t acceptable in any form’. Untypically generous in conceding ‘the blame lies not within the system, the blame lies not with the State, the blame lies not within religion… it lies within each and every one of us’, as its riffs, overlaid with Kevin’s stinging guitar, accelerate suddenly, tempo-shifting with accumulative power, before this garbled syntax of apocalypse collapses into a cacophony of discordant noise and yells. Then the closing track “The Fun Is Over” announces ‘the nightmare has started… the end has arrived’. It’s time to stand back and reject it all. Now’s the time for action.

Although this is the album that defines Flux Of Pink Indians, and best encapsulates what it was all about, the fun was by no means over. It was followed by a second LP, ‘The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks’ (Spiderleg DLP SDL13, 1984). Then, by 1986 Birkett had ignited the fledgling One Little Indian label, through which the group released its third and final album, ‘Uncarved Block’ (1987, One Little Indian TP1) produced by Adrian Sherwood, with the band-name abbreviated to Flux.

Appropriately, it’s One Little Indian that re-mastered and re-issued ‘Strive To Survive Causing Least Suffering Possible’ (on 8th July 2013), in various formats. With a double vinyl pressing augmented by original album demos plus the now-highly collectible EP ‘Neu Smell’. All formats restore the original 1983 artwork, while the CD and download package adds a live set from Shepherds Bush Empire, captured in November 2007 by a one-off reformed line-up playing support to ex-Crass singer Steve Ignorant’s ‘Feeding Of The 5000’ show. On this night Flux was completed by bassist Ian Glasper, who’d met Colin and Kev while researching his authoritative book ‘The Day The Country Died: A History Of Anarcho-Punk 1980 To 1984’ (Cherry Red Books, May 2006), his sequel to ‘Burning Britain: The History Of UK Punk 1980-1984’ (Cherry Red Books, January 2004).

For the accompanying publicity release, Martin admits to initial reservations over reforming, ‘considering all the principles and beliefs that Flux stood for, I had mixed emotions as to why we should play the show,’ but ultimately discovered ‘I was astonished at how much interest there still is in Flux.’

‘The opportunity to play all those great songs from ‘Strive’, and alongside Steve of Crass, was too compelling to say no to’ rationalises Colin. And ‘we were able to reproduce the album with more power than we ever had before.’

‘I wasn’t sure how it would feel playing a gig with the band again after a break of twenty-five years,’ concurs Kev, ‘especially as I’d hardly picked up a guitar in the interim, but as soon as we started rehearsing it just felt right.’ And it does.

Inviting people to think, to question, to protest, is not a significant element of what’s going on in music today. And Flux Of Pink Indians were always bottom-up, not top-down. More concerned with igniting activism in their audience, provoking them to form their own groups and their own labels, to work through an underground network of not-for-profit fanzines, to join an activist demonstration. This was more vital than getting their ID-mugshots across the cover of the ‘NME’. That might have been a part of it. Although not, by any means, a significant part of it. Things are different now. I download the digitalised version of the album package. How would Flux have originally dealt with downloads and online subversion? As “Take Heed” eloquently documents, they always distrusted and were fiercely opposed to Big Music industry machinations. But downloads is an even more efficient way of circumventing monolithic industry structures… isn’t it?

“Punk will never be dead,

as long as some of us refuse to be led…”

                     (“Take Heed”)

Contact: Federica@indian.co.uk

Poem: 'Thirty Seconds To The End Of Time'

THIRTY SECONDS TO

THE END OF TIME /

‘A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE’

we meet on the gallery steps
I haven’t thought of you in years, honest,
a poor correspondent, a poorer friend,
you’ll probably never get to read this, and
a dutiful historian never jumps to conclusions
so neither will I, but yes, such fragments stored…

gradually this thing refamiliarises,
the smoky kisses that fug my glasses,
the small gold rings that pierce your nipples...

some of us were artists, wrote poems or plays,
mostly we were layabouts, on the day it rained you
strolled barefoot down the Hyde Park pizza parlour,
surely you’ve not forgotten that?
it could have been worse, a night of dreams
confronting these ruins in slowness, instead of
this perverse archipelago of nostalgia in which our
medieval gryphons have flown, our unicorns paced,
manticores prowled away in the pterodactyl silhouettes
of golden cockroaches, and so many stone gargoyles
that it seemed the cathedral must take flight too, and
mermaids with the skin of petals lost in tragic affairs
who take a step towards the dark mirror
where the night moves in moonlight…

if all of this strikes you as fanciful, it’s
just an avalanche of memory seeping
into dark earth, half evaporated,
ignited by that meeting on the gallery steps,
dutiful historians never jump to conclusions
and you’ll probably never read this anyway
so none of it really matters, honest…


Published in: ‘QUARRY issue 6’ (UK – August 2008)
‘GLOBAL TAPESTRY JOURNAL no.33’ (UK – January 2012)

Science Fantasy: Thomas Burnett Swann

THOMAS BURNETT SWANN:

INTO THE WANDER-WOOD

ANDREW DARLINGTON travels to Crete to rediscover

the work and the lost world of an unfairly neglected

American fantasist whose stories first achieved prominence

in the British ‘Science Fantasy’ magazine

“Out in the dark blue sea lies a land

called Crete - a rich and lovely land, washed

by the waves on every side...”

(Homer ‘The Odyssey’)

I never quite understood what Homer meant about the ‘wine-dark seas’ of Crete. Until I came here and saw the setting Cretan sun flame the Aegean to something as richly intoxicating. Now – in the courtyard of the Palace of Knossos, just 5km from the Heraklion airstrip, I see Thomas Burnett Swann in new illuminations too. Knossos is Swann in stone. A fusion of myth and archaeology. This, the palace of King Minos, was discovered by Greek historian Minos Kalorairinos, and controversially reconstructed by Sir Arthur Evens. But its labyrinths were planned and executed by Daedalus. Here, in Swann’s 1964 ‘Science Fantasy’ serial “The Blue Monkeys”, mythology fights its last ‘War of the Beasts’ against the encroaching forces of human rationalism. Here the hybrid man-beast Eunostos, the last ‘Bull-that-walks-like-a-man’, unites with the beast-princess Thea, niece of King Minos, in a doomed attempt to resist the island’s Achaeon conquerors. Crete is a land of thirty-million olive trees. Home to the world’s oldest viniculture. Up from Piskopiano there’s the stark limestone moonscape of the Dikti cave – birthplace of Zeus. Suddenly, here, Swann’s elegiac stories becomes tangible and real.

I don’t know a great deal about Swann’s life. Little more than fragmentary glimpses salvaged from book jackets and magazine profiles. I know he was born in Florida in 1928. That he served in the US Navy during the Korean War, but that he was an academic by nature. To the editor of his greatest fictional home – the British ‘Science Fantasy’ magazine, Swann was a ‘putter-in’ who built ‘a phrase round a ‘boss-word’, a sentence round a key-phrase, forms paragraphs of carefully-matched sentences, and inlays them with epithets until their colour and texture is exactly what (he) envisages’ (see 32). I’m also a ‘putter-in’, and this sounds about right.

Swann’s education yields impressive qualifications including an A.B. from Duke University, a Master’s from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D from the University of Florida, which enabled him to become a Professor of English Literature at the Florida Atlantic University, a position he used to authenticate the ‘framing’ sequence for his novelisation of the “The Blue Monkeys” as ‘The Day Of The Minotaur’ (1966), his most powerful eulogy to the power of dream. Through the medium of his narrator Swann commends ‘the accurate historical framework, the detailed descriptions of flora and fauna, the painstaking fidelity to fact in costume and custom’ (13) of his own work. Other writers used mythology before him. H Warner Munn took his lost Roman legion through remnants of Arthurian, Atlantean and Toltec quasi-history as early as the ‘Weird Tales’ serial forming the novel ‘King Of The World’s Edge’ (1939). But Swann’s vision is clearer. He is more closely attuned to the roots of all story-telling in dream and wonderment. He is a writer who retains ‘an ear for the well-turned phrase, the elegant (yes, even the flowery) epithet’. His ornate enigmas of the past are located where species divisions are fluid, where history dissolves and melts into myth. He deifies the natural world. And few have done it better.

It’s possible to argue Fantasy as the cranky eccentric inferior of its more rigorously disciplined neighbouring genre, Science Fiction. At its best – restrained by the laws of physics, SF has an ability to stimulate the imagination to a degree seldom achieved by any other form of popular fiction, whereas Fantasy’s effect on the imagination is more often than not soporific. Both can be viewed as escapist forms of literature, and – of course, Fantasy is part of an eternal Bardic tradition extending back beyond Homer (and one from which SF has itself evolved). Nevertheless, the trendy-mystic catch-all of Swords-&-Sorcery, Dragons, Boy Wizards, Teen-Vampires, psi-mutants, and endearing Diskworld Hobbit-facsimiles currently infesting bookshops is a depressing place to be. There are exceptions. Lovecraft’s elaborate and mesmeric Cthulhu mythos has a snaringly compulsive breadth of vision. The sheer poetic beauty and outlandish grotesquerie of Mervyn Peake gives his work a quality that defies any attempt at limited categorisation. Fantasists CS Lewis and Leigh Brackett must get special mention too, while the degree of fascination still exerted by Tolkien must make him a candidate for any list of honourable exceptions.

And I don’t want to imply that Thomas Burnett Swann automatically qualifies for inclusion in such an elevated pantheon of Fantasy writers. Merely that his tales are quaintly individualistic and imaginatively original enough to be afforded a degree of serious consideration I’d not readily extend to many of his contemporaries. Swann produced work for a number of years, in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’ and Ted White’s ‘Fantastic’, but most notably through the pages of the fondly remembered ‘Science Fantasy’, and later through his own slim novels. And in doing so he built up a unique stylistic identity. He used his awesomely imaginative bestiary of mythic characters as metaphors for wonderment. Michael Moorcock – himself no stranger to rich prose, recognises Swann’s “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” as one work which ‘has shown uses to which Fantasy can be put’, one which ‘has done more than entertain on an escapist level’ (31). While even the ‘glittering adjectives’ of a much earlier story – “The Painter”, playfully animates the real into the wonderfully phantasmagoric. Here, the surreal monstrosities of Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘Garden Of Earthly Delights’ become a virtual intrusion into the artist’s actual life via hideous aliens – ‘demons exploring the sky in their fish’, amid opulently poetic prose where ‘apples glisten like Venetian goblets, twisting their fine-blown spheres to catch the moonlight’, and horror floods his body ‘like water invading a swimmer’.

The man Theodore Sturgeon describes as ‘a remarkable writer’, decided to drop academia in favour of the pen in the early 1960’s. From then on Swann lived as a poet, an essayist (publishing work on Christina Rossetti and the poet ‘HD’) and a fantasist. He died from cancer in 1976. To these bare bones of a life I add Kyril Bonfiglioli’s musings on his creative technique, ‘one could no more trim down his work without damaging it hopelessly than one could clip a few inches off the side of a good painting’ (32).

This sounds about right.

---- 2 ---

“In the tall green flame of the cypress, I see his

shadow, flickering with the swallows. In the

city that crowds the Palatine, where Fauns walk

with men and wolves are fed in the temple, I hear

the rush of his wings. But that is his shadow and

sound. The bird himself is gone. Always

his wings beat just beyond my hands, and the wind

possesses his cry. Where is the bird of fire?”

The way Tolkien plundered Anglo-Saxon mythology and language is well documented. At his best, Swann goes back further into the classical roots of mythology, to Virgil, Homer and beyond. He sculpts landscapes and texts redolent with the rural imagery of ‘the world’s great childhood before the Trojan War’, a time of ‘daffodil-whispering breeze’ and ‘leaf-cleansed air’, a time when even anger was poetic – it ‘clawed at (the) throat like an ice-encrusted branch’ (‘Green Phoenix’, 1972). A time when ‘wonders were as numerous as sparrow’s nests in spring’ (‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, 1976).

John Carnell describes Thomas Burnett Swann as an American ‘unhonoured and unsung in his own country’. But it was Carnell, as founding editor of the elegant ‘Science Fantasy’, who was largely responsible for building that first phase of Swann’s strange evolution. The earliest stories, published while Swann was still studying for his PhD, had yet to assume the enhanced mythological complexity that was to become his most hypnotically powerful form. “Viewpoints” for example (in rival ‘Nebula’, May 1959), has a contemporary setting and flirts with a kind of post-Chernobyl horror in which a radiation-blasted woman has skin of ‘weathered green brass’. But her choice to remain on the mutant’s reservation, accepting her role as part of a separate new race already anticipates Swann’s later preoccupation with a biodiversity of sentient species (there’s also, incidentally, a car called Ariel!). “The Dryad Tree” (‘Science Fantasy’, August 1960) – to Carnell, is ‘a light fantasy in a modern setting... that conjures nostalgic memories of the defunct ‘Unknown Worlds’.’ It envisages an unconventional trans-species menage-a-trois in which Cloe, an Italian Orange Tree, is jealous of John’s new wife Mari. Again, the resolution comes not with violent confrontation, but through gentle assimilation.

But it’s through the stories that follow that Thomas Burnett Swann discovers his style, and his audience. In the novel ‘Green Phoenix’ he chronicles items from the history of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy – incidents that classical Roman writer Virgil apparently forgets to mention. There are no Dryads or Fauns in Virgil’s ‘The Aeneid’ (and while Swann refers to the wandering Trojan’s son as Ascanius, his predecessor usually calls him Iulus), yet the framework of Swann’s novel can be placed without difficulty within a couple of the penultimate chapters of Virgil’s epic. Swann uses King Latinus, rescued intact from the text of ‘The Aeneid’, and also his daughter Lavinia, although her ‘Green Phoenix’ marriage to the hero of Troy is considerably more placid than in Virgil’s version. Swann omits Turnus to whom she was originally betrothed. But such nit-picking comparisons are misleading. Swann’s research is voluminous. Each of his tales come complete with a list of academic esoterica he’s consulted to aid its fabrication. But he merely uses Virgil, as he uses textbooks on Minoan or Etruscan history, as stepping stones to the creation of his own mythologies.

A qualification that can be applicable, however, relates to the exact delineation of his fantasy species, and the apparent confinement of the scope of their world. There are Dryads, Centaurs and Fauns – creatures elaborated from mythology, phantasms condensed out of superstitious rural imaginings, grown from shadow patterns across forest floors, the movement of random clusters of foliage, the rustle of leaves disturbing silence. They should be as inexact, insubstantial and as inconsistent of form as in the tales of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’. Yet Swann veers close to making them endearing and decorative, defusing the elements of both mystery and menace. It’s like taking the beautifully complex draughtsmanship of a Pre-Raphaelite painting without also accepting the decadent fin-de-siecle element of evil omnipresent darkness. Anthologist and critic Judith Merril concurs. To her, Swann’s fictions are ‘a far cry from the earth-dark tragedies of such Ancient World chroniclers as the late Henry Treece, and the lighter approach inevitably diminishes the stature of the myth-figures. If, however, you prefer your blood-spilling flavoured with charm, rather than taken raw, then Swann blends these ingredients with considerable skill’ (33).

That sounds about right. But ‘Green Phoenix’ is just one element of something that should be considered as a whole. The novel was first published (in the USA) in 1972, and is a coming together of ideas Swann had been developing in short story form for a decade. Mellonia, Aeneas’ Dryad lover first appears in the 1962 short story “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?”. Written by a Faun with a reed pen, it tells of Mellonia’s relationship with Remus ‘the Wolf’, the founder of Rome, and how through him she makes good her promise to found a second Troy in Italy. The story, according to a contemporary blurb, ‘received more praise than any other in recent years’. “The Sudden Wings”, a voyage into painful beauty, follows its success. Set at the time of Roman expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean, it concerns the loneliness of the last member of a winged human species, Eros, the Dragonfly Boy. He is an ‘eternal’ who had gamed with a Princess of Ur and is ‘older than evil’. In “Dolphin And The Deep” the Etruscan Bear searches for lost Circe, while “The Murex” is set among Amazons and ant-like Myrmidons on the island of Aegina.

I know Aegina too, walking where the Doric Temple of Aphaea overlooks the Saronic Gulf – perhaps this is the ‘Bay of Coral’ where Swann’s naked Amazons dive for scarlet and lavender sponges? It’s on this island that Daphne and Loxo track a band of Myrmidon ant-boys from the walled town back towards their nest, half for gain (‘like the fabulous ants of Arabia, they were said to horde (sic) gold and emeralds, electrum and lapis lazuli’), and half for sport (‘you have the mind of a wolf’ jokes Loxo). As they stalk their prey, the ilex and linden trees are alive with spirit-presence, the sensual land haunted with stories, redolent of thyme and passed time. The Amazons are rationalised as a kind of proto-Feminist collective of abused or deserted women in revolt against patriarchy. Daphne herself was exposed to die as a baby, saved and reared by Amazon leader Gorgo. Yet their tribe had also fought Centaurs and driven them from the island. Now Gorgo leads her Amazons to raid the nest, only to become lost in its mushroom chambers and tunnels, and forced to retreat, defeated by the ant-boy’s cunning. Separated from her group, Amazon Daphne warily befriends winged Myrmidon Tychon. Together they ride a hippocampus, a giant sea-horse. Like the arm of the sea and the corner of the land, the two meet ‘in sweet apartness’, his unsettling golden-skinned maleness calling ‘a stranger out of the deeps of me, as a necromancer whistles the white-faced spirits of the tide.’ Their liaison is interrupted by returning Amazons. Punished for their transgression, despite her protests, Tychon is thrown to Orion, the great chained bear. Then the remaining Myrmidons affect a rescue, ‘they seemed to step from the sunbeams of the late afternoon; to walk with light through the green woods; to walk as light’. Daphne realises that ‘the same moon controlled our tides’ and she joins the ant-boys in polyandrous marriage, as their new queen.

There’s a strange gentleness to such stories, and little violence. ‘Most of the world’s harm, it seemed, was done by ignorant, essentially decent men’ (‘Will-O-The-Wisp’). There is much talk of love, a love that not only tames wild bears and, helped by the correct alchemaic catalyst enables mortals to sprout ‘Sudden Wings’. A love that seduces Amazons into strange marriages. A love that is romantic, maternal, paternal, or the love of comrade for comrade, or sometimes even a love with ill-defined incestuous or homosexual aspects like that of Eros and Mark (6), or Herrick and Nicholas (‘what makes a man a god is people to worship him. Even one person if he worships enough’ (26)). There’s a pleasingly androgynous ‘Satyricon’-esque ambivalence of blurred sexual identities. Rather, a feeling of universal sensuality devoid of the need for imposed gender divisions. ‘I understand’ comments Amazon Daphne ‘that men could be manly in tenderness’. The ambiguity of sexual roles, as this quote indicates, is extended to include the leading protagonists of the stories. Heroes who are not only heroic, but live up to every outmoded definition of the term. The poet Herrick for example has ‘bare legs splendid in the sun, his bare arms like those of a blacksmith, the archangel hair.’ These heroes also tend to possess a childlike youthfulness, and are given to displays of emotion and even tears that more contemporary modes – unlike those of Homer’s time, find unmanish. Probably such decompartmentalisation of roles reflects more on the sickness of our own society than upon those created by Swann. Heroines are similarly beautiful, yet complex. Matriarchal societies and ‘covens’ abound – the Amazon society is dominated by Gorgo, just as Judith, the charismatic leader of the Gubbings, and Volumna, leader of the Dryads, are her direct counterparts.

There are no villains.

---- 3 ---

“Before Romulus, the entire Mediterranean world had

abounded in Satyrs and Centaurs, Tritons had played in

the sea-pools, and even the air, it was said, had throbbed

with sudden wings as boys and girls had tumbled through

the clouds. But now, thanks to the depredations of man,

such creatures were almost extinct...” (6)

Following the eventual demise of ‘Science Fantasy’, and the publication of ‘Green Phoenix’ came further novels including ‘The Lady Of The Bees’ (1976) drawn from the same mythic sources, ‘The Day Of The Minotaur’ expanded and rewritten from “The Blue Monkeys”, and ‘The Tournament Of Thorns’ (1976). ‘Moondust’ (1968) even enters the fractured Jewish crypto-history of The Torah and ‘finds fairies in the foundations at the battle of Jericho’ (34). Swann describes the Biblical city infiltrated by the non-human wizardry of sciences older than history, with an attendant subterranean realm called Honey Heart, populated with winged females and intelligent foxes.

Thomas Burnett Swann had by now become the centre of a minor cult which climaxed with the 1976 appearance of ‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, a novel set in ‘post-Elizabethan England’. Here, the underlying sensuality of the earlier fantasies remain, but its wondering, somehow chaste innocence is a little more knowing. The sense of menace a little more fully realised. Swann writes that ‘when God had come to England with the Romans, the Pagan Gods had scuttled from field and fen, and the Devil, who gave them asylum in Hell, appeared to be permanently routed and tidily exiled.’ But the element of Puritan guilt gives evil a Freudian psychological basis, validating the mutterings of dark submerged sexuality. The attributes of sensuality are even extended to embrace the inanimate. Dartmoor, under ‘the first light of dawn had begun to flush the tors. Usually they resembled huge jagged tombstones, but now they were what they had been to her ancestors before the fall, unabashedly phallic, earth’s virility yearning to the fruitful sky.’ This is an essentially Pagan vision of the world, of Sky-Mother/Earth-Father as in virile pre-christian belief. Yet the novel lies well within the tradition of Swann’s mythos. Robert Herrick the poet, in pursuing and being captured by the remnants of a supernatural race living on Dartmoor, does for the novel what Virgil had done for ‘Green Phoenix’ (while not only Virgil but also Dryads and Satyrs are alluded to in the later work). There are other points of cross-reference that serve merely to update the outer limits of Swann’s terrain by a fistful of centuries. The research and settings are meticulously exacting, detail from Herrick’s own life, to the Devonshire Folklore of the persecuted ‘Gubbings’, to lists of furnishings and materials described in archaic or unfamiliar terminology. A list of research source material is credited.

The Gubbings, like the Myrmidons, and the Dragonfly Boy, are winged.

In “The Night Of The Unicorn” (12), written for a 1975 Arkham House Press anthology – ‘Nameless Places’ edited by Gerald W Page, Swann finally brings his location back into the twentieth century. It tells of a Mexican village which awaits the appearance of a Unicorn, an ex-whore anticipating that, although the creature will not approach her, a single glimpse will make the wait worth while. Thomas Burnett Swann is the teller of gentle mythologies in which duels are fought in ‘Trials Of Verse’. In which beautiful women of strange hybrid species woo human lovers, Mellonia is torn between her allegiance to the Dryads and to Aeneas, just as Stella is torn between Gubbings and Herrick, or Daphne between Amazons and her former prey, the Myrmidons. He uses poetic imagery to create an internal world to consistently encapsulate his vision – the moon is described as a ‘bird of fire’, the Gubbings’ diminutive wings are ‘thwarted flames’, tents are ‘grounded birds yearning for flight’ and the forest is ‘so dark that the sun was a dim constellation in the night of foliage above them.’ In Swann’s stories a youthful world of childlike innocence and purity is receding in time to be replaced by a more dour and world-weary maturity. His tales speak of a world, and of life-styles that are in harmony with the earth. A world, and a value-system that have somehow subsequently been misplaced, that simultaneously dissolve like childhood with the first pubic hair of maturity, to be destroyed by the intimations of evil that adulthood brings. An analogy perhaps, with the Judeo-Christian Fall alluded to by Swann in ‘Will-O-The-Wisp’, in which wisdom again creates the knowledge of evil. Or then again, perhaps the Eden myth itself is just a parable of lost childhood?

It’s as if he’s writing a symbolic paean to childhood and the childhood of the world. There’s ‘a great sadness, for what I had lost and more, for what I must lose, stirring in me like the grey moth of autumn. I felt the wings and a chilling dust of snow...’ (8). Perhaps he’s writing parables of the despoilation of nature by human technological pollution, for the theme of species nearing extinction recurs – the last fugitive Gubbings, the last Dragonfly Boy, the last Centaur. Or maybe he’s just writing magical tales with their own internal logics. Swann’s fiction, like the simile of the tents, yearn for flight.

Whatever the motives he weaves oddly compelling, strangely individualistic tales that even those with a bias against pure Fantasy can find charming.

The images that reach us from Minoan Crete – the bull-dancers, the ‘Prince with Lilies’, the ‘Blue Ladies’, have been painstakingly reconstructed by historians from an incomplete jigsaw of mosaic fragments found in the ruins of the Knossos Palace, their gaps imaginatively fleshed out. Splinters of what is known from the deep past, elaborated into what is conjectured. Thomas Burnett Swann worked in that way. Knossos is Swann in stone. He was here – in Crete, to research ‘Day Of The Minotaur’. Its scroll of papyrus, inscribed with its ancient manuscript, was supposedly excavated from a cave near the ‘ancient town of Phaestus’ – modern Phaistos adjacent to the Roman archaeological site of Gortys. Here there are still ‘oak trees older than Saturn’. Swann stood beneath ‘hills terraced with olive trees and vineyards, which climb gradually into the Range of Ida and the Country of the Beast’. I recognise the first. I can now believe the second. From these shores, into the wine-dark seas of Crete, the Beauty-and-the-Beast story of the Minotaur ends as Eunostos sets sail to find the Isles of the Blest, leaving Crete to human occupation.

The loss, here, is almost tangible.

“Hide it if you must, deep as the deepest

trireme crusted with coral, but beauty will

burn into light” - old Dolphin proverb

THOMAS BURNETT SWANN

(12 October 1928 – 5 May 1976)

RESEARCH SOURCES FOR

THIS ARTICLE: SHORT STORIES

(1) “Winged Victory” (‘FANTASTIC UNIVERSE’ - July 1958)
(2) “Viewpoint” (‘NEBULA no.40’ - May 1959)
(3) “The Dryad Tree” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no. 42’ - August 1960)
(4) “The Painter” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no. 44’ - December 1960)
(5) “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.52’ - April 1962/ then as novel ‘LADY OF THE BEES’ 1976)
(6) “The Sudden Wings” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.55’ - October 1962)
(7) “The Dolphin And The Deep” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.60’ - August 1963/ then as novel 1968) (8) “The Murex” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.63’ - February 1964)
(9) “The Blue Monkeys” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY nos.67/68/69’ - Sept 1964/Dec 1964/Jan 1965)/ then rewritten as the novel ‘DAY OF THE MINOTAUR’ (1966)
(10) “Vashti” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.72’ - May 1965)
(11) “The Weirwoods” (‘SCIENCE FANTASY nos.77/78’ - Oct/Nov 1965)
(12) “The Night Of The Unicorn” (‘NAMELESS PLACES’ edited by Gerald W Page, Arkham House Press, 1975, collected into ‘THE YEARS BEST FANTASY STORIES vol.2’ edited by Lin Carter - Daw 1976)

NOVELS

(13) ‘DAY OF THE MINOTAUR’ (Ace 1966 USA/Mayflower 1975 UK - a ‘slightly different’ version of “The Blue Monkeys” serial)
(14) ‘THE WEIRWOODS’ (Ace - 1967 USA)
(15) ‘MOONDUST’ (Ace - 1968 USA)
(16) ‘THE DOLPHIN AND THE DEEP’ (Ace - 1968, three short novellas, ‘The Dolphin And The Deep’, ‘The Murex’ and ‘The Manor Of The Roses’ from ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ November 1966 from his ‘John And Stephen’ series which also includes ‘The Stalking Trees’ in the January 1973 issue)
(17) ‘WHERE IS THE BIRD OF FIRE?’ (Ace - 1970 Collection, includes ‘Where Is The Bird Of Fire (The Latium Trilogy)’, ‘Vashti’ and previously unpublished ‘Bear’)
(18) ‘THE GOAT WITHOUT HORNS’ (Ballantine - 1971)
(19) ‘FOREST OF FOREVER’ (Ace - 1971 USA/Mayflower 1975 UK
(20) ‘GREEN PHOENIX: THE LAST STAND OF THE PREHUMANS’ (Daw SF - 1972 USA) (21) ‘WOLFWINTER’ (1972)
(22) ‘HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN’ (Daw - 1974)
(23) ‘THE NOT-WORLD’ (Daw - 1975)
(24) ‘THE LADY OF THE BEES’ (Daw - 1976/ sequel to ‘GREEN PHOENIX’)
(25) ‘THE TOURNAMENT OF THE THORNS’ (Daw 1976/ from ‘MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SF’ stories 1966/1973)
(26) ‘WILL-O-THE-WISP’ (Corgi Science Fantasy - 1976 UK)
(27) ‘THE GODS ABIDE’ (Daw -1976)
(28) ‘THE MINIKINS OF YAM’ (Daw - 1976)
(29) ‘CRY SILVER BELLS’ (Daw - 1977)
(30) ‘QUEENS WALK IN THE DUSK’ (Heritage Press - 1977)

OTHER SOURCES

(31) ‘ASPECTS OF FANTASY Part 3’ by Michael Moorcock (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.63’ - February 1964’)
(32) Editorial by Kyril Bonfiglioli (‘SCIENCE FANTASY no.69’ - January 1965)
(33) Book review by Judith Merril (‘NEW WORLDS no.170’ - January 1967)
(34) Book review by James Cawthorn (‘NEW WORLDS no.189’ - April 1969)

There are also poems published in the ‘NORTH CAROLINA QUARTERLY’ and ‘CORNUCOPIA’ magazines, poetry collections - ‘WOMBATS AND MOONDUST’ and ‘ALAS, IN LILLIPUT’, as well as books of Literary Scholarship - ‘THE CLASSICAL WORLD OF H.D.’ and ‘CHARLES SORLEY: POET OF WORLD WAR I’
A poem (by HD?) supplies the titles for “Where Is The Bird Of Fire?” and “Only Night Heals Again”. 


The original version of this article was published in:
‘THE MENTOR no.94’ (Australia - June 1999)

CD: Paul Revere & The Raiders

Album Review of:

‘HERE THEY COME’ & 

‘MIDNIGHT RIDE’

by

  PAUL REVERE

& THE RAIDERS

(SPV 306232-CD – www.spv.de)

In the history books of the American War of Independence, ‘Paul Revere’ is immortalised as the patriot who made the famous ride announcing ‘The British are coming!’ During the mid-sixties his namesake was performing the same function in Rock ‘n’ Roll. Like – say, Tommy James & The Shondells, they scored a string of massive American hit singles, while unlike Tommy James, not one of them made the slightest impression in the UK. Yet they were fun opportunistic populists with a sure sense of catchy riffs. Their first hit “Like, Long Hair” happened as early as 1961, but as the English invasion exploded they were perceptive enough to angle their sound accordingly. They supposedly did the original cut of “Louie, Louie”, but lost out to the Kingsmen version on the chart, although both were done in the same ‘Northwest Recorders’ studio in Portland, Oregon. It’s included on their third album – ‘Here They Come’, produced with Terry Melcher in 1964, amid a patchy grab-bag of covers associated with English-invasion bands, some done ‘live’, although technically “Do You Love Me”, “Time Is On My Side” and “Money” were not British at all, but American R&B sides. Only “Something” is a shameless stand-out, a magnificently cheesy teeny-bop power-ballad as immaculately targeted as it is irresistibly effective.

Later, recorded with what is considered their ‘classic’ line-up, their fifth album – ‘Midnight Ride’ in 1966, up-powers into “Kicks” which is trash garage-punk at its finest, a Mann & Weil anti-drugs infotainment fuelled on the artificial energies of Byrds guitar-twang, rattling tambourine and driving chorus. They add surf-harmonies to “Little Girl In The Fourth Row” which stokes romantic audience-fantasies that pony-tailed vocalist Mark Lindsay is serenading directly at them, a ploy as cynical as McFly or the Jonas Bros would ever get. Then they set the template of Boyce & Hart’s “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” for the Monkees, then the Flies, Sex Pistols – and even Ant & Dec to replicate. Finally tipping the album over into the voice-over kitch of “Melody For An Unknown Girl”, measure for measure, everything you most love about sixties pych-beat is here.

Although they seldom got better than this, the hits went on. I’d personally rate “The Great Airplane Strike” (US no.20, October 1966), “Ups And Downs” (US no.22, March 1967) and “Him Or Me, What’s It Gonna Be?” (US no.5, May 1967) as up there with the best sixties Pop-Rock singles ever. Their regular slapstick antics on Dick Clark’s ‘Where The Action Is’ – and its sequels ‘Happening ‘68’ and ‘It’s Happening’ also helped maintain their high-profile visibility. “Indian Reservation (The Lament Of The Cherokee Indian)” eventually provided their only no.1 as late as May 1971, despite it having started out as a Mark Lindsay solo project and despite it being nicked from an earlier UK hit by Don Fardon. By then changing tastes, and changing personnel had rendered them unfashionable. Beatles’ PR-man Derek Taylor who also handled the Raiders’ press admitted that although they had become ‘irrelevancies’ there were still some ‘nervous citizens (who) felt reassured some good safe things never changed.’ They filled that role as headliners through the rest of the seventies, well into the eighties, and survived comfortably into the decades beyond.

Live: 'The Who... A Quick One In Hull (1967)'

A QUICK ONE…

WITH THE WHO

THE WHO at The Hull

University Students Union

(4 December 1967)

I swear this is the way it happens. Ask him now, Daltrey will probably deny it. But I was there, and every word is true. The Students Union building sits in amongst the manicured lawns of the Hull University, Cottingham Road campus. Not a big venue, as venues go. But the student circuit is key to promoting new albums. Exposure to the sharp young decision-makers you need onside if you’re to elevate from the casual Pop-fiend followers of a quirky little singles band into the serious album thing. And the Who have ‘A Quick One’ to market. But it’s not quite working out that way.

There’s a disturbance from the start. Opener “I Can’t Explain” is a jarring earful of volume that shudders and vibrates in piercing jabs of over-amplified Stratocaster stabs. Short. Sharp. Staccato. Incendiary. In the uncanny hush that descends after its lurching juddering close there’s a cluster of guys at the back of the standing crowd who start into yelling and laughing. I mean, who pays the ticket price if all you’re going to do it harass and catcall the group? Unless it’s some kind of ‘hey, look at me’ thing. The Who go into “Substitute” and “Pictures Of Lily” but the irritation gets increasingly obvious. The yelled insults, taunts and laughter getting louder and more obnoxious.

So Daltrey sorts the situation. Hung on the mike-stand he peers out into the audience, searching out the offender. Then delves into his back pocket to produce a fist-fold of folding money. ‘OK, don’t spoil this for other people’ he appeals reasonably, ‘if you don’t like what we’re doing, fine, come up here, come on stage, I’ll give you your money back, I’ll refund your ticket-price, OK?’ Eyes are on the provocateur. Less than a moment’s hesitation. The guy starts up towards the stage, the crowd parting to form a path for him. He’s swaggering. The centre of attention. Which is the intention. He shifts right to the short climb of steps up onto the stage, jumping them two at a time. Now he’s on stage. Moving towards the centre where Daltrey steps forward to meet him. Wide grin, left hand extended with the offered notes. Yes, it’s working out. Daltrey is not a big guy. But in one swift vicious arc his right hand balls into a fist and lashes out perfectly targeted, WHAP, the blow to the face takes him by surprise. The heckler lurches back, stunned, keels back over the stage-edge into an accidental audience-dive.

In the blitzed silence that follows Pete promptly strikes up the frantic intro play-in to “Run Run Run”, and they pick up as though nothing has happened. I swear this is true. Although ask him now, Daltrey would probably deny it. Meantime, listen to the Who’s compressed hyper-charged energies. When it comes to aggression, attack, vehemence, violence and arrogant hatred there’s nothing that Punk ever did that the Who hadn’t done first. They harbour a grudge against the world, retaliating though a series of angry abrasive going-for-the jugular singles. And they did it on acceleration. The ‘My Generation’ album (December 1965) encompasses their entire All Mod Cons covers-and-anthems phase. It’s all there, impacted into those twelve revelationary spasms. The upfront Brunswick-label singles – “I Can’t Explain”, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” and the distorted feedback of “My Generation”, form an immaculately bratty trinity. Shel Talmy’s other client-group – the Kinks, had a head start. The Who have urgent time to make up. No time to waste.

Of all the sixties groups – and there were plenty, the Who had the greatest interdependent synergy. As in the hydra-headed advert-art for “Happy Jack” – four long-necked heads on one body, each member is as vital as each other. Still in jacket and Mod-preened hair, Roger Daltrey is a bruiser with attitude, the perfect front-man vocalist. His voice a muscular half-shouting onslaught, equally adept at leading half-tricksy sun-kissed harmonies. But although he’d later try various other projects with varying degrees of success, without Townshend’s writing he’s merely a voice-for-hire. Townshend is a damaged personality who casts as many darkly-violent shadows as he produces blinding flashes of brilliance. He contributes solo vocal bits on stage and sings occasional tracks on LP’s, while the later albums issued under his own name are not without their moments, but his writing needs Daltrey’s bombast and projection to give them their life. Keith Moon was never going to be content just to sit behind his drum-kit to the rear on the stage, his enthusiasms bring surf-harmonies into the Who, and his explosive seriously-deranged stage-presence makes him a vital visual group component. His ferocious drum-style intimidatingly upfront yet never less that appropriately precise. While the solid deep-throat low-slung bass-lines pouring from ‘The Ox’, either in cahoots with Keith as rhythm section, or providing separate song-feed through the likes of “Boris The Spider”, makes it impossible to imagine the Who without John Entwhistle.

Some recent writers have sampled their well-thumbed ‘Guinness Book Of Hit Singles’, noted that two subsequent Who 45rpms – “A Legal Matter” and “The Kids Are Alright” only reached no.32 (in March 1966) and no.41 (September 1966) respectively, and misguidedly assume this indicates loss of traction. Not so. By then they’d jumped labels. Brunswick belatedly lift those singles off the album to milk their cashflow. Everybody who wants those tracks, already has them. And by album two – ‘A Quick One’ (December 1966) they’ve already lurched on, striving into an entirely new phase. “Substitute” (‘I look bloody young but I’m just backdated’) and “Happy Jack” take a lyrical shift into a novel weirdness unlike anything else in Rock, before or since. Odes to oddity in their every twisted couplet. Transmuting the pure adrenalin gone before into a furious set of contradictions where north is south, black is white and lies are fact. “Pictures Of Lily” is about masturbation, and for anyone who missed the point, Keith plasters his kit with vintage pin-up porn. While whatever the hell the percussive “Happy Jack” is about is still anyone’s guess. But it works, like fish-hooks barbing the inner lining of the cranium, they refuse to work loose. Hits pinging, flying and scoring like shiny balls in a pinball machine. The harmonies tighter, smoother, the subversion more crafted. And despite hyperbole, it is subversion. Subverting and reinventing what a Pop 45rpm can do, testing its limits. Distorting it into new configurations, but still charting into the Top Ten.

This night they find space to do “Summertime Blues”, indicating the roots of teen insurrection, the viral link between Eddie Cochran and Sid Vicious. With John doing the deep-voice ‘No dice son, you gotta work late’ insert. Just as their “Shakin’ All Over” provides the bridge between Johnny Kidd’s pioneering Brit-Rock and Guess Who’s US Top Tenner (as done on the Who’s ‘Live At Leeds’?). While “Young Man’s Blues” (also done live at Leeds) has all the full-on power and attack that Led Zeppelin will later claim. Although the album deliberately spreads writer-credits across the four, with Entwhistle’s creepy-crawly “Boris The Spider” as solidly unsettling as anything by Pete, and Keith’s manic soundtrack “Cobwebs And Strange” a long-term stand-out weirdy, it’s still integrated around Townshend’s damaged cerebral SatNav tuned into the moons of bedlam.

Next up, “A Quick One, While He’s Away” might be a clumsy unwieldy concoction of unlikely bits welded together into a muddled 9:10-minute sequence. It’s ambition greater than the six-linked sum of its ability. But, although we can’t know it at the time, the seeds of ‘Tommy’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ are here. It’s a fumbled try-out for what’s to come. The tale of infidelity with a letchy old perv as archly comic as it is ludicrously absurd. A Girl Guide ‘fornicates’ with a Music-Hall caricature-villain. Entwhistle sings the clip-clop clip-clop ‘my name is Ivor, I’m an engine driver’. ‘Randy old bastard’ yells Keith. ‘Social Comment’ deadpans Pete. But this night Townshend, in particular, uses its repetitive ‘you are forgiven, you are forgiven’ redemption climax as a message targeting the unruly audience-elements, reaching out and pointing, the arc he’s indicating draws us all into that reconciling forgiveness. Maybe, just maybe, these kids are alright after all?

Vindicated, they close with an extended “My Generation”, Roger whirling the mike around his head, so it smashes into the cymbals riding atop Keith’s kit in a spray of sparks, as Moon detonates speed-fusillades bam-bam-bam rat-atat-tat with truly scary physical intensity. It’s not just solid walls of volume – but that too, interspersed by rippling light and shellshock shade, an intimidating noise-density from just three players, provoking shrieks of feedback-protest from the speakers. It’s more. Helen Shapiro made her 1961 ‘gonna be my own adviser, ‘cos my mind’s my own’ manifesto. The Who razor it down to the incoherent stutter ‘why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away?’ Cliff Richard did the 1962 ‘’cos we may not be the Young Ones very long’. The Who razor it down to the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’.

I swear this is the way it happened. They’d played Hull before, in 16 June 1966. But the next time they play Hull it will be the bigger-capacity ‘City Hall’. And the Who will continue after Keith Moon. They will continue after John Entwhistle. In fact, they’re still performing as The Who. And I guess they have every moral right to do so. But to me, The Who ended the day Keith Moon died.

Poem: "Swimming To Ithaca"

SWIMMING

TO ITHACA

Sometimes, I don’t like the poems I write.
But they write themselves anyway.
This one is about mortality. About death.
And about choosing the moment…

wetness

beach of shingle

old. alone now

forgetful. time slip away

cell by cell. in flakes of skin

this is where it began. with homer

this is where it ends. now

this is how i intend it

swim from this point

from this fókis beach

towards ithaca

until you swim no more

and the waters of lethe

soothe it all away

except

it’s colder. darker

there’s panic. terror

and then wetness again

on this beach of shingle

this not how i intended.

poetry is unreliable.

a poor guide

and the sun

is still warm…

Live: U2's ZOOROPA tour in Leeds

ZOOROPA AT

ROUNDHAY PARK:

NO DRY ICE

OR FLYING PIGS

(12th October 1993)

U2’s ‘Zooropa’ tour reaches Leeds to play to

their largest-ever audience, Leeds becomes gridlocked,

and Susan of Morley wins a book and an album

The local radio station has declared U2 Day, with outside-broadcasts direct from Roundhay Park. ‘This is another chance to be a RADIO AIRE U2 WINNER! Do YOU know what year “When Love Comes To Town” was a hit? Ring 0532-344963 and YOU can win the ‘Zooropa’ album and copies of the U2 book ‘Burning Desire’…!’ Simultaneously an ad-plane spirals overhead, zigzagging the blue sky trailering a red ‘U2 GO TO THE BIG APPLE BAR DINER, LEEDS’ streamer. Do they? Do they really?

While this ragamuffin in a beaded pixie-hood is trying to black-market tickets at me, and won’t take no for an answer. Already the IPM (Images Per Minute) count is high. It’s as though Marshall McLuhan never happened.

‘This is the largest PAYING crowd we’ve ever played to’ proclaims Bono. ‘This makes Wembley Stadium look like a Bowling Green’, while behind him it subtitles ‘ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS ENTERTAINMENT: SERVICE CHARGE NOT INCLUDED’.

‘1988?’ suggests the first caller uncertainly, so chicken Colonel Sanders could market him.

You know this. You know they open with “Zoo Station”, Bono appearing halfway up the gantry framed by the screens. You’ve seen it, read it, done it. You know he goose-steps across the screens doing the Peter Sellers ‘Doctor Strangelove’ salute beneath the suspended autos wreathed in vapour trails of cigarette smoke. But ‘EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG’, or at least an approximation that can’t quite measure up to the REAL thing. And THIS IS (STILL) NOT A REHEARSAL.

We sit behind Gordon Strachan. Leeds United drew this season’s first match 1-1 to Manchester City. He has footballer’s immaculately false hair-styling, and he grins as he signs autographs. Behind us there’s a Vegeburger stall, official ZOOROPA merchandising, and the Amnesty International stand.

Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra’ (the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ music) booms from the towers. A smoking hole opens up in the audience epicentre, it storms into whirlpools out of which magics a huge caricature ‘Bono’ in inflated Frank Sidebottom artificial head, waving and cavorting. He’s followed by a ludicrous monochrome ‘Edge’, ‘Clayton’ and ‘Mullen’. Roadies who look like Victor Mature in ‘Samson And Delilah’ (1949) attempt to stuff them back into the magician’s box from which they emerge, and drag them towards the stage. ‘Bono’ retreats back in last, waving royally, as if on clockwork.

 “The Fly” comes second. Dense and distorted. ‘GUILT IS NOT OF gOD’. But “Even Better Than The Real Thing” is pin-sharp and digitally balanced. Then “(She Moves In) Mysterious Ways”, and the audience smoke-hole regurgitates a harem dancer whirling bumping and grinding towards the stage, teasing and flirting as Bono sneaks an ‘ah, love to love you Baby’ into the fade. In the audience a life-size plastic sex-doll passes dumbly over people’s heads, pinkly naked. Mouth a perfect sexually-accessible ‘O’.

Bono channel-hops a visual slipstream of Euro-TV with the remote control. ‘It makes more sense when you DON’T speak the language.’ Welcome to the global village. The medium is the message, and the massage. Televisual lobotomy comes via the crystal bucket, an image saturation from the glass teat, with William Burroughs taken on as script-consultant. Fields of sunflowers. Prowls of buffalo. EGY. BIR. OKAN. ONE. UNE. NYE. “One” is dedicated to Sarajevo. Simultaneously St James Hospital one-&-three-quarter miles down the Harehills Road prepares a ward to accept the first of John Major’s ‘clutching-at-PR-straws’ OPERATION IRMA casualties (airlifting the wounded from the Sarajevo siege).

‘1990?’ queries the next caller tentatively. The outside broadcasts break for a traffic update. There’s gridlock clear through Leeds backing up on the M1 beyond Exit 46. The ‘T’-shirts say ‘Brian May’, ‘ZOOROPA’, ‘Big Country’, ‘ZOOROPA’, ‘R.E.M.’, ZOOROPA’, ‘Barbara Cartland’ (!) and ‘STOP SELLAFIELD: U2’. Adam Clayton is in all-over blue. The Edge in an orange jacket. We are trapped in the United States Of Unconsciousness where Central America means Kansas.

Bono does “Unchained Melody”. A nuclear strike of missiles launch from Cold War silos. As he gets to ‘speed your love to me’ they detonate in a holocaust of exploding cars from every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie at once. “Until The End Of The World”, and Bono moves out along a platform into the audience, wetly and open-mouthed kissing the video camera so his incredibly magnified lips near-devour us all from the screens. The sun goes down like a slow Hiroshima in reverse. A blitz of lights strobe up. “New Year’s Day” gets the night’s first mass roar of approval, green and red lights turn the scaffolding into an industrial oil refinery. Lighters spark held high in constellations across the crushed human undulations.

‘80,000 people and counting’ says Radio Aire. £22 a ticket. That’s £1,760,000. There’s a specially-constructed viewing platform to take sixty wheelchairs. A girl from Morley called Susan wins the album and the Sam Goodman book for correctly identifying April 1989 as the date when “When Loves Comes To Town” (with BB King) got to no.6 on the chart.

ZOOROPA is stunning. But spectacle on this scale ain’t as innovatory as the overkill postmodernists-on-legs claim. BELIEVE THE HYPE. Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ (1977) tour had flotillas of helium pigs and Spitfire fly-pasts over the stadia. Even Jefferson Airplane had big movie backdrops at the Fillmore’s which explains the dialogue from the 1933 ‘King Kong’ (‘it was beauty that killed the beast’) that closes their ‘Bless Its Pointed Little Head’ (1969) live album. TV’s and on-stage fast-cut SEGA-MEGA-TV type home videos ain’t new either. Every early eighties industrial-dance Club outfit studded their set with synchronised screens of sub-Warhol handhelds or pseudo-Godard cut-ups. So Leonardo Da Vinci designed the parachute three centuries before the first aircraft? He also blueprinted the helicopter principle. It’s said he went on to invent Betamax – hell, no-one’s perfect. Not even genius. Where U2 DO innovate – and it’s a breathtaking conceptual osmosis, is to autowreck it all together. Electrifying the tired old corpse of ‘y’all right!!!’ Stadium Rock with mainline techno upgrading. Despite its spectacular incandescence ZOOROPA reduces down to human dimensions. The event never eclipses the players. U2 never lose the focal point. Yet despite the sound-and-vision accuracy, it’s a mass experience. Images overlap into each other, an animated sensory wrap-around of frantic speeded-up activity and solarised slo-mo video prattle that traps the retina as the sound hits the ear.

I’ve seen nothing like it. It’s still tattooed indelibly into the back of my head. It’s as if we’ve been given the magic cinema ticket and step into the ‘Close Encounters’ (1977) end-game as the alien Mothership descends through waves of ethereal light into all that sublime Spielbergian spine-shivering transfiguration.

‘…old stuff’s been repeated too many times’ drones the speakers.

“Numb” is covered up by ZOOROPA static. Machines and Soldiers. The Edge’s voice so flat Pizza-hut could cover it with red peppers and black olives and stick it in the plastic menu-holders.

For “Baby Face” Bono writhes on his back while a girl from the audience operates the camera. ‘Never pick on a Liverpool girl’ he gasps, chastened by her ardour. Then enquires ‘these new songs OK?’

They traipse into the audience for a skiffle session. The ‘Elvis 1968 TV Special’ jam. “Stay”, “Angel Of Harlem”. “When Love Comes To Town” (as a nudge to Radio Aire listeners?). “Satellite Of Love” is a three-way duet, Bono, the Edge, and the giant magisterial Lou Reed on the screens, the vocals glop together supernaturally. And Bono is singing ‘…if I could, you know I would…’ ZOOROPA: forget the theory, feel the beat.

He begins “All I Want Is You” starkly acoustic. One verse in and it erupts blindingly into “Bullet The Blue Sky”. Raging guitar solo. Everything burns loop-brained red. Blazing crosses ascend. Then they twist themselves into swastikas. ‘Don’t let it happen again.’ The sequence is awe-inspiring on all levels, visually, sonically and politically.

‘Gary Graham is due for execution by poison injection on a Texas death row. DON’T LET HIM DIE.’ They name-check it to Amnesty International. You can join at the stand behind us. This is an information-station with pinko liberal tendencies. The continuity of conscience is impressive (although, despite it all, Gary Graham – ‘Shaka Sankofa’ is executed by lethal injection at 08:49, Thursday 22 June 2000).

After “Running To A Standstill” Bono is swallowed by dry-ice clouds, emerging crouched playing harmonica. “Where The Streets Have No Name”. Gordon Strachan dances like a footballer dances. Slightly off the beat.

But despite the acceleration into modernity that shoves U2 head hands and feet above every other arena band on the planet, already the nostalgia quotient is at work. The older songs – “Pride (In The Name Of Love)”, get the most intimidatingly spontaneous responses. The charismatic Martin Luther King presiding above immaculately choreographed audience handclaps like a regimented Queen video.

Intermission. Tropical fish drift across giant screens. Access Zoo TV: faces sampled from the audience flash up to confess or proclaim. ‘I had a shit on the roof of my neighbour’s car.’ ‘Well, I didn’t vote for them, so who the fuck did?’ A skinny girl in a body-stocking says ‘I just want to get something off my chest,’ and she flips out a pretty nipple. This is ZOOROPA À LA MODE. As an encore device it’s unnecessary, but acts as a bridge to Ego MacPhisto – Bono in gold lamé and horns persona. AKKERS. DRACHMA. DOLLARS. SPONDULÉ. “Desire” is lascivious with greed and lust, drenched in explosions of cash. And “Moon River”, ‘I love that one. Do you love that one?’ he smarms. ‘I love the people of the north, too. You’re so… generous. They send you the nuclear waste of the world. And you accept it all. How very generous of you. I think I should ‘phone Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer to express our gratitude.’ He counts out the ex-Directory number as he punches the buttons so everyone can hear.

Gummer, predictably, is not home. ‘I’m afraid he’s not in at the moment.’

‘You’re sure he’s not asleep?’ No, he’s not asleep. Just unavailable.

‘So can I leave a message…?’ And MacPhisto leads the community singing of Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You”.

Then ‘Ultra-Violet Light “My Way”’. “Love Is Blindness”.

And “Can’t Help Falling In Love” – waltzing in close with a girl from the audience. A falsetto so high it threatens to leave the range of human senses altogether, to become audible only to dogs. Until Elvis himself, from the ‘Blue Hawaii’ (1961) soundtrack, takes over.

Lights extinguish. ‘Thank you and Goodbye,’ with a final announcement that ‘ELVIS IS STILL IN THE BUILDING’. Which, in a sense, he is.

‘Radio Aire’ continues its bulletins into Sunday’s early hours as gridlocks unravel slowly through Leeds and beyond. U2 catch the last flight south from Leeds/Bradford airport, and Gordon Strachan returns to the reality of the new season’s struggle in Premier Division football.

Full ZOOROPA Set List:

(1) “Zoo Station”, (2) “The Fly”, (3) “Even Better Than The Real Thing”, (4) “Mysterious Ways”, (5) “One” with snippet of “Unchained Melody”, (6) “Until The End Of The World”, (7) “New Year’s Day”, (8) “Numb”, (9) “Baby Face”, (10) “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)”, (11) “Angel Of Harlem”, (12) “When Love Comes To Town”, (13) “Satellite Of Love”, (14) “Bad” with snippets of “Fool To Cry” and “All I Want Is You”, (15) “Bullet The Blue Sky”, (16) “Running To Stand Still” with excerpt of “The End”, (17) “Where The Streets Have No Name”, (18) “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” – Then Encores (19) “Desire” with snippets from “You Make Me Feel So Young”, “Solid Gold Easy Action” and “My Way”, (20) “Love Is Blindness”, (21) “Can’t Help Falling In Love”