Peter Maxwell Davies: Farewell to Stromness

This popular short piece by Sir Peter Maxell Davies, who died last month, is taken from The Yellow Cake Revue.

This was a collection of cabaret-style pieces that he performed with Eleanor Bron, as part of the 1980 St Magnus Festival, in protest at plans to mine uranium ore in Orkney.

Farewell to Stromness is played here by Ezra Williams.

George Mackay Brown said Stromness "is but a tumbling stone wave, a network of closes, a marvel of steps from the seaweed up to the granite of Brinkie's Brae".

I've been there and he's right.

Read More

Ziggy Stardust came from Isleworth

Embed from Getty Images

A treasure turned up on BBC Radio 4 Extra the other day: Ziggy Stardust came from Isleworth.

It tells the story of Vince Taylor, a British rocker from that lost period before the Beatles.

As the iPlayer blurb says:

Ziggy Stardust was a rock and roll fantasy. But David Bowie's fictional rockstar, around whom his 1972 album, stage show, and film were built, was inspired by a real performer, Vince Taylor, born in Isleworth, Middlesex. 

This programme uncovers the truth about a singer whose wild lifestyle ultimately destroyed him, but in so doing he gave rise to a myth that transcended glam-rock and science fiction. 

His record "Brand New Cadillac" remains to this day a British rock 'n' roll classic, covered later by The Clash.

And Bowie is interviewed in it:

Vince Taylor underwent a kind of public breakdown at his next gig, where he started claiming he was a divine being. David Bowie bumped into him in London and later said: 

"Vince Taylor was the inspiration for Ziggy...He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock n roll. I'm not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. There was something very tempting about him going completely off the edge."

Read More

The Pogues: A Rainy Night In Soho

"This is Shane MacGowan before the shambling drunk routine took over completely," says Tom Conoboy.

In the comments below there is a debate about whether the song is about whisky, as Conoboy argues, or about romantic love as its surface suggests.

The truth, surely, is that it is both at once. Poems and songs can do that. It's why people write them rather than essays.

Read More

Spencer Davis Group: Let Me Down Easy

It was my birthday on Friday, so I am allowed to choose a Spencer Davis Group track as my Sunday video. (I don't make the rules.)

Let Me Down Easy appeared on the Spencer Davis Group's Second Album in 1966. It had been a hit in the US the previous year for Bettye LaVette.

Read More

The Who: I'm a Boy

Writing about moves to ban tackling in school rugby, I quoted some lines from this song. I have since found this video, so here it is on a Sunday.

Wikipedia explains the genesis of "I'm a Boy":

The song was originally intended to be a part of a rock opera called 'Quads' which was to be set in the future where parents can choose the sex of their children. The idea was later scrapped, but this song survived and was later released as a single. 

The song is about a family who "order" four girls, but a mistake is made and three girls and one boy are delivered instead. The boy dreams of partaking in sports and other boy-type activities, but his mother forces him to act like his sisters and refuses to believe the truth.

I once reminisced about going out and buying Substitute by The Who when it was re-released in 1976 because it was so much better than anything in the charts at the time.

This was on the B-side, along with Picture of Lily. I don't think I have ever got better value than that.

If you are a fan of The Who in the 1960s, also have a look at this video of three songs performed at the Marquee Club.

Read More

The Iain Duncan Smiths sing "This Balanced Plan"

Genius!

Thanks to @paulwaugh

Read More

The Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square

Embed from Getty Images

After visiting Old St Pancras I wandered down to Brunswick Square and the Foundling Museum.

As its website explains:

The Foundling Hospital, which continues today as the children’s charity Coram, was established in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to care for babies at risk of abandonment. Instrumental in helping Coram realise his vision were the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel. Their creative generosity set the template for the ways in which the arts can support philanthropy.

It also claims to be Britain's first children's charity and its first public art gallery.

The image above shows the original building, with its girls' wing, boys' wing and chapel in between them, which demolished in 1928. The current building, once the headquarters of the charity, was put up in 1937.

When I went round last week their was an exhibition of children's book illustrations in the basement, a cafe and heartbreaking exhibitions about the charity's history on the ground floor, and exhibitions of art by the institution's 18th-century patrons on the floors above.

It was an odd combination, but somehow a compelling one.

When the Hospital closed in 1926, the children were moved first to Surrey and then to a new building at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire.

An account of its later days (it closed in 1954) shows it was one of the barrack-like institutions that children's charities insisted on running early in the 20th century. Their disappearance after the second world war marked a long stride forward.

I did, however, come across one fact about the Foundling Hospital's history that may be of interest to someone I know.

It seems that fashionable London would flock to see the children (or at least the girls) eating their Sunday lunch.

I shall suggest this to Lord Bonkers as a nice little earner for the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans.

Read More

The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: Fire

What else could it be after last night?

A post for Voice by Laruen Wise makes the case for Brown as an important figure:

Almost 50 years ago, musical icon Arthur Brown stepped out on stage, five-foot tall flames leaping from his head, and uttered one of rock music’s most stirring lines: "I am the God of Hellfire." 

At that point, the British theatrical rocker who brought us The Crazy World of Arthur Brown in '68 had no way of knowing that he would come to be seen as a major pioneer in not only progressive rock and heavy metal, but the entire concept of what makes a stage show. 

He’s influenced generations of musicians who searched for an edge, from King Diamond, KISS, and Peter Gabriel to Marilyn Manson, Rob Halford, and Alice Cooper.

Read More

An evening with the legendary Arthur Brown

I have just got back from seeing Arthur Brown at the Harborough Theatre. The evening was a mixture of stories and performance theatre about his music career, all interspersed with songs.

He is best known for his 1968 number one hit Fire, which was an early melding of pop and theatre. But there is more to him than that. Finding himself treated as a guru by some because of the themes of his songs, he felt a fraud and has dedicated his life since to seeking enlightenment.

And tonight the way brought him to Market Harborough.

Read More

This remake of The Sound of Music looks rubbish

Read More

The Stains: Bored

I came across a tweet the other day that suggested the actor David Hemmings had lived briefly in Shrewsbury High Street. That is hard to reconcile with what I know of his life, but it did lead me to this record.

The Stains were a Shrewsbury punk band whose original vocalist was Dom Estos. And Dom Estos was Dominic Hemmings, the adopted son of David Hemmings.

His mother was Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes. Dominic had already been born when Hemmings met her during  a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960 and they fell in love. They married shortly afterwards and Hemmings adopted Dominic, but the marriage did not last.

A few more snippets...

The band turn up in a letter to the Guardian by Mark Webb in 2010:

I was amazed to read of Kevin ­Rowland's antipathy towards ironed creases in jeans ... In the 70s, playing drums in Dom Estos And The Stains, we got a gig supporting Dexys ­Midnight Runners at Shrewsbury Music Hall. Dexys got the bigger dressing room, but we had the electric socket. A knock on the door and Mr Rowland appears: "Hello, lads. Can I plug in my iron to do my trousers?"

Dom Estos appears still to be making music, under the name Dominic Ouvry, as part of Liquid Vision.

And a little googling suggests Genista Ouvry used the name Jenny Lewes because Lewes was her mother's maiden name.

Not only that: it suggests she was a direct descendant of George Henry Lewes, Victorian man of letters and partner of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans).

Read More

Six of the Best 578

Mary Reid has been reading a report from the Manifesto Club on Public Space Protection Orders.

It's not Bernie Sanders that Jerermy Corbyn resembles, but Donald Trump. Lance Parkin draws parallels between the woes of the Republicans and the Labour Party.

"Our heritage, our history, our quirky collecting natures are being eroded and erased by the need to make financial savings, to economise, to pare down and re-shape." Tincture of Museum on the threat to our smaller museums.

"All this promises well for Mile End, does it not? Think of all the comfortable and respectable suburbs of London, from Norwood to Golder's Green, and try to find one with a series of concerts like this." The Guardian recently republished a 1921 interview with Adrian Boult about his plans to bring classical music to the East End.

The Gentle Author on two unlikely neighbours: Handel and Jimi Hendrix.

The Nottingham Post has a gallery of 30 photographs of the city's Victoria station.

Read More

Police to reopen Jeremy Thorpe case

From ITV News:

An investigation into the alleged involvement of the former leader of the Liberal Party in a plot to kill is to be reopened. 

Avon and Somerset Police has passed the files from the original investigation about Jeremy Thorpe, former MP for North Devon, to colleagues in Wales. 

The alleged hit man Dennis Meighan told The Mail on Sunday that he met representatives of Thorpe in 1975. He claims they wanted Norman Scott, said to have been the MP's gay lover, silenced. 

However a few days later Mr Meighan says he backed out of the plot and told the police. But he alleges that all mentions of Jeremy Thorpe in his police statement were removed. He believes that someone in Whitehall covered up his claims. He was never called to give evidence at Mr Thorpe's trial along with three other men accused of attempting to murder Scott. All four men were acquitted at the high profile trial.

First Lord Lucan and now this. Seeing the scandals of my teenage years being recycled makes me feel young again. Can John Stonehouse be far behind?

The odd thing about this is that Meighan's story was known at the time of the Thorpe trial. As I blogged in December 2014:

Here is Auberon Waugh writing in the Spectator on 5 June 1981. Among six questions that remain to be answered about the affair, he lists:

Why Denis Meighan, the man who sold Newton his gun, was not allowed to mention Newton's offer of £1,000 to do the job - of murdering Scott - for him.

So it may be that the police are concerned about something else.

And I think I know what it is.

One of Thorpe's co-accused was a nightclub owner from South Wales by the name of George Deakin.

As I revealed earlier in 2014, he was the uncle of the guitarist in Black Lace.

You know: "Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple, shake the tree."

Lock them up, I say. Lock up the whole bloody family.

Read More

Jordan: Rule Britannia

When I was young a top British recording star would be named to sing for us at Eurovision, but the choice of song was left to a public vote. In those days, incidentally, voting involved sending a postcard.

This year we have the public vote back, but no stars. Joe and Jake (me neither) will be singing 'You're Not Alone' for us in Sweden in May.

This video would have been my choice.

It comes from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee, which I saw at a university film club that year. (Those were the days when teenagers went to university to encounter dangerous new ideas, not demanding that they be protected from them.) It has not been much seen since, but deserves a viewing if only as a historical curiosity - I am going to order the DVD.

Stuart Jeffries once described Jubilee thus:

The film's framing device has Queen Elizabeth I consulting her court astrologer Dr John Dee (played by Rocky Horror Show creator Richard O'Brien). Dee shows his queen a vision of her realm 400 years hence. It is over-run by roving gangs of girl punks and thuggish police. Dorset has become a fascist state within a state where the rich luxuriate behind barbed wire. The old Queen Elizabeth (played by Jenny Runacre) is horrified. 

It's likely that Elizabeth II, whose silver jubilee celebrations are mocked in the film's ironic title, wouldn't have cared for Jarman's vision of her kingdom either. She especially wouldn't have liked Jordan dressed as a punk Britannia, miming to a souped-up reggae version of Rule Britannia and lifting her skirt to show her bum. 

In a sense, Jarman was expressing similar nihilistic views to those of Johnny Rotten in God Save the Queen. Neither believed in the English disease that the political philosopher of Britain's decline Tom Nairn described as "the glamour of backwardness". Jarman told the Guardian's Nicholas de Jongh in February 1978: "We have now seen all established authority, all political systems, fail to provide any solution - they no longer ring true."

You will also read more about Jordan in that article. Here real name is Pamela Rooke and her character in Jubilee is called Amyl Nitrate. She was interviewed in the Guardian in 2004.

I don't know what the Europeans would make of it, but combining punk and patriotism ticks a lot of British boxes.

Read More

Six of the Best 576

"An idea that was floated at one point (which thankfully never materialised) was placing gigantic, inflatable MPs arses in town centres for passersby to kick. There was a sense of enforced “fun” about the whole thing at all times that was exhausting to be around." More and more, the Leave campaign resembles Yes to AV, says Nick Tyrone. And he should know.

Michael Wilson argues that we must defend free speech on campus.

"She began by saying 'You all know me in here…' (I didn’t), I was thrown to discover that the first guest speaker at a Labour Party pressure group was a member of the Socialist Workers Party." Labour member Joe Cox attends a Momentum meeting and finds it is not for him.

Jennifer Wilkinson on the prison memoirs of the suffragette Constance Lytton.

"The exact location and nature of Ravenserodd is open to some debate, but it is often believed to have been located to the east of the present-day Spurn Point and was said in the fourteenth-century Chronica Monasterii de Melsa to have been 'distant from the mainland a space of one mile and more'." Caitlin Green explores the lost settlements of the Lincolnshire coast.

Thom Hickey reminds us of the forgotten talent of Helen Shapiro.

Read More

Geordie: All Because of You

Last Friday BBC4 broadcast a documentary on The Easybeats to AC/DC: The Story of Aussie Rock. You can watch it for on BBC iPlayer for the next three weeks.

You can see The Easybeats on this blog, and the documentary was so thorough that you saw Angus Young when he was in long trousers.

AC/DC's first lead singer was Bon Scott, who was found dead in his car in East Dulwich in 1980. The Guardian once did its best to turn it into a mystery along the lines of Brian Jones' death, but the cause was clearly acute alcohol poisoning.

Scott's replacement in AC/DC was Brian Johnson. Before AC/DC he was with the British band Geordie.

This was there most successful single, reaching no. 6 in the British singles chart early in 1973. It has lasted better than a lot of the other hits of the period.

Read More

The Lark Ascending and Snailbeach lead mines

Now do you see why I am always going on about this place?

Read More

Tragic Magic: The Life of Traffic's Chris Wood

Way back in 2008 I blogged saying that Dan Ropek was writing a biography of Chris Wood from Traffic.

Thanks to someone who has found that old post and left a couple of comments, I can tell you that Tragic Magic: The Life of Traffic's Chris Wood has now been published.

The book's blurb says:

Traffic was the most enigmatic British band of their day. Formed in early 1967 by Chris Wood, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Dave Mason, they rejected the bright lights of London in favor of a run-down, supposedly haunted, cottage in the country - a place to live communally and write music. 

With Chris especially intent on channeling the vibes of England's landscape into their sound, days would be spent getting high, exploring, playing and working in varying proportions. Against all odds, this eccentric model paid off - songs such as "Dear Mr. Fantasy" and "John Barleycorn Must Die" would lift Traffic into the upper echelons of the rock world. 

As they brushed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and the Grateful Dead, and with Dave dropping in and out of the band, Traffic's music evolved from a synthesis of Steve's innate musicality, Jim's atmospheric lyrics and Chris's special brand of congenial mysticism. Record sales boomed and tours carried them back and forth across the Atlantic, everything seemed to be going to plan - a dreamlike fairy tale come true. 

But for Chris, a toll would be exacted. 

Amid the clashing egos, wearing road trips, stressful break ups and a complex personal life, he vacillated precariously between bursts of exquisite creativity and torrents of self-destruction; a paradoxical dance which continued until his death in 1983. For a man who found artistic expression everything, and for whom suffering for it was an expectation, Chris would stare fully into the Medusa's face of the music industry, paying a higher price than perhaps any of his contemporaries. 

Researched and written over a ten-year period, "Tragic Magic" offers the only definitive account of Traffic's story and Chris Wood's quietly extraordinary life.

Read More

Holly Macve: The Corner of My Mind

I heard Holly Macve on Radio 3's Late Junction the other evening.

They thought she comes from Liverpool, but the Bella Union site tells a different story:

Bella Union have recently signed the exciting talent of Holly Macve. Boss Simon Raymonde says "Little is known of Holly other than she is a 20 year old from Yorkshire who appeared out of nowhere in Brighton late last year. I had a tip-off to go to a basement bar where she was playing. In a room full of beery boys chatting across all the music beforehand, the minute Holly opened her mouth the room fell silent. Hers is a rare gift."

She is currently writing and recording in the North-East of England with Paul Gregory (Lanterns On The Lake).

Whatever the truth of it, she sounds as though she comes from somewhere rural in America.

Read More

Ronnie Lane and Eric Clapton at the Drum and Monkey

The Drum and Monkey today

I have just listened to the BBC Radio Shropshire programme on Ronnie Lane and Eric Clapton that I blogged about on Monday. (It was broadcast today at lunchtime.)

Far from exploding the myth that you could once hear rock and roll aristocracy playing at remote Shropshire pubs it proved the stories were true.

It also includes a rare interview with Ronnie Lane's widow Kate. Well done, Johnty O'Donnell.

You can listen to the programme for the next month on the BBC website. It occupies the second hour of Paul Shuttleworth's show.

There are also some photographs from the most celebrated concert at the Drum and Monkey on the BBC Radio Shropshire Facebook page.

Read More