Listen yourself warm

I've had a request from James. He enjoyed my snowy photo from a couple of weeks ago, but it's making him feel cold. He's had enough of the winter and wondered if I could post some 'summery music' to warm things up a bit. Well James, your wish is my command. It's a great idea, and I've had a blast putting together a summery/warm playlist this morning.

Rather than risk the authorities taking me away for posting tracks without permission, I thought a Spotify playlist might be the safest bet, so I hope that the majority of you have access to Spotify. If not, you should be able to hunt down the tracks elsewhere. I present — with great pleasure — the Summer Heat playlist.

1. Ma'Africa - Mahotella Queens and Ulali (from 1 Giant Leap). This had to be the first choice, as it warmed me up very effectively on a snowy walk recently. It's a great, bouncy, sunny track, which will put a spring in your step.
2. Night Scented Stock - Kate Bush (from Never For Ever). It's a short, sweet gem of a song, and other than the title, it isn't obviously summery. But somehow I always think of a hot, midsummer night in a secret, moonlit garden when I listen to this. YMMV.
3. Psychedelic Shack - The Temptations (from Psychedlic Shack). Party music! You will be dancing by the end of it (or at least jigging in your seat) and that will warm you up.
4. Firefly - Michael Franti (from Songs from the Front Porch). I find Michael Franti's voice wonderfully warm, and the atmosphere of this song just says warm summer night to me.
5. Plastic Factory - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (from Safe As Milk). What would a playlist be without Beefheart? This is another that might not scream summer to everyone, but for me it makes me think of driving off on holiday, windows down, yelling the line "Factory's no place for me, Boss Man leave me be!" at the top of my voice while drumming on the steering wheel. It also has a lovely, dirty, stomping quality to it that somehow says summer freedom to me.
6. Marieta - Ibrahim Ferrer (from Buena Vista Social Club presents Ibrahim Ferrer). A deliciously lively, infectiously upbeat track. In contrast to Plastic Factory, if listening to this doesn't immediately conjure up images of hot, Cuban nights, dancing your flip-flops off in a sweaty, smoky club, you have a faulty imagination. I particularly love the bit near the end where it all kicks off.
7. Mustt Mustt - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (from Mustt Mustt). I could have chosen any of the Sufi master's music, but even though this is one of the most well known of his works, I really love it. Nusrat's voice a source of warmth of its own, and that's reason enough to include it.
8. Nocturn - Kate Bush (from Aerial). The song is actually about skinny dipping in the sea on a midsummer night, so it's very appropriate. Plus, it's a great song, and her voice has the same warmth inducing properties as Nusrat's.
9. Summerfield Avenue - Chris Wood (from Trespasser). This makes me remember playing in the garden in the summer when I was a kid and splashing about it the paddling pool.
10. Sankofa - Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (from Hypnotic Brass Ensemble). Brass — I have decided — is inherently summery, and this is just the right music for sitting in the sun and drinking a beer or two.
11. Sweet Home Alabama - Lynyrd Skynyrd (from A Retrospective). More, 'going away on holiday in a carefree mood' music. Also, classic track.
12. One Day Like This - Elbow (from The Seldom Seen Kid). This is one of those songs which is in danger of over-exposure, because it seems to be used as background music to just about every TV programme. However, it's a lovely song — uplifting, life-affirming and sunny.
13. Bonus track! Sexual Healing - Kate Bush (B side of King of the Mountain). I had absolutely no idea that Kate had covered Sexual Healing until I found it by chance on Spotify. It's hard to compete with the Marvin Gaye original, but this is pretty special. I'm including it because a) it's Valentine's Day and b) if this doesn't warm you up, nothing will!

Enjoy.

The Imagined Village - Empire and Love

Mr. Bsag recently saw The Imagined Village play in Birmingham. I was intensely jealous, because I couldn't join him due to a work commitment. However, he brought me back their latest album — Empire and Love — which I'm really enjoying. The Imagined Village are a kind of folk/world music collective, involving several talented musicians including Chris Wood, Eliza Carthy and Martin Carthy, along with parts of Chris Wood's 'Best Band in the World' (Barney Morse-Brown and Andy Gangadeen).

Here they tackle a wide range of songs, some traditional and some modern, but they manage to give each a unique and fresh feel, combining traditional English acoustic instruments with Indian sitars, tabla and dhol. I've listened to the album a lot recently, and I love all the tracks, but I'm particularly fond of 'Space Girl' (sung by Eliza Carthy) — a cautionary tale set to 1950s sci-fi sounds, and 'My Son John', sung by Martin Carthy. The latter is a traditional song about a young man losing his legs to a cannon ball, but they have very cleverly updated it to weave in references to Iraq and Afghanistan, and John getting a set of carbon fibre 'blades' to replace his legs. This works very well and reinforces the sad point that young men continue to lose life or limb while fighting other peoples' wars.

Chris Wood sings 'Scarborough Fair', rescuing it from folk cliché, and also leads on the lovely track 'Sweet Jane', accompanied by Indian instruments. However, the standout track for me is a cover of Slade's 'Cum on Feel the Noize'. A folk version of Cum on Feel the Noize? It seems like (and for all I know was) the outcome of a somewhat drunken bet to see who could come up with the most unlikely song to cover in a folk style. However, much like Apple products, it somehow Just Works™.

Martin Carthy sings the lead vocals, and the whole song is taken at a much slower tempo than usual. This makes it sound like a sad, regretful lament, rather than the roaring party track that Slade recorded. I was so struck by this complete change in tone that I started imagining the music video that might accompany it.

Scene: Interior. Night. We are in a very gloomy, down-at-heel, shabby pub: the kind of place where people go to drink and try to forget their troubles.

We focus on Martin Carthy, dressed and made up to look like someone down on his luck, oppressed by his life. He is staring into his pint disconsolately, then looks up and starts to sing:

You think I've got an evil mind I'll tell you honey
I don't know why
Don't know why

He could be addressing us, the viewer, or alternatively complaining to someone who isn't there. The pub is the kind where people tend to have conversations with invisible interlocutors, so it's not clear which it is. At any rate, his voice is querulous and indignant. He can't understand why he has been so misunderstood.

He sings a brief, quiet version of the chorus, in the manner of someone who knows he will never get wild, wild, wild again, or — for that matter — ever feel the noize.

Then the camera pulls out to reveal the other band members occupying the pub. All are seated at separate tables, nursing their drinks and not looking at one another. As the next chorus begins, they join in, quietly:

So come on feel the noise
Girls grab your boys
We'll get wild, wild, wild
We'll wild, wild, wild
Come on feel the noise
Girls rock your boys
We get wild, wild, wild
Til dawn

Every 'wild' is sung slowly on a sad, descending intonation, like a sigh or a dying breath.

Later, the barman picks up his sitar from behind the bar¹. There's an instrumental bridge, and everyone has that unfocussed look of people remembering their past glories and knowing that they have gone, never to return. No one smiles.

FIN.

Seriously, it's a cracking track, and has reversed my hatred of the Slade song, which is no small feat.

¹ Did I mention that there's a sitar? Well there is, and it rocks. \oo/ \oo/ ↑

Give me heart and soul and error

I was watching an excellent Arena documentary the other day about Brian Eno. Eno is a fascinating person, and would most likely be at the top of the list if I ever got asked who I would invite to a dream dinner party. He is one of those rare and precious people who think quite deeply about both art and science, and manage to combine elements of both in new and interesting ways in their work.

There were lots of great bits in the documentary, including a flick through one or two of the hundreds of notebooks he has filled throughout his life. He said that he writes things down so that he can think about them properly (not necessarily to remember them later), and he had notes on everything from mundane reminders of dental appointments to elaborate pictorial representations of the events of a day.

But what really caught my attention was when he was talking about how he dislikes over-precise music. Music has become rather standardised and polished. For example, drummers now routinely record to a click track, so while their drumming sounds very precise, it doesn't necessarily sound 'right', and has a tendency to be have a bit of a cold, antiseptic feel. He said that he preferred a bit of surprise and variability in music — something that doesn't sound exactly the same every time it is performed.

For probably the first and only time in my life, I thought, "Brian, I was thinking just the same thing myself this morning." I had been listening to a band called Sym who play a variety of unusual instruments like the Swedish nyckelharpas (no, I've never heard of it before either) and the hurdy-gurdy. I love anything with a hurdy-gurdy in it, and I was wondering idly why I'm so fond of the sound it produces. It gradually dawned on me that I love it precisely because it never quite sounds the same twice. It's a gloriously 'dirty' sound, with scrapes and squeaks and buzzes and multiple harmonics, and I doubt that even skilled hurdy-gurdy players can play it with absolute consistency. All of these faults just make it sound more real and alive, and that makes it a joy to listen to.

You can take the same approach with electronic instruments by adding back the variability in various ways (like Eno's keyboard which plays a different sampled sound on each key), so the warm and fuzzy feel isn't necessarily restricted to acoustic, analogue instruments. But that feels a bit like cheating, somehow.

Walking songs

The recent snow has made cycling to work impossible. Some brave (or foolish) souls have been cycling along the main roads, but my route goes through parks and other open spaces where it's certain that very little gritting will have been done. I'm also a total coward when it comes to riding in icy conditions. I have a Weeble¹ like ability to stay upright — despite slipping — when on foot, but I crash to the ground on a bike at the first wobble on ice.

Usually when I can't ride to work for whatever reason, I take the train, but I decided (for reasons of economy and fitness) to try walking at least one way to work this past week. The plan was to walk the 4.8 miles to work² in the morning, and then catch the train back again. It isn't a huge distance, and it ended up taking me an hour and 10 minutes at a brisk pace, even negotiating the snowy pavements. I had to get up earlier, but it was really pleasant getting into a good walking rhythm, watching dawn break, and having the route mostly to myself for the first part at least.

On Friday afternoon, there were signalling problems at Birmingham New Street, and consequently much of the local network was thrown into disarray. Mr. Bsag called me to say that there were cancellations noted for at least the next hour, so I decided that I might as well walk home too.

I had been quite cold in the office during the day, and the chill persisted despite the exercise, so half way home I felt rather weary. I was listening to my iPhone on shuffle, and just at that moment, the track Ma' Africa by Ulali and the Mahotella Queens (from the album '1 Giant Leap') came on. As soon as it started, I felt instantly warmed, thinking about hot, African landscapes, and within a few minutes I was almost bounding up the hill, a spring in my step, admiring the way that the setting sun was washing the snow with pink and smoky grey.

If the snow continues, I can see I'll have to put Ma' Africa on repeat, particularly when travelling home.

¹ Thank you low centre of gravity! ↑

² A different route to the one I cycle, which is longer, but more cycle-friendly. ↑

The campaign against pink

I was reading The Guardian a while before Christmas, and came across an interesting article about a campaign called Pink Stinks, started by two sisters (Emma and Abi Moore). They were sick of the lack of choice of clothes (everything pink and sparkly) and toys for girls, and the fact that toys which should be gender neutral (like globes) were being marketed towards girls by being manufactured in pink. The kinds of toys and activities marketed towards girls also seemed designed to restrict them to 'feminine' roles. Those of you who have read this blog for a while will know my hatred of pink gadgets marketed at women, so this campaign struck a chord with me.

The article had a wonderful advert for Lego from the 1970s, which features a smiling girl (wearing a blue t-shirt and jeans, as it happens), proudly holding out a wonderful, wild Lego construction. What I like about the picture (apart from the lack of pink) is that it is genuinely gender-neutral — you could substitute a picture of a boy, and it would have exactly the same message. I also like the fact that the Lego construction doesn't look like anything in the real world, but is the joyous result of seeing what happens when you put loads of Lego bricks together, quite unlike the restrictive Lego sets you get now which have lots of shaped, specific pieces so that you can only make a house, or whatever it is.

In the article, Emma and Abi said that they were amazed at the level of criticism they had received. People seem to think that girls are genetically pre-disposed to love pink, and that to say that there's something wrong with everything for girls being made in pink is somehow denying girls' human rights. Well, when I was a kid, girls liked lots of different colours. Some liked pink, it's true, but we all wore lots of different colours ¹. I also think that girls played with a greater variety of toys. I was a real tomboy (I'm sure that surprises no-one), and although I did have a few dolls, I also played with Lego, Meccano, my brother's toy cars and planes, and I made tree-houses and go-carts. I find it a bit creepy that some people seem to think that it's perfectly normal for little girls to be obsessed with only one colour.

Of course it's true that boys and girls are different and that there are some differences in what they like, but should we decide for them what kinds of things they should like, based on their gender alone? Should we restrict the kinds of activities and roles that girls (or boys, for that matter) are supposed to enjoy? Apart from anything else, it's fairly obvious that toy manufacturers are trying make more money by getting parents to buy the same tat twice over (if they have sons and daughters), by making them buy it in both pink and blue.

¹ In fact, it being the 1970s when I grew up, we wore some revolting colour combinations: mustard and purple, anyone? ↑

Post-Christmas pre-New Year round up

I meant to post just before Christmas to wish everyone a good holiday, I really did. It's just that I was so exhausted from a very busy period at work that I just flopped as soon as my holiday started, and did practically nothing. Doing nothing has done me the world of good though, and I feel much revived. So much so, that I took the big step of upgrading ExpressionEngine (which runs my blog) to the beta version of 2.0.

As it often is with these things, it didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. For some reason, one of the templates (which are kept in the database itself by default with ExpressionEngine) got truncated, so I had to delve into the backup of the database to find the original. Thank goodness for backups! I've also got a slightly odd installation because I have all the ExpressionEngine files in a subdirectory, but then fiddle with the URLs so that the directory doesn't appear in the permalinks. So I had to try to remember what the heck I had fiddled with last time to get it to work properly. Anyway, it all seems to be working now, and the new control panel is a great improvement. There are huge architectural changes under the bonnet (it now uses the CodeIgniter framework), but until I have time to delve around a bit more, the control panel is the only visible thing which has changed. I'm sorry if the feed has suddenly updated with lots of old articles. I've been converting all of the articles from their mixture of Markdown, HTML and Textile format to be HTML (partly because the Markdown plugin hasn't yet been updated for version 2.0). I've worked back to articles originally published in 2004, but haven't quite had the energy to do the final two years, since nobody probably looks at them now anyway.

As I said, apart from some intensive tinkering, I've done very little: a bit of baking, a lot of reading and a fair bit of film/TV viewing, and that's it. I did sit down and watch Hamlet on the TV — all 3+ hours of it. I've seen quite a few of Shakespeare's plays at one time or another at the theatre, but for some reason I've never seen Hamlet. I don't think I'll be posting any spoilers if I tell you that it's not the cheeriest of the Bard's productions. Almost everyone dies, or is miserable, or goes mad, or — for the most unfortunate characters — suffers all three.

The thing that surprised me most was that it was all so familiar, despite the fact that I've never seen it before. I don't just mean the "To be, or not to be" speech or the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" one, or even, "Alas poor Yorick". So many of the incidental phrases have become an embedded part of the English language, that it almost feels as if Shakespeare is dealing in clichés, but of course it was Shakespeare who created the clichés. There was "to the manner born¹", "hoist with his own petard", "brevity is the soul of wit", and so on. It's pretty impressive that the words of one man, writing plays in the 16th Century, are still in such common usage in the 21st Century.

¹ I was convinced that this was "to the Manor born" until Wikipedia put me right. Penelope Keith has a lot to answer for. ↑

Chris Wood gig

Last night, Mr. Bsag and I went to see Chris Wood play the All Services Club in Moseley. We had been looking forward to the gig for ages, as we are both big fans, but because of various other circumstances, we were exhausted after a very hard and busy week, and wondered if we were going to be in the right mood to appreciate it. We needn't have worried: it was fantastic, and the warmest, most intimate and spellbinding gig I've ever been to.

The All Services Club is a funny venue. The decor is a two or three decades out of date, and the main room contains a tiny stage of the kind that looks as if it is more used to hosting small children wearing tea-towels on their heads and pretending to be shepherds than world-renowned folk musicians. However, the tiny venue gave the event a very intimate feel. Since there is no stage entrance, Chris and the band had to wander through the audience to mount the stage. Near the end of the show, he was talking about encores, and how the accepted procedure is:

1. Band sing 'last song'
2. Audience applauds
3. Band goes off stage
4. Audience applauds
5. Band comes back on stage
6. Band plays encore

Given the stage, step 3 was impossible because there was nowhere to go (he put it a bit more strongly than that, to a lot of laughter), so they would just play two more numbers and end. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I adore Chris Wood's voice, and I love his style of guitar playing. When he sings, I hang on his every word like an utter fangirl. It helps that he is a consummate storyteller. Telling stories is a very old craft (and one of the original functions of folk songs, of course), but it's difficult to do well. He pulls you in to the story from the start, so that you can't wait to hear what happens next. There are emotional highs and lows, twists and turns and unexpected and beautiful turns of phrase that make you laugh or make tears come to your eyes, so that you have to pretend you've got a bit of dust in them.

On this tour (and on the new album, 'Handmade Life'), he was playing with a fantastic band comprising Robert Jarvis on trombone, Barney Morse Brown on cello and Andy Gangadeen on drums. They were terrific, and enhanced and complemented his sound, without overwhelming the words in any way. Robert also did an uncanny impression of a Merlin-engined Spitfire on the trombone (during the song 'Spitfires'), which made plane-mad Mr. Bsag¹ go a bit misty-eyed.

They played many of the songs off the new album (which we bought — and got signed! — at the gig), as well as a scattering of older favourites. Sometimes that can be disappointing if you haven't heard the new material yet: artists are understandably keen for you to hear what they have just been working on, but audiences like to hear what they already know and love. But in this case, it was wonderful. His songs are stories, and it was a priviledge to hear them for the first time live, rather than recorded². 'Hollow Point' was a great example of the thrill of hearing these things for the first time (though I'm sure that the experience will deepen with repeated listens). It starts off describing a beautiful summer day ("Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper"), and sounds like a traditional folk song about pastoral pleasures with some sinister undertones. But then we find out that the person in question is getting on a bus. Gradually, it you realise that it's the story of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in 2005. It's a lament for him, and the feeling of doom, sorrow and inescapable fate is incredibly powerful.

I also loved 'Turtle Soup' — a song about Darwin's time on The Beagle. The tune is a great, sea-shanty-like thing, but the lyrics are very evocative too. There are a couple of lines at the end ("'Cause the church may shout but Darwin roars/At the age of twenty three") that made me covertly raise my fist in a Darwin Power salute (Biologists in da house! Reprazent!) and mutter an exultant "yes!" under my breath.

There were lighter moments too. Chris described 'My Darling's Downsized' as a love song for old gits, but that's fine by me. It's a lovely, warm song about the pleasures of cooking rock cakes and watching your potatoes chit on the allotment, and contained a lot of lines that made me laugh:

I light the touch paper but I don't retire
Because my love for her cannot be overstated
It's deep and it's not final salary related

As Chris said between numbers, folk singers have always sung because they felt that something need to be said. He upholds this tradition by championing the cause of people who are little-known, quiet, everyday heroes, from history to the present time — just don't get him started on David Starkey or Henry VIII. He also comments on the social and political situation, so there are quite a few tracks on the album about the credit crunch. He's certainly a man worth listening to, and I felt very lucky to be able to do just that yesterday.

¹Well, OK — me too. ↑

²Doubly so, because only those going to the gigs have access to the album until it is on general release when the tour ends. ↑

Men of the City

A busy month has meant that we've built up a backlog of recorded TV, so we've only just watched a Storyville documentary by Marc Isaacs, called Men of the City. I've always really enjoyed documentaries which sit back, observe and mostly let people speak for themselves, rather than asking questions, and Men of the City did just that. It's a real gem of a film.

Very simply, the film follows the lives of four men who work in the City of London: a hedge fund manager; a street sweeper; a man who holds a sign pointing to the nearest Subway sandwich shop; and a man who collects money on behalf of City clients. It's an incredibly beautiful, humane film. The photography is stunning (a downpour in London has never looked so beautiful), the music (by Michel Duvoisin) is lovely, but it's the portrait of the men which really holds your attention.

When you think of bankers and City money men and the recession, it's very easy to think "Bankers? Greedy, money-grabbing, selfish...blighters the lot of them." But of course, that's utterly untrue — every person is unique, and while it's easy to hate a faceless group of people, it's impossible to do so when you encounter people as individuals.

The hedge fund manager seemed to be looking at the world through a grey blanket of exhaustion, tinted with vivid washes of stress as his screens of figures changed from green to flashing red. His face showed a completely different kind of intensity as he printed out and mounted huge prints of his children (he had separated from their mother), smoothing the prints lovingly into an album. The money collector (I never did quite work out what his job involved) seemed to be a constant bundle of tension, and I feared for his poor heart. He wasn't rich, and yet his life had been one long round of worry about meeting the demands of his job and keeping a roof over his and his wife's head. The only time when I saw the stress ease from his face was when he was talking about motorbikes and the joy of just getting on the bike and going for a ride — then he looked free at last.

The Subway sign holder was an exhausted Bangladeshi man, holding the sign for minimum wage 10 hours a day on freezing streets, then working in a restaurant in the evening, and trying to look after his teenaged daughter alone in the time between. When she went into hospital and he had to visit her, he lost the sign holding job, and had to trail around restaurants, literally begging for a job. That was heart-breaking.

In many ways, the street sweeper seemed the most serene and happy, even though he wanted to get out of the city. He was an avid reader of New Age philosophies, trying to make sense of his life. But he had some startlingly poetic opinions about his job. Most people, he said, think of street sweepers as losers, but he saw it as serving his community. And if you can't make any job — even street sweeping — into a "graceful act", as he put it, then how can you act gracefully towards yourself or others? That really struck me. He's right, I think. It's not what you do, but how you do it that matters. It wasn't clear whether he actively chose his profession, or whether it was a last resort, but he seemed to me to be like a non-religious monk in some kind of gritty, open air monastery. He did his job as gracefully and mindfully as he could, and was aware and in touch with everything going on around him, in stark contrast to the others in the film, who seemed to have turned in on themselves, out of self-protection.

Most TV programmes and the newspapers deal in broad brush strokes and crude stereotypes, which is why it's so valuable to have programmes like this looking at individuals with a humane and non-judgmental eye.

A review of three things sharing a theme

I'm lagging behind a bit on reviewing some stuff I've come across recently, so I thought I might save a bit of time by doing a three part mini-review. When I was thinking about it, I realised that the film, book and album I'm about to review share a theme: death.

I expect I've lost all three of my readers now. But in these difficult times, a bit of morbid fascination cheers everyone up, right?

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

The novel opens with the death of Queen Victoria, and follows two families — the Coleman and Waterhouse families — who happen to have adjacent family plots in a London cemetery. Sweeping social changes are about to replace the formality of the Victorian era (with its obsession with elaborate mourning rituals and rigid social class system), with something more informal and fluid in Edward's reign. The women's suffrage movement is slowly gaining momentum, to widespread disapproval from those who are still hanging on to the old, Victorian ways.

Each chapter relates events from the viewpoint of one of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman and their daughter Maude, or Mr. and Mrs. Waterhouse and their daughter Lavinia. Occasionally, we get a very different view from the household servants, or from the boy who digs graves in the cemetery. The story (revolving around the cemetery) is pretty gripping, and the characters are brilliantly realised. In particular, the way that you see the two girls (Maude and Lavinia) maturing throughout the novel is fascinating.

Far North directed by Asif Kapadia

If you like the landscapes of the Arctic (it was filmed in Svalbard), you'll probably like this film. The photography is absolutely stunning, which is as well, because the plot is minimal and the dialogue almost non-existent. Given the minimal plot, it's difficult to describe without giving anything away, but I'll try not to post any spoilers. The story centres on Saiva (played by the terrific Michelle Yeoh) who has been told by a Shaman that she will bring death on disaster to any who get close to her. In an attempt to avoid this fate, she exiles herself, rescuing a baby called Anja along the way. One day they come upon a dying man, Loki, and everything starts to fall apart.

The film has a kind of harsh, mythic quality, enhanced by the fact that you can't place the time or geographical location of the action easily. I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say that it doesn't have a happy ending, and death and relentless fate are omnipresent. At the time, it felt like quite a slight film, but it has lodged itself stubbornly in my mind, and I keep thinking about and reinterpreting events in the film.

Better Times Will Come by Diana Jones

I first heard a few tracks from this album in a concert of American Roots music shown on TV, and hosted by Seasick Steve. I found her mellow, unornamented voice and the way she sang about heartbreaking things with a total lack of sentimentality utterly mesmerising. And she tells a story so well. The songs on this album aren't (quite) all about death, but they are mostly sad songs about hard lives and difficult choices.

There are many good tracks, but in my opinion, 'Henry Russell's Last Words' is the best. Henry Russell was a Scottish miner who died in a mining accident in West Virginia in 1927. He and more than 100 others were trapped in the coal mine, and — without any hope of rescue — slowly suffocated and died. As the air was running out, Henry wrote a note to his wife Mary with a piece of coal. Jones used this letter as the basis for the lyrics.

The quiet acceptance, sorrow and dignity of Henry's words shines through the simple melody. Unless you are made of stone, the repeated refrain of "Oh how I love you, Mary" will bring tears to your eyes. Every single time you listen to it...

Ukulele Prom

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, or occasionally look at the tweets in the sidebar of this site will have noticed me going on about the Prom featuring the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (UOGB). The prom actually happened on Tuesday night, but we recorded it and listened to it last night. I've made no secret of my love for UOGB, and their performance at the Prom didn't disappoint. Any group of people who can turn Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' into a ratpack swing classic, make 'Anarchy in the UK' sound rather sweet and wistful, or sing 'Pinball Wizard' from Tommy a capella and make it sound like a sea shanty, have my undying admiration. The latter piece also got the funniest, most affectionate heckle of the night from the audience. They announced that they would be singing (without their instruments) one of the greatest English Rock songs of all time, and someone yelled out "Judas!". OK, so it's only funny if you know your Dylan folklore, but then it's hilarious, and it was delivered with perfect timing.

The piece de resistance was when they played Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' with approximately 1,000 ukulele-wielding audience members playing along. It could have sounded dreadful, but actually, it was brilliant, uplifting and rather joyous. It's great to hear professional musicians doing what they do best, but even better is when they let you join in. When so many people participate, you don't have to feel self conscious about making a mistake (really — who is going to notice if one person in 1,000 plays a dud note?) and you can just enjoy the feeling of being part of something wonderful. I get the same feeling every time I take part in the CBSO singalong. I'm only a very poor amateur, but it's wonderful to join the professionals, concentrate hard, and mix my voice with so many others. I would have loved to have been at that Prom, and might have even bought a ukulele and learned to play the piece specially for the occasion!

When governments go wrong

In the space of a couple of weeks I found myself watching three dramas (one a drama-documentary) which had striking parallels I hadn't anticipated. It was pure chance that I saw all three so close together in time, but the effect was a bit creepy.

The first was the Torchwood mini-series, Children of Earth. An excellent series (though full of over-the-top sci-fi stuff, as you might expect), Children of Earth explored some quite serious themes concerning ethics and morality. I don't want to give away any spoilers if you haven't seen it, but it asked the question, would you trust the government to make a difficult ethical decision? The answer was a resounding "No way!" because the Government is made up of imperfect people who have their own needs and those of their families at heart, rather than those of the country.

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution was a drama-documentary about the aftermath of the French Revolution, and included some interesting details I hadn't known about before. Of course, the French Revolution started with a very noble, humanist idea (liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that), but somehow it ended up with what amounted to people being convicted of 'Thought Crimes'. Any dissent was punishable by death, and even showing fear or anxiety while being tried was taken as evidence of guilt. As Simon Schama put it, with an out-of-control dictatorship in charge, who could convict you of a totally trumped-up crime, any sane person would be mortally afraid.

Finally, we saw V for Vendetta, a film I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. It is set in Britain in the near future, where an apparent terrorist threat has allowed a dictatorship to take over the country and destroy civil liberties in the name of protecting the people¹. They do nothing of the sort, of course, and institute a repressive, totalitarian regime that Robespierre would recognise. It's also a cracking action-thriller, but the political and ethical issues lifted it above the level of similar films.

The message that I took away from all these films is the danger inherent in governing bodies thinking that they can make decisions for the populace, and force people to think in certain ways. You may start out with good and benign intentions (like Robespierre), but it always ends in tears and executions.

¹ Sound familiar? ↑

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Last weekend, we made a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park — a wonderful, enormous, outdoor art gallery near Wakefield. I'd never been before, but it won't be the last time I visit, because there was so much to see. Even if you're not into art and sculpture, there are some lovely walks through the parkland and woodlands, and it would be worth visiting just for that. It's worth mentioning that entry is free, and you only need to pay for parking (currently £4 per car), or arrive by bus.

It's hard to know where to start, because I enjoyed so many of the art works. I've loved Andy Goldsworthy's pieces for a long time so I enjoyed his Hanging Trees and Outclosure. The Hanging Trees are dry stone wall boxes set into a length of wall, containing a horizontally suspended tree, which you look down on as if on a corpse in a coffin. Outclosure is a perfectly circular, tall dry stone wall, set in a woodland clearing. It is too tall to see over (unless you are very tall), and the tight perfection of the stone work makes you feel as if you are being kept out of something you'd really like to get into.

I also loved James Turrell's Deer Shelter. As the name suggests, this is built out of an old deer shelter in the parkland, and takes the form of a kind of bunker, built into the earth. You enter it through one of two dark tunnels, which feels a bit like entering a Neolithic barrow might. You come out into a square, white room with a perfectly square opening in the roof, through which you can see only sky. Around the edge of the room, there are cool, concrete benches, with sloping back rests that encourage you to lean back and look up at the square of sky. I can't explain exactly why, but I found it magical. It is quiet in the room, though it echoes like a cathedral, and you can hear distant sounds from the outside and feel the breeze. Framing a section of the sky seems to really mess with your depth perception. The first time we went in, there was low, uniformly grey sky, and it was as if the sky was simultaneously flat and sitting right above our heads and also thousands of miles above us. Every now and again, you would catch a glimpse of a swift rocketing across the sky and that would give it sudden and shocking scale. Later, after it had brightened up and we were hot and tired from a long walk, we went in again, and the coolness, breeze and tranquility of watching the clouds drift across the blue square of sky was delicious and mesmerising. I could honestly have stayed there all day, and just enjoyed the changing light. I'd love to be in there when it rains. The benches are under the covered part of the roof, so you could look up into a square column of falling rain drops, while remaining mostly dry.

Rather late in the day, we found the indoor, underground gallery, which was showing a lot of pieces by Peter Randall Page. I don't think I've ever seen his work before, but I loved it. Photography wasn't allowed in the gallery, so you'll have to see the website for pictures of the indoor works, but the pieces were mostly huge, beautifully carved blocks of granite or limestone. They have very organic shapes, and look like seeds or cells blown up to gigantic proportions. Unfortunately, you weren't allowed to touch, which was a great shame, because they made you want to stroke them to feel the texture or trace the engraved lines. I'm not usually a fan of abstract works, but I really liked all of his pieces. He also had some wall mounted pieces, which were made from shapes of dried clay, split and opened out into mirror symmetrical patterns which formed an overall egg shape or pair of wings. They reminded me of ink blots or tissue slices mounted on a glass slide, or perhaps slices of an MRI scan. I think that the patterns — regular, but with organic imperfections and irregularities — were what I liked so much about them, and it's also what I like about a lot of Andy Goldsworthy's work.

It was a great day out, and you can see some of my photos on Wings Open Wide (with a new look!) or in my Flickr set.

Fanny

A few weeks ago, I caught the very end of a re-run of The Old Grey Whistle Test, and a brilliant band from the 1970s. They were an all-female band and had a terrific style, with vocals slightly reminiscent of Janis Joplin. I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of them before because they were so good. I waited for the credits at the end of the programme and found out that the band was called Fanny. I know — it's an unfortunate name, but don't let that put you off. I've done a bit more research on them and — to my delight — found that a retrospective collection of four of their albums (with lots of extra material) is available on Spotify in the form of First Time in a Long Time: The Reprise Recordings.

If you like rock bands, you should definitely go and listen, but here's what I like about them. First (and most importantly), they are great musicians. There is some wonderful guitar work (both lead and bass), brilliantly funky keyboards, and some incredibly crisp drumming. I don't even usually notice percussion to any great extent, but I found myself listening to how sharp and precise the drumming was, and yet it still felt lively and organic. Second, the band members also seem to share the song-writing credits and they all (at one point or another) take lead vocals, which makes for some quite diverse tracks. Some of their songs are quiet and folk-influenced, some are hard, driving rock, and some really funky. They also do some really good covers, including a wonderful cover of Cream's 'Badge'. It takes a lot of confidence and skill to take on a classic from such respected musicians, but they pull it off with considerable aplomb, and bring a new feeling to it. Judging from their performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, they were also electric live, and didn't exploit their unusual status as an all-female band at all, but just relied on being great musicians, regardless of gender.

I also love 'I Just Realised', 'It Takes a Lot of Good Lovin'' and 'Seven Roads', but there's a lot to choose from. You can buy the collection on iTunes, but the next time I go to our local vinyl shop, I'll be rummaging through the 'F' section seeing if I can find any of their albums on vinyl, because that would be a real treat.

1066

We finally got around to watching the Channel 4 historical drama 1066 a few days ago. I was never very keen on History in school and these historical dramas can be truly dreadful, but we really enjoyed it. They made the sensible decision to tell the story of the Battle of Hastings (and the lead up to it) from the perspective of the ordinary people of the village of Crowhurst. So we followed the 'weaponmen' as they were effectively conscripted to go and support King Harold, and protect the coast against the expected Norman attack.

I was obviously not paying attention in my History lessons, because I hadn't realised that the arrival of the Normans was preceeded by an attack by the Vikings (or víkingr¹) in the north. So some of Harold's men had to run 200 miles in four days to try to prevent the Viking advances. That lead to huge losses on both sides, but the Anglo-Saxons sort of won (in the restricted sense of 'win' in which they had more men alive at the end), only to hear that the Normans had landed, and they had to run 200 miles back to the south coast.

The drama was authentically bloody and realistic, capturing the fear and chaos of battle. I also liked the way that they interspersed the narration (by the superb Ian Holm) with quotations from Norse sagas and contemporary reports and writing. It also made me realise just how much Tolkien shamelessly nicked from Anglo-Saxon and Norse writing and mythology. 'Middle Earth' comes straight from the Saxons, as does 'orc' which was adapted from the Anglo-Saxon 'orc-nea' meaning demon or monster -- or in this dramatisation -- monstrous Norman foreigner.

The timing of the broadcast was a bit unfortunate, because racist nationalists always seem keen to invoke Anglo-Saxons as the 'true English' and not, for example, Celts, Romans, Normans, Vikings, Africans or any of the many and varied people who have made England and Britain what it is today. 'We' are no more Anglo-Saxon than we are any other race in most parts of the country. But the film makers did at least try hard to show that there were (of course) good and bad people on both sides, even though our sympathies were with the Anglo-Saxons. For example, there was a rather noble Norman character (Baron de Coutances) from Brittany who was forced into fighting for William by the kidnapping of his family, and tried to stop the worst atrocities perpetrated by his side. One of the Viking attack party also ended up fighting on the side of the Anglo-Saxons.

Once again, I'm rather late in mentioning this since it was broadcast in May, but it is coming out on DVD soon, and I'd recommend it to anyone who snored their way through the Battle of Hastings at school.

¹ For some reason, I see that written in blue with the 'r' in pink. Can't think why... ↑

Mike Leigh

We watched the film director Mike Leigh get interviewed by Mark Lawson a few weeks ago, and it was a fascinating insight into his working methods. I've seen quite a few Mike Leigh films, the most recent of which was Happy-Go-Lucky, and I always admire the way he gets such great performances from actors. His modus operandi is famously quirky and intensive. He starts off with a rough idea of the plot and then gathers together the cast. He works very intensively with small groups of cast members, and together they construct the characters. They spend long periods discussing in great detail tiny aspects of that character's life, their likes and dislikes, and what has got them to the present moment. At the end of this, each actor knows their character intimately, and can react to situations confidently in character as they start to improvise scenes.

One very important point that he made is that each actor is only allowed to know what their character knows, so there is a great deal of secrecy in rehearsal. This means that -- when they are improvising -- they react naturally because they genuinely don't know what will happen next. Leigh related an example during the rehearsals for the film Vera Drake, where the family were sitting around the table having a meal, and the police knocked on the door. The actor playing Vera's husband had no idea at that point that Vera was an abortionist, so when the police officer read out the charges, he was genuinely shocked. Similarly, they build up the characters chronologically, so if a piece involves a brother and sister, and the sister then marries and later has an affair with another man, the brother and sister characters will be fully constructed before the husband and lover.

After all this improvisation, during which the dialogue and script emerges from the collaboration between Leigh and the actors, the actual filming takes place. But it all remains very natural and believable, because it has been built from the characters' reactions to events. One of the fascinating things that Mike Leigh said in the interview was that he can't actually write anything without seeing it. He sees the screenwriting process as completely collaborative, and a work in progress, much like a novel which is drafted and re-drafted repeatedly as it is written.

I'm not an actor (and don't want to be), but I think that it must be really rewarding (if a bit terrifying) to act in a Mike Leigh film and play such an active part in the creation of the film.

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