Ensemble Pastorale at PortsFest

 Ensemble Pastorale, St. Mary's, Fratton, June 30th

Ralph Vaughan-Williams would have been 150 this year had he lived and so we've not been short of programmes marking the event. Ensemble Pastorale have given it some thought, though, and gave a rare outing to some lesser heard pieces. Soprano, clarinet, French horn, vln/vla, cello and piano is not a configuration one gets the chance to hear often and we didn't quite hear them all at once. And 'pastorale' is the word for much of Vaughan-Williams, his birthplace, Down Ampney, nestling in the Cotswolds and lending its name to his famous hymn tune.  

That was roughly where we began, with the Suite for Viola and, here, Piano with Lis Peskett immediately finding the rich tone of the viola and Karen Kingsley playing the orchestra. I've been unsuccessfully trying to pair composers with comparable poets in recent weeks but might have decided on Vaughan-Williams and Thomas Hardy this evening, when one never feels too far from hearing echoes of one's lark, or the other's darkling thrush, and the time-torn ambience of rolling, rural England.

We were soon taken out of any familiar comfort zone, though, by Stefanie Read's wordless soprano accompanied by Robert Blanken's clarinet in Three Vocalises. Written in 1958, the last year of his life, they are an extraordinary departure from what one expects from V-W. However many guesses one was given, and one might tentatively begin with Schonberg before ever getting the composer. Stefanie filled the St. Mary's acoustic in an abstract but thrilling way, sometimes merging with and at others separating from the clarinet and one could be forgiven for being taken aback by both the composition and the performance.We could also be grateful for being reminded that the voice is a musical instrument which can be easy to forget.

Karen then played three short Birthday Gifts, the first warm, the second Winter Piece chillier and the Pezzo Ostinato like a lullaby alternative to the Listen with Mother Faure Berceuse with apologies to any teenagers who don't know what that means.

Six Studies in English Folksong brought out Emma Sharrock with her cello from which she straightaway brought out of it a sure, sonorous tone, which made the ache in these lyrical pieces tangible and only enhanced the cello's place as by some way my favourite instrument until As I Walked over London Bridge raised the tempo to a jauntier jig.

In the second half, Stefanie returned to sing three songs, which included the manifesto of spirited outdoor adventure, The Vagabond, which is no rarity and entirely lends itself to her operatic sense of drama, before she left the five non-vocal instrumentalists to play the Quintet in D major.

Written in 1898, when Vaughan-Williams was 26, one would again have no chance of guessing the composer if you didn't know. In poetry terms, he was perhaps still 'searching for his own voice'. It's a disconcerting confection of ideas apparently going in several directions at once. My first speculative attempt at identifying the composer might have had to be Erik Satie ( !!! ). It's full of ideas and I'm sure Ensemble Pastorale, having rehearsed it, find more sense in it than me on first hearing. The clarinet is redolent of jazz, Lucy Brown's fine clarity on the horn riff bringing to mind a leitmotif from Wagner. It was the horn that made some sense and imposed some order at the end of the Andantino before it sprang into a mercurial finale. One's chances of hearing that again in a live concert are next to nothing and so I  was very glad of it.

It is a wonderful thing that musicians like Pastorale are dedicated enough and clearly enjoy their music enough to present programmes like this which are not 'mainstream' at all. Vaughan-Williams is not a favourite composer of mine. It's a very competitive field and the Top 20 is hard to get into even for musicians of great genius. V-W is never going to be a candidate for mine and yet an evening such as this was a treasure, packed with imagination, superb musicianship and with a couple of crazy surprises.

I want them to know that it is all worthwhile, that there are some of us out here who enjoy hearing them as much as they enjoy playing. I was supported in that view by someone I spoke to on the way out.

Please keep up the great work.

Herewith the Wake

 Part I of Finnegans Wake, the first eight chapters, finishes on page 216 out of 628 pages so it's a third read if only one hundredth understood. Looking at the commentary on the next two chapters, it says it gets 'denser' from then on and we already can't see the would for the sleaze.

None of the 'action', such as there is any, has happened yet. There is hardly any. We've had puns, wordplay, the most erudite reference points to history, literature, philosophy and religion and it's been day time. Night falls at the end of Part I. 

This is surely a dead end in the history of the novel, it could go no further, except that Beckett et al took it into an Exagmination. It is, however, a dead end that's been everywhere. And all of Joyce is autobiographical, not only drawing on his life but also his previous work. We've had a catalogue of the stories in Dubliners, references to Ulysses and, quite pointedly, a few hints that T.S. Eliot took the idea, or at least the design, of The Waste Land from Ulysses. The commentary, if not so much the Wake, makes us aware of Giambattista Vico (Naples, 1668-1744), whose analysis of history and Yeats's 'gyres' originated from.

Having been introduced to H.C. Earwicker, the children, Shem and Shaun in all their guises and manifestations, Chapter 8 is the famous bit, on Anna Livia Plurabelle, the most famous, best and most comprehensible bit who, identified with the river, the Liffey, life, 'riverrun' gives us a more flowing poetry than the jokey, jaunty, disjointed rhythms of much of the rest, like the last words,

Telemetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of , hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

 

and who's to say that the 'sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing' poetry of Under Milk Wood, by the author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, doesn't owe a debt to that.

 

I'm making notes on the commentary before proceding with each section of the text, two chapters at a time. It's not as if I'm likely to return to them once I've done enough to be able to say I've 'read' it but, like making notes at a concert to help with a review, it concentrates the mind so that one comes away with something. William York Tindall readily accepts that his 331 pages of Reader's Guide are inadequate to explain the Wake and so my brief notes on that barely tarnish the surface but at least one's tried where others, more sensibly, fear to tread.

In the meantime, alongside the Wake and the Guide, for light relief I'm reading the Selected Letters and so, thus far, am out of sync because Joyce at present in the letters is in Rome, imposing upon Stanislaus for money and help in a demanding way. Who does he think he is, he's still trying to get his poems and Dubliners into print. But I think he knows, like Bach, Shakespeare and Mozart must have done, that he's a genius.

He takes a dim view in these letters of George Moore, of Oliver St. John Gogarty and other contemporary novelists. Joyce identifies himself as a 'socialist' which, if open to some doubt as to what he means by it, at least sets him apart from the right-wing devotions of many of the headlining modernists. And, certainly, as per Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait, he's a Catholic who is simply not having it.

One can't expect to like a genius as a person. The genius is in their work and there isn't enough left over to make them gorgeous in real life. In these early days of exile, moving about, teaching, trying to find time to write, with Nora and two children to support, his letters back to Stanislaus detail how he accounts for every penny or lire on candles, food and a shave.

But, having got this far, one is in for a peony if one's got it in for Ezra Pound. We bloody loved Portrait at 'A' level and knew instinctively that Joyce was 'cool' and D.H. Lawrence easy to get good marks on but nowhere near as admirable. Lawrence took it too seriously for a start. And then Dubliners soon turned out to be the best prose fiction in the language and The Dead, with Nora's past in there somewhere, the most masterly literary art work I've ever read.

Some artists develop and go further into their method (Picasso, Shakespeare, Beethoven) whereas others carry on doing roughly the same successful thing (Haydn, Larkin, Hardy's poems). It's only worth exploring further if the further exploring goes into fertile territory. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can't be accused of not having dome that. Having written something as great as The Dead, there was no point in writing it again. But whether we can all be expected to keep up with where he went after it is another question. It's neither our fault or his. What we are missing is what he'd have done next, had he returned to something more like Dubliners in later life and not died, just before he became 60, instead.

 

The End of the Affair at Sheffield Hallam

 News on the wireless this morning that Sheffield Hallam University is withdrawing its Eng Lit course. I can think of good reasons to justify that but theirs isn't one of them. It's because their Eng Lit graduates don't end up in highly-enough paid jobs.

It's a shame it has come to this, that the point of reading books is to make oneself a big pile of cash. 'Study' and 'education' were once for their own sake and having done something worth doing for its own sake for three years one could then append a diploma that fitted one for a profession. The relationship between poetry, especially, and money has never been an easy one and I'd prefer they kept each other at arm's length for their mutual benefit. But, for Hallam University, an appreciation of Shakespeare was only ever a stepping stone to an executive position, a 4-bedroom house in Surrey, cruises and a car better than those one's friends have.

To be honest, university taught me very little about Shakespeare. The professor whose seminar group I was in was the worst teacher I can remember. His lecture on Donne was more about himself than it was about the great Metaphysical poet and my heart sank when he was appointed to read my dissertation on Marvell. But, to be fair to him, he said he didn't agree with a word of it but had to accept it was well argued and, given more time, I'd have been 'first class honours'. I now realize that the missing time was that spent playing pool and going to see The Clash, Elvis Costello and Public Image Limited.

But I can see advantages in taking Eng Lit off the syllabus. As I understand it, it's only been a university subject for a hundred years or so anyway. Before that it was understood that one read literature in one's own language for oneself, in the same place that pop music has occupied for students more recently. One did Classics, knew Latin and Greek, Horace and Eurypides, and read Shakespeare and wrote one's own poems for leisure. I'm not sure what I'd have done in 1978 to qualify for three years of grant. Probably Geography, and I dare say Hallam will be reviewing if that is sufficiently monetarizable soon.

But the advantages if taking Eng Lit out of university are worth considering. It will mean an immediate end to those reams of half-baked essays that doctors and professors have to sit through and think of a kindly mark for. Somebody I knew at university once met the Head of English in the changing rooms after playing squash.

- Oh, do you play squash?

- Yes.

- Are you any good?

- No, not really. 57,58.

Which my friend suddenly realized was the very mark the professor had given his last essay.

The academic staff will be further saved the difficulties of thinking of new areas of research. An Approach to the Phantasmagoria in Dylan Thomas, New Lines in the Solemn Apoplectics of The Beat Generation, The Spider in the Bath - Metaphor and Simile in Marianne Moore. Not all of them need writing but, unlike the great Monica Jones who wouldn't do it, publication of significant work are what academic careers on based on, not teaching. Teaching takes some doing. I once met a Creative Writing lecturer/poet who had to give their students ideas to write about ( ! ). Surely that shouldn't be necessary.

Literature could be read more openly, with more imagination. I've spent more than 40 years now trying to recover from the 'education' university provided me with. I'm not particularly grateful for that. Some of the best, most insightful readers of poetry I've met since seem to have greatly benefitted from not having been through the process. I have to admit I wanted to get as good a grade as I could get and so wanted to say the right thing, which made one 'orthodox' at the time but many of the orthodoxies being promoted in English departments between 1978-81 are not quite so 'gospel' now.

Sheffield Hallam's decision has much to be said for it even if the motivation for it is misguided. But good decisions can be made inadvertently. I think there's a theory that Bobby Robson wouldn't have got England to the semi-finals if injuries hadn't made him change his midfield. I forget the details.

--

Although it seems a bit late to be having seminal moments in pop music history, one could not miss Paul McCartney and Diana Ross at Glastonbury.

Paul is well aware that the Wings back catalogue is much less liked than the Beatles songs, and we heard why early doors in a succession of non-descript songs with unimaginative titles. Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen were brought on as gloriously big name surprise guests. They are not young men, either, but they're younger than him. Why they are so idolized by people of a certain age was perhaps explained by what I briefly saw of an act called Years and Years. I didn't understand it. I felt like the Wright brothers in their bi-plane being overtaken by a space shuttle invented by Elon Musk.

I thought Paul's voice had gone, although he could still do some high notes, until it came to Diana Ross who, I have to admit, simply couldn't find the tune. And quite why she finished with a cover version, I Will Survive, when she's got the most glorious back catalogue of Holland-Dozier-Holland masterpieces, I don't know. She might say it's all about 'love, love, love' but it's more about the brand. 

However, it's a brand I'm devoted to and even if I'm Still Waiting didn't work it was still very moving. A lot of credit goes to the backing singers for when it sounded most like Tamla Motown. 

But Miss Ross is 78 and Paul is 80. One might be tempted to say they're the two biggest names in pop music still living. We never thought, in the 70's, they'd still be doing it to such vast crowds by now. We've been living in a time of Heritage Rock and Pop for most of our lives. Although The Beatles were inevitably my first love, after Doris Day, circa 1964, it's Miss Ross that makes me feel like crying, and only for positive reasons, now.

As a third essential choice, I'd like to have seen the Jesus & Mary Chain, iconic indie pop genius, but can't find it anywhere.

I'm sure it will turn up somewhere in due course     

In the bargaining was the weird

 When I said I was 'getting' 25% of Finnegans Wake the other day, I was wildly overestimating. As William York Tindall says in his introduction to A Reader's Guide,

what authority on the 'Wake' knows the half of it? 

Even with his guide and another, any appreciation of what's going on that achieves double figures will be an achievement.

I began by thinking that by now, with an appreciation of the work of Stanley Unwin, The Goons, A Clockwork Orange and other such deliberately linguistically divergent adventures since 1939, we might be less inclined to be quite so challenged by Joyce's text but it's well beyond all of that. Tindall's book takes up to page 82, 26 of which are introduction, to summarize Chapter 1, which is 74 pages long. And even then he scribbles in extra notes at the end that haven't fitted into his explanation.

That is dense enough as it is and, as with reading Derrida or Foucault, for example, one wonders if the commentary is preferable to the real thing. But it's Finnegans Wake one is supposed to be reading so the plan will be to read a chapter in summary and then gaze at the novel itself. Impressively, the Wordsworth Classics edition, , from 2012, £1.50 from a charity shop, corresponds exactly to the page references in the guides, which is useful, but what a colossal achievement of typesetting and proof-reading it is, with almost every line containing at least one non-standard dictionary-available word.

There is really no obvious way into the book since it refers to everything, the 'characters' shift between several identities and 'meaning', to say the least, is unstable. But the focus of the first section is best seen as the sin and fall of H.C. Earwicker due to some vaguely specified incident in the park. Joyce came from a Catholic background and is thus drenched in the idea of sin. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, a Catholic upbringing is something one can't escape as, perhaps, his own Marxist reading has proved to be. One can't become no-longer Jewish and these younger, non-racial cultures are apparently as difficult to remounce. It is a credit to any censor that banned Joyce's writing that they had the capacity to understand it well enough to do so.

I'm making my own notes on the guides as I go in the hope they will leave me with some tenuous grasp of what I've been through. Tindall's book seems a much more user-friendly aid than Bernard Benstock's Joyce-Again's Wake which is tempted too often towards its own obscurities rather than trying its best to make things as clear as possible. Tindall openly admits to not knowing and acknowledges a debt to a group he set up who shared their thoughts towards a better, communal appreciation.

In making this attempt on the Wake, however casual and peremptory it may be, I'm aware that I'm more like watching a documentary about an attempt on the north face of the Eiger than doing anything of the sort myself. I'm capable of little more than a walk up the Malvern Hills, but it's there and ought to be looked at as best one can. One can't leave the work of the author of Dubliners unfinished and so we will see how it goes. 

In the meantime, with Portsmouth Library Service currently excelling themselves and having book reservations ready at one's local library within two days, they are furnishing my impromptu Joyce Festival with the 400 pages of Selected Letters, too. The loans can be extended on the catalogue website from home. I might need to do that. They might not be getting these booksback for some time. And, in the likely event that nobody else wants them, I'd gladly give them a good home now I've extended my shelf space.

I'll hope to be still in the game after the next four chapters and report back. I did have a bit of a taste for the long haul, the 12 Hour bike ride, Proust, the Complete Works of Buxtehude but they were always within the bounds of sanity. I can't think of anybody else, however hard they tried, who produced anything like Finnegans Wake. It is surely more 'mind-bending' than anything else that set out to be. I'm not sure how much the author's mind needs to be bent before they attempt to bend the reader's. The saddest thing is the story that Joyce, who died a few weeks before reaching 60, was said to be planning to return to something more like Dubliners next. I'd love to read what that would have been.

Music and Movement

It was track 10 on disc 4, the slow movement of Sonata no.33,  that suddenly went a bit further and was replayed a few times before moving on to disc 5.

Haydn is perfectly good company throughout but that music moved into Bach. Perhaps Haydn could have written like Bach all the time but Bach had done that and his job was to write like Haydn. In the meantime, he teems with ideas and, having found another theme, does what he always does with it. It's never dull, it's great either as an accompaniment to reading or to concentrate on with one's whole attention. The Complete String Quartets can take 25 discs, the Symphonies 33. One might wonder if we have world and time enough to listen to them all before wondering that he had enough to write them. It is to the great credit of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven that their elite group of composers still isn't infiltrated by Haydn, or Brahms, Schubert, Josquin, Buxtehude or Shostakovich but that's nothing for them to be ashamed of.

But whereas Haydn can be relied upon to be Haydn, one of our greatest contemporary composers, Errollyn Wallen, is more various. She recognizes no musical boundaries but that means that some of her pieces are likely to suit more than others. The Cello Concerto and In Earth, from Purcell, are C21st masterpieces and her album of songs is powerfully entirely different again and so I was bound to make a point of tuning in for her opera, The Paradis Files, on Saturday night.

One day we might arrive in a paradise where 'disability' wasn't such an issue that the point needs making that all the cast in some way identify as disabled but it's not yet been made sufficiently irrelevant. Other such 'woke', non-binary or diverse points were made in an extended prologue. Maria Theresia von Paradis was an C18th composer who was blind. I diligently lasted about 45 minutes but have the broadcast saved on the Virgin box and so can return to it. I am more of a Mozart and Puccini man when it comes to opera - nowhere near resilient enough for Wagner and even finding Shostakovich plenty and so Errollyn might have gone beyond my comfort zone with this but I watch and wait for any further discs from her.

--

George Eliot's Essays go onto the shelves in a blaze of glory. What sense, what acumen, would that she were living at this hour. Yes, I'd read enough of theology to miss the later pieces on that but shouldn't have been surprised that even the poems were worth having, in particular the Brother and Sister Sonnets, some sort of template for The Mill on the Floss.

But if moving from Haydn to Errollyn's opera was a stretch, finishing George left me looking for my next move. I do have time and I really ought to make the attempt one day, there's no time like the present and so the library catalogue shows two guides to Finnegans Wake which the heroic, 'beautiful librarians' can fetch out of the store for me, and we will see how far we get.

Up to page 12 so far is the answer in an outdoor session that was more of a pleasure than a dutiful chore. It's not impossible. One has a sense of what is being suggested and endlessly extended. The nain question was what percentage of it was I appreciating. I'd be glad of 25% and would think that worthwhile. But what percentage of any work do we 'get'.

To so thoroughly comprehend any work that we 'get it' 100% would make it recondite. We shouldn't even completely understand our own work.

At Lancaster, 1978-81, Head of the English Dept was Prof. David Carroll, a fine, liberal patrician who had edited the variorum edition of Middlemarch among other work on George Eliot that made him pre-eminent in his field. He probably had at least a 95% grasp of George Eliot but I don't suppose he imagined he knew it all, or wanted to.

Contemplation of the 'mystery', or the unknown, seems to be part of the weird attractiveness of religion which is subsequently bolstered by a celebration of 'faith', which is to say, no, we haven't got the foggiest idea but that's what makes us so certain. 

That is the most dubious self deception, a surrender to bewilderment and an abandonment of all reason in favour of magic.

The magic is the bit we haven't yet explained to ourselves and could be what keeps literature and all art compelling, why we can return to the likes of Mozart, Tamla Motown, Chagall, Rembrandt and Elizabeth Bishop time and again and not tire of them. Once they became 100% explained they would have all the life of a legal document. 

Religion is literature, if only it could accept itself as such. It is wildly imaginative, potentially spell-binding and rich in its invention. It wouldn't have caught on otherwise. But whereas literature accepts that it is a partial attempt, religion sees itself as the big answer.

It would be all over if it was but it isn't all over, is it.        

Racing Cars - Didn't I Tell You

 

 

 

How many years have I spent looking for this track. On a Peel Session in 1976 it was called Breaking the Rules and that's what I've been looking for. So, just now, I googled a few lines of the words and, guess what, it was released on record under a different title.

It was hardly likely to live up to my memories of it but it doesn't do badly at all. Mostly because I have a good memory for such things.

Eliot's Essays

Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Metaphysical Poets and other such work were among T.S. Eliot's finest work and epoch-making but two or three generations earlier, the essays of George Eliot were no less rigorous and more progressive in their way.

Time was something the C19th had more of for writing and reading and 30 pages of Penguin paperback, around 12000 words, is not uncommon for a review in The Westminster Review, some of them taking a page worth of text to cite as a thoroughgoing example.

She's never less than lively, uncompromising in her dismissals of the unworthy but not gratuitous. The put-downs are always explained by a comprehensive dismantling of the work in question. Perhaps the best-known, and one of the most entertaining, is Silly Novels by Lady Novelists from 1856, showing little sympathy for those genre writers incapable of the scope of Middlemarch, who are by now only preserved as victims of her disapproval.

The devout preacher, Dr. Cumming, is reduced to matchwood in Evangelical Teaching:Dr. Cumming whose thesis seems to depend on little more than his own 'faith' and, in particular, that no action is worthwhile unless it is in the service of 'the glory of God'. Ms. Eliot refers to the story of Grace Darling who,

when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her to brave death for the chance of saving others; it was only good if she asked herself  - Will this redound to the glory of God?

The extracts from her correspondence with Frederic Harrison, 1866-70, include some discussion of Auguste Comte and Positivism, believing in the natural rather than the supernatural, which came before A.J. Ayer and Logical Posivism, that scientific knowledge was the only kind of factual knowledge although, it seemed to me, always fell back on some a priori which might as well be 'faith' or 'God'. One is glad of the brief introduction to that section which quotes T. H. Huxley's summary of Positivism as 'Catholicism minus Christianity' which succinctly shows it's only half a job achieved.

But, as in their turn, Marxists learned their scriptures, recited their doctrines and depended for everything on dogma, 'faith' was a ricketty thing in the mid-C19th under the scrutiny of such a fierce intelligence as Ms. Eliot's and she remains as relevant now as she was then.

It was only a few years ago that I heard the idea that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch which seemed to me some sort of progress on the idea that The Bible was the word of God. Theology hasn't ever been a major subject of mine. It turns out that Ms. Eliot was well aware of that idea about 170 years ago and equally able to show how it could not be, so that accreditation was short-lived.

It's by no means all theology, though, and there are wise words on Notes on Form in Art, where 'form' means 'shape' rather than rhyme and metre. Perhaps 'form' is 'art', the way that elements in a work relate to each other to make a coherent whole. But she anticipates Modernism in a way,

for even the ravings of madness include multitudinous groups and sequences which are parts of common experience,

so perhaps some of the disjunctures so admired in Dali, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Parker (and provide your own examples) had been forEseen some decades ahead of them being seen as revolutionary.

It might seem odd to us now that Beethoven 7 was seen as an offence to music and that T.S. Eliot described Donne's technique as,  'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together' but in between times George Eliot saw no reason to find such things incoherent. It's only a matter of seeing beyond fashion and orthodoxy and then not being taken in by any 'shock value'. Being any good depends on more than some perceived novelty. That's been done before.

In her review of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, she suggests,

We all begin life by associating our passions with our moral prepossessions, by mistaking indignation for virtue, and many go through life without awaking from this illusion.

The £3.50 I paid for this book would have been money well-spent for that sentence alone. Not all writers have had their reputations enhanced by having their small print read, those other writings beyond the titles that they are famous for. I think it's unlikely there's anything to be found that would besmirch the reputation of George Eliot.

Ironically, for someone who had their doubts about all the accoutrements of religion, she might have made a good saint but 'saint' is one of those titles you shouldn't be awarded if you'd accept it and I'm sure she would have appreciated the irony.

  

Library Re-organisation

 A lot of websites like this one, ostensibly about books, feature pictures of shelves of books. It probably involves some braggadocio, implying that if I've read all these books I must be very wise by now, but it's interesting to see what they've got.

It's no different here. But the recent expansion of the library is an excuse for a sort of exhibitionist guided tour. It's by no means on the scale of the project Larkin oversaw at Hull University but it matters to me.

It began by making the small upstairs room into a place to read. That involved clearing the floor of the piles of papers and making use of the front bedroom. I found three ideal bookcases in a second-hand shop and they were delivered yesterday. 

Very broadly, poetry is downstairs and fiction upstairs, so the two identical smaller bookcases went upstairs to house the collections of fiction that are not on the A-Z shelves. Thus, Graham Swift and Sebastian Faulks share the top shelf of one and Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst the other. Richmal Crompton almost fills a shelf herself and lines up next to Richard Yates and Raymond Carver. On the third level, art books, predominantly Maggi Hambling catalogues, are next door to Murakami and, fittingly, at the bottom, are files of university and sixth form work that somehow got me a 2:1. The shelf above on the left might be needed for Music once the CD's need another shelf downstairs and on the right are old newspaspers, like a long run of the TLS, Danny Baker's old columns from The Times, old Racing Posts and other highly
significant historic moments.

Not much has changed on the shelves in what is left of the newly developed room. George Eliot has her own shelf on a small bookcase that includes Danny Baker, Alexei Sayle and other memoirs, including Me, Moir by Vic Reeves. But the room gains a chair, a Canaletto, a Rothko and a CD player with a resident 10 disc set of Haydn Piano Sonatas. One could listen to them all day, literally. They add up to 11 and a half hours of music. It's likely that that much of anybody would do some damage to one's reason and I'm certainly not going to try it with Philip Glass.

 

Downstairs, I hadn't realized that the larger bookcase was taller than the one there already and so the expansion of poets's biographies across two adjacent shelves doesn't put them in a straight line but moving three volumes on Larkin to there means that the Larkin shelf below is a better fit. From Dante to Hughes, with four volumes on Auden and the whole bottom two shelves devoted to Shakespeare biography, it's a reading list in itself. All the possible reasons why a misfit becomes a poet must be in there somewhere.

On the left we then go Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien, then below, much pre-C20th before the Auden section. Under them is some 'theory', T.S. Eliot and across the way are still the Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin shelves with Rosemary Tonks and some reference books. In the corner are C20th anthologies, some Dr. Johnson and, if you haven't been mentioned yet, you're in the A-Z poetry which in a previous re-shuffle, brought the more eminent names to the front (Mahon, Kleinzahler) because they are doubled up. I have to remember where those hidden behind are likely to be.

There is a sort of order to it. I should still know where to find most things and, as such, although it's always going to be an ongoing job, it provides its own sort of satisfaction.

Giulia Semerano and Filippo di Bari at Chichester

Giulia Semerano and Filippo di Bari, Chichester Cathedral, June 14

Guilia Semerano and Filippo di Bari began preparing their four-handed Pagine di guerra by Alfredo Casella before Putin's sinister intentions were made obvious. They became appallingly relevant in performance, as in Chichester today.

In four short movements, it moves through the rumbling, threatening parade of the heavy German artillery, the grave desolation of before the ruins of Reims cathedral, the thundering crescendo of charge of the Cossack cavalry, all of which established that the piano is rightfully a percussion instrument, before the lilting anxiety of wooden crosses which had something of the bleakness of Shostakovich about it. Not easy listening, but vividly of the moment. Guilia and Filippo don't appear to be an act willing to compromise.

Six épigraphes antiques are Debussy in his more avant-garde mode, light and pastoral invoking Pan, 'god of summer wind', before the crepuscular For a nameless tomb, some fractured twinkling suggested by the title In order that the night might be propitious. My faded French never did include 'crotales' which I find to be 'antique cymbals' in Pour la danseuse aux crotales and we drifted dreamily towards greater intensity in To thank the morning rain.

Guilia is, more or less, the rhythm section seated on the left and Filippo takes the top notes and much of what melody there is, and there was more in Schubert's Allegro in A minor, D.947. Written in the last year of his life, which was only his 31st, we might retrospectively interpret it as a 'rage against the dying of the light' but it's likely he knew, too. After the imperious opening, a life-affirming tune emerges. There's a lot going on in the four hands busy on one resilient keyboard and we can equally wonder what Schubert would have done given another 30 or 40 years developing from where he was with that as we do with what might Mozart's Symphony no. 75 been like (Beethoven 7, maybe !!)

One never tires of, or apologizes for, repeating praise for the standard of Chichester's programme and Guilia and Filippo belonged there. The programme for September to November is already in place and is bound to ensure I continue to shuttle back and forth on the no.700 bus on an almost weekly basis.

A warm, airy day outside with much to relish indoors. I was even treated to an exercpt from a cathedral tour as they stopped to be informed about the 'Arundel Tomb' made famous by Philip Larkin. It's a pet subject, bordering on obsession, of mine. I joined the group, who were German tourists with the benefit of an interpreter. They were told they wouldn't have heard of Larkin, whose Gedichte are available to them like Goethe and Schiller are to us. And they were told the subject of the poem was 'love' which, if you had to sum it up in one word, maybe that is an option but one shouldn't take everything one is told as gospel.

Discretion is the better part of valour. I left them to it.

Derek and Clive based on Valerie Eliot

 

With the proviso that the easily-offended should not listen to Back of the Cab from the brilliant 1977 Derek and Clive Come Again, it only happens that, 45 years later, it looks like it was based on a letter from Valerie Eliot to The Times, published on 10/2/70. It's quoted on page 468 of Robert Crawford's Eliot After The Waste Land, 

As he got in, the driver said: 'You're T. S. Eliot'....'Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about", and, do you know, he couldn't tell me.

 

It has nothing to do with the Eliots or Russell, really, but it suggests that Peter Cook remembered reading a letter to The Times. Very sadly, young Dudley isn't easy to hear on this on You Tube. It's worth finding elsewhere.

Eliot After the Waste Land

 Robert Crawford, Eliot After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape)

Seven years after Robert Crawford's first volume of his life of T.S. Eliot, the story is completed with 'After The Waste Land'. That's how long it takes. I remember it being seven years between Jonathan Bate thinking 'he might write about Ted Hughes' in Oxford and the appearance of his equally weighty Unauthorised Life. It represents a monumental effort. Prof. Crawford's first chapter alone has 190 footnotes to 31 pages.

Such an undertaking can't be done without some regard to one's subject but in Eliot's case, it can't be easy. We are very soon back into the horrors and misery of 'being Eliot' that led him to his waste land. While Eliot's standing as the vast, imposing icon of C20th poetry in English, might have undergone some reconsideration, few will deny him the significance he remains credited with and the high priest status he once occupied.

Robert Crawford's narrative is judicious and objective in its dealings with Eliot's right-wing sympathies and friends. While Eliot's life could be almost as grim to read as it must have been to live, it's engagingly and astutely written-up here once one becomes inured to the trauma, hopelessness, genuine sickness and hypochondria.

Sometimes such high art and intellectualism can be reduced to a disarmingly simple equation. Eliot's personal distress, the racism that seems to come with him from Missouri and his 'aridity' make him neither the first or last person in a crisis to adopt the dogma of religion as a way of imposing a sense of order onto the chaos he can't deal with. Otherwise, in his own words, he is 'a shell with no machinery in it'.

His marriage to Vivien is a disaster. He is for much of his life 'in love with' Emily Hale with who he maintains a close, if mostly long distance, friendship until later in life, when she was keener on marriage, it fails, or he fails it.

As his career and standing as a poet, critic, dramatist and editor establish him as such a major figure, the litany of impressions of him accumulates- Virginia Woolf describing him as 'a corpse', his own inversion of Sartre in finding 'Hell is oneself' and one commentator finding his dependance on all things Anglo-Catholic 'medieval'. Which, of course, to many of us, it is. Modernism might have looked like a revolutionary, new thing across all the arts circa 1911 and subsequently but in the hands of Ezra Pound, Eliot, Yeats and even in some ways, Joyce, it was backward-looking. One can appreciate how Pound's simplistic analysis of economics and the effect of usury led him to outright anti-semitism and fascism. Eliot treads a fine line in remaining friends with him, adopting almost equally as absurd points of view, while never perhaps quite tipping over into fascism. Crawford performs an equally fine balancing act in presenting such troubling issues.

With Vivien in a much less stable condition than Eliot, Crawford is particularly good on the genesis of the Four Quartets. Whether or not Eliot had been editor at Faber & Faber, the likes of Auden, MacNeice, Larkin and Hughes would most likely have had poetic careers that prospered either way but he showed good judgement in signing them up, his error coming when he rejected Animal Farm.

Meanwhile, only 96 pages before the end of the story, Valerie Fletcher, is a schoolgirl in 1940 whose 'inspirational' English teacher plays her class the recording of Gielgud reading The Journey of the Magi and she asks,

'Who wrote that poem?'....'I shall marry that man'.

And 17 years later, and 38 years his junior, making her way towards the position of most opportunity, his secretary, via working for Dylan Thomas, that's exactly what she did. And, in a miraculous turnabout, she engineers some happy years of devoted marriage for both of them in a brilliantly executed plan that succeeds beyond all expectations, and she continued to look after his legacy after his death in 1965 until hers in 2012. There are few examples of devotion and the 'power of poetry' than that.

It is a happy ending that nobody could have seen coming.

Much is made of Marina as Eliot at his finest. Nobody will ever talk me out of regarding Prufrock as a sensational, essential poem and there is an austerity, economy and authority about Eliot's poems that will ensure their reputation, rather than his, will be in little doubt. His essays also come with great gravitas and are persuasive about 'tradition' were it not for his increasing reliance on church doctrine as an 'a priori' last resort on which to depend. But there is a question asked of celebrity guests in The Times on Saturdays about 'the play they walked out of' and I left Murder in the Cathedral at half-time. I'd almost rather have been accidentally caught in a symphony by Bruckner.

Robert Crawford's magnum opus on Eliot is unlikely to find Eliot any more admirers and, as can be the case, knowing too much of the inside story risks reducing what we once thought of the poems but it is an excellent job done on a difficult subject, the two volumes adding up to 894 pages. It never quite stops being disconcerting that Crawford, with his reasons given in the introductions, refers to his subject as 'Tom' as if he were a friend. It's not easy to regard him as that but in private he wrote Cats, which paid for Faber's poetry list and he would do a Chaplin walk, twirling his umbrella, and was a big fan of Groucho Marx except that, when they eventually met, they didn't get on particularly well.

Nothing's ever easy. The debt he owes to Valerie is immense.

Matchbox Twenty

 

It's actually Last Beautiful Girl that I put on the playlist but it doesn't matter.

I hadn't realized that my musical preferences were of quite such interest to others until I was questioned at work 'if I still liked Matchbox Twenty', as if it was some sort of offence. All very well, it's a godawful name for a band but their Exile on Mainstream album made no secret of their uncontroversial ambitions which included aspiring to the condition of Fleetwood Mac, but coming from someone still unashamedly devoted to Pink Floyd, it seemed like an unworthy accusation.

Yes, of course. And why on earth not. All you have to be is any good and if The Velvet Underground, the Jesus & Mary Chain, the Fugees, Public Image Limited and Faust were once ground-breaking radicals, one wouldn't have retained an interest in them if the ground they broke wasn't worth breaking. Pink Floyd were over well before Dark Side of the Moon whereas Rob Thomas brought some heartfelt passion to mainstream, AOR, FM, traditional 'soft rock' and I avidly bought up his albums, only having found out about him on the strength of his astute career move of doing the single with Carlos Santana. I entirely believed in the authenticity of his outpourings, not that it matters because art is art and artificial and we accept that Diana Ross, David Bowie, The Beatles and all are dramatizing situations that might be fictional. I was persuaded that Rob Thomas meant it, though.

I don't know whether it's 'cool' or not. I only know whether I like listening to it. 

He looks and sounds like he means it. I've long been impressed by his desperation. Whether that is real or not is neither here nor there. I didn't take them at their word when The Beatles claimed to live in a yellow submarine.

There is more self-examination in the words to Push,

And I'm a little bit angry, well
This ain't over, no, not here
Not while I still need you around
You don't owe me, we might change, yeah
Yeah, we just might feel good

I wanna push you around
Well, I will, well, I will
I wanna push you down
Well, I will, well, I will
I wanna take you for granted

 

than there ever was in UnderMy Thumb, Honky Tonk Women or Some Girls by the legendary, knighted singer of such songs as those.  

Chess and Library Diary

The Chess World resounded to the news of Friday evening's LiChess <1700 1+1 Arena Tournament as BorderIncident claimed second place with DWWWWWW in the allotted 27 minutes. It's true I've had a few tries and today's 20th place out of 200+ is more like it but it felt like something.

LiChess 10/6/22 1700 1+1 Arena 

Sadly it's not possible to find any way of saying I should have won. The winner took three more games to get one more point and had a lower tournament rating but third place was 100% and thus beat that rating and I eventually lost the game that was in progress when time ran out so that doesn't count but was no use to me anyway. Still, exciting times in this mid-division although it might be some time yet before another such run comes together to challenge for a gold trophy.

--

My new little studio upstairs seems most amenable with the Haydn Piano Sonatas on order to be provide the soundtrack. It even comes complete with its own board to put across the chair's arms in the way that Larkin wrote of an evening, just in case some lines need to be applied to an old envelope.

The board is part of an old wardrobe from another room, dismantled as part of the knock-on effect of creating this new facility. That space will be required to accommodate papers moved to make space on the previously cluttered floor. So, I'm in the market for a couple more bookcases and can then embark on the biggest reorganization of the library for some years.

Poetry biographies now need two shelves. The 'favourite living novelists' - Barnes, Swift, Faulks, etc. - need better housing than the landing carpet. Auden, maybe Mahon and Kleinzahler, could get shelves to themselves like Larkin, Gunn and Shakespeare biography have as well as the Bishop, Tonks, O'Brien section.

The sorting of old papers is an endless job. I'm reluctant to throw things away and gradually, articles kept from newspapers can get put with the books they refer to. Looking at some of them is like visiting a disappeared world. From the folder of first year Classical Studies, I find an essay on the 'triumvirate' that I have no memory of doing for a tutor I can't remember either.

A mark of 55 and comments including 'thin', 'repetetive' and 'reading done?' make me shudder but also pity the poor tutor who would far rather have been progressing with his work on Augustine and Boethius than wasting his time on my paltry effort. And maybe I had more pressing priorities, too, like making my debut poetry reading at the Lancaster Literary Festival or going to see The Clash.

But 55 translates into a 2:2. Ye Gods and Little Fishes. If you could serve up such undercooked drivel 43 years ago and get away with it what on earth are they dishing out degrees for these days. 

Cool Down the Pace, or not

 

 

The new CD player/radio to furnish the new reading/listening room upstairs was due to arrive tomorrow, which was fine. Then it was due to arrive today which was a problem because I might not be in, as per below. But then it arrived yesterday, as soon as it would have if I'd had Amazon Prime.

It's a featherweight thing. It's hardly anything at all compared to the radiogrammes that took up half of long ago sitting rooms to play shellac 78's or LP's of Harry Lauder, Myra Hess, Mario Lanza or Gracie Fields and still sound crackly. Younger people by now wouldn't be able to conceive of the need for a record player at all but for me, and still some of my generation, there's a need to 'have it' rather than have a subscription to a service that says it will provide it. Top marks to Alexa who had no trouble finding Mama Told Me by the Jess Davies Band the only time I asked her, him or it for anything but it might not have absolutely everything. 

When you remember how long it could take to set up an old 'music centre' before you could try it out with Martin Rushent's latest Human League studio adventure, this thing got unpacked, set up and got working in less time than it had taken earlier to look through the 2.45 at Fontwell and decide to have a tenner on the horse that came second. 

I'm traditionally Johnsonian in steadfastly refusing to refer to any rules or instruction book when putting any such thing together but soon realized that the short cut was not to assay any attempt at such a short cut. The first thing I played on it was Spem in Alium, no new record player being expected to play anything less for its first effort, and then I tried out Let Your Yeah be Yeah, on which the bass line and genius arrangement were not only clear enough but the main interest.

But, tuning in to Radio 3, it was unlucky to be doing so at the time of some, no doubt glorious for those who like it, performance of Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony no. 2. It might take some time for me to dissociate my use of headphones in that room from the drag of that overblown music. I'm prepared to give Wagner the benefit of all the doubt there is when he's compared with much of Mahler, and all the Bruckner I've heard because even I, with all the time in the world, can't be sure I have enough time for that.

Music shouldn't be hurried up only to display virtuosity if there is good reason to play it slower to linger over and relish it. It's not always the 60 metre indoor dash or the downhill 5 furlongs at Epsom or Goodwood. But we none of us have got all day.

I'll be taking the Harnoncourt Brandenburg Concertos upstairs next, probably with Petula Clark. Once it's been established that it's a suitably removed eyrie in which to consider such things, I can hardly wait to make those Haydn Piano Sonatas, as below, the music in residence.     

James Kirby at Lunchtime Live!

James Kirby, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 9

Portsmouth cathedral's piano absolutely sparkled as James Kirby set off into the Allegro moderato of Haydn's Sonata in E Flat, Hob XVI:52. That is Haydn aged 62 and still at the height of his mercurial powers, the 'moderato' marking sounding like one of his little jokes in places. The Adagio was much more tentative, almost fragmentary, and at times one thought one could hear Beethoven coming and if the Allegro had been quick enough, one had to be prepared for a Presto that was dazzling as well as quirky with both maestros, Joseph and James, enjoying themselves enormously.

Chopin is never short of a tune and two Nocturnes wove them into rich textures that blossomed to fullness before easing their way to satisfyingly restful conclusions.

Looking up Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana, it is based on a character in Hoffman. James explained about Schumann's Florestan and Eusebius, who represented the two contrasting sides of his 'bi-polar' personality. It consists of eight movements, beginning busy and exuberant which it predominantly was. I got ahead of myself, trying to follow which movement we were on, and navigated myself back via two 'langsam' episodes. A similar pattern recurred throughout the merry-making, the enervated darker side and a valiant march. 

Much of the reason I was ahead of Robert and James in the programme was the very generous length of the performance. One can usually expect to be back outside by two o'clock but James gave great value by playing until 2.15, and why not.

He is among the highest class of musicians we get locally, including the local superstar Angelina, not just in Portsmouth but in my wider orbit, delivering these pieces with easy authority, and so it is much to be regretted that he played to such underwhelming numbers. It is to be hoped that word gets around about these events because there simply must be more people in the area who would appreciate such music if only they knew. You could get nearly as many as were there today for a poetry reading.

I'm immediately off to the internet to find out about recordings of Haydn's Sonata in E Flat, Hob XVI:52 and by James Kirby which, sadly, won't be the same thing but, having asked him about it, at least he's been presented with the idea. A disc of such things would furnish my new upstairs listening room most elegantly.

Alquin – Convicts of the Air

 

 

The Rock Show was by far the hardest to compile, trying to find things that still seemed to matter 50 years after when they briefly did seem to. I've not been tempted to revisit Alquin by ordering a CD, which one still can, but with The Faust Tapes being relatively famous for its place in the history of Virgin records and as an avant garde masterpiece, if there is such a thing, it is the probably the most obscure record on this whole playlist betting without the two tracks I had a hand in writing.

It's ghostly, its use of a flute entirely in keeping with the gothic feel of Jethro Tull and Focus, amongst others. Rock music from the late 60's and into the 70's exuded this atmosphere of mystique which, like Doris Stokes and most other atmospheres of mystique, didn't stand up to much scrutiny. 

Whether it was entirely due to the accession of the UK to the European Common Market that the early 70's saw a wave of continental bands, from Can and Amon Duul to Kraftwerk and Golden Earring, or whether their foreign-ness made them seem more exotic is hard to say. I was a fan of Focus, and certainly Faust even now seem to matter but there's a lot of old pop music available to listen to and they don't get listened to at all any more.

Alcuin was also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin – was an English scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. Like Jethro Tull, Fotheringay, Steeleye Span and Lindisfarne, there was a niche vogue for band names that evoked the misty, distant past. Not quite as distant as Tyrannosaurus Rex but not as gratuitously odd as Spooky Tooth or Tremble the Days Behind You which, admittedly, I just made up.  

Recent Acquisitions

I was indebted to a correspondent for a tip for the film, Reaching for the Moon (2013), a dramatisation of the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota Soares. It might not be quite essential to any Bishop devotee but it's well worth seeing.

It makes use of the villanelle, One Art, and The Shampoo and seeing it again might reveal more of the poems in it. She tells Robert Lowell that she'd like her epitaph to say she was the 'loneliest person in the world' and, accused by Lota of being somewhat emotionally unforthcoming she replies that,

you can't expect someone born in the desert to swim like a fish.

Perhaps, since I'm 150 pages into volume 2 of Robert Crawford's life of T.S. Eliot, there is mileage to be had out of poetry, or indeed all art, seen as an outlet for the emotionally restricted.

Lota is clearly the 'alpha' half of the relationship but it's always triangular, at least an isosceles triangle, with Lota's previous partner, Mary, never far away.

As can happen with such films, or anything else, one can begin unconvinced but, after 114 minutes, can be lured in and moved by it in the end. It will certainly stand another look.

-

Stephen Hough's 2-disc Liszt Piano Music is by no means all as diabolic and showy as the Mephisto Waltz that it opens with and make Liszt such a compelling composer in live performance. There is some of that but having seen such pieces in concert in recent months, one misses the visual stimulus of seeing how they do it with only the disc. However, compensation is to be had from a number of much softer pieces, such as Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este and they provide meditative accompaniment to reading as well as being silkily gotgeous and make the stormy maestro a fuller character through these lesser-heard pieces.

No. 2 is the more melodic and memorable of the String Quartets on the Lindsays' recording of those by Borodin, occupying a place somewhere near Tchaikovsky on the musical map, perhaps, but is another welcome addition to the shelves that will get a few more plays before being filed there to take its chances.

--

We await with interest the outcome of the Conservative MPs' opportunity to express confidence in their leader. Paddy Power are no longer offering odds about it which suggests the conclusion is foregone but the market fluctuated throughout the day with 'no confidence' as short as 2/1 at one stage.

I note that my MP, Penny Mordaunt, is joint third favourite to be the next party leader, which might not be the same thing as Prime Minister, and it would be useful to know who votes which way because when the current Prime Minister is eventually removed and his diminishing band of supporters look towards their next career moves, we'd like to know who it was that saw fit to keep him in place.

There probably will be some kind of future post-Trump, post-plague, post-Boris and post-economic crisis but what we won't be needing is the likes of the Moggs who so resolutely defended the indefensible. Even rats have the sense to leave sinking ships.

David Bowie - Wild is the Wind

 

Considering that David Bowie was such a consummate songwriter, it seems almost perverse to represent him in the 1970's Show with a song he didn't write but it took me years and years to realize that he didn't write it because it sounds so much like a Bowie song that one can hardly be blamed for not thinking otherwise. It's often of interest to see which songs major artists choose to cover, from The Beatles Baby It's You, The Ramones Be My Baby and when I saw Elvis Costello circa 1979, his One Day I'll Fly Away encore, all acknowledging girl group masterpieces, which can go at least as far as Bowling for Soup doing Britney's Baby One More Time. Rolf Harris doing Stairway to Heaven, amongst others, was post- ironic but mostly it's homage, like Oasis Come on Feel the Noize, The Human League You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling or Soft Cell's Tainted Love.

Wild is the Wind appeared on Station to Station, the 1975 album of six extended tracks, all of them glorious, that completed a run from at least as early as Hunky Dory if not earlier, through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and still had the three 'Berlin' albums to come. Not everybody accepts my thesis that it was Bowie, not the Beatles, that was the most important pop music for my generation but I was 11 when the Beatles went their separate ways and, although conversant with much of their material, my most formative years were still ahead of me.

And while Hunky Dory is a certainty for any Greatest Album shortlist with me hearing Changes as Tony Blackburn's Record of the Week on the R1 Breakfast Show and yet still somehow too far ahead of its time to make the Top 30, it's Station to Station that brings the Golden Age of Bowie to its greatest moment, for me. 1975 wasn't a good year with T. Rex having lost their way, the 'glam' stars becomimg tarnished while they tried to find 'other musical directions' and The Sex Pistols still waiting to happen although the New York Dolls already had.

Nobody took a 'gap year' in those days to go to Machu Pichu or Vietnam to find themselves in between 'A' levels and university. One was glad enough to scrape sufficient 'A' level grades to get into a university, even if it wasn't a very good one that was going to teach you things it would take you the rest of your life to un-learn. I took my own gap year away from pop music and listened to Beethoven and Shostakovich, with Station to Station as a last monument to help me along. Al Green was in there somewhere but it would be worth taking up again by 1977. 

It's the way Bowie sings Wild is the Wind that makes it seem so obviously his own but it isn't. But you might have thought Queen Bitch was a Lou Reed song. It isn't. While Lou possibly might not have sold as many records without being taken up into the Bowie sphere of influence which would stretch far enough to include Steeleye Span, and Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople surely owed their string of chart hits that followed All the Young Dudes to him, David was nothing if not expert in seeing something he could use and whether there would have been any Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust or any of what came on the back of them if there hadn't been the Velvet Underground, well, who's to say.