Sounds of the 70's

 Sunday afternoons with Sounds of the 70's is genuinely restored with Shaun Keavney. One might say that his laid-back style is not so far from that of Bob Harris but there is a big difference between Shaun's deferential way and Bob's, in which Bob was too often a part of the story. Both have to attempt to be thrilled by the music they are playing whether they privately liked it or not but Bob circumvented that with his policy of West Coast programming and obvious devotion to the Eagles and all that came with them. Johnny Walker had had a certain affinity with Springsteen but still kicked in with Smokey Robinson & the Miracles enough times for it to be clear he admired a certain sort of Tamla Motown even if he didn't worship Diana Ross & the Supremes to the extent that Tony Blackburn and I do. But Shaun, being younger, is later 70's and shifts the emphasis towards 1977/78 and what happened then.

For better or worse but at least with a more open stance. It's interesting to see how well various things have lasted. On a walk in the summer, it was remarked how some books one had thought brilliant when young no longer seemed so when returned to. Hermann Hesse was a case in point where I'd not expect Siddhartha to have lasted the distance but would want to reserve judgement on Narziss und Goldmund until another look gave it a chance to defend itself.

On today's Sounds of the 70's, my suspicions were confirmed that the Police and Blondie, who seemed so welcome and ground-breaking in 1978 haven't aged all that well. Still good pop music but hardly things for all time, Debbie's best work possibly being on the comeback, Maria, Sting having taken himself increasingly seriously and started to look almost as silly as Bono.

It was Elvis Costello's (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes that demonstrated it is possible to sound as tight and relevant now as it was then. And then Shaun included some T. Rex, as he has proved willing to do, and Born to Boogie put the issue to bed. Of course big name pop stars are going to get carried away with their own success but pop music is best done with some 'edge', irony or preferably both. Marc was as guilty as Sting or Bono of thinking it was all about him but whereas the Police and U2 turned out to be one dimensional and derivative, T. Rex and Elvis Costello still bring with them some intensity.

Then, the nomination for the classic album came from Newcastle and one's hopes rose until the caller chose Gerry Rafferty, said he'd met Ray Jackson and Ray Laidlaw in the bar but what he wanted played was something just as 'meaningfully' dreary as Baker Street. 

What a shame. He so very nearly have got that right. 

--

Things continue to move on. The Jesus & Mary Chain, from the 1980's but still glorious, were on the agenda for Brighton in January. I'd possibly have been there for some age-worn cool kids but before I'd got it sorted, a better offer came along. 

Barbara Hannigan, Erik Satie, Socrate, Wigmore Hall. Absolutely essential. Not by any means mainstream but, for all the best reasons, exactly the right thing. With this year's Best Concert award by no means decided yet but 'leaning towards' one in Wigmore Hall in January, the 2027 choice already has an odds-on favourite. One can't lose in such a situation. Either these great things live up to expectations or maybe exceed them. But it remains just about thinkable that something else might turn up to exceed even those.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A pattern begins to emerge after the third Rose Tremain novel in short order. She does the raptures of love very well, time and again, this time in The Gustav Sonata, but also the counter-balancing pain and difficulties.

Central to The Gustav Sonata is the humanitarian offence of falsifying the dates of Jews escaping Nazism into 'neutral' Switzerland and the question of who betrayed who when the police chief who facilitates as many migrants as he can before the border is secured more tightly against them is betrayed by his wife.

It's a complicated web of relationships in which the widow is left trying to lure Gustav, the son, into a relationship in her old age. Meanwhile, Gustav's close childhood friend has a career as a concert pianist undermined by stage fright. It makes for a grim book, no less beautifully realized than The Housekeeper or Absolutely & Forever, but somehow more discomfiting as the unhappiness outweighs the rapture.

It is a good time to wait before overdoing the Tremain, for fear of the law of diminishing returns applying to Music & Silence. Thus The Anatomy of Melancholy might add intervals of relatively light relief during 600 pages of Wittgenstein's life. When the primary texts are hard going- and Wittgenstein is surely a paragon example of that- then a biography can be an easier point of access. It looks like even Ludwig himself didn't expect anybody to understand his Tractatus. 

--

The archive Middlemarch recently on BBC4 with Juliet Aubrey, Rufus Sewell, Robert Hardy et al was a masterpiece of both costume drama and seminal novel, a fine example of why the BBC is still worth all of its licence fee and would be even more so if showing more of what it has stored away and caught up with a few more recent good books.

I was once told that my preference for George Eliot over Dickens was somehow inevitable, I'm not now entirely sure why, but surely she is in a different class. Maybe Dickens is a bit more 'obvious' and Eliot is dealing with things more subtly but one can hardly accuse Dickens of creating lurid caricatures when Patrick Malahide's Casaubon, Aubrey's Dorothea, Hardy's Brooke and Sewell's Ladislaw were clearly delineated- to great effect- with minor parts tending towards cartoons, but all the better to make its points in a costume drama that, for the most part, resolves into a happy enough ending.

--

Meanwhile, Unearthed: The Mystery of the Shaman Woman arrived at phenomenal conclusions from the discovery of a Mesolithic- 9000 year old- burial site in Germany. It's not for me to say that they came to some very specific conclusions from a few old bones and what was found with them but to create a female shaman who could put herself into a trance by leaning her head back to cut off the blood supply to her head and becoming renowned as a healer is a huge step.

Most compelling was how the discovery, once taken up by the Nazis as an Aryan icon, all white, blond and blue-eyed, was re-made as dark-skinned and the news to me that Europeans were dark-skinned 9000 years ago and those of us who became 'white' only did so due to a change in diet, starchy foods apparently gradually making us paler.

I'd have thought that was an absolute godsend to all us liberal left, 'intellectual elite' who don't think that white is naturally superior. Alongside the documentary about the vast libraries of Timbuktu, it all begins to make Western white culture- all that Bach, Shakespeare, relativity and space exploration- look more like a recent aberration in the longer perspectives of history.

Given the prognostications about the 10% chance of AI finishing off humanity in the next ten years, it could just be that, quite beautifully, all that arrogance and cleverness brought with it its own downfall. It was already clear that if AI was asked to solve such problems as climate change it would realize that it was caused by human beings and, if asked to prevent it, would thus wipe out its cause. It would be a great shame if there was nobody left to appreciate the irony so I suggest we appreciate now, in advance, just in case.   

From the Heart

Tongues and Grooves, From the Heart, Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, Oct 1 

The long-established poetry series, Tongues & Grooves, nowadays mostly presents From the Heart where readers, whether poets or not, undertake to recite poems that are not their own from memory. I find it hard enough to read poems in front of an audience with the text right in front of me so it's unlikely I'd take on the challenge but one way for my good mate, Kev, to improve his status towards 'best mate', should he feel the need, was to choose one of my poems to learn. The very least I could do was turn up to support him.

Maybe about half of the performers get through without being prompted, which is impressive. Nobody attempted They flee from me by Thomas Wyatt but I'm sure that's what the words do under the pressure of performance. And it is the reader's performance rather than the poem one is appreciating. Shelley's not a huge favourite of mine but the recitation of Ozymandias was exemplary. Neither was the poem read by Cat Sawkins but she just about cleaned up in what became a family double when Maggie did Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow which I possibly could have done about fifty years ago but it's not a game that what can expect to improve at with age. Maggie's reading of The Rain Stick, from Seamus Heaney's brilliant book The Spirit Level, was usefully illustrated by the very thing and probably my favourite poem of the evening but it was strange to find oneself applauding a great reading of one's least favourite poet in English Literature - Kae Tempest- but that's how it works. Gareth Toms doing the nearby Armitage public poem, The Theatre of the Sea, revealed him as something of a showman.

It was impressive that a couple of those whose main job was to provide the interval barber shop choir extended their involvement by performing poems, too. And if Maggie is as thoughtfully gifted a presenter as she is a poet then in Janet Ayers she has an ideal co-host whose confidence and demeanour are always well-ahead of the potentially precarious situations of microphone malfunction, unremembered lines or anybody winning too many raffle prizes.

I had no idea what to expect. Poetry readings can, on occasions, be dire experiences. Anybody who fancies having a go at doing poetry 'live' could easily be a recipe for disaster. But many of them have done it before and there's more talent out there than one might think. Poetry isn't always the uplifting, therapeutic thing it is sometimes claimed to be. But at Tongues & Grooves, From the Heart took on all my doubts and cast them aside with the most gracious ease. Hugely enjoyable show in all its variety and good will.

 

 

 Kevin Rogers, once frontman of the Von Trap Family, finds himself performing Romanticism by David Green nearly fifty years later. That's progress for you.  

Anatomy and other stories

The last time I saw Jeff Turner, he said The Anatomy of Melancholy was his favourite book. It might have been prompted by me saying it looked forbidding and I'd done a dissertation on Andrew Marvell at university rather than have to read it as part of C17th Lit. Nonetheless, I took it as a recommendation, promoted it up my list of forthcoming reading and now it is underway. It will be a leisurely project, mindful of the advice that it can be read selectively rather than from cover to cover.

It's nowhere near as forbidding as its size and title might make one think. Burton portrays himself as Democritus Junior. Democritus was the philosopher who laughed at human folly and Burton finds the same attitude as an antidote to his melancholy. In a torrent of classical references, he comes across like Dr. Johnson or Montaigne as sane and reasonable in the mad world of human ambition and endeavour. The book would be much reduced in length if his quotations from the Latin and Greek were not followed by a translation but if we could only have one or the other, most of us would prefer the translation. 

Like Johnson and Montaigne, he is good company. Not necessarily what one would expect of someone who spent their whole C17th adult life at Oxford University. But his melancholy was real and the remedy, which was to write the book, seems to work. As Johnson also advises, keeping busy is good for you and lassitude a bad thing so the Anatomy very neatly provides the answer to its own question.

--

Meanwhile, now into The Gustav Sonata, Rose Tremain's books don't yet look like stalling on me like Henry James did. So far, three quite different novels have similar underlying themes. She does intense love very well, and then undermines it.

In Absolutely & Forever, it is clearly nothing of the sort as Marianne is so totally given to Simon until they marry other people less than happily but, as it turns out, wouldn't have been much more successful marrying each other in the circumstances.

Good novels can still be written after Ulysses and the Wake which had seemed to take the form and blow it up. If Adorno didn't actually say that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz, he might have implied that it shouldn't be but much good work followed on from re-adjustments after two World Wars. Pop music raced from Bill Haley to the overblown late 60's, prog and punk but still emerged to keep on producing for fifty more years to date. It might be hard to compare Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, say, with Virginia Woolf as 'high art' but they are brilliant at what they do within their more limited ambitions.

It took me more than three books to come to a standstill with Henry James. Two more volumes look resentfully down at me from the stockpile on the top shelf. But Music & Silence, sure to be taken from there before they are, looks different again by being 'historical'. Now that I've found her I won't her go. I won't build my world around her. The biography of Wittgenstein will fit in somewhere. But it would have been a great pity if the du Maurier book hadn't led me to her.

How would we ever know what we had missed. We have to trust that in the time we had, we found as much as we could. 

--

The replacement of the headphones damaged beyond repair when some ceiling fell in last winter has resulted in me playing some long unplayed discs. I've not been playing 'pop' discs for years.

Garbage, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Matchbox Twenty, Joni Mitchell. Impressive things too good to be left lying around disused forever. Hejira is complicated stuff, Garbage Version 2.0 a little bit posturing but the interest is often in the texture of the sound the bands make more than the words.

I was reminded about when I was pointedly asked in the office 'if I still liked Matchbox Twenty' by one whose idea of 'cool' still included Pink Floyd. I most vibrantly replied that I did. Rob Thomas is a brilliant, passionate songwriter and singer who once said their ambition was to be Fleetwood Mac and that's a fine thing to want to be. I think the point my interrogator might have been trying to make was that they aren't regarded as quite as 'cool' as the Velvet Underground, the J&MC, Wyclef Jean, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and suchlike.

But now, DGBooks Radio presses on towards 1000 tracks. There's Cliff, the Osmonds, What Are You Doing Sunday? by Dawn and The Archies. Pop, pop, pop music. To be enjoyed, not rated on a 'cool meter' where, anyway, Floyd struggle to get 3/10, Queen hardly get off the mark and Zappa is less than zero.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's a new usage abroad. 'Bad actors' are people who do bad things. It appears it comes from a novel. It is suddenly all over the place.

We have recently been inundated with people 'leaning into' things, before that every interviewer asked at least one 'good question' per interview and before that it was 'look' or 'listen' before any reply, somewhat abrasively, as if the questioner wasn't going to. These epidemics are contagious. They catch on quickly when they do and for a while can be heard every day.

This morning it was reported that the Fairford incident might have involved a 'foreign actor' so I e-mailed in to Stig and Kate at Times Radio Breakfast,

Are there any suggestions who the foreign actor involved at Fairford was?

Was it possibly Gerard Depardieu.

Were there also bad actors involved?

Could they have included Donald Sinden.

 

Perhaps too facetious even for their sometimes contrary attitude. They didn't read it out. I'll use it here instead.

--

This morning I found out that Google AI will set you a quiz on any given subject, if asked. I scored 8/10 on Lindisfarne island, 10/10 on Lindisfarne the band, 9/10 on Cliff Richard, 5/5 on Thom Gunn and 3/4 on Sean O'Brien. So I wondered what the chances were that it could set me a quiz on myself.

None. But in the process I found these kind words here,

Richard Williams Facebook  

That's entirely fair enough. He's a good lad.  

 

My ultra modest career continues to kick off in a few new directions as Kev Rogers prepares to recite Romanticism, the poem not the whole book, at an event in the Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, on Thursday evening. Then on Weds 21st, I'm helping out Portsmouth Poetry Society in their role as the local Stanza group in a joint reading with Chichester. I'd invite you to come and be there but numbers are limited and my guest allocation is spoken for.

All these small things make me wonder if I'd tried harder and put myself about more when I thought wider recognition was desirable I may or may not have been a contender. But I'm glad I didn't. I wouldn't have been much good at it. The poems, such as they are, have been allowed to be what they are and find what direction they found away from too much attention. Like Rick Nelson in Garden Party, if I couldn't please everyone I was better pleasing myself, as it were.

Jeffrey Turner

 Jeff Turner had been gathering together those poems of his I don't already have with a view to an essay surveying his work. We were due to meet soon but now won't be doing after his death on Saturday, after a short period of incapacity.

We were employed by the same civil service department in the 1990's and he turned out for the cricket team a number of times into his late 50's. 

He wasn't one to advertize his talents unduly. On one occasion, about some business in the office where he worked, I noticed a booklet on top of an open briefcase and, being inquisitive beyond my remit, found it to be a catalogue of rare and antiquarian books. Asking whose it was, Jeff owned up and said it was from Peter Scupham, a friend of his and a poet of some reputation. It transpired that Jeff attended weekends at Scupham's historic family pile in East Anglia with Anne Stevenson, Anthony Thwaite and more.

It wasn't until some years later that our conversations about poetry developed much further on walks. I gave him copies of my booklets as they appeared and he gave me his. Most memorably, asking him to sign one in the pub after a walk, he produced the box that contained his italic pen, assembled it and in due course proceeded to add his idiosyncratic signature.

He didn't do anything in haste but did everything he did thoughtfully, not least his poems. Whereas our poems were more or less from a similar area of the poetry map, mine are often written in short order once they are ready to be written but one couldn't imagine Jeff's coming without a more careful process.

They are characteristically deep meditations, often on nature or the place of humanity in it. I asked if he felt Edward Thomas was any sort of model for him but he thought not,

I've never consciously styled myself on Thomas. I think it's a matter of vaguely similar outlook and temperament. I'd like to write like Auden but that wouldn't be honest. Bishop, Wilbur and certain poems by Rimbaud have a style which I like to refer to when in doubt.  

Elizabeth Bishop I can see now, as in her Sandpiper perhaps. And that, like her, his published output amounts to relatively few poems which suggests that both either only wrote poems when something significant enough presented itself or that their quality control didn't allow through poems that they weren't entirely happy with.

Jeff published two booklets, The Angled Boat and The Other Parish, and there are a number of limited edition poems produced by the Chestnut Press, and Gruffyground, at their invitation, on handmade paper. I will hope to compile a bibliography and see if the essay his work deserves is possible but it might be limited to an appreciation more than anything definitive. 

I know that he was placed in the National Poetry Competition more than once. On one occasion,

'The Gecko' was an entry in the Arvon competiton when Paterson won it. It didn't earn a prize, only a commended which didn't worry me too much as Michael Donaghy got the same and he wasn't upset at all. 

There was also an appearance on Radio 3 alongside James Michie and an accompanying 'short-lived' magazine called 3.  

He had been 'chuffed' when I asked if he might be part of a reading I was looking into proposing to next year's Portsmouth BookFest. He need not have been concerned that he would 'lower the standard', his modest dignity would have enhanced the event. His last e-mail from a few weeks ago ends with a promise to write at more length 'tomorrow'.

At an early stage of making some notes on The Angled Boat, I wondered whether it would be appropriate to make some lateral comparison of Jeff's poems with those of John Donne. Any similarity is not immediately obvious but it could be that Donne's 'metaphysical' way, where his entreaties to girlfriends or meditations are a vehicle for his showy ingenuity, is not unlike Jeff's contemplation of tiny detail being a way into exercising his lines into quiet, sometimes extraordinary, performances. In Moss, for example, it takes him beyond,

This solanum, winter cherry, is dead.

But I keep it for the moss

that brims the pot and for the six 

muted orange fruits that hang like moons

above an unattempted planet.

 

in a way that is like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand.  

 

I never came away from any discussion of poetry with Jeff feeling anything but the wiser for it. He was the 'less deceived', once saying that 90% of poems aren't much good; that Eliot's attitude in his critical essays was that, 'this is all a bit too hard for you', and that an obituary of Thom Gunn I did for another website was good 'in parts'. But the value of his discriminating approach was that one was allowed to feel that if and when he said kind things about your work he probably wasn't just being polite. Although he was always that, too.   

Emilija Karaliūtė at Lunchtime Live !

 Emilija Karaliūtė, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 24

One might imagine that one has heard of most musical instruments but, as with most things, I reckon there's always more one doesn't know about than one does. Thanks to Emilija Karaliūtė, those who were in Portsmouth Cathedral today can at least transfer the kanklės from the first category into the second. It is a Lithuanian flat-bed harp, related to the zither or perhaps more distantly to the dulcimer or Indian santoor. If Frank Muir defines it as such on Call My Bluff, you will know to pick him. More important than that, though, or whether what Emilija plays on it is folk or classical music, is that it is gorgeous.

One becomes absorbed in the instrument to the extent that the differences between folk pieces, Debussy and Handel that might be apparent on the piano are less noticeable. 

The stillness and mystery of The Forest Idyll by Alfonsos Mikulskis quickened into something sparkling and then another composer new to most of us, I dare say, Juozas Naujalis and his Dear Lithuania was melodic. The 'classical' part of the programme was segued into by way of the delicacy and shimmering of a Prelude by Jonas Švedas before a sumptuous On Wings of Song by Mendelssohn. It's not only a matter of two hands playing different parts, as with the pedals on a piano or harp, the strings were adjusted by hand, presumably to mute or sustain the notes.

Strictly speaking, the Passacaglia, HWV 486, might have been identifiable as Handel with its walking left hand lower line under the decorative right while The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was reflective. But then the usually reliable stock of adjectives failed me in the finale, Land by Takatsugu Muramatsu. Not beyond words but maybe more abstract and modern - the composer being born in 1978 - than evocative of anything specific if not the pure sound of the kanklės itself.

Emilija was a tremendous find for the Lunchtime Live series, deeply appreciated by a gathering, many of who, like me, must have been very glad to have taken a chance on music that could have been anything for all we knew. A rarity and a special, luminous thing. And now we do know and are grateful for the privilege of having heard it and all about it.