From the Archives - Steel Pulse

Reggae Britannia is forthcoming at the Barbican shortly, a concert featuring some of the British contribution to the genre that was ground-breaking if never quite as good as the real thing from Jamaica.

The unlikely joining of forces of young punks with West Indian music was an almighty movement at the time, in retrospect slightly more explainable in terms of the dull, conservative music that one lot were rebelling against and the dumb, uniformed and uninformed control that the other was subject to.

It was an exciting time, even though debates over whether some crossover had happened when The Police and Elvis Costello were credited with playing 'white reggae' now look as if they were trying a little bit too hard.

It wasn't the worst time to be at University, one's room within 5 minutes walk of the concert hall on campus and, when wised-up in the third year, having an understanding with a doorman who will remain nameless - but, thanks, Mick - that if we were outside the back door at exactly 8 o'clock then he could let us in for nothing.

It must have been in 79 that we found our way into the backstage room with Steel Pulse and someone kindly tore their bit of paper in half so that I could get all Steel Pulse's autographs as well. They were most hospitable and shared with us what they were having after the concert. Oh, I had some of their Perrier water and I think there were some biscuits or sandwiches as well. And I bought a T-shirt while I was there. They still like money, these people. It's not just principles they work on.

Nice people, though. Here they are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULRZ3zLXc8&feature=related

Maximum Respect.

From the Archives - F.C. Spartak

It is a quiet period on the website at the moment, it has to be said, and in need of features to keep us entertained here, I have excavated the archives for items of the most arcane interest.

My first episode here goes back to 1975-6 in the lower divisions of the Gloucester Sunday League where I played just about the last of my football and ended a promising career at the untimely age of 17.

On the day that the transfer window closes and Newcastle United might suddenly be in need of a new striker, I must point out that I'd prefer to play for Fulham, Notts County or Forest but since I've been out of contract for these last 35 years, the transfer deadline might not apply.

My club, F.C. Spartak, were headline makers in November 1975 when finally scraping a win but in Feb 76, the Gloucester Citizen's now fading parchment records the predator snapping up an unconsidered trifle against the mighty G.P.O. Reserves in a gripping match report. My value to Mark Hughes would be enhanced if I could find the piece that shows I bagged a brace in another match but it hasn't come to hand yet. I've already got some club issue white shorts and my boots with some 1976 mud on them are still in a bag somewhere so I'm waiting by the phone.

Goodbye, Chief Inspector Barnaby

And so Wednesday sees the last Midsomer Murders featuring Chief Inspector Barnaby.

Not my usual sort of entertainment but a 'guilty pleasure', with its supply of caricatured suspects, unlikely murderers and picturesque settings.

I'll miss it but must remember to use the transition to a new detective as a chance to give it up.

There'll be not a dry eye in the house.

Architecture

I've never been able to think of a favourite building whenever asked, if only by myself. I like a bit of architecture now and then but never get further than thinking I'd better not pick the Houses of Parliament and then trying to choose a favourite cathedral.

So, I'm glad to be able to nominate the Hotel Marquez de Riscal by Frank Gehry.

I can see that this is a bit like nominating the rarest orchid as your favourite flower in some impressionable craze of teenage infatuation with the exotic, but it's somewhere to start.

How Many Books Should One Have Read

How many books should one have read?

The more one finds out about, the less it seems one has covered. One realizes that one isn’t ever going to find the time or commitment to have another run at Proust, read Tolstoy, probably not Cervantes and highly unlikely to venture into those big early novels by Sterne or Fielding or Smollett. Having only gazed at the pages of Mansfield Park and no other Jane Austen, not got very far into Dickens and reading no more than the merest handful of all the new books that are published each year, the pile of unread books and the list of titles one really ought to know something about is increasing exponentially and in the end one’s conclusion, by which I mean mine, is that one has hardly read anything. I don’t mean you. You might have read everything.
Being qualified in a subject is often taken to mean that you know a lot about it but a degree in Eng Lit doesn’t mean you’ve read everything and postgraduate study only seems to take you deeper into more specialized areas rather than widening one’s remit.
Although three years of full-time reading suggests one might have found the time to read extensively, students have to write essays, get drunk and get off with each other, attend pop concerts, protest about things generally, take part in other extra-curricula activity and have all those formative experiences that set one up for a lifetime of work, these days in a call centre or delivering pizzas. The last thing one is likely to find on a campus is young people reading books.
Doing four or five courses a year but taking the summer out, it is not a 12 month reading year. Victorian Literature, on my course, allocated a week to Dickens in which I read the first few chapters of Bleak House, made a mental note of the symbolic fog, abandoned it and decided to negotiate the period without its most famous novelist. I struggled with but counted Middlemarch as a text I’d done, disliked Vanity Fair and did an essay on Matthew Arnold’s poetry. It wasn’t my strongest area.
Elizabethan Lit was dominated by Shakespeare, of course, which meant knowing little more than what I’d picked up about him, plus Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the poems in England’s Helicon. I was lucky that some courses overlapped with others, Aesthetics with Stylistics and Criticism, and a concentration on C20th literature that meant I left anything pre-Shakespeare unconsidered, missed out the C18th and avoided an exam in C17th lit by doing a dissertation on Marvell.

It has to be said that poetry was a clever option to do essays on when one could conjure and mumble a few thousand words based on a handful of poems- very closely read, of course- when having to get the grasp of novels ostensibly took much longer to do.
Even with a 52-week year, it’s not usually possible to read a book per day, so even if one read one book for each course each week, that would be 13 texts on which to base one’s experience of, say C20th American Literature. So let’s not assume that a degree is any guarantee that anybody’s read anything. Not the B.A. they gave me anyway.
Once one leaves behind the requirements of education, one is free to follow one’s particular interests and so, yes, I’ve read all of my favourite poets, and several novelists but the dutiful pursuance of developing any comprehensive knowledge of literature as a whole long since stalled.
Having been impressed by the depth and breadth of reading of some professional academics whose job it is to know about their areas of expertise, and having compared notes with others whose knowledge is far greater than mine, it is obviously possible to do a lot better than me if gifted with the necessary desire, acuity and avidness. But I’ve also met respected figures, reviewers of books in high places and, no, they haven’t read that. Or that. And not that, either. So I’m not alone in some of my failing.
So, how many books should one have read? More than me. It might be polite not to ask if I’ve read this, that or the other because, nah, I’m sorry, but I probably haven’t.

CeeLo Green - The Lady Killer

CeeLo Green, The Lady Killer (Warner Bros)

The hilarious addition of a Parental Advisory sticker to a CD case these days is of more use to parents wishing to avoid the teenager's fascination with 'adult' language than help protect the little cherubs from a few epithets that would go unremarked in the playground.

Whereas these stickers once indicated a product aimed at mature people and not fit for an audience of minors, they now flag up the fact that there might the sort of tiresome attemps to shock that many of us grew out of decades ago.

CeeLo seems a sensible enough sort of dude, man, protecting his eyes against the sun's harmful rays with sensible eyewear and is apparently understated in his exhibition of expensive jewellery. There is also an engrossing game to he had with his attitudes and songwriting in which one tries to guess which elements of his vocabulary are the explicit bits that we have to be careful of. In one song he informs one object of his affection that 'being in love with your ass ain't cheap', whereas elsewhere in the same song are 'shit' and 'nigga' and the most successful song on the album Forget You is the radio-friendly version of a different title beginning with the same letter. So, not really anything to suggest that the Parental Advisory label is any more than a way of making it seem interesting to children.

CeeLo is a proper singer, though, and Bright Lights, Bigger City takes a riff that sounds very like Billie Jean and adds a voice that has more in common with Mark Morrison than our namesake, Al. Whereas CeeLo does involve himself in lovelorn suffering from time to time his basic message to the world is that he's out for a good time with the ladies and though keen to gain satisfaction for himself, a useful bi-product of that will be some for those ladies, too.

Much of this is, of course, as conventional as an Elizabethan sonneteer writing about nymphs and shepherds. But whereas Al Green and Gregory Isaacs were often more plaintive and either tired of being alone or lonely lovers, CeeLo is more upfront and passionate whether in times of romantic success or in defeat.

But it's a great record, produced and arranged to the minute, and perhaps more enjoyable than I might have hoped this excursion into pop-picker territory at my time of life might have been. I'm sure it's meant to be funny in places; Please sounds as if it's going to be Misty Blue for a few bars; Cry Baby is cheerfully apologetic and possibly my favourite on first few hearings but I'm sure I'm going to get quite used to this album. You take all the swagger and pomp and excess as read and then see what's left and on this record there's plenty.

Julian Barnes - Pulse

Julian Barnes, Pulse (Jonathan Cape)

Every so often one sees an article about how difficult it is to market books of short stories. Not only is that a shame but I don’t understand quite why it should be either.
Icons of literature like Joyce and Salinger have volumes of short stories among their finest work, there are great specialists in the genre like Katherine Mansfield, Maupassant and William Trevor and, at their best, short stories provide the perfectly-sized piece to read in the bath or at bedtime. I don’t like the idea that any writing is written for a specific market or made to fit a certain size because I’d prefer it if writers could write exactly what they feel the need to write but, sadly, most writing is inevitably produced with a market in mind. But not much of that need apply if you happen to be Julian Barnes, who presumably by now exercises more control over his output than most and whose publishers are likely to be grateful for what they are given.
This new book is divided into two parts, the first very contemporary and each alternate one set at Phil and Joanna’s where a group of friends provide dialogue at dinner parties. While immaculately observed, the very credibility of the conversation makes it difficult to judge whether Barnes is capturing the middle-class zeitgeist, satirizing it or presenting the reader with an awkward encounter with their own likely attitudes, anxieties and would-be wit. Global warming, the smoking ban, recycling and the sex lives of the middle classes are their main areas of interest. In a recognizable mix of concern, complacency and guilt. When one of them says, ‘I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.’ and they reply, ‘Neither can I.’, the dinner parties and these stories are summarized very neatly. In the last story of this section, Marriage Lines, the woman of an unmarried couple on a walking holiday in the Hebrides wears a wedding ring for form’s sake, which makes ‘them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time’ and that might apply to much of Barnes’ accounts here of relationships.
East Wind is a topical story of a very downbeat English affair between an Estate Agent and a waitress from Eastern Europe that ends rather abruptly while Gardener’s World shows a marriage defined by attitudes to the garden with the man interested in growing fruit and vegetables and the woman gaining influence with her preference for wisteria and more decorous flora and fauna.
The second section is themed around the senses and are immediately more literary, impressive and accomplished in a different way.
The Limner is about an itinerant deaf, mute portrait painter and the somehow inevitable tension between his ways of seeing the world and the expectations of those prosperous enough to employ him to paint their portraits.
A tremendous moment comes with the disarmingly simple last line of Complicity, which after detailing the early stages of a relationship and a sort of meditation on aesthetic themes, it ends,
And then I touched her.
Harmony is another story on a theme of misunderstood motives in a basically unsympathetic world, in which innovative medical practice involving magnetism temporarily cures a pianists blindness in a big European city beginning with a V in the time of Haydn and Mozart. I don’t know where that could be and I don’t know why the old ruse of deleting precise fictional dates, places and names is used. But it’s interesting that she needs to be taught to play again having had her sight restored, when being able to see her fingers on the keyboard ruin her ability to play. And, of course, when the healer is demonized and the pianist returned to her family, she goes blind again.
The final story, Pulse, is about the sense taste of taste and perhaps also a sense of taste as well the closing down of the senses and as such is the most compelling and moving in the book. Barnes’ writing is exquisite at times and a transparent window at others in an age when prose style doesn’t seem to be the issue it might once have been. He is a candidate for the title of most accomplished English prose fiction writer and on this form is perhaps ahead of MacEwan, Boyd and Sebastian Faulks with Ishiguro somewhere thereabouts but they all have Alan Hollinghurst to think about, too, and with him due along in the Spring with his most broad-canvas novel yet, they might have some thinking to do.

Courtly Forlorn

Courtly Forlorn

The palace is calm, too calm for comfort.
The Queen has said she wants to be alone.
The King is thoughtful, much more than usual.
He has no time for his jester’s joking.
The birds in the cage don’t feel like singing.
He frets and sighs and sends his fool away.

At first he thought that the Queen was joking
And didn’t see anything unusual
When she told the jester to stop singing
And threw her favourite handkerchief away.
He had no sense of her plain discomfort
And so it was just hers and hers alone.

He’d like her to be relaxed as usual
But for the life of him can’t find a way
To offer her any sort of comfort.
He misses her soft, melodic singing
He sometimes overhears when they’re alone.
But he can’t help. No, you must be joking.

The King spends long anxious evenings alone
With only memories of birds singing.
There must be reasons to explain away
The cause of the Queen’s chronic discomfort.
She has become a stranger to joking.
The circumstances are most unusual.

The Queen has seemed to be so faraway
With the sad King unable to comfort
Her and he knows that his futile joking
Is inappropriate. But she’s alone
Inside her melancholy. The usual
Endearments are missing. No-one’s singing.

But one day he thinks he hears her faint singing
And, though it still seems too soon for joking,
He thinks he ought to spend some time alone
With the Queen, as used to be quite usual,
And yet again sends the jester away
And the Queen comes to the King for comfort.

Some Minds Think Alike

There's consensus for you, and something reassuring.
The same day that my little piece on Postmodern Play appears, Todd Swift at Eyewear is saying something very similar, http://toddswift.blogspot.com/ 'Snowing on Raine', Jan 14,
Paul Muldoon's poem of 1994, "Incantata", is arguably the most influential mid-length poem written in Ireland and the UK in the last two decades - and perhaps the finest, too. It has certainly had a huge impact on a certain sort of longish, clever, playful, sinuous, syntactically and formally adept poem that Paul Farley, John Stammers, Don Paterson and Roddy Lumsden (to name a few of the best mainstream poets writing after Muldoon) like to write.

It is disappointing to see he got there a couple of hours before I did and I should have rushed to the web sooner, but some minds, whether or not great, think alike.

The Play's the Thing

The English poetry of recent decades has been defined by its major anthologies by a lack of definition. Motion and Morrison, Hulse, Kennedy and Morley and most lately Lumsden all more or less opted to describe the 'plurality' and 'diversity', the multi-cultural cross currents of the poetry and the fact that what the poets in each of their anthologies had in common was that they had nothing in common. They declined the opportunity to identify a prevailing style or put any idiom or school at the forefront of their perception of the brief periods they undertook to represent.

That's not wrong but it reserves judgement in a way that Alvarez didn't in his account of the 1950's poets. But future literary historians are unlikely to be satisfied with such a refusal to name, label and categorize. While we might enjoy the idea of an enterprising creative flux, it isn't always going to look like that with the benefit of hindsight and the winnowing of the reading list and the need some will feel to apply a more rigorous defintion to the late C20th and early C21st poetry.

I was looking back at Sean O'Brien's Firebox anthology this week, seeing how his biographical notes on the poets looked now, since they first appeared in 1998. He refers there to 'the age of Muldoon' without deliberately trying to attach the phrase to the time in an epoch-making way but it might prove to have been a starting place for more thoroughgoing attempts at writing the history.

These designations are nowhere near as useful as they seem and need to accept that not all they refer to adequately cover the poetry of the time. Not all the poems of the 1940's were Apocalyptic, as a paragon of sanity like Alun Lewis shows, and not all poetry of the 1950's was, or wanted to be, 'Movement' poetry. But since everything is in some way now post-Modern, and has been for some time, the Postmodernism of Muldoon offers a potentially useful place to group together poets that followed Hughes, Hill, Heaney and Sylvia Plath.

The element of Postmodern 'play' in Muldoon does not involve any suggestion of a loss of seriousness when he provides such monumental and memorable poems as Incantata, but he added, and continues to explore intrepidly, an ingenuity the like of which might not have been seen before. An early tributary to this method might be the Martianism of Craig Raine, whose own ingenuity was much admired in the 1980's before meandering into a cul-de-sac of its own making.

However, one could put such poets as Ciaran Carson, Don Paterson, Simon Armitage (never more so than in the prose poems in Seeing Stars), Roddy Lumsden and Glyn Maxwell into a similar class of playful language artists while recognizing that this generation was robbed far too soon of two contributors with the untimely deaths of Michael Donaghy and perhaps Mick Imlah. That makes it look like a boy's game, and it might even be that if Jo Shapcott and others can't be shown to belong to such a grouping . And so perhaps those separatists who seem to argue that 'women's poetry' is a different thing to the rest of it might actually have identified a discernable split. I don't want it to be true but if the male of the poetic species wants to play with their linguistic gadgets while their female counterparts concentrate more on emotional engagement, then there might yet be a identifiable difference where I had thought that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and rhythms worked in exactly the same way whoever was using them.

So, it will be for a more accomplished critic than I that pins down a prevailing mode of Postmodern Play in recent English* poetry. History isn't properly written until a judicious amount of time has been allowed to elapse but I don't think the poetry of the latest fin de siecle is likely to be recorded as a period in which lots of different things went on.

Eventually, somebody's going to have a stab at saying what it was and others will then see that as a consensus opinion.

* I'm using the term 'English' here to refer to poetry written in the English language, by poets born in the British Isles or living there. It's a difficult area to draw a line round but it obviously doesn't include American poetry.

Sixteen Quid to see Roger McGough

http://www.newtheatreroyal.com/index.php/whats-on/roger-mcgough

I was just wondering whether to make a trip to LRB in London next month to see Don Paterson, Jo Shapcott and David Harsent. It's six pounds and the travel won't cost much more than that if arranged parsimoniously.
Then I picked up the programme for the New Theatre Royal and my eyes stood out on stalks as if in a cartoon on seeing that Roger McGough wants sixteen pounds for you to hear him read his pomes.

Sixteen Quid to see Roger McGough

Roger McGough
That Awkward Age
Sat 19 February7.30pm
Tickets £16

I know in a recession times are tough
and poets need to live and all that stuff
but that looks to me like a rip-off.
For that much I'd want Peter Ustinov.

For half that we saw Macbeth killed by Macduff.
This is beyond a joke. Enough's enough.
I don't know what they can be thinking of
- it's sixteen quid to see Roger McGough.

Top 6 - Classical Music CD's

I know what 'classical' music is, it's everybody else that doesn't. So, before the trickle of e-mails arrive telling me that none of my selections here are 'classical', yes, I know.

In the third form at school, our teacher, Michael Rangeley, asked the class for their definitions of it and was offered such attempts as 'music with violins in it', 'music for old people', 'played by orchestras', 'not in the charts' or 'written by composers' before I, among the least talented musicians in form 3A, but a bit of a know-all when playing at home, on my territory, said that it was music from the second half of the C18th, like Mozart and Haydn. Or, at least, I think I said something like that.

I'm sure you wouldn't have found your way to this website if you needed telling that but, it has to be said that, given the vagaries of language and the ways it gets used, 'decimated' seems to have come to mean 'obliterated' when, of course, it means 'reduced by one tenth' and 'classical music' seems to mean something like 'art music'. I'd prefer it if we could refer to Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi and the like as 'music' and designate The Rolling Stones, Abba, Take That and Toad the Wet Sprocket as 'pop music' but it's not a debate I'm going to win and Amazon's website thinks that 'Music' is the term for 'popular' things and 'Classical Music' is a minority interest.

It's far too late for all that now. Pedantry only delivers its own self-satisfied rewards. All I've done here is pop along my CD shelves and picked off the six I'd least want to be without. And it would be impossible to survive with six and so some absolutely essential composers don't even get a mention, those whose music would pack out an Essential 100.

The best CD I've ever bought is Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres (pictured) with James Bowman and Michael Chance at the top of their form. Music I first heard in the film Tous les Matins du Monde played there by Jordi Savall, I suppose. I'm afraid that there might be one or two too many choices here that are a secular man's attempt at belief in a heaven but in actual fact, it's here on Earth. I'm probably supposed to say that 'sublime' isn't the word but it is.

To justify the selection of a whole CD here on account of only its last five minutes might seem reckless but I put double CD's of major works back on the shelf because I didn't want to be without Josquin Desprez's Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem, the best tribute to another artist ever written, mourning the passing of a mentor and influence from the previous generation in C15th music. It's a bit more than gorgeous on The Clerks' Group, Ockeghem, Missa Ecce Ancilla, etc.

Out of the several versions of Spem in Alium, one somehow never gets over one's first love and so it has to be Tallis: Spem in Alium, King's College Choir, David Willcocks. It's a big, surging sea of energies and passion and has never been as shifting and complete for me than in this recording made in 1965.

Although we really are winging it here by not having some very essential composers, we still can't go without Bach, but we are going without Pablo Casals (if you see what I mean). One of the rules of Top 6 is supposed to be that you're not allowed to mention near misses or anything that you'd like to include but can't. I'm not doing very well at that here. There might well be more critically acclaimed accounts of the set but the one I have, bargainly bought once, is by Bernard Roberts, Bach, The Well-Tempered Klavier. If one CD, and it might be cheating because this is a set of 4, had to last you the rest of your life- and we can't be sure how long that's going to be- then this would be the most likely candidate. I often think and have long thought how less is often so much more and the piano, which Bach obviously didn't know about, on its own, can be so much better than double orchestra and five choirs. The rubato might be more highly praised in other versions but Bernard has never let me down.

James MacMillan was most gracious when signing my programme on the South Bank many years ago at the premiere of his piece about Iona. He is a bit of a hero of mine even if not everything he's ever done is quite as listenable as I'd like. But once you've done one life-changing masterpiece then you tend to stay among my favourites for a long time afterwards. The original recording of Seven Last Words from the Cross, London Chamber Orchestra, Polyphony, Stephen Layton does that for him, for its hard-edged, unsentimental setting but mainly and forever the blinding violin theme in the third movement which never ever fails.

There's no room for a novelty sixth choice if you've not found any place for some of the greatest genius ever to flatter us by being of the same species as we are (a line I'm grateful to Michael Bywater for when long ago writing about Bach in the Sunday paper). Rachmanninov's Vespers, The Choral Art of Alexander Sveshnikov was the music that I was listening to that made me want to think about this selection but it isn't getting a bye into the final because of that. It's huge and shows Rachmanninov to be considerably more than piano music fans know him to be, which is fine enough. Quite honestly, this makes Wagner sound like tootlings on a pennywhistle in comparison. I've no idea what it says and don't need to. But that's Russia for you. Big.

And so it's mostly singing, isn't it. And opera will have to wait for its own Top 6.

But a footnote needs to be added here about the world that one influential record opened up for me in 1971. Waldo's Mozart 40 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjXH18Qsz7s.

All the other attempts at popularizing classical music fail in a variety of horrible ways but Waldo still sounds faithful to me and I'm still grateful to him for all he did.

Walking on Water

On the subject of poems about Portsmouth, which we were, the theme of this poem from a few years ago came to mind with the tragic news of someone not surviving a walk across the frozen Baffins Pond just recently.

It was an ill-advised idea, obviously, and I have since reflected on the possible outcome of my little adventure, which was some years before I wrote the poem about it.

It is a miracle that the temperature can make water bind itself together to make it solid and, if I were to want to make a contrived metaphor for poetry, which I don't, I might say that poetry is when words bind themselves together to allow the poet to walk daringly across their surface. But since I'm not a creative writing tutor, I don't need to say anything quite so silly.

This and That

I never really wanted to be a blogger. I don't want to be anything that involves being a word that hadn't been coined when I was at school. It all seems so recent and far too new-fangled.
I wanted to be someone who had a website, not minding quite so much having something that hadn't been invented before the 1970's. But blogger it is that I seem to be, however reluctantly. And so here's some blogging, various and disparate though its themes might seem.

I came back home on New Year's Eve reading the obituary of Bobby Farrell, one of the essential ingredients of the great Boney M. There was much to admire in his spectacular career, not least of which was that after legal rulings over the ownership of the Boney M name, there were at one time five different acts using it. But that is of only the most arcane interest when the real point is the performances, one of the more notable being when they gave their Rasputin thus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDgZ52XYX4&feature=fvst

Radio 3 have begun the year by broadcasting every note of the music of Mozart, which they have already done for Bach and, I think, Beethoven. It is a great undertaking and to be applauded, not least the excuse to repeat the original cast of Amadeus with Felicity Kendal as a coquettish Constanza. It suggests the impossibly desirable state of affairs in which we might have separate Radios Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. so that there is never the danger of tuning in to Radio 3 to find that it is Jazz Record Requests. But there is a downside to listening to too much of the same thing for slightly too long. For example, you start to think in terms of Mozart's little idioms and phrasings, not only the heavenly moments but the habitual stylings of the 1780's. You really can have too much of a good thing and surfeit on such luxury. And you realize that Mozart did what he did, as we all surely do, within the constraints of his contemporary fashion, and that it was only expressed in symphonies, concerti, quartets, sonatas and opera because that's what people expected then. And you feel a little bit sorry for the apparently equally talented sister, Nannerl, whose playing in the wonderful parlour pieces has been less revered by posterity as quite so 'beloved of God', or perhaps the hothouse education of their father.

And if any of that makes us wonder about 'perfection' in art, then as an addition to my premature review of Christmas television, I've got to say I don't remember ever seeing a part played quite to the verisimilitude as Daniel Rigby did as the early Eric Morecambe in the wonderful Eric and Ernie (pictured), in which the tremendous Victoria Wood and Vic Reeves were big enough to play supporting roles.

But, it wasn't Eric Morecambe, it was somebody pretending to be him, convincingly. The latest issue of PN Review had arrived in the meantime, in time to remind me what utter sophistry can be written about poetry. Not, of course, Neil Powell praising the art of criticism in the work of William Empson and the like, but the unsubstantiated claims and blurry 'analysis' offered by some of the reviewers. One claims to establish the fact that Fiona Sampson's Rough Music proves her to be a 'major poet' without saying if that means equal to Chaucer, or maybe Shelley, or just Betjeman or if it just puts her into the top twenty of living poets in the English language or not even that. As a general rule, most reviews of poetry published these days need putting through the kind of bullshit detector that is available on the interweb before seeing what they really say and then just read the poems instead. The very vagueness of unsupported assertions like this one demean not only Fiona's poems but poetry, the art of criticism and anybody who reads it all at the same time.

So, I just read the poems. And the best poems in PNR were those by the late Romanian dissident poet, Liviu Campanu, the notes on contributors even giving us his dates. They were translated by Patrick McGuinness, and if no more seemed to be available in English than those in his recent collection then that would have been where I'd have run through the well rehearsed issues about poetry in translation, how it doesn't translate and can't be expected to and how poetry thus can never really hope to become international. Except that it turns out that Campanu is an imaginary poet like the Indian poet in the recent Derek Mahon book, Christopher Reid's Katerina Brac and all those other invented poets. And, yes, although they didn't claim to be translations, both Detroit Jackson and Jason Craddock, in the unlikely event that you saw their poems, were actually me. I'm sorry about that.

I did find the complicity of PN Review, such a highly respected organ, in this subterfuge just a fraction undermining but, never mind, I wasn't thinking of renewing my subscription to this overly erudite and complacently intellectual magazine anyway. I'll be off to Magma if anywhere, with the prospect of a higher percentage of pages I can get to the end of while still wanting to turn over.

Or perhaps I'll stay with Boney M. At least it was obvious from the start that they had nothing to do with how good their records were.

Sea Front

The Portsmouth Laureate job made me wonder how many poems I'd written about Portsmouth in the 28, is it, years since I came here.

Not many specifically about it, really. But this came to mind and, after some time excavating the room upstairs, eventually to hand.

In 1982, at the time of the Falklands War, I watched a grey battleship merging into the mist one morning as it left, and then wrote this, which was then included in my typed and stapled collection 14 Poems in 1986.

The first line had described the absolute flat calm of the sea but I was told at a poetry group meeting that the sea is big and powerful and so, rather too meekly, I changed it rather than stick to my description of what it was really like.

What you must do in poetry, you see, is write cliche after cliche or else nobody will believe you. Still, it was three decades ago now and I'm not letting it annoy me at all.

Top 6 - Cliff Richard

Radio 2 recently repeated a Top 20 Cliff chart, voted for by 20 thousand listeners, and although it inevitably included some items one would be grateful to do without, it could have been worse but certainly provided the motivation to put the record straight.

This isn't a New Year's prank. It's almost so fashionable to dismiss Cliff with expressions of horror and distaste that it is surely by now naff to do so. For me, the definition of 'uncool' is to be found in the bombast of U2 and their singer with a Messiah complex, in the dreary ramblings of Coldplay, the unremitting bleak of Radiohead or the over-rated posturing of The Doors, most of whose adherents presumably don't reckon much to Cliff. But I doubt if it bothers him too much, fifty years into his career while the casualties of pop music lie strewn across its history. All Cliff has to do is keep thinking of reasons to pack out the Albert Hall each year, whether it's the last ever (definitely) reunion with The Shadows or his seventieth birthday.

It has to be admitted that the last decade or two haven't added much to the Cliff oeuvre but, there again, The Rolling Stones haven't done much new of note in that time either.

Two of Cliff's best records were completely overlooked by the public vote. Don't Talk to Him and Constantly are masterpieces of songwriting, production and performance from the golden age of the early sixties. The first is a cheerful expression of paranoia and the second roughly chiming with the sentiment of Shakespeare's Sonnet 57.

The Next Time is another timeless poem on loss and regret featuring the great Norrie Paramor's orchestration, making us feel that even if it didn't seem so at the time, the 60's was a better time to be a teenager than now.

Among my favourites is also one of the singles that came with Cliff's revival in the late 70's, Some People, somewhat hopefully pleading that 'he's not like that at all' when considering how cruel others can be to each other. Well, he was, actually, when he stole one of The Shadows' girlfriends. He's not quite the angelic boy next door that he pretends to be, having pursued his career with a single-mindedness that some of his more drug-addled rivals wouldn't have been in any fit condition to emulate. The Shads were put together from the best club musicians he could find and were, in those glory days, the best backing band money could buy.

One of their finest performances comes on the rock'n'roll classic Dancing Shoes.

Which leaves us with that usual Top 6 quandary of having only one choice left and far too many candidates to mention. I don't know. Rather than go for an obvious classic, though, I'll have Time Drags By.

It's a shame he missed out on having a number one in each decade. We had just the song for him but we'll probably never know if he even listened to the demo.