The Mountain comes to Mahomet

Sometimes there's no need to go looking one's next dose of aesthetic engagement, it comes to you.

A second volume of James Kirkup was about as much as one would want of him in quick succession. The mis-fit outsider role is explored in some depth and to good effect but he knows everybody and has a bad word for most of them. The British Council are given their own special category of opprobium, not least because they don't like him either. The pacifist, vegetarian, perhaps even anarchist stance is both idiosyncratic and icomoclastic at the same time but we can at least credit him with sticking to his principles. One thing he does provide, though, is a bit tip for Ronald Firbank, part of his high camp, Wildean milieu and so, spending a few days dutifully progressing through a few more pages of the Wake, I'll await the arrival of some Firbank with high hopes.

I ventured down to Fratton to see what wise woman in her secondhand bookshop had but she was closed. She did, however, have a poster in the window advertising Black Uhuru upcoming in the Wedgewood Rooms. Having missed Lee 'Scratch' Perry there a couple of times in recent years, I was compelled to make sure of the mighty Uhuru who I last saw 42 years ago in Brighton, not for a moment imagining I'd see their 50th Anniversary Tour.

Doing some long overdue, it seems, homework, I was saddened to find that Puma, the girl, died aged 36 in 1990, so it's not her on the picture, then. Dire pangs of remorse swept through me, looking through their discography, seeing the album I unloaded in the heartbreaking vinyl sell-off. But, as so often, one's memory can't be relied on. Leaving to Zion isn't on the Red album, it's on Black Uhuru, but, worse than that, it looks like they don't usually play it. How could they not. It's like Argentina going into the World Cup without Maradona. Maybe I'll e-mail them and ask if they can play it in Southsea.

The glory years were those with Sly'n'Robbie who then were to reggae what Chic were to disco, all conquering and doing wonders for any act they felt like helping. So maybe I'm not expecting anything ground-breaking butI'd be inconsolable if Black Uhuru were in town and I wasn't there. That will make two pop concerts this year, the first since the Jess Davies Band which was four years ago and quite a bit more than that since three times in London for The Magnetic Fields. It clearly isn't over til it's over. They'll have me sitting in doing Jo Whiley's show soon at this rate.

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Long overdue, though, was a better listen to Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, which, with its loud and quiet contrasts, doesn't lend itself to explaining itself away in the front room. It is well served by headphones, they are on the CD player upstairs and the Haydn Piano Sonatas have done their bit to the extent that they are in danger of defining the room. Lady Macbeth is an exhilarating thing and demands closer attention which is not helped by having the libretto and synopsis on a disc. I'd much rather have it in the booklet. But it will get more attention, Shostakovich having an ever stronger claim on Greatest C20th Composer even though I'm not giving him much credit for those big symphonies.

 

I live in hope that the Larkin Society journal can make use of my latest contribution, the essay on Rosemary Tonks is done, I think, although I'm not sure it is what the publications I have in mind for it want and Thomas Hardy for next year's Portsmouth Poetry Society programme is done. So now would be a very good time for an idea to be visited upon me, the little event, glimpse or something in another book that triggers the miniature novel, some poems or anything worthy of the time spent on it. Time doesn't wait for a writer to come up with their next idea. Otherwise I'm just nominally, and very gradually, compiling the pop music book that will never be finished.

Tune in next week to see the new acquistion painting and I don't think I've done Top 6 painters before so I'll try to justify that disparate list. Summer, and August especially, can be a barren time for highlights but it's not looking bad at the moment.