Marc Bolan Anniversary

It would be remiss of me if I didn't bring your attention to two items on the BBC schedules this weekend. On Friday night, 9 p.m. BBC4, Marc Bolan:Cosmic Dancer and I understand Johnnie Walker's Radio 2 Sunday afternoon show is a Bolan special, too.
Forty years, can it really be forty years since the tragic accident that robbed us of Marc, in between the departues of lesser lights, Elvis Presley and Bing Crosby. There was a record player in the Prefect's Room at school that we could use in the intervals between making up abstruse reasons for putting sprogs in detention. Woe Betide any first or second former suspected of 'looking at me in a funny way'. But I took in Telegram Sam to play as my first tribute since it wasn't a set text in those days.
Legend that he already was by then, I doubt if anybody, not even he, thought at the time that his music would become quite so iconic and celebrated as it has become. Similarly with Cliff's campaign a few years ago to extend royalties to a 70 year limit from its previous 50 years, they must have thought this is fine, make hay while the sun shines but reaching the 50 years and the cash still rolling in, one can understand why Cliff didn't want it to stop.
We took it seriously enough at the time - pop music was a serious subject - but there was always the suspicion that Marc was messing about. He didn't care how he got famous, or what for, with his early modelling career and various projects on the outskirts of the underground, championed by John Peel. Whether it was Chuck Berry, Cliff or Bo(b Dy)lan he took as role models, it didn't matter as long as one day it would work and the early Tyrannosaurus Rex sat on the floor like Indian classical musicians. But, like Dylan, he was to put away the acoustic guitar and plug in the electric, to the horror of purists but it was the making of him. John Peel was thus lost along the way as an admirer, as Tony Visconti, the genius producer who made the T. Rex records sound as good as they do, was to be stood down in his turn. But that was because Marc had lost it by then and didn't know what was good for him.
If nowadays pop acts are marketed by sinister forces and targeted at particular demographic groups, T. Rex weren't just nice and safe and aimed at readers of Jackie. Simon Napier-Bell wasn't the Simon Cowell of his day, the difference being that most of his acts were any good. Cute, androgynous and glam he may have been but Marc knew his 50's rock'n'roll roots and quoted Chuck Berry, lifted Jeepster straight from Howlin Wolf and began 20th Century Boy with the most imperious of rock beginnings. Not particularly interested then in who was the best rock guitarist (Page, Beck, Clapton, etc.), and certainly not now, he is still my nomination for favourite electric guitar player even if I accept he might not have been the most technically proficient. And I'm delighted that in any discussion of the period with my contemporaries, the debate is never T. Rex or Slade - though hats off to Nod for all his fine work- but more acutely, which record represents the peak of T. Rex. Some say it is actually the Tyrannosaurus Rex period, but then there are adherents of most of the obvious Top 6, a feature overdue a revival here, which is the string of singles through 1971 and 72,
Ride A White Swan
Hot Love
Get It On
Jeepster
Telegram Sam
Metal Guru

They seem to pick themselves because you can't leave any of them out. I'm with Get It On, for its guitar sound, prime Bolan poetry and Rick's virtuoso piano part.
And so, more of an exercise for the cognoscenti, I think we need another 6.

20th Century Boy and Children of the Revolution continue that sequence but there are b sides, which Marc was always generous with, album tracks and early work, from which Baby Strange, Sunken Rags, Cosmic Dancer and Ballrooms of Mars suggest themselves but one of them's got to go before we really start thinking too hard because Lofty Skies needs to be in. In the interests of not picking the obvious singles, the bump and grind of our sainted generation, we Children of the Revolution, will have to be deferred to the third list. On which the majesterial, if episodic, Raw Ramp would be essential.
The measure of a songwriter is not one or two masterpieces or the fact that they didn't write masterpieces all the time but how deep is their list. And Marc's are worth a bit more for the panache of their delivery.

   


So, he would have 70 shortly, perhaps touring on a bill that he'd be top of with those who remain from The Sweet, Mud and Showaddywaddy but I'm sure he'd still be claining to be the godfather of whatever new pop crazes there are, if they still have them, from Lady Gaga to, I don't know, do they still have them. I doubt if X Factor would have picked him if he was a hopeful candidate now because, ironically, he had that so-called 'x factor' whereas they are looking for the entirely familar and unadventurous thing that's very much the same as what they always pick and completely lacks it.

We went to pay our respects, some years ago now, at the site of the fatal tree on Barnes Common. As you can see, I wasn't much less beatnik then than I am now.
But the least we can do is be grateful, those of us that did, to have lived through a time when it all seemed worthwhile.
 Keep a little Marc in your heart.

Poetry Winner

So, there it is in writing on my name badge from yesterday's official opening of the refurbished Lynx House, Poetry Winner.
Mounted on a cushion of burgundy, an accolade to show for all the 40-odd years it took to become an overnight sensation. Something to make my despairing parents proud of me.

I shouldn't mock. It's not the worst poem I've ever written and now, realizing that Nottingham and Gloucester are also ten-letter words, I've added in two prequels to make a poem that may or may not be called Autobiography. Although I have used that title before, I think it's as much of that dire and dreadful tale of underachievement as will ever be written and more, as it implies, than anybody will want to read.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I'm pleased about it, of course, but I would have been more pleased about it a few more years ago when I still thought it meant anything, before it dawned on me that sport is just a circus and started to feel only pity for those who are 'passionate' about it.
Nottinghamshire, of who I am a nominal supporter, won the T20 on Saturday, to add it to the 50-over cup they've already won and the second division championship they've bossed all season. So that's all three of the competitions they were in. Great.
In both the semi-final and the final they dragged convincing wins from disadvantageous positions and it made for a roller-coaster day that ended happily. Well done, lads, give my regaards to Radford Road.
But I couldn't find on the Paddy Power website where to back them @ 7/4 to win it outright so I didn't, although I would have, and the horse I backed at Newton Abbot was clear and only had to jump the last when he made a calamity of a mistake, came to a standstill, Noel Fehily did well to stay on but it was too late. And that is all that sport is for nowadays, which might seem cynical but I'm not sure that Notts did it for me and so I'm no more than vaguely attached to their success by some vestige of emotion.

Whereas art is the opposite of that. I'm aware that Simon Rattle and Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee were handsomely rewarded for their efforts at the Proms and didn't have me specifically in mind as they performed Gurreleider and Raga Bihag respectively, and what they did was similarly dependent on displaying a high level of technical prowess. Although, yes, Rattle does just move his arms about in front of the band. But last night was the best night's telly we are going to get this year, two Proms I'd heard already but were much enhanced by seeing them having only previously heard them. There's more to music than what it sounds like.
Schoenberg's epic song cycle is the very height of late Romanticism, which doesn't sound like an advert for it but it might be more so if the others one thinks of as such - Mahler, who is let off with a mild rebuke, but Bruckner and Wagner who are guilty as charged - weren't the first to come to mind.
Immediately one is on Amazon looking at the options until one sees there's one of those 5-disc Warner Bros. sets at bargain price, Simon Rattle, the Second Viennese School. That'll do.
So, there's no need to explain to readers of this highbrow website who were the composers of the second Viennese School but you don't hear so much about the first. Oh, I see. That was Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and some say Schubert. It's no wonder you never hear about the First Viennese School, they don't need such billing. They were Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and some say Schubert. It's like the poetry of the 1950's, Philip Larkin and the Movement. Larkin doesn't need The Movement to make him sound significant, it's the others who wouldn't have been in a movement unless he'd been there to define it. But there was no movement. Nobody who was said to be in it either thought they were or wanted to be. Maybe John Wain did, I don't know.
But what is there to do about the timelessness of the Mukherjee performance. Indian classical music seems to have no need of movements or 'late romantics'. The artist remains the servant of the form, maybe it never felt the need to break out of the discipline and they don't seem to make the distinction between composer and musician that came about, probably, with Romanticism where personality emerged and subjugated art to its confessional needs.
The performance is there, then gone forever having conjured forever from somewhere and will be different next time. It's difficult to get used to in a Western tradition that values classic performances and authoritative texts and interpretations. That Prom would probably have been the Event of the Year had I been there but getting home from the Albert Hall after midnight isn't on, I've just about promised the Event of the Year to the Welsh Championship 12 Hour and although I gave it to Chic at Glastonbury not long ago in a not very good year for events, it's a very sad thing to give such an accolade to something you saw on the telly.

The Finished 'Unfinished'

Schubert, The Finished 'Unfinished', Symphony no.8 in B minor, Kammerorchester Basel/Mario Venzago (Sony)

And the reason why this order, previewed in keen anticipation not long ago, didn't arrive until now was because I hadn't actually ordered it. It's always worth checking.
What did one expect, though, now that it's here. It was always out of the question that the third and fourth movements could immediately impress enough to sound right after such well-known and much-loved movements as the first two. But that is set against a recent playing of no.9 which is great in scale if a bit more sub-Beethoven and rhythmically adventurous than as outstandingly 'Great' as it is called. And it is with similar feelings that this re-made no.8 leaves us at the end. Quite possibly credibly Schubert, one just knows it's not from an autograph score and so it is essential to know about, will be played in preference to leaving the symphony unfinished but it's like only having Lulu doing a fine job on The Man Who Sold the World if the Bowie version had ever been lost.
The opening shimmering violins are surely too quick. But I often think tempi are taken too fast rather than too slow. Festina lente, it's not a race. Harnoncourt's first two movements are timed at 26.21 on his complete Symphonies recording which compares with 22.24 by Venzago so I might have a point, for once. I might not have thought this new release would win by quite such a margin had I not been prompted to look it up by those opening bars. The first movement is marked Allegro moderato, so we are left to wonder how fast moderately fast is meant to be. If disco records can have beats per minute ratings then metronome values indicated by the composer shouldn't result in four minutes difference between two recordings of the same 20-odd minutes of music and I'm with Harnoncourt, I'm sure he'd have been delighted to know.
Another of my usual objections is contrast. Light and shade, dark and light, loud and soft (betting with Haydn's Surprise Symphony), were surely Romantic inventions, or preferences, that have been taken to further extremes by contemporary composers who still think we are going to be shocked and surprised by surprisde and shock. No, we've come to expect it, it's as predictable as the next eight bars of Philip Glass. It's fine in Beethoven, maybe it was him that made it seem so necessary, but we've been paying for it ever since.
But Venzago possibly flows better in his reconstruction of Schubert than he does in his interpretation of the extant first two. Except that it is in this unfamiliar territory that we are in less of a position to say.
At less than 44 minutes, with only this symphony on it, one might expect more for the pound in your pocket but what would one fill up the other half hour with. On this occasion, the symphony stands alone and I, personally, felt the need to know. And it stands up as well as it could have been expected to. The added movements were never going to exceed what we had already but they make enough sense for a respectable pass mark and, who is to say, play it enough and one day they will probably sound right.
Best of luck to it and thanks for doing it.

Larkin's Arundel Tomb

It's not the first time I've made this point and it's unlikely to be the last but I was recently given the opportunity to revive an old favourite theme and so did.
My correspondent at Plucarden Abbey was kind enough to send me an article, Surprised by Hull by Jonathan Tulloch from a recent issue of The Tablet, the weekly magazine on Catholic pre-occupations. Surprised to find Larkin a subject for their attention, I was uneasy at the selective quotations Jonathan used to bring about an optimistic view of Larkin. By all means, he is not quite the complete curmudgeon of popular assessment but wheeling out the last line of An Arundel Tomb to suit his purposes is going too far although plenty of people see fit to do so.
I've been involved in debates about it before and had to re-read it several times to make sure it wasn't me that had been wrong all along. However much Eng. Lit. these days seems to want to see the writing as appendages to an author's biography or 'theory', the text must remain the real focus of our attention and so no amount of appeal to Larkin's sensitive side should divert us from the poem's argument as a whole, elusive though it might seem.
Thus, I wrote a letter to the Editor in the hope of adding The Tablet to my palmares of The Gloucester Citizen, The Sunday Express, The Listener, Retail Jeweller and The TLS. It was acknowledged but hasn't, to my knowledge, appeared yet and so it probably won't. There is also a poem in progress, although slow progress, called Letters to the Editor, to balance such activity with the idea that the authors of such things should have better things to do.
Anyway, just for the record.

Dear Sir,

I am indebted to a Catholic friend who brought my attention to Jonathan Tulloch’s fine piece, Surprised by Hull  (5 August) and it is to be applauded that The Tablet could feature such an item on an as avowedly atheist writer as Larkin.

But maybe not quite so fast. An Arundel Tomb is mainly remembered for its last line, ‘What will survive of us is love’ and Jonathan does include in his quotation the preceding line that it is ‘our almost-instinct almost true’ which qualifies it considerably. But those enamoured of the last line tend not to notice how Larkin has taken great care to eschew the optimistic sentiment of his ending more profoundly than that.

The last stanza begins,

Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.

And continues,

                       The stone fidelity

They hardly meant

And so, although it does say it has come ‘to prove’,

What will survive of us is love.,

that is at most an almost instinct that is only almost true, so the poem is saying no such thing.

There is certainly more optimism in Larkin’s poetry than he is sometimes given credit for but let us not get carried away.

Yours Faithfully, as it were,

David Green

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There would be no poems, music or any such thing without the ones that went before. Beethoven couldn't have done what he did without Mozart and Haydn before him. It's a matter of whether one stands on the shoulders of giants to reach higher or only fall back from their example.
I'll be most disappointed if I can't make it to Cheltenham for the Thom Gunn Celebrration, to promote the new Selected Poems, which fits in nicely with Alan Hollinghurst. As such, I thought I'd look at Clive Wilmer, the latest to edit a selection of Gunn, and got his own New and Selected Poems from 2012. Thus it was that I was reminded of when Lindisfarne first split and I saw the off-shoot band, Jack the Lad, described as 'surrogate'. There's no shame in that but it does suggest that they found no distinct identity for themselves beyond being ex-Lindisfarne. In Wilmer's poems I was immediately struck by how much like Gunn's they were and then found, in a poem to Gunn on his sixtieth birthday, how he openly says that,
I tried to imitate your 'mighty line',

and he does it very well, like the second generation inheritor of Gunn's tribute to his mentor, Yvor Winters. When he is in that mode, he imitates the rigour and cadences like Gary Numan taking up the electronic-period Bowie or Shakin Stevens doing his karaoke Elvis, but when he isn't, he's different again, 'poetic' in a Keatsian way, perhaps.
But as when Eric Idle played the Rutles songs to George Harrison, there are moments like With a Girl Like You when 'it's a bit close, that one'. I've done it myself, unwittingly. Pleased with myself having finished a new poem, I'm admiring my own handiwork and then, oh no, all I've done is re-make a Larkin poem, it's not quite as much me as I thought. Because somewhere in the sub-conscious, there's plenty there and the longer it stays there fermenting, the more one assumes it's one's own.
Wilmer's Charon's Bark, from a book first published in 1992,
me stranded on this shore
and glimpsing you,
too far out, too baffled by the crowd

and

your set eyes blind to the same look
in these that reach out after you.

is very close to Gunn's A Waking Dream, from a book published in 1982,

but he looks through me and beyond me,
he cannot see who spoke

Imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.
-
But not always.
More than halfway thrrough the old Ben Pimlott Harold Wilson, one difficulty I have with it is whether it's appropriate to listen to something sublime and wonderful like Bach or Buxtehude when reading of such underhand horse-trading. It doesn't seem right.
But the parallels between Labour's two most electorally succesful leaders start to dawn on one as soon as the difficulties Wilson had with a number two called Brown are set out in quite such detail. One can hardly expect politicians to be honourable. It was to establish if Wilson was any better than the latest generation that I got the book. Well, maybe he was the blueprint, based on the way he was at first very impressive in putting away blase, patrician MacMillan and the old school.
This analysis must have been done before but it's not just a volatile sidekick called Brown that Wilson and Blairr have in common. If they ever had any socialist agenda in the first place, it is soon compromised by becoming Prime Minister and both find themselves subservient to the American president. They both ride their luck to come away with impressive win ratios at General Elections and then hand over to the next man, who has been waiting a long time, so that it's them that can inevitably lose the next election. One thing you can say for Margaret Thatcher is that she didn't go willingly and John Major did actually cling on. But Wilson and Blair both went from being dazzling, young, apparently progressive Prime Ministers to shifty, untrustworthy operators looking after themselves. And that is not particularly an indictment of them but the way politics is. I wish I didn't find it quite so morbidly captivating. It might be interesting to see the same period from a Roy Jenkins point of view next but I think Lord George Brown will one day be my next political biography.
-
But, raising one's spirits beyond all that fiddle, was Friday night's late night Prom, mainly for the evening raga, played by Budhaditva Mukherjee (sitar) and, worthy of almost erqual billing, Soumen Nandy (tabla), to mark the 70th anniversary of the partition of India. So, presumably that means the great Rajan & Sajan Misra Prom that has lived in the memory ever since must have been for the 50th anniversary, twenty years ago. Good grief, there have been precious few radio concerts that have impressed quite as much as that did.
I know that it is almost jazz in a way but it's a far, far better thing that they do, in a vastly longer tradition and conjuring much more rarified thoughts of mountain ranges, mystery, meditation and passion than self-indulgent meanderings in self-consciously 'cool' clubs where your first thought is to look at your watch and wonder how much longer it's going to take to say nothing whatsoever. Indian ragas make forever seem perfectly acceptable but it is, paradoxically, all in the moment and I don't want just any record by Budhaditva and his mate Soumen, if he is his mate, I want that concert

And, while we are on the Proms. Tremendous recording of the Beethoven 5 concert with Mirga on telly this evening. You can't help but like her but it's unlikely I'll be learning her surname and she'll always be Mirga to me.

And, finally. Michael Craig-Martin was the guest on Private Passions today. It's all very well being highbrow and snooty and pleased with oneself for never having heard of Big Brother celebrities or Little Mix but perhaps I ought to have heard of him, some kind of godfather to the YBA's, who are by now much older British Artists, perhaps in the same way that Paul Weller was elevated to being the 'modfather' by Britpop. For someone of that pedigree who you might associate with marketing more than art for art's sake, he spoke a lot of sense, like there being no rules about art.
For forty years and more, wherever I've been there have always been people who want there to be 'rules', even to the extent, I suppose, of making lists of rules that say there are no rules.
A sonnet has 14 lines; counterpoint is this, coimposition in a painting is that. Virginia Plain and Up the Junction are two singles that didn't have a chorus. Well, good for them but so what. You can, if you want, abide by as many rules as you want- as it happens I usually choose to- but all you have to do is be any good.   
Good lad, good music choices, too, immediately ruling out orchestral music in favour of smaller groups and opera. I'm not saying I'd go all the way with him on that but I know what he means.

P.S. During the following concert from the Cadogan Hall, with songs by Reynaldo Hahn, it was news to me that the composer of A Chloris was a boyfriend of Proust's.

You don't find things like that out on The One Show.

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There are hundreds of TV channels to choose from but most of the time I watch old QI, old Not Going Out, old The Chase, and not much new. I saw Fern Britton heroically nominate Science Fiction for Room 101 the other night only to be howled down by a nerd called Robert Webb and then Danny Baker made a convincing but unsuccessful case for punk rock.
And then it comes to Sunday night and the BBC put the Prom of the St. John Passion up against Far from the Madding Crowd. I ask you.  But never mind how many league tables put Bach top of the greatest creative artist of all time, the intention to flick between channels in an effort to do both, Thomas Hardy won. Although I might have to go back to the book to see if that is really how it ends because I don't think it does.
--
Meanwhile, back on the page, Ben Pimlott's Harold Wilson hasn't taken long to answer the questions asked of it. Like were politicians always quite as shifty, manipulative and self-seeking as they onviously are now. Post-Blair, post-Cameron, and not yet safely post-Boris and with the cartoon swot, Jacob, now being posited as a contender, were past generations quite as conniving, ambitious and unworthy as them.
Well, in the example of Harold Wilson, yes, they were. It is a heavy book and probably far too dangerous tothrow at cats but it needs to be to unravel the complexities of Wilson's tactical genius. Pimlott is good, never less than thorough and comes up with regular fine turns of phrase, like, when Harold is deftly positioning himself to appeal to the centre and left of the Labour party while not really being of their ilk,
Wilson's actual distance from Gaitskell was so small as to be scholastic.
Lord George Brown is in there but deserves a book to himself and Marcia has already taken control of the project. If there isn't much good satire or comedy on the small screen - and how can there be with the news consistently weirder than any joking can make it look- one is grateful for that time before one can remember it for onself and, no, not much has changed. We've just got less respect for it now.
And, in praise of olden days, and in line with Danny's railing against the over-rating of 1976/77 in pop music, the debonair Jack Buchanan is one place we can go for balm in these nutcase times.
--
But we must do what we do and carry on doing it, regardless.
The Perfect Book was set for October 2019 as I collected more poems for a bigger book than the customary dose of 14 poems every four years. But I'm looking at the twenty I have, and have made some judicious amendments, and I feel an itch.
It's not a book the world needs and I'll give it away to anybody unguarded enough to express the slightest of interest but I want to see it. And so I stare at the poems from time to time, in between a novice hurdle from Roscommon and a beginners chase at Southwell on a Sunday afternoon, and wonder if they are any good. Or, rather, whether I like them enough because that's all that matters. And I think I do, possibly too much to subject the innocent darlings to a pamphlet competition in the hope of getting somebody else to do the donkey work of putting them through the presses. I can do that and save them from being bullied by poems by people with creative writing degrees or the horrors of being typeset and edited by a foster parent. Never mind if you're not short-listed for Forward prizes, reviewed in Poetry Review or read out at the Ledbury Festival, you were mine and I loved you for all your shortcomings and lack of competitive edge.   
On the other hand, of course, word might spread like wildfire through the disparate poetry communities about this wonderful little book that has made poetry by avoiding all the usual pitfalls that give poetry such a bad name for preciousness, virtue signalling, excess erudition or just trying too hard to be poetry and I'll be turning down contracts, invitations and professorships on a semi-full-time basis.
We'll see.