This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Friday, 20 July 2018
Thursday, 19 July 2018
Last night's set lists at The Habit, York
Da Elderly: -
Never Let Her Slip Away
Free Fallin'
Ron Elderly: -
Just My Imagination
Lola
The Elderly Brothers: -
Walk Right Back
The Sound Of Silence
No Reply
I Saw Her Standing There
You Really Got A Hold On Me
It was busy, with plenty of punters and players on a warm night in York. The usual eclectic mix of music was on show with some fine performances. The Elderly Brothers closed the open mic itself and continued to play unplugged for another hour, with folks requesting songs, joining in and dancing!
Wednesday, 18 July 2018
Tuesday, 17 July 2018
Monday, 16 July 2018
The Return of Michael Nesmith and the First National Band
How a half-forgotten Seventies country-rock group led by the Monkee in the green wool hat returned from oblivion
Andy Greene
Rollong Stone
31 January 2018
Michael Nesmith couldn’t believe what he was seeing when he walked onstage at the San Bernardino, California, club Pappy & Harriet’s Palace earlier this month. It was his first gig with his early-Seventies country-rock group the First National Band since they split 46 years ago amid raging public disinterest, yet here was a capacity crowd euphorically singing along to songs drawn from a trio of albums that never went higher than Number 143 on the Billboard album chart.
“This is something I’ve dreamed about, but it’s never actually happened to me,” says Nesmith. “The audience, before I start singing each song, began singing them back to me. Usually I just get ignored and nobody plays attention to me. On this tour, audiences have actually been weeping and saying, ‘This is the greatest music that never got heard.’ It’s getting me verklempt.”
Of course, playing to rapturous audiences is nothing new to Michael Nesmith. As the Monkee in the green wool hat, he performed for throngs of shrieking teenage fans in the 1960s. In recent years, he’s periodically toured with his surviving bandmates Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork. But to him, playing with the First National Band is a wildly different experience. “It’s qualitatively different because Monkees crowds are there because of the television show,” he says. “They are remembering that time that we did this funny thing in the haunted house with the hillbillies and Mr. Schneider. This is pure, unadulterated, romantic and spiritual love that happens when great music is sung. And I never expected it. Not in my life.”
Nesmith formed the First National Band right around the time he walked away from the Monkees in 1970. Working with pedal-steel guitarist O.J. Rhodes, bassist John London and drummer John Ware, he fused country and rock in a way that had never been heard before. “It was an amalgam of something that happened in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,” he says, “between television and phonograph records, live bands and live studio acts.” Lead single “Joanne” reached Number 21 on the Hot 100, but the band’s debut, 1970’s Magnetic South, was a complete bomb. Follow-up efforts Loose Salute and Nevada Fighter did no better and the group split just two years after it all began.
It was a crushing experience for Nesmith, especially since he started the group with stratospheric dreams. “I wanted it to be was one of the great bands in the world playing some of the great music in the world with some of the great people in the world,” he says. “Nothing less than that. I thought, ‘Well, why can’t I play stadiums with the First National Band?'”
The agony grew worse just months after they split when Linda Ronstadt’s live backing band named themselves the Eagles and began landing massive radio hits with country-rock songs like “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” “I was heartbroken beyond speech,” says Nesmith. “I couldn’t even utter the words ‘the Eagles’ and I loved Hotel California and I love the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, all that stuff. That was right in my wheelhouse and I was agonized, Van Gogh–agonized, not to compare myself to him, but I wanted to cut something off because I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’ The Eagles now have the biggest selling album of all time and mine is sitting in the closet of a closed record company?”
Through the rest of 1970s he continued to record solo albums that were somehow even less popular than his First National Band work – including the ironically titled And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’ – but his attention gradually turned toward business ventures. (His mother invented Liquid Paper and left him a substantial fortune when she passed away in 1980.) A 1996 Monkees reunion fizzled out after a brief U.K. tour, but in 2012 he returned to the band for a series of highly successful tours. He eventually left the touring unit, but he participated in the group’s 2016 comeback album Good Times! That year, he played with the group at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles at a show that was billed as his final appearance with the band.
Around that time, urged on by his sons Christian and Jonathan along with some California-based concert promoters, he began thinking about resurrecting the First National Band. Despite selling virtually no records, the group slowly developed a passionate, cult following over the years as fans stumbled upon the old albums. A legitimate reunion was out of the question since Rhodes and London have passed away and Ware, at age 73, told Nesmith that he’s simply too old to go back on the road. That allowed Christian Nesmith – an accomplished musician in his own right, who was recently part of the Monkees’ touring band – to assemble a new lineup of the First National Band that includes bassist Jason Chesney, pedal-steel guitarist Pete Finney, drummer Christopher Allis, and vocalists Amy Spear and Circe Link. Christian Nesmith plays guitar and Jonathan Nesmith is on piano, guitar and vocals.
Completely unsure if there was an audience, they put a single show at the 500-seat Troubadour on sale and watched in amazement when it sold out in 42 minutes. “That sent a shockwave through the promotion company,” says Nesmith. Four dates were added at clubs around California, which wrapped up January 28th at the the Chapel in San Francisco with special guest Ben Gibbard. The set list focuses on songs from the three First National Band albums but also features later tunes like 1977’s “Rio” along with “Different Drum,” a tune Nesmith wrote right before he joined the Monkees in 1965 that Linda Ronstadt turned into a big hit. There are no firm plans for other shows, but Nesmith says they are seriously looking into playing at least a few more gigs in markets outside California sometime later this year.
The only Monkees song in the First National Band repertoire is “Papa Gene’s Blues,” but that doesn’t mean Nesmith has completely turned his back on his original band. He’s deep into talks with promoters about a summer tour where he’d share the stage with Micky Dolenz. “Mick is a great performer,” says Nesmith. “I love working with him. He’s a wonderful guy. So the idea of us going out and doing something under the banner of the Monkees is under discussion. The agents are standing there with a stack of offers. I think they are running through June, but we have not accepted anything.”
If such a tour does happen, it won’t mean, at least to Nesmith, that he’s going back on his 2016 pledge that Monkee Michael walked offstage forever at the 2016 Pantages Theater show. “This isn’t Monkee Michael and Monkee Micky going out,” he says. “If we go out on another tour and we do it and use the Monkees logo and name promote it, it will be very different than a Monkees show. I mean, it’ll be Monkees music, but there’s no pretense there about Micky and I being the Monkees. We’re not. We’re the remnants, but we’ll have a good time if we do it.”
This proposed tour begs a very obvious question: Why isn’t Peter Tork involved? Nez picked his words very carefully when we posed this to him. “Well, you’d have to ask Peter,” he says. “I’m afraid I would betray a confidence if I said any more than, ‘This is not a right time for him.’ I don’t think it would untoward for you to give him a call and just launch the question. He has his reasons. They are very private. If he’s willing to share them with you, so be it.”
We reached out to Peter Tork and got this response via email: “Nez’s comment sounds oddly worded,” he wrote. “Although he and I have not been in touch for more than a year (which is not unusual in our history), I have in general made no secret of the fact that all these recent years of Monkees-related projects, as fun as they’ve been, have taken up a lot of my time and energy. Moving forward I have blues projects that I want to give my attention to and focused on putting together some shows with my band, Shoe Suede Blues in support of our new CD Relax Your Mind, a Lead Belly tribute project that’s very dear to my heart. So, I’m shifting gears for now, but I wish the boys well, and I’ve learned to never say never on things further down the line.”
Whatever happens going forward, right now Nez is focused on the future of the First National Band and figuring out exactly why it’s suddenly become so popular. “Dare I say it became hipster music?” he asked. “No. I don’t say that. But dare I say that it’s music whose time has come? I’m pretty confident in saying something like that. I never thought it would happen.”
31 January 2018
Michael Nesmith couldn’t believe what he was seeing when he walked onstage at the San Bernardino, California, club Pappy & Harriet’s Palace earlier this month. It was his first gig with his early-Seventies country-rock group the First National Band since they split 46 years ago amid raging public disinterest, yet here was a capacity crowd euphorically singing along to songs drawn from a trio of albums that never went higher than Number 143 on the Billboard album chart.
“This is something I’ve dreamed about, but it’s never actually happened to me,” says Nesmith. “The audience, before I start singing each song, began singing them back to me. Usually I just get ignored and nobody plays attention to me. On this tour, audiences have actually been weeping and saying, ‘This is the greatest music that never got heard.’ It’s getting me verklempt.”
Of course, playing to rapturous audiences is nothing new to Michael Nesmith. As the Monkee in the green wool hat, he performed for throngs of shrieking teenage fans in the 1960s. In recent years, he’s periodically toured with his surviving bandmates Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork. But to him, playing with the First National Band is a wildly different experience. “It’s qualitatively different because Monkees crowds are there because of the television show,” he says. “They are remembering that time that we did this funny thing in the haunted house with the hillbillies and Mr. Schneider. This is pure, unadulterated, romantic and spiritual love that happens when great music is sung. And I never expected it. Not in my life.”
Nesmith formed the First National Band right around the time he walked away from the Monkees in 1970. Working with pedal-steel guitarist O.J. Rhodes, bassist John London and drummer John Ware, he fused country and rock in a way that had never been heard before. “It was an amalgam of something that happened in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,” he says, “between television and phonograph records, live bands and live studio acts.” Lead single “Joanne” reached Number 21 on the Hot 100, but the band’s debut, 1970’s Magnetic South, was a complete bomb. Follow-up efforts Loose Salute and Nevada Fighter did no better and the group split just two years after it all began.
It was a crushing experience for Nesmith, especially since he started the group with stratospheric dreams. “I wanted it to be was one of the great bands in the world playing some of the great music in the world with some of the great people in the world,” he says. “Nothing less than that. I thought, ‘Well, why can’t I play stadiums with the First National Band?'”
The agony grew worse just months after they split when Linda Ronstadt’s live backing band named themselves the Eagles and began landing massive radio hits with country-rock songs like “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” “I was heartbroken beyond speech,” says Nesmith. “I couldn’t even utter the words ‘the Eagles’ and I loved Hotel California and I love the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, all that stuff. That was right in my wheelhouse and I was agonized, Van Gogh–agonized, not to compare myself to him, but I wanted to cut something off because I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’ The Eagles now have the biggest selling album of all time and mine is sitting in the closet of a closed record company?”
Through the rest of 1970s he continued to record solo albums that were somehow even less popular than his First National Band work – including the ironically titled And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’ – but his attention gradually turned toward business ventures. (His mother invented Liquid Paper and left him a substantial fortune when she passed away in 1980.) A 1996 Monkees reunion fizzled out after a brief U.K. tour, but in 2012 he returned to the band for a series of highly successful tours. He eventually left the touring unit, but he participated in the group’s 2016 comeback album Good Times! That year, he played with the group at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles at a show that was billed as his final appearance with the band.
Around that time, urged on by his sons Christian and Jonathan along with some California-based concert promoters, he began thinking about resurrecting the First National Band. Despite selling virtually no records, the group slowly developed a passionate, cult following over the years as fans stumbled upon the old albums. A legitimate reunion was out of the question since Rhodes and London have passed away and Ware, at age 73, told Nesmith that he’s simply too old to go back on the road. That allowed Christian Nesmith – an accomplished musician in his own right, who was recently part of the Monkees’ touring band – to assemble a new lineup of the First National Band that includes bassist Jason Chesney, pedal-steel guitarist Pete Finney, drummer Christopher Allis, and vocalists Amy Spear and Circe Link. Christian Nesmith plays guitar and Jonathan Nesmith is on piano, guitar and vocals.
Completely unsure if there was an audience, they put a single show at the 500-seat Troubadour on sale and watched in amazement when it sold out in 42 minutes. “That sent a shockwave through the promotion company,” says Nesmith. Four dates were added at clubs around California, which wrapped up January 28th at the the Chapel in San Francisco with special guest Ben Gibbard. The set list focuses on songs from the three First National Band albums but also features later tunes like 1977’s “Rio” along with “Different Drum,” a tune Nesmith wrote right before he joined the Monkees in 1965 that Linda Ronstadt turned into a big hit. There are no firm plans for other shows, but Nesmith says they are seriously looking into playing at least a few more gigs in markets outside California sometime later this year.
The only Monkees song in the First National Band repertoire is “Papa Gene’s Blues,” but that doesn’t mean Nesmith has completely turned his back on his original band. He’s deep into talks with promoters about a summer tour where he’d share the stage with Micky Dolenz. “Mick is a great performer,” says Nesmith. “I love working with him. He’s a wonderful guy. So the idea of us going out and doing something under the banner of the Monkees is under discussion. The agents are standing there with a stack of offers. I think they are running through June, but we have not accepted anything.”
If such a tour does happen, it won’t mean, at least to Nesmith, that he’s going back on his 2016 pledge that Monkee Michael walked offstage forever at the 2016 Pantages Theater show. “This isn’t Monkee Michael and Monkee Micky going out,” he says. “If we go out on another tour and we do it and use the Monkees logo and name promote it, it will be very different than a Monkees show. I mean, it’ll be Monkees music, but there’s no pretense there about Micky and I being the Monkees. We’re not. We’re the remnants, but we’ll have a good time if we do it.”
This proposed tour begs a very obvious question: Why isn’t Peter Tork involved? Nez picked his words very carefully when we posed this to him. “Well, you’d have to ask Peter,” he says. “I’m afraid I would betray a confidence if I said any more than, ‘This is not a right time for him.’ I don’t think it would untoward for you to give him a call and just launch the question. He has his reasons. They are very private. If he’s willing to share them with you, so be it.”
We reached out to Peter Tork and got this response via email: “Nez’s comment sounds oddly worded,” he wrote. “Although he and I have not been in touch for more than a year (which is not unusual in our history), I have in general made no secret of the fact that all these recent years of Monkees-related projects, as fun as they’ve been, have taken up a lot of my time and energy. Moving forward I have blues projects that I want to give my attention to and focused on putting together some shows with my band, Shoe Suede Blues in support of our new CD Relax Your Mind, a Lead Belly tribute project that’s very dear to my heart. So, I’m shifting gears for now, but I wish the boys well, and I’ve learned to never say never on things further down the line.”
Whatever happens going forward, right now Nez is focused on the future of the First National Band and figuring out exactly why it’s suddenly become so popular. “Dare I say it became hipster music?” he asked. “No. I don’t say that. But dare I say that it’s music whose time has come? I’m pretty confident in saying something like that. I never thought it would happen.”
Sunday, 15 July 2018
Friday, 13 July 2018
Dead Poets Society #83 W. H. Auden: If I Could Tell You
If I Could Tell You by W. H. Auden
Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reason why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Time will say nothing but I told you so
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reason why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Wednesday, 11 July 2018
Tuesday, 10 July 2018
Monday, 9 July 2018
Peter Firmin RIP
Innovative designer who co-created the children’s TV shows Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss and The Clangers
Anthony Hayward
The Guardian
Mon 2 Jul 2018
The artist Peter Firmin, who has died aged 89, was a pioneer of children’s TV. The classic programmes he made with Oliver Postgate, including Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss and The Clangers, were loved by generations of British viewers.
The world they created during their 30-year partnership involved a crude but innovative animation system. Characters were moved by magnets positioned under a table that acted as the set – in a studio established insidea disused cowshed at Firmin’s farmhouse in Blean, near Canterbury, Kent. Postgate came up with programme ideas, wrote the scripts, directed and produced them, and provided the narration, while Firmin designed the characters – whether drawings, models or puppets – and sets.
Their first major success, Ivor the Engine (1959-64), the story of a Welsh steam engine that wanted to sing in a male-voice choir, was Firmin and Postgate’s first series made by their own production company, Smallfilms. The 32 black-and-white episodes commissioned by ITV were so popular that, a decade later, Ivor the Engine was revived by the BBC for 40 colour films (1976-77).
An even bigger hit was Bagpuss (1974), voted No 1 in a 1999 BBC poll of children’s programmes. It featured a pink-and-white-striped “saggy, old, cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams” in just 13 episodes that were repeated regularly for 13 years – but one of the secrets of its success was the result of an error. “I drew a picture of a marmalade cat,” Firmin told the journalist Richard Webber. “I then asked a company in Kent to produce some marmalade-striped material, but a mistake with the chemicals left it pink!”
The cat’s owner, Emily (based on one of Firmin’s daughters), collects objects for her “shop”, Bagpuss & Co, but nothing is for sale. She puts them in the old-fashioned window alongside Bagpuss, who sleeps there on a cushion until woken from his slumber by Emily’s magic words, spoken entrancingly by Postgate at the start of every episode: Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss / Old, fat, furry cat-puss / Wake up and look at this thing that I bring / Wake up, be bright / Be golden and light /Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing.
One of Firmin’s own favourites among the programmes he made with Postgate was The Clangers (1969-74), featuring small, pink, knitted, mouse-like creatures living on a blue moon, with neighbours including the Soup Dragon and the Froglets – and the first of their productions to be made in colour. Firmin designed the characters and his wife, Joan (nee Clapham, whom he married in 1952), knitted them.
The series was revived three years ago, with Michael Palin narrating it in the UK and William Shatner in the US, and Firmin as executive producer and design consultant. Made in stop-motion, rather than the modern CGI, the new Clangers won a Bafta award as the best pre-school animation. “I hate CGI faces on humans because you look in the eyes and there’s nothing there,” said Firmin. “There’s no soul.”
Without Postgate, Firmin created the 1960s TV puppets Fred Barker and Ollie Beak, as well as the mischievous fox Basil Brush for Ivan Owen to operate and voice in the manner of the British cad actor Terry-Thomas in an ITV series, The Three Scampis (1962-65). Basil, with his “Boom! Boom!” catchphrase, returned in the magician David Nixon’s series Now for Nixon (1967) and The Nixon Line (1967-68) before beginning his own long-running show in 1968.
Firmin was born in Harwich, Essex, the son of Lewis, a railway telegrapher, and Lila (nee Burnett). On leaving Harwich county high school, he gained diplomas from Colchester School of Art (1947) and the Central School of Art and Design (1952) in London, either side of national service in the Navy (1947-49). He then painted pictures of saints for the celebrated stained-glass artist Francis Spear. “I’ve always had the fault of drawing people with heads that are too big for their bodies, looking slightly humorous,” said Firmin. “Some of the saints in my stained-glass windows had rather large noses and funny faces.” After work designing posters in a London publicity studio, he went freelance as an illustrator for New Scientist and other magazines.
In 1958, while teaching at Central, he met Postgate, who was working as a stage manager on children’s programmes at the ITV London company Associated-Rediffusion and looking for someone to draw the characters and backgrounds for his own creation, Alexander the Mouse (1958), about a mouse born to be king. This was followed by The Journey of Master Ho (1958), the story of a Chinese boy and his buffalo – aimed at deaf children – for which Firmin created a willow-pattern background.
The pair’s first BBC series, The Saga of Noggin the Nog (1959-65), Firmin’s idea based on Norse legends after he had seen the Lewis Chessmen at the British Museum, was revived in colour in 1982. The duo’s other early programmes included The Seal of Neptune (1960), about sea horses in an undersea kingdom, and Pingwings (1961-65), featuring penguin characters in Firmin and Postgate’s first series with stop-frame animated puppets rather than painted card.
The Pogles, made for the BBC’s Watch with Mother slot in 1965, was deemed too frightening for pre-school children with its story of two countryfolk threatened by a witch, so only the first of its six episodes was screened. However, the programme returned as Pogles’ Wood (1966-68), with a family living in the root of a tree, minus the witch.
Postgate and Firmin’s final series were Tottie: The Story of a Dolls’ House (1984), based on Rumer Godden’s children’s novel, with a sequel, Tottie – A Doll’s Wish (1986), and Pinny’s House (1986), about a race of tiny people.
They were jointly presented with the 2007 Action for Children’s Arts JM Barrie Award “for a lifetime’s achievement in delighting children”. Postgate died the following year, and Firmin received a special award at the 2014 Bafta children’s awards. In retirement, Firmin enjoyed engraving and print-making, skills he had learned at art school.
He is survived by Joan and their six daughters, Charlotte, Hannah, Josephine, Katharine, Lucy and Emily.
• Peter Arthur Firmin, artist, illustrator and animator, born 11 December 1928; died 1 July 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/02/peter-firmin-obituary
Mon 2 Jul 2018
The artist Peter Firmin, who has died aged 89, was a pioneer of children’s TV. The classic programmes he made with Oliver Postgate, including Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss and The Clangers, were loved by generations of British viewers.
The world they created during their 30-year partnership involved a crude but innovative animation system. Characters were moved by magnets positioned under a table that acted as the set – in a studio established insidea disused cowshed at Firmin’s farmhouse in Blean, near Canterbury, Kent. Postgate came up with programme ideas, wrote the scripts, directed and produced them, and provided the narration, while Firmin designed the characters – whether drawings, models or puppets – and sets.
Their first major success, Ivor the Engine (1959-64), the story of a Welsh steam engine that wanted to sing in a male-voice choir, was Firmin and Postgate’s first series made by their own production company, Smallfilms. The 32 black-and-white episodes commissioned by ITV were so popular that, a decade later, Ivor the Engine was revived by the BBC for 40 colour films (1976-77).
An even bigger hit was Bagpuss (1974), voted No 1 in a 1999 BBC poll of children’s programmes. It featured a pink-and-white-striped “saggy, old, cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams” in just 13 episodes that were repeated regularly for 13 years – but one of the secrets of its success was the result of an error. “I drew a picture of a marmalade cat,” Firmin told the journalist Richard Webber. “I then asked a company in Kent to produce some marmalade-striped material, but a mistake with the chemicals left it pink!”
The cat’s owner, Emily (based on one of Firmin’s daughters), collects objects for her “shop”, Bagpuss & Co, but nothing is for sale. She puts them in the old-fashioned window alongside Bagpuss, who sleeps there on a cushion until woken from his slumber by Emily’s magic words, spoken entrancingly by Postgate at the start of every episode: Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss / Old, fat, furry cat-puss / Wake up and look at this thing that I bring / Wake up, be bright / Be golden and light /Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing.
One of Firmin’s own favourites among the programmes he made with Postgate was The Clangers (1969-74), featuring small, pink, knitted, mouse-like creatures living on a blue moon, with neighbours including the Soup Dragon and the Froglets – and the first of their productions to be made in colour. Firmin designed the characters and his wife, Joan (nee Clapham, whom he married in 1952), knitted them.
The series was revived three years ago, with Michael Palin narrating it in the UK and William Shatner in the US, and Firmin as executive producer and design consultant. Made in stop-motion, rather than the modern CGI, the new Clangers won a Bafta award as the best pre-school animation. “I hate CGI faces on humans because you look in the eyes and there’s nothing there,” said Firmin. “There’s no soul.”
Without Postgate, Firmin created the 1960s TV puppets Fred Barker and Ollie Beak, as well as the mischievous fox Basil Brush for Ivan Owen to operate and voice in the manner of the British cad actor Terry-Thomas in an ITV series, The Three Scampis (1962-65). Basil, with his “Boom! Boom!” catchphrase, returned in the magician David Nixon’s series Now for Nixon (1967) and The Nixon Line (1967-68) before beginning his own long-running show in 1968.
Firmin was born in Harwich, Essex, the son of Lewis, a railway telegrapher, and Lila (nee Burnett). On leaving Harwich county high school, he gained diplomas from Colchester School of Art (1947) and the Central School of Art and Design (1952) in London, either side of national service in the Navy (1947-49). He then painted pictures of saints for the celebrated stained-glass artist Francis Spear. “I’ve always had the fault of drawing people with heads that are too big for their bodies, looking slightly humorous,” said Firmin. “Some of the saints in my stained-glass windows had rather large noses and funny faces.” After work designing posters in a London publicity studio, he went freelance as an illustrator for New Scientist and other magazines.
In 1958, while teaching at Central, he met Postgate, who was working as a stage manager on children’s programmes at the ITV London company Associated-Rediffusion and looking for someone to draw the characters and backgrounds for his own creation, Alexander the Mouse (1958), about a mouse born to be king. This was followed by The Journey of Master Ho (1958), the story of a Chinese boy and his buffalo – aimed at deaf children – for which Firmin created a willow-pattern background.
The pair’s first BBC series, The Saga of Noggin the Nog (1959-65), Firmin’s idea based on Norse legends after he had seen the Lewis Chessmen at the British Museum, was revived in colour in 1982. The duo’s other early programmes included The Seal of Neptune (1960), about sea horses in an undersea kingdom, and Pingwings (1961-65), featuring penguin characters in Firmin and Postgate’s first series with stop-frame animated puppets rather than painted card.
The Pogles, made for the BBC’s Watch with Mother slot in 1965, was deemed too frightening for pre-school children with its story of two countryfolk threatened by a witch, so only the first of its six episodes was screened. However, the programme returned as Pogles’ Wood (1966-68), with a family living in the root of a tree, minus the witch.
Postgate and Firmin’s final series were Tottie: The Story of a Dolls’ House (1984), based on Rumer Godden’s children’s novel, with a sequel, Tottie – A Doll’s Wish (1986), and Pinny’s House (1986), about a race of tiny people.
They were jointly presented with the 2007 Action for Children’s Arts JM Barrie Award “for a lifetime’s achievement in delighting children”. Postgate died the following year, and Firmin received a special award at the 2014 Bafta children’s awards. In retirement, Firmin enjoyed engraving and print-making, skills he had learned at art school.
He is survived by Joan and their six daughters, Charlotte, Hannah, Josephine, Katharine, Lucy and Emily.
• Peter Arthur Firmin, artist, illustrator and animator, born 11 December 1928; died 1 July 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jul/02/peter-firmin-obituary
Sunday, 8 July 2018
Saturday, 7 July 2018
Steve Ditko RIP
Steve Ditko, Influential Comic-Book Artist Who Helped Create Spider-Man, Dies at 90
By Andy Webster
The New York Times
7 July 2018
Steve Ditko, a comic-book artist best known for his role in creating Spider-Man, one of the most successful superhero properties ever, was found dead on June 29 at his home in Manhattan, the police said on Friday. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by Officer George Tsourovakas, a spokesman for the New York Police Department. No further details were immediately available.
Mr. Ditko, along with the artist Jack Kirby and the writer and editor Stan Lee, was a central player in the 1960s cultural phenomenon known as Marvel Comics, whose characters today are ubiquitous in films, television shows and merchandise.
Though Mr. Ditko had a hand in the early development of other signature Marvel characters — especially the sorcerer Dr. Strange — Spider-Man was his definitive character, and for many fans he was Spider-Man’s definitive interpreter.
Mr. Ditko was noted for his cinematic storytelling, his occasional flights into almost psychedelic abstraction, and the philosophical convictions that often colored his work. Scrupulously private, he had a mystique rare among industry superstars.
The initial visual conception of Spider-Man did not come from Mr. Ditko. According to Blake Bell’s book “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko” (2008), that image came from Mr. Kirby, who penciled an origin story for the Marvel title Amazing Fantasy in 1962.
When Mr. Lee, Marvel’s editor, assigned Mr. Ditko to ink it, Mr. Ditko noticed similarities between Spider-Man and the Fly — a Kirby creation for Marvel’s competitor Harvey Comics from 1959 — and raised his concerns with Mr. Lee.
Kirby’s take was rejected, and the character’s origin was revamped to eliminate those similarities. (Out went a magic ring, among other elements.) Mr. Lee gave Mr. Ditko a synopsis to flesh out.
Mr. Ditko ran with the character. Spider-Man made his debut that year in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and the character’s popularity led to his own title, The Amazing Spider-Man, which Mr. Ditko penciled, inked and largely plotted from 1963 to 1966.
Unlike Superman or Batman (characters from Marvel’s chief rival at the time, National Periodical Publications, which later became DC Comics), Spider-Man had humanizing flaws. He was hounded, not praised, by the press and the police. In his secret identity as Peter Parker, he was mocked by his peers. And he struggled with guilt over his uncle’s death, which he felt he could have prevented, and fretted about his aging aunt.
Mr. Ditko also helped conceive famous villains, like the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus, and supporting characters.
Spider-Man’s fight scenes and aerial acrobatics had a spry kineticism that contrasted with the brawny physicality of Kirby’s compositions. Spider-Man, unlike the thunder god Thor and other signature Kirby characters, was not musclebound; he was a slender teenager. While Mr. Lee’s dialogue for Spider-Man could be buoyant, peppered with wisecracks, Mr. Ditko lent mood.
Spider-Man’s mask, obscuring his entire face, and his web-textured costume had a slightly morbid aspect. Spider-Man’s pensive moments — when Peter agonized over sacrifices his alter ego had demanded of him, for example — echoed the psychological struggles in Mr. Ditko’s earlier horror comics.
Stephen Ditko was born on Nov. 2, 1927, in Johnstown, Pa. His father, also Stephen, was a steel-mill carpenter; his mother, Anna, was a homemaker. His father bequeathed to his son a love of newspaper strips like Hal Foster’s “Prince Valiant,” and the young Stephen devoured Batman and Will Eisner’s noirish Sunday newspaper insert, “The Spirit.”
After graduating from high school in 1945, Mr. Ditko joined the Army and was stationed in Germany, where he drew cartoons for a service newspaper. In 1950, under the G.I. Bill, he attended the Cartoonist and Illustrator School (which later became the School of Visual Arts) in New York.
Mr. Ditko’s first work in print was in early 1953, in a romance comic from a minor publisher. For three months he worked in the studio of Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, before heading to Charlton Comics, which had its headquarters in Derby, Conn. Charlton offered low pay and inferior production values but creative freedom, and Mr. Ditko would return there often over his career.
The introduction of the Comics Code Authority — a regulating body established by the industry in 1954 in response to Senate subcommittee hearings into the supposed influence of comics on juvenile delinquency — stifled Mr. Ditko’s Charlton output, which had largely covered horror, crime and science fiction.
Influenced by the artist Mort Meskin, a specialist in mood and noirish textures, Mr. Ditko had infused his pre-Charlton work with a sweaty anxiety and recurrent motifs of paranoia. In “In Search of Steve Ditko” — a 2007 British documentary narrated by the TV personality Jonathan Ross— the novelist and comic book writer Alan Moore says that in Mr. Ditko’s work there was “a tormented elegance to the way the characters stood, the way that they bent their hands.”
He added, “They always looked as if they were on the edge of some kind of revelation or breakdown.”
In 1954, tuberculosis forced Mr. Ditko back to Pennsylvania, where he nearly died. After a year, he returned to New York, where he approached Mr. Lee, at the time a writer-editor for Atlas Comics, a precursor to Marvel.
Mr. Lee, impressed with Mr. Ditko’s speed and proficiency, hired him. Atlas’s horror line, emasculated by the code, became largely divided between Kirby’s stories, starring generic monsters with names like Groot and Fin Fang Foom, and Mr. Ditko’s agonized character studies.
Cutbacks at Atlas brought Mr. Ditko back to Charlton, where he and the writer Joe Gill created the nuclear-powered Captain Atom, before returning to what was now the Marvel Comics Group. Marvel was in a rebirth, starting with the publication of The Fantastic Four in 1961, and continuing with Thor and the Hulk.
Spider-Man appeared in 1962. Kirby drew the cover of his debut, but for three years the character was Mr. Ditko’s baby.
Mr. Ditko helped develop other Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man and the Hulk. Of these, probably his best-known, besides Spider-Man, was Dr. Strange, a “master of the mystic arts,” who first appeared in 1963.
For Dr. Strange’s occult adventures and battles in alternate dimensions, Mr. Ditko created foreboding expanses of abstract shapes and patterns, ruled by evil sorcerers and supernatural entities.
But it was with Spider-Man that Mr. Ditko flourished. Marvel artists generally followed the “Marvel method,” in which artists built on Mr. Lee’s synopses and were encouraged to emulate Mr. Kirby’s outsize style.
Mr. Ditko, who focused less on fight scenes and more on Peter Parker’s psyche, had broad license with plotting and drawing “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Many fans regard Issues 31, 32 and 33 — which climax with the superhero, after reviewing his life, triumphantly upending heavy machinery that has pinned him — as a Ditko peak.
Mr. Ditko’s conception of the series had been shifting, increasingly influenced by Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy. Spider-Man’s villain the Looter was named after Rand’s term for those leeching from the creative elite, phrases like “equal value trade” crept into Parker’s words, and he voiced resentment toward student protesters. (Mr. Lee, in speaking engagements on college campuses, found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to irate young audiences that such a stance was Mr. Ditko’s, not his own.)
Mr. Ditko bristled at being denied royalties when Spider-Man had his own animated ABC television series and was used in product tie-ins. He left Marvel in 1965 (Spider-Man No. 38 was his final issue) and worked for other publishers before returning to Charlton.
Mr. Ditko pursued Randian notions further, particularly with Mr. A, a character he created for Witzend, a black-and-white comic aimed at adults and unconstrained by the Comics Code. Mr. A, attired in a white suit and conservative hat, was named after “A is A,” the idea in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” that there is one unassailable truth, one reality, and only white (good) and black (evil) forces in society. Unlike mainstream superheroes, he killed criminals.
For Charlton, Mr. Ditko created the Question, also in a suit and hat but devoid of facial features. Like Mr. A, the Question spoke in a stilted, didactic vernacular akin to a philosophical tract’s. (Like Captain Atom, the Question is now owned by DC.) In 1968, Mr. Ditko said in a rare interview that the Question and Mr. A were his favorite creations.
In 1968 Mr. Ditko joined DC, where he created the Hawk and the Dove, superpowered brothers of opposing moral dispositions, and the Creeper, a crime fighter with a maniacal laugh. Another bout with tuberculosis derailed those series, and both ended within a year.
Mr. Ditko’s aversion to attending comic conventions and meeting fans was well known. Early unauthorized reproductions of his work in fanzines angered him, as did the failure by some fanzine publishers to return originals he had lent them. By 1964 Mr. Ditko had withdrawn from the public eye, limiting exchanges to mail or telephone. His reclusiveness, and his Randian ideas, lent his work a patina of mystery.
The 1970s and ’80s proved comparatively fallow. Mr. Ditko’s output plummeted, especially after Charlton’s demise in 1978. In the 1980s, there were more stints at Marvel and DC and at the independent publisher Eclipse. However, in 1991, Mr. Ditko co-created Squirrel Girl for Marvel, who remains a fan favorite.
In later years, Mr. Ditko created black-and-white digest-size comics financed with Kickstarter funds and sold online. These self-published titles, ad-free and often edited by Robin Snyder, bore a scratchy, sometimes pointillistic style and Randian preoccupations: rationality, “looters,” “earners.”
There was no immediate information about survivors.
Mr. Ditko was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1994. In Sam Raimi’s Hollywood feature “Spider-Man,” in 2002, the opening credits read, “Based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.” The 2008-9 ABC animated series “The Spectacular Spider-Man” gave similar credit.
In 2016, the Casal Solleric museum in Mallorca, Spain, presented a retrospective of his work, “Ditko Unleashed.” That same year, Marvel Studios released the hit film adaptation “Doctor Strange”; an opening credit read, “Based on the characters created by Steve Ditko.”
Mr. Ditko avoided his fans to the end. In 2014, Dan Greenfield, a writer for the website 13th Dimension, recounted reaching Mr. Ditko’s Manhattan apartment doorway in an attempt to interview him. Mr. Ditko did not bite.
7 July 2018
Steve Ditko, a comic-book artist best known for his role in creating Spider-Man, one of the most successful superhero properties ever, was found dead on June 29 at his home in Manhattan, the police said on Friday. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by Officer George Tsourovakas, a spokesman for the New York Police Department. No further details were immediately available.
Mr. Ditko, along with the artist Jack Kirby and the writer and editor Stan Lee, was a central player in the 1960s cultural phenomenon known as Marvel Comics, whose characters today are ubiquitous in films, television shows and merchandise.
Though Mr. Ditko had a hand in the early development of other signature Marvel characters — especially the sorcerer Dr. Strange — Spider-Man was his definitive character, and for many fans he was Spider-Man’s definitive interpreter.
Mr. Ditko was noted for his cinematic storytelling, his occasional flights into almost psychedelic abstraction, and the philosophical convictions that often colored his work. Scrupulously private, he had a mystique rare among industry superstars.
The initial visual conception of Spider-Man did not come from Mr. Ditko. According to Blake Bell’s book “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko” (2008), that image came from Mr. Kirby, who penciled an origin story for the Marvel title Amazing Fantasy in 1962.
When Mr. Lee, Marvel’s editor, assigned Mr. Ditko to ink it, Mr. Ditko noticed similarities between Spider-Man and the Fly — a Kirby creation for Marvel’s competitor Harvey Comics from 1959 — and raised his concerns with Mr. Lee.
Kirby’s take was rejected, and the character’s origin was revamped to eliminate those similarities. (Out went a magic ring, among other elements.) Mr. Lee gave Mr. Ditko a synopsis to flesh out.
Mr. Ditko ran with the character. Spider-Man made his debut that year in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and the character’s popularity led to his own title, The Amazing Spider-Man, which Mr. Ditko penciled, inked and largely plotted from 1963 to 1966.
Unlike Superman or Batman (characters from Marvel’s chief rival at the time, National Periodical Publications, which later became DC Comics), Spider-Man had humanizing flaws. He was hounded, not praised, by the press and the police. In his secret identity as Peter Parker, he was mocked by his peers. And he struggled with guilt over his uncle’s death, which he felt he could have prevented, and fretted about his aging aunt.
Mr. Ditko also helped conceive famous villains, like the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus, and supporting characters.
Spider-Man’s fight scenes and aerial acrobatics had a spry kineticism that contrasted with the brawny physicality of Kirby’s compositions. Spider-Man, unlike the thunder god Thor and other signature Kirby characters, was not musclebound; he was a slender teenager. While Mr. Lee’s dialogue for Spider-Man could be buoyant, peppered with wisecracks, Mr. Ditko lent mood.
Spider-Man’s mask, obscuring his entire face, and his web-textured costume had a slightly morbid aspect. Spider-Man’s pensive moments — when Peter agonized over sacrifices his alter ego had demanded of him, for example — echoed the psychological struggles in Mr. Ditko’s earlier horror comics.
Stephen Ditko was born on Nov. 2, 1927, in Johnstown, Pa. His father, also Stephen, was a steel-mill carpenter; his mother, Anna, was a homemaker. His father bequeathed to his son a love of newspaper strips like Hal Foster’s “Prince Valiant,” and the young Stephen devoured Batman and Will Eisner’s noirish Sunday newspaper insert, “The Spirit.”
After graduating from high school in 1945, Mr. Ditko joined the Army and was stationed in Germany, where he drew cartoons for a service newspaper. In 1950, under the G.I. Bill, he attended the Cartoonist and Illustrator School (which later became the School of Visual Arts) in New York.
Mr. Ditko’s first work in print was in early 1953, in a romance comic from a minor publisher. For three months he worked in the studio of Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, before heading to Charlton Comics, which had its headquarters in Derby, Conn. Charlton offered low pay and inferior production values but creative freedom, and Mr. Ditko would return there often over his career.
The introduction of the Comics Code Authority — a regulating body established by the industry in 1954 in response to Senate subcommittee hearings into the supposed influence of comics on juvenile delinquency — stifled Mr. Ditko’s Charlton output, which had largely covered horror, crime and science fiction.
Influenced by the artist Mort Meskin, a specialist in mood and noirish textures, Mr. Ditko had infused his pre-Charlton work with a sweaty anxiety and recurrent motifs of paranoia. In “In Search of Steve Ditko” — a 2007 British documentary narrated by the TV personality Jonathan Ross— the novelist and comic book writer Alan Moore says that in Mr. Ditko’s work there was “a tormented elegance to the way the characters stood, the way that they bent their hands.”
He added, “They always looked as if they were on the edge of some kind of revelation or breakdown.”
In 1954, tuberculosis forced Mr. Ditko back to Pennsylvania, where he nearly died. After a year, he returned to New York, where he approached Mr. Lee, at the time a writer-editor for Atlas Comics, a precursor to Marvel.
Mr. Lee, impressed with Mr. Ditko’s speed and proficiency, hired him. Atlas’s horror line, emasculated by the code, became largely divided between Kirby’s stories, starring generic monsters with names like Groot and Fin Fang Foom, and Mr. Ditko’s agonized character studies.
Cutbacks at Atlas brought Mr. Ditko back to Charlton, where he and the writer Joe Gill created the nuclear-powered Captain Atom, before returning to what was now the Marvel Comics Group. Marvel was in a rebirth, starting with the publication of The Fantastic Four in 1961, and continuing with Thor and the Hulk.
Spider-Man appeared in 1962. Kirby drew the cover of his debut, but for three years the character was Mr. Ditko’s baby.
Mr. Ditko helped develop other Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man and the Hulk. Of these, probably his best-known, besides Spider-Man, was Dr. Strange, a “master of the mystic arts,” who first appeared in 1963.
For Dr. Strange’s occult adventures and battles in alternate dimensions, Mr. Ditko created foreboding expanses of abstract shapes and patterns, ruled by evil sorcerers and supernatural entities.
But it was with Spider-Man that Mr. Ditko flourished. Marvel artists generally followed the “Marvel method,” in which artists built on Mr. Lee’s synopses and were encouraged to emulate Mr. Kirby’s outsize style.
Mr. Ditko, who focused less on fight scenes and more on Peter Parker’s psyche, had broad license with plotting and drawing “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Many fans regard Issues 31, 32 and 33 — which climax with the superhero, after reviewing his life, triumphantly upending heavy machinery that has pinned him — as a Ditko peak.
Mr. Ditko’s conception of the series had been shifting, increasingly influenced by Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy. Spider-Man’s villain the Looter was named after Rand’s term for those leeching from the creative elite, phrases like “equal value trade” crept into Parker’s words, and he voiced resentment toward student protesters. (Mr. Lee, in speaking engagements on college campuses, found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to irate young audiences that such a stance was Mr. Ditko’s, not his own.)
Mr. Ditko bristled at being denied royalties when Spider-Man had his own animated ABC television series and was used in product tie-ins. He left Marvel in 1965 (Spider-Man No. 38 was his final issue) and worked for other publishers before returning to Charlton.
Mr. Ditko pursued Randian notions further, particularly with Mr. A, a character he created for Witzend, a black-and-white comic aimed at adults and unconstrained by the Comics Code. Mr. A, attired in a white suit and conservative hat, was named after “A is A,” the idea in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” that there is one unassailable truth, one reality, and only white (good) and black (evil) forces in society. Unlike mainstream superheroes, he killed criminals.
For Charlton, Mr. Ditko created the Question, also in a suit and hat but devoid of facial features. Like Mr. A, the Question spoke in a stilted, didactic vernacular akin to a philosophical tract’s. (Like Captain Atom, the Question is now owned by DC.) In 1968, Mr. Ditko said in a rare interview that the Question and Mr. A were his favorite creations.
In 1968 Mr. Ditko joined DC, where he created the Hawk and the Dove, superpowered brothers of opposing moral dispositions, and the Creeper, a crime fighter with a maniacal laugh. Another bout with tuberculosis derailed those series, and both ended within a year.
Mr. Ditko’s aversion to attending comic conventions and meeting fans was well known. Early unauthorized reproductions of his work in fanzines angered him, as did the failure by some fanzine publishers to return originals he had lent them. By 1964 Mr. Ditko had withdrawn from the public eye, limiting exchanges to mail or telephone. His reclusiveness, and his Randian ideas, lent his work a patina of mystery.
The 1970s and ’80s proved comparatively fallow. Mr. Ditko’s output plummeted, especially after Charlton’s demise in 1978. In the 1980s, there were more stints at Marvel and DC and at the independent publisher Eclipse. However, in 1991, Mr. Ditko co-created Squirrel Girl for Marvel, who remains a fan favorite.
In later years, Mr. Ditko created black-and-white digest-size comics financed with Kickstarter funds and sold online. These self-published titles, ad-free and often edited by Robin Snyder, bore a scratchy, sometimes pointillistic style and Randian preoccupations: rationality, “looters,” “earners.”
There was no immediate information about survivors.
Mr. Ditko was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1994. In Sam Raimi’s Hollywood feature “Spider-Man,” in 2002, the opening credits read, “Based on the Marvel comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.” The 2008-9 ABC animated series “The Spectacular Spider-Man” gave similar credit.
In 2016, the Casal Solleric museum in Mallorca, Spain, presented a retrospective of his work, “Ditko Unleashed.” That same year, Marvel Studios released the hit film adaptation “Doctor Strange”; an opening credit read, “Based on the characters created by Steve Ditko.”
Mr. Ditko avoided his fans to the end. In 2014, Dan Greenfield, a writer for the website 13th Dimension, recounted reaching Mr. Ditko’s Manhattan apartment doorway in an attempt to interview him. Mr. Ditko did not bite.
Celebrities had slightly better luck. In the television documentary, Jonathan Ross, accompanied by the writer Neil Gaiman, visits the Manhattan building housing Mr. Ditko’s studio, hoping for a meeting. The two briefly receive an audience. But on camera? Not a chance.
Friday, 6 July 2018
Wednesday night's set lists at The Habit, York
Our host opening the show with Stephen Stills' Love The One You're With
Ron Elderly: -
The River
Always On My Mind
Da Elderly: -
Laurel Canyon Home
Midnight On The Bay
The Elderly Brothers (1): -
Love Hurts
Bird Dog
So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)
The Elderly Brothers (2): -
All My Loving
Another Saturday Night
Bus Stop
Handle With Care
Medley: High Heel Sneakers/It's All Over Now
Maybe the quietest night in Habit open mic history! Whether folks were partied out after our boys' fine victory in the World Cup, or too much sun, whatever it was, the bar was half empty for most of the evening. And too few players! As a result there were double turns for those who stayed and The Elderly Brothers closed the show. The Acoustic Jam ran on until closing time with a run through some of the least played songs from our songbook.
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