You can't make a monkey...

Now that's what I call a sandwich

Courtesy of The Blue Bell, York. A very generous eatery. A pint or two of Farmers Blonde complemented the meal very well.



Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

The Price Of Love
Love Hurts
Sweet Virginia
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Barbara Ann

A brilliant night packed with punters and musicians. Wild & free.

Last night's songs

At the Waggon & Horses, York included: -

Too Far Gone
The Year Clayton Delaney Died
Bullfrog Blues
Goodnight Irene
My Hometown
Downtown Train
Wade In The Water
Heart Of Gold
Colours
Tom Dooley
May You Never
He'll Have To Go
Dead Flowers
Long Distance Operator
Falling
You Are My Sunshine
Sea Of Heartbreak
Down By The Riverside
Sweet Virginia
Mind Your Own Business
And a reprise of Goodnight Irene

Probably the best ever jam-night at the Waggon. A capella endings to several songs were much appreciated by the punters. The players rather enjoyed themselves too. A crackin' night.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #164

Alfred Hitchcock - North by Northwest

My favourite Hitchcock: North by Northwest Cary Grant, Saul Bass's titles, Bernard Hermann's score, that all-conquering crop-dusting scene. Why is it that Hitchcock's biggest crowd-pleaser makes critics sniffy?

David Shariatmadan
guardian.co.uk
Friday 3 August 2012

Life, most of the time, is matter of routine. We get up, go to work, pass the day as we have hundreds like it before. But this predictability is an illusion, because at any moment, the whole reassuring framework could collapse. An accident, an incredible stroke of luck, a crime: and suddenly everything has changed.

Roger Thornhill's life turns on a dime in the bar of the Plaza Hotel on 59th street, at the moment he calls over the bellboy. He's an advertising executive – one of the original Mad Men – whose anxieties centre around keeping his women sweet (with gifts dispatched by an obliging secretary), his mother happy and the Skin Glow account ticking over. But that bellboy was looking for a certain George Caplan, and he's not the only one: a couple of shady characters waiting around the corner see Thornhill and think they've found their man. When he steps into the lobby for a moment, one of them presses a gun to his heart.

He's whisked out of his natural habitat – no more martinis for Roger, at least not quite yet – and into a world which no longer seems to be following the rules. Who are these men who keep insisting he's Caplan? Who threaten to kill him if he tries to escape? And why, having arrived at a well-appointed country house, is he asked how much he knows and how he knows it?

At this point, we're as baffled as Thornhill. Despite having been with him for only a couple of scenes, we feel all the disorientation – and the rising panic – of his having been taken for someone else. Hitchcock, as ever, taps a reservoir of primitive fear. How would it feel if no one believed you were you? And the harder you tried to convince them, the less they took you seriously?

Luckily Thornhill isn't the kind to go down without a fight. Fifteen minutes after the opening credits and we are in a car chase with a quirk – our hero is almost blind drunk behind the wheel, having been force-fed Bourbon. He escapes, not for the last time, into the hands of the police, a safe haven compared to the gang who have it in for George Caplan.

The pace doesn't slacken. Thornhill finds himself at the UN, then suddenly accused of murder and on the run, dodging the cops on a sleeper train to Chicago. That's where he meets the devastatingly cool Eve Kendall, a Hitchcock blonde who's clearly nobody's fool. True, the shine she takes to a strange man she knows may be guilty of murder stretches credulity, but only until we receive the first hint she may already be in on the game.

If you haven't already seen North by Northwest, I'm jealous. You're in for an amazing ride. I haven't even mentioned the famous crop-duster scene – which again plays on a very deep-seated fear of having nowhere to hide – or the climax on Mount Rushmore, a sequence that elevates nailbiting to an Olympic-level sport. This is Hitchcock at his slickest, his most crowd-pleasing, his least encumbered by cod-psychological plotlines involving trances or kleptomania. It is a rollicking, old-fashioned adventure, laced with excitement. Cary Grant is a leading man so assured he makes James Bond look insecure, and Eva Marie Saint a love interest with more charisma than Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak combined. Then there's Bernard Hermann's punchy and frenetic score, and Saul Bass's revolutionary titles, the very essence of 50s metro chic.

Which is why it baffles me that North by Northwest is regularly eclipsed in assessments of Hitchcock's oeuvre, not least by the all-conquering Vertigo, which has been fetishised by critics since the 1960s. It received another boost earlier this week in Sight and Sound's once-a-decade poll, while North by Northwest was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps the lack of Freudian handwaving leads people to rate it poorly in comparison. But despite the preposterous (though seamlessly woven) plot, it's a rather good psychological fable, and a lot less pretentious into the bargain. Thornhill is a man who can't – or hasn't had to – grow up. Eve saves him, but not before she breaks the bonds that have kept her in a terrifyingly subservient relationship. Hitchcock's ability to conjure up that sense of a perfectly pleasant life going haywire is especially powerful.

Our thrill is to see it all unfold, safe in the knowledge that at the end we'll be able to return to the old routine. And even if things don't always go as planned, perhaps we'll be able to tackle them with a little of the old Thornhill panache.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/aug/03/favourite-hitchcock-north-by-northwest?INTCMP=SRCH

Just like the Monkey Bar on a Friday night

The Return of Philip Marlowe...

Can John Banville resuscitate Philip Marlowe?
Raymond Chandler's estate have chosen John Banville to write a new Philip Marlowe novel – but can he capture the hero's loneliness and the bleak glitter of LA?

Tom Williams
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 9 August

There is nothing more certain to upset a writer's fans than to suggest his greatest hero is in need of resuscitation. This, though, is exactly the risk that the Raymond Chandler estate is running with the announcement that John Banville is to write a new Philip Marlowe novel. It was inevitable really. Bond – young Bond, new Bond, now William Boyd's Bond – has set the benchmark for reinvigorating a classic brand and where Bond goes other estates are sure to follow. But if the Chandler estate has learned one thing (other writers have tackled Marlowe before to varying degrees of success), it's the importance of getting a proper writer to do the work – this is no job for a ghost or a newbie – and in John Banville they have just that. I have to confess that I'm cautiously optimistic.

Though the news was met with praise and derision on Twitter, the choice of John Banville is a clever one. He has form in this field. His Quirke novels, written under the name Benjamin Black, are very good indeed. Set in 50s Dublin, Chandler readers will recognise more than a bit of Marlowe in the lonely pathologist with a weakness of drink and a habit of being drawn into crimes that are none of his business. There is so much to enjoy, from Banville's fine turn of phrase ("Grains of mica glittered in the granite of the steps; strange, these little secret gleamings, under the fog") to his ability to render the city of Dublin in carefully wrought prose. And like Chandler he has a willingness to forgo plot in favour of character. Though ostensibly about crime, the books are more about Quirke's uneasy relationship with his daughter than they are about murder and death. Chandler might have smiled at this successful balance of the literary and noir. It was something he himself certainly strove for and it was his wish to write novels that were serious and literary that pushed him to produce the books he did. In the early 50s he started a third-person novel, without Marlowe and almost without murder but found he couldn't quite bring it off. He set about rewriting the book and it became The Long Goodbye.

Despite Banville's debt to Chandler, the thin press release that announced the deal in America, suggests that there is a niggling worry. Banville, it claims, wants to bring back Marlowe's "good friend" Bernie Ohls. Marlowe worked with Ohls at the DA's office and he appears in both The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, but to call them good friends is a step too far. In fact, to call them friends at all is probably misleading. Philip Marlowe doesn't have friends: his defining quality is loneliness. The briefest of connections – Terry Leonnox in The Long Goodbye being one – result in betrayal. Isolation is the price Philip Marlowe has to pay for being a good man in the great wrong place that is Los Angeles. Chandler always saw this as key to his character. In one of his last letters he said as much: "I think he [Marlowe] will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection … I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated." Hopefully John Banville will understand this when he comes to write his Philip Marlowe novel.

In the end, the new book will be judged on two things. Can Banville get to grips with Chandler's Los Angeles and can he capture the voice of Marlowe? Los Angeles' unique situation in the world – the money, the beauty, the sheer darn fakery of it all – made it a great subject for a novel and Chandler was one of the first to tackle it with vigour. He watched it grow from a village to a city on the edge of greatness but he saw the dark corruption that beat at its centre. Since he died, other writers have challenged Los Angeles in their fiction with success, but what will John Banville bring to it? Will he see LA for what it is or what it wants to be? And what will he do with Marlowe? The finest of fine lines separates pastiche from parody and when imitating a writer like Chandler there is a greater risk of falling flat. We shall have to see if Banville can bring it off but I, for one, can't wait.

• Tom Williams is the author of Something Mysterious In The Light, Raymond Chandler: A Life published by Aurum Press.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/aug/09/john-banville-philip-marlowe-raymond-chandler?INTCMP=SRCH

Tom Williams' blog: http://www.tomwilliamsonline.com/the-return-of-philip-marlowe/

Frank O'Hara reads Having a Coke with You...

Alfred Hitchcock - Marnie

My favourite Hitchcock: Marnie

Emily Cleaver
guardian.co.uk
Monday 13 August

A yellow handbag fills the frame. Its owner walks away from the camera, poised on high heels, suit clipping her waist, hairdo a geometrical helmet. She is abstract art, a construct of colour and couture. We don't even see her face until she washes the dye from her hair and becomes a blonde. The opening shots of Marnie are Hitchcock's ideal of visual storytelling at its purest, and the rest of the film is an underrated gem.

Marnie had a lukewarm reception. Audiences expected killer birds or mother-fixated murderers, not "instant psychiatry". Even Hitchcock warned fans they might not get what they expected.

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a serial thief: she stays in a job long enough to learn the safe combination before stuffing her handbag with cash and moving on. But there's something wrong: she can't bear to be touched, and a flash of red gladioli or a splash of red ink on her sleeve sends her into a paroxysm of terror. Marnie is caught out by new boss Mark Rutland (a dashing Sean Connery), who blackmails her into marrying him and sets about trying to analyse her.

Marnie is technically brilliant, the suspense shots are some of Hitchcock's best. A shot so wide it looks like split screen; Marnie empties a safe while a cleaning lady mops closer and closer to witnessing the crime. But the classic Hitchcock theme of sexuality is also taken somewhere disturbing. It's a film about ownership. "I've tracked you and caught you and now I'm going to keep you," Mark tells Marnie.

In a troubling scene that cost the film's second scriptwriter his job (he thought it should be cut: for Hitchcock it was the whole point) Mark takes what he sees as rightfully his. Marnie stares blankly past the camera as it bears down on her.

Marnie owns nothing she hasn't stolen. She's even the result of an ownership transaction – conceived in a tryst paid for by a baseball sweatshirt. Her mother, who won't give her love, keeps possession of her past.

Geoff Dyer wrote about artist Martijn Hendriks's pure paranoia version of The Birds with the birds digitally removed, but Marnie is Hitchcock's own attempt at removing the birds. There's no papier-mache horror needed here. The fear and anxiety are in Marnie's past, invisible even to her.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/aug/13/my-favourite-hitchcock-marnie?INTCMP=SRCH

Alfred Hitchcock - I Confess

My Favourite Hitchcock: I Confess

A forgotten albeit flawed masterpiece, this thriller about a priest accused of murder – bound to keep secret the confession made to him by the real killer – smoulders gloriously

Philip Olterman

guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 8 August 2012

On the surface, it looks as if collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and Hungarian-born scriptwright George Tabori were doomed to failure. Tabori worked on the scripts for two of Hitch's films: he was replaced on North By Northwest by Ernest Lehman, who came up with the cropduster scene, and was dropped from I Confess after the production company found the ending of his script too shocking.

In 1986, Tabori – widely championed as one of Europe's greatest theatre directors when he died in 2007 – gave an interview with a German newspaper in which he said: "I was never a particular fan of Hitchcock's work." The problem, he explained, was that he had grown up as part of generation of European filmmakers who still had aspirations and ideals about cinema. Hitchcock, on the other hand, just wanted to entertain. The way Tabori envisioned it, I Confess was meant to be socio-political parable for McCarthyite terror – "Hitch listened to my ideas, but ultimately he just wasn't interested."

I can tell why Tabori might have said that, but I also reckon couldn't have been more wrong. Even without Tabori's final touches, I Confess is Hitchcock's most European film: continental arthouse with a dash of British humour, barely touching the American gothic that became Hitch's trademark.

Set in French-speaking Quebec City, it starts with a dramatic collage of street signs that would have pleased Walter Benjamin, culminating in a camera swoop through an open window: a man lies murdered on the ground. Next, a shot straight out of Fritz Lang: a shadowy figure in a cassock walking down old-world cobblestones. As he turns a corner, the murderer discards his ecclesiastical robes and packs them in a bag.

In the next scene we see the man in a church, confessing his crime to a real priest: the murderer is Otto Keller (OE Hasse), a German refugee who works as a lay caretaker at the church. Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) promises to keep the sacramental seal but we already know what's going to happen: the churchman will end up as the prime suspect in the case. Will he keep his oath, or break it to save his life?

Cahiers du Cinéma rated I Confess more than any of Hitchcock's other films; Eric Rohmer called it "a modern masterpiece". You can see why: for those who like to break their films down into structural parts, there's plenty to admire. Keller's confession is neatly mirrored by that of Logan's girlfriend (Anne Baxter) from pre-priesthood days, now married. She tells the police that the victim had been blackmailing her, and that she saw Logan on the night of the murder to seek advice. It's meant to serve as an alibi, but the timing doesn't quite match up, and her testimony only ends up incriminating the priest further.

As it happens, this bit is also where the film's flaws are hardest to ignore. In Tabori's original script, Father Logan gets revealed to be the father of an illegitimate child and is executed at the end – too much for the producers to handle. But without those revelations, the plot starts to sag a bit. What exactly is Logan's teenage sweetheart being blackmailed for?

It would be absurd to pretend that I Confess can match Strangers on a Train for suspense, The Birds for thrills, or North by Northwest for wit. There's a fairly amusing running gag involving a dopey priest on a bike, but even he looks like he would rather edge out of the reel. Instead, it offers something we don't usually turn to Hitchcock for: seriousness.

Lead actors matter in Hitchcock's films, but mainly because of what they do, rather than what's going on inside them. Here it's different: it's almost as if the former Jesuit schoolboy Hitch is caught off-guard, not so much confidently directing as being slowly mesmerised by Father Logan's inner turmoil. Hollywood's original method actor before Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift filmed with his acting coach just out of shot, but his performance is a masterclass in subtlety. He interiorises so much, you sometimes start to wonder if he's acting at all.

Clift's understated style is brought out even more by the contrast with theatrically-trained Hasse, who does more melodrama with his eyes in the first minute than Clift in the entire movie. When Keller overhears his name mentioned by police, he swooshes around like a camp Count Dracula doing a double take. Contrast that with Clift's character being declared innocent by the judge at the end of the movie: for a few seconds there's no reaction whatsoever, then Father Logan breathes the softest, aspen-leaf sigh of relief.

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/aug/08/my-favourite-hitchcock-i-confess?INTCMP=SRCH

Donald Fagen - Sunken Condos

Sid Waddell RIP

Sid Waddell was renowned as a darts commentator at the BBC and then Sky TV, and for his skill at manipulating the English language to suit the unbridled excitement he personally felt about every dart thrown. Sid, known as "the voice of darts", who has died of cancer aged 72, played a key role in the promotion and development of the sport's modern era.
Well-known phrases, such as "there hasn't been this much excitement since the Romans fed the Christians to the lions" and "there's only one word for that – magic darts", endeared him to fans and fellow commentators. Mike Walters, of the Daily Mirror, summed up Sid's appeal: "If puns, pathos or peerless analogy is your currency, nobody does it better."



Paul Buchanan Interview...

Some Sort Of Surrender: An Interview With Paul Buchanan Of The Blue Nile
David PeschekJuly 19th 2012

Blue Nile singer Paul Buchanan and David Peschek get teary-eyed discussing mortality, love and Mid Air, his first solo album- and his first release in 8 years

"Paul Buchanan", wrote Chris Roberts, "can make the word 'stay' more evocative than an entire Yeats compendium."

"Stay, stay," Buchanan keens on the first Blue Nile album and then, easy as conversation, hard as love, "and I will understand you." A Walk Across The Rooftops has so many moments like that, tiny moments on which great things hinge, a constellation of epiphanies. Unique even in the band’s own catalogue, it sounds like nothing else: full of space, rupture, suspension, flight, awe, possibility. Years before I ever dreamed of moving to Glasgow – where the album was made - A Walk Across The Rooftops made the city seem deeply romantic, glamorous in the headiest way. "Is there a place in this city – a place to always feel this way?" Buchanan sings in ‘Tinseltown In the Rain’ – Glasgow as Hollywood strafed with drizzle. Hats, which followed six years on in 1989, is more streamlined – still gorgeous though: glistening like the rain-splashed streets the songs inhabit. Then the gaps between records grew longer and the records themselves less cohesive – always threaded with magic, but frustrating too. Four albums in something like three decades. It seems now as though Buchanan, Robert Bell and Paul Joseph Moore are unlikely to record together again – but there is Mid Air – a masterpiece of long-dark-night-of-the-soul meditations on mortality; on evanescent love and indelible memory. Has the man often called the Scottish Sinatra made his 'The Wee Small Hours of the Morning'? Sinatra’s an odd comparison I always think: Buchanan’s suave, yes, but for me closer to the Bowie of ‘Word On A Wing’ (from Station to Station) but with a rasp, a crack in the voice, a creasedness that somehow simultaneously suggests weariness and wonder.

Mid Air is tremulous, tentative, little eddies of piano and vocal rather than rigidly structured songs, glances at something that in fact works cumulatively: glinting fragments of something you have to stand back from to see properly. Closer reference points: 'Patty Waters Sings' - a strange, haunted witching-hour album of fractured should-be standards written and sung by the white jazz singer/pianist beloved of Miles Davis and released on the avant-garde-bordering-on-down-right-eccentric label ESP Disk in 1965; Tim Hardin’s equally fractured, witching-hour intimate 1969 album Suite For Susan Moore and Damion: 'We Are One, One, All In One' – recorded late at night, scraps of feeling spun into smears of song intended to win back a family that was already gone.

Finally meeting the man whose records have sung inside me since I was a teenager, it’s wonderful to see how much like his songs he is: vulnerable, lyrical, "In love with a feeling." There’s a moment when deep into our conversation he voices something about the gap "between the advertisements and the traffic" – and I have chills. It’s as if – as I have been for a quarter of a century, as I am whenever I look out across any city at night, but especially in Glasgow – inside a Blue Nile song. Is there a place in the city – a place to always feel this way?

So, we’ve come to expect lengthy breaks between Blue Nile albums, but the absence of Paul on your tour six years ago, this solo record – does this mean the end of the group?
Paul Buchanan: I don’t know what happened with the band; it’s up to everybody - and, in a way, I ended up making the record for a number of reasons, but I suspect my uncertainty… and, kinda, mournfulness about the group was one of them. I just made the record that came out. It would be difficult to construe it as anything that’s supposed to be a Blue Nile record, you couldn’t argue that’s it’s like the Blue Nile.
[with mild incredulity] You couldn’t?
PB: I don’t think so, no. There’s no… ‘stuff’ on it. I know there are similarities, possibly in a couple of the ballads, but no it wasn’t in any sense a reaction. You know, I love the other two men, it’s a such a huge part of my life, and my bewilderment about whether we were going to make another record was part of it. Having had a sense of purpose for all those years, even if it was just: the three of us will meet, and we’ll put our money together, and even if we’ve just got one pound for a cup of tea – it was somewhere to go, you know. So honestly – it was nothing to do with career. There’s an emotional strand in there. I would like to think we’ll have some sort of Damascene moment, bump into each other and go, You know what? Let’s do the show right here.
You’re still in touch with Robert.
PB: Yes.
But not Paul.
PB: No. Neither me nor Robert have seen nor heard from him much at all really, to be honest. There was some paperwork that had to be signed recently, so we all did it, as straightforwardly as we could. It’s a mystery to some extent and I think you have to respect that. The other night I watched - there was a very low-budget documentary we made in America a hundred years ago, and I happened to see some of it the other night. It’s just very difficult – as it is in any relationship, you know, how did we get there from here? And I don’t think Robert knows either. Half the time I sort of expect Paul to just show up, you know?
Creative relationships can be just as intense as romantic relationships.
PB: Starting back into it, you don’t realise how close you were.
It’s a very intimate thing to do with someone…
PB: …very. And all your defences are down; and it was joyful. It was absolutely joyful. I’ve got nothing negative to say about it. It’s like love in the regard that you have to accept that there are some periods that are mysterious to you. And this is a little bit mysterious to me. But there was never any question in my mind that Paul is gifted. There’s nobody like Paul; there’s nobody like Robert. You know perfectly well that a group is a dynamic. The three of you together create something like… a fourth person.
‘The other thing.’
PB: The other thing. I was very lost when I realised I didn’t have to get up in the morning and go to a little rehearsal room. Truly, truly lost.
When was that?
PB: Probably after High [2004], and the touring, it started to dawn on me. I think in the back of my mind I – and Robert ­- sort of expected, when we were getting ready to tour, that Paul would wander in. Definitely at the beginning. But then as we finished off the dates, it dawned on me: the phone’s not ringing.
He knew the tour was being planned?
PB: Yeah, I’m sure he did know. I think you’re always trying to balance what you want with respect for the other person’s wishes. I think in that sense we excelled with each other. It would have been better, for me, if we’d carried on - but maybe we needed to stop, and it may be that we’ve achieved, individually, some perspective that will inform the music. The clichés are true: you start out in absolute privacy because nobody’s interested and you think external strains aren’t affecting you…
…and they are…
PB: They are. It’s very simple: if I had to choose whether or not to make another Blue Nile record before I die, the answer would be yes. It’s very liberating to be with two people you trust completely. It brings out the best in you; it makes you very unself-conscious. I think it’s true of all groups. So I was heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken and I probably spent a couple of years really just sitting in the kitchen wondering what had happened. Even with this record, I didn’t dust myself down and think, Well let’s get on with making a record. I was kinda working away, trying to write something for someone else with no luck whatsoever, but when I listened back to it – on a little Dictaphone actually, that Robert gave me – the songs that are on the album, they were all there. And a friend said, You should make a record – just a 10” EP or something, it’d be good for you to do something. So the first thing I did was go to the studio and play the sketches to the engineers, and said, I’m thinking of releasing this, as a sort of lo-fi thing. They put the songs up on the studio speakers and said, Well, you can’t really hear the music: you can hear your foot, and your hand hitting the keyboard, and the telephone; you can hear traffic: We don’t think you should [release it as is].
[laughs] ‘Automobile Noise’.
PB: ‘Automobile Noise’. So I thought, I’ll re-record them. I only did a couple of afternoons a week, to tell the truth, with a young engineer who’d never made a record before [actually the son of the engineer on all four Blue Nile albums]. So it was therapeutic rather than careerist.
Have you ever been careerist?
PB: I think at certain points you get drawn into going with the flow, largely because there are so many things to say yes or no to you literally can’t answer them all in a day. And with the best of intentions, you think, it’s ok, none of this is affecting me. Obviously, we didn’t produce records very often; we didn’t try to generate an image of any kind. So no, I wouldn’t say we were careerist. Once in a while, you look back and think, Maybe I should have shaken hands with that person – but I think we were beyond that. As I said once when we were playing live, ‘I flirted with obscurity but I went too far.’ But – c’est la vie. [On the deluxe double CD version of Mid Air] There’s a couple of other songs, and instrumental things. A couple of them are instrumental versions of the songs, and the others are what I initially intended to put on the ‘A’ disc – but I was prevailed upon to do otherwise. I had thought about it working a certain way. I had recorded the songs instrumentally and then, almost as an afterthought, I sang them. But when I realised that probably more people would buy the standard versions, Robert and the engineers and prevailed upon me [not to]. For me, I actually listened to the ‘B’ disc a lot, and was satisfied there was a good half-hour of music that was worth having, because you don’t want to look like you’re padding it out. The versions spoke, if you know what I mean. I didn’t want to have to do that thing you had to do in the old days of loading up b-sides of 12"s in order that people would buy them. I think it works on its own; it’s a different mood. You get a box! What can I tell you!?
It can be a job making a CD into a lovely object.
PB: The designer was endlessly patient and constructive and attentive. You need that good fortune to have someone that’s as involved as you in making something aesthetically beautiful.
And if you’re only doing it, well… roughly once a decade…
PB: Yeah – I need to step it up.
Are you gonna play live?
PB: Well you know - that’ll be a hoot! Yeah – I think so. I was just waiting to see if anybody would be interested in seeing it, to be honest.
Oh! Of course they are!
PB: Ach, come on. It’s such a funny wee thing I couldn’t work out how to do it. But now I think it would be good to play [straight through] from beginning to end. It’s only 36 minutes. And then I’ll try to figure out what to do [after].
Play Mid Air in its entirety, have a little interval and then do greatest hits! Play the spoons!
PB: Play the spoons, yeah! Going out with a guy to play the piano, and maybe one other guy too do some of the… background. To go from that to a Blue Nile set is such a leap in terms of personnel and money you know? So what I’d do is try to prevail upon whoever’s [promoting] it to reflect that in the ticket price. So people could come and get an hour and a quarter [and not feel cheated]. Come out again after the interval essentially with the same people. I could do ‘Family Life’, ‘From a Midnight Train’ – at a stretch I could do a couple of things on the guitar.
That acoustic session you did for [US West Coast radion show’] Morning Becomes Eclectic is great. It’s almost like a little album itself. That’s you playing guitar isn’t it?
PB: Yes. Me and this other guy, a lovely guy who’s played on and off with us for years: a great human being.
When you said ‘I’d like to make another Blue Nile record before I die,’ I was gonna say, somewhat cheekily, You might only get one in!
PB: [laughs] I might only get one in! I’ve probably written it; I’ve certainly written quite a lot of it but it’s funny – you have old habits. I’ll write a demo up to a certain point and then stop; I’d want to stop, because it’s habit…
Because you’re waiting for what the others bring?
PB: Yes. That space. And I might go in and say, I’ve got ten songs and they’ll say, We like seven of them. That habits remains, so we’ll see. I hate to sound Biblical about it, when I look at what we did do, and as you get older you look at yourself more – your vanities and your dreams – well, I’m now looking and thinking the only way I can redeem my own life in some sense is to do something that was a little bit of a quantum leap in terms of what it expressed and what it stated. I know I can’t think that – I’m not clever enough to think of what that is, so it becomes some sort of humility, some sort of surrender. You accept that you’re deeply flawed as a human being – you have major character flaws and insecurities and all these things, and accepting that, and that you can’t really think your way to the next stage, and at this point the only thing I can imagine or hope to validate the shambles of my own existence is to in some way be part of something that expresses harmonically what I can’t articulate.
To pour yourself into the music in some way.
PB: You read about some conflict in the newspaper and think, I wish I could solve that. Really pull the juice off. How do you let go of your own imprints, the things that are ingrained in you? It’s the only thing I can think of now that would provide a happy ending.
For?
PB: Me, or what I chose to do with my life...

More... much more at http://thequietus.com/articles/09375-paul-buchanan-blue-nile-interview

The Victorian/Edwardian Friday Night Boys

The Diogenes Club

Bob Dylan's Tempest - Another First Listen...

Bob Dylan's Tempest: first listen
Neil McCormick dissects Bob Dylan's new album Tempest, due for release later this year

Neil McCormick
8 August 2012

“I’m searching for phrases to sing your praises,” croons Bob Dylan on Soon After Midnight. It is fantastic to be able to report that popular music’s greatest troubadour is still as brilliant and bewildering as ever.

Words spill out on his 35th album, Tempest, to be released by Columbia next month: one liners, couplets, random observations, overheard expressions, inverted slogans and non sequiturs, verses and images often set up in baffling opposition to one another. What sounds at first like a gentle country love song contains the admission “My heart is fearful / It’s never cheerful / I’ve been down on the killing floor” and concludes with the threat to drag the corpse of somebody called Two Timing Tim “through the mud”.

There’s a lot of blood spilt on Tempest through murder and revenge, chaos and confusion. On the Muddy Waters style, harmonica-driven blues of Narrow Way, Dylan declares “this is a hard country to stay alive in / I’m armed to the hilt.” Although unfolding with a lot of wit and relish, this is Dylan’s darkest, maddest, most provocative collection of songs in a long time.

The word is that Dylan is pleased with his latest effort, or, as someone at his record company told me, “he wants people to hear it.” I have had the privilege of being amongst a select few journalists around the world to be allowed a sneak preview. It would be absurd to attempt a definitive review based on such a cursory listen but I was blown away with the mad energy of the album. At 71-years-old Dylan is still striking out into strange new places rather than revisiting his past. Although he no longer attempts to scale the heights of poetic imagery and dense metaphor that established him as popular music’s greatest lyricist, instead writing in bluesy couplets, the extreme collision of ideas and characters and the mysterious, ambivalent arcs of his narratives creates a pungent effect. Dylan still has the power to disturb and thrill. I emerged from this listening session feeling like I had been on a journey into the weird dream territory of Ballad Of A Thin Man, where nothing is quite what it seems.

His voice, often little more than a croak on stage these days, invests these ten tracks with the spirit of something ancient. Sure, he has the wheeze and gargle of an old man, but the words come through loud and clear, delivered with real relish. Los Lobos founder David Hidalgo’s fiddle weaves through the acoustic shuffle of Dylan’s touring band, guitarist Charlie Sexton, Stu Kimball and Donnie Heron, drummer George Receli and bassist Tony Garnier.

The sound is a continuation of the blues, country and folk styles that run through all his later work, but with less of the kind of Thirties pastiche he’s played with since 2001’s Love And Theft . There is a sense is that Dylan is still honing in on that wild, mercurial music he hears in his head.

These ten tracks range from the throwaway blues of Early Roman Kings to the nine minute ballad Tin Angel to the title track which runs to 45 verses and 14-minutes, relating a vision of the sinking of the Titanic. The album’s beautiful, surprising conclusion, Roll On John, is almost out of character, a shaggy, loose piano and organ lament for one of rock’s great dreamers, John Lennon. Dylan sings to his lost friend “your bones are weary, you’re about to breath your last / Lord you know how hard that bit can be” before breaking into an elegiac, bittersweet chorus (“Shine a light / Move it on / You burned so bright / Roll on John”). This is an album I can’t wait to hear again, the sound of a great artist approaching the twilight of his career with fearless creativity, our finest songwriter regarding the murderous madness of the world with an unflinching gaze and a loving heart. Roll on, Bob.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/bob-dylan/9461252/Bob-Dylans-Tempest-first-listen.html

Bob Dylan - Early Roman Kings

Bob Dylan - Tempest: early report...

Bob Dylan's Tempest: first listen

We've had a sneak preview of what may be Bob Dylan's final album. The good news? It's the best thing he's done in a decade

Capsar Lleweilyn Smith

guardian.co.uk

Monday 6 August 2012

Could this be the last time? The customary intrigue that surrounds the arrival of a new Bob Dylan studio album – and this is his 35th – was stirred by its title: Tempest. Given that The Tempest was Shakespeare's final play, and we know that Dylan is a student of the Bard, could this be the 71-year-old artist's way of telling us that with this record he's calling it quits?

Dylan himself has appeared to pooh-pooh the question, telling Rolling Stone last week: "Shakespeare's last play was called The Tempest. It wasn't called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It's two different titles." Nonetheless, that same report called the album "dark"; according to the LA Times "a darkness has replaced the instrumental interludes, buoyancy and lightness of his last three albums"; while Billboard in the US said that "death … is a dominant subject on Tempest".

Perhaps, then, there would be some sense of letting go on this album – so it came as a surprise on listening to it in London on Monday that it opens with the jaunty Duquesne Whistle, something like a more rambunctious Nashville Skyline Rag from the 1969 album. Complete with jamming organ and slick guitar licks (shades of Charlie Christian?), the whistle threatens "to blow my blues away".

It's a mood sustained in the gentle Soon After Midnight – "it's soon after midnight and I've got date with the fairy queen … and I don't want nobody but you" – on which some of Dylan's phrasing recalled for me the feeling of Under the Red Sky, the title track on the 1990 album; Narrow Way does carry notes of foreboding, heightened by a line about the British burning down the White House, but since when can you hear Bob Dylan singing about having (as I think I heard it) "a heavy stacked woman with a smile on her face" and not laugh, too?

The humour resurfaces throughout the album, with the band – the touring outfit of bassist Tony Garnier, drummer George G Receli, steel guitarist Donnie Herron and guitarists Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball, plus David Hidalgo from Los Lobos on this and that – often entering into the spirit and enjoying themselves. And characteristically, Dylan has chosen to preview Tempest in unconventionally amusing fashion, letting the track Early Roman Kings soundtrack the trailer to a new HBO TV series about terrorism, Strike Back.

The darkness does finally start to descend with the gospel-influenced Pay in Blood ("I pay in blood … but not my own") and Scarlet Town – which is the setting for the Child Ballad Barbara Allen that Dylan has sung throughout his career.

Following what was a single, cursory listen, it's not possible to get fully to grips with that song or the slow-burning Tin Angel or the title track, which lasts almost 14-minutes and tells the story of the sinking of the Titanic over the course of 45 verses. This last is a subject Dylan has touched on previously (in a line on Desolation Row), while several blues and folk songs have tackled it – Richard "Rabbit" Brown's Sinking of the Titanic and the Carter Family's The Titanic among them. Dylan told Rolling Stone his song evolved from fooling around with the melody to the latter, but what we end up with is something on a bigger scale. And just as the 16-minute Highlands from Time Out of Mind namechecked Neil Young and Erica Jong, it's Leonardo DiCaprio who gets a mention here, among a cavalcade of characters.

"People are going to say: 'Well, it's not very truthful,'" Dylan said of the song to Rolling Stone. "But a songwriter doesn't care about what's truthful. What he cares about is what should've happened, what could've happened. That's its own kind of truth.

"It's like people who read Shakespeare plays, but they never see a Shakespeare play. I think they just use his name."

Then finally, there's Roll on John, which digs back into the blues and into William Blake to tell part of the story of John Lennon; it's warm, mysterious and moving – and an excuse to dig out that famous footage of the pair in London taxi cab – with Dylan at one point singing: "I heard the news today, oh boy!"

In terms of the Dylan canon, does it bring to mind the crepuscular menace of Not Dark Yet?. Perhaps it's more Forever Young.

Released on 11 September, the same day as Love and Theft in 2001, and likely his strongest album since then, Tempest also arrives more than 50 years since Dylan's debut.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/aug/06/bob-dylan-tempest-first-listen?INTCMP=SRCH

Robert Hughes RIP

Robert Hughes obituary

Australian writer whose TV series The Shock of the New took modern art to a mass audience

Michael McNay

guardian.co.uk

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74 after a long illness, dismissed the notion of Crocodile Dundee as a representative Australian figure as "macho commedia dell'arte". All the same, Hughes as the Crocodile Dundee of art criticism is too good a parallel to reject: burly ocker from the outback, tinny in left hand, confronted by New York aesthete armed with stiletto, reaches with his right hand for his own massive bush knife, commenting slyly to his terrified assailant: "Now that's what I call a knife."

I described him in the Guardian once as writing the English of Shakespeare, Milton, Macaulay and Dame Edna Everage; Hughes enjoyed the description. His prose was lithe, muscular and fast as a bunch of fives. He was incapable of writing the jargon of the art world, and consequently was treated by its mandarins with fear and loathing. Much he cared.

When he reached a mass audience for the first time in 1980 with his book and television series The Shock of the New, a history of modern art starting with the Eiffel Tower and graced with a title that still resounds in 100 later punning imitations, some of the BBC hierarchy greeted the proposal that Hughes should do the series with ill-favoured disdain. "Why a journalist?" they asked, remembering the urbanity of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

He gave them their answer with the best series of programmes about modern art yet made for television, low on theory, high on the the kind of epigrammatic judgment that condenses deep truths. Van Gogh, he said, "was the hinge on which 19th-century romanticism finally swung into 20th-century expressionism". Jackson Pollock "evoked that peculiarly American landscape experience, Whitman's 'vast Something', which was part of his natural heritage as a boy in Cody, Wyoming". And his description of the cubism of Picasso and Braque still stands as the most coherent 10-page summary in the literature.

Hughes was born in Sydney into a family of lawyers descended from an Irish policeman who had emigrated to Australia 100 years before Robert's birth. This was something of which Hughes was obscurely ashamed, because convicts were to be the heroes of his great work of Australian social history, The Fatal Shore (1987). His father died when he was 12, and he went to a Jesuit boarding school, St Ignatius college.

At Sydney University, where he went to study architecture, he was academically undistinguished. In his words: "I actually succeeded in failing first year arts, which any moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed."

All the same, he went on at the age of 28 to write a book on The Art of Australia. He himself later dismissed this as juvenilia. In truth, it is a useful source on Australian art. After its publication the popular historian Alan Moorehead advised Hughes, who by now was making a bare living as a freelance architectural writer, to go to Europe.

Hughes took the advice, travelled around the great art capitals and the dodgier casinos, washed ashore in London, wrote art criticism for the Sunday Times which, with the proviso that art did not have the hold on the public imagination then that it does now, had something of the same effect as the young Kenneth Tynan erupting in the theatre columns of the Observer. In London he wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1969) that bombed. However, a Time magazine executive happened upon a copy, leafed through it, and promptly hired Hughes as art critic. In 1970 he moved to Manhattan and wrote for Time for the rest of the century.

The Shock of the New was a success around the world; the book was revised and republished in 1991. But, when Moorehead took Hughes under his wing and gave him shelter for a couple of months at his house in Porto Ercole, Tuscany, he also advised him that if he wanted to find a big subject for a book, he ought to consider convicts. Convicts! thought Hughes. I didn't come all this way to think about convicts but about Piero della Francesca.

Nonetheless, the seed was planted. And when, in tackling a TV series on Australian art (called Landscape with Figures), Hughes could find no book to tell him about the experience of Australia's early settlers, in effect the cultural background, he was committed. "Our past was either denied or romanticised. I wrote The Fatal Shore to explain it to myself."

His private working title for the book was Kangaroots. In the public records office he found a privy council envelope marked Convict Ms, tied with faded ribbon still bright red in the knots and containing rat-nibbled papers bearing firsthand testimony of the experience of transportation under George III. The rest is history, 688 pages of it.

He followed this in 1990 with a study of Frank Auerbach, a painter whom he much admired, not least for his refusal to paint by the yard, either bespoke or made to measure. In a more dogged way, the British painter possessed the qualities that are most to be valued in Hughes himself and which are demonstrated in his collection of essays Nothing If Not Critical (1991).

Normally these collections of journalists' cuttings are not much of an advance on vanity publishing. Hughes's collection is a jewel box. Here he is on Watteau's "musicality": "it lives in pauses, silences between events. He was a connoisseur of the unplucked string, the immobility before the dance, the moment that falls between departure and nostalgia." And on a new manifestation of fashionable Manhattan, Hughes sets out his stall in the first sentence: "A taste for Alex Katz's work is easily acquired, but is it obligatory?"

Such certitude; but Hughes could also leave the door quietly ajar: "One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of colour than Gauguin; and while one is under the spell of this show, it seems quite certain that none except Van Gogh and Cézanne did."

His blithe clearsightedness always eschewed ideology, so that when he essayed into the broader cultural scene with his book excoriating American political correctness, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993), he found himself ducking flak from left and right. And in 1995 a Time cover story on the assault on federal funding of the arts caused such outrage that Newt Gingrich, the house speaker, demanded and got a right of reply.

In 1999 Hughes had a near-fatal car crash in Western Australia, from which legal complications followed. The episode provided the starting point for his memoir Things I Didn't Know (2006).

The hallucinations he suffered after the accident led him to identify even more strongly with an artist taken up with grotesques and horrors, and in 2004 he produced a long-planned book, Goya. That was also the year of his BBC television sequel programme, The New Shock of the New, which regretted the growing power of money and celebrity in art. These themes recurred in a Channel 4 programme criticising Damien Hirst in 2008, and there was also plenty of scope for sharp observation in his last book, the historical survey Rome (2011).

Hughes is survived by his third wife, Doris Downes. His previous marriages ended in divorce, and in 2002 his son by his first wife took his own life.

• Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, art critic and historian, born 28 July 1938; died 6 August 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/07/robert-hughes

Ol' Mutton chops is back...

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

Sea Of Heartbreak
Dream Baby
Bye Bye Love
Barbara Ann

In the presence of a soon to be £150 a week better off pensioner from Stockton Lane, the night rolled on in style. A packed house saw a variety of acts including plaintive folk-rock, dirty low down blues and the above mentioned choons from yesteryear. A crackin' night!

Marvin Hamlisch RIP

Marvin Hamlisch, composer for Broadway and the screen, dies aged 68

Award-winning arranger and producer best known for music from film The Sting and for Barbra Streisand's The Way We Were

Associated Press

guardian.co.uk

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Marvin Hamlisch, who composed or arranged the scores for dozens of movies including The Sting and the Broadway smash A Chorus Line, has died in Los Angeles. He was 68.

Hamlisch collapsed and died on Monday after a brief illness, his publicist Ken Sunshine said, citing the family. Other details were not released.

Hamlisch's career included composing, conducting and arranging music from Broadway to Hollywood, from symphonies to R&B hits. He won every major award in his career, including three Academy Awards, four Emmys, four Grammys, a Tony and three Golden Globes.

The one-time child prodigy's music coloured some of Hollywood and Broadway's most important works.

Hamlisch composed more than 40 film scores, including Sophie's Choice, Ordinary People, The Way We Were and Take the Money and Run. He won his third Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin's music for The Sting. His latest work came for Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!.

On Broadway, Hamlisch received both a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for the long-running favorite A Chorus Line and wrote the music for The Goodbye Girl and Sweet Smell of Success. He was scheduled to fly to Nashville this week to see a production of his musical The Nutty Professor, Sunshine said.

Hamlisch even reached into the pop world, writing the No 1 R&B hit Break It to Me Gently with Carole Bayer Sager for Aretha Franklin. He won the 1974 Grammys for best new artist and song of the year, The Way We Were, performed by Barbra Streisand.

"He was classic and one of a kind," Franklin said Tuesday after learning of his death, calling him one of the "all-time great" arrangers and producers. "Who will ever forget The Way We Were?"

Hamlisch's interest in music started early. At the age of seven he entered the Juilliard School of Music, stunning the admissions committee with his renditions of Goodnight Irene in any key they desired.

In his autobiography, The Way I Was, Hamlisch admitted that he lived in fear of not meeting his father's expectations. "By the time Gershwin was your age, he was dead," the Viennese-born musician would tell his son. "And he'd written a concerto. Where's your concerto, Marvin?"

In his teens, he switched from piano recitals to songwriting. Show music held a special fascination for him. Hamlisch's first important job in the theater was as rehearsal pianist for the Broadway production of Funny Girl with Streisand in 1964. He graduated to other shows like Fade Out-Fade In, 'Golden Rainbow and Henry, Sweet Henry, and other jobs like arranging dance and vocal music.

"Maybe I'm old-fashioned," he told the Associated Press in 1986. "But I remember the beauty and thrill of being moved by Broadway musicals – particularly the endings of shows. The end of West Side Story, where audiences cried their eyes out. The last few chords of My Fair Lady. Just great."

Although he was one of the youngest students ever at Juilliard, he never studied conducting. "I remember somebody told me, 'Earn while you learn,'" he told the AP in 1996.

The Way We Were exemplified Hamlisch's old-fashioned appeal – it was a big, sentimental movie ballad that brought huge success in the rock era. He was extremely versatile, able to write for stage and screen, for soundtracks ranging from Woody Allen comedies to a somber drama like Ordinary People.

He was perhaps even better known for his work adapting Joplin on The Sting. In the mid-70s, it seemed everybody with a piano had the sheet music to The Entertainer, the movie's theme song. To this day, it's blasted by ice cream trucks.

Hamlisch's place in popular culture reached beyond his music. Known for his nerdy look, complete with thick eyeglasses, that image was sealed on NBC's Saturday Night Live during Gilda Radner's "Nerd" sketches. Radner, playing Lisa Loopner, would swoon over Hamlisch.

Hamlisch was principal pops conductor for symphony orchestras in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Dallas, Pasadena, Seattle and San Diego at the time of his death. He was to be announced to the same position with the Philadelphia Orchestra and also was due to lead the New York Philharmonic during its upcoming New Year's Eve concert.

He was working on a new musical, Gotta Dance, at the time of his death and was scheduled to write the score for a new film on Liberace, Behind the Candelabra.

He leaves behind a legacy in film and music that transcended notes on the page. As illustrative as the scenes playing out in front of the music, his scores helped define some of Hollywood's most iconic works.
He is survived by his wife of 25 years, Terre.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/07/marvin-hamlisch-composer-dies?newsfeed=true

Happiness - the only gift they possess

Naivety personified...

Ian goes cap in hand to Jimmy... Will he never learn?

Golfin' Blues...

The adverse effects of growth hormones...

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #163

Twisted Road (Bob, the Dead & Roy Orbison name-checked)

New song Twisted Road (after The Needle & The Damage Done)

The Letters of Ted Hughes - review by Terry Kelly

Sylvia, Shakespeare and Shamans

Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, edited by Keith Sagar, The British Library, 340pp, £25 (hardback)

Charting a friendship of almost thirty years, the correspondence of the poet Ted Hughes and the critic Keith Sagar is an unexpected literary treasure trove. Many of the letters in this substantial volume were not included in Letters of Ted Hughes (2007), edited by Christopher Reid, so we are afforded additional insights into the life and work of the late Poet Laureate. But while it is clear from the outset that Sagar is a true believer in most things Hughesian, he is by no means a fawning or unquestioning literary dsciple. Sagar often parts company with the author of such iconic volumes as The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow and Birthday Letters in such areas as the poet’s rather mystical and myth-laden view of the British royal family, fishing, astrology, Rosicrucianism, Cabbala and Hermetic Neo-Platonism. When, in one of his earliest replies to Sagar, in August 1969, Hughes ‘castigated’ W. H. Auden for dismissing Yeats’s attachment to arcane beliefs, Sagar comments: ‘I have to admit that my sympathies were more with Auden than with Yeats and Hughes.’

The book literally starts with a bang. In March 1969 Sagar was driving a group of mature students to se Hughes give his first televised reading in Didsbury, Manchester. Sagar’s car skidded, keeled over and landed in a ditch. Thankfully, no one was hurt and the battered but unbowed lecturer wrote to Hughes the next day, explaining why there were five empty seats in the audience. Hughes replied the following month, just after his then lover, Assia Wevill, had taken her own life and that of their child, Shura. (Hughes would later dedicate his 1970 volume, Crow, to mother and child.) Sagar eventually received a hundred and forty-five letters from Hughes over three decades. Apart from mutual affection and respect for each other’s literary opinions, poet and critic shared connections from their earliest days: they were born within ten miles of each other, were from similar, working-class backgrounds, and both were educated at schools in the West Riding of Yorkshire and later at Cambridge. Just as importantly, Hughes and Sagar shared a passion for animals, Shakespeare and D. H.Lawrence (Sagar edited Lawrence’s poems for Penguin).

Nonetheless, Sagar soon discovered that Hughes, a man of considerable intellect and vast reading, harboured a visceral dislike of anyone delving into his personal life, particularly anything relating to the death of his first wife, the American poet, Sylvia Plath. By the time Sagar got to know Hughes, the poet had already been burdened with the Plathian legacy for six years. Like T. S. Eliot before him, Hughes believed that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’. Hughes, tirelessly supported by his redoubtable sister, Olwyn, detested much of the literary and biographical sleuthing of the women he tended to dismissively refer to en bloc as ‘the feminists’. Initially, Hughes felt the need to protect his two young children, Frieda and Nicholas, from what he saw as the worst excesses of the Plathites; from the kind of people who chipped away his surname from Plath’s grave at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire; from those feminist critics who even implied Hughes had driven the author of Ariel to suicide on 11 February 1963. But literary friends were not immune from the poet’s wrath. Hughes scolded the poet and critic Al Alvarez for dealing in psychological speculation when writing about his troubled late wife. When the critic David Holbrook writes about Plath’s poetic language, Hughes likens him to ‘some pornographer or exhibitionistic voyeur’.

As a trusted friend, Sagar is able to be honest with Hughes about his own coolness towards such late and in extremis Plath poems as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’, while also questioning the apparent lack of sexual imagery in her work, as outlined by the leading critic Hugh Kenner. Hughes, however, often displays an automatic resistance to most Plath commentators and literary criticism itself, warning Sagar ‘[not] to follow him too closely on the “frigidity of S. P.” trail. After all, what if he’s wrong? (Maybe that never occurs to him – many silent classes have polished his confidence.) Lots of people didn’t like her – for no reason at all. I never knew anybody else who got poison pen letters from complete strangers. And it seems to go on after her death’ (23 May 1981). In the same letter, Hughes laments the fact that his late wife’s poems ‘have been overlaid with other people’s fantasy visions of her’. On 4 January 1975 Hughes alludes to the almost incendiary nature of Plath’s work: ‘Olwyn has just assembled the whole final mss of Sylvia’s collected poems – after a near-disastrous involvement with so-called editors. Whoever becomes involved with that material seems to succumb to the hysterical supercharged public atmosphere that surrounds it.’ Sagar’s literary honesty sparks a fascinating analysis by Hughes (23 May 1981) of Plath’s poetic intentions, which appears to subvert the feminist view of Plath as a kind of tragic literary victim:

'Ariel – March-Nov. 62 – is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this ‘real self’. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it – having children etc + confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely) ... Ariel is her record of her experience of it – of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of (for good reasons) ... I read those Ariel poems as a climb – not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out.'

The clearly strong friendship between poet and critic is occasionally tested along the way, almost exclusively on literary matters. Even before Hughes published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, to decidedly ‘mixed’ reviews in early 1992 Sagar did not pull his punches regarding his own misgivings about the book and the mythic structure Hughes believed underpinned the Bard’s plays. The old friends exchanged a series of detailed letters about the nascent Shakespeare book throughout much of 1990. A letter from the poet dated 1 September (which does not appear in Letters of Ted Hughes) is a detailed defence of his reading of the plays – often line by line responses to queries from Sagar – and such poems as ‘Venus and Adonis’.

Hughes and his Boswellian literary friend most often disagree on the mythical templates which the poet feels shape the plays, the same kind of mythical structures which fed Crow and other famous volumes. Hughes refused to budge on his dogmatic central thesis, that ‘even though the physical details of the play may seem to contradict the design of the mythic equation, the overall pattern of the finished drama must obey it’. Sagar’s commentary calls Hughes’s eccentric Shakespeare study ‘over-elaborate, tortuous and incomprehensible’, and even the poet came to regret elements of its structure. Hughes would later claim that late nights working on the book may have damaged his immune system and even precipitated the cancer which eventually claimed his life. When John Carey savaged the book in the Sunday Times, the poet proved just as vociferous as in his stewardship of the Plath estate, staging a full-blooded, aggressively Crowlike defence in his right of reply in the same newspaper (19 April 1992):

'That rictus of derision on Carey’s face distorts his mind’s eye too. He goes through my book, sticking his tongue out at everything, with the mental freedom of one of those blinded donkeys that spend their days plodding in a small circle, turning a millstone, and then, when they’re let out into the open landscape, go on plodding around in the same small circle.'

Sagar believed Hughes’s appointment as Poet Laureate in late 1984 afforded him the opportunity to act as a shaman-like literary figure between the secular and spiritual worlds. Hughes viewed Shakespeare, Keats and Eliot as shamanic poets, with Sagar’s fellow Hughesian critic, Neil Roberts, hoping the poet ‘might turn the Laureateship into an organ for creatively exploring the role of religion, ritual and mythology in our society’. Sadly for both critics, ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ proved to be the only Hughes poem which seemed to fulfil his shamanic potential. What becomes increasingly clear in this lengthy exchange of letters is the importance of myth – classical, primitive and otherwise – to the Hughes canon and the extent to which a grasp of much arcane mythological material is essential to a full understanding of the poetry.

On 29 January 1998, nine months before his death, Hughes published his final collection, Birthday Letters – a volume of poems exploring his relationship with Sylvia Plath. (In accordance with the poet’s wishes, Faber and Faber published the book when Hughes believed the time was astrologically right.) Birthday Letters was welcomed as a major literary event in some quarters and lavished with praise by leading critics and fellow poets. Andrew Motion called it ‘his greatest book’, while for Seamus Heaney it was an ‘awesome’ collection. However, a cooler Karl Miller thought there was as much artifice as candour in the volume: ‘the two poets can seem larger than life, their destiny written in the stars’. Ian Hamilton was even more direct, viewing the collection as more about literary history than literary substance. He found most of the poems ‘fairly lumpishly composed and of scant technical distinction ... out of a total of some eighty items, only a handful could be said to earn their keep, as poems’. The year before publication (2 October 1997) Hughes confided to Sagar: ‘Those pieces about S. P. in the end of the New Collected are probably too obscure ... I’ve put together about 90 – full context makes them read more openly. Still thinking whether to pub. or not. Probably not, but it would be a burden gone.’

On 18 and 19 July 1998, a few months after the publication of BirthdayLetters, Hughes opens up in his final substantial letter to his constant friend and critic about his final book. He admits the poems contravened his ‘inborn conviction that you never talk about yourself in this way – in poetry’, feeling he had ‘committed some kind of obscure crime, publishing them’. Maintaining that ‘none of it is faked’, Hughes saw publication as cathartic, while admitting to still feeling trapped by the Plath myth: ‘with Sylvia’s reputation as my environment, I could never escape with her onto the other levels. There simply was no more time ...’ This book of letters is a fascinating record of an enduring personal and literary friendship and an essential addition to Hughesian scholarship.

TERRY KELLY

This review appears in the current issue of The London Magazine

http://thelondonmagazine.org/issues/aug-sept-12/

Tonight's setlist

At the "Dharma Banana" open mic, the Cumberland Arms: -

Love Song
Falling

Have never previously ventured to the upstairs open mic (on the first Sunday in the month) but was invited to do so last Thursday. Some excellent players, each limited to 2 songs. Another debut to add to the list.

Neil debuts a new song about a Bob song

http://www.examiner.com/article/neil-young-debuts-new-song-about-dylan-s-like-a-rolling-stone-albuquerque

Alfred Hitchcock - Strangers on a Train

My favourite Hitchcock: Strangers on a Train

Hitchcock's study of the guilt that taints the human condition is just one cinematic masterstroke after another

Catherine Shoard

Thursday 2 August 2012

The master of suspense did not care whodunnit. For Hitch, the question was all but academic: to be alive is to stained. Culpability comes with conception.

It's hard to think of any adult in his films – the great ones, anyway – whose copybook has not a smudge, whose odd blots don't mushroom and bleed, soak their coats and cloud their judgement. And, for me, his primary preoccupation was never more brilliantly realised than in Strangers on a Train, the murder-swap thriller from 1951.

To refresh: straight-batting, social-climbing tennis star Guy (Farley Granger) has a chance encounter on a train with sardonic playboy Bruno (Robert Walker). Bruno knows Guy is romancing a senator's daughter (played by Ruth Roman) – and indeed is eager to move into politics – but can't get a divorce from his unfaithful wife, Miriam. Bruno himself is fed up with his controlling father. So he proposes they exchange bump-offs, to insulate the other from blame.

Guy laughs the idea off, but Bruno goes through with the killing, strangling Miriam in an amusement park. The appalled – yet liberated – Guy must then fend off the suspicions of the police, the fears of his fiancee and, most dangerous of all, Bruno, eager that Guy goes through with his end of the bargain. And, as the original trailer hammers home – even as it sternly asserts this is a fable of how evil can infect the clear conscience – it is a bargain.

Right from the start, we see that Guy does, on some level, accede. It's an absolutely audacious sequence, so thematically cohesive, so snappy, so fun. In that, it absolutely bears the thumbprints of Hitch, rather than, say, Patricia Highsmith, on whose novel it's based, or even Raymond Chandler, whose credit was flagged energetically in publicity, but whose early draft was junked by the director, who roped in his wife and Ben Hecht's assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to overhaul.

That opener is a true coup de cinema; there are countless others threaded through. The trip through the underworld as Bruno tops Miriam after hopping in a boat called Pluto through the tunnel of love. It's never fantastical – filmed in an actual fairground – but it's absolutely operatic in its nods and shots, its sillouettes and soundtrack (Miriam and her two groping friends actually sing along to the song 'The Band Played On'). The climatic fight on the carousel; the murder refracted in the victim's spectacles; the Expressionist visuals – Hitch's most vivid use of swoops and chiaroscuro since the drummer scene in Young and Innocent).

A word for the grace notes, too: Bruno's manicure from his mother; his hound at the top of the stairs, his nail-biting grope for the lighter dropped down a drain, spliced with Guy's epic, against-the-clock tennis match, which must be completed before Bruno plants it as incriminating evidence.

All these suggest our sympathies should lie with Bruno, not our hero. So does the casting. Robert Walker is everything Kevin Spacey could be; deft and feline, smart and charming, sweet and insidious. That he was just 31 when he shot this is shocking; that he died eight months later, suffering from mental illness, is terrible.

Conversely, Granger does well to make our clean-cut leading man so much of a drag. How different would it have been had James Stewart taken that part, or Cary Grant. Granger is dapper, like Stewart, but nervous where Stewart was lackadaisical. Unlike Grant, he is permitted, in this, no discernible sense of humour, and only surface, mannequin glamour. Ruth Roman, taking third billing, was foisted on an unconvinced Hitch, and it shows. The movie seems to mock her while appearing to idolise. The lighter may be the MacGuffin but the girl is an irrelevance, a token, an afterthought.

For the key to Strangers is that it's a love story; Bruno and Guy's meeting in the dining car is every bit as seductive as Grant and Marie Saint's locomotive bunkup in North by Northwest. This is a film saturated in the sweat of McCarthyism (there's an astonishing shot of Bruno, alone, clad in black, watching Guy from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial).

Even the final scene, a supposedly larky little coda warning against the perils of chat with even the most innocuous fellow passenger, would not work were we still not jittery with a paranoia that's part and parcel of just pottering around in the world. Whoever you are, whatever your situation, whispers can be insistent, skeletons have a habit of rattling the handle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/aug/02/my-favourite-hitchock-strangers-train?INTCMP=SRCH

Laurel and Hardy - on location

Shot while filming Should Married men Go Home? (March 1928)

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

Sweet Virginia
The Boxer
The Price Of Love

An amazzzing night of open mic madness. Far too many players which restricted the set length. But what a night! Everything an open mic should be - and more.

Last night's Jam Session . . . . .

At The Waggon & Horses, York: -

An interesting evening of musical shenanigans with the punters sitting in amongst the players, songs included: -

Black Is Black
Down By The Riverside
Long May You Run
Ticket To Ride
Chain Of Fools
Too Far Gone
I Heard It Through The Grapevine
Hotel California
Mind Your Own Business
You Do Something To Me
Midnight Special
Baby What You Want Me To Do?
Till There Was You
May You Never

There were other songs, but my memory and musical knowledge of more recent beat combos is sadly lacking.