Friday, 21 March 2014
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Ian Ravenscroft at The Centurion: A Ten Song Set
Ian, right, with reviewer Paul Kelly in the centre; on the left is estranged FNB Jimmy Henderson, for whom the past is another country (Hebburn...).
The Best of Da
2 How Can We Say Goodbye?
3 Is It Only The Moonlight?
4 I'm Just a Loser
5 Falling
6 Everybody's Talkin'
7 Where The Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day
8 Out on the Weekend
9 Heart of Gold
10 Harvest Moon
A SPARSE but appreciative audience witnessed a 'Best of Da' ten-song set last night.
Given free rein due to a shortage of players, he took full advantage.
Five self-composed numbers kicked off the evening, with the jaunty thirties-styled 'Is It Only the Moonlight' and the waiting-to-be-recognised pop standard that is 'Falling' connecting best with punters.
Ploughing on, regardless of rowdy revellers at the bar, a few fluffed lyrics during 'Everybody's Talkin'' failed to deflect from its evergreen musical buoyancy.
Best of all was a tender rendition of Crosby's 'Where the Blue of the Night...'
A harmonica-accompanied 'Heart of Gold' followed before he closed up with a swooning 'Harvest Moon'.
After carefully packing up his guitar and harmonica rack he was approached by one appreciative audience member with the words: "Thank you for entertaining us".
It was fair comment.
PAUL KELLY
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
New Paddy McAloon Interview - Crimson/Red, Prefab Sprout, recording, expectations, life - all the big stuff...
Long Player with Pete Paphides. Episode 5 - 'Paddy McAloon' by Long Player With Pete Paphides on Mixcloud
http://www.mixcloud.com/longplayer/long-player-with-pete-paphides-episode-5-paddy-mcaloon/
Monday, 17 March 2014
The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (John Banville) - reviews
The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel, review – the detective is reborn
John Banville's convincing imitation of Raymond Chandler's literary detective brings to mind an older Humphrey Bogart
Mark Lawson
The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/12/black-eyed-blonde-philip-marlowe-novel-john-banville
Mark Lawson
The Guardian
Wednesday 12 March 2014
The 23rd novel by the Irish writer John Banville feels like a literary equivalent of Winston Churchill's description of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The Black-Eyed Blonderepresents a literary brand-name wrapped in a pseudonym inside a Man Booker prize winner. Although this is Banville's attempt at a novel in the style of the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler, he has chosen to publish it under the name of Benjamin Black, the identity he has adopted for a series of crime novels (including Christine Falls and Holy Orders) featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist in the 1950s.
The 23rd novel by the Irish writer John Banville feels like a literary equivalent of Winston Churchill's description of Russia as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". The Black-Eyed Blonderepresents a literary brand-name wrapped in a pseudonym inside a Man Booker prize winner. Although this is Banville's attempt at a novel in the style of the Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler, he has chosen to publish it under the name of Benjamin Black, the identity he has adopted for a series of crime novels (including Christine Falls and Holy Orders) featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist in the 1950s.
Black-Banville remains in the same decade for this Marlowe makeover, which finds the private eye living in the rented residence on Yucca Avenue in Los Angeles that he occupied in the final Chandler books. The Long Good‑byeand Playback were set in the early 50s, and charted Marlowe's attraction to and eventual marriage proposal from the heiress Linda Loring. As Black-Banville's Marlowe expresses the hope of one day marrying Loring, The Black-Eyed Blonde seems to sit between the last two completed Chandlers and Poodle Springs, the final, unfinished Marlowe novel, which Robert B Parker finished in a previous authorised continuation, commissioned by the Chandler estate to mark the author's centenary.
The plot, though new, follows the master's hand. On a listless LA day, a beautiful young woman turns up in the PI's office. She is Mrs Clare Cavendish, heiress to a perfume fortune built by an Irish immigrant family, the Langrishes. For tantalisingly unclear reasons, Mrs C has hired Marlowe to find a former lover, Nico Peterson, who has disappeared. The private eye soon learns that Peterson has been killed and cremated, although this information becomes increasingly questionable as the investigator follows the trail deeper into the scent company.
The reputation of the original novels rests largely on two factors: the tone of the prose and the character of Marlowe. As the books are narrated in the first person, these are closely linked, so any Chandler stand-in must convincingly carry on both. But a popular perception has developed that Chandler's style consisted entirely of witty metaphors and witticisms stitched together. In fact, between the anthologised one-liners, the language is often looser and more discursive, but so strong is the legend of Chandler's high style that any pretenders will be judged on how successfully they achieve it.
The Irish understudy takes on Chandler's habits convincingly. The Marlowe books have a paradoxical tone of energetic weariness, which this imitation echoes in numerous lines. Visiting a witness, the detective reports that he "lowered himself into one of the armchairs. It was so deep my knees nearly gave me an uppercut." Painted roses on a bedside lamp throw shadows that look like "bloodstains someone had started to wash away and then given up on".
The biggest decision for any literary ventriloquist – faced also by the numerous authors, most recently including William Boyd, who have extended the James Bond franchise – is to what extent simply to transplant the central character, or, just as importantly, any of the actors who have played the role on screen. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum are probably the Connery and Craig of the Marlowe adaptations and the protagonist of The Black-Eyed Blonde is easy to visualise as an older Bogart. Black-Banville's Marlowe – like Boyd's 007 – has begun to worry about the medical effects of all the drinking and smoking, but is otherwise recognisably the figure of the originals: chess-playing, introspective, sensitive, self-hating. "Women are not the only thing I don't understand – I don't understand myself either, not one little bit."
What Banville, through Black, brings to Chandler is perhaps an enhanced literary sensibility. His Marlowe is alert to nuances of language, delighted when the name of Mrs Langrishe is accidentally recorded in a message as "Mrs Languish", and thrilled when an interrogatee uses the word "milksop", which he has previously only ever seen written down. On another occasion, when the private eye gives his name, the response from the witness is "Like the playwright?", followed up with some apposite lines from Doctor Faustus.
Long before he finally took the Booker with The Sea in 2005, Banville hadbeen cast as the epitome of serious, prize-winning literary fiction, but the subsequent decade seems to have unleashed a pleasure in plot and playfulness that wasn't evident before. Even while routinely trashing crime novels, in interviews and at festivals, as "cheap", he has published them at the rate of almost one a year and now seems to have concluded that he would rather add to his shelf a Black-Chandler rather than a Black or a Banville. The genre of new books by dead writers is a curious and questionable one, but Banville and his crime-writing pseudonym have played the game as well as anyone could.
The plot, though new, follows the master's hand. On a listless LA day, a beautiful young woman turns up in the PI's office. She is Mrs Clare Cavendish, heiress to a perfume fortune built by an Irish immigrant family, the Langrishes. For tantalisingly unclear reasons, Mrs C has hired Marlowe to find a former lover, Nico Peterson, who has disappeared. The private eye soon learns that Peterson has been killed and cremated, although this information becomes increasingly questionable as the investigator follows the trail deeper into the scent company.
The reputation of the original novels rests largely on two factors: the tone of the prose and the character of Marlowe. As the books are narrated in the first person, these are closely linked, so any Chandler stand-in must convincingly carry on both. But a popular perception has developed that Chandler's style consisted entirely of witty metaphors and witticisms stitched together. In fact, between the anthologised one-liners, the language is often looser and more discursive, but so strong is the legend of Chandler's high style that any pretenders will be judged on how successfully they achieve it.
The Irish understudy takes on Chandler's habits convincingly. The Marlowe books have a paradoxical tone of energetic weariness, which this imitation echoes in numerous lines. Visiting a witness, the detective reports that he "lowered himself into one of the armchairs. It was so deep my knees nearly gave me an uppercut." Painted roses on a bedside lamp throw shadows that look like "bloodstains someone had started to wash away and then given up on".
The biggest decision for any literary ventriloquist – faced also by the numerous authors, most recently including William Boyd, who have extended the James Bond franchise – is to what extent simply to transplant the central character, or, just as importantly, any of the actors who have played the role on screen. Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum are probably the Connery and Craig of the Marlowe adaptations and the protagonist of The Black-Eyed Blonde is easy to visualise as an older Bogart. Black-Banville's Marlowe – like Boyd's 007 – has begun to worry about the medical effects of all the drinking and smoking, but is otherwise recognisably the figure of the originals: chess-playing, introspective, sensitive, self-hating. "Women are not the only thing I don't understand – I don't understand myself either, not one little bit."
What Banville, through Black, brings to Chandler is perhaps an enhanced literary sensibility. His Marlowe is alert to nuances of language, delighted when the name of Mrs Langrishe is accidentally recorded in a message as "Mrs Languish", and thrilled when an interrogatee uses the word "milksop", which he has previously only ever seen written down. On another occasion, when the private eye gives his name, the response from the witness is "Like the playwright?", followed up with some apposite lines from Doctor Faustus.
Long before he finally took the Booker with The Sea in 2005, Banville hadbeen cast as the epitome of serious, prize-winning literary fiction, but the subsequent decade seems to have unleashed a pleasure in plot and playfulness that wasn't evident before. Even while routinely trashing crime novels, in interviews and at festivals, as "cheap", he has published them at the rate of almost one a year and now seems to have concluded that he would rather add to his shelf a Black-Chandler rather than a Black or a Banville. The genre of new books by dead writers is a curious and questionable one, but Banville and his crime-writing pseudonym have played the game as well as anyone could.
Hello, My Lovely
‘The Black-Eyed Blonde,’ by Benjamin BlackBy Olen Steinhauer
14 March 2014
About two-thirds of the way through “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Philip Marlowe — that name might ring a bell — tells us he “lit up another cancer stick.” For a novel set in the early 1950s, this sounded anachronistic, so I went online to investigate. While a connection between tobacco and cancer was suggested in the 1930s in Germany, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang places the earliest use of “cancer stick” at 1959 — which is not to say that it wasn’t used before then.
That I made such an effort to research two insignificant words doesn’t merely peg me as the guy you don’t want to be stuck with at a party; it says something about “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Benjamin Black’s latest mystery, and his first to feature Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye. Black recreates Marlowe’s voice (that is, Chandler writing Marlowe’s first-person narration) with such startling mimicry that a reader (this one, at least) can’t help cynically seeking out its flaws. Cancer sticks aside, “The Black-Eyed Blonde” could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud.
It’s no secret that Benjamin Black is the mystery-writing pseudonym of the Irish novelist John Banville, and so the idea of this prizewinning writer channeling one of the most recognizably literary of crime novelists makes a good deal of sense. It’s a challenge Banville obviously approached with pleasure, reveling in the opportunity to work up the ornate similes that are the stamp of Chandler’s prose.
We meet Black’s Marlowe at the window of his office in the Cahuenga Building, peering down as a long-legged woman crosses the street, noting from the way she carefully checks for traffic that “she must have been so good when she was a little girl.” Since this is the fictional Bay City, you can bet she isn’t so good anymore. She is Clare Cavendish (née Langrishe), and she’s a wealthy perfume heiress. Within minutes, she turns up in Marlowe’s office — a “blonde with black eyes” — to ask for help finding her old lover, Nico Peterson, who has been missing for two months. Given the track record of beautiful blondes walking into private investigators’ offices, we know there’s a lot more to her story.
The twists and turns that follow involve missing persons, stone-cold Mexican hit men, easy-to-anger cops (Bernie Ohls, an old friend) and the impenetrable rich, as well as the participants in a gruesome and nearly fatal encounter at the indoor pool of the Cahuilla Club. It’s all par for the course for Marlowe, who suffers beatings and stoically faces heartbreak, drinking his way through a heady labyrinth of double-crosses that leads to a visit from an old friend in a blood-soaked drawing room. It is, as they say, a page turner, and terrific fun.
There are intimations of Black’s Irish background in Clare Cavendish’s mother, Dorothea Langrishe, “a tough old dame” whose husband, devoted to Michael Collins’s cause, was killed in the Irish civil war in a particularly terrifying fashion. Another clue appears when Marlowe heads off to the Bull and Bear, noting that “I can’t decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockneyfied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven’t the heart.”
Like the model Black is following, the overall story is less important than the individual scenes, and charting the cause and effect from Marlowe’s office to the corpse in the final pages may require a slug of whiskey and an aspirin. “Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit,” Marlowe tells us. “Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It’s one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there’d be no life at all, dear or otherwise.”
Despite the loyalty to Chandler that Black displays here, by the end of “The Black-Eyed Blonde” there’s an odd emptiness. Not merely the existential emptiness of the noir novel, where the hero is left, as always, alone, but a deeper emptiness, a suggestion that literary style has triumphed over content, leaving a hollowed-out place where the emotion should have been. Halfway through, I was already asking myself a poisonous question: Why write a book that reads so completely like Raymond Chandler 61 years after the publication of “The Long Goodbye,” his last great novel?
By now the conventions of noir fiction, as created by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, have become such a part of our world, and so often parodied, that we can almost predict them before opening the next book. The femme fatale walking into the P.I.’s office and twisting him around her pretty finger while lying through her teeth; the drinking and the bursts of violence; the high-society folks with secrets to sweep under the rug; the soulless thugs and surly cops; and the dead who are, inevitably, not dead. Black has included them all here — and well — yet despite the impressiveness of his achievement, a reader in 2014 expects something fresher, if only the inversion of a few conventions.
I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s satirical story “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote,’ ” in which a 20th-century writer is reproducing “Don Quixote” word for word. The argument is that the new version is an original work because Menard’s times, life experience and purpose are different from those of Cervantes. What was once a picaresque novel is now a historical novel written, impressively, in an archaic language. “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” a novel that reads like a lost Chandler original but is written by a contemporary author, raises the question: What, beyond imitation and a paycheck, is Black’s purpose?
Am I being a killjoy? Probably, because despite my complaints I found “The Black-Eyed Blonde” entertaining, and any fan of Chandler’s work is going to enjoy it. Yet when a novelist of Banville’s stature resurrects one of the genre’s luminaries, he inspires the hope that this new outing will compete with Chandler and Marlowe’s finest appearances, even in some small postmodern way. Instead, this walk down the mean streets feels like one we’ve already taken in some half-forgotten Bogart movie, returning to a time when men were men and the women were so alluring, as the line from “Farewell, My Lovely” goes, they could “make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Then again, that may be justification enough.
About two-thirds of the way through “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Philip Marlowe — that name might ring a bell — tells us he “lit up another cancer stick.” For a novel set in the early 1950s, this sounded anachronistic, so I went online to investigate. While a connection between tobacco and cancer was suggested in the 1930s in Germany, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang places the earliest use of “cancer stick” at 1959 — which is not to say that it wasn’t used before then.
That I made such an effort to research two insignificant words doesn’t merely peg me as the guy you don’t want to be stuck with at a party; it says something about “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” Benjamin Black’s latest mystery, and his first to feature Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye. Black recreates Marlowe’s voice (that is, Chandler writing Marlowe’s first-person narration) with such startling mimicry that a reader (this one, at least) can’t help cynically seeking out its flaws. Cancer sticks aside, “The Black-Eyed Blonde” could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud.
It’s no secret that Benjamin Black is the mystery-writing pseudonym of the Irish novelist John Banville, and so the idea of this prizewinning writer channeling one of the most recognizably literary of crime novelists makes a good deal of sense. It’s a challenge Banville obviously approached with pleasure, reveling in the opportunity to work up the ornate similes that are the stamp of Chandler’s prose.
We meet Black’s Marlowe at the window of his office in the Cahuenga Building, peering down as a long-legged woman crosses the street, noting from the way she carefully checks for traffic that “she must have been so good when she was a little girl.” Since this is the fictional Bay City, you can bet she isn’t so good anymore. She is Clare Cavendish (née Langrishe), and she’s a wealthy perfume heiress. Within minutes, she turns up in Marlowe’s office — a “blonde with black eyes” — to ask for help finding her old lover, Nico Peterson, who has been missing for two months. Given the track record of beautiful blondes walking into private investigators’ offices, we know there’s a lot more to her story.
The twists and turns that follow involve missing persons, stone-cold Mexican hit men, easy-to-anger cops (Bernie Ohls, an old friend) and the impenetrable rich, as well as the participants in a gruesome and nearly fatal encounter at the indoor pool of the Cahuilla Club. It’s all par for the course for Marlowe, who suffers beatings and stoically faces heartbreak, drinking his way through a heady labyrinth of double-crosses that leads to a visit from an old friend in a blood-soaked drawing room. It is, as they say, a page turner, and terrific fun.
There are intimations of Black’s Irish background in Clare Cavendish’s mother, Dorothea Langrishe, “a tough old dame” whose husband, devoted to Michael Collins’s cause, was killed in the Irish civil war in a particularly terrifying fashion. Another clue appears when Marlowe heads off to the Bull and Bear, noting that “I can’t decide which are worse, bars that pretend to be Irish, with their plastic shamrocks and shillelaghs, or Cockneyfied joints like the Bull. I could describe it, but I haven’t the heart.”
Like the model Black is following, the overall story is less important than the individual scenes, and charting the cause and effect from Marlowe’s office to the corpse in the final pages may require a slug of whiskey and an aspirin. “Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit,” Marlowe tells us. “Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It’s one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there’d be no life at all, dear or otherwise.”
Despite the loyalty to Chandler that Black displays here, by the end of “The Black-Eyed Blonde” there’s an odd emptiness. Not merely the existential emptiness of the noir novel, where the hero is left, as always, alone, but a deeper emptiness, a suggestion that literary style has triumphed over content, leaving a hollowed-out place where the emotion should have been. Halfway through, I was already asking myself a poisonous question: Why write a book that reads so completely like Raymond Chandler 61 years after the publication of “The Long Goodbye,” his last great novel?
By now the conventions of noir fiction, as created by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, have become such a part of our world, and so often parodied, that we can almost predict them before opening the next book. The femme fatale walking into the P.I.’s office and twisting him around her pretty finger while lying through her teeth; the drinking and the bursts of violence; the high-society folks with secrets to sweep under the rug; the soulless thugs and surly cops; and the dead who are, inevitably, not dead. Black has included them all here — and well — yet despite the impressiveness of his achievement, a reader in 2014 expects something fresher, if only the inversion of a few conventions.
I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s satirical story “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote,’ ” in which a 20th-century writer is reproducing “Don Quixote” word for word. The argument is that the new version is an original work because Menard’s times, life experience and purpose are different from those of Cervantes. What was once a picaresque novel is now a historical novel written, impressively, in an archaic language. “The Black-Eyed Blonde,” a novel that reads like a lost Chandler original but is written by a contemporary author, raises the question: What, beyond imitation and a paycheck, is Black’s purpose?
Am I being a killjoy? Probably, because despite my complaints I found “The Black-Eyed Blonde” entertaining, and any fan of Chandler’s work is going to enjoy it. Yet when a novelist of Banville’s stature resurrects one of the genre’s luminaries, he inspires the hope that this new outing will compete with Chandler and Marlowe’s finest appearances, even in some small postmodern way. Instead, this walk down the mean streets feels like one we’ve already taken in some half-forgotten Bogart movie, returning to a time when men were men and the women were so alluring, as the line from “Farewell, My Lovely” goes, they could “make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Then again, that may be justification enough.
Sunday, 16 March 2014
Saturday, 15 March 2014
Tony Benn RIP
Tony Benn obituary
Veteran leftwing Labour politician who went from being 'the most dangerous man in Britain' to a national radical treasure
Brian Brivati
The Guardian
The US was an imperial power that had pursued a policy of world domination since the second world war, and that policy was based on a doctrine: "A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world." All events and developments were made to fit the worldview. All was underpinned by imagined conspiracies and persecutions.
Once this manifesto was completed, it never again altered. From the mid-70s onwards, Benn ceased to have anything new to say as a political thinker. The rest of his life was spent trying to make current events fit his outlook and condemning those who changed their minds and positions. This resistance to new ideas, new evidence and critical thinking about changing events was extremely damaging to the left in the UK. As Benn's mind closed to alternative positions, so the part of the British left that he led became deeply conservative, if not actually reactionary.
Many tortuous conclusions resulted, for example calling on Britain to recognise the Soviet-imposed government of Afghanistan. The great parliamentarian was by the end of the 80s characterising Britain as a state in which the extra-parliamentary struggle had to be supported because democracy was not working. In 1981 he told a Trotskyite group that Labour was "under attack by the Pentagon, Brussels, IMF, the House of Lords and the SDP".
After the US invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, he told Tribune that America might seize control of the UK if British governments did not do its bidding. The following year, he defended the right to revolt against the "oncoming" totalitarianism of the Thatcher governments, and in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash he predicted worldwide rioting in the streets and the meltdown of nuclear reactors.
In 2003 he was dismissive of a woman whose family had been executed by Saddam Hussein as a CIA spy: her words were American propaganda. He was a leading figure arguing against the liberation of Libya from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi and strongly opposed any intervention in the conflict in Syria by outside powers.
By the end of his life many of his positions on anti-imperialism and anti-western intervention had become mainstream on the British left and he had become a respected elder statesman of the anti-war, anti-US, anti-intervention generation of radicals. The roots of Benn's socialism were stubbornly non-Marxist. He did not arrive at his worldview through historical materialism as much as through the Bible. He was therefore always a slightly awkward leader of the economic determinists of the left.
What he lacked in knowledge of political economy or revolutionary theory he always more than made up for with energy. This was applied with equal zeal to everything he did: "I have got built into me, through my upbringing or whatever, a tremendously strong inner voice saying what I should do at any moment." In the 1960s, Foot noted: "No one in Labour party history – not even Herbert Morrison in his heyday – applied his mind and energies more assiduously to the work of the [National] Executive."
Teetotal Benn was more than assiduous: he was obsessive. From an early age he kept all his papers, the basement of his house in Holland Park, central London, becoming a massive personal archive, filled with every conceivable piece of office machinery. Towards the end of his life he downsized to a flat nearby, but the archiving remained a passion.
The element of moral fervour that underpinned everything Benn did came from his nonconformist conscience, which made him view life as a process of self-improvement and his career as a duty. One of his most endearing qualities as a younger man was that if someone was unconvinced by his position, his reaction was that he had not put his case well enough.
He never stopped preaching through any programme that would have him, and was a resident on radio's Any Questions and television's Question Time for decades, becoming in time more comfortable with forums in which he could communicate directly with the public – "people at home". His writing tended to be stilted and formulaic, but he was a superb speaker, at his best in the Commons, but articulate and usually humorous, as occasion demanded.
Faith also provided the inspiration for the perfect association in Benn's mind between his own interests and those of the Labour party, the country and, at times it seemed, the world: anyone who did not see the harmony of interests in the same way Benn dismissed as part of the world's problem.
He was often compared with Thatcher. They shared the same qualities of unblinking belief when faced with the glaring lights of contradictory facts. Benn was a true believer and expected true belief, but he differed from Thatcher because he was not a hater. Policy genuinely mattered more to him than personality.
The urge to question and challenge authority made him one of the great parliamentarians of the postwar period. With Foot, Enoch Powell and a handful of others, he had the ability to command the house's attention, especially when he spoke of matters relating to its own rights and privileges. This was a theme he returned to consistently in the 80s and the 90s, when he felt strongly that the role of the Commons in scrutinising the executive was being undermined by the concentration of power in Downing Street, first by Thatcher and then by Blair.
In 1987 the first volume of his diaries appeared, covering the period 1963-67. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. At the same time, Benn began to present more and more reform bills to the Commons. He did not do things by accident. The switch from trying to capture the party to producing an endless flood of words, in bills, the diaries, collections of essays, videos of speeches, CDs, DVDs, through websites and in semi-authorised biographies formed the great project that filled out his final years. By 2013 a film, Will and Testament, was in post-production.
In response to the flood of his own words, the public's perception of him shifted. Much of what he said was highly critical of the Blair governments and the European Union. He appealed to the anti-war movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Ukip supporters in about equal measure. No longer the most dangerous man in Britain, he had the final volume of his diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (2013), in which he movingly described Caroline's death from cancer, serialised in the Daily Mail. Caroline died in 2000 and he is survived by their children.
Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."
He had half a century in parliament. Then he had an Indian summer as a national radical treasure, the Home Counties' favourite revolutionary. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist. He will be forgotten as a practical politician and a political thinker.
In the end, his reputation will be significantly greater than the sum of his achievements because of the vast archive he accumulated and the quality of his diaries. He was like Samuel Pepys – someone who described an age without ever having shaped it – and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds, and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.
• Tony (Anthony Neil Wedgwood) Benn, politician and diarist, born 3 April 1925; died 14 March 2014
Veteran leftwing Labour politician who went from being 'the most dangerous man in Britain' to a national radical treasure
Brian Brivati
The Guardian
Friday 14 March 2014
Tony Benn, who has died aged 88, was a pivotal figure in British leftwing politics in the second half of the 20th century. A national institution, instantly recognisable from his distinctive voice, intense self-belief and fondness for a mug of tea and a pipe, he was held in sufficient regard that even his critics usually found some aspect of his life or career to praise. It had not always been so: the journalist Bernard Levin parodied him as "Mr Zig-Zag Loon"; Harold Wilson maintained that Benn immatured with age; and the rightwing press came to call him the most dangerous man in Britain.
For a moment in the mid-1970s, Benn appeared to be the man of the age, able to say what was wrong with it and how it should put itself right. His problem was that people mostly refused to listen.
Stagflation and industrial militancy destroyed Edward Heath's Tory government in 1974. The battle between Benn's ideas and those of the new right for addressing the crisis of British capitalism and democracy shattered the centre of British politics. Public opinion was more receptive to the views of Margaret Thatcher: she captured first the Conservative party, in 1975, and in the election four years later the British state.Tony Benn in 1961. Photograph: Philip Jones Griffiths/The Observer
In the process she inflicted an epochal defeat on the British left. Benn was not responsible for Thatcherism, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the only thing that would have damaged the left more than Benn's failed attempt to capture the Labour party would have been his success. After narrowly losing the contest for the deputy leadership in 1981, he withdrew from practical politics and launched one of the greatest rhetorical projects of the modern era.
From an early age he had kept a diary, and from 1964 he updated it nightly. Later he started recording every speech and meeting. He kept every paper he could. This massive archive was used to give free range to his messianic tendencies as he published volume after volume of revealing and insightful diaries, polemical essays and the videos of his speeches.
If he could not change the world, he would try to make it listen and learn. Only Winston Churchill's self-mythologising surpassed this as a model of how to secure one's own place in history. In this and other ways, Benn's career was an extraordinary journey. As he put it: "Like my father, I grow more left as I grow older."
His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916.
Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). In 1942, he reluctantly gave up his Commons seat when called upon to bolster the wartime coalition's Labour contingent in the Lords, accepting a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate.
He and his wife, Margaret, created a happy, industrious and religious London household, with three sons (a fourth was stillborn); the Stansgate title came from their second home, by the Blackwater estuary in Essex. Tony – the second son, initially known to his family as Jimmy – was born in London and grew up at 40 Millbank, Westminster, which was bombed in the war and much later was the site of Millbank Tower, housing the headquarters from which New Labour planned their 1997 election victory. From Westminster school he went to New College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics.
After second world war service in the RAF (1943-45) he returned to Oxford, graduating in 1948, spent some time in the US, and worked as a BBC radio producer (1949-50). He was known formally as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie by friends and family, till in 1972 he settled on plain Tony Benn. However, the change of name could not disguise the fact that he was the product of an elite background. As he once said: "My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they're up to."
In 1949, he married a wealthy American, Caroline Middleton DeCamp, a socialist, educationist and biographer, and they, too, built a happy domestic life in a large house in Notting Hill, west London. Their daughter, Melissa, and three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, were all active politically, with Hilary becoming a Labour cabinet minister. Caroline's wealth matched Benn's own inherited capital, derived from the Benn Brothers publishing firm.
On entering parliament through the Bristol South East byelection of November 1950, caused by the ill-health of the former chancellor of the exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps, Benn was a conventional centre-right backbencher, criticising the Bevanite rebellion against the Attlee government. His elder brother, Michael, had been killed in a flying accident while on active service in 1942, leaving Tony the eldest sibling. Aside from the psychological impact this had, he would thus one day be Lord Stansgate and have to give up his seat.
In 1955, he introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage. The Lords voted against the measure, but the dispute forced him to develop his formidable reputation as an advocate of constitutional reform.
Throughout the 1950s, he was generally known as a broadcasting expert, an advocate of the modernisation of Labour's electoral strategy and a campaigner on colonial issues. He was the first MP to table a motion on apartheid, following his father's lead, as in many other aspects of his life. Initially a follower of Hugh Gaitskell, the party's leader from 1955, Benn switched to Wilson when Gaitskell proposed the revision of clause four of the party constitution in 1959, dropping the commitment to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Gaitskell in turn withdrew his support for Benn's campaign to retain his seat.
In 1960, Benn's father died, thus disqualifying him from remaining in the Commons. He was still eligible to stand as a candidate in the resulting byelection, which he won. Nonetheless, he could not take up the seat; though abandoned by his party leader, he fought on alone.
After a three-year struggle, he gained the support of the Conservative government for the Peerage bill and was able to renounce his title. His Conservative opponent in Bristol South East, Malcolm St Clair, stood down, and Benn won the resulting byelection, returning to the Commons at just the right moment.
Gaitskell had died in January 1963, Wilson succeeded him, and Benn was back as an MP the following August. Early signs of his radicalism had come in 1954, when he joined the H-bomb national committee, and in 1957, when he introduced a Human Rights bill. On the use of military force and unilateral nuclear disarmament, he was securely on the left of the party. He argued that "all war represents a failure of diplomacy", while not making it clear if that included the war against Hitler.
When Labour won in 1964, Benn was appointed postmaster general, outside the cabinet. He also began his habit of making a daily diary entry, in parallel with his colleagues Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. Benn's record as a minister was mixed. He was generally effective and, in the 1960s, well liked by most of his civil servants because he was good at going through the work taken home in his red boxes. He was also an efficient spin doctor, focusing on eye-catching policy decisions that he took time and trouble to communicate effectively, frequently leaking documents in the name of freedom of information and defending his right to discuss general issues in speeches.
As postmaster general, he tried and failed to have the Queen's head removed from stamps. After entering the cabinet as minister of technology (1966-70), he backed Concorde, not least because it would be partly built in his Bristol constituency. In both jobs he attempted to connect the actions of the government with socialism: "We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values."
In 1968, at a meeting of the Welsh Council of Labour in Llandudno, Benn first suggested that revolutionary action might be necessary to prevent the violence taking place in France being repeated in the UK. "It is no good saying it could not happen here. It could … The widening gulf between the Labour party and those who supported it last time could well be an index of the party's own obsolescence." Parliament, too, had to change. This theme of giving the party to its grassroots would recur into the 1980s. The press, however, ignored all this, preferring to focus on Benn's call for push-button referendums.
According to his cabinet colleague Tony Crosland, Benn welcomed Labour's defeat in 1970. He became heavily involved with the Alternative Economic Strategy developed with Stuart Holland and Judith Hart, and summed up rather better in Holland's book The Socialist Challenge (1975) than in Benn's own Arguments for Socialism (1979). From this time, his radical views on constitutional and international affairs began to be reflected more obviously in his economic analysis.
If the problems of democracy could be cured by more democracy, planning and nationalisation would cure the problems of the economy. Following the rapid increase in oil prices and the chaos of the Heath government's confrontation with the miners, there appeared to be no future in the status quo. Democracy and capitalism seemed equally impotent in the face of a global crisis of economic, social and political confidence. Benn's radical critique of the 1964-70 Wilson government now chimed well with the militancy of the shop stewards' movement. The failure of the City and the service sector to replace the jobs being lost to deindustrialisation and the sense of Britain becoming ungovernable by conventional means fed Benn's growing militancy.
After Labour's return to power in 1974, Benn's attempt as industry secretary to force the Wilson government to implement the election manifesto was thwarted by his departmental civil servants and his cabinet colleagues. The document sat, as the Attlee manifesto had done from 1945 to 1951, in the middle of the cabinet table, but this time it was completely ignored.
Benn's failures were compounded through 1975. Having championed the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Economic Community, he saw the "yes" campaign win. He was a leading figure opposing the use of wage restraint on trade unions but saw the policy reversed. Finally, having been given a key economic ministry, he was demoted to Energy, Wilson informing him via the Daily Telegraph while he was on a visit to Jamaica.
From then on he was a "dissenting minister" in the government, a leader of those across the Labour movement frustrated by the government's lack of radicalism. Having made a respectable showing in the first round of the leadership election that followed Wilson's resignation in 1976, he supported Michael Foot, but the prize went to James Callaghan.
When Labour lost the 1979 general election, Benn was well placed to assume the leadership of the left, and began to propose constitutional changes to give greater representation to the views of activists and trade unionists in drafting the manifesto and in selecting MPs. Militant and other Trotskyite groups that had perfected techniques of entryism sponsored the resolutions on party reform.
Two very different groups were now following Benn. On one hand there were revolutionaries of various kinds, many of whom wanted to destroy capitalism and did not mind killing off the Labour party in the process. On the other, Labour's left wing felt disappointed and betrayed by what they saw as the failures of the party's five years in office. The more progress Benn made with his demands for reform, the greater the possibility of a split became. When Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980, Benn came close to running against Foot, but decided to hold back.
Despite Foot's passionate appeal to unity, Benn did stand against Denis Healey in the September 1981 election for the deputy leadership. Healey won, under the reformed system that Benn had championed, by less than 0.5%. This margin was accounted for by some of the MPs who would soon be leaving for the Social Democratic party (SDP), launched the previous March – though others of this group actually voted for Benn in the hope that he would win.
Labour began the long, hard climb back to power. The left of the party split – the Tribune group backing Foot and later Neil Kinnock, and Benn setting up his own Campaign group in 1982. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached. It took a decade to roll it back completely, but Benn's realistic challenge for the leadership was over.
By 1983, Bristol South East had disappeared in boundary changes, and Benn failed to depose Michael Cocks in the safe seat of Bristol South. Instead he fought and lost Bristol East. He was selected for the first Labour seat to fall vacant, Chesterfield in Derbyshire, which he won in a byelection in March 1984.
Benn's period out of the Commons and Kinnock's policy review took much of the momentum out of his career. When he stood for the leadership in 1988, he was heavily defeated. He became a widely respected and effective backbench critic of the Conservatives, and then, from 1997, of Tony Blair's Labour government. In 2001 he retired after 51 years in the Commons "to devote more time to politics".
The major elements of the Bennite critique of British capitalism were that Britain needed a siege economy to protect domestic industry; nationalisation or selective share ownership of the top 25-100 companies and joint stock banks; wide-ranging constitutional reform; withdrawal from the Common Market, Nato and Northern Ireland; unilateral nuclear disarmament, and so on. The Bennite worldview presented a well worked out analysis according to which the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations ran the global economy. The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Spin doctors and pollsters dominated politics. "I did not enter the Labour party … to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris," wrote Benn.
Tony Benn, who has died aged 88, was a pivotal figure in British leftwing politics in the second half of the 20th century. A national institution, instantly recognisable from his distinctive voice, intense self-belief and fondness for a mug of tea and a pipe, he was held in sufficient regard that even his critics usually found some aspect of his life or career to praise. It had not always been so: the journalist Bernard Levin parodied him as "Mr Zig-Zag Loon"; Harold Wilson maintained that Benn immatured with age; and the rightwing press came to call him the most dangerous man in Britain.
For a moment in the mid-1970s, Benn appeared to be the man of the age, able to say what was wrong with it and how it should put itself right. His problem was that people mostly refused to listen.
Stagflation and industrial militancy destroyed Edward Heath's Tory government in 1974. The battle between Benn's ideas and those of the new right for addressing the crisis of British capitalism and democracy shattered the centre of British politics. Public opinion was more receptive to the views of Margaret Thatcher: she captured first the Conservative party, in 1975, and in the election four years later the British state.Tony Benn in 1961. Photograph: Philip Jones Griffiths/The Observer
In the process she inflicted an epochal defeat on the British left. Benn was not responsible for Thatcherism, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the only thing that would have damaged the left more than Benn's failed attempt to capture the Labour party would have been his success. After narrowly losing the contest for the deputy leadership in 1981, he withdrew from practical politics and launched one of the greatest rhetorical projects of the modern era.
From an early age he had kept a diary, and from 1964 he updated it nightly. Later he started recording every speech and meeting. He kept every paper he could. This massive archive was used to give free range to his messianic tendencies as he published volume after volume of revealing and insightful diaries, polemical essays and the videos of his speeches.
If he could not change the world, he would try to make it listen and learn. Only Winston Churchill's self-mythologising surpassed this as a model of how to secure one's own place in history. In this and other ways, Benn's career was an extraordinary journey. As he put it: "Like my father, I grow more left as I grow older."
His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916.
Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). In 1942, he reluctantly gave up his Commons seat when called upon to bolster the wartime coalition's Labour contingent in the Lords, accepting a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate.
He and his wife, Margaret, created a happy, industrious and religious London household, with three sons (a fourth was stillborn); the Stansgate title came from their second home, by the Blackwater estuary in Essex. Tony – the second son, initially known to his family as Jimmy – was born in London and grew up at 40 Millbank, Westminster, which was bombed in the war and much later was the site of Millbank Tower, housing the headquarters from which New Labour planned their 1997 election victory. From Westminster school he went to New College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics.
After second world war service in the RAF (1943-45) he returned to Oxford, graduating in 1948, spent some time in the US, and worked as a BBC radio producer (1949-50). He was known formally as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie by friends and family, till in 1972 he settled on plain Tony Benn. However, the change of name could not disguise the fact that he was the product of an elite background. As he once said: "My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they're up to."
In 1949, he married a wealthy American, Caroline Middleton DeCamp, a socialist, educationist and biographer, and they, too, built a happy domestic life in a large house in Notting Hill, west London. Their daughter, Melissa, and three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, were all active politically, with Hilary becoming a Labour cabinet minister. Caroline's wealth matched Benn's own inherited capital, derived from the Benn Brothers publishing firm.
On entering parliament through the Bristol South East byelection of November 1950, caused by the ill-health of the former chancellor of the exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps, Benn was a conventional centre-right backbencher, criticising the Bevanite rebellion against the Attlee government. His elder brother, Michael, had been killed in a flying accident while on active service in 1942, leaving Tony the eldest sibling. Aside from the psychological impact this had, he would thus one day be Lord Stansgate and have to give up his seat.
In 1955, he introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage. The Lords voted against the measure, but the dispute forced him to develop his formidable reputation as an advocate of constitutional reform.
Throughout the 1950s, he was generally known as a broadcasting expert, an advocate of the modernisation of Labour's electoral strategy and a campaigner on colonial issues. He was the first MP to table a motion on apartheid, following his father's lead, as in many other aspects of his life. Initially a follower of Hugh Gaitskell, the party's leader from 1955, Benn switched to Wilson when Gaitskell proposed the revision of clause four of the party constitution in 1959, dropping the commitment to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Gaitskell in turn withdrew his support for Benn's campaign to retain his seat.
In 1960, Benn's father died, thus disqualifying him from remaining in the Commons. He was still eligible to stand as a candidate in the resulting byelection, which he won. Nonetheless, he could not take up the seat; though abandoned by his party leader, he fought on alone.
After a three-year struggle, he gained the support of the Conservative government for the Peerage bill and was able to renounce his title. His Conservative opponent in Bristol South East, Malcolm St Clair, stood down, and Benn won the resulting byelection, returning to the Commons at just the right moment.
Gaitskell had died in January 1963, Wilson succeeded him, and Benn was back as an MP the following August. Early signs of his radicalism had come in 1954, when he joined the H-bomb national committee, and in 1957, when he introduced a Human Rights bill. On the use of military force and unilateral nuclear disarmament, he was securely on the left of the party. He argued that "all war represents a failure of diplomacy", while not making it clear if that included the war against Hitler.
When Labour won in 1964, Benn was appointed postmaster general, outside the cabinet. He also began his habit of making a daily diary entry, in parallel with his colleagues Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. Benn's record as a minister was mixed. He was generally effective and, in the 1960s, well liked by most of his civil servants because he was good at going through the work taken home in his red boxes. He was also an efficient spin doctor, focusing on eye-catching policy decisions that he took time and trouble to communicate effectively, frequently leaking documents in the name of freedom of information and defending his right to discuss general issues in speeches.
As postmaster general, he tried and failed to have the Queen's head removed from stamps. After entering the cabinet as minister of technology (1966-70), he backed Concorde, not least because it would be partly built in his Bristol constituency. In both jobs he attempted to connect the actions of the government with socialism: "We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values."
In 1968, at a meeting of the Welsh Council of Labour in Llandudno, Benn first suggested that revolutionary action might be necessary to prevent the violence taking place in France being repeated in the UK. "It is no good saying it could not happen here. It could … The widening gulf between the Labour party and those who supported it last time could well be an index of the party's own obsolescence." Parliament, too, had to change. This theme of giving the party to its grassroots would recur into the 1980s. The press, however, ignored all this, preferring to focus on Benn's call for push-button referendums.
According to his cabinet colleague Tony Crosland, Benn welcomed Labour's defeat in 1970. He became heavily involved with the Alternative Economic Strategy developed with Stuart Holland and Judith Hart, and summed up rather better in Holland's book The Socialist Challenge (1975) than in Benn's own Arguments for Socialism (1979). From this time, his radical views on constitutional and international affairs began to be reflected more obviously in his economic analysis.
If the problems of democracy could be cured by more democracy, planning and nationalisation would cure the problems of the economy. Following the rapid increase in oil prices and the chaos of the Heath government's confrontation with the miners, there appeared to be no future in the status quo. Democracy and capitalism seemed equally impotent in the face of a global crisis of economic, social and political confidence. Benn's radical critique of the 1964-70 Wilson government now chimed well with the militancy of the shop stewards' movement. The failure of the City and the service sector to replace the jobs being lost to deindustrialisation and the sense of Britain becoming ungovernable by conventional means fed Benn's growing militancy.
After Labour's return to power in 1974, Benn's attempt as industry secretary to force the Wilson government to implement the election manifesto was thwarted by his departmental civil servants and his cabinet colleagues. The document sat, as the Attlee manifesto had done from 1945 to 1951, in the middle of the cabinet table, but this time it was completely ignored.
Benn's failures were compounded through 1975. Having championed the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Economic Community, he saw the "yes" campaign win. He was a leading figure opposing the use of wage restraint on trade unions but saw the policy reversed. Finally, having been given a key economic ministry, he was demoted to Energy, Wilson informing him via the Daily Telegraph while he was on a visit to Jamaica.
From then on he was a "dissenting minister" in the government, a leader of those across the Labour movement frustrated by the government's lack of radicalism. Having made a respectable showing in the first round of the leadership election that followed Wilson's resignation in 1976, he supported Michael Foot, but the prize went to James Callaghan.
When Labour lost the 1979 general election, Benn was well placed to assume the leadership of the left, and began to propose constitutional changes to give greater representation to the views of activists and trade unionists in drafting the manifesto and in selecting MPs. Militant and other Trotskyite groups that had perfected techniques of entryism sponsored the resolutions on party reform.
Two very different groups were now following Benn. On one hand there were revolutionaries of various kinds, many of whom wanted to destroy capitalism and did not mind killing off the Labour party in the process. On the other, Labour's left wing felt disappointed and betrayed by what they saw as the failures of the party's five years in office. The more progress Benn made with his demands for reform, the greater the possibility of a split became. When Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980, Benn came close to running against Foot, but decided to hold back.
Despite Foot's passionate appeal to unity, Benn did stand against Denis Healey in the September 1981 election for the deputy leadership. Healey won, under the reformed system that Benn had championed, by less than 0.5%. This margin was accounted for by some of the MPs who would soon be leaving for the Social Democratic party (SDP), launched the previous March – though others of this group actually voted for Benn in the hope that he would win.
Labour began the long, hard climb back to power. The left of the party split – the Tribune group backing Foot and later Neil Kinnock, and Benn setting up his own Campaign group in 1982. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached. It took a decade to roll it back completely, but Benn's realistic challenge for the leadership was over.
By 1983, Bristol South East had disappeared in boundary changes, and Benn failed to depose Michael Cocks in the safe seat of Bristol South. Instead he fought and lost Bristol East. He was selected for the first Labour seat to fall vacant, Chesterfield in Derbyshire, which he won in a byelection in March 1984.
Benn's period out of the Commons and Kinnock's policy review took much of the momentum out of his career. When he stood for the leadership in 1988, he was heavily defeated. He became a widely respected and effective backbench critic of the Conservatives, and then, from 1997, of Tony Blair's Labour government. In 2001 he retired after 51 years in the Commons "to devote more time to politics".
The major elements of the Bennite critique of British capitalism were that Britain needed a siege economy to protect domestic industry; nationalisation or selective share ownership of the top 25-100 companies and joint stock banks; wide-ranging constitutional reform; withdrawal from the Common Market, Nato and Northern Ireland; unilateral nuclear disarmament, and so on. The Bennite worldview presented a well worked out analysis according to which the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations ran the global economy. The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Spin doctors and pollsters dominated politics. "I did not enter the Labour party … to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris," wrote Benn.
The US was an imperial power that had pursued a policy of world domination since the second world war, and that policy was based on a doctrine: "A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world." All events and developments were made to fit the worldview. All was underpinned by imagined conspiracies and persecutions.
Once this manifesto was completed, it never again altered. From the mid-70s onwards, Benn ceased to have anything new to say as a political thinker. The rest of his life was spent trying to make current events fit his outlook and condemning those who changed their minds and positions. This resistance to new ideas, new evidence and critical thinking about changing events was extremely damaging to the left in the UK. As Benn's mind closed to alternative positions, so the part of the British left that he led became deeply conservative, if not actually reactionary.
Many tortuous conclusions resulted, for example calling on Britain to recognise the Soviet-imposed government of Afghanistan. The great parliamentarian was by the end of the 80s characterising Britain as a state in which the extra-parliamentary struggle had to be supported because democracy was not working. In 1981 he told a Trotskyite group that Labour was "under attack by the Pentagon, Brussels, IMF, the House of Lords and the SDP".
After the US invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, he told Tribune that America might seize control of the UK if British governments did not do its bidding. The following year, he defended the right to revolt against the "oncoming" totalitarianism of the Thatcher governments, and in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash he predicted worldwide rioting in the streets and the meltdown of nuclear reactors.
In 2003 he was dismissive of a woman whose family had been executed by Saddam Hussein as a CIA spy: her words were American propaganda. He was a leading figure arguing against the liberation of Libya from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi and strongly opposed any intervention in the conflict in Syria by outside powers.
By the end of his life many of his positions on anti-imperialism and anti-western intervention had become mainstream on the British left and he had become a respected elder statesman of the anti-war, anti-US, anti-intervention generation of radicals. The roots of Benn's socialism were stubbornly non-Marxist. He did not arrive at his worldview through historical materialism as much as through the Bible. He was therefore always a slightly awkward leader of the economic determinists of the left.
What he lacked in knowledge of political economy or revolutionary theory he always more than made up for with energy. This was applied with equal zeal to everything he did: "I have got built into me, through my upbringing or whatever, a tremendously strong inner voice saying what I should do at any moment." In the 1960s, Foot noted: "No one in Labour party history – not even Herbert Morrison in his heyday – applied his mind and energies more assiduously to the work of the [National] Executive."
Teetotal Benn was more than assiduous: he was obsessive. From an early age he kept all his papers, the basement of his house in Holland Park, central London, becoming a massive personal archive, filled with every conceivable piece of office machinery. Towards the end of his life he downsized to a flat nearby, but the archiving remained a passion.
The element of moral fervour that underpinned everything Benn did came from his nonconformist conscience, which made him view life as a process of self-improvement and his career as a duty. One of his most endearing qualities as a younger man was that if someone was unconvinced by his position, his reaction was that he had not put his case well enough.
He never stopped preaching through any programme that would have him, and was a resident on radio's Any Questions and television's Question Time for decades, becoming in time more comfortable with forums in which he could communicate directly with the public – "people at home". His writing tended to be stilted and formulaic, but he was a superb speaker, at his best in the Commons, but articulate and usually humorous, as occasion demanded.
Faith also provided the inspiration for the perfect association in Benn's mind between his own interests and those of the Labour party, the country and, at times it seemed, the world: anyone who did not see the harmony of interests in the same way Benn dismissed as part of the world's problem.
He was often compared with Thatcher. They shared the same qualities of unblinking belief when faced with the glaring lights of contradictory facts. Benn was a true believer and expected true belief, but he differed from Thatcher because he was not a hater. Policy genuinely mattered more to him than personality.
The urge to question and challenge authority made him one of the great parliamentarians of the postwar period. With Foot, Enoch Powell and a handful of others, he had the ability to command the house's attention, especially when he spoke of matters relating to its own rights and privileges. This was a theme he returned to consistently in the 80s and the 90s, when he felt strongly that the role of the Commons in scrutinising the executive was being undermined by the concentration of power in Downing Street, first by Thatcher and then by Blair.
In 1987 the first volume of his diaries appeared, covering the period 1963-67. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. At the same time, Benn began to present more and more reform bills to the Commons. He did not do things by accident. The switch from trying to capture the party to producing an endless flood of words, in bills, the diaries, collections of essays, videos of speeches, CDs, DVDs, through websites and in semi-authorised biographies formed the great project that filled out his final years. By 2013 a film, Will and Testament, was in post-production.
In response to the flood of his own words, the public's perception of him shifted. Much of what he said was highly critical of the Blair governments and the European Union. He appealed to the anti-war movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Ukip supporters in about equal measure. No longer the most dangerous man in Britain, he had the final volume of his diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (2013), in which he movingly described Caroline's death from cancer, serialised in the Daily Mail. Caroline died in 2000 and he is survived by their children.
Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."
He had half a century in parliament. Then he had an Indian summer as a national radical treasure, the Home Counties' favourite revolutionary. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist. He will be forgotten as a practical politician and a political thinker.
In the end, his reputation will be significantly greater than the sum of his achievements because of the vast archive he accumulated and the quality of his diaries. He was like Samuel Pepys – someone who described an age without ever having shaped it – and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds, and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.
• Tony (Anthony Neil Wedgwood) Benn, politician and diarist, born 3 April 1925; died 14 March 2014
Friday, 14 March 2014
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Paul Buchanan on The Blue Nile - Peace at Last remastered at last
Navigating The Blue Nile again with band’s classic album re-release
James McNair
March 2, 2014
Paul Buchanan is a people person. Mention your baby daughter to him and next time you speak he’ll remember her name and ask how she is. “The true line is important, James,” says the singer speaking on the phone from Glasgow, and the true line – ie all that is precious and emotive about life – has long informed Buchanan’s songwriting with The Blue Nile.
The Scottish trio’s 1984 debut A Walk Across the Rooftops and its tardy 1989 follow-up Hats established them as a treasured cult act. Blending rain-smeared, unashamedly romantic songs of the city with 1980s studio technology rendered humane, their wonderfully transporting music was ultimately defined by Buchanan’s voice; that wincingly accurate conduit of emotion that, in 2012, rode stark, piano-based arrangements on his acclaimed solo debut, Mid Air.
Today, though, Buchanan is discussing The Blue Nile’s 1996 album Peace at Last. Last year saw A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats remastered and reissued, each with its respective bonus disc, and now the group’s third album is getting the same treatment. “We wanted lines on hands and faces,” Buchanan has said of the LP.
Having made their first two, wearingly meticulous records in a former Victorian schoolhouse in the tiny village of Pencaitland, East Lothian, the group were reluctant to pitch camp there again. Signing to Warner Bros afforded them the budget to lead a more itinerant lifestyle, hence they spent time in Los Angeles and various European cities, often recording on the hoof in spontaneously hired rooms.
“It was a slightly bumpy period between the three of us in terms of the direction we should take,” says Buchanan. “The song Soon is a good example. I, more than anyone, was pushing for the slightly retro version that’s on the album and that was based on an old organ that I’d found in a junk store.
“The reaction to Hats had been great, but in a sense we weren’t ready for it. People would say of Peace at Last: ‘Oh, it’s not like Hats.’ We were like: ‘Yes, we know – we made Hats!’ The technology was changing after that, and you began to hear all these electronic records that had a certain precision to them. I didn’t want that.”
Buchanan says that an acoustic guitar that fate earmarked for his attention was crucial in finding the way forward on Peace at Last. Out walking in Manhattan one morning, he went into the renowned music shop Manny’s Music, briefly strummed an old black-and-tan-coloured Gibson, then put it back.
“Robert [Bell, The Blue Nile multi-instrumentalist] was in New York at the time, too, and he phoned me and said in passing: ‘Oh, I seen a guitar I think you’d like today.’ He described it and I went: ‘That’s really weird – I’ve just played it.’”
The instrument, with an “earthy, rusty-stringed vibe” that so attracted Buchanan, leads the album’s opener Happiness, a song that also packs sublime input from an amateur gospel choir from downtown Los Angeles. In typical Blue Nile fashion, recruiting them was a very low-key process.
“Someone at the record company knew a lady who worked at the post office whose sister sang,” says Buchanan. “So we went to meet the choir at their church and then they came down to the studio with their kids a few days later. We had a cup of tea, did a couple of takes and took some photos. There was an honesty to their performance you could feel in the room. They were doing it for the love of it.”
• The two-disc collector’s edition of Peace at Last (Virgin EMI/Universal Catalogue) is out now
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/music/navigating-the-blue-nile-again-with-bands-classic-album-re-release
The full tracklisting of the album is as follows:
Disc One: Digitially Remastered Album
Happiness
Tomorrow Morning
Sentimental Man
Love Came Down
Body And Soul
Holy Love
Family Life
War Is Love
God Bless You Kid
Soon
Disc Two: Bonus Tracks
Soon (Laurel Canyon Mix)
War Is Love (New Vocal mix)
Turn Yourself Around
Holy Love (Picture Mix)
A Certain Kind Of Angel (Unreleased Demo)
There Was A Girl
There Was A Girl
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
Last night's set list
At The Centurion, Newcastle upon Tyne: -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Tell Me Why
The Only Living Boy In New York
Baby What You Want Me To Do
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
You're Sixteen
It's been a long time since the last visit to an open mic at The Centurion. No trip to York this week, so, knowing that the event had restarted after a 2 or 3 year gap, thought I'd take a chance.
The boy Paul came to witness the mayhem and may well provide his own review if he can be arsed! His only formal comment being "Too much Neil Young".
The host forgot that I'd asked to play and, feeling guilty, gave me the headline slot. Beer intruded on a couple of songs, but it turned out ok in the end (I think).
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Tell Me Why
The Only Living Boy In New York
Baby What You Want Me To Do
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
You're Sixteen
It's been a long time since the last visit to an open mic at The Centurion. No trip to York this week, so, knowing that the event had restarted after a 2 or 3 year gap, thought I'd take a chance.
The boy Paul came to witness the mayhem and may well provide his own review if he can be arsed! His only formal comment being "Too much Neil Young".
The host forgot that I'd asked to play and, feeling guilty, gave me the headline slot. Beer intruded on a couple of songs, but it turned out ok in the end (I think).
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
James Ellis RIP
James Ellis obituary
Actor who played Bert Lynch in BBC police drama Z-Cars and appeared in shows ranging from Doctor Who to Nightingales
Dennis Barker
The Guardian
Actor who played Bert Lynch in BBC police drama Z-Cars and appeared in shows ranging from Doctor Who to Nightingales
Dennis Barker
The Guardian
Sunday 9 March 2014
The actor James Ellis (also known as Jimmy), who has died aged 82, was the longest-serving original cast member of the hugely popular BBC television series Z-Cars. When Z-Cars began in 1962, it represented a major change in the way the police were characterised in fiction. The BBC police series Dixon of Dock Green had been running for seven years, with Jack Warner playing the understanding, avuncular police constable Dixon. Z-Cars, by contrast, had the actors Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor making cynical remarks about the death of a murdered police colleague whose funeral they were attending, and Ellis, as Constable Bert Lynch, hearing from a colleague how he beats up his wife, without doing anything about it. Z-Cars attempted to show how moral anarchy in the rundown industrial area of the fictional northern town of Newtown could infect the police as well as criminals.
Lynch's Belfast accent was for real. Ellis, whose father had been a sheet-metal worker in a Northern Ireland shipyard, had been advised at acting school to iron out his accent, but he declined to do so. It made the character of Lynch immediately distinctive.
Born in Belfast, Ellis won a city scholarship to Methodist college, and there made his first acting appearance, in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, before studying English literature and French philosophy at Queen's University Belfast. He dropped out to pursue an acting career and in 1951 won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic.
He established himself as an actor and director in Belfast, where, he said, "By 1960 I was running theatre companies where I gave a plasterer called Frank Carson his comedy break in pantomime." He made an early TV appearance in 1961 in a BBC production of Stewart Love's The Randy Dandy, as Dandy Jordan, a Belfast shipworker who refuses to strike, which brought him to the attention of BBC producers casting for Z-Cars.
When Ellis signed on for the series, it was intended to run for only six shows. It went on for four years before being dropped by the BBC, only to re-emerge in the spinoff shows Softly, Softly and Softly, Softly: Task Force, and then a revival of Z-Cars. During its long run, Ellis was often taken for a real policeman by people who recognised his face, while police officers who met him tended to give him advice on how his role could be made even more realistic.
After Z-Cars ended in September 1978, Ellis continued to appear on TV in a wide range of programmes. In the Play for Today Billy trilogy (1982-84) he was Norman Martin, the violent father of a Protestant working-class family, with Kenneth Branagh in an early role as his son Billy. He was Peter Warmsly in the 1989 Doctor Who story Battlefield, and had regular roles in Nightingales (1990-93), the Channel 4 sitcom about security guards also starring Robert Lindsay and David Threlfall; In Sickness and in Health (1992, with Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett); the football drama series Playing the Field (1998-2002); and the BBC Northern Ireland drama Ballykissangel (1998-99, as Uncle Minto). His films included No Surrender (1985), Priest (1994) and Resurrection Man (1998).
He also pursued an interest in writing, especially poetry. In the early 1970s, he began to translate from the French the work of poets including Pierre de Ronsard. Later, he embarked on verse of his own, some about his father, a man conscious of his lack of education who toured secondhand bookshops for volumes that might improve his own and his son's education and understanding. A book of Ellis's poems, Domestic Flight, was published in 1998; and a book of short stories, Home & Away, in 2001. He also did charity work for the Lord's Taverners, and continued to take acting work, most recently appearing on TV in 2012 as a care-home resident in ITV's Eternal Law.
Ellis is survived by his second wife, Robina, whom he met when she was working behind the cameras on Z-Cars, and married in 1976; their son, Toto; and his daughter, Amanda, from his first marriage, to Betty, which ended in divorce. Two sons of his first marriage, Hugo and Adam, predeceased him.
• James Ellis, actor and writer, born 15 March 1931; died 8 March 2014
The actor James Ellis (also known as Jimmy), who has died aged 82, was the longest-serving original cast member of the hugely popular BBC television series Z-Cars. When Z-Cars began in 1962, it represented a major change in the way the police were characterised in fiction. The BBC police series Dixon of Dock Green had been running for seven years, with Jack Warner playing the understanding, avuncular police constable Dixon. Z-Cars, by contrast, had the actors Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor making cynical remarks about the death of a murdered police colleague whose funeral they were attending, and Ellis, as Constable Bert Lynch, hearing from a colleague how he beats up his wife, without doing anything about it. Z-Cars attempted to show how moral anarchy in the rundown industrial area of the fictional northern town of Newtown could infect the police as well as criminals.
Lynch's Belfast accent was for real. Ellis, whose father had been a sheet-metal worker in a Northern Ireland shipyard, had been advised at acting school to iron out his accent, but he declined to do so. It made the character of Lynch immediately distinctive.
Born in Belfast, Ellis won a city scholarship to Methodist college, and there made his first acting appearance, in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, before studying English literature and French philosophy at Queen's University Belfast. He dropped out to pursue an acting career and in 1951 won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic.
He established himself as an actor and director in Belfast, where, he said, "By 1960 I was running theatre companies where I gave a plasterer called Frank Carson his comedy break in pantomime." He made an early TV appearance in 1961 in a BBC production of Stewart Love's The Randy Dandy, as Dandy Jordan, a Belfast shipworker who refuses to strike, which brought him to the attention of BBC producers casting for Z-Cars.
When Ellis signed on for the series, it was intended to run for only six shows. It went on for four years before being dropped by the BBC, only to re-emerge in the spinoff shows Softly, Softly and Softly, Softly: Task Force, and then a revival of Z-Cars. During its long run, Ellis was often taken for a real policeman by people who recognised his face, while police officers who met him tended to give him advice on how his role could be made even more realistic.
After Z-Cars ended in September 1978, Ellis continued to appear on TV in a wide range of programmes. In the Play for Today Billy trilogy (1982-84) he was Norman Martin, the violent father of a Protestant working-class family, with Kenneth Branagh in an early role as his son Billy. He was Peter Warmsly in the 1989 Doctor Who story Battlefield, and had regular roles in Nightingales (1990-93), the Channel 4 sitcom about security guards also starring Robert Lindsay and David Threlfall; In Sickness and in Health (1992, with Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett); the football drama series Playing the Field (1998-2002); and the BBC Northern Ireland drama Ballykissangel (1998-99, as Uncle Minto). His films included No Surrender (1985), Priest (1994) and Resurrection Man (1998).
He also pursued an interest in writing, especially poetry. In the early 1970s, he began to translate from the French the work of poets including Pierre de Ronsard. Later, he embarked on verse of his own, some about his father, a man conscious of his lack of education who toured secondhand bookshops for volumes that might improve his own and his son's education and understanding. A book of Ellis's poems, Domestic Flight, was published in 1998; and a book of short stories, Home & Away, in 2001. He also did charity work for the Lord's Taverners, and continued to take acting work, most recently appearing on TV in 2012 as a care-home resident in ITV's Eternal Law.
Ellis is survived by his second wife, Robina, whom he met when she was working behind the cameras on Z-Cars, and married in 1976; their son, Toto; and his daughter, Amanda, from his first marriage, to Betty, which ended in divorce. Two sons of his first marriage, Hugo and Adam, predeceased him.
• James Ellis, actor and writer, born 15 March 1931; died 8 March 2014
Monday, 10 March 2014
John Banville on Philip Marlowe's return in The Black-Eyed Blonde
Reinventing Philip Marlowe
Raymond Chandler turned crime fiction into art. When John Banville was asked to write a new Marlowe story he wondered how he could match the intricate plots and capture the spirit of the famous detective
John Banville
The Guardian
Raymond Chandler turned crime fiction into art. When John Banville was asked to write a new Marlowe story he wondered how he could match the intricate plots and capture the spirit of the famous detective
John Banville
The Guardian
Saturday 8 March 2014
It was in my teenage years that I first encountered the novels of Raymond Chandler. From childhood onwards I had been keen on crime fiction: like many boys I was fascinated by puzzles, eager to find out everything I could about adult passions, and unslakeably bloodthirsty. I liked in particular the Queens of Crime, that regiment of murderous ladies in flowered frocks, as I pictured them: Agatha Christie, of course, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, and Dorothy L Sayers. Their brand of polite murder mystery, perfectly characterised in the title of WH Auden's 1948 essay "The Guilty Vicarage", provided a frequently unacknowledged but vital ingredient of a really satisfying whodunnit: cosiness.
Chandler offered something original and exciting. Philip Marlowe was a new kind of detective – poised and articulate, dry as a dry martini, as witty as Thurber and as disenchanted as Scott Fitzgerald – but there was also a quality to these novels I had not encountered before in crime fiction. Although I would hardly have been able to articulate the thought at the time, what I found most attractive in Chandler's work was the sumptuousness of the prose style. Even when the streets that Marlowe was obliged to go down were the meanest, the language in which they were described was rich in metaphor, at once sensuous and crisp, and marvellously redolent of mid-century California, a place and a time we all thought we were familiar with from the movies.
"The most durable thing in writing is style," Chandler wrote in a letter to a literary agent in 1945. In this assertion and others like it he was laying claim to his place on Parnassus, if on one of the lower slopes. Flaubert and Joyce complained frequently and loudly of having no choice but to scatter the gold coinage of their prose over the base metal of mere mortal doings, and Chandler too, in his less emphatic, more sardonic, way, sought to set himself among the gods of pure language, pure style.
Like the bard of Bay City, the French and Irish masters of realist fiction frequently professed to care nothing for content and everything for form – and form, of course, was just another word for style. Writing to one of his numerous correspondents, Chandler insisted that "the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it". Out of their grand indifference, however, Flaubert created Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, and Joyce Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus; and Chandler, not to be outdone, gave us Marlowe, the private eye of private eyes, who is among the immortals.
Who was Chandler, where did he come from, and what formed him? Marlowe was a quintessential native Californian, but Chandler decidedly was not. He was born in Chicago in 1888, into a Quaker family of Irish origins – by coincidence, his mother Florence was born in Waterford, the same Irish city from which his father's people had emigrated to America earlier in the 19th century.
Maurice Chandler worked for the railroad, was an alcoholic and, if his son is to be believed, a waster, who abandoned his wife and son. In 1900 Florence Chandler transferred young Raymond and herself to Britain. Chandler attended Dulwich College, which lists PG Wodehouse among its old boys. "A classical education," Chandler later wrote, "saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what current fiction is too full of."
He had hopes of becoming a barrister, but could not afford to go to university. However, his Waterford uncle, Ernest Thornton – a name that should have a place of honour in the annals of American literature – offered to send him to Europe for a year, to study French and German and to some degree to finish his education. Chandler spent time in Paris, Munich, Nuremberg and Vienna. At the end of this Wanderjahr he returned to London and became a journalist, not very satisfactorily. Later he forsook the newspapers for a job in the civil service, with an equal lack of satisfaction. He also began to write poetry.
All this seems hardly the typical apprenticeship of a crime writer, and certainly not of one who began his career by churning out hard-boiled stories for Black Mask and other pulp magazines that were so popular at the time. But then crime writing was a last resort for him. All his life he not only felt himself out of place geographically and socially – "a man without a country", as he said of himself – but considered that the writing work he was doing was beneath him, even in the years when he was receiving critical acclaim – Auden and Evelyn Waugh were among those who recognised his talent and originality – and earning a lot of money. He was ever on the lookout for slights, and in his letters never misses an opportunity to take a swipe at the highbrow critics, especially Edmund Wilson, his abiding bête noir.
Despairing of making a life for himself in Britain, and all but abandoning his ambitions to be a poet and essayist, he appealed again to Uncle Ernest over in Waterford, pledging that if Ernest would lend him £500 he would never press again on that sainted gentleman's generosity. Ernest, spotting an offer that even if he could he would be ill-advised to refuse, agreed. "On 10 July 1912," his latest biographer, Tom Williams, writes, "Raymond Chandler boarded the SS Merion at Liverpool. He was wearing a tailored suit, carrying his silver-tipped cane, and had $40 in his pocket. He was heading to America." He stopped in Nebraska for a while, scratching a living from odd jobs, then crossed the Rockies and landed at last on that tawny strip of coastline that, with a few intermittences, would be his home, however uneasily, for the rest of his life.
In Los Angeles he worked as a bookkeeper, of all things, in a creamery, of all places. Then, in 1917, he enlisted in the Canadian army, which, unlike the US army, would provide his mother with a stipend to live on while her son was serving abroad. In France he fought in the trenches, an experience that marked him – indeed, scarred him – for life. "Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again," he said. After the war he once more worked in various jobs, the most long-lasting of which was with an oil company, from which he was dismissed in 1933 for drunkenness, absenteeism and moral turpitude – he had an eye, and more than an eye, for the secretaries. It was to be a long while before he came back to writing: his first detective story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask in 1933, while his first novel, and his first masterpiece, The Big Sleep, did not appear until 1939, when he was 50.
What was the cause of this fecklessness and restless discontent? More to the point, what was it that drove him to drink? Here the question of sex rears its androgynous head, and a very loaded question it is. Some readers have detected strains of misogyny in his work, and certainly his attitude to women is guarded, to say the least – I think I am right in saying that in every one of the Marlowe novels the killer turns out to be a woman. His wife Cissy was 18 years older than he was, which meant she was only nine years younger than his mother. There is no doubt that he loved Cissy, and that he was devastated by her death, yet it seems to have been a distinctly peculiar marriage; but then, what marriage is not?
Commentators have also pointed to traces of homoeroticism in the work. My friend the Chilean novelist Rodrigo Fresán suggests that the only person Marlowe ever really loved was Terry Lennox, the friend who betrayed him in what many consider to be Chandler's finest novel, The Long Goodbye. We should keep in mind, however, that Chandler was a man of his time, a time in which women were women and men as often as not turned out to be Rock Hudson, and everyone tossed throwaway insults at "frails" – women, that is – effeminate men, black people and Jews. It does not make it right that everyone was doing it, but all the same, everyone was doing it.
Chandler wrote, in the same letter quoted from above, that he was "fundamentally rather uninterested in plot" – that "rather" is an example of those jaded little Englishisms he frequently affected – and returned to the theme of the supremacy of style: "The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time." Here he was, surely unconsciously, echoing Henry James, who in his notebooks reminded himself that "In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it."
What Chandler was after, he said, was "richness of texture". He pointed out that he "wrote pulp stories with as much care as slick stories [ie stories for literary magazines] … I obeyed the formula because I honestly liked it, but I was always trying to stretch it, trying to get in bits of peripheral writing which were not necessary but which I felt would have a subconscious effect even on the semi-literate readers." This is an artist speaking, and it was Chandler's achievement to lift the crime genre to the level of art – not high art, perhaps, which part of him disdained, but art all the same.
He tried not to be pretentious. In "The Guilty Vicarage" Auden had singled him out for praise, which provoked an outburst of false modesty. "Auden leaves me lost and groping. His piece about detective stories was brilliant in the clear cold classical manner. But why drag me in? I'm just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form." Further on in the same letter, however, complaining that pulp-magazine editors would always take out descriptive passages because readers did not appreciate that kind of thing, he comes up with this wonderful encapsulation of his aims and his methods:
"And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell."
When my agent, Ed Victor, who represents the Chandler estate, first approached me with the suggestion that I might write a Philip Marlowe novel, I hesitated for a long time. Should I, an Irishman in the second decade of the 21st century, attempt to follow on from an iconic and much-loved writer whose first novel was published six years before I was born? There was much to daunt me. Could I invent a plot to match the master's fiendishly intricate mysteries? Would I be able to catch anything of the flavour of postwar Los Angeles, the accents, the atmosphere, the acrid feel of a time and place so specific to the Marlowe books? Above all, would I be able to reinvent a convincing Marlowe?
I went back to the novels, of course, but also to the essays and the letters – especially the letters – and felt the pull of an irresistible affinity. Good crime writing is as difficult as any other kind, and, in its way, just as rewarding. In The Black-Eyed Blonde – one of a list of possible titles that Chandler drew up, and which I was happy to borrow from – I have sought not to parrot Chandler, but to honour the spirit, vigorous, valiant and melancholy, of this master of English prose. And now I wish I could meet up with him in some shady bar on Sunset, slide on to the stool beside him, give him a light for his cigarette and buy him a gin gimlet, and ask him how I did.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/08/philip-marlowe-raymond-chandler-john-banville
It was in my teenage years that I first encountered the novels of Raymond Chandler. From childhood onwards I had been keen on crime fiction: like many boys I was fascinated by puzzles, eager to find out everything I could about adult passions, and unslakeably bloodthirsty. I liked in particular the Queens of Crime, that regiment of murderous ladies in flowered frocks, as I pictured them: Agatha Christie, of course, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, and Dorothy L Sayers. Their brand of polite murder mystery, perfectly characterised in the title of WH Auden's 1948 essay "The Guilty Vicarage", provided a frequently unacknowledged but vital ingredient of a really satisfying whodunnit: cosiness.
Chandler offered something original and exciting. Philip Marlowe was a new kind of detective – poised and articulate, dry as a dry martini, as witty as Thurber and as disenchanted as Scott Fitzgerald – but there was also a quality to these novels I had not encountered before in crime fiction. Although I would hardly have been able to articulate the thought at the time, what I found most attractive in Chandler's work was the sumptuousness of the prose style. Even when the streets that Marlowe was obliged to go down were the meanest, the language in which they were described was rich in metaphor, at once sensuous and crisp, and marvellously redolent of mid-century California, a place and a time we all thought we were familiar with from the movies.
"The most durable thing in writing is style," Chandler wrote in a letter to a literary agent in 1945. In this assertion and others like it he was laying claim to his place on Parnassus, if on one of the lower slopes. Flaubert and Joyce complained frequently and loudly of having no choice but to scatter the gold coinage of their prose over the base metal of mere mortal doings, and Chandler too, in his less emphatic, more sardonic, way, sought to set himself among the gods of pure language, pure style.
Like the bard of Bay City, the French and Irish masters of realist fiction frequently professed to care nothing for content and everything for form – and form, of course, was just another word for style. Writing to one of his numerous correspondents, Chandler insisted that "the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it". Out of their grand indifference, however, Flaubert created Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau, and Joyce Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus; and Chandler, not to be outdone, gave us Marlowe, the private eye of private eyes, who is among the immortals.
Who was Chandler, where did he come from, and what formed him? Marlowe was a quintessential native Californian, but Chandler decidedly was not. He was born in Chicago in 1888, into a Quaker family of Irish origins – by coincidence, his mother Florence was born in Waterford, the same Irish city from which his father's people had emigrated to America earlier in the 19th century.
Maurice Chandler worked for the railroad, was an alcoholic and, if his son is to be believed, a waster, who abandoned his wife and son. In 1900 Florence Chandler transferred young Raymond and herself to Britain. Chandler attended Dulwich College, which lists PG Wodehouse among its old boys. "A classical education," Chandler later wrote, "saves you from being fooled by pretentiousness, which is what current fiction is too full of."
He had hopes of becoming a barrister, but could not afford to go to university. However, his Waterford uncle, Ernest Thornton – a name that should have a place of honour in the annals of American literature – offered to send him to Europe for a year, to study French and German and to some degree to finish his education. Chandler spent time in Paris, Munich, Nuremberg and Vienna. At the end of this Wanderjahr he returned to London and became a journalist, not very satisfactorily. Later he forsook the newspapers for a job in the civil service, with an equal lack of satisfaction. He also began to write poetry.
All this seems hardly the typical apprenticeship of a crime writer, and certainly not of one who began his career by churning out hard-boiled stories for Black Mask and other pulp magazines that were so popular at the time. But then crime writing was a last resort for him. All his life he not only felt himself out of place geographically and socially – "a man without a country", as he said of himself – but considered that the writing work he was doing was beneath him, even in the years when he was receiving critical acclaim – Auden and Evelyn Waugh were among those who recognised his talent and originality – and earning a lot of money. He was ever on the lookout for slights, and in his letters never misses an opportunity to take a swipe at the highbrow critics, especially Edmund Wilson, his abiding bête noir.
Despairing of making a life for himself in Britain, and all but abandoning his ambitions to be a poet and essayist, he appealed again to Uncle Ernest over in Waterford, pledging that if Ernest would lend him £500 he would never press again on that sainted gentleman's generosity. Ernest, spotting an offer that even if he could he would be ill-advised to refuse, agreed. "On 10 July 1912," his latest biographer, Tom Williams, writes, "Raymond Chandler boarded the SS Merion at Liverpool. He was wearing a tailored suit, carrying his silver-tipped cane, and had $40 in his pocket. He was heading to America." He stopped in Nebraska for a while, scratching a living from odd jobs, then crossed the Rockies and landed at last on that tawny strip of coastline that, with a few intermittences, would be his home, however uneasily, for the rest of his life.
In Los Angeles he worked as a bookkeeper, of all things, in a creamery, of all places. Then, in 1917, he enlisted in the Canadian army, which, unlike the US army, would provide his mother with a stipend to live on while her son was serving abroad. In France he fought in the trenches, an experience that marked him – indeed, scarred him – for life. "Once you have had to lead a platoon into direct machine-gun fire, nothing is ever the same again," he said. After the war he once more worked in various jobs, the most long-lasting of which was with an oil company, from which he was dismissed in 1933 for drunkenness, absenteeism and moral turpitude – he had an eye, and more than an eye, for the secretaries. It was to be a long while before he came back to writing: his first detective story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in Black Mask in 1933, while his first novel, and his first masterpiece, The Big Sleep, did not appear until 1939, when he was 50.
What was the cause of this fecklessness and restless discontent? More to the point, what was it that drove him to drink? Here the question of sex rears its androgynous head, and a very loaded question it is. Some readers have detected strains of misogyny in his work, and certainly his attitude to women is guarded, to say the least – I think I am right in saying that in every one of the Marlowe novels the killer turns out to be a woman. His wife Cissy was 18 years older than he was, which meant she was only nine years younger than his mother. There is no doubt that he loved Cissy, and that he was devastated by her death, yet it seems to have been a distinctly peculiar marriage; but then, what marriage is not?
Commentators have also pointed to traces of homoeroticism in the work. My friend the Chilean novelist Rodrigo Fresán suggests that the only person Marlowe ever really loved was Terry Lennox, the friend who betrayed him in what many consider to be Chandler's finest novel, The Long Goodbye. We should keep in mind, however, that Chandler was a man of his time, a time in which women were women and men as often as not turned out to be Rock Hudson, and everyone tossed throwaway insults at "frails" – women, that is – effeminate men, black people and Jews. It does not make it right that everyone was doing it, but all the same, everyone was doing it.
Chandler wrote, in the same letter quoted from above, that he was "fundamentally rather uninterested in plot" – that "rather" is an example of those jaded little Englishisms he frequently affected – and returned to the theme of the supremacy of style: "The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time." Here he was, surely unconsciously, echoing Henry James, who in his notebooks reminded himself that "In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it."
What Chandler was after, he said, was "richness of texture". He pointed out that he "wrote pulp stories with as much care as slick stories [ie stories for literary magazines] … I obeyed the formula because I honestly liked it, but I was always trying to stretch it, trying to get in bits of peripheral writing which were not necessary but which I felt would have a subconscious effect even on the semi-literate readers." This is an artist speaking, and it was Chandler's achievement to lift the crime genre to the level of art – not high art, perhaps, which part of him disdained, but art all the same.
He tried not to be pretentious. In "The Guilty Vicarage" Auden had singled him out for praise, which provoked an outburst of false modesty. "Auden leaves me lost and groping. His piece about detective stories was brilliant in the clear cold classical manner. But why drag me in? I'm just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form." Further on in the same letter, however, complaining that pulp-magazine editors would always take out descriptive passages because readers did not appreciate that kind of thing, he comes up with this wonderful encapsulation of his aims and his methods:
"And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell."
When my agent, Ed Victor, who represents the Chandler estate, first approached me with the suggestion that I might write a Philip Marlowe novel, I hesitated for a long time. Should I, an Irishman in the second decade of the 21st century, attempt to follow on from an iconic and much-loved writer whose first novel was published six years before I was born? There was much to daunt me. Could I invent a plot to match the master's fiendishly intricate mysteries? Would I be able to catch anything of the flavour of postwar Los Angeles, the accents, the atmosphere, the acrid feel of a time and place so specific to the Marlowe books? Above all, would I be able to reinvent a convincing Marlowe?
I went back to the novels, of course, but also to the essays and the letters – especially the letters – and felt the pull of an irresistible affinity. Good crime writing is as difficult as any other kind, and, in its way, just as rewarding. In The Black-Eyed Blonde – one of a list of possible titles that Chandler drew up, and which I was happy to borrow from – I have sought not to parrot Chandler, but to honour the spirit, vigorous, valiant and melancholy, of this master of English prose. And now I wish I could meet up with him in some shady bar on Sunset, slide on to the stool beside him, give him a light for his cigarette and buy him a gin gimlet, and ask him how I did.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/08/philip-marlowe-raymond-chandler-john-banville
Sunday, 9 March 2014
Help Poet Hugo Williams Find a Kidney
A rally round for ailing Hugo Williams
7 March 2014
Sorry to hear that Hugo Williams is unwell. The TS Eliot Prize winner has been on dialysis for three years and Heywood Hill, the old Curzon Street bookshop, has sent out an unusual appeal to its customers.
Hugo’s “health is failing fast and soon he will not be fit enough for a kidney transplant,” says its newsletter. It goes on to inform his customers that “His family has just started a Facebook campaign to find him a live donor — please share it far and wide.”
Hugo’s daughter Murphy says the wonderful responses so far have been “his first ray of hope for a long time” with more than 600 people already signed up. “But we are still looking for the one angel who will make the miracle happen.”
Help Hugo Williams, Poet, Find a Kidney- see https://www.facebook.com/HugoWilliamsKidney?notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite
7 March 2014
Sorry to hear that Hugo Williams is unwell. The TS Eliot Prize winner has been on dialysis for three years and Heywood Hill, the old Curzon Street bookshop, has sent out an unusual appeal to its customers.
Hugo’s “health is failing fast and soon he will not be fit enough for a kidney transplant,” says its newsletter. It goes on to inform his customers that “His family has just started a Facebook campaign to find him a live donor — please share it far and wide.”
Hugo’s daughter Murphy says the wonderful responses so far have been “his first ray of hope for a long time” with more than 600 people already signed up. “But we are still looking for the one angel who will make the miracle happen.”
An interview from a couple of years back:
Andrew Johnson speaks with award-winning poet Hugo Williams
12 April, 2012
by ANDREW JOHNSON
Hugo Williams looks surprisingly well, considering he needs a kidney transplant. The winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry and the TS Eliot prize is sitting on a well-worn sofa in his home in Canonbury having just got in from dialysis at St Pancras Hospital.
His wife, the artist and former tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane, is there watching over him.
His skin, which belies his 70 years, is full of colour and he looks lean and trim.
But, he warns, I shouldn’t be fooled.
“It’s very funny,” he says. “If you lose a lot of weight people tend to say you look well. I think it’s because they’re secretly horrified. They think: ‘God he looks thin, and ill and old and unwell – better say he looks well’.”
He laughs, before adding: “I have a fairly youthful skin, so for 70 I’m doing well. But I have lost two stone, so for me I look ghastly.”
Williams first learned he had a failing kidney three years ago and describes talking about it as a sort of out-of-body experience.
“It’s a shock, [a feeling that] this can’t be me,” he says.
“There are all kinds of reactions you go through. One is a slight sense of shame, another is depression and a shrinking of the world. People who have been through it before say you just have to get a grip really.
“It’s interesting why one feels shame,” he adds. “I suppose it’s because one is no longer quite the physical specimen one was before. And also feeling ashamed at being so self-obsessed and self-pitying.”
There are moments he forgets he’s ill but these are inevitably followed by the awful recollection.
A bit like waking from a pleasant dream. “In a sense the better time you have, the more of a shock it is to remember what’s really going on in your life,” he says.
“Sick people tend not to be with well people very much because they remind them about being ill too much. Whereas if you’re with sick people you can say, well, I’m not as sick as him.”
The psychologist he was referred to – “a young chap who was doing his best to comfort this old geezer” – had one bit of wisdom, he adds, which was to keep the dialysis separate from the rest of his life.
This is why he troops down to St Pancras three times a week armed with a laptop, CDs and Akira Kurosawa and Curb Your Enthusiasm DVDs.
“It’s five hours there, and four hours on the needle. It takes an hour to get there, so the whole thing is about seven hours. But it is containable in that it’s three times a week. I’ve got my mornings and my weekends.”
Williams was born into a theatrical family, and has the kind of easy charm and sense of humour that public schools – he went to Eton – tend to provide to some of their more sensitive pupils.
His sense of humour is still intact, and he explains that his wife Hermine is also a part of the treatment for the comfort she provides.
He is now on the waiting list for a kidney and looking for a donor. Hermine isn’t compatible but she may be able to join a kidney exchange programme.
In the meantime, there’s a likelihood of three years of painful dialysis.
That’s the average wait, he explains, although it’s not a list you move steadily up.
The computer throws in other factors, such as age, and whether or not you have young children.
“But would I do it myself?,” he wonders of donating an organ. “The dialysis is going all right – sometimes it’s not too painful putting the needles in.”
The laptop is one of the concessions to modern technology he has had to make – he still uses a manual typewriter. Another is buying a mobile phone so the hospital can call should a kidney becomes available.
“Otherwise they’ll offer it to someone else,” he says.
Being a poet, however, has proved to be a “saviour” he adds, because to write means going to a mental state where he is neither ill nor well.
He is thinking of writing a long poem about his condition and has a first line, inspired by St Pancras Cemetery, the grounds of the Old Church in St Pancras Road where he kills a bit of time before going for dialysis next door.
“The first line would be: ‘This is where the Great Western railway cuts through the cemetery of St Pancras Old Church’ to momentarily treat the cutting through of the cemetery as the news of this cutting through of my life.
“Poetry reminds you who you really are and what you do,” he says.
“I’ve never thought of poetry as being self-expression. I’ve always thought of it as a making job, making something that will last. It’s much more of a search than an expression – like trying to find out something you didn’t know. I start working with phrases and see what they can be made to say, rather than making them say things.
“So it’s a collaboration with words. It sounds pretentious. I’m always going on about this and hating myself at the same time. You need lots of peace and sunshine and music and coffee and all that. I was listening to a programme about Chopin the other morning and he was deeply crippled toward the end of his life and when started to play his body relaxed and became recognisably the way it had been before.
“Poetry is like that – a place where there is no illness or wellness.”
http://www.camdennewjournal.com/feature-andrew-johnson-speaks-award-winning-poet-hugo-williams
by ANDREW JOHNSON
Hugo Williams looks surprisingly well, considering he needs a kidney transplant. The winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry and the TS Eliot prize is sitting on a well-worn sofa in his home in Canonbury having just got in from dialysis at St Pancras Hospital.
His wife, the artist and former tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane, is there watching over him.
His skin, which belies his 70 years, is full of colour and he looks lean and trim.
But, he warns, I shouldn’t be fooled.
“It’s very funny,” he says. “If you lose a lot of weight people tend to say you look well. I think it’s because they’re secretly horrified. They think: ‘God he looks thin, and ill and old and unwell – better say he looks well’.”
He laughs, before adding: “I have a fairly youthful skin, so for 70 I’m doing well. But I have lost two stone, so for me I look ghastly.”
Williams first learned he had a failing kidney three years ago and describes talking about it as a sort of out-of-body experience.
“It’s a shock, [a feeling that] this can’t be me,” he says.
“There are all kinds of reactions you go through. One is a slight sense of shame, another is depression and a shrinking of the world. People who have been through it before say you just have to get a grip really.
“It’s interesting why one feels shame,” he adds. “I suppose it’s because one is no longer quite the physical specimen one was before. And also feeling ashamed at being so self-obsessed and self-pitying.”
There are moments he forgets he’s ill but these are inevitably followed by the awful recollection.
A bit like waking from a pleasant dream. “In a sense the better time you have, the more of a shock it is to remember what’s really going on in your life,” he says.
“Sick people tend not to be with well people very much because they remind them about being ill too much. Whereas if you’re with sick people you can say, well, I’m not as sick as him.”
The psychologist he was referred to – “a young chap who was doing his best to comfort this old geezer” – had one bit of wisdom, he adds, which was to keep the dialysis separate from the rest of his life.
This is why he troops down to St Pancras three times a week armed with a laptop, CDs and Akira Kurosawa and Curb Your Enthusiasm DVDs.
“It’s five hours there, and four hours on the needle. It takes an hour to get there, so the whole thing is about seven hours. But it is containable in that it’s three times a week. I’ve got my mornings and my weekends.”
Williams was born into a theatrical family, and has the kind of easy charm and sense of humour that public schools – he went to Eton – tend to provide to some of their more sensitive pupils.
His sense of humour is still intact, and he explains that his wife Hermine is also a part of the treatment for the comfort she provides.
He is now on the waiting list for a kidney and looking for a donor. Hermine isn’t compatible but she may be able to join a kidney exchange programme.
In the meantime, there’s a likelihood of three years of painful dialysis.
That’s the average wait, he explains, although it’s not a list you move steadily up.
The computer throws in other factors, such as age, and whether or not you have young children.
“But would I do it myself?,” he wonders of donating an organ. “The dialysis is going all right – sometimes it’s not too painful putting the needles in.”
The laptop is one of the concessions to modern technology he has had to make – he still uses a manual typewriter. Another is buying a mobile phone so the hospital can call should a kidney becomes available.
“Otherwise they’ll offer it to someone else,” he says.
Being a poet, however, has proved to be a “saviour” he adds, because to write means going to a mental state where he is neither ill nor well.
He is thinking of writing a long poem about his condition and has a first line, inspired by St Pancras Cemetery, the grounds of the Old Church in St Pancras Road where he kills a bit of time before going for dialysis next door.
“The first line would be: ‘This is where the Great Western railway cuts through the cemetery of St Pancras Old Church’ to momentarily treat the cutting through of the cemetery as the news of this cutting through of my life.
“Poetry reminds you who you really are and what you do,” he says.
“I’ve never thought of poetry as being self-expression. I’ve always thought of it as a making job, making something that will last. It’s much more of a search than an expression – like trying to find out something you didn’t know. I start working with phrases and see what they can be made to say, rather than making them say things.
“So it’s a collaboration with words. It sounds pretentious. I’m always going on about this and hating myself at the same time. You need lots of peace and sunshine and music and coffee and all that. I was listening to a programme about Chopin the other morning and he was deeply crippled toward the end of his life and when started to play his body relaxed and became recognisably the way it had been before.
“Poetry is like that – a place where there is no illness or wellness.”
Hugo Williams
If I’m Early
Every other day I follow the route
of the Midland Railway
to where it cuts through
St Pancras Old Church Cemetery.
I might go into the church
and heave a sigh or two
before continuing via a gate
set in the cemetery wall
to the Mary Rankin Wing
of St Pancras Hospital.
As a young man, Thomas Hardy
supervised the removal of bodies
from part of the cemetery
to make way for the trains.
He placed the headstones
round an ash tree sapling,
now grown tall, where I stop sometimes
to look at the stones
crowding round the old tree
like children listening to a story.
A Game of Dialysis
The home team appears
in a blue strip, while the visitors
keep on their street clothes.
We find our positions
from the file with our name on it
placed beside our bed.
Now all we can do is wait
for the opposition to make a move.
We don’t like our chances.
The action commences
with the home team wandering about,
or making a tour of the circuit.
Certain moves are typical –
lengthwise, for example,
carrying something,
is a popular move, or scoring points
by passing back and forth
between the glove dispenser
and the needle disposal box.
The visitors can only look on
as the enemy’s game plan emerges.
We score by keeping quiet
about our disadvantages,
or saying something funny.
Whether anyone gets hurt
depends on who is marking whom.
The blues fan out round the room.
Each of them is doing something difficult
to somebody lying down.
The Art of Needling
You find out early on
that some of the nurses
are better than others
at the art of needling.
You have to ascertain
who’s on duty
that knows what they’re doing,
someone familiar
with your fistula arm
and beg him to ‘put you on’.
If he’s any good
he’ll take his time
raising or lowering the bed,
laying out his things on the tray.
He won’t forget the spray.
He’ll listen to the ‘bruit’
produced by your fistula.
He’ll note the ‘thrill’ of it,
feel it with his finger.
Only then will he go in.
Even so, a wayward needle
can pierce a fistula wall,
causing a ‘blow’ to occur.
Then you have to go to A&E
for a fistulaplasty.
The Angel of the Needles
The beauty of the Indian nurse
puts the fear of God in me
when she approaches my bed
carrying the blue tray.
Did she have to take a needling test
like other mortals?
Or did they let her in
for being one of the angels?
I want her to like me,
but I have to look away
when she strips the paper from the needles
and bends over me.
She applies the tourniquet
and lays a finger on the vein.
Something about her touch
makes the needles melt in my flesh.
She takes away the pain
by telling me in a mournful tone
about her son Ibrahim
who is bullied at school
for the mixed pigments on his face.
Zombie
I’m technically dead, they tell me,
but I remember being alive
as if it were yesterday.
I’m covered in mud, like a zombie,
swimming around
in the storms of a new grave.
I remember the world above
and what it was like up there,
thanks to a friend
who sucks my blood for me.
He keeps me alive
in the sense that memories are alive.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n02/hugo-williams/from-the-dialysis-ward
Every other day I follow the route
of the Midland Railway
to where it cuts through
St Pancras Old Church Cemetery.
I might go into the church
and heave a sigh or two
before continuing via a gate
set in the cemetery wall
to the Mary Rankin Wing
of St Pancras Hospital.
As a young man, Thomas Hardy
supervised the removal of bodies
from part of the cemetery
to make way for the trains.
He placed the headstones
round an ash tree sapling,
now grown tall, where I stop sometimes
to look at the stones
crowding round the old tree
like children listening to a story.
A Game of Dialysis
The home team appears
in a blue strip, while the visitors
keep on their street clothes.
We find our positions
from the file with our name on it
placed beside our bed.
Now all we can do is wait
for the opposition to make a move.
We don’t like our chances.
The action commences
with the home team wandering about,
or making a tour of the circuit.
Certain moves are typical –
lengthwise, for example,
carrying something,
is a popular move, or scoring points
by passing back and forth
between the glove dispenser
and the needle disposal box.
The visitors can only look on
as the enemy’s game plan emerges.
We score by keeping quiet
about our disadvantages,
or saying something funny.
Whether anyone gets hurt
depends on who is marking whom.
The blues fan out round the room.
Each of them is doing something difficult
to somebody lying down.
The Art of Needling
You find out early on
that some of the nurses
are better than others
at the art of needling.
You have to ascertain
who’s on duty
that knows what they’re doing,
someone familiar
with your fistula arm
and beg him to ‘put you on’.
If he’s any good
he’ll take his time
raising or lowering the bed,
laying out his things on the tray.
He won’t forget the spray.
He’ll listen to the ‘bruit’
produced by your fistula.
He’ll note the ‘thrill’ of it,
feel it with his finger.
Only then will he go in.
Even so, a wayward needle
can pierce a fistula wall,
causing a ‘blow’ to occur.
Then you have to go to A&E
for a fistulaplasty.
The Dog
A dog has got hold of my arm
and is dragging me down.
Its canines pierce an artery.
Its entrails twitch with my blood.
Whenever I am brought in
for further questioning,
the dog stands over me,
grinding its teeth in my flesh.
It’s like being nailed to the floor
and told to relax.
A dog has got hold of my arm
and is dragging me down.
Its canines pierce an artery.
Its entrails twitch with my blood.
Whenever I am brought in
for further questioning,
the dog stands over me,
grinding its teeth in my flesh.
It’s like being nailed to the floor
and told to relax.
Blood spurts like a confession.
This is what dogs are for,
to find out who you are.
I watch its eyes going round,
analysing the evidence.
I’ll admit to anything.
This is what dogs are for,
to find out who you are.
I watch its eyes going round,
analysing the evidence.
I’ll admit to anything.
The Angel of the Needles
The beauty of the Indian nurse
puts the fear of God in me
when she approaches my bed
carrying the blue tray.
Did she have to take a needling test
like other mortals?
Or did they let her in
for being one of the angels?
I want her to like me,
but I have to look away
when she strips the paper from the needles
and bends over me.
She applies the tourniquet
and lays a finger on the vein.
Something about her touch
makes the needles melt in my flesh.
She takes away the pain
by telling me in a mournful tone
about her son Ibrahim
who is bullied at school
for the mixed pigments on his face.
Ray’s Way
Ray Blighter appears in the doorway
of the dialysis ward
in all his ruined finery –
waistcoat, buttonhole, blazer,
eyebrows dashed in with mascara –
and pauses for a moment to ensure
all eyes are upon him.
‘MY NAME IS BOND’ he shouts
to the assembled company.
‘JAMES FUCKING BOND.’
He sets off down the line of beds,
muttering, looking straight ahead,
yellowing grey flannels
flapping round his ankles.
He’s two hours late,
having been ‘run over by a bus’,
but God help anyone who’s taken
his precious corner bed.
If the rabbi is there ahead of him
he’s liable to turn around
and go home again.
He sets out his life
on the table across his bed –
beer cans, biscuits, betting slips,
a hairbrush, aftershave,
a radio tuned to Radio 2,
the only one allowed on the ward
because Ray is a ‘character’.
He goes and stands in the fire exit
for his ritual ‘last cigarette’
before he kills himself.
‘Do you smoke Morland Specials
with the three gold rings?’ I ask.
Ray lifts a coal-black eyebrow.
‘Do you think I look like Sean Connery?’
He acted with Sean, he tells me,
in several James Bond films,
including Live and Let Die.
‘And no, not as a bleeding extra!’
When he goes on to describe his role
in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai
the penny drops.
Trapped in his own Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp for ten years,
he’s lied and cursed his way free.
‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’,
he tells me confidentially.
‘I’m going to the fucking races.’
Of course he is. I may be there myself.
Ray Blighter appears in the doorway
of the dialysis ward
in all his ruined finery –
waistcoat, buttonhole, blazer,
eyebrows dashed in with mascara –
and pauses for a moment to ensure
all eyes are upon him.
‘MY NAME IS BOND’ he shouts
to the assembled company.
‘JAMES FUCKING BOND.’
He sets off down the line of beds,
muttering, looking straight ahead,
yellowing grey flannels
flapping round his ankles.
He’s two hours late,
having been ‘run over by a bus’,
but God help anyone who’s taken
his precious corner bed.
If the rabbi is there ahead of him
he’s liable to turn around
and go home again.
He sets out his life
on the table across his bed –
beer cans, biscuits, betting slips,
a hairbrush, aftershave,
a radio tuned to Radio 2,
the only one allowed on the ward
because Ray is a ‘character’.
He goes and stands in the fire exit
for his ritual ‘last cigarette’
before he kills himself.
‘Do you smoke Morland Specials
with the three gold rings?’ I ask.
Ray lifts a coal-black eyebrow.
‘Do you think I look like Sean Connery?’
He acted with Sean, he tells me,
in several James Bond films,
including Live and Let Die.
‘And no, not as a bleeding extra!’
When he goes on to describe his role
in Bridge on the Fucking River Kwai
the penny drops.
Trapped in his own Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp for ten years,
he’s lied and cursed his way free.
‘I won’t be coming in on Monday’,
he tells me confidentially.
‘I’m going to the fucking races.’
Of course he is. I may be there myself.
Diality
The shock of remembering,
having forgotten for a second,
that this isn’t a cure,
but a kind of false health,
like drug addiction.
It performs the trick
of taking off the water
which builds up in your system,
bloating your body,
raising your blood pressure.
It sieves you clean of muck
for a day or two,
by means of a transparent tube
full of pinkish sand
hanging next to your machine.
Your kidneys like the idea
of not having to work any more
and gradually shut down,
leaving you dependent.
Then you stop peeing.
Dialysis is bad for you.
You feel sick
most of the time, until the end.
The shock of remembering,
having forgotten for a second.
The shock of remembering,
having forgotten for a second,
that this isn’t a cure,
but a kind of false health,
like drug addiction.
It performs the trick
of taking off the water
which builds up in your system,
bloating your body,
raising your blood pressure.
It sieves you clean of muck
for a day or two,
by means of a transparent tube
full of pinkish sand
hanging next to your machine.
Your kidneys like the idea
of not having to work any more
and gradually shut down,
leaving you dependent.
Then you stop peeing.
Dialysis is bad for you.
You feel sick
most of the time, until the end.
The shock of remembering,
having forgotten for a second.
Zombie
I’m technically dead, they tell me,
but I remember being alive
as if it were yesterday.
I’m covered in mud, like a zombie,
swimming around
in the storms of a new grave.
I remember the world above
and what it was like up there,
thanks to a friend
who sucks my blood for me.
He keeps me alive
in the sense that memories are alive.
Going Home
Leaving behind the Gothic frowns
of the former workhouse, I pass through a gate
into a churchyard overhung by great trees,
where the nurses go to smoke.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s tomb,
where Shelley proposed to her daughter,
escaped demolition by Thomas Hardy
and seems to be plunging off into a storm.
Shelley’s heart, wrapped in a brown paper parcel,
Hardy took by train to Bournemouth,
sitting in a first class compartment
with the heart on his knee.
Leaving behind the Gothic frowns
of the former workhouse, I pass through a gate
into a churchyard overhung by great trees,
where the nurses go to smoke.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s tomb,
where Shelley proposed to her daughter,
escaped demolition by Thomas Hardy
and seems to be plunging off into a storm.
Shelley’s heart, wrapped in a brown paper parcel,
Hardy took by train to Bournemouth,
sitting in a first class compartment
with the heart on his knee.
Saturday, 8 March 2014
Brian Wilson - The Bedroom Years...
By Brian Chidester
March 7, 2014
It turns out that Brian Wilson—leader of the Beach Boys, notorious recluse during the early 1970s—didn’t just lie in bed and let his beard grow long. In a recent cover story for the L.A. Weekly, I posited that Wilson had quietly amassed a body of songs from 1968-74 that fed Beach Boys albums, side projects and his own solo career for many years to come. The individual tracks that comprise the “Bedroom Tapes,” an umbrella moniker for the period entirely of this chronicler’s own making, are superfluous. The more important question remains the extent of Wilson’s lost catalog and how it came to matter.
The story goes that Wilson reached an artistic peak with his production of the Beach Boys landmark 1966 album, Pet Sounds, which was succeeded in every way by the infamous Smile sessions that followed in ‘67 and which ended in disaster. That is to say, the album was abandoned and left on the shelf until 2011, when it received a Grammy Award for Best Historical Album. Back in the summer of 1967, Wilson pulled out of his competitive production race with the Beatles. The Beach Boys then had a studio built in the living room of Wilson’s Bel Air mansion, where they’d work on a series of lo-fi albums in the wake the chief Beach Boy’s tumble.
To be certain, the home studio did not remain in the home until 1974, but was dismantled in ‘72. Albums recorded from summer 1967 to spring ‘68—Smiley Smile,Wild Honey and Friends—were indeed homemade and lo-fi Wilson productions, though they were tracked at Wally Heider Studio and ID Sound, as well as Wilson’s home. His full retreat as leader of the Beach Boys seems to have begun in the summer of ‘68, following a brief stint in a mental institution, and lasted until 1975, when the band appointed an experimental psychologist to coax Wilson back into official Beach Boys activity. However, as the “Bedroom Tapes” label represents the whole era and not a specific project conceived of by Wilson himself, it is important to acknowledge that cut-off lines of delineation can easily blur.
For starters, an alternate version of the Wild Honey track “I’d Love Just Once to See You” boasts an extended tag, whose quirk could mark the onset of the “Bedroom” sound. Alternately, spirited takes of “Whistle In,” from summer ‘67, are also characteristic of the way Wilson attached himself to a basic riff and noodled with it endlessly during the “Bedroom” years. By spring 1968, a number of unrealized outtakes from the Beach Boys’ Friends album were tracked, which too foreshadow the intimacy of Wilson’s early ‘70s stockpile.
“Our Happy Home” is a short, bouncy riff that maintains the gentle air of theFriends sessions. A tape labeled “New Song” features a slowed-down melody of what later becomes the Friends rocker “Transcendental Meditation”; the bridge to “New Song” is what has long been described by collectors as “Spanish Guitar Song.” Another, titled “Even Stephen,” is an early version of the Friends cut “Busy Doin’ Nothin’,” its casual lyrics presenting a visitor step-by-step directions up to Wilson’s pad. “You’re As Cool As Can Be” is an additional instrumental from the Friendssessions, this time an upbeat, driving melody pounded out by Wilson at the piano.
Wilson also cut an early version of the gorgeous Sunflower ballad, “All I Wanna Do,” which in ‘68 featured a sitar but no lyrics. A song titled “Walkin’,” as well as Wilson’s solo piano version of Burt Bacharach’s “My Little Red Book,” were also tracked during the Friends sessions, both long known to bootleg collectors. “Sail Plane Song” and “We’re Together Again” were recorded in the aftermath of Friends, and both have been comped on Beach Boys reissues since the 1990s.
Of particular note regarding the Friends album is the pair of tracks written by middle Wilson brother, Dennis—“Little Bird” and “Be Still.” According to Stephen Kalinich, who wrote lyrics to both songs, “Little Bird” was based around a riff that Brian had already worked on as “Child Is Father of the Man” during the Smilesessions. “It was his gift to Dennis and I,” remembers Kalinich. Brian was also the organist on “Be Still,” long thought to be a solo Dennis Wilson outing on vocals and keys. Brian, in fact, cut a longer organ version of “Be Still,” as well, with Kalinich reading it as an extended poem.
By 1969, Wilson—whose retreat from the Beach Boys had turned into a rout—commenced work on a full spoken-word album with Kalinich. “America, I Know You,” the album’s centerpiece, was, in fact, possibly the truest “Bedroom” tape in Wilson’s oeuvre. The backing track—a gorgeous string arrangement of ascending and descending chords—was tracked at the Wally Heider Studio on Aug. 22, 1969; according to Kalinich, however, the heartfelt reading of the poem was delivered in Wilson’s bedroom, where microphones were set up to capture the ambience.
Sadly, that same year, Wilson’s father, Murry, sold the rights to his son’s publishing to Irving-Almo at the absurdly low price of $700,000. (The catalog today is valued at around $100 million.) Wilson’s first wife, Marilyn, says the sale sent the fragile songwriter into even deeper depression.
The Beach Boys situation, sans Wilson, became desperate. A forged signature apparently put Wilson’s mansion up for collateral in order for the band to acquire additional recording funds needed to complete their last Capitol Records album, 1969’s 20-20. They signed with Warner Bros. in 1970. Mo Ostin, head of Warner Bros. at the time, said of the chance to sign the Beach Boys away from Capitol: “The only signature I care about getting on that contract is Brian Wilson’s.” Wilson, as the goose that laid the golden egg, was marched into a conference room in white undershirt and tossled hair, where photographs show him scribbling his John Hancock with pronounced disdain.
1970’s Sunflower, the Beach Boys’ Warner Bros. debut, was, in many respects, theirAbbey Road—a lush production that signaled an end to the 1960s, the decade that gave them creative flight. Sunflower was, in fact, largely produced by the youngest Wilson brother, Carl. Dennis Wilson contributed four stellar new compositions as well. Brian Wilson also wrote a number of new tracks at the time, many of which embody the “Bedroom” aesthetic at its most pure—sweet melodies set to intimate lyrics and tender falsetto vocals.
A session for Wilson’s “Good Time,” in fact, was tracked in early ‘70 with either Wilson himself or Beach Boy Bruce Johnston segueing into a brief rendition of the Beatles’ “You Never Give Me Your Money.” It seems that every Beach Boy tried in some way to keep Wilson engaged during the Sunflower sessions. (Johnston co-wrote the album’s “Diedre” with him.) Wilson’s early version of “Our Sweet Love” features his own solo vocals over a basic piano and drum track, which Carl Wilson later augmented with strings and harmony vocals. Beach Boy Al Jardine wrestled “At My Window” from Wilson, which started out as a simple cover of the Kingston Trio’s “Raspberries, Strawberries.” Wilson and Jardine also co-wrote an outtake titled “Back Home” together.
A piano demo of the Wilson masterpiece “’Til I Die” exists, as does a full production with the more optimistic lyric “I’ll find my way” alternating for what eventually became “I lost my way” on the Beach Boys’ 1971 Surf’s Up album. According to the band’s engineer Stephen Desper, a version of Brian’s eco-conscious ballad, “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” was first recorded with brother Dennis Wilson on lead vocals before being replaced by manager Jack Rieley on the final track. This version has yet to surface.
Outtakes from the period include: “Where Is She?,” a sweet Wilson ballad from 1970 which saw release on last year’s Made in California box; “H.E.L.P. Is on the Way,” “Games Two Can Play” and “I Just Got My Pay,” all of which were released on the 1993 Capitol box set, Good Vibrations; “Soulful Old Man Sunshine,” co-written by Wilson and Rick Henn of the Sunrays, of which a demo version and a full Beach Boys recording were released on the soundtrack to VH1’s 1998 documentaryEndless Harmony; and “My Solution,” a 1970 Halloween novelty by Wilson, often bootlegged, never officially released. A song titled “What Can the Matter Be?” was tracked in 1969; its title has been thrown around as one written by BW, though according to session logs, every Beach Boy is present on the track except Brian. A few additional BW songs from the era have been recently discovered, but not heard by this author.
In 1971, Wilson—assisted by songwriter David Sandler—produced an album by American Spring, featuring Wilson’s wife Marilyn and sister-in-law, Diane Rovell, on vocals. Wilson recorded a pitch-perfect piano demo of “Awake,” hitting catastrophically high falsetto notes; the song later appeared in a Spring version on the album. An unheard Spring outtake titled “Funky Fever” was recorded at Ike Turner’s Bolic Studio on Feb. 28, 1972; a cover of Jimmy Rodger’s “Honeycomb” was cut in October ‘74 with Marilyn on vocals. The latter featured Roy Wood of ELO and Wizzard on the backing track. (Wood also played on the Beach Boys’ “It’s OK” from the same session.) The former Mrs. Wilson retains the masters to the American Spring album, as well as a number of other Brian Wilson tapes from the period.
Wilson also labored in 1971-72 with lyricist Stanley Shaprio and songwriter Tandyn Almer to re-write the Friends album for an unrealized A&M Records project. (A&M’s Irving-Almo owned the aforementioned publishing to Wilson’s ‘60s catalog, as sold by father Murry Wilson, who needed to fund the final renovations of his tacky home in Redondo Beach.) According to Shapiro, four tracks were recorded by the trio—new versions of “Passing By,” “Wake the World,” “Be Still” and title track, “Friends.”
Shapiro also told me the story of the time Dennis Wilson had engineer Stephen Desper queue up a Brian Wilson reel-to-reel labeled “Song to God.” According to Shapiro, as the tape ran and Dennis and Desper sat mesmerized, Brian came barreling down from his bedroom, ripped the tape off the playback and yelled, “Don’t you ever touch that again! That’s between me and God!” No tape for this has ever been found. Nor has anything for Wilson titles like “Is Jack Rieley Superman?” or Wilson/Rieley’s “Burlesque,” the latter an outtake from the Beach Boys’ 1972 album, Carl & the Passions – So Tough.
A 1978 instrumental labeled “Beach Burlesque,” tracked during the band’s MIUalbum sessions, might be the same song, but as of this writing, Rieley, who is currently in a hospital in Berlin, has not been able to confirm it. Beach Boys historian Andrew G. Doe did previously get Rieley to repeat a couplet of the “Burlesque” lyrics, which reads: “Tantalation and hot glowing skin/Sun’s ‘bout to rest.”
Also missing is the tape of Wilson’s early 1972 production of “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’,” while a tapebox for “Beatrice of Baltimore” is present in the Beach Boys’ vault, though it features no vocals for the song that eventually became “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone” on Carl & the Passions. A tape has been found, however, of the jagged 1972 instrumental “Rooftop Harry.”
According to engineer Barry Rudolph, the Beach Boys vaunted into Larabee Studios in West Hollywood after midnight and began unloading truckloads of equipment whilst Wilson sat lotus position in a corner for two hours. When he awoke, a flurry of action took place on tape, Wilson himself playing piano, electric bass, toy piano and a calliope on “Rooftop Harry,” all of which ran through a then-new device called the Countryman Phaser. The results are manic.
Another instrumental, labeled “Body Talk,” may be a Brian song, but its credit is indefinite. Finally, a demo tape of “Sail on, Sailor,” the Beach Boys’ 1973 hit song, was last heard five years ago. It was then in the possession of a venerated Beatles collector, who has since disappeared with the tape.
In the summer of 1972, the Beach Boys moved their entire entourage (management and family alike) to the Netherlands. There they would record their 19th album,Holland. The studio in Brian’s Bel Air mansion was dismantled and shipped overseas, never to be re-installed in his home again.
From his cottage in Holland—dubbed “Flowers”—Wilson was recorded by an unnamed guest singing the Danny Kaye hit “Daddy Dear” at the piano. He segues into a quirky version of Al Jardine’s “Suzie Cincinnati” for the same guest. “Brian went through a period,” recalls Bruce Johnston, “where he would write songs and play them for a few people in his living room, and that’s the last you’d hear of them. He would disappear back up to his bedroom and the song with him.”
What Wilson worked on most in Holland was Mt. Vernon and Fairway (A Fairy Tale in Five Parts). Session tapes for the mini-work attest to Wilson’s enthusiasm for Mt. Vernon, which was eventually released as a bonus EP with the Hollandalbum. Mount Vernon tells the story of a Pied Piper who brings magical music to a family of young princes and princesses from inside a glowing transistor radio; the Pied Piper disappears forever when they stop believing in him. Wilson saw it as a thinly veiled allegory of his deteriorated relationship with the Beach Boys. “I wrote it about Mike Love,” Wilson confirmed to me in 2003 for a documentary I co-directed for the Carl Wilson Cancer Foundation.
Tracking sessions for the “Mt. Vernon and Fairway – Theme” reveal BW sitting with brother Dennis, reciting some of the fairy tale’s narration over a basic piano; he stops to explain its sense of innocence lost as expressed in the metaphor of the transistor radio. Nostalgia eventually gets the best of Wilson, who jumps headlong into a piano version of “A Casual Look,” a ‘50s doo-wop hit that suggests the magic in the music was as much an outgrowth of the transistor era as it was from within the Pied Piper himself. Indeed, the Brian Wilson of 1972—looking less like a real wizard and more like The Big Lebowski’s Dude in bathrobe and beard—recognized in his disintegrated family relationship a mirror of the larger social disintegration of Nixon-era America.
The Mt. Vernon section known as “I’m the Pied Piper” was recorded in Holland in an exuberant extended version. Another section—the appropriately titled “Better Get Back in Bed”—started out as the stand alone track “Pa, Let Her Go Out,” before being integrated fully into Mt. Vernon. Wilson revised the melody in 1976 for a version titled “Lazy Lizzie.”
On June 4, 1973, Murry Wilson died. The relationship with his three sons was beyond fractured by the end, and Brian himself chose not to attend his father’s funeral. He instead flew to New York City with sister-in-law Diane, where the two visited the Bronx Zoo amongst other sightseeing ventures. Wilson wrote a song about the zoo’s main attraction, a baby gorilla named Patty Cake.
Before Murry died, he gave the Beach Boys’ official photographer, Ed Roach, a stash of cassette tapes to store. Amongst these was a second fairy tale by Brian Wilson. According to Roach, the recording features Wilson reciting a narrative about two young girls who get lost in the woods on their way to school. Wilson’s daughters, Carnie and Wendy, play the roles of the young churls over a cute musical track. Roach says that half a dozen other Brian songs remain in the stash Murry gave him before passing away. Brian also reportedly wrote a song titled “Just an Imitation” about his father in 1974, though no tape for the latter has been found.
By 1974, Wilson finally completed A World of Peace Must Come, the poetry album he’d started with Stephen Kalinich back in 1969; an acetate was cut of the entire platter, though no record deal followed. (The album remained unreleased for three decades.) Kalinich, however, began writing Beach Boys songs again with Wilson once the band moved out to Colorado to record with producer Jim Guercio. The two cut a piano demo to an unreleased rocker titled “Lucy Jones,” on which Wilson shares lead vocals with Kalinich. Wilson also delivered a soaring falsetto vocal of the Kalinich lyrics to “California Feelin’,” a American Gothic number released on last year’sMade in America box. An early version of the Kalinich/Wilson Christmas single, “Child of Winter,” features Dennis Wilson on lead vocals and Carl Wilson singing the bridge. Finally, “Brian’s Jam” boasts the basic 1-to-4-up bassline that seems to have endlessly percolated in Wilson’s head throughout 1974-75 on versions of “Ding Dang” and “Short’nin Bread” too numerous to count.
Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees was another ‘70s L.A. hellraiser who seems to have had a “Short’nin’ Bread” experience with Brian Wilson. Dolenz wrote about a BW/John Lennon/Harry Nilsson meeting in his 1993 autobiography, I’m a Believer, wherein Dolenz has the quartet taking acid at his beach house in Malibu. Accordingly, Wilson plays the same note on the piano over and over; Lennon just stares into the swimming pool. Though no tape exists from this moonlit affair, according to Monkees archivist Andrew Sandoval, Dolenz does have a tape of Wilson and Nilsson jamming together on “Clangin’,” another BW variation on “Short’nin’ Bread.”
“Good Timin’,” later released as the lead single of the Beach Boys’ L.A. (Light Album, was first tracked in Colorado, but not completed. Finally, “Riding High on the Music” and “Grateful Are We for Little Children” (later “Saturday Morning in the City”) were co-written with Kalinich there, but no tapes have surfaced for them.
By 1975, the Beach Boys were back in Los Angeles and Brian Wilson—under the 24-hour supervision of experimental psychologist Eugene Landy—was thrust back into producing an album of oldies titled 15 Big Ones. The album was promoted behind the gimmicky “Brian Is Back” tour of ‘76. Wilson, in fact, never returned to the form that saw him produce groundbreaking works like Pet Sounds and Smile. Yet, in their wake, he soldiered on and, from 1968-74, left a scattered body of strange, often-brilliant, always inimitable music that is now dubbed the “Bedroom Tapes.”
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