FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #154

Paul Buchanan

Paul Buchanan: 'I felt lost after The Blue Nile'.

It's taken Paul Buchanan eight years to get around to recording his first solo album. And, he says, he never imagined anyone would hear its fragile songs

Graeme Thomson

guardian.co.uk

Thursday 10 May 2012

Sitting in a cafe a stone's throw from his flat in Glasgow's West End, Paul Buchanan looks out the window and sighs. "When you're feeling particularly lost the last thing you admit to yourself is that you're lost, but looking back, I felt rotten. Terrible. It wasn't the best of times, but the action of making the record was helpful."

Elegantly grey and almost terminally self-effacing, Buchanan is feeling "emotionally tired". After 30 years in The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian trio that elevated romantic yearning to a superior art form, at 56 he is about to release his first solo album. Reflecting his pain at the sudden death of a close friend and the almost unfathomable disintegration of the band he always believed was "for life", Buchanan is the first to admit that Mid Air "isn't all singing and dancing". It is, however, a truly special record, consisting of 14 brief, beautiful songs built around the fragile nexus of his immaculately emotive voice and soft piano, with the occasional daub of textural colour.

Though musically more muted than the Blue Nile, Mid Air negotiates the same precarious high wire between euphoria and melancholy, realism and fantasy. On one song, Buchanan has "starlight in my suitcase"; on another, he returns to that cinematic dream country "high above the chimney tops". Writing the album, he would gaze from his kitchen at 3am, see the lights still burning in the windows of neighbouring tenements, and wonder why everyone was still up and what they were thinking about.

The sense of isolation was in direct contrast to the way the Blue Nile operated. On their first two albums in particular, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982) and Hats (1988), Buchanan and fellow bandmates Robert Bell and PJ Moore were "a group of real friends, truly democratic". They wanted the songs "to be better versions of us – of everything. We wanted to make pictures, so we tried to remove ourselves from the fabric of it, to get out of the way of the music." He laughs. "I'm not sure why we gave ourselves such a Herculean task…"

By the release of their fourth album, High (2004), the dynamic had changed. Aptly, the band that famously never did anything in a hurry fell apart in slow motion. There were no fist fights, no screaming matches; instead, everything gradually drifted to a halt. The phone stopped ringing. Nobody was organising rehearsals. Although he was hurt, Buchanan was aware that "it had been going that way for a long time. You can hear it. We could all hear it. To me, High is a stoic record – it sounds like we were trying to stick with each other and do our best to survive. Some of the unfettered joy had gone. Some kind of magic had slipped away from us, and some of the hope that we started out with. We adhered to each other until we had finished the record, but maybe individually and collectively we weren't as happy as we had been."

A couple of years after High, Buchanan toured and Bell was part of the band. Despite the odd "bump in the road" the pair remain friends, but there has been no contact with Moore for several years. Buchanan – who readily admits he can be "pesky" – remains baffled. "Neither of us has seen PJ for God knows how long. I'm sure he has his reasons, but I can honestly say Robert and I are blissfully unaware of them. He's super-talented and I care about him, but I've left it alone for the best." Does he hope for a rapprochement? "It's not cut and dried. The right thing to do as people would be to get together again – even if we then say goodbye. That's my vague hope. It probably won't happen, but I know that contributing to that unit was me at my best."

Engineered by the son of Blue Nile producer Calum Malcolm, Mid Air was mostly recorded in Buchanan's flat, working "civilised hours" over a couple of years. Half-joking, he likens the process to Ted Hughes's "sacred trance": the songs appeared almost by accident while he was "banging away" in an attempt to come up with something for Garbage singer Shirley Manson, who had approached him to collaborate on her – as yet unmade – solo record. "Shirley is lovely and I really wanted to get what she wanted, but nothing came out of it in the end. It was only when I looked back I thought, I've got all these little things that I've just noted and put to one side."

He was writing from emotional necessity rather than any commercial impetus. "At no point did I think I was making a record. It never occurred to me that anybody else would listen to it. Looking back, that was a great thing. That unselfconscious quality becomes more elusive as you go on making music, so it's nice to be brought back to that very simple expectation. It was almost like starting out again. I wasn't deliberately making a record of fulfilling a contract. There's a joy and innocence in that."

The Blue Nile famously laboured over their records: four albums in 22 years is hardly a prolific batting average. Mid Air, too, comes a full eight years after High. Buchanan says he has no problem coming up with material, so why does the process take so long? "You work and work and work and have the life that you have, and once in a while, sometimes once in a decade, you see a few things you've got and think, yes, that's authentic. You try to stay true to that little moment whatever the costs." Such is the distance, it seems, between simply writing songs and chasing starlight.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/10/paul-buchanan-lost-blue-nile?INTCMP=SRCH

Donald "Duck" Dunn RIP

Bass player and songwriter Donald "Duck" Dunn, a member of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame band Booker T. and the MGs and the Blues Brothers band, has died in Tokyo. He was 70.

Dunn was in Tokyo for a series of shows. News of his death was posted on the Facebook site of his friend and fellow musician Steve Cropper, who was on the same tour. Cropper said Dunn died in his sleep.
Miho Harasawa, a spokeswoman for Tokyo Blue Note, the last venue Dunn played, confirmed he died alone early Sunday. She had no further details.
Dunn, who was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1941, performed on recordings with Eric Clapton, Neil Young and many others, and specialized in blues, gospel and soul. He played himself in the 1980 hit movie "The Blues Brothers."

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/13/2797282/bass-player-donald-duck-dunn-dies.html#storylink=cpy

Maurice Sendak

Paul Brady at The Sage, Gateshead - review by Terry Kelly

Paul Brady
The Sage Gateshead

Wednesday 9 May 2012

AUDIENCES immediately sense when a performer is a musical master.

From the second he stepped on stage, Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady was clearly the real thing.

Opening with an energetic version of the Hank Williams's country standard, You Win Again, Brady took his fans on a musical journey through his long and varied career.

A guitar maestro, Brady is also no slouch on piano and mandolin, moving between all three instruments with great skill during a 90-minute show.

His current solo tour is partly about promoting his new two-CD anthology, Dancer In The Fire, with Brady trawling through his extensive back catalogue for songs highlighting both his roots in traditional music and his later West Coast rock leanings.

So the mainstream pop of Smile - which he called "a soppy love song" - was followed five minutes later by the traditional folk standard, Mary and the Soldier.

The often fraught relationship between Ireland and England was explored in a fiery version of his classic, Nothing But The Same Old Story, before Brady closed the show with a beautiful version of the traditional ballad, The Lakes of Ponchartrain.

Special mention must also be made of brilliant support act, Eleanor McEvoy, an impressive songwriter and singer, who joined Brady for the singalong duet, The World Is What You Make It.

Terry Kelly

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/lifestyle/entertainment/music/live-review-paul-brady-the-sage-gateshead-1-4530705

Friday Night Boy Caption Competition!

I'll admit, I thought that intrepid reporter Terry Kelly had infiltrated a Bund meeting in Deckham until I saw the 'Cleadon Park' sign, so I suspect something less sinister afoot.

First prize if you're a guy: a copy of the Scoundrels' legendary unreleased live album, once described as 'enigmatic' by someone who hadn't heard it.

If you're a woman: a date with Paul.
Second prize: two dates with Paul.

Maurice Sendak RIP

Maurice Sendak's dark visions delighted generations of children

The author who won fame with the brilliant but unsettling Where the Wild Things Are refused to patronise his young readers

Esther Adeley

guardian.co.uk

Tuesday 8 May 2012 

Maurice Sendak didn't like being referred to as a children's book illustrator, believing the term was disrespectful of his talents and cast him "in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person".

But to young readers Sendak's "kiddie books" – in particular, 1963's hugely popular Where the Wild Things Are – were anything but idiotic, creating imaginative visions of childhood that adults might have considered dark, cruel or disturbing, but which thrilled and delighted three generations of children.

On Tuesday Sendak died at his home in Connecticut, aged 83. The man considered by many to be the most important children's author of the 20th century suffered a stroke on Friday, according to his longtime friend and carer, Lynn Caponera, and died as a result of complications.

"We are terribly saddened at the passing of Maurice Sendak," said Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books, which published his books. "He was a glorious author and illustrator, an amazingly gifted designer, a blisteringly funny raconteur, a fierce and opinionated wit, and a loyal friend to those who knew him. His talent is legendary; his mind and breadth of knowledge equally so.

"Every once in a while, someone comes along who changes our world for the better. Maurice Sendak was such a man."

In a six-decade career, Sendak provided the illustrations for more than 100 children's books, writing and illustrating 20 more and winning a host of prizes including, in 1970, the Hans Christian Andersen award for children's book illustration, the most prestigious award in the field. His early work, including images for Ruth Krauss's A Hole is to Dig, published in 1952 – a collection of children's sometimes quirky definitions of everyday words – and Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear series from 1957, conjured comfortably wholesome images of childhood.

It was with Where the Wild Things Are in 1963, however, that Sendak would achieve international acclaim. The book tells the story of a boy called Max who is sent to bed without supper and embarks on a dreamlike journey to a country inhabited by a population of fanged "wild things" that were both lovable and disturbing. The book attracted controversy on publication thanks to its unsettling theme, but proved a phenomenal success. It has sold more than 17m copies worldwide and in 2009 was adapted into a Hollywood movie.

Sendak attributed his success to a refusal to patronise younger readers or sugar-coat their experiences, considering them "a better audience and tougher critics". "I refuse to lie to children," he told the Guardian last year, with characteristic irascibility, in one of his last interviews. "I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

Sendak was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, the children of Polish Jewish emigrants. Both his parents' families would later be killed in the Holocaust, an experience that was traumatising for them, and convulsed the imagination of their son. "It forced me to take children to a level that I thought was more honest than most people did," he once said. "Because if life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults, and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up."

In the late 1940s Sendak was working as a commercial illustrator – his first book, in 1947, was a physics textbook called Atomic for the Millions – and as a window dresser at FAO Schwartz, the New York toy store. An introduction to the children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom led to a commission to illustrate his first book for younger readers, Michel Aymé's The Wonderful Farm.

Where the Wild Things Are was not the only work to attract controversy. In the Night Kitchen (1970), the story of another surreal adventure, this time by a boy called Mickey through a baker's kitchen, has frequently been banned or censored because of Sendak's depictions of the young boy's nudity. His favourite among his own works was Outside Over There (1981), about a young girl whose baby sister has been stolen by goblins.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas, including the Czech opera Brundibar in 2003, with his collaborator and close friend, the Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner.

He produced various animated TV series based on his illustrations. He returned last year to children's books, with Bumble-Ardy, the first work to which he had contributed both words and pictures in three decades. Its theme was characteristically troubled, concerning a naughty piglet who loses his parents to a bacon slicer.

Though he never acknowledged the relationship to his parents, Sendak shared his life for 50 years with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst. His partner's death in 2007, and those of increasing numbers of friends, had left him "caved in" with grief, he said, and his own view of death was typically unsentimental.

"I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput," he told one interviewer. "I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/08/maurice-sendak-dark-visions-children?INTCMP=SRCH

Last night's setlist

At The Habit, York (with Ron): -

He'll Have To Go
True Love Ways
Walk Right Back
Love Hurts
Ebony Eyes

An enjoyable night with excellent sets from Mark Wynn, Colin Rowntree & Chris Helme. Good things from other folks too. Open mic bliss.

Hal E. Chester RIP

Hal E Chester obituary
Shrewd film producer behind School for Scoundrels and Night of the Demon

Joel Finler

guardian.co.uk

Monday 16 April 2012

Hal E Chester, who has died aged 91, was a juvenile actor, then a producer of low-budget movies in Hollywood, before he moved in 1955 to Britain, where he set up his own production company to take advantage of the lower costs of filming. Over the next 15 years he turned out a wide range of pictures, which often featured American stars such as Mickey Rooney, Dana Andrews, Yul Brynner and Paul Newman. For a period he specialised in British comedies. The first and best of these was School for Scoundrels (1960), loosely based on the popular Gamesmanship books of Stephen Potter. The impressive cast included Alastair Sim, Terry-Thomas and Dennis Price, with Ian Carmichael as the intrepid hero trying to impress Janette Scott.

Small, dynamic and fast-talking, Chester was perhaps a typical example of the shrewd and ambitious Hollywood producer. He was born Harold Ribotsky in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of seven children of Polish-Jewish parents who had arrived in the US in the 1890s. Enterprising and hard-working from an early age, he was a delivery boy, a magician's assistant, a newsboy selling subscriptions, a runner on Wall Street and an enthusiastic amateur painter before turning to the theatre. When he first went on the stage he took the surname of his new stepmother and called himself Hally Chester.

His performance in the popular play Dead End led to an offer from Hollywood to appear in a sequel to the 1937 film of that play. This follow-up was entitled Crime School (1938) and starred Humphrey Bogart; Chester appeared as one of the Dead End Kids. Continuing to play tough, streetwise juveniles as part of the popular, but short-lived cycle of teenage gang movies, he was one of Monogram's East Side Kids and was among Universal's Junior G-Men.

After a break from filming during the second world war, when he toured the country making personal appearances, Chester returned to Hollywood, where he produced a number of musical shorts. Still only in his mid-20s, he co-wrote and produced Joe Palooka, Champ (1946), the first of a series of Monogram movies loosely based on the popular comic strip.

The best of Chester's early low-budget features were The Underworld Story (1950), a hard-hitting gangster flick directed by Cy Enfield and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), most memorable for its stop-motion monster effects created by Ray Harryhausen. Chester maintained a steady output of around one picture per year, and collaborated on the story or script for a number of his most interesting projects such as Crashout (1955), an atmospheric thriller about a group of ex-convicts on the run.

The Bold and the Brave (1956) starred Rooney, Wendell Corey and Don Taylor as American GIs fighting in Italy. The Two-Headed Spy (1958) provided Michael Caine with one of his early roles. In between came a memorable horror movie, Night of the Demon (1957), starring Andrews as a psychologist caught up in a series of deaths. After The Double Man (1967), a typical cold war spy thriller, and The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968), starring Newman, Chester made one more film – Take a Girl Like You (1970), based on the Kingsley Amis novel – before retiring, just as most of the American studios were severely reducing their overseas commitments.

Chester, who was married three times, continued to live in London until his death. He is survived by two sons.

• Hal E Chester (Harold Ribotsky), film producer, born 6 March 1921; died 25 March 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/16/hal-e-chester?INTCMP=SRCH

Lichtenstein, Klee and Lowry works to be unveiled by Tate galleries

Art lovers will be able to enjoy a major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work and find out how LS Lowry was influenced by the French, as the Tate galleries reveal next year's programmes

Alex Needham
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 9 May 2012

Comic strips, matchstick men and David Bowie will hit the Tate in 2013, along with Marc Chagall, Gary Hume and Paul Klee. The four galleries – Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool – have announced their programmes for next year, which include the first major retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work for 20 years and a show that will demonstrate how LS Lowry was influenced by French painting.

Lichtenstein, whose comic-strip-style paintings made him one of the forefathers of pop art, will be shown at London's Tate Modern from February. The exhibition will include landmark works including Whaam!, his famous 1963 picture of a fighter plane being shot by another, and Drowning Girl, both appropriated from contemporary comics, as well as the Artist's Studio series which saw him bring his graphic, pop style to his own surroundings and other real-life art works. It will also display lesser known late work including a series of female nudes and Chinese landscapes.

The gallery's autumn show will be dedicated to Klee, a pivotal figure in 20th century art, who taught at the Bauhaus school and whose intense, radiant paintings, replete with symbolism and references to the unconscious, draw on cubism, surrealism and primitive art. It will be the first Klee exhibition to take place in the UK for more than 10 years.

The Lowry show will take place at London's Tate Britain from next June, the first of its kind since the artist's death in 1976. Last year, the actor Ian McKellen accused the Tate of neglecting the artist, after claiming that it had shown only one of the 23 Lowry works it owns – a claim the Tate denies. Though Lowry's images of matchstick-style workers in industrial landscapes are some of the most famous in British art, the exhibition promises to reveal how he was influenced by French painters such as Camille Pissarro and Maurice Utrillo. 

Tate Britain promises to unveil its refurbished galleries in early summer next year, including a re-hang that has already aroused some controversy, with Burlington magazine claiming that it was prioritising modern works over pre-20th century ones. It will also stage an exhibition of work by Hume alongside that of Patrick Caulfield, who died in 2005.

Tate Liverpool will approach another aspect of popular British art with its show Glam! The Performance and Style, which promises to demonstrate the influence of the glam rock era, from 1971 to 1975, on other art forms in Europe and America. The gallery will also host Chagall: A Modern Master, the first exhibition of the Russian artist's work for 15 years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/09/lichtenstein-klee-lowry-unveiled-tate

See also: http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/roy-litchensteins-studio.html

And http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/roy-lichtenstein-at-tate-modern.html

And http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/l-s-lowery-at-tate-britain.html

Tonight's setlist(s)

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

Unknown Legend
So Close
Love Letters In The Sand
Birds
There Stands The Glass
Falling

A very quiet night player-wise, so after a brief pause there was an impromptu jam without amplification (Cumberland Arms style). Some of the songs played included: -

Baby What You Want Me To Do
Dirty Old Town
Too Far Gone
American Pie (abridged)
Old Man (request)
Out On The Weekend
Isn't It A Pity (request for a George Harrison song)

And so the evening drew to a somewhat premature close.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #153

Bede's World, the spiritual birthplace of the FNB, on a fair day in May...

The American...

Paul Buchanan reads The Lover Mourns For The Loss Of Love/Aedh Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

William Butler Yeats

Archie Burnett interviewed by Terry Kelly

Living with Larkin
Terry Kelly interviews Archie Burnett about editing the landmark edition Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems

Scottish academic Archie Burnett studied at the University of Edinburgh and later Oxford University, where he completed a thesis on Milton. He worked as a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford, between 1974 and 1978, then as a lecturer and finally Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University from 1979 until 2000. With Christopher Ricks, he is currently Co-director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University, USA. He edited the Oxford editions of The Poems of A.E Housman (1997) and The Letters of A.E. Housman (2007). This interview took place by email in January, 2012. 

Archie Burnett, in an earlier interview with About Larkin in 2008, you told me that you first encountered Larkin's poetry as an undergraduate. Do you recall which particular poem or poems first caught you eye; and what were your first impressions of Larkin's work? 

I think the first Larkin poem I encountered was 'Church Going' in Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry, at Edinburgh in 1968-9. Thereafter I got to know The Whitsun Weddings, and I bought High Windows when it appeared. First impressions were of the poet's accessibility, the distinct voice (or rather voices), the technical mastery that didn't advertise itself, and of somebody having something to say. 

You were lucky enough to attend a rare poetry reading by Larkin at St John's College, Oxford – the poet's old college, of course – in November 1974. Not only that, but you also met the poet briefly at a college dinner, finding him 'gentle, unassuming, and candid'. Again, do have any particular memories of his reading – such as the poems he selected or any comments on what he read – or of your brief encounter?

There's a full account of the reading by R.J.C. Watt: '"Scragged by embryo-Leavises": Larkin reading his poems', Critical Survey, 1.2 (1989), 172-5. Larkin read nothing from The North Ship ('because I think it's awful'), but his reading was impressive without trying to be so. It was particularly funny to hear him reading 'Vers de Societe' and 'Sympathy in White Major' (with 'craps' and 'in a pig's arse') in that cultivated accent of his. When I met him before lunch one day I asked him if he disapproved of Jake Balokowsky, and he said no, which I found hard to believe. 

Faber and Faber first approached you to edit Larkin's poems in 2002, when you were in the middle of editing Housman's letters, eventually issuing a contract for the project at the end of 2007. You believe you were approached because of your editorial work on Housman. Given that you had no obvious 'track record' in the field of Larkin studies, did you have any doubts or misgivings about the size of the task? 

After fourteen years of work on the edition of Housman's poems, in which I encountered so many scholarly difficulties, I am not easily daunted. Even the edition of Housman's Letters, which took ten years, was a comparatively easy task. I had been looking at Larkin's poems in Collected Poems (1988) before I started work in earnest, and I had convinced myself that they should at least receive a commentary. The work in all took about four years, one of which was a sabbatical. 

I presume you acquired Anthony Thwaite's edition of Larkin's Collected Poems when it was published in 1988. As an editor, did you have any misgivings, then or later, about the wisdom of breaking up the careful 'architecture' of Larkin's three mature volumes with early, unfinished or inferior work? 

I don't approve of splitting up published volumes, for the reasons I give in the introduction to my edition. The main reason is that the choice of poems and their arrangement within each volume are critical and creative acts on the part of the poet. I do, however, provide very full information on the chronology of composition and publication of all the poems. 

In an email in 2008, you told me that you hoped your edition of The Complete Poems would 'bring people back to the poems, who were perhaps diverted towards the seamier side of the biography.' More than 20 years after the controversial Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's A Writer's Life, do you see your edition of The Complete Poems as part of that rehabilitation process? 

It has always been one of the functions of scholarly editions to bring new attention to the writings and promote study of them. When Christopher Ricks published his edition of Tennyson in 1966, for instance, it didn't matter whether you liked Tennyson as a person: here was an edition that shed new light on the poems. Had Larkin not been the writer he was, it is doubtful whether there would have been a biography of him like Andrew Motion's, or Anthony Thwaite's substantial edition of Selected Letters. The poems are what count.

Following on from this, did you have any reservations in republishing a highly intimate poem such as Love Again – a poem removed from the most recent version of the Collected Poems in 2003 – or lines revealing the 'seamier side' of Larkin's personality, such as the salacious or racist verses, clearly meant for the eyes of like-minded male friends of the poet? (Such poems were dubbed 'playground snigger' in an otherwise highly favourable review of your edition by Fiona Sampson in The Independent, and their inclusion sparked some 'disquiet' for Anthony Thwaite and Andrew Motion, joint literary executors of the Larkin Estate, in a letter of theirs published in The Guardian.) 

Well, Larkin has many sides, and I'm an editor not a censor. I don't like some of his political gibes, in verse or elsewhere, though they strike me as mere outbursts rather than as anything seriously thought through, and I could live without the bunny rabbit verses. But these for me would be literary-critical, not strictly editorial, issues. Another consideration is quite simply that most of the verse you refer to was already in print. Some of the short verses included in the letters are funny and accomplished, others are not only light but lightweight. As an editor, I want to include everything: people will make their own minds up anyway. If you look at the volume of Ben Jonson's poems in Herford and Simpson's monumental Oxford edition, you will find many short epigrams and epitaphs and other light verses. A whole tradition of such verse, including limericks, would not survive if editors cut them out because they disapproved of them or dismissed them as being too slight. And I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had cut it all out I would have been criticized for doing so in an edition that purported to be complete. 

In 2008, you indicated that your intention with The Complete Poems was 'to print everything, even uncompleted poems from the workbooks.' Clearly, this editorial brief changed at some point, given that you eventually decided not to publish complete transcriptions, which your introduction states would have proved 'much more costly.' Was it a mixture of financial, practical or editorial factors which persuaded you to only reproduce those unpublished or uncollected Larkin poems which you considered 'complete,' or which did not contain variant or inconclusive endings? 

The main reason for exclusion of verse from the workbooks was incompleteness. I printed a few items, some of them already in print, that I thought might be complete, though I expressed doubts as appropriate. Some long drafts in the workbooks remain incomplete, and it would seriously distort what is there to print a readable plain text. 

I believe your work on The Complete Poems started in earnest in 2007, when you visited the Larkin archives at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, the British Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Did you encounter any problems in transcribing Larkin's notebooks and typescripts or in the overall, editorial process? 

I did not encounter any significant problems of transcription or in the overall, editorial process. Had I been attempting a complete transcription of the workbook materials, things would have been different. In particular, Larkin's scorings-out are often so heavy that it is well nigh impossible to read what has been scored out, and the apparatus for recording textual variants would have had to be very substantial indeed. 

Your commentary on the poems is one of the strongest features of the new edition. Did you assemble the commentary as part of the transcription process or was it produced later? 

I started with the commentary, trying to ascertain what might be involved and how large it would be. Thereafter, I developed it alongside work on the texts of the poems. 

You allow three exceptions to your rule of excluding poems with uncancelled or alternative endings ('Compline,' 'Sting in the shell' and 'The poet has a straight face'). But why not make such an exception for a much more significant poem such as 'The Winter Palace'? (And could similar exceptions not have been made in the case of such unfinished poems as 'The Duration' or 'Letters to My Mind' ?) 

I made these exceptions because the poems had already been printed without acknowledgement that they contained uncancelled alternative wordings. The textual source of 'The Winter Palace,' as I explain in my introduction (p.xix) contains cancellations and further inconclusive drafting that render it, in textual terms, not even a borderline case. Unless you are providing a faithful transcription, you can't print something the poet cancelled (as though he hadn't done so), and you can't print it as though there were no further inconclusive drafts.

Archie, you are quite tough on Larkin editor A.T. Tolley, citing his 77 errors in the published text of  Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), calling him an 'uncritical follower' of the original Collected Poems of 1988 and drawing attention to his shortcomings in several parts of your commentary. But can any substantial volume be completely blemish-free? (For example –- to play devil's advocate – you make reference on p.456 to The Card-Players, and Roger Day's assertion that the poem's rhyme scheme is abbacddcefeggh, which is questionable, if not simply inaccurate. Other Larkin commentators may raise other points of fact.) Frankly, should academics in glass houses tempt fate by throwing stones?

There are over 70 errors of wording alone, and many other shortcomings. If I don't record in detail what is wrong, readers will be puzzled as to which text is correct. It's unlikely that they will consult the primary sources in the archives. Nothing is perfect, but an all-out effort should be made to ensure that imperfections are kept to a minimum. I see nothing wrong with Roger Day's comment on 'The Card-Players,' and in any case it's his comment, not mine. You may disagree with Andrew Motion when he says that the bridles at the end of 'At Grass' should be halters, or with James Booth's comments on the bird's eggs at the end of 'The Explosion,' but your disagreement does not invalidate the inclusion of these comments, which become topics for discussion.

Leading critics, including Helen Vendler, expressed doubts about the publication of uncollected poems by literary perfectionist Elizabeth Bishop. Similar doubts have been raised about tampering with canonical Larkin. But given that Larkin himself told the late Faber and Faber chairman Charles Monteith that 'there is nothing I should like more than a Collected Poems under your imprint,'  what do you think he would have made of your weighty edition of The Complete Poems?

As a university librarian and as a writer, Philip Larkin was very knowledgeable and very knowing about manuscripts and scholarly editions. In the introduction (pp.xxv,xxvi) I quote him saying 'Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unfinished work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer's intentions', and lamenting the fact that if manuscripts of British writers end up in American libraries 'definitive editions of such British writers will in all probability be American'. His meticulous preservation of the workbooks (he gave the first one to the British Library in 1964) and of his manuscripts and typescripts should be seen in the light of such comments. I cannot speculate, however, as to what he would have thought of my edition. 

Finally, have the mostly positive reviews  of The Complete Poems made all your hard work seem worthwhile, can we expect a paperback version soon and does the volume mark your final involvement with Larkin's work?

I naturally feel pleased when reviewers recognize the work that has been done. I would not have undertaken it had I not thought it worthwhile. I really want readers to look again at this poet, who at his best was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century English literature and whose second-best was better than most. It is entirely for the publisher to decide about publication in paperback. I am embarking on a large project of which I am not at present free to make details public, but I can't say that I won't return to Larkin one day.

From http://www.philiplarkin.com/al.htm

See http://www.bu.edu/english/people/faculty/archie-burnett/

Let's see that one again...

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York: -
Set 1:-
Love Song
Falling
I Don't Want To Talk About It
Sugar Mountain
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
There Stands The Glass

Set 2 (with Ron): -
Bye Bye Love
The Price Of Love
True Love Ways

After the Toon's demolition of Chelsea in the company of Tom T, I wandered along to The Habit to express my love for the black & white. A grand night of music it was, and amazingly Ron & I were the last turn  of the night. Amazing - just like Cisse's 2nd goal.

Paul Brady interview by Terry Kelly

Paul Brady’s happy to be on his own again
 
By Terry Kelly
Wednesday 25 April 2012

ACCLAIMED singer-songwriter Paul Brady is one of Ireland’s finest musical exports.

A multi-instrumentalist, with a career stretching back to the 1960s, he has appeared and collaborated with some of the biggest names in popular music, Eric Clapton and Carole King included.

We spoke to him ahead of his appearance on Tyneside next week.

Sustaining a long musical career must sometimes be a difficult business. But Brady, who first found early success with folk band The Johnstons in the 1960s and later with influential 1970s folk unit Planxty, seems fairly relaxed about his day-job.

When he steps on to the stage of Hall Two of The Sage in Gateshead on Saturday, May 5, he will be accompanied by only a guitar and perhaps a keyboard.

“I enjoy doing solo tours. It’s something I’ve done for much of my career and I feel comfortable with just a guitar and a piano,” he explained.

Brady visited the same venue last year, but was then part of the large musical troupe, collectively known as The Transatlantic Sessions, which includes such noted players as Jerry Douglas and Aly Bain.

His solo stint will partly be about promoting a new double CD, called Dancer In The Fire - A Paul Brady Anthology (Proper Records), which is very much a personal retrospective, covering more than 30 years of his recording career.

Brady is pleased when I say the album could have been given the alternative title, ‘My Forgotten Children.’
He said: “That’s just how I feel about many of these songs. The album doesn’t contain my best-known songs, but ones for which I feel great love.

“I’ve always hated those compilations which just repeat someone’s greatest hits. These are simply some of my personal favourites.”

Born and raised in Strabane, Northern Ireland, on the border with the Irish Republic, Brady was very much a child of the 1950s, being influenced by a variety of sounds, from swing, jazz, and from show tunes to classic ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll.

That musical diversity is reflected in Dancer In The Fire, which incorporates everything from the traditional folk standard, I Am A Youth That’s Inclined To Ramble, to The Long Goodbye, co-written with Ronan Keating.

Asked if his musical collaborations are fired by purely creative or commercial imperatives, Brady responds: “Really, it’s a fun imperative. I have written so many songs and albums by myself, that it’s good and inspiring to work on a song with someone else.”

Plus, making many albums has allowed him to work with producers and players associated with some of his own musical heroes, such as Steely Dan.

And there cannot be many Irish singer-songwriters who have had the chance to teach traditional folk tunes to Bob Dylan.

Brady briefly teamed up with Dylan at Slane Castle, near Dublin, in 1984, teaching His Bobness the chords of the folk classics, Arthur McBride and The Lakes of Pontchartrain.

“What can I say? It was Dylan, although his guitar playing was, er, basic.”

Paul revealed his latest projects include working on songs with Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon (“We met at a Horslips gig”) and these latest collaborations may appear on his next studio album.

* Paul Brady will appear at The Sage Gateshead on Saturday, May 5, at 8pm. Tickets are £22.50 and £19.50. Call the box office on 443 4661.

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/lifestyle/entertainment/paul-brady-s-happy-to-be-on-his-own-again-1-4484048

Last night's setlist

At the Waggon & Horses, York: -

Is It Only The Moonlight?
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong
Tell Me Why

A little Neil indulgence - has to be done every now & then. A great night of live music. Where would we be without it? (Answers on a postcard please - no, forget that).

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #152