Margaret Thatcher RIP

There's no getting away from this, I suppose. The most divisive British leader that I can remember - although voted in three times...

Check http://www.guardian.co.uk/ for comments that will be anywhere from a reasonably balanced rational critique to frothing Spartism, but avoid the readers' comments unless you want to be reminded of the appalling lack of knowledge that lies behind them.

This site's naturally going to me more respectful and positive about her work: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Whereas this site, conveniently ignoring her stance on Europe,  is probably ready to invade Poland  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

Here's the local spin (I'll avoid the Chronicle's views and let it follow its unique journalistic path that somehow involves mentioning Denise Welch every other story): http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2013/04/09/margaret-thatcher-in-death-as-in-life-the-iron-lady-divides-us-all-61634-33140367/

Annette Funicello RIP

Last night's set list

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Tennessee Waltz
Let Your Fingers Do The Walking
On The Way Home
Tell Me Why

An unusual night in that it was booked as an open mic, but at 10pm a band came on and did a 45mins set. Never mind, the amazing bluesologist (ok I made up that word) Colin Rowntree sang and played some great stuff, finishing off with a surprise Shipbuilding as an ironic tribute to some old boiler who passed away recently.

Boz Scaggs - Memphis preview and Cadillac Walk...

Sarah Pickstone - Stevie Smith and the Willow

John Moores Painting Prize won by Sarah Pickstone
15 September 2012

Artist Sarah Pickstone has won the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize for a work inspired by poet Stevie Smith.

The award is billed as Britain's most prestigious painting prize.

Manchester-born Pickstone based the winning painting on an illustration by Stevie Smith to accompany her 1957 poem Not Waving But Drowning.

Judge Fiona Banner described the work, titled Stevie Smith and the Willow, as "an enigmatic double portrait that grapples with the creative self".

Banner, herself a Turner Prize-nominated artist, said: "It's a representation of the poet Stevie Smith in a deranged landscape.

"It's also a painting of one artist reflected through another, a meeting of literary and pictorial minds."

Pickstone picked up the award, which is handed out every two years, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, as part of the Liverpool Biennial.

The painting of a girl bathing in the water under an old weeping willow tree is based on the illustration of a girl that Smith used to accompany her poem, which Pickstone said "might represent some kind of everywoman - an artist or mother or child".

"It's a very dark poem," she said. "The poem was one of many sources for the painting, I've always been intrigued by Stevie Smith and how she worked, and I had a sense of wanting to make something more joyous out of the poem."

Previous winners of the award include David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Peter Doig, while Sir Peter Blake, who won the junior section in 1961, is now the prize's patron.

Pickstone, who was also nominated in 2004, is the first female artist to win since Lisa Milroy in 1989.

She was chosen from more than 3,000 entries. Other nominees included Ian Law, Narbi Price, Stephen Nicholas and collaborative duo Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings.

Fiona Banner was joined on the judging panel by fellow Turner Prize-nominated artists George Shaw and Angela de la Cruz, plus BBC creative director Alan Yentob and Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick.

Yentob said the entries proved the art of painting was "alive and well and bursting with ideas".

"The selection was tough because the quality was high, but the jury was especially impressed and heartened by the creativity and conviction on display in the final five prize winners," he said. "Yes, painting still matters."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19598723

Sarah Pickstone:

"How do we define image? Is image a visual thought? Do all images have their source in other images, or associations with other images? 'Stevie Smith and the Willow' is a painting from a series of works which nod towards creative communality. It has at its heart the drawing that accompanies Stevie Smith's 1957 poem, 'Not Waving But Drowning'. Smith was definitely an original, whose poems (and pictures) make a confluence of the comic and the metaphysical. In the painting, the girl (artist, poet, reader, child) bathes in the water under an old weeping willow: part tree, part self, part story, part rebirth.

I've been working for the past three years on the ways in which figures, places and ideas meet and open each other, specifically referencing writers who happened, in history, to pass through London's Regent's Park. The park has long been a source for my work, a place where the public and the private, the external and the psychological worlds, come together. It's also a place of constant renewal. The painting is about this renewal, natural and aesthetic, across form, time and image."

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/jm2012/prizewinners/pickstone.aspx

Sylvia Googled, 2010

Sarah Pickstone: The Writers Series
6 April - 12 May 2013

The New Art Centre is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by Sarah Pickstone since she won the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize in 2012. For a number of years, Pickstone’s work has explored the ways in which figures, places and ideas meet. She has, in particular, found inspiration in the many writers associated with Regent’s Park in London at different times throughout history, from George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield to Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith. This interest has culminated in the paintings in The Writers Series, which are shown together in the Gallery at Roche Court.

Pickstone considers the importance of Regent’s Park as either an actual presence in fiction or as a background to various writers’ lives. However she does not represent the reality of the Park in her paintings, nor does she illustrate the writers’ lives or scenes from their books. Instead Pickstone evokes the atmosphere of the Park as a magical place which blends together public, private, external and psychological worlds. So whilst writers and the Park are her subject matter, Pickstone’s overriding interest is in human connections, the forces of the natural world, memory and imagination

As the writer Ali Smith has written, Sarah Pickstone’s paintings question how we actually define imagery. Is an image a visual thought? And what would thought look like, if we could see it?

Sarah Pickstone’s park pictures are a versatile and liberating act, a meld of vision and thought come together into an embodiment of both. They take what we think we recognise or already know – landscape, portrait – and by means of fusion and metamorphosis redefine and revitalise both. Her device, an investigation of the image of the writer in nature, particularly of the writers who've happened to pass through one particular green London landscape over the course of several centuries, or of one green landscape through which so much cultural thought, invention and creativity has by both chance and design passed, actually banishes time, redraws notions of fertility and uncircumscribes fixity of both image and expectation.

Sarah Pickstone lives and works in London. She studied at the Royal Academy Schools* and subsequently won a scholarship to the British School at Rome. The Writers Series is her first exhibition with the New Art Centre.

Sarah Pickstone and Ali Smith will be in conversation at Roche Court on Monday 3 June, as part of the Salisbury International Arts Festival. Tickets are available from http://www.salisburyfestival.co.uk.

http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2013/03/16/artspublish/2348917559.html

See http://www.sarahpickstone.co.uk/home

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

STEVIE SMITH

Smith discusses and reads the poem at 

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7089

* after studying Fine Art at Newcastle University, where I sort of knew her.

Lee Halpin RIP: Death of a Film-maker

Frozen to death: Two men arrested in connection with death of film-maker Lee Halpin

A film-maker from Heaton has died while creating a documentary about sleeping rough on the streets

Kerry Wood

5 Apr 2013

Two men have now been arrested in connection with the death of film-maker Lee Halpin. The men, aged 26 and 30, were arrested on suspicion of supplying controlled drugs.

The former Heaton Manor School pupil, aged 26, was discovered in the vacant Summerhill Hostel, on Westgate Road, Newcastle, just before 10am on Wednesday.

The men have been bailed pending further inquiries.

It’s believed Lee Halpin set aside this week to go it alone on the city’s streets experiencing and filming what life is like for those who are living rough.

He’d spoken with his friends about looking forward to the project and on Sunday was asking his 1,500 Twitter followers if anyone had a sleeping bag he could borrow.

In his last Tweet – on Sunday at 11.05am – Lee asked his followers: “If anyone has got an old phone I can have for a week, I'd be very grateful.”

But three days later Lee, who lived with his family in Heaton, Newcastle, was found dead in a boarded-up hostel on the city’s Westgate Road.

It is not yet known how he died, but it’s feared the 27-year-old may have succumbed to hypothermia.

A Met Office spokesman confirmed the lowest recorded temperature for Newcastle early on April 3 was around -4.2C.

Lee’s friend of 10 years Daniel Lake said: “I was just talking to Lee on Saturday, having some banter talking about football and how excited he was about going out filming.

“Lee was a great guy, a character and was well known. His big things were creative writing and poetry. He was making a documentary about homeless people living in Newcastle’s West End.

“No one knows how he passed away, but we think it could have been hypothermia. He made the ultimate sacrifice trying to raise awareness about what was happening to other people.”

Lee, a former Heaton Manor School pupil, was discovered in the vacant Summerhill Hostel just before 10am on Wednesday.

A Northumbria Police spokesman said it was believed no third party was involved in his death, adding: “Police were informed the body of a man believed to be in his 20s had been found in a derelict building in Westgate Road. A report will be prepared for the coroner.” Paramedics were also called to the property.

Since Lee’s death, tributes have come in from friends and those who knew him. One friend described Lee as “a great advocate for the NE arts scene”.

Having completed his creative writing MA at Newcastle University, Lee went on to become a founder editor of Novel, a magazine covering all aspects of North East culture from performances and exhibitions to launch parties and talent.

And for almost a year, he’d featured on the airwaves with his The Weekend Starts Here Show on Radio Tyneside, on Fridays from 8pm till 10pm.

On Twitter, tributes have been paid by those who worked with and knew Lee.

Staff at Intimation Creative said: “We’re very sad to hear that Lee Halpin passed away....Our thoughts go out to Lee’s family and many friends.”

The band Tea Pad Orchestra said: “We are very sad to hear of the death of Lee Halpin......Helped us a lot. Thanks mate and goodbye.”

Dan Howarth described Lee as a “talented, courageous and thoroughly excellent bloke”, adding: “Shattered by the news of the death of Lee Halpin.....a massive loss.”

A post mortem examination to establish his cause of death is expected shortly.

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/local-news/heaton-film-maker-lee-halpin-dies-2519352


And from the Guardian, which has, perhaps wisely, decided to close its comments section on the story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/05/radio-presenter-lee-halpin-dead?fb=native

For Novel magazine see http://www.novelmagazine.co.uk/

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #196

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York (The Elderly Brothers): -

Lola
If I Fell
Hello Mary Lou
Sea Of Heartbreak
You're Sixteen

Probably the most manic night in The Habit EVER! It was like Christmas & New Year's Eve all rolled into one. Some crackin' turns and an amazing audience. After the conclusion of the open mic, several people took it upon themselves to tinkle the ivories on the very out of tune piano. The highlight/lowlight was a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody which got most of the clientele singing along. Raucous would be an understatement.

This must be the first night that the Elderly Brothers have not covered an Everlys song but it was enjoyable to give If I Fell a first run out.

Time for bed I think!

Richard Griffiths RIP

Richard Griffiths
Richard Griffiths, who has died aged 65, was one of Britain’s most recognisable actors, deploying his girth and equally sizeable talent to great effect on television, on stage, and on the big screen.

29 Mar 2013

He was memorable in a host of different genres, with a range and subtlety that belied his giant physique. A natural in Shakespeare’s comic roles, notably Falstaff, he later captured the imagination of young filmgoers with his performances as the hideous Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter series. But it was, perhaps oddly, for his portrayal of two sexual predators that he was best-loved.

As Uncle Monty in Withnail and I (1987) he erupted, cheeks lightly rouged, into the bedroom of his nephew’s terrified flatmate, declaring that “I mean to have you, boy, even if it must be burglary.” Like the film’s other stars, Paul McGann and Richard E Grant, Griffiths would have such memorable snippets of dialogue quoted at him by legions of fans for the rest of his career. (“They’re all a bit silly about it, and they quote stuff and expect me to know it. I find that very odd.”)

Almost two decades later he played Hector, an inspirational teacher who fondles his pupils while giving them lifts home on his motorcycle, in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004). The play was a smash hit in London, and went on to repeat the success on Broadway. Like Withnail it contained some lines that left audiences helpless with laughter (notably when one boy sighs: “I’m a Jew ... I’m small ... I’m homosexual ... and I live in Sheffield ... I’m f---ed.”) A large part of its appeal, however was what its director Nicholas Hytner called Griffiths’s “masterpiece of wit, delicacy, mischief and desolation”.

Griffiths was always at pains to insist that Hector is not a paedophile – the boys in the play are all over 18. “I’d feed all paedophiles into a tree-shredder,” he told interviewers. “One minute with a tree shredder. Anything left the police can have.” And he was almost as intemperate with audience members who forgot to turn off their mobile phones. At least three times he interrupted the play in mid-performance, threatening to walk off.

Griffiths became so associated with gay roles that many assumed he was gay himself. “Look, I’m just acting,” he said. In fact he was married and declared a pronounced preference for women of a fuller figure. “I could never understand the attraction of Bette Davis. I always preferred Jane Russell.” Moreover, not only was he not gay, it turned out that he had started life so skinny that he required medical treatment.

Richard Griffiths was born on July 31 1947 in Thornaby-on-Tees, North Yorkshire. His father, Thomas, was a steelworker who also fought for money in pubs and, like his mother, the former Jane Denmark, was deaf-mute. Only two of the couple’s five children survived: two were stillborn and one, a longed-for daughter, died days after birth. The poverty, Griffiths said later, was “Dickensian”, with the unusual twist that, as he communicated with his parents by sign language, and the family had no television or radio, Richard’s childhood home was largely silent.

He ran away frequently but always came back to his parents because “I was sort of responsible for them. From the age of four I would help with the shopping. They would sign and I would translate to the shopkeeper.” As a result, he complained, “I have a lifelong loathing of shopping.”

He was also skinny as a boy, so skinny in fact that aged eight he was given treatment on his pituitary gland. His metabolism slowed and he gained 60 per cent of his body weight within a year. He was picked on at school but, owing to his new-found heft, coupled with a temper that he retained throughout his life (“I think I get it from my father. He was a very aggressive man”), he was more than able to hold his own. “I was the biggest. I once attacked two kids because they threw an apple core at me and it hit me in the face and everyone laughed – and that was what really made me angry, being laughed at. So I pursued them round the school and beat them up. I was so angry. It was the best fight I ever had.”

He left St Bede’s school at 15 and applied for “a poxy job in a warehouse” only to find himself one of 300 hopefuls; so he returned to full-time education at Stockton and Billingham College. Taken by a teacher to see his first professional theatre production at 17, when he was in the audience of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Griffiths found himself spellbound.

He applied to do a drama course at the Northern College of Music in Manchester, which did not go down well at home. “In Teesside at the time ... if you said you wanted to be an actor it meant you had to be put to death. I had to keep the acting secret from my Dad. He raged at its pooffery when he found out.”

His first major role was in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the college’s drama society. When the student playing the governor of Massachusetts fell ill, Griffiths, promoted from a minor role, found himself overawed. “But I learnt it and did it.”

Like the principal characters in Withnail and I, Griffiths’s years as an aspiring actor were hard. But he soon realised that the weight he struggled with was a theatrical asset. Early in his career he was playing the Griffin in Alice in Wonderland when the actor playing the Mock Turtle turned to him and said: “Now listen to me, lad, you are very, very useful. You’ll never be out of a job.”

In the mid-1970s Griffiths was spotted by Trevor Nunn, then the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director, and moved to live in Stratford. He rose through the roster of roles, eventually playing Bottom and Trinculo as well as Volpone and Henry VIII.

Still, it was a precarious life, and the best financial rewards came from advertising. Griffiths appeared in a series of television ads for Holsten lager, then in 1979 was asked to go to America for three days to film a series of ads for BMW. But Nunn would not give him the time off from the RSC and Griffiths lost out, a blow he never forgot. “That would have meant never having to worry about overheads again, and I could have devoted my life to interesting theatrical projects.” Instead, he would have wait until the Harry Potter films (from 2001) to achieve real financial security – despite its subsequent success, Withnail and I was a flop at the box office.

Griffiths appeared in many other films, from Gandhi (1982) to Naked Gun 2 1/2 (1991), and also became well known to viewers of Pie in the Sky as Detective Inspector Henry Crabbe, a food-loving policeman who longs to retire from the force and set up his own restaurant. The light-hearted drama ran for five series on BBC1 from 1994.

Despite his success, Griffiths was not averse to moaning about the lot of the actor. It was a trait, he admitted, that drove his wife, Heather Gibson, an Irish actress whom he met in 1973 in a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, “nuts”.

His most enduring concern, however, was with his size. His bountiful proportions may have come in useful in securing work, but there were complications elsewhere. Armrests on seats were a particular bugbear. And while he felt that the business of moving about and acting provided some sort of veil to his shape, posing for still photographs left him uncomfortably exposed. “I don’t like the way I look so I don’t like being photographed. I become defensive.” Being asked to appear naked, as his co-stars were in a production of Equus (2007), was never an issue. “Thank goodness it’s not me being naked. I wouldn’t inflict my naked body on any paying audience.”

“Everybody my age should be issued with a 2lb fresh salmon,” he told an interviewer before the play opened. “If you see someone young, beautiful and happy, you should slap them as hard as you can with it. When they ask, 'Why did you do that?’, you say, 'Because, you lucky young bastard, you don’t know how fortunate you are.’ And they don’t...”

Richard Griffiths, who is survived by his wife, won an Olivier Award in Britain and a Tony Award in America, and continued to work until his death. Once asked what he would like his epitaph to be, he replied: “Richard Griffiths. Actor. Born 1947. Died 2947.”

Richard Griffiths, born July 31 1947, died March 29 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/9961457/Richard-Griffiths.html

Last night's set list

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Heart Of Gold
Unknown Legend
Out On The Weekend
Love Song
There Stands The Glass
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Teach Your Children
Helpless

Finished off a most enjoyable evening of open mic music with rather more songs than I'd expected to play. Most turns were backed with drums and/or bass + guitar.  So much fun to play in a band, albeit a scratch band.

Some excellent country tunes from Matt Ransom and some swampy Velvet Underground-tinged songs from Simon Micklethwaite. Great harmonies, bass and lead guitar from host Dave Keegan.

And beer too of course!

Nazi enters; Miliband exits

Paolo Di Canio confirmed as new Sunderland manager

• Former Swindon manager succeeds O'Neill
• Miliband resigns in protest at Italian's poilitics

Louise Taylor
The Guardian

Sunday 31 March 2013

Paolo Di Canio has been revealed as Sunderland's left-field, kill-or-cure choice to stave off the threat of relegation from the Premier League.

The volatile former Lazio, Juventus, Celtic, Sheffield Wednesday and West Ham striker, and most recently the Swindon Town manager, was appointed head coach on a two-and-a-half-year deal after breakneck talks in the north-east.

The move immediately proved controversial, David Miliband, the former Labour MP, stepping down as a non executive director in protest at Di Canio's political past in which he has admitted to being a fascist but not a racist. Miliband said: "I wish Sunderland AFC all success in the future. It is a great institution that does a huge amount for the north-east and I wish the team very well over the next vital seven games. However, in the light of the new manager's past political statements, I think it right to step down."

More at http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/mar/31/paolo-di-canio-sunderland-talks-manager

and here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/apr/01/david-miliband-resign-sunderland-di-canio

Not sure Ms Taylor's use of "left-field" is appropriate, but this is the Guardian, so it could be irony or just a bloody stupid mistake. 

I can see it now: the cultural life of city will be invigorated with the unemployed, Labour (okay, AND BNP)-voting masses, whose grandparents fought for this country in World War II, sitting in their street-corner cafes, discussing the merits of Futurism, Pound and Wodehouse over coffee...

Surely an apt moment to sever the Metro link?

On a brighter note, here's the man with a conscience, David Miliband, currently getting all kinds of shit in the press for his decision to leave Parliament and earn a lot of money as  head of the International Rescue Committee in New York City, pictured with the FNB's poet, journalist, critic, resident Sunderland supporter AND, when he can find the time, sex symbol, Terry Kelly.

Phil Ramone RIP

Phil Ramone and Paul Simon with their Grammy Awards for Still Crazy After All These Years in 1976

Phil Ramone, Producer for Music’s Biggest Stars, Dies at 79

By BEN SISARIO
Published: March 30, 2013

Phil Ramone, a prolific record producer and engineer who worked with some of the biggest music stars of the last 50 years, including Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Barbra Streisand, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 79. Though it was widely reported that he was 72, public records and his family confirm that he was born Jan. 5, 1934.*

His death was confirmed by his son Matthew. He did not immediately give the cause, but Mr. Ramone was reported to have been admitted to a Manhattan hospital in late February for treatment of an aortic aneurysm.

In his 2007 memoir, “Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music,” written with Charles L. Granata, Mr. Ramone defined the role of record producer as roughly equivalent to that of a film director, creating and managing an environment in which to coax the best work out of his performers.

“But, unlike a director (who is visible, and often a celebrity in his own right), the record producer toils in anonymity,” he wrote. “We ply our craft deep into the night, behind locked doors. And with few exceptions, the fruit of our labor is seldom launched with the glitzy fanfare of a Hollywood premiere.”

Mr. Ramone’s career was one of those exceptions. He was a trusted craftsman and confidant in the industry who was also one of the handful of producers widely known to the public. He won 14 Grammy Awards, including producer of the year, nonclassical, in 1981, and three for album of the year, for Mr. Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” in 1976, Mr. Joel’s “52nd Street” in 1980, and Mr. Charles’s duets album, “Genius Loves Company,” in 2005. He also produced music for television and film, winning an Emmy Award as the sound mixer for a 1973 special on CBS, “Duke Ellington ... We Love You Madly.”

Mr. Ramone was born in South Africa and grew up in Brooklyn. His father died when he was young, and his mother worked in a department store. A classical violin prodigy, he studied at the Juilliard School but soon drifted toward jazz and pop, and apprenticed at a recording studio, J.A.C. Recording.

In 1958, he co-founded A & R Recording, a studio on West 48th Street in Manhattan, and built a reputation as a versatile engineer, working on pop fare like Lesley Gore as well as jazz by John Coltrane and Quincy Jones. He ran the sound when Marilyn Monroe cooed “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and three years later won his first Grammy as the engineer on Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s landmark album “Getz/Gilberto.”

As a producer, he had a particularly close association with Mr. Joel and Mr. Simon; the back cover of Mr. Joel’s 1977 album “The Stranger” features a photograph of Mr. Ramone posing with Mr. Joel and his band at a New York restaurant.

“I always thought of Phil Ramone as the most talented guy in my band,” Mr. Joel said in a statement on Saturday. “He was the guy that no one ever, ever saw onstage. He was with me as long as any of the musicians I ever played with — longer than most. So much of my music was shaped by him and brought to fruition by him.”

Mr. Ramone’s relationships with those men were deep enough that he named two of his sons after them: Simon and William (known as B. J.); they survive him, along with Matthew, his third son, and his wife, Karen.

As a producer, Mr. Ramone was known for a conservative sound rooted in jazz and traditional pop, and in later years his biggest successes included albums with Mr. Charles, Tony Bennett, Elton John and others.

But he was also a proponent of new technologies. He was an early advocate for digital recording, and pushed for Mr. Joel’s “52nd Street” to be one of the first commercially released albums on compact disc, in 1982. Mr. Sinatra’s 1993 album “Duets,” featuring stars like Bono, Ms. Streisand and Natalie Cole, was made by connecting Mr. Sinatra’s studio in Los Angeles with others around the world using fiber-optic cables.

In an interview with Billboard magazine in 1996, Mr. Ramone explained why he believed a producer should not leave too much of his “stamp” on a recording.

“If our names were on the front cover, it’d be different, but it’s not on the front cover, and the audience doesn’t care,” he said. “If you think you have a style and you perpetrate that onto people, you’re hurting the very essence of their creativity.”

“The reward of producing,” he continued, “comes when somebody inside the record company who has a lot to do with what’s going on actually calls you and says, ‘Boy, this record really came out great.’ Or when other artists call you and want to work with you.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/arts/music/phil-ramone-record-producer-and-winner-of-14-grammys-dies-at-79.html?_r=0

*The Los Angeles Times obit has his age as 82! See:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-phil-ramone-20130331,0,2206451.story

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #195

Paul Williams RIP

Paul Williams, Crawdaddy Founder, 'Godfather of Rock Criticism' Dead at 64

By Andrew Flanagan

March 28, 2013 

Paul Williams, the writer and editor who helped create what we now know as rock journalism with Crawdaddy!, a magazine he founded in 1966, died last night at the age of 64 from complications related to a 1995 bike accident.

Williams began publishing Crawdaddy! at the age of 17, following his earlier work publishing science fiction fanzines -- as Johan Kugelberg stresses on Williams' website, "science-fiction fandom roots… all rock fanzines and of rock fandom." Williams continued to publish and grow Crawdaddy! for two years, printing the early work of influential writers such as Sandy Pearlman and Jon Landau; the former would go on to produce The Clash's Give 'Em Enough Rope, while the latter of whom would go on to manage and produce Bruce Springsteen.

REM's Peter Buck on Paul Williams' site described his writing thusly: "His writing was very conversational and fan oriented, in the sense that he was a fan. He wasn't reviewing records he didn't like because he got the assignment from some guy in an office. The passion was always there. You could tell that Paul was someone who wrote about things that he actually cared about."

In its two-to-three-year run (as Williams described it), the magazine's distribution went from 500 copies to 25,000 and could count among its fans Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Luc Sante.

Following the initial success of Crawdaddy!, Williams closed up shop in New York and moved to Mendocino, Calif. where he traveled with Timothy Leary and "ended up at John and Yoko's Bed-In for Peace in Montreal." It was also around this time that Williams struck up a friendship with the influential science fiction author Philip K. Dick, a relationship that continued after Dick's death, when Williams was named his literary executor. Williams is credited with helping to secure Dick's literary legacy.

Williams' wife, singer/songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill, made a short post to Facebook on Williams' death: "Rock-writer Paul S Williams, author and creator of CRAWDADDY magazine, (and my husband), passed away last night 10:30pm PST while his oldest son was holding his hand and by his side. It was a gentle and peaceful passing."

What follows is the introduction that Williams wrote to the first issue of Crawdaddy, dated February 7th, 1966 (which preceded Rolling Stone, by a full 18 months). The initial two-year run of Crawdaddy! can be read and enjoyed here.

"You are looking at the first issue of a magazine of rock and roll criticism. Crawdaddy will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the speciality of this magazine is intelligent writing about pop music. Billboard, Cash Box, etc., serve very well as trade news magazines; but their idea of a review is a hard-driving rhythm number that should spiral rapidly up the charts just as (previous hit by the same group) slides.

"Crawdaddy believes that someone in the United States might be interested in what others have to say about the music they like."

Williams went on to pen more than 25 books, including the three-part "Bob Dylan: Performing Artist," "Outlaw Blues," and "Das Energi."

He revived and ran Crawdaddy between 1993 and 2003 before selling it to Wolfgang's Vault in 2006.

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/global/1554929/paul-williams-crawdaddy-founder-godfather-of-rock-criticism-dead-at

Pioneering rock journalist Paul Williams dies at 64

Steve Pond

Reuters
28 March 2013

Paul Williams, a pioneering music journalist who started the first magazine devoted to rock 'n' roll criticism, died on Wednesday in Southern California. He was 64.

Williams was the founder of Crawdaddy! magazine and the author of more than two dozen books about music, popular culture and new-age philosophy. He died of complications related to Alzheimer's, which came on after he suffered a brain injury in a 1995 bicycle accident.

Williams was a 17-year-old student at Swarthmore College when he launched Crawdaddy in 1966. At a time when the mainstream media looked askance at rock music and the only magazines devoted to the sound were teeny-bopper publications like Tiger Beat, Williams wrote in the first issue that his goal was "neither pinups nor news briefs" but "intelligent writing about pop music."

"Paul was the first to write about rock music seriously," singer-songwriter Mojo Nixon told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009, when he participated in a benefit to raise money for Williams' medical expenses. "Most pop music was meaningless fluff, but Paul realized that something else was going on there."

Crawdaddy!, whose early writers included Jon Landau and Richard Meltzer, predated Rolling Stone, which Jann Wenner launched in 1967 after meeting with Williams. Williams left Crawdaddy! in 1968, but relaunched it in 1993 as a subscription-only newsletter.

In addition to his work with the magazine, Williams wrote for a number of other publications, including Rolling Stone, for which he interviewed the seminal science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick in 1974. Williams became friends with the author and served as the executor of Dick's literary estate after the writer's death in 1982.

He also took on tasks as disparate as volunteer firefighter and campaign manager for Timothy Leary's run for California governor.

Williams' books include "Outlaw Blues," "Das Energi," and a number of works on Bob Dylan -- including "Dylan -- What Happened?" about the singer's 1979 conversion to Christianity. After the book's publication, Dylan's office reportedly ordered 114 copies so the singer could give them to friends.

Williams suffered an accident riding his bicycle in 1995, and was hospitalized for a month with a brain injury. He recovered, but later began to show signs of dementia. His wife, singer-songwriter Cindy Lee Berryhill, put him in a managed-care facility in Encinitas, California., in 2008.

On Sunday, three days before his death, a one-day celebration of Williams' life was held at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in New York City, with music provided by Berryhill and Lenny Kaye.

According to a Facebook post by Berryhill, Williams died on Wednesday night in the company of his oldest son.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-rt-bob-dylan-crawdaddymt1thewrap83036-20130328,0,7710043.story

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York (The Elderly Brothers): -

Things We Said Today
Needles And Pins
Crying In The Rain
You're Going To Lose That Girl
You're Sixteen
To Know You Is To Love You
Love Hurts

Some great music from our host Mark Wynn (new CD released at the gig - thanks Mark), the completely bananas Completely Bananas, the wonderful Boss Caine/Dan Lucas and bluesman extraordinaire Colin Rowntree. The Elderlys got a good run for their money - not often we get a 7-song set!

Maurice Chevalier - Sweeping the Clouds Away...

Last night's set list

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

The Old Laughing Lady
Don't Let It Bring You Down
Love The One You're With
I Don't Want To Talk About It

An eclectic crowd of punters and players. All together a most enjoyable evening. Plucked out some songs I haven't played for a while and a first for me with Love The One You're With.

Paul Muldoon - Put Me Down

Put Me Down

I want to be the transport ship
From which we both lift off
I want to be the cartridge clip
In your Kalashnikov
I want to play war games in which
We get to use live rounds
And though you've left me for dead in a ditch
At least you've put me down
Put me down put me down
At least you've put me down

I want to be the rifle butt
You hold close to your breast
I don't care if your comments cut
Right through my Kevlar vest
I want to be within your scope
Should your remarks rebound
I guess I'm still hoping against hope
You won't just put it down
Put it down put it down
You won't just put it down

To my being on tenterhooks
Whenever you're around
I want to be the instruction book
You simply can't put down
Put down my love put down
The manual you can't put down

I want to be the haversack
That hangs about your neck
I'd follow you to hell and back
From this same helideck
I want to be the smoke that clears
Above the battleground
When the cry goes up for volunteers
I trust you'll put me down
Put me down put me down
I trust you'll put me down

Paul Muldoon

The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15780

Captain Peacock RIP

Frank Thornton obituary
Actor best known as the haughty department store supervisor Captain Peacock in the TV comedy Are You Being Served?

Carole Woddis
The Guardian

Monday 18 March 2013

The actor Frank Thornton, who has died aged 92, had a flair for comedy derived from the subtle craftsmanship of classical stage work. However, he will be best remembered for his longstanding characters in two popular BBC television comedy series – the sniffily priggish Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and the pompous retired policeman Herbert "Truly" Truelove, in Roy Clarke's Last of the Summer Wine.

Robertson Hare, the great Whitehall farceur, told him: "You'll never do any good until you're 40." And, said Thornton, "he was quite right." In the event, he was 51 when David Croft, producer of another long-running British staple, Dad's Army, remembered the tall, long-faced actor from another engagement and decided to cast him as the dapper floor-walker in charge of shop assistants played by Mollie Sugden, Wendy Richard, Trevor Bannister and John Inman in the Grace Brothers department store of Are You Being Served? (1973‑85). Thornton's latter-day Malvolio, all pinstripes and impassive disdain, proved a perfect antithesis to the general air of jobsworthy incompetence and smutty innuendo.

Captain Peacock was ideal casting for Thornton, who went on to appear in all 10 series. For when it came to a sense of the punctilious, the right way to do things, Thornton was your man.

In later life, he came to lament his own typecasting, feeling it had limited his chance to play more heavyweight roles. But his deadpan manner and ability to play the straight man gave him a career that extended for more than seven decades from a debut in 1940.

It was Thornton's understated but exquisite sense of timing that marked him out and gave him his durability, something that the writer-director Ray Cooney put down to his early years in weekly repertory, where over a period of three years "you'd get through 150 plays. It steeped you in character work."

He recalled Thornton's ability to hold his ground in the most trying circumstances, citing an instance in the 1993 run of his West End farce It Runs in the Family. With the rest of the cast "corpsing" around him, Thornton, solid as a rock, and the foil for the surrounding mayhem, resisted by a desperate working of his eyebrows before finally succumbing "with tears pouring down his face". He was, says Cooney, the epitome of professionalism.

Born Frank Thornton Ball in Dulwich, south-east London, he was educated at Alleyn's school. He knew he wanted to be an actor from about the age of five, but first became an insurance clerk, taking drama classes at night at the London School of Dramatic Art. As a child, he described himself as "a bit of a loner, not one of the lads. I think I was probably a bit of a prig because I seem to have been stuck with this supercilious persona for as long as I can remember."

From his first professional appearance, in Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears in Co Tipperary, he swiftly graduated to companies led by the actor-managers Donald Wolfit – where he met his future wife, Beryl Evans – and John Gielgud. After reaching the West End and appearing in the first production of Rattigan's Flare Path in 1942, Thornton then spent four years in the real RAF.

After demob, he divided his time between repertory and the West End before his television comedy career took off in 1960 with Michael Bentine's frenetic It's a Square World. Regular appearances followed alongside such comic greats as Tony Hancock (including the celebrated Hancock's Half Hour episode, The Blood Donor), Benny Hill, Eric Sykes, Ronnie Corbett and even Kenny Everett, on whose show he memorably appeared attired as a punk rocker.

But he also continued to work in the theatre. His air of lugubriousness served him well as a "grey-faced, bug-eyed" Eeyore (as one review put it), in an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh at the Phoenix theatre, London, in the early 1970s.

In 1980, he and Gwen Nelson were the old couple in Eugène Ionesco's absurdist drama The Chairs for the Royal Exchange, Manchester, and played Gremio in Jonathan Miller's TV version of The Taming of the Shrew. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, he could be seen in the West End and elsewhere in classic revivals: Cooney farces, and musicals such as Me and My Girl (1984), Spread a Little Happiness (1992) and three of the Barbican's Lost Musicals series, Music in the Air (1993), the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band (1994) and Take Me Along (1995).

The reality TV court show got its comeuppance with the spoof version All Rise for Julian Clary (1996-97) in which Thornton supplied the necessary token gravitas. When his turn came for This Is Your Life in 1998, Clary responded with a glowing compliment: "I'm here, Frank, to tell the world what we all know, what a funny, amusing and very handsome man you are." By then Thornton had succeeded Michael Bates, Brian Wilde and Michael Aldridge in leading the exploits of the trio at the heart of Last of the Summer Wine: his tenure lasted from 1997 till the series came to a close in 2010.

Thornton had more than 60 film credits, including Victim (1961), The Dock Brief (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (with Zero Mostel, 1966), A Flea in Her Ear (with Rex Harrison, 1968), The Bed Sitting Room (1969), The Old Curiosity Shop (1995) and Gosford Park (2001), as well as the Disney TV adaptation of Great Expectations (1991). His last appearance came in the 2012 film version of Run for Your Wife.

He is survived by Beryl, whom he married in 1945; a daughter, Jane; and three grandsons.

• Frank Thornton (Ball), actor, born 15 January 1921; died 16 March 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/18/frank-thornton

The Orchid House Project - Walk the Wire

The song is about a high wire walk between the Twin Towers. Filmed by Paul Kelly (Friday Night Boys) and edited by Charlie Hedley in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Now available in online stores.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #194

Last night's set lists

At The Habit, York (both by the Elderly Brothers): -

Set 1: -
Things We Said Today
True Love Ways
You're Sixteen
Crying In The Rain
Lola

Set 2: -
The Price Of Love
Things We Said Today*
Let It Be Me
Bye Bye Love

A very enjoyable night at The Habit. Not exactly heaving, but well attended all the same. Went on first (after our mercurial host Mr Mark Wynn) and were later invited to close the proceedings when rather over-refreshed. Mark asked us to reprise Things We Said Today* as he had been playing said track (by the Fab Four) only that morning.

Some wonderful turns as ever, including Dan Lucas (who recently performed on 'Whispering' Bob Harris's radio show) and the evergreen duo Completely Bananas.

Oysterity: a poem for the budget - by Sean O'Brien

Blah about "society"
And what we should give back –
The matter just kept coming up
All evening at the table:
A lot to swallow while we spoke
Of national austerity,
Of Cameron and Cable
And the coalition-claque.
So is it better out than in?
Purge the nation till it pukes
And purge us all of sin?
We went in for the oysters
We might never eat again,
Went for snot and shell-clack
As something to remember
In the times when fare is plainer:
The day will come when you no longer
Cash your cheques at Coutts.
Eat, be merry, sympathise,
But meanwhile fill your boots.
The truth hates a dissembler.
Then and there, what could we do?
It seemed like a no-brainer.
So we set about the oysters
In an orgy of the vowels,
Giving no thought to the morrow
Nor any to the bowels.
We were the slaves of history
But we ate in affirmation –
Bear the glut of privilege
Then stand with the protesters.
And write about it later –
Ah, the pleasures of the text.
(Not to mention of the oysters.)
You're a poet, you're a seer,
So you're out there on the edge,
And you're all imagination
So you know what's coming next.
In the middle of the night
I knew I must return my share
To the stripped bed of the sea –
A long-term contribution
To sustainability.
I took the long view of the sink
Which was taking it from me –
Rose madder of unknown origin
Among the usual stuff.
I had to work to clear its gaze:
But it would neither wink nor blink.
Whatever I'd been served,
It left me badger-rough,
Eye-deep among the heaving stink,
Crouching, eyeing narrowly
The sink's own non-committal eye.
What did it mean? Just then it meant
I'd got what I deserved,
And all in all I'd rather die
Than go on paying back
The bellyful of slime
And glop and bladderwrack
It seemed I had ingested
With the spiced-up Amble oysters.
This government would make you sick!
I'd heard a neighbour say.
He took of glug of oyster, adding:
Their recipe's untested.
They've got us eating cack.
I took his point, for there was much
Too much to take in then and there,
So much that should, but as it proved,
Could never be digested.
Perhaps if I had cut my throat,
For in my guts I felt that's what
These policies suggested,
I should have spared myself the pain
Of picking through my entrails,
Learning that what's true for one
Who's disembowelled, disinvested,
Is also true for nations –
All remedies are poisonous
And even nations fail.
The oyster's aphrodisiac
May also steal your thunder.
Such ambiguous creations!
Then be charitable: give
A bit back when you chunder.
Anyway, I've had it now
With molluscs, and with seaweed
And with overpriced crustaceans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/19/budget-2013-oysterity-sean-obrien?INTCMP=SRCH