Ron Elderly: -
Autumn Leaves
Love Is The Drug
Just My Imagination*
Da Elderly: -
You've Got A Friend
I Believe In You
I Don't Want To Talk About It*
The Elderly Brothers: -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
When Will I Be Loved
Crying In The Rain
I Saw Her Standing There
* there was a second set at the end of the night for those still around who wanted to play again
What started out as a mild, dry night in York turned foul, hence The Elderlys' inclusion of Crying In The Rain in their set. The Habit was busy for most of the evening with a boisterous and enthusiastic audience. Previous host Dave was standing in for Simon and he kicked-off proceedings with Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice It's All Right. There were one or two new performers including a couple from Boroughbridge who covered Tom Petty's Free Fallin', Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson and The Beatles' If I Fell. As we went round for a second time they sang Paul Simon's Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard. Taxi driver Chris and his wife arrived mid-way through proceedings and he asked me to accompany him on Neil Young's Birds, Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home To Me. With a full-ish house at the close of the open mic, The Elderlys ran through some lively Elvis, Chuck Berry, Springsteen and Beatles numbers unplugged and folks got up to dance!
Friday, 14 June 2019
Thursday, 13 June 2019
Bod Dylan: Rolling around America
All aboard the Bob Dylan express! How Rolling Thunder revved round America
When Dylan chanced upon a huge Roma gathering in France, he was transfixed – and formed his own travelling supergroup. As Martin Scorsese brings its ragtag magic to screens, we hitch a ride back to 75
Richard Williams
The Guardian
Tue 11 Jun 2019
In May 1975, his marriage breaking up, Bob Dylan spent six weeks in the south of France. His host, an artist named David Oppenheim, had recently provided a painting for the back cover of Blood on the Tracks, an album of seemingly confessional songs that had taken Dylan back to the top of the charts. Critics acclaimed its songs as evidence that, after almost a decade of straying from the straight and narrow, he was prepared once again to bare his soul.
But Dylan, as usual, was restless. A year earlier he had toured for the first time since his motorcycle accident in 1966, reuniting with the Band, his old accomplices. It had been a commercially successful but artistically sterile experience. He was looking for something new, and he found it when Oppenheim introduced him to the Camargue, a land of salt marshes, wild horses and a village called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Celebration … Roma girls dress a statue of St Sarah at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
There he witnessed the annual gathering of Roma, arriving from across Europe for the spring festival in celebration of Saint Sarah. Later he claimed that it was after spending his 34th birthday watching them carry her effigy from the sea to the shore, and listening to them sing at night, that he had a dream in which the song One More Cup of Coffee came to him, fully formed. But it was the more general sense of a travelling community with a natural way of expressing its culture that inspired the next and typically unexpected phase of his career.
“There was a Rolling Thunder energy and that was his invention,” Joan Baez says in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, the documentary by Martin Scorsese released this week on Netflix. Using verite and concert footage, some of it first seen in Dylan’s long-buried feature film Renaldo and Clara, Scorsese reframes that energy while adding a layer of meta-reality that reflects Dylan’s enduring fascination with masks, disguises and alternative facts.
After his return from France, Dylan based himself in a Greenwich Village apartment and underwent a full reimmersion in the folk scene from which he had emerged a dozen years earlier. In the clubs and coffee houses, fellow performers clustered around him: old friends like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bobby Neuwirth and Roger McGuinn and new ones such as the violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had approached when he saw her carrying her instrument case on the street.
Some of them took part in the sessions for his new album, Desire, with Rivera adding a touch of Romany abandon as she wound her fiddle lines around Dylan’s voice. The songs ranged from a demand for the release of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter, a boxer imprisoned on a murder charge, to a startlingly direct address to his wife, Sara. The unit stayed together, accumulating extra members, as plans were made for taking the show on the road.
Dylan wanted to perform, but he needed to escape from the music industry machine. If there were precedents for the adventure, they include the transcontinental bus trips made by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the mid-60s, the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus in 1968 and Paul McCartney’s decision to exorcise the ghost of Beatlemania by taking Wings out on a small-scale, low-key, unannounced tour of British colleges in 1972.
Outside, the world was a turbulent and bloody mess. The Watergate scandal was still echoing as the last US forces in Vietnam were airlifted from the roof of the Saigon embassy. The Khmer Rouge had taken over in Cambodia and civil wars were raging in Lebanon and Angola. Dylan had long since withdrawn from overt political commentary, but there was a statement implicit in his decision – made as America geared itself up for its Bicentennial celebrations – to open the tour in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrim Fathers had arrived in 1620 and survived a hard first winter in their new settlement only through the kindness of the indigenous Wampanoag tribe.
New recruits included the singer Ronee Blakley, direct from starring in Robert Altman’s Nashville, the guitarist T-Bone Burnett, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Having decided to film the tour – on and off stage – for Renaldo and Clara, a movie in which all the participants would be ascribed fictional roles, Dylan recruited the young playwright Sam Shepard to provide a screenplay. He added Baez, who would share scenes in the film with Sara Dylan, the woman for whom Dylan had left her 10 years earlier. Others drawn “like metal shavings to a magnet”, as Shepard would write in his Rolling Thunder Logbook, included Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Hawkins, Harry Dean Stanton and Mick Ronson, the ex-Spider from Mars. Jacques Levy, an off-Broadway theatre director with whom Dylan had been writing lyrics, devised the show’s structure.
“This was Dylan at his most generous,” Burnett observed in his foreword to Shepard’s book. “He had offered his stage to old friends, new acquaintances and in some cases complete strangers.” At the wheel of his Winnebago, Dylan drove some of the troupe while others were transported in a converted Greyhound bus. Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky acted as baggage porters even after the poet’s slot was axed in rehearsals, when Levy slashed the eight-hour running order in half.
“Welcome to your living room,” Bob Neuwirth told the audience every night before introducing the first of several guest spots. Some of Dylan’s performances were professionally recorded and are included in a new 14-CD box set. The revelations include a wonderfully tender solo delivery of Easy and Slow, a song picked up during his encounters with Irish folk musicians, and several magnificent duets with Baez, their voices fitting together much better than they ever had in their younger days.
As for Renaldo and Clara, whose intended sources of inspiration (according to Shepard) included Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste, Dylan spent a couple of years working on a four-hour version that fascinated some, mystified many more, and disappeared soon after its release in 1978. The concert and backstage footage – although not the dramatised sequences – now forms part of Scorsese’s film, along with several mischievous red herrings. It’s a stylish palimpsest beneath which the ghostly outline of the original film can be clearly discerned, although the several enigmatic absences include that of Sara, who had the part of Clara, opposite Dylan’s Renaldo.
The new film’s highlights include the night Baez adopted the whiteface makeup and hat bedecked with flowers and feathers that Dylan had worn throughout the tour; the morning Dylan and Ginsberg paid homage at Jack Kerouac’s grave; and the afternoon a room full of middle-aged Jewish women, who thought they had gathered for a mahjong session, found themselves listening in bemusement as Ginsberg read the Kaddish he had written for his own Jewish mother. A very on-her-mettle Joni Mitchell runs through Coyote, the song about her affair with Shepard, in Gordon Lightfoot’s living room in Toronto while Dylan and McGuinn watch her fingers, trying to pick up the chords. Some of Dylan’s stage performances, notably a howling, full-throttle Isis, are colossal in their blazing passion.
The Rolling Thunder Revue ran against the grain of the music industry. As a business plan, it was never likely to catch on. The biggest concerts, at Madison Square Garden and the Houston Astrodome, were benefits for boxer Rubin Carter’s defence fund. A second set of shows, in the spring of 1976, visited larger venues but petered out with a final concert to a half-empty convention centre in Salt Lake City.
A year later, amid the stirrings of punk in England, something of its freewheeling methodology was revived by the first Stiff Records tour, in which Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe travelled together, sharing rhythm sections and shuffling the running order. Closer in musical terms was Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions project of 2005, with its onstage informality and a mixture of original and traditional songs.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything – it’s about creating yourself,” Dylan says in a new interview in the film. By the time Renaldo and Clara appeared, he was making a new album, Street Legal, and preparing for a marathon world tour with a different lineup, still powerful but retaining little of Rolling Thunder’s raggle-taggle spirit. And in January 1979, a few weeks after that band’s final show, another encounter with Christianity – this time of the evangelical variety – gave him the cue for the next phase of his life. Around the bend, a slow train was coming.
• Rolling Thunder Revue will launch on Netflix and in selected cinemas on 12 June. Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder Revue, the 1975 Live Recordings box set is out now.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/11/bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue-martin-scorsese
Tue 11 Jun 2019
In May 1975, his marriage breaking up, Bob Dylan spent six weeks in the south of France. His host, an artist named David Oppenheim, had recently provided a painting for the back cover of Blood on the Tracks, an album of seemingly confessional songs that had taken Dylan back to the top of the charts. Critics acclaimed its songs as evidence that, after almost a decade of straying from the straight and narrow, he was prepared once again to bare his soul.
But Dylan, as usual, was restless. A year earlier he had toured for the first time since his motorcycle accident in 1966, reuniting with the Band, his old accomplices. It had been a commercially successful but artistically sterile experience. He was looking for something new, and he found it when Oppenheim introduced him to the Camargue, a land of salt marshes, wild horses and a village called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Celebration … Roma girls dress a statue of St Sarah at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
There he witnessed the annual gathering of Roma, arriving from across Europe for the spring festival in celebration of Saint Sarah. Later he claimed that it was after spending his 34th birthday watching them carry her effigy from the sea to the shore, and listening to them sing at night, that he had a dream in which the song One More Cup of Coffee came to him, fully formed. But it was the more general sense of a travelling community with a natural way of expressing its culture that inspired the next and typically unexpected phase of his career.
“There was a Rolling Thunder energy and that was his invention,” Joan Baez says in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, the documentary by Martin Scorsese released this week on Netflix. Using verite and concert footage, some of it first seen in Dylan’s long-buried feature film Renaldo and Clara, Scorsese reframes that energy while adding a layer of meta-reality that reflects Dylan’s enduring fascination with masks, disguises and alternative facts.
After his return from France, Dylan based himself in a Greenwich Village apartment and underwent a full reimmersion in the folk scene from which he had emerged a dozen years earlier. In the clubs and coffee houses, fellow performers clustered around him: old friends like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bobby Neuwirth and Roger McGuinn and new ones such as the violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had approached when he saw her carrying her instrument case on the street.
Some of them took part in the sessions for his new album, Desire, with Rivera adding a touch of Romany abandon as she wound her fiddle lines around Dylan’s voice. The songs ranged from a demand for the release of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter, a boxer imprisoned on a murder charge, to a startlingly direct address to his wife, Sara. The unit stayed together, accumulating extra members, as plans were made for taking the show on the road.
Dylan wanted to perform, but he needed to escape from the music industry machine. If there were precedents for the adventure, they include the transcontinental bus trips made by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in the mid-60s, the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus in 1968 and Paul McCartney’s decision to exorcise the ghost of Beatlemania by taking Wings out on a small-scale, low-key, unannounced tour of British colleges in 1972.
Outside, the world was a turbulent and bloody mess. The Watergate scandal was still echoing as the last US forces in Vietnam were airlifted from the roof of the Saigon embassy. The Khmer Rouge had taken over in Cambodia and civil wars were raging in Lebanon and Angola. Dylan had long since withdrawn from overt political commentary, but there was a statement implicit in his decision – made as America geared itself up for its Bicentennial celebrations – to open the tour in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrim Fathers had arrived in 1620 and survived a hard first winter in their new settlement only through the kindness of the indigenous Wampanoag tribe.
New recruits included the singer Ronee Blakley, direct from starring in Robert Altman’s Nashville, the guitarist T-Bone Burnett, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. Having decided to film the tour – on and off stage – for Renaldo and Clara, a movie in which all the participants would be ascribed fictional roles, Dylan recruited the young playwright Sam Shepard to provide a screenplay. He added Baez, who would share scenes in the film with Sara Dylan, the woman for whom Dylan had left her 10 years earlier. Others drawn “like metal shavings to a magnet”, as Shepard would write in his Rolling Thunder Logbook, included Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Hawkins, Harry Dean Stanton and Mick Ronson, the ex-Spider from Mars. Jacques Levy, an off-Broadway theatre director with whom Dylan had been writing lyrics, devised the show’s structure.
“This was Dylan at his most generous,” Burnett observed in his foreword to Shepard’s book. “He had offered his stage to old friends, new acquaintances and in some cases complete strangers.” At the wheel of his Winnebago, Dylan drove some of the troupe while others were transported in a converted Greyhound bus. Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky acted as baggage porters even after the poet’s slot was axed in rehearsals, when Levy slashed the eight-hour running order in half.
“Welcome to your living room,” Bob Neuwirth told the audience every night before introducing the first of several guest spots. Some of Dylan’s performances were professionally recorded and are included in a new 14-CD box set. The revelations include a wonderfully tender solo delivery of Easy and Slow, a song picked up during his encounters with Irish folk musicians, and several magnificent duets with Baez, their voices fitting together much better than they ever had in their younger days.
As for Renaldo and Clara, whose intended sources of inspiration (according to Shepard) included Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste, Dylan spent a couple of years working on a four-hour version that fascinated some, mystified many more, and disappeared soon after its release in 1978. The concert and backstage footage – although not the dramatised sequences – now forms part of Scorsese’s film, along with several mischievous red herrings. It’s a stylish palimpsest beneath which the ghostly outline of the original film can be clearly discerned, although the several enigmatic absences include that of Sara, who had the part of Clara, opposite Dylan’s Renaldo.
The new film’s highlights include the night Baez adopted the whiteface makeup and hat bedecked with flowers and feathers that Dylan had worn throughout the tour; the morning Dylan and Ginsberg paid homage at Jack Kerouac’s grave; and the afternoon a room full of middle-aged Jewish women, who thought they had gathered for a mahjong session, found themselves listening in bemusement as Ginsberg read the Kaddish he had written for his own Jewish mother. A very on-her-mettle Joni Mitchell runs through Coyote, the song about her affair with Shepard, in Gordon Lightfoot’s living room in Toronto while Dylan and McGuinn watch her fingers, trying to pick up the chords. Some of Dylan’s stage performances, notably a howling, full-throttle Isis, are colossal in their blazing passion.
The Rolling Thunder Revue ran against the grain of the music industry. As a business plan, it was never likely to catch on. The biggest concerts, at Madison Square Garden and the Houston Astrodome, were benefits for boxer Rubin Carter’s defence fund. A second set of shows, in the spring of 1976, visited larger venues but petered out with a final concert to a half-empty convention centre in Salt Lake City.
A year later, amid the stirrings of punk in England, something of its freewheeling methodology was revived by the first Stiff Records tour, in which Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe travelled together, sharing rhythm sections and shuffling the running order. Closer in musical terms was Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions project of 2005, with its onstage informality and a mixture of original and traditional songs.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself, or finding anything – it’s about creating yourself,” Dylan says in a new interview in the film. By the time Renaldo and Clara appeared, he was making a new album, Street Legal, and preparing for a marathon world tour with a different lineup, still powerful but retaining little of Rolling Thunder’s raggle-taggle spirit. And in January 1979, a few weeks after that band’s final show, another encounter with Christianity – this time of the evangelical variety – gave him the cue for the next phase of his life. Around the bend, a slow train was coming.
• Rolling Thunder Revue will launch on Netflix and in selected cinemas on 12 June. Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder Revue, the 1975 Live Recordings box set is out now.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/11/bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue-martin-scorsese
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
Bob Dylan and Mick Ronson and The Rolling Thunder Revue - reviewed
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese review – passion on tour
This freewheeling doc hitches a ride in Dylan’s ’75 tourbus, with Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and a young Sharon Stone in tow
Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian
Tue 11 Jun 2019
‘Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything,” says Bob Dylan. “It’s about creating yourself.” At 78, the musician moves into a new phase of self-creation with this intriguing, fascinating, perplexing, sometimes exasperating film directed by Martin Scorsese – which is to say Scorsese has supervised a witty curatorial edit of archive film material, and in effect collaborated with Dylan in another artistic act of self-reshaping.
The film is about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue show of US and Canada in 1975 – a 57-date tour in which the troubadour appeared in whiteface makeup, with an extraordinary changing list of support acts that included Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McQuinn, Ronee Blakley, “Ramblin’” Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth and the violinist Scarlet Rivera. And these weren’t massive arenas he was playing, they were little halls and venues, with publicity sometimes limited to flyers handed out on the day to astonished denizens of the little towns in which the Ken Kesey-style tour bus would cheerfully roll up with the grinning Dylan at the wheel. Try to imagine it happening now.
What was it like for Dylan to be spearheading this event, a kind of musical rumour meandering through an America that was just recovering from the mortification of Watergate and gearing itself up as best it could for its bicentennial celebrations? “It was so long ago I wasn’t even born,” says the wry Dylan now with a shrug, and his interviewee appearances are all very funny, that voice as dry as prairie grass.
The film does not quite wish to tell you what it was like in any obvious way. There is something weird and mischievous going on. The concert footage and backstage scenes appear to be drawn from the same trove of archive material that formed the basis of Bob Dylan’s lengthy and ill-fated 1978 film about the tour, Renaldo and Clara, which he co-wrote with the late Sam Shepard – who is interviewed here. Like that film, the Rolling Thunder Revue does have some personae who may not be, strictly speaking, factual. The footage is attributed to a certain dyspeptic film-maker who is actually the performance artist and comedian Martin Von Haselberg, husband of Bette Midler. A certain politician is interviewed and you may think: “Wait, that guy looks like the actor Michael Murphy.” It is the actor Michael Murphy. Could it be that this is all a modern commedia dell’arte in which, with Scorsese’s discreet assistance, Dylan is retreating behind masks, masks that might allow him to tell a higher truth?
Possibly. Scorsese drops further hints with clips from films concerned in various ways with theatrical performance: Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1893), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945) and Tony Gatlif’s Latcho Drom (1993). Sometimes the creative semi-remembering is a bit opaque, and there were times when I could have done with some more straightforward documentary realism. But it’s churlish to complain when this is all so gripping, both as a time capsule and as a showcase for Dylan’s unique presence and glorious performances from Baez, Mitchell and also from Patti Smith who was not actually a member of the Rolling Thunder tour but is shown performing before it got started.
Allen Ginsberg is another intensely 70s figure shown here on tour, at once egotistical and yet deferring utterly to Dylan’s majestic importance. There is a great interview with Sharon Stone, who appears to have gone briefly on tour with Rolling Thunder as a young woman and is (delicately) interviewed about her experiences – including bursting into tears when she discovered that Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman was not, despite what he’d caddishly told Stone, based on her. Could it be that she was not the only young female fellow traveller on whom Bob used that line?
The emotional centre of the film is Dylan’s protest song Hurricane, about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was falsely imprisoned for murder. That song, and the Rolling Thunder tour, were an important part of the momentum that overturned Carter’s conviction – though he would not be finally released for another 10 years.
This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.
Tue 11 Jun 2019
‘Life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything,” says Bob Dylan. “It’s about creating yourself.” At 78, the musician moves into a new phase of self-creation with this intriguing, fascinating, perplexing, sometimes exasperating film directed by Martin Scorsese – which is to say Scorsese has supervised a witty curatorial edit of archive film material, and in effect collaborated with Dylan in another artistic act of self-reshaping.
The film is about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue show of US and Canada in 1975 – a 57-date tour in which the troubadour appeared in whiteface makeup, with an extraordinary changing list of support acts that included Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McQuinn, Ronee Blakley, “Ramblin’” Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth and the violinist Scarlet Rivera. And these weren’t massive arenas he was playing, they were little halls and venues, with publicity sometimes limited to flyers handed out on the day to astonished denizens of the little towns in which the Ken Kesey-style tour bus would cheerfully roll up with the grinning Dylan at the wheel. Try to imagine it happening now.
What was it like for Dylan to be spearheading this event, a kind of musical rumour meandering through an America that was just recovering from the mortification of Watergate and gearing itself up as best it could for its bicentennial celebrations? “It was so long ago I wasn’t even born,” says the wry Dylan now with a shrug, and his interviewee appearances are all very funny, that voice as dry as prairie grass.
The film does not quite wish to tell you what it was like in any obvious way. There is something weird and mischievous going on. The concert footage and backstage scenes appear to be drawn from the same trove of archive material that formed the basis of Bob Dylan’s lengthy and ill-fated 1978 film about the tour, Renaldo and Clara, which he co-wrote with the late Sam Shepard – who is interviewed here. Like that film, the Rolling Thunder Revue does have some personae who may not be, strictly speaking, factual. The footage is attributed to a certain dyspeptic film-maker who is actually the performance artist and comedian Martin Von Haselberg, husband of Bette Midler. A certain politician is interviewed and you may think: “Wait, that guy looks like the actor Michael Murphy.” It is the actor Michael Murphy. Could it be that this is all a modern commedia dell’arte in which, with Scorsese’s discreet assistance, Dylan is retreating behind masks, masks that might allow him to tell a higher truth?
Possibly. Scorsese drops further hints with clips from films concerned in various ways with theatrical performance: Georges Méliès’s The Vanishing Lady (1893), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945) and Tony Gatlif’s Latcho Drom (1993). Sometimes the creative semi-remembering is a bit opaque, and there were times when I could have done with some more straightforward documentary realism. But it’s churlish to complain when this is all so gripping, both as a time capsule and as a showcase for Dylan’s unique presence and glorious performances from Baez, Mitchell and also from Patti Smith who was not actually a member of the Rolling Thunder tour but is shown performing before it got started.
Allen Ginsberg is another intensely 70s figure shown here on tour, at once egotistical and yet deferring utterly to Dylan’s majestic importance. There is a great interview with Sharon Stone, who appears to have gone briefly on tour with Rolling Thunder as a young woman and is (delicately) interviewed about her experiences – including bursting into tears when she discovered that Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman was not, despite what he’d caddishly told Stone, based on her. Could it be that she was not the only young female fellow traveller on whom Bob used that line?
The emotional centre of the film is Dylan’s protest song Hurricane, about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was falsely imprisoned for murder. That song, and the Rolling Thunder tour, were an important part of the momentum that overturned Carter’s conviction – though he would not be finally released for another 10 years.
This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.
Monday, 10 June 2019
Sunday, 9 June 2019
Moonscapes at the Watts Gallery, Guildford
Artemis by Charlie Barton
Artemis - Charlie Barton"It's impossible not to wonder at the Moon and about the Moon, it's full of myth and magic. My inspiration to paint the moon came from a number of influences, as a child I listened endlessly to David Bowie's Space Oddity; I was rocketed up in that tin can to a wondrous world way beyond my world… I grew up on Salisbury Plain where we would ride across the cratered "Impact Area", a pock marked landscape that seemed to me just like the surface of the moon. As there was no light pollution on the Plain the night sky was often a visual feast of stars. My late father who navigated on the first Round The World sailing race, gave me huge inspiration when describing the night sky on his voyage. His sextant was always an object of fascination to me. On his death in 2000 I was drawn to contemplate the cosmos & found myself lured to the Moon."
"I paint in oil, & sometimes pigment. I begin my process by painting on the floor where I apply a resin called Alkaflow to create the texture of the lunar surface, once dried, the canvas goes back onto the wall where I apply more paint. This process is repeated so I build up layers of paint."
https://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/moonscapes-contemporary-art-interventions/
Windsor castle by Abraham Pether
Lambeth Palace by Moonlight by Henry Pether
Pool of London, Billingsgate to the Tower, Moonlight
A River Scene with Cottage by Sebastian William Thomas Pether
On show at the Watts Gallery are four paintings by Abraham, Sebastian and Henry Pether, widely known as the ‘Moonlight Pethers’. The works depict either recognisable landmarks in Britain, or imaginary views against a backdrop of a silvery moon and a waterside setting. Abraham Pether’s Windsor Castle, made in 1809, is a typical example of the artist’s nocturnal scenes that reinforces his reputation as ‘Moonlight Pether’. Henry Pether’s Lambeth Palace by Moonlight and Pool of London, Billingsgate to the Tower, Moonlight demonstrate the artist’s accuracy and eye for detail in representing architectural subjects and skill for moonscapes. Sebastian Pether’s A River Scene with Cottage shows an imaginary setting with a lake and a mountainous landscape that reflects the moonlight.
For Abraham and his sons, Henry and Sebastian Pether, moonlit and dramatically illuminated scenes became signature works. During the early 19th century this family of artists established a reputation for producing a series of nocturnal, atmospheric paintings, which were both part of an artistic and a scientific enterprise. In addition to his career as an artist, Abraham Pether had an extensive knowledge of scientific subjects and gave lectures on electricity. ‘His philosophical and mathematical researches deserve every praise: he was an admirable mechanic, and had constructed telescopes, microscopes, and almost every instrument relative to science, upon the grandest and most improved principle’, an obituary reported. Both Abraham’s sons, Henry and Sebastian followed their father’s example and continued the tradition of moonscapes.
Hamlet and the Ghost by Frederic James Shields
Cosmoscope - Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell
Begun in 2016, Cosmoscope was a major interdisciplinary research project led by Simeon Nelson, Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire. It brought together leading biomedical, astro and experimental physicists at University College London, Oxford University and Durham University, and psychologist Monia Brizzi.
Inspired by historical astronomical instruments and models of the cosmos, Cosmoscope presents a narrative of the origins, evolution and nature of life. The installation explores quantum, human and cosmic scales from the biomedical study of blood flowing through the human heart, to the order and disorder of atoms and molecules, to the dynamics of cosmic formation and meaning.
Accompanying Moonscapes, an exhibition that explores the interactions between art and astronomy in the late nineteenth century, Cosmoscope illustrates how the latest ideas and research in art and science continue to draw upon and inspire each other today.
Endymion by G. F. Watts
On show at the Watts Gallery are four paintings by Abraham, Sebastian and Henry Pether, widely known as the ‘Moonlight Pethers’. The works depict either recognisable landmarks in Britain, or imaginary views against a backdrop of a silvery moon and a waterside setting. Abraham Pether’s Windsor Castle, made in 1809, is a typical example of the artist’s nocturnal scenes that reinforces his reputation as ‘Moonlight Pether’. Henry Pether’s Lambeth Palace by Moonlight and Pool of London, Billingsgate to the Tower, Moonlight demonstrate the artist’s accuracy and eye for detail in representing architectural subjects and skill for moonscapes. Sebastian Pether’s A River Scene with Cottage shows an imaginary setting with a lake and a mountainous landscape that reflects the moonlight.
For Abraham and his sons, Henry and Sebastian Pether, moonlit and dramatically illuminated scenes became signature works. During the early 19th century this family of artists established a reputation for producing a series of nocturnal, atmospheric paintings, which were both part of an artistic and a scientific enterprise. In addition to his career as an artist, Abraham Pether had an extensive knowledge of scientific subjects and gave lectures on electricity. ‘His philosophical and mathematical researches deserve every praise: he was an admirable mechanic, and had constructed telescopes, microscopes, and almost every instrument relative to science, upon the grandest and most improved principle’, an obituary reported. Both Abraham’s sons, Henry and Sebastian followed their father’s example and continued the tradition of moonscapes.
Harvest Moon by Helen Allingham
Moonbeams Dipping into the Sea by Evelyn de Morgan
Luna by Evelyn de Morgan
Moon Cabinet by Rupert Senior
The Moon Cabinet - Rupert Senior
Exploring the blurred boundary between Art and Science, the Moon Cabinet draws inspiration from orreries, the moon and beyond. The swirls in the burr ash grain look like the surface of the moon and are interspersed with craters and sub-craters, gilded in yellow gold, palladium and 'moon gold' leaf. Opening the doors reveals a magnificent blue night sky. The craters are now transformed into planets within a solar system that seem to float in space. At the centre is a black hole.
It is a key cabinet. Behind the craters are stainless steel hooks, fashioned like little satellites spinning off into space.
Cosmoscope by Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell
Moonbeams Dipping into the Sea by Evelyn de Morgan
The Moon Cabinet - Rupert Senior
Exploring the blurred boundary between Art and Science, the Moon Cabinet draws inspiration from orreries, the moon and beyond. The swirls in the burr ash grain look like the surface of the moon and are interspersed with craters and sub-craters, gilded in yellow gold, palladium and 'moon gold' leaf. Opening the doors reveals a magnificent blue night sky. The craters are now transformed into planets within a solar system that seem to float in space. At the centre is a black hole.
It is a key cabinet. Behind the craters are stainless steel hooks, fashioned like little satellites spinning off into space.
Begun in 2016, Cosmoscope was a major interdisciplinary research project led by Simeon Nelson, Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hertfordshire. It brought together leading biomedical, astro and experimental physicists at University College London, Oxford University and Durham University, and psychologist Monia Brizzi.
Inspired by historical astronomical instruments and models of the cosmos, Cosmoscope presents a narrative of the origins, evolution and nature of life. The installation explores quantum, human and cosmic scales from the biomedical study of blood flowing through the human heart, to the order and disorder of atoms and molecules, to the dynamics of cosmic formation and meaning.
Accompanying Moonscapes, an exhibition that explores the interactions between art and astronomy in the late nineteenth century, Cosmoscope illustrates how the latest ideas and research in art and science continue to draw upon and inspire each other today.
http://simeon-nelson.com/index.php/cosmoscope-at-watts-gallery/
Full Moon by William H. Rau
Hampstead Hill, Looking Down Heath Street by John Atkinson Grimshaw
Moonscapes
Landing on Tuesday 2 April
Orbiting until Sunday 23 June 2019
Watts Gallery | Friends free
Join us in the year of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing for Moonscapes, the first exhibition to explore nineteenth-century visions of the moon.
Presenting a selection of works by significant artists including William Holman Hunt, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Evelyn De Morgan and G F Watts, Moonscapes will consider the Victorian fascination with the earth's closest cosmic neighbour, bringing into focus the many ways in which nineteenth-century artists have drawn inspiration from the moon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of contemporary art interventions that will accent the key themes of the exhibition through light, sound and space including: Cosmoscope by Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell; The Moon Cabinet by Rupert Senior; Artemis by Charlie Barton and Year 2 Arsenic 1 by Garry Fabian Miller and work by Mary Branson as Artist in Residence.
https://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/whats-on/moonscapes/
Homeward Bound (The Pathless Waters) by William Holman Hunt
The Sower of the Systems by G. F. Watts
Copernicus Crater by James Naysmith
Landing on Tuesday 2 April
Orbiting until Sunday 23 June 2019
Watts Gallery | Friends free
Join us in the year of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing for Moonscapes, the first exhibition to explore nineteenth-century visions of the moon.
Presenting a selection of works by significant artists including William Holman Hunt, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Evelyn De Morgan and G F Watts, Moonscapes will consider the Victorian fascination with the earth's closest cosmic neighbour, bringing into focus the many ways in which nineteenth-century artists have drawn inspiration from the moon. The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of contemporary art interventions that will accent the key themes of the exhibition through light, sound and space including: Cosmoscope by Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell; The Moon Cabinet by Rupert Senior; Artemis by Charlie Barton and Year 2 Arsenic 1 by Garry Fabian Miller and work by Mary Branson as Artist in Residence.
Year 2 Arsenic 1 by Garry Fabian Miller
The appearance of the moon, and its changing phases, has been the subject of debate and visual interpretation since time immemorial. The development of astronomical telescopes in the seventeenth century sparked intense lunar interest in Britain, leading scientific pioneers to found the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820.
Artists were similarly beguiled by the complexities of the cosmos. Some, such as G F Watts, became closely associated with astronomers - in his case Sir John Herschel, President of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Artists were captivated by the painterly challenge of depicting nocturnal landscapes, and saw the moon as a symbol of nature's enormity. For Abraham Pether and his two painter sons, depicting the moon became the family business. Known as the 'Moonlight Pethers', their glowing landscapes balance detailed technique with intricate meteorological observation.
Conversely, Pre-Raphaelite artists such as William Holman Hunt sought to represent the eerie lunar atmosphere by portraying solitary figures in contemplation of the moon. Holman Hunt's luminous watercolour The Pathless Waters (Homeward Bound) 1869 captures this mood of nocturnal melancholy.
From the 1880s, oil paintings featuring the personification of the moon were produced by symbolist painters including Evelyn de Morgan and G F Watts. In De Morgan's Luna 1885 the moon is embodied by the figure of a young woman seated on a crescent, with the artist representing the Roman Goddess. Watts's dynamic vision for the creation of the cosmos is illustrated by the Sower of the Systems 1902, in which a robed, faceless figure sweeps across space, radiating arcs of gold to form galaxies.
Moonscapes will also examine the scientific tools that astronomers have used to expand lunar knowledge. From an intricate orrery (a mechanical model of the Solar System) to a globe mapping the moon's cratered surface, these complex and beautiful objects show how enterprising scientists attempted to decipher the mystery of the lunar orbits. Early stereoscopic photography will close the 384,400 km distance and bring the moon into focus in astonishing detail.
The exhibition features Cosmoscope, a monumental sound and light sculpture created by artist Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell at the University of Hertfordshire's School of Creative Arts, who have kindly supported this artistic collaboration.
Look out for events and talks featuring leading experts, including Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock (BBC The Sky at Night), Robert Massey (astronomer), Professor Craig Underwood (Surrey Space Centre) and Dr Daniel Swift (writer).
The appearance of the moon, and its changing phases, has been the subject of debate and visual interpretation since time immemorial. The development of astronomical telescopes in the seventeenth century sparked intense lunar interest in Britain, leading scientific pioneers to found the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820.
Artists were similarly beguiled by the complexities of the cosmos. Some, such as G F Watts, became closely associated with astronomers - in his case Sir John Herschel, President of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Artists were captivated by the painterly challenge of depicting nocturnal landscapes, and saw the moon as a symbol of nature's enormity. For Abraham Pether and his two painter sons, depicting the moon became the family business. Known as the 'Moonlight Pethers', their glowing landscapes balance detailed technique with intricate meteorological observation.
Conversely, Pre-Raphaelite artists such as William Holman Hunt sought to represent the eerie lunar atmosphere by portraying solitary figures in contemplation of the moon. Holman Hunt's luminous watercolour The Pathless Waters (Homeward Bound) 1869 captures this mood of nocturnal melancholy.
From the 1880s, oil paintings featuring the personification of the moon were produced by symbolist painters including Evelyn de Morgan and G F Watts. In De Morgan's Luna 1885 the moon is embodied by the figure of a young woman seated on a crescent, with the artist representing the Roman Goddess. Watts's dynamic vision for the creation of the cosmos is illustrated by the Sower of the Systems 1902, in which a robed, faceless figure sweeps across space, radiating arcs of gold to form galaxies.
Moonscapes will also examine the scientific tools that astronomers have used to expand lunar knowledge. From an intricate orrery (a mechanical model of the Solar System) to a globe mapping the moon's cratered surface, these complex and beautiful objects show how enterprising scientists attempted to decipher the mystery of the lunar orbits. Early stereoscopic photography will close the 384,400 km distance and bring the moon into focus in astonishing detail.
The exhibition features Cosmoscope, a monumental sound and light sculpture created by artist Simeon Nelson with Rob Godman and Nick Rothwell at the University of Hertfordshire's School of Creative Arts, who have kindly supported this artistic collaboration.
Look out for events and talks featuring leading experts, including Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock (BBC The Sky at Night), Robert Massey (astronomer), Professor Craig Underwood (Surrey Space Centre) and Dr Daniel Swift (writer).
Saturday, 8 June 2019
Dr John RIP
Dr John: the voodoo-fuelled showman who beat his own path through rock
The trailblazer who injected New Orleans R&B with sinister psychedelia will live on as an icon of curdled idealismAlexis Petridis
The Guardian
Fri 7 Jun 2019
For a few years after the Summer of Love, record stores were thick with hastily knocked-together concept albums about astrology or Indian mysticism or the occult, designed to cash in on the audience’s supposedly expanded consciousness. Here, it seemed, was another: a session musician reinventing himself as Dr John, singing songs about Louisiana voodoo thick with New Orleans slang and Creole patois, clad in a flamboyant Mardi Gras headdress and facepaint. Yet Gris Gris was anything but a novelty record. It was both one of the most extraordinary debut albums of the 60s and the beginning of a solo career that would last 51 years.
Its presentation certainly courted the psychedelic market – Dr John billed himself as the “Night Tripper”, a lysergic honorific that nodded to the Beatles – but the music bore almost no relation to anything else in rock music at the time. Instead, it boasted an innovative, brilliant and at times unsettling synthesis of New Orleans musical traditions – jazz, funk, rhythm and blues – made by a man steeped in both the city’s culture and the darker side of life. He certainly sounded like he knew of what he spoke: all the lyrics about serpent spirits and curses and witch doctors, which should have seemed like hokum, sounded authentically ominous and disturbing in Dr John’s coolly menacing drawl.
Mac Rebennack was nearing 30 when he transformed himself into Dr John and released Gris Gris: he had already packed a lifetime’s worth of musical experience and incident into his 27 years. His father’s connections as a record store owner in New Orleans’ Third Ward enabled him to sneak into local recording sessions: by 13, he was a professional musician, playing organ in strip clubs in the Third Quarter and performing with Professor Longhair, a local pioneer whose blend of blues, boogie-woogie and Afro-Cuban rhythms, Rebennack would later claim, “put the funk into music”.
By 16, he was a session guitarist and occasional producer, working out of Cosimo Studios and playing in a succession of bands. He even had a local solo hit in 1959, a brooding Bo Diddley knock-off called Storm Warning, but Rebennack was also trouble: his career as a guitarist was ended when his finger was injured by a gunshot at a gig in Jackson in 1960; he became a heroin addict and dealer; he was involved in running a brothel. In 1963, he was sentenced to two years for drug offences, and on release shifted operations to Los Angeles, where a contingent of exiled New Orleans musicians – led by arranger Harold Battiste – were making headway as session players.
Rebennack became a member of the most revered Hollywood session group of all, the Wrecking Crew, playing with everyone from Sonny and Cher to Frank Zappa, but professed himself dissatisfied and homesick. Pining for New Orleans, he created the character of Dr John, loosely based on the legend of a 19th-century Senegalese freed slave turned New Orleans voodoo king, the music inspired by the disparate sounds Rebennack had heard at a spiritualist church in the Lower Ninth Ward. Here, he claimed, “Hindus and Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Masons, even voodoos” all worshipped together. He initially developed the idea for singer and actor Ronnie Barren, but when Barren balked, Rebennack took on the role, surrounding himself with fellow New Orleans expats and recording Gris Gris in late 1967.
The music Rebennack and Battiste concocted for the album was so out of step with prevalent trends that Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun initially refused to release it. In Rebennack’s retelling, Ertegun dismissed him as a “boogaloo motherfucker” when their paths crossed in the studio. But when it finally did come out, Gris Gris oddly chimed with the times. It sounded like it was recorded live, which clicked with the shift away from psychedelia to something more earthy and traditional, exemplified by the rootsy Americana of the Band’s Music from Big Pink, on release the same year.
Fri 7 Jun 2019
For a few years after the Summer of Love, record stores were thick with hastily knocked-together concept albums about astrology or Indian mysticism or the occult, designed to cash in on the audience’s supposedly expanded consciousness. Here, it seemed, was another: a session musician reinventing himself as Dr John, singing songs about Louisiana voodoo thick with New Orleans slang and Creole patois, clad in a flamboyant Mardi Gras headdress and facepaint. Yet Gris Gris was anything but a novelty record. It was both one of the most extraordinary debut albums of the 60s and the beginning of a solo career that would last 51 years.
Its presentation certainly courted the psychedelic market – Dr John billed himself as the “Night Tripper”, a lysergic honorific that nodded to the Beatles – but the music bore almost no relation to anything else in rock music at the time. Instead, it boasted an innovative, brilliant and at times unsettling synthesis of New Orleans musical traditions – jazz, funk, rhythm and blues – made by a man steeped in both the city’s culture and the darker side of life. He certainly sounded like he knew of what he spoke: all the lyrics about serpent spirits and curses and witch doctors, which should have seemed like hokum, sounded authentically ominous and disturbing in Dr John’s coolly menacing drawl.
Mac Rebennack was nearing 30 when he transformed himself into Dr John and released Gris Gris: he had already packed a lifetime’s worth of musical experience and incident into his 27 years. His father’s connections as a record store owner in New Orleans’ Third Ward enabled him to sneak into local recording sessions: by 13, he was a professional musician, playing organ in strip clubs in the Third Quarter and performing with Professor Longhair, a local pioneer whose blend of blues, boogie-woogie and Afro-Cuban rhythms, Rebennack would later claim, “put the funk into music”.
By 16, he was a session guitarist and occasional producer, working out of Cosimo Studios and playing in a succession of bands. He even had a local solo hit in 1959, a brooding Bo Diddley knock-off called Storm Warning, but Rebennack was also trouble: his career as a guitarist was ended when his finger was injured by a gunshot at a gig in Jackson in 1960; he became a heroin addict and dealer; he was involved in running a brothel. In 1963, he was sentenced to two years for drug offences, and on release shifted operations to Los Angeles, where a contingent of exiled New Orleans musicians – led by arranger Harold Battiste – were making headway as session players.
Rebennack became a member of the most revered Hollywood session group of all, the Wrecking Crew, playing with everyone from Sonny and Cher to Frank Zappa, but professed himself dissatisfied and homesick. Pining for New Orleans, he created the character of Dr John, loosely based on the legend of a 19th-century Senegalese freed slave turned New Orleans voodoo king, the music inspired by the disparate sounds Rebennack had heard at a spiritualist church in the Lower Ninth Ward. Here, he claimed, “Hindus and Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Masons, even voodoos” all worshipped together. He initially developed the idea for singer and actor Ronnie Barren, but when Barren balked, Rebennack took on the role, surrounding himself with fellow New Orleans expats and recording Gris Gris in late 1967.
The music Rebennack and Battiste concocted for the album was so out of step with prevalent trends that Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun initially refused to release it. In Rebennack’s retelling, Ertegun dismissed him as a “boogaloo motherfucker” when their paths crossed in the studio. But when it finally did come out, Gris Gris oddly chimed with the times. It sounded like it was recorded live, which clicked with the shift away from psychedelia to something more earthy and traditional, exemplified by the rootsy Americana of the Band’s Music from Big Pink, on release the same year.
Moreover, 1968 was the year that flower-power idealism curdled: it was a year of rioting, violence and upheaval, of Sympathy for the Devil rather than All You Need Is Love. That suited the album’s sinister atmosphere perfectly. Its flatly astonishing closer, I Walk on Gilded Splinters, offered up eight minutes of crawling malevolence and threatening braggadocio: if you took the title as a reference to needles, as plenty did, it sounded remarkably like a sneering, screw-you defence of Rebennack’s drug use, a distant Louisiana relation of the Velvet Underground’s Heroin. The live show Rebennack devised to support the album was a sensation, involving dancers wearing nothing but body paint, the singer disappearing in a puff of smoke and voodoo rituals. In St Louis, they were arrested after a band member bit the head off a chicken on stage.
If anything, Gris Gris’ followup, Babylon, was even further out: the lyrics more political and apocalyptic, the time signatures off-kilter, many of the instruments made by the eccentric inventor and composer Harry Partch. Rebenack and Battiste fell out after its recording, the latter protesting that his former collaborator was “a hopeless drug addict”. Certainly, Rebenack’s life seemed to be unravelling. During the making of 1970’s Remedies, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, but escaped. Released unfinished, the album was as otherworldly and evil-sounding as ever, as demonstrated by the supremely disturbing 17-minute Angola Anthem. On arrival in London shortly after its release, Rebenack was feted by fans from the rock aristocracy*, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton among them, but recording sessions on which both featured descended into chaos – “everything was confusemental”, as Rebenack characteristically put it – and The Sun, Moon & Herbs was scythed from a projected triple album into a mere seven tracks.
And yet Rebenack survived, even thrived. Pragmatically retiring the theatrical excesses and sonic weirdness of his Dr John persona, 1972’s Gumbo saw him charging masterfully through a selection of New Orleans R&B classics – Professor Longhair’s Tipitina among them – while its follow-up, In the Right Place (1973), pared him with funk band the Meters and legendary producer Allen Toussaint to striking effect: the album was his biggest US hit and the raw groove of Right Place, Wrong Time his biggest single.
It was a commercial peak he never scaled again. Desitively Bonnaroo attempted to repeat its predecessor’s formula with diminishing returns. Thereafter Rebenack’s albums became increasingly sporadic and variable in quality – 1979’s Tango Palace saw him unexpectedly, perhaps ill-advisedly, dabbling in disco – although he remained in demand as a sideman, working with everyone from Rickie Lee Jones to Van Morrison. He kicked drugs in 1989, and released In a Sentimental Mood. It wasa good album, his drawling vocals added real licentiousness to Makin’ Whoopee and a dissolute air to Accentuate the Positive, but a world away from Gris Gris and Babylon.
He was finally persuaded to don his Mardi Gras headdress once more by Jason Pierce of Spiritualized, on whose 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space Rebennack guested. The same year he released Anutha Zone, supported by a starry cast of younger British musicians – Supergrass, Paul Weller, the Beta Band, Martin Duffy of Primal Scream – all clearly in thrall to the Dr John myth and the strangeness of his first three albums. In truth, Anutha Zone never really matched the innovation or menace that characterised his earlier work; 2012’s Locked Down got him a lot closer, boasting a spacey, swampy production courtesy of the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and noticeably better songs, not least the fantastic Eleggua and Revolution.
But in his later years, Rebennack seemed more comfortable as a simpler artist or a kind of living reliquary of New Orleans musical practice, cutting tributes to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, collections of Johnny Mercer standards and two strong albums inspired by the devastation wrought on his home town by Hurricane Katrina. He wore his elder-statesman-of-the-Big-Easy status well, genially pleading drug-related amnesia when asked by interviewers about the late 60s. (“I was tore down all that time … It’s hard for me to look back … It all falls into some grim abyss.”) But if he claimed not to remember it himself, it’s still likely to be the thing he’s best remembered for: not as the traditionalist he was at heart, but a visionary artist who took local traditions and transformed them into music that sounded like nothing else on Earth.
* Fucking hell. There's one for the cliché book...
Friday, 7 June 2019
Poem for D-Day: Chanson d'Automne by Paul Verlaine
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Chanson d'Automne by Paul Verlaine
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long
Pale as with pain,
Breath fails me when
The hours tolls deep.
My thoughts recover
The days that are over
And I weep.
And I go
Where the winds know,
Broken and brief,
To and fro,
As the winds blow
A dead leaf.
from Paul Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens (1867)
For those desperate to know, we're using the Arthur Symons translation.
Thursday, 6 June 2019
Tuesday, 4 June 2019
Monday, 3 June 2019
Sunday, 2 June 2019
The Rutles at The Cluny, Newcastle 2019 - review
31 May 2019 – The Cuny, Newcastle upon Tyne
Ian Ravenscroft
1 June 2019
The main hall of The Cluny was full as The Rutles took to the stage shortly after 8:30pm for the first of two 50-minute sets - the current band consisting of: -
Neil Innes (aka Ron Nasty) – vocals, guitar, keyboards, ukulele
John Halsey (aka Barry Wom – full name Barrington Womble) – vocals, drums
Ken Thornton – vocals, lead guitar
Phil Jackson – vocals, keyboards
David Catlin Birch – vocals, bass guitar
Ron Nasty’s delivery was delightfully tongue-in-cheek. The supporting players took turns to deliver lead vocals on selected songs, but Ron was the ‘main man’. The band were tight and there was some excellent guitar playing from ‘Rutling’ Ken Thornton throughout. David Catlin Birch sported an authentic Hofner Violin Bass Guitar. He was once a member of the pop band World Party and played the original ‘Paul’ in The Bootleg Beatles.
They played virtually all of those wonderful pastiche songs from The Rutles and Archaeology. Highlights were Blue Suede Schubert, I Must Be In Love, Ouch!, Good Times Roll, Get Up And Go, Easy Listening (lead vocal Barry Wom), Eine Kliene Middle Klasse Music, Joe Public...… and that timeless favourite Cheese And Onions.
At one point, by way of introduction, Ron said “I’m going to sing a folk song, it’s unaccompanied”….. Putting one hand to his ear in true folky tradition, he began……
I’ll sing you a song about Nigel Farage… (laughter)…
And all that he has done…. (long pause)… (laughter, cheers and applause)
I can’t recall which song they were playing, but at the end Barry took a drum solo and it morphed into the final few minutes of Abbey Road. Ken Thornton played all three lead guitar parts to perfection. By The End I was all dewy-eyed.
Ron waxed lyrical about The Rutles and postulated that there should be a verb “to rutle…. After all haven’t bands been doing this for years and years? Even George Harrison rutled when he formed his band with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne?” What followed was The Traveling Wilburys’ Handle With Care. Later in another tribute to George, who did so much to make the original film, they surprised everyone with a rendition of All Things Must Pass, with Ron on ulkulele.
At the interval I bought a t-shirt and The Wheat Album, which had passed me by last year.
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