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Bob Dylan’s Achievement Awards Are Still One Short

May 15th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Lauded, awarded praised and endlessly debated, Bob Dylan reaches 70 in May 2011. Isn’t it about time he won the greatest honour of all: the Nobel Prize?

On May 24th 2011, the most analysed poet of the 20th century, Bob Dylan, celebrates his 70th birthday. At an age when many are in retirement, Dylan shows no signs of slowing. His Never Ending Tour, a popular name for his touring schedule, has played around 100 gigs a year since June 1988. It continues.

While Dylan and his backing band evolve as the tour progresses, the opening announcement remains unchanged. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock and roll. The voice of the promise of the Sixties counter-culture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock….’

He is all that and more; but ‘the poet laureate’? The honour ‘laureate’ comes from Ancient Greek for ‘crowned with laurels’; the best. While Dylan has been showered with awards, Nobel’s Prize for Literature has not yet been offered.

Alfred Nobel’s will created an award for: ‘the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction …’ Surely Dylan qualifies?

Many Accolades

Moving backwards through the decades, Ace Showbiz lists his most glittering acknowledgments by public and music/film industries, through nominations and prizes. Things Have Changed, for example, won an Academy Awards Oscar for Best Music, Original Song and a Golden Globe in 2001 for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture, a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Male Vocalist and for Best Motion Picture Song (Wonder Boys, movie 2000).

His 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid movie soundtrack was nominated for a BAFTA in 1974. Brit Awards nominations came in 2007 for Best International Male Solo Artist and Best International Album (Modern Times). Slow Train Coming won a Dove Award (1980) with Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett; while Grammy nominations arrived in 2010 (Best Americana Album for Together Through Life, Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance for Beyond Here Lies Nothin’).

Grammy Awards came in 2007 for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album (Modern Times), Best Rock Vocal Solo Performance (Someday Baby, which also got Best Rock Song nomination). 2004 saw him share a Grammy nomination with Mavis Staples for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (Gonna Change My Way of Thing) and win one on his own for Down in the Flood (Best Rock Vocal).

2002 gave him a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and nominations for Best Rock Male Vocal (Honest With Me) and Album of the Year (Love and Theft).

All Kinds of Music

1997’s To Make You Feel My Love was Grammy nominated in 1999 as Best Country Song. Grammies came in 1998 for Cold Iron Bound (Best Rock Vocal), Time Out of Mind (Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Folk Album) and Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, nominated in 1996 as Best Rock Vocal.

Dignity was Grammy nominated in 1996 (Best Rock Song); World Gone Wrong won Best Traditional Folk Album in 1995, with another nomination in ’94 for Good As I Been To You (Best Contemporary Folk Album). 1967’s All Along The Watchtower waited till 1994 before a Grammy nomination as Best Male Rock Vocal, when 1964’s My Back Pages also got praise nominated as Best Rock Vocal by Duo or Group (shared with Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, George Harrison and Eric Clapton).

Grammy gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992; in 1990 he shared one for Best Rock Vocal By Group with The Traveling Wilburys. Nominations in 1987 for Biograph as Best Historical Album recognized tranches of his cannon and nominations for Best Inspirational Performance (Shot of Love, 1982 and 1981 Saved) marked achievement high points.

Other music from his overtly Christian period (Gotta Serve Somebody, 1980) won a Grammy; Concert for Bangladesh was 1973 Album of the Year shared with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell and Ravi Shankar. Nashville Skyline Rag (Best Country Instrumental, 1970); John Wesley Harding (Best Folk Performance, 1969); The Times They Are A’Changin’ (Best Folk Recording, 1965); and Bob Dylan (Best Folk Recording, 1963), were lauded.

Hosts of Prizes

It’s both number and scale of awards that impresses. In 1964 he was Grammy nominated for Best Documentary, Spoken Word or Drama Recording for We Shall Overcome (The March on Washington, August 28, 1963), shared with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Anderson, Rabbi Joachim Prinz.

Awards from Las Vegas Film Critics Society, Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival, Polar Music, Prince of Asturias Awards, Satellite Awards fill shelves of the man who calls himself, ‘only a song and dance man’. In 1982 he was inducted into the US Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and 1988 into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Described by William Langley in the UK’s Daily Telegraph (8 April 2011) as the man ‘who changed popular culture more than anyone alive’, he sells out stadiums ‘almost fifty years after his most creative period’. Langley acknowledges that detractors say he pulled off ‘one of the greatest confidence tricks in entertainment history: wreathing himself in a persona of precocity, intelligence and activism’, then disclaiming it to ‘create an aura of mystery’.

Most commentators, including Langley, maintain that view doesn’t square with the influence of his three pivotal albums, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966), ‘widely held to be the bedrock of everything rock music became’.

With such a catalogue of songs, lyrics, poetry, music isn’t it time to award him the Literature Nobel honour? In another fifty years, won’t people still be humming/singing his ballads, traditional/contemporary folk, country and rock songs? Won’t many be quoting, arguing over and being influenced by his haunting lyrics? Won’t his songs still be used in films?

The best birthday present would be an invitation to Scandanavia for the Nobel!

First published on Suite 101, 12 May 2011. (and still not come to pass!)

Image: Bob Dylan in 2010 – Alberto Cabello

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British Royal Wedding Spotlights Interest in All Things Regal

April 26th, 2012 | Add a Comment

This article was first published on Suite 101, 9 April 2011. With continuing interest in the Queen’s Jubilee of 2012, it still has something to say about the monarchy in Britain today.

Kate and William’s April 2011 nuptials are like a British movie with a global audience and a reminder of how films about royals endlessly fascinate people.

Peter Kellner, President of the UK’s YouGov Opinion polling organisation, said in April 2011: “For 123 of the past 174 years, we’ve had a female monarch. For how many of the last 174 years has American democracy produced a female president?” His point was wider than a dig at Americans; it illustrated a British acceptance of the Royal Family in general and The Queen in particular.

Whether Brits are naturally Royalists or not, the fact is that Britain is still an unwritten constitutional monarchy, and interest in all things royal is part of the cultural, historical and commercial fabric of the nation. Films about British royalty support that.

Today’s royals refer to themselves as ‘The Firm,’ an affectionate name for the family business: attending state and civic functions, advising the government of the day and acting as the national figurehead. If Britain didn’t have a Royal head, it would elect a president like other countries.

The House of Windsor

Since King George V changed the German ‘Saxe-Coburg’ in 1917 during the First World War, Windsor has been the Royal Family surname. The 1994 TV comedy series The House of Windsor showed it as a family enterprise, affected by topical issues, particularly as seen from a U.S. perspective.

Penny Junor’s book, The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (2005), gave a sympathetic overview of their success that “lies both in the magic of the monarchy and in the family’s organization into the titular businesslike entity, a phrase coined by Prince Philip.” She asserted the value of the monarchy during this era without hierarchy, deference and respect was to act as “a fixture in this morass of modern life.”

This is the soap opera of royalty. The most recent and acclaimed outing was The King’s Speech (2010), which Listal described as: “George VI, also known as Bertie, reluctantly takes the throne of England when his brother, Edward, abdicates in 1936. The unprepared king turns to a radical speech therapist, Lionel Logue, to help overcome his nervous stutter and the two forge a friendship.”

Set against what was a very real crisis for the monarchy and the onset of World War II, it was simultaneously real history brought to life, a genuine human interest story and well directed, acted and filmed. People and most critics alike took to it. They also did with The Queen (2006).

Listal described that as an intimate behind-the-scenes glimpse at the interaction of Monarch and Prime Minister Blair during their struggle in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, “to reach a compromise between what was a private tragedy for the Royal Family and the public’s demand for an overt display of mourning.”

Its success was partly due to “humanising the Sovereign.” After it, Helen Mirren was sometimes mistaken for the Queen. It was more than people being unable to separate fiction from fact, it was that the Queen, generally much-loved and admired, was humanised so convincingly by the actress, that people felt they knew their monarch.

Earlier Royalty On Film

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) distorted history in a romanticised account of Mary Boleyn, one-time mistress to Henry VIII and her sister Anne, who became his second wife. His daughter Queen Elizabeth I appeared in Orlando (1992). Internet Movie Database said: “Young nobleman Orlando is commanded by Queen Elizabeth I to stay forever young. Miraculously, he does just that.” The film followed him through centuries of British history, experiencing a variety of lives/relationships, including changing sex. Fantasy overtook fact.

Elizabeth (1998) kept historical accuracy in the young Queen wrestling with personal love versus her sense of royal destiny against a backdrop of court conspiracy and betrayal. Elizabeth also appeared in Shakespeare in Love (1998), a clever imagining of how Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, paralleling his own romantic passion.

The ill-fated ‘Nine Days Queen’ of 1553 was the subject of Lady Jane (1986), where politics, scheming, treachery and love abounded, ideal movie material. The rakish Charles II made it legal for woman to appear on stage in Stage Beauty (2004), a glimpse of theatre life in Royalist-Restoration England after the civil war. The same period fascinated Johnny Depp and John Malkovitch who made The Libertine (2004) and the makers of Restoration (2005).

Few films focussed on Queen Victoria’s long reign. The Young Victoria (2009) IMBd described as “a dramatization of the turbulent first years of Queen Victoria’s rule and her enduring romance with Prince Albert.” Her Majesty, Mrs Brown (1997) was a controversial probe into her extended period of mourning him. Servant Brown gradually brought her back to life with a touching but frowned-upon relationship.

Rich Movie Plots

King John, King Richard (Lionheart), the English throne, taxation and the Crusades accompany the legend of Robin Hood. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Robin Hood (1973) with animals, Robin and Marian (1976) and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) exploited it in differing interpretations of the Middle Ages. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) was the comic version.

Shakespeare’s interpretations of English kings got a makeover in Henry V (1944), seen by many as buttressing patriotism on the British home-front during the war, a remake in 1989 and Richard III (1955; 1995). The Lion in Winter (1968) was about Henry II and his three sons, each wanting to inherit the English throne. Becket (1964) saw that same king turn against his friend Thomas-a-Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

A Man For All Seasons (1966) was about Henry VIII wanting divorce and the principled Sir Thomas More opposing him. The Madness of King George (1994) was described by Listal as a “meditation on power and the metaphor of the body of state, based on the real episode of dementia experienced by George III [now suspected a victim of porphyria, a blood disorder].” As the king went mad, he was marginalised, so the film asked: Who was really in charge? A valid question with sovereigns, then and now.

Cinema-goers like their kings and queens to be real, plausible, outrageous, incredible, stubborn, tragic, vulnerable, confused, dark-sided people, just like them. They want human monarchs on screen, even if not telling the whole truth. That’s why royalty is such an enduring theme for movies.

Image: Some of ‘The Firm’ During Trooping of the Colours, 2007 – jon

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Downing Street Is More Than Merely the Prime Minister’s Residence

April 25th, 2012 | Add a Comment

 

Number 10 and neighbouring buildings make up an iconic part of the both the “Westminster Village” and the world’s view of the seat of British government.

To date, fifty-two men and one woman have entered the famous black door of No 10 as Prime Minister. It has been their family home; nerve-centre of governments and nation during war; and in times of political difficulties, ‘the bunker’ of beleaguered premiers. It’s the soap opera of the nation.

The front masks a rabbit warren of rooms and passages, a mix of styles and periods, including the very latest security technology. TV crews are almost constantly camped outside, across the cul-de-sac, facing the door. Who comes in and out could be newsworthy. Ministers, visitors, officials, celebrities: the arrival and departure of everybody tells the watching world something about them and the government.

A defeated Prime Minister (Gordon Brown most recently in May 2010), and a new incumbent arriving (David Cameron on the same day), represent the seamless flow of the British democratic tradition. It’s like ‘the king is dead; long live the king’ in the monarchy. The civil service continues, though, serving one administration after another.

Steeped in History

The street was built by and named after Sir George Downing (1632-1689), soldier and diplomat, who, according to the Downing Street website, was rewarded for service under Charles II by the plot of land on which the street today stands. This was despite serving Cromwell after the English Civil War, too. Number 10 was but one of several houses, on both sides of the thoroughfare.

Generally regarded as Britain’s first Prime Minister, first Lord of the Treasury, the first of ‘the first among equals’, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745) refused to accept Number 10 when it was offered as a personal gift, insisting it was for his successors. According to Number 10, the Prime Minister’s official Website, that’s why it’s the Prime Minister’s official residence and office to this day.

Walpole served almost 21 cumulative years as PM (still an unbeaten record), living and working in the house, despite being imprisoned for six months in the Tower of London for accepting a bribe as Secretary for War. The term ‘Prime Minister’ was regarded as more of a term of abuse then. Indeed, not till the early 20th century did it become a title of status.

Following him, it was mainly Dukes, Earls and a Marquess (Rockingham) who occupied house and position, including Bute, Wilmington, Newcastle, Devonshire, Chatham, Grafton, Liverpool, Palmerston and North, before commoners such as Pitt, Addington, Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill interspersed with nobility in office. Spencer Perceval held the post for just over two years before being shot in the Lobby of the House of Commons (1812). His body lay in Downing Street for five days before the funeral.

After that, the house was remodelled for a high-profile role, including a State Dining Room, and by the 1820s, it was the centre of government. Next door, Number 11, became official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, by the late 1830s, the neighbourhood was decidedly seedy, with flourishing brothels and gin palaces.

Peel’s secretary was murdered in Whitehall in 1842. Security became an issue, Downing Street’s residential popularity declined. The building of the Foreign Office, complete with its own Cabinet Room, in the late 1860s dwarfed Downing Street’s prestige. Rather than abandon it, Disraeli had it modernised to closer to what people recognise today.

The 20th Century

Visitors pass through the door, past cloakroom and Cabinet Room, to the Grand Staircase, walls carrying paintings or pictures of every Prime Minster in chronological order, most recent at the top. There are also Cabinet group photos and records of Imperial Conferences at the bottom. It’s a walk up history’s ladder.

Clement Attlee (of whom Churchill said: “an empty taxi drew up in Downing Street, and Attlee got out’), Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson (“Whichever Party is in office, the Treasury is in power’), Heath, Callaghan, Major, Blair and Brown are the more recent holders of the office, and Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first (and so far, only) woman Prime Minister. All served during differently turbulent times.

Wars, international/financial/domestic crises, personal sagas, political ebbs and tides, royal visits, foreign heads of state, celebrities/MPs/Lords and ordinary petitioners eager to hand in their supplications to officials inside and pose for photos with the famous door behind them, Number 10 has seen drama; it’s like a stage set. The Downing Street walk from gate to house, is like Hollywood without red carpet.

Number 11 is usually occupied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. William Gladstone, beginning in 1881 claimed residence in all three, 10,11 and 12, as he was Prime Minister and Chancellor simultaneously. After victory in 1997, Tony Blair took Number 11’s more spacious apartment, as his family had 3 young children (and a baby later), while his Chancellor, at that time unmarried Gordon Brown, took the smaller flat above Number 10.

Ubiquitous Security

In 2001, Number 9 was named after reorganisation, and is the Downing Street entrance to the Privy Council office and home of the Government Chief Whip. Previously, this office bearer resided at Number 12, now the PM’s Press Office, Strategic Communications Unit and Information & Research Unit.

Despite earlier security fears, it was not till 1989, fearing Provisional IRA terrorist attack on the PM (Margaret Thatcher), black gates were constructed, public access denied. Any member of the public nowadays demanding right of entry without an appointment gets short shift, as ‘it’s not a public road’ any longer. Demonstrations are kept across Whitehall, opposite the gates.

Such are the times in which people move about tourist areas like central London. Security is almost as tight at the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall, a few hundred yards away. People lobbying there or seeking entry in controlled numbers to Downing Street expect to be searched and watched. It’s worth it, even for those who can but stare through railings, to see living democracy, culture and history in action.

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First published on Suite 101, 6 April 2011.

Image: Number 10’s Iconic Black Door – robertsharp

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Crowd-Sourcing Is the New Business, Politics and Arts Democracy

April 23rd, 2012 | Comments Off on Crowd-Sourcing Is the New Business, Politics and Arts Democracy

The internet has provided many innovations. Now comes the harnessing of collective wisdom of untold numbers of people to solve problems, create new ideas.

In the UK, in the months before the March 2011 Budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, opened an ‘online portal’ to accept suggestions for financial changes from anybody who wanted to log on. How many did that may only be known by civil servants, but it’s an example of a new phenomenon: crowd participation.

Businesses, artists and politicians are waking up to the natural corollary of universal social networking. If people have suggestions, grouches/grumbles, lateral thinking, they can come up with ideas others haven’t thought of.

In the early 2000s, Web 2.0 was vaguely ‘using the web as a platform’. Now it’s a web democracy about the production and selection of ideas. In an essay (2009), investor and programmer Paul Graham said amateurs surpass professionals. Wikipedia was an illustration of this, he argued: ‘it’s free and good enough’. The web now decides what is news and what will be read, rather than editors or old-media publications.

People wanted to buy individual tunes rather than whole albums or CDs. People want to blog and tweet, saying whatever they want, however trivial. People-power demanded web evolution, with more free stuff, to be able to eat, holiday, work, entertain and date through the web. Even if most people agree about something, shades of agreement are many. This is where Web 2.0 is online democracy in action.

Business Crowd-Sourcing

In March 2011, Freelancing Matters, the publication of Professional Contractors Group, published an exposition of how far crowd-sourcing has penetrated business. It cited Nokia, who in 2010 held a Nokia Make My App competition inviting anybody in the world to submit app ideas. They received nearly 8000, and took up thirteen to develop.

Nokia’s Head of Crowd-Sourcing, Concepting and Innovation, Pia Erkinheimo, was quoted as saying that Nokia had over sixty thousand employees, but could plug into the thoughts of four million members of Nokia Forum. Crowd-sourcing does not simply canvass opinion and ideas, it uses ‘platforms that interact with human behaviour’.

It’s human behaviour, analysed through complex algorithms by engineers, economists and anthropologists, that makes rapid innovation. Erkinheimo was further quoted by Freelancing Matters as saying” “With crowd-sourcing we are creating a place for lucky accidents, surprising idea combinations’.

Other companies cited included: pharmaceutical manufacturers Eli Lilly who funded access to brainpower outside the company; Boeing, Dupont and Proctor & Gamble who post scientific problems and invite ‘seekers’ to solve them, paying in the process. Some oil spill recovery problems were posted in 2007. One was solved by an engineer from outside the oil industry who proposed a solution from his own (concrete) experience.

Idea Bounty is an intermediary site that links businesses with the global population to source new, innovative thinking. Legal, programming and engineering companies use such systems increasingly, and as more sophisticated technology comes on stream, it will become business commonplace. Naked Wines uses collective power of customers to commission wines from suppliers on an online platform unrestricted by physical limitations.

Political Crowd-Sourcing

Emailing, tweeting and other network structures are already means of conveying individual opinions in a mass form to politicos. Elections themselves are large-scale opinion polls; a government referendum taps views on specific issues. What is new and different, is that the people’s representatives are inviting voters to input directly and frequently into policy making.

An MP presenting an argument in the House of Commons has added weight if he/she can say: ‘I have received this or that collective opinion from constituents….’ Political parties sound out opinions of focus groups and targetted voters, in order to develop/hone policies. Now they do it on a continuous basis, a massive scale.

Still smarting from their 2010 election defeat, the British Labour Party launched a spring 2011 offensive to millions of voters (even those their records showed did not support them) to harness thoughts, reactions and priorities of voters responding at work, home and in their neighbourhoods. Nothing startling there; what’s new is that their new policies presumably will respond to scientifically-interpreted mass thinking.

Arts Crowd-Sourcing

In early 2009, crime novelist James Patterson published, AirBorne. It was described by Sarah Perez on Read Write Web as a ‘crowd-written’ work, the first and last chapters written by him, with the 28 chapters between composed by different authors. She said: ‘With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit mainstream’.

One site to promote entirely free online novels and cyberbooks in most genres is Starry.com where authors publish ‘to promote their work, seek representation and/or develop a following’. That is different from Corduroy Mansions, a series of novelscreated by Alexander McCall Smith from 2008, where Daily Telegraph readers submitted sections based on characters and settings he created, and he rewrote them.

The product was published daily in paper, website, podcast and finally in hardback. This was crowd-writing too. The Telegraph wrote: ‘An entertaining mix of characters is no novelty for Mr McCall Smith’s fans, but the online medium has lent a new intimacy and immediacy to his work’.

Kate Mossman of The Times (March 2011) reported that experimental songwriter Imogen Heap was making a ‘piece of music inspired by sounds and words uploaded by fans’, called Heapsong1 after a press story of a man seen cycling in vain from the Japanese tsunami. Public would contribute artwork and a video for it. A striking match, dishwasher, boiling kettle, a cardboard box were contributed for Heap to weave into new music.

Mossman reckoned that crowd-sourcing, pulling in fans to inspire and physically construct works, may be the future of music production. Maroon5, Coca-Cola and Facebook teamed up to make a song in 24 hours via live webstream. Like improvisers on stage reacting to audience suggestion, or mashing all sorts of artists like choirs, techno and orchestras to make albums, concerts and videos, people are not socially alone when part of a creative process.

If, as the old adage runs: ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’, crowd wisdom is not without disaster potential. However, it’s here to stay. It will evolve using old and new and become ubiquitous. Until the next big thing.

First published on Suite 101, 2nd April 2011.

Image: Do Crowds Really Have Collective Wisdom? – BenFranske

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English Piers: Long Walks Into the Past, Present and Future

April 21st, 2012 | Comments Off on English Piers: Long Walks Into the Past, Present and Future

The Victorian/Edwardian walkways off Britain’s coasts hold enduring fascination, are historic legacies and business opportunities, mixing past and future.

There’s something beyond quaint curiosity about standing on a platform, off-shore, enjoying views and bracing air. ‘Pier’ describes a raised, supported walkway over water, freely flowing around its piles and beneath its planking. Piers can be simple and short or a major structure a mile long.

Warehouses and cargo functions define US and Australian piers, but the British cast-iron model became associated with the pursuit of pleasure and entertainment, although Lowestoft South doubles as harbour wall on its north side. Cromer Pier and Britannia Pier, Gt Yarmouth still sport working theatres.

Piers were beloved of Victorian/Edwardian architects, town planners and citizens as they became symbols of civic pride. They are cast-iron icons of 19th Century Britain. Brighton, for example had Chain, West and still has Palace Pier; others cherished a single edifice.

Pier Politics

According to National Piers Society, less than half Victorian-era piers remain; many ‘face an uncertain future’. The Society, founded in 1979, under the auspices of Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, has become the leading pier authority, mounting fund-raising and awareness campaigns, saving many.

Neglect, decay, perceived anachronism and the ravages of weather contribute to the demise of piers. Advice to local/national government, heritage bodies, lottery boards and the media remind people (and taxpayers) of the enjoyment available from piers and the cultural significance of heritage.

Working with organisations like British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers and Attractions (pier owners/operators) and the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society (ship excursions from pier landings and heads), the Society works in economically difficult, politically challenging climates.

BALPPA hosts a lunch every spring for Members of Parliament with attractions, amusements or piers in their constituencies. Like all lobbying lunches, it’s an opportunity to combine business with pleasure and network over a range of tourist issues.

Southend Pier: Political Difficulties

First planned in 1828, it opened at 600 feet. By 1846 it was a mile and a quarter with a passenger train. Later electrified as wood was replaced with iron, it grew. By 1898 it was the world’s longest. After war use by the Navy, it enjoyed glory days till late 1960s, with annually 5 million rail passengers and a million walkers.

By the mid 1970s, fire destroyed the pier head; repairs were estimated at over a million pounds. Like many civic amenities, arguments crystallised around costs of redesign, repair, safety and changing fashions versus treasuring local history and exploiting new commercial/entertainment ideas, like amusements, museums, bingo/lotteries, fishing, marketed as ‘Traditional British Seaside Holidays’.

Political and economic debate continued into the 21st century. With increasing cost of health and safety compliance, the future of piers is far from rosy. Many are used for lifeboat stations and as unusual settings for functions like weddings.

At Southend, as elsewhere, grandiose plans for roller-coasters, casinos and restaurants do not win universal support. Of course, councillors are anxious to save by renewal, but are wary of schemes which may fail in harsh economic times, leaving unfinished works to the mercies of Britain’s seas.

Lost Piers

Piers that succumbed to sea-swell, storms, erosion, collapse, collision and fire, include: Leith Trinity Chain Pier (1821- 1898); Aberavon (1898) became a breakwater in the 1960s; St Leonard’s Palace in Hastings (1891) was bombed in the war, demolished in 1951, and the short, never-completed Aldeburgh Pier in the mid-19th Century.

Roller-skating, wrestling, animal shows: piers have tried everything to pull crowds, especially outside summer seasons. Minehead’s pier opened in 1901, and became the only one completely demolished in the war, to give gun batteries a clear view. Rebuilding plans in the 2000s collapsed. Lytham had one (1865-1960) but still has St Annes (1885). Folkestone Victoria (1888-1943); Fleetwood Victoria (1910-2008), Redcar (1873-1981) and Lee-on-Solent (1988-1958) have gone.

The first recognised picture postcard (1894) featured Scarborough Pier (1869-1905). Morecambe lost two: Central (1869) burned away in 1991 and West End (1896-1978) from storms. Dover had Promenade (1893-1925); Plymouth had their Promenade (1884-1953) and Walton-on-the-Naze’s 1830-1880 one give them briefly the distinction of being the smallest resort to boast two piers.

The Isle of Wight lost five: Shanklin (1890-1993); Cowes Victoria (1902-1961); Cowes Royal (1866-1882); Ventnor Royal Victoria (1873-1992) and Ryde (1864-1924); but retained Sandown Culver (1879), Yarmouth (1876) and another at Ryde. Kent’s Pegwell Bay was the shortest-living of any, just 5 years from 1879.

Living Piers

In Hunstanton, locals refer to ‘the pier’: an arcade and bowling complex occupying the entrance of what was once East Anglia’s finest. Opened in 1870, paddle steamers crossed The Wash to Skegness Pier (still surviving). Its pavilion was destroyed by fire in 1939, and after the war it housed a small zoo and miniature steam railway. Storms struck in 1978; it was engulfed in flames in 2002.

Other genuine piers survive, with degrees of former glory evident. Blackpool South, North and Central Piers are essential to their tourist industry. Aberystwyth Royal, Falmouth, Bangor Garth, Felixstowe, Southampton Royal, Anglesey’s Beaumaris, Southport, Southsea Clarence and Southsea South Parade, Harwich, Bognor Regis, Llandudno, Burnham-on-Sea, Clevedon, Weymouth Bandstand, Colwyn Bay Victoria, Southwold and Hastings survive.

So do Boscombe, Herne Bay, Swanage, Bournemouth, Hythe, Teignmouth Grand, Torquay Princess, Lowestoft Claremont, Totland Bay, Clacton, Mumbles, Weston-Super-Mare Birnbeck, Paignton, Penarth, Ramsey Queens, Dunoon, Saltburn, Sandown Culver, Cleethorpes, Colwyn Bay Victoria, Deal, Worthing and Weymouth Commercial/Pleasure Pier, while Gravesend Town is the oldest surviving cast-iron pier in the world (1834).

Piers in Movies

Barnacle Bill (1956) was set on Hunstanton Pier. The Dark Man (1951) featured Hastings Pier. Cromer Pier set the opening of DV8 Dance Company’s The Cost of Living. Piers are part of the landscape of seaside resorts, yet nostalgic reminders of simpler but ambitious times. Many are phoenix-like icons, rising from (literal) ashes to be reborn.

Brighton’s West Pier featured in Oh What A Lovely War (1968) and The Fruit Machine 1998. Brighton Rock (1947; 2010) from Graham Greene’s novel, demanded local Brighton scenes. The Daily Mail’s Simon Cable reported (February 2011) that for the 2010 remake, producers found Brighton Pier ‘too modern’, so used Eastbourne Pier instead!

West Pier awaits better economic times for a partial rebuild to create ‘Brighton i360’, a viewing platform, virtual pier in the sky. The plans follow years of extensions, rebuildings since 1866. Landing stages, bandstand, ballroom/concert hall and architectural features led determined bands of activists/campaigners to fight for its survival.

They raised money; every few years fire or heavy gales destroyed bits. Council demolition orders and business regeneration ideas came and went. Still standing, it’s a skeleton of former glory, but a landmark to a symbolic dream: to stand on a pier enjoying the heritage, imagining the future where people value their pasts.

First published on Suite 101, 25 March 2011.

Image: End of the Pier Shows at Cromer – Bodacea

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Puppets and Performers on Stage Together Creating Reality

April 15th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Avenue Q Performer and Puppet, As One - Michael Schamis


Even when actors manipulate puppets in front of audiences, the puppet comes alive, absorbing, compelling, believable. It’s a powerful dramatic device.

‘Puppet’ has been a useful English language word for centuries. Some kind of political leader installed by a more powerful force is often referred to as ’puppet government’ or ‘puppet regime’. The term, broadened out, means simply anyone weaker controlled by somebody stronger: a puppet, pulled by strings at the behest of a controller.

Some have it that ‘poppet’, meaning a term of affection for another, as in ‘pet’, ‘doll’ or ‘dear’, is from the same root. It is a representation of a person, a kind of surrogate human-being, which on stage can be extremely moving, unpleasant, sinister or comic. Puppets are, in fact, a very ancient theatrical form.

Historic, Cultural Puppet Artifacts

From simple, found-objects, silhouettes, shadows, stringed or marionettes, rod, hand/glove, arm, finger, sock, chin-face to video animations, puppets are made of virtually anything. Punch and Judy is a particular kind of puppet art form, with stereotypical characters playing a well-known story of challenging authority with myriad variations, stemming from the 16th Century Italian commedia dell’Arte.

Carnivals, religious ceremonies, circus-like entertainments, miniatures, life and larger replicas, children’s toy puppet theatres have all been part of puppet history. Puppets have been, even if small, parts of cultures from around the world, from Java to Vietnam, Italy to Thailand and Japan.

Developed in Japan over, literally, thousands of years, Bunraku puppets were about two thirds life-size wood carvings standing against illumination, manipulated by three puppeteers, dressed neutrally and adding mystery themselves to the stage.

The body itself (particularly hand, forearms and face), has been utilised in puppetry. The ventriloquist’s dummy, operated on the knee or arm of the manipulator while he/she ‘throws’ the voice to make it sound as if the dummy is speaking, is another form of the art.

Puppets in the Movies

The dummy coming alive is spooky; most famously used in Dead of Night (1945) and Dead Silence (2007) which Internet Movie Database described as; ‘widower returns to his hometown to search for answers to his wife’s murder, which may be linked to the ghost of a murdered ventriloquist’.

Movies such as The NeverEnding Story (1984), Labrynth (1986) and The Dark Crystal (1982) have used real life puppets, rather than animation or computer graphics. Thunderbirds was a successful children’s TV programme of electronically operated marionettes.

A particularly 20th century development was the visibility on stage of puppeteers, not only manipulating puppets but interacting as characters, alter-egos and puppet voices. Most observers find after a time of such shows, that it’s the puppet absorbing interest, rather than the operator.

The Muppets were a successful TV and film brand first created by animator Jim Henson in the 1950s. A ‘muppet’ became any puppet in his Muppet Show style, and was supposed to be ‘marionette’ combined with ‘puppet’. The children’s TV series, Sesame Street employed that style and the Disney empire took over the trademarks and names in 2004. TV, films, spin-off merchandising have established puppets and humans visible together as a distinct sub-genre.

Avenue Q Is Any Place, Any Time

The hit musical Avenue Q (2002), grew from an original adult puppet idea for a TV show (which it never was) to off-Broadway, to Broadway to London’s West End to touring. The creators, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marks wanted a new form of musical, tapping in to people’s love of Disney cartoons and animation, The Muppets, Sesame Street with eclectic musical styles and contemporary themes.

Marks said at the UK tour start in 2011: ‘Let’s do something funny and relevant about people like us and appealing enough for people to get over the hurdle of it being a musical’. There is, according to Cameron Mackintosh, UK’s most successful producer, ‘an element of familiarity in the music, but it’s not a pastiche of show business and neither are the jokes’.

Politically correct, it wasn’t. Sketches/songs about being gay, unemployed, black, mixed race relationships stood alongside more old-fashioned romance, hurting people and disappointment, community spirit; all played in a larger than life, clean-cut smiley 1950s style but with a darker under belly that made it very early 21st Century.

The puppets were the stars. UK tour Puppet Coach Nigel Plaskitt came from experience in Doctor Who, Combat Sheep, Alice in Wonderland, children’s programmes Pipkins and Heggerty Haggerty and was principal puppet performer on Spitting Image. The puppets were the essential face of Avenue Q, a unique selling point.

Rachel Jerram, star of the British tour said: “It’s so human, even though it’s actually puppets, but there’s a human heart to it’. The fact that puppets seem like human beings, with their mouths more or less in synch with their actor/operators, the almost shared facial expressions, the arm that moves in a human-like way: is the magic of human-puppetry on stage.

Almost Everything Can Be Made Into Puppets

In a powerful mix of emotions, Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel War Horse became a play, and later in 2011 will be a Spielberg movie. Set during the First World War, cataloging the appalling loss of human and animal life, the big challenge was producing life-sized horse puppets. It was a huge stage success, winning awards on both Broadway and the West End.

Handspring Puppet Company made the horses. The operators were on stage, like grooms caring for the animals, but bringing the skeletal representations alive, exacerbating poignancy of the narrative, the quality and believability of the actors. Suspension of disbelief for the puppet master makes an absorbing theatrical experience.

Blind Summit Theatre, performing at Norwich Puppet Theatre in 2006 with a piece of actor/puppet work called Low Life, or Trestle Theatre’s 2004 true story interpretation of the Smallest Person , about a nineteen and a half inch child, played by a puppet given life by the ‘unseen’ animator. Disney’s The Lion King has done it on stages around the world since 1997.

Big scale or small, puppets with actors bring the inanimate to life but in such a variety of ways that performances are enhanced, skills developed and theatre’s boundaries are pushed ever further out. There is no limit on the strings that move this style of theatre.

First published on Suite 101, 16 March 2011.

Image: Avenue Q Performer and Puppet, As One – Michael Schamis

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Westminster Hall, the Jewel in the Crown of Britain’s Parliament

April 14th, 2012 | Comments Off on Westminster Hall, the Jewel in the Crown of Britain’s Parliament

Westminster Hall, from the South - Tagishsimon

 
For 900 years, the Hall has been a focal point in British democratic history, and today it’s a priceless, unique tourist, political and cultural attraction.

Built in 1097 on orders of William (Rufus) II, son of William the Conqueror, to show his new subjects the majesty of his authority, it was, and still is, a magnificent architectural achievement. But even more significant has been its role in some pivotal historical moments in British history.

Architectural Wonders

It was Europe’s largest, 73 x 20 metres, so large that the royal household usually ate elsewhere. The outside stone walls were at least two metres (6 feet) thick, and slightly curved making it thicker in the centre. They were plastered, painted and hung with drapes.

The roof was the most impressive. It was centrally unsupported, hammer-beams of English oak, resting on wall buttresses, commissioned in 1393. The lanterns to let smoke out came four years later, and the roof was finished in 1401, with 176 tons of lead.

A feat of design and engineering, it still impresses today as visitors gaze at the massive structure 28 metres above them. Fragments of the ‘King’s High Table’, used by monarchs up to Elizabeth I, were found in 2006 under the south end steps. This was originally another symbol of royal authority, and was used for coronation breakfasts and presenting crown and sceptre to the new monarch.

The King’s Champion rode in full armour and challenged anyone minded to question the King’s succession. For six centuries, the Dymock family have held that function and still hold the right!

Home of the Courts of the Land

Four principle courts, Common Pleas, King’s Bench, Chancery and Exchequer, sat in Westminster. Gradually the separation of courts from King evolved, though all courts sat in his name. Westminster Hall thus provided the birthplace of the English legal system, which travelled through most world democracies.

It was an achievement as profound as Parliamentary democracy itself, birthed in the same chamber. Only later did the monarchy develop as non-divine. The White Hart, personal emblem of King Richard was put in extensively in decoration, and the fleur-de-lys, the French royal symbol was quartered with the three lions of England.

Between courts, it was the home of shops and stalls, the full bustle of a medieval street market, a mix of common and royal, secular and religious. It was also the place for ‘disguisings,’ forerunners of masques and entertainments, musicians and jousting tournaments. In the 1500s it was used for ‘real’ tennis.

The Parliamentary website described images, crowns and robes painted red and green, all on an altar to ‘emphasise the quasi-divine status of the King.’ Such displays in a building were unprecedented, but led to the green of the benches in the Commons and the royal reds and purples in the Lords, adjacent.

Changes, Reforms and Reconstructions

Over the centuries Westminster Hall has received major reconstructions. From the 1740s onwards, the roof had to be supported by props. The lead was stripped to reveal decay, then sold to pay for Westmoreland slates. Rebuilding of the north facade was done between 1819-1822 to the original style.

In 1834, two stoves used to destroy Exchequer wooden tally sticks set fire to the Lords and much of the remaining buildings. Popular voices at the time said it was God’s punishment on Parliament for passing the Great Reform Act of 1832. Firefighters saved Westminster Hall.

Architect Charles Barry built a new Parliament, and replaced the Hall’s great south window with the present stairs, arch and window set back, a new St Stephen’s Hall. Westminster Hall was no longer the main entrance to the whole Palace. In 1885, there was an Irish Fenian bomb, necessitating repairs near the Chapel.

Death-watch beetle was found in the beams in 1913, and concealed steelwork was employed. The next danger came from fire bombs dropped by the Germans during the blitzkrieg attacks on London in the Second World War. 10 May 1941 in the night, Westminster was hit.

The Commons chamber burned, and Westminster Hall was threatened. Former Cabinet Minister Walter Elliot, who lived nearby, ordered firemen to save the Hall, and let the Commons burn, as they couldn’t save both.

Trials and State Occasions

In its capacity as a high court, Westminster Hall heard hearings of impeachment, spying and treason. Thomas Turberville, William Wallace, Sir Thomas More, John Cardinal Fisher, the Protector Somerset and King Charles 1 stood trial in the Hall. At the end of the English Civil War, January 1649, Charles was tried for tyranny and treason and condemned to death while he was still king.

It was a momentous event in English history in a turbulent time. His beheading took place a few hundred yards down Whitehall. In 1660, after the Interregnum (Oliver Cromwell had taken his oath as Lord Protector there) and the restoration of Charles II, many of the regicides who had signed the death warrant were themselves tried and condemned in the Hall.

There were other notable trials there over the next 200 years, including Guy Fawkes and Gunpowder Plot conspirators. It has been used for rallies and events of a purely political nature. After the First World War it was ruled that events should have ‘a legal, parliamentary or national significance.’ 48 coffins for R101 airship victims rested there in 1930.

Ceremonial addresses to the Monarch from Parliament are presented there. South African President Nelson Mandela addressed both Houses in 1996. The late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was the most recent royal to lie-in-state in 2002, and 200,000 people filed past to pay respects; her husband in 1952 drew 800,000. Winston Churchill’s saw a million in 1965.

The Hall Chapel can be used by MPs for weddings. Off it are rooms for staff dining, committees, speeches, meetings. Guided tour parties gather in the hall and can buy souvenirs. Sometimes visiting lobby groups are marshalled in it. It’s a living part of the Westminster village, a piece of history that has seen so much of the cultural life of Britain. It is to be treasured.

First published on Suite 101, 12 March 2011.

Image: Westminster Hall, from the South – Tagishsimon

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Blonde on Blonde Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

April 11th, 2012 | Add a Comment

'Blonde on Blonde': Dylan's Greatest Album? - Alberto Cabello


From a man as controversial as Bob Dylan, who reinvents himself regularly, it’s hard to choose one album to mark a pivotal turning point, but this is it.

In a 2006 review of the All-Time 100 Albums on Time, Alan Light included Blonde on Blonde (1966), coming at the end of a 14-month period of creativity from Dylan, that he never equalled. Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited preceded what became labelled ‘rock’s first significant double album’. Significant it was, and remains a seminal work.

Light described it as having ‘a tense, shimmering tone’, and after the ‘tiresome’ opener, Rainy Day Women 12 and 35, it went on to achieve Dylan’s greatest heights, ‘the very pinnacle of rock’. British Dylan devotee Roger Ford agreed, publishing a major work, reconstructing every facet of the album from recording techniques and history to lyrics, from quirks to personal touches.

Ford called it ‘the record that can’t be set straight’. He admits that it wasn’t necessarily better than other Dylan albums; it just caught him at the right time ‘to sink in deeper’. That’s how it captures many listeners over the decades. Ford was also drawn to the sheer range of issued versions with different editings and remixes: two mono, two stereo vinyl, different sleeve photos, song with no agreement on title, two CDs and an abridged version.

The Mysteries Explained

Which is the ‘real’ Blonde on Blonde? Ford attempted an answer, but wondered, in effect, if it mattered to only sound purists. They are all ‘real’, or none. Mixing and methods used to lay down recordings make differences to the way people hear songs. Later remixing, more/less bass or drums and stereo/mono issues have become a tangled web of confusion with this album.

Some versions have called Side 2 Track 2, Memphis Blues Again; the Dwarf Music Songbook called it Stuck Inside of Mobile With The. Rainy Day Women had the sound and feel of drugs, according to Stephen Webb in his book Dylan Redeemed (2006), but the lyrics ‘stone you jus’ like they said they would’, implied religious persecution. He looked at Dylan as born-again Christian.

He said that many Blonde on Blonde songs could ‘be classifed as druggy’, but his use of ‘intuitive associations and juxtaposed time frames’ could be traced to other influences, such as painting. He accepted that Dylan said marijuana was part of the musicians’ scene, but Dylan denied interest in psychedelics.

Also writing from a religious perspective, Michael J Gilmour in Tangled Up in the Bible (2004), said songs from the album have direct Bible references. Stuck Inside of Mobile with The ‘was an important person inviting strangers to his son’s wedding’ (from Matt 22:1-14 and Luke 14: 16-24).

Gilmour said Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands had the lines ‘sad-eyed prophet’ (from Jer 8:21-9:1, 13:17 and ‘kings of Tyrus’ (from Ezekiel 22:12). However, Nigel Williamson’s Rough Guide to Bob Dylan (2004) said of the epic 11 minutes of song: ‘it contains plenty of clever word-play and coded private imagery’, but Dylan’s devotion to Sara Lowndes (admitted on the Desire album, 1976) with phrases like ‘flesh like silk’ and ‘saint-like face’, was obvious.

He maintained that I Want You from the album, released as a single in 1966, was also a straightforward love ballad for Sara, among a list of typical Dylan characters, like ‘the guilty undertaker’, ‘drunken politicians’ and the ‘dancing child with his Chinese suit’. Dylan wrote many of these songs in the Chelsea Hotel, where he also spent time with Edie Sedgwick, who preceded Sara.

Williamson suggested Just Like a Woman was for the ‘mentally unstable Edie’, as was Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat. One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) was a narrative, an inquest into a failed relationship, and thought it may have been for Joan Baez, but if it was, it was the closest Dylan ever got to thanking or apologizing ‘for using her as a stepping stone’ in his own career.

Of Visions of Johanna, Williamson said: ‘like much great poetry, literal interpretation is less important than mood and impression’. It attained a marriage of rock music and poetry for him, with potent lines like ‘the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face’.

Controversy Is the Key

Dave Rosen, writing on Ink Blot Magazine waxed lyrical about the album: ‘he distills the expansive surrealism he pioneered on the two groundbreaking albums that preceded it to a thematic thread’. This thread was subject to both speculation and disagreement. Rosen argued that the songs defied description and interpretation, coming soon after Dylan had shocked his trad-folk audience by going electric.

It was controversy from Dylan again. For Rosen: ‘Johanna wrapped the listener in a warm spangled word-veil of mystical psychedelia’; Most Likely You Go Your Way ‘chugs along like a magical train’. The folk messiah was reconciled with the prophet, in what Dylan himself described of Blonde on Blonde as ‘that thin, wild mercury sound’.

So, mystery poet/lyricist second to none of the 20th century, no mean musician and singer of a tremendous range of styles, this album was another Dylan turning point. When people say Dylan is not pop singer, not balladeer, not rocker, not poet, they haven’t listened. The man who wrote, for instance, Make You Feel My Love (1987), was the most gentle lover.

And the man who created Blonde on Blonde was at that point in his long, creative career that he couldn’t help but break new ground, set new benchmarks, raise expectations, felt still by those who listen. The fact is, this exercise of revisiting and reinterpreting Blonde on Blonde could have been done equally for John Wesley Hardin, Desire, Blood on the Tracks, The Times They Are A Changin’, Highway 61 Revisited, Shot of Love or Modern Times, such is the potency of Bob Dylan.

First published on Suite 101, 12 March 2011.

Image: ‘Blonde on Blonde’: Dylan’s Greatest Album? – Alberto Cabell

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The Incredible String Band Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

April 10th, 2012 | Comments Off on The Incredible String Band Revisited and Reinterpreted for Today

Huge Range of World non-Western Instruments Used - Steve Evans

 
One of the more quirky, hard to categorise British 60s bands, ISB were influential as musicians’ musicians. Have they still got a relevant message now?

Usually defined as exponents of late 1960s ‘psychedelic folk’, The Incredible String Band (ISB) were called by Making Time, a website resource devoted to compiling an encyclopedia of 60s’ British beat music, early devotees of ‘World Music’. They were eclectic, deriving influences from many genres, cultures and sounds, fusing them with poetry as lyrics.

Robert Plant, Billy Connolly, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were among their fans, and they started as Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson playing in a Scottish folk club in Glasgow. Mike Heron joined to play guitar and record producer Joe Boyd signed them to Elektra label. In 1966 they released their first album.

Uniqueness in More than Band Name

Even then, their own writing and musical innovations were taking them out of the folk bag, and into separate travels, Williamson to Afghanistan and Heron to ‘Morocco’s soft perfumed air’ enriching their style, and 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion was released in 1967, the ‘summer of love’. Stylistically, it didn’t conform to the stereotypical hippie/drug/free-love climate of that year. It was more ‘underground’, according to Making Time.

African instruments, such as the gimbri, Indian sitars, ever more original lyrics and Palmer and Williamson’s distinctive vocal timbres, made their sound unique. John Peel gave them airtime on his late night Perfumed Garden programme on pirate Radio London. Their next album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1968) was their biggest selling, and included the epic 13 minute A Very Cellular Song, which wove a narrative of amoebae: ‘amoebas are very small’.

For Wee Tam & The Big Huge (also 1968) they were joined by their girlfriends, Rose Simpson and Licorice McKechnie, and Making Time argued most critics rated this one the peak of their creativity. Later, involved in Scientology, the men lost ‘the critical element necessary to create the outstanding music that they were known for’.

Other albums followed: Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending, which was part dramatised in video (1970) as a ‘Happening’ shot in Scottish countryside that put flesh on the bones of the weirdness, obscurity and self-indulgent hippie claptrap that critics of the flower-power 60s often make. It was described as ‘a surreal pantomime in song and dance’. They played Woodstock Festival in 1969, though not to universal acclaim.

A multimedia experience at London’s Roundhouse called U and a handful more albums followed, with the girls leaving, other musicians joining and a more rock flavour coming through, which isolated Williamson. Their final shows were in 1974, and they worked separately. A reunion of the original trio in 1999 led to a career playing the nostalgia circuits for a few years.

The Legacy

The opening of Joe Boyd’s book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, read: ‘The 60s began in the summer of 1956, ended in October of 1973 and peaked just before dawn on 1 July 1967, during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London’. In his opinion, that span of cultural creativity remains unparalleled: ‘You can still play The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and it sounds like part of contemporary culture. It resonates strongly to this day. In terms of music, at least, I don’t think there’s been an era to match it since’.

Boyd discovered ISB, recognising their individualism within their collectivism and added them to his production stable (Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM, 10,000 Maniacs and Billy Bragg). He was not the only aficionado to record warm thoughts beyond fond memories from the distance of time. Tim Owen analysed on Jazz Mann, 2010’s reissue of three ISB albums.

He referred to guests on the albums: ‘collectively contributing bass, piano and organ, sitar, harps, violin and percussion to an already heady brew, their presence is surely down to a presiding communal impulse’. The instinct for radical instrumentation was ‘fearlessly boundless’. Microtones were explored and varied instruments included: sitar, organ, dulcimer, harpsichord, gimbri, flute, tamboura, rattles, oud, mandolin, Jew’s harp, water harp.

The songwriting that accompanied the musical explosion marked them out with literary authority. Seen as idiosyncratic by some, merely psychedelic by others, it had a freshness that strikes today. The layering of multi-track recording became available, and they used it. It was a happy coincidence of vocal, writing, playing, innovating talents.

Deriving power from Gilbert and Sullivan (The Minotaur’s Song), American spiritual and mediaeval chant, traditional folk, non-Western cultures with a nod to contemporary rock and popular music, the albums still thrill as voyages of discovery. The urgent sense of the theatrical in their performances gave them a completeness shared by few bands.

They were one of the few British psychedelic bands to be popular Stateside. George de Stefano, writing in June 2010 on Pop Matters, recalled his visit to a gig with other stoned youngsters at the Fillmore East. ISB were two guys and two girls all dressed in ‘colorful counterculture finery’. He recalled the Cellular one about amoebas with the chorus turned into a chant and flower petals tossed at audience from the aisles.

He critiqued their exotic instrumentation, pointing out Jackson Browne and Judy Collins covered some of their songs, while First Girl I Loved, Painting Box, The Hedgehog song, showed they could turn out popular classics. Cellular, Minotaur and Keoeeoaddi There were on another plane altogether. It was their ‘creative daring and open-hearted spiritual yearning’ that stayed in the mind, too.

Their recorded works were beyond mere concept albums, as Williamson explained in 2010: ‘What I wanted to make was innocent music, straight from the well-spring of the heart. To forget all cramping skill, to play instruments one couldn’t play, link audiences and performer, jump styles and themes with the logic of dreams and visions’.

That they and the versatility of their musical prowess chimed with the zeitgeist of the 1960s is unquestionable; that they speak to today’s aging baby-boomers and their youngsters interested in those days with lessons to be learned, is debatable, but proved.

First published on Suite 101, 11 March 2011.

Image: Huge Range of World non-Western Instruments Used – Steve Evans

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Redemption: The Greatest Story Ever Told Again and Again

April 9th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Dickens' Story Part of Christmas Commercialism - Stephen McKay


One work of redemptive literature, ‘A Christmas Carol’, has inspired more interpretations and reinventions than almost any other in the English language.

In Christian belief, people can be saved by Christ the Redeemer. This concept of being saved, given freedom from something that binds, has inspired more literature and film than almost any other theme.

Redemption means, variously, freeing from bondage, atonement, reclamation, reparation, restitution, propitiation and salvation. It implies a freedom from some restriction; although physical, financial, mental and personality limitations are natural in life. From the ancient world, a redeemer paid a price or ransom for somebody.

That in Christianity is the redeeming work of God through Jesus Christ, to pay the blood price/atone for man’s sin and set him free from its bonds. This new situation was a restoration of what was regarded as man’s natural state, before Satan tempted man down the road to sin and, ultimately damnation.

Redemptive Literature

This is a powerful concept, and it’s not hard to see how it appeals to creatives in many variations. Tolstoy wrote a play called Redemption (1900), and there have been novels with the title from Tariq Ali (1990), Mel Odom (2000), Leon Uris (1996) and Howard Fast (1999), all from different genres.

British writer Ian McEwan wrote a novel called Atonement (2001), made into a movie in 2007, which was described by Internet Movie Database as: “fledgling writer Briony Tallis, as a 13 year old, irrevocably changes the course of several lives when she accuses her older sister’s lover of a crime he didn’t commit.” The atonement element, the redemption, came in her trying to put right the damage of her transgression.

Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol (1843) featured mean-spirited miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who dismissed all attempts around him to celebrate Christmas with what became a catchphrase, “Bah! Humbug!” In the chill night dark, alone, he was visited by the ghost of his former partner, Marley, condemned by his lifetime meanness to wander the earth in heavy chain.

Scrooge was shown the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come who showed him the effects of his greed, the opportunities for good he passed by and his fate, unloved, forgotten. He woke from the visions, overjoyed at the chance to redeem himself, which he did with enthusiasm.

Most Used Redemption Story

It has produced legion movies, with a short from 1901 the oldest surviving screen work; in 1908, 1923, 1938, 1951, 1970, 1984, 1999, 2009; Scrooge appeared in 1938 and Scrooged in 1988. It has been recorded by famous actors on cassettes, LPs and CDs. Mister Scrooge was a 1958/9 opera and A Christmas Carol another opera in 1978/9.

There have been radio, direct to DVD, TV-only and cartoon versions: An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998), Christmas Carol, The Movie (2001), A Flintstones’ Christmas Carol (1994), The Jestons’ Christmas Carol (1985), Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Sesame Street Christmas Carol (2006), to name but a few.

The story has been parodied: Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, (1988), An American Carol (2008) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009). The plot has been adapted, revisioned and played with in films like The Six Shooter (1953), An American Christmas Carol (1979), Skinflint, A Country Christmas Carol (1979), Scrooged (1988), Dr Who (2010) and appeared in graphic novels in 2004 and The Graphic Novel (2008).

It’s toured in musicals and plays in hundreds of adaptations and versions; musical in 1970 as Scrooge; Michel Legrand’s music was in the 1981 version; many American churches use the 1982 version The Gospel According to Scrooge; Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow and Gerald Charles Dickens (his great-great-grandson) have done effective one-man readings/actings over years and Scrooge! A Dickens of a One-Man Show (1991) was a US hit.

Scrooge: The Musical (1992); A Christmas Carol: The Musical (1994, another in 2005); A Christmas Carol – As Told By Jacob Marley (deceased) (2009/10) and a 2006 computer animated version featuring anthropomorphic animals in lead roles, all confirm the fact that not only is Dickens’ story infinitely open to interpretation, but the theme of redemption is strongly evident in literature.

Redemption, the Word, the Idea

Movies using the title include a western (2009), Garofalo’s 2004 and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which Internet Movie Database summed up as: “two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.” The desire to do right, even among prisoners, was portrayed as fundamental, but with a twist.

In music, there is a progressive-heavy band called it, albums by many artists and individual songs have been named Redemption, a notable one by Christian singer Johnny Cash. Bob Marley’s classic, Redemption Song, contained the lyrics: ‘But my hand was made strong/by the hand of the almighty/we forward in this generation triumphantly/won’t you help to sing/these songs of freedom?/‘cause all I ever have/Redemption songs’.

There is even a Microsoft Outlook tool, Redemption, to work round limitations imposed by Outlook Security Patch. So on every front, every genre, every aspect of life, the concept of redemption is integral to human need. It counter-balances human gravitating towards their darker sides. The variations on A Christmas Carol are just one (widespread) dimension of that.

It is even more copied/imitated/derived from than Romeo and Juliet; that’s because there is an uplifting higher-purpose redemption in A Christmas Carol.

First published on Suite 101, 9 March 2011.

Image: Dickens’ Story Part of Christmas Commercialism – Stephen McKay

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