Armistice Day Poems

These two poems were written when I was about 12

NOVEMBER 12TH 1918

Peter's march is slowed now;
The metal, the wood
All gone, that 'shine'.
"Ended", they said,
Though it was long, long overdue
The lull, the pause.
Where lies the conclusion?

Broken men he passed
On his tramp to the start
Of his life after death.
Smoke and screams seemed so far behind
While the flowers seemed too far ahead.


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FUNERAL OF A COMRADE

I saw a painted ribbon,
The name I didn't catch,
A death pall, holding shadows -
Dark, and long, and drawn.
The wagon held the cannon,
The coffin held the tale,
The leaders held the reason,
The widows placed the blame.

The Gathering Sound

An Evening With James.. With The Orchestra of the Swan & The Manchester Consort Choir

What do you do if you’re a band that’s been around for 30 years, lived all the highs and all the lows the fickle music business brings, had several hits including one big, fat anthem, and now find you have a large, dedicated following but know that you probably won’t truly excite the record companies again?

Well, obviously you play as often as you and your following can stand it, charge the earth for tickets, and juke-box all your best loved songs.  Simple.

However, James have never taken the simple option.  Not for them a live show where they are lazily going through the motions.  They have followed their own advice from ‘Sound’, their 1991 top ten hit, striving to ‘do something out of character’. Something they’ve never done before. Often playing lesser known songs, frequently altering arrangements to give fresh zip to crowd pleasers, and sometimes playing their best known song ‘Sit Down’ right at the start of the show, or even eschewing it all together, James are a band who want to enjoy the show as much as their audience do.  And they do that by not allowing tiredness and staleness to set in.

So in some ways it should come as no surprise that they have gone on a bank-breaking tour with an orchestra and choir, playing venues not always associated with the rough and tumble of the rock circuit.  Anyone expecting dinner jackets and posh frocks though, would be pleasantly relieved to find that this was an orchestra, and this was a choir, that were going to get down and dirty with the band.  Other artists seeking to breathe new life in to their show may have fallen in to the Spinal Tap folly, the self-aggrandising prog-rock delusion that pop music is somehow high art. That wasn’t going to happen here.

Taking the back catalogue and choosing songs (at least one from each album) that lend themselves to invigorating interpretation through orchestral accompaniment, rather than simply applying a false artistic credibility to the usual set list, has produced an entirely new experience for the die-hard fans, and a show that can be equally enthralling to anyone who doesn’t really know James.  There are songs no one has heard live before, and songs that even the most dedicated fan has forgotten.  Instead of a sugary, operatic run through of the usual suspects, the audience are treated to a fascinating, thrilling and enthralling experience that doesn’t rely on a history of familiarity.

Joe Duddell’s arrangements for the 22 strong orchestra are spiky, choppy, warm and mellifluous; soaring here, punctuating there.  Bass guitar parts are liberated, vitalised, chords boom out from the string section, horns give new meaning to traditional structure, lending a warm canvass to Andy Diagram, letting his trumpet soar, without ever getting in the way.

And that’s the key to all this; this gourmet food knows that, whatever innovative ingredients you put in the recipe, a meat dish is a meat dish.  Fears that James, the band, would be lost among the orchestral score and chamber sized choir are soon forgotten.  This is still guitar based rock and roll.  This is a band doing what they know best in a way that they didn’t know they could do, and loving every moment of it.

Their joy is infectious, and while some of the normal conventions of the ‘rock gig’ are missing, they are not replaced entirely by the conventions of the orchestral concert.  Yes, there is an interval, yes; we know there will be an encore because, while the band has left the stage, the orchestra and choir remain. There is some comical interplay, the sort you might expect at a Prom concert, but not a ‘gig’: singer Tim Booth steals a violinist’s score sheet and the violinist has to follow him around the stage as Booth teasingly holds it in front of him, before finally tearing it up and throwing it at him. Post-interval, Booth joins the waiting orchestra and finds that by picking up the conductor’s baton, the orchestra play a note. He moves it, they play another. A mime ensues, Booth waving the baton, the orchestra playing, the singer increasingly, ludicrously attempting to catch them out until finally leading them into a rousing blast of the William Tell Overture.  ‘I’ve always wanted to do that he says’ his smile wide.

Greg Batsleer’s choir too know how to bring out the essence of each song; sometimes staying in the background and providing – admittedly quite robust - backing vocals, or despatching various members to stage front to broaden and deepen the song.  In ‘Mediaeval’, from their second album ‘Strip-Mine’, all 16 singers come to the front, and with extra drumming from the some of the band, and everyone playing their hearts out the experience is absolutely thunderous. ‘We are sound’ goes the refrain. Yes, you bloody are!

Expectations, naturally, are different; everyone is seated, there’s a choir and an orchestra.  For a band used to everyone jumping up and down from the off, this is a major challenge.  Booth is a past master at this though, and it’s not long before he’s in amongst the audience, getting literally face-to-face with people, making his way along the rows of seating, singing to and with people, picking others out to dance with.  The psychological barrier between stage and audience is ripped away. We are all in this together. Later, as people find they can leave their seats, get up and enjoy, he leads some of the audience through the auditorium, reminiscent of the scene in Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’, as Jim Morrison wove his way around, like some demented guru, more and more people following, chanting ‘Break On Through’.

It’s an emotional evening, joyful, exuberant, moving. Before the interval the band and choir leave the stage still singing, there’s a sense that they’re enjoying this so much they can’t stop.  Later, during ‘Sometimes’, the audience threaten to drown out the show, singing the refrain ‘Sometimes, when I look in your eyes I can see your soul’.  Booth masterfully takes control, getting the audience to alternate with the choir, setting up a mini-contest.  The show is interactive, it’s as important for the audience to be part of this show as it is for the players.

When the end finally comes, a poignant ‘Top of the World’, there is jubilation at how wonderful all this sounds, sadness that it’s the end of the show, the end of the tour.  And there is awe and wonder on the faces of those on stage… This is THE ALBERT HALL for goodness sake! There is a cacophony of noise, the audience is on its feet, singing, clapping, dancing, cheering.  Looking around there is an absolute sea of movement from the floor to the top of the tiers.  Booth watches, marvelling at the spectacle, wanting this moment never to stop, drinking it in to remember this feeling forever.  He turns to his cohort and says ‘wow!’

Wow indeed.

Hacked off

If you're reading this, it strikes me that you have just burdened yourself with yet another peice of the technological jig-saw that is, sooner or later, going to swamp us into a complete standstill. I've seen an advert for a tv gizmo that allows you record up to a terabyte of tv programmes. A terabyte! Once we had clunky old VCRs that could, fantastically, record prorammes on long play, thus doubling the space on the tape. So we went out, socialised, made babies, got drunk, worked and all sorts of things.  Then found we didn't have time to watch all those things we'd recorded.

Now we can record EVERYTHING! And.. if you delete it, apparently, you can get it back. Great. So you didn't have time to watch it in the first place, and you can get it back so as not to watch it all over again.

And this is just the base of the iceberg; we have social networking sites. OK, that's Facebook for everyone except the odd few. Twitter. E-mail. Skype. Text messaging, Instant news websites. There is more micro-information available to us about everyone we know than we ever, ever dreamed possible. or indeed, thought necessary. Hell, we even have blog sites we can pour our thoughts into, so if you're reading this...

So, with all this access to the thoughts of everyone we know, more than we can manage, what THE HELL possesses people to hack in to the phones of complete strangers and read their text messages?  Surely they must be thinking 'enough already!'?

Rupert Murdoch now claims to be a little bit deaf and forgetful, and not really able to say he knew what was going on... Well, I'm not losing my hearing, and not particularly forgetful yet.  But I am, at least in this one specific thing, just for this once, with him. Neither do I. It's all too much.

I think it's a good job I was neither important enough nor, thankfully, had I sufffered a tragedy of public interest, to have my phone hacked. (Though, who's to know? Certainly not the boss of News Demonical). If they did hack me though, what would they find? I like rugby and pass on and receive bits of news from the rugby world with my brother.  Sometimes I'm late home from work and need to tell someone. Usually my wife. And I have some friends who have, let's be brutally frank, a very dodgy sense of humour.  Not that interesting really.

So I'm torn between outrage at the diabolical liberties taken with our right to privacy, and a - probably misplaced - sense of sympathy with the hacking hacks who had to wade through the tedium and trivia of other people's lives. Like we don't have enough of it thrust at us anyway.

Oh, this was the News of the World. Stock in trade of course, the prurient prying.

Except those no trade for them anymore. Ha!

Graduating from Cambridge. Medieval Modernity.

In Medieval Britain, there was a time when to wear the wrong sort of clothing would mean arrest and punishment. This was due in part, to the plague of 1348, when the death of almost half the population led to the distribution of wealth being greater. This meant that those who survived found themselves better off than they had ever been, and the poorer classes began to imitate their social betters in what they wore, ate and how they lived. The Sumptuary Law passed by Edward III was an attempt to restore the social order; by governing exactly how individuals from each class could outwardly display their status.

This form of social control continued until well in to the 17th century. Now, with our relaxed social conformity and (until recently anyway) our greater standard of living, it is only really possible to tell the super-rich and the extremely poor from the rest of us. Who you are, and how you fare in life is much harder to read from outward signs. Unless, for example, you are graduating from the University of Cambridge. Here, tradition pervades thickly, like damp fog on a high hilltop. Navigating your way takes caution, and strict adherence to the official pathway.

The social order is maintained, and displayed: the gown you wear is an outward emblem of what you have become. A 'Mathmo', or perhaps a 'Natsci', each subject having it's own colour, and each level of degree having some other tell-tale sign to those in the know, perhaps the length of the gown, or the length of slit you are permitted. The graduation ceremony itself has elements that are 800 years old, with a parade through the town culminating in a reverential service at the Senate Hall. There is much pomp, with the studious carrying of maces donated by the Duke of Buckingham when Chancellor (1626-28), and earnest entry of the important figures, taking up their allotted places at the front of the hall, while the graduands are assembled in orderly fashion toward the back.

The whole has a feeling of high church or catholic mass. Indeed, the official name for the ceremony is Congregation. There is no doubting who is where in this macrocosmic world. The red gowns are the those at the top, and between them and white fake fur of the BAs are subtle degrees (yes, I know) of social order. As I watched my son, Gareth (Mathmo, Masters, blue flash in the gown) kneel before the Vice-Chancellor, I though, how very medieval. How very moving. Long may it continue.

The Owl Killers

It is said that the past is a foreign country, and Karen Maitland's novel of the Dark Ages opens the door to a world that is both strange and oddly familiar. Like a trip to Europe. The village of Ulewic is peopled by characters who work, play, gossip, scheme and simply try to live - just like us.  Their lives however,  are shadowed by ignorance, superstition and religion,   The parish priest is flawed, both intrinsically by his own failings, and extrinsically by the unenlightenment of the age, for example, damning a young dumb girl because her lack of screams when being tortured as a suspected witch, proved her devilment. 

The women of the nearby Beguinage, whose religion is both humanitarian and bound by piety, aggrieve the priest, and he, desperate to regain favour with the Bishop of  Norwich, becomes inadvisedly drawn to the anti-religion secret sect known as the Owl Men. Cleverly narrated by several lead characters, events are given a different complexion depending on the teller. The denoument is perhaps a little flat, with the tale shouting for a heroic intervention somewhere.  But the writer knows her subject well enough to immerse us in a very dark time indeed, so that we feel we know the village, the people and the mindset.  And for that, it is a very rewarding excursion to that foreign land.