When I grew up in the 60s youth culture was hard to find. Now that it is everywhere it seems strange to remember what hard work it was to find it. But that certainly did make it seem more personal and a real adventure of discovery, these things were well hidden. There was no record player in my house so, for example to hear the Beatles, the only chance was random moments sifted out of the humdrum BBC boredom. Funnily enough request shows like Family Favourites aka Forces Favourites on the BBC Light programme would play the Beatles occasionally, as did the chart show Pick of the Pops and Saturday Club. But these shows were on just once a week. There was no pop music radio station until the Pirates came along in about 1965. So it was with great excitement that I found Radio Caroline North on 257m Medium Wave, however that didn’t last long, since they were closed down by the Marine & Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967. Radio 1 then arrived to replace the Pirates, using many of the same DJ’s, but I refused to listen for some time since I was so annoyed by the closure of Radio Caroline. It had felt like a radio station just for me and, despite the ads, was dedicated to the music . Eventually I purloined an old valve radio from my grandparents. It was large and heavy, mains powered and took several minutes to warm up. Yet it was in a cool bakelite case and had a 5 inch speaker, as shown above. On this ancient radio I discovered Radio Luxembourg on 208m, in particularly David “Kid” Jenson and his progressive music show, usually broadcast every weekday at midnight from October 1970. Here I heard The Band, Lou Reed and Neil Young for the first time and made many musical discoveries. There was a lot of staying up late, but the big radio sat right by my bed, glowing in the dark. The only comparable programme on Radio 1 was Top Gear with John Peel, broadcast just on a Saturday.
Grundig Stenorette 2010 Mini Steno-Cassette Voice Recording Dictaphone
Despite not having a record player or radio for many years I did come into possession of an early Grundig dictaphone. It had been given to my father as a business gift, but since he didn’t use it I eagerly adopted it. This was a tiny (c.125cm) Mini Cassette Voice Recording Dictaphone, similar to the one illustrated. This amazing machine was really an early cassette player, too small and tinny for music, but great for the radio. I had just one tiny cassette for it (I did not realise you could buy any more!) which lasted for 30 minutes. Still I put it to good use, recording the classic BBC Radio 2 comedy I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, so my cassette was exactly the right length. Having recorded the show I would listen chortling under the bedclothes at night. And of course I could replay any great joke I had either misunderstood or greatly appreciated. I wiped and then recorded the next show until the poor little tape wore out, while receiving an education in outlandish humour still with me today. The line-up of the show was John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Jo Kendall, David Hatch with script input from Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, so as you can see it contained the roots of Monty Python, all of the Goodies and was responsible for the still running I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus would go onto becoming the defining comedy show of my youth. An early introduction to this zany type of humour had been Do Not Adjust Your Set featuring the magnificent Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, on ITV 1968-9, ostensibly a children’s programme. From this show Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin went on to join Python along with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, which started on the BBC in October 1969. At school we loved them so much we invented a fake religious assembly involving lining up, flipping the radio socket and shouting “Dinsdale” as gruffly as we could. This was performed just before the actual school assembly to put us all in a stupid mood. Dinsdale was one of the gangland Piranha brothers and a very naughty boy, haunted by an 800 yard long hedgehog called Spiny Norman. I also had the privilege of seeing Monty Python’s 1st Farewell Tour at Liverpool Royal Court Theatre in 1973 (although we knew all the jokes) and to appear as an extra in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. Only last year I sang Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree in a choir for Michael Palin, the comedy never ends…
Monty Python’s Flying Circus – series 2, episode 13 -1970
On Sunday 27 October I saw the Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band at Cafe Oto. This 17 piece ensemble from Japan played the gamut of modern big band music, starting off with the stomping rhythm of Stone Stone Stone (I believe). One of the glories of this orchestra is that it functions as separate bands within the band, the sectional conductors calling out changes for their own ensembles. This makes for great excitement and dynamism, a feeling that each moment, each break is special. During the evening they covered nearly every known genre from French Romanticism to Northern Soul, I heard the systems music of Steve Reich for a few bars, and plenty of Sun Ra, spinning off into atonal galaxies. You never knew what was coming next, yet it was all held together, with the great joy and happiness evident within this big band.
It took me some time to appreciate big bands, they seemed too amorphous and maybe old fashioned, belonging to a previous generation. I was brought up on The Beatles, you could hear what everyone was doing, and hear exactly how they all worked in unison and why every component was vital. They had the power of amplification on their side to make even four people sound like an orchestra. However before electrification and the public address system took over, all bands had to be large, simply to make enough noise to fill the hall. So back in the 30s big bands ruled the roost and they played acoustically. That now seems admirable to me, I want to hear the musician, not the processing. So what is a big band? Basically it should contain at least 10 performers and a brass section, that is the limit of my definition. It is a very open category, the keynote being dynamic excitement.
Probably the first big band sound I loved would be the fabulous arrangements by Nelson Riddle for Frank Sinatra, without even thinking they were a big band. I got into a great deal of trouble at Sounds (a rock music weekly) for making Songs for Swinging’ Lovers (1956) the No. 3 in my Top 10 albums of all time, which meant it would have appeared in their Top 100 – I had to remove it! While that album may have been too jolly for Sounds, I wonder if my first truly memorable gig by a live big band, Sun Ra at The Venue in 1983, would have been acceptable with the album Jazz in Silhouette (1959)? I was to see the Sun Ra Arkestra at Cafe Oto many more times from 2009 to 2014, cementing my love of this music. In fact thinking back, I had bought Escalator over the Hill by Carla Bley in 1972 while still at school, yet I did not even think of this as jazz or big band at the time, more like experimental rock featuring Jack Bruce. I guess what made these records acceptable was the pulsing and dynamic rhythm section, after all big band music was originally made for dancers.
Sun Ra Arkestra at The Venue, Victoria London 1983
In my pantheon of great big bands there many are I have discovered over the years. You can’t go wrong with anything by Duke Ellington, and my first choice of his would be Ellington Uptown (1952) featuring A Tone Parallel to Harlem (Harlem Suite). Another great modernist composer is Stan Kenton, you can hardly believe this music was made back in the early 50s, and albums such as Innovations in Modern Music (1950) feature a 37 piece orchestra with a 14 piece string section. Following up on some of Kenton’s inventiveness there is Don Ellis who brought a swaggering 60s feel to big band music, and if that’s a bit much try Gil Evans, famous for his work with Miles Davis. A contemporary acolyte of Gil Evans, who has also worked with David Bowie, is Maria Schneider with several Grammy Awards to her name – check out Data Lords (2020).
Closer to home there is the fabulous Spanner Big Band, playing modern arrangements of 50s classics from Mingus, Ellington and Basie as well as a few reorchestrated pop tunes. They are led by the dynamic Dan Spanner and regularly play at the Three Compasses in Hornsey for free. Also recommended are Orquesta Esterlar, a community-based Cuban big band, playing monthly at The Post Bar in Tottenham, and that’s free as well. So do go along…it’s always a privilege to see a crazy big band and financially these days they are performing for the love of it. You can tell from the smiles, on your face and theirs.
Spanner Big Band at Jamboree, Kings Cross London 2024
Pleasant but underwhelming is all all I can say. The fact you can “see” through the goggles (if you want) is excellent, so it is easy to forget you are wearing them. The eye navigation and finger clicking worked great, as did window manipulation. Normal photos looked no better than a good hi-res monitor, still lots of oversharpening. Asked to zoom in on a still, it looked over processed and smoothed as usual, like most iPhone pics. The iPhone panoramas were nice to move around, but of course displayed classic jpeg artifacts. The 3D photos and videos looked better through the stereoscopic glasses, apart from some dodgy backgrounds. Still, you need a Vision Pro to see them properly. Apparently the 3D media were all taken on iPhone 15, so that was good. I was then encouraged to watch several Apple video promo’s. Of course they looked great, they have spent millions of dollars on them, so they should. Did they look better than normal video, no they looked like normal 4K video to me – that is high quality but with some special cinema adaptations.
Then it all went wrong. I went to my hi-res gigapixel website and you could not make a fullscreen view. Not only that, the resolution was not even HD, it was like viewing the internet in 2001, 720×480 pixels. I should say that I was able to actually navigate my panoramas, they just looked awful. Ok, so then I tried my 4K videos on Vimeo, same result. I actually cried out “appalling”. I then asked if there was download throttling. No response. I then asked if Safari didn’t work properly. No response. If this is actually how it works, Vision Pro is not ready for primetime. If it cannot play a normal 4K video, what is the point? If you can only properly view work specifically made for the Vision Pro, I would say wait a few years.
I should explain here that throughout the Vision Pro experience there is a personal Apple Specialist who monitors your actions and your views on a remote monitor. You talk with each other during the demo. Undoubtedly this person is following a script, as a result they do not appear to be able to answer actual questions. Not only that, but my Specialist was wearing a mask, which did not aid communication. (Have I got Covid, have you got Covid, either way it is unpleasant). I also spent 10 minutes wearing the device with an error message, while the Specialist disappeared, so probably not their best ever demo. However, that did give me time to take the selfie above, so thank you!
Nevertheless, I can see the appeal of this device in certain circumstances and enjoyed the experience. I did manage to use the virtual keyboard with eye navigation, a bit like using an iPhone keyboard in fact. As you might expect from goggles, by far the most impressive part of the experience was the best 3D I have ever seen. This is only version 1…hope it gets better!
Why does anyone use X formerly twitter? It is a poisonous cesspool of unregulated misinformation. This is amply demonstrated by the ludicrous and inflammatory tweet by the owner of X saying Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. It received nearly 2 million views before being told by the Daily Telegraph it was fake news. The day before he claimed in response to the anti-immigration protests in England and Northern Ireland that “civil war is inevitable”. This man may be an interesting businessman but he knows nothing about British politics. And guess who has the most followers on X – the owner! Surely something wrong here…
But what staggers me is why our trusted commentators, the government and the BBC for example, continue to use and hence promote this broken platform. This is a classic addiction scenario – I know it does harm but I can’t help using. I suggest a detox and course of rehab. So get a grip and follow your own recommendations.
X is now trying to suing advertisers who have withdrawn from the platform. I was not aware that advertising is mandatory. X is no longer the nice global town square, but currently global riot central. Back in 2020 it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were not genuine people, says Wikipedia. It seems ridiculous to me that anyone would sponsor this unregulated farrago. In fact I would regard any advertiser on X as suspect, so boycott now, please!
To put this in perspective I was amazed when twitter became so popular with our members of parliament. They had no control over this foreign medium, were surrendering copyright and participating in a shouting match. Of course it was fast, easy and universal, but numbers do not excuse their behaviour. MP’s may comment about the riots on X, but they do not seem to care or even realise they have been fomented by posts on X itself. When you use the platform, you are promoting the platform. Finally an NHS Trust has seen the light stating the platform is “no longer consistent with our Trust values”. Our government should do the same.
You only need to look at any blog to see how random the replies are. Maybe 5-10% are of any interest, at least 50% are exercising their copy and paste hobby horse, while probably 25% have not even read the article! Here I am referring here to the Guardian Comments which are highly moderated, others are even worse. Most YouTube comments are just bigging up and content free, while we all know how Amazon reviews can be bought. Comments are a world of fluff.
In 2006 my website, z360.com, was cool site of the day on Fark and received over 4 million hits. They ran a comments column which was either very nice or moronic, mostly concerning a single dog occurring in my panorama. At that moment I realised internet numbers and followers are entirely worthless and meaningless. Yes cat videos are still No.1 on YouTube, but so what and who cares?
You do not need an online safety act, just stop participating in harmful forums, you hypocrites. Stop giving them legitimacy. Despise the meaningless numbers. Just leave.
X
Update 12/08/24 MPs beginning to see the light: Josh Simons, the Labour MP for Makerfield, said “What matters about Musk is not only what he said, but how he changed X’s algorithms. He’s turned X into a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups seeking to corrupt our public sphere. Nobody should have that power.”
This is the camera, a Minox 35 GT from 1981, that I always carried with me for several years. It was tiny, only 100mm wide and 31mm deep when closed, it weighed just 200g, yet took standard 35mm film. It felt like a spy camera, I was always ready. In those days only professionals carried a camera 24/7, you were the exception. Today it is no longer in production since it has been well superseded by the power and ease of use of our ubiquitous phone cameras. Yes, we are all photographers now and all those photographs are free at the point of use. How times change, how quickly advanced technology becomes redundant.
In the 80s to become a photographer you had first to build a darkroom. That was the only way to process film fast enough to be of commercial use, without spending a fortune on poor quality rush processing. So it took maybe an hour to process film and then maybe a couple of hours to make prints, and that was with a film drier and a Kodak drum print drier. Remember this was just for monochrome. Every click cost money, many jobs would be completed on just 1 roll of film, that is 36 pictures on 35mm or 12 on 120 format. Nowadays I may take 500 pictures or more, there are so many more decisive moments these days! And they are all free…
Kodak Glazing Machine and Print Drier
The fastest film available was normally Kodak Tri-X or Ilford HP5 at 400 ASA, often push processed to 800 ASA. There was Kodak Recording film at 1250 ASA, which had an enjoyably coarse grain, but that meant it was reserved for specialist uses. I was also an early adopter of Ilford XP1 400, a chromogenic C41 35mm film with its own specialist developer. It had so little grain and such good gradation, that art directors and picture editors thought I was using medium format, so I loved it. As for colour, I adopted transparency film, which had a fast turnaround time of 2 hours at a good E6 processor like Primary Colour. Of course the transparency, once mounted, was the final product ready for production, there were no negatives or prints. As a result the initial exposure had to be spot on, often bracketing of exposures was necessary. Alternatively you could get a clip test for the first few frames of the roll, and then order the development to be adjusted as you required. Good colour film was always slow and the best was Fuji Velvia which was only 50 ASA. Hence I often had to use a big hammerhead Metz 45 flashgun when out on location. Most transparency films above 100 ASA looked washed out, compared with Velvia or Fuji RDP 100. A particular issue for me was tungsten balanced film (3200K) for use at concerts. The only real choice was Kodak Ektachrome 320T, but I never liked it much. Otherwise there was Fuji 64T, excellent on a long exposure, using a tripod at night.
So the days of worrying about ASA, colour balance or even exposure are over. Photography sure has become easier, if not child’s play. Take a RAW format photograph and all those variables can be adjusted, no accuracy is required. The dynamic range of a good digital camera far exceeds film, an exposure 5 stops out can be recovered in Lightroom or Capture One, any colour balance may be used, and digital photos can now look great at 3200 ASA. My Minolta Flash light Meter IV is totally redundant, as are most of my photographic skills. Yes we are all photographers now…
De Vere 54 enlargers, with cold cathode and condenser heads, in my darkroom c.1985
My Father and Godfather committed suicide. That was their privilege, they were Doctors. They knew they were terminally ill and they had access to the relevant drugs, and so did not need to involve a third party, which would be currently illegal. They assisted their own dying. In fact, my Father failed the first time, which shows just how difficult it can be. Don’t forget providing information, advice, support or assistance to anyone intending to take their own life is against the law. Until 1961 attempted suicide was itself a crime, leading to prison and loss of all goods.
Unfortunately, my Mother, who had made it clear through several documents such as a Living Will and DNR (do not resuscitate instructions) that she did not wish her life to be prolonged, lived through 6 months of Hell. She also had a sympathetic local doctor and had already refused further chemotherapy for breast cancer. All of this appeared to make no difference. At her lovely hospice, I was told by a tearful doctor my Mother would die within 2 weeks. Sadly my Mother survived too long and was ejected from the hospice, and had to be placed in a retirement home, which turned to be a very unpleasant experience for us all. She fervently wished for assisted dying for that 6 months. Despite trying not to eat, she lived too long for a happy ending. I blame our outdated legal system.
Thus to say I support assisted dying would be an understatement. Of course at my age I’m already worrying about my own lack of choices. Assisted Dying is a right which should belong to us all. Thank you Jonathan Dimbleby, Julian Barnes, Patrick Stewart, Jo Brand, Prue Leith and Esther Rantzen for raising the profile of Dignity in Dying.
As Prue Leith says “While I am healthy at the moment, I’d very much like to have a little lethal concoction sitting in a safe waiting for the right moment. And I’d rather it was legal.”
It is beyond my comprehension why anyone who is not a millionaire would vote for the Tories. Still there are only 2,849,000 millionaires in the UK (4.8%), not enough to win an election. But people still vote for them – At least for the last 14 years. Shows how much I know…
I Saw Keir Starmer speak in 2014 before he was an MP for Holborn & St Pancras (aka Camden). He answered every question at Camden Girls School better than anybody. I told my hairdresser (who also held a hustings, see my video) he would be the Prime Minister one day. I believe I will be proved right.
Personally I will be voting Independent.
The Labour Party is a War Party.
Nuclear weapons can destroy the World.
Hence I do not vote for them.
I hope that is not a surprise.
I can’t remember when I first came across Murakami, but it was some time in the early 90s, probably his 3rd novel A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). From that first reading I was hooked, entranced by his surreal imagination, the contemporary view of Japanese society and his wide ranging and accurate musical references. You could tell you were taking off on a wild careening ride, destination unknown. In fact this is the way he writes, the novel expands autonomously as he works on it, yet he nearly always manages a satisfying conclusion. As he says “writing itself is like dreaming”. To me this makes him a truly modern novelist, you don’t feel manipulated by the characters and events, the door is ajar and there is simply a sense of mutual exploration. The often bizarre characters grow organically, reacting to strange events in a totally plausible way. These are open books, there is no predestination. He manages this because his writing style is somewhat prosaic, relating them in a very down to earth way, however bizarre they might be.
This unique style is probably down to the fact he never intended to be a novelist and certainly never trained to be one. He found his own unique voice, he explains in Novelist as a Vocation (2022) , by writing in English and then translating this back into Japanese. This gave him the simplified, pared down and highly readable style we know today. He is not in any literary tradition, which lends him an honest and personal voice. In fact the story of how he became a novelist, which he has told several times, could come straight out of one his novels. At the age of 29, he was running his own small jazz club called Peter Cat, when he went see his favourite baseball team and…
The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.
I can still recall the exact sensation. It felt as if something had come fluttering down from the sky, and I had caught it cleanly in my hands.
After the match he bought writing paper and a pen and proceeded to write every night for six months, producing his first novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979).
Before he became well known in the West, I always felt that Murakami readers were like a secret club. If in conversation with someone unknown and the subject of his books arose and they had read them, a mutual friendship seemed assured. A particularly bizarre experience of this nature happened in Northern Armenia. The country was suffering at the time from a complete breakdown, the Russians had left a few years previously, leading to the closure of farms, factories and even the education system. Nobody seemed to know who ran anything, people were just getting by in unregulated chaos. I was reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), a surreal cyberpunk novel about a crumbling walled town. There were many strange parallels between the book and the situation I found myself in and Murakami has stated that “I was so popular in the 1990s in Russia, at the time they were changing from the Soviet Union – there was big confusion, and people in confusion like my books”. Anyway to my surprise, one of our drivers (in fact from Syria) had read some Murakami, so I had leave my copy of the book with him, it seemed both appropriate and fair in the strange circumstances.
The lack of pretension combined with the acid and surreal wit in Murakami’s work, often makes me reflect on the similarity to British writers like Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, J.G. Ballard and even Brian Catling. There is an unusual symbiosis between Japan and the UK as islands at the end of continents, which perhaps leads to a unique form of isolated irrationality, as well as a secret understanding of the others situation. While his authorial voice can always be heard, his novels are quite varied, and he appears to have great fun with the design, Norwegian Wood (1987) appearing as 2 small volumes in a box, 1Q84 (2010) had a heavy black burnt look and Killing Commendatore (2017) had bullet holes on the cover. He always entertains the reader.
My admiration for Murakami was cemented by perhaps his greatest novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). If you read only one of his novels, this is the definitive one, for me at least. Shortly after this I read Haruko Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), a biography written by his translator Jay Rubin. Murakami had always been a quiet and mysterious character but this book revealed both his life story and the vast range of his output once he became an author. He writes translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver as light relief from his novels, as well as a several collections of short stories, interviews and reportage. The novel Norwegian Wood (1987) which ensured his popularity in Japan and led to his living in the USA for several years, is charming, sad and maybe a little dated. Perhaps avoid 1Q84, it is huge and highly repetitive, but let me recommend nearly everything else. There are two semi autobiographical works What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) and Novelist as a Vocation (2022), both of which are fascinating. All of his short story collections are highly entertaining and I thought his most recent novel Killing Commendatore (2017) to be a return to form. Looking forward to The City and Its Uncertain Walls due to published in translation later this year.
Photograph by Thierry Bal of Musarc performing The White Noisery
The gateless gate opens To reveal no sound Except the hum of life
These are our eons Cast all around us We are blind to them
I hear the sound of surf Sweeping all mind away But there is great unity
Let’s all move in time Above the morass We call human life
Inspired by The White Noisery (2012) by Jennifer Walshe
This poem was composed for the Musarc Winter Konsert 2023: We Are Participating. There was a Shared Reader and Writing Project for members of the choir and this was my final input after several discussions and Zoom calls. The poem was incorporated into a psalm “The night is cold and the radio seems to be on”, which was written by members of the choir and performed with the audience.
Head of Invention aka Newton after James Watt by Eduardo Paolozzi 1989
I have a bad memory. I know this because at the age of ten I had to remember the poem Froggie Went a-Courtin and repeat it to the class. This I failed to do and ended up bottom of the class at “Poetry” in my school report. Even now it takes maybe six months for me to remember people’s names, I seem to have a blank spot there. I work around it, and it requires special effort if I am forced to name someone, who may even be a good friend. However give me a hint, or even better a multiple choice question, and I will usually get the answer right. Hence I am pretty good at quizzes like Pointless or Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel. This was brought home to me when I did the first ever multiple choice O Level in Chemistry and unexpectedly got an A. My teacher was amazed and so was I, but show me the answer and I will do well.
I have maybe the best memory of anybody I know since I learnt the part of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the longest in his whole magnificent oeuvre. I repeated this about twenty times on stage and very rarely used the prompt. I did have a method for when I got stuck, by substituting the word anything for the missing word, and nobody seemed to notice. To learn and remember all this, the role had to occupy my whole being and life, and for many months it was uppermost in my mind. At several points I thought the whole project was impossible, and I remember being on the top deck of a London bus, while trying to memorise lines, and realising I never would. Fortunately I was wrong, the mind is a bit of plastic elastic which can accommodate priorities and it is remarkably powerful. The bizarre end of this story is that I do not remember a single word of the play Othello, and would be hard put to even recognise any of those lines now.
The pain of learning lines is one of the reasons I gave up acting. Some people say they find it easy, but I never did. The role had to subsume me, take over my life and become an obsession. I found this an unpleasant trade-off. Once in a semi-pro production of Max Frisch’s The Fireraisers I was playing the lead character Mr Biedermann, and ended up comping or even inventing half the dialogue, since I hadn’t been given time to learn it all properly. Again nobody noticed, it was done with conviction! Personally I also had to revise dialogue on a daily basis if I was to remember it, and life is too short for that.
Now of course I am simply amazed I manage to remember anything, so I try not to. My mind is already full of stuff I am barely aware of or cannot access when I want, so I am trying to look after it. Does the mind ever get full I wonder, and certainly some of the rooms in this ever expanding mansion seem very distant. Yet it is a cave of treasures, constantly surprising me! This very blog is an example of random memory syndrome.
I read the book above in 1976, after I had taken LSD aka acid for the first time. It was a profound, yet relatively short lived experience. The book itself is an entertaining, if over the top read. Let’s not forget Timothy Leary was a well educated university lecturer with a Ph.D, he knew how to write, lecture and entertain. The Politics of Ecstasy was first published in 1966 in the USA and would become the foundational story of the late 60s hippie drug culture. It was first published in England in 1970, and I read it with a pinch of American salt, I already knew exaggeration when I saw it, yet it had an authority and intellectual chutzpah which was invigorating. I was already well aware of the profoundly spiritual and dangerous properties of this drug, having quizzed the few people I knew who had taken it, they had my admiration at the time. I had done my my homework, but nothing could prepare me for the reality. I believe it was on this first trip that I discovered how disorientating it could be, since I was at a concert in Pathfoot, Stirling University. Feeling spaced out, I realised I should be lying down and relaxing, so I departed early. As I was leaving through a long, large corridor I discovered I could rotate the whole corridor until I was walking on the ceiling. This was a great feeling until I start thinking too much about it and realised that this might not be a good idea since the corridor was not under my full control, it seemed to to have a mind of its own and I did not wish to fall to the floor – hey where is the floor, what is a floor, I thought gravity was supposed to exist, apparently now it does not… Most of Leary’s musings are based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and that should tell you before venturing any further that we are in dangerous territory. This territory was politely called a “bad trip”, yet it could destroy lives. We all knew what had happened to Syd Barrett, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd. For a good example of the foggy synaesthesia brought on by LSD, listen to his 1969 album The Madcap Laughs.
The “shit hit the fan” on my second trip a few years later, when I was back at Stirling. That night I kept notes of this profound experience, which do not make much sense now, but do provide a few pointers which I will attempt to interpret and explain:
No.1 : Everything was melancholy and industrial because we were probably listening to Escalator over the Hill by Carla Bley, not the best choice in the circumstances, but I liked it. It is also possible we were listening to Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, in particularly the tracks In The Light and Kashmir. These notes begin when we had retreated to my little room and I was choosing the music. There was a lot of chaos in the next door flat (of which more later) and I had determined to have a spiritual experience by listening to cool music lying on my bed.
No.2 & 3 : These were my flatmates, also tripping – everyone was, and no doubt we were arranging ourselves in my tiny bedroom, with most people lying on the floor, finding cushions and trying to get comfortable.
No.4 : Any minor interruption seemed freighted with meaning back then.
No.5 : No doubt this was me playing the album Big Fun by Miles Davis, released in 1974, an electronic jazz album with an Eastern drone vibe, and probably the track Great Expectations which goes on for 27 minutes.
No.6 : Fweejum is a made up word that has stayed with me. I was attempting to express the noise a a large vehicle or other object makes sweeping past you, think of it as the imaginary noise that time makes when it is moving very fast, with a doppler effect. Pronounce it without enunciating the letters and you might be getting close to the sense of dropping through the floor, through time and space at great velocity.
No.7 : My flatmates were probably getting fed up with the music and had decided to use the experience to make some unconsciously inspirational art. I have no idea really, it could easily be an imagined drawing in the great dome of starscape enveloping us. Pretty sure I wasn’t physically drawing.
No.8 : Here we are in proper meaningless drug addled territory, there seem to be an infinity or maybe just 166 rabbit holes, blind alleyways or dark caves to plunge into. They multiply as you examine them and it is easy to get confused, you might choose the wrong one. At least it wasn’t 666.
No.9 : By this time I am probably listening to Go Ahead John, the third side of Big Fun and featuring the jazz rock guitarist John McLaughlin. On acid anything visualised tends to mutate and expand, yet seem real.
That was the sensible part of the evening. Beforehand an older and I thought wiser friend, also on drugs, had been violently sick. I looked on dispassionately at the fabulous technicolour mess, containing a wonderful mass of imaginary writhing creatures, just grateful I hadn’t experienced the nausea of feeling the soft organs of my body decide to leave home. Never mix drink and serious drugs I thought selfishly to myself. Meanwhile next door my fellow students were in full on LSD party drinking mode, which soon turned sour. Among our number was a garrulous French student, who spoke perfectly good English. As the evening progressed she was picked on and her every utterance became a source of great hilarity, purely due to her French accent. At an early point I had tried to intervene, to no avail, which was probably when I sloped off to my bedroom to listen to music. At dawn, many hours later, I returned, and she had been reduced to a gibbering wreck, who could no longer speak in any language, completely incoherent. She was truly in a state, yet the barbs continued and I felt powerless by this time to intervene. The behaviour of my fellow students, despite being on drugs, had been appalling. After several days she did recover the power of speech, but I believe she left Stirling and went back to France.
By this time I was trying to look after myself, sleep seemed impossible, life extended emptily, all desire had gone leaving yawning emptiness. That next day I attempted to behave normally and attended a lecture. I was beyond caring, nothing went in and it appeared nothing ever would. I had heard about flashbacks, when you regress to a drug induced stupor, and I was in fear of a slowly repeating chaos. Had I ruined my life? Would this go on forever? Of course not, after 36 hours with no sleep I was simply at my wits end and exhausted. Still it would take a good few days before I re-assembled my life, and determined to slowly clear up my mental state.
The fact that drugs were everywhere at Stirling can be clearly seen in the covers of The Student Handbook for the years 1975-1977. In addition drugs were openly traded in the Students Union, Alangrange, while the University itself hit the headlines in 1976 when a student broke his leg while “attempting to fly” from a third floor window. The young man broke his leg, and in court claimed he was high on LSD. A few months later, to my horror, there he was in our kitchen high on LSD. I did not think this was a good idea as we were on the top floor. I also vividly remember talking down a minor member of the Royal Family who had taken too many mushrooms. I was a bit annoyed since I had to buy him lunch and midday seemed to be the wrong time to take drugs. He had probably been up all night, I guess. Closer to home my flatmate, who was a big burly motor-biker from Dundee, decided to decorate his room with black bin-bags, which covered every surface – walls, floor and ceiling, and I nicknamed his room the black hole of Calcutta. What started off as a bit of fun soon descended into something more serious, he refused to leave this room and I presume he was taking lots of drugs. A form of psychosis crept in, he didn’t listen to any of us and stopped attending lectures. Suddenly he became obsessed with saving frogs. It was spring and the frogs were migrating across a road from the large lake at the centre of the University. There were literally thousands of frogs and it seemed inevitable a few would be killed on this quiet road. I was concerned enough to try and help my flatmate save some of these frogs, but I soon realised it was a pointless exercise, and that this formerly robust human being was being brought low by a serious mental illness. He disappeared at the end of term, never to return.
After promising myself that my LSD days were over, I believe I did take it once again, but it was a much milder experience, I am glad to say, and have little memory of it. I was lucky, and never did experience a bad trip, but I could easily see how that could happen if taken in the wrong circumstances and without due respect to the dangers. Later in life I did try ecstasy and MDMA briefly at festivals, pleasant but nothing compared to the mind curdling power of the acid trips mentioned above. I had lost the desire to lose control in this way, although I still knew a few people who ended up in hospital due to imbibing so called soft drugs. I certainly do not regret taking LSD, it was a remarkable lesson in the powers of the mind and how sanity can be paper thin. However, much to my disappointment, this experience was no spiritual shortcut. I did not arrive in Nirvana, but maybe discovered there are other ways to get there.
If you want to hear the real atmosphere of these times and the liturgical, obsessive nature of the promotion of LSD listen to Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out by Dr. Timothy Leary, a motion picture soundtrack album made by Mercury in 1967. Here is a taster from a track called The Trip: Root Chakra: “…Drift single celled in soft tissue swamp, sink gently into dark fertile marsh, drift beyond the body, float to the centre (I’m Drowning!) float beyond life and death, down soft ladders of memory.”
The sad and much too early death of Benjamin Zephaniah this week prompted memories of the first time I saw him way back in 1983 at the Angels of Fire Festival. I was excited to see him since I had heard about him through the New Musical Express, which was my reading matter, rather than the Poetry Review. To put this in context, Angels of Fire was a six night poetry festival featuring new performance poetry and upcoming modern poets, at the Cockpit Theatre near Marylebone. The choice of performers was certainly prescient and varied, since several of them went on to have long careers. This festival of poetry, which gave me an excellent grounding in many different voices, was shaken up by the rockin’ dub protest poetry of Benjamin, which seem like a righteous breath of fresh air at the time.
I went to every night of the festival, since I regarded it as my first documentary photography project. I did not really know what I was doing, but was allowed to take photos as a member of the audience (times have changed…). Of course I was not being paid, but I managed to wangle my way in for free for a few nights through British Library Sound Archive contacts, who were recording it. I felt at home there since I had worked at the Cockpit as a Stage Manager. Fortunately the festival was sponsored by City Limits, a London listings magazine, and I made some early print sales, with the photos being used in their poetry column. Eventually some of theses photographs were exhibited at The Drill Hall in Chenies Street WC1.
Seething Wells
I was also looking forward to seeing Seething Wells (aka Steven Wells 1960-2009), who lived up to his moniker, along with other early ranting poets such as Little Brother and Joolz. The more refined feminist poetic tradition was also represented by Michèle Roberts and Alison Fell, while a notable contemporary wordsmith was Jeremy Reed, full of Bowie references. The world of sound poetry was not forgotten either, with the appearance of the legendary Bob Cobbing (1920-2002), later to be seen at The Klinker in Islington. Here are some of the photographs I took of these poets:
I was heartened to see Benjamin Zephaniah become become a Professor of Poetry and part of the National Curriculum, turn down his OBE, and always act with generosity, wit and humility. Here he is in full flow at the ICA a year later, I believe.
In 2001 I went to Gaza, as a fledgling panorama news photographer. This was not yet a valid passport to success, but with the help of Gary Knight of Newsweek, and after queuing up for many hours at a nameless bureaucratic office in Jerusalem, at the last moment I was granted permission to enter Gaza. Despite some controversy over my tripod bag, which apparently resembled a rifle holster, I walked the walk into this hell-hole at the only entry point, the Erez Crossing. Way back in 2001 this place was a war zone, as can be seen from my photographs and panoramas, I was both appalled and excited. At the time Gaza was still occupied by the Israelis, who lived in sequestered areas and bunkers, with a very heavy, but hidden military presence. Despite the fact you cannot see them, many Israeli guns will have been pointed at my head. The level of destruction throughout Gaza was staggering, even at that time. Sadly, this forlorn area has been a disaster waiting to happen for many decades. We went straight to a hotspot in Southern Gaza at Khan Yunis, a site of recent Israeli shelling and a refugee camp. Since there were still Israeli factories and residences in Gaza, the level of military intimidation was still very high. Bizarrely I saw advertisements at the time in the Israeli Press for holidays in Gaza, it certainly would not have been my first choice holiday destination, despite the long beaches.
for a larger panorama click fullscreen, or on a phone go here
After photographing the checkpoint outside Khan Yunis at Gush Qateef (which protected an Israeli enclave), which you can see in the panoramas, we went the following day to the funeral of two young boys in Rafah (see above), killed by the bombing. Emotions ran high and as an outsider it was a genuinely scary experience on the way to the cemetery and many guns were fired into the air. A sense of this can be seen in the video below. Following this striking experience we waited around in the hot sun to meet the Fatah Hawks. Eventually we were taken to their apartment, filled with more guns, to negotiate an interview. It was a scary situation to me, but nothing much happened, everyone was polite and we had some tea. However this was not the end of the story, since a few days later these Hawks would kidnap my photographer friend Gary and the Newsweek bureau chief, as detailed in this CNN article. No doubt these gunmen were to become members of what now would be called Hamas, who were already making a deadly play against Fatah, the Palestinian Authority who controlled Gaza. Luckily my friends were released after only one day, while if I had gone back to Gaza with Gary I am sure I would been on the kidnap list as well. This brief event made worldwide news. After the the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, Hamas became the democratically elected rulers of Gaza in 2006. There have been no elections since.
Man pleads his case at Israeli Checkpoint, Gaza 2001
We headed back to Gaza City, via a new housing development that had been shelled. On the way we were stopped by the Israeli army at the Kfar Darom Checkpoint, since I had illegally been taking pictures from the back of the car. Because we had good accreditation Gary managed to talk our way out of a sticky situation involving large machine guns. After these full-on days and sleepless nights we relaxed in Gaza City, I believe at the Al Deira Hotel. Wow, now I felt like a proper Newsweek journalist (it was a luxury hotel), and we even managed to wangle a bottle of wine. Of course we did have to drink it a 100 yards away from any other guests, so as not to upset them, but that was down by the beach so it was fine. I got out safely with a real sense of relief, but as mentioned above Gary had to go back a few days later for the ill-fated interview with the Hawks. For a few moments I feared the worst. Still it was a successful trip and my panoramas were published on the foto8 photojournalism website. I was nicknamed Mr. Bean by our excellent local fixer, due to my insouciance. Taking the hint, I did eventually make the decision that artistic photography was probably a better direction for me than preying on other peoples misfortunes, there was to be no more war photojournalism. It had been an interesting experience, but was not to be repeated.
Since I left Gaza, it has been prey to a series of deadly bombings in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 by Israel, while in 2007 Human Rights Watch described the Gaza Strip as an “open-air prison”. When I was there in 2001 I could already have told them that, since even then there appeared little hope for this beleaguered and isolated strip of land, home to two million people. The international community has allowed this unbearable situation to fester and should bear responsibility. Gaza, totally reliant on foreign aid, and with no control over it’s own water supply, electricity, airspace, coastline, imports and infrastructure has been made into a tinderbox waiting to explode. Nevertheless that does not excuse the appalling and self-serving actions of Hamas on the 7th of October 2023. I fear more death.
A good sense of my feelings was expressed in this 2006 Panoramic Music Video, using the photographs taken in Gaza :
Update 31/0/08/24 Associated Press August 15, 2024 – Reported Total deaths: Palestinians killed in Gaza: at least 40,005 People killed in Israel: about 1,200 Palestinians killed in the West Bank: 623 People killed in Lebanon: around 530
Bikes have been going up in price and it is a confusing market. Decide how much you wish to spend and even more importantly what you will use it for. This blog is aimed at the non-specialist sport and hybrid rider, like me. I would say a good new bike will now cost a minimum of £600 and you can easily spend double that. I recommend a new bike for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because everything works and will continue to do so for several years. Unless you do your own repairs, fixing problems on your bike can easily cost over £100, plus parts. Soon your bargain will be costing you money, because parts on old bicycles do wear out and need replacement. In addition when you buy a new bike you can select one from the vast range out there that is designed to suit you and your specific needs. The other problem is of course, if you buy a second hand bike, there is a high probability it has been stolen from someone else and can be reclaimed. Nevertheless, buying an old rusty bike with a good frame and renewing the chain, brake pads, wheels and tyres yourself can be a very satisfying experience, although after upgrades will still cost you £400 at the very least.
Your first decision should be determined by drop handlebars – or not. If you like riding fast you will want them, and it also determines the bike geometry. Personally I like them, but I only really use the drops when going downhill fast. At my age I also need a riser in the stem on many sports bikes (see above). If the saddle is more than a few inches above the handlebars I soon start to feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, ensure the saddle is high enough for full leg extension. Straight handlebars, found on hybrid bikes, can make a bike feel more stable, but I find most of them too wide for urban use, so I cut them down to about 56cm. Think carefully whether you need mudguards (I certainly don’t), a pannier (I prefer a backpack) or suspension – it’s only really useful for off-roading. Most so-called comfort saddles are far too wide for me, find one that suits you and is reasonable. At the other extreme, cleats and clip-in shoes are an annoyance in town, but may be useful over long distances. As for tyres, 28mm is good for sports and up to 35mm for a hybrid is fine, after that rolling resistance will escalate. My favourite brand is Continental, especially the Grand Prix 4-Season, never had a puncture!
On to some specific examples and recommendations. Firstly try to buy a bike in the January / February sales, they are often 20-30% cheaper. Also look out for last years model, it should be much better value and just as good as the full price one. If you are confident with a spanner and an allen key it is now much cheaper to buy a mail order bike in many cases. Why do I say you need to spend £500-£600? Because if you spend this much nearly all the parts will be of good, long lasting quality. Bike manufacturers tend to hide poor components, it may seem well specified, but somewhere corners will have been cut to reduce costs. I myself was prey to this when an unbranded crank on a nice bike from Genesis (a reputable brand itself) simply snapped. I should say it was replaced, under guarantee, with a Shimano one. Yes, some brands are better than others!
We all have favourite brands and these are some of mine: Ribble, Ridgeback and Boardman. My recommendation for a bargain sports bike would be a Boardman SLR 8.9 Carbon, retailing at £1200. It does not have disk brakes, but does have a super light carbon frame and Shimano 105 gears. Mine was stolen, but luckily it was insured with Yellow Jersey. With disc brakes this bike costs another £550 – still good value! Once you are over the £2000 mark you are entering specialised territory, paying a premium for small improvements. Carbon frame bikes weigh about 9kg, you can lift them with one finger. An aluminium frame will weigh a few kilograms more and a steel / alloy frame is heavier still, just don’t buy anything over 20kg. Think carefully about weight, not only because a lighter bike is friendlier to cycle, but you often have to carry them, upstairs or onto trains, for example. Many commuters choose a light folding bicycle like a Brompton (c.£1000) with small wheels, which I enjoy riding over short distances. Just remember those small wheels are more dangerous on our potholed roads, as a good friend of mine and his broken arm can attest. Boardman also produce a great hybrid town bike, the HYB 8.6, which fits my cost profile at £600 and does have disc brakes – great value. Or check out the URB 8.6, the three gears may be enough for town usage. My favourite bike company is Ribble, since they allow you to customise your bike. Their bikes are generally better specified than Boardman, and as a result a bit more expensive. However you can choose your own tyres, stem and crank length, as well as many fancy colour schemes. I bought a carbon framed Ribble R872 with Shimano 105 gears and Mavic wheels for £1400, weighing only 8.5kg. A delight to ride, it now retails around £2000 with disc brakes. Ridgeback sell a range of reliable commuting bikes starting at £550, but there are many more good bike companies, like Cannondale, Specialised, Trek and Giant.
Wilier Triestina E-bike, later upgraded with Continental Contact Urban 35mm tyres
Electric bikes are now the happening category, but they can be very heavy, 25-40kg! Still lightweight versions, about 15kg do exist, but they are expensive, like the Boardman HYB 8.9E or Ribble Hybrid AL e at about £2400. Ribble even sell an electric carbon sports bike, the Endurance SL e, apparently the lightest ever, but prices start at £3300 (yes I would like one). Since I live in London I sold my car, after all who needs the hassle (closed roads, 20mph speed limit) and expense (congestion charge, parking, insurance). In addition I have a Freedom Pass for public transport anyway, so I just stopped using the car. In town a bike is the fastest way to travel, especially if you include parking time. Hence I bought a Wilier Triestina Hybrid GRX E-bike 2022 in a sale and it has been marvellous, weighing only 14kg. A large size one is still available at Merlin, 41% off, for just £2000. The cheapest good electric bike I have seen, but not ridden, is the estarli e28.8 retailing at £1625 and weighing 16.5kg. These bikes have internal batteries so they do not even look electric, and the power is applied very smoothly to the rear wheel. The law in this country means you have to pedal to power the bike and the assistance only goes up to 15.5 mph, but that is fine. There are now some good electric bike conversion kits like Boost or Swytch costing around £600. One thing to note is that you need fewer gears on an electric bike.
As for security, yes it is a nightmare. I currently use an Abus city chain motorbike lock weighing over 2kg when out at night, since I have had so many locked-up bikes stolen. In addition I have a Knog Scout attached which functions as an alarm and has a Find my Bike function like an Apple AirTag. There are also some Chinese rear lights on Amazon which can function as very loud movement alarms, £20-£30. Hope that info helps, but remember bike thieves use spotters and very powerful electric saws, it’s only a matter of time if they fancy your bike…so keep it inside.
I greatly enjoy reading musical biographies, they are usually informative and take you closer to the music. A really good one let’s you hear the voice of the composer, through quotes and interviews. They are are also quite surprising and strange, all these people are different and defined, usually working in a very specific and often quite mannered way. My favourite author at the moment has to be John F. Szwed, an American anthropology professor who really knows and loves music. His defining work is Space is the Place : The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, which explores of the life of Herman Blount (Sun Ra), despite his many attempts to conceal his real-life origins. The amount of research is staggering, yet Professor Szwed does not lose sight of the invented character Sun Ra became, revelling in both the fantasy life and unique music that was created by the Sun Ra Arkestra. He quotes, pays respect and provides a personal exegesis of the crazy life led by this man, always understanding when he can. In the other books I have read by him, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth and So What: The Life of Miles Davis, he uses the latest biographical information to update the standard stories with many insights, never pandering to the accepted formula, while always accenting the musical development.
Many biographers simply tell the life story, they seem to forget the musical history. We all know that music can be difficult to write about, but the critical faculty appears to vacate many a biography. Hey, tell me why something – an album – is good and why we should love it, that is surely part of any good musical biography. I will mention here just 2 books which were really appalling: View from the Exterior by Alan Clayson about Serge Gainsbourg, so badly written and patronising I threw it across the room in anger. Then there is Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale, a lovely DJ, who seemed to lack a sub-editor, never mind a fact checker, writing a cobbled together self-serving mess.
So maybe here I should tell you about a good English biography of Serge Gainsbourg, A Fistful Of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons. She is herself a real music writer and part time musician, but her masterwork is surely I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. This great biography appears to have been written with the full participation of the subject, featuring many interviews, but does not seem cloying or hagiographic. It appears definitive, details all the music, all the scandal, that is all that I want. The same could be said for Different Every Time by Marcus O’Dair, the authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, and I also greatly enjoyed All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt. To mention a classic, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald is fabulous, especially the “Introduction: Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade”, but it’s hardly a biography as such. Naturally I loved Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer by Philip Watson, but it is a huge and detailed tome, so first you you have to know and love the music. In terms of general music books, two stand out, The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century (2007) by Alex Ross and Improvisation – Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980, revised 1992) by Derek Bailey. For an interesting overview of popular music try Let’s Do It and Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley. If you’re a fan of Soul music then the trilogy of Detroit 67, Memphis 68, Harlem 69 by Stuart Cosgrove are a fascinating read. For a more literary, poetic approach I recommend Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, an imagined life of Buddy Bolden in 1905 New Orleans.
Another interesting area is the ghost written biography, you are never quite sure who you are listening to, although they can be entertaining. Certainly Life by Keith Richards was better than expected, you can hear his voice and his love of the music. Also quite readable, if formulaic, are the Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend autobiographies. My own favourites include Morrissey (arch and selective), Tracey Thorn (honest and now local), Tony Visconti (Bolan and Bowie) and Cosey Fanni Tutti (proper artist). I also enjoyed Words Without Music by Philip Glass, a stranger journey than you might have imagined. Special mention should be given to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, fabulous chapters in a life, but not the whole story, so we await Volume 2, ha ha. For a truly eclectic and well written blog about music try The Blue Moment by Richard Williams, he knows everyone and is always interesting.
Alright, the greatest ever music biography has to be Really the Blues written by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe in 1946. This is the best because it is easily the first and written in a unique hip argot. It breaks all the rules since it is evidently ghost written and grossly exaggerated, by an average accompanist to the great Sidney Bechet. Nevertheless it contains all the musical fervour, the drugs and the polemic (re race) a funky biography requires. To realise this book was published in 1946 was a revelation, it predates On the Road by Jack Kerouac by more than 10 years, and is counter-cultural before the term existed. Eat your heart out Bukowski, and of course Tom Waits loves it. Even now this pre-beat book is forthright and hip, there is nothing new under the sun, folks.
Update 23/08/24 Just read Straight Life (1979), the autobiography of saxophonist Art Pepper (1925-1982). It is both vividly real and scarifying, even more so than “Really the Blues”. I thought I had already read this, since I followed and enjoyed Art’s music for many years, and even saw him at Ronnie Scott’s in the early 80s, but I was wrong. This nearly incredible story (rather full of drugs and jail) is both visceral and moving. It has been brilliantly edited by his wife, Laurie Pepper, incorporating many contradictory interviews from Art’s jazz contemporaries and family. It may not go into sufficient detail in terms of explaining the music, but as a portrayal of the brutal reality of a classic jazzman’s life, it is without peer. Highly recommended!
I don’t think the word “belief” means anything. It’s a hovering wobbly, jelly phrase meaning something like: “I’ve decided to think something’s true because I wish it were true.” Different Every Time, 2014 – Robert Wyatt
My problems with belief started when I was 8 or 9 at Junior school. We had an excellent form teacher, Miss Laister, whom I trusted and understood. However, one sunny day we had a discussion about Christianity, and we were asked if we believed in Jesus Christ. I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be popular, kind and interesting, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I felt a bit too young to give a definitive answer and maybe expressed some reservations. It was then that the bombshell in my mind exploded, since Miss Laister kindly told us that it wasn’t a question of supposition, logic, science, history or anything else, simply one of faith. You just had to believe, all your problems and worries would be solved, it was that simple. That was it, there was no other choice. This immediately appeared antithetical to everything I had been taught. Even then, to make this exception for Jesus and no-one else seemed unfair, I would have to investigate further. I was already aware other religions existed, and that for instance Jewish people did not have to attend religious assembly or recite The Lord’s Prayer, so what happened to them at the pearly gates?
Like many of my peers I attended Sunday School, basically biblical study, and engaged with the many fascinating stories. I got hold of a St. James Bible and determined to read it cover to cover, but failed to get much past Genesis, it was not an easy read. Later I was awarded a beautiful red leather bound version of the New Testament, this was bit easier, and I proudly took it along to my Sunday School. From my limited studies I was already not prepared to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God, since I was aware of the many inconsistencies, plain cruelty, changes of tone and competing gospels. Later, aged 11, I had a Christian fundamentalist classmate from Bahrain, who I used to tease with choice quotes from the Bible, asking if he believed in the contradictory and confusing verses I selected. I also vividly remember having an attack of the giggles, if not hysterics, when told the Fishers of Men story from the Gospel of Matthew. This did not go down well at Sunday School, but I would guess by this time I had already decided I would not be confirmed. That is I would not ask God’s Holy Spirit to give me the strength and commitment to live God’s way for the rest of my life. Most certainly I would not be living as a disciple of Christ in the Church of England. I have never regretted that decision. My position at the age of 14 or 15 is demonstrated by the moment when I called Jesus a bastard, not that I wanted to. My good Roman Catholic friend had somehow bet me that I wouldn’t say it before a graven image, yet I felt mentally obliged to follow through on my convictions and did so. I was of course being quite accurate (Joseph was not the father), but my friend believed I was going to hell in a handcart. Such is the power of indoctrination.
Well it was a long journey, via an interest in Western Buddhism during my 20’s, to finally arrive at my own version of agnosticism. Quit simply I agree with this statement: “I cannot know whether a deity exists or not, and neither can you”. Getting to this point may have taken some time, but it was certainly encouraged by one of the bravest books ever written, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, published 2006. It was as if I had waited nearly my whole life for someone to take on the exceptionalism granted to religion, this medieval way of thinking, and the lip service paid to plainly outdated ideas.
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’. The God Delusion, 2006 – Richard Dawkins
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. God Is Not Great, 2007 – Christopher Hitchens
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. New York Times, 1999 – Steven Weinberg
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Questions sur les miracles, 1765 – Voltaire
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1788 – Edward Gibbon (from a quote by Lucius Seneca, 50AD)
The idea that any religious document is the “Holy Word of God”, as is claimed, can now be fully put to bed. Here is a brief resumé of what we now know regarding the great religious texts. The Bible as we know it was formulated in c.367AD during the councils of Hippo and Carthage, and excluded the Apocrypha. The Gospels were written forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus in Rome, they are pseudepigrapha, the claimed author is not the true author. This is the case for the majority of the Bible. None of the authors of the New Testament actually met Jesus. The Old Testament is part folklore and part mythologised Jewish history, formulated in 1400BC, centuries after the events portrayed. For example, there is no historical record of Israelis (Moses and the Exodus) in Egypt. Watch out for Pseudoarchaeology! The Koran has an even more confusing history since Mohammed was allegedly illiterate and it was dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel, this oral tradition only being written down many decades later. The Hadith, “the backbone” of Islamic civilization, was cobbled together from many contradictory oral sources, generations after Muhammad’s death. Strangely Islam posits that God is an Arab, as the Koran is always recited in Arabic, and hence a translation cannot be the “Word of God”. These are the western patriarchal religions for the last 2000 years: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They come form the same Abrahamic root, use the same basic stories and, given their authorship, cannot possibly be the word of God. We should remember that these religions represent just a moment in our evolution, whose time has now passed. In the Eastern world it is somewhat more complicated since there is no specific word of God, but rather a series of myths, stories and philosophies of life. That is fine, but I was under the impression that myths are not meant to be factually true, so I don’t believe any of that either. The Bhagavad Gita may be a great book, but no-one claims it was written by God, thank heavens.
When you end up not believing in anything (don’t follow leaders…) life can take a strange, slightly dystopian angle, which was encouraged by science fiction in general and the band Joy Division in particular. Like John Lennon (cf. his song God) my I don’t believe list is long, including fairies, ghosts and UFO’s, although they can all make interesting stories. I am a believer in the French principle of laïcité, which separates church and state since the 1789 revolution (confirmed in 1905), and includes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This principle does include a right to the free exercise of religion. Still, we all need somewhere to place our own spiritual needs, and obviously the Church no longer managed to fulfil this role for me. I did manage to read a religious book, recommended by my Mother, written by our local C of E vicar. However I could only manage to do this by replacing the word God with the word Gaia (thank you James Lovelock), which seemed to work quite well. I took refuge in the work of Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest who became a Buddhist hippy, and the classic series Zen and Zen Classics (1960) by R.H. Blyth. Later still I spent 4 years doing Tai-chi, which fulfilled many of my spiritual needs, but it’s not a religion. We live in a spiritual desert, where can we put these feelings?
Science appears to hold the answers since it is an open system, constantly being revised. It is empirical, open to scrutiny and genuinely man-made, but is that enough? Certainly the classical religions no longer answer the fundamental questions that led to their creation, science has filled that vacuum. There are many wonders of evolution and nature, yet do they really fulfil our hidden desires for a transcendent belief system? Humans appear to have a millenarian death wish desire, we need to dream and confront an apocalypse, however illogical that may be. Every generation searches for a New Messiah, we all self-dramatise and seem to think we live in the end times, as if history never happened. No-one wants to die, feel their life is pointless, and traditional religion came along to solve that problem. Such is the power of wishful thinking – believe this (or that) and you can live forever in heaven! For a long time we were all a member of an eternity cult. In reality the hope, promise and drama of traditional religion is over, and we await the replacement with some agitation and trepidation. At least there are fewer pointless religious wars, there is no heaven and hell, blasphemy is over, while the churches are empty. And lo, let there be no more self-appointed divine agents, defenders of the faith, no more confession, transubstantiation or apostolic succession. In the meantime, we should all become Secular Buddhists, that is the best I can say.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing, does not go away. Introduction, 1972 – Philip K. Dick / published 1985
Update 30/08/23 The day after I published this article, this was the headline in The Times newspaper, saying only 24% of clergy would describe Britain as a Christian country today.
Update 08/10/24 Just read Rationality by Steven Pinker and I was glad to see he uses the Philip K. Dick quote about reality, referred to above. He makes a strong point about the difference between the mythology mindset and reason, and why we humans are both tempted and fascinated by the myth makers. The book is humorous and pointed, although sometimes repetitious, and there is a bit too much algebra for me. Still it is highly recommended and here is my favourite quote, of many:
Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated. Rationality, 2021 – Steven Pinker
Since the release of Big Sur (Version 11) in 2020 your system is locked, with a read-only file system separate from the user files, although it does not appear like that to you, the user. We have lost control of our computers. Apple systems are now so locked down and filled with security codes and devices (T1, T2 Security Chip) that we no longer understand or can even control what they are doing. This is security by obfuscation. Release Notes for upgrades typically include just a tiny portion of the actual changes, bug-fixes, and possible regressions that Apple has done. Passwords multiply and dual factor authentication has become the norm. Without the correct passwords your computer has to be physically returned to Apple Support, you only normally get 10 attempts to enter the correct one. After 50 attempts to guess your own password in “Recovery” you are permanently locked out of your own machine. Many updates are now covert, even though they have caused serious damage on several occasions. Everything is sandboxed and apps no longer have access to your own disks, files and folders, without explicit permission. System updates are now only available online, through Software Update. Applications which are not officially approved by Apple are highly unlikely to work. Starting up your computer from another external disk is essentially no longer possible. With Apple Silicon you can no longer replace or upgrade your hard disk, increase the amount of RAM, never mind attempt to service your own machine (there are no service manuals).
So all that may seem pretty awful, but maybe we are just reaching forward to the time when the computer just becomes an appliance, which runs without needing to be “serviced”. In due course it will self-upgrade and run without user interference. This is already happening in the world of phones, which are of course now very powerful computers themselves. It must also be remembered that soon nearly all the high street banks will close, your computer will become your bank and hence must be secure. Once everything is run in solid state, system on a chip, reliability increases and it either works or doesn’t. Neither you, or anybody else, can break your OSX System, it is locked. Your modern computer is already self healing, it will try and help you, that is machine learning aka AI. I already have a computer which has been used and run for nearly a year, without ever restarting, now that is an appliance.
I come from a time when computers regularly crashed on a daily basis, involving loss of unsaved work and regular restarts. There was a voodoo knowledge required to run a computer, involving selecting extensions, repairing permissions, defragmenting hard disks, clearing viruses, checking memory usage, updating again and again. All this knowledge is now redundant and soon all these problems will have evaporated. Still I would like to mention a few of the crazy computer glitches I have seen. The worst is a hard disk so full it cannot even start up. A computer needs some space to write files when it starts, without any available space you must start up from an external disk. In short, never let your your system hard disk become more than 80% full. Apple now lets you “manage “ your files in iCloud Drive, although I do not recommend this as you will soon be paying them even more money. One of the best resources in the old days was Disk Warrior, which could recover lost hard disks (HFS+ format) by rewriting the Directory, when it worked it was just like magic. Once when I was asked to install a new hard disk, I was surprised to find the new disk was in fact a book, they hadn’t opened the Amazon package! Embarrassment and wasted journeys all round. In a previous blog article I detail the folder found on an iMac which claimed to be larger than a million gigabytes (1.13 Petabytes). Best of all, I was called out to fix a computer which had stopped working. It had crashed and they didn’t know how to switch it back on!
Apple still have some way to go in their search for a perfect locked system. Some key applications such as Soft Raid, Drive DX and many others may require Kexts (Kernel extensions) to function and currently require you to run Reduced Security (available in Recovery Mode / Startup Security Utility). It is also difficult to install many third party apps without Reduced Security / Allow all apps. To access this on Apple Silicon Macs, press and hold the Power button until the display shows Loading Startup Options, then release it. This takes you to the Startup Options screen, select the Options icon, then click Continue underneath it. On Apple Silicon all the old ways to access startup commands have changed or disappeared. There are currently no third party apps to repair APFS disks (since it is not documented), you must use Disk Utility, which is slowly improving. The reported available space on APFS disks can also be wrong or misleading. I recommend switching off iCloud Drive, it can become confusing unless you really need it. You no longer need anti-virus software, switch it off. Buy a cheap external disk for Time Machine to safeguard your data, although it no longer backs up your System. Please remember your computer login password and Apple ID, they are vital, use the Passwords app for everything else. Check everything in Security and Privacy. This is the modern Apple world of computing, there is no Trash only a Bin, things work differently now.
Is it Ronald Reagan’s idea of an April Fools Day Joke to say he is going to reduce nuclear weapons?
This was my question on the 88th edition of Question Time on April 1st 1982 at the Greenwood Theatre in London.
I invented this question on the actual evening as I entered the building, due to a headline in the Evening Standard that day. We had already posed another question on the invitation weeks earlier. The minute I wrote down this question I felt it had a good chance of being selected, it was right on cue. Even then I knew it fulfilled the brief to be up to the minute.
My question was highly apposite, since our Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the American President Ronald Reagan had been spending many millions on installing Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, leading to widespread protests. Reagan would later declare Russia to be an “Evil Empire”, making the case for deploying NATO nuclear-armed intermediate–range ballistic missiles in Western Europe. Yet on this day an Evening Standard headline falsely claimed that Reagan would be reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons, which I believed merited some suspicion, if not downright disbelief.
Sir Robin Day, the host (see above), was magnificent and I was very impressed with the Tory Norman St John-Stevas. During the warm-up with test questions they were both hilarious, but a lot more circumspect when the show went live, to my disappointment. Little known to me at the time was John Smith, later to become Leader of the Labour Party in 1992. The other panel members were MP Mike Thomas, a founder member of the SDP, and Terry Marsland, a feminist member of the TUC.
I wore a very loud and gay pink shirt, so I certainly stood out, and I believe you had to stand up when suddenly you were told to ask your question. For many years, if not decades, people would tell me they had seen me on TV. I had already long forgotten about it, but it was a powerful lesson in the power of the media, since it had been seen by many millions of people.
Of course the response to my question was a lot of humming and hawing, no-one said that nuclear weapons were an insult to our culture, civilisation or even religion, as I wanted them to. No-one came out in direct support of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, though some expressed sympathy. I thought it was a poor response. Yes, I was a strong supporter of CND at the time and still am. I should point out here, that in 2020 the UK are still spending $6.2 billion every year ($72.6 billions spent worldwide) on nuclear weapons, which could destroy the world as we know it. While I was proud of my question, I gave an anodyne response when the question was referred back to me, which I had not been expecting. This was a very live show at the time. I simply said I agreed with John Smith. Always prepare a witty and cutting answer!
In 1982, at the instigation of Patrick D. Martin, I became the photographic co-ordinator for Robodevco. This later became The Roboshow, where a prototype multimedia computer controlled a forty-three screen, three dimensional sound experience. It was hosted by ‘Q’, a virtual robot at a large warehouse off Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town, London, 1985. It proved to be a “a completely new screen sensation”.
Before the Roboshow there was the Technocab, the most enjoyable part of the whole experience. This was a blacked out London taxi cab containing a Trinitron TV and a BBC computer. Due to the size of the huge cathode ray tube monitor it was a one person experience with binaural headphones, like a solo cinema. The cab would start up as if going on a journey, often dry ice was involved, sometimes we rocked the cab to simulate movement. A taste of what you would see (2 mins in) is contained in the following video, the Roboshow Electronic Press Kit. This low-res video features my stills animated with Bob Lawrie of Blink Productions, as well as the triggered micrographics of Richard Brown.
On the strength of this intense experience nearly a million pounds was raised to fund the Roboshow experience, which was intended to be franchised. A prototype multi screen cinema was constructed and the images would fly around the space in a truly fresh and disorienting manner, after being introduced by Q, a TV robot. Out on location Q was sometimes an American football style roller skater with a video boombox, who featured in the video shot by Charlie Arnold.
The Roboshow garnered a lot of good press, being featured in The Observer, The Face and New Scientist. This description of the show was published in the Evening Standard, January 1987:
“We went into a room that seemed smaller than it actually was because the 20 chairs on the raised platform were pointing towards 50 TV screens that ran around the front and side walls. There was one big screen in the middle. The lights dimmed. A rollerskater zoomed straight across our line of vision from left to right with an accompanying sound effect that seemed almost three dimensional. The show had begun– and for the next seven minutes images flickered, jumped, danced and propelled themselves across the screens. Sometimes it was the same picture. Sometimes it would break up so you were seeing the same thing from divers angles on different screens. It is an experience 50 times as intense as watching regular TV because of the interplay between the screens and the meganess of the sound system.”
These are some of the quotes from the Robodevco Press Pack, which demonstrate why Roboshow garnered so much attention:
“Totally wild … any explanation would fail. to do justice to this experience” Bruce Dessau, City Limits, Aug 21 ’86.
“The next medium to take over where Cinema left off’ Televisual, Nov ’86.
“Q makes Max Headroom look about as wacky as Sooty” Direction, Oct ’86.
“Superb -look forward to seeing it in Piccadilly Circus” Juliet Rix (BBC Newsnight).
“The technical possibilities are extremely exciting” Roma Felstein (Broadcast).
“Very impressive” Barry Fox (New Scientist).
“The most important development in Entertainment since they got rid of the Proscenium Arch” Anthony Horowitz.
This is my photograph of the actual prototype Roboshow in Kentish Town. It was intended to expand the show and run it at Paul Raymond’s Revuebar Boulevard Theatre in Walkers Court Soho, London. Unfortunately this never happened.
It is important to remember that all this was happening before the advent of the internet, digital cameras, HD video or flat screen monitors. In fact analogue video was equivalent to 720×576 pixels at best, that is 625 (576 visible) interleaved scan lines in a 4×3 format. At the time Video 8 with it’s small form factor was the most exciting camera development, but most video was filmed on large and heavy U-matic cameras. Nevertheless The Daily Mirror observed that “the revolution starts here… Shock the music industry and change the world of video”. For an in depth explanation of all this technology the article in The Games Machine magazine, dated August 1987, reveals the many participants and innovations involved:
As well as the visuals, audio was an integral part of the experience. A holographic cassette was produced with music by Phil Nicholas, a Fairlight programmer, later to work with The Willesden Dodgers, Stock Aitken Waterman and Def Leppard, among many others.
Here is a promo pic of Patrick Martin, Phil Nicholas and Marcus Kirby taken at Robodevco headquarters:
By 1985 I was fortunately working for New Musical Express and so mostly avoided the machinations involved when new directors and accountants were appointed to Robodevco. The freelance crew (who made the Roboshow) were encouraged to sign contracts to make them rich when the project succeeded, yet were to become liable for large debts as bank guarantors without real equity. Thankfully I did not sign up. Ultimately, after the failure to produce an actual show, this led to arguments about the structure of the project and ultimate dissolution of the company. The directors became XYLO and took the technical assets which opened at a disco called Zhivagos in Darlington in 1988. RIP. Meanwhile Patrick regrouped and formed Psychovision with a new Technocab, but this time in a Dodge van. I went to the grand unveiling at Chelsea Harbour, but disastrously the new van was not yet finished. Shamefully the many punters were told it had broken down on the Westway. Eventually the Dodge Technocab aka Psychomobile did surface at Covent Garden:
There was some mitigation for the previous disasters when in 1992 Psychovision created a 5 screen show for the Victoria & Albert Sporting Glory Exhibition which was later screened as part of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In 2011 Justin Kirby made Roboshow Reboot, a website to document this story, but it has long since disappeared. Here is a brief 44 second clip of my submission for this. It sure all was groundbreaking fun while it lasted…
To conclude here is the full interview Richard Brown made for Roboshow Reboot at the Rewire 2011 conference, which sums up the whole story very well:
In 1985 I photographed Robert Smith of The Cure at his record company offices in Marylebone, London for Sounds. He was a sweetie, and all seemed to go well. However, for the first time ever (for me at least) the photos were taken “on approval”. This procedure was totally antithetical to the way I worked and to what I believed being a photographer was. However the photos were intended for the front cover, so I thought fine, no problem. It did mean I had to hurry more than usual and to make a presentation box. In order to protect the fragile original Hasselblad transparencies I mounted them in expensive glass 2.25” slide mounts. There was no time to make costly duplicate medium format transparencies. The black and white prints were proofs and not the intended final master prints.
Yes it was horrible
Well I guess the story can be told now. To keep it simple this is what happened – he destroyed the photographs he liked. That is THE WRONG ONES. When I say destroyed I mean he smashed the glass of the slide mounts and then proceeded to cut up the unique and original transparencies into tiny shards. I received in return a box of broken glass and slivers of cut-up film. Since the photographs were for the front cover, these were the best ones, the colour transparencies. Sounds magazine was not interested in shreds of film for their cover at the time. Nor did the magazine, record company and PR organisation wish to make their pop star appear really stupid, so there was a big hush-up.
Robert himself was horrified…
I was remarkably angry and punched a wardrobe much too hard. I could see which way the wind was blowing in the celebrity industry and soon changed my style from portrait to commercial studio photography of inanimate objects. At the end of the day a perfunctory sum was paid in recompense, months later. To me that was not the point at all, I had missed doing the cover photo and everybody seemed to think it was somehow my fault. I guess it’s all down to the pecking order, but no-one has the right to destroy someone else’s original work.
Cropping suggestions from Robert
In those pre-digital days there were no scanners or any easy way to use the shards of film I was left with. Now 37 years later I have relaxed enough to open up this can of worms and follow Robert’s advice. Yes here is the cut-up he suggested making all those years ago. It might be “art on purpose” but it’s certainly not a Sounds cover.
