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 I blame our outdated legal system.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.
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.”
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
Playing Iago with Frances Barber (then Brookes) as Emilia in Othello. Photo: Brian Tarr
The first point is pointless. I was with the careers advisor at school aged 17 and I did not have the guts to tell him I wanted to be a rock singer. Of course I already knew that to say such a thing would be treated as some kind of joke, if not a reason for him to laugh at me and tell me to grow up. There were no degrees in this subject, and he probably had no conception of what I was not talking about. Still I was disappointed with myself not to raise the subject, not to make the point. In retrospect I realised other errors were made, since I was about to become the Editor of the school magazine. At the time time I had no conception this was an actual job, since once again there was no degree available in this subject. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the correct degree was English Literature, which I in fact did end up partially studying. Yet the idea that this was an actual job evaded me. You could only be a Teacher.
Later I had my big break as an actor, I was to play Iago in Othello at the Oxford Playhouse, sponsored by The Observer. This I managed to do and was quite good, and certainly better than the Zambian playing Othello. Unfortunately he was having some kind of nervous breakdown, having been accused of actually strangling Desdemona. This massive production became a laughing stock when he refused to go within three feet of her, so my performance became rather incidental. After the first night we never saw the Director again, yet there were many more nights of pain in front of thousands of people. Thus ended serious acting.
Life and Death Show at a Youth Club. I am under the table.
Another disaster, at least to my mind, put an end to my film career. We had written a touring youth theatre show called The Life and Death Show about the nuclear apocalypse. After many performances we had honed down the Protect and Survive story into a tight and entertaining forty five minutes. This had involved meeting the Secretary of CND, Bruce Kent, and hiding under a table. I was thrilled that this led to making a film at The Albany in Deptford. However this was early days for video, still on reel to reel video tape I believe, and quite simply the Director lost all the audio during the edit! Despite this setback something was recovered leading to a Premiere at the ICA Videotheque. That was all good, but the incomprehensible dialogue sounded like a deep sea quagmire. This naughty Director went on to win many prizes and became a Professor of Film, I never appeared in another film. Such are the breaks, those moments…
Again The Observer was to blame, kind of. I took my huge photographic portrait portfolio into their Art Editor at the ‘Colour’ Magazine (the supplement) and they loved it. To work for them was my dream, so I thought that I had made to the big time, after doing covers for NME and Sounds. It was all close-up black and white portraits, rather in the style of Steve Pyke or maybe even Avedon. However I ended up “second choice”, that is nowhere, and I gave up. Or at least changed my style, I had tried and failed, but of course (in retrospect) I should have tried harder.
The writing was on the wall in 2011 when Tate Britain removed my panoramic tour of Peter Doig from their website, because they were being sponsored by Google. Of course they did not inform me, despite saying “it looks absolutely brilliant”. It was replaced by some fuzzy auto-made panoramas full of stitching errors and incomprehensible angles, the writing on the wall was truly invisible. Yet Jonathan Jones in The Guardian said “Google Street View-style tours of galleries are not to be sniffed at”. He had probably never seen a real panoramic tour in his life. You can’t compete with world organisations working for ‘free’. There is no actual point here, just a gradual decline as Google Street View took over the world, at least in panoramic terms.
That was, in a sense, a list of endings. The high points are not being mentioned here since this article was inspired by the The Last Days of Roger Federer and other endings by Geoff Dyer who makes the point that whole lives can turn on a sixpence, or, at least in terms of tennis, on a single point.
First Rule of Life Club 1. Never talk about any of these things
This is a story rarely told, yet apparently we nearly all do it. The subject may upset you, if so stop reading now. The subject of wanking aka masturbation aka self-abuse has not been covered in most of my reading, and in my researches I have only found two recent articles which mention it, by Lily Allen and Giles Coren. In 2009 NHS Sheffield published a controversial leaflet called Pleasure stating “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. A more recent booklet titled Masturbation (see above) expresses the current medical opinion succinctly: “Masturbation is a natural, healthy expression of sexuality, which can have a large number of health benefits, not least that of sexual pleasure.” Anyway, for better or worse, here is my personal take on the subject, of which the keynote is honesty. I hope it will be amusing, informative and kinda bizarre.
I have no particular memories of erotic stimulation before my adolescence, although it was a subject of mystery and fascination. Come adolescence and the floodgates opened and haven’t closed since. The utter shock and mess of my first ejaculation was totally unexpected, despite having been told the “facts of life”. Obviously they had censored a few chapters, I soon realised. A veiled enquiry was made to my mother, and I gathered that everything was normal and I was perfectly healthy. “Night emissions” were apparently to be expected from someone of my age. However I found all the semen a great inconvenience, and it made masturbating in bed rather problematic. I decided to use the toilet, where tissues were available. A box of Kleenex by the bed was not a good look in those days.
Anyway new doors and avenues of exploration were opening before me, but where could I find real information? I had no idea and amongst my peer group it was either a no-go area or just filled with nudge-nudge wink-wink big boys talk. I was on my own and for me the answer was books. I tried the dictionary and yes in those days it simply described masturbation as “self-abuse”, which wasn’t very helpful. However my father was a doctor and I found a huge volume called Cunningham’s Text Book of Anatomy from the Oxford University Press 1937. This 1500 page academic tome was well illustrated with photographs of naked men and a whole chapter on the Uro-Genital System with graphic illustrations. It was highly informative, but not very sexy. To make up for that I found on the bookshelf nearby the classic photo documentary book The Family of Man, created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Now I am sure this was not the intended usage of a book documenting the greatest photographic exhibition of all time, but already on page 3 there is a naked lady lying in a forest. There is a lot of reality, wonder and romance in the many photographs, but of much more importance to me at the time was the appearance of a few naked ladies. I was desperate.
Expanding my search through the bookshelves I finally found a cache of sexual classics, not hidden exactly, but well out of the way. These books were to be my window on a hidden world. I started with the Kama Sutra which proved interesting, but rather frustrating, not sexy enough. There was also The Jewel in the Lotus by Allen Edwardes, written in 1959 and apparently a historical survey of sexual culture in the East. More down to earth and sometimes plain obscene was The Perfumed Garden by Sheik Nefzawi, a fifteenth century Arabic sex manual, translated in 1886 by Sir Richard Burton. Now this book was really the business, both serious and lascivious, I found it very arousing. Of course I could not take these books away, I could not not wank while reading them, they had to be read surreptitiously and immediately replaced in the bookcase. They were my secret. Then I discovered Walter, My Secret Life. This book was closer to home, allegedly being the memoirs of an unknown Victorian gentleman and his erotic life, involving many prostitutes and brothels. It has been prosecuted for obscenity many times and was only finally legally published in 1995. This was an edited two volume set, apparently there were eleven volumes in total and Wikipedia describes it as “one of the strangest and most obsessive books ever written”. Opening the book at nearly any page there was a panoply of detailed sexual encounters.
So after the brief period of night emissions I would get home from school, read a bit from the from the naughty library, carefully replace the book and then retire to the toilet with a Sunday Colour magazine or a copy of Vogue. In retrospect I am pretty sure my mother knew what I was up to, but nothing was ever said. At this time, and for many years, I did not have any “dirty“ magazines. I was far too intimidated to purchase them, if not too young, and in any case there seemed to be no safe place to hide them. This was not the case at school, where there was a lively blackmarket for copies of Parade. This remarkably cheap pinup weekly, had originally been named Blighty Parade and aimed at servicemen. A bit more raunchy was Fiesta, which as the cheapest “porno“ magazine (bare breasts only at the time), became very popular. The sexuality portrayed was down to earth and blatant, reinforced by having the first Readers Wives section. Playboy was occasionally available, but regarded as too expensive, classy and American, although with better printing. I believe it was the centre spread from Fiesta, which was attached to the inside of the new boy’s desk in our class, who had no truck with such publications. We all enjoyed the look of horror on his face, yet the irony was that he would become the biggest heart throb in our school only a few years later. At the time he would not believe that his parents could possibly have had sex. O tempora, o mores!
Sex education at school was relatively farcical, and none of the teachers wanted to undergo the embarrassment. Different teachers tried, they all failed, there was no textbook. As part of these occasional lessons we were invited to write down our questions on bits of paper, to overcome our own apprehension. I wrote “What is menstruation”, leading to a prolonged bout of blushing by our teacher when read out in class. I never did receive an accurate explanation, although I already knew the answer. There was one event of note which has stayed with me, there was a school cinema trip to see Helga, a West German Federal Government sex education documentary. This was a very graphic movie including a live birth, and we needed special permission to see it, being under age. Pretty sure my parents had to sign the dispensation, and as a result only half the class made it to the cinema. It taught me more about sexuality than any of our lessons, and I was very taken with Helga herself. For many years this was the most explicit movie I had the privilege of seeing.
I started experimenting with different places, our toilet did not feel right. Down the end of our road was a wild piece of bracken and paths next to the golf course. While exploring there I found a damp stash of abandoned dirty magazines, which proved to be an exciting discovery. After a few visits on my bike, they disappeared and I thought about making my own secret stash there. Nothing came of it, simply too uncomfortable among all the brambles. Another time I found a building site with a stack of magazines left by the builders, I became a regular visitor on Sunday when no-one was about. Pictures of Lily solved my childhood problems sang the Who, and how right they were, they helped me feel alright. Once on a long boring holiday drive through France I had been amusing myself with sexual fantasies. We stopped at a mountain lay-by and I ran off to have a wank over the glorious view, quite risky but eminently worthwhile. Sometimes the urge to wank would simply overcome me, this happened particularly in afternoon history lessons at school, teacher droning on, dull as ditchwater. Yes I got caught in flagrante by a schoolmate, said I had itchy balls, but this did manage to rather put me off the idea. Later I had a fondness for wanking in other peoples bathrooms, always made it seem more dramatic. Must have been a consummate red-faced liar by this time.
One of the problems of my adolescence was the unexpected erection. This could occur at any time, no erotic thoughts or stimulation needed, this thing appeared to have a mind of it’s own. That is one of the reasons I have never worn those loose boxer shorts, and I found that even Y fronts appeared to have an escape hole. I was sitting innocently on the train home from school and suddenly the sharp eyed girls noticed a pointy lump in my trousers. I shifted position as if uncomfortable, but it was too late, my dick had escaped from my Y fronts and there was little I could do about it. I went bright puce and shrugged my shoulders. I was powerless to conceal the truth, there we are folks. Even worse was being caught in my pyjamas early one Sunday morning, dick sticking straight out through the loose fabric fly. My mother came into the room and I attempted to hide behind the empty dining room table, shuffling nervously. She asked what I was doing and I mumbled some blatant excuse. I presume she realised what was going on, because I was quickly left in peace. Ever since I have worn good tight briefs, hold it in place man.
A few years later both my parents were often at work, so if I got off school early I had the house to myself. I proceeded to explore their bedroom and found such erotic classics as Fanny Hill, Portnoy’s Complaint and In Praise of Older Women. In addition there were some old copies of Playboy and Mayfair in the bedside cabinet. Much more exciting was a copy of The Joy of Sex subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking, a British illustrated sex manual. To get round censorship issues this book did not have photographs but pen and ink line drawings. As a result they were highly explicit for the time, while also conveying a certain sensitivity and tenderness. I did not find them highly erotic, the bearded man didn’t help much, but this groundbreaking and popular book was certainly informative. For just a few weeks I did find some copies of the truly pornographic Danish publication Color Climax. This was well printed in A5 format with full orgy photo stories, from the fully clothed meeting, then oral, then anal, of course intercourse and finally the naked ejaculation. Not much has changed from this template. I presume these illegal magazines must have been loaned from a friend, dad had not been to Denmark, where pornography had been legalised in 1969. This was the the first hardcore pornography I had ever seen, it was both highly arousing and intimidating, if not slightly unpleasant. It was though a relief, in some ways, to finally see the real thing: pornography in color.
The rest of the magazine bares no resemblance to this opening spread…
I spent a year in France as a language assistant, where pornography had been legalised. Here I saw the gamut of poorly made sexploitation movies in the local town cinema. This was still a novelty so the cinema would be quite busy, and it seemed bizarre to be watching this smut with the headmaster of the school where I worked. The French didn’t care, in fact I discovered their sensitivity in these and other sexual matters were quite different to the prim British mores. In the local town there was a red light area, many blatant prostitutes on one lively street. I often walked down this street in fascination, though not temptation, to visit the school where a friend from the UK worked. As well as Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones I did get to see one moving and powerful film in Paris featuring real sex, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Koriida) by Nagisa Oshima. Well over a million people saw this film in France, it was finally released in the UK in 1991. Fortified by this sexual liberation I was possessed to buy a gift for my parents, which I presumed would be unavailable in the UK. For reasons beyond me I chose Histoire d’O by Pauline Réage, beautifully illustrated with gothic line drawings by Guido Crepax. It was a proper large coffee table hardback edition, very popular in France, despite the S&M undertones. It was welcomed with a forced smile and obviously went nowhere near a coffee table in our house. What was I thinking? I blame the Marquis de Sade.
I have decided to end Part One of this memoir here, while I was still a frustrated virgin. Of course the wanking continued (to my surprise), but the whole situation becomes more complicated, if not compromising, when involved in a relationship. I should make it clear here that somehow my sexual fantasy life and my real sexual life have alway remained separate, though they are interconnected, because that seems to be healthier to me. I can also say that real sex is so much more than having a wank, that I feel embarrassed to put them in the same sentence. It’s the difference between fantasy and reality.
Of the many lurid texts I have read, this simple phrase has proven to be a sincere comfort:
How do you dance when you are 14? How do you even know what to do, without looking stupid? My solution was to copy the girls, they all seemed so self assured as they shuffled mellifluously. I was in the Church Hall of St James Church, Birkdale, Southport. It was at least dark, which helped my embarrassment, since this was before the arrival of the flashing disco lights. It was my first experience of a discotheque, and my first dance song was the hit of the day, Sugar Sugar by the Archies. This classic of bubblegum pop had a moronic and repeating rhythm, which seemed to make dancing easy. I was already aware it lacked the danger of say The Rolling Stones or even the funk of Tamla, but this was after all a church disco, and even the suggestion of kissing a girl seemed quite outré, in the building which had been my Sunday School. Well I had broken the spell, and managed to dance in public, although no-one could see me, all for the better. The narrow horizons of the Church Hall disco would soon spread out into the brand new world of the discotheque, which would later become the de facto night out. It never failed to amaze me that I was listening to the most orgasmic song ever, Je t’aime by Serge Gainsbourg, while next door the the vicar would be sermonising against all this sexual behaviour among young people. Down the disco was the only place I could hear this song, since I did not have a record player and it was banned by the BBC.
Of course Je t’aime was not much good for dancing, it was the smooching song played at the end of the night. The real staple of dancing was Motown, in fact Tamla Motown Chartbusters Volume 3 was practically a disco in it’s own right and used as such for house parties on a Dansette. The girls laid down their handbags and jackets and danced in a circle around them, a little club it was often difficult to break into. As a guy there was always a question, could you dance on your own? Sometimes the boys would form their own little circles, but they did not last long, after all you were supposed to be picking up girls. At some places it was OK to dance with a guy, but often you felt obliged to ask a girl for a dance, even though you might not fancy them at all. It was not deemed gay as such to dance with a guy, since that usage of the word did not yet exist for us, nor in reality did the concept. The insult was to be called a “homo”, but most people didn’t bother with that, they knew you just wanted to have some fun and enjoy the music.
The world of church hall discos expanded into sports clubs and eventually schools. Once you got in, sports clubs were cool since you could buy under age alcoholic drinks with no questions asked, while obviously at the church hall disco the staple drink was Cola. Some school discos were more like snogging contests, the dancing used as a polite introduction. Couples would then be seated all along the walls, french kissing for hours, forgetting the perfunctory disco. Dancing at the time was pretty basic and followed the sedate formula seen on Ready, Steady, Go and then Top of the Pops. Being a good dancer appeared to involve fancy footwork, as if we were all auditioning to be Irish dancers. Yep a few steps forward, a few back, what we would now call Dad Dancing. Occasionally for a rock song there would be a bit more animation from the guys, involving leaning over and shaking the head to and fro. If you were lucky a bit of jumping might be acceptable.
This was the situation at my first school disco, where I finally experienced proper rock music and managed to dance to it. The excitement was palpable when any of the following records were played: Summertime Blues by The Who, Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Black Night by Deep Purple. We felt we were experiencing the dawn of a new age, the search was on for “heavy” music, which was at the cutting edge of our adolescent experiences. This music belonged to us, our parents could not comprehend it. Near the end of that sweaty night, the lights suddenly came on, a Stanley knife had been found on the floor. There was often an undercurrent of violence at these dance venues, which you could put down to peer groups, nascent gangs or just the basic enmity between different schools. I avoided all this macho posturing as much as I could, but you had to be aware of when the trouble might start. My school did not hold another disco.
Another key dancing experience was at a Caravan Park in Woolacombe, Devon. For the first time I went on holiday with friends and not parents. As part of the provided entertainments there was a nightly disco, designed for families and bar regulars. The most popular song was Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road, need one say more. However during the evening there was usually a Rock interlude, and then the 5 of us would take over the dancefloor, trying to outdo each other. There were no girls to dance with and we didn’t care, this was a celebration of youth culture and showing off. Hardly anybody else wanted to dance to these songs anyway, but we loved In My Own Time by Family, Devils Answer by Atomic Rooster and Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. After a few days we knew every word and electric chord and were jumping all over the place, fuelled by the local cider. I spent some time perfecting my split leg jumps to the power chords of Pete Townshend, it wasn’t easy to do that on time. The locals managed to put up with us, maybe we were deemed part of the entertainment. Of course, being under age, we couldn’t dance anywhere else.
Shortly after this the music scene was hit by T.Rextasy, all the girls seemed to love Marc Bolan. For a time T.Rex seemed to be all there was to dance to, and I did quite like Get It On and Hot Love. However it all seemed a bit retro and vapid, lacking in funk. At the time the Charts were a battleground, we all had our favourites, which helped define our personalities. At 6pm on a Sunday there was the Top 30 Chart Show on Radio 1, which was listened to in both horror and amazement, depending on who got to Number 1. Bizarrely it was followed by Sing Something Simple, as if to calm us all down. Over on television there was Top of the Pops on the following Thursday, where T.Rex had made their name with Marc wearing glitter and make-up. My most vivid memory of watching the show was the day my father declared the end of British civilisation while watching Sweet. Maybe he had missed the wondrous transgressions of David Bowie. Slowly TOTP seemed to become even more of a marketing exercise, with the real music appearing on Old Grey Whistle Test, where the groups actually played their own instruments, although there was less dancing on view.
Santana Annunciation by Mati Klarwein – Cover of Santana Abraxas
And then came my Latin revolution. At the time I did not even realise I was listening to Latin music, it was all Rock to me of a particularly funky variety, with beautiful guitar playing. I am talking about Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen by Santana. I already knew and liked the original Fleetwood Mac version, but this was the song that started a new dancing style, my hips took on a life of their own. The break as they segue into Gypsy Queen and the tempo slowly increases was like a magic potion to me. I could certainly dance to this on my own, in fact usually had to, since I was behaving like some kind of whirling dervish. The first time was in Southport Rugby Club, surrounded by muscle men. Vague sense of danger, but I was kindly regarded as some kind of hippy loon. Only rarely was this record played in discos at the time, so you had to make the most of it. I believe I certainly made the most of it a few years later at a disco bar in Biarritz and upset the locals. Out of the blue I was punched to the dancefloor and received a good kicking, dancing can be a dangerous business. With shouts of pédé ringing in my ears, I hightailed it out of there, to be met with much tea and sympathy. I am still dancing to Latin music, but a bit more aware that the dancing style should match the situation.
Now all this is not exactly Idiot Dancing, that was yet to come. However I wrote the phrase “Bring Back Idiot Dancing” on my work folder around this time. I was already feeling I had missed the Sixties, that the craziness I had witnessed in the film Woodstock had disappeared and we were stuck in a kind of anodyne normalcy, behaviour could only go so far. I was proved wrong, yet by this time I had been to some exceptional rock concerts by The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, but these were not dance events, there was no raving. At concerts you had to go right to the back to dance, you couldn’t dance properly in a packed, seated venue, let alone stand up. Of course at a good concert, you all jumped out of your chairs for the last song or encore and shimmied about, but you cannot call that proper dancing. Later at non-seated venues like Pathfoot at Stirling University I began to experience the mass psychosis and craziness that a thousand people raving together could bring on.
So now, for the time being, Rock became predominant. Everything else seemed lightweight, if not uncool. I was schooled by Darrell Jay’s Progressive Music Show at the Dixieland Showbar on Southport Pier, a huge ballroom. Here we preened to Rebel, Rebel by David Bowie, but eschewed the southern rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can you dance to Be Bop Deluxe? Only with difficulty I found out. Meanwhile at Stirling University there was a free disco every night in the most amazing Student’s Union, The Grange. There was a bar, then some seats and tables alongside the DJ booth. In the middle of this large room there was a dancefloor, and then at the back, raised up and in the dark, sat all the dope dealers. Here the beer was 9d a pint or about £1 today (it was subsidised) and dope cookies were available on Tuesdays. So yes dancing nearly every night to all forms of rock known to man in 1973, as well as a fair bit of soul and then some plain weird stuff. The dancefloor was only about 5 metres wide and could become absolutely rammed, but anything went there. I learned how to dance in a confined space and still enjoy myself. I befriended the DJ’s to find out how they chose their music, but they were not very informative. Still in my second year I became the DJ Convenor for Stirling and managed the discos at Pathfoot, which would open a few days a week after the Grange closed at 10pm. We had 2 turntables, but usually no microphone. People could bellow in your ear for requests. The must play record was Alright Now by Free, not forgetting Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones and Layla by Derek and the Dominos. I would try to slip in the heaviest song I knew, The Nile Song by Pink Floyd. However this was only available on the Relics album, side 2 track 4, and was very difficult to cue up in the darkness, so I often gave up. Also I would attempt to slip in a few tracks which I wanted to dance to, although vacating the DJ turntables was frowned upon. Silence was a sin. We danced to my selection of the hits, which I had a budget to choose and purchase every week.
Around this time I met Eric (and his pet rat), who was a big Northern Soul fan. Wow he could dance and in a totally new way, gliding around like a cool well oiled machine, none of that stomping and angular histrionics found in the student rock fan. I then discovered that people liked what they knew, and inserting a Northern Soul section into my playlist did not go down well with a writhing mass of drunken students at Pathfoot. This was old soul music and not regarded as cool, though on the other hand they loved It’s Better To Have (And Don’t Need) by Don Covay and demanded Superstition by Stevie Wonder. Not to be put off, I found some smooth leather soled shoes, which could allow you to swish around a wooden dancefloor, with your feet never leaving the ground. All the action became contained in the hips, incredibly fast and smooth. This was my home made version of the style used at Wigan Casino (without the dips), which I succeeded in trying out at the disco behind the Scarisbrick Hotel in Southport. However I soon found out this style did not work for Rock or on carpets, and I never plucked up the courage to go to Wigan Casino itself. There was also a high risk of ending up on your arse, if you got over excited.
Talking of gliding around, I did learn to waltz while working in France and it was wonderful. Well it was just one night, and the elderly teachers at the Lycée where I was working took me on board and taught some basic steps. Of course I was never leading, but by the end of the evening I was floating round the room, aided by some glasses of Crémant. It was never as good again. Everyone in France appeared to have gone to dance school, it was all Le Roc (a form of swing and jive dancing), there was no freeform or solo dancing. Eventually I approximated a clumsy form of this, using my waltz steps, but felt constrained and I constantly went off-piste, which did not go down well. What happened to the Rock revolution I wondered, it was like dancing in the 50s. I did not want to remember steps but to express myself. It felt like being one of the regimented souls on the original Come Dancing, which I despised. There was one fantastic night in Paris at a small sweaty club watching the crazy rock group Au Bonheur des Dames (like Sha Na Na meet Bonzo Dog Band) perform Oh Les Filles, the crowd intermingling and dancing like people possessed for the whole set, no sign of Le Roc, but plenty of hand holding, hip swinging, clapping and shouting. Magnifique!
Then came Punk, I cut my hair and loved the spirit, but you could hardly call it dance music, more like a mosh pit of anger and idiocy. You can only pogo up and down in one kinda way. As mosh pits go, Grannies in Cardiff with Stiff Little Fingers was pretty intense. Ian Curtis of Joy Division was certainly a mesmerising performer to watch, which I did at The Nashville Rooms in Kensington, but there were only a few tracks such as Transmission which I wanted to dance to. Soul music was the guilty pleasure of my Punk years. This was reinforced by going to see John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, which I secretly loved and introduced me to K.C. and the Sunshine Band, but it was regarded as deeply unhip by my punk counterparts. The Disco wars had started and never the twain shall meet. That did not stop me from buying a Chic 12” on the same day as a 7” single by the Clash. I can fairly say that Shame by Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King is one heck of a record, but I might not have proclaimed that back in the day. I had missed the early records of Michael Jackson, but when I first heard Billie Jean it was electrifying. Down the empty disco I had no-one to dance with, so I ended up dancing with a pillar. Since then I have regularly used pillars as dancing partners, you can hang onto them or swing round, push away or nudge up to them. At a squeeze, walls can also provide a platform to bounce off or get close to, I love dancing with walls. If needs must, you understand.
There is a certain unwritten etiquette involved when you dance in public. Firstly you have to choose your space carefully, a favourite of mine was the gap in front of the speakers. If it’s too busy there try and carve out a space on the edge or in the shadows, which allows you to manoeuvre into a better position. Try not to come between couples or break into groups, unless invited. Once there, at least make an effort to synchronise your movements in some way or another, a lot of good dance moves are learnt by copying others. Lots of eye contact, respect all around and make clear your intentions. Sometimes I would dance with other people, at other times just on my own to get lost in the music. If there’s a pack of wild dancers down the front, head in and join them, it’s a communal activity after all, and give everyone the space they need as you interweave. Watch out for and avoid the flailing drunks, just move on if you feel uncomfortable. The worst mistake is standing on other people’s toes, always apologise. My biggest bugbear is people just standing there, not properly dancing, like some kind of bollard taking up valuable dancefoor space. Participate in those good times!
Falling out of love with the bombastic nature of Rock, it was African music that came to the rescue. The first real soukous music I heard was by Franco & T.P.O.K. Jazz, but it was his countryman Kanda Bango Man who I got to see and fell in love with. He appeared at WOMAD in the I.C.A, and the Africa Centre in Covent Garden, no seats there and room to dance. Nearly every song was an exhortation to dance, by the dynamic frontman. The revelation was the interweaving of the guitar line by Diblo Dibala, the very fluidity of his playing encouraging you to nearly ignore the rhythm and simply follow his swaying melodies raining down on you like an excited waterfall. Wikipedia says of Kanda Bongo Man “His form of soukous gave birth to the kwassa kwassa dance rhythm where the hips move back and forth while the hands move to follow the hips.” Reggae was also becoming popular, but that required a very laid back shuffle after a few blunts, not quite my animated style. Much more to my taste was Papa’s got a brand new Pigbag, an anarchic mix of tribal rhythms, James Brown bassline and funky jazz. I then tried Sol Y Sombra , a world music club in Charlotte Street, London, but it was all a bit fey and earnest dance wise, for me at least. The search was on.
Heaven. That was what proved me wrong. Heaven was a Cathedral of Dance, and probably still is. This is a gay club underneath the Arches at Charing Cross, London. The entrance is down an intimidating tunnel and to gain admittance you had to demonstrate you were gay, in which I falsely succeeded. Once inside there was a luxurious bar area and then the most cavernous dance hall I had ever seen. Not only that, the sound system was poundingly 3D loud, my bones were vibrating, while the lighting spread the length of the entire hall scanning and pulsating in time to the hi-energy music. The place was full of men, only men, frugging as if their life depended on the music, amazing dancers of all types. They carried on regardless all night, showing off their moves in a splendid array of S&M costumes. It was all bit much for little me, if not intimidating, but upstairs there was a chill-out bar with occasional live music where I could relax. This apparently was a superclub, I had never seen the like of it, dancing had arrived and was simply massive. All that came later (House, Raves, EDM) pales into insignificance with this first revelation, I have never been in a more amazing dance venue. I went back many times, saw friends performing upstairs, New Order downstairs, and my best man was the star of the first gay play performed there. I was also called out by a good gay friend for going there when I wasn’t gay, I didn’t care. Nevertheless I did not always feel at ease dancing there, it was all a bit motorik after a while, plus I was me on my own usually and felt a bit exposed, had to keep moving around, it was a predatory place. I was not part of the club, just a visitor. I remember going to The Fridge in Brixton and seeing Leigh Bowery, but he was a fashion icon rather than a dancer, plus I just wasn’t in the mood for dancing that night. Still, if you wanted to dance, gay clubs were the place to be in the early 80s.
Jesus at Great British Music Festival, Olympia 1976.
There is no doubt who was the greatest idiot dancer. It was Jesus aka William Jellet, who really was an idiot, or at least severely misguided. Some of his quotes include “I never wanted to be Jesus, but I realised I was”; “Music has been used by God to open up people to find their true spiritual selves.”; “I’m completely free of the forces man has created, which stop him from being himself”; “If you want to know the truth, listen to Jimi Hendrix”. From the late sixties onwards and for many decades he would be the first man standing at a gig, his long blond hair waving over his kaftan (if he was wearing clothes that day), freaking out to the music in a sepulchral manner. He appears in several films of the period, including Cream’s last 1968 performance at The Albert Hall, The Stones in the Park in 1969 and the 1971 Glastonbury Fayre. One acquaintance said he told her that he loved Isadora Duncan and admired her for her free dance form, and that it was his bounden duty to dance. I first saw him at the Reading Festival in 1974 and forever after he would crop up at a huge variety of venues, even at punk gigs, although his preference appeared to be for the hippy era bands. He was often greeted with an ironic cheer when he stood up to start dancing, sometimes with maracas or bongos, and he was a regular at The Marquee in Wardour Street. For me he was an inspiration, the first man standing and you always felt he was behaving out of a sense of admiration for, and surrender to, the music. There is an excellent article about his life and crazy times by J.P. Robinson at Medium, from which these quotes are taken. There was also Stacia Blake, who danced with Hawkwind, but I think you would have to call her a professional, I presume she was paid. The same goes for Bez with Happy Mondays, a few decades later. Another public figure who I saw dancing like a dervish was Gareth Sager of Rip, Rig and Panic. This stands out since we were at an Ornette Coleman gig in the Victoria Theatre, Pimlico. Usually no-one dances at free jazz gigs, although this time there were two drummers and a pounding bassline from the album Dancing in your Head. It was a lesson that you could really dance to anything.
I may not be a trained dancer, but I did follow some movement courses. For nearly a year I had to move like an Orangutang every morning at 10am. This was part of theatre training at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, where I also learned some basic tumbles and acrobatics. These classes have stayed with me and certainly influenced my dancing. I also met my first professional dancers there, truly dedicated and fit people, even if they were always getting injured. They used to rehearse to the great roots album The Path by Ralph MacDonald, a percussionist influenced by both Trinidad and New York. It was at this time that Mike Bradwell of Hull Truck Theatre impressed me by saying his actors never went to the gym, but down the disco instead. Indeed, the BBC has stated that dancing is one of the best ways to reverse the ageing process. Years later I spent a good few years studying Tai Chi, I took those dexterous hand movements and incorporated them into my style, to the extent that I now dance a much speeded up version of that art form, with a bit of clapping included. I also worked with some professional dancers in theatrical and alternative productions. Again their work ethic was second to none, but they were useless down the disco, maybe it was too much like work. I saw Ballet Rambert in in 1976 doing proper modern dance, loved them. Later the seminal Michael Clark with The Fall at Sadlers Wells showed me how disparate art forms could work together, while my modern dance favourites were The Featherstonehaughs. The greatest dancer I ever saw was Louise Lecavalier of La La La Human Steps performing Human Sex in 1985 at The Town and Country Club, Kentish Town, London. Incredibly physical and acrobatic to a pounding, fractured live rock soundtrack. A thousand barrel rolls, a thousand swoops and swings, this was a work of unfettered abandon. Closer to home my flatmate was in Zoo, the hip TOTP follow up to Pan’s People, now he could dance and do the dips, great fun! My dance style is the culmination of all these influences, I hope.
It is important to remember why I was going out to these clubs. As opposed to most of my friends, I was not trying to pick anyone up, get drunk or score drugs, though that may have happened. If there was no dancing, or I just stood watching, the evening was a disappointment. Many a time at a party I retreated into a corner and started dancing with myself. There would be no dancing if I didn’t like the music, I was strict about that, but as you have seen I would dance to nearly anything. Sometimes though I just wasn’t inspired, you had to feel the music begin to pulse through you, get ready for take-off, then make your move. At other times the music was so funky I just had to start the dancing, get the party started. Dancing is like a virus, someone has to get infected. These were often the best moments, you had to find your style for that moment, be totally engaged, prove the validity of the music. And of course one was on show, so you did your best in the circumstances. Too much flailing or being too fast would put off the other dancers, this had to measured, you were aiming for mass participation. I often failed.
There are many ways to dance to songs and sometimes it is the very words which become the expressive root. I was in a small back street bar in Antiparos, Greece called The Doors. As the night progressed tables were cleared and the tiny floor became a writhing mess of bodies, with people also perched on the bar and chairs, shaking along to the music. As expressed by the name, this was a rock venue, and unexpectedly the highpoint was Hurricane by Bob Dylan. This is not a dance song, but a story song, and the words became the source of the movement. I knew every word and proceeded to act them out, howling the key lines along with Bob. A similar experience happened with Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen at The Boogaloo on Archway Road in London. The very intonations of the words can provide the rhythm for dance. It is your choice what aspect of a song to dance to, usually it is the percussion, sometimes the bassline. If a song feels a bit slow pick out the tambourine or congas, they are often at double tempo. The problem with a lot of electronic dance music it that it mandates the rhythm, you are locked in with no real variation for minutes on end, I soon get bored. Dancing should be dynamic, not formulaic.
This is a description of my behaviour at a jazz venue, Cafe Oto for example. I am sitting down because that’s what you do. I still can’t believe how static people are listening to live music. I know some people don’t like to dance, in particularly many of my musician friends, yet I get a strong physical reaction necessitating movement. The music plays, light rhythm, singer songwriter on electric guitar with cool amplified foot beat. The audience sit there like Easter Island statues, kinda riveted and not moving. Out of the corner of my eye I see a lady holding a glass. There is one finger tapping it. I am a mess of subdued kinetic movement. Right now my head is sharply flicking maybe five degrees every few seconds, mainly to the left. My arse is constantly shifting weight in time to the music, the muscles there causing a rolling motion in my torso. The shoulders too are rolling, moving back and forth about one to two centimetres. Legs currently stationary, being careful with a bottle under the chair. All quite contained. I look around again, no one is moving. A few minutes later I have shifted position and my legs are at about 90 bpm, bouncing on the toes. My head has calmed down. No one else is moving. Are we listening to the same music? Why am I the only person moving?
Maybe after that I should provide a little list of my own great dance experiences, although you have to imagine them since talking about dancing is even worse than trying to describe music. OK, dancing barefoot on hessian mats to the Ace Records soul extravaganza (featuring Jimmy McCracklin), feet a mass of blisters the following day and I could hardly walk. Dancing calypso with a Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, cruelly assassinated a few years later. On La Isla Bonita with squaddies in Belize, quite competitive. In China dancing solo in a an empty venue the size of Camden Palace with a 16 piece band – just to show them how it’s done. Down Philip Sallon’s Mud Club, in various London venues, all of a haze now. Standing on the chairs at the Royal Festival Hall as the crowd erupts over Khaled, all night. The Tropicana Beach Club, off Drury Lane, non stop samba party, and what a great dance club! Freaking out to The Hives at the back of The Roundhouse. The bass speakers at Cargo in Hackney going right through me, giving me palpitations. Bukky Leo at Passing Clouds in Dalston, packed full of Fela Kuti rhythms. The Big Chill and Womad festivals, too many events to remember. Most recently at a Disco Soul night in Hornsey Town Hall, for maybe the last time. Lots of kudos from the young people that evening. Many a time I have been asked what drugs I am on, or whether I have some to sell. The answer is always “Nothing. I am high on the music, Thank You”.
When I say Idiot dancing, I am referring to a totally freeform type of movement in response to the music. It can be of any style, but energised with a sense of wildness, even danger. I love kinetic performers, reacting to their music. The best recent example is Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands dancing to Seasons (Waiting On You), as seen on the Jools Holland TV programme. I dashed out and bought the record, trying to incorporate some of his moves into my own style. Another revelation was Beyoncé on her first solo hit Crazy In Love, that performance turned her into a star, every word actuated with movement. Certain records instantly make me want to dance, for many years the best was Boogie Wonderland by Earth, Wind and Fire, at other times Finally by Ce Ce Peniston or Too Blind To See It by Kym Sims. A certain record can just click into place, it consumes you, you forget yourself and life can’t get better. This has happened dancing to Step It Up by the Stereo MC’s, My Baby Just Cares for Me by Nina Simone and You Get What You Give by New Radicals. You have to get involved to get the feeling, the unexpected are often the best, trust the DJ and follow his lead. “Enjoy this trip and it is a trip” said S-Express on one of the craziest and most stupid dance records ever, a glorious meaningless wind-up. It has all calmed down a bit these days, so to conclude on an elegiac note here is a quote from the album Record – Nine euphoric feminist bangers from Tracey Thorn – or so says the sticker.
Dancefloor by Tracey Thorn (2018)
Play me Good Times, Shame Golden Years, let the music play It’s where i’d like to be Is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me Oh it’s where i’d like to be
So I read back in 1976 that it was the madeleines that brought back the memories. As a young man I could understand that, even though I had fewer memories to draw on. The book after all was called À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, and the personal romanticism was endearing. Yes the 1920s, and so it seemed all time, were defined by the depth and power of that novel. This was the place that structured and held our memories, through the pages of a book we could visit and imagine the lives of others and our relationship to them, even use them as ciphers for own lives and feelings. This was a romantic notion which has not fully stood the test of time and the vicissitudes of experience. I now regard novels as a form of emotional manipulation, I can see the scaffolding, the agenda to influence our behaviour, playing with our emotional involvement for the benefit of ‘the story”. However this was relatively anodyne compared with my music problem, as we shall see.
I was not prepared for the way that music has locked itself into my brain and made me behave like some automaton, like a Pavlov’s dog who salivates with the correct stimulation. This is more direct and visceral than a novel, it seems to lie at a deeper more primal level, hence I have even less control over it. All the major events of my life have their soundtrack, after all I grew up at a time when music became the predominant cultural, outlaw influence. For my parents there was a relief at just escaping the ravages of war, and for them cinema had been the revolution, the cultural signpost to a better life. But by the late 60s the cultural signifier was something my parents could not understand – Rock Music.
Incomprehensible to them, it has now become a cultural norm. This music that then seemed so outlandish, hidden in corners, has through acclimatisation and advertising, been made into the ultimate capitalist’s dream. You can sell the same stuff again and again, through vinyl records, cassettes, cd’s, the box set and now Spotify. Rock Music won that cultural war. Punk, the ultimate fuck off music, now sounds like tinny pop. (Fuck off, the ultimate insult, is now printed in the Guardian and repeated regularly on TV, so has also lost the power). Perhaps as a result I love free jazz, the final bastion of fuck off music, but don’t really want to listen to it at home, you need the atmosphere, the thrilling moment of improvisation.
But back to my problem, certain songs trigger emotions I can’t control, even though I despise them. As a kid I loved The Beatles, then for 20 years I could not bear them and never listened to them. In the 90s I had kids and suddenly The Beatles were catnip, they could not lose and they still can’t. Somehow every word, every strum, every bit of enthusiasm had become part of me, I even do a passable imitation of Ringo (talking not drumming). I feel forced to resist their jolly banality, yet somehow they always win, I am in too deep to betray them. All you need is love they sing, with just enough knowing, enough edge. Imagine… all the sounds they made were unconsciously baked within me and now I am stuck with it – I just can’t get you out of my head, as the song so accurately says. And there is the point, life has become a series of hummed song titles, signifying nothing. Personally, I believe the rot set in with Queen, the first content free, yet highly competent rock band. They had nothing to say, but you could certainly hum along.
In fact this phenomenon was given a name in the 80s (when pop music transitioned from rebel to mainstream), the earworm. This has now become a medical condition related to OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and can be severely distressing. For some these involuntary musical imagery attacks can last several days. There is no known cure, apart from chewing gum (a distraction activity). I do not suffer personally from this form of distress, but am certainly prey to earworms, often expressing themselves as a constant and unconscious humming. This is often more annoying for those around me, since I am hardly aware I am doing it. In general earworms are transitory, may well be pleasant, and experienced by most people at some time. It appears to be the case that the more music you listen to, the more likely you will be subject to earworms. In our current streaming media age we are all vulnerable, indeed that appears to be the intention.
So now that pop music is endemic in our culture, I can be caught out and manipulated by just hearing a few bars in a shop, on an advert or East Enders. Memories come flooding back, like some kind of mind control. They slowly devalue the original, often romantic, memory, leaving me bereft, as if my privacy has been invaded. In a sense it has been, since the songs now have a different, twisted agenda – to manipulate my emotions or simply to sell me something. Certain events in my life are so keyed into a song, that the song has become the physical representation of them, to the detriment of the actual event. In particularly some girlfriends in my past life stand before me as soon as I hear “their song”, that has somehow come to represent them. I am no longer in control of this process, I feel abused. Once upon a time these songs were outside the culture, personal and secret, now they are just part of the machine we have lost control of. Unbelievably there was once a thrill to hear pop music in a shop like Biba, since the only other place to regularly hear it was on pirate radio. Now we are just surrounded, the muzak is universal, turning rebellion into money.
Earworm Songs, an abridged personal list
Can’t Buy Me Love : The Beatles
All you need is Love : The Beatles
Instant Karma! : John Lennon
Gimme Some Truth : John Lennon
All Right Now : Free
In The Year 2525 : Zager and Evans
Suzanne : Leonard Cohen
Sweet Jane : Velvet Undergound
(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais : The Clash
Into the Valley : The Skids
Ever Fallen In Love : Buzzcocks
We Will Rock You : Queen (A Top 20 Earworm)
A Love Supreme : Will Downing
Too Blind To See It : Kym Sims
Can’t Get You Out of My Head : Kylie Minogue
Swords of a Thousand Men : Ten Pole Tudor (Current TV Ad)
Every generation believes it is at the cutting edge, that we know everything we need to. It appears the society we live in could be made no other way, that progress has been made to get us to this apogee of civilisation. Both the Greeks and the Aztecs appear to have believed they had found the answers, as do most “civilised” societies, wherever they may be. No doubt Christians in the middle ages were glad to have resolved the mysteries of creation and to have a book of God’s laws they could believe in. Pity the poor pagans making pointless sacrifices, or the barely civilised natives of South America, they would not be going to Heaven. For in that moment God had given us all the answers. Come the industrial revolution and modern science, huge progress was made and the daily grind became steadily more distant. There were sewers, machines that milled and a better form of transport than the horse. We finally knew the shape of the world and could communicate across it, what more did we need? All we could eat was in a shop nearby.
Now we are in a new era of instant communication, we have atomic power and have visited the moon. We understand our own recipe, DNA, and can scan our own brains. The Universe started with the Big Bang and has been mapped. We even have the power to destroy our own planet. What more do we need to know?
That is the hubris of the human condition. We only see what we know and look back in pity and despair on our deluded forebears. Yet the world moves on dynamically outside our ken, at it’s own glacial speed, in ways we have yet to fathom. While we are proud to have split the atom and discovered the Higgs boson, we already sense this this is just the tip of the quantum iceberg. When we discovered the power of splitting the atom we thought we had solved our energy needs and in the rush of that discovery huge mistakes were made. Many lives were lost. Controlling nuclear fission turned out to be much more complicated than we had ever dreamed, while the cost of nuclear waste disposal turns out to be higher than the cost of nuclear reactor construction.
There is a universe of quantum effects which defeats our senses and understanding. Our logical and classical consciousness cannot comprehend matter which has properties of both waves and particles. Put simply, the quantum world is invisible, antithetical and incomprehensible to us. Einstein himself, a founder of quantum physics, had a great deal of difficulty with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, believing that “He (god) does not play dice”, and this conundrum has yet to be fully resolved. Nevertheless the existence of quantum entanglement or as Einstein called it ”spooky action at a distance” has not been disproven. Thus instead of becoming more comprehensible our sense of the world is slipping away into multiverses, live or dead cats and the flapping of a butterflies wing which can change everything. There are no longer truths, only possibilities. Maybe space itself has an atomic structure, currently unknown to us. We are moving into a world we cannot see, our senses blind to the machinations of the quantum world. Until recently we did not need to know this information to survive, the evolution of our senses has failed to keep up with our theoretical knowledge. In this situation mistakes are easily made.
Now we are aware of it, the effects of Quantum Mechanics, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, appear all around us. Your USB stick uses quantum tunnelling, as does in effect the light switch, never mind the laser, transistor and LED bulb. That all seems quite sensible, but a new field is opening up called Quantum Biology, telling us that quantum effects are an integral part of living phenomena. So we think we know everything, but cannot explain the sense of smell. There are quantum effects at work here, and the harder you look, the more they start cropping up everywhere. It is a matter of asking the right questions. The tennis player can hit a ball that theoretically he has not had time to react to. A dog can smell things that aren’t there. A human eye can detect a single photon. Animals can navigate using the inclination of the magnetic field of the earth. These phenomena are believed to be caused by quantum effects. Indeed, quantum wave function collapse might be the root of our consciousness. Most vitally of all photosynthesis (used by all plants) appears to use quantum coherence. In other words, we really know nothing about how the world really works down at the atomic level. We may have an inkling, but there is a whole new science here to be discovered, which will in turn make what we believe now into a vaguely ridiculous approximation. Yes our descendants will laugh at our naivety, and so it will continue.
Update 09/05/21
Our profound lack of self-knowledge is explained in the book The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb (2020). We have no idea how the panoply of medicinal drugs (Librium, Vallium, SSRi’s) actually work. We do know the mind invents what we perceive, just one example being the invisible blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. Put simply, if we do not know how the brain works, how can we really know anything. Despite a solid bedrock of understanding, we have no clear comprehension about how billions, or millions, or thousands, or even tens of neutrons work together to produce the brain’s activity. Or as Olaf Sporns has put it: Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding.
Matthew Cobb finishes his Introduction with this sentence: The four most important words in science are “We do not know”.
Without countries, the whole question of nationality dissolves. Nearly all countries have been invented in the last few hundred years. Germany and Italy only became nation states in 1871. The Act of Union creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was passed by Parliament in 1800. The United States of America was named in 1776, but only became the country we know today in the mid 19th century. If you look at France it is even stranger. From a series of completely separate fiefdoms with different languages, after the revolution of 1789 they gradually became a unified country, with one language mandated by 1880. This unification and language normalisation all took a long time. In the 1940s, more than one million people in France still spoke Breton as their first language. Until you all speak the same language, you really shouldn’t really be called a country. So France was hardly what we would now call a country until maybe the 1950s. The same goes for many other countries, excluding Belgium of course, which has three official languages in various dialects. Canada also has two official languages, French and English, yet it has managed to remain a unified country. This is a complicated subject.
Does a language define a country? Well maybe it should, for how else can you do it? Obviously where someone is born no longer defines nationality. It is a matter of chance, we could be born anywhere, and often are. Place of birth does have a bearing on our cultural beliefs and behaviour, but not in a readily definable way – it all depends on our personal history. The fact is that language is a primary factor, since the structure of language already contains a hidden and unconscious stack of social rules and behaviours. You only have to look at the structure of a particular language to see it echoed in actual social behaviour – 84% of Dutch people do not believe you are Dutch unless you speak Dutch. Language has become the defining cultural factor of what we call nationality.
Following this reasoning, in a world where English is now the first or second language for most people, the so called English aka American language is about to take over. Soon we will all be “English”. Mandarin Chinese may be spoken by more people, but it is not a numbers game, it is an influence game. Many African countries are now adopting English as their first language, for economic reasons. In the light of this information the United Kingdom’s departure from any influence over the European Community seems like a betrayal of historic partnerships. We have already won the battle of language, now we retreat? However, slowly, with many bumps in the road, we are all coming together, becoming one, like it or not. News, sport, music and cinema are already global concerns.
The evident craziness of the country concept becomes obvious at the level of sport. Now the passport of the sportsman is up for grabs, following rules which can change, and are different for each sport. Many English sport-stars were born in another country, became naturalised here, and became English. I’m referring to Johanna Konta from Australia, Mo Farah from Somalia, Linford Christie from Jamaica, for example. My mother was born in Indonesia and my uncle in Peking; they both represented Scotland at university level athletics. But of course now they could represent China, Scotland, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Borneo, England or nearly any other country in the world, depending on their residency history. Neither ancestors nor place of birth define your sporting nationality, there are choices to be made. So in the recent European Championships, Israel is represented by Lonah Chemtai Salpeter, a Kenyan runner who has lived in Israel for eight years, Turkey is represented by Jak Ali Harvey from Jamaica, who previously had run for Jamaica at high school level. Of course in football, with so much money running around, the rules are even more byzantine. That is presuming a footballer worth £10 million can get a visa.
Of course if you are rich enough, the world is your oyster. Indeed for the super rich there are still no countries, nationality is just another commodity. Citizenship can be bought in over 20 countries round the world. Even in the USA, so mindful of immigration, residence is awarded to foreign nationals who invest $1m in the economy and create 10 full-time jobs for US citizens within two years of arrival. If you want to live in Europe you can buy an EU passport in Malta for only 650,000 euros. In the UK may I suggest joining the Tier 1 Investor Programme with £2,000,000 in your pocket. Come on down, join our country!
The entire concept of nationality is built on a colonialist concept of the world. Borders were invented by Victorians drawing lines on a map, now we have to live with these arbitrary lines as if they were god-given. Of course they slice through many tribes and communities, which the Victorian map-makers often had no notion of. Only 70 years ago a line was drawn partitioning India into two countries, along religious lines, and over 14 million people were displaced. The most nefarious effects have been in Africa, leading to ongoing conflicts, most recently in Sudan, but their blight can also be vividly seen in the Middle East.
We have to get over the idea of nationalism, it is meaningless. The recent DNA investigations of our genetic origins make a joke out of our petty racist behaviour. Apparently most English people came from first Northern Portugal, then Middle Europe, Germany and Denmark. We have only been here for 6000 years and the Welsh have more right to be called English, if you follow the law of the soil argument, than most people in Kent, who arrived from Europe more recently. Genetically speaking, Israelis and Palestinians cannot be separated, so why build a wall? We should look at nationality like supporting a football team, a completely arbitrary decision based on random cultural associations and proximity to the ground where the football is played.
It might seem as if I’m saying where you come from does not matter. It absolutely does, it defines our cultural and social identity – you might rise above it, so to speak, but you will never escape it. We are who we are, our identity cannot be subsumed. In our new modern world, our global village, the possibilities seem endless, but they are a chimera. We can’t all just go and live where we want, in our rapid transit world that is a recipe for chaos. Realistically, residency has to be a managed process, however hard that might be. We have yet to come to terms with this new reality, now that you can cross continents in a few hours. The situation where the best educated Asians and Africans came to live in the UK, to work in our National Health Service for example, should be coming to an end. They are needed in their own countries, where they can accomplish so much more. We should no longer be encouraging them to emigrate, but training them so they can return home and improve their own societies. We should all be encouraged to visit, just don’t miss the last bus home.
World government already exists, it’s called the UN, for better or worse. Since 1948 it subscribes to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a cool document in over five hundred languages and it should be taught in all of our schools. The United Nations might still be structured in terms of countries, but the decisions they make are world decisions. That is the only way forward.
Originally stardust
Then bilateral
Now I am Human
I live on Earth, I am an Earthling
I came from Africa
I am a member of the United Nations
I am a European
I am at present a member of the European Union
I am a member of the currently privileged Western Elite
I am a Scotsman
I am a UK citizen
I have the right of abode in the United Kingdom
I was born in Romford, Essex
I may be Scenglish
I do not identify as English, except when England play football
My father was born in Dunfermline, Fife
My mother was born in Sumatra, Indonesia
My brother is a Kiwi
My sons are Jewish UK citizens, soon to become Germans
I am roughly 4% Neanderthal
Some Asians are a bit Denisovan
We are the sole survivors of the genus Homo
We are all Homo Sapiens
97-year-old Sgt Benjamin Ferencz, originally from a Jewish family in Transylvania, helped liberate the death camps in Europe, became a chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court. He is the last surviving prosecutor from the 1947 Nazi Nuremberg Trials.
Following a chance encounter with this inspiring man on the BBC World Service radio programme Hardtalk I have assembled these quotations. He spoke with self effacing honesty, his direct words often laced with a bitter humour.
As he says think about it and act on it.
I served for three years in the United States Army, in every battle from the Battle of the Bulge to the beaches of Normandy, and I tell you there will never be a war without crimes – never – because warfare itself is the biggest crime of all.
We were trying to show people how horrible it is if you take a leader who’s very charismatic, and unquestionably follow him, even to murdering little children. These were educated people; one was a father of five children. They were not all wild beasts with horns.
These were patriots trying to do their duty to protect either their religion, their nationality or their economic security.
They wanted to brag about how many they killed.
War makes mass murderers out of otherwise decent people.
Hell would be paradise, compared to what I saw.
I never tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable, it would have been a practical impossibility.
Vengeance is not our goal.
We have not learnt the lessons of Nuremberg.
The most powerful nations of the world are not yet ready to surrender what they perceive as a sovereign right to use whatever means they perceive to be necessary in order to protect their own interests as they see them.
No politician appears without his flags flying.
For centuries we have glorified warmaking.
We have not learnt that you cannot kill an ideology with a gun.
Use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime.
The world has changed, we’re not throwing rocks anymore, we’re gonna kill everybody.
Think of all the money we are wasting on preserving the outdated nuclear weapons, which nobody knows what to do with and which are obsolete.
My general reasoning is that the world is a small planet. We must share the resources on this planet, so that everyone can live in peace and human dignity, and it can be done. The recognition that we have to move as a unit gave us the EU, it gave us the US, 50 states with very differing opinions. Most wars are fought against another group, the ‘other’. When you are a part of the other, you’re less inclined to attack it.
Law is always better than war.
Law must apply equally to everyone.
The re-education of the human spirit on a worldwide basis is the task before us, and we are doing it.
Fundamental things such as colonialism and slavery, the rights of women, the emancipation of sex, landing on the moon, these were inconceivable not long ago. But miracles can be performed.
“God is always with us even through the storms.. “
Finally here we are at the end of 20 Centuries alone, our greatest fear realised. We are shivering in our new found isolation as the reality dawns that there really is no one out there. For eons human beings have found comfort in a cornucopia of gods who have slowly become more distant and evanescent, until now when they have finally slowly evaporated into the myths of former ages.
Surely no-one really believes that, for example, the Bible is the actual word of god, since we now know who wrote it – the Gospels were written not by disciples or eyewitnesses but by Romans a century after the death of Jesus. As initially the Age of Enlightenment, followed by the observational and predictive nature of science engulfed us, we lost our pagan belief in the supernatural. The initial reasons for our pagan beliefs were swept away piece by piece: the world is round, there is an invisible force called gravity, we are all related, invisible germs do exist, we are a speck on the edge of the universe and amazingly E = mc2. Just as our notion of the universe has expanded, so the gods have inevitably been placed further away. We may not find them for sometime. In my lifetime god was initially living behind a cloud just up there, then perhaps in another dimension or time immemorial, now he is way out beyond the big bang. This is so far away as to be meaningless and certainly not the nearby bearded grandfather figure we initially invented to help soothe our troubled souls.
God Creates Adam, Sistine Chapel 1508 by Michelangelo
Yet the nebulous desire for some sort of supernatural relationship is buried deep in our psyche, as evidenced by our positing of external spiritual influences in nearly all historical societies. Recent times have seen the supplanting of supernatural forces, whether they be ghosts, spirits or gods, with a fresh look to the heavens for salvation. There must be something out there, and we attempt to will it into existence through science fiction. The near universal popularity of Star Wars ($27 billion income) and Star Trek (by 1972 it was being syndicated in 60 countries) demonstrates the contemporary desire to meet an alien, to have a family, to not be alone.
By doing away with our gods and their self-appointed agents we have lost some comfort and certainty in our lives, yet the benefits of freedom from the savagery of the Old Testament and hell-fire damnation are myriad. In the harsh light of our modern scientific reality, there has been a more realistic look at our own behaviour and the mutual responsibilities to our isolated planet, which should eventually have a positive outcome.
Science currently tells us there must, by the law of probability, be more life in the universe. An example of this is the Drake equation, which gives an estimate of the number of civilisations in our galaxy. Since we have yet to find extraterrestrial life we are confronting a new universal existential anxiety: Fear Of No Aliens or FONA. This is not a new idea, but a contemporary restatement of the eternal conundrum “Why are we here?”, which our historical myths and religions have claimed to answer for many centuries. Now if we can’t find those pesky aliens, we will invent them, we are used to doing that. Perhaps it may be better to “unask” the question as some eastern philosophies do.
NASA Mars Spirit Rover Photograph 2008
Once recognised FONA can be seen coursing through our culture in many different guises, from the medieval fear of a godless world to our adoption of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating system. With the decline of violence (cf. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker) and the cultural opposition to xenophobia, we can finally embrace the so called alien and hence make our discovery of it more realistic.
FONA is simply the latest development in a seemingly never ending quest, a more mature yet still perplexing reaction to our perceived place in the universe. Is there anyone out there? We fervently hope so, to the point that we have already invented a panoply of anthropomorphic aliens, just as we once did with our gods. The difference is now that we recognise our own creations for what they are: science fiction. Nevertheless the emotional desire to find the alien/god/creator/teacher remains strongly within our human psyche. It looks like FONA will be with us for some time to come, maybe it always has been.
WMAP image of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, shaped by Quantum Effects
Perhaps we are here with our unique self-awareness just to strive to explore…and one day find those aliens.
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
Stephen Hawking Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)
For further information see The Fermi Paradox
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) saw the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Drake equation, and the lack of evidence for such civilizations.
aka: Where is everybody? • Where are they? • The Great Silence • silentium universi
