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British Art Up North: Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Birmingham

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PART TWO – The Twentieth Century

Walter Sickert - O Nuit D’Amour
Walter Sickert’s O Nuit D’Amour in Manchester shares the unconventional perspective of Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room In Paris (see Part One), one drained of drama. The warm chandelier glow of a restaurant, in which a violinist serenades the diners, is seen through four window panes (frames within the frame) set in the dim, mossy green wall panels (a green which is characteristic of Sickert) and the deeper darkness of the night beyond which takes up most of the composition. The figures inside are blurred and indistinct, and the implied sound of the violin and the buzz of convivial chatter muted by the windows. This heightens the sense of being shut out, of being a remote voyeur of someone else’s romantic evening. The Blackbird of Paradise (1896-8) in Leeds is a portrait of a smiling woman dressed in black, with a black-feathered headdress capping her dark plumage. Her face is painted with thick curving strokes, building up layers of pale foundation and rosy rouge. The scarlet lips and earring contrast with her black outfit. She is presumably one of the performers from the music halls which Sickert frequented in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the Old Bedford being a favourite. This portait differs from his usual compositions which drew on these environs. They tended to incorporate stage surroundings and the seats, stalls and boxes of the theatre itself, along with their occupants. The Miner (1936) in Birmingham is a picture of down to earth romanticism, with the returning miner, face still blackened, embracing his wife at the door, drawing her into a coal-dusted kiss. There is a sense of immediate and passionate need, which can’t wait until he crosses the threshold. Perhaps there has been an accident, and she had feared him dead. The flagon under his arm suggests that there is something to celebrate. The underlying narrative is left ambiguous, allowing us to provide our own details.

Wood in Richmond Park - Spencer Gore
Two artists influenced by Sickert, Spencer Gore and Robert Bevan, have paintings here which move beyond the observational urban scenes which typified the work of the Camden Town and London groups to which they were attached. Bevan made regular trips down to Somerset, staying at a farm in the Blackdown Hills, near the Devon border. Here, he painted rural scenes, often with farmhouses and animals included. In their subtle transformations of the landscape into clearly outlined, angular forms, they adapted the post-impressionism of Cezanne and Gauguin into a particularly English idiom, as can be seen in Dunn’s Cottage (1915) in Leeds. Gore’s Wood in Richmond Park (1913-14), in Birmingham, used the same subdued palette of ochres, olive greens and mustard yellows for its receding ranks of tree boles as he used for his town and city scenes of Letchworth and London. Sadly, it would be one of the last paintings he finished; he caught pneumonia after getting soaked during an outdoor painting session and died on 25th March 1914.

There are a number of works by artists associated with the Slade School of Art in the early part of the century, all of whom were searching for some new means of expression, a break from the traditions of the Victorian age (a search vividly described in David Boyd Haycock's book A Crisis of Brilliance). They wished to evade the orthodoxies of the Royal Academy, but were also suspicious of the official alternatives promoted in Bloomsbury circles by the critic Roger Fry. Fry had organised an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910 called Monet and the Post-Impressionists which introduced the colourful and formally inventive paintings of Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh and, above all, Cezanne to the London art world. Such vivid works, soaked in the light of the Mediterraenean, proved a particular inspiration to artists such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, both of whom were firmly ensconced in the Bloomsbury clique. But to others, they were something to react against, not least because of Fry’s patronage. He was a man who had a strong, opinion-forming influence on the artistic direction of the day, his ideas coming to carry the weight of received wisdom. They were codified in fellow Bloomsbury acolyte Clive Bell’s 1914 book whose declamatory title, Art, seemed to indicate the drawing up of a definitive statement on the state of things, the setting down of a newly established aesthetic. To a new, rebellious and idealistically ambitious generation, Fry was a controlling father figure whose influence they sought to break away from. Richard Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, David Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts all tried to find their own visual style, to depict their own particular experiences of the changing world, their own way of seeing and sense of place, drawing on the example of Cezanne to some extent, and on other more turbulent currents of modernism cutting a swathe across the continent. Stanley Spencer was also at the Slade in the pre-war period, but, as with Francis Bacon, I confess to having a blind spot where his paintings are concerned, and will leave them to the many others who better appreciate his work.

The Vorticists pursued a more radically modern direction than the post-impressionism adapted to English climates by the Camden Town and London groups. They drew on the angular forms and noisy, aggressively self-promoting rhetoric of the Italian Futurists. The latter aspect was a speciality of Wyndham Lewis, never a man to worry unduly about making or keeping friends. Richard Nevinson was a particular Futurist acolyte for a while, and collaborated with the leading (and invariably loud) voice of the movement, Filippo Marinetti, whose spell he had fallen under when he had visited London for an exhibition and accompanying performances in 1912. The English version of the Futurist Manifesto, published in 1914, volubly set itself against almost everything which had gone before and which came to mind. It was swiftly superceded by Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist manifesto, set out in his magazine Blast, which immediately caught the eye with the striking explosive graphic design of its cover. This also set about loudly decrying everything else which had preceded it or which was going on at the time as being a load of old rubbish. Both were inherently macho movements, glorying in manifestos-at-dawn scrapping (whether verbal or physical – the one frequently spilling over into the other). The noise and artillery blast of war was the ultimate expression of its valorisation of the iron poetry, power station noises and harsh factory rhythms of the machine age. First hand experience of the conflict soon put paid to such hollow, strutting rhetoric, however. Nevinson worked with his foreign correspondent father in a Quaker ambulance unit in the first year of the war, tending to French soldiers in a railway shed in Dunkirk, temporarily converted into a hospital ominously known as the Shambles. His painting La Patrie reflects this experience, and put paid to any of the notions of the war as an endeavour of patriotic heroism, the ideals of clean and noble sacrifice promulgated by the relentless propoganda.

La Patrie - Richard Nevinson
Richard Nevinson’s La Patrie (1916) in Birmingham depicts a dark shed filled with bodies, limbs straight lines set at sharply steepled angles. A new admission is being carried in on a stretcher, his legs forming a pyramid which is highlighted by the narrow rectangle of light greyly penetrating the gloom. Features are shadowed, eyeless scars and open-mouthed gashes, set in granitic, sculpted grimaces of pain or vacant gapes of numbed finality. Bandages provide some of the few curved lines in the composition, blood staining their grubby whiteness offering the only hint of primary colour. The clenched fist of the man in the foreground, who stares upward into the darkness, is a spiral of light olive against the surrounding blackness, and forms a focal point (the regard of the man lying on his front to the left also draws our attention to it), embodying the agonies of the bodies massed all around, and of the war at large. This isn’t a field hospital, it’s a morgue, both for those already dead and those who have been left to die. The resemblance to a cattle shed is appropriate. Sadly, Nevinson was to revert to Futurist type shortly after returning home, and was soon bragging about his war experiences, turning them into self-aggrandising tales of personal endurance and daring escapades. La Patrie remains as a powerful depiction of the charnel house reality of the conflict, however. In Silver Estuary (1925) in Leeds, Nevinson offers a pacific version of the blasted landscapes of the Western Front (as depicted by Paul Nash), the serpentine curves of the light-hazed water draw the eye towards the horizon, broken by the upright or gently leaning straight lines of the marker posts. It’s a picture full of light, the direct opposite of La Patrie.

Praxitella - Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis’ Praxitella (1921) in Leeds is a full length seated portrait (positioned on appropriately modernist furniture) of Iris Barry, with the Greek sculptor Praxiteles given a female name. The body spreads out in a series of voluminous folds and pleats exaggerated into vorticist planes, until they look like segmented plates of armour. The dark green lends a mossy aura, like age old growth covering tumbles of rocks in the dank heart of the woods. The striped bands circling the lower skirt and the piping around the hems are a fungal brown which adds to the feel of something which thrives in the shade, away from the sun. This brown is also echoed in the mushroom-like stem which props up the chair arm. The face is verdigrised, like tarnished and weathered copper. It seems shrivelled in comparison to the rest of the body, planted awkwardly on a rolled tube of a neck, the swivelling division marked by another line of fungal brown. Its surface is broken up in the cubist manner, but the blocked-off, clearly outlined facets remain coherent, giving the appearance of sheet metal hammered into an angular mask approximating human features. Red lips pout beneath a sharp cylindrical nose and the beams of yellow eyes peering with cold calculation from beneath half-shuttered lids. Their sensuality is disturbing in its utter disconnection from the rest of the face. The hands, resting in the lap, look gauntlets from a suit of armout, or the chrome, segmented claws of a robot, a term which had been invented a year earlier by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Any resemblance to the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis would be entirely appropriate given that Barry would go on to become the curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s probably fair to say that this isn’t a terribly flattering portrait from the point of view of the sitter, although Barry was a friend of Lewis’. It is a fascinating modern depiction of the human form re-fashioned for the machine age, however.

Pond at Garsington - Mark Gertler
Mark Gertler’s Pond at Garsington (1916) in Leeds provides a contrast between the curved organic forms of the trees and the rectilinear shape of the pond. It’s tilted upward like a mirror, reflecting the world at a slightly off-kilter angle. The bowed bough of a tree on the right hand side is mirrored in the pool, forming a zig-zag border to that side of the frame. The tree in the foreground has a solid, almost bodily presence, with a cockatoo crown and two foliate arms raised in supplication or rude gesticulation. Mark Gertler’s ambiguous relationship with Garsington and the artistic gatherings which Lady Ottoline Morell hosted there is perhaps reflected in the picture. The stillness and lack of human presence in this scene is at odds with the garrulous goings on associated with the place. Gertler was frequently the life and soul of the party, but also suffered from periods of depression and self-doubt. At times he expressed a certain amount of disdain for the social circles in which he moved, at Garsington and elsewhere, whilst generally taking advantage of the opportunities they offered him. This painting suggests a desire for a solitary centre into which he could retreat.

Jazz Party - William Roberts
William Roberts’ The Jazz Party (1923) in Leeds emphasises the solidity of bodies packed into a room in which a party is in full swing, immobile heads reduced to shrunken appendages. Their faces are like African masks, drawing on the same influences which had inspired Picasso and the Cubists. The bodies are jammed together in conglomerations of angles and curves, elbows and asses. Only the figure in the centre breaks free of the dancing mass, his shrugging shoulders and upraised hands suggesting a rapturous response to some soaring trumpet phrase. The cone of the phonograph speaker is pointed directly at the dancing mass, the implied blast of sound seemingly sweeping them into one half of the frame as if it were directing a galeforce gust of wind. The dancers look strangely stiff and joyless, coin slot mouths set in rigidly inexpressive gawps, the masks conjuring a ritualistic air. This is furthered by the group on the right hand side. The pompadoured figure in the upper right grasps his forehead and wails in a seeming agony of emotion. A comforting arm encircles him, its hand placed on his upper arm. Beneath the arching angle of his armpit, another man supports a woman who seems to have fainted, her closed eyes and open mouth suggesting unconsciousness or death. The ecstasy of jazz has produced its own mini-pieta, with the indifferent figures sitting at the table below, dealing cards and playing the records, like Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross.

Double Self-Portrait - David Bomberg
David Bomberg’s Bab-es Siq, Petra (1924) in Birmingham depicts the entrance to the ancient Arabian city carved from the desert mountains. The rocks here are painted in very fleshy tones, the shadowed cleft between the two outcrops, leading into the ancient ruins, taking on a sensual quality. The shadows are illuminated by a single small square of white, as if we are being guided towards this sacred space. Bomberg’s Double Self-Portrait (1937) in Wakefield is a portrait of the artist as a happy and contented man, with beret and stem pipe providing the traditional accoutrements. His face is flushed with a warm pastel glow and his head haloed by a billowing pink cloud. Stripes of purple paint are draped over his shoulder, as if he was wrapped in imperial splendour. Bomberg seems to be feeling good about himself here, perhaps deliberately repudiating the by now clichéd depiction of the artist as tormented bohemian outsider, wracked by the quest for a new vision and totally misunderstood by society at large.

The selection of inter-war works in the left of the two twentieth century galleries in Leeds seems to cluster around the focal point of the Unit One group which Paul Nash established in 1933, and the branching streams which it attempted to channel can also be found in the other museums under scrutiny here. Unit One, a utilitarian name if ever there was one, was intended to bring artists together in order to further the cause of the promotion and development of certain tendencies in modern art. Its membership consisted of Nash himself, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, John Armstrong, John Bigge, Edward Burra, Frances Hodgkins, Edward Wadsworth, and the architects Wells Coates (responsible for the Isokon Flats in Hampstead where Hepworth lived for a while, and the external stairway of which I’m standing in front of in my profile picture) and Colin Lucas. Hodgkins swiftly resigned, his place taken by Tristram Hillier. As tends to be the case with artists, however, ideological conflicts and creative differences soon manifested themselves, and the group didn’t last more than a year. It only managed to stage one exhibition, which was held at the Mayer Gallery in April 1933. Part of the reason was the tension caused by contrary attractions of the twin poles of abstraction and surrealism, which the various members were moving towards, and which many regarded as being mutually exclusive and immiscible.

Still Life (Dolomites) - Ben Nicholson
Nicholson led the branch which favoured an abstraction informed by sculptural and architectural considerations. The admission of architects into the group was a recognition of their importance in forming a recognisable and coherent modernist style which could be combined with and incorporate modernist artforms. Nicholson, Hepworth and others were also influenced by the Russian Constructivists, artists and architects who were by this time written out of the cultural history of their own country since Lenin and then Stalin’s declaration of the supremacy of social realism as the only necessary art of the state. English Constructivism would reach its austere apotheosis in Nicholson’s reliefs, one of which, Construction (1945), was on display in Manchester. Built up from layers of board (a cheap and disposable material) placed on top of each other, painted white or left in their original brown shades, and with perfect circles cut out off centre, these seemed designed to take their place on the clean white interiors of modernist houses or flats; perhaps even one of the apartments in the Isokon. The shifting sunlight would move shadows around the declivity of the recessed circle, giving it a subtly morphing aspect as the day progressed. Still Life (Dolomites) (1950) in Birmingham folds in thinly drawn outlines, including recognisable objects such as a goblet and the stupa-like lid of a teapot or samovar. Small areas of colour create a sense of depth and layered three dimensionality (a certain trompe-l’oeil effect), as well as providing bright bursts of contrast to the prevailing creams and cardboard browns. It has the feel of a die-cut pop-up waiting to be folded out, the frame laid out to become the base.

Figure for Landscape - Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth has attained a degree of widespread recognition and a reputation sustained over a long enough period such that she has now earned a whole artistic space named after her (the Hepworth Wakefield), housing her sculptures in a purpose built gallery in Wakefield, the town in which she was born. Its spacious and light filled upper floor contains works spanning her considerable range, from small, intimate marble groupings, smooth mini-megaliths, through hollowed out, boulder like forms in wood and stone, lines of space and tension marked out with tightly strung threads of string or nylon in the Constructivist, Naum Gaboesque manner, to the models for large scale public structures. These include the metallic framework of Construction (Crucifixion) from 1966 which, with its varying breadths of line, solid and outlined lengths, and red and white blocks of colour acts as an homage to Mondrian, with the addition of a yellow sun disc breaking with his strict adherence to linearity, adding an individual, female circularity; the Winged Figure from 1963, which still perches on the inverted L of its pedestal on the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street, poised to launch into a swooping flight over the sluggish traffic and thronging shoppers; and the Figure (Archaean) from 1959, which leans over with an inquisitive stoop, the oval space beneath its flattened off top acting as a lens to frame whatever lies beyond, inviting focussed observation. The Hepworth collection centres around a number of the maquettes, or sculptural models, which she prepared as guides for bronze casts. One of the most effective of these is Figure for Landscape from 1959-60, which is placed in a window looking out towards the busy ring road rushing by on the other side of the river. In this bleached bone plastercast version, it looks even more like a spectral figure, sheets billowing out around a vaguely human form, a slack, groaning gap where the face should be, the interior a shadowy, gutted hollow. It must have startled a fair few travellers after dark, illuminated momentarily in the headlights of passing vehicles. You can come across one of its verdigrised bronze casts drifting amongst the trees in the grounds of Exeter University, which it has haunted since 1965.

Superimposed Forms - Jessica Dismorr
Jessica Dismorr’s Superimposed Forms (1938) in Birmingham has the simplified abstraction of Nicholson, with a limited, subdued palette and cut out forms resembling the sculptural shapes of Hepworth. The pale creams and browns have the quality of polished marble or rock. The shapes are layered on top of one another, giving them a diaphanous, translucent quality, as if they were floating in some liquid suspension. The straight edges and angles and the sensuous curves rhyme, contrast and interconnect with one another. There’s a hint of figurative elements, of the human form, and the two greyish brown shapes at the back (or is it the front) are like doorways or Romanesque archways upended and laid on one side.

Yellow Balance - John Tunnard
John Tunnard’s Yellow Balance (1937) in Leeds looks like the plans for a mobile sculpture. A long red pin is fixed into a sloping ground, and a taut skein of black and white threads are attached to and join together two forms: a grey, boatlike shape with jutting prow and rising hull, and the yellow wind-filled spread of sail, marked with a plectrum-shaped brown thumb smudge. The grey hull rests on a black, pointed fulcrum, and a wayward swaying and bucking motion is implied, riding the swells of some invisible ocean of the air. An thick black line arcing across the canvas is suggestive of a horizon, with a black spire peering over its brim. It scores through the yellow and grey boat forms, making them seem translucent and evanescent, assemblages of Perspex and cellophane.

Abstract Composition (With String) - Francis Butterfield
Francis Butterfield’s Abstract Composition (with string) (1936) in Leeds has a palette of cubist restraint, its coppery browns and dirty creams along with its textured surface giving it a woody appearance. The straight, plank-like blocks are contrasted with the wandering line of the ‘string’. Some of its amoeboid lobes are shaded in, giving an impression of raised or recessed depth. Circles further offset the straight lines, the lower one also adding a striking element of primary colour. It looks like the mark left by a coffee mug, although this would have to be a particularly bloody cup of java (borscht-filled instead, maybe). A wobbly oval form hovers towards the to of the frame, tilting perilously close to the sharp right angle just below, a proximity which adds an element of tension to the composition (which otherwise is lent a relaxed, easy feel by the slack loops of the string).

The Shore - Paul Nash
Paul Nash was less doctrinaire than some of his Unit One colleagues, and felt the attraction of both abstraction, a kind of post-Voricist geometric ordering of the world into rationalised form, and a surrealist sensibility which introduced the incongruous and the extraordinary into the daylit world. Ultimately, however, his art was always rooted in a sense of place, an intuiting of the spirit which suffused certain special, magical locales. Dymchurch, on the South Kent coast, where he went to live after being discharged from the army, and where he recovered from physical and mental debilitation, provided an environment of prefabricated geometrical rigour, a straight-lined concrete boundary to hold back the surging curve of the sea. This was ideal surrealist territory, as well, with the shore meeting the constructed human world; the edges of the unconscious depths of dream meeting the rational world of conscious sensibility. The flat plane of the beach, an interzone between the two states, features in a lot of British surrealism, appropriately enough for an island nation. In Nash’s 1923 painting The Shore, in Leeds, the edge of the sea is demarcated by a curving line, which we understand to be shifting and unstable. Its colours and reflective surface are contiguous with the sky, and it has more in common with that realm than with the land. The boundary of the human world is marked by rigid and heavily outlined straight lines, which stretch out in angular, wedge-like stretches to the horizon, where a sharp perspective point joins with the curve of the sea. The expanse of sand is divided by parallel black lines, groins with small upright poles which are eventually eradicated by the obscurity of distance. No human form breaks the conjunction of the natural and the constructed, the line and the curve. Other Dymchurch paintings do introduce spectral figures, which glide along the concrete seawalls like apparitions in some of MR James’ stories set on the East Anglian coastline.

Forest 37 (assemblage) in Leeds is formed of wooden glove stands split in two. A diversion into sculpture using found objects, it shows Nash’s allegiance to surrealism. The imagination sees strange forms in everyday items and the broken and discarded, making the ordinary strange (and vice-versa). The appropriated glove stands form the bare, optimal idea of a forest, a dream reduction to symbolic form. Placed with a box frame, they have the feel of a stage set, some strange, Svankmajer-like puppets liable to emerge at any moment. These splintered, blasted trees, resembling the gnarled, petrified forests glimpsed from the train in the Universal horror movie Son of Frankenstein, can’t help but remind us of the devastated First World War landscapes Nash drew and painted, culminating in his stark masterpiece We Are Making A New World.

Nocturnal Landscape - Paul Nash
Nocturnal Landscape (1938) in Manchester reflects Nash’s fascination with megalithic sites. Here, the stones take on semi-organic forms. The stone on the left is heart shaped, a fruit stone, perhaps, whilst that on the right appears to be sprouting a thick shoot. Behind them is another stone which looks like a pruned stem protruding from the earth, a cutting planted in the hope that it might take root. Ragged, flapping sheets of cloud blowing across the evening blue sky almost appear to be emerging from the sheared plane of its surface, angled towards the heavens. The ground they are all planted in or resting upon is barren, however, a parched yellow, either the dry, dead grass of late summer or the hot sands of a desert. The stones themselves look like wind-scoured bone. They cast cool blue pools of shadow, the colour matching that of the sky. On the lower plane to the upper right of the picture, shaded a darker estuarine brown, two standing stones stand sentinel either side of an upright ring, the assemblage resembling the megalithic site Men-an-tol in Cornwall. It has a ritualistic air about it, an atmosphere enhanced by the scrap of moon just above it, a recumbent foetal shape suggestive of incipient rebirth. To the right is another small pile of stones and what looks like the giant shells of dead turtles, something washed ashore from the moonbright sea on the horizon. A line in the sand suggests that it has been dragged here, towards the standing stones. On the upper, arid plane, a trellis on the left adds an incongruous surrealist element (as if the megalithic landscape weren’t in itself inherently surreal), the brown of its wooden struts making some connection with the brown of the ritual plane below. Its geometrical form is more intellectual construction erected to contrast with the primal massing below, is a modern manifestation from a world which puts its faith in the rational. The grid casts a distended moonshadow of itself, looking like the barred door of a prison cell. The shadows of the stones are a more ambiguous, seemingly divorced from the forms which cast them. Their oval and rounded shapes are suggestive of cave entrances into the subterraenean world.

Circle of Monoliths - Paul Nash
The Circle of Monoliths (1938), in Leeds removes the neutral strip of the shore, the interzone dividing land and sea, and has the ocean waves surge across megalithic fields. The two landscapes of dream border each other with no clearly defined boundary. The colours suggest a blurred inversion, the field a greyish oceanic blue and the sea the green of pasture land. The hedgerows continue through the waters in a wedge of narrowing perspective towards the horizon, as if marking out a safe road, a means of magically navigating both media. This pathway ends with a sloping shaft of light, which has the solidity of a thick suspension cable, or an escalator leading to the heavens, as in some posters for A Matter of Life and Death. To the right of the path, what appears to be an inverted tornado draws the water upward in a conical funnel rising from concentric ripples. It resembles an exaggerated earthworks, a melange of Badbury Rings, Old Sarum and a remoulded Silbury Hill. The megaliths in the foreground, emerging from a twilight field of pale china clay blue, are coloured with what looks like painted designs, emphasising contours, hollows and chiselled facets. The large stone in the centre foreground, shaped like a giant molar, is decorated with two circles shaded with red and yellow, black and white, which lends them a spherical aspect; planetary orbs, perhaps, or twinned sun and moon. The three smaller stones stand within red ovals of shadow, as if each had a protective moat of sacrificial blood, or as if they themselves were bleeding at the roots. This red colouration is echoed in the vine which coils around the hedgerow tree like an exposed network of veins. There are significant correspondences between the stones and elements of the landscape, which points to one being an expression of the other. The stone on the far right is analogous to the white cliffs on the upper left of the frame, looking as if it could have been extracted from one of its eroded cavities. The stone to its left partially mimics the form of the splintered tree trunk directly below. The stone on the left of the picture acts as a gnomon, casting a scalpel-edged blade of shadow which pierces the green heart of shadow beside the foregrounded stone – a pool of water, perhaps, if this greenness corresponds with that of the sea.

Landscape of the Moon’s First Quarter (1943) in Birmingham is one of a series of majestic works which Nash painted towards the end of his life, when chronic illness in the form of a chronic and ever-worsening asthma made him aware that he didn’t have much time left. He returned to the landscape around the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. He had first discovered the Clumps in 1911, and described the surroundings as ‘full of strange enchantment…a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten’. He depicted the twinned stands of beeches crowning chalk hill mounds from a number of perspectives, and with varying seasonal and meteorological atmospheres. He tried to express the spirit of this place which had affected him so deeply in his youth, and now did so again in his declining autumn, in all its myriad and mercurial aspects. In doing so, he made of it a landscape suffused with his own personal mythology. Through this intense connection with the Clumps and their surrounds, his sacralising of the local topography, he would leave some part of himself behind, the imprint of a concentrated act of sustained vision.

Landscape of the Moon's First Quarter - Paul Nash
In Landscape of the Moon’s First Quarter, the Clumps are a background detail, reduced to a hazy outline in the upper right of the frame. They are fused into one form here, the trees irregular, slate-grey bubbles, like timeworn boulders or rain-swollen clouds. Their fused form is reflected in a more individuated manner in the small stand of trees which lies directly below in the foreground of the picture. Pink-tinged evening clouds amass behind to form a mountainous range, the highest peak almost touching the lower cusp of the half moon, which looks as if it were a drifting puff of smoke belched out from a volcanic interior. In the foreground of the picture, a stretch of ground, bleached yellow by what we can assume to be the final rays of the setting sun, resembles an expanse of sandy beach. Two spheres of unequal size balance on another plane which forms a border on which the composition as a whole rests – a stone path or low wall in front of a country house, maybe (Nash was a frequent visitor at Boar’s Hill, a friend’s house near the Wittenham Clumps). These spheres, moss-fuzzed stone ornaments or immaculately sculpted shrubberies, are earthbound echoes of the moon hanging high above them near the upper border of the frame. They seem to be going through their own phases, with penumbral quadrants and curved terminator lines dividing light from dark. Sources of light are ambiguous, cast shadows suggesting the simultaneous effect of both sunlight from the left and moonlight from above.

In between the strand at the bottom of the frame and the cloud mountains at the top are expanses of trees; some areas of wild woodland, and some cultivated and ordered. To the left is a line of poplars, their trunks proceeding in regularly spaced, evenly upright lines. They form a fence-like barrier marking the limits of the more chaotic zone to its right. The unbroken mass of foliage, with rounded base curving up to tapered tip, looks solid and heavy, too weighty for the short stick-like boles upon which it rests. To the right of these tightly wrapped speciments is a tree whose wavering, curvilinear branches are exposed, skeletal and vulnerable. What foliage it has is tinged a peachy pink, and blends with the massing of clouds above and beyond. Rooted in bushes below, it connects earth with sky, and the ordered human plantation with the less evident, unmarshalled order of the forest. This wild area has an insubstantial appearance, its billowing layers, painted in autumnal russets and browns, like blooming cumulus clouds, or a roiling, muddy torrent. If we were to hold to the latter image, the Wittenham Clumps would rise like a local variant of the Isle of Avalon, Somewhere amongst this chaotic surface, ot the right of a tree which looks like an erect black glove, floats another luminous moon in half-shadowed phase. The black glove tree and another upright conifer in front of the billowing, roiling forest, look like dirty plumes of smoke, the result of some solemn pyre. Perhaps they are Cyprus trees, traditionally associated with death and the afterlife. White clouds of smoke blow out from the palm-edge of the black glove, two owls flying before its expanding front. Beneath this cloud is a black void, and to its right a dark archway leading into the woods, one of the dark-mouthed entryways leading into the heart of the landscape which are a feature of Nash’s late Wittenham Clumps pictures. Maybe it’s even an entrance to a subterraenean passage which leads to a resting place beneath the barrow mounds of the Clumps themselves.

Flowers in a Window - Winifred Nicholson
Winifred Nicholson’s Flowers at a Window (1939) in Birmingham is one of her paintings of thresholds, flowers placed at the interface between interior and exterior spaces. A winding, bluish-grey road joins with the bluish-grey of the window frame, making a direct connection between these two spaces. A dark arch in the distant blue hills resembles a cave mouth, hinting at a further threshold through which the mysteries of the landscape can be penetrated. The borders of the window frame the landscape, making it a picture within a picture, and giving it a slightly numinous quality – a world beyond. The terracotta of the bowl, the chocolate brown of the soil and the pale, tentative green of the bulb shoots stand out clearly and vividly against the subdued cream of the window ledge and the sandy brown of the hills beyond. The bare, outreaching branches of the trees and the barrenness of the hillsides indicate that winter prevails outside, but the new-blooming flowers within, set against this dead landscape, give promise of imminent spring.

Composition - John Selby Bigge
In John Selby Bigge’s Composition (1940) in Leeds, two cabbage leaves and a scallop shell rest on a shore, hugely oversized specimens all. A lacy spume of wave-edge foam arches into the bottom of the frame, cradling a speckled scatter of pebbles. The endless plain of sandy beach beyond, stretching to the far horizon, is where the sea should be. Some inversion has taken place, subconscious exposed and conscious mind concealed. The hard, jagged edges of the scallop’s exoskeletal ribs seem to have caught the soft cumulus of cloud drifting by above, and also create a trompe l’oeil tear in the vegetal leaf they overshadow.

Black Pyramids - John Armstrong
John Armstrong’s Phoenix (1938) in Leeds, erects a classical domed apse, starkly white and unadorned, which towers above the ruined façade of a 20th century house. Its monumentality and smooth perfection contrast strikingly with the jagged edges of exposed brick along the half-demolished outer wall of the house, and the scarred and torn surfaces of coloured wallpaper in what was once the inside wall. The apse seems to be an attempt to memorialise this wounded building, to make of it something permanent and sacred, a representation of the ruins and rubble from which it rises. It brings to mind Mervyn Peake’s blitz poem London, 1941, beginning with the words ‘half rubble, half pain’. Armstong’s Black Pyramids (1942) in Manchester brings together the solid forms of black pyramids and rectangular blocks in wooden colours, their arrangement suggestive of some highly regular desert megalopolis. A swarm of light, sandy cubes clusters in the shape of a sharp pointed (but pointless) exclamation mark, with a ballooning shadow extruding from its spinning needle base. The sky is textured like beaten bronze. The whole breathes a mysterious, alien air, with something portentous and Lovecraftian about it. His Lapping Waters (1944) in Birmingham is painted like a mosaic, in a style which is a kind of squared off version of pointillism. It gives the impression of something which belongs on a wall in some sacred space rather than on a canvas stretched out within a frame. Something which is pretending to be what it is not, in itself a rather surrealist gesture. The background sky looks like small panels of beaten copper - The sea appears frozen into whipped up pyramidally pointed waves, like magnetised metallic pellets piled up and carefully shaped, and from this gelid surface emerge three ossified claws, like the appendages (one extra to form a sharp-ended tripod) of some enormous mutant crab (shades of Guy N.Smith). The three claws balance some spherical form, its rilled surface suggestive either of a metallic ball or a microscopic form of intricately repetitive patterning – some sort of egg, perhaps. The tips of the claws have penetrated its surface, so that it is pinioned in its flight, its interior exposed to further probing. It’s a picture full of implied violence, rendered ritualistic by the static mosaic form.

Requiescat - Edward Wadsworth
The setting of Edward Wadsworth’s Requiescat (1940) in Leeds is a stony shore whose pebbles have the soft roundedness and pink and peppermint colouration of jelly beans. The cliffs in the background, with their turf fuzz and sheared white faces, look like the scrunched remains of granny smith apples. Their upward sloping aspect gives them the appearance of runways, launching suicidal vessels either into the pink sunset sky or the turquoise sea. The worn wrecks of ships grounded on the beach are bristled with exposed nails. They resemble rib cages, cracked open and splayed apart. The reds and the grey blues (which echo the colour of the ocean) suggest the remnants of a body which has rotted or been eroded away, traces of blood, sinew and muscle. A battered and warped teapot in the bottom right corner adds a poignant memory of domesticity, its deformed shape and salt-abraded surface rendering it an ahistorical artefact, lost in time as well as space. Wadsworth’s Composition on a Red Ground (1931), also in Leeds, shows that he felt the pull of both surrealism and abstraction. The abstract arrangement of forms here looks like a lost design from the Festival of Britain, or an anticipation of fifties graphic style. The elaborate frills and folds suggest cloth or paper, with some fanning out from what appears to be a blue crystalline form. The black shapes, bordered in white, resemble scrolls and have a mourning aspect, contrasting with the jauntiness of the frilled forms. All of these are set against a deep red background, suggesting a certain interiority, the screen of closed eyelids which absorb projections from the dreaming mind.

Polynesian Fantasy - Merlin Oliver Evans
Merlin Oliver Evans’ Polynesian Fantasy (1938) in Leeds is like an illustration from a textbook on alien biology. Odd chitinous forms are suggestive of insect life, with seedlike eggs or wormy larvae pointing to origins and early stages of mature forms. The tightly bound striations of raw meat on the figures on the right and left sides of the frame also resemble exposed musculature, specimens stripped down to reveal their mechanical workings. These are both very aggressive looking creatures, the one on the left having a head like a beaked axe designed for ripping and tearing, the one on the right topped with an elongated, protuberant cranium uncannily resembling HR Giger’s designs for the horrific creatures of the Alien films. Other forms resemble armoured pupae, whirring locusts or strange insect/bird hybrids, the bluish-grey object in the centre a semi-organic structure with hooved base stand. What looks like an egg lying on its table surface points to a certain sacral aspect, with the two meat-insects approaching from either side to pay obeisance. Or perhaps, given their erect, barbed and thorned penises, to pierce and impregnate the egg. This crudely vicious imagery points to a strain of aggressive sexuality which underlies a good deal of surrealist art. It’s one aspect which comes to the fore when the subconscious is cracked open, its contents spilled out and rearranged.

Landscape of the Grail - Cecil Collins
Cecil Collins’ Landscape of the Grail (1934) in Leeds owes more to a visionary tradition in British art, running from Blake through Samuel Palmer and, yes, Stanley Spencer. Collins created his own mythography, which drew on surrealism but was equally influenced by sacred art and notions of archetypal symbolism. Here, the sacred fire is contained within a stylised outcrop of volcanic rock, which emerges from the surrounding night. The dark blue and black is backdrop is imprinted with double lined square and diagonal grids, which gives it a quilted appearance. A comet flames through this quilted night, its arcing flight traced with a faint milky trail. It’s red eye in the palm of a pink starfish form hints at some nuclear form, making a connection between macro and microcosmic scales in the universe. The candle flame within the rock is contained within a red-veined leaf aura, like protectively cupped hands. The molten yellow light which it radiates flows through fissures in the rock, flowing downwards like a magma stream seen from a safely distant viewpoint. Two pinwheel flowers emerge from the slate-grey slopes. One blazes like a star, its central stigma pulsing out radial spokes of white light. The other bleeds light from its petals in ribboning cascades. They seem to feed on and grow directly from these molten streams running off from the burning heart of the grotto.

Night Work is About to Commence - Emmy Bridgwater
Emmy Bridgwater was one of a small number of female British surrealists (another being her friend Edith Rimmington), and was based in Birmingham, a central member of the Birmingham Surrealists group in the mid-century. Naturally enough, then, Night Work is About to Commence (1940-43) is to be found in Birmingham. It’s a very strange and weirdly absorbing painting. A long, shallow bathtub is sitting or perhaps gliding down a corridor lit with a buttery light. The fact that its leading curve (its prow) is clipped off by the edge of the frame hints at a slow movement across the sloping diagonal plane of the composition. It is stuffed with all manner of folded up deck chairs, screens, racks and frames, all seemingly connected in a jumbled assemblage. A pole with a serrated attachment of four jagged diamond shapes (mirrors?) joins the two distinct jumble piles (with fore and aft deck chair sails), one end having smashed through a frame. They hint at some mysterious machinery, the striped cloth of the deck chairs billowing out like Viking sails in a mysterious interior breeze. A crow or raven perches on a towel draped over the edge of the bath, staring down with a beady grey eye at what might be a bath sponge, which appears to be emitting a low level bioluminescent glamour. On the bottom left, the edge of some brown wooden box or stool intrudes, its squared off right angle contrasting with the curved lip of the bath.

Press for Making Shells - Graham Sutherland
In Graham Sutherland’s Press for Making Shells (1941) in Manchester, the machinery is given a monstrous life of its own. The shadows in the recessed panel of its rectangular ‘head’ looks like a hungry, gaping maw, whilst the bell-like boiler on top is a cranium in which the mechanistic impulses which drive it clatter away. The belching steam issuing from its obscure recesses have an almost solid, semi-organic appearance, manipulating appendages with stubby, grasping digits – Robbie the Robot arms. The flames beneath the stomping rods of the legs are very Blakean, stylised and resembling savage petals or sharply tapering butterfly wings. They tint the surrounding mouldering green, with a rosy blush. The sickly, institutional green infects the two figures in the bottom left of the frame, who are reduced to de-individualised outlines. They feed the flame as if tending to the altar of a terrible god.

Ruined Cottage, North Wales - John Piper
John Piper’s landscapes often have the static, solid quality of theatrical backdrops, many of which he did indeed design. Ruined Cottage, North Wales (1943) in Manchester depicts a cottage which has reverted to the landscape from which its materials were taken. The remains of the ruggedly constructed wall to the left now resemble the outcropping of a tor, with the hint of a visored, chthonic head, angular jaw jutting out and elephantine ear listening out for approaching footsteps. The far wall rises like a moorland hill, shaded in the brown of dead bracken and lit by a mysterious light. The dark sky has a tarry quality, with the texture of canvas and paint giving the impression of windblown motion and scattered rain.

Crater - Richard Murry
Richard Murry’s Crater (1941) in Manchester demonstrates the way in which war creates naturally and terribly surrealistic landscapes, as Paul Nash had demonstrated in the First World War. Here, the devastation moves from the battlefronts to the cities, with Murry depicting the aftermath of an aerial bombardment. The ashen palette, spotted with patches of lichenous yellow, and topped with a heavy strip of sky in tombstone grey, provides an expressionistic evocation of the physical and emotional wreckage. The crater in the forefront of the composition is like the swallowing mouth of some surfacing leviathan. It looks like a volcanic crater, which has wreaked havoc on the city in a latterday Pompeii eruption. Still smoking ruins in the background indicate that the destruction has come from another source, however.

Maples Demolition, Euston Road - Frank Auerbach
Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester art galleries are particularly strong on the art of the early and mid-century period. But lets take a few tentative steps into the post-war period. Frank Auerbach’s Maples Demolition, Euston Road (1960) in Leeds
Employs his usual thickly applied and roughly textured layers of oil paint. Here, he represents the exposed structure of the city with a series of straight lines scored into the surface. The prevailing yellows, along with the rust red of iron beams, gives a feeling of a scene saturated with dazzling midday light, a scorching, almost solid heat. The diagonal which bisects the frame like a slash through the canvas could be a supporting strut, the shooting path of a piece of thrown debris, or a focussed beam of searing radiance. A door is incongruously placed in the top right hand corner, two parallel diagonal lines pointing down from its marooned rectangle, marking the space where a staircase used to be. A regularly divided succession of vertically stacked rectangles in the background marks a high rise block visible beyond the shell of this old building, an indication of what will rise on this site. The seemingly abstract forms of the painting resolve themselves more clearly into the ruined interior the more you stare at it, subtle gradations in colour making themselves apparent. Features stand out with a three dimensional solidity, which is only partly due to the knobbly relief patterns created by the accretions of hardened paint.

Paper Mill, Men and Paper Bales - Prunella Clough
Prunella Clough’s Paper Mill, Men and Paper Bales (1953) in the Hepworth Wakefield shows her moving towards abstraction, with two human figures included but squeezed into the top of the composition. If the title didn’t tell us that they were surveying a field of paper bales, we’d be none the wiser, and if they were taken out of the frame we’d essentially be looking at an abstract work. The ordered geometry of the creamy white background, divided with broad strokes of grey, is disrupted in the centre right of the frame. Order is torn and shredded and thrown into a chaotic knot of fragmented shapes. Spurts and spots of bright red against the dirty whites and ochres seem to reflect the violence of this disruption.

After the Meal - Jack Smith
Jack Smith would make a more abrupt transition into a pop-influenced abstraction in the 60s, which would mark a complete break from his earlier, unambiguously figurative style. An example of the latter is to be found in After The Meal (1952) in Wakefield. It’s imbued with a strange, haunted variety of off-centre realism, which brings to mind David Lynch and Eraserhead. The domestic interior is largely drained of significant colour, leaving only the yellow of cutlery bone handles, tablecloth patterning and furniture wood. The objects on the table, remnants of the titular meal, have a more palbable presence than the baby, who gazes into space from his mother’s shoulder with empty black button eyes, and the girl in her shapeless brown dress heading for the evening streets beyond the open door. She glances back and meets the viewer’s regard with a sullen indifference, tempered with a slight quizzical tilt of the head. And with that unreadable look, we will leave her to head out into the mysteries of the 50s night, and into a future which would soon blare into brighter primary coloured pop explosions.

PART ONE is over here.

Katy Dove at the Spacex Gallery

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Sundazed flight - October (2011)
Katy Dove, whose exhibition Meaning and Action is currently on show at the Spacex Gallery in Exeter, is a Glasgow-born artist who combines painting, animation and music to make shimmering patterns and combinations of shape and colour. The centrepieces here are her animated films, shown in two dark, hived off nooks into which you fumble, hands outstretched, before collapsing onto the comfortable sofa. Being thus shut off from the outside world allows for a pleasing sense of total immersion in the images growing and metamorphosing in front of you.

A Colour Box - Len Lye for the GPO (1935)
The lower of these two mini cinemas shows three films made over the last decade. The earliest, Luna, dates from 2004, and animates a procession of abstract shapes, sometimes approaching organic form, in a shimmying, polychromatic dance across the screen. At times, it is reminiscent of the films which Len Lye made for the GPO, and relates also to Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger’s kinetic studies in colour and movement in the inter and post-war years. Primary reds, yellows and blues predominate. Lines float across with coloured pennants raised, to be replaced or overlaid by small green circles, like peas, which settle into vibrating arrays. They are joined by smaller red dots, which float in contrary motion, making transits of the green discs and juxtaposing colours in a pleasing way (like pimentos in olives). The succession of shapes and patterns provide stimulating contrasts whilst maintaining a sense of coherent development, as if some natural process of transformation were unfolding. Sometimes, the pattern recedes into the haze of blue distances, still shifting like a model of an atomic cloud. Rainbow striations fountain off to either side and there is a shower of black feathers at some point, as if violent revolution had erupted within a parliament of crows. The soundtrack provides a blueprint for those which we will hear on future films, with environmental sound recordings blended with loose group improvisations. Here, insect chirp and, later, the two note hoot of a cuckoo harmonise with drifting voices, moving with a cloudlike, Ligeti-esque lack of fixity, and bell-like chimes.

Fractured landscape - Sooner (2007)
Sooner, from 2007, rhymes with its predecessor, whether consciously or not, lending it a sense of direct connection. It begins with rich, deep colours – purples and blues – across which a knotted spiral turns. A face seems to emerge from the pools of colour, which seep into one another in an edgeless patchwork. This may well be pattern recognition, however, the desire to make something concrete and familiar out of the abstract. The vividness of the intitial colours soon fades into a paler, washed out palette, like a batik died coverlet. Blue lines and curves move over grey cloudlike areas and clumps of earthy brown, giving a sense of landscape reduced to its fundamental elements. The screen is divided up into collaged squares which drift across the screen like phantom cells floating through the aqueous humour of the eye, projected onto the image of the world. Lime green pennants are carried across by invisible marchers, and cut-out Sergeant Pepper-style moustaches bob upside down like stiff-winged birds. Finally, a black and grey veil of horizontal stripes draws across the backdrop, the stage curtain or drooping eyelid descending. The soundtrack begins with looped voice and develops into a tribal chanting and clapping, spontaneous campfire rituals.

Psychedelic Forest - October (2011)
October, from 2011, develops the natural elements of the previous two animations, this time using filmed footage of wild, expansive landscapes. Opening with a scrunched circle of paper or foil pulsing with a sheen of iridescence against a background of clouds, it moves on to a dense weave of pine branches through which the sun palely shines with low horizon winter dazzlement. A red triangle is drawn with an invisible red marker pen, as if delineating angles of solar radiance. In the next scene, an oval of blue sky is roughly cut into footage of a tree-lined hillside swaying in a stiff breeze, the ragged edges making it look even more precipitous. Eyes and a mouth, open in a moue of surprise, are torn out of the sky in leaf, seed and bird-shaped holes, making a mask of sky through which the swaying branches (evergreen and bare deciduous) can be seen, their motion like the nervous alertness of a creature which has strayed from its natural habitat. Protruding branches and bracken and trailing roots cut across the blue of the sky like scars. The forest is banished, and the blue sky claims the whole of the screen. Yellow, dotted circles are traced across its surface, eye-dazed sunspots projected from someone unwise enough to stare at the sun (you didn’t listen to Patrick Moore). The black silhouettes of animated birds flock across this sun-dappled sky, so redolent of summer days which currently seem far, far away. A seascape is overlaid with diamond frames, measuring and framing the chaotic, perpetual motion of the waves, capturing it in prismatic facets. Woods are psychedelicised, soaked in polychromatic ‘raindrops’ which create a sense of vision at once blurred and enhanced, unsuspected spectral dimensions brought out by the rain. This idea of expanded vision is carried through to the final image, in which ‘eyes’ are roughly cut out of a blue sky, and are stained with splashes of vibrant colour, all washed together in two wildly intermixed pools, windows of a vivid and bright soul. The soundtrack here starts with a rumbling drone, over which voices hover, joined and replaced by plinky improv guitar, ripples of zither or autoharp, measuring metronomic ticking and music box or celeste tinkling. It sounded at times a little like the Texan group Charalambides, or even some of the weirder, communal stretches of the Animal Collective.

Digital painting - Meaning and Action
The most recent film, Meaning and Action, from this year (2013), gives the exhibition its title. At the outset, drips of pale colour drip down the blank screen like daubs of liquid paint on an upright canvas, forming an instant abstract colourfield of light pinks, yellows and greens. The outlines of fingers then intrude, like shadow projections on a slideshow screen (he said, showing his age), fingers and thumbs joined to form a directorial frame. A blossoming black nova explodes the coloured screen, which is transformed into a ribbed weave of blue daubs against which leg shadows kick in languid hoofer exercises. Hand and arm snakes dangle in hydra conglomerations from the top of the screen, and swing with the motion of synchronised plumb bobs or cuckoo clock counterweights. An outlined profile pushes into the frame from the left, face flickering with psychedelic light and colour. It is a momentary intrusion into what is essentially a study in the motion of limbs and digits, of shadow, outline and colour. Towards the end, the crooked angles of elbows form a refractive, kaleidoscopic mandala, turning one of the more awkward and ungainly aspects of the body into something sublime. The soundtrack here strikes a more strident tone than the low-key explorations of previous films. A reverb-enhanced electric guitar is hit as much as played, providing scratchy scrawls of sound which sometimes have an air of violence and aggression – like Derek Bailey in a particularly narked off mood.

The illuminated curtain wall
The motion of limbs silhouetted in Meaning and Action is carried through to some of the pictures on display in the main Spacex hall. There are a couple of photographs which record a collaboration with choreographer Sheila Macdougall, music and movement style events in which dancers twirl about trailing colourful lengths of material which trace the trails of their lighter than air motion through space. Works on paper which type out repeated patterns of letters, drawing coloured lines through some of them, resemble both needlework samplers and graphic scores, suggesting tones and musical shades. There are also a couple of paintings, abstract and colourful in a Miro style, and watercolour works on paper which look like backdrops for use in the animated films. The large, church-like windows at the back of the gallery are draped with white curtains decorated in patterns of coloured shapes, which themselves form screens which are illuminated when the sun happens to be shining. This makes for a great effect if you’ve just emerged from the dark screening box – it’s like coming out of the cinema on a really bright day. And today, for one brief moment, the sun did shine through, showing them off to their best effect - as glowing stained glass drapery.

The exhibition continues until 4th May, with a gallery breakfast on the 26th April!

John Boorman at the BFI

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There’s an interesting cinematic jumble of objects from John Boorman’s six decade career on display at the BFI Southbank at the moment. This coincides with a season of films which includes his daughter Katrine’s new portrait of her father, Me and Me Dad. Family has always been important to Boorman, and his children have featured in several of his films, most notably in Excalibur, in which Katrine herself performed Igrayne’s provocative dance and young Charley gave the boy Mordred a memorable edge of childish cruelty. The season culminated with Boorman being awarded a BFI fellowship. It’s good to see him thus rewarded, since the imaginative richness and colourfully idiosyncratic invention of his work demonstrates that there’s more to British cinema than doctrinaire social realism and exquisitely costumed historical drama. Boorman dovetails the native romanticism of Powell and Pressburger with the continental modernism of Antonioni and Godard, and also draws on a strain of British mysticism which later expanded to encompass the Ireland which he made his home.

Walker's stride - Point Blank
This mysticism was exported to America for his existential gangster picture Point Blank (1967). For this, he transformed Los Angeles, a distinctly unmysterious location of conspicuous surfaces, into a haunted landscape. Both Lee Marvin and the flyovers, modernist apartment blocks and cubist storm drains are made to appear insubstantial and dreamlike, in spite of their concrete solidity. In part an abstract study of Marvin’s physical presence, his character, appropriately named Walker, becomes a grey-suited ghost drifting through an unreal city with no centre. It’s as if he were lost in some outer puragatorial circle of a no-man’s land between life and death. Boorman became good friends with Marvin, and took him off to the Pacific islands of his traumatic wartime experiences for the cathartic filming of Hell in the Pacific. When Marvin died, his wife Pam offered Boorman the choice of a single item of his personal effects as a token of remembrance, and he chose the pair of brown brogues in which Walker crossed the interstices of LA. In the film, they create a gunshot ricochet when he strides with unstoppable intent down a long corridor, a sound which is mixed musique concrète style on the soundtrack to create a layered, echoing rhythm marking the inexorable approach of nemesis. It’s one of the classic movie walks, and one which I feel compelled to emulate whenever a suitably resonant length of enclosed corridor presents itself (and if a pair of swinging double doors at he end allows me to sweep them open in a dramatic Patrick McGoohan as Number 6 gesture, then so much the better). One of the brogues is present at the BFI in all its size 12 glory, a firm base upon which Marvin’s monumental frame was once planted, a physique capable of projecting both brutish menace and an elegant and elegantly controlled choreography of movement and posture onscreen.



A poster for the 1965 Dave Clark Five film Catch Us If You Can gives a breezy indication of Boorman’s roots in swinging sixties British cinema. Dave Clark’s beat combo may have been a second division version of The Beatles, but Boorman emulated the freedoms which Richard Lester brought to the use of camera, sound and editing, and also followed him in casting a surreal eye over the British social landscape. This was a period in which cinema began to pull away from the theatrically-derived realism of the kitchen-sink movement and allow itself a bit more imaginative breadth and formal playfulness. Boorman, who like many British film-makers of the period started out making documentaries for the BBC, would never look back. He avoided the dominant British realist mode, with its suspicion of imaginative expansiveness or Romantic extravagance, and set about making a series of fantastic and allegorical films in the late 60s and 70s. Even when he made his later political films, an air of mythological struggle removed them from the ordinary. This might explain why the likes of Beyond Rangoon and Country of My Skull have failed to find favour, critics seeing them as overly schematic. They present recent history in fabular terms, using old storytelling forms with their clearly polarised divisions. As a result, there is a certain confusion in terms of style, content and intention.

Boorman made several significant forays into the SF and fantasy genres in the 1970s. Deliverance can be seen as a horror film with an allegorical framework, and offers a less extreme blueprint for the ‘endurance’ subgenre which is so prevalent at the moment. Its forested wilderness setting is the first of several such landscapes which form the symbolic environments of his films – the jungles of Beyond Rangoon and The Emerald Forest and the oak woods of Excalibur being further examples. Humanity’s fall from harmony with nature is a recurrent theme, the fall from grace and expulsion from the Garden. Even when Boorman turns to telling his own childhood tale in the impressionistic wartime reminiscences of Hope and Glory (1987), the meandering upper reaches of the Thames provide a thread which connects the young boy and his experiences with a Piper At The Gates of Dawn style mood of nature reverie. It’s a mood which evokes an innocent childhood spent in the Garden whilst the world beyond burns and splinters. Such archetypal concerns bear comparison with the work of Terrence Malick, although Boorman’s films never share the overt religiosity with which it is increasingly suffused.



Zardoz (1973), often derided and summarily dismissed with a sarky remark about Sean Connery’s costume, is an example of what was sometimes described by science fiction critics at the time as science fantasy (it might now be defined as falling within the cross-fertilizing generic hybrid term The Weird). Science fantasy would be applied to the kind of works produced by Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny or Michael Moorcock – science fiction seen through a mythologically-focussed, Tolkienesque lens. A certain amount of pseudo-rationalisation (post-apocalyptic tribal primitivism, the ‘magic’ of remnant technologies, and alien ‘ogres’ and ‘dragons’) removed them from the fairy-tale worlds of secondary realms whilst retaining their general tenor. The old tales wearing new clothes, essentially (an analogy which Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany self-consciously played with in novels like Lord of Light and The Einstein Intersection). There may not be anything particularly profound in the division of the far future humanity of Zardoz into brutal primitives and immortal decadants, a divergence echoing the Morlocks and Eloi of HG Wells’ Time Machine. But the mythological storytelling is bold, a recasting of age-old tales of men and gods, with a self-reflexive sense (as in the later Metamorphoses iterations of Greek myths) of such tales being consciously cultivated, shaped and sustained. The Irish landscapes are stunning, and add to the feel of timeless myth, and the visual design, a fusion of the traditionally rural with a dream of futurity, are colourful, ambitiously epic (especially the giant floating face of Zardoz – literally an incarnated godhead) and as imaginatively intoxicating as the best SF literature. The poster on display here has the metallic, sharply-bladed lettering of the title which looks like the kind of graphic design used for band names on 70s album covers (designed to be traced out onto exercise books or canvas satchels). This is appropriate enough, since the film has a slight air of the prog rock concept album about it.

Penthouse angel - Exorcist II:The Heretic
Boorman’s sequel to The Exorcist, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), further explored his fascination with the mythological strata upon which the rational, technocratic surface of the modern world lies. He pulled the idea of demonic possession back from the clichéd Satanism of Dennis Wheatleyesque pulp terrors, conjuring shamanistic flights of the spirit instead. He introduced a channelling of the supernatural through scientific means in the manner of Nigel Kneale, and played with philosophical and metaphysical notions deriving from Teilhard de Chardin positing the evolution of a world consciousness. Boorman had been given the chance to adapt and direct the original Exorcist movie, but had turned it down, considering the story to be ‘repulsive’, little more than ‘a film about a child being tortured’. His belated follow up was to be ‘an antidote, a film about goodness rather than evil’. Regan becomes a herald of a new breed of enlightened and compassionate being who will bring healing to the world. She also represents a new and intuitive spirituality which will need no priestly hierarchy to intervene between the personal and divine. Significantly, vital passages of the story take place beyond the western world. It is from an African shaman, another healer, that the priestly protagonist learns about the nature and attraction of evil, and is given the key to exorcising the lingering influence of the demon Pazuzu. We discover that this panglobal spirit is particularly drawn to individuals who radiate a powerful and influential aura of active benevolence, an aura which it tries to block and snuff out. This spirit of the air is memorably envisaged as a buzzing locust, whose chittering flightpath we follow as it ‘infects’ all around it, transforming its fellow creatures into monsters of rapacious appetite and forming them into a ferocious black swarm. Evil is given an entirely different face, reflecting primal fears of famine, pestilence and resultant conflict largely alien to the mindset of the industrialised world. Boorman would increasingly turn to non-western settings for his later films, which also addressed questions of global politics – films such as The Emerald Forest, Beyond Rangoon, The Tailor of Panama and Country of My Skull.

Fantastic landscapes - Exorcist II:The Heretic
The stage bound sets representing the dramatic Ethiopian landscape – high plains scarred with deep ravines, temples carved into wind-sculpted bluffs and fantastic cities resembling constructs of bleached and scoured bone – have a heightened, dreamlike quality which deliberately rejects realism and creates the impression that the priest’s journey is spiritual as much as physical – a journey into a mythic inner landscape. It anticipates the final scenes of Excalibur, which were also shot on a stage set. They are soaked by the blood red light appearing to radiate from the flat disc of a setting sun which resembles the one set up by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2003 for his Weather Project. Boorman’s individual approach in Exorcist II was bound to disappoint an audience who simply wanted more pea soup puke, adolescent swearing and po-faced Catholic invocations of medieval deviltry. Whilst there is much to enjoy in the film, Boorman’s visions were not always realised with great clarity or coherence, and he was certainly not well served by the somnambulistic performances of Richard Burton and Linda Blair in the central roles. For many, the Heretic of the subtitle was Boorman himself, who had tampered with a formula whose replication was the sole purpose of the blockbuster sequel. Its box-office failure was the greatest sin in the eyes of the big Hollywood studios, and at this point they and Boorman parted company. His mystical approach drew the film away from the essentially visceral nature of its predecessor which, for all its brooding religiosity, was more concerned with body than spirit. It was that physical element which had made such an impact on audiences in 1973, and when they found that it was lacking here, they swiftly lost interest.



The film Excalibur (1981) remains Boorman’s most explicit realisation of his mythological preoccupations, and is represented in the exhibition by two key props: the grail and Merlin’s silver skull cap. Boorman had long wanted to make a film drawing on the Arthurian matter of Britain. He had made a semi-documentary film for the BBC in 1966, The Quarry, which was set around Glastonbury and centred on the artistic struggles of a sculptor named Arthur King. He had also worked on a proposed modernising adaptation of John Cowper Powys’ massive 1932 novel A Glastonbury Romance, in which the grail myths attached to the locale are central. When he suggested a film about Merlin to United Artists, who had financed his previous picture, Leo the Last (1969), they offered him the alternative of adapting Lord of the Rings (to which they owned the rights) for the screen. Its patchwork composite of British, Celtic and Norse mythology and folk tale appealed to him, and he worked on producing a script which both encompassed the grand narrative sweep of Tolkien’s story and solved the many technical problems involved in realising this fantastic secondary world in a believable fashion. This script is on display in the cabinet, its open pages a tantalising glimpse of an unrealised epic. In his autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, published just as Peter Jackson’s trilogy was coming out, he is generous in his praise for The Fellowship of the Ring, modestly concluding that his version would have been meagre fare in comparison.

Boorman was particularly interested in Merlin, and envisaged him as a timeless trickster figure. Incarnations of the trickster archetype turn up as central characters in several of his later films, too, appearing in The General, The Tailor of Panama and The Tiger’s Tail. Interestingly, all of these are played by Irish actors (Pierce Brosnan in The Tailor of Panama and Brendan Gleeson in the other two), perhaps reflecting the popularity of such figures in Irish folk tales and legends. It also provides the perfect mythological type to represent contemporary economic prestidigitators. Nicol Williamson’s portrayal of Merlin is extraordinary. He represents him as eccentric and mercurial, veering wildly between the buffoonery of a fool and the gnomic wisdom of a seer. At one moment he is an approachable companion and confidante, at the next a dangerous and unknowably alien being, scarcely human and only briefly passing through the mortal world before departing for someplace beyond. Excalibur is one of those films which I saw and wholly absorbed as a teenager, and from which I periodically quote various of Merlin’s many memorable lines, like some Python or Withnail bore. My favourite is probably ‘a dream to some – a nightmare to others’, the first part delivered with murmured intimacy, the second bellowed with declamatory ferocity, arms flung out like a bird suddenly taking wing.

A dream to some - Nicol Williamson as Merlin
The silver skullcap is central to the look of Boorman’s Merlin, a great example of a costume prop providing the visual cue to the nature of a character. Boorman had wanted to give Merlin an ageless, hermaphroditic appearance by having him appear with a smoothly shaven head, but Williamson, a notoriously egotistic actor, balked at such a demand. The skullcap was an inspired compromise, created by Terry English, who also fashioned the armour. It gave Merlin the appearance of a John Dee figure who, like the Merlin of TH White’s The Once and Future King, spanned the ages, walking through centuries of time. With the polished chrome of his gilded pate glinting in the sun, he looks like an androgynous android or alchemist, ancient and futuristic at one and the same time. The reflective metallic walls of Camelot seem to draw on this simple but symbolically resonant piece of signature headgear, and also have the feel of being magically out of time, a moonage Biba daydream.

The end of the quest - Perceval brings the grail to Arthur
The grail is a simple vessel, with no conspicuous ornamentation. The centrality of the grail quest to the latter part of the film points to Boorman’s interest both in the Wagnerian variations on or derivations from the theme (both directly in Parsifal and indirectly in the Ring Cycle) and in Jung’s interpretation of it as a symbol of humanity’s search for enlightenment and a sense of sacred unity connecting the self with the universe. Also on display are the costume sketches for the suits of armour which encase the central characters in heraldic carapaces. The design of the helmets in particular provide the outward projections of their inward compulsions. Uther’s is dark and ferally wolf-muzzled. Arthur’s has the curved beak of a griffin, with short spikes studding the brow like newly sprouting horns. Lancelot’s has a pure platinum sheen with nobly erect dragon’s ears at the side. Mordred’s is a mask haloed with brattish golden-boy curls, the lower edge accentuating Robert Addie’s sullen aristocratic pout. Eschewing villainous black, it is a Louis XIV sunking visage suggestive of a new and tyrannous dawn.

There is also a costume design sketch for Sarah Miles’ outfit from Hope and Glory, a fine piece of replica 40s fashion, with the attached woollen fabric sample demonstrating the attention to authentic detail. At the far end of the display, there’s a mystery costume, unidentified by accompanying label; a dress made of squares of fabric loosely sewn together. It could be from Excalibur (but isn’t as far as I’ve been able to determine) or from one of his films set in the present day. It could even be from the 70s rustic peasant chic of Zardoz, cinematic representations of the future always tending to reflect the fashions of the era in which they’re made, no matter how much the designers try to make it otherwise. This mystery dress serves as an appropriate symbol of the timeless qualities of myth which Boorman has striven to capture in all its myriad forms.

Samuel Palmer, Simeon Solomon and the Camden Town Group at RAMM, Exeter

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Samuel Palmer - Self Portrait
The new selection from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s art collection on display in the downstairs gallery includes some paintings which will be familiar to Exeter citizens who have visited regularly over the years. But there are also some new acquisitions which are being displayed for the first time. Chief amongst these is Samuel Palmer’s After the Storm, a late watercolour from 1861. This was painted on the North Devon coast, with a perspective looking out from Lee Bay. The mountainous outcropping of Castle Rock rises above the sheer cliff face in the middle distance, like a shattered tower keep at the foot of the Valley of Rocks, which leads up to the clifftop town of Lynton. The jutting headland of Foreland Point protrudes in the distance, a more solid echo of the clouds hanging above. These provide an element of Romantic sublimity, a touch of Alpine awe found closer to home. Palmer uses magic hour tones to lend his seascape a stained glass luminosity, the deep blue of the sea contrasting with peaches and saffron yellows of the after sunset horizon with which it is edged. This colour saturated seascape has a melodramatic narrative imposed upon it, as if Palmer were trying to bring his work into accord with Victorian pictorial conventions. A ship has foundered on the rocks, and a lifeboat is being heaved across the shore towards the sea, its crew preparing to row out and rescue any survivors still clinging to the wreckage. One of the lifeboatmen is embracing his young son as he is called by another young man whose hand is raised, summoning him to join the vessel as it is launched into the breaking waves. His wife stands to the side, body tensed with anxious anticipation, hands nervously wrung or firmly clasped in fervent, supplicatory prayer.

1861 was a terrible year for Palmer. His 19 year old son Thomas, to whom he had devoted all of his attention after the death of his daughter at the age of three, and in the face of his own stagnant artistic career, died after a short period of consumptive illness. It’s difficult not to see this tragedy reflected in the emotional parting of father and son which is the dramatic focus of After the Storm. The magic hour sunset light was typical of Palmer’s work, along with atmospheric moonlit night settings. There is, indeed, another late watercolour from 1865 with the title The Golden Hour. After the Storm, in common with the rest of his watercolour work from his middle and late periods, lacks the visionary intensity and sense of numinous presence characteristic of the paintings he produced whilst living in the North Kent village of Shoreham in the seven years between 1827-34. The Darent Valley, or the ‘valley of vision’ as he called it, provided him with the perfect stage backdrop for the realisation of his ideal spiritual landscapes. From it, he projected an Arcadia protectively bounded by the soft, feminine curves of sheltering hills and the rounded, piled up ranges of cumulus clouds, and lit by the silver sickle of a harvest moon, the copper disc of a lowering sun or the warm evening glow emanating from welcoming cottages and churches. These Edenic settings are peopled by figures languorously working in the fields, sheaving and bringing home the golden harvest or lounging about beneath bountifully burdened apple trees. It was a dream, of course, but a glorious one, a landscape suffused with what Palmer saw as a divine spirit. Unfortunately, his non-naturalistic, visionary paintings found no more favour with the public, patrons or the art establishment than had the work of his friend and inspiration William Blake (who came down to visit him in his Shoreham house towards the end of his life).

Scenes from the valley of vision - The Magic Apple Tree
Palmer saw his rural idyll as a retreat from the industrial expansion of the London on the outskirts of which he’d grown up. His solution was to look back to an idealised past, as it would be for the Pre-Raphaelites some years later. It was a past which included a reverence for old masters like Durer, Fra Angelico and Leonardo, soundtracked by Elizabethan English composers like Purcell, Tallis and Gibbons, and with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as its key literary work. But the ideal world which he constructed in his imagination and superimposed on his magical valley clashed badly with the distinctly unromantic realities of the rural labourer’s life in the early nineteenth century, which was a matter of grinding poverty and backbreaking toil rather than mystical communion with the cyclical progress of the seasons. The Captain Swing riots of 1830, a spontaneous reaction across Southern England to a failed harvest, depressed wages and the threat of widespread unemployment posed by new agricultural machinery, punctured Palmer’s dreamworld. Its radiance was already waning as the economic reality of his own commercial failure led to increasingly desperate poverty. An inheritance, which had sustained him for some time, had eventually dwindled away. Frustrated that visionary imagination, intensely personal artistic activity and spiritual idealism were turning out to be forces insufficient to transform his life and the indifferent world about him, he grew increasingly reactionary, retreating into narrow religious conservatism and judgemental hellfire condemnation. The 1832 Reform Act, which took tentative steps towards widening the voting franchise in the country beyond the landowning class, raised his ire and led to him proselytising for the Tories in apocalyptic ‘death of England’ fulminations which were dismissed, if they were noticed at all, as the ravings of a crank.

A Letter from India (1859)
He calmed down once he got married in 1837 to Hannah Linnell, by which time he had left the valley of vision and returned to London, having reluctantly relinquished his Darent dreaming. Hannah was the daughter of John Linnell, a successful and wealthy painter who was also a friend and patron of William Blake. Palmer had got to know Linnell in 1822, when he was still a teenager, and the older, well-established artist had guided him towards forming his own individual style and tastes. He was to prove something of an ogre as a father-in-law, however, loudly voicing his strongly held views and never forgetting to remind his son-in-law of his failure as an artist, both commercially and, in his opinion, aesthetically. Palmer remained humiliatingly beholden to him financially, and it was Linnell who funded a journey to Italy in the wake of the marriage. He steeped himself in the art of the area, consciously adapting his landscape painting to a more classical style, shorn of visionary stylisation, in an attempt to gain wider acceptance, and to hopefully earn a living with which he could support his family and gain some degree of independence. His watercolours from this point onward still have a vivid eye for the numinous qualities of landscape, but they are of a different, more prosaically Romantic tenor to those of the Sharpham period. In later years, he would look back with nostalgic yearning to his days in the magic valley of vision. His regular travels to Devon and the West Country, which began in 1833, suggest that here more than anywhere he managed to recapture something of the enchanted spirit which had illuminated those fast receding days. Paintings such as Mountain Landscape at Sunset (1859), The Good Farmer (1865) and The Dip of the Sun (1857) set the shadowed contours of Dartmoor landscapes before rubescent sunset sky backdrops. The Brother Home From the Sea (1863) and Robinson Crusoe Guiding His Raft Into the Creek (1850) locate their dramas of arrival or return in front of the limestone cliff arch of Durdle Door in Dorset, the jutting spar marking the furthest westward cusp of the curve of Lulworth Cove beyond. A Letter from India (1859), meanwhile, places another narrative within a North Devon landscape. Castle Rock and the Valley of Rocks are viewed from the opposite direction this time, and from an inland perspective. The sun sets below the ocean’s rim, setting the clouds on fire, and the crags of Lundy Island protrude above the watery horizon like the phantom city of Ys risen from the depths.

Simeon Solomon - Night (1890)
Another new painting on display is Simeon Solomon’s Night, a small watercolour painting from 1890. Solomon was born in 1840 in Bishopsgate in East London, on the edge of the Spitalfields area which was home to a large Jewish immigrant population in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Solomon was the youngest of 8 children born to orthodox Jewish parents. He clearly grew up in an environment which encouraged artistic expression, since his brother Abraham and sister Rebecca also had successful careers as painters. Night features a dreamy face in profile, eyes gazing outwards but lost in inner absorption. It is garlanded with light blue poppies, and a bird’s wing of the same colour sweeps back above the ear in a streamlined suggestion of flight. Liquid, light-blue swirls seemingly exhaled from nostrils or mouth are like the vapour trails of dream, and the contours of the billowing grey cloak the expanding shadow of night which this mythic figure trails in its wake. Solomon signs his picture with his characteristic serpentine double S transfixed with a straight line topped by a downward curve. Short strokes rising from this curve are suggestive of radiant flames or beams of light, as if this is some sort of ceremonial torch. It’s a signature symbol which looks like a tattoo. Night bears a definite resemblance to the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, both in the androgynous appearance of the dreamer, and in the poppy motif. This recalls Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, his memorial portrait of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s muse, in which the poppies carried down by a bird alludes to her opium addiction. This is no incidental similarity, and certainly not a case of stylistic copying. Solomon had met Rossetti back in 1857, and through him got to know Burne-Jones and the poet Algernon Swinburne. All four were very close and in the early 60s were pioneers of the Aesthetic style, both in their art and in their lifestyles. The flow of influence and ideas between them was mutual and benefited all in finding their own individual style and thematic preoccupations. Burne-Jones may have partly derived the pallid, androgynous subjects of his later work from Solomon’s sensual dream figures. Of these figures, the poet and art critic Arthur Symons commented that ‘these faces are without sex’ and that ‘they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts themselves’.

Solomon photographed by David Wilkie Wynfield
Solomon was particularly close to Swinburne, and illustrated two of his most controversial works, which remained unpublished until after his death: Lesbia Brandon, his erotic novel and The Flogging Block, his mock epic poetical paean to flagellation. Swinburne in turn wrote two more restrained poems inspired by Solomon: Erotion and At A Month’s End. It was Swinburne’s work in particular which was the object of a swingeing and hugely destructive attack on Rossetti’s circle by the critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, in which he decried what he described as ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for its moral turpitude. The ruling powers, both cultural and political, were determined to clamp down on such liberal expressions of desire. The Paris Commune was enjoying its chaotic and brief anarchist ascendancy over the channel, and the Victorian establishment was not about to tolerate the assertion of individual liberties beyond those which were endorsed by the state, which might in turn expand into demands for greater political liberty. Burne-Jones had already experienced censorious ire over his painting Phyllis and Demophoön, which had been exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society and attacked for indecency. The dreamy homoeroticism of much of Solomon’s work, and the suggestive androgyny of his subjects (sometimes dressed in priestly robes) made them another target for the repressive forces of conservatism. His alliance with the flamboyant Swinburne, who was recklessly liable to flaunt his transgressions, increased his vulnerability to attack. In 1873, he was arrested for soliciting in a toilet near Oxford Street, found guilty of illegal homosexual acts, and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. Fortunately, an acquaintance managed to use his influence to suspend the sentence, and he got away with a period of police supervision. The man who he’d been having sex with, a 60 year old stablemaster, was not so lucky. He had to serve out his 18 month sentence, as well as facing the ruinous social repercussions.

Simeon Solomon - Self Portrait (1860)
The echoes of Oscar Wilde’s martyrdom in his 1895 trial are inescapable. Wilde espoused an aesthetic brand of utopian socialism in which the transformation of society would free people from the strictures of time and narrow convention and allow them to express themselves in whatever artistic manner suited them. The wide reporting of the details of the trial, and the repugnance which was stirred up destroyed his public persona as the spokesperson for Aestheticism, and left the movement, with its potentially radical worldview in ruins. Wilde served out his sentence, at least partly involving hard labour to which he was utterly unsuited, and it broke him physically and spiritually. Solomon may have evaded imprisonment and labour, but he still had to face the social opprobrium, verging on hatred, with which any gay man, designated a sexual criminal, was burdened at the time. He fled to France, but was arrested again for having sex with another man, and on this occasion did serve out a three month prison sentence. The year of 1873 opened an unbridgeable fissure in his life, and effectively ruined him. Galleries and patrons were no longer interested in his work, and his friends, the fickle and self-interested Swinburne included, turned their backs on him. Only Burne-Jones, outwardly less of a flamboyant rebel than Rossetti and Swinburne, stood by him. He turned more and more to alcohol, and fell into destitution, until finally he was obliged, in 1884, to take up residence in the St Giles Workhouse in Bloomsbury. At he lowest ebb, he was reduced to begging on the streets. But despite such desperate circumstances, he continued to work, producing small scale visionary paintings, and chalk sketches and pen and ink drawings of angelic heads. Night is one such. The artistic spirit simply refused to be crushed. A lot of the works from the 90s have a melancholy air of escaping into interior dreamworlds. Dreaming sleep is a recurring theme, retreating from harsh reality into blissful imaginative reverie. This is reflected in titles such as The Moon and Sleep, the Healing Night and Wounded Love, and Night Looking Upon Sleep her Beloved Child.

Solomon's grave in Willesden Jewish cemetary
Solomon’s art fitted in perfectly with the Decadent phase of the Aesthetic Movement, the fin-de-siecle 90s of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, the Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. Solomon anticipated the spirit of this age, with his dreaming androgynes and blurring of the rigid parameters of sexuality. His influence can be seen not only in the palled figures of Burne-Jones, but in the limpid and dandyish fops and angels of Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley. Solomon was something of a cult figure to this new generation of aesthetes. He was collected by one of the chief intellectual forces behind Aestheticism, Walter Pater, and by its public figurehead, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was particularly upset to lose his Solomons in the sale of his belongings made necessary by the personal and cultural disaster of his trial. Solomon may have fallen on hard times, but his work retained a devoted coterie of admirers. There were tow major retrospectives in the immediate wake of his death: an exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London in 1906; and a book, Simeon Solomon: an Appreciation by Julia Ellison Ford, published in New York in 1908. It’s clear, therefore, that the value of his work was recognised at the time, even if it would subsequently fall into obscurity once more, eclipsed by his better known contemporaries, whose scandalous activities provided more colourfully and acceptably entertaining versions of the wild bohemian life. Obviously, such appreciation would have been of immeasurably greater use to Solomon had it been forthcoming whilst he was alive. But the lingering taint of scandal, together with his slow plummet into the netherworld of underclass destitution, meant that people were reluctant to be publicly associated with him, particularly after the Wilde trial. He died in 1905, still in the workhouse, five years after Wilde’s passing. It’s strange to think that his last works were produced whilst the first stirrings of twentieth century modernism were making themselves felt on the continent, currents which would first be recognised and drawn upon in nearby Bloomsbury and Fitzroy Street. Although Solomon had long since moved away from the Judaism which had formed the subject of many of his early paintings, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden, where you can seek out and lay a poppy or sunflower upon his grave.

Walter Bayes - Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front
Another new picture here is Walter Bayes’ large scale 1915 painting Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front. Bayes was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, which formed around Walter Sickert, its presiding elder. It replaced the Fitzroy Street Group, which had met and exhibited in the house and studio space of 19 Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia, the area of narrow Georgian streets north of Soho. Bayes was the intellectual of the group, writing art criticism for the Athenaeum magazine and supporting himself by teaching at the Westminster School of Art. He was less in thrall to the colourful stylisation and formalism of the continental post-impressionists than the other Camden Town Group members, and painted in a more conservative academic style. He did follow his friend Sickert’s example in choosing unusual and sometimes counterintuitive perspectives for his subjects, however. But his Victoria Station might as well be in a different world form that portrayed by Camden Town fellow Charles Ginner in his 1913 painting Sunlit Square, Victoria Station (this produced in the same year as his Clayhidon, also on display in the RAMM gallery). Bayes’ palette is muted, in keeping with Sickert’s dark, smoke-stained non-primary colours from his dimly lit music hall and Mornington Crescent interiors. The stone arch beneath which the soldiers pass forms a foreground frame within a frame. It’s brooding mass, topped with an ornamental keystone, has the heaviness of ceremonial architecture, and there is a fateful sense that these men are filing through a gateway of doleful significance, a presentiment of memorial monuments later to be erected in their collective name. The drab olive khaki of their uniforms makes of them a largely unindividuated mass. Only the red coat of a woman walking arm in arm with her man and the small red circle of a cap which hangs on the barrel of an erect rifle stand out, adding defiant touches of distinctiveness, reminders of the world beyond military uniformity. The cap on the barrel is a poignant variant on the traditional nursery rhyme image of the knotted pack on the end of a stick thrust over the shoulder of the innocent traveller heading out into the world for the first time. The interior of the station into which the men are trooping in their haphazard group is dark and wreathed with ragged palls of locomotive steam. A suspended bulb provides an angular cone of dim illumination, which fails to penetrate beyond a narrow radius. Although perhaps viewing with the benefit of historical hindsight, there seems to be a highly symbolic dimension to the painting. These men are entering the baleful shadows of a netherworld which will carry them with regimented and timetabled efficiency beyond the land of the living.

Charles Ginner - Clayhidon
Two more familiar works from the museum’s collection on display are from fellow members of the Camden Town Group, the aforementioned Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan. Both are connected with Clayhidon Farm on the Blackdown Hills in Devon, near the Somerset border. Both stayed there in the years before the war, sketching and painting the farm buildings and routines and the surrounding landscape. These paintings are displayed in their centenary year, both having been created during a 1913 visit. Charles Ginner’s Clayhidon exhibits his carefully measured and meticulously built up technique and style. Fields, trees and the roofs, walls and chimneys of the farm buildings are marked out with thickly layered lines of paint, the whole composition divided into strongly distinct ‘pieces’; it’s like a stained glass window or a surface of ornamental marquetry. The oil paint is applied with careful evenness, and the overall impression is of static order, a gelid atmosphere, as if the scene were filtered through the heavy, humid air of a long summer afternoon. With such solid and firmly girdered construction, it’s not surprising to learn that Ginner trained and for a while practised as an architect, before devoting himself to his art. He was born in France, growing up in Cannes, and was educated in Paris, so he could claim a close connection to the source of the post-impressionism which the Camden Town Group aimed to translate into an English idiom. Quite the opposite of the stereotype of the wild bohemian artist, he was a quiet, self-contained and rather conventional batchelor, who kept regular working hours throughout his life. He was very close to his fellow Camden Town Group members Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, and was deeply affected by their early deaths. He nursed Gilman through a bout of influenza, which proved such a killer after the war, but both subsequently caught pneumonia in the early winter months of 1919. Ginner survived, Gilman didn’t. Ginner lived alone from then until his death, in his house in Pimlico, in 1952, a man increasingly out of his time. He never stopped working, however (and received a commission as a war artist in the second world war). Indeed, his life seemed to have been his work.

Robert Bevan - Devonshire Valley No.1
Robert Bevan’s Devonshire Valley No.1 similarly divides the landscape into discrete blocks of colour, although they are not so firmly delineated here. The characteristic Camden Town colours of muted mauves and magentas and light and dark olive greens are prominently used. Bevan is more free and expressive with his brushstrokes than Ginner, particularly in the wavering lines of the foliage to the left of the frame. His composition is a lot less rigidly controlled, edges allowed to blur into that which they outline. The impression is less of a heavy summer’s day than a hazy spring one. If Ginner’s work shows the influence of Van Gogh, then Bevan’s is more in tune with late Monet (who was still painting at the time, of course) and Cezanne. Bevan had also studied in Paris, and had stayed for a while in the artists’ colony at Pont Aven in Brittanny in the 1890s. This was a hugely fulfilling time for him, during which he met and got to know Gauguin, producing several sketched portraits of him in his books. Unlike Ginner, who was principally an urban artist, Bevan preferred the rural life and the depiction of rural subjects. He painted on Exmoor between 1895-7, and after marrying a Polish woman, Stanislawa de Karlowska, in 1897, made a number of trips to her home country in the early twentieth century. Here, he sketched and painted rural life in and around the villages in which he immediately felt at home. He was quite mature in years by the time he hooked up with Sickert and his circle. Sickert invited him to join his Fitzroy Street group after seeing some of his pictures exhibited in the first Allied Artists Exhibition in 1908. It was the first time he’d received significant recognition for his art. An inward man lacking in self-confidence and belief, he’d frequently doubted his talents and the worth of his endeavours. His wife, Stanislawa, was firm and constant in her encouragement, however, and it was largely due to her support that he persisted in his artistic career. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, and his subjects whilst in London generally centred around cabs and omnibuses, and horses and the world of the stables on the periphery of the city. This was a world in its twilight years, the era of horse drawn transportation already increasingly supplanted by the spread of electricity and the insidious invention of the internal combustion engine. Bevan’s choice of the stables as a subject for his urban art suggested that his heart lay beyond the boundaries of the city. He felt particularly drawn to the farm at Clayhidon, and returned on numerous occasions throughout the 1910s. Eventually, he bought his own cottage nearby – Lychetts in Bolham Valley in the Blackdown Hills. Devon was his own version of Palmer’s magic valley. And it was in Devon that he passed away in 1925. The paintings he produced in the area which he made his home remain amongst his most personal, and his best.

There's an excellent archive site providing extensive information on Simeon Solomon, with plentiful illustrations, over here, as well as a good general article (with pics) at the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture site over here.

Broadcast in Shindig Magazine

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The cover of the latest edition of the music magazine Shindig, whose tastes generally tend towards 60s psychedelia, is this month graced by a photo of Trish and James from Broadcast, circa Tender Buttons, looking appraisingly down at the camera eye, a painted wall of words forming a cryptically semi-legible backdrop. It’s the first step in locating the band within a broader history, allying them with a continuing stream of adventurous music which seeks to marry pop melodicism with avant garde and experimental sounds and techniques and poetic lyrics. Psychedelia, if you will, although the retro connotations of the term ill suits the music which Broadcast made, which, whilst drawing on many influences from the past, was always resolutely forward looking. Small side pieces folded into the main article pinpoint some of the music which fed into Broadcast’s evolving sound – The United States of America above all. There’s also a short article on the 1969 White Noise LP An Electric Storm, a collaborative effort bringing together Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the Radiophonic Workshop with the young American musician David Vorhaus. Another big inspiration for Trish and James, it was, as she observed in Broadcast’s Invisible Jukebox article in the September 2005 edition of Wire magazine, slightly marred by the intrusion of ‘orgy vocals’. There’s an obvious element of sadness in the implication inherent in appearing in a magazine devoted to the glories of bygone days that the band are now a part of the history upon which they drew. Trish’s death at the beginning 2011 effectively brought the ever-evolving musical adventures she and James had shared, together with their fellow travellers, to an end. But in the interview which is the centrepiece of the issue, James reiterates the promise of material recorded for the album intended as a follow up to Tender Buttons (a full-force Broadcast album as opposed to the fruitful collaboration with Julian House’s Focus Group on the Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP) being forthcoming at some future date, when he is entirely satisfied that it has reached a suitably finely tuned state to stand as the fitting tribute which it will inevitably partly be viewed as. The article is titled The Children of Alice, which also points to a continuation of the lineage: James has been recording and will be performing under that fitting name in a trio which includes longtime friend Julian House, alias The Focus Group, and Roj Stevens, a former Broadcast compadre who has more recently recorded an excellent album on the Ghost Box label (its percussive and slightly abrasive electronic palette sounding like it wouldn’t have been out of place on Tender Buttons, or indeed on the faux library music of the Microtronics mini-cds). The choice of name references Trish’s love of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Miller’s 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland, and its suggestion of continuation, rather than a new start with a new individual perspective, is hugely heartening. If Trish is the girl who left Chelmsley Wood to go down the rabbit hole, then it seems that the spirit of her brave explorations into the hidden continents of the imagination is to be honoured, and further expeditions mounted. The Children of Alice will release their first recordings as part of the Devon Folklore Tapes series on June 1st, and will be performing at the Deerhunter/Atlas Sound ATP festival in Camber Sands in June (and you can see a clip of Trish singing with Bradford Cox during an American tour over here).



In one of several capsule side pieces bracketing the main article, Dan Abbott offers a ten best of Broadcast list. James and Trish’s methodical approach to recording and perfectionist attention to detail means that any such list is bound to be highly subjective. The time and care taken to craft each song on each album means that their records were few and far between but uniformly strong. There could be any number of top ten combinations. Abbott chooses a representative selection, reflecting the different phases of the band’s development, and the various aspects of their sound and songwriting. Clearly a committed fan with a broad and deep knowledge of their oeuvre, his choices tend to direct us away from the obvious, but always with a colourful and frequently poetic description which imagistically summarises why he considers it essential. How can you not immediately want to hear a piece whose ‘notes hang suspended like stars glimpsed through gaps in a magic fog as it slowly engulfs an unsuspecting night-time city’. Wonderful stuff, and entirely apt for the track in question (and I’m not going to tell you which one it is, either – you’ll have to guess, or buy the magazine). I’m happy that he’s chosen Arc of a Journey, one of my favourites from the Tender Buttons LP. It’s one of Trish’s most evocatively allusive lyrics, summing up science fiction landscapes with a few carefully chosen phrases, the simple, yearning melody backed by atmospheric and refreshingly non-generic electronic sounds which suggest they’ve learned something from their collaboration with the BEAST (the Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre) on the Pendulum EP.



Lists by their very nature invite response and suggested additions, however. So, if you insist: Book Lovers was my introduction to the band, and its shifting minor key arpeggio, suggestive of the 60s harpsichord sound which managed both to have a flavour of the antique and to inhabit the kinetic bustle of the present, drives it on irresistibly. The lyrics, full of bibliophile sensuality and excitement at book learning, are a statement of intent, with an unapologetic ‘it’s not for everyone’ pointing to their determination to pursue their own winding and idiosyncratic path. The melancholic instrumental addendum is gorgeous, a long drawn out sigh, both satisfied and a little sad, marking the closing of the storybook. Echo’s Answer follows the literary trail, with lyrics quoting Tennyson’s Echo’s Answer, as used in Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Its languorous pace is typical of a number of Trish’s daydream songs. Illumination from the Extended Play Two EP has a quietly ecstatic feel, with a rich mix of electronic sound textures over propulsive bass (which has an echoing concrete shadow throughout) and a gently rolling swell of drums giving it an epic, orchestral sound. It’s the baroque frame supporting a beautiful folkish melody, with visionary lyrics of great power (‘wait, the growing stem of time/waits poisonous outside’ is a striking opening couplet) expressing the autonomy of inner worlds, and a chorus of soaring wordless vocals. Poem of Dead Song, also from the Extended Play Two EP (both are collected on the Future Crayon compilation of EPs) has another lusciously melancholic opening section, beginning this time with wordless vocals. With the soft, bell-chords of the synths sounding behind her, the strike of the initial chime burnished away to leave only glinting resonance, it sounds like Trish singing to herself whilst walking back home along silent night streets. An abrupt shift in tempo and key takes us into what is not so much a chorus as a different plane of the song, refracting against the initial passage at a subtly off-kilter angle. Words come to the fore, although the muffled vocalisations continue with a crooning harmonisation in the distance. A solemn invocation calls on transformative powers, offering a hopeful vision of a clear path ahead.



Valerie, from the HaHa Sound LP, is essential, a perfect setting of Lubos Fiser’s main theme from Jaromil Jires’ 1970 Czech surrealist fairy tale film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. The film became intensely personal to Trish, as she reveals in her sleeve note to the soundtrack album, released a few years back on the Finders Keepers label, and now happily repressed on vinyl with the original green poster design replacing the bloodstained daisy on the cover. It was a work of art to which she immediately felt instinctively attuned. It suffused her psyche so comprehensively (‘I became Valerie’, she notes of the experience of listening repeatedly to Fiser’s music) that such an appropriation seems entirely natural, the melody and lyrics a deeply affecting reflection of her inner life, as expressed by her sense of connection with the images on the screen. Hawk, which ends the album, flies along on a steady, ratcheting wooden pulse, two notes tic-toccing along at a nimble pace. Sparse synth arabesques are plucked out in reverberant harpsichord tones at regular intervals. Trish sings in a low register, the melody restrained in its emotional range. The words, intoned as much as sung, are imbued with a mythic feel. There’s the sense of a steady flight through the upper air, looking down on an ancient tundral landscape, progress measured out in the rushing beat of a strong and wide wingspan. The song sounds like a precursor to the ‘what you want is not what you need’ one chord Mongolian lute kosmische freak out with which Broadcast would end their concerts in the post-Tender Buttons period.



Tender Buttons, the title track of the LP which James and Trish made as a duo, draws on the linguistic play of Gertrude Stein, and finds Trish delighting in alliterative connection and the assonant qualities of words, creating striking contrasts or surprising associations through semi-random conjunctions of sound and meaning. The slithering, fast-picked guitar spattered over the firm supporting frame of the looping bassline sounds like Lou Reed in the early Velvet Underground days, or a stuttering passage in a Sonny Sharrock solo, a preface to the eruption. Black Cat, always a concert favourite, returns us to Alice’s subterranean or beyond-the-mirror dreamworlds. The repeated refrain ‘curiouser and curiouser’ is given its own distinctive inflection, the emphasis laid on the last two syllables. The electronic backing has a fizzing, roughly burred edge, which makes it sound as if it’s going to combust into smoking flame at any moment. This provides an added sense of tension, contrasting effectively with the measured vocals. The Focus Group collaboration Witch Cults of the Radio Age is a collage of song and sound fragments, which makes individual tracks harder to isolate and highlight. I See, So I See So, with its incantatory worlds and vocals, always stuck in my mind, though. The ‘solar on the rise’ lyric reminds me of Kenneth Anger’s films (as did the short films which accompanied the album), with Trish as a dark-haired incarnation of Marianne Faithfull in Lucifer Rising. It seems designed to sung on the rounded crest of an iron age burial mound or hill fort to mark some significant winter conjunction (in ‘magic January’). Finally, In Here the World Begins, from the Mother Is the Milky Way tour cd, is another low-key Pagan hymn, with lyrics of meditative self-reflexivity (‘a dream within a dream’) which fold in upon themselves before expanding outwards once more. The synths here sound like some plucked zither reverberating in a watery cavern. It was punctuated on stage by the most luminous synth lines from James, glowing with summery solar warmth. Trish would step lightly up and down the stage in front of a spotlit and back-projected screen, her shadowed form growing huge and then diminishing again as she did so. It’s a blissful and utterly entrancing lullaby, with all the acceptance of paradox and mystery often found in children’s songs (as in ‘life is but a dream’, cheerfully chorused in nurseries and libraries across the land as the concluding sentiment of Row, Row, Row Your Boat). Well, those are some of my favourites. Others will assemble a completely different set. All are equally valid.



Julian House is an abiding presence throughout the magazine. In his guise as a graphic designer with a distinctive, instantly recognisable style, he has produced to double page title spreads: One for the Broadcast article, featuring collaged fragments of Trish’s publicity and cover photo portraits, some outline cut-outs, some cropped and squared off; the other for an article on the dubious pleasures of 70s Italian giallo films, an imaginary poster in the period style of the one he designed for Peter Strickland’s recent film Berberian Sound Studio (and there’s an article on Broadcast’s soundtrack for this, too). Getting into the profundo rosso spirit of things, its steeped in shades of deep red. House is also interviewed in his role as joint chairman of the Ghost Box parish council, along with Jim Jupp (aka Belbury Poly, or the vicar of Belbury). Once more, he voices his indifference to the cultural pontifications filed under the unwieldy theoretical heading of hauntology. The Focus Group’s forthcoming LP, The Electrick Karousel, is previewed, apparently offering us numerous nuggets of ‘baroque psych’. It also features the magic trio of House, Roj and James on several tracks. The children of Alice are coming out into the world in many different guises.



As if all this weren’t enough, there’s also an article by Trembling Bells’ head Alex Nielson (a regular contributor of accessible and insightful reviews to the Wire), who shines a light on the post-Incredible String Band LPs of Mike Heron. I remember his Smiling Me With Bad Reputations album with vague fondness (sadly, it fell victim to one of my periodic Record and Tape Exchange purges many moons ago). My teen self particularly enjoyed the track with Pete Townshend and Keith Moon, glorying under the Beefheartian title Warm Heart Pastry. It seemed a surprising change of direction, before you recalled the move towards a heavier rock sound on the latter and little-loved Incredible String Band LPs. A news item at the beginning of the magazine has alerted me to the fact that Trembling Bells are returning to the Exeter Phoenix on 20th July. After their previous visit with Bonnie Prince Billy, they are teaming up on this occasion with the aforementioned Mr Heron, together with his daughter Georgia Seddon.

Night Ferry (1976)
Another article surveys the modest pleasures afforded by the Children’s Film Foundation from the 50s through to the 70s, which have grown in charm with the passing of time (I can’t say I ever saw one while I was actually a child). They now offer an insight into a more innocent world, which seems separated by a gulf greater than the few intervening decades would suggest. Watch the London Tales collection released by the bfi (it’s in the Devon library system if you’re from these parts), and in particular the widely roaming attempts of three schoolchildren to set up their own rag and bone round in The Salvage Gang, and you’ll see a city which simply no longer exists (and you’ll find yourself straining to pick up background detail passing by during the children’s trip on the top deck of a routemaster – a modern variant on the turn of the century ‘phantom rides’). Night Ferry (1976) is also fascinating, with its young punk protagonists in unglamorous back street settings in south west London reflecting their time and place with an unforced realism rather undermined by the preposterous (but fun) Egyptian mummy heist plot. The opening scene, in which one tyke tries to evade apprehension having trespassed into a busy railway marshalling yard to retrieve his toy glider, is particularly hair-raising. It has all the cringing tension of a public information film, with a shockingly violent accident just waiting to happen. The boy is seen hopping out of the way of oncoming trucks, and running in the narrow space between a stationary line of wagons and another approaching train. It’s inconceivable that such scenes would be filmed today, even if marshalling yards still existed. More treats for trainspotters (sorry, rail enthusiasts) come in the form of extensive footage, both in platform and onboard, of the night sleeper service from Victoria to (via Sealink) Paris and Brussells, just a short while before it was scrapped. I look forward to the release of the Weird Adventures CFF collection forthcoming from the bfi, which includes Powell and Pressburger’s 1972 swansong, The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

All in all, this edition of Shindig seems to be especially constructed to meet the needs of the average Broadcast fan, and thus can be considered essential.

Comrades and Pre-Cinema at the Bill Douglas Centre

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The lanternist and the moon - Comrades

I had a good look around the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture up at the University of Exeter last weekend, on one of a select few Saturdays on which it is currently opening. Located on the periphery of the campus in the Old Library, where unloved books go to gather dust, yellow and slowly fall apart in a warren of strip-lit underground levels, it’s not exactly prominent or conspicuously inviting. But it is worth seeking out and investigating, piled high as it is with a rich variety of memorabilia spanning the history of cinema and its antecedents. The collection is the fruit of several decades of assiduous antique and junk shop combing by the Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas and his lifelong soulmate, emotional support and companion in creative exploration Peter Jewell. Their collection began in a fairly modest way in 1961, shelves gradually filling with books on the cinema, and the silent period in particular. Other objects associated with the movies and their marketing soon formed a further, rapidly accreting layer above this scholarly bedrock. It was not long before every space in the flat which the two shared in Soho from the mid-60s onwards was taken over by their impressive personal museum, as can be seen in the 1978 interview conducted there, which is included as an extra on the BFI Comrades dvd. Jewell estimates that they eventually amassed some 50,000 items, a testament to the mutual passion for the moving image which had brought them together in the first place. Jewell, whose family home in Barnstaple was a regular residence for Douglas, a welcome retreat from the unsupportive and wearying hustle of the London-based film industry, donated the collection to Exeter University following Douglas’ death from cancer in 1991, at the terribly premature age of 54.

Bill sets up the praxinoscope
Making your way downstairs, past the posters for gaudily coloured science fiction b-movies, silent films starring half-forgotten screen sirens and lengthy variety bills with cinematographic spectacles just one more novelty act, you discover what was, for Douglas, the heart of the collection, and the core of his own private obsession. The bunker-like conditions are appropriate here, since this really is a hidden hoard of magical delights. The hushed atmosphere and sense of being hermetically sealed off from the daylit world, together with the fact that I’ve never encountered another living soul down here, make you feel as if you are trespassing into some sacred, forbidden chamber. This is the room in which Douglas’ pre-cinematic devices and toys are displayed – early means of projecting images, creating the impression of movement or depth, or producing illusionistic effects which play upon visual perception. Here you’ll find phenakistoscopes, kaleidoscopes, filoscopes, stereoscopes and a large green mutoscope, better known as a What the Butler Saw machine (and yes, you can crank the handle and have a leering look at the casting couch scene flickering by within). Douglas was particularly fond of the praxinoscope, an ingenious and beautiful moving image toy invented by the Frenchman Emile Reynaud in 1876. This consisted of a revolving barrel with a strip of successive images fitted around the inner rim. These would be reflected on the mirrored facets of the central hub, illuminated by a shaded candle, which gave a convincing impression of movement to whatever figure or object was depicted. Douglas’ excitement at taking out his own praxinoscope from its wooden box in the 1978 interview is charmingly evident. Too polite to foist his toy on his interlocutor, he is nevertheless delighted when asked to demonstrate its workings, and goes about its construction and operation with the proprietorial pleasure and educative zeal of someone showing off their pride and joy, revealing their hidden passion. As he points out, this was an experience which could be enjoyed communally, everyone gathering around to gaze into the mirror, anticipating the shared dreams of the cinema. Indeed, Reynaud invented a theatrical elaboration of the praxinoscope, the Theatre Optique, which he unveiled to a Parisian audience in October 1892. This allowed for his figures to be projected via a system of reflective mirrors onto the rear of a screen, their movements played out against a magic lantern slide backdrop. Douglas also demonstrates how the different speeds at which the barrel could be revolved, or the way in which it slowed down led to a contemplation of nature of motion, and the manner in which it is observed.

The 'lanternist' demonstrates a thaumatrope disc in Comrades
Also in the collection are thaumatrope discs, with images on either side which merge when the attached strings are wound and then released to rapidly spin around. It’s an example of the persistence of vision which is key to the experience of cinema. The best known example, with the bird on one side becoming incarcerated in the cage on the other, is used in Comrades as a visual representation of the fates of the Tolpuddle martyrs who are the subject of the film. One of Eadweard Muybridge’s multi-camera motion picture studies of movement from the 1880s is included, a succession of photographic images which have proved amenable to later cinematic animation. One of the unrealised scripts which Douglas worked on towards the end of his life, Flying Horse, was based on Muybridge’s experiments and the tragic events of his life. There’s a hand-cranked Lumiere camera prominently placed in the centre of the space which effectively marks the beginning of cinema, and to a large extent the eclipse of the entertainments which surround it. Also prominent is a selection of magic lanterns and the delicate, hand-painted glass slides which threw luminous, candlit scenes onto screens or living room walls. A travelling lanternist, his appearance drawn from the 19th century prints and engravings, played a central part in Comrades, and the magic lantern prop made for the film takes its place amongst original models.

The lanternist in the rain - arriving in Tolpuddle in Comrades
Douglas and Jewell dedicated a great deal of time and effort into expanding their collection, particularly during the lengthy periods when Douglas found work hard to come by. His semi-autobiographical trilogy comprising My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home, funded by the BFI’s production board set up in the 1970s, won him awards and critical plaudits (some of these awards on display here), but didn’t lead to offers of funding for further films. It would be almost a decade before he got to make his intimate historical epic about the Tolpuddle martyrs, Comrades, years during which he became a respected and well-loved teacher of direction at the National Film and Television School. After several delays, partly caused by a serious falling out with the initial producer, Ismail Merchant (there was never any way that Douglas was going to make a decorous Merchant-Ivory production), he finally started shooting his film in September 1985, having finished his script in 1980. His fascination with pre-cinematic optical entertainments found a significant place within the script, and provided a series of formal devices which reflected on the way we perceive the world, and the manner in which images are used to tell particular stories. Douglas and Jewell were both huge fans of silent cinema, and had read widely on the subject, in addition to seeing screenings of as many films from the era as they were able. Douglas’ choice of modern classical composer Hans Werner Henze to write the music for Comrades was made on the basis of having heard his score for Erich von Stroheim’s silent masterpiece Greed. There’s a letter written to Henze in the corner of the museum dedicated to Douglas which attests to this. The influence of silent cinema on Comrades can be felt in the way that the images are left to tell as much of the story as possible. The contemplative concentration on expressive faces and gestures shows an affinity with Carl Dreyer, as well as with his spiritual descendants Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman.

George Loveless' lantern slide portrait from Comrades
Comrades bears the subtitle A Lanternist’s Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and What Became of Them, which appears separately on the screen to give it particular emphasis. It’s the kind of wordily descriptive title which might indeed have appeared painted on the side of a travelling showman’s hoarding or bill poster. The lanternist appears as a witness in the opening scene, looking on from a distance as machine breakers disguised as women are cut down in cold blood by redcoated cavalry who sweep down on them from the hillsides. Lugging his magic lantern equipment on his back, he becomes a news vendor, travelling from village to village. As he cries out as he enters the village of Tolpuddle, he charges a penny for the entertainment, but ‘all the news is free’. The first image we see in the film is a blazing white solar disc, which is slowly eclipsed by a dark circle. It could be seen as a lens cap being placed over the projector, a blocking off of light which also symbolises stories left untold, histories unrecorded. The rest of the film, with its variety of visual storytelling devices embedded within the frame of the cinema screen which will be the ultimate development of their illusions and shadowplay, can be seen as a progression towards the full revelation of those hitherto untold or ignored stories. And the delight which the toys or entertainments bring shows that those lives are filled with magic, joy and love as well as toil, misfortune and exploitation. Douglas’ use of pre-cinematic devices goes against the realist grain, introducing a deliberate element of non-naturalistic imagery which makes it clear to us that we are being told a story. He also departs from British social realism by insisting upon hope, rather than having his characters ground down by the depredations of the world in which they live. He makes the Methodist preacher George Loveless the central character of his tale, and views him as a man of uncomplicated goodness and quiet determination. He is aided in this by a beautifully measured performance of great warmth from Robin Soans. Douglas saw Loveless (a wholly inappropriate name for the generous and universally liked character presented here) as a saintly man, commenting in a talk he gave at the Bridport Film Society in October 1987 that he ‘couldn’t see any evidence of anything he did against any form of human life…he only gave to human kind’; As good a definition as any. He is not interested in exposing some dark side to his character. In this too – allowing for a character to be merely and simply good and kind – he went against the grain of British film-making at the time.

Blossom and Decay - the book and print seller's window in Comrades
The lanternist is played by Alex Norton, who brings a great stillness and alert presence to a character who is essentially an observer, an outsider who gradually becomes involved with the lives of those he encounters. He makes periodic appearances throughout the first half of the film. He provides us with an introduction to the socially and economically segregated world of Tolpuddle, linking the elegant grandeur of the country house, with its gentile manners and conspicuous display of wealth, and the village, with its spare cottages and muddy paths, which appears even more starkly bare as he enters it during a filthy downpour. The contrasting reception he receives in each environment marks a clear moral division between the two. We are initially denied access to the country house, viewing his approach to the local lord from the darkness outside, his pitch for a performance seen in the form of a shadow puppet play, figures rising and circling around one another in silhouetted outlines thrown onto the backlit curtain. This shadow show, symbolic of social exclusion, is repeated in variant form later on in the film, when the wives of the arrested men are only able to see their trial through an obscuring pane of frosted glass (another device designed to eclipse the story), turning everything into a vague blur of movement. Other illusionistic pictures or toys are associated with exclusive or elitist environments in which George Loveless and the other villagers meet with deceit or dismissal. The book and print shop in Dorchester has a print in its window called Blossom and Decay, which can be found in the Bill Douglas Centre, in which two young children full of blooming health, pose with a cornucopia fruits, glasses of milk, bouquets of flowers and huge loaves. Viewed from a distance, however, these details form the image of a skull, a grim memento mori pointing to their, and the observer’s inevitable end. In the Tolpuddle mansion, meanwhile, there is a picture of a sailing ship which, when viewed from another angle, turns into a portrait of an unsmiling cavalier (the two being painted on obverse sides of pyramidally raised rills). He looks down on the viewer with a disdainfully appraising air, as if he doesn’t really approve of the person gazing up at him from their disadvantaged position. One of the Tolpuddle villagers gives him an appropriate arm gesture in response, which we can almost imagine being accompanied by a Carry On ‘up yours’ raspberry.

Children's pictures - attic lantern show
Cutting away from the illuminated window and its shadow play, a baying of hounds gives a shorthand aural indication of the rude rebuff of the lanternist and his proffered entertainments and his unceremonious subsequent ejection from the premises. We momentarily see the him outlined in profile against the huge bright disc of the full moon, as if he were framed in the glare of his own projecting light. It gives him a noble, almost heroic appearance, far from the mangy cur he’s just been treated as, a subhuman creature fit only to set the dogs on. In the village he pauses by the window of George Loveless’ cottage, suffused with the low radiance of his humble hearthfire. In this dim but homely interior, he makes hand shadow puppets by the light of the moon against the interior wall for the Loveless’ children. It’s a direct inversion of the scene at the big house – shadows created from the outside, through an open window, rather than cast from within a veiled interior. His welcome here is warm and open, quite the reverse of his treatment at the big house. The fact that we often see his magic, made from shadows and light, from a child’s eye perspective indicates that Comrades is in a sense a children’s version of the Tolpuddle martyrs’ story. It views things with clarity and simplicity, and draws clear divisions between right and wrong, and has no place for shades of moral ambiguity. It asks us to view the world from a fresh and innocent perspective, to cleanse our minds of world-weary cynicism. Entertainments and stories for children are also capable of conveying harsh truths which are often elided in the ‘adult’ version. The lanternist shows a slide of ‘three little soldier boys’ who go to war to a wide-eyed gathering in the gloom of the village hall loft. With a sharp rap of his tambourine to conjure a cannonade, he abrubtly jerks one of the slides to the side, making their startled heads fly off – a shocking piece of subversive anti-militarism for impressionable young minds.

Meetings in ancient landscapes - Maiden Castle
Later on, the lanternist frightens the children on a foggy night by capering wildly behind the village hall, his shadow looming large on the stony screen of the windowless sidewall as he bangs and rattles his tambourine, striking it against himself and into the ground. In the ghostly light glowing through the billows of mist, he takes on an almost demonic cast. This mercurial, sprite-like side, full of playful capriciousness, gives him an air of otherness, and prepares us for the transformations he undergoes throughout the film. He is like a figure from a folk tale, a wanderer who arrives at a village from the wide world beyond and may not be entirely what he seems. The folk-tale aspect of the story (which is allied with its children’s storybook qualities) is also reflected in the evocation of the spirit of place, of the particular setting within which the tale is told. This being a story of agricultural labourers, the land plays a centrally important part. Douglas frames the Dorset landscape beautifully, making painterly compositions of ploughed soil, autumn wheatfields, rolling pasture, glinting sea and chalky Purbeck cliff and winding, flinty trackways. Ancient earthworks and chalk figures also figure, with Douglas’ camera looking down on the Cerne Abbas giant and up at the ramparts of Maiden Castle (shot in what he referred to as ‘God’s light’). This furthers the sense of the film as folk tale, with the characters rooted in a landscape which is steeped in accreted legend and history, sculpted by age-old human habitation. It places Douglas within the neo-romantic lineage of painters like Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. It also suggests a natural affinity between man and landscape, a connection with the contours of local geology and geography which can be followed down the generations, and which is now being eroded away.

The lantern show of spectacle - Doubtfire’s Famous Diorama
We encounter different incarnations of the lanternist as the story unfolds, all played by Alex Norton and in all but one case peddlers of optical entertainments or diversions. The form is mutable but some essence remains the same. His recurrent presence as an onlooker and impish commentator gives the film its own internal persistence of vision, as well as the self-reflexive sense of a story being both recounted and recorded. When the actual lanternist takes his leave of Tolpuddle, and has a few parting words with George Loveless, he tells him that because of him he is ‘a changed man’. The warmth of his reception in the village, where a ragged and penniless itinerant such as himself has found such generous hospitality, has led him to feel a direct involvement in the labourer’s cause. No longer will he be a passive observer. His political awakening comes about all through human contact and kindness, with all the fellow feeling that it engenders. Responding to the sincerity of his feelings, Loveless tells him ‘go then, and make a union of lanternists’. It’s an idealistic vision of a unionised future which allows for creativity to be freely realised and adequately rewarded, and is to an extent no doubt a rueful reflection on Douglas’ part of his own struggles within the modern ‘lanternist’ industry.

Sergeant Bell's Raree Show

...and what lies inside
The lanternists’ departure makes way for successive incarnations (some of which have already appeared before he heads off into the world to spread the news). He is the stout, union-jack waistcoated proprietor of ‘Doubtfire’s Famous Diorama’, whose extravagant and noisy theatrical spectactle, akin to the grotesqueries of the French Fantasmagorie (an impressive mock-up of which I remember from the Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank), employs sophisticated moving lanterns alongside frantically busy stagehands, and offers ‘a journey to the Antipodes’ – a presentiment of the curiously onlooking Loveless’ fate. At the village fair, the gaily if grubbily uniformed Sergeant Bell brings along his Royal Raree Show – a fold out stand bearing a wooden box with two round peepholes opening on to a diorama of the garden of Eden, in which an African Eve is transformed, et in Arcadia ego-style, into a bony death. This raree show was based on an 1839 print which the film’s prop, together with Alex Norton’s ‘sergeant’, brought to life. It can now be found amidst the authentic period pieces in the Bill Douglas Centre, as can the Edenic diorama. When George Loveless is driven through the streets of Dorchester after his arrest, on his way to his cell, the lanternist turns up in the guise of a destitute vagabond, huddling in a recessed stairwell. Reduced to passive observer once more at this bleak point in the story, the camera focuses on his eye, which looks through the straight iron railings at the curved spokes of a passing carriage wheel. This contrast of static and still, straight and curved lines creates a strobing op-art effect, a bedazzling impression of contrary motion such as that which can sometimes be seen in early cinema. Once sentence has been passed and the men have gone from the village, the lanternist turns up as a mysterious visitor looking out from the interior of a coach. He beckons the children over and shows them a thaumatrope disc, the toy which contains a single image on each side of a disc which are combined when it is rapidly twirled on the attached strings. His is the old bird and cage favourite. He points out the bird and the cage on their reverse faces before spinning it around and incarcerating the one in the other. But his underlining of their initially separate states offers hope that the men will once more be free, and will return home. It turns out that he is bringing money gathered by sympathisers for the support of the wives and their families.

Journey's end - the panorama runs out
The long voyage to Australia, as foretold in Doubtfire’s Diorama, is recreated in the form of a painted panorama, the camera gliding steadily over it to give the impression of movement. When we’ve passed Africa, India and Van Dieman’s Land to drop anchor in Botany Bay, we see the lanternist as ship’s captain, selling the moving panorama we’ve just seen to one of the overseers rowing over to transport the convicts to their harsh new world (‘for just one penny you can put the world in your pocket’). This panorama can be found stretched out on the wall in the Bill Douglas Centre, the eye reproducing the film’s interlude as it scans its elongated transglobal span. The behemoths and trident bearing Neptunes which populate the pictorial representation of the sea journey suggest that we are now entering the land of myth, a part of the story which is more sparsely documented, and therefore reliant on imaginative expansion. The narrative also fragments at this point, the comrades disunited and becoming the centre of their own separate stories. The lanternist turns up in the shelter of a wooden cubicle in the scorching midday sun of the outback desert, his spyhole turning his overseer’s hut into a camera obscura. His failure to see the inverted image of the chained convict labourers projected on the wall as they approach his box, pick axes raised, means that it will become his splintered coffin.

Revolutionary silhouettist - decapitating the portrait
He turns up again in a colonial governor’s house as a prim and powdered silhouette portraitist, dextrously cutting the outline of James Fox’s aristocratic profile with his scissors, finishing it off with a snipped decapitation which sends it tumbling to the tabletop. By a tropical shore, adjacent to the surreally twisted forms of a petrified forest, he appears in the eccentric guise of Gaviotti, his caravan proclaiming his ‘Celebrated Steam Heliotypes and Solar Mezzotints’. With his steampunk proto-camera, he takes pictures of the Aborigines, recording another untold layer of history. In his developing shed, his glass plates hang like delicate windchimes, clinking together with a gentle clinking susurration. The Aborigine, standing posed within his own sacred landscape, forms a direct link with the convicts and the land from which they have been wrenched. His image is reproduced on the plates which hang in the shed alongside that of one of the Tolpuddle transportees, a picture which brings them back together again when another of their number sees it. These images fade before our eyes, however. The Aborigine, who is left obediently posing by a tree, is left to fade from his own story. The transportees meet beneath another tree, and also fade from the land, leaving little trace of their temporary presence, returning home to resume their own interrupted stories.

Lost pioneer - Gaviotti's steampunk camera
Our final view of the lanternist returns him to his original guise. The men are free, and receive a ceremonial welcome home in a grand hall which looks a little bit like a cinema. They line up on the stage as if to give us their curtain call bows. And there in the wings stands the lanternist, now smartly dressed and in possession of a three lensed triunal lantern. A technological progression in the art of magic lantern projection allowing for added layers of movement and more impressive special effects within the backdrop slide, it means that the tale can now be told more fully and with even greater visual impact. Douglas had originally intended to create a similar effect of cinematic progression by filming the Dorset scenes in black and white with a compressed ratio before expanding into widescreen colour for the scenes set in the vast open vistas of the Australian landscape. The lanternist takes a bow as he is given credit for telling the story ‘through the power of optics and magical transformations’. When Michael Hordern’s progressive reformer and campaigner for the martyrs’ freedom notes that ‘it was almost as though he’d been present throughout’, Alex Norton’s lanternist gives a knowing straight to camera look, all but tipping the audience a wink. The final shot is of a bright white disc, wiping out the eclipse with which we began. The lens cap is now off and the story has been recounted in full. We end with magic lantern slide portraits of the Tolpuddle martyrs, footnotes alerting us to their subsequent lives in true Hollywood biopic style. The slides are there to be used again (and you can see them in the Bill Douglas Centre), the story retold until it is transformed into exemplary myth, the village becoming as much a part of the legendary landscape as the Cerne Abbas Giant or Maiden Castle.

His final bow - the lanternist with his 'Triunal' projector

Ray Harryhausen

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Cyclops vs.Dragon - The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Ray Harryhausen’s calling came to him young, when his parents took him to see King Kong at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre in LA. He was only 13 at the time, but he knew what it was he wanted to do, and set about achieving it with the spirited energy of the dedicated hobbyist. As he self-deprecatingly observed on many an occasion, he was lucky enough to be able to extend his hobby into a lifetime career. Lucky and, of course, with a natural and abundant talent which soon made itself apparent. Willis O’Brien, the stop motion animator who brought Kong and his dinosaur combatants to such vivid and characterful life, was Harryhausen’s idol, his work the pinnacle to which he aspired to ascend. He plucked up the courage to phone him some years after seeing Kong, by which time he had started to produce his own amateur films featuring dinosaurs. Finally, in 1939, he got to meet him on the MGM lot, where O’Brien was working on one of several never to be realised projects. ‘Obie’, as he soon came to know him, proved friendly and solicitous and gave him much valuable advice. He encouraged him to study anatomy, the better to understand how to make his models look convincing and move in a realistic manner. Harryhausen would always study the movements of the animals most closely resembling his fantastic creatures, whether at the local zoo, the aquarium or simply in the human zoo of the city streets. Appropriate then that he should make a cameo appearance in 20 Million Miles to Earth as a man looking at an elephant in a zoo – a real creature which he will later transmute into rampaging stop-motion form. He even went so far as to take a few fencing lessons to prepare for Sinbad’s sword fight with the skeleton in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

Best pals - Ray and Mighty Joe
Such assiduous care and attention to fine detail make his stop-motion animation endlessly enthralling, and the sheer quality of his work have ensured that he has been widely and enduringly revered and imitated by animators over the years. He did get to work with his hero, Obie, on Mighty Joe Young (1949), which effectively became his apprentice work, introducing him to the world of Hollywood studio film-making. He did the bulk of the animation for this rather less than mighty son of Kong, and there was a definite sense of the artistic crown being passed down to the next generation. Harryhausen’s death can thus also be seen as the end of a lineage dating back to what many still regard as the finest fantasy film ever made (an opinion with which I wouldn’t feel inclined to argue). With CGI having effectively consigned the labour intensive art of stop-motion to the film museum, this is a lineage which is sadly now effectively at an end. Harryhausen would always honour Obie’s memory and pay tribute to the formative influence he exerted upon him. He would later make the allosaurus vs. cowboys picture Valley of the Gwangi which O’Brien had been planning when Harryhausen visited him at the RKO studios in the 40s. He used some of his storyboards as a basis for key scenes, such as the lassoing of the dinosaur in the drystone gulch.



O’Brien also taught the young Ray the value of fine draughtsmanship and the ability to produce swift and accurate sketches when detailing setpieces and storyboarding action. He introduced him to the etchings and lithographs of Gustav Doré. With their striking use of light and shade, they had a naturally cinematic appearance. They were to be a strong influence on Harryhausen’s own fine charcoal, pencil and ink pictures. Dynamic compositions such as the skeleton tumbling from the top of the exposed ruin of a winding stair as Sinbad prepares to give its skull a final cleaving blow with his scimitar; or an allosaurus rampaging through the shadowed vaults of a cathedral; or a group of men running through the rubble of a bombed out city as three legged Martian war machines stalk towards them are all executed with great skill and dramatic flair. The scenes they envisaged often created the immediate visual impact needed to sell the picture they were summoning up for studio bigwigs in one enticing image.

Arabic aliens - Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
The latter image, with the Martian war machines, came from the version of War of the Worlds which Harryhausen tried for many years to make. Unfortunately, it was never to come to fruition. Ray would certainly never have let the strings show on those spaceships, as he later demonstrated in Earth Vs the Flying Saucers. His aliens were a bit more freaky, too – basically beaked amphibious heads on scuttling tentacles. He even got as far as designing two latex rubber demonstration heads. The beaked fish-man appearance was later incorporated into the design of the Kraken sea monster in Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen was never shy of re-using work cast aside in previous years. The homunculi who attack Sinbad and his sleeping compatriots in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger bear more than a passing resemblance to the Selenites from First Men in the Moon, aliens adrift in an Arabian fantasy (or perhaps it was the Arabian fantasy adrift in a post-Star Wars cinematic landscape). HG Wells was an abiding favourite of his. Another unrealised project was an adaptation of Wells’ Food of the Gods, whose giganticised animals would have been a natural for him to bring to looming and lowering life. He did get to make a light-hearted version of Wells’ rather darkly dystopic First Men In The Moon, however. His insectoid Selenites and grub-like mooncalves captured the feel of Wells’ lunar ant colony, and he also got to make a solidly brass-fitted Edwardian geodesic spaceship. He plotted one of Jules Verne’s fantastic voyages in Mysterious Island, whose oversized fauna (a crab, a bee and a chicken!) gave him the chance to realise some of the big beasties he might have enjoyed creating for Food of the Gods.

Attacking the one-eyed monster - The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
As his love of Wells indicates, Harryhausen was something of a classicist when it came to SF and fantasy (and he was much more at home with the latter). He shared the essentially conservative tastes of his lifelong friend Ray Bradbury. The two Rays met when they were both young men, artistic success and the acclaim of their peers still ahead of them. It would be Bradbury who, many years later in 1992, would present Harryhausen with his Academy award for a lifetime’s contribution to the technological development of cinema (the Gordon E Sawyer award). They both loved Kong, and vowed that they would sustain their love of dinosaurs into old age, treasuring their youthful relish of the exotic and fantastic. It was a vow that both managed to keep without too much difficulty. Their work tended to remain rooted in the era of the 20s and 30s in which they grew up – the age of colourful pulps, imperial adventures and monster fandom (Forrest Ackerman, founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland was another friend). Indeed, as Harryhausen turned to the worlds of Greek myth and Oriental fantasy in the late 50s and 60s, his films became increasingly nostalgic in their very escapism, their isolation from any contemporary currents in popular culture or in society.

Lost Worlds - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
This disconnection from the usual signifiers of a particular decade gives them a curiously ageless quality, free from any attempts at zeitgeist riding. Even the sets, harking back to Doré and John Martin, the Victorian painter of immense depictions of Biblical apocalypse and Babylonian city states, steered clear of the contemporary designs which manifested themselves in many historical fantasies (and indeed in the 50s lounge furnishings found on the planet Altair IV in Forbidden Planet). Perhaps it’s significant that Clash of the Titans, his farewell to stop-motion animation movies, was released in 1981, at the dawn of the studio blockbuster period, and of the market-driven cinema it represented, with all its attendant crudities and loud sensationalism. Harryhausen’s finely crafted and lovingly made fantasies looked out of place in such a world, their emphasis on individual creative effort out of step with the corporate imperative. Even in the 1970s he was still producing classical and oriental fantasies rooted which tended to involve the discovery of lost worlds in the She or Lost Horizon manner. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the adventurers finally reach an arctic Shangri-La of a distinctly Egyptianate nature with a transforming beam of coloured light at its heart. And in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, he drew designs for a fountain of youth, bubbling up in a vast subterraenean cavern and surrounded by an intact stone henge. The entrance to this sacred chamber is reached via a cave in a cliff face carved with heads derived from Indonesian Buddhist sculpture. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger meanwhile uses the perfect lost world set – Petra, the city carved into the cliffs in the Jordanian desert.

Kali attacks - The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Harryhausen always felt free to mix his mythologies. As early as his SF picture 20 Million Miles to Earth, he named his ever-growing Venusian monster the Ymir, after the father of the giants in Norse mythology. He would quite happily import mythical beasts from other tales or even other traditions when making the Greek classical or Sinbad films. Cyclops, centaurs, sirens, Buddhist carvings, Egyptian statuary and the Hindu goddess Kali (looking more like a dancing Shiva, actually) turn up in Sinbad films (he was well travelled, I suppose) and the Kraken sea monster of Norse mythology is co-opted to menace Andromeda in Clash of the Titans. The Hydra, meanwhile, migrates from the legend of Hercules’ labours and becomes the guardian of the golden fleece which Jason and his Argonauts have to do battle with. Harryhausen would point out to picky critics that he was making fantasy films, not academic adaptations of the classical tales. These stories existed in many variant versions, anyway, having always existed within malleable oral traditions before being written down and rendered ‘definitive’. The same goes for the dinosaurs vs. humans films (One Million Years BC in particular). This was a colourful fantasy, not an essay in paleontological reconstruction. However, Harryhausen, ever the perfectionist, would try to make his dinosaurs in accordance with current scientific knowledge as far as practical demands allowed. Given the considerable expertise which many young children have when it comes to dinosaur taxonomy, this was probably wise.

Talos descends - Jason and the Argonauts
Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation technique involved moving his models in each of the 24 frames which went up to make a second of 35mm sound film. This was hugely labourious and time consuming, and required intense concentration, a minute sense of continuity and a fine attention to every nuance of gesture and movement. Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending A Staircase No.2, with its blurred yet analytical depiction of movement over time, provides a good visual analogy to the kind of stretched out and slowed down perception of time Harryhausen had to cultivate. His moving monsters were always evidently models – they never achieved a convincing semblance of real life. But those who carped that they lacked realism fundamentally failed to appreciate their true appeal. It was the very fact that they did look like models stirred into miraculous motion, golems raised from inert, moulded clay by some cabbalistic enchantment, which lent them their magic aura. Harryhausen seemed to be well aware of this, which is why there are so many statues, lifeless figureheads or limply hanging skeletons which are brought to life in his films – the witches or sorcerers (invariably wicked) who achieve this acting as surrogate animators. There is the six-armed Kali in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, which also has a wooden figurehead which comes to life; the bronze colossus Talos in Jason and the Argonauts; and the golden bull christened the Minaton (a kind of robotic minotaur) in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, which acts as a labour saving mechanised galley crew. He had also planned to adapt Karl Capek’s play R.U.R (standing for Rossum’s Universal Robots – the first use of the term), bringing the Czech writer’s mechanical men to life.

Talos Awakes - Jason and the Argonauts
The Talos sequence in Jason and the Argonauts is probably my favourite Harryhausen scene. The moment when the monumental statue, kneeling on its plinth with sword at the ready, turns its cumbersome head with rusty creak of ages to look at the two fools making away with its titanic treasures, is electrifying. And when it effortfully pulls itself up and climbs down from the plinth, to the accompaniment of the low rumbling brass of Bernard Herrmann’s score (his standard lumbering monster music), I still find myself catching my breath. Harryhausen animates the stiff-limbed gait of the verdigrised giant perfectly, creating an awkward, naturally pixillated movement suggestive of joints which haven’t seen exercise in aeons. It was entirely appropriate that Harryhausen turned to casting his own bronze statues in later life. He created casts of both his Talos and Shiva models, giving them a more permanent form than the fragile and perishable latex rubber of the originals.

With Trog on your side - Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
The care which Harryhausen took over his creations, and the evident love he put into giving life naturally led to them often taking on a sympathetic air. His monsters were frequently imbued with a certain noble savagery. This was another legacy of Kong, the imperious master of its kingdom, whose wild environment is invaded, and whose untamed nature brought low by contact with human civilisation. There’s always a part of me that’s rooting for the giant roaring beasts as they’re poked, prodded and pierced by spears, swords and arrows, and a feeling of sadness when they slam lifelessly to the ground with a final bellow or drawn out screech. The prehistoric saurian in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms disturbed from its ocean bed slumber by the noisome rumblings of the atomic age; the alien Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, which is brought to our planet from Venus and is treated as a freakish beast by all who come into contact with it; and the great ape of Mighty Joe Young, subjected to all manner of circus indignities – all invite audience sympathy. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Harryhausen goes the whole way and finally makes one of his stop-motion figures, the prehistoric giant Trog, a dumbly loyal friend to our intrepid adventurers. He lends his brute strength like a humanoid Kong, a beast once more tamed by Beauty. Perhaps significantly, the Harryhausen family dog when Ray was a boy was named Kong.

T Rex vs.Triceratops - One Million Years BC
Harryhausen created a wide variety of creatures over the course of five decades, to each of which he imparted a living movement drawn from his careful study of analogous species. He modelled real animals such as baboons, elephants and walruses. He also recreated extinct ones, bringing dinosaurs, carnivorous and herbivore, back to life for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, One Million Years BC and the Valley of Gwangi. There were molluscs, crustaceans, marine reptiles and cephalopods – the giant octopus from It Came From Beneath the Sea, the giant crab and nautiloid from Mysterious Island and a giant turtle for One Million Years BC; and insects (all giant, of course) – scorpions in Clash of the Titans, bees in Mysterious Island and a wasp in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Pterodactyl with mini Raquel - One Million Years BC
Creating the illusion of flight in its different forms was one of many challenges he relished setting for himself in each film. The flickering wings of an insect in flight was a very different proposition from animating the flapping, spike-beaked scrap of a pterodactyl, the top-heavy bulk and wide wingspan of a roc or the mid-air gallop of the winged horse Pegasus. Making a skeleton stalk and stab entailed building a particularly fine armature, the jointed metallic frame at the core of all his cast latex rubber models, to provide the bones within the bones. He often had his monsters an magical creatures fight on different planes, climbing up stairs and jumping off and onto plinths and platforms, all of which allowed for an increased range of postures and gestural movements.

Death's head grin - Jason and the Argonauts
His Dynamation photographic process involved the matching of actors with model action (the integration of mannequins human and manufactured), and that combined action against model, studio and location sets. This entailed managing the delicate task of matching colour, tone and scale, blending the real and the imaginary in as realistic a marriage as possible. Such a blend had demonstrably not been the case in some of his earlier studio pictures such as 20 Million Miles to Earth, where the back projections of Rome were obtrusively ill-matched with the animation. The celebrated summit of his achievement with Dynamation was the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, which he choreographed to the last detail in his charcoal storyboards. The skeletons he fashioned for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts (the singular creation from the former piecing itself together to rise from the earth with its bony brethren in the latter) area a marvellous design. The beetling, drawn in brow ridge and leering death grin lends them a jack-o-lantern appearance of gleefully psychotic ferocity. They look like they relish the prospect of reducing their opponents to the lifeless and fleshless state from which they’ve temporarily been resurrected.

Ymir and model farmer - 20 Million Miles to Earth
For all the technical mastery of the Dynamation scenes, it was also always fun seeing a jerkily writhing of a human being picked up in the jaws of a dinosaur, screaming horribly before being chomped (the bloodcurdling cries another element taken from Kong), or lifted bodily in the claws of a Roc to be deposited in a mountain nest as food for the chicks. There’s a brief but rather impressive scene in 20 Million Miles to Earth in which the reptilian Ymir wrestles with a farmer in a barn, understandably enraged by the fact that its just had a pitchfork stuck into its back. Harryhausen animates the man quite convincingly as he tries to fight off his attacker, his blows growing more desperate as the creature sinks its teeth into his shoulder. Most famously, a tiny model of Raquel Welch was carted off in the clutches of a pterodactyl in One Million Years BC, feebly gesticulating as it disappeared into the distance, spears thrown in the flapping and cawing beast’s wake all falling pitifully short.

Monumental lumber - Earth vs.the Flying Saucers
The Jason skeleton fight demonstrated the complex action Dynamation could co-ordinate between actors and models. But Harryhausen also enjoyed having his creatures interact with miniature sets, which usually involved their utter destruction. There are many wonderful scenes of oversized monsters chewing on masonry and twisting iron girders as if they were plasticene, reducing all to decorous rubble. He drew upon his friend Ray Bradbury’s short story The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms for the poetic scene in which the subaquatic saurian rears up to confront an isolated lighthouse. It hears its foghorn as an aggressively challenging bellow, its reflecting beacon a blinking eye, and tears wounds in the brickwork with its claws. Later, it goes stomping through Manhattan in the classic style, snacking on foolhardy NYPD officers who stand their ground in the face of the overwhelming evidence that their guns are having no effect whatsoever. The giant octopus which Came From Beneath the Sea wrestles the span of the Golden Gate Bridge into new plastic forms, like a post-war sculptor. The Venusian Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth climbs to the top of the Colosseum in Rome in an attempt to evade the US army. They blast away in their usual dunderheaded manner with bazookas and howitzers. Between enraged monster and aimless artillery, they manage to destroy a fair amount of antique Roman architecture before the inevitable end. The spectre of Kong looms large again as the rather pitiable beast plummets to the roads ringing the old Roman circus. It even gets to wave a defiant Kong-style fist at its tormentors below before taking its dying fall. Most enjoyably (and in a stylistic departure for Harryhausen) the sharp-edged discuses of the alien ships in the self-explanatorily titled Earth vs. the Flying Saucers fell the Washington Monument like so much dead lumber (crushing fleeing citizens in its timbering shadow), strim the classical columns guarding the Lincoln Memorial, and crack the dome of the Capitol like a hollow eggshell. It was a scene memorably parodied by Tim Burton in Mars Attacks, with the Martians rather more adeptly manoeuvring their saucers to toy with the toppling monument, tipping one way and t’other and making the panicked tourists run thither and thither before crushing them with much gleeful cackling.

Enter Medusa - Clash of the Titans
Harryhausen also delighted in sinuous, elastic motion, whether it be in the winding tentacles of the giant octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea, the seven heads of the Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts, or more simply in the trumpeting trunk of the elephant in 20 Million Miles to Earth. More balletically, he also animated a serpentine bellydance in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, an enchanted snake growing four limbs which undulated with hypnotically swaying gesticulations before the tail reverted to boa instincts and tried to throttle its new-grown head. This delight reached its apogee in the snaking hair of the Medusa in Clash of the Titans, in which the multiple coils of the gorgon’s tangled barnet writhe in hissing and chaotically contrary motion. The Medusa’s slithering approach is all lit by a light mimicking flickering torchlight in a subterranean lair, an effect which had to be sustained in all the 1/24th of a second frames. Ray Bradbury called it ‘the finest piece of work he ever did’.

Centaur vs.Griffin - Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Again, for all the technical achievements of the Dynamation action, the climactic setpieces of Harryhausen’s films, the Jason and Sinbad ones in particular, tended to feature monster on monster gladiatorial combat. This put the real stars of the movie centre stage, with the humans pushed to the periphery. They occasionally prodded the antagonist of their favoured creature with puny pinprick spears, which produced an irritant sting at best, but generally they took the opportunity to slink away to safety. As far back as 20 Million Miles to Earth, he set his amphibious Venusian giant against an escaped circus elephant (the same one whose real incarnation he himself had been seen feeding a few moments earlier in his small screen cameo). In the later films of his mature period he pitted curved claw against razor-toothed claw, clacking scimitar beak against boulder-like fist. There was the classic fight between T.Rex and triceratops in One Million Years BC, with the mighty carnivore leaping onto the bony plated herbivore’s back, trying to avoid the jabbing thrusts of its goring head lances. Surprisingly, the triceratops comes out the victor in that one. An ogrish Cyclops lashed out at an unleashed dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and the friendly troglodyte tried to pummel the defrosted sabre-tooth tiger in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. Both anthropoid bruisers were outclassed, however, and the outcome seemed something of a foregone conclusion. Griffin vs. Centaur in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was a rather more even match – club and hoof against beak and claw, brutish grunt met with screeching squawk. Harryhausen creatures never reached a linguistic level, but their panoply of howls, roars, snarls and piteous dying screams were articulate in themselves. Lets finish with the image of this mighty bout, played out in front of the henge fencing the fountain of eternal youth. Place your bets now, and watch The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to find out who wins. My money’s on the griffin. It’s a wickedly clawed southpaw with good beak action, and the centaur’s vulnerable in its undefended flanks.

Alan Garner on the Television: The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Keeper

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PART ONE



Alan Garner is widely regarded as one of the finest writers of children’s fantasy in the post war period. His first two novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) were both set around the Cheshire escarpment of Alderley Edge, the area in which Garner grew up. Ancient mythological figures and legends were reawakened to play out their archetypal conflicts once more in this landscape. In Elidor (1965) a church in a decaying area of Manchester proves to be a gateway to a similarly barren otherworld, a chivalric Arthurian realm whose golden age is long over. The worlds of urban realism and symbolic fantasy are implicitly linked, as are the two very different literary modes which they represent. A strong attachment to landscape and the myths and histories that inhere within it has been a characteristic of his fiction ever since. Towards the end of the 60s and into the 70s, his novels became more enigmatic, written in a condensed, elliptical and very literary style. They demanded a great deal of concentration from an adult reader, let alone the young readership to which they were still being marketed. It was these challenging and emotionally highly charged stories which Garner adapted for the television, beginning with his 1967 novel The Owl Service, which he scripted for ITV in 1969. In 1978 he turned his 1973 novel Red Shift into a BBC Play for Today. And finally, he wrote a haunted house (or cottage) story for the half hour ITV children’s series Dramarama in 1983.

Alison, Gwyn and Roger - the eternal triangle
The Owl Service largely takes place around a large old manor house adjacent to a village in a Welsh valley. The house has been inherited by Alison, a girl in her late teens. She and her mother, Margaret, have come here on holiday with her stepbrother Roger and his father Clive. It’s a new family set-up, Clive and Margaret having just married, and tensions soon become apparent. The house is kept with sullen resentment by an outsider, Nancy, who also acts as cook. She has returned after many years, having moved away to the other side of Wales. She is accompanied by her son, Gwyn, a precociously intelligent, self-educated boy. Standing sentinel outside, endlessly raking the gravel drive, is Huw Halfbacon, the gardener. He watches the house and the comings and goings of its inhabitants as if waiting for something to happen. The story begins with Alison hearing scrabbling, scratching sounds coming from the attic above her bedroom ceiling (premonitory shades of The Exorcist). She gets Gwyn, with whom she is on friendly terms, to climb up and take a look. He uncovers an old, dust and grime coated set of plates painted with a pattern which weaves the beak and eyes of an owl into a garlanded floral design. Alison becomes obsessed with tracing out the pattern onto sheets of paper, which she then folds into origami owls. Once she has done this, the original pattern disappears from the plates, leaving them blank. Her driven creation of owls from flowers acts as the trigger for the re-enactment of an age-old legend associated with the local landscape. Huw looks on and makes obscure bardic proclamations. It’s as if he had expected this to happen, and had experienced it countless times before.

Tom and Sally parting at Crewe
Red Shift, like The Owl Service, features teenage protagonists on the cusp of adulthood, but who are still beholden to uncomprehending parents. They too are wracked with intense, wrenching feelings for one another which are thwarted by the social and economic forces of the world around them, as well as by their own doubts and anxieties. Tom lives in uncomfortable proximity with his mother and father in a static caravan in Rudheath, Cheshire. He has an expressively romantic relationship with Jan, who lives with her parents in a nearby bungalow. When they move away and Jan begins her nursing studies in London, Tom arranges for them to meet at regular intervals at Crewe railway station. From here, they cycle out into the outlying countryside. Besides Tom and Jan’s story, we also slip back into two historical eras, witnessing violent events which occurred within the landscapes which they explore. These time shifts are triggered by a mixture of emotional affinity and a tapping into the spirit of particular powerful locations.

The struggling rump of a Roman legion, which includes some native followers, is ambushed and retreats to the rocky outcrop of Mow Cop. Here it becomes pinned down on a sacred tribal spot, where the soldiers discover a heavily pregnant woman sheltered in a cave. She is regarded by the local tribe as a fertility goddess, but treated as a prize of war by the Roman members of the legion. The exception is Macey, who refuses to violate her like the others, treating her with due deference. He is a young Romanised Celt brought into the legion when he was just a child, and used by its leader, Logan, for his ability to go into a state of frenzied violence when certain trigger words are used. Another story takes place in the Civil War period. Another young seer, Thomas Rowley, gazes out towards Mow Cop from the tower of the church in the nearby village of Bartholmey as the inhabitants prepare for a siege. A militia of Royalist Irishmen is sweeping across the country from the West ruthlessly set on rooting out parliamentary sympathisers. Amongst those they seek is John Fowler, a charismatic figure in the village who is central to the organisation of the retreat into the fortress of the church. The Roman and Civil War periods are linked by a physical artefact, a stone axe-head. It is used by Macey, who breaks it from the axe in one of his frenzies, and dug up by Rowley, who calls it a lightning stone. He believes it to be a token of good luck if placed with a hearth, a ward against future lightning strikes. Tom and Jan discover it in an old ruined cottage on top of Mow Cop, and Tom takes care of it for them, holding it as an emblem of the possibility of a future spent together.

The Keeper's cottage
The Keeper is an enigmatic and subtly disturbing supernatural tale. It concerns Peter, an enthusiastic amateur ghost hunter. He is accompanied on one of his nocturnal investigations by Sally, as they seek to find proof of reported hauntings in a half-ruined gamekeepers cottage. Peter intends to measure and record any phenomena which might become manifest, confronting the unknown with empirical rationalism backed up with a battery of scientific equipment. His grandmother had told him tales from her childhood about the house and its reputation as a bad place. It had been left to fall into ruin by the daughter of its last inhabitant, a gamekeeper who shot himself in 1912. Sally seems to sense an abiding and watchful presence in the house. Her intuitive, empathic feel for the spirit of the place acts as a counterbalance to Peter’s analytical aloofness. As the night wears on, they play scrabble to pass the time. The words they choose with uncommon swiftness turn out to be from the lines of an old folk rhyme, which Sally has also unconsciously written out. It becomes increasingly clear that they have, through their curiosity, made a connection with some formless but powerful spirit of the land, a keeper which resents their presence.

Many of the themes of The Owl Service and Red Shift can be found in condensed form in their opening title sequences. The Owl Service uses musique concrete and diagrammatic animation and shadowplay to fold together modernity and age old tradition, the natural and the mechanistic, rational and supernatural in disconcerting visual collage. The title card pictures, with their clear and simple outlines and monotone colouring look like printed illustrations from a children’s book. Their minimal animation therefore gives the sense of stories coming to life, pages flickering into being, their contents made physically manifest in the world beyond the covers. The music begins with the rippling of a harp, a sound redolent of bardic traditions and the old oral storytelling fixed and codified in the books of the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Celtic legends. The harp is followed by a gurgle of water draining down a plughole, the sound transformed to give it a metallic cast. It conjures notions of a fluid passage corkscrewing through time. We then hear a motorbike engine revving, a more guttural reiteration of the harp and water sounds which lets us know that we have entered the mechanistic age of the internal combustion engine. All three sounds form elements of an unbroken continuum, it is suggested.

Bird shadows
We see a stand of trees on a hill which are then contracted within a circular frame. In the story, this is both the focal lens of Roger’s camera and the hole in the standing stone which seems also to act as a lens, bringing resonant echoes of past events into focus. The combination of the two create a composite vision, an amalgamation of ways of seeing both ancient and modern. As if to give this concept visual form, we then see a pattern of concentric circles rippling inwards, waves of time drawn towards a focal point. A pictorial candle’s glow is animated into flickering motion, the camera zooming into the flame as if our vision were drawn mothlike towards its immolating fire. A papery flutter of wings accompanies bird shadows cast by hands joined at the thumbs. A similar image was used at the strikingly effective cover of the Ghost Box LP As The Crow Flies by The Advisory Circle. It wouldn’t be surprising if its designer, Julian House, had been influenced by The Owl Service titles. Another of his Ghost Box covers, for Belbury Poly’s The Owl’s Map, also features an outline owl design. Hands then make a circle, echoing the one in which the trees were framed. This circular formation, a cyclical symbol, hints at a non-linear view of time, one which encompasses rebirth and recurrence. It is an invitation for something to come through, for an old pattern to re-establish itself.

Colouring in the owl service pattern
After the flight of wings, the harp returns, playing an old Welsh tune, and we see the pattern on the plate constructing itself, growing in an almost organic form, like time-lapsed lichen. As it is coloured in, as if by an invisible child’s felt pen, it seems flushed with renewed life. We hear a scrabbling, percussive patter, as of the scurrying of small, clawed feet. This morphs into an unnerving rubbing, ratcheting and stretching sound. It feels like some plastic material whose tensile strength is being tested to its limits, pulled taut from both directions. Something trying to break through the skein of time, perhaps. It also perfectly expresses the psychological tensions caused by the close proximity of the story’s characters, and the threat that one or more of them may snap, unleashing a destructive backlash. The raking tracks of clawed nails tears three ragged, parallel lines down the flower and owl mandala, and it fades from view. These titles really are a miniature masterpiece in themselves. They manage to convey so much, with such power, in a very short space of time.



Red Shift begins with a bounding Autobahn style electronic theme by Phil Ryan. It immediately introduces the idea of modernity and of fast motorised motion. We see blue lights coming towards us on a motorway, which blur and reform in the shape of stars approaching (or some interstellar vessel rushing towards them), a ring nebula at the centre perhaps the remains of some cataclysmic supernova. This gives an idea of the contrasts in scale which will be a feature of the story – from the intimate and personal to the historical and cosmological. It also introduces the central astronomical metaphor of blue and red shifts. Observation and measurement of these opposite ends of the visual spectrum allow us to determine whether a star is moving towards our point of perspective (blue, indicating a greater frequency in wavelength) or disappearing into the distance (red, indicating a lower frequency). The ring shape of the nebula again hints at a cyclical view of time. We see the faces of the three male protagonists framed within its iris, morphing into one another within this symbolic stellar formation. The personal and the universal are brought together, a cosmic connection outlined.

Tom in the iris of the ring nebula
We then see red car lights moving away along the other lane of the motorway, the title Red Shift appearing over them, the metaphor spelled out. Two people stand on the verge, rooted in the local landscape while all about them is in motion. They are seen from both perspectives, the blue and red shifting streams, stationary observers within the flux of progressive and regressive time, their relativistic perspective not yet available to us. They are depersonalised, peripheral figures stranded on a hard shoulder no-man’s land. These are our present day protagonists, Tom and Jan, but they are located from the beginning within a wider expanse in terms of time and space. In the opening scene, we find them sitting on a sandy hillock adjacent to the motorway, watching the cars and lorries rush past. To Jan’s innocent question ‘where are we going?’, Tom gives a smart aleck response, talking about continental shift, planetary rotations and expanding universes. Such geological and cosmological perspectives threaten to dwarf them, reduce them to insignificant specks. But when Jan announces that she’s going to move to London, the perspective narrows down to matters of immediate personal import, which have a more direct emotional impact.

Watching the trespassers enter
After the 80s electropop of the Dramarama titles (complete with synth drums and vocodored vocals), the opening credit sequence is contrastingly quiet and restrained. We hear the sparse and suspended chordal clangour of a hammered dulcimer (generally an indicator of East European intrigue in cold war spy thrillers) lightly breaking the silence in the interior of the gamekeeper’s cottage. The breathy whisper of a flute is suggestive of soft respiration, and the sense of presence is further indicated (as it is throughout the story) by the movement of the camera. A chair is set before the fireplace, with logs burning in the small iron grate. The camera eye point of view moves towards the chair, where it lowers its perspective. It’s as if some invisible form were settling itself in before the warm glow. The titles appear over the flickering flames. We hear two figures noisily approaching, and the camera swings suddenly around, startled by this unexpected intrusion. The blank gaze notices them passing by the window, and the door is forcefully shouldered a few times before it bursts open. Sally and Peter enter, and we see that the room is entirely bare, the chair unoccupied, the fireplace cold and the grate empty. We have immediately been introduced to the discomfiting idea that there is something in the cottage, however, and that it is watching. Sally’s later comment, when Peter asks whether she has ever seen a ghost, is perceptive and prescient: ‘I’d be more bothered if a ghost had seen me’.



Mythology and folklore are the matter at the heart of each of the three stories. The sense of a present at the nexus of deeper veins and currents of time is suggested by the way that ancient tales or rhymes whose words flow with incantatory cadences are made manifest in the modern world. These old legends are often attached to a particular place, but they are also universal in their recognition of the play of human emotions, and the conflicts engendered by the potent mixture of sexual, social and generational tensions and rivalries. In the Owl Service, the three young protagonists are driven to enact the story of the rivalry between Lleu Llaw Gyffes and Gronw Bebyr, lord of Penllynn. Their murderous rift came about because of the love between Gronw and Blodeuedd, Lleu’s wife. The story is told in Math Son of Mathonwy, the fourth branch of the Mabinogi, the Celtic legends collected in the 14th century in two volumes, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest and brought together in what is now known as The Mabinogion.

In this story, the magician Gwydion makes a wife for his nephew and charge, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, from ‘the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet’. He does this after Lleu has been cursed by the Lady Aranrhod, his mother, whom Gwydion had tricked into breaking a previous prophecy. She had provided Lleu with arms to defend her castle against a nonexistent enemy which Gwydion had conjured up, and had thereby gifted him his territorial inheritance. In revenge, she consequently vows that ‘he shall never have a wife of the race that is now on this earth’. Blodeuedd, the woman of flowers, is fashioned for Lleu in what amounts to a magically arranged marriage. But she develops a will and independent desires of her own, and falls for Gronw Bebyr, lord of Penllyn, whom she meets whilst he’s abroad hunting stag. He also falls for her, and they plot to do away with Lleu. As is generally the case in these stories, there is a complicated and unlikely set of conditions which must be met before a particular destiny can be fulfilled. There is an element of Celtic tall-tale telling to the legends, which Gwynn also indulges in when he spins Alison a shaggy yarn about sheep on the upper sides of the valley needing stilts to balance and stop themselves from toppling over. He describes this as ‘soaking the Saxon’, maintaining the tribal divisions of past millennia.

Updating the old tales - Gwyn takes aim at Roger
Once the conditions which will render Lleu vulnerable have been met (in this case involving him standing with one foot on the side of a bath by a riverbank, the other on the back of a goat), Gronw strikes him down from the hill crest of Bryn Cyfagyr with a specially fashioned spear he has honed in the prescribed manner over the course of the previous year. Lleu is instantly transformed into an eagle and flies off, seemingly banished for good. Gronw claims both Blodeuedd and Lleu’s cantref of Ardudwy. Gwydion, meanwhile, vows to discover Lleu’s aquiline incarnation and determine whether his fate is irreversible. He eventually finds him in the branches of an oak tree, shedding flesh and maggots which a sow feeds on below. This would seem to indicate that there was some remnant of the mortally wounded human still present. Gwydion uses his magic to transform him back into the old Lleu once more, although he is in a pitifully mangy condition. He recovers in Caer Dathyl in Gwynedd, Math son of Mathonwy’s kingdom, and then sets out to take reprisal against Gronw and Blodeuedd, with Math’s forces at his disposal. Gwydion overtakes Blodeuedd as she is fleeing with her maidens, all of whom drown in a lake. He transforms her into an owl, telling her ‘thou art never to dare show thy face in the light of the day’, and that she will be regarded as an enemy by all other birds.

Gronw, meanwhile, negotiates with Lleu in an attempt to save his own skin. But Lleu will accept nothing less than the opportunity to strike a blow similar to that which he was on the receiving end of, and on the very same spot as well. Gronw pleads to be allowed to place a stone between himself and the intended trajectory of the spear, arguing that the balance of blame for his bloody deed lay with Blodeuedd and her insinuating persuasions. Lleu grants his wish for this seemingly impenetrable piece of mineral armour, but he throws the spear with such force that it transfixes both the stone and Gronw’s heart. The stone with a hole through it is left standing on the banks of the Cynfael river in Ardudwy like a memorial headstone, and is named Llech Ronw, or Gronw’s Stone.

Gronw's Stone - Roger as target
We see it in the opening scenes of The Owl Service, Celtic spiral patterns forming a tangled horizon beneath the hole. Roger swims in the river from whose banks it rises, climbing out to lean against the bole of an aged tree, his exposed breast directly in line with the imaginary vector of the spear’s flight suggested by the hollow circle. In the next scene, we find Alison in her bedroom, idly tracing the circular pattern of light reflected from a glass of water or the pond outside to shimmer on the ceiling. We are immediately reminded, both by this and by the circle in the stone, of the circular patterns in the opening titles. When Alison hears the scratching coming from the attic above her (and above the circle of light) it is almost as if she has summoned it up, invoking the recommencement of a pre-established cycle of events (the circularity of which will also be reflected in the round, white circle of the plates themselves, which are uncovered in the attic). Gywn is called in, and the two are evidently comfortable in each other’s company (Alison remains dressed only in a loose, oversized nightshirt). He picks up the ornamental spear which stands by the dressing table and pokes at the ceiling with it. The roles which each will inhabit are established from the outset. Roger is the cuckolded and ousted Lleu, Gwyn the local usurper Gronw, both in romantic and territorial terms. And Alison, of course, is Blodeuedd, the woman created from flowers and later turned into an owl.

Comic icons 1 - Gwyn as green man

Comic icons 2 - Roger as green man
Gwyn and Roger also take up ironic modern poses with echoes of the old iconographies of the green man or wild men, figures connected to the natural landscape (woodlands in particular) and its seasonal changes. Gwyn is seen in the corridor holding his arms up to either side, the globe of a cabbage balanced in each hand. Roger poses more awkwardly and self-consciously in front of his timer-set camera, a large branch held up above his head as if it were sprouting from his ribs. With his silly grin, and with Gwyn’s cabbages from the garden, they are both caricatures of the figures of the ancient British wilds. Their foolish stances are a reminder that industrial civilisation has largely swept such dark and mysterious places aside, although certain residual impulses remain lodged in the inner depths. The bathetic nature of their impressions also makes it clear that they are hopelessly ill-prepared for the mythological roles they are fated to play.

Learning the part - reading the old tales
After the plates have been found and Alison has begun transferring the patterns into origami owls, we find her reading a green hardback Everyman edition of the Mabinogion (the paperback version of which I’ve taken my quotes from) in the garden on a hot summer’s day. It’s a book which Gwyn has lent to her, as if to impart the ancestral knowledge which is an instinctive part of his Welsh inheritance. Alison looks every bit the sulky English Lolita in her red bikini and bright plastic sunglasses. Her awakening sexuality is the catalyst for casting her as the reincarnation of Blodeuedd’s freshly created spirit. It also makes her a precursor of Angela Carter’s modern reinventions of female fairy tale characters in her Bloody Chamber stories and in the film The Company of Wolves which derived from them. The reflections of Gwyn and Roger framed in the twin screens of her dark lenses points to the formation of a new incarnation of the eternally recurrent triadic relationship. Alison uses the book to shield herself from both of them, dispelling these reflections and blocking their undisguised boyish desire. When Gwyn kicks the book away, we see a brief flash of the flowered owl design tattooed on her face. She is possessed as much by the power of the word and the truthful outline of the story as she is by the energising effect of the occult circuitry in the plates’ pattern. The word reinforces and fixes the energies which the owl service patterns and the paper models which are made from them unleash.

Mask of anger - the owl tattoo
The dangerous power of words and of powerful, archetypal stories is made alarmingly apparent when Gwyn is attacked by a fluttering flock of torn pages (an attack accompanied by shrill free jazz flurries and squawks). They swirl around him with the angry, snapping susurration of mobbing birds driving off an invasive, threatening presence. ‘Boy, there’s axiomatic’ he comments at this self-evident demonstration that the old myths still have power. Gwyn is one of a number of auto-didactic smart-arses with more than a hint of self-portraiture about them which can be found in Garner’s work (Tom in Red Shift is another). The ancient word comes to life and punishes Gwyn for his disrespect, his contemptuous kicking of his own book and his own traditions. It asserts its undiminished force in the world (or this corner of it, at least), the abiding truth encoded within the eccentric symbolism of its surface details.

Huw Halfbacon is a complex figure who is both Gwydion (and specifically identifies himself as such in the novel) and, in a previous iteration of the tale involving him, Nancy and Bertram, the former upper class owner of the house, an incarnation of Lleu. He also acts as a chorus, and both he and Gwyn talk about the old tale from the Mabinogion. Gwyn provides clarification and a narrative précis, whilst Huw comes out with a kind of running footnote commentary and explicatory exegesis, progressing from an anticipatory ‘she is coming’ to a declamatory ‘she is come’. His reading of the story attempts to reach a more sympathetic understanding, however, which would transcend his and the boys’ assigned roles. It could almost be seen as a revisionist modern interpretation, taking into account and giving primacy to the female perspective of Blodeuedd/Alison, and acknowledging the way in which she is controlled, the pattern of her life set out for her.

Huw Halfbacon
Through having been created for a particular purpose, marriage to a lord, she comes to represent, to a contemporary reader, the social powerlessness of women and the rigid expectations of class. Huw observes how hard it is to be ‘shut up with someone you’re not liking very much’. He notes that Lleu is a hard lord, and that Gronw is ‘not a bad man’. His repeated mantra ‘she wants to be flowers and you make her owls’ points to an alternate outcome to the story which takes her needs and desires in to account. His despairing cry ‘why must we destroy ourselves’ suggests that he is all to well aware of his own powerlessness to alter events, however. He seems to have abdicated his own role and shrugged off complicity by displacing any sense of responsibility. For all his proclamations of power and regal guardianship (‘I own the ground, the mountain, the valley; I own the song of the cuckoo, the brambles, the berries’, and ‘my land is the country of the summer stars’) he is in the end helpless in the face of Alison’s violent climactic metamorphosis and the seismic meteorological chaos is unleashes across the valley. The time of his domineering, capricious and vengeful authority is over. A new balance of power must be found to re-establish harmony in the world.

Garner claimed that Red Shift was inspired by the ballad of Tam Lin and Burd Janet and the Queen of Fairy, which may be familiar to many through the version Sandy Denny sings on Fairport Convention’s classic Liege and Lief LP. This is a fairy tale of the darker variety, before the old superstitions were diluted into sweeter and less threatening nursery fare. The Queen of Fairies is a figure of fearful otherwordliness who has held Tam Lin under her spell since capturing him when he fell from his horse. Janet disobeys explicit instructions not to go to the large house of Carterhaugh where he lives. The local story has it that any maiden who goes there will lose her virginity to the rakish Tam. But Janet has been promised the house by her father, and goes there to claim her inheritance. Carterhaugh is a haunted place which has the feel of being located on a threshold. It is also a world away in terms of class and wealth for local lass Janet, of course. But she meets and falls in love with the enchanted Tam Lin, and according to several versions becomes pregnant with his child. He warns her away, however, revealing that he is doomed to be offered up by the Queen of Fairy as a tithe to hell (an interesting collision of Pagan and Christian iconography there).



Janet once more shows her independent strength of spirit, however, and insists on fighting for his life. If she is to break the spell she must pull him from his horse as he rides by with the Queen and a retinue of knights on All Hallow’s Eve, when the exchange of the human currency of the damned is due to take place. She must then hold on to him throughout the long night as the Queen wrenches his body through many transformations, turning him into a lion and a serpent before he finally lies as a naked knight in her arms. The story is clearly ripe for modern interpretation as a parable of sexual awakening and of female independence and strength. It has been used as such in Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock and Catherine Storr’s Thursday (Storr is better known for her children’s classic Marianne Dreams). It use in Red Shift is a little more oblique and notional, however. Charles Butler has written an excellent article, Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of Tam Lin, about how Garner incorporates the spirit of the ballad into his story rather than using it as a rigid template. He points to the key moments in the story in which the female characters hold on to the vulnerable male protagonists, whose transformations are the inner ones of wrenching emotion and psychological turmoil. The women are holding them together and shielding them from external forces which manifest themselves as manipulative parental figures (real or proxy). They hold them through dark nights to keep them from disintegrating mentally (or at least try to). The corn goddess does this on Mow Cop in the Roman period; Madge Rowley holds Thomas in the Civil War episode to warm his wounded body through the night on the bleak plain of Rudheath after they have fled the churchyard massacre; and Jan (the modern equivalent of Janet) tries to keep the volatile and mentally hyperactive Tom (the modern version of Tam) from suffering an implosive breakdown which will burn out his buzzing neural circuitry. Such an implosion would be an inverted echo of the supernova which created the ring nebula we see in the titles at the beginning.

The Bloody Braggadoccio prepares to strike
Other elements of the story are taken from fragments of history which have been passed down through hearsay and rumour as much as record. The Roman strand draws on the legend of the lost Ninth, the legion which disappeared and many have gone native, blending in with the local tribes. They are explicitly identified as such in Garner’s novel, in which their leader Logan states ‘we’re the Ninth’. We learn that they’ve disguised themselves as the ‘Mothers’, who make tribal war with the local ‘Cats’. In the Play for Today adaptation, they are more like a ragged and beleaguered rump. There are a few natives in tow, but in a significant variation from the book, this is a desperate remnant of men adrift in unknown territory, ambushed in their tents and driven towards Mow Cop where they make ready for their last stand. There is certainly no sign of the raid on the Cat village which occurs in the book. The Civil War episode is based on reports of a massacre at Bartholmey in 1643, which only became widely known after the Field-Marshal of Royalist forces in Cheshire, Sir John, Lord Byron, unwisely crowed about it in a letter which fell into the wrong hands (thus earning him the title ‘the bloody braggadoccio’). The lack of any more detailed report leaves a vague blankness which leaves room for the imaginative expansion of legend.

Automatic Scrabble writing
In The Keeper, the hidden meanings of folk rhymes form the basis of the story’s revelations. The sinister sense decrypted from seeming nonsense verse gives voice to some unnameable other, a force which is beyond conventional understanding. Language and words are key here. The rhyme emerges through the letters placed with semi-conscious haste on a Scrabble board, and is then written down in an idle moment by Sally, once more without conscious input. Both Scrabble rounds and scribbled rhyme are a form of automatic writing, bypassing conscious intent to reach some deeper layer of intuitive awareness. With the chill realisation which is at the heart of the best classic British ghost stories, it becomes retrospectively evident that some presence has found its way into both their minds. Whatever force is at work appears to be drawing on deep veins of folk memory to deliver its message or, as it turns out, warning. The rhyme, once pieced together in acrostic form and written out on paper (a bit like a Cageian chance score which taps, Zen-like, into the momentary flux of a larger universal order) reads thus: ‘go away from my window my love, my love/Go from my window my dear/for the wind’s in the west and the cuckoo’s in his nest/And you can’t have a lodging here’. The image of a figure standing at a window looking out hints at an observing presence in the house. The roving camera, which observes the two protagonists from various interstitial points of view (behind the fireplace and from between the exposed slats of the crumbling wall) gives a constant sense of something watching and waiting. The reference to the cuckoo in its nest also hints at the discomforting sense that this presence has found a lodging in their minds, the fragile house of the self in which it will grow and eventually evict the inhabitants for which it was originally built. The fact that the cottage they are spending the night in was built for a gamekeeper, someone who watches over the surrounding land to make sure that trespassers don’t intrude, suggests that this invisibly scrutinising force has an analogous role. It’s the guardian of some more intangible threshold.

to be continued...

Elektrik Karousel by The Focus Group

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The new Focus Group album, Elektrik Karousel, comes with the usual accompanying Ghost Box conceptual packaging, creating a contextual world of the imagination which the music can inhabit. In this case, Julian House, the individual turning the dials behind the Focus Group screen, has designed, along with fellow Ghost Box boss Jim Jupp, an old fashioned board game with a distinctly surrealist cast. The pieces are engravings from old books, and include triple-headed sea gods and louche devils; flayed horses and disembodied ears; anatomical cross-sections of cochlear tracts and optic nerves; plumed helmets and Victorian military medals; cartographer’s dividers and antique playing cards. They look like props from a Jan Svankmajer animation, liable to fill out, flush with colour and come to life at any moment; or elements from one of Max Ernst’s collage novels, waiting to be inserted into a dream tableau.

Caught in the Carousel - Max Ernst's Reve d'une Petite Fille qui Voulut Entrer au Carmel (1930)
The inner sleeve of the LP or the foldaround cover of the CD are illustrated with the trail of squares the players must traverse arranged around a central karousel with its spinning arrow of chance (a dice is clearly not necessary for this game). Corresponding to the track titles, these squares allow for the use of a variety of typographical styles whose associations give the impression that the game’s moves progress backwards and forwards through the decades as much as across the demarcated board space. They also resemble the small ads which might be found at the back of comics, SF magazines or underground music papers. The slightly wonky placement of the squares, along with the deliberate misalignment of the two colour printing, gives a visual cue to the rough aural collages of the record. The cover, with its vaguely op-art black and white patterning, suggests that the whole game could expand into three dimension (either magically or by folding along the dotted lines) and begin to revolve like the barrel of a zoetrope or the mirrored axle of a praxinoscope – in both cases to bedazzling, hypnotic effect, possible depositing the children depicted onto a life-size board whose hazardous labyrinth they must negotiate in order to find their way back to the real world.

Science of the supernatural - Blackwood tributes
Titles are an assemblage of recurrent Focus Group and Ghost Box obsessions. Hope Hodgsone (sic) once more points to a love of British supernatural literature. Algernon Blackwood has already been paid tribute to in the title of The Willows, the Belbury Poly LP whose back cover also bears a quote from the story. Quotes from Welsh writer of weird tales Arthur Machen also grace the covers of two Ghost Box LPs: The Focus Group’s We Are All Pan’s People has a passage from The Great God Pan, whilst Belbury Poly’s The Owl’s Map extracts a description of age old musical ritual from The White People (the title story in Penguin’s recent collection of Machen’s fiction). The capitalised SPOLK looks like a mnemonic acronym, conjuring memories of SPLINK, a similar and rather confusing example urgently delivered by Jon Pertwee in a 70s public information film which tried to inculcate in suggestible children the proper way to cross a road. The Flourescent Host, Skipping Spook (evidently a friendly spirit in the Motley Hall mould) and Wax Phantom are further hauntings, whilst The Heavy Blessing, Flaming Voices and Hoojumany continue the investigations of witch cults begun on the collaborative LP with Broadcast. Various tracks with prominent Ks (the Elektrik Karousel, Kinky Korner Klub and the Kool Kranium) point to a thrilling future of scientism and synthetic living in which the soft and extraneous and extraneously curved C has been eradicated as a needless inefficiency. From a graphic designers perspective, the K also has the naturally dynamic look of a figure putting one elegantly straightened leg forward whilst raising a celebratory arm to propose a toast or wave at an admiring crowd. Finally, More Night Films we can assume to be from the Hammer or Amicus (or even Tigon or Compton) canon, with lashings of Kensington gore, rituals conducted in purple robes, Thames Valley gothic piles and as much exposed actorly flesh as the ducking and diving producers could charm the BBFC scrutinisers into permitting.

Jon Pertwee urges us to splink
The album sets out its sonic stall in the opening moments of the brief prelude, Make Way. A Carl Orff-like percussive tinkling is juxtaposed with manic mechanical ricochets sounding like field recordings made in a Japanese pachinko parlour or an aging chorus of excitable cash registers. This is overlaid by the sound of children making a racket in the resonant space of a swimming pool. The later gives off the chlorinated whiff of the public information film, another common Ghost Box reference point. A ‘learn to swim’ film of this type was explicitly evoked in The Advisory Circle track In The Swim from their Mind How You Go LP. The second track, Elektrik Karousel, gets the game moving with a rolling jazz drum pattern in the Take Five style, which is phased and spun around. The carousel is definitely turning, and taking its slightly woozy effect. Harpsichord arpeggios and patterns are layered on top, as are snatches of immaculately RP-articulated dialogue which sound as if they are being tuned in from half-remembered children’s programmes. Then there is the Pavlovian jangle of ice cream van chimes.

The harpsichord is a signature sound throughout, its sprightly, lightly plucked notes non-resonant and so following each other in rapid succession before awkward silences can descend. It’s an instrument which somehow became prominent in the 1960s and summons up the contradictory impulses of that wild decade. It’s both antique and kinetically of the moment, expressing a bustling English eccentricity which at the time was both looking to the future whilst trying to maintain well-worn traditions. It could be used as the soundtrack to a betweeded Margaret Rutherford blithely riding her bicycle through an unchanged country village or to a mod-styled Mrs Peel speeding away from her London mews flat in a fast white sports car. And with a little echo and reverb, it neatly conjures the unthreatening approach of friendly spooks. Other sounds which recur and give the album its particular flavour and sense of continuity with previous Focus Group records include xylophones, musique concrete blips and skrees, chanted, ritualistic vocals and pastoral flute (whether in folk, Kes-jazz or impressionistic Debussyish mood). On this record there are also elements of free jazz sax (on The Magic Pendulum), Indian classical music (sitar, bansuri flute and tabla on Flaming Voices) and even the surprising intervention of swooshing Jeff Beck-like jazz fusion guitar sounds on The Plastic Castle, perhaps suggesting the thrill of rushing down a plastic slide descending in a spiralling curve from the crenellations. Sounds recur and recombine at various junctures throughout like themes being reiterated, varied and placed in different settings. Indeed, the whole album, whose tracks are generally very short, feels like an extended suite (with Flaming Voices as a mini-suite within). This is given further credence by the lack of track divisions on the vinyl LP. The recurrence of particular sounds or harmonic sequences (there’s a series of soft guitar chords which seems to emerge at periodic intervals) also brings us back to the Karousel game, with its own cycles and loops, dictated by the chance operations of that spinning dial, sending players back to previously occupied squares.


Julian House may be the secret mastermind behind The Focus Group, but here he gives credit for ‘help from Broadcast’. There is a sense, then, that the collaboration begun on the Witch Cults from the Radio Age LP is being continued in some shape or form. House is now in a post-Broadcast trio with James Cargill and Roj Stevens, both ex-members of the group. They will be recording and hopefully performing under the name Children of Alice. Both James and Roj have recorded for Ghost Box before, and it is they who contribute to this album under the proud Broadcast banner. Something of their characteristic sounds can perhaps be detected at various points. James’ warm analogue synth lines seem to lend a magic hour glow to Flaming Voices, Let’s Listen, SPOLK and Petroleum Paisley, whilst the trundling and clanking sound of complex mechanisms in motion which was a feature of Roj’s The Transactional Dharma of Roj LP forms the unstable Meccano framework to parts of Bachoo, Flaming Voices, Frumious Numinous and Harmonium. To offer a Radiophonic Workshop analogy, which seems appropriate in the context, Roj is like John Baker, using the electronic manipulation of sounds found or synthesised to produce elastic, springy rhythms. James, meanwhile, has a Paddy Kingsland ear for melody and a Delian sense of rich atmospherics. These elements combine perfectly in Flaming Voices, which maybe affords us a glimpse in to what the Children of Alice might sound like.

That name pays tribute to the late Trish Keenan, the voice (and much more) of Broadcast, who had an abiding love of Lewis Carroll’s labyrinthine dream tales. She is given thanks for the ‘sounds you sent’. And is that an echo of her song in the angelic choral voices drifting in the nebulous background of Frumious Numinous. The title makes reference to the nonsense ballad (which yet makes instant sense) Jabberwocky from Alice Through the Looking Glass (‘Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the Frumious Bandersnatch!’, you’ll recall). You can hear a recording of Trish reading it on the Broadcast website. It’s a suggestive title, with hints of the transcendental, a numinosity which often illuminated her lyrics. It hints at some spirit living on, perhaps just in the molecular patterns of oxide tape or in the lines of digital light etched into the polycarbonate spiral of a CD. But hopefully in some more expansive form.

House’s technique in the studio (or sat in front of his laptop) mirrors his graphic style in its deliberate creation of a rough-edged, imperfect finish. Where his visual collages preserve or cultivate torn borders and hastily scissored outlines, the aural collages of The Focus Group delight in seemingly abrupt and clumsy edits (the equivalent of cinematic jump cuts), and loops whose ‘joins’ can be clearly heard. The hiss of scratched vinyl can be detected at certain intervals, too. The nature of the materials used to make the sounds is left raw and exposed, just as much as it was in the brutalist concrete architecture of the 60s and 70s, and with a similar aesthetic and perhaps even ideological intent. It seems to amount to a pronounced disavowal of the polish and surface sheen of airbrushed perfection offered (and it’s an offer that is generally accepted) by the effortless tools of digital manipulation. The process is apparently made evident, although this is of course an imaginary process. There are no tape loops or spliced edits, no whirring spools or glowing dials. The rough cut and paste juxtapositions are a conscious aesthetic choice, creating the appearance of something which has been put together in a more laborious and solidly mechanistic way. The illusion of materiality adds to the archetypal Ghost Box concern with the utopian dreaming (and propagandistic scheming) of the post-war British world (Macmillan to Callaghan, roughly speaking). Some of the tracks look to the more avant-garde, lab-coated tendencies of music in this period. A radio being tuned at the start of Hypnoradiol, which thereby incorporates the static sounds of the universe between stations into the piece, which is followed by pointillist punctuations and vocal distortions, points to John Cage and early electronic experiments. The electronic stridulations on The Heavy Blessing sound like the artificial chirruping and metallic frog chorusing on Pauline Oliveros’ 1967 tape piece, gloriously titled Alien Bog.

Johnny plays jazz - Staccato meets...
A processed flute in tigt gruffil (anagram or meaningful nonsense?) could be transposed from an early Tangerine Dream record. Flaming Voices has a wafting breeze of Debussyesque flute, which morphs quite naturally into its Indian equivalent (Debussy was influenced by Eastern music, after all). The Indian music adds a new colour to the Focus Group palette. It is blended with a Stravinskyish oboe in a marriage which seems a lot more relaxed than the rather stiff East meets West meetings between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin. Most striking and unexpected is Hope Hodgsone, which sounds like a straight piece of reflective after hours jazz. There’s even a touch of night club chatter and clinking glasses to give it that authentic Village Vanguard aura. It’s a spare piece with soft brush on snare and cymbal, a minimal bass suspension and impressionistic Bill Evans chords. Has it been edited together from different sources in the prescribed xenochronous Zappa manner. If so, it’s skilfully done (and in this instance, you can’t hear the join). Or perhaps this is the surprise new direction for the Children of Alice – a piano jazz trio. The title posits (in my mind, at least) the appealing notion of a character who is a combination of William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective Carnacki and John Cassavetes’ jazz piano playing PI Johnny Staccato, smoky New York dives colliding with Edwardian drawing rooms.
...Carnacki - chasing after hours spectres

The final named track, More Night Films, has a touch of the spiralling Terry Riley all night flight organ plus delay improvisations bubbling away in the background, beneath more plucked, slightly melancholic harpsichord figures. Riley did record the soundtrack for a couple of films in the early 70s – Les Yeux Fermés and Lifespan. Perhaps there’s a hint of those here; Late night art screenings for an audience nodding off on scattered beanbags. Such longform, flowing improvisations are the exact opposite of the Focus Group’s concentrated cut-out vignettes. Riley isn’t allowed to float off into a prolonged nocturnal trance here, though. The Night Movies end and we are left in an echoing auditorium for a brief untitled coda. A queasy Blackpool organ plays a desultory chord over and over, only serving to emphasise the emptiness of the space. The ratcheting clatter of the opening is now the emptying of the tills and the bustle of cleaners, who are also eager to finish up and get home as quickly as possible. We are being ushered out – the show’s over. But it can start again whenever we want, the karousel set once more into slow rotation, speeding up into a disorienting, dazzling and ever changing blur of motion. Just go back to square one (Make Way), spin the dial and begin the game all over again.

Film Freak by Christopher Fowler

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Christopher Fowler’sFilm Freak is a follow up to his well-received memoir about growing up in the South East London suburbs of Greenwich, Paperboy. Categorising both as memoirs is misleading, however. Whilst they do contain a good deal of autobiographical material, these books are as much about the evocation of time and place and the exploration of the cultural tenor of the 60s and 70s, the decades in which young Christopher grew up and found his way in the world. Paperboy was a reminiscence of a childhood world, and of the peculiarities of the British character in the post-war period. It was affectionate but resolutely unsentimental, tending towards the painfully but often hilariously honest exposure of the absurdities underpinning the façade of suburban normality. It was also unrelenting in its depiction of the claustrophobia inherent in a traditional nuclear family, within which any love between husband and wife had long since become desiccated, drifting and settling to mingle with the household dust. Film Freak finds him departing the family home at the earliest possible instance, leaving his father to his endless round of disastrous DIY projects. He swiftly finds a job in an ad agency as a copywriter, the best way he can think of turning his love of writing into remunerative employment.

If Paperboy summoned up the spirit of a particular corner of South East London in the 60s, Greenwich and its surrounds, then Film Freak does the same for Soho and Fitzrovia. Fowler wastes no time in seeking out the local cinemas, and spends the greater part of his spare time in faded picture palaces and rank fleapits watching what amounts to a history of British film. Once he gets involved in the film industry himself, setting up a promotional company, the geographical compass narrows even more. The business end of the British film world was concentrated in the Soho artery of Wardour Street, a loose hub around which the studios scattered in the hinterlands of London formed a radially attached ring. In a manner familiar from the wonderful Bryant and May books, Fowler delights in uncovering the hidden strata of local myth and geography; a rather less portentous and obscurantist variety of the psychogeography practised by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Will Self et al. Here, we learn of the underground world beneath Wardour Street – the tunnels worming their way between buildings on either side, and the secret basement screening room bunkers where the rough cuts of innumerable movies were shown to a small coterie of insiders. Some to be forever forgotten, others to achieve subsequent immortality in more or less modified forms. There are excursions to places beyond this small world, outside the comforting if mouldy and nicotine-coated womb of the aging London cinemas. But the nightmare of Cannes and Hollywood makes the return to these damp and dreary isles seem like a relief. Fowler’s descriptions of the manners (or lack of them), the insularity and the stunning levels of insularity and self-delusion on display in these movie business subworlds balance undisguised revulsion and level, dispassionate observation in the classic Waugh, Isherwood or Huxley Englishman abroad style. In fact, the LA sections reminded me of Michael Moorcock’s Letters from Hollywood, a similarly amusing and insightful collection of observational missives originally sent back to JG Ballard in his English filmtown home of Shepperton.



Fowler conjures up the atmosphere of the 70s in all its pungent, decaying glory. This is as much a book about that decade and the declining years of the British film industry as it is a personal story (although one’s own life is, of course, inextricably intertwined with the times one lives in). There are plentiful asides which give his own outlook on the cultural characteristics and social shifts of the era. Fowler is far from being a ‘Bakelite-sniffing nostagist’ when it comes to his recollection of a past age, to requote Matthew Sweet’s splendid phrase from his secret history of British cinema, Shepperton Babylon, which is cited in Film Freak. The two books sit comfortably beside each other on the shelf (as the sharing of Alec Guiness in The Man in the White Suit as a cover star in some editions would suggest), each offering an affectionate but clear-eyed view of the British film industry. Much of the humour in the book (and it is an audibly funny read) comes from detailing with telling precision just why the 70s were such grubby and desperate years, a ‘plummet from the dazzling 60s into miserable decline and poor taste’, as it is put. Any retro veneer of glamour we might be under the illusion the period possessed is soon stripped away. The first ad office Fowler works in, in Fitzrovia, has none of the modernist, future-now décor he was expecting. Instead, it looks like ‘a Welsh post-office’. The flesh-burning qualities of the static electricity conducting Brentford Nylon sheets he is obliged to make ads for are hilariously outlined in a way which also summons up the proudly synthetic spirit of the age. Even the NFT is included in the portrait of a country whose brief flowering has been and gone, the petals fallen and the stem drooping and withered. It is summed up as ‘a building designed to punish people for liking films’. I can’t say the experience I’ve had there have ever been particularly punishing.

Fowler is not one to say unpleasant things or spread cheap gossip about people, famous or otherwise, whom he comes across in the course of his career in the advertising and film businesses. The closest he gets to celebrity tittle tattle is an observation about how unbearable Eric Morecambe became over the course of an evening, so determined was he to be constantly ‘on’. This is really a way to express empathy with Ernie, the eternally overlooked partner, who he notices diplomatically smoothing things over with everyone afterwards, acting as Eric’s minder, or the solicitous overseer of a wild kid brother. Elsewhere, he ignores the many objectionable actors and showbiz ‘personalities’ (whilst acknowledging their capacity for appallingly self-regarding behaviour) and notes how ‘smart…quick witted and gentle’ and aware of his limitations Larry Grayson proved to be. Kenneth Williams is the soul of kindness and generosity, taking time to make helpful suggestions to someone new to the business as to how he might improve his comic writing. Cary Grant, whom he briefly bumps into in LA (he marries the receptionist at the office where Fowler works), thankfully maintains his immaculate aura, glowing with the ‘charisma of sun god’.

Not George Sanders' finest hour
Fowler doesn’t put too much of himself into the book. He remains more of an observing presence at its centre, a relatively anonymous POV camera soaking in what he sees and reflecting on his surroundings and the people who populate them. He remarks that he feels authors should maintain a certain degree of mystery and anonymity, otherwise their projected personality distorts the reader’s reception of their stories (and good storytelling is what Fowler prizes above all). It’s refreshing to find a memoir which doesn’t descend into indulgent displays of self-diagnosing therapeutics or literary feuding and cattiness (celebrity gossip culture for the prurient highbrow). Not that Fowler isn’t capable of the odd sharp-clawed swipe. I did enjoy his comment (another of his footnote asides) about George Sanders’ suicide note, which cited boredom as the reason for ending it all. ‘He had presumably been watching his own late film output’, Fowler pitilessly (but very amusingly) remarks, having just discussed a typical example, the 1973 living dead biker flick (and Trunk Records favourite) Psychomania. Rather ignominiously, this was indeed the film which he bowed out on, the final item in his filmography. All About Eve or Journey to Italy it ain’t, although it does have its own special charms. Coincidentally, the suave Mr Sanders also worked as an advertising copywriter before making it in the movies.

Fowler’s coming out is dealt with in a similarly offhand, flippant manner, which characterises the light and witty tone of the book as a whole. Anecdotally, his awareness of his sexuality is confirmed in his own mind ‘when I snubbed my school’s rugby final to go to Die Fledermaus’ (he had already revealed his love of Gilbert and Sullivan’s quintessentially British comic operas in Paperboy). Of course, it was probably a great deal more complex than that, but there something positive in the shrugging attitude to sexuality as being an incidental aspect of an individual’s character, looking forward to a world where no-one really does give a damn. A tiny glimpse of another side of his life is offered by a throwaway remark about being stranded in a wintry Tottenham Court Road in the early hours, modesty covered by little more than a dusting of body glitter. Actually, he later writes that he suspects regular gay clubbers are reactionary at heart, something which a constant diet of ‘Kylie, cock and ketamine’ (a wonderfully alliterative triad which shows that those years writing film poster straplines weren’t wasted) would tend to instil. This is not the sort of book in which such revelations and wild times predominate, however. We’re more likely to find young Chris in his true home, a rank cinema with peeling wallpaper, cracked plaster and sticky carpets where a double bill of well-worn, scratched and dirt flecked films is unreeling before his hungry eyes. The author retains his cloak of semi-invisibility, allowing us a few discrete glimpses of the person it’s wrapped around (no flashing, mind). Of course, one can put together a composite (and perhaps deeper) portrait by reading between the lines of the fiction, where an author tends to leave the most personal of traces.

The Scala today from the top of a bus
There are certain personal touchstones scattered throughout both Paperboy and Film Freak which trigger memories for me. In Paperboy, the South East London suburban settings were very familiar, as was the importance of the local library in incubating a love of reading. More specifically, the Popular Book Centres to which he refers, with their diamond printed stamps, which allowed you to exchange the books for half their value, were regular haunts of mine. I used to travel to the one in Lewisham on my trusty three-speed bike (two-speed in effect, since one gear had conked out) or on the 21 bus if I had a bulging bag of books to barter with. Here I’d stock up on Dicks and Delanys, New Worlds and Dangerous Visions anthologies, Le Guins, Aldisses, Ballards and Vonneguts – anything which took my fancy (and of course I’m leaving out the less cool stuff, here). In Film Freak, the Scala Cinema is the point of connection, a place whose shadows I regularly retreated into to absorb generous helpings of Cocteau and Tarkovsky, Powell and Pressburger and Hitchcock, all-night showings of George Romero, horror and sixties countercultural oddness, and If and Blow Up whenever they were shown in double or triple bills. Fowler describes the audience there as consisting of ‘social outcasts, autistic film nuts and…loners’. Not sure which one I was – possibly all three. I also share his love of discovering London film locations. Like him, I sought out Maryon Wilson Park in Woolwich, used in such an atmospheric way by Michelangelo Antonioni in Blow Up. It still looked little different from the place where David Hemmings photographs what may be a murder in the upper, tree enclosed area, and where he ends up participating in a game of ‘mime tennis’. I confess, I may have run up the steps and clicked my heels in imitation of Hemmings’ Baileyesque fashion photographer.

Smashing Time OST - worth 30 quid according to the latest Record Collector Guide

Fowler has a taste for idiosyncratic cinematic fare, and a not inconsiderable amount of the book is spent in outlining particular favourites which he saw at the time (a time when the wide variety of repertory cinemas provided a readily available introduction to the history of cinema). The Bliss of Mrs Blossom and Beautiful Things (which achieves the considerable feat of casting the Thamesmead Estate in a favourable light) have thus far passed me by, but I will keep an eye out for them from now on. It’s always good when you are pointed in the direction of new films and books like this. Other choices are more familiar. I’m particularly fond of Smashing Time, Sparrows Can’t Sing (I’ve written about those two, in fact) and Death Line. The latter features a devolved cannibal living in the underground who emerges from time to time from the tunnels leading into Russell Square tube station (although a lot of the film, as with most recent movies with underground sequences, was shot on the platforms of the disused Aldwych Station). I feel an obscure sense of admiration for Fowler’s feat of first seeing the film in what is now the Renoir Cinema (formerly the Gate) in the Brunswick Centre (itself a location in Antonioni’s The Passenger) just a stones throw away. Rather tiresomely, I mutter ‘mind the doors’ to Mrs W every time we pass through Russell Square on the tube, these being the only words now left in the pitiful creature’s vocabulary. Disappointingly, the announcement system intones the safety mantra ‘mind the gap’ these days.



The text of the book is structured in an unconventional way, although it hardly reads as hardboiled Joycean modernism. There are footnotes on nearly every page, which are initially distracting, but soon become like conversational asides or quips sparked off by a certain comment. More often than not, these offer mordant commentaries on particular personalities or products redolent of the period. They’re like transatlantic translations for those who would have no reason to know what Peak Freans biscuits were, or who on earth Joan Turner was (actually, I didn’t know that one). There are also plentiful lists (Fowler seems an inveterate lister) detailing everything from favourite London films and locations to our intrepid traveller’s brief sampling of the myriad artificial highs on offer in Hollywood, the latter tabulated as ‘my cause and effect chart of chemical experimentation’. It’s a comical and unpreachy refutation of the supposedly ecstatic or mind-opening properties of drugs. The ultimate horror on offer here is the local bastardisation of the English cuppa, the only stimulant which our Chris really craves. No Huxleyan intellectual or gonzoid Hunter S Thompsonish pill scoffer, Christopher prefers to keep the doors of perception firmly shut, thanks. Keen observation, the power of good art and a vivid imagination are more readily available and quite sufficient to steer the mind beyond the mundane.

Fowler’s double-columned lists are particularly amusing, bathetically contrasting a projected ideal with the provincial, small-time British reality. This is best illustrated in the table juxtaposing Hollywood film conventions with their equivalents in British life. In addition to mocking Britishness in a way which makes it clear that he really rather likes it here, Fowler has a neat line in self-deprecating humour of the kind which only works if you are in fact quite comfortable in your own skin. The photoshop grafting of his head onto Alec Guiness’ running form from the poster of The Man in the White Suit on the book’s cover is entirely apposite. He depicts himself as the quiet, semi-anonymous ‘little man’ who struggles to overcome an overly apologetic nature inculcated by his archetypal English upbringing. But, as with Guiness’ character, underneath the mild-mannered exterior there is a determination, allied with self-belief, a tireless work ethic (and an inherent talent) which makes him stand out. The Mr Cellophane from Chicago to whom he likens himself becomes inked and fully coloured in. The story is really a classic bildungsroman; in other words, the growth of a young man into maturity and wisdom.

The Producers - Bialystock and Bloom, or Sturgeon and Fowler?
Fowler puts a lot of this growth down to his friendship with a character called Jim Sturgeon, who is himself colourful and manifestly substantial from the outset. Their odd couple relationship is at the heart of the book. It is a love story of sorts, with two people who seem to complete each other. A portrait of his father as an English icon of repression, disappointment and failure was at the melancholy heart of Paperboy. Jim is like the father he never had (we don’t have to intuit this for ourselves, he tells us so quite explicitly). Even his own dad seems to view him in this light, as the father he wished he might have been. Fowler likens them to Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in The Producers (he is Gene Wilder’s Bloom, of course), and suggests that they should have had a composite name in the modern Brangelina mould, although he ends up with the rather less than celebrity headline friendly Fowlgeon. Jim is the bluff and hearty bon viveur, always living well beyond his means (not even really registering the concept of ‘means’). He naturally becomes the centre of attention in any room he enters. But he is also genuinely interested in people and the world around him, and views things from his own unique, acutely angled perspective. Fowler’s episodic narration of their meeting, dreaming, scheming and eventual parting is like a letter to a lost love. Jim also becomes the manifestation of the nobler aspects of the spirit of the age, made manifest through the billowing miasma of his chain-smoked ciggies. When he dies, so does the era they had made their uncertain but ever-hopeful way through (even when they had no rational cause for hope). Fowler’s final tribute to his dear friend, sitting through a double-bill of his favourite movies (The Producers and Harold and Maude) in an empty cinema is deeply touching. As he walks out into the Soho night, he says goodbye to all the ghosts he has so palpably summoned up in the course of the book (the writing of which means that Jim can now take his place amongst them). The past is now not just another country, but from an entirely different continuum. Wardour Street, he says in conclusion, is now ‘an alien universe’.

Children of Alice on Devon Folklore Tapes

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Harbinger of Spring, an 18 minute piece by Children of Alice, was released earlier this week, fortuitously timed to coincide with the long-delayed turn of the season, the sun warming up the English earth at last. It forms one side of the Devon Folklore Tapes Vol.5 cassette, which comes wrapped with typically imaginative and beautifully executed artwork by David Chatton-Barker. I must admit, the revived appeal of cassettes leaves me a bit baffled. They really did seem a redundant medium, made for mangling and hugely frustrating when you’re trying to wind to the beginning of a particular track. Recording on tape is now exponentially more effortful than burning multiple copies of a CD-R, and not noticeably cheaper, so this seems to be creating extra, time-consuming labour in a wilfully perverse manner. But retro-fetishisation knows no bounds, and I’m probably missing some charm inherent in these compact little plastic packages.



This is the first post-Broadcast music by James Cargill. Here, he forms a trio with old Broadcast cohort Roj Stevens and Julian House, Ghost Box co-founder and Focus Group prestidigitator. They have all played together recently, on the Focus Group LP The Elekrik Karousel, released last month. But James and Roj understandably took a more subsidiary role in Julian’s project, lab assistants in his experimental combinations of sounds. Harbinger of Spring forms a more cohesive whole than House’s deliberately fragmented and roughly edited collages. It marks a similar shift to that which could be heard in Broadcast’s Mother is the Milky Way, which took the ideas they’d developed in the Witch Cults of the Radio Age collaboration with the Focus Group and moulded them into a suite of more impressionistic and songlike forms. Harbinger of Spring sees the Children of Alice furthering and refining that line of development, emphasising the gently psychedelic soundworld and the mood of pastoral reverie. There’s certainly a sense of continuity with previous recordings by Broadcast and The Focus Group, and no attempt at a radical break with the past. Nor would their really be any need for such a ruction; there’s still much to explore here, new riches to discover.

The piece has a progressive structure, with various sections clearly delineated from each other, and characterised by their own distinct soundworlds. This makes it feel as if we are being led on a journey, passing through different stages. We begin with mechanical clock chimes, a cuckoo springing forth with a drawn-out, distorted cry which is multiplied to sound like the plaintive cries of estuarine waders. A clipped voice instructing someone to ‘replace your receiver’ suggests a household interior from which the responsible adult is temporarily absent, an impression deepened by the sound of giggling children. We hear a vaguely hummed song, an isolated child crooning to herself. LP surface hiss and crackle is like the hum of warm air, the drifting dust illuminated by the sunlight angling into a sleepy afternoon room. All that follows could be seen as an aural daydream, a mental meander through inner worlds akin to Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.



Warm synth tones and birdsong move us out of the house and into the garden. From hereon, there’s a pastoral feel to the music, a hazily impressionistic, Delius-like reverie. This transition is cued by chimes and reverse tape effects which evoke that summery psychedelic haze. Electroacoustic autoharp (maybe) and the glinting swell of what sounds like processed harmonium respiration cast bright rays of sunshine upon and set caressing breezes playing across our recumbent forms. Xylophones and flutes sound like birdcalls, in the musically imitative manner of Messiaen (or Beethoven in the Pastoral Symphony, for that matter). Wobbly tape effects, with reels sped up or slowed down, make for birdcall variations. It all goes a bit Clangers for a couple of seconds, too, as if the knitted moondwellers had launched an expedition which landed in an English garden (one of Major Clangers grand projects which didn’t end disastrously, for a change). No doubt the few lucky souls who managed to get their mitts on a tape release in the millisecond before it sold out caught their breath for a moment when first hearing this section, thinking the fragile oxidated ribbon had already wrapped itself around one of the revolving capstans.



A bass drum and cymbal splash paints a picture of something diving and plopping through a watery surface – the garden pond, perhaps. Bubbly sounds take us underwater, where we hear submerged chanting voices, a drowned chorus. A music box seems to be playing a looped fragment of Someday My Prince Will Come, whilst a series of echoing boings conjure the image of a comic, animated frog leaping about, possibly with a crown fixed around his warty bonce. A jokey musical association, perhaps, with fairy tale connotations. Brief, brightly metallic notes struck on a toy piano are like small, darting fish, flashing mercurially across our field of vision.



A cuckoo clock sends its wooden herald concertinaing out of its hatch, marking another transition. We hear the ratcheting sound of wound up gears, a trundling wooden rhythm and percussive clashes, their resonance deadened. It’s as if a toy monkey had suddenly come to life in a haunted playroom, clapping its little cymbals together with manic fixity of purpose. Reverse tape effects once more suck us into the summer psychedelic vortex. The buzzing, drowsy drone with its molecular swirl of overtones evokes the dreamy drift of blossom and down filling the air. I’m reminded of the XTC song Summer’s Cauldron from their season’s cycle LP Skylarking. A cuckoo broadcasts its two note call above the soporific haze, the sound given a somnambulant echo, as if heard though dozing semi-consciousness, and shifted to a minor interval. The music of Delius once more comes to mind, in particular the perennial favourite On Hearing the First Cuckoo In Spring.



The cuckoo, whose call recurs in mechanical, field-recorded and processed form throughout, is the harbinger of spring. Benjamin
Britten uses Edmund Spenser’s poem The Merry Cuckoo in his Spring Symphony, in which the bird is identified as the ‘messenger of spring’. He also includes Thomas Nashe’s Spring, which celebrates the time when ‘Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king;/Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,/Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:/Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’ The piece concludes with the anonymous 13th century song Sumer is icumen in, familiar to many as the cheerful ditty which the Summer Islanders chant, merrily swaying in time, as they burn poor old Sergeant Howie to death at the end of the Wicker Man. ‘Sumer is icumen in/Laude sing cuckoo’. Britten may very well have been another inspiration here. He’s certainly been mentioned in Broadcast interview of old, and it would certainly be appropriate in this, his centenary year.



A shimmer of electroacoustic autoharp, of the kind which Trish used to play onstage with Broadcast, draws a translucent veil which marks off the permeable divide leading us into the next module. A wavering, plucked motif seems to have subaquatically distorted echoes of Ashes to Ashes, a tiny tear in time through which half-perceived sound of the past have leaked. A bass clarinet adds an ominous note, and a soft bell, initial attack smoothed away as if the clapper were wrapped in felt, begins to toll the progression of time. A descending synth pattern gives the impression of a ringing carillon drifting across the meadows from a church tower, the sound made more ethereal by the acoustic contours of geography and distance. This all draws us back to the preoccupation with bell sounds on the Broadcast LP Ha-Ha Sound, from Minim (‘how sweet the bells’) to the Little Bell (‘it used to ring across the air/It’s sweetened tone would linger there’).



A ratcheting, two-step wooden rhythm is introduced, adding a sense of urgency (as if we were suddenly following the white rabbit, scurrying along with his eyes on his pocket watch). It’s reminiscent of the propulsive flight path of Hawk, the concluding track on Ha-Ha Sound. A deliberate nod to the past, perhaps. More reverse tape effects suggest that we’re being rapidly called back from our reverie, sucked back up the rabbit hole to the waking world. A sprinkle of harp adds a folkish or bardic element, echoing the theme music of The Owl Service (which James and Trish included in a mix for Johnny Trunk’s OST show on Resonance FM a few years back). A line of dialogue from Village of the Damned, George Sanders tensely repeating to himself ‘I must think of a brick wall’, lands us in Midwich. As with the use of a sample in Mother is the Milky Way taken from the Nigel Kneale scripted Hammer film The Witches, also set in an English village, this adds a sinister undercurrent to the bucolic idyll, hinting that there are dark forces at work in the paradise garden.



Liquid bubbling sounds locate us by the pond once more, fishes gaping to the surface. A synth squiggle sounds like a bee buzzing across the stereo spectrum. Everything ends with distorted female vocals, singing a self-absorbed and slightly melancholic refrain. These sound more mature than the girls we heard at the start of the piece. Something has been learned in the course of this kaleidoscopic journey. Alice has woken up from her summer afternoon dreaming, and found herself older, the lonely little girl left somewhere behind.

Well, these were some of the impressions which occurred to me as I listened to this beautiful and carefully crafted piece of music. Happily, you can listen to it yourself, as James has immediately put it up on bandcamp. Close your eyes, put the headphones on and see what pictures it projects inside your mind.

Jazz Enlightenment, Approximate Classics and Psychedelic Suites

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I’ve begun recently to tentatively tweet on behalf of the Oxfam Music and Art shop in Exeter, alongside its manager, Jane. I’m highlighting some of the more notable items that come our way, whether they be classics, sought-after rarities, intriguing oddities, or just have nice covers which I can take a picture of and post. And, let’s face it, some of them are simply things which attract my attention because they’re part of my personal canon – I just like them.


Such is certainly the case with John Mclaughlin’s My Goals Beyond and Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxters, both of which are long-term favourites of mine. Mclaughlin’s 1970 LP turned down the electric riffing he’d unleashed on his 1969 sessions with Miles Davis (notably for the Bitches Brew LP), in the Lifetime power trio with Tony Williams, Larry Young (with Cream bassist Jack Bruce joining for the follow up) and on his debut as bandleader, Devotion (with its timelocked Ira Cohen mylar-mirror photo and enthusiastically phased Alan Douglas production). My Goals Beyond picks up from delicate, contemplative acoustic track at the end of Extrapolation album (which otherwise is more reflective of the British free jazz scene at the time), Bill Evans’ lovely Peace Piece, whose mood of stillness Mclaughlin translates perfectly to the guitar. A number of short solo acoustic guitar numbers (with some overdubbing) take up the second side of My Goals Beyond, including versions of Bill Evans’ Blue In Green, his contribution to Miles Davis’ perennial favourite Kind of Blue, and Charles Mingus’ elegiac Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat. The first side is taken up by two loose and lengthy group improvisations, Peace One and Two, which unfurl around steadily circling bass lines and humming tambura drones.

Many of the musicians involved were associated with Miles Davis’ late 60s bands, or would go on to play with him in the early 70s. Mclaughlin himself had stumbled into playing with Davis on the In A Silent Way sessions almost as soon as he’d set foot in New York, and percussionist Airto Moreira and drummer Billy Cobham turned up on the Bitches Brew sessions, even if their efforts didn’t surface on the album as originally released (of course, every note Miles and his cohorts ever breathed, hit or plucked has now been issued in some form or another). Cobham went on to provide the swinging, jabbing percussion on Miles’ tribute to boxer Jack Johnson, whilst Moreira can be seen in the film of the Isle of Wight festival performance, in which free interpretations of the Bitches Brew material were aired before a slightly bewildered audience waiting to hear The Doors and The Who. Badal Roy, playing tabla, provided the rhythmic template for the Indian influenced linear improvisations, allowing them to soar free from set harmonic patterns. Dave Liebman’s lyrical, Coltraneish soprano sax and Jerry Goodman’s singing violin rise together into the wide blue yonder like twin larks ascending. Goodman, originally from jazz-flavoured psych-rock band The Flock, would play alongside Mclaughlin again when he plugged in and launched his spiritual explorations with full, twin-necked force in the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Both Liebman and Roy would go on to join Miles for his On The Corner album, whose world fusions may well have been influenced by Mclaughlin’s pioneering ventures. Bassist Charlie Haden also launched explorations outside of the usual jazz borders (and well beyond his Midwestern origins), having initially expanded the music’s boundaries with Ornette Coleman. He would play with Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry in the 70s, both of whom introduced significant world music elements into their sound (occasionally to such an extent that the question might be asked ‘is this any longer jazz’?), and his own commitment to progressive international politics led him to record arrangements of the African National Congress anthem and Spanish Civil War and anarchist songs with his Liberation Music Orchestra. Haden is a great lover of the jazz tradition too, however, as displayed in his Quartet West LPs, one of which we also have on the shelves (unless someone nabbed it over the weekend). Appropriately enough, this 1980s reissue is pressed on clear vinyl, so that Mclaughlin’s far-off goals can be dimly made out through its groove-frosted disc (like a thin sheet of ice lifted from a small pond).


The sessions for After Bathing At Baxters found Jefferson Airplane let loose in the RCA recording studios, where they built up its song ‘suites’ from scratch, learning how to use the equipment (the studio as instrument) as they went along. The melding of songs into unbroken, discrete sections, no doubt drawing on Sergeant Pepper, works particularly well on the opening trio (subheaded Streetmasse). The Ballad of You & Me and Pooneil’s psychedelic free association, with burning acid guitar lines from Jorma Kaukonen and a rhythm which is both foursquare and woozily wonky, leads into the tape splicing and manipulating musique concrete goonery of A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly, the sound of people messing with the machinery and having a great deal of fun doing it. Perhaps this is what caught Zappa’s ear, and led to his collaboration with Grace Slick the next year, Would You Like A Snack, which appeared as an extra on the Crown of Creation CD reissue a while back. After a strange, giggling distortion of John Donne (‘no man is an island…is a peninsula’) we launch into the irresistible opening guitar lick of Young Girl Sunday Blues, the San Francisco sound encapsulated. Marty Balin’s yearning vocals, given little leeway on the rest of the album, are allowed their full emotive rein, the catch in his voice giving them a slightly countrified air. Elsewhere, Paul Kantner’s delicate, folkish portrait of a free spirit runs into his celebration of the spirit of the age, Wild Tyme, and Grace Slick forcefully sings two of her fiercely literate, provocatively confrontational compositions, rejoice (that’s James) and Two Heads. The cover, by Ron Cobb (who would later work as a designer on Dark Star, Star Wars and Alien), is great too. The colourful Airplane Haight Ashbury house, trailing balloons, flies with triplane wings over a monochrome America choked with the detritus of the industrialised, consumer society. Its prescient view of an ecologically devastated wasteland was later reflected in Cobb’s designing of an Ecology Flag, an alternative stars and stripes used as a symbol by the nascent environmental movement in the 70s. For those record collectors amongst you, for whom fine detail is all important, this is the UK stereo repressing with the orange RCA label (so no gatefold sleeve). For others less concerned with matrix numbers and label design, this has the advantage of making it a lot cheaper.


Another interesting record which has just gone out on the shelves is the 1974 LP Hallelujah by the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which documents their sell out concert at the Albert Hall. The Sinfonia were renowned for mangling popular classics such as Also Sprach Zarathustra, the William Tell Overture and the Blue Danube Waltz. Their spirited but woefully inaccurate renditions brought tears to the eyes produced by a mixture of laughter and wincing pain. Although they appeared to be a mere novelty comedy act (albeit an extravagant and populous one), and were by and large received and written about on that level, there were more interesting and musically exploratory ideas active beneath the surface. The Sinfonia drew on Cornelius Cardew’s idea of the scratch orchestra, an ensemble which aimed to democratise music making by removing the emphasis on virtuosity. Cardew used graphic scores and emphasised free group expression and improvisation within the loose structures they provided. The Sinfonia was founded by the composer Gavin Bryars in 1970 whilst he was teaching at Portsmouth Art College. He too emphasised a non-technical, intuitive approach to music which eschewed virtuosity and pitch-perfect notated score-reading. By applying this approach to the classical music world, however, he challenged the elitism inherent in its structure and in the education system which produced its performers from such a narrow range of society. Widely familiar pieces from the repertoire were chosen so that the members of the orchestra would already have an idea as to what they should be playing. They were all earnest in their desire to create music, otherwise the whole enterprise would have descended into intentional, exaggerated amateurishness.


In fact, some of the people involved were more than competent musicians (including Bryars himself). It wasn’t long before Brian Eno, himself an avowed non-musician, became involved, taking his place on the clarinettist’s stool. He appears in this unlikely guise on this LP, which he also produced. His would continue to have a fruitful artistic relationship with Gavin Bryars, giving several of his compositions (including The Sinking of the Titanic) their premier recordings on his Obscure Records label (now gathered together over at Ubuweb). The Orchestra’s position within the diverse world of British experimental music in the 70s, and its sharing of some of its ideological concerns, is reflected in some of the other musicians and composers taking part. Simon Fisher Turner sits next to Eno in the clarinet section. He would go on to provide the soundtracks to several of Derek Jarman’s films, including the sublimely drifting mix of sound, speech and music for Blue. Michael Nyman bravely takes up the euphonium, having apparently joined the orchestra mid-concert, such was his immediate enthusiasm. He went on to provide the driving, baroque-meets-minimalism soundtrack to The Draughtsman’s Contract, as well as many concert pieces. He also had a more experimental work, Decay Music, released on Eno’s Obscure label. Kate St John is definitely not an amateur oboe player, having recorded as a session musician with many top pop and rock acts, as well as in her own right and in collaboration with Bill Nelson and the other Eno, Roger. Steve Beresford, playing trumpet, represents the improv and free jazz scenes, whose ideals of non-idiomatic playing which avoids preconceived patterns or reflexive riffs he imports into the gleeful warping of classical forms and notions of perfect reproduction. And there’s a more straight ahead jazz player, tenor saxophonist Phil Woods, who left America for France in 1968 and moved into more exploratory, free waters. His marriage to Charlie Parker’s widow Chan provides a direct link with jazz aristocracy. Perhaps its not such a leap from Parker’s nimble bop lines (a different kind of virtuosity) to the Sinfonia. He always did dream of playing over a string section.


Another interesting oddity (with a simple but graphically striking and colourful cover by Jim Fasso for this UK release) which has just turned up is vibraphonist Gary Burton’s album of Carla Bley compositions A Genuine Tong Funeral, billed on the back cover as ‘a dark opera with words’ (those words don’t seem to extend beyond the evocative titles and Carla’s liner notes, however). Arranged in the form of a suite which documents imaginary, exotic death rites, this is a blend of jazz and Bley’s early compositional style, which draws on twentieth century chamber music. The music is far from the lugubrious experience the overarching concept might suggest, however. Bley’s answer to the question ‘does humour belong in music?’ is always an unequivocal ‘yes’. The Gary Burton Quartet under whose banner the record is released includes electric guitarist (and sometime John Mclaughlin collaborator) Larry Coryell, bassist Steve Swallow (a longtime personal and musical partner of Bley’s) and ‘Lonesome Dragon’, more prosaically known as drummer Bob Moses (later to play in a trio with Dave Liebman – there are always connections to be found in the companionable world of jazz - and on Pat Metheny’s debut LP on ECM, Bright Size Life, featured on this week’s Freak Zone). There are musicians beyond the core quartet on this record, however, and a distinguished group of guests they are, too. Steve Lacy was always an adventurous collaborator in whatever context he found himself, and here he plays his signature instrument, the soprano saxophone. Gato Barbieri blows hard tenor saxophone, as he would do on the soundtrack of Last Tango in Paris a few years later. Jimmy Knepper plays trombone, as he did for several years with Charles Mingus, until the irascible bassist punched him in the mouth whilst they were preparing for the fraught 1962 Town Hall concert in New York, which was to have showcased his large scale compositions. It was a blow which seriously affected Knepper’s ability to play for a couple of years, landed Mingus in court on an assault charge, and unsurprisingly ended their personal and musical relationship for many years. Knepper’s fully recovered and in fine form here, though. Michael Mantler, personally and musically attached to Bley for a number of years, plays trumpet. He’s perhaps better known now as a composer who blends jazz and modernist music and literature. His 70s albums No Answer and Silence were based on the words of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter respectively (and we’ve got a hard to come by double CD release which paired them both on the online Oxfam shop at the moment).

In fact, we’ve got something of a golden hoard of great modern jazz at the moment: Art Pepper, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Pat Metheny, Jim Hall, and the funky flute of Jeremy Steig, and a whole lot more. Do come and plunder it if you’re passing by.

Gwyneth Herbert, Fiona Bevan and Nancy Elizabeth at the Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter

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There were two excellent gigs at the Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre last week, featuring three fine female singers, each with their own distinctive voice and songwriting style. On Thursday, Fiona Bevan was introduced by headliner Gwyneth Herbert, who declared that she had fallen in love with her the first time she saw her perform. It soon became apparent why. Her songs were filled with a natural joie de vivre, even when they entertained an element of heartbreak (as in the wittily titled Dial D for Denial). Poppy and eminently hummable, they nevertheless had real substance, and bore the stamp of lived experience sincerely expressed, without straying into Joni or Janis (Ian) confessional territory (a territory I’m always happy to venture into, I should add). She accompanied herself with simple but deft and surely strummed and plucked chords on a nylon-strung classical guitar. She did pick up the ukelele at one point, its happily chugging chordlets providing the perfect complement to her smiling presence, whilst studiously avoiding any nodding and winking Formbyisms. Cradling such a tiny instrument emphasised her tall frame, which was topped by a coronal bubble of hair worthy of Marlene in Blonde Venus. This alternately absorbed the radiance of the stage spotlights, becoming a varicoloured stellar beacon, or provided a retinal after-image silhouette hovering before the backdrop. Her voice was lilting, light and honeyed, with a jazzy, Billy or Ella vibrato leaving the end of each line lingering in weightless suspension in the air, as if she were cherishing the shape and sound of her words. Vocalise syllables were effortlessly overlaid in the upper range, seemingly for the sheer joy of it, and further demonstrated her versatility and assurance without being in any way showy. Alone in front of the untenanted array of instruments waiting for the full band to come, she nonetheless commanded the attention of the audience, and had them spellbound throughout.

Fiona Bevan
Fiona returned to her centre stage spot for Gwyneth Herbert’s performance of The Sea Cabinet, a suite of songs commissioned by Snape Maltings and inspired by a residence along the exposed and windswept Eastern coastline of Suffolk. Herbert’s seasongs are part of a noble lineage. Snape Maltings was converted into a concert hall in the 1960s under the guidance of Benjamin Britten to house the expanding festival based in nearby Aldeburgh which he had instigated in 1948. Britten’s own music had been inspired by the coastline here, and the sea and local landscape is a dominant presence in his best known opera, Peter Grimes. There are faint echoes of the moods painted in the Four Sea Interludes extracted from that opera in some of her settings, from the pizzicato pointillism of Sunday Morning (heard in Drip and Fishguard Ladies) and the sparse evocation of empty expanses of space in Dawn (which she depicts in her own song interludes).

Gwyneth’s songs were akin to short stories, depicting events from particular viewpoints or portraying the inner lives of her characters. She took on their roles, adopting the appropriate singing style, and was occasionally joined by Fiona in what became dialogue duets. This was particularly notable (and hugely enjoyable) in the lustily sparring shanty narrative of The King’s Shilling. Herbert’s pleasingly burred voice dovetailed with Bevan’s higher and lighter tones with harmonious congruence. The role-playing aspect fitted in with the theatrical nature of the evening. The songs were interspersed with a story, read by Gwyneth, about a woman wandering the shoreline, combing for washed-up artefacts which she collects, notes, classifies and takes home to file in her sea cabinet. The songs arise from these lost and discarded objects. They become the imaginative seeds for further stories and portraits, which span the decades and centuries and range from the personal to the folkloric, both tales bold and tall and glimpses of untold lives on the margins and in the shadows. Gwyneth reads these interludes beautifully, with great sensitivity and feeling. She would have been great on Jackanory, and could quite easily have a sideline recording audiobooks.


The words convey the melancholic and time-scoured sense which seems inherent in this landscape. In collecting these drifted fragments of other people’s lives, the cabinet curator seems to be trying to make sense of her own. The songs could be seen as projection of her own displaced self, exhibiting varying degrees of fantasy, the trying on of different personae. But the character in Promises, who remains true to a marriage which swiftly descends into disappointment and abandonment, remaining rooted also to place, perhaps gets closest to the truth. The final image, of a wedding gown made from torn fishing nets hung from her bedroom wall, suggests that a marriage to the sea may be the ultimate conclusion of this lifelong hunting and gathering. A ghost in her own life, she will end up spectrally adrift on the North Sea swell, until she herself becomes a piece of the flotsam, the sorting of which has so fully occupied her years – bones on the shore. Perhaps she will take her place alongside the east coast hauntings of MR James’ ghost stories. It reminds me of the powerful end of the extraordinary narrative poem The Laughter of Stafford Girls’ High by Carol Ann Duffy (who I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing at the forthcoming Ways With Words literary festival at Dartington), included in her collection The Feminine Gospels. Mrs Mackay, who has roamed out of her marriage and across the country, but who ‘had finally run out of land’, walks out into the waves, which ‘danced her away like a groom with a bride’.


The bleak, flat expanses of the east coast, the end of the land on Britain’s flood-levelled rump, lend themselves to such sorrowful songs and backward-looking introspection. It is a place where people wash up, where lives run out, and where time seems to hang a little heavier, the past lingering on in local pockets of dense gravity whilst the modern world beyond rushes on. The delicately wistful piano and wordless vocal prelude summons up the atmosphere of reflection and reminiscence which pervades the Sea Cabinet and the intertwined narrative. It has some of the autumnal air of Norma Winstone’s songs, both on her own albums and with Azimuth. It feels like Kenny Wheeler’s plangently sighing trumpet could join in at any moment. The aforementioned Promises also has something of an ECM air, with the keening guitar (Al Cherry or Harry Bird? – it would be appropriate if it were the latter) reminiscent of Terje Rypdal’s echoing electric, which often seemed to be drifting on a chill wind from the fjords. The mixture of Herbert’s cracked and heavy-hearted vocals (more musical character acting) and the effects-drenched guitar also brings to mind Marianne Faithfull’s collaboration with Bill Frisell on the Strange Weather album.

This is definitely the out of season seaside we are inhabiting, a depopulated strand of faded memories and wide horizons drawing the gaze towards introspective distances. The album includes the recorded sounds of steps on shingle and the unceasing susurration of the waves. It might have all been in my mind, but there seemed to be a background whisper of waves emanating from the rear of the hall throughout. This put me in mind of Embers, Samuel Beckett’s play in which these sounds are also a constant presence (you can find Patrick Magee's extraordinary performance of it at ubuweb). In this work, too, the sea and empty shore direct the mind towards memories both sorrowful and bitter, the hypnotically repetitive cycle of the waves’ steady respiration stirring up ghostly voices and phantasmal scenes.
It wasn’t all bittersweet introspection and melancholia, however. The audience was involved in the spectacle, and made to feel as if they inhabited the landscape which was being conjured up. We were encouraged to add our own ambient contribution to the soundscape during one song, Sweeter, with the tips or flats of fingers pattering on palms or softly clicking, thus summoning a light rainshower. She made a more intimate connection with some members of the audience, who had responded to her open invitation to form a chorus for one song. It became apparent that the preponderance of tops with horizontal navy stripes wasn’t evidence of some new fashion trend – these were her handpicked crew of pirates. Such participation was a further manifestation of the spirit with which she involved fans and music lovers in the funding of her recording of the Sea Cabinet songs, giving them back something in return, whether in the form of a signed copy, an individual music lesson or a private concert. The chorus took their place in front of the stage, and she descended to sing with them and direct them with a bit of gestural conduction. The use of the area in front of and around the stage in this and other songs added to the theatrical feel of the evening, the sense of connecting with the audience. It also created a sense of space, the no-man’s land between performer and audience effectively becoming the interzone of the shingled strand.

For the hymn to sentimental nostalgia Sweeter, Gwyneth followed Fiona’s example and picked up a ukelele to sing the happy/sad memory song, redolent of pierrot pierside shows, soaked in longing for times long vanished. Penny Woolcock’s recent film From the Land to the Sea Beyond, compiled for the bfi from archive footage of life on the coast throughout the twentieth century, would be a great backdrop for this song, and several others too. The nostalgist’s sense that the glory days are in the past also pervaded The Regal. Clattering junkyard percussion, with Gwyneth wielding a cheese grater, rhythmically rasped with a stick, conjured up the sound of Mrs Wittering laying out the crockery in her once thriving b&b, going through the bustling motions.

The ocean is used as a metaphor for love lost or turned sour in a couple of songs. I Still Hear the Bells undermined the dream of the romantic escape to an isolated seaside idyll, with images of building on shifting sand, too close to the edge. In echoes of the old legend of the drowned city of Ys which surfaces from time to time (a legend, or a variant thereof, drawn upon by Debussy, Alan Stivell and Joanna Newsom), the bells of the church in which they were married still ring out in the minds of the parted couple from beneath the waters which have engulfed it. This allows for a loud, clangourous chorus, with bell sounds hocketed around and any nearby object co-opted as percussion. Drip, meanwhile, detailed the steadily progressive dissipation of a woman’s identity (or it could be a man), her sense of self drowning in the domineering, engulfing personality of the partner from whom she no longer has the strength or will to get away. The initial brittle jollity of the verse bursts into full-throated soul-testifying in the chorus, Herbert’s voice letting loose a flood of feeling, which this character has dammed up for so many years. It’s a formidable vocal force which is also brought to bear on the siren song Lorelei, an old favourite revived from the All the Ghosts LP. Here, the old destructive Rhine spirit is reincarnated in a modern woman against whom men collide and shatter. It’s seen as her tragedy (as well as her strength) that none of them prove a match for her. The chorus again is powerfully soulful, with an edge of desperation and a folkish tinge to the language.

Gwyneth Herbert - framed by Brighton seafront sculpture?

Herbert’s voice is a flexible and finely tuned instrument, capable of moulding itself to the many and varying forms her music takes (it’s a long while since anyone could sensibly confine her within the admittedly comfortably furnished jazz ghetto). As already noted, it has a sensitive storytelling timbre. It’s capable of nuanced ballad portraiture and atmospheric vocalese as well as soul wailing and blues growling. She put it to more roistering use in a trilogy of rowdy nautical songs. Plenty Time for Praying set the whisky and rum flowing as Gwyneth and Fiona called out a forceful siren song in seductive shanty form, luring mesmerised pirates to their ecstatic doom. Drink swayed along to a Tom Waits junkyard clatter, offering a myriad reasons to seek the oblivion offered by the demons stoppered in the bottle. The King’s Shilling was a Brecht and Weill-flavoured tale of nautical temptation, with Gwyneth taking the role of the man tempted to take to a life on the ocean waves, Fiona as the woman telling him he’d better not, unless he wanted a kitchen knife plunged into his back. The whole ended with a freeform vocal and instrumental tempest, presumably plunging everyone into the roiling deeps and down into Davy Jones’ locker. Herbert’s voice emerged, keening like a seagull, a sea maiden’s shamanic transformation.

There were also tales of invasion, of the island fortress breached. Alderney began with the remembrance of a personal island idyll, an old whistled tune maintaining the air of nostalgia established by the previous songs. But this distracted mood was shattered by the violent, percussion-rocked chorus. This painfully recalled the desecration of this paradise, the quarrying and concreting of the pastures and narrow streets by the occupying Nazi army once the inhabitants had been evacuated. Fishguard Ladies remembered a less successful attempt at invasion, this time from the French, via Ireland, in 1797. The women of the Welsh port stood on the cliffs above Goodrington Sands and, as the song would have it, lifted their petticoats and saw the timid Gallic boys off with a few bawdy choruses. More ratcheting and clattering percussion suggested both the loading and priming of old rifles and the sounds of domestic labour transformed into rhythms of martial defiance. It’s a triumphant, rude gesture of a song which, like all the others emanating from the cabinet, sees things from a woman’s perspective (the perspective of the cabinet’s curator, as I suggested). These are sea songs for the ones who stayed ashore, although as the Fishguard Ladies so amply demonstrated, this by no means entails passive waiting and watching.


The Sea Theme with which the storybook was opened returned to mark its closure, the sad piano chords and softly lulling voices drifting away on the tide, leaving us with a faded and rather melancholy postcard of a now empty landscape. It was a wonderful, theatrical experience (and I can imagine who fantastic it must have been on the Wilton’s Music Hall stage), and large velvet curtains should really have swept across to draw a veil over the finished performance. However, such grandeur had to be restricted to the theatre in my head, and the actors took their bow to deservedly warm applause.

Nancy Elizabeth’s performance on Sunday evening was a more low key affair. It was just her alone on stage standing with guitar or sitting behind her keyboard, although she was joined after a while by a friend on bass to add a bit of heft. He also provided the occasional low, rumbling electronic drone as an atmospheric and slightly ominous bedrock to a couple of numbers. She began with two songs not yet recorded, one of which rode on a hypnotically spiralling fingerstyle guitar pattern in the Nick Drake One of These Things First mould. Most of the material was drawn from her new LP Dancing, however. It’s been a favourite of Stuart Maconie (also heading down this way for the Dartington Ways With Words festival, where I shall be going along to hear him). He’s played several tracks on The Freak Zone, his eclectic Radio 6 showcase for the rarefied, esoteric or just mildly offbeat.


The first of the Dancing songs, Last Battle, was prefaced by ethereal, wordless vocalising, which soared on operatic updrafts. Such fearless flights into the upper register reminded me a little of Lavinia Blackwall’s singing in Trembling Bells (coming up in July at the Phoenix), or the romantic psych-folk stargazing of Shelagh McDonald. There are echoes too of Jane Weaver and her Fallen By Watchbird projects. Nancy soon came back to earth, however, her voice settling into its pure soprano tenor, strong and vulnerable at the same time in an early Sandy Denny manner. A Mancunian common sensibility insures that her songs don’t float off into Narnian realms or folkish netherworlds, any fey waftiness immediately dispelled by the city’s plain, no-nonsense outlook. She remains on the street where she lives and makes her observations from that firmly rooted standpoint. Last Battle is a song which eschews dewy-eyed romance for a declaration of independence and self-assertion in matters of the heart (‘won’t wait in a cage till someone comes to rescue me’). Her pragmatic outlook on love is further expressed in Desire, and could be described as desolate but philosophical. It has something in common with the pleasurable melancholy of Elizabethan lute songs, with their disquisitions on the pain of love. Indeed, the discreet, singularly struck piano chords sound like they could have been transcribed from a strummed lute, the high, yearning vocals of the chorus akin to the emotive singing of a counter-tenor. It’s an anti-lament reaching a position of resigned equanimity, choosing to reject the myth of romantic, ever-lasting love. The forceful Debt with which she ended her performance, was driven by fierce chordal strumming and underpinned by a throbbing electronic drone, which was suggestive of the mountain-shaking bass chanting of Tibetan monks. A song of love and parting, it expressed a rather more active desire to hold on as long as possible, but was once more prepared to let go, to accept a natural ending.

Fiery firmanent - the Dancing cover
Nancy’s Romanticism is of a rather more broad variety, venturing at times into the mystic. It’s the full-blooded Keats and Shelleyan beast, with a strong golden vein of Blakean vision, leading her to ‘dream cloudy like a poet’, as she sings on Shimmering Song. If she is given to traditional singer-songwriterly bedroom introspection, the expression of personal feeling is soon expanded to connect with the wider vistas afforded by the active imagination. This is perfectly encapsulated in the beautiful sleeve art for the Dancing album, which she designed herself. A silhouetted row of suburban rooftops, compressed into the very bottom of the cover, gives way to rising, arced layers of collaged, varicoloured and textured paper – a fiery firmament coruscating above the everyday. The craters of a full moon, which is limned with a blue corona, are made up of words, luminous and sacred. Nancy alluded to her insomnia during the concert, and this picture suggests that the nightworld she often finds herself awake in is a place of heightened reality, full of wonders revealed to the open and receptive mind.

Cecil Collins - The Great Happiness (1974 version)
Simon Says Dance, the single from the album, was half-dismissed as throw-away song thought up during an insomniac phase. It depicts life and love as a universal and eternal dance, moving from waltz hall to disco floor. A sense of mystical connection and the unearthing of the extraordinary from the everyday characterise a number of Nancy’s songs. As she sings in Shimmering Song, she is ‘thinking of ways I can turn a mundane day into shimmering song’. In Death in a Sunny Room, which is by no means as goth-gloomy as it sounds, and which featured a gorgeous piano arrangement, she sang ‘under a giant blanket of stars we spin away’. Intimately personal and astronomically vast scales are conjoined in one transcendent moment. Desire, on the other hand, sees ‘horizons crumble in my hands as I learn new depths of love’, a rather more ambiguous and earthbound metaphor. Indelible Day makes a permanent impression of a dawning moment. There almost seems to be a recognition of some divine, radiant and all-encompassing presence in the line ‘I can see the light of a golden sphere with ubiquitous rays’ (and what a great-sounding word ‘ubiquitous’ is – one of my favourites). Cecil Collins’ painting The Great Happiness comes into mind here, his depiction of a solar, life-giving force filling the sky with light. Nancy’s spiritual songs are suffused with a similarly numinous glow.

She incorporates elements of Indian scales and rhythms into some of them. Shimmering Song has Eastern vocals, additively building up and ascending, two steps up and one back. Raven City also has Indian-inflected melodies, and is her most explicit piece of religious mysticism, essentially depicting a transformation in the nature of the soul. In contrast to most rock and pop songs, this is not achieved through romantic love, although there is an intriguing allusion to ‘other entities’. A moment of transcendent comprehension comes upon her, when ‘I revealed and beheld all the universe in me’. The song was another which Nancy played at the keyboard (set up to sound like a piano throughout), its spacious chords initially interspersed with claps, lending it a calmly celebratory air (clap happy music in a less hysterical register than usually encountered). These turned into rippling, arpeggiated chords which seemed to emulate the shimmering, metallic clangour of the East European cimbalom.

For all the heady mystical themes underlying many of the Dancing songs, Nancy’s self-declared favourite from the album was Heart, which she wrote about and for her grandmother. It’s evidently deeply felt, a real heartsong which empathetically tries to see the world from the point of view of an old woman whose mind has drifted into self-forgetful dementia. It’s not at all depressing, however, finding hope in the continuance of life and the remembrance of the passionate way in which it has been lived, a persistence of personality in some form. In spite of it all, ‘I woke every morning with my own heart’. Another piano song with sublimely simple chord patterns. Nancy seemed to reserve her most emotionally charged moments for when she was safely at rest behind the keyboard (although the makeshift drumstool she was obliged to sit on was, she observed, a little precarious). She finished with no instruments at all, however, delving back to her artistic origins to sing a brief, a cappella encore of The Wheel Turning King, a ritualistic song which she recalled having recorded in a small church for her first EP back in 2006. It brought things full circle in an appropriately all-embracing way. In the end, the beginning.

Richard Matheson

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Richard Matheson, who died earlier this week, began his life as a writer with stories sold to the thriving SF and fantasy magazine market in the post-war period. His first published work was Born of Man and Woman, appropriately enough, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950. Many of these short stories were later gathered together in the numbered series of Shock collections, whose 70s paperback editions had particularly lurid pulp covers which belied the quality of their contents. Which wasn’t to say that Matheson didn’t sometimes resort to slick fantasy plots which revolved around last minute revelations turning everything topsy-turvy: the desolate alien planet is really a post-apocalyptic earth, the beautiful woman has been an android all along, what was assumed to be heaven is really hell, and so on. But these cheap (albeit often rather effective) devices were generally an incidental way of rounding off the story with a memorable flourish. The true substance lay in their psychological portraits of characters confronting a universe which is beyond their comprehension or control.


Matheson is probably more widely known for his work in film and television, which he began to concentrate on from the late 50s onwards. Nevertheless, the written word was always at the heart of his screenwriting. Many of the original scripts he produced were actually adaptations of previously published novels. This was the case with The Incredible Shrinking Man, his 1956 novel, which was filmed the following year from his script. It displayed many of the preoccupations and concerns which would characterise his work over the following decades. The protagonist begins steadily to diminish in stature after being dusted by a cloud of atomic radiation. The use of radiation as a catalyst for his condition is in some ways nothing more than a casual, plot device of its time, used to explain away all manner of transformations and monstrosities. But the anxieties and fears which run through Matheson’s stories reflect an underlying unease trembling beneath the affluent surface of the Cold War America of the 50s and 60s, with the bomb as the everpresent threat hanging Damoclean above everyone’s head. We experience his existential angst via his narration of his inner thoughts. He becomes increasingly isolated in the world. In one particularly touching sequence, he makes temporary friends with a midget from a travelling circus whom he meets whilst going on a night walk through the local park. But soon he has begun to recede from her too, and is left all the more lonely. The shrinking man is also driven to question his, and by extension humanity’s place in the universe. He has constantly to adjust to the changing nature of his relationship to his surroundings. These remain largely domestic throughout, but the family home becomes an environment as alien as any distant planet. The everyday made strange and frightening is another Matheson trait. The way in which the domestic environment becomes a comfortless, alienating and increasingly dangerous prison for the shrinking man can also be seen as an externalisation of mental disintegration. SF and fantasy is a great way in which to make the metaphorical real, to create solid manifestations of inner demons and subconscious fears. Matheson’s isolated characters are frequently taken to be delusional or mentally unbalanced. His famous Twilight Zone story Nightmare at 20,000 Feet features William Shatner as a nervous and twitchy (he was always good in such roles) airline passenger who has just recovered from a breakdown which occurred on a previous flight. This proves an added complication when he begins to see a gremlin scuttling about on the storm-lashed wing of the plane. If it would be difficult to credit someone babbling about an inhuman creature tampering with the engines in mid-flight, this goes double for someone with a known history of mental illness. Shatner’s character realises this, and from then on is another of Matheson’s characters who must face the incursion of the strange into the everyday alone.



The domestic setting of The Incredible Shrinking Man also reflects a certain amount of gender anxiety. The protagonist is confined to the home, where his wife increasingly towers over him. Matheson uses the fantastic to reflect social changes and the tensions which they create. There are broader Darwinian fears, too, as he ceases to be the dominant species in the food chain, eyed up first by the family cat and then by the scurrying spider in the basement into which he falls. A lengthy sequence details how he uses his brains to defeat the spider, which is now a deadly predator far too powerful and quick for him to escape without the use of all his native intelligence. The ending demonstrates an abiding spiritual side to Matheson’s work. As the shrinking man diminishes to the point of invisibility, he climbs out of the basement and enters the garden. He begins to contemplate the universe from the atomic scale, a recessive vastness as awe-inspiring as any cosmic distances. There is a persistence of consciousness as he effectively leaves the human world, however, and he talks of merging with creation, still a part of its fabric (this comes with a certain amount of Godly rhetoric, de rigeur for the climax of 50s SF films, although at least there are no Biblical quotations). Matheson would remain fascinated with this idea of the persistence of consciousness. The journey into an afterlife was central to his 1978 novel What Dreams May Come, turned into a film in 1995. Somewhere in Time, the 1980 film which he adapted from his 1975 novel Bid Time Return also re-united its time-crossed lovers beyond death.


Perhaps Matheson’s best known novel is I Am Legend, first published in 1954. It’s a rationalised fantasy, positing a world ravaged by a pandemic which has seemingly infected everyone but the protagonist, the first person narrator of the story. The disease with which humanity is infected brings with it many of the symptoms associated with the vampire of gothic fiction. These are all given biological or psychological explanations. Matheson was essentially bringing the monsters of the Romantic period into the godless modern age or scientific rationalism. His vampires are the precursors of the zombies which have now overrun horror cinema. But whereas zombies are reductive lumps of ambulatory meat, his creatures remain human, something which the protagonist of I Am Legend is forced to recognise in the end. He is another of Matheson’s lonely men, wandering the crumbling city streets alone in the daylight, holing up in his bunker before they emerge at nighfall. It’s a novel which has proved irresistible to Hollywood, but thus far they have flunked it. The first adaptation, Last Man on Earth (1964), was initially scripted by Matheson, but was altered so much that he all but disowned it. He was none too keen on The Omega Man (1971) either, although it has its moments, and is the best of the three. The 2007 film uses the original title, but is largely an excuse for cgi backdrops of a ruined and overgrown New York and plentiful zombie shoots. Matheson would bring the old monsters into blinking into the modern world once more in his two Kolchak the Night Stalker TV movies. These featured an investigative reporter stumbling across the supernatural in the brightly lit world of Chicago; in the first case a vampire, and the second an immortal murderer who keeps himself alive with human blood. Of course, no-one believes the slightly shifty Kolchak, and although he defeats the forces of darkness, his stories never see the light of day. The Legend of Hell House (1973), adapted from his 1971 novel Hell House, is also a rationalised fantasy, with Roddy McDowell’s scientist conducting empirical experiments to reveal the secrets of a haunted house.


Matheson translated the work or other writers’ work for the screen as well as his own. Night of the Eagle (1961) is a particularly fine adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s novel of campus rivalry manifested through the witchcraft practised by faculty wives to promote the careers of their husbands. It’s another story in which gender anxieties are central. Peter Wyngarde’s professor’s horror at the idea of the supernatural being real is as much to do with his disbelief in the notion that his wife could have had anything to do with his success as it is with the disruption of his rigidly held rationalist worldview. The script was a collaboration with Charles Beaumont, who was something of a fellow spirit. Both wrote some of the most memorable Twilight Zone stories, which were generally suffused with paranoia and psychological terror. They both also wrote the scripts for Roger Corman’s series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Matheson wrote the original run, beginning with House of Usher in 1960, followed by The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), the compendium Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963). These allowed his literary side to come out, and he provided some wonderful dialogue and dramatic setpieces for genre veterans like Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. He also demonstrated a fine sense of comedy and the absurd in the hilarious wine-tasting scene in the Black Cat segment of Tales of Terror, in which the florid language of Vincent Price’s oenophile is contrasted by Peter Lorre’s more basic guzzler’s vocabulary; and in the voluble titular bird of the Raven, and its climactic magicians’ duel between Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. It’s particularly nice to see Boris showing a lighter side here.

Wine-tasting duel - Tales of Terror
My favourite Matheson moments come in his Twilight Zone stories, however, which for me are the best distillations of his dark art. This is horror which makes an impact on an existential as much as a visceral level. Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet is oft cited as the classical Twilight Zone story, but there are Matheson gems scattered throughout the five series aired between 1959 and 1964. Shatner stars again in Nick of Time as a young newlywed man who stops off at a diner with his new bride. He becomes obsessed with the novelty fortune telling machine at his table, which dispenses cards with aphoristic insights which seem to voice his inner thoughts. It’s a perfect expression of the underlying self-doubt which plagues someone who’s just setting out on an entirely new course in his life. Third from the Sun is a good encapsulation of Cold War anxieties, as two families of scientists involved in a rocket programme look to the future and find it to be short-lived as the world plummets headlong towards apocalyptic conflict. They steal the rocket and escape from what seems to be contemporary America. Of course, you guessed it, the planet they’ve identified as their new home is…Earth. The story nevertheless is a strongly and sympathetically observed depiction of common fears at the time. Little Girl Lost anticipates Poltergeist in its tale of the young daughter of an ordinary American family who falls through into some noplace dimension from which her frightened voice can be heard in her bedroom. Another tale of domestic fears, its atmosphere is notably enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score. A World of Difference is a psychological tale in which a man’s ordinary day’s work at the office is suddenly disrupted by the cry ‘cut’, at which point he discovers that his whole life is nothing more than a film script, his office prop flats. It’s a plot which makes manifest the protagonist’s alienation from his own routine existence, the feeling that he’s not altogether present in his own life.

Matheson displayed his comical side once again in Once Upon A Time, in which he gave Buster Keaton the chance to show off a few routines, old and new, in his role as a nineteenth century janitor who inadvertently dons a time-travelling helmet which plunges him into the present day. And When The Sky Opened is a genuinely unsettling metaphysical horror story, seen from the point of view of one of three astronauts returning to earth from a pioneering rocket launch into deep space. They have no recollection of what went on up there, and then one of them simply vanishes. But this is no ordinary disappearance. He has ceased to exist, at this or any point in time. Newspaper headlines now report that tow astronauts went into space, and no-one can recall the colleague about whom our protagonist makes increasingly frantic enquiries. When the second astronaut suffers a similar fate, he is left alone, the sole witness to a reality which is being systematically edited. He realises that he will be the next to be erased by whatever force has been set in motion. We never discover the nature of that force – no trite revelations here, just an acknowledgement that there are vast and unknowable mechanisms at work in the universe, in the face of which human lives count for very little.

Lee Marvin in android drag - Steel
In Steel, Lee Marvin plays a boxing promoter in a future world (1974!) in which fighting has been abolished. The sport continues with android combatants, however, and it is one of these that he carts around the country on Greyhound buses, his weary mechanic in tow. Their machine is an obsolete model which has long seen better days. It pops a spring and gives up the ghost before the fight is about to begin. Marvin’s character, a sweaty, desperate hustler who’s fallen well behind the game, decides to take to the ring himself rather than forfeit the money. Inevitably, he takes a bloody pounding from the dispassionate machine he faces, and gets roundly booed for putting up such a poor show. Collapsing onto the floor of the ‘workshop’ changing rooms, he sends the mechanic out to get the money, and has to accept, through bloodied teeth, when he comes back with just half. It’s a compellingly bleak tale of human beings struggling to survive at the bottom of the heap, unable to adjust to a mechanised world which has made them redundant. Marvin’s heroic if foolhardy stand goes entirely unnoticed, and he leaves town completely humiliated, but still determined to carry on with his pitifully outmoded fighter, Battling Maxo. Rod Serling’s customary summation reads the story as a parable of the indomitable human spirit. That seems a hopelessly optimistic interpretation of this sombre and downbeat tale.

Howling into the storm - Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet has been mentioned already. But what a masterpiece of pacing and sustained tension it is. Set within a claustrophobic environment, the interior of a small plane, it slowly builds up from initial glimpses of the gremlin to Shatner’s character’s realisation that he alone can act to save the plane and everyone in it. To do so he must behave in a way which will make everyone think he has lost his mind once more. The story reaches its climax as he is sucked out of the emergency exit window, tenuously harnessed by his safety belt, and faces the beast which slowly stalks towards him along the wing in the howling rain. The camera focuses in on his screaming face as he aims his wild shots with the gun he has lifted from a security guard – a moment of cathartic intensity as he is loosed from the confines of the plane and from his artificially maintained façade of calm sanity. It’s not difficult to see how this particular story has lodged in the minds of so many who have seen it over the years. It was inevitable that it would be one of the episodes chosen for the anthology film made in the 1980s. Matheson would enjoy pushing Shatner to the edge again in the Star Trek episode which he wrote, The Enemy Within. Kirk's personality is sheared off into two distinct entities when the transporter goes awry - a good Kirk and a bad one. Perhaps he realised that Shatner was at his best when playing neurotic or psychotic characters.

Night Call derives from an early short story published in 1953, Long Distance Call, and expands upon it to produce an emotionally draining tale which once again makes maximal use of a confined space. An old woman, Miss Keene, house and wheelchair-bound, receives a phone call in the middle of a storm-tossed night, and is plagued by further calls thereafter. The caller on the other end of the line is initially inaudible, but soon begins to emit pained groans, and then an effortful ‘hello (spelled out ‘h-e-l-l-o’ in the story), as if he has not uttered words for a very long time and is unused to their sounds. Miss Keene, who has been persistently calling the exchange about her nuisance calls, is finally informed that a team has come to repair the storm-damaged line near her home. She couldn’t have been receiving any calls, they tell her. The line has come down – over the cemetery. In the Twilight Zone episode, we go on to discover that the lines are grounded in the grave of her fiancé, who had died many years ago as a result of her negligent driving. She had been a domineering companion, controlling his simple and passive soul. She realises that it was him who had been trying to get through to her on the phone, and wills him to call her again. But she had told him to let her be, and he once more obeys her command, leaving her alone and desolate in her remote house. The Twilight Zone version has a powerful emotional charge. But it does lack the kick of the original story’s final line, in which the anonymous graveyard caller rings again and says ‘hello, Miss Elva. I’ll be right over’.

The amazing Agnes Moorehead in The Invaders
My favourite of Richard Matheson’s Twilight Zone stories is The Invaders. It’s a bold and stark drama which is almost entirely free of dialogue, and is a one-hander. As such, it’s the purest expression of his lonely person theme. It’s set in a remote farmhouse inhabited by a solitary, independent woman. On one calm, still night a spaceship crash lands onto her roof. It’s a small vessel, a classic 50s saucer. In fact, it’s the model used in Forbidden Planet, a film whose props and sets turn up in several Twilight Zone episodes (Robbie the Robot even makes a special guest appearance in one). The story details the woman’s increasingly desperate attempts to fight off the tiny invaders, robotic figures which sting her with burning ray guns, stab at her with her own kitchen knives, and burn entrance holes in the wainscoting like mice. Matheson’s economical script benefits immensely from an extraordinary, bravura performance by Agnes Moorehead, who makes us feel the bewilderment and escalating desperation of this beleaguered but strong and indefatigable woman. Jerry Goldsmith’s score also ratchets up the tension throughout, and he is wise enough to know when silence is more effective than any sound. In the end, the woman climbs up on to the roof and smashes the miniature spaceship with an axe. We feel a sense of triumph before hearing the distress call emanating from the wrecked vessel, announcing the disastrous termination of the mission. The menacing little robots are given ordinary human names. The camera pans around and, yes, the insignia reads USAF Probe. It’s an Earth ship which has found itself on a planet of giants. But it has been pre-emptively aggressive and belligerent, assaulting a lone woman in her home. There’s a definite anti-militaristic slant here, and we can feel no sympathy for the tiny people whatsoever as they face their end so far from home. This is a daring and brilliantly sustained piece of minimalist storytelling. It anticipates the similarly concise and single-minded Duel (1971), Stephen Spielberg’s early TV film which was based on a Richard Matheson short story.

I watched Steel, Night Call, Nightmare at 20, 000 Feet and The Invaders last night as a tribute to Richard Matheson. What a treat it was. There’s no better way to remember his singular talent, so go out and find them now.

Alan Garner on TV: The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Keeper

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Red Shift - Tom and Jan on the heath

PART TWO
The power or spirit of place is always central to Alan Garner’s novels and his television work. This power is enduring and remains on some level untouched by the transformations of time and human inhabitation. In Red Shift, Rudheath, Mow Cop and Bartholmey church are the loci of events in all three time periods. They each exert their own particular atmosphere, and seem to provide the natural stages upon which certain acts in eternally recurrent dramas are acted out. Rudheath is the cursed heath, the lifeless interzone through which the motorway ploughs in Tom and Jan’s time. In the civil war episode, Madge calls it ‘a terrible place’ as she flees in the night through its low-lying scrub of trees and bushes with her wounded husband Thomas and the renegade Thomas Venables, who has both betrayed and saved them. The blasted plain is a symbolic landscape betokening a psychological state of despair and hopelessness. It’s most famous literary use is in Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is alluded to in Tom’s comment in the book, when they are in Bartholmey Church, ‘Tom’s a cold’. This is a line repeated several times by Edgar, the beleaguered son of the Earl of Gloucester, who has donned the disguise of Tom, a wretched madman (a variant of the traditional character Tom o’Bedlam). Lear and his loyal fool meet him in a hovel as they wander across a heath. Tom in Red Shift is clearly and self-consciously (and perhaps even a little self-pityingly) casting himself in this role.

The Owl Service - Gwyn by the mountain stream
The high promontory of Mow Cop and Bartholmey Church tower mirror mirror each other across time, both sacred spaces and lookout points. They are sanctuaries which can offer the platform for a more expansive vision, but can also become traps if the sanctity of the place is defiled. Holy sites and cursed ground can be co-existant, the divisions between states a matter of spiritual affinity or tribal affinity, or some more metaphysical distinction. In The Keeper, the cottage is a cursed place from the perspective of Sally and Peter and the local populace, as haunted houses tend to be by definition. But the land beneath is sacred. The pervading sense of wrongness derives from its violation through human incursion and the presumption of control over the surrounding land signified by the building of a gamekeeper’s cottage. In The Owl Service, the river, the hill with its crowning copse, the mountain and the whole enfolding valley itself are all imbued with a particular power, humming with inherent history and myth. Each landscape feature conveys a discrete episode in the overall story. When Gwyn climbs to top of the mountain, with the intention of crossing the ridge and walking straight on out of the imprisoning valley, thus abdicating his role in the drama, he is confronted by Huw, who seems to know everything which is happening on the land he claims as his own. He babbles on about the time when they stole the hogs from the neighbouring lord with the help of his (or Gwydion’s) magical trickery. He is relating another of the stories from the Math Son of Mathonwy branch of The Mabinogion, hinting at further tales attached to other landscapes. There is a geographical and narrative continuum which extends beyond the valley, which harbours just one chapter of the ongoing universal drama.

Paul Nash - Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase (1943/4)
The standing stones, copses of trees on hills and recurrent circle motifs in The Owl Service are all characteristics of the late paintings of Paul Nash, in which he imbues the landscape of the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire with a symbolism which is both universal and intensely personal. That sense of connection to a landscape, of an interior affinity with its contours and features, can lead to a deeper awareness of hidden aspects of the self. The possibilities (and dangers) of such self-knowledge are represented in The Owl Service by the positioning of mirrors in the woodland surrounding the house. This also adds a touch of surrealism. The props of the domestic interior (and we’ve seen the prominent dressing table mirror in Alison’s room earlier) take their place along the borders of the wild exterior. This is the landscape of the waking dream. The semi-cultivated forest of the unconscious shallows interpenetrating with the conscious furnishings of the ‘civilised’ mind. The boundaries between the interior of the house, the realm of Nancy and Alison, and the exterior patrolled by Huw and Gwyn is not clearly defined. Whilst Huw and Nancy, by now fixed in their roles, keep to their zones (Huw looks extremely awkward when he has to make a brief incursion into the house, his beatific expression temporarily dropping from his face), Alison and Gwyn are still flexible enough to pass regularly back and forth through (Alison creeping out of her room at night). Alison pleads with Gwyn to take her even further outside of her territory, to lead her along the ancient trackways which wind their way up the mountainside. These are the paths which the local inhabitants trod when they went to cut peat mountain’s flank. She wants to share in the connection to the land which Huw and Gwyn share through their ancestry. These trackways are a record of old human patterns of work and civilisation left on the land, lightly sketched traces scratched on the surface of the deeper temporal formations of geological and climatic forces. It is these forces which Gwyn refers to when they do make their ascent, leading Alison with the offhand order ‘let’s climb this metamorphic Welsh mountain’.

In The Keeper, the spirit of place is embodied (or disembodied). We are able to see through its eyes (or its point of view) without ever witnessing a visible manifestation. The spirit of place is the place. It’s also the place through time – what has been built upon as well as what has been built up. This spirit is a wounded and defensive entity, intent on guarding against further encroachment. It marks the increasing awareness of environmental degradation and the growth of the green movement, and is in tune with the sense of humanity’s disharmonious presence within the natural world. Sally and Peter fold out their own chairs and table in the cottage, and set out their scientific equipment all around. It is only when Sally finally sits on the chair in front of the fire, which we have witnessed the spirit of the place settling down into from the suggestive camera POV several times, that a connection is made. ‘All it wants is to be left alone’, she says. ‘The earth not broken’. The place has become cursed because of human presence. They are the ones who haunt it.

The Owl Service - red Alison with her coded snooker ball
There is a human rootedness in place which grows stronger over time (and so more difficult to break free from). In The Owl Service, Huw seems a part of the land, as much its guardian spirit as the invisible Keeper. He is generally rooted to the ground with rake or broom, which he leans on as a conductor of the earth’s power (wood being appropriate in this symbolic sense) as much as a contemplative and conversational prop. He rakes over the gravel of the drive as if to remove the traces of Alison’s father Clive and his wife Margaret’s invasive presence. His beaming face appears between the bracketing necks of a bronze statue of paired cranes, as if he too were a part of the fauna. After Gwyn has spent the night with Alison in the birdhouse in the woods, Huw, assured that the old tale is playing itself out once more, grows heady with his sense of his mythological nature, declaring himself to be the lord of the valley and that lives within it. Later, when Gwyn tries to escape the valley, Huw passes on his proprietorial position, along with the paralysing rootedness it brings with it (how long before he finds the equivalent of broom or rake?). ‘You are lord of the valley now’, he tells him. ‘The heir in blood’. The valley is likened to a reservoir of power, with the eternal triad her incarnated as Alison, Roger and Gwyn acting as conduits for its psychoactive narrative current. Stephen McKay, in his booklet notes to the Network dvd release, points out the colour symbolism running through the series. The three young characters are each represented by a colour corresponding to one of the wires in a plug (as they were coded in 1969). This is seen in the predominant colours of the clothes they wear. Alison dresses in red, Roger in green and Gwyn in black. There is also a scene in which they are all in the games room, rushing around the snooker table colliding their respective red, green and black balls against each other across the green baize surface.

In Red Shift, the atmosphere of place is associated with historical moments involving the clash of native and invading forces. There is a sense that the particularity of certain landscapes exerts a strong influence on human behaviour, and that they are stage sets waiting for certain acts in the dramas of the age to be performed. This is obviously the case in a military context, in which geography plays an important strategic role. Certain routes are ideal for an invading army, and certain elevated features offer advantageous positions from which to make a defensive stand. Rudheath is the place where the Roman legionary soldiers suffer ambush and attack, and are forced to retreat. In the book, on the other hand, it is the route they take on the way to launching a flash raid on the local ‘Cat’ village. It’s the direction from which the Royalist attack on Bartholmey comes. The heath is a transitory zone, steeped in an atmosphere of fear and uncertaintly. Tom lives adjacent to it in a static caravan with his parents, whilst Jan lives nearby in a bungalow with hers. Jan’s house is one of a series she has lived in as her parents move around the country according to the peripatetic needs of their work. Both are temporary and unstable homes, akin to the tents which the Romans set up.

Red Shift - John Fowler directs the church defences
Rudheath is an open and exposed place, both literally and symbolically, where lives are lived in a state of vulnerable uncertainty. Those who find themselves there are looking for the first route out. In contrast, Bartholmey Church and its surrounding village, set in its enfolding valley, is a place of retreat and entrenchment. Tom suggests that it could be ‘a Come to Britain poster’, a Batsford book cover rural idyll. The empty church becomes a sanctuary for Tom and Jan, a place apart from the judgemental scrutiny of his parents. It’s in the hushed surrounds of its nave that they both come to the realisation that Tom’s mother has been intercepting Jan’s letters and disposing of them. For them, it becomes a place where truth is revealed, an enclosed space of sacrosanct intimacy (despite Tom’s unstoppable flow of sardonically clever comments). In the Civil War era, John Fowler leads the villagers into the church in anticipation of the Royalists’ arrival. His attempts at an honest expression of his feelings towards Madge are firmly rebuffed, and we gain the impression that have become a frequent and unwelcome imposition. The church becomes a sanctuary besieged and eventually breached. John refuses to step forward when his name is called by the Royalist commander ‘for breach of the King’s peace’, even when his fellow villagers are killed one by one. It is his father who finally betrays him for the sake of the others (a futile gesture, as it turns out). The sacrosanct, sheltering space which has allowed Tom and Jan to find an element of truth and honesty is here defiled. John’s silence, which condemns his neighbours to death, echoes the silence which Tom’s mother tries to impose on Jan by stealing her letters. Her duplicity is uncovered by her son’s openness in questioning Jan, whereas John’s disavowal of responsibility is uncovered by the passive father. He is the local vicar and thus, in a sense, the guardian of the sacredness of the place.

Red Shift - Macey with the killing axe
Mow Cop, a holy site for the Celtic Cat tribe, also becomes a sacred space besieged and desacralised when the Roman soldiers make defensive camp there. They are safe while they remain there. Logan, their leader, who knows all about local customs and beliefs, sees the tribal heads carved from stone and realises that they have ‘touched sacred ground – blood can’t be shed on it’. In the Civil War period, too, the villagers are led out from the church before being lined up and slaughtered. We are witness to the bloody history running beneath the placid pastoral poster image of Britain. The historical episodes in Red Shift represent a progression from warring tribalism to settlement and towards an intimate and self-contained domesticity. This progression follows a geographical progression from Rudheath in the north (on the Cheshire Plain near Northwich), through Crewe (where Tom and Jan meet at the station), then east to Bartholmey and Mow Cop. Crewe was a town built around the railway and its manufacturing needs. As such, it can be considered an extension of Rudheath, in that it was inherently a transitory place, and one associated with the needs of a particular industry. We go from the open heathland where nothing substantial takes root and everything is vulnerable to external influence or assault, and then to Crewe, a no-place until its growth in the mid-nineteenth century to facilitate people getting elsewhere. Heading east, we come to the village in the valley, and from there to the cottage, the sacred cave and the tower on the hill. This progression is also reflected in the change in the status of the stone axe-head which is used by Macey in the Roman period and subsequently rediscovered in the Civil War and modern eras. It begins as a violent, bloodstained weapon, with which Macey fells tribal attackers left and right during one of his berserking frenzies. When he becomes close to the corn goddess, however, he rejects its violent use, telling her that the killing is ‘not from me’. When Thomas unearths it from the streambed in Bartholmey, it becomes a ‘thunderstone’, a talisman lodged in the fireplace to bring protection to hearth and home. Tom finds it still in place in the ruin of Thomas and Madge’s cottage atop Mow Cop. It then becomes the token of Tom and Jan’s intimacy, and of a continuity with a domesticised past, which offers the hope of a future in which they too are settled. When Tom sells it to a museum, he betrays their intimacy, and undermines that hope.

Holding history - unearthing the axe-head
The axe-head connects the characters from their separate times, bridging the divide of centuries. It also implicitly makes connections with inhabitants of more distant eras, since it is evidently an object which Macey has himself discovered and appropriated for his own use. Tom’s studies reveal that it was ‘a votive axe from the Beaker period. 3,500 years and it had survived’. Its smooth roundedness is designed for the firm grip of a hand, which gives it a symbolic weight and solidity, the conjunction of geology and history made tangibly real in the holding. This conjunction is given a further cosmic dimension as the camera circles its holed, sinusoidally curved oval form at the end of the story. It’s a shot which echoes the circling nebulae which we saw in the opening credits sequence, the axe a similarly illuminated form set within depths of surrounding darkness. Layers of human, historical, geological and cosmological time are embodied in this one simple yet symbolically complex piece of worked stone. It ends up encased beneath museum glass, an objectified artefact on display to all. But it can no longer be held or touched, and so the feeling of a direct physical connection to generations past is broken.

Artefacts charged with externally imposed meaning also feature in The Owl Service. Guilty relics associated with the betrayal and murder in the recurring Mabinogion tale are squirreled away in a rocky cleft on the top of the mountain. The arrowhead from Gronw’s spear and the brake blocks which Huw removed from Bertram’s motorbike, inadvertently leading to his death, lie side by side. Gwyn replaces the arrowhead with a cheap tourist gewgaw with an owl design, bought in the village but made in England. In a present in which the substance of local myth and ancestral history grows more attenuated, its form altered to sell as a romanticised and sanitised package to tourists and outside investors, the authentic is replaced with the manufactured facsimile. Deeper meaning has been drained away, the stories trivialised and their darker, more profound currents diverted.

The Keeper - the empty room
The cottage in The Keeper is also a place to which stories adhere. Peter’s grandmother had told him ‘tales’, and the suicide of the original gamekeeper, followed by his daughter’s decision to let the house fall into a natural state of ruin rather than profit from its sale, make it clear that there has been a foreboding atmosphere about it from the beginning, which has echoed down the years. There is a deeper substrata underlying the building which stretches beyond history and into geological expanses of time. The Keeper embodies and ancient, pre-human spirit of place. The generational stories attesting to its presence are reminiscent of the layered hauntings in Nigel Kneale’s 1972 TV play The Stone Tape, which are successively erased until only some formless, pre-historic abyss remains, along with whatever inhabited its dark depths. The cottage opens upon a similar abyss, and as in The Stone Tape, ends up becoming an ageless prison or tomb. In the final shot, Sally and Peter are no longer there, and their equipment has been cleared away. The chair in which Sally sat and the window which she looked out of and in which her face was reflected are both now bare. The fire burns in the grate once more, the chair still rooted in place in front of its warm glow. It’s as if they’d never existed, never crossed the threshold of the cottage’s front door. This has become a place of disappearance, of non-being. Sally’s reading book, Schindler’s Ark, which we glimpsed earlier, connects this metaphysical abyss with more particular historical disappearances and erasures.

The Owl Service - making owls in the doll's house
Garner’s characters often find themselves confined within enclosing spaces. It’s a confinement which is a reflection of psychological states as much as it is a delineation of literal limitations. In The Owl Service, the valley forms such space, albeit a fairly expansive one, with the house another set within it. House and valley are separate realms, as we’ve seen. Nancy seldom leaves the house, as if to do so would deprive her of some essential part of herself, which is inextricably connected to this dark interior. Huw, meanwhile, is rooted to the valley outside, only occasionally retreating to the shabby shed in the grounds where he sleeps. The two are often caught gazing at each other from their divided worlds, separated by panes of glass. Huw has become so accustomed to his limited horizons that he acknowledges nothing beyond the valley’s rim. Gwyn tries to remind him that ‘there’s a world outside’, but his own attempts at leaving the valley prove futile. Gwyn also attempts to point Alison towards farther, more expansive horizons when he finds her hunched up in the woodland hen coop. She has escaped the house and her bedroom sanctuary to retreat to this even more claustrophobic and constrained space. ‘You can’t spend your life in a doll’s house’, Gwyn tells her, with possible reference to Ibsen’s play about the frustrations arising from the domestic respectability expected of women of a certain class in late nineteenth century society. But the rather whiny and spoiled Alison shows little signs of having the individual will or strength of character to cast off the comfortable privileges which such a constrained life can afford. Roger is also to be found in the confined space of the basement, where he sets up his photographic developing studio. Hanging up the images he has taken through the ‘eye’ of the Stone of Gronw, he is able to ‘see’ further in this room with no windows than in the outside world of objective vision. This is an inner space, the confining white-washed walls of the basement those of his own skull. Clive, meanwhile, can generally be found polishing his car. This is the confined space he’d prefer to be inhabiting, mobile and heading away from this place. As his car would retreat down the drive, Huw would be raking over his traces behind him.

Red Shift - Tom in his headphone world
In Red Shift, Tom is marooned in the confined space of the family static caravan. This is not the forced proximity of the family holiday, however, but the permanent situation in which he must exist. The caravan is further subdivided, at convenient moments, into separate living spaces, everybody retreating into their own private cells. Tom retreats even further into his headphone space, blocking out the sound of his parents and their TV programmes. He goes so far inwards that he is in danger of losing contact with the world outside of his head altogether. We see the outside of Jan’s house (her parents’ bungalow) but never go inside. Her life is, to a certain extent, closed off to Tom. An essential element of mystery and separation remains. In the Roman period, the soldiers lie within their small tents upon the heath. These offer wholly inadequate protection when they are penetrated and slashed by the swords and spears of tribal attackers outside. Up on Mow Cop there is another enclosed, womblike space, in which the corn goddess is discovered. Macey and the tribal Celt enter through its narrow aperture to commune with her, the other soldiers blunder through to violate her. The church and its tower are the spaces into which people retreat in the Civil War period. All of these confining interiors are places in which to gain some necessary or protective distance from the world, to shut it out. But the world keeps forcing itself in.

The Keeper - Interstitial spirit
In The Keeper, the spirit of place whose perspective we share via the camera’s point of view crawls around the margins of the cottage’s central room, keeping to the crumbling and splintered interstices of the walls. It drifts about, looking out from the cold darkness behind the hearth. This spirit of the natural environment has been driven to the wainscot spaces within the larger confining space by human habitation, or civilisation, to take a broader outlook. If the cottage, like Roger’s basement, can be seen as analogous to the mind, an interior space, then this is the instinctive level of consciousness pushed to the borders by human intelligence. It represents the freedom of the pre-rational mind, before the development of self-awareness and the resultant separation from the surrounding world (the Fall, essentially); a dispersed consciousness free from the cage of rationality and the self.

The Owl Service - On top of the world
These confined spaces open up into wider universal perspectives, if only the characters are able to perceive them. In The Owl Service, Gwyn and Alison climb the mountain and rest against the Ravenstone outcropping at its peak. From here, they look out across the valley and to hills and mountains beyond, gaining a godlike view of their environment and the lives they’ve been leading within it, and a heady sense of new and unlimited possibilities. They temporarily rise above the restraints of inheritance and learned social assumptions. Alison’s desire to climb the old path, with all its associations with traditional manual labour, and to climb it with Gwyn as her guide indicates a desire on her part to rise above the limitations and expectations of her social and class status. Huw is also affected by his ascent to the mountaintop, the boundaries of his kingdom expanding to infinity as he proclaims ‘my land is the country of the summer stars’. The small, enclosed valley is suddenly one with the vast expanse of the cosmos.

Red Shift - cosmic perspectives in the local landscape
In Red Shift, too, events are seen within the compass of a cosmological scale. We move from the particular and the inwardly personal to the universal. Tom has a star chart on his wall in the caravan, beneath which he studies the Neolithic stone hand-axe which he has discovered with Jan on Mow Cop. The expanses of deep space and the layers of deep, geological time and human pre-history are all connected, each enfolding or unfolding within the other, and each encompassed by the human mind. Tom and Jan place themselves within the cosmological perspective, orienting themselves when separated in space by looking up at Delta Orionis in the belt of the Orion constellation. This is in fact a multiple star, with three stellar bodies orbiting each other, and thus also acts as a cosmological metaphor for the connection between Tom, Thomas and Macey across time. In looking at an object across such vast distances, Tom and Jan are also effectively looking back in time, the light which is focussed onto their retinas having taken many hundreds of years to reach them. ‘We’re looking at it as it was when the Roman’s were here’, Tom tells Jan. When they cycle out from Crewe towards Bartholmey, which will establish a further connection across time through the experience of the spirit of a particular place, we see the great white oval of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Its dish is tilted up to point at distances far beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and drink in the radiation emitted across the spectrum from all directions, connecting the Earth with the cosmos. The Jodrell Bank dish can also be seen in the documentary on Garner included on the Owl Service dvd, a grand big science construct in the rural landscape neighbouring the reconstructed medieval farmhouse where he lives. So these connections across time and space are ones which he makes in his own life, too.

The Keeper - weathering the storm
In The Keeper, Sally and Peter are subjected to a terrifying assault of banging noise reminiscent of The Haunting, as if something were trying to smash its way through a door or boundary wall to get to them on the other side. They are also cowed by a howling wind and what seems to be a crushing increase in the density of the local gravity, which forces them to the ground. They cling on to each other to prevent themselves being swept away into some netherworld. Their minds are forcibly opened to a dimension lying beneath the surface layer of human civilisation and its attendant boundaries built up by the rational mind. There is a deep series of substrata underlying the walls which humanity has built, beneath the very thin layer of history silted up on top.

The Owl Service - Bloduedd revealed
The opening up of space is accompanied by an opening up of time. In The Owl Service, the past is a part of the present. Again, it rises through like underlying, granitic substrata once the surrounding territory has been eroded away. This is directly represented by the disintegration of part of the wall in the games room, revealing the painting of Blodeuwedd beneath. This is actually a reproduction of one of the female figures from Boticelli’s Primavera, her eyes grown hollow and shadowed. Spring has entered her autumn. The use of this reproduction might have been due to time or budgetary restrictions, but it actually works quite well, linking the Mabinogion character to wider mythic traditions. Huw talks about the legend in the present tense. Indeed, his speech generally avoids the use of the past tense. He exists in a temporally transcendent state, the eternal present of mythic time. Hauntings and possessions, the stuff of supernatural fiction, are here a manifestation of the collapse of the temporal perspective inherent in ordinary human consciousness. Gwyn intuits this when he suggests that the re-emergence of ancient mythic archetypes is a temporal phenomenen - ‘not haunted, more like still happening’.

Oral history also keeps the past alive in the present. Huw’s telling of the legend makes it feel as if it is happening now. When such oral histories are written down, they are also fixed for future generations, and can be brought to life again in the minds of literate societies. Gwyn and Alison read the Mabinogion, and through it come to a better understanding of the present and their own part in the eternal story. Gwyn’s seemingly native knowledge of the valley is also a product of oral history and storytelling. He grew up in North Wales, but has learnt all about the place from his mother, who never really left in spirit, and knows it better then the landscape of his childhood.

Red Shift - Thomas looking out from the church tower
In Red Shift, the erosion of temporal boundaries is suggested by camera angles and editing. Film editing splices time within the same space. What is implied in the form and structure of the Red Shift film is also present in The Owl Service. Roger’s camera captures moments of frozen time, with the ‘eye’ in the Stone of Gronw forming a megalithic focal point, a locus of power which enables the collapse of temporal boundaries. In Red Shift, we see Thomas in the tower of Bartholmey Church in the Civil War period looking east to Mow Cop. We see Macey and the legion encamped there looking west, and then Tom looking out from the ridge of the outcropping. Thomas is like a fulcrum connecting these two distant eras together. The rubbled remains of his cottage, where he settled with Madge, are the ruins of time, implying a domestic life after they’d fled Bartholmey. It’s a life we never get to see, however. The shifts in time are brought about not by periods of quiet and contentment, but by moment of crisis, of personal and historical fracture.

Red Shift - the blooded axe
Blood and ancestry is another way through which different times are connected. Blood is used as a symbol in The Owl Service and Red Shift. In The Owl Service, Alison draws blood from Roger’s cheek soon after she has been ‘possessed’ by the mythic energy contained in the owl patterned plates. The three lines from her raked fingers are like the scratch of an owl’s razored claws. The blood on the axehead is also a mark of violence which connects Macey with Tom’s smashing of the caravan window, and his shedding of his own blood in anger. As mentioned before, the sacred space on Mow Cop is ground on which blood is not allowed to be spilled. The same goes for the church at Bartholmey. Rape and violation, which occurs in and around both sites, is a way in which the invader or outsider can impose or imprint themselves on the territory which they claim, both psychologically and genetically. So, the Royalist soldiers rape the village women whose husbands they have just killed outside the church, and the Roman soldiers rape the corn goddess in her holy cave. Logan, the legionary commander, makes things quite clear when he points to the goddess pregnant belly and says ‘that’s the legion in there’. This is more explicitly chilling in the novel, where they take her as a captive from the village they raid. In the television adaptation, she is already heavily pregnant when they find her in the cave. But the sense of a more insidious invasion, carried in the blood, is evident. At the end of Red Shift, Tom confronts Jan over her ‘betrayal’ of him. He has spied on her in London, where he intended to surprise her by meeting her at Euston rather than Crewe, and seen her with another man. Refusing her explanations, he attempts to claim her by having sex with her. It’s a scene which connects uncomfortably with the scenes of violation in the other eras which we witness. Jan makes it very clear that she feels she has been used as an object. ‘It would like to go now’, she says through clenched teeth.

Father figures - Macey and Logan
A certain ancestral connection between the characters in each time is also implied in their shared name, with its different variants: Tom, Thomas and Macey. Tom comes out with the old phrase ‘more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows’ at the beginning of Red Shift. The Toms are in a sense aspects of the archetypal figure of the fool. The fool is not necessarily an idiot or jester, but can be seen as someone at the beginning of the journey through life, taking the first steps along the road. They have experienced little of the world, and have yet to accumulate any significant wisdom. They are, in fact, something of a blank slate. But their naivety and innocence can sometimes lead to insights which the more world-weary and cynical might miss. The three aspects of Tom are all attempting to set out into the world, to become themselves more fully. To do so, they have to gain some distance from the respective father (or mother) figures who have shaped their lives up to this point. Tom needs to get away from the moralising scrutiny of his mother and from his father’s weak attempts to assert his paternalistic authority. Thomas needs to get away from the baleful influence of John Fowler. And Macey needs to break free from Logan, his surrogate father. All three father figures have the aspect of military leaders to some extent or other. Logan is the legionary commander; John Fowler organises the defence of the church and is clearly the dominant voice in the village; and Tom calls his father the sergeant major, whether because he is in the army or just as a jocular mode of address is not made clear. In order to establish themselves in the world, to assert their individual, sovereign selves, the Toms must free themselves from this paternalistic authority.

To be concluded
PART ONE is here.

Laura White at the Spacex Gallery

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Laura White’s exhibition at the Spacex Gallery in Exeter tells us We Can Have It All. Variety seems to be a key element. The main display gallery is turned into a sculptural hall which makes play with the grandeur of cavernous museums and galleries, the churchlike spaces in which Culture is reverently displayed. The objects here arrayed reflect the kind of things you might expect to find in those hallowed halls, but irreverently fashioned from cheap and throwaway materials and shot through with artificially bright and cheekily cheerful primary colours. White’s sculptures are displayed on plinths of varying shapes and, most importantly, height. The varying elevations granted each object suggest a competitive jostling for position and attention, for a symbolic place of prominence betokening a pinnacle of influence and critical approval. The different levels of the plinths also help to create an overall panoramic view from either end of the hall, and to provide contrasting groupings as the viewer threads their way through the maze of objects. Some of these objects are built up from the stuff of moulded plastic mass production, around which clay, putty or plasticene has been built up. The thumbprints in the malleable material marking the shaping of human hands contrast nicely with the smooth and shiny surfaces of the roundly smooth plastic, whose moulding has been entirely the work of machines. Traces of the plastic objects which are the structural foundations show through. There’s the barrel of a toy gun, the curving bowl of a serving spoon, the wheel of a toy car, the arc of partially exposed carpet bowling ball globes, the cantilevered handle of a colander, the grinning teeth and bulging eyes of toy animals and the contoured spouts of watering cans. A bright canary of a yellow lemon squeezer seems to diffuse downwards through the teetering assemblage atop which it precariously perches. The symmetrical spouts of two watering cans, one green, one orange, which form the spreading ‘wings’ of a sculpture similarly infect its colouration, lending its upper half a dipped marbled mottling. The unnaturally bright colours of all these things stand out against the white and grey of the clays in which they are embedded. It’s like some amalgam dug up in the far future from a 20th/21st century geological strata, veined with the non-degradable detritus of the modern throwaway age, has been used as a sculptural material. White reclaims these plastic materials which are so ubiquitous as to be invisible and looks at them afresh, enjoying their clearly unnatural colours and contours. By layering more traditionally sculptural forms, redolent of more skilled sculptural techniques, over the top she both makes the case for the continuing relevance of sculpture in an age of mass manufacture, and creates a witty (and fun) sense of tension between the mass-produced and the artfully created – between high and low culture.


The high culture of art history is referred to throughout, set into jumbled juxtaposition, classical, religious and modernist tendencies all thrown together in close potted history proximity, staring and pointing at one another. There’s an element of light mockery to these allusions, pastiches which bring the reverence and mystification accorded to much art down to size. A rounded, hollowed out form resembles a model of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, but the plastic objects which form the basis of those curves belie the inspiration of the natural world which was so central to her work. Another work which mixes white plaster like material with colourful inserted objects brings Miro’s sculptures to mind – the toys embedded here seeming oddly appropriate. A brightly unwinding spiral helter skelter may allude to Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist dream model for the Monument to the Third International, but its vivid red is more fairground colouring than post-revolutionary Soviet Russian heraldry. The twisting vines Medieval and Renaissance crosses, which would have been wrought out of gold, are here rendered in grey putty-like clay, their decorative detailing created not by fine filigreed work and embedded jewels but by the impressions of plastic fruit shapes and the faces of children’s plastic toys. There are geometrical sculptures like something by Gaudier-Brzeska (but made out of scraps of wood) and spindly iron figures in a post-war British style. A CD rack covered in different colours of plasticene (or blu-tac?) even becomes a bit of miniaturised minimalism, a compact Donald Judd piece for the mantelpiece. Classical works are given back their colour, and relieved of their ‘ideal’ forms. A mossily bearded Ptolemaic bust is given a blue and green mottled patina, as if it has been copiously crapped on by pigeons producing polychromatic birdlime. This tends to undermine the dignified philosophical regard of the sculpted features, indicating a person of deep seriousness and importance – making it all the more funny, of course. Another bust, a female figure this time, is painted in dark ashen grey, with the whites of its eyes staring solemnly out. It looks like one of the living busts from Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et La Bete. Two other classical figures are rendered in gnome-like size and placed on low-level plinths which reduce them further in comparison with the towering objects which surround them. With their rounded pot-bellies and hands resting on hips or about to scratch balls, not to mention the fact that they’re dipped in poster-paint blue and green, they are distinctly non-heroic forms. Their physiques owe more to the Smurfs than they do to some idealised vision of Adonis or Aphrodite.


The remaining room, walled off from the main gallery, is given over to three large pictures of individual sculptures, which are leaned against the wall. This seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. It’s an ideal room for projections or works which use some element of light. Nevertheless, the photographs make the scale of the pieces ambiguous. Are they really this big, or could you in fact hold each of them in the palm of your hand? Are the vases which are piled up on top of each other in a brimful celebratory tower dolls house miniatures or the actual full-sized thing? They have the look of elaborate cakes, alternately evil and impregnated with enough e-numbers to set your eyes spinning like pinwheels. One, a layered pagoda of ornamented dishes, has black spiked excrescences protruding from its surface at regular intervals, as if some deadly mould had grown from infected spores. Another monumental cupcake (or ice cream globe) is topped with a bronze sphinx with brown headdress – caramel and chocolate, perhaps. They are confections which look both tempting and revolting. I think I’d probably have to pass.

This is an accessible and enjoyable exhibition, full of colour and variety, which wears its learning lightly and is a lot of fun to wander around. It continues until 23rd February.

Maddalena Fagandini

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Maddalena Fagandini, who died last week, was one of the more unsung of the pioneering women producers and composers who developed the techniques and sounds of electronic music in the early days of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There’s some confusion about the precise dates of her residency in Room 13, the Workshop’s hideaway within the big barn of the Maida Vale studios. This is indicative of the fairly flexible inter-departmental structure of the BBC at the time. Studio Managers in the Workshop were appointed on a short-term basis and came and went at regular intervals. Fagandini was one of the first, but was also called away for other production duties. This was partly due to her bilingual fluency in English and the native Italian of her parents, which made her particularly indispensable during the coverage of the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, published in 1983 to mark its 25th anniversary, records her tenure as spanning the years 1960-63. The recent BBC4 Workshop documentary Alchemists of Sound extends it to 1966 and has it beginning in 1959. Louis Niebur’s book Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop makes it clear that she worked on the TV programme Outside and the theme for the World Service radio programme Science and Industry in 1959. It seems fair to assume that her most creative period lasted from 1959-1962, the latter year being the last in which examples of her work appears on the 2008 double CD overview BBC Radiophonic Workshop: A Retrospective. This also provides a pleasing sense of continuity with the two most famous of the Workshop’s female composers. Daphne Oram had left in 1959, year after the Workshop opened, having tirelessly campaigned for the formation of an electronic music studio within the BBC along the lines of those operating on the continent; and Delia Derbyshire would join in 1962, becoming one of the most celebrated of the composers in what is often thought of as the Workshop’s tape-tangled and early synthesiser experimenting golden age. Fagandini was working in the formative years, and as Louis Niebur notes in Special Sound, ‘was one of the Workshop’s most prolific and creative early composers’. She was therefore instrumental in developing the distinctive soundworld for which it would become known.


Fagandini’s relative obscurity partly stems from the nature of the Workshop’s initial remit. It was intended as a studio to provide sounds for drama and documentaries rather than to create independent pieces of music, as was the case in the state radio studios in France, Germany and Italy. This was one of the major reasons for Daphne Oram’s precipitate departure. She’d envisaged something more along those lines, and felt that such strictures wouldn’t allow her enough leeway to pursue her own compositional path. Fagandini had visited the Italian National Radio’s Studio di Fonologia in Milan, where the likes of Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono created modernist electronic music, and where John Cage put together his Fontana Mix in 1958-9, the period of the Workshop’s launch. She was therefore familiar with the variety and possibilities of modern studio techniques and the uses to which they were being put by ‘serious’ composers. She had worked on the technical side of production at the BBC (having first been employed as a typist) but had a musical background (largely self-taught), which made her ideal for the creative laboratory of the Workshop. Compositions were anonymously attributed to the department rather than the individual, however. It was only with the release of ‘pink’ Radiophonic Workshop LP in 1968, which marked the 10th anniversary of its creation, that some of its composers received their due. Fagandini, who by this time had moved on, wasn’t one of them however (the album showcased the work of Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and David Cain). It wasn’t until the Radiophonic 21 LP, released in 1979 (marking 21 years of the Workshop), that a small selection of her pieces became generally available. Those tracks were all included on the 2008 Retrospective CD. Because much of her work was carefully integrated and ingrained into the programmes for which it was created, programmes which are not repeated (or in some cases have been wiped), its impact and importance has faded with time. But what remains indicates how much her compositions fed into later developments.


She worked on the 1959 drama Outside with Desmond Briscoe, who would go on to become the head of the department, which was the first TV programme to use the Workshop. The extract on the Retrospective collection begins with the rattling of keys and opening of a clanking metallic door familiar from the beginning of Porridge, and then goes on to represent the bewilderment of a released prisoner venturing out into the world once more through a sonic manipulation and estrangement of everyday sounds, ending with the resonant clang of a gong, which sounds like some dazing (or perhaps clarifying) mental blow. It’s a fine example of the way in which electronic music can embody subjective states and interior landscapes. She also worked with Phil Young on the signature tune for the World Service programme Science and Industry (for which she is not credited on either the Radiophonic 21 or Retrospective releases). This strikes an interesting balance between and musique concrete and purely electronic sounds. The percussive metallic hammering seems to point to a past of heavy industrial labour, whilst the electronic element points to a rapidly approaching future in which the machines will take over. The proto-sequencer pulsations also demonstrate the strong rhythmic component of Fagandini’s music.


This came through particularly clearly in her interval music. These were composed for the intervals which still existed between programmes at the time, small self-contained pieces of the music which were designed to engage the viewer whilst they waited. They often incorporated an element of marking the passing moments, expressing the passage of time, which was also evident from the clock on the screen, in a mesmeric fashion. Fagandini’s Interval Signal, included on the Radiophonic 21 and Retrospective collections, was designed to be congruent with the sweep of the screen clock’s arm which eliminated the second dots one by one. It’s constructed from simple woodblock clops given a little added echo, which sound like the steady splashes of fat drops of water. With its gradual additive accumulation of layers (followed by a retrograde stripping away), looping repetitions and rippling phasing effects, it resembles the early minimalist music of Steve Reich (the first section of Drumming), Philip Glass or Terry Riley. There’s something inherently organic about its regular patterns, the building up and slow release of musical mass like the drawing in and letting out of breath. It also sounds a little like the mechanistic pattering of The Playful Drummer, one of the pieces on Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby records, which would be released in 1964, electronic music designed to engage or tranquillise toddlers. The other interval signal piece included on the Retrospective is Time Beat, which has a similarly elastic rhythm, more skittering this time and lightened by buoyant reverb. A low key underlying drone provides a sense of unchanging continuity beneath the changeable surface, the constant hum of blood, nerves and synapses. As Louis Niebur points out in Special Sound, this started off in October 1960 as Music for Party Political Conferences, and incongruously jaunty attempt to make people believe that watching TV coverage of the ritualistic annual seaside gatherings would be exciting and fun. It then progressed to a more appropriate use as an interval signal.


It was in this context that it caught the ear of George Martin, who heard in it potential for a novelty beat record along the lines of a Joe Meek production. He got a music publisher to sort out the rights, came up with an accompanying arrangement to flesh it out and make it more palatable to a pop audience, and released it in 1961 as a single on Parlophone Records, which was given the title Time Beat. The Workshop’s policy of maintaining corporate anonymity led to a pseudonymous credit, and the overall attribution to ‘BBC Radiophonics’. For the composer, Martin came up with the name Ray Cathode, clearly wanting to highlight the electronic music aspect of the record. He recognised the interest such novel sounds had amongst the public, an interest fuelled in no small part by Fagandini and the Radiophonic Workshop. Of course, he would later play around with studio tape effects in a pop context with The Beatles on Revolver and Sergeant Pepper, and Paul McCartney in particular would take a keen interest in developments in electronic music and the goings on at the Workshop. Fagandini also came up with a ragged, offbeat melody with rough-edged sawtooth wave sounds for the b-side, Waltz in Orbit, with Martin laying some jazzy Brubeck-like block chords behind (It’s A Raggy Waltz – In Space). It offered a light-hearted sketch of a slightly battered and clunky satellite propelled in a spinning dance around the earth, a more jerry-built Sputnik. Although it was hardly a hit, it was reviewed on Juke Box Jury, so Fagandini did produce an authentic pop single, albeit inadvertently. The BBC documentary Alchemists of Sound makes play with the mystery of the anonymous composer, and Fagandini sportingly joined in, stating ‘I am not Ray Cathode’. But she was.


Further electronic sounds were produced for the BBC stand at the 1962 Ideal Home Exhibition in a piece which hovers around half-expressed nursery melodies in a distracted, dreamy manner. The manipulation of the xylophone notes on tape to create a spacious sound and springy rhythm anticipates the work of John Baker, whilst the tinkling bell sounds at the end (title Ideal Home Exhibition on the 21 and Retrospective collections) look forward to the more playful side of Delia Derbyshire’s music. The 1962 piece The Chem Lab Mystery, composed for the closing titles of a TV serial, is pure electronic music, appropriately enough. It’s burbling oscillator sounds are suggestive of reactive processes in arrays of test tubes and flasks, whilst glittering descending glissandi produce that otherworldly sound that only electronic music can, inducing cool ‘thrill of science’ shivers. In 1961, she created the music and sound design for an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s modern recasting of the Orpheus and Eurydice story to fit his own mythology of self, Orphée, which was produced as a play in 1926 and then turned into a film in 1950. In an ironic bit of synchronicity, she was wholly dispensing with George Auric’s original score for the film whilst Daphne Oram was working with him to produce the haunting electronic atmospheres for The Innocents. Fagandini drew on Greek scales for her music, mixing short harp figures with pure, singing sinewave tones, and for the Princess (Death) tape-reversed piano notes, reflecting her origins from the benighted world beyond the mirror. The scenes in which Orphée tunes into the poetic signals from the other side on his radio are accompanied by plucked notes which are lent the hazily blurred shimmer of dreams through tape fiddling. The violent chorus of the shrieking furies who tear Orphée apart in a Bacchanalian frenzy is edited and layered together into a frighteningly intense sound collage which calls to mind Berio’s work with Cathy Berberian in Milan. Unfortunately, only short extracts of the drama are available to hear (via the examples included with the Special Sound book), the rest buried somewhere deep in the darkness of the BBC vaults of doom.


In Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s history of the Radiophonic Workshop, Fagandini also mentions having enjoyed working on a drama called Rhinoceros, for which she created the sounds of the lumbering beasts from scratch. She talks of the unnerving time she had conjuring up sounds for a series of real life ghost stories for the series Things Which Go Bump In The Night in the early hours in the deserted, shadowy and eerily silent Maida Vale Studios. She also provided the sound design for a 1960 production of Czech playwright Karel Capek’s beast fable Insect Play, an ideal subject for radiophonic treatment.


Fagandini’s time at the Radiophonic Workshop was an interlude in her career, and she didn’t pursue her music after she left in the early 60s. This is a shame, and another reason whey she remains a relatively obscure figure. But she went on to other fruitful and very useful pursuits as a producer in radio and TV, involving herself wholeheartedly in projects which were equally creative in their own way. She made many programmes offering an accessible and intuitive way to learn foreign languages, bringing together various different media (TV, books, cassettes and latterly CDs) and doing her not inconsiderable bit to make Britain a bit more linguistically (and by extension culturally) cosmopolitan. She also produced the landmark TV history of the blues, The Devil’s Music. Evidence of her contributions to the history and development of electronic music in Britain through her formative work with the Radiophonic Workshop may be a bit thing on the ground, but her role was nevertheless a vital one.

Ida Kar and Women In Art at Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery

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Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery is currently showing a selection of Ida Kar’s photographic portraits of post-war artists and writers under the title Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer. The description could equally well suit her or her subjects. The 40 or so pictures are drawn from the major retrospective held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2011, which did much to bring her back to public attention after her star had waned in the wake of the sixties. They add up to a fascinating composite portrait of the times.

Kar’s full name was Ida Karamanian, the surname indicative of her Armenian heritage. She trimmed the tail off at some point, donning her bohemian artistic persona by creating a monicker of intriguing ambiguity and impactful brevity. It looks like it should be an anagram (Arkadia, perhaps). Her formative years found her exposed to a cosmopolitan variety of cultures and climates. She was born in Russian in 1908, where she spent her childhood, before moving to Egypt and the ancient city of Alexandria. Her first taste of the bohemia to which she would surrender herself came through her studies in Paris, where she enjoyed the left bank life from 1928-9. At this point, she wanted to be a singer, perhaps influenced by the chansonniers of the day like Damia and Fréhel. In the 30s, having moved back to Egypt, married and set up home in Cairo, she became increasingly interested in photography, however. She had briefly worked as an assistant to a photographer in 1935 and learned the techniques and processes involved, and established her own studio in Cairo. Interestingly, the photographer Lee Miller was also living in Cairo at this time, having also married an Egyptian man. Perhaps they met. It was in the 1940s that she met Victor Musgrave, who had been posted to Egypt during the war. He was a poet and painter with a surrealist bent, and also an editor, art critic and, later on, a gallery owner and curator. They fell in love and lived in the Old Town, the bohemian quarter of Cairo, before getting married in 1944 after Ida’ divorce had come through.


They moved to London in 1945, initially living in a Close off Regents Park before moving to an old Victorian terraced house at 1 Litchfield Street, a small conduit linking Charing Cross Road with St Martin’s Lane. The ground floor was taken up be a gallery owned by the painter John Christoforou, which Musgrave helped to run. Ida set up a photographic studio on the top floor. Their new home was a short hop from Soho, and they were soon immersed in the bohemian life, artistic and otherwise, of its narrow streets, clubs and watering holes. Ida was sociable, outgoing and loquacious, and very generous with her time. She surrounded herself with friends and acquaintances, some of whom came to stay in Litchfield Street, which was effectively an open house, the gallery a meeting space and the flat a lodging room for itinerant artists. Some of these also became her lovers, since neither she nor Musgrave saw their marriage in terms of monogamous sexual fidelity. Whilst her strident character and uncensored opinions meant that she was not always an easygoing or relaxing companion, she showed a genuine interest and dedication to her expansive circle of friends. She was quite the opposite of her contemporary John Deakin, another photographic chronicler of Soho life and sometime contributor of celebrity shots for Vogue. He, by all accounts (and you can read about both him and Kar in Barry Miles’ history of the capital’s post-war counterculture London Calling) was a duplicitous parasite and poisonous stirrer. Kar took no active part in the artistic life of the capital and was ignorant of contemporary currents, seemingly uninterested in what was going on in the worlds of art, theatre or literature. This curious disconnection may actually have worked to her advantage, since she approached her subjects as individuals and working people, irrespective of their achievements (or lack of them). She took photographs of people who were part of her life, who happened to be artists, writers and musicians, and through them gained introductions to others who agreed to have their portraits taken. Jacob Epstein, one of the elders of British art, who lived in the area, was particularly helpful in this regard. She took a number of pictures of him in his studio whilst he was working on a sculpture of the actress Elizabeth Keen in 1951, one of which is included here.


The exhibition in Plymouth is divided into three geographical groupings. The largest naturally comprises the London pictures, which range from the 1951 Epstein portrait to a striking photograph of Bridget Riley taken in 1963, in which she is enfolded between the op-art striations of her own paintings. Riley had met Musgrave by chance in 1961 whilst she was passing the gallery which he now owned. This was Gallery One, which had taken its name from the number of the house in Litchfield Street where it first opened in 1953, after Christofours had departed for other shores. By the time of this fortuitous encounter, however, it had moved to smarter premises in Mayfair. Riley happened to be carrying a portfolio of her work, Musgrave took a look, liked it and gave her the first major exhibition of her career. Kar captures her at this early point, before her eye-dazzling graphic style was adopted as one of the defining looks of the decade. Other artists tend to be photographed in their studios, thus granting us a fascinating glimpse into the working spaces (and works in progress) of the likes of sculptors Henry Moore, Kenneth Armitage and Reg Butler, and painters Ivon Hitchens, Sandra Blow, Keith Vaughan and John Piper. An exception here is a portrait of Graham Sutherland with his wife Katherine relaxing in their Kent home in front of a whitewashed fireplace, a couple of his paintings casually propped on the mantelpiece above. Yves Klein is posed with one of his sponges hovering above his head like a thought bubble or a tethered brain balloon, its intense blue transformed into inky photographic monochrome. Stanley Spencer sits beneath a black umbrella even though he’s indoors. Its canopy echoes the moppish bowl of his hair, and it lends him an air of added eccentricity as he looks out from its protective shadow with a mildly inquisitive regard. His suit is shabby and flecked with chalk or paint, a pencil sticking out of its breast pocket, and an old jumper covers a frayed shirt with tie loosely knotted beneath a collar unbuttoned and askew. He is a picture of distracted unworldliness, the archetypal artist immersed in their work to the point of self-neglect. John Piper, on the other hand, stares into the camera eye with an intense, transfixing and rather dolorous stare, tie firmly knotted and top button done up. He is the artist as serious labourer as opposed to Spencer’s dishevelled daydreamer. Behind him we can see a model for a ballet set he was working on, which may be the one which now resides in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s theatre and performance galleries.

Yves Klein
There’s a selection of photographs from two trips to France. The first was made in 1954, with some of the resultant portraits included in her 40 Artists from London and Paris exhibition at Gallery One. Man Ray looks a little irritable posing in front of his 1952 painting Mademoiselle H. Arch-modernist architect Le Corbusier shows his artistic side, leaning on a desk full of sketches, with paintings stacked up behind him, looking out at us through the thick black circles of his spectacles with a crow-like regard. Marc Chagall, who you'd expect from his paintings to be open and full of joy, appears nervous and defensive, looking to one side rather than meeting the eye of the lens. His hands seem gnarled and painful. Albert Giacometti, who you'd think from his sculptures would be full of nervous angst, cheerfully perches on wooden steps outside his studio. Fernand Leger, on the other hand, looks glum and downcast in a cap. The the old Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini strikes a distinctly deadpan pose and looks postively Ivor Cutlerish way in a newspaper hat, fruit and croissants temptingly set out behind him.

Marc Chagall
Kar went back to France in 1960 in order to take some more photos for the exhibition of her work being prepared for the Whitechapel Gallery. This would be one of the first major photographic exhibitions to be presented in an art gallery in Britain, and was a significant recognition of her achievements. She had been greatly assisted in setting up the show by John Kasmin, whom she and Musgrave had met in 1956, and who became their lodger, gallery assistant and later Ida’s business manager. He would go on to open his own art gallery in Bond Street in 1963, which became one of the most important of the 60s, exhibiting paintings by the likes of David Hockney, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Robin Denny, Howard Hodgkin. During her 1960 French trip, Kar shot Andre Breton, one of the founding fathers of surrealism, behind his desk, which is engulfed in letters and papers. There are paintings by Picasso and de Chirico on the wall, and African or Oceanian masks and carvings on every available surface. Georges Braque leans on a chair amongst his paintings, an amused look in his eye, whilst Jean Arp stands at his sculptor’s table, chisel in white-gloved hand.

Following the success of her Whitechapel show, Kar travelled down to St Ives to capture some of the artists at work in the far corner of the South West. Subjects included here are Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon (a charmingly informal shot with his daughter on his shoulder), Bryan Wynter with his wife Monica and son, Patrick Heron, potter Bernard Leach, sculptor Denis Mitchell and Barbara Hepworth, who warrants two pictures. In one, Barbara Hepworth at Work on the Armature of a Sculpture, she is neatly framed by the curling wire and mesh frame of her own work. The St Ives artists’ portraits are accompanied by an example of their work from the Plymouth museum collection, as are some of the London artists. Hepworth’s Constellation from 1973 is one of her white, smoothly rounded marble forms with a hole through its centre, which invites a caressing touch but is unfortunately encased in glass. Bryan Wynter’s Oceanic II from 1963 evokes the Cornish sea with a series of blue brushstroke currents and swells. Patrick Heron’s Six in Light Orange with Red in Yellow silhouttes cut out red shapes against yellow backrounds to dazzling effect. Stanley Spencer’s portrait gives the museum the excuse to get out the painting he made of allotment gardens on the Plymouth Hoe in 1955 (Hoe Garden Nursery). John Piper’s connection with the city is made through a sketch for one of the stained glass windows he designed for the post-war restoration of St Andrews Church. This was for the East window in the Lady Chapel, and incorporated various symbols such as the Marian rose (the rose without thorns, an ivory tower, a grail, lilies, a serpent, a golden gate and, at the apex, a shining star, all set against a deep blue background. I got to have a look at Piper’s beautiful windows later, thanks to the kind auspices of a warden who let me nose about even though the church was technically open only for the choir practice which was going on. Thankfully, the sun was out, so I was able to witness them in their full radiant glory.


Kar continued to work throughout the 60s, but sadly, her mental state grew hazy as the decade drew to a close. Her relationship with Musgrave ran its course and the marriage ended. As loosely defined and noncommittal as it may have appeared, her connection with her husband was an important one for her, and when it was severed, she drifted. Her bohemian friends largely abandoned her, converging on the latest bright figure or new scene, revealing the less appealing side of the counterculture, its fickleness and sometimes ruthless self-regard. She died in the bedsit to which she had been reduced in 1974. Musgrave went on to become a collector of outsider art produced by the mentally ill or those whose existed on the fringes of society, an interest perhaps partly influenced by his former wife’s decline. Kar’s reputation has experienced a revival in recent years, however, and the National Portrait Gallery now holds a significant collection of her work, from which this exhibition is drawn. It continues until 13th April.

A Hamadryad - John William Waterhouse
The museum also currently has an exhibition focussing on women both as artists and as artistic subjects. This has some interesting paintings and objects, including a sketch for Millais’ Ophelia, with poor Lizzie Siddal as its sodden subject, lying for hours in tepid bathwater. It’s the archetypal Victorian image of passive suffering and self-sacrificing womanhood. For the concomitant image of woman as mysterious temptress and aloof mythological embodiment of otherness we can turn to the adjacent painting A Hamadryad by John William Waterhouse, he of Lady of Shallott fame. This has the nude wood nymph entwined in the roots, vines and ivy of her tree, her upward tending shock of hair continuous with the dark foliage. She looks down at the wee faun playing his panpipes all unawares. The red umbrella of a toadstool stands out amongst the woody browns and greens, and presumably symbolises some poisonous temptation which we are to associate with her, rendering her sinister and dangerous. A portrait of Mrs Mortimer Collier and Family painted by John Collier in 1879 presents his wife in a dark Victorian domestic interior, dressed in sombre black velvet and almost literally an object for the children to play with. She sprawls on the couch whilst they tease out her absurdly long hair, which seems to reach down to her feet. A later portrait by Collier from the 20s, this time of a Mrs Osborne, presents a striking contrast. She is dressed in the practical fashions of the age, has short wavy hair wrapped in a headscarf and is clearly about to go out.

An Aerial View of Plymouth and Environs - Dorothy Ward
Of the women artists on display, Dorothy Ward’s large canvas An Aerial View of Plymouth and Environs really stands out, not least because of its monumental scale. It presents a fascinating glimpse of the pre-war city, and set it within a wider landscape, leading back to rolling hills and moorland peaks, with a church perched on top of one such at the back, like an object of pilgimage. The winding roads and rivers invite imaginative exploration of city and country, much as the maps in the flyleaves of a Tolkeinesque fantasy trilogy. It reminds me of the similarly expansive (if somewhat smaller) illustrations of the Scottish city of Unthank (an imaginary version of Glasgow) in Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark. You can read a bit more about Ward here. Also here are Therese Lessore’s naturalistic, informal 1921 painting Cook, a portrait of a woman at work. Lessore’s painting particularly impressed Walter Sickert. As Matthew Sturgis writes in his biography of the artist, Sickert observed that ‘by “some strange alchemy of genius”, the essential being and movement of her subjects – not models, but real people doing real things – were “torn from them and presented in ordered and rhythmical arrangements of the highest technical brevity and beauty”, fixed by the “cold and not unkindly malice of her vision”’. His enthusiastic promotion later helped her sell her first painting, and he was evidently impressed with her on a personal level too, since he married her in 1926. Unfortunately, his reputation and increasing dependence on her (she was 25 years his junior) led to the eclipse of her own artistic development. It was only in the few years left to her after his death in 1942 (she died in 1945) that she was able once more to explore her own creative avenues.

Pastel Autumn Balloon Trees - Clarice Cliff
One of Clarice Cliff’s pieces of porcelain tableware is on display, a sugar sifter (whatever that might be) produced in 1930 with a typically colourful design, the title perhaps appropriately sounding like one of Donovan’s sunny psychedelic songs – Pastel Autumn Balloon Trees. Margaret Lovell’s 1970 sculpture Jib solidifies the wind formed curve of a sail, its surfaces rough and blackened, leaving the polished bronze to gleam along the edges, outlining it in light. June Miles’ 1966 painting Clifton Park takes the colours and fascination with neglected urban corners of the Camden Town group and transfers them to Bristol. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s Card Table, from 1967-9, uses its subject matter as an excuse for an essentially abstract scattering of square forms, with varying shades of red, grey or green, against larger rectangular divisions. It’s a small scale and interior kind of abstraction, very different from the sort of thing she’d been doing in St Ives, inspired by the sea and the Cornish landscape, or the grand series of paintings she produced in the early 50s, complex interpenetrating concatenations of icy blue planes which drew on her observations of glaciers in the Swiss Alps. She continued to paint into old age, producing abstract works, often on paper, up until her death in 2004.

Waiting by Prunella Clough
Waiting by Prunella Clough is a late picture from 1991, by which time she had long turned her back on the industrial, dockside and urban landscapes with which she had made her name in the post-war period. This large semi abstract work retains a certain air of concrete surrounds with the abraded greys of its surfaces, however. The figure on the left is half way between human and plant form, something which has become a part of its environment (and whose slightly slumped, immobile posture presumably gives rise to the title). The bell-like head could be a rain hat or the cap of a toadstool, the spindly legs the spreading shoots of tubers. The central vertical eye of the body (a shape suggestive of the feminine) has the spectral sheen of an abalone shell, a pulsating heart of chromatic life within the pervasive grey. Other organic forms and patterns are foggily suggested behind this figure, and you can almost make out the lines of an elderly face beneath the dark, shapeless mass heavily pendant from the top of the frame. Or perhaps this is just pattern recognition derived from the weathered cracks and ridges of granite or concrete, indicative of the desire to find familiar form in the abstract. The exhibition continues until November.

Two Nights of Beckett at the Bike Shed

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Last week I enjoyed two nights of Samuel Beckett plays at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, part of a Beckett-centric season entitled, presumably with a certain amount of irony, Winter Warmed. The first evening brought together four works, two from the latter part of the 50s and one each from the 60s and 70s. Connections and common currents became readily apparent, and it was evident that the programme had been chosen with great care and well-informed consideration. The first half consisted of readings of or from two plays written for radio: All That Fall (first broadcast on 13th January 1957) and Embers (broadcast 24th June 1959). They were both performed by members of local company The Uncommon Players, who have brought their productions to all corners of Devon (and beyond) both inside and out for many years now.



The actors dressed in character but read from their scripts, so this fell somewhere between a stage performance and a recreation of the conditions of a radio recording. It was a rare opportunity to see these works on stage, and would have been all the more unusual (and unlikely) in Beckett’s lifetime. Always particular about the way in which his plays were interpreted (to the letter being his preference), he even turned down a request by Ingmar Bergman to produce theatrical versions of All That Fall and Embers in 1963. Bergman’s interest in them points to an intriguing connection between their work, and makes you wonder at the extent to which Beckett’s plays informed Bergman’s films at this time (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence came out in 1961, 62 and 63), and influenced his progression towards a pared down, internally focussed modernism towards the end of the decade (Persona, Hour of the Wolf and especially The Rite).

Desmond Briscoe at the controls
The sound mixer played a most important part from his little corner, hunched over in the steely glow of his laptop. He produced the soundworld which is so central to these works. All That Fall in particular was instrumental in providing the impetus behind the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, the establishment of which Daphne Oram and others had been working so hard to achieve. Having been asked by BBC drama producer Donald McWhinnie to write a piece for radio, Beckett became enthusiastic about the possibilities of sound carefully and consciously employed as an integral part of the overall texture and meaning of the drama. Studio engineer Desmond Briscoe was brought in to realise the sonic directions in Beckett’s script. He was familiar with the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry at the RTF (the French national radio) studios in Paris, and their creation of what they termed musique concrète from the recorded sounds of the world (be they train whistles, human breaths, saucepan lids, spinning tops or any other of the sounds they used in early pieces). McWhinnie had even gone over to the studios to meet the two pioneering engineer/composers in preparation for the recording of Beckett’s play, and Douglas Cleverdon, another drama producer, had a particular interest in concrète sounds, having broadcast one of the earliest concerts of the new music, recorded at RTF, on the Third Programme in 1955. Briscoe’s subtle manipulation of the sound sources in All That Fall give them a slight unreal quality, giving them a sense of being at a remove from objective reality, sounds perceived through (or perhaps generated from) the mind of the play’s protagonist Mrs Rooney. All That Fall proved a big critical success, and the evident delight displayed by an artist of Beckett’s stature at the potential of the studio to bring new dimensions to his drama significantly furthered the case for an electronic music and sound effects department being established within the BBC. The Radiophonic Workshop would open a year later in 1958, with Desmond Briscoe soon becoming its head.



In the short extract of All That Fall performed at the Bike Shed, we didn’t get to hear some of the more startling effects, such as the long anticipated arrival of the train at Boghill Station. In the original broadcast, its hissing exhalations of steam and screeching of brakes were amplified and sculpted with echo, delay and feedback until it sounded like some great beast heralding approaching disaster. We did get to hear the establishing rural sounds of chickens and other farm animals. However, actual recordings were used in this case rather than the Percy Thrower-style human impersonations which began the original broadcast, again setting our perception of the world slightly askew. There was also a snatch of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, one of Beckett’s favourite pieces of music, which emanates from a run-down house which Mrs Rooney passes. She also cues the sound of a dove (‘leave me, listening to the sound of the ring doves’) which have previously gone unheard, once more suggesting that we are perceiving the world through the filter of her sensorium, and her mind, which occasionally retracts to experience a more inward reality. Gillie Stoneham, the actress playing Mrs Rooney, provides the heavy shuffling of feet which marks out her weary via dolorosa towards the station to meet her blind husband. The sound of effortful steps, measuring out distance and steady progress, recur in Embers and become the rhythmic focus of his late piece Footfalls.

Mrs Rooney is one of Beckett’s reflexive chatterers or self-dramatisers, like the half-buried Winnie in Happy Days, the similarly immobile Hamm in Endgame, and Henry in Embers. The latter is told that his daughter once asked ‘why does daddy keep on talking all the time?’ Unlike the relentlessly, defiantly cheerful optimism of Winnie, however, Mrs Rooney emphasises the negative to the point of positively relishing it. Her voluble suffering takes on a comical aspect, brought out particularly well in Stoneham’s performance, through its repeated and emphatic articulation, and later on (beyond the span of this extract) through her loud declarations of wounded dignity as she is manhandled like a piece of baggage or believes herself ignored. The physicality of existence is brought to the fore, as is its ongoing processes of erosion and decay. Christy’s cart piled high with dung which Mrs Rooney passes at the start of the play presents pungently earthy evidence of the trail of waste mounded up in the course of a life. She suggests he perch on top, mount his own dung throne from which he can be king of his own shitheap and survey the surrounding territory. Mrs Rooney’s struggle with her declining and ungainly physical form is both comic and tragic. It resembles a slowed down version of the battles with the intransigent matter of the everyday world which the great silent film comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy) would intently engage in at every turn. Indeed, there’s something Oliver Hardyesque about her, albeit in a female Irish incarnation. Beckett would go on to a rather uneasy collaboration with Buster Keaton in his 1965 film, reductively entitled Film, which made clear his debt at the same time as it demonstrated the unlikelihood of Keaton ever comprehending it. Mr Tylor’s bike, with its flat back tyre, and Christy’s stubbornly stationary hinny (the offspring between a female donkey and a male horse) are the first examples of the slowing down and disintegration of the substance of the world. Mrs Rooney encounters along them along her way to the station, and they can all be regarded as an extension of her own state. In the end, she joins with her blind, austere and miserly husband to retrace her steps back home. They become another of Beckett’s complementary pairings, abrasive but interdependent. They seem destined to retreat further inward, shutting out the world beyond their narrow twin orbit (‘we shall draw the blinds’, Mr Rooney says at the end) like Clov and Hamm in Endgame.

Buster Keaton in Film
Having had a mere morsel of All That Fall as a starter, we got to enjoy Embers in its entirety. This was another piece written for radio, once more produced by Donald McWhinnie for the BBC Third Programme and first broadcast on 24th June 1959, with Jack Macgowran in the principal role of Henry, and Patrick Magee providing the voice of the abusive music teacher. Macgowran and Magee were two of Beckett’s favourite actors and interpreters of his work. They appeared together in a 1964 production of Endgame, with Macgowran playing the servile Clov and Magee the dictatorial Hamm. Macgowran also played something of a Hamm-type character in Roman Polanski’s Cul de Sac, in itself a film greatly influenced by Beckett, Pinter and the theatre of the absurd, as the title makes clear. Macgowran’s 1966 LP of Beckett readings, which includes extracts from Embers and Endgame (and which I bought from the Exeter Oxfam music and art shop a couple of months ago) can be found on ubuweb. You can also hear his extraordinary performance in the original Embers there. It’s wrongly ascribed to Magee, and it’s true that Macgowran’s voice does indeed have the dolorous intonations of the Northern Irish actor here. Macgowran’s Henry speaks with an enervated whine, which makes it all the more shocking when he launches into a raw and full throated holler worthy of Captain Beefheart. The Uncommon Players’ Martin Reeve (who also directed both Embers and All That Fall) voiced Henry with a rather more forceful and bitter tone, his changes in register coming across as an amplification of his simmering resentment.



The sound in the original broadcast was again created by Desmond Briscoe, now as part of the Radiophonic Workshop a year after its opening. He gives the constant background susurration of the sea a burnished electronic aura. It sounds like the rising and falling hum and drone of electricity substations or pylon cables in the wind, producing an analogue imitation of human respiration. It gives an impression of a haunted half-world, a shore on the dividing line between life and somewhere beyond, the conscious and the unconscious mind. Henry feels compelled to tell the imagined shade of his dead father ‘that sound you hear is the sea’, going on to add ‘I mention it because the sound is so strange’. The Bike Shed engineer restricted himself to a more straightforward, unprocessed (unradiophonicised?) recording of waves breaking and receding along a pebbled shore. This continued throughout, occasionally asserting itself with a rise in volume before dying down into the background once more.

Footsteps here are lent a brittle reverb by crunch of shingle on the beach. In this production the sound was created live by Reeve, who shuffled his feet in a trayful of cat litter, or some such aggregate. This had the effect of pulling back the magician’s curtain and allowing us to see how the illusion was made. This literal disillusionment did offer an insight into the world of the foley artist, but, having noted it, it proved more effective to close one’s eyes after a while and recreate the original conditions of the radio (sounds coming out of the dark, as Beckett put it). Reeves’ Henry also followed his own barked out stage directions and stood or sat as ordered (‘down’ or ‘on’). The dramatic element was largely extraneous, although unavoidable in such a context.

The steady continuum of the waves’ inhalation and exhalation was contrasted by the odd intrusion of clattering hooves. These were cued by Henry, who raised his voice in a commanding, directorial manner. As with Mrs Rooney and her doves, this suggested a reality constructed within the mind as much as externally perceived. They sharply and unforgivingly delineated the passing moments with a succession of short, non-resonant sounds, Henry at one point wondering of a horse if it would be possible to ‘train it to mark time. Time and mortality is thus set against the eternal, the unceasing waves from which voices of the past emerge. From this ocean, both internal and external (the circulating tides of sea and blood) emerges Ada, Henry’s dead wife. She is voiced with distanced frailty by Gillie Stoneham, much palpably present than she was as Mrs Rooney in All That Fall. She sat at the back to the left, far apart from Henry, who was positioned slightly to the right of stage front centre, and the two never met each other’s abstracted gaze. Her voice was drained of all colour and tonal variation, sounding as if it were weakly tuned in from the aether, the signal likely to fade out at any moment. Beckett’s script specifies that she is to speak in a ‘low remote voice throughout’. She is one of the earlisst of a series of ghosts which inhabit Beckett’s twilight worlds. They are locked into repetitive actions and circumscribed orbits, raking over old memories indelibly stained with guilt. We were to encounter another such spectral figure, dressed in a nightshirt winding sheet, in A Piece of Monologue, and they also manifest themselves in late works like Footfall and Ghost Trio. The idea of souls trapped in purgatories or hells, inhabiting moments from the past in looped repetition is also found in Play (in which they are encased in large urns), which reflects Beckett’s lifelong love of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Breath, from 1969, was originally written as ironic introit to Kenneth Tynan’s revue Oh Calcutta, his celebration of the decade’s sexual liberations which loudly promised plenty of onstage nudity. Beckett fell out with Tynan over what he saw as a failure to respect the integrity of his stage instructions. Since then, it has been seen (if at all) extracted from the specific context for which it was created. It bears some relation to the contemporaneous conceptual pranks of the Fluxus artists, or indeed of the Dadaists in the early decades of the century. In its paring down of the elements of theatre to their absolute bare essence, it is the most extreme of his works, and bears comparison with John Cage’s 4’33, the ‘silent’ piece which in fact comprises the sounds which fill silence and demonstrate its impossibility. It probably takes longer to read on the page than it does to witness. It begins with what Beckett describes as ‘an instant of recorded vagitus’. This means the cry of a newborn baby. The word derives from the Roman deity Vagitanus, the protector of the newborn who brings forth their first cry as they enter the world. The baby’s cry is immediately conjoined with a long indrawn breath and subsequent exhalation. It’s a concise encapsulation of the span of a life, a brief arc of birth, growth, decline and finally silence, and acts as a reductio ad absurdum of Beckett’s themes and preoccupations. Language is erased, completing the processes of editing and simplification to which he’d subjected in previous work, and expanding the pauses and silences which were a regular punctuation until they engulf everything else. The ‘miscellaneous rubbish’ scattered across the stage is a further instance of the material detritus which litters Beckett’s plays (and which Hamm discards at the conclusion of Endgame). The fading up and back down again of the theatre light (a naked bulb suspended above the audience in this case) reflects the importance of light and darkness in the plays. This is carried through into the next work, A Piece of Monologue, with its fading down of the light moments before the end, and also takes us back to the dying firelight of the dimly glowing coals in Embers. The birth cry morphing into the ascending inhalation of life and the declining exhalation leading to death also finds expression in the fist line of the Monologue, ‘birth was the death of him’.



The stage set up for this Breath followed Beckett’s instructions that there should be ‘no verticals’. This is the randomly accumulated junk of an unplanned life and should be inherently disordered (even the appearance of disorder requires conscious ordering). It looked like the kind of art installation which gets accidentally cleared away by the cleaners. Brown ribbons of magnetic tape were strewn around like drab or time-stained bunting. This was presumably a reference to Krapp’s Last Tape (which has been performed previously at the Bike Shed) and the medium through which its protagonist listens to his filed and indexed memories, recorded on spools which have here been unravelled and effectively erased. The silence following Breath was punctuated by a few disbelieving titters and tentative applause, which goes to show that it still has the power to provoke both ridicule and surprise. Its very brevity, and the greater amount of time which went into the preparation of its short span on the stage and its subsequent clearing away, made this a pointed and soberingly poignant 40 seconds or so.

A perhaps mildly disgruntled audience was obliged to file out after Breath had expired, having only just come into to hear its initial amplified filling of the lungs. When they returned (I’d sneakily remained lurking in the shadows at the back) the clutter was gone, replaced by a single dim globe of light in the centre of the stage. A man stood to the front left corner of the stage and began uttering the tattered sentences of his monologue. This was Les Read, a retired drama lecturer from Exeter University who was here putting his academic expertise to practical use. He took on the not inconsiderable challenge of performing the solo Piece of Monologue, which Beckett had first written for the English actor David Warrilow in 1979. The isolated narrator remains stock still throughout, the audience’s attention focussed directly upon him and away from the central globe of light which dimly casts its glow over him. He is a man who has retreated to the shadows at the margins, and that is the territory into which we are led.

The Monologue finds another spectral figure marking out the boundaries of a confined space, going through repetitive rituals involving the lighting and extinguishing of a wick-burning lamp. This unnamed character is a ghost fixed upon its unvarying track, and it’s possible that the grave he repeatedly recalls seeing is his own. The clearing away of Breath’s detritus can almost be seen as a thematic preparation for this piece. Our narrator talks of facing a blank wall from which pictures have gradually been torn to be left strewn over the floor in a shredded drift. They are memories stripped away to reveal the underlying blankness, and the complete isolation of the narrator’s ghostly half-life. As in Endgame, there is a window which looks out from the confined space of the room onto a world beyond. But it is an inaccessible world, mysterious and dark, ‘that black beyond’. The world has itself become immaterial, ghostly, and all is now compressed into this small room, life reduced to the habitual movements which are enacted within it. The concentration on the details of daily (or nightly) observances has a compulsive aspect to it which seems to be an attempt to block out painful recollection. Hence the repeated phrase ‘he all but said of his loved ones’, a drawing back from emotional articulation or specific memory. An intriguing extra element inadvertently introduced on this night was the intrusion of the prompter on the odd occasion when Reed came to a halt (and aside from these few instances, his performance was exemplary). This was understandable, given the dense, repetitive nature of the language, composed of short phrases with few definite articles and laid out on the page in a solid block of text. Whilst his presence was obviously a matter of practicality, the prompter became a voice from the outer darkness penetrating the narrator’s isolation, prodding him on to continue when he showed signs of fading. A semi-divine force or perhaps just an attempt at human contact, its gentle Devonian accent suggested a benevolent attempt to break through. This definitely positioned it as an invasive presence in Beckett’s universe, a sentimental element which he would never have allowed. With the dying of the light at the end, the evening came to a close.

Endgame with Patrick Magee
The following night, the Uncommon Players returned under the directorship of Anthony Richards to perform Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, one of the two works (alongside Waiting for Godot) for which he is best known. This takes place within another confined and circumscribed world, a featureless room with two windows at the back which might be a bunker sheltering its inhabitants from a post-apocalyptic world, or might be the cavern of a skull, with twin sockets gaping outwards. The attachment of specific meaning in terms of character, place or metaphorical meaning is not encouraged. At one point Hamm, one of the characters, tentatively enquires ‘we’re not beginning to…to…mean something?’, which raises a brief laugh from his companion (other half?) Clov, and a dismissive ‘ah that’s a good one’. Hamm also offers a few pieces of pre-emptive auto-criticism throughout, remarking that ‘this is deadly’, and later hopefully observing that ‘things are livening up’.

The main two characters, Clov and Hamm, are another of Beckett’s double acts, complementary foil who are also inseperable halves of a symbiotic whole. Clov is ostensibly the servile, active aspect, although his mobility is pained and effortful in the standard Beckett manner. His derivation from the old silent comedians is to be found in the repeated comic business which requires him constantly to shuffle back and forth, reaching his destination before having to return and retrieve forgotten stepladders or spyglasses. He was played by Philip Robinson with an end of tether edginess. But there was also an underlying pitifulness, a broken quality which suggested that his resentment at his servility would never be translated into actual rebellion, no matter how many times he might say ‘I’ll leave you’. Hamm is the intellectual aspect of this dual character, blind and immobile in his moveable chair (not moveable by him, however, as several attempts demonstrate). His is a dictatorial mentality (his chair a director’s seat) given to endless questioning and speculation. As played by David Watkins, he was curt and rude (often amusingly so) with an aristocratic assumption of superiority. But he also had a wheedling side which acknowledged his total dependency on Clov. His manner reminded me a little of Jim Broadbent in the films of Mike Leigh. In this production, he sat in an armchair mounted on a pallet, like a makeshift dais, which gives him an air of wasteland regality. Clov and Hamm are both stained with filth. Clov wears an extremely grubby white vest, and Hamm begins with blood and god knows what else stained handkerchief shrouding his face. Both have the look of decay about them.

Taking physical and mental decrepitude to an even greater extreme are the two other characters, initially hidden, Nag and Nell, Hamm’s ‘accursed progenitors’. They appear, faces dusted a deathly white, from two cylindrical rubbish bins (battered oil drums in this production) in which they mostly remain sedately ‘bottled’, resting on their stumps. Nag appears most often, and is reduced to a creature of simple appetite, calling for his ‘pap’. Their vagueness (reminiscent of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister in The Goon Show) resolves into sharper focus only when familiar memories or oft told stories are rehearsed once again. As played by Jan Hookway and Eddie Holden, they were touchingly frail and half-present, more ghosts living in reiterated fragments of the past. Nell and Nagg’s confinement, stuffed into their bins with the lids screwed down, is similar to the fates suffered by other Beckett characters: Winnie buried up to her waste (and in the second half, her neck) in Happy Days, and the three protagonists of Play, stored in large urns from which only their heads protrude. Beckett’s love of Dante once more comes through in such purgatorial images of entrapment.



Nell and Nagg’s bins shrink the boundaries of the world to an even narrower circumference. The idea of confining cylinders or other hollow, imprisoning forms, is a recurrent one in Beckett’s work, and was evidently one which played on his imagination. Similar set ups can be found in his stories The Lost Ones, in which 200 people live in a cylindrical silo, Ping, in which one person lives a monadic existence in a small white cube, and All Strange Away, which features a white rotunda in which two people lie back to back. Rod Serling used a similar idea in the Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit, whose title clearly alludes to the theatre of the absurd and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here, five archetypal characters – a ballerina, an army major, a clown, a tramp and a highland piper – awake to find themselves inside a towering cylinder with no doors. They have no memory of who they are or why they might be here. A fantasy rationale is provided in the end (not a very comforting one, however), but the atmosphere throughout is redolent of Beckett and the theatre of the absurd (as indeed are a good many other Twilight Zone episodes). Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 science fiction film Cube, in which 6 characters wake up to find themselves in a structure comprising interlocked cube-shaped rooms primed with a variety of deadly traps, is similarly Beckettian in its premise, and remains true to such influences by refusing to offer any concrete rationale which would place this netherworld within a fixed moral or political framework.

The room in Endgame is thoroughly explored, and the world beyond observed at regular intervals. Hamm insists that Clov takes him on a tour ‘right round the world’, and he is heaved from one wall to the other on his portable pallet before being parked back in exactly the same central spot from which they had set out. The windows look out onto a wider universe, one affording a view of the earth, and one of the ocean; one the realm of waking life, the other the depths of the unconscious. Such a clear division is open to any number of symbolic interpretations – or none at all. As Clov repeatedly explains, both are equally devoid of life or motion (no waves rippling the surface or winds blowing the dust), the world having sunk into an entropic flattening out of form in preparation for its final fading away. The Bike Shed proved the perfect place to stage Endgame. Its vaulted, underground space needed little adaptation to give it the feel of Hamm’s bunker, and a back wall with windows was there ready to use. Bright lights shone directly through them gave an impression of arid lifelessness beyond with the simplest of means. The fact that the small theatre was tightly packed with a capacity audience added to the sense of airless claustrophobia generated by the play – rather too effectively, in fact – I was glad to get out into the cold night air afterwards. It was a fine production by the Common Players, and it was great to see it attracting such a wide and appreciative audience. The Bike Shed continues to go from strength to strength. Long may it continue.

Neil Innes at the Phoenix Arts Centre Exeter

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The multi-faceted Neil Innes visited the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter last week, a man who can claim to be a founding Bonzo, honorary Python, compiler of the Innes Book of Records (release it on dvd, BBC!), amiable children’s TV presenter, ex-Rutle and current and full time Neil Innes, singer, songwriter, humourist, raconteur and clown. He played a solo show which embraced pretty much all of these multitudinous selves, ranging from cheerful vulguarity to more profound meditations on time and memory, truth and illusion. In keeping with his art school background and the strongly visual and theatrical aspect which was always a part of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, he was flanked by a couple of pieces of junk shop sculpture – readymades, to cite Duchamp or the Bonzo b-side to Mr Apollo. A distended hat stand angel of the north spread its arms to his left, head capped with a flying ace helmet and goggles, wingspan formed of copied tabloid front pages with screaming headlines mostly decrying the nefarious evildoings of asylum seekers. Innes christened it Icarus Allsorts (he’s takes a shameless pleasure in wordplay and tortuous punning), its newspaper wings destined to send it plummeting into the lower depths. On his right was a bicycle wheel mounted no a table, his Wheel of 4 Tunes. It blended another nod to Duchamp (via his bicycle wheel readymade) with game show randomisers (the fixed grin showbiz falsity of game show hosts having long been a target of the Innes/Python axis), a spin of the wheel by an audience member causing an arrow to point to one of four colours affixed to the spokes. This would indicate the colour of an envelope to be opened, with all due hushed anticipation, revealing which of four potential songs would be performed. The mixture of the childish, the populist and the cerebral which it represented summed up the polarities at play within Innes’ music and approach to life and art. The Bonzo Dog Band were originally the Dada Band, after all, the twinning of the 1920s children’s cartoon character with the absurdist early 20th century art movement neatly setting out their stall.



Innes retains a resolutely non-conformist outlook, which partly finds its expression in gleefully childish behaviour; Thumbing the nose is used as the secret club sign of his nascent ‘ego warrior’ movement and he gets the audience to blow a defiant group raspberry which rumbled through the tiers of seating. It’s a more honest form of rebellion than the eternally extended adolescence of rock, and is more true to the gadfly instinct at the heart of the anti-authoritarian impulse, the desire to mock the powerful and deflate the pompous in the most direct and playful manner. Innes’ childish absurdism also connects with an open-minded inquisitiveness, an ability to view the world with an imaginative clear-sightedness which untangles needless complexity whilst admitting of illogic, paradox and grim irony, sometimes with delight and sometimes sadness. He may not have sung How Sweet To Be An Idiot tonight, but it could stand as something of a signature song. Other numbers like Disillusioned and City of the Angels, which he did sing, voice discontent with the state of the world without ever descending into cynicism or nihilistic hopelessness and hyperbole. Disillusioned details the process of coming to see things as they really are, the narrowing down of vision which can come with knowledge and time (a literal disillusionment, or disenchantment, which means that ‘my eyes no longer play tricks on me’). City of Angels’ central image of a man shot by the police whilst reaching into his pocket to produce a card explaining his muteness was all the more horrifying for having derived from a news story Innes heard whilst staying in LA. The ‘paradise lost in the city of angels’ which it bleakly conveys was ironically counterpointed in musical terms by what he described as LA chords; those smooth, gliding progressions of major 7ths beloved of Joni and the Eagles.



City of Angels witnesses Innes at his angriest and most direct, his ironic couplets and wordplay comical only in the most desperate sense. Other songs dealt more obliquely with the passing of time, memory, regret and mortality – grand philosophical themes (or thinking about thinking, as he put it) which are also the stuff of universal human experience. Stealing Time was one such, which ‘takes a lifetime’ as the chorus gnomically points out. The wistful quality often found even in his comical songs draws on his love of clowns and clowning, and also of the great silent and early sound movie comedians. The raised eyebrows and cheeky side-smiles with which he accompanies certain lyrics definitely have something of the Stan Laurel or Charlie Chaplin about them, and he later paid tribute to the sublime silliness of Max Wall. His song Eye Candy updated Buster Keaton’s short The Cameraman for the multi-channel age, with its passive TV viewer finding himself inhabiting the worlds on the other side of the screen, making disorientating, channel-hopping jump-cuts between programmes, much as Buster did in his cinematic dream montage many years earlier. Innes ended his final pre-encore song by getting the audience to sing a Country Joe style cheer, spelling out SOD OFF. At which point he shuffled disconsolately towards the wings with the slump-shouldered and headhung pathos of an old pierrot clown, the odd pitiful backward glance inviting sympathy which was duly given in a series of ‘aaaahhs’.



Innes is also an expert pasticheur. He reminisced about the early days of the Bonzos, and their recording of a novelty song (My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies) at Abbey Road. The Beatles were putting together Revolver at the same time. Having heard the sound of George Harrison’s dense, pounding chord from I Want To Tell You forcefully echoing along the corridors, he had to go back to playing rinky dink piano on the silly 20s number they’d dusted off from a 78 unearthed in a junk shop (and he demonstrated the gulf between the two to amusing effect). Clearly his musical radar wavered more towards the future which George and the others were sounding out as opposed to the archaeological artefacts which he and his enthusiastically amateur cohorts were digging up from the past. He did sing a song drawing on the charmingly contrived rhymes of those corny old songs, though, which he accompanied on his ukulele, an instrument for which George showed an increasing fondness in his later years. Innes got to be the next best thing to a Beatle: a Rutle, and there was a splendid medley of Rutles songs which he played at the piano. He folded together choice extracts from the nostalgic Doubleback Alley; the psychedelic Good Times Roll (‘written after we’d discovered tea’, as he observed, and ending with a discordant swell full-stopped by a distinctly unresonant piano ping parodying the lengthy decay of the final Day In The Life chord); the McCartney bright Another Day, which includes the marvellous rhyming of pusillanimous with animus; and my favourite, the nonsense-filled Cheese and Onions (from the film Yellow Submarine Sandwich, of course), with its fantastic ‘do I have to spell out’ chorus (C.H.E.E.S.E. etc.). Unlikely as it may seem, this song was covered by the late ‘80s dream pop band Galaxie 500 (just as long running indie rock stalwarts Yo La Tengo covered the Bonzo’s Readymades in 2000). So his modern pop sensibilities been disseminated wide and far over the years, finding receptive ears in surprising places.

Another Rutles song provided the encore which, with typical subversion of conventional logic and order, came immediately after the interval. Shangri-La (originally a song from a 70s solo album) was included on the Rutles’ Archaeology LP, their response to The Beatles’ Anthology releases. It has a long fade-out chorus which combines elements of Hey Jude and All You Need Is Love, inducing a similar impulse to singalong in unison. It would indeed have been a good way to end it all, but for Innes, that would have been far too obvious and odiously showbiz. Protest Song, of the tunes randomly thrown up by the dada gameshow wheel, offered pastiche of another 60s musical titan, Bob Dylan. Prefaced by some hilarious comic fumbling with guitar strap and harmonica stand (which demonstrates that Innes is a skilful clown himself), and endless peg-twiddling tuning which only succeeded in returning to the same wincingly off-key note (‘I’ve suffered for my music, and now it’s your turn’, he warned us), this caught his Bobness circa ’65 (or perhaps one of his many subsequent imitators) with keenly observed accuracy, both vocally and lyrically. His harmonica solos were excruciating in a manner similar to his ‘ecstatic’ guitar solo on the Bonzo’s Canyons of Your Mind, a transcendent awfulness which could only be achieved by someone possessed with real musical talent and the ability to thoroughly abuse it. In his final song, Surly Morning Blues, his Roland keyboard provided the Beach Boys pastiche through a preset sound (another readymade?) which, he suggested, seemed to indicate that Brian Wilson was trapped inside (something on the order of the keyboard in Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen, perhaps). It produced some hilarious faux-vocalising, which he put to use with great comic timing.



As an acknowledgement of his various collaborations with Eric Idle in The Rutles, Rutland Weekend Television and Monty Python (as well as in Do Not Adjust Your Set, before they hit the big time) he sang his Philosopher’s Song (which he put forward as his most clever lyric). As originally sung by a professorial chorus of Bruces in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, its elucidation of the drinking habits of various famous philosophers provided a suitable way to herald the interval exodus to the bar. The Wheel of 4 Tunes also blessed us with Quiet Talks and Summer Walks, a Bonzo song from the Keynsham album (‘when the madness had set in’, Innes added with a touch of Vincent Price melodrama). It’s a gorgeous ballad sung from the perspective of a flower observing strolling young lovers passing by. Its Donovanesque surface of summer of love whimsy is underlaid with a more poignant reflection on time and love, which was in tune with the philosophical themes of the evening. It also provided the basis for a memorable Innes Book of Records film, with Innes going all Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and donning the guise of a giant daisy. The evening did in fact have a loose overall structure, without ever becoming too ‘slick’, as Innes put it with evident aversion to going through over-rehearsed routines. Random events (or mistakes) were still given space, and welcomed. A running theme had adds from his purported sponsors, ‘Fiasco Superstores’, intruding upon songs or forming interludes, a pop art device reminiscent of The Who Sell Out. The blue-striped Fiasco motif (now who could he be thinking of?) also extended to the banner hung above the merchandising stall outside.



There was also a deal of anecdotage, stories of Viv Stanshall, the Bonzos, George Harrison and others, with jokes thrown in along the way (I particularly liked his retelling of Barry Cryer’s Stannah Stairlift gag). They were all related with a natural ease and self-effacing warmth and wit, remembrances of someone who ‘went through the 60s and is now going through them again’. Some of his recent CDs have themselves provided a kind of aural set of memoirs. Such modesty leads him to praise the work of others, heroes and collaborators. He finished (before his non-encore encore) with a rendition of a routine which Max Wall used to end one of his shows, involving two sticks of rhubarb and two potatoes (here imaginary specimens). It was a hugely enjoyable from a consummate (but not too much) professional who can stand proudly amongst such company, thumb firmly pressed to nose. And as a bonus extra-mural encore, I got his jokes about air of freedom and freedom air (fruits de mer) and his satnav telling him about the mysterious Exeter Head on the way back home. The old brain’s a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.
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