Nick Talbot’s band Gravenhurst played at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter on Saturday as part of a triple bill alongside Ed Wood Jr and Mary Epworth. Ed Wood Jr, a French drums and guitar/keyboards duo, kicked off proceedings in fiery style. Sharing nothing of their namesake’s shambolic amateurism, but something of his tendency to mix together wildly incongruous elements to form a weirdly compelling fusion, they produced a complex and extremely disciplined noise of a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting nature. Sounding a little like Battles at times, particularly in the opening number, with its pounding glam drum pulse, they negotiated knotty time-signatures and lightning rococo riffs with effortless ease. There was an element of nonchalant prog virtuosity in the way the guitarist hammered on melodic runs whilst simultaneously playing keyboard lines with his right hand. All that was missing was a modern indie variant on the Rick Wakeman glittering cape to provide a suitably superheroic costume. The drummer played with agility and military marching band precision, and the unison passages between the musicians were a thrilling conjunction of melodic bursts and rolling rhythmic cells. Though mostly an instrumental band, there was a smattering of vocals, mostly accompanying some pummelling hardcore guitar. I didn’t catch the lyrics, but the growling tone and aggressive intensity of the sound suggested that they probably weren’t about a pleasant picnic on a sunny summer’s afternoon. Effects pedals filled out the sound and left us at the end with a loop of a recorded voice blending with delayed guitar and keyboard noise fading to silence after the instruments had been laid down and the musicians bade us thankyou and goodnight.

Mary Epworth

Mary Epworth played in a duo with a drummer, alternating between a handsome hollow-bodied guitar and an electric autoharp, with tone control knobs and all. Her music encompassed a variety of styles, from a 70s style bluesy soul through country rock, early PJ Harvey style rock primitivism and raucous folk singalongs. Saddle Song was an infectious shanty style number, with swaying deckside rhythm and sturdy phase-swelled autoharp strumming. Other songs incorporated some fine close harmonising with the drummer, which brought to mind Gillian Welch’s singing with musical partner David Rawlings. Epworth’s guitar playing didn’t extend beyond providing full downstruck chords, but combined with the powerful drumming, this gave the music an uncluttered, driving forcefulness. At the centre of everything, however, was the deep and rich resonance of her voice, which has a classically soulful quality without ever resorting to showy dynamics. A fine instrument used with taste and restraint. She let us know about her weekend activities in between songs in what she said was like a mini-holiday. Going to see owls and eagles at a bird sanctuary (she is obsessed by wildlife, she said, as her songs Black Doe testifies), eating a quality scotch egg, and, the day after the concert, going to see a theatrical adaptation of a M.R.James ghost story. I must say, it sounds like a fine time. She ended by putting down her instruments and handing her guitar to the drummer, who climbed out from behind his kit. She then sang a gospel-tinged song, accompanied by a guitar treated to provide additional church organ organ shades. A fine piece of testifying with which to conclude.

Nick Talbot

Gravenhurst turned out to be Nick Talbot doing a solo act. I must confess to being a little disappointed by this turn of events, since there was nothing to indicate this whittled down incarnation in the publicity leaflets and posters for the evening. Yes, I could have checked the Gravenhurst website, but for me they are a band, with all the different timbres and dynamics which a band brings to the material at hand. The worldview of Talbot’s music is nothing if not downbeat, focussing on isolation, emotional numbness, mental illness, urban angst, romantic betrayal (‘black romance’ as he sang on Nicole), political repression and simmering violence. Bleak is his favourite colour. The subjects of his songs stand on the brink of an empty grave, gazing into the beckoning void and contemplating whether to allow themselves to fall in. With Talbot standing alone in the spotlight playing unadorned guitar (acoustic first, hollow-bodied electric later), the bleakness dials were turned up to maximum. The songs sounded here like they were in delicate demo form, rough sketches waiting to be inked in and coloured. They seldom stray from the minor key, although subtle and unexpected harmonic turns often feature, hinting at shifts in the quality of light, if not quite a sudden shaft of illuminating light breaking through the overcast skies. There were none of the additional textures provided by synthesisers and electronics on the albums, no hidden fx pedals, compact synths or samplers; nor was there any of the exhilarating energy of the louder rock numbers. There was certainly nothing of the magisterial arrangement found on The Prize on the new LP The Ghost in Daylight, which boasts strings by the marvellously named Algernon Blackwood Memorial Ensemble. Perhaps wisely, The Prize was left off the set list, which was a shame, however, since it’s a great song, one of the best Gravenhurst have ever recorded. There was a risk that such relentlessly bleak and minor key material might prove wearying in such austerely unadorned settings. Or that the absence of any leavening humour might result in a response of perverse hilarity, a kind of heroically positive resistance to such cumulative doomsaying. The lack of tonal variety, which might have made for a more pleasurable sort of melancholia, a depressive music which you could move to, Joy Division style, instead made for a difficult listening experience requiring a concentrated stillness. Talbot’s rather diffident stage manner didn’t help, with a fair amount of fiddly fine-tuning between songs providing mood-breaking silences. Perhaps a little end of tour weariness had crept in (this was the final date), but you sensed that he wasn’t one for accommodating an audience, adopting an ascetic, anti-entertainment take-it-or-leave it stance. A dismissively contemptuous response to a song request (to be fair, he’d already played) certainly suggested that he had no truck with traditional niceties. In the end, the performance probably went on for an optimum amount of time (just under an hour). It was about as much as the spirit could take before beginning to wilt. But for the time he was on stage, Talbot played with rapt intensity, and the extra attention required was well rewarded.


The solo nature of the show drew attention to Talbot’s accomplished folk fingerpicking style, and the strong element of traditional folk which underpins his music. Richard Thompson would seem to be an influence (his Fairport song Farewell, Farewell was covered on the Gravenhurst album The Western Lands), with Richard and Linda songs like End of the Rainbow and The Great Valerio setting the pattern for stark, unrelenting, clear-eyed pessimism and poetic allusiveness, as well as an underlying compassion for the human condition at its most desperate. When asked to pick songs for a Guardian podcast, Talbot chose Thompson’s Has He Got A Friend For Me, along with Sandy Denny singing Reynardine, and Broadcast’s Black Cat, the latter two by some of my absolute favourites, which naturally suggests that I’d have an affinity with his music. I love the Thompson of Fairport and the 70s albums with Linda Thompson too. The Lou Reed of Berlin would also seem to be a point of reference, the song Damage II (played tonight) beginning with the line ‘Emily said’; an homage, perhaps. The set began with I Turn My Face to the Forest Floor from the 2003 LP Flashlight Seasons, a more or less solo effort. He naturally drew more from the quieter, more austere side of his output, and there were a couple more songs from Flashlight Seasons, Bluebeard and Damage II, both dealing in a more or less direct way with mental disintegration. A memorable line in the latter, talking about ‘climbing the stairs in the dark’ points to the sepulchral gothic ambience of much of the music. This quality comes through even more on record, with the shadows of organ drones and whispering electronics added, but is still present here in songs like Cities Beneath the Sea, with its hauntingly beautiful imagery of buried or submerged worlds from which ‘the dead see through the eyes of the living’. The memorial strings on The Ghost in Daylight suggest that Algernon Blackwood is an inspiration, but Cities Beneath the Sea and others of Talbot’s city songs are perhaps also a reflection of his reading of Iain Sinclair, whom he mentions in an interview in The Quietus. The influences on his songwriting come from literary sources musical as much as, or perhaps even more than, musical ones. The Western Lands, the title of his 2007 LP, may be a mythologizing allusion to his westcountry homeland (he lives in Bristol), or it may be a nod to William Burroughs and his late novel of that name. Or indeed both at once.


Grand Union Canal was ‘another song about urban angst’, as he announced with apologetic self-deprecation, a sketch (in heavily cross-hatched charcoal) of the city as maze in which the protagonist has ‘walked every street’ but ‘can’t find a way out’, retreating to his cell of a room. Several songs deal with the insidious attraction of violence, a perennial theme for Talbot. He indirectly acknowledges its dangerous allure, whilst never offering prurient descriptions, but also shows a moral repugnance at its casual expression and use in personal or political control and subjugation. As he bluntly puts it in I Turn My Face to the Forest Floor (possibly in response to the endless gangster ‘comedies’ being churned out in post-millenial Britain), ‘the East End rogue you so admire is a murdering fuckhead’. The almost biblical image of casting stones (a metaphor for personal culpability for violent acts and their outcomes) recurs in I Turn My Face to the Forest Floor (something of an ur-song for Talbot) and Black Holes in the Sand (from the similarly titled 2004 mini-album, which I handily found in Oxfam the other week), voiced in the latter as a tongue-tripping cause and effect chorus confessing ‘held the hand that threw the stone that killed the bird that woke the city’. Thankfully, he didn’t sing any of the songs he has written about serial killers, the one aspect of his work which I unequivocally dislike, adding as it does to the tawdry modern tendency to mythologise and lend a repugnant ubermensch aura to such pathetic sociopaths. The sense of a deep and easily tapped aquifer of violence in the human soul (and perhaps particularly in the soul of men) is conveyed all the more chillingly through being sung in Talbot’s hushed and softly mellifluous tones. It’s a voice which seems to express an abiding sadness at the fallen state of the world, and at the shrunken souls of the wretched which it dissects. It will probably never attempt a happy song, but the sad songs it sang on this evening, crafted in such carefully chosen words, cast their own simple and unadorned spell.

John Cassevetes’ 1970 film Husbands, re-released in a new digital restoration, showed at the Exeter Picture House last week, and I wasn’t about to miss such a rare cinematic screening for one of my favourite directors. I sat in the auditorium with the two other people who’d come along, one of whom lost patience with the film’s rambling longueurs and walked, leaving just myself and one other to see the picture to its abrupt and creditless finale. An abrupt cut and the screen goes black, the house lights fading up. Cassavetes had crammed all the credits into two opening title cards so that he could fit as much of the considerable amount of film he’d shot into the running time the studio were insisting upon as possible. The early exit and minimal audience are perhaps understandable (and this was the mid-week matinee timeslot into which the Picture House shoves the bfi touring re-releases it seems reluctantly obliged to screen). It certainly is a difficult film, offering little concession to the viewer in terms of narrative progression, sympathetic characterisation, conventional cinematic technique and professional gloss, or brisk pacing and editorial concision. But it does strive for an emotional intensity in its revelation of the inner lives of its three middle aged, middle class American protagonists, confronting a moment of existential crisis in their lives which they struggle to articulate and understand. Cassavetes himself plays Gus, with his friends and frequent subsequent collaborators Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara playing Archie and Harry respectively. Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara aim for a level of truth in their depictions of their characters which steers clear of easy sentiment or rote habits or tics. It’s very much an actor’s film, and furthers Cassavetes’ sense of life as a performance, which his films all explore in one way or another.


The film begins with a montage of photographs, snapshots of four friends larking about by the side of the pool, showing off their muscles and their beer bellies (the latter much the more impressive), their families looking on from the sidelines, the bassline of a rollicking tune providing the memory track for these glimpses of good times. We then jarringly cut to the silence of a parade of black funeral cars, Archie, Gus and Harry weaving their way through the throng of mourners to hear the eulogy to their friend Stuart, one of the quartet in the photos, who has died suddenly and unexpectedly. It is a bitterly cold New York day, and the men look stunned, lost and bewildered. The heat from the cars creates a shimmering haze in the wintry air, adding to their sense of the unreality of what is happening. The frozen chill of the day acts as a metaphor for the frozen state of their lives, their numbed sensibilities, which their shock and their inability to find an adequate response to it forces them to confront. Travelling in the back seat of one of the cars after the funeral, they review the minister’s summary of their friend’s life as if talking about a film they’d just seen. They all agree not to go home, heading instead to the city, where we find them late at night in a boozy, street singing state of wobbly, inebriate camaraderie. The next day, they engage in strenuous physical activity, playing basketball and having a swimming race, as if to prove that they still possess some of the athleticism of their youth. Then it’s back to the bar for an epic night of drinking, during which they keep the beer flowing in order to persuade the resident habitués to join in a round of competive singing. The three friends act as a reviewing panel, encouraging or goading the participants, vicariously trying to connect with an authentic expression of feeling, of something which arises from genuine experience. We never see the denouement, or find out who’s adjudged to have won, Cassavetes typically plunging us straight into the middle of a scene and abruptly cutting before it’s reached any definite conclusion.

Into the black - bog as existential void

We find the three in a black, existential void of a toilet (an expressionistic reflection of their inner states) where Archie and Gus give direct, visceral expression to their own feelings in a loud, echoing bout of vomiting and farting. It’s an emetic purging in physical form of the emotions which they are unable to express verbally. Harry is roundly mocked for not being able to vomit, to show how he feels, and notice his increasing marginalisation in this scene, Stuart’s death having upset some dynamic balance which prevailed in the friendship between the four men. In the worst insult imaginable in the universe of Cassavetes’ films, he is accused of being a ‘phoney’, a charge to which he reacts violently. We see further evidence of his violent temper the following morning when he smashes up the phone booth in the bar having failed to get through to his wife. Harry sentimentally declares his love for his friends, drawing them both close to him and declaring them to be more important to him than his wife.

The hollow routine - Harry at work

Gus and Archie return with Harry to his suburban home, where he has a violent confrontation with his wife and her mother. Restrained from further assault by Gus and Archie, who rush in from the street outside, where they’ve been waiting for him to emerge, he effectively brings his marriage dramatically crashing down around him. He leaves having forced his wife to make a declaration of love which is so patently made under duress that even his insensitive soul has to acknowledge its falsity. Harry decides to go to work, as if his life is still proceeding along its normal track. We see him in his office at the ad agency where he works, going through the motions, trying to avoid encountering anyone, but putting on the hollow charm which he can don with such ease when he bumps into a client. He sits at a draughtsman’s desk, which suggests he may once have had some creative inclinations. The advertising world he works in is presented with its usual associations of selling out and prostituting creativity for trivial commercial ends. Harry’s weary manner, beneath the surface veneer of charm, suggests that he is as sick of his working routine as he is of his domestic life. Gus also goes to work in his dentist’s surgery, even though he is still dishevelled and unshaven, having still not made it back home. He sees a patient who is so nervous she can’t stop giggling, so that he can’t even begin to examine her teeth. All the time, Archie keeps hovering at his shoulder, trying to articulate in his slow and hesitant way some nagging sense of unease, of emotions still not resolved. The two leave together and go to seek out Harry, sensing he may need their help. He has also fled from his office, and meets them on the street outside. Having picked up his passport from home before his tempestuous encounter with his wife, he impulsively declares that he is going to fly to London. Archie and Gus decide that they should accompany him, if only to tuck him in safely when he arrives before returning home. ‘We’re all jerks here’, as Gus observes, fools requiring each other’s company more than ever at this time. We see them on the plane, the exhilaration of their impulsive trip already wearing off. Archie in particular looks anxious and uneasy, knocking back the scotches to allay his nerves. It seems evident that by this stage they are following Harry out of a feeling of loyalty, sensing that he needs to be looked after and possibly protected from his own worst impulses.

Awkward intimacies - Archie and Julie

When they arrive in England, it is teeming it down, and the rain doesn’t relent for their entire stay, confining them indoors throughout. They find a hotel, where they take adjoining rooms with connecting doors, and gather together in the bathroom (a bit more salubrious than the black toilets in the New York bar). They go out gambling at a fancy casino, where they play a noisy game of craps (apologising for being loud and American) and quickly lose their stake. They agree to try and pick up some women, and we witness the cringeworthy ineptitude of their efforts in unflinching detail. Nevertheless, they do manage to bring three sceptical and wary partners back to the hotel: Archie a young Chinese woman, played by Noelle Kao, who doesn’t appear to speak English (indeed, she doesn’t appear to speak at all) but who we later learn is called Julie; Gus a tall, elegant but nervous and sensitive woman called Mary, played by Jenny Runacre in her first major role; and Harry a well bred Chelsea girl called Pearl, played by Jenny Lee Wright. Again, it’s characteristic of Cassavetes’ approach that he focuses on the most awkward moments of the three men’s introductory approaches and rusty chat up lines and never gets to the point at which their crude seductions meet with unlikely success. Having retreated to their separate rooms, we follow Gus’ fumbling tussles with Mary and Archie’s stilted, painful attempts at communication with the mutely passive Julie in extreme close-up. Peter Falk’s nose appears to fill the entire screen at one point, and the cameraman does his best to keep pace with Cassavetes’ and Runacre’s vigorous wrestling and horseplay. Harry breaks down in tears before being led off by Pearl, and we find her consoling him as he confesses his feelings of confusion, his sense of being adrift.

Guilt offerings - Gus and Archie come home

The next morning, Archie and Gus see off their partners, both Mary and Julie leaving in a state of considerable ill-will. The women get soaked in the relentless rain, a drenching which symbolises the shabby and unchivalrous way in which they have been used. Runacre’s character slips on the pavement and falls flat on her backside in a moment (evidently authentic) which really makes you feel for her, and loathe Gus for his offhand dismissal of her feelings. The two friends declare themselves to be in love, but it’s a self-serving feeling, a revival of the romantic impulsiveness of youth, the excitement of which will soon fade. They decide it’s time to go home and face up to their responsibilities, refreshed by their adventures. They find Harry with a new set of ‘friends’, however, a surrogate family he has picked up with an older woman and her two teenage daughters, who are sharing a bottle of champagne which he has ordered. He tells Archie and Gus that he’s going to stay, and dances with the older woman whilst singing a lonely, desolate and broken version of Dancing In The Dark, whilst the others sip the champagne which is evidently the price of his their continued presence. If he were taking part in the drunken singing contest which he and his friends instigated earlier, he would no doubt have won, although not necessarily for reasons he would have immediately comprehended. He doesn’t realise the extent to which he’s baring his soul, and this morning after parting is a sad affair, a desperate attempt on Harry’s part to prolong a moment which has already faded, to keep the party going well beyond the point at which its energy has been spent. It’s symptomatic of a desire to maintain a permanent state of carefree adolescence, free from care and the weight of accumulated responsibilities. The three friends say their goodbyes, and Gus and Archie return to America. When they disembark at the airport lounge, they stock up on toys and gifts, filling large paper sacks which they heave up under their arms, bulging and spilling over the edge with guilt offerings. They go back to their neighbouring homes and we follow Gus up his drive, where he is greeted first by his young daughter (in fact Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands' daughter Alexandra), who bursts into tears (very convincingly), and then by his son (Nick Cassavetes, who would go on to be a filmaker in his own right), who shakes his head and tells him ‘boy, are you in trouble’. As he walks around the corner to the back door, the scene cuts and the screen goes dark. Harry’s house apart, we never get to see the homes from which these men have taken flight, never meet the wives whose confidences they have never sought over their loss. Cassavetes would go on to explore the female psyche in similarly unflinching detail in the films he made starring his wife Gena Rowlands in the 70s and 80s: Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night and Love Streams. But Husbands is a film about men and their intimate friendships, and as such, women remain by and large peripheral or unseen presences.

Harry leaves home

Cassavetes had been considering a film based around three friends throwing aside the established pattern of their lives and heading off on a wild and impulsive binge for some time. He originally approached Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn, both of whom he knew well, with the idea of a story in which the three of them would travel across America at a point of mid-life crisis, hitting bars in various towns along the way and trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong (or indeed if it had at all). Each might have been interested individually, but conspicuously failed to get on, and the prospect of spending a considerable amount of time in each other’s company was not one they found appealing. Cassavetes presented the basic idea to Falk and Gazzara on separate occasions, both more or less casual meetings at which he asked them whether they wanted to be in his movie: Falk at a Laker’s basketball game and Gazzara in a shouted exchange as he was leaving the Universal Studios car park and more coherently over lunch at a restaurant. He knew neither of them personally at the time, but they all became very close whilst making the film, and a lifelong friendship was forged. They would both go on to feature in further Cassavetes films; Falk co-starring with Cassavetes’ wife Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, and Gazzara taking the lead role in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

Cassavetes has an erroneous reputation as an improvising director, filming performances which are spontaneously arrived at in front of the camera. It’s partly his own fault, since he ended his first film Shadows with a credit which read ‘the film you have just seen was an improvisation’. It wasn’t, and neither was Husbands. Both were closely scripted, and the script adhered to, by and large. The jazz milieu of Shadows (and its Charles Mingus soundtrack), its reputation as being a ‘Beat’ movie, and Cassavetes’ own role as a jazz piano playing gumshoe in Johnny Staccato probably added to this general impression of compositional looseness. I’ve just started watching Staccato (as it was first known) again for the first time since it was shown as the opening part of a musical TV strand on the BBC presented by Charlie Gillett many years ago, which introduced me to Cassavetes. It’s enjoyably noirish fare, with an interesting if hackneyed jazz club backdrop (including real musicians such as Barney Kessel and Red Norvo), and several episodes were directed by Cassavetes himself, at his own insistence. Gena Rowlands co-stars in one episode, and the inserted scenes shot on the streets of New York echo those in Shadows (which he was in the process of editing at the time he was making Staccato) and in Husbands (including the hilarious walking race scene with Falk, apparently based on real challenges issued by the highly competitive Cassavetes). As with the performances in Mike Leigh’s films, the appearance of spontaneity is hard won. There is a great deal of improvisation, but it doesn’t take place in front of the camera, but in the many rehearsals and intense discussions in which characters are explored, and the things they might say or do discussed. The results of such sessions were incorporated into the endless revisions Cassavetes made to his ever-evolving script, along with any chance happenings, ‘accidents’ or incidental observations which made an impact along the way.

Jazz gumshoe - Johnny Staccato

He encouraged Falk and Gazzara to draw on their own personalities and experiences and to analyse their feelings and beliefs in an uninhibited and unselfconscious way in order to build and understand their characters. He also allowed them to choose their own names for their characters, to give them a sense of owning and inhabiting them. Gazzara’s Harry is loud and voluble, capable of displaying great warmth and charm but also a bullying aggression. Falk’s Archie is reserved and ponderous, very slow and deliberate in his manner, but also funny in an inquisitive and perceptive way. Cassavetes’ Gus is antic, quixotic and a little devious and calculating, disguising (or perhaps at times communicating) his feelings through humour. He’s also an arch provocateur, observing and listening to others and prodding them towards certain reactions – much like a film director, in fact. The film was also a very personal one for Cassavetes, almost an expression and exorcism of his own fears and regrets and a recognition of his demonic side. The scene in which the friends play basketball is a recognition of the faded sporting dreams of his youth (and he does look pretty useful on the court). He had also recently mourned the loss of his elder brother, so the sense of shock at losing someone who dies suddenly and unexpectedly in the prime of their life was very real to him. Falk and Gazzara were very divergent in their acting styles, and it was Gazzara who was better suited to Cassavetes’ directorial approach. As a product of the Method acting school, having studied at the Dramatic Workshop and the Actors Studio where the Method originated, he was used to looking inside, to tap his own feelings and memories in order to build up a detailed and emotionally rounded character. Falk, however, was a more traditional type, and felt the need for definite and explicit direction. This caused a certain amount of tension since Cassavetes had no intention of providing it. He wanted Falk to find his own way towards understanding Archie. In the end, Falk’s uneasiness about this approach (an unease which he never dispelled in working with Cassavetes) actually contributed to his performance (as it did in A Woman Under the Influence, particularly during Gena Rowlands’ electrifying breakdown scene), with Archie’s confusion, hesitancy and bewilderment a dominant, defining element of his character. The scene in which he badgers Gus in the dentist’s surgery could well be an echo of Falk’s own efforts to get Cassavetes to tell him just exactly what he should be saying and doing, and why.

Court jesters - past athleticism

Cassavetes had no truck with conventional cinematographical techniques and set ups, and he fired his cameraman on Husbands, Aldo Tonti, shortly after they began shooting, partly because he was too ‘professional’, and he felt he was likely to want to do things his way and impose his own style on the material. To replace, the relatively inexperienced Vic Kemper was promoted director of photography, his first big break. Cassavetes favoured long, uninterrupted takes, often shot several times, and used up a lot of film in the process. This gave the actors space and time to get into the rhythm and feel of a scene without constant disruptions breaking their concentration, and ensured that the moments in which their performances really came to life would be captured. It also meant that there was a great deal to do when the film was in the can and it came to the editing stage. It was in the editing that an element of improvisatory composition might be said to have come into play, with the sounding out of different combinations, variations and alternative rhythms. Cassavetes spent a huge amount of time editing Husbands, almost the entirety of 1970, during which he searched through the footage and tried out different combinations in an attempt to get something of what he was searching for. What that was might not even have been all that clear to him, but he hoped to discover it in the creative forge of the cutting room. He produced a rough cut of about four hours, which was further whittled down by editor Peter Tanner and producer Al Ruban to just under 3 hours. This version was apparently a very effective, wild and crazy comedy, justifying the film’s subtitle ‘A Comedy About Life, Death and Freedom’, which appears darkly ironic in the finally released cut. Any comedy by that time is in the mordant observation of flagrant folly, flailing desparation and epic feats of self-delusion. Cassavetes declared Tanner’s cut to be ‘too entertaining’, fired him and took on the editing himself. He seemed perversely displeased by the extent to which people had enjoyed the film, and set out to make sure the audience would have a harder time. He intended to make an anti-romantic picture, the obverse of a Hollywood idea of a buddy movie, and had repeatedly said on set that he wanted ‘no cute. Nothing cute’. He wanted his film to be an unsentimental portrayal of male friendship and behaviour, with all its attendant evasions, rituals and obligations.

Lost - Archie and Gus at the funeral

Cassavetes became completely lost in the editing, as if he were mesmerised by the footage of the characters he, Falk and Gazzara had created, and produced at least five separate versions of the film. Some of these put the focus more exclusively on Archie or Harry, making it Falk’s or Gazzara’s picture. He even dictated a novelisation (never published) which took the form of cross-cutting internal monologues, which would have given the reader (not to mention Falk) an intimate and detailed understanding of each of the characters and their backgrounds. This level of obsessiveness and the reluctance to let the whole thing go shows just how important Husbands was to Cassavetes, how much of himself he had invested in it. A 154 minute version was finally shown at the San Francisco Film Festival before an audience of cinephiles who were, in line with the times, radically-minded and political. It received a volubly negative reaction. Cassavetes and Falk appeared to take questions after the screening, and was asked whether the characters reflected his, Falk’s and Gazzara’s own lives. He replied that yes, they’re us, and Falk gave an affirmative nod. The hostility levels in the theatre rose appreciably. This was a period in which the feminist movement was burgeoning and growing in confidence, making an increasing impact on the wider public consciousness. Husbands seemed to embody many of the brutish behaviours and complacent assumptions which feminism was taking a stand against. The three married men go off carousing together, leaving their wives at home to look after the children, and pick up other women whom they then casually dump the next day; they all gang together to bully and abuse a woman in a bar; and one of them assaults his wife and her mother. In equating himself with his character onscreen, it was almost as if Cassavetes was going out of his way to make the audience hate him. It’s probably a good job that Gazzara wasn’t there, since his character Harry is probably the least sympathetic of all three.

Sidewalk racing - shooting on the streets

It was in Cassavetes’ nature to want to provoke a strong reaction. Any authentic expression of feeling was good, even if it was one of hostility and burning rage. In an oddly self-defeating attempt to define what he was doing with these characters, who he himself described as acting like bastards, he said ‘we try to prove that selfishness is important, a way to stay sensitive’. Far from being a statement of some odious Ayn Randian axiom, he seems to be suggesting that a certain amount of self-regard is necessary to an awareness of what you really feel, to find out what you really want in life, as opposed to merely following social or familial expectations. Made suddenly and shockingly aware of their own mortality, the three friends set out deliberately to tear up the rules of social politesse in order to stir up some sense of what they really want, what is important to them. Cassavetes went on to make what could be seen as his response to feminism in his 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence, and his 1980 picture Gloria was effectively a feminist riposte to the macho posturing and dick-waving gunplay of the Hollywood gangster movie. So he made reparations in the end, and maybe won back the approval of the San Francisco audience.

Barroom bullies - prolonging the agony

Columbia Studios, to which Husbands had been sold, demanded further cuts be made to bring the running time down, and a 142 minute version was produced for release, a re-edit which led to a falling out between Cassavetes and his long-suffering (but he always came back for more) producer Al Ruban. Once the film was in the cinemas, they then went ahead and trimmed a further five minutes or so, without Cassavetes approval. He was naturally pretty livid. These cuts were made in the two scenes which the studio had always strongly objected to: the toilet vomiting scene and the bar singing competition scene which precedes it. The vomiting scenes in the black void toilets may be seedy and rank, with the sound mixed to a level which foregrounds what is happening behind the cubicle door, refusing to allow us to ignore it; but it is a pivotal moment in that it marks the point at which Gus and Archie fully acknowledge the loss of their friend, their own fragile mortality and the inevitability of their physical decline. To edit it out completely (there’s only the barest hint of it in this print) is to lose something important. The cuts to the barroom scene involve a significant shortening of the trials the three men put the tartan cap wearing woman played by Leola Harlow through in their attempts to make her invest her song (‘it was just a little love affair’) with the authentic feeling they adjudge her performance to lack. This may seem like a blessing. The prolonged nature of the men’s boorish bullying is designed to make the audience feel ill at ease (although Peter Falk’s striptease is undeniably amusing) and to shortcircuit any natural sympathy they might feel for these characters over the loss of their friend. But again, it’s a scene which is central to the overall conceit of life as performance, performance as life, and of the need to express something genuine and real in that performance. We also lose the affecting rendition of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime sung by John Kullers’ careworn old man, which was a particular favourite moment of Cassavetes’. The version which has been restored and sent on the rounds of the regional cinemas is this shorter, Columbia approved cut, so we were deprived of the full digital eruption of ceramic bowl-amplified retching. The longer version, with the above cuts intact, is widely available on dvd, released by Columbia, so it’s perplexing that this non-director’s cut should be given the archival seal of authenticity. However, it’s great to have it back in the cinemas at any length, and to see it on the big screen in all its awkward, messy and bloody-minded (ie human) glory.

Ravi Shankar, who died on Tuesday, had an immense influence on Western music in the latter half of the twentieth century. He did more than anyone else to bring Hindustani music and Indian culture in general to Europe and America, and to present in a popular and accessible way. The traces of Indian modes and rhythms, and of the resonant, singing buzz and ringing, sympathetic drone of the sitar in particular, can be found across a broad spectrum of musical styles from the 50s onwards. It was through Shankar that Brian Jones and George Harrison took to twanging simple melodic accompaniments on the sitar, introducing an intoxicating new sound to pop on songs like Paint It Black and Norwegian Wood. Harrison had been introduced to Shankar’s music on record by Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of The Byrds, and it was also the derivation of the scattershot clusters of notes in their own brand of raga rock. Harrison, of course, went on to study briefly with Shankar, but never approached the level of mastery or dedication required of the serious Indian musician. He never lost his love of Indian music, though, and continued his relationship with Shankar, producing several of his recordings, including a handsome 1995 4-CD retrospective for his 75th birthday, In Celebration, which encompassed all aspects of Shankar’s playing and composing.


Shankar was introduced to many of the 60s hippie generation through his appearance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, recorded at generous length in the DA Pennebaker film which commemorates the epochal event. Shankar was granted his own afternoon slot, since any attempt to condense his music in between the folk pop of Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and Papas, and the guitar smashing and burning of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend in the evening would have been both pointless and disrespectful. It’s the thrilling interplay between Shankar’s rapidfire sitar runs and the intuitive responses of his regular tabla player Alla Rakha in the final jat section of raga they’re playing (Raga Bhimpalasi) that visibly wows the crowd. It was this aspect, along with the improvisatory nature of the music, which made him a favourite in the jazz world. John Coltrane, in particular, was a huge admirer, sufficiently so to name his son Ravi (and Ravi would later go on to meet his namesake). The influence of Shankar’s sound can be heard on pieces such as India, one version of which rides on a tamboura drone, and on the lengthy modal explorations of his many My Favourite Things excursions. These take their cue from Indian ragas in terms of extending the Western sense of appropriate (and endurable) duration well beyond the normal span, requiring new efforts of concentration. Coltrane’s duets with Elvin Jones on the likes of Impressions and Chasin’ the Trane also feel like a jazz variant on Shankar and Alla Rakha’s rhythmic byplay. This can also be heard in the lightspeed unison passages fired out by John McGlaughlin and Billy Cobham on the Mahavishnu Orchestra LPs The Inner Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire. McGlaughlin drew more directly on the Indian musical heritage in his acoustic group Shakti, in which he played alongside Indian musicians including Zakir Hussain, the son of Alla Rakha, and had a special acoustic guitar built with sympathetic strings stretched across the sound hole.

Ravi Shankar at Monterey Pop Festival, 1967

The music of the minimalist composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass drew heavily on Indian music in the early 60s. Young’s drone pieces for his Theatre of Eternal Music environment, and Riley’s extended, tape-delay multiplied ‘phantom band’ improvisations on saxophone and organ were both inspired by Indian styles, and undoubtedly by hearing Shankar recordings. They both went on to study under the Indian vocal singer Pandit Pran Nath in the 70s, Young recording The Tambouras of Pandit Pran Nath in his honour, over an hour of hypnotic tamboura drone (great for improvising over). Glass met Shankar whilst in Paris in 1964, working as a session musician and transcriber in the studio where the latter was recording the score for the film Chappaqua. He always claims to have learnt a huge amount from Shankar in that short space of time, lessons which were formative in pointing to the slowly evolving additive rhythms and melodic spirals which were so central to his early music, and continue to be so to this day. Glass later collaborated with Shankar on a 1990 LP, Passages, which doesn’t show either at their best, amounting to a conventional chamber orchestrated dilution of both styles. Shankar also had an influence on the British folk scene, with several musicians incorporating the sitar alongside guitar and more traditional folk instruments to create a sound which is today generally known as psych folk. Mike Heron played the sitar on Incredible String Band songs such as Maya, There Is A Green Crown and Nightfall, and John Renbourn used it as an additional colour on Pentangle albums. The droning strings provide a weird, shimmering shadow to traditional songs like Once I Had A Sweetheart, Cruel Sister and House Carpenter, blending particularly well with the clipped notes of the banjo on the latter. The extended soloing and fluid, rapidly picked lines of the Grateful Dead’s guitarist Jerry Garcia, with their sliding blurs, also bear the hallmarks of Ravi’s influence (mixed in with a bit of bluegrass), Indian music having a particularly strong presence in the Bay Area. One of the Dead’s drummers, Mickey Hart, also played in various Indian and world rhythm orchestras, generally alongside Zakir Hussain, with the 1976 Diga Rhythm Band being a notably successful meeting of minds.



Ravi Shankar’s relationship with the hippies, and with the rock world in general as it grew into a mass marketed distillation of ‘countercultural’ values, was an ambivalent one. His association with George Harrison, and by extension with The Beatles, enabled him to introduce Indian classical music to an even wider, and younger audience. But he had no illusions about the fact that it was little more than a novel background sound for a lot of these new listeners. The sitar and tamboura drone is still synonymous for many with 60s psychedelic wooziness, an association with a brief moment in pop cultural history which does a considerable disservice to the centuries over which the music had been developed and refined into a complex and highly expressive artform on the Indian subcontinent. Shankar’s mixed feelings about the widespread adoption of Indian sounds as mood or head music in the 60s was perfectly summed up by his famous remarks at the Concert for Bangladesh which George Harrison organised in 1971. Shankar came on with his musicians, who settled down and looked at each other whilst sounding out a few single notes and tabla taps, making adjustments as necessary. When everything had been set up to their satisfaction, they fell silent in preparation for playing, only for the audience to burst into rapturous applause. ‘Thank you’, Shankar replied with measured sarcasm, ‘if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you enjoy the playing more’. Shankar also had great reservations about the hippie lifestyle. He disliked the drugs and the smoke-filled concert halls and the inability of some sections of the audience to appreciate to pay the music due respect and attention. If people really wanted to appreciate the music, and to gain an understanding of the culture from which it came, they needed to approach it in a proper mental and bodily state, he suggested. He was also no doubt sensitive to criticisms that he was sacrificing his art to commercial forces by playing to large rock crowds. Woodstock might have appeared as the apotheosis of the countercultural love generation for many, the point at which it became a ‘nation’, but for Shankar, who played there but didn’t appear in the film (even in subsequent bonus feature stuffed and additional performance appended directorial cut dvds), it marked the end of his engagement, his sympathy for its underlying ideals having run short. ‘I saw half a million people in the mud and rain’, he said. ‘No one was really in their right mind, and the music was just a background. That was the end; I promised I would never do that again’.


He was not an ascetic and saintly guru shying away from the base materialism of the world, mind you, nor did he ever claim to be. He was born in Varanasi on 7th April 1920 as Robindra Shankar Chowdhury. He adopted the name Ravi (meaning sun) in his 20s, as something more than just a stage name, although it also served that purpose well enough. He had a fairly privileged youth, particularly after he’d joined the renowned dance troupe of his elder brother Uday, with whom he travelled the world in luxurious style, acting as a background ‘chorus line’ dancer and playing various musical instruments in a cursory fashion. Uday was 20 years his senior, and must have been something of a father figure to him, particularly in the light of his own father’s almost total absence from his life (he didn’t even meet him until he was 8). He made his debut recording in 1937 with his brother’s troupe on an LP with the snappy title The Original Uday Shankar Company of Hindu Musicians Recorded During Its Historic Visit to the United States. He wasn’t playing sitar at this time, however. The momentous decision to take up the instrument came a year later in 1938. He had been encouraged to do so by the sarod master Allauddin Khan, who had been touring with the dance company. He went to study with Khan in the small Bengali village of Maihar, which was also the name of the gharana, or musical school, with which Khan was associated. Also studying with him was Khan’s son Ali Akbar Khan. Indian music has always been a dynastic affair, a tradition which Shankar furthered by teaching his daughter Anoushka to play the sitar, playing alongside her in numerous concerts in his latter years. His tabla player Alla Rakha also taught his son Zakir Hussain to play, and he has gone on to perform in a wide variety of musical set ups, from traditional Indian classical concerts to Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s world percussion ensembles and John McGlauglin’s Shakti Indian groups. Ali Akbar Khan would grow to become an acknowledged master of the sarod like his father. The sarod is a lute with a metallic neck (all the better for sliding notes) and a dry, non-resonant sound which offers a complete contrast to the sitar’s reverberant strings. Shankar wanted to play the sarod at first, but Khan wisely suggested that he would be better suited to the sitar. He would go on to play many duets (or jugalbandi) with Ali Akbar Khan, including the performance at the Concert for Bangladesh, and the lp recordings Master Musicians of India (1964) and the Apple-released In Concert (1972), a performance which took place shortly after Allaudin Khan’s death and was dedicated to his memory. Sadly, the two fell out in the 1980s, which brought their memorable and cherished collaborations to an end.


Shankar collaborated with a wide and disparate group of musicians over the years, bringing many musical styles and traditions together, to varying degrees of fruitfulness. Fusion is inherent to the northern Hindustani classical styles, anyway, emerging as it did in the 13th century with the advent of the Mughal Empire, which introduced influences from the Islamic world to the purer Hindu religious forms. These persisted in the south, forming a distinct stream known as Karnatic music. Shankar united the two by playing with musicians from the Karnatic tradition. He worked with West Coast jazz musicians on a couple of tracks on the 1962 LP Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali (which I remember getting out of the library way back in my teenage years, when it still had records), refugees from the Stan Kenton and Chico Hamilton bands: Bud Shank on flute, Dennis Budimir on guitar, Louis Hayes on drums, and future Keith Jarrett trio bassist Gary Peacock. He duetted with Yehudi Menuhin, whom he had first met in Delhi in 1952, on the popular 1966 West Meets East LP (and its follow ups), the violinist proving stiff and inflexible, unable to adjust his classical technique to the fluid vocal lines essential for Indian music (for which the voice is the source of all sound). East also met further East on the 1978 LP East Greets East (those titles never avoided the obvious), on which he collaborated with players of the traditional Japanese flute and zither, the shakuhachi and the koto. He also composed and played on several soundtracks, beginning with the lovely folk themes played on sitar and flute which he provided for Satyajit Ray’s 1960 portrait of Bengali village life Pather Panchali. Variations of these can be found on that 1962 LP Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali (a good record to start with if you want to get into Shankar’s music in all its variety). He also wrote and performed parts of the music for the 1968 film Charly, an adaptation of Daniel Keyes’ affecting SF novel of artificially enhanced human intelligence Flowers for Algernon. His music for Jonathan Miller’s 1966 TV adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is particularly successful in creating an atmosphere of sun-dazed drowsiness, imbuing the English gardens, meadows and decaying buildings in which he sets the story with the hazy, surreal quality of a half-waking state. Shankar’s Alice music was a particular favourite of Trish Keenan from the band Broadcast.


Shankar has something of a connection to the South West and Devon through the Dartington Hall Estate, a rural social, educational and artistic endeavour set up by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in the 1920s. Leonard Elmhirst had been a close friend of and personal assistant to the towering figure of Bengali (and Indian as a whole) literature. Tagore was a tremendous influence on Shankar and many other artists of his generation. The Elmhirsts’ experience of Indian culture proved an inspiration for many aspects of the integrated rural enterprise which they worked to create and sustain. As a result, Indian music and art has always found a home there. Shankar’s brother Uday’s dance troupe visited in 1934 for a performance and short teaching session. He returned several further times in the 30s, brother Ravi present for some of the visits, including a longer six-month residency in 1936. In the light of these connections, Shankar returned at various intervals to perform in the old medieval great hall, the last time being in 2004.

Ravi and Anoushka Shankar at the 2005 Proms

I was lucky enough to get to see him perform during the 2005 Proms in the Albert Hall. His daughter Anoushka played lead in the first half performance of his Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra, a piece first recorded by Ravi with Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1971. It’s a light but colourful work, sounding a bit like the kind of 50s and early 60s exotica which plundered sound and rhythms from around the world, shaking them together with lush orchestrations to produce a gaudy but sometimes quite tasty cocktail – an odd reversal of the process in this case, making the authentic sound ersatz through the addition of Western colourations and musical structures. In the second half, he took to the stage with Anoushka, and the two duetted on a raga which lasted a little under an hour. I was close enough to smell the incense which burned on the stage, to the side of the carpet upon which they sat. This was one of a series of concerts he gave with Anoushka in his 85th year. His age wasn’t apparent as he played with typical sensitivity and agility, and the scalar patterns he threw back and forth with his daughter in the rhythmic jat section were as thrilling as ever in their melding of musical minds. I definitely felt in the presence of a legend. Anoushka Shankar now remains to carry on his legacy and nurture and develop the musical traditions which her father did so much to bring to the world through another generation.

Back in September, I went to see an exhibition in the Tate Britain which purported to be curated by the Robinson Institute, whose aims were to ‘promote political and economic change by developing the transformative potential of images of landscape’. The exhibition used the classically columned aisles running through the centre of the Tate building, with their temple-like grandeur, to house a jumbled assemblage of materials, turning the spaces into an ad-hoc blend of museum, gallery and library. Its slightly knocked together, church hall aspect, which worked against the professionalism and sanctity of the building in which it set up its stall, gave it the appearance of a collection of artefacts scavenged and gathered together after the fall – a reconfiguration of cultural matter in the wake of a cataclysmic crash aiming to provide a new way of seeing the world. The Robinson who lent his name to the institute was (or perhaps still is) an ‘itinerant scholar’; and like his shipwrecked and marooned namesake, a man adrift, isolated and at a remove from the dominant concerns of society. His name also links him with the Robinson of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s black novel Journey to the Centre of Night, who provides the bitter, anti-social narrative voice, full of fiercely intelligent misanthropy. Celine’s Robinson evolved into the titular character of Chris Petit’s novel, ringmaster of Soho’s night circus, would-be diviner of its secret heart, and witness to the apocalyptic deluge which turns its narrow streets into the canals of a new Venice.


The character of Robinson whose explorations the exhibition drew upon is the subject of three films by Patrick Keiller: London, Robinson In Space and Robinson In Ruins. A blend of fiction and documentary, they are structured around a narration which relates the journeys and reflections of Robinson (we never learn his first name), although he remains an off-camera presence throughout. The images presented to us are coolly, classically distanced, static observations of the atmospheres of place and time, season and weather. Robinson’s excursions are roughly planned, with vague scholarly ends in mind, but allow for diversions and chance happenings or revelations along the way. They are attempts to address ‘the problem of London’ and, in Robinson In Space, ‘the problem of England’. The first two films are narrated by a travelling companion (voiced by Paul Scofield) who is both close to and distanced from his guide (the distance which comes with the well-educated background the narrator’s accent suggests, and which is embodied in the public school use of surnames rather than Christian names as a mode of address); Close enough to be a sometime lover, but not really a friend. Robinson’s explorations take the form of short journeys in search of some particular connection, often of a literary or artistic nature, with place. The seven journeys in London (although the pattern set out at the beginning becomes a little diffuse as events proceed) begins with a pilgrimage to the sources of English Romanticism: Hugh Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill, the locale for his novel The Castle of Otranto, and the view over the Thames from the hill above Twickenham, the winding curve of the river across the plain still redolent of the pastoralism of Turner and Reynolds. Robinson is in essence a latterday Romantic (a term he describes in London as defining ‘a mode of feeling’), a man out of time in a materialist age. He also shares the Romantics’ yearning for a new Utopian society arising out of the ashes of some revolution or catastrophe. In Robinson In Space, in which he embarks on a further seven journeys suggested by Daniel Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, spiralling outwards from the centre point of Reading, he finally discovers it in the unlikely guise of Blackpool. This it the end point of his journey, a town whose economy is based almost entirely on the pursuit of pleasure. It’s also revealed as the town he came from before he moved to London (and perhaps not coincidentally, it is where Keiller grew up, too), giving his quest something of a Wizard of Oz ‘there’s no-place like home’ circularity.


Robinson In Space explores the strange hinterlands of England, linking the blank spaces of commerce (the container ports of Sheerness and Tilbury), justice and containment (the newly built and privately run prisons at Blakenhurst and Doncaster), self-contained mall worlds (Bluewater and Merry Hill), and military, communications and power installations (the Menwith Hills geodosic ‘golf ball’ tracking stations, DERA – the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency – at Malvern, the smoking cooling towers of Didcot Power Station and the monumental bunkers of Sellafield, and the Hiatt Works, with its historical links to the slave trade). Literary associations with land, place and memory are unearthed and followed up along the way: Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps; Daniel Defoe’s supposed meeting with Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, at the Llandoger Trow wharfside pub in Bristol; and Shandy Hall, where Laurence Sterne set his labyrinthine cock and bull story Tristram Shandy. The final image, of lorries, trains and cars shuttling back and forth over adjacent bridges (the camera angle making it seem as if they are stacked one on top of the other in rising, Metropolis-style layers) spanning the Tyne in Newcastle, is choreographed to Allan Gray’s floating, whole-tone scaled music from Powell and Pressburger’s dream for a post-war Britain A Matter of Life and Death. These hypnotically arrayed bridges with their perpetual contrary motion portray an England caught between an industrial past and some new future configuration, in the meantime suspended in some indeterminate no-place, filling its uncelebrated midlands and obscure peripheries with deliberately faceless, inaccessible and secretive bases, enclosed complexes and depopulated compounds.


If Robinson In Space criss-crossed England observing the furtive landscape of its new service industrial base, then Robinson In Ruins concentrates on a more narrow radius surrounding the city of Oxford. Robinson, having, by the time of Robinson In Space, been dismissed from the teaching position we were told he held in London, has now, it is revealed, spent some time in prison. This may well have been an outcome of his investigations and reports in Robinson In Space. Paul Scofield’s narrator is, of necessity, gone (the actor having died in 2008), replaced by another ex-lover, this time female and voiced with calm authority by Vanessa Redgrave. Robinson In Ruins is presented as a specimen of the found footage genre, a device generally associated with verite-style horror movies. Its filmed content and the written comments read out by Redgrave purportedly derive from 11 film cans and a notebook found in a caravan in the corner of a field. From the beginning, Robinson states that he is ‘looking for somewhere to haunt’, plotting the course towards his conspicuous absence. The evidence he leaves suggests that he has succeeded in managing his disappearance (or has been ‘disappeared’), and is perhaps now dead. His journeys on foot through the villages and fields surrounding Oxford explore in microcosm the agricultural history of England and the current state of arable farming in relation to the wider condition (bad, in short) of the national and global economy.

Rocket sheds at Westcott

Robinson, true to his Romantic nature, seeks out the pastoral picturesque, the soul of a certain vision of Englishness (the kind which put the Hay Wain on hundreds of living room walls), believing that by framing such pictures ‘in the manner of Turner’ with his camera, he will dispel some ‘great Malady’ which has infected and possessed the spirit of place. He also visits SSSIs (sites of special scientific interest) and finds hope for the future (albeit not necessarily a human future) in nature, and plant life in particular. A certain strain of apocalyptic, Blakean mysticism becomes apparent in his usually empirically analytical and intuitively sceptical outlook. He dreams of building eco-villages in old, disused clay pits, ‘experimental settlements in spaces of extraordinary biomorphic architecture’ (spaces which Keiller, trained and practicing as an architect, has perhaps dreamed of too). He is attempting to imagine a new form of futurism, a new kind of science fiction vision to replace the old, now-tainted variety. This futurism past is represented by the old 50s hangars of the rocket testing site (or ‘Guided Projectile Establishment’) at Westcott, a site now occupied by a business park. Robinson’s mysticism extends outwards beyond the bounds of the Earth towards speculations about a cosmic connection linking meteorite falls and historical moments of seismic social and political change. He also believes that ‘he could communicate with a network of non-human intelligences’. These principally seem to take the alien-sounding form of Xanthoria Parietina, more commonly known as lichen. Seen in close up, they do indeed form extraordinary biomorphic florescences against the rigidly geometrical green tesseract patterning of the Newbury roadsign (a beautiful image which was reproduced as a large photograph in the exhibition). Exotic beliefs stemming from a science fiction imagination (frequently indistinguishable from reality in the bewilderingly swift and ceaseless flux of the present) were also voiced in Robinson In Space (hence the title, I suppose), in which Robinson ‘explained that life on Earth evolved after the arrival of Buckminsterfullerenes in meteorites. Buckminsterfullerenes are complex carbon-based molecules with a vaguely geodesic structure (hence the nod to Fuller and his geodesic domes), which do indeed, it has been deduced from studying meteorite impact craters, exist in space. Robinson had also visited Horsell Common (a SSSI) in the course of his travels, the site which HG Wells chose for the first landing of his Martian cylinders in War of the Worlds. In Robinson’s SF imagination, the boundaries of fiction and fact, of the metaphorical and the real, become indistinct, leading to his delusions of alien plant communication (unless Robinson In Ruins, which is after all itself a fiction, has crossed genres and become a science fiction movie).


The lichen which so fascinates Robinson is seen as a model for a new kind of co-operative social structure. It exemplifies a symbiosis, a conjunction which benefits both participants, actually comprising two different but interdependent species – a fungus and a green algae. Robinson’s belief that he can communicate with a fungal algae may present a strong case for his solitary wanderings and mental divagations having led him too far from reality (and sanity); But as a metaphor, it has a simple elegance, and in close up an unearthly beauty (the geometrical backdrop of the metallic sign being the human world, and the invading spread of the lichen the alien). Robinson’s biophilia (‘the love of life and living systems’, as the narrator helpfully informs us) is manifested through many shots of plants and flowers. These take the steady, statically framed gaze common to all the films to new, unhurried lengths, inviting a meditative absorption in the detail of movement and sound. A shot of a cluster of teasle heads, their spiky ovals blossoming in pink and green, boiled-sweet colours, is taken from ground level, with the blue sky as a speckless backdrop. It makes them look like some strange alien forest rising improbably into the summer haze. We watch them for what seems like several minutes, as butterflies flit on and off, and their occasional nodding motion makes manifest the light wafts of warm air. Another sequence invites us to observe a stand of foxgloves trembling and swaying in the wind, bending out of the shot from time to time before springing back into the frame. This movement makes them seem vigorously alive, and their flexibility in the face of the passing breezes offers an Aesopian fabular lesson, a variant on the tale of the oak and the reed. The static form and extended length of these vegetative takes (‘vaster than empires and more slow’ as Andrew Marvell might have put it) makes them look like photographs possessed with sudden motion, and reflects Keiller’s background in architectural photography. The exhibition contains a good number of photographs, including some by Keiller himself. The stills from the film work perfectly as carefully composed photos, as did those from Robinson In Space included alongside the published and annotated script. Other photographs in the exhibition include selections from Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London series, and Bernd and Hiller Becker’s Coal Bunkers (1974), which captured vernacular and sculptural industrial architectural forms shortly before they were to become redundant. They were often in a state of disuse and disrepair, a kind of concrete gothic ruin which possesses its own desolate Romanticism.

Framing the landscape - the Wittenham Clumps (Robinson In Space)

The exhibition followed the form of the films, tidily compartmentalising itself into seven separate sections, reflecting the various stages of Robinson’s journey around Oxford in Robinson In Ruins and the themes and historical events it encompassed. The first part, entitled Robinsonism, (thereby granting the character immortality as a philosophical system), sets out the nature of the project, its basis in a reflection on and detailed framing of landscape, after the manner of the Romantics. Robinson, drifting towards a Blakean mysticism, was hoping that ‘if he looked at the landscape hard enough, it would reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events’. This is a transposition to a rural context of Robinson’s philosophy of urban observation which underpinned the film London, in which he put forward the similar belief that ‘if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events’. The important difference between the two, learned through the travels and incarceration of the intervening years, lies in the removal of the active, causational element. This philosophical shift betokens a willingness to suspend the ego and become a part of the surroundings in order to understand it, rather than to impose oneself upon it. Robinson succeeds in this to the extent of eventually disappearing into the molecular grain of the landscape, becoming a part of its accumulated strata of history, fiction and myth. The introductory notice to this first part of the exhibition states that ‘the lnstitute continues his enquiry, with the aid of works by artists, writers, historians, geographers, cartographers and geologists, and a variety of other objects, that advance its exploration of unfinished histories in landscape’.

The architecture of New Babylon - Constant Nieuwenhuys

There are books which form a sample of the Institute’s imaginary library, some of which are available to read at a desk, chained to the display cabinets behind to prevent pilfering. These include Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the locales in which are thought to have drawn upon the Otmoor landscape north east of Oxford, a central site in Robinson In Ruins; A book of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon plans for an utopian future city from the 60s and 70s, based on a world in which land has become collectively owned, an influence on Robinson’s dreams of an ‘extraordinary biomorphic architecture’ and new social model; Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the Captain Swing agricultural riots of 1830; Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which Robinson had read whilst travelling around Oxford and its environs in Robinson In Space, the narrator remarking ‘I think we were never so happy as on the day of our pilgrimage to the memorials of Robert Burton’ (suggesting that Robinson was most content when in a state of pleasurable melancholia); Jorge Luis Borges stories collected in Labyrinths, for their penetration of the surface of things, their dismantling of the singular vision of history, the idea of the discrete and indivisible self, and the immutable materiality of the world – for revealing the molecular basis of perception and reality; and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as an exemplar of the Romantic worldview which Robinson shares, and as a founding work of the science fiction imagination, which Brian Aldiss, in his history of the genre, characterises as being ‘in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode’.


The second section of the exhibition is entitled 1795, referring to the amendment to the Settlement Act made in that year, which allowed for much greater freedom of movement of the labour force, and is seen as key moment in the development of an industrialised economy. Robinson links this historical shift with a meteorite fall in Yorkshire, and a mineral specimen of space rock is duly displayed. A close-up of the Newbury roadsign with its blooming Xanthoria Parietina stain was also included, pointing the way from the fields to the urban centres, and through its symbiotic biological patina, to the possibility of alternate forms of social organisation (or to post-human futures). A quotation from Frederic Jameson’s The Seeds of Time (no relation to John Wyndham’s SF collection – or is there?), also included in the film, points to the vital importance of visionary art and fiction in offering new and different ways of seeing the world: ‘it seems to be easier’, he writes, ‘for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’.

GPSS signposts

The third section looks at Greenham Common, Aldermaston and the Government Pipeline System (GPSS), the landscape of militarised power. The GPSS traces the hidden circulatory system of the national body’s lifeblood. Its hidden subterranean presence undermines notions of an ineradicable English identity rooted in the rural landscape. It is a system which is linked to a longer pipeline heading East across Europe, a drip feed making Britain’s dependence on wider geopolitical forces apparent. Robinson also notes tributaries branching off to military bases and weapons research establishments, many owned or part-owned by the US government or American corporations. A map outlined this veinous web, and there was a model of one of the pipeline markers, looking like a homely, slope-roofed birdhouse, painted with cheerful yellow stripes. Robinson used these markers to follow the pipeline north to the village of Ipsden, near which he passed a field of opium poppies, grown for medical use. They had a hypnotic effect, wavering with a pink blurring of vision commensurate with their narcotising purpose. The idea of secret government power sources piped into bases from alien sources is illustrated in science-fictional form in Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass 2, those sources genuinely extra-planetary rather than merely extra-national in this case. This played on a small screen, with headphones for those who wanted to listen to the soundtrack. Unfortunately it was the 1957 Hammer film with Brian Donlevy in the title role, playing Professor Quatermass as an entirely inappropriate American tough guy, rather than the original 1955 BBC series. It was a cheaper and more concise choice, and served well enough to make the point.


Section 4was entitled the Non-Human, The Post-Human, and looked at Robinson’s biophilia, and his argument for the primacy of symbiotic relationships in nature. Included amongst the plant studies and Keiller’s own picture of foxgloves (a still taken from Robinson In Ruins) was one of Michael Landy’s etchings of hardy plants dismissed as weeds, the colonisers of post-industrial wastelands and urban cracks and patches of scrub – in this case, a study of herb robert. William Blake’s patron and follower John Linnell’s Study of A Tree from 1806 foregrounds the tree as a beautiful form in itself, rather than as just one element in a landscape. Philip Wilson Steer’s Elm Trees from 1922 remains as a record of a species now wiped out from the British Isles, a foretaste of the potential for mass extinctions.


The Agriculture sector, number five, included the note that ‘Robinson rarely saw anyone working in the fields, even during harvest’, the arable farming processes now being so heavily mechanised. In Robinson In Ruins, we watch huge combine harvesters slowly and inexorably eat their way through broad expanses of wheat, looking like unstoppable robotic mega locusts. Turner’s Harvest Home illustrates the older ways, with a celebratory gathering of farm hands in a huge barn, the golden glow of the evening landscape framed through its doors, the cavernous spaces waiting to be filled with the last wagons of hay just pulling up. James Ward’s 1808 painting Beef is a patriotic display of plenty, two hulking sides hanging up raw, bloody and dripping. Meanwhile, Andreas Gursky’s large scale photograph Chicago Trading Floor II, on which yellow and orange shirts blended in an almost abstract way with the blue of computer screens, indicated the kind of place where the fluctuating values of the wheat harvest and other farming produce was likely to be determined.

Satellite dishes on Enslow Hill

Stage six of the exhibition’s survey was based around the year 1930, a year of revolutions. The Captain Swing riots spread across the country, and in the seven towns surrounding Otmoor in Oxfordshire, there was active and recurrent resistance to attempts at enclosure and the diversion of the river. Robinson notes that it was also the year in which the Liverpool to Manchester Railway was opened, and that on the 15th of February, a meteorite landed in Launton near Bicester. The final section, Hanged, Drawn and Quartered, ventures further back in time while remaining geographically rooted in the Oxfordshire fields. 1596 marked the year in which the carpenter Barholomew Steer called for a rebellion against the local gentry who were enclosing the land, declaring his intention to tear down the fences they had put up and attack the manor house. In the end, only three other men turned up at his meeting point on Enslow Hill, and they failed to tear down any fences or make their proposed march on London to demand a change to the enclosure laws. He was said to have preached ‘the politics of Cockagne’, a vision of common ownership, plenty and creative leisure which would later be reflected in Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon some four hundred years later. The would be rebels were swiftly apprehended and taken to Newgate prison, where Steer undoubtedly died after torture. The surviving two members of the rebellion that never was were brought back to Enslow Hill, where they were hung, drawn and quartered. The site now looks down on an array of satellite dishes, relaying images and messages almost instantaneously around the globe, nestling in an old disused quarry. It is also an area rich in fossils (some of them on display in the exhibition), geological and historical planes of time intersecting with the invisible, intangible and transitory networks of contemporary information overload.

Hepworth and Hamilton

Various works of art from the Tate collections were displayed throughout to reflect Robinson’s multi-layered and –disciplined outlook on the world, his efforts to make connections. His approach was echoed in the Psychogeographical Guide to Paris produced by Situationist artist and prankster Guy Debord in 1957. Henry Moore’s Family Group, with its roughly formed bronze figures of mother and father holding a baby between them, draws on geological forms and suggests a connection between humanity and the landscape which it inhabits. It also, more prosaically, bears some resemblance to the piece of public art which Robinson films outside a LIDL supermarket on a retail estate. Barbara Hepworth’s Sun and Moon sets red and black discs, the latter intersecting with an open circle as if about to eclipse it, against a frottage background suggestive of a ploughed field. It gives semi-abstract, symbolic form to cyclical patterns of nature and the seasons, as does Richard Hamilton’s Microcosmos: Plant Cycle, with its watery sun cresting the horizon like the arc of a cranium. A Paul Nash sketch of the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, made in 1943-4 near the end of his life, echoes Robinson’s travels in investing these twinned hilltop stands of beech with a personal symbolism and meaning, and the sense of connection with a particular place through time. Robinson notes them during his wanderings across Oxfordshire in Robinson In Space. Nash’s Totes Meer has intimations of a bleak post-human world in its depiction of a wintry ocean whose waves are composed of the wreckage of crashed German bombers. Beyond its specific wartime context, it could be seen as a sea of industrial detritus, creaking and grinding as it washes up on the shore of the world. Eduardo Paolozzi’s bronze bust Shattered Head and Nigel Henderson’s Head of a Man (which looks a bit like William Burroughs), both from 1956, look like they are either cracked and decayed, dug out of the ground after many years, or half-formed, golems made from the stuff of the earth – a modernist Gog and Magog.

Henderson and Paolozzi

How much sense any of this would have made to those unfamiliar with Keiller’s Robinson films is uncertain. The Institute’s assemblage would have seemed a merely random gathering of objects and artistic works. But they may well have been intriguing enough to make the viewer want to make the connections between the apparently disparate elements and seek out the source. Which would have been well worth their while.

This year was dominated by two writers for me. Having been introduced to the elderly London detectives Arthur Bryant and John May towards the end of last year in The Victoria Vanishes, I read a further 8 novels featuring the duo at the beginning of this. They’re such hugely appealing characters, bringing the values of post-war optimism and hope into a darker and more complex and venal present. May’s tact and ageless elegance and charm perfectly balance Bryant’s old from an early age gruffness and instinctively anti-establishment egalitarianism, a becalming John le Mesurier to his friend’s raging, eccentrically autodactic Romantic soul. As befits a writer who also has an affinity with the darker end of the fantastic genres, the detectives’ investigations within the Peculiar Crimes Unit generally have an aura of the strange and the supernatural, although seldom stepping beyond the bounds of the rationally explicable (although Bryant does gather some important tips from his scatty, Margaret Rutherford-esque occultist friend Maggie Armitage). The novels also explore a rich seam of London lore and urban legend, often centring on a particular aspect of the city (its pubs, theatres, sewage systems or underground network). Bryant’s wayward researches allow for a good deal of tangential but fascinating material about the London nobody knows (except Bryant, of course), offering a rather more accessible take on Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographies. These are very much London novels, although the duo do make the odd, rather reluctant expedition beyond its boundaries: a short jaunt down to Brighton (London-on-sea) to consult with a punch and judy man in The Memory of Blood, and an ill-advised trip across a snow-bound Dartmoor in White Corridor, a novel which fruitfully experiments with the series’ form. You strongly suspect that Bryant’s unrestrained (and usually unprompted) expositions of his outlook on various aspects of contemporary politics and society act as a convenient vehicle for the author’s own views (regularly aired on his prolific and always interesting blog). I’ve yet to read the latest case, The Invisible Code, published earlier this year, and so have that and two more upcoming novels (and a comic) to look forward to next year. Can’t wait.


I also read Fowler’s Hell Train, his homage to Hammer films and, with its intertwined portmanteau tales set on a train of the damned, perhaps Amicus and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors too (with a bit of 70s Cushing and Lee throwaway romp Horror Express added for good measure). If it failed to live up to its initial promise (and, for an avowed Hammer fan, enticing premise of a ‘lost’ script), then it was never less than entertaining. The novel has a story within a story structure, with a scriptwriter trying to produce a story super-quick, adjusting it according to the demands of the producer. The cameo which he adds in to allow for an appearance by Peter Cushing is particularly nicely done. The 2001 story collection The Devil In Me showed the range of Fowler’s writing, ranging from noir to horror, Wodehousian humour to quietly observational character pieces. Particularly fine were Crocodile Lady, in which a primary school teacher returning to the job after many years, follows a child who has been led astray during a school outing through the chaos of the underground with heroic doggedness; and The Beacon, a beautifully balanced tale about connection and understanding in the age of remote digital communication, which resembled the short stories of Katherine Mansfield in its sad ironies and delicate characterisation. Fowler’s childhood memoir Paper Boy was lovely, both funny and poignant, with a hint of melancholia which is perhaps inherent in such reminiscences, with their memories of people and places long gone. With its south east London suburban settings, it also inhabited territory with which I am extremely familiar. Paperboy was a gratifying success for Fowler, and a follow up memoir, Film Freak, taking him into the heart (or thereabouts) of the London film industry, is due for publication in the near future. Another one to look forward to in the new year.


I also read a great deal of Angela Carter this year, which marked the 20th anniversary of her horribly early death. I worked my way through all of the novels, save for The Passion of New Eve and Nights At the Circus, which I read last year. It was particularly interesting to read the early and relatively neglected books, and to find the familiar elements of later books present in nascent form. Shadow Dance, Several Perceptions and Love form what is sometimes thought of as the ‘Bristol trilogy’, reflecting Carter’s time in that city during the 60s, and cast an ascerbic and ironic eye over the aspirations of countercultural drop-outs. The Magic Toyshop is set in Carter’s childhood territory of South London, and presents a 60s world still in thrall to oppressive Victorian values and with an atmosphere defined by decaying gothic-revivalist architecture. Whilst none of these have explicitly fantastical elements, their fascination with the gothic and with masques, role-playing and dark grotesquerie sowed the seed for future fabulations. Heroes and Villains was post-apocalyptic science fiction which might easily have found a place in New Worlds magazine, alongside similarly brutal depictions of social collapse and primitive savagery produced by M John Harrison (The Committed Men) and Keith Roberts (The Chalk Giants) at around the same time. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann, Carter’s gave her imagination full reign in a picaresque journey through a landscape in which the monsters of the id have been set loose, under the influence of the Doctor’s rays. The protagonist, Desiderio, has a variety of encounters on his travels, travelling with gypsy bargees, performing in an erotic carnival, visiting an extravagantly impersonal brothel with a licentious count, falling prey to cannibals, and becoming a sexual slave to a herd of centaurs before finally arriving at Hoffmann’s castle. It’s an extravagantly decadent novel, consciously drawing on various literary sources, and finds Carter at her most full-blooded, her unexpurgated imagination brought to life with lush, rococo prose. Her final novel, Wise Children, marries Shakespeare with music hall and Hollywood in a bawdy and warm-hearted tall tale of theatrical dynasties and the good life south of the river. I also re-read The Bloody Chamber, which contains Carter’s best known reconfigurations of and commentaries upon fairy tales and folklore. I managed to pick up a copy of the new Folio Society edition, with its lovely accompanying watercolours in a classic Rackhamesque style by Igor Karash, who won a competition to provide the illustrations. A Postcard From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp was a short and very personal reminiscence of the person whom she knew, whilst Angela Carter: A Literary Life by Sarah Gamble provided valuable analysis of her work, relating it to her life and experience.


I read two books by Elizabeth Hand, who could be said to be one of Carter’s successors. Generation Loss was a fine detective story of sorts, with burned out punk photographer Cass Neary travelling from her native territory of New York up to a remote town on the wintry coast of Maine to meet a legendary photographic artist, who disappeared into reclusive obscurity many years ago. She comes across a community locked into its own dark Pagan rituals (Hand’s novels often find Pagan rituals and beliefs re-emerging in the modern day), distorted from their origins in hippy communalism. It’s an utterly absorbing mystery, with an engaging protagonist, the drug-taking, heavy drinking Cass, a wiry Patti Smith type wholly out of her element in the wilds of Maine, but finding her way to the heart of the matter with the help of amphetamines, cynical toughness and an underlying passion for her lost artistic vision. The short novel Illyria was a coming of age tale, with its young female protagonist discovering her artistic path within another semi-rural communal set up, an element of the supernatural intruding via a strange miniature stage uncovered in an attic space, which seems to glow with its own footlights, and experience its own microclimates. An entrancing fable of the golden moment of youth when all seems possible, and the world appears to be a stage awaiting your grand entrance. It’s wise but not overly pessimistic in its depiction of the disappointment of potential greatness left unrealised, of the dissipation of youthful energy and excitement.


There were some exciting new novels from favourite authors, with M.John Harrison’s Empty Space, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Tim Powers’ Hide Me Among the Graves and Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Empty Space was the follow up to his previous novels Light and Nova Swing, which saw him produce his own distinctive brand of hypermodern space opera. I read all three consecutively, to better appreciate the sequence as a whole. Light set up Harrison’s fictional universe, which the other novels also inhabit. There are three intercutting narrative strands, one featuring a twentieth century theoretical scientist and grubby serial killer named Michael Kearney (Harrison never dwells on his impersonal murders, which are as incidental to the story as they are to him); the other two set in a 25th century in which humanity has spread out to the far corners of the cosmos, and centre around a rebellious ‘k-ship’ (an interstellar craft which uses the reality warping potential of the new physics) pilot named Seria Mau Genlicher; and wide boy Ed Chianese, on the run in the slums of a corporation planet from the Eva and Bella, the Cray Sisters.


Light contrasts a dreary present day world on the cusp of the new millennium with a future of almost limitless possibilities, in which different and seemingly contradictory physical laws and scientific models co-exist and can be exploited. In spite of this miraculous sense of endless potential, people nevertheless constrain themselves the same roles in the same old scenarios. They have themselves tailored, or ‘zipped’, or use disposable ‘cultivar’ bodies which provide them with overdetermined sexual stereotypes. Men can have huge tusks, whilst women often go for the Mona package, modified into eternal Marilyns. The corporatisation of human life has been exported to the stars, with a resultant ennui and sense of powerlessness which infects the sections set in the present day. Some opt to spend their time in the viscous proteome of the ‘twink tanks’, like Ed Chianese, dreaming away their lives in manufactured worlds and stories. The corporate governmental expansion into the furthest reaches of the cosmos and appropriation of what it finds there (boldly going in the name fo maximising profit margins) is embodied in their creation of the k-ships. These are fusions of human, machine and something wholly other: ‘shadow operators’ who cluck and worry like over-solicitous old ladies, their disembodied, phantom forms flickering at the periphery of vision. Seria Mau is forever bound to her ship, like a spectre anchored to the site of its death, the ghost wired into the machine from which it projects itself. The scene in which she discovers the pitifully diminished and mutilated state of her body, de- and re-formed whilst she was still a young woman to fit into the ship’s pilot tank, hardwired into its navigation systems, is filled with a terrible poignancy and a furious burning rage at the powers which would use people as so much disposable meat in the pursuit of further power and dominance. Looming above the planets of the ‘Beach’, a marginal interzone marking the boundaries of the known universe, is the Kefahuchi Tract, a radiant auroral rent in the universe which represents a remnant of the mysterious, the transcendentally unknowable, a completely different order of reality. Daredevil pilots, or entradistas, such as Ed used to be, defy conventional physics common sense in order to approach the borderlands, pushing at the bounds of the possible.


The emergence of the tract has something to do with the advanced quantum calculations of two scientists in the present day, Michael Kearney and Brian Tate, who struggle to continue their work in the face of corporate pressure. Kearney is haunted by a creature he knows as the Shrander, a being which manifests itself as a terrifying ragged figure with a stripped horse’s skull for a head, like something out of an old folk ritual. He kills in the belief that this will keep it at bay, and is a thoroughly wretched creature, despite the fact that we know his theories (the Kearney-Tate equations) will lead humanity out to the stars. In the end, he confronts the Shrander at a place called Monster Beach in America, which evidently corresponds with the Beach on the edge of the Kefahuchi Tract, and is granted a vision of the astonishing beauty of the cosmos from which he has been shrinking. Light is a simply dazzling book, filled with subtle correspondences, linguistic play, anger-fuelled satire, and the display of an almost casually profligate imagination. It’s also extremely deft in its use of science fiction’s potential for surrealism and metaphor.


Nova Swing grounds the cosmic sweep of Light, limiting things to one planet. This is Saudade, onto which a part of the Tract has crashed in the wake of the events which ended Light. This results in a forbidden zone at the industrial end of Saudade City, which has similarities with the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (again, there are correspondences here, Kearney having seen all Tarkovsky’s films in Light). As in Stalker, it is an area contiguous with the mundane world, and seemingly a part of it with its decaying industrial landscape. But it operates according to unpredictable and surreal (a permanent whirlwind of shoes, for example) physical rules of its own. Vic Serotonin is a guide to this dangerous area, hanging out at the White Cat, Black Cat bar whilst he waits for clients (another correspondence with a film seen by Kearney in Light, this time directed by Emir Kusturica). Other characters in this neon noir novel include Lens Aschemann, a compassionately weary detective who looks like Einstein feels like he’s stepped out of a Wim Wenders film or a science fiction novel by Samuel Beckett; a policewoman technologically enhanced to the point where she can shift into a hyperkinetic blur of motion and lighting, millisecond calculation; treet punk Alice Nylon (the perfect name for a street punk); wasted zone veteran Emil Bonaventura and his tango loving daughter Edith; and barkeeper Liv Hula, Mona packaged Irene, and ordinary Joe ‘Fat’ Antoyne. These three end up joining together to buy out the spaceship Nova Swing and run it as a transport vessel (interstellar truckers). They return again in Empty Space, and Irene provides the heart of the story, remaining possessed of a certain innocent sense of wonder (the state which old-fashioned SF was often said to evoke). She is somehow linked with Anna Waterman in the present day, who was married to Michael Kearney in the first novel, and now lives on her own in the Sussex house she shared with her late second husband. The south downs loom in the background like the Tract. The tract bleeds through into the ‘real’ universe in both times; bodies fuse, interpenetrate one another and hang suspended in space after death, slowly revolving like planetary satellites or galaxies (another Tarkovsky allusion here, perhaps, to the levitating or orbiting zero-g bodies of Mirror and Solaris). Irene and Anna are adrift in the world, but intuitively enjoy moments of simple and direct joy. Anna’s naked nightswim down the Sussex river is the equivalent of the entradistas’ plunges into the Tract. And for the young man she meets outside the village pub, the grand cosmic drama of the far future is concentrated into the experience of watching his hounds racing down a corridor of light when he goes out lamping at night.


There’s something summatory about these novels. They bring together many of the elements characteristic of Harrison’s work over the years: the juxtaposition of the seedy and defeated with the transcendental; a Gnostic spirituality in which a divine force (often in fearful form) attempts to break through into a devolved world; the use of Tarot cards and their symbolism to indicate the play of chance and recurrent patterns in life; cats and their mysterious otherness; the horse’s skull, which features (in the form of lamb’s skull) in the Viriconium story The Luck in the Head; the New Men, straying from the fantasy lands of Viriconium into this science fictional universe; the seedy séances held in dilapidated suburban houses; the colourfully poetic naming craft carried over from the 1974 anarchist space opera The Centauri Device (Light’s La Vie Féerique, Karaoke Sword and Touching the Void – the latter a link with Harrison’s love of climbing – and The Centauri Device’s decadently Aesthetic Atalanta in Calydon, The Green Carnation and Driftwood of Decadance – Wilde and Swinburne in space); and the constant theme of tawdry, prefabricated fantasy and escapism as a trap, and the metaphysical need to find one’s own way of pushing against the limits of environment and perceptual limitation. These are novels of great, poetical richness (with moments of great humour, it should be added), which bear repeated reading.


Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue centres around a record shop dealing in jazz, funk and soul in Oakland, California. Its name, Brokeland Records, clearly invites some kind of state of the nation comparison. The novel, rooted in a singular place and concentrated span of time, is an anti-epic, the opposite of his last novel of this size, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, which engaged directly with the grand sweep of twentieth century history. It’s the story of the two men, one Jewish (Nat), one African-American (Archy), who run the store, and also of their partners (Gwen and Aviva), who are midwives supervising home births, and Nat’s son Julius and his friend Titus (who it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly in this dynastic family drama, to be Archy’s forgotten son). Both sets of adults represent the individual character of a particularised spirit of localism, the historically continuous heart of an area. Both face threats from corporate hostility and competition; the women from the insurance company funded hospital, and the men from the proposed building of a new mall, incorporating its own record shop designed, in parasitic Starbucks style, to replace the original. The story imaginatively magnifies its seemingly small scale setting with a wealth of popular cultural references, creating a sense of universality, of connection with a wider world. It also gives the sense that the problems which these two families have, both on a personal, social and economic level, connect with the concerns of modern society at large. Pop culture is seen as a uniting force (as it is in the essay The Amateur Family in Chabon’s recent essay collection Manhood for Amateurs), bringing together families, communities and otherwise disconnected individuals. Here, jazz and black American music of the post-war years forms the central connection and source of obsessive amateur scholarship (I particularly like the reference to the pipe once owned by Archie Shepp, and winced when Nat, in one of his rages, threw a rare Sun Ra LP on Saturn Records across the room to crack against the wall), which might leave some of the references obscure to many (but then what’s the internet for, after all). There are plenty of references to Star Trek, blaxploitation and martial arts films, the Avengers, Asimov’s Foundation novels and many other cult artefacts thrown in along the way as well. Obama has a presidential walk-on part, and a certain intertextuality is present in the return of the grey parrot from Chabon’s short novel The Final Solution, in which he introduced an elderly, retired Sherlock Holmes into the period of the Second World War. The parrot sits on the shoulder of the Hammond organ playing character Cochise Jones, as if he were some kind of jazz pirate.


Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (the title a reference to an unfilmed scene from the original King Kong, re-introduced by Peter Jackson in his remake) is a sprawling novel which bears comparison in its extravagant length to his 1975 novel Dhalgren, which in itself marked a significant change in direction (and was a key book of my teenage years). It’s certainly a long way from The Fall of the Towers trilogy (published 1963-5), which was the first Delany I picked up (in Hay on Wye on a childhood holiday in Wales), a relatively conventional if poetically written science fiction novel. There are still SF elements in the current novel, which proceeds from the present day some seventy years (a lifetime) into the future. But the focus, as in Delany’s recent novels The Mad Man and Dark Reflections, is almost wholly on the physical manifestations of desire, and the utopian vision of a world in which its manifold varieties are accepted and catered for in mutually supportive communities of caring and generous people (men in this case, as the sex is exclusively gay). As much of a fantasy as the early SF perhaps. Changes in the nature of the world, social and technological (the two affecting each other) are noted, but remain in the background, although the society within a society in which the novel takes place is a model of wider transformations. At heart, this is a love story, however, a story of a lifelong partnership between its two main characters (one black, one white): Eric and Morgan (or Shit as he’s more generally, and affectionately, known). The concentration on intricately and delicately detailed sexual encounters, the nature of which might often be construed as disgusting, is shocking at first, but the very compassion and kindness of those involved, and lack of aggression or coercive hostility in any of the participants make it seem, in the end, the most natural thing in the world. A respectful and mutually beneficial means of communication and physical satisfaction in which everyone’s needs, no matter how unconventional, are respected. A key quote from Samuel Johnson, written down for Eric by his gay ‘uncle’ Bill, reads ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’, to which he appends the comment ‘but note the good doctor said “beast”, not “animal”. For he who forgets the animal he is, has taken the first step toward becoming a beast’. This undeniably challenging novel also marks a geographical shift for Delany, moving out of the cities, and the suspended apocalypse of Bellona in Dhalgren, and into a remote rural setting on the coast of the US southern state of Georgia. As such, it takes its place in the tradition of American rural utopianism. Perhaps Thoreau would have approved.


Another favourite author published a new novel this year, Tim Powers’ Hide Me Amongst the Graves being a follow up to his The Stress of Her Regard, published some 23 years earlier in 1989. Again, I re-read the first novel again in order to enjoy the stories as a cohesive whole. Whether the new book can be appreciated without first having read the earlier one is dubious. It’s certainly preferable to read both. I’ve looked at them in more detail elsewhere, so suffice to say that Hide Me Amongst the Graves was a thoroughly satisfying follow up, taking Powers back to the Victorian London of his best known work (and a founding novel in the steampunk subgenre) The Anubis Gates. The typically dense and thoroughly worked out mythology common to both novels brings together a comprehensive collection of Romantic and gothic device, which are rationalised around the central notion of a mineral race, stony creatures of the earth, which predates humanity, and which, in its vestigial form, still preys parasitically upon it. They form close and, in their own murderously jealous way, loving relationships with particular individuals, and bring with them, as a side effect, visionary insight which feeds into artistic inspiration. They are like bloodsoaked muses. The novels ingeniously incorporate vampires, lamiae, golems, ghosts and many other supernatural manifestations into their overarching mythological schema, and also use the Romantic and Aesthetic poets as major characters, commenting on their lives and the nature of their inspiration in the process: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Polidori, Mary Shelley and Edward Trelawny in The Stress of Her Regard, and Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and a returning Trelawny in Hide Me Amongst the Graves. Powers also evokes the haunts of the Romantics very atmospherically, from the Alps, Venice, and Ligurian coast of the first novel, to the gaslit London of Hide Me Amongst the Graves, with its hidden and labyrinthine subterranean subcity.


Also this year, I read Kim Newman’s highly entertaining Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles (how can you resist a title like that), a series of tales in which the Napoleon of Crime’s righthand man, the proudly thuggish Colonel Sebastian Moran, relates several of the classic Sherlock Holmes stories from the villain’s perspective, revealing Moriarty’s hand to be evident in more cases than Watson gave him credit for. Holmes here becomes less deductive genius, defending crown and country from international villainy, more an irritating meddler ruining carefully laid plans of beautifully elegance and consummate wickedness. Wicked and its follow up Son of A Witch by Gregory Maguire were brilliant expansions of the Oz mythos, making of the childhood tales something wholly adult. Maguire uses his recasting of L Frank Baum’s world to reflect upon the pains of growing up, of being visibly different, as well as to comment on modern politics, religion and the uses and abuses of power. These were novels which really surprised me. I expected them to be relatively throwaway entertainments (and there’s nowt wrong with those), but they turned out to be something much deeper (whilst still being hugely entertaining).


I also read James Knowlson’s comprehensive life of Samuel Beckett, Damned to Fame, which offered fascinating insights into his role in the French resistance during the war. I look forward to seeing some of the Bike Shed Theatre’s Beckett season in Exeter in the new year. Throwing Muses singer and songwriter Kristin Hersh wrote something which went well beyond the standard rock autobiography in Paradoxical Undressing, offering an intimate, impressionistic and beautifully written account of her early life which read more like a novel. Finally, Barry Miles’ London Calling was an enjoyable account of the post-war counterculture in the capital, from Soho soaks, penniless poets and savage artists of the Bacon, Freud and Dylan Thomas era, to those of the YBA generation. In between, he ranged over the artistic and radical political spectrum, from jazz lovers, British beats, Mods, pop artists, hippies and revolutionaries to punks, industrial noisemakers and new romantics. He spends the greatest amount of time in the 60s. Here, his observations benefit greatly from his own direct involvement in the scene, having worked at the Better Books shop in Charing Cross Road, co-run the Indica Gallery where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono, and helped launch the countercultural newspaper International Times. Miles also writes about Michael Moorcock, J G Ballard and New Worlds, and two figures I’ve become familiar with this year: Pauline Boty (whom he describes as ‘the purest, and perhaps the best, of the British pop artist of her time’, with ‘none of the dull masturbatory “male gaze”of the male pop artists’) and Bruce Lacey, theatrical prop maker, antic performer, robot controller and general madcap goon. It’s a fascinating story, with Miles customarily unafraid to make moral judgements, and shows what a rich and fertile ground the city has been for artists wanting to go against the grain.

The cinema was mainly a place to see re-issues for me this year, generally travelling the country courtesy of the bfi. Quai des Brumes, Marcel Carne and Jacques Prevert’s fatalistic dockside romance, its digitally clarification thankfully leaving the fogbound atmosphere intact. Jean Gabin possessed an offhand, Bogart-like everyman charm as the disaffected anti-hero, lost in his own existential fog, but offered the chance of salvation through the luminous-eyed Michele Morgan, a young innocent beset by corrupting forces, who persuades him that this isn’t the end of the road after all. A supporting cast of beat barmen, suicidal poets, dedicated and saintly soaks, predatory ‘uncles’ and cowardly petty gangster bullies add to the self-conscious and very French tenor of this nocturnal world, all beautifully shot in moody black and white. The Lodger was also a fogbound film, London smog swirling through Hitchcock’s street sets in this London set thriller, his breakthrough film from 1927. The elegant, sad-eyed Ivor Novello (whose charming music was the subject of a Simon Callow narrated Prom in the summer) provided the model of the ambiguous Hitchcock protagonist, suspected of the murders carried out in the area, but appealing to the female lead nonetheless, and presented as an attractive character to the audience. Hitchcock later encouraged the view that this was his first truly characteristic film, and it had many assured and imaginative directorial touches. Novello’s initial entrance, face swathed in a scarf and topped with a broad-brimmed hat, leaving only his expressive eyes visible, made him seem like a character from one of the German expressionist films which Hitchcock admired so much. Malcolm McDowell’s entrance in Lindsay Anderson’s If… would seem to be paying homage to this scene. The sound of Novello’s character’s restless pacing across the upstairs flat was represented by making the ceiling at which the suspicious landlord’s family and policeman friend transparent, another nice expressionist touch. Nitin Sawhney’s new score was fine, except when he introduced two songs to soundtrack romantic scenes. The introduction of a contemporary pop sound seemed a misjudgement, raising the unfortunate spectre of Giorgio Moroder’s pop video mangling of Metropolis.


Plague of Zombies and Quatermass and the Pit were both great, concise Hammer films from the prolific mid-60s period. It would have been good if they could have been shown in double bills reproducing the conditions in which they were originally shown. The digital restorations made the vivid colours really come to life, and revealed details which had previously remained obscure, such as the posters for other Hammer films on the walls of the tube station corridors in Quatermass and the Pit (Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Nanny and The Witches, the other film which Nigel Kneale scripted for the studio at the time). Plague of Zombies’ famous dream sequence came over in all its queasily tinted glory, and Jacqueline Pearce’s performance remained impressive and affecting. Quatermass and the Pit was by far the best of Hammer’s Quatermass adaptations, with Andrew Keir’s Scottish professor hugely preferable to Brian Donlevy’s lame American tough guy. The stagebound London street and underground sets were impressive, and if some of the effects were rather exposed on the big screen and with the new digital clarity, it didn’t really matter. Barbara Shelley was as great as ever, particularly in her electrifying levitation scene, and there was a very effective score by Tristram Cary, including some unnerving pulsing and howling electronic sound.


Carl Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet was an incredibly powerful experience, its emotions magnified on the big screen. Its concentrated sense of place, and of weather, and its intimate observation of family and small community relations also came through with more clarity in the cinema, which allowed for a greater absorption in its constrained environment. The final scene is one of the most moving in all cinema, a miraculous resurrection which restores to life the woman who is the balancing heart of the family. It is both spiritual and very physical (the husband and wife Mikkel and Inger’s passion for one another is clearly evident, revealed in small gestures), the close-ups revealing their embrace in all its saliva and snot dripping emotional intensity. The messianically deluded Johannes, an utterly mesmerising performance by Preben Lerdorff Rye, is a mystical presence throughout, his madness an ambiguous blend of the genuinely visionary and the mental fractured. It’s perhaps the greatest religious film in the history of cinema.


At the opposite end of the spectrum, Husbands was John Cassavetes’ long-gestating and highly personal portrait of friendship, self-delusion and mid-life crisis. It’s a film which is unapologetic in its honest and unflattering examination of male behaviour, and it drew directly on the feelings and experiences of its three main actors: Cassavetes himself, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara (the latter of whom died earlier this year). All three became completely absorbed in the creation and inhabitation of their characters, and a real and lifelong friendship was forged during the filming. As for new films, Berberian Sound Studio was the standout for me, centring around a quietly commanding performance by Toby Jones (recently seen playing Alfred Hitchcock in the TV movie The Girl). The claustrophobic limitation to dimly lit studios and hotel rooms gave it a very interior feel which, as Julian House’s characteristically potent poster design suggested, reflected the story’s excavation and exposure of the reserved protagonist Gilderoy’s psyche. The fetishistic lingering over the dials and switches of the analogue equipment highlighted the sonic element which was so integral to the film, and it was also blessed by an atmospheric score by Broadcast. The film has just been released on dvd, and Broadcast’s soundtrack will by released on the 7th January. Two Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s follow up to Two Day in Paris, had considerable charm, largely due to the presence of Delpy and her co-star Chris Rock. The French family’s arrival in America pushes the original’s acerbic and surprisingly unflattering portrayal of Delpy’s home country and its culture to new and excruciating depths. I’m looking forward to her return in 2013 as Celine in Before Midnight, Richard Linklater’s Greek-set follow up to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.


Away from the cinema there was more Hitchcock in the form of Sabotage, his downbeat English thriller with the famous boy with a bomb on a bus scene – still shocking to this day; and the picaresque American ‘wrong man’ chase adventure Saboteur, with its Statue of Liberty finale presaging North by Northwest in its ‘dangling from a famous monument’ cliff (or torch) hanger. Young and Innocent, a lesser known 1937 English picture, was another wrong man on the road searching for the real killer thriller, light and jokey in tone. The long crane shot tracking through the seaside hotel at the end, finishing with a close-up of the killer’s eye, its twitching the detail betraying his guilt, is justifiably renowned. I rediscovered David Lynch, having unexpectedly been mesmerised by Inland Empire, three hours of undiluted dream logic which were a superb distillation of his surrealistic essence. As a result I went back to see Lost Highway and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which possessed this essence in smaller doses, along with the small town teen dramas and generic elements which I find less compelling. Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff were both excellent, quiet and slow-paced anti-dramas with considerable cumulative power. The former in particular was an almost unbearably moving story of one woman searching for her missing dog, reminiscent of Robert Bresson in its distanced by compassionate focussing on small detail and rejection of grand or melodramatic expressions of emotion.


There was some good Czech stuff, including Frantisek Vlacil’s magisterial medieval epic Marketa Lazarova, the similarly evocative Valley of the Bees, set in the same historical era, and the 1970 film Adelheid, a ‘haunted house’ story in which the ‘ghost’ is a living German woman. In the post war period, she is forced to become the housekeeper in the large, empty house which was once her home. Mala Morska Vila (aka The Little Mermaid) was Karel Kachyna’s beautiful and surreal 1976 retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, with wonderful costumes (and hairstyles) and a great score by Zdenek Liska (released on Finders Keepers Records). Milos Forman’s 1967 freewheeling comedy of bumbling official incompetence Fireman’s Ball was unsurprisingly the last he made in his native Czechoslovakia, and was shot by Miroslav Ondricek, just before he went off to work on If… with Lindsay Anderson. Some of the female actors who make brief appearances (this is largely a film about foolish men) are familiar from Forman’s earlier Loves of a Blonde, and Vera Chytilova’s Daisies. The 1972 film Saxana (aka Girl on a Broomstick) was good fun, and the soundtrack is once more available on Finders Keepers.


Other highlights included: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s bewitching Buddhist fantasies Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Tropical Malady; Terence Davies’ translation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea into his own inimitable style, with a fine central performance from Rachel Weisz; Roman Polanski’s rain and bloodsoaked Macbeth; Chris Marker’s La Jetee and Sans Soleil, watched in tribute to the French director who died this year; Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 film Deep End, set in Soho and a dilapidated East End swimming bath, and released in the bfi’s Flipside series; Wim Wenders’ Wrong Move and Until The End of the World, the latter clearly a huge self-indulgence, but I can’t help liking it anyway; Andrew Kotting’s Ivul, a fable about a boy who decides his feet will never touch the ground again, and travels across the treeline; Pasolini’s Accatone and Medea (with the Masters of Cinema releases of Porcile and Hawks and Sparrows awaiting); Michael Powell’s late, Australian-set portrait of an artist and his muse (played by James Mason and a teenage Helen Mirren) Age of Consent; Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, a highly stylised giallo (not usually a subgenre I have any liking for) and the deeply strange, Christopher Wicking-scripted Scream and Scream Again, a 1970 horror film which blends swinging sixties clubland nightmare with the neo-Nazi genetic engineering of brutal superbeings, and which features the ever-interesting Michael Gothard as a psychotic hippy; Jacques Demy’s bizarre but colourful musical A Slightly Pregnant Man (a typically hangdog Marcello Mastroianni, here married to Catherine Deneuve’s hairdresser); the wonderful The Ghost and Mrs Muir, with its lovely Bernard Herrmann score, an old favourite; Paul Kelly’s Saint Etienne-produced semi-fictional look at the pre-Olympic Lea Valley What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day?; Light Years Away, a strange allegorical fantasy starring Trevor Howard and Mick Ford which I’d remembered from childhood; Artemis 81, another complex fantasy from the same period, written by David Rudkin; Some great children’s TV fantasy, largely courtesy of the ever-reliable Network – Shadows and Dramarama Spooky (with fine stories by Alan Garner and Susan Cooper), The Boy Merlin, Children of the Stones (again), Escape Into the Night (an adaptation of Catherine Storr’s novel Marianne Dreams, which makes for an interesting comparison with Bernard Rose’s 1988 adaptation Paperhouse), and The Ghosts of Mottley Hall, with the marvellous Freddie Jones on fine blustering form (and he could bluster like no other); some excellent bfi documentary collections – London on the Move, Wonderful London (a fascinating insight into the capital in the 20s), Roll Out the Barrel and Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow; the landmark series 49 Up, observing the lives of a diverse collection of people from various backgrounds over seven yearly periods, which also came to its latest instalment, 56 Up, this year; and of course, a goodly amount of Doctor Who, including Robert Holmes’ hilarious satire of bureaucracy The Sunmakers, and the Pertwee adventure The Ambassadors of Death, available in colour at last and serving as a fitting tribute to Caroline John.

Nicole Lizée

There was an interesting piece on Radio 3 the other day by Saskatchewan-born composer Nicole Lizée, a premiere from last year’s Proms commissioned by the BBC and played by the Kronos Quartet. The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop paid homage to the pioneers of electronic music in Britain, its subtitle, Fibre Optic Flowers, referencing Delia Derbyshire’s poetic visualisation of her own sonic creations. Lizee has mixed conventional orchestral instruments with modern technology before, incorportating turntables and children’s electronic toys (the latter somewhat reminiscent of Birmingham post-Plone circuit-bending Speak and Spell maulers the Modified Toy Orchestra). Her Hitchcock Etudes for Piano and Glitch played with clips from the master of suspense’s films, creating digital loops and warped extracts from Bernard Herrmann’s soundtracks and growing fractured splinters of Bartokian piano from their repetitive phrases. These work very well with the manipulated video extracts from the films (rather like People Like Us’ work in a similar vein), which focus in particular on Hitchcock’s suffering heroines – Janet Leigh in Psycho, Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much and Tippi Hedren in The Birds. The section in which the piano echoes Norman Bates’ faltering speech patterns is a stuttering, glitchy take on Steve Reich’s music in the Different Trains mould, with its emulation of the rhythms and melodic qualities of vocal samples.

Kronos Quartet

There’s often something a little disappointing about the way the classical music world takes on, absorbs and diminishes sonic experimentation, translating it into the usual orchestral palette. Steve Reich and Terry Riley’s music has never seemed so exciting since they became feted and began to receive commissions from prestigious ensembles. The radio 3 introducer’s rather condescending remarks on the piece seem to sum up the general attitude, reducing it all to the level of a lighthearted, ‘jolly’ amusement – not really ‘proper’ music, you understand. The Kronos Quartet have always seemed willing to incorporate other elements into their soundworld, however, and this proves to be the case here. Oscillators, multi-track cassette decks and turntables are brought into play, and there seems to be a perpetual underlying level of sound ‘weather’, hinting at Delia Derbyshire’s atmosphere pieces such as Blue Veils and Golden Sands. The sound of a typewriter points to the Workshop’s use of concrete sounds, and also provides a link with unconventional works from the early twentieth century, such as Eric Satie’s Parade, which also introduced the hammering of alphabetical keys into the orchestral mix. Cut up elements of the sounds from the Doctor Who music are instantly recognisable, even in their isolated form – a bit of wobbulator bass here, some percussive, hammered piano string there, and the odd snatch of the whistling oscillator melody. Ghostly, reverbed echoes of a more genteel string quartet music hover like the sounds of an earlier BBC era, light music still lingering like ragged wisps of fog in the aether. The quartet, in its more unadulterated moments, sends out flickering, trailing currents of sustained tones which attempt to realise Delia’s vision of fibre optic flowers, glowing with subtly electronically enhanced luminescence. The violins produce bending, fluid glissandos at some points, which sound like the playing of Popol Vuh guitarist Conny Veit, and the whole ends with another nod to Krautrock/Kosmiche music, with a locked groove snatch of a line from Kraftwerk’s The Hall of Mirrors (‘even the greatest stars live their lives in the looking glass’). Perhaps a sly dig at the tendency to reflexively locate the birth of modern electronic pop music with another quartet beginning with Kr. Nicole Lizée certainly seems to be a potentially worthy successor to the great female electronic composers attached to the Radiophonic Workshop over the years. You can hear her piece over here until Thursday night – starting about 31 minutes in.

There was a wealth of great Scott on Radio 6 this weekend to mark both his recently released album Bish Bosch and his 70th birthday. Stuart Maconie’s Freakier Zone on Friday night had Rob Young, author of Electric Eden and editor of the collection of Scott essays and interviews No Regrets, on the phone from the chill climes of Oslo choosing some music which threw light on the sonic and lyrical aspects of the current work (which could be said to encompass the last three records – Tilt, Drift and Bish Bosch). Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto for 13 instruments is one of this ‘clocks and clouds’ pieces, in which nebulous miasmas of indeterminate pitches swirl around complex layers of metronomic rhythm. The scuttling harpsichord certainly resembles some of the more kinetic moments in the new album, suggestive of swarming insects seen close up in some scientific film. Jonny Greenwood’s music from the recent film The Master further demonstrates the influence of post-war modernist composition on the Scott’s current soundworld, with its debt to Penderecki’s early music evident in the swooping glissandos, tracing rocketing ascents and plummeting descents (perhaps alluded to in Scott’s line about ‘dropkick coloraturas fouling my ears’ in the lengthy piece SDSS 1416+13B on the new album, sung whilst similar warning siren string sounds arc woozily behind him). The remarkable opening scenes of Simon Pummell’s 2003 film Bodysong (a dizzying, overwhelming collage of births) are scored by Greenwood with a Messiaen-like sequence of unresolved floating chords which are also characteristic of Scott in his more transcendental moments, going right back to the days of Boy Child, Angels of Ashes and Big Louise (‘didn’t time sound sweet yesterday’).


Diamanda Galas’ Todesfuge from her LP Defixiones Will and Testament shares with recent Scott a fearless facing of the darkness, both out in the universe and down in more interior worlds. Galas’ articulate anger at the abuses perpetrated by the powerful is far more explicitly expressed, both in her music and in interviews, than tends to be the case with Scott. He tends to be more indirect, working through implication and suggestion, viewing the world through the subjective lens of the characters he creates. The tone of his recent records has tended to be either passive or distraught in terms of the vocals, the scenarios established from a certain distanced remove, as if observed by an indifferent deity, or seen from an internal, helpless perspective. The chaos and violence of the world has been found in the industrial clattering of its instrumental noise, its silences and tense moments of calm in the finer grain of detailed sound. Bish Bosch exhibits a new level of forecefulness, however, both in its more guitar-centric instrumental palette and in the vocals. Scott spits out scatological phrases with a mixture of relish and disgust, and snarls put downs in the guise of the dwarf entertainer Zercon. It’s a real shock when he suddenly screams the lines “what kind of unnatural son would do that to his own mother?”, the conclusion of a Freudian howl apparently quoted from the wisdom of Louis B Mayer.


Diamanda Galas manages both to inhabit the psyches of the victims of historical and political violence and oppression and to voice almost supernatural maledictions against the oppressors with her remarkably versatile voice. Schrei X is certainly one of the most disturbing records I’ve ever listened to, a portrayal of solitary incarceration and political torture which vocalises the sound of a mind coming apart. It relates directly to Scott’s work from the Walker Brothers track The Electrician onwards, which deals with similar themes of political torture from a subjective point of view. The lack of context could almost be said to render such claustrophobic vignettes as absurdist abstractions of the fundamentals of human psychology and power relations in extremis rather than pieces of specific political comment. They’re certainly very far from traditional protest songs. The title of Galas’ book The Shit of God also forms a link with Bish Bosch’s abiding concern with the gross matter of physical existence, with aging, decay, deformity and bodily ejecta (including the farting sound of escaping gas on Corps de Blah). This preoccupation with the physical extends outwards from the body into the universe. The protagonist of Phrasing is situated ‘neath a protein moon in a protein sky’ with a ‘protein song howling through the meat’. The grossly, intimately physical and the cold, interstellar spaces of astrophysics and cosmological distance are contrasted, but all are found to be subject to the same forces. On the microscopic scale, phrases such as ‘eukaryotic gobbler of gavotte’ and guanine restraint’ use the language of genetic science to place the individual within the pre-ordained dance of DNA’s spiral cage. In Corps de Blah, the summer stars of ‘Altair, Vega, Drogba and Deneb’ (three of which form the so-called Summer Triangle, as any viewer of The Sky At Night will know) ‘doff to Dentist’s stoop of moon above the haunches’. This is a wonderful imagistic depiction of the crooked crescent moon, which also serves to link the stellar (or sub-stellar) with the delicate and vulnerable body of the earth. Zercon (a very scientific name, homophonous with the mineral zircon, part of the metallic element zirconium), the desperate, scabrous dwarf jester of SDSS 1416+13B, tries to raise himself from the Earth and ascend to the heavens by sitting on a flagpole, greasing it behind him as he climbs to prevent anyone from following, and so that there’s no possibility of descent. He resembles the pillar squatting desert saints of the first millennium, and Scott may have drawn on Luis Bunuel’s surreal and satirical depiction of one such in his 1965 film Simon of the Desert. Bunuel’s film also In the end, however, entropy exerts its negative force with a vengeance, and coldness, darkness and silence begin to dull Zercon’s furious energy, born of rage at his deformity and the mockery which it engenders. His eventual heavenly transcendence is of a piece with his existence. Rather than being transformed into an element of some dazzling, eternal constellation, taking his place amongst the company of gods and heroes in the night sky, he becomes a brown dwarf star, imploding into shrivelled anti-radiance (the SDSS 1416+13B of the title, small, decaying and shit-coloured – an interstellar ball of dung).


The tragicomic play between spiritual aspiration and physical decrepitude is locked into Zercon’s very nature, his defining name which determines his inescapable fate. The definition of the mineral zircon in the Oxford English Dictionary has it ‘occurring as prismatic crystals, typically brown but sometimes in translucent form of gem quality’. Zercon can’t maintain his translucent form, but at least he shouts his defiance at the void, mocking its silence and asserting his own temporary physical being. The heavens, for all their glittering celestial promise, turn out, funnily enough, to be as much of a toilet as Earth and the material body he dragged around there. In his interview with Stuart Maconie on the Freak Zone, Scott describes the Roman numerals which punctuate the song as being like graffiti on toilet walls; phone numbers predating the invention of the technology necessary to give them meaning. He reads them out as if they were letters, holding out the promise of some codified numerical language which will reveal an underlying order and purpose to the universe. Again, the rift between spiritual aspiration or intellectual pretension and the reality of base physical matter produces a bathetic (and funny!) outcome. Or perhaps the secrets of the universe really are to be found scrawled on the walls of ancient toilets.


Another piece of music which Rob Young chose was the song Wakin’ on the Sky from the soundtrack to David Lynch’s film Inland Empire. Essentially a mumbled dream monologue propelled by a steady swing beat, it links in with the semi-recitative passages of Bish Bosch. Scott talks in his interviews both with Stuart Maconie and Jarvis Cocker (on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service show broadcast on the 2nd December 2012) about how the lyrics are the starting point of his compositions. The sounds or ‘arrangements’ (a word he hesitates to use) are wholly suggested by them. At times, indeed, the various sounds (and they are particularly varied on this record) seem like colour or shading for a kind of sound poetry, the words taking precedence over any conventional musical form and guiding the overall structure. The film Inland Empire in itself presents structural analogies with Scott’s new music, through its folding together of disparate and seemingly disconnected elements linked through a loosely associative patterning. Small or incidental details in one scene become central in another. Lynch, like Scott, has often been labelled pretentious or accused of deliberate obscurantism, his work easily or lazily dismissed as nothing more than weirdness for its own sake. Both Lynch’s films and Scott’s albums require a certain adjustment in expectations, in the ways of seeing or hearing, and above all a little patience in allowing sense to settle slowly (and possibly intuitively), without being forced.


It’s interesting that so many of the pieces of music which Rob Young has chosen to reflect aspects of Scott’s new work have cinematic connections. Ligeti’s work is well known from its use in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Extracts from his choral piece Lux Aeterna accompany a glide over the lunar surface, and the amazing Atmospheres carries astronaut Dave Bowman to Jupiter and beyond the infinite with suitably disorientating shifts between extremities of pitch, wavering and unstable drones, pointillistic scuttling and nervy stridulation. Scott’s interest in film is a longstanding one. He translated Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal into a narrative ballad, which introduced listeners into the world of his fourth solo LP. His Walker Brothers song Mrs Murphy (initially on a 1966 EP prophetically entitled Solo Scott, Solo John) was a kitchen sink movie in song form, its switching between multiple viewpoints making a connection between these early pop years and the similarly cinematic perspectives of Bish Bosch. Farmer In the City on his 1995 LP Tilt was dedicated to Pasolini, and his 2000 Meltdown Festival on the South Bank included a rich programme of cinema, including films by the likes of Carl Dreyer (Gertrud), Ingmar Bergman (Persona), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Chinese Roulette), Josef von Sternberg (The Shanghai Gesture), and Aki Kaurismaki (Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana and Drifting Clouds). The latter’s mordant sense of humour perhaps hints at a hidden comical side to Scott’s recent work. There was also an appearance by the great German actress Hannah Schygulla, star of many Fassbinder films, in her chanteuse guise. A performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot points to the centrality of his influence on Scott’s latterday work. He also talks about Robert Bresson in his interview with Jarvis (Bresson’s A Man Escaped was included in his festival programme), highlighting his spare style, focussing in on the small and relevant detail, and paring away of all he considered extraneous, leaving only some essential undramatised core of humanity. He also mentions the sculptor Giacometti in this context, with his fragile, skeletal bronze figures.


With these kinds of references, it becomes clear that he is in a sense still working a 60s vein. Not the one that many who still insist on seeing him as the pop idol or Euro-existentialist crooner which he has long put behind him would have him return to; rather a kind of resolutely experimental modernism whose fundamentally serious approach has long made it unfashionable, and which demands the undivided attention of the listener. It’s the kind of music which used to be quite prevalent, used in television programmes and even the odd children’s drama (Children of the Stones springs immediately to mind). It could be nostalgic for futurisms past were it not for the digital clarity and cold, glinting surfaces of the music, which locates its sound very much in the present day. As Rob Young comments, Scott is clearly a musician who has kept up to date with developments in musical and recording technology (if there is now any difference between the two). David Sylvian, whose song The Rabbit Skinner from his 2009 LP Manofon is Young’s last choice, made a similar transition from pop stardom to a more fractured, experimental music, and has also looked back to experimental music from the 60s and 70s for inspiration whilst still keeping abreast of modern trends. Rabbit Skinner involves the participation of free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker (who’s also played with Scott, and performed at his 2000 Meltdown Festival), who emerged from (and helped to create) the sixties free improvisation scene, playing in John Stevens’ pivotal Spontaneous Music Ensemble; John Tilbury, pianist in free improv group AMM in the 60s and interpreter of modern piano music by the likes of John Cage and Morton Feldman; and ‘glitch’ musician Christian Fennesz, very much a part of the modern digital musical world. Unlike Scott, however, Sylvian’s voice seems less integrated into the resultant sound world. Whereas Scott builds the sounds around his words in the studio, Sylvian’s voice seems tentatively grafted on here (as was noted in Ian Penman’s review of the record in the October 2009 issue of The Wire, in which he observes that it ‘sounds as if it was made in two very discrete spaces’). The song is still compelling in its own way, however, perhaps because of this inherent tension and the slightly awkward nature of the encounter. Sylvian’s voice has also remained fairly constant in its crooning softness (and there’s certainly more than a touch of 60s solo Scott in there) whatever context it’s fitting into. Scott, on the other hand, has adjusted his vocals to the material recently, as he discussed with Stuart Maconie. The lyrical content has brought out a more anxious, higher pitched register, which sounds more fragile and vulnerable. He talks about wanting to get away from the soothing, ‘tranquilising’ quality of his luxuriant baritone. But the voice of old is still there, and can be brought out for use when needed, particularly, as he points out, for the more conventionally songlike melodic phrases. An extract from the track Epizootics which Maconie plays perfectly illustrates this. It also has a passage which has a contemporary jazz sound, like something by Acoustic Ladyland or Polar Bear (or anything else with Seb Rochford in), which rather seems to belie Scott’s claim that he doesn’t listen to jazz anymore because it’s not doing anything that wasn’t already well-established in the sixties (again, harking back to 60s sounds).


Scott has always guarded his privacy, taking the view that we have neither the right nor the need to have any insight into his personal life. This has led to the establishment, whether cultivated or accidental, of an enigmatic persona, which spans the downward looking figure swathed in a veiling scarf and retreating behind the protective visor of dark glasses on the cover of his first solo LP to the one who appears today beneath the shade of his ubiquitous cap’s peak. He can be evasive in interviews particularly, as often seems to be the case, they are show more interest in his pop past than his current work. He seemed thoroughly at ease in the company of Jarvis Cocker and Stuart Maconie, however. Jarvis he knows of old, having produced the final Pulp album and invited him to perform at his Meltdown Festival. Both tend to be referred to by their first names, implying a certain familiarity. In Scott’s case, this probably arises from the intimacy of his 60s songs, as well as from the fact that his first four solo LPs were enumerations of the title Scott. Jarvis’s self-titling of his first solo LP may have been a small act of homage to his musical hero. The Freak Zone interview is particularly interesting, and Scott is audibly pleased at Stuart Maconie’s evident appreciation of and insight into the kind of music he’s now making. As they say their goodbyes and the recording fades down, we hear him saying that it’s the ‘best interview I’ve had so far’, which must be hugely gratifying for Maconie. Prior to the Freak Zone, there was also an hour long Scott mix chosen by listeners on the Now Playing show presented by Tom Robinson, which focussed on the 60s music and songs by admirers like Jarvis, Julian Cope and Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy. Perhaps the song which best reflected Scott’s current work was played before this mix, however: X-TG (Throbbing Gristle without Genesis P-Orridge) and Antony Hegarty performing Nico’s Janitor of Lunacy, from the recent Desert Shore project covering that LP with a variety of vocalists. Antony’s voice transforms the Gothic chill of Nico’s harmonium dirge into an eerie heavenly hymn, its reverberant echo seeming to come from someplace else – an asylum located beyond the range of normal, sane perception, and not necessarily a dark place, either. Bowie’s atmospheric new single/song Where Are We Now?, played near the start of the show, also bears the imprint of 60s Scott. His influence is still pervasive, and perhaps in years to come we’ll hear more pop musicians mining the deep inner territories which Scott is now exploring – out on his own again.

Nocturnal Snowfall on Kanbara - Hiroshige

The Snow Country exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in the Shiba Room at the Fitzwilliam Museum over Christmas provided some beautifully chill seasonal scenes in an otherwise damp and drear Cambridge. It also highlighted the importance of weather and climate in Japanese art, and in the woodblock print in particular. Whether in spring’s pastel massing of cherry tree blossom, autumn’s burnished blaze or winter’s leaching of colour from the world, transforming it into shades of white and grey, the seasonal markings serve to locate the depiction of particular places within a particular climatic quadrant of the turning year. In much the same way, Haiku or other traditional forms of Japanese poetry include details which identify the time of year and establish a sense of place. Such observation of seasonal atmosphere also draws attention to the passing of time and the transient nature of each moment. Most of the pictures on display in the Fitzwilliam dated from the golden age of the Japanese woodblock print in the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. It was a form which developed wholly within the span of the Edo Period (1600-1867). This was the age of the Shoguns, military rulers who controlled the country through a government known as a Bakufu, and who divided the country into feudal kingdoms. Edo became the capital of Japan at this time, a new city for a new era, with the Shogun’s palace located at its centre, surrounded by a moated lake. The Shogun’s palace was surrounded by a ring of grand residences in which the feudal lords and their retinues were obliged to spend a certain amount of time every other year in order to attend court. Somewhere beyond this aristocratic core, in typical downtown style, lay the Yoshiwara district, a pleasure quarter officially licensed by the government. It was here that the geisha, courtesans, kabuki actors, artists and sumo wrestlers gathered and performed. The rich cultural life which grew up in this area became known as ukiyo, or the floating world, a recognition of the fleeting nature of the pleasures it offered, and of the fact that it might move on elsewhere at any time. Indeed, it did of necessity in 1657, after a terrible fire which razed most of Edo to the ground. Yoshiwara became New Yoshiwara, suggesting that things would carry on in much the same way. The patrons of the new popular arts of the floating world tended to be the merchants, a class who were accumulating increasing wealth but were regarded as complete nobodies within the rigidly defined class divisions of the feudal society. Yoshiwara, and areas like it in other Japanese cities such as Rokujo Misuji-machi and the Gion geisha district in Kyoto, was where they went to spend their money and enjoy themselves in an environment relatively free of the strictures and controls of whichever Shogun was in power at the time.

Edo Nightlife - Hiroshige's Night View of Saruwakacho from 100 Views of Edo (1857)

The prints which depicted this world came to be known as ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world. The technique of producing multiple prints from one carved block made low-level mass production possible, making this an art which was affordable for a wide audience. The popular nature of its subject matter reflected this broad appeal. There are few pious religious scenes or noble depictions of historical triumphs here. Ukiyo-e tended more towards ‘star’ portraits of famous kabuki actors in their best known roles (a genre all to itself, known as Yakusha-e; portraits of geisha or other beautiful women (pin-ups, essentially) known as Bijin-ga; and depictions of familiar places in Edo or beyond (a form of souvenir postcard). There are also some prints in the exhibition from the later nineteenth century, dating from the Meiji period which began in 1868, the year in which Imperial power was restored, replacing the Shogun Bakufu which had held sway for some 250 years. It was a period which saw the opening up of the Japanese economy to Western trade after centuries of isolation. This was hardly a matter of choice for the Japanese government. It became evident that it was a course which had to be taken in the wake of the unsubtle diplomatic visit of US Commodore Matthew Perry with his accompanying armoured steamships in 1853. The sudden reconnection with the wider world also resulted in the conscious adoption by the new Imperial power of a Western outlook in terms of economic and political philosophy, which was increasingly reflected in the art and culture of the time, as later prints in the exhibition testify.

Japonisme - Van Gogh's copy of Hiroshige's Okashi Bridge - Sudden Shower Near Atake from the 100 Views of Edo

Taguchi Beisuku’s 1895 print Braving Heavy Snow – A Japanese Officer Scouts Enemy Territory, depicting a scene from the Sino-Japanese War, for example, could almost be a panel from a Tintin book. Its naturalistic view of its horseback military subjects and the direct representation of the icy wind through sweeping lines of blown snow largely reject the stylisation typical of woodblock prints from the first half of the century and before. Weather would have been suggested through the hunching over of small figures (in the style of the classic ‘struggling against the wind’ mime routine) or the bending of a stand of trees or bamboo. Similarly, Ogata Gekkko’s the Sleeping-Dragon Plum Tree at Kameido, again from 1895, has a much more naturalistic depiction of its two female subjects and the landscape through which they walk, the latter drawing on European watercolour traditions. At the same time as these transformations were taking place, Japanese artforms were having a significant impact in the West, with exhibitions in London in 1862 (comprising objects from the collection of Sir Rutherford Alcock, Britain’s first diplomatic representative in Japan) and at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867 providing a heady introduction to European audiences. This led to a fashion for all things Japanese, and for the adoption of elements of Japanese style into western art and design. The art critic Philippe Burtry coined the term Japonisme in 1872 to illustrate this trend. Artists like Monet, Whistler and Van Gogh were hugely enthusiastic about ukiyo-e prints, and those of Hiroshige in particular. The simple but expressively outlined depictions of people and places and the carefully balanced use of a limited range of bold colours, as well as the formal stylisation greatly influenced developments in their own work, and thereby in the development of western art as a whole. The fact that the West’s discovery of the riches of Japanese art should come about through a political imperative to open up global trade which would in its own turn compromise that very uniqueness and aesthetic self-containment which had led to its development is one of history’s many little ironies. The uncovering and exposure of these treasures established the conditions for their subsequent diminishment.

Ki No Tomonori - Suzuki Harunobo (1767-8)

The earliest picture here, Suzuki Harunobo’s Ki No Tomonori from 1767-8, shows the ukiyo-e at its most stylised, in a composition in which sinuous lines predominate. Harunobo was one of the best known and most celebrated artists of his day, and was central to the development of colour in the woodblock print (colour prints becoming known as Nishiki-e). He depicts the river with flattened lack of perspective, a rippled ribbon of fabric contoured with undulating lines of varying length, running roughly parallel and conveying a sense of rapid and complex flow. Sharply peaked waveforms at the top suggest a churning turbulence, which is in complete contrast with the serene and poised female figures in the foreground. All of these impressions are achieved with a simple spareness of form. The stylised effect is furthered by the use of raised relief lines on the paper which follow the contours of the riverrine flow, adding a further textural dimension. Such embossed relief patterns were made using a technique known as kimedashi or kimekomi, in which the paper was first pressed onto the uninked woodblock on which raised lines had been left exposed by the carver, and an impression made on the relevant area. It was often used to highlight the pattern designs or outlines of kimonos. The two figures in Harunobo’s picture both wear long kimonos. In the Bijin-ga pictures of beautiful women, kimonos descend to the ground in a few elegantly sinuous lines, evoking languorous, elegant poses and a general sensual curvaceousness. It’s easy to see the influence of such long, expressive lines on Aubrey Beardsley’s fin-de-siecle illustrations for the likes of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Kabuki Actors Segawa Kikunojô V and Bandô Mitsugorô III - Utagawa Kuniyasu (1826)

An 1826 print by Utagawa Kuniyasu provides a good example of the actor print, the Yakusha-e. Kabuki actors were real celebrities in the floating world, famed for particular roles with which they became identified. The title of Kuniyasu’s print, Kabuki Actors Segawa Kikunojô V and Bandô Mitsugorô III, identifies the stars, and would have provided a dramatic souvenir for the theatregoer; a film still before the fact. Snow scenes in kabuki plays were created through a combination of painted backdrops and, when required, flurries of torn up pieces of white paper to represent snowfall. These often formed a suitable dramatic setting for action scenes, as depicted by Kuniyasu here. The two characters engage in mortal combat, sword taking on heavy chain with weighted balls at its end. A spattering of white paint thrown across the two figures is suggestive of a spray of bleached blood. It makes the combat resemble a particularly intense snowball fight as much as a duel with deadlier weapons. The flicking of paint across the surface of the paper anticipates the action art more than a century in the future. The implied downward thrust of the brush lends a feel of violent motion which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the scene depicted. There’s another kabuki print, an atypical work by Ando Hiroshige, better known for his hugely popular landscapes. This one gives a more widescreen view which encompasses the entire stage, showing the different layers of chaotic action. It’s the culminating act of the famous historical play Chushingura, in which 47 Ronin (Samurai without a lord) avenge the death of their master. So well known is the play that it was even used as the title of a short electronic piece by Spencer Dryden on the Jefferson Airplane LP Crown of Creation. Hiroshige’s figures, seen in the middle distance and background, are drawn in the manner of characterful manga sketches. Manga was originally a word for study sketches of people, animals, landscapes or other subjects, although it’s now better known as a general description for the comics which are such a prevalent part of contemporary Japanese culture, and (less accurately) for the animated films which derive from them. Hokusai’s books of manga character sketches, the first of which was published in 1814, were another significant influence on Western artists in the latter part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating as they did the variety of ways in which nuances of character and appearance could be suggested in a few simple lines. In Hiroshige’s kabuki print, the postures of the manga-like characters convey a confusion of madly dashing action, a panicky middle of the night rush to defend against a surprise incursion into the sleeping compound of the Lord Muronao’s castle. A tiny smudge of red in the middle distance gives evidence of the violent struggle going on all around, an emblematic splash of blood on snow. Above it all, the full moon floats serene and calm, coolly surveying the melee below with distanced indifference.

Winter – Shinobazu Pond - Utagawa Kunisada (1858)

Other prints contrast warm interiors with the wintry world beyond. Utagawa Kunisada’s Winter – Shinobazu Pond from 1858 (a print designed to decorate a non-folding fan) has a geisha playing a shamisen (a lute which produces sharp, twanging notes like a louder and less metallic banjo) whilst the snow drifts down outside. Perhaps the snowflakes fall in unison with the firmly plucked notes which she produces. The island shrine in the centre of the lake creates an impression of isolation and tranquillity, a place apart from the busy noise of the city. Formally, the picture is full of diagonals. The screen which frames the lake and island is a grid set at a diagonal tilt, and the long neck of the shamisen forms another diagonal line, offset at a slight angle to the screen, creating a diverting variance from the prevailing symmetry. Keisei Eisen’s Overnight Snow in Yoshiwara from 1825 contrasts the cosiness of the interior of a courtesan’s room with the frozen cold of the exterior. The warm colours of the courtesan’s kimono pool around her solicitously kneeling figure whilst she brews up a kettle over the coals in an iron brazier. The snow-covered district outside through which people hurry with their bamboo umbrellas is framed in a circular window, like a landscape print within the print. Utgawa Kuniteru’s 1840 print Rolling a Snowball shows that fun can be had outside too, its scene of children at play designed to appeal to sentimental parents and grandparents. The group of children is building a snow rabbit, demonstrating that where snow settles, wherever it happens to be in the world, it will always be used as a material to sculpt something or other. Other children have lifted circular sheets of ice which had plugged barrels or ponds and have suspended them to use as gongs, producing shivery reverberations.

The form of ukiyo-e which really rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, and which proved particularly popular in the West, was the landscape print. These were perfected first by Katsushika Hokusai and then by Ando Hiroshige. Hokusai is represented in the exhibition by three prints. Poet Travelling in Snow from 1833 has the titular subject sitting on horseback on a promontory extending out into a lake, which almost looks like it could be precariously hanging over empty space. He gazes up at a tree which bends over the water’s edge under the weight of snow, a weary arch echoed by the horse’s bowed neck. The birds on the water beneath the arching branch look like a last few falling petals of blossom. The yellow tints to the snow suggest a slightly jaundiced light, and the whole picture is suffused with a sense of age and tiredness. We sense from his air of absorbed contemplation that the poet is composing lines about the scene in his head. Minamoto no Muneyuki Ason from 1835 has a group of hunters wrapped in assorted layers of clothing gathering around a fire. Its plume of smoke is rendered in wavering, raked outlines which make it look like an evanescent river in the air. The upward diagonal of its passage traces the prevailing direction of the night breezes. The men both lean away from the rosy flames and hold their hands towards them, conveying the intensity of both heat and cold, and the attempt to find a situation at some comfortable interface. A certain metaphorical element is evident, which is furthered by the fact that they’re standing outside of an abandoned, dilapidated hut, in which an old pot still hangs over a fireplace long since gone cold. The transience and mutability of life is once more an underlying theme.

Evening Snow at Ryogoku - Katsushika Hokusai (1833)

Evening Snow at Ryogoku from 1833 finds Hokusai at his most stylised, verging here on a semi-abstract form. The Ryogoku area of Edo, with its famous bridge, is seen from a bird’s eye viewpoint, a convention drawing on Chinese painting traditions. Ryogoku Bridge is thronged with a crowd crossing the river, depicted as a compressed series of interconnecting ovals – the brims of straw hats and the canopies of umbrellas. Its conglomeration of round shapes is reminiscent of the scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent in which a swarm of obstructing umbrellas descends the steps outside a building, shot from above. Lobate lozenges of fog cloud are laid across the rooftops like cut-out strips of paper, and there is a twining border incorporated into the print which resembles a pop art version of Celtic knotwork. The whole has very 70s poster feel, with its plumply rounded graphic style. It looks far more like the product of the twentieth that the early nineteenth century.

Kameyama – Clear Weather After Snow - Hiroshige

Hiroshige is the artist who dominates the exhibition, and who brought the landscape print to new levels of sophistication. He was also extremely popular from an early point in his artistic career, his travelogue series 53 Stations on the Tokaido Road (there are actually 72 prints) from 1833 being a massive bestseller. The Tokaido Road linked Edo with Kyoto, and was the route which local lords (or Daimyo) and their retinues would take when they came to the Shogun’s court. But it would also have been familiar to merchants and pilgrims to Kyoto’s shrines, and Hiroshige’s atmospheric and often humourous scenes would conjure up personal memories in those who bought them. There are two of the 53 Stations prints here. Number 16, Nocturnal Snowfall on Kanbara (scroll up to the top), sets subtle shades and gradations of grey against the white of the paper, with the farther mountains in the background blushed with an icy blue to emphasise their chill grandeur and distance. The snow cover softens sharp edges, making roofs and mountains seem slightly inflated and bulbous. The figures trudging towards the village provide muted elements of colour and sluggish motion against the surrounding stillness. Their hunched forms say much about the freezing temperatures and the biting cold wind from which one of them protects himself by wrapping his head within the protective cone of his folded straw umbrella. Number 47, Kameyama – Clear Weather After Snow has a diagonal compositional form, mountain slopes sweeping upwards across the frame until they reach the outer wall of Kameyama Castle, at which point the angle of the curve ascends sharply. It’s as if the castle wall is some final rocky outcrop marking the summit of the mountain. The retinue climbing towards the wall is glimpsed behind the tree and snowline, nearly swallowed up by the landscape and identifiable mainly through the oval shapes of their hats and the rectangle of the sedan they carry. The insignificant dots of colour they introduce into the monochrome surroundings are magnified in the washes of rose, yellow and blue which tint the sky with the promise of sunrise. Geometrical clusters of demi-hexagons at the bottom left form a hive which indicates the roofs of village houses. But they could almost be a range of distant mountain tops, which would put this castle at rarefied, celestial heights, the retinue at the end of a very long and weary ascent.

Evening Snow on Hira Mountains (1834) - Hiroshige

Evening Snow on Hira Mountains from 1834 has a massing of mountain peaks rising to the right of the frame, shaded in deepening densities of grey. Their craggy edges are softened by snow, and the whole range looks as if a sheet has been thrown over it, or as if it has been wrapped by some nineteenth century Japanese equivalent of the environmental installation artists Christo and Jean-Claude. A sense of receding perspective is achieved by leaving a mountain in the mid-distance unshaded with the prevailing greys, and depicting a far off range without the use of any solid, drawn outline. The white of the paper is left as a ghostly void between earth and sky, mountains which look like clouds (or vice versa), shrouded in an evanescent, ethereal obscurity lent by fading light and frozen, misty air. The turquoise blue of the lake in the bottom right of the frame provides a striking intrusion of colour into what is an otherwise grey world. Hiroshige produced a number of series of prints depicting scenes around his home city of Edo. Evening Snow At Asuka Hill is from his 1837-8 set 8 Views of the Environs of Edo. Once again it uses a chiaroscuro wash of grey to create a chill, wintry ambience. A hint of the woodblock’s grain shows through in the sky, suggesting the gusts of wind swirling the snow through the evening air. The bare branches of the cherry trees on the slope, whose blossoming is so synonymous with springtime, only serve to emphasises the bleak lifelessness of the season, but also hold out the promise of future renewal and rebirth.

Gion in Snow (1834) - Hiroshige

Gion in Snow from 1834 comes from his Famous Views of Kyoto series, and shows a group of geishas entering a shrine marked by the pi sign of a Torii gate. The gate is cut off at the top of the frame, which is divided diagonally (in a manner characteristic of many ukiyo-e prints) by the cool metallic blue of the fence which marks the border of the shrine’s territory. The geishas wear the raised sandals known as ‘geta’ (as do many of the figures in the exhibition’s pictures) which are particularly useful for negotiating the snowy ground. They’ve created a scattering of birdlike prints in the snow, a patterning suggestive of play, aimless wandering and sociable loitering. Gion, whose buildings are seen beyond the gate, was a well-known geisha district in Kyoto, and the gateway here marks the meeting point of the sacred and profane, the worlds of vivacious pleasure and solemn contemplation. The geishas passing through the gate suggest that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive, the border between them permeable. Ukiyo-e prints could go through many pressings if they proved popular (as Hiroshige’s invariably were). The first was generally a run of about 100. Later editions often exhibited a lessening in quality as the artist no longer collaborated directly with the etcher and the inker, and the woodblock itself grew worn or damaged. The Gion in Snow print in the exhibition was from a later edition, as can be seen from the crack in the roof resulting from a chip in the block. It has the fortuitous effect of giving the appearance of a gap in the snow cover where a small block has avalanched over the edge of the eaves.

Fukujawa Timber Yards (1857) - Hiroshige

Hiroshige’s prints reached new heights of formal innovation and imaginative vision towards the end of his life (he died in 1858 during a cholera epidemic which swept across Edo through the summer and into the autumn), as if he intuited that time might be short. His 100 Views of Edo (actually significantly more in number) from 1857 shows scenes from the life in the capital through a variety of striking perspectives, many of which have an almost cinematic sweep. They may indeed have been influenced by photography, which had arrived in Japan from Europe after the opening up of its borders. There’s certainly a new emphasis on the framing of the picture, and the unconventionally prominent placing of certain elements in the foreground. Number 112 in the Edo series, Atagoshita and Yabulani, contrasts the straight lines of the buildings on the left border with the snow-frosted bamboo reaching out from the right hand border with a branching, organic disregard for a rigid, compact symmetry. The canal running down the middle has a deeper blue thread in its central channel suggesting both coldness, swift currents and depth. There’s a vivid use of colour contrasting with the snowy whiteness: in the green clothes of the people walking by the canal, which echoes the evergreen shades of the bamboo stalks and leaves on the other side; in the varying blue shades of the water; and in shrine gatehouse in the background, whose warm red façade seems to defy the snow to settle. Number 106 in the series, Fukujawa Timber Yards, is a study in straight lines, both diagonal and parallel to the plane, of differing and broken length. It’s a composition only a few steps from the abstractions of the vorticists, celebrating the mechanised technologies of the early twentieth century. But Hiroshige offsets the straight lines with the rounded ones of the umbrella’s oval in the foreground and the bridge’s arc in the back, as well as the branching organic forms of the trees along the water’s edge, one of which is speared through by a bundle of timber. These make it clear that it is human agency which has chopped and ordered natural form into such simple, splintered geometries. The broken lengths of the timber slanting across the frame seems to connect earth with sky, and Hiroshige includes creatures from both elements at either end: Sparrows, which are possibly about to use the inviting the jutting ends of the planks as a convenient perch; and the small pug dogs playing in the snow. Both pairs of creatures seem wholly oblivious of each other, worlds apart.

Fukugawa, Susaki and Jumantsubo from the 100 Views of Edo - Hiroshige

Fukugawa, Susaki and Jumantsubo, number 107 in the 100 Views of Edo series, takes the idea of the bird’s eye view and makes it literal. The white circle of the eagle’s eye looks down on the landscape with godlike omniscience, and the scything arcs of its wings form a bracketing border embracing the upper part of the frame, leaving just enough space in the top right hand corner to fit in the cartouches common to all ukiyo-e. The span of its wing on the right side seems poised to sweep the landscape, lying small below, aside, clearing space for some new creative endeavour. Perhaps it stands for the artist’s brush, his ability to create and recreate the world anew. The double downward arches of the eagle’s wingspan form an inverted mirror image of the smaller contours of the largest of the mountain peaks below, adding to the powerful aspect of this mighty bird. The staves of a single barrel bobbing in the water share the colour of the eagle’s brown plumage, its insignificant, isolated form a small detail linking the elements of water and air. Perhaps its progress is what the eagle has its eye on, its fishy contents offering easy pickings. The marshy landscape between water and sky is created with economical strokes and minimal outlines at its edge, suggesting an intermediate area with no clear point of delineation distinguishing it from the bay it borders. The demi-hexagons used as a shorthand for distant agglomerations of rooftops are a characteristic device which recurs from the Clear Winter Morning in Kamayama print from the 53 Stations of the Tokaido some 24 years earlier. With the straight-lined trees looking strangely like stands of transmitters or clusters and trails of pylons, these could almost be imagined to be the outlines of futuristic domes protecting self-contained environments.

Mountain and River on the Kiso Road (1857) - Hiroshige

Perhaps the most impressive and large scale work on display in the Shiba Room was the three-panel print Mountain and River on the Kiso Road from the Snow, Moon and Flowers series of 1857. This late trilogy of majestic landscapes set out to evoke the atmospheres of winter (snow, of course), autumn (the moon) and spring (the flowers). The latter were represented obliquely through a swirling bed of floral whirlpools troubling the Pacific surface. All three are like miniature, self-contained worlds which invite contemplative exploration. The snowbound Kiso Road landscape depicts a stretch of hills whose folds and valleys are parted by rivers and waterfalls, joined by flimsy bridges, inhabited by precariously perched huts, bristled with spiky trees, and threaded with stepped passes and precipice paths traversed by tiny hiking figures. The smoothly humped contours of the hills make them look like the backs of sleeping leviathans waiting for a time when they can reawake, stretch and shake off all these pests and minor irritants. The streams and rivers are depicted in all their aqueous moods – calmly flowing, falling in sheer white noise cataracts and roiling in turbulent, eddying whorls. The whole landscape has an overarching feeling of stillness and silence, a removed air once more enhanced by the hovering perspective of the bird’s eye viewpoint. From up here, everything looks small, but not insignificant. Rather, the interconnection of the different elements of the landscape, both natural and manmade, become apparent, and humanity takes its place within the overall balance of the composition, of the world.

The Hollywood Costume exhibition at the V&A, which I went to see over Christmas, covered a century or so of classic American studio movies, and gathered together a stellar cast of phantom stars. There really was an impressive range and number of outfits on display, crowding three large halls and spotlit within suitably shrouded surrounds of cinematic darkness. In the first hall, the costumes were displayed as empty shells, hats raised on thin lengths of wire to balance on invisible heads. It drew attention to the obvious absence at the heart of the show, the vacuum left by the actors who had brought them to life. We initially left to fill in that void, to add our own spectral superimposition of recollected faces and expressions. As we progressed, however, the ghostly parade of uninhabited but still filled out costumes was replaced by the more solid form of dummies. They were black and featureless, still lacking all but the most notional of features, with just a little bit of stylised hair sculpted from stiff cardboard or leather to suggest character (Johnny Depp’s wild, windblown thickets of Bride of Frankenstein streaked hair from Sweeney Todd, for example). Finally, as we approached the final room (and the culminating shrine to Saint Judy and Our Lady Marilyn), small wafer-thin screens provided odd virtual-reality approximations of heads. It’s an acknowledgement of the squared-off frame through which we always view these legendary figures, and the carefully contrived fantasy which they convey, a fantasy which the costumes they wore did much to construct. The actors faces are caught in a frozen, slow-motion loop – so slow that it took a while to notice them coming to life at first. The effect was as ghostly as the initial invisibility, giving the effect of a projection of imprinted memory.

Marlene in Angel (1937)

The exhibition started on a high, the first star you were greeted with being Marlene Dietrich via her dress from the 1937 film Angel. This was a light Ernst Lubitsch comedy from the post von Sternberg period, by which time her image had been firmly established. The extensively jewelled, embroidered and fur-lined gown shows off the feminine side of Marlene (with a knowing wink added) – we’ll see her more masculine attire later. It was designed by Travis Banton, who worked for Paramount in the 20s and 30s, and also created Marlene’s extraordinary costumes for the von Sternberg pictures Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus and the delirious The Scarlett Empress, which established her complex, highly self-conscious screen goddess persona – lazily vampish, wearily erotic and beneath the veneer of indifference, deeply and irreducibly romantic. In the same introductory parade, Vivien Leigh’s green velvet dress with ‘Robin Hood’ hat from Gone With the Wind stands with prim correctness (we get to see her red velvet dress later, too, from this most extravagant of costume dramas). A different shade of green is displayed by Kim Novak’s woollen dress from Vertigo, offering a contrast in period, material and colour tone. The men are noticeably shabby in such company. Jeff Bridge’s towelling dressing gown, as loosely sported by The Dude in The Big Lebowski, faced the more elegant and expensively tailored outfits with defiant obliviousness to fashion or style. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp outfit is obviously one of THE iconic costumes in cinema history, and even if he has fallen from the pinnacle of fame and worldwide regard he enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was still quite a thrill to be able to peer so closely at such an instantly familiar get up. The trousers were authentically tattered and spattered with mud, the shoes holed and twisted, and the jacket frayed at the edges with buttons hanging on to a last wisp of thread. The painstaking creation of such a worn and beat look was achieved with a level of detail which went far beyond what would have been detectable on the screen, no matter how palatially gargantuan. It’s the perfect example of the way in which a costume goes a good way towards defining a character, one of the things which the exhibition set out to explore.

Katherine Hepburn in her Philadelphia Story dress

Some of the great designers from the classic Hollywood era were given their due. Many a glamorous picture from the 30s and 40s ended with the credit ‘gowns by Adrian’, a singular appellation akin to an artist’s signature. Its declarative ring and assumption of familiarity put him on a par with the actresses he dressed – Garbo, Harlow, Garland, Hepburn and Crawford. He was in fact Connecticut born Adrian Adolph Greenburg, who avoided the Anglicisation of names common in Hollywood by simply editing the last two out. The most eye-catching of Adrian’s gowns here was the dazzling sequined scarlet of Joan Crawford’s killer dress from the 1937 picture The Bride Wore Red. Its carmine splendour was rather diminished by the monochromatic black and white of the picture, however. The 1938 historical drama Marie Antoinette obviously gave him full reign to produce something of maximal extravagance for Norma Shearer to show off in the title role. It was Versailles via 30s couture, and we also got to see its modern equivalent nearby, with Kirsten Dunst’s costume for Sofia Coppola’s new romantic Marie Antoinette from 2006 also included, galleon-topped hat and all. Katherine Hepburn’s white dress from The Philadelphia Story was simple and elegant, its trim and line showing the influence of Classical Greek styles which was one of the trends of the time.

Greta is Queen Christina

Most exciting as far as I was concerned was the regal dress Adrian designed for Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, worn in one of the few scenes in which she forsakes her more masculine garb. It produces a priceless look of startlement from co-star John Gilbert when he sees her sitting on the throne in it, having previously encountered her under very different circumstances. Away from the illuminated black and white of its screen incarnation, it is a rather dull beige colour, its jewels rather evidently paste, its precious stones glass beads. But it was worn by GARBO, which gives it its own special aura. Ironically, the costume in the exhibition which caused the most excitement and stirred up the most publicity was the one which, viewed objectively, without this added aura, was the most drab and ordinary of Adrian's creations. It was, of course, the gingham apron dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, with ruby slippers adding a touch of Technicolor sparkle. The clash between the two elements of the costume serves to symbolise the two worlds between which Dorothy is torn – the homely, familiar, but limited one of family, hard work and realistic expectations and the more exciting but dangerous one of imaginative freedom and exploration. By the time I got there, the original ruby slippers, immensely valuable and no doubt hugely expensive to insure, had been replaced by reproductions (very good ones, mind you).

Marilyn tries to warm up Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot

Dorothy’s dress and slippers were saved until the end, a culminating point and perhaps the ultimate example of how a costume can become so much more than just material given pattern and design. Beside it was another costume which may have caused many to feel a little weak-kneed: Marilyn’s white dress from The Seven Year Itch. It was the very one which, raised by wafts of warm air from a New York subway, led to thousands of posters, parodies and statuettes. It was such a simple thing in the flesh (or rather cloth). But elaborate and showy fashions were almost redundant in costumes which Marilyn would be animating. The dress was made by Travilla, another mono-monickered designer. He went the other way from Adrian, dispelling any taint of the ordinary by expunging his Christian names (William Jack), happy to revel in the exoticism of his surname alone (i.e. to sound Latin and foreign). He was the man who clothed Marilyn in her greatest films of the 50s. Perhaps more interesting as a dress than as a piece of iconography like the Seven Year Itch costume was the tassled and beaded 1920s number with accompanying stole draped sinuously across the shoulders. It’s the one she wore in Some Like It Hot whilst singing I Want To Be Loved By You, teasingly playing with the shadowy border of the spotlight’s illumination and the lowcut line of the dress’ bust. She subsequently sports it during her attempted seduction of the duplicitous Tony Curtis’ supposedly frigid heir to the Shell millions on what she believes to be his yacht. It’s not, and he’s just a lowly saxophone player for hire, and it takes all his will power to maintain the fiction. Travilla’s association with the movies blossomed in the 50s, but he started out in the 40s, and won an Oscar early on for his work on The Adventures of Don Juan. Erroll Flynn’s rakishly piratical costume for the title role was on display, loose shirt and trouser allowing flexibility of movement for duelling foil action. Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean foppery was placed adjacent for contrast and to demonstrate continuity and influence.

Edith Head

Perhaps the reigning queen of Hollywood costume design, and certainly the most instantly recognisable with her distinctive black helmet of symmetrically cut hair and ubiquitous dark, round-lensed glasses, was Edith Head. She began work (uncredited) on the 1927 silent picture Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture) and continued through to the 1970s. Most of this long period was spent with Paramount Pictures, and she took on whatever the studio assigned her. During her golden period, spanning the 40s through to the 60s, she was incredibly versatile, responding to any challenge which was thrown down. She worked on film noirs (making Barbara Stanwyck’s costumes for Double Indemnity), comedies (including Preston Sturges’ run of classics in the 1940s, again with Barbara Stanwyck, and the Bob and Bing road movies), and musicals. In the latter category, the exhibition included a striking red, sequin-dazzled dress with open front worn by Ginger Rogers in the 1944 picture Lady in the Dark. Ginger sported it in a dream sequence set in a circus in which vivid colour was used with deliberate and prominent symbolism. Nearby, Nicole Kidman’s showgirl costume from Moulin Rouge, displayed on a dummy perched high with leg kicking out on a pendant swing, provided a modern contrast.

Tippi Hedren in The Birds

Head enjoyed a particularly fruitful creative relationship with Alfred Hitchcock on the pictures he made for Paramount and Universal in the 50s and early 60s. The green dress worn by the second incarnation of Kim Novak’s Madeleine in Vertigo was on show, as previously mentioned. Vertigo is a film in which costume and the identity it confers is a vitally important element. James Stewart’s character Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine’s grey suit, and the recreation of a silvery ‘ghost’ of a woman from the past, could almost be seen as an attempt to reverse time into a pre-Technicolor (or pre-cinematic) era of monochromatic black and white. Head’s light green skirt and jacket for Tippi Hedren in The Birds matches the colouring of the lovebirds she buys as a pointedly sarcastic gift for Rod Taylor’s character, and the equivalence lends her her own distinctive plumage. It’s a costume which carries a certain cool self-assurance, as betokened by the upturned collar. Hitchcock is intent on ruffling that assurance through his avian assaults, and the costume is finally torn and unravelled during the traumatic bird-filled attic scene. Head also worked with Audrey Hepburn on many of her films, including Roman Holiday and Funny Face (whose beatnik costumes were particularly her style). Although fashion house Givenchy provided the costume designs for Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Head was still the supervisor on the film. The black dress in which Audrey glides through the escalating chaos of her epic party was on display, as was her very different cockney flower girl’s costume from My Fair Lady. Head moved aside for Cecil Beaton on that one, who had after all designed the costumes for the original stage play.

Louise Glaum's spider dance costume from Sex (1920)

Other costumes played against type or expectation. Mary Pickford’s tomboy overalls and cap from the 1925 picture Little Annie Rooney pulled against her sweet and girlish image. An accompanying clip showed her scrapping with a boy with impressively unrestrained realism. Marlene’s tux and topper (made for nonchalantly flicking to a jaunty angle) from the 1930 von Sternberg picture Morocco (on which Travis Banton was once more the costume designer) emphasised her androgynous appeal and ambiguous sexuality, playing against the almost parodic femininity of her elaborately theatrical and ornately accessorised gowns. Joan Crawford’s waitress uniform from the 1945 noir melodrama Mildred Pierce was drably utilitarian, a conscious dimming of her customary glamour. She soon exchanged it for a fur coat with shoulder pads broad enough for an American football player. Carole Lombard’s costume (another Travis Banton creation) from the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, meanwhile, stood, or lounged (it was displayed on a dummy reclining in a suitably languorous pose) for the classic shimmering silver sequined sheath dress of the period, a figure hugging suit of armour in which to take to the battlefields of the evening parlours and nightclubs. Other costumes were inventive, offbeat or redolent of their age. Vanessa Redgrave’s Guinnevere outfit from the musical Camelot was a 60s loose and freely hanging woollen dress with the unusual decorative addition of pumpkin seeds sewn into the veil like dessicated beads furthering its wholesome organic look. Bessie Love’s costume for her character Hank Mahoney in Broadway Melody of 1929 was a reductive division into a bare outline of a chorus girl’s outfit, separated into its basic elements: a hollow top hat and a jacket with isolated shirt cuff bracelets emerging from invisible sleeves. Louise Glaum’s tantalising spider web outfit from the 1920 film Sex, which promises more than it actually reveals, was another startling music hall costume, in which her vampish character performs her man-catching spider dance at the Frivolity Theatre in New York. It’s the kind of outrageous and provocative design which Hollywood could only get away with in the halcyon pre-Hayes Code days. Claudette Colbert’s dress from her 1934 film Cleopatra gives the Queen of the Nile a very art deco look. Its lengths of green silk are pleated below a scarab brooch into streamlined folds. The art deco look of the brooch goes to show how much the discovery of Egyptian antiquities and art influenced the moderne style. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleo, on the other hand, drapes herself in a black negligee of suspiciously 60s vintage, with a tasteful asp design stitched in. Placed side by side, it has to be said Claudette’s costume puts Liz’s in the shade. Of course, we’ve not got Amanda Barry’s Cleo outfit to compare them both with. Neither wins points for historical accuracy, however.

Claudette's Cleo (picture it in jade green)

There’s a science fiction section at the back of one of the halls. Darth Vader’s beetle carapace costume from The Empire Strikes Back and Ming the Merciless’ imperial finery from the 30s Flash Gordon serials illustrate the importance of the cape to interstellar dictator chic. Ming’s velvet outfit, with its snazzy yellow zig-zag trim, is looking a bit faded now, like heavy curtains exposed to decades of sunlight. And the metallic instrument panel which forms Vader’s bust is in a shockingly shabby state. The surface is scratched and scuffed and its chunky plastic buttons look like they’ve been ripped off from a flat-top tape recorder. Rachel’s black and charcoal suit from Blade Runner, meanwhile, harks back to the 40s, its shiny material suggesting some synthetic fabric yet to be invented. With its exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched in waist, it takes a classic Edith Head look and projects it into a re-invented noir future (neon-noir, as the film has often been dubbed).

Charles Middleton's Ming the Merciless

There were a good many costumes from more modern films. Superheroes were posed in unusual positions: Spiderman halfway down the wall; Batman watching from the shadows on an elevated ledge; Michelle Pfeiffer’s PVC catwoman suit crouching above the exit door, its stitched together skin torn, leaving gaping gashes; and the Superman of Christopher Reeve’s incarnation suspended awkwardly above the milling spectators, low enough that the exceptionally tall might bump into his stomach and set him swaying. Superhero materials are synthetic, sometimes unappealingly so – Superman’s nylon, and Spiderman’s lycra. The latter could be (and no doubt was) digitally airbrushed on screen, but it looked uncomfortable, impracticable and inelegant close up. Warren Beatty’s lemon yellow Bugsy Malone trench coat attempted to reproduce the colour scheme of the comics, colours which are used on the page to identify and define character. Then there was the black trench coat from The Matrix, whose billowing tails were suspended into the gelid bullet time of the movie. Many others seemed either to be deliberately turning their back on glamour (Bruce Willis’ Die Hard t-shirt, the lovers’ practical outdoor clothing from Brokeback Mountain, Matt Damon’s melt into the crowd high street outfit from The Bourne Conspiracy). As far as women’s costumes go, they seem to be self-consciously harking back to the classic Hollywood period (Kate Winslet’s white pin-striped dress and hat from Titanic, Keira Knightley’s greening evening dress from Atonement), or to be stuck in a permanent recycling of certain historical periods (Cate Blanchette’s regal red costume from Elizabeth: The Golden Age or Judi Dench’s from Shakespeare in Love). They simply fail to hold the same level interest, for me at least. Only in gothic dramas and comedies such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (from which the Count’s capacious red dressing gown and Mina’s ancestral incarnation Elisabeta’s sumptuous gown were included) and The Addam’s Family (with Morticia’s velvet dress sharing the arachnoid theme of Louise Glaum’s webbed dress from Sex) was something of the old flamboyence allowed to shine through once more. Perhaps modern sensibilities are too attuned to the notion of camp, and too ready to detect it and dismiss it. The appetite for a certain sort of realism in dramas beyond the prescribed genres of the fantastic (where its influence has also crept in, leading to the decline of gothic stylisation) has dispelled the old, elaborately artificial fantasies. I guess they really don’t make them like they used to any more. The exhibition continues for a few more days (until the 27th January) before packing its trunks and taking the next liner back to the land of dreams.

The bfi restoration of Anthony Asquith’s 1928 film Underground was first shown at the 2009 London Film Festival, but it has now finally made it into a handful of cinemas across the country ahead of its dvd release in the summer. It was the first film on which he received a sole directing credit, having previously been assistant director on a picture called Shooting Stars in 1926. It’s an astonishingly assured debut, fully assimilating new techniques from the continent and handling what could easily have been an overheated melodrama with sensitivity and a keen observation of character. A prefatory title card informs us that this is to be a story about ‘workaday people whose names are just Nell, Bill, Bert and Kate’. Fortunately, that snootily patronising ‘just’ is not reflected in the ensuing film. The rituals, rhythms and places of work are central to the film, and from our perspective some 8 decades on give a fascinating glimpse of the differences from (and similarities to) our own lives. Nell works in a department store, Bill as a station attendant on the underground; Bert as a power station operative, and Kate as a home-based seamstress. The story revolves around their intertwining love stories, and the passions which they arouse. Nell becomes the focus for Bill and Bert’s amatory advances, whilst Kate pines after Bert (who lives downstairs from her), who firmly rebuffs her advances (telling her that it’s all over) until it becomes convenient for him to use her. We can tell that Bert is a bad egg from the start. When we first see him, he nabs a seat which a soldier and a sailor are vying to give up for a young woman standing in the aisle. When they remonstrate with him, he merely gives them a cock-eyed ‘what are you going to do about it’ grin from beneath his broad flat cap. When we first meet Bill, on the other hand, he is standing at the bottom of an escalator helping bewildered travellers find their bearings in the underground tunnels. He even rescues a puppy which has toboganned down the central slope and reunites it with its owner.

Nell (Elissa Landi) on the elevator

The tone of the film veers between light comedy, romance, psychological drama and action thriller. The transition between these wildly disparate moods is sometimes a little awkward, but never to the extent of unbalancing the film as a whole. The actors playing the four central characters are all great. Elissa Landi’s Nell seems very modern in her gestures and looks, a very 20s character who remains relatively unfazed by the attentions she receives from the two men. Her reactions, looks and gestures are naturalistic and unaffected, effectively giving the sense of an ordinary young woman of the period. Norah Baring’s Kate is a tragic female character in a more traditionally Victorian mould, working in overworked and underpaid conditions little changed from nineteenth century and wasting her affection on a love which is clearly one-sided (and which, in true Dickensian Nancy style, is wasted on a brute). She is more exaggerated in her emotional gestures, which seem to derive from an earlier, DW Griffith era of theatrical film acting. The scene in which she realises that she has been used by Bert and begins to mentally unravel is very affecting, however, partly due to its underplayed tone. We watch her circling the room, making small adjustments to the sparse ornaments and objects which dot its bare spaces, turning a plant pot around and picking at the earth and leaves. It seems like the prelude to a more tempestuous collapse (as indeed proves to be the case). Her nervous mental energy (and the overwhelming volume of work she has to get through to earn a crust) is also ably conveyed in the ferocity with which she turns the wheel of her sewing machine.

Bill and Bert are contrasted in their manner of courting. Bert takes a direct approach, effectively stalking Nell, confronting her in her workplace and later following her along the riverfront and forcefully pushing her up against an alley wall. She pushes him away and requests he lower the barrier of his arm leaning against the bricks. When he refuses, she simply shrugs and ducks under. His rough and cocky ‘you know you want it’ approach definitively fails to impress, and suggests that Bert is really only after one thing. Bill on the other hand takes her on an omnibus ride out to a more idyllic and pastoral riverside setting on the outskirts of the city (out Twickenham way?), where they enjoy a picnic reclining beneath a solid oak tree. A ragged but winsome urchin creeping up on them with an eye on their sandwiches adds a mild element of tension, and may serve as a reminder of Bert with his flat cap. But he ends up sharing their meal and bringing the two closer together in a natural and unforced manner (as opposed to Bert’s unsubtle approach), his temporary presence hinting at a long-lasting relationship and a future family.

Bill (Brian Aherne) and Nell in the emergency stairwell

Brian Aherne, as Bill, mixes a winning hesitancy and boy next door charm and courtesy with hints of a more calculating and worldly side. This latter aspect sometimes uses the mask of innocence to its own advantage. It is he, after all, who first thwarts Bert’s pursuit of Nell by tripping him up at the foot of the escalator and then delaying him further by dusting him down with sarcastically fussy solicitude. Cyril McLaglen’s Bert is fairly open and transparent in his rough charms. There’s little guile to his character, and his casual and throwaway attitude to romance is clearly well known to the regulars at his locals, who exchange knowing glances at his mooning over his latest ‘girlfriend’. It is only after a confrontation in the significantly male environment of the pub (the only woman is the stolidly indifferent barmaid, who remains rooted to the counter throughout) that his wounded pride drives him to take reprisals against his rival, which swiftly escalate beyond his control. He does so by using Bill’s appearance of bland innocence against him, with the intention of revealing the more violent aspect of the man who tripped him up on the escalator and laid him out in the pub which lies beneath. The antagonism from this point on exists more between the two men, with the women reduced to secondary, reactive roles. They could be seen in terms of a Jekyll and Hyde split, expressions of conflicting sides of the male persona. As such, the final epic chase becomes a struggle between these normally co-existent halves which have gone to war against each other to assert dominance.

Power Underground - Edward McKnight Kauffer

If it’s taken on a literal level, the highly charged and thrillingly shot chase sequence is a coda which is jarringly out of register with the rest of the film (although very exciting in its own right). It takes us to the heights of the power station roof before descending once more to the depths of the underground in a way which connects both locales. The underground is a place apart from the regular world above, a warren of the unconscious in which normally suppressed feelings are given a tentative flicker of expression. The power station is seen to be the source of the underground’s power, and is also the symbolic representation of powerful human passions, the generating heart where they connect with full, blinding force. A similar connection was made linking machine and muscle, overground and underground in Edward McKnight Kauffer’s striking futurist-inspired Power Underground poster produced for the Underground in 1931 (one of those featured in the set of Royal Mail stamps issued to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first London underground train). The final chase feels like it could have been lifted from one of Hitchcock’s wrong man suspense thrillers. Perhaps it’s not so inappropriate, given the underlying theme of doubles and split personae which runs throughout Hitch’s oeuvre, and the tendency of his heroes to be a little bland or complacent, his antagonists often more characterful, sympathetic or even attractive (albeit psychopathic).

Chelsea Blue - Lots Road Power Station

The film is a delight for transport enthusiasts, as well as for anyone interested in the history of London. There is a good deal of location shooting which gives fascinating glimpses into the inter-war city. Bill and Nell’s trip on the top of the omnibus harks back to the ‘phantom rides’ of early cinema, in which the camera would be set up at the front of a tram or train to film the passing parade. Here, the focus is obviously on our two romantic leads, the camera facing backwards, but we do get to see the buildings receding on either side. The conductor sells them a ticket from a wooden rack of pre-prepared specimens (producing an audibly excited exclamation from one bus enthusiast in the audience). This was long before the introduction (in 1953, if you must know) of the ‘Gibson’ paper ticket-roll machines which were suspended from the conductor’s neck, with their mini-hurdy gurdy style dispensing handles and adjustable printing blocks in convenient reach at the front. Nell’s walk by the riverside during which she is accosted by Bert also offers a background picture of the working Thames, barges drifting past and the chimneys of factories and power stations belching smog-creating smoke into the London skies. We also get a panoramic view of the Thames in West London from the sloping rooftop of the Lots Road Power Station in Chelsea Creek during the climactic chase sequence, a plume of steam marking the progress of a train across the Chelsea Harbour bridge far below. Lots Road provided the electricity for the Metropolitan Line, the first underground line to be opened (in 1963, 150 years ago). It remained independent from the other lines, which were amalgamated within the dominant Underground Group, until the unification of all London transport systems within the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation set up in March 1933 (and better known as plain old London Transport). The underground scenes centre particularly around the escalators whose distinctive uplighting ‘torches’ seem to place them at Picadilly Circus. The station had been redesigned by London Underground architect Charles Holden and was only officially opened on the 10th December 1928, which might explain the confusion of so many of the passengers Bill has to help out. Holden would go on to design many of the distinctively moderne stations on the northern end of the Picadilly line (Arnos Grove and Southgate being particularly good examples), as well as the fabulous art deco headquarters of London Underground at 55 Broadway, which boasts sculptural reliefs by Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein on its external façade. The Picadilly escalators are seen in all their glory, with their wooden treads, bronze fittings and triumphal rows of evenly spaced uplit torches.

Picadilly escalators

There’s some lovely observational comedy concerning underground etiquette (or its breaching) in the opening scenes. Acquaintances spot one another across a crowded carriage and lean over to conduct a conversation through an archway of arms. Bert reads his neighbour’s paper, much to his irritation (made visible in the traditional manner by shaking and readjusting the broadsheet), and it is pointedly thrust into his hands in roughly folded form as the other chap departs the carriage. A portly gentleman takes up a position in the aisle, holding on to the hanging knobs on either side, and Nell is hypnotised by the gentle sway of his belly as the carriage rocks in its forward rush. A policewoman (or is she a conductor?) standing stiff and erect beneath her brimmed upturned bowl of a hat repels all eye contact with her basilisk glare, sending one meek chap shrinking behind his paper after his offer of a seat is batted aside as a base insult. With the war and the female workforce which it engendered now a decade or so in the past, the idea of women in uniformed positions of authority was evidently once more a cue for wry amusement, and the use of the matronly ‘old dragon’ stereotype. She does crack a sisterly smile when Nell thwarts Bert’s advances by chucking his beloved cap away, though. There is much tactical manoeuvring involving the offering of seats and the acceptance or refusal of the offer. This tends to be a less than selfless attempt on the part of gentlemen to move nearer to an attractive young woman, or a counter move on the woman’s part to move further away. What with Bill’s use of the escalator as a means both to trip up his rival and to make initial contact with Nell, the crowded carriages and corridors of the tube seem to be portrayed as a natural theatre for flirtation and the possibility of turning a chance encounter into something more lasting.

Underground etiquette

The regimentation of the escalator into slow and fast lanes (standing on the left, striding up on the right) has yet to become ingrained, and ascent and descent is something of a hustling free for all. Notices instructing passengers which foot they should step off with are in place at the bottom, and there is an amusing scene in which a foot soldier lugging two bulging kitbags is sent into a panic of confusion by this simple advice. This is largely due to the looming presence of his fearsomely moustached sergeant major behind him, who observes his stumbling disembarkation with an air of exasperated familiarity. The walls are absolutely plastered with advertisements, most of them a great deal smaller than those found today, and filled with text rather than enticing passers-by with the kind of arresting images which we have become so inured to today. It gives the corridors and station walls a rather cluttered look. There is no sign of the posters designed for the Underground Group, and later London Transport, which reached a consistently high standard of artistic distinction under the guidance of publicity director Frank Pick. These were displayed in especially reserved spaces outside the stations and in the entrance halls and lobbies. The more generalised advertising we see here was restricted to corridors and station platforms. Pick would also ensure that there would be a more standardised aesthetic approach to the visual side of the tube system once the London Transport body co-ordinating all aspects of the capital’s transport was created in 1933. When we catch sight of a tube map, it is still one of those drawn by FH Strangemore, composed of curving lines which attempt to follow the contours of real geography. Frank Pick’s famous design, reducing the complex web of intersecting lines to a pipeline schematic of geometrical semi-abstraction, would not appear until 1933. When Nell gets off at Waterloo Station near the end of the film, she does so by opening the gate at the end of the carriage herself. The pneumatic automatic door system, operated by the driver, had evidently yet to be introduced on this line. By 1930, it would be a feature of all the trains, which were by then standardised throughout the system, so this scene was about to become historic even as the film was made. The opening title cleverly incorporates the ceramic UndergrounD sign outside a station, each letter contained within its own tiled block, with the bracketing U and D larger than the rest. These signs, and the graphic setting of the word, were used on the buildings which Leslie Green designed for the UERL (the Underground Electric Railways Company of London) and on their posters and publicity. The UERL predated the amalgamation of different and competing lines within the Underground Group, of which it was the major and controlling company.

Anthony Asquith

Asquith demonstrates an inventive cinematic eye throughout. Although the story he tells is fairly conventional and clearly aimed at a popular audience, he is not averse to using innovative or experimental techniques to express its more interior aspects. He was familiar with the latest films from Europe through his membership of the London Film Society, which screened pictures by the likes of Fritz Lang, FW Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein at the New Gallery Cineman in Regent Street and the Tivoli in The Strand. Alfred Hitchcock was another member and regular attendee. The Society was set up in 1925 under the aegis of the renowned newspaper critic Iris Barry. She was assisted by Ivor Montagu, an enthusiast for the more experimental form which some European directors were taking. He had travelled to Germany in 1925 and written an article for The Times about the new German cinema, and was familiar with its practitioners, some of whom he knew personally. He would go on to work with Hitchcock on the post-production of The Lodger after its fate became embroiled in the internal politics of the Islington Studios where it was made. Rather than impose his views and act like some heavy-handed studio enforcer, as Hitchcock feared, he voiced his enthusiasm for the film and encouraged him to emphasise the expressionist elements, extending them to the design of the intertitle cards. The Lodger, also restored by the bfi and released in a new print last year, provides a good point of comparison with Underground. By the time of Asquith’s film, the European techniques have been fully absorbed and raised to a new level of technical sophistication. The cameras have also moved beyond the studio, displaying a greater facility for location shooting. Such freedoms, and the mature and complex visual style which had developed by the end of the 20s, would be severely curtailed by the arrival of sound and the cumbersome equipment which accompanied its near universal adoption, and it would be a long time before they were rediscovered. Asquith himself, after his next film A Cottage on Dartmoor, would retreat from his innovative and highly cinematic style, producing the kind of conventionally theatrical fare which would be a dominant part of British cinema for the next few decades; Pictures like Pygmalion, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Crane shot - location shooting in Chelsea Creek

The expressionist use of shadows in Underground can be seen in the distorted grid stretching along the angle of the ceiling and walls from the skylight outside Kate’s room. When she comes out to look over the banister and watch Bert’s return, she is caged within these bars of shadow, one of which covers her eyes like a blindfold. It’s a perfect visual shorthand with which to introduce the character, trapped as she is within the cage of her own lingering longing for the man she watches, and by the unrelenting demands of her work which imprisons her within her room and her inescapable poverty. The play of shadows also provides a humorous counterpoint to Bill and Nell’s initial encounter in the well of the emergency staircase, in which they awkwardly arrange a first date. As the two look at each other and speak in nervous bursts of speech, their shadows on the wall behind them diverge from the movements and gestures of their progenitors, embracing and kissing in what amounts to a projection of Bill’s (and maybe also Nell’s) sublimated desires. The Lots Road power station, with its towering, smoking chimneys and monumental, block-like mass looks like a futurist fortress, and is the perfect locale for tilted and skewed expressionist angles. The underground sign at the start, which serves as the title card, is also set at a diagonal slant, a statement of stylistic intent. Asquith also includes shots which fill the screen with abstract geometrical patterns, as if he were drawing on the work of Futurist, Russian Suprematist or Constructivist, or (nearer to home) Vorticist movements. All were intent on producing an abstract or semi-abstracted art for the machine age in which the straight line and grid pattern predominated over the rounded, branching forms of nature. A close-up of the wooden escalator steps has their revolving rectangles, with their raked perpendicular striations, passing hypnotically before our eyes. There is also a shot which pans along a lengthy row of angular windows high up on the wall of the power station, which gives a sense of measured out time and distance (Kate is running towards the entrance at this point).

Superimposition and rapid intercutting familiar to Asquith from the montage techniques of Russian filmmakers like Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov is also employed to add new psychological and metaphorical layers to the story. In a scene set in a street corner pub, shots of the patrons and their interactions with Bert are interspersed with brief, repeated inserts of snooker balls being struck by cues and the hammers of a player piano jangling against the strings. Both imply an element of sound and serve to conjure up the atmosphere of the place in a visual manner. Later, the increased frequency of the inserts also creates a sense of rising tension as Bill enters and a confrontation brews up. When a fight does break out, the final sucker punch is shown as a point of view shot from the perspective of the unfortunate recipient (Bert). The fist flies towards the camera until it almost fills the frame (and we can imagine it cracking the lens), at which point we fade to black – the blank screen of unconsciousness. The shot is subsequently replayed as a loop superimposed over Bert’s bloodied face as he walks home, its obsessive reiteration a projection of his furious sense of humiliation. Later, as Kate runs towards the power station, she seeks Bert’s glowering face projected over it. This serves the direct narrative function of indicating his presence in the building, the projected object of her breathless dash. But it also makes the subjective link between the driving power generated by the dynamos within and the electrifying, force which Bert seems to exert on Kate, driving her on as if her will was no longer her own. When Bert emerges from the power station for the final pursuit, his hair has risen into a crazed expressionist shock, a wild mad scientist thatch worthy of Lang’s Rotwang or Dr Mabuse, or Robert Wiene’s Dr Caligari. It’s as if he’s absorbed the power from the generators and has turned into some fizzing electrical monster.

Rooftop chase - river view from the Lots Road Power Station

There are further individual touches which add an idiosyncratic flavour to the film. During the frantic fight in the lift, a blind man (and we know he’s blind because he’s go a notice hung around his neck which says so) gazes off in the opposite direction. This creates a certain tension in the viewer, whose attention is partially drawn away from the action. Comparitive shots of Kate and Bert preparing themselves in front of their separate dressing table mirrors in their separate rooms (she readying herself to approach him, he rapidly changing to head off to the pub) make the gulf between them apparent, and tell us how futile her hopes of winning his non-existent affections are before we even see them meet, or learn of their former relationship. Incidental characters also add depth and enriching detail to the bustling and crowded city portrayed in the film. There’s the starving urchin in the countryside, a penniless street artist by the river, and an old man playing a jig on a penny whistle to entertain a straggling group of children, as well as the odd assortment of well-worn regulars at the pub and the diverse cross-section of working Londoners on the tube. The opening and closing shots make imaginative use of the blackness of the tunnel to emulate the blankess of the screen before the film frames begin running through the projector. At the beginning, a white dot just off centre expands to reveal itself as the tunnel mouth as the train in which we are enjoying a ‘phantom ride’ (with the camera point of view placed in the driver’s cab) approaches a station. It’s like a cinematic variant on the theatrical curtain being raised on the drama about to unfold. At the end, the process is reversed, the darkness of the tunnel expanding to enfold us, the curtain lowered to bring the story to a close.

Platform seating - Waiting at Waterloo

Silent film soundtrack maestro (and sometime playwright – he wrote a very touching play about Laurel and Hardy) Neil Brand provides another of his fine programmatic scores, which responds to the shifting moods and registers of the story with an appropriately wide-ranging use of orchestral styles. He also employs sounds from his orchestral palette for several moments in which instruments are played onscreen (the penny whistler, a mouth organ wheezed by the urchin, and Bert’s whistling of The Boy Friend), incorporating them smoothly into the score rather than resorting to direct imitation. There’s a quotation of the tune ‘Where Did You Get That Hat?’ for a scene in which Bert tries on a series of the pancake-shaped caps he favours, which is a nice little touch typifying the care he takes to match the music precisely with what we are seeing on the screen. Brand’s classy score it the icing on the cake for this excellent restoration of film which will only add to Asquith’s reputation as a rediscovered master of British silent cinema.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Robin Guthrie Trio played at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter last week with the venue appropriately laid out café style with round tables and chairs. This was music to drift off into a reverie rather than dance to (unless a gentle rocking sway counts), and a seat to slump into allowed for a far more comfortable experience of the dreamlike sounds Guthrie produced from his jade-coloured guitar. The days of the Cocteau Twins are long gone, as are the vocals overlaying his floating effects-sculpted guitarscapes. I have to confess that I never quite warmed to Elisabeth Fraser’s sugar hiccough reveries; they strayed a little too far towards indie feyness for my tastes. But I loved the Cocteau Twins sound, and in particular their collaboration with Harold Budd (who himself appeared at the Phoenix last year), with whom Guthrie went on to collaborate on a couple of lovely duo albums. This set up was thus ideal as far as I was concerned. It had something of an ECM trio feel (Terje Rypdal or John Abercrombie in their more atmospherically-textured, less jazzy moments, perhaps), including the international cast: Guthrie from Scotland, of course; his bass player Steve Wheeler from Australia; and drummer and percussionist Antti Mäkinen from Finland, providing the Scandinavian jazz element. Wheeler and Mäkinen provided a solid underpinning for the gossamer light chordal washes Guthrie stroked from his guitar. Wheeler thrummed chords and firmly plucked riffs propelled the more rhythmic passages, whilst Mäkinen used all manner of techniques to add percussive sounds which were often as much about adding colour as keeping time. He used brushes to create gently susurrating rhythm suggestive of waves or breeze, hit small pinging notes on a tiny bell or produced spiralling metallic sounds from a dangling sculpture which looked like the peeled skin of an aluminium apple.



Guthrie turned to his laptop between each song, his face lit by its pale glow as he switched to the next programme of sounds. The guitar here was electronic rather than electric, a means of triggering sounds which was far removed from any strutting rock gestures. The chords which he gradually layered together like delicate sheets of gold leaf lacked all attack, growing with a gentle sonic incline before slowly fading in whispering reverberations. Using a panoply of pedals to loop, echo and delay the sounds, Guthrie was sometimes left standing motionless in the bluish spotlight, contemplating the heavenly harmonic clouds he’d set to drifting around the room. He cut an avuncular figure, face characterfully rounded out with a fulsomely rustic beard, his guitar resting comfortably on a gentle tumulus swell of belly. He lacked a microphone, and wasn’t about to waste time chatting with the audience, but smiled benignly throughout, sipping appreciatively at a glass of red towards the end. At one point, the other two left the stage and left him on his own, creating a solo of quite stunning beauty, a slowly expanding ambient swell with seemingly infinite reverb which reminded me of moments of Charalambides or Jackie-O Motherfucker at their most expansive and ecstatic. To show that the music could also provide the basis for more standard song forms, support act Mark Gardener, ex-Ride front man, returned to perform a piece he’d written at Guthrie’s studios in France. It was a rousingly anthemic encore, leading into a final example of the trio at their most vigorous, which made you think that yes, this could be the basis of a great off-kilter dream pop band. But who needs that when you can enjoy such sublime instrumental textures on their own merits, without any unnecessary distractions.

Raymond Cusick has rightly been hailed for his design of the Daleks for the original Doctor Who story in which they appeared in December 1963, only the second serial in its very first season. It was a design to which that much abused and overused term ‘iconic’ can for once be confidently and accurately applied. As ever with BBC productions of the time, there was a good deal of contingency involved, practical considerations of cost, time and utility playing a role in what was eventually produced. Terry Nation’s original intention, backed up by producer Sydney Newman’s determination to avoid ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was to create something which steered clear of the usual man in a rubber suit clichés of monstrous SF aliens (clichés which Dr Who would later wholeheartedly embrace, often to great effect, and on occasion not). Nation’ descriptions in his script were left vague; he described machine-like creatures moving on a cylindrical base with mechanical arms and a lens eye on a flexible stalk. Cusick took this basic scripted thumbnail sketch and set to creating a workable model. He originally thought of a straight cylinder, which really would have looked like the mobile dustbins which the Daleks were later to be characterised as. But he realised that this would be distinctly uncomfortable for actors who would have to stand stooped inside for considerable period of time. It would be far better for them to be seated, which would also make them easier to operate. The leg room thus required led to the forward flaring expanse of their ‘skirts’, which, with the inspired addition of the half-tennis ball bumps giving it a textured design, had the appearance of a thorax separate from the dome-capped ‘head’. This gave some sense of a body, which added to the terror they inspired: they were alien, but not wholly other. It’s a characteristic which Steven Moffat cleverly exploited in a recent story which played on the horror of being forcibly turned into one of them. The angular thrust of their skirt also added to the menace of the dalek glide, lending its leading edge the aspect of a plough, designed to cast aside all in its path.

Daleks vs. Mechanoids - The Chase

The grilled ‘neck’ beneath the shiny skull cap also played a practical part, allowing the encased actor to see out, whilst the flashing ‘ear’ lights (perhaps the Daleks’ only cute feature) were added so that it would be clearer which one was talking (or shouting, as tended to be the case with these irritable creatures). The lights would be flicked on and off by the actor inside in morse-like flashes corresponding to the lines being spoken. The actor could also operate the whisk-like gun, which Cusick added, and also gesticulate with the sucker. As director Richard Martin ruefully recollects, the plunger was a matter of contingency. They wanted some sort of mechanical arm, but the budget was already at full stretch, so they had to make do with what they could find lying around – a sink plunger (which no doubt still had to be accounted for). This served as an all-purpose if rather impractical hand. Ironically, this underwhelming facet of the Dalek design was the first we ever saw of them, as they menaced Barbara at the end of the first episode before being fully revealed at the beginning of the next. A magnet was attached beneath the black rubber sucker so that it could carry metal trays. In the first Dalek story, one of the creatures brings in some food on a tea tray to the Doctor and his imprisoned companions, thus proving for all time that this was an alien invented by an Englishman. Rob Shearman would later make effective play with years of mockery occasioned by the plunger in his Dalek story in the revamped Russell T Davies series. A soldier unwisely takes the piss and finds out exactly what the sucker is capable of in a horrific scene which ensures that the appendage will never be seen in the same jokey light again.

Dalek vs. Dracula - The Chase

The Daleks were an immediate success, in no small part due to their immediate visual impact, their classic profile so to speak. Cusick must have looked on with a certain amount of weary resignation as he saw his original work licensed out to become a phenomenal marketing success from the mid 60s through to the seventies. Die cast toys, board games and play costumes were mass produced to meet insatiable public demand. Whilst his design might have been distributed in a wide variety of forms throughout the households of Britain (and beyond), as a jobbing staff designer at the BBC he presumably saw not a bean of the considerable profits accrued over the years. Of course, if people wanted to replicate the actual Dalek, the mutated mess which lurked within the protective metal casing, they could have done so in a budget fashion following that taken by Cusick. The slimy claw briefly seen protruding from a tarpaulin covering the corpse Ian has scooped out of the decommissioned Dalek’s lid was the hand from a joke shop gorilla costume smeared in Vaseline.

The first monster - petrified Magneton

His contributions to Doctor Who went well beyond the fashioning of the Daleks, however. He worked as a designer on the programme for a little over 2 years, from December 1963 through to January 1966, when he bowed out in style no the epic 12 part Dalek story The Daleks’ Master Plan. With his work for The Mutants, the serial later to be known as The Daleks, he can lay claim to having created a number of Doctor Who firsts: its first alien, a rather charming chameleon-like creature with upright eye stalks called a Magneton, whose dead husk the Doctor and his companions chance upon (he would later design another alien with snail-like eyestalks for the Keys to Marinus, this time rising from that pulp SF classic, the squirming brain in a bell jar); its first alien environment, the petrified forest on Skaro, whose haunted strangeness is economically conveyed through some trails of white lattice-like growths; and the first alien city, the Daleks’ metropolis. This looks magnificent, and only a cynical curmudgeon or someone whose senses are oversaturated with digital dazzle, leaving them unwilling to expand upon the model in their own imagination, would point out that it was evidently just a collation of toothpaste tube lids, plastic screws and box corner reinforcers.

Dalek City - knick-knack dystopia

Its interiors also feature Doctor Who’s first corridors, walled with a semi-reflective material which gives it the look of some alien alloy. The running down corridors aspect of Doctor Who was later to become something of a cliché, but it was used so much because of its simple effectiveness (and, of course, because it was economical). The suspense is heightened when something might appear around the corner at any moment. Cusick cleverly pointed to the fact that this city had been constructed with non-human needs in mind by making the doorways oval and low-lying. He also created an alien symbology, with dials and controls covered with ‘pie-chart’ designs. Futurity was indicated, 60s style, by the use of a lot of Perspex, with blinking lights and diodes behind suggesting complex computational functions in constant operation. Cusick would also make impressive use of Perspex in The Keys to Marinus, with the giant machine brain which provides the calculating judicial Conscience of the planet represented by a large transparent platonic solid, an all-knowing, all-seeing dodecahedron.

Perspex mind - the conscience machine in Keys to Marinus

Cusick seemed to specialise in the more science fictional aspects of the first two series, mostly leaving the historical backdrops to others. His broken down spaceship in The Rescue had the kind of deglamourised shoddiness which would later be a feature of the Nostromo in Alien (and Ridley Scott was a BBC designer at the same time as Cusick). He created another spaceship as working environment for the Sensorites, a story for which he also imagined another convincingly alien city. The climax of The Rescue featured a particularly effective and atmospheric set – the Dido temple, with its columnar row of smoking braziers, draped tapestries and its round table and altar decorated with Aztec-style designs. In low light shone through drifting smoke, this looks very impressive indeed. Cusick also explored the domestic quarters of the Tardis in the third story, Inside the Spaceship (or The Edge of Destruction). Curved plastic beds descend from the walls, and there is an automatic food dispenser which synthesises whatever is programmed in. Shades of the Nutrimatic in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although no one asks for a cup of tea. He also designed the Tardis’ rather unwieldy ‘fault locator’, a bank of instrumentation which took so much effort to set up that it soon quietly disappeared.

Ian and Barbara inspect the drains in Planet of the Giants

One of his greatest triumphs can be found in the oversized sets he designed for the Planet of Giants, which outshone the rather dull story in which they featured. A miniaturised Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian make their way through rocky canyons which turn out to be the gaps between garden paving stones, and come across dead specimens of ants and earthworms. Later, Ian and Barbara unwisely climb into a the cavernous interior of a briefcase and are carried into a laboratory. Here, there is a great aluminium sink set, with very convincing plughole and adjacent plug with linked chain. There is also a king-sized spiral-bound notebook, a tangled slope of cloth-insulated phone wires and a mighty telephone handset, as well as a match on the scale of a caber, which Ian and Susan heave up like battering ram, taking a short run-up to strike it against the side of a shed-sized matchbox.

Viewing the Op Art caves - The Chase

Cusick did design the sets for one of the historical Whos, however: The Romans, which encompassed a rather impressive villa, a stretch of Roman road, a marketplace, various rooms of the Emperor Nero’s court, prison and a galley slaves’ rowing deck. All of this with a budget which was fiddling change in comparison with the money thrown at the Taylor/Burton Cleopatra a year or so earlier, and which would make Carry On Cleo look like a lavish epic. Perhaps his greatest challenge came with two series whose episodic nature required multiple sets, often of an elaborate nature. The Chase finds the Doctor, Barbara and Ian pursued by the Daleks across space and time, stopping off on a desert planet, Aridius (the vaulted, labyrinthine underworld of which is impressively Piraneisian); the top of the Empire State Building (where Peter Purves does a hilarious turn as a stereotypical Texan before turning up later as a completely different character, Steven, who would become one of the Doctor’s companions for the next year), the Marie Celeste (a well-realised ship’s deck set); a haunted house complete with gothic monsters and paraphernalia, which turns out to be an abandoned, robot-populated fun fair, Frankenstein’s House of Horrors (and it’s great fun seeing the Daleks confronting – and getting a pasting from – Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster and freaking out at a wailing female ghost); and finally, the planet Mechanus. Here, there are some entertaining giant ambulatory mushrooms which envelop any who linger too near with their umbrella-like caps; some great op-art caves; and a fantastic alien city which follows the fungoid theme by resembling something that has grown from rotting humus. It looks like something that Roger Dean might have drawn for a 70s Yes album cover (triple gatefold, of course). There's a miniature shot I particularly enjoy here of a model mechanoid travelling across the arcaded bridge between the cliffs and the main city. Cusick also gives us a mechanical adversary for the Daleks, the Mechanoids, which resemble trundling Faberge eggs. There’s a great climactic battle between the two, taking place on another excellent city interior set, which of necessity involves a lot of intersecting ramps along with white arching architecture which makes it all look like the bisected section of a seashell.

Prog rock cities - The Chase

This was all tremendously demanding, with much being expected in a short space of time. The scriptwriter, Terry Nation, had also put Cusick through his paces on an earlier story, The Keys of Marinus. Here, the plot coupon structure requires the gathering of various segments of a key to gain control of the powerful conscience machine before the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan can leave the planet. This meant that Cusick had to develop and build a completely new environment for each episode. There was the initial island of glass surrounded by an acid sea (another fantastic model alien environment), with a pyramid atop a mountain containing the all-powerful machine; a beach spiked with shards of black glass (and with some rather nifty one man submarines beached upon its shores – Perspex, of course); a lavish palace and banqueting hall; a trap laden laboratory in a tropical region which is besieged by carnivorous plants; ice caverns, economically achieved by using cellophane shot in low reflective light; and a museum, courtroom and city interiors. Considering the time strictures, with the erection of sets, run throughs and filming of each episode required to be completed in one day, this was asking an incredible amount.

Isle of glass in an acid sea - Keys of Marinus

Cusick outlined his approach as being a matter of ‘beg, borrow and steal’. This is put to great effect in the palace scene, in which he has evidently raided the historical props department to create a motley scene of decadent excess. He also enjoys wrecking it, showing the tawdry and dilapidated reality which lies behind the hypnotic illusion implanted in the minds of the questing travellers. A comment on extensive use of illusion which he had to resort to achieve what was required of him, perhaps. Cusick noted that Nation tended to be a bit vague when it came to specific description in his scripts. He would, he said, write something along the lines of ‘they enter a white featureless room’. When he asked Nation about this, he told him that it was up to him to supply the detail. There is indeed a scene in Keys of Marinus in which Ian and the Doctor walk into a blank, featureless room, its only prop a battered table and a rusty tin cup. Under the hypnotic spell of the aliens who run the place (those brains with protruding eye stalks mentioned earlier), they see what we don’t – a fantastically well-equipped (cyclotrons and all) phantom laboratory. Maybe Nation was having a little self-effacing dig at his own shortcomings here.

Far from armless - Ian fails to approach idol with due caution in Keys to Marinus

Cusick also designed a marvellously fierce-looking idol for the tropical episode, which grabs the curious who approach too closely and swivels round to deposit them in a secret room beyond. Cusick had wanted mechanical arms, but had to make do with real ones thrust through convenient holes. There’s never any doubt that they’re real, and that they will obviously come to life, but the whole thing still looks pretty good. Cusick, ever his own harshest critic, and recollecting things with unsentimentally acerbity, observed that it ‘didn’t quite work, but it was cheap’. His assessment of his work on Keys of Marinus, an experience which he evidently felt was absurdly overdemanding, was particularly damning. Asked whether he was proud of anything he’d done on the story, he replied, with the air of a true perfectionist, ‘I can really say no’. I’d say he was wrong, and that he had much to be proud of there and elsewhere.

It’s become something of a tradition over the past few years for the Animated Exeter festival to stage an open air spectacular for the delight of the local citizenry. The cathedral has proved the obvious Beer stone backdrop for inventive animated projections which have used its windows, towers and buttressed walls to tell tales both haunting, surreal and amusing. This time, events moved North to Belmont Park, and, under the direction of the Mischief La-Bas company, mixed projections with theatrical storytelling and historical re-enactment to thrilling effect. It was the climax of both the Animated Exeter and the Extreme Imagination festivals, which had conjoined at various points, encouraging the half term hordes to get involved in various creative literary and artistic activities. Philip Reeve, author of the wonderful Mortal Engines books, had written a new story for Extreme Imagination, The Exeter Riddles. This envisioned time leaks breaking out around the city, caused by some mysterious power source, and depositing bewildered denizens of past eras at various familiar locales. An interactive game, Time Winders, produced by Slingshot, took place around the city over the weekend, with players following clues to trace the source of the leak before the rifts in time wreaked havoc and reduced all to smoking rubble. Posters were to be found in bus shelters and shop windows promoting the efforts of the Ministry of Historical Defence and calling on citizens to come to their aid, for the sake of their city and ultimately Britain itself. They were printed on a red background in an authoritative, utilitarian wartime and post-war type, with which people have been refamiliarised through countless Keep Calm and Carry On variants. It really was a widely co-ordinated effort which seamlessly grafted an entertaining and expansive fiction onto the everyday world.



The posters directed us to Belmont Park where, on a chill Saturday evening, the boundaries were dramatically lit with flaming torches. Ambling around the perimeter, we came across idling Georgian soldiers in fine green tailcoated uniforms; a foppishly attired and cheerfully loquacious Civil War parliamentarian with foil at the ready to run through any royalists who might cross his path; World War 2 land girls and air raid wardens celebrating victory with a hearty singsong which they encouraged us to join them in (handily unfurling a banner on which the words to We’ll Meet Again were daubed, in case we didn’t know them); a group of squatting cavemen and women (or perhaps survivors of some future apocalyptic war – the time crack spread outwards in both directions from the present) warming themselves around a fire in front of their hide-draped bivouac; a group of Roman legionaries, their polished helmets and handsome plumes glinting in the baleful glow in the far corner, which flickered over the stone building which used to be the lavs; and a number of figures clad in dusty white, their faces fixed plaster masks, who stiffly descended from a tiered platform at various intervals to stiffly totter about like horror movie mummies before returning to their set positions. They were statues from the façade of the cathedral magically brought to life (rather like those on the front of York Cathedral at the start of Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) we later learned. Officials wandered around, clearly identifiable in the modern manner by their hi-vis jackets, printed with the MOHD logo.



Over and above all this milling activity, the insistent sound of heavy drilling shattered the night air, originating from the Mining Area, marked as such by another MOHD sign and barricaded off. A large scaffold framing a black screen indicated that this was where the climactic show was to take place. Two officials dressed in black uniforms (recalling a previous gathering in the park in the thirties, when Oswald Mosley addressed a rally of blackshirts) stood atop its upper walkway. Their amplified voices called everyone in, crossing searchlights also drawing the attention of all in the park and no doubt beyond as well. They summed up the crisis in the city, reporting sightings of cavemen in John Lewis (shrinking from action movie explosions on widescreen TVs, perhaps) and Romans on the cathedral green. The source of the time leaks had been traced to the city’s heartstone, which had been reawakened, and which lay directly below. Our collective effort was now required to summon up the spirit of Sidwella, the local saint whose tale of murder in the cornfields and the bubbling up of a renewing spring where her blood was shed blends elements of Pagan and Christian symbolism (and who was central to the Isca Obscura animation projected onto the cathedral walls a couple of years ago). This call to mental fight, in the Blakean sense, combined with the Attlee-era poster style and the clipped accents of our expositing ministerial narrators, pointed to a subtle underlying element of nostalgia for a time of post-war consensus in which all were intent on creating a public society which worked for the good of all, rather than slaving for a private and corporately governed world. And, of course, the whole shebang benefited from funding by the Arts Council, City Council and Heritage Lottery Fund. This was a rite in which the lingering ghosts of Mosley’s fascists would be exorcised.



With deep bass rumbles and pulsating electronic music reminiscent of the F&%* Buttons (whose childishly profane name prevented them from fully benefiting from the use of their music in the Olympic opening ceremony, another celebration of the collective post-war spirit) the heartstone rose from the behind the boards screening off the mining area, its pulse of throbbing life gradually increasing in a wakening accelerando. Cut into facets like a precious jewel, its blank, white, hexagonally outlined surface provided the focal prism for a procession of reversed moving pictures, whirling us on a rushing journey from the Exe Estuary to the modern-day Exeter. Here, passersby retraced their steps, walking backwards presumably to deposit whatever was in their bags back onto the shelves. It reminded me a little of the eyeflash succession of subliminal images in Yellow Submarine, when the magic vessel takes off from Liverpool and flies off towards psychedelic seas, passing through a rapid montage of English land and cityscapes before plunging into the water with the final crashing chord of A Day in the Life. Perhaps I should mention that I’d seen a screening of a sparkling new digital print of the film at the Animated Exeter festival a couple of days previously. On the big screen and with such beautifully clear (and hand restored) colour, I saw it anew, in a completely fresh light. There were many delightful sequences, with the Eleanor Rigby collages having always been a favourite. There was also the surreal pop art invention of the sea of monsters, the retina-dazzling op-art of Only A Northern Song, the splashily impressionistic Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and the wonderfully celebratory All Too Much – enlightenment with an assurance of getting home in time for tea.

Back to the dawn of man

Back to Belmont. As the heartstone became a black hole hoovering time into its depthless vortex, backward running local news and home movie footage faded from colour to black and white, calendar pages mentally stripped off and blown away on chronological winds. Further and ever accelerating regression swept us back through medieval and prehistoric periods, cheekily refracted through familiar movie images: knights and monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Rachel Welch as a fashionably coiffured primitive in One Million Years BC, and ape ancestors grazing the plains in 2001: A Space Odyssey, their grunts given echoing recognition by the cavemen whose curiosity had led them to mingle in with the watching crowd. Even the pre-human was a given a look-in, with an animation from David Attenborough’s evolutionary survey Life On Earth run backwards, beating a retreat from land to a simpler, unicellular life drifting through the oceans, a de-evolutionary folding-in. The computer graphics of the late 70s used in Life On Earth now seemed as much an antediluvian relic of the past in the context of the rapid evolution of digital and communications technologies as the primitive transformations they depicted. They also served to show how far animation technology has developed in just a few decades. To demonstrate, we were about to witness an evolutionary leap worthy of the mystical denouement of 2001.

Finally, with time spooled back and packed away in the heartstone’s crystalline archive, Sidwella made her appearance. Drifting spectrally across the screen, she was a wide-eyed starchild, serpentine strands of red hair (still stained with sacrificial blood?) wafting like water weeds in an invisible aetheric current. She cupped the stone, dense with accumulated time, in her hands, gazing at it with open wonder and infinite curiosity. It glowed with a responsive light, and then its glittering facets shattered, dispersing in luminous shards. The stone, now blank and drably featureless once more, sank back into the ground, its recession marked by a cascade of sparking light spitting and crackling along the top of the screen. Sidwella drifted back to whatever otherplace she’d emerged from, and the MOHD officials emerged once more to declare that all was safe once more. The destructive forces of fragmentation and disharmony had been dispelled by our collective summoning of the feminine spirit, and harmony and rightness was restored. A small celebratory firework display lit the sky behind us, reflected impressionistically in the windows of the terraced houses beyond the park railings, the skeletal wintry branches of the plane trees in front forming charcoal silhouettes against the blossoming explosions. Disaster has been deflected by collective effort, and by the invocation of a female spirit of renewal and open-hearted compassion. It was a message of hope for everyone to take home with them, a light in dark times. It was a positive, imaginative and wonderfully staged event which brought a bit of magic to a bitter February night.

Some interesting stuff has made it onto the Oxfam online shop from the Exeter Oxfam Music and Art HQ, courtesy of yours truly and my backroom compadre Kevin. It features delights from the well-lit rooms of pop and jazz, as well as more obscure fare skulking in the shadowy corners. The 1972 LP The Seven Ages of Man, a kind of progressive soul jazz concept album, has a nice cover illustrating the stages of life via 15th and 16th century woodcuts by the likes of Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Holbein. It boasts an intriguing mix of top class British jazz and soul musicians, many of whom worked tirelessly as session players, but who here have the opportunity to take to the spotlight. I say British, but in fact the stellar quartet of backing singers all came over from America to forge substantial careers in these isles. Pat (better known with the initial prefix PP) Arnold travelled to the UK with the Ike and Tina Turner Soul Revue and stayed to record a number of records on Immediate, with labelmates Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces writing a number of songs for her. Doris Troy also came to Britain from the US, making the transition from singing with soul legends like Solomon Burke and The Drifters to providing backing vocals for a diverse array of countercultural artists, from Pink Floyd and the Stones to Vivian Stanshall and Nick Drake (she sings with PP Arnold on Poor Boy from the Bryter Layter LP). New Jersey born Madeline Bell (her first name misspelled on the back cover) was a longtime vocalist for and friend of Dusty Springfield, as well as a solo artist in her own right and member of early 70s pop group Blue Mink. Rosetta Hightower was a member of the 60s American girl group The Orlons before crossing the channel, where she recorded with the likes of John Lennon and Joe Cocker. Lead vocals on the album are taken b Perry Ford and Kay Garner. Ford was in the 60s British vocal trio The Ivy League, who had a number of hits and also provided backing vocals on The Who’s first big single I Can’t Explain, before Pete Townshend and John Entwhistle made it clear that they were up to the job themselves. Garner was a tireless session singer who also worked with Dusty, and many, many others, as well as being one of vocal trio The Ladybirds, who had the dubious pleasure of being regularly featured on the Benny Hill Show. Her voice also graces many an advertisement from the 70s and 80s.



On tenor sax and flute we have Tony Roberts and Harold McNair. Roberts worked with folk and jazz double bass player Danny Thompson in several contexts over the years, from his 1967 trio with John McGlaughlin through to his later fusion group Whatever (and that’s jazz-folk rather than jazz-rock fusion). He also played on several records by Thompson’s fellow Pentangler John Renbourn, including the early music flavoured The Lady and the Unicorn and The Black Balloon, on whose title track he played some exquisite flute. He was also involved in several incarnations of Ian Carr’s seminal 70s jazz-rock group Nucleus. Jamaican born McNair had the privilege of playing with Charles Mingus when he came over to Britain in the early 60s. He bridged the worlds of jazz and pop, adding his impressionistic flute lines to a number of Donovan tracks and playing on numerous other records. He also created the gorgeous pastoral moods which added such emotional impact to Ken Loach’s film Kes, his flute tracing the swooping and diving flight of the kestrel. Thankfully, this soundtrack was released a while back on Trunk Records. Sadly, McNair was dead by the time the Seven Ages of Man record was released, having passed away in 1971 at the terribly premature age of 39. Bassist Brian Odges played with Michael Gibbs and was part of the group, alongside Tony Oxley and John Surman, on John McGlaughlin’s classic 60s jazz LP Extrapolation. He was another session musician who pops up in all sorts of surprising places, from James Bond soundtracks and Goodies LPs to The Walker Brothers 1978 LP Nite Flights, which saw the beginning of Scott’s artistic renaissance. Pianist Gordon Beck, who also provides some of the string arrangements, was another element in Nucleus, and played in Tubby Hayes’ groups in the 60s.



Talking of Tubby, one of the monumental figures on the 60s jazz scene, we have a re-release of his 1964 LP (under the guise of the Tubby Hayes Orchestra) Tubbs’ Tours. This was put out on the Mole Jazz label, the publishing branch of the late lamented record shop which was over the road from Kings Cross Station and the Scala cinema (also long gone, although still operating as a nightclub and music venue). The label features their wonderful logo, a mole in check trousers and braces blowing hard on his tenor sax. Despite the title, this isn’t a live record. The tours are in the mind only, and refer to a loose theme taking us on a whirlwind trip around various corners of the world. Hence we have The Scandinavian, the flute melodies of Raga, Parisien Thoroughfare, Sasa-Hivi (it’s complex time signature pointing to an African influence) and Israel Nights, before they bring it all back home to identify The Killer of W.1. Tubby takes up his tenor and flute, but also demonstrates his percussive talents on vibes and tympani. Other members of the big band include Jimmie Deuchar on trumpet and mellophonium (a horn associated with the Stan Kenton band), and tenor titans Peter King and Bobby Wellins (who created the legendary solo on Starless and Bible Black on Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood LP). More driving hard bop comes courtesy of a reissue of Jackie McLean’s 1965 Blue Note LP Consequence, on which he is egged on by ever-energetic trumpeter Lee Morgan, and supported by pianist Harold Mabern, bassist Herbie Lewis and Ornette drummer Billy Higgins.



Veering off on more abstract improvisatory paths, Paul Rutherford’s 1978 LP Neuph is in the understandably underpopulated genre of solo trombone (and euphonium) albums. I say solo, but there is in fact one short duet here – his dog joining in rather with a rather mournful whine to accompany some trombone thoughts, which be may be a canine idea of musical euphony, or simply an indication that a bowl of Pedigree Chum is required. Rutherford (who is familiar to a couple of folks working here from South East London days of yore) was a mainstay of the 60s and 70s British improvisation scene. He played in a trio with double-bass wrangler Barry Guy and guitarist Derek Bailey, was a temporary part of John Stevens’ ever-shifting Spontaneous Music Ensemble, a key component of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, and a founder (along with Bailey and Guy) of Iskra 1903. The latter displayed his radical left-wing inclinations, Iskra (or The Spark) having been a revolutionary newspaper edited by Lenin in the early 20th century. He did this for a while from a small office in Clerkenwell, now enshrined in the Marx Memorial Library. The LP uses overdubbing to achieve a layered sound, allowing Rutherford to build up a compositional bed over which to improvise, or simply to have the pleasure of playing with himself. The whole record acts as a showcase for his extended techniques and finely tuned ear for lower end musical textures.



Rutherford’s approach circled the borderlands of contemporary composition and was congruous with certain post-war modernist trends in classical music. John Cage introduced elements of chance into his compositions, although he tended to shy away from any notions of improvisation. In the classical world, the composer must always be king or queen, the musician the loyal vassal. The Hungarian Amadinda Percussion Group has a bash at his 1940 piece Second Construction, which also contains some prepared piano, with a nail and a piece of cardboard wedged between the strings, which are then played directly, without recourse to the keyboard. There are also pieces by Hungarian composers Istvan Marta (Doll’s House Story from 1985) and Laszlo Sary (Pebble Playing In A Pot from 1978). Marta’s Doom: A Sigh from the Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels LP is one of the most profoundly depressing pieces of music I’ve ever heard (it’s also, in its own expressive way, a brilliant sound picture of despair in a Ceaucescu-era Romanian village). This is somewhat lighter. Also in a cheerful vein are American xylophone virtuoso George Hamilton Green’s ragtime pieces for the instrument, and a different kind of virtuosity is displayed in a number of African traditional pieces.



Another quartet taking an unconventional approach to classical music were the Camarata Contemporary Chamber Group, whose LP The Music of Erik Satie: The Velvet Gentleman was released in 1970 on the Deram Records label, the ‘progressive’ subsidiary of Decca Records. Various Satie pieces, including the familiar Gymnopedies and Gnosiennes and the beautiful and mysterious Pieces Froides, are arranged for flute, oboe, clarinet and guitar, added to which are the new found sounds of the Moog synthesiser. More pioneering Moog sounds can be found on Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley’s 1967 LP Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, with its retina-dazzling full spectrum op art cover. Perrey and Kingsley had direct access to the source, having been shown by Robert Moog himself how to use his new musical machine. There’s also a bit of Ondioline on there, the instrument immortalised in the title of Stereolab’s epic drone odyssey Jenny Ondioline. A lot of the music is of a rather whimsical cast, with covers of the likes of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Strangers In The Night and Winchester Cathedral, but the French and German duo do head out into the kosmos for Carousel of the Planets and Pioneers of the Stars.



Electronic music of a more intensely serious nature is to be found on the 1965 Turnabout LP self-descriptively titled Electronic Music. This features John Cage again, with the tape material for his Fontana Mix, recorded at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan in 1958. This was, rather charmingly, named in honour of his landlady in Milan. It was the basis of one of his chance pieces, the score written on a number of plastic transparencies on which geometric images were inscribed. These would then be layered on top of one another, with a grid at the bottom providing a nexus upon which the various graphic elements (lines, points and curves) would intersect. The instrumental combinations were left unspecified (the element of indeterminacy extending beyond the compositional realm), and the sleeve notes tell us that versions were performed by David Tudor for amplified piano, Max Neuhaus for percussion and guitar by Cornelius Cardew. Cage was invited to the Milan studios by Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio, and the second side of the LP is taken up by Berio’s 1961 piece Visage, also recorded at the Studio di Fonologia. This is an extraordinary work (which I've written about before), harrowing and hilarious, sensuous and harsh, with bewilderingly swift transitions between states. At the centre of it all is the remarkable voice of Cathy Berberian, Berio’s wife at the time. Her performance explores the whole range of human emotions and vocal sounds, and takes us into the whirling maelstrom of a troubled subconscious. From the other side of the Atlantic, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, we have Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroglu’s Agony, a representation in electronic sound of Armenian painter Arshile Gorky’s painting of the same name. The piece is appropriately fierce and fragmented, with mechanical explosions, sirens and eruptions depicting a noisy zone of conflict, either external or internal.



There’s more modern classical music on an LP by the Speculum Musicae chamber group, who play pieces by American composers Donald Martino (Notturno from 1973) and Charles Wuorinen (Speculum Speculi, or Mirror of the Mirror, from 1972). These pieces in some ways mark the last hurrah of musical modernism in America. There’s a steely and prideful defiance in Wuorinen’s sleevenote definition of his and Martino’s compositions as ‘demanding contemporary music’. He acknowledges the primary influence of Milton Babbitt, who embodied the abiding intellectualism of 50s and 60s classical orthodoxy in America – music as theoretical mathematics and advanced calculus, the marks of the score as important as their audible realisation. His infamous remarks about not being concerned as to whether his music had an audience was taken out of context (the title of the article in which it appeared, Who Cares Who Listens?, was not of his choosing), but nevertheless pointed to a certain indifference to the reception of his work beyond the insulating walls of the academy. As for notions of popularity, there was a definite sense that this was a music of almost monastic seriousness, and that it had somehow failed if it afforded any immediate pleasures. There’s actually something retrospectively refreshing about this purity of intent, although the attendant snobbery and elitist disdain for any music which didn’t conform to the new and rigidly defined ideal is less admirable. Doctrinaire artists of this stripe seem intent on refuting any other path, as if there can’t be a plurality of forms co-existing at the same time. What a narrow and dull cultural world they seek to bring about. Wuorinen’s view of the total serialism of the post-war years, as proposed and practiced by the likes of Boulez and Stockhausen, is almost mystical in its belief in its essential rightness. He observes of himself and Martino that ‘in our dissimilitude we bear witness to the inexhaustible treasures of our common patrimony – the twelve tone system’. An illuminating use of the word patrimony there. This was a rigorously abstract and unemotional music which rejected what it saw as the ‘soft’ feminine stylistic attributes of open expression. Female serialists are certainly thin on the ground (mind you, female composers of any sort are not exactly numerous at this point in time). Wuorinen is ultimately generous in ceding control of his music, however. He refuses to overdetermine its meaning or dictate the way it should be listened to, unlike control freaks in the Stockhausen mould. His sleevenotes come to the conclusion that the responsibility for appreciating the music lies with the listener, and he finishes with the observation that ‘once a work has left its maker, it follows its own life’.



The austerity of works in which every element of composition was subject to serialist calculation was somewhat offset by the unusual instrumental colours which were often employed. Percussion frequently came to the fore, and in Wuorinen and Martino’s works we have vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, glockenspiel, temple blocks and gongs. Unusual wind instruments are also used – contrabass, bass clarinet, alto flute and piccolo. There wasn’t much point in making a dramatic break from old symphonic or sonata form conventions if you were going to continue to use the same orchestral colours (and electronic music played an important part here, too). Pierre Boulez’s 1957-62 piece Pli Selon Pli (Fold Upon Fold) also uses an unusual chamber configuration of soprano, mandolin, piano and guitar. Boulez was the belligerent and unrelentingly doctrinaire godfather of hardline total serialism, intent on getting his way and liable to sulk if he didn’t. In this 1969 recording on CBS he conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the outer orchestral sections. The quartet interludes, which set fragments of poetry by Stephane Mallarmé, are folded into the embedding orchestral parts. The choice of Mallarmé’s lush symbolist verse is an odd one, its sensuality perhaps designed to provide a lyrical counterpoint to the dry asperity of the music. Like many of his pieces, he took ages to finish it (and may yet decide it needs a bit more work). For one who often seemed so arrogantly self-assured in his pronouncements on the correctness or otherwise of musical forms, he seems peculiarly insecure when it comes to his own work.



From Boulez to Cant. Is there any possible connection between the two? There’s always a connection between anything in the universe on some level, but I’m at a loss here. The juxtaposition of tweedy Pierre (looking uncharacteristically warm and friendly on the cover, it has to be said) and the gaily-shirted and sailor-capped Brian Cant on the cover of Hey You – Songs from Play Away is a naturally funny one, though. The classic line up joining the irrepressible Brian here are pianist and musical arranger Jonathan Cohen, ex-folkie Toni Arthur, former chart topper with the Four Pennies Lionel Morton, and future Evita Julie Covington. They invite you to enjoy them in A Rollicking Round, try your hand at The Luck of the Game, guess What Is It?, dream of the Broadway Twilight and singalong to the old Play Away theme tune.



Toni Arthur’s darkly atmospheric 60s folk records with her husband of the time Dave Arthur, Morning Stands on Tiptoe, The Lark in the Morning and in particular Hearken to the Witches Rune have recently found renewed favour, their focus on the supernatural elements of traditional music and custom blending perfectly with the sensibilities of modern psych folkies. Original psych folk in the Incredible String Band mould coming out of the unlikely and far from witchy environment of Coventry (which does contain the word coven, mind) can be found in a comprehensive compilation of Dando Shaft material on See For Miles Records. The Shaft featured the vocals of Polly Bolton, who has gone on to become a fine traditional singer, whether solo or alongside Albion Band incarnations, the late Bert Jansch or Alan Stivell. She also made an adventurous duet album, View Across the Bay (which I came across in the shop a few months back), with free improv saxophonist Paul Dunmall (a longtime member of Keith Tippett’s Mujician quartet) who also played his Northumbrian pipes for the occasion, as well as picking up ocarinas, Asian harmonicas, shawms, low whistles, recorders and something called a pregnophone.



The double LP compilation The Walker Brothers Story on Philips Records contains a couple of sublime Scott b-sides which anticipated his classic quartet of 60s solo albums. Archangel is the lyrical precursor of Angels of Ashes, with the big choruses of Such a Small Love and Montague Terrace In Blue. Mrs Murphy is a condensed kitchen sink movie, the L-Shaped Room, A Taste of Honey and This Sporting Life compressed into a 4 minute pop song, its lyric switching cinematically between different viewpoints. Scott gets all existential on In My Room, Spanish songwriter Joaquin Prieto’s study in gloomy introspection which has also been covered by Marc Almond on his Torment And Torreros album with the Mambas. An avowed Scott fan (he wrote the notes for one version of the Boy Child compilation a while back), he was perhaps introduced to it via this version.



Scott would no doubt enjoy the Albert Camus spoken word 10” Albert Camus Vous Parle. Albert addresses a few introductory words to the listener, and reads an 11 minute extract from Cure favourite L’Etranger (The Outsider). There’s also a 10 minute scene from the play Le Malentendu (The Misunderstood) with Alain Cuny, who appeared in films by Fellini (La Dolce Vita and Satyricon), Bunuel (The Milky Way), Jean-Luc Godard (Detective) and Louis Malle (Les Amants), and Maria Casares, the princess Death in Cocteau’s Orpheé. Actor and chansonnier Serge Reggiani reads a bit from the story Les Amandiers too.



Finally, we have a 12” on the old Russian Melodiya Records of the Soviet National Anthem, given the full martial blast on the A side, with what I suppose amounts to a remix on the reverse. I love the idea of this going out on the shop floor to nestle between 12” singles by Wham and Madonna (and below the Metallica one currently on display). Therein lies the conclusion to the cultural battles of the cold war – a historically inevitable victory in the long run.