PART THREE



There is a tension in Garner’s work between the intuitive consciousness, sensitive to time, place and feeling, and the rational, empirically ordered mindset, which seeks to make sense of the world and its existence within it through intensive learning and the application of rigorous intellectual analysis. The former is open to the forces inherent in the environment it inhabits and to any connection which might be forged with them. As such, it is both vulnerable to harm and capable of attaining a heightened state of awareness, an elevated perspective such as that gained from the top of Mow Cop, Bartholmey Church or the mountain at the head of the valley in The Owl Service. Those inclining towards the latter mindset are to an extent locked inside their own heads, monadic presences within a landscape they can only regard with a remote vision. This is particularly the case with Garner’s autodidactic working class intellectuals, who lack the ready peer group with whom they could exchange ideas and work towards a consensus viewpoint.

Peter keeps a rational record - The Keeper

It is an opposition between the mythological and the mechanical worldview, the ancient and modern, the timeless now and the fixed progression of present moments dying into the past to give birth to the future. In Red Shift, Tom surrounds himself with his books and charts in his cell-like bedroom space within the larger cell of the caravan. The map of the night sky constellations on the wall above him opens out onto wider, near infinite spaces which expand within his feverishly enquiring mind, leaving red shift traces in their wake. He can recount the histories attached to the landscapes he travels through with Jan without necessarily sensing their spirit, the layers of time and emotion which have accreted on their surfaces. John Fowler in the Barholmey of the Civil War period is also someone with great intelligence and learning – he is a batchelor of arts = who is out of touch with his environment and with the people living in it. The same could be said of the ‘civilised’ Romans deep in the heart of territory they consider primitive and barbaric. In The Keeper, Peter sets up his scientific equipment in the haunted cottage in an attempt to gain the measure of manifestations of a spirit for which he has no natural feeling. Evan after it has made itself very much apparent, he still desperately scrabbles around trying to get a record of it, to fix it and reduce it to readily quantifiable form. Gwyn in The Owl Service has his books too. He lends his copy of The Mabinogion to Alison, infecting her with the power of the story, the virus carried by the age old language translated into a modern idiom. He evidently values his education very highly, since his mother, Nancy, uses the threat of its withdrawal as the ultimate sanction to keep him in line. When she makes good on that threat, he attempts to run away, to pull free from the delimiting gravity of the valley. Learning is precious to him, and not something he is able to take for granted. The elocution records which he tells Alison about are another way to escape his environment, to transform himself by altering the nature of his language. This is his version of the transformations undergone by the characters in the Mabinogion story which he is fated to re-enact. Words and their usage have power.

Learning and education is a curse as much as a blessing for these characters. It expands their mental horizons, but makes them all the more aware of their immediate physical ones, and increasingly disconnected from their surroundings. It shows them how vast the world is, and the universe beyond, how deep the gulf of time, and then leaves them unanchored, adrift. By thinking themselves beyond locality and place, consciously cutting themselves off from ancestral territory, they come to realise the value of what they lost. To regain what was once an instinctive knowledge requires a studied effort, a process of relearning and connecting. They will always remain essentially outsiders, however, even if they do return. The divide has been established and can never be adequately bridged again.

John Fowler watches Thomas Rowley watching, seeing things he'll never see - Red Shift

The intellectuals in Garner’s stories, who may very well be refractions of his own persona, splintered autobiographical shadows, are contrasted and often paired with visionaries. These are characters who are sensitive to the continuum of time, place and emotion. In Red Shift, Thomas Rowley gazes out to Mow Cop with a far away look in his eye. He seems to see across expanses of time as well as space, picking up the echoes of his temporal twins (his fellow Toms) in the past and future at this resonant place. It’s the site where he and Madge will settle in their cottage, so his rapt focus on this spot suggests some kind of predestined outcome to which he is vaguely attuned. John Fowler, the educated intellectual of the village, recognises Thomas Rowley’s visionary insight, and is also aware that it is something which he wholly lacks. He ascribes religious significance to it, which suggests that he has a yearning for the spiritual and wishes to learn from Thomas; to gain knowledge of something which his intellect is unable to encompass. ‘That man sees God’, he states before Madge Thomas, recognising an unmediated awareness of an immanent presence in the world which is occluded from his analytical, bookish mind. ‘He already knows more than I could learn’ he confesses at another point. Madge refuses to acknowledge any divine connection, perhaps realising that John’s desire to tune into any such communication might prove harmful to her husband.

Gwyn in The Owl Service is highly intelligent and learned in the lore of the land. But it is a distanced learning, an attempt to understand the place of his origin from which he has become disconnected. Alison’s empathetic connection with the human elements of the Mabinogion tale are what brings it to alarming life. There is a difference between an abstracted, analytical reading and one which fully absorbs the feelings and universal meanings the words are trying to convey. Such a reading translates thought and emotion and opens a direct conduit to the writer and to the time and place in which they lived. Those emotions then bleed into the present via the sensitive reader. For Gwyn, however, they remain no more than dead ideas and symbols to be picked apart for historical and cultural insight; inert stories safely locked into a distant past which has no relevance to the modern world. It’s a past which betokens primitivism and an inability to adapt and change (this despite the transformations which abound in the Mabinogion).

Logan programming Macey for blue-silver rampage - Red Shift

In Red Shift there is a similar distinction between the ‘civilised’ Romans and the ‘barbaric’ natives. The Romans are characterised by their adherence to ideas of discipline and a rational ordering of the world; an understanding which allows them to exert control over it. Macey, the Romanised Celt, is the mystic in their midst. His visionary powers are controlled and exploited for their own ends. Logan, as the legionary commander, uses him to gain insight into the tribal mindset. He also draws from his subconscious wells of rage to transform him into a berserker, a rampaging human weapon which can be switched on and sent charging into the melee. The exploitation of the visionary, the attempt of male characters to induce and then control the possessed state is also seen in John Fowler’s interrogative probing of Thomas Rowley. It is also evident in The Owl Service. Alison’s possession seems to greatly please Huw, as if it fulfils the great plan he is constantly making portentous allusions to (‘she is come’). When Sally finally ‘sees’ the invisible watcher in The Keeper and goes into a trance state in which she divines its nature and purpose, Peter’s reaction is to frantically question her, trying to glean as much information as possible whilst its retains its hold. He is still trying to maintain a rational approach towards the ineffable, to translate visionary insight into recorded observations which can be empirically analysed at a later date.

Shattering the barrier of time - Red Shift

In Red Shift, Logan prompts Macey’s possessions, his berserking fits, with trigger words. He controls him through tapping into his anger, the unstable lava flow of rage bubbling beneath the surface. Language is the key (language and colour). Logan tells him ‘get your big words’, and talks about the blue and silver. Thomas Rowley is a man of few words, and his wife Madge warns John Fowler not to infect him with his learning – the virus of language and the abstract ideas it conveys. For these visionaries, language clouds mental clarity and allows for manipulation and control. For Tom, in the present day, the blockage of his linguistic flow, the brilliant but often facile oupouring of words, in a moment of intense emotion leads him to press his hands against the caravan window until it shatters. It’s this instant of red, inarticulate rage which communicates down the years to the Toms of the past, the emotion of place overcoming the barriers of time. The localised storms towards the end of The Owl Service and The Keeper are also blown in on emotional weather fronts.

Counter-possession - Logan's phantom charge in Red Shift

The attempt to control those possessed by visions, to treat them as if they were puppets, has its inherent dangers. Logan is poisoned by the corn goddess and in his delirious state is commanded by a tearful Macey. When he is ordered to ‘charge’ he does so, and leaps straight over the edge of the sheer rock face. It’s a symbolic killing of the father, a rejection of male power and influence in favour of female wisdom; a pre-Roman notion of the sacred. Similarly, Thomas Rowley turns from the command of John Fowler, with whom he has a fight on the roof of the church tower, and ends up cradled in the arms of Madge. Both Macey and Thomas are wounded or damaged visionaries. Logan tells Macey ‘you’re finished’ shortly before his own end. But they find salvation and healing through female power, persistence and wisdom.

Confronting the controlling mother - Red Shift

In the modern day, the pattern is reversed however. Tom is tormented by the prurience and oppressive control of his mother. His father is in her thrall, weakly acting as her mouthpiece. In The Owl Service too, Gwyn is controlled by his monstrous mother, Nancy. We never see Margaret, the mother of Alison and step-mother of Roger, but her influence is felt throughout, her off-stage power evident. Clive is another weak father, intent on appeasing Margaret and acting as her ambassador. This is particularly the case with Roger, his son, who rejects his new mother and is deeply unhappy with the promiscuous nature implied by her nickname, the Birmingham Belle. If the historical periods in Red Shift saw a turning away from the father, the modern day is characterised by an attempt to gain freedom from maternal influence.

Alison at home and at ease in The Owl Service

Class plays its corrosive part, too. The relationship between Gwyn, Roger and Alison is further complicated by their respective social status. Gwyn is effectively a servant in the house, and his subservient position makes him vulnerable. It is easy for the others to assert their superiority over him. This is explicitly voiced in the novel when Roger calmly explains to Alison, as if this observation were a given, ‘he’s not one of us, and he never will be. He’s a yob. An intelligent yob. That’s all there is to it’. And the barriers come down. In the TV adaptation, this is implicit in the way they both completely ignore him as they pass him crying on the stairs. When it is convenient, he simply becomes invisible.

Nancy remembers her moment of triumph - The Owl Service

The house belongs to Alison, who inherited it from her father. She’s from an upper class lineage, although her mother’s soubiquet ‘the Birmingham Belle’ suggests that she originates from a lower class. Indeed, the jibe may be so much viciousness directed at someone who married ‘above her class’ and is assumed to have used her wiles to gain social advancement. In this respect, there is a connection between her and Nancy. We learn that Nancy’s former lover Bertram was a previous owner of the house, but that ‘they’ arranged for him to be killed in a motorcycle accident. She has a feeling of being denied what was, in her mind, rightfully hers; the home which she might have come to live in as her own, as the lady of the house rather than as a domestic housekeeper. She takes delight in manufacturing a situation in which Clive is made to feel socially awkward, ‘making him look a fool’ by giving him the wrong utensil to eat a pear. It’s a twisted act of inverse snobbery which makes it clear that she believes her rightful position is sitting at the table, not serving it.

Furious Nancy - The Owl Service

Nancy is highly sensitive about her status, even (or perhaps especially) with her son. His precocious intelligence and progress at school strike her as a sign that he’s getting above his station. The education which might enable to break free from the limitations of his environment is seen by her as a betrayal, a rejection of his upbringing, his class and ultimately of her. ‘I’ll not be looked down by you’ she snaps when he gets too smart, and threatens to take him out of school so that he’ll have to work behind the local Co-op counter (another touch of inverse snobbery on her part). Gwyn is also deeply self-conscious about his social status. His ambition to be a scholar are connected with his desire to break free from his background. He associates the world he wishes to become a part of with middle class diction, and has therefore acquired a set of elocution records for himself. They’re a symbol of his sense of inferiority on both a personal and national level. The idea of making anything of himself whilst burdened with a working class Welsh accent seems simply impossible to him. Whe his ownership of the records is discovered by Roger, they become a means of ridiculing his pretensions to become someone other than who he is, to break through the barriers of class and race.

Where Gwyn’s mother threatens him with removal from school and a premature curtailment of his dreams of escaping through native intelligence, Alison’s mother controls her by threatening to suspend her membership of the tennis club and choir; privileges of class which are viewed as essential to belonging and maintaining her place amongst her social peers. She is compliant in the face of this potential disruption to the smoothly ordered surface of her life. It is this, in addition to the betrayal of his confidence regarding the elocution records, which makes Gwyn realise the gulf which lies between them, and the wholly provisional nature of any intimacy they might have shared.

In Red Shift, Tom is the son of working class parents, his father an army man in the lower ranks. Jan is the daughter of middle class parents, teachers of some sort, whom we never see. But we learn that they regularly have to move due to the nature of their work. Tom’s father has pretensions to middle class values, to ‘sophisticated’ tastes. He displays them in his ostentatiously expressed appreciation of wine. Jan offhandedly trumps him on this score by instantly identifying his mystery Moselle. It turns out she has spent a holiday on a German vineyard. When Tom learns that she has slept with the vineyard owner, it feels like a double betrayal. The older man, whom he sees with Jan in Euston station, has the easeful charm and seigneurial suavity which wealth and the stability of the privileged upbringing breed. To make things worse, Jan seems to have dressed up to meet him. He’s out of his class, and in his mind, there’s nothing he can do to compete.

John Fowler directs

In the Civil War period, John Fowler is at a remove from the villagers. He is the son of the pastor, and has also been raised up by his learning and academic qualification. When we first see him, he rides towards the church on a handsome white steed whilst others trudge along on foot, bent beneath the burden of their belongings. He takes on the direction of their defences with a natural assumption of power connected to his position in the village. In the Roman time, the class divisions are also national, as they are to an extent in The Owl Service. Romans over Romanised Celts and tribe against tribe. In the Civil War period, the villagers in Bartholmey are besieged by Irish Royalists. The massacre which follows is a slaughter made easier by the dehumanising us and them divisions hardened by national difference. In The Owl Service, the local Welsh villagers seem to act with a gestalt mind to prevent Gwyn and his mother from leaving the valley.

The origins of class are found in the initial period of invasion and occupation, and the divisions of land which ensue. Macey is adopted by Logan, but is seen as little more than a pet (a ‘boy’). He is kept as long as proves useful. But when it becomes clear that he will no longer function as a killing machine, Logan tells him that he’s finished. The tribal soldier, the village peasant or the modern servant is not granted individuality, but is seen only in terms of their functionality. Macey keeps saying that the killing is ‘not from me’ and that ‘I’m outside when Macey kills’. But this murderous possession is the only aspect of his self which is of interest to Logan and the Legion, the part which makes him a useful shock trooper, the wild joker in the ranks. There is a sense of depersonalisation at this level of society, a dull awareness that your feelings, your desires, your notion of your self are as nothing in the face of social, historical and even cosmic forces. Tom feels this helplessness when he learns of Jan’s brief holiday affair. Their relationship is subject to external forces, and a wealthy landowning aristocrat can take her away from him merely be showing due consideration and kindness. The rage which connects him to the forgotten footsoldiers and peasants of the past is the violence of emotional dispossession, the pain caused by the dislocation of self.

Delta Orionis as a constant body to orient by - Red Shift

Colour plays an important symbolic role in Red Shift and The Owl Service. We have already seen how Roger, Gwyn and Alison have their own colour motifs which correspond to the old wiring of a plug. In Red Shift, the polarity between blue and red, the colours at the opposite ends of the spectrum, is central. Red is the colour of blood, rage, violence and a martial outlook. It’s also the colour of passion, particularly when it has gone nova and tipped the balance of reason. Blue is the colour of calm, reflection, coolness and tranquillity. It’s also the colour most frequently associated with spirituality, depth and eternity, the colour of the heavens. Red is a correspondingly physical, material colour, shading into earth tones. The Virgin Mary’s mantle is usually represented as blue, painted with sumptuous and expensive lapis lazuli pigments in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is the mantle of the sky, sometimes jewelled with stars; a befitting garment for a sky goddess. Stella Maris, star of the sea, is one of many manes given to the Virgin, a guide and protector for mariners in the night sky. Tom chooses a star to orient himself and Jan whilst they are apart. A distant, constant body (from their perspective) to unite them at a particular temporal instant. Perhaps significantly, he picks Delta Orionis, one of the stars in the belt of the martial male constellation of Orion the Hunter. He uses its dryly scientific designation rather than calling it by its Arabic name of Mintaka.

As a heavenly colour, blue can vary between shades of light and dark – from morning translucence to midnight opacity. Its moods shift accordingly, and remind us that blue is a colour also associated with depression and despondency (the blues, in a blue funk). It serves as an expression of Macey’s confusion and despair, a chromatic representation of the fragmentation of his personality. The blue-silver of Macey’s colour visions and the blue and white light of Thomas’ fugues clarifies the tone, bringing it into focus and placing it at the lighter end of the spectrum. Blue-silver is also suggestive of an alloy, a modern metallic shade. Having attained a state of calm equilibrium (the tranquil blue), Macey tells the corn goddess that he’ll continue to ‘watch blue silvers’ because ‘it might matter some day’. A cut to the modern day reveals an inter-city train with its blue and silvery white livery.

Kandinsky - Blue(1927)

The artist Wassily Kandinsky elucidated his own feelings about the symbolic associations contained within shades of blue in his 1912 work On the Spiritual in Art. ‘Blue is the typical heavenly colour’, he wrote. Blue unfolds in its lowest depths the element of tranquillity. As it deepens towards black, it assumes overtones of a superhuman sorrow. It becomes like an infinite self-absorption into that profound state of seriousness which has, and can have, no end. As it tends towards the bright (tones), to which blue is, however, less suited, it takes on a more indifferent character and appears to the spectator remote and impersonal, like the high, pale-blue sky. The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.’ That remote brightness corresponds with the blue-silvers Macey perceives, the silent stillness the state he and Thomas attain after all the conflict and torment.

Blue and red (or sometimes yellow) have often been defined as male and female colours, with associated symbolic characteristics. The values change. Mondrian, for example, saw red as the feminine colour, partly because he regarded the intellectual and spiritual realm as male. Kandinsky initially regarded blue as a male colour, as did his fellow Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) artists. He later reversed his views, however, switching the spectral polarity of the genders. On balance, blue has been regarded as a female colour, red as male. Garner combines the cultural significance of colour, its emotional and spiritual resonance, with its scientific aspects. He thereby creates complex layers of metaphor which both bring together and contrast modern and pre-industrial worldviews.

Red shift is a piece of scientific terminology which refers to the effect experienced by a stationary observer when an object is moving away from them. In sonic terms, this is analogous to the Doppler shift from a higher to a lower tone when a train has passed by. The red shift is a phenomenon particularly associated with astronomy and cosmology, however. Observed in stars and galaxies, it can be used to deduce that the universe is expanding, astronomical bodies moving apart from one another (deductions made by Edwin Hubble in 1929). In terms of emotional metaphor, red is a lonely colour, the tone of parting, of isolation and loneliness. Blue, on the other hand, is the sound of the train approaching, the end of the spectrum betokening coming together, unification, communication. The ‘us’ with which the corn goddess blesses Macey at the end, holding out the promise of a future together. These scientific metaphors, applied on a human level, are reminiscent of the way in which entropy, an embodiment of the tendency towards running down within a closed system as delineated in the second law of thermodynamics, was used as a central motif in the British science fiction of the 60s emerging from New Worlds magazine under Michael Moorcock’s editorship.

Palm-pressed pane

From Tom’s rooted perspective, everything seems to be disintegrating, the shattered fragments falling away from him (a touch of personal entropy afflicting him, as if he had strayed into New Worlds territory). Jan is moving away, his relationship with his parents is becoming poisonously antagonistic and he is retreating further into himself to cope, isolating himself within his studies and his headphone mind. When we witness his moment of breakdown, his splintering of the caravan window into jagged fragments, we see the pink-red of his palms which become bloody as they slice through glass. When Thomas and Macey sense his presence, however, they associate it with blue. He is coming towards them from that moment of emotional crisis, approaching with a temporal blue shift. They feel his pain and rage, but there is no reciprocal emotional echo. He remains alone, a disconnected body in a cold universe. Thomas and Macey move in the end towards the blue end of the spectrum, away from the red, and away from Tom’s inchoate rage. They are both rejecting blood, violence and the dominance of the male perspective which gives rise to it. Both end up cradled in the arms of a woman who helps to heal their wounded minds and bodies. The reversal of the red shift signifies a psychological realignment, both on an individual and a historical and cultural level. A cessation of conflict and competition in favour of settling down and establishing a stable community.

Ground sun-setting - Red Shift

The Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher devised a colour psychology scale in the 1940s. John Gage outlines the system in his classic study Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. ‘Blue…is held to be concentric, passive, sensitive, unifying’, he writes, ‘and thus to express tranquillity, tenderness, and love and affection. Orange-red, however, is eccentric, active, offensive, aggressive, autonomous and competitive, and hence expressive of desire, domination and sexuality’. When Tom finds out about Jan’s fling with the man in white (a neutral non-colour) he rejects her embrace, pushing her violently away. There is none of the blue shift union which brings together Madge and Thomas, Macey and the corn-goddess. The reversal of perspective from red to blue is symbolised by the goddess’ turning of the milling wheel ‘sun-setting’ or anti-clockwise. The sun as male symbol is pushed beneath the horizon, occluded. The meal thus produced poisons Logan and his men. Logan goes insane, kills his men in a berserking fugue and is directed over the edge of Mow Cop by Macey, a terminal charge to attack phantom forces. Tom tries to reverse the red shift by turning partings with Jan at Crewe station into hellos. The blue-silvers of the inter-city trains seem to conspire in supporting this willed illusion. From a certain perspective, they are seen as a union. Macey sees them bathed in blue shift light, images travelling back through time to reach him. For the final parting, however, Tom leaves her with a tentative ‘see you’, as if no longer certain that they will meet again. She greets this with a smile, acknowledging a possible shift in perspective on his part; a more realistic, balanced outlook.

Red Axe

Blue Axe

Macey and Thomas both end up enveloped in the dark, crepuscular blue of evening. We cut from these final scenes of calm repose and see the blue-silvers slip away from Tom’s vision. As the camera focuses on the doors slamming shut, a blinking sequence of red flashes contrasts with the blue; the inside of the doors is orange-red. This is no longer a blue-shift hello-goodbye. The red shifting reality of parting is made apparent. Tom looks to the side, into the gloomy shadows beneath the station vaults. The light turns red and we dissolve to a shot of the axe head in its museum case. It’s suffused with a red glow, which fills the whole room. It’s as if the axe is once more coated with the blood which had been washed off with Macey’s healing, the exorcising of his violent alter ego (his other Tom) and the rebirth of his female soul. It has been denuded of its power, its physical embodiment of unity and domesticity, of violent rootlessness transformed by love and trust; the connection made through touch. Now it is a symbol of isolation, disconnection and distance. It has been correctly identified and labelled, but is no more than an inert historical artefact, its emotional and spiritual resonance locked away. As the camera zooms in on it, the red light fades away, however. We see the axe head in close up as a night-time blue-grey. We are taken back to the evening calm in which we left Macey and Thomas. The blue reminds of the axe’s symbolic guise as an object of union, love and domesticity. The end titles are superimposed on its flat edge: Red Shift on a blue background. It serves to underline what Tom has lost.

Tom red shift is partly an attempt to distance himself from his own inner turmoil. ‘I need a red shift’ he says after a fraught encounter with Jan in which his language has become fragmented and he seems on the verge of a breakdown. He wants to take refuge in a part of the mental spectrum where the frequency is less intense, wavelengths more widely spaced out. But it is also a turning away from intimacy and connection. It is characteristic of the male psychodramas at the heart of The Owl Service and Red Shift. The female characters are more or less refracted through the lenses of these crises, whether as objects of love and desire or as forces of control (the domineering mother). The possession to which Alison and Sally are subjected transforms them into archetypes rather than individuals. They become mysteries to be solved. The rational intellect of Garner’s self-contained autodidacts is incapable of parsing that mystery, or of dispelling the illusion of mystery and getting to the simple human heart of the matter.

Alison's agony - the final possession in The Owl Service

Tom recognises this when he tells Jan ‘my head knows. The rest of me will catch up. Heart and mind have become sundered, abstracted intellect having occluded emotional intelligence. The same is the case in The Owl Service. When Alison is going through her storm-wracked torments at the end, assailed by invisible owls which score her face and cascade her with feathers, Huw and Gwyn can only stand by, powerless or unwilling to help. As Huw laments to Gwyn, ‘you have only hate in you’. It is Roger who brings an end to her suffering through simple empathetic connection. He comforts her and shows her love and compassion, asking nothing in return. In a sudden moment of illumination, he offers the same to Gwyn, voicing a sympathetic awareness of his pain and the bitterness it gives rise to. Gwyn can only turn away with impotent shame. In the book, the frantic flurry of feathers is transformed into a soft shower of fragrant petals. Alison/ Blodeuedd becomes flowers, not owls. It’s a transformation which was anticipated in the flock of Alison’s folded paper owls which Roger discovered in the locked garage. From a distance, they looked like a field of flowers, gathered sprays of white meadowsweet.

The shock of recognition - Peter in The Keeper

In The Keeper, Peter distances himself from the protective embrace within which he and Sally have enfolded themselves during the spectral storm. He turns his back on her and returns to his charts and instruments, the safe world of measurable fact. It’s a reflexive retreat back into the self-contained rational mindset. When he is confonted with Sally in her possessed state, he is forced to look her directly in the eye, to tsee the fire burning in the dark centre of the pupil. ‘Who are you?’ he asks, a look of horror on his face. She, or the spirit of the guardian she is now possessed with, reflects the question back at him. His face slackens from its rictus of terror into a look of understanding and dull acceptance. ‘You’, he weakly replies. It’s a recognition of unity, the dissolving of separate personalities into an all-embracing commonality. This is a dissolution which entails the utter destruction of ego, the disappearance of the self. They are gone, absorbed into the spirit of the place. Part of the haunting they came to investigate.

The inner flame relit - The Keeper

In Red Shift, John Fowler asks a similar question of Thomas Rowley when he comes out of one of his visionary fugues. Thomas says of the figure he has seen ‘I know him’. John interrogates him, asking ‘do you see God?’, and then, as if it were a natural progression, ‘is it me?’ He sees himself as a completion of Thomas, the head which meets and unites with the visionary spirit. Madge is the heart. For John, they are fragmented shards of a whole. Madge and Thomas prove to be whole unto themselves, however. John is one of the fragmented selves scattered through time, symbolised by the shattered shards of glass smashed outwards by the angry tension of Tom’s pressing hands.

Mow Cop folly

Tom confronts Jan over her infidelity in the folly built on top of Mow Cop in 1754. It stands in contrast to the ruin of Thomas and Madge’s cottage in which they’d discovered the votive stone axe-head; the thunderstone which Thomas had built into the fireplace and the ‘bunty’ which Jan had fixed upon as a special object physically embodying the connection between her and Tom. In One Pair of Eyes, the 1972 biographical documentary about Garner included in the recently released BFI dvd of Red Shift, he describes the folly as ‘ridiculous’ and completely non-functional. It is a non-place, neither domestic nor wild. As such, it’s an ideal constricted circular arena in which to play out the tortuous drama of their relationship’s ending. Earlier, Tom had thrown out the quote ‘love is not love which alters when alteration finds’. He fails to observe its meaning, though. His lack of wisdom and self-knowledge is unconsciously elucidated in his follow-up quote: ‘more know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows’ (both of these quotes taken from the book).

Tom has his words, his complex language. But in moment of emotional intensity he becomes completely inarticulate. John Fowler also finds himself speechless at the moment when all look to his leadership. When the Irish Royalists are at the door, he cannot think of what to do. His words fail to translate into action. When his is given the opportunity to reveal himself by the leader of the Royalist forces, to sacrifice himself for the villagers, the noble words once more fail to come to his lips. Jan explains Tom’s shattering of the window pane to his parents by observing ‘he ran out of words’. Or as his mother less kindly puts it, ‘what can’t speak can’t tell’. Rage fills the void left by loss of language.

Confining folly - Circling confrontation on Mow Cop

The illusion of idealised love is laid bare in the folly. It is revealed as being as fake as the fabricated ruin, built on similarly romantic foundations. Tom’s ideal of ‘perfection’ can’t withstand the complex tangle of real emotion. His language dries up and he is reduced to short, staccato phrases. Jan despairs that he is now ‘no talk, No fun. Just grab’. She has become an object, a body to be possessed. In this case, the possession is of a physical nature, rather than the spiritual possession of Sally and Alison (although there is a metaphorical dimension there, too). She voices her resentment at his objectification, bitterly spitting out ‘it would like to go now please. It feels sick’. Language, particularly when employed by a keen mind, can become a tool for creating and sustaining a self-delusory state. It can become a barrier against rather than a gateway to knowledge of the self. Thomas and Macey find peace through silence after the noise and hysteria of conflict and chaos. ‘Silence forgives’, the corn goddess tells Macey. Thomas has remained taciturn throughout, speaking only when necessary.

Disconnected headphone mind - Red Shift

In the end, Garner’s male protagonists are left isolated. They remain in the landscape to which they are anchored, but are at the same time disconnected from it. They are all Tom Fools, locked inside the prison of their own intellect. Self-contained bodies drifting out into the cold spaces of the expanding universe, red shift traces trailing behind them, marking their lonely voyage for any who might care to observe from the distant perspective of home.

PART ONE is here

PART TWO is here

Stephen Volk’s new novella (novelette? I never did work out the fine distinctions) Leytonstone is a tangential follow up to Whitstable, his acclaimed 2013 book, also published by Spectral Press. He once more fashions a story around a particular time, place and a real person inhabiting them. Whitstable offered a heartfelt portrait of the aged Peter Cushing wandering through the sleepy Kent seaside town in which he had settled with his beloved wife Helen and made his home. It reflected upon both Cushing’s gentlemanly manner, old world kindliness and Christian worldview and the moral rectitude and certainty of the more upright, crusading characters he played onscreen. These qualities were set against the backdrop of the harsh, increasingly desensitised world of the 70s in which such moral and spiritual convictions had begun to dissipate, and to which the fantasy world of Hammer with which Cushing was so indelibly associated was struggling to adjust. New fears and terrors, allied with the uncertainties attendant upon a declining economy, were arising to eclipse the gothic staples of the Hammer universe with monsters of a more grimly realistic tenor – monsters with a human face. Cushing’s personal crisis of faith and hope in the wake of his wife’s death becomes paradigmatic of the crisis of the country at large. In the manner of Boris Karloff at the climax of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 film Targets, Cushing has to face a contemporary monster imbued with all the ambiguous complexities of human nature. In that film, Karloff confronted a sniper who had turned his sights on the audience at a drive-in where one of his old cobwebbed gothics was screening. In Whitstable, Cushing intervenes in order to protect a young boy who has turned to him, or rather to Dr Van Helsing, for help in driving out the father whom he believes to be a vampire. In doing so, the actor has to face his own fears of redundancy and helplessness in a world he no longer understands, and feels he has no real place in anymore. It is a deeply moving portrait, full of the compassion and psychological insight Volk brought to difficult and upsetting subject matter in his supernatural TV series Afterlife. This was a fictional iteration of Cushing, but it spoke about the man and his work with great eloquence, revealing much about the enormous respect, admiration, and indeed love with which he is still regarded by so many (myself included).


Volk treads a parallel path in Leytonstone. Whereas Whitstable viewed the compensatory imaginative world of a child from the perspective of an adult, Leytonstone invites us to see things from a young child’s point of view. That child is Fred, or ‘Cocky’ to his schoolmates. We know him better as Alfred Hitchcock, or perhaps as ‘Hitch’, the nickname which he preferred as an adult to the crude name-calling of the playground or childhood streets. At this stage in his life he is a 6 year old boy living in the east end London borough of Leytonstone, in a house attached to the successful greengrocer’s business of his father, William Hitchcock.

Volk adopts a cinematic style appropriate to his subject, setting the scene with the acute eye of the accomplished screenwriter. There is some quick cross-editing in the first few pages, with Fred’s recitation of potato varieties intercut with close-up details of the street, indicating someone approaching (‘dark legs stride in mirror-black shoes’). The imaginary camera eye then pulls out to give us an interior and exterior view of the Hitchcock greengrocer’s. Later, there are expressionist shadows which turn a policeman walking the gaslit streets into a skull-faced ghoul: a nod to the German films from which the young Hitchcock learned so much in the formative years of his career. We get a foretaste of some of Hitchcock’s own cinematic devices too. Windows and peepholes provide voyeuristic screens within the screen, iris ovals which make the audience complicit in what they watch. Fred clears the misted pane of his bedroom window to look out onto the evening street below. Volk observes that ‘it’s black and white out there, like a film’. A view at a safe distance from the pick-up he half-comprehendingly watches take place. Later, he spies on a prototype Hitchcock blonde through a hole in a matchbox he had customised for a practical joke (played upon said blonde). This tiny matchbox is a miniature model of the prying lens of the movie camera. Echoes of Rear Window resonate down the years. The fact that the matches are of the England’s Glory make provides the potential for a crude joke (the glory hole) which Fred would have no understanding of, but which the adult Hitch most certainly would. His love of bawdy toilet humour is anticipated in Fred’s nervous inscribing of a cock and balls, copied from a piece of graffiti he has seen, onto the wall of the toilets at his Jesuit school.


Other well-recorded aspects of Hitch’s character and behaviour are also anticipated, lent dramatic context and provided with psychological insight: his compulsive comfort eating, his yearning for easeful luxury, his enactment of elaborate and cruel practical jokes, and his placid remoteness and emotionally distant demeanour. His iconic image is pictured at the end of the book seated onstage at the American Film Institute’s celebration of his life and work. It is an image of someone who is aloof and at a remove from ordinary human motivations, which he observes and sums up with a few dramatically weighted words of mordant wit. Volk describes him as ‘a vast Buddha as recognisable as any of the actors whose name he put up in lights’. It’s a description which could be applied to the giant sculpture of his head which rests, heavy-lidded and rustily bronze, in the centre of a complex of offices and flats built on the site of the Islington studios where his film directing career took flight. But this is a Buddha, Volk’s story suggests, who never achieved enlightenment; who remained in the dark, alone and filled with a paralysing fear which could only find release through his art. Behind the Buddha’s serene gaze lies a void.

Hitchcock and Truffaut

The first half of the story centres around an event which became a well-worn anecdote reeled off time and again by the mature and feted Hitch. His father took him to the local police station when he was a small boy (‘about six’, as Hitch told it). He had arranged for the policeman in charge to lock him in a cell for a short period of time (‘five minutes’ was the general estimate). ‘This is what we do to naughty boys’ the PC in charge told him by way of explanation. Hitch told this well-rehearsed tale, along with many others, as a way of deflecting any attempts at soliciting personal information. It offered a tidbit of prefabricated insight into the genesis of the ‘wrong man’ theme running through his work, along with the notion of transferable or latent guilt which attends it. The anecdote was duly brought out for the 1962 interview with Francois Truffaut which formed the basis for his 1967 book on Hitchcock. This was the only window on his early childhood he allowed his admiring interrogator, aside from a remark that, rather than being strict, his father was ‘a rather nervous man’. The only other glimpse we can get of Hitch’s childhood is the photograph of him posing next to his father, perched comfortably on a stout pony, in front of the luscious cornucopia of fruit and veg (including pineapples strung upside down like gamebirds) displayed in front of the shopfront with its proudly prominent sign reading W.Hitchcock – Fruit Salesman. William and Fred are both dressed in tropical khaki, the windows draped with flags to celebrate Empire Day (a celebration which the exotic fruits also implicitly play their part in). The photograph is incorporated into Volk’s story, which gives us some idea as to what might be going on behind the distant, detached gazes of father and son.

Volk takes the police station story and transforms it from the inflexible anecdotal shield it had become into a raw and pivotal moment in young Fred’s emotional and psychological development. The constant reiteration of the experience in the form of an amusing tale becomes a double-bluff; a piece of genuine self-revelation coated in the polished veneer of a light, carefully crafted recollection. It’s a pointer to the nature of Hitch’s films, the way in which he embedded his own deeply personal fears and desires beneath their immaculately contrived surfaces whilst never, ever admitting to any such dimension in public. In Volk’s story, the punishment meted out in the police station is a great deal more traumatic than the mild admonishment of the anecdote, the incarceration much lengthier than the brief incarceration Hitch outlined. Fred is left there overnight, bullied and tormented by a sadistic policeman who delights in telling him that Jack the Ripper is lodged in the adjacent cell. He has only a piss-stained bed with an indeterminately sticky blanket to curl up on, his lullaby sinister nonsense songs bellowed by the neighbouring drunk. It’s related with a Kafkaesque sense of existential terror. Fred feels utterly abandoned, and betrayed by his parents (his mother who let him go with a promise of his favourite steak and kidney pie upon his return). But most of all, he doesn’t understand. If he’s being subjected to this terrible punishment, he must be guilty of something. But what? Some latent sin he has yet to manifest? A universal guilt lodged within every human heart? It’s almost as if he is being guided to discover that guilt. At this juncture, he might as well be called Fred K.

The shadows of films to come are glimpsed throughout the story. There’s a certain game-like element to these allusions. They are partly speculative excavations, searching for the psychological strata underlying the stories Hitch chose to tell. But they are also offered with a nod and a wink, an enjoyable bit of movie spotting for terminal film buffs. The Ripper reference looks forward to The Lodger; the stuffed bird in the Jesuit father’s office, the transvestite and the police officer’s taunting ‘bit of a mummy’s boy, are we?’ to Pyscho; the ‘fluttering and scratching’ pigeons filling the upstairs room of a ruined house to The Birds’; the idea of hiding a body in a sack of potatoes to Frenzy….and so on.

Shadow selves - Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train

Other abiding themes running through Hitchcock’s films are also alluded to. The idea of disguised or hidden selves is present from the start in the form of metaphorical architecture – the division between the immaculate and bright streetfront display of the Hitchcock greengrocer’s and the dark interior behind in which the family lives. One of the bullying policeman’s methods of playing on young Fred’s imagination is to act as if he believes that his thorough knowledge of transport timetables and routes points to his being a potential spy. He turns something innocent, a source of intellectual pride, into something secret and despicable. Spies are key characters in a significant number of Hitchcock films: The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, North by Northwest, Torn Curtain and Topaz. Volk has Fred ask his father what a spy is. His answer sheds light on their role within these pictures. His dad also inadvertently describes himself and all adults who aren’t unblemished saints (ie all adults), and presents his son with a sketch of his future self. A spy, William explains, is ‘a person who keeps secrets. Somebody who says he’s one thing but he’s really another’. The spy theme and the idea of the self hidden behind a carefully maintained surface extends to the doubled characters which cast mirroring reflections across Hitchcock’s filmography. Cary Grant and James Mason (Roger Thornhill – or ‘Mr Kaplan’ - and Phillip Vandamm) circling each other in North by Northwest is the example that most vividly springs to mind. But there are also the pairings of Cary Grant and Claude Rains in Notorious, Farley Granger and Robert Walker (Guy and Bruno) swapping murders in Strangers on a Train, James Stewart scripting Raymond Burr’s murder of his wife to alleviate his boredom in Rear Window, deadbeat Jon Finch and his psychopathic mate Barry Foster (Richard Blaney and Bob Rush) in Frenzy and many others. In Leytonstone, Fred’s father William is doubled with the monstrous, bullying policeman. The latter is a bluff brute who lives to feed his appetites, without any moral compunctions which might curb them. William is far more uncertain of himself (the ‘rather nervous man’ of Hitchcock’s recollection), filling his life with labour to allay the fear that it might all be ultimately without purpose. Or rather, that he might never discover that sense of purpose which those around him seem intuitively to possess. The doubling theme finds interesting form in Johan Grimonprez’s 2009 film Double Take, in which footage taken from introductions to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series is contrasted with interviews with and footage of a contemporary Hitchcock impersonator.

Villain as victim

There’s an often ambiguous borderline separating hero from villain in Hitchcock’s films. They are, to varying degrees, different aspects of a divided self. The hero is sometimes bland and rather weak, as with Guy in Strangers on a Train or Richard in Frenzy. The villain is contrastingly smooth, decisive and charismatic. In other cases, Psycho being the prime example, the heroes are little more than bullies, the villains damaged, fearful and misunderstood (save by the director and, perhaps, their victims). Fred exhibits sympathy towards the ‘villain’ as he appears at the beginning of Dickens’ Great Expectations. ‘I like him’, he says of Magwich after his mother has called him ‘a terrible man’.

The wrong man as Christ-like martyr - The Lodger

The doubled self also links in with the ‘wrong man’ theme. If there is a wrong man then there must also be a right man, or a man who bears the genuine burden of guilt. Fred is the wrong man (or boy) in Leytonstone. But in a sense he is also the right man. his imprisonment is a premonitory punishment (akin to the delayed punishments meted out by the Jesuit teachers at the hour of the pupil’s choosing). The notion of overwhelming and all-pervasive personal guilt, prevalent also in his Catholic upbringing and schooling, almost invites action to provide a palpably solid basis for its nebulous presence, an identifiable source for its oppressive weight. Volk suggests a religious dimension to the wrong man theme (a dimension explicitly evident in Hitchcock’s I Confess) by having Fred ask of the Jesuit schoolfather ‘but Jesus was crucified as a criminal. For a crime he didn’t commit. What was the crime they though he committed?’ So Christ was, from a certain viewpoint, and example of the ‘wrong man’ – the lamb taken for a lion. Or of the right man, taking on the guilt and sins of others, something only possible by virtue of a shared humanity. The wrong man takes on the sins of the ‘villain’ with whom he becomes inextricably linked. The guilt is, to all appearances, removed from the ‘sinner’, for the time being anyway. What happens to that guilt? Does it correspond to something that was always present in the ‘wrong’ man? Of course, it’s the nature of the plot’s progression that he tries to return it to its original owner. The analogies with Christ only stretch so far. As Father Mullins, the Jesuit teacher, states, desperately trying to evade the issue, ‘it’s complicated’.

Of course, there has to be a Hitchcock blonde. The prototype here is a girl called Olga from the local convent school. Fred is fascinated by her coolness in the face of his friends’ base schoolboy pranks. His confusion over his feelings towards her leads to the dramatic tension at the heart of the second half of the novella. A tension which mirrors that of the first, but with Fred now putting himself in a position of power. Taking up the director’s chair. It provides a psychological basis for Hitch’s treatment of the ice blondes in his mid-period classics (Grace, Kim, Eva, Janet and Tippi) which is directly linked to his experience in the police cell. The production of exquisitely manufactured scenarios of suspense and release as a means of subsuming personal, inexpressible fears, art as a means of controlling that which eludes you in real life. It is also, as the parallel events of the story make clear, an indirect way of trying to connect with someone, to create an intimacy based on shared fear. This perverse melding of romance and terror would characterise many of his films. It also suggests that if Hitchcock has his doubles onscreen, the characters which truly express the secret spaces of his heart, then they are not the suavely collected Jimmy Stewarts, Cary Grants or Sean Conneries, but the fearful, haunted Tippi Hedrens, Kim Novaks and Eva Marie-Saints.

Volk takes a certain amount of license with the facts in Leytonstone. The police cell incident took place when Hitch was about 6, and that is Fred’s stated age in the story. He attends St Ignatius Jesuit School, although Hitchcock didn’t go here until 1910, when he was 11 years old, by which time the family had moved from Leytonstone to Stepney (via Poplar). His precocious 6 year old self is already familiar with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whereas Hitch spoke in interviews about having discovered him when he was 16. There is also no mention of his older brother and sister, William jr. and Nellie, who would presumably have been living at home at this time. But this is mythography, not biography. Volk is creating a fictional portrait based on aspects of a well-known public persona and body of work, drawing on elements from a whole lifespan. Hitchock’s version of his own life was as much fiction as fact (the same could no doubt be said of us all). Volk’s story, with its compression and folding outward of time, its collision of the real with the invented, reflects on Hitch’s fundamental, Kane-like inscrutability.


There have been many attempts to psychoanalyse Hitchcock, generally undertaken in an amateurish and highly speculative manner. They seem to take their cues from the psychology for simpletons lecture at the end of Psycho. Hitch was a master of misdirection and manipulation, both in his films and as regarded his private life. It’s tempting to reach for facile simplifications when trying to penetrate his implacable exterior, to draw on particular events to neatly summarise the complex contradictions of his character. Donald Spoto’s controversial biography, whilst admirably frank and honest in some respects, is all to ready to reach instant psychological conclusions. Volk’s book is partly a response to these versions of Hitchcock, which have reached their apogee in two recent films (Hitchcock and The Girl) which cast him in a deeply unflattering light. By portraying Hitch as the young Fred, a frightened and confused boy, Volk is able to examine the roots of his art and its universal appeal from a neutral distance.

Hitch’s films have affected an enormous number of people over the year, attracting an audience way beyond the coterie of cinephiles who continue (in the wake of Truffaut and the Cahiers du Cinema boys) to revere him. Vertigo has now displaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time in the weighty estimation of Sight and Sound readers and critics. Volk’s Hitchcock is ultimately a mystery to himself, just as his father is depicted as being. He’s not a monster. He remains that frightened boy, bewildered by the betrayals and machinations of the adult world; torn between adoration of his father, respect for his father’s authority and a rejection of both; and disconnected from the turbulent swell of his own emotions, and thereby from real communion with others. He is a tragic figure.

Reaching out for contact (see also the Anthony Perkins photo above)

Towards the end of the book, we encounter him in the form we know at the American Film Institute’s celebration of his life and work held in 1979, not long before his death the following year. The lost little boy is still there, unable to apprehend the love and professional respect being directed towards him. He remains adrift, the world never having truly made sense to him since that night in the police cells when he was confronted with such overwhelming fear and guilt arising from an unknown place, from no identifiable source. The films are phantom emanations, attempts to reach that emotion, to create a sense of commonality through fear and suspense. The adulatory response of the AFI audience is proof that he achieved that. The tragedy is that he is unable to share in that commonality. The depth of his films lies in the perception of the tragedy lying beneath their exciting colourful surfaces (and the nearness of that tragedy to the surface of Vertigo is perhaps why it is so critically revered). Hitch also persisted in asking the questions which Volk has his Jesuit teacher Father Mullins so definitively to answer. In a strange way, he was a religious director.


Volk’s book brilliantly and movingly gives an origin myth to bring light to the ambiguous depths and tragic dimensions of the films, and to restore to Hitchcock his humanity, the wounded and confused pain and compassion at the heart of his work. The critic and playwright David Rudkin wrote, in his TV play Artemis 81, of Hitchcock’s camera being a ‘consecrating eye’, detecting the sacred aspect of his work, the yearning for a transcendent sense of connection, of profound love. This sense of the sacred, of shared fears and desires, is at the heart of Hitchcock’s great post-war work. It’s what has earned him his immortality, and has made such a profound impact on so many people over the years. We can all empathise with these feelings at some level, learn to fall together and find release from our fears. Hitch, forever Fred deep inside, remains outside, watching us with an impassive, unreadable regard, that famous profile a serenely blank mask. Perhaps he’s Buddha after all.

The golden age of British horror movies continues to exert a fascination over successive generations of fans. The films of the late 50s through to the mid-70s belong to a distinct period of post-war popular culture, a pre-corporate era in which small companies could produce and market movies which were relatively small in scale but highly distinguished in quality. It was also a time in which maverick Soho producers at the lower end of the market could knock off cheap exploitation pictures which occasionally (very occasionally) resulted in the revelation of a fresh and exciting new talent, creating something which transcended the formula its backers were flagrantly trying to copy. The horror cinema of this era bears so little relation to contemporary manifestations of the genre, with their emphasis on prolonged physical pain and the dogged pursuit of new extremes, that they seem to come from a far more distant time, beyond living memory. Their values can seem impossibly outmoded, but in this marked difference lies part of their charm. The best of the pictures from this time offer a great deal more than the nostalgic appeal of period quaintness, however. They were made with great care and craftsmanship, featured actors of real class (the oft-twinned names of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee being the stellar examples) and a wonderful array of character performers, and were often possessed of a full-blooded romanticism which formed a continuation of British traditions both cinematic (Powell and Pressburger and Gainsborough), literary and artistic. The Hammer and Amicus studios were the most notable homes from which they emerged. And they were homes, with a family feel to what they produced, a house style which you could depend upon. It’s a seemingly contradictory thing to say about the productions of a genre intended to inspire terror, but a real warmth and affection for their films and those involved in the making of them has developed over the years. Two new books pay homage to them in the form of reference-steeped fiction, and serve as testament to this enduring appeal.


The Hammer of Dr Valentine by John Llewellyn Probert, published by Spectral Press, is a sequel to The Nine Deaths of Dr Valentine, which won the British Fantasy Award for best novella at the 2013 World Fantasy Convention. That first encounter with the diabolically resourceful physician, bent on avenging the death of his daughter, drew very consciously on the films of Vincent Price. The models for the absurdly elaborate deaths meted out to the medical staff deemed responsible for allowing his daughter to die are lifted from Price’s films, Valentine adapting them according to circumstance. The narrative structure and blackly comic tone is lifted from Theatre of Blood and the Dr Phibes movies in particular. They were distinguished by lusciously contrived camp, the horror (and they were surprisingly vicious at times) alleviated by knowingly exaggerated and patently ridiculous excess. Dr Valentine emulates ham thesp Edward Lionheart in Theatre of Blood in his adoption of role-playing disguises, his propensity for gloating moral lectures and his relish for bad puns and mordant quips as agonising at the torments he inflicts upon his victims. These victims are invariably loathsome and wholly undeserving of sympathy, thus allowing us to enjoy the spectacle of their exquisitely plotted and executed demises.


The Hammer of Dr Valentine shifts the focus from Vincent Price and onto the extensive output of the Hammer studios. The Doctor is back and this time choosing as the subjects for his art of death the tabloid sleazemongers and hack bestseller writers who distorted the true nature of his previous escapades. As an aesthete of decadent derangement, this distortion of his carefully constructed narrative or revenge is unforgivable. Thus they are picked off one by one, eliminated by the monster they helped to foster and becoming fodder for more of their kind. Still sticking assiduously with the template of Theatre of Blood and Dr Phibes, even though nominally now on Hammer territory, the Doctor is provided with a young and loyal female assistant, his co-star and siren in the deadly skits he contrives. Also following the pattern, the forces of the law always plod a few paces behind. The returning DCI Jeffrey Longdon is left cursing impotently at his minions, the morbid chorus of DIs Martinus, Graves and Wentworth, as he comes across the latest implausible murder scene. He’s less the stoical Peter Jeffries of the Phibes movies, more the irascible, cynical and petulant Donald Pleasance in Death Line. There’s a less morally compromised character on the roster of potential victims, John Spalding, the equivalent of Joseph Cotton in The Abominable Dr Phibes or Ian Hendry in Theatre of Blood. If anyone is likely to survive and bring the Doctor’s murderous mystery play to a close it will be him. He is also effectively the ‘savant’ of the scenario, the character with the specialised knowledge necessary to defeat the monster. He is no Van Helsing, but his knowledge of the variety of Van Helsings on screen may prove of use. As a film critic he is acquainted with the whole range of Hammer films and thereby with the modus operandi of the supervillain he and the police force face. But will this cinephile learning arm them sufficiently to defeat such a mercurial, elusive foe.


Hammer fans will have a huge amount of fun spotting the films whose deaths Dr Valentine goes to such lengths to reproduce. They’re not necessarily the obvious ones, either. Probert digs deep into the Hammer back catalogue and comes up with some surprising and effective choices. He may just lead you to dust off films you’d put to one side as inessential. Fear In The Night or The Reptile, for instance. Valentine is in some ways a superfan himself, dressing the part and paying his own form of tribute with appropriate bucketloads of Kensington gore. Probert makes no bones about his own love of the studio’s output. Well, most of it anyway. He reserves a pronounced disdain for the 70s psycho Peter Pan drama Straight On ‘til Morning, with the new Hammer star of the time Shane Bryant and an uncomfortable Rita Tushingham (her unease palpable in the commentary she provides for the dvd release). His objects to what he perceives as its failed pretensions towards arthouse status. I find things of interest in it. It seems to be a swinging sixties film infected with the growing disillusionment of the seventies. The Knack or Smashing Time in which the bright pop art backdrops have faded to grey, the zany antics wound down into entropic stasis; the Peter Pan fantasy of carefree youth is no longer sustainable, and the attempt to prolong it induces psychotic breakdown. But no, it ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of such a scenario, and descends into another of Hammer’s tiresome psycho derivatives.

Prominent citation of sources during the opening credits for The House That Dripped Blood

In an extensive afterword, Probert provides a film by film key to the story’s cinematic reference points. There’s a lovely image in the book of the police incident room map, lines of red wool radiating out from the crime scenes to join with small reproductions of the relevant Hammer film posters. The afterword is Probert’s explanatory counterpart to this chart. It is charmingly autobiographical, and his remembrances of first encounters with various films will chime with many readers, prompting their own misty reminiscences. I particularly liked his recollection of watching Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed on HTV Cymru, unconvincingly dubbed into Welsh. Amicus gets a look in via the reference to Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, the classic study of German expressionist horror. It is prominently placed on a desk and lingered over by the camera at the start of The House That Dripped Blood.

We also get to visit Dr Terror’s Haunted Cornish Funfair, which combines Dr Terror’s House of Horror’s with the fairground setting of Torture Garden. A new entertainment venture for Peter Cushing’s tarot reader, perhaps. The rides include Dr Blood’s Coffin and Crucible of Terror, references to two Cornish set films of surpassing dullness (Zennor standing in for ‘Porthcarron’ and Perranporth for any Cornish folk out there). ‘These local things were never up to much’, one character muses, ‘so they could give the Crucible of Terror a miss’. It’s an amusingly offhand critical dismissal. Probert’s story is full of such pleasing details and, like its illustrious sources, serves up shudders of fear and laughter in equal and well-balance measures. We also get to visit one of the ultimate locations for 60s and 70s British horror: Oakley Court, a neo-gothic mansion by the Thames in Berkshire (conveniently close to Hammer’s Bray Studios). It provided the backdrop to several Hammer films, transported to Cornwall for The Reptile and Plague of Zombies and middle Europe for Brides of Dracula. Amicus used it for one of their few all-out gothics, And Now The Screaming Starts, and it was put to atmospheric use in Vampyres. Intriguingly, a parting reference to Don’t Look Now suggests that the demented Dr V may yet return – but moving into the arthouse and using Nic Roeg films as his sick source material. We can only wait with fearful anticipation.


Terrors of the Théâtre Diabolique is an anthology edited by Dan Barratt and John Davies. It is graced with an urbane introduction by David Warner, who played an unfortunate character in the Amicus film From Beyond the Grave, a devilish cover by Simon A.Brett and illustrations by Paul Griffin. Profits from the sales of the book, whether in physical form or as a downloadable pdf, are going to MIND, a particularly worthy charity. Not least amongst the services it offers is enlightening the public about the nature of mental illness, thus dispelling the bogies summoned up in Amicus’ film Asylum; an absurdly melodramatic view of the ‘mad’ as devious and dangerously unpredictable which is still surprisingly prevalent. The inspiration here is the series of portmanteau horror films made by Amicus from the mid 60s through through to the mid 70s. Or the early 80s if you care to include The Monster Club, which I rather think I do, largely out of blurry nostalgia. Alright, so Amicus had folded by then, but it was produced by Milton Subotsky and is an Amicus film in all but name. It was the first horror film I saw in the cinema. I was thrilled at the prospect of watching an Amicus picture on the big screen, having become familiar with the likes of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, From Beyond the Grave and Asylum via Saturday night horror double bills on the BBC.


Dan Barratt shares my affection for the Amicus portmanteau films and has fashioned a contemporary version in the form of a short story collection. He supplies the framing narrative himself, inviting others to provide the creepy vignettes he sets up. The opening scenes are written with a cinematic sweep, taking the point of view of a swallow gliding down towards a seaside town. This affords us long and medium distance establishing shots, followed up by exterior close-ups of the Victorian gothic details of a crumbling theatre of dark varieties. Following a near escape from a local cat, the swallow conducts a swift (sic) aerial survey of the interior before coming to a rest at a high vantage point, from which it can watch events unfolding below. The choice of a swallow might be a little nod to Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. The swallow as symbol of selfless sacrifice provides an ironic contrast to the self-absorbed outlooks of the characters who people the stories in the collection.

You're all dead already - end of story

The protagonists in Amicus films are by and large unsympathetic: selfish, mean-spirited, venal, cold-hearted and frequently coldly murderous. They tend to find themselves gathered together in some unwelcoming venue (a crypt, a vault) or linked by a common locale they all visit (a strange shop, a house which changes hands with suspicious regularity). There is a guide or host who welcomes them, generally with a highly portentous, sepulchral air. He then proceeds to tell them their secret stories, reading their fates, which invariably involve a distinct element of finality. Having pronounced their collective doom, he then reveals the shocking truth, which brings the film to an end. This tends to be a reminder that they’re all dead already and will be, or have for some time been spending an eternity in hell.

Peter Cushing's mild-mannered shopkeeper in From Beyond the Grave - just don't shortchange him

There’s certainly a strong current of judgement contained within the stories of the Amicus portmanteaus. Poetic justice is meted out with cackling relish, often rounded off with a summary quip from our guide. I always loved Peter Cushing’s parting words to Ian Carmichael in From Beyond the Grave. Carmichael had just surreptitiously swapped price tags on two antique snuff boxes, buying the more expensive one for a considerably reduced price as a result. In this uncanny shop, hidden away in a forgotten city alleyway in which the Victorian era seems to live on, it is, however, extremely, indeed fatally unwise to cheat the proprietor. ‘I hope you enjoy snuffing it sir’, he says, a pitiless note underlying his amiable, mild-mannered demeanour. He clamps his pipe in his mouth, turns and shuffles off with a certain air of weary disappointment at being confronted yet again with human weakness and greed. The moral comeuppance visited upon richly deserving characters betrays the influence of the notorious EC comics of the 50s. These had a notably satirical undercurrent, drawing (and inking) a picture of contemporary America as a moral vacuum which belied the comfortable self-satisfaction of the Eisenhower era. Vengeance was often carried out at the clawed, earth-encrusted hands of rotting revenants, leering corpses returning from the grave to right wrongs with much rending and tearing of flesh. They were anti-superheroes of a sort, emerging from the earth rather than descending from the skies, draped in ragged shrouds rather than colourful capes. A suppurating Justice League of America for the downtrodden and betrayed. Needless to say, they failed to win the approval of the moral majority. The Amicus films didn’t really share the barbed satirical element of the EC comics, although there was a certain undermining of 70s consumerism and class divisions, the relentless pursuit of wealth and the idealisation of the spotless suburban household. There weren’t many rotting corpses clawing their way out of the grave either. One memorable exception was the tale of Arthur Grimsdyke, a highly effective episode featuring a performance of heartrending pathos from Peter Cushing. We cheer him on when he returns from the dead to make literal the figurative heartlessness of his proto-yuppie tormentor. That story was told in Tales from the Crypt, one of two films directly adapted from EC comics.

Grimsdyke returns in Tales From The Crypt

There’s definitely a strong element of moral comeuppance to the tales told in the Théâtre Diabolique as well. We have our guide here, too. A cowled figure who ushers his ‘guests’ through a tour of the dilapidated Victorian house of varieties, leading them into the subterranean vaults lying beneath the stage. There are conscious echoes of Amicus films throughout, as you would expect from a homage. The touring party pass various dusty objects in storage rooms which hint at stories untold, or perhaps ones we’ve seen before: an ‘ornate mirror’ reminds us of the possessed glass in From Beyond the Grave; ‘a child’s doll’ the toy which Christopher Lee snatches from the hand of the little girl he believes to be a witch in The House That Dripped Blood; ‘some scattered illustrated pages’ are perhaps drawn by Tom Baker’s artist in Vault of Horror, whose portrait subjects suffered damage commensurate with that inflicted upon their images. Others are less familiar, although ‘a large, ominous pendulum blade’ and ‘a human sized ape suit’ might have strayed in from the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe pictures The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death. Similarly, a ‘spiralling metal staircase’ which ‘groaned and swayed alarmingly’ may have been relocated from Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, as memorably visualised in Robert Wise’s The Haunting.

Ingrid Pitt in a publicity still for The House That Dripped Blood

As for the stories themselves, they fit the Amicus mould in that they share a contemporary setting. No moonlit gothic castles wreathed in mist here. Amicus briskly dispensed with the gothic staples in their first portmanteau picture, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, which featured werewolves, vampires, a crawling hand (the beast with five fingers), voodoo curses and, er, a swiftly spreading variety of intelligent, carnivorous weed (menacing poor old Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman). They turned up from time to time, but in a joky context. Vampires bared their teeth with an accompanying nod and wink in Vault of Horror (tucking into rare or medium clots in an exclusive restaurant) and in The House That Dripped Blood (supplying a splendid and much reproduced still of Ingrid Pitt hissing through elongated incisors if nothing else). They no doubt realised that they couldn’t beat Hammer at their own game, and so set their cruel tales in 70s living rooms, bedrooms and lounges (and basements). The horrors often extended to the décor.

JR Southall’s House Sitting is a variant of the malevolent house tale. A building which feeds off the fears and painful buried memories of those who stray into its field of baleful influence. Ghosts of the mind are awakened, personal hauntings set into spectral motion. Southall’s tale harks back to The House That Dripped Blood, with its desirable Victorian detached house from which tenants are despatched with disdainful frequency. It also echoes the evil architecture of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, with its uncanny feel for the hidden weaknesses of its inhabitants. The Day Martin Anderson Lost It is a latterday tale of Walter Mitty daydreaming. This is extreme Mitty, however, with fantasies of psychotic violence directed against a hated call-centre boss superceding the whimsical escapism of Thurber’s character. In railing against corporate workplaces with their empty managerial mantras, it voices frustrations which we can all identify with to some extent.

David Warner looking decidedly unwell in From Beyond the Grave

Tony Eccles’ The Finding is a haunted house tale whose supernatural manifestations centre upon a mirror with uncanny properties. It’s the kind of mirror whose depths contain a little more than a simple inverted reflection presented to those standing in front of it. It brings to mind the David Warner episode in From Beyond the Grave, one of the more disturbing of the Amicus stories, not least because of Warner’s quietly intense performance. It follows its protagonist into the depths of a psychotic breakdown, his murderous actions prompted and directed by a figure in the mirror he bought from Peter Cushing’s shadowy emporium. He didn’t pay enough cash, either. A haunted mirror also appears in the honourable ancestor of the Amicus portmanteaus, the 1945 Ealing picture Dead of Night. Eccles’ story also plays with the confusion of the real and the imaginary, the border between rational perception and emotionally clouded hallucination. This ambiguity provided the basis for a few Amicus stories. There was the ‘Dominick’ episode of The House That Dripped Blood, in which a murderous character from writer Denholm Elliott’s novel seems to have come to life. And in Asylum, Charlotte Rampling dreams up an imaginary friend (Britt Ekland) who indulges in all the wild things she is far too timid and anxious to do herself.

Simon A Brett’s The Artist’s Medium concerns a very special pen which, when mixed with bodily fluids (their specific provenance doesn’t seem overly important) becomes imbued with the power to alter in reality that which it draws on the blank page. Used unwittingly in a state of post-coital reflection or in a fit of drunken rage in the wake of a bitter break-up, the results prove grimly ironic. They are punning deaths in the Amicus mould, figures of speech or symbolic representations rendered literal, with liberal splashes of gore to bring it up to date. The Vault of Horror story with Tom Baker as an artist who discovers his power to affect reality through his painted representations is a classic reference point here. Tom misuses his powers, but comes a cropper when a workman knocks over a bottle of white spirit onto his self-portrait, causing features to blur and run – a Francis Bacon meat face for real.

Lee Rawlings’ By Rook or By Crook (the agonising Amicus pun contained in the title) is kitchen sink psycho horror combined with the Freudian supernatural of The Birds. The dynastic rivalry between father and son is also a clash between the pragmatic Yorkshireman’s bluntly fiscal worldview and the more aesthetic outlook of his adopted offspring. The age old imperative to displace the father, enshrined in the modern age by Freud, is given a nicely ritualistic air by the stark, ancient landscape in which the story takes place. Jon Arnold’s The Golden Ghouls (another painful pun) draws on the new extreme strands of cinema, and on the body horror which has been a significant generic strand since the 80s. His story is simplicity itself. Two lively old ladies in an old people’s home who still entertain libidinous thoughts are charmed into drinking an elixir of youth. It’s a homeopathic remedy whose sub-microscopic elements are demons from hell. They are duly possessed and their puppeteered bodies are made to dance to the devil’s tune in a strict modern tempo. Arnold takes the satire of the EC comics and some of the Amicus stories to delirious new levels (or depths). His story seems driven by a pervasive disgust at and cynicism about the modern world, and exhibits a visceral horror of old age. The wholesale assault on venality, consumerism and the empty, possessive carnality which accompanies it is unbalanced and more than a little hysterical. Arnold certainly holds nothing back in his detailing of the ladies’ orgiastic rampage. It’s like a mini-Salo, portraying contemporary society in terms of readymade circles of hell. The in your face unpleasantness could almost be construed as rude riposte to the relatively refined horrors of Amicus and Hammer, a mark of how far we have come (or fallen). Milton Subotsky, an old school horror aficionado (as witness the books displayed at the start of The House That Dripped Blood, borrowed from his own collection) would not have countenanced its like. I certainly don’t have the stomach for it, which is why I tend to avoid most modern manifestations of horror. A matter of taste (and age), I suppose.

Who's next? Could it be YOU?

The finale, bringing us out of the theatre once more, creates an explosive eruption of Lovecraftian delirium which Amicus could never have dreamed of staging on their meagre budgets. They tried consigning a soul to a fiery pit of damnation at the end of Vault of Horror, but their ambition outstripped their means, and the effect was frankly embarrassing. Dan Barratt gives a grandiose climax which encompasses and then surpasses the default Hammer way of ending things by bringing the house down, and usually burning it the ground as well. A quiet coda offers a version of the typical Amicus ending in which the guide or proprietor turns to the new visitors, customers or lost souls. Who will be next to enter my domain – could it be you? Here we are introduced to a modern incarnation of the popularly loathed social type, the sort who many would gladly see receiving their just dues. For our age, it is a banker. It rounds things of with a pleasing circularity, ending on the kind of wryly humorous note which characterised the Amicus films. A reminder not to take any of it too seriously. The curtain falls. But which side are you left on? Who is that cackling dryly in the shadows? Why has it all gone so dark? Where has everybody gone? Hallo?

This record, which came into the Oxfam record shop in Exeter yesterday, is a real discovery. Ottilie Patterson was the singer with the Chris Barber Band, belting out good time trad jazz. But on this 1969 album she explores entirely different territory. There's dark folk with lush studio arrangements, baroque psych pop (with the rhythm section of Brian Auger's Trinity lending a bit of heft) and jaunty Elizabethan dances setting Shakespearean lyrics. The label has a nice art nouveau/Biba look - all purple and orange swirls. Very late 60s. It was set up by Giorgio Gomelsky in 1966. He was one of those characters in swinging London who seemed to try his hand at anything. He managed (vaguely) the Stones and the Yardbirds at the outset of their careers, ran the Crawdaddy Club which they emerged from and produced a number of records. In the 70s, he was involved with Gong (he produced the Flying Teapot album) and in particular Magma. They ignited his love of experimental, exploratory music. The Marmalade label released records by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity (including Wheel's On Fire), John McLaughlin's Extrapolation (his 'free' record with John Surman, Tony Oxley and Brian Odgers) and John Stevens Spontaneous Music Ensemble (a key progenitor of British free improv, here with Kenny Wheeler, Derek Bailey, Trevor Watts, Peter Lemer, Johnny Dyani and Maggie Nichols), English psych pop band Blossom Toes (whose music features in Eric Rohmer's film La Collectionneuse), a pre-10CC Graham Gouldman and Kevin Godley, and Chris Barber himself. Diverse or what! This is a great record, though. The dark tenor, low key balladry and expansive arrangements remind me of 60s Scott Walker. Which is never a bad thing. Here's Ottilie with the dark, epic folk of Helen of Kirkconnell.

Walk On is a major exhibition loosely themed around the act of wandering and the art it has inspired over the past 5 or so decades. It is distributed around various venues in Plymouth, allowing the spectator to become a participant by tracing their own routes across the city. Indeed, the city itself can become a backdrop if you take part in one of the walks coinciding with the show, or if you borrow Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Walk Book and follow their recorded instructions. The everyday can be transformed, the art prompting you to perceive familiar surroundings from a different angle, making them new and surprising or rendering them strange and alienating. The title Walk On suggests a continuum of work, a distinct path beaten through the tangled and tortuous landscape of modern art. It also suggests a certain indifference to contemporary trends, a lighting out for territories beyond, travelling along tracks branching off from the from the urban Artworld heartlands. The exhibitors here might not consciously be participating in a shared movement or drawing on each other’s work. But there’s evidently something inherently attractive to the artist about walking, getting out into the world. It’s an act which implies a broadening of perspective and an exposure to the unexpected, the unplanned. Walking pursued for its own end can also be a solitary endeavour and positions the artist as an observer, a stranger passing through and recording what she sees. Making the walk itself a subject questions the very basis of art. How does the artist represent what he sees? How to convey the many impressions which impinge upon the sensorium, how to map the totality of experience, or even the smallest part of it. Part of the fascination of the exhibition lies in the variety of means and modes used to translate direct observation into some kind of representational form.

The first two artists the visitor encounters in the part of the exhibition housed in the museum (the largest of the venues) are Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who studied together at St Martin’s College of Art in London. It’s the perfect starting point, locating the origins of walking art in the 1960s, a decade which was defined artistically by a spirit of experimentalism and adventure; a wilful breaking away from established traditions. One obvious way of doing this was to move beyond the confines of the gallery space to create works in and from the landscape. Hamish Fulton conducted and early walk in 1967 with fellow students, shuffling along in a cluster from St Martin’s to their chosen destination a short distance away in Soho. It marked a conscious step away from premises where art was officially ‘done’, moving slowly into the chaos of the city and taking time to observe its passing parade. The route was retraced for the 40th anniversary of the event; walking as remembering and reflecting upon time and change. The representation of this walk takes the form of a poster advertising something which has already taken place. Details of time and place are laid out in a clear, bold graphic style, and there is a photo of the original walkers, which also acts as a snapshot of a London moment, with the styles and period details telling the story of the era. It could almost be a flyer for a band that’s recently passed through, yet to be torn down and pasted over with the latest thing.

From local beginnings, Fulton’s path radiated outwards, embracing the whole world. Investigations of the backyard expanded into epic explorations of far flung wilds. From college to the city, from the city to the country beyond its borders, and from that country to other countries, other continents. Just walk on. Eventually he attempted the ultimate ‘walk’: a climb up Everest. This is also presented in a bold graphic style, this time principally in the form of the bright, colourful Tibetan flag, which is placed centrally in the composition. It turns the walk into a political act, a crossing of boundaries and a refusal to recognise their invisible imperatives.


31 Walks is the first of the maps in the exhibition. They take many forms, artists playing with the idea of the map as a diagrammatic representation of landscape, and as a guide to navigating your way through the land; the map as a way of planning journeys or of making them in the imagination, mental travel through inner space. Fulton’s map shows the British and European landmasses as white blanks given shape by the sky blue of the surrounding seas. His walks over the decades are traced with thin, winding lines, intersecting capillaries with arrows indicating the direction of flow. The text compressed into the top right corner (over the unwalked Nordic countries) reads ‘walking coast to coast/coast to river/river to coast/river to river’. Britain in particular is condensed into a watery island, a land defined by what is not land. Imagistic word lists are another means to summon up the impressions of a journey. Fulton reverses the dictum that a picture is worth a thousand words. The repetition and varied placement of the two words ‘river’ and ‘coast’ with their accompanying associations with complex line and expansive border create their own rhythm of motion and connective pattern. The value of the work is in the direct experience as far as Fulton is concerned. ‘A walked line, unlike a drawn line, can never be erased’ he writes in one of the works here. And elsewhere, ‘the artwork cannot represent the experience of a walk’. It can only be alluded to through symbols – words, flags and maps. Beneath the 31 Walks map are printed the words ‘walking into the distance beyond imagination’. Fulton disappears into the all-encompassing haze of oceanic blue. We can only follow him so far, picking up on the traces he leaves behind him.

Fulton takes the art of walking into head-scratching metaphysical zones in which the nature of representation becomes an inseparable part of the work. We will never get to experience the walk, the work itself (although there is a chance to join one of his walks during the exhibition), only the attempt to express something of its essence. It’s a reflection upon the nature of art in general. Richard Long isn’t quite as reductive as his contemporary. Although an early work does pare down the tracks of his Dartmoor walks to a few minimal lines and circles, symbols charting his own territory with no co-ordinates provided to help give the outsider an idea of the topography covered. Long is also more inclined to make his mark on the landscape (and make a record of that marking) as is evinced by England 1968 and A Line In The Himalayas 1975. The linearity of the track ‘drawn’ across the field through walking repeatedly back and forth and the neatly arrayed, lightly coloured row of stones forming a runway to the distant mountain peak are clear indications of human presence and organising thought in the non-linear surroundings of the natural world.

Long uses maps as record and ‘proof’ of his walks as well as for the visual pleasure they afford. If a map is a two-dimensional diagram of a three dimensional space, then Long takes it to the next dimension as well. One of the works displayed here, A Square of Ground 1966, is a small tabletop landscape, a hilltop draining into a stream which traces folded contours as it runs down into the valley. This miniaturised topography, which resembles a geological model, implies a similar miniaturisation of any human figure (including Long himself) within it. It’s a pocket version of the sublime, with observers (us) peering down from above like towering gods.

Long also uses natural materials gathered on his walks, something which Fulton pointedly never does. In this exhibition, he has created two circles from blocks and wedges of stone, laid out on the gallery floor like fragmented wheels. This construction of a work composed of elemental materials in the centre of a ‘refined’ space creates a sense of dislocation, of worlds colliding. The congruent arrangement of raw materials redolent of stark, remote sites, circles which the visitor has to walk around as they make their way through the gallery, summons up a ritualistic atmosphere. It’s entirely appropriate that an exhibition in the neighbouring room displays materials recently found in a Bronze Age burial mound at Whitehorse Hill on Dartmoor.


A good many of the artists in the Walk On exhibition take their cues from Fulton and Long, adapting or updating them according to their own particular experience or intention. Maps are a recurrent feature. Chris Drury’s High Desert Wind superimposes a map of Ladakh on a cross-section of the human heart. It contrasts the spiritual with the corporeal, outer with inner landscapes. Symbolising the yearning for travel and adventure, self-discovery and enlightenment, it is a map of the human heart. Jeremy Wood’s White Horse Hill is a relief map made from cardboard which bursts out from the frame in ridges and contoured rosettes. Its protruding dimensions were drawn from GPS tracking signals. The ancient chalk downland landscape and the marks which man has made upon it (the Uffington White Horse) are thus contrasted with modern satellite technologies. These are technologies which create a distance from the landscapes and places which were once sacred, as the powerful lines of the chalk horse indicate.


Sarah Cullen displays several drawings whose abstract patterns were created using a simple yet ingenious low-tech home-made device. She carries a case on her walks within which a pencil is suspended and weighted over a sheet of paper. The swaying and jogging of the case beneath its handle is translated into the inscribing movement of the pencil. It becomes an index of the effort, changes of direction, ascents and descents involved in the walk, all recorded in the relative densities and vectors of the lines and curves made on the page, the areas which they fill more fully and those which are more sparsely shaded.


There are tabletop landscapes, miniature geological features or built-up maps. Brian Thompson, like Jeremy Wood, uses GPS technology to create layered sculptures whose shapes are determined by the tracked outlines of his walks. These outlines are incrementally enlarged, with the final form resembling a stalagmite mountain outcropping. These accretions equate with the formation of the landscape over time, but also with the intimate interconnection of landscape and memory. Again, the surface skimming devices of modern satellite technology are used to express something more ancient and deeply rooted.


Tracy Hanna’s Hill Walker shines a spotlight on pristine conical mountain of mounded plaster dust. Set within a dimly lit cubicle, it casts a sharp shadow in its wake. The mountain has a dark, penumbral side, the hidden reverse of its brightly illuminated face. Projected onto the slope we see the tiny silhouette of a figure trudging up its steep incline. It never quite reaches the top, fading away to reappear at the base again and begin the ascent once more. Tragi-comic, heroic and ridiculous, this mini-drama – a pocket-sized epic – reflects the British love of the noble failure, as enshrined in the mythologised stories of Scott and Mallory. It’s also a light-hearted embodiment of the human spirit for exploration and adventure or, in more nebulously spiritual terms, its constant aspiration towards some higher state. It’s also just great fun.


Some artists develop personal systems through which they visually codify the impressions gathered on their walks. James Hugonin’s Binary Rhythm takes the colours he has noted during this walks through the Northumbrian landscape and arranges them in grids of tiny squres. The result is a tiled wall, a sampler of the rich variety and infinite contrasts of nature’s palette. Rachel Clewlow records the landmarks passed on her urban walks in a small notebook. The information is laid out with obsessive neatness and symmetry on the page, the writing tiny but perfectly spaced. This information is translated onto the canvas, appearing as a visual analogue through the application of a codifying system. The results are reminiscent of spectral read-outs, Venn diagrams and bar charts (and the colour paintings of Bridget Riley) but have an abstract visual beauty all their own. It’s only through close inspection that you can see the framework they are built on – the artistic x & y axes for the visualised memory graph.


Some artists create a strong narrative structure to give form and meaning to their wandering. Sophie Calle’s photographs are intimate snapshots of her 1980 travels to Venice, capturing mysterious details which imply some personal significance hidden from us. These are put into context by the accompanying text, a first person narration which resembles the inner monologues of a Raymond Chandler PI. Calle decided to follow a stranger she had met briefly in Paris. Her attempts to track him down in Venice, where he had told her was going on a trip, build up a feeling of suspense, and the developing story of obsession and identity crisis resembles a Hitchcock film. The self-conscious manner of its telling is also like a Jean Luc Godard take on the detective genre – Calle as Anna Karina. Calle’s obsessive pursuit drives her to adapt different disguises, becoming a character in her own self-willed drama. Her random quest also makes her a stranger in an unknown city, and the story conveys a feeling of alienation, of being adrift in unknown territory. Maps are also supplied, attempts at providing evidence for way may very well be one big sustained work of fiction.

Walking also lends itself to game-playing, the setting of rules and limitations and the direction of human action and behaviour. Tim Knowles’ Kielder Forest Walk finds him rigorously following a straight line plotted through a dense coniferous plantation. It’s a fool’s journey through a dark land, pointless but not without aim. The unedited 8 hour HD film of his hapless endeavour is only ever likely to be seen in short extracts. A POV perspective of a man in a protective mask plunging relentlessly on through dim, uniform woodlands is only going to hold the attention of even the most determined viewer for a limited period. It’s the sheer single bloody mindedness with which the walk was carried out which makes it admirable in its own perverse way. The artist did it because he could and said he would, and that’s that.

There are others who walk the line, figuratively following in the footsteps of Richard Long. Carey Young directly quotes Long in one of her Body Techniques series of works. She created a line on the rubble strewn outskirts of Dubai, which she then walked along dressed in a grey business suit. She almost seems to merge with her surroundings, as if she had arisen from this wasteground. The glass towers clustering in ever-growing profusion behind her suggest that she is enacting a modern mythological drama, one which marks an ending as well the emergence of a new world. The mark made on this landscape won’t be subject to the gradual erosion of natural forces but will almost instantly be erased by the accelerated temporal demands of global finance.

Catherine Yass’ High Wire sets up a scenario in which walking the line is imperative, a matter of life and death. She filmed the high-wire walker Didier Pasquette crossing a line strung between high-rise blocks on the Red Road estate in Glasgow. The vertiginous experience of the walk is heightened by the use of a POV perspective gained by attaching a camera to Pasquette’s head. The tentative crossing, with long-distance shots taking in the estate and the horizon beyond, symbolises the post-war ideals of high-rise, high-density living, and the decline of the utopian dream which saw the Red Road monoliths erected. The wire-walker must sustain a concentrated balancing-act. If he succeeds, he walks amongst the clouds. If he fails, he falls fast and far onto the hard reality of the concrete world below. The towers have now been demolished, the dream reduced to rubble and then cleared away, dispelled as if it never existed.

Marina Abramovic walked the wavering and in parts semi-erased line of the Great Wall of China in 1988. She started at one end, her partner Ulay at the other. Their meeting in the middle marked the end of their collaboration and of their romantic involvement. It’s not as cold and clinical as it sounds. The original intention had been that they would marry upon meeting. But the complex arrangements and negotiations required to set up the walk took years, and personal circumstances changed in that time. The symbolic heart of the action was thereby turned on its head. An immense symbol of political power and dominance was also transformed into the backdrop for an epic personal drama. There are six photographs of the walk displayed here, each with small drawings of diagrammatic figures scribbled 6 years later placed beneath. These are star doodles from someone who has now attained art celebrity status. They resemble pieces of retrospective graffiti scrawled on the wall. A personal iconography spelling out the affirmation ‘Marina woz ere’.

Bruce Nauman walks the lines of a square in ‘Walking’, taking ungainly backward pigeon steps and making walking look like suspended falling. His video focuses on the most basic of movements, but sets them a little off kilter, making them seem effortful. The masking tape path laid out on the floor looks like a crude practice grid, the walker some alien being just learning how to inhabit a human body. It’s not quite got it right yet.


Francis Alys’ short film Guards records an event in which he created a set of rules for a troop of Coldstream Guards. They enter the square mile of the City of London singly from different directions. When they meet their comrades they begin forming into ranks and march in step. Groups gradually agglomerate and coalesce, the sound of their heavy, tramping shoes increasing in volume and intensity. The aim is to form an 8x8 square. When this is achieved, their instructions are to march to the nearest bridge over the Thames. The film acts as an exploration of the City’s empty weekend alleys and byways. They are sounded out by the explosive ricocheting of the soldiers’ one-two steps. The inherent oddity of the deserted streets is heightened by the anomalous presence of these anachronistically colourful troops. Individually, they appear lost, as if they had just woken up to find themselves in this unfamiliar setting. A battalion from an Imperial past teleported to a concrete future, left to wander dazedly through the maze of the Barbican. They seem touchingly human in these first stages of bewilderment, peering around corners or finding in comfort in sitting and combing their busbies. As soon as they encounter their fellows, however, stereotypical behaviours snap into place, and exaggerated marching steps turn them in to programmed components in a greater whole. There’s something almost lemming-like about their final passage to the river. When the square breaks up, its destination having been reached, the individual components of the marching machine once more disperse, as aimless and lost as they were at the beginning now that their purpose has been fulfilled. There are many dimensions to this playful but gripping work. On a purely visual level, the vivid red of the soldiers’s uniforms provides a pleasing contrast to the prevailing grey of the City buildings. There’s something here of the old Busby Berkeley routines, with their choreographed direction of bodies in synchronised motion shot from above. A stiff , deindividuated dance devoid of all personal expression. Guardsmen with strong nationalistic associations marching through the financial district can’t help but carry symbolic overtones. Are they here to restore order and impose control over a system which has descended into chaos? To drive out predatory jackals and instate a new set of values? The sight and sound of soldiers marching through the old streets of London makes us reflect upon how fortunate we have been not to have experienced such violent disruptions in the recent past. The martial rhythms drum up ghost echoes of alternative histories, time streams superimposed for a brief visionary instant.

Guards takes some of its footage from CCTV cameras, and this emblem of modern surveillance and paranoia features in a number of works. Alys uses it again in Nightwatch, another short film. We watch the nocturnal wanderings of a fox through the empty halls and corridors of the National Portrait Gallery via these remote viewing eyes. The fox sniffs at plinths, walks the length of benches, crawls under cabinets and leaps up onto a table where it curls up to go to sleep. All under the blank regard of the serried ranks of Tudor and Stuart worthies who hang lifelessly on the wall. Like Guards, Nightwatch gains much of its power from placing its subject in an alien environment. The contrast here is between a creature renowned, in an urban context, for scavenging (the ragamuffin urchin of the city’s fauna) and the refined setting it is set loose in. The figures it moves amongst are the kinds of people who would have hunted it down in their day. But they are now immobile, fixed in their immortal aspects. The fox is a brush-tailed blur of restless motion in the still hush of the museum after dark, following whatever trails it is picking up on the parquet flooring. There’s a certain tension as to whether it will knock a bust from its pedestal or piss on a portrait of the queen. The fox’s folkloric role as trickster and wily outsider gives an extra resonance to the film.

Some artists order the memories of their travels through the traditional holiday means of the slide show or the collection of mementoes. Atul Bhalla’s Yamuna Walk shows a series of pictures of a walk along the banks of a river which passes through New Delhi. This progression of images and the contrasts they throw up portrays the different aspects of the river, the co-existence of seemingly incompatible qualities. It is sacred, and industrial and agricultural resource, a workplace, a site of grandiose and politically charged engineering works, and a dumping ground. A list of words at the end are like captions which have floated free from the scenes they were intended to explain. This stream of words trigger recollections of the images which have passed before us. It’s an associative flow which sums up the bewildering chaos of the landscape Bhalla depicts in all its decay and fecundity.

Julian Opie's cover for Saint Etienne's How We Used to Live

Juian Opie’s Summer is based on a walk through the countryside in France. The artist took a regular series of photographs which became the basis for a slowly progressing slide show of paintings. Opie’s landscapes are characteristically simplified, reduced to outline forms filled with undifferentiated colour and with little distinguishing detail within. It is an edgeless Arcadia painted in shades of green, and with the images fading gently into one another, we glide through it with frictionless ease. The soft murmuration of ambient music accompanies our dreamy drift. Objects have a blurry lack of definition. We can recognise trees, but any finer species distinction is impossible. Rounded rectangles looming before us could be haystacks or they could be standing stones. It’s almost like a journey through a Batsford book cover. This is a landscape in which nothing can hurt, and everything is perceived through an anaesthetised veil. It also reminded me of some of the lovely covers Opie did for Saint Etienne at the time of their Sound of Water album.

Alex Finlay’s The Road North: The 53 Stations documents a journey through Scotland he made with his travelling companion Ken Cockburn. Their progress is memorialised by a collection of whisky miniatures, each a distillation of place and associated feeling. These feelings, records of a moment (the moment after knocking back the local malt) are expressed in the form of compact verses or epigrams, written on labels and attached to the bottles. They pay homage to the haiku written by Basho during his journey on the Narrow Road to the Deep North. One reads, for example, ‘approaching the bridge my fingers can’t help feeling for change’. The bottles may also be a nod to the many inns depicted in Hiroshige’s woodblock print series 53 Stations on the Tokaido Road, which often have landladies positioned outside almost forcibly dragging passing travellers into their establishments.

The lure of the northern wilds is felt by many artists. Richard Long and Hamish Fulton both headed for the Himalayas. Iceland is also a popular destination. Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson went on a ten-day walk through the north of the island. A series of pictures on a concertinaed length of card is like one of the fold-out postcards you used to be able to get if you had more to say than would fit on just the one side. The title, Home, suggests that it might indeed be something to send back from far flung regions. The pictures depict cairns, markers and also perhaps memorials. They could represent guiding posts, reassuring the traveller that they aer on the right track; or reminders of the lost, those who wandered from the path and never found it again. They are ambiguous and silent forms, tightly packed and self-contained, enshrouded in icy mist.


Dan Holdsworth also travelled to Iceland, and his lightbox image is like a huge projected slide. It is blown up to a scale intended to convey something of the sublime nature of the chill volcanic landscape. The eye is drawn into its mysterious depths, and you almost feel as if you could drift into it. The negative inversion of light and dark amplifies the uncanny spirit of the place, lending it an unworldly ambience. The soft illumination suffusing the glass plate from an obscure source behind serves to deepen the unfathomable shadows, radiating a dark light.

The words Walk On conjure the lyrical invocations of Rogers and Hammerstein and Neil Young in the songs You’ll Never Walk Alone and Walk On. The one anthemic and prayerful, the other resigned and dismissive of critical carping. They both confront the obstacles and disappointments of life, recognise the inevitability of change and determine to persist whatever happens. Walking is an act of hope, of openness to the unfolding of new experiences and encounters. The artists here embrace it in a variety of ways, displaying a great breadth imagination and vision. So walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone. You’ll never walk alone.

It was tremendously sad to learn of the passing of Nick Talbot, who died on 4th December at the desperately premature age of 37. Talbot had been the creative force behind the group Gravenhurst for 12 years, ever since their first LP Internal Travels, released in 2002. Indeed, Gravenhurst was, at various points, a veil for solo projects and performances. Talbot’s hushed voice, assured guitar fingerpicking and ear for affecting melody made the more intimate solo aspects of his work quietly compelling, drawing the listener into dark places and states of mind, but always tempered with compassion, pity and even empathetic identification. The more haunting and haunted aspects of the folk repertoire were an influence, as were the folk artists of the 60s and 70s. There are definite echoes of Nick Drake’s solid fingerstyle playing to the circling patterns of Circadian on the Ghost in Daylight album, for example, and his more dextrous accompaniments recall Bert Jansch and John Renbourne, in or out of Pentangle. There’s something of a folk air to the name, too. It’s an imaginary English place fashioned from a real village. Whilst Gravenhurst songs often have a contemporary urban setting, there’s always a hint of older patterns coming through the grubby surfaces, ancient and mysterious landscapes underlying the cracked concrete surfaces, thrice told tales recurring once more.


Gravenhurst could also create a driving sound as a trio or quartet, with the occasional guitar explosion providing the cathartic release of ecstatic noise. There was s subtle sound design applied to both the stark acoustic and fleshed out electric incarnations of Gravenhurst. Talbot had been inspired by the likes of Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation when he moved to Bristol in the 90s, drawn to the richness and depth of their drone-based sounds. Many of his own productions surround the songs with shimmering haloes of organ drone and flickering spectres of electro-acoustic sound. They can be heard to great effect on Fitzrovia, which is backed by the moaning ghosts and echoing rush of the forgotten histories and buried rivers (‘Wandle, Falcon, Effra, Ravensbourne’) the song summons up. This, together with a feel for dynamic pacing which gives some of the longer numbers a sense of narrative development, lends his music a certain cinematic air. There were the occasional instrumental pieces, too. This seemed to be a direction he was moving in on the last album, The Ghost in Daylight. Carousel and Islands are particular lovely ambient miniatures, the latter dedicated to the Broadcast singer Trish Keenan. I first saw Gravenhurst when they supported Broadcast back in 2006.


Lyrically, Talbot was always attracted to dark matter. A recurrent theme was the seed of violence inherent in humanity, ‘the velvet cell within men’. In an early song from Flashlight Seasons, I Turn My Face to the Forest Floor, he wrote ‘you’re only a stone’s throw from all the violence you buried years ago’. It’s a line which forms the basis for a significant portion of his future output. This violence exists on a personal level, but also expands outwards into society and into the political arena. It reflects the balance of power at all levels. So, in Black Holes in the Sand, he sings ‘I held the hand that threw the stone that killed the bird that woke the city’. A circle of culpability and indirect agency which insists on a moral dimension to the most seemingly inconsequential of actions. The Foundry on the 2012 album The Ghost in Daylight makes the connection between violent impulses on a personal level and the violence of fascism and other political doctrines of forceful control explicit. ‘A uniform changes something inside’ Talbot writes, ‘and you won’t know when evil comes, evil looks just like anyone’. Anyone is capable of it, ‘the man with the match could be anybody’. This concern with violence also manifests itself in one aspect of Talbot’s writing which I find troubling: his portraits of murderers and serial killers. The serial killer as a modern day mythological figure and recurrent motif of horror and detective fiction is a cultural phenomenon which I find particularly depressing. Talbot’s disturbingly allusive songs are generally indirect and focus on the inner state of the characters he creates. In some respects, they are contemporary manifestations of old, death-haunted folk songs. Although Talbot’s approach is the opposite to the extrovert melodrama of Nick Cave’s murder ballads – his songs hint at hidden stories rather than explicitly relating them in an unfolding narrative. It’s significant that the only time he does do this it turns out to be a cover version – Husker Du’s Diane.

These songs also intersect with another abiding thematic concern, the distance between people and the retreat into states of disconnection and isolated inner solitude. Another early song from Flashlight Seasons, The Ice Tree, sets the mood: ‘we try to connect with the people outside, they pass through our slumber like trains in the night’. A feeling of numbness and emotional damage blurs the psyches of Talbot’s subjects. They stumble through the world like bewildered ghosts. In She Dances, the dancer thinks ‘I need new clothes, new skin; a mind I can bear to live in’. Another character (in Animals) reflects upon the revellers of an English Saturday night and muses ‘I wish I could be like them and I try/but I find it more rewarding to walk along the river/picturing my body discarded in the water’. Clearly there’s a good deal of self-loathing going on here, which can develop into an unhealthy way of defining identity, of creating confining prisons for the soul. This is fully expressed in the short lyric of the lengthy Song From Under the Arches: ‘I’ve seen bad things in bad places/What did I learn?/Wallow in grime/Tonight we’ll drink the sewers dry/We can’t function outside of these dreams of suicide’. Relationships are also seen as traps, with romance a self-deluding compulsion which causes people to keep dancing around one another when any feeling has long since dissipated.


Talbot’s view of love may have been jaundiced, but he remained a romantic, albeit a dark-hued one. ‘The universal dance/The black romance’ as he puts it in Nicole is one whose steps he rehearsed over and again. He rakes over the cold ashes of love rather than stoking its initial heat, dwelling on the sadness of its diminishment and the bitterness of its betrayal. Again, a shrinking into the cold cage of the disconnected self is often the cause of death for romance. As he writes in The Ice Tree ‘I caress where my lover once lay by my side before I turned inwards and forced her to fly’.

Talbot was also a romantic in his use of romantic language and mysterious imagery drawn from the natural world. Pine forests, rivers and seas, snow, ice and fire, stars and moon are all used to evocative symbolic effect. These depict real, figurative and inner landscapes, the latter suggested by the title of the first Gravenhurst album, Inner Traveller. Natural landscapes are contrasted with decaying cityscapes, the expansiveness of the former serving to highlight the claustrophobic confinement of the latter. In Grand Union Canal, for example, he writes ‘while you are waiting for me by a copper blue sea/I am fading away in this room’. He conjures city atmospheres with a beautiful economy of effect worth of his literary hero Iain Sinclair. I particularly like ‘black spine Northern Line, feeds on money and time’ from Hourglass. It seems to paint the city itself as a predatory beast, a devouring underground serpent. Seasons and their atmospheres are also invoked, winter and autumn in particular. The winter chill is the natural mood for a Gravenhurst song, and we find it in the opening lines of The Foundry in which ‘two wolves chase a whitetail through the snow’, as well as in songs such as Fog Round the Figurehead (a marvellously imagistic title), Winter Moon and The Ice Tree. The idea of buried or sunken ruins, artefacts or histories is also one which fascinated Talbot. There are the ‘cities beneath the sea/in deserted towns and burial mounds’ and ‘buried in sand/an ancient talisman touched by a thousand hands’, as well as the ‘lost event(s) consigned to history’ in Fitzrovia, the secret stories of the city. These lost worlds or frozen landscapes equate with the subterranean caverns of the unconscious, the unexplored territories of the self.

It might sound as if the tenor of Talbot’s music is relentlessly and oppressively downbeat. Whilst it’s difficult to deny this charge given the evidence cited above, there are counterbalancing forces. They lyrical quality of the language raises the tone above turgid misery-mongering. The sheer beauty of much of the music and the light delicacy of Talbot’s voice (like a less wavering Robert Wyatt), which is shot through with compassion, sympathy and even pity, makes the subject matter easier to bear, and casts it in a different light. A commensurately harsh musical setting would indeed make it oppressive, the kind of thing which would only appeal to people who feel that music should be harrowing and extreme, an aural endurance test. And there are chinks of light which shine through, too. They are all the more pronounced and precious for their scarcity. Talbot rejected shallow triumphs, glittering prizes and facile, baseless positivism. What hope does emerge is hard-earned and thereby genuine and strong.


There is a non-denominational religious aspect to all of this; a yearning for an authentic way of being free of the traps of violence, false emotion and material desire. Something beyond ‘the emptiness of the prize’. He is seeking ‘the Ghost of St Paul, still missing’, as he put in the song on The Ghost in Daylight. Perhaps there are hints of it in older forms, in the mysterious folk rituals which he summons up so well in songs like Flowers in Her Hair. The unmasking of the Spring Queen, the metamorphosis of veneration into abomination, marks a passing of something from the world, a desacralisation. ‘And when the flowers died they saw through the disguise/and all the townsfolk circled her/with prayers and tar and feathers/and fire’. And later, in The Ghost of St Paul, ‘slowly the smell of her fades/as blossoms wither away’. The sense of the world as sacred, and of that sacredness as being essentially feminine, incarnated in the form of the Goddess, is supplanted by a worldview dominated by the male violence Talbot dissects. A violent power which itself dissects (and murders) anything threatening its authority or potency. The eponymous authority figures in Hollow Men ensure that the status quo is maintained, and that there can be no rebirth of the Goddess, of sacrosanct female power: ‘her name is known, her name is known,/cut her up, cut her out,/crush her before she finds it’.

Talbots landscapes are haunted by the hunted. From the whitetails chased by two black wolves in The Foundry through the ‘dog loose in the woods’ where there’s ‘a fox tied to a tree’ in Flowers In Her Hair to the knowledge that ‘they will come for me/with searchlights streaming through the cedar trees’ in Song Among the Pine. But there’s still a hint of something which was once there, and may one day be rediscovered and resurrected. The key line in Ghost of St Paul dedicates the song to those who refuse to give up hope, who continue the quest and resist the controls of those who would corral their spirit: ‘here’s to the brave/to all those resisting’.

Some of Talbot’s influences were revealed through his choices of covers. He went back to the roots of the expansive, noisy drift of fellow Bristolians Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation by taking the psych pop of The Kinks’ See My Friends and extending its two chord drone to the horizon. Husker Du have already been mentioned, but there is a general translation of the brutal realism and anti-romanticism of hardcore into a more melancholic English idiom. The cover of Fairport Convention’s Farewell, Farewell demonstrates a real affinity with Richard Thompson’s bleak but compassionate songwriting. The spectral winds ghosting around guitar and voice suggest final words of parting, perhaps delivered from somewhere beyond. It’s a truly haunting interpretation. A version of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren also captures the haunted, yearning quality of its briny drift with unadorned simplicity. Talbot also sang The Beatles’ Only A Northern Song on a Mojo collection of Yellow Submarine covers. It was a choice which indicated he might have shared George Harrison’s disdain for music biz practices. He also expressed a great admiration for Ian Curtis’ writing, his pared down but resonant phrasing.


Talbot was a writer as well as a musician, and literary influences show through in much of his work. Hollow Men alludes to TS Eliot, whose Waste Land also permeates Gravenhurst’s entropic landscapes. William Burroughs, an early inspiration, is acknowledged in the title of the LP The Western Lands. The cover itself has a rather bookish graphic design. Talbot also wrote for the online magazine The Quietus, and interviewed a number of writers for its pages. He was a keen student of philosophy, and his interview with John Gray makes fascinating and revealing reading. Gray opposed the rationalist/humanist fundamentalism of Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling in his books Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals. He offered a different interpretation of religion which acknowledges its value and usefulness as a mythological template for understanding the complexities of human behaviour and experience. In his introduction to the interview, Talbot indicates his sympathy for Gray’s views and his dislike for the wholesale attacks on religious belief launched by Dawkins and Grayling, whilst declaring his own atheist standpoint. He wrote ‘to the many atheists who found the Dawkins camp’s rabid proselytising not only smug but tinged with an oddly religious fervour, the prospect of an intellectual heavyweight tearing up the very foundations of the rationalist position was a beautiful thing’. It shines a further light on, and adds more complex shading to the yearning for the sacred, for deeper connection in the Gravenhurst lyrics.


Talbot’s interview with Alan Moore reveals further literary influences: both Moore himself and the London writings of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Talbot published a few issues of a comic called Ultraskull, written by himself and a small coterie of collaborators. Avowedly amateurish, thoroughly cynical and deliberately offensive, it was an uncensored outpouring which recast Gravenhurst preoccupations in the form of deep black humour. It was occasionally funny, frequently sick, sometimes both – a nihilistic blast. Talbot was a particular admirer of Sinclair’s language, viewing its concentrated folding of word pictures, allusions and metaphors as something to aspire to. The conversation with Moore also turns to HP Lovecraft, which points to another inspiration, a source for those subterranean cities and ‘black holes in the sand’. Talbot was a horror fan in general, and ghosts and spectres flit through his work over the years. The luminous string arrangement at the end of The Prize is provided by the Algernon Blackwood Memorial Ensemble.


In fact, The Prize is a grand song to go out on. If the sentiments of the lyric insist upon the emptiness of the prize, be that romantic fulfilment or the promises of shiny consumer enticements, the glorious coda offers something far more uplifting. The strings swell and pulsate, building and building until the voice of the guitar explodes into roaring harmony, elevating everything with an ecstatic chordal riff. It’s such a celebratory sound, not empty at all. Perhaps that the message left for us. Music is where we find direct connection. In a cold world, this is the warm, beating heart of it all. The real Prize. God bless and may you find peace.

It was on a sharp, blue-skied autumn day that I set out to hunt down the demons of Ashcombe. I’d seen pictures of the strange, distorted faces carved into the dark oak of 17th century bench ends in Todd Gray’s fine book on the subject, Devon’s Ancient Bench Ends. These were like nothing else I’d come across in my explorations of old Devon churches. They were emanations from the shadowy undergrowth of the rural imagination, monsters from the night side, the impenetrable gloom of the surrounding forest depths. They seemed to display no evident religious symbolism. Demons tended to be relegated to the exterior of churches, reminders of the evils from which the interior would provide sanctuary. But here they have invaded the space of the nave, settling themselves down right beside the congregation. This demanded closer inspection. But they proved frustratingly elusive. On my first visit I found the church locked, even though it was remote and unlikely to attract the attentions of all but the most dedicated and well-informed vandal. I returned on a Sunday, but discovered that services were few and far between, parcelled out between several other small churches in the parish. Perhaps this journey would prove more fruitful. There was a sense of anticipation in the air, a sense of immanence which augured well (or maybe ill).













The road to Ashcombe from Dawlish wound along the side of a valley, following the rippling contours of the gently folded hills. The hedgerows were rich with bright berries and late blooms. Bees sucked on pin-headed stamen clusters which looked like they were dipped in sugary sherbet. A fiery ball of robin’s pincushion tangled itself wirily around a pink-thorned rose bush, dewdrops caught in its threads and glinting with jewelled sunlight luminescence. A kestrel hovered over an open field, wings arched back in tense suspension, perfectly poised to plummet onto its pinpointed prey. Look out down below! Buzzards circle lazily on invisible currents, landing on bare, blasted branches and adding hunched, slightly sulky silhouettes to the tree’s skeletal outline. Raptor cries screech across the echoing valley. This is an edgeless landscape, defined by its curving horizons and sinuous roads. Woodland copses cresting undulant fields warp beneath contrasting cloud masses. Abstract compositions are drawn by tractors and harvesters, tramlines and long wavelengths etched through dry wheat. They are like energy patterns, circling in concentric ripples around the metal trees of pylons. Pylons, with their geometric grids, break up the non-linearity of the landscape. Only human constructs are linear here: Gates, greenhouses (there is a rose growing farm down by the river in the valley) and telegraph poles.


Arriving at the edge of the hamlet of Ashcombe, the prospect of the 12th century church tower, elevated by the rise of the slope on which it is planted, is framed by trees, chimneys and a telegraph pole. The pole sprouts a solid junction box and the brown ceramic discs of insulators, which are strung from the sky-raking wires like sleek mushroom caps. The Norman tower is ancient, but the telegraph technology it is juxtaposed with also looks outmoded, redolent of a redundant post-war moment. An old church filled with strange carvings and the crackling energies of 50s technology; this could be the setting for a Nigel Kneale TV drama in which the supernatural is confronted with the modern apparatus of scientific rationalism.


The church lies on the lower slopes of a steep hill which marks the southern end of the Haldon ridge. It’s a forested spine of land which extends a fair few miles, a rainshadow divider separating the Exe Valley from the Teign Valley and the rise of the moor beyond. Ashcombe is tucked into a fold in the lee of the range. It catches the sun on its path from the east, but the shadows can fall quickly and prematurely as the Haldons impose their looming gloom. It’s a short but sharply inclined trudge upwards from the trough of the bell-curve the road traces through the Ashcombe dell to the church’s hunched stone outline which broods above it. The graveyard is mounded up like the rounded back of a surfacing leviathan. Tilting crosses and gravestone arches stand out starkly against the sky, their dark contrast already beginning to dispel the brightness of the afternoon, to whisper intimations of a more chill atmosphere.











But there is brightness and life in the graveyard still. The efflorescing fruits of a tree produce vulgar, blushing pinks and glisteningly succulent oranges, nature’s vivid colour contrast to sombre grey stone. Violets cluster in the leaning shadow of granite slabs. Moss and lichen bloom across flat stone planes, forming their own expanding universes. Snails add their slimy script to etched lines, a spiral punctuation mark emphasising the letter or word where they take their fastened rest. Some find shelter in the sharp-angled armpit of a cross. Berries sprayed across a hardy shrub throw hard buttons of primary red against neutral granite, blood on fossilised bone.


The church is locked. Frustrated, I rattle the door a few times, as if this will do any good. I walk back down to the lychgate, its paint peeling in flakes of dark green, harmonising with the shedding of autumn tumbling all around it. Looking at the notices for hints as to when the next service might find it open and filled with sound and light. A postcard with faded felt-tip writing, half-hidden by other pinned pieces of paper, is just about legible. It tells me that there is a key held in the yellow cottage at the bottom of the hill for any who wish to explore the church. A large black dog greets me there, letting me know that somebody is in, whilst not exactly encouraging me to make myself known to them. The woman who answers is friendly and trusting, however, handing me the key without hesitation. She apologises for the state of the interior. Renovation work is being carried out, and she inhaled some dust when she was last in there. As a result, she has not been well enough to clear away the harvest festival decorations and offerings. I sympathise but wonder if I will be similarly infected. How old is this ‘dust’? From what part of the church has it been excavated or disturbed? But I have come this far. I must not falter in my resolve.


Disappointingly, the key is an ordinary front door variety rather than the large black iron affair I had hoped for. It fitted into a small yale lock inserted above the large hole which would have required an object ten times its size. The latch lifts with a pleasingly firm clack when I turn the circular iron door handle, however, and the heavy door creaks open. I walk through into the hushed interior, the outside world immediately receding, distanced by the airlock of the porch. The first thing I notice is the font, whose wooden cover is woven with strands of corn, grass and hedgerow berries. All are now withered and dessicated, their decorative arrangement falling into desuetude and disrepair. A heady scent of apples fills the church, overripe and on the verge of rotting fermentation. A neglected harvest offering left to mark the passing of autumn’s fecund riches and the advent of winter’s barren scarcity.








A green man with an amiable, placid face, broad and flat and topped with pointed porcine ears, looks out on the font from a capital atop a pillar at the back of the nave. Over the altar rail a golden foliate head peers down on the apples, grain and vegetables presented on the border of the sacred space of the sacristy. It is at the conjunction of roof joists painted a vibrant black, green, red and gold; a strange echo of Jamaican national colours in this rural English church. The joists also connect with what looks like a lion’s head wrapped in a turban. The Lion of Judah? More lions jut nobly from the arm rests of an oak throne beside the altar, the nub of their manes designed for a palm to rest at ease on, to stroke the woody nap of the tamed beasts’ head. On the back of the chair, two pot-bellied cherubs stand atop piles of rock or coal and bend beneath baskets of the same strapped to their backs. It’s a heavy load for such diminutive creatures to bear – child labour, essentially. A perky lectern eagle looks brightly out to the nave, its alert gaze surveying the three ranks of benches filling the space. It dates from the time of Elizabeth I and its noble, benevolent visage, beak crinkling into a knowing smile, bears the wisdom of the centuries, just as its back has borne the weight of the Word, the opened book.







The restoration and repair work being carried out in the church is made evident by the scaffolding at the back of the north aisle. The organ by the entrance in the north aisle is shrouded in a curtain of smoky plastic. The pipes are visible as spectral formations, seen as if through a billowing fog. I imagine the music they would make, muffled and diffuse, sounds drifting through from a dimly perceived distance. The window in the south transept has been boarded over, the direct southerly sun streaming around the edges in sharp-edged, haloing spears of light.





That same low, dazzling late Autumn light lends mocking haloes to the St Nectan demons. They rest on the bench ends like wicked Chads, or wedge themselves into the corner angles. With their lolling tongues, sharp-edged grins, curving tusks and pointed ears, they are like anti-cherubs, exuding abandoned glee at their own grotesque natures. One has serpentine wings, its flapping lips parted in a rubbery, toothless groan. Hooded, sunken eyes stare out with blank, pupil-less depth. Its neckline is a ragged gouge, as if the head had been crudely torn off by a savage force. A close cousin of this creature retains two teeth, protruding loosely and squarely from its upper lip (which looks as if it has the jellied consistency of a rock pool anemone), inverted echoes of the tombstones outside. If anything, the teeth make it look even worse than its gummy kin. A moaning spectre wraps its thin, vaporous face around the scrolled top of a bench end. It is impaled on the spearheads of Gothic arches. An arc of tongue darts out of the gaping, downturned mouth. It looks a little like the ghostly alien which made a regular appearance in the final end title of the original Star Trek series.





A squashed head seems to labouring under dense local gravity, and gurns around its two prominent teeth. A squirrel and a lizard nuzzle against it, whether familiars or tormentors it’s not wholly clear. Almond-eyed serpents spiral up the side of the bench, living, writhing vines. The distinction between human and animal becomes blurred with many of the figures here. There is a head which is part human, part…cat? It certainly has a cat’s alert, radar ears and long, flat nose. And its tongue hangs in the way that cat’s tongues do when they get distracted in the middle of a preen. But it also has wings scrolling back behind it (feathered or scaled rather than furred). Flying cats? It doesn’t bear thinking about. A head with two arms emerging from its base appears to be crawling, advancing with a crablike scuttle. The upper face is like a chitinous mask fixed above mouth and chin. It resembles a devolved form of humanity, or a Moreauvian experiment in vivisected hybridisation. Halfway to the crablike creatures of HG Wells’ terminal beach in The Time Machine, it is retreating back to the ocean. It also brings to mind the spider-head from John Carpenter’s version of The Thing.





A goofy, big-nosed simpleton looks up with dull, sleepy eyes sunken in lazy folds of flesh, its face pockmarked by woodworm. Its mouth hangs vacantly open in a buck-toothed, slack-jawed yokel half-smile, thick ox’s tongue rolled out beneath three slab-like pegs. Two peasants lean out from opposite sides of a bench end, their soft craniums moulded, squeezed and straightened into corner points. Their chins rest in cupped hands. One leers lasciviously, the other seems to be yawning, or perhaps he is boorishly bellowing some choice insult. Or maybe he just has really bad toothache, and is yelling in pain.




Two more corner figures come in the form of toothless angels (angels of the angles). They are round-cheeked and bullet-headed, celestial beings of a very Earthly cast, incarnations of ordinary local folk. Their faces are the theatrical happy/sad masks with the upward and downward curve of the mouth reflecting the comic and tragic poles of experience. The ‘sad’ angel’s eyes bug out with worry, and a night cap hints at early hours anxiety and circling, sleepless thoughts. The ‘happy’ angel looks at ease beneath relaxed, thickset brows. Its smile looks a little self-satisfied, a little self-satisfied, a little secretive, wolfish. A little….evil. Between the two angels rests a swinish demon, not showing the least concern at their proximity. Indeed, it is the angels which appear the more affected by its presence; the one fearfully so, the other sensing the possibilities an alliance might offer, the potential for power and personal worldly influence.



Another demon roosts nearby. This one is a creature of appetite, omnivorous and ravenous. It is bat-winged and tusked, with four-clawed hands ready to clutch at unwary prey. Its cross-eyed gaze by no means suggests limited vision and its tongue lolls out with panting hunger. In the far corner of the church, another serpent winds up the side of a bench-end, its pointed head nearly reaching the top. It is lightly dusted with plaster, a white powder like ash or the finest fall of snow (or some of that bee sherbet).


My first instinct is to wipe it clean. But no. On no account must I touch any of these creatures. What manner of dreadful curse might be unleashed I fear even to contemplate (perhaps the holder of the key might enlighten me). I’ve read my M.R.James. I know that the curious must be cautious, lest their studies uncover things best left to the darkness of ignorance. I have no wish to share the experiences of Archdeacon Haynes in The Stalls of Barchester. He feels the oaken carving of a cat on a choir stall come to life beneath his hand (‘I was startled by what seemed a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur, and a sudden movement, as if the creature were twisting round its head to bite me’), and that of a cowled, deathly monk changes so that ‘the wood seemed to become chilly and soft as if made of wet linen’. I have observed from a safe distance and made no contact whatsoever. I feel assured that no terrifying, malevolent spirits will be made manifest from the ancient wood, released to haunt and torment me like the unfortunate archdeacon. I leave the shadows of the church behind, along with whatever might inhabit them, the scent of autumn decay and damp, sifting plaster and walk out into the light, to the sound of birdsong in the graveyard.


I lock the door behind me. And that flicker of darkness flapping out from the tower? A trick of the light, an illusory spectre of the peripheral vision. The dry, snickering whisper in the air above my left shoulder? Nothing but a breath of wind through the leaves. I hasten my step and swiftly close the graveyard gate behind me, striding down the hill to return the key to its guardian in the cottage in the pit of the valley with a brisk word of thanks. And then I jump onto my bike and cycle out of Ashcombe with much haste before the light begins to fail. The demons recede behind me, remaining on their benches, locked into the time-polished wooden expressions and poses of the centuries. The chittering noises, the half-perceived feeling of shadowing presence, the sweet, rotting odour and the occasional brush of something flitting past – they are all in my head, I know. I must remain strong. I must.

PART ONE


The British Library exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination began, appropriately enough, with a descent. After a brief introductory film in which four explorers of diverse Gothic realms (Neil Gaiman, Sarah Waters, Ben Wheatley and Mark Daneilewski) outlined the shadowy territory we were about to stumble blindly into, we walked down a set of stairs and entered a gloomy, crypt-like space. The ‘rooms’ we passed through were separated by draped veils of funereal black which shivered in currents of a spectral wind with no evident point of origin (yes, it was the air conditioning, but let’s not break the mood here). Darkness prevailed. It was all is it should have been; as it was fated to have been.

Surrealist Gothic - Jan Svankmajer's The Castle of Otranto

The first room concerned itself almost exclusively with Horace Walpole, his antecedents, friends and those he went on to influence. He was portrayed as an origin figure for Gothic literature and its subsequent cultural offshoots. Most notably, this was due to his anonymous self-publication in 1764 of the novel The Castle of Otranto, which established many of the staples of Gothic fiction to come: the incursions of the supernatural, the medieval castle with its secret vaults, the revivification of buried histories and ancient curses, the menaced and imperilled heroine and the general air of barely suppressed hysteria. It may be a story seldom read today, but its influence can be felt through its still proliferating lineage. The Czech animator, filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer paid homage to it in his short 1979 condensation of the novel, which was shown in the upper entrance room. Period illustrations come to animated life as a book’s pages are riffled by an invisible hand. The framing device for the film has a historian and literary archaeologist claim to have discovered the real Castle of Otranto at Otrhany, near Nachod in the Czech Republic. It is this which Walpole used as the basis for his fictional locale, he claims. As well as suggesting a rediscovery of a half-forgotten text, it’s a clever way of having the Gothic world of imaginary derangement infect and invade what is presented as rational documentary realism. Svankmajer is a contemporary inheritor of the surrealist sensibility, and as such his co-option of the Castle of Otranto is an acknowledgement of the prominence of Walpole and the Gothic in general within the surrealist canon, its curated cabinet of curiosities. A 1765 edition of the novel was displayed in the exhibiton, with Walpole, safely assured of the novel’s success, identifying himself as the author. It now bears the subtitle ‘a Gothic story’. Thus the genre was coined.

The exhibition took care to point out Walpole’s own influences, making it evident that The Castle of Otranto didn’t appear magically formed from a pure and untrammelled imagination. Shakespeare’s ghosts and supernatural beings offer a clearly defined precedent (if such a description is apposite for such immaterial manifestations and half-glimpsed sprites). Walpole’s 1728 copy of The Merchant of Venice was included here, as was Henry Fuseli’s highly dramatic and very physical rendering of the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a 1796 engraving. A 1529 edition of Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur and a 1617 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene further outlined the appeal of antiquity and of a dream medievalism, a fantasy of the past replete with quests and allegorical stories, strange landscapes inhabited by demons and monsters waiting to devour souls which strayed from the righteous path.

Johann Muntz's print of Strawberry Hill

Walpole’s fashioning of his own private Gothic domain at Strawberry Hill on the winding banks of the Thames below Twickenham from 1747 onwards was an attempt at realising this fantasy world in solid, architectural form. He was thus the progenitor of Gothic revival architecture in addition to recasting it in a new literary form. Some of the original plans for the house’s elaborate Gothicisation were included, serving to emphasise its general air of studied artifice. It was pointed out the Walpole intended his home to be a showpiece from the outset, charging visitors for admission once it was completed. It was a series of theatrical sets which the imagination was prompted to fill with shadowy figures and strange happenings. The spirit of Strawberry Hill, the experience of inhabiting the living dream of a self-created Gothic fantasy, inspired the writing of The Castle of Otranto.

Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856)

Walpole initially published the novel anonymously, claiming that it was a translation made by one William Marshal of a work originally written by an Italian with the florid name of Onuphrio Muralto and printed in 1529. This may partly have been a device designed to shield him from any adverse reaction to the story’s sensational aspects. But once more, Walpole set the trend for the literary work as ‘discovered’ manuscript. Included here were two of the best known 18th century forgeries: James Macpherson’s ‘translation’ of Fingal, an early Gaelic epic by an ancient poet known as Ossian; and the ‘discovery’ of a number of manuscripts by 15th century Bristolian poet Thomas Rowley by the teenage would-be poet Thomas Chatterton, best known today as an exquisite corpse in Henry Wallis’ Pre-Raphaelite painting of 1856. Chatterton’s doctored manuscripts were on display, pasted into a large scrapbook. The crude attempts to make them appear timeworn and antiquated, with brown staining liberally splashed across the vellum he acquired from the attorney’s office in which he worked, now appear charmingly amateurish. That people were prepared to accept them as genuine is testament to the 18th century intoxication with antiquity, the intense desire to commune with voices from the past.

Walpole's Becket Reliquary

Walpole found fulfilment of this desire through his dedicated antiquarianism. He collected objects from centuries past, both in England and on his journeys through Europe, and filled up every niche and corner of Strawberry Hill with his diverse finds. A particularly beautiful 13th century enamelled reliquary chest dedicated to Thomas Becket was included in the exhibition, housed in a glass cabinet in the middle of the room which enhanced its sacrosanct air. This was an object to be circled and gazed at from all angles, but not touched. A certain distance was maintained, as it would have been for pilgrims centuries ago. It must have been thrilling for Walpole to be able to pick it up whenever the fancy took him, to open the small, hinged lid and peer reverently inside, imagining what it once contained. Alongside the reliquary was a book by his friend George Vertue, a catalogue of the antiquities he drew up whilst staying at Strawberry Hill, opened to show the page on which a colour study of the adjacent object was printed.

John Dee's 'shew stone'

Most intriguing, however, was another artefact which Walpole owned, one which, whilst looking fairly unprepossessing, was imbued with great power and mystery. This was John Dee’s spirit mirror. On loan from the British Museum, it is a smooth, flat disc of polished obsidian, darkly and depthlessly reflective. The accompanying tooled leather case bears a handwritten label by Walpole indicating the nature of its content. Walpole bought the mirror in 1777, and it was used by Dee in the late 16th century. But it originally found its way over to Europe from what is now Mexico, part of the plunder of the Conquistadors in the 1520s and 30s. Dee was obviously aware of its provenance as a mirror for divination and conjuration used by the Mexica priests. Dee himself was a magician, mathmetician, alchemist, cartographer and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, all disciplines which were regarded as part of an undivided body of knowledge. A fascinating character, he has proved irresistible to a number of writers and artists, and appears prominently in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence of novels, Alan Moore’s Promethea comics, Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee, Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana and Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window. Dee became acquainted with a young man called Edward Kelley, who claimed to commune with angels. Dee spent an increasing amount of his time attempting to make such a communication himself, with Kelley as intercessory bridge. The black reflecting mirror, or ‘shew stone’, was supposedly given to him by an angel and gave him access (via Kelley) to dimensions normally inaccessible to human vision. Whether or not you give any of this the slightest credence (and the question of whether the stone was ever in Dee’s possession is open to debate) there is a thrill in seeing this myth-infused occult object which such a fascinating historical figure firmly believed opened up higher planes of knowledge and existence, and allowed him to make contact with the beings who possessed and inhabited them.

Edward Young's Night Thoughts illustrated by William Blake

Walpole’s shared schooldays and later acquaintance with Thomas Gray also forges a connection between him and the so-called graveyard poets. This short-lived branch of English poetry, epitomised by Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742), gave expression to the morbid musings of young men who wandered around graveyards contemplating mortality, their own and others. The graveyard became the Gothic locus of a strange, inverted form of romanticism, pale, drawn and half in love with Death. The cold idyll of the graveyard, drained of bright colour save for the odd bunch of fading blooms and the red of the poisonous berries on the yew tree, would provide the trysting place for Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley. They would rendezvous by the grave of Mary’s mother in St Pancras churchyard. Neil Gaimain’s novel The Graveyard Book (which features later in the exhibition) also uses the graveyard as a romantic locale within the fenced and gated bounds of which the tale of a young boy’s growth to maturity takes place.

William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoaz

A 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake, who wrapped his angels, demons and tormented sleepers around a central pane containing the text. Pages of this book, which was only ever partially published, were on display here. It was a troubled commission, and only a fraction of the watercolours Blake produced as sketches for later engravings finished in final printed form. He retained many of the proofs which remained unused and began writing his own poem in the blank, squared-off spaces intended for Young’s words. The night journey undertaken by the figures he had drawn influenced the dark prophecies and troubled invective in Vala, or The Four Zoas, written shortly after the altercation with a soldier in the Sussex village of Felpham which had almost led to his trial for sedition. Never published in his lifetime, it was rediscovered in 1889, surfacing in a fin-de-siecle period the mood of which suited its intensely expressed visions of doom and apocalyptic fire. The pages exhibited here showed that the Gothic was capable of inspiring and encompassing extraordinary visionary height, and even more profound depths.

Fonthill Abbey - the ultimate Gothic folly

As the Gothic form developed, so it expanded to explore and colonise new areas, testing the boundaries of aesthetic, social and even physical tolerance by pursuing new extremes. There was an architectural model of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey on display which has long outlasted the extravagant fantasy for which it served as a template. Fonthill was designed to be the ultimate Gothic dwelling, leaving Strawberry Hill in its extensive shadow in terms of its scale and obsessive detail. It proved a hubristic structure, however, built without the accumulated knowledge of the medieval masons. The gargantuan spire, now a fairly obvious symbol of overweening male ego rather than a physical manifestation of heavenly aspiration, was from the beginning an unstable structure, which collapsed several times. Beckford eventually gave up on his expensive dream and built a structure which, perhaps in wry recognition of the true nature of Fonthill, resembled a folly; the tower which still raises its finger on the hills above Bath. Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786), a copy of which was on display in the exhibition, took the Gothic into the realms of the Arabian Nights fantasy. The ‘exoticism’ that this form afforded, its distance from the norms of Western civilisation and from familiar narratives and settings, allowed for new extremes of cruelty, violence and depravity. Naturally, the notoriety which ensued did nothing to harm the success of the book.


The exhibition notes made the observation that the levels of sex and violence in Gothic novels increased markedly in the wake of the French Revolution and the bloody Terror into which it descended in the 1790s. Matthew Lewis’ The Monk was the prime example offered here, which also throws in a good deal of anti-clericalism for good measure. The horrors of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation became another staple of Gothic fiction, memorably featuring in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (another subject of a Jan Svankmajer film). The figure of the depraved or pitiless monk, a terrifying cowled and faceless presence possessed of unassailable power and authority, took its place amongst the repertory of Gothic characters. The English Reformation cast a long shadow, and Catholic institutions and rituals could still be relied upon to elicit a shudder if cast in a suitably sinister light.


German Gothic novels, which drew on a rich heritage of folklore connected with mountains and dense forests, were renowned (or notorious) for being even more graphic than their English counterparts. They were briefly in fashion towards the end of the 18th century. In Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic literature, Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine is offered a list of seven novels to read after she has finished Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. Some are German, whilst others ape the Germanic style. They are all, however, perfectly ‘horrid’, she is assured. They have therefore come to be known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, and all turn out to have been real, published works. Austen evidently had in-depth knowledge of contemporary Gothic. Editions of these obscure works were laid open side-by-side in a central display cabinet so that we might glimpse something of their appalling nature. The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), subtitled A German Tale (as the former may as well have been too) were both by the English novelist Eliza Parsons. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath was another German tale written by an English writer, whilst Clermont (1798) was by the Irish writer Regina Maria Roche. The Midnight Bell (1798) by Dutch author Francis Latham not only claimed to be ‘A German Story’ in its subtitle, but also to be ‘Founded On Incidents in Real Life’. The final two novels were the genuine article, even if they claimed not to be. The Horrid Mysteries (1796), or ‘A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse’ was actually a translation of the novel Der Genius by Carl Grosse. The Necromancer or The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg sounds particularly intriguing (and particularly German). Disappointingly, the splendidly named Flammenberg turns out to be another pseudonym, a florid mask for more mundanely monickered Carl Friedrich Kahlert.

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

Henry Fuseli was Swiss rather than German, and a long-term resident of the British Isles. There remained something Germanic about the fantastical, grotesque nature of much of his work, however. In 1781 he painted The Nightmare, a print of which was exhibited here. It remains one of the definitive images of the Gothic imagination, and was hugely popular at the time, reproduced in many subsequent engravings. The demonic imp crouching on the chest of the uncomfortably sprawled, restlessly sleeping woman and the marble-eyed, phantom horse materialising from the shadows have been the subject of much pastiche and parody over the years. This powerfully physical representation of a dream state is viewed with disturbing objectivity from a viewpoint exterior to the dreamer, as if these were real demonic beings inducing night terrors in the unknowing sleeper. The sideways stare of the homunculus, meeting the gaze of the picture’s viewer, makes it feel as if we have come across a scene we should not have borne witness to. It is a tableau of temporary suspension, full of the potential for sudden and very rapid subsequent action. The poster for Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, his and writer Stephen Volk’s version of the events of that famously stormy night at the Villa Diodati (which we’ll come to in a moment), restages The Nightmare for a cinematic tableau.

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece illustration for an 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The Nightmare is a bridge into the Romantic era. The exhibition notes suggested that the Romantic artists largely diverged from Gothic themes. However, there were exceptions; manuscripts of Coleridge’s Christabel (a forerunner of Poe’s poetry) and Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite were included to show that they did sometimes descend into the shadows. And it was from the milieu of the Romantic movement that a work would emerge which would profoundly influence the direction which Gothic would take and form the ground from which new generic hybrids would sprout and flourish. Not the least of these would be science fiction, which Brian Aldiss defines, in Billion/Trillion Year Spree, as being ‘characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode’. The work in question is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Included here was an 1831 edition with illustrations by Theodor von Holst. His depiction of the monster bears a resemblance to William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea. The title page print depicts with stark simplicity the horror Frankenstein feels towards his creation, and his abandonment of the bewildered newborn man, who sprawls like a loose-limbed puppet in the laboratory.

Shelley’s revised manuscript for the 1831 edition was on display, handwritten on blue paper. Also present was a letter written by Lord Byron, protesting that no impropriety had taken place during that storm-wracked evening at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had played host to Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, his physician John Polidori and Clair Clairmont, his mistress of the moment. Given his reputation, and such protest was liable merely to stoke further salacious speculation, and he would probably have been better advised to hold his silence. That evening, Byron had been reading ghost stories aloud as the storm rumbled and flashed outside (and German ghost stories at that!) He also read lines from Coleridge’s Christabel, which sent the unhinged Shelley fleeing from the room with a wild shriek. The reading led on to the suggestion that everyone should write their own horror story to complement the fearsome atmosphere of the night beyond. This challenge, instantly mythologised by all parties present, resulted in the first outline of Frankenstein. Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), who had already lost a child of her own, and whose mother had died as a result of her own delivery into the world, came up with the idea of the blasphemous birth of a new, monstrous man through the generative, galvanic powers of science; powers which wholly excluded motherhood and female agency.


Frankenstein functions as a gateway into the world of modern Gothic, largely via the numerous cinematic variations which have evolved from the central idea. The clip of Bride of Frankenstein playing on a loop was really our first glimpse of Gothic as the major stylistic component of the horror genre as it developed in the twentieth century. Frankenstein’s creation evolved (or devolved) from the tormented haunter of the wilderness, the self-educated outsider abandoned by his father, into Boris Karloff’s innocent, shambling brute, both pitiful and terrifying. Frankenstein provides us with our first classic horror monster. The novel opens a nocturnal window onto the twentieth century, giving us a brief prospect of the encroaching shadows of Gothic horror whose tendrils would extend into every aspect of popular culture. There was a copy of the 1967 Brunswick LP An Evening With Boris Karloff and his Friends, contained soundtrack clips from the great Universal monster movies introduced by the now elderly actor. Also on display were some of Scott MacGregor’s set designs for the late Hammer film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). This served as a self-reflective and melancholic conclusion to the studio’s series of Frankenstein pictures, almost invariably starring Peter Cushing as a particularly amoral Doctor, which had been so central to their output. Along with the Dracula films, they were instrumental in building their reputation as purveyors of quality Gothic to the masses. MacGregor’s designs are sketches for a dream film which could no longer be realised with Hammer’s dwindling resources in the bleak years of the mid-70s. Interestingly, Frankenstein and his creation have been conspicuously absent from recent revivals and revisitations of the Gothic canon. The single shambling monster has been largely supplanted by hordes of shuffling, moaning zombies. Maybe it is time for the creature to rise from the slab once more.


Frankenstein was the progenitor of many literary forms and ideas. But it can also be seen as an endpoint in terms of ‘pure’ Gothic fiction, if indeed there is a beast of such pedigree. Its Romantic sensibility and use of landscapes giddy with sublime terror (alpine peaks and Arctic wildernesses) as exteriorised expressions of interior states mark it apart from the more generic Gothic novel. The spectres of 18th and early 19th century Gothic arose from the historical past (real or fabled). Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, is created through the application of scientific rationalism, Henry Frankenstein himself the modern Prometheus who fashion his own relentless Nemesis. And so, we leave the 18th and early 19th century Gothic rooms and pass through the doorway into the period which has surpassed them in terms of furnishing the modern imagination with its ‘classic’ Gothic props – the Victorian age. And naturally, the writer who ushers us into this fogbound, gaslit world is Charles Dickens.

PART TWO


Charles Dickens is the perfect figure to usher us into the Victorian world, and into the dark, narrow and crowded streets of the rapidly expanding, noisily industrial capital. A clip of the recent BBC adaptation of Bleak House, with Gillian Anderson as a ghostly Lady Dedlock, shows us the scene in which Jo the crossing sweeper takes her to the gates of the paupers’ cemetery. The bones lie on the surface in some parts, and Jo remarks of the man she is searching for (known only as ‘Nemo’ at this point) that ‘they put him wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to get it in. I could unkiver it, with my broom, if the gate was open’. He then excitedly points out a rat, which runs into the ground to feast. This depiction of the bodies of the dead protruding from their shallow graves, seen through the eyes of a streetchild for whom it is wholly unremarkable, is a grim Gothic touch which Dickens drew from factual observation. Victorian London was, for many, a Gothic city, but one marked by poverty and squalor rather than elegantly decaying castles and crypts. A staggered pile of booklets on display were a reminder of the part published format of the book, episodically issued in 1852. The public would devour the story in monthly instalments, eager to discover what happened next.

Woman in Black - Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House

Gothic had become a flavour or shade which could be added to the kind of multilayered work of which Dickens was a master. It might be associated with a a particular character, plot strand or setting. It was a transferable style which could be employed in a variety of contexts. Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories as well, including The Signalman, an enduring classic of the subgenre, and the collaborative collection The Haunted House, whose framing story (written by Dickens) introducing separate tales anticipates the Amicus portmanteau films of the 1960s and 70s. It was a form which would become increasingly popular as the Victorian period progressed. It was an era much preoccupied with mortality and the memorialisation of the dead. The great necropolises which were built on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding urban centres were themselves like miniature cities of the dead. They would prove ideal Gothic locations, particularly as the years added attractive layers of gentle ruination and ivy entanglement. For Dickens, the Gothic could also encompass an element of social comment or psychological portraiture. The graveyard in Bleak House is disturbing for its exposure of appalling poverty as much as the rat-gnawed bones of the dead. Lady Dedlock drifting blankly through Chesney Wold and Miss Havisham presiding over the cobweb-strewn Satis House in Great Expectations are both spectres prematurely haunting their decaying homes. They are portraits of mental and moral paralysis.


For Dickens, the true Gothic locale was not a remote, ruined abbey or centuries old castle but the dark alleys and dilapidated houses of London. Its gaslit Gothic atmosphere is perfectly captured in the engravings Gustav Doré produced for the book London, A Pilgrimage, a journalistic record of travels through the city which highlighted the huge gulf between the rich and poor. Plates depicting the rookery of Bluegate Fields, the night-time pavement sellers of Harrow Alley in Houndsditch, the ragged wraiths working in the Lambeth gasworks and the mazes of back to back terraces in the sooty shadow of arcing railway viaducts are densely shaded with an almost palpable darkness.


The Gothic followed in the wake of mass migrations from field to factory and relocated to the city. Urban Gothic was formed in the choking fogs of London; fogs like those described in the opening scenes of Bleak House, in which Dickens imagined the possibility of encountering ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. The primeval swamp seeps through into the streets of the modern city. Urban Gothic bred its own monsters and mythologies which were promulgated in the rough pages of the Penny Dreadfuls and Penny Bloods. These episodic works featured sensational cover illustrations which dramatically depicted scenes of horror and bloodshed. Precursors of the EC comics of the 50s, their potential effect on the minds of the masses who read them occasionally troubled the moral guardians of Victoria’s realm. But they generally fell so far below the literary lighthouse beam that they escaped any real censure. The dreadfuls introduced the likes of Varney the Vampire, with his impulsive thirst for blood; Sweeney Todd, the demon barber and fresh meat merchant; and Spring Heeled Jack, a proto-supervillain who could effortlessly leap over the rooftops of London, and who gradually morphed into an enigmatic superhero in the Batman mould. A copy of The Mysteries of London by George WM Reynolds was also on display, explicitly inviting the reader imagine their city as a labyrinth of hidden terrors, lurking and ready to spring. The prolific Reynolds also wrote an early werewolf tale with his 1846-7 series Wagner the Were-Wolf. Some of Dave McKean’s original full-colour illustrations for the Batman story Arkham Asylum were displayed as an example of a modern version of the urban Gothic of the Penny Dreadfuls.

Harry Clarke's illustration for Poe's William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe was a central (perhaps THE central) figure in mid-19th century Gothic literature, and his morbid sensibility spread like an enervating virus, distilling fever dreams from the unconscious underworld of a motley spectrum of writers and artists, from French Decadents through Edwardian illustrators of children’s books to subversive Surrealists. One of Poe’s letters was on display, allowing us to inspect his neat handwriting and feel a sense of communion with the man who wrote it. Truth to tell, it doesn’t provide a very edifying portrait. Addressed to Fanny Osgood, one of a series of women with whom he became obsessed in his short lifetime, and whose patronage and hospitality he frequently called upon, its fulsome and fawning praise of her literary efforts is embarrassingly transparent in its bid for her favour. Poe’s influence on the late Victorian and Edwardian imagination is clearly visible in the illustrations from various editions of his work. On display here were Edmund Dulac’s plate for The Raven, Harry Clarke’s for William Wilson, Arthur Rackham’s for The Oval Portrait and John Buckland Wright’s woodcut for The Tell-Tale Heart. Presiding over this gloomy Poe corner was the magisterial voice of James Mason, narrating the expressionistic 1953 animated interpretation of The Tell-Tale Heart, with designs by Warner Bros. background artist Paul Julian, who would, appropriately enough, go on to work with Roger Corman. Mason explains his actions in a patient and scrupulously rational manner: ‘it was his eye, yes, that eye. His eye, staring, milky white film. The eye, everywhere in everything. Of course I had to get rid of the eye’.

Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for The Masque of the Red Death

Poe’s work certainly informed the Yellow Book Decadance of the fin de siecle period, the dying days of the Victorian period. A copy of the Yellow Book was on display here. And indeed its cover was an exquisite shade of yellow, an instantly distinctive object to be seen with tucked under your arm, connoting an all-embracing aesthetic worldview. One of Aubrey Beardsley’s Poe illustrations was also on display, a depiction of a scene from The Masque of the Red Death, full of leering, deformed grotesques and limp, opiated beauties. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was presented as the emblematic story from this movement, a self-reflexive myth for, and about, its participants. It’s a mythic encapsulation of the cost of the pursuit of excess and all-consuming sensual indulgence cast in Gothic form. The figurative is made manifest and hidden away in the attic. Wilde was the public spokesman for the Aesthetic movement (French-style Decadence in all but name). His elegant dandyism and elevation of the passing witticism into an exquisitely crafted artform promoted the idea of art as an all-encompassing worldview, affecting mannerisms and modes of dress as much as any actual creative artefact which might be produced in time remaining. This was a philosophy which would resonate throughout the 20th century, finding expression in the theatricality of latter day Goths as well as the self-reflective (or obsessed) art of the likes of Gilbert and George and a number of the YBAs. Indeed, there were some works by the Chapman Brothers later in the exhibition. Wilde’s own penchant for the Gothic, as well as his conflation of life and art, were displayed in the calling cards he had printed after he emerged from Reading Gaol. He cloaked himself in the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, adopted from Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer. Wilde thereby cast himself as the cursed exile who had made an ill-advised pact with the Devil and is now fated to tread a lonely, immortal path through the world.

Richard Mansfield as Jekyll...and Hyde

Another key work of the late Victorian period was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, originally published in 1886 as a Shilling Shocker (a complete work as opposed to the Penny Dreadful’s serialisations – hence the slightly inflated price and altered alliteration). Stevenson’s story is a subtly suggestive study of the duality inherent in the human psyche, its terrors remaining relatively subdued. It was the hugely successful theatrical production of 1887, written by JR Sullivan and starring Richard Mansfield in the twinned title role(s), which changed the tone of the story, and set the pattern for future adaptations. The bifurcation into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ selves, or rather selves which suppressed the desire for sensual pleasure and gave it full, destructive reign. Jekyll and Hyde became another myth of fin-de-siecle Decadence, a companion piece to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Richard Mansfield’s performance was particularly noted for its remarkable transformation scene, aided by theatrical lighting and make-up. A photograph displayed here gives us an idea of the thrills which the Victorian theatregoers would have experienced. Using the developing room magic or double exposure, we see the upright Dr Jekyll, face a saintly picture of benevolent intentions, transformed into the hunched, bestial figure of Hyde, hands clawed and poised to grab whatever they can grab a hold of. Hyde really does appear to be a shadow self in this photograph, a parthenogenetic homunculus tearing itself free from its noble progenitor.


The theatrical production of Jekyll and Hyde, which Stevenson professed to hate, was running at the time that the Jack the Ripper murders began to impinge on the public consciousness in 1888. The two became superimposed in the minds of many, Jack and Edward Hyde becoming mirrored selves. Theatrical fiction and factual speculation percolated together to form the beginnings of the potent myth which distilled the dark essence of late Victorian London. The city of terrible night, its narrow Whitechapel streets filled with the stench of poverty and despair. One of the most startling exhibits was a work of fiction purporting to be fact; another example of the fakery which seems to play such a prominent part in the history of Gothic (and which lives on in ‘found footage’ horror movies). A letter written in red ink boasting of murderous exploits and promising more horrors to come is signed Yours Truly Jack the Ripper (‘Don’t mind me giving the trade name’). Undoubtedly a hoax, it has nevertheless accumulated a certain amount of legendary cachet, being the first of a welter of such fevered missives, stoked by sensationalist newspaper reportage. Alan Moore, in his kaleidoscopic Ripper epic From Hell, has two journalists from the Daily Star compose the letter in a Wapping flat, giving the public a fiend whose luridly outlined exploits they can gorge themselves on (in the page of The Star, of course).


Robert Bloch’s story Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper draws on the letter’s signature, and imagines Jack as an immortal who surfaces in various eras to commit his ritualistic killings, which serve to keep him alive. The subsequent pairing in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology of Bloch’s A Toy for Juliette and Ellison’s own A Prowler In the City At the Edge of the World takes as its basis the way in which ‘Jack’ was transformed into an almost supernatural figure, an elusive trickster constantly eluding his pursuers with mocking ease. He was an inheritor of the powers of Spring Heeled Jack, and a precursor of the regrettable archetype of the superhuman serial killer in modern culture. Harlan Ellison reduces him to a pathetic puppet of greater, more debased forces at the end of his story, a conclusion which has considerable moral and allegorical force, and once more addresses the role of the media in creating and feeding an appetite for such atrocities.

Laird Cregar in the 1944 version of The Lodger

The Ripper murders, as filtered through Jekyll and Hyde and proto-tabloid journalism, gave rise to Belloc Lowndes’ 1911 novel The Lodger. The entrance of Ivor Novello’s titular character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 film version, face disguised beneath the mummifying wrap of a scarf , ragged wisps of illuminated fog dissipating behind him, is an electrifying expressionistic rendering of the mystery and fear fuelling the ever-expanding Ripper mythos. Actually, the 1944 version of The Lodger, with a mesmerising performance by Laird Cregar at its heart, better evokes the social gulfs within Victorian society which the Ripper murders so horrifically exposed. It’s also interesting to note the narrowing gap between literary source and cinematic adaptation. Only 38 years separate The Lodger from the Ripper murders and Richard Mansfield’s theatrical transformation into Hyde (and 32 from the 1920 John Barrymore film), the cinema from the music hall, the gas lamp from the electric light, the horse drawn Hackney cab from the motor car. They really do seem worlds apart.

First edition of Dracula in fin-de-siecle yellow book covers

The final work from the late Victorian period explored here is of such moment that it merited a whole room to itself. The visitor was obliged to make a detour from their natural winding progression through the exhibition’s dimly lit corridors, turning into this sealed off sepulchre which immediately felt like a sacred space. Indeed, so caught up was I in the cultural current leading me eagerly on from one thematic display to another that it wasn’t until I’d reached the end and exited into the light of the British Library’s lofty atrium that I paused and thought ‘hang on, there was something missing there’. Retracing my steps, I discovered the hidden sanctum which I’d initially passed by. The book in question is, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897. Its influence on the horror genre and on popular culture in general is pervasive and profound, and anything in this compacted space could offer a partial survey at best. The literary exhibits were particularly fascinating. There was a pleasing congruity to the inclusion of some of the books which Stoker consulted in the British Library whilst researching the background of his story. Perhaps some of them were even the same copies.

Of particular significance was a book written by William Wilkinson, Esq., ‘Late British Consul Resident at Bukarest’, which blended colonial memoir, history lesson and traveller’s tales, and was given the fustily prosaic title An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them. Stoker initially read this not at the British Library but in the subscription library in Whitby, the seaside town on the Yorkshire coast where he was staying for his summer holidays in 1890. The historical passages make reference to King Ladislas of Hungary forming an alliance with the Wallachian Voivode Dracula in 1444 to fight the Turks. It was in Whitby, therefore, that Stoker found the name for his vampire lord, although he would transform him from a prince (voivode) into a count. There was no such noble rank in Wallachia in the 15th century, but the baleful influence of Lord Byron together with the antics of his acolytes on the European continent had created an indelible impression. Vampires and Gothic villains in general had become strongly associated with dissipated Western European aristocrats.

The illustration included in the 1901 edition of Dracula

Stoker followed the established convention by ennobling his title character, even though he envisaged him as a stout military figure with a thick Central Eastern European moustache. This explicitly described appearance (roughly reproduced in the illustration in 1901 edition) would seldom be acknowledged in subsequent adaptations. Wilkinson also notes that Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. This could connote evil, although it could also use refer to the folk devil as a trickster figure. As such, it could be used in a complimentary sense as a badge of bravery or ingenuity in warfare or matters of state. Wallachia was also entirely separate from Transylvania, but such cavils are irrelevant. Dracula is not a historical novel, and the local colour and geographical detail Stoker derived from Wilkinson’s book and other accounts of the area provided a richly mysterious and haunted backdrop for Jonathan Harker’s arduous journey to Dracula’s castle and the final pursuit through the Transylvanian landscape. The mountainous and thickly forested world which he conjured up from his reading room travels was shrouded in fogs of superstition and venerable custom. Journeying there was akin to falling back in time to a pre-industrial era, leaving behind the nascent modernity of the late Victorian period in which electric lighting was already beginning to banish the shadows and returning to the Middle Ages. It was a reiteration of the Gothic’s abiding delight in resurrecting the spectres of primitive (and imaginary) histories which contrasted with the comforts of the present.

The demons of Lewtrenchard

Another book which Stoker consulted, Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and its People, contained fold-out maps (one of which was spread out here) which facilitated imaginary exploration, mental expeditions into the Carpathian Mountains via the Borgo Pass. Also on display was the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves, a collection of legend and lore which provided the inspiration for the wolves Dracula heralds as ‘the children of night’, and for his own transformation into a great hound which leaps onto the shore of Whitby from the deck of the wrecked Demeter. Baring-Gould was the parson of Lewtrenchard church, nestled in the shady valleys west of Dartmoor. In addition to collecting local folklore and folk music, he was a dedicated antiquarian, endeavouring to save the church furnishings and decorations of the Gothic period which other Victorian clergymen were busy discarding and destroying. His small church is a treasure house packed with objects rescued from diverse parts, restored and refitted. And hidden on the side of the pulpit facing the east wall are a pair of grinning demons carved from wood by the Pinwill sisters, Esther and Violet, in imitation of medieval originals. They would certainly not have looked out of place in Dracula’s castle.

More demons lodging in Lewtrenchard - call for the Rev. Sabine-Gould, demon hunter

Also included here was a manuscript Stoker wrote for a theatrical version of his novel. Scrappily assembled, with passages cut and pasted from the printed page, this was evidently dashed off with great haste. It was an exercise to establish theatrical copyright and prevent others from hijacking his ideas, distorting them and profiting from the thinly veiled results. Perhaps he had the success of JR Sullivan and Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde in mind. It also suggested that Stoker was highly conscious of the fact that Dracula was a work which had the potential for broad popular appeal. The script formed the basis for a theatrical reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897, staged concurrently with the novel’s publication. Present in the select audience was Henry Irving, the actor-manager for whom Stoker acted as personal assistant and factotum in all things. Irving was an imposing figure, an archetypally demanding and egotistic theatrical, and a dominant force in Stoker’s life, source of both reverence and fear. Some have claimed him as a model for Dracula. Its certainly likely that some of his characteristics found there way into the portrayal of the commanding count. His approval or even mild encouragement was vital for Stoker; but all he received after the show was brusque brush-off. The self-absorbed Irving had no time to dispense the words of praise he demanded and required for himself.


Projected onto the back room of the Dracula room were scenes from the finale of FW Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, expressionist shadows taking on a life of their own, extending grasping claws ahead of the rodent-toothed creature casting them. Stoker’s worries about the unauthorised appropriation of his material seems to have been justified, since the German company who produced the picture, Prana Films, had made no effort to seek approval for their adaptation. The widowed Florence Stoker’s attempts to gain recompense merely resulted in the company going bust. In order to discourage further such incidences, she managed to get a court order requiring all copies to be destroyed. Fortunately, this celluloid auto-da-fé wasn’t altogether thorough in its execution, and surviving prints resurfaced in later years. As a result, we can still enjoy what has become established as an enduring classic of German expressionism and cinematic Gothic. Stoker’s character and vampiric lore would soon spread with the exponential infectiousness of a blood-borne virus, putting it well beyond any possibility of containment.

The exhibits here briefly sampled the cultural shadow cast by Dracula over the long decades of the 20th century. His looming presence was in some ways a counter-reaction to the forces of modernism and rapid technological progress; a renewed example of the Gothic finding inspiration and escape in a time of social transformation through the resurrection of the past. The character as Stoker envisaged him was eager to embrace the possibilities afforded by new technologies and economic channels. That was the reason for his move to England. But this is one of a number of the novel’s aspects (including his Eastern European military bearing) which have been abandoned in successive cinematic incarnations. Christopher Lee’s repeated pleas to the Hammer hierarchy to return to the book as a direct source fell on deaf ears.

Vampire - Edvard Munch

The female vampire had already found its way into the broader European literary and artistic stream as a symbolic character. In Baudelaire’s poem The Vampire it stands as a very French metaphor for the destructive nature of love, and the fear of the devouring woman. It was also a stock pre-Freudian fever dream figure in Symbolist art, an image to set alongside the many personifications of Death in chill Nordic and Baltic landscapes. Edvard Munch’s Vampire, aka Love and Pain (1894), could almost be an illustration for Baudelaire’s bitterly misogynistic poem. Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire was a rather surprising inclusion in the exhibition, serving as a representation of these literary adoptions, and another version of the vampire as belle dame sans merci. Appropriately enough, it was written in 1897, the year of Dracula’s publication. He’s certainly not somebody you’d associate with such Decadent company. But then he’s a writer to whom many misconceptions have become attached over the years. The printed poem was accompanied by an illustration by Philip ‘son of Sir Edward’ Burne-Jones, an explicitly erotic tableau which bears some relation to Fuseli’s Nightmare. It was this image which gave birth to the poem in Kipling’s imagination, an example of visual art exerting a direct influence upon literature.


Edward Gorey’s Dracula toy theatre brought his mordant drawings to marvellous pop-up life, and demonstrated the broadening appeal of the whole mythos. The sets are actually models for the stage designs he produced for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula. His lugubriously amusing figures prove eminently suitable to the novel’s characters and scenarios. A slight element of mockery is appropriate given their familiarity at this stage, but is obviated by the beauty and care with which they are drawn. And his Dracula has a moustache! A lovely artefact for Gothic children to exercise their morbid imaginations upon – the cardboard Lucy Westenra’s head can easily be stuck back on with sellotape.


It’s but a few short steps from here to Sesame Street’s delightfully numerate Count, the vegetarian vampire duck of Cosgrove-Hall’s Count Duckula and the vampire grandpas and uncles-next-door of The Munsters and Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga The latter features the wonderfully weird Uncle Festus Zlüdotny, whose spluttered speech-bubble utterances are rendered in the undecipherable symbols of a mysterious yet somehow inherently violent alphabet. A vampire slaying kit, with tools and substances covering most recommended means of undead extermination, was on display in its own standalone cabinet, its components housed in a neatly portable valise whose compartments concertinaed out with ingenious pragmatism. It had no apparent provenance, and its presence was therefore rather anomalous, but fun nevertheless.

Christopher Lee endures the Scars of Dracula

A design for Frank Langella’s Count in John Badham’s 1979 film of Dracula suggested future developments of the character, and of the vampire in general, as a romantic figure. The animalistic bloodsucking and viral furtherance of the undead plague were increasingly relegated to the background, incidental details eclipsed by the old fashioned seductions of the irresistible Heathcliff anti-hero. Alas, there was nothing here to match the display of Christopher Lee’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness costume in the BFI’s Gothic display a couple of years ago. Hammer was represented (and represented it simply HAD to be, of course) by more of Scott MacGregor’s set designs, this time for Scars of Dracula. Indisputably the nadir of Hammer’s Dracula cycle, and quite possibly of its Gothic output at large, the designs indicate just how far the studio (and director Roy Ward Baker) was prepared to go in its determination to keep up with contemporary trends and add new elements of explicit gore. In the bedroom set, a bloody corpse sprawls across the four-poster, severed body parts scattered to the side along with the saws and knives which have been used in this clumsy dissection. The echoes of the grim finale of Witchfinder General are all too evident. Perhaps thankfully, this scenario was never realised in the completed film. Christopher Lee’s Dracula merely leaps into the chamber and stabs Anoushka Hempel’s vampire seductress with a knife whose rubbery flexibility is all too plain. It’s a gratuitous scene which is as risible as it is illogical and inexplicable. MacGregor’s set for the castle roof is an atmospheric Gothic arena, a stage for dramatic confrontations. Sadly, the final realisation fell far short of his vision, the greatly reduced budgets of the 60s and 70s more than usually evident.

As with Frankenstein, Dracula made it through to the vinyl age too. Displayed here was the cover of the Studio2Stereo LP Dracula with Christopher Lee, a compilation of Hammer soundtracks. A real treat, this one, with James Bernard’s stirring score for the original Hammer Dracula set in context by Lee’s narration. It also features cues from Bernard’s score for She, as well as contemporary composer John McCabe’s music for the 1972 psycho-thriller Fear in the Night, Harry Robinson’s lushly romantic themes from The Vampire Lovers and extracts from David Whittaker’s score for the stylish Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, wittily scripted by the late Brian Clemens. The 70s provenance of the LP was clear from its use of a promo still from Dracula AD 1972 on the cover, Christopher Lee tucking into the jugular of poor old Caroline Munro.

Leaving the Dracula room, we also take our leave of the 19th century, and enter a new era in which the medium of cinema, with its large, darkened palaces, would prove a perfect site for the expansion of the shadow worlds of the Gothic. But those shadows often originated and drew their raw sustenance from the archetypal monsters, human and otherwise, which emerged from the gaslight illuminated fogs of the Victorian imagination.

A remarkable cover from a collection of Paul Robeson 78s which has just come into the Oxfam Music and Art shop where I work, vintage dust and all. Released in 1943, the illustration explicitly connects the struggle for civil rights in America with the fight against fascism in Europe. Robeson throws off his chains and plunges a dagger into the heart of the Nazi worm. Robeson sings the Spanish Republican (here refererred to as Loyalist) song The Four Insurgent Generals; Moorsoldaten (The Peat-Bog Soldiers), an anthem of the International Brigades originally written in 1933 by German dissidents in a concentration camp, and here arranged by sometime Brecht collaborator Hanns Eisler; the US song about union activist and martyr Joe Hill (sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock); two songs from Russian composer Ivan Dzerzhinsky's opera Quiet Flows the Don; The Purest Kind of Guy from No For An Answer, a musical about unemployed Greek workes by Marc Blitztein. Blitztein was a gay Jewish composer perhaps best known today for his 1937 pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, the chaotic Broadway production history of which was recently dramatised in Tim Robbins' film of that name. And Native Land by Jewish-Russian composer Isaak Dunayevsky, a favourite of Stalin's, apparently. He composed the soundtrack for Volga-Volga, a broad 1938 comedy rumoured to be Uncle Joe's favourite film. It was important at this time that Robeson performed songs by political dissidents, Jewish composers and gay writers (Blitztein made no secret about his sexuality). Robeson sings the Spanish, German and Russian songs both in English and the native language. The forthright cover image makes it clear that Columbia were wholly behind his selection. It would be unthinkable that they would release such a collection 10 years later, by which time McCarthyism was well under way and he was being investigated by the HUAC (House Unamerican Activities Committee) and was denied a passport to travel abroad to perform. It should also be said that he was still fulsome in his praise of Stalin at this point.
So, an absolutely fascinating piece of history.

It was a freezing January morning when I lifted my bike off the train at Tiverton Parkway station and wheeled it down the ramp into the carpark. The station is nowhere near Tiverton (it’s actually just outside Sampford Peverell), but it is near the Great Western canal which winds its way across mid-Devon from Tiverton in the West to Greenham and the River Tone in the East (it used to continue as far as Taunton). A telling proximity, given that the coming of the railways meant that the canal never extended its watery vein from Bristol to English Channel as originally planned. It was eastwards that I was bound, to the village of Holcombe Rogus just a short, winding turn of a country road from the Great Western’s terminal tunnel. I pedalled off, crunching the ice glazing puddles and sending the silhouettes of crows flapping into the sky from the skeletal branches of their winter roosts. The path alongside the canal immediately passes beneath a concrete road bridge carrying the busy A361 traffic. It’s a bleakly functional signifier of the decline of the railways, which is why you can no longer get anywhere in mid-Devon (Tiverton included) by train.




The canal is frozen over, lengths of anchored reed emerging from the pale blue plane of its surface and forming acutely angled peaks. The reflections of these sharply outlined reed strokes combine to create rectilinear groupings of wonky rhomboids. Nature’s formalist abstract compositions. I lose myself in their strangely perfect patterns for a while, but then an electric blue peripheral eyeflash and I immediately look up to see a kingfisher dart in a frictionless glide over the icy channel. I follow its flight in staggered cycle stints, from bullrush perches to branch overlooks to weir post plinths. In the colour drained winter landscape it is a tiny splash of vivid orange and blue life, a mesmerising will-o-the-wisp drawing me inexorably onward. At times it levitates into the air above unfrozen stretches of the canal, hovering blurrily before plummeting with mercurial suddenness into the icy waters. Its beauty is at times quite breathtaking, and I am entranced for a lengthier period than I had bargained for, or had factored into my admittedly extremely loose and largely notional schedule.




On the other side of the canal, I pass a perfect pastoral scene, sheep grazing beside an oak tree spreading bare branches before a small chapel in the middle of a field the size of a large garden. Had it been a burnished autumn day, it could have been a composition from a Samuel Palmer painting, the Darenth Valley superimposed over the rolling plains of mid-Devon. The building was Ayshford Chapel, dating from the 15th century and attached to the medieval seat of the Ayshford family, a manor which was recorded in the Domesday Book. 16th and 17th century monuments to successive generations of Ayshfords can be found in the church at Burlescombe nearby. From the latter part of the 17th century onward, manor house became farmhouse and, by the looks of it, remains so to this day. The location of a chapel in a farm field occupied by a placidly grazing flock of sheep suggests an obvious symbolism of the sort the more pious Pre-Raphaelites would have used unhesitatingly. It was also an incongruous and delightful sight to happen upon.





There were techno pastoral vistas to be viewed from the towpath, too, as the canal was paralleled by the striding giant frames of pylons. Crackling lines were held up by upraised, ceramic insulator-braceleted arms sloping from hunched, vorticist shoulders, strung in slackly undulant lines from one giant to the other. They crossed the canal and marched off over the gentle rise of the slope beyond, marking out distance with dwindling perspective as they approached the horizon. Blue reflections in half-frozen water contrasted with the quills of bulrushes on the bankside, coiled and pendant tubes of insulators the hollowed out forms of the erect, solid seed heads, chocolate brown and cigar-shaped. Passing under the power lines, I paused to tune into the harsh electron drone, the white heat overtone hum of modernity. I’m travelling back to the pre-modern age, alongside an early modern industrial transport network. I’ll soon arrive in a time when technologies of the electric (now digital) age, long since taken for granted, would have been considered miraculous, magical and quite possibly the work of the Devil.


The canal now ends just beyond the twin nooks of old limekilns, entering a dark, narrow tunnel of the sort to produce claustrophobic nightmares, or inspire a ghost story by LTC Rolt or Robert Aickman (both founders of the Inland Waterways Association in the post-war period). Pushing my bike up the slope to the bridge above, I travel the short distance along a contour winding country road to the village of Holcombe Rogus. The church is at the further end of the street which gently winds up between tidy cottages, raising its square, crenellated, copper weather vane-crested tower above them all. It is bordered by the imposing façade of Holcombe Court, a 16th century Tudor house built by Sir Roger Bluett, and inhabited by the Bluett family until they sold the estate in 1858. We will discover a good many Bluett’s inside the church, and will find the divisions so unequivocally demarcated by the manorial walls looming above the humbler dwellings of the villagers below will be replicated in its sanctified but far from unworldly space. The venerable Nikolaus Pevsner says of Holcombe Court that ‘its entrance front is the most spectacular example of the Tudor style in Devon’. The gates are connected to an intercom with attached number code pad, a clear signal for the uninvited to clear off. I take a quick photograph and then briskly retreat before the current incumbents release the hounds.




Walking up the path to the church, the present started to seem more attenuated, the sense of still suspension engendered by the clear winter chill intensifying the effect. The mud and lack of preservation gloss allowed for a true sense of the surroundings inhabited by our medieval forebears, much more so than many buildings which have been cleaned up, fenced around and littered with signage and presented to us as prime cuts of our heritage. A sturdily buttressed, roughly-bricked building bordered the narrow approach, lying long, heavy and squat. This was once the church house, the hall where the villagers would gather for meetings, church ales and seasonal revels. Festivities would no doubt spill out into the surrounding streets and even into the graveyard and the nave of the church, its public space. The high west wall of the graveyard is also the wall of the Tudor manor house, and its roofs and chimneys rise ostentatiously above its top edge. A door in the wall gave direct personal access to the churchyard for the Bluett family, a private passage and short processional leading to the south porch.


I enter the porch and turn the iron ring on the oak door upward. The latch inside lifts with a decisive thunk and I push the door open, the creek of iron hinges echoing around the still interior. There is always a slight thrill upon finding an old church open, and knowing that you will now be able to explore its layers of history, to become attuned to its hushed ambience and subtle resonances. These must be haunted spaces to inhabit at night, with only a flickering candle to hold back the murmuring darkness.




I wander along the aisles of the nave, head craned upward so that it’s a wonder I don’t run slam bang into a pillar or crack my shin on a bench end. It’s not long before I spot my first Green Man, carved on the capital of one of the 15th century stone columns. A two-faced head in peasant’s hood, its features an uncommon portrait of a common villager, folds itself around a corner. Its Janus gaze takes in the unscrolled landscape of historical time and untold visions of far futurity, finding no distinctions between them. The head’s dumbly gaping mouth spews forth plaited oak shoots decorated with acorn cups both empty and full, which garland the columnar circumference. This symbolic figure of the woodlands, emblem of vegetative renewal, has proliferated within the church, manifesting itself on the trunks of several columns.








One Green Man has leaflike ears and a mild porcine face, hawthorn-like branches and leaves issuing from its gullet. Another capital is carved with a fourfold Green Man, one face for each corner. Their varying moods and visages seem to reflect the shifting tempers of the seasons. One stares blankly with gummy vacancy, hardly there at all. Another looks ferociously out with sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed hunger. And another has a bovine mien, ears devilishly pointed but with the blunt, squared-off teeth of the herbivorous ruminant. A fourth face, thoughtful and human, a wreath of hair crowning the ridges of a bony forehead, looks down on the benches below, the eyes alert and intelligent. They are all tethered together by ropes of ivy which shoots forth from generative mouths, the sprouting language of the greenwood.





That other perennial inhabitants of medieval churches, the memento mori skull, is also present in bony profusion. Church’s are death-haunted spaces, full of memorials to those who have passed through and beyond. Here is Death etched in slate on the floor, ebony features smoothed by centuries of soles. He wears a wreath, the Emperor of his own domain, and one eye socket has a tiny grain of red lodged in it. He crowns one of the Bluett memorials, kingly pate bounded by a crown, although sans the crown of his teeth, his hollow gaze focussed on an unearthly distance beyond the heraldic eagle and squirrel perching on milky helmets before him. He is at the root of another Bluett tomb, cracked open like one of the squirrel’s nuts. And he is carried by the ghost effigies of the Bluett children like some dark-lit Hallow’s Eve punkie. He is everywhere, inescapable. You cannot evade him whichever route through the aisles you take.



Low winter light pours in through the windows at the east end of the church. It illuminates the marble globes fixed into smooth craters in the gray, lunar stone of the reredos, the screen behind the altar. It looks like they might long ago have worn the dishes of those craters through repeated rolling rotations. The red, black and grey patterning of the spheres resembles the plateaus, rifts, oceans, deserts and mountain ranges of planetary surfaces, the warmly reflective glow hinting at habitable worlds.




I ascend the narrow spiral of stairs which used to lead the dizzy climber to the rood screen dividing nave from chancel, secular from sacred, the public from the priesthood. It’s no longer there, the steps ending in empty space, a small rectangle of hardwood acting as a token barrier. The colourfully patterned organ pipes rise in swelling and ebbing graphs, physically charting the relative masses of sound, the volumes of air which will be displaced. I imagine a protean organ chord suddenly erupting from the arrayed pipes, tumbling me back down the stairs in a Peanuts roll. I could potentially jump from the narrow top stair on which I perch, feet placed toe to ankle in a sideways alignment, and land on the roof of the organ, sending up a thick billow of age-old dust like a volcanic ashcloud. But I suspect my dashing leap, Phantom of the Opera theatrics on a parochial scale, would result in my crashing straight through the ceiling leaving me trapped within the belly of the musical beast.






From the precarious vantage point of the top stair, you can get a close view of the stained glass angels in the upper tracery of the East window arches. Created in 1892, they are Arts and Crafts creatures. But they also look curiously like comic book characters from the 1970s, or golden haired rockers from an album cover by Jim Fitzpatrick. The Victorian artists may have left out extraneous detail which wouldn’t have been visible to the congregation below, but the resultant simplification of form apparent from closer quarters results in a surprising modernity. These are timeless angels. A thread of spidersilk spans one of the angelic panes, anchoring a spun which gently trembles with its seething black cargo. Soon the face of the angel will be occluded by a crawling arachnid shadow of tiny scuttling dots.


Another pane has a two-dimensional cookie-cutter strip in the form of a clover leaf intertwining with a triangle in a puzzling Escher embrace. The three lobes of the clover the leaf and the three points of the triangle are perhaps symbolic of the Trinity, a linking of the divine symmetry of nature with the ideal geometries born of the rational mind.






I turn to descend the spiralling stair once more. Halfway down, I pause to look through the diamond lozenges of the centuries old windows. They are frosted with a fine cracquelure of scratches, cracks and webs which seem to have fused the surface, all spotted and coloured with dots and blots of lichen and mold. The windows frame the gravestones, manor house wall, church house and trees, freezing them in a blue-green light. It resembles the gelid tint of the icebound canal. The world outside is lent the semblance of worn and abraded antiquity. It’s as if the speed of light has grown sluggish in its passage through this obscuring glass, and I am looking out at a scene from some indeterminate period of the past. Will I witness a stern figure in Puritan black walk determinedly up to the churchyard gate? Or church ale revellers in medieval tunics stumble out of the church house? I turn from such reveries and tread the last few downward steps to re-enter the main body of the church.



I cross to the North side of the chancel where a screen brought from St Peter’s in Tiverton in 1854 now encloses the Bluett family chapel. The screens proclaim this as a private space, the Bluetts exercising manorial rights even in death. It contains the elaborate tombs of two generations of the family. Richard Bluett and his Mary Chichester are dressed in sober black, their heads resting on the pleated plates of their capacious ruffs. Richard died in 1616, some years after Mary. His effigy rests on its side, propped up on an elbow, and looks down on the recumbent form of his wife below. His eyes are clear, and the brown-irised pupils shift their gaze sideways to focus upon her face. Mary’s eyes are turned upward, and are glazed with the sightless film of death, focussed on nothing visible in this world. Richard’s lips are full and ruddy, still flushed with life; Mary’s are thin, drawn and pale within her drained marble features. Two panels of text above the couple proclaim her virtues in gold lettering, declaring that ‘a modest matron here doth lye/A mirror of her kind’, being ‘Godly, chaste and hospitable’.





The subsequent generation, Sir John Bluett (d.1634) and Elizabeth Portman opt for more formal tomb attire and poses and restrict themselves to monochrome marble. He is encased in armour, with a frilly lace collar adding a courtly touch and making it clear that the protective plating is purely ceremonial. His face has suffered some minor damage over the years, however; and a crack across the bridge of the nose and from the mouth to the cheek (the latter appearing as if it has been partially disguised by the growth of a moustache) are suggestive of duelling scars or war wounds. Lady Elizabeth has on her finest dress, with expansively puffed out sleeves making the point that she doesn’t expect to be doing any practical work. They both stare blankly upward at the ceiling of their funerary fourposter, their heads resting on tasselled pillows of stone, hands pressed stiffly together and raised in permanent prayer. At their feet, loyal heraldic beasts keep eternal guard. Elizabeth has a small house dog curled up by her pointed slippers, ready to yap ferociously at any potential desecrators. Sir John has a bushy-tailed squirrel nibbling on a nut clutched in its tiny paws. It’s a creature which also perches atop the heraldic helm crowning the tomb. A perplexing and potentially comical choice. But perhaps the squirrel’s storing up of its nuts represents a pragmatic conflation of the worldly husbandry of wealth with the promise of spiritual fulfilment in the life hereafter. Heaven is a place where you have an endless supply of nuts. The squirrel is, of course, of the red variety, its transatlantic grey hoodlum brethren yet to have been introduced to take over the whole park bench feeding racket in the 20th century.




At the side of the cold stone bed, the Bluett children obediently line up in an orderly rank. They were all daughters (and thus none could inherit the estate) and they float spectrally in palled marble, gowns sweeping the floor. Some carry flowers, some have hands pressed in prayer, others carry skulls before them. These are the unlucky ones, these bony tokens memento mori of their own early passing, outlived by their parents. I briefly became fascinated by the views of a varying array of intricately twined topknots visible from behind, a rare insight into the details of period hairdressing.



Both pairs of Bluetts are overlooked by the vague presences of Putti, disembodied infant heads fluttering about with the aid of wings attached to their neck stumps. They look like they they’ve alighted for the briefest moment and, easily distracted, will flit off elsewhere at any instant. On my way out of the chapel, I notice a slab tombstone on the floor memorialising another Bluett along with his wife, Kerenhappuch. What a name! And she lived to the age of 94, dying in 1759. A fine innings, seeing out significant social and constitutional changes, and no doubt aided by the medical advances of the 18th century age of reason.


Adjoining the Bluett memorial chapel is the Bluett Pew, the living taking their place alongside the dead. It’s a clear statement of continued lineage, of power and wealth (and spiritual capital) inherited and maintained into the present generation and beyond. The tall screens boxing off seats reserved for the Bluetts and guests resemble the rood screen which divided the congregation in the nave from the sacred rituals performed by the priesthood in the sacristy. But here, the division is between titled landowner and commoner. Perhaps a better analogy, then, one devoid of sacred connotations, would be a private box at the theatre or opera. The screen, carved in the early 17th eentury Jacobean period, is topped by 15 oval medallions, each a small theatrical proscenium framing scenes from the early books of the Bible – the Pentateuch. The stars arcing across the borders suggest a bounding firmament containing this earthly stage with in its circling embrace. It’s rather like Shakespeare’s wooden O from the prologue of Henry V, both the Globe theatre and the world at large which it strives to represent on its stage.




The sequence of narrative tableaux within the medallions is full of vivid life. The carved figures are simplified, but are all the more potently present for it. Eve in particular, who features in three scenes (the temptation, the expulsion from Eden and the raising of the first children, Cain and Abel) is filled with primal power and spirit. She looks timeless, both ancient and new, not rooted in any particular style of the period in which she was fashioned. Suckling the younger child, Abel, she as the look of a mother Goddess figure, an icon of fertility rooted to the landscape in which she sits, and which she also blesses with her fecundity. She is haloed by dusty cobwebs, canopies gilded by silvery sunlight – Our Lady of the Spiders.


In the temptation scene, Eve reaches up to pick a second fruit to hand to Adam who stands on the other side of the dividing bole of the Tree of Knowledge. She faces us full on, a frontal boldness which makes her the focus of the composition, the active subject. The serpent is knotted in the crown of the tree above, its head hanging down like the questing tip of a parasitic vine. The whole, and Eve in particular, is reminiscent of Gauguin’s treatment of the same subject (in painting and woodcarving). The same direct, elemental quality he found in the art of the South Sea Islands is present here in an English village church. In the expulsion from Eden carving, the angel border guard hastens Adam and Eve on their way with what looks like a well-aimed Chaplinesque boot up the bare backside. Adam pushes Eve ahead of him with a shove to the head, a violent gesture which makes it clear who will bear the blame for this exile and fall. Or is he perhaps simply preventing her from looking back at the paradise garden which they are leaving behind forever.



Behind them, a palm tree raises a feathery headdress. Trees feature in a number of the carvings, partly as a means of dividing the scene into separate sections. The also act as central props to ensure structural stability. The various stylised specimens range from fluting, tapered columns to the arching trunk of the burning bush (coiled with ivy and tipped with deciduous leaves) and a smoothly-barked, bulbous-based baobab besides which Moses stands. His head is parallel with the top branches, as if he were a towering giant.



The knotted, worming line of the serpent recurs too. Snakes writhe away from the burning bush and drape themselves in the tree beneath which Adam and Eve raise their children (the lurking poison which will enter Cain’s heart). Moses sets up a copper effigy of a snake as a protective talisman for his people, the sight of which inures them to the deadly effect of the fiery serpents which God has set on them as a punishment for doubting him.





Some of the figures are wearing the clothing of Tudor times, an anachronism which serves to bring an immediacy to the stories being related. Adam is a gentleman farmer in early 17th eentury ruff and tunic, ploughing the fields whilst a stormy-faced Cain beats the oxen with a stick. The mysterious giant in the first medallion sports Tudor headgear with a feather rakishly attached. Balaam, meanwhile, has something of the look of a Turk about him, complete with broad, bushy moustache. Two later carvings, made in 1858 during a restoration, and depicting Israelite spies returning from Canaan with a huge bunch of grapes and the bearing of the Arc of the Covenant by armed guards, are more open to the possibilities and pleasures of historical fantasia.





There is much here of the violence and retribution spattering the Old Testament. Cain’s murder of Abel, the primal fratricide which introduces death and murder into the world, is shown in all its brutal, bludgeoning savagery. Balaam’s encounter with the warrior angel which bars his way is pregnant with suspended actions and imminent bloodshed. The angel draws its sword in readiness to kill the disobedient messenger, its scything wings emphasising its muscular power. Balaam in turn beats his donkey, who turns aside from the heavenly assassin to whose presence his master is blind, thus saving his ungrateful hide. Moses raises his dagger to slaughter his son, Isaac, in a sacrifice demanded by God. His killing arm is physically restrained by an angel which leans into the world from the starry border. Moses sits above a thicket of pikes, spears and halberds bristling beyond a battlefield tent. His arms are held up by his brother Aaron and companion Hur. As long as these arms remain upraised (in a gesture of prayer and praise), the battle will go in favour of the Israelites, and Joshua, their military chief, will defeat their enemy, the Amelekites, ‘with the edge of a sword’.



Another medallion depicts a giant figure (Goliath?) striding towards a richly garbed man with a wine jug at his belt leading an ox (a sacrificial offering, perhaps). The giant holds a sword on which a severed head is impaled like a cocktail nugget. His shield bearing arm is flung out behind him and would appear to have knocked a fool to the ground. This subservient figure tumbles in his wake, grovelling body hunched in a compact, serpentine squiggle. The snake this time takes human form.


The preponderance of scenes from the life of Moses can perhaps be seen as an illustration of the rectitude of authority and power. Those who oppose Moses oppose God, and they are punished accordingly. The assertion of the divine right of kings was still extant at the time the carvings were created. There was a related sense, propagated by those whom it served, that the social order was ordained by heavenly decree. The tableaux depicting Moses bringing down the tablets from Mount Sinai and chastising the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf; of his remote direction of the course of a battle; and of his protection of his people through the creation of a magical talisman (the copper snake – an acceptable idol). All were illustrations of the rightness of authority, and the wisdom of following the appointed leader. These medallions face outwards from the seats of the Bluetts, the local face of authority and landowing power. They gave something of visual interest for the congregation of commoners to contemplate, to look up to. The establishment of authority and power is also evident in the scene in which Melchisedcck, a king and priest of Salem, pays due homage to Abraham in the victorious wake of a number of battles, and receives a grant of land in return.



Whatever political message or subliminal lessons might be encoded in the choice of biblical stories and their placement above an enclosure reserved fro the local landowning aristocracy, the carvings themselves are beautifully crafted, the figures full of life and character. I turn from my contemplation of them, neck a little sore from craning upwards, and head for the door. On my way out, I notice another stone-carved figure on a capital at the back of the nave. This one looks as though he might be a king, trimly bearded and crowned .Who could he be? Few of the Tudors sported beards, and he is certainly too gaunt to be the lustily full-faced Henry VIII. An earlier medieval monarch, perhaps. I also notice the Victorian stained glass in the rear window, which depicts the visitation of the three kings and the shepherds to the infant Christ in his stable crib. One of the shepherd’s, ostentatiously robed in purple fur, has bought his bagpipes along and is giving them a full, Dizzy-cheeked blast. I can’t help feeling this is a poor choice of instrument with which to lull a newborn baby.




I pick up the pen to sign the visitors’ book, and realise that my fingers are too frozen to grasp it firmly. The stone vault of the church is like one great refrigerator. I write my appreciative comments in a palsied script. Outside, the sunlight is approaching its golden hour glory, and I spend a few minutes wandering amongst the graves, their shadows sharp and clearcut. A couple of neat tussocks of moss top the flat plateau of one headstone, their green humps contrasting pleasingly with the smooth, granitic grey – a miniature moorland landscape. As the hedgerows and hilltop copses begin to make intricately brachiated silhouettes against the sky, I realise that it is time to move on. I pass by the church house, now casting its shadow over the muddy path to the church, and push off onto the country road which will lead me to the canal path, and thence once more to the age of future present.

This is a slightly longer version of the essay included in the splendid Folklore Tapes release Calendar Customs III.

Midwinter is the low ebb of the year, the heart of the lifeless season when the sun describes a wearily flattened arc across the sky, it luminosity dimmed and wan, its passage brief. Shadows lengthen, the branches grow bare and bony, temperature drops and darkness prevails. The spirit sinks and a general sense of lassitude fills the soul. It is a season of shivering and sighs in which summer warmth and light become a hazy memory. There is a need for cheer, for hope and conviviality, for reminders of Spring’s renewal to come. Old midwinter rites and rituals, centring around Christmastide observances and celebrations, bring a little warmth and light into this chill time of scarcity and spiritual despond.



In the pre-industrial age, the pattern of the pastoral and agricultural year shaped the rhythms of human labour and rest. The midwinter period between December and early January encompassed weeks when there was little to be done save a bit of dung spreading. The holidays could extend from St Nicholas Day on the 6th December to Plough Monday, the first to fall after Twelfth Night. Plough Monday marked the recommencement of the agricultural year. It was a still interval of cessation during which the coming year could be contemplated and good fortune invoked through the observance of certain propitiatory acts (or the studious avoidance of others). Bells were tolled in various parishes on Christmas Eve to keep the Devil and his ill-doing at bay over the ensuing months. At All Saints, Dewsbury in Yorkshire, this involved sounding one clangourous knell for every year since Christ’s birth, spaced at even intervals between the hours of 10 and 12 (and thus requiring precise calculation). This feat was known as Ringing or Tolling the Devil’s Knell, a long funereal watch which, in keeping with the inversions characteristic of the season, was cause for celebration.



Wassailing was (and still, to an extent, is) a means of ushering in the luck of the new year. The word derives from the old Anglo-Saxon greeting ‘waes haell’, or ‘good health’. The standard response (although not necessarily in Anglo-Saxon England) was ‘drinc haell!’, or ‘I’ll drink to that’, presumably accompanied by the raising of a goblet or drinking horn and the hearty quaffing of its contents. Wassailers, who were predominantly women, would travel from house to house singing their wassailing song and bearing their wooden wassailing bowl (sometimes decorated with ribbons and evergreen boughs). The bowl was full of spiced ale with variant combinations of roasted apples, toast, nutmegs, sugar, eggs and cream; a dubious concoction, half drink, half bread pudding, sometimes known as lamb’s wool. The householder accepting the offered libation and offering food or other gifts in return would bring luck into their homes for the approaching year. The luck of the house was of particular concern at this time, what with the retreat into the domestic space in the face of encroaching cold and darkness.





Wassail songs are a species of celebratory folksong all to their own. A typical and particularly well-known one (largely due to its collection by Ralph Vaughan Williams) comes from Gloucestershire and the opening verse gives the general flavour, as well as revealing the wassailers on the occasion of the song’s recording to be male:
Wassail! Wassail! All over the town.
Our bread it is white, our ale it is brown:
Our bowl it is made of the Maplin tree,
We be all good fellows who drink to thee.
The renowned 17th century lawyer and scholar John Selden found the wassail ale very sour and grumbled about ‘wenches with wassells at New-Years-Tide’ who ‘present you with a cup and you must drink of the slabby stuff, but the meaning is, you must give them monies, ten times more than it is worth’. There was certainly an element of minor wealth redistribution to this and many midwinter traditions, and well-off men like Selden often found cause for complaint. Christmas might be a time of generosity and openness, but who were the deserving poor? And whey did they have to be so forward about claiming their share? Similar complaints were voiced about the annuities known as ‘boxes’ granted to tradesmen or those in the delivery trades on what came to be known as Boxing Day. The change of the day’s name from that of the first Christian martyr, St Stephen, to one marking what amounted to a holiday bonus charts a trajectory from the sacred to the secular and pecuniary which has been marked since well before the Victorian era. It was one reason why the parliamentarians banned Christmas.




This was an opportune season for the less well-off to earn a little extra in a time of scarcity and scant labour. They sold their entertainments, decorations and blessing (an possibly the cessation of their nuisance-making) whilst wielding the implicit threat of diminishing the luck of the house, or even of cursing the inhabitants on these spiritually charged days. The Scots, needless to say, were particularly good at the cursing part. A New Year song sung on South Uist whilst seeking hogmanay, or gifts, from local households had an extra verse in reserve should such generosity prove lacking:

The curse of God and the New Year be on you
And the scath of the plaintive buzzard,
Of the hen-harrier, of the raven, of the eagle,
And the scath of the sneaking fox,
The scath of the dog and cat be on you,
Of the boar, of the badger and of the ghoul,
Of the hipped bear and of the wild wolf,
And the scath of the foul polecat.

That’s some heavy duty scathing.





Another wassailing tradition involved the blessing of an apple orchard. The wassail bowl was filled with cider, some of which was poured onto the roots of the greatest tree, the apple tree man. Trees were beaten with sticks and a regionally varying species of cacophony conducted via pots and pans, gunshots or ‘apple howling’. Was this driving out evil spirits lodged in the wood or waking the trees? Or was it simply for the visceral and slightly illicit joy of making a right racket to echo through the night air at such a dank and lifeless time? Pieces of toast soaked in the wassail cup’s contents were also hung from the branches or wedged into their forks; an offering for the robin, always a cheerful symbol of the season and a bird of good omen. A Somerset wassailing song praises the tireless creature: ‘a poor little robin sits up in a tree/And all day long so merrily sings he/A widdling and twiddling to keep himself warm,/And a little more cider will do us no harm…’





Good luck and its opposite, ill-fortune, were attached to particular days. Christmas Eve, or Adam’s Day, was a day on which supernatural and demonic forces were in abeyance. Therefore, it was a good time for auguries and divinations (particularly as regarded fortunes in love), activities which might otherwise attract unwanted attention. Ghost stories have always been popular on Christmas Eve, a tradition extending into the TV age, with the glowing set replacing the suggestively flickering fire and bringing the chilling tales of MR James into warm living rooms. Perhaps there was a vestigial sense that this was a safe time for their telling.





If you were born on Christmas Day you would be blessed with a blindness towards ghosts and spirits. Holy Innocents Day on the 28th December, on the other hand, was a cursed date. Sometimes known by the vaguely unnerving name of Childermas, it marked the slaughter of the innocents by King Herod. It was considered unwise to begin any important task on this day; it would only come to ruin. Fishermen refused to go to sea, the washing went undone (you might be ‘washing away’ one of your kin) and it was generally best to do nothing and just sit it out.




The earthing of malignant magic seems to have spread to St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) if the tradition of hunting the wren was anything to go by. Particularly prevalent in Ireland and Wales, this involved the ‘wren-boys’ setting traps in the early morning and then displaying their prize in a specially made and decorated cage in a laddish parade through the town or village. At any other time of the year this would have been the height of folly. The wren was sacred, the king of the birds, a crowning which ironically acknowledged its tiny stature. To kill it would have invited great ill-fortune into the foolhardy hunter’s life.



That it was permissible and safe at this time is indicative of the inversions of the natural and social order which were a feature of the season. This delight in turning the world upside down also manifested itself in the appointment of Lords of Misrule in wealthy, noble or royal households or university communities to oversee, with their retinues of mock courtiers, the reign of merry chaos which brought life to the dark days. The Lord (or his regional variants such as the midwinter sovereign or Abbot of Unreason) was a burlesque version of his master, with gaudily regal robes and a degree of pseudo-authority, right up to the ability to stage ‘executions’ on a prop gibbet. The masters of the household would affect to serve their staff during the ‘misrule’ of the temporary Lord, albeit to a limited ceremonial extent.



In ecclesiastical circles there was a similar tradition of appointing Boy Bishops for a period extending from St Nicholas’ Day on the 6th (the Turkish saint having a particular connection with children) and Holy Innocents Day on the 28th. The Boy Bishops would lead some aspects of the services in their specially tailored vestments and go on tours of the surrounding parishes. In Bristol, the Boy Bishop of St Nicholas Church and his retinue were invited to a lavish banquet on the saint’s day. The tradition continues or has been revived in some areas. The Boy Bishop’s tenure at Hereford Cathedral is particularly renowned, and forms a major plot element in Phil Rickman’s novel Midwinter of the Spirit, featuring the diocesan deliverance consultant (or exorcist) Merrily Watkins. The first Merrily Watkins novel, Wine of Angels, begins with a night-time orchard wassailing which ends disastrously. Rickman knows his calendrical rites and customs.



The inversion of the natural order is also a central component of mummer’s plays, or mumming. These are generally enacted on Boxing Day, New Year’s Day or Twelfth Night. They are fixed routines which are carried out with ritualistic solemnity, the stock cast of characters stepping forward like mechanical figures ratcheting forth from a town clock’s doors to introduce themselves and deliver their lines. ‘In steps I’ say the likes of St George (or another hero figure), his foe the Turk (or some other adversary reflecting contemporary antipathies), Bold Slasher, the quack doctor, a fool named Tosspot and occasionally a dragon or, trailing a whiff of sulphur, Beelzebub. Roland Hutton likens the latter, with his club and frying pan, to the Irish god The Daghdha. In parts of the Westcountry the play was introduced by Father Christmas, who stood outside of the rote action and had a little more leeway to extemporise a commentary. An element of guising (the donning of disguise) was also involved. Participants would blacken their faces, turn their jackets inside-out, bedeck themselves with ribbons or strips of newspaper and indulge in cross-dressing. The centre of the ‘drama’ (although the proceedings were studiously undramatic) was the combat leading to the death or dire injury of St George or his foe, who was resurrected by the concoctions brewed by the doctor. Their comically self-evident inefficacy hinted that magic rather than medicine was at work here. It was a resurrection myth in capsule form, an invocation of the dormant powers of life and a rite to bring fortune and abundance in the coming months. The mummers took the routing round the houses, bringing luck to those who rewarded them and finding their way by and by to the local inn.


In the North-East, mummery was accompanied by sword dances, although the mumming aspect gradually faded away. The sword dances, using flexible blades or sometimes lengths of wood, culminated in the formation of a locked pattern in the form of a pointed star (a significant form?) or rose. This was usually lowered around the head of one of the attendant fools or cross-dressing ‘bessies’, offering a mock sacrifice where once the death might have been all too real.



Another form of ritualised drama taken round the houses over the Christmas period involved the parading of a horse’s head on the end of a stick, with the bearer hidden beneath a covering sheet. These heads were wooden in the case of The White Mare of the Isle of Man or the Poor Old Horse of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But the Mari Lwyd of Wales was the bleached skull of an actual horse, its eyes glassy marbles, its hair strands of coloured ribbon. It was a nightmarish apparition, and one which haunts M.John Harrison’s Viriconium and Light novels and stories. The Mari Lwyd also goes through the pantomime of death and resurrection, and its difficult not to see a symbolic enactment of the seasonal cycles. The Hooden Horse of North Kent is accompanied by a team including a mollie, or transvestite, and its is still paraded through the streets of Whitstable, its health assiduously maintained by the Ancient Order of Hoodeners. I like to imagine the long-term Whitstable resident Peter Cushing observing the ceremony, perhaps even taking part, leading the Hoodeners with a solemnly purposeful yet kind and compassionate Van Helsing gaze.


A celebration in time of darkness requires light, and fires were indeed started with due ceremony. If Christ was the light of the world (John 8:12), then the fixing of his date of birth at the Council of Tours in 567 also served to usurp the claims of others to bring light into the world. The Mithraic celebration of divine birth in the world also fell on the 25th December, as did that of the cult of the unconquered sun, or Sol Invictus, which the Emperor Aurelian established as an official state religion which lasted between 274-323. With the Roman Saturnalia and Pagan solstice festivals also occurring around this time, it was good sacred territory to tactically stake out and colonise. There is inevitably a sense, however, if not of Pagan roots showing through, then at least of a continuity of human experience and spiritual need. The warmth and conviviality engendered by a fire or flickering candle flame serve as a reminder that the summer sun will be reborn.


In Stonhaven, near Aberdeen, fireballs were swung in small cages at the end of long chains or ropes, forming small, whirling meteorite trails through the evening air. Allendale has its flaming tar barrels, lit as the old year turns into the new and worn like Arthur Brown hellfire bonnets. It’s an enthusiastically revived and maintained carnivalesque tradition celebrated in the Unthanks’ beautiful song Tar Barrel in Dale. In a variant of wassailing traditions found in the border counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and similarly intended to bless the next year’s crop, twelve bonfires were lit in a circle on Twelfth Night, often with a larger central one – Old Meg as it was sometimes known. In Ross On Wye, an effigy was erected in the centre of the fires and burned.




Plough lights were kept burning in many parish churches, often glinting off the idle blades of the plough itself which was kept propped against the wall until Plough Monday. Candles also served to light the evergreens which were brought into the house – holly in the living room, ivy in the porch, and sometimes bay and broom as well. The ashen faggot was burned in Devon on Christmas Eve, a bundle of ash twigs which crackled and kindled one by one, marking the progress of the evening like an irregular clock. As each popped and hissed into flame, the onlookers would take the opportunity to stand up, loudly wish each other good cheer and pass around a large communal cup of cider.



The best known Christmas flame came from the yule log, however. It was a large log prepared over a lengthy period and giving off plentiful light as well as heat. It was to be lit from a piece of kindling saved from the pervious year’s log, and kept burning for Christmas Eve and Day to preserve the luck of the house. Richard Carpenter warmly depicts the yule log tradition in a Christmas episode of The Ghosts of Mottley Hall, although unfortunately the wood chosen is inhabited by an old elemental spirit which spreads discord and ill-humour through the house before being coaxed to its airy freedom. The word yule itself derives from the old Saxon, via Nordic languages: the Norse Jol, Swedish Jul and Danish Juul. These were words for the Scandinavian midwinter festival, suggesting further layers to the hybrid and ever-evolving native traditions.



The contemporary character of Christmas and midwinter festivities bears little resemblance to the old celebrations and observances. We have inherited wholesale the imports and reinventions of the Victorians, which themselves have been recast in hyper-commercialised late capitalist mould. The frenzy accompanying the season can sometimes seem to verge on the psychotic. But the genuine excitement many still feel indicates a certain continuity with the spirit our ancestors. There is a continuum of human experience, a need to find comfort and light in a time of darkness. Even with the pitiless and relentless glare of shopping centres providing the permanent, blazing illumination of a false sun, we are not fooled. We still need to be reassured that the true sun will return in radiant glory. The dying of the light is not permanent. There will be resurrection, new life, a new year with all that fortune may bring.
So a jolly WASSAIL! to you all.

Notes for a filmclub screening.


Valerie and her Week of Wonders is a Czech film made in 1969, the year after the Prague Spring and its brutal suppression by the Soviet Union. It’s a colourful fantasy, both rooted in its time and place (it’s very central European and very 60s) and with a universality which gives it broad appeal. Part surrealist serial, part folkloric fairytale with elements of gothic horror it is the story of a young girl’s first steps towards the adult world. Her dreamworld is populated by a strange cast of characters, grandmothers, monsters, minstrels and missionaries whose identities are constantly shifting as if they were all part of some carnivalesque parade or harlequinade. Through her adventures she learns more about the world she inhabits and becomes more confident in negotiating her way around it, more sure of herself. Throughout it all she remains magically protected, partly through the agency of her magic earrings; her unassailable innocence is like a protecting veil, repelling those who would assault and corrupt her. It is a story about the usefulness of stories, the value to be found in fairytale fantasies which help us find our place in the world and warn us of its dangers without ever losing our sense of enchantment with its manifold wonders.


The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim wrote about the value of fairytales in guiding children towards the adult world in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, taking a Freudian perspective on their scarcely concealed subtexts. He suggests (and I’ve changed his use of male pronouns to make it more relevant to the context of Valerie) that ‘in order to master the psychological problems of growing up – overcoming narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries; becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation – a child needs to understand what is going on within her conscious self so that she can also cope with that which goes on in her unconscious. She can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of her unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams – ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures. By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which they enable her to deal with that content. It is here that fairy tales have unequalled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for her to discover as truly as her own. Even more important, the form and structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which she can structure her daydreams and with them give better direction to her life’.


Angela Carter was a little more wary of finding useful guidance for negotiating life’s universal dilemmas in fairytales. She liked Charles Perrault’s no-nonsense variations on Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots. But she remembered bed-time readings of Hans Christian Andersen with horror. ‘Please make it stop, I used to say…but they kept on assaulting my sensibilities with Andersen’s fairy-tales with a grand air of self-satisfaction. Weren’t these dreadful stories Children’s Classics? Weren’t they only doing their cultural duty by forcing them on me? Isn’t the function of a good fairy-tale to instil fear, trembling and the sickness unto death in the existential virgin, anyway? And why should children have a good time? The sooner you learn your own impotence in the face of universal despair, the better’. She sought in her own revisionist fairytales, collected in The Bloody Chamber and elsewhere, and in her anthologies of traditional folkloric fairytales, to find examples which reflected women’s experiences; stories which might be of use to women and girls alike, presenting them with heroines they could identify with and learn from. In her introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales collection she wrote ‘that I and many other women should go looking for fairy-tale heroines (reflects) a wish to validate my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my share of the past. She notes of fairy-tales that ‘on the surface, these stories tend to perform a normative function – to reinforce the ties that bind people together, rather than to question them. Life on the economic edge is sufficiently precarious without continual existential struggle. But the qualities these stories recommend for the survival and prosperity of women are never those of passive subordination’. Carter certainly found something of value in Valerie. She saw it when it received it premiere in the National Film Theatre in London, emerging in the 80s after a long period of obscurity languishing on the shelf of the banned. She loved it, and it was a strong influence on the writing of the screenplay of The Company of Wolves, her adaptation of her own Bloody Chamber stories, and her subsequent adaptation of her early novel The Magic Toyshop for a TV film. The Company of Wolves is a close cousin to Valerie, created very much in the same spirit.

Valerie is often thought of as being the last of the films emerging from the so-called Czech New Wave, a group of filmmakers emerging from the FAMU school which had been established in Prague in 1947. Having been banned for many years by the authoritarian Communist government, with its reforged iron links with the Soviet Union, it has been rediscovered in the west in recent decades and has steadily built up a cult cache fostered by a dedicated band of proselytisers. Many of these have emerged from the musical world, amongst them Andy Votel of the Finders Keepers label, who organised a number of screenings and who released Lubos Fiser’s luminous score on Finders Keepers, and the late Trish Keenan of the group Broadcast. Trish had a particularly personal relationship with the film and voiced what many perhaps feel in her sleevenotes to the soundtrack release. Watching the film and subsequently listening to her cassette recording of the soundtrack, ‘it was like a door had been opened in my subconscious and fragments of memories and dreams rejoiced right there in my living room’. Broadcast have been a favourite band of mine for a long time and it was Trish’s reverence for Valerie, expressed in a number of interviews, which made me seek it out. I found a copy on an old Redemption dvd, a label which mixed horror and Euro exploitation, the self-produced photographic covers no less lurid for being in black and white. The print they used was faded and dust-flecked (they had no resources for restorations) but the magic shone through nonetheless. I was immediately entranced. It’s magical central European fairytale world seemed to work according to a dream logic all its own, but I felt wholly attuned to it, not worrying about whether it made any sense or had any overt meaning. Its spell was cast, its enchantment made manifest on some deeper level than the rational. I knew I would be returning again and again to the town square with its central fountain, to the strange underground crypts, the labyrinthine house, the surrounding fields and lakes. Trish wrote about being ‘confirmed by the church of Lubos Fiser’. I was a convert too.


The film is an adaptation of a novel by the poet and surrealist writer Viteslav Nezval. Nezval was a creative force in a number of artistic fields in the early twentieth century. He was instrumental in setting up the Poetist movement in the 20s, whose writers aimed to lyrically portray the Czech landscape and to view the world through a heightened, imaginative perspective. It was essentially the direct opposite to the socialist realist outlook which would predominate from the Stalinist period onward. Inevitably there was a manifesto, the Poetist Manifesto, which was written in 1924. It set out the poetist beliefst thusly: poetist art should be ‘playful, unheroic, unphilosophical, mischievous, and fantastic’, and offer ‘a magnificent entertainment, a harlequinade of feeling and imagination…a marvellous kaleidoscope’. The sense of playfulness, of a kaleidoscopic masquerade of the fantastic is certainly characteristic of the film Valerie. It is also shot with a beautifully lyrical eye, full of sun-dappled lakes and mist-hazed meadows, evocations of the sensual world in its landscapes and its small details (and there is indeed something very Kate Bushlike about Valerie). The lyrical feel is beautifully captured in the cinematography of Jan Curik, who collaborated regularly with Valerie director Jaromil Jires. The scene in which Valerie runs through the morning meadow has an almost mystical quality to it, the light and mist suggesting a heavenly otherworld. Curik manages to convey the feel of summer with an almost palpable warmth and freshness. His evocation of summer moods is particularly impressive given the fact that it was apparently raining for the greater part of the shoot.

This Czech lyricism found visual realisation in a number of films in the late 20s and early 30s on which Nezval collaborated with director Gustav Machaty. He wrote the scripts for Erotikon and From Saturday to Sunday and was also involved with the 1932 picture Ecstasy. This achieved a certain notoriety due to the scenes in which its female star, Heddy Kiester, goes skinnydipping in a Czech lake. No big deal in its homeland, where the lyrical feel for landscape was often accompanied by a sensual connection between character and natural environment. However, when Heddy Kiester relocated to America, changed her name to Lamarr and became a major Hollywood star, such innocent pleasures were seen as scandalous in the censorious climate of the post-Hayes code era. The Hayes Code had been written by Will Hayes in 1927 and subsequently revised in 1930, when it was given more clout in order to save the great American public from being corrupted by the movies and led into the ways of sin. With covert input from the Catholic church, its puritanical conservatism is ironically similar to the censorship imposed by the Soviet state (and all authoritarian regimes). Valerie would fall foul of such censorship, its anti-clericalism and depiction of a younger generation vampirically fed upon by a corrupt elder generation interpreted as veiled anti-authoritarianism. Its very lack of readily identifiable plot and morally unambiguous message was enough to outrage the philistine overseers of the iron state. If they failed to immediately understand a work of art, they deemed it ‘elitist’, assumed it harboured a dangerous subtext and banned it.


Another collaborator on these three films from the late 20s and early 30s was an artist called Alexandr Hadkenschmied. His role was fairly loosely defined but he brought an experimental and exploratory aesthetic to bear on what was largely straightforward narrative drama. He emigrated to America in 1939 (he was obliged to leave the country after working on an anti-Nazi documentary), where he adjusted his name to Alexander Hammid and married the writer and filmmaker Maya Deren. They collaborated on the 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon which bears some resemblance to Valerie in that it is a film which proceeds according to dream logic, shifts from domestic spaces to natural environments (the beach in this case), features magical objects and tokens, is filled with an atmosphere of heady surrealism and is viewed from a female perspective. There is a shot in Meshes, often reproduced, in which Maya Deren (who takes the dreamer’s role) stands at a window, hands pressed against the glass, looking pensively to one side, her face merging with the reflections of foliage and branches in the pane. This pose is almost exactly reproduced when Valerie gazes out from an oval carriage window. A conscious homage perhaps? You can sometimes see Maya peering up from the basement of the Cavern Club in Exeter when the door opposite the Boston Tea Party is open for bar deliveries. Incidentally, Meshes of the Afternoon, like Valerie, has been influential on a number of musicians. The group Pram, who emerged from the same Brum scene as Broadcast titled and EP Meshes and, in case this didn’t sufficiently spell out their love of Maya Deren, also wrote a song called Meshes of the Afternoon for their Helium LP.

Valerie and Maya Deren - on the threshold of dream

Viteslav Nezval was also a founding member and leader of the Czech surrealist group, which grew out of the concerns of the Poetist movement, and was officially established in 1934. Czechoslovakia was a significant site of surrealist activity, a satellite with a strong connection to the mother planet of Paris. This was perhaps unsurprising given the tradition of the fantastic in late 19th and early 20th century Czech literature; a tradition whose most renowned proponents were Franz Kafka and Gustave Meyrinck (author of The Golem), even if both did write in German. The novel Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a product of Nezval’s surrealist period. It was completed in 1935 but not finally published until a decade later, in 1945. By this time, Nezval had utterly renounced surrealism, poetism and any form of art which delighted in the unfettered imagination. He’d long been a communist, but he now grew more hardline and followed the Stalinist credo that socialist realism was the only valid form for art to take. Art which formed a useful social function or provided emotive propaganda for the state. Films about socialist martyrs were perennially popular. Jaromel Jires would make one in the wake of Valerie’s post-Prague Spring disappearance, And Give My Love to the Swallows. Nezval even sank so low as to pen a poetic paean of obsequious praise to Stalin. Like most manifesto-writing artistic tyrants, Nezval wasn’t content merely to follow his own artistic path. He wanted everyone else to travel it as well, with all alternative routes to be barricaded with road blocks. He attempted to dissolve the surrealist group in 1938, but fortunately failed to exercise his reductive authority. The group went underground during the war and the subsequent Soviet dominion but re-emerged during the Prague spring of the 60s. One of its major creative talents was the artist, filmmaker and animator Jan Svankmajer, whose superb, surrealist take on Alice in Wonderland, simply titled Alice, screened at Studio 74 in the Phoenix as part of the Animated Exeter festival last Friday. Alice was established as part of the surrealist canon from the early days of the movement, and its influence can certainly be felt in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the film in particular. Alice was also a firm favourite of Trish Keenan, who particularly loved Jonathan Miller’s dreamy summer of love version for the BBC, with its languorous score by Ravi Shankar.

Nezval’s loyalty to the party had one advantage in subsequent years however. It meant that director Jaromil Jires was able to get his long-planned film of Valerie passed for production by the communist authorities who dictated what was or was not acceptable. The presence of Nezval’s son Robert in the cast (he plays the check-suited drummer who leads the players into the town square) lent a further air of official sanction to the project. It’s certainly not the kind of thing which Nezval himself would have approved during his tenure as head of the Orwellian Ministry of Information film department from 1945-50. However, he was safely out of the way by 1969, having died in 1958, his reputation for unswerving loyalty intact. Sadly, his son, born out of wedlock and presumably unrecognised by his father in the hypocritically puritan climate of the party hierarchy, committed suicide in 1971, shortly after the film’s release.

Jaromil Jires was part of the Czech new wave movement which emerged in the 60s, taking advantage of the new spirit of post-Stalinist liberalism which led to the Prague spring of 1968. This was the year in which the reforming president Alexander Dubcek attempted to outline a new form of socialism and free his country from totalitarian control. A number of important talents emerged from the FAMU film school, including directors Frantisek Vlacil, Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilov, Jan Nemec, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. The new wave films of the 60s often had a spirit of youthful rebellion which fitted in with the more general worldwide sense of generational conflict which characterised the decade. The assumptions and authority, moral and political, of the older generation were brought into question, and the emerging generation attempted to forge a new worldview, a new way of living. Forman’s Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball, Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains and Larks on a String, Juraj Jakubisco’s Birds, Orphans and Fools and, in particular, Vera Chytilova’s Daisies and Fruit of Paradise all partake of this spirit, as does Valerie. This congruence with wider countercultural trends is one reason why the films of the Czech new wave, and Valerie above all, have found such favour with musicians in the modern alternative rock sphere. Indeed, some of you may remember the Exeter collective Birds, Orphans and Fools, named after Jakubisco’s film, who brightened the city with music, art and screenings of strange and wonderful movies a while back. Another collective formed around members of the American psych-folk group Espers, going by the name of the Valerie Project. They got together to record an alternative soundtrack to Valerie, having already performed it live at several screenings, thus proving the transatlantic appeal of the film. The recording was released on the Drag City label in 2007, so you can cue it up and experience the film in an entirely different way. Although this does seem sacrilegious given the sheer sublime beauty of Lubos Fiser’s luminous score.


Several of the filmmakers associated with the Czech new wave left the country after the Soviet invasion of 1968 and found a natural place in the independent American cinema of the 70s, which had also emerged from 60s countercultural origins. Milos Forman made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Ivan Passer the underrated Cutter’s Way, a brilliant post-60 lament which heralds the dawn of Reaganite America. Valerie was made after the Soviet tanks had rolled into the streets of Prague in 1968, ending the brief, bright spring promising the summery air of freedom to come, now crushed beneath rumbling, clanking treads and smothered by iron grey clouds. It’s often regarded as the last film of the Czech new wave and therefore has a certain valedictory air to it (valedictory Valerie). Its summer idylls are dreams of what might have been, and in their universality, also serve in general as a requiem for the softer kind of 60s utopianism.

Valerie was Jaromil Jires’ third film. The first, made in 1963, was The Cry, whose central protagonist is a TV repairman who gains glimpses into the lives of the customers whose homes he enters and who also reflects on his own life. It’s loose, playful and full of incidental observations and incorporates dream and fantasy sequences in a way that Richard Lester would in his 60s movies with or without The Beatles. The year before making Valerie he shot The Joke, an adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel of the same name. A real product of the Prague spring in that it was unthinkable that it could have been made earlier, it cast a bitterly ironic and straightforwardly critical eye on the Stalinist period of the 50s. Its central character suffers terribly for a throwaway quip on a postcard sent to his girlfriend which reads ‘long live Trotsky’. The film was still shooting when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Inevitably, it didn’t fare well with the new regime.
Valerie was unlike anything Jires had previously produced. This undoubtedly owes a great deal to one of his key collaborators on the film, Ester Krumbachova. Krumbachova was a figure of major importance within the Czech new wave. The fact that she only directed one film herself (The Murder of Engineer Devil of 1970, surely due for rediscovery and re-release) merely serves to undermine the French auteur theory which would ascribe the director as the singular creator behind any given picture. She wrote, or co-wrote, a number of scripts for the landmark films of the new wave, including Jan Nemec’s Kafkaesque The Party and the Guests, his lyrical Martyrs of Love, and collaborated most fruitfully with Vera Chytilova on two films towards the end of the 60s, Daisies and Fruit of Paradise. These surreal, highly colourful pictures both feature wilful female protagonists who act out their desires in a manner both strident and playful. Fruit of Paradise in particular has a lyrical sensuality and feel for landscape and palpable texture which is very reminiscent of Valerie. The symbolism of the forbidden apple and the fruit of paradise, of the Edenic garden also links the two films. Valerie cheerfully crunches into one of the apples which have been lined up around her funeral bier. Indeed, she eats a variety of fruits throughout the film, as does the protagonist of Fruit of Paradise. This natural sense of pleasure, the pleasure in the natural, is very different from the conspicuous consumption of the doll-like automatons of Daisies, who self-consciously ‘go bad’ to fit in with a world which they have decided has no meaning or purpose. They end up cramming their face full of rich meats, creamy desserts and cakes from a banqueting table which they raid and thoroughly trash.

Krumbachova was, in addition to being a writer and sometime director, a costume and set designer, roles she fulfilled for Valerie. Clearly she was a woman of manifold talents and her creative influence over Valerie was considerable. This female signature on the film is important given the sensitive subject matter of a young girl’s coming of age and her vision of the adult world of sexuality through the symbolic lens of folkloric fairytale. Her authorship and her creation of the film’s visual look noticeably transforms the tone of the book and avoids any element of exploitation which might otherwise have tainted the story. This is Valerie’s film, Valerie’s dream, Valerie’s useful fairy-tale. We see everything through her eyes. She may be subject to various threats, confronted with disturbing and even horrific sights, assailed by vampires, wereweasels and perverted priests. But she remains magically protected throughout, either by her enchanted earrings, or by Orlik, or increasingly be her own command over every situation. Her adversaries try to bind her to the machineries of time, but she soon masters the mysteries of dream logic. She becomes a lucid dreamer, recognising that ‘it’s just a dream – I’m dreaming it all’. And if it’s her dream (the dream of life) then she can control it, wander through it and watch, learning all the time. Valerie observes her own story with curiosity and even, later, amusement (the moment where she sticks her tongue out at the priest whose about to burn her at the stake is priceless). The adult world is initially frightening and bewildering, with its secrets, hypocrisies and contradictions (represented by the shifting nature of the familial characters, their ever-changing masks). But as she learns, loses her fear and gains command of her environment, it becomes something to anticipate with equanimity and pleasure, stripped of its secrets and lies. The final parade and circle dance offers a world of guiltless pleasure ,the repressive, hypocritical priest penned in a domed cage like a squatting black toad to keep him from doing any further harm. But Valerie isn’t ready yet. She wanders around the sunny glade, watching and smiling before retreating to her familiar white bed, drifting into peaceful sleep to wake from her dream.

Krumbachova’s set designs contrast the clean sunlit rooms aboveground with the dusty crypts below; the sepulchral gothic world of tombs and cobwebs with the obsessively tidy and well ordered spaces of the grandmother’s house to which they are connected, providing a subconscious underside. Valerie’s room is a pure, unsullied white, her sanctuary and the outward manifestation of her inner world. It is briefly and shockingly invaded by the black-clad, predatory priest as he tries to possess her physically and colonise her secret self. But he is repelled by her power of innocence, confronted with his own monstrousness. His assault on Valerie’s innocence kills him, as will the weasel’s later on (although death is a relative state in this dreamworld).

Krumbachova’s costume for the weasel, with his lustrously black vampiric cape, draws heavily on traditional gothic elements. The monster make-up, with white face and bald head, pointed ears and prominent teeth, is a variant on the look of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu from FW Murnau’s 1922 classic (a film which Nezval hugely admired). The weasel (more literally translated in the novel as polecat) takes the vampire back to the peasant figure familiar from old Central and Eastern European folklore. Far from the aristocratic figure of Bram Stoker’s novel, these creatures of village superstition were more animalistic and more likely to be a threat to your livestock than your maiden daughter. Rather than fearing garlic, they were likely to reek of the stuff.

Krumbachova suffered like so many in the wake of the Soviet invasion, and retreated from the world of film for a while. She did return in triumphant fashion in 1976 however, designing the sets and costumes for Karel Kachyna’s wonderful fairy-tale film Mala Morska Vila (The Little Mermaid). Her creations include the incredible blue undersea hairstyles sported by the merfolk – resplendent impermanent waves. They’re the finest movie hairstyles since Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius grandiloquently unveiled Elsa Lanchester’s white-streaked art deco Bride of Frankenstein barnet back in 1935. The blue mermaid look was one which the singer Jane Weaver adapted for her 2010 album The Fallen By Watchbird, her own version of a Czech-style fairy-tale fantasy.

Mention finally has to be made of Lubos Fiser’s gorgeous score. With its lullabies and fanfares, gothic organ chords and delicately plucked lutes, children’s choirs and lusty male choruses, lyrical themes and crashing dissonant chords, music box waltzes and meditative harpsichord nocturnes it is the perfect accompaniment to Valerie’s kaleidoscopic dream and the constant abrupt transformations which occur within it. The lightly tinkling celeste motif which heralds the magical transformations wrought by Valerie’s earrings is a recurrent sound and perfectly evokes the aura of enchantment which surrounds her like a shimmering shield. Fiser went on to score another colourful gothic fantasy in 1972, Juraj Herz’s Morgiana. But he was also a prominent composer in the post-war Czech world of classical music, although he suffered neglect through his failure to conform to the requirements of the state. His piece 15 Prints After Durer’s Apocalypse gained him international recognition after it won a UNESCO prize in 1967. His classical work benefitted to an extent from a revival in the period after the Velvet Revolution, and the process of rediscovery continues to this day, some 17 years after his death.


Fiser’s lullaby theme for Valerie, the music we hear both at the beginning and end of the film and throughout in a procession of variations, was adapted by Trish Keenan for the Broadcast song Valerie, included on the 2003 album Haha Sound. This presented her own take on the film’s aura of enchantment, voicing her identification with Valerie and her wondrous adventures. I’ll leave you with the lyrics as a guide, Trish’s code for entering the dreamworld of Valerie:

Inside the mask another disguise
I fall to sleep before closing my eyes
Tiredness draws in my head a cartoon
Sun at the window, good things coming soon
Shake your earrings over my head
Lay down your dreams on my pillow
Before bed
The silence of ice at the borders of day
Sun in my face will not keep them away
Sinking me into the white of your room
Sky through the curtain, good things coming soon
Shake your earrings over my head
Lay down your dreams on my pillow
Before bed.

The latest offering from the Folklore Tapes folk (Ian Humberstone and David Chatton Barker in this instance) is a treasure box filled with exquisite objects, a reliquary as the promotional copy casts it. The unholy contents are far from saintly, however. These relics are collected reports and rumours, historical remnants in the form of oral tales and myths in set down in ballad form. Here are dark terrors, tenebrous forms condensed from the night’s impenetrable blackness and given wild, bestial life. This is the opening release in a new Occultural Creatures series and the first supernatural manifestation to be sighted is the terrible, protean outline of the black dog.

At the heart of the project, its scholarly foundation and narrative bone structure, is Ian Humberstone’s investigative study of black dog traditions in England. It has academic heft and an authority anchored by extensive footnotes and bibliographic markers. Fervid poring over little consulted texts are supported by field expeditions and first hand explorations and interviews, mining local knowledge and gaining a feel for the geography of myth, the spirit of folkloric place. Where it succeeds over more dusty tomes is in its ability to bring the stories alive, to create a rich sense of atmosphere, conjuring time, space and mood and making the sense of dread and uncanny mystery palpable. These are accounts made to be read aloud, as indeed a number of them have been in a handful of compelling performances. The ‘prowling and ill-omened animation of the witching hour’ has been brought to life as a stark woodcut silhouette thrown onto a white screen of ghostly cloth by an overhead projector, backdrops shifted in the blink of an eye by a prestidigitator’s hand whipping away photographic transparencies. ‘Listen close and I will tell you all I know’, Ian begins. It’s as if we are gathered around the warm, hypnotically flickering radiance of a fire, the shadows cast to the periphery of vision by the beguiling coil and sway of its transient flames.


The prose has a bewitching cadence, an enchanting use of the language of romance which lends it a bardic quality. Read it in your head in measured metre with a soft Scottish brogue to hear it in its optimum form. Ian Humberstone traces the development of the ubiquitous black dogs of legend and folklore from demonic beasts, embodiments of hellish power, to the less corporeal though no less terrifying outlines of spectre-hounds, haunters of dark lanes and wild moors or guardians of magical hoards. He gathers together the linguistic branches of the black dog family, the regional vernacular which produces barguests, shocks and hooters, gytrash, padfeet and skrikers. They are manifold but tend to share common characteristics; uncommonly large black hounds with eyes as big as saucers. Occasionally they swell in size, expanding to take on an aspect of cosmic horror, becoming indistinguishable from the terror of the night’s dark abyss.

Ian travels the length of the land to gather tales of these dread beasts, tracking their footprints to Devon, Herefordshire and Norfolk, Yorkshire, Somerset and even to the dark, stinking heart of old London town. Photographs, soft with film stock grain, add eyeflash instants, impressions of landscape and the particularity of place. Tudor ruins with their long-cold fireplaces; the graveyards of flinty East-Anglian churches; stygian fern and ash-leaf veiled cave-mouths; and the imprint of the black dog on weather vanes, pub and road signs. Our fearless and intrepid explorers, messrs. Humberstone and Chatton Barker, are glimpsed as figures in these landscapes, picking their way through the tumbled limestone trail of Troller’s Gill, measuring out the distances of the high moorland or soaking up the sun outside the Black Dog Inn.


There are also stills from the celluloid strips of David Chatton Barker’s 16mm film, also included in the box. The stock is deliberately corroded, subjected to weathering and bio-chemical erosion by elements taken from different black dog sites. The patterns thus produced lend an air of antiquity to the film (an antiquity already inbuilt, in these our accelerated times, by the physicality of the medium, the care and labour required for its development). These are strips of film steeped in long time, partaking of the slow geological transformations of the world. They also reflect the transformations of the tales marking the brief moment of human presence in the landscape. Tales whose articulation of a forbidding wildness, an essential otherness, express a subconscious awareness of the tenuous provisionality of this habitation. The blotched and cracked surfaces of the filmstrips are like relief charts for some hidden territory, Ordinance Survey maps for the otherworld or route maps for the inner landscape. The black dogs traverse these celluloid terrains like mental emanations, suggestive silhouettes etched onto the retina via inky Rorschach smears. ‘So what do you see in this one?’ ‘The spectre-hound of hell’. ‘Ah, most interesting….’

The treasure box also houses a 12” LP, which summons up sonic atmospheres to bring the book’s manifestations to life. It is best heard with the lights down low. It begins with the comforting flutter and weave of birdsong, allowing a moment of calm before the black dog is summoned. A dull, metallic clang, a bell with no ecclesiastical resonance, no hint of heavenly overtones, sounds like a huge feeding bowl being struck with a giant’s wooden spoon. ‘Here boy, fresh bones’.


The moaning of a nocturnal wind sets the scene for the Barguest of Dob Park Lodge, the discomforting accompaniment to the night journey of the treasure hunter who ventured into the underworld beneath the old, deserted Tudor mansion. It’s a wind gusting in from elsewhere, a chill otherworld. As Ian Humberstone puts it, ‘here we leave the known world behind and step ovesr the threshold into myth’. Deep, echoing booms sound out the cavernous spaces, hinting at far-off activity, hammering, pounding labours or the earth-shuddering thuds of giant footsteps. There are small chittering sounds closer at hand, dry scuttling and stridulation in the impenetrable shadows. The rustily rotating wheels and gears of some clanking, ratcheting machinery can be heard in the muffled distance, gradually becoming clearer and more defined in the aural spectrum, growing steadily nearer; the clockwork mechanics of fate winding through its inexorable motions.

The inquisitive hoot of an owl signals a change of scene as we head down south again to listen to the Devon landlord’s tale. The landlord of the Black Dog pub, naturally. Glinting clusters of zithery notes suggest raindrops shivering from the eaves outside, or sparks spitting from the hearth of the inn at Uplyme. Our host talks of ‘inheriting’ the legends along with the pub. It is the landlord’s duty to tell the tales which have been passed on to him, to perpetuate the local legends which tend to find their oral node in the convivial communal space of the pub. Marina Warner writes of the local folklore and memory encoded in pub names, citing the old Mother Redcap in London. For many years it commemorated a neighbourhood character, an old witch of great and dubious renown in the area. Novelty pub names of contrived eccentricity imposed by the large brewers erased this marker of history, character and custom. As she wrote in her 2006 article for the Guardian, ‘Pub names and signs are some of the oldest surviving traces of exchanges and folklore in a particular place. More and more names and phrases in the public arena are tied to adverts and commodities – global creep of meanings for everybody and no one’.

The Black Dog in Uplyme remains, however, and the dog who once took up a regular inglenook residence in the evening was a benevolent guardian, a spectral companion like the one which watches over Tarkovsky’s stalker as he lies down to rest in the Zone. The one encountered outside is far more to be feared, a shape torn from the fabric of the night, swelling to take on the dimension of a dark constellation.


The coming of the beast said to be a reincarnation of the restless spirit of Black Vaughan, the unloved lord of the manor of Hergest Court in Herefordshire whose malign influence seemed to persist beyond the grave, is foretold by dolorous doom chimes. These are soon overlaid by wintry minor key toy piano melancholy, the deadened notes falling like snowflakes. Menacing synth brood adds a final unsettling layer of ground mist to this lost John Carpenter theme. Something is padding towards us in the darkness, and there is nothing we can do to evade it. The legend of Black Vaughan, his fate and the curse of his black dog haunted ancestors, along with the theories that the origins of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, lie here on the Herefordshire borders rather than on the moors of Devon, form the basis of The Prayer of the Night Shepherd, one of Phil Rickman’s excellent novels featuring the diocesan deliverance consultant (or, to use the old parlance, exorcist) Merrily Watkins.

A brief interlude of light, a respite from night’s oppressive terrors. Birdsong pastoral sets the scene for a playfully piping synth gavotte (or somesuch renaissance caper), a reconstructed parade to Dog Village conducted according to the fanciful colourations of the modern imagination; pageantry with all the authentic antiquity of recollected horror films and pysch-folk albums. And none the worse for it.

The Eastern legends of Black Shuck are related by Malcolm Busby with an estuarine Essex matter of factness. He’s a natural storyteller, a conspiratorial narrator. We feel the beguiling magic of these oral histories, and are compelled to lean in a little closer to tell the tales as they were told to him. Spectral winds shiver and moan in the background, carrying with them the sharp, salty tang of the coastal marshes. This is another fireside gathering on a night you wouldn’t care to be abroad. To be out….there. At the end, after empty glasses a slammed onto the table with an air of determined finality (this one really is the last), yearning synth melodies and hazy chorales suggest our genuine need for such stories, for the presence of something other in the world, the persistence of mystery, of the wild unknown, even if it produces shudders of terror (shudders which are secretly to be relished).


We head north again to seek out the Barguest of Troller’s Gill. As we pick our way cautiously through the scree and boulder rubble littering the passage of this narrow valley scarring the limestone landscape we hear an eerie descending trill. Otherworldly bird calls with a coiled metallic sheen, made (we might imagine) by lamp-eyed, sharp-beaked creatures of the kind found perching in the blasted branches of the spook-infested woods surrounding the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West. The voices, which don’t sound like they come from any creature of flesh and blood, multiply, as if a sinister flock were gathering – deathbirds anticipating a carrion feast. A trickling stream and footsteps navigating rocky ground sound an aural map of the terrain. A folkish tune with plinking, bicycle wheel accompaniment suggestive of raindrop splashes develops into a haunting, gliding music box melody. A dance of fate, a death waltz.

An ominous drone heralds the London tour guide’s tale, a grim Newgate legend from the foul heart of the famine-blighted middle ages involving sorcery, cannibalism and a murderously vengeful hound. As if to emphasise that the shadows of the past are not easily exorcised, particularly when attached to places of such dark notoriety, he ends by pointing to the old site of Dead Man’s Walk (now Amen Court), the passageway leading from the cells to the gallows, where the shade of the black dog can still sometimes be seen flitting across the ill-lit wall. Naturally, such sightings do not bode well for the unfortunate observer.

Finally we ascend to the moorland heights of Somerset to encounter the Watchdogs of the Wambarrows. A metallic shimmer evokes the uncanny nature of the landscape, and swooning waves of blurry sound conjure up a delirious, hallucinatory atmosphere. Amorphous, transient forms wisp into being before dissipating and swirling away with the mists. A ghostly howling emerges from and is absorbed into the blustering perturbations of the chill air. Nothing is certain in this charged, uncanny topography.

This is a highly entertaining and imaginatively engaging survey of the black dog legends of England which wears its in-depth research lightly, making it accessible to all. Beautifully presented as ever, it is an exquisite work of art underpinned by genuine scholarship. This is a labour of love long in the birthing, and its been well worth the wait. So read the book as you listen to the record, and don’t be surprised if you hear the padding of phantom feet, the distant hint of wild, haunted howling. Wherever you are, the black dog is on your trail.

A longer version of an essay included with the Folklore Tapes box Calendar Customs IV: Crown of Light


Midsummer is the most natural time of the year for a celebration marked by simple pleasure and unaffected joy. The midwinter rites of Christmastide, the diametric opposite of midsummer on the face of the annular calendar, have an air of fortification and remembrance – illumination kindled to hold back the dark and nurture a hope for solar renaissance. If midwinter is the time when the seeds of light are sown, midsummer is the moment when they flower to their fullest extent. The sun is at its apogee, its long arc across the sky vaulting to its utmost height. The earth, spinning through its axially tilting orbital dance, presents its northern hemisphere to bask in solar warmth, bringing out its summer colours – bright grassy greens and buttercup yellows, speedwell blues and poppy reds. Darkness has been cast aside, compressed into a few brief hours (or dispelled altogether if you travel far enough north into the Scottish isles or Scandinavian wilds). The triumph of light, of the spirit of life, is to be rejoiced in unreservedly, no matter how brief its moment of ascendance.


As with midwinter rites, including Christmas day itself, there is a slight misalignment with the precise moment of solstice division into maximal periods of light and dark. The summer solstice falls on the 21st June. The first rays of the rising sun shafting through the megaliths of Stonehenge onto its central ‘altar’ stone are greeted by Druid revivalists, rooted in 18th century reinventions. Thousands of bystanders respond to the morning solar radiance with the glinting digital scintillations of their mobile cameras and phones – a very modern form of worship, attracting a mass congregation, if only for this one day. The antiquarian dream of Stonehenge as a solar temple of the Druids is one which enchanted William Blake amongst others, as the image of a megalithic trilithon gateway for the giants of old Albion in his illuminated book Jerusalem attests. Mere fancy it may be, but it’s one which still exerts considerable influence on the contemporary imagination, mired in a materialistic present and yearning for a sense of connection with a magical past.


Traditional midsummer celebrations have not taken place at the time of the solstice, however, but three days later on the 24th, St John’s Day, and even more so on its preceding eve. This is the date which has come to be officially designated midsummer’s day. Further festivities were held on the joint saint day of Peter and Paul, the 28th. Many must have simply bridged the two festival days with continuous merriment. And remember, this is the time of Glastonbury weather (the Glastonbury festival being a modern manifestation of midsummer revels), so suggesting alternative dates for a festival which was of its essence an outdoors celebration was an eminently pragmatic hedging of bets.

There’s really only one way to celebrate the supremacy of the sun and whatever divinities are associated with it: build up huge fires on the high places of the landscape to reflect some of its flaring, mesmerically roiling photosphere back at it; to emulate some of its warmth, that radiance which makes the heart lighter, the spirit more buoyant. Poets have recognised the spiritual refreshment afforded by this time of light, its countermanding of wintry melancholy. Matthew Arnold, in Thyrsis, his elegy to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, asks of those who suggest their spirit departs with the falling blossom ‘too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?/Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,/Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,/Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,/Sweet-William with his homely cottage smell,/And stocks in fragrant blow;/Roses that down the alleys shine afar,/And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,/And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,/And the full moon, and the white evening-star.’


John Clare, the farm labourer poet, who suffered desperately from the depredations of depression, nevertheless revelled in the ecstatic moods of summer: ‘Now swathy summer by rude health embrowned/Precedence takes of rosy fingered spring/And laughing joy with wild flowers prankt and crowned/A wild and giddy thing/With health robust from every care unbound/Comes on zephers wing/And cheers the toiling clown.
Happy as holiday enjoying face/Loud tongued and ‘merry as a marriage bell’/They lightsome step sheds joy in every place/And where the troubled dwell/Thy witching smiles weans them of half their cares/And from thy sunny spell/They greet joy unawares’.

Accounts from as far back as the 4th century in the old French province of Acquitaine record midsummer fire festivals in which blazing wheels were set rolling down steep hillsides – the solar disc turning on its tumbling course. In mid 19th century Buckfastleigh in Devon a wheel with rim and spokes wrapped in straw was set ablaze and rolled from the heights on midsummer eve, accompanied on its fiery descent by villagers pelting alongside, attempting to steer it with sticks to a steamy dousing in the river Dart. If they succeeded in their endeavour, good fortune would prevail over the coming months, and a good harvest guaranteed. If not, they’d had a wild time and could repair breathlessly to the nearest alehouse to drown their thirst.

Font in Bratton Clovelly church, Devon

The representation of the sun as a wheel was common in medieval times. It symbolised both its daily progress across the sky and the procession of the solar year with its seasonal transformations. Solar wheels can be traced on many Norman fonts, often the oldest objects in rural parish churches. Like many other pagan symbols or allegorical beasts, they have been translated into a Christian idiom. This marked a process of continuity and fusion as much as an imposition of alien values. It was the cataclysmic historical and cultural rift of the Reformation which brought this continuum of belief and practice to a violent iconoclastic end.

John Aubrey

The fires of medieval belief and ritual were increasingly stamped out, both literally and figuratively. The antiquarian John Aubrey wrote, in his 1688 volume Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme (a pioneering folkloric work), ‘still in many places on St John’s night they make Fires on the Hills: but the Civill Warres comeing on have putt all these Rites or customes quite out of fashion’. Nevertheless, the tradition lived on the further reaches of the isles.

Hilltop fires were lit on St John’s Eve across England and Eastern and Northern Scotland and in the Northern Isles (less so in the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland and the Western Isles). In Scotland, the sun’s progress would be ritually re-enacted by processing around the fields three times sunwise (ie clockwise) with blazing torches held aloft, the crops and herds thereby blessed. Bonfires were started as the sun slowly sank below the horizon, staining the sky with its tangerine and vermillion afterglow. In the Northern Isles, Johnsmas fires were built from varied materials including heather, fish bones, peat, flowers, seaweed and feathers.

In Westernmost Cornwall, chains of fires were lit tracing the rugged, curving concave coastline of Mount’s Bay from Penzance to the Lizard. Cornish midsummer fire traditions were revived by the Old Cornwall Society in 1929, colouring them with druidic romance whose nationalist elements lent the proceedings a curiously formal, civic air. Beginning atop the tor of Carn Brea, the site of a Neolithic settlement, the fires are blessed in the old Cornish language and flowers arranged in the shape of a sickle thrown into the flames by a local girl designated the Lady of the Flowers. The sickle anticipates the harvest whilst the ceremony is a decorous and fragrant reminder of a more elementally superstitious past when a bountiful harvest required the offering of human life. Antiquarians in previous centuries dreamed of detecting remnants of the wicker giant sacrifices which Julius Caesar claimed to have witnessed in the Gaul of the 1st century BC in midsummer fire rituals, but there was really no evidence to support the fabric of their fancies.

Sir Benjamin Stone's picture of the Whalton Baal Fire rites in 1903

The Baal Fire at Whalton in Northumberland is lit on the village green on the 4th July, harking back to the old midsummer’s eve date before the rift between the Julian calendar and its Gregorian replacement opened up in September 1752, a faultline which swallowed up 11 days (precious moments guarded by the Paladin of the Lost Hour in Harlan Ellison’s short story). It’s a celebration which can lay claim to real continuity, perhaps even with a pre-Reformation tradition. The word baal could derive from the Celtic bel, meaning the sun, or light, or from the Anglo-Saxon bael, meaning fire (which is also the root of Beltane). Fuel for the fire is carried by hand to the place of burning, and children dance around the stacked tinder before it is set alight as the evening shadows gather. Couples take over from the children, dancing around the flames and later leaping over the crackling embers, as was the way with midsummer fires across the land. Leaping the fire and darting through its smoke, breathing in and wreathing the body with its heady woodscent aroma was an act of purification and invited good fortune.

A Shropshire monk writing in the 14th century described the ‘three manner of fires’ which were made on St John’s eve. ‘One is of clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John’s Fire’. The bonefire was a purifying conflagration, its evil stench and acrid smoke driving away malevolent forces and keeping pestilence at bay. The wake fire was the sociable circle of warmth around which people would gather for the night. St John’s Fire was a ritual blaze with a rather more solemn ambience.


It wasn’t just in rural areas that fires were started. The estimable John Stow, Elizabethan tailor and self-educated antiquarian (who we’ve encountered in previous Calendar Customs explorations) recorded his good-humoured observations of London midsummer celebrations in his invaluable and highly readable 1598 masterpiece Survey of London. ‘In the month of June and July, on the vigils of festival days, and on the same festival days in the evening after the sun setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood or labour towards them: the wealthier sort also, before their doors near to the said bonfires, would set out tables on the vigils, furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbours and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for His benefits bestowed on them. These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours before at controversy, were there, by the labour of others, reconciled, and made of bitter enemies loving friends; and also for the virtue that a great fire hath to purge the infection of the air’. As well as re-iterating the idea of fire and its smoke as a purgative and purifying force before the potentially arid and pestilential days of the long summer, Stow gets to the heart of the matter here; a communal fire acts as a focal point for gathering around and generates good spirits and an amiable atmosphere. It’s this as much as any symbolic, spiritual or magical purpose which explains the widespread popularity of midsummer fire ceremonies over so many centuries. Even an 18th century protestant cleric such as Henry Bourne, writing in his 1725 volume Antiquitates Vulgares, recognised the fundamental innocence of such impulses (unless taken too far, of course, he felt compelled to add): ‘when they (the fires) are only kindled as tokens of joy, to excite innocent mirth and diversion, and promote peace and good neighbourhood, they are lawful and innocent, and deserve no censure. And therefore when on Midsummer-Eve, St Peter’s Eve, and some other times, we make bonfires before shops and houses there would be no harm in doing so, was it not that some continue their diversion to too late hours, and others are guilty of excessive drinking’.

Fires burning in the streets of London naturally cast the looming shadow of King Mob, summoning the potential spirit of its mutinously grinning collective visage. It’s perhaps no surprise that the city watch played an increasingly prominent role in the medieval and Tudor periods. From the 14th century onwards, they were required to parade through the streets in their gayest finery, carrying flaming ‘cresset’ buckets on poles slung over their shoulders. No such finery for the black-clad, baton-wielding riot police who set about the latterday travellers intent on holding a free Solstice festival in the fields around Stonehenge in 1985, a one-sided altercation which became known as the Battle of the Beanfield (although ‘rout’ would be a more accurate description).

The Salisbury Giant and sidekick Hob-Nob

Midsummer parades grew in size and theatricality throughout the Tudor period, with passing pageants featuring creatures and characters from biblical and national mythologies. Giants were prominent (as they would be) along with saints, dragons, hobby horses, Moorish kings, Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, unicorns and Jesus Christ himself, all accompanied by minstrels and morris dancers and brought to moving picture life in the pixillating flicker of a hundred smoking torches. Such pageantry was another victim of Reformation and Civil War. As early as 1533, Henry VIII’s Royal Council was looking to curtail these potentially rebellious gatherings, and in 1539 he succeeded in suppressing the annual London march for the remaining 8 years of his reign. It was never the same again and soon faded away completely, a fate which befell similar parades across the country. A mouldering remnant of an effigy was discovered in 1844 in the backrooms of a Tailor’s Guildhall in Salisbury; a giant which once bestrode the midsummer parades, now a tattered, dimineshed shade of its former self. It now lies quiescent in the city museum.


Midsummer parades have been reinvented in some areas, though, notably so in Penzance. The Mazey Day festival has been fashioned around the old Golowan (St John’s Eve) celebrations. At midnight on St John’s Eve, a Penglaz ‘obby ‘oss is brought out, a flower-garlanded and gaily beribboned horse’s skull held aloft on a pole, its empty sockets filled with the night’s shadows, chomping incisors flashing an enamelled grin in the torchlight. A female ‘teaser’ leads it in a snaking serpent dance down to the quayside, the townspeople twisting and turning in its mesmerically swaying wake.

Midsummer is not one of the festival periods during which the worlds of faerie are at a perigee point of proximity to the waking world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairy court and mischievous sprites making sport with human destiny is, despite its title, set on May Day eve. Midsummer’s eve is still a time steeped in powerful magic, however. Although Midsummer is a solar festival, a daylit affair, this is also the point at which the astrological calendar moves into the house of Cancer, a sign associated with water and the moon.

It was thought to be a time when witches were active, going abroad to gather flowers and herbs whose potency was at its height on this night. As John Aubrey noted, ‘Midsummer Eve is counted or called the Witches’ Night’. Cornish Penwith witches were said to gather on Burns Down above Zennor on midsummer’s eve, the nomenclature denoting the many fires which were lit amongst the natural cauldrons of the granite landscape basins and on the tables of dolmen stones. The Witches’ Rock which was the ultimate site for their midnight assembly is no longer there, having been broken up and possibly used for stone wall construction in the nineteenth century. It used to be said that touching the rock nine times at midnight would afford protection against ill-fortune – a species of associative counter-magic. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the farm which lies beneath Burns Down is called Tregerthen, or Rowan Tree Farm. Rowan wood afforded powerful protection against the depredations of witchcraft, and twigs tied together with red ribbons and hung above stable and farmhouse doors would keep harmful magic at bay.

St John's Wort

Effigies of witches were burned in some fires, a tradition revived by the Cornish at St Cleer. A witch’s broom and hat are perched on the peak of the bonfire mountain. When it is lit, a variety of herbs and flowers are thrown onto the pyre to nullify their efficacy in any witchery attempted in the vicinity. The very flowers used for the purposes of witchcraft (or, as was more likely the case, herbal medicine) could be employed as magical protection. Garlands of vervain, yarrow, mugwort, plaintain, dwarf elder, corn marigold (the ‘summer’s bride’), orpins and, most powerfully of all, St John’s wort (or chase-devil) could be hung on doors to repel malevolent spells, or burned in midsummer fires to create a purifying incense. Yarrow hung up on St John’s Eve would ward of sickness for the coming year. Those seeking St John’s Wort on the evening when its magic was at its most potent might have a bit of hunt on their hands, however. It was said to be able to move to evade those intent on picking it.

Of course, midsummer flowers were beautiful decorations, magical powers notwithstanding. John Stow noted ‘on the vigil of St. John the Baptist, and on St. Peter and Paul the Apostles, every man’s door being shadowed with green birch, long fennel, St. John’s wort, orpine, white lilies, and such like, garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers’, their colours brought out in the evening by the illumination of hundreds of lamps to ‘make a goodly show’. Another tradition involved the creation of midsummer cushions; either an actual cushion upon which flowers were arrayed, or a stool covered in a layer of thick, clayish soil into which flowers were embedded. The poet John Clare loved such presentations and wanted to title one of his later collections The Midsummer Cushion.

Orpine

Midsummer was a time considered particularly propitious for divination, especially when foretelling romantic fortunes. Flowers play their part here too. The prominent floral aspect of midsummer rites and celebrations is hardly surprising given that this is the time of fullest flowering. Two orpine flowers were hung together, sometimes resting against a plate, on midsummer’s eve. If, on the following morning, they had inclined towards one another, love would blossom and fidelity was assured. If they turned away from each other, love would fade and loyalties stray. In the disastrous event of the orpines withering, a death in the household was foretold. Fortunately, this was highly unlikely. Orpine flowers were renowned for remaining fresh long after having been cut, hence one of their common names, life-long. Another such name was ‘midsummer men’, indicating how closely and widely they were associated with these divinations.

The magical potency of flowers reached its peak on St John’s eve, and in some cases this was the only time at which their power became manifest. A piece of mugwort ‘coal’ dug up beneath its roots (in actuality a rotted part of those roots) on St John’s Eve would afford protection from plague, ague, lightning, carbuncle and burning, and was thus a highly sought after natural treasure on this one enchanted night. Fernseed (the tiny spores on the underside of fern leaves) was particularly elusive, supposedly appearing on this one evening of the year and no other. If you were somehow able to gather it (and you would likely face opposition from witches jealously guarding their special patch) it would confer upon you the power of invisibility. Sacred springs or wells could also be used for divination, with the bubbles or ripples produced by offerings of coins, bent pins or flowers thrown upon the waters providing answers to questions of love and matrimony. These offerings, or coloured ribbons tied to adjacent trees, would activate the healing powers of the waters.

A sunwise circumnavigation of the well was often part of the ritual, as at the Pin Well in Alnwick Park in Northumberland. Processing or dancing in a circling, sunwise direction was a feature of many midsummer celebrations, modelling the ecliptic solar passage across the sky and thereby invoking its power and blessing. Never anti-sunwise (or widdershins), however; that would summon dark otherworldly forces into your life and invite ill fortune. The North Eastern antiquarian Moses Aaron Richardson, writing in the 6th volume of his mid-19th century collection titled, with exhaustively thorough accuracy, ‘The Local Historian's Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences, Historical Facts, Legendary and Descriptive Ballads, &c., connected with the Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland, and Durham’, remarks upon the three holy wells near Longwitton-hall in Northumberland. ‘Great concourses of people from all parts, also used to assemble here in the memory of old people on “Midsummer Sunday and the Sunday following” and amuse themselves with leaping, eating gingerbread brought for sale to the spot, and drinking the waters of the wells’. He also notes the myth of the guardian dragon associated with the wells, a creature capable of making itself invisible and renewing itself by dipping its tail in the healing waters. It was defeated by one Sir Guy of Warwick, who noticed its secret and cunningly interposed himself between the beast and its source of power, hacking it about until it could take no more, curled up and died. The wells were thenceforth free for all to use. Three cheers for Sir Guy!


To retain the magical properties of plants and flowers gathered St John’s Eve, or the divinatory secrets of sacred waters, it was a general requirement that complete and solemn silence was maintained. The Moomins understood this, as Tove Jansson related in Moominsummer Madness. After sitting by their midsummer fire for a spell, Moomintroll, the Snork Maiden and the Fillyjonk venture out into the night meadows to gather nine kinds of flower (as we have seen with the Witches’ Rock, nine is something of a magic number). The Snork Maiden recalls previous midsummer evenings when ‘we went off to pick nine kinds of flowers and put them under our pillow and then our dreams came true. But you weren’t allowed to say a word while you picked them, not afterwards until morning’. This most magically-wise of creatures also knew some midsummer romantic divinatory rites: ‘First you must turn seven times around yourself, mumbling a little and stamping your feet. Then you go backwards to a well, and turn around, and look down in it. And then, down in the water, you’ll see the person you’re going to marry’.

Midsummer’s eve in the Moomin’s world was also the only time to sow the seeds which almost instantaneously germinate into the small, ghostworm creatures known as the Hattifatteners. More midsummer’s eve sowing magic could be achieved by a girl who walked 12 times (sunwise, of course) around a church, scattering hempseed in her wake whilst intoning the rhyme ‘hempseed I sow/Hempseed I hoe/Let him tht is my true love/Come after me and mow’. The phantom of her future love would then appear, trailing after her, completely under her spell.

A more unsavoury form of love divination is practised in the kitchen, with the midsummer’s eve baking of dumb cakes by a small gathering of women. Once more, the preparation and cooking must be carried out in complete silence. The ingredients are simple and few: half flour and half flour mixed into a dough with the piss of each participant. Each in turn makes a mark or scratches an initial on the cake (or cakes). After the rigorous observation of various scrupulously specified instructions (for this is a highly ritualised recipe) the baked cakes are taken out of the oven and the spectres of future husbands appear to break the piece of cake (or take the smaller bunlike variants) bearing the mark of their bride-to-be and present it to her. As with all supernatural procedures, there were attendant dangers. The anonymous author of the 1685 volume Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open (Mother Bunch herself, perhaps) concluded his or her instruction with the saucily valedictory line ‘if there be any so unfortunate to hear a bell, I wish I had them to my bedfellows this night to prevent leading apes to hell’. Leading apes in hell, a phrase which turns up in a number of Shakespearean quotes, was the proverbial fate of old maids in the 16th and 17th centuries, although its precise meaning remains obscure. However, the fact that it is taking place in hell suggests that it’s unlikely to be pleasant. So, a recipe which risks bestial intercourse of whatever variety in the fiery pits. You don’t get that in Delia (as far as I’m aware).

The combination of summer heat and the heightened influence of the moon led to midsummer being considered a time of delirium and madness, particularly for those already affected by such states. Tove Jansson’s Moominsummer Madness plays on such associations, as well as on the theatrical elements which are also central to the novel. The phrase midsummer madness was common in Shakespeare’s time. In Twelfth Night, Olivia responds to Malvolio’s absurdly misguided advances by declaring ‘why, this is very midsummer madness’. Such tendencies lend St John’s eve festivities and edgily antic air, creating a sense of licensed lunacy and abandon. Midsummer sports such as swinging fireballs on the end of chains, running with tar barrels, leaping through flames or rolling burning wheels down hills were ways of toying with chaos, playing with scarcely contained elemental forces that could easily grow rapidly out of control and scorch, char or completely consume; A good analogy for those skirting the borders of mania. Perhaps by allowing the demons of the mind their night of wild freedom, their longer term ravages might be curtailed in the dog days to come.


The ephemeral nature of the sun’s triumph was acknowledged in rites which anticipated harvest time, the fruiting and going to seed of plants now in the full glory of efflorescence. The smoke from fires was partly intended to ritually cleanse the air, protecting crops and herds from pestilence and blight. In Herefordshire and Somerset, fires were lit adjacent to orchards to encourage a good crop in the autumn, as John Aubrey noted: ‘On Midsummer-eve, they make fire in the fields in the waies: sc. to Blesse the Apples’. The ephemerality of human life was also underlined by the south western custom of the midsummer’s eve church porch watch. On the long, hazy evening and short, balmy (hopefully) night of this enchanted evening, it was the phantoms of the living which drifted dreamily abroad, as we’ve seen in the context of a number of the divinatory rituals. The porch watcher could observe the villagers filing dumbly into the parish church, departing once more at midnight. If any remained inside, it was a sure sign that they would die during the following year (in some variations of the tradition, it was only those thus marked who entered the church in the first place). Once more, dangers attended this encounter with the supernatural. If the watcher was overcome with weariness and slipped into sleep during their nightlong vigil, they would join the phantom congregation remaining inside before the next St John’s eve.

For all that it kept one eye on the time to come, and on the dwindling of the light, midsummer’s eve and its ensuing day were all about celebrating the moment. The sun is rising now, climbing to the height of its radiant glory. Light and warmth and joy fill our hearts in this instant, This Instant! So let us gather around the convivial fires, revel in the amber glow bronzing one another’s faces and leap boldly through the flames and fragrant smoke. Surrender to the holy midsummer madness. We are alive. Blessings and thanks to Bright Phoebus, to the lifegiver, to The Sun.

I’ve attempted to avoid mentioning one of the central incidents in the story, but surrounding allusions will inevitably give a good deal of the game away. So to avoid disappointment and irritation I will hereby issue a SEMI-SPOILER alert.



Stephen Volk’s novella The Little Gift may be a relatively short work, but it contains volumes within its carefully constructed narrative. It comments upon the aridity of corporate clone culture, the subtle but everpresent divisions of class, the vital import of art and spiritual nourishment in an aggressively materialistic world, the coarsening effect of tabloid journalism and the philosophical distinction between instinctive and morally conscious action. As a story written by an author generally working within the horror genre (and I think that, with its exploration of the dark corners of the human psyche, this qualifies as a horror story) it is also strident in its rejection of the prurient allure of one of the modern avatars of the monstrous, the serial killer. A brutally realist monster for materialist times, stripped of all supernatural mystery and ripped from the lurid headlines of the real world. They are driven only by debased appetites, playing on fears of physical pain and torturous death rather than any threat to the soul, inviting the lurch of nausea in place of the vertigo felt in the presence of the uncanny.

Above all, however, The Little Gift is a terribly human story filled with an empathetic awareness of the frangibility of the emotional self, the fragility of bodies – bodies and souls. Its cruel ironies and correspondences (and I shall endeavour not to reveal the central irony, which is embodied in the title) act as harsh lessons, stunning blows leading to damaged self-awareness. It begins with our first person narrator in the midst of night terrors, the existential dread given form by sleeplessness. They obviously have a subconscious source beyond their ostensible cause, the little gifts of dead mice and birds left by the cat. Something fundamental is exposed in the vulnerable hours before dawn.

The little gift left by the pitiless pet at the start of the novella seems like some physical manifestation of these night fears. The mauled, near-dead bird is a token of feline fellow-feeling, a sharing of the kill with the pride, allowing the privilege of the final death-blow to lie with the chief provider. The link between human and animal is established at the outset and is reiterated throughout the story. The narrator sees the cat’s actions as instinctive, engineered by ‘millions of years of evolution’. His own actions, the impulsive affair he falls into, are seen in similarly materialistic terms, animalistic drives followed at a time when his sense of self has been reduced to a dulled nullity. He fantasises about sex in the toilet, the ultimate reduction of passion to basic physical need and fears that some pheremonal musk might betray him to his wife, as if she could sniff him out. The first kiss, the peremptory prelude, takes place in the gardens of the grand house in which the corporate away day is taking place, the failed competitors for the prize mate aimlessly shuffling around the topiary like statuesque figures in a demystified version of Last Year in Marienbad. Later, on a trip with his family, the narrator pulls in at a location called Heaven’s Gate which offers a prospect over Longleat Park and the animals living in the safari park there. It’s a different view of the animal kingdom akin to the anodyne paintings of lions settling down with the lambs in the summery fields of the Lord found on the covers of the Jehovah’s Witness circular Watchtower. If this offers a converse metaphor for family life, then it is a fantasy, a forcefully willed ideal which bears no relation to true nature. Even emotions and psychological problems are spoken of in materialistic terms, with talk of Neuro Linguistic Programming and the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. All along, the narrator is aware of ‘the little man inside me, my soul’.

The scattered detritus of torn-out feathers are described discovered by the narrator’s wife at the beginning of the story are described as ‘dark commas’ spread across the room, their radius indicative of a fluttering struggle, agonies prolonged by the playful predator. It’s a powerfully poetic image, the comma marking a pause before an ensuing clause, the crux upon which a sentence turns; an interlude in the continuity of a life. But their provenance as the dismembered remains of a dying creature is also suggestive of a full stop, an ending in a parallel sentence. The image of a dark, feathered comma is used as a demarcation of significant moments of change in the narrative. Laid horizontally between certain paragraphs, it underlines temporal shifts or decisive alterations of intention or perception; the drift of time and mind. These symbolic punctuation marks are part of the visual schema for the book created by Pedro Marques which add a significant element to the overall impact. The exquisite surrealist corpse of the cover illustration, the dismembered doll angel with its bird head and plucked wings, is a disturbing yet strangely beautiful image.

The comma in the life of the protagonist is the banal disruption of a mid-life crisis. Volk depicts this with all the confused immediacy and panicked lack of perspective a first-person narrative affords. The very specificity of the details with which the narrator sums up his life – the Range Rover Evoque, the ‘gorgeous’ Kawasaki and the half-timbered cottage in All Cannings in Devizes – along with the contemptuously mocking self-awareness accompanying their listing, point to the falsity of such materialist aspirations as indicators of success and happiness. Tellingly, his ‘beautiful’ wife and ‘two gorgeous, healthy children’ (gorgeous like a Kawasaki) are tagged onto the end of the list as an afterthought, unnamed additions to the tokens of boastful achievement. You can almost hear David Byrne’s semi-hysterical vocal asking ‘well, how did I get here?’

What’s in a name? Naming or the withholding of names is important in The Little Gift. The narrator remains unnamed throughout and thus maintains the anonymity of the nameless. Although we are privy to the intimacies of his inner life at a time of personal crisis we see little beyond the borders of his brief and vividly real liaison. He remains essentially ill-defined, the primacy of family to his sense of self asserted rather than depicted. He also denies the serial killer his name, refusing to add to his mythologisation, his transformation into a folk demon. I’m reminded here of the ending of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in which the brutal fascist captain is told in the moments before his execution that his name as a father will be denied him, never mentioned to the son that the woman who is about to take his life is cradling. He will be erased from his family tree. The shared namelessness adds to the sense that killer and narrator are connected however, both remotely touching one another on the spectrum of blank disconnection. ‘He always seemed part of me, attached by some dark umbilical’, our protagonist admits at the end. ‘The little man inside me’, perhaps, his dark soul. Or the ineradicable infection passed on by debased acts (again, don’t mythologise them by using the word evil, as if there were some inverted transcendence or any kind of active anti-morality at play), the tainting of the soul through contact, propagated through the grubbily ink-stained vector of the tabloids.

Part of Volk’s purpose here is to regain the humanity of the victims, to force us to empathise with them in their darkest moment, to be with them in the terror of their final loneliness without for one moment using their experience for the most despicable kind of prurient onlooking. It is something which has to be done with the utmost sensitivity, because we are approaching real and enduring suffering here. Volk is no stranger to addressing the darkest areas of human experience however, notably in the series After Life, which was fearless in its confrontation of the most distressing of scenarios (and which featured an episode which once more demythologised the serial killer archetype, exposing the blankness at the core of such characters). He always retains a humanist outlook which makes us feel for his characters, never revelling in or unnecessarily dwelling upon physical pain. And it is the humanity of the killer’s victims which is of the essence here, the acts themselves revealed only indirectly through the flashgun snapshots of tabloid reports. It’s a similar approach to that taken by Phil Rickman in his Merrily Watkins novel The Lamp of the Wicked, which also deals with the poisonous legacy of the Gloucester murders. Merrily has the ultimate nightmare in which she dreams that of daughter Jane (a character with whom we have become intimate over previous novels) being bundled into the back of the builders van. It’s a humanisation of the victim at the most intimate level, and allows her to empathise all the more with those who lost the people they loved in such a terrible way and who have to endure such dark imaginings over and over again. Such a shared humanist perspective suggests an affinity between the work of Rickman and Volk; an affinity which was obviously picked up by whoever commissioned Volk to adapt Rickman’s second Merrily Watkins novel Midwinter of the Spirit.

His wife and children are initially unnamed too, merely referred to in terms of their family connection. It is only after he meets his lover that they take on names and become more clearly defined as individuals, just as he feels himself waking up into a sense of an authentic self once more. His rehumanisation humanises them. Their names feel like they have an allegorical ring to them: Trudy, the true one and his daughters Verity (more truth) and Amber (the precious, the catcher of warm, hearthglow light). His lover’s name blends hints of the exotic with counterbalancing mundanity, the romantic with the drab everyday. Ghislaine is a French name which could have come from an old troubadour romance, whilst the surname Hammond is rooted in the English heartland in which this anti-romance takes place. The element of Frenchness may also be a nod to the British films of the grey 50s in which any element of illicit love (a fairly broad definition back then) tended to involve French actresses such as Simone Signoret (see Room At the Top) or other continentals who were more prone to that sort of thing. She has a hidden middle name too, of Italian provenance this time. Lenzi, which temporarily transports her out of the landscapes of motorway service stations and conference centres into the genuinely romantic dream of villages in the Tuscan hills.

Volk is brilliant at building up anti-romantic detail, with the precise location of a rendezvous at a services on the M5 between junctions 11a and 12 exposing its crushingly dispiriting nature whilst enabling us to locate it on our maps and explore its ambience for ourselves should we so wish. But he also finds beauty in imperfection, in the vulnerability and tenderness of those struggling to find happiness or fulfilment in a disconnected, corporate world but refusing to give up on themselves or others. We are defined by our imperfections as much as anything, he suggests. And it is those imperfections, the departures from an airbrushed presentation of the self to the world which make Ghislaine so plausibly real, and which makes her so attractive to our narrator. They catch onto one another as they drift aimlessly by, spinning closely around in a temporary dance of mutual recognition.

There is also a subtly portrayed class barrier between them. Not a gulf, but the kind of fine gradation which still creates instinctive divisions in the stratified society of Britain. Ghislaine is from Birmingham, we are initially led to believe. This misapprehension (she is actually from Wolverhampton, we later discover) is indicative of the generalised stereotype into which people are instantly assigned at first encounter, the reduction of the individual to a set of crude assumptions. Birmingham is a place synonymous with dour, brutalist pragmatism and an absence of romance, of any spark of the visionary. For me, as the home of the bands Broadcast, Pram and their various associates, it’s a major locus of magic and strange enchantment, an indication that rich interior landscapes and constellations of the imagination can be discovered and flourish in any environment. It contrasts markedly with the Wiltshire idyll in which the narrator lives, however. Ghislaine’s relatives may have come from the Tuscan countryside, Lenzis filling the graveyards there, but it is a place that her family have long since left behind for the built-up, motorway-bound terrain of the midlands. Our narrator, meanwhile, is able to take advantage of a ‘gite with a swimming pool near Brignoles, a former olive press’ which belongs to a company director. It may very well say something about my position within the British class spectrum that I had to look up what a gite was. Ghislaine has the contrasting prospect of a hen night in Barcelona, travelling by Easyjet and staying at a place called the Hotel Derby. Again, Volk is spot on when it comes to providing the telling anti-romantic detail. He could no doubt write a fine romantic comedy full of such wry observation if he had the mind to. I strongly suspect he doesn’t. Ghislaine’s one taste of upper crust living comes during the away day weekend, which takes place at a stately home converted into a conference centre. It hardly counts.

In a way, the class divide makes the passionate interlude all the more urgent and affecting. They both see each other for who they really are, with all trappings of status stripped away. As is always the case, however, it is far easier for our narrator to retreat back into the protective compound of his wealth, the stability of family. He is required to make the decisive move, but his default setting is drift. He simply doesn’t have the killer instinct. That has to be provided by someone else. An actual killer, perhaps. There is something peculiarly, poignantly English about his struggle to express his desires, to even articulate his feelings to himself. A verbal dance of self-deprecation skips lightly away from direct statement and it is down to Ghislaine to direct the affair, to read the all-too obvious signs. This disconnection from desire and clogged up communication is embodied in the fact that he finds it easier to make contact via the remote, truncated means of text messages. Printed out in bold type, these are disturbingly echoed in the lurid tabloid headlines and flashes of pruriently detailed reportage which are also printed in bold. Both condense, coarsen and elide truth, weakening the empathy which comes from true human connection.

These equivalences and correspondences create a sense of interconnected patterns spanning all manner of divides. Ultimately, they link a ‘respectable’, hard-working family man with an indolent, despicable killer, an unreadable void whose humanity has, at some point, been wholly erased. Or was he merely, like the housecat whose impulses are indulged, merely doing what he was programmed to do by nature. Are we more than a collective mess of amalgamated instincts? What makes us different from animals? Are we moral beings or are we just kidding ourselves? Mention of ISIS headlines on the news taking over once the killer’s tale is done raise the stakes and places such questions on a global scale. We have been offered the possibility of a religious work of art by Matisse, inspired by the kindness of a Catholic nurse who subsequently became a nun, as some kind of redemptive embodiment of the spiritual nobility inherent in the human soul. The description of the glass, its vivid colours and living light (‘the intense blue of the Mediterranean and the Madonna’ – beautiful writing here) gives an almost catechistic pagan sense of the immediacy of being. The equivalences which are so much a part of this intricately structured novella once more provide ironic counterparts however. And it would take a particularly intense moment of Blakean visionary transport to experience a similar flooding of divine light in the Gloucester services off the M5. The final image could have taken place in those services (thus echoing filmic images of dissolving or bubbling liquids stared at by James Mason in Odd Man Out and Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, both characters suffering crises of identity and hovering on the edge of death and violence). I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which sugar cubes absorb and draw up the tea or coffee into which they’re dipped until they’re entirely consumed by it and I’m clearly not alone. Here, such an effect acts as a complex and ambiguous piece of symbolism. The sugarcube soul, absorbing that to which it is exposed? A metaphor for the transient nature of all things, the vital importance of making the most of our short span? Of not allowing ourselves to drift into the dissipation of the unexamined life, slowly reduced to the sludge of base, instinctual existence? Or of the way in which the lonely, monadic self can find indivisible commonality with another if it is prepared to open itself up and communicate with complete honesty? Our narrator used to take two sugars. He ends up taking one, which he watches darkening with the stain of his black coffee. Perhaps he still has some distance to go.

These are profound issues, questions which address the fundamentals of who we are as individuals, as political and social beings; as humans in fact. No easy resolution is arrived at, no closure comfortably attained. In the insidious, dangerous manner in which expert storytellers operate, we are invited to think for ourselves, to think about ourselves. It is Stephen Volk’s Little Gift to us. I for one am thankful for it.

Originally published as a Warp Records press release for the debut LP by Children of Alice.



Children of Alice have been quietly producing amorphous and intoxicating soundscapes as part of the Folklore Tapes collective for a number of years now, beginning in 2013 with Harbinger of Spring on the shared Ornithology release. This poetic conjuration of rebirth and new growth was the first unfurling of post-Broadcast creation from James Cargill, one half of the personal and artistic relationship at the heart of that epochal and increasingly feted band. The name Children of Alice was chosen as an act of tribute to the late Trish Keenan, for whom Alice in Wonderland and in particular Jonathan Miller’s summerhazy 60s idyll of an adaptation, was a presiding inspiration. The name invokes her abiding spirit and also creates a sense of continuity with the evolving Broadcast soundworld, which became more concentrated and individual as it refined itself and adapted to new configurations. The group (or perhaps we should call them a collaborative triad, since they occupy island territory far removed from the familiar shores of rock, though still keeping it in vision on the far horizon) consists of Cargill along with his former bandmate Roj Stevens (who played keyboards in Broadcast) and Julian House, co-founder of Ghost Box records, whose distinctive graphic design work also gives the label its signature look, and hidden prestidigitator behind The Focus Group.


Both Stevens and Cargill lent their incubating musical presence to the 2013 Focus Group album Elektrik Carousel, and a fully-fledged collaboration was hatched with the Ornithology record a few months later. Stevens had released a solo record on Ghost Box in 2009, The Transactional Dharma of Roj Stevens, whose clicking and ratcheting clockwork rhythms suggested the cogs and teeth of complex interlocking machineries and automata set into keywound or water-powered motion. He brings a similar sensibility to the recordings here, creating an impression of irregular, juddering forward motion, a Heath-Robinsonesque progression. House is a concrète collagiste, his assemblages torn by abrupt a deliberately rough-edged jump-cuts, audio analogues of his visual work. Cargill’s warm synth colours infuse the whole with sustaining solar radiance, and bass lines redolent of the Broadcast duo LP Tender Buttons occasionally rise to the surface before drifting off on the mercurial flux of transformative sound. Julian House had previously collaborated with James Cargill on the album Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate the Witch Cults of the Radio Age, and Children of Alice further explore and expand upon these researches (and those carried out on the Mother is the Milky Way tour CD). These are sound pictures whose discrete movements, organically morphing musical matter and sudden transitions produce a sense of passage through a kaleidoscopically refracted panorama and form a narrative of journeys into inner landscapes. The sound world is gently psychedelic, full of backmasked tapes, phased flutes and analogue hum. Clocks and birds chime and twitter, processed autoharps and glockenspiels glint and shimmer, woodblocks and hand-drums plock and patter.


The music the Children of Alice triad make is impossible to narrowly define. It dissolves the limiting boundaries between field recordings, musique concrète, electronica, programmatic classical music, psych folk, experimental rock, radiophonic sound, library cues, hip-hop sampling and imaginary soundtracks. These four pieces (songs or tracks seem inadequate handles to define them) are pastoral concrète, a romantic English modernism (for, to answer Paul Nash’s rhetorical question, it IS possible to go modern and be British) which replaces brutalism and the clashing bruitage of the city with birdsong, folk chatter and the sundappled buzz and hum of a summer’s afternoon (shades of XTC’s Summer’s Cauldron, with its ‘insect bomber Buddhist droning’) and hedgerow bricolage. There is an inherent lightness to these sound pictures, a feeling of expansiveness and joyful exploration. Inner and outer worlds meet, and the divide between them becomes indistinct and, in the end, irrelevant.


Harbinger of Spring is the lengthiest pieces here, a sonic suite which guides us through a varied terrain, its successive sections like rooms in a spatially transcendent mental mansion, interiors and landscapes interpenetrating like one of Paul Nash’s surreal rooms, lapped by oceanic edges and lit by pendant moons. Beginning with cuckoo sounds which spring from carved, concertinaed clock automata to transform into woodland heralds of the turning season, this playful pastoral tone poem evokes both post-war electronic and electroacoustic composers such as Jonathan Harvey, Trevor Wishart (the morphing of human agonies into bird choruses in the immensely powerful Red Bird), Bernard Parmegiani and Pierre Henry, and British composers such as Benjamin Britten with his Spring Symphony (Broadcast had already drawn on Britten’s music for their song Echo’s Answer) and the Delius drift of reveries like The Walk to the Paradise Garden and In A Summer Garden. Messiaen’s Catalogue D’Oiseaux piano pieces are also a point of comparison, their field-notated birdsong imitations set within musical evocations of landscape, weather and seasonal climate. The fact that comparisons from the classical and avant-garde worlds are easier to draw than examples from the realms of rock and pop indicates the sui generis nature of Children of Alice’s music. There really is nothing else like this being produced at the moment.


Harbinger of Spring set the pattern for subsequent releases in the Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs series – a harbinger of the seasonal tone-poems to come. The Liminal Space from FTCCI Fore Halloween, Rite of the Maypole – An Unruly Procession from FTCCII: Merry May and Invocation of a Midsummer Reverie from FTCCIV: Crown of Light summon up the spirit of seasonal rites and traditions, whether as remembrance, reproduction or ongoing observances. Landscape, time and ritual are inseparable, and these pieces are full of the spirit of an age in which the seasons of man and the cycles of the pastoral year were in close synchrony. The nature of the music makes the substance of time malleable, folding it in and stretching it out, moulding it until it becomes immaterial, eternal. Only timelessness remains, a process of perpetual becoming, recession and renewal; but never an ending or a beginning.


Elements of these pieces trigger associative responses, particularly from those Broadcast fans attuned to the influences Trish and James have promulgated over the years through mixes and interview effusiveness. A revving motorcycle engine brings The Owl Service to mind; cracking flagellations and ‘orgy vocals’ Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus’ White Noise track My Game of Loving; swooping sirens and agitated voices the public information films which portrayed a world in which fatal danger was everpresent in the seemingly ordinary and everyday; singing, glassy sonorities the unearthly calls of Les Sculptures Sonores; the ratcheting clogs of a large clock, with its imprisoning linear temporality, the mechanism which features in the Angela Carterish Czech fairytale fantasy Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (a firm favourite of Trish’s); and are those stridulating creaks and boings the sound of Froglets, making a surprise visitation from the soup-rich asteroid of The Clangers? These associations (and many more particular to the individual auditor) all add to the richness of the experience. For these are condensed and multi-layered soundworlds which bear repeated listening. They are unique works of singular imagination, and this first LP by Children of Alice is an extraordinarily inventive work. May it be a harbinger of many further explorations and investigations of cults and rituals, inscapes and landscapes, the temporal and the transcendental to come. Meanwhile, lay back and immerse yourself in these transformative sonic poems, take the hands of the Children of Alice and let your mind drift and come into sudden sharp focus as they lead you into undreamed of yet instantly familiar worlds. Like Alice herself on that hazy summer’s day, dream and wake UP!

Asked to come up with a book from the library shelves I would recommend, I decided upon Kristin Hersh's wonderful novelistic memoir of the early days of Throwing Muses, her struggles with strange mental states, her passion for music and her friendship with Betty Hutton. I wrote a little too much for a 90 second youtube spot, but here's the whole lot:


Kristin Hersh is a singer who first revealed her extraordinary songwriting talents in the group Throwing Muses, whose angular, splintered pop and glinting shards of lyrical poetry cut an artfully beguiling swathe across the late 80s and 90s. She also recorded a series of solo albums which spanned the dynamic range from hushed acoustic whisper to snarling guitar noise, gathering force for the full, fierce banshee howl of her hardcore trio 50 Foot Wave. Paradoxical Undressing was published in the US as Rat Girl with a cover by Gilbert Hernandez which seemed to bring Kristin into the universe of the Love and Rockets comics he created with his brother Jaime; She’d certainly fit in there. The book looks at the early days of her musical career. It’s no conventional rock autobiography, however. Drawing on a diary she began writing at the age of 18, this is the story of one year in the life of a character called Kristin Hersh. The title suggests a revealingly naked honesty, but also a portrayal from a distance. This was a traumatic time for Kristin, a period encompassing the ecstatic highs of musical transport and the lows of mental breakdown and hospitalisation. When she was a child she had a serious accident; she was knocked off her bicycle by a car and suffered significant head injuries. It was from this date that her mental health problems started. Rather than voices in her head, she heard songs; Urgent, wild and sometimes savage songs which needed to be released. She was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, later adjusted, as with so many, to bipolar disorder. The self she writes about here is a person viewed from afar, a shadow skin shed along the way. It’s a recreation of a character, damaged but full of artistic fire and curiosity, finding her way in the world, possessed by the raging, chaotic music in her head and trying to find the right vessel with which to set it loose upon an unsuspecting public. ‘For what it’s worth’, she writes in the introduction, ‘this my old diary’s story, riddled with enormous holes and true’.


The book is also a story of an unlikely friendship; that between Kristin, attending college at a precocious age thanks to a hippie professor father known as The Dude, and Betty Hutton, a film star of the 40s and 50s, going back to study after the fading of her career; Krissy and Betty. Betty is a defiantly individual old lady with a penchant for blue cowboy boots and hats, and a love of life which defies the depredations of time. She shares her wayward wisdom with Kristin, and the dialogues between them are some of the highlights of the book. ‘Everything that wacky old Betty Hutton told me was true’ Kristin writes in the introduction and the book is dedicated to her, although sadly she died before its publication. Betty comes along to some of Kristin’s early Throwing Muses gigs, sometimes with a priest in tow and offers a wryly amusing outsider’s perspective on the sweaty, unglamorous and intense indie scene. She is like a wise grandmother in a modern folktale, helping Kristin grow into herself, to find a sense of purpose and remain true to it; to take some control over the chaos inside. She tells her, in the manner of a blessing, ‘it’s okay to be scared sweetheart. How’re you gonna give ‘em your heart if you don’t have one’. In the song Elizabeth June which she wrote about Betty, Kristin remotely replies, with the wisdom of experience, ‘and you were right it was okay to be scared’.

Kristin at the Phoenix

The two quotes which preface the book come from Dostoyevsky and Micky Dolenz, the joker of The Monkees. In tandem, they hint at the range of the book, its combination of seriousness and play. And Mickey’s quote, ‘the universe is godding’, is as gnomically profound as the words of the great Russian novelist. The pairing also points to the fact that this is as much novel as it is musical memoir. It is impressionistic, elliptical, funny, honest and poetic. The narrative is nonlinear, moving in and out of moments and encounters with a fluidity which expresses the intensity of these formative youthful days. Fragments of song lyrics are interpolated throughout, taken from the full expanse of Kristin’s songwriting career, offering parenthetical comment on the passages they footnote. ‘Songs don’t commit to linear time’, she explains. ‘songs’re weird: they tell the future and they tell the past, but they can’t seem to tell the difference’. This lyrical trail also points to the way in which the raw material of life is forged and honed into the transformed, universal matter of art. Music is seen as pure expression throughout, something which transcends the grubby, deceitful disappointment of everyday life. It is a holy calling and Kristin is on a mission, no matter the damage she might sustain as a result of its pursuit. But with this book she finds another means of expression. Her prose is beautifully balanced, its style even and carefully judged, her language poetic without ever becoming precious. There is a cool and humorous feel to her writing, and she maintains a wide-eyed distance from what at times are catastrophic personal breakdowns. She writes about mental illness with direct immediacy; there’s no attempt at analysis or clinical insight. This is an attempt to convey how it feels, a close-up and intimate mapping of the inner landscape of a mind in terrible turmoil. It is at times astonishingly powerful and brings with it a huge empathic charge. I can only think of Virginia Woolf as a comparative writer who brings her own suffering to bear on the portrayal of chaotic mental states with such searing insight.


Kristin is a great observer too. She writes perceptively about the details of everyday life and her evocations of the world around her are acute, vivid and full of an open and enquiring wonder at the beauty of life. Ultimately, what I get from this book is a sense of optimism and an enduring commitment to both art and life, which are seen as inextricably linked. Kristin takes her protagonist, herself, through some dark experiences, but she never loses her love of life, her wonder at its crazy, wild beauty. At the end, she is expecting her first child. Her latest album, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace makes reference to another of her children. Like all of her recent albums, the music on the CD is contained within a book. Kristin continues to combine the arts of songwriting and prose to hugely rewarding effect. I saw her at the Phoenix last year, her songs interspersed with readings. It was a stunning gig, bewitching, entrancing and communicating with typical intensity and directness. ‘I absolutely did not invent this’ she writes at the end of the book, before leaving us with a lyrical fragment from the song Cartoons: ‘I wasn’t staring. I was just looking far away, dazzled by something I forgot’. So, this is an act of remembrance and invention. Which doesn’t mean it’s not all true. Paradoxical Undressing.

Notes for an introduction to a film club screening.


Powell and Pressburger – an alliterative pairing whose enunciation immediately summons up an aura of magic and enchantment for me. I first came across their films in the 1980s when they were being rediscovered after several decades of neglect and critical disdain. I remember going to see them in the NFT and the repertory cinemas of London (the Scala and the Everyman were particular favourites). I fell in love with them and experienced an indefinable thrill every time I saw them. They were a part of my self-education, my teenage cultural awakening and they have remained a vital part of my life ever since, re-awakening those feelings every time I see them. I feel such an affinity for them that it probably wouldn’t be going too far to say that they are an inherent part of my soul. My English soul.


Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were, for 17 years between 1939-1956, an inseparable creative partnership, their intuitive understanding of one another leading to a series of films which were collaborations in the most intimate and complete sense. Emeric expressed the close conjunction of their artistic temperaments, saying ‘ he knows what I am going to say even before I say it – maybe even before I have thought it – and that is very rare’. Powell, with typical impishness, described their relationship as being like ‘a marriage without sex’, the qualification an addendum which perhaps didn’t need spelling out. All the films they made for the independent production company they set up in 1942 and called The Archers were credited as being written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Their logo saw a golden arrow joining 8 others on the Technicolor target (or monochrome if it was a black and white film), although it thunked in just outside the bullseye. Powell sent Emeric a copy of a rhyme written by James Agee: ‘The arrow was pure gold/But somehow missed the target./But as all Golden Arrow trippers know/’Tis better to miss Naples than hit Margate’.


There was no creative hierarchy or division, this was a collective act of creation. Michael Powell explained the idea behind this amalgamated credit some years later; ‘We wanted the titles to express the order of importance as we thought it’ he said, ‘so we decided on Written, Produced and Directed. In other words you’ve got to have a bloody good story to start with and it’s got to be well developed and then it’s got to be well produced, you’ve got to find the money and dress it properly, and that sort of thing…and then directing is purely one of the other things, like photography’. Of course they each had their particular role, but wouldn’t exclude the other from influencing their work. Powell would further elaborate in an interview for Variety in 1980: ‘in theory we made the films together; in practice, of course, I’m a director, just as Emeric had a long struggle to establish himself as a writer. So basically our ideas were usually Emeric’s conception as a story and Emeric’s working out in script form, from then we worked together and I would take over the direction, but every decision that was of any importance, including, of course, the editing particularly…was all made by the two of us together’.


Emeric was Hungarian, born in Miskolc in the northeastern part of the country. His father was an estate manager (the Pressburgers came from Pressburg, once the regional capital of Hungary but by this time, as Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia). He had a rural childhood growing up on farms, a pastoral upbringing which would strongly influence his worldview and his writing. This is made manifest in A Canterbury Tale above all else. He was educated in the city of Temesvar. When the maps were redrawn by the Allies in the aftermath of the first world war Temesvar was swallowed up by Romania and became Timisoara. It was the start of Emeric’s stateless roamings through the 20th century, his Hungarian nationality and his Jewish identity making him a target for the unwanted attentions of a succession of oppressive powers. He escaped to Prague before making his way to Germany (always his preferred destination) and eventually to the UFA studios in Berlin. His time there as a screenwriter and editor gave him an education in film-making and production which was to stand him in excellent stead for his later work. The Nazis came to power, however, and it wasn’t long before Jews in the film industry were targeted. 31st March 1933 was Jewish Boycott Day, a purge of the studios which saw a mass exodus of talented artists and engineers. Emeric stayed on in Berlin, reluctant to leave. But a phone call tipping him and impressing upon him the urgency of his immediate departure led him to flee to France with swiftly procured passports. He lived and worked in Paris for a couple of years before sailing over to England in 1935.


Three years later, in 1938, he travelled to Denham studios to start working on a picture for his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda (soundtrack to be composed by Miklos Rosza, another Hungarian!) called The Spy in Black and was introduced to its brash and sometimes abrasive director, Michael Powell. The quiet Hungarian and the romantically extravagant Englishman almost immediately formed a bond which would last until their deaths. Perhaps even beyond. Powell’s second volume of memoirs, Million-Dollar Movie, describes a meeting with Emeric in his modest country dwelling, Shoemaker’s Cottage (‘a little number that looks as if it had been run up by the Brothers Grimm’), 50 years since their first encounter. They talk companionably about the old times, and about their artistic relationship. Emeric expounds on their philosophy, concluding that they remained always amateurs, dedicated to their vision. It’s only as the conversation reaches its conclusion that Powell reveals that Emeric was, at this point, already dead. It’s typical of the mutual generosity inherent in their partnership that, at the end of his lengthy 2 volume autobiography, he should let his dear friend have the final word.


Michael Powell himself was a Man of Kent (as distinct from a Kentish Man). He grew up in the Kentish Weald and Downland, a landscape of oast houses, hop fields, chestnut woods, meandering rivers, ridgeways and downland meadows. His family was based at Howletts farm near Canterbury then Hoath, even nearer to the city in which he received his early education. Like Emeric, his was a rural upbringing. A Canterbury Tale finds him returning to the landscape of his childhood. During the filming, he stayed at an inn in Fordwich, just a few miles from the old farms he remembered so vividly (as the first volume of his autobiography, A Life In Movies, attests). But despite this, A Canterbury Tale is Emeric’s film. Powell admits as much, and Emeric, always a modest man, said ‘this is the only one of them that is entirely mine’. It’s good to emphasise Emeric’s contribution because it is often eclipsed by the focus on Powell as the ‘auteur’ director (the fault of Martin Scorsese and the Cahiers du Cinema mob). Emeric’s stamp can be seen in the outsider perspective which predominates in this portrait of the Kentish landscape and spirit. In particular, the perspective of John Sweet’s Sgt Bob Johnson from Oregon. He’s perpetually mystified and amused by English ways; by their phones, their obsession with tea, their stoicism, their uncooperative mirrrors, their habit of shaking hands.


Eventually, Emeric became more English than anyone. Anton Walbrook’s extraordinarily moving refugee speech in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is essentially his expression of his own feelings. He found a home in these isles after years of enforced wandering and exile. And he ended up in Shoemaker’s Cottage in Suffolk, a true English country home. But he always remained Hungarian at heart. Many of his closest friends were Hungarian. And he never lost his taste for Hungarian cooking, spiced with plenty of paprika; a taste he shared with his English friend. As Kevin Macdonald writes in his biography of his grandfather Emeric, ‘Michael was enthusiastic about another of Emeric’s great loves. On cold winter evenings in London he was introduced to Hungarian cooking. Pots of goulash, bowls of cucumber salad and flocks of chicken paprika were set before him. But most of all Michael remembered the turkey’. Theo’s (Anton Walbrook’s) speech in Colonel Blimp, talking of his close friendship with Roger Livesey’s Clive Candy, echoed Emeric’s feelings and friendship with Michael Powell. They referred to each other with loving familiarity as ‘old horse’ or ‘Holmes and ‘Watson’ (Emeric, surprisingly, Holmes). Emeric was both supremely English and the eternal outsider. A condition which lent him his unique insight into the national character.


A Canterbury Tale was filmed in 1943, as preparations for D-Day were in full swing. Signs of the war are evident. There is extensive bomb damage evident in the centre of Canterbury. Denham studio sets were substituted for parts of cathedral. The stained glass in the Nave had been removed for the duration to preserve it from potential destruction. These scenes were a triumph for German designer Alfred Junge (who had spent a period of internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien), who would later go on to create the Himalayas on Pinewood stagesets for Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. The cathedral bells had also been cossetted away for their own protection. Those are not the real ones used for dissolve shots at beginning and end. They are miniatures, but with real bell ringers ‘miming’ them to assure realistic changes.


Emeric was not allowed into Kent during the shooting even as daily visitor to set. This was the decision of Percy Sillitoe, the chief constable of Kent, who deemed him a risk as a technical ‘illegal alien’ (Hungary was a Nazi ally). He stayed in Powell’s cottage in Bratton Fleming in Devon. The troops seen in Canterbury at end were on their manoeuvres in preparing for D-Day, a piece of historical verisimilitude which gives the film an added frisson in the modern day. Who knows how many of those individuals marching through the pilgrim’s gates made it back. Of course, the landings were over by the time film was released in 1944. This was already history (unthinkable otherwise that such manoeuvres would be revealed).


Emeric said that A Canterbury Tale was the first stage in the Archer’s ‘Crusade against materialism’. In the context of the war and the vision of the world which would be built after its end, he asked ‘who is going to think about the human values, the values that we are fighting for’. Looking back at Canterbury Tales created a sense of continuity, linking the ancestral past with the present, conjoined by the mystical connection with landscape and memory. They were moral tales, blending chilvalry and noble sentiment with bawdy humour. Exactly the sort of thing which would court the approval of J. Arthur Rank, that arch Methodist. Having initially contemplated a period adaption, Micheal and Emeric decided to do a modern version. Emeric posited ‘a tale of 4 modern pilgrims, of the old road that runs to Canterbury, and of the English countryside which is eternal’. This sense of the eternal is central to the mystical quality of the film, the sense that time is insubstantial; that the landscape makes the past and the stories and lives which have become a part of and helped to shape its contours, its woodlands, streams and meadows immanent, particularly along the old ways trod by so many feet and carved by so many cartwheels over the centuries. Colpepper’s speech before his evening lecture makes this explicit. "Well there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old road and as you walk, think of them, and the old England. They climbed Chillingbourne Hill, just as you did, they sweated and paused for breath, just as you did today. And when you see the bluebells in the spring and the wild thyme, the broom and the heather, you're only seeing what their eyes saw. Ford the same rivers, the same birds are singing. When you lie flat on your back, and rest, and watch the clouds sailing as I often do, you're so close to those other people, that you can hear the thrumming of the hoofs of their horses, the sound of the wheels on the road, and their laughter, and talk, and the music of the instruments they carried. And when I turn the bend in the road, where they too, saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I've only to turn my head, to see them on the road behind me."


The opening quote from Chaucer, with pilgrims riding on horseback, also creates a palpable sense of connection. 'Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote/The droghte of Marche hat perced to the rote.../And small fowles maken melodye,/That slepen al the night with open ye/(So Priketh hem nature in hir corages):/Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages'. The hawk transmogrifying into a spitfire is a bravura piece of visual poetry eliding past and present (and many have noted the parallel with 2001:A Space Odyssey). This is the anti-materialism that Emeric speaks of. But there are also links with the British documentary movement, the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings in particular (Listen to Britain, Heart of Britain, Words for Battle, A Diary for Timothy, Spare Time). The blend of location shooting with the heightened effects of studio shoots creates this heady blend of the poetic and the real. There is also and interest in observing, in going off and exploring; hence the non-sequential and meandering narrative, like the serpentine Stour we see running across the Kentish plain. This deviation form sequential narrative was, in its own traditional way, very modern. This might go some way towards explaining the lack of understanding by contemporary reviewers, such as the unsympathetic Dilys Powell.


Powell and Pressburger had always fostered a fine repertory company of actors. Powell had wanted to draw upon his stars from Colonel Blimp, Roger Livesey and Deborah Kerr, to take the central roles in A Canterbury Tale. But Livesey simply didn’t understand the part of Colpepper. Like a number of critics, contemporary and otherwise, he found the glueman aspect distasteful. Deborah Kerr had just signed to MGM and was also at the tempestuous (always tempestuous with Micky) end of a relationship with Powell. Thomas Culpepper was played by Eric Portman, who had previously been in the Powell and Pressburger pictures One of Aircraft is Missing and its converse companion, 49th Parallel, in which he was monstrously memorable as the vessel for Nazi doctrine Leiutentant Hirth. The three leads were all giving their first film performances. Michael Powell met Sheila Sim at a party with her new fiancé, Richard Attenborough (who would have a small part in Powell and Pressburger’s timeless masterpiece, A Matter of Life and Death). They were later to marry, and she would eventually become Lady Attenborough. Dennis Price had been found in a theatre production some months before and Powell had kept him in mind ever since. Sgt John Sweet, the gloriously innocent heart of the film, was an American GI whom Powell had spotted in a touring US army production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. He made a big impression on him as the narrator. His simple and unaffected performance feels true and enormously affecting due to its lack of artifice. Also featured is Esmond Knight in a triple role. He intones the opening Chaucerian narration, plays the ‘village idiot’ with his strangely arch, 18th century aspect (a wise fool), and the waxed-moustached, pipe-clenching soldier at Colpepper’s lecture. Michael Powell had wanted him for Portman’s role as Hirth in 49th Parallel. But he had been persuaded by Vernon Sewell to join the navy. His ship The Prince of Wales was hit by the Bismarck, an encounter in which he lost one eye and was blinded in the other. Powell cast him in the film Silver Fleet (an Archers production directed by Sewell) anyway and always included him in later pictures where possible , as here. Knight eventually regained some sight in his remaining eye. But his hugely enjoyable comic turn here is all the more admirable knowing the circumstances under which it was delivered. Also look out for station guard at the start, an immediately recognisable presence even here in his youth. He never really changed. I won’t tell you who it is, but you can always greet him with a saucy ‘oh, hello’.


The film is also blessed by Erwin Hillier’s luminous cinematography. He had a background in the German UFA studio. He started work as camera assistant on Fritz Lang’s M, and may indeed have bumped into Emeric Pressbuger, who also worked at UFA, at some time. They had a shared apprenticeship. The black and white contrasts, shadows and light blending in the mysterious night, have all the hallmarks of German expressionism. A style which would also be transposed, via another German cinematographer, Karl Freund, into the Universal horror style of Frankenstein (and there are definite echoes of horror in A Canterbury Tale – it would have been interesting to see what a Powell and Pressburger/Hammer collaboration would have produced). Michael Powell also noted Hillier’s obsession with cloudscapes, another significant feature of A Canterbury Tale. ‘The only thing he was a bit loony about was clouds in the sky’, he notes in A Life In Movies. ‘He detested a clear sky, and it sometimes seemed to me that he forgot about the story and the actors in order to gratify this passion. “Meekee, Meekee, please wait another few minutes”, he would plead. “There is a little cloud over there and it is coming our way, I’m sure it is”.


Allan Gray’s music perfectly blends in with the sound of bells at the beginning and end. And his angelic choir perfectly expresses the mystery of the landscape, the spirit of place. There is also a social dimension here. The contrast of the city with the countryside. A nascent ecological consciousness is evident, embodied in Colpepper’s favoured reading, Soil and Soul. Colpepper is religious figure with a decidedly ancient aspect. Michael Powell noted of Eric Portman’s Culpepper that he ‘had the face of a medieval ascetic’, which ‘could quite easily have been torn out of a medieval manuscript’. This medieval aspect also plays into the misogyny of the glueman, his historical refusal to acknowledge the place of women in society (although the glue also acts as a metaphor for social cohesion, and for the pouring in of knowledge and learning), This is seen in his refusal to allow women to work on his farm. The film acts as a rebalancing of this divisive vision of the past. Through his observation of women at work, and their lack of fear (none of the ‘victims’ of the glueman whom Alison interviews, all engaged in active and responsible working roles, express anything more than irritation at his activities) he learns as well; as he does through his relationship with Alison.


In the end, all receive their blessings. The entry into Canterbury is transcendent and really quite profoundly moving. Emeric succeeded completely in his crusade against materialism. Even Colpepper, his sins revealed before him, his confession made, receives some sort of exclulpation, although he stands penitently apart from the crowd. We end with the chiming of the bells and a return to Chaucer. Time transcended. The pilgrim’s way remains open. Enter through the gates and find the truth that lies within your heart.

An overview originally uploaded for a Bleep.com 'advent calendar' release of a special 5 year mix in 2016.





FTV. Five years of Folklore Tapes. It feels odd writing it down, both because it feels like this motley collective has been around for a far greater span of time – they have certainly amassed an impressive body of work for a mere half decade; and because their art seeks to transcend the notion of time. Only Timelessness, as David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone’s flickering 8mm eyeflash trip through Dartmoor landscapes (and inscapes) expresses it. The Folklore Tapes folks are essentially British visionary romantics in the spiritual lineage of William Blake and Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash and Michael Powell, Arthur Machen and Derek Jarman. All explorers of the genius loci, the spirit of place inhabiting landscapes in which geology, history and myth (personal or universal) have become compressed into intermingling strata. These antecedents are monumental presences in an alternative underground current, often rendered invisible or given scant, disdainful regard within a cultural climate overwhelmingly favourable to realism, whether social or psychological. It’s significant that several are visual artists. The visual element of the Folklore Tapes world is hugely important. This incorporates the exquisite graphic design of David Chatton Barker, which has graced most of the releases; the idiosyncratic packaging (from bespoke boxes and brightly coloured cassette casings to envelopes imprinted with unique ink-stamps and hollowed out and rebound books); the handmade, decorated and reconfigured instruments which are art objects in themselves (rather like Harry Partch’s ensemble of cloud-chamber bowls, gourd trees and chromelodeons); and the performances in which film and projections play such an important part.


The temporal may be transcended, or its linearity looped and warped, but Folklore Tapes was initially more spatially specific. It all began down in Devon, in the somnolent cathedral city of Exeter. These were the days of Devon Folklore Tapes, and the first release, Two Witches, set the template. A study and aural invocation of two local conjuring women from the nineteenth century, Hannah Hemley from Hembury and Mariann Voaden, who had inhabited a rough, tumbledown cottage near Bratton Clovelly, north-west of the Moor. Bratton Clovelly (whose church boasts a magnifent Norman font set about with fire-tongued dragons, impassively chthonic giants’ heads and solar wheels) is not too far from the Lewtrenchard parish of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who recalled Mariann in his 1908 book Devon Characters and Strange Events. Both locales may prove fertile ground for future exploration by folklore tapes researchers. Two Witches was a collaboration between David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone, who continue to be the central HQ of Folklore Tapes operations to this day, the binary system around which various bodies have since orbited. The guiding ethos and essential aesthetic approach was in place from the very start; the exploration and poetic evocation of folklore and the folkloric spirit through research, notes, quotations, field explorations and recordings, visual artwork and music.


David and Ian called themselves researchers rather than musicians or artists, an appellation which somehow incorporated all of the above into one coherent and all-embracing practice. The placing of a cassette inside a hollowed out book was also significant. The contents were a way of ‘reading’ the stories of the two witches through an act of identification, an imaginative inhabitation of the witches’ world which translated research into the direct emotional affect of music. The Rev. Baring-Gould may have offered one conduit into this world (just as he had lent imaginative fuel to Bram Stoker, researching Dracula in the British Library, through his Book of Werewolves), but it is Theo Brown who has proved the tutelary spirit guiding the Folklore Tapes seekers, from the beginning and for always. Brown was an unorthodox folklorist, working outside the clubbish confines of academia and therefore scorned by many of its pompous proponents. She engaged directly with her subjects, travelling about Dartmoor in her caravan and getting to know the inhabitants of its villages personally. Her accounts are written in a poetic style, retaining the element of storytelling bewitchment and colourful detail essential to bringing folk tales and legends to vivid, compelling life.


When Ian and David eventually came to pay tribute to Theo in 2014 with their Theo Brown and the Folklore of Dartmoor collection, they did so with the care and reverence due to such a formative and continuing influence. In their notes, they liken her to Delia Derbyshire, Lotte Reiniger and Vera Chytilova, the Czech director of Daisies and Fruit of Paradise – all women touched by inspiration, passionate individualists who struggled to make their highly distinctive voices heard. The box housing the varied artefacts of this multi-media release was a treasure chest, tapes making way for 7 x 7” inch records (a magically symmetrical calculus presenting the vinyl medium itself as an occult artefact), each carrying a sound picture of a Dartmoor village or locale and its attendant legends or spirits etched into its grooves, otherworldly presences ready to be released into the room as sinister resonances through the trembling vibrations of the speaker cones (or directly into your head through your phones). A DVD of the film Only Timelessness was included, its celluloid record of expeditions onto the moor digitised but losing none of the elemental texture of fracture and frost cracking and the corroded earth colours of biological decay nurtured by burying the reels in the organic matter of the moor for a month (the influence of Stan Brakhage evident and openly acknowledged). Damage and erosion is re-imagined as alchemical transformation, geological time running like a fissure through the images of the present to create a dual vision, an abstracted landscape where the processes of millennia are inscribed upon the experience of the moment, resulting in a sense of numinous immanence inherent in every rock, tree and stream (the kind of feeling which Arthur Machen attempted to convey in his story Hill of Dreams).


This is the territory from which myth and legend, folklore and superstition is born, making wraithlike and evanescent contact with the human imagination, emerging from the protean moods of the local weather and the unfiltered white noise of the rushing river as much as from the chthonic bones of granite underlying the whole humpbacked topography, occasionally emerging as the gnarled, arthritic knuckles of the tors. And it’s the abstracted landscape and its inherent spirit, ancient and intensely of the everpresent now, which preoccupied romantic moderns like Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious. And Theo Brown too. Also contained within the treasure chest was a series of postcards reproducing the woodcuts which she created as illustrations for her books and publications. For she was an artist too, having trained at the Westminster School of Art in the 1930s – even more reason for her to be the guiding anima presiding over the ongoing Folklore Tapes quest. Of course, every treasure box needs a map, and one was duly presented here – a guide to finding the geographical locales over which the records layer uncanny atmospheres. Although once there, such inner soundscaping may prove unnecessary. The Genius Loci works its own magic. The green box lid is illustrated with a silhouette profile portrait of a youthful Theo Brown contained within a circle, as if it were intended for a lover’s locket. Her face is lined with the fine cracquelure of leaf-lined veins, fragile and fissile but in its verdure holding the promise of renewed life. It’s a superb illustration which amounts to a declaration of love, and a determination to keep Theo’s spirit and vitality alive. It is this continuity of spirit, I feel, which lies at the heart of the whole Folklore Tapes adventure.


After a year or so, the Devon diaspora began. Folklore folks lit out to triangulate the hidden topographies lying between Exeter and Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh, London and the Shetlands, travelling and mapping new roads whilst continuing to unearth the old ways and the legends and lore which inhere within the amalgam of their centuried strata. And David and Ian picked up a ragtag band of fellow travellers along the way, some journeying for a prolonged period, others for a short stretch of the path. Here’s David Jaycock, weaving enchanted arabesques out of arcane guitar tunings as he would go on to do in his feted collaboration with Marry Waterson, the latest scion of the regal folk clan; and here’s Rob St John, visionary crooner of transported states and dream-infused landscapes, paying his respects to the Pendle witches on the 400th anniversary of their infamous trial; and spiritual father Andy Votel, fooling nobody behind his Wicker Man-citing Anworth Kirk nom de stylus, hymning and finding compassionate communion with lost Dartmoor soul Kitty Jay in a manner very different to Seth Lakeman on the second Devon Folklore Tapes release Graves; Magpahi (aka Alison Cooper) and Paper Dollhouse (Astrud Steehouder & Nina Bosnic) investigating rituals and practices in Devon folklore; Carl Turney and Brian Campbell taking off their surgical masks and emerging from the sinister psych Clinic to recreate a succession of calendrical customs; Sam McLoughlin (of Sam and the Plants renown) coaxing electronic sounds from unlikely places and embracing his dark persona as N. Racker; Mary Stark observing the turning wheel of the year and tuning in to the subtle shifts in its moods; The Blue Funz (Alex Borland and Daniel Potter) making merry hell and proving obligingly chameleonic to fit in with the atmosphere or requirements of the occasion, morphing at will into White, Yellow, Black, Gun Metal Grey and even, presumably for a particularly swanky do, Platinum Funz; and, of particular significance, the first post-Broadcast music created by James Cargill, in cahoots with old bandmate Roj Stevens and long-time friend, Ghost Box co-founder, graphic designer and Focus Group collagist Julian House. Their musique concrète narratives continue the direction started on the Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP. The name they have chosen for themselves, Children of Alice, pays homage to Trish Keenan, who loved Lewis Carroll’s book of nonsensical wisdom and in particularly the 1966 Jonathan Miller film, shot in gloriously psychedelic black and white. She is part of the Alice trio, her spirit inhabiting everything they do, and by extension she is also a member of the Folklore Tapes collective. There is no fixed present, only timelessness. She is there, always there.


The house Folklore Tapes musical style could be described as programmatic folk improv concrete psych soundscaping, although even such an unwieldy handle fails to cover all bases. Some concentrate on a few of these elements, others just one (there is an a capella folk tune on one of the Calendar Customs releases), whist the occasional brave soul attempts the whole shebang. Often the approach is more granular and pointillist, attention paid to the particles of sound, the suggestive noises which conjure up half-heard echoes, voices and animate scrabblings with no readily identifiable point of origin. Small sounds require concentrated listening on the part of performer and auditor, bringing artist and listener closer together. MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) and Gruppo Nuova Consonanza (the Italian improv group which numbered Ennio Morricone amongst its ensemble members), with their real time improvisations, AMM with their favouring of small sounds and a tendency towards hushed quietude, and Hugh Davies with his homemade pocket ‘Shozyg’ musical devices all provide useful musical comparisons. But that’s only one aspect of the Folklore Tapes sound. Whilst they generally eschew rock moves, an occasional riff may break out and startle because of its very singularity. Ian Humberstone can certainly crank out the psyched-up guitar when the need arises, and make it sound surprisingly funky at the same time. And whilst this might not be the time and place to rock, there are plenty of sacred stones, and sounds ground and clacked from carefully selected pebbles and flints.


Writing is also an integral part of the FT project. Ian Humberstone’s treatise on Black Dog legends has been a long-treasured and extensively worked-upon endeavour, and gave birth to another treasure box of a release: Folklore Tapes Occultural Creatures Vol.1 – Black Dog Traditions of England. Its Rorschach hound splattered upon a gold embossed disc is an inspired bit of design, and the contents live up to its promise. Ian’s book is at the heart of it, and there are also spoken word interludes in the accompanying recording. The attention to detail in this work of art extends to the traditional inkpad print impressed upon the inside of the box lid, this time a pattern of clawed pawprints arrayed around a central, spiral-inscribed pad. The Black Dog Traditions box (or reliquary, as it is referred to within) is another central release in the Folklore Tapes canon, the realisation of a personal project (obsession?). Ian’s writing is wonderfully poetic and you can feel the presence of Theo Brown standing approvingly at his shoulder. The writing really comes to life when read out in performance. The black dog tales (and particularly the tale of the Barguest of Troller’s Gill) have been adapted into electrifying performance pieces, narration and in the moment musical soundscaping blending with intuitively congruent improvisational nous. The soft Scottish burr of Ian’s lulling reading voice works wonderfully to cast a spell over the entranced audience. Other writers have also been drawn into the fold, including your humble scribe, who has provided the notes to the four extant Calendar Customs releases (celebrating the ritual moments of the old year) and Bristol hauntologist and cultural polymath Richard Locksley-Hobson, who wrote about the eccentric folklorist and local ‘character’ Tatersall Wilkinson for the Lancashire Folklore Tapes release Memories of Hurstwood. And then there is the mysterious Barum Ware, a name which sounds like an old Dorset village centred on an ancient parish church and adjacent inn-house with beech-lined hillfort just beyond its bounds, but which in fact derives from the vases crafted in Barnstaple (once known as Barum) from Devon’s distinctive red clay. And M.Ware is indeed a vessel for jewelled, decadent prose weaving images redolent of Poe and Lovecraft, Beardsley and Harry Clarke. He has produced some illuminated and intoxicating sleeve notes and it is rumoured that his work can also be found in a fabled journal, whose possible provenance is whispered abroad by a favoured few.


The inspired amateurism of Theo Brown makes itself felt in the instrumentation with which the Folklore Tapes musical researchers draw their sound pictures. These are charity shop orchestras and boot fair chamber groups. Amplified thumb pianos are constructed from hacksaw blades, player pianos reconditioned with bellchimes bolted on, home-strung wire zithers mic’d up for radiophonic ‘terror zings’, battery operated fans used as whirring propellor-plectra, paint pots and other household hardware pattered upon and bicycle wheels set into perpetual motion by attaching them to turntables and run with a lightly held stick for bespoke plinking thruuungs. Harmoniums, warmly humming portable analogue synths, bells, accordions, fiddles and even guitars are even employed. It makes for a fascinating performative spectacle, audiences craning forward to try and work out exactly how these sounds are being produced by these folk intently crouched over their floor-scattered devices as if they were cooking a pan of beans over a campfire. No ELP sized fleet of articulated lorries is required for this nonetheless rich and varied orchestra. It all fits quite comfortably in a hired transit van.


The budget ingenuity and of necessity-birthed invention (of necessity and, I suspect, also of moral choice) extends to the garage and garden shed multimedia contraptions which are employed for performances in art galleries, witchcraft museums and riverside festival tents. All have a whiff of Heath-Robinsonesque absurdity, but it’s a wonderful absurdity, a discovery of utility in the throwaway (without any Womble preciousness). Feathers, leaves and branches are scattered about and decked around pillars and posts. The husk of a fan becomes a mandala upon which a sheep’s skull is reverently placed (decorated with curved twigs and soon fleshed with candle wax). An antediluvian smoke machine wheezes thickenting seafogs out of its battered frame, filling tent spaces until radiant shafts of coloured light seem to take on an almost physical form. Sheets are hung up and become screens for the outline projection of ferns, dried flowers and seedheads. And centrally, an old overhead projector is switched into heat-producing action (the heat an occasional boon in some chilly environs). A functional device once associated with lectures and lessons, the rigorous and formalised decanting of fixed knowledge, becomes an anarchic and defiantly hands-on artistic tool (and one in which the prestidigitating hand of the artist is made transparently apparent). Transparencies are picked up and thrust under the light before being whipped away and replaced with another lying close to hand; a rapid transference performed with semi-improvised urgency. It’s a reincarnation of the magic lantern shows of the pre-cinematic age using 70s technology. Bill Douglas would have approved. Coloured inks are occasionally flicked and smeared across the transparencies with violent action art gestures. Inky fingers are then wiped across light-dazzled brows, leaving blue eye shadows and scarlet scars. This shamanic face-painting lends the illuminated operators a look of wild intensity, smudged with coloured axle grease from the mechanical toil of fixing immortal engines and sparking soft machines. These are the labours of the Folklore Tapes collective. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. And these boys and girls now have a good many years of experience underneath their belts. Long may the merry parade continue. Here’s to the next five years of research into the timeless.