"I lived in a little terraced house, in an area popular with young families. When the baby Ott3r arrived, amidst a storm of primary coloured plastic and weird things that I still haven't worked out the use of, we bought a baby monitor. It turns out that there are only so many frequencies: after rushing upstairs to calm the cries of mysteriously sleeping baby on a couple of occasions, we figured out that someone was using OUR frequency. Well, something had to be done. So, in the wee small hours of the morning...I picked up the 'transmit' bit of the baby monitor, and started speaking into it... And so it was that a house a few doors up the street suddenly lit up as (I imagine) the concerned parents rushed to baby's room to find the source of a creepy baby voice that was repeating "Satan is my Maaaaaster, Satan is my Maaaaaster"."
I think this almost tops my favourite payback story, which I first heard from the writer and broadcaster Dr Michael O'Donnell.
It concerned a London teaching hospital, where there was a particular medical registrar who was a nasty little shit, particularly towards the student doctors.
A group of these pondered their revenge, and their course of action was determined for them when they discovered that the Registrar had a phobia of snakes.
That weekend, they drove out onto the North Downs and collected three grass snakes (in case you didn't know, grass snakes are not poisonous, but they look a bit like adders, which are). They then took the snakes back to the hospital and let them loose in the Registrar's room while he was elsewhere.
OK, standard medical-student-type prank, you may think. But they added a stroke of malign genius: they left a note on his desk, which read:
Bring On The (Not So) Empty Horses, or 'Robin Hood - Men In Tucks'
Television and the movies have had a lot of mileage out of the Robin Hood story down the years, from Errol Flynn and Richard Greene through to Mel Brooks and Kevin Costner.
One of the most successful and well-regarded retellings of the legend was Robin Of Sherwood, made by Goldcrest Films and HTV West in the mid-1980s. I remember watching it and thinking that, mysticism apart, this was probably the most gritty (and therefore nearer to the real world) adaptation yet. The characters were more rounded than the 'man in green, unconvincing maiden and cipher crew members' tendency of previous efforts. And it had great music by Clannad.
I can't say that I watched it all; I drifted away by the time Michael Praed (Robin) went off to Broadway and was replaced with Jason Connery. But it was one of the better TV series of the time.
By the magic of teh interwebs, it is now possible to watch those most interesting parts of any dramatic production: the out-takes. Below are two collections of bloopers, cock-ups and pranks from the show's whole run. They're probably the funniest I've ever come across and, if nothing else, they suggest that - however hard location filming can be - the cast and crew were having a great time.
Chuckle as Judi Trott (as Marian) completely fails to get to grips with the fundamentals of archery!
Groan as a stick fight between Clive Mantle (as Little John) and Praed ends up with someone's rod seriously bent out of shape!
Giggle as Nickolas Grace (as Robert de Rainault, Sheriff of Nottingham) camps it up like there's no tomorrow!
And cheer as Praed, Grace and the late, lamented Robert Addie (as de Rainault's sidekick, Guy of Gisburne) fail totally to take seriously the trails they have to make to camera to promote the US network which was to screen the show over there (where they called it Robin Hood because Americans have no sense of geography beyond their own shores)!
And as for the horses...well, just watch...and listen.
(Baked by Mictoboy, and posted to the B3ta board (Warning! Some content there NSFW!) just to make us all feel jealous).
**********
Fay Ray - "Different Morning"
Back in 1978/79, when I was in sixth form, we had a record player (as they were then called, my children) in the corner of the Common Room. This was little more than a square wooden box with a Garrard turntable and a crappy speaker bunged in it (we often connected it up to a guitar amp to give it a bit more ooomph).
There was a clique of us who monopolised that corner and who used the machine to play what suited us. This varied from heavy metal (usually courtesy of Andy Beresford - AC/DC for preference) and Led Zeppelin and The Faces (Pol Wong's special interest), via space rock (lots of Hawkwind, with Alan Howells to the fore in this area) to prog (Gabriel-era Genesis). There were other, less frequent, excursions into new wave and what would come much later to be called 'indie'.
It was the dawn of the independent labels, proliferating in the space afforded by the explosion of musical activity following punk. DinDisc (OMD), Mute (Silicon Teens), Bludgeon Riffola (Def Leppard); they all made their appearances in our corner.
It was there I first heard a record on another label I'd never heard of. The label was Duff, the band was called Hot Water, and the single (strictly speaking, the B-side) was called Different Morning. It was one of the better tracks I'd heard from that whole era, and although I didn't get a copy myself due to a shortage of funds and a lack of opportunity, I never completely forgot it. I find now that someone is trying to sell a copy on eBay for £40, when the book price for it is probably around a quarter of that. Good luck, fella.
Hot Water didn't last all that long, and most of the band morphed into a group called Fay Ray. They released one well-regarded album before their record company dumped them, but included on that LP was a cover of Different Morning. What follows is a clip of Fay Ray's version, presumably recorded for promotional release. It seems to have the energy I remember from the Hot Water version, though.
Some thoughts on this clip: firstly the antics of the lead guitarist. John Lovering (who wrote this track) was at that time a lecturer in economics at University College Bangor. He's now Professor of Urban Development and Governance at Cardiff University. Someone commenting on the YouTube clip below said that he was trying to be like Robert Fripp, but I see a strong resemblance to the engineer and author Tim Hunkin. Secondly, there is a very visible saxophonist on this clip. Goodness knows why, because - blowing up a storm as he obviously is at times - he is completely inaudible (although sax featured strongly on the original Hot Water recording, as I recall it).
Anyway, enjoy:
Update: Through devious means, I've managed to get to hear Fay Ray's 1982 album Contact You. It's a good one, which makes it all the sadder that it has never been officially reissued on CD. Perhaps also the cokehead wankers of Warners could be persuaded to loosen their grip on the band's second LP, which has lain unreleased in their vaults these last twenty-seven years.
"A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings"
In his Inaugural Address as Rector of Glasgow University in 1972, a speech which was reported on the front page of the New York Times (which compared it to Lincoln at Gettysburg), the trade union leader Jimmy Reid got it so right. The correctness of his analysis is even more apparent today, and the need for his vision greater than it has ever been in my lifetime:
"Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.
"Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.
"Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially de-humanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well-adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else. They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid-West. He hated suggestions for things like medi-care, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn't work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think - have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have."
"It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However, it is wrong. They are as much products of society, and of a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop-out. They are losers. They have lost the essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not Oz, a magazine I haven't seen, let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed - although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.
"Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.
"Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like "this full-bodied specimen". Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of the bloke's eulogy. Then he concludes - "and now I give...", then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.
"The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term "the rat race". The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended, friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, "Listen, you look after number one." Or as they say in London, "Bang the bell, Jack, I'm on the bus."
"To the students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?"
"Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.
"Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.
"From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant, without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the West of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.
"The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.
"Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It's once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked "Where do you come from?" I can reply: "The Western Region." It even sounds like a hospital board.
"It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals - where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.
"Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under 'M' for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.
"If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let's make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let's gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.
"Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people's participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.
"To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It's a social crime. The flowering of each individual's personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone's development.
"In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with a full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.
"Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard, initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.
"My conclusion is to re-affirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It's an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man' s heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In "Why should we idly waste our prime...":
"The golden age, we'll then revive, each man shall be a brother,
In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,
In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,
And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature."
"It's my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It's a goal worth fighting for."
I'll just throw this in here quickly before I go to bed.
It's 1968. I am about six years old. If I have been a good boy, my mother lets me take her brand-new Marconiphone transistor radio up to bed with me for an hour or so (so it would be around eight o'clock).
I listen mostly to Radio Luxembourg. A particularly catchy record is getting what would later be termed 'heavy rotation'. There are no lyrics; just a tune on an acoustic guitar with a lively orchestral accompaniment.
It is some years later before I find out that the piece is called Classical Gas, and was composed and performed by one Mason Williams, an American musician and comedy writer.
Over forty years on from when I first heard it (complete with the legendary 'Luxembourg Fade'), I still think it's a wonderful piece.
In the first clip below, you can see Williams and orchestra performing it on an edition of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (for which he was chief writer), with the familiar Mike Post arrangement.
Then, as a bonus, the second clip features a purely acoustic version which Williams recorded for his 1970 album Hand Made. It provides for an interesting contrast with the recording which many of us have known and loved for much of our lives.
This is strangely, movingly beautiful (click on the image below):
(Four warnings: 1. You'll need Adobe Flash enabled, 2. It loops forever if you let it, 3. The sound level is a bit loud, 4. You could end up as I have done, struggling to keep watching it through your tears - it really is that beautiful)
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - "Last Night In Soho"
Back at the start of last year, I did a brief obit of Dave Dee, mentioning one of their more intriguing hits, "Last Night In Soho", written (as were all their chart records) by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley.
Contrary to what I said then, it's quite clear now that the song was not about a rent-boy, but rather about a young hit-man for the gangsters who proliferated around the seedy side of Swinging London. The lyrics are here.
It's a great story song - and was Dave Dee's stated favourite as a result - and it's a song I've not been able to get very far away from in the last eighteen months. So I thought I might as well link to a YouTube video of them performing (i.e. miming) on the German TV show Beat Club at the time of its release.
It's in that terrible fake stereo they went in for around that time and the sound drops out briefly at the start of the last verse, but the excellence still shines through.
One of my favourite writers on the web is Philip Challinor, who blogs as The Curmudgeon. He writes with a combination of ascerbity, asperity, absurdity, irony and outrage about literature, politics and society (amongst other - more mundane - concerns).
It is not simply because he is probably the only blogger (yech!!) who links back to here that I warmly recommmend him, and particularly two of his most recent pieces:
Atheist Ireland have produced a simpler, clearer version of The Copenhagen Declaration (featured here on 29/06/10):
Declaration on Religion in Public Life
"We support this amended version of the Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life. We invite other people and groups to also support it.
Personal Freedoms
Freedom of conscience, religion and belief are unlimited. Freedom to practice religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.
All people should be free to participate equally in public life, and should be treated equally before the law and in the democratic process.
Freedom of expression should be limited only as prescribed in international law. All blasphemy laws should be repealed.
Secular Democracy
Society should be based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Public policy should be formed by applying reason to evidence.
Government should be secular. The state should be strictly neutral in matters of religion, favoring none and discriminating against none.
Religions should have no special financial consideration in public life, such as tax-free status for religious activities, or grants to promote religion or run faith schools.
Secular Education
State education should be secular. Children should be taught about the diversity of religious beliefs in an objective manner, with no faith formation in school hours.
Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Science should be taught free from religious interference.
One Law For All
There should be one law for all, democratically decided and evenly enforced, with no jurisdiction for religious courts to settle civil matters or family disputes.
The law should not criminalize private conduct that respects the rights of others because the doctrine of any religion deems such conduct to be immoral.
Employers or social service providers with religious beliefs should not be allowed to discriminate on any grounds not essential to the job in question."
Needless to say, Thy Judge commandeth thee to read, absorb and Spread The Word.
...and that, to me, is a scary concept in itself. I'm taking you back to a point in my life where contemplating thirty-five years was akin to countenancing eternity. Thirty-five years back, to me then, was Ancient History. I mean, from that point it would have meant going back all the way to 1940, to a time when not only did I not exist, but to when my parents probably hadn't even met yet. So much had happened, so much had changed; a war had been fought and - ostensibly - won (although the ideas of the Nazis have never really died, and the world was still going to spend decades divided against itself).
So the mere notion of thirty-five years would have seemed unreal to me at the time. And yet, here I am guiding you back to my own 1940, as 'twere.
Anyway, to cut - as they say - to the chase. It is the summer of 1975; one of the last real summers we had here. I was thirteen years old. The weather was hot, humid and sticky. And so was I. Late nights featured an open bedroom window, me wearing in bed as little as possible consistent with the need to cover potential embarrassment, as even being under a bedsheet raised the temperature to uncomfortable levels.
What late nights also featured was listening to Downtown on Radio City out of Liverpool some thirty miles distant. A late-night programme of easy-ish listening, presented at the weekend by a mad Irish broadcasting legend called Arthur Murphy, and during the week by the smooth, calm voice of Bill Bingham.
The music featured on the shows was, to a large degree, the standard commercial radio playlist of the time, but with the odd excursion (and I mean odd - Isao Tomita's electronic mangling of Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 got what they call 'heavy rotation').
This meant that chart material featured very strongly, although it tended towards the AOR end of the scale (this was way before punk, remember). Which meant that late nights for me meant hearing one of the most sublime songs - and one of the most remarkable feats of production - of the whole pop era; 10cc's I'm Not In Love.
I've remarked elsewhere (well, here to be precise) what a gem of a track that is: a beautiful tune, lyrics at once both wistful and ironic, and a multi-layered production which in its conception and execution seemed many years ahead of what anyone else was doing.
The techniques used in creating the track seem primitive in comparison to the ease of electronic and digital recording and sequencing with which we have become so familiar. But remember, just like Kraftwerk's Autobahn (and more on that here), it was all done with tape, razor blades and a lot of Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg inventiveness.
But just how did Stewart, Gouldman, Godley and Creme bring about this miracle? Listen to this, and be aware of genius at work:
The Judge
RAVES!
