Telling from Birds Toll

The blogging wing of www.julianowen.net Tweeting noises also known to emanate from @JulianMarkOwen

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

On anti-Semitism: the lesson from history doesn’t come with an asterisk

Full disclosure. I’m not Jewish.

Nor am I Muslim, though I’ll speak out against Islamophobia.

I’m not gay, a woman, transgender, black, or brown, but I’ll assert that anyone who is has a fundamental right to equality, and to live without fear.

The vast majority of fellow leftists would surely do likewise. What’s become shockingly clear in the last few days is that far from the majority will do the same when it comes to anti-Semitism. My Facebook timeline has become chock-full of bullshit like this:

Meme 1:

This image says, in terms, that the question ‘Is it anti-Semitic to suggest Hitler supported Zionism?’ is of no interest to anyone beyond Westminster.

Oh, really?

A  few words from Jonathan Freedland:

Ken Livingstone's key mistake was also the most telling. He said Hitler had wanted to pack Germany’s Jews off to “Israel” in 1932. But there was no Israel in 1932. It would not come for another 16 years – too late to provide refuge for the 6 million Jews, including 1 million children, who by then had already been murdered by Hitler.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country deeply and personally effected by all that transpired after 1932. Ken Livingstone is in the news because he defended Naz Shah after she said that Jews should be transported - TRANSPORTED - to America. Okay, she didn't say Jews. She said “Israel”. But you don’t think she meant for Israel to be transported en masse, do you? That she intended Christians to be sent to this mythical piece of unclaimed land? Or Arabs? She meant Jews. Because they’re the problem, right?

To her credit, Shah has since admitted that what she said was anti-Semitic. More than that, she has been praised by her local synagogue for the sincere manner in which she has been learning about the issue. Let’s hope that continues, because the struggles she has overcome to become an MP are unlike anyone else in the House. At her best, we need more Naz Shahs.

We do not need more Ken Livingstones. Because even after Shah admitted that her comments were anti-Semitic, and apologised, he insisted that suggesting the “relocation” of millions of Jews to a faraway land was simply “rude and over-the-top”.

Politically, he had no need to do that. He could have said “She apologised, let’s move on”. But he didn't. He went to great pains to insist that Shah’s “solution” was not anti-Semitic. No great surprise there. When it comes to Jewish matters, there are plenty more examples of him leaving his boot in after the ball has been played. Which is a pisser, because he's a man who backs the NHS, public transport, equality in education, and plenty more things I value besides. But if he walks like an anti-Semite and talks like an anti-Semite, it’s a dereliction of logic not to at least entertain the notion that he is an anti-Semite.

 Meme 2:

The caption is as pernicious as it is disingenuous. Livingstone didn't say "It's wrong for Israel to bomb civilians and murder kids". He said "When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel – this before he went mad". I fully understand why many on the left are tired of Corbyn and his allies getting attacked and derided at every turn, but that really isn't the point. The point is that if Livingstone's words had come out of the mouth of Farage, or David Starkey, there'd be no reserve in condemnation.

Perhaps you agree with Nick Griffin and claim that Livingstone was historically correct in asserting “Hitler was supporting Zionism.” Perhaps you’re one of those citing the Havaara Agreement - “to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine” - as evidence. You know, from the Wiki page that concludes “After the German invasion of Poland and the onset of the Second World War in September 1939, the practical continuation of the Haavara agreement became impossible,” as if everything that happened up to that point had been tickety-fucking-boo.

Again, Livingstone is peddling a classic antisemetic trope. To read without context is to assume that the ‘agreement’ was reached by two parties on a level playing field. But you know that isn’t true. You know that one side lived in fear of being shot, and the other held the gun. As John Blake makes clear in this excellent piece on the subject, historical truth “lives in the whole, not in the parts”.

In response to the ‘Westminster bubble’ meme, a friend of a Facebook friend posted: “Playing the tired old 'anti semitism' card to cover up their modern times atrocities in Palestine”.

“Why are you even talking about Israel?” I asked. “Anti-Semitism effects Jews everywhere, not just those in Israel. If the issue was Islamophobia, you wouldn't start banging on about Saudi Arabia, even though it’s responsible for many more unlawful deaths than Israel, appalling murderousness in Palestinian territories included.”

It’s worth noting that as conversation ‘progressed’, his tone was distinctly cool until the moment I said “I’m on the left”, and he immediately took a turn for the pally: “BTW yes i have friends who are Jewish... also I'm very happily married to a bonny jewish lassie! Best wishes hombre.”

No, I’m not your hombre. Tribal politics sucks. It reduces otherwise smart people to rabid Pavlovian dogs. “Someone I like has been accused of anti-Semitism? Invoke Israel!”

I’m fairly sure that the majority of people liking and sharing these memes are not anti-Semitic. I’m fairly sure they’re generally caring and decent. But when we look at everything that led up to the holocaust, the lesson from history does not come with an asterisk:

“We must always speak out against anti-Semitism”*

*Unless we perceive it to be politically disadvantageous.

Return to that ‘Westminster bubble’ meme. Imagine you’re someone who has been beaten in the street simply for being Jewish. Imagine it’s your grandmother who was the sole survivor of an event that wiped out the entirety of the rest of her family, and she’s showing you her photo album yet again because she’s desperate that their memory live on. A family, of which you are a descendant, slaughtered simply because of their religion.

As I say, I’m not that person. But if I was, and I saw friends sharing a photo that said “All of these issues concern me, except yours,” I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t only feel disillusioned, or upset, or abandoned. On some level, I’m pretty sure I’d feel scared. I’d be horribly, viscerally aware of what can happen when society begins to make excuses for anti-Semitism. When people who might otherwise be allies say “Sure, I know he said that, but here’s the real issue...”

No, anti-Semitism is the issue.

Deal with it.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

13 Truths We’ve Learned From The Attacks On Paris

I’ve never known the world to feel a more confusing place.

Certain points, though, stand in stark clarity:

1. If you didn't know before why so many refugees are seeking shelter in Europe, you do now; if your home was in territory governed by the group behind the Paris attacks, you would run, too.

2. If you claim to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Parisians, but would deny refugees sanctuary in your own neighbourhood, you might want to have a quiet word with yourself; they are victims of the same people.

3. Our multicultural society represents everything IS stands against. The more we embrace it, the swifter their defeat in the UK.

4. It is ludicrous to dispute that Western foreign policy has been a causal factor in the rise of IS. It rose in a power vacuum we helped create.

5. Right now, that really, really isn’t the point.

6. The most widely agreed lesson from the history of the last century is: you should never appease fascism.

7. Recent statement from the Green party: “World leaders must defeat ISIS using the weapon that these terrorists fear most of all: peace talks.”

8. Rewrite the statement using different fascists. Say it aloud. Listen to how hollow it sounds: “World leaders must defeat the Nazis using the weapon that Hitler fears most of all: peace talks.” 

9. Talking means compromise. Compromise means being prepared to have people living in IS controlled land. Land where unfavoured people are systematically wiped out.

10. When we see black and white film of people being systematically wiped out, we say “Never again”. We should say the same when we see it in colour.

11. As dirty and imperfect and awful as its foreign policy actions have been, there is no moral equivalence between the West and IS: one side kills people in a nightclub with off-target missles; the other kills them because they’re in a nightclub.

12. They are not simply a nebulous threat, like al Qaeda. They hold territory. They hold people in that territory. 

13. They are more expansionist in intent than the last fascist regime to hit Paris. The world cannot choose whether or not to confront them. It can only choose when.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

A brief history of world-shaping images

“Please stop sharing that photo of a burning girl on my timeline.” Twitter, 12 June 1972

Step from that parallel world back into this one. The one where a young Syrian boy was found drowned on a beach, and people pleaded for others to stop sharing images of his demise.

Head for Twitter, Facebook, or similar. Post Nick Ut’s iconic image of a naked, napalmed nine-year old, running crying down a road after her village was bombed by South Vietnamese forces. Just don’t expect a reaction. 

We’ve dealt with Kim Phúc. Her moment of terror is filed away in our mind somewhere near black and white film of piles of lifeless bodies being bulldozed into pits, or sprawled skeletal huddles staring wide-eyed into the cameras of Belsen liberators. 

No one is begging for cable channels to stop rerunning these and similar scenes on a daily daytime basis. The people pressed against barbed wire fences are a “But seriously, though...” interlude in a film reel we all know by heart, spooling through to Del Boy falling through the bar, “Don't tell him, Pike” and an elephant crapping on the studio floor. 

This isn’t to say we don’t look on with compassion at the famished masses in striped uniforms. We do. But we do so in the knowledge that we can do nothing to help. Even as we quietly mouth “never again,” we reassure ourselves that the pictures are history’s responsibility. 

The life of a little boy from Syria is worth no more or less than that of a Vietnamese peasant girl in Trang Bang or an elderly Jewish man in Auschwitz. Right now, it simply seems that way. There is surely only one reason for calls to stop sharing images of the boy on the beach: the photo has nothing to do with yesteryear, everything to do with right now. It is our responsibility, yet we feel powerless. Please, just let me look away... 

Or let me blame David Cameron. While Angela Merkel said on Monday that Germany will take at least 800,000 asylum seekers this year, the Prime Minister said yesterday: “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees.” As if anyone was arguing that offering sanctuary was the solution, rather than reflexive humane response. 

But don’t blame Cameron too much. He’s a politician articulating what seemed, until yesterday, the mood of the majority. 2,500 asylum seekers drowned before the little boy, in this year alone. We knew this. Broadcast news has been updating the tally regularly. Within six months of Italy stopping its Mediterranean search and rescue mission last October, there was a 50-fold increase in deaths. The rise was predicted. The Italians ended their help after EU member states refused a plea for a collective contribution of just £6.5m a month. In the UK, Cameron heard no dissent save for a few murmurs from the usual suspects. 

We can blame the press, dedicated fanners of anti-immigrant flames, whose language has changed overnight. As Robert Webb noted of this morning’s LBC’s breakfast show: “After weeks of anti-'migrant' shit, Nick Ferrari now doing his Sunday voice for dead little boy. Nick, shouldn't that be 'little migrant'?” 

But don’t blame the press too much. Like politicians, it’s in their interest to chime with the public mood, not cut against it. It was this morning that we read “The Sun urges David Cameron to help those in a life-and-death struggle not of their making”. Not yesterday morning. Not before they’d registered a shift in opinion. 

We can blame ourselves. People trying to escape conflict or poverty in Syria, Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, more, have been drowning in the Mediterranean for a very long time. A catastrophic lack of imagination and empathy meant it required a single image of a single boy for us to finally take notice. 

But don’t blame ourselves too much. It is a time for positive action, not negative. Europe is confronted with its greatest refugee crisis since 1945, and there is so very much to be done. 

Ensure your local MP follows the line of David Burrowes, Tory MP for Enfield Southgate. Generally vocal in opposition to immigration, today he said: “At the very least what we should be doing is accepting more than 1% of Syrian refugees because we accept more than 1% responsibility. We should be looking in the region of thousands rather than hundreds.” 

Sign the petition asking that parliament debate a motion to ‘Accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK’. Parliament considers all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures - at the time of writing it has 133,000. More would be useful. 

Support those organisations actively working and campaigning on the front line, among them Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Refugee Action. 

If the loss of a single life is a tragedy, then to help save one is priceless.

Image: AP/Press Association Images

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Farewell, farewell: remembering Nick Talbot

Nb. You’ve come through to Personal Reminiscence about Nick Talbot, aka Gravenhurst. If it’s Informative Obituary you’re after, I recommend you go here. 

There aren’t too many people you clearly remember meeting for the first time. I met Nick Talbot sitting next to the jukebox in the Cadbury pub, Bristol, me facing the bar and his check shirt backing against it. He had released one album, Internal Travels, and I was interviewing him about the imminent release of the second, Flashlight Seasons. We hit it off. He waxed lyrical about a-ha - never trust a 'music fan' who doesn’t like pop - and I introduced him to Bert Jansch. At meeting’s end, he gave me an unmastered copy of the new album, and I crossed the road home, put on the CD, and had my ears swoon clean off. In review I said that it 

Chronicles life with a clarity of sound, voice and lyricism that is at times breathtaking, at others shocking, but never less than entirely involving – pretty as it sounds, you wouldn’t dare turn your back on it for a second. 

Later that week I went to see Nick play at Jesse Morningstar’s wonderful, properly all-comers open mic night at the Chelsea in Easton. It was rather like Lionel Messi turning out for a Sunday league pub team.

Friendship grew swift. Trips to stay with he and Erin out by the river were a particular treat, there was that wondrous time when I managed to catch his US tour with Broadcast, in Portland, and I have seldom felt more proud than when he dedicated my favourite track, The Ice Tree, to me at Flashlight’s launch. “It’s the weakest track on the album,” he said afterwards, and, in retrospect, he was right. “I caress where my lover once lay by side… she could not know me, if I know not myself” was catnip to a perma-lovelorn hack, but uncharacteristically wistful of Nick. Nick didn’t do wistful. He did beautiful. He did physical, forensic, violent, and it all added up to beautiful because there is nothing more beautiful than someone saying ‘Here’s the world as it really is’. Even if difficult, truth reassures; saccharine and sentiment unsettle.

Which, emphatically, is not to say that Nick didn’t do love. He did it in song, and he did it in life. He had a more comprehensive grasp of political philosophy than anyone else I’ve met, all of it firing a passionate belief in social justice. His innate rationalism wasn’t cold or austere, but imbued with warmth in the fact that the world could and should be so much fairer. See blog for details. And, by goodness, he was funny. See blog again. Also, his comic.

Musically, Nick never stood still, be it in collaboration, or the album-by-album evolution of his solo work. Increasingly, an awful lot of his satisfaction came from song writing. He became ever more determined to say more with less. So it was that on his last album of new material, The Ghost in Daylight, he was able to write The Foundry, and this imagistic summary of all that happened at Auschwitz. All six words of it: “the gathering dust on Aspen leaves”.

Music wasn’t always a natural home for Nick's intellect. When I interviewed him before the release of The Western Lands, he said: 

If a song deals with anything beyond happy-clappy ‘I love you, I want you back’, you’re ‘a bit arty’. Nick Cave said in a lecture ‘You can’t trust happiness unless it’s breathed the same air as despair’, and he’s right. This shouldn’t even need to be raised. When I talk about these things in interviews, I’m almost made to feel like I’m special pleading: ‘Well, yeah, I know my stuff is a bit pretentious but, look, I’ve got good reasons for writing about these things’. I think ‘Fucking hell, no writer or director would be forced into this position of trying to justify themselves’. There’s a rampant strain of anti-intellectualism in the music industry. 

Trish Keenan, of Broadcast, helped him hugely. 

Trish said: ‘You should take what you do really seriously, but you mustn’t take yourself seriously’. That’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. 

Nick was devastated when Trish died, and now here we all are today. Of all the many things I’d like to say to Nick, the one most repeatedly coming to mind is this: I want to express my disappointment at his finally having sold out. After years of stoic integrity, his final act was to push up album sales by tragically dying in the run up to Christmas. I’d tell him this because it would be punctuated by his exploding in laughter.

“Fuck off!” he would add. “Who do you think I am, John fucking Lennon? Anyway, Mr Keeping It Real, I see you climbed aboard the Artist I Knew bandwagon pretty bloody quickly.”

"Oh, please. If I was looking for attention I’d be writing all about the time you thought it would be a good idea to [REDACTED], or the night you confessed to having [REDACTED], or simply that [REDACTED]. No, I’m writing this because you were a dear and irreplaceable friend, and trying to put your loss into words is a first step in trying to come to terms with it.”

“I know, dude, but you can do that without publishing it.”

“Yeah… well… people will want to read about you, Nick. That helps too, you know?”

“…”

“And, well, yeah, maybe I do want to identify myself alongside you. Who wouldn’t? Do you have any clue how privileged I felt whenever you'd send me a CD or file of a work in progress? Or my pride in the fact that you rated my writing? You were fucking extraordinary.”

So, there’s one imaginary conversation. There have been countless others, each as ultimately futile as the last. Of all death’s many cruelties, the incessant impulse to talk to the deceased ranks high. I’m put in mind of a song by Flipron, another West Country band with an eye for an acute lyric: “Let us drink to the telephone and the line that disappears down my street / I remember it used to lead somewhere, but today it just doesn’t reach.”

As an Englishman of a certain age, I really don’t have many friendships where time spent together is closed by the sharing of a hug and an “I love you”. Thus has begun one of those rare moments when one can only assume that the planet’s special effects team has stepped in. Because how else to explain daylight following nightfall when the world has, surely, jarred to a halt?

Nick wasn’t my brother, or son. He wasn’t my trusted musical collaborator, or housemate. Seeing Nick wasn’t a regular feature of my weekly routine, or even monthly. My world will restart sooner than many people’s, and with a void easier to negotiate in the day-to-day. To all those closest to him, I know something of your loss, but most of it is beyond my comprehension. I can only offer my sincerest condolences, and the hope that there is at least some comfort to be taken in the fact that your boy, your brother, your friend, was a musician, a man, who touched so very many lives that he shall never be forgotten.

Peace be with you, Nick.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Urinal Cake II: Local World refuse to pay freelancers, get served with court notice

Back in November, as the last remnant of Venue magazine was closed, I was one of 50 writers and photographers who signed an open letter to its new owners, Local World. They wanted to re-brand the website under the Bristol Post banner, taking all our work with it. This, we explained, had left us a little miffed. More pertinently, we asserted our rights under copyright law. 

Thanks in no small part to the publicity generated - Buzzfeed, Guardian, et al - their plans dissolved. The site was left untouched. 

That’s when things took a turn for the punitive.

Tom Phillips and I, the only journalists employed on Venue in its final weeks, were refused payment for our work. Implicitly at first, with all queries left unanswered. Then, on February 17, confirmation of what we’d long suspected: 

We received instructions last year from the Bristol office to hold off with the payments for your invoices, wrote Local World’s Leicester-based accounts department. 

That same day, I wrote to the Bristol office. I explained that, if they didn’t send payment by the end of the month, I’d be left with little choice but to take them to court. Month’s end was still some way off. They had plenty of time. There was no reply. 

I’d suggest the ambivalence lay in Local World’s revision of its management structure; its promotion of sales staff to key posts; phasing out people who might describe this post as a “journalistic report”, rather than a “content-providing solution for the personal blogging platform”. 

Because of all the editors I’ve known, there’s not a single one who wouldn’t have immediately been demanding to know what in god’s name the money-deniers thought they were up to. “Sue them if you think you’ve got a case, but you can’t just refuse to pay them!” 

One or two might have suggested sending the boys round as an alternative. 

And most would have added “If you’re assuming to collectively quote us, you should have said ‘a sanctimonious journalistic report’”. They’re a hard breed, editors, but generally fair. 

But there was no one of editorial background amid the Bristol office coterie. Their culpability was so obvious, a loss in court so inevitable, I still couldn’t quite believe they weren’t prepared to offer a belated mea culpa. Yet as the silence went on, the more it seemed they genuinely believed that paying someone for completed work wasn’t practically the first line of employment law, but a trifling optional extra. I began to picture the people responsible meeting for conspiratorial cups of coffee at the nearest available Costa, each brandishing a soggy biscotti as if it was the Sword of Damocles itself. 

Eventually, on the last day of February, one of their number got in touch with Tom: 

I have referred your invoices to [regional MD] Sarah Pullen who will make the decision regarding payment. We’re just fitting her up for the sword. 

Yes, I made up the second bit. And no, it isn’t as laughable as the first. 

Clearly, it was time to take recourse in the law. The week before Venue closed, Local World’s Chief Executive, David Montgomery, declared the skills required by his new strain of journalists content-harvesters to be “generally present in most 12-year-olds”. One can only surmise that the age threshold for entering management is altogether lower. 

On March 10 my claim was served at the Local World head office in London, and on March 11 I received a flurry of URGENT!-marked emails. Wiser heads had prevailed. All outstanding monies would be paid into my bank account first thing next morning, they assured me. I told them that, if they paid my £60 costs as well, I’d waive my claim for interest and consider the matter closed. Next morning, the outstanding sum, plus costs, were paid into my account. I withdrew the claim.

So, there it is. I’m not so disingenuous as not to understand the Bristol office’s desire to take punitive action - they were placed under an intense spotlight on November 29, all the more dazzling for its swift unexpectedness. 

Equally, I can’t help but think they were hugely reckless - people have been left homeless for want of a lot less than £810. 

To my great good fortune, the withholding of payment came during a bit of freelancing purple patch, and I was unaffected by its absence. Better, the sum would originally have come to me in stages and be long-since frittered by now. Instead, coming in a lump, it has afforded me a long-overdue, shiny new computer upon which to carry on freelancing. Equally satisfyingly, some of the aforesaid commissions came as a result of the profile generated by Local World’s actions. In looking to punish me they were, ultimately, hoisted by their own regard.

These are passing fancies. Not the things that will stay with me. What will stay with each of the 50 signatories to the open letter is the extraordinary level of public support for our action, not only in the UK, but around the world; the biggest director of traffic to the original open letter was National Geographic. I know I write on behalf of all of us when I offer sincere thanks to all who helped spread the word, sent messages of encouragement, and who, on the day Venue finally closed, helped turn what should have been a melancholic wake into beaming celebration. We hadn't a hope of success without you.

Perhaps our only failure was in not being able to convince Local World that it wasn’t simply copyright law they needed to be mindful of, but their treatment of employees in general. With a little help, maybe they can be encouraged in that direction, too. 

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Meet the letter writers: Marc Crewe (deceased)

One of the late signatories to Venue's 'Last Post', Ellen Doherty, has already been celebrated, lamented in this blog. It now seems right and timely to remember the other. Without the enduring inspiration of Marc Crewe - Doc - the #ripvenue open letter and attendant hoopla would never have happened. This tribute was originally published in Venue magazine in December 2008. And though it might be an obituary, please be warned it is also what the Guardian would term "expletive-ridden". Like, seriously. 

Doc was the kind of cunt who’d laugh darkly if he thought his passing might precipitate a record for the most gratuitous use of the word ‘cunt’ in an obituary (cunt). Such was his apparent, proudly worn cynicism. But it was a cynicism born of frustration, the black humoured frustration of a man with a deep and rare passion for life’s moments of beauty, railing against and never accepting why those moments had to be so fucking fleeting. Still, the moments were many. Country walks with a pub in the middle, The Fall, Nick Cave, the richness of the English language and those who use it best, Scott Walker, Steely fucking Dan, secretly reading Dostoyevsky in the school library because 14 year old boys living in Wotton-under-Edge just can’t admit to that kind of thing, drugs, drink, open-hearted sharing of aspirations and fears and love, the bit that goes ‘Dur! Dur! Dur! DURR!’ in ‘North Country Boy’, writing and performing poetry, Homer Simpson, Richard Thompson, the moment of personal liberation that was the onset of punk, smoking, loyalty, food, and above all – way and enduringly above all – Lesley, Tom, Joe and Rachel, to whom Doc’s beloved words will never be able to adequately express my sympathy.

Ten years ago, when Venue gave me my first paid journalistic work, Doc took me under his wing. He believed in my writing, backed me, and filled me with confidence and booze. In those less professional days, a quick lunchtime drink would become long afternoon drinks, on into early evening and still further into late night. He talked with a perceptive, straightforward, matter-of-fact honesty like no one I’d ever met. I didn’t know you were allowed to talk like that, and I fucking loved it. He’d share his darkest thoughts, give wise counsel to mine, and be utterly, beamingly joyous in the midst of those fleeting moments. Though ill health began latterly to feed his cynicism more readily, those moments – though fewer – still came. Collectively, they leave me writing words in tribute to the coarsest member of a tiny group of people who have profoundly shaped my understanding of friendship and my way of thinking, and to give thanks – horribly fucking premature thanks – for a life unreservedly, unapologetically lived.

And I do this because Doc has reneged on a promise – unspoken, but a promise alright, made plain through years of surviving seemingly unsurvivable excess – to be indestructible. He should be reading this copy now, telling me “there’s no such word as ‘alright’, all right?” and calling me precious for insisting it remain unaltered. He should also be reading back the sentence about the promise and telling me that I still use too many fucking sub-clauses. Then he’ll quietly change it, make it read better, and smile a smile of professional satisfaction when I don’t notice the difference. But he isn’t, and he won’t. And that sentence, that unusually straightforward sentence, currently makes no sense at all. 

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Venue: The Last Post

Dear Local World, 

So, here we are then. Friday 29 November 2013. Venue’s last day on Earth. Hours from being swept away as part of what you so dreamily term “the development of the what’s on module". Sometime in December, we learn, venue.co.uk will re-emerge, like butterfly become grub, as www.bristolpostwhatson.co.uk. Because, heck, nothing answers “Hey, where to find what’s happening in town tonight?” quite so snappily as www. bristolpostwhatson.co.uk. Given a firm push, a downhill gradient and a stiff following wind, it just rolls off the tongue. 

It may surprise you to learn we don’t necessarily have a problem with you closing the Venue website. Don’t get us wrong, it is curious timing. As you know, the most recent figures for daily page hits are: August - 44,162; September - 48,544; October - 55,824. Nevertheless, the two remaining of our number, working part-time on alternate weeks, would be the first to admit that Venue is a husk of its former self. Frankly, they’ll be glad to be put out of their misery. Where once they were part of a vast team of journalists delivering informed, first-hand comment from every last facet of city life, today our hapless duo struggle to do much more than pass on received opinion and rehash press releases. Naturally, we don’t have to explain this process to you, Local World, but we’re keenly aware that newcomers to the site might look at recent content and wonder at our concern. 

We’ll come to that shortly, but, this being an open letter, a brief history lesson for the uninitiated (we’re being tactful here, Local World - we’re all too aware you haven’t got a fucking clue yourselves). Venue magazine began life in 1982, covering Bristol and Bath and surrounds, and swiftly gaining a strong national reputation. After 18 proudly independent years it was sold to Bristol United Press, owned by your predecessor, the Northcliffe Newspaper Group. Last year, having suffered death by a thousand cuts and a colourful assortment of full-frontal stabbings, the magazine was closed down. Today, it’s fallen to you, Local World, to apply the coup-de-graceless and bring down the final curtain on 31 years of work. 

And hand it all over to the Post. 

The Post, which decreed all street art as vandalism for years, and yet today, having so very belatedly recognised which way the wind is blowing, reaches for Banksy with the same onanistic lust the Express reserves for Diana. 

We’re not going to claim we ever “championed” Banksy. We never really went in for “championing”. We simply covered everything we considered of value. So we might not have “championed” street art, but we did report it. Always. Even before 1985, the year of Arnolfini’s seminal ‘Graffiti Art’ exhibition, featuring work from the UK’s first wave of can-wielders. One of them was called 3D, or Robert Del Naja. He went on to co-found Massive Attack. We put Massive Attack on the cover before they’d even released a single. 

Do you see what we’re driving at here? Have you any idea the number of wonderful bands, and theatre groups, and artists, and voluntary organisations, and filmmakers, and minority groups who had no voice anywhere else, at all, ever, and poets, and DJs, and on, and on, who claim inspiration from something they read in Venue? We make no assertions for the influence of our opinion; we simply did our level best to place a mirror in every last corner of Bristol, no matter how hidden, and allow the city to reflect back on itself. 

And you want to hand over that legacy to a paper whose management - not journalists - are the precise equivalent of those radio stations which promise “your better music mix” and then put the same few songs on repeat. Which claim “the best new music” and fail to add “once it has charted and proved its popularity.” You want to hand over that legacy because, to quote from a staff email you neglected to send us, “The existing Venue website has really good functionality with a real blend of music reviews, listings, restaurant reviews etc, etc. This is a fantastic opportunity to grow our digital audience and a great platform to sell advertising on.” 

Do you have any idea how much that hurts, Local World? Of course you don’t. You who boast all the cultural hinterland of a freshly discarded wet wipe. (Though you do have history, of course: born earlier this year, the helplessly stumbling result of a merger between Iliffe Media and Northcliffe, with a profit forecast of approximately £30 million - that debt-free dowry from the Daily Mail General Trust was a lovely gift, no? And they absolved you of responsibility for the deficit on that pesky old final salary pension scheme. Ah, Local World! You are to localism what urinal cake is to mountain freshness.) 

And now you presume to inherit our work. We were writers, Local World, photographers, not “content providers”. We knew our shit. We didn't settle for doling out essential listings information swimming in platitudinous gloop; we made a fucking good read.

And we really liked to swear.

Our editors consistently backed our individual judgement and allowed us complete freedom of expression. As a result, Venue inspired a loyalty out of all proportion with the pittance it paid. Local World, we put our very heart and soul into our catalogue of work. And if you think you can now simply walk in and trample on its remains, then you can, with the very greatest lack of respect, fuck the fuck off. 

Because we, the undersigned, do hereby assert our full rights under copyright law. It really would be for the best if you were take a moment to visit this page on the Venue website. Sit down, take a deep breath, and pause and reflect on this: “This website and its content is the copyright of the individual authors credited.” Please be assured we did not pull this phrase out of our collective arses, but out of legal statute. And if we perceive so much as a single full-stop, a solitary pixel of our work when your shameless hijacking is unveiled, then you in turn can expect to perceive a court summons. We are, to put it in terms you regularly use but cannot hope to understand, passionate about defending our legacy. 

Sincerely, 

Tim Alban

Robin Askew

Lesley Barnes

Tony Benjamin

Melissa Blease

Anna Britten

Darryl Bullock

Charlotte Butterfield

Jay Chakravorty

Hannah Chapman

Matt Collins

Marc Crewe (deceased)*

Stephen Dalton

Roy Delaney

Ellen Doherty (deceased)*

Carl Dolan

Rebecca Ewing

Kristen Grayewski

Elfyn Griffith

Tom Hackett

Mike Harley

Steve Henwood

Kerry Hood

Gareth Jones

James Martin

Nic Matthews

Tamar Newton

Toby O'Connor Morse

Huw Oliver

Julian Owen

Emma Parkinson

Kid Pensioner

Tom Phillips

Oli Pool

Leah Pritchard

Pat Reid

Jo Renshaw

Andrew Rilstone

Stuart Roberts

Anna Rutherford

Mark Simmons

Delia Sparrow

Joe Spurgeon

John Stevens

Campbell Stevenson

Nick Talbot

Lou Trimby

Rina Vergano

Tom Wainwright

Cris Warren

Ben Welch

Kirsten Williams

Kate Withers

John Christopher Wood

Adam Workman

Steve D Wright

Nicola Yeeles 

*Because if there is an afterlife, and we don’t add these enduringly lamented names to our treatise, we’ll never hear the end of it.

This letter was originally published on the Venue website. It stood at the top of the homepage for an hour and four minutes, before the site was pulled down. Cached version here.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Remembering Ellen Doherty

Mos Def, O2 Academy Bristol, 14 April 2010; Ellen's favourite Venue shoot. www.duchessphotographic.com

It is always the truly individual we cherish most. The brilliant, beautiful Ellen Doherty was most certainly that. As radiant in person as her photography was vivid, she lived a life of rare accomplishment, setting the bar ever higher and jumping it every time.

As music editor at Venue I was privileged to be able to offer space to showcase a wide array of writers and photographers. None made me more proud than Ellen. A great number of would-be contributors had a confidence that overreached their ability; she was the opposite. In the days I’ve spent since her death, reflecting on how she could be so utterly fearless, it pulled me up short to remember how she came to work for the magazine. In January 2009 I interviewed the singer, Joe Volk, then working at the Malawi Education Project. As we concluded, he spoke of a co-worker: a gifted photographer, hugely enthusiastic about the Bristol live music and clubbing scenes, but lacking the confidence to send in samples of her work.

With a little encouragement, they arrived. And, of course, were more than worthy of being rewarded with a try-out. Her first commission came in February: fittingly enough, a hip hop ace, RA The Rugged Man, at The Croft. The following month, I saw her at work for the first time, at The Cube. It was a tricky gig: a crowd pin-drop quiet and seated, band barely louder and equally static. The kind of gig in which a camera shutter can sound like a thunderclap, any movement provoke hissed disapproval. I’ve seen photographers sit in their seats and hope for the best, and I don’t blame them. Ellen, though, laden with camera bags she appeared to have no right to be able to lift, glided back and forth, disturbing neither band nor audience; an art in itself.   

She was invariably immaculately stylish, and yet combined that with no apparent sense of personal vanity. Example: when Rhode Island noise architects, Lightning Bolt, played the Fleece shortly before Christmas 2009, they set up in the middle of the floor, and were soon surrounded on all sides by a tight-knit circle of riotously dancing fans. Circumstances that would test any photographer. More testing still as we recall that, of all of Ellen’s many qualities, an abundance of height was not among them. Typically, she turned the situation to her advantage: clambering on top of the mixing desk and bidding the sound engineer to hold her waist as she leaned over the throng to gain both a bird’s eye view and perfectly moment-capturing images: two musicians in the centre, wild crowd filling out the frame in all directions.

It spoke volumes. I once asked a high profile photographer whether he fancied covering a gig away from his usual haunt. He was keen, until learning the (reputable, well established) venue had no barrier between stage and crowd. Such an attitude was an anathema to Ellen. Yes, she could take magnificent portrait shorts on demand, but that wasn’t the point: a gig wasn’t simply about the figures onstage, but the shared experience of everyone in the room. She was, in the very truest sense, a photo journalist.

It’s this, of course, that drove her most recent - and, I think, her very best - work, in Malawi. Ellen might have been adept at filling gallery walls (you need only look at From Dylan to Dubstep, her project with mentor and former teacher, Keith Baugh), but it was never an end in itself. It was about people, and a sense of place. If you only know her for her music-based work, I’d urge you take a little time to appreciate the extraordinary variety of her work in Africa: the people, the landscape, the wildlife, the way of life. If a picture tells a thousand words, then this selection alone is a whole book on Malawian culture.

Ultimately, her last completed project, Inside Out Malawi, was also her most eloquent. It doesn’t serve as the perfect epitaph. The perfect epitaph should have come decades hence, and detailed the logical progression, the ever more brilliant ambition, of a body of work infused with a desire to give a voice to the voiceless. In this case, transforming the profile of lakeside fishermen from anonymous mass to individual dignity. Ellen’s introduction to the film offers fluent explanation, but it’s the reaction of the participants that speaks of its success. It's still so very hard to comprehend that it was only made last month.

That’s Ellen the professional. I should also speak briefly of Ellen the friend. I’d arrive at gigs earlier than normal in order to enjoy a little catch-up time, often in the knowledge it was likely to be the best part of the evening. She was good for a quotable line of review at gig’s end, too. One night, following a set from a particularly self-important “fusion” band, I deeply regretted the need to fill space on the page meant I couldn’t simply run with Ellen’s delightfully succinct “chundering shitfest”.

My leaving Venue was the catalyst for a friendship away from gigging, fuelled in part by finding solidarity in the ups and downs of freelance life. Whether concerning work or life more generally, we delighted in each other’s triumphs, commiserated in setbacks, and empathised in the battle against procrastination. I said earlier that Ellen was fearless. That’s wrong, of course. She spoke plenty about fear, latterly for obvious reasons, but there was never a fear not pushed aside by a determination to pursue her work, her life.

Part of the sense of loss now, naturally, relates to losing all of those times yet to be shared: this week was to have been beers by a river; we were planning a book; she was about to mentor me in the ways of digital photography (though, strictly speaking, she wasn’t yet aware of this). I suspect the majority of people reading this will have had similar plans, many concerning matters of much greater import.

I write acute in the knowledge that I was an outer satellite in Ellen’s many-starred galaxy. Such was her warmth and breadth of travel, there must surely be hundreds like me, each devastated, tears yet to dry. To those at the centre of Ellen’s universe - those for whom she was a daughter, sister, the closest of friends - I can only offer the most sincere of condolences. If it might bring even the tiniest slice of solace, then please know that to countless people across the globe, Ellen will never be forgotten, and the great good fortune in having known her never overlooked. She was, to coin a word, amazing. 

There will be a wake for Ellen at the Golden Guinea, Bristol, from 2pm on Thu 4 July; then, on Thu 11 July, a screening of 'Purple Rain', at the Portcullis, Clifton, Bristol, from 8pm. See here for full details.

www.breastcanceruk.org.uk

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Wilko Johnson Farewell Tour: Bristol

Every farewell tour holds its own subtext. Even if, as one often suspects, it’s along the lines of “Let’s announce these gigs as the last, pull in a little more lucre, then go round again.” Not here. For Wilko Johnson isn’t merely saying farewell to performing, but, apparently within a matter of months, to life itself. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer shortly before Christmas, on January 2nd he was told he had no more than a year to live.

On February 27th he’s onstage at the Fleece. It’s difficult to conceive of a man bearing greater vitality. You might think to link it to Johnson’s interview with John Wilson on 'Front Row', and the former's warmth-inducing reaction to his prognosis: “Every little thing you see, every cold breeze against your face, every brick in the road, you think ‘I’m alive, I’m alive’.” Or you might think to be less self-consciously mawkish, and acknowledge simple continuity. The prowling, boggle-eyed, tightly coiled stage presence before us tonight is singularly recognisable as the one that swept in from the Canvey Island delta almost 40 years ago, and who, as songwriter-guitarist with Dr Feelgood, tore up the musical landscape just as surely as he did venues across the country.

When the band released ‘Down by the Jetty’ in 1974, the leaders of the church of rock 'n' roll had become remote from their followers. ‘Progressive rock’ could not have been less aptly named. Those ludicrous figures of flabby indulgence were regressive in the extreme, propagating the notion that the one true path lay in technical - even, lord help us, costume - wizardry. Cue Johnson, Lee Brilleaux, and the rest of the Estuary-accented Martin Luthers that comprised Dr Feelgood, prime movers among non-conformists stripping the message back to its bare essentials. Not gathering in expensive, gaudily gilded musical palaces, but in the local on the corner; not claiming greatness on their own behalf, but asserting the great democratic truth that rock ‘n’ roll is music by the people, for the people; strap on a guitar and you, too, can spread the word. Thus, the group that delivered us from self-regarding pomp and inflated the birthing pool of punk.

‘Barbed Wire Blues’, ‘Dr. Dupree’ - tonight’s standout moments from Johnson’s solo back catalogue bear the same hallmark as those wrought from the fierce Feelgood furnace. In his kinetic hands resonate echoes of all that is good and lean and spare: the clipped style of Stax mainstay, Steve Cropper, of blues music’s plugging into electricity in Chicago and, especially, the minimal yet endlessly rich riffs that cascaded from Chuck Berry.

Drummer Dylan Howe boasts a welter of flashy jazz chops, should he wish to deploy them, but instead opts for simple unfussiness throughout. In so doing, he clears the rhythm room floor for the extraordinary bassist to his left, whose sinewy lines brought supple power to any Blockheads classic you care to mention. Any bassist would be forgiven for following simple 12-bar blues patterns on most songs tonight. Most who didn’t, who chose embellishment, would be at risk of adding unwelcome drag to supremely efficient sleekness. Norman Watt-Roy is not most bassists. Like Paul McCartney, or John Entwistle, his playing bestows depth far beyond the call of duty, doesn’t detract from the ferocious energy of Johnson’s playing, but adds to it. As the singer stalks back and forth, Watt-Roy’s own energy is focused entirely on his instrument, studiedly wringing the neck of his bass with the grim, relentless determination of a man trying to strangle a chicken that just won’t die.

“You know that you look so good,” sings Johnson to his cradled guitar. “I wanna live the way I like,” he sings later, the line wrapped around a cheesewire blues riff. These are the moments with which anyone hoping for a sentimental mood must content themselves. A talk show stage is one thing, a musical one quite another, and Johnson doesn’t mention his diagnosis all night. He does ask for sympathy at one point, but sarcastically, and as reaction to pain elsewhere. Earlier in the day he’d been talking to a Japanese journalist on Skype (not, you’d imagine, a common occurrence pre-diagnosis), and became so annoyed that he began stabbing a bread knife firstly into a mattress and then, ironically for a man of such precision, into his hand. “You are sorry for me, aren’t ya?”

At gig’s end comes a simple “We hope you have enjoyed the show,” ‘Back in the Night’ segueing into ‘She Does It Right’, and the most perfect of encores. Covering Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ might have been a live staple for decades, but tonight, placed on the end of the set list, the unspoken becomes, if not spoken, then acknowledged. “Bye! Bye, bye, bye!” sings Johnson. “Bye! Bye, bye, bye!” return the crowd, gleefully, a mass of waves. Thank yous exchanged, the trio file along the back of the bar through a sea of handshakes, and on and away to the next farewell. While the tour cannot help but movingly underscore man’s stark mortality, this particular man remains utterly unbowed, utterly high, it seems, on the joy of sharing songs destined for eternal life. Wilko Johnson: sage against the dying of the light.

 Pic: Brian David Stevens

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

In praise of the humble bell, or To hell with cycling fetishists

A hammer, a metal body. Together, a bell. All history is here: as hammer has fallen unto body, so the world has learned of queens deceased, of kings vanquished; men have been summoned into battle, women and children into lifeboats, ships reported lost; bells, bells, bells, each ring changing the course of events like so many fluttering butterflies in so many Amazonian rainforests; indeed, hung from church towers, as a vast network of inanimate existentialists – a wedding to announce here, a remembrance silence commencing there - they’ve made citizenry aware of the very passing of time itself.

In short, the bell is one of mankind’s most potent, enduring inventions. Unless you work for Mud Dock Cycleworks, Bristol. In which case it ranks some way behind the High V-Neck Downhill Jersey With Eyewear Chamois At Left Interior Sideseam And Anti-Bacterial Fabric Treatment. Or so I must assume for, when I last popped in, said garment was on proud display. As, indeed, were a welter of other should-be humble goods bearing glowing references apparently cooked up by the NASA press office: backpacks, frame wax, and on. But yet... no bells. At all. Anywhere. Not even in the miscellaneous pile of 'value' tat in front of the checkout. Which was a shame for it was Sunday afternoon, recreational cyclists’ rush hour, and I was about to pedal 30 combined miles of thronging cycle path and busily narrow canal edges.

Now, fair’s fair, there are circumstances in which the prominently touted Mud Dock Zest For Trails Organic Soap (yours for a mere £4.50) would offer greater worth than something designed to go ‘ding’. It’s just that none of them involve riding a bike. For this reason, it didn’t strike me as an unreasonable question.

“I wonder whether you might have some bells?”

“Excuse me..?” replied the assistant. I’ll admit, I’m not always the clearest of speakers and, from the look on his face, I rather feared he apprehended I’d questioned his manhood. So I spoke more slowly. “A bell. Might you have a bell? To go ‘ding’?” He heard me clearly this time. I knew this because the look on his face had lost any sense of ambiguity and was now firm. Now he knew he was disgusted. Without a word he turned on his heel, walked into the storeroom and returned with arms outstretched, like a washerwoman bearing horizontal tongs from which drape y-fronts distressingly capable of being deployed with equal utility as beige colour charts. Each hand held a bell. “How much?” I asked, tone involuntarily apologetic, sensing his embarrassed urgency that the transaction be over as swiftly as possible. “Quid for either.” Quid dispatched for the one on the right I left hurriedly, reflective tabard draped around my new purchase like a Roethke around a Razzle.

Outside I sat down to recover. Just what kind of lowlife was I, buying something so desultory there wasn’t even any a) packaging or b) marketing spiel? That said, I’m sure they could have piled bells high and flogged them for a tenner a pop if only they’d thought to tag each one a Soundwave Cascader Featuring Passivated Atomic #13 Casing With Single Action Polypropylene Sidearm. I thought on. Perhaps my reckless disregard at the prospect of carrying extra weight was the issue? But then, as I attached the tiny hemisphere of aluminium to my handlebar, I was reassured to realise I could compensate for the addition of mass by trimming half an inch from each shoelace.

I set off up the cycle path. Suffice to say that, over the course of two hours, 50-odd times my new purchase went ‘ding’ and 49-odd times people graciously, often smilingly, moved aside; I’ll hazard a guess that the single chap who didn’t was a cycling zealot standing firm on principle. To his sort, doubtless, I’m a freak. I’ll tether a tent to my bike rack (yes, a rack – more weight! For shame!) and set off for a couple of hundred miles or so in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. The shirt is not aerodynamically figure-hugging, nor does it breathe in the reassuringly expensive fashion of Gore-Tex®. It breathes like cotton. The shorts are similarly unprepossessing, doing all that I need a pair of shorts to do in that they start at my waist and end above my knees. They do not cling about me like shrinkwrap to a frozen chicken, nor are they padded out with the lumpen lining of Sir’s Package Protection™. Shrewdly, I’d already ensured snug transportation of my giblets by prior purchase of a dinky little thing called a Comfortable Saddle.

Generally on these rides I’ll have the time of my year, for cycling is about escape. From timetables, from traffic, from people, from spending. It’s emphatically not about dropping a small fortune on allegedly cycle-specific goods, dressing head to toe in allegedly cycle-specific gear, and – be still my beating irony detector - affecting to shout “Behold my rugged individualism as I escape your consumerist world!” No, beyond the basics, cycling is in no more need of an industry built around it than is breathing in and out. Or releasing a hammer against a metal body.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

On furthering a gay-friendly world, and reducing the tenderness deficit

I’d been on the planet for 14,657 days before I saw it happen. I’m not the most observant person, admittedly, but still sharp enough to have seen men and women do it together in pretty much any restaurant I’ve ever been in, countless parks, pubs, pavements, on trains and in church, heck, even in the familial home. Often enough, in short, not to really notice it at all anymore. This, however, this I noticed. I suppose not seeing something for the prior 14,656 days will do that to a mind. Because, until last summer, in what would have been the shadow of Bristol cathedral, had the sun been shining, I had never seen two men gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes.

Which means one of things of three things. The sensibility of a gay man is likely to be infinitely less demonstrative than his straight counterpart. On balance, and after careful consideration, I suspect this proposition can be quietly discounted. Second, in appraising people in relationships, the percentage identifying as gay works out roughly as 0.000001%. Feel free to submit evidence to the contrary, but for now I’m going to file that figure under ‘Unlikely’. Which leaves us with proposition three:  a significant minority of couples are gay, but feel hugely less able to alert the world to their love.

At best, this suggests that the world is experiencing a tenderness deficit it can ill afford to do without. Because unless you’re in the throes of post-relationship trauma, if the sight of a couple strolling hand-in-hand doesn’t offer at least a flicker of gladness at renewed confirmation of warmth in all-too-frequently cold cosmos, you might want to get your cynicism levels checked.

And at worst? At worst it’s symptomatic of a society in which gay teenagers are up to four times more likely to kill themselves than their straight peers. Of the many studies into teen gay suicides, the most conservative estimate I’ve seen puts the figure at twice as likely. Twice as likely to conclude that life in this world is not for them, and act accordingly. At this point it’s probably worth noting that the first day I saw two men gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes was also the first time I attended a Pride march, and its attendant, jubilant feeling of collective safety. I have a fancy the two facts are related.

I also fancy I’d become a little complacent. A little too caught up in the pervading notion that society has become a whole lot more comfortable with homosexuality. In many ways, of course, it has. After all, it’s almost half a century since the men outside the cathedral would have smilingly embraced under threat of attracting a suspicion that might ultimately have seen them prosecuted and imprisoned. Gay men on television are no longer exclusively camp, cathode ray-era incarnations of a tradition stretching back into the salad days of music hall, but, by and large, afforded as rounded and three-dimensional a depiction as anyone else. It’s not perfect - it’s generally reserved for ‘quality’ dramas to deploy characters whose homosexuality is unremarked upon, rather than an ishoo in its own right - but nor is it mince or be damned. And we’re led by a Prime Minister with a background more classically old school Tory than any since Sir Alec Douglas-Home nearly 50 years ago, but who would no more denounce gay marriage or seek the reintroduction of Section 28 than he would call for full nationalisation of the education system.

Thus, I see clear evidence of a more gay-friendly world in law, in entertainment media, even in Downing Street. In every facet of life, in fact, apart from the bit comprised of stepping out the front door. Therefore, I can only conclude, if society at large is wholly comfortable with homosexuality, then somebody forgot to tell homosexuals.

In 2011, a YouGov poll commissioned by Stonewall resulted in one in five lesbians, gay men and bisexuals stating that they’d been a victim of a hate crime or incident in the previous three years. That same year, figures revealed that homophobic attacks reported to the police were up by 42% in Brighton, 28% in London, two cities widely perceived as being among the most gay-friendly in the country. Proof that homophobic violence is on the rise, said gay rights campaigners; evidence that victims feel more comfortable reporting hate crime, said police. Either way, confirmation that gay couples had brutally stark reasons to think twice before displaying affection.

Deplorable, of course. A stain on civilised society. But as the rest of us straight folk backslappingly congratulate ourselves that we’re all metrosexual now, tut at the minority spoiling it for everyone else, we absolve ourselves from a responsibility that should be ours. I cannot know how it might feel to be someone - a teenager in particular - living in a world where the choice to reveal sexual identity is to expose oneself to potential threat; I can only imagine. And I’d imagine I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I thought the mindset of a homophobic attacker was exceptional; that perceiving these to be isolated mindsets might sometimes make me fearful, but not suicidal. Not with the reassurance that the rest of the world was standing full square behind me.

 But I’m not at all sure I’d perceive that to be the case. Instead, I think I’d see homophobic violence as the extreme end of a sliding scale of reactions to my sexuality. A sliding scale also including distaste and, commonly, ridicule. Factors lower in level but widespread, altogether more likely to make me wonder whether I could ever attain the most important building block of a happy life: to simultaneously be true to myself and truly accepted. And if I couldn’t see that as ever being likely to happen, then, well, perhaps I’d be among the group up to four times more likely to opt to end things now.

Very few people are directly responsible for violence in the world. We’re all responsible for background noise. Even as we collectively purport to be altogether more gay-friendly than past generations, the use of the word ‘gay’ as a pejorative term has, conversely, become almost endemic. “Your shirt is so gay.” Not only endemic, but meaningless. “You don’t finish work until six? That’s so gay.” Generally, I find, such statements are uttered by people who’d recoil in horror at the thought of pejoratively using ‘black’ or ‘Jewish’. Similarly, you don’t have to watch too much television, often panel shows exclusively featuring people proudly steeped in the alternative school of comedy, for variants of, say, prison shower jokes. I’d reckon that to a man - it’s always a man - they’d vehemently contest they were invoking the age old fear of the predatory gay male (a fear which is, as Stonewall’s YouGov poll makes clear, grimly ironic). But if you’re a gay teenager watching at home, or are in town and overhear the price of a coffee declared “gay,” what’s your reaction? When you’re in bed that night, weighing up the chances of acceptance in the wider world, which side of the ledger is being marked?

And then there’s the church. I’ll be clear: most Christians I know take no issue with homosexuality at all. Even among those who do, the majority would concede that God has an awful lot of earthly troubles to deal with before wearily turning his attention to who's not inserting tab A into slot B. Nevertheless, others still will sigh, the bible is perfectly clear on the matter. They have a point. Leviticus 18:22: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination’. So, if you’re one of those conflicted between humane compassion and biblical truth, a suggestion: why not cast around in Leviticus for something new to fixate on? Perhaps campaign to bar disabled people from approaching church altars (21:16-23), lock menstruating women in solitary confinement and get them to slaughter a couple of pigeons - or turtles, if you have some to hand - when they’re done (15:19-30), or, if you suspect the vicar’s unmarried daughter might be having sex, burn her to death (21:9). There is, of course, a chance you might stir up a new hornet’s nest elsewhere. Or, you might come to conclude that the Book of Leviticus is the product of a whole other time and place, and should have no bearing on the contemporary Christian’s view of the world. Better to skip forward to God become man, and the words of Christ. The sole passages in the bible where God speaks directly, without an interpreter. You know, the bit where he says an awful lot about the loving of neighbours and the turning of cheeks, and nothing at all about homosexuality.

Biblical verse notwithstanding, there are still those who’ll instinctively cleave to the “but it isn’t natural” line. Okay, but if you’re one of those people and indulge in any sexual act beyond penis/vagina interface - which is to say, surely, all of you - then I reserve the right to cry “hypocrite!” Or perhaps, finally, it’s all the work of the devil and the joke’s on me. But then how to outwit a situationist joker covering his tracks by spreading homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom in broadly similar ratio? An animal kingdom which, let’s be honest, has never been known to dwell for too long on ‘lifestyle choices’.

A quick note. I've talked about Christianity because it’s by far our most prevalent religion, and because its words and leaders have the highest profile. Leaders like the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, and whose Christmas Eve sermon is guaranteed to make headline news. In a world riven by war, hunger, disease, and greed, he decided he could best use his annual moment in a spotlit pulpit to attack plans for gay marriage. Whether any disabled people dared approach the altar for communion is not a matter of public record. All that being said, do feel free to substitute Christian with Muslim, Jew, Scientologist, even atheist - anyone at all, in fact, more concerned with propagating their own strict code of moral order than giving pause to consider its impact on potentially vulnerable youth.

Those youth do not need the process of coming out to be made any more difficult than, for many, it already is. They should sense a background noise in their life assuring them that they can do so without the merest fear of reprisal or rebuke. Ultimately, the notion of a need to come out at all is a damning one in itself. Whilst the rest of society passes through the customs hall of adulthood perfectly freely, why should but a single group be made to feel required to stand in line with something to declare?

If the totems of gay acceptance - legislation, media representation, et al - suggest we’ve come a long way, the fundamentals do not. Until gay couples are displaying affection in public in the same proportion as straight partners, the world is a poorer place and, for many young people, one they’re all too likely to tragically leave. A suicide rate up to four times higher for gay teenagers is, frankly, an abomination on us all.

 If you’re a young gay person reading this blog, and feel in need of support, you might want to visit the brilliant It Gets Better project. You’ll also find plenty of wise words and advice at Stonewall. 

The image at the top of the page was sourced from Woolf & Wilde.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Putting the Great in Britain

Was the Olympics bread and circuses in the face of economic gloom, or can the optimism lead to a more United Kingdom? With Oliver Burkeman, Steven Baxter, David Aaronovitch and Professor Christine Griffin. 

Cheers, Mitt Romney. His doubts about the UK’s ability to stage a successful Olympics united a nation in ‘Why, we’ll show you, mister!’ fist-shaking even before Danny Boyle’s perfectly pitched opening ceremony, that long-lost feat from ancient times of actually making us feel good about ourselves.

The world felt good about us, too. Incredulous athletes - cyclists, archers, canoeists - wide-eyed at mightily roaring crowds. London appeared more fresh-faced than at any time since the 60s, bursting with modern stadia. More playful, too, and on a whole new scale: for Twiggy's coy pout and mini-skirt, read sand and bikinis in Horse Guards Parade. And our sportspeople vacuumed up medals like precious metal-addicted Dysons.

Thus, a capital bathed in euphoric disbelief. Didn’t it? “Not very much doubt about that,” says London resident, writer and broadcaster, David Aaronovitch. “I haven’t spoken to anybody who isn’t surprised like hell how well it’s all gone, how well we’ve done and how smooth things are.”

So if the Olympics was the mother of all parties, are we now destined for unparalleled hangover? Will the shift in mood sustain and build something new, or collapse in the face of recession-fuelled pessimism? “It's bread and circuses, of course, but it's a pretty good circus you have to admit, and we're not running out of bread just yet,” says media commentator, Steven Baxter. “The games have certainly helped people feel better about themselves and the country they live in for a while, but 16 days can't undo the past few years of pain. We’re still facing up to a pretty gloomy future with not very much money coming in and an awful lot going out - and a Government determined to cut, cut and cut again. I'd like to hope that the optimism could make things better, but I really can't see it happening.”

Christine Griffin, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Bath, is sceptical at how widely the Olympic bubble stretched. “There’s certainly a more positive mood in certain areas, but it’s not clear how widespread it is. If you’re in a bad state economically - you’ve just lost your job, you face repossession - to see everybody all jolly can make you feel worse.” Still, there may yet be long-term benefit. “It’s not so much the mood of optimism now, but events might act as a touchstone. If there are attempts to cut funding to sports amenities, some might be more likely to say ‘Don’t do that’, to get involved.”

Over the course of a Saturday night hour in the Olympic Stadium, three British athletes won gold: a mixed-race heptathlete, a 10,000m runner who’d sought refuge from Somalia, and a pale-skinned ginger-haired chap in the long jump. “It was absolutely terrific,” says Aaronovitch. “You couldn’t have picked upon a series of people more likely to be bullied at school, and it was our best athletic night ever.” Might this be the real legacy - a widespread change in perception of what it means to be British? “It’s easy to make that argument, yes. It’s not an intellectual argument, but then the argument against a multi-ethnic Britain is quite often not an intellectual argument of any kind. Often you’re simply dealing with competing sentiments, offering competing pictures in very simple terms for people to latch on to.”

For the moment, at least, Aaronovitch senses a change in mood. “My view is that we were - maybe we still will - beginning to go into rather a narrow, nasty place, in which we’re effectively saying ‘We don’t want to give the poor any money’, ‘We don’t want to let immigrants in because we blame them for what’s happening to us’. For the moment at any rate, that mood of closing in on ourselves has lifted a bit. We feel genuinely better about ourselves, even if we do face unemployment and a continuation of the recession. The impetus towards a narrower, meaner Britain has been broken.”

“People do feel better about Britain, and being British, than they did before,” agrees Baxter. “People held their breath and hoped that we wouldn't be a laughing stock. The games have been organised well and the elite athletes have provided medal success. That's a good thing in itself, but you have to wonder whether the elites are being overfed at the expense of the grassroots - at the moment, because the Olympics are here, we're OK with that, but we might not be when we see our local swimming baths closed down. A happy society is something to strive for, but happiness is fleeting.”

In the meantime, says Aaronovitch, “you look at the medals table and realise we’re now a sporting superpower. We’re surprised at what we can do. Any parent knows the terrible moment when their child gets to believe they can’t do something. Collectively, as the nation’s children, discovering in fact we can do something - made good volunteers, have good sportspeople, etc - it’s a corrective.”

It’s also a relief. Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. “Before the Games, it looked like the event was going to be a tightly controlled, corporate-branded phenomenon that would squeeze out the human feeling; in fact the opposite happened. I know people say that what they're happy about is the gold medals, but I think the real high comes from the sense of a shared experience, and of course it's often easier to get people interested in sharing such an experience when it's characterised by victory rather than failure. But it's the sharing not the victory that really energises people, I think.”

London 2012 served as the antonym of Death of Diana 1997. A nation bound in apparent collective joy rather than apparent collective grief. 15 years ago we demanded the Queen start sobbing, the more uncontrollably the better. Post-PR makeover, by June 2012 we were happy to be wowed by her ability to wave at boats. Two months later she was leaping from a helicopter with James Bond. Little wonder we were awestruck. So is part of the Olympic legacy a further cementing of monarchy?

“I think so,” says Aaronovitch, “and I was struck by something else. They brought William and Harry into the BBC studio. I’m no kind of royalist whatsoever, but they were good. In so far as people like that could be ordinary, they were. They weren’t stuffed shirts, didn’t say ridiculous words, answered the questions straightforwardly and honestly. If you listen to the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1969, he’s all ears and nose, looks awkward, but listen to his accent and then the accent of his sons, it’s completely changed.”

As far as lovers of the political status quo were concerned it was a good week for burying bad views, with style and substance separated by a distance that was positively Beamon-esque: barely had the head of state landed in the stadium when the threat of change to the constitution itself was annulled, word of Nick Clegg’s raising the white flag on Lords reform making but a tiny dent in the Olympics-saturated news cycle.

The Union as a whole had a good Olympics, with its ubiquitous flag. A flag we’d become ashamed of, having seen it ceremonially taken down in embarrassingly far flung corners of the globe - “goodness me, I’m so sorry, whatever were we doing out here?” - or framing the hate-filled faces of the National Front. Following Euro 96 - when English fans realised the cross of St George was theirs - and the onset of devolution, it really only turned out for village fetes. Now it was spanning the shoulders of giants.

We’re a way out from the independence referendum yet, but even so, pity poor Alex Salmond. “Up in Scotland when Andy Murray puts on the Union Jack, or Chris Hoy talks about ‘we’ in the sense of Britishness, that message has got to feed through,” says Aaronovitch. “It would’ve been better for [Scottish Nationalists] if the whole thing had gone wrong - ‘We’ve got great sportsmen, but London’s let us down’ - but they can’t really say that, can they?”

Remarkably, nor can anyone.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Save Saved Venues!

Bristol (and Bath): Know Your History

You might imagine that something as culturally significant as the Venue back catalogue has had every page scrupulously scanned and stored for posterity. You did? You probably weren’t a regular reader. Everyone, though, would surely assume that the archive would at the very least be locked in a vault for safe keeping? Alas, no. You’d best read on. 

You remember Venue, right?

Local mag. Started in 1982.

Bristol was a moribund city, not a clue what to do with itself. Of course it was. The heart of Bristol, the reason for Bristol - the port - was gone. The port had married Bristol to the sea and the sea’s extended family: the rest of the world, its wealth, its people. Now Bristol and the sea were undergoing an irretrievable maritime breakdown. Bristol had looked out confidently across the globe for the best part of a millennia. Now it was staring uncertainly at the ground.

Finished in 2012.

Bristol has yet to figure out what it is, but it knows what it isn't. It isn't moribund, or clueless, or staring at the ground. In those 30 years, everything that had come to Bristol in the preceding centuries was left to percolate: people, ideas, rhythm, custom. People of Bristol played around to their heart’s content in the fields of animation, science, music, theatre, more. The city's cracks allowed a most extraordinary flow of inspiration.

Some of what they came up with changed the world. Most of it didn’t. An awful lot more should have done, and remains a city’s treasured secret. And all of it, every last bit of it, lies recorded in the pages of Venue.

(We should note that during the same period change was no less startling in Bath, a city transformed by knocking down a shopping centre and replacing it with a slightly different one. Venue was there every step of the way, checking its watch incessantly and praying the train to Temple Meads would come soon.) 

Naturally, there is a Venue archive. It moved with the magazine when it shifted from Jamaica St in Stokes Croft to North Road in St Andrews, and on to its final resting place in the Post building. It sits there in the basement today. And it may sit there perfectly safely tomorrow, the day after, and so on. But it may not. Because the thing is, the contents of the archive rooms around it - the Post’s own archives - have been moved. Into a skip. And dumped. Thousands of books, photos, papers. Dumped. The loss of historical knowledge is incalculable. 

I only know this has happened because I was speaking to Eugene Byrne yesterday. He'd come to the building to visit the Venue archive while researching a book about un-built Bristol, grand schemes and ideas that never came to fruition. A bound-to-be-fascinating, perfectly Eugene project. Nobody writes about Bristol history - education, societal trends, nuanced sweep of local politics - like Eugene. If nothing else, the Venue archive is a Eugene anthology, and by a distance the most comprehensive and clear-eyed account of Bristol's recent history. If you don't think it's worth saving in its own right, you'd presumably shrug at the thought of Pepys' diary turning to ash in the Great Fire. And that’s before you consider the music, the art, the festivals, the large scale developments, the retail, the restaurants, the pubs, the huge changes in the city’s demographic, the everything. Nothing - really, nothing - will more thoroughly explain Bristol 1982-2012 to future generations like hundreds of thousands of pages of Venue. If you're in a band, or theatre group, or cycling club, or a pub, or you teach, or you vote, or you breathe air within Bristol's city limits (or Bath's), this is your history. 

Right now, all of this knowledge lies in one room. And my reason for writing this blog is that I think it’d be ever so nice if it were to lie in a different one. A records office, a university, a museum, a community centre. Ideally, somewhere that interested parties, academic or otherwise, could pop by for a read. 

If you can’t help yourself, but think it a worthy aim, please pass word along. Thank you.

EDIT 1. I've received a post reply from Becky Perrett-Davis, who is Commercial Director at Venue Publishing and Metro South West. Not to mention also being a thoroughly lovely person: "As I understand it Bristol Library have their own archive of Venue, but they were missing a few...I am still trying to track down the best person to talk to, so I can find out which issues complete the set. Until this time I have managed to buy a couple more months and move them to a different location...but for the time being they are safe. I just need help to find out from the Library what they need.....all help gratefully received though... :-)"

My apologies if I've jumped the gun in seeking help. Not exactly good journalistic practice to file story first and ask questions later. Sense of urgency outdid sense of professionalism.

I guess was still a little shocked at learning what happened to the Post's own archive. I shouldn't have been, really, given the history of recent years. Everyone understands that print publishing is exceedingly difficult at the moment, that it won't play the same role in the future, and that new directions need to be sought. It's just that, in the meantime, it would surely be beneficial to all parties if policy smacked rather more strongly of managed decline, and rather less of scorched earth.

EDIT 2. Hurray! The archive was moved on Friday morning. Cultural vandalism averted, but it was a ludicrously close-run, insane-it-should-even-have-been-necessary thing. Let all future generations with a wish to learn from and about this transitional period in Bristol's history give thanks to beyond-the-call diligence from Becky, coordination from Bristol Reference Library's local studies librarian, Jane Bradley, and assiduous vanning from Simon Fry.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Toulouse Lautrec: The Full Story (C4)

“You know what people come here for,” said our host, Waldemar Januszczak, conspiratorially. Showing less faith in his viewers than such a confident opening implied, he added: “They come… for this.” Cue dancing girls. We’re at the Moulin Rouge. He was right. We did know.

Thanks to John Huston’s original film version of ‘Moulin Rouge’, in which tonight’s subject, the artist Toulouse Lautrec, was played with cruel pantomime by an actor with false shoes attached to his knees, we also know that the artist tended towards being short. “He was a leetle man,” confirmed a Parisian vox pop. “A meeniscule man.” Januszczak, who all but allows the waters to break in the pregnant pauses for which he apparently knows of no contraceptive, was on hand to add the voice of authority. “This… little man… who hurried about here getting notorious.” Short, you say? “Yes, he was short. Yes, he drank. And yes, he did live in a brothel. But that’s just an itsy bitsy bit of his story. Toulouse Lautrec’s… tragedy… is that no one takes him… seriously.” The viewers’ tragedy was that they were not being taken seriously by a man they could not take seriously.

Still, it would be unfair to insinuate that Januszczak told us about little more than Lautrec’s lack of height. There was also what the family did rectify it. Electric shocks and hanging weights, gruesomely enough. And, showing us around the family home, the amiable son-in-law of the wee man’s great niece also informed us that: “The mother, she learned English to her son.” “Taught him English,” corrected Januszczak, an itsy bitsy bit ironically.

The mother also learned her son that he could becomeFrance’s greatest artist, and packed him off toParisfor some formal training by the aristocracy’s favourite portrait man, Leon Bonnat. Cue a city-surveying Januszczak. “Whichever cliché you choose to bestow upon this steaming cauldron of depraved creativity…” he began, in somewhat ungainly haste to bestow his own. The classy option might have been not to bestow one at all. 

So Lautrec decamped to the bottom of the road to Montmarte. Or, in Januszczak-speak, “Paris’ naughty quarter, with historic quantities of bad influence and temptation.” Not everyone’s history books, it would seem, lead toRome.

When Bonnat’s studio closed, master Lautrec’s new tutor encouraged more naturalistic observation, and up the road to decadence – and a revolutionary approach to painting - he walked.

It was here that he developed a penchant for gauche American cocktails. Januszczak was surprised. After all, he reasoned, “you know what the French are like about their drink.” This informative observation was given to a man not unaccustomed to being French himself. Summoning a truly admirable level of graciousness - you know what the French are like about their sophistication – he admitted that, yes, he did.

And so to the paintings themselves. Traditionally, of course, this is the area where the art historian would earn his corn by forensically teasing out subtext in the work far beyond the reach of the casual viewer. With that in mind, here is Januszczak casting his eye over the tender portrait of the prostitute who took Lautrec’s virginity.

“What really makes this an… interesting painting is what he’s done to her face. Look… she’s got her finger up to her mouth as if she’s sucking her fingers. And all this hair falling over her… eyes.”

Many are the Januszczak lovers wont to compare their hero to Sir David Attenborough. Sadly, that would only be valid if the Knight of the Creased Khaki were ever to stride garrulously into shot and offer enlightenment on the level of: “An… enormous animal… feeding its bulk by way of a trunk, swinging away there at the front of its large… grey body…”

It is, frankly, not enough. So, in the spotlight next week? Allow me to hazard a guess. “This… deeply troubled… one-eared man… In this painting, the interesting thing is that the sunflowers are yellow. And… look… they’re in a vase…”    

Watch the programme here.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Gravenhurst: the quotes see daylight. Or, the second longest Nick Talbot interview on the net.

Back in February I nipped round to Nick Talbot’s place to interview him ahead of the release of ‘The Ghost in Daylight’ album. You can read the resulting feature here. It’s got context and everything. On the other hand, it was written for print and, as such, limited to 850 words. Plenty of musicians should face a word count limit whenever they open their mouth. Mr Talbot, most assuredly, isn’t one of them. 

So here is everything that was said on the record: the catalyst for return, inspiration, the dubstep side project Ex. 1, the sound of the new album, dissecting key tracks, and the largely unheralded collaboration with Mike Paradinas, Heterotic.

I’d done all of the previous albums while married - a stable, domestic background going on. At the same time, there were lots of aspects of the music industry I wasn’t enjoying. Mainly, not touring in a way I was happy with. The Broadcast tour of 2005 was really good fun, but I was still having trouble. A lot of tours we were having to cancel dates because I was losing my voice. We’d end four shows short in Germany, or France. Cancelling shows is awful because even if you go back and do them again the ticket sales are never as good - it just creates chaos and lets lots of people down. I lost a lot of money because I still paid everyone, even if we didn’t do the shows.

One of the biggest problems was that I couldn’t hear my voice. A lot of the songs were pretty loud. ‘Flashlight Seasons’ was quiet, but I was writing more and more songs which were getting fucking loud. I was singing the same way - I don’t have a very strong voice - and a lot of the venue monitoring left a lot to be desired, so I was often having to shout above it and losing my voice.

I wasn’t enjoying it, and touring is a really big part of being a musician if you’re putting out records and you want to promote them. Unless you’ve already got a massive, established base - like XTC were able to say ‘Right, we’re never playing live again’ - you’ve got to go and do it. Even on the last tour, when I’d decided to get in-ear monitoring, I’d still have some trouble. I was dreading it.

Some individual gigs worked really well. You’d arrive in a really wonderful government-funded art space, in Brussels, or something, like Le Botanique, or somewhere in Germany, and the monitoring would be fantastic.

So I thought ‘What about this am I enjoying?’ You never want to whinge about it, because you’re doing what so many people would lose a limb to do, be a musician for a living. When I finished ‘The Western Lands’, we went on tour, I ended the relationship I’d been in throughout my time with Warp, so I no longer had another half, an anchor to bolster me. Also, I’d written a lot of songs in my previous band, Assembly, that became Gravenhurst songs, so I built up a back catalogue of songs which were half-finished and could be rearranged. After ‘The Western Lands’ they were all used up. I was writing from scratch completely. We went through 2008 promoting the album, I lost my voice, got a throat infection, we had to cancel tours.

I made a really bad decision to move into a flat on my own. When you come back from a tour to an empty flat, which I hadn’t had time to sort out, it was a bit depressing. I should have moved in with other people - I isolated myself at the worst possible time. I was faced with several new situations: having to write from scratch, being single, and being faced with the ultimate question: is being a musician good for my health, is it really a good idea? I carried on doing shows, but just solo shows. I enjoyed them because I could hear my voice, communicate with the audience, and not lose money. 2009-11 should have been ample time to write.

As well as having to write from scratch, I’d run out of ideas. I really needed to restock the pond of ideas: read a lot, watch lots of movies, find new people to rip off. If I’d been in the mindset of ‘Make another album, I’m enjoying this’, then I’d have just got on with it. But I wasn’t in that mindset. I knew that to do it I’d have to tour. Warp wouldn’t release my records if I said I wasn’t touring. So with that in mind, I didn’t have anything to spur me on to write anything. So I drifted for quite a long time, constantly saying to people ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make another record’.

Michelle, my manager, was constantly saying ‘You’ve got a good few albums left in you’. A few songs slowly came together, like ‘The Prize’. She said ‘That’s the best thing you’ve written, you’ve got to make another album. You’ve written this, you could definitely write more’. I first played it for Ali at Toybox, who wanted to put together tracks for the website of artists who’d played there. That must have been 2009. But because I didn’t know whether I wanted to carry on, I didn’t sit down every day and try and write songs.

If you don’t sit down and treat it like a job, then you’re not going to write songs. I’m going to completely contradict myself now: I never went into this because I wanted to work hard. Richard Thompson treats it like a day job - he gets up, starts around nine o’clock, and knocks off at five. I know psychologically that would be good for me, and being up at the same time as other people, but I’ve never been like that. I’ve always been a night owl, never felt like picking up a guitar at that time in the morning. I tried, but it didn’t feel right. Slowly, things started to come together. Alongside doing Gravenhurst, I’ve contributed to Guy [Bartell]’s Bronnt Industries Kapital. I started making a lot of dubstep as Ex. 1.

Two things happened: I got really into Elliot Smith, and really into Burial. It’s not dubstep - the rhythm is more two-step garage sounding. I feel like wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I Like Generic Dubstep’. I really love the wobble bassline, really got back into dance music. I think a lot of people did. Drum and bass got really stale, dance music had been a bit boring for a while. Rob Ellis - Pinch - brought the Croydon sound - my original stamping ground - to Bristol, and I was really into that. I started making dubstep-type stuff, but I was really influenced by Burial. He has something far more ‘Gravenhurst’ in his production style - the cobwebby hiss and noise and everything. I was inspired, but it didn’t help because I thought he’d left everyone behind completely - two albums in a row that are completely seminal. And Elliot Smith just raised the bar so high in terms of songwriting that I couldn’t compete.

 At the end of 2010 I did a tour supporting Paul Smith. He was putting out a solo record, and thought it would be good to have me as support. I thought that’d be great, because he’s a really lovely bloke - I’d got to know him through Maximo Park being on Warp. It was brilliant, the most positive touring experience I’ve had. I got on with his solo backing bandmates so well. My backing band in Gravenhurst, the Allender Band, were friends of mine and got on really well as friends, but in some ways we didn’t have that much in common in terms of other interests. As soon as I started talking about politics their eyes had this glaze to them, they suddenly found things they needed to do elsewhere. So I felt a bit isolated in terms of conversation topics. When I’m on tour, if I get bored I get depressed, and all it takes to stop that is decent conversation. They’re great musicians, but them being a band in themselves they kind of have their own in-jokes. I felt very, very lonely. Them combined with me losing my voice all the time was hellish.

Paul’s backing band are lovely, I’ve far more in common with them. I think a big part of it is because they’re all northerners, politics isn’t something they choose to be interested in. They’re tribally, have parents who were affected by the miners’ strike. We were the only Labour-voting family in the whole of Surrey, I think. They didn’t read the Economist every week, weren’t complete newshounds or politics nerds, but just had that interest in the blood, so you could have that conversation at any time. And their other interests were sociology, arts and humanities, general stuff. Mine weren’t interested in talking about anything except music and comedy, and our sense of humour was a bit different: mine was more ‘South Park’, more satirical, theirs’ was more ‘Mighty Boosh’, whimsical. These things don’t matter that much normally, but when you’re on tour they matter enormously.

It wasn’t just nerdy conversations about politics. We were playing in Milan and went to the venue two nights before the actual gig, and were camped out. Really helped we were in a tour bus - that made it luxurious! The people running the venue said ‘Come to the club’, so we had two nights of free cocktails all night. It was really great fun, we were just dancing to pop music - ‘Dancing In The Dark’, ‘I Feel Love’, Pet Shop Boys, all the stuff you want to hear. Paul set me a challenge: finish your album by Christmas. I didn’t, but I finished writing it by Christmas. I didn’t finish it for another year! But when I got back I realised ‘Okay, so I can tour, but it’s like any job and you’ve got to find the right people to work with’.

So that tour changed everything. Without it, I’m not sure this album would have happened. It was so positive. I went away for three weeks and was always stimulated. I’m basically poaching Paul Smith’s backing band, but he’s been doing the new Maximo Park album so I felt it was okay. Rachel the guitarist I’ve got playing bass and singing harmonies - first time I’ll have had harmonies live, which will be amazing - and it turns out Claire the bassist plays drums. I’ve got to play quietly. Any track like ‘The Prize’ will be with bundle sticks, not sticks. We can still play stuff like ‘Song From Under The Arches’ - that’s really loud, but only in the bits that don’t have singing. If they’re loud and singing, like ‘The Velvet Cell’, I can’t do them. Everything’s about preserving the voice.

For inspiration I was reading Gordon Burn. He died, sadly, at the age of 60 and clearly had a couple more decade’s worth of books in him. Half of one of the lines in ‘The Prize’ is nicked from one of his books. You can open any of his books on any page and see a line of prose that’s fantastic. Lots of David Peace, lots of Iain Sinclair - his novels are so dense, so difficult to read, but you can get great ideas from them, symbolism. The only one I’ve read start to finish in a reasonable, normal manner is ‘London Orbital’. It’s a bit like ‘Naked Lunch’ - William Burroughs sent it off to be printed in Italy because nowhere else would touch it because of obscenity. They couldn’t read English, printed it all in the wrong order, and it came back and he was delighted! Completely plotless.

Doing things compulsively that you don’t want to do, anything from drug habits to sexual addiction to pursuing fame to holding onto unhealthy relationships - ‘The Prize’ could be about any of those things. When Elliot Smith was asked about songs that seemed to be about drug references, he said he used drugs as a metaphor for any kind of dependency.

On his first album, Elliot Smith was recording in a bedroom at night and had to sing quietly. Similar situation with me - those choices are often made through practical limitations. He didn’t get the full band sound until he had the money to record in a studio with ‘X/O’, his first on Dreamworks. He wanted stuff to sound like ‘Abbey Road’, was pissed off he’d made these lo-fi four-track albums - lots of stuff he recorded he considered demos, but were released because when people at the label heard them they thought they were amazing. I didn’t start recording with a full drumkit until I had the ability to record with four microphones at the same time, and that was when I had the money to record ‘Fires in Distant Buildings’ at Toybox.

With this album there are two songs with full drum kit, the rest are very minimal, no drums at all, or one track electronic. I think in the back of my mind it’s been influenced that I want to be able to play these songs solo. I thought to myself ‘How did I do this before I was even on Warp, before any of this pressure - the money pressure - how did I do it? How did I used to just enjoy playing the guitar?’ I used to do lots of different tunings, play lots of covers, work out what tunings they use. Like when you gave me ‘Jack Orion’, you introduced me to Bert Jansch, I worked out that stuff. I was listening to ‘Pour Down Like Silver’ by Richard Thompson, it’s got a tuning I’d not used before, and I came up with something new. ‘Flashlight Seasons’ came out of that open-endedness where you don’t know what’s going to happen, that playfulness where you’re doing it for itself. I wanted to get that back, and be able to play solo and be independent, and be able to sing and not lose my voice. So with all that in mind, a lot has gone back to the acoustic sound of ‘Flashlight Seasons’, but at the same time it’s actually the most electronic.

Whilst it’s got very acoustic guitar sounds, there’s lots of these kind of sounds - unidentifiable, choral, possibly synth sounds, possibly organ, it’s not clear - they’re electrical sounds. There was a lot of underlying electrical noise in ‘Flashlight Seasons’, but they’re more to the fore here. Some of them are dominating it. There’s a track that hasn’t got any guitars at all, just all organ/Mellotron/synthesisers, and the drum beat is a Roland 606. I was playing around, I didn’t think it was going to be a Gravenhurst track. I don’t know why I started putting vocals over it, the vocals are completely buried in the mix, very impressionistic, very Slowdive. This is the first album where there’s a song that’s purely acoustic guitar, nothing else. Even on ‘Flashlight Seasons’ there’d be overlays. There’s a lot on ‘Flashlight Seasons’ that sounds quite naive to me now. Lyrically, certainly, but also in the way that I’ve arranged things. This is definitely more sophisticated.

There isn’t a word for what I want to say. ‘Electronic’ you think ‘electronica’, to one extent you think Kraftwerk and, to another, Autechre, or Minotaur Shock. I say ‘electrical’ because it makes me think of the hum of switching on an organ, rather than Max/MSP patches that make granular synthesis like Autechre, sounds that are completely alienating. All of the sounds I’ve used on the album are - I hate to use the word ‘warm’ or ‘organic’ - but there’s something humane about them.

One track on the album, ‘Fitzrovia’, is about that part of London: the psychological history of the political space. A hot bed of anarchist thought at the turn of the 19th century. I allude to the way the left has lost its way, hark back to the days when it was proud of being labelled socialist, people pinned their colours to the mast. People drawn toward left-wing thinking have spent too much of their time being influenced by the kind of people who think it’s more important to wear a Che Guevara t-shirt than read George Orwell. Guevara bought into the culture of suicidal martyrdom, the religious aspect of glorious death - he went into that jungle to die, basically. He started forced labour camps, killed anyone who disagreed with him - just because he was on the left doesn’t make him any less despicable a figure. We’ve got completely false idols. The lyric goes ‘You’re a poster child for revolutionary brands...  you never see you’ve canonised the wrong man.’ They really should be walking around with George Orwell t-shirts - he’s the man who pointed out the left needed to be very suspicious of Stalin. He had apologists on the left ’til the 90s.

In the track I talk about the Battle of Cable St, a time when you had solidarity on the left, this wonderful moment of trade unionists, Jews, socialists, communists, average Joe on the street, all coming out to face down Moseley: “Riot scenes on Cable Street, government boots on civilian dreams / A lost event consigned to history”. The song is woven into a metaphor about London’s lost rivers: Wandle, Falconbrook, Effra, the idea of simply paving something over and pretending it’s not there. But you still need to be able to access them, check they don’t suddenly start bubbling under and turning up on Oxford St; the left paves over things about its history that it doesn’t like, the fact it’s shown more solidarity with Stalin than with any Kurdish trade unionist.

Someone writes a song about the Holocaust in the popular song idiom - is that a good idea? How can that work? But I think I got away with it. The song is called ‘The Foundry’, written from the point of view of an American soldier imagining what it was like to be a German civilian living next to a concentration camp and being in denial about what was going on. One of the lyrics is ‘The gathering dust on aspen leaves’. There’s a German poet called Heinrich Heine who wrote, ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’ So I took that and wrote: ‘If you let them burn books, you let them burn bodies, the man with the match could be anybody / A uniform changes something inside, holding a gun makes you feel so alive, and everyone else is doing it too, it’s all right.’ And then the chorus... [For the record, Mr Talbot adds this with can’t-quite-believe-it-himself hearty chuckle] the chorus is ‘You won’t know when evil comes, evil looks just like anyone, I blame I blame I blame anyone but me.’ It’s the best lyric I’ve ever written, without a doubt.

I’m so proud of this album, it’s the best thing I’ve done. And I’m particularly proud of the lyrics - even good bands have shit lyrics. One of the few areas we get consistently good lyrics is hip-hop - even the most commercial hip-hop generally has good lyrics, and often very funny lyrics. It’s central. Whereas words in rock ‘n’ roll can be throwaway.

I’m doing a project with Mike Paradinas at the moment, called Heterotic. He’s sent me 40 pieces of electronic music, and I’m writing vocal lines and lyrics. I don’t think he understands how long it takes me to write the words. How long it takes to condense down, have as few extraneous words as possible. He writes two tracks a week, doing it all on his laptop in bed, and it doesn’t work like that! I can’t sit down and expect to have something at the end of a session at writing - I can have less than I started with, and that’s progress!

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Review: Talk at the BBC

To watch these three hour-long anthologies of interviews from the BBC archive is to watch an illuminating, conversational style that has long since slipped beneath television’s electromagnetic waves. And it’s to wonder: when did it drown, and just what kind of cloth-brain pushed it in? 

Between the 1950s and the early 70s, claim the BBC’s notes on the series, came ‘arguably the golden age of conversation’. And right there is your answer to the ‘when..?’ question: around the time programmes were no longer simply broadcast, but marketed. In the final programme, there’s an argument between groundbreaking, cake-baking, ball gown-draping TV chef Fanny Craddock, and the historian AJP Taylor. It’s highly entertaining. But if you’d told Taylor he was contributing in some way to a ‘golden age of conversation’, he’d most likely have replied that, gosh, though he was tremendously flattered, the longer view might suggest that the Wood Lane studio fell some way short of an Athenian academy, and Socrates having a natter with Plato.

There’s barely a whiff of hyperbole in the entire 180 minutes (what there is, we’ll come to anon). Instead, just un-spun, unhurried conversation involving film stars and philosophers, political leaders and comedians, oligarchs and matriarchs. Conversation allowed to roam freely and deeply into areas feeding the intellect as readily as the heart. Conversation wont to elicit revelations of a nature all but impossible in today’s typical format. For example, if he were alive and interviewed today, it’s difficult to conceive of Field Marshal Montgomery being granted time do anything but talk about his greatest hit, to recollect - and I’ll have to hurry you here, Monty, because we need to squeeze in the new one from Michael Kiwanuka before the break - his funniest anecdote from the Second Battle of El Alamein, that great Ruuuuumble With Rommel, runner-up in the viewers' poll for Top 50 Most Extreme Desert Military Victories (for those keeping score, it was topped by Peter O’Toole).

No, in 1968 Monty is allowed to do more than roll out aforesaid funny line - “You were only supposed to blow the bloody Korps off!” - and instead, simply, be himself. As such, he is revelatory. Because I don’t know about you, but I figured Field Marshal Montgomery might have perceived a lip-bitingly annoying, sheer don’t-know-they’re-born-ness among the long-haired young men and short-skirted young women louchely and unconsciously enjoying the freedom of the Isles he helped save barely two decades hence. Instead, while most contemporary commentators avow that the sight of all these young people with spinning eyes and whirling kaftans heralds the end of days, he says: “They’ve got to express themselves, and up to date they’ve not been allowed to. Now they demand that they must be allowed to, and that’s all right. They’re up against their politicians, you see, and I don’t blame them...”

It’s not only the interviewees who benefit from the conversational wide open spaces. For the modern viewer, ‘Talk at the BBC’ is a joy in its unhurriedness alone. No tweet us this, text us that, email us a phonetic fart, no what do you think, at all. Which is fine, because I know what I think and, to be honest, only came here to see they think. Thus, to wander into one of these programmes from another channel is the televisual equivalent of walking into a great park in the middle of a bustling city. I wonder what television controllers make of great urban parks? Do they survey people in deckchairs, doing nothing but, y’know, sitting there, and wonder why park keepers aren’t circling them in electric carts, beeping tiny horns and blowing tiny whistles, telling them how much the nice family over there beneath the weeping willow is enjoying the park even if the coffee is a little on the steep side - sign here if you want to be kept abreast of this developing coffee situation as we cross now to Jonathan who’s talking to that chap with the arthritic dachshund about the adequate or otherwise number of dog dirt disposal bins - and eventually explaining that they don’t want to be doing this but how else are they to compete with the excitingly stimulating city beyond?

In the second programme there were two interviews with Dr Jacob Bronowski (younger readers might like to try imagining a Jewish Rowan Williams). It’s all but impossible to imagine someone as thoughtfully contemplative on television today. After one question comes a pause so thoughtful, so contemplative, there’d be time enough for a modern television executive to hold an inquiry into why it had gone quiet, fire the producer, hire another, and still have a few moments in which to impatiently wait for Bronowksi to begin: “Weeeeell...”

It’s worth a brief diversion to note that the thinking space allowed in talk shows did not take place in isolation. Television drama, for example, was in essence a theatrical stage covered by largely static cameras, single scenes playing out in very long minutes, not jump-cut seconds. And documentary? Weeeeell... here’s Bronowksi in ‘The Ascent of Man’, at Auschwitz. Wonder at his humility, his humanity, but wonder too at a documentary shorn of music telling you what to think - whither the mournful cello? - and instead utterly silent but for the words of the presenter and the landscape: the wind, the birdsong, the oven door clanging shut...

“Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm," says Bertrand Russell in ‘Talk at the BBC’’s concluding episode. "I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism." He's asked whether his leading role in CND might display or encourage same among the movement's supporters. "I do give them support, but not for fanatical reasons. I support them because everything sane and sensible and quiet that we do is absolutely ignored by the press, and the only way we can get into the press is to do something that looks fanatical."

The interview is a gem, as timely as it is so utterly of another time altogether. So are near countless others. Thus, Martin Luther King talking race and personal fallibility with John Freeman, a wonderful conversation later mirrored by Malcolm X carefully running Cliff Michelmore through the gist of “By any means necessary.” 

We see how much things change: the man who doesn’t take questions from women “because they’re too illogical” segues into an interview with “A star with the head of a girl of 15, and the body of a woman of 22,” a contention the merits of which the viewer is helpfully allowed to weigh as the camera pans along her legs. Conversation focuses solely on hair and diet. A pity, as it left no time for Claudia Cardinale to talk about, say, having just completed filming Fellini's ‘8½’.

We see how much things stay the same. “Will it be a salacious paper?” asks David Dimbleby of the News of the World’s latest proprietor in 1969. “We’re obviously not going to avoid the subject,” says Rupert Murdoch. To be fair, he doesn't add “Nudge-nudge! Eh?! EH?!” To be fairer still, he’s only not adding it because his eyebrows are screaming it via the medium of dance.

Best of all, perhaps, we see people whose like we shall never see again. Not because of some unrepeatable human quality, but because they hail from an unrepeatable age. Men like George Robertson, who represented the UK in the 1896 Olympic Games. Women like Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, a former suffragette. Each is captured on film speaking with a specific kind of clipped, can-do articulacy that has since become extinct. One struggles to imagine Dame Margery, for example, recall sharing a platform with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as, like, a total game-changer in terms of her personal journey. Instead, she didn’t consider women being given the vote as an end to the struggle “because, you see, we were basing our request for the vote on inequalities and injustices and lack of opportunity, so that we knew the moment we got the tool we had to go on working.”

Finally, we see the rise of the interview as practiced today by Paxman and Humphreys. Only, largely, John Freeman didn’t use it on politicians.

“Do you sleep well when you go to bed at night?”

Tony Hancock admits that he doesn’t.

“Why don’t you sleep, do you think?”

All of this shot in extreme close up, Hancock’s face a bag of tics. Freeman goes on to cover his subject’s worrying about weight, why he doesn’t want children, and then asks:

“Do you get a kick out of your anxiety?”

“Anxiety..?” twitches Hancock, anxiously. “Would you explain that a bit more?”

“Well, something appears to me - even at the end of this conversation - to be eating you. You say that your happiness is just ahead of you still, but there’s something troubling you about the world and I’d like to know what it is.”

“It’s YOU, you bastard!” roars Hancock, overturning the table and making for Freeman’s neck until pulled away by a frantic looking stagehand. Well, you wouldn’t blame him if he did. But he doesn’t. Instead, he simply replies: “I wouldn’t expect happiness. I don’t... I don’t think that’s possible.”

It's almost unbearable to watch. Indeed, few things could be less bearable. Among them, finding yourself at Rommel's side for the Second Battle of El Alamein, meeting Rupert Murdoch in the grand final of an all-in eyebrow dancing competition - having used up every last ounce of lift getting past an unusually perky Rowan Williams in the semis - and a power cut depriving you of the opportunity to see what in the name of all humanity Freeman is going to ask Hancock next.

Two further things to note here. Firstly, if it was to be of value to anyone, the televised interview couldn’t continue in the manner of ‘Picture Parade’. We see Peter Haigh interviewing Joan Crawford in 1956, clasping her hand to his leg and cooing: “Joan, there are thousands of things I want to ask you, and I don’t quite know where to start.” So he doesn’t. Not really. He merely looks longingly into her eyes, asks “What is your recipe for glamour?” and proceeds to inquire whether she wouldn’t mind elucidating, should it not prove too irksome, upon all the other myriad ways in which she happens to be so completely and utterly marvellous (this is only out-creepified by the later entrance of Crawford's protégé, who she introduces as "the most lovely, beautiful child in the whole world - except my own four children - Miss Heather Sears." For the remainder of the interview, as Crawford and the lovely, beautiful child sit in ever-closer embrace on the chaise longue opposite, Haigh adopts the stoic countenance of a loyal husband trying to politely interject in a conversation between his flushed-anew wife and her virile new lover).

Secondly - and, to modern eyes, astonishingly - Freeman’s technique works. No matter how unnerving we might find the questioning, the answers are all there. Nobody has coached Hancock how to avoid a question because it’s never previously been necessary. So, bless his cruelly-blasted-with-merciless-spotlight face, he answers them.

It was but a tiny window of illumination. A short time later we see Jim Callaghan being interviewed by a typically persistent Robin Day, repeatedly questioned on a thorny party political matter - aka recently dethroned eyebrow dancing champ, Dennis Healey - that both men know he cannot answer on in public. Increasingly vexed, and surely voicing the inner thoughts of anyone today interviewed by Paxphreys, he complains: “I thought it was the same question phrased in a different way.” From this point Callaghan effectively closes the interview down, no matter how much Day tries to recover lost ground. Thus, even in its infancy, adversarial questioning proved of limited value. Today, of course, it sits in perpetually stunted adolescence: politicians arrive in the studio already clammed shut, the interlocutor spends the entire interview obstinately trying to prise them open, and then others sit around pontificating about who ‘won’ (clue: it’s never a third party hoping to learn something).

Ultimately, point-scoring interviewers appear never to have matured beyond door-slamming teenagers. Conversely, those preferring to engage the mind - as opposed to ego - have fared strikingly well. Today John Freeman is 97, Cliff Michelmore 92, Alan Whicker 86, and Michael Parkinson none of your bloody business, young man, you didn’t ask damned impertinent questions like that in my day, I can tell you.

Which augurs well for the longevity of Mark Lawson. In 2004’s ‘The Truth About Sixties TV’, he took issue with “golden ageists” viewing antique output through rose-tinted goggle boxes. Quite right, too, in all areas but one. For the ‘Mark Lawson Talks To...’ series is the only surviving relative of the great ancestry recalled so beautifully, humorously, beguilingly, movingly by ‘Talk at the BBC’. A format that could yet prove the solitary boon of television executives having to plan their way through an age of license fee austerity, as the penny drops - "Here's a thought! Just how much do two chairs and a microphone cost nowadays?" - a few more are spent (spent on something sane and sensible and quiet), and Lawson is no longer alone in taking the role of informed, interested, unhurried conversationalist. 

Of course, it’s not for everyone. But if you’re the type of person with enough interest in life to be desirous of drawing breath for at least another hour or so, here’s the final episode. It’s available to stream or download until 11.59pm on Thu 12 Apr.

[tellingfrombirdstoll]

Whitney: A Death, or The Parable of the Toyota Corolla

And so Houston tragically, perhaps inevitably, joins the so-called ‘48 Club’ alongside the likes of Tom Fogerty, Wendy O. Williams and Her Out The Shangri-Las.

Or not. Whitney Houston was spared the indignity of rolling news desperately contriving a soundbite to sell her death - “Etta James, the voice of Diet Coke, is dead” - on account of the simple facts being so easily digestible: only artist to score seven consecutive No.1s on the Billboard Hot 100, goddaughter of Aretha, cousin of Dionne, most influential singer of her generation - hey, this stuff writes itself!  

And so it did. Unfortunately, no one on television news desks noticed that autopilot was beginning to overreach itself, that “an unprecedented ability to shift records” was being translated into “the greatest singer of all time”. Which is a bit silly, really - it might be the world’s biggest ever seller, but no one will lament the passing of “the greatest car of all time” when the last Toyota Corolla finally rolls off the production line.

It’s understandable enough, of course. An hour ago you announced her death, the biggest showbiz story of the year, and so this hour you need to raise the stakes a little. But we’re a week on now. So, in the cold light of day, let’s begin appraising things a little more clearheadedly. Let’s admit that, if we’re honest, greatest singers of all time tend not to approach songs with all the empathy of an articulated lorry approaching a hedgehog. Sure, onlookers are treated to a Technicolor spectacular, but something is lost along the way.

Thus, her take on Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. Take a moment to recite the lyric in your head. Has ever a piece of popular verse been more deserving of the epithet ‘love song’? ‘Love’ as in selfless regard for another, a heartbroken protagonist realising there’ll be more suitable partners for their beloved further down the line, and so exiting stage left to leave the way clear. It is, to say the least, a melancholic state of affairs. And like Nick Cave said in The Secret Life of the Love Song, “Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.” Accordingly, Parton’s reading of the song is dignified, restrained, a handwritten note quietly pushed under the back door.

By contrast, Houston alerts all local news stations of her paramour’s address, lands a gold-plated helicopter on his front lawn, stops and poses for pictures, has a quick “No, don’t talk me out of it, I have to go through with this!” session with a shrink on the driveway, blinks back tears in a to-camera piece about ‘My journey’, briefly consults her full-time mascara assistant, knocks on the door, and hands over a giant factory-written Hallmark card when it opens. Meanwhile, melancholy lies bleeding somewhere in an adjacent block, having crashed to earth when its quiet floating was cut to shreds by rotor blades. Poor bastard. It never stood a chance.

By any reasonable reckoning, in judging a great singer - as opposed to a technically great voice - we must factor in the ability to interpret a lyric. And alas, though it would be apt - and mean the world a more beautiful place - her version of I Will Always Love You is not frequently listed in the Top Ten Songs By Which To Exit Divorce Courts. Instead, with all the appropriateness of coffins taking their curtain call to Walking on Sunshine, newly married couples walk down the aisle to it every week. Somewhere, in all the showboating of vowel stretching time, the essence of the song has been so utterly lost that down means up and left means right. Which makes Whitney Houston the very definition of style over substance.

Extraordinary style, granted, that uniquely spectacular voice an instrument of peerless range and precision; no doubt, she could - should - have been one of the greatest singers of all time; could have imbued that belt, Etta style, with real feeling; could have cut out all the vocal histrionics by sitting down with a producer who’d play Olivier to her Dustin Hoffman - “Why don't you just sing, dear girl?” - and really test herself. Instead, to return to the motoring analogy, she was like an F1 car eschewing being pushed to the limit on the track in favour of the cheap applause that comes from issuing smoke-billowing spins in closed-off city centres.

And that, as X Factor auditions remind us every year, is her legacy. Why go to the effort of getting to the heart of a song when you can perform a nifty bypass with emotional shorthand? Pick a syllable, any syllable from any word - just be sure not to miss any “I”s or “You”s - and run it up and down the breadth of your range. Repeat to fade, et voila! Meaningful singing. Everybody says so! Keep practicing and you might, just might, catch the ear of Simon Cowell. A man who, with unusual candour, professed himself moved to tears by Houston’s death. “She was a legend,” he said. “These people don't come around often. No one could sell a song like Whitney.”