The song of John Ball

I’ve been listening to Chris Wood’s version on his Trespassers CD of the song ‘John Ball’, written in 1981 by Sydney Carter (who also wrote ‘The Lord of the Dance’) to mark the 600th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt in England. Ball was a radical Lollard priest who had been expelled from the priesthood and jailed for asking questions about equality in the eyes of God, and he gave the sermon to the peasant army as it was camped on Blackheath, overlooking the City of London.

His sermon started with these words:

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

This sentiment would have chilled the beneficiaries of England’s hierarchical and feudal society. After the revolt had been put down – its leader, Wat Tyler, tricked into negotiations – Ball was arrested and hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor.

But the phrase, and the radical idea embedded within it, has echoed down the centuries, to the Diggers, to Tom Paine, to the Chartists, to William Morris, even, it seems, to the Occupy Movement. We still remember him, more than 600 years on, and have long forgotten those who had him killed.

The picture at the top shows John Ball addressing the rebel Peasants on Blackheath. It is published by Wikimedia Commons and is used here with thanks.

Going Dutch

I went on the ‘Go Dutch’ Big Ride demonstration organised by the London Cycling Campaign a couple of weeks ago, which, despite the rain, was billed as the largest cycling demonstration ever to take place in London. The ride went from Park Lane to the Victoria Embankment, all on roads specially closed for the duration, taking in Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall as it went.
The theme – you might have guessed this by now – was that if conditions for London’s cyclists were a bit more like those in the Netherlands, more people would cycle and the government and the Mayor might hit their cycling targets.
So I was amused to read a few days later, in Bella Bathurst’s eclectic but entertaining Bicycle Book that when Holland plays Germany Dutch football fans chant at the German supporters ‘Give us back our bicycles’. Beating the Germans is something of a special occasion for the Dutch, especially at football, as Simon Kuper relates in his book Football Against The Enemy.
And sure enough, this chant dates from the war years, by Bathhurst’s account. In 1942, during the German occupation, the Nazi authorities confiscated Dutch bicycles both to stop the Resistance from using them to get around, and because they were running out of transport.
“No other German enactment has called up such bitterness in all ranks of society”, wrote a German officer. “The Dutchman, who is practically born on a bicycle, views the seizing of that bicycle as practically the worst thing that can happen to him.”
Of course, the London Cycling Campaign is right. Dutch-style cycle facilities in London would improve the city’s cycling numbers. But culturally, we have a little way to go just yet.

The picture at the top is from the ibikelondon blog, and is used with thanks. There are also images of the day at Ben Brown’s photostream on flickr.

Another country

I’ve had the miners’ strike more on my mind since I went to see the Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a couple of weeks ago, because the exhibition includes his famous reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave, when police cavalry charged protesting strikers.

So when The Guardian published some poems from Jubilee Lines, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (she has commissioned a new poem for each of the 60 years of the Queen’s reign) I turned first to the mid-80s. Sean O’Brien, whom I’ve written about here before, a child of the north, had claimed 1985 with a tough and unforgiving poem called ‘Another Country’:

Whenever someone sagely says it’s time to draw a line,
We may infer that they’ve extracted all the silver from the mine.

O’Brien’s poem starts with a epigraph from Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, the title of a 1930 poem. Here’s an extract:

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires
Pylons falling or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;
Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below…

Auden was born in York and brought up in Birmingham, but was fascinated by underground workings and mining machinery. This early poem – not included by him in his Collected Poems – was written on a visit to the north-east of England, where O’Brien now lives and works. It is one of several from the period that dealt with the decaying or lost landscapes of the early industrial revolution.

There are obvious echoes here of the industrial landscape that Britain has lost since Thatcher’s campaign de-industrialise the country (I use the word ‘campaign’ with care here) of which the calculated destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers was such an exemplary part. And echoes too, in O’Brien’s title, of the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s novel of loss, and of class antagonism. London, now, is the other country, as it milks the rest of Britain of resources.

But no matter what you do, history doesn’t vanish. (I had this argument once with an uncomprehending career coach who told me I could put the history I was embedded in to one side and simply ‘move on’ in the modern, deracinated, non-place manner. I was uncomprehending too). And this is how Sean O’Brien ends his poem:

Where all year long the battle raged, there’s “landscape” and a plaque,
But though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back:

Here then lie the casualties of one more English Civil War,
That someone, sometime – you, perhaps – will have to answer for.

No matter how hard you try to tramp it down, the dirt insists on coming up through the roots.

The image at the top is a screenshot of Mike Figgis’ film of Deller’s reconstruction of The Battle of Orgreave, from the Bureaux blog, and is used with thanks.

Lenin in the garden

While in Tallinn recently, during our trip to the Baltic states, we took a short bike tour with the excellent City Bikes, a two-hour circuit that took in some of the sights beyond the city centre. As we went along a cycle path through a wood our guide pulled over, had us put the bikes down, and pushed through a screen of trees to a fence behind.

It turned out that this was the grounds of the Estonian History Museum, and a couple of salvaged statues of Lenin had been parked there while the curators decided what to do with them. Obviously the subject of all of the Communist-era statuary is a controversial one, even now, all across the former Eastern bloc.

In Lithuania an entrepreneur has opened up a theme park based around scores of Soviet-era statues; initially amid much criticism, it’s now a commercial success. Sadly, because it’s in Grutas, in the south of Lithuania, we didn’t get to visit it.

The photograph is by Andrew Curry, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Stating claims

I’ve just been on holiday to the Baltic states, and when I left Vilnius at the end of July there were posters of the poet Czeslaw Miłosz everywhere. (And I mean everywhere; it was if someone had bought up the city’s outdoor advertising inventory for a product launch). Miłosz won the Nobel Prize for Literarature in 1980, and this year marks the centenary of his birth. There is also a newly unveiled plaque to Miłosz in the University in Vilnius, also to mark his centenary.

Now, normally, I’d have written ‘Polish’ in front of the word ‘poet’ in the first sentence of this post, but in the complex 20th century history of central Europe, with its shifting borders, it seems that things are not exactly as they appear.

Miłosz wrote in Polish, and lived and worked in what is now Poland for nearly twenty years, but he was raised in what is now Lithuania – but was at the time of his birth still part of Tsarist Russia. He also attended university in Vilnius. Researching this post, I discovered that he identified himself as both Polish and Lithuanian. A couple of quotes in his entry in Wikipedia capture this ambiguity:

“I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.”.

“My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish not a Lithuanian poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me”.

These multiple identities, of course, are common across many parts of the world, especially those marked by wars and migration. In the second half of his life, Miłosz lived in France and then the United States. And if you’re one of Europe’s newest states, it is important to make these claims: Lithuania, like the other Baltic states, first became independent in 1918, only to be invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, regaining its independence only in 1990. The advertising is working; for I’d have known none of this had the city not been decked in posters advertising the country’s most famous poet.

The photographs in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. They are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Eisenstein and Eisenstein

Chunks of Riga’s new town were built quickly at the height of the gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the result is a dense concentration of art nouveau architecture. Many of the most flamboyant buildings were built by Mikhail Eisenstein, the Russian architect who graduated from St. Petersburg. At the time Riga was part of Tsarist Russia. The detail is the devil, and the façades of his buildings are full of details, each floor of each house decorated differently.

More unusually, there are more than half a dozen of his buildings in the space of about 500 metres, most of them in one street, Alberta Iela, where he designed five buildings in a row.

He was also the father of the great Soviet film director Sergei, who, it’s said, hated his father’s work. “My father must have had nightmares putting all that detail into his buidings”, he is reputed to have said.

One hardly has to be a Freudian analyst to see signs of the son’s rebellion: instead of deeply decorated buildings for a rich clientele, the son preached the simplicity of the cut and threw himself into the Soviet revolution.

The photographs on this post were taken by Andrew Curry. They are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Replacing lost energy

I’ve been meaning to blog for months about the Lucozade sign which graces the raised section of the M4 as it comes into London, restored after a gap of six years. It was a fine example of ’50s neon advertising, but was taken down when Lucozade’s owner, Glaxo SmithKline, sold its former site by the M4, once the Lucozade factory.

The original is now in the Gunnersbury Museum, and the building it used to be attached to has been demolished, but a replica has found a home near to the former location, following a campaign by local residents.

Of course, for people of my age, Lucozade is either an iconic childhood brand or a triumph of reinvention. When the sign first went up, you drank Lucozade only when sick, which explains why it originally read ‘Lucozade aids recovery’. By the time the drink started appearing in clubbers’ backpacks in the late ’80s (the perfect accompaniment to ‘Es’, if not Wizz), the spread of HIV meant that it needed to be updated. At least that was how I remembered it. But it seems there’s something blurry about Lucozade and memory. It turns out that Ogilvy & Mather had rebranded Lucozade in 1983, before the clubbing boom, shifting it away from ‘recovery’ to ‘empowerment’, or some such brandspeak. And rewritten the sign as a result.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Peter Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

Taking the pain away

I’ve just read Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut’s book about the firebombing of Dresden, which he experienced as an American prisoner of war held in the city. It’s written elliptically, perhaps by way of answering the question of how to write about one of the great war crimes of the Second World War.

The story is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a man who sees time differently from the rest of us, seeing history as a series of parallel moments rather than a linear progression. The book leaves open the question of whether this is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. (And in Chapter 1, before we get to Billy’s (deliberately) fragmented narrative, Vonnegut – or at least an authorial voice – says that he has written and thrown away five thousand pages in trying to tell the story. The book was published in 1969: it’s as if he was waiting for sufficient innovation in narrative form to be able to write it. So it goes.)

Anyway, this is a long preamble to a wonderful passage in which Billy, who sees time differently, watches a film of a bombing raid backwards:

“It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

“American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewman. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of their planes. The containers were neatly stored in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewman and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

The picture at the top of this post comes from the blog Through A Vintage Lens, and is used with thanks,

Battle of Britain Day

My father in law, Denis Robinson, was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, so its dates have a particular family resonance. I wanted to mark the 70th anniversary of the decisive day – on the 15th September – with Paul Nash’s famous painting, which seems to capture the intensity of the Luftwaffe’s last great assault, a day when, at one time, all of the RAF’s 176 serviceable planes were in the air. In real life, it’s a large canvas, with lots of detail; well worth visiting the Imperial War Museum to see.

Denis is best-known amongst Battle of Britain historians for the photograph he took of his own plane, nose down in a field outside Wareham, after he’d crash-landed it after being hit by a German plane. Given that the great fear of all pilots was that the plane would catch fire, and explode, I’ve always admired his presence of mind in taking the photograph. Afterwards he walked to a local pub where he was given brandy. The BBC recently interviewed him about his experiences in the Battle of Britain (scroll down for the audio).

‘The Battle of Britain’, by Paul Nash’ hangs in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, and I have used their image of it with thanks.

Mixing the 80s

My colleague Stacey Yates is also a photographer, and she inveigled me into an interesting project that’s recently been published in the magazine Under The Influence, in their ‘Thatcher’s Children‘ edition. The project was to ‘mix the ’80s’ – to produce a mixtape that reflected my experience of living through the heady days of Thatcherism. Of course, you can’t make a mixtape without a recipient, but she and her journalist collaborator Nina Hervé had thought of that. They matched me up with Phil Adams, who works for Rough Trade; we’d not met before, but having exchanged some light touch autobiography, he made a tape for me and I for him.

One of my conventions when I used to make mix tapes in the ’80s was that I’d write a letter with it, to explain the choice of music, and (partly to my surprise) Under The Influence published all of my mixtape letter and all of Phil’s. The pdf of the letter, with the tracklisting, can be downloaded below. I’ll be honest; I didn’t realise that it was going to be published when I wrote it.

Of course, the business of trying to replicate in a largely digital era the essentially analogue experience of the mixtape wasn’t straightforward – one of the conditions was that it had to be delivered on a cassette. I still have a record deck, but the cassette deck that used to be plugged into it packed up a couple of years ago. So, of course, I cheated, and made the tape on my computer and copied it via a portable CD/tape/radio unit. Phil, who sometimes DJs, seemed more at home rewiring his equipment to make it work, and sent us a photo afterwards. (It took him all day.)  And at least I had an old TDK C-90 to tape it on. TDK were the best, by far, and I still have some thirty year old TDK tapes in my house (even play them sometimes, if that doesn’t seem impossibly retro) when the Maxell, BASF, and Boots tapes have long shedded their oxide or wrapped themselves around the tape capstans.

But it all brought back a sense of why the analogue mixtape is inherently a more personal, intimate experience than the digital playlist, and, without going all Walter Benjamin on you, this is essentially because it’s a lot more work and much harder to copy – in other words, precisely because it’s analogue. (Coincidentally, Russell Davies was blogging about this recently). And oddly, although it’s clearly easier to shuffle tracks around in iTunes, it’s harder to get the same level of control over the music, whether that’s about the gap between different tracks (some need less space, some more) and it was impossible, at least on my equipment, to get the right fit of music to length of tape (they never were exactly 45 minutes on each side). The digital equivalent of the tastefully judged ‘fade to zero’ exists technically, but without the tape counter it’s impossible to know what you’re aiming at.

Once we’d made the tapes, and listened to each other’s, Stacey brought Phil and I together in a cafe to talk tapes and talk the 80s. She thought we’d talk music, but actually we got more excited by the mechanics of mixtapes. So here are Phil and Andrew’s rules for making mixtapes; who knows, they may even come in handy in some future ‘powerdown‘ post-digital world:

• The first three or four tracks on side one really matter. Get those right and the rest will flow.
• Side two also needs to start well.
• The flow matters – always sacrifice a favourite song if it wrecks the flow
• The texture of the music matters as well as the rhythm
• Don’t waste space – try to close within seconds of the end of the cassette

Stacey took a portrait of each of us – and some pictures of the tapes – to go with the article. She’s just put them up on her blog. And I should add – as someone who lived through the ’80s as an adult – that the edition of the magazine, largely written and photographed by people who were barely in nursery school at the time of Thatcher’s Iron Pomp – is a fascinating take on the decade.

The picture at the top is one of mine – published here under a Creative Commons licence. The track list and letter can be downloaded here: Heart Meet Head-the 80s mixtape.