MICHAEL WILDING surveys the sorry state of Australia’s universities
The systematic degradation of the universities has now been continuing for 40 years.
It began at the end of the 1970s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Australia dutifully followed suit. The policies were a mixture of reprisals for the radical political activism of the 1960s and 70s, and the systematic replacement of public and state ownership by privatisation. Funding for the Arts – History, English, Philosophy, etc – was drastically reduced since it was perceived that the protests had developed from those areas. Vocational courses were introduced in keeping with the new market economy business model. Staff were pressured to take early retirement. Those who remained found that the safeguards of the traditional concept of academic freedom were being removed. Tenure was steadily abolished. New appointments and promotions began to be made for a fixed term contract. If you said or wrote something deemed to be unacceptable – and the list of the unacceptable has grown rapidly – you were likely to find yourself out of a job at the end of your contract.
Then it was decided that too few students went to university. In the 1950s and 1960s, 5% of the eligible population went to university. The new aim was to exceed 50%. This was easily achieved by deciding that colleges of advanced education, institutes of technology, teachers’ colleges, art schools, nursing colleges should all become universities, either by changing their name or by merging with existing universities. These institutions had been primarily vocational. Their staff were often drawn from people who had had experience in industry, marketing, media and so on, and could impart practical experience. They had a higher teaching load than university staff, but they were not expected to undertake research. These institutions had generally functioned well, and their students were engaged with the practical and vocational orientation of their courses.
But the more abstract and theoretical nature of university courses was not something that has engaged today’s vastly increased number of students – especially as most of them are struggling to hold down jobs, and to fit their courses into spaces in their employment schedule. As a result, the traditional university courses have been dumbed down and reoriented. Foreign language courses withered away and in many cases perished. The classics of ancient Greece and Rome were taught in translation, insofar as they were taught at all. The number of characters a student of Chinese was expected to learn was halved. Indian studies shifted from historical and cultural studies to a business studies orientation. English courses withered away; exposure to works of literature was drastically reduced, as critical theory, creative writing and other developments occupied the syllabus space, while communications and media studies, despite having little credibility in media industries, further drew away traditional students.
Other factors came into play. During the 1960s, there had been two federal funding bodies for academic research in Australia, one for the arts and one for sciences. The marked difference between them was that grants for the arts were modest. The arts researcher typically asked for no more than Aus$10,000 for some research assistance, for typing, for travel. The science grants were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to support equipment and teams of research assistants. It was a system that functioned well. Then the two funding bodies were merged and funding became pretty well entirely on the scientific scale. Grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars were available for the arts; small grants were no longer the model. This was wasteful enough but worse was to follow. A new concept of ‘teaching relief’ was introduced, allowing grant recipients to use research funds to hire someone to do their teaching for them.
One justification for research funding in the arts was that the discoveries made during research fed back into teaching, ensuring teaching was of a high quality and at the cutting edge of knowledge. Now, to adapt the old saying, as for teaching, our servants shall do that for us. And these servants hired to do the teaching were all employed as part time, casual staff. They were paid around Aus$50 an hour during teaching term; during vacations they had to apply for welfare. While the grant recipients swanned around and never saw a student, let alone imparted any knowledge. The university administrators saw these research funds as a source of finance. They appointed further administrators, on high salaries, who coached academics in how to apply for research grants. People who had acquired funding were made into ‘distinguished research professors’ on five year contracts. They moved from campus to campus and grant to grant, doing no teaching.
And much of the time no research conclusions were ever published. The scandal of this has never been exposed, but thousands upon thousands of tax-payers’ dollars were handed out with nothing to show for it in return. The universities took their cut of the funds, the distinguished professors took their salaries, but all too often nothing was published. When a senior academic I knew tried to research into how the Australian Research Council awarded grants, he found it was impossible. All records of unsuccessful applications had been destroyed. There was no way of assessing the assessors and of examining the so-called peer-reviewing process. Nonetheless, the process continues. Publication used to be a mark of academic achievement. Now success in receiving funding is deemed more important. The emphasis has shifted from evidence of work produced to evidence of money received.
The universities have spent millions of dollars hiring management consultants to restructure them from their original religious and cultural foundations to corporatized machines for making money
This is part of the shift to a business model. The universities have spent millions of dollars hiring management consultants to restructure them from their original religious and cultural foundations to corporatized machines for making money. Vice-chancellors now call themselves CEOs and are given grotesquely large salaries – Aus$1,800,00 a year plus bonuses at the University of Sydney. Bonuses! Gratifyingly, quite a few of them have been dismissed for plagiarism and other corrupt behaviour. And the number of administrators, paid far more than teaching staff, has proliferated absurdly. One of the consequences of the merger of universities with art schools, nursing colleges, agricultural colleges and the rest, was that the heads of those institutions were all given highly paid administrative titles in the expanded university. Where there used to be a vice-chancellor and a deputy, now there are a dozen or more deputy vice-chancellors. They all seem to get sabbatical leave, though rarely have any of them done any significant academic work. But this is just part of the insane growth of the administrative bureaucracies in the universities. When I first taught at the university of Sydney there used to be one administrator for every 12 members of the teaching staff. Now fewer than 50% of university staff are actually involved in teaching.
And now over 40% of students in Australia are foreign students. The universities have made themselves dependent on foreign students. They are now the economic base of the operation. Forget providing a cultural context and education for Australian students. The universities have become part of an immigration racket. Student visas allow residency, the opportunity to provide cut-price work, and the chance of citizenship. Some of the recruitment agencies that find overseas students not only receive a large finding fee but are also involved in the construction industry, building, renting and selling student apartments. This has nothing to do with education. And with the travel restrictions and health issues arising from Covid-19, this has proved a disastrous model, with Australian universities suffering a massive reduction in fees and consequent massive job cuts, as overseas students no longer enrol.
Indeed, it has been the antithesis of education. In order to cater for the influx of foreign students, standards have been dropped, indeed abandoned. Most of the top rank of foreign students go to the United States, United Kingdom or Europe. Australia caters for the generally less able ones – and caters for them by lowering, or abandoning, standards. There are endless, authenticated stories of academics being instructed not to fail foreign students: they have paid their fees, they must be passed. Academics who attempt to maintain standards are overruled and disciplined.
Back at the beginning of the century when I published my novel Academia Nuts, I felt I had recorded the university in decline. In a comic way, of course. Campus farce. “Unmistakeably the last waltz”, the Times Higher Educational Supplement called it. But “’tis not the end when we can say, this is the end”. The decline had a lot further to go. Now my portrait of an institution in decline looks quite idyllic compared with the current state of the universities.
MICHAEL WILDING is emeritus professor of English and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. His essays on Clarke’s life and works are collected in Marcus Clarke: Novelist, Journalist and Bohemian, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2021; www.scholarly.info
Jacek Karczmarczyk, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
WILLIAM STROOCK reforges an old musical allegiance
In 1987 this scrawny, disgruntled 14-year-old became a metalhead. It’s an old story. I hated school and life and everything, really. Metal was the best available outlet for expressing that. I stamped my feet and pumped my fist to drums and bass thumping like a British coal ring jack hammer. I wore all the black metal band T-shirts and grew a long, blond mullet that chicks told me was soft and lustrous. Whitesnake’s Slide It In was the first metal album I bought with my own money. But David Coverdale’s hair metal band was a gateway to the likes of Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy and other bands more ‘respectable’ within the metal community. With glee, I discovered that Ozzy had been in a band before his solo career. Who knew?
Grunge killed metal, so the cliché goes. In truth, by 1990 metal may not have been dead, but it was certainly dying. The hair metal bands had done just about the last thing one could with the genre. This was chick-friendly metal, and the hard-core fans hated it. The usual hair metal band formula was to release a party anthem, followed with a ballad. It worked for Extreme. Heavy metal collapsed under the weight of its own success and hair metal un-seriousness. As music progressed I progressed too. I grew up and out and lifted weights. Much to the delight of my parents, I cut my hair and put the black heavy metal t-shirts away. I listened to Grunge.
Grunge eschewed glitz and big hair for flannel and sneakers. The Seattle sound was serious. In college, I listened to Kurt Cobain’s stories and Eddie Vedder’s songs about suicide and depression. It seemed Grunge would dominate the 90s. But Kurt Cobain killed himself, and Pearl Jam moved away from the power chords and searing guitar riffs of their first two albums. They became something of a niche band with a cult following. Grunge’s second wave, led by the likes of Creed, was decidedly unmemorable. Dave Grohl soldiered on with the Foo Fighters. Grunge flared out faster than anyone could have imagined and rock was left with what?
In the early 2000s, the last true rock stars were probably Kid Rock, who fused hard rock with rap, and Cheryl Crowe. In Seven Nation Army, Jack White found the last great guitar riff. Rock and roll had run its course. After Grunge died, this former metalhead had abandoned rock entirely and spent years discovering classical music and jazz. By 1998 I was really into Tchaikovsky, not just The 1812 Overture, but pieces like the triumphant Marche Slave. I got into the big bands too. Duke Ellington can whack one over the head with thundering drums just as well as AC/DC. Tchaikovsky and Duke Ellington may not have been metal, but they were heavy. Ten years after I got into heavy metal I didn’t care about it at all.
My metal revival began in early 2003. The 90s were already a lost world of frivolities like the Clinton impeachment and the return of disco (it doesn’t suck, by the way), brought to an end by 9/11. I turned 30 and began writing my first novel. Back then, I liked listening to music while I wrote. I broke out the Led Zeppelin box set of ten CDs. I hadn’t listened to them in years. But now I approached Zeppelin as a grown man, with an ear for music honed by a half decade of listening to classical and Big Band. Now I could pick out bits in a Led Zeppelin song I never would have when we were 15. That summer, I listened to Metallica’s Black for the first time in years. The controversial album, considered by some to be a departure from the band’s oeuvre, sounded as fresh and hard hitting in 2003 as it did upon release in 1991. Slam producer Bob Rock all you want for lightening up Metallica a bit, but Black is an utterly unique album and we’ll not see it’s like again.
During the winter of 2004, I picked up a guitar for the first time. After a gruelling year learning the basics, I taught myself hard rock songs like Free’s ‘Alright Now’, and the ethereal mist that obscured the likes of Jimmy Page slowly lifted. The mystery was gone. I could play Jimmy Page pretty well, and there was no more overrated bit of balderdash than his violin bow over a guitar. AC/DC’s Malcom Young liked simple chord progressions like Back in Black, but brother Angus’ leads were herky-jerky and violent and difficult to pick up. I’ve come to think of Page as more of a pioneer than a maestro and if asked the age-old rock question, believe the greatest guitar player is recently deceased Eddie Van Halen. He was classically trained but played manically like he wasn’t. In time, I could play. After a while, I could shred, nimbly picking strings and moving our fingers up and down the fretboard. I fired out notes frenetically, like a gunner on a quad .50 caliber anti-aircraft gun spitting tracers over the Pacific. Or so I told myself.
Iron Maiden’s Eddie
As I learned to play guitar, I noticed that heavy metal was creeping back into the culture. By then this former metalhead was a more or less permanent substitute teacher at a high school in suburban New Jersey. In the hallways, I saw some of the kids wearing reprints of black heavy metal shirts from the 1980s. I spotted the classic Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhodes Tribute T-shirt, Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ cemetery album cover, and even the old Iron Maiden Eddie T-shirts. Eddie, the tattered skeleton that became the sixth member of Iron Maiden, was ubiquitous in the 1980s and now he’d returned. There was Eddie as a white-wigged English judge handing down a ten-year sentence. There he was again in the cockpit of a Spitfire. And most famously, Eddie carried the Union Jack into battle as The Trooper. I pointed out to these young Millennials that I had the same T-shirts, and they actually asked me about metal in the 1980s. With pleasure I recounted, but not too much; I didn’t want to overdo it like a Boomer who can’t shut the hell up about the 60s, man.
I then discovered Sam Dunn, a Canadian anthropologist, documentary film maker and lifetime metalhead. In 2005 Dunn released his first film, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, a two-hour meditation on the history and meaning of heavy metal. He followed this up in 2008 with Iron Maiden: Flight 666, an inside look of Iron Maiden’s 2008 world tour. The author attended their shows at New Jersey’s Meadowlands and PNC Bank Arts Center. On 11 November 2011 (the very date is a heavy metal inside joke), Dunn released Metal Evolution. This was an 11-part history of heavy metal, from the very earliest proto-metal bands like Jimmy Hendrix and Cream, right on through to the Nu Metal bands of the 90s. Dunn’s series is akin to the BBCs The World at War. There will never be a better documentary series about heavy metal.
As the metal revival grew, in 2008 VH1 launched That Metal Show. Heavy metal was back on the air, albeit on VH-1, which in the 1980s would have been a mark of shame. That Metal Show was hosted by radio DJ Eddie Trunk and his comedian sidekicks Don Jameson and Jim Florentine. The trio were children of the 70s and 80s, and lifelong metal fans; Trunk had been a record industry producer in the 80’s. That Metal Show was a platform for the discussion of all things hard rock and heavy metal, often hilariously so. Florentine bragged about seeing fellow Long Islanders Twisted Sister during their epic pre-MTV touring days. Jameson bragged about losing his virginity while wearing an Iron Maiden T-Shirt. Over the course of fourteen seasons That Metal Show added greatly to heavy metal’s historical record and taught us much I didn’t know.
Twenty years after I first joined the heavy metal scene, I was back, a better metalhead than I’d ever thought possible – and a better music lover too.
MARK GULLICK savours an appreciation of an excitingly original music scene
Punk rock in both its British and American incarnations is probably as thoroughly documented as any musical genre. Punk seen as a transition, stage or catalyst, however, and the loose, disparate and inspired genre it gave rise to, is relatively uncharted territory, which makes Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again necessary reading for those interested in some of the most innovative rock music to emerge from the Western world in the last century or this.
Post-punk had something which punk had only in larval form – variety. Punk simply could not pluck cards randomly from its deck and come up with a hand as musically diverse as Joy Division, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, XTC, Throbbing Gristle and Devo. The sheer range of styles is breath-taking when it is presented in the accurate and mannered style of Reynolds’s book, and this is a thrilling account of a time of invention and music as genuine art, one which I bemoaned the lack of until a music journalist friend alerted me to Rip It Up.
Punk did not simply stop, of course, allowing post-punk to clock in for its shift, although Reynolds does follow convention by marking the territorial division in the traditional way. Thus, punk ends with the final Sex Pistols gig in America, and the post-punk period commences with John Lydon’s formation of Public Image Ltd. But, as Reynolds shows, there is another dividing line, not temporal but conceptual. Where punk was mostly visceral, post-punk was in large part cerebral.
Although the title of Reynolds’s book – the name of a song by Scottish band Orange Juice – suggests a year-zero reset for alternative music in Britain, there was of course a shading of one ‘movement’ into its successor. Punk had liberated rock music in two main ways, financial and formal. Pre-punk, you needed record company backing or well-off parents to buy equipment (undoubtedly one reason so many British rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s were so posh). APE (after the punk era), you could emulate The Cure’s Robert Smith, who recorded the band’s first albums with a £17 electric guitar from Woolworth. I saw the guitar played on several occasions, having known The Cure when they were starting out, and it always sounded good to me, becoming a trademark sound for Smith.
Robert Smith, with his Woolworth’s guitar
The formal liberation is less obvious, but punk stripped down the concept of the song to its bare components, and this demystification of music carried on into all the major post-punk bands. The Gang of Four’s Damaged Goods is about as far from Yes as it is possible to get. But this was not the denial of rock history, far from it. Among post-punk bands there was also an awareness of what went before them that had evolved from the semi-nihilist ramalama of punk rock into a type of working manifesto.
Gang of Four – not like Yes
Punk bands had their lineage in 60s garage rock, rockabilly, The Stooges, MC5 and more, and some were more rock-literate and aware of the provenance of their sound than others. But where punks had a vague inkling of what birthed them, post-punks knew to antiquarian detail which bands were their progenitors. And they were not just aware of musical artistic tradition. You were more likely to hear Sheffield industrial-synth duo Cabaret Voltaire (as their name would suggest) talking about Dada as The Damned.
Put simply, the musicians who followed the punks were several leagues more intelligent. Magazine’s Howard Devoto, all of Wire, XTC, even The Fall’s Mark E. Smith – given bouts of incoherence – were all thinkers. There is a delightful snippet in which Reynolds tells of The Ramones’ dumb amazement, while touring with Talking Heads, that David Byrne et al read books in their down time instead of raising hell. Rather sadly, the abiding iconic figure from punk ended up being Sid Vicious, as inarticulate and destructive a clod as you could find. Compare and contrast with Gareth Sager of visionary post-punk band The Pop Group;
In an NME feature, Gareth Sager argued that Western civilisations, being “based on cities”, were sick because they were cut off from “natural cycles”, unlike African tribes where repression simply didn’t exist
Whereas with punk there was a riot going on, post-punk sometimes felt like there was a seminar going on.
My own favourites from the period – Joy Division, Wire, The Fall, The Slits, Magazine and Killing Joke – receive the treatment you would expect as post-punk luminaries. I have a particular affection for Joy Division and Killing Joke, which stems from a wonderful 45-minute conversation about music with Joy Division’s tragic singer Ian Curtis a year before his suicide, and a drunken evening with Geordie Walker, Killing Joke’s phenomenal guitarist. He wouldn’t let me pay for any drinks, claiming that we were drinking the royalties from Love Like Blood, the band’s biggest hit.
Killing Joke
Reynolds is not Britcentric, however, but rather transatlantically exhaustive. He ranges across the herring pond with the ease of a practiced music journalist, showing an appreciation of sub-genre as well as genre.
Musically, punk is familiar territory. The Ramones, 1234, rolling eighths on the bass, total 4/4 drumming and what was habitually described in the music press of the time as ‘buzz-saw guitar’ (the go-to adjective for post-punk guitar sounds being ‘angular’). Post-punk was both more experimental and far more knowledgeable and expansive concerning its ancestry than punk. Its effects were also not limited to the music. Graphic design also benefitted from post-punk, and Rip It Up has occasional sleeve art which shows a much more advanced visual and graphic awareness about packaging – perfected by Scritti Politti’s use of famous branding to adorn their sleeves – doubtless a result of the link between post-punk and art college.
Much of the post-punk conversation tends back towards art and art rock, and various players have their say on the subject. Deciding what is art and what is not, of course, is akin to playing rock-scissors-paper in that the winner has not displayed any particular skill in the subject. But at the same time even the culturally tone-deaf can tell that there is a difference between Wire and Magazine on the one hand, and The Damned and Slaughter and the Dogs on the other. That said, the more trying aspects of the art-school approach are highlighted by a Wire gig at which, onstage,
…someone attacked a gas stove, while Zegk Hoop featured twelve people with newspaper head-dresses on playing percussion
Art, quite possibly, for art’s sake.
Any review of a cultural movement is now habitually viewed through the prism of the present, given the interesting times in which we live. To use the contemporary vernacular, Reynolds is pleasingly non-woke. It is a simple fact that, while punk took inspiration from black music, post-punk was almost entirely a white phenomenon. Then, of course, this might draw the occasional disinterested observation. Given that the one Reynolds includes, bemoaning the whiteness of the post-punk scene, comes from Lester Bangs, we would do well to remember that Bangs was a drunken drug addict best known for being Lou Reed’s court jester.
If post-punk had happened now, the whole movement, if such it was, would be under the Klieg lights of woke. Music is strictly patrolled by the commissars now, as is the whole entertainment industry. Post-punk took a studied view of politics rather than a coerced one. Reynolds makes an astute observation about post-punk bands and their rather more guarded approach than their forebears, not to race but to anti-racism, which feels very familiar today;
[W]hile most British post-punk groups participated in the Rock Against Racism tours and festivals of the era, they were wary of both RAR itself and its sister organisation, the Anti-Nazi League, suspecting them of being thinly disguised fronts for the militant, left-wing Socialist Workers Party (who valued music purely as a tool for radicalising and mobilising youth).
Today it is of course mandatory for musicians to keep their CV up to date concerning race. It is difficult to imagine XTC’s debut album, White Music, having a problem-free release just at the moment.
XTC
If you already enjoy the music of any of the bands covered by Reynolds, Rip It Up is a schoolroom of apocrypha. Personally, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures remains very close to my heart and not least because of sound effects on two tracks, Insight and I Remember Nothing. They sounded, respectively, as though someone had recorded an old lift for the first song, and smashed bottles in the second. I had never heard music like it. How did they do that? The answer, of course, was hidden in plain sight, like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter. The producer of Unknown Pleasures, Martin Hannett;
…loved the occasional extreme effect: On the debut Unknown Pleasures, he miked up the clanking of an antique lift for Insight and incorporated smashing glass on I Remember Nothing.
Reynolds achieves two pleasing results for a rock music writer in that he does not assume the role of central arbiter who decides what is good and what is not (he limits himself discreetly to assessing cultural value) while simultaneously being unable to disguise his favourite artists (he has an obvious soft spot for PiL and Scritti Politti). So it is as the enchanting hybrid of fan and researcher that he traces the many tributaries of the post-punk river, and the many cultural effects, not least in the media.
Punk did post-punk a great service by creating a highly significant, high-circulation, rock-literate music press. Reynolds estimates that, including the ‘knock-on’ rate of readership, where copies are read and passed on, the combined readership of the four big titles was around two million a week, figures the MSM would kill or die for now. And so post-punk was not left floundering around wasting its sweetness on the desert air because of mass media’s lack of interest. They had a dedicated press from the start.
They also had a figure who is sainted in any music biography covering the period he was alive, and rightly so: John Peel. Having championed punk and taken enthusiastically to its descendants (before an attack of musical malaise in the mid-1980s led him to claim that “I don’t even like the records I like”), Peel was as crucial as he had been and was to be in the promotion of what Reynolds calls “dissident music”, music produced outside the establishment industry channels:
Peel’s support of the marginal and maverick was all the more crucial because Radio One, before deregulation of the airwaves, enjoyed a near monopoly over pop music in the UK.
The production side of the music industry also underwent change due to post-punk. It is a common perception that while punk was about DIY records and musical autonomy, its demise represented the end of independence and the return of the big record companies and promoters. In fact – and Reynolds devotes a painstakingly researched chapter to this – the punk bands couldn’t wait to get famous and get on a major label, while the period covered in Rip It Up was notable for the fierce autonomy of some of the bands and labels. Of course, as The Clash’s Joe Strummer (somewhat hypocritically) had noted, record labels were always going to be “turning rebellion into money” and, as Mark E. Smith wryly noted, “all the English groups act like peasants with free milk, on a route to the loot”, but the post-punk era saw more determination about retaining creative and financial control.
But any movement is only what its defenders say it is. Post-punk, as Reynolds makes beautifully and caringly clear, was very far from monolithic. Ska, Goth, New Pop, synthpop, Industrial, post-punk’s territory is expansive and divulgent. Some was complete news to me, and I was what Mark E. Smith called a “printhead” at the time when it came to the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. I had never heard of (with the exception of The Residents) the subject bands of the chapter ‘Freak Scene: Cabaret Noir and Theatre of Cruelty in Post-punk San Francisco’. Reynolds is encyclopaedic.
He is also a good music writer. Elvis Costello once quipped that “writing about music is like dancing about writing”, which contains a point but does not tell the full tale. Many rock writers use the experience as a rite of passage to the ‘proper papers’, whereas with Reynolds, his love of his subject matter keeps the prose buoyant and the descriptions of the music – which can unseat music writers prone to exuberance – are concise and evocative. It feels as though, had you not heard one note produced by one band in Rip It Up, you would still find it an enjoyable read.
Rip it Up and Start Again is a wonderful book about an exciting and artistically fresh few years. Reynolds counts himself fortunate – after having been a slow starter with punk – to have been involved in the wonderful flat-pack Renaissance that was post-punk:
Young people have a biological right to be excited about the times in which they’re living. If you are very lucky, that hormonal urgency is matched by the insurgency of the era – your innate adolescent need for amazement and belief coincides with a period of objective abundance. The prime years of post punk… were like that: a fortune.
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD recalls the shambolic genesis of the Stones’ masterpiece
At about eleven on the Monday morning of 9 March 1970, a somewhat distressed-looking olive green, midsized BMC lorry of the kind typically used to haul heavy goods around the country, crunched up the gravel driveway of a sprawling manor house located just outside the village of East Woodhay on the Hampshire-Berkshire border. The driver of the truck was a burly 31-year-old with the uncompromisingly Scots name of Ian Stewart, and he was there not to deliver industrial equipment but to help record a rock and roll album.
For the next several hours Stewart and two assistants threaded dozens of multicoloured cables through the home’s heavily studded front doors and into the entrance hall, in due course installing drum kits and guitar amplifiers, knocking together crudely fashioned isolation booths like the old sensory-deprivation chambers in TV’s Double Your Money, and plugging in a forest of microphones against a backdrop of musty chandeliers and ancestral portraits that stared down in silent reproach at the cast of shaggy-haired residents gradually emerging from all corners of the home, whose doll-like smallness gave them the air of elves curiously inspecting a room in an advancing state of preparation for a party.
Stargroves
The somewhat implausible name of the house was Stargroves, and at that time it was owned by Mick Jagger. Jagger and his band the Rolling Stones – for it was they – had elected to record in this manner in order to relieve themselves of the tedious 9-5 restrictions of a traditional commercial studio. By doing it their way the five band members and their auxiliary musicians could plug in whenever the mood took them, and the 8-track console installed in the back of the truck parked outside would capture the results.
It was a good idea, and it almost worked. Jagger himself, along with his colleagues Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor duly spent much of the next six weeks cutting the basic tracks for what became the group’s ninth British LP, and the first to be released on the band’s own label, and which, after toying with the likes of Sour Grapes and – for some compelling reason – The Vagina Album, they named Sticky Fingers. For his part, the Stones’s narcotically-inclined guitarist and on his day leading creative force Keith Richards sometimes made it to the recordings, and sometimes didn’t. If a session was called for, say, ten o’clock at night, Keith might stroll in around three in the morning accompanied by his entourage of spliff-wielding Rastafarians, waif-like young women and sundry other advisers and assistants notable for their heavy use of mascara and the leather satchels clutched in their arms.
Before long, certain other challenges inherent to the concept of a group of young rock musicians working without external supervision also asserted themselves. As the weeks wore on, there were frequent arguments and absences throughout the band. The rhythm section of Wyman and Watts were both married men with children, and more than once they expressed their distaste for working through the night in a colleague’s remote country estate located some 80 miles from their own suburban-London homes. Several witnesses later noted that even the consummately professional Jagger would periodically down tools, if the phrase weren’t so inappropriate, whenever one of his specially favoured female companions appeared at Stargroves. “Suddenly”, Ian Stewart once told me, “there were days when Mick disappeared upstairs”.
Perhaps all rock and roll albums should be made with comparatively primitive technology installed in the back of a truck parked outside the door, with creative differences being not so much aired as shouted out, because the result of the Rolling Stones’s labours, as buffed up by the band’s wunderkind producer Jimmy Miller at various locations over the course of the next twelve months, and formally released on 23 April 1971, remains arguably the masterpiece of their long career.
It would require a life of more than mere detachment from the whims of popular culture, and devoted instead to the most austere monastic seclusion, for the reader not to be on terms of at least passing familiarity with the album’s opening number ‘Brown Sugar’. A – or the – classic frothy Stones raveup, it had curious origins. In the summer of 1969, hard on the heels of events such as the firing and almost immediate death of the Stones’s founding genius Brian Jones, and the band’s perhaps ill-advised free concert in front of 300,000 fans in Hyde Park just two days later, Mick Jagger had flown to Australia with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull to take the lead role in Tony Richardson’s film Ned Kelly – the idea presumably being that one rebel, no matter how slight his screen-acting experience, should play another. The production got off to a bad start when Jagger was forced to walk a gauntlet of protesters on arrival at Sydney airport, indignant that their nation’s 19th-century outlaw hero should be portrayed by, as one of the signs had it, a “pommy faggot”. Following that there was the near-fatal overdose of Jagger’s costar and travelling companion, which again saw the words ‘Stones’ and ‘drugs’ deployed in close proximity to one another in the world’s tabloid headlines. Tony Richardson promptly dropped Faithfull from the cast of Ned Kelly, which would go on to grace all the ‘Worst Movies in History’ lists following its limited release in June 1970. Adding injury to insult, Jagger was badly hurt when, once out on location, a prop pistol exploded in his hand. The unit nurse stitched him up and told him to keep his right arm immobile. Preferring to doctor himself, Mick instead picked up a guitar one afternoon and idly strummed a two-bar phrase around the C, G and F chords, then threw in some hurriedly improvised bondage-fantasy lyrics. This happy collision between boredom and physical therapy would be the best thing to come out of Ned Kelly. Once back in London, Jagger and Richards swiftly worked up the riff into ‘Brown Sugar’.
Next up on Sticky Fingers was a hidden gem called ‘Sway’, a solid if largely unremarkable reminder of the band’s blues roots until Mick Taylor suddenly swooped in with a bottleneck slide guitar during the bridge, and a dramatic, virtuoso outro solo that may represent the finest 30 seconds of his five-and-a-half year tenure as a Rolling Stone. Another swift gear change ushered in ‘Wild Horses’, a lovely ballad in its way even if Ian Stewart, doubling as the band’s primary roadie and occasional pianist, had pronounced himself unwilling to perform on any ‘Chinese shit’, as he termed music with minor chords, when called upon to accompany the track. Essentially a love song from Keith Richards to his partner Anita Pallenberg, Jagger rewrote the lyrics as a plea to Marianne Faithfull to rejoin him after she’d stepped out with one of Anita’s exs (all very fraternal were the Stones in those days), the painter Mario Schifano. It perhaps wouldn’t be hard to locate the names of certain rock and roll bands who over the years have embarrassed both their audiences and themselves by their misguided attempts at the romantic air – somehow I’m always reminded on these occasions of the baroque strains of Spinal Tap’s immortal ‘Lick My Love Pump’ – but what’s extraordinary here is that the Stones are at their most convincing when they aim at the sublime.
Next up: the gloriously eccentric ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’, a rock-guitar groove that swerved halfway through into a mariachi jam session. It was pronounced No. 25 on one of Rolling Stone magazine’s incessant lists of The 100 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time, but even without that particular bauble it would be hard for any normally sensate listener to remain wholly unmoved by Keith Richards’s shattering opening guitar bolt and the collective locomotion of his four colleagues and their sidemen – Bobby Keys on tenor sax to the fore – that followed. Side One, as such things were then designated, ended with the Stones’s somewhat frazzled take on Mississippi Fred McDowell’s classic spiritual ‘You Gotta Move’, which they’d initially cut in embryonic form at around three one morning in December 1969 while crouched around a microphone positioned in a toilet bowl (for that ‘shitty sound’, as Keith approvingly put it) at Muscle Shoals studio in rural Alabama.
Flip the disc over, and you had the horn-drenched blowout of ‘Bitch’, after which things calmed down with three songs – ‘I Got the Blues’, ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Dead Flowers’ – with seemingly little in common but their border-jumping from the world of roots rock and roll into those of country and soul, and back again, not to mention their assorted drug references and the basic premise of ‘Morphine’ itself, with its gory allusion to Marianne Faithfull’s recent miscarriage.
The whole thing wound down with the soporific ‘Moonlight Mile’, a weirdly insinuating slab of orchestral blues with lyrics one earnest American reviewer described as a “rare case of Mick Jagger letting go of his public persona, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the weariness that accompanies the pressures of keeping up appearances as a sex-drugs-and-rock and roll star”, and another perhaps overextended himself by comparing to W.B. Yeats. The song had a curious and on the whole less exalted genesis. Keith Richards had first strummed the moody chords to ‘The Japanese Thing’, as the track was then known, while sitting on the kitchen floor, a bowl of cereal in his lap, late one night at Stargroves. Initially there had been something of a skeleton crew present at the moment of creation, with just Charlie Watts on drums and the trumpet player Jim Price improvising on piano. Mick Jagger was upstairs in his boudoir, Bill Wyman had also retired, and nobody knew exactly where Mick Taylor was after his co-guitarist had informed him, “Don’t bother to play on this – you’re too bloody loud”. Six months later, Keith was too stoned to make it to the final session for ‘Moonlight Mile’, which the two Micks put together in his absence. Taylor later expressed a certain surprise to see his name omitted from the song’s all-important writing credit, an early milestone down the road to his decision to defect from the band in December 1974.
Kali – unlikely inspiration for the Stones’ slavering lips and tongue logo
Even without the bulging Andy Warhol-designed crotch on the front cover, and the particularly lubricious advertising campaign that met its release, Sticky Fingers could be said to definitively capture the debauched essence of the Rolling Stones in all their strung-out 1970s glory. It was also the first product to feature the band’s iconic trademark, inspired, apparently, by the Thug goddess Kali, and actually drawn by a young Royal College of Art student named John Pasche. Pasche was paid his standard design fee, fifty guineas. That tongue and lips logo, slavering in a cunnilingual leer, would soon be recognisable to millions of people around the world who never bought a rock record or attended a concert: it remains today the ultimate pop-culture accessory.
The last sight that many Britons thought they would ever have of the Rolling Stones was of the band camping its way through ‘Brown Sugar’ on Top of the Pops. Mick Jagger vamped it up in a pink satin suit, Keith Richards’s chugging guitar drove the teenaged audience into a synchronised boogie, and the rest of the band mimed frantically away as best they could. By the time the clip aired on the evening of 15 April 1971, the Stones themselves were already safely ensconced in their new South of France domiciles, either victims of a merciless Establishment backlash, or, more prosaically, of the Inland Revenue’s attentions to their back earnings, depending on which version of events you prefer. Either way, the sessions for their next album moved from Mick Jagger’s relatively sedate Home Counties estate to the more ramshackle charms of Keith Richards’s digs on the Riviera, and the last of the band’s indisputably great albums would duly emerge under the title Exile onMain Street. But that’s another story.
We tend to think of British music, and the landscape of the British repertoire, as belonging to English composers such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten. But it is not just bucolic, visionary southern English landscapes that have inspired great music.
The Welsh landscape is just as much a place of legend, poetry and long thoughts, and here another school of British music may be found and appreciated, of 20th-century romantics and romantic-modernists – Alun Hoddinott, William Mathias, Daniel Jones, Grace Williams, and Arwel Hughes. For Hoddinott, the Welsh landscape and Welsh lore provided huge sources of inspiration, although his work also included pieces that stood alone from ‘Welshness’ and demonstrated a pure, contemporary appeal, such as The Sun, the Great Luminary of the Universe. Mathias and Jones are known for their symphonies (Jones also achieving note as a prolific writer of string quartets), and Grace Williams for her Sea Sketches and Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Rhymes, but Arwel Hughes might be less familiar to music-lovers, certainly to an English audience. The time has now come to rediscover British music, to understand it through its Welsh, Scottish and Irish voices, beginning with the magnificent, and largely unknown, music of Arwel Hughes.
Arwel Hughes
Hughes was born in 1909, in the mining village of Rhosllannerchrugog, near Wrexham. Hughes’s background was shaped by family, by the kindness of a very musical elder brother, and by local nonconformist (Baptist) traditions. Yet self-containment need not be inward-looking, and it was clear that the young Arwel’s talents would propel him toward an academic musical career of the highest quality. His son, the conductor Owain Arwel Hughes, wrote of those early years:
My father was a highly-gifted keyboard player from a very young age, quite astonishing when one thinks of his upbringing as the tenth and youngest child of a mining family with no musical heritage whatsoever. He went to the Royal College of Music to study composition and organ, a courageous decision, not to say a huge financial burden considering his background
And what a step it proved to be for the young Welshman alone in London, as Owain Arwel explained:
My father studied composition under that musical giant Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence was profound not only as an inspiring teacher but also as a gentle, caring father figure…
Vaughan Williams was not the only luminary to influence Hughes; other tutors included Gordon Jacob (who arranged Vaughan Williams’s English Folk-Song Suite), and Gustav Holst. It was not long before the student from North Wales was absorbed into the English High Church musical tradition, as an organist and choirmaster at the Church of SS. Philip and James, Oxford. In 1935, the chance came to return to Wales in a role for the BBC, that of Studio Assistant at the Corporation’s offices in Cardiff – the prelude to a successful career that was to last until 1971, when Hughes retired from the post of Head of Music.
During that long span, Hughes devoted much time to championing his fellow Welsh composers, and this generosity of spirit may have interrupted his own progress as a writer of symphonic works. However, time was found in the evening to compose, and there is no doubting the natural inspiration and gift for momentum, mood and melody at the heart of Hughes’s wide output. It is also worth noting that this quiet and unassuming administrator (alongside his Welsh BBC colleague, the conductor, Mansel Thomas) gave us one of the country’s much-loved television institutions. Dechrau Canu, Dechrau Canmol was a Welsh programme devoted to community hymn-singing, and it was always Hughes’s desire to see music – religious, or otherwise – actively touch the hearts and daily lives of ordinary people. The formula was taken up by the English BBC and entitled Songs of Praise; it was fitting that the show should have been presented by that great Welshman, Sir Harry Secombe.
Possibly Hughes’s best-known piece is the highly-accessible oratorio, Dewi Sant (Saint David), commissioned as a Welsh contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain. For soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus and large orchestra, the work begins with a flourish – “Praise the Lord for all of His saints/Praise the Lord for David our Patron…” Straightforward and a showpiece for a Welsh choir, the opening section then gives way to a meditative pastoralism, every bit as touching as the English masses and impressionism of Vaughan Williams or Howells:
Who’ll bring his sickle to the yellowing wheat and his scythe to the meadow at morn?
Who’ll come to burn the tares that choketh the rip’ning corn?
But there are also some blood-stirring lines for chapel-going Welsh patriots:
In Cymru’s vineyard the tree was planted;
Fed were its roots with the blood of the martyrs, / Beneath its bloody branch is shelter,
Find refuge and rest in the arms of the Saviour,
For on this precious tree doth grow
The leaves to heal the nation’s woe
The words for Dewi Sant were written by Hughes’s fellow countryman, the poet Aneurin Talfan Davies, and the work was first performed at that great shrine to Celtic Christendom, St. David’s Cathedral, Pembroke, in the July of that momentous Festival of Britain year.
Another well worked-out piece – finely-structured, again accessible yet with a deep saying – is the comparatively early Fantasia in A minor, for strings (1936). It is a piece of “absolute music” – music for music’s sake, although the Welshness is one of impressionism and shadow. The composition is immediately appealing: a quiet, slow introduction, and the gradual gathering of energy, to achieve the soaring, intense statement on strings to be found in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, in parts of Herbert Howell’s Elegy for Viola and Strings – or in the introspection of Britten’s Lachrymae for viola and strings.
More obviously Welsh themes appear in Hughes’s Owain Glyndwr (1979), Anatiomaros (“Great Soul”) (1943), his Prelude “To the Youth of Wales” from 1945, and an opera, inspired by folk legends, entitled Menna – a spirit in operatic writing, reminiscent of the English composer Rutland Boughton’s ancient Arthurian and mystical dramas, or of Delius’s Irmelin. Apart from the whole of Menna (which has received at least one studio performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra), all of the Hughes works mentioned in this article have been recorded under the baton of the composer’s son, conducting Camerata Wales and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, thanks to the innovative Swedish record label, BIS.
There is one stirring piece that has not, as yet, been recorded for posterity. Written especially for the Welsh Proms at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff (a concert series founded in 1986 by Owain Arwel Hughes), it is that national favourite – God Bless the Prince of Wales. A magnificent arrangement of a traditional hymn of praise to Wales and its Prince, Hughes conceived the work as a Welsh version of Jerusalem – something noble and heroic for a Celtic audience to sing at the end of their promenade concerts. With its evocations of “ancient mountains and lovely dales”, and the spirit of the people who dwell there, a nostalgia – or sense of hiraeth – fills the concert-hall. It is difficult to understand why the works of this pupil of Vaughan Williams and master in his own right should be so unfamiliar.
Alun Hoddinott
The inspiration for Wales’s other 20th century composers came from many different sources. For Alun Hoddinott (1929-2008), there was the lyricism of Welsh folk-music – idioms and archetypes incorporated into his sets of Welsh Dances (similar in spirit to Sir Malcolm Arnold’s English and Cornish Dances of the 1960s). He also set out to commemorate specific events in Welsh life, such as the Investiture of HRH The Prince of Wales in 1969. Three Investiture Dances were the result – a suite most definitely in the native style, but with a surprisingly dark-in-tone, slow central movement – which seems to take us into a strange, craggy region of mountains, Neolithic stones, and skies ruled by birds of prey.
Another composer from west of the Severn is Daniel Jones (1912-93), a remarkable man – friend of Dylan Thomas, wartime cryptographer, and the composer of 13 symphonies and eight string quartets. Jones did not self-consciously promote Welshness in his music, but rather produced his work as an artist who just happened to be born in Wales. An orchestral item of his was performed at the 1982 Proms, his Dance Fantasy, and I was able to obtain the composer’s autograph on the concert programme – Jones standing by the artists’ entrance, quite informally, at the end of the evening, genial, friendly and quite ‘everyday’ in his manner. Jones’s string quartets belong to the same sound-world as the chamber music of Britten or Tippett. They are brilliantly well-crafted, and yet seem to evoke mind’s-eye images of sea or landscapes in Pembrokeshire and west Wales.
Sir Edward German
One piece of music that is self-consciously Cambrian is Welsh Rhapsody by Sir Edward German, a composer born in England – but with Welsh blood in his veins – and originally known as Edward German Jones. He is, perhaps, best known for his lyrical light opera, Merrie England, but also gained considerable acclaim in his lifetime with music for many other plays; for coronation music for George V, and symphonies (one subtitled, The Norwich).
Now to the wild domains of Scotland, and Victorian and Edwardian high-romanticism. It fell to a Scottish composer, Hamish MacCunn (1868-1916), to create a musical world of drama and legend – MacCunn being, perhaps, the Sir Walter Scott of orchestral works and opera. MacCunn was one of the first students at the new Royal College of Music, which was founded by the future Edward VII, and opened in 1882, and his best-known work is The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, a piece of great melody, atmosphere and power. Just like Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave, MacCunn’s scene-painting has an immediate fresh-air, open-air quality; with the drama and overwhelming presence of majestic natural forces flowing through his rich score. Scottish moorland, mountains, rivers, and shifting weather conditions are all felt in the overture, with a sense of Scottish clans, border raids, blood feuds and ancient folklore never far away.
Cecil Coles
Then there was Cecil Coles, who entered the Royal College of Music in 1907. Coles was influenced by Highland themes and landscape, and a number of years ago at the Proms, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland performed his bright, energetic The Comedy of Errors. Coles served in the Great War, and actually became bandmaster of his regiment, but, like his English contemporaries George Butterworth and Ernest Farrar, he was killed, in his case whilst helping retrieve injured comrades by dragging them back to the British lines. Who knows where British music might have gone, and what works might have been created, had not the war cut down such talents?
Sir Hamilton Harty
Similar inspirations – landscape, longing, memory, history – but this time in the landscape of the island of Ireland, can be enjoyed in the Irish Symphony and tone-poems, With the Wild Geese and The Children of Lir by Sir Hamilton Harty, a charismatic conductor and composer, born in County Down in 1879. Again, the name – Hamilton Harty – is unfamiliar to modern concert audiences, although recordings by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, and the Ulster Orchestra, have at least maintained his presence on CD. The muscular, immediately impressive styles of Berlioz or Tchaikovsky come to mind in the Irish composer’s assertive, call-to-arms, yet occasionally dreamy music. With the Wild Geese is especially intriguing, Harty’s wild spirits being the Irish soldiers who fought with the French at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, but whose spirits returned to the skies and lands of Ireland in the form of a flock of birds.
The great wealth of music and musical inspiration from across the British Isles is to be treasured and cherished, and yet it seems that apart from a few specialist music festivals, BBC Radio 3 and the occasional outing for one or two of the works mentioned, our composers and their works are largely unknown. Modern society’s obsessions with dissolving the past, living only for the moment, and our general, gradual journey into a malaise of self-doubt are all taking us away from the bedrock of our culture. Now, more than ever, we need to find again our national voices in art and music – to re-anchor and rediscover the music of the isles.
ALEXANDER ADAMS surveys the story of deliberate destruction
We are familiar with the folly and – from the Baroque period onward – the purposefully constructed ruin used to enhance the pathos of a place, most especially a view of a country estate. This would be a view that could be controlled, protected and secluded, reserved for the delectation of initiates, guests, devotees and – crudely – the owners of the land. For if wildness can be fabricated as easily as order, then ersatz history can also be generated to meet the expectations of the cultivated observer. The frisson of melancholy, the stimulation of imagination and the contentment of viewing destruction from a position of comfort are experiences the ruin can provide. Whether or not that ruin is ‘real’ is a matter of degree. After all, a building as a habitable residence and as a blasted ruin are separated by less than a human lifespan and can be produced through merely absence of funds or care. It can be cultivated by purposeful neglect as well as it can be forged by purposeful intent.
Ruins as an aesthetic
The Romantic relic is generated through defacement plus time, one encountered in a time of tranquillity by a traveller, for it is the curious traveller or pilgrim who fully sees the artefacts in a way that inhabitants of the region cannot. Consider Piranesi’s views of Rome. Among the ruins – greatly enlarged by the artist – the Romans of the day continue their quotidian lives heedless of the grandeur their squalid lives animate. They cannibalise palaces and bath houses to build their meagre abodes. These Romans are portrayed in a way to contrast them with the nobility, purpose and polity of their Roman ancestors. Where the elder Romans were capable of epic achievements unmatched, the latter-day Romans can only rob and scavenge their ancestors’ ruins. Thus, the Romans of Piranesi’s day were little better than parasites or termites eroding their habitat to eek out their paltry existences. In Piranesi’s Rome, Man (brought low from his high estate) is no more or less than a mean function of Nature, like wind, rain or the roots of plants, destined to topple even the sturdiest of towers. Piranesi’s Romans are little different from animals which graze under the pinnacles of an abandoned cathedral spire. It is surely their very indifference which makes them animals; it is the traveller, pilgrim and connoisseur (one who can afford and appreciate the prints of an artist such as Piranesi) who is the moral being because he responds to art and comprehends history, thus elevating himself above the animals of the field and wood.
Note that tranquillity is prerequisite for the appreciation of nature and the ruin. Not only is measured contemplation in a time turbulence or movement impossible, but for a ruin to have stately gravity, erosion must be halted (or slowed) to a state where it is not perceptible to the mortal. For a ruin to have a timeless quality, time cannot be seen to be changing its subject visibly in “human time”. A sand castle being washed away by the waves is not noble. However, if the castle were large enough (or, conversely, the spectator small enough) and the waves slowed to a nearly imperceptible speed, then nobility would be achieved. Bears fighting is awe-inspiring; sparrows fighting is comic. Again, if those sparrows were large enough and fought more slowly, then they would inspire awe. The essential material conditions of sand castles and sparrows do not preclude grandeur; it is the framing of these beings that determines their emotional impact upon the viewer. It is our perception – not our comprehension or the material attributes of that which we contemplate – which imbues a subject with emotional weight and determines the amount of significance we attribute to it.
What separates the Romantic ruin from evidence of atrocity? How does shock and anger shade into estimable melancholy and detached contemplation? Time is surely one factor. When I painted the ruins of Berlin photographed in 1945, I was fascinated by their visual correlation to ruined abbeys and castles and yet the historical immediacy impinged upon my understanding of them. Captured photographically in 1945, they were too raw, too fresh, too soused in newly spilled blood to be Romantic. Did, I wondered, my translations of these images into paint take away their sting? When I painted from photographs of battlefields, I was unsure as to whether I was just playing in the mud of Flanders, turning soil, fetid water and shattered tree trunks into brush strokes that were dainty and earnest, slashed with élan or arbitrarily revised. Who was to say that I was not more selfish, cavalier and flippant than any Georgian poet or Victorian historian, considering my (comparably) much greater appreciation of the atrocities connected to these battle fields compared to any comprehension they might have had about the subjects of their contemplation?
Ignorance numbs. To the uninitiated, the crofters’ cottages of the Scottish Highlands have a tragic timelessness. Yet once one understands that crofters were sometimes forcibly evicted from their inherited homesteads, these buildings seem more a marker of political and socio-economic forces than simple tides of time. Lady Butler could take as her subject the Irish crofter departing her home for the final time as a contemporary subject, pointed in its political commentary. Over one century later, her painting and the ruined cottage carry emotional charges, if one has the basic information that allows the subject to become legible. The information needs to be recorded and imparted through conscious will.
Sometimes the landscape remembers for us. In dry summers, when water demand is high, the levels of a reservoir in mountainous North Wales sink low and, for a few days, the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn are revealed. The stone walls of houses and chapels are upright and dry under the hot sun, standing over pools of drying mud. Former residents can see the lost streets of their home village, lost when the valley was flooded in 1965 to provide the expanding thirsty conurbations of north-east England with potable water. Disgruntled Welsh nationalists paint anti-English slogans on the walls in white paint. No one paints on the slag heaps of the Rhondda Valley despoiled by miners; instead, their artificial outlines are abraded by foliage and erosion.
Sometimes we ourselves become ghosts – walking ruins. When a Cockney visits the back streets of Stepney to be surrounded by Bangladeshis and Somalis, is he any different from a Canarse Indian viewing the first palisades of Fort Amsterdam erected on the tip of Manhattan island? It is the visitor returning to his homeland who is the relic, the last fragment of the past washed up on a shore made newly unfamiliar. It is he who is out of time, like the Flying Dutchman drifting the oceans. He is the ruin, looked at by native eyes as a curiosity of history, a temporal aberration. In time, his mortal remains will mimic the ruin. His bones will imitate the exposed beams and the vacant eye sockets of his skull will be the glassless windows of the abandoned house.
Decay is demonstrative of the passage of time. Time is difficult to measure visually, especially in a momentary encounter or a static record (a work of art or photograph), so visual evidence of decay – staining, erosion, cracking, weathering, lichen – forms the tangible mark of the passage of time. As for statues, we incorporate insults into their meaning. The hammer marks of statue defilers become the patina of our antiquities, absorbed into the meaning of the statue read backwards. A form of teleology, if you like. The statue was made to be defiled, lost, unearthed, traded and placed in an art museum for our momentary diversion. Art + time = pathos.
Buildings as their own memorials
This idea of decay spawning pathos is connected to the idea of a building as its own memorial. The building’s full potential is only realised in its ravaged, ruined form, when it can symbolise of the loss of a civilisation, religion or people. Only once it has served its first stage of utility can it enter its second stage of utility – as a former building.
When Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler discussed the grand architectural projects of the Third Reich, they referred to their projected buildings’ afterlife as ruins. Strange as it may seem for a regime which expressed a desire to last a thousand years (matching that of Rome), the planners of the regime had half an eye on the debris of their country as a failed civilisation, which was to manifest itself as ruins at which travellers would marvel. Thus, one component of the functionality of Nazi-created boulevards, memorials, triumphal arches, concert halls and ministries was to awe not only the inhabitants of Germania (as Berlin was to be called) but the inhabitants of the former Germania. For Speer and Hitler, the glories of Rome and Greece were a template for imperial greatness and architectural perfection. It therefore follows that for Nazi Germania to be the salutary example of cultural achievement it was intended to be, it had to be encountered in a defeated, fragmentary and partially erased by the people who would replace the German titans of old. The wonder and melancholy produced in contemplation of the ruin was a suitable spur to dreaming heroic figures of later ages who would strive to emulate their lost ancestors. A sensation of loss, temporal distance and incomplete comprehension were integral to the Romantic response to the ruin and for the architects of Nazi Germany.
It was this aspect that Anselm Kiefer admitted in his richly patinated giant paintings of Nazi buildings brought to ruin. The irony was that by the time Kiefer began his paintings in the late 1970s, the Nazi buildings had to be ruined in his imagination because the more significant Nazi buildings – especially the Neue Reichskanzlei – had been utterly erased. Kiefer had to consult publicity photographs of the buildings in pristine condition before he could summon the apocalyptic aftermath in his imagination. Generally, nothing so ambiguous or evocative as a state of ruin is permitted to Nazi buildings. They are either in use or completely erased. Exceptions are: coastal defences (abandoned, unusable and on liminal land), the Berlin and Vienna Flakturm (hugely expensive to dismantle) and the concentration and death camps (in a state of suspended animation, semi-preserved as historical reminders).
Not one trace
Modern iconoclasts have no intention of allowing anything as material as ruins to survive. They call for the destruction of material they deem offensive, to be marked by open space or replaced with new icons of the religion of social justice. The warriors of social justice take an old-fashioned absolutist view of cultural material. Produced by the exploitation of ‘black bodies’, facilitated by ‘white colonialism’, set in service of Christianisation of foreign lands, the relics of the past are infused with the toxins of social injustice at an atomic level. The utterly unparalleled evil of white, European, colonialist, Christian, patriarchal systems of barbarism which sustained society and produced its monuments transferred its evil to the very matter of its manifestation.
The statue must be toppled, the plinth must be dismantled, the plaque must be removed, the street name must be erased, the books recording the subject’s deeds must be deaccessioned from every public library. Once the subject is eradicated, his ghost can take any form his detractors wish, unimpeded by material evidence. Just as the graves of holy men were opened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to allow the smashing of bones, so today’s iconoclasts pursue their own forms of ritual shaming. Not only was the Bristol statue of Edward Colston toppled and submerged in June 2020, stained glass windows dedicated to him were dismantled, his name was removed from the concert hall and from the school founded in his name. The society commemorating his beneficence was dissolved. He was unpersoned during an orgy of revisionist righteousness, designed to allow Bristolians to forget, to rest easy now their historical debt had been paid.
Perhaps these new zealots intuit from their atavistic instincts that when material remains exist they can accrue mystery, significance and power in the minds of men. Colston’s statue may be permitted to live on in a museum, but only in its damaged state, to be surrounded by demeaning contextualisation intended to perpetuate the public humiliation. It is a trophy. Perhaps in future, no evidence of the supposed miscreants of history will remain except as trophies in displays intended to subvert lasting glory into endless infamy in stocks of the public space. Damnatio memoriae, as the Romans would have recognised. There will be no ruins to linger among and no fallen colossi to contemplate. Will the masked rioters of Europe mimic the masked iconoclasts of ISIS in Nineveh by reducing statues to stones, stones to pebbles, stopping only when the no trace of the subject remains identifiable?
The fury of today’s destroyers comes from the fact that the sins they condemn (colonialism, racism, capitalism, ecological exploitation) are diffused into every particle of their life. Pennies that flow through their bank accounts are residues of slavery. Houses they live in contain bricks made by the exploited. In their pockets, they have iPhones with components of cobalt and cadmium, mined by slaves in Africa. Their clothes are made in conditions they themselves have called ‘sweatshop’. Their pension providers invest in tobacco, munitions, genetically modified crops, oil drilling, polluting airlines, ‘big pharma’ and all manner of enterprises which have yet to be condemned by the pure. The very substance of the rioters’ lives cries out with injustice. So, they target scapegoats. They deflect and they project. Snagged in a trap of irresolvable contradictions, they lash out and their fury is strategically directed by politicians, educators, lobbyists and agitators. The Christian destroys the pagan idol; the Muslim destroys the infidel’s false image; the warrior for social justice destroys the statue of his ancestor. Each seeks to expiate guilt and protect the next generation from encountering the false authority. Some leave ruins, others leave none.
ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)
STUART MILLSON searches for unjustly overlooked Kent composers
A recent release on an innovative recording label – with the somewhat obscure title, Heracleitus – brings a mysterious figure from 20th century music in this country into view. The CD from the recording arm of the English Music Festival, an organisation dedicated to the rediscovery of the musical traditions of this island, owes its name to an almost forgotten song by Peter Warlock, which receives its world-premiere recording in the disc (Heracleitus – songs by Warlock, Gurney and Butterworth, EMR CD036).
Peter Warlock (1894-1930) was perhaps one of the first English minimalists – or at least, a composer able to concentrate profound sensitivity and emotion into sparse and sparing spans of music.
Warlock is best known for his Suite, Capriol – based upon 16th-century airs and dances – and the slanting light of desolate marshland in the melancholic song-cycle, The Curlew; but in the song, Heracleitus, the listener encounters a timeless whisper from classical antiquity, set in an English mist, and reverently delivered by tenor, Charles Daniels:
‘They told me, Heracleitus, they told
Me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear
And bitter tears to shed;
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.’
(W J Cory, 1823-92, after Callimachus (3rd century BC)
Warlock lived for a time in the north Kent village of Eynsford, which even today (despite traffic) is a reassuringly old-fashioned place, standing beside and fording the clear stream of the River Darent, overlooked by downland and willows. By a stroke of good luck, the M25 – which planners wanted to build through the Shoreham and Eynsford valley – went elsewhere, saving an idyllic landscape from noise and destruction.
E J Moeran, Warlock’s fellow composer and boon-companion
A blue plaque at the Eynsford High Street cottage which he shared between 1925 and 1928 with fellow composer, E.J. Moeran commemorates his time there – and by all accounts (“with the kitchen swimming in beer”) it was a jolly, bohemian existence, or perhaps too dissolute to sustain. Moeran – a man who seemed as Irish as he was English – even earned the name, “Jolly Jack”, and when not composing his Violin Concerto or landscape-inspired rhapsodies, shared his composer-friend’s propensity for ale-drinking. Legends abound of the Eynsford sojourn: a naked Peter Warlock, no doubt under the influence of the local brew, even rode a motorcycle back and forth through the village – to the amusement of fellow bohemians, no doubt, but probably to the consternation of the natives. When returning from London on the train, the Eynsford station-master was always ready to bang on the window of the carriage in which Warlock was travelling – thus waking the slumbering composer from his stupor.
Another of the composer’s north Kent circle was the curious figure of one Hal Collins. As Michael Trend noted in his 1985 book, TheMusicMakers – TheEnglishMusicalRenaissancefromElgartoBritten:
… Hal Collins – also known as Te Akau – a part-Maori, who boasted a cannibal grandmother. Collins was an interesting man in his own right: he was an effective artist, as his woodcuts show, and also, it seems, a self-taught musician who once played a whole act of an opera from TristramShandy which he had in his head.
Yet a purity is found in Warlock’s music, at odds with the excesses – and darkness of his character (a darkness, emphasised by his strange, untimely, lonely death in a Chelsea flat in 1930): wistful phrases, beautiful and touching, yet slipping away into a feeling that the composer is longing for something unattainable. (Warlock wasn’t the musician’s real name – the composer abandoning his familial name, Heseltine, for a persona far more tantalising and provocative.) It was, perhaps, a natural thing for Warlock to have come to this Kentish valley. Neighbouring Shoreham was the home of the early 19th-century mystical and pastoral painter, Samuel Palmer. He and his followers loved the countryside and described themselves as “the Ancients”, often dressing in the mediaeval costume. The paintings – oddly modern, in their style – or at least, not entirely what one would expect of the early half of the 19th century – depict a mediaeval world of corn, twilights, harvest, rural-dwellers. A photograph exists of smiling Peter Warlock, tankard in hand, standing alongside members of the Shoreham Dramatic Society – the members in their rustic Robin Hood costumes.
English music is so often associated with scenes of rural Britain. As the inter-war Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said: “England is the country, and the country is England.” Vaughan Williams wrote a PastoralSymphony, in part, a response to the Great War; and a composer called Ernest Farrar (who was born in Lewisham in 1885 – some 10 miles from Eynsford) which in those days was a rural village by the River Ravensbourne) composed a suite of English Pastoral Impressions, the first movement of which suggests bells chiming in the distance, and a gentle dance on the village green – the music then subsiding into a dream sequence, as distant, watchful horn-calls evoke longing and memory. Farrar served in The Great War, his life ending on the Western Front in the last year of the conflict.
In the search for Warlock, other forgotten figures have emerged from the north-west Kent… Who, for example, has heard of John Veale (1922-2006)? Veale was born in the suburb of Shortlands (famous for its 19th-century ragstone-constructed water pumping station, built in the style of a chateau) and a part of Bromley – once a Kent market town, but now known as the London Borough of Bromley. He composed symphonic works, and his Violin Concerto (which is reminiscent of William Walton) has been recorded by the Chandos label. Yet, just like the Cornishman, George Lloyd, Veale sank into complete obscurity during the time of the Second Viennese School takeover at the BBC during the 1960s and ‘70s; and was quite surprised in the early 1980s to have received a telephone call: “Is that the composer, John Veale?”
Just a couple of miles away in equally built-up Beckenham (although there are still village almshouses by St. George’s church), emerged another composer: Carey Blyton (a relative of the famous children’s author). Many will be surprised to know that Blyton wrote much of the early incidental music to the classic television sci-fi series, Dr. Who – haunting, abstract minimalist pieces, including a brief march-like interlude for the character of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, an accomplice of the Doctor. In complete contrast is the composer’s Song of the Goldfish – a strange evocation of the fish’s existence in a living room bowl – and an adventure-tale Overture, The Hobbit (recorded on a British Light Overtures series by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia).
Villages just beyond the M25 – suburbs which were once villages themselves. Look carefully through the neat hedges and fragments of still-wild woodland that has managed to cling to life in our congested age: a legacy of music created by some of England’s most unusual artistic personalities remains…
Derek Turner interviews Canadian rock titan EDGAR BREAU
Q. Canada’s musical heritage is as varied as its landscape – from the Celtic-and French-infused “music of the maritimes”, via Portia White, Oscar Peterson, Paul Anka, Neil Young, Steppenwolf, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, to M.O.R. mega-acts like Rush, Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Michael Bublé, and Justin Bieber. But your musical roots draw from less familiar soil. Critics have detected influences ranging from English folk to psychedelia and “Krautrock”, and Soft Machine to Stockhausen and Velvet Underground. I assume you don’t ever apply labels to yourself! But do you have a kind of philosophy of music? What attracts you to a song? Does it have to be ‘meaningful’ as well as melodic and rhythmic? How would you describe your writing process?
A. I started out playing Gordon Lightfoot cover songs from his record Back Here on Earth. Well-constructed songs of place, person, and lived experience by one of the best. Next came Scottish songsmith Donovan Leitch, with his bluesy Celtic mix – a very subtle writer, lovely melodies and rich lyrical content. Bob Dylan’s symbolist lyrical experiments were also a big influence on me in my youth. Those two poles pretty well sum up what I look for in a song. When I first recorded in 1974 my songs sounded nothing like the above-mentioned songwriters. Only later would the early folk influences return.
My writing process now – I take various open tuning approaches, finger style. I sometimes will start off with a catchy, promising song title. “That was the Week that Was”, the satirical BBC program furnished me with one such. It suggested word play to me, and the story line developed gradually into a romantic week that was brief and seemingly of little consequence – “the drinks got to me” – but upon reflection something more powerful occurred and reflection fills the mind of the protagonist with poignant memories. I throw out reams of material on the way to something solid that I can work on and develop into a good song. Trial and error and a lot of revision.
A 1757 map of French Canada
Q. What music did you hear around you when you were growing up? Were your parents musical? What is your family background? What was 1970s Hamilton like to grow up in? To an outsider, it looks like a city both busy, and with some commitment to culture.
A. There was always music in the home. My father, who was an east coast Acadian from Chatham New Brunswick, played the mouth organ and sang old French songs he learned in his youth. His musical tastes ranged from accordionist Harry Hibbs, a traditional Newfoundlander, country singer Hank Snow, balladeer Jim Reeves, Strauss waltzes and some Italian opera. I have three older sisters who played and danced to Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Jerry Lewis, Ivory Joe Hunter 78s. Later on, the youngest of them, Maureen began buying girl-group 45s by the Chiffons, Supremes, Ronettes, Martha and the Vandellas, and many others. I watched American Bandstand with her. She brought the Rolling Stones’ records into the house as well. My mom loved all our records. My father was mostly contemptuous of it, except for Gordon Lightfoot.
My father came from a French/Catholic Acadian background which reached far back in our country’s history. Our most distant relative, Vincent Breau (Breaux, Brault) arrived in Canada from France in 1661 and became the ‘Adam’ of the entire line of descendants bearing his name. It could be said that the ‘Breaus’ were one of ten or twelve founding families of Acadia, a former French colony established in 1604 in the territory that now includes Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in Canada. My grandfather worked in a saw mill, and built and played violins despite the missing digit caused by an accident at the mill. My great grandmother was said to be Mi’kmaq who are a First Nations people of the Northeastern Woodlands, indigenous to the Atlantic Provinces. I learned this later in life from a relative and have no reason to doubt it. My grandmother was also French Acadian. Dad was a decorated soldier in the Carlton York regiment and saw action in the Italian campaign after a stay in the U.K. training and – if his stories can be believed – rabble rousing, carousing and having the time of his life. He was shot through the wrist in Italy, ending his active duty as a sniper. On return home he left ‘down east’ as he always called it looking for work in the Toronto/Hamilton area of Ontario. Many others came here from the Atlantic coast. Dad worked at the Westinghouse factory but when layoffs loomed relocated to Guelph Ontario to work in the penitentiary as a guard. His qualifications: he had singlehandedly guarded hundreds of Italian POWs with a machine gun. Certainly he didn’t have much of an education, working in lumberjack camps at age 16.
Ever the soldier, he found it hard to understand his eldest son’s nonchalance towards jobs and education. I considered myself rather as a poet, and a musician destined for great things. We clashed at times, to put it mildly and understandably.
My mother came from Welsh/Irish stock, strict Catholic. Some were clerics, nuns, missionaries, one in Darjeeling, India. Our home was literally full of people. At the height of it, as I entered adolescence there were 15, consisting of myself, six siblings, an aunt (actually my cousin, family secret), two foster children and four cousins. We ate in three shifts. I grew up listening to prison stories, the raw violence that occurred there – stories of prisoners in the ‘hole’ being hosed down after they did unspeakable things with their own excrement, razors in toothbrushes, brawls my dad was involved in, challenges the soldier would never back down from. I believe Blood Sweat and Tears vocalist, David Clayton Thomas, was incarcerated as a young man when my dad worked there. He references a certain guard, ‘the silent tough one’, in his memoirs and I wonder if it’s Mr. Breau. My brother, Michael took after dad but his way was an outlaw, wild and lawless road that ended up behind the bars my father looked at from the other side. Michael was as tough as nails, a legend in the east end of Hamilton, a beloved lone wolf who carved out his own way, and eventually made good in the renovation business.
Things were chaotic at times and I was beginning to come off the rails. In the summer of 1972 after reading Kerouac’s On The Road, I found a hitchhiking buddy, my own Neal Cassady, and thumbed across the country, having many adventures on the road. Like Kerouac, I was a mix of Catholic and bohemian, a conservative in some ways intellectually, but living and moving in more liberal and for a time decadent and – I dare say it – dabbling in the occult and avant-garde circles. He was French Quebeçois, I was part French Acadian. Both of us were anti communist.
My father was a socialist, in early days pro-communist, but later on he became a social conservative. He rejected the labour movement’s drift away from working-class economic issues into social issues and, eventually, identity politics.
Hamilton was a tough steel town when I was growing up there in the east end of the city where the steel mills were located. I hesitate to name the gangs, even today, that divided up the turf. Warfare it was. One learned to be wary and forever looking over your shoulder on the streets for potential menacing action. Later on, I would take karate lessons from two wonderful streetwise African-Canadian black belts originally from Detroit, who taught me respect and honour while honing my fighting skills. Shortly after attaining my brown belt I decided to leave the dojo, worried about breaking a hand or a finger, intent now to be a musician and absorbed in romantic interests. A loss of discipline no doubt…
Hamilton today
Q. How did you meet your bandmates? What was it about Pink Floyd’s Saucerful of Secrets that inspired Simply Saucer’s name? After all, your favourite Floyd member, Syd Barrett, had much less to do with that album than its predecessor. Was listening to prog rock and psychedelia a way to imaginatively remove yourself from an unpleasing reality?
A. I met my bandmate Paul Colilli at high school. He was fascinated by Sixties bands as they emerged and buying all the records he could get his hands on. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Byrds, the Nazz, Canada’s Kensington Market. We became close friends and talked incessantly about music, literature and film. Paul was taking instructions in classical piano and eventually I began rehearsing with him at his parents’ home. We collaborated in naming the band and began looking for other musical adventurers.
He was of Italian-Canadian background with strict parents and they eventually steered him into post-secondary school education away from the rough bohemian influences. Late in 1973, my best friend left the band to pursue a degree and career as an academic and eventually became a modern renaissance man, the Dean of Italian Studies at Laurentia University. He was a world-renowned scholar known for his writings on Italian literature, culture and philosophy. He released a couple of albums later in life, describing his music as metaphysical ghost music. Sadly, Paul passed away in 2018 but not before recording new music with his old friends in Simply Saucer. A release is due in 2021 under the name Saucer73. See the link for more on Paul Colilli – https://aati.uark.edu/in-memoriam-paul-colilli-1952-2018/
I men another bandmate, David Byers, at a record store. His relatives in Holland had been sending him Dutch underground bands like Savage Rose, Wally Tax and the Outsiders, Supersister, and Group 1840. Dave had caught the Velvet Underground at a Toronto outdoor festival and immediately became a fan. I felt the same way about them and began patterning my vocals and guitar-playing after Lou Reed.
All of us were collecting records voraciously and would vie for bragging rights when we found obscure offerings, most of which would later become part of the rock canon, groups like The Seeds, The Stooges, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, The Thirteenth Floor Elevator, The Can, Faust. We held drunken rituals called Record Spinoffs where we would rate our latest ‘finds’ by criteria of “originality”, “obscurity” and there would be a winner at the end of the drinking bout crowned and celebrated.
Musically we began to jell, mainly playing improvisational pieces – long jams, psychedelic, erratic, angular – using electric guitars, audio generators, mini moogs, electrified flutes and saxophones. We had picked up a drummer by then, an eccentric fellow by the name of Neil de Merchant who had pop-jazz leanings. My foster brother, John, played synth under the moniker, “Ping”, and a high school friend Kevin Christoff rounded out the band.
At the time a coterie of us were engrossed in imaginative, fantasy fiction. The Lord of the Rings I had read in my high school days but now it was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Arthur Edward Waite’s occultist biography of Louis Claude de St. Martin and his novel, The Quest of the Golden Stairs, as well the Rider Tarot deck he designed. There was E.R. Eddison’s Fish Dinner in Memison, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and, most frightening of all, the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Incidentally I hadn’t read Lovecraft since those halcyon days but recently picked up a copy of Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life – a penetrating disturbing essay, reassessing his works and was induced again to read The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness, both stories absolutely terrifying. Houllebecq writes
The twentieth century may come to be recognized as the golden age of epic and fantasy literature, once the morbid mists of feeble avant-gardes dissipate. It has already witnessed the emergence of Howard, Lovecraft and Tolkien – three radically different universes. Three pillars of dream literature, as despised by critics as they are loved by the public.
The fantasy writers filled my young man’s head with dreams of forbidden planets, arcane occult rituals, monster races of humanoids spawned in the mists of times, places sublime ‘at the back of the north wind’. Arthur Machem, Lord Dunsany, Poe, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with a Catholic mystic or two thrown in for good measure. I lived in a strange enchanting world mentally and it began to spill over into the music of Simply Saucer.
Q. But then you reinvented yourselves as rawer rockers, with ‘She’s A Dog’ – a steel-town sounding, stripped-down song which seems strangely unrepresentative of your earlier, later, and even contemporary careers. Other songs from that period were much more ambitious, with synthesizers and theremins. Why did you choose that song? Was it a simple bid for commercial success? Wasn’t the Hamilton audience ‘ready’ for the other things you’d been doing? Julian Cope implies this, when he says you
conjured up a whole raft of imaginary Canuck ne’er-do-wells to travel with [you on your] extremely idiosyncratic musical travelogue
A. The responses to our live show in the early days of performing could be rather dramatic. We emptied out an arena in Carlton Place, Ontario; they just weren’t ready for our heavy metalloid music. Two fans braved it out to the end, showering us with praise. In Oakville, Ontario we were thrown off the stage, the drummer, literally thrown out of the club. Projectiles were hurled at us in St. Catherines. Professor Colilli, years later, declared that we were ‘deconstructing music’. Either that or just self-destructing!
Eventually we ended up in the studio where we recorded the studio side of Cyborgs Revisited (1974) at the home studio of Daniel and Bob Lanois in Ancaster, Ontario. Daniel would become, later on, just about the most famous record producer in the world. His client list is very impressive – U2, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Willy Nelson, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers – the list is long. Back then, I remember him sitting cross legged on the studio floor with his hands over his ears bravely enduring our “heavy metalloid music”. The six songs we recorded would not see the light of day for another 15 years, all the major Canadian record labels rejecting our demo. The day would come, though, when critics would outdo themselves in superlatives trying to describe the sounds on Cyborgs Revisited – our posthumous slab of vinyl, mysterious gift of outsider music to the world.
All of the songs were composed in a dreary narrow storefront, with walls painted black. I lived and slept and ate there for a year, amplifiers, guitars and chords on the floor where I slept on a thin piece of sponge, the sounds of the street echoing in the background, hoods pulverizing their latest victim perhaps with a pool cue, knife, or once when the local gang ‘ladies’ stopped by brandishing a plank with nails in at aimed at the head of our cheeky new drummer. It was claustrophobic in there, and so what better to do than compose my songs of dystopic technology running rampage over the fields of fairy?
Such considerations as a job to provide food and clothing, I blithely ignored. My concerned mother sent care packages over to the hovel, concerned that I would starve. The local thieves took advantage of my naivete, stowing stolen Harley Davidsons at the back of the rehearsal space on one occasion… ”Would you mind keeping these here for us for a couple of days? Thanks man…” I had no idea.
The gangs penetrated the inner sanctum now and again, threatening me with tyre irons, stealing guitars (alas), and demanding the band ‘play some Led Zeppelin’. One of them years later led a phalanx of motorcycle bad boy riders, some Hells Angels included, out of respect for their compatriot, brother Mike, to the graveyard where they hastily constituted an honour guard for my deceased father, the tough old prison guard whom they well respected. Later on in the church hall, George, we’ll call him, who had bitten off a rival’s ear and wore it around his neck as a talisman remarked that he remembered dropping acid outside our rehearsal space and then inspired by our music went out and “busted some heads”. I was flattered …
So yes, She’s A Dog was written for commercial success, and in fact England’s New Musical Express declared it “the pick hit single of the week” – a mix of the Kinks, Who and Velvet Underground, which suited me very well.
Q. Now, of course, Cyborgs Revisited is viewed as one of the great Canadian rock albums. But the songs on it were quite old by the time it was issued in 1989, and you had long ago reinvented yourself as a balladeer. You must have had mixed feelings at hearing those songs again, not to mention being expected to perform them.
A. Yes, absolutely it was difficult. I had abandoned the electric guitar by 1979 and invested in an acoustic guitar made by a soon-to-be internationally celebrated luthier by the name of Grit Laskin. I was enthralled by the American primitive guitar stylings of John Fahey and had crafted new songs with a more mature lyrical content. I was in the studio at the time Cyborgs Revisited was released, recording my first solo album. The critical reaction to Cyborgs Revisited right from the beginning was extremely positive and in some cases ecstatic. I felt very divided. The reviews poured in, and folks were calling Cyborgs Revisited one of the greatest Canadian rock albums ever made. There was shock that this music had come out of Canada. The record collectors salivated over it, stunned that the music had been hidden from the world since 1974.
Meanwhile, back at home my wife was very pregnant with our third child, fearful of my return to playing music, hysterical at the late hours I was keeping and my increasingly outside the mainstream political beliefs and their inclusion in my songs. “Think of your kids”, she would say. “We could be subject to an arson attack. What’s happening to you?” The centerpiece of my album, New Sacred Cow Blues, was rather reactionary in a revolutionary kind of way. The intent was to write a new kind of protest song, one not coming from a liberal progressive outlook but au contraire from a radical traditionalist perspective. The cannon was now on a swivel and pointing directly back at the smug and complacent ‘former’ counter culture that had become ossified, mainstream and as intolerant as the straight culture it had denigrated in the Sixties. My new anthem began with the words “I’m serving notice, on a wooden door…” casting me as a modern Luther intent on dismantling the smug countercultural ‘verities’ that had gone unchallenged for so long, a reaffirmation of the medieval call to order and hierarchy. In short, it was a clarion call of battle for the soul of the West.
Under the strain of my own grandiose obsessions and my wife’s nervous projections of paranoia (which would eventually lead to a nervous breakdown), with inner divisions running wild in my psyche, I cracked, walked away from the studio and the music world and hunkered down for the next ten years, homeschooling my children and subscribing to radical traditionalist publications like Small Farmer’s Journal, Modern Age, University Bookman, the Chesterton Review, the Dawson Newsletter, Issues and Views (African American conservative entrepreneurs who introduced me to the economist Thomas Sowell’s libertarianism).
Inspired by Chesterton’s and Belloc’s politics of distributism and championing of a new Agrarianism, I made plans to move into the north country and live self-sufficiently, growing my own food, making cheese (I had already made a start on this), homeschooling my children, farming in the three-cows-and-an-acre tradition. I made inquiries about a century-old farmhouse in Tara, Ontario, but on the homefront things were starting to fall apart, and money was running out. I took a woodworking job and left my wife to school the kids. Soon after she completely broke down mentally and ended up at the psyche ward at the local hospital. The plan was put on hold and soon faded into the distance as crisis mounted year after year.
Q. The folk influences you and others have cited seem much more obvious in your modern work – in songs like ‘Patches of Blue’, ‘Martha’s Back’ or ‘Mount Idaho’. Articles about and interviews with you throw up English folk names, like Steeleye Span. But what about other folk traditions? Were you conscious of an Acadian, or more precisely Franco-Ontarian, inheritance, and did you listen to that vein of traditional music?
The Acadian flag
A. My father stressed the nobility of our French heritage, taught us French phrases, extolled the unparalleled military virtues of General de Gaulle (who remains a favourite). The Acadian side of the family were fun loving, uninhibited, opinionated, argumentative.
My father played his music, yes, but it wasn’t until his retirement that he delved deeply into the history of his family and learned in depth the tragedy of the Acadians – their dispersal and deportation from Acadia in 1755 when they refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the English crown. He immersed himself in their history and genealogies, nursing a grudge against the predatory English, drawing Acadian flags, writing poems of his lost homeland and inculcating in his children fervour for our lost heritage.
Q. Folk music is frequently associated with radical or at least liberal politics – probably inevitable given its emphasis on giving voice to the unheard and unlucky. But this is not today’s cultural kind of radicalism, with its abortion, BLM and transgender activism – but more about economic fairness. I ask because of your foray into politics in the late 1990s, when you stood for the Family Coalition Party in the Ontario provincial elections, on a socially conservative and even fiscally conservative platform. What brought that about?
A. I became interested in apologetics in the 1990s. John Henry Newman’s “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” and his “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” were influential as were the high Anglican popular works by C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. George Bernanos, Charles Peguy, Russell Kirk all influenced my thinking – the list is long.. After the band broke up in 1981, I began reading Solzhenityn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago. I’d sit in the corrugated iron shack on the coke oven battery, while my fellow workers got stoned and played cards, absorbed in the tortures, interrogations, the bone-numbing fear and the ever present bureaucracy heartlessly processing the prisoners. My father’s socialist and rosy view of the Soviet Union crumbled. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ I began to see as symptomatic of our own culture’s dreamy abstractional drift towards totalitarianism. The woke social justice warriors, critical race theory, cancel culture are all modern manifestations of it in our own time.
I gave a talk on apologetics at church one evening, and a couple of the founders of the Family Coalition Party happened to be there. They approached me afterwards urging me to run in the upcoming provincial election. They must have been mightily impressed with my talk! The party was socially conservative, and much of their approach was based on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity – defined as an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Health savings accounts, diverse educational models like charter schools, home schooling were extolled by the party. I was already home schooling at that time. Government encouragement of small family farms and stewardship of the environment were a part of the platform.
My politics are localist, communitarian, distributist, ecology-mindful, freedom-oriented, based on the principle of subsidiarity. They are agrarian-centred, with an emphasis on the common good, the nation state over individual assertions of an atomistic, narrow, idiosyncratic, often times delusional, ‘identity’. I believe a society works best when there is a tension between liberals and conservatives. We need them both – iconoclasts who can smash up the dead ideas and debris of our imperfect past and the conservers of tradition, our lovely countryside, family farms, faith and yes our history.
Q. Why didn’t you carry your politics further? You lost that election, but most politicians lose their first elections. What do you make of Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservatives – and Canadian politics more generally?
A. I was asked to run again but declined. The shellacking I took in the polls had been rather bracing but that alone doesn’t account for my reluctance to run again as I’m by nature a strong-willed contrarian accustomed to living outside the mainstream, unbowed by a lack of popular support for my convictions. I ran a respectable campaign and learned much about the intricacies of our democratic process. There were tensions at home by that time that sidelined my nascent political career. Things were beginning to fall apart in my marriage.
Premier Doug Ford has shut down numerous small businesses due to the pandemic while allowing bigger franchises, such as Costco and Walmart, to continue to thrive. He’s promised to give the taxpayer the scientific data in support of his closures but has consistently failed to deliver on that promise. He sold out and betrayed the social conservatives he needed to win the nomination in the first place and since then has demonstrated his incompetence convincingly.
I supported Leslyn Lewis in the recent federal Conservative leadership race; although she lost a close contest, I believe she’s the future of the party. A Jamaican immigrant, she earned degrees from the University of Toronto, York University and Osgoode Hall Law school, and practiced law for 20 years starting her own firm. She specialized in corporate, real estate, immigration and energy law. She has a Masters degree in environmental studies, and would push back against political correctness. She agrees with Jordan Peterson that ‘gender expression’ and ‘gender identity’ should not be grounds for discrimination protection in the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act because she believes it would threaten people for using ‘incorrect speech’. A more ecological version of Maggie Thatcher, perhaps?
Right now the federal government under the ‘leadership’ of Justin Trudeau is spending the country into oblivion and pushing every politically correct woke dogma imaginable down the throats of the populace. A kind of soft totalitarianism begins to pervade our institutions, and cancel culture abounds. Our state broadcaster the CBC feels like a mere adjunct of the Liberal Party, while universities demonize views which just a decade ago were perfectly acceptable. Illiberal mover and shaker elites, buttressed by critical race theory, racialize every aspect of life, including mathematics. As identity becomes paramount in divvying out social justice, the poor remain on the sidelines; economic hardship takes a back seat to the latest favored “identity victim’. Trudeau’s election promise to bring safe water to every indigenous reserve has fallen by the wayside, his carbon reduction plans are an empty promise. He cowers before Communist China, failing to speak directly to them about the Canadian hostages they keep. Justin Trudeau is a mere shadow of his father and former Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
I applaud James Lindsay, the mathematician/philosopher, whose website, Public Discourses, systematically critiques Critical Race Theory and demonstrates that is not at all about social justice but about Marxist political power and dominance through the destruction of the liberal norms of political discourse. Indeed, it is at heart anti-democratic and totalitarian.
Q. What do you think of the contemporary Canadian musical scene – acts like Arcade Fire, July Talk, Deadmau5, and Drake? Which, if any of these, do you enjoy? If none of them, then who do you listen to mostly?
A. I know little of any of them other than Arcade Fire named one of their albums, Neon Bible, after the novel of the same name by the great Louisiana writer John Kennedy Toole who wrote the masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces. (I identify deeply with Ignatius Reilly sans the disgusting bodily functions.)
I find my music in out-of-the-way thrift storesand junk shops, and friends give them to me as gifts. Recent finds – a six record (vinyl) set by celebrated Polish harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska on RCA Victor 1958, called The Well Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. All of this for Canadian $3.50. Another is Sing Round the Year, 18 carols selected and composed by Welsh born composer, musician, singer and entertainer, Donald Swann – sung by him and the girls of Mayfield School, Putney and the boys of Westminster School. A real find that, for a total of 0.25 cents! One more – a record by the legendary Memphis-born blues singer, Alberta Hunter, an original soundtrack recording from the film Remember My Name. She recorded it at the age of 83 and it is smoking hot great. Picked it up used, for a mere pittance. You get the picture. I collect as always really finding whatever happens to show up. Books the same way. I’m not systematic or organized at all really. Whatever catches my fancy, and currently I’m reading Michel Houllebecq. Bed time reading are the Essays of Graham Greene.
Finally, Simply Saucer continues to thrive. We were a headlining act at the 2019 Goner Fest in Memphis Tennessee and have played NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Austin and many other American cities, and much of Canada. We were slated to tour California and much of the American west coast in 2020 but Covid had other plans. We are returning to the studio to record once again. I have wonderful bandmates of spectacular talent including original member Kevin Christoff on bass, Mike Trebilcock, formerly of the popular powerpop band the Killjoys on guitar, Colina Phillips, who as a session singer worked with Bruce Cockburn, Bryan Adams, Alice Cooper and many others, on backing vocals and synth and a youthful drum phenom, Brad Bridges. And finally, I’m an avid member of the Churchill Community Garden Association, a rank amateur amazed each year by the fecundity of my plot at harvest time.
ALEX WOODCOCK-CLARKE says a noisy segment of the British population wants to extinguish fireworks
And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good. God did more than that. He gave it to Man so Man could paint the night skies with stars and fountains of light to the music of thunder. Now it is the modern age, and God is dead. New voices arise from the void, querulous and offended, and what they say (and they are legion) is: “Let’s snuff out fireworks!”.
Is it me? Did I go mad? As I walked along the Bois de Boulogne did an anvil fall on my head in the manner of a Looney Toons cartoon? Is a large, statistically significant demographic of the British population truly mustering to eradicate joy? Has prevailing opinion really come down in favour of darkness and silence?
Transitory and brilliant is the history of fireworks. Though their origins are lost in the smoke of pre-history, the historian of chemistry, Professor J R Partington, notes they were known to the Chinese by the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1206-1368 AD) and used as “arrows of flying fire” at the siege of Kai-feng Fu. By the end of the 15th century, one mandarin scholar, Wan Hu of the middle Ming dynasty, devised a flying machine from two large kites, a wicker armchair and 47 large rockets so that he might escape troubled times and go and live on the Moon. His slaves ignited the blue touchpaper and retired. After the gigantic explosion, Wan Hu and his machine were never seen again. Some are sceptical Wan Hu’s lift-off ever took place (its first mention only came in the October 1909 edition of Scientific American) but in 1970 the International Astronomical Union named an ancient crater lunar crater after him. Fifty-two kilometres wide, it is as good a place as any to mark his landing or, considering its depth of five kilometres, impact.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, fireworks were bringing colour and fire to the Enlightenment all over Europe. Not of any historic importance themselves there was no historical figure which they did not throw into relief. Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, incorporated a regiment of fireworkers into his army to put on victory displays. Peter the Great of Russia initiated the tradition of setting off pyrotechnics at New Year’s Eve. In 1693, he put on a high fireworks scenario, cued by a 56 cannon salute, which included a fiery portrait of Hercules prying open the jaws of a lion while live dwarves, dressed as cherubs, “desported themselves madly” within the burning frame.
In France, Louis XIV instituted a tradition of firework displays in the garden of Versailles, some of which went on for five days at a time. The climax of one huge festival entitled, “The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island” culminated in a blazing battle between three sea monsters, which spread to the “Palace of Enchantment” and led to a volcanic cataract of fireworks which exploded the very island itself and blew the wigs off the Sun-King and 600 invited guests.
Of course, wherever there is excitement, there is danger. Fireworks have never been any exception. George Plympton, the editor of The Paris Review and a noted fireworks aficionado, cited Ralph Waldo Emerson: “As soon as there is life, there is danger” in recalling the immense pyrotechnical displays that took place in 1749 to mark the ending of the War of Austrian Succession. At one, in Paris, “there were forty killed and nearly three hundred wounded” when two competing clans of artificiers, one French and one Italian, “quarrelling for precedence in lighting the fire, both lighted at once and blew up the whole”.
Something similar happened on the same date in England. An enormous pyrotechnical machine was built in Green Park by the famous Italian fireworks designer, Gaetano Ruggieri. It was over 114 feet high and designed to be fired while Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, especially composed for the occasion, was debuted before George II and his retinue. On the night, the machine blew up prematurely causing Ruggieri to attack Charles Frederick, the English comptroller of the Woolwich Depot, with his sword; a man fell off the machine to his death; a boy tumbled from a tree, also fatally; another man toppled into a pond and drowned; a crowd gathering outside Buckingham House panicked and many bones were broken; people on the Surrey shore tried to escape on boats that were so in danger of being swamped their crews threw interlopers into the Thames in batches. The diarist Horace Walpole saw a young girl whose party dress was set on fire by a wayward rocket. “She would have been destroyed if some person had not the presence of mind to strip her clothes off immediately”. On the plus side, there were fewer casualties than it might have been expected since it transpired the Duke of Richmond had previously confiscated twenty-five tons of fireworks on the grounds of “public safety” (and used them at his own party three weeks later). At the end of the evening, Ruggieri was arrested and sent to the Tower.
Walpole’s verdict on the night?
Whatever you hear of the fireworks, that is short of the prettiest entertainment in the world, don’t believe it. I have never passed a more agreeable evening
Few places in the world gave fireworks as warm a welcome as in the British Isles. Alan St. Hill Brock, a member of the great Brock dynasty of British fireworkers (or, more properly, pyrotechnicians) speculates that it was Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a friar known also as a doctor mirabilis, was the actual (if dubious) inventor of gunpowder, as its written formula first appeared in his 1267 Opus Majus treatise. Certainly, one Mr. Guido Fawkes was a fan of British fireworks since the 3,400 pounds of explosive he smuggled into the House of Commons in 1605 were purchased from Pains, the Salisbury-based (and still operating) fireworks manufacturer.
Fireworks have painted the backdrop of British history throughout recent centuries, adding size and drama to the grand events like royal weddings or birthdays or jubilees, or great victories when we used to have them. The enormous extravaganza of 19 July 1919 commissioned from the Brocks fireworks family to celebrate the Treaty of Versailles was the largest show ever put on in the UK, perhaps even in the world. Prints and engravings of the time show the entirety of Hyde Park alive with rocketry, aerial bombs and hundreds of curlicue serpent shells. The finale alone was based on 2,000 rockets exploding in the air at the same instant.
What may be more recurrent in the national experience and perhaps more British are not the giant displays but the smaller, private experiences. Watching dad in the back garden trying to launch a two-inch rocket in the rain with a sodden box of matches. A line of school pals huddled together spelling rude words in the air with sparklers. The Scout pack watching through binoculars a display in the Co-Op carpark lit by the local vicar who has insisted on safety protocols that rival a guided missile test. Such fleeting moments that put the power of Zeus or Thor, all their fire and thunder, in your hands and the hands of people just like you – that’s the British experience. And it’s that experience that a new surge of anti-firework campaigners wish to extinguish.
2020 has seen a surge in resentment against the use and enjoyment of fireworks. Her Majesty’s Government has spent time and money this year reviewing nine live petitions submitted by members of the public to ban, limit, ration, restrict, weaken or otherwise squelch fireworks (out of 164 submitted). The one in 2019 received 753,000 signatures. The most recent one (which runs into 2021) already has 278,000 signatures, well over the threshold to trigger a parliamentary debate. This petition demands fireworks be strictly limited to state-licensed displays. “Better enforcement of existing law is insufficient”, the petitioners insist. Vulnerable people and animals must be protected from “the distress and anxiety caused by unexpected firework[s]”.
There was something approaching ecstasy amongst supporters of a ban when COVID restrictions led to the cancelling of 5th of November firework displays in London, Sussex, the Midlands, Manchester, Yorkshire, Devon and Newcastle, Perth and the Highlands. The renowned Skinningrove Bonfire, in North Yorkshire, which features complex Heath Robinson-type wooden structures like castles and pirate ships, was squelched. Further south in Lewes, East Sussex, Bonfire Night celebrations, which usually attracts 80,000 people, were abandoned, as were the riotous Tar Barrels celebrations at Ottery St Mary in Devon, a tradition dating back to the 17th century. It was the same story for the event at Kenilworth Castle, one of the most-anticipated fireworks displays in the Midlands.
And don’t think you can make up for the cancellation of the organised displays by setting off a few bottle rockets in the back garden. Devon and Somerset Fire Service, for example, reminded anyone caught in breach of lockdown rules on household mixing, even in their own garden, faced a fine starting at £200. If you were found to be the organiser of a gathering of more than 30 people, like a firework display for family and friends, the fine rockets up to £10,000. “Think about your neighbours, particularly older people or those who are self-isolating, pets and, of course, those of us in the emergency services”, says Paul Jennings, the assistant commissioner for fire safety at the London Fire Brigade, says. Yes, think about us. Us, the local bureaucrats, the safety enforcers, the fun police, your paid servants.
“Woohoo!” was the persistent and general reaction on the Facebook page of FAB (FireworkABatement) as news of each of these cancellations rolled in. FAB is not a very large activist group on the face of it, with only a little over than 20,000 supporters on its new media channels. It’s led by Julie Doorne, a fine-looking woman in late-middle age who runs a horse-related business. All she does, and does it very successfully, is exchange information about domestic firework horror stories with like-minded types and then watch them bounce back and forth, always amplifying, always gaining force across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like until they’re picked up by the local and national media. “Puppy was Literally Scared to Death from Cardiac Arrest Due to Fireworks” is one of hers from last year. It’s about an adorable 18-month old black lab, Molly, who heard a firework go off at local firework display, instantly had a heart attack and keeled over, stone dead. If that incident was not terrible enough, the accompanying FAB release adds: “Moreover, some animals also mistakenly eat the remnants of fireworks, and it often results [sic] to choking and death. Lastly, the fumes that fireworks emit might be poisonous to some animals”. This story then appeared unquestioned in Metro, the Independent and the Daily Record.
Ms. Doorne is not asking for much. She doesn’t want to ban all fireworks. Only those used by private individuals. And she doesn’t want to stop fireworks being used whenever we want. Just restrict them to November 5th, Diwali and some other official public holidays when they can be let off in council-sanitised environments.
Well, who cares what she thinks? And yet her campaign has now been adopted, almost point-for-point, by the billion-pound campaigning charity, the RSPCA. Both the Welsh and Scots governments have promised “urgent reviews” of existing laws. Children’s charities and those associated with the elderly and the military veterans are also falling into line. Slowly but surely, the big battalions of moral suasion are coming into line. If you think the humble whizz-bang, the sparkler and 800 years of history can stand against them, think again.
The inevitable consequence of welfare democracy is the dictatorship of “the vulnerable”. The poor, the sick, the stupid, the drama student, you know, chumps. Unlike other tyrannies, this one is babyishly impotent (power vests, of course, in its state-appointed or media self-appointed “carers”) in all respects except one. To wit, stamping on the fun of other people so long, of course, as the fun is utterly inconsequential, and the other people in question are not like themselves. So, after fox hunting, ready salted crisps and guffawing at the sex lives of celebrities, the next simple pleasure scheduled for cancellation maybe not this year, maybe not the next but very soon will be – bang! – fireworks.
ROSALIND RAWNSLEY pays tribute to a great idealist and reformer
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley is usually thought of today, a century after his death, as one of the three founders of the National Trust, or, in Lakeland in particular, as the Defender of the Lakes. The National Trust, it is true, remains his most tangible memorial, but his active involvement in a multiplicity of other fields, made of Canon Rawnsley a household name during his lifetime, not just in the field of conservation – but also in education as an early advocate of co-education and equal opportunities for girls, and in the encouragement of music, nature study and the arts; in public health, local government (he became one of the first County Councillors for Cumberland and towards the end of his life was co-opted onto the Education Committee for Westmorland) and literature, to name but a few of his wide-ranging concerns. Rawnsley was what today would be called an ‘activist’ – to any of the many and varied causes which captured his interest, he would devote his wholehearted attention, leading from the front wherever possible and whenever his ecclesiastical duties permitted.1
Born at Shiplake-on-Thames into an ecclesiastical family with its roots in Lincolnshire, Hardwicke, in spite of uncertain health throughout his life, was an indefatigable man of phenomenal energy and stamina. He would think nothing of tramping several miles across the fells during the night to see the sun rise over Helvellyn, catching a train to London after breakfast the next morning to attend a meeting, and returning home in the evening to deal with his correspondence or to prepare a sermon. No theologian, but a devout man of simple faith, he was much sought after as a preacher. He was blessed with a melodious voice, which he used to advantage not only in church but as a lecturer on a wide range of topics which interested him, ranging from the history, customs and archaeology of his beloved Lakeland, the influence of the Vikings, the German miners of Keswick in the time of Elizabeth I, to the archaeology of Palestine and ancient Egypt and the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, or the life and work of the Venerable Bede, and of course the application of John Ruskin’s philosophy of labour. He did however sometimes allow his vivid imagination to run away with him, and was not above reinventing history to suit his purpose.
Rawnsley never stood on his dignity, getting on famously not only with the great-and-good, whose deep pockets could be relied upon as a source of funds for his various causes, but also with the Lake District shepherds and dalesmen. He made a study of the Lakeland native breed of Herdwick sheep, an interest he shared with his good friend and protegée Beatrix Potter, who herself in later life became a famous breeder of Herdwicks, and in more than one of his books about Lakeland he wrote knowledgeably about the upbringing and particularities of the breed. Somewhat choleric at home and in Committee, he could be rash and impatient with those who disagreed with him and his impetuosity not infrequently got him into trouble, but he was never afraid to apologise when proved to be in the wrong. To any cause capturing his interest he would not just lend his name, but would invariably be an active participant, always leading from the front.
John Ruskin
Hardwicke Rawnsley was educated at Uppingham under the enlightened rule of his godfather Edward Thring, who introduced him to the Lake District and to the poetry of William Wordsworth, who was to become his poetic muse. From Uppingham he went up to Balliol, where he became an enthusiastic and life-long disciple of John Ruskin, whose ideas of social justice he wholeheartedly embraced and endeavoured to put into practice throughout his life.
After university he volunteered as a lay chaplain to a mission to the poor in Soho, during which time he became acquainted with Octavia Hill, the social reformer, who was herself a disciple of John Ruskin. They remained friends thereafter and some 20 years later, in company with Sir Robert Hunter, would together become co-founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, since abbreviated to The National Trust. At Balliol, having neglected his studies in favour of athletics and the river, both areas in which he excelled, Rawnsley, achieved only a respectable Third in Natural Science. He made up his mind to follow his father and grandfather into the Church, was ordained deacon in 1875 and was appointed Curate to the newly-formed Clifton College Mission in Bristol.
A prolific writer, Rawnsley published innumerable ‘occasional’ sonnets, having been introduced to what became, under the guidance of Charles Tennyson Turner, a family connection, his favoured verse form. Unfortunately for his reputation as a poet, he did have a fatal facility for sonnet-writing, which proved to be his undoing in this field at least, since he would dash off a sonnet at a moment’s notice on whatever topic occupied his attention at any given time. As a result, the poetic quality was, to say the least, variable. However, it has recently been realised that in the absence of any surviving diaries, Rawnsley’s sonnets – especially his first published book of verse, Bristol Sonnets – prove to be an invaluable primary source of information about his life and personal feelings.2
His literary output over the next 40-odd years, published on both sides of the Atlantic, extended far beyond verse, encompassing biography, pamphlets, magazine articles, papers for learned journals, innumerable letters to the press including at least 160 to The Times, memoirs, lectures, sermons, and ten books devoted to the Lake District, its scenery, history, literary associations and customs. The lyrical writing in these volumes, to a certain extent intended as early ‘guide-books’ to Lakeland, has seldom if ever been equalled, and never surpassed.
Marrying into a wealthy mine-owning family, Rawnsley became financially independent of his ecclesiastical stipend, as Vicar first of the tiny parish of Wray-on-Windermere, in the gift of his cousin who had inherited Wray Castle, and thereafter of Crosthwaite in Keswick. (He was later appointed a Canon of Carlisle Cathedral and an honorary Chaplain to King George V.)
At Wray, Hardwicke and his wife Edith, herself a talented artist and craftswoman, recognised the precariousness of the lives of many of their parishioners, seasonal farm labourers, laid off during the winter months. For these men, idleness led not only to poverty but also to boredom, to relieve which they would all too often resort to the pub, as Rawnsley had also found to be the case among the poor of Bristol. In the spirit of Ruskin, the Rawnsleys decided to offer lessons in woodcarving, a Lake District traditional craft in danger of dying out. These classes could not only provide an occupation to keep the beneficiaries at home, but also give them a new skill by which they could earn a competence during the winter months. When the Rawnsleys left Wray to take up the living of St. Kentigern, Crosthwaite and moved to Keswick in 1883, the classes in Wray were discontinued, but the seed had been sown.
The Rawnsleys, as convinced Ruskinians, and in accordance with Ruskin’s teaching that, “Art is the expression of man’s delight in the works of God”, wanted to put into practice what they understood to be Ruskin’s philosophy of labour. In his influential work The Stones of Venice, Ruskin, through a close study of the architecture of that city, made it clear that, to him, the secret of its incomparable beauty lay in the hand-work which lovingly created it – the balconies, in which each element, taking inspiration from nature, was individually wrought by a master craftsman, using as his materials the hand-cut stones and hand-made bricks which comprise materials used for the buildings and palaces. No two are identical, but all bear what Ruskin described as a “family likeness”. He pointed out that objects, when hand-made, fit for purpose, and without any superfluous embellishment, have an intrinsic charm and attraction of their own which no mass-produced item, however well-made, could ever emulate.3
Rawnsley at Balliol, 1872
Edith Rawnsley in 1874
All Ruskin’s thoughts and reflections on this subject were distilled and synthesised in the eight volumes of Fors Clavigera. This series of open letters addressed “to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain”, appearing almost monthly from 1871 to 1884, taken together afforded Ruskin with a device for a philosophical exploration of various aspects of work and its conditions in England. Labour was a topic close to Ruskin’s heart – when Rawnsley had come under his influence at Oxford, soon after Ruskin had been appointed to the chair of Fine Arts at the University, ‘The Professor’ had recruited a team of undergraduates, of whom Rawnsley was one, to build a new road for the people of the village of Hinksey, an exercise which Ruskin deemed would provide a suitable antidote to their usual diet of athletics and beer, and teach them the value of manual labour. The ‘Hinksey Diggers’, immortalised in an early photograph, and much ridiculed in the contemporary press, represented an early exercise in ‘public relations’ long before the term was invented. Ridiculed or not, the lesson was not wasted, on Rawnsley at any rate who, as a sensitive and impressionable young man, was later to put Ruskin’s philosophy to effective practical use in the Keswick School of Industrial Arts.
The Hinksey Diggers, 1874 – Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley is leaning on the spade
Returning to Fors, as Clive Wilmer in his commentary on the work remarked, while the letters are indeed concerned with labour, their subject is work viewed through the lens of human destiny, the Fors or ’Fortune’ of the title, being she who holds the key to the future of mankind. (Perhaps in the midst of the current pandemic, through which Gaia seems to be at last wreaking vengeance on mankind for destroying the planet, ‘Gaia’ should have usurped the title!)4
All forms of labour are seen as rooted in nature and having a common purpose – that of promoting the wealth that is life, rather than simple existence from day to day, from hand to mouth. “There is no wealth but life”, as Ruskin proclaimed in Ad Valorem, the fourth of his essays on Political Economy in Unto This Last, the title being a reference of course to Christ’s parable of the workers in the vineyard.
Happiness, in Ruskin’s model, a model incidentally shared by his good friend Thomas Carlyle, does not depend upon making as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. Money, per se, should not be an end-in-itself, but only a means to a higher end, and payment should be geared to need, rather than to desert.
As Ruskin’s biographer, John Batchelor, makes clear, in an ideal world there would be no place for competition – no market forces – no laws of supply-and-demand – no industrial capitalism. This idealistic philosophy was diametrically opposed to the ideas of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill (Ruskin’s particular bête noir), for whom the sole purpose of labour was the generation of wealth, which in turn, it was to be assumed, would increase the overall happiness of nations.5
England in the third quarter of the 19th century, through the efforts of the newly-enriched and powerful entrepreneurs, had become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth and the first to become an urban rather than an agrarian society. Yet at the same time, for much of the population the norm continued to be a life of grinding poverty, starvation and injustice. This paradox was not wasted on Ruskin. He laid the responsibility for this state of affairs squarely at the door of the industrial revolution. Men were no longer in touch with the land and with nature; they no longer gained inner satisfaction from working with their hands to create beautiful or functional objects, from the conception to the finished product. Instead the majority had become mere cogs in the wheels of industry – mechanical ‘hands’ on a production line. They had ceased to be individuals, happy in the joy of creation.
In his writings, Ruskin urged the socially conscious middle-classes to put the clock back by restoring to nature the urban wastelands which they themselves had created. Perhaps the new-rich individual with a social conscience would be in a position to put into practice Ruskin’s exhortations, but for the urban man-in-the-street this must have seemed a vain hope and an idealistic philosophy, impossible actually to put into practice. Those who do not have enough to eat do not have the time, leisure or inclination to engage in philosophical reflection.
Rawnsley in 1885
It was in reaction to this state of affairs, and drawing on Hardwicke’s experiences in Mission work in Soho and Bristol, that the Rawnsleys, building upon the work they had already carried out at Wray with the woodcarving classes, decided during the winter of 1884 that the time had come to put into practice some of Ruskin’s ideas about the dignity of labour. Ruskin had taught that for work to be enjoyable the worker must not only learn new skills, but he must at the same time have some autonomy and control over the task in hand – a notion completely at odds with the modern and more cost-effective factory system, where each man was employed to carry out one single repetitive task on a production line.
No doubt actively encouraged by Ruskin, who now lived conveniently close at hand at Brantwood on the shores of Coniston Water, the Rawnsleys wasted no time in setting up classes in woodcarving and metalwork. These classes were financed by local ladies, who paid to attend classes in the Parish Room in the afternoons, so that the classes for working men could be held in the evenings, free of charge. Woodcarving was taught by a local artist and designer, and Edith Rawnsley, who had taught herself to do metal repoussé, took charge of the metalwork classes. In this she was aided by a talented jeweller from the vicinity, she herself providing many of the designs. And so, the Keswick School of Industrial Arts (KSIA) was born. It was an immediate success, owing, as Ian Bruce observed in his magisterial history of the KSIA, to “the careful selection of instructional material and tuition”, and grew rapidly in size and scope. After two years, some 30 students were attending full time, rising to 67 after four years, with many more attending the evening classes. Every finished article remained the property of the school, with the student who had created it receiving part of the proceeds when it was sold.6
After only a few years of activity the School outgrew its makeshift temporary premises; better workshops and a showroom were essential. Accordingly, by the late 1880s, fund-raising for the erection of purpose-built premises had already begun. The money was raised with astonishing rapidity; in 1891 land was acquired on the banks of the River Greta in the centre of Keswick, and the first turf was cut in May 1893. The attractive building, in Arts and Crafts style, reflecting Westmorland vernacular architecture and featuring the round stone chimneys on square pedestals which Wordsworth had so appreciated, with a traditional ‘spinning gallery’ providing access to the showroom on the first floor, was largely built of various types of native slate-stone. The new School, with workshops adorned with improving quotations from Ruskin and others, was opened in April 1894 with considerable ceremony, though Ruskin himself was not well enough to attend. Ruskin’s philosophy of labour was encapsulated in the couplet, inscribed underneath the spinning gallery, and undoubtedly composed by Hardwicke himself: The Loving Eye and Skilful Hand shall Work with Joy and Bless the Land.
The Carlisle Journal on 6th April 1894 reported that a particular feature of the new building was a collection of art objects and models, designed to constitute a museum of reference for art workers. A library well-stocked with reference works, displayed gifts from artists including William Morris, who presented specimens of printing by the Kelmscott Press, self-portraits by Holman Hunt and G.F. Watts, later to be joined by others promised by William Morris and Walter Crane. Since observation from nature was a key element of the teaching at the School, the grounds were planted with trees, shrubs and flowers. As Ian Bruce recognised, the school “embodied the ideas and philosophies which underpinned the idealised communities envisioned by the proponents of the Arts & Crafts movement.”
From its earliest years, even before the opening of the new building, the School flourished, making a wide range of products in silver, copper, and wood, such as trays, candle sconces, bowls and vases. In the woodcarving department, tables, screens, corner cupboards and clock-cases were produced. All were individually hand-worked and finished, to point up the contrast between these lovingly created objects and the soulless factory-made, die-cast products then flooding the market. Good design was of course vital, and this became even more important as the School, with its growing reputation, began to attract special commissions, often for church furnishings such as altar crosses, chalices, alms dishes, candlesticks, and so forth. One of the School’s most important commissions was for a new reredos for Rawnsley’s own Crosthwaite Church, designed by Edith and worked by her with craftsmen from the School. She also designed elegant copper electroliers for the church and for the new Keswick Museum building, all of which were made at the KSIA and are still in use today.
The reredos at St. Kentigern’s church at Crosthwaite, designed and worked by Edith Rawnsley
In addition to metalwork and woodcarving, another local craft which had almost died out was the hand-spinning and weaving of linen. This had first been revived by Albert Fleming, another disciple of Ruskin, who with Marion Twelves, had set up the Langdale Linen Industry. Miss Twelves and her team of ‘spinsters’ had eventually moved ‘over the Raise’ (a reference to Dunmail Raise, now the A591, a mountain pass that connects the southern and northern sides of the Lake District, the main route through the centre of the Lakes) and became for some years amalgamated with the KSIA before differences of opinion between Miss Twelves and Edith Rawnsley resulted in the amicable separation of the two enterprises. Miss Twelves, yet another follower of Ruskin, then set up her own linen manufactory, which with his permission she named the Ruskin Linen Industry. Apart from beautifully worked items in what she called ‘Ruskin Lace’, a form of embroidered lacework incorporating different types of stitching and cutwork, two of the most publicised of the items produced by Marion Twelves and her team were the unbleached handwoven and embroidered linen palls, designed by Edith Rawnsley, for the funerals of Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, in 1892 at Westminster Abbey, and for John Ruskin eight years later. Ruskin’s pall is still on display in the Ruskin Museum at Coniston.
Many thousands of items were produced by the Keswick School of Industrial Arts during its century of existence, and are now much sought-after, commanding high prices. Unfortunately, however, in the end the KSIA became the victim of its own success. Increasing demand meant that orders could not be fulfilled without resort to the introduction of some mechanised processes. The range of goods was simplified; products in stainless steel which could not be entirely made by hand, were introduced and proved very popular, and in spite of the best efforts of the Trustees and management committees, changing tastes and the effects of two World Wars finally caused the School to close a few weeks short of the hundredth anniversary of its foundation. The fatal flaw of Ruskin’s philosophy of labour was embedded within it from the start – as long as the enterprise remained small, with only a limited production, hand work from the drawing board to the finished product by a single craftsman as an ideal could not be faulted, but in practice, as the organisation grew, it simply was not commercially viable, and Ruskin’s principles had to a certain extent to be jettisoned, for the business to survive.
Today, in spite of various vicissitudes including serious flooding on more than one occasion, the attractive KSIA Arts and Crafts building, now a restaurant, still stands – a monument to the vision of the School’s founders, Hardwicke and Edith Rawnsley, and to John Ruskin, who inspired them.
Rawnsley, photographed by Herbert Bell (Courtesy of Armitt Centre)
Ruskin, in Ad Valorem, wrote:
There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That man is the richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost; has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions; over the lives of others
If Ruskin’s dictum is accepted, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley was a rich man indeed.7
ROSALIND RAWNSLEY, after a career as a poetry recitalist and Arts Administrator in the field of classical music, attended the Victoria University, Manchester as a mature student, gaining a PhD in the history, philosophy and psychology of education. Her (unpublished) 1998 thesis is entitled The Celebration Movement and the influence of J.F. Herbart on moral education in England through the work of Frank Herbert Hayward (1872-1954). She is the great granddaughter of National Trust co-founder Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, and her biography of him (jointly written with Michael Allen) will be published by Methuen on 27th May 2021, under the title Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley 1851-1920 – An Extraordinary Life. She lives in France
