A solo trip into town last night to the Liquid Room for The Orb and Ozric Tentacles. I’m not especially keen on the Liquid Room as a venue, but I found a spot in the middle of the ground floor and settled in. I’d seen the Ozrics before but not The Orb.
The Orb did their thing. A lot of happy people melted into the beats and enjoyed it a lot; I was not one of them. The Orb’s thing is not my thing – I prefer melody – but that’s OK. There was one really weird moment, though, when it felt like all of existence was reduced to my senses being pummelled by sound and light. It felt strange and somehow important and not, as you might expect, disorientating; it was nice to have that weird sense of being even if my overwhelming feeling during most of their set was please make it stop!
I escaped to the upstairs level where the sound wasn’t so intense and was amused to see the sound man ignoring what was happening and checking his phone messages. Quite a few people were obviously only there for the Orb because they left before the Ozrics came on. Their loss.
Ozric Tentacles bill themselves as Europe’s premier psychedelic trance band and that is as accurate as it can be. Last time I saw them they were on a double bill with Gong and their music swam in the same pond as Gong; this time, with a slightly different line up and Saskia more prominent, they came on like the unholy lovechild of Gong and the Chemical Brothers. It occurred to me quite early on in their set that they were doing everything that the Orb did but with actual musical instruments, played by people. Dear reader, I have to report that your Cosmic Surfer dad danced a lot.
I had another of those moments during the Ozric’s set, and I promise that I had only had one beer with my supper. This time it was longer-lasting and more affirming, with a greater sense of what Jerry Garcia called the form beyond chaos. It pointed toward something other that I thought I understood at the time but didn’t note down and have now, 12 hours later, quite forgotten. Maybe it will come back to me, maybe it won’t; maybe the memory of the meditative moment happening is sufficient of itself.
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Different drummer and bass player, but here’s the Ozrics last year
Something I’ve noticed about myself as I grow older is that I find I’m responding more emotionally to some things. Two specific examples in the past 24 hours brought this to mind. The first is Peter Ross’s A Tomb With A View. I’ve had this book for a while and have been dipping into it rather than binge-reading. Peter writes very well, and it’s a joy to savour some of his sentences (She spoke to gravediggers and the elderly, picking up stories like pebbles of quartz, following the light darkwards) but I found the chapter I read last night, Unmarked, from which that sentence comes, almost unbearably moving.
The second was rewatching Tim Plester’s The Way of the Morris, last mentioned here nine years ago. Plester’s film, about the Adderbury Morris Men in Oxfordshire, doesn’t so directly grab the heart strings and tear ducts as Ross’s book; the trigger is simultaneously abstract and visceral, evoking feelings about time and place, identity, family, memory and tradition. It also celebrates, and finds dignity in, the ridiculous, summoning thoughts of ravens and coyotes, dancing foxes and other tricksters, the weird and the vulgar, primal even, that underpin the quietly respectable. Morris was known in pre-Reformation Scotland, of course, but people forget that.
It’s a lovely film that I recommend almost unreservedly (my only hesitation is Billy Bragg talking some faux-Celtic nonsense about Samhain) but if you want to see The Way of the Morris you’ll need to buy a copy. Two trailers are online, though.
Long-term readers will recall I used to dance Rapper in Edinburgh, and a wee bit Long Sword in Biggar. That finished for me, for various reasons, when I changed jobs in early 2011. I miss it sometimes, even though I know my knees probably wouldn’t react well to it now. I haven’t written about it for a while and haven’t really reflected on it enough to write much now, but, at its best, it wasn’t just a good excuse to go and dance in pubs and have a good night. There was something else going on, something about the act of dancing itself as an expression of something else. I’ll come back to this when I’ve thought about it some more.
How happy’s that man That’s free from all care Who loves to make merry Who loves to make merry With a drop of good beer.
With his pipe & his friends Puffing hours away Singing song after song Till he hails a new day. He can laugh dance and sing And smoke without fear Be as happy as a king Till he hails a new year.
(from the singing of Adderbury Morris)
And you can’t say fairer than that.
***
Music: The Princess Royal is a Morris Dance tune, associated with Cotswold Morris but also recorded several times by folk musicians. The tune may–or may not–have originated with Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan, there is debate. There is always debate. It also crops up in both major and minor key versions. Some dance it as a solo jig, others, notably Abingdon Morris, dance it as a side.
Anyway, here are two versions of the tune by Martin Simpson and Martin Carthy. The first is Martin Simpson in his trademark style with Carthy somewhat lower in the mix; the second, taken at Carthy’s pace, is more obviously a dance tune.
I passed a pleasant hour or so this morning watching the excellent Way of the Morris, a documentary by Tim Plester ostensibly about the Adderbury Village Morris Men but, as with the best such films, resonating in all sorts of areas.
One of the areas that it focused on was Morris Dance as an expression of English identity, albeit that the European spread of similar dances was also drawn out. What is not usually commented on is the presence of Morris Dancing in Pre-Reformation Scotland.
That there was dancing of that name in Scotland is not in doubt. The earliest reference of which I know is in the Scots Treasury accounts for 1501-02 which records a payment
To the men that brocht in the morice dance, and to thair menstralis; 1501–2 Treas. Acc. II. 135.
And there are a number of similar references in accounts and occasionally in literature through to at least 1617. Unfortunately we have no evidence of what this dance entailed or how widespread it was. The fact that it is predominantly mentioned in Treasury Books has led to at least one suggestion (I can’t remember the source) that it was a predominantly courtly dance for pageants rather than more widespread. In my view a valid counter-argument is that they are the principal records to have survived (or even to have been kept) and hence the lack of other evidence is not itself testimony to anything other than the poverty of the materials available to us.
The Fool
Although we have no records of the dances the records are suggestive: the Edinburgh Accounts Books for 1590 record an event put on for Anne of Denmark at which it seems there were 12 dancers in white shoes and for whom 12 ‘hattis of flouris’ were provided. A record from 1508 suggests that ‘woman’ character–perhaps what we would now call a Dame or a Betty–seems to have been involved, as well as a fool. This may be viewing the past with a modern gloss however.
More generally, though, we can infer the existence of a lively set of communal traditions from the extensive efforts by the Post-Reformation Kirk to stamp them out! These traditions point to a Scottish past with greater tie in to the European mainstream than is generally realised (though as a seafaring trading nation it really should be no surprise).
Alas for the Reformation! As the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statuary, the Kirk and its counterparts destroyed and vandalised an ecclesiastical and secular artistic heritage with the attention to detail of a zealot and the absolutely certainty of the self-righteous. It is difficult to think of a more significant erasure of European life and culture until the First World War wreaked its madness (another theme of Way of the Morris).
It is a mark of the success of the Reformation that so little trace remains of Scottish heritage–at least in the Lowlands; the Highlands had their own scouring–to the extent that suggestions of the Morris in Scotland are routinely mocked and scoffed at, frequently abusively, today. It is an absurd irony that, in the attempts to forge a faux Celtic mythology for Scottish popular culture, its true richness is routinely ignored and denied.
It’s been a quiet week for the most part although it ended with a rattle last night when we ran a Rapper Workshop to see if we could find any new dancers for Mons Meg.
It was a successful evening in that we had 25 folks show up and I think that a goodly number of them will take their interest further. We also had a good fiddler whom we met last week on our pub tour come along and play. After the workshop most of us dropped round to Bennets Bar where, suitably rehydrated, we did a decent dance. Certainly a better dance than last time we were there when we snapped a sword! It had the desired effect which was to show the new recruits where Rapper has its true home.
And we put the hat round and made a few quid as well.
I wonder what my 21 year old self – pictured above right, would have made of it? I like to think that I would have appreciated it and been interested enough to have joined in, but there’s a decent chance that I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember really. My interest was eventually caught by sword dancing around 1985 which was still four years away from this picture being taken – although I didn’t actually do anything about it for another 20 years. Maybe if I was interested at 25 I would also have been interested at 21 and could have been involved with the legendary but now no more Beltane Rapper of Edinburgh.
light and shade
Just before Christmas I posted here about Arthur Berry and particularly his magnificent Lament for the Lost Pubs of Burslem. For the benefit of anyone who is googling and finds this post then I am pleased to say that I received a copy of a cd with it on this morning from BBC Radio Stoke.
The cd is called “Lullaby of Queen Street” and cost £6.50 plus £1 P+P. The cd contains eight of his broadcast monologues and they’re all good.
Surprisingly, given that it has come from the BBC and is on their own label, the sound quality is erratic as though the broadcasts were put on without any mastering or balancing; so they are at different levels and there is the occasional distortion, almost as though they were recorded off air.
Be that as it may the Lament is as wonderful as I remember it and it is lovely to be reunited with it after many years.
Mind you, the book I ordered in December hasn’t appeared yet.
Kirkburton Rapier Dancers, Holmfirth, 2006
The title of this post is taken from Trevor Stone’s booklet from 1980 about Yorkshire Longsword dancing. I said above that I first got interested in sword dancing in 1985 which was when, I think, Channel 4 in the UK showed the Bill Bryden production of The Mysteries (Sadly unavailable on DVD).
In the course of the play, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which concludes with the foundation of Israel, is marked by a simplified longsword dance (making the obvious use of the six-sword lock) and it made a big impression on me. I didn’t encounter the dance again, somehow, until The Jake Thackray Experience made our first visit to Holmfirth Festival of Folk in 2006 when I first saw the Kirkburton Rapier Dancers and I was floored. It was after that experience that I looked to see if anyone was dancing Longsword in Scotland and thus got involved in the first workshop from which Mons Meg emerged.
I subsequently danced some Longsword for a while in Biggar but that is dormant for a while and I’m itching to try and get a proper Longsword side started in Edinburgh. Time will tell.
Mons Meg were out for a tour last night, our first for a while, and we stuck to our familiar stomping ground of Leith Walk.
Although the dancing was a bit rusty, it was a good crawl with enthusiastic punters and, I think, decent takings in the hat. We did eight dances overall in
Mathers
The Theatre Royal
The Elm Bar
The Brunswick
Priscillas
The Victoria
The Boda and
Sophie’s
with two of those fine establishments treating us to free aquavit as a reward for our efforts.
Mons Meg has come to mean a great deal to me. It is more than an brand identity or a set of people in kit who happen to dance Rapper in Edinburgh. It has grown with a core group of individuals who have developed a team identity which expresses itself most fully when dancing together of an evening. Mons Meg consists in the people who have pushed and pulled it to where it is now which is to say that Mons Meg consists in the people who are part of it or who become part of it over a period.
No room at this inn last night
Around that group of individuals there is a membrane which has grown which is intangible yet real and, when on a tour, it puts us in our own defined world even as we interact with others.
Once that membrane is punctured it can not be repaired, you just have to plug away and hope that a fresh one grows.
Although it is a while since we have managed to get together to practice thanks to weather and injuries, it was apparent to me the minute that we kicked off our first dance that this felt right. As the evening went on I realised that this – Mons Meg out dancing together and drinking beer – was why I like this so much.
Which was a very timely reminder because, prior to last night, I had pretty much decided that once we had fulfilled some engagements later in the year I was going to leave.
Today started feeling a little rough but that has passed with a short walk through the snowy slush to the shops and a pot of tea. To aid recovery further I can smell supper cooking through the way – shoulder of lamb slowly cooking in rosemary, garlic and red wine. Unfortunately I couldn’t get hold of fresh rosemary and am using dried but what the heck. Just as soon as this is posted I’ll go through and prepare some veg and, I think, some yorkshire puddings to round things off.
DART has been great for a number of reasons. I’ll post a longer assessment later when I have had time to process some thoughts but we have had a whale of a time.
In dance terms I think we did well – certainly the judges’ comments suggest so. We are not here primarily to compete but to dance and to participate in the first of what the organisers hope will be an annual event. I’d like to think that we made friends and we have certainly enjoyed fine hopitality.
The photo to the right is of me calling on in the last of the pubs in which we danced – Tommy Doyle’s – and a video of this dance will appear on YouTube in a few days. The photo was taken by Sean Smith as was the one below. As the day went on I twigged that it was worth working the crowd in a way that I might not do at home and it seems to have been the right thing to do.
We also did a spot of guerrilla dancing – dancing in another pub in between two of the competition venues and collecting $50 in the hat in the process. I found this helpful because it turned the afternoon into a regular pub tour, albeit that the venues contained audiences (and other dancers) who helped to lift the atmosphere and fed back into the dance.
Mons Meg in Tommy Doyle's
In the evening there was a meal and a showcase where all the teams performed a dance on stage. In a break in proceedings, on a neighbouring table, Toronto Womens’ Sword started to sing, a capella and in close harmony. Entirely appropriately for the occasion they kicked off with “A Miner’s Life”
Union miners, stand together
Do not heed the Coal Board’s tale
Keep your hand upon your wages
And your eye upon the scale
They were stunning and entrancing and, for me, worth the price of the airtickets in themselves.
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