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
Lindsay and I were at Barrowland this week to see Public Service Broadcasting on the opening night of their latest tour. This was the third time I’ve seen them at Barrowland (the sixth time I’ve seen them overall since 2017) and, in a sign of changing times, this show was sold out, and tickets went fast. It goes without saying that it was a great gig – I don’t recall ever seeing a bad one from them. The first time I saw them, playing The Race For Space in it’s entirety at the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival, was excellent and they manage to get better with every tour. They spent an hour and forty-five minutes on a selection from across their history, all played with skill, confidence and energy, and bolstered by a ‘lively’ crowd.
The inestimable Peter Ross, author of the excellent Steeple Chasing and A Tomb with a View amongst many other things (and a fellow devotee of Half Man Half Biscuit) was there too: his Guardian review is here:
I’ve embedded the video for Night Mail, which Peter mentions, at the foot of this post. It’s one of PSB’s earliest recordings and remains a setlist staple. I’ve also embedded ‘Progress’, by turns ironic and optimistic (the voice over is from a film about progress in the UK mining industry.)
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I watched David Olusoga’s new A House Through Time: Two Cities At War, rapt. I saw the first episode on telly (for which I often need my hearing aids these days) and the other three episodes on iPlayer with noise-cancelling headphones. The hyperlink is to iPlayer which you might not be able to access outside of the UK. This series was narrowly focused on two apartment blocks, one in London the other in Berlin, and deftly used the central conceit of researching the lives of the residents to follow a broader social history, in this case roughly 1930 to 1945. In the best traditions of public service broadcasting, it informed, educated and entertained, and packed a powerful emotional punch, especially episode three. Highly recommended.
I’m still watching the latest from Marvel, Agatha All Along, and I’m still really not sure what to make of it. As I wrote last time, it has a distinctly American sensibility for, I now realise, American values of pantomime: the acting is not – and is not supposed to be – naturalistic. It also sits in a line of witchcraft narratives that owe a lot to the Brothers Grimm as filtered through Disney, and the Wicked Witch of the West of The Wizard of Oz – and not in an ironic or critical way. I think I’m enjoying it, but I’m not as enthusiastic as the mass of fans on social media.
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I’ve been spending time reading The Scotsman from 1933 and 1939 as background preparation for the next novel(s) and it has been fascinating. My initial aim was to get background colour and detail for the stories and I’m getting that, but I’m also struck by the differences between then and now. By that I do not just mean a world where the listings are for Radio not TV and international travel is by sea not air, I also mean the way in which the paper is written and edited. Grammar and syntax are spot on even if the vocabulary is now dated, but, more than that, there are no bylines and no opinion columnists: the focus is on the verities of who, what, when, where and how. The reporting of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in late January of 1933 is exemplary: concise, sharp, analytical and objective.
There is also that thing of watching events play out in real time when I know the outcome and it doesn’t end well (something that is strong in A House Through Time as well.)
Working through the papers (and I plan to read through 1936 too) is quite time consuming but worth it. As I mentioned last time, I intend also to work through the Edinburgh Evening News and Edinburgh Evening Dispatch for the same years for a different tone and a different assumed audience. It has since occurred to me that for many people of the time the primary news source would not have been the papers but Pathé newsreels in the cinema. happily, these have been digitised and are freely available online.
An odd thing has happened. I had a listen to Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (Anthology edition). I thought it was OK and listened to it again. The second time through I enjoyed it. Can you guess where this is going? I’ve since bought Folklore and Evermore and rather like them. I am not a Swifty in the sense that I don’t connect with everything she does, but I do like some of it quite a lot.
Jeez, a Deadhead and Swifty-adjacent: who’da thunk it?
In other news, I haven’t run since February thanks to a knee problem that I’ve been resting. My gym membership starts up again in two weeks and I’ll get a clearer idea of how things, er, stand then. I think it’s a muscle problem rather than a knee problem as such, so aside from not running I’ve also been stretching quads a lot. It mainly impacts if I’m going down hill so my first tentative steps will be on a treadmill followed by a flat surface. I still have time to get back to 10K fitness by autumn, though maybe not as confidently as last year.
My time generally has been spent either revising the work in progress, a more substantial job than I expected, or digging into my family tree. On the latter, from a position of scepticism I’ve become more enthusiastic about the contribution of genealogy DNA as a means of confirming or refuting possible ancestral lines. Finding a DNA match with a sibling of a conjectured 5xgreat grandmother is, if not 100% cast-iron, about as good evidence as you can get that the conjecture is correct.
Meantime, I really like this, because I was a 17-year old boy once too.
I’ve been working on a playlist made up of bangers from the 80s and it has been a disorienting experience. There’s joy in rediscovering some of this stuff, including material I didn’t especially like at the time, but some of the songs – from 1980 to 82 – have triggered full on flashbacks to sitting in Student Union bars with them on the jukebox, flashbacks so real I can taste the cheap beer and smell the tobacco smoke and hear the clack of the snooker balls.
But there are one or two songs that have provoked sudden moments of melancholia, the awareness of the passage of time from when I was young and Kirstin and I were engaged and getting married and setting up home together.
As I write, Cher is wishing that she could turn back time, and so do I. In some cosmologies and philosophies, all times are happening simultaneously. I’d like that to be true and that those days remain as real as they were when they flew past and I’ll get to live them again.
Also, I don’t think I ever got the answer – is Vic there?
After taking that tumble last week, I gave it five days before I went out for a run and spent most of the time listening to what my body was telling me and alert for reaction. It went fine, and I gave myself a couple more days until going out again, which I did this morning. The aim today wasn’t about distance and it wasn’t about speed: my aim today was to run for a continuous 45 minutes, which I achieved. I did a little more than that, but by then I was on our hill and gritting my teeth.
Assuming no more accidents or illness, I’m back on my leisurely track towards 10k fitness. Sometime in the next couple of days, I’m going to follow a reasonably flat route and aim for 7k, then focus on short runs through next week. This would put me on a path to 10k fitness sometime in early to mid August. If I get there, I’ll look for a couple of 10k runs to enter and reward myself with a T-shirt and a medal 🙂
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TV has livened up again with the appearance of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. After bailing on season 3 of Star Trek Discovery and putting Picard on pause, I was sceptical about any new shows in the franchise, but I’m enjoying Strange New Worlds a lot. I don’t think it’s groundbreaking, but it has a good cast and tells its stories well, even if the stories are familiar.
The Witcher is back for season 3 and has started strongly. I’m also enjoying Star Wars Visions on Disney+ – anime shorts from the Star Wars universe (well, except for the Ardman mashup of the pod race from The Phantom Menace and Chicken Run.)
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For reasons not unrelated to the acoustic bass guitar that I’m currently grappling with, I’ve been listening to a lot of The Beatles. I haven’t listened to a lot of their stuff for a while and it’s fascinating to come back to them with fresh ears. The journey from a hot band playing rock’n’roll standards in Hamburg and Liverpool to the emergence of their own writing talent is one I’m going to have to think about more, but something happened in 1963. It might have been meeting George Martin, but there was something else going on: the emergent repertoire of Lennon/McCartney originals is qualitatively different to the Hamburg/Cavern material.
At the same time, McCartney begins to emerge as a creative and influential bass player, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. He has said that a big influence was James Jamerson of Motown, but there is more to it than that. The bass line of All My Loving is rooted in neither rock’n’roll nor Jamerson. By the time of Michelle (1965) he’s a long way from roots and triads or walking basslines.
There was more to the Beatles than just Macca, of course, but I can’t help but think his restless creativity was the catalyst for what the band became.
A couple of films held me rapt this week, both of them documentaries. One was In The Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50, by Toby Amies, the second Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, by Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt. I’ve put the trailers for each of them at the foot of this post.
The King Crimson documentary shares a quality with the two great Grateful Dead Documentaries, Anthem to Beauty and Long Strange Trip in that you don’t actually have to like the band in question to enjoy the film, though liking them obviously brings an added dimension. Amies’s film began as an attempt to do the impossible – to explain what King Crimson is as an entity and an aesthetic. It does not achieve that in a definitional way, that would be too didactic, but a sense of what it means to be part of the band emerges from the mix of live and rehearsal footage and interviews.
Naturally, the whole thing revolves around the singular vision of the cirkus-master, Robert Fripp, a man you may love or hate but, personally, I rather like.
Some further thoughts provoked by the film underlie this recent post on writing:
Dreaming Walls is an elegiac look at the spectres – living and dead – haunting the Chelsea Hotel in New York. It’s a gentle film that refuses to deliver the resolution that some watchers seem to crave. Most of the critical reviews I’ve seen focus on what the film does not do rather than engage with it on its own terms. An honourable exception is the review in Den of Geek. A better approach would be to do what Robert Fripp invites the listener to do – to abandon expectation and simply be present
The film’s portraits of the remaining long-term residents are evocative of not only a bohemian past, but also a defiantly idiosyncratic present that rages against the dying of the light. And for all it’s apparent lack of form, the film is made with the emotional precision that is the hallmark of love. There are ghosts here, and beauty.
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Ernst Haas, 1980
Anything evocative of old New York will always prompt me to look again at the pioneering photographers who shaped our mental images of the city. Of the colour photographers of American cities and psychogeographies, Ernst Haas commented that, the [make of] camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE.
In a sense Haas was obviously correct; it is the artist not the equipment that creates the image. In another sense, he was wrong because equipment and art are intimately intertwined. A polaroid image is not the same as that from 35mm film, and to use one or the other is a deliberate choice on the part of the photographer just as much as an artist chooses between charcoal and pastels.
In that context, it struck me that a lot of the aesthetic of classic photography comes from the characteristics of glass – Leitz and Zeiss lenses particularly and also, later, Nikon lenses – but also from film emulsions, particularly the many forms of Kodachrome. Important too were professional reproduction techniques for galleries and magazines, whether it’s Eggleston using dye-transfer or Nan Goldin’s use of Cibachrome. I like film cameras, and the classic cameras and lenses survive, but the emulsions do not. Unfortunately.
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