Photograph by Thierry Bal of Musarc performing The White Noisery
The gateless gate opens To reveal no sound Except the hum of life
These are our eons Cast all around us We are blind to them
I hear the sound of surf Sweeping all mind away But there is great unity
Let’s all move in time Above the morass We call human life
Inspired by The White Noisery (2012) by Jennifer Walshe
This poem was composed for the Musarc Winter Konsert 2023: We Are Participating. There was a Shared Reader and Writing Project for members of the choir and this was my final input after several discussions and Zoom calls. The poem was incorporated into a psalm “The night is cold and the radio seems to be on”, which was written by members of the choir and performed with the audience.
Head of Invention aka Newton after James Watt by Eduardo Paolozzi 1989
I have a bad memory. I know this because at the age of ten I had to remember the poem Froggie Went a-Courtin and repeat it to the class. This I failed to do and ended up bottom of the class at “Poetry” in my school report. Even now it takes maybe six months for me to remember people’s names, I seem to have a blank spot there. I work around it, and it requires special effort if I am forced to name someone, who may even be a good friend. However give me a hint, or even better a multiple choice question, and I will usually get the answer right. Hence I am pretty good at quizzes like Pointless or Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel. This was brought home to me when I did the first ever multiple choice O Level in Chemistry and unexpectedly got an A. My teacher was amazed and so was I, but show me the answer and I will do well.
I have maybe the best memory of anybody I know since I learnt the part of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, one of the longest in his whole magnificent oeuvre. I repeated this about twenty times on stage and very rarely used the prompt. I did have a method for when I got stuck, by substituting the word anything for the missing word, and nobody seemed to notice. To learn and remember all this, the role had to occupy my whole being and life, and for many months it was uppermost in my mind. At several points I thought the whole project was impossible, and I remember being on the top deck of a London bus, while trying to memorise lines, and realising I never would. Fortunately I was wrong, the mind is a bit of plastic elastic which can accommodate priorities and it is remarkably powerful. The bizarre end of this story is that I do not remember a single word of the play Othello, and would be hard put to even recognise any of those lines now.
The pain of learning lines is one of the reasons I gave up acting. Some people say they find it easy, but I never did. The role had to subsume me, take over my life and become an obsession. I found this an unpleasant trade-off. Once in a semi-pro production of Max Frisch’s The Fireraisers I was playing the lead character Mr Biedermann, and ended up comping or even inventing half the dialogue, since I hadn’t been given time to learn it all properly. Again nobody noticed, it was done with conviction! Personally I also had to revise dialogue on a daily basis if I was to remember it, and life is too short for that.
Now of course I am simply amazed I manage to remember anything, so I try not to. My mind is already full of stuff I am barely aware of or cannot access when I want, so I am trying to look after it. Does the mind ever get full I wonder, and certainly some of the rooms in this ever expanding mansion seem very distant. Yet it is a cave of treasures, constantly surprising me! This very blog is an example of random memory syndrome.
I read the book above in 1976, after I had taken LSD aka acid for the first time. It was a profound, yet relatively short lived experience. The book itself is an entertaining, if over the top read. Let’s not forget Timothy Leary was a well educated university lecturer with a Ph.D, he knew how to write, lecture and entertain. The Politics of Ecstasy was first published in 1966 in the USA and would become the foundational story of the late 60s hippie drug culture. It was first published in England in 1970, and I read it with a pinch of American salt, I already knew exaggeration when I saw it, yet it had an authority and intellectual chutzpah which was invigorating. I was already well aware of the profoundly spiritual and dangerous properties of this drug, having quizzed the few people I knew who had taken it, they had my admiration at the time. I had done my my homework, but nothing could prepare me for the reality. I believe it was on this first trip that I discovered how disorientating it could be, since I was at a concert in Pathfoot, Stirling University. Feeling spaced out, I realised I should be lying down and relaxing, so I departed early. As I was leaving through a long, large corridor I discovered I could rotate the whole corridor until I was walking on the ceiling. This was a great feeling until I start thinking too much about it and realised that this might not be a good idea since the corridor was not under my full control, it seemed to to have a mind of its own and I did not wish to fall to the floor – hey where is the floor, what is a floor, I thought gravity was supposed to exist, apparently now it does not… Most of Leary’s musings are based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and that should tell you before venturing any further that we are in dangerous territory. This territory was politely called a “bad trip”, yet it could destroy lives. We all knew what had happened to Syd Barrett, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd. For a good example of the foggy synaesthesia brought on by LSD, listen to his 1969 album The Madcap Laughs.
The “shit hit the fan” on my second trip a few years later, when I was back at Stirling. That night I kept notes of this profound experience, which do not make much sense now, but do provide a few pointers which I will attempt to interpret and explain:
No.1 : Everything was melancholy and industrial because we were probably listening to Escalator over the Hill by Carla Bley, not the best choice in the circumstances, but I liked it. It is also possible we were listening to Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, in particularly the tracks In The Light and Kashmir. These notes begin when we had retreated to my little room and I was choosing the music. There was a lot of chaos in the next door flat (of which more later) and I had determined to have a spiritual experience by listening to cool music lying on my bed.
No.2 & 3 : These were my flatmates, also tripping – everyone was, and no doubt we were arranging ourselves in my tiny bedroom, with most people lying on the floor, finding cushions and trying to get comfortable.
No.4 : Any minor interruption seemed freighted with meaning back then.
No.5 : No doubt this was me playing the album Big Fun by Miles Davis, released in 1974, an electronic jazz album with an Eastern drone vibe, and probably the track Great Expectations which goes on for 27 minutes.
No.6 : Fweejum is a made up word that has stayed with me. I was attempting to express the noise a a large vehicle or other object makes sweeping past you, think of it as the imaginary noise that time makes when it is moving very fast, with a doppler effect. Pronounce it without enunciating the letters and you might be getting close to the sense of dropping through the floor, through time and space at great velocity.
No.7 : My flatmates were probably getting fed up with the music and had decided to use the experience to make some unconsciously inspirational art. I have no idea really, it could easily be an imagined drawing in the great dome of starscape enveloping us. Pretty sure I wasn’t physically drawing.
No.8 : Here we are in proper meaningless drug addled territory, there seem to be an infinity or maybe just 166 rabbit holes, blind alleyways or dark caves to plunge into. They multiply as you examine them and it is easy to get confused, you might choose the wrong one. At least it wasn’t 666.
No.9 : By this time I am probably listening to Go Ahead John, the third side of Big Fun and featuring the jazz rock guitarist John McLaughlin. On acid anything visualised tends to mutate and expand, yet seem real.
That was the sensible part of the evening. Beforehand an older and I thought wiser friend, also on drugs, had been violently sick. I looked on dispassionately at the fabulous technicolour mess, containing a wonderful mass of imaginary writhing creatures, just grateful I hadn’t experienced the nausea of feeling the soft organs of my body decide to leave home. Never mix drink and serious drugs I thought selfishly to myself. Meanwhile next door my fellow students were in full on LSD party drinking mode, which soon turned sour. Among our number was a garrulous French student, who spoke perfectly good English. As the evening progressed she was picked on and her every utterance became a source of great hilarity, purely due to her French accent. At an early point I had tried to intervene, to no avail, which was probably when I sloped off to my bedroom to listen to music. At dawn, many hours later, I returned, and she had been reduced to a gibbering wreck, who could no longer speak in any language, completely incoherent. She was truly in a state, yet the barbs continued and I felt powerless by this time to intervene. The behaviour of my fellow students, despite being on drugs, had been appalling. After several days she did recover the power of speech, but I believe she left Stirling and went back to France.
By this time I was trying to look after myself, sleep seemed impossible, life extended emptily, all desire had gone leaving yawning emptiness. That next day I attempted to behave normally and attended a lecture. I was beyond caring, nothing went in and it appeared nothing ever would. I had heard about flashbacks, when you regress to a drug induced stupor, and I was in fear of a slowly repeating chaos. Had I ruined my life? Would this go on forever? Of course not, after 36 hours with no sleep I was simply at my wits end and exhausted. Still it would take a good few days before I re-assembled my life, and determined to slowly clear up my mental state.
The fact that drugs were everywhere at Stirling can be clearly seen in the covers of The Student Handbook for the years 1975-1977. In addition drugs were openly traded in the Students Union, Alangrange, while the University itself hit the headlines in 1976 when a student broke his leg while “attempting to fly” from a third floor window. The young man broke his leg, and in court claimed he was high on LSD. A few months later, to my horror, there he was in our kitchen high on LSD. I did not think this was a good idea as we were on the top floor. I also vividly remember talking down a minor member of the Royal Family who had taken too many mushrooms. I was a bit annoyed since I had to buy him lunch and midday seemed to be the wrong time to take drugs. He had probably been up all night, I guess. Closer to home my flatmate, who was a big burly motor-biker from Dundee, decided to decorate his room with black bin-bags, which covered every surface – walls, floor and ceiling, and I nicknamed his room the black hole of Calcutta. What started off as a bit of fun soon descended into something more serious, he refused to leave this room and I presume he was taking lots of drugs. A form of psychosis crept in, he didn’t listen to any of us and stopped attending lectures. Suddenly he became obsessed with saving frogs. It was spring and the frogs were migrating across a road from the large lake at the centre of the University. There were literally thousands of frogs and it seemed inevitable a few would be killed on this quiet road. I was concerned enough to try and help my flatmate save some of these frogs, but I soon realised it was a pointless exercise, and that this formerly robust human being was being brought low by a serious mental illness. He disappeared at the end of term, never to return.
After promising myself that my LSD days were over, I believe I did take it once again, but it was a much milder experience, I am glad to say, and have little memory of it. I was lucky, and never did experience a bad trip, but I could easily see how that could happen if taken in the wrong circumstances and without due respect to the dangers. Later in life I did try ecstasy and MDMA briefly at festivals, pleasant but nothing compared to the mind curdling power of the acid trips mentioned above. I had lost the desire to lose control in this way, although I still knew a few people who ended up in hospital due to imbibing so called soft drugs. I certainly do not regret taking LSD, it was a remarkable lesson in the powers of the mind and how sanity can be paper thin. However, much to my disappointment, this experience was no spiritual shortcut. I did not arrive in Nirvana, but maybe discovered there are other ways to get there.
If you want to hear the real atmosphere of these times and the liturgical, obsessive nature of the promotion of LSD listen to Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out by Dr. Timothy Leary, a motion picture soundtrack album made by Mercury in 1967. Here is a taster from a track called The Trip: Root Chakra: “…Drift single celled in soft tissue swamp, sink gently into dark fertile marsh, drift beyond the body, float to the centre (I’m Drowning!) float beyond life and death, down soft ladders of memory.”
The sad and much too early death of Benjamin Zephaniah this week prompted memories of the first time I saw him way back in 1983 at the Angels of Fire Festival. I was excited to see him since I had heard about him through the New Musical Express, which was my reading matter, rather than the Poetry Review. To put this in context, Angels of Fire was a six night poetry festival featuring new performance poetry and upcoming modern poets, at the Cockpit Theatre near Marylebone. The choice of performers was certainly prescient and varied, since several of them went on to have long careers. This festival of poetry, which gave me an excellent grounding in many different voices, was shaken up by the rockin’ dub protest poetry of Benjamin, which seem like a righteous breath of fresh air at the time.
I went to every night of the festival, since I regarded it as my first documentary photography project. I did not really know what I was doing, but was allowed to take photos as a member of the audience (times have changed…). Of course I was not being paid, but I managed to wangle my way in for free for a few nights through British Library Sound Archive contacts, who were recording it. I felt at home there since I had worked at the Cockpit as a Stage Manager. Fortunately the festival was sponsored by City Limits, a London listings magazine, and I made some early print sales, with the photos being used in their poetry column. Eventually some of theses photographs were exhibited at The Drill Hall in Chenies Street WC1.
Seething Wells
I was also looking forward to seeing Seething Wells (aka Steven Wells 1960-2009), who lived up to his moniker, along with other early ranting poets such as Little Brother and Joolz. The more refined feminist poetic tradition was also represented by Michèle Roberts and Alison Fell, while a notable contemporary wordsmith was Jeremy Reed, full of Bowie references. The world of sound poetry was not forgotten either, with the appearance of the legendary Bob Cobbing (1920-2002), later to be seen at The Klinker in Islington. Here are some of the photographs I took of these poets:
I was heartened to see Benjamin Zephaniah become become a Professor of Poetry and part of the National Curriculum, turn down his OBE, and always act with generosity, wit and humility. Here he is in full flow at the ICA a year later, I believe.
In 2001 I went to Gaza, as a fledgling panorama news photographer. This was not yet a valid passport to success, but with the help of Gary Knight of Newsweek, and after queuing up for many hours at a nameless bureaucratic office in Jerusalem, at the last moment I was granted permission to enter Gaza. Despite some controversy over my tripod bag, which apparently resembled a rifle holster, I walked the walk into this hell-hole at the only entry point, the Erez Crossing. Way back in 2001 this place was a war zone, as can be seen from my photographs and panoramas, I was both appalled and excited. At the time Gaza was still occupied by the Israelis, who lived in sequestered areas and bunkers, with a very heavy, but hidden military presence. Despite the fact you cannot see them, many Israeli guns will have been pointed at my head. The level of destruction throughout Gaza was staggering, even at that time. Sadly, this forlorn area has been a disaster waiting to happen for many decades. We went straight to a hotspot in Southern Gaza at Khan Yunis, a site of recent Israeli shelling and a refugee camp. Since there were still Israeli factories and residences in Gaza, the level of military intimidation was still very high. Bizarrely I saw advertisements at the time in the Israeli Press for holidays in Gaza, it certainly would not have been my first choice holiday destination, despite the long beaches.
for a larger panorama click fullscreen, or on a phone go here
After photographing the checkpoint outside Khan Yunis at Gush Qateef (which protected an Israeli enclave), which you can see in the panoramas, we went the following day to the funeral of two young boys in Rafah (see above), killed by the bombing. Emotions ran high and as an outsider it was a genuinely scary experience on the way to the cemetery and many guns were fired into the air. A sense of this can be seen in the video below. Following this striking experience we waited around in the hot sun to meet the Fatah Hawks. Eventually we were taken to their apartment, filled with more guns, to negotiate an interview. It was a scary situation to me, but nothing much happened, everyone was polite and we had some tea. However this was not the end of the story, since a few days later these Hawks would kidnap my photographer friend Gary and the Newsweek bureau chief, as detailed in this CNN article. No doubt these gunmen were to become members of what now would be called Hamas, who were already making a deadly play against Fatah, the Palestinian Authority who controlled Gaza. Luckily my friends were released after only one day, while if I had gone back to Gaza with Gary I am sure I would been on the kidnap list as well. This brief event made worldwide news. After the the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, Hamas became the democratically elected rulers of Gaza in 2006. There have been no elections since.
Man pleads his case at Israeli Checkpoint, Gaza 2001
We headed back to Gaza City, via a new housing development that had been shelled. On the way we were stopped by the Israeli army at the Kfar Darom Checkpoint, since I had illegally been taking pictures from the back of the car. Because we had good accreditation Gary managed to talk our way out of a sticky situation involving large machine guns. After these full-on days and sleepless nights we relaxed in Gaza City, I believe at the Al Deira Hotel. Wow, now I felt like a proper Newsweek journalist (it was a luxury hotel), and we even managed to wangle a bottle of wine. Of course we did have to drink it a 100 yards away from any other guests, so as not to upset them, but that was down by the beach so it was fine. I got out safely with a real sense of relief, but as mentioned above Gary had to go back a few days later for the ill-fated interview with the Hawks. For a few moments I feared the worst. Still it was a successful trip and my panoramas were published on the foto8 photojournalism website. I was nicknamed Mr. Bean by our excellent local fixer, due to my insouciance. Taking the hint, I did eventually make the decision that artistic photography was probably a better direction for me than preying on other peoples misfortunes, there was to be no more war photojournalism. It had been an interesting experience, but was not to be repeated.
Since I left Gaza, it has been prey to a series of deadly bombings in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 by Israel, while in 2007 Human Rights Watch described the Gaza Strip as an “open-air prison”. When I was there in 2001 I could already have told them that, since even then there appeared little hope for this beleaguered and isolated strip of land, home to two million people. The international community has allowed this unbearable situation to fester and should bear responsibility. Gaza, totally reliant on foreign aid, and with no control over it’s own water supply, electricity, airspace, coastline, imports and infrastructure has been made into a tinderbox waiting to explode. Nevertheless that does not excuse the appalling and self-serving actions of Hamas on the 7th of October 2023. I fear more death.
A good sense of my feelings was expressed in this 2006 Panoramic Music Video, using the photographs taken in Gaza :
Bikes have been going up in price and it is a confusing market. Decide how much you wish to spend and even more importantly what you will use it for. This blog is aimed at the non-specialist sport and hybrid rider, like me. I would say a good new bike will now cost a minimum of £600 and you can easily spend double that. I recommend a new bike for a variety of reasons, but most importantly because everything works and will continue to do so for several years. Unless you do your own repairs, fixing problems on your bike can easily cost over £100, plus parts. Soon your bargain will be costing you money, because parts on old bicycles do wear out and need replacement. In addition when you buy a new bike you can select one from the vast range out there that is designed to suit you and your specific needs. The other problem is of course, if you buy a second hand bike, there is a high probability it has been stolen from someone else and can be reclaimed. Nevertheless, buying an old rusty bike with a good frame and renewing the chain, brake pads, wheels and tyres yourself can be a very satisfying experience, although after upgrades will still cost you £400 at the very least.
Your first decision should be determined by drop handlebars – or not. If you like riding fast you will want them, and it also determines the bike geometry. Personally I like them, but I only really use the drops when going downhill fast. At my age I also need a riser in the stem on many sports bikes (see above). If the saddle is more than a few inches above the handlebars I soon start to feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, ensure the saddle is high enough for full leg extension. Straight handlebars, found on hybrid bikes, can make a bike feel more stable, but I find most of them too wide for urban use, so I cut them down to about 56cm. Think carefully whether you need mudguards (I certainly don’t), a pannier (I prefer a backpack) or suspension – it’s only really useful for off-roading. Most so-called comfort saddles are far too wide for me, find one that suits you and is reasonable. At the other extreme, cleats and clip-in shoes are an annoyance in town, but may be useful over long distances. As for tyres, 28mm is good for sports and up to 35mm for a hybrid is fine, after that rolling resistance will escalate. My favourite brand is Continental, especially the Grand Prix 4-Season, never had a puncture!
On to some specific examples and recommendations. Firstly try to buy a bike in the January / February sales, they are often 20-30% cheaper. Also look out for last years model, it should be much better value and just as good as the full price one. If you are confident with a spanner and an allen key it is now much cheaper to buy a mail order bike in many cases. Why do I say you need to spend £500-£600? Because if you spend this much nearly all the parts will be of good, long lasting quality. Bike manufacturers tend to hide poor components, it may seem well specified, but somewhere corners will have been cut to reduce costs. I myself was prey to this when an unbranded crank on a nice bike from Genesis (a reputable brand itself) simply snapped. I should say it was replaced, under guarantee, with a Shimano one. Yes, some brands are better than others!
We all have favourite brands and these are some of mine: Ribble, Ridgeback and Boardman. My recommendation for a bargain sports bike would be a Boardman SLR 8.9 Carbon, retailing at £1200. It does not have disk brakes, but does have a super light carbon frame and Shimano 105 gears. Mine was stolen, but luckily it was insured with Yellow Jersey. With disc brakes this bike costs another £550 – still good value! Once you are over the £2000 mark you are entering specialised territory, paying a premium for small improvements. Carbon frame bikes weigh about 9kg, you can lift them with one finger. An aluminium frame will weigh a few kilograms more and a steel / alloy frame is heavier still, just don’t buy anything over 20kg. Think carefully about weight, not only because a lighter bike is friendlier to cycle, but you often have to carry them, upstairs or onto trains, for example. Many commuters choose a light folding bicycle like a Brompton (c.£1000) with small wheels, which I enjoy riding over short distances. Just remember those small wheels are more dangerous on our potholed roads, as a good friend of mine and his broken arm can attest. Boardman also produce a great hybrid town bike, the HYB 8.6, which fits my cost profile at £600 and does have disc brakes – great value. Or check out the URB 8.6, the three gears may be enough for town usage. My favourite bike company is Ribble, since they allow you to customise your bike. Their bikes are generally better specified than Boardman, and as a result a bit more expensive. However you can choose your own tyres, stem and crank length, as well as many fancy colour schemes. I bought a carbon framed Ribble R872 with Shimano 105 gears and Mavic wheels for £1400, weighing only 8.5kg. A delight to ride, it now retails around £2000 with disc brakes. Ridgeback sell a range of reliable commuting bikes starting at £550, but there are many more good bike companies, like Cannondale, Specialised, Trek and Giant.
Wilier Triestina E-bike, later upgraded with Continental Contact Urban 35mm tyres
Electric bikes are now the happening category, but they can be very heavy, 25-40kg! Still lightweight versions, about 15kg do exist, but they are expensive, like the Boardman HYB 8.9E or Ribble Hybrid AL e at about £2400. Ribble even sell an electric carbon sports bike, the Endurance SL e, apparently the lightest ever, but prices start at £3300 (yes I would like one). Since I live in London I sold my car, after all who needs the hassle (closed roads, 20mph speed limit) and expense (congestion charge, parking, insurance). In addition I have a Freedom Pass for public transport anyway, so I just stopped using the car. In town a bike is the fastest way to travel, especially if you include parking time. Hence I bought a Wilier Triestina Hybrid GRX E-bike 2022 in a sale and it has been marvellous, weighing only 14kg. A large size one is still available at Merlin, 41% off, for just £2000. The cheapest good electric bike I have seen, but not ridden, is the estarli e28.8 retailing at £1625 and weighing 16.5kg. These bikes have internal batteries so they do not even look electric, and the power is applied very smoothly to the rear wheel. The law in this country means you have to pedal to power the bike and the assistance only goes up to 15.5 mph, but that is fine. There are now some good electric bike conversion kits like Boost or Swytch costing around £600. One thing to note is that you need fewer gears on an electric bike.
As for security, yes it is a nightmare. I currently use an Abus city chain motorbike lock weighing over 2kg when out at night, since I have had so many locked-up bikes stolen. In addition I have a Knog Scout attached which functions as an alarm and has a Find my Bike function like an Apple AirTag. There are also some Chinese rear lights on Amazon which can function as very loud movement alarms, £20-£30. Hope that info helps, but remember bike thieves use spotters and very powerful electric saws, it’s only a matter of time if they fancy your bike…so keep it inside.
I greatly enjoy reading musical biographies, they are usually informative and take you closer to the music. A really good one let’s you hear the voice of the composer, through quotes and interviews. They are are also quite surprising and strange, all these people are different and defined, usually working in a very specific and often quite mannered way. My favourite author at the moment has to be John F. Szwed, an American anthropology professor who really knows and loves music. His defining work is Space is the Place : The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, which explores of the life of Herman Blount (Sun Ra), despite his many attempts to conceal his real-life origins. The amount of research is staggering, yet Professor Szwed does not lose sight of the invented character Sun Ra became, revelling in both the fantasy life and unique music that was created by the Sun Ra Arkestra. He quotes, pays respect and provides a personal exegesis of the crazy life led by this man, always understanding when he can. In the other books I have read by him, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth and So What: The Life of Miles Davis, he uses the latest biographical information to update the standard stories with many insights, never pandering to the accepted formula, while always accenting the musical development.
Many biographers simply tell the life story, they seem to forget the musical history. We all know that music can be difficult to write about, but the critical faculty appears to vacate many a biography. Hey, tell me why something – an album – is good and why we should love it, that is surely part of any good musical biography. I will mention here just 2 books which were really appalling: View from the Exterior by Alan Clayson about Serge Gainsbourg, so badly written and patronising I threw it across the room in anger. Then there is Hey Hi Hello by Annie Nightingale, a lovely DJ, who seemed to lack a sub-editor, never mind a fact checker, writing a cobbled together self-serving mess.
So maybe here I should tell you about a good English biography of Serge Gainsbourg, A Fistful Of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons. She is herself a real music writer and part time musician, but her masterwork is surely I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. This great biography appears to have been written with the full participation of the subject, featuring many interviews, but does not seem cloying or hagiographic. It appears definitive, details all the music, all the scandal, that is all that I want. The same could be said for Different Every Time by Marcus O’Dair, the authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, and I also greatly enjoyed All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt. To mention a classic, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald is fabulous, especially the “Introduction: Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade”, but it’s hardly a biography as such. Naturally I loved Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer by Philip Watson, but it is a huge and detailed tome, so first you you have to know and love the music. In terms of general music books, two stand out, The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the 20th Century (2007) by Alex Ross and Improvisation – Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980, revised 1992) by Derek Bailey. For an interesting overview of popular music try Let’s Do It and Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley. If you’re a fan of Soul music then the trilogy of Detroit 67, Memphis 68, Harlem 69 by Stuart Cosgrove are a fascinating read. For a more literary, poetic approach I recommend Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, an imagined life of Buddy Bolden in 1905 New Orleans.
Another interesting area is the ghost written biography, you are never quite sure who you are listening to, although they can be entertaining. Certainly Life by Keith Richards was better than expected, you can hear his voice and his love of the music. Also quite readable, if formulaic, are the Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend autobiographies. My own favourites include Morrissey (arch and selective), Tracey Thorn (honest and now local), Tony Visconti (Bolan and Bowie) and Cosey Fanni Tutti (proper artist). I also enjoyed Words Without Music by Philip Glass, a stranger journey than you might have imagined. Special mention should be given to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, fabulous chapters in a life, but not the whole story, so we await Volume 2, ha ha. For a truly eclectic and well written blog about music try The Blue Moment by Richard Williams, he knows everyone and is always interesting.
Alright, the greatest ever music biography has to be Really the Blues written by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe in 1946. This is the best because it is easily the first and written in a unique hip argot. It breaks all the rules since it is evidently ghost written and grossly exaggerated, by an average accompanist to the great Sidney Bechet. Nevertheless it contains all the musical fervour, the drugs and the polemic (re race) a funky biography requires. To realise this book was published in 1946 was a revelation, it predates On the Road by Jack Kerouac by more than 10 years, and is counter-cultural before the term existed. Eat your heart out Bukowski, and of course Tom Waits loves it. Even now this pre-beat book is forthright and hip, there is nothing new under the sun, folks.
I don’t think the word “belief” means anything. It’s a hovering wobbly, jelly phrase meaning something like: “I’ve decided to think something’s true because I wish it were true.” Different Every Time, 2014 – Robert Wyatt
My problems with belief started when I was 8 or 9 at Junior school. We had an excellent form teacher, Miss Laister, whom I trusted and understood. However, one sunny day we had a discussion about Christianity, and we were asked if we believed in Jesus Christ. I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be popular, kind and interesting, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I felt a bit too young to give a definitive answer and maybe expressed some reservations. It was then that the bombshell in my mind exploded, since Miss Laister kindly told us that it wasn’t a question of supposition, logic, science, history or anything else, simply one of faith. You just had to believe, all your problems and worries would be solved, it was that simple. That was it, there was no other choice. This immediately appeared antithetical to everything I had been taught. Even then, to make this exception for Jesus and no-one else seemed unfair, I would have to investigate further. I was already aware other religions existed, and that for instance Jewish people did not have to attend religious assembly or recite The Lord’s Prayer, so what happened to them at the pearly gates?
Like many of my peers I attended Sunday School, basically biblical study, and engaged with the many fascinating stories. I got hold of a St. James Bible and determined to read it cover to cover, but failed to get much past Genesis, it was not an easy read. Later I was awarded a beautiful red leather bound version of the New Testament, this was bit easier, and I proudly took it along to my Sunday School. From my limited studies I was already not prepared to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God, since I was aware of the many inconsistencies, plain cruelty, changes of tone and competing gospels. Later, aged 11, I had a Christian fundamentalist classmate from Bahrain, who I used to tease with choice quotes from the Bible, asking if he believed in the contradictory and confusing verses I selected. I also vividly remember having an attack of the giggles, if not hysterics, when told the Fishers of Men story from the Gospel of Matthew. This did not go down well at Sunday School, but I would guess by this time I had already decided I would not be confirmed. That is I would not ask God’s Holy Spirit to give me the strength and commitment to live God’s way for the rest of my life. Most certainly I would not be living as a disciple of Christ in the Church of England. I have never regretted that decision. My position at the age of 14 or 15 is demonstrated by the moment when I called Jesus a bastard, not that I wanted to. My good Roman Catholic friend had somehow bet me that I wouldn’t say it before a graven image, yet I felt mentally obliged to follow through on my convictions and did so. I was of course being quite accurate (Joseph was not the father), but my friend believed I was going to hell in a handcart. Such is the power of indoctrination.
Well it was a long journey, via an interest in Western Buddhism during my 20’s, to finally arrive at my own version of agnosticism. Quit simply I agree with this statement: “I cannot know whether a deity exists or not, and neither can you”. Getting to this point may have taken some time, but it was certainly encouraged by one of the bravest books ever written, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, published 2006. It was as if I had waited nearly my whole life for someone to take on the exceptionalism granted to religion, this medieval way of thinking, and the lip service paid to plainly outdated ideas.
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’. The God Delusion, 2006 – Richard Dawkins
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. God Is Not Great, 2007 – Christopher Hitchens
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. New York Times, 1999 – Steven Weinberg
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Questions sur les miracles, 1765 – Voltaire
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1788 – Edward Gibbon (from a quote by Lucius Seneca, 50AD)
The idea that any religious document is the “Holy Word of God”, as is claimed, can now be fully put to bed. Here is a brief resumé of what we now know regarding the great religious texts. The Bible as we know it was formulated in c.367AD during the councils of Hippo and Carthage, and excluded the Apocrypha. The Gospels were written forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus in Rome, they are pseudepigrapha, the claimed author is not the true author. This is the case for the majority of the Bible. None of the authors of the New Testament actually met Jesus. The Old Testament is part folklore and part mythologised Jewish history, formulated in 1400BC, centuries after the events portrayed. For example, there is no historical record of Israelis (Moses and the Exodus) in Egypt. Watch out for Pseudoarchaeology! The Koran has an even more confusing history since Mohammed was allegedly illiterate and it was dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel, this oral tradition only being written down many decades later. The Hadith, “the backbone” of Islamic civilization, was cobbled together from many contradictory oral sources, generations after Muhammad’s death. Strangely Islam posits that God is an Arab, as the Koran is always recited in Arabic, and hence a translation cannot be the “Word of God”. These are the western patriarchal religions for the last 2000 years: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They come form the same Abrahamic root, use the same basic stories and, given their authorship, cannot possibly be the word of God. We should remember that these religions represent just a moment in our evolution, whose time has now passed. In the Eastern world it is somewhat more complicated since there is no specific word of God, but rather a series of myths, stories and philosophies of life. That is fine, but I was under the impression that myths are not meant to be factually true, so I don’t believe any of that either. The Bhagavad Gita may be a great book, but no-one claims it was written by God, thank heavens.
When you end up not believing in anything (don’t follow leaders…) life can take a strange, slightly dystopian angle, which was encouraged by science fiction in general and the band Joy Division in particular. Like John Lennon (cf. his song God) my I don’t believe list is long, including fairies, ghosts and UFO’s, although they can all make interesting stories. I am a believer in the French principle of laïcité, which separates church and state since the 1789 revolution (confirmed in 1905), and includes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This principle does include a right to the free exercise of religion. Still, we all need somewhere to place our own spiritual needs, and obviously the Church no longer managed to fulfil this role for me. I did manage to read a religious book, recommended by my Mother, written by our local C of E vicar. However I could only manage to do this by replacing the word God with the word Gaia (thank you James Lovelock), which seemed to work quite well. I took refuge in the work of Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest who became a Buddhist hippy, and the classic series Zen and Zen Classics (1960) by R.H. Blyth. Later still I spent 4 years doing Tai-chi, which fulfilled many of my spiritual needs, but it’s not a religion. We live in a spiritual desert, where can we put these feelings?
Science appears to hold the answers since it is an open system, constantly being revised. It is empirical, open to scrutiny and genuinely man-made, but is that enough? Certainly the classical religions no longer answer the fundamental questions that led to their creation, science has filled that vacuum. There are many wonders of evolution and nature, yet do they really fulfil our hidden desires for a transcendent belief system? Humans appear to have a millenarian death wish desire, we need to dream and confront an apocalypse, however illogical that may be. Every generation searches for a New Messiah, we all self-dramatise and seem to think we live in the end times, as if history never happened. No-one wants to die, feel their life is pointless, and traditional religion came along to solve that problem. Such is the power of wishful thinking – believe this (or that) and you can live forever in heaven! For a long time we were all a member of an eternity cult. In reality the hope, promise and drama of traditional religion is over, and we await the replacement with some agitation and trepidation. At least there are fewer pointless religious wars, there is no heaven and hell, blasphemy is over, while the churches are empty. And lo, let there be no more self-appointed divine agents, defenders of the faith, no more confession, transubstantiation or apostolic succession. In the meantime, we should all become Secular Buddhists, that is the best I can say.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing, does not go away. Introduction – Philip K. Dick 1972 / published 1985
Update 30/08/23 The day after I published this article, this was the headline in The Times newspaper, saying only 24% of clergy would describe Britain as a Christian country today.
Since the release of Big Sur (Version 11) in 2020 your system is locked, with a read-only file system separate from the user files, although it does not appear like that to you, the user. We have lost control of our computers. Apple systems are now so locked down and filled with security codes and devices (T1, T2 Security Chip) that we no longer understand or can even control what they are doing. This is security by obfuscation. Release Notes for upgrades typically include just a tiny portion of the actual changes, bug-fixes, and possible regressions that Apple has done. Passwords multiply and dual factor authentication has become the norm. Without the correct passwords your computer has to be physically returned to Apple Support, you only normally get 10 attempts to enter the correct one. After 50 attempts to guess your own password in “Recovery” you are permanently locked out of your own machine. Many updates are now covert, even though they have caused serious damage on several occasions. Everything is sandboxed and apps no longer have access to your own disks, files and folders, without explicit permission. System updates are now only available online, through Software Update. Applications which are not officially approved by Apple are highly unlikely to work. Starting up your computer from another external disk is essentially no longer possible. With Apple Silicon you can no longer replace or upgrade your hard disk, increase the amount of RAM, never mind attempt to service your own machine (there are no service manuals).
So all that may seem pretty awful, but maybe we are just reaching forward to the time when the computer just becomes an appliance, which runs without needing to be “serviced”. In due course it will self-upgrade and run without user interference. This is already happening in the world of phones, which are of course now very powerful computers themselves. It must also be remembered that soon nearly all the high street banks will close, your computer will become your bank and hence must be secure. Once everything is run in solid state, system on a chip, reliability increases and it either works or doesn’t. Neither you, or anybody else, can break your OSX System, it is locked. Your modern computer is already self healing, it will try and help you, that is machine learning aka AI. I already have a computer which has been used and run for nearly a year, without ever restarting, now that is an appliance.
I come from a time when computers regularly crashed on a daily basis, involving loss of unsaved work and regular restarts. There was a voodoo knowledge required to run a computer, involving selecting extensions, repairing permissions, defragmenting hard disks, clearing viruses, checking memory usage, updating again and again. All this knowledge is now redundant and soon all these problems will have evaporated. Still I would like to mention a few of the crazy computer glitches I have seen. The worst is a hard disk so full it cannot even start up. A computer needs some space to write files when it starts, without any available space you must start up from an external disk. In short, never let your your system hard disk become more than 80% full. Apple now lets you “manage “ your files in iCloud Drive, although I do not recommend this as you will soon be paying them even more money. One of the best resources in the old days was Disk Warrior, which could recover lost hard disks (HFS+ format) by rewriting the Directory, when it worked it was just like magic. Once when I was asked to install a new hard disk, I was surprised to find the new disk was in fact a book, they hadn’t opened the Amazon package! Embarrassment and wasted journeys all round. In a previous blog article I detail the folder found on an iMac which claimed to be larger than a million gigabytes (1.13 Petabytes). Best of all, I was called out to fix a computer which had stopped working. It had crashed and they didn’t know how to switch it back on!
Apple still have some way to go in their search for a perfect locked system. Some key applications such as Soft Raid, Drive DX and many others may require Kexts (Kernel extensions) to function and currently require you to run Reduced Security (available in Recovery Mode / Startup Security Utility). It is also difficult to install many third party apps without Reduced Security / Allow all apps. To access this on Apple Silicon Macs, press and hold the Power button until the display shows Loading Startup Options, then release it. This takes you to the Startup Options screen, select the Options icon, then click Continue underneath it. On Apple Silicon all the old ways to access startup commands have changed or disappeared. There are currently no third party apps to repair APFS disks (since it is not documented), you must use Disk Utility, which is slowly improving. The reported available space on APFS disks can also be wrong or misleading. I recommend switching off iCloud Drive, it can become confusing unless you really need it. You no longer need anti-virus software, switch it off. Buy a cheap external disk for Time Machine to safeguard your data, although it no longer backs up your System. Please remember your computer login password and Apple ID, they are vital, use the Passwords app for everything else. Check everything in Security and Privacy. This is the modern Apple world of computing, there is no Trash only a Bin, things work differently now.
Is it Ronald Reagan’s idea of an April Fools Day Joke to say he is going to reduce nuclear weapons?
This was my question on the 88th edition of Question Time on April 1st 1982 at the Greenwood Theatre in London.
I invented this question on the actual evening as I entered the building, due to a headline in the Evening Standard that day. We had already posed another question on the invitation weeks earlier. The minute I wrote down this question I felt it had a good chance of being selected, it was right on cue. Even then I knew it fulfilled the brief to be up to the minute.
My question was highly apposite, since our Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the American President Ronald Reagan had been spending many millions on installing Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, leading to widespread protests. Reagan would later declare Russia to be an “Evil Empire”, making the case for deploying NATO nuclear-armed intermediate–range ballistic missiles in Western Europe. Yet on this day an Evening Standard headline falsely claimed that Reagan would be reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons, which I believed merited some suspicion, if not downright disbelief.
Sir Robin Day, the host (see above), was magnificent and I was very impressed with the Tory Norman St John-Stevas. During the warm-up with test questions they were both hilarious, but a lot more circumspect when the show went live, to my disappointment. Little known to me at the time was John Smith, later to become Leader of the Labour Party in 1992. The other panel members were MP Mike Thomas, a founder member of the SDP, and Terry Marsland, a feminist member of the TUC.
I wore a very loud and gay pink shirt, so I certainly stood out, and I believe you had to stand up when suddenly you were told to ask your question. For many years, if not decades, people would tell me they had seen me on TV. I had already long forgotten about it, but it was a powerful lesson in the power of the media, since it had been seen by many millions of people.
Of course the response to my question was a lot of humming and hawing, no-one said that nuclear weapons were an insult to our culture, civilisation or even religion, as I wanted them to. No-one came out in direct support of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, though some expressed sympathy. I thought it was a poor response. Yes, I was a strong supporter of CND at the time and still am. I should point out here, that in 2020 the UK are still spending $6.2 billion every year ($72.6 billions spent worldwide) on nuclear weapons, which could destroy the world as we know it. While I was proud of my question, I gave an anodyne response when the question was referred back to me, which I had not been expecting. This was a very live show at the time. I simply said I agreed with John Smith. Always prepare a witty and cutting answer!
In 1982, at the instigation of Patrick D. Martin, I became the photographic co-ordinator for Robodevco. This later became The Roboshow, where a prototype multimedia computer controlled a forty-three screen, three dimensional sound experience. It was hosted by ‘Q’, a virtual robot at a large warehouse off Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town, London, 1985. It proved to be a “a completely new screen sensation”.
Before the Roboshow there was the Technocab, the most enjoyable part of the whole experience. This was a blacked out London taxi cab containing a Trinitron TV and a BBC computer. Due to the size of the huge cathode ray tube monitor it was a one person experience with binaural headphones, like a solo cinema. The cab would start up as if going on a journey, often dry ice was involved, sometimes we rocked the cab to simulate movement. A taste of what you would see (2 mins in) is contained in the following video, the Roboshow Electronic Press Kit. This low-res video features my stills animated with Bob Lawrie of Blink Productions, as well as the triggered micrographics of Richard Brown.
On the strength of this intense experience nearly a million pounds was raised to fund the Roboshow experience, which was intended to be franchised. A prototype multi screen cinema was constructed and the images would fly around the space in a truly fresh and disorienting manner, after being introduced by Q, a TV robot. Out on location Q was sometimes an American football style roller skater with a video boombox, who featured in the video shot by Charlie Arnold.
The Roboshow garnered a lot of good press, being featured in The Observer, The Face and New Scientist. This description of the show was published in the Evening Standard, January 1987:
“We went into a room that seemed smaller than it actually was because the 20 chairs on the raised platform were pointing towards 50 TV screens that ran around the front and side walls. There was one big screen in the middle. The lights dimmed. A rollerskater zoomed straight across our line of vision from left to right with an accompanying sound effect that seemed almost three dimensional. The show had begun– and for the next seven minutes images flickered, jumped, danced and propelled themselves across the screens. Sometimes it was the same picture. Sometimes it would break up so you were seeing the same thing from divers angles on different screens. It is an experience 50 times as intense as watching regular TV because of the interplay between the screens and the meganess of the sound system.”
These are some of the quotes from the Robodevco Press Pack, which demonstrate why Roboshow garnered so much attention:
“Totally wild … any explanation would fail. to do justice to this experience” Bruce Dessau, City Limits, Aug 21 ’86.
“The next medium to take over where Cinema left off’ Televisual, Nov ’86.
“Q makes Max Headroom look about as wacky as Sooty” Direction, Oct ’86.
“Superb -look forward to seeing it in Piccadilly Circus” Juliet Rix (BBC Newsnight).
“The technical possibilities are extremely exciting” Roma Felstein (Broadcast).
“Very impressive” Barry Fox (New Scientist).
“The most important development in Entertainment since they got rid of the Proscenium Arch” Anthony Horowitz.
This is my photograph of the actual prototype Roboshow in Kentish Town. It was intended to expand the show and run it at Paul Raymond’s Revuebar Boulevard Theatre in Walkers Court Soho, London. Unfortunately this never happened.
It is important to remember that all this was happening before the advent of the internet, digital cameras, HD video or flat screen monitors. In fact analogue video was equivalent to 720×576 pixels at best, that is 625 (576 visible) interleaved scan lines in a 4×3 format. At the time Video 8 with it’s small form factor was the most exciting camera development, but most video was filmed on large and heavy U-matic cameras. Nevertheless The Daily Mirror observed that “the revolution starts here… Shock the music industry and change the world of video”. For an in depth explanation of all this technology the article in The Games Machine magazine, dated August 1987, reveals the many participants and innovations involved:
As well as the visuals, audio was an integral part of the experience. A holographic cassette was produced with music by Phil Nicholas, a Fairlight programmer, later to work with The Willesden Dodgers, Stock Aitken Waterman and Def Leppard, among many others.
Here is a promo pic of Patrick Martin, Phil Nicholas and Marcus Kirby taken at Robodevco headquarters:
By 1985 I was fortunately working for New Musical Express and so mostly avoided the machinations involved when new directors and accountants were appointed to Robodevco. The freelance crew (who made the Roboshow) were encouraged to sign contracts to make them rich when the project succeeded, yet were to become liable for large debts as bank guarantors without real equity. Thankfully I did not sign up. Ultimately, after the failure to produce an actual show, this led to arguments about the structure of the project and ultimate dissolution of the company. The directors became XYLO and took the technical assets which opened at a disco called Zhivagos in Darlington in 1988. RIP. Meanwhile Patrick regrouped and formed Psychovision with a new Technocab, but this time in a Dodge van. I went to the grand unveiling at Chelsea Harbour, but disastrously the new van was not yet finished. Shamefully the many punters were told it had broken down on the Westway. Eventually the Dodge Technocab aka Psychomobile did surface at Covent Garden:
There was some mitigation for the previous disasters when in 1992 Psychovision created a 5 screen show for the Victoria & Albert Sporting Glory Exhibition which was later screened as part of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In 2011 Justin Kirby made Roboshow Reboot, a website to document this story, but it has long since disappeared. Here is a brief 44 second clip of my submission for this. It sure all was groundbreaking fun while it lasted…
To conclude here is the full interview Richard Brown made for Roboshow Reboot at the Rewire 2011 conference, which sums up the whole story very well:
In 1985 I photographed Robert Smith of The Cure at his record company offices in Marylebone, London for Sounds. He was a sweetie, and all seemed to go well. However, for the first time ever (for me at least) the photos were taken “on approval”. This procedure was totally antithetical to the way I worked and to what I believed being a photographer was. However the photos were intended for the front cover, so I thought fine, no problem. It did mean I had to hurry more than usual and to make a presentation box. In order to protect the fragile original Hasselblad transparencies I mounted them in expensive glass 2.25” slide mounts. There was no time to make costly duplicate medium format transparencies. The black and white prints were proofs and not the intended final master prints.
Yes it was horrible
Well I guess the story can be told now. To keep it simple this is what happened – he destroyed the photographs he liked. That is THE WRONG ONES. When I say destroyed I mean he smashed the glass of the slide mounts and then proceeded to cut up the unique and original transparencies into tiny shards. I received in return a box of broken glass and slivers of cut-up film. Since the photographs were for the front cover, these were the best ones, the colour transparencies. Sounds magazine was not interested in shreds of film for their cover at the time. Nor did the magazine, record company and PR organisation wish to make their pop star appear really stupid, so there was a big hush-up.
Robert himself was horrified…
I was remarkably angry and punched a wardrobe much too hard. I could see which way the wind was blowing in the celebrity industry and soon changed my style from portrait to commercial studio photography of inanimate objects. At the end of the day a perfunctory sum was paid in recompense, months later. To me that was not the point at all, I had missed doing the cover photo and everybody seemed to think it was somehow my fault. I guess it’s all down to the pecking order, but no-one has the right to destroy someone else’s original work.
Cropping suggestions from Robert
In those pre-digital days there were no scanners or any easy way to use the shards of film I was left with. Now 37 years later I have relaxed enough to open up this can of worms and follow Robert’s advice. Yes here is the cut-up he suggested making all those years ago. It might be “art on purpose” but it’s certainly not a Sounds cover.
Playing Iago with Frances Barber (then Brookes) as Emilia in Othello. Photo: Brian Tarr
The first point is pointless. I was with the careers advisor at school aged 17 and I did not have the guts to tell him I wanted to be a rock singer. Of course I already knew that to say such a thing would be treated as some kind of joke, if not a reason for him to laugh at me and tell me to grow up. There were no degrees in this subject, and he probably had no conception of what I was not talking about. Still I was disappointed with myself not to raise the subject, not to make the point. In retrospect I realised other errors were made, since I was about to become the Editor of the school magazine. At the time time I had no conception this was an actual job, since once again there was no degree available in this subject. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the correct degree was English Literature, which I in fact did end up partially studying. Yet the idea that this was an actual job evaded me. You could only be a Teacher.
Later I had my big break as an actor, I was to play Iago in Othello at the Oxford Playhouse, sponsored by The Observer. This I managed to do and was quite good, and certainly better than the Zambian playing Othello. Unfortunately he was having some kind of nervous breakdown, having been accused of actually strangling Desdemona. This massive production became a laughing stock when he refused to go within three feet of her, so my performance became rather incidental. After the first night we never saw the Director again, yet there were many more nights of pain in front of thousands of people. Thus ended serious acting.
Life and Death Show at a Youth Club. I am under the table.
Another disaster, at least to my mind, put an end to my film career. We had written a touring youth theatre show called The Life and Death Show about the nuclear apocalypse. After many performances we had honed down the Protect and Survive story into a tight and entertaining forty five minutes. This had involved meeting the Secretary of CND, Bruce Kent, and hiding under a table. I was thrilled that this led to making a film at The Albany in Deptford. However this was early days for video, still on reel to reel video tape I believe, and quite simply the Director lost all the audio during the edit! Despite this setback something was recovered leading to a Premiere at the ICA Videotheque. That was all good, but the incomprehensible dialogue sounded like a deep sea quagmire. This naughty Director went on to win many prizes and became a Professor of Film, I never appeared in another film. Such are the breaks, those moments…
Again The Observer was to blame, kind of. I took my huge photographic portrait portfolio into their Art Editor at the ‘Colour’ Magazine (the supplement) and they loved it. To work for them was my dream, so I thought that I had made to the big time, after doing covers for NME and Sounds. It was all close-up black and white portraits, rather in the style of Steve Pyke or maybe even Avedon. However I ended up “second choice”, that is nowhere, and I gave up. Or at least changed my style, I had tried and failed, but of course (in retrospect) I should have tried harder.
The writing was on the wall in 2011 when Tate Britain removed my panoramic tour of Peter Doig from their website, because they were being sponsored by Google. Of course they did not inform me, despite saying “it looks absolutely brilliant”. It was replaced by some fuzzy auto-made panoramas full of stitching errors and incomprehensible angles, the writing on the wall was truly invisible. Yet Jonathan Jones in The Guardian said “Google Street View-style tours of galleries are not to be sniffed at”. He had probably never seen a real panoramic tour in his life. You can’t compete with world organisations working for ‘free’. There is no actual point here, just a gradual decline as Google Street View took over the world, at least in panoramic terms.
That was, in a sense, a list of endings. The high points are not being mentioned here since this article was inspired by the The Last Days of Roger Federer and other endings by Geoff Dyer who makes the point that whole lives can turn on a sixpence, or, at least in terms of tennis, on a single point.
This is my Grandfathers Dress Stewart Kilt, not the one I wore to school.
Of course it wasn’t a skirt but a kilt, but to everyone else but me, it was a skirt. I was age 10 at Farnborough Road Junior School, Southport, on summer clothes day. Was I bullied? You bet and I expected it. This was a challenge which I paid for, punched to the ground, constant skirt flipping. Much to the disappointment of my tormentors I had serious underpants on, unlike my grandfather.
He was a London Scottish soldier at the trenches in World War One and was regularly inspected to make sure he wasn’t wearing any, which was “illegal”, and a sign of enfeeblement. A few lashes would fix that. Later I noticed a fab tartan pair of boxer shorts he had, but they were from his dress, not army, kilt. I still wear them (as not visible above).
I was so proud of my kilt and wee sporran, bought by my grandfather in a splendid shop along the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I took the blows with flamboyant outrage, and I would guess none of my school chums had ever seen a kilt, apart from my Scottish friend Maurice. I was well aware of the notional provocation. I also had a Sgian Dubh, a ceremonial stabbing knife kept in the sock, but thought it wiser not to take it along. This black dagger had not gone down well at Sunday School. Although it could have come in useful!
Years later I wore shorts to my senior school, it was summertime. I was pilloried by my adolescent peers in long trousers. What a hoot! Don’t zig, zag. Have confidence. Always a joy to be different.
Well it was the M1 Mac I had been waiting for, so on announcement day I plumped for a Mac Studio with M1 Max, 24-core GPU, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The migration from a Mac Pro 2010, 2×3.46ghz and 96GB Ram went smoothly considering I was coming from the 2018 Mojave 10.14 system. As you can see I am using all the ports on the back, grateful for their inclusion. One of the main reasons for this update was simply to be on a modern and supported system, yet I am hard put to find any useful improvements in the system software.
In fact I am disappointed that there are still so many glitches after all this time, there should have been plenty of time to iron all these out. Firstly it took the Music app 40 hours to re-index my iTunes library after several crashes. In addition the Music app still appears to be in development, being unable to scroll artwork, so this is all you get, half a picture, and the rest is missing:
No Scrollbar !
Surely it can’t be that difficult to make a scrollbar like we had in iTunes. In addition you can no longer drop music into a playlist – it appears briefly then disappears. I then have to go and hunt for it in the Recently Added Playlist. Of course I was also faced with the plethora of permissions issues, simply to use an attached disk, slowly I am overcoming them. My Keychain refused to transfer, so I was forced to use Two Factor authentication, despite Apple saying it was optional, still dealing with issues arising. It then took 12 hours to update Final Cut and X-Code, while Apple System Status said everything was OK – oh no it wasn’t! On the monitors front the system regularly refuses to respect my 2 monitors, forcing everything onto one screen, especially after trying (it takes several times) to sleep the computer. I was plagued with the notorious flickering HDMI connection initially, making the 4k monitor run at 50 instead of 60hz, seemed to assuage the problem, but not an ideal solution. This problem has now been resolved, but the Sleep function appears to be broken. I was also surprised to see the spinning beachball so regularly on this fast computer, in particularly just looking up recent items can cause it. I had none of these problems on my 12 year old Mac Pro, so I was expecting better.
There have been lots of minor changes for the sake of it. Overall there are some improvements with connectivity and the neural engine, yet in day to day usage the computer is not much faster than the old Mac Pro, despite the hype and carefully chosen speed graphs. I would call it incrementally faster, seconds here and there, some things still take a long time! The neural engine certainly makes video encoding a breeze, that is many times faster. I have noticed the computer settling down after a few weeks usage, this may be due to Trial aka triald which uses machine learning to improve usability. This is good but apparently allows parts of macOS to be automatically updated regardless of your settings, which I am not so keen on. There are also some documented problems, which I have avoided or worked around such as the issues with kexts (kernel extensions) which are being deprecated, but can still provide useful functionality. Yet, since the Library is now locked , you can no longer delete old, unused kexts! It should be noted that MontereyOS still cannot provide SMART monitoring of external disks without a kext. It is also now nearly impossible to make a proper backup disk of your system. Of course I had to lose all my old 32 bit apps and regret the loss of iView Media Pro and several disk repair apps. I have found a useful replacement for Media Pro in Photo Mechanic Plus, but there is a lack of repair and analysis apps for M1 Macs. More seriously there appears to be a variety of issues with the Thunderbolt ports, which do not give the advertised speed of 10GB/s for USB3.1. If in doubt use an expensive Thunderbolt 3 or 4 enclosure as I had to (see OWC Envoy Express 2TB NVME SSD above). My favourite Mac Guru Howard Oakley says: Lack of support for 10 Gb/s SuperSpeed+ in USB 3.1 Gen 2 is arguably the most serious failing in what has otherwise been a very successful transition.
A part of me thinks this is all a brilliant sales pitch to make us buy new computers. Simply refuse all updates to the old ones, tell us they are no longer supported and slowly make them incompatible. Yet people have still managed to take old Mac Pro’s past the 2018 Mojave system, by hacking and “illegally” installing newer systems. Why can’t Apple themselves do this, if the hardware is capable?
Despite all the aforementioned I would still recommend an M1 Mac (see Do not buy an old Intel Mac). Things can only get better!
Update 26/05/22
Bargain Samsung 32” 4K Monitor for £250!
I bought a Samsung M70A monitor for only £250, matching my much more expensive BenQ PD UHD monitor. It was cheap since it has been superseded by the M80. This is allegedly a smart monitor and does have USB-C, but I have resolutely switched off all the smart possibilities and ended up with a 100% sRGB display. A few caveats: there is no proper profiling, but using a Spyder Pro monitor colour calibration tool it now looks great and runs full sRGB 3840 x 2160 @ 60.00Hz. In addition, despite being sold as a 32” monitor, it is only 31.5”, still Samsung make cheap good looking screens.
PS. If you require the sRGB Colour Profile to make this a good monitor drop me a line!
Yes it turns out Boris was right to end the the pandemic restrictions, since now hardly anybody is dying from Covid. Let us not forget that the 35 deaths above are people who have died within 28 days of their first positive test, and they did not all die from the direct effects of Covid. This manner of counting has greatly increased the number of deaths (and the level of panic). The BBC estimates that currently, fewer than two in every three Covid-related deaths are estimated to be caused by the infection. Fewer people are currently dying than the average for the last five years.
Another criticism was that he was not backed up by the scientists, who usually surround him. I presume that was because their projections had proven to be drastically wrong. The modellers from Imperial College and SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), who inspired the lockdown, have appeared to get lost in their own statistics and preferred to err on the side of caution, if not plain dystopia. To quote from The Guardian:
Prof Neil Ferguson, went further and suggested that, following the “freedom day” relaxation of restrictions on 19 July, the 100,000 figure was “almost inevitable” and that 200,000 cases a day was possible. Cases topped out at an average of about 50,000 a day just before “freedom day”, before falling and plateauing between 25,000 and 45,000 for the next four months.
Now that at is an error of 200-300%, plainly not acceptable. (Incidentally, Professor Ferguson had to resign from SAGE for breaking lockdown restrictions.) This is just one example of the scientific modellers getting it wrong, just think of those empty Nightingale Hospitals costing 530 million. Now that the dust is settling it is worthwhile to look at overall death rates to discover the reality of the situation. From one perspective Covid in 2020-2021 has proven to be just more than twice as deadly as Flu in 2014-2015. However it is more interesting to look at the Global Excess Death Rates, since this removes the problems about how you count Covid deaths. Undoubtedly Covid has been a major and deadly pandemic, shown by the fact that most countries have suffered excess deaths (that is more than the expected average). On a fascinating chart compiled by The Economist, the UK is roughly in the middle with 222 Excess Deaths per 1000 people, yet for Sweden, which did not have a lockdown, the figure is 126. Draw your own conclusions, here are some numbers:
Excess deaths since country’s first 50 covid deaths
Last updated on February 14th 2022
Bulgaria: 919 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
South Africa: 414 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
USA: 305 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
UK: 222 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
France: 150 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
Sweden: 126 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
Japan: 16 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
New Zealand: -51 Excess Deaths per 1000 people
Yes the -51 for New Zealand does mean that more people are living than expected! I hope they will be fully immunised by the time the the virus does hit them, which seems inevitable sooner or later. Another issue which has recently become clearer is that Covid basically preys upon the old and infirm, leading to this amazing quote from Professor Mark Woolhouse:
People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.
So why are we bothering to vaccinate children? In conclusion we have certainly made many mistakes, but I have been grateful for the vaccination programme and I am glad the restrictions are finally ending.
P.S. Boris is an arch manipulator and consummate liar!
Too often scientists sound like just another interest group out to protect its reputation and budget. As Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College London modelling group were quoted as admitting: “We do not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression.” It is why Sweden’s decision to avoid a draconian lockdown merits serious analysis. Its GDP fell by 2.9%, Britain’s by 9.4%.In the European league tables Sweden falls around the middle in deaths per capita, still well below Britain.
Due to popular request I am listing my albums of the year, that is the ones I have listened to extensively. This is an eclectic list, starting with new albums and then drifting off into reissues or older albums re-discovered. I hope you find something of interest.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises A truly contemporary chill out album combining electronica, masterful sax playing and gorgeous orchestration. You can hear the six decades of jazz history in the playing of 80 year old Mr Sanders, so relaxed yet so authoritative, I would have liked even more. A unique and wonderful combination of talents, the beauty makes you want to swoon.
Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince Another slow burner from this Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer and singer. At times reminiscent of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the singing is peaceful and plangent. There is a an overlying senses of sadness, but it is not cloying or without movement. Many of the lyrics are based on the Ghazal, an Arabic poetic form steeped in loss and longing. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain, says Wikipedia.
Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime
Burning guitar, as if Hendrix had joined Tinawaren. This is a powerful album to be played loud, packed full of galloping riffs from the Azawagh desert of northern Niger. I had the pleasure of seeing him a few years ago at Cafe Oto, you can see the pics here.
Hedvig Mollestad Trio: Ding Dong. You’re Dead.
The discovery of the year and the gig of the year. Instrumental Rock-Jazz combining the Goth sensibilities of her Norway home and intense guitar shredding. She manages to sound totally original, with a huge vocabulary of psychedelic and jazz riffs, constant excitement. She plays with a huge sense of élan, yet never forgets the atmospherics. This is a proper power trio with bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad together in HM3 since 2011. Wow, what a night, as you can see here.
The Coral: Coral Island
A delightful album using spoken word and pop songs to take you on a journey to Coral Island, a seaside resort with ballroom, funfair. pier and a werewolf. The charming story songs seem like a throwback to more melodic times. Of course it all reminds me of my home town Southport, not surprising since they are from Hoylake, just across the Mersey on the Wirral Peninsula.
Olivia Rodrigo: Sour
It’s the popular choice! If you’ve had enough Fiona Apple, Taylor Swift or even Lana del Ray then try this. Yup the kids have been lapping this up and I enjoy the yearning, the swift changes of pace and the vocal gymnastics. Proper pop entertainment from California.
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: Raise The Roof
Perhaps not as strong as their classic Raising Sand from 2007, the chemistry is still unique. It is strange to think that the bombastic vocalist of Led Zeppelin has become such a sensitive singer, and paired with the golden tonsils of Alison Krauss, the contrast is often very moving. The odd mixture of country, rockabilly and blues is very relaxing.
Sly & Robbie meet Nils Petter Molvær: Nordub
Well this was released in 2018, but I’m still playing it regularly. It is included here in memoriam to Robbie Shakespeare, who sadly died in December 2021. They were a unique rhythm section, playing on many reggae classics as well as with Serge Gainsbourg, Grace Jones and Bob Dylan to name but three. To find out more about Nils, see my blog.
Max Richter: Voices
A unique album setting readings of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights to music. It is both ghostly and moving and flows along beautifully. As the voices and instruments intermingle a genuine aural landscape is constructed, without being cloying or didactic. In 2021 Max released an instrumental reworking of this album called Voices 2, but I prefer the original – with the voices!
Journeys In Modern Jazz: Britain (1965-1972)
Yes they are still making Jazz compilations in 2021, and this one is very well put together and sounds remarkably contemporary. Several of the tracks would be very hard to source and it’s great to hear them fresh and remastered. Strangely we thought that British jazz lived in the shadow of the real guys in the US of A, this album gives the lie to that, being both funky and adventurous. Big rediscoveries were Don Rendell and Ian Carr, and especially the great closing track by Michael Gibbs. Heavy!
Bob Dylan: Man On The Street
This is a weird one, being a 10 CD package which I presume is a bootleg, or perhaps it is out of copyright. Still it is available on Amazon right now for a mere £22. All these CD’s contain the radio broadcasts, home recordings and live concerts from 1961 to 1965, famous to any bootleg collector. Thus you get the contents of the first ever bootleg, Great White Wonder, as well as his 1961 Carnegie Hall gig and the 1965 BBC recordings. They sure sound better than the versions I have heard over the years and contain many unreleased tracks and hilarious interludes.
Black Gold: The Very Best Of Rotary Connection
This was my soul epiphany of 2021. Of course I knew ‘I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun’ from many raves, but was not aware just how crazy this band was. I thought they were lightweight and not funky enough, but I was coming from the wrong direction. They were a truly psychedelic choral soul band, with an amazing arranger in Charles Stepney and a world class singer in Minnie Ripperton. During the years 1967 to 1971 they took soul music and made it epic with massed choirs and orchestras, covering rock classics from Hendrix, Cream and The Band. They deserve their own church.
Gustav Holst: Choral Works
A recent discovery recorded in 1984 and composed 1908-1912. It was a great solace during the lockdown when singing was outlawed. Most of it is a predominantly female choir with the harpist Osian Ellis and it is very dynamic. My reference point was the work of David Axelrod and albums like Earth Rot, although this is much more ethereal. The singing itself is very rhythmical and builds to powerful climaxes, very satisfying and quite strange.
The Lost Jockey: Professor Slack EP
Another result of lockdown was the digitising of some rare vinyl albums from my vast collection. This 10″ EP was my favourite, recorded in 1982. The Lost Jockey were the British answer to the systems music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. However they seemed to be much funnier, poppier and funkier to me, and I held out great hopes for them. I was so keen on them I even wrote an article about them (unpublished). Still this EP, full of restlessness despite the pulsing, was as good as it got. Their solitary full album was a disappointment, although several members went on to have very interesting careers with Man Jumping, The Shout and on the ZTT label.
Black Box Recorder: Life Is Unfair
Totally missed this group 20 years ago, although I was aware of Luke Haines, but found him a bit arch. Yet with the addition of Sarah Nixey on sensual and domineering vocals it all seems to work, the irony of the lyrics arrows straight home. They really are the funniest English group ever, the black humour skewering school, motorways, sundays and, in their only hit, the facts of life. This is the 4CD box set of all their albums with a free poster.
Well the idea of all your files on all your devices sounds great, but it is a chimera. Firstly they are not necessarily on your device, but can be in the cloud. Secondly you will soon be paying for this privilege, Thirdly they are not always accessible, in effect they cannot be relied upon.
If you have a small hard disk, files are “evicted” to iCloud. Soon you can no longer download them all and you become a Prisoner of iCloud. Keep paying the ransom! This may sound like a bad joke, but your old unused files can be deleted by Apple after 6 months. The terms Apple sets for iCloud specifically exclude any liability for loss of data. Also iCloud doesn’t work perfectly all the time, so do check Apple’s service status page.
My personal advice is never to use iCloud for data backup, although it can be useful for sharing and syncing data between devices. iCloud is not Time Machine, which backs up data to a local hard disk. You cannot backup an entire Mac to iCloud, but you can use it for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. You will be paying for this, since you will soon use up the free 5GB allocation.
Much better value is to buy a 2TB hard disk for about £55, like the Toshiba 2TB Canvio Basics Portable External Hard Drive, USB 3.2, and store or backup your data on this. You will no longer be a prisoner or have to pay the ransom. Apple will charge you over £80 per year to backup this amount of data to iCloud.
To delve a bit deeper, if you are using iCloud Drive (which Apple encourages, it earns them money) beware of this symbol:
This means the data is stored in the cloud and you do not have full control of it. If it is a large item like a video, it may take hours to download. You may also see this icon in iTunes, where there are 6 possible iCloud icons. Unfortunately you have very little control over items that may suddenly go to the cloud. Your only control is basically on or off, but do not play around with this, since it may take hours or even days to re-sync an iCloud Drive.
So some advice, since there many options about what you can sync. I personally sync Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Safari, Notes, Find my Mac. Reminders, Siri and Keychain may also be useful to sync via iCloud. These are all small items and should be free to sync. Since I am a photographer I do not sync Photos, that would be an expensive nightmare. For some people it may be useful, but you will soon be paying for more storage. Also do not sync items you may not use like Stocks, News, Home. If you use iCloud for i-device backups remember they are a space hog, and to delete out of date or unused devices. Obviously I do not use or recommend iCloud Drive. Do not “Manage” your files in About this Mac / Storage, unless you are aware of the consequences, it switches on iCloud Drive. Before deleting anything from iCloud, be sure you won’t need it again. Once it’s deleted from iCloud, it’s gone forever.
Do NOT tick all these boxes!
My favourite article on iCloud problems is by Howard Oakley, it is quite long and there is no magic bullet. To conclude, keep in mind that the Italian antitrust regulator has found that Apple’s iCloud terms and conditions are unreasonable and unfair to consumers, and may breach consumer protection laws. Best of luck navigating the modern world of cloud computing!
Nikon Z7 with TTArtisan 11mm f2.8 Fisheye and Nodal Ninja Lens Ring for Panoramas
So what are the advantages you may ask. Quite simply the most important reason for me was to have access to 4K video, so that my cameras could compete with my iPhone. Now that I have a Nikon Z7 and Z50 I have found a plethora of other reasons for the upgrade. When I saw the the power of 4K video on my iPhone XS , it was apparent my old Nikon D800 was simply outclassed by the new computational video options in my iPhone.
Still from iPhone 4K video – who needs SLR cameras?
However this iPhone has only one usable lens (the telephoto is lower quality, although I hear they have improved), and I found this very limiting. Now I have access to lenses from 7.5mm to 500mm, lots of options. Not only that, but due to the short flange distance, many vintage lenses can now be easily used with an adaptor. Talking of adaptors, the Nikon FTZ adaptor for G lenses works very well retaining full AF. However it is very bulky with a large box sticking out below the camera, which I find quite annoying, both for tripod and handheld use. (Update: There is now a version without the large bump). If you are using an old lens without AF, I recommend using a dumb circular adaptor. As for Z lenses, the new Nikon S lenses are indeed of spectacular quality, if rather expensive. Much better value and more entertaining are the third party Chinese lenses from Pergear, TTAritisan, 7 Artisans, Laowa and Meike among others. I have bought several of these metal manual focus lenses, in particularly fisheyes and wide angles, and optically they are excellent performers. In particularly my TTArtisan 11mm f2.8 fisheye was a lot sharper than my old faithful, the Nikon 16mm f2.8 fisheye, much to my surprise. The edge performance was a league above, although 11mm seems a misnomer, having a nearly identical 180º field of view to the Nikon 16mm. There are now some Chinese AF lenses from Viltrox, at least half the price of the Nikons, which have been well reviewed.
Callanish monolith Stone c.2600BC, Isle of Lewis. Nikon Z7 with TTArtisan 11mm f2.8 Fisheye.
So much for the lenses, the real surprise was actual usage. For 30 years I have only used my cameras in full manual, locked ISO, spinning the speed and aperture dials as necessary. Now I have discovered the power of Auto ISO (still available in Manual), and am already getting lazy. With the power of dual gain sensors it does not make much difference to noise and quality when shooting in Raw whether the ISO is 100 or 10000. I am aware that for full quality I should be below ISO 400, but can you tell the difference? Anyway the speed of use, once fully set up, allows me to nearly shoot at random. The amount of information in the electronic viewfinder (which takes some getting used to) is highly informative and can be rapidly changed. The peaking function is invaluable for manual lenses. I trust the AF and exposure (-1/3) and of course all the pictures are now free.The latest sensors are amazing, I remember never shooting above ISO 800 on my Nikon D200. Meanwhile these cameras are truly optimised for video, the focus no longer jumps or hunts, aperture changes proceed as if click-less, even changing shutter speed is done smoothly. In addition you have the speed and flexibility of a touch screen, articulated monitor and best of all, silence. A minor annoyance are touch buttons on the Z50 monitor, often accidentally touched by my nose since I am left eye dominant. They have moved them on the similar spec Nikon Zfc. The autofocus is great, with a few confusing options, wide area-s seems to suit me. Mirrorless cameras tend to use more battery and require attention since while the camera is on the monitor is on, which has caught me out a few times. Always switch off when not using and it easily takes hundreds of shots and an hour of video (with a restart). One advantage is that they can be recharged via USB without the mains adaptor.
In conclusion everything feels quiet, smooth and light, that’s all good. Do they take better photos than my old D800? Perhaps, but the benefit is really apparent in the sparkling video, tracking autofocus and flexibility of use.
