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.
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:
To think you could record a track such as this and then not release it for several years is staggering to me. It was recorded for the Oh Mercy album in 1989 and the producer, Daniel Lanois, believed it should have been the opening track of that album. It finally appeared at the end of 58 tracks on The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991. As if to make up for this omission it has now appeared in various versions on at least another 4 compilation albums. However a song of this quality deserves a place at the centre of a great album, which perhaps Oh Mercy could have been if another famous track recorded at the same time, Dignity, had also been included along with classics such as Everything Is Broken and Most Of The Time.
Back to the song, its resonance comes from the way it updates the classic Dylan of the 60s and is one of his last songs to still rock as if he wanted to be a Beatle or even Bruce Springsteen rather than a gravel voiced bluesman. The galloping drums (Daniel Lanois also produced U2) promise a redemption which of course never quite arrives, but we are certainly hurled towards another world by the building, chiming guitars of Mason Ruffner. The vocal phrasing is particularly strong and dylanesque, constantly tripping you up with the unexpected meanings, and when he gets to the punchline (Into the path you are hurled) the music soars, and his voice rises to the occasion.
This is a song which takes his dazzling work of the 60s and refracts it to render a more modern and mature vision. The lyrics are neither verbose nor florid, as they could have been in the 60s, they are simply trying to accurately describe a state of mind. In a sense it is a summation of his career, which can indeed appear as a series of dreams given his chameleon like metamorphosis from folk, protest, rock, surrealism, country, troubadour and guignol into an elder statesman on a never ending tour. There is a sense of sadness and languor, an absolute belief in his refusal to be a spokesman with all the answers, yet the mystery of existence still haunts and the extra terrestrial cards are nearly within his grasp. The emotion of a life lived pours through this song, a joyous requiem to the mystery of the unconscious.
The point he is making – that life is seriously a never ending Sisyphean task and yet also a series of vignettes which repeat outside comprehension, that his dreams have constructed his reality and so it has come to be, reflect a desire we all recognise – to arrive at a moment where we are at peace with our own dreams. In their bare and graphic descriptions we understand these incoherent dreams, perhaps we feel we have shared them. (I certainly do.) This man is no longer haunted by the history of his vivid imagination and crazy life, nor his frightening dreamscape, it has all become one and he accepts it for the madness that it was and may still be. There is still wonder, but no longer any fear, he is an observer who does not have to understand everything in order to see the chance of redemption. Surely the sign of a man who has gone the distance, no more worries, just thinking.
Bob Dylan thinking of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), author of Illuminations. Stills from the official video for Series of Dreams 1991.
A sense of the series of dreams referred to in the song can be garnered from the official video, which quotes from many historical aspects of Bob’s life:
Original Release 1991 : The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991.
This track also appears on : Greatest Hits Volume 3 (1994), The Bootleg Series, Vol 8: Tell Tale Signs (2008), The Real…Bob Dylan (2012), Side Tracks (2013).
Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the middle and the bottom drop out
And you’re walking out of the darkness
And into the shadows of doubt
Wasn’t going to any great trouble
You believe in it’s whatever it seems
Nothing too heavy to burst the bubble
Just thinking of a series of dreams
Well the state of contemporary portrait photography does not appear to be the healthiest judging by the show at the National Portrait Gallery. Or maybe it is the judges who are incapable of choosing examples of truly photographic images which amaze and excite us. This possibility is suggested by giving the £12,000 prize to an enlarged photo booth style picture which is badly cropped and flatly printed. Many other entries appear to be box ticking exercises to fulfil some imagined social criteria not directly relevant to the art of photography. Some pictures were parts of a monograph which do not stand up when taken out of context, or journalistic commissions featuring famous people and formula photography. The number of people either sitting on chairs or looking straight to camera is stultifying and there appears to be a strange obsession with gypsies and twins. Of course there is a photograph of The Queen, in this case a tiny and unpleasant snatch shot. In these portraits nobody is doing or expressing anything, there are hardly any actual physiognomic examinations (surely the essence of portrait photography) and certainly a lack of technical exploration. The formulaic and unadventurous nature of the Taylor Wessing Prize is demonstrated by the previous years entries which could replace this year without anyone noticing.
The exhibition was cramped (£3 for 3 small rooms) and clumsily laid out with the prizewinner hidden in a corner (halving the potential viewers) and many pictures stacked one above the other making viewing difficult. The lack of respect for the skills of photography was demonstrated by the fact that there were no technical details whatsoever.
My criticism of this show was reinforced when I nipped upstairs to see the free Starring Vivien Leigh: A Centenary Celebration exhibition, featuring 2 portrait photographs by Madame Yevonde and and Angus McBean which are truly photographic images and far superior to anything on view downstairs.
The Madame Yevonde portrait was taken at an acute angle in vivid dye-transfer Technicolor in 1936 and was more daring in its posing and use of colour than anything on view in the 2013 selection.
The Angus McBean portrait is a monochrome double exposure print from 1952 nearly in silhouette, both more technically adventurous and revealing than any of the contemporary work. Surely the judges could have found some equally strong work in 2013?
PS “Fabio” did raise a smile..
Postscript 2016
The Guardian says the 2016 £15.000 winner is “An apparently simple and straightforward picture of a boy in his school uniform”. The Judges say “something beautiful out of the everyday”. Oh yes the Judges have chosen another incredibly boring photobooth shot !
