Saturday Buddha

It's All In The Way You Look At Life

2012-02-10T18:01:00.015Z

I consider it an article of supreme faith that the only possible way to understand the fractures and strains of our modern day society in Britain is acceptance of the fact that it is an utterly different country entirely from that which existed prior to the turn of the century. That as sourced to the demographic critical mass we have obviously breached, the sense of physical threat around us constantly, the deranged employment and property markets, the criminally banal content of much media output, the total lack of social mobility, the degradation of our political culture, the foul atmosphere and decay of our capital city, the generational loss of hope and the pained nostalgia so many people now have for a country lost in time and meaning.

No other song in popular musical history arguably captures such melancholy sentiments and yearning for easier times as the Goffin and King masterpiece - Goin' Back. This song was made famous by The Byrds in America in 1967 and a year earlier in the UK by Dusty Springfield. Springfield is no longer with us - alike two other renowned British female singers of the period Alma Coogan and Kathy Kirby - though the respect towards her musical output remains immense to this day. None moreso as regarding the Dusty in Memphis album of 1969 - which contained the transatlantic top ten hit Son of a Preacher Man - as recorded at the American Sound Studios where Elvis Presley also made his late Sixties hit singles Suspicious Minds, Don't Cry Daddy, Kentucky Rain and In The Ghetto.

Of Springfield's contemporaries, neither Cilla Black nor Lulu matched the slinky and cultured otherness of the French Ye Ye girls across the English Channel though they both produced truly magical moments of pop - especially Black's utterly overlooked What Good Am I which was a number 24 single in 1967 and Lulu's cover of Neil Diamond's The Boat That I Row that reached number 6 in the same year. Also in 1967, Lulu's To Sir With Love was the theme tune to the great movie starring Sydney Poitier and Judy Geeson which explored racial and class tensions in an East End school in Britain's capital. The song gave Lulu an American number one while the film stands as definitive a snapshot of Lost London as the Karl Reisz documentary Lambeth Boys.

Other British female singers of the period one may recall include the stunningly beautiful Sandie Shaw and that magnificent footage of her miming the gloriously upbeat Long Live Love during a Top of the Pops rehearsal with a face of either utterly detached cool or possibly abject misery; Jackie Trent whose It's All In The Way You Look At Life is arguably one of the greatest songs of the entire Sixties never to have been a massive global hit; Marianne Faithful whose wistful Come And Stay With Me was one of Morrissey's eight Desert Island Discs in 2009; Susan Maughan and her singular smash hit Bobbie's Girl; Billie Davis who was one of the defining markers of Sixties fashion; Twinkle who gave Britain its own motorbike death epic Terry; Jewish Eastender Helen Shapiro; Mary Hopkins from Pontardawe in Wales and Clodagh Rogers from Newry in Northern Ireland.

The two figures from the time I recall most fondly however are Anita Harris and Petula Clark. Harris was from Midsommer Norton in Somerset and used to perform regularly on stage with famous television magician David Nixon. She also posed nude at one point for Mayfair magazine. Long remembered for her appearances in two Carry On movies - Carry On Doctor and Follow That Camel - she had several hit singles in 1967 and 1968 including The Anniversary Waltz and The Playground.

The album track London Life by Bacharch and David sees her dismiss the foulness of London's inclement weather by contrasting it to dancing to dawn on Sunday morning before listening to the speeches at Hyde Park Corner:

While Paris sleeps
London just keeps right on a-swingin'
and all the songs that the world is singing
you will find that they all are born in London, England.

The delightful 1968's children's song We're Going On a Tuppenny Busride presents a technicolour daydream of a bus journey from London to Pamplona and Paris. Alike Clark's Typically English this particular track seems almost prehistoric in origin to modern ears by way of the kind of roll-up smoking, jittery, personal space-invading, malevolent and passive-aggressive individuals one tends to share a bus stop with in modern-day London. And that's just the schoolgirls...

Petula Clark from Epsom in Surrey was a child-star during the Second World War in Britain and had a successful career in France before her main chart success in Britain and America. Looking at her performances of Downtown on The Dean Martin Show, I Know A Place on The Ed Sullivan Show and a medley of the two on Hullabaloo it is hard to think of another British solo performer of the period with such total star quality combining presence, beauty, grace, charm and charisma. Most famously, and during a prime time NBC television special in 1968, the performance of her own song On The Path of Glory with Harry Belafonte attracted criticism on race grounds from the show's sponsors in light of her touching his arm at one point - Clark refused to remove the clip and insisted the special would be shown intact or not at all.

Eighty years old in November, Clark's adult movie career is essentially associated with 1968's Finian's Rainbow where an Irish leprechaun tracks down his stolen gold in the American Deep South and the underrated Goodbye Mister Chips musical in 1969 with Peter O'Toole. In the former she brings the exile Fred Astaire to tears while waxing upon How Are Things in Glocca Mora - a place no doubt mercifully free of marching Ulster Protestants - while in the latter she steals the show to every watching schoolboy's delight whilst lost in music on Fill The World With Love on her first day at the school assembly.

These unique and highly talented female artistes of the Sixties were such fundamental creative figures in a period when British popular culture matched and often surpassed anything else in the world and when our country still retained a sense of class, originality and style others could only dream of aspiring to.

Let everyone debate the true reality
I’d rather see the world the way it used to be
A little bit of freedom’s all we lack
So catch me if you can I’m goin’ back

A Story For Today

2012-02-05T15:29:00.020Z

In the previous post about Elvis Presley I referenced the BBC Play For Today production Long Distance Information. In the past few months I have also watched two other plays again from that long running series - Elephants Graveyard from 1976 and The Comedians from 1979.

Peter McDougall's Elephants Graveyard revisits the great folk myth of industrial Britain that in the good old days some men who were out of work got up in the morning anyway out of pure shame and went about their business to give the impression of gainful employment. This ties in with commentary in Paul Mason's recent Why It's All Kicking Off Everywhere as to the black social contract of the Nineties in the UK being essentially that a lifetime of dole money would compensate for a lifetime of work in post-industrial Britain without too many questions being asked since employment opportunities were essentially now extinct. The play stars Jon Morrison and Billy Connolly hiding out in the Scottish countryside away from their wives' gaze and has certain supernatural overtones in its resolution. The two actors had starred the previous year in McDougall's magnificent Just Another Saturday about the Orange marching culture in Glasgow.

Trevor Griffiths' The Comedians had played theatrically for several years by the time of the television production and is the story of a nightclass for budding stand up comedians in Manchester - including a young Jonathan Pryce as the maverick student alongside an Irishman, an Ulsterman and a Jew amongst other hopefuls. Pryce's performance at the talent night itself is extraordinary to behold and there are also sobering asides from the teacher - portrayed by Bill Fraser from The Army Game - on racist and sectarian generalisations and his horrifying war experiences. Quite simply it is one of the best television plays of our time.

Play For Today began in 1970 with Ray Davies of The Kinks taking the lead role in The Long Distance Piano Player and ran until 1984. It was the successor to the BBC's The Wednesday Play which started in 1964 and with the namechange reflecting the now varied transmission day. The BBC Head of Drama at the time the series commenced was Sydney Newman who had earlier produced the similar Armchair Theatre for independent television and he aimed to continue making dramas that balanced social realism with a broad public appeal. Furthermore he wanted to get away from the BBC's safe image and produce content with "agitational contemporaneity". Mr Newman - if you are still with us - I trust you are utterly transfixed by the current edgy status of New Britain.

Often controversial, the most famous plays of the series were the Ken Loach-directed Up The Junction in 1965 which focused on working class life in Battersea - and which was later made into a successful feature film starring Dennis Waterman and Suzy Kendall - and Cathy Come Home from 1966 which tackled the subject of homelessness in raw and unflinching fashion. Loach's The War Game was totally withdawn from transmission for twenty years under government pressure because of its controversial depiction of a nuclear attack on London. In a British Film Institute poll in 2000 for the greatest British television programme of the century The War Game was placed 27th and Cathy Come Home second. Alike with several episodes of Steptoe and Son, Dr Who and George Best's only international hat trick many of the episodes were wiped with only 63 out of the 173 made in the BBC archives today.

More than 300 programmes of Play For Today were subsequently produced and as consisting of original television plays and adaptations of stage plays or novels alike. The quality, timelesseness and reknown of so many are extraordinary to consider in hindsight and covered all genres through to even science fiction with 1980's The Flipside of Dominick Hyde. Certain plays such as Willy Russell's 1977 Our Day Out that had transmitted elsewhere on the BBC network were also given a repeat showing in the Play For Today slot. Rumpole of Bailey and Gangsters from 1975 would subsequently become full television series on ITV and BBC respectively.

Some of the best remembered of the plays would be Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), The Foxtrot (1971), Penda's Fen (1974), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), Nuts In May (1976), Spend Spend Spend (1977), Abigail's Party (1977), The Black Stuff (1978), Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Just A Boy's Game (1979).

Alike with The War Game two plays would be pulled from transmission entirely due to controversy over the content - Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle in 1976 which contained a rape scene of a disabled woman and the borstal violence portrayed in 1977's Scum. Both these dramas would appear in cinematic form before their eventual transmissions as original television plays.

In the aforementioned BFI poll of the year 2000 no less than five Play For Today programmes were regarded as being in the top 100 British television productions of the 20th Century: Abigail's Party (eleventh), Blue Remembered Hills (36th), Nuts in May (49th), Bar Mitzvah Boy (56th) and Edna, The Inebriate Woman (57th). Alan Bleasdale's The Boys from the Blackstuff which was a sequel to the original television play was seventh.

Play For Today naturally also covered the subject of the Ulster Troubles though several plays commissioned were not produced. Ironically the civil disorder of the Northern Ireland conflict would remain much in the background of the two best-remembered plays set there - Stewart Parker's Iris In The Traffic, Ruby In the Rain in 1981 and Too Late To Talk To Billy by Graham Reid in 1982.

Stewart Parker, whose final play Pentecost took place against the background of the May 1974 Ulster Workers Council strike and indeed stands as one of the greatest pieces of Irish drama to date, set his play on one winter's day in Belfast and followed the parallel lifepaths of the two eponymous women. Belfast punk legends Stiff Little Fingers provided the soundtrack with singer Jake Burns in a supporting dramatic role himself. In 1977 Parker's first contribution to Play For Today was The Catchpenny Twist which covered the songwriting career of two ex-teachers against the political vagaries of Seventies Ireland. His later, and magnificently titled, The Kamikaze Groundstaff Reunion Dinner was shown in 1981 in the series and had white British actors playing Japanese war veterans. He died of cancer in 1988 at the age of only 47.

Graham Reid's play regarded the familial travails of a young working class Protestant in South Belfast portrayed by Kenneth Branagh and with three further plays to follow as based around the character of Billy Martin. Branagh also starred in Reid's Easter 1916 contribution to the Play For Tomorrow mini-series of 1982 which looked at tensions at a Northern Ireland teacher training college on the centenary of the Dublin rising.

Seven other productions over the course of Play For Today's run touched upon the Ulster conflict.

Dominic Behan's 1972 Carson Country - starring Harry Towb and Sam Kydd - looked at Protestant working class life around the period of the Home Rule crisis and the creation of the Northern Ireland state. It was transmitted in October of that year instead of the planned May in order as not to provoke trouble during the marching season. The following month Behan's The Folk Singer for Armchair Theatre on ITV - about the visit of a Liverpool musician to Belfast - was given a later scheduled transmission slot on the instructions of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Three months later in turn ATV chairman Sir Lew Grade banned entirely the transmission of Kenneth Griffith's Hang Up Your Brightest Colours:The Life and Death of Michael Collins and this would not be shown at all until 1993.

Over the remainder of the Seventies Taking Leave (1974) was the story of a British soldier who returned to Ulster after six years of service and considered his parents' wish for him to terminate his service; Colin Welland's Yer Man From Six Counties (1976) focused upon a young boy's move to the West of Ireland after the death of his father in an IRA bomb; The Legion Hall Bombing (1976) looked at the Diplock court system then operational in Northern Ireland and whose transmission was also delayed by further BBC concern over editorial content while The Last Window Cleaner (1979) followed the transfer of a policeman to Ulster and his experiences in wartorn Belfast at The Crumlin View boarding house.

During the Eighties Jennifer Johnston's Shadows On Our Skin (1980) viewed the Troubles through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy in Derry's Bogside - and with Horslip's Time To Kill used in the soundtrack - while Fire At Magilligan (1984) followed upon the consequences of a driver picking up a hitchhiker on the motorway out of Belfast and the two gradually realised they were not unknown to each other after all.

In consideration of both The Wednesday Play and Play For Today as high water marks of television drama and British television alike, they reflect a society clearly vanished in much of its social and even physical constructs alongside now fractured senses of identity and community cohesion. Though the BBC's reputation and content is now a mere shadow of what it once was, these plays truly represent an extraordinary cultural archive of a much-lamented and utterly lost country.

Elvis in Britain

2012-02-02T23:06:00.000Z

During what would have been the early to mid-Seventies in Northern Ireland I recall as a child hearing one of apparently several comedic parodies of the song The Deck of Cards which was a hit for Wink Martindale in 1959. This version was voiced by somebody impersonating Protestant political leader the Reverend Ian Paisley and when reaching the "face cards" he would note how the Jack was naturally the papist jackanapes of Rome while the Queen was of course Queen Elizabeth II the Defender of the Faith. As for the King - well that was obviously "Elvis Presley!!!"

Elvis touched down twice in Britain. In 1967 the MGM movie Double Trouble had Presley heading a rock combo on tour in London and Belgium. His leading lady Annette Day from Telford in Shropshire never worked again in cinema after this, her first and only film performance, though the feature does lay claim to some historic importance due to the late Norman Rossington being the only actor to appear in both an Elvis and a Beatles movie - Double Trouble and A Hard Day's Night respectively.

The opening credits and theme song from the movie retain some kitsch appeal although the one minute and twenty seven seconds long single lifted from the soundtrack album - Long Legged Girl (With The Short Dress On) - bombed at number 63 in the Billboard Top 100 and 49 in the UK charts. The album also contains one of the total lowpoints of Elvis' life in the irony-free duet with Day on Old McDonald. Presley allegedly screamed "It's come to this" during recording of this track and was only becalmed by being assured it would not appear on the forthcoming soundtrack album where in fact it remains to this day for all the world to hear forever and ever until the end of time.

Double Trouble of course was filmed entirely in Hollywood. In reality Elvis' single fleeing presence on British soil came on March 3rd 1960 at Prestwick Airport near Glasgow while in transit home to America from military service in West Germany - as lampooned in the famous "Elvin Pelvin" episode of Sgt Bilko. The airport in Ayrshire was also used at the time as a USAAF air base and during his brief two-hour stop-over Elvis signed autographs, met fans at the NCO's mess and gave a brief press conference. On exiting the plane he had asked fans "Where am I?" with the crowd shouting back "Prestwick!"

Actually during the pre-digital days of the Eighties I used to acquire some interesting bootleg video and audio-cassette material on Elvis from a dealer in Cambuslang in Glasgow. Very intriguing stuff in hindsight such as magnificent outtakes from the 1968 NBC Special including Presley flirting with the incredibly beautiful Susan Henning during a photoshoot from the bordello sequence and the unbearably sad 1977 CBS Special from shortly before Elvis' death in August of that year.

I remember too buying a grainy copy of the 1968 musical comedy Live A Little Love A Little which included both the future dance hit A Little Less Conversation - as sung by Elvis to a blank-eyed bimbo zombie - and the great lost single Edge of Reality which was only released as the b-side to If I Can Dream. Also there was the final Elvis dramatic role of all in 1969's Change of Habit with Mary Tyler Moore as a nun wavering between either Dr Elvis - with his lush sideburns and brilliant black University of Tennessee at Memphis sweat-shirt - or helping to raise the spirits of the downtrodden at the community Fiesta of Saint Juan de Cheguez with some groovy latin music.

There was also a compilation of movie trailers including the appalling Easy Come Easy Go from 1967 where Elvis played navy frogman Lieutenant Ted Jackson - "The bottom of the sea - where the action is!" - and Charro! from the following year featuring Elvis in a cool beard, a striking Hugo Montenegro score, dramatic horse rides through the Superstition Mountains at Apache Junction and not much else.

Finally I recall an interesting Elvis bootleg audio-cassette I acquired called Kickin Back which included a gorgeous rendition of Bread's Aubrey with his backing group and a crazed onstage rant about drug allegations - probably leaked by "freaks who carry your bag to the room" - following which he only managed to calm himself down by singing The Hawaiian Wedding Song. Mental.

I got to Memphis in the end too - as haunted and strange a place as that captured in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train without question - and have in my possession to this day my own parents' copy of the iconic 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong album that I have been playing now for over forty years. That collection contained the utterly raucous Big Hunk O'Love while the other June 10th 1958 tracks from that solitary recording session Elvis made just after he had joined the army - including I Got Stung and I Need Your Love Tonight - are mortifying reminders of where Elvis' career could have and should have gone in the Sixties.

The Seventies was naturally a mixed bag for Elvis Presley but a lot of his commercial output has dated very well in hindsight. Be that renowned tracks of the ilk of the stunning Burning Love to criminally overlooked songs such as Paul Williams' Where Do I Go From Here - the latter perfectly capturing a sentiment comprehensible to so many millions of us treading water in life year after year in familiar places now changed beyond recognition:

If I knew the way I'd go back home but the countryside has changed so much I'd surely end up lost.
Half-remembered names and faces so far in the past at the other side of bridges that were burnt once they were crossed.

The mostly melancholic From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis,Tennessee album from May 1976 would include a moving version of the Northern Irish anthem Danny Boy with just a simple piano accompaniment and as recorded at Gracelands itself. Danny Boy - which is often used as a non-contentious alternative to the British national anthem at certain sporting events involving Northern Irish representatives - was first published in 1855 as Londonderry Air by Dr George Petrie after composer Jane Ross had transcribed a tune from local fiddler Jimmy McCurry in Limavady. The famous lyrics of exile, loss and love of Ireland were added in 1912 by an Englishman Fred Weatherly.

Returning to Prestwick Airport on that historic day, I also recall that there was even a children's television dramatisation of Elvis' visit to Scotland in the Dramarama series of the Eighties on ITV - Waiting For Elvis as produced by Scottish Televison. Presley furthermore was also the subject of a 1979 Play For Today on BBC television with regard to Neville Smith's Long Distance Information. This was about an English disc jockey and Elvis-obsessive presenting his radio show as the news of Presley's death is broken across the world.

The play ended with one of the characters reflecting upon how if Elvis had been born British then surely "we would have looked after him" or some such. An affectionate and moving sentiment in hindsight - and especially in light of how people of an older Britain saw themselves as a fundamentally grounded nation. Though then again our national character never stopped the career of George Best ending on New Years Day 1974 at the grand old age of 27.

Safe Home Elvis.

Signs of the Times

2012-02-01T21:01:00.000Z

During the late Seventies and early Eighties the resident dance troupe on BBC's weekly Top of the Pops was Legs and Co. All relatively anodyne stuff in hindsight though saw a great clip a while back on Youtube from October 1977 where they really let go. Dressed in black and dancing to the disco classic Let's All Chant, one of the blonde members looks directly into the camera at one point wth definite erotic intent while holding out her upraised arm in a manner that wouldn't take the human anthropological skills of a Desmond Morris to interpret.

This disappeared off the website for quite a while and returned only recently where one realised that the routine that was actually being danced to was Ram Jam's Black Betty and it had just been the uploader himself or herself who had added the Michael Zager Band backing track in the first place and which had actually worked perfectly. So often things are just not quite what they seem to be in the modern day.

In the Sixties and early Seventies it was Pan's People who provided the dancing entertainment on Top of the Pops. The striking blonde dancer every British male recalls was married to actor Robert Powell - most famously associated with his role in Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth television drama from 1977 which was top-heavy with famous actors of the ilk of Laurence Olivier, Anthony Quinn, Anne Bancroft and Rod Steiger. I recently watched this again and whereas some of the narrative thread is so qualified by the subsequent Life of Brian pastiche by Monty Python as to be almost unwatchable, it nevertheless contains many memorable scenes of dramatic power.

The story of Christ was literally vaporised in the first third of Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist documentary from 2007 - analysed as nothing more than a well worn historical rehash of earlier formal religious manifestations across the world and as based on mulifarious virgin births, miracles, betrayals, crucifixions and resurrections. That particularly with regard to the worship of the god Horus in the ancient Egyptian world and the interweaving geometric intricacies of the Zodiac.

On a broader level one of the most incredible aspects of modern life is access to this kind of revolutionary information by way of the new media surge of the past decade and its platform interconnectivity. The third Zeitgeist documentary was released for free on the internet in January 2011 only 11 days after its official first screenings. It received 300,000 Youtube hits in 24 hours and 4.5 million in its first two months.

The degree of intelligent and informed analysis of our troubled times - be that as conspiracy-grounded or otherwise - is extraordinary in scope for those who can engage the time and priority to this end. From Zeitgeist's analysis of the military-industrial complex through to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares documentaries on the BBC which analysed the fused developmental pathways of Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism. And recently Mark Steyn's After America, Paul Mason's Why It's All Kicking Off Everywhere and Michael Lewis' Boomerang all provide extraordinary written insights into periods of political and economic change whose destructive speed and scale takes the breath away.

Mainstream print media in the UK and national television news coverage alike seems to be literally being buried alive as historic opinion formers by the cutting edge quality of such analysis in the public domain now. This as suggested when looking through one weekend edition of what is regarded as our finest national newspaper some days ago.

The content ranged from wearying financial debate on the society-rescuing panacea of 95% mortgages to ludicrous career change advice for a market fundamentally blocked with internships like an animal fat-encrusted drainpipe. There was also bland analysis of the Scottish independence question which - in self-censorious or unaware fashion - never seems to touch upon the medium and long term economic logic of that nation disassociating itself from the historic demographic changes in South East England. And indeed tectonic social shifts we cannot even envisage as yet that have already been rent.

So in the words of the revolutionary Jesus of fact or fiction - empowered with human insight so hugely relevant to the problems of our time - and as interfacing with the modern age of unprecedented communication processes:

And in the morning, it will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times.

The Stranglers - Coming Your Way

2012-01-23T17:21:00.033Z

If ever you had counted the centuries you threw away
and all the lies that you had started
and all the chances thrown away...

In the quarter century I have been living here in London there are three concerts I deeply regret having missed. Two of these were at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank around about 2003/2004 - the late Arthur Lee and Love's full performance of the classic Forever Changes album and Irish folk legends Planxty. The third was The Stranglers gig at Alexandra Palace in the summer of 1990 which would be the last performance of the group with Hugh Cornwell as vocalist after ten studio albums together. This was the same North London venue where The Small Faces played their final concert in 1968 before Steve Marriott left to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton.

The style, cool, political incorrectness, darkness, prescence, attitude, humour and sound of The Stranglers in their original incarnation define the albeit fleeting power and passion of the punk era for me alongside The Skids, the various components of Ulster's shellshock rock and the music of The Ramones from Beat on the Brat right through to Joey Ramone's solo Maria Bartiromo which was released shortly before his death in 2001.

Following Cornwell's departure The Stranglers produced six more albums with two different vocalists - and with a seventh Giants to follow shortly. Cornwell is also due to presently release his sixth post-Stranglers solo album Totem and Taboo and his first novel Windows on the World. My knowledge of the respective later outputs are limited despite seeing both parties live in concert in London but listening recently to the pounding Spectres of Love from the 2006 Suite XVI album by The Stranglers - and also Hugh Cornwell's wonderful The Story of Harry Power from his solo Beyond Elysian Fields - suggests at least some significant contributions of worth.

The first three albums by The Stranglers were released in 1977 and 1978 - Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes and Black and White. I remember a clip of celebrity chef Keith Floyd (who used the later Waltz in Black as the theme tune to his cookery programmes) walking along the beach at Deauville in Normandy for an episode of his Floyd On France series and interrupting an accordion-driven Gallic dirge in the background with a comedy vinyl scratch to replace it with Hanging Around - this track name checking the infamous Coleherne gay pub near Brompton Cemetery which is now dearly departed itself.

I also recall a BBC play - which may or may not have been part of the Play For Today series - using the No More Heroes title track to a clip of some teenage tearaways zooming down the road on their Raleigh Chopper bikes. But it is perhaps the Black and White album in its entirety that holds its own with the best of the Sex Pistols or The Clash by way of the sheer quality of tracks such as Nice n' Sleazy, Sweden, Toiler on the Sea, Curfew and Do You Wanna. To my knowledge this is the only album to ever enter the Top Five album charts in the United Kingdom with the word "hymen" in the lyrics just as Rattus Norvegicus smuggled "clitoris" into the same upper reaches of commercial success on the track Peaches.

Aside from The Stranglers' debut album and Black and White, it is fourth album The Raven in 1979 that would appear to be most highly regarded to this day by the existing fan base and the musically informed alike. This album - as available in an exciting limited edition 3-D cover at the time and which I remember buying in Manchester - provided the group with the commercial crossover success of Duchess and expanded the lyrical content of their songs to take on board the Iranian revolution and the controversial Governor of Queensland Joh Bjelke- Petersen alongside the mundanities of brothels, suicide, Los Angeles, genetics, aliens, heroin and the Vikings.

A recent and very entertaining Kinks biography by Nick Hasted looked at some of the lunatic career dynamics of that group in the Sixties and Seventies. The Stranglers in turn would replicate the same bizarre pathways in 1981 by way of the decision to follow up the success of The Raven with the utterly uncommercial The Gospel According To The Men In Black album . Any listening of the single Just Like Nothing On Earth will instantly confirm the rank strangeness afoot. The same year, and with Golden Brown becoming their most successful release of all, the group decided on the ponderous six minutes and eleven seconds title track of the album La Folie (sung in French) as a subsequent single release as opposed to the sublime yet punchy Tramp. Golden Brown was a number 2 hit - La Folie made it to number 47.

A move to the Epic label from United Artists heralded a distinctly mellower sound for The Stranglers in the mid-to-late Eighties as arguably captured to just as good (if not better) effect in my opinion, on Skin Deep, Ice Queen and Laughing from 1984's Aural Sculpture as compared to the previous year's more widely recalled Feline with its its beautiful trio of singles in European Female, Midnight Summer Dream and Paradise.

The last two albums by the original line-up of The Stranglers brought further hits in Always The Sun and the 96 Tears cover though are not regarded that positively in hindsight despite the wonderful Latin execution of the lengthy Too Precious on Dreamtime and another lost hit single opportunity with Man of the Earth from 10 - the band having broke up before its scheduled release.

If one considers other non-album singles of the quality of Five Minutes, Bear Cage, Walk On By and particularly Strange Little Girl alongside magnificent b-sides such as Here and There, Cruel Garden, Vietnamerica and especially the filthy and degenerate Old Codger with Soho jazz legend George Melly this surely underscores the worth of reinvestigating this massively talented, utterly unique and criminally underrated great British band.

...when all is said and all is over
when all is just a memory
our ships will stay for just a moment
leaving false gods and hypocrisy.

The Big Match

2012-01-21T15:58:00.055Z

My interest in football, and particularly the constitution of the modern game, ended a long long time ago with the exception of Matthew Le Tissier's career at Southampton and the World Cup tournament itself. It probably was shortly after the 1986 Mexico finals and the Bradford and Heysel disasters I would imagine.

In many respects of course the radical changes affecting the culture of football and its grounding in the British working class - as exemplified by the BBC's The Football Men documentaries on Jock Stein, Matt Busby and Bill Shankly - prefigured and predated other historic sea changes to come as regards our national economic base and social dislocation.

That said my ongoing interest in the game of the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties is undimmed. The literature available on the subject is often of an extraordinarily high quality with some excellent reads in the past year including Duncan Hamilton's As Long As You Don't Kiss Me biography of Brian Clough, Rob Bachi's The Unforgiven: The Story of Don Revie's Leeds United, Rob Steen's The Mavericks (looking at the respective careers of Tony Currie, Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson, Frank Worthington, Stan Bowles and Charlie George), Paul McGuigan and Paolo Hewitt's The Best Player You Never Saw - The Robin Friday Story , Gordon Burn's comparison of the careers of Duncan Edwards and George Best and Flower of Scotland: A Scottish Football Odyssey by Archie MacPherson.

All reflective of times long gone and never to return as the pictures of Crystal Palace manager Malcolm Allison with Seventies British sex legend Fiona Richmond topless in a communal bath would clearly suggest.

When visiting Derry for the first time last year I saw the Brandywell stadium near the Bogside from the walls of the old city. Derry City football club were founded in 1928 and won the Irish League title in 1964-65. Because of the scale of civil disorder in the city the club was forced to play home fixtures from 1971 thirty miles away in Coleraine. The Irish League insisted on the continuance of this arrangement, despite recommendations from the security forces otherwise, and Derry City left the Northern Ireland football league in October 1972. They now play in the Irish Republic's League of Ireland.

The mighty Belfast Celtic, the major team from Catholic West Belfast and formed in 1891, had left the Irish League in 1949 after a crowd assault on Protestant player Jimmy Jones during a derby match against Linfield on Boxing Day 1949 at Windsor Park. Belfast Celtic had won 14 Irish League championships and today a shopping centre stands on the site of Celtic Park. My late grandfather was a Linfield fan and often talked about the talents of Derry City and Belfast Celtic - the dissolution of the latter being widely regarded as a chronic loss for the game of football on the island of Ireland.

I remember many nights at Windsor Park myself during the extraordinary run of success the Northern Ireland international side had during the Eighties. A striking memory of that period for no doubt many fans was the fantastic Tottenham Hotspur and Blackburn Rovers winger Noel Brotherston and his balding pate. Brotherston played in the match against Israel which secured Northern Ireland's place in the 1982 World Cup Finals and earlier scored the winning goal against Wales in 1980 to take the British Home International Championship to Belfast for the first time.

The 1980-81 home internationals remained unfinished because of trouble in Northern Ireland relating to the Maze hunger strikes. England and Wales refused to travel to Belfast and thus the championship was declared void. Northern Ireland won the final tournament in 1983-84 and therefore remain the British champions - Noel Brotherston from Dundonald on the outskirts of Belfast tragically died of a heart attack at the age of only 38 in 1995.

The greatest memory of those glory nights at Windsor was without doubt the 1-0 victory over West Germany in November 1982 during the European Championship qualifiers - that 1984 tournament standing between Northern Ireland's appearances at the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain and 1986 in Mexico. Ian Stewart of Queens Park Rangers scored the only goal that cold rainswept night while Manchester United's Norman Whiteside hit the winner at the return match in Hamburg one year later - two of the most extraordinary results in British international football history.

My two main recollections of the victory in Belfast were the crowd reaction to the goal which no doubt was heard on Pluto that evening and the chants directed against the opposition goalkeeper throughout - "Schumacher - Schumacher - You're a wanker - You're a wanker!!" In the final table Northern Ireland failed to reach the finals on goal difference to West Germany.

George Best had played his last international match at Windsor Park on 12th October 1977 in a 1-0 defeat by Holland. One of the public tributes made after his death by one fan recalls international matches at Windsor in the Sixties where he watched "the old men in the flat caps and grey coats" watching genuine moments of pure fleeting magic in their unrelentingly tough and hard lives in industrial northern Britain.

Although there was serious talk of Billy Bingham recalling Best to the squad for the 1982 World Cup finals it may well be fortuitous that that did not come to pass and we are left instead with the extraordinary historical counterfactuals of a Northern Ireland team reaching the 1966 and 1970 finals in England and Mexico with Best at his peak.

The road to the 1966 finals came to grief off the back of a draw with Albania in November 1965 where the considerate hosts put on a trip to a mental home to relax the visitors prior to the game in Tirana. Best missed the match against the USSR in Russia in late 1969 which ended Northern Ireland's campaign for the 1970 finals - their first stage opponents there would have been Mexico, Belgium and El Salvador and in another world George Best could have played against the host country in the opening match of one of the greatest football tournaments in history.

It is colour footage from the earlier 10th September 1969 match at Windsor Park against the USSR - one month after the outbreak of serious civil disorder in Belfast and Derry and with a tense and strained atmosphere inside the ground - which is often shown to this day in slow motion to maximise the rare genius of Best. As an exceptional obituary by Sean O'Hagan noted: "Football as poetry. And pop. And a kind of perfection, fleeting and breathtaking. Football, George Best style."

Youtube also has footage available of the May 1971 Home International tie where, alongside the famous goalmouth incident with Gordon Banks, Best openly teases Arsenal defender Peter Storey to take the ball off him to the delighted roars of thousands of home fans.

There is a lovely story in a Danny Blanchflower autobiography of the first Northern Ireland World Cup campaign in Sweden in 1958. The squad were based in Tysoland near Halmstad for their training and a 13-year old local boy Bengt Jonasson became the team's unofficial mascot and traveled on the team bus to matches, interpreted and attended civic receptions with the squad.

When Northern Ireland left the competition after defeat by France during the quarter-finals Jonasson attended the farewell dinner where he linked hands with Blanchflower and his hero Harry Gregg to sing Auld Lyne Syne. As he was so physically upset when the team left Stockholm to return home the players, officials and reporters paid for him to visit Belfast where he saw his adopted team - so often referred to as "Ireland" in those days even in the chanting of supporters in vintage footage - play England at Windsor Park.

Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg who came from Coleraine was regarded as "the hero of Munich" by rescuing team mates - including Bobby Charlton - from the wreckage of the burning plane in February 1958. There is a very famous story about a young George Best shooting the ball through Gregg's legs several times in an early training session to the elder's considerable chagrin.

A lifetime later and after Best's death he talked movingly of a conversation where he had asked Best why he had never let the world know the real person behind the often vilified public persona and became visibly emotional when recalling the reply "It's too late H - it's too late". Harry Gregg and Billy Bingham would both act as pallbearers at Best's Stormont funeral in 2005 alongside Northern Ireland World Cup legends Peter McParland and Gerry Armstrong and Seventies icons Dennis Law and Derek Dougan.

The stories of the wit and wisdom of Tottenham Hotspur captain Danny Blanchflower from Bloomfield in East Belfast are of course legion. My favorite however will always remain the story of his time on American television in the mid-Sixties following his retirement when he was employed as an expert analyst for matches in the attempt to set up a professional soccer league there.

Blanchflower was articulate as ever but typically forthright about the appalling quality of play. TV executives did not appreciate such candor and he was told to "be more positive" by the studio boss after describing some play as "terrible". On the predictable next error Danny Blanchflower commented "And that was positively awful!" His contract was cancelled forthwith.

These were the people's heroes and those were the days.

The Towers

2012-01-19T18:08:00.010Z

The most fundamental cornerstone of Ulster Protestant identity as relating to a sense of "nationhood" remains the Battle of the Somme and the events of 1st July 1916 north and south of the River Ancre which left 5,500 Ulster soldiers dead, wounded or missing.

The scale of military achievement and sacrifice that day of the 36th Ulster Division - as forged from Carson's original Ulster Volunteer Force and battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles and Royal Irish Fusiliers - was encapsulated in the words of Captain Wilfred Spender: "I am not an Ulsterman but yesterday, the 1st July, as I followed their amazing attack, I felt that I would rather be an Ulsterman than anything else in the world."

The Ulster Division completed their basic training in the north of Ireland at Clandeboye near Belfast, Ballykinlar on the County Down coast and at Finner in County Donegal.

The Ulster Tower stands today as a memorial to the fallen of the Division - the only Allied soldiers on the Thiepval sector on the first day of battle to capture the first line of German defences and with some even reaching the second. Built in 1921, and opened by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson who was later assassinated by the IRA in the Knightsbridge area of central London, it is a copy of Helen's Tower on the Clandeboye estate itself. This in turn had been constructed in 1861 by Lord Dufferin in honour of his mother and would have been a familiar last sight of Ireland for many of the soldiers leaving Belfast Lough and their homeland forever.

Several poems had been written about the tower in County Down by literary luminaries of the time such as Tennyson and Kipling. The words of the former are now inscribed inside the memorial in Belgium with "Ulster" replacing the reference to the original's inspiration.

Helen's Tower, here I stand,
Dominant over sea and land.
Son’s love built me, and I hold
Mother’s love in letter’d gold.

The Ulster Tower memorial includes a plaque commemorating the nine Victoria Cross holders of the 36th Ulster Division during the Great War and also an obelisk in honour of members of the Orange Order who fell. The latter memorial, dedicated in September 1993, includes the insignia of the Order on it and the word 'Boyne' at the base. Between is an inscription commemorating those of "the Orange Institution worldwide" who fought and who "finally passed out of the sight of man".

Near Ypres in Flanders stands another memorial in the form of a traditional Irish round tower and in honour of all the Irish fallen of the Great War of both religions. It stands close to the site of the June 1917 Messines Ridge battle where the men of the Ulster Division and those of the 16th Irish Regiment fought together.

The tower in the Island of Ireland Peace Park houses bronze cubicles containing record books listing the known dead and the unique design allows the sun to light the interior only on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The inscription on the peace pledge plaque in the park's centre circle notes:

As Protestants and Catholics, we apologise for the terrible deeds we have done to each other and ask forgiveness. From this sacred shrine of remembrance, where soldiers of all nationalities, creeds and political allegiances were united in death, we appeal to all people in Ireland to help build a peaceful and tolerant society. Let us remember the solidarity and trust that developed between Protestant and Catholic soldiers when they served together in these trenches.

The park also incorporates three pillars classifying the killed, wounded and missing of the three voluntary Irish Divisions - the 36th Ulster (32,186), the 10th Irish (9,363) and the 16th Irish (28,398) - and an upright tablet listing the counties of Ireland with the names flowing together to suggest the unity of death. Nine stone tablets include prose, poems and letters from Irish servicemen.

I was thinking a lot about the two Irish towers earlier this week having just watched Christian Carion's Joyeux Noel - the 2005 movie based on the Christmas 1914 truce on the Western Front between British, French and German infantry. In this instance the British soldiers portrayed are from a Scottish regiment. Scotland's extraordinary contribution to Britain's military heritage having been mentioned to a large degree during recent media commentary on a future referendum for Scottish independence and indeed as analysed in Gregory Burke's National Theatre of Scotland play Black Watch which returned to London and the Barbican Theatre last year.

The slaughter at the Somme and Passchendaele - and the preceding Christmas truces of 1914 and 1915 - are long embedded as the defining mental images of the Great War in our national psyche. The equivalent with regard to the Second World War is of course the iconic photograph of St Paul's Cathedral on the north bank of the River Thames on 29th December 1941 - the night of the Second Great Fire of London.

On this evening - London's 114th night of the Blitz - bombs would drop from 1815 GMT until the all-clear just after midnight on the very same streets that had burnt in 1666. One fireman recalled "By the time we finished tackling the fires on the roof of the Stock Exchange, the sky, which was ebony black when we first got up there, was now changing to a yellowy orange colour. It looked like there was an enormous circle of fire, including St Paul's churchyard." The cathedral however survived because of the bravery of the emergency services and since an incendiary device lodged on the roof - and which had commenced setting the lead of the dome on fire - dislodged and fell to the floor of the Stone Gallery where is was extinguished. 12 firemen and 162 civilians died that December night.

Last Sunday afternoon while walking over Parliament Hill in North London - which, alongside Primrose Hill near Regents Park, provides the most spectacular vantage point for viewing the grand sweep of what was once the world's greatest city - I became aware for the first time of the unprecedented defacement and disfiguration of the vista by way of Renzo Piano's 72-storey "Shard" skyscraper.

Completely overshadowing the view of the cathedral from northern vantage points to a literally criminal degree, the scale of the building is redolent of something from the Dubai or Shanghai skylines. In fact it is so out of keeping with its historic surrounds it verges without exaggeration on the Ministry of Information building as portrayed in the 1954 adaptation of 1984 with Peter Cushing or even Sauron's main fortress in Morder in The Lord of the Rings.

"The Shard" - soon to be the tallest habitable structure west of the Urals - successfully received planning permission from the London Borough of Southwark in 2002 and was then the subject of a subsequent public enquiry into its suitability. Full permission was granted in 2003 with John Prescott, then the minister in charge of planning, declaring that he was "satisfied that the proposed tower is of the highest architectural quality". Then London Mayor Ken Livingstone approved of its construction while current incumbent Boris Johnson acclaimed it as a “clear and inspiring example of confidence in the capital’s economy”.

One media commentator has noted how the metallic finish on the building has significantly interfered with Freeview television reception to the immediate north east as it sits full square between the Crystal Palace and Croydon transmission masts and the part of the capital that includes the Olympic Village. Many locals in the area are therefore having to subscribe financially to cable connections without due compensation. There have also been question marks raised about a potential "glare" factor on sunny days in light of its visibility from so many parts of central and inner London.

The historical importance of St Pauls as the great survivor of our defining battle for national survival obviously counting for little by way of more restaurants and hotels and flats that no middle-income person can ever afford again or office space for industries that the vast majority of people do not work in or choose not to work in.

Most importantly, the skyscraper surely represents the defining moment when modern London formally takes upon itself the status of the fifth nation of the United Kingdom - disconnected entirely from all others in so many cultural respects and those forging way beyond mere demographics.

"The Pinnacle” in Bishopsgate which shall follow - next to St Ethelburga’s church which was severely damaged by an IRA bomb in 1993 and close to the beautiful Leadenhall Market - shall be the second tallest inhabitable building west of the Urals.

In another world of long ago - the world of our then enemies - Richard Schirrman was in a German regiment holding a position in the mountains of the Vosges and wrote an account of military fraternisation in December 1915. This would be the last year of the Great War when such events occurred:

When the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of the Vosges behind the lines ..... something fantastically unmilitary occurred. German and French troops spontaneously made peace and ceased hostilities; they visited each other through disused trench tunnels, and exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes for Westphalian black bread, biscuits and ham.

Though military discipline was subsequently restored Schirrman would never forget the incident and reflected upon the hope that "thoughtful young people of all countries could be provided with suitable meeting places where they could get to know each other." He went on to found the German Youth Hostel Association in 1919 - the first of its kind in the world.

Five years after the end of the Great War Werner Heubeck was born in Nuremburg. During the thirties he was a member of the Hitler Youth and during the war served in the Hermann Goering division of the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. He moved to Northern Ireland in the year of my birth to manage the Ulster Transport Authority buses and is remembered to this day for personally boarding them during the worst years of the Troubles to singlehandedly remove bombs planted by the IRA. Despite the huge targeting of buses during the civil disorders Heubeck's leadership and belief in keeping services running to schedule represented another fundamental toehold on normality for a country at war - 800 of the 1,300 fleet being destroyed.

Today we truly live in brand new times with brand new priorities - never has so much been lost forever for the sake of so few.

Come On Baby Do The Juke Box Jive

2012-01-17T09:54:00.014Z

Paul Mason's recent Why It's All Kicking Off Everywhere analyses how the new global revolutions have been fundamentally dynamised by the influence of social media tools and the internet. Mark Steyn's earlier After America - which cheerily dissected the imminent and irreversible end of Western Christian Civilisation - also included a brief insight into a future of "humanity turned inward" where blackberry-originated tweeting and Facebook updating was thus "pioneering a form of immortality that extends the moment forever."

Youtube alone is solely responsible for one of the most intrigueing social phenomena of our time as affecting huge swathes of the middle-aged population. This being the ability to experience gut-wrenching and dewy-eyed nostalgia over a golden past for a glorious 365 days of the year now as opposed to just the late afternoon of Christmas Eve or when you turn your Christmas lights off the following evening.

So while cracking open that second bottle of red wine - and what with Monday being the new Friday during the winter months - one can transpose and tranquilise oneself alike on a light flight one never thought possible only a few years previously.

Richard O'Sullivan leaving behind the 6 Myddleton Terrace flat in Earl's Court and the two hottest girls in Seventies London) for the life of a highwayman in Dick Turpin, the strange ending of the ITV children's classic Brendon Chase with three teenagers huddled together like H-Block protestors in the Eighties, those extraordinarily emotive theme tunes from Robinson Crusoe to Mister Rossi and the sheer otherness of Catweazle, Lizzy Dripping or even Wurzel Gummidge.

One may ponder in turn as to how groups like Vinegar Joe, Horslips or Be Bop Deluxe never achieved the commercial acclaim they deserved. Or indeed in turn why utterly commercial fodder from The Rubettes to Chicory Tip to The Congregation still sound so utterly wonderful - The Rubette's Juke Box Jive being the great lost song I wish The Ramones had covered.

There is all the sheer craziness of Frank Carson's frigging lunatic Ip Dip Chibberdy Dip single, the rock n roll jiving in leather to the magnificent Remember This down at The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club or Northern Ireland showband Clubsound's Belfast Belfast classic which would give half the government opposition frontbench a stroke if they heard it today.

That warm glow of familiarity for better days when things were not quite so tough - or just the vain hope of one day hearing the theme tune to Hope and Keen's Crazy Bus again - only qualified of course by the the rank evil of the IRA bursting French chanteur Claude Francois' eardrums during a 1975 bombing of the Hilton Hotel in London or the bitter knowledge that Vesta Chicken Curry or Beef Rissotto probably were as shit back then as they would taste today.

Penny Dreadfuls

2012-01-14T00:25:00.028Z

I recently viewed some extremely funny stand-up footage of the English comic Stewart Lee including his acerbic character analysis of the Top Gear presenters - as to who was the most despicable - and his feelings on the questionable attraction of the Harry Potter books to an adult readership.

I mentioned a similar quibble in an earlier post and indeed it does seem incredulous sometimes - though perhaps fundamentally logical considering the blanket use of Second World War settings in Sixties and Seventies British comics such as Victor, Hotspur or the ubiquitous Commando magazines - that so many middle-aged males of today were getting stuck into Sven Hassel paperbacks with such gusto at a relatively early stage of their teenage years. We may have lagged behind later generations in terms of being immersed in the dark reaches of sex and drug experimentation but at least we were sharing our father's reading tastes of death and glory as opposed to the twee adventures of a myopic pubescent wizard and his wanker public school mates. This no doubt another pointer to now long-departed masculine foundations of working class life in a then industrial Britain.

Sven Hassel's war experiences across Europe in a Wehrmacht penal regiment were subsequently questioned by Danish writer Erik Haaest who claimed that Hassel was actually a member of the Danish auxilary police in situ during the occupation and took his story ideas from returning Waffen SS volunteers who had served on the Eastern Front. Imagine overhearing those kind of conversations down at the local pub? The books are still published to this day though in hindsight it is probably only the first two - Legion of the Damned and Wheels of Terror - that seemed grounded in some form of terrible authenticity.

It has been interesting to note too this week - and in particular with the cinema release of Steven Spielberg's War Horse - that my favorite comic character from times gone by is revered to this day as one of the greatest of all British strips and with many volumes reproduced in book format. Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun's Charley's War - which ran in Battle magazine between 1979 and 1985 - followed the Great War experiences of Charley Bourne on the Western Front and in Russia.

Going back to the earlier Seventies in turn another character I loved was Adam Eterno - who appeared in Thunder, Lion and Valiant magazines. In this story an alchemist's apprentice quaffs the Elixer of Life in a London cellar in 1580 and is cursed by his furious master with literal everlasting existence as opposed to just a lifetime's worth of youthful good looks. Eterno is thus doomed to travel through time seeking out death by a golden weapon to break the spell and bring release from this mortal coil.

Eventually he decides to give up and become a time-travelling do-gooder though god alone knows what he would make of his hometown today. Then again with lust for gold, monumental income discrepancies, alcohol dependency, physical squalor and hatred of outsiders in the loop he probably would feel right at home.

The Eternal Now And Otherwise

2012-01-04T22:06:00.013Z

Many works of the Belfast artist John Luke (1906-1975) such as The Old Callan Bridge and The Lock At Edenderry are said to capture "the eternal now". According to Rory Fitzpatrick's God's Frontiersmen which accompanied the Channel Four series of the same name "it is always Sunday in Luke's work, families walking their dogs through the green, drumlin country in the warm afternoon, or evening after work as a father comes home to a white Ulster farmhouse set in formal idyllic landscape."

Similar themes regarding the timelessness of the Ulster countryside were captured in both the 1972 BBC Northern Ireland documentary Loughsiders - with the poet Seamus Heaney exploring the County Fermanagh waterways and visiting the Janus figure on Boa Island as "the first god of the first people" - and of course several Van Morrison songs such as And It Stoned Me, On Hyndford Street and in particular Country Fair from the 1974 Veedon Fleece album.

During the Christmas break I was reading some moving recollections of old Belfast on the main internet forum from various expats around the world and what they missed from a long lost time and place:

I miss the smell of freshly baked bread when I walk past the sites of the old Kennedy's and Hughes' bakeries. I miss the days when neighbours could leave their front doors open without the fear of being robbed. I miss the sound of the horn at Mackies that you could set your clocks or watches by. I miss the old Smithfield and Variety markets that could have a child's senses buzzing. I miss the lovely inexpensive fresh fish sold from handcarts. But most of all I miss members of my family and my friends who have passed on who walked the streets of Belfast with me...

In the 60s when we were kids we used to go into town on a Friday night and stare endlessly into S S Moores sport shop window in Arthur street, dreaming of one day being able to afford a new football strip. Walking around town on a Friday night there was always the sound of music coming from the `Boom Boom Rooms` or some other dance venue. We would then go round to the Queens bridge and watch the cross channel steamers sailing from Belfast. The Glasgow boat left at 8-30pm, the Liverpool boat at 9-30pm and the Heysham boat at 9-40pm, then it was time to go home. On a Saturday morning it was the Stadium picture house for the kids morning matinee and then in the afternoon it was a dander down the Shankill to Smithfield market. Smithfield was fascinating for a young lad as it contained almost everything you could ever dream of. Unfortunately Smithfield has gone and so have the boats, but I guess nothings for ever. If only one could turn the clock back and relive those days...

I miss the old department stores with the grand stair cases and lots of nooks and crannys for different departments. I miss watching the birds gathering on the electric wires in the winter in donegal place when you were waiting for the bus. I miss the old double deckers with the big silver knobs on the end of the seats. I miss the brilliant santa experience in robbs going on a trip on santas sleigh before you ever saw him, it actually felt like you were moving. I miss the old buildings that are daily disappearing. I miss knowing who your next door neighbor is, the milkman coming and waking you up in the morning, the bread van coming round the streets. I miss so much sometimes it feels like it never really existed...

The last sentiment is something so many British people can relate to in light of the uncharted waters we now find ourselves in as a society - the shock of the new encompassing unparalleled financial stagnation, demographic shifts of historic scale and consequence, rampant criminality, insidious manipulation of the mass media, the obliteration of our job market by industrial internship abuse and a tide of cultural marxism which has reached the point where literally unbroadcastable "millie"-style Northern Irish female voices can be heard on our national state radio.

In respect of our beleaguered capital I also took some time over Christmas to look at the magnificent portraits in Philip Davies' Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870-1945 volume. In such a brief period of time has the magnetism and glory of London entirely dissipated to leave a metropolis where one is fundamentally disassociated from its historic reach, national character or even a genuine capital city experience itself.

The provisional quotation from Virgil to be used at the Ground Zero memorial in New York City is No day shall erase you from the memory of time. That accepted, the British cities and the very streets we loved now seem to be fading into shadows of memory within a span of mere months as opposed to years or decades.

Happy Xmas Belfast

2011-12-20T11:12:00.030Z

I remember flying into Belfast's George Best Airport two Christmas Eves ago on a particularly bright yet frosty morning. The plane made a turn around about Scrabo Tower at the top of Strangford Lough - the tower itself a memorial erected in 1857 to Charles Stewart the Third Marquess of Londonderry who was one of Wellington's generals during the Battle of Waterloo and uniquely well respected by his tenants for his attempts to alleviate suffering during the potato famine.

The view southwards across the water to the Mourne Mountains - and on clearer days from the tower itself even to the Isle of Man and the Scottish coast - was literally breathtakingly beautiful.

It was completely understandable why C S Lewis was inspired by the physical splendour of County Down when constructing the dreamlands of his Narnia novels or indeed why former Southern Irish President, Taoiseach and earlier South Down MP Eamonn De Valera stated that County Down was every Irishman's second favourite county after that of his birth.

Newtownards lies at the top of the lough and is where the main Northern Ireland commercial radio station Downtown Radio transmits from. Apart from the doom-laden three-note musical sting which preceded the terrible news bulletins of the Troubles period, there are two other innocuous things always remind me of the station that I listened in to during the Eighties.

The night time slots were often filled by Jackie Flavelle who had played bass guitar with the Chris Barber Jazz Band in the late Sixties and other artists such as Rod Stewart and Dr John. Flavelle Unravels regularly had a game where listeners could phone in and try to not respond in the positive or negative for 40 seconds or so to Jackie's questions and then they could win a pen or pencil or something really cool. The DJ would patiently explain the complex rules to the listener and then the game would commence with what seemed like 95% of all listeners saying Yes or No within seconds. It doesn’t sound like much in hindsight but it was constantly entertaining at the time – in some way it was a cross between the dumbest thing you have heard in your life and a Zen riddle.

I also remember around December – and alongside other standards such as Jona Lewie’s Stop the Cavalry, Beau Jangle's The Moon Shines Tonight On Charlie Chaplin or Paul McCartney's nightmarish Wonderful Christmastime– that they used to play local band Cruella De Ville’s I’ll Do The Talking quite a lot. It wasn’t about Christmas per se but really fitted the mood of this particularly haunted time of the year perfectly somehow and certainly deserved a much wider hearing.

When I was back in Northern Ireland at this time I also walked up to and over the Cave Hill in North Belfast on Boxing Day. The mountain was a major inspiration behind the writing of Swift's Gullivers Travels.

On the summit of Cave Hill the United Irishman leader Wolfe Tone met compatriots Henry Joy McCracken, Thomas Russell, Samuel Neilsen, Thomas Russell and others in 1795 at an Iron Age settlement called McArts Fort. Here they would pledge allegiance to an Ireland free of English rule and one which would unite the Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in harmony. The subsequent uprisings in the non-Plantation Ulster counties of Antrim and Down and at Wexford in the South in 1798 - alongside the failure of the French fleet to arrive in support - leading to a diametrically opposite form of union within a handful of years.

From the same geographical spot one can see the Antrim Road waterworks which the Luftwaffe mistook for the Harland and Wolff shipyards during the 1941 Blitz - leading to extraordinary levels of civilian death and destruction in residential North and West Belfast including the homes of both my grandparents in the Woodvale and Oldpark districts.

Close by in 1973 in turn was the site of an horrendous double murder of a Catholic politician and a Protestant female companion by loyalist paramilitaries in revenge for the republican murder of a mentally handicapped Protestant youth. It literally shocked all of Northern Irish society to the core at the time.

Yet from the same vantage point I could see the very estate and even street I grew up in during the Seventies - my Tomahawk bike, Mario Lanza's Christmas Hymns and Carols, my Scream Inn and Haunted House board games, the Christmas Radio Times, Subbuteo's Targetman , The Broons and Oor Wullie annuals and those five Mettoy "Wembley Soccer Stars" figurines of George Best, Charlie George, Bobby Moore, Francis Lee and Martin Chivers. Billy Bremner never got around to joining the squad.

In the far distance from the Cave Hill was the outline of the dark Mournes where - when growing up as a teenager in the Protestant community - I felt my country ended by default due to the interplay of political violence upon the self-contained cultural dynamics of partition. I sincerely wish it had been otherwise with regard to all the people of Ireland and how we could have and should have related to each other.

During the Nineties when living in London I recall an ITN news broadcast prior to the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires where reporter Tom Bradby was walking across either Murlough Bay or Tyrella Beach towards Newcastle and the Mournes in the evening and elaborating upon historic developments that suggested the conflict was essentially about to come to closure within days and hours - "It's over".

Around the same period I remember very moving footage on a current affairs programme of two Christian groups from the Protestant and Catholic communities meeting and embracing in a candlelit gathering in the middle of Lanark Way between the Shankill Road and the Springfield Road - an urban thoroughfare often used as a shortcut for sectarian killers during the latter period of the Troubles.

South of Larnark Way in turn I recollect to this day how, during my final years living in Northern Ireland in the early Eighties, a gable wall at the junction of the Shankill Road and Northumberland Street would invert the usual trend for threatening political rhetoric or jet black sectarian ribaldry by bearing the unusually upbeat encouragement Happy Xmas Belfast for a year or two.

The Ulster Troubles were certainly a period of unequivocal criminal waste, destruction and human degradation. Only this week came news that North Belfast residents are to be consulted on longer access hours through a peace wall in Alexandra Park - this was erected in 1994 to stop sectarian fighting in the area and remains the only park of its kind in Europe with a barrier in the middle. 49 other peace walls remain in Greater Belfast.

However at the same time to have been fated to grow up in the Sixties and Seventies in such a physically beautiful country and to share your youth with all the great people of Belfast and Northern Ireland of those days was nonetheless a rare blessing.

As always this Christmas I will recall those vanished communities, places and times with enormous fondness and respect.

Louis MacNeice - Born In Belfast Between The Mountains And The Gantries

2011-12-14T21:19:00.024Z

Within only a few miles distance of each other in County Down in Northern Ireland lie the last resting places of an extraordinary European warrior and an acclaimed national poet - both of whom died prematurely in the middle part of the last century.

In the graveyard of Movilla Abbey in Newtownards is the family tomb of Special Air Services founder, rugby international and proto-type hellraiser Blair Mayne who died in a drink-related car crash in December 1955 at the age of only 41 and whose failure to be awarded a Victoria Cross is a matter of considerable military controversy to this day. The biography of Mayne by Martin Dillon and the late Ulster Unionist politician Roy Bradford concludes:

He sleeps within the ruined walls of a thirteenth-century abbey in County Down, but the high company of heroes will forever be his Valhalla.

Several miles away at Carrowdore Churchyard - also in close proximity to Strangford Lough on the Ards Peninsula - is where the poet Louis MacNeice is buried with his mother. MacNeice died in December 1963 at the age of 55 having contracted viral pneumonia from working in inclement weather during the making of his final radio play.

MacNeice was born in Brookhill Avenue in North Belfast right beside my former school. This is situated among the Cliftonville, Oldpark and Antrim Road districts mentioned in my earlier post about the Jewish community there and indeed close to the former homes of Israeli President Chaim Herzog and actor Harry Towb - all extremely troubled and dangerous areas during the civil unrest of the Seventies.

A contemporary and friend of W H Auden and Stephen Spender, MacNeice's poetry was critical of bourgeois society and modern life in general. Subject matter would range from love to the approach of war and from place and travel to childhood - the latter including one particularly haunting tableau of Christmas past:

and as if through coloured glasses
we remember our childhood's thrill
waking in the morning to the rustling of paper
the eiderdown heaped in a hill
of logs and dogs and bears and bricks and apples
and the feeling that Christmas Day was a coral island in time
where we land and eat our lotus but we can never stay

Although resident for most of his life in England as an academic and writer it is MacNeice's poetry about his homeland that I find particularly striking in its analytical regard - be that with reference to his Planter heritage in Ulster as discussed in Carrickfergus or his excoriation of the non-belligerence of Eire during the Second World War in Neutrality wherein he berates "the neutral island in the heart of man".

However it is the sixteenth canto of Autumn Journal in which MacNeice's vitriol against the vagaries of Irish history and culture ranges in truly kaleidoscopic fashion - the power and passion made even more extraordinary by the time of its publication in 1939 when the partition of Ireland had politically and socially solidified to granite permanence - and would become moreso with Northern Ireland involvement in the subsequent global conflict.

The canto incorporates references to IRA assassins, Roger Casement and Maud Gonne alongside the voodoo of the Orange bands in Belfast's York Street, Kathleen ni Houlihan and King Billy.

To the nationalists of a free Ireland:

Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us?
Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof
in a world of bursting mortar!
Let the school children fumble their sums
in a half-dead language;
Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums;
Let the games be played in Gaelic

As for the Northern Ireland Unionists in Belfast:

A city built upon mud;
Free speech nipped in the bud,
The minority always guilty;
Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

This section of Autumn Journal - mostly remembered for the phrase "Put up what flag you like, it is too late to save your soul with bunting" - ends with the labelling of Mother Ireland as a bore and a bitch and the admonition:

She gives her children neither sense nor money
who slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogue
and a faggot of useless memories

In a period of time where senses of hostility and antipathy between the peoples of Ireland are blending out into history itself as opposed to bleeding into it, the scope and content of this section of Autumn Journal has retained every bit of its invective power over sixty years after its creation.

MacNeice, alike James Joyce, held impassioned feelings about the political, cultural and religious divisions of his homeland. But the affection he held for Ireland was undeniable. His sense of belonging and connectivity to Ireland may have been problematical and complex but his physical presence there today - alike with George Best who was also originally buried beside his mother - speaks volumes in terms of emotional resolve and closure.

The poet's poet whose profound and unique literary talent was forged upon the geographical and cultural streetscapes and landscapes of Belfast, Ulster, Ireland and Britain.

The murderous fractures amongst the people of these islands which commenced so shortly after his death being so utterly heartbreaking in the sheer scale of unadulterated and bewildering pointlessness.

Days In Europa

2011-12-10T21:22:00.022Z

Several posts ago I mentioned the Wild West nature of new media dynamics in light of the gonzo snuff footage of Gadaffi's death as then ejaculated across most national news websites. The extremely sudden apotheosis of the same arriving by way of the racist tram lady sensation here in London wherein not a single brain cell was engaged in terms of of filming an albeit obstreperous individual in the public domain without consent, uploading the same onto youtube with considerable glee and the subsequent avalanche of violent and indeed homicidal invective rained against the lost soul under consideration from a multitude of global twitters.

The legal and practical implications of this incident are no doubt considerable in scope by way of the fact that similar verbal infective can no doubt be heard - and recorded - in any golf club bar across the United Kingdom on any day of any week. Or the fact that everybody's identity can be sourced within milliseconds now within the digital domain - be you effing and blinding on public transport about "the others" or capturing it for posterity on your i-phone.

And hence onto the radical developments afoot in Europe with the British political salvo against the Euro salvation plan.

Forging beyond the expected jingoistic responses in sections of the national press there is of course some natural reticence to blindly support David Cameron's historic veto by way of the concomitant support given to the UK financial sector - something akin to reverence towards the SS for their striking Hugo Boss uniforms and ingenious propaganda and marketing acumen if one can ignore the oul mass murder stuff.

Likewise the fact remains that such an act of national retrograde defence has originated in a deeply fractured United Kingdom that has experienced such monumental demographic and industrial changes since the time of Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech in the Eighties - particularly in Greater London and South East England as regards the former - that it is literally not even the same physical country frameworking both the historical moment and historical risk.

Internal aspects of ongoing national dissolution have of course been evident from the early Seventies as regarding such matters as Scottish North Sea oil, Welsh devolution or the Ulster Vanguard movement. However it would certainly appear that a fateful new chapter may shortly commence in the history of our highly fraught archipelago home with huge repercussions for our political classes. Likewise for our own individual ability to manage or subvert a life stasis as certainly never experienced before in this country in recent times.

George Best And Northern Ireland

2011-11-27T12:37:00.018Z

During the Ulster Troubles, and outside the remit of political actors and those caught up in the violence of the times, only the Northern Ireland comedian James Young would appear to have pro-actively used a significant public profile to plead for reconciliation through the remit of political satire and a folk celebration of working class life.

Conversely, and as discussed in an earlier post, it would mainly be sporting figures from Northern Ireland that appeared capable of winning unqualified allegiance and broad-based support across the sectarian divide. And indeed across the generation gap too if one were to qualify similar claims now associated with the Seventies punk music scene in Belfast and Derry.

Five years on now from the death of George Best and the affection towards his person remains undimmed across Britain alongside the pride he brought to all the Ulster people during days of anarchy, mass murder and bedlam.

Best the working class Protestant born in a city whose Loyalist gable end walls would often be inscribed during the Seventies with the acronym KAI for “Kill All Irish” yet would be mourned from Dublin to Galway and from Donegal to Cork alike.

Between April 1964 and October 1977 George Best would play 37 times for Northern Ireland and score nine goals in a series of matches which would consist of 13 victories, 16 defeats and eight draws. 16 of these appearances would be against British opposition. These 37 matches in turn were made up of 16 Home Internationals, 14 World Cup qualifiers, 5 European Championship qualifiers and two friendlies.

If mid-1966 can widely be accepted as the start of political unrest with three murders carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force then it can be seen that the majority of Best’s international appearances took place during the Troubles themselves. The international football team even had to play home matches on mainland Britain between 1972 and 1974 because of the scale of violence - Best himself played in the 16th February 1972 match against Spain in Hull for this reason.

The background of civil conflict in Northern Ireland that ran in parallel to Best’s domestic and international career injected a significant undertone to much of the public response to his death in the country of his birth. Best’s passing uniting the men and women of Ulster in the realisation that the ghost to be mourned was not only that of an acclaimed individual but of an often maniacal time shared together which had nevertheless uniquely defined them as one people.

For all the naysaying of older generations of Northern Irish people - about a talent cut short and wasted alike a raft of fellow Celts - for the children and teenagers of the Sixties and Seventies he was indeed nothing more than a defining cultural cornerstone of our lives and has left behind a million memories of genius, skill, intelligence and so much laughter and fondness.

Perhaps in other circumstances another Northern Ireland player could have performed such an act of brazen cheek against hapless England goalkeeper Gordon Banks in 1971 by flicking the ball away during a goal kick and heading into the net – but only Georgie Best could have done it in front of a Cinzano advertising hoarding in the world’s then bleakest grief hole. Likewise perhaps no other celebrity in the history of television marketing could have managed to advertise Cookstown family sausages and Fore aftershave while keeping both professional and personal reputation intact.

To no small degree the former Junior Orangeman and Belfast Telegraph delivery boy from the Cregagh estate would indeed be the sole public figure to supersede Irish political rancour in life and death – the commentaries he made himself upon religious division on the island of Ireland having unfailingly reflected genuine sadness and humility.

For when Ulster almost ripped its physical being apart with butchery for three decades perhaps no other individual contributed so much to help rebalance how others saw us in our time of war - showing the world the kind of people we were and, more importantly, were not.

Three Is The Magic Number

2011-11-22T08:56:00.012Z

Despite our country being so strong and resilient enough to have weathered two world wars and a great depression, our national variants of conservatism, socialism and their bastard offspring since the mid-sixties would still have overwhelmed all quarters.

An article by A N Wilson pinpoints our irreversible national decline to lack of social mobility through the negation of educational selection, violent de-industrialisation and self-perpetuating dependency cultures. In turn it has always appeared self-evident that the trio of social factors underpinning the abject misery of modern British life are population movements of most obviously historic proportions, industrial internship abuse which is destroying mid to late-career progression for hundreds of thousands of middle-aged people and the ubiquitous property hyperinflation.

2011 has merely witnessed new hybrid offshoots of all the above with the mid-summer civil insurrections, science fiction rental outgoings discriminating further against the millions already locked out of the property market and the realisation for smug owners of appreciating properties in Southern England that their even smugger children will never earn an income.

Yesterday's announcement of government measures to ease the burden of first time buyers of course never touched upon the lose-lose logistics of hyperinflated property prices for individual buyers and broader British society alike. The steaming and pestilential swamp of the UK housing market merely to be peopled with a few thousand more wide-eyed and shell-shocked lost souls unable to gauge the lack of correlation between fantasy prices and long term income streams, realistic job security frameworks and natural human lifespans.

If this year has seen the final throw of capitalism's dice across the world, then Great Britain will surely be the last casino of the damned.

Jews In Ulster

2011-11-14T13:35:00.050Z

I recently visited the extremely impressive Entertaining The Nation exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town in London. In another interactive section of the collection it was interesting to note how Jewish settlement in Ireland was now barely limited to only three cities - Dublin, Cork and Belfast. There are now no Jewish communities left in Waterford, Limerick or Derry with a functioning synagogue.

The Jewish community in Ireland numbered around 5,500 in the late Forties but today is approximately only 1,900 strong in the Republic of Ireland and 500 or even lower in Northern Ireland.

Despite the sectarian polarisation of the city, the Belfast Jewish community experienced no historical instance of anti-semitism alike that attending the Jews of Limerick at the start of the 20th Century. In Belfast the original community was centred around Carlisle Circus in the north of the city with the second synagogue being located on Annesley Street there.

Famous shipbuilder Gustav Wolff's family converted from Judaism and was thus brought up in the Protestant faith though Hamburg-born Jew Otto Jaffe was Belfast Lord Mayor in 1899. Jaffe launched an appeal during his period of office for the dependents of soldiers fighting in the Boer War. He would nevertheless later be accused of being a German spy during the Great War and left Ulster due to the intensity of national feeling. Jaffe's family linen business was in Bedford Street where James Young's Group Theatre was later situated.

A memorial fountain to Jaffe's father Daniel still stands in the city centre near the Victoria Square shopping complex while another in the City Cemetery on the Falls Road - which has contained a section for Jewish interments since 1874 - has been frequently vandalised.

During the Second World War children from the Kindertransport stayed at the Millisle Refugee Farm on the County Down coast - this remained open until 1948. An urban myth associated with the 1941 Luftwaffe bombing patterns during the Belfast Blitz related to Jewish settlement on the Antrim Road whereas in fact the destruction was essentially based on navigational errors with the Belfast waterworks having been mistaken for the Harland and Wolff shipyards. During the end of the war in turn both SAS leader Blair Mayne from County Down and future Official Unionist Party leader James Molyneaux from County Antrim were amongst the British soldiers who took part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The Jewish community was already in numerical decline by the time of the start of the Ulster Troubles in 1969. In the course of the conflict the antiques dealer Leonard Kaitcher was abducted, held for ransom and murdered by Republican terrorists in 1980. Some years previously leading bookmaker Leonard Steinberg survived a murder attempt, left Northern Ireland and as the owner of Stanley Leisure became a life peer in 2004.

For such a small cultural group however it nevertheless did provide a figure of significant historic note in future Israeli President Chaim Herzog who was born in Clifton Park Avenue in 1918. Alike with the Annesley Street area, this would be a very troubled part of the city during the civil disorder and terrorism of the Seventies.

The actor Harry Towb was born in the Northern Ireland port of Larne but grew up in the Oldpark/Crumlin Road district of North Belfast. A familiar figure in British drama, Towb appeared in movies such as The Blue Max and Above Us The Waves and also television dramas from The Avengers to Stewart Parker's Lost Belongings. Towb, who died in 2009, once recalled his early days in mainland Britain in the Fifties where many English boarding houses displayed the warmest of welcomes to him personally: "No Irish, no Jews, no theatricals".

In the early Nineties Towb starred in the BBC sitcom So You Think You've Got Troubles with Warren Mitchell which parodied the various paradoxes of religious tradition. I also recall his award-winning Cowboys BBC television play in 1981 where an American Jew returns to the visit the city of his birth. "Cowboys" is used in the Northern Irish vernacular for "hoods" in the same way that "Apache" or "Comanche" was used during the Troubles as politically incorrect descriptions for areas prone to violent disorder.

The play ends, if I can remember correctly, with Towb and his wife getting lost at night time in a brutalist council estate while retracing the steps of his youth in what was then the countryside on the outskirts of the city. It ends violently with them encountering two (most probably Loyalist) cowboys asking for a contribution to the cause of political freedom. Cowboys fully captured the sadness and waste underpinning so much social change in Belfast in the Seventies including indeed the very area where Towb himself grew up.

The now demographically minute Jewish community of Belfast - alike the Italians of Little Patrick Street - have made a significantly unique contribution to the rich history of the north of the city as one of the most interesting urban districts in the entire British Isles.

Milford Junction Lost

2011-11-08T13:09:00.016Z

Last year I visited the chapels to both the British Army's Ulster regiments in the Protestant Cathedral in Armagh City and that to the Irish Regiments - many long defunct - at Westminster Cathedral in London. In both instances the knowledge of division, waste and hatred on the island of Ireland sadly frameworking the period of mighty military endeavour memorialised.

As a recent article by Peter Hitchens sadly noted, the broad-based cultural connectivity and social reverence our society once held towards the terrible sacrifices in warfare may well now be gradually dissipating in the same irreversible manner as so many other aspects of life already have in a fractured and directionless Britain.

With bedlam on our national borders and within the financial sector having brought social mobility and national development to standstill on one hand, we also find ourselves lodged within a parallel historical pathway where the Britain of even one month ago now seems like another country. A point solemnly underscored in turn in by Canadian Mark Steyn's recent analysis of the post-Anglophone world After America.

Hence the confluence of compound stress, an overarching life insecurity and the terrible sense of cultural loss that constitutes so much of our life experience today.

More tea anybody?

A Farewell To Kings

2011-10-24T17:06:00.009+01:00

So with extreme irony the Middle East leader who once funded the attempted genocide of the Ulster Protestant has come to grief amidst ghastly gonzo footage of human degradation worthy of the shenanigans inside Seventies Loyalist shebeens as portrayed in the Resurrection Man or Nothing Personal movies.

Truly nasty snuff footage for all the family spread across the vast majority of UK newspaper websites as the entire industry and its commercial base vaporises apace. Such a coincidence. One publication even threw in some extremely rare pictures of Ma and Pa Ceausescu mid-execution during an extraordinary week of press coverage on the death of Gaddafi.

What with a personal web search last week taking me with a single click from an image-sharing site - holding a benign early Eighties photograph of a rainswept Windsor Park football match between Northern Ireland and England in Belfast - right onto a multi-option sex chatroom, I sense your average Media Studies lecture these days must be throwing up fascinating prognoses for future developments within Wild West multi-media.

Gimme Shelter

2011-10-13T13:15:00.016+01:00

In parallel to property mega-inflation in the capital and the nationwide credit crunch, the UK housing charity Shelter confirmed today that private rental levels are officially unaffordable - as linked to a percentage of personal income - in 55% of local authorities in England. London in turn is two and a half times as expensive as the rest of England.

This rank discrimination jigsaws with perfection into the decision of the British student body to focus protest on college fees as opposed to the much greater evil of cross-generational career-destroying internship abuse and with demographic changes afoot in South East England unparalleled in Europe since the wars of the Yugoslavian succession. Arguably the most fateful, albeit unlikely, combination of social changes since VJ Day.

The toxic swamp of London now offers a hectic New York-style lifestyle without any of the fun. A regimented Teutonic work experience without any of the financial rewards of living in Germany. And now a private rental sector offering up sub-standard micro-living conditions for the price of concomitant financial insecurity for life.

At the very least I trust there are going to be some cracking good folk songs coming out of all this one day...

Laurel And Hardy And Twats At Oxford

2011-10-05T21:36:00.026+01:00

I remember once reading a thread on the "Exiles" section of the main Belfast internet forum where a lady in her Sixties from Canada wistfully recalled the good old days and the friends she left behind. She mentioned three of them by name in the hope that the possibility may arise in the scary new digital world that somebody would know them and there might be a way to re-establish contact. The first reply from a jet black Ulster cyber-humourist simply noted: "They're all dead".

My first interface with the fateful circularity of life came as a child when I was watching an old compendium of clips from Laurel and Hardy movies - one that included the famous Way Out West sequence of their charming soft-shoe shuffle outside a saloon bar. On asking my mother about their whereabouts thereafter I was informed that alas they were gone in body and spirit. A crushing and literally tearful blow I recall to this day.

For many people in their forties and fifties Laurel and Hardy were a mainstay of television viewing in their youth. In hindsight, and while cross-referencing their filmography, I can distinctly recall seeing the entireity of their 1929-1935 talking shorts. These were often transmitted around the 6pm slot on BBC2 in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Likewise for all thirteen of their Hal Roach- directed feature films made between 1931 and 1940. I also remember that Channel 4 showed some of the later Twentieth Century Fox and RKO features during the Nineties - A-Haunting We Will Go, Air Raid Wardens, The Big Noise etc - though these were essentially of interest to movie buffs only by virtue of their status as some of the worst films ever made.

One of the final Laurel and Hardy features to be generally well regarded was 1940's A Chump At Oxford. In this film Stan and Ollie are a pair of total fuckwits in America who manage to foil a bank raid. The kindly and decent bank manager subsequently offers them a reward of their own choosing. Being conscious of being complete morons they decide upon "an education". They are subsequently dispatched to Oxford University England while dressed as Eton schoolboys - as fifty year olds.

At this point an interesting timelapse interface kicks in with regard to the social backgrounds of the New British nomenklatura - of both conservative and socialist hue - who have governed us so magnificently in recent times to offically make the UK the happiest country on earth. Not.

For on arriving in Oxford the world's most beloved comedy duo are mercilessly harried and bullied by the resident sneering and well-heeled students including a particularly young Peter Cushing. They are directed to their digs by way of a maze and - while lost therein - are practically scared to death by a genuinely terrifying apparition of a ghost-demon which of course is nothing more than a bastard upper class prank. Their accomodation also turns out to be the dean's residence and he is well fucking furious.

This of course is trumped by Stan Laurel bashing his head and transforming into Lord Paddington - the ultimate upper class sneering cunt imaginable.

Ear-wiggling and monocoled Paddington physically thrashes the student body ranged against him before turning on his erstwhile buddy Ollie and tormenting him mercilessly. From calling him "Fatty" every minute to denigrating his obesity and physical bearing alike...it is truly painful to watch even seven decades later. Stan finally snaps out of his reverie but not before directly inducing Oliver Hardy's nervous breakdown.

This movie is dated beyond words though this ten minute segment alone is a priceless moment of truly magnificent comedy and arguably one of the highlights in the entire career of Ulverston's finest son.

The rock group Mott The Hoople once reflected upon the light-year distance between the Liverpool docks and the Hollywood Bowl. Cumbria to Culver City was certainly no mean feat either let's face it.

The Europa Hotel Belfast

2011-10-04T21:29:00.042+01:00

There is some extraordinarily moving footage from the 2010 Glastonbury Festival of Ray Davies of The Kinks performing an emotional version of the song Days. This was shortly after the death of the original guitarist Pete Quaife.

Days is a wonderful encapsulation of both affection and loss alike for partners, family. friends or even animal companions.

It can also be read as a goodbye to better times gone by from the perspective of a current period of personal change, growth and struggle. That in the same vein as Van Morrison's Madame George - recorded as the very streets and districts of Belfast in which the song was set approached blanket physical and societal collapse during the Troubles.

Earlier this week I watched a BBC documentary about the much-bombed Europa Hotel in Great Victoria Street in Belfast - which is located beside the equally bombed train station that was referenced in the same Morrison song. Some impressive archive footage and computer-generated reconstructions of the attacks were balanced out by wearily predictable reminiscences from the likes of Anne Robinson, Trevor McDonald and John Suchet of their time there as journalist residents while bitter oul Belfast burned and blew up around them.

There still always seems to me to be a faint trace of cosmopolitan superiority in such interviews as to how the restless natives were behaving at the time in Reginald Maudling's "bloody awful country". And indeed a wee bit of a snigger at the parochialism of the hotel restaurant's services and penthouse lounge dollybirds. When the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Brian Faulkner insisted during the 1972 closure of the Stormont parliament that the country was "not a coconut colony" he was probably getting closer to the truth of mainland political attitudes than he could ever have realised. Faulkner of course was a highly intelligent man and a worthy Prime Minister for any country in North Western Europe.

All so truly tiresome of course in light of the sheer tragedy of the destruction of one of Britain and Europe's great port cities and the fact that so many posters on Northern Ireland internet forums to this day often reference the people gone from those times as much as the terminal physical changes since the late Sixties.

Overshadowing all of course being the proud fact that during the Northern Ireland Troubles many more good people stayed in Ulster than ever left for North America, South Africa or Australasia.

Reggie Perrin - Return To Climthorpe

2011-09-27T21:30:00.027+01:00

A leitmotif threaded through so many television situation comedies is that of highly intelligent individuals fated to be stuck fast in dread life stasis year in and year out. From Sgt Ernest Bilko at Fort Baxter and Camp Fremont to Harold Steptoe up Oil Drum Lane and Basil Fawlty down in his Torquay hotel. And from Father Ted Crilly on Craggy Island to Tim Canterbury in Wernham Hogg's Slough offices.

I have recently watched the first series of The Fall and Rise Of Reginald Perrin again which completely falls within this comedic remit while interfacing with pathways of human stress and struggle whose modern day relevance are unquestionable.

The only qualifications upon this series not being dated are the fact that the Exotic Ices Project that instigated Reggie's nervous breakdown would be the exact kind of meaty endeavour to trigger blanket salivation in any second year PR or Marketing student in our current wankerish times. Likewise the thought of trying to "keep it real" while commuting from Surrey to Waterloo - from one's attractive detached house, wife and extended family to a permanent job with benefits and a pension - is alas something most of us can never aspire to again.

Several posts ago I made reference to one particular website advertising vacancies within Westminster that were so geared towards industrial internship abuse as to actually be the subject of tabloid exposure. Two days ago I noted when revisiting the same website that the main salary division active upon vacancy searches devolved to "Voluntary, unpaid or expenses only" and "National Minimum Wage or more".

We live in the strangest of shellshocked times where the banking fraternity has acted like pantomime villains to such an extent that a villainous pantomime banker himself - or somebody impersonating one - can appear on BBC breakfast television making statements so laughably offensive as to represent a literal curse on the British economy and civil society alike. Not too far below such bastardry however - which already should be considered as a seminal moment in British social and broadcasting history - is the behaviour of the HR "industry" in underpinning the malicious spread of the internship phenomena.

Whether or not if it is even possible for the current generation in their twenties to circumvent such lose-lose logistics - where ideally one's lifetime mortgage outgoings should be out of the way by the age of 21 to free up salary slack - the fact remains that this one social development alone looks set to cause unprecedented damage to a plurality of generations in its scale and sweep.

If Reggie had seen the future shock over the horizon perhaps he could have turned things around just through looking for a new job alone as opposed to talking things through with his cat, sloppy infidelity and a faked suicide.

Gusty Spence (1933-2011) - The Wages Of Victory

2011-09-27T13:24:00.018+01:00

Several posts ago I made note of the sheer amount of political and paramilitary personalities from the early years of the Ulster Troubles that are now deceased. In turn, the death of former Ulster Volunteer Force leader Gusty Spence this week is of particularly historic importance in light of his connection to the very first fatalities of the entire conflict in 1966. I will return to the subject of radical loyalist voices in a later post – these as qualified by the broader morality of political violence and its interface with the dynamics of the peace process.

Spence’s political odyssey and political legacy alike - against the sheer madness of the Ulster Troubles and the loss of so much precious human life for so little political gain – is naturally open to a host of moral and ethical questions. A relative of the second victim of the Troubles openly queried his status as a peacemaker following his death some days ago as indeed is her fundamental right as a direct victim.

Gusty Spence’s significance in the long narrative of the Troubles is however of unquestionable importance from leadership of “heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause” in the mid-Sixties to the proffering of “abject and true remorse to all innocent victims” in the 1994 loyalist paramilitary ceasefire statement.

In turn – alike some other members of the Official Republican movement and the UVF prison leadership of the early to mid-Seventies – Spence deserves at least a worthy footnote in the history of socialist thinking in the British Isles as opposed to the public schoolboys and political shysters that have degraded its political honour in recent times to the point of ridicule.

The firestorm of the Ulster Troubles lasted from 1971 until 1976. The subsequent year, with a significant drop in fatalities, can be seen the beginning of the second broad half of a conflict that at most times seemed likely to run and on forever. Or, to quote one female Protestant OAP referenced by social scientist Sarah Nelson in 1984:

I seen it before, before ever Ireland was divided, and in the twenties, and each time after that: and Ireland will never be at peace, or us and them stop fighting, till the end of the world.

It was in 1977 that Spence delivered an extraordinary speech from the Maze Prison on the 12th of July which analysed the bitter politics of social division in Northern Ireland with huge intelligence, clarity, focus and inclusivity.

Over two decades before the murders and intimidation and destruction would end for good - and that within the context of dialogue and compromise - the sentiments standing as the most sobering of political reflections.

That upon one of the most meaningless and unnecessary civil conflicts in European memory and at a particular moment of hopeless stagnation.

History shall be the judge of these words:

We never tire of celebrating the advent in history when William of Orange achieved for us in 1690 Civil and Religious freedom. We, the Protestants of Ireland, were the persecuted in those days and now things are somewhat reversed. But is persecution necessary for the establishment of the inherent freedoms of mankind? Has persecution ever changed a person’s views? Do we really want freedom and the pursuit of happiness at the expense of some other unfortunate soul?…I submit that it is fear which makes one people oppress another…We are living in the most socially and legalistically oppressive society in the Western Hemisphere…Polarisation complete with one section of the community cut off from the other except for some middle-class contacts which appear to be more concerned about their class than community…WE are a police state with the accompanying allegations of torture and degrading treatment to suspects undergoing interrogation…Even yet we still have men nonsensically counselling that victory is just around the corner. Victory over whom – the IRA? Or do they mean victory over the Roman Catholic community?…The fears of Roman Catholics will not go away because bigoted Unionist politicians say so. We in Northern Ireland are plagued with super-loyalists…If one does not agree with their bigoted and fascist views then one is a ‘taig-lover’, or a ‘communist’…Unfortunately, we have too many of these people in our own ranks. No fascist or bigot can expect sympathy or understanding in the UVF compounds…The sooner we realise that our trust has been abused, and the so-called political leadership we followed was simply a figment the sooner we will attempt to fend for ourselves politically and to commence articulation in that direction…ours was a sick society long before the fighting men came on the scene. Life in Ulster before the troubles was artificial…We want employment and decent homes like all human beings, and Loyalists will no longer suffer their deprivation stoically lest their outcries be interpreted as disloyalty…The politicians seemingly cannot or will not give us the peace we so earnestly desire, so I therefore call upon all the paramilitaries to call a universal ceasefire. To open up dialogue with each other in order to pursue ways and means of making such a ceasefire permanent. Eventually Loyalist and Republican must sit down together for the good of our country. Dialogue will have to come about sometime, so why not now? There is no victory in Ulster, not for the IRA, or the UVF, the police or the army. There is only victory for humanity and common sense.

They Don't Know About Us And They've Never Heard Of Love

2011-09-24T14:28:00.034+01:00

Back from a refreshing break to New Europe where bad history and pending EU membership alike cannot stop some countries fast tracking tourist prices up to Mayfair champagne bar-levels in parallel to the ongoing Euro firestorm.

In my time away from London Town asking prices for property have risen by 1% on a national level - despite the credit famine and Great Depression - while figures of approximately 65k have been discussed with regard to deposits for basic properties in the capital. The same great city where one globally famous park in the north west of the metropolis seems to be a magnet every day now for hordes of unsavoury looking pseudo-fishermen whiling away their time in lager consumption and general relaxation when most of the rest of the country is either working or looking for work. Or indeed worrying about not having work or ever working again.

Likewise a London where a sign in the window of a local charity bookshop underlined their willingness to accept both volunteers AND interns and where a major epicentre of the August intifada - in the south-east of the city and in the vicinity of London Bridge station - has appeared in a Saturday broadsheet property feature this very day openly praising its cheapness because of its bad reputation.

Having recently finished Dominic Sandbrook's social history of the early Seventies it truly would appear that - alike the subject matter of his preceding Sixties overviews - it analyses a country now vanished in its entirety with regard to broad cultural connectivity, shared history and social balance.

That in turn of course is qualified by certain unlamented and beastial Seventies lowpoints such as the power cuts and the terrorism of the time, the merciless cruelty of Leeds United openly torturing Southampton FC in March 1972 or Eric Clapton's August 1976 Birmingham speech portraying Enoch Powell as the caring and protective Alpha Patriarch of the White Nation. Or indeed just plain grim memories of compulsory Sunday school, mid-week Cub Scouts and Saturday afternoon short back and sides.

More worrying than the self-contained nature of the Sixties and Seventies would appear to be the case that the Eighties in turn - as discussed in Alwyn W Turner's much overlooked Rejoice Rejoice which followed on from his Crisis? What Crisis? Seventies social history - appear to be as equally distant from our everyday reality. That both metaphorically and in concrete approximation of present and future security, stability and sanity.

The attractive women aside, when one starts to look at footage of Bucks Fizz or Tracey Ullman or the Human League backing singers or even Dollar with wry affection for a lost golden age we all shared then it is seriously worrying.

Forbidden Planet

2011-08-31T13:17:00.015+01:00

This most historic of months in modern British times comes to closure not with acts of national reconciliation or reflection but with the news that house prices and rents alike are set to rise by 20% over the next five years in the UK. That throwaway £26,000 deposit in London in particular barely providing a conduit to an interface lifestyle experience worthy of collecting dog stools in Victorian Britain for the tanner's yard.

This counter-cyclical economic phenomena thus defies all historic logic with regard to the natural rise and fall of property prices in Western Europe, the background of an ongoing depression, the hidden reality of a decade of utterly stagnant wages and the recent outburst of violent civil unrest that has made London a truly dangerous geographic landscape in which to base one's life. Even the infrastructural changes of the past decade that have brought us to this juncture display no noticeable improvements concomitant with current Olympian rental or mortgage outgoings.

The social expectation of incomes being organically linked to costs of living was of course a crucial and openly acknowledged matter of public debate and concern during the Seventies and Eighties for the working population of Britain up to and including every soap opera and situation comedy character. As these common sense observations of pure economic logic have apparently evaporated alongside unions, class struggle, political awareness and national pride alike it is thus difficult to ignore the sense that in the first two-thirds of 2011 this country has taken a radical step forward into utterly suicidal lifestyle logistics. These centred upon non-existent social mobility, the realisation of nightmare European border control issues and the crystal clear abscence of any political policy to control the banking crisis.

Late-Weimar Germany without the kabarett, industry, vibrant cities, a working class, intellect, beautiful women or kultur.

The World About Us

2011-08-25T21:20:00.039+01:00

Recently we have seen the return of cult 1970 British movie Deep End to independent cinema screens alongside a DVD release. It follows the tragic course of a teenage boy's infatuation with a fellow swimming pool attendant, stars the extraordinarily beautiful Jane Asher and has a magnificent soundtrack from Can and Cat Stevens. The landscape of a seedy down-at-heel London was actually filmed in the port of Hamburg while Asher's boyfriend at one point takes her to a typical sleazy Mary Millingtonesque porn movie thinly disguised as a sex education primer. Diana Dors in turn makes her own unique contribution to The World of Georgie Best by bringing herself to a state of intense sexual arousal in the bathhouse by holding the male lead's hand while fantasising about Manchester United's greatest son in full sporting flow.

Although written histories of Britain can adequately articulate acute social observations such as the fact that the breakup of working class kinship structures in the late Sixties was balanced out by the benefits of individual freedom and privacy - and indeed right through to the nation-destroying repercussions of European Union membership of the present day - the fact remains that it is the moving image that captures the most thought provoking encapsulations of a society in bewilderingly fast transition.

Both the 1971 thriller Villain starring Richard Burton and Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 Frenzy alike display a London with a sound industrial base, a city where the working class could easily facilitate a sustained existence and where society was as demographically monocultural as the people in George Formby's 1935 trip to the Manx TT races for his No Limit feature film.

In 1979's The Long Good Friday the character of Harold Shand - portrayed by Bob Hoskins - waxes passionately about the future regeneration of the London Docklands and the rebirth of Britain itself. Little knowing of course that such resurrection would be actually be forged upon self-centred and destructive dynamics worthy of fictional agents provocateurs lieing in the English shires in the early Forties guiding Luftwaffe bomber streams towards the capital by flashlight signal. And with as many indigenous Eastenders around to witness such Phoenix-like revival as the chance of bumping into a French Huguenot down Spitalfields Market this Bank Holiday Monday.

Euston Films' priceless Minder series of the late Seventies and Eighties in turn was set in magnificently characterful parts of West and South West London such as Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney that now are as bereft of charm as the local estate agents' souls. The hill station par excellence of West London itself - as captured for all posterity in its grotty pubic-lice ridden nadir in Nicolas Roeg's Performance - has left its history of rack renting and race rioting well behind as a magnet for the cream of trust fund bohemians and fast-track interns.

With our jolly Old Etonian Lord Mayor at the helm and with crazed civil disorder afoot redolent of Hammer's Plague of the Zombies, the making of modern London proceeds apace.

Norman Wisdom - The Bulldog Breed

2011-08-21T13:31:00.040+01:00

I have always looked back with huge fondness to my childhood holidays on the Isle of Man. I remember seeing Jaws, Live And Let Die, The Island On Top Of The World and Orca - Killer Whale in the cinema there at the time. Also the professional wrestling at the Villa Marina and the most politically incorrect waxworks in history. More than anything else though I remember the sheer numbers of people who were holidaying in July and August. From the Fifties right through to the late Seventies it was a hugely popular destination for people from all over the British Isles and, in the older days, with certain cities predominating the makeup of visitors depending on the summer week that the factories traditionally shut down.

In general though the island has always maintained a low profile - even the horrific Summerland disaster of 1973 which left 50 people dead is barely referenced let alone mentioned these days. The Isle of Man is probably most famous for its retention of corporal punishment by birching up to 1976, its tax haven status and as being the home of Norman Wisdom for the latter period of his life.

Wisdom - comedian of choice for Charlie Chaplin and the people of Albania - appeared in around twenty feature films during his career. The movies themselves have naturally dated but the sheer talent of the man cannot be doubted right from the Class War classic Trouble In Store of 1953 to the final What's Good For The Goose in 1969 where Norman the banker leaves his dreary life of suburban hell with his frigid wife to hook up with very young teenage hippy girls and dance along to The Pretty Things at the Screaming Apple Club in groovy Southport.

1954's One Good Turn contains punk anarchy on the Brighton train which predates The Ramones' first album by 22 years and Jimmy the Mod in the Quadrophenia movie by a quarter of a century. The scene in The Early Bird where he eats an apple spiked with drugs and begins to hallucinate is one of the truly classic moments of British comedy to rate with Harold Steptoe berating his elderly father for using such words as "rape", "vibrators", "spunk" "cock", "nipple" and "bristols" in an innocent family game of Scrabble up Oil Drum Lane. Steptoe Senior's commentary on the changing face of London in the October 1965 episode Crossed Swords may well not see the light of day in broadcasting terms ever again.

Wisdom's 1992 autobiograpy My Turn is an often extraordinary read with regard to the poverty of his London upbringing, brutal beatings from his father, walking to Wales to look for a job down a mine and spending Christmas Day alone and unloved as a 14-year-old in a boy's hostel.

Alike with George Best, the public tributes on various websites following his death were of blanket affection. One gentleman noted that his movies were the solitary moments of happiness in a childhood destroyed by sexual abuse at the hands of his father. Likewise that Norman's valiant character who always stood up to the snobs, managers, bullies and general wankers of this world inspired him on to a successful career in the Royal Navy. This was certainly not the only comment of its nature from people remembering unhappy childhoods that he managed to brighten up for an hour and a half.

Norman Wisdom was not dissimilar to Ulster's James Young in his rare ability to blend pathos with quick-witted and fast-paced humour. They had a talent that was utterly unique and crossed the generations in terms of appeal. Likewise they came from a time and place where working people certainly did not expect a hand-up in life from anybody and realised that hard work was the only alternative on offer to secure one's very survival. Be that in time of war, peace or civil war in the case of Northern Ireland. An industrial world and a way of looking at life that now seems to have been destroyed down to the last physical and metaphorical atom.

Crossroads

2011-08-20T20:43:00.021+01:00

As noted in an earlier post, the mondo-film The London Nobody Knows from 1967 displayed a capital city that in the late Sixties - by the evidence of some footage filmed in Spitalfields in particular - was beset by acute social problems regarding housing, poverty and physical decay. The falling population of London in this period, and predications that such decline would certainly continue, underpins the core reason why the appalling infrastructural defects we see around us today are directly linked to political decisions taken in the Seventies to match inward investment to negative demographic projections. There can be no other explanation for the shameful state of modern London as compared to most other European capitals.

To try and gauge some similarly core truths from the afterglow of the civil unrest of recent weeks I am drawn towards two sobering images from the north and south of Ireland. Both of them relate to the history of struggle and labour which are the fundamental foundation stones of the national characteristics of our peoples and the sense of cultural seperateness of our island lives.

In May of this year a magnificent city council-funded statue to the mill girls was erected at the corner of the Crumlin Road and Cambrai Street in West Belfast. This was in close proximity to the former Ewart's, Brookfield, Flax Street and Edenderry linen mills that provided such a dynamic for the city's initial wealth and industrial expansion. The tens of thousands of millies - both Catholic and Protestant - would work long hours for minimal pay (or "buttons" in Belfast vernacular) while under threat of horrendous industrial injury and a raft of appalling lung and chest conditions. When I saw the statue a few weeks ago around teatime, the surrounding streets - which would have once been black with hundreds upon hundreds of workers leaving the factories at that time of day in the earlier half of the last century - were utterly deserted. And there the wee millie stands all alone by herself this very night - waiting for her mates who are now all in nursing homes or dead.

Last week in turn I watched Robert J Flaherty's 1934 Academy Award-winning fictional documentary Man Of Aran which displayed the daily life-or-death struggle for survival in the most inhospitable of geographic locations off the west coast of Ireland. Although criticised for certain fabrications such as the continued existence of basking shark hunting at that time - and with a healthy note of noble savagery engrained throughout - it nonetheless displayed an utterly brutal existence not long departed at the time of its making.

The power and scale of the industrial revolution in Western Europe as directly linked to often appalling consequences for the grandparents and great-grandparents of many middle-aged people today can now be considered a self-contained epoch. A walk around the Thompson dry-dock in Harland and Wolff in Belfast - which once contained monumental White Star Line ships under construction including The Titanic - is as sobering an experience as this country can offer for anybody with an interest in history.

It also underscores that if the age of heavy industry can be dated to a specific start and end point then the much shakier foundations of the liberal state as laid down in the midst of the Second World War may now be approaching a crisis of such veracity that its very long term existence in its current constitution is highly questionable.

The English riots of this month - as copperfastened with the release of yet more footage of Droog-style ultra-violence this week - may well have catalysed that very same liberal state (and state of mind) to go up in a similar whiff of smoke to that recently emanating from the burning sports and home electronic shops on the local looted High Street. Also the post-modern screaming lunacy of refugees being placed in multi-million pound homes in residential London does make one consider why international or charity bodies of yore were not attempting to vacate the people of Aran from the fate of their terrible subsistence life on an island that did not even have the luxury of soil.

In the public mind today - or at least within that of the working people carrying the entire future burden of the UK on its almost broken back - it is most certainly a given that the blind sustenance of self-perpetuating dependency cultures and current immigration policies will directly result in an accelerated decline in living standards for the vast majority of British people. Already most hard working people cannot dream of replicating the levels of fundamental individual and familial security that was utterly attainable in the Seventies or Eighties for anybody with the drive to work for a living when the alarm clock rung. In turn if the Nineties can often be looked back at now as a period of relative stability then it truly is time to fucking worry fast.

As for those naysayers who would claim that our state still assures a guaranteed modicum of support in comparison to other parts of this troubled universe I recommend personal reflection to be deferred until after a visit to any UK Jobcentre in the current financial holocaust and to experience the degree of concern awaiting therein with regard to your life, death or ability to fulfill personal potential as a former taxpayer.

No matter what happens to the European peripherals who have attracted so much media attention earlier this year, the fact remains that today - as affected by the historical turn of criminal events of this very month and in ways that forge well beyond matters of race or culture - Britain stands unequivocally at the crossroads.

Mary Millington - Another Girl Another Planet

2011-08-17T09:32:00.024+01:00

One of the great determiners of radical national decline in the Seventies in the United Kingdom - alongside the hopeless battle against inflation, industrial unrest and terrorism - was the fact that one of the biggest grossing British movies of 1977 was the sex comedy Come Play With Me which ran continuously for four years at the Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street in London's Soho. The same year in the USA Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saturday Night Fever were released.

In the course of the past year we have seen the reissue of all three of Mary Millington's mainstream cinema releases on DVD and another edition of Simon Sheridan's superb Keeping The British End Up history of the genre.

Millington's three movies make of course for truly mortifying viewing. Come Play With Me may not be the sort of thing you want to watch with your mother but you could probably get away with watching it with your father these days even if he was a comedy vicar. The sexual dynamics of The Playbirds in turn are capped by the constant presence of Windsor Davies, one of the That's Life rentboys and Dave the barman from Minder in almost every scene as police officers. Likewise the political incorrectness of some of the dialogue - "Are you a rapist?" for example - is up there with the lyrical content of the first three albums by The Stranglers. Confessions From The David Galaxy Affair does stand out slightly from the others it must be said as containing possibly the worst piece of character acting in British dramatic history from the late husband of the late Diana Dors - Alan Lake.

The movies however do have significant historic importance in throwing light on the extraordinary censorship of the time in Great Britain which was so out of kilter with mainland Europe. Sheridan's book notes how so many hardcore scenes were shot during the making of these frothy asexual comedy romps for sole inclusion in the dirty foreign export versions. Likewise - and as is so typical of bloody everything in the past three decades of our country's social history - these British movies were contemporaneously marketed in one of the leading UK portfolios of adult magazines (which included one title named after public decency mandarin Mary Whitehouse herself) as containing extreme sexual content to be avoided by those of a nervous disposition. Do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Outside the context of the three movies as discussed - and the dark netherworld of satanic carnal sin she briefly shared with Alfie Bass, Irene Handl and Cardew Robinson - Mary Millington herself certainly lived the unexpurgated sexual dream (or nightmare) every bit as much as Linda Lovelace or Marilyn Chambers. Sherdian's earlier biography covers this in considerable detail from her initial forays into pornography in order to fund her mother's healthcare through to her suicide at the age of 33.

However in contrast to the scene in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights where a cocaine-fuelled pool party takes place for porn industry habitues - against the scorching background of a Californian sun and Eric Burdon and War's dreamy Spill The Wine - the posthumous and utterly tasteless documentary of Millington's life True Blue Confessions includes a scene of her at work in the sex shop she ran in a seedy South London street.

With all the erotic intent and measured sensuality of a labored and indecisive chip shop order, Millington frankly underscores in the narrative that:

....it's a myth about the Dirty Raincoat Brigade....they really don't exist...customers aren't dragged in...they come in because they want to...and they want to be able to take it away and read it in the privacy of their own homes...they should have the right to do that...there are hundreds of thousands of very lonely men...they've no chance at all over ever picking up a girl...but they can buy sexy magazines and take them home and masturbate while they look at the pictures which gives them the relief which I feel they need.

Such a commonsense and indeed quintessentially British contribution to the history of adult cinema from beautiful doomed Mary Ruth Quilter (1945-1979) - Britain's once and future Golden Girl.

London Riots August 2011 - Alpha and Omega

2011-08-15T09:33:00.037+01:00

Two particularly controversial interviews were transmitted last week on BBC television in the wake of the civil disorder.

On one live link-up between the News 24 studio and seasoned West Indian commentator Darcus Howe - who was positioned in front of a landscape which replicated the ruins of Darmstadt or Pforzheim during World War Two - the presenter attempted to throw a sucker punch in reply to Howe's emotional explanations for the rationale behind the violence by claming that he had been involved in rioting at one point too some years previously. Even without Howe "acting the oul wounded soldier" seconds after classifying the disturbances as "an insurrection" himself, it was a spectacular piece of unprofessionalism and rank racism worthy of the kind of newspapers that have been known to recently evaporate overnight. Somehow I doubt that Fiona Armstrong would have been egged on by her producer to say the same thing to round off an interview with the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. A new low point in BBC history.

Then we had historian Dr David Starkey - who at one point in the past referred to the mighty nations of Scotland and Ireland as "feeble little countries" - flailing wildly under attack in the Newsnight studio from two alpha attack females and a wee fella with a sociology GCSE. Starkey's Little England armoury consisted of denigrating the fusion of patois with Estuary English, the rank violence of gangsta culture, the prophecies of Enoch Powell and some suspicious Bell Curve-style asides that are probably best kept at home to yourself, the dog and the four walls.

Forgeing beyond all the instant social history we gathered in the past from The Rock n Roll Years , Powell's political legacy as a brave former soldier, British patriot and defender of the Union, opponent of capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality, intellectual heavyweight and parliamentary scourge of horrendous British military abuses in Kenya's Hola Camp deserved better respect than its crass utilisation in such manner. The latter - as discussed in Caroline Elkin's Britain's Gulag - is of a truly savage nature. Conversely it is fair to say in passing that Powell's subsequent influence on Official Unionist Party thinking while MP for South Down at the end of his career may well have been seriously detrimental to Ulster Unionism in general by way of its hopeless integrationist dynamic.

Either way, the major undertone of the week gone past is not about the future pathways of any solitary ethnic group in the United Kingdom and the ability or inability to integrate to British cultural norms. Dominic Sandbrook's chapter on race relations in his recent history of the Seventies State of Emergency clearly notes that the ethnic group that made least attempt to integrate in that period - the Chinese - were actually the group who received the least hostile reception from white society.

Likewise whether the rioters and looters currently being funnelled through the court system mend their ways by Wednesday night volleyball matches - or training to be hedge fund managers or defence barristers - is of less national importance or urgency than the revival of Cornish tin mining.

The fundamental question facing the now politically devolved UK (apart from England) after last week's civil disorder - beyond the loaded studio debates and sub-tabloid spin - is surely the very survival of a broadly accepted British national identity across these islands and throughout and within its constituent countries.

London Riots August 2011 - Beyond The Pale

2011-08-13T17:44:00.018+01:00

Following the historic events of the past seven days I suspect that there are very many British citizens between West Lothian and New London this weekend who are now questioning the state of our nation with outright jawdropping disbelief.

With constitutional musings regarding Scottish independence gathering apace - and with the Northern Ireland Assembly having even successfully weathered foul dissident violence - a focus has certainly fallen across England in terms of the extraordinary social fractures now revealed and in turn what this means with regard to a shared sense of proud national identity across the British Isles.

Analysis of such matters is naturally complex. Growing up in Belfast in the Seventies I regarded myself as British as the only possible default since Northern Irishness was a misnomer as underpinned by the civil war outside the front door and the wishes of a third of the population to secede from the state. Likewise for many of my generation, it was the actions of bold military geniuses such as Seamus Twomey and Gerry Adams that guaranteed that any sense of a northern form of Irish identity amongst the broad mass of the Protestant community would be unlikely to materialise at any point before the end of human existence.

I looked out my bedroom window to the Mountains of Mourne and that was essentially where my country ended - division thus fossilised on both the political border and within the political mind alike. The peace process in turn was probably forged moreso on the conflict reaching political and military stalemate as opposed to people deciding to stop hating each other. The sheer amount of territorial flag flying in evidence in Ulster last week - of both loyalist and republican origin alike and with at least ten seperate varieties in evidence within the former category - tending to corroborate the ruddy good health of tribalism.

Today, with an English friend reporting from a Scottish holiday last week that the local natives view their sense of shared "Britishness" with England with about as much fond regard as a stepping barefoot in a pool of cold sick outside the local pub on Sunday morning, it must be considered that the political devolution of the past few years may well be matched by a significant emotional parting of the ways across the United Kingdom. This crucially underscored by the BBC editorial decision last week to clarify that the British rioting was happening in London and Manchester in England as opposed to Edinburgh New Town, Portmeirion or the Giant's Causeway. A clear reverse indeed of the sports commentators of the Seventies who would refer to the Northern Ireland national football side as "British" or "Irish" depending on whether they were winning or losing.

It is much too early of course to consider the scale of damage to community relations in the short to medium-term that last week's wave of criminality and manslaughter caused but, disingenuousness aside, one certainly did not expect to be walking down Rossville Street in Derry's Bogside in total peace and calm last Saturday afternoon (apart from one snarling dog who sussed I was not a Belgian Troubles tourist) and be in fear of one's own life in residential London three days later.

All changed, changed utterly...as a former Anglo-Irish resident of the Primrose Hill-Camden Town lifestyle interface frontline once noted.

London Riots August 2011 - A Passion Play

2011-08-11T21:05:00.021+01:00

With so much extraordinarily frank exchange currently in evidence within public discourse on The Troubles here in London - and with the Daily Mail now approximating Der Stuermer without the gothic script - we have also seen the first raft of sociological explanations from the femi-liberal para-state for the past week of anarchy. It would also appear that les damnes de la terre on operational duty over the past few nights in Greater London have included a downtrodden and supressed teaching assistant, a millionaire's daughter and an Olympic ambassador.

As regards the social deprivation context it is well to remember that most working class people of middle age in post-industrial Britain have often heard the well-worn folk wisdom from their parents that their grandparents' generation in turn forged immense wealth for this country during the first half of the 20th century while being paid "a pittance".

In turn there are hundreds of thousands of people in white collar employment today in the private sector - and in industries formerly regarded as middle class preserves as recently as fifteen years ago - who are managing farcically huge workloads on a daily basis for a similarly relative pittance in un-unionised or de-unionised environments. And that without necessarily feeling the urge to venture into CCTV Land in the dead of night - and from their stress-induced alcohol dependency issues - to engage in civil insurrection and industrial-scale looting.

The biblical scale of housing discrimination railed against British citizens off the back of the credit crunch will be returned to in another posting for the sake of my blood pressure.

As for alienation I simply wish to recall some sentences from Martin Dillon and Denis Lehane's Political Murder In Northern Ireland Penguin Special of 1973 when reflecting on the year of terror and madness just past:

More people died on the roads in Northern Ireland in 1972 than at the hands of the assassins. But no one who lived in the province during those twelve months would have any difficulty deciding which was the more frightening statistic. The real casualty figures of the assassinations are not to be found in the body counts of killed and injured. They are to be found in the minds of 1.5 million people, most of whom lived in terror of their lives.

Don't even begin to dare to talk to the forgotten majority of good Protestant and Catholic citizens of Belfast tonight who lived through 1972 about alienation, bigotry, hopelessness, discrimination, lack of opportunity, threat, civil rights and civic responsibility.

London Riots August 2011 - A Place Apart

2011-08-10T20:50:00.039+01:00

Last week I visited the beautiful city of Derry on the Foyle. I walked the course of its historic walls and went to both The Fountain district (the last remaining Unionist area on a West Bank depleted of 10,000 Protestants since 1969) and the excellent civil rights museum in the Bogside.

On the way there I drove past Claudy where on 31st July 1972 IRA car bombs killed nine people including a nine-year-old girl. Operational command was in the hands of a Catholic priest - a fact speedily buried for many years to avoid the logical corollary of utter homicidal bedlam - while the bombing itself coincided with the British military's Operation Motorman drive into the paramilitary-controlled no-go areas.

One week later here in the smouldering ruins of London - and with no-doubt historic developments afoot in order to prevent the period of the Olympics descending into our greatest national humiliation since the Battle of Hastings - today's news coverage turned up an interesting juxtaposition.

There has been significant reference to the presence of vigilante patrols among both the Sikh and Turkish Cypriot communities as well as in white working class areas of Enfield and Eltham. Somewhat more coverage however has been focused on the actions of local residents in the lifestyle interface of Clapham where middle-class residents have been displaying serious "Keep Calm And Carry On" resolve by sweeping up the detritus of anarchy and looting. The BBC news website tonight also underscoring "The broom - symbol of resistance?" to the zombie nation they pro-actively helped create.

In 1972 Conor Cruise O'Brien's States of Ireland collection of essays included an often ridiculed consideration of benign and malignant prognoses of the Ulster conflict - the latter including an open civil war resulting in re-partition and a two county sectarian Ulster Protestant statelet.

Speaking personally, with the candidness that a direct victim of political violence is entitled to, I would also propose that a not impossible counterfactual for the Protestants of Ulster during the early Troubles would have been walking along the Liverpool quaysides with suitcases in hand or indeed a grave in the Irish Sea with a bullet in the head. Frothy kind of stuff like that.

The past few days have seen unparalleled civil disorder - as long predicted by this blog, a literal declaration of war against British civil society and a semi-insurgency against the civil power. Not something most civically-responsible people would want to leave the wife, kids and inglenook fireplace to get involved in I dare presume.

The pictures from Clapham Hill Station may throw up a terribly civilised and wistful vision of Englishness in the midst of rank savagery but alas the events of the past few days are now beyond qualification. My Mass Observation-style public eavesdropping of the past 48 hours in turn suggests an extraordinary seachange in social attitudes here in England. These are certainly of no laughing or chirpy matter but indeed point towards pure history in the making. As certainly befits matters of life or death.

London Riots August 2011 - Hopelessness And History

2011-08-09T13:48:00.028+01:00

Last week I was listening to Strabane singer-songwriter Paul Brady's scathing commentary on anti-Irish racism Nothing But The Same Old Story which documented the treatment of the Irish community on the mainland in the early Seventies. I recently spoke to an aunt of my own who recalled "No Irish No Blacks" signs on London boarding houses in the period. And this on such a scale that when seeking accomodation one time in the capital during a brief visit she reflected to her husband how they might have to approach a police station, as Ulster Protestants, to secure shelter for the night.

The second verse of Brady's 1981 song includes the steely aside:

I'm sick of watching them break up
Every time some bird brain puts us down
Making jokes on the radio
Guess it helps them all drown out the sound
Of the crumbling foundations
Any fool can see the writing on the wall
But they just don't believe that it's happening

The civil unrest in Greater London this week has made me reflect upon a particularly interesting set of historical dynamics in play both then and now.

Ulster in the Eighties was enveloped in a blanket of total political and economic stagnation. Every other day seemed to bring reports of off-duty members of the security forces being murdered in the border region. These men and women being amongst the bravest citizens in British or European history. I recall in turn that there was definitely an acute feeling amongst the alienated Ulster Unionist community during the early Eighties - when riots broke out in mainland British cities - that forging beyond the obvious nuisance value of the Union, that something of significantly portentous nature was resident in the bedrock of British society across the Irish Sea that could take way longer than three decades to play out. The fucking Irish certainly did not hold the clear monopoly of Britain's problems.

Secondly, when considering political violence in Ulster during the course of the Troubles - and in particular with regard to its Loyalist manifestations - it is quite clearly a matter of historical record that the twin drivers were an (albeit often sophisticated) politics of exclusion and de-industrialisation of considerable vintage. When looking at television footage of the recent anarchy in London it would certainly appear that a considerable percentage of the perpetrators have skipped the history and went straight to the swagger.

Finally, in light of the current civil disorder it is of particular interest that there are huge reservations in play with regard to the introduction of baton rounds against uncontrollable hooligan masses intent on murder and criminal damage perhaps this very night. Such reticence of course was not an insurmountable problem whatsoever when considering the kaleidoscopic raft of repressive legislation and security measures thrown against the Catholic community in Northern Ireland for three decades.

With that potentially reverse-racist conundrum in the loop then a truly perfect and shimmering historical circle takes form and shape on this beautiful sunny English afternoon.

George Best - The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)

2011-08-08T13:02:00.013+01:00

Following on from the utterly mortifying and hateful Celia Walden book on George Best comes the relaunch of an often-mawkish musical covering the legend's life from the Cregagh estate to Valhalla.

One of the writers once painted the Northern Ireland international football fanbase as snarling bigots in an earlier play where the main character is so nauseated by the alpha-male loyalist frenzy at Windsor Park that he decides to throw in his lot with the Republic of Ireland supporters and travels with them to the USA World Cup where no such political incorrectness ensues. After all they had a cantankerous oul Brit of a manager at that time themselves. The other writer recently set the history of the Maze Prison - up to and including the death of the IRA hunger strikers - to a Capital Gold soundtrack.

Dancing Shoes is redeemed by some decent acting - particularly from its female cast members - though the set design is amateurish and the "Moon in June" songwriting leaves much to be desired. Dialogue-wise it often lapses into weary parochialism and the humour is often set to a laboured and predictable pattern.

Best embodied the first and indeed ultimate fusion of pop celebrity and sporting genius in a period of British social history that is now often regarded with literal heartbreaking reverence. As a highly intelligent man in turn his comments on the political situation in Ulster and the cultural divisions in Ireland were always heartfelt, sincere and measured.

I personally feel that the scale of Best's individual talent within the history of the British Isles does not merit such an essentially premature, family-friendly and often cliched portrayal such as this - and that despite touching base with the realities of his alcohol addiction.

I may be wrong of course. Maybe George was indeed looking down from his celestial whereabouts and chuckling fondly at one of the final scenes in the Grand Opera House Belfast where he and Alex Higgins perform a pre-death song and dance in the City Hospital celebrating their rollercoaster lifepath from such humble working class origins.

But I would somehow err upon the strong possibility that - as the one European icon who definitively proved that effortless cool need not originate on American celluloid - he wouldn't have been.

Alex Hurricane Higgins - Don't feel sorry for me, I stood on top of the world

2011-08-02T09:32:00.021+01:00

Yesterday I was reading how the surviving family of snooker legend Alex Higgins has criticised Belfast City Council in light of the lack of a permanent memorial to their brother alike the naming of the city airport after George Best. Disappointingly I also recall a while back how the public subscription appeal for a statue to Best was saved by a substantial donation from a businessman.

Higgins' character was obviously of more flamboyant and unreserved bent than Best and one must assume that there was more of a cross-generational appeal to even a playboy as regards a hellraiser. That let alone without broaching some of more particularly outrageous moments of Higgins' life story - up there with Elvis's 1977 CBS Special or Amy Winehouse Live In Belgrade - regarding death threats to team mates and scatological comments to one particular teenage snooker wuenderkind.

Nevertheless Higgins' talent was certainly utterly unique amongst the chaos of his life and times. Likewise his final autobiography was genuinely moving, funny and utterly contrite.

The Belfast Telegraph's Gail Walker captured Higgins' appeal beautifully in a magnificent obituary:

Somehow, he managed to create his own piece of Belfast wherever he went, a scale model of the city exact in every detail from the good looks, the charm, the rakishness and the genius, right down to the tiny detail of the pig-headed, sometimes stupid, gable-wall uproar...More than anyone in the public eye, Higgy was a Belfastman, soaked in the city he was born in. It was that which we recognised here — Higgy made it under the wire of our different religions and allegiances, infiltrating our affections, simply because we knew that if his genius was his own, his flaws were all ours.

More pithily - though perhaps just as genuinely felt in similarly Belfast fashion - another poster on a Northern Ireland-orientated internet forum noted "He was a wanker - but he was our wanker".

Either way the family's disappointment certainly hints at how modern society - even one as self-analytical, emotional and pathos-loaded as Ulster - is gradually moving more and more away from what were once very fundamental historical codes of communal awareness and pride.

The Boyne Water II

2011-07-29T20:56:00.019+01:00

The BBC's high-profile BBC historical drama The Hour has been the recipient of some truly scathing reviews over the course of the past fortnight from such disparate sources as Peter Hitchens, Max Hastings and Kevin Myers. The latter's often hilarious demolition concludes that:

Amnesia-themed vice is the great national dish of the English: this magical elixir unfailingly enables them to see old sin as completely new. It is why English history endlessly repeats itself, and in only slightly different forms. It is why eruptions in Ireland always take the English by surprise. It is why they then invariably -- and even gratefully -- accept the one-sided Irish version of history: for -- the poor dears -- they have almost none of their own.

This to an extent links in to earlier commentary on the summer intifada in Belfast and the ongoing existence of political violence which, as more and more historical commentaters are realising, should have theoretically ended in 1985 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and a concomitant historical crackdown on paramilitarism on both sides of the Irish border. The footage from last week of North Belfast teenagers steering a burning motor car towards our extremely brave security forces was certainly not meant to happen a quarter century down the line from the agreement signed between Margaret Thatcher and Garret Fitzgerald.

The attraction of the Irish nationalist political agenda in Northern Ireland to so many outside parties in mainland Britain - including half of The Beatles - does indeed to no small degree ride roughshod over certain obviously unpalatable historical pathways. This none moreso with regard to the annual violence associated with the parading season in Ulster.

Well regarded political literature from Ruth Dudley Edwards and Brian Kennaway on the Orange Order has analysed the social and religious framework of the organisation and clearly exposed the machinations behind anti-parade protests from political parties now in power at Stormont. This as confirmed by Gerry Adams himself during a Sinn Fein conference in Athboy, County Meath, in November 1996.

Eric Kaufmann's academic study in turn clearly underscores the attempts the organisation made in the early Seventies to steer membership away from Loyalist extremism in favour of clear support for the security forces. Kaufmann notes for example how following a government ban on parading in 1970 an Orange Order Central Committee meeting included assertions that a disorganised defiance of the ban would play into the hands of Republicans. Concern was expressed in turn over the rising influence of Loyalist paramilitaries and the infiltration of “undesirable people” into the Order.

There are of course a million and one variables to set against any re-appraisal of the Orange Order but the life experience and survival of the British in Ulster over the past forty years should be of considerable theoretical interest to all those concerned about the political direction of the mainland in the next four decades.

Not of course that historical qualifications such as these matter whatsoever anymore in a New Britain where several years ago a survey of schoolchildren noted that most thought the Battle of the Boyne took place in Lord of the Rings.

Roger Nowell - The Skipper

2011-07-27T09:22:00.009+01:00

I recently read the sad news of the death in July 2010 of Cornish trawler captain Roger Nowell who featured in the excellent BBC documentary series The Skipper in the early Nineties. As essentially dated at the point of transmission I am not sure if this ever got a repeat showing though there was definitely a follow-up film made many years after the production of the original programme itself.

Newlyn-based Nowell came across as such a good humoured and charismatic individual and I have such fond memories myself of so many trips to Cornwall as one of the most beautiful of all British regions that currently constitute the United Kingdom. That alongside Skye, Carmarthenshire and North Antrim/South Armagh in my opinion.

Daphne Du Maurier’s classic Vanishing Cornwall talked about significant fracturing of the folk heritage in the county as long ago as 1967. The Skipper in turn may represent a last look at another British industry doomed by the garnering forces of European centralisation. Likewise a part of the Celtic periphery of the British Isles now utterly transformed by extraordinary financial discrepancies between local wages and property prices to the point of truly post-modern dimensions.

Sham 69 - Tell Us The Truth

2011-07-22T08:39:00.017+01:00

An interesting footnote in British and Irish punk history was the fact that English band Sham 69 – formed in Hersham in Surrey in 1976 – took their name from grafitti that singer Jimmy Pursey spotted on a local wall which proclaimed Walton and Hersham ’69. This was in reference to the local amateur football team’s victory in the Athenian League in 1969 and with most of the message having faded away.

Although not as well remembered today as their contemporaries they still mustered considerable success with three of their albums – Tell Us The Truth, That’s Life and The Adventures of the Hersham Boys. Likewise there were some memorable Top of the Pops appearances in tandem with five Top Twenty hit singles in Angels With Dirty Faces, If The Kids Are United, Hurry Up Harry, Hersham Boys and Questions and Answers.

I have never really been able to make out whether the track Ulster from the first album was a comment on the zero-sum game of Northern Ireland violence or else a “pox on both your houses” commentary on the Troubles. Dismissed by some true believers as cartoon punks there was certainly nothing funny about the skinhead violence attracted to their live appearances - singer Pursey being certainly very vocal in condemnation of this both on and off-stage. While the sentiments of their lyrics may certainly sound politically incorrect today, this cannot detract from the longevity of the angst expressed.

All foreign feet down Oxford Street
Faces from places I've never been
All the shops and restaurants
Ask for money I haven't got
It’s just a fake - make no mistake
It’s a rip-off for you but a Rolls for them

There are two particular clips of Sham 69 that I think are utterly priceless. Firstly, on the Hersham Boys video it concludes with Pursey barn-dancing around with his “grandad” and an old grey-whiskered black dog. Something quite unlikely to have been replicated by Bono or Michael Stipe. Or Coldplay. The end of the video also includes footage of the band chanting the chorus of the song while gathered around the street sign at the entrance to Hersham itself. There is a little six-year-old blonde boy in shorts to their right skipping along in turn and “acting the goat” as they used to say in Belfast.

Then there is footage of an appearance on what I assume is Jim’ll Fix It with the guitarists thrashing away in the background while Jimmy Pursey elucidates the lyrics of the If The Kids Are United verses to a 12-year-old boy with all the mateyness of the best big brother in history. The studio audience of mums and dads and kids get into the spirit of things while at the song’s end the boy's brother – or twin – joins in on the chorus while a four year old girl sits inbetween clapping along in turn. This was certainly one of the coolest music clips I had seen since viewing Eddie Cochran playing C’mon Everybody for a group of American 12-year-old school children. Likewise one of the greatest moments of the British Class War.

Alike with the other great street punk band The Cockney Rejects, Sham 69’s frequently magnificent music seems now to come from a time as long ago and distant as Saturday afternoon wrestling on World of Sport with Les Kellett, Adrian Street and Kendo Nagasaki.

But at the same time - as grounded in the disaffection of alienated and fucked off working class youth in early post-industrial Britain - it does throw up questions as to why a sector of our population solely responsible for the humour, folk spirit and financial wealth of our country became so vilified to the point of rank caricature, dismissal and contempt.

Home Come The Heroes

2011-07-18T20:36:00.017+01:00

So once again one of Western Europe's most utterly unique political phenomena has arisen wherein the government and population of Northern Ireland have had their communal self-respect rescued by sportsmen and women. Golfers Darren Clarke, Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell have joined the ranks of George Best, Derek Dougan, David Healey, the World Cup football squads of 1982 and 1986, Joey Dunlop, the European Cup-winning Ulster rugby squad of 1999, Willie John McBride, Eddie Irvine, Alex Higgins, Dennis Taylor, Barry McGuigan, Wayne McCullough and Mary Peters. All Protestant and Catholic alike.

Hindsight is a very flexible quality as beautifully captured at the very end of the fourth of Graham Reid's "Billy" plays - Lorna. Norman Martin, as played by James Ellis, is now living in England with his second wife and looks back fondly to the old days in Donegall Road in Belfast - a time when his family life was overshadowed by his own drunkeness and brutal ways. Thinking of his daughter Lorna moving into a new property he wistfully reflects "It's empty tonight...I can see it, you know. Jasus, the nights I tramped up that wee street...or staggered and fell up it....there's no light on tonight". He finally concludes fondly that "we did some living in that wee street".

Fast forwarding to the summer of 2011 and the recent cross-community rioting in Belfast, we can safely say that the importance of our recent sporting achievements by individuals of such outstanding personal calibre is utterly beyond any over-sentimentalised qualification in terms of our national sense of rescued worth.

Three points are worth underscoring in turn with regard to the recent civil unrest in Northern Ireland. Firstly the value of saved human lives since the political resolution of 1998 must always overshadow the moral fractures of the peace process as regards demilitarisation and decommissioning delays, prisoner releases and continual interface unrest. The Troubles in Ulster were never going to come to closure with an Alliance First Minister and cabinet majority.

Secondly, by 2011 the fact remains that the vast majority of all the people of Ireland are now utterly cogniscent of the self-reinforcing, farcical and ridiculous bigotry that divided people with so much in common for so long. Likewise for the the kneejerk and insensitive mainland observations towards all the restless natives of Ireland too. That as no more magnificently lampooned than by the Starrett cartoon of Bernard Manning prefacing a joke with the line "There were these thick Paddies..." against a backdrop of such accused as O'Casey, Behan, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce and Synge.

Lastly, people in both the North and South of Ireland after twenty years of peace are certainly aware that beyond the conflict dynamics grounded on ethnicity, religion, politics, economics and nationality that violence and division were still underpinned to some degree by a passionate sense of belonging. So to recall the haunting words of Northern Ireland's last Prime Minister Brian Faulkner as head of the short-lived power-sharing Executive of 1974 when appealing for support against a background of widespread industrial and paramilitary disruption: "Today, I fear, we are the despair of our friends and the mockery of our enemies. Let us not plunge this country, which all of us love in our different ways, into a deepening and potentially disastrous conflict".

The Hidden Paths To Chaos

2011-07-18T14:44:00.020+01:00

When I was growing up some of comics I remember regularly reading were The Beano, Knockout, Krazy and Whizzer and Chips. In one of these there used to be a strip called Toad-in-the-Hole. It was basically about an English village that time forgot. So your average chirpy milkman or cheeky newspaper boy venturing into it - circa 1975 and looking for randy housewives - would be faced with loads of people in English Civil War-period costume and idiots dressed like Captain Hook or the Witchfinder General spouting Olde English riddles. In hindsight the idea was probably lifted totally from Catweazle. The name in turn being a cheeky wordplay on Cotswolds villages such as Stow-on-the-Wold or Moreton-in-Marsh.

It was revealed last week that three out of four newly created jobs in the UK last year were given to non-British nationals while in Boston in Lincolnshire one quarter of the population is now of non-British origin. One major newspaper commentator at the weekend did question why an extraordinary demographic change in such a thoroughly unlikely place was not given a higher news profile in light of a recent tragic accident there. Likewise how up to recent times locals would refer to inhabitants of other county towns and villages who settled in Boston - probably alike the inhabitants of Toad-in-the-Hole would - as "foreigners". This is very similar to a common phrase used in Northern Ireland to this day - "blow-ins".

So if one is lucky enough to get hold of one of the 25% of available job opportunities left in the UK, the Edvard Munch Memorial Personal Finance Calculator (available upon request from any high street bank - closed on Saturdays) needs to balance up you and the wife's stagnating salaries against hyperinflated mortgage payments, all domestic bills and insurances, reproduction of two lovely children incorporating tear-inducing child care and drama school fees, the non-sacrificial two holidays a year and motor car, upkeep of your often physically rotting period property, nasty travel costs since your company has moved out of Central New London for the benefit of their American shareholders, private healthcare and stratospheric outings for pensions and personal savings. And of course three lottery tickets a week alongside loads of wine for your Monday to Thursday evening speed bingeing.

Thank God that the digital porn revolution has knocked out the need for expenditure on Razzle, Knave or H and E Monthly magazines ever again anyway...

Steve Marrriott And The Small Faces - Filthy Rich

2011-07-15T20:50:00.016+01:00

And so another week comes to closure in our beloved archipelago home.

In the past few days the Irish Republic's credit rating has been formally downgraded from "junk" to "punk" status while reports on the country's immigration levels have produced literally jawdropping figures in light of the timespan within which such historic demographic change has come to pass in what was so recently one of Western Europe's most monocultural states.

Tonight at midnight on the British mainland in turn the wee ghost of the flat-capped, Woodbine-smoking, bare-footed and soot-encrusted Fleet Street newspaper boy will essentially be screaming out the horrors of the dread confluence of a vanishing British culture - just like the ITV series Disappearing World I watched as a kid in the Seventies in fact - with the worst nightmares of capitalist excess.

I have recently finished reading Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier's magnificent All Too Beautiful biography of Steve Marriott in the past few days. I easily rate this book alongside the very best in the genre such as Johnny Rogan's overview of Van Morrison and Ulster No Surrender , Jerry Hopkins' Elvis:The Final Years and the wonderful Dear Boy story of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher.

With the Small Faces' Decca and Immediate material now compiled together across several impressive compilations it is much easier to appreciate the electicism, power and wit of their musical output on such tracks as Shake, Sorry She's Mine, All Or Nothing, My Mind's Eye, Just Passing, Baby Don't You Do it, Tell Me (Have You Ever Seen Me), Green Circles, Get Yourself Together, I'm Only Dreaming, Tin Soldier, Afterglow, Song of a Baker, Rollin' Over and Donkey Rides A Penny A Glass.

Alike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1963 and 1965 in Belfast respectively - and The Who in Lisburn in 1966 - The Small Faces also played in Northern Ireland at the Ards Pop Festival in Newtownards on 5th July 1968. Support was from The Soul Foundation, Mystics and The Cousins. One must assume that the young people who attended were not otherwise mentally engaged in the mounting waves of political radicalism and reaction to the detriment of enjoying one of the greatest of all British rock groups live in County Down. Two days previously the Derry Housing Action Committee staged a sit-down protest during the opening of the Craigavon Bridge extension over the River Foyle leading to 17 arrests while three months to the day after the concert would come the fateful RUC reaction to another civil rights demonstration in Derry that can be seen as the second of the three defining moments when the Ulster Troubles commenced in earnest.

The Small Faces split up on the last night of 1968 during a concert at Alexandra Palace in North London and although the subsequent hard rock and blues of Humble Pie and The Faces alike have their attractions, it still remains an interesting counterfactual about how their music could have progressed had they had stayed together into the Seventies in their original lineup. This particularly so when listening to material as strong as the final Autumn Stone, Red Balloon or Call It Something Nice.

The group briefly reformed in the mid-Seventies though bass player Ronnie Lane only stayed for a re-recording of the Itchycoo Park single - Rick Wills replacing him for the two Playmates and 78 In The Shade albums. I have only heard the latter work which, while not wildy memorable, does contain some decent material and with Marriott still in fine voice.

Best of all, the final song of the final Small Faces album would be Filthy Rich with Marriott's Cockney music hall howling - alike that on Lazy Sunday, Rene or Happy Days Toytown - bringing their career to a wonderfully ribald, two-fingered and pisstaking closure.

The Small Faces music to this day casting timeless shadows from both a long lost London of the coolest modernist style to a vanished East End of utterly unique character.

I wish that I was famous like me best mates are
I'd build a dirty great house and have half a dozen cars
A private yacht with sunken baths
If I was filthy rich I'd build me own filthy bitch
She'd have elegance, class with Mitzi Gaynor's arse...
and Jane Mansfield's posthumous tits

The Boyne Water

2011-07-12T08:23:00.014+01:00

Today is the 321st anniversary of the victory of Prince William of Orange's armies over those of King James II at the Battle of the Boyne near Drogheda in the modern-day Irish Republic. Actually the military engagement itself took place on 11th July by the Gregorian calender and 1st July by the old-style Julian calender. The 1st of July 1916 in turn being the day of the 36th Ulster Division attack against the Schwaben Redoubt German lines north and south of the River Ancre at the start of the Battle of the Somme. The Ulster Division, which had been forged from Carson's orginal Ulster Volunteer Force and the Young Citizens Volunteer militia, were the only British forces on the day to meet their military objectives and suffered 5,500 killed, wounded or missing in casualties.

As every last child of school age in modern Britain knows - not - William's success on behalf of the Reformed faith ensured the continuation of the Protestant Ascendency in the British Isles and arguably the birth of modern British parliamentary democracy.

The overwhelming majority of people across the world who share feelings of goodwill towards all the people of Ireland would surely agree that the epilogue to the modern Ulster conflict must lie with former Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's extraordinarily moving closing comments in his May 2008 address at the battle site and in the prescence of then Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley:

"The past will remain important to us all. We cannot change what has gone before. We should not and must not forget our history. But as we gather on this famous battlefield, it is not history that concerns us now. It is the future. In the future, let us respect each other and our different identities. In the future, let us value each other and our rich traditions. In the future, let us understand each other and our shared history. Let us work together for all of the people of this island. Let us be reconciled with each other. Let us be friends. Let us live in peace."

At the same ceremony Paisley insisted that the killing times be ended forever while his wife Eileen recalled seeing Ireland from the window of a transtlantic flight from the United States:

"I wished I could swim for I would jump out and swim the rest of the way home to Ireland. It was so precious and so green and so fresh and so welcoming. It was home and that is the thing about home."

The past week has brought the sad news of the death of Alliance Party of Northern Ireland founder Sir Oliver Napier - one of the few politicians from the early Seventies who clearly grasped the fundamental interconnectivity between political conflict and political engagement in wartorn Ulster. One wonderful tribute made to him on the main Northern Ireland political blog would note: "I am surprised that someone says above they never saw him angry as he always came across on TV as permanently angry, like an extremely frustrated but dedicated schoolmaster trying to explain simple algebra to the densest members of the fourth form for the hundredth time."

As reflective of the sheer distance of time I find it of considerable interest how many of the major political actors from the earlier stages of the Troubles and of Paisley's generation are now deceased. Alongside Napier these include Northern Ireland Prime Ministers Terence O'Neill, James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner; British Prime Ministers Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan; Irish Taoiseachs Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Charles Haughey and Garrett Fitzgerald; Northern Ireland Secretaries of State William Whitelaw, Francis Pym, Merlyn Rees and Humphrey Atkins; Irish politicians Connor Cruise O'Brien and Neil Blaney; leading Ulster Unionists Harry West, Jim Kilfedder, Enoch Powell, William Craig and Northern Nationalist leaders Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin.

The same applies for many of the higher profile paramiltaries of the early Seventies such as Republicans Sean Mac Stiofain, Daithi O Conaill, Maire Drumm, Billy McMillen and Seamus Twomey. Likewise for Loyalists John McKeague, Charles Harding Smith, Billy Mitchell, Sammy Smyth and Tommy Herron. Several of these individuals dieing in violent circumstances.

Today here in modern London when I consider this annual celebration in Northern Ireland and Scotland of the indestructible bonds of history and heritage across the Irish Sea - and with regard to a shared Britishness that often no longer exists in a Britain that is also practically extinct -it truly does seem like an eternity ago when, during the Twelfth celebrations in the Belfast of the appallingly violent first few years of the Troubles, literally every Protestant home in the city would appear to be flying a Union flag or Ulster flag during this period of July. In those days Orange Order membership in Northern Ireland was an extraordinary 60,000 strong and the crowds watching the parades were enormous.

In fact - all political qualifications aside, if that is at all possible of course, and without even interfacing at all with the poet John Hewitt's observations about the complex construct of Northern Irish Protestant identity in its British, Irish and Ulster constituents - the more we progress through our own troubled, disconnected and alienating times I honestly can barely believe that that kind of broad-based cultural display of British identity ever happened anywhere at all in these islands.

What A Bloody Environment For A Man Of Imagination

2011-07-09T15:09:00.028+01:00

The above quotation is from the late Joseph Tomelty - the Northern Irish actor who starred in the movies Moby Dick and A Kid For Two Farthings and was the author of many works such as the novel Red Is The Port Light, the play All Soul's Night and the classic Ulster radio comedy The McCooeys which provided James Young with his commercial breakthrough. He was also the former father-in-law of Sting. These immortal words are enshrined on the ground of the Writer's Square facing St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast city centre.

I was reading about Tomelty this weekend with regard to Carol Reed's classic Odd Man Out film starring James Mason as an IRA man on the run in late Forties Belfast and in which he also starred. The movie attracted attention from contemporary censors because of the violent content and was certainly a brave attempt at that time to analyse the complex dynamics of political violence. The Irish Republican Army's S-Plan of 1939-40 having entailed a bombing campaign on the mainland which killed five people in Coventry in August 1939 and for which two Irishmen were subsequently hung at Birmingham Prison.

Some extraordinarily insightful pieces of British social history have been published over the past decade that raise similarly interesting question marks about the political and economic state of our nation in the 35 years after World War Two.

It can now be clearly seen that the swinging reforms on abortion, sexuality, censorship, divorce and capital punishment were running well ahead of what was still a deeply conservative British society in the mid-Sixties. Likewise that life during the Seventies was - unless you were in Studio 3 of BBC Television Centre watching The Sweet, Mud, Sparks, The Glitter Band or The Wombles miming to their latest hit record while eating a packet of Spangles or Rancheros - essentially pretty shit. I eagerly await analysis of the complex and insidious developments of the subsequent three decades that have left our society in such toxic, demented and irreversible straits.

If there was a moment in recent years however when I did fall back on some residual hope for the valiant life spirit our once great country it was during a recent trip to Northern Ireland. Normally every weekend when buying my Saturday morning paper here in New London I receive not a single recognition from the female shop assistant for my relatively upbeat weekend demeanour and friendly informality.

In Ulster by contrast I recently bought a copy of the national university's rag magazine in the local newsagent - the said publication full of the ubiquitous dirty jokes and soft-core sexual images. On returning the following morning to buy my Sunday newspaper I was met by the cheery greeting from the same newsagent "So were you abusing yourself over that yesterday then?"

GUBU-UK

2011-07-07T20:19:00.021+01:00

Some of the most moving public commentaries ever to be found on media platforms following the death of a major celebrity were the tributes left in honour of George Best back in November 2005.

These ranged from an old Belfast neighbour now living in New Zealand who remembered a solitary eight-year-old boy kicking a football around the field near Burren Way one cold Christmas Day morning - while wearing a conspiciously new pair of football boots - to a gentleman who recalled an Amsterdam bar bursting into applause when word of his death was transmitted on satellite television.

Two months ago a major British publisher produced an outstandingly vile book by a former journalist who had been obliged to act as George Best's chaperone on behalf of her tabloid employer. She was thus ideally placed to document the final bender into oblivion of the infamous wife-beating alcoholic Junior Orangeman. The writer also openly claimed that when she met the former footballer she had no idea about his personal history.

The frontpiece of this book disingenuously describes it as a "tender and beautifully written account of a unique relationship" while Tony Parson's backpiece plug assures us that we will love George Best all the more for having read it. In reality of course it was objectionable to Best's memory, to his surviving family and to the millions of people whose lives he touched positively across the world. Everybody involved in the commissioning and publication of this book should be utterly ashamed. Equally contemptuous was the raft of glowing reviews the terribly well-connected authoress received across the board from journalists and journalist buddies so obviously blind to the blatant qualifications attendant to the life and death of one of our great national heroes.

Now, less than two months on from this new low in British publishing, has come a phone hacking scandal which is due to bring the News of the World's 168 year history to closure this Sunday. In this instance the ethical misbehaviour involved invading the privacy of British families bereaved across the full remit of human loss - from soldiers murdered by the Taliban to the schoolgirl victims of sex killers.

The lexicon of the English language in this instance provides no suitable categorisation for such rank immorality - and all in the brave and noble cause of a shrinking commercial market.

So, following completion of Eamonn Sweeney's magnificent Down Down Deeper And Down social history of the Irish Republic in the Seventies and Eighties, let me fall back on Conor Cruise O'Brien's legendary acronymn for the crimes and misdemeanours of Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey at the time - Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented.

But A Short Time To Live

2011-07-05T20:48:00.012+01:00

One of the few relatively inoffensive films within the remit of mondo cinema was 1967's The London Nobody Knows directed by Norman Cohen and narrated by the late James Mason. Thankfully this short documentary is devoid of any of the horrendous animal abuse so often associated with the genre apart from some goldfish placed temporarily in a cistern within a Holborn public lavatory for historical accuracy.

The feature included scenes of the Spitalfields district, a derelict theatre, Islington and Edgware Road street markets, pie and mash shops and the swinging Kings Road alongside haunting images of meths-drinking alcoholics and residents of a Salvation Army hostel.

It also includes footage of Kensal Green Cemetery in West London. The rotting, broken and desecrated gravestones and tombs of the aristocrat, military leader, leading businessman, merchant banker and colonial government official alike all displaying the fateful evidence of the fearful march of time.

Such melancholic juxtaposition can of course be observed in the major graveyards of any major British city. The industrial and civic elite of Victorian Belfast can be found interred in Clifton Street Cemetery whose immediate environs must surely have ranked as possibly the most dangerous place in the whole of Northern Ireland during the Troubles in terms of risk to life and limb in the hours of darkness. The cross-denominational City Cemetery on the Falls Road meanwhile was out of bounds to many surviving relatives for most of the conflict's duration.

During the weekend I ventured into one of the "Magnificent Seven" London cemeteries encircling the inner part of the city. In the course of a mere 40 minute visit I witnessed at least eight male loiterers hanging around with the same surreptitious intent as Euronaturists walking slowly along the summer shoreline eagerly analysing the shell life underfoot. I would also observe at least one comatose or possibly dead male figure on the grass near the exit, an individual immersed in deep meditation or a catatonic state of mental collapse behind the chapel and a fellow wheelchair-bound lost soul scrawling electrocardiogram shapes in his notebook while in front of one dark gothic grave.

The middle pathway of the cemetery was at one point being utilised by a five-strong group of actors/arseholes loudly proclaiming their dramatic lines to all and sundry and with the male contibutors shuffling along like zombies. The certain otherness in the air even fed down to the aggressive grey squirrels around and about and the two crows kicking the shit out of each other on the ground.

There was a major sports stadium right beside the grounds and the eternal Heathrow flight path overhead. Several disconnected and well-heeled local mothers pushed their prams through the environment - all so utterly oblivious to their cultural surroundings that they may as well have been walking through the Battle of Mons or the Beirut Green Line.

With no noticeable ground staff in attendance in turn it was - in particular consideration of the large percentage of the interred that had perished while on active military service - a uniquely appropriate New London resting place for all those who died for an older or better Britain.

The Value Of Nothing

2011-07-03T12:45:00.020+01:00

And so it came to pass that a senior government minister has now directly alluded to the fact that since the English language is dead easy - what with no stupid genders for nouns, nightmarish diphthongs or irritating accents - that everybody in the world seems to have come to live in South East England and hence the chosen few who hit the property boom jackpot have been checkmated by the realisation that their children are unlikely to ever secure paid employment.

In turn such encouragement to positively discriminate in favour of our own citizenry has been met by a cutting observation from the head of the British Chambers of Commerce that this may not be possible since our graduate pool apparently consists of lazy, unemployable and semi-literate eejits. Furthermore "...when you have these bright young Eastern Europeans who really want to work and have very good customer service skills then employers are going to turn to them - and quite right."

Obviously blanket generalisation makes the world go around but the aggressive behavior I witnessed from a similarly constituted group of bright young people on Friday night at a major London park would certainly fall outside such a glowing remit - and I say that having grown up in the global capital of anti-social behaviour in the Seventies. I remember once as a teenager getting on board a Belfast Citybus and noticing a crowd of hoods on the back seats. Hastily grabbing a place near the front and studiously observing the fascinating street life outside the window - alike other passengers - the tense atmosphere would subsequently be racked up a tad with an observation from the Droog leader that "It's too quiet in here". Low cunning certainly being not utterly bereft of a certain intelligence and dark wit.

Having said that the most actuely anti-social behaviour I witnessed growing up was without doubt that of my first year maths teacher whose physical size and malevolent prescence overshadowed our lives. This gentleman had acquired a nickname from either the famous late Fifties cowboy character Bronco Lane or else an early Seventies TV movie detective Bronk as portrayed by Jack Palance. Period after period of lessons would pass in silence while he awaited an answer to some question that everybody had long forgotten. He would sneer at all us 12-year-olds about the purgatorial future that would await any individual without a maths O level. A sickly smile playing across his face alike the Louis Tussauds figures I remember from the Isle of Man waxworks in the Seventies and the Chamber of Horrors therein - smirking and sneering SS men removing prisoners' fingernails, whipping them with barbed wire or jackbooting them to death. A common refrain he would use to generalise upon our utter uselessness as a group would be that we were nothing more than "nuisance values."

Most obviously the leadership of Britain is suddenly realising that a nation without borders, and where every citizen is made to feel like a "nuisance value" through waking up every morning to draw breath and then expecting financial renumeration for a day's work, does not a happy country make.

The Price Of Everything

2011-07-01T09:38:00.031+01:00

In the golden dawn of the Ulster peace process - during the first decade of the century - the rank evil of sectarianism was briefly supplanted by that of the foulest racism. One gable wall in loyalist Mid Ulster would apparently bear the legend The Chinese Are The New Taigs. Or something equally appalling. During the death of the previous Pontiff another urban scribe had implored all of the Orange tribe to Fuck The Next Pope on the wall of a major Belfast commuter thoroughfare. Last year I was talking to a gay friend and commenting on how sexuality seemed to be of zero consequence now within most social circles in modern London. He replied that "It's only because everybody has found something better to hate".

And thus this summer the chief focus of national animosity would appear to veer between the nation of Greece on one hand and the public sector workers on the other - as linked by the communal fear of your average Briton ending up in a pauper's grave after forty five years hard work and five in retirement as a Big Issue seller. Alike many other tourists, the sleek wonderfulness of the Athens Metro did indeed ring some alarm bells in my mind on seeing it three years ago while from my own perspective of private sector employment such matters as pensions, bonuses, inflation-linked payrises, benefits, career progression or even job advertisements with accompanying salaries are already matters of ancient history in our island home.

As always however, the reality gap within toxic Britain remains at its most concentrated as regards the property market. The core faultline running through this dark malignity being that while inward investment from spooky developing countries to the East may well have lifted the entire market in an upwards trajectory it cannot disguise the fact that it has not been accompanied by any notable infrastructural changes for the better in its lower nine-tenths. Hence two days ago when a news feature considered Britain's cheapest property in a terraced street in Burnley there was not a solitary appreciation of the million and one better ways to spend your £10,000 than acquiring something as aesthetically pleasing as genital warts on your honeymoon night.

The disunity within the UK workforce in terms of sharing risk may of course be the result of well-worn and insidious divide and rule manipulation from dreaded player-actors above. In turn the inability of market forces in the property sector to be tempered by a national depression is already bucking all historical economic logic and hence cannot continue into perpetuity. Taken together however - and as projecting against some idealised balance for the future of Great Britain as a thriving North West European democracy - our very everyday reality now seems to be fracturing and dissolving into the purest and most instinctual forces of human selfishness, envy and greed.

Upon such foundations shall a Big Society be created.

Golden Years

2011-06-29T11:52:00.027+01:00

And so with Blue Peter’s final transmission from Television Centre our national broadcasting organisation makes a defining emotional break from its London hub. TVC will thus shortly join Alexandra Palace, Lime Grove, Woodlands, Television Theatre and Windmill Road in the civil service history books.

The Blue Peter garden shall be concreted over to prevent a second desecration from unfriendly locals, the tea bars locked up forever like high category prisons turned into living museums while the grave of Sir Basil Brush will be disinterred from the “The Ring” prior to reburial in Media City Salford. Famous producers Piers Parsnips and Bunty Braithwaite await their first Jobclub interview on Monday morning in lifestyle interfaces they did not even know existed on this side of the Iron Curtain while never again will the West London catchment area of employment be rewarded with such rich pickings from a local business.

A Northern bard once acerbically noted “When you want to live - how do you start, where do you go, who do you need to know?” The glory days of industrial lifering may now be capped by internships, contract work and plummeting deference from the Great British post-working class to any terrestrial television output from our learned betters. Yet rest assured the power of nepotism, background and political correctness is unlikely to be undermined by any publicly-spirited or indeed publicly-funded geographical relocation in this instance.

Oil Drum Lane Dialectics

2011-06-21T11:27:00.031+01:00

During the initial few months of the current Conservative-Lib Dem coalition here in the United Kingdom there was a considerable amount of analysis in the media harking back to the Edward Heath government of the early Seventies. This by way of comparisons to the ghastly circumstances leading to the arrival of Selsdon Man at the Palace of Westminster in 1970 or the equally appalling state of industrial relations at the time of his or its electoral defeat four years later.

Two of the greatest of all British social commentators - Albert and Harold Steptoe - reflected upon the state of the nation in depth in the 1974 Back in Fashion episode of Steptoe and Son. In the useless shite-enclosed yard at Oil Drum Lane Harold pretends to be a po-faced BBC newsreader while reflecting upon the surety of a right-wing government to come alongside the introduction of curfew restrictions, the showtrial of Harold Wilson, the "disappearance" of Tony Benn, Barbara Castle's suicide while in private hospital and the military defeat of the TUC at the hands of the Royal Navy. Another commentary in this segment of the episode was as politically correct as giving a modern-day seven-year-old a Sven Hassel paperback for his or her birthday. Or indeed my old work colleague's dismissive commentary upon the corporate mindset underpinning semi-compulsory after-hours workplace team bonding - "Softball is for bisexuals".

Still, for all the plebian horror of mid-Seventies Shepherd's Bush, Brook Green and Hammersmith it was nice to see a glimpse in the programme of a society where people had at least one other interest apart from the value of their property or the secure status of their elderly parents' Dignitas booking. Even if that was just football and smoking - or of course sectarianism in Belfast and Glasgow.

The Seventies, for all the myriad problems of the time, are so halcyon in contrast to today's national meltdown that they may as well consist of a decade-long loop of Mike Batt dancing with Pans People to Summertime City.

Earlier this week I was reading and listening to some of Alan Watt's Zen reflections. Alongside incredibly moving commentary on death and the philosophical limitations of the "I" identity he managed to capture in three mere minutes the rank lunacy of not living for the moment. In modern London in contrast I know not a single soul who is living for the moment, is in a position to live for the moment or even knows anybody else pulling this magical trick off.

The growing degree of user generated content on news websites that suggest that at least a considerable percentage of the British population has completely sussed out the lunacy of property hyperinflation - as relating to future societal stability for everybody who is not an estate agent - does not override the fact that current lifestyle imbalances are firmly rooted in a bed of national selective amnesia and unselective idiocy alike. A fortnight ago a close friend - who works in what 100% of the country would consider a middle class profession - noted to me how the highlight of his weekend had consisted of a Sunday afternoon stroll down to public plastic recycling facilities in the knowledge that he could not even afford a pint of ale in transit. And also that while about to emark on such a journey he heard some cunt on Radio 4 reflecting on the demise or otherwise of the British food renaissance.

This of course is similar to the property features in weekend newspaper supplements singing the praises of some filthy outer London suburban griefhole that is without doubt awaiting cast-iron guaranteed medium-term gentrification along the lines of Notting Hill and Shoreditch. The only current selling point in the meantime being its ten minute proximity by bus to another larger urban warzone that happens to have some train or tube connection.

I could of course go on and on about this into inifinity but in conclusion I still pinpoint the breaking point for this country's historic shift into utter madness to the period when male grown ups starting reading fucking Harry Potter books on public transport without fear of ridicule or verbal abuse.

Ulster 71

2011-06-19T16:48:00.019+01:00

I watched a television programme last night that had originally transmitted on BBC Northern Ireland on the opening day of the now almost forgotten Ulster 71 festival at Stranmillis Embankment in Belfast. In part it was redolent of Telly Savalas' infamous travelogues for Birmingham, Portsmouth and Aberdeen and in regard to one of the most ill-timed public events in history after the 1940 Tokyo Olympics.

Half the population of Northern Ireland attended between May and September 1971 - including the author - but of course it was a controversial decision to go ahead with the exhibition in light of how the security situation at the time was devolving. It was essentially a celebration of Ulster history and its industrial heritage on the fiftieth anniversary of the Northern Ireland state and was the biggest of its ilk in scale since The Festival of Britain. There were demonstrations against its opening by Republican supporters, the introduction of internment without trial took place during August 1971 and Stormont itself was prorogued six months after the exhibition closed.

The theme of the festival was "By Our Skills We Live" and the promotional programme incorporated some of the entertainment on hand such as James Young, Gloria Hunniford and some go-go dancers. A "Tunnel of Hate" section attempted to invert the wall sloganeering of the time with the use of graffiti against sectarianism, poverty and racism and as alongside other positive empowerments such as "Remember The Pensioners". Noises of street conflict and riot provided the soundtrack in the background.

I have seen three other pieces of online footage in the past few days that emphasise the extraordinary scale of social change in Ulster. There was a heartbreaking Northern Ireland Tourist Board clip from the turn of the Fifties into the Sixties which essentially displayed a completely and utterly extinguished cultural and physical landscape. Then an overview of Belfast cinemas of yesteryear that have likewise disappeared in their entirety. The clip showed the long gone ABC and New Vic in Great Victoria Street – once the Hippodrome and the Ritz. In one of these I saw my very first X-rated movie – George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead twinned with The Great British Striptease in support. The latter feature had Bernard Manning as compere. Dear God.

Finally there was cine-footage from the 1974 Twelfth of July Orange Order marches in East and South Belfast. All the usual political qualifications aside it was fascinating by way of the sheer folk spectacle of so many participants and spectators alike -which indeed would be latterly noted by Irish writer Dervla Murphy in her A Place Apart travelogue - and seeing the now extinguished historical fusion of Orange culture and Ulster Protestant identity across the class divide. One public comment attached to the clip would underscore the distance of time itself by noting: "just looking through and seeing some of the faces...dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead...1976 was a long time ago.”

From the perspective of early summer 2011 in turn - and what with the revival of Republican and Loyalist youth intifada in Belfast interface areas this very week - Ulster 71 may seem an awful long time ago too but the echoes from the "Tunnel of Hate" have certainly proved more durable than anything those terribly clever civil servants, PR and marketing men or designers could ever have then imagined.

Far Away Fields Are Green

2011-06-19T16:47:00.009+01:00

From the time that I was old enough to read true classics of British children's literature such as the Oor Wullie and The Broons Christmas annuals my mother told me that "faraway fields are green". Alike later advice to my sneering and wankerish adolescent self to think about "getting a job in a bank" she was unequivocally and utterly correct in hindsight. London may throw up a world of creative and aesthetic possibilities for those with time and money to spare but the quality of life now is truly questionable in the extreme for everybody else.

At my first job at the end of the Eighties here I met a young Englishman who I will call Roger because that was his name. He was an English language teacher in Spain but decided to return to the capital for one last go at making it "work". He was highly intelligent, upper middle-class, well read, humorous, affable and attuned to a raft of New Age alternatives from vegetarianism to Gurdjieff to yoga. Roger's spiritual immolation at the brutal hands of prototype-New London in the 13 week period leading up to Christmas 1987 was very tangible to observe though in that period he did make interesting comments on the future shock ahead for this city. None moreso than when he looked at the first edition of the London Evening Standard's glossy supplement for the ueber-rich and dismissively hurled it across the office as if he had picked up a chilled used condom or Portuguese Man of War jellyfish tentacle.

Roger also quoted Van Morrison lyrics to me that I subsequently can source to three particulary magnificent songs - Astral Weeks, You Don't Pull No Punches But You Don't Push The River and Alan Watt's Blues. Shortly before his re-emigration to Madrid on Christmas Eve of that very year, Roger told me that one December morning he was waiting at a bus stop in South London daydreaming to himself when the ubiquitous white van passenger pulled alongside and commented directly into his face "What are you looking at ...you stupid fuck". This being the quality of indigenous British citizen we have allowed to walk away - unequivocally forever - in recent decades.

That in turn reminds me of a midnight moment some years back when going along Camden High Street in New London looking for a cash dispenser. It was like walking through the Battle of Stalingrad except back then the very dogs of that city used to swim the Volga to safety overnight. In traversing the scumscape of rubbish, spunk, phlegm, minicabs, drugs, grime, dog's dirt, piss, nightbuses, miniskirts, rain, threat, cardboard, hamburgers, VD, vomit and hordes upon hordes of Euroteens and twentysomethings "living the dream" I do clearly remember observing to my partner that "At least in Belfast when I was growing up we KNEW it was shit".

That Was The Week That Was

2011-06-17T10:02:00.006+01:00

I was part of that Sixties and Seventies generation of children in this country who could be found on Sunday evenings religiously attempting to record music off Radio One onto a cumbersome portable tape recorder. I found some of these knackered and unplayable cassettes a while ago and according to my handwritten scrawl they had consisted of utterly random material. Stuff like Fox's Only You Can, Sailor's Glass of Champagne, Chris Hill's Renta Santa, Barry Brigg's Sideshow and the David Parton version of Isn't She Lovely.

Life in Britain now week after week is likewise offering up a literal Top Twenty rundown of decay, dislocation and dementia. Over the past seven days alone we have heard of a Doncaster security guard attempting to remove a wart on his finger with a shotgun blast and unsurprisingly removing the same offending digit in doing so, seen pictures of HMS Invincible being broken up into pieces at a Turkish rag and bone yard and the British Broadcasting Corporation announce that Television Centre is up for sale. The gall this raises within me at the very thought of this historic building - and icon of national broadcasting - falling into the hands of high street retailers is only offset by the conviction that the original architectural design would lend itself magnificently to a 24 hour mega-garage to service the big shopping centre across the road.

Reports this week also mentioned that no less than one in every one hundred Slovakians lives in New London and that there may be some significant financial influence in the mix from the direction of New China as to why nobody can afford to buy property in the capital anymore even with a major lottery win. The same situation applying apparently to other desirable cities in North America and Australasia.

The BBC also decided to show the final moments of one very brave gentleman's life in a documentary on voluntary euthanasia presented by writer Terry Pratchett. Forging beyond the rights and wrongs of the debate itself I do question whether we needed to see this individual directly on camera as he desperately pleaded for water following the intake of fatal toxins. The Swiss attendant firmly restrained him from doing so - as was both her practical and salaried duty - but having to witness a final act of basic instinct and drive in one human's mortal existence was certainly of questionable taste.

Returning to the Seventies, the Loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster in the early part of the decade borrowed the name of the globally franchised children's programme Romper Room as a grim monicker for their shebeens turned torture chambers and murder dens. Black humour can mask all sorts of desperation and directionlessness - as is now the case with Britain and its everyday usage as a way to retain communal and personal sanity - but I still wish all this could be happening in somebody else's country.

Critical Mass - The Ulster Defence Regiment

2011-06-14T09:36:00.009+01:00

One Ulster Television advertisement from the very early Seventies sticks in my mind every bit as much as George Best's plug for Cookstown family sausages or the recommendation to drink Nambarrie Tea. It centred around a call for membership of the Ulster Defence Regiment - the locally recruited branch of the British Army that replaced the Ulster Special Constabulary in 1970 and would be merged with the Royal Irish Rangers as the Royal Irish Regiment in 1992 after over two controversial decades of active military service.

If I can remember correctly the advertisement showed a random motorist being stopped by a UDR patrol and asked for identifiation and access to the vehicle for searching. The understandably peeved driver squirms with annoyance at this ridiculous delay - while muttering such asides as "Could you not be out catching some terrorists for a change?" etc - before a stentorian voice from the rear proclaims "Sarge, we've found a weapon".

The resolution of the Ulster Troubles by way of the Good Friday Agreement was of course flawed in many respects. In the same way the acceptance of the broad framework of peace by the Northern Irish and Irish public would be of much more historical note than the ingenuity of the political construct itself. However it does seem that certain matters still stubbornly fall outside the remit of post-conflict re-analysis and this none moreso than the role of the UDR.

This week a memorial statue to the regiment was erected in Lisburn and, alike many people who were direct victims of terrorist violence in Ulster, I also am inclined to agree that their positive role within the limitation of Troubles violence is extremely overlooked.

The Irish writer Kevin Myers described the Ulster Troubles as "a seventeenth-century religious conflict bottled in a late twentieth-century industrial decline". I personally feel that the outbreak of conflict was gauged upon positive social change and negative economic retraction alike interfacing with appalling political misjudgements. And that in a society where religion was not the overarching cause of conflict but essentially a mark of ethnic identity. The resultant mess was the equivalent of throwing a bucket of hot goose fat over a burning chip pan.

The State therefore would cease to exist for the Catholic community in 1969 and for the Protestant community in turn three years later. Within that vaccuum paramilitarism would flourish across the religious divide and many ordinary citizens feel compelled to volunteer for part-time military and policing duties. Unparallelled political reappraisals took place during this period too from Connor Cruise O'Brien's clinical dissection of Irish nationalism to William Craig's violent political rhetoric as the head of the Ulster Vanguard movement.

The reason why the tensions and divisions of Seventies Ulster did not terminate in open civil war and repartition was, in my opinion, due in largest measure to the blessed fact that the small geographical size of Northern Ireland allowed the country to be literally swamped with security forces.

Those people who joined the UDR - overwhelmingly from the Protestant community because of Republican paramilitary intimidation of potential Catholic recruits - put themselves at incredible risk during their off-duty civilian life. The deaths of all the 260 serving or former UDR soldiers who were murdered during the conflict are related in David McKittrick's Lost Lives and make for grim reading. Around 500 other members were seriously injured in terrorist attacks.

As the main focus of Republican criticism of British security policy in Ulster, the UDR did indeed have an image problem as related to the activities of a minority of its membership. However the sheer scale of individuals who served in the regiment during its existence make blanket condemnation ludicrous in consideration of other civic, religious, political, military, paramilitary and financial organisations in modern British and Irish history which could provide similar qualitative examples of deeply immoral behaviour but easily surpass that in terms of numbers involved.

During the unveiling of the statue, showing a male and female member on duty at a checkpoint, the Trust chairman noted: "It was unfortunate that there were members who did bad things and we're not trying to hide that....but what we would say is that there's almost 50,000 people who didn't do bad things - who did good things, who were ordinary decent people who wanted to do the best they could for their country."

In turn a poster on a Belfast newspaper website this week stressed how in hindsight, even as a liberal critic of the regiment at the time and as somebody fiercely against paramilitarism, that the UDR's role in peacekeeping has been criminally undervalued. He would also note in turn how the choreography of the conflict's endgame mirrored radical changes in paramilitary, policing and military structures whereas the earlier phasing out of the UDR prior to 1994 has left its reputation in some form of historical limbo.

I have always understood that the Irish peace process is inclusive of all parties to conflict and hence must be similarly cognisant of the raw dynamics which underpinned service in the UDR by the vast majority of its law abiding membership. Within a demographic as politically aware, astute and sophisticated as Nationalist Ireland - and with the British monarch having recently having paid homage to Republican icons such as James Connolly, Padraig Pearse and Liam Lynch - then reconsideration of the UDR's role is surely not a bridge too far in terms of final closure upon the Ulster Troubles.

As for most British people on the mainland, the UDR is nothing more than a forgotten part of a forgotten conflict that warranted little engagement at the time provided it remained on the other side of the murky and radioactive Irish Sea. However that still does not negate the fact that the British people will certainly not see the like of the men and women of the Ulster Defence Regiment ever again. That as a body forged from citizen volunteers and in terms of pure loyalty, bravery and selflessness.

They represent in no small measure another closing chapter in the history of the United Kingdom.

The Future Holds The Most Terrible Adventure Of All

2011-06-12T22:29:00.007+01:00

The first volume of Dominic Sandbrook's social history of Britain in the Sixties references a July 1963 collection of essays on British society entitled Suicide of a Nation. Hungarian-born editor Arthur Koestler - who would in fact commit suicide with his wife in the early Eighties - noted in the introduction that "the cult of amateurishness and the contempt in which proficiency and expertise are held, breed mediocrats by natural selection: the too-keen, the too-clever-by-half, are unfit for survival and eliminated from the race to which the last to pass the post is the winner."

Nearly 20 years later, in April 1982, the Alan Clark diaries include the following observation with regard to the approaching conflict in the South Atlantic: "If we are going to go, I feel let us go out in a blaze - then we can all sit back and comfortably become a nation of pimps and ponces, a sort of Macao to the European continent". Most Britons over the age of forty will no doubt feel the burning acidic pain of both statements keenly with regard to all that has come to pass and the lack of any organic balance remaining in our country.

I recently have seen pictures of conurbations in the English home counties that were stunningly picturesque up to the late Sixties but now resemble the remains of a visitation from fleets of aggressive Martian town planners. Armed with blockbuster bombs of hellfire and shit. Yesterday in London I walked through an area studded with the blue plaques of intellectual giants of global reknown such as Plath, Yeats and Engels but where the uniquely British Class War has now descended to local hostelries to the extent that ordering a pint feels like begging for a scrap of gristle from his Lordship's table.

We have a world of work now where most employment websites contain nothing but internships and the only natural way to circumvent this madness would apparently be by becoming an internship co-ordinator. We live in a country where upper middle class broadsheet commentators endlessly discuss the way the word "chav" denigrates the working class whereas the entire construct of working class identity has actually been beyond classification for well over a decade in the United Kingdom anyway. As any person born in a British working class community from the Forties to the Seventies knows full well.Today too we have under-13-year-old females being pampered in an Essex beauty salon specifically geared to this demographic whereas when I was in primary school in the mid-Seventies the wee girls were still singing skipping songs about Diana Dors whose cinematic career had peaked two decades previously.

And then last week we had Germaine Greer reflecting from her academic Shangri La on the fact that the last solitary and residual piece of national pride we have left - our armed forces - are constituted of course by thousands of potential rapists.

I wonder if anybody is in Brussels, Bruges or Antwerp tonight pondering over similar kinds of downright lunatic reflections about post-war Belgium?

Come To Ulster

2011-06-09T20:32:00.004+01:00

The Smithfield Market and Gresham Street area of central Belfast is now a mere sex shop-pockmarked shell of the shell it already was when I was growing up in the late Seventies and early Eighties. The apparently fantastic market itself had been destroyed in a terrorist bombing at an early stage of the Troubles.

I do remember though going into the pet shop back then and seeing an elderly and uncuddly simian creature huddled up in the fireplace behind the counter. On one occasion it was possibly smoking a roll-up but this could be my memory playing tricks on me. Further on up the street was the brilliant Harry Hall's second hand book shop with a wide range of volumes for sale including a particularly good Irish history selection I recall - many of antiquarian note. There was also a well-thumbed pile of second hand jazz mags for purchase by any interested gentleman peruser. Around the corner in turn was the alternative Just Books with a notice displayed prominently in the window stating that it reserved the right to refuse to serve anybody in uniform. I honestly wonder how your typical posh female style or travel writer could spin this kind of funky street life within modern day weekend supplements?

On one Belfast forum a while back somebody was recalling his days working in the area in the Seventies as a delivery driver. He remembered once having to park his goods vehicle into a particularly awkward space. When hailing a passing old age pensioner for assistance with the plea “Watch me reverse?” he was met with the reply “Why…do you think you’re good at it?”

In recent posts I have mentioned both George Best and James Young. When Best was on ITV's 1982 World Cup panel there was one moment during the programming when they showed a video of one of the Northern Ireland campaign songs for the tournament in Spain – Yer Man by Sammy Mackie. This entertainer – who performed in the guise of a typical fan and behaved like a plebian imbecile - made Ally’s Tartan Army singer Andy Cameron sound like a particularly young, fragile and wistful Nick Drake. On completion of the atrocity, and on returning to the studio, presenter Brian Moore awaited Best’s feedback. With not a solitary indication of cultural discomfort Best casually replied “Sure they’re all like that over there”.

As for James Young, I remember being told once how he absolutely loved to embarrass latecomers to his Group Theatre shows. One night while in full flow during the opening monologue a couple entered the auditorium and made their way to their seats. Young, on spotting the new arrivals and the fact that the gentleman was balding, joked “How are you doin’ Curly?” to be met with the witty rejoinder “Go and fuck yourself”.

Life is never easy on an ethnic frontier but rain and bigotry and everything aside….it wasn’t the worst place in the world.

Stuart Adamson - Open Sound

2011-06-08T23:55:00.009+01:00

I was lucky enough to catch a few of the major punk and New Wave groups live in concert at the time though deeply regret missing the only Belfast concert by The Skids in October 1980. The impenetrable vocals may have had the same esoteric quality that required subtitling on Peter Mullan’s extraordinary Neds movie but they produced a mighty and utterly original sound all the same. Their particular legend will essentially grow and grow.

In comparison the musical output of guitarist Stuart Adamson’s subsequent Big Country has been qualified in hindsight both by the questionable fashion styling of the Eighties and some terribly mis-produced material in their mid-career period. Nevertheless their two original albums The Crossing and Steeltown incorporated genuinely universal themes of maintaining self-respect and hope in the middle of struggle and deflation. Likewise Big Country produced a vital, worthy and contemporary commentary on the violent and brutal death of industrial Britain - surely the single most important historical factor underpinning the self-perpetuating social meltdown of today and the staggering disconnectivity with the recent past we can sense nowhere moreso than in our national capital. Having seen them live on five occasions across the British Isles I feel to this day that they were also the greatest live act of the Eighties.

Adamson’s December 2001 suicide has unequivocally cast an unbearably sad shadow across some of his later songs such as You Dreamer, Alone, Dive Into Me and particularly My Only Crime. Still the first overview of his career last year from Allan Glen, despite causing some considerable ructions within the residual fanbase, is a long overdue study of a hugely important figure in British popular music and an artist whose work truly deserves reappraisal.

Stuart Adamson certainly had huge pride in his own roots within both the Celtic littoral of the United Kingdom and industrial Britain alike. Hence when The Skids were asked by a record company at one point for the title for a forthcoming compilation he replied “There's no argument over what it's called. It'll be called Dunfermline - or it won't be released “.

Such words of faith, passion and a true belonging have all but disappeared now from our British folk memory.

Hanging Around

2011-06-07T22:59:00.004+01:00

At the end of last month we had some hushed confirmation of radical demographic changes in the UK - as directly linked to European Union membership - sneak quietly in and out of the heavily censored news agenda. Something as historically important in fact for the United Kingdom as Idi Amin's explusion of the Ugandan Asian community in 1972. Or indeed the population movements in North and West Belfast in August 1971 during internment week against the backdrop of the Ballymurphy killings and the burning of Cranbrook Gardens, Velsheda Park and Farringdon Gardens by their own Protestant residents.

Thankfully such a significant milestone in British social history can be easily submerged by all interested parties into the staggering stasis of daily UK life and the surety that our economic worries amount to nothing compared to what could be ahead for the toxic Euro fringe countries when the double recession bites and no future bailouts are forthcoming. But then again if aid convoys to Thessaloniki, Porto and Limerick sound a bit unhinged can it truly be any more insane than the failure of hyperinflated UK property prices to remotely match the plummeting income sources around us today?

I personally am still convinced that the only reason New London retains some semblance of normality and animation is because all those living the internship dream - which probably amounts to everybody under the age of 30 - can miraculously remain at home with their parents in Metroland without each party killing each other and that the putrid place is now full 365 days a year of one billion tourists flooding in on budget airlines. With the doors most obviously "open" on one hand, and a solitary job sector overshadowing everything else like a malign Colossus on the other, it's making all this hanging around for a normal life pretty damn stressful isn't it? Week after week....24 fucking hours melting into the next 24 hours.....of nothing but nothing.

At least James Joyce's Dubliners had Catholicism and guilt to fall back on alongside the beautiful salvation of alcohol and a caraway seed.

Terri Hooley - Walls And Bridges

2011-06-06T13:45:00.006+01:00

Two years ago, the founder of the Good Vibrations record label in Belfast in the late Seventies – Terri Hooley – was the recipient of a letter from former American President Bill Clinton who praised his role in promoting alternatives to violence in Northern Ireland.

Hooley’s contribution to the cultural life of the city in its darkest days is truly beyond measure though to their immense credit a handful of major performing artists continued to play in Belfast during the peak of the Seventies Troubles such as Horslips, Rory Gallagher, Elton John and Cliff Richard.

The first single released on the label was the magnificent Big Time by Rudi. It was criminal that both Rudi and The Outcasts on Good Vibrations, alike The Blades from Dublin in the same period with singles such as Downmarket and Hot For You, did not reach a bigger audience.

A BBC feature article later in 2008 included this magnificent commentary from Hooley: “Good Vibrations was more than just another record shop and label. It enabled young people to believe in the power of self-expression and understanding at a time when society in Northern Ireland was tearing itself apart. We were on the side of the angels. I would gladly have died then for something that l believed then, so for me personally (and l can't speak for anybody else) it really was a time to be proud. But if l had known in 1978 that Belfast was going to become so corporate and the way things were going to turn out, l would have been fighting for a wage-less, money-less, class-less society. Belfast is not about new shopping centres. Belfast is the centre of the universe and if we can solve all our problems, we can solve the problems of the world.”

Interestingly, Hooley’s autobiography from last year includes reference to a physical run-in with John Lennon in London in the early Seventies over the latter’s strident feelings towards militant Irish Republicanism. This tieing in with earlier telling commentary on the same matter in Johnny Rogan’s No Surrender biography of Van Morrison and to which many Beatles fans may wish to remain selectively blind. Lennon’s reflections on the subject to be found on the Some Time In New York City album make Paul McCartney’s Give Ireland Back To The Irish sound as deep and considered as Kierkegaard’s political rhetoric.

It certainly sounded as if Lennon’s humanitarian instincts did not extend to the British soldiers serving and dieing in Ulster. This ironically so since the overwhelmingly vast majority of them were working class in social origin and – as often standing between a final descent into anarchy in the one corner of the United Kingdom that unfortunately included my own street - were considered heroic in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of Lennon's then-fellow British citizens. For it certainly was not the Baader Meinhof Gang blowing up my local Esso garage, Spar or sweet shop in 1972.

The Good Vibrations record store in Winetavern Street in Belfast, for all the usual factors rationalising the retailing of books and music in the UK, is now due to close.

The Big Lie

2011-06-05T12:16:00.006+01:00

There are so many parts of New London that throw up headspinning vistas of total soul destroying awfulness.

Shepherds Bush has held a long term anthropological fascination for me in this regard despite one of Europe's biggest shopping malls being situated there now and of course the price of local properties. A place where there is a sense of danger and threat in a bank queue is probably suggestive of something profoundly wrong in the environmental mix.

Yet I still sense that the Archway-Holloway area trumps even this what with the statue of Dick Whittington's wee black cat there looking scared stiff by its surroundings. Three miles away from Archway in Belsize Park a faux-Banksy piece of wall graffiti is now covered by perspex on the intitial assumption that it was the real thing. In Archway the real Banksy of Charles Manson hitchhiking to nowhere has been clumsily defaced by grafitti in turn.

One astute poster on the sadly underutilised www.knowhere.co.uk website alluded to its charms as follows: "There are 3 prisons in Holloway. Pentonville, Holloway & the rest of Holloway. Burglary has to be higher than anywhere else in the world. Only a fool would choose to live in Holloway. I can't think of anywhere I would rather not live at. Smackland twinned with Crackzone = loserville there world of crime. Avoid it unless you want to be a victim too."

Despite this, and with a man being murdered here a while back for asking a fellow citizen to refrain from throwing chips at fellow bus passengers, an estate agent blurb I read last week still waxed lyrical about the magnificent selection of shops and restaurants in this vibrant and cosmopolitan quarter. Likewise with regard to the apparent Dordogne-style charm of its petite yet charming market.

This truly is something worthy of the German Ministry of Propaganda during the final Total War period. Or to be more exact it would be as if they had told the German people a couple of years earlier that the Afrika Korps and Sixth Army had won the battles of El Alamein and Stalingrad. The behavior of these fucking eejits would all be terribly funny of course if it wasn't so potentially deadly. For even my own mother has constantly reminded me since childhood that "not all the bad boys are in Belfast you know".

Down At The Crescent

2011-06-03T10:05:00.007+01:00

Great Chalkie Davies picture here of Doctor Feelgood at the Crescent Bar in Sandy Row in the late Seventies - the Wee Wullie Younger's Tartan Ale sign complementing the breeze block and steel cage composition beautifully.

Sandy Row is the second most famous Loyalist area in Belfast – King William III travelled down the nearby Lisburn Road in 1690 on the way to fight the Pope at the Battle of the Boyne while in the other direction the first intercommunal rioting took place in 1857 between the Protestant locals and the Catholics of The Pound district. Van Morrison references a trip from Dublin to Sandy Row – by way of the soon-to-be frequently bombed Great Victoria Street station – in Madame George. The nearby Donegall Road district gave the world Ruby Murray, Alex “Hurricane” Higgins and the setting for Graham Reid's magnificent "Billy" television plays of the Eighties while ten minutes away in turn is Windsor Park football stadium where George Best played 18 times for Northern Ireland between 1964 and 1977. The tower in the background is the rear of the City Hospital where the author was born on the same day The Who played at the New Barn Club in Brighton and The Beatles at the Capitol Cinema Cardiff in 1965.

This 1978 Doctor Feelgood lineup we see here are not the original members I believe. The early footage of the group performing All Through The City at the Southend Kursaal in Julien Temple’s 2009 Oil City Confidential documentary is absolutely jawdropping. Vocalist Lee Brilleaux, guitarist Wilko Johnson and bassist John B Sparks look like the kind of guys you would see drinking schnapps by the bucketload at a wedding disco in Northern Finland in 1975. And then stabbing you to death in the forest afterwards. Or worse. It would take a literal battalion of stylists to replicate this kind of effortless cool again in modern times.

Likewise for the mighty Small Faces and the point during the run through of the Ogdens Nut Gun Flake album on the June 1968 Colour Me Pop TV special when they are performing Son of the Baker and Steve Marriott violently wipes the spit from his mouth with the back of his hand. A later mimed performance on the French Surprise Partie has three of them arriving late for the start and Marriott stopping to fix his hair in the middle of the guitar solo.

Sure beats having pop stars who model their body language on Norman Wisdom and need testosterone shots - something that Norman himself certainly didn't need for the extraordinary love scenes with an ultra-nubile Sally Geeson in his final What's Good For The Goose movie.

The sheer brilliance of our British and Irish rock and pop heritage of the Sixties and Seventies is utterly monumental in scale and orginality.

Titanic Town - World City

2011-06-01T12:38:00.004+01:00

At 1213 GMT yesterday at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast a single flare was launched to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the launch of The Titanic in 1911 - 150,000 people lining Victoria Dock to watch the original event.

The opening of a Titanic museum soon - alongside the high media profile given last month to the 70th anniversary of the Easter 1941 Luftwaffe triple blitz which left 900 Protestant and Catholic dead - are very significant cultural developments in the self-image of the city. An extraordinary industrial heritage, an important strategic role in World War Two and George Best together make it a truly world city.

Likewise in the darkest days of the Troubles it was certainly the wisdom and wit of all the Ulster people alone that ensured societal survival as opposed to the vagaries of politics providing some form of salvation. I recall one vox-pop in the aftermath of the 1993 Shankill Road bombing when local male residents were expressing extraordinarily violent words of retribution to the reporter – up to and including the recommendation of indiscriminate sectarian mass murder in revenge. Even at that nadir of political violence one background female voice could still be heard clearly stating “But you can’t say that”. I am convinced that it was the survival of this humanist rationale and the small geographical size of Northern Ireland that kept us apart from an all too plausible Bosnian implosion across the Irish Sea.

As the conflict becomes more distant I also hope that the threads of radical Northern Protestant dissent in Irish history will be brought to the fore more and more as a conduit to understanding across the island. This by way of broad political movements – the United Irishmen, the Independent Orange Order or the Northern Ireland Labour Party - or that of individuals themselves of which there are many. The latter ranging from South Tyrone MP T W Russell to the Reverend Armour of Ballymoney and from local politicians Harry Midgeley and Tommy Henderson to international footballer Derek Dougan who – alike George Best – saw an all-Ireland football team as opening up positive pathways to bringing people together and away from sectarian division.

Dougan, who carried Best's coffin and died himself in 2007, wrote an interesting biography The Sash He Never Wore in 1972 that is well worth reading and an overview of the questionable aspects of sports administration in the early Eighties called How Not To Run Football which featured a crucified Seventies Pop Bestie on the cover. At one point during the early days of the Troubles he stated that both he and Best should go back over and sort it all out. These two guys couldn’t have done a worse job than Reggie Maudling and Merlyn Rees lets face it.

Returning to New Britain, I saw some appalling footage last night of abuse in an award-winning residential care home in Bristol against people with learning difficulties. This was both physical and verbal in nature and included one "carer" completing his shift by sneering at a handicapped girl and calling her "a gimp". If this is where the unemployable indigenous post-working class are being funnelled into from UK Jobcentres (and Jobcentre advisors) then the time has certainly come to worry for anybody with elderly parents, young children or a pulse.

Watching that new low even by our sewer-like national standards I really sensed that had my canine sixth sense not already been battered out of my body and soul - alike the victim of a Korean dog butcher - that I honestly would be on my way to Heathrow right here and right now. Speedily traversing the North Circular Road and Western Avenue – formerly desirable thoroughfares turned into Chernobylesque carbon monoxide deathzones – to "get the hell’s gates" out of New London fast as the ghosts of an Oul Belfast would say.

Take Another Look

2011-05-29T12:02:00.015+01:00

Five television theme tunes always transport my mind back to an older and better Britain. The fact that one of them was transmitted entirely in the Eighties is deeply worrying about the current state of the nation.

There was the heavy prog rock of the World in Action current affairs series and the folk wailing of Desmond Wilcox's The Family.

Following this would be Richard O'Sullivan's funky Robin's Nest introduction - Racism Lite what with the one armed Irish Free State waiter Albert Riddle being constantly belittled and denigrated by Robin's cunt of a father-in-law.

Then we have Ronnie Hazelhurst's Sorry theme tune which was the programme about the fifty year old librarian living at home with his parents and starring Ronnie Corbett - somebody as funny as white hot fishhooks wedged really deep up the urethra.

Lastly there was the music from Take Another Look. This was a mid-Seventies weekend morning programme for kids stuck in amongst all the other great stuff like Camp Runamuck, Why Don't You, Champion The Wonder Horse, Robinson Cruesoe, Casey Jones, The Flashing Blade, Scooby Doo and (strangely enough) Sgt Bilko and The High Chaparral. Take Another Look was full of strange closeups of everyday items - armies of bugs in your carpet, microbes in rotting cheese, lice on a discarded pubic hair etc. The theme tune for that one was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's take on Kraftwerk no less.

All five of these tunes make me feel so wistful and melancholic about our national past.

In hindsight I think I first got the suss about Britain's ghastly decline in the Nineties when I was in Greek airports waiting to return to the UK from holiday...looking up at the departures screen to wonderous ice-cool destinations like Dusseldorf, Stockholm, Munich, Milan, Copenhagen and Stuttgart. All a bit like that lyric from The Undertones' third album I guess: "Sunday nights at Oscar's disco...I wish that I had someplace good to go". One of my best friends tried to qualify this at the time however by insisting that German life would be just like living in Birmingham albeit with everybody speaking German and that it's worthwhile staying in the UK "just to watch the shit go down".

Then at the turn of the decade I once recall waking up one sun-bleached Saturday morning to hear Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. They were playing The Hollies' Look Through Any Window and the sheer drowsy joy of snoozing to the sound of golden summers past was obliterated by the dawning realisation that it wasn't London 1965 outside my window after all but the year 2000 and it was FUCKING CRAP.

Several years back in turn I did a SWOT analysis of emigration options as opposed to what New Britain was then throwing up. When comparing Britain to mainland European, North American and Australasian alternatives I came up with a single "strength" for staying in the UK - the English language. Rest assured this solitary factor alone will no doubt be writ large when the final reckoning is made of our Khmer Empire-style descent into oblivion.

Free The People

2011-05-25T21:41:00.004+01:00

One of the main British newspapers has a very active online careers forum. Always find it interesting to see how so many threads for careers and career changes terminate because of the lack of advice that is geared to practical adult realities of Western European life.

I remember one pissed off unemployed female arts graduate completely lost it with regard to feedback from the resident careers advisor which she regarded as "mumbo jumbo job speak tripe advice". I tended to agree in terms of given analysis of "networking" pathways since 40% of people who work in my current industry are apparently so clinically depressed that they can barely reply to a friendly e-mail these days for months on end.

During another online "Live Q & A" some older gentleman threw in the towel following the ubiquitous internship/volunteering recommendations with the adjoiner "I am not in a position to leave my wife, mortgage and children to come to London and work for nothing". Buy this man a pint.

As for advice to budding journalists to "start a blog" let's not go there. However talking of which, I remember in turn seeing a website advertising some School of Journalism in New London which boasted lecturers who allegedly had direct experience from national newspapers and television. This truly must be the equivalent of guitar lessons from Jimmy Page, blowjob advice from Linda Lovelace or art history seminars from Hermann Goering. The website also included a wee cheeky puff from the graduates themselves including one bold claim from a student that she apparently had managed to get one article published within three months of leaving. The risk analysis of that in the modern world of firestorm domestic outgoings needs no qualification.

So therefore Middle England has meekly accepted that younger generations will not have access to buying a house prior to the long overdue death of their bloody miserable parents, that third level education will be restricted to the denizens of the rich and the poor and that somehow positivity alone will pay dividends in finding work in a world without employment.

Stick Apocalypse Pension on top of that cunting stew, ratchet up another few decades of insidious legal tinkerings across the public and private sector of work - whose long-term societal fallout for the United Kingdom will probably make The Blitz look like the Festival of Britain - and looks like the only salvation for this country will be insourcing from the Third World since people here will work longer for less and with one very big fucking smile on their face.

Meanwhile in some other European countries I believe there are existent benefits relating to breast-feeding time that can be taken in lieu by the male partner. And it's not even frigging Scandinavia...

James Young - "The Real Ireland"

2011-05-24T12:46:00.008+01:00

Some typically patronising Hollywood fare dished up yesterday by the American President in the Irish Republic for the poor who never got away.

Reminds me of a scene from James Young's early Seventies Saturday Night TV series on BBC Northern Ireland when Hank and Mary Lou Effincracker arrive in the terraced Terence O'Neill Steet in South Belfast in search of "the real Ireland". They knock on Lily McCondriac's door in search of leprechauns in her yard to be told that the only thing in her yard is the IRA, the UDA and the British Army...and that all the "leprecorns" died swimming to America.

Young is such a unique figure yet sadly almost forgotten now outside the remit of certain older Ulster generations. The owner of the Group Theatre, his one man shows commenced in the mid-to-late Sixties and his albums outsold The Beatles in Northern Ireland. These contained a mixture of comedy songs, sketches, straight stand-up and monologues.

The monologues in particular focus on life, death, poverty and bigotry in industrial Belfast and - although perhaps overly sentimental to the modern ear - are an incredible mixture of bathos, humour and reflection. His timing and ability to invert sectarianism into the ludicrousness it ultimately represents is impeccable.

Even when the Group Theatre closed down in the early Seventies due to the scale of violence he took his one man show seperately to each divided community - while performing the exact same material - right through to his death in his mid-fifties on 5th July 1974 in North Belfast on the way to a friend's funeral.

In the midst of such a testosterone-driven city Young certainly stood out that's for sure. I have an aunt in Australia who can remember him out "shapping" for his "messages" in Donegall Pass in his house slippers and wheeling his wee basket behind him.

Another problem to an extent while listening to Young these days was that he did have a certain statist conception of Northern Ireland in that - albeit unintentionally according to the social norms of the time within a Protestant community considering itself historically "under siege" - Catholics perhaps were construed as still essentially "the other" within his material. It is difficult to avoid this and I say that as a huge admirer of his work.

Nevertheless in the depths of truly terrible times he was one of the rare voices in civic society cautioning reason, rapprochment and the acceptence of a shared identity of sorts.

The BBC series of 1972 and 1973 - which always ended with Young encouraging the Ulster people "Wid yiz stap fightin'" - obviously was produced on a micro-budget and the comedy songs are hideously dated with the exception of the posthumously released Come Ye To Ulster.

However some of his most famous monologues still available on CD have certainly stood the test of time: Why I Am Here, Slum Clearance, We Emigrated, Wee Davy, I Married A Papish, Salute to Belfast, The History Lesson, The Stranger, I Believe In Ulster, The Oul Black Man, The Feud, This Is Us and the final and incredibly moving We're Here For Such A Little Time.

Within the context of the time, Young's comic talent, warmth and humanity allow us glimpses into a lost Ulster society and a now decimated industrial urban culture.

With only two books having considered his career to date - and that including a posthumous overview by his partner Jack Hudson - he is a criminally overlooked albeit minor figure in British and Irish social history.

George Best - The Torch In The Infinite

2011-05-23T19:12:00.005+01:00

The visit of the Queen to Dublin's Garden of Remembrance last week naturally threw up residual and mirrored questions of morality. This by way of the civilian and military victims of Republican terrorism in the relatively recent modern conflict and consideration of what particularly radical Republican legends of yore would have felt about such an historic display of respect in a still-partitioned island.

Either way the endgame choreography has unequivocally reached final closure against the lunatic continuity of a dissident threat on one side and the long threatened civilianization of remaining Loyalist groups on the other - the delay in the latter feature of conflict transformation seems to be completely gauged to keeping one local Northern Ireland security journalist in employment into perpetuity.

Yesterday in turn would have been George Best's 65th birthday. Best, as one of the most individually gifted personalities in global social history and with a charismatic appeal that could only be replicated again on celluloid, unequivocally gave all the people of Ulster something to be proud of in the darkest days of the Troubles when there was NOTHING.

Days of bloodshed, anger, fear, betrayal, suspicion, hatred, mass murder and appallingly parochial political mediocrity. As one poster on a tribute forum to Best once noted, tens of thousands of Northern Ireland people who lived through the Troubles were truly gifted with self-respect within themselves and from outside parties which he alone forged by the man he was in the midst of absolute blanket societal collapse.

You are not missing much down here George but you left us way too soon.

The End Of The End

2011-05-20T21:33:00.005+01:00

Interesting Daily Mail article today considering the fact that some people are willing to cough up a 35k deposit on a 150k property....which in London of course represents an ex-council property on a sink estate in Homerton. This accompanied by public commentary either gloating about those unfortunates still stuck in rental hell or saner individuals claiming that this represents a genuine life disenfranchisement for MILLIONS of indigenous Britons.

I personally feel that it is certainly not a clearcut case of certain people "missing the boat" in terms of not entering the property market before a certain cut-off date. This with regard to the percentage of the population currently renting due to divorce, illness and unemployment factors......scary grown-up shit like that.

Also the entire property market cancer has been painfully obviously caused by the existence and subsequent non-existence of credit voodoo by the banking sector. Hyperinflation within the property market has clearly not arose due to any economic or infrastructural changes underpinning the wondrous quality of life in New Britain.

In turn, if New Britain is so fantastic - as reflected by such Twilight Zone prices - how on earth can one explain the utter misery of the average New Briton, his/her breathless horror at future prospects or the disconnectivity of our current lifepaths with anything wistfully remembered prior to 1979.

Lastly, the sheer smugness of the dullards luxuriating in their property-centred life security stands in utter contrast to the blanket destruction of our society - a British society pulverised not by ideology or nationalism or warfare but nothing more than suburban fucking petit bourgeois greed.

Wonderland

2011-04-25T20:10:00.005+01:00

Yesterday in North London I passed one estate agent's window and saw an utterly dreary property from the Thirties on the market for £2,150,000. It was so completely hilarious with regard to the wide angle lens interior shots I went to find my partner to show it to her as an example of a new low even by New London's idiotic standards.

By the time I returned an American couple were also examining the picture and openly commenting on the utter ridiculousness of such a price tag being attached to something so bland and characterless.

It's quite obvious now that the only "logic" that the UK property market could be grounded within would be if everybody lived to 170 years of age and had a 130 year working career. Innit?

Stiff Little Fingers: Alter Your Native Ulster - Alter Your Native Land

2011-03-26T11:32:00.007Z

People are sayin honest things...we were just tired of all the shit that your ma and da tell you...it's a load of balls....look what its done for this country...2000 people dead for what.....I mean who wants a united Ireland....who wants to be in a United Kingdom or anything...it makes no odds to me like....I'm still standing at the corner every night and goin down to the Harp Bar - SHELL SHOCK ROCK

Stiff Little Fingers tonight at The Forum in Kentish Town - nearly 30 years since the first time I saw them in George Best City. Ali McMordie looks like Billy Wright's twin and the audience resembled an English Defence League disco or the post-production party on THIS IS ENGLAND. Pretty mighty stuff to come from your home postcode though let's face it.

Time to put it in the past and fly safe home back to Belfast - PICADILLY CIRCUS

Internogeddon!!!

2011-03-05T10:10:00.005Z

I remember years ago discussing the plummetting standards of British school examinations with an acquaintance and both of us agreed that it worked on a principle that all the wee children may as well have their "piece of paper qualifications" since there were no more jobs anymore at the end of study anyway.

Seven years later and the industrial abuse of internships represents one of the most destructive social changes in British social history since the Great War. That is not to even begin to consider the fact that so many career change opportunities for people in their thirties and forties are now logjammed because of this exact phenomena too.

Earlier this week in turn I told several work colleagues about one particular Westminster-orientated website offering wonderfully interesting political research opportunities and the notable dearth of any work benefits approximating a salary. As one friend pithily noted in reply: "Compared to this it would actually be easier to engineer a career within politics by becoming an MP in the first place."

The sheer constancy of New Britain's three decade long pact with the forces of chaos and insanity truly never ceases to amaze.

I Spit On Your Spit

2011-01-13T21:18:00.004Z

New Britain January 2011 - the worst winter since the early Sixties. The morning trains as soul destroying as the Soweto Express 1971 - the carriages full of fat girls in Ugg boots.

Lost Lives

2010-08-26T20:57:00.005+01:00

The historian ATQ Stewart pontificated in his work The Narrow Ground upon the fact that, for all its manifold similarities with other global events, the Ulster problem was just the Ulster problem.

In similar ways if one were to dissect the various factors that have contributed to the current stew of New British life it's so apparent that even one of the six or seven major historical components since 1939 would be enough to disassociate us as a nation from more stable and content liberal democracies on the continent.

Interesting article in today's newspaper in turn with the writer talking wistfully of the sense of irrevocable loss he feels looking at family pictures from the fifties and sixties - grandfather paddling in the sea with his braces on and trousers rolled up, family games of cricket on the beach etc. Ties in with so many feelings I get now when returning to Belfast - the afterglow of terrorism aside its the sheer scale of depopulation that hits me more and more.

Last week I saw the gargantuan scale of the Thompson dry dock where the Titanic was completed. That even outshone the bit of grotty tarmac masquerading as a three pounds a day car park that used to be the world famous Sirrocco works just across from the shipyard.

When I looked at another story today about a woman who had both urinated upon and then committed a sex act at a war memorial - and the view of her boyfriend giving Nazi salutes and shouting IRA slogans at protesting ex-servicemen - it really shines a light on the heart of the matter here in New Britain in my opinion. That essentially when the industrial base of our nation disappeared in the late Seventies and early Eighties we may very well have lost so much more than societal connectivity to our broad cultural heritage.

Indeed we may very well have lost EVERYTHING.

Vulvazulu!!!!!!

2010-06-22T20:18:00.005+01:00

The eve of destruction perhaps with Stephane Grappeli's England about to take on the mighty Slovenes in the morn and with dark shadows of Ally's Army's fate in "The Argentine" taking concrete form.

Not being a bitter Scot however I am not gentically disposed to wish ill of the English team by default but seeing the cuntish visages of the Chelsea representatives over the past week really puts positive considerations beyond the pale. My heart however does bleed for the poor working class slaves who have travelled to New South Africa in their blind support.

So best wishes to Slovenia and in particular to the three fans who braved the Famous Three Kings sports pub in Kensington for the final group match against Northern Ireland and who had to endure a rousing reception of YOU'RE JUST A COUNTRY FULL OF RACISTS by the majority.

Talking of Ulster I note that Bono has given his holy blessing today to the Saville Report. Such wankery aside it has been interesting to note on certain online forums how the actions of the same accused regiment in Ballymurphy in late 1971 and on the Shankill in late 1972 are most certainly not forgotten. Nor the dead they left behind. Today as well the brother of a UVF volunteer shot dead by undercover soldiers following an assasination of a Catholic has asked for the annual memorial parade to be suspended so all injured parties can move on.

Days Like This indeed.

Hot Fun In The Summertime

2010-05-23T20:06:00.004+01:00

Even having grown up in a particularly volatile area of North Belfast during the Seventies I still cannot recall a time when the sense of danger and threat was as ever present as it is now in modern day New London.

The weekend's events when London's unpoliced feral scum - whose cradle to grave half-life we are all supporting - nearly shot dead a picnicing local resident in the urban village charm of Hackney is another milepost on our capital's road to complete dissolution.

Apologies for the repitition but at least growing up in Ulster I had thousands of British soldiers and RUC officers to protect my life and limb in comparison to London where one's security is apparently represented by the rare sight of some podgy or loping community police clown with a sociology GCSE.

Making History Work

2010-05-09T13:58:00.005+01:00

So much to take in at the moment with the complex fallout from the election and the insane Labour vote that has turned logic on its head - the first-past-the-post qualifications aside. This without even touching upon the fact that every indigenous (oops) English person over the age of 30 seems to have the political attitudes of the bastard lovechild of Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin if elicited with correct surreptition.

Been here before of course back in 1974 but not even Provo bombs on the mainland can compare with the big black cloud of toxic financial shite on the way over from Mykonos and Banana Beach let's face it.

Saw some commentaries yesterday on one of the more outre right-wing websites with reference to the destruction of the BNP. Truly redolent of the kind of rhetoric to be found in Loyalist magazines from the early Seventies in Northern Ireland - Ulster, Loyalist News, Ulster Loyalist etc - in terms of focusing blame on the apathetic indigenous Briton himself and offering truly exclusionist prognoses for the demographic future of England.

At least in 1974 when we were here before we had the afterglow of Elvis Presley and Georgie Best in the folk memory loop, The Wombles and Hey Rock n Roll. Now all we get is teachers attempting to murder Generation Scum stormtroopers and political leaders with silky-smoother faces than Mary Millington's knicker drawer.

Do The Vega

2010-04-25T14:37:00.004+01:00

Currently re-reading Greil Marcus’ Elvis biography Last Train To Memphis – the greatest fairytale in history. Some of the writing is extraordinarily insightful: This was Elvis’ mark – he conveyed his spirituality without being able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in his simplicity.

I remember Memphis as the most haunted place I had ever seen in my life before Boker Hill in Cambodia last year - still can't work out whether I was underwhelmed or overwhelmed in truth to be honest. However can never forget seeing one particularly brilliant piece of grafitti though on the wall of Gracelands the night I was there - I love big fat karate Elvis.

Talking of South East Asia...so many Eastern religions seem to be grounded on the transitory nature of existence and the misery of its accompanying struggles. Now with shopping having replaced politics and Christianity outright in British social culture it's no wonder there is so much angst around about the sheer “treading water” half-life we are mired in and the inability to grasp the fundamentals of prioritising in a brave new world gone totally fucking mad.

Hypercompetition for jobs, revenue implosions, technological advances outstripping reality, the Dr Hyde and Mister Hyde of globalization, the public sector scamfest, the generation apartheid, institutionalized mediocrity, offices as an extension of female workers’ social lives, career changes gauged around compulsory pre-volunteering – if this is not critical mass then god help us with regard to what is around the next corner.

When freelancing three years ago at a particularly ghastly company - whose man management structures seemed to be based on the Kapo hierarchy used in German Konzentrationslager - I used to have lunch every day with a good friend and we talked in no inconsiderable depth about the untenable nature of European life in its retarded British incarnation. We certainly sussed out the doomed future shock facing creative media in terms of its subsequent outplay and – if not accurately predicting a broader social stasis worthy of James Joyce’s Dubliners here in blessed Albion – then at least clarified the clear remits that our society needed to orientate towards in order to return to some semblance of reality.

That, as centred around the logical deflation of the property bubble, has yet to come to pass. Ergo the twenty-somethings coming to our buzzing metropolis now need to commence their adult lives here with a good 100k in their back pockets for a property deposit and be guaranteed to hit 30k-plus salaries in their first jobs out of Media Studies Polyversity.

Meanwhile there were riots on the streets of Athens today off the back of the government having to secure emergency aid from the eurozone and the IMF - three other former fascist countries and the Irish Free State perhaps to follow suit.

Viva Las Vegas indeed.

Los Pasajeros

2010-04-22T22:44:00.005+01:00

Saw a news story today about a 21-year-old girl who committed suicide after two hundred job rejections in two years. This comes the day after unemployment figures in the UK have hit a 12 year high of 2.2 million. With so many professional people now having to engage with benefit agencies the galling interface with institutionalised degradation is now likely to shadow us all to the grave.

Memories of a recent period of unemployment include a "back to work" session where they produced a list of the day's active job opportunities - ranging from toilet cleaning to senior managers at Goldman Sachs - and hawkishly observed that all unfortunates present were pro-actively "reading" the farcical paperwork like a political re-education session in 1976 Vietnam. Likewise after several months - and despite whatever quantitative amount of internet research one was daily engaging in - everybody now is forced to pro-actively "use" the jobcentre "computer system" to source applications so that they could have evidence of one's right to jobseekers allowance micro-scrapings. At one point I was personally forced to clarify to the benefit officer that I could not specifically apply for a particular job she suggested as I could not speak Urdu. In turn the paperwork associated with housing and council tax benefit claims make financial disclosure at divorce look as straightforward as filling in a weekly lottery ticket.

Alike at least one stout-hearted Ulsterwoman interviewed during the 1974 Ulster Workers Council strike I too would rather eat grass than ever revisit such a soul-destroying environment again which at best resembled a scream-filled dungeon at Bedlam with its coterie of schizophrenics, security guards and transexual reception staff.

On the train journey home tonight in New London I was also blessed with the prescence of five Ali G clones for one stop - all making tourettes squeaks and grunts amongst their hardcore gangsta rapping and sexual commentaries about a Chinese lady on the opposite platform and how she might get her tits out if they stared at her enough. Reminded me of a trip in from Heathrow two years back when five skinhead Chelsea fans entertained the whole Picadilly Line carriage - including two elderly ladies - for seven full stops to Leicester Square. The songs included odes referencing the charms of London girls, something about Jews who support Tottenham Hotspur not having foreskins and how they would not surrender to the IRA.

Some fringe Loyalists of course pithily underscored a wee while ago, during an outbreak of racist violence in Belfast, that during the kulturkampf of the late sixties there actually weren't really that many English volunteers on the Shankill Road willing to defend the Ulster Protestants from genocide. That very same country of course being reduced to a bloody civil war within a four year remit as both sides to the historic quarrel essentially viewed "the state" as having died.

Looking at those fucking eejits tonight I suspect something similar may well be happening here on the mainland right now. And that no matter how excited the thousands of unemployed Media Studies students might currently be about voting for Nick Clegg.

I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing In Perfect Harmony

2010-04-03T13:09:00.004+01:00

In the run up to Holy Week here in New London we have witnessed an extraordinary teenage gang killing at Victoria Station in front of horrified commuters en route to Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. Also noted that the consumer generated content commentary function on at least one leading newspaper has been conspiciously absent all week for this very high profile crime story - above and beyond legal limitations affecting future trial proceedings.

Tony Blair returned to his former Sedgefield constituency to pledge his troth to the Labour Party as British military casualties in the Afghanistan campaign alone continue to advance beyond the halfway mark of the total killed in the three decades of conflict in Ulster.

On Thursday another bizarre story broke about proceedings at a Welsh primary school which seemed like a hybrid of The Midwich Cuckoos and Lary Clark's Kids.

This week I also concluded that my chief pet hate - surpassing even that of pointy shoes for men - is the serial abuse of office colleagues eating fucking cereal in front of their computers in the morning. On a brighter note a newspaper this week had a great picture of two meerkats sunbathing while sitting atop a dormant horizontal colleague. That was unequivocally good.

JJ, Bestie And Two Men From Torrens Road

2010-02-26T16:44:00.004Z

Last week I watched the moving documentary Lord of the Wing about the Celtic footballer Jimmy Johnstone who ironically enough could have lined up with Best, Charlton and Law at Manchester United at one point. There is an incredibly moving scene in the middle of the film where he is outside Parkhead stadium being greeted by delighted Celtic fans of every age and description.

In consideration of the fact that the European Cup winning team of 1967 of which he was part was comprised entirely of geographically "local" talent - alike the famous Ajax of Amsterdam side of the early Seventies - it's not only redolent of a literal techtonic shift in the commercialisation of sport but also the internal dynamics of a working class British culture now vanished. With Hollywood actor Robert Duvall claiming Wee Jinky as the biggest character he ever met it ties in again with the broader sense that deindustrialisation, globalisation and socialism have left nothing more than a margarine society of multi-platformed consumer-orientated nothingness in its wake.

I remember reading in a tribute forum shortly after George Best's death how one fan had met him and recalled a match against Southampton in the early Seventies. Bestie was tormenting the ugly full-back so much and so cruelly that at one point he stopped the game, lifted the ball from the ground and offered it to the full-back so he could "play" too. What did George Best do on hearing this recollection that would not have even happened in a Hollywood movie? He just smiled to himself.

Likewise last week I was looking at a very active Belfast web forum and a long thread which talked about the street my paternal grandparents lived on near the Oldpark Road. One of the posters was talking about one very quiet and unassuming man who used to live there who during the war had fought at Monte Cassino and was awarded the biggest military medal the Americans could bestow on an Allied soldier for what he did.

The headmaster of the now closed primary school at the end of the same street - David Russell - later became the headmaster of my own school. He had been in a Japanese POW camp and mentioned to Anthony Bailey - who authored the 1977 book Acts of Union - that after his experiences in the Far East that "it's hardly likely that anything that happens on the Oldpark Road is going to worry me". Shortly before he died Mr Russell subsequently revisited Japan to meet a former miner who had treated him kindly during a serious bout of illness while imprisoned there.

I wonder what kind of men from this worthy decade will be spoken of with communal pride in 2050 by the young teenagers of today? I personally am drawn to the last paragraph of Phillip Orr's The Road to the Somme from 1987 with regard to our Brave New World of blandness and caution - The men we have met on the pages of this book have acted as our guides through one stretch of the dark past. Their voices fade back into the silence from which they came.

The Past Is Not Itself

2010-02-22T14:01:00.008Z

Channel 4's ten thousand pound psychotherapy session for the former IRA Chief of Staff was truly extraordinary viewing by way of both trite choregraphy and the wearying Sixth Form College presentation of the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom figher" arguement.

Henry McDonald's definitive Gunsmoke and Mirrors has already clinically demolished the myth of the Troubles as a foregone reaction against institutionalised sectarianism and no more need be said on that front. However the fact that a terrestrial television channel produced a documentary giving airtime for relgious reflection to a figure who loomed so large behind the Bloody Friday and La Mon atrocities is truly beyond reproach.

Remembrance of the archive footage of black torsoes being shovelled into binbags at Oxford Street bus station in 1972 or those 1978 photographs of human beings transformed into charcoal cannot of course stand in the way of such a terribly clever project.

Actually in consideration of the current world of work perhaps the whole idea actually orginated with a post-Media Studies degree internship in the first place? Either way umissable viewing for all victims of IRA violence in the UK and a studied analysis of a true military genius. Hopefully a Christmas Day repeat awaits.

Postscript To An English Journey

2010-02-14T18:49:00.005Z

This week’s gay proceedings have been bookended by analysis in the press of the most important social apartheid of modern times – the baby boomer’s monopoly on jobs, welfare, pensions, property and family life itself – and corroboration of a political agenda underlying the immigration megahike. And of course Channel 4's decision to have Gerry Adams lecture us on Christian morality. Oh truly to be a celestial fly on heaven's wall when Christ asks HIM about Jean McConville, Bloody Friday and the La Mon Hotel anon.

It seems to be becoming harder by the day to stay optimistic based on any honest narrative reading of the modern history of our island home. The economic and social meltdown of the Seventies preceding a political revolution unparalleled in Western European liberal history since the advent of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. The unfinished nature of its resolution in turn leaving the country begging for psychological closure – only for New Labour to set fire to the ruins.

Likewise the world of work in the United Kingdom – as now qualified by degree factories, industrial abuse of internships and HR sociopaths – appears keyed to the never ending search for 20-year-olds with 40 years of work experience. Ditto for those with the leadership qualities of Danny Blanchflower and Blair Mayne combined who will nevertheless work for a zero salary.

This Saturday night I journeyed across North London – through Holloway Road, Finsbury Park and Seven Sisters to Stamford Hill, Lower Clapton and Hackney. It was redolent of a journey several Christmases ago – when the Gatwick Express festively imploded – and where I joyously traversed the dream landscape villages of Croydon, Mitcham, Streatham, Tooting and Brixon. The kind of socially disfunctional madness we thus see around us in our groovy trailblazing capital is not that of ancient gibbering twilight senility but of screaming wild-eyed hysteria. Real “cutting your fucking eyes out” bedlam in terms of Acton High Street drunken vagrant vernacular.

Beloved ghost spirits of Priestly and Betjamin - pray come and see. Make haste too. YOU WILL NOT FRIGGING BELIEVE IT.

Our Lady Of Orangeville

2010-02-04T12:25:00.006Z

On Channel 4 at the weekend I watched a drama about the life of the late Mo Mowlam - New Labour's first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. A genuinely sad story about her fight against cancer though actress Julie Walters' accompanying press commentary that the Good Friday Agreement could not have happened without her prescence raises two particular question marks with regard to this political figure.

Firstly, I recall in her autobiography how one black and white picture included Mowlam, her family and grinning media mates "on the Queen's bed at Hillsborough Castle". Other text in the book also mentioned the kids racing around the state rooms in go-karts. Whatever one's opinion on royalty the fact remains that the Ulster Protestants who died during the 20th Century on military duty did so in no small measure out of loyalty to the throne as a tangible symbol. And indeed as part of a "nationhood" the equal of any other part of the United Kingdom - and in certain examples actually more so. From the Somme to Messines to Passchendaele to Saint-Quentin. From the beaches and skies of Normandy to the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. From the frontlines of the Imjin River battle in Korea to being shot in the back while off-duty in Fermanagh and Armagh.

Secondly, I tend to question how retrospective politcal honour should fall in such substantial measure upon a figure now centrally reknowned for telling a Northern Irish political and religious leader to "fuck off". Even with due consideration of the relative merits and demerits of Ian Paisley's political career, this truly must be considered a jawdropping historic benchmark with regard to the depths to which our political culture has plummeted into utter degradation.

The Mathematics of British Destiny

2010-01-02T23:20:00.005Z

Forging ahead in this new January dawn of hope I read today that British national debt has doubled during the "noughties". From a straightie-one-eightie £350 billion pounds between the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and 1999....to a cool funky £700 billion pounds today. It is also estimated by the Treasury that this will should double again by 2014.

Going back to the really good old days in counterpoise I breached the taboo of revisiting the past and watched the Morecambe and Wise 1973 Christmas show last week - what an utterly peurile experience aside from a solitary New Seeker's nipple.

This Is A Happy Land

2009-12-23T20:56:00.005Z

And so 2009 draws to closure - as possibly fateful a year in British history as 1940 in my opinion. Deregulated financial black magick has now went the way of heavy industry - leaving nothing more than a service economy with nobody to service in its wake.

And with everybody in the entire world apparently now living in Greater London I sense Messrs Marley, Scrooge, Christmas Past and Cratchit are fucking well off out of it.

The Descent Of Their Last End

2009-12-18T12:36:00.005Z

Snow is now general all over London. It falls across the dark centre, the hill stations, the free-fire zones, pound shops, no-go areas, dole queues, empty crisp packets and ripped up lottery tickets. Over the semenated upon peep show interiors, receivership notices, porn spam, closed Accident and Emergency Wards, dog shit, Suicide Bridge on Archway Road, muggers, landlords, current account charges, estate agents, BNP councillors, cancelled trains, churches turned into serviced apartments, war memorials, the 7” Johnny Reggae single in a second-hand record shop closing down sale, lifestyle interfaces, microwaveable cheeseburgers, terrified OAPs. Over crushed Red Bull cans, skinheads, that Sam Smith’s lager with the funny Austrian guy who looks like Joseph Mengele in Argentina, dirty looks, underpasses on the North Circular Road, pet cemeteries, the ruins of World War Two aerodromes, monosodium glutamate, the archeological remains of the Hammersmith Palais and the Astoria, psychopaths, osteopaths, budget cigarettes. Over the Christmas ghosts of Lady Diana, Georgie Best and Steve Marriott. Over bottles of Fanta, bags of pickled onion Monster Munch and retro packets of Opal Mints. Over the rosy cheeked boy at that bakery window who ended up on the Picadilly meat rack. Over the footsteps of Mary Millington in Soho and Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia. Over every last tear, heartfelt sigh and lost dream in this broken city.