I died of boredom at the age of 9

Saturday we went to have another look around Freightliners Farm in the springy! sunshine! as a market had been promised. In reality, it involved 1) a stall selling tea in plastic cups and 2) cake. A house-spouse, rather than a farmers, market. The animals were fun though – sheeps and goats and chickens, oh my! There were several fluffy cats living on the farm, most of which were sitting on the poultry coops licking their lips. Another was trying to dig her way into the cage. I checked each bird very carefully to see if any were hiding lemsip under their wings, but they all seemed healthy; in fact there was a notice asking people not to touch animals if they had a cold; I imagine that the pigs were moaning about the humans and an outbreak of person flu. There was an amusing incident when a goat escaped and I thought hilarious hi-jinks were about to ensue as Dave tried to trap it, but unfortunately, he caught it by the collar and returned it to its pen where it fixed a baleful eye on him, vowing to remember to butt him the next time we visit. Remind me to tell you the story about David and the llama some time.

In the evening, we eschewed the heady social life of North London to go through our 7” singles, dumping the Super Furry Animals, the God Is My Co-Pilots and the Prudes. I was very reluctant to get rid of the latter not because it’s a good song (Dave pulled the whisky bottle stopper out with his teeth to express the song in mime) but because it reminds me of an afternoon in Leeds, twagging off a sixth form trip to a  lecture on Jane Austen to go shopping and we ended up in the exciting world of Jumbo Records. We got in trouble when we went back to school but I can’t really remember that, only the heady freedom of an afternoon out of South Yorkshire. Throwing away the record means I’ll never feel that exact same emotion again, but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing; how many things are we supposed to be able to remember anyway? Couldn’t life be episodes, things that stop and start, rather than this long elastic thread that jumps you backwards unexpectedly and unpleasantly to any given moment, Billy Pilgrim-like, just by a funny smell or a mediocre song?

Sunday we went to the Conservatory, a little green oasis in the ratty maze of the Barbican where signs are designed to point you in a circular motion. This was our third attempt to visit, but the warm tropicalia was worth the effort.

Back at home, I watched two sterling pieces of TV, the first being Soul Britannia which was about the effects of black American music on ver British teenager circa 1960. It started off badly with yet another library shot of bombed out streets and the voiceover explaining to us about austerity and post-war and teenagers not wanting to be like their parents blah blah yawn blah. Like, hello? It wasn’t just the babyboomers who wanted different lives - it was just that there were more of them and thus they were in a position of greater power and have used this to force their cultural hegemony on us ever since. But no teenager wants to be like their parents, otherwise nothing would ever change.

Then there was Elton John explaining that he backed loads of black singers (and then went off to play Sun City, although he forgot to mention that bit) and Mick Hucknall being his usual slimy self and Mica Paris being contractually obliged to appear on every BBC show ever (and wear a stupid little hat whilst doing so) and I was about to switch off, thinking gawblimey, they’re gonna bring on Joe Brown and Tommy Steele soon to talk about milk-bars, but then the programme moved onto the ska parties hosted by the West Indian immigrants in the ‘50s, the Notting Hill record shops and Soho clubs, Jimmy James - the first Anglo-Caribbean underground soul star, and the way the soul movement was fed by and catered to the Black GIs stationed in Britain. There was quite a bit of footage showing blacks and whites dancing together which made a change from the usual No Irish, no Blacks message that’s usually portrayed in documentaries about the first wave of commonwealth immigration. I’m not some kind of racism-denier but it can’t be that every single white person in Britain in the 60s was a card carrying NF member, as is sometimes implied. The programme claimed that white people in the UK would hear more black American music than the average white American because black music was only played on black radio. However, Sam Cooke got to number 1 in the US in 1957, in both the ‘regular’ chart and the r ‘n’ b chart, so I don’t think much of that theory.

The programme went on to talk about the mod movement and the discrepancy between the prissy modernists and the raw down and dirty bluesmen, yet how the two factions were inter-dependent. There was a little pop at the Rolling Stones for stealing the blues and a (white) purist complaining about “bastard hybrids”, but I disagreed with that – music will always stay the same unless you take influences and create a new sound. Whereas the debt that the Rolling Stones et al owe to black music should be acknowledged and paid, progress can’t be halted by a few traditionalists. It’s horribly unfair that Mick Jagger et al became horrendously rich and famous whereas Robert Johnson died young and poor, but it remains a fact that everyone is influenced by everything. And in the end, I’d rather listen to Dusty Springfield’s ‘black’ voice than Diana Ross’s ‘white’ one.

Instead of complaining about theft, Otis Redding took one of the Stones songs and make it 3,000 times better. On the other hand, Eric Burdon stating that he didn’t think soul and blues was black music, it was white working class music, and that he wasn’t racist because he was used to seeing miners coming up from the colliery with black faces (“of course, they could wash it off”) is rather bizarre, not to mention naïve. I think Burdon should have been singing about a pub in South Shields called the Rising Sun, rather than pretending that he knew New Orleans brothels. But I forgive him because of the footage of him, Chris Farlowe and Otis Redding singing Shake on Ready Steady Go and the absolute delight, gratitude and hero worship in his eyes, as if he can’t believe he’s there singing with The Man. The programme also had footage of James Brown and Sam and Dave and I marvelled at their seemingly unrehearsed synchronised dancing. Solo Sam is on at the Barbican but I don’t want to watch some old man singing for his supper. I want the original. The nearest we ever got to this was on our trip to South Africa where a kwaito party was taking place on the beach and boys on podiums were dancing in unison and it felt as if we were a part of something, temporarily at least.

Anyway the next ep is on Wigan and post-punk ska revivals and, but the third is about acid-jazz and will no doubt feature Jazzie B in extremis. I mean, fair-dos to the man for writing 2 good songs back in 1989, but so did Birdland and no-one lets them comment on documentaries, do they?

After that I watched Ultraviolet which was a Jack Davenport vehicle put out by Ch4 in 1998 after the mega success of This Life. He plays a cop dragged rather unwillingly into a special branch operation that deals with Code Vs, who are people with no heartbeat who eat or drink nothing but blood. The word vampire is never mentioned, there are no dodgy east European accents, no capes, no bats, no stakes or crosses, these are (almost) 21^st century vampire hunters who wield guns that shoot UV light, allicin, and charcoal. The vampires want gain power not through magicks and myth but with science and technology.

If the series were made now, global terrorism might be the analogy, but it was 1998 and so we have Aids and cancer, global warming and its effects and the new technological tools coming into play – the internet was no longer just for geeks. Along with Jack, there’s a priest, a Scientist/Doctor and an ex-army geezer, all with their own stories, some of which are explored, some not. In between the story arc, there are individual episodes about paedophiles, dodgy cityboys, a woman carrying a half-vamp half-human child, immigration and sickle cell disease, and vampire smuggling. There was plenty of material for a second and third series, but the creator decided not to go down that route. A pity, because the series was quite slick and sophisticated. It had great shots of London – the city was all moonlit bridges, dark tunnels and late night parks. Apart from people using public telephones, it didn’t look 9 years old at all.

 

I died of boredom at the age of 9

Saturday we went to have another look around Freightliners Farm in the springy! sunshine! as a market had been promised. In reality, it involved 1) a stall selling tea in plastic cups and 2) cake. A house-spouse, rather than a farmers, market. The animals were fun though – sheeps and goats and chickens, oh my! There were several fluffy cats living on the farm, most of which were sitting on the poultry coops licking their lips. Another was trying to dig her way into the cage. I checked each bird very carefully to see if any were hiding lemsip under their wings, but they all seemed healthy; in fact there was a notice asking people not to touch animals if they had a cold; I imagine that the pigs were moaning about the humans and an outbreak of person flu. There was an amusing incident when a goat escaped and I thought hilarious hi-jinks were about to ensue as Dave tried to trap it, but unfortunately, he caught it by the collar and returned it to its pen where it fixed a baleful eye on him, vowing to remember to butt him the next time we visit. Remind me to tell you the story about David and the llama some time.

In the evening, we eschewed the heady social life of North London to go through our 7” singles, dumping the Super Furry Animals, the God Is My Co-Pilots and the Prudes. I was very reluctant to get rid of the latter not because it’s a good song (Dave pulled the whisky bottle stopper out with his teeth to express the song in mime) but because it reminds me of an afternoon in Leeds, twagging off a sixth form trip to a  lecture on Jane Austen to go shopping and we ended up in the exciting world of Jumbo Records. We got in trouble when we went back to school but I can’t really remember that, only the heady freedom of an afternoon out of South Yorkshire. Throwing away the record means I’ll never feel that exact same emotion again, but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing; how many things are we supposed to be able to remember anyway? Couldn’t life be episodes, things that stop and start, rather than this long elastic thread that jumps you backwards unexpectedly and unpleasantly to any given moment, Billy Pilgrim-like, just by a funny smell or a mediocre song?

Sunday we went to the Conservatory, a little green oasis in the ratty maze of the Barbican where signs are designed to point you in a circular motion. This was our third attempt to visit, but the warm tropicalia was worth the effort.

Back at home, I watched two sterling pieces of TV, the first being Soul Britannia which was about the effects of black American music on ver British teenager circa 1960. It started off badly with yet another library shot of bombed out streets and the voiceover explaining to us about austerity and post-war and teenagers not wanting to be like their parents blah blah yawn blah. Like, hello? It wasn’t just the babyboomers who wanted different lives - it was just that there were more of them and thus they were in a position of greater power and have used this to force their cultural hegemony on us ever since. But no teenager wants to be like their parents, otherwise nothing would ever change.

Then there was Elton John explaining that he backed loads of black singers (and then went off to play Sun City, although he forgot to mention that bit) and Mick Hucknall being his usual slimy self and Mica Paris being contractually obliged to appear on every BBC show ever (and wear a stupid little hat whilst doing so) and I was about to switch off, thinking gawblimey, they’re gonna bring on Joe Brown and Tommy Steele soon to talk about milk-bars, but then the programme moved onto the ska parties hosted by the West Indian immigrants in the ‘50s, the Notting Hill record shops and Soho clubs, Jimmy James - the first Anglo-Caribbean underground soul star, and the way the soul movement was fed by and catered to the Black GIs stationed in Britain. There was quite a bit of footage showing blacks and whites dancing together which made a change from the usual No Irish, no Blacks message that’s usually portrayed in documentaries about the first wave of commonwealth immigration. I’m not some kind of racism-denier but it can’t be that every single white person in Britain in the 60s was a card carrying NF member, as is sometimes implied. The programme claimed that white people in the UK would hear more black American music than the average white American because black music was only played on black radio. However, Sam Cooke got to number 1 in the US in 1957, in both the ‘regular’ chart and the r ‘n’ b chart, so I don’t think much of that theory.

The programme went on to talk about the mod movement and the discrepancy between the prissy modernists and the raw down and dirty bluesmen, yet how the two factions were inter-dependent. There was a little pop at the Rolling Stones for stealing the blues and a (white) purist complaining about “bastard hybrids”, but I disagreed with that – music will always stay the same unless you take influences and create a new sound. Whereas the debt that the Rolling Stones et al owe to black music should be acknowledged and paid, progress can’t be halted by a few traditionalists. It’s horribly unfair that Mick Jagger et al became horrendously rich and famous whereas Robert Johnson died young and poor, but it remains a fact that everyone is influenced by everything. And in the end, I’d rather listen to Dusty Springfield’s ‘black’ voice than Diana Ross’s ‘white’ one.

Instead of complaining about theft, Otis Redding took one of the Stones songs and make it 3,000 times better. On the other hand, Eric Burdon stating that he didn’t think soul and blues was black music, it was white working class music, and that he wasn’t racist because he was used to seeing miners coming up from the colliery with black faces (“of course, they could wash it off”) is rather bizarre, not to mention naïve. I think Burdon should have been singing about a pub in South Shields called the Rising Sun, rather than pretending that he knew New Orleans brothels. But I forgive him because of the footage of him, Chris Farlowe and Otis Redding singing Shake on Ready Steady Go and the absolute delight, gratitude and hero worship in his eyes, as if he can’t believe he’s there singing with The Man. The programme also had footage of James Brown and Sam and Dave and I marvelled at their seemingly unrehearsed synchronised dancing. Solo Sam is on at the Barbican but I don’t want to watch some old man singing for his supper. I want the original. The nearest we ever got to this was on our trip to South Africa where a kwaito party was taking place on the beach and boys on podiums were dancing in unison and it felt as if we were a part of something, temporarily at least.

Anyway the next ep is on Wigan and post-punk ska revivals and, but the third is about acid-jazz and will no doubt feature Jazzie B in extremis. I mean, fair-dos to the man for writing 2 good songs back in 1989, but so did Birdland and no-one lets them comment on documentaries, do they?

After that I watched Ultraviolet which was a Jack Davenport vehicle put out by Ch4 in 1998 after the mega success of This Life. He plays a cop dragged rather unwillingly into a special branch operation that deals with Code Vs, who are people with no heartbeat who eat or drink nothing but blood. The word vampire is never mentioned, there are no dodgy east European accents, no capes, no bats, no stakes or crosses, these are (almost) 21^st century vampire hunters who wield guns that shoot UV light, allicin, and charcoal. The vampires want gain power not through magicks and myth but with science and technology.

If the series were made now, global terrorism might be the analogy, but it was 1998 and so we have Aids and cancer, global warming and its effects and the new technological tools coming into play – the internet was no longer just for geeks. Along with Jack, there’s a priest, a Scientist/Doctor and an ex-army geezer, all with their own stories, some of which are explored, some not. In between the story arc, there are individual episodes about paedophiles, dodgy cityboys, a woman carrying a half-vamp half-human child, immigration and sickle cell disease, and vampire smuggling. There was plenty of material for a second and third series, but the creator decided not to go down that route. A pity, because the series was quite slick and sophisticated. It had great shots of London – the city was all moonlit bridges, dark tunnels and late night parks. Apart from people using public telephones, it didn’t look 9 years old at all.