Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

Hotel Pelirocco, 10 Regency Square, Brighton, East Sussex. BN1 2FG
Sunday 11th July 2010 from 6pm - 8pm

by Guy Sangster Adams

Amanda Smyth

By all accounts the inaugural Ace Stories evening, with Cathi Unsworth topping the bill,  rocked the Hotel Pelirocco, no mean feat given that it is one of Brighton’s most rock ‘n’ roll hotels.  Now the second in  Jay Clifton’s and Sam Collins’ five event Live Lit series is fast approaching. This time around the headlining writer is Amanda Smyth whose debut novel, Black Rock  (Serpent’s Tail, 2010),  has been shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize, and gained widespread critical acclaim. Including Anita Sethi, writing in The Independent: ‘In painterly images, Smyth evocatively shows more than she tells. Not only people but place exerts a powerful force…There are echoes of the archetypal “mad woman”, if not in an attic then in a marital room in the Caribbean, with scenes reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea… this is a vivid and compelling story, exploring the extent of our control over our destinies.’

Support readings come from Brighton-based poets,  Theodore Koulouris and Naomi Foyle, whilst the evening closes with live music from singer-songwriter, Birdengine.

Ace Stories, Sunday 11th July, 2010, from 6pm to 8pm,
at Hotel Pelirocco, 10 Regency Square, Brighton, East Sussex. BN1 2FG
Admission £3.

Links:

Ace Stories
To be added to the mailing list for updates on forthcoming Ace Stories events, email:  Jayclifton330 AT googlemail DOT com
with ‘Add me to the Ace Stories mailing list’ in the subject title.

Hotel Pelirocco
www.hotelpelirocco.co.uk

Plectrum - The Cultural Pick preview of the inaugural Ace Stories event

Abi Curtis lives in Brighton and lectures at Sussex University. Her poetry collection, Unexpected Weather, won Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize 2008. The poems below, Death by Lightning and Mandibles, are both from Unexpected Weather (Salt, 2009).

On 10th June 2010 she will be reading with Luke Kennard, Tom Chivers, Mark Waldron, Katy Evans-Bush, and Diana Pooley, at Salt Poets at Lauderdale House, from 8pm, Lauderdale House, Waterlow Park, Highgate Hill, London N6 5HG.

DEATH BY LIGHTNING

I left you in the house, your eyes on me,

suffering from a relative of grief,

took myself from here to the neighbouring village.

I don’t usually walk, preferring donkey or moped

but neither could fare in the weather:

rain slopped from eaves

turning the streets to streams

thin fish lost their bearings and followed

to be found tomorrow, breathless,

heads in the railings.

I doubt they knew anything about it,

sent to sleep by strange air lifting their scales.

Rain was in my neck, my boots were buckets,

sky a marbling of dark and unfamiliar faces,

clouds deep as difficult ideas, luminous at their edges.

Light cleaved the sky. I counted and wasn’t disappointed

by the sound of a giant piano dropped

onto a collection of empty cauldrons.

I smiled: the sky was furious for me

so I might stay inside the cupboard of my head.

But soon the water overcame, tipping

from flat roofs, stabbing from the arms of lampposts.

Paving slabs lifted to expose whole villages

of slugs and toads.

The sea, two miles away, suggested itself on the wind.

Unable to turn back, I searched for shelter.

Light revealed a  shape at the graveyard gate: a woman under

a yew older than landscape. Room for two. I joined her,

politely distant, staring at the knots and carvings in the trunk:

tracks of every death that’s marked elsewhere in stone,

hems of marriages leaving the gate, home for ivy,

sheets of frost and mushrooms shelving out like flesh.

The woman watched the rain as if to concentrate

on just one drop and shuddered when the thunder

spread its voice above the leaves.

She was not beautiful.

She didn’t hold her body supple as an animal.

I could not name her type of smile.

Later, I learned she felt the shock in her foot;

shared what I cannot remember.

I looked up through the branches holding

tight their fists of leaves.

I have that image stencilled in my eyelids.

I smelled the metal in the air and tasted

nothing.

You know, if you watch anything through flashes

of lightning, it appears suspended

as if life were frame after frame and never moving.

I was senseless: a snapshot of myself under a canopy.

I’m still here, now in the living room

where we question each other.

I didn’t replay memories or gain an answer,

but I’ve read the best stuff has the power

to take off the top of your head.

You’ve changed, though you never left this room.

Every day you run your hands over

the root-system printed red on my chest

and in the dark part of your eye

I detect a storm.

MANDIBLES

The archaeologists have been in the office again.
You’ve come to work through the night when

you find their shoe-boxes shelved with the books,
then face the other way, try to write, to look

at the dark-glazed view into the quad.
You turn around, fingering the lip of a box.

Nobody said, Don’t Touch. This one’s labelled
‘Mandibles’. As you slide the lid, a smell

of dried mouths and subtle rot.
Each piece of jaw in a plastic pocket

you can feel through to the nubs of bone,
unable to identify symphysis, molar, canine.

You recall Mr Fozard pulling a tooth
to leave a hole for your tongue to search, a taste

of pink, of omnivore. Bridges, dentures,
ivory tusks cross-sectioned

like the rings of an oak;
pulp canals, the roots that bind your mouth

to your thinking head.
Porcelain, amalgam, gold:

offerings to the speech of the soul.
But here, in this box, the bones are small,

herbivorous. At last you see animals,
re-skinned and furred, decay reversed,

their skulls re-clothed:
deer stripping red fruit from the hedge-row,

rabbits, light-headed and wet-eyed,
clipping the green from the fields.

Links:

Abi Curtis
web.me.com/abicurtis/

Salt Publishing
www.saltpublishing.com

Lauderdale House
www.lauderdalehouse.co.uk

The Market House, St Austell, Cornwall
1st - 5th June 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

Word M’art is the new mission for the irrepressible and phenomenally proactive ‘international action poet’, Sally Crabtree. “Poetry should be taken down from its ivory tower and given back to the people,” she says, and to facilitate this she has created the interactive supermarket themed installation, Word M’art, to engage people of all ages and backgrounds with poetry as part of their everyday lives. The week long launch event at The Market House will include such special offers such as Poems in a Tin, I’ll Eat My Words edible poetry in the cake aisle, a pharmacy counter offering poetic cures, live musical-poetry from singing shelf stackers, and dancing in the aisles courtesy of the Trolley Waltz.

For the gloriously pop art poetry of the Poems in a Tin, which Crabtree originally created for National Poetry Day and which inspired Word M’art, prior to the launch at The Market House, she has been running Word M’art workshops for groups within the St Austell community, so that they may write their own poems for the tins. Which is all part of Crabtree desire, or rather revolutionary zeal, to encourage everyone to get involved in reading, writing, performing poetry. Her resolute intention is to, as she says, “show people that poetry doesn’t have to be boring, stuffy, or elitist. It can be fun, exciting, engaging, and uplifting. There’s a poetry revolution going on and I want to encourage people to sign up!”

In Crabtree’s hands the revolution will not only be poetic, but also very, very, brightly coloured! Following the launch week at The Market House, Word M’art will be rolled out across the country, where is can be set up in bustling supermarkets, empty shops, at fêtes, carnivals, and festivals, or as a museum or gallery installation.

Word M’art runs from 1st June - 5th June 2010
at The Market House, Market Street, St Austell, Cornwall PL25 5QB
Open 10.30am to 4pm.
Free admission.

Links:

Sally Crabtree
www.thepoetree.net

Poems in a Tin filmed ‘advert’/guerrilla Word M’art poetry in a branch of the Co-op
www.youtube.com

Hotel Pelirocco, 10 Regency Square, Brighton, East Sussex. BN1 2FG
Sunday 13th June from 6pm - 8pm

by Guy Sangster Adams

Ace Stories is a new series of literary events running between June and December 2010 created and directed by Jay Clifton. The programme will, Clifton says, “provide an entertaining but definitely seriously-minded programme of readings and music,” that promotes “literary appreciation and development.” In addition to six events at the Hotel Pelirocco in Brighton, the programme also features four events in October/November at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, which will include film screenings, literary discussion, live music, and dramatic readings with a Deep South of the USA focus, as part of the Southern Discomfort season.

The inaugural Ace Stories event on 13th June features Cathi Unsworth, author of Bad Penny Blues and The Singer, plus local writers Howard Cunnell, reading from his novel Marine Boy, Heli Clarke, and live music.

Authors already lined up for future Ace Stories events include Science Fiction writer China Mieville (The City and The City and Perdido Street Station) Greek novelist and playwright Pavlos Matesis (The Daughter), and Amanda Smyth (Black Rock).

Ace Stories, Sunday 13th June, 2010, from 6pm to 8pm,
at Hotel Pelirocco, 10 Regency Square, Brighton, East Sussex. BN1 2FG
Admission £3.

Links:

Ace Stories
To be added to the mailing list for updates on forthcoming Ace Stories events, email:  Jayclifton330 AT googlemail DOT com
with ‘Add me to the Ace Stories mailing list’ in the subject title.

Hotel Pelirocco
www.hotelpelirocco.co.uk

De La Warr Pavilion
www.dlwp.com

Benedict Newbery is a poet and journalist, in addition to being an occasional poetry reviewer and copy editor for Nude magazine.  His poems have been published in Magma, Succour, the delinquent, South Bank Poetry, Carillon, and Straight from the Fridge.  In October 2006 he presented poetry and spoken word in a joint exhibition, Morningwell, with painter Simon Dawe.  Whilst the film of his poem Cul de Sac, which he storyboarded and co-directed with animator Sandra Salter, was shortlisted for the 2008 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin.  Last summer,  on behalf of the Sohemian Society, he hosted Moscow Rules a literary journey in Hampstead tracing the action in Le Carré’s  Smiley’s People.  He lives in London and performs at various open mic events around the capital.

It’s The Administrators!

Steve Jones
mans the phones
Slumped
with koala eyes
crumbs of disco biscuit
down the sides
of his brain.
Nods at Jane,
rubs his face
and starts to disappear.

Sandy Brown
is settling down
louche in an olive suit.
Bored,
sending figures
down yellow forms —
can do this in his sleep.
Sniffs at Jane
who says hello
and sits by Paul,
a bloke she knew from school.

Paul Tillings
form filling
berk in a Burton’s suit.
Tedious.
Pressing a boil
on his neck,
snipping bites
from meat paste
on white bread,
making mistakes
for Jane to rearrange
and file.

All

fucking

day.

© Benedict Newbery 2009. All rights reserved.
(First published in the delinquent)

The Royal Oak

It’s early doors
and the air holds flies
above cold slops,
as Pete and Jack -
soon joined by the man in the cap -
stand apart on lino
that lifts beneath the bar.

Passed them every day.
Nipping out and popping in
to drop a bob or two
on three o’clock’s also-ran.
Stooped over palms,
each way’s bits of shrapnel,
picking, adding, sorting,
then slipping in again.

Later on
jetsam, driftwood,
a wheel on the wall
and brass
ripped from some old bar,
filled a space
left by the net drapes
and cracked formica.

But just the same in name.

And sat apart,
Pete and Jack
and the man in the cap -
last of the Black-and-Tans,
half-and-halves
with drop on the side.

Passed them every day.
Chin to chest,
yellow eyes
among the liver spots,
beards stained
with Capstan tracks
framed by Sixties hair.
Shoulders forward
close to the building’s edge,
then slipping in again.

© Benedict Newbery 2008. All rights reserved.
(First published in Magma)

Weymouth Bay

This evening’s end
slipped beneath the swell
of a late-summer sea
and joined The Hood,
tonight the Bismark too -
hulks of Special Brew
sent below on pebble shot
from the battery of boys.
Now gone.

Far off
the sun wrapped the bay,
drew shadows up cliffs
into secret grass
of thumbnail fields -
parcels tied by fingers
that stretched
from the barns and farms,
trees and drystone walls.

Night came
black as the guts
of hunting cod,
raised a bombers’ moon
to light a king astride his horse,
then out, across the water,
dropped a path
to touch the stump
of a lost pier -
a thousand lovers
on August tea dance afternoons,
the big band’s brassy swing
still tingling in the bay.

© Benedict Newbery 2008. All rights reserved.
(First published in Carillon)

Cul de sac

I saw Mrs Smith who lost a child -
slipped from the pier - her only son,
open the gate to an empty house
as her silent husband climbed the hill
on his long-gone daughter’s bike

I heard Jack Jones in his garden shed
bending steel and shaving wood
while making plans and mental lists
of things required by his broken wife
to ease her last two years

I heard old Stan smashing six-inch nails
with jackhammer pace to create a space
beneath the ploughed up lawn
where he and Daisy would be safe from harm
through an endless night that never came

I saw tall John leave his house at dusk
in his big greatcoat and trilby hat.
His final month spent in hotel bars,
wandering through blackening nights,
then slipping back at a later hour -
the last of that year’s ghosts.

© Benedict Newbery 2008. All rights reserved.
(First published in the delinquent)

To watch the film of Cul de Sac, which was shortlisted for the 2008 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, CLICK HERE

Benedict Newbery
benedictnewbery.com

‘Very, very, very, funny and very very feel-good’
NUS magazine

‘Extremely good poetry but smiles too much’
John Hegley

‘Words of wit, wisdom and intelligence’
Apples and Snakes

Paul Lyalls has  performed at 10 Edinburgh festivals, 1 Eton College, 5 Glastonbury’s and on a 73 Bus, which made the ‘and finally…’ bit of the 6pm national news. He is also one of the stars of BBC2’s ‘Big Slam Poetry House’ and  in 2008 he was Poet for the London borough of Brent (’London’s 5th coolest borough’) and performed at the new Wembley stadium. In addition to which, for the last 12 years he has  hosted Express Excess, London’s outstanding spoken word night. Whilst he also runs exciting poetry workshops in primary and secondary schools.

This year he has contributed two poems to Penguin’s A-Z of Children’s Poetry and has just published his first full collection of  poems,  Catching the Cascade ( Flipped Eye), from which the following poems are taken.

The Value Of Wales

Its chief contribution to the UK
must be as a unit of measurement,
night after night
a news desk declares
‘An area of Rainforest,
the size of Wales disappears every year’
‘The amount of water
London loses through its creaking Victorian pipes
would fill a swimming pool
the size of Wales’.
Every part of the world has a similar unit of measurement:
in the United States it’s an area the size of New Jersey;
on mainland Europe the reference more often than not
is Slovenia - which appropriately happens to be
98.4 percent the size of Wales.
But just how accurate is Wales
as a unit of measurement?
Just how constant is that land-mass?
It’s worth remembering that at low tide
Wales measures 20,761 SQ KM.
Whereas at high tide, it’s only 20,449 SQ KM
and to really put it into context,
each year coastal erosion erodes an area of Wales
the size of Central Swansea.
For those of you in Europe trying to visualise this,
that’s the equivalent of an area the size of down-town Ljubianna.

Time

Our hotelier pointed out that
all the clocks in all the hotel rooms
all said different times.
So, in some rooms you were late
and in other rooms you were early.
“It’s not a problem”, said the Nuclear Physicist
breakfasting on the next table
“Time actually happens four times slower than
we think”?
“Not round here it doesn’t!” rejoined our hotelier,
“Round here, time happens really fast.”
At which, I gazed out of the window
and surveyed the lifeless two street
regional-coastal town -
which had about as much going
on as a letter that never arrives.
If ever there was an
argument for there not being a God,
this place was it.
“In fact,” continued our hotelier, “you can tell
how much is going on around here
by the all the things that are happening:
in September there’s a Wicker Doll fair,
in October a Poetry Festival and a Science Convention,
in November there’s Bonfire Night
and before you know it,
it’s Christmas.
Right, who’s got time for another cup of tea?”

The Anatomy Of A Bookshop

English Literature
was beside the drinking fountain.
American literature
was over near the vending machine.
Romance,
next to the fire escape.
Philosophy
was between the first and second floors.
Crime
could be found next to the tills.
Politics
was below ethics.
Self-help,
by the mirror.
Making The World A Better Place
was next to books on children’s names.
Religion
was next to Fantasy.
Poetry,
Was down in the basement
with Wines, Beers and Spirits.

Hard Fast And Beautiful

In John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939),
(which raised the Western genre
to artistic status )
she was the ’saloon girl’ Dallas
who had been forced out of town
by puritanical women.
When ‘The Ringo Kid’ (John Wayne)
proposes to her, she says
“But you don’t know me,
you don’t know who I am.”
“I know all I want to know.”
he says.
Seeing a glimmer of hope
she asks the drunken doctor
(Thomas Mitchell)
“Is that wrong for a girl like me?
If a man and a woman
love each other?
it’s all right,
ain’t it Doc?”

All poems ©Paul Lyalls 2009

Catching Cascades  is available from all bookshops and Amazon priced  £5.99

Paul Lyalls
www.paul-lyalls.com

Express Excess, every other Wednesday, The Enterprise, 2 Haverstock Hill, London NW3
Doors 8.30pm Performances 9pm
Tickets £5/£3 (concs)
Express Excess Facebook page

Plectrum’s profile of Express Excess from issue one:  READ MORE

Paul Lyalls will also be performing poems from Catching Cascades and hosting the Plectrum Live Edition at Express Excess on Wednesday 3rd February MORE DETAILS

And also:

Monday 25th January: Brighton Komedia club with Will Self & Elvis McGonigal
44 - 47 Gardiner St, 7.30pm, all tickets £12.
Sunday 14th February: RONNIE SCOTTS Jazz verse Jukebox, with Fran Landesman, Dorothea Smartt, Winston Clifford
47 Frith St doors 6.30 show 8pm, tickets£6/5
Fri 26th February: Finsbury Arts Festival with Adam Bloom
St Lukes Central St EC1 8pm, all tickets £5
Sat 27th February: Hawth Theatre with JOHN HEGLEY & Niall O’ Sullivan
Crawley, East Sussex. 8pm,  all tickets £12
Thurs 4th March: Haringey Literature Festival
Wood Green Library. Check with library for full details.
Thursday 18th March: Bang Said the Gun
The Roebuck, 50 Great Dover ST, SE1 London, 8PM, tickets £3

“Proust would have made a great TV reviewer,” writes John Grindrod in the introduction to Shouting at the Telly, the collection of rants and raves about television which he has edited, and which has just been published by Faber & Faber. “He had three key attributes,” Grindrod continues, “firstly he didn’t get out much; secondly, he had a fondness for nostalgia; and thirdly, an appreciation for how the trivial and the profound are inexorably linked.”

In the absence of Proust, Grindrod has drawn together an eclectic array of  writers, critics, comedians, actors, and broadcasters, including Travis Elborough, Rebecca Front, Emma Kennedy, Matthew Sweet, and Boyd Hilton, bringing ire, satire, insight, wit, and celebration to every genre of programme, from reality to factual, soap to sitcom, cult to comedy.

Whilst along the way salient questions are answered: Is Freddie from Scooby-Doo a colossal pervert? How do you win America’s Next Top Model? And if you play the theme from Inspector Gadget in a nightclub will people dance? The answer to the latter is to be discovered in Daniel Pemberton’s Great TV Themes, which follows in full below.

Daniel Pemberton is the BAFTA nominated composer behind many of the themes and sounds you hear everyday on TV. His credits include everything from cult comedy series (Peep Show, Suburban Shootout) to mainstream reality shows (Hells Kitchen, Love Island, Bad Lads Army); acclaimed dramas such as Born With Two Mothers (starring Sophie Okonedo and Lesley Sharp) and Vincent Van Gogh biopic The Yellow House (starring John Simm) to BAFTA and Emmy award winning documentaries (Hirsohima , George Orwell - A Life In Pictures); top rated lifestyle programmes (Great British Menu) to big budget family adventures (Prehistoric Park). His ability to jump genres effortlessly yet still bring a unique and recognizable sound to every project saw him named as ‘one of the hottest people working in television today’ by Broadcast magazine, who praised him as ‘a composer prepared to take risks’.

Great TV Themes

I do hope the great TV theme is not a dying breed. It would possibly seem so in today’s modern media environment. While 1960s shows like The Prisoner had amazing title sequences and themes that lasted almost two minutes (!), their modern equivalents, like Lost and Heroes, just have a noise that is over in five seconds. Boring. Or they just use some bland by-the-numbers rock song that really has nothing to do with the show at all. More boring.
The key, I think, to a good TV theme is first to create an interesting sound palette - use an unusual array of noises. Then write a great tune. And then try and get it played as often as possible. If you can tick all three of these boxes then you should have a classic. It’s amazing we don’t have more of them. A lot of TV execs like themes that sound like something else they’ve heard before. Or they want you to do a million different things in ten seconds leaving no space for an actual tune. Or they want it to have a ‘big impact’ ending. You really don’t need a big impact ending - it’s often the biggest false economy there is. But still they persist, making you rewrite something that was great into something that’s not. I’ve been there - many, many times. However every now and again someone slips one through the net and produces some gogglebox gold. Here are my personal favourites:

Grange Hill
Written in an hour by renowned TV composer Alan Hawkshaw (the only man who could not only write the themes to Countdown and Channel 4 News but also the legendary b-boy breaks tune The Champ), Grange Hill originally started life as a piece of library music called Chicken Man that was chucked into a recording session at the last minute. It has since become an icon of British childhood, it’s bizarre funkiness instantly transporting you back to a time of Mr Bronson telling someone off and a sausage on a big fork. Wow. They foolishly changed it in the nineties to some synth tosh that no one liked. Idiots.

Knight Rider
Knight Rider. What a fucking amazing ahead-of-its-time tune. Obviously everyone else now also realises this which is why it has been sampled to death by everyone from Timbaland and Busta Rhymes to So Solid Crew and their contemporary Crazy Frog. The tune was written by Stu Phillips and the show’s creator Glen A. Larson. I’ve always wondered whether Glen A. Larson actually did anything at all on it or whether he just wanted a slice of the action because it was his show (much like Simon Cowell and his ’songwriting’ credit on The X-Factor theme) and thus he could do what he wanted. If anyone knows Glen A. Larson please could they find out as this one has puzzled me for years.

The South Bank Show
I agree it is not often you get to read someone citing Andrew Lloyd Webber as an influence. But his theme tune to The South Bank Show is awesome. Taken from his crazy classical rock mash-up album Variations, the reclaiming nostalgia from tv theme tunes theme is based on a piece by Paganini and it still sounds good today. I know it’s really uncool but I do wish more people would make records like that today. I secretly love them.

The Krypton Factor
This was one of the few TV themes written by The Art Of  Noise. Like much of their commissioned work (also listen to the rather patchy soundtrack of the Dan Akroyd Dragnet film) it seemed to use exactly the same noises as their records of the time. Namely lots of sampled horn blasts and that ‘dum dum dum’ noise that was all over Close to the Edit and the drums from Beatbox. Maybe Trevor Horn had just bought some expensive new glasses and didn’t want to spend any more money on memory for his Fairlight sampler. We will never know. Anyway it’s one of those made-in-the-eighties tunes that has aged remarkably well. But whatever happened to the show’s
spooky host Gordon Burns?

Inspector Gadget
Do-do-do-do-do Inspector Gadget. Another fantastically groovy TV tune that you are probably humming to yourself right now. But did you know that the theme is pretty much a rip-off of the classical tune In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg? Work it out on the piano to see what I mean. I used to love watching the show not just for this but also for its super funky moog synthesiser underscore. I even once tried to DJ it at a night in Shoreditch many many years ago. I had previously convinced myself that this was going to be a massive dancefloor filler and send the crowd into a frenzy. It didn’t. It cleared the room. Oh dear.

Treasure Hunt
Helicopters. In the 1980s helicopters seemed to be on TV all the time. Helicopters and motorcycle display teams. Where are they today? One show that used them heavily was Treasure Hunt. The theme tune was a super pomp synth rock monster that built to an epic crescendo. The music said ‘this could be the most exciting thing you will see on TV all year’. The show said: ‘Oh look here’s Kenneth Kendall and a married couple who look like they last had sex seven years ago, standing about in a room full of fake books’. What a swizz.

The Great Egg Race
I don’t know how many of you remember this show but it has got one of the most killer theme tunes of all time. I tried to seek it out again researching this piece and I was shocked at how fresh it still sounded - a tight punky kinda beat with some horribly catchy Moog drops on top. It got me wanting to dance round my studio in about two seconds flat. If someone like Simian Mobile Disco sampled it up they’d have a massive hit on their hands. A gem waiting to be rediscovered.

Tour de France
Again this is a bit of a personal choice but the old theme from the Channel 4 version of this was ace. It wasn’t - as many believe - Kraftwerk’s track of the same name but a rather spacey sounding synth tune by some bloke who used to be in The Buzzcocks that somehow managed to incorporate French kids’ tune ‘Frère Jacques’ and still sound cool.

Doctor Who
Not much more needs to be said about this. Originally written by top TV composer Ron Grainer (who also did classic themes to The Prisoner and Tales of the Unexpected), it was warped into crazy electro freakout territory by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Grainer, apparently so impressed at what the now legendary soundsmith had done with his track, offered her half the royalties. Ludicrous BBC staff guidelines, however, meant, sadly, she couldn’t accept them. The current arrangement, by the normally superb composer, Murray Gold, is, in my opinion, no match for the original whatsoever. Boo hoo.

Roobarb and Custard
A viciously funky weird theme tune that sounded like a Fender Rhodes put through about six different distortion and filter pedals. In my various TV works I have tried to rip the sound off more times than you care to mention. It fitted the jaggedness of Bob Godfrey’s visuals perfectly. Best not to think about the rather dodgy rave version knocked up in the nineties by the blokes from Global Communication before they were cool.

© 2009 Daniel Pemberton

Shouting at the Telly: Rants & Raves about TV by Writers, Comedians & Viewers
Edited by John Grindrod
Faber & Faber £9.99

Links:

Daniel Pemberton
www.danielpemberton.com

Shouting at the Telly
shoutingatthetelly.blogspot.com

Faber & Faber
www.faber.co.uk

Luke Kennard is a poet, critic, dramatist and pugilist. He is compassionate, but prone to anxiety and bleak introspection. Many have called him polite and quite funny, but add that he suffers from a tendency towards constant nervous laughter and an apparently involuntary rictus of disdain. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Stride Magazine, Sentence, Echo:Location, The Tall Lighthouse Review, Reactions 4, Orbis, 14 Magazine, The Flying Post, Exultations & Difficulties. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and was shortlisted for Best Collection in the 2007 Forward Poetry Prizes. He is quite tall.

Computer Club, a new, previously unpublished work of short fiction by Luke Kennard may be read in issue 3 of the print edition of Plectrum.

The Migraine Hotel is published by Salt Publishing

My Friend

My friend, your irresponsibility and your unhappiness delight
me. Your financial problems and your expanding waist-line are a
constant source of relief. I am so happy you drink more than I do
and that you don’t seem to enjoy it as much. When I hear you
being arrogant and argumentative, my heart leaps. Your nihilism
is fast becoming the richest source of meaning in my life and it is
my pleasure to watch you speaking harshly to others. When you
gossip about our mutual acquaintances I sigh with satisfaction.
Your childish impatience delights me. The day you threw a
tantrum in the middle of the supermarket was the happiest day
of my life. Sometimes you say something which reveals you to be
rather stupid - and I love you then, but not as much as I love you
when you are callously manipulative. Your promiscuity is like a
faithful dog at my side. When you talk about your petty affairs,
you try to make them sound grand and important - I cherish
your gaucheness and your flippancy. At times it seems your are
actually without a sense of humour : I bless the day I met you.
You bully people younger and weaker than you - and when others
tell me about this, I am pleased. Sometimes I think you are
incapable of love - and I am filled with the contentment of waking
on a Saturday morning to realise I don’t have to go to work. I
often suspect that you do not even like me and my laughter
overflows like water from a blocked cistern.

The Dusty Era

for S.F.

One day he was walking behind her with several colleagues
from the Embassy when the hairgrip fell out of her hair
(bronze, decorated with three parrots) and clattered to the
pavement. It was Stockholm, and high winter. She was deep
in conversation with a girlfriend and didn’t hear. His colleagues
chuckled and continued to admire her legs.
They walked five blocks before she noticed her hair around her
shoulders, patted the back of her head and stopped walking.
She turned and looked first at the pavement and then up,
where she caught his eye. She looked hurt, as if something in
his face had apologised for conspiring against her with lesser
men (he responded with an apologetic grimace) then she
took her girlfriend’s arm and walked on, hurriedly.
Two summers later, looking for cufflinks for the reception, he
found the hairgrip in a pawn shop in Östersund. An event
Grabes describes as, ‘One of those overdetermined little
moments that gradually conspired to snap his reason like a
chicken bone and force him into organised religion, more
credulous than even the altar boy.’ (ibid, p. 136) It should be
noted that Grabes was one of the men walking with him that
winter evening in 1956, and that he was, in all probability,
quite attracted to E. himself - a fact that throws Grabes’s
more spiteful observations into relief.
He stood with a hip-flask, complaining in the port, a parcel of
Christmas presents under one arm. Each day contains a hundred
subtle chasms. You can betray someone by not smiling,
murder them by not saying ‘Mm,’ at the appropriate points
in the conversation.
Years later he sat on the swingset in the playpark, an unopened
letter from his daughter in his inside pocket. He was throwing
pine-cones at the rusty ice-cream van. ‘You should be
banned from describing anyone,’ he said out loud in the condensation.
Two of his would-be future biographers crashed
into each other on the autobahn and were killed instantly.
One of them was me, hence my omniscience.
The Embassy was dustier after that - it came to be known as the
Age of Dust or the Dusty Era. A fault on the line made the
intercom pop sporadically like a man about to say something
difficult.

Variations On Tears

I realise you never cry because the last of your tears have been
anthologised as a Collected and you can’t stand the idea of appendices.
But what am I to make of the demonstrators playing cards
with your daughters ? Have they betrayed your estate ? Go tell
the children to gather their strength for the inevitable backlash.
I realise you never cry because each one of your tears contains a
tiny stage on which a gorgeous, life-affirming comedy is always
playing and it cheers you up the minute you begin. But what am
I to make of the bare interior of your house ? You’re waiting for
inspiration, right ? Go tell the children to gather dust on the
shelves of archive halls.
I realise you never cry because to do so would be to admit defeat
to your harlequin tormentors - wringing their hands at the sides
of their eyes and making bleating sounds - and you don’t want
to give them the satisfaction. But what am I to make of the Make
Your Own Make Your Own ______ Kit, the first instruction of which
is ‘Have a good idea for something’ ? Could I have not worked
that out for myself ? Go tell the children to gather followers for
our new religion.
I realise you never cry because you are a total arsehole who cannot
even muster enough compassion to feel sorry for himself. But
what am I to make of your red, blotchy eyes when, as your pharmacist,
I know for a fact you are not allergic to anything ? Have
you, after all, been crying ? Go tell the children to gather my
remains from the ditch and look out for the white bull who, I’m
told, is still at large.
I realise you never cry because the last time you cried four separate
murders were reported on the evening news, each one more
grisly and inexplicable than the last, and you incorrectly assume
there was a correlation. But what am I to make of this terrifying
breakfast ? Are you trying to get rid of me ? Go tell the children
to gather the farmers from their taverns to gather the new crop
of thorns.
I realise you never cry because when you do, you are beset by
birds with long tails and brightly coloured plumage and sharp,
hook-like beaks who are uncontrollably drawn towards salt. But
what am I to make of your statement, ‘The world is not built on
metaphors’ ? What exactly do you think the statement ‘The
world is not built on metaphors’ is ? Go tell the children to
gather in the clearing and await further instruction.

And I Saw

A false prophet slapped in the face by a wave ;
A woman screaming at her clarinet,
‘What would you have me do, then, drown you, too ?’
Remaindered novels washed up on the shore.
A cat, baffled by a drowsy lobster, jogged
Over the pebbles towing a little carriage.
And the cat didn’t say anything - because
It was a cat. And the carriage was not full
Of tiny men, a watermelon or an
Assembly of diplomatic mice
Because the carriage was an example
Of man’s cruelty in the name of research.
The cat belonged to a behaviourist
And had been raised in an environment
Of only black horizontal lines. So
It saw my sprinting across the beach
To dismantle its harness as a whirl
Of fenceposts and orange rubber balls
And was gone faster than the better idea
You had a moment ago. Leaving me
Only the seagull’s dreadful anthem :
‘I just want to tell you how sad we all feel.’
The airplane trail made the cloud a wick -
I thought I saw it starting to burn down
And I knew we had been lucky to avoid
Disaster so far. I shared a bench with
A man who wanted to redefine us
As victims of one kind or another
Instead of whatever names we’d chosen :
Steven Victim, Jenny Victim, Franklin
Victim. I disagreed but couldn’t speak.
He ate raw mushrooms from a paper bag.
In fact it was a computer game called
The Enormous Pointlessness of it All III.
When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying ‘I’m dead,’
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the first generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality.

© Luke Kennard 2009

Kieron Winn photographed by Eleanor Sepanski

Kieron Winn was educated at Tonbridge School, where he later briefly taught, and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Herbert Read and T. S. Eliot. His poems have appeared in magazines including Agenda, The Dark Horse, The London Magazine, Oxford Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Spectator, and in a short film about his work on BBC1. A selection of his poems appears in the Carcanet anthology Oxford Poets 2007. He was awarded the University of Oxford’s English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize in 2007. He lives in Oxford, where he is a freelance teacher.

Read a selection of new, previously unpublished poems by Kieron Winn in issue 3 of the print edition of Plectrum.

A British Veteran

A hand that held a rifle on the climb
To Passchendaele now bears a bubbling flute.
His hand is strong and rubicund, his frame
Mobile and actual as he toasts his eight

Australian great-great-grandsons; woollen cloth
Is covering his body now as then.
That hand will soon slip under the stream of myth.
No one thinks Agincourt was fought by men.

(Author’s Note:  The poem is based on Harry Patch, the last British soldier of World War I, who died on July 25th 2009; and on Claude Choules, a former mariner, who lives in Australia and is now the last surviving veteran of the British forces in World War I.)

© Kieron Winn 2009

Youth

Springy, with bright but half-inhabited skin,
Scarcely in time, still waiting to begin,
Travelling half a dozen to a car,
Heading towards some vague but certain star,
We ran together with a single nature,
Unset, with fewer props, as if one creature,
And after every party fell asleep
In house or barn in a sprawling animal heap.
Our charm to adults was the hope of some
Lineless utopia that will never come.
Now almost all of us have sprung apart,
And rich but private chambers form each heart.

© Kieron Winn 2008, originally published in The Interpreter’s House number 38 (2008)

The Great Old Poet in Bermuda

Swimming, as ever, helps with all my ailments.
My tender wife is singing in the bedroom.

I have become a classic. I look at my book
And contemplate changing the species of a crab.

The spirit sleeps in such places. Let me enjoy
My yellow silk pyjamas, I am no Dante.

My heart is going: I would enjoy some sherbet.
Later today we may go out to buy some.

In this afterlife I need not exert myself.
Now I have done my work. I whistle and live.

© Kieron Winn 2006, originally published in Oxford Magazine number 248 (2006)

Chair

Not the couch: that animal slumber
disguised beneath tapestries
Not that but the seat he tucked under
an expanse of desk
with its four, elegant insect-legs,
shaped as a man with a blank
totem’s head, arms curved out
to receive.

Dark, cracked leather the colour
of book-binding, or last days of a rose,
the cut nub of a cigar, its ember
catching in the rug, the inside
of my cheek where I chew,
or his. The flavour of Thursday,
a stained wooden spoon, bad luck.
Good luck. A blend of pleasure
and regret. That.
It smells of an Autumn stopped
from turning and swivels
only with effort

preferring to face a crowd
of statuettes: Greek, Roman, Chinese.
Tiny, petrified gods.
Captive audience.
Sit in his place and touch their heads.
Notice the Baboon of Thoth has a skull
smooth as soapstone, as skin. He looks
unlikely but his charge is writing.
Don’t worship; sit with him
and let them watch.
Sink back into the indentation,
ghost of a spine.
Let the arms enclose you,
take this paper,
start again.

©Abi Curtis 2009

Lupercalia

This is a night to go out
Dare the wolves to circle.
Beyond the fire their eyes
uncountable
Beyond those, breathing rolls back
to a forest of firs
shaped as the flights of arrows.

This is a night to go out
Put on layers and layers
Keep your own warmth close
Don’t envy fire in any window
Swivel your ears
to the noises you love
Keep low
Take your leave.

This is the night to go out
Your shoulders roll towards
the Prussian blue of later
the soft-spots of an old dusk
the tender fury of clouds
Follow this logic and

hours from now, you’ll witness
a marriage in the alley-way
six eyes telling you
Keep our secret, we have our reasons
You circle them
Lope to where there’s room
to view approving looks
from the moon.

This is the night you’ll end up
calling through the o-shaped valve
of the throat, long and loud
until everything’s connected
The night you won’t remember how
you made it home
or got like this:
smoky and besotted.

©Abi Curtis 2007

(Originally published in Humbug, Tall-Lighthouse 2007)
California

We dug our heels into the sand at Santa Barbara
and from the shore we witnessed pelicans drilling
down the air through a solidity of water,
breaking the blue skin of the world.

We couldn’t take our eyes from the diving bird:
a beak somewhere between a spoon and a saw,
wise-eyed and plump he targeted lunch,
floating back up with a catch swinging,
packed in the loose suitcase of his mouth.

The pier stretched on with our line of sight
into the haze.

©Abi Curtis 2009

Abi Curtis recently won the Crawshaw Prize for Poetry and her collection Unexpected Weather is forthcoming from Salt. She won an Eric Gregory award in 2004 and published a pamphlet, Humbug, with Tall-Lighthouse in 2007. She lives in Brighton and lectures at Sussex University.

“Would you like to do something special for a lot of money?”

It was nothing Sue hadn’t heard before. The man who was asking was dressed in a grey chauffeur’s livery, his cap in his hands along with a pair of black leather gloves. He had parked his Rolls Royce along the pavement by Embankment Gardens some minutes previously and made his way straight over to the bench where she was sitting. He obviously knew the score.

By the side of Charing Cross Station, on the banks of the Thames that glittered dark and dangerous in the sodium glow of the streetlights, was where you came when you had an itch you couldn’t scratch. Or, if you were like Sue, when you had nowhere else to go. She had first found herself here only hours after she’d arrived in London, the colonel’s £20 tight in her fist. Her introduction to the Smoke not perhaps the most auspicious; a pick-up on King’s Cross station, a man with military bearing who had spoken in a voice of decorum and privilege, offering her employment as his live-in maid.

One short trip to Bloomsbury later and that decorum had dissolved before her eyes. The colonel wanted to take parade. He’d had her strip naked and stand with legs and arms outstretched while he, wearing only riding boots, a Sam Browne belt and his officer’s cap, screamed “Fire!” and threw a handful of strawberry jam right between her legs. The direct hit splattered, the colonel’s eyes bulged and he spasmed like he was having a heart attack. That was Sue’s cue to make a run for it, snatching the money he’d laid out on the table as she fled, strawberries and cream forever struck off her personal menu.

Some deep-rooted instinct must have led her here, down towards the river where the trade was done, just as it was in her native Newcastle. The rest of the city’s flotsam and jetsam had washed up here too; she was only latest in a long line of lost souls who hung around the Silver Lady mobile canteen, dipping furtively in and out of the public toilets by the side of the train station, men and women with eyes that stared but saw nothing, mouths that never asked questions.

Those that came down here among them to do the asking, they always had the same clipped, refined tones as the colonel. The more respectable the veneer, the deeper the depravity beneath. Sue’s eyes lingered over those leather drivers’ gloves. She wondered just how ‘special’ this was going to be.

“It’s a birthday surprise for my master’s son,” he said, “who comes of age today.”
There was a trace of humour in the chauffeur’s eyes, but he wasn’t so coarse as to wink. “He’s a very shy boy, young Harry,” he went on, “and my master is anxious that he learns the ways of the flesh from a woman such as yourself, one who is both clean and yet well versed in these matters. He must learn from an expert, don’t you think?”

Sue did like to be asked her opinion, it didn’t happen often. She liked it even more to be considered skilled, which actually she was, in the ways of deflowering young men. This was an easier proposition than she had anticipated and it was about to get even better.

“Of course, my master is willing to pay handsomely for your time, to ensure that the experience is one young Harry is not likely to forget. Shall we say £25? Of course,” he rushed to finish the sentence before she could answer him, “if you feel your services are worth more then you only have to say, we don’t want any arguments.”

Sue had already got to her feet. “Canny,” she said. “I mean, 25 is champion, pet.”
“Well then,” the chauffeur took her by the elbow and guided her towards the waiting limousine, “we shall go directly to the house.”

The back seat of the Roller was all pale leather, more expansive and comfortable than any bed Sue had recently known and she breathed in the smell of it with pleasure. The chauffeur slid back the glass petition behind his seat and started the motor, heading down the Embankment towards Belgravia.

As the sleek machine glided silently down the moonlit river, Sue popped a handful of purple pills and prepared herself with a fantasy, one that she often came back to. Appropriately for the occasion, it was in memory of the boy who’d taken her own virginity, a black-haired, blue-eyed North country boy. His looks and prowess were embellished each time she recalled him so that now he resembled more closely Robert Mitchum than the apprentice shipbuilder who’d taken her down an alley, hot breath in her ear, hot kisses up and down her neck, pressing his stiff crotch against her as he pinioned her to the wall. She could still hear the strange, bird-like cry he made as he pulled down the straps of her rigid, black underwired bra, his hand coming up her legs as her own unfastened the buttons on his fly, knowing what it was to want a man inside her, wanting him right now, hard against the wall…

“Here we are, madam,” the chauffeur opened the door and Sue stepped out of her reverie and into Eaton Square. Whether Young Harry, with his pampered Southern ways, would be up to Bob’s muscular mastery was now largely irrelevant. However clumsy and artless his first lesson in love was to be, she at least was now ready for him in body and mind.

They walked up the steps of an imposing white mansion, between two tall pillars to the front door, where the chauffeur rang the bell and delivered Sue into the care of a butler. Not a word passed between the servants of the house, just a nod; this scene was well rehearsed and everybody knew their duties. The chauffeur faded back into the night and the butler led the way down the corridor, to the most luxurious room Sue had ever laid eyes on.

It was arranged almost like a Bedouin’s tent, with ceiling-to-floor drapes and what looked like a parachute silk dipping from the ceiling, diffusing the light from above it into a soft glow that fell across the four-poster bed, bedecked in similar white silks and huge French pillows. The walls were oak-panelled and had a number of doors set into them, the wall-to-wall carpet was thick beneath her stilettoed feet. Everything seemed to have been arranged for a sumptuous ritual deflowerment.

“Now,” the butler spoke in the same measured tones as the chauffeur. He handed her five crisp £5 notes. “If you’ll get ready, take off your clothes and wait for him, he’ll be along presently. Because he’s so shy, you won’t mind if the lights are out? You’ll be able to teach him in the dark, won’t you?”

The butler withdrew and Sue just had time to shove the beehives into her handbag and stash that under the bed before the lights went out. Hurriedly, she undressed in the dark. It didn’t take long; her profession eschewed rigid corsetry in favour of easy access bras and knickers. Memories of Bob raced through her veins along with the rush of sulphate as she laid back on the cool sheets in readiness for the young master.

Soft footfalls came across the deep carpet. She felt the weight of a man getting onto the other side of the bed. Sue tried to keep the image of Bob going as she softly encouraged her timid charge: “Over here, pet, don’t be shy.”
Her hand reached out in the darkness and touched… the strangest thing. Where she was expecting the hard flesh of a skinny young man, she felt only softness. A softness that enveloped her naked body, a softness that felt like… fur.

Fur running over her skin. For a second her body responded before her bewildered brain could kick in. It always had been that element of danger that had got her going; that had led her from that Tyneside alleyway to here in the first place. She squirmed under the downy touch and instinctively reached up to where the head and shoulders would be on a man. But her fingers raked only more fur; she could make out no recognisable features.

Her mind did a somersault and she tried to reason what it could be. A fur coat, maybe. It could be part of the kink, the strange form Young Harry’s shyness took. She didn’t want to think that this could be something worse than that, that she was perhaps not in bed with a man at all…
Well whatever it was had big strong arms because a second later she felt her ankles gripped firmly and her legs hoisted up into the air, then the unmistakeable hardness sank into her. Sue gasped. This was no demure virgin who held her legs open and pumped away with the strength of a sheet-metal welder, pinning her to the bed with effortless ease.

It was in this moment of shock that the lights came on and the air was suddenly full of the sounds of whooping. Sue looked up to see the parachute had been whipped away, revealing a minstrel’s gallery that was full of people, men and women, dressed up to the nines in evening gowns and black tuxedoes. One second seemed to stretch into infinity as Sue’s horrified gaze took in their faces, flushed with excitement, the jarring sounds of their laughter and cat-calls as they craned over the rail, punching the air with their fists, and the lights of the chandelier above glittered off their Champagne glasses and their jewellery.

Then, even more slowly and unwillingly, she turned her eyes down to whatever it was that was providing the other half of their entertainment and a silent scream caught in her throat.

It was a man, but it wasn’t a man. Covered in black fur he was, from head to foot, with a black mask across his face, a low, bulging forehead and thick nose, white teeth set into a rigid, fearful grimace and only slits for eyes behind which seemed to be nothing more than blackness.

In a house in Eton Square, for the delectation of the upper echelons of society one evening in the Autumn of 1960, Susannah Houghton was being fucked by a man in a gorilla suit.

Now that really was a first.

© Cathi Unsworth 2009

Author’s note: I stumbled across this story as part of the research for my forthcoming novel, Bad Penny Blues. It was a tale told by one of the unfortunate working girls who became the third victim of the so-called Jack The Stripper in February 1964. Like many of the other murdered women in this case, she had been part of an illicit scene involving kinky sex with the upper classes, in the same era and milieu as the Profumo Affair. In many of the true crime accounts of the Stripper story, her claims about the man in the gorilla suit are taken with a pinch of salt and indeed they do have the familiar ring of an urban myth in the making. However, if you take a stroll around Eaton Square today, you will find a blue plaque beside the door of No 1, the former abode of Lord Robert John Graham Boothby, friend of Winston Churchill and Ronald Kray, whose name will always be indelibly linked to the dark currents of the Sixties and the places where power and perversion met.

Cathi Unsworth is a writer, editor and journalist who lives and works in London. Cathi began her writing career on Sounds at the age of 19 and has written and edited at many music, film and alternative arts publications since. She is the author of the noir novels The Not Knowing and The Singer, and edited the award-winning book of short stories London Noir (all Serpent’s Tail). Her new novel Bad Penny Blues will be published by Serpent’s Tail in August.

Links

www.cathiunsworth.co.uk

www.serpentstail.com

by Guy Sangster Adams

“It just felt that the best way to tell the story of American music was to hit the road,” says Amanda Petrusich, whose debut full length book, It Still Moves: Lost Highways & The Search for the Next American Music, was published in Britain the week of Barack Obama’s inauguration and chimes with the current resurgence of interest in Americana music underscored by the success and Brit Awards nominations of Fleet Foxes and Seasick Steve and the BBC Four series Folk America and the accompanying Barbican concerts.

It Still Moves works on a number of levels mixing the highly personal account of Petrusich’s journey across key points on America’s musical map including New York, Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, Nashville, and Appalachia, with a sturdy history of the musical genres that have infused Americana music¾country, blues, folk, jazz, gospel, and bluegrass¾and the artists most redolent of those styles including The Carter Family, Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan. The duality aids the readability and accessibility of the book and was an intentional stylistic device as Petrusich explains, “some of my favourite authors have always done that really well, like Joan Didion or Truman Capote; it feels personal, it feels very authentic to the writer, but at the same time you’re learning a lot along the way and there’s a lot of factual information that’s being permeated through these personal narratives. That’s what I love to read and it ended up being what I love to write as well.”

It is absolutely her use of the personal that provides the reader an highly entertaining engagement with both the tactility of, and her passionate and thorough understanding of the history of Americana music; be it her description of leaving Brooklyn at the start of her journey with “my trunk heaving with plastic bags fill of clothes, two crates of mix tapes, three pairs of sneakers, and four family-size tubs of Animal Crackers”, her visit to Graceland where for “the first time Elvis has felt comprehensible to me; he liked monkeys and watching television in the kitchen”, her endearingly eccentric trait of taking elaborate and expensive CD (hand-crafted wooden) box sets back to their musical origins, such as The Carter Family: In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain to A.P. Carter’s grave in the Appalachian mountains, or her eroticisation of the open road and particularly Interstate 64, “giddy and anxious the entire time, blind to landmarks and history my whole body is craving the highway [...] practically panting with anticipation, I evacuate downtown Charlottesville and nose toward the interstate”.

But Petrusich’s primary musical focus is not retrograde, as the book also offers her analysis of, and interviews with, the musicians who have re-imagined and reworked Americana into new forms through the 1990s and into the 2000s, such as Wilco, Freakwater, and Iron & Wine, under genres labels such as alt-country and its sub genres with, as Petrusich writes, “ridiculous names¾see twang-core, country -punk, insurgent country, lo-fi, roots, rock, desert rock, gothic country, and, a personal favourite, y’allternative”, and indie folk, free folk, freak folk encapsulated by David Keenan in 2003 The Wire Magazine cover story New Weird America.

Whilst with an understanding that American music reflects the landscape from which it springs, one of the key quests of her journey was to discover “how Americana music is transforming to accommodate the massive cultural and geographical shifts in the American landscape.” In that, two twenty-first century dates loom large over Petrusich’s theme: the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 and Barak Obama’s victory in the presidential elections on 4th November 2008, and the route that Bush administration took the USA on in the intervening years. As Petrusich writes, “in retrospect it seems almost inevitable that a film soundtrack [O Brother Where Art Thou?] packed tight with ancient American folk songs would soar to the top of the pop charts in a year when nearly everything ‘American’ was being challenged, threatened, and rearranged.”

Petrusich’s decision to undertake her journey came not only during a key time of national soul searching but also at a key time of her life. She turned 26 whilst she was on the road, and has just celebrated her 29th birthday; I suggest to her that the period between those two ages is often as much a transitional stage as between the ages 16 and 19. “I do think that’s a complicated period for human beings,” Petrusich concurs, “that stretch at the end of your 20s, and I think the book in many ways is a coming of age story and also a search for identity, identity as it relates to one’s country; what is this place I live, it’s shaped everything about me, what does it mean? I think also politically at that particular time living in America there was a lot of disillusionment, especially amongst people of my age group, thinking that we were being carried along by an administration that we all felt powerless to stop and at the same time felt very strongly was not making the right choices for this country, not making the right choices for the world, and I think it was a time when the words ‘patriotism’ and ‘patriotic’ were getting imbued with all kinds of meaning that I wasn’t comfortable with, and so it was nice to hit the road and really fall head over heels back in love with America at a time when I was otherwise feeling a little, you know, maybe I should move to Europe.”

The road trip has become an essential and mythical ingredient of Americana, from Robert Johnson, to Woody Guthrie’s road trip in a 1953 Model A Ford, from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to Bob Dylan, to Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, via Easy Rider, to Larry McMurty’s Roads published in 2000. A long tradition that has hitherto been the preserve of a male narrator, as Petrusich writes, “the man on the road is the stuff of American legend, the woman on the road is the stuff of teenage fantasy,” expanding upon this in our interview she says, “the iconography of terrible 80s metal band videos; women wearing short jean shorts and a halter top being stranded on the side of the road and the man swooping in to save her.” Although a desire to right the gender balance had not initially occurred to her, as she explains, “I hadn’t really realised how entrenched that idea of the man as the driver is, it’s the default mode in many Western cultures, you see a couple get into a car and the man’s always driving, and I never really gave it much thought until I started working on this and I thought there’s not a ton of road stories that are written by women; you know it strikes me as odd because I know all these women who love to drive and to hit the road but it hasn’t been expressed in the same way, at least in literature.”

Petrusich’s quest and title were inspired by the lines from Donovan Hohn’s A Romance of Rust, “Where lies the boundary between meaning and sentiment? [...] Between memory and nostalgia? America and Americana? What is and what was? Does it move?” Her response and conclusion is that It Still Moves, to which one might now add an Obama-esque exhortation of ‘Yes it does!’

It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, & The Search for the Next American Music (Faber & Faber) £14.99

Links

www.amandapetrusich.com

www.faber.co.uk

I pressed my cheek
against the granite headstone
buried my face and howled
into my up-turned coat collar
tracing the lost years
with my thumb
and my own surname
etched in stone

(more…)

This year, Robert Hastings, the owner of Black Spring Press, is celebrating his fifth year at the helm of the small independent publishing company. Originally founded in the mid-eighties by Simon Pettifer, the imprint has never had, Hastings says, “anything that you would call a mission statement; I don’t think it would want to have one”. The catalogue includes writer/songsmiths Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen and is, Hastings says, an “idiosyncratic collection of things that seem to be in the air and carry a resonance”. Which carries a note of charming disinflation that risks belying the fact that, under his tenure, Black Spring Press have also been at the forefront of restoring the literary reputations of two writers, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, concurrent with introducing a whole new generation to their work.

(more…)

“Spoken word,” says Paul Lyalls in defining Express Excess, the monthly performance night that he has hosted for twelve years, and which has just become bi-weekly, in the room above The Enterprise Pub in Chalk Farm, London. Though he goes onto quantify this further by saying, “The core of it has been poetry, but that’s quite a loose term” and that the night “blends and amalgamates lots of different styles”.

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As I slipped into silk underwear and dabbed perfume behind my knees, you should have been there. As I hurried to dress and skipped down the stairs, I remembered the first time you kissed me. I remembered us being sweethearts, my puppy love. How you surprised me when you contacted me on the internet after over twenty years. For months we wrote to each other, each teasing email, a little more flirtatious, revealing. Finally this provoked me to invite you to meet me, I typed: Saturday at 8pm at Trafalgar Square, meet me by the lions and wear a flower in your lapel.

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