Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

Selected and translated by Sárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová
With a preface by John Carey

(Faber and Faber) £12.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

‘The greatest belief would be to believe in people,’ is the quote from the Czech writer, Karel Capek, which opens this collection of his journalism and letters which has been selected and translated into English for the first time by Sárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová. The line is taken from his 1922 novel, A Factory to Manufacture the Absolute, his vision of consumer society, which alongside a number of his other works, is seen as an early example of, though the terms had not then been coined, of science fiction and speculative fiction. Which include, probably his best known work internationally, RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play which premiered in 1921 and gave the world the word, ‘robot’, inspired by the Czech word, ‘robota’, which relates to feudal forced labour. Though Capek was keen to point out, as an article from The People’s Paper included in Believe in People states, that it was his brother the artist, writer and poet, Josef Capek, who created the word.

Capek’s belief in people, his avowed humanism, remain undiminished throughout Believe in People, which instil the writings with both a wonderfully inspiring positivity and also an increasing poignancy, as the chronology of each section leads the reader through the all too brief life of the first, liberal democratic republic of Czechoslovakia, from it’s birth in 1918 to the Munich Agreement which sounded its death knell in 1938.

Even in the face of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s radio address infamously labelling Czechoslovakia as “a far-away country” made up of “people of whom we know nothing”, which pre-empted Britain’s signing of the pact with France, Germany, and Italy, in Czechoslovakia’s absence, Capek remained optimistic and as the final piece in the collection, Greetings, demonstrates he continued to believe in, and hold no malice towards the peoples of the signatory nations of the Munich Agreement, and counter to Chamberlains’ words, he found it all too easy bring to mind images of ordinary people in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, going about their day-to-day activities.

“Indeed,” he writes, “one is cross with many, and keeps saying to oneself , what has happened can never be forgotten: how can we possibly communicate with one another in the midst of this unprecedented distance and alienation? And then you think of, say, England, and suddenly you see the little red house in Kent before you. The old gentleman is still trimming the bushes and the girl is pedalling away swiftly and straight. And see you’d like to greet them. How do you do? How do you do? Nice weather, isn’t it? Yes, very fine. So you see, that’s it, and you feel lighter.”

Very sadly, the same day that Greetings was published Capek died from pneumonia, though his friend Dr Karel Steinbach, who was present when died, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová quotes in her introduction, wrote, “As a doctor I know that he died because in those days there were no antibiotics and sulpha drugs, but those who say that Munich killed him also have a great deal of the truth.”

Though had he lived, as a critic of both fascism and communism life would have been very difficult for Capek in the years that followed. Indeed, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová states, when the Nazis arrived in Prague on 15th March 1939, “he was said to be number three on the Gestapo list, and they arrived at his house that same day to find that he had been dead for nearly three months.” His brother, Josef, who had also criticised fascism and Hitler, was arrested, and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

It would be another fifty years until Czechoslovakia could return to being a liberal democracy through the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, lead by Václav Havel. Karel Capek was a key inspiration on Havel, for whom, as he is to many Czechs, as Tobrmanová-Kühnová writes, “he is not only a master of the word but a moral example.” Believe in People is a wonderfully engaging collection, reflective, funny, inspiring, and philosophical. It provides a fascinating insight to the excitement and joie de vivre inherent in the birth of nation, and the devastation at its loss and betrayal, whilst also bursting with insight and wisdom that is as relevant to peoples of  all countries today as when the words were first written.

Links

Faber and Faber: www.faber.co.uk

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(Portobello) £12.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

“Imagine what it is to be rejected by the most sophisticated and casually stunning place in the world. A place filled with the highest percentage of women on the planet able to pull off chinchilla wraps with jeans. To not be welcome in the City of Love is tantamount to being rejected by love itself. Why couldn’t I have gotten thrown out of Akron, Ohio? City of Rubber.”

Though the French authorities have never “formally banished” Sloane Crosley, the sequence of adventures and misadventures that have befallen her in their capital city, as she recounts in Le Paris!, one of the nine essays in How Did You Get This Number, including out of loyalty to a Protestant friend, making a confession at the Catholic cathedral of Notre Dame, despite being Jewish and speaking little French, to a French/Japanese speaking priest, have lead her to feel that she “will not be ‘asked back’ anytime soon.”

Sloane Crosley

Crosley has a magnetic attraction to, come mischievous delight in pursuing, happenstance and circumstance that often leaves her out of step with accepted mores, but in falling out of step she observes and spotlights the absurdities all too common in following the pack and the path of doing something just because that’s what everyone else does. Whilst, with the same wickedly spot on humour and terrific insight, she also navigates and highlights the complexities and perplexities facing a just-turned-thirty New Yorker, both in her home city, following on from her 2008 debut collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, and also, as above in Paris, in an SUV in Alaska with a ‘hen party’ wearing bear bells on their pony tails, and in Lisbon in an open air bar with three amateur Portuguese circus clowns…

Smart, sassy, subversive, with a Noir edge - not least in Crosley’s trip to McGurk’s Suicide Hall whilst searching for a new appartment - How Did You Get This Number is a terrific mix of funny, reflective, and revelatory.

Links

Sloane Crosley: neverrockfila.com/crosley/

Portobello Books: www.portobellobooks.com

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(Sceptre) £14.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

From the vantage point of last year’s Margate Meltdown, the Ace Café’s annual Spring Bank Holiday charity motorcycle ride-out from North London to the Kent seaside town, Travis Elborough, whilst wryly observing the promenade juxtaposition and proliferation of black leather jackets and Mr Whippy ice cream, also reflects on the contemporary, happy camaraderie and intermingling of the Ace Café Rockers and a group of Mods from the nearby Deal Scooter Club. A far cry, he notes, from the violent clashes between Mods and Rockers in the town over Whitsun 1964, which lead local magistrate, Dr George Simpson to not only hand out punitive £50 fines to all those arrested, but also infamously to decry all those involved as, “petty little saw-dust Caesars.”

A speech which served the headline writers very well in stoking moral outrage of the, young people are uncontrollable, it was never like this in my day, variety. As ever it was, as Elborough reveals, “rowdy teenagers had, in a sense, been menacing Bank Holiday festivities since their inception in the 1870s,” and in following this line of research he has uncovered a wonderful article from the Bournemouth Times in 1938, reporting events from the August Bank Holiday and “frothing at the mouth at the mere arrival of ‘groups of youths, some wearing gaudy paper hats with inscriptions such as, ‘Come Up and See Me Sometime’, parading along the Drive singing the latest dance hits.’”

The seaside allure for youth culture is only one component, Margate but one stop along the route of Elborough’s hugely enjoyable exploration of the full English - be it served up by an eccentric landlady in a B&B, dished up en masse in an holiday camp, or under cling film on a paper plate and entirely fashioned from rock - seaside experience, from Brighton to Blackpool, Skegness to Scarborough, New Brighton to Bexhill-on-Sea, and all the people, architecture, and entertainments that give it such redolence, and which has proved such a successful international export.

Travis Elborough © David X Green www.davidxgreen.com

But his Quadrophenia-tinged chapter does serve to highlight the facets that make Elborough such an engaging cultural companion, mixing astute personal observation with gems that only the most assiduous research uncovers, informed by a breadth of sources all of which he approaches with the same informed passion be they historical document, literary text, pop cultural reference, or beach hut conversation, both his erudition and enjoyment of his subject are always to the fore in Wish You Were Here, as they were in his two previous books, The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster, and The Long Player Goodbye: The Album from Vinyl to iPod and Back Again.

As with the two latter titles, Wish You Were Here is not an exercise in nostalgia, Elborough is adept at choosing cultural subjects to examine and contextualise at points after periods of decline when they prove that the final words in their histories have not been written, in light of the London mayor’s competition to design a new Routemaster, the resurgence in vinyl record sales, and the renaissance that is gathering pace in even the most rundown English seaside towns, which lead Tatler to dub Hastings the ‘Notting Hill of the South Coast’ three years ago, and which makes Wish You Were Here as much a snapshot of the here and now and a penny in the slot telescope view of where we are heading, as it is a postcard of where we have been.

Read an exclusive article by Travis Elborough, A Postcard From Brighton’s Colonnade Bar, written whilst researching Wish You Were Here,  in the Brighton Focus section of issue 5 of the print edition of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick, which also includes contributions from Biba founder, Barbara Hulanicki,  and Brighton based poet, Abi Curtis. FOR MORE DETAILS

Links:

Sceptre www.hodder.co.uk/sceptre

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(Optimum Home Entertainment)
On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

First broadcast between 1965 and 1966, with series 4 The Avengers entered the era for which it is best remembered and which was also its most influential, as
Diana Rigg, in the role of Emma Peel, took over from Honor Blackman’s Dr Cathy Gale, as sidekick to John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee. Emma Peel’s name, so the story goes, came from ABC’s (Associated British Pictures, the programme’s production company) press officer, Marie Donaldson, saying that the character need to have ‘man-appeal’, which became abbreviated to ‘m-appeal’… Emma Peel.

The crackling sexual tension that had already existed between Steed and Cathy Gale, was ramped up to become far more overt in Steed and Emma Peel’s relationship. Equally the use of leather and PVC costumes, which had been introduced in series 3 for Cathy Gale, particularly for the fight scenes, was continued and became more body conscious and more markedly fetishistic, with zips and buckles. The fetishism was taken even further in the episode, A Touch of Brimstone, when she is dressed as the ‘Queen of Sin’, in a leather corset, knee-length stiletto heeled boots, and a dog collar studded with six inch spikes. All of which played up the vaunted man-appeal of the character, but Emma Peel also, as with Cathy Gale before her, equally and importantly subverted stereotypical roles for women combining not only brains, beauty, and independence, but also physical prowess; she dispatches her male, whip wielding adversary in A Touch of Brimstone in very short measure. Emma Peel became just as much an icon for women as she did for men. Though the dominatrix look proved too much for the American censors, and the episode was banned in the US.

With her striking op-art clothes designed by fashion designer, John Bates, Emma Peel also became a key fashion influence. Under the label, Avengerswear, Bates also licensed his designs to a number of manufacturers, and they were available in shops around the country from the moment series 4 aired. Bates’ geometric designs were also groundbreaking in that before their use in The Avengers it had been considered they would not work on the film cameras of the day. Both reflecting the times and setting the times, Emma Peel’s Mod style, replete with Lotus Elan and Vespa 150 scooter, juxtaposes pleasingly with the continuance of Steed’s bowler hatted and furled umbrella, dandy-edged, vintage Bentley driving, English gentleman.

Sexy, stylish, witty, and inventive, this first series of the Emma Peel era of The Avengers remains as influential and enjoyable now, extraordinarily 45 years on, as it was first time around.

Links
Optimum: www.optimumreleasing.com

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360 Degree Music
On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

That Roses Kings Castles’ new single, One Born Every Minute, hooks you immediately with a rhythm section that, like bright sunlight preceding louring storm clouds, mixes the catchiest pop with a darkly alluring rockabilly edge, should come as no surprise, since RKC is the creation of former Babyshambles drummer, Adam Ficek. Though to purely classify Ficek thus is to fail to highlight that he is also a gifted multi-instrumentalist, DJ, and, as his RKC lyrics and his blog show, an erudite writer, all of which One Born Every Minute ably clarifies. Whilst also demolishing any generic stereotyping of drummers! The tabloid outplaying of Pete Doherty’s life sometimes threatens to occlude the fact that his musical collaborators have been as talented as they are.

Ficek began RKC as a side project in 2007 as a way to release the songs he was writing during the long periods on the road whilst on tour with Babyshambles. The extraordinary journey, in all senses, that he went on both within and without Babyshambles has also inspired One Born Every Minute, as he says, “the song is mainly based around the characters I have met over the past few years in this crazed whirlpool of an industry. It takes all sorts…. some nicer than others.”  Through Ficek’s vocals, which pleasingly mix shades of Deram period Bowie via Anthony Newley with a rawer modernity, One Born Every Minute presents snapshots of the knife-edge of success and hype, the steep drops that lie either side, and the people that all too often gather around someone whose life is lived in the public eye, when they are at their most vulnerable.

All things are possible with One Born Every Minute. One can choose to project upon its lyrical allusions, to unravel who might be who, or one can choose to be swept up in its rhythmical and melodic insistency, or like all the best singles one can choose both. Choose the latter, and just as the best singles always do, the joyousness of One Born Every Minute will propel you into feeling that all things really are possible.

Links

Adam Ficek: www.adamficek.com

360 Degree Music: www.360degreemusic.com

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Second Sight Films
DVD On release

By Guy Sangster Adams

“I shall be severe, but show affection occasionally,” says fifty-something, professional hitman, Victor Meynard (Jean Rochefort), outlining the terms of the ’stage’, or internship, he offers to an artless, young messenger, Antoine (Guillaume Depardieu), rather than killing him, after Antoine inadvertently witnesses one of Victor’s hits. Motivated by the fact that is unmarried, and has no heir to whom he can pass on the family business of killing, the perks Victor offers as part of his proposal to train Antoine in the ways of assassination include a Carte Orange (the unlimited travel pass for Paris, which has just been replaced by the ‘Navigo’).

But it seems that Victor’s midlife crisis is gathering pace when he not only fails to carry out his next assignment, to kill a beautiful art forger and petty thief, Renée Dandrieux (Marie Trintignant), who has duped a gangster into buying a fake Rembrandt, but also begins to fall for her, as the seemingly ill-assorted trio go on the run from the gangster.

Wild Target (Cible émouvante) is a masterful black comedy, with a wonderful mix of impressively realised knock about farce, subtle comedic moments, and a gripping thread of menace, which earned its writer and director, Pierre Salvadori, a César nomination for Best First Work, when it was originally released in 1993. Rochefort’s performance is superlative, indeed all three lead actors give superb performances, and the crackling interplay between them, and also with Madame Meynard (Patachou), Victor’s gloriously batty and utterly ruthless mother, creates a thoroughly enjoyable film.

Both the now octogenarian Rochefort, whose career spans five decades, and nonagenarian Patachou (aka Henriette Ragon), are and continue to be much loved and legendary figures of French cinema and theatre. Trintignant and Depardieu, both born into famous French acting families, became favourite actors for Salvadori to work with, taking roles both in his next film, Les apprentis (1995), and again sharing the lead roles in White Lies (Comme elle respire, 1998). Very sadly, both subsequently died at an early age. Trintignant died in 2003, aged 41, of a cerebral edema as a result of being punched by her boyfriend Bertrand Cantat, lead singer with the French rock group, Noir Désir, and  Depardieu died in 2008, aged 37, after contracting severe viral pneumonia whilst filming L’Enfance d’Icare on location in Romania.

A British remake of Wild Target, starring Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, and Rupert Grint has just been released.

Links
Second Sight Films www.secondsightfilms.co.uk

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(Serpent’s Tail) £10.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Occasionally, a book arrives in the post for review, that grips so tightly from an initial glance at the jacket blurb and the first line, that one reads it in a single sitting, straight from the Jiffy Bag, unable to tear oneself away, even if one should want to. Anne Peile’s debut novel, Repeat it Today with Tears, is one of those books.

Set in London in the early 1970s, and narrated by Susanna, a teenager who is studying for her ‘O’ levels, the book charts her search for the father she’s never known, the idealised figure who has been absent from her life, the part she needs to make her whole. When she discovers he is living within walking distance of her home in Clapham, across the river in Chelsea, she affects a meeting, but chooses to conceal her identity, and adding a startling rapier tip to the parrying straightforwardness of the book’s opening line, “The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the Easter holiday,” begins an affair with him. To borrow from King Lear, to which there are parallels, in that moment it is as clear to Susanna, as it is to the reader, that ‘that way madness lies’, but so engulfed is she, both by her love and her role, that she becomes both perpetrator and passenger, as ensnared in the tragedy that unfolds, as the reader is compelled to keep reading.

Repeat it Today with Tears is unsettling, not least in its examination of the fragility of boundaries and the close proximity of tipping points, between accepted mores and taboo, between sanity and insanity, between love and the (self-)harm, (self-)loathing, and destruction that can stem from its embrace. It is also an alluring and beautifully written book, with acutely well observed characters, from the protagonists to the vignettes, such as the women doing their laundry at the Nine Elms wash baths.

Peile’s evocation of London, and specifically Chelsea and the areas just south of the river, Battersea, Clapham, Wandsworth, in 1971/1972, is also wonderfully done. She creates a fascinating mix of teenagers and teenage fashion along the King’s Road, in and around the Great Gear Market, and their confluence with the older Chelsea set of artists and bohemians, then still prevalent in haunts such as the Picasso café and The Chelsea Potter pub. Set against the very different world, across the river, a world that had not changed so fast, though change was on its way, not least in the demolition clearing the site for the New Covent Garden market.

All in all, Repeat it Today with Tears is a phenomenally powerful debut novel, and highly recommended.

Anne Peile will be reading from Repeat it Today with Tears at the Plectrum Live Edition at The Horse Hospital on Wednesday 23rd June 2010. FOR MORE DETAILS

Links:
Serpent’s Tail: www.serpentstail.com

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Xtra Mile Recordings
Released 24th May 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

“Critics,” announces an answerphone message at the beginning of War is Noise, “you probably got this album for free, so please don’t trouble yourself with clever analysis, music is for listening to, not writing about, so why don’t you cut your hair and go and get a real job.” I did receive the album for free and although I am quite attached to both my hair and job, in the spirit of compromise that is abroad I will respond rather than analysing, whilst also heartily exhorting that you both listen to Jaakko & Jay’s debut album and also go see them live.

The Finnish duo, like their label mate, Frank Turner, for whom they have also been a support act, have maintained a near constant tour schedule, playing live with one microphone, an acoustic guitar, and a single snare and ride drum. The vitality and exuberance of their stripped back live sound has translated exceptionally well to the record, aided and abetted by harmonica, banjo, trumpet, and fiddle, to create fourteen punk folk tracks, underscored with an insistent and infectious rockabilly edge that propels you to your feet, whether you are dancing to save the world, to free your soul, or just because it’s a fantastic beat. Fuelled with shouts and harmonies, rattling riffs and drifting melodies, humour and insightfulness, through songs that protest, satirise, and wear their hearts on their sleeves, War is Noise leaves you in an excited spin, with a broad smile on your face, energised and wanting to engage (or reengage…) with life!

Links:

Jaakko & Jay: www.myspace/jaakkonjay

Xtra Mile Recordings: www.xtramilerecordings.com

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(4AD)
Released 24th May 2010

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Despite their name, Stornoway came together not on the islands of the Outer Hebrides but in Oxford. Though it was a shared passion for the Scottish band, Teenage Fanclub, that united founder members, singer and principal song writer Brian Briggs and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Ouin, during Freshers’ Week at the university. In common with Teenage Fanclub, vocal harmonies, guitar, string, brass, and organ sections which reference 1960’s folk-, surf-, and psychedelic rock/pop, such as The Byrds, Beach Boys, and Love, abound on Stornoway’s debut album, Beachcomber’s Windowsill. Five years in the making, the album and the re-released first single, Zorbing, coincidentally share release dates with Teenage Fanclub’s first new album and single in five years.

But interwoven with their acute pop sensibilities, the songs on Beachcomber’s Windowsill are also imbued with sounds and images that evoke both the historical and the elemental. The layers of history and tradition set against the beauty of Oxford’s cityscape, seen at first light or under moonlight, echo through the inspirational mix, with the use of traditional instruments, bell chimes, and choral singing; an essence of Magdalen College Choir continuing their 500 year old tradition of singing in the dawn from the top of Magdalen Tower on May Morning. Though Stornoway also channel folk song traditions that have their feet more firmly on the ground, or on the deck, with both elements of Bluegrass and sea-shanties layered into a number of the tracks. It must be added that the band are also not averse to creating new instruments to supplant the traditional, such as turning carrot chopping into percussion.

The elements course through the album’s lyrics, but not unlike an Hebridean island the force of storms and tornados can abate almost as soon as they’ve begun, leaving sunlit or starlit stillness and reflection in their wake. Beachcomber’s Windowsill’s tumult is love, and all the vistas through which a heart may be swept by passion and love requited, unrequited, lost, and tenderly remembered. From “zorbing [rolling along in a transparent plastic orb] through the streets of Cowley” in the single of the same name, to anthropomorphizing into a seabird in The Coldharbour Road, via an heartfelt exhortation to disengage people from a life of screens and return them to “free range” on We are the Battery Human, it’s a fantastic, surprising, and beautiful journey through an album that is an enchanted island in a sea that is all too often awash with mediocrity.

Links:
Stornoway: www.stornoway.eu

4AD: www.4ad.com

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(Stephen Overbury) £12.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

The film Performance, a chapter on which is included in London Babylon, also acts as a useful cipher for the themes of this intriguing book. The story at the core of Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s film, shot in 1968 though not released until 1970, is the societal collision between the East London gangster, Chas (James Fox), and the reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger), in whose West London house he seeks sanctuary. Interlaced with sex, drugs, violence, and esotericism, darkness undercuts the brightness of the psychedelic, and the cut-up technique blurs the real and imaginary.

Just as the cast and crew blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction, and encapsulated the conventions that ‘Swinging London’ had dissolved, in mixing, around its Kings Road, Chelsea epicentre, the aristocracy, the underworld and the new the new icons of pop- and counter-culture. Both David Litvinoff, the film’s consultant and dialogue coach, and John Bindon, who played one of Chas’ gang, had links to the Krays and the Richardsons, and violence was very much a part of their lives. Whilst the aristocratic antique dealer and interior designer, Christopher Gibbs, created the sets for Turner’s house, and Cammell, born into a privileged background, had been a society portraitist with a studio in Chelsea. Though that said, after boring of the latter, Cammell did live, by all accounts, a formidably unconventional and decadent life.

Unsurprisingly, given all the above, the stories and rumours, from the salacious to the troubling, that surround Performance are legion. Similarly the abutment of such an extraordinary mix of characters and backgrounds that gathered around the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid to late 1960s, has also given rise to equally extraordinary tales that remain highly intriguing even as, with the passage of time, their veracity becomes harder and harder to ascertain.

With London Babylon, Steve Overbury has in part taken a lead from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, and also the shorthand and license that appending ‘Babylon’ to a title (vis à vis Imogen Edwards-Jones’ sequence of books) now brings, and does not shrink from recounting those tales in all their salacity and scurrility. Though his focus is not only the famous names, but also the lesser known characters who though they were at the fringes of the Beatles and the Stones, their actions were not without effect. Amongst them, Bindon and Litvinoff, the drug dealer and Keith Richard’s driver, ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez, and Count Jean de Breteuil.

Akin to the melting pot of styles and backgrounds present in ‘Swinging London’, Overbury’s book is also an hybrid of styles. As he explains in the introduction, the other motivator behind the book’s title was the discovery in his research that in the 12th century a section of London Wall was called ‘Babeylone’, and throughout London Babylon there are sections which are more formally structured and referenced studies of London’s cultural history. Whilst also threaded intermittently throughout the book are the surprising imagined dialogues between Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and others.

London Babylon has clearly been a labour of love for Overbury; to bring the book out he has, as he explains on his website, had to resort to “Punk publishing”, and the hefty work load that that entails. The book is a little rough around the edges, for a future edition a further copy edit would be great, and for me at least a list of sources or bibliography would be fantastic. But that is not to diminish the breadth of Overbury’s passion and research, and the degree to which he has clearly immersed himself in his rich subject matter.

Links

London Babylon: www.londonbabylon.co.uk

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(Faber & Faber) £12.99

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

“I felt the explosion full in the face. The force of it hot-wired my imagination, invaded my dreams and taught me everything I needed to know about the realities of youthful self-empowerment,” writes Nick Kent about the impact of his first exposure to the Rolling Stones at the first concert he ever went to. It was 1964, Kent was just shy of his 13th birthday, and through a school friend whose dad was the promoter he not only had a front row seat, but was also invited backstage afterwards to meet the band: “Suddenly I had my future adult agenda mapped out before me.”

That portentous night lit the fuse on the agony and the ecstasy, the insight and addiction, the violence and opprobrium, that would engulf Kent in the following decade. Nine years later he met the Stones again, this time to interview them, by which stage he was a key figure both at the renascent NME and in a golden age of music journalism. The band approved of what he wrote to such a degree they commissioned him, all expenses paid, to accompany them on the final leg of their tour and write a book about his experiences: “my wildest teenage dream becoming a reality.”

But for the highest highs, in every sense, acclaim, and limelight life that the 1970s brought Kent, it also brought him the most extreme counteractions. In the closing scenes of the film Withnail & I Ralph Brown’s similarly kohl eyed character, Danny, laments on the passing of the 1960s, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over, and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” The blackness, which Kent terms the “dark vortex” was to follow in the 1970s, and forms an omnipresent undercurrent to Apathy for the Devil, as “the caring sharing 1960s were dead and gone” and fuelled by increasingly harder drugs, primarily heroin, “now it was every man for himself.”

Apathy for the Devil provides a front row seat, more often than not the edge of that seat, on Kent’s tumultuous journey through those equally tumultuous ten years, and his myriad adventures with those who would define the decade. Ziggy-era David Bowie announces, “So you’re Nick Kent. Aren’t you pretty!” on their first meeting, his dealings with Led Zeppelin become increasingly white-knuckle, as at times is his friendship with Iggy Pop that endures throughout the 1970s. His love affair with Chrissie Hynde ends in heartbreak, sacked twice by the NME, he pursues a music career that, not least through his increasing heroin addiction, fails to kick start but includes giving the first public performance of New Rose, ‘the first British punk single’ whilst playing in the first line up of a band that would become The Damned.

He also developed a close friendship with Malcolm McLaren, also acting as his music culture guide and joining an early line up of the Sex Pistols. Though that friendship was infamously decimated at the Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club  in 1976 when, at McLaren’s instigation, Sid Vicious beat Kent up, followed up the following year when to announce Vicious joining the Sex Pistols McLaren sent telegrams to the media saying, “he [Vicious] gave Nick Kent just what he deserved at the 100 Club.”

By the end of the decade the “dark vortex” had consumed Kent, and as he adds in the book’s ‘Afterwards’ if time travel became possible “the seventies would be the last time zone in history I would return to.” But his return to that decade in words and memories makes for an extraordinary book, by turns a fascinating, revelatory, insightful, troubling, comedic and tragic, but always engaging account of the irresistible rise and fall of the author and his decade. As Danny in Withnail & I also said, “If you’re hanging on to a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision - let go before it’s too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope?”

Links

Faber & Faber: www.faber.co.uk

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(Atlantic Books) £25.00

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

In 1959, the sixteen year old Barry Miles, with a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in his pocket, hitchhiked from his home in the Cotswolds along the south coast with London as his “ultimate destination.” For as long as he can remember London had exerted a magnetic pull on Miles; once there he made a beeline for Soho. The previous summer, whilst staying with his cousin in Wembley, they had explored Soho and sat “drinking coffee from glass cups” in the 2i’s coffee bar “staring out at Old Compton Street thinking this was the centre of the world as ‘Dream Lover’ by Bobby Darin played on the juke book.”

Soho and London’s West End are at the heart of London Calling because it has been there, as Miles writes, “that the magnet that draws people to London” is located and from 1945 to the 1990s, the period that the book primarily covers, a key area, with forays to the King’s Road and Notting Hill, for the creative and counter-cultural life of the capital. Miles outlines in his introduction that the  focus of the book is more personal history than encyclopaedic: “I have usually described the people I know, or whose work I am most familiar.” But then since his first visit to the 2i’s, Miles has been very well placed not only as a witness but also as key participant in the counter-culture.

Along the Soho streets that Miles explored on his first visits could still be seen the majority of the bohemian milieu that had been drawn to the area in the 1940s and the newer arrivals that began to gather through the 1950s in the pubs and clubs like the French House, the Colony Room, and Ronnie Scot’s, including Julian Maclaren-Ross, Tambimuttu, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Colin MacInnes, and George Melly. Many of whom Miles would subsequently meet, and all of whom feature in the first part of London Calling along with the founding of the ICA, the Angry Young Men, and Teddy Boys.

In 1963, after four years at Gloucestershire School of Art, and many such trips hitchhiking to the capital, Miles moved to London, and was directly involved with much of what part two of London Calling explores. As the manager of Better Books in the Charing Cross Road he co-organised the Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time event at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, the idea for which stemmed from a reading Alan Ginsberg gave at the shop and which was a key event in the creation of London’s underground/counter-culture. The following year with John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and support from Paul McCartney (who was the shop’s first customer) he co-founded the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, where subsequently John Lennon met Yoko Ono.  Also in 1966 he co-founded the International Times, Europe’s first underground newspaper, as a fund raiser for which the following year he co-organised the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream which was headlined by Pink Floyd.

Part two also includes Oz magazine, UFO, The Arts Lab and the film Performance. Whilst part three takes in the 1970s and 1980s via Punk, Alternative Miss World, New Romantics and Neo-Naturists, Gilbert and George and Leigh Bowery.

In the introduction Miles writes that he “also wanted to make the book accessible and amusing as humour is an often overlooked side of the avant-garde, so many of the anecdotes are included purely for the sake of levity.” In this he is entirely successful because London Calling is a wonderfully readable book to which the anecdotal, in addition to Miles’ personal experiences, add another wonderful layer to this fascinating and highly engaging book. To parts of the history which might be better known, they also provide fresh insights, to say nothing of wry smiles! “Recently, walking down Great Chapel Street in Soho,” Miles recounts, “I overheard two young men talking, ‘You know,’ one of them said, ‘looking at this you could easily be in Shoreditch.’”

From the 1990s onwards the “vast acreage” of the East End has developed as the artistic neighbourhood of London, though Miles writes, “it is too spread out to have any real centre” and though there is “plenty of transgression, protest, experimentation, and excess [...] it’s just not underground anymore.” Since the mid-1980s, and increasingly so in our fully networked age, art and music have gone mainstream, and though “there will always be cutting edge activity, bohemia has been globalized.”

Read Carla Borel’s StillSoho by Barry Miles from issue 2 of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick  READ MORE

For more on the life and writings of Julian Maclaren-Ross:

Watch the Black Spring Press profile on the Plectrum Broadcast Player which includes contributions from his son Alex Maclaren-Ross, writer Cathi Unsworth, and Robert Hastings, the owner of Black Spring Press. CLICK HERE

Plus from issue 1 of Plectrum - The Cultural Pick:
Book Review: Julian Maclaren-Ross Selected Letters edited by Paul Willetts READ MORE
Independent Focus: Black Spring Press & The Revival of Literary Reputations READ MORE

Links

Atlantic Books: www.atlantic-books.co.uk

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(Mute)
CD, Vinyl, 2CD, On Release

By Guy Sangster Adams

That the excellent new Liars album already has an host of influential fans is borne out by the second CD in the 2CD edition of Sisterworld which features remixes and reinterpretations of each track by other artists including Thom Yorke, Alan Vega, Devendra Banhart, and Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and packaging designed by the Grammy award nominated Brian Roettinger/Hand Held Heart which when one opens the CD case allows a ‘through the keyhole’ view into the concertina-fold outer sleeve and a glimpse into the sunshine filtered woods of Sisterworld.

Sisterworld is Liars’ parallel world, a conceptual space to which they have ascribed the criteria that it is their “own space, devoid of influence, somewhere remote from the false dreams amassed in L.A.” in which they “explore the underground support systems created to deal with loss of self to society,” by way of “the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A.”

Sisterworld is, as the view through the concertina suggests, as dramatically and sensorily charged as being in the midst of a dense forest on a summer’s day; light when it breaks through the branches creates temporal spaces of the most magical beauty, whilst the dark corners seem darker than you could ever imagine, the shadows forever shifting and encircling, accelerating one into fright-or flight-or freeze.

Liars, Sisterworld ©Zen Sekizawa

In short, the fifth album from this three-piece is phenomenally engaging. It creates an highly evocative soundtrack to a personal film that plays so vividly through your mind as you listen; a film of falling through the cracks in the film capital of the world, adrift and alone in the city of angels with a paucity of guardian angels. Sisterworld is by turns transcendent and troubling, the smoothest caress can quickly become the harshest of grips, ethereal harmonies, and floating violin, viola, and cello strings are blown away by the rawest garage rock, following the hopeful will-o’-the-wisp bassoon can be fatal as you realize that the rasping vocals are framing a counterpoint picture of despair.

But the best alternative realities are made stronger by recognition and understanding of the mainstream to which they are opposed, and Sisterworld is a brilliant alternative to the mainstream, and a wonderful escape from the glass and steel forest of homogenisation.

Links

Liars: www.liarsliarsliars.com

Mute: www.mute.com

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(Laurence King) £24.95

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Maia Adams’ supremely elegant new book provides the first overview of the extraordinarily innovative designs and diverse creative practice that has transformed fashion jewellery over recent years and instigated its current renaissance.

Fashion jewellery has antecedents in the costume jewellery of the twentieth century, from Coco Chanel in the 1920s who, as Adams writes, “challenged the status quo that jewels were only for the very wealthy,” to the 1960s and the use of plastic, wood, and paper by designers such as Paco Rabane, to its apogee in the diamante studded 1980s, and the prevalence of the “supersized imitation jewels” of Butler and Wilson, and the rubber bangles and crucifixes designed by Maripol which Madonna made ubiquitous. But as Vicki Beamon, of Erickson Beamon, explains in Fashion Jewellery, “Costume is an antiquated term for jewellery that, on the whole, was designed to look real,” and as Adams elaborates, to define the theme of her book, “this new breed of designer fashion jewellery makes no such claims - its purpose is not to imitate but to innovate.”

Erickson Beamon AW08 jewellery ©Greg Kadel

Erickson Beamon are one of the 33 designers profiled in the book, and provide a key link from the 1980s to the present day, three decades during which their “jewels of fantasy,” as Hamish Bowles has written, have reflected the times “from the rollicking, coruscating, dangerous 80s, the sleek, spare, barely there 90s, and our eclectic new century.” Judy Blame equally provides a link to the 1980s and in both his pioneering use of found objects in his jewellery and multi-faceted career that has also included accessories design, styling, and photography,  he has equally become an iconic mentor and inspiration not only to a new generation of fashion designers such as Gareth Pugh, but also to the new fashion jewellery designers.

Judy Blame coin purse ©Judy Blame

Many of whom, as Adams writes, “work simultaneously as stylists, photographers and fashion, costume, or product designers [which] means that they bring an eclectic arsenal of techniques and influences to bear on a body of work that runs the gamut from craft-based to technology-led; cerebral to silly; witty to whimsical.”

Amongst its line up of luminaries, Fashion Jewellery also features Scott Wilson, long time Hussein Chalayan collaborator, whose  sculptural headwear/jewellery hybrids have become renowned “spectacular catwalk statements” and whose earrings adorn the model on the book’s striking cover. In addition, Laurent Rivaud, to whom Vivienne Westwood went when she choose to launch her jewellery line in 1994, including the iconic orbs, and who now, under his own label R, creates minutely detailed jewellery, antique in appearance, drawing inspiration from a host of influences including Arthur Rackham, Fortunato Pio Castellani, Lord Leighton, and PJ Harvey. Whilst Natalia Brilli wraps an eclectic array of objects such as whistles, sea urchins, scarabs, and watches in leather to create her one-off jewellery pieces.

Natalia Brilli's gemstone bangles ©Julien Classens & Thomas Deschamps

Fashion Jewellery is crammed with great photographs, including still lives, catwalk shots, and fashion editorial spreads, working drawings, and features exclusive interviews with many of the featured designers, and provides a fascinating, inspiring, and exciting exploration of an equally fascinating, inspiring, and exciting time in jewellery design.

Links

Laurence King www.laurenceking.com

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Nintendo
b/w Abraham, Martin, & John; On the Turner Grand #2;  Nintendo (demo version)
(Xtra Mile Recordings)
EP available now, download only

(Xtra Mile Recordings)
Album, released 15th March

By Guy Sangster Adams

The resplendent piano saturated Nintendo EP is a wonderful prologue to Chris T-T’s excellent new album Love is not Rescue. Nintendo, which is also the opening track on the album, immediately establishes the sea change in sound and themes from T-T’s last album Capital which, fittingly as it concluded his London Trilogy, featured a far more caustic, rockier and inner city edge and edginess. But although both the new EP and album are less about kicking over the statues that is not to say that they don’t pack just as powerful a punch, and in many ways perhaps more so.

Against a piano as calming as watching a gentle incoming tide, lyrically Nintendo charts a relationship on the ebb, and holistically creates a superb and contradictory mix of poignancy and self deprecation, with a knowingness and great wry humour; for managing to make Nintendo Wii both a moving and funny lyric alone T-T should be lauded! For the EP Nintendo is backed with three tracks not included on the album: a demo version of Nintendo, On the Turner Grand #2 a six minute piano improvisation, and a great cover version of Dick Holler’s Abraham, Martin, and John. The latter is a beautiful, melodic, reflection both on loss and the struggle for human rights.

Key facets, equally, to the other tracks on Love is not Rescue, which are erudite and engaging, set to a stripped back sound of piano, organ, or acoustic guitar, to which the sounds of pedal shifts or fingers sliding on the fret board, all add to the whole. They are highly reflective and explore love, loss, and relationships, from the stand point of looking back over the decade since the release of his first album, and the effect that career choices, nigh on perpetual touring, to say nothing of getting older, have had on T-T’s personal life, and conversely the effect of the personal on the professional. As with Nintendo, Stop Listening and In The Halfway House (I Don’t Sleep Around) adroitly mix the laying bare of emotions with wry humour, not least in their pay-off lines, whilst Tall Woman is an acutely affecting study of saying goodbye to someone who has literally loomed large over one’s life.

Love is not Rescue also includes a great reworking of A.A. Milne’s Market Square, from When We Were Very Young, which as with Milne or T-T alike could be enjoyed as a wonderfully whimsical tale about wanting to buy a rabbit or as a more cautionary story about how even in a market of global availability the things that are most worthwhile to us don’t always have to be bought and sold.

That said, Nintenedo EP and Love is not Rescue do both have to be bought and sold, but they are entirely worth your money!

Links

Chris T-T: christt.com

Xtra Mile Recordings: www.xtramilerecordings.com

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(Laurence King) £19.95

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

The sequel to her book Restaurant Design, Bethan Ryder’s New Restaurant Design which is published in paperback for the first time, continues her exploration of the world’s most “elegant, unusual, and spectacular dining spaces.” Underscoring and continuing her theme established in the earlier book that eating out can be “as much a lifestyle choice and source of entertainment as a form of nourishment,” Ryder showcases 45 restaurants grouping their designs under four sections Global Views, New Baroque, Modern Classic, High Concept.

Philippe Starck features twice in the New Baroque section with both the “fairytale fantasy” of the Bistro of the Faena and Universe hotel in Buenos Aires in which the gilt detailed, snow white furniture is watched over by white unicorn heads emerging from white silk draped walls, and also with Bon in Moscow, the third Bon restaurant but the first outside Paris. Predominantly black and gold the space “conjures up a hauntingly gothic atmosphere” with an interior that includes black crystal chandeliers, gold Kalashnikov lamp bases, distressed, graffiti scrawled walls, and a white skull motif on the black upholstery of the “half burned gilded armchairs.”

Whilst the major feature of the dining experience at Evo, within the High Concept section, are the views of 18 kilometres (11 miles) afforded from the UFO-like glass, geodesic dome perched atop the 105 metre (344 foot) high Hesperia Hotel in Barcelona, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, Alonso I Balaguer Arquitectes, and GCA Arquitectes Associats. Thus the interior has been kept simple with glossy black lacquered tables, cream chairs, and golden yellow rhomboid-shaped fabric shaded lights which arch up following the curve of the dome “like sci-fi sunflowers.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

Modern Classic includes the Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury/DW5’s extraordinary Black Box, the restaurant for the shop Aïzone, a branch of Aïshti the Beirut fashion department store akin to Harvey Nichols or Barney’s. The exterior is lined with black aluminium panels and there is a projecting arm which not only contains a three-dimensional picture frame to display images and advertisements, but can also accommodate Aïshti fashion shows. Khoury’s, as Ryder writes, “daring and creative reclamation of war-torn buildings” has continued to reassert the identity of this troubled city; Black Box itself was damaged during the 2006 Lebanon War.

But Khoury remains phlegmatic, as is underlined in Ryder’s interview with him in the introductory section of the book which features interviews with 11 of the most influential restaurant designers (including Patrick Jouin, Marcel Wanders, Rob Wagemans, David Collins):
“Our part of the world raises far more burning and dramatic questions which you are faced with and which you cannot avoid. The problems are so obvious, especially when it comes to entertainment, and the situations are very interesting, I like tough situations, and I don’t like cute, happy little stories. That’s not my department.”

Bon Moscow designed by Philippe Starck

New Restaurant Design is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and floor plans, and coupled with Ryder’s erudite, informed, and unstintingly researched text creates both a superb overview of current restaurant design and an highly evocative travelogue.

Links

Laurence King www.laurenceking.com

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(Optimum Releasing)
DVD on release

By Guy Sangster Adams

The Avengers: The Complete Series 3 is the second phase of Optimum’s fantastic intention to release the first full restoration of every episode of The Avengers over the course of a year, which began in October 2009.  Where episodes have been lost, they are recreated through stills and commentaries, and the DVDs come replete with a host of fascinating extras.

With series 3 The Avengers established the model for which it is best remembered and the ingredients that have ensured it has remained both highly influential and a classic exponent of the spy-fi genre.

Filmed in 1963 and originally screened in 1964 in a peak time Saturday night slot on ITV, for series 3 Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, described in the original promotional material as a top level secret agent “who works under cover of his life as a wealthy man-about-town with an aristocratic background,” became ever more dandified, his bowler hat, furled umbrella, and flared cufflink displaying cuffs now omnipresent. Whilst the idea of Steed being aided by alternating amateur assistants in the earlier series was shelved in favour of Mrs Catherine Gale (Honor Blackman) being his partner in each episode. Which also allowed for a crackling sexual tension to be developed between the two characters.

With her PhD in anthropology and social conscience Mrs Gale was presented as a foil to counter Steed’s more ruthless and louche character traits. Though she equally, and importantly, subverted stereotypical roles for women combining not only brains, beauty, and independence, but also physical prowess; the fight scenes in each episode more often than not displaying Gale’s expertise in Judo. Blackman, as she explains in an interview included amongst the host of great extra features on the DVD, always threw herself wholeheartedly into the action sequences, which in the episode Mandrake, also included here, lead to her inadvertently knocking out the actor playing her assailant for seven minutes. Early in series 3 Gale’s leather outfits were introduced, ostensibly as clothes it would be easier for her to fight in, and became both influential and infamous. They were teamed with knee high leather boots that very quickly gained the widespread sobriquet of ‘kinky boots’; their popularity leading Blackman and Macnee to record the single Kinky Boots in 1964.

Lobster Quadrille, the last episode of series 3, was originally screened in March 1964, and was Blackman’s last episode as she left the programme to take up the role of Pussy Galore in the James Bond film Goldfinger, which was released in September of that year. Redolent of the humour inherent in both The Avengers and the Bond films which the series undoubtedly influenced, the final scene features Steed bidding farewell to Gale as she sets off on holiday with the suggestion that she might spend her time “pussyfooting along those sun-soaked shores.”

Links
Optimum Releasingwww.optimumreleasing.com

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(Laurence King) £17.95

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

Like surfing and skateboarding, there is an highly addictive and compulsive edge to fixed-gear (or ‘fixed-wheel’ in Britain) riding, often veering into the obsessional, as photographers and filmmakers Mike Martin and Gabe Morford interviewed in Fixed state, “track bikes are a gateway drug to all forms of cycling.” Martin and Morford’s documentary, Mash SF, explores the riding techniques, to say nothing of tricks and hill bombing, developed by 13 San Franciscans in the face of the challenge of riding track bikes without brakes, multiple gears, or the ability to freewheel, around the city, and since its release in 2007 has been highly influential in the global subculture which has grown up around the adoption of track bikes for urban streets. Fixed is the first book to examine both this rising subculture and its sporting and historical antecedents, and provides a fascinating overview.

Chris Boardman breaking The Hour record in 1996 © Gary M. Prior/Getty Images

Across three sections Racing, Track to Street, and Beyond Riding, Fixed explores the development of the fixed-gear style. The earliest bicycles were all fixed-wheel, but from the turn of the last century the style was predominantly reserved for sports use and has developed through ever greater quests for speed, characterised not least in recent years by Chris Hoy in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and in the 1990s the duelling between, and radical designs employed by Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree, both of whom are interviewed in the book, to win the record for The Hour time trial. From the early 1970s a parallel street culture has developed, initially through the adoption of the style by bicycle messengers in New York, spreading to messengers in other cities worldwide through the 1980s and 1990s.

Keo Curry performs his signature trick, the Keo spin © Kyle Johnson

Whilst in recent years with fixed-gear becoming, as Edwards and Leonard write,  a “wider phenomenon in urban culture, boutiques, and galleries,” designers, artists, and brands including Paul Smith, Ben and Oscar Wilson, Cinelli, Vans, and Nike, have created their own interpretations of fixed-gear bicycles and attendant clothing and accessory ranges.

Riders on the London Fixed-Gear & Single-Speed Tweed Run, January 2009 © Roxy Erickson

Links
Laurence King: www.laurenceking.com

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(Laurence King) £24.95

Reviewed by Guy Sangster Adams

100 Years of Menswear begins and ends with suits; from the accession of Edward VII in 1901 and his influential lead towards a greater informality in dress codes, to Thom Browne whose collections are a direct riposte against the informality of ‘business casual’ and motivated New York magazine in 2006 to declare him the “cutting-edge men’s designer who’s going to save the suit from extinction.” Though with nearly three and half centuries of adaptation and reinvention behind it, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s oft borrowed line, the suit’s death-knell may well be exaggerated. The very dapper Twain also features in the book in a great photograph from 1900 in which he is wearing one of his trademark white serge lounge suits of which, as Cally Blackman writes, “he had 14 made so he could wear a fresh one every day.”

John Hazel, Harold Wilmot, and John Richards arriving at Tilbury docks aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 © Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Though men’s fashion over the last 100 plus years has not been purely about suits, and has also been subjected to a myriad of influences, which means that any book attempting to cover it enters, as Blackman underlines in her introduction, a “minefield” because “the categorisation and classification of looks and styles is notoriously difficult; they are interwoven, overlapping and slippery.” To plot a clearer path through this, Blackman has divided the book into two parts, 1900-1939 and 1940 to the present day, and subdivided each part into six sections through which she explores, for example the impact of uniforms, manual work wear, sportswear, and Hollywood films.

Marc Bolan at home c1975 © Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This works well, particularly as the book is 95% pictorial, enabling changes and developments to be not only clearly illustrated and plotted, but also highlighted through juxtaposition. Which is supremely aided by the quality of the picture research which has resulted in the book, from Terry O’Neill’s fabulous cover shot of David Bowie onwards, being packed with many wonderfully evocative and rarely seen photographs and illustrations.

Links
Laurence King: www.laurenceking.com

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(Optimum Releasing)
Released on DVD 11 January 2010

By Guy Sangster Adams

During the Second World War both Britain’s deteriorating canal system and the declining number of working boats plying its waterways enjoyed a brief period of revivification. This fascinating, evocative, and beautifully shot Ealing Studios gem, which is available on DVD for the first time, is part drama and part documentary and was filmed along the Grand Union Canal in the summer of 1944, though not released until September 1945. The film centres on two families, the Smiths and the Stoners, who have lived and worked afloat for generations and the love story that unfolds between Mary Smith (Jenny Laird) and Ted Stoner (Robert Griffiths). Whilst also documenting and trumpeting not only the revival of the inland waterways for the war effort but also the history of canals from the eighteenth century onwards.

Tradition versus progressiveness is also at the heart of Painted Boats, in common with a number of Ealing Studios films and not least with director Charles Crichton’s later film The Titfield Thunderbolt. With Painted Boats this is encapsulated by the juxtaposition between the Smith’s horse-drawn barge Sunny Valley and the Stoner’s diesel-powered Golden Boy, and the extra hardships that refusing to change brings to the Smiths, not least ‘legging’ Sunny Valley loaded with thirty tons of coal through tunnels. Though mechanical horsepower does not inure the Stoners from change either as the increasing dilemma as to how long they can continue on the canals or whether they may have to move ashore hangs over them as it does over all their contemporaries.

In fact, post war the decline of commercial canal traffic was phenomenally rapid, until by the 1960s only a token number of working boats remained. Of course we are now very familiar with the leisure based reinvigoration of canals, but Painted Boats provides a wonderful insight into the closing chapter of a way of life, and is made all the more evocative by the poetic commentary written by Louis Macneice.

Links
Optimum Releasingwww.optimumreleasing.com

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