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Nostalgic wallows 4: the snooker

 

From unsplash.com / © Dalila Moreira

 

For the first time in years, I’ve been reminded that the sport of snooker still exists.  This is because of the headlines that have accompanied the final of the 2025 World Snooker Championship, which a few days ago was won for the first time by a Chinese player, Zhao Xintong.  His victory has led to speculation that snooker, already popular in China, will rise to ‘another level’ there.  Mind you, this new association with China will probably cause Donald Trump to slap tariffs of 145% on all snooker-related imports to the USA.

 

Anyway, snooker being in the news again has prompted me to dust down and repost this nostalgic piece about the long-ago days when snooker was exciting, all the time…

 

I learned many things from my maternal grandmother before she passed away in 1997 at the venerable age of 93.  One of them was a fascination with the late 1970s / early 1980s phenomenon that was televised snooker.

 

During the 1970s most of my family, immediate and extended, had lived in Northern Ireland.  In 1977, however, my parents bought a small farm in the south of Scotland and that became the new home for them, me and my siblings.  My grandmother, then in her seventies, soon got into the habit of crossing the Irish Sea and visiting us in Scotland.  However, because of the distance and effort involved in travelling, she would make the most of it and stay for a few weeks at a time.

 

Since my grandmother was an avid viewer of TV programmes, this meant that, while she resided in our house, we had to relinquish control of our television set to her.  Unfortunately for me, she seemed addicted to every soap opera going, from the humble British ones like Coronation Street (1960-present), Crossroads (1964-88) and Emmerdale Farm (1972-present) to the opulent American ones like Dallas (1978-91) and Dynasty (1981-89), all of which I considered to be televisual brain-death.

 

However, one unexpected thing I noticed when she came to stay was that she was also a big fan of the sport of snooker, which had recently taken off in popularity and was attracting big TV audiences.   At some point, I started watching it with her, with the result I became hooked on it too for a few years.

 

Here’s an example of how much my grandmother was into the snooker.  One time she arrived with us while the World Snooker Championship – sponsored until 2005 by the tobacco company Embassy – was underway and was being broadcast live on BBC2.  Some matches took place early in the morning, so she’d rise early to watch them.  One morning my mother entered the living room, where my grandmother was immersed in a TV snooker game, and noticed she was wearing a cardigan that was inside out.  A label protruded from the knitted collar behind her neck.  My mother pointed this out, but she just sighed and nodded at the TV screen.  “I can’t take it off and change it round just now,” she said.  “If I did, I’d cause bad luck for Alex.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Bigpad

 

The Alex she worried she might inflict bad luck on if she put her inside-out cardigan on the right way was Alexander Gordon Higgins, ‘Hurricane’ Higgins as he was known to snooker fans.  He was famed for his mercurial abilities.  On a good day he’d play brilliantly.  On a shit day he’d play… well, shit.  He was also famed for his mercurial temperament, which I’ll talk about in a minute.  He was of working-class Protestant stock from Belfast in Northern Ireland, which was one of the reasons why my grandmother loved him.  I remember a couple of times watching TV with her when Higgins fluffed an important shot.  “Oh Alex!” she’d lament.  “Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex…”

 

As snooker had risen to prominence, so had Higgins.  He’d been playing from the age of seven, first in Belfast’s Jampot Club and YMCA; and by 1968, before he turned 20, he’d won the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships.  Physically slight, Higgins had for a time in the 1960s intended to become a jockey rather than a professional snooker player.  I suspect this was part of the spell he cast later over my grandmother and ladies of a similar age, when he was still scrawny and undernourished-looking.  Those ladies just wanted to feed him up and put some colour in his cheeks.

 

By 1972, Higgins had turned professional and he won that year’s World Snooker Championship, although this didn’t make much of a stir in the public consciousness because technology wasn’t ready for the sport yet.  As the game required its players to sink all the red balls on the table, and then pocket in order the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black ones, you needed to watch it on a colour television to know what was going on.  And in British homes, colour TV sets didn’t outnumber black-and-white ones until 1976.  I remember an uncle acquiring a colour TV before 1976, but the colours refused to be contained by the outlines on the screen and would swim across them, which made it migraine-inducing to watch.

 

However, once everyone could watch snooker in proper colour, the sport took off and its leading players became stars.  What’s fascinating, and retrospectively rather sad, is that many of those guys weren’t cut out to be stars.  They didn’t have the glitz of other big British sporting names of the 1970s, such as elegant playboy racing driver James Hunt or permed heartthrob footballer Kevin Keegan.  Often, they’d grown up learning to play snooker in the booze-sodden, cigarette-fogged environments of pubs and club and hadn’t received much of a formal education.  From the way Higgins behaved at the snooker table and away from it, you sometimes wondered if he’d had any opportunity to develop social skills at all.  It must have been discombobulating for them to suddenly find themselves in the national limelight, suddenly become big media names and suddenly be chasing big sums of prize money.

 

Among this collection of misfits, oddballs and eccentrics there was, besides Higgins, Welshman Ray Reardon, already in his forties when snooker made him famous.  Not one to modify his appearance and style to match the expectations of stardom, Reardon sported an imposing widow’s peak; and that and the way he stalked hungrily around the table earned him the nickname of ‘Dracula’.  Then there was the ashen-faced Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White of Tooting, London, who wasn’t yet out of his teens by the end of the 1970s, who slightly resembled Johnny Depp in his Edward Scissorhands period and who came across as a younger, marginally less troubled version of Higgins.  From the age of eight or nine, he’d played truant from school so he could practise in his local snooker hall.

 

© ITC Entertainment

 

Jimmy ‘Whirlwind’ White and Ray ‘Dracula’ Reardon, incidentally, inspired an odd little movie called Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987) directed by the much-admired Alan Clarke.  The title characters, obviously modelled on White and Reardon, were played by Phil Daniels and Alun Armstrong.  The film has received the accolade of being ‘undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history.’

 

Another unconventional figure was Higgins’ fellow Northern Irishman Dennis Taylor, who suffered from bad eyesight.  Ordinary glasses weren’t much use to Taylor at the snooker table because, when he bent over it to take a shot, his weak eyes would end up looking over the top of the glasses rather than through them.  So he had to wear a pair of specially designed glasses with heightened lenses that made him resemble a non-spangly incarnation of Elton John.

 

From wikipedia.org / © John Dobson

 

Meanwhile, some glamour was injected into the snooker world by the Latin-looking, vaguely Antonio Banderas-esque Silvino Francisco, who was actually South African; and by the white-clad Kirk Stevens, a handsome lad with the all-important 1970s perm, who hailed from Toronto.

 

Stevens was one of a triumvirate of Canadian players who found fame as snooker players back then, which meant it was the first, possibly only, time that your average British person on the street could name three famous Canadians off the top of their heads.  Also from Canada was Cliff Thorburn, who was known as ‘the Grinder’ for his remorselessly methodical style of play and who resembled a better-groomed Donald Sutherland; and Thorburn’s fellow British Columbian ‘Big’ Bill Werbeniuk, whose weight was in the region of 20 stones.  The hefty Werbeniuk suffered from a tremor and to subdue this when playing he relied on beer: lots of beer.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he’d typically have knocked back six pints before the start of a match and he could get through 40 to 50 pints in a day.  One urban myth at the time was that Werbeniuk had all this beer medically prescribed to him by a doctor and got it for free.  More feasible was a story in the British press about him claiming the price of half-a-dozen pints each match-day as a tax-deductible expense.

 

Thus, snooker back then offered an array of peculiar characters whom you’d find in few other sports, constantly having their ups and downs, which I imagine was another reason why it appealed to my soap-opera-mad grandmother.

 

Some of the downs they suffered were spectacular.  In his autobiography, Jimmy White confessed to taking crack cocaine for a few mad months in the 1980s, while Kirk Stevens owned up to having a general cocaine problem during the same period.  Stevens’ admission came after the final of the 1985 British Open, in which he’d played Silvino Francisco.  The South African accused Stevens of being as ‘high as a kite’ during the match.  Not that Francisco could complain too much, for in 1997 he was arrested and jailed for three years for smuggling cannabis with a street value of £155,000.

 

In the late 1980s Cliff Thorburn was heavily fined and banned from a couple of tournaments for failing a cocaine test; and to complete the Canadian drugs hat-trick, Bill Werbeniuk quit the sport after getting into trouble for taking the drug Inderal, which snooker’s governing body listed as a forbidden substance.  To be fair to Werbeniuk, he was taking Inderal on the advice of his doctors, who thought it might help to curb his ruinous alcohol consumption.

 

Alex Higgins, meanwhile, was in a league of his own.  An unabashed pisshead, he somewhat inevitably ended up in the orbit of the hellraising movie star Oliver Reed.  However, if you’re to believe some of the stories, Reed found him hard to put up with – and vented his frustrations by, for instance, chasing Higgins around his mansion with an axe and feeding him a pretend hangover cure made out of perfume and washing-up liquid.  Neither was Higgins afraid of drugs.  According to fellow snooker-player John Virgo, he once asked clean-living popstar Sting at a concert if he had any ‘gear’.  “Yes,” said Sting, “we’ve got some baseball caps and T-shirts left.”  “No,” retorted a disgusted Higgins.  “Not that kind of gear.  I mean the kind of gear that goes up your nose!”

 

Higgins logged up a long and unflattering list of misdemeanours.  He got into trouble for pissing into a potted plant during a tournament in 1982.  (Virgo: “As he later argued, they were fake plants in the pot, so he ‘wasn’t being cruel to the flowers’”).  He headbutted a tournament director in 1986 after refusing to provide a urine sample for a drugs test.  He ended up playing in the 1989 European Open on crutches and with an ankle in plaster after falling 25 feet from a ledge outside the windows of his girlfriend’s apartment – he’d been trying to climb into the apartment after having a row with her.  He punched a press officer in 1990.  And the same year, he threatened to have the mild-mannered Dennis Taylor shot, which was no laughing matter since Higgins and Taylor belonged to either side of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide and Higgins came from Belfast’s Sandy Row area, notorious for its links with the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Defence Association.

 

The result was a slow, painful but inevitable erosion of Higgin’s playing ability, his emotional stability, his finances and his popularity.  By the late 1990s, I couldn’t argue when an Irish friend dismissed him out of hand as ‘an unmannerly wee pup.’

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joni-Pekka Luomali

 

Even before those characters began to self-implode amid booze, drugs and violence, the future of snooker had materialised in the form of Englishman Steve Davis.  He would dominate the sport during the 1980s, when he won six world titles and was ranked world number one for seven years in a row.  Davis was scandal-free in his behaviour but also, unfortunately, relentlessly robotic in his playing style and deadly dull in his personality.  It was no surprise when the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image (1984-96) featured a sketch where Davis tries to jive up his image by giving himself a new nickname, to rival Alex Higgins’ ‘Hurricane’ and Jimmy White’s ‘Whirlwind’.  Eventually, he chooses ‘Interesting’.

 

Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, in effect, created the mould for the snooker players who would follow.  A new generation of them were growing up, less conditioned by the boozy, seedy world of pubs and clubs from which many of their predecessors had emerged.  They were better equipped to withstand the pressure of public and media attention and go sensibly about the business of winning tournaments and making money.  For these pragmatic types, snooker was more of a job than an obsessive passion.

 

Still, some of my fondest snooker memories come from seeing the seemingly invulnerable Davis get beaten in a crucial game by a less organised, more human opponent.  There was, for example, the final of the UK Championship in 1983 when Davis went up against Higgins and soon had a seven-frames-to-nil advantage.  Miraculously, Higgins managed to pull himself together and eventually beat Davis 16-15 to win the competition.

 

Even better was the 1985 World Championship where Davis played Taylor and again built up a seemingly unassailable early lead, of eight frames to nil.  But Taylor rallied and the lead seesawed between them, and eventually both players ended up on 17 frames each.  Late on in the deciding frame, victory was decided by whoever could pocket the black first – which Taylor managed to do.  My jubilation at Taylor’s win was marred by the fact that I and many others were watching the final that night in the Hillhead Bar at Aberdeen University’s Hillhead Halls of Residence.  The final frame went on beyond midnight and beyond the bar’s closing time.  Desperate to get us all out of the place, some absolute sadist in the bar-staff pulled the plug on the TV seconds before Taylor took that final, all-important shot at the black.

 

I’ve written humorously about them, but things didn’t end well for some of those snooker players.  Kirk Stevens returned to Canada where, broke, he had to eke a living as a construction worker, landscape gardener, lumberjack and car salesman before he finally got back onto the local snooker circuit.  Silvino Francisco, before the nadir of his cannabis arrest, was already in an ignominious situation, having to earn cash by working in a mate’s fish-and-chip shop.  Bill Werbeniuk was unemployed and on disability benefits prior to his death in 2003.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Royal Bar

 

Higgins’ end was pitiful.  Diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, and subjected to radiotherapy treatment that destroyed his teeth and made it difficult for him to eat even the meagre amounts of food that he’d survived on previously, Higgins refused to curtail his heavy drinking and smoking.  In 2010, having become dependent on disability payments just as Werbeniuk had, Higgins was found dead in his Belfast flat.  His demise was attributed to a mixture of malnutrition, pneumonia and bronchitis.  Photographs of him taken towards the end of his life show a shrivelled, shrunken figure that looked more like Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter movies than a human being.  I’m relieved my Hurricane-loving grandmother didn’t live long enough to see him in such a state.

 

With nearly all its old characters retired or dead, I’ve paid little attention to the snooker world in the last quarter-century.  Indeed, looking at recent lists of champions, the only names I recognise are those of Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins.  Still, for its modern players, it’s no doubt a saner and safer, though blander, sport nowadays.

 

But one nice thing I’ve noticed is that Steve Davis, once the embodiment of everything I found mind-numbingly boring about snooker, is actually quite cool nowadays.  Since hanging up his snooker cue, he’s reinvented himself as a radio, club and festival DJ specialising in trancey, dancy electronic music.  He collaborates with British-Iranian musician and composer Kavus Torabi and they’ve even formed an electronica band called the Utopia Strong, which released albums in 2019 and 2022.

 

So it turns out that Davis got it right with his tactics.  He came across as a clean-living dullard in his youth but crucially he preserved his faculties, health and finances.  And now, in his snooker retirement, he’s become Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis at last.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Knight

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Rab Foster gets moored up

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Rab Foster, my fantasy-writing alter-ego, is on a roll this week.  Just two days ago, The Cats and the Crimson, a story I wrote under that pseudonym, was published in Issue 159 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  Today, another Foster-attributed fantasy story appears in the new edition – Volume 19, Issue 4 – of the monthly online publication Schlock! Webzine.  It’s called The Shrine on the Moor and chronicles another adventure in the life of my sword-and-sorcery character Drayak Shathsprey.  By my calculations, this is the sixth tale featuring Shathsprey to have made it into print.

 

In fact, The Shrine on the Moor is a direct sequel to a story called The Pit of the Orybadak, which featured in the magazine Savage Realms Monthly in January 2024.  Pit of the Orybadak was about Shathsprey’s experiences during a bloody battle and its equally bloody aftermath.  The events of The Shrine on the Moor, when he escapes onto the moor of the title, and encounters the shrine of the title, take place a few days later.  Has he really escaped the battle?  Is there nobody around who still wants to kill him?  Of course not…

 

I’d like to think The Shrine on the Moor has a flavour of the 1968 John Boorman movie Hell in the Pacific.  But, being a sword-and-sorcery story, it has ghosts and primordial gods mixed into it as well.

 

For the month of May 2025, The Shrine on the Moor can be read here.  And you can access the contents page of Schlock! Webzine Volume 19, Issue 4, with links to a dozen tales of fantasy, horror and science fiction, here.

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Rab Foster herds some cats

 

© Swords & Sorcery Magazine

 

The Cats and the Crimson is the name of a fantasy story I’ve just had published in the April 2025 edition, Issue 159, of the online publication Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  As always with my fantasy fiction, the story is attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

One part of its title refers to its heroine, Cranna the Crimson, the formidable red-haired swordswoman who takes no shit from anyone, least of all from male chauvinists.  She’s previously featured in my published stories Vision of the Reaper (which appeared in the collection Fall into Fantasy 2023) and The Drakvur Challenge (which last year appeared in the third issue of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly).  The other part of the title refers to the cats that Cranna encounters when she enters a mysterious desert town in search of treasure – firstly, cats of the cute, domestic variety, but later, ones of a more sinister nature.

 

I don’t want to give away anything more about the story.  Though I will say it contains a rebuke to sentiments expressed by American vice-president and Trump-lackey J.D. Vance, who notoriously complained about women who are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”  I’m sure Cranna would react to those words by socking the contemptible, eyeliner-wearing creep in the jaw.

 

For the next month, The Cats and the Crimson can be read here, while the April 2025 homepage of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, with three further stories and a book review, is accessible here.

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Even bloodsuckers get the blues

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

A few days ago my partner and I went to see Sinners, the new horror-cum-gangster film directed, written and co-produced by Ryan Coogler.  Here are my thoughts on it.  And before I go any further, a word of warning: there will be spoilers.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, as I’d heard something about its plot and it sounded horribly like 1996’s Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-scripted From Dusk till Dawn.  Although a few misguided souls nowadays look back on that film as a neglected and misunderstood classic, I have to say I f**king hated it.  In part, this was because From Dusk till Dawn began so well, as a nastily-effective little crime thriller wherein two fleeing bank-robbing brothers (Tarantino and George Clooney) kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to smuggle them over the US / Mexico border.  Disappointingly, things then go south in all senses of the phrase.  The group arrives at a mysterious Mexican bar called the Titty Twister where the staff and many of the patrons prove to be – surprise! – vampires.  The rest of the film is a ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek splatterfest where the humans battle against waves of bloodsucking undead.  While From Dusk Till Dawn’s sudden change of tone has been praised in some quarters for its audacity, I found it a vertiginous plunge into cheesy bollocks.

 

Anyway, the structure of Sinners is not dissimilar.  Its first half plays out as a period gangster story, then vampires show up and its latter half becomes an exercise in horror.  Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, it’s about the homecoming of black gangster twin brothers Stack and Smoke (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who’ve recently left Chicago where, it’s suggested, they worked for Al Capone.  On their home turf, they embark on a new project – purchasing a disused sawmill and turning it into a juke joint, i.e.. a place for live music, dancing, drinking and gambling whose customers are from the local African American community.

 

To ensure the juke joint’s opening night is a success, they staff it with trusted friends, family members and associates: Smoke’s ex-wife, the occult-dabbling Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to handle the catering; hulking buddy Cornbread (Omar Miller) to man the door; and boozy old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), slinky singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) and young, startlingly-talented guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide the music.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Despite a few obstacles – two thieves who soon regret tangling with the take-no-prisoners Stack, the fact that the sawmill’s former owner is head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the disapproval of Sammie’s dad, a preacher who believes music is only virtuous if it’s used to further the word of the Lord – the juke joint opens, pulls in the crowds and is soon swinging.  And then the vampires arrive.

 

Yes, I was dreading this moment – because I had really enjoyed the non-fantastical part of the film.  Coogler did a great job depicting the minutiae of the 1932 Mississippi Delta.  This was a world where the black population was just a couple of generations removed from the official slavery of the Confederacy and most of them now toiled in the racket that was sharecropping, a form of unofficial slavery.  At the same time, they were crafting a musical culture, the blues, that would ultimately revolutionise American and global music through its influence on rock and roll.  One touch among many that I liked here was the portrayal of the Chinese shopkeepers, Grace and Bo, who thanks to their ethnicity are able to run stores in both districts of the Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the black one and the white one.

 

Anyway, when the vampires show up, does the film turn to shite as From Dusk till Dawn did?  Thankfully, no.  Coogler provides some foreshadowing to prepare us for the twist, so it doesn’t come as a credibility-straining bolt from the blue.  During the opening sequence, a voice-over talks about certain types of music being “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future” and attract supernatural creatures – an idea that’s echoed later when the vampires admit Sammie’s miraculous guitar-playing has drawn them to the juke joint.  (Even before the vampires arrive, Coogler treats us to a phantasmagorical sequence where Sammie’s playing seems to conjure up among the dancing crowd the spectres of music past and future – West African shamans, Chinese Xiqu performers, hip-hop DJs and an electric guitarist who looks like he’s a member of George Clinton’s P-Funk collective.)

 

Also preparing viewers for the tonal switch is an earlier sequence where a white man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), flees from a squad of Choctaw Native Americans and takes refuge in a cabin inhabited by a hard-up white couple.  The pursuing Native Americans politely warn the couple that they’re sheltering something evil.  But as KKK robes are visible inside the cabin, it’s no surprise that the couple believe the story of their white visitor rather than that of the ‘Injuns’.  Noticing the sun is setting, and with a shotgun pointed at them, the Choctaw decide discretion is the better part of valour and retreat.  Which leaves Remmick to reveal himself as a vampire and infect his two saviours.

 

Coogler leaves this bit of world-building unexplored – which makes it wonderfully intriguing.  Why are the Choctaw acting as vampire hunters?  It also reminds me of the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a dog – actually the titular thing in canine form – is chased by a pair of wrathful Norwegians in a helicopter.  Compared to the Norwegians, though, the Native Americans are more pragmatic and level-headed.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Later, Remmick and the vampirised Klan couple appear on the threshold of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint, bearing musical instruments and pleading to be let in (“We heard tell of a party”) so that they can have a jamming session with Sammie.  Sinners makes much of the belief that to get onto a premises, a vampire has to be invited – and Smoke and Stack, suspicious of white folks, are in no hurry to invite this trio inside.  So they bide their time outside, biting and vampirising anyone who goes home early or nips out of the building for a pee.  While they wait for their opportunity to get inside, their numbers grow…

 

In a smart move, Coogler makes Remmick Irish and gives him a taste for music as strong as his taste for blood.  So, lurking outside, the vampires knock out a few tunes themselves – a charming version of the Irish / Scottish folk number Wild Mountain Thyme, for instance, and when there’s enough of them to stage a full-scale vampire hooley, a raucous rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, during which Remmick indulges in some step-dancing.  This makes being a vampire look like fun and Remmick, entreating the folks in the juke joint to surrender to him and his horde, makes a persuasive-sounding case for being vampirised.  Once you’re a vampire, it doesn’t matter what skin-tone you have.  Black vampires are treated no worse than white ones: “This world already left you for dead.  I can save you from your fate.  I am your way out.”

 

There’s a snag, of course.  Remmick, as the Count Dracula / Mr. Barlow-style lead vampire, calls the shots and his minions have to do his bidding.  Indeed, they seem parts of a giant hive-mind – evidenced by their chorused singing of Rocky Road to Dublin, which contrasts with the individuality Sammie expresses with his guitar.  And Remmick’s interest in Sammie and his music isn’t motivated by an impulse of sharing but by a desire to assimilate them.

 

It’s fun to speculate who or what Remmick symbolizes.  When he makes his first pitch at the juke joint’s door, begging to be let inside while Sammie, Delta Slim and Pearline perform, I was reminded of those white British rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s, like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.  Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they started their careers desperate to play blues music and become known as bluesmen themselves.  Which prompted Sonny Boy Williamson II to quip caustically: “These English boys want to play the blues real bad… And they do, real bad.”

 

But maybe it makes more sense to compare Remmick to the white-owned American music industry.  His hunger for Sammie parallels how that industry gobbled up black artists, of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, whatever, and made a fortune off their music whilst giving them as little credit, money and control over their work as possible.  Often, their songs ended up being sung by someone else, someone white – see Pat Boone singing a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti just five months after its release in 1955 – with precious few royalties making it their way.

 

Incidentally, late on, Remmick comes out with a sob story about how he was persecuted and deprived of his land in Ireland – presumably at the hands of the British and presumably back in the days when he was still human.  That a victim of oppression has become a supernatural killing machine, one with a fascistic disregard for the lives of the people he feeds on, is Coogler’s way of reminding us that many poor white people, treated like dirt in their home countries, emigrated to other parts of the world where they treated indigenous people and black people like dirt too.  It’s a sad reflection on human nature that people near the bottom of the pile have a psychological need to believe there are people even further down the pile whom they can mistreat and regard as inferior.  Though this observation would no doubt delight Elon Musk, who recently grumbled that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time analysing Sinners but I should also say it’s a supremely entertaining movie.  It’s exciting, scary, funny and atmospheric.  Furthermore, it proves a point that many filmmakers overlook – if you want a horror film to grip an audience, give them likeable and sympathetic characters to identify with.  That way, they have an investment in those characters and things feel much more tense when bad stuff starts happening.

 

© Cedric Burnside Project

© Silvertone Records

 

It goes without saying that the soundtrack is great too.  I’m particularly pleased to see that Cedric Burnside had a hand in performing some of the blues tunes – I attended a cool gig by Burnside at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2015 and afterwards got his signature on a CD as a present for one of my mates.  Also, don’t rush off when the credits start rolling at the end.  There’s still a scene to come, one set in the early 1990s and featuring the venerable bluesman Buddy Guy.  (By a coincidence I saw Guy perform in the early 1990s, though obviously the early-1990s Guy in Sinners is a good bit older than the one I witnessed.)  It’s a coda that’s both sinister and affecting.

 

And the acting is excellent.  Michael B. Jordan is impressive in the twin roles of Smoke and Stack.  I soon forgot that both characters were being played by the same person.  It’s a pleasure seeing Delroy Lindo again, whom I fondly remember as the villain in the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and from numerous Spike Lee movies.  And as Sammie, Michael Caton is a revelation.  He’s young and naïve, as the script demands, but he’s blessed with a deep, prematurely-old voice that totally persuades you this lad can sing and play the blues.

 

One thing about the casting, though.  Jack O’Connell is perfectly fine as Remmick.  But since the character is a scary old monster who’s Irish and musical, I don’t know why they didn’t cast the obvious candidate for the role: Van Morrison.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

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Happy belated birthday, Patrick

 

© Pan Macmillan

 

A month ago, I planned to post something on this blog in honour of the great Irish writer Patrick McCabe, who celebrated his 70th birthday on March 27th.  Somehow, though, I forgot all about it and the Happy-Birthday-Patrick post didn’t appear.  I must have been distracted by something else near the end of March – probably the latest atrocity or lunacy perpetrated by Donald Trump’s administration in the USA.  I can’t remember what.  The atrocities and lunacies have come thick and fast since the Orange Jobby’s inauguration as the 47th American president and it’s impossible to keep track of them.

 

Anyway, here’s that post now.  Be warned that it contains many spoilers for McCabe’s books.

 

Patrick McCabe hails from the town of Clones (pronounced ‘klo-nis’, not as in the 2002 Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones) in County Monaghan, just over the border from Northern Ireland.  Clones is famous as the birthplace of boxer Barry McGuigan, known during his pugilistic career as ‘the Clones Cyclone’, though I suspect McCabe was more intrigued by the exploits of another famous, or infamous, native of the town, Alexander Pearce, the convict, serial escapee and alleged cannibal who was hung in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1824.

 

Clones and the surrounding countryside are obviously influential on McCabe’s writing and that explains some of the affinity I feel for it – Clones is only a 35-minute drive from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, where I was born and went to school. Though Clones is in the Irish Republic and Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and as a result the political and cultural vibes aren’t quite the same, there’s nonetheless much in his books I can relate to: how his characters think, behave and speak and how they deal with, or fail to deal with, the frustrations and absurdities that their environment assails them with.

 

Also, McCabe’s books can be very funny and very dark, frequently at the same time.  If there’s anything I find irresistible, it’s the combination of humour and darkness, done well.

 

The most famous of McCabe’s books is 1992’s The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  Like Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), it made such a splash that it both overshadowed his other works and became the measuring stick against which they were all compared.  However, while Lanark and Trainspotting were Gray and Welsh’s first published books, The Butcher Boy was McCabe’s fourth.  It followed the children’s book The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1985) and the novels Music on Clinton Street (1987) and Carn (1989).  That last book is set in a small Irish town, the Carn of the title, that’s clearly a fictional stand-in for Clones and it’s the only one of his early works that I’ve read.

 

© Picador Books

 

Actually, I read Carn after I’d read The Butcher Boy, and for a long time I thought it was published after The Butcher Boy too.  Maybe Carn feels like a subsequent book because The Butcher Boy is set in the early 1960s, while Carn’s plot spans the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  Amusingly, late on, McCabe describes how the townsfolk of Carn have become addicted to the brash American TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91) and are talking about J.R. Ewing and co. as if they’re real people.

 

Carn tells the tale both of two women, Sadie and Josie, who are trapped in the town in different ways – one drudges in the local meat-packing factory, the other is an outcast who returns after a long exile – and of the town itself, experiencing economic growth in the 1960s, witnessing nearby Northern Ireland going insane in the 1970s, and suffering economic decline in the 1980s.  At one point, Josie reflects on the changes, on how “a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.”  Carn isn’t McCabe’s best work, but its blend of sadness, tenderness, bleakness and humour makes it an interesting blueprint for what was to follow.

 

The Butcher Boy is a more claustrophobic read than Carn because we’re stuck inside the head of its main character, psychotic youngster Francie Brady.  Told by Francie in the first person, we quickly realise he’s an unreliable narrator.  Indeed, the opening line spells it out: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.”  This isn’t unreliable narration in the style of Kazuo Ishiguro where it gradually dawns on you that the reality isn’t quite as it’s being presented.  It’s unreliable narration where you know fine well the vile and cruel things that are really going on, despite Francie’s deluded blathering, and you read on with (metaphorically) your fingers over your eyes, waiting for the excruciating moment when the penny finally drops.

 

This happens several times.  Francie’s friendship with a comparatively normal lad called Joe Purcell clearly frays much more quickly than Francie thinks it does.  Francie clings to the belief they’re best buddies even when it’s obvious Joe is repelled by the sight of him.  Also, after the deaths of his parents, Francie becomes obsessed with a story he’d heard from his father, Benny, about their honeymoon in the seaside town of Bundoran.  As Benny told it, he and Francie’s mother were young, beautiful and blissfully in love.  We just know from what we’ve seen of Benny, a drunken brute of a man, that the reality was horribly different.  Francie, though, believes in the ideal until he finally goes asking questions at the Bundoran boarding house his parents stayed in.  Only then does he realise the hideous truth.

 

© Picador Books

 

Worst of all is an earlier episode where Francie calms down for a while, works in the local abattoir and lives at home with Benny, who’s – supposedly – still alive at the time.  But Benny is oddly subdued and it’s evident to the reader that he’s died of alcoholism and is slowly decomposing into the sofa.  Francie, in his madness, doesn’t twig on until several months later when the police come calling.

 

Incidentally…  No disrespect to Patrick McCabe, but I have a wee quibble about the book’s continuity.  Francie mentions watching that hoary old American sci-fi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which was produced by Irwin Allen and ran from 1964 to 1968.  But the book’s later action takes place against the potentially-apocalyptic background of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, two years before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea debuted on television.  Maybe McCabe was thinking of the movie that inspired the TV show, released in 1961?

 

In 1997, The Butcher Boy was filmed by Neil Jordan, a writer-director who with movies like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) has a knack similar to McCabe’s for taking the dreary and mundane and creating something out-of-the-ordinary with it.  Though with Jordan, what’s created is closer to magical realism.  With McCabe, it’s gothic.  The film follows the book fairly faithfully, with a few small embellishments – I liked Sinead O’Connor cameoing as the Virgin Mary.  However, just by being a film, it’s a less suffocating experience, as we’re seeing events as bystanders, not inside from the cockpit of Francie’s head.  Incidentally, McCabe appears among the cast playing the town drunk, Jimmy the Skite.

 

© Picador Books

 

I’ve read claims that Francie’s mental unravelling is meant to symbolise Ireland’s fragile and precarious sense of identity, moving from colonial status to independence and having to navigate such momentous events as the permissive swinging 1960s and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  But to me McCabe’s next book, The Dead School (1995), is more obviously about that.  It pits Old Ireland – represented by Raphael Bell, the pious, patriotic and upstanding master of a boys’ boarding school – against Young Ireland – represented by Malachy Dudgeon, a product of a dysfunctional family and a member of a younger, less conservative and more fun-loving generation than Raphael’s.  Malachy becomes a teacher and ends up working at Raphael’s school, with disastrous consequences for both of them.  Later, when their paths cross again, things are even worse – one is mad, the other an alcoholic.  The Dead School describes a collision of two different eras, and two antagonistic Irish mindsets, and the result is as unpretty as The Butcher Boy.

 

After the darkness of those two books, I was ready for Breakfast on Pluto (1998), which also made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist.  This recounts the early-1970s adventures of Patrick ‘Pussy’ Brady, described in contemporary reviews as a ‘gay transvestite’ though now I suppose she’d be called a transwoman.  Pussy leaves her Irish hometown and heads to London in search of her biological mother, who’d abandoned her when she was a baby.  Overshadowing everything are the Troubles that have recently bloodily erupted in Northern Ireland and are making their presence felt in London too, thanks to bombing campaigns by the IRA.  With Irish terrorist violence on the menu, Breakfast on Pluto may not sound a barrel of laughs, but I found it hilarious thanks to Pussy’s droll way of describing things.  I also found it curiously uplifting.  Despite having many indignities inflicted upon her, Pussy is a trooper who keeps on going.

 

Breakfast on Pluto was filmed in 2005, again courtesy of Neil Jordan.  The movie version is a bit too long and episodic, but it’s mightily enjoyable and has a lighter, breezier feel than the book.  Cillian ‘Oppenheimer’ Murphy plays the main character, whose name is changed from ‘Pussy’ to the less provocative ‘Kitten’.  This is one of several alterations Jordan makes.  Kitten’s first lover – whom McCabe depicted as a crooked Irish politician in the mould of Charles Haughey – becomes a singer in a rock band, played by Gavin Friday, real-life singer of the Virgin Prunes.  And generally, Jordan glams things up with some pleasantly nostalgic references to early-1970s popular culture.  For instance, the film features both Wombles and Daleks, which I don’t recall being in the original.  McCabe has a cameo in this too, playing a schoolteacher who freaks out when the young Kitten asks him for advice on how to have a sex change.  Sadly, though, Breakfast on Pluto is one of Jordan’s more underrated and neglected films.

 

© Picador Books

 

A year after Breakfast on Pluto, McCabe published a short-story collection, Mondo Desperado. The stories’ titles, like My Friend Bruce Lee, I Ordained the Devil and The Boils of Thomas Gully, tell you what to expect – more of that inimitable McCabe cocktail of the humdrum, absurd, grotesque, macabre and howlingly funny.  Deserving special mention is the opening story, Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge, which memorably begins: “It’s hard to figure out how in a small town like this a mature woman of twenty-eight years could get herself mixed up with a bunch of deadbeat swingers, but that is exactly what happened to Cora Bunyan and I should know because she was my wife.”

 

After that, I lost track of McCabe’s books for a while.  To date, there’s been seven more I haven’t read: Emerald Gems of Ireland (2001), Call Me the Breeze (2003), Winterwood (2006) – which Irvine Welsh reviewed admiringly in the Guardian – The Holy City (2009), Hello and Goodbye (2013), The Big Yaroo (2019) and Poguemahone (2022).  A few years back, however, I did read his 2010 novel The Stray Sod Country, which I thought was wonderful.  It features another of McCabe’s exquisitely-drawn Irish small towns.  This time, the action takes place mostly in the late 1950s, around the time of the launch of Sputnik 2 in 1957 and the Munich air disaster in 1958 – though there are jumps forward in time to add perspective to the 1950s-set plot.

 

The Stray Sod Country has an omniscient and sinister narrator.  This, we learn, is a malevolent supernatural being called a fetch, which has a dismaying fondness for entering the minds of humans, corrupting them and encouraging them to do harm to others.  Sneakily, the fetch foments and escalates feuds between the townspeople.  Thus, for example, a rivalry, then hatred, develops between Golly Murray, wife of the town’s barber, and Blossom Foster, wife of its bank manager.  Meanwhile, in a fit of priestly jealousy worthy of Father Ted (1995-98), local cleric Father Hand fulminates against his old rival Father Peyton, ‘the infuriatingly smug Mayo toady’, now a ‘celebrity priest of Hollywood, America’ who associates with Frank Sinatra.  But he’d be better advised to worry about a disgraced schoolteacher called James A. Reilly.  Father Hand had him run out of town for kissing a male pupil.  Reilly is living as a vagrant in the nearby bog, nursing his wrath whilst in possession of an Enfield rifle from the Irish Civil War, and he’s fertile ground for the fetch.

 

I felt McCabe portrayed the cast of small-town eccentrics populating The Stray Sod Country with more affection than usual.  And he seemed to have a genuine love for the time and place depicted.  Perhaps the great man was mellowing with age?

 

So, I wish Patrick McCabe all the best as he enters his eighth decade.  Barry McGuigan may be the Clones Cyclone, but in literary terms McCabe is the Clones Hurricane – a hurricane of the homespun, the hideous and the hilarious.

 

© Bloomsbury Publishing

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Liar wolves, not dire wolves

 

From unsplash.com / © Reyk Odinson

 

Donald Trump has recently rampaged through the world’s global trade system with the delicacy of Godzilla taking a stomp around downtown Tokyo.  That would be Godzilla after he’d been on a week-long cocaine binge.  So, in the current climate of gloom, dread and despondency, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the world’s news outlets have latched desperately and uncritically onto a story that looks like good, even uplifting, news.  Those news outlets have made much of the claim by an American biotechnology and genetic engineering company called Colossal Biosciences that it’s created the first dire wolves to have graced Planet Earth in about ten millennia.

 

The dire wolf, according to Wikipedia, is “an extinct species of canine which was native to the Americas during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene epochs (125,000-10,000 years ago).”  It was generally bigger than most modern wolves.  Research suggests “the average dire wolf to be similar in size to the largest modern grey wolf.”  Dire wolves also pop up in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books (1991-2011), but more about that in a minute.

 

The headlines have come fast and furious: DIRE WOLF REPORTEDLY BROUGHT BACK FROM EXTINCTION; NO LONGER EXTINCT: DIRE WOLVES HOWL AGAIN AFTER 12,000 YEARS; LONG EXTINCT, DIRE WOLVES ARE BACK, AND NOT JUST IN GAME OF THRONES; SCIENTISTS PERFORM WORLD’S FIRST DE-EXTINCTION TO REVIVE THE DIRE WOLF THAT VANISHED 12,000 YEARS AGO.  Time Magazine stuck a picture of one of three dire wolves supposedly created by Colossal Biosciences on a recent cover, below the word ‘extinct’ with a line scored through it and the inspiring message: “This is Remus.  He’s a dire wolf.  The first to exist in over 10,000 years.  Endangered species could be changed forever.”

 

So hey, this is great news, yeah?  Extinction is bad, so ‘de-extinction’ must be good, right?  And since much extinction in the last couple of millennia had been caused by humanity, isn’t it gratifying to see good old human know-how being put to work reversing the process and bringing one – hopefully the first of many – extinct species back?

 

Except, of course, that it’s a load of bollocks.  The New Scientist has responded to the company’s claims with an article whose lead-in puts it succinctly: “Colossal Biosciences claims three pups born recently are dire wolves, but they are actually grey wolves with genetic edits intended to make them resemble the lost species.”  Although some genuine dire-wolf DNA was used in the project, the genome was merely analysed to determine what a dire wolf’s key traits would be.  The DNA itself was way too aged and decayed to be spliced into anything, Jurassic Park-style.  The Colossal Biosciences team then made edits to modern-day grey-wolf DNA to replicate those dire-wolf traits.  Finally, three modified wolf-pups were produced using domestic-dog surrogate mothers and caesarean sections.  So what you’ve got aren’t dire wolves.  You’ve got three grey-wolf pups that’ve been tinkered with genetically to give them characteristics the team think dire wolves might have had.

 

The analogy here isn’t the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park (1993).  No, it’s Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, David Hedison and Jill St John.  In that film, the dinosaur special effects were achieved by taking modern reptiles like iguanas, monitor lizards and crocodiles and glueing horns, frills and fins onto them to make look ‘dinosaur-ish’.   Which is what’s been done with these young grey wolves in a fancy, high-tech way.

 

The Irish-American palaeontologist and writer Caitlin R. Kiernan summed it up bluntly in her online journal the other day: “…there’s this bullshit about a company named Colossal Biosciences claiming to have resurrected dire wolves.  They haven’t.  Not even close.  It’s a hoax that would make P.T. Barnum proud.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © American Museum of Natural History

 

Also, it’s not merely nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.  It makes extinction sound like something that’s solvable through scientific jiggery-pokery, an error that can be fixed without the arduous, inconvenient lengths that human beings need to go to to prevent extinctions happening, which is to stop killing life-forms through hunting, habitat-destruction, economic consumption and general greed, cruelty and ignorance.

 

In the last few days alone, I’ve seen stories on the Guardian’s environment page about a report on New Zealand’s environment, which warns that “76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles” are “threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened”; and a warning by 32 charity organisations that proposals under the British government’s new planning bill “could push species towards extinction and lead to irreversible loss”; and the grim likelihood that Donald Trump’s decimation of USAID will wreck conservation projects leading to increased poaching and habitat encroachment and serious threats to such animals as lemurs, white rhinos, gorillas, orangutans and elephants.

 

The uncritical coverage given to the dire-wolf story is harmful because it encourages the idea that animal extinction is not so serious now because science can resurrect those animals later.  Which would be bad enough if the idea was based on proper science.  But it’s not – it’s based on the spin coming out of Colossal Biosciences.

 

As I said, direwolves (spelt not as two but as one word) turn up in the Game of Thrones books: “Direwolves once roamed the north in large packs…   According to Theon Greyjoy, direwolves have not been sighted south of the Wall for two hundred years.  Rangers of the Night’s Watch hear direwolves beyond the Wall.”  I’m quoting a Game of Thrones wiki here, as I’ve never read the books.  I haven’t watched the 2011-2019 TV show based on them either, having always intended to read the books first.

 

I find it a bit disappointing that Games of Thrones author George R.R. Martin seems to have swallowed the Colossal Biosciences hype hook, line and sinker.  In a recent blogpost, he said in February he’d been to visit the secret installation where the three supposed direwolves are being kept.  Obviously in a state of giddy excitement, he declared: “I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon…  And Colossal is just beginning.   Still to come, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and… yes… the dodo…  I can’t wait.” The post also has an undeniably cute picture of him holding one of the genetically-edited beasties.

 

To be fair to Martin, I suppose it must be flattering to have a biotech company pay you the compliment of (allegedly) creating some animals that nowadays most people only know as fantasy-creatures in your novels.  So flattering that it’s befuddled his critical faculties.  Of course, it’s likely that Colossal Biosciences chose to work on dire wolves because the creatures are currently famous due to the Game of Thrones phenomenon – making it an excellent PR stunt that’s earned them lots of headlines.

 

And I suppose, as someone who writes fantasy fiction under the penname Rab Foster, I’d be flattered too if a biotech company offered to create some fabulous animals or monsters that’d appeared in my stories.  Not that there’s much chance of that happening – last year, as Rab Foster, I earned about 75 pounds, which I suspect is a wee bit less than George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones royalties for 2024.  If any biotech outfit was up for it, though, I’d like them to have a go at creating the sinister miniature-harpy things in my 2022 short story Crows of the Mynchmoor, which were basically crows’ bodies with shrunken copies of a witch’s head grafted onto then.  I’d like a flock of those to keep in my garden.  I bet they’d really creep out folk passing by on the street.

 

© 20th Century Fox

Posted on

Buck Rogers in the 21st century

 

 

After the rock band Feeder – consisting of Welsh vocalist and guitarist Grant Nicholas, Welsh drummer Jon Lee and Japanese bassist Taka Hirose – appeared in the 1990s, I bought their first few albums: Polythene (1997), Yesterday Went Too Soon (1999) and Echo Park (2001).  I enjoyed them at the time, but don’t remember much about them now – just a few songs like High (1997) and their biggest hit, Buck Rogers (2001).

 

After Echo Park, I stopped listening to Feeder.  This wasn’t because of a decline in their musical quality.  I moved around a lot in the 2000s and 2010s and lost touch with many of the bands I’d been into during the previous decade.  Often I was living in countries where it was impossible to hear about and buy new music by Western rock bands.  And YouTube isn’t much help if you’re somewhere with little or zero Internet connectivity.

 

Also – in an echo of the tragedy that befell fellow Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers – Feeder lost their drummer Jon Lee when he committed suicide in 2002.  I actually suspected the band had called it a day after that.  However, now I’ve done some research, I see that Nicholas and Hirose have soldiered on and produced nine further albums to date.

 

Anyway, it was recently announced that, as part of their current Black / Red tour, Feeder would perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café on April 2nd.  Though the band are now officially a two-man outfit, Nicholas and Hirose are accompanied by rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Tommy Gleason and drummer Geoff Holroyde.  So, I purchased a ticket and, come April 2nd, got myself along to the Hard Rock Café.

 

 

This was the second gig I’ve attended at that venue.  With uncanny symmetry, the previous band I saw there was another Celtic one who came to prominence during the Britpop era playing indie / punky rock music, Northern Ireland’s Ash.  Consequently, I couldn’t help but compare this Feeder gig with the Ash one… and it seemed slightly inferior.

 

For one thing, it was shorter.  Feeder played for 80 minutes.  I think they could have chucked in a couple of extra songs to get the gig to the hour-and-a-half mark.  A more important issue, though, was the crowd.  Ash had attracted a good mixture of Western expatriates and Singaporeans, who’d bopped to the band’s songs with great enthusiasm.  The Feeder audience, however, consisted mostly of expats in their thirties and forties and they were, frankly, a bit lame.  Stuck at the back of the crowd, I found myself staring across a sea of sensible T-shirts, slightly-greying hair, bald-spots, baseball caps (strategically placed to conceal bald-spots) and shaven scalps (strategically shaven to camouflage bald-spots).  When they were at their most enthusiastic, they reacted to the music by, well, jiggling a bit.  (Admittedly, that’s what I did – I jiggled a bit.  But I have an excuse.  I’m a frail old man now.)  I felt sorry for Grant Nicholas when he suggested, “Let’s get a 1990s mosh-pit going…”, and nothing happened.

 

My mood was also dampened by the fact that the gig took place in the Hard Rock Café – surrounded by such holy rock-and-roll artefacts as J.J. Cale’s guitar, Michael Jackson’s cymbals and, er, the drumkit of Rob Blotzer from RATT.  Yes, with the café’s tables and chairs removed for the evening, you get the feeling you’re in a small, sweaty, standing-room-only venue where the band are just a few yards away.  That intimacy is great (and uncommon in Singapore).  However, the Hard Rock Café doesn’t have a stage – or, if it does, it has no stage to speak of.  It looks like the bands play on a strip of floor at one end of the main room.  Thus, even if you aren’t far from the performers, you won’t see much of them over the heads of the spectators at the very front.

 

 

There’s the matter too of having to pay Hard Rock Café prices for your drinks.  A pint of Carlsberg set me back a blood-curdling 28 Singaporean dollars, which is 16 British pounds sterling.

 

Still, despite the subdued crowd and the problems with the venue, once I relaxed and focused only on the show, I did enjoy it.  Bravely, Feeder didn’t go down the easy route of pandering to 1990s nostalgia, which is currently modish thanks to the hype over this summer’s reunion tour by the Gallagher siblings, and they played just four songs off those first three albums I mentioned earlier – though the songs were well-received and Buck Rogers inevitably got a good reception late on in the set.  On the other hand, they devoted more than half their set to material off their three most recent albums, Tallulah (2019), Torpedo (2022) and Black / Red (2024) and it was absolutely fine.  The standout for me was their 2024 song Playing with Fire – I definitely prefer Feeder when they’re being heavier and Playing with Fire was a good essay in heaviness.

 

Kudos, by the way, to drummer Geoff Holroyde (who looks like a slightly-better-groomed Alan Moore) for wearing a Flying V Bar T-shirt and thus giving a plug to Singapore’s premier heavy metal pub.  Mind you, I was in the Flying V a week earlier and they had a big banner up promoting tonight’s gig, so perhaps he was just returning the compliment.

 

Posted on

Getting trollied with Banksy

 

 

A while ago, my partner and I, plus a friend, paid a visit to The Art of Banksy: Without Limits, an exhibition showcasing the work of the world’s most famous pseudonymous street artist, political activist and general agent provocateur.  The exhibition is currently showing at the Fever Exhibition Hall on Singapore’s Scott’s Road and contains more than 200 Banksy-related artworks, prints, sculptures, photographs and film-clips.

 

Our Without Limits experience began ominously because we arrived there at the same time as several busloads of teenaged pupils from one of Singapore’s international schools.  Not only were there a lot of kids crowding the place, but they were all carrying bags and backpacks – this happened in the afternoon and, presumably, they were heading straight home after their visit – which added to the congestion.  But to be fair, though these kids were a distraction by dint of their sheer numbers, they were nowhere near as annoying as they could have been.  They could have affected a bored, I’m-too-cool-for-this air of nonchalance – behaved liked stereotypical teenaged prats in other words.  (I should know.  I was a stereotypical teenaged prat once myself.)  However, most of them seemed to take a genuine interest in what was displayed around them.

 

 

Indeed, I heard some intelligent conversations among them.  For example, beside a reproduction of one of seven murals Banksy had done in Ukraine in 2021, showing a little girl upending an adult, judogi-clad martial-arts expert, one young lad explained to his mate how it represented Ukraine’s resistance to the invading, and supposedly vastly superior, forces of Russia.  (Putin, of course, claims to be a black belt in judo.)  When I saw those throngs of kids at the exhibition’s entrance, I had fears I might end up doing an impersonation of Victor Meldrew.  Thankfully, I had no cause to do so.

 

 

If you live in the United Kingdom, as I have on and off, you’ll have become accustomed to stories about Banksy and his exploits surfacing now and then in the media: for example, about him circulating fake ten-pound notes bearing the face of Princess Diana; or opening a deliberately-shite theme park called Dismaland Bemusement Park; or having a work fed through a shredder at the very moment it sold for a million pounds at Sotheby’s Auction House.  However, I found Without Limits informative because it was the first time I’d seen all these incidents gathered together and given a narrative.  The dots had been joined up, creating a proper overview of the guy’s career.

 

So, having viewed this exhibition, what conclusions can I draw about Banksy?  Well, I can’t deny his flair for taking well-worn British symbols and icons, the sort of things you’d see in a London souvenir stall, and subverting them.  That’s subverting them in a mild, almost tourist-friendly way so that nobody is offended.  Thus, you get a sculpture of a collapsed, partly-folded red British telephone box; or a picture of Queen Elizabeth II sporting Ziggy Stardust’s jagged red-and-blue lightning flash from her brow to her jawline; or one of a Household Cavalryman atop a fairground-carousel horse that’s attached to a giant spring; or one of Winston Churchill with a green Mohican hairdo (actually based on a real incident in 2000, when a May Day protest led to a strip of green turf being plonked on the head of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square).  And, generally, there are plenty of Union Jacks and images of British bobbies on show.

 

 

Secondly, I note Banksy’s keen eye – and perhaps perverse love – for the tawdrier aspects of life in 21st-century Britain: what I like to think of as ‘crud Britannia’.  This is represented, for instance, by a picture where one of those poor guys frequently seen on Britain’s decaying high streets holding a sign with an arrow and the words GOLF SALE finds himself in front of the column of tanks that advanced on the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989; or one set in a crumbling English seaside resort where a pensioner sits on a bench oblivious to a circular saw eating its way through the promenade towards him.

 

 

Britain’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, may not be pleased to learn that it’s a recurring motif in this regard.  There’s a picture where some 1940s, Enid Blyton-style English kids stand to attention by a flagpole, from which a plastic Tesco bag flutters; some Andy Warhol-esque prints of soup cans, only these are cheapo ‘Tesco Value’ ones; and some simple designs where prehistoric, cave-painting figures are shown with shopping trolleys (Tesco ones, no doubt).

 

And thirdly, you won’t miss Banksy’s leftwing and anti-establishment politics, though of course cynics would argue that by marketing his leftwing, anti-establishment artwork so cannily and successfully, he’s actually thrived in the capitalist system, and its attendant power-structure, that he supposedly disdains.  The hardest-hitting work on show is Napalm, a stencil piece showing Phan Thi Kim Phuc – the little girl in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph The Terror of War, seen running and screaming with severe burns after US forces napalmed her village during the Vietnam War – flanked by and having her hands held by Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald.  A similar Vietnam-War theme appears in Happy Chopper, wherein a US military attack helicopter is depicted with a giant, pink ribbon below its rotors.

 

 

Also anti-establishment is Banksy’s obsession with putting riot policemen in jokey, ironic and disempowering positions.  You get a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz having her basket searched by a thuggish-looking law-enforcement officer; one where a massive cop in armoured combat gear is made to stand splayed against a wall while a little girl in a pink dress frisks him; and a sculpture of a policeman’s head, encased in a helmet that’s been fashioned out of a discotheque mirror-ball.

 

 

Without Limits wasn’t perfect.  It ran out of steam in its later stages, which I found rather repetitive.  Certain key Banksy images appeared again and again…  And there’s only so many times that you can look at that Banksy rat, or that masked bloke in the act of throwing a bouquet of flowers, or that little girl with a balloon on a string, without crying ‘Bor-ring’ in the voice of an annoying, nonchalant teenager.  Also, I wasn’t impressed by the exhibition shop.  I’d seen many cool things that afternoon, but disappointingly the merchandise on sale sported only a few very basic and very familiar Banksy images.

 

Nevertheless, for the most part, I found Without Limits engaging and entertaining and I’m happy to give it a thumbs-up.  Incidentally, if you’re in Singapore and haven’t seen the exhibition yet, you’d better get a move-on – for it ends on April 13th.

 

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My safe space

 

 

The world is in a terrible state at the moment.  It’s apparently morphing into a real-life version of the scenario imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), wherein the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  We now have Russia run by Vladimir Putin, China run by Xi Jinping, and the USA run by the grotesque triumvirate of orange gobshite Donald Trump, viper-in-hillbilly-form J.D. Vance, and the chainsaw-wielding, ketamine-popping, Seig Heiling, superrich super-dickhead Elon Musk.  All three countries have been open about their territorial ambitions, about their wish to expand and become real-life, continent-engulfing equivalents of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  Very bad news if you live in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Panama, Greenland or Canada.  Pretty bad news for the rest of us.

 

Thus, in these troubled times, it’s a relief to have a safe space: a little cubby hole you can retreat to, and hide in, and where your brain can function removed from all the awfulness happening outside for a while.  For me, that space is provided by the Flying V bar, Singapore’s self-styled ‘heavy metal headquarters’, which is hidden away in a back corridor in the basement of the Adelphi Shopping Centre on the city’s Colman Street.  Actually, the shopping centre is next door to the National Gallery, which makes the Flying V an ideal spot to sit with a beer after a visit to the gallery and ruminate on all the artwork you’ve just experienced.

 

 

A Singaporean shopping centre may seem an incongruous place to find a heavy metal bar.  However, it isn’t the only music or metal-related business in the Adelphi.  On your way there, you pass a few units containing shops that sell vinyl records, many of the heavy-metal variety.

 

 

Inside, the walls of the Flying V are slathered with old posters and flyers advertising heavy-metal bands, concerts and festivals.  Even if you don’t touch a drop of alcohol, you can spend a pleasant hour in the place just reading the items crammed over the walls and enjoying the little glows of nostalgia they kindle in you.  On my part, for example, I gave happy sighs when I discovered an Art Nouveau-inspired poster for the mighty space-rock band Hawkwind, designed by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles; a picture of the late, great Ronnie James Dio tricked out in sword-and-sorcery gear, as was Ronnie’s wont to wear; and a poster for the much-missed Motörhead on their 1980 world tour, promoting their greatest-ever album Ace of Spades.

 

 

On the other hand, when I took my cat-loving partner there, she was delighted to find this proclamation about the feline species emblazoned on the wall behind our table.

 

 

The Flying V’s drinks menu includes a beverage called Trooper Premium British Beer.  Trooper’s vivid label-design gives you a clue as to who produces it.  Yes, it’s the result of a project involving veteran heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, singers of such anthems as Number of the Beast (1982) and Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter (1990).  The latter song will always be close to my heart because of the fact it knocked Cliff Richard’s sanctimonious Saviour’s Day (1990) off the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the 1990 British singles chart.  The band produce Trooper in partnership with England’s Robinson’s Brewery.  So, if you spend an afternoon getting sloshed on the stuff in the Flying V, you’re not being wasteful or unproductive.  You’re actually helping to fund Iron Maiden.

 

As I’ve said, the world is in a dire state just now and it sometimes feels tempting to retreat into the Flying V and hole up there for good.  However, the place does contain a warning against staying on the premises for too long.  You might end up like this guy.

 

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Eggers’ banquet

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector.  This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

 

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses.  The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title.  A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

 

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great.  At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector.  When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws.  But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen.  And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

 

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula.  That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old.  13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life.  Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu.  More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese.  That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema.  I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t.  Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula.  However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu.  There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen.  Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

 

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template.  Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok.  Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host.  He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

 

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination.  These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

 

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there.  Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him.  Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals.  Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg.  Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple.  Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated,  escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city.  Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well.  Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene.  As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16).  Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

 

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task.  You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss.  But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula.  And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter.  His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

 

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock.  The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore.  (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.)  If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do.  More on that in a minute.

 

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing.  When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught.  Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz.  Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok…  I can see why it’s been controversial.  Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair.  Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok.  During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness.  But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

 

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970).  But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

 

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time.  Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché.  As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss.  (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent.  At least it’s different…  And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing.  But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys.  (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

 

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged.  The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives.  Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces.  Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte.  If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought.  In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

 

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok.  But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.  It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy.  It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

 

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much.  This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures