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Rab Foster gets cosy

 

© Cloaked Press

 

Fall Into Fantasy 2026, this year’s instalment in the Fall into Fantasy series of short-story anthologies from the publisher Cloaked Press, went on sale a couple of days ago.  Its 15 stories include one entitled Jerthemia the Healer, which is attributed to Rab Foster, the penname I use when I write fiction in the fantasy genre.

 

Jerthemia the Healer is a rare thing from me.  It belongs to the sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘cosy fantasy’.  The Wikipedia entry on cosy fantasy describes it as being “characterized by its focus on comforting, low-stakes narratives set in fantasy worlds.  It emphasises themes of community, friendship, healing, and everyday life, often eschewing violence, war, and other serious conflicts which are typical of high fantasy…  Relationships, including family, found family, friendship, and healthy romance, are central…”  The entry goes to list some examples of cosy fantasy, such as Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop (2024) – a novel “full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love” – and Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (2022), which is about a retired orc who joins forces with a succubus and opens a coffee shop.

 

Well, anybody who knows me would undoubtedly say that cosy fantasy sounds much too wholesome and un-cynical a sub-genre for someone with my unwholesome and cynical character to be working in.  And yes, usually, any time I’ve tried to write a cosy fantasy story, it hasn’t gone well – by the second or third page, one of the characters is puking up their intestines or getting their face ripped off or having horror-slugs crawl out of their eye sockets.  I guess I’m not mentally programmed to write that gentle, nice sort of fiction.

 

However, with Jerthemia the Healer, the central idea was strong enough for me to put the whole story on paper without turning it into a bloodbath.  And that idea is…  Well, I think I can give it away here because it’s already been given away in the blurb accompanying Fall into Fantasy 2026 on Amazon… The central character, Jerthemia Ros, is a fantasy-world vet who has to attend to sick or injured mythical animals.

 

An obvious inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer is literature’s most famous veterinarian surgeon, James Herriot, who wrote eight books between 1970 and 1992 based on his life as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.  These inspired the very popular TV series All Creatures Great and Small, which ran from 1978 to 1980 and later from 1988 to 1990 and starred Christopher Timothy, Peter Davison and Robert Hardy.  I’ve only read one of Herriot’s books and it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, and I always found the TV show a bit twee,  But from all accounts Herriot was a decent and humble man who genuinely loved the animals he worked with, so all power to his memory.

 

By the way, ‘Jerthemia Ros’ is an anagram.  Have you worked it out yet?

 

One other inspiration for Jerthemia the Healer (and a huge influence on my fantasy writing generally) is the legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, whose films were populated with all manner of mythical creatures brought to life by his special-effects wizardry: dragons, rocs, cyclopes, hydras, harpies, gorgons, krakens, etc.  In my story, the appearance of one of the creatures is entirely modelled on a beastie that Harryhausen animated in his 1973 movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

 

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

 

The tenth volume in Cloaked Press’s Fall into Fantasy series, Fall into Fantasy 2026 can be purchased at Amazon here.

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The Herschell house of horror

 

From wikipedia.org / © Super Festivals

 

Halloween is just over a month away.   Here’s a first, horror-themed post to mark the beginning of the ‘witching season’.  

 

I didn’t particularly care for the films of American director and producer Herschell Gordon Lewis, who was nicknamed ‘the Godfather of Gore’ and who passed away ten years ago today, on September 26th, 2016.  That said, I certainly liked the idea of Lewis.

 

Lewis’s exploitation movies spanned a variety of genres – softcore erotica (usually set in nudist colonies and including the likes of 1963’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares), comedies, children’s movies and at least  one feminist biker flick, 1968’s splendidly titled She-Devils on Wheels.  However, it’s for his horror films that he’ll be remembered, and for the simple but at the time innovative approach that he brought to the horror-film genre.  He made the first horror movies that were truly horrible, i.e., loaded with bloodletting, dismemberment, disembowelment, scalping, eye-gouging, tongue-ripping and so on: Blood Feast (1963), 2000 Maniacs (1964), Colour Me Blood Red (1965), Taste of Blood (1967), The Gruesome Twosome (1967), The Wizard of Gore (1970) and The Gore Gore Girls (1972).

 

Not unexpectedly, Lewis’s approach did not go down well with mainstream movie critics – “Thoroughly revolting Z-grade garbage” was a typical assessment of Blood Feast – and was hardly the stuff that mainstream movie audiences flocked to.  But his horror movies still packed enough folk into America’s drive-ins for them to turn a tidy profit and, over the years, he found a number of admirers among left-field film fans, filmmakers and commentators.  More on those later.

 

Needless to say, his work didn’t make its way to the United Kingdom anytime soon.  I remember reading about Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs in film books and magazines when I was a kid and thinking, “Wow, these must be the most hideous and terrifying films ever made!”  But at the same time I knew the chances of me seeing them in censorious Britain were non-existent.  The chances became less than non-existent during the 1980s when British politicians, tabloid newspapers and moral campaigners worked themselves into a lather over the ‘video nasties’ scare.

 

In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that I finally laid eyes on some footage from his movies.  This was courtesy of Jonathan Ross’s offbeat TV series The Incredibly Strange Film Show (1988-89), which devoted a whole episode to Lewis.

 

How different it is nowadays.  A while back I saw some of his movies as double-bills on Britain’s now-defunct Horror Channel, which was available for all to watch on Freeview.  Quite a few of them are up on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Dailymotion.  And with modern films featuring high-tech animatronic and computer-generated effects, Lewis’s movie gore – basically all the offal he could find at the local butcher’s shop and lots of bright red paint – looks so primitive it almost has a retro charm.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Box Office Spectaculars

 

Blood Feast was the film that made Lewis’s name and it remains his most famous, or infamous, effort.  I have to say it’s a very bad film.  The acting is atrocious, the budget is visibly tiny and the general level of professionalism is not much higher than Ed Wood standards.  And yet…  It might be one of the worst films I’ve seen, but I’ve never been able to forget it.  Somehow, it still creeps me out.  Maybe it’s the stark, single-minded way it goes about its bloody business – something reinforced by the score, a slow, thudding, doom-laden thing that’s little more than a funereal drumbeat.  It’s so minimalist it makes the sparse, pulsing synth scores that John Carpenter did for his movies sound like Vivaldi.

 

Among the rest of Lewis’s oeuvre, I’ll admit to liking (a little bit) 2000 Maniacs, possibly because it’s an insolent remake of Brigadoon, the cheesy 1954 MGM musical about a phantom Scottish Highland village that appears out of the mist for one day every century.  But while the village in Brigadoon appears so that Gene Kelly and Van Johnson can perform song-and-dance numbers there like The Heather on the Hill and I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean, the phantom village in 2000 Maniacs has a darker purpose.

 

It’s a southern USA village whose inhabitants were slaughtered by northern forces during the Civil War and now, as ghosts, they reappear every so often to take bloody revenge on any hapless Yankee travellers who come their way.  As a commentary on the horrors of the Civil War, it’s hardly in the class of, say, the fiction of Ambrose Bierce; but in its crude, tacky manner it’s effective.

 

The only other 1960s film by Lewis I’ve seen is his third ‘gore’ film, Colour Me Blood Red, which is about an unsuccessful and embittered painter (Gordon Oas-Helm) whose paintings lack a certain something… A certain colour… A certain shade of a colour… Well, the title tells what the missing shade is and, as soon as he realises that, he’s secretly murdering people and applying their blood to his canvases.  Hey presto!  The local, snobby art critic (William Harris) immediately switches from slagging off his work to proclaiming him a genius.

 

While Lewis’s previous two horror films at least did things with a gory elan, Colour Me Blood Red is a dreary, uneventful thing.  Particularly duff is a sequence where the artist terrorises two victims who are out at sea in a pedal-boat – an action set-piece involving a pedal-boat is about as exciting as it sounds.  Also, among the friends whom the film’s young heroine (Candi Conder) hangs out with are a beatnik couple who insist on talking in a super-annoying type of rhyming hipster / jive-speak.  At one point they manage to rhyme ‘daddy-o’ with ‘patio’.  I spent the film waiting for them to die horribly.  But damn it, they didn’t.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mayflower Pictures

 

Meanwhile, I have to confess to liking, again a little bit, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore, which is about a stage magician (Ray Sager) who uses power tools to perform mind-bogglingly gruesome tricks on volunteers from the audience.  When the tricks are over, the volunteers seem to be alive, well and in one piece.  But later, after the show, they ‘revert’ to the grisly state they were in onstage and, obviously, die.  Again, it’s cheap and ineptly made, but the film has a weirdness that’s difficult to forget.

 

The Wizard of Gore also won Lewis one of his very few acknowledgements from mainstream cinema.  In 2007’s acclaimed comedy-drama Juno, Jason Bateman’s music / comic-book / movie nerd convinces Ellen (now Elliot) Page’s Juno that The Wizard of Gore is a better horror movie than Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977).  I have to say that if they honestly believe Lewis’s schlocky little opus to be superior to Argento’s demented masterpiece, Bateman and Page must be really thick.

 

I’ve also watched Lewis’s last movie from this era, The Gore Gore Girls, which is problematic even by its director’s usual standards.  It’s a horror comedy, of sorts, wherein an arrogant, dandified – complete with walking cane – private investigator (Frank Kress) and a liberated lady reporter (Nancy Farrell) investigate a series of murders where the victims are strippers and the suspects include a traumatised Vietnam War vet and a bunch of radical feminists who protest against striptease acts with placards saying things like ‘Quit with Tit!’  Finally, the investigator gets the supposedly liberated reporter drunk and goads her into participating in an amateur striptease competition with a 1000-dollar prize, which she wins, turning her into the killer’s next potential victim – and bait in the crafty investigator’s trap.

 

The Gore Gore Girls is unpleasantly misogynistic and voyeuristic and it handles themes like feminism and post-traumatic stress disorder with as much finesse as you’d expect, i.e., none.  But for me its biggest problem is Kress’s investigator, whom Lewis evidently intends to come across as a quirky, outspoken but lovable rogue.  He actually comes across as a complete dickhead.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Lewis Motion Picture Enterprises

 

After a long hiatus from filmmaking, Lewis returned to it in his later years.  This was after his great influence on the horror-movie genre had been recognised – generally in, say, the slasher movies of the 1980s where the emphasis was on bloody and outrageous ‘kills’ rather than on plot or characterisation, and specifically in the works of certain filmmakers who’d drawn inspiration from him, like Eli Roth, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.  In 2002 he directed a belated sequel to Blood Feast, Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, which featured Waters in a cameo, and in 2009 a standalone horror film called The Uh-Oh! Show.

 

Meanwhile, without Lewis as director, 2000 Maniacs was remade in 2005 as 2001 Maniacs (which Eli Roth co-produced), and that remake received a sequel in 2010 entitled 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams.  The Wizard of Gore was remade in 2007 and Blood Feast in 2016, the latter with Lewis in a supporting role as ‘Professor Lou Herschell’, which must have been one of the last things he ever did.  These films contained an element never seen before in Lewis-related movies: some decent actors.  Their casts included such accomplished performers as Robert Englund, Bill Mosely, Crispin Glover, Brad Dourif and Jeffrey Combs.

 

A decade after his death, Lewis’s influence lives on.  I recently watched Curry Barker’s acclaimed horror movie Obsession (2025).  The sequence in it that’s most horrible – or depending on your point of view, most hilariously over the top – immediately put me in mind of The Gore Gore Girls.

 

What I love about Lewis, though, is that in the early 1970s he packed in filmmaking and turned to something very different – advertising.  He became a guru on the subject and made a fortune writing books about it, such as 1974’s The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion and 1977’s How to Handle your own Public Relations.  His speciality was direct marketing, the practice of bombarding large numbers of people with word of your product – which, while pissing off the vast majority of them, should hook a sufficient minority of them to make the exercise worthwhile.  In a way, that’s what Lewis did with his horror movies.

 

In the end, Lewis became a very wealthy man – an exemplar of the American Dream.  The fact that he achieved that dream on the back of direct marketing and excessive bloodletting seems odd but, also, appropriately American.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Box Office Spectaculars

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Happy Mondays deliver a scrappy Tuesday

 

 

On Tuesday last week I went with a friend to Singapore’s Foo Chow Hall to attend a gig by the legendary Manchester band the Happy Mondays.  The Mondays helped popularise a cheerily trippy, dance-rock sound that was dubbed ‘Madchester’ – a reflection of the fact that many of its proponents originated in the same north-of-England city: see also the Inspiral Carpets, James, 808 State and, most notably, the Stone Roses.  In fact, the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses were to the Madchester sound what Nirvana and Pearl Jam were to grunge.

 

I love the Happy Mondays but I have to concede they only ever made three albums of note and those were recorded a long time ago: the memorably titled Squirrel and G-Man Twenty-Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Can’t Smile (White Out) (1987), Bummed (1988) and Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches (1990).  I think that last album is superb, consisting of classic tracks from start to finish.  But the, shall we say, hedonistic nature of the band, and the chaos that seemingly surrounded them, meant the Happy Mondays would never reach those heights again.  In the 36 years since, they’ve put out two more albums, to mixed reviews, and ticket sales for their concerts have depended on the nostalgia and affection of their fans – fans who, these days, are getting long in the tooth.  I should know.  I’m one of them.

 

In fact, the last time I saw the Happy Mondays live was back in 1999 and even then they seemed a legacy act. That was at Scotland’s premier summer music festival, the now-defunct T in the Park, and the Mondays headlined Stage 2 on the festival’s second and final day.  By that point I was well-lubricated, but I do remember their set being brilliant even if it didn’t offer much musical innovation.  The next day, at work, a couple of my colleagues who’d also been at T in the Park, in a soberer condition, reacted to my report of seeing the Happy Mondays at Stage 2 with horror.  “What?” they exclaimed. “You ventured over there?” That year’s festival had taken place close to Edinburgh and the crowd at the Happy Mondays’ set had all resembled characters from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1992).  I guess I’d been too high-spirited to notice.

 

It was a contrast 27 years later to see the band in the saner surroundings of Singapore, performing before an audience of comfortably well-off Western expatriates – nearly all of whom were a bit on the wrinkly side. My friend, who’s in his early forties, must have been one of the youngest people on the premises.

 

 

The line-up isn’t quite the Happy Mondays one of old, but it’s not far off it. There’s cussed singer-songwriter (and tambourine-tapper) Shaun Ryder, long-term guitarist Mark Day, long-term drummer Gaz Whelan and the talismanic dancer and maracas-shaker Bez, who is surely history’s greatest example of a band-member who doesn’t really play anything and is just there to help the vibe.  Keyboardist Dan Broad has been on board since 2008.  Sadly not around anymore is bassist and Ryder’s brother Paul, who died four years ago. Their bassist in 2026 is Mikey Shine, who was originally involved with the band for half-a-dozen years in the noughties.

 

Female vocalist Rowetta, who’d been a mainstay of the Happy Mondays since 1990, left the band in 2024. Her departure was followed by acrimony a year later when she alleged that Shaun Ryder had punched her during an altercation in 2000 – something that Ryder strongly denies.  Singing in her place on the current tour is Firouzeh Berry, whom I believe is also Bez’s wife.

 

This year the band is celebrating the 35th anniversary of Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches and thus we were treated to all ten tracks from that album performed in chronological order.  The remainder of the set contained several songs from their earlier two albums, plus the haunting and mighty dance track Hallelujah from the 1989 EP of the same name.

 

 

Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room.  Shaun Ryder’s voice was never a thing of beauty and nowadays it’s well past whatever prime it once had.  His singing was rough, even sepulchral at times.  I occasionally found myself imagining I wasn’t listening to the Happy Mondays at all but to another Manchester band, the Fall, who were famous for the growly stream-of-consciousness vocals of their late founder and singer-songwriter Mark E. Smith.  Well, it sounded like a version of the Fall with some cool dance grooves.

 

The issue was particularly noticeable during the first couple of songs when the front-of-house engineer hadn’t yet got the balance right at the mix desk and Ryder’s voice wasn’t just prominent but drowning out the rest of the band.  At least Ryder was open about his vocal shortcomings, for example, groaning before one of the more melodic numbers that he’d be forced to attempt to sing more.  Firouzeh Berry’s voice, meanwhile, had to do some heavy lifting to compensate.

 

 

Still, some songs emerged relatively unscathed.  The band delivered a fine rendition of Hallelujah late on and, thankfully, my all-time favourite Mondays tune, Loose Fit from Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches, was one of the evening’s highlights.

 

Bez was as spritely as ever.  Indeed, cavorting about the stage, he looked more mobile and agile than he had any right to be, considering his age (62) and his long history of reckless and excessive living.  During the Covid-19 pandemic, I chuckled when I heard he’d decided to become a fitness instructor and, to help folk stay healthy during lockdown, was putting exercise videos on YouTube under the title Buzzin’ with Bez.  But this fitness lark obviously hasn’t done the old bugger any harm.

 

 

So, due to one key component of the band sounding like an asthmatic frog, it was a scrappy evening – but istill a fun one.  The audience certainly enjoyed themselves.  The fact that many punters had turned up wearing identical Happy Mondays T-shirts, emblazoned with the 2026 tour logo, and that prior to the gig they’d been sinking pints in pubs along Tyrwhitt Road outside, gave the proceedings the rowdy air of a football match – albeit one where the whole crowd supported the same team.

 

Indeed, it seemed appropriate that the venue was Foo Chow Hall, a place that frequently hosts tournaments by Singapore Pro-Wrestling (SPW).  Just as the Happy Mondays are a bit lacking in musical finesse these days, so pro-wrestling is hardly dripping with proper, competitive sporting integrity.  But you can’t deny that both serve up plenty of entertainment.

 

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30 years on, it’s still the worst toilet in Scotland

 

© Channel Four Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Just over a year ago, I posted on this blog about the sad closure of The Projector, Singapore’s alternative cinema.  According to a statement on the cinema’s Facebook page, this was caused by “rising operational costs, shifting audience habits, and the global decline in cinema attendance,” factors that had “made sustaining an independent model in Singapore especially challenging.”  The Projector was the one venue in the city-state where you could see, on a big screen, independent and arthouse films, ones that were generally offbeat, ones focused on minorities and not necessarily made in the handful of big international languages.  It also offered opportunities to watch older movies in a cinema, for example, ones by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch.  Though sometimes it showed modern Hollywood and Chinese blockbusters too.

 

The Projector operated at two locations, the Cineleisure shopping mall on Grange Road and the Golden Mile Tower on Beach Road.  Happily, this year, a new cinema called The Filmhouse has started doing business in The Projector’s Golden Mile Tower premises and has a similar agenda of showing films you wouldn’t otherwise see in Singaporean cinemas.  According to Wikipedia, The Filmhouse retains “certain key team members and features” from The Projector.

 

Last week, I made my first visit to The Filmhouse and was pleased to find it busy.  It’s a smaller operation than The Projector with, as far as I can ascertain, just two screens, but probably that makes more financial sense – a non-mainstream cinema can’t afford to have many overheads.  The lobby contained a bar, comfortable seats and, most importantly, a relaxed and friendly ambience.

 

 

When I went into one of the halls and found my seat, I was slightly disappointed that, before the movie started, the short film warning patrons to keep their phones silent and refrain from using them during the show wasn’t the famous one used by The Projector.  That had footage from the super-schlocky Turkish science-fiction movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, better known as Turkish Star Wars, and featured ‘Turkish Luke Skywalker’ training for battle by smashing his big fists repeatedly against a desert boulder.  You were warned that if you violated the cinema’s policy on phone-use, you would suffer punishment similar to that being inflicted on the rock.

 

Still, The Filmhouse’s anti-phone film is cute enough.  It has a brief clip of the late David Lynch telling us, “You have a very good heart.’  Then we’re asked to prove Lynch right about our hearts by turning off or muting our devices and not spoiling anyone else’s enjoyment of the movie with them.

 

Anyway, what was the film I went to see?  It was a 30th-anniversary showing of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), freshly spruced up for cinematic re-release.  As the movie poster’s tagline announced: “Choose life.  Choose the big screen.  Choose a brand new 4K restoration.”

 

At the time of its release, Trainspotting caught the zeitgeist of mid-1990s Britain, obsessed with Britpop and all things Cool Britannia.  Yes, how long ago that all seems now.  To be honest, it annoyed me in some ways that the movie got lumped in with the Britpop / Cool Britannia thing, even if the filmmakers opportunistically loaded its soundtrack with music of the time, by bands such as Pulp, Blur, Sleeper, Elastica, Leftfield and Underworld.  That said, the two songs that defined the film, Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life from 1977 and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day from 1972, had nothing to do with 1990s Britain.

 

To me Trainspotting sprang from an earlier, darker and less glamorous era than the one of Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack mini-skirt and Blur-versus-Oasis – namely, the mid-to-late 1980s, when Edinburgh’s boom in heroin use and the subsequent, resultant HIV / AIDS epidemic led to the city being dubbed ‘the AIDS capital of Europe’.

 

This became material for the book that inspired the film, Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993), which is an altogether bleaker and rougher-edged piece of work than Boyle’s cinematic version.  Though of course the film isn’t without its bleak or rough-edged moments either.  The worst toilet in Scotland, anyone?

 

© Channel Four Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Still, I’m not complaining too much.  I think both Trainspotting the book and Trainspotting the movie are great and are classics in their respective fields, 1990s Scottish literature and 1990s British cinema.  But after 30 years, how would the latter work hold up?

 

Pretty well, I thought, though the animatronic zombie-baby that Renton (Ewan McGregor) imagines crawling across the ceiling during a traumatic ‘cold turkey’ episode looks terrible now.  Mind you, it looked ropey enough in 1996.

 

I wondered how, in these days of extreme anxiety about sex predators preying on children, the gag about Renton meeting Diane (Kelly Macdonald) in a nightclub, going home with her and discovering the next day that she’s still at school would come across.  Not as ickily as I feared.  Diane is clearly the one doing the manipulating and Renton is properly horrified when he learns how old she is really.  Plus, McDonald’s true age at the time, 20, means the sequence’s punchline, when Diane appears in her school uniform, is cringily funny but – thankfully – a bit unbelievable.

 

Meanwhile, I winced at the scene following the death of Tommy (Kevin McKidd), where a grieving Spud (Ewan Bremner) pays tribute to his late friend by singing Two Little Boys – a song popularised by, and forever associated with, the Australian entertainer, TV personality and artist Rolf Harris, who had a smash-hit with it in 1969.  In 2014, Harris hit the headlines when he was found guilty of sexually assaulting four underage girls.  But to be fair to Two Little Boys, it was around long before Harris got his hands on it.  It was written in 1903 by composer Theodore F. Morse and lyricist Edward Madden.

 

The Singaporean audience I saw Trainspotting with certainly enjoyed it, even though I wondered how a film about heroin addicts would go down in a country with some of the strictest anti-drugs laws in the world.  If Trainspotting had taken place in Singapore, the drug dealing characters in it like ‘Mother Superior’ (Peter Mullan) and Mikey Forrester (Welsh in a cameo) would have been executed long ago.  Much of it they found funny, which is appropriate because the film is essentially a (very black) comedy.  The Worst Toilet in Scotland sequence and the one where the hapless Spud spectacularly soils the bedsheets in the house of this girlfriend Gail’s (Shirley Henderson) parents, then manages to scatter the contents of those bedsheets across Gail, her parents and their kitchen, elicited guffaws.

 

© Channel Four Films / PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

 

Also getting laughs was Renton’s famous ‘It’s shite being Scottish’ rant.  He may have hit a chord with the audience when he raged, “Some hate the English.  I don’t.  They’re just wankers.  We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers!”  The Singaporeans, of course, were once colonised by the English too – though, technically, as part of the British Empire, they were colonised by the Scots and Welsh as well.

 

On the other hand, I must have been the only person in the cinema-hall chuckling during the references to and jokes about Sean Connery.  (“Do you shee the beasht?  Have you got it in your shights?”  “Clear enough, Missh Moneypenny!  This should preshent no shignificant problemsh”)  Most folk there were about half my age and I guess ‘Big Sean’ is unknown to the younger generation.

 

One thing I felt about seeing Trainspotting 30 years on was that now the Britpop musical soundtrack sounds quaint rather than cutting edge, and now that I know the punchlines to all the jokes about jobbies, Sean Connery and so on, its depiction of heroin addiction is more on-the-nose.  Without the film’s cultural baggage distracting me, I better perceived the horribleness of the characters’ situations.  Like when baby Dawn – whose zombie-fied form Renton will hallucinate about later – dies from neglect and her parents, Sick-Boy and Allison (Susan Vidler), after a moment’s anguish, greedily reach for the syringes, needles and smack again.  Or when Tommy – who was originally the healthiest and most level-headed of the gang – becomes ruinously addicted and, while he lies ravaged on a mattress, a conscience-stricken Renton tries to apologise for getting him hooked on the stuff.  Tommy pays the apology no heed and is interested only in getting money for his next fix.

 

Another thing I noticed in 2026 about Trainspotting is that, for a film supposed to be the greatest one ever set in Edinburgh, you see very little of Edinburgh in it.  You have the famous opening scene where Renton, Spud and Sick-Boy try to shoplift in (the now long-gone) John Menzies bookstore on Princes Street and are chased along the thoroughfare by security, with Renton making a last, doomed break for freedom down Calton Road and under Waterloo Place.  But that’s all.  The streets, side-streets, bunker-like nightclubs, pub-interiors and blighted junkies’ dens could be anywhere.  Though that’s hardly surprising considering it was partly funded by the Glasgow Film Fund and most of it was shot in Glasgow.

 

Compare that with the sequel, T2: Trainspotting (2017), which was partly based on Irvine Welsh’s literary follow-up Porno (2003), also used some bits from the novel Trainspotting that didn’t get into the first film, and also featured stuff from scriptwriter John Hodge’s own imagination – like the psychotic Frank Begbie (Robert Carlyle) staging an escape from Saughton Prison.  In T2, you get to see the Royal Mile, the Grassmarket, Cockburn Street, Harvey Nichols, the Scottish Parliament, the tram system, the Forth Road Bridge and Salisbury Crags.  It’s practically a love-letter to the Scottish capital.

 

Still, a few months ago, I was in Edinburgh and found myself walking down Calton Road.  And my immediate reation was, “Hey, this is where Ewan McGregor ran and got caught in Trainspotting!”  So one little piece of the city, at least, was immortalised by the original film.

 

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Orange man upsets Orangemen

 

From wikipedia.org / © The White House

 

It’s difficult these days to find anyone outside the borders of the USA who likes President Donald J. Trump.  Not after he insisted on imposing tariffs on nearly everyone else in the world, from Canada and the European Union to remote Antarctic islands whose populations are limited to penguins.  Not after he launched his ham-fisted ‘military operation’ against Iran – and was seemingly blindsided by the fact that Iran, a country bordering the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for the world’s oil supplies, promptly retaliated by blocking that artery.  Didn’t see that one coming, did you, Donny?

 

There certainly wasn’t much love for Trump displayed when he landed in Ireland – the southern part – at the weekend and protestors marched through the streets of Dublin carrying signs saying things like: ‘DONALD TRUMP, YOU FLEW ALL THE WAY TO IRELAND JUST TO FIND WE DON’T F*CKING LIKE YOU EITHER.  NOW F*CK OFF HOME.’  They also carried some graphic Trump-shaped balloons, in the act of getting it up the butt from other human-shaped balloons, including a Benjamin Netanyahu one.  Later, on his golf course at Doonbeg in Country Clare, four protestors arranged themselves in a line and bent their bodies into the forms of four letters: ‘T’, ‘N’, ‘U’ and ‘C’.  I may have got the order of the spelling wrong.

 

However, there’s one group of non-American people who believe Trump is the absolute bees’ knees.  In fact, you’ll find them in another part of the island of Ireland.  I’m talking about Northern Ireland’s hard-right-wing, fiercely pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).  They love Trump.  Well, they did until very recently.

 

This is unsurprising.  There are many similarities between the views of the DUP and those of Trump and his cult-like Make America Great Again (MAGA) followers.  The MAGA faithful contain many evangelical Christians who believe stuff like the reason no dinosaurs exist today is because they were too large to get on board Noah’s Ark.  Similarly, the DUP includes among its ranks such God-bothering, science-hating specimens as Thomas Buchanan, Member of the Northern Irish Assembly (MLA) for West Tyrone and a campaigner for the teaching of creationism in schools, who rejects evolution as a “peddled lie” because, he reckons, “the world was spoken into existence in six days by His power”.

 

Trump and MAGA’s contempt for science is expressed most clearly in their claim that man-made climate change isn’t happening and is all a hoax – a convenient belief for Trump to have, seeing how much money fossil fuel companies pumped into his election campaigns – despite the fact that 97% of actively-publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming in the past century is highly likely because of human activities.

 

From wikipedia.org / © UK Parliament

 

That’s also the DUP’s stance, articulated especially by Sammy Wilson, currently Member of Parliament for East Antrim.  It was mind-melting that Wilson served as Environment Minister at the Northern Irish Assembly from 2008 to 2009.  During his tenure, he blocked a government advertising campaign designed to encourage people to cut their energy consumption and reduce C02 emissions.  He also described climate activists as a ‘hysterical pseudo-religion’.  And he said, “The tactic used by the ‘green gang is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact.”  Talk about incriminating yourself.

 

Like Trump and his adherents, the DUP likes nothing better than to dump on minorities.  These might be people of colour.  When ethnic minorities were targeted and burned out of their homes during a riot in Belfast in June, it was as much their fault – ‘problematic foreign cultures’ – as that of the rioters and arsonists, according to certain DUP politicians.

 

Or they might be members of the LGBTQ community.  See comments by Buchanan and Iris Robinson, senior DUP figure and wife of one-time DUP leader Peter Robinson, about homosexuality being an ‘abomination’, or Trevor Clarke, MLA for South Antrim, who until 2016 believed that HIV affected gay people only.  Oddly for a party that chants endlessly about Northern Ireland being as ‘British’ as the rest of the UK, it opposed the province allowing same-sex marriage (which finally happened in 2020) at a time when same-sex marriage was legal in England, Scotland and Wales.

 

Like Trump, the DUP has a fondness for lining their pockets and for dark money.  For instance, there was the ultra-dodgy Renewable Heat Incentive, or ‘cash-for-ash’ scheme, which was introduced in 2012 while Arlene Foster – later to be DUP leader and Northern Irish First Minister – ran Northern Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment.  Ostensibly, this encouraged people to switch from fossil fuel to biomass heating systems.  In reality, it meant unscrupulous farmers – many of them no doubt DUP voters – could set up biomass heating systems in empty cowsheds and still claim back £1.60 for every £1 they spent.  The scheme’s believed to have cost taxpayers some £400 million.

 

And then there was a £425,000 donation to the DUP from the shady anti-Scottish-independence organisation the Constitutional Research Council, rumoured to have really originated in Saudi Arabia, India or even Putin’s Russia.  In 2016, in the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, £282,000 of this was spent by the DUP on a ‘Vote Leave’ advertisement in a newspaper that wasn’t even published in Northern Ireland.

 

Trump is a man who proclaims his Christianity and does photo-ops with the Bible when there’s right-wing American Christian voters to woo, yet happily does such un-Christian things as cheat on his wife and have a fling with a pornographic movie actress, or brag about his technique with the ladies, which is mainly to ‘grab ‘em by the pussy.’  He has kindred spirits in the supposedly fiercely Christian DUP.  For instance, there was the 2009 scandal involving Iris Robinson, who had an extramarital affair with a lad young enough to be her grandson and also illegally procured some £50,000 to help him with a business project.

 

Earlier, in 1996, Sammy Wilson was involved in a stushie when the Sunday World newspaper published photos of him and his ex-girlfriend romping nakedly during a holiday in France.  Funnily enough, Wilson went on to denounce breast-feeding in public as ‘exhibitionism’.  In Wilson’s world-view, it’s obvious that ‘bare boobs during naked holiday romps = good’, but ‘bare boobs for feeding hungry babies = bad’.

 

Maybe the most striking overlap between Trumpism and the DUP are sexual assault cases involving their leaders.  E. Jean Caroll claimed Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s and brought two civil lawsuits against him, which were decided in her favour – though Trump is currently pestering the Supreme Court about an appeal.  It may or may not be a coincidence that he’s mentioned 38,000 times in Justice Department files relating to the activities of the late child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Eptstein.  Meanwhile, in 2026, Newry Crown Court found Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP from 2021 to 2024, guilty of “18 charges: one count of rape, four of gross indecency, and 13 of indecent assault.”

 

From the Belfast Telegraph

 

Given all these alignments, it was no surprise that in 2020 when Trump was campaigning for re-election after his first term as president (and lost, although ever since then he’s been lying that he won), three DUP MPs – Wilson, Paul Girvan and Ian Paisley Jr – were photographed posing with a banner saying ‘TRUMP – 2020 – KEEP AMERICA GREAT!’ outside the Houses of Parliament.  Paisley Jr claimed to be ‘good friends’ with Trump and “added that the president keeps a framed picture of himself with his father, the former First Minister of Northern Ireland who died in 2014.”

 

As one-time MP for North Antrim, Paisley Jr got “suspended from the Commons for thirty sitting days, for not declaring visits to Sri Lanka paid for by the Sri Lankan government and for breaking the Commons rule banning paid advocacy…”, i.e., for accepting “very expensive hospitality, for himself and his family, from an overseas government accused of serious human rights violations.”  He got into similar bother over an undisclosed trip to the Maldives.  So the former MP for North Antrim, Sri Lanka and the Maldives is obviously a man after Trump’s heart.

 

Anyway, I’ve been roaring with laughter since the weekend.  During his sojourn in southern Ireland, Trump threw his staunchly pro-British DUP admirers under the bus when he opined about the future of Ireland, north and south.  “I will ‌tell you,” he said during a press conference with the taoiseach Michael Martin, “I’d love ‌to see it unified…  You know what?  The way I look at it, it’s going to happen eventually.  It may as well happen now…  The UK will have something to say about it, obviously.  But I think it would be a great thing.  I mean, how can it be bad?”  Later, he doubled down on what he’d said.  “Many people agree.  I made what I considered to be a fairly routine comment.  I have had so much support on that.”

 

The moral of this story is that, once again, there is zero point in sucking up to Trump.  No matter how oleaginous you are towards him, he will, sooner or later, through malice, narcissism, stupidity or dementia, or a combination of all four, crap all over you.

 

Ian Paisley Jr retorted: “Everyone is allowed a personal opinion even when it’s wrong.”  Accusing Trump of being wrong?  Oh dear, Ian.  That framed picture of you and your dad may not be hanging on the White House wall for much longer.

 

From wikipedia.org / © UK Parliament

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More musical genres I don’t like

 

From wikipedia.org / © Michael Spencer

 

It’s time to put poison pen to paper, or poison fingers to keyboard, and release more bile about more types of music I can’t stand.  Having poured scorn on jazz, country and Irish, prog rock and disco music in my previous post, I’ll now address another four musical genres that I’d sooner poke a sharpened stick into my ear than listen to. And first up is…

 

New romantic

Just into my teens, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I naively thought it was a great time to like music.  Punk had recently happened and on its heels had arrived the new wave bands.  Even on mainstream outlets, such as the BBC’s Radio 1 and its flagship TV music-show Top of the Pops (1964-2006), you regularly heard the likes of Blondie, the Jam, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Boomtown Rats, Talking Heads, the Undertones and Martha and the Muffins.  Some of these artists ranked highly in the singles and albums charts and a few even made it to number one.  Thus, frequently, the period had a nice correlation between what was popular and what sounded good.

 

It couldn’t last.  Indeed, I remember the moment things changed.  Early in 1981, I was watching an episode of Tiswas, the anarchic Saturday-morning kids’ TV show, when presenter Chris Tarrant said words to the effect of, “Here’s a video of a song by a great new band called Duran Duran!”  Then I found myself staring at my TV screen in bafflement, trying to make sense of the figures of Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Andy, John and Roger Taylor, wearing puffy and frilly shirts, sporting floppy fringes and slathered in make-up, while they cavorted to the strains of Planet Earth.  The new romantic craze had begun.  The horror!

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ben Aris / Capitol Records

 

Thereafter came a flood: Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Wham, Visage, A Flock of Seagulls, Classix Nouveaux, Kajagoogoo, the Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, all of whom drove me up the walls.  Vacuous songs.  Production qualities that might have sounded hi-tech in the 1980s but just sound dated now, all dinky drums and plinky keyboards.  A smug dedication to style over substance, with the performers lavishly dressed and expensively coiffured.  Maybe I’m giving them more social significance than they deserved, but they seemed to personify the flash-your-cash, greed-is-good ethos of the Thatcherite 1980s.

 

Now you can reply to my moaning by saying, “Well, if you didn’t like them, you didn’t have to listen to them!”  But actually, back then, you did.  For a couple of years, the new romantic bands were everywhere,  On the radio.  On TV.  On the covers of glossy new teenybop magazines like Smash Hits and Number One.  In the newspapers – never more so than when the Sun famously ran the headline, ‘BOY GEORGE’S BIG SECRET: I PREFER A CUP OF TEA TO SEX’.

 

Things got particularly bad in 1984-85, during my second year as a student at Aberdeen University, when to make ends meet I worked in a nightclub called Ritzy’s three or four evenings a week.  I was a member of its floor-staff and the club’s DJ liked his new romantic records.  It was truly gruelling to have to collect glasses and empty ashtrays whilst being blasted by Spandau Ballet crooning their way through True (1983), and then Wham chirping Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984), and then Simon Le Bon conspicuously failing to hit the high notes in Duran Duran’s Wild Boys (1984), and then, oh joy, Boy George ruminating, “War, war is stupid, and people are stupid…” in Culture Club’s The War Song (1984).  Happy memories…  Not.

 

Honourable exceptions: David Sylvian’s outfit Japan were sometimes called a new romantic band and I thought they were pretty good.  And I liked Adam and the Ants, at least, up until Adam Ant turned into a dandy highwayman.  And though I’ve just given Duran Duran a kicking, I’ll admit that their late-career hit Ordinary World (1992) is a lovely song.  In fact, Ordinary World has featured in not one, but two textbook examples of how to use pop music effectively in movies – Matthew Vaughan’s stylish gangster film The Layer Cake (2004) and Nia DaCosta’s superb zombie flick 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026).

 

From wikipedia.org / © Capitol Records

 

Hair metal

During the first half of the 1980s, it wasn’t easy being a heavy metal fan, as I was.  Heavy metal had a serious image problem then.  Both conservatives and left-wingers regarded it as music made for disreputable, juvenile, sexist, dumbly hedonistic louts.  It didn’t help that metal’s most visible sub-genre at the time was all of those things.  There’s nothing wrong with being disreputable, but hair metal was also juvenile, sexist, dumbly hedonistic and loutish.  (And at the same time, kind of lame – I’ll get to that in a minute.)

 

Actually, its practitioners referred to the music as ‘glam metal’ but, given the extravagant, backcombed locks they sported, and the amount of hairspray they used, I prefer the more dismissive moniker ‘hair metal’.  The movement received other disdainful nicknames too, which is a testimony to how disliked it was.  The bands – Mötley Crüe (who added umlauts to their name not because they liked listening to Motörhead, but because they liked drinking Löwenbräu), Quiet Riot, W.A.S.P., Ratt, Poison, Warrant, Dokken, Cinderella – were sneeringly called ‘poodle-heads’.  Their sound was also described as ‘butt rock’.

 

Clad in spandex, caked in make-up, jangling with accessories and balancing on their bonces the aforementioned ‘big’ hair, whilst singing songs whose lyrics sounded like they’d been written by Frank Kelly’s Father Jack Hackett character in Father Ted (1995-98) – see Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls (1987) – they were bloody awful.  To my ears, they weren’t even that metal.  They used poppy guitar riffs and harmonies and churned out an ungodly number of power ballads.

 

A decade earlier, God had put an end to the foolishness of prog rock by creating punk music.  Thankfully, around 1988 or so, He again decided enough was enough and created grunge.  Once kids started listening to Kurt Cobain and co, the poodle-heads became history.  Incidentally, there’s a 2005 song by the surreal English indie band Half Man Half Biscuit called Upon Westminster Bridge whose lyrics sum up my feelings about hair metal.  It goes “Oh help me Mrs Medlicott / I don’t know what to do / I’ve only got three bullets / And there’s four of Mötley Crüe.”

 

Honourable exceptions: Guns n’ Roses.  That’s it.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mercury Records

 

Thankfully, after hair metal’s demise, heavy metal couldn’t possibly produce another sub-genre that was so horrible.  Could it?  Well…

 

Nu metal

“I’d rather have my eyelids pulled out than listen to nu metal,” David Mustaine, the frontman of Megadeth, once remarked.  Which is ironic, considering that the one time I saw Megadeth play live, in Chicago in 1995, the support bands included Korn, an outfit credited with helping to kickstart nu metal in the first place.

 

Mustaine’s disdain for nu metal is typical of many in the traditional heavy metal community, who thought the music of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, the Deftones, Disturbed, Alien Ant Farm, Papa Roach, etc., sucked because it incorporated influences from hip-hop while neglecting the established staples of heavy metal, such as guitar solos.  Mustaine was particularly sore about nu metal’s absence of guitar solos: “I’m talking about the bands that wouldn’t do guitar solos. Guys who get out there and they’d do rhythms and stuff but they’d never do a guitar solo…”

 

Well, I don’t mind heavy metal music not having guitar solos and certainly don’t mind it being influenced by hip-hop.  Indeed, I love some of the bands who tried to fuse the two genres before the existence of nu metal (and inadvertently became the inspiration for it): Faith No More, the early Beastie Boys and the mighty Rage Against the Machine.  In fact, RATM’s Tom Morello has stated: “For better or worse, Rage Against the Machine seemed to have planted the seeds for the genre that sprung up known as nu metal.  My apologies.”

 

But I found most nu metal music to be a pain in the arse, a crime against the ears and an affront to the intelligence.  The first – and by far the worst – negative about it was the toxic, misogynistic, bro-y energy it seemed to generate in its heyday.  As Tom Morello observed, “the ethos of it tended to be… anti-woman and fratty.”  This reached its nadir at the Woodstock 1999 festival when, during a Saturday evening performance by Limp Bizkit, the crowd erupted into an orgy of vandalism, violence and sexual assault.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ruzov Dimitry

 

Add to that its fashion sense, or lack of one.  Every nu metal band looks a nightmarish collision of chin beards, frosted tips, dreadlocks, shaven scalps, piercings, tattoos, baseball caps, beanies, cargo pants, baggy shorts, hoodies, sports tops and white socks.  Plus the lyrics which, when they aren’t being misogynistic, are being whiny.  The New Musical Express once summarised them as: “I hate my daddy wah wah I’m drowning do you know how it feels to be face down in a rotting corpse drownin’ in blood so ashamed of who I am… wah wah wah wah.”

 

Honourable exceptions: I like some stuff by Korn, Slipknot and System of a Down.

 

Emo

The journalist Gavin Baddeley described emo in his 2015 book Street Culture as ‘punk for kids not ashamed of being smart or showing their feelings… The look was a blend of preppy punk and geek chic… the attitude one of angst, unabashed awkwardness and frustration, making it a powerful draw for smart teenaged misfits.”  He also detailed emo fashions: “…tight black jeans and skinny-fit band t-shirts, sneakers… piercings and tattoos… plenty of black hair-dye and eyeliner…”

 

Well, I have difficulty telling the difference between emo and another, equally black-clad sub-culture, goth.  Yes, I know emo is supposed to have its roots in the American hardcore punk scene in the 1980s, whereas goth was a melancholy offshoot of an older punk scene, the UK one in the late 1970s.  But all the same…  I can’t help but think of a 2013 episode of the TV cartoon-show South Park in which the Goth Kids try to explain the distinction to a child-protection officer: “A goth believes that, deep down, the world is totally f*cked up, but an emo believes that, deep down, they are totally f*cked up…  Emos are more prone to suicide but goths are more prone to be depressed that so many people commit suicide…  Goths’ darkness is nihilistic whereas emos’ is cynical…  Wait, I thought we were cynical…”

 

Anyway, I’ve nothing against the sub-culture of emo and its adherents.  My beef is that emo bands – like My Chemical Romance, Funeral for a Friend, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Paramore – simply do nothing for me.  Sorry.

 

Honourable exceptions: I’ve seen Death Cab for Cutie described, in their early years, as an emo band, and I like them.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jezebel Parker

 

And now I have all that worked out of my system, I’ll hopefully return to writing about nicer subjects shortly.

Posted on

Musical genres I don’t like

 

From pixabay.com / © Fietzfotos

 

In recent years, I’ve tried to follow the adage, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  Therefore, rather than write about books, films, TV shows, etc., I thought were bad and slag them off, I’ve tried to focus on works I thought were good and be positive in my vibes.

 

However, I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and feel grumpy.  So, here’s a post radiating unapologetic negativity – about some genres of music that I always thought were a bit, or a lot, rubbish.  But my diatribes will also mention some honourable exceptions, thus leavening the darkness with a little sunshine.

 

Jazz

There’s a sizeable segment of the world’s music-loving population who think jazz music is the bees’ knees.  But it never did much for me.  In fact, I agree with Jimmy Rabbitte, the youthful Svengali behind the band in The Commitments (1991).  After Dean the saxophone player starts sneaking jazz bits into the band’s soul sound, Jimmy confronts him while he’s having a pee at a urinal and declares, “Jazz is musical wanking!  If you want to wank, use that thing in your hand, not your sax!”

 

© Beacon Pictures / 20th Century Fox

 

It’s surprising because I love blues music, another musical genre that grew out of the culture of the American south’s black population in the early 20th century.  Yes, I can happily spend all day listening to my collection of records by bluesmen and women like John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Minnie, Freddy King, Bessie Smith, Howling Wolf and so on.  But jazz?  It strikes me as ponderous and leaves me cold.

 

I suspect part of my beef against jazz is powered by the fact that certain people I’ve known over the years who were into the genre were, frankly, pretentious and annoying.  This includes two ladies I’ve encountered, at different times and in different places, who fancied themselves as jazz chanteuses, fronted bands and did that ‘scat’ singing thing where they drooled ‘shooby dooby doo-wah’ into a microphone all evening thinking it made them the epitome of cool.  It didn’t.  (By the way, anyone acquainted with me when I lived in Sapporo in the 1990s, please note – the above rant does not apply to the well-known jazz fans Gordon Ents and William Green, whom I knew back then and regarded as really good guys.)

 

Honourable exceptions: I think Ethiopian jazz is brilliant.  Its jazziness is suffused with Middle Eastern sounds and rhythms, making it sublimely trippy.

 

© Ritz Records

 

Country and Irish

I know many folk dislike country and western music on account of some of its practitioners and fans being right-wing, red-necked and, well, a bit racist, and on account of its seemingly limited subject matter: trucks, trains, prisons, farms, horses, beer, heartbreak and patriotism.  But such generalisations do the genre a disservice.  It’s also produced some great artists: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, Kris Kristofferson and the saintly and now sadly departed Dolly Parton.

 

But country and Irish music, which Wikipedia defines as “a musical sub-culture in Ireland formed by mixing North American country-style music with Irish influences” that “emerged from Ireland’s showband scene, where local bands would play American pop standards tailored to Irish sensibilities”?  Sheesh!  I find it an aural puree.  All the interesting, gritty bits (symbolised by Johnny, Hank, Willie, Gram and co. above) have been removed and what’s left are some easy-on-the-ears twangy guitars, jaunty accordions and cheery female choruses and a bloke from Athlone or Letterkenny crooning about tractors, or hayfields, or going to church, or – that great country and Irish staple – ‘mammy’.

 

My own, late mother was into country and Irish music and her record player gave heavy rotation to the likes of Foster and Allen and the inimitable Brendan Shine, which explains why I’m so scarred.  If you can listen to Brendan Shine’s 1981 opus Spuds (“Spuds, spuds, spuds! / Ah, these spuds are really great / Good oul Irish spuds / Are on everybody’s plate!”) all the way through without having a breakdown, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.  At least my mum wasn’t that keen on the country-and-Irish superstar and knitwear-clad cultural juggernaut that is Daniel O’Donnell.  O’Donnell’s reputed to have sold 10 to 15 million records globally and was parodied in the 1998 Father Ted episode Night of the Nearly Dead, in which a much-loved singer called Eoin McLove visits Craggy Island and bluntly informs Ted, “I have no willy.”

 

Honourable exceptions: I’m not wild about the music, but Philomena Begley can certainly sing.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Atlantic Records

 

Prog rock

Prog rock, or to give it its full title, progressive rock, was initially essayed by bands in the early 1970s like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, Yes, Pink Floyd after Sid Barrett left and Genesis before Phil Collins took over.  It had guitar solos and keyboard solos that twiddled on forever because the musicians wanted to convince everyone that, no, they weren’t just dumbass rock or pop musicians but proper artistes pushing boundaries by fusing rock with classical music and (eek!) jazz.  Much of it is unlistenable to me.  I agree with John Peel, who once observed, “the one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn’t progress.”  Anyway, by the mid-1970s, God decided that enough was enough and created punk rock, which seemed to put an end to it.  (Though Marillion popped up in the 1980s and the genre lives on today.)

 

Honourable exceptions: Okay, I’ve been facetious.  I have a few nice things to say about prog rock too.  Firstly, looking at Wikipedia’s List of Progressive Rock Bands, I see many names on it whom I actually like.  However, while those bands may have been prog-rock-tinged at times, I view them as essentially playing different types of music: Hawkwind (space rock), Can (Krautrock), Rush (hard rock and heavy metal), Ozric Tentacles (psychedelic rock), etc.  Secondly, you can’t deny that, judiciously used, the music of prog rock bands has enlivened many movies – see Michael Mann’s use of Tangerine Dream on his soundtracks, or Dario Argento’s use of Goblin on his, or Vangelis’s contribution to Blade Runner (1982), or how that bit from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1971) turned up brilliantly in The Exorcist (1973).  And thirdly, among albums by latter-day prog rock bands, I thought Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) was wonderful.

 

From wikipedia.org / © RSO Records

 

Disco

I don’t hate disco.  I was just never into it.  So sorry, ABBA, Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band and Earth, Wind and Fire.  The problem, of course, is that to be a fan of disco music, you have to be a fan of dancing, and as I have always danced like I possessed two left feet, that’s excluded me from the culture.

 

Incidentally, it’s weirdly ironic – considering how disco was a big thing among the black, Latino and gay communities in the late 1970s – that two legendary disco bands have been tarnished by associating with intolerant far-right-wing politicians recently.  Admittedly, these are modern incarnations of the bands, i.e., with hardly any of the original line-ups remaining in them.  A version of Boney M has been in talks to perform at this month’s conference by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, while a version of Village People played at inaugural events for Donald Trump in 2025.  Of course, Village People’s YMCA (1978) is much-loved by Trump, who dances to it at every opportunity – arthritically shuffling about whilst joggling his little fists in front of him like he’s trying to milk a levitating cow.

 

Honourable exceptions: The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive (1977) is a sprightly tune, though I like it even more in this mash-up with AC/DC’s Back in Black (1980) from Wax Audio.

 

Right, I’ve released some of that yellow bile from my system, am feeling better and will end this post here.  But stay tuned.  I’ll be writing about more musical genres I can’t stand soon.  (Hint: we’re getting near the 1980s…)

 

© Beaumex Music

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Cormac’s tales from the riverbank

 

© Vintage

 

I’d assumed I was long past the age where I could get really, really excited about books.  If I had to compile a list of my favourite 20 books of all time, I would expect everything on it to be stuff I’d read in my teens, twenties or, at a stretch, my thirties: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946-59}, etc.  I still read a fair bit, but nothing I peruse these days seems to generate the same frisson that certain books did in me during my youth.

 

I wouldn’t completely agree with the legendary blues singer and musician B.B. King when, in 1969, he sang The Thrill is Gone.  But I would say the thrill survives in a reduced capacity.  You get older, you become less impressionable, and nothing surprises you anymore.  Or so I thought.

 

I was surprised when, a couple of years back, I read the books in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy (1995-97), about King Arthur, and found myself entranced by them – so much so that when I got to the final volume, 1997’s Excalibur, I wrote on this blog that I was “almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.”  It’d been a long time indeed since a series of book had had such an effect on me.

 

Now the same thing has happened with Cormac McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical novel Suttree (1979).  A few pages in, I realised I was reading a very special book – for me, anyway – and I consumed the rest of it with a passion.  And I imagine that in my top-20 books list, one of the entries that I read during the first half of my life has just been demoted from it and Suttree has taken its place.  Yes, I reckoned McCarthy’s novel was that good.

 

Before I continue talking about Suttree, a warning – there will be spoilers.

 

The novel recounts the adventures, and misadventures, of a young man called Cornelius Suttree while he lives on a houseboat on the Tennessee River by the rundown edge of Knoxville in the early 1950s.  He ekes out a living fishing and selling his catches at the local market.  He also fraternises with the neighbourhood’s underclass, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, eccentrics, down-and-outs and mad people.  McCarthy, who died in 2023, was not one for giving interviews, so I assume it’s never been determined how much of Suttree is autobiographical.  I’d imagine, though, that the novel – written over 20 years – is at least partly inspired by the period of his marriage to Lee Holleman in the 1960s when, according to his Wikipedia entry, “McCarthy moved to what Holleman’s obituary calls ‘a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxviille.’”

 

As the narrative unfolds, we learn about Suttree’s past.  He’s from a well-to-do family and his lifestyle choices haven’t pleased his father.  In a letter to him, that father states his belief that “the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it.  If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it.  In the law courts, in business, in government.  There is nothing occurring in the streets.  Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”  We also learn that he’d been in a marriage that, ultimately, he’d run away from.  More on that in a minute.

 

Incidentally, we get clues that Suttree is quite a handsome devil – as McCarthy himself was in his young days.  At one point he and some mates get into a catastrophic brawl in a dodgy Knoxville dance-place: “Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle…  He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing.”  Though he’s now gap-toothed, Suttree has the following conversation with a nurse: “You created quite a sensation.”  “What, among the inmates?”  “No, silly.  Among the nurses.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Evening Star Books

 

I’ve used the word ‘narrative’ but Suttree doesn’t have the structure of a typical novel.  It’s rambling and episodic, really a patchwork of vignettes and short stories featuring the same characters in the same setting.  The reader takes pleasure in the randomness of it, not knowing what grotesqueness, hilarity, idiocy, beauty, horror, weirdness or, indeed, moment of sheer poetry is going to appear next.

 

A couple of the longer ‘short stories’ see Suttree leave Knoxville, temporarily, with painful results.  In one episode, he discovers that the son he left behind has died and sets off to attend his funeral, even though he has barely any money.  When he gets to his destination, his former wife and in-laws, and indeed the whole community, react to him with contempt and hatred.  He only leaves the town alive thanks to the begrudging intervention of its sheriff, who opines: “You, my good buddy, are a 14-carat plated son of a bitch.  That’s what your problem is…  Now I’m goin to do you a favour.  Against my better judgement.  And it’s not goin to make me no friends.  I’m goin to drive your stinkin ass to the bus station and give you an opportunity to get out of here.”

 

Another time, a chancer called Reese and his family arrive on the scene.  This symbolically occurs during a flood, when all sorts of flotsam and jetsam are being washed past Suttree’s houseboat: “Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear…”  Reese inadvertently befriends Reese, his wife and his children, who inhabit that barge-shack and, for all his worldly wisdom, gets suckered into helping Reese with a get-rich scheme we know is doomed from the start.  They travel upriver and begin fishing for mussels, believing there’s money to be made from selling their shells and pearls.  Though there’s a little light, with Suttree romancing Reese’s daughter, what follows is mostly a gruelling litany of hardship, futility and, finally, tragedy.

 

However, much of the book simply records Suttree’s interactions with the characters who live, fish and scavenge around him.  They’re an intriguing bunch even if you don’t envy them their existences.  They include the Ragpicker – his title says it all – who claims not to believe in God because “I got no reason to think he believes in me”; Daddy Watson, a former railwayman happy to tell Suttree about the gory train crashes he witnessed during his working life; Ab Jones, a black man who with his wife Dolly runs an illicit bar on another houseboat and whose defiant nature invariably gets him into trouble; Mother She, an ancient and decrepit witch who provides the novel with its most hallucinatory episode; Michael, a native American fisherman whom Suttree briefly befriends; and Red Callahan, who ‘s perhaps the closest thing in Suttree to the psychotic Francis Begbie in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), another episodic book about a bunch of misfits living in punishing circumstances.

 

One part of Suttree that’s particularly Welsh-like – i.e., simultaneously horrible and funny – concerns a male prostitute called Leonard.  He enlists Suttree’s reluctant help to dispose of the corpse of his father, which his family has kept hidden at home for months, pretending the old man is still alive so they can keep collecting his social security money.  At one point during the operation, Suttree protests, “That’s the awfullest stink I ever smelted.”  Leonard retorts, “That‘s the biggest reason we had to get him out of the house.”

 

Apart from Suttree, though, the most prominent character is the chaotic Gene Harrogate, a youth whom Suttree first encounters while they’re both in prison – Harrogate for the unusual crime of sneaking into a watermelon field near his home, cutting holes in the crop and then having intercourse with them.  (As the stunned farmer says, “You ain’t goin to believe this…  Somebody has been f*ckin my watermelons.”)  Following his release, Harrogate takes up residence in Suttree’s neighbourhood, living “under the final concrete arches of the viaduct where they ran to earth…  The earth was cool and naked and dry.  Here some bones.  Broken glass.  A few stray dog-turds…  there was never a retreat so secluded.”

 

From pixabay.com / © Riedlinger

 

Suttree becomes his surrogate big brother, trying to rein in his wildest and daftest impulses and having to mop up after him when his antics end in disaster.  He’s remarkably patient, considering how madcap Harrogate’s schemes are.  At one point, the lad learns he can earn a dollar for every dead bat he finds and hands into Knoxville’s medical authorities, who are keen to monitor rabies in the local chiropteran population.  Soon Harrogate is firing poisoned pellets into the air from his skiff, at dusk, hoping the swooping bats will mistake them for insects.  “Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens.  Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river…”  More spectacular, and no more successful, is a project he devises after finding a cave / tunnel system that takes him under Knoxville – where, he believes, he can dynamite his way into the vault of the city treasury.

 

Incidents like these make Suttree the funniest of McCarthy’s books.  Although folk who’ve read Child of God (1973), or Blood Meridian (1985), or The Road (2006) would probably argue that having more laughs than the norm in McCarthy’s oeuvre is not a particularly high bar.  Anyway, I found myself guffawing loudly in places.

 

The prose oscillates between Joycean flamboyance and Hemingway-esque precision.  The opening paragraph reads: “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming of the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunks and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brink or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”

 

In contrast, after Suttree’s friend J-Bone informs him of his son’s death, McCarthy describes the moment thus: “Suttree set his cup down and looked out of the window.  There was a small pool of spilled cream on the marble countertop at his elbow and flies were crouched about it lapping like cats.  He got up and went out.”  Some may find this disparity in writing styles off-putting.  I have to say, for me, the combination is like catnip.

 

Unflinchingly, the book explores a harsh, brutal but somehow fascinating world, one whose inhabitants certainly suffer, yet you also understand the hold that world exerts over them – through the moments of peace and calm, the occasional pleasures, the camaraderie, the satisfaction of knowing you’re not bound by the rules and regulations of conventional society.   But it’s also a transitory world where nothing lasts for long, including the people living in it.  As the book progresses, characters get killed, get permanently incarcerated (in the prison or asylum) or simply vanish.  As you near the book’s end, you wonder what Suttree’s choice will be.  Will he decide to stay here and become a casualty too, or will he try to escape?

 

But if he does escape, you suspect his experiences on the river will haunt him for his remaining days.  Just as Cormac McCarthy’s experiences of poverty and desperate living in Tennessee haunted him for 20 years and informed this marvellous novel.

 

From pixabay.com / © Leoleobobeo

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Attack ‘n’ Byrne

 

 

In the past few weeks I’ve been fortunate enough to attend two of the best musical concerts I’ve ever experienced.  Both took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.

 

On July 29th, the Star hosted the English trip-hop collective Massive Attack.  Formed in Bristol in 1988 by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws and Andre ‘Mushroom’ Vowles, Massive Attack is less massive in terms of members nowadays.  Only 3D and Daddy G remain, Tricky and Mushroom having left in 1995 and 1999 respectively.  What we got on July 29th still sounded massive, though.

 

In the 1990s, I loved the band.  Their three albums from that decade, Blue Lines (1991), Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1999), are all-time favourites of mine.  I found their sound irresistible: its hypnotic melodies, its measured pace, its building crescendos, its atmospherics, its lurking orchestral grandeur – composer John Barry never seemed far away – and, unpinning everything, its relentless drums and basslines.  After hearing them, I had a hard time getting songs like the soaring Unfinished Symphony or the sublimely restless Safe from Harm from Blue Lines, or the haunting Teardrop from Mezzanine, out of my head.

 

My ultimate Massive Attack song, though, was Mezzanine’s Angel, which after a slow but remorseless build-up lets fly two minutes and 19 seconds in.  That’s the best crescendo in music ever.  It would make a terrific accompaniment to a movie sequence where there’s a brooding sense of unease, then an explosion of action.  It has been used in films, actually, but the only one I’ve heard it in was the forgettable 2004 remake of Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).  I know it turned up in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) too, but I’ve never watched that one.

 

The one time I saw them live during the 1990s was in insalubrious circumstances.  They played at the now-defunct Scottish music festival T in the Park in 1999.  The crowd was boozed-up and raucous and I’d been at the front of it all afternoon, before they performed, watching earlier bands on the bill.  These included the then-popular rock band Reef.  While Reef were playing, someone bodysurfed past me and accidentally struck me in the head with a boot.  A week previously, I’d been the victim of an assault, which resulted in me getting multiple stitches in the back of my head in an A and E department.  The body-surfer’s boot opened those stitches and blood leaked out everywhere, including down my face.  Consequently, when Massive Attack came on, I looked like I’d just strolled off the set of a horror movie.

 

It didn’t help that a crowd-member then flung a bottle at the stage, which smashed down close to their frequent collaborator, the reggae roots singer Horace Andy.  They continued playing, but looked extremely pissed off.  (They should have followed the example of Jim Kerr, the frontman of Simple Minds.  Supposedly, once, when somebody chucked a bottle at Simple Minds during a Parisian gig, he told the crowd, “I hope whoever threw that dies of cancer.”)

 

 

So, what a contrast to see them again, 27 years later, from a vantage point high in the circle of the grand and comfortable Star Theatre.  On the stage, 3D, Daddy G and their team of travelling musicians were ensconced, in near-darkness for much of the time, among their instruments and consoles while the theatrics were provided by dazzling visuals that materialised on giant screens above them to accompany each song.  In fact, ‘visuals’ is too lame a word to describe what the audience saw.  A reviewer in Australian Musician wrote that the band used “monolithic LED screens, archival footage, political imagery and dreamlike sequences to create a constantly shifting portrait of a world where personal freedom, privacy and even human emotion are increasingly commodified.”

 

As the visuals shifted wrenchingly from the picturesque Swiss lakeside city of Zug (where much equity money ends up, apparently) to Africa and impoverished locals having to dig up precious minerals in wretched  conditions, from worrying graphics illustrating the global reach of mass surveillance to gibbering headlines about celebrities, from Peter Thiel quotations about why democracy is a bad idea to bald statements that could have come from 1984’s Ministry of Truth (‘WHAT IS PURPOSE?’), I was reminded of the work of radical documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis.  Later, I learnt that Curtis and the band have enjoyed a long association and he worked with them to put these digital displays and film clips together.

 

Not that the visual show was entirely serious.  I was delighted to see the great horror actor Bruce Campbell get chased through a cabin by the forces of darkness in The Evil Dead (1982) while a message flashed up telling us we can’t escape ‘the algorithm’.  Later, another great horror actor, Boris Karloff, appeared as the title character in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) in an ironic commentary on the West’s tendency to blame China for everything.  (See Covid-19.)

 

 

Musically, it was superb.  The crowd gave roars of appreciation for Horace Andy, singing on three tracks, including – yes! – Angel; and for other longtime collaborators Deborah Miller,  singing on Unfinished Symphony and Safe From Harm, and Elizabeth Fraser, who did vocal duties on Mezzanine’s Black Milk and Group Four and a cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren (1970).  Fraser also brought the evening to a perfect close with the final song, Teardrop.

 

The gig was overshadowed by an incident at the end when, briefly, 3D and Daddy G brandished a Palestinian flag onstage.  Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported that this broke a local law forbidding “the public display of foreign national emblems without a permit or exemption.”  Afterwards, according to the Times, the authorities released a statement saying, “…the police… administered stern warnings to both men for the offences of Section 3 of the Foreign National Emblems (Control of Display) Act and Section 16 of the Public Order Act,” and “both men will be banned from re-entering Singapore.”  The BBC, meanwhile, quoted an official spokesman as saying Singapore’s police “take a serious view of acts which could potentially harm the racial and religious harmony in Singapore”.

 

This leaves me with mixed feelings.  I believe people should be free to express their opinions, so long as that expression doesn’t cause innocent parties any harm, and I don’t see how two 60-something men holding a flag for a few seconds in a theatre full of Massive Attack fans could cause much harm.  However, I also believe in the old adage, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’.  Singaporeans are proud of the stable, prosperous, multicultural society they’ve created, in a region that, elsewhere, has often been troubled by ethnic and religious conflicts.  For many people, having strict laws outlawing the display of foreign flags (and eliminating any possibility they could be used to stir up trouble) is a price worth paying.  I didn’t see much sympathy for the band on local Internet discussion-forums, where the sentiment was largely, “Bloody foreigners, coming over here, breaking our laws.”  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said one commentator, evidently not a fan.

 

It’s worth noting that the UK authorities have given Massive Attack a hard time too for their pro-Palestinian sympathies.  3D was arrested in Trafalgar Square in April this year for carrying a sign expressing support for the proscribed, allegedly terrorist group Palestine Action.

 

Anyway, this furore obscures the fact that the concert itself was exceptional.

 

 

Then on August 7th, singer-songwriter David Byrne – one-time vocalist and guitarist with legendary American new-wave band Talking Heads – performed at the Star to promote his 2025 solo album Who is the Sky?  This gig didn’t begin well for me.  When I bought my ticket via Ticketmaster, I got an email warning me not to try to enter the venue using a screenshot of it.  I should have the ticket open in my Ticketmaster account, on my phone, ready for security staff to scan its QR code.  Just before I set off for the Star, I discovered the link in the email was taking me not to the David Byrne ticket in my account, but to the Massive Attack one from 10 days earlier.  This kept happening on my phone only.  When I clicked the link on my computer, I was taken to the correct ticket.  Finally, exasperated, I took a screenshot of the Byrne one on my computer and sent it to my phone, as proof I’d at least bought the ticket.

 

When I explained the problem to the ladies at the Ticketmaster table outside the Theatre entrance, they told me to use the screenshot on my phone.

 

“But your instructions said…”

 

“Just use it!”

 

The security lady looked at me tetchily when I presented the screenshot, but she scanned its QR code and it was accepted.  I was in.

 

 

I wasn’t only me suffering technical difficulties.  The gig was scheduled to start at eight o’clock but nothing happened onstage for another half-hour – except for a few minutes when David Byrne himself walked into view.  He explained that some glitches were delaying proceedings and, by way of apology, entertained us with some sightseeing photos he’d taken that day in Singapore.  He did this with much enthusiasm.  His photos appeared on big screens above him and included one taken at Singapore’s marvellous Haw Par Villa, where you can stroll through a giant diorama depicting the 10 Courts of Hell from Chinese and Buddhist mythology.  That photo depicted sinners impaled bloodily on a ‘hill of knives’, which Byrne cheerfully informed us was the afterlife punishment awaiting people who charge too much interest on loans.  You know, bankers.

 

Byrne came across as someone with genuine interest in the places he travelled to and his good humour was greatly engaging.  I’d always thought he was decent, but after this episode I decided he was an absolutely top bloke.

 

During the delay I’d observed how the stage was empty.  It contained no instruments or equipment.  When the gig finally started, I understood why.  After the opening number, a static rendition of the 1979 Talking Heads song Heaven, which Byrne sang accompanied by two musicians playing a violin and portable keyboard (while the earth rose majestically through space on the screens behind), the show really became a show – a dance one as well as a musical one.

 

For each song, Byrne and eleven blue-clad co-performers went through a set of choreographed moves.  Six of the eleven were dancers and background singers.  The other five were musicians, carrying their instruments with them – guitars and keyboards, drums such as a tom-tom, timbale, snare drum and marching bass drum, and, when the song required, a violin or saxophone.  The musicians especially impressed me, keeping focused on where they were going as well as on what they were playing.  Meanwhile, the screens conjured up various backdrops: American suburbia, a forest, a skyscape, psychedelic patterns, a disorientating video where the same performers followed the same moves they were currently doing onstage but wearing animal-heads.

 

 

It felt part Broadway musical, part cheerleader routine, part circus (with Byrne as the ringmaster), part parade by a marching band.  Byrne even reminded me at times of Willy Wonka, orchestrating his co-performers like Oompa Loompas.  (I have to say, though, that with his blonde hair and cheery demeanour, Byrne looked more like Peter Isherwell, the sinister, ultimately incompetent billionaire played by Mark Rylance in the 2021 end-of-the-world movie Don’t Look Up.)  It’s also pretty astonishing how Byrne can do all this, seemingly effortlessly, at the age of 74.

 

With a plethora of drums, the music was percussion-heavy, which suited the catchy rhythms of Byrne’s solo songs perfectly.  I wondered if his Talking Heads songs would come across as well, but they did.  Several (including 1985’s And She Was) were performed during the first half of the set, before the focus switched to his solo stuff.  Then, near the end, out came the biggest Talking Heads numbers: Psycho Killer (1977), Life During Wartime (1979), Once in a Lifetime (1981) and Burning Down the House (1983).  Psycho Killer got the biggest reaction from the crowd, who inevitably chanted “Fa-fa-faa-fa-fa, fa-fa-faa-fa-fa!” in unison.  But I think it’s Once in a Lifetime that’s my favourite in Byrne’s oeuvre.  I remember first hearing it on Top of the Pops (1964-2006) when I was 16 and thinking it was bloody weird.  A week later, when I heard it again, I was hooked.

 

Anyway, this was a wonderful concert too.  Maybe not quite a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but not far off one.

 

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School’s out forever

 

 

It’s weird to see a place that dominated your life for five years – setting parameters on how you spent most of your time, determining most of the people whom you met and became friends (or enemies) with, and having a considerable bearing on how the rest of your life would turn out – in rubble.  I’m talking about my old alma mater Peebles High School, which I attended from 1977 to 1982.  Most of it has now been demolished.  I visited the remnants of it when I was back in Peebles, in the south of Scotland, two months ago.

 

Okay, Peebles High School isn’t really a pile of rubble.  It lives on in a new form.  Since November last year, a brand new school, built at a cost of 46 million pounds, standing where some of the playing fields used to be, has been open for business.  (“A bit IKEA,” was the verdict of my two nieces, who’ve been pupils there.)  I’m talking about the old Peebles High School.  A third of it got destroyed in a fire in November 2019 and for the next half-dozen years, while the new school was approved, planned and constructed, it limped on in a moribund condition.  Now it’s almost completely gone.

 

I made a pilgrimage to what’s left of the old school one afternoon and spent five minutes peering through the mesh on the copious barriers, placed around the site to keep the curious public at bay, and thinking such melancholy thoughts as: “Jings!  That hillock of debris is the spot where I once had a fight with Roy Kilner!”  It looked desolate and depressing.

 

The few parts of the premises still standing that afternoon included the four-storey tower – once the tallest structure in Peebles – which contained an entrance hall, cloakrooms and toilets (on the ground floor), the maths department (first floor), the business studies department (second floor) and the geography department (third floor).  It was as a fifth-year student that, one day, I exited the late John Cornwall’s geography class rather too enthusiastically and  tripped coming down the staircase from the top floor to the second floor.  I sprained my right ankle so badly that for the next month I hobbled around on crutches with my right foot in plaster.   The reason the tower hasn’t been demolished yet is, depending on whom you speak to in Peebles, because bats, a protected species, have been discovered roosting inside it, or because it’s been found to be riddled with asbestos.

 

Also still there was part of a building to the north of the tower, which if I remember correctly contained the home economics department and which you passed through to get to the (now flattened) science labs.  Did the side of that building facing onto the playground also contain the home of the school janitor, who was affectionately known to pupils as ‘Johnnie the Jannie?”  I can’t remember now.

 

 

There’s a Facebook page dedicated to past times in Peebles, one that’s popular with the area’s older folk.  A vintage black-and-white photo of the town, or a reference to something in it that no longer exists, frequently attracts nostalgic comments – about how Peebles was so much better when, for example, it still had a railway or its edges didn’t sprawl with new housing developments.  I was surprised, then, when someone recently posted photos of the ruins of the old school and many of the comments underneath – frequently from people who’d been pupils at it in the 1950s and 1960s – were decidedly not nostalgic.

 

One wrote, “…for me seeing the rubble certainly doesn’t encourage any tears.”  Another described a lot of the teachers in her schooldays as “cruel bullies”, which prompted somebody else to reply, “back then they were the very worst you could find.  Most of them should have been sacked for what they did to us.”  Yet another commentator stated, “I would quite like to go up and throw a couple of bricks at what’s left of the windows…”

 

Well, I have certain memories from my five years at Peebles High School that would make me happily undergo electroconvulsive therapy if I thought it would erase them from my brain, forever.  But generally my recollections of the place aren’t bad.  Some of them are quite good, actually.  I think the fact that by the 1970s the school contained some younger teachers with more humane and principled ideas about what teaching involved – i.e., imparting knowledge to juvenile minds and maybe even trying to instill a love of learning in them, as opposed to acting like cops on riot duty and herding, containing and controlling them – made my experiences there better than those of the older Facebook commentators.

 

That said, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there certainly were a few throwbacks left in the teaching staff.   I remember a decrepit old science teacher handing back exam papers one day and a sleepy pupil failing to hear his name being called out repeatedly.  When the pupil woke up and hurried forward to belatedly collect his paper, the teacher flung it on the floor in front of him and ordered him, “Well, pick it up, lad!”  The pupil crouched down and the teacher started kicking him about the floor.  Another time, that teacher lost the rag at a pupil who, at the end of an experiment — heating a solution over a Bunsen burner — had made the mistake of pouring the solution down a sink.  He chastised the kid by seizing him by the hair and shaking him like a ragdoll, which must have left his scalp in agony.  That old git was an incredibly shite teacher, by the way.

 

I should add that a few of the older teachers were good.   I liked Mr. MacPherson, the art teacher, who was a kindly soul.  I belonged to the local scout troop and one Remembrance Sunday us scouts were made to attend a Remembrance service in Peebles’ Saint Andrews Leckie Parish Church.  There, Mr.  MacPherson gave one of the Bible readings.  He turned up with a bunch of medals fixed to the breast of his jacket, signifying that in addition to being kind he’d been brave during his days in uniform.  Meanwhile, Miss Spence, one of the maths teachers, was a fearsome disciplinarian and ran her classes with military precision.  But she was an excellent teacher.  Despite being crap at maths, I scraped a pass in the Higher exam after a year of her tutelage – a great achievement on her part.

 

But it was the younger teachers who were responsible for most of the good memories I have of Peebles High School.  And some of them taught us stuff I actually still remember.  When I read news reports about the current, catastrophic wildfires in Spain, France, Greece, Canada and elsewhere, I recall Mr. Roxborough telling my second-year, general-science class about the Greenhouse Effect.  That was the first time I ever heard the term used.  “I won’t be around to experience it,” he said, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “but you young folks probably will.”  Or when the news that a mouse had been cloned made the headlines in 1979, I remember our biology teacher Dr McHardy explaining to us just what exactly cloning involved – and when asked the inevitable question about cloning humans, replying, “Oh, it’s certainly possible to clone a human.  We simply haven’t developed the science to do it yet.”

 

Who else?  I have fond memories of Ian Jenkins and Dick Thornton teaching English, Sandy Boak teaching modern studies, Midge Jenkins and Dave Mallon teaching languages…  At the end of my schooldays, I was accepted as a participant on a European Economic Community scheme whereby young people were given grants to allow them to visit an EEC country and do a project about some aspect of the local culture.  Dave Mallon went out of his way to fix me up with contacts in France and arrange accommodation for me there for three weeks.  Doing that project was first time I’d ever set foot outside the United Kingdom and Ireland and I was grateful to him for helping me have that experience.  Alas, while I was back in Peebles, I learned that he’d passed away in 2025.

 

Anyway, all this proves that it doesn’t matter how financially well-off or well-resourced or high-tech a school is.  It’s useless if it doesn’t have decent teachers.  My old high school might be rubble now, but at least it had a few of those.

 

My apologies to any teachers whose surnames I may have misspelled.  I think my memory’s good, but it’s not that good…