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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.

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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…  

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Favourite temples 2: the temple of revenge in Sri Lanka

 

 

Continuing my occasional series about memorable temples I have visited – here’s something about the Temple of Devol (Seenigama Devalaya) off the Sri Lankan coast, which I encountered in 2018.

 

Just offshore from the coastal village of Seenigama in south-western Sri Lanka, you’ll find a temple consisting of two small buildings perched on top of a rocky little island.  The temple is devoted to an imperious-looking deity called Devol, who’s believed to look after the local fishermen and, it’s said, local truck drivers too.  But he’s more famous for being a god of revenge.  If someone has wronged you, you can travel to the island and make an offering to Devol in the hope that he’ll impose retribution on the culprit.

 

To get from the island from Seenigama’s beach, you have to travel in a flimsy-looking boat with an outboard motor.  It can take twenty or more people at a time, some of whom – not all – are given life-jackets.  When I got to the beach, I discovered that most of my fellow passengers were feisty old Sri Lankan ladies who boarded the boat by enthusiastically beetling up over its stern and sides and into its two rows of seats.  A little later, they transferred themselves from the boat to the island itself with a similar, impressive display of agility and sprightliness.  I couldn’t help but wonder if those elderly ladies were heading to the temple to call on Devol to wreak revenge on their enemies.

 

The boat-trip only took a minute or two.  The island quickly swelled up out of the sea ahead of us, the rocks at the waterline black, the higher rocks grey, and then these natural formations giving way to manmade walls of faded yellow with blue-painted arched crests along their tops.  The boat ended up bobbing and swiveling drunkenly in the surf next to some slimy boulders that, further up, transformed into stone steps.  Walking around the island in footwear isn’t allowed and I’d already removed my boots and stashed them in my bag – which was just as well, because to get from the boat and onto the boulders I needed to wade through a swash of seawater.

 

 

While I got up to the steps, I felt uncomfortably like Stephen Maturin, the landlubberly and accident-prone ship’s surgeon in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander books, who “at one time or other… had contrived to fall between the boat that was carrying him and almost every class of ship and vessel in the Royal Navy.”  But I managed to negotiate the boulders, ascend the steps and get onto the temple grounds up-top without slipping, drenching and embarrassing myself.

 

In addition to the buildings, the temple contains a small tiled yard, a clump of palm trees, a well, a small metal sculpture in the shape of a rooster and a tall concrete pole with spotlights attached.  The day I was there, many pigeons were perched on the golden-yellow roofs and flies were crawling in great profusions about the tiled ground.

 

 

I found inside the smaller temple building a tall statue of Devol with a coppery red face and an impressively curly moustache.  His image is partially obscured by curtains, supposedly – I’ve read somewhere – to lessen the harmful effects of his wrath as it radiates out of him.

 

After taking a few photographs in that room, I turned around and stepped out of it again.  The moment my bare feet touched the moonstone at the threshold – which like all the horizontal surfaces here was wet and treacherous – I slipped spectacularly and landed with a great thud on my ‘jacksy’, as they say in Glasgow.  Thankfully, my bag, with my boots inside it, muffled the impact of the fall and possibly saved me from breaking my tail-bone.  It was embarrassing, however.  All the visitors in the yard outside promptly looked my way and enjoyed a quiet chuckle at my haplessness.

 

 

The larger temple building contained an altar on which, if you wish Devol to wreak revenge on someone, you present offerings of chilis, garlic and hot spices that, later, a priest grinds up in a ritual outside.  That’s right, that’s how it works here – to place a curse on the person who’s mistreated you, you need to contribute to the making of a chili paste.  Three deities lurk in alcoves behind and to the left and right of the altar.  The central one look fairly benign, but the other two are more sinister.  The left-hand deity wears a helmet and girdle made out of interlocking cobras while the right-hand one looks even more ghoulish, with a rictus grin and fangs protruding downwards from the ends of its long mouth.

 

 

Various travel blogs in which I’ve read about the temple have gone on in detail about how the visiting pilgrims, seemingly intoxicated by the idea of getting revenge on their persecutors, work themselves into states of ecstasy and hysteria.  But I saw none of that.  The crowd who’d come with me in the boat seemed very calm, composed and quietly respectful.  (Well, apart from their moment of mirth when I keeled over on that slippery moonstone).  As I’d said earlier, most of them were elderly local ladies.

 

It occurred to me afterwards that Devol has several roles – he’s a guardian of fishermen (and truck-drivers) as well as a bringer of revenge – and maybe the ladies had come with a more benign purpose.  Maybe they just wanted to pay their respects to Devol and ask him to look after their sons and husbands while they made their livings out on the waves or out on the roads.

 

Posted on

Uncle Sam (Part 2)

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

Continuing my tribute to the great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who died on July 13th…

 

Sam Neill got top billing alongside Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing movie of all time until James Cameron’s Titanic was released four years later.  While it was gratifying that Neill’s career get a boost from his involvement in such a blockbuster, I have to say I’m not  a great fan of it.  That’s probably because prior to seeing the film, I read the book it’s based upon, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), wherein the story and characters are darker, more complex and more interesting than Spielberg’s interpretation of them.

 

As Alan Grant, a palaeontologist asked to assess the titular theme park where, it’s planned, visitors will pay good money to gawk at dinosaurs that’ve been cloned back into life using bits of ancient DNA, Neill is inevitably – and literally – dwarfed by his co-stars, the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s special-effects team, headed Stan Winston, created using then-cutting-edge animatronics and computer-generated imagery.  Still, he invests Grant with enough quirks to make him memorable.

 

He’s sometimes curmudgeonly and not fond of children, even ones who like dinosaurs – see how he spooks one youngster with an account of how velociraptors killed their prey, or how he freaks out the grandchildren of park-owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) by pretending to get fried by an electric fence.  Paradoxically, he can be child-like himself.  When he first sees one of Hammond’s dinosaurs, his wonderment leaves him struggling for words and he almost faints.  And he shows juvenile delight when he encounters a triceratops, which he hails as “my favourite when I was a kid… the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”  (When I was a kid, the triceratops was my favourite dinosaur too.)

 

When Jurassic Park received a royal premiere in London, Neill found himself sitting between his 10-year-old son and Princess Diana.  According to Neill, his son got so worked up at the film’s scary bits that he started farting uncontrollably, and Neill became paranoid about what his royal neighbour would think when she smelled the fumes: “Princess Di is being exposed to the horrors of a little boy’s fart, but she’s going to think it’s me.  I am going to be subliminally blamed for my son’s crimes, and I don’t think she’ll talk to me afterwards.”  However, gallantly, the princess did speak to him later and ‘never mentioned’ the flatulence.  Jeff Goldlum commented drolly on Neill’s anecdote: “I’ve heard him tell that a couple of times and it’s just amazing the lengths that he will go to still blame the boy.”

 

Neill played Grant twice more, in the second sequel Jurassic Park III (2003), which I saw on TV and found pretty inconsequential; and the fifth one, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which got lousy reviews and which I’m in no rush to see.

 

© Miramax / Buena Vista international / Jan Chapman Productions

 

As well as being in 1993’s biggest blockbuster, Neill was in the same year’s biggest arthouse movie, Jane Campion’s The Piano.  He plays Alisdair Stewart, a settler in 19th century New Zealand who, via an arranged marriage, suddenly acquires a wife, the mute Ada (Holly Hunter).  He also acquires a piano, the playing of which is Ada’s only opportunity to express herself.  Predictably, Alister and Ada don’t enjoy a happy marriage and the piano is the catalyst for trouble.  It becomes the means by which Ada, unable to tolerate Alisdair’s sexual advances, instead discovers sensuality with a neighbouring settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), under the pretext of giving him piano lessons.

 

While Keitel’s character first seems weird and brutish, but gradually shows himself capable of tenderness and decency, Neill’s goes the other way – we initially have some sympathy for Alisdair, but he becomes a villain who propels the plot towards its climax of mutilation and attempted suicide (though, ultimately, it ends happily).  In his 2023 autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This: A Memoir, Neill wrote of the film, “I don’t think I can overestimate how important The Piano is for me in hindsight.  It sits in my funny old CV like a medal on my chest.  It wasn’t my film.  It was Jane Campion’s.  I wasn’t the star of the film.  That was Holly Hunter.  But there is honour to be found in the second fiddle.  Or fourth.  No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things.  But you served.  I was there in an important feminist film.  I was there in the front line in an important New Zealand film.”

 

As many have noted, The Piano is an example of how Neill used his screen presence to generous effect.  He didn’t hog the limelight but gave his co-stars space to perform to their full potential.  This was especially so with his female co-stars.  While Neill reined himself in a little, they got the chance to bloom in their roles – not only Holly Hunter in The Piano, but Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), and reportedly – I’ve unfortunately never seen it – Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979).

 

In 1995, Neill worked with cult American director John Carpenter and made the horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which critics greeted unenthusiastically at the time but which, gradually, has been re-evaluated and is seen now as a misunderstood classic.  It features Neill as an insurance investigator called John Trent, who’s hired by a publishing company to track down its missing star author (Jurgen Prochnow).  The author’s name is Sutter Kane and though his initials, and massive sales, suggest he was inspired by Stephen King, his tales of cosmic horror and fearsome ancient beings called the ‘Old Ones’ indicate he’s based on the legendary Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Trent’s investigations bring him into ever-stranger situations where he encounters characters and settings from Kane’s fiction.  It’s as if the writer is controlling what happens in reality – which is worrying, since his new novel concerns the end of the world.

 

© New Line Cinema

 

While I’m glad a movie involving Sam Neill, John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft has received some retrospective love, I’m afraid I agree with those unenthusiastic critics in 1995.  Like many of Carpenter’s later movies, there’s just too much going on in In the Mouth of Madness and you get the impression the director’s throwing everything at the wall in the hope some of it sticks.  That said, the movie has some memorable moments, such as a scene where Trent and a client discuss business in a restaurant, not noticing a mad axeman creating mayhem in the street outside their window.  Carpenter also stages a spooky sequence wherein a night-time cyclist keeps inexplicably reappearing in front of a cruising car – and keeps changing.

 

I prefer an earlier Neill-Carpenter collaboration, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), an adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 novel of the same name, itself inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man (1897).  It’s a somewhat awkward film – the tension between the studio, Warner Bros, who wanted an out-and-out comedy, and the star, Chevy Chase, who wanted to show he could do ‘serious acting’, is palpable – but nonetheless I think it’s underrated.  I certainly enjoyed Memoirs of an Invisible Man more than director Carpenter did, who once said of it: “I really wanted to quit the business after that movie…  I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film.  He shall not be named who needs to be killed.  No, no, no, that’s terrible.  He needs to be set on fire…  No, no, no.  Anyway, it’s all fine.  I survived it.”  Presumably Carpenter was referring to Chase, who has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult.  Even an invisible Chevy Chase was too much for him.

 

Carpenter certainly didn’t mean Neill, who played the film’s slightly James Mason-like villain.  “I love working with him,” the director said of Neill.  “He comes prepared.  He knows what he’s going to do.  He reacts to other actors who are there.  I mean, he’s just a dream come true.”

 

© Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures

 

Another horror movie Neill made in the 1990s, which initially got savaged by the critics but was retrospectively reassessed and lauded as a classic, is Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997).  Set in 2047, it’s about an experimental spaceship that’d disappeared during its maiden voyage inexplicably reappearing years later with no sign of its crew.  When a rescue mission, whose members include Neill, investigate, it becomes clear the ship’s hyperdrive system accidentally sent it into another dimension – a dimension known to religious folk as ‘hell’ – and back.  And it’s returned with something nasty on board.

 

Well, I’m sorry to be a misery-guts again, but I also agree with the 1997 reviews of Event Horizon and don’t see it as an unappreciated masterpiece.  It strikes me as a muddled mixture of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), with that old chestnut of ‘characters being tormented by their innermost fears brought to life’ thrown in.  To be fair to Paul W. S. Anderson, the studio, Paramount Pictures, removed much footage from his original edit, believing it was too gory and horrific, and the finished product was not what he and scriptwriter Philip Eisner had envisioned.  Incidentally, as Neill’s character is Australian, he had him wear a uniform with an Australian flag-patch – but one where the Union-Jack part of it has been replaced by the Aboriginal flag.  Neill hoped that by 2047 a more tolerant, Pauline Hanson-free Australia would better honour its indigenous inhabitants.

 

By the start of the 21st century, and his sixth decade, Neill had become something of an institution and seemed the personification of the word ‘avuncular’.  A good example of this is in the Australian movie The Dish (2000), a gentle comedy in which he plays the boss of an Australian radio telescope that, in 1969, is landed with the job of relaying film-footage from the Apollo 11 moon-mission to the eagerly-awaiting world’s TV screens. This isn’t easy for Neill and his team as, first, they suffer a crippling power cut and then, on July 20th, the day of the landing, a violent storm threatens to blow their dish over.  Neill is reassuringly calm and reasonable throughout.  Thinking about the film now, I can’t recall any moment in it where he didn’t seem to be wearing a cardigan or puffing at a pipe.

 

© Madman Films / Piki Films / Defender Films

 

He’s somewhat less avuncular, but still loveable, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).  He plays Hector, a grumpy old misfit who takes to the New Zealand mountains with his chubby, juvenile-delinquent foster-kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) when the latter panics about being returned to state care.  They soon have police, social services, vigilantes and the media after them.  Along the way they encounter hardship, killer wild boars and a literally tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic called Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) but also form a genuine, father-son bond.  Director Taiki Waititi creates an affecting and funny movie but avoids easy laughs and cloying sentimentality.  Neill and Dennison’s characters take some hard knocks and their happy ending is hard won.

 

During the 21st century Neill also became a fixture on television – appearing in shows like The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-9), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-14), Old School (2014), Tutankhamun (2016), The Twelve (2022-25) and Apples Never Fall (2024) –  and on social media, where he regularly posted updates about Two Paddocks, his beloved farm and vineyard in New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region.  Famously, Neill named the animals on his farm after celebrities he knew in showbusiness, supposedly because it made him less inclined to eat them: “Well, you can’t eat a friend…  I’m not a vegetarian, but I have a ram called Jeff Goldblum.  You wouldn’t want to eat Jeff, would you?”

 

This led to some memorable moments as, for example, Neill posted, “MICHAEL FASSBENDER ASSAULTED!” – his rooster, named after Michael Fassbender, had had his tail-feathers torn out by a rogue dog.  Or a comment he made about Helena Bonham-Carter, one of his cows: “She’s had 16 calves now.  She’s up for it, if nothing else.”  Or a sad disclosure that Meryl Streep, a chicken, had been “…killed by a ferret recently.”  During Covid-19, his gentle and good-humoured updates about his farm and its whimsically-named inhabitants was an antidote to the stress and boredom of lockdown.  They certainly cheered me up more than, say , Gal Gadot and a bunch of her thespian pals crooning John Lennon’s Imagine on Instagram.

 

In a 2023 interview in the Guardian, Neill opined, “I’m not afraid to die but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big…  But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.”  A lot of people would have loved to have got another decade or two of Sam Neill, and his acting talents, and his sense of fun.  But we should be grateful for what we did get.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Posted on

Uncle Sam (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Sean Koo

 

Having just paid tribute to the centenarian Mel Brooks, I hadn’t intended to post another film-related entry so soon on this blog.  Sadly, however, Sam Neill, whom I admired both as an actor and as a person, passed away three days ago and I thought I should pen some words in honour of him too.

 

Neill’s passing was made even sadder by the fact he’d recently been declared cancer-free after a five-year battle against the disease.  Seemingly, his immune system was so weakened by the treatment he’d received that he fell prey to pneumonia.  Rima Te Wiata, Neill’s co-star in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) told the New Zealand Herald: “It really sucks, actually… I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?'”

 

Though officially a New Zealander, Neill could also be called a Northern Irishman because in 1947 he was born in Omagh, county-town of County Tyrone (17 miles away from where I spent my childhood), to New Zealand and English parents.  He moved from there to Christchurch in 1954 and presumably, if he’d ever acquired a Northern Irish accent, he soon lost it.  Decades later, when he played the psychotic Belfast policeman Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of the TV show Peaky Blinders (2013-14), he asked two mates – Northern Irish actors Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt – for coaching so that he could produce a convincing ‘Norn Irn’ accent.

 

He also began life as ‘Nigel’, but by the age of 11 had taken to calling himself ‘Sam’.  When he started acting, he was glad he’d chosen the blokey ‘Sam’ over the slightly effete ‘Nigel’.  In an interview published recently in the Guardian, he commented, “If I’d stayed with Nigel Neill, I don’t think I would have had a film career.”  He’d obviously never encountered the great screenwriter Nigel Kneale, whose creations included the Quatermass films and TV dramas.

 

Though he’d done film and TV work throughout the 1970s, including Roger Donaldson’s thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977), described on its Wikipedia page as “the first feature-length 35 mm film produced entirely in New Zealand”, Neill first came to my attention in 1981, when I was a horror-film-obsessed teenager and when he appeared in two fairly high-profile horror films, Graham Baker’s Omen III: The Final Conflict and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession.  I read about them in film magazines like Starburst and Fangoria, though I was too young to see them in a cinema because in the UK they were given ‘X’ certificates, meaning only people aged 18 and over could see them.  In the case of Possession, I didn’t even have a chance to see it later on video for it ended up on the Britain’s infamous (and idiotic) ‘video nasties’ list, deemed likely to ‘deprave or corrupt’ its viewers and thus banned from home viewing.

 

© Mace Neufeld Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Omen III: The Final Conflict was the third in the trilogy that’d started with Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) and continued with Don Taylor’s Damien – Omen II (1978) and that told the tale of Damien Thorn, the son of Satan and the Antichrist who, according to Biblical prophecies, will rise to power in end times.  Unlike the earlier two movies, where Damien is depicted as a kid (first played by Harvey Spender Stephens, then Jonathan Scott-Taylor), he’s now an adult.  Portrayed by Neill, he’s the powerful CEO of Thorn Industries and soon into the film also becomes US ambassador to Britain, a position from which he hopes to launch his biggest project yet – the thwarting of the Second Coming of Christ.

 

As Damien, Neill is suave enough to be convincing as a powerful operator in purely human affairs, one who can rub shoulders with top people in top places and get what he wants; whilst also having a sinisterness and darkness that makes you accept him as the same, infernal creature he was in the earlier films (especially the disturbingly baleful Spender Stephens in the first Omen).  Alas, Neill is the only thing of value in the film.  Coming after the original, which was very enjoyable hokum, and the second film, which at least had its moments, The Final Countdown is a damp squib.  Unlike his predecessors Donner and Taylor, Graham Baker doesn’t have the directing chops to properly mount the Omen films’ main attractions – the set-piece ‘accidents’, elaborate, supernaturally-engineered and inevitably fatal, that bump off anyone who gets in Damien’s way.  That said, the scene early on where the previous American ambassador commits ‘suicide’ and conveniently creates a job opening for him, is agreeably splattery.

 

A far less conventional horror film, and a far better one, is the same year’s Possession.  Though it defies all description, you could say it was a particularly traumatic and traumatising break-up movie…  Or a brooding parable about the Cold War (it was filmed in West Berlin)…  Or a psychological thriller involving doppelgangers…  Or a body-horror film wherein a woman makes repeated love to a vilely tentacled, half-human, half-squid creature…  Or an espionage thriller leading to an apocalyptic World War III finale.

 

Director Andrzej Żuławski – himself suffering from depression after recently being expelled from his native Poland – put Neill and his co-star Isabelle Adjani through the wringer during the film’s making.  Neill remarked in 2021 that he ‘escaped’ from the movie with his ‘sanity barely intact’.  Adjani suffered even more, though, and supposedly needed a couple of years to get over the experience.  That’s understandable when, for instance, you see the berserk intensity of the now-legendary sequence where she suffers a miscarriage in a subway corridor.  Actually, a young Gaspar Noé must have been highly impressed by that sequence because he basically got Sofia Boutella to recreate it in his 2018 movie Climax.

 

© Gaumont Distribution

 

Things were looking up for Neill’s career in 1983, when he played the title role in Reilly, Ace of Spies, a 12-part TV series dramatizing the life of real-life superspy Sidney Reilly during the first quarter of the 20th century.  Reilly was scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin and directed by Jim Goddard and Martin Campbell and Campbell, a fellow Kiwi, would later direct two James Bond movies, Goldeneye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006).  In fact, for a time in the mid-1980s it looked like Neill was in with a shout of becoming the next James Bond.  (It makes sense – there have been Scottish, Australian, Welsh and Irish Bonds, so why not a New Zealand one?)

 

In the Guardian interview I mentioned earlier, he was asked about the Bond role.  He said he would have accepted it if it’d been offered to him, but added: “I’m also aware that I wouldn’t have enjoyed my life so much if I was an ex-Bond. That’s what people would say when I went for my morning coffee. ‘Look – it’s what’s-his-name, who used to be James Bond?’ ‘Yeah, he was the one I never really liked.’”

 

In 1989 he had a good role in Philip Noyce’s Dead Calm, a maritime thriller / horror movie that conveys both the claustrophobia of being at sea – you’re stuck in the confined space of a boat – and the agoraphobia of it – you’re out on a vast, empty mass of water, far from civilisation and help.  Neil and Nicole Kidman (in her seventh, and breakout, film role) play a couple who, while yachting, discover a sinking schooner.  They pick up one survivor (Billy Zane) who – surprise! – turns out to be a crazed killer.

 

Still, I had the impression that during the late 1980s Neil’s moment had passed and he was destined to spend his remaining career in movies’ supporting casts as a reliable character actor.  This was suggested, for example, by his role in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, where he gets fourth-place billing after Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn.  He plays the second-in-command to Connery’s Captain Marko Ramius, and a participant in a plot whereby the only submarine-commander in the Soviet fleet with a Scottish accent, and his officers, commandeer a super-submarine called Red October and attempt to defect with it to the West.  When Neill’s character starts waxing lyrically to Connery about the rabbit farm he plans to start up after they reach America, you know he’s going to get killed before the end.

 

© Mace Neufeld Productions / Paramount Productions

 

However, then, Neill’s fortunes took an upswing – because Steven Spielberg and blockbuster-dom came knocking.

 

To be continued…

Posted on

The 100-year-old Mel

 

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George

 

Last week saw much hype and noise about the United States of America celebrating its 250th birthday.  Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the USA marked the 250th anniversary of its independence from the British by holding a Great American State Fair on Washington DC’s National Mall.  This featured empty booths, cancelled musical performances, racist flags, power outages, collapsing roofs and a plywood model of the victory arch Trump wants to build on the Potomac that cracked, crumbled and oozed yellow gunk.  How odd that hardly anyone wanted to go to it.

 

In other moves to celebrate America’s 250th Independence Day, Trump refurbished the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, also in Washington DC, so that its water would shine a patriotic blue, though it immediately shone a less patriotic green thanks to a sudden and unforeseen algae bloom.  He also tried to extend the USA team’s run in the 2026 Football World Cup by arm-twisting Gianni Infantino and FIFA into breaking the sport’s red-card rules so that a key American player could play in the team’s next game – which they lost, courtesy of a 4-1 drubbing by Belgium, causing their exit from the competition.

 

The sound and fury about the 250th anniversary of American independence, and the Trump-esque shenanigans accompanying it, have obscured the fact that, one week earlier, the USA witnessed another important three-digit birthday.  June 28th saw the 100th birthday of the legendary American filmmaker, comedian and general funnyman Mel Brooks.  By the time he turned his hand to making movies in the late 1960s, Brooks already had impressive comic credentials – devising the famed 2000-Year-Old Man comedy sketch with Carl Reiner, for instance, or creating the classic spy-comedy TV show Get Smart (1965-70) with Buck Henry.  But it’s fair to say his films are the body of work for which he’s most beloved.

 

Like much of the comedy I experienced from an early age – the Carry–On movies, or those starring Abbott and Costello, or the telly career of Ronnie Corbett – I’ve had a complicated and changing relationship with the oeuvre of Mel Brooks.  As a youngster, I thought it was brilliant.  As a young adult, who took himself much too seriously, I dismissed it – certainly, the later films Brooks made – as crass, cringeworthy guff.  Now, in my old age, I can find pleasure in the entirety of Brooks’s canon and appreciate the artistry displayed in even what are, by general consensus, his lesser efforts.  A bad joke might provoke a groan rather than a laugh, but to engineer that groan you still need a certain, warped skill.

 

I think I passed from my youthful period of Brooks-disdain to my more mature period of Brooks-admiration in the 1990s.  This was when I was attempting to woo (with a total lack of success) a lady from New York whom I considered, for a while, the coolest thing on earth.  We were chatting one evening about our favourite films and the object of my affections suddenly astounded me by saying she was a huge fan of…  No, not Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), or Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), or Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), but…  Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987).

 

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Brooksfilms

 

“Seriously?” I spluttered.  I’d seen this science-fiction / Star Wars piss-take shortly after its release and thought it was dreadful.  But, patiently, the lady explained to me the sociological depth and cleverness of some of Spaceballs’ jokes that I’d missed – for example, when Bill Pullman and John Candy rescue the princess (Daphne Zuniga) and Pullman remarks, “That’s all we needed…  A Jewish princess!”  I had to concede there was more to Brooks’s humour than I’d thought.

 

So, I had my moment of epiphany.  I decided, to misquote a line in The Producers, “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Mel Brooks party.”

 

Anyway, it’s a fortnight late for the great man’s 100th, but here is a belated guide to the funniest bits, in my opinion, of his movies.  There’s no mention of The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Life Stinks (1991) because I haven’t seen those two.

 

L.S.D. gets auditioned in The Producers (1967)

The movie that put Brooks on the cinematic map, The Producers has had quite an afterlife, becoming a successful Broadway musical that, in 2005, was turned into a film itself.  For me, its highlight isn’t the famous song-and-dance number Springtime for Hitler that’s the centrepiece of the show that impresario Zero Mostel and accountant Gene Wilder stage in the hope it’ll be a massive flop (allowing them to make a fortune from the shares they’ve sold in it).  No, the highlight comes earlier.

 

That’s when hippy Lorenzo St. DuBois – L.S.D. to his friends – stumbles into the show’s auditions by mistake and performs, with his female guitar / keyboards / sax backing band, a funny-terrible number called Love Power.   (“And I give a flower to the big fat cop / He takes his glove and he beats me up!”)  Played by Dick Shawn with thigh-high furry boots and a Campbell’s soup-can hanging on a chain around his neck, the hapless L.S.D. is hilarious – and the sequence reaches a perfect conclusion when Mostel bellows ecstatically, “THAT’S OUR HITLER!”

 

From instagram.com / (c) Embassy Pictures

 

The campfire scene in Blazing Saddles (1974)

If I was more sophisticated, I’d nominate as the funniest moments in Brook’s smash-hit comedy-western the scenes where he skewers the residents of frontier town Rock Ridge for their bone-headed racism.  (“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers.  These are people of the land.  The common clay of the new West. You know…  morons.”)  However…  I’m nominating instead the sequence in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickens’s men sit around a campfire and stuff themselves with traditional cowboy fare – beans – with flatulent results.

 

I first saw Blazing Saddles when it played on a big screen in the assembly hall of my school as one of the movies chosen for the school’s Film Club.  When the farting began, the teenaged audience, including myself, laughed like drains.  We were still roaring our heads off minutes after the sequence finished.  No other film shown during the several years I was a member of that Film Club – not Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), not Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), not Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – provoked so tumultuous a reaction.  I’m not proud.

 

The monster meets the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974)

The most genuinely affectionate of Brooks’s genre parodies, Young Frankenstein pokes fun at the black-and-white Frankenstein movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s.  My favourite part of it is when Brooks sends up the sequence in Bride of Frankenstein (1936) where the Frankenstein monster (Boris Karloff) is touchingly but briefly befriended by a lonely blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who’s unaware of his monstrousness.  Here, the well-meaning but, well, blind hermit (Gene Hackman) accidentally and repeatedly scalds and burns the unfortunate monster (Peter Boyle) whilst trying to offer him broth, cigars, etc., until the latter flees from his cottage in terror.  Despite the gleeful bad taste of the gags, the Young Frankenstein sequence retains some of the sweetness and sadness of the Bride of Frankenstein one.  It also makes you wish Gene Hackman had played more comedy roles.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gruskoff / Venture Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The boardroom table in Silent Movie (1976)

This was another movie shown at my school’s Film Club and another sequence that sent us – uncivilised little oiks that we were at the time – into paroxysms of laughter.  Evil corporation Engulf & Devour intends to take over the studio of filmmaker Mel Funn (Brooks) but that won’t happen if the new movie Funn is making becomes a hit.  Engulf & Devour’s board of executives hatch a fiendish plan to sabotage Funn and his movie – they’ll send sultry nightclub singer Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to seduce, then dump Funn and re-kindle the massive alcohol problem he had previously.  When a picture of Vilma is unveiled to the executives, sitting around the boardroom table, they’re so impressed that the table rises by several inches.

 

The line Funn / Brooks inspires when Vilma does dump him, and he goes on a massive bender to drown his sorrows – “He is truly the lord of the winos!” – is pretty funny too.

 

The orchestra in High Anxiety (1977)

Brooks’s next film takes fond aim at the thriller movies of Alfred Hitchcock.  Its hero, Dr Richard Harpo Thorndyke, again played by Brooks himself, suffers from the titular disorder, the vertigo-like ‘high anxiety’.  While travelling in the back of a car, Thorndyke / Brooks suffers a moment of ominous foreboding, which is accompanied by an equally ominous swell of Bernard Herrmann-like orchestral music – the sort that Hitchcock liked to insert into his films to augment the mood.  This being a Brooks film, though, Thorndyke’s car then passes a bus that contains, as passengers, the orchestra playing the music.

 

Yes, this is the second time Brooks has used that gag.  It originally appeared in Blazing Saddles and involved the Count Basie Orchestra performing in the desert,  But the orchestra-on-a-bus joke in High Anxiety works better, I think.

 

The Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part I (1981)

A truly hit-and-miss collection of gags and sketches, History of the World, Part 1 depicts five chapters in world history from the Stone Age to the French Revolution.  Its undisputed highlight is a segment about the Spanish Inquisition.  This features Brooks as Torquemada – his victims are warned not to try to talk him out of torturing them because, “You can’t Torquemada anything!” – and an elaborate Busby Berkeley-like song-and-dance number in a torture chamber which, with its exuberant bad taste, is as impressive as Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.

 

© Brooksfilms / 20th Century Fox

 

Snotty’s line in Spaceballs (1987)

Spaceballs spoofs Star Wars (1977) but also contains some elaborate send-ups of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979) – the latter even drafts in John Hurt to reprise his role as the unfortunate Kane.  But the funniest, or groan-iest, bit in it for me is a simple pun.  A Scottish character called Snotty (Jeff MacGregor), obviously based on Scotty from Star Trek (1966-69), is in a control room flicking a series of switches.  “Lock One!” he shouts.  “Lock Two!  Lock Three!  Loch Lomond!”

 

The abbot in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

You have to be a connoisseur of long-ago comedy double-acts to appreciate my favourite joke in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Brooks’ irreverent take on the then-recent and hugely-successful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).  An abbot (Dick Van Patten) is walking in his finery outside his monastery and enjoying the adulation of the local population.  Then a guy who looks and sounds suspiciously like Lou Costello yells at him, “Hey, Abbott!”  Van Patten grumbles, “I hate that guy.”

 

Dracula tries to control Mina’s mind in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

I don’t hold it against Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which stars Leslie Neilson as the legendary vampire count, that it isn’t great.  After all, there have been many attempts over the years to spoof vampire films and hardly any of them have been funny – see Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967) or Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1977).  In fact, it wasn’t until Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014) that I encountered a vampire-movie parody that made me laugh.

 

However, Dracula: Dead and Loving It has one funny part where, from a distance, Dracula / Neilson exerts his willpower over the bitten and partly vampirised Mina (Amy Yasbeck) and tries to summon her: “Mina…  Open your eyes…  Arise…  Come to the door…”  The operation goes less smoothly when the mind-controlling vampire discovers there’s a confusing closet door in the way, and a hazardous footstool, and an inconvenient maidservant who’s also picking up his telepathic instructions: “Mina…  You are in the closet.  Open the door and come out…  Watch out for the footstool…  Stand up…  Not you, sit…  No, you sit…  You stand…”

 

And just before I finish, some praise is due for Brooks as a producer too.  He’s the man who oversaw both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

 

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George