Month: November 2022

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Favourite Scots words I-L

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Evanson

 

Today is St Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland.  So, in keeping with tradition on this blog, here’s the latest instalment in my A-Z of the always-fascinating Scots language….

 

Once upon a time, the main detractors of the Scots tongue seemed to be those snobby, London-based, Oxbridge-educated fossils who ran Britain’s literary establishment.  I’m thinking of the furore that greeted James Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late winning the Booker Prize in 1994.  How Late… was written uncompromisingly in the voice of a working-class Glaswegian and its success did not go down well in many posh quarters.  Simon Jenkins, for instance, described it getting the Booker as ‘literary vandalism’, Kelman as an ‘illiterate savage’, and the novel itself as “the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk.”

 

But compare that with the reaction of Britain’s literary establishment to last year’s Deep Wheel Orcadia, the science-fiction verse-novel by Harry Josephine Giles, which is told in Orcadian and which won 2022’s Arthur C. Clarke Award.  Deep Wheel Orcadia has been greeted respectfully, for example, here and here, rather than with the horrified pearl-clutching or bemused mockery that used to be the norm.

 

No, looking at social media, it seems to me that nowadays the folk who bash the Scots language most, and who virulently denigrate people who use it, are Scottish ones – those of a Conservative and / or Unionist disposition.  The more extreme members of this faction profess to be loyal subjects of ‘the King’ (Charles presumably, not Elvis) and staunch supporters of a certain football team in Glasgow.  They also slather their Twitter profiles in Union Jacks and, without a shred of irony, declare that they ‘hate nationalism’.

 

In other words, Scots has become part of a culture war.  It’s been aligned with the Scottish independence movement and the independence-seeking Scottish government at one end of the battlefield; while at the battlefield’s other end, Unionists and British nationalists deny that Scots exists or deride it as ‘slang’ or ‘an accent’ or (at best) ‘a dialect of English’.  Likewise, they do down any sort of Scottish culture that suggests Scotland is slightly different from England and the inhabitants of Great Britain aren’t just a single, homogenous mass.  Hence, you get the likes of Ian Smart, self-styled ‘lefty lawyer’ and ‘Scottish Labour Party hack’, dismissing former Machar (Scotland’s Poet Laureate) and writer-in-Scots Jackie Kay as “a woman from Bishopbriggs, writing doggerel”, and slandering another Scots-using author, Emma Grae, as a ‘white nationalist’.

 

Scotland’s other language, Gaelic, gets it in the neck from these types all the time too.  Witness the celebrated episode where right-wing Scottish troll Effie Deans complained on social media about how road-signs in Gaelic caused her to get lost in the Fort William area.  This was despite the place-names being printed in English as well as in Gaelic on the signs.  “She’s like a post-imperial psychotic satnav gone wrong,” commented one wit on Twitter.

 

Anyway, here’s a further selection of my favourite words in Scots, this time those beginning with the letters ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘K’ and ‘L’.  And Scots is a language.  If you don’t like that assertion, you can stick it up your hole.

 

From google.com/maps

 

Inch (n) – not the unit of measurement but a geographical word with two meanings, both of which turn up in Scottish place-names.  It can be a small island (see Inchmurrin in Loch Lomond, which is actually the largest freshwater island in the British and Irish islands), or an expanse of flat ground next to a river (see Markinch in Fife).

 

Irn Bru (n/adj) – Scotland’s ‘other national drink’, the fizzy, luridly-coloured, non-alcoholic beverage that’s claimed to be both a hangover cure and the only soft drink in the world not to be outsold by Coca Cola in its native country.  I’m not sure if either of these claims stands up to scientific scrutiny, but who cares?  All right, Irn Bru is a trademark more than a vocabulary item, but I’ve seen it used as an adjective meaning ‘orange’, for instance, as in “the Irn Bru-coloured ex-American president, Donald Trump.”

 

Jakey (n) – a down-at-heels, worse-for-wear vagrant with an alcohol dependency.  The alcohol in question is usually either Buckfast Tonic Wine or Carlsberg Special Brew.  The Scottish-based bestselling author J.K. Rowling is sometimes referred to as ‘Jakey Rowling’ by Scottish-independence enthusiasts, irritated at her high-profile support for Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom during the 2014 independence referendum.

 

Janny (n) – a janitor.  In Matthew Fitt’s  But n Ben A-Go-Go (2000), hailed (22 years before Deep Wheel Orcadia) as the first-ever science-fiction novel written in Scots, the main character works as a cyberjanny, ‘cleaning up social middens in cyberspace’.

 

Jag (n/v) – variously, the painful pricking sensation you get when you touch a thistle-head; a needle-and-syringe injection; a serving of whisky, as in “Wid ye like a wee jag ay Grouse?”; or a supporter of Partick Thistle Football Club, the third football team in Glasgow whose mascot, Kingsley, is the most terrifying sporting mascot in the world.  The adjective derived from jag is jaggy.  Yes, Kingsley is the world’s jaggiest sporting mascot too.

 

© Partick Thistle Football Club

 

Jalouse (v) – to suspect.

 

Jaup (v) – ‘to splash or spatter’, according to my well-thumbed copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary.  Like a lot of Scots words, I heard this one, or a vowel-altered variation of it, before I even moved to Scotland.  While I was living in Northern Ireland as a wee boy, and whenever my mother was frying something in the kitchen, she’d bark at me: “Stay back or ye’ll be japped by the pan!”

 

Jiggered (adj) – exhausted.

 

Jing–bang (n) – the lot or ‘every last one’, as in the phrase, “the whole jing-bang ay them”.

 

© D.C. Thomson

 

Jings! (exclamation) – a mild and very old-fashioned expression of surprise in Scotland.  Nowadays, in fact, I suspect there is just one person in Scotland who still says “Jings!”  That is Oor Wullie, the dungaree-clad, bristly-haired juvenile delinquent from the Sunday Post comic strip of the same name.

 

Jobby (n) – a turd.  A word much loved by Billy Connolly, as in his routine about the mechanism that expels faecal matter underneath airplane toilets, the jobby–wheecher.  (Wheech means to remove something quickly and suddenly.)  Incidentally, another Scottish term for excrement found in this region of the alphabet is keech.

 

Jouk (v) – to duck or dodge.  A nice story I’ve heard is that this word found its way to the American south.  There, a juke joint became a roughhouse dancing venue where people had to keep jouking this way and that to avoid punches, bottles, etc., thrown on the dance floor.  In turn, this led to the machines that played records of the music you heard at such places being called jukeboxes.

 

From unspash.com / © Max Tcvetkov

 

Keek (v) – to peep or glance at something.  The derivative keeker refers not, as you might expect, to a peeping Tom, but to a black eye.

 

Ken (v) – to know.  Meanwhile, the adjective kenspeckle means ‘well-known’.

 

Kent yer faither! (idiom) – “(I) knew your father!”  In other words, “Don’t give yourself airs and graces because you’re from humble stock, same as the rest of us.”  I’ve never heard anyone use this as a putdown, but I’ve heard several folk over the years complain about kent–yer–faither syndrome in Scotland.  They felt Scotland was a place where if you managed to improve yourself and be successful, you then had to deal with a bunch of jealous, moaning gits trying to cut you down to size.

 

Kirk (n) – with a capital ‘K’, the Kirk refers to the Church of Scotland, i.e., the institution representing the country’s once-dominant Presbyterian faith.  With a small ‘k’, a kirk refers to a church building.  In 2008, when George Takei, who played Mr Sulu in the original series of Star Trek (1966-69), married his long-term partner Brad Altman and invited all the surviving members of the Star Trek cast to his wedding, except for William Shatner, whom he famously disliked, a joke about this circulated in Scotland.  The punchline went: “The Kirk doesn’t approve of gay marriage anyway.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © NBC

 

Laldy (n) – ‘your all’.  The expression “Gie it laldy!” has been bellowed from the touchline of many a Scottish sports field.

 

Leid (n) – a language.  Thus, this entry is about the ‘gid Scots leid’.

 

Links (n) – defined in the Free Dictionary as ‘relatively flat or undulating sandy turf-covered ground usually along a seashore.’  A links can also refer to a golf course positioned on such terrain.  For example, eastern Edinburgh has Leith Links and Fife has Lundin Links.  In fact, Ruth Davidson, the tank-loving honorary colonel who used to lead the Scottish Conservative Party, was ennobled not so long ago and she chose for herself the title of ‘Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links’.  Although I prefer to call her: ‘Her Royal Highness Baroness Colonel Tank-Commander Ruth Davidson of Jar-Jar Binks’.

 

Loon (n) – a word common in North-East Scotland, equivalent to laddie, just as the North-Eastern quine is equivalent to lassie.  When I was out drinking as a young guy in Aberdeen, my Aberdonian pal George Boardman would cheerily cry at the end of the evening, “See ye later, loon!”

 

Loup (v) – to jump.

 

Lugs (n) – ears.  I’ve heard more than one person, after being subjected to someone else’s haranguing or moaning, retort: “Quit burnin ma lugs!”

 

Lum (n) – a chimney.  Some years ago, the Guardian reviewed a collection of short stories by the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray and the reviewer complained about the number of typos in the book.  He cited as an example ‘Edinburgh lums’, which he assumed was a misprint of ‘Edinburgh slums’.  But no, Gray was actually referring to the smoky chimneys of the Scottish capital.

 

From unsplash.com / © Uwe Conrad

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A peripheral vision

 

© Penguin Books

 

For someone who’d normally describe himself as a ‘voracious’ reader, I’ve read a shockingly small number of books in 2022.  I’d like to think this was due to the stress and disruption I’ve suffered this year while moving from Sri Lanka (which had been my home for the previous eight years) to Singapore. However, back in January 2022, I contracted Covid-19.  Although it was a very mild dose, and seemed to have minimal effects on me, I’ve worried since then that it impacted on my powers of concentration, made me less able to process information, and slowed down the mental faculties I use when reading.

 

This worried me particularly a few weeks ago when I started reading The Peripheral, the 2014 novel by cyberpunk maestro William Gibson – which, coincidentally, has lately been made into a TV series starring Chloë Grace Moretz.  During The Peripheral’s first 100 pages or so, I struggled to follow what was going on, found everything bewildering and came close to giving up on it.  Was Covid-19 brain-fog stopping me from getting to grips with the book?

 

In fact, beforehand, I could have just read the blurb on The Peripheral’s back cover, where the book’s central gimmick that caused me so much initial confusion is plainly explained.  But I didn’t read it, wanting to avoid ‘spoilers’.

 

All of William Gibson’s fiction – of which I’ve read two-thirds of the Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), all of the Bridge trilogy (1993-1999) and two-thirds of the Blue Ant trilogy (2003-2010) – is disorientating at first.  Gibson is not one for exposition.  He drops you straight into the action, which invariably unfurls in some near-future scenario with characters peppering their speech with unfamiliar techno-talk, jargon and cultural references.  All of which your reading-brain simply has to get acclimatised to.  So, I knew what to expect, but with The Peripheral I was alarmed at how long the process of acclimatisation took.  For a large, early section of it, I felt I was sinking.

 

But finally, after the 100-page-mark, I began to swim.  That’s when the book became really enjoyable, as enjoyable as anything else that Gibson’s done.  And before I proceed any further, I should warn you that there’ll be spoilers here too.

 

Once you grasp the novel’s basic premise, following it becomes much easier.  For events aren’t happening in one future scenario but in two. There’s a setting not too far into the future, featuring a rural American town where life isn’t much different from that in 2022 – just a bit cruddier.  The environment has been even more degraded, it sounds like warfare has become more high-tech but no less brutal, there are possibly even more chain stores and fast-food joints, and much of the local economy seems based on drug production.  Meanwhile, the characters make extensive use of 3-D printing and drone technology, and we hear of a recent fad where kids played with cute little Transformers-like robots that had iPads instead of heads.

 

In this setting, the novel’s heroine, Flynne, fills in for her brother Burton for a few days while he’s out of town. Burton, a former soldier, gets paid for playing a role in a strange new virtual reality / video game – presumably testing it out – by an ask-no-questions company that’s supposedly based in South America.  Flynne takes over his role in the game and, while playing, witnesses a murder in a cityscape that looks weirdly similar to London but at the same time isn’t London.

 

This strange version of London provides the book’s other setting.  It’s a real place, only seven decades further into the future.  The murder that Flynne believed she witnessed in a game has happened in reality, and a publicist called Wilf Netherton and his wealthy pal Lev Zubov, scion of a family of London-based Russian oligarchs, are informally investigating the disappearance of the person Flynne saw killed.  Lev has been using a form of time travel – well, time-travelling communication via a mysterious ‘server’ created in China – to hire people in the past to carry out operations for him.  Those hirelings believe they’re working in computer simulations in their own time.  It becomes obvious they need to get in closer contact with Flynne, who’s the only witness to what happened.  However, whoever engineered the murder has access to the server too and is soon hiring assassins in Flynne’s time to take out her and her brother.

 

Gibson explores the book’s two-different-futures-in-communication gimmick to the full.  The protagonists living in the further-away future have full knowledge of the earlier one, including its economy.  Thus, using the server and their knowledge, they can manipulate that economy to finance interventions in it.  While Wilf and Lev tamper with the world around Flynne and Burton, making them exponentially richer, able to create their own corporation and pay for their own protection, the villains of further-future London intervene too – not only staging assassination attempts, but also recruiting to their cause the unsavoury corrupt politician / drug manufacturer who controls Flynne and Burton’s hometown, and sending against them a cult of demented Christian fanatics (whom Gibson has evidently modelled on the real-life, loathsome Westboro Baptist Church).

 

Things step up a further gear when Wilf and Lev manage to send back in time some advanced technology, via a 3-D printing company run by Flynne and Burton’s friends.  This allows Flynne, Burton and others to transfer their minds to the future London, where they’re embedded inside ‘peripherals’ – artificial, semi-cyborg bodies that can be humans, animals or homunculi – which the people of the era hire out and inhabit for special occasions in the way that people of past eras hired out and wore fancy dress.  And Wilf amusingly gets to make a trip in the other direction, where he’s psychically installed inside one of the iPad-robot toys of Flynne’s time.

 

One thing that I’ve noticed about Gibson is the importance he attaches to communities.  This was especially noticeable in his Bridge trilogy, where he had San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge taken over by a band of outsiders, misfits and radicals and turned into a township where they live their lives according to their non-corporate, eco-friendly ideals; or a ‘cardboard city’ of homeless people at a major Japanese railway station that’s actually a refuge for computer hackers, otaku and general ‘cyber-gypsies’.  In The Peripheral, much is made of the rundown, hard-pressed and exploited community that’s home to Flynne, Burton and their family and friends – many of those friends being military veterans like Burton.  They don’t have it easy, but they stand by one another, even when threatened by murderous thugs employed by dark forces from the future.  This includes looking out for an ex-soldier called Conner, who’s returned from the battlefield both mentally and (severely) physically damaged.  Indeed, one highlight is when Conner’s mind get transferred to future London and, to his joy, he finds himself inhabiting a full-bodied peripheral.  A full body is something he hasn’t had for a long time.

 

Meanwhile, Gibson’s description of London in that further-off future is ripe with satire.  Russian oligarchs are so established there they’ve practically become the aristocracy, while advanced technology has allowed areas of it to be turned into tourist-orientated recreations of the Victorian past – as if parts of London aren’t that way now.  He also gently takes the piss with the character of Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, a police detective investigating the murder who seems to know more about what’s happening than she lets on.  Lowbeer embodies every imperturbable, raffish crime-fighter in a long tradition of non-realistic British crime stories.  I wondered at first if Lowbeer was conceived as a female version of John Steed from the TV show The Avengers (1961-69), but recently on social media I saw Gibson state that he’d imagined her as ‘Tilda Swinton channelling Quentin Crisp.’

 

Faults?  Well, occasionally, Gibson’s description of the action – the full-on action scenes, with danger and violence – can be frustratingly sparse, to the point where you have to reread his descriptions a couple of times to figure out what’s just happened.  He’s a writer who’s interested in fast-moving narratives but not so much in action itself.  Also, while the peripherals are a logical plot-component, the concept of them seems slightly old-hat after James Cameron made extensive use of the same concept five years earlier in his movie Avatar (2009).  Not that that’s Gibson fault, of course.

 

And connoisseurs of time-travel stories might find it a cop-out that Wilf and Lev can interfere in their past as much as they like without suffering any effects in their present.  This is because, Gibson explains, the moment they start interfering they create a ‘stub’ – an alternative timeline where the reality containing Flynne, Burton and the others begins to branch off from the established, ‘official’ timeline, developing in its own way towards its own, unknown future.  The idea makes sense, but some may miss the complexity of a traditional time-travel story where interference in the past has unexpected and unwelcome consequences in the interferers’ present.  See Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder for the classic example.

 

The Peripheral is very entertaining, then, but there’s a grimness at its heart that’s rather like finding a dollop of ultra-sour cream within an ice-cream sundae.  The grimness is something called the Jackpot.  This isn’t a single cataclysmic event but a protracted series of smaller ones – “droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves” – that represent humanity reaping what it sowed with its onslaught against the natural environment.  The Jackpot occurs between the novel’s two time-settings and accounts for something Flynne notices when, in peripheral form, she arrives in future London.  There seem to be very few people around.

 

Late on in The Peripheral there are suggestions that, as their timeline diverges from the established one, Flynne, Burton and her friends, empowered by future technology and investment, can do something to avert or at least alleviate the Jackpot and create a better future for themselves.  Meanwhile, away from the pages of Gibson’s novel and looking at the dismal, real-life events of the early 21st century, I fear we’ll be hitting our own Jackpot all too soon.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gonzo Bonzo

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Jack the lad

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

 

After I’d been deprived of live music for nearly two years, courtesy of Covid-19, my luck certainly enjoyed an upswing this mid-November.  On November 12th, I got the chance to see Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium.  Two days later, Jack White rolled into town on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which kicked off in White’s home city of Detroit on April 8th and concluded three days ago in Christchurch, New Zealand, with five continents visited along the way.

 

The Singaporean leg of the gig was held in the Capitol Theatre in the Capitol Building, the picturesque 1929 neoclassical building on Stamford Road, whose refurbished interior also contains an atrium of ‘modern and classical dining establishments’, a retail mall and the luxury Kempinski Hotel.  My partner and I had tickets for the upper circle, getting to which was a little weird.  The theatre’s entrance is in the middle of the atrium, among the eateries.  For the circle seats, we were directed through a door out of the foyer and into the atrium again, up a couple of modern escalators that climbed the atrium’s side, and through another door that brought us back inside the theatre.

 

 

The theatre – whose auditorium retains its 1929-vintage appearance – quickly filled up.  It would have been nice to report that the crowd was immensely varied and contained everyone, to quote White’s most famous song, “from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”, but it largely consisted of Western expats.  These included both suited, sombre ones who’d just arrived from work and casually dressed, hanging-out, shooting-the-breeze ‘dude bro’ ones.  Unfortunately, the yaketty guys sitting directly in front of us belonged to the second faction.  There were a few Singaporean-looking folk in attendance, though, such as a guy admirably clad in a death-metal T-shirt and ragged denim shorts, with long hair and an impressive amount of tattoos; or a bloke in a white T-shirt I could see below in the stalls, pressed against the front of stage, who reacted to the music with such berserk jigging and gyrating that several times I thought he was going to start a fight with people he crashed into on either side of him.  He must have been Jack White’s biggest fan in Singapore.

 

White and his three band-members – bassist Dominic John Davis, keyboardist Quincy McCrary and drummer Daru Jones – came on stage to the strains of the MC5s’ Kick Out the Jams (1969), a famously hectic song whose hecticness, it’s fair to say, they matched during their two-hour, 23-song set. They delivered a gloriously intense and relentless barrage of rock ‘n’ roll noise.  Commendably, they also achieved a balance between performing with utter musical virtuosity and, from the look of things, having an extremely good time.  McCrary’s keyboards were agreeably high in the mix, giving the band’s sound, to my ears at least, a faintly Doors-ian or Stranglers-esque tinge.  Meanwhile, kudos to the instrument tech team, who had their work cut out scurrying constantly about the stage and making sure all the instruments and equipment, including White’s fleet of guitars, were functioning correctly and bearing up to the strain.

 

Dressed in a dark suit, white boots and a patterned, chest-revealing shirt and sporting a slicked-back shock of hair whose colour can only be described as ‘metallic blue’, White resembled a character Nicolas Cage might have played in a sweaty, disreputable thriller directed in the early 1990s by Brian De Palma.  Some of his more histrionic stage-moves evoked the mighty Nicolas Cage too, come to think of it.

 

The set gave a neat overview of White’s musical career.  The songs played ranged from Cannon, off the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album in 1999, to two items from White’s last solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, released in July this year.  In fact, about half the songs came from White’s solo work, Blunderbuss (2012), Lazaretto (2014), Boarding House Reach (2018), Fear of the Dawn (April 2022) and the afore-mentioned Entering Heaven Alive.  Of these I’m familiar only with Blunderbuss.  That’s not because I stopped liking or lost interest in White after 2012.  It’s just that during the last decade I’ve lived in places where it’s been difficult to keep up with contemporary Western music.  However, the solo stuff fitted in seamlessly alongside the older stuff performed, which mostly came from his celebrated noughties band the White Stripes.

 

The bulk of that White Stripes material was found on their third and fourth albums, 2001’s White Blood Cells (Dirty Leaves and Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl and We’re Going to be Friends) and 2003’s Elephant (Ball and Biscuit, The Hardest Button to Button and the inevitable Seven Nation Army).  Nothing appeared from their last two albums, Get Behind Me Satan (2005) and Icky Thump (2007), which at least meant we were spared their rather fearful version of Corky Robbins’ Conquest (1952), the one with the bullfighting-themed video, which I’ve always thought was a rare White Stripes misfire.  Bravely, Seven Nation Army was played not as a crowd-pleasing finale but as the opening number.  It did resurface late on, though, after the band had ended their main set and left the stage and before they returned for their encore – because the crowd started chanting its memorable riff: “DAAAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAAAH-DAAAH!”  At this point, I tried to get a chorus of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” going, but nobody played ball.

 

Also aired were songs by the bands White played in during the noughties that weren’t the White Stripes – the Raconteurs’ jaunty Steady as She Goes (2006), and the Dead Weather’s ominously organ-heavy I Cut Like a Buffalo (2009).  The one song of the evening not to belong in any way to the Jack White canon was a cover of 1992’s 7 by Prince and the New Power Generation.  It didn’t surprise me that he included something by the diminutive Minneapolitan musician-singer-songwriter.  Prince, with his tireless prolificity and penchant for new projects, self-invention and basically never standing still, strikes me as an obvious role-model for White.

 

© Third Man / J / XL

 

Neither did it surprise me that Another Way to Die, the song he did with Alicia Keys as the theme for the unloved Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008), was left off the setlist tonight.  While it’s better than the anodyne, play-it-safe themes the Bond producers have used on the most recent films, Another Way isn’t great.  But it would have been fun for me to hear a second Bond theme played live in 48 hours, after Guns N’ Roses performed Live and Let Die (1974) on November 12th.

 

Talking of which, the audience was told in plain terms before the gig not to use phones to film or take pictures.  This meant, mercifully, we were spared the experiences of the Guns N’ Roses concert, where often it seemed I was peering at the stage through a galaxy of phone-lights – or indeed, through a galaxy of Samsung Galaxy phone-lights.  Audience members were encouraged instead to obtain official photos from White’s website, which is what I’ve done for the pictures at the top and bottom of this entry.

 

Actually, looking through the site’s gallery of photos from the Singapore gig, I see that the tour photographer, David James Swanson, managed to snap one of the guy in the white T-shirt who was moshing crazily in the stalls.  I bet he’s happy about that.

 

© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson

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Only a few Duff moments

 

 

I’ve had a hellishly busy week.  That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

 

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12th.

 

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth.  I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot.  (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”)  Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

 

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts.  Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.”  Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

 

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy.  And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor.  The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

 

I had to work on November 12th until six o’clock.  As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material.  This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness.  But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

 

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late.  I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor.  Presumably much needed.

 

 

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray.  Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration.  Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart!  Keep your legs apart!”

 

Most of the stadium is roofed over.  Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements.  The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real.  Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening.  The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting.  Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage.  Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked.  Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

 

 

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money.  Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and…  The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement.  The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action.  From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction.  And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared…  Axl Rose!  Duff McKagan!  Slash!  Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

 

 

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky.  But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again.  McKagan looked admirably lean and mean.  As for Slash…  Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing.  He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

 

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too.  Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990.  He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008.  This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’.  So where was Dizzy?  Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off?  It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember.  I snatched a picture of the moment.  Here’s Dizzy!

 

 

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise.  Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night.  The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though.  It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs.  There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding.  That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

 

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy.  I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start.  But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

 

And then there were the ballads.  I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge.  Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times.  When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

 

 

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever.  Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it.  Maybe the band would forget to play it?  But no.  Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started.  At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads.  This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991).  At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

 

 

But enough of the negatives.  What of the positives?  Well, there were plenty.  Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc.  Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

 

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously.  For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

 

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969).  The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes.  Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show.  Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s.  An all-round top bloke, then.

 

 

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

 

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear.  They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself.  Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

 

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II.  Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting.  It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said…  Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…”  If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

 

Oh well.  You can’t have everything, I suppose.

 

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert.  After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again.  Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief…  Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens.  Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did.  Thanks, guys!

 

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Rab Foster gets starstruck

 

© Aphelion Webzine

 

I’m pleased to report that Rab Foster, the penname I attach to my fantasy fiction, has got a new story included in the November 2022 edition of the webzine Aphelion.  The story is entitled The Tower and the Stars and is a sword-and-sorcery tale involving a bloodthirsty cult of star-worshippers, who are based in an ancient tower in the middle of a vast and desolate marsh.  It’s also influenced by the celebrated American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, at least with regards to the entities that the cult is trying to invoke.  The horrors in Lovecraft’s stories were famously ‘nameless’ and ‘unspeakable’ and generally so horrible as to be beyond description, which is very handy for a writer.  If your villains are indescribable, you don’t have to spend time and effort describing them.

 

The story’s main characters are a benevolent witch called Gudroon, who previously appeared in a story of mine entitled The Foliage, which was included in last year’s collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3; and a swordsman called Drayak Shathsprey, who was featured in a story entitled Crows of the Mynchmoor that I had published at the start of 2022 in the online Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  So, The Tower and the Stars is what in modern parlance is known as a ‘team-up’.  Watch out, Marvel Comics Universe – here comes the Rab Foster Universe.

 

For the next month, The Tower and the Stars can be accessed here, while the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Aphelion can be accessed here.

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Jim Mountfield chimes in

 

© Cloaked Press LLC

 

Jim Mountfield, the nom de plume under which I write horror fiction, has just had another short story see the light of day.  This one is called The Chimes and it appears in Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror, a new collection from Cloaked Press LLC.  As the blurb for the collection explains: “Sometimes it’s not what goes bump in the night, but what lurks in plain sight that is the true horror.   Come along for the chills and thrills as these Cloaked Press authors explore the terrors of such seemingly mundane items as an antique desk, a television, or a cute little stuffed elephant…”

 

In The Chimes, the terror-generating mundane item is a set of wind chimes that somebody finds hanging in a garden behind a newly-bought house.  Although wind chimes in other places and eras were believed to have positive powers, being able to scare off evil spirits, protect against the evil eye, bestow good fortune and facilitate good Feng Shui, these wind chimes, when they start tinkling sinisterly, have effects that are anything but good.

 

With 15 stories of supernatural-object-related horror and fun contained within its 258 pages, Nightmare Fuel 2022: Objects of Horror can be obtained in paperback or Kindle form here.