Author: MrM0untfield

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Ian Jenkins 1941-2025

 

From facebook.com / Peebles Beltane Festival

 

At the end of last month I received some sad news.  Ian Jenkins, a teacher, a politician and a well-kent face in the Scottish town of Peebles, where I spent some of my formative years, had passed away at the age of 84.

 

He taught me English for four of the five years, from 1977 to 1982, that I attended Peebles High School.  It’s impossible to think of the English-literature texts I had to study during those four years – novels like Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1871) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954); drama like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1959), Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959), Barry England’s Conduct Unbecoming (1969) and the Shakespeare plays Romeo and Juliet (1595), Hamlet (1601) and Macbeth (1606); and poems by Robert Burns, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, John Betjeman and Ted Hughes – without hearing Ian’s voice, with its gentle, mellifluous accent, explaining and quoting from them.

 

He hailed from the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde and, to my ears at least, his accent seemed mellifluous.  Mind you, I came from western Northern Ireland, where folk often spoke broadly, gruffly and roughly.  Compared to there, most types of Scottish accent sounded charming to me.

 

When I was at school, attitudes about educating young people had shifted from the old-fashioned, dictatorial approach to a more humane one.  But even in the late 1970s and early 1980s there remained some intimidating, traditional-minded teachers who made pupils feel as uncomfortable and on-edge in their classrooms as newly-conscripted troops hunkered down in the trenches.  Also, the European Court of Human Rights didn’t get around to banning the tawse – that palm-flaying form of corporal punishment informally known as ‘the belt’ – from Scottish schools until the mid-1980s.

 

But you never approached Ian Jenkins’ classroom with a feeling of trepidation.  You never worried he’d got out of the wrong side of bed that morning and he might lose the rag and start swinging the tawse at the slightest provocation.  No, you looked forward to his lessons because he was a mellow, kindly and jolly soul.

 

And unlike some of his colleagues, he treated his pupils as adults.  I remember the occasional English lesson with him giving way to a debate about one of the big political issues of the time, such as nuclear disarmament – Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan in December 1979, East-West tensions were high and the prospect of the world vanishing in a puff of mushroom-shaped, radioactive smoke was not a remote one – or whether there should be a Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a protest against that Soviet invasion.

 

Another issue of great geopolitical importance we discussed was the terrible performance – under the hapless stewardship of Ally MacLeod – by Scotland’s national football team at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

 

© Revelation Press

 

I remember one lesson that made me wonder how happy he was being a teacher.  In teaching, after all, you tend to talk about the same things year after year, in the same surroundings, with the only element of change being your pupils arriving, growing older, and departing again.  During that lesson we looked at Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1842 poem Ulysses, in which the legendary Greek hero is now an old man, is back home after his many travels and adventures, and faces spending the remainder of his life in peaceful domesticity.  But he decides, “To hell with that!”  He resolves to set sail again and look for new adventures: “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world / Push off and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.”

 

Wistfully, Ian remarked that sometimes he felt he should follow Ulysses’ example and set off in search of excitement and adventure before it was too late.  And by the time of the poem, Ulysses had already done stuff.  He’d fought in the Trojan War, escaped from the cyclops Polyphemus, encountered the sorceress Circe, survived the Sirens, sailed between Scylla and Charybdis and been the lover of the nymph Calypso.  Whereas Ian had merely taught English at a high school in Peebles.  I’m sure, though, countless Peebles schoolkids during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were glad he didn’t clear off as Ulysses did and persevered with the teaching.

 

He certainly had my gratitude, for the help he gave me with my writing.  I’d been writing stories since I was nine or ten years old and in my teens, after class, I’d sometimes approach Ian clutching the latest piece of fiction I’d penned and ask him if he could read it and offer me advice on it.  The poor man.  At the time I was heavily influenced by the great, if verbose, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and my stories were written in florid prose and featured some hopefully horrific (though more often absurd) subject-matter.  For example, one story I gave him was about a man who comes into possession of a grandfather clock that’d once belonged to a witch and discovers that the witch’s monstrous familiar still lives inside it – the inspiration for this effort was Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House (1933).  Yet Ian was remarkably patient, civil and encouraging in his feedback.  He did advise me to use fewer adjectives, though.

 

I left school in 1982 but kept in touch with Ian and his wife Midge – who was also a teacher, of French, and who at school had had the unenviable task of trying to coax the euphonic French language out of my broad, gruff and rough Northern Irish-accented mouth.  I frequently bumped into them around Peebles and also sometimes called at their house, which seemed a wonderful place to me because: (1) it was full of books; and (2) it contained whisky too, a generous dram of which was pushed my way any time I visited.

 

Ian was always eager to lend or recommend books to me.  The first time I read Ernest Hemingway, it was a collection of Hemingway’s short stories he’d lent me – no doubt hoping I’d discover from it you could write effective prose without sticking three or four adjectives before every noun.  Another book from the Jenkins lending-library important for me was one that introduced me to the ghost stories of M.R. James.  In the early 1980s, in response to his urging, I procured and read a copy of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), now regarded as the most important Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century.  And he championed the works of Thomas Hardy.  After reading Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), I remember arguing with him – in a friendly way, over a nip of whisky – about the book’s most outlandish character, Little Father Time.  “He’s a bit over the top,” I said.  Ian retorted, “Aye, but he’s fun.”

 

© Penguin Classics

 

I managed, though, to read Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) before he did.  In the mid-1990s Ian told me one of his pupils had decided to write her English Sixth-Year-Studies dissertation about it.  So, he thought he’d better familiarise himself with Trainspotting to be able to give her support.  “Well,” I asked, “what did you think?”  He replied, “It’s, er, robust.”

 

Then in 1999, like Ulysses, Ian did set sail in search of new adventures.  Okay, he only sailed 21 miles up the road, from Peebles to Edinburgh, where he became a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) representing the constituency of Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, which included Peebles.  But as this was the first time Scotland had had its own parliament for nearly 300 years, it was a historical occasion and being one of the new MSPs was an achievement.  I’d known he was a political creature and in our conversations politics was a regular topic.  He was a lifelong Liberal Democrat, which led to some bickering between us – again in a friendly way, because it was invariably done over a nip of whisky – because during the 1990s my lapel regularly sported a badge for the Scottish National Party (SNP).

 

I lived in Edinburgh during the late 1990s.  July 1st, 1999, saw the official opening of the Scottish Parliament.  As I’ve said, this was the first time since 1707 there’d been a Scottish parliament, so it was a big occasion with a big parade.  Because the streets of central Edinburgh are narrow and aren’t conducive to large crowds gathering to watch a parade, a giant screen had been set up in East Princes Street Gardens so that folk could watch the festivities there.  That was where I headed.  The parade included delegations of schoolchildren from all over Scotland and, at one point, a group of kids from Peebles High School appeared on the screen.  Then the camera cut to an excited, jolly-looking man jumping up and down and waving at them.  I burst out laughing, which prompted a woman standing nearby to ask, “What’s the matter?”  I told her proudly, “That’s my English teacher.”

 

During his four years as an MSP, Ian served as the Liberal Democrats’ spokesperson for Education, Culture and Sport.  It pleased me that Robert McNeil, the journalist and sketch-writer who covered the Scottish parliament for the Scotsman newspaper, referred to him affectionately as ‘Jolly Jenkins’.  I worked on the upper part of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and a couple of times bumped into him there – in those days, the parliament did its business in the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly Hall on the Mound, before the official parliament building was opened at the foot of the Mile in 2004 – and, as ever, he was happy to stop and chat.

 

After he stood down as an MSP in 2003, I continued to bump into him and Midge in Peebles.  I’d encounter them at Peebles’ annual agricultural show.  At one show in the early 2010s he told me how pissed-off he was that the Nick Clegg-led Liberal Democrats had formed a coalition government with the Conservatives.  I’d also see them at Peebles’ Eastgate Theatre.  One evening, my partner and I arrived there for a late showing of the 2014 Mike Leigh movie Mr. Turner, which starred Timothy Spall as the unorthodox English painter J.M.W. Turner, and we met the Jenkinses emerging from an earlier showing of it.  “I hear Timothy Spall grunts a lot,” I said.  Bemused, they confirmed that, yes, Spall does grunt a lot in the movie.  Our last meeting must have been in 2015.  That was when I had some work lined up in Kolkata in India and I needed to write the name and contact details of a possible referee on the application form for an Indian visa.  So, I asked Ian if he’d be my referee and, naturally, he agreed.

 

It saddens me that I didn’t see him after that.  My work situation changed, which kept me in Asia for most of the time and reduced my opportunities to go back to Scotland.  Covid-19 happened, which changed my work situation even more and reduced the opportunities to go home even further.  There were many things I’d have liked to tell him during the past ten years.  I’d have loved to report that, finally, I’d managed to read all the novels written by his beloved Thomas Hardy – even the most obscure ones, like Desperate Remedies (1871), A Laodicean (1881) and Two on a Tower (1882).  Not being a fan of Britain’s honours system, I’d have enjoyed ribbing him about the fact that, in 2024, he’d been made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) – though I should add that he got his MBE for very good reasons, for his work for charity and services to his local community.  “Does this mean,” I’d have asked, “you can now call yourself ‘Emperor Jenkins’?”

 

Most of all, I’d have liked to tell him that the number of short stories I’ve had published has now reached treble figures.  My 100th story appeared in print in 2024.  At least part of that achievement is due to the encouragement I got from my old English teacher.

 

After he died, one of my siblings sent me a link to a Peebles Facebook page, where the announcement of his passing had brought a flood of condolences and tributes from people who’d known him, often first of all as pupils in his classroom.  It felt like half of Peebles had posted.  Dozens and dozens of messages spoke of his kindness and decency, his patient and good-humoured teaching, his sense of civic duty, how he did his best to help and encourage the folk he came in contact with, how – whoever you were and whenever and wherever you met him – he was always pleased to stop and blether with you.   Which reminded me that my experiences of the man were by no means unique.

 

So, Ian Jenkins might not have been a hero in the roving, adventuring, Greek-mythological mode of Ulysses.  But in terms of the positive impact he had on many people’s lives, and the simple pleasure of his company, he was a hero – a true local hero.

 

© BBC

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Acting the goat

 

 

When I was a teenager in the United Kingdom, I recall people of my parents’ generation rolling their eyes in disgust when the radio or TV played music made by and aimed at young people. They regarded the musicians as ‘uncouth’ and ‘disrespectful’ – the Sex Pistols, for example, fronted by a young Johnny Rotten, sneering their way through God Save the Queen, or Motörhead, fronted by a young Lemmy, growling their way through Ace of Spades – and the music itself as ‘just a racket’.  There was, these members of the older generation agreed, only one way to cure the malaise of delinquency and degeneracy that’d afflicted younger folk and turned them into noisy spiky-haired louts and noisy long-haired hooligans…

 

“National service!” they’d agree.  “Bring back national service!  That’d teach these young whippersnappers some manners!  That’d sort them out!”

 

Well, the existence of the Singaporean band Wormrot nullifies that argument.  They are evidence that national service may not be the antidote some think it is for curing society’s younger members of their urge to make loud, unruly and unholy music. For the band formed in the late 2000s immediately after its founding members, vocalist Arif Suhaimi, guitarist Rasyid Juraimi and drummer Fitri completed the two years of national service that Singapore requires of its young male citizens.   Having hung up their uniforms and become Wormrot, the trio dedicated themselves to the noisy subgenre of grindcore, which Juraimi once described in an interview as “a bastard child of punk and metal with less limitation.”

 

Wormrot have achieved some notable things.  They were the first Singaporean act to play at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival, in 2017, though they had to perform in unusually cramped conditions – their stage was inside a train carriage, with its seats removed, which’d been dubbed the ‘Earache Express’.  And they’ve supported the legendary Napalm Death.  Even people who’ve never listened to grindcore, and have no idea what it is, know the name ‘Naplam Death’.

 

And fabulously, it was at one of their French concerts in 2012 that pictures of ‘Biquette the Grindcore Goat’ first went viral.  Biquette was, yes, a goat.  She was rescued from a milking factory and adopted by a communal farm, and she famously enjoyed being at the front of the crowd at heavy metal and punk concerts.

 

From disciplinemag.com

 

Yet things looked slightly bleak for Wormrot in recent years.  Fitri departed from the band in 2015, with Vijesh Ghariwala taking over the drumkit for the next nine years.  However, the band was less able to absorb the blow of losing vocalist Suhaimi in 2022.  They had to embark on a world tour using Gabriel Dubko (of the German band Implore) as a temporary, stand-in singer.  As a result, they arrived back in Singapore lacking the services of a full-time vocalist.

 

Happily, both Suhaimi and Fitri rejoined Wormrot in 2024, meaning the band has now reverted to its original line-up. The middle of this month saw them appear at an event with the self-explanatory title SG Metal Mayhem V, held at the Singaporean venue Phil Studio. Though Wormrot were the third of four bands on the bill, and thus weren’t the headliners, I suspect it was their presence that attracted the bulk of the local crowd – this was a chance to see the rejuvenated band back in business.

 

I couldn’t leave work until after SG Metal Mayhem V had started and unfortunately I missed the opening act, Microchip Terror, an artist who specialises in ‘electronic body horror music’.  I’ve listened to some of his stuff online and, to me, it seems an intriguing blend of Nine Inch Nails, synthy old John-Carpenter movie scores and death metal vocals.  I made it there in time to catch the second band, the Japanese outfit Kruelty who, their website claims, “find that sweet spot… of heavy beatdown hardcore and 90s American / Scandinavian death / doom metal…”  Kruelty’s vocalist Zuma (Kohei Azuma) was in fine growly form and their set was well-received.

 

 

Also growly and well-received were the evening’s headliners, the veteran – on the go since 1990 – Brazilian death metal band Krisiun.  This outfit’s line-up consists of three brothers: vocalist and bassist Alex Camargo, guitarist Moyses Kolesne and drummer Max Kolesne.  When I think of bands containing three or more siblings, the Bee Gees, the Osmonds, the Jackson 5, Hanson and the Corrs spring to mind, but Krisiun are a wee bit less… genteel than that lot.  With their beards, long hair, denims and tattoos, they have an outlaw-ish / biker-ish vibe.  If Lemmy had ever played a warlord in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie – he was in one such movie once, but in a minor role – I could imagine this trio playing his phalanx of bodyguards.  Anyway, Krisiun delivered the goods at SG Metal Mayhem V, their aggressive vocals and brutal sound offset by some impressively virtuoso guitar-playing.

 

But before that, the crowd got to see – and certainly got to hear – local heroes Wormrot.  The cacophony they produced, and its pleasures, are best summed up by a comment about them I read on Reddit.  After attending a Wormrot gig, the writer “couldn’t hear the whole way home” and a ringing in his ears “didn’t go away for a couple days,” but… “It was fantastic.”  Yes, by standing within earshot of Juraimi’s manic guitarwork, and Fitri’s frenzied drumming, and Suhaimi’s inhuman screeching, you’re subjecting yourself to a massive sonic assault.  But the experience is strangely wonderful.

 

The delighted crowd showed their appreciation by forming a mosh-pit – though this being Singapore, it was a slightly less bone-juddering mosh-pit than in other metal gigs in other parts of the world.  It more resembled a demented conga-line.  There were also attempts at crowd-surfing, though these threatened to end up like Jack Black’s famously disastrous attempt to crowd-surf in School of Rock (2003).

 

And sweetly, I think I saw someone wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Grindcore Goat.  Rest in Peace, Biquette.

 

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Farewell, Turkish Luke Skywalker

 

From youtube.com / © Anıt Film

 

Well, this is depressing news.

 

It was announced on August 19th that The Projector, Singapore’s alternative cinema, was closing its doors – immediately.  As of August 20th, The Projector would no longer exist.  A statement on the cinema’s Facebook page blamed “rising operational costs, shifting audience habits, and the global decline in cinema attendance,” factors that “have made sustaining an independent model in Singapore especially challenging.”

 

Aghast film fans who went to The Projector’s premises on the top floors of the Cineleisure shopping mall, just off Orchard Road, on the afternoon of the announcement found staff-members clearing the place out.  Reportedly, those fans were allowed to take old posters, brochures and other merch home with them as bittersweet mementoes.

 

The Projector was really the only place in Singapore where you could get to see, on a big screen, movies that weren’t the blockbuster fare of the multiplexes (though it found time to show blockbusters too).  In other words, you could watch independent and arthouse films, ones not made in the handful of big international languages, ones focused on minorities, ones that were generally offbeat.  It was also a rare venue where older movies got outings on the big screen – I remember it showing movies by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa and the recently-departed David Lynch.  On top of that, it provided an important space for other types of cultural events, such as poetry readings, book launches, charity fundraisers and vintage markets.  And, if you just wanted to chill out with a beer, it had an agreeable bar.

 

My partner and I visited The Projector on a number of occasions and one feature of it we liked was that we could watch films there surrounded by people who actually seemed to appreciate films – and behaved accordingly.  We knew that in The Projector we had a good chance of being able to watch a movie without getting annoyed by folk around us chomping and masticating noisily on snacks, or chatting, or farting around on their unmuted phones, a frequent hazard of filmgoing in the multiplexes.  We knew we’d probably be allowed to fully focus on, and enjoy, what was happening on the screen.  Which is what the cinematic experience should be about.

 

Indeed, The Projector had a stringent policy on phones.  It preceded each showing with a short film warning patrons to keep their devices silent and refrain from using them.  This film consisted of a scene from the notorious Turkish science-fiction movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam or The Man Who Saves the World – though it’s best known internationally as Turkish Star Wars – which was such a blatant rip-off of George Lucas’s Star Wars that it used uncredited space / special-effects footage and music from the 1977 classic.  “It was,” its Wikipedia entry informs me, “panned by film critics and has often been considered to be one of the worst films ever made.”

 

The scene used by The Projector was one in which ‘Turkish Luke Skywalker’ trained for battle by smashing his big fists repeatedly against a desert boulder.  You were warned that if you violated the cinema’s etiquette about phones, you would suffer punishment similar to that being inflicted on the rock.

 

Anyway, that’s all over now.  My partner and I had visited The Projector three times this year – two of the three films we saw, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) and Robert Eggars’ Nosferatu (2024), I’ve reviewed on this blog – but now, I wish we gone there more often.  Too many times, we’d planned to go and see something but had called it off at the last minute because we were ‘too tired’ or had ‘too much to do’.

 

The Projector’s sad demise is yet another unwelcome reminder that these days we live in a cutthroat hyper-capitalist world that seems to know the price of everything but the value of nothing – and if you cherish a venue, a business, a service, and don’t want to lose it, then you absolutely have to use it.

 

From facebook.com / © The Projector

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It has happened here

 

© Renard Press

 

Nowadays, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) feels like a story of alternative history, exploring what would have happened in the USA if the historical timeline had taken a twist in the mid-1930s it didn’t actually take.  But when Lewis wrote it, the real timeline and his imaginary one were in the future.  He was peeking ahead to the presidential election of 1936, one year after his novel’s publication, and wondering, “What if…?”  In its original context, then, It Can’t Happen Here was a work of science fiction, though the future imagined was so barely ahead of the present that it probably didn’t seem like that.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that reading the book in the middle of 2025, with the USA sliding remorselessly towards authoritarianism under the presidency of Donald Trump, It Can’t Happen Here doesn’t feel dated.  No, it’s surely more relevant than ever.

 

The novel explores what could have happened if the 1936 election hadn’t been won by Franklin D. Roosevelt – who in fact won it resoundingly, garnering over 60 percent of the popular vote and securing over 98 percent of the electoral college.  In Lewis’s version of events, the presidency is won by a populist maverick called Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip.  It’s commonly assumed Lewis based Windrip on the controversial Louisiana governor and US Senate member Huey Long.  In an ironic twist of fate, Long was assassinated one month before It Can’t Happen Here was published.  The son-in-law of a political rival shot him, though it’s been claimed Long actually died of a wound from a ricocheting bullet fired by one of his trigger-happy bodyguards, who immediately responded to the attacker by pumping him ‘full of lead’.

 

Early on in It Can’t Happen Here, we get to read Buzz Windrip’s campaign manifesto, The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.  This is a grab-bag of crowd-pleasing promises – the government giving every family 5000 dollars a year (point 11) while wealth being capped at 3,000,000 dollars per person (point 5) – and nakedly racist, reactionary and jingoistic rhetoric.  You have to swear allegiance to the New Testament and the flag if you want a job in the professions (point 4), threats are made against the Jews (point 9) and blacks and women are disenfranchised (points 10 and 12 respectively).  Oh, and there’s a sneaky final point, number 15, wherein Congress and the Supreme Court have to cede all authority to the Presidency.

 

The manifesto is popular enough to put Windrip in the White House and, thereafter, the USA experiences a rapid fascist takeover similar to the one Hitler engineered in Germany in 1933-34.  Windrip soon has his own militia / secret police making sure everyone toes the line, media, educational and economic institutions are bullied into acquiescence, and opponents, dissenters and anyone else the regime takes a dislike to are herded into concentration camps – that’s what the novel calls them, several years before the Nazis made the term ‘concentration camp’ synonymous with evil on an industrial scale.

 

The country’s lurch into dystopia is seen through the eyes of Doremus Jessop, a 60-year-old, liberal-minded editor of a smalltown newspaper in Vermont.  Jessop finds out the hard way that the new regime doesn’t take kindly to criticism – he pens a scathing editorial, which leads to an altercation with some officials, which results in his son-in-law being executed.  Afterwards, he’s forced to do an about-turn with his paper’s editorials and news coverage and make it a propaganda mouthpiece for Windrip and his government, as every other official news outlet in America had become.

 

Later, a disgusted and horrified Doremus hooks up with a resistance movement, the New Underground, run by a dissident senator called Walt Trowbridge who’s escaped to and based himself in Canada, and he begins surreptitiously writing and distributing an anti-Windrip newsletter called The Vermont Vigilance.  Later still, Doremus and his associates are rumbled and they wind up in a concentration camp.  But the story isn’t quite over yet for the dogged old editor…

 

© Penguin Books

 

As I said earlier, when you read It Can’t Happen Here today, there’s an elephant in the room – a corrupt, authoritarian, orange-skinned elephant, one with a bad combover, a ludicrously long red tie, a big mouth, a small pair of hands, a tiny but cunning brain, a criminal record, and a penchant for cheating at golf.  Yes, it’s shocking how much Lewis’s novel anticipates what Trump is up to in America at the moment.

 

As with Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which is now better funded than most countries’ armies and is no doubt attracting into its ranks all sorts of far-right nutjobs, Windrip sets up a militia called the Minute Men (MMs) and recruits into it thugs and low-life who relish having the power to intimidate, bully, beat up and murder their neighbors.  Doremus’s life gets progressively harder as Shad Ledue – his former handyman, who’s a lazy, ignorant brute and who lusts after his youngest daughter – joins the local Minute Men and, gradually, shins his way up the pole until he becomes District Commissioner.  And Trump’s enthusiasm for creating ‘immigration detention facilities’, like the notorious ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ in Florida, mirrors Windrip’s enthusiasm for creating concentration camps, like the one Doremus latterly finds himself an inmate of.

 

It Can’t Happen Here makes much of the regime’s assault on academia.  Early on, Doremus receives a worried letter from an acquaintance at his old alma mater, Isiah College, warning about how its Board of Trustees is bending to Windrip’s malevolent will.  “What,” he asks, “can we do with such fast exploding fascism?”  Trump has famously tried to do the same with America’s universities – some, like Columbia University, groveling to him pathetically; others, like Harvard, putting up slightly more of a fight.

 

Windrip sees to it that the ‘most liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first name.”  Trump, of course, has made sure that the present-day Supreme Court is packed with yes-men and yes-women.

 

And in an effort to bolster its authority, Windrip’s regime launches an operation to end ‘all crime in America forever’.  Criminals are “tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent… and two in ten taken in the MMs as inspectors.”  That sounds suspiciously like Trump’s recent takeover of Washington D.C., supposedly in the name of ridding the capital city’s streets of crime, though more likely to divert attention from the possibility that Trump’s name appears in the US Justice Department’s files investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Generally, Lewis’s descriptions of how Windrip manages to captivate the American public, or a section of it sufficiently large to get him into power, are depressingly similar to how Trump weaves a spell over his ‘MAGA faithful’ – portraying himself as an outsider and anti-establishment figure, despite the fact he’s the son of a real-estate millionaire and has had everything handed to him on a plate.  Of Windrip, Lewis says: “…he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering above them, and they raised their hands to him in worship.”

 

Meanwhile, Lewis highlights how the regime puts in positions of authority people who are worthless but unswervingly loyal to Windrip.  That loyalty, of course, rewards them with wealth, power and prestige.  Trump too has populated his government with sycophantic mediocrities, self-serving grifters and dangerous incompetents like Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio.  Their single virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is their ceaseless willingness to bow, scrape and debase themselves before him.

 

There’s even a parallel with Elon Musk who, as the world’s richest man and CEO of the social-media platform X, has a massive ability to inform and misinform people and shape their opinions.  The It Can’t Happen Here version of Musk is Bishop Paul Peter Prang, a priest who makes a hugely popular and influential weekly address on the radio.  Like Musk’s voice on social media, Prang’s voice ‘circled the world at 186,000 miles a second’ and practically ‘leapt to the farthest stars.’  (Prang’s character was inspired by a real-life demagogue, the ‘Radio Priest’ Charles Coughlin.)  And like Musk with Trump, Prang enthusiastically backs Windrip for president – but gets short shrift from the man he’s championed once he’s across the threshold of the White House.  Though while Trump merely dropped and humiliated Musk, Windrip sticks Prang in jail and then in an ‘insane asylum’: “No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.”

 

All that said, It Can’t Happen Here is not a perfect book.  It has certain features that earn it the dreaded sobriquet ‘of its time’.  The focus is almost entirely on a handful of comfortably well-off white Americans and, though there are brief references to the horrors Windrip visits upon the black community, the book shows no interest in exploring these.  Also, Lewis makes mocking references to sexuality of Lee Sarason, Windrip’s Machiavellian campaign manager, who wears ‘violet silk pajamas’ and obviously has a fondness for strapping young men.  But no mention is made of the regime’s official policy towards homosexuals, which presumably would have been as murderous as Nazi Germany’s.  And male chauvinists will appreciate how Doremus gets to have his cake and eat it throughout the book, in that he’s simultaneously married to one woman, dull, frumpy Emma, and engaged in an affair with another, the bewitching firebrand Lorinda.  He’s never taken to task for this.

 

And the book’s tone can be awkward at times.  Lewis writes it in a folksy, sardonic, Mark Twain-like style that sometimes works, especially when its poking fun at the general hypocrisies, absurdities and idiocies of Windrip’s regime.  It works less well when it’s detailing the brutal realities of that regime – the tortures and humiliations, for instance, that Doremus has to endure while he’s in a concentration camp.  For subject-matter as bleak as this, I suspect the only way to record it is with the precise and dispassionate prose of, say, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

 

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here may not quite make it into the top tier of great dystopian novels, then.  However, in 2025, you’re unlikely to read one that feels more terrifyingly prescient.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Touring Club Italiano

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It could have happened here

 

© Triad Granada

 

Recently, I’ve read a couple of ‘alternative history’ novels that imagine different realities in the 1930s and 1940s: wherein Britain and the USA were taken over by fascism just as Germany and Italy were.  What could have induced me, in 2025, to read novels about Britain and the USA succumbing to fascism?  I really can’t imagine.  Here are my thoughts on one of those books, Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978).

 

Deighton is best known as the author of The IPCRESS File (1962), the book that introduced the world to Harry Palmer, a down-at-heels spy whose humdrum experiences are a corrective to the glamorous espionage fantasy-world inhabited by Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

 

Actually, that description does both Deighton and Fleming a disservice.  Harry Palmer isn’t even the name of the protagonist in The IPCRESS File.  Deighton keeps its first-person narrator anonymous.  The name was only devised for the character in 1965 when the book was made into a film with the non-capitalised title The Ipcress File, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Michael Caine.  Also, while the film version is determinedly unexotic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, restricts its action to a non-swinging 1960s London, Deighton’s novel is more expansive.  It allows its hero to do some properly exciting, Bondian things, such as participate in a rescue mission in Beirut and visit an American neutron-bomb test site in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Meanwhile, Fleming’s novels certainly featured exotic locations (the Caribbean, the Swiss Alps, the French coast), exotic activities (scuba diving, skiing, gambling in casinos) and exotic food and drink (caviar, stone crabs, Dom Pérignon champagne), which no doubt tantalised his readers, many of whom were living in drab, austere, post-war Britain and eating such rationing-era fare as pig’s trotters, spam and lardy cake.  But he invested at least some of those novels with a little grit and realism too.  However, just as the medium of film made Harry Palmer more lowkey than the literary original, so a series of over-the-top movies unanchored the character of Bond and floated him off into the realms of total fantasy.  Ironically, the Harry Palmer movies and the first nine Bond movies shared the same producer, Harry Saltzman.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Film Distributors

 

I was reminded of this dichotomy when reading SS-GB because, while its hero inhabits a grey, downbeat world, where dealing with even the simplest details of everyday life can be exhausting, some big, almost Bondian things hove into view and require his attention.  These, though, hardly make his existence any more glamorous.  Rather, they make it a lot harder for him than it was already.

 

In Deighton’s imagined alternative universe, SS-GB begins in November 1941.  Nine months earlier, in February, Britain surrendered to Germany.  February 1941 was four months before, in real history, Hitler turned against Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, an event that in in SS-GB evidently didn’t happen because the novel depicts Germany and the Soviet Union as, still, firm allies.  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, which drew the USA into the war against the Axis powers, occurred at the end of 1941 and hasn’t happened yet.  One wonders if, here, it will happen, given the alterations elsewhere on the timeline.  The USA remains neutral in SS-GB, whilst peering across the Atlantic at a fully Nazi-controlled Europe with wariness and trepidation.  Incidentally, Deighton provides almost no exposition about what has gone on and it’s left to the reader to infer.

 

SS-GB’s hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, is a policeman at Scotland Yard who finds himself having to do his police-work under the supervision of the German occupiers.  His immediate superior is General – ‘or, more accurately in SS parlance, Gruppenführer’ – Fritz Kellerman: “a genial-looking man in his late fifties… of medium height but his enthusiasm for food and drink provided a rubicund complexion and a slight plumpness…”  Obviously, it was never put to the test, but Kellerman represents a good guess on Deighton’s part about how many German officials would have behaved if they had been posted to a defeated Britain and put in power there.   They’d have behaved like amiable Anglophiles, dressing in tweed suits, going hunting and fishing on country estates, playing golf, guzzling Scotch whisky and stocking their rooms with British antiques.  (Deighton has fun developing that last idea.  He depicts a bunch of 1940s British spivs running an illicit trade in British heirlooms, aimed at the German occupiers.)

 

Archer fits neatly into those Germans’ image of Britain because he represents another cosy and much-loved British cliché: the famous sleuthing detective.  Recognising him, one occupier exclaims, “You’re Archer of the Yard… You’re the detective who solved the Bethnal Green Poisonings and caught ‘the Rottingdean Ripper’ back before the war.”  Later in the book, Archer plays up his fame among the Germans – at least, the ones who enjoy true-life crime stories – to his advantage.

 

Behind the bonhomie of the likes of Kellerman, however, lurks the despotic ruthlessness of Nazi Germany.  Early on, Kellerman warns Archer about what may be coming.  Of Scotland Yard, he says, “Neither of us want political advisors in this building, Superintendent.  Inevitably, the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.”

 

The story begins with Archer assigned to what looks like a straightforward murder case, a shooting in a rundown neighbourhood called Shepherd Market.  The murder scene is a flat “crammed with whisky, coffee, tea and so on, and Luftwaffe petrol coupons lying around on the table.  The victim is a well-dressed man, probably a black-marketeer.”  Of course, Archer gradually realises there’s more to the case than initially meets the eye.  And, as he grapples with the increasingly serious implications of what he’s investigating, he encounters a variety of characters who may be on his side or may be out to get him.

 

These include an officer in the SS’s intelligence service, an intense and driven man called Oskar Huth, who’s flown in from Berlin and put in charge of Archer and his investigation, and who’s the antithesis of the jocular Kellerman.  When Archer meets him off his Lufthansa plane and inquires where his bags are, he snaps, “Shotguns, golf-clubs and fishing tackle, you mean?  I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense.”  Constituting the one glamorous element that enters Archer’s life during the book is Barbara Barqa, a foxy American journalist who’s been allowed into London by the press attaché of the German Embassy in Washington.  She unexpectedly turns up at the murder scene and, predictably, isn’t all that she seems.  Meanwhile, additional tension comes from Archer’s elderly sergeant, and mentor, Harry Woods.  He’s a man ‘who fought and won in the filth of Flanders’ and ‘would never come to terms with defeat.’  It’s whispered that he has connections with the British Resistance movement, which makes Archer’s position very precarious.

 

As Archer’s investigation continues, I was, initially, a little disappointed by two of the main plot devices that Deighton uses.  These devices seemed to me slightly obvious ones for an alternative-history / World War II novel set in early-1940s London.  One is the race by various countries to develop a game-changing weapon – guess which weapon that is.  Indeed, when Archer learns that the murder-victim was suffering from radiation poisoning, I was reminded of Troy Kennedy Martin’s masterly TV miniseries Edge of Darkness (1985), which had a policeman investigating a killing and finding himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy involving the nuclear industry.  The other plot device is an operation to rescue an important personage whom the Germans have imprisoned in the Tower of London.  If the rescue is successful, it’ll be a boost for Britain’s battered morale and a propaganda win for the British Resistance.  Again, guess who that personage is.

 

To be fair, Deighton keeps both plot devices grounded. They’re wrapped in believably authentic realpolitik involving the neutral Americans, different elements in the British Resistance, and competing factions among the occupying Germans.  And the way one of them is resolved, near the end, caused me genuine surprise.  Also, there’s a subplot involving Karl Marx – whose remains are buried at London’s Highgate Cemetery – that I thought Deighton handled ingeniously.

 

But what really makes SS-GB a pleasure are Deighton’s descriptions of everyday life in occupied London – and what the ordinary population, war-weary, demoralised and living near the breadline, have to put up with.  There’s ‘the green, sooty fog’ with its ‘ugly smell’, which doesn’t quite hide ‘advertisement hoardings, upon which appeals for volunteers to work in German factories, announcements about rationings and a freshly pasted German-Soviet Friendship Week poster shone rain-wet.’  There’s Archer’s landlady, whose soldier-husband is in ‘a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.’  She serves her policeman lodger eggs she got from a neighbour as payment for an ‘old grey sweater to unravel for the wool’, and a cube of margarine, ‘the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers.’

 

And there’s a rather desperate-sounding gala evening at the Metropolitan Music Hall.  This ends with the cast trying to cheer up the dejected London audience by ‘throwing paper streamers, wearing funny hats and popping balloons that descended from a great wire basket suspended from the ceiling’ – leaving the theatre ‘in a chaos of litter that had to be salvaged for re-use.’  The line-up for the evening includes Gracie Fields and Flanagan and Allen.  No George Formby, though.  Probably he’s in a prison camp, as a punishment for punching Hitler in his 1940 movie Let George Do It! 

 

And there are the ruins and wreckage left both by the Blitz and by Deighton’s imagined German invasion.  It’s a grey, wet, cold, blasted place, full of dejected and frustrated people, and it isn’t difficult to envision the London of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) being a little further along the road.  Deighton, who’s still with us at the venerable age of 96, was ten years old when World War II broke out, and he came from the Marylebone area of London.  Presumably, he had images of the city in wartime seared into his memory and didn’t have to stretch his imagination too much to describe SS-GB’s version of it.

 

Thus, SS-GB’s crowning achievement is a depiction of Nazi-controlled London, and Britain, that you can practically see, hear, feel, smell and taste.  Though of course, you really wouldn’t have wanted to.

 

© Harper Collins Publishers

 

Apparently, in 2017, the BBC turned SS-GB into a five-episode TV miniseries, starring Sam Riley, Rainer Bock, Lars Eidinger, Kate Bosworth and James Cosmo.  I haven’t seen it, but let’s hope the BBC made a good job of it.  

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James Bond Island

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket.  We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea.  Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun.  It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming.  So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island?  Of course not.

 

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun.  I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise.  It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton.  It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting.  It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life.  It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!”  Democrats?  That’s a surprise.  And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

 

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun.  One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”  The other is the spectacular scenery.  Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

 

 

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile.  Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level.  Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’.  We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears.  Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

 

 

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time.  It was very busy with tourists.  We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area.  If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors.  Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

 

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth.  In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane.  Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it.  But I managed in the end.

 

 

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included.  It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

 

 

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat.  I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun.  I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks…  Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies.  That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

 

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea.  A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park.  One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

 

© Figment Films / 20th Century Fox

 

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland.  This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways.  Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998).  This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards.  More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

 

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay.  Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior.  The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions.   It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground.  Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay.  We followed the slightly less busy one.

 

 

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags.  But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies.  Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year.  Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

 

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach.  Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment.  It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1st to October 1st.

 

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio.  (Sorry, Ewan.)  It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up.  Win-win all round, I’d say.

 

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Return to Ozz

 

From youtube.com / © BBC

 

My previous post was about the much-loved Ozzy Osbourne, singer with groundbreaking heavy metal band Black Sabbath in the 1970s, and an ultra-successful solo artist from the 1980s onwards, who died on July 22nd.  Here are my favourite dozen songs featuring Ozzy’s vocals.

 

Black Sabbath (from 1970’s Black Sabbath)

The eponymous first song on Black Sabbath’s eponymous first album, this sets the tone for everything to follow.  It immediately establishes a horror-movie vibe, opening with rumbling thunder, sluicing rain and clanging altar bells.  Then the doomy chug of heavy guitars and the sepulchral wails of Ozzy’s voice kick in: “What is this that stands before me?  Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”  Things eventually speed up for a tumultuous but still menacing climax.  (Unsurprisingly, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler were horror movie fans and their band’s name comes from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the equally legendary Boris Karloff.)

 

Incidentally, I like how Ice T uses Black Sabbath for his 1989 track Shut Up, Be Happy.  He retains the song’s ominous music but replaces Ozzy’s vocals with the voice of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, intoning about how America has just been put under martial law: “All constitutional rights have been suspended.  Stay in your homes.  Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys.  Shut up!”  Depressingly, Shut Up, Be Happy is more relevant than ever in 2025.

 

Meanwhile, for a proper cover version of Black Sabbath, I’d recommend the one by goth-metal band Type O Negative on 1994’s Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, a collection of Sabbath covers whose other contributors include White Zombie, Therapy?, Corrosion of Conformity and Faith No More.  It’s not the most the adventurous of covers, but the late Peter Steele’s vocals are suitably foreboding.

 

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

 

Iron Man (from 1970’s Paranoid)

Much loved by Beavis and Butthead, this is the most remorseless and skull-crushing of Sabbath songs.  It’s about a man who travels into the future, witnesses the apocalypse, gets turned to steel, then returns to the present to warn humanity but is ridiculed and shunned because he’s now a metallic freak: “Is he alive or dead? Has he thoughts within his head?  We’ll just pass him there…  Why should we even care?”  So, what does he do?  He engineers the apocalypse he foresaw: “Heavy boots of lead, fills his victims full of dread…”

 

I’ll make a confession here.  Back in my drunken-asshole student days, I arrived home from the pub one Saturday night and, with one of my flatmates, also a drunken-asshole student, we made a bet while we played the album Paranoid on the flat’s stereo.  If we played it at full volume, during which song would another flatmate, a clean-living, go-to-bed-early type, finally lose it, jump out of bed, fling open the door of his room and scream at us to turn it down?  You guessed it.  While Ozzy was hollering about Iron Man being turned to steel in the great magnetic field, the door of that flatmate’s room swung back and a voice bellowed: “WOULD YOU TURN THAT DREADFUL RACKET DOWN?”

 

War Pigs (from Paranoid)

A lamentation against war and those who orchestrate it, War Pigs is a reminder that Black Sabbath’s members were youths during the late 1960s when the pacifistic hippy movement was on the go.  This being Sabbath, though, War Pigs dwells bitterly on war’s violence and hatred rather than try to counter it with calls for peace and love.  It’s a long song, just under eight minutes, yet short on lyrics – the word-count is less than 150.  But oh, what words: “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses…  In the fields, the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning…”

 

This song has seen several notable cover versions.  Judas Priest did an impeccably metallic rendition of it – I also like the accompanying video, wherein Priest-frontman Rob Halford stomps about the stage like a farmer in wellies trying to negotiate a boggy field.  A funked-up version of it impressively closes the 2023 album On Top of the Covers from singer / rapper T-Pain.  But for a reworking of War Pigs that’s splendidly ‘out there’, yet retains the original’s drive and power, you can’t beat what the ‘Ethiopian Crunch Music’ band Ukandanz did to it.  They replaced Tony Iommi’s guitar with a saxophone and sang it in Amharic.

 

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

 

Planet Caravan (from Paranoid)

The sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’.  Well, if the stories about how Ozzy and the rest of Black Sabbath were behaving at the time are true, they certainly needed a good coming-down song.  To augment the faraway sound, Ozzy sang through a Leslie speaker during the recording, which gave the impression he was warbling the lyrics underwater.

 

There’s a mellow cover of Planet Caravan at the end of Pantera’s less-than-mellow 1994 album Far Beyond Driven.  Indeed, Pantera performed Planet Caravan at the Back to the Beginning concert, Ozzy’s farewell show staged in Birmingham just two-and-a-half weeks before he died.

 

Children of the Grave (from Master of Reality)

Master of Reality is possibly Black Sabbath’s heaviest and doomiest-sounding album.  Its best track, Children of the Grave, has an urgent, unsettling sound that suggests creepy, occult-flavoured goings-on.  That feeling is increased by the song’s horror-movie-like title and the way it’s whispered sinisterly during the coda.  But if you listen properly to the lyrics, you discover it’s not about the supernatural at all.  It’s really another anti-war song, like War Pigs: “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear?  Can they win the fight for peace, or will they disappear?”

 

Supernaut (from 1972’s Vol. 4)

The exuberant Supernaut might be, as the lyrics suggest, about a man trying to find “the dish that ran away with the spoon” or “the crossing near the golden rainbow’s end”.  Or it might be about, you know, substances.  Of which, by then, the band were taking a lot.

 

For a cracking (and funny) cover version of this song, look no further than the one by 1000 Homo DJs (actually a side-project of the industrial rock band Ministry) which retains the original’s insane jauntiness while spicing it up with a solemn 1960s voice intoning about the dangers of taking acid.  For my money, this is the best track on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, basically because it’s not afraid to try something different.

 

© Vertigo

 

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (from 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath)

What can I say?  This is my all-time favourite Black Sabbath song – ever, ever, ever.

 

Symptom of the Universe (from 1974’s Sabotage)

It could be argued that the hectic, exhilarating Symptom of the Universe is a track that helped invent punk rock.  And if it didn’t, it surely helped invent thrash metal.  Fittingly, the Brazilian thrash metallers Sepultura do a nifty version of this song, which again can be found on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath.

 

Never Say Die (from 1978’s Never Say Die)

By 1978 the writing was on the wall for Ozzy Osbourne’s association with Black Sabbath.  He’d already quit the band briefly (and been replaced, equally briefly, by singer Dave Walker) and Never Say Die would be the final Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath album until 2013’s 13.  Thus, it was recorded under strained circumstances.  Never Say Die was badly received at the time, and nowadays it’s fashionable to write it off as Ozzy-era Sabbath’s last, perfunctory gasp.  But, if you can handle the ‘jazz inflections’, it’s not a bad album – just different.  As the Guardian once said of it, “it’s a quirky and enjoyable record, as long as you don’t expect Sabbath Even Bloodier Sabbath.”

 

And the title track is a stormer.  Ozzy delivers it so directly and defiantly he could be fronting a garage band.

 

Crazy Train (from 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz)

The second track off Ozzy’s first solo album, this has a cleaner, nimbler guitar sound – courtesy of tragically short-lived guitarist Randy Rhoads – that’s in keeping with the mainstream American glam-metal aesthetic that, for a while, dominated heavy metal in the 1980s.   The lyrics begin wholesomely – “Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate” – but by the chorus we’re getting a probable summation of Ozzy’s mental state at the time: “Mental wounds not healing, life’s a bitter shame, I’m going off the rails on a crazy train!”  (It wasn’t until 1982 that he’d marry the formidable Sharon Arden, the woman who’d, eventually, clean him up, sort him out and reinvent him as an amiable, reality-TV dad.)

 

© Jet Records

 

That same year, the now Ozzy-less Black Sabbath released Heaven and Hell, their first album with Ronnie James Dio on vocals.  1980 was also when I entered the ‘senior school’ – fifth and sixth year – at my high school.  One of the perks of this was that the senior pupils had their own common room in the school basement, with a record player and loudspeakers.  For a few, ear-bleeding months, Blizzard of Ozz and Heaven and Hell were never off that record player.

 

Mr Crowley (from Blizzard of Ozz)

I don’t think Ozzy had acquired the moniker the ‘Prince of Darkness’ yet.  However, aware that darkness was part of his schtick, he included this song on Blizzard of Ozz – a paeon to the English occultist Aleister Crowley.  Depending on your point of view, Crowley was truly the Wickedest Man Alive or was a piss-taking libertine who enjoyed terrorising genteel, respectable British society with exaggerated tales of his diabolism.  The song is launched in melodramatic fashion by the organ-tones of keyboardist Don Airey, but Ozzy sings it with agreeable wistfulness: “Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic with the thrill of it all.  You fooled all the people with magic.  Yeah, you waited on Satan’s call…”  

 

For a really over-the-top version of Mr Crowley, check out this effort by Cradle of Filth.

 

Thereafter, Ozzy would put out a dozen more solo albums.  The best that can be said about them is that they’re variable in quality.  But their highlights are certainly better than anything on the seven albums Black Sabbath released during the same period that had neither Ozzy nor Ronnie James Dio singing on them.

 

And obviously…  Paranoid (from Paranoid)

Yes, I’m glad this was what Ozzy sang at the very end of his farewell concert earlier this month.  There was no better way to bow out.

 

© Vertigo

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Adi-Ozz amigo

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ted Van Pelt

 

The Prince of Darkness has gone dark.  I was saddened to hear of the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, singer with legendary heavy metal band Black Sabbath, on July 22nd for two reasons.

 

Firstly, Ozzy’s eerie, high-pitched, alien-sounding vocals were the perfect accompaniment for the crunching, doom-laden guitars and drums of his Black Sabbath compadres, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward.  Their rumbling, abrasive sound evoked the heavy machinery in the factories where the working-class quartet found employment as youths and where they would have spent their lives had they not hit the bigtime with their music.  Indeed, Iommi’s time in a steelworks ended with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist.  Ozzy didn’t fare much better, beginning work as a toolmaker’s apprentice and cutting off the top of his thumb on his first day on the job.

 

It was also a sound that was massively influential.  As I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago, Sabbath’s influence is “all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk.  And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal.  Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros. Records

 

Secondly, when I heard of Ozzy’s death, I felt like I’d lost a crazy, shambolic but lovable uncle.  Yes, he styled himself as the Prince of Darkness – or at least, his manager-wife Sharon Osbourne did, realising how lucrative his mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know brand was.  And in the 1980s he was a bête noir among Christian American parents and there were unsuccessful attempts to sue him for, it was alleged, causing two young men to kill themselves after they’d listened to his song Suicide Solution from his first solo album Blizzard of Ozz (1980).  And during his young, hellraising years, it certainly sounded like the drink and drugs turned him into a psycho at times.  But once he reached middle-age, he became an amiable, if hapless, teddy bear of a man.  He was also a superstar devoid of airs and graces.  No doubt the tough, unpretentious start to life he’d had in Birmingham helped keep his feet on the ground.

 

And, fabulously, he never lost his Brum accent.  “Oi’m the Prince of Dawkness!” drunkards would cry in pubs the world over, whenever his name came up in conversations.

 

His everyman image received a further boost when he, wife Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly featured in Emmy-winning reality show The Osbournes (2002-05).  While I have to say I found the other members of his family an acquired taste, Ozzy was wonderful just for being himself.  Millions of men like me, watching the show as they entered both middle-age and the 21st century, surely sighed wistfully as they recognised themselves in Ozzy’s failing efforts to control the environment around him.  Failing to control his offspring.  Failing to control his pets – I remember him accusing one recalcitrant dog of being “worse than Bin Laden.”  Failing to control the technological gadgets in his house.  “I’m a very simple man,” he ranted at one point. “You’ve got to have, like, computer knowledge to turn the f**king TV on and off… I press this one button and the shower starts going off…”

 

No doubt it was Ozzy’s lack of guile that led him, in his younger days, to being an absolute disaster in terms of boozing and drug-taking.  His behaviour resulted in him being sacked from Black Sabbath at the end of the 1970s, though Ozzy claimed he was no worse a state than the other three band-members were at the time.  Still, it must have been difficult working with a man given to such antics as snorting a line of ants in the mistaken belief they were a line of cocaine, or getting arrested for urinating over the Alamo whilst wearing a frock.  “Son,” a member of the San Antonio police force told him gravely, “when you piss on the Alamo, you piss on the state of Texas.”

 

My favourite story from Ozzy’s wild years was one that happened after he’d returned to England from America, where he’d been making the 1972 Black Sabbath album Vol. 4 and where he’d also developed a taste for LSD.  “I took 10 tabs of acid, then went for a walk in a field.  I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour.  In the end the horse turned round and told me to f**k off.  That was it for me.”

 

A lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy did nothing for Ozzy’s health and, more recently, he was beset by health issues: Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain.  At Christmas 2016, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend emailed me worriedly and said, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”

 

Happily, Ozzy made through nine more Bells.  He also made it to Back to the Beginning, his farewell concert held at Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5th this summer.  The bulk of this consisted of performances by a dazzling range of heavy metal bands who might never have seen the light of day if Black Sabbath hadn’t set the ball rolling for their genre in 1970 – Mastodon, Anthrax, Lamb of God, Alice in Chains, Gojira, Pantera, Tool, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Metallica and others, plus two guest-ridden ‘superstar’ bands assembled by the event’s musical director, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.  The event climaxed with a five-song solo set by Ozzy and then a four-song set by the original Black Sabbath line-up of him, Iommi, Butler and Ward, playing together for the first time since 2005.

 

Back to the Beginning’s 45,000 tickets sold out in 16 minutes.  It also raised 140 million pounds for charity.  Rather prophetically, Ozzy said of the concert a couple of months before it happened: “I’m going to make this f**king gig if it’s the last thing I do.  Well, it will be…”

 

He died just 17 days afterwards.  His life was chaotic but, at the very end, his timing was impeccable.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jet Records

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Jim Mountfield gets slotted in

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

Jim Mountfield is the pseudonym I attach to fiction I write that’s dark and macabre in nature, and I’m delighted to report that a new Mountfield short story has just appeared in Volume 19 Issue 6, the July 2025 edition, of Schlock! Webzine.  It’s entitled Slot Boy and it takes place in Scotland, against an appropriately Scottish backdrop of parochial wee towns, middle-aged neds, cranky auld wifies, mobility scooters, and terrible football.

 

Despite its Scottish setting, Slot Boy – like many of my stories – owes a lot to the works of Stephen King.  Although the inspiration for this particular story comes from something I suspect King isn’t in a hurry to trumpet as one of his finest hours, the anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987), which was a sequel to the rather better Creepshow (1982).  One of the three segments in Creepshow 2, The Raft, was based on a short story included in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, but the other two segments, Old Chief Wood’nhead and The Hitchhiker, were apparently stories he devised especially for the film.  He wrote an outline that was then polished into a script by legendary horror filmmaker director George A. Romero, though the final movie was directed by Michael Gornick.

 

Weirdly, it was Old Chief Wood’nhead that inspired Slot Boy.

 

The Raft and The Hitchhiker both have their moments, but Old Chief Wood’nhead is rightly regarded as the worst of Creepshow 2’s stories.  That’s despite it featuring the stalwart character actor George Kennedy (a man I always associated with crashing airplanes – he was in 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix and all four of the 1970s’ Airport movies) and Dorothy Lamour, star of the Bob Hope / Bing Crosby Road to… movies (1940-62).  Kennedy and Lamour play an elderly couple who own a shop with a hulking, timber cigar store Indian, the titular Old Chief Wood’nhead, standing outside it.  Predictably, bad things happen to them. Then, magically, seeking revenge, Old Chief Wood’nhead comes to… Well, you can guess the rest.

 

Native American culture is a rich source of stories and myths – see the works of Stephen Graham Jones – but Old Chief Wood’nhead operates at the level of a crass old Hollywood western, with a caricatured ‘injun’ shooting arrows, removing scalps and wielding a tomahawk.  Of course, the horror in the story, or in any horror story, is nothing compared to the real-life horrors that North America’s native American population had to endure during history.  Estimates suggest that population stood at about eight million in the whole continent in 1492; but in the USA, by 1890, it’d been reduced to a quarter of a million.  Though no doubt Trump will soon rewrite all that and have it taught in schools that life was peachy for Native Americans after European settlers arrived.

 

If Old Chief Wood’nhead was a bit asinine, why on earth did I think of it again after so many years, let alone get an idea for a story from it?  Well, for the first two years that I lived in Singapore, I regularly ate and drank in an establishment on Singapore’s Mountbatten Road that, bizarrely, had this standing on the edge of its premises:

 

 

I don’t think I ever saw a cigar store Indian during my time in Scotland, but shops there used to have other figurines standing outside their doors, usually for charity purposes.  One of those figurines features in Slot Boy and plays a role in the story similar to that played by Old Chief Wood’nhead in Creepshow 2.  I just hope the result is scarier – and funnier – than the movie segment.

 

During July 2025, you can read Slot Boy here, while the main page of Schlock! Webzine, Volume 19 Issue 6, can be accessed here.

 

© Laurel Entertainment / New World Pictures

Posted on

All the rage

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Danny Boyle is a venerated British filmmaker.  His resume includes nasty wee Edinburgh crime noir Shallow Grave (1993), zeitgeist-surfing ‘cool Britannia’ classic Trainspotting (1996), Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics that, briefly, gave Britain a little street credibility in the eyes of the world.  Obviously, the small-minded and idiotic result of the Brexit referendum in 2016, when a narrow majority of British people voted to leave the European Union, put an end to that street cred.

 

However, as a connoisseur of zombie movies, I feel Boyle’s biggest cultural contribution might be directing the 2002 movie 28 Days Later, which was written by novelist and fellow-filmmaker Alex Garland.  This follows events after the escape from a research laboratory of a virus that transforms its victims into wrathful, slavering, hyperactive zombies.  28 Days Later helped to establish the idea that zombies don’t have to lumber mindlessly and slowly, as they had in nearly all zombie movies prior to 2002.  They could be fast.  They could run.  That’s although the film doesn’t actually feature typical, reanimated-corpse zombies, but virus-infected people who are duly referred to as ‘the infected’.

 

As in all good zombie movies, Boyle’s infected act as metaphors.  In 28 Days Later, they symbolise the rage that’d lately become common in British society.  Terms like road-rage, air-rage and even shopping-trolley rage had only recently entered the country’s vocabulary in 2002.

 

In the first sequel to 28 Days Later, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s underrated 28 Weeks Later (2007), the US Army occupy Britain after the epidemic.  There’s an obvious metaphor at work here too.  The Americans set up HQ (and marshal together the survivors) in a supposedly safe area of London they call the ‘Green Zone’, their efforts to end the contagion actually lead to it spreading among those who were hitherto uninfected, and their firepower ends up killing friend and foe alike…  All horribly reminiscent of what the real-life American military was doing in Iraq at the time.

 

Now Boyle and Garland have reunited to make 28 Years Later, the first part of a projected new trilogy in the franchise – the second film is already in the can and will be released next January, and the third one will be made if the first two make money.  Later in the trilogy, Cillian Murphy, the breakout star of 28 Days Later, is supposed to be returning in the role of Jim, the character he played in the original film. And before you read further, beware – from here on, there will be spoilers for all three movies made so far.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, 28 Years Later‘s metaphor is pretty on the nose.  Britain, overrun by the infected, and with a few uninfected inhabitants surviving in isolated, heavily-fortified communities, has been quarantined from the rest of Europe.  Other European countries’ navies patrol it to make sure nobody carries the infection off its shores.  (28 Weeks Later ended with the virus making it to France, but we’re informed that that outbreak was contained.)  So infected Britain in the 28 Years Later universe is a symbol of Brexit Britain in our universe.

 

Actually, an expository map shows Ireland infected and quarantined too, though nobody mentions this in the film.  It’s a grim echo of the prediction once made by arch-Brexiter and gobshite Nigel Farage that, post-Brexit, Ireland would follow Britain out of the EU.

 

28 Years Later begins in a village on an island off the English coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that, thanks to the tide, is underwater much of the time.  The villagers are depicted living a low-tech lifestyle: rearing sheep and pigs, growing vegetables, cooking full-English breakfasts on wood-burning Raeburn stoves, sipping home-brewed beer in the local pub and participating in singalongs under an ancient portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.  This would no doubt appeal to many of Nigel Farage’s supporters, longing for a simpler version of England back, say, in the 1940s, that never really existed – prior to multiculturalism, wokeness and other such evils.  And no, I can’t recall seeing anyone in 28 Years Later’s village scenes who’s a person of colour.

 

The movie centres on Spike (Alfie Williams), a twelve-year-old lad who’s grown up on the island and is facing a daunting rite of passage.  His father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is taking him for the first time to the mainland, where he’s expected to prove his manhood by using his bow and arrow on the infected and making a few ‘kills’.  (Bullets have run out by this point.)  Jamie’s timing of this seems tactless since his wife, Spike’s mum, Isla (Jodie Comer) is currently bedridden, stricken by a mysterious illness that has her oscillating between lucidity and delirium.

 

Following their sortie on the mainland, Spike learns of the existence of a man called Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been living there alone and has dedicated himself to building a spectacular ‘bone temple’ using the remains of, and commemorating, all those who’ve perished since the contagion began 28 years ago.  Though evidently mad now, Kelson was, back in civilised times, a doctor – one thing Spike’s island home doesn’t have.  So he brings his sick mother to the mainland, in search of Kelson, hoping he’ll be able to cure her.  Along the way, they encounter a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), stranded in England after the patrol-ship he was on sunk off its coast.  They acquire a baby, birthed by an infected woman but somehow uninfected itself.  And, predictably, they have to contend with the infected.

 

These are mostly similar to the infected in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, but some have devolved and others evolved. There are swollen, leprous-skinned specimens called Slow Lows, crawling along the ground and stuffing their mouths with worms.  Conversely, there are also Alphas: hulking, superstrong, superfast and relatively more intelligent, all beard, hair and muscles (and large, swinging willies), with a penchant for not only ripping their victims’ heads off but for pulling their spines out through their neck-stumps.

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Well, I’ll say first of all that 28 Years Later certainly isn’t perfect.  It has much that’s inconsistent and illogical.  Firstly, scriptwriter Garland shifts the goalposts regarding the infected.  In the 2002 film, the survivors realise they only need to stay alive for the length of time it takes for the infected to starve to death because, basically, they’re too crazy to eat.  They bite and infect their victims but don’t munch on them.  In 28 Weeks Later, they have all starved to death and the US Army decide it’s safe to enter Britain.  When the virus strikes again, it’s because of a survivor (Catherine McCormack) who’s a medical anomaly – she unwittingly carries the virus without showing any symptoms of it.  In the new movie, though, it transpires the infected can eat.  They’ve sustained themselves mostly by preying on the red deer that now roam Britain in huge herds.

 

It’s Boyle and Garland’s franchise, so they can reboot it any way they like, I suppose.  But it’ll be interesting to see how they square this with the return in the upcoming sequels of Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later.

 

Also, the contagiousness of the infected’s bodily fluids that was so dangerous in the earlier films – Brendan Gleeson succumbs when a drop of blood falls into his eye in 28 Days Later, Robert Carlyle when he gets saliva on his lips in 28 Weeks Later – is disregarded here.  Humans cheerfully impale and hack at the infected at close quarters without fearing arterial sprays.  Taylor-Johnson encourages his son to fire arrows into the infected practically point-blank.  And I can’t see how a human embryo can gestate inside an infected mother for 40 weeks without the resulting baby emerging from the womb as a slavering, bite-y, red-eyed little monster itself.  Science goes out of the window sometimes.  The existence of the Alphas is explained as certain people reacting to the virus like they’re suddenly ‘on steroids’.  But I can’t imagine a virus transforming some of its victims into what are basically deranged versions of Jason Mamoa.

 

Other things are illogical too.  Fiennes’ character slathers himself in iodine until he’s almost as orange as Donald Trump because iodine seems to repel the virus.  In this post-apocalyptic world, where does he get all his iodine from?  He’s survived in the infected-infested wilderness for decades, gradually building his bone temple, but how?  He refers to a river helping to keep the infected at bay, but late on an Alpha comes stomping into his abode without any apparent difficulty.  And the temple’s centrepiece, a towering pillar of skulls, is alarmingly precarious when Alfie first encounters it.  He touches it and a few skulls immediately fall off.  Yet later, it’s strangely solid when Alfie has to climb to its very top.

 

But, despite all that, I did enjoy 28 Years Later and would probably give it eight out of ten.  Boyle orchestrates the horror sequences with customary panache, while the tension is leavened with both humour and pathos.  Much of the humour comes from Spike’s interactions with the Swedish soldier, who’s from an uninfected world where life has developed into the 2020s along lines we’re familiar with.  He talks of smartphones, being online, using delivery drivers and ladies having ‘work done’, all to the bewilderment of poor Spike (and to the amusement of the Singaporean audience with whom I saw the film).

 

© DNA Films / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

Meanwhile, there’s pathos when Spike finally gets his mum to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson.  The latter is not, as we’d expected, a dangerous madman like Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, but a thoughtful, pacifistic man who, with his bone temple, has found an unconventional way of dealing with and acknowledging the massive horror he’s witnessed around him.  And Kelson helps Spike learn some painful life lessons.  I thought Gleeson’s death in 28 Days Later, caused by a freak accident that wouldn’t have happened if he’d been standing a few inches to the side, was one of the saddest scenes in horror movies.  But there’s one here that equals or surpasses it for tragedy.

 

The performances greatly enhance the movie.  Young Alfie Williams is a revelation as Spike, likeable from the start, but getting more likeable as we follow him through the often difficult and harrowing learning curves the plot throws at him.  Taylor-Johnson is effective as Jamie, a man who’s a good dad but not a good husband, while Comer makes Isla a rounded and convincing character.  During those moments when the script lets her be cogent, we understand why Spike takes the risks he does in getting her to a doctor.  But Fiennes ultimately steals the show.  After the intensity of the movie’s first two-thirds, his appearance as the kindly Kelson is a relief, indicating that some humanity and decency has survived in this brutal world.

 

But I’m not happy about the film’s ending, especially as it comes so soon after Fiennes’ gravitas.  Its final minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar with the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).

 

One reason why I like 28 Years Later overall is its setting: northeast England, where I lived in the early 2000s.  The island the survivors are holed up on is actually Lindisfarne, Holy Island, which as far as I know hasn’t appeared in a film since Roman Polanksi directed Donald Pleasence in Cul-de-sac there in 1966.  I cycled to Lindisfarne once, and I can only assume that when Spike and Jamie go sprinting along the causeway to it in 28 Years Later, they don’t have a strong east wind blowing into their faces like I did when I struggled along it on my bike.  Here are a couple of photographs I took then:

 

 

Meanwhile, I’m no expert on northeastern accents and I couldn’t distinguish between a Geordie one, a Mackem one and a Smoggie one.  However, to me, most of the cast at least try to sound like they come from that part of the world, which is nice.

 

Also, the film is a welcome reminder of the northeast’s beautiful landscapes and I guess at least some of it was shot in Northumbria’s Kielder Forest.  Its depiction of local geography is rather barmy, though, giving the impression that you can walk in a few hours from Lindisfarne to the Angel of North (which is south of Gateshead) or to Sycamore Gap (which is off the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle, between Hexham and Haltwhistle).  Sycamore Gap hit the headlines in 2023 when the iconic sycamore tree there was cut down by a pair of morons who deserved to have their heads ripped off and their spines pulled out of their neck-stumps.  Sweetly, in 28 Years Later, Boyle digitally restores the tree because, in the movie’s timeline, that act of vandalism never happened.

 

This brings the series full circle for me because it was in northeast England that I originally saw 28 Days Later.  Indeed, I saw it at a special premiere event at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which both Boyle and Garland attended.  They introduced the film beforehand and answered questions from the audience afterwards.   Boyle seemed laidback and was even unruffled when a member of the Geordie audience told him he hadn’t liked the look of the film, shot on digital video cameras, at all.  Garland was more combative and sounded particularly pissed off when someone mentioned the makers of another 2002 zombie movie, Resident Evil, who’d claimed he’d copied the beginning of 28 Days Later from the beginning of their film.  Garland pointed out that both films were obviously inspired by the opening chapter of John Wyndham’s classic end-of-the-world novel Day of the Triffids (1951).

 

After the screening, I was tempted to put up my hand and ask Garland why the infected took so long to die.  If they were too crazy to eat, wouldn’t they be too crazy to drink too, and wouldn’t they die of thirst a lot sooner?  But I decided not to, not wanting to infect him with the rage virus.

 

© DNA Films / Fox Searchlight Pictures