MrM0untfield – Page 15 – Blood and Porridge

October 16, 2022October 24, 2022

More Wordsworth’s ghosts

© Wordsworth Editions

Another Halloween-inspired reposting about books of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories…

I’ve just read two more collections of ghost stories published in the excellent Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery and Imagination series. Other books in this series have featured work by still-celebrated writers like E.F. Benson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James and Edith Wharton; but also by writers like Gertrude Atherton, Amayas Northcote, J.H. Riddell and May Sinclair, who were prolific and / or acclaimed in their day but whose names slipped into obscurity following their deaths. Getting republished by Wordsworth Editions might, of course, help to rescue their names from obscurity.

The two latest Wordsworth collections I’ve read were both published in 2006. They are A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread by R. Murray Gilchrist and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew.

Firstly, I’ll talk about the collection I enjoyed less. R. Murray Gilchrist was born in Sheffield but lived for much of his life in Holmesfield, 800 feet up in Derbyshire’s Peak District. By the time of his death in 1917 at the age of 50, he was responsible for 22 novels and about 100 short stories. However, A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread is something of a misnomer because most of the stories featured don’t particularly evoke feelings of ‘dread’. Rather, they are tales of darkly gothic romance, where the atmosphere – and, alas, the prose – is often stiflingly thick.

These are stories where every building is an imposing structure with ‘stacks of twisted chimneys’ and ‘great square windows’ and is ‘a vision of gables’ that’s ‘so covered in ivy that from a distance it seems like a cluster of rare trees with ruddy trunks and branches’; where every garden is adorned with statues of satyrs, nymphs, dryads, dragons and the goddess Diana; and where the air is always suffused with the sickly-sweet smells of flowers, such as roses, lilies, honeysuckle, ‘withering snowdrops’ and ‘scarlet poppies, with hearts like fingers’ that effuse ‘a close and sleepy perfume’. The villain of the story The Manuscript of Francis Shackerley even gives off ‘a rich smell of violets’ and it’s said that ‘his skin by some artificial means had been impregnated lastingly with their odour.’

Unfortunately, Gilchrist’s writing is frequently hamstrung by melodrama (“O the midsummer noontide; the trembling air; the golden dusk that clung around the fir trunks!”) and is occasionally, clunkingly awful (“My thoughts had withered, my words had grown unpregnant”). There’s an attempt to emulate the morbid, decadent intensity found in such tales by Edgar Allan Poe as Berenice (1835), Ligeia (1938), The Oval Portrait (1842) and Eleonora (1850), but while characters indulge in much internal and external pontificating and running hither and thither to no great effect, the impression you get is one of bluster rather than of anything genuinely, dissolutely macabre. Some of the stories I found a real chore to get through.

Still, there are a few items where Gilchrist dials it down a bit and manages to strike a properly creepy note. The Lover’s Ordeal is a tale of a dare that unexpectedly ends up featuring a vampire. The Grotto at Ravensdale sees a newly married couple encounter tragedy at the titular, and haunted, cavern. The Priest’s Pavan is about a harpsichordist forced to play some demonic music at a wedding party. And A Night on the Moor itself is an atmospheric piece where the main character experiences a time-slip.

Also, two additional stories, The Panicle and The Witch in the Peak, are tagged on in an appendix at the end. Presumably this is because they eschew the aristocratic characters, lavishly gothic settings and rather po-faced tone of the other stories and instead have straightforward and refreshingly humorous narratives where working-class people experience supernatural goings-on in the Peak District. The 19-century Derbyshire dialect is rather hard to decipher, but I enjoyed these two stories more than anything else in the collection and would have liked more with their flavour.

© Wordsworth Editions

Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer is more modest in its ambitions and I have to say I found it the more enjoyable read because of that. It has eight stories, all connected by the recurring character of Aylmer Vance – ‘a curious-looking man, tall and lean in build, with a pale but distinctly interesting face’ – who as the title indicates is sensitive to paranormal activity and acts as a supernatural detective, trying to explain and put an end to hauntings suffered by other people. The narrator, however, is an acquaintance of Vance’s called Dexter. Vance tells the first three stories to Dexter, then Dexter becomes an unwilling participant in the fourth one, and then for the remaining four stories joins forces with Vance and serves as a Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

There’s nothing spectacular here, but there are some imaginative ideas – the fire-raising ghost of a frustrated poet in The Fire Unquenchable, for example, or the malevolent spirit of a pianist using his music to haunt the woman he lusted after when alive in The Indissoluble Bond. Meanwhile, The Stranger, about a young woman attracted to a mysterious figure she encounters in a local wood, is a nicely pagan affair with a hint of Arthur Machen; and the final story, The Fear, is impressively oppressive and ‘does what it says on the tin’.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Aylmer Vance as much as I might have done. This was because a year earlier I’d read a Wordsworth Editions collection called Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, written by William Hope Hodgson, which was a set of tales about, yes, another supernatural detective called Thomas Carnacki. The Carnacki stories were good enough to have influenced later writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley and the Vance stories can’t help but seem a little pedestrian in comparison.

Aylmer Vance also suffers from a problem that’s inevitable when you have a series of supernatural stories that are mostly self-contained and have different elements (ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, etc.) but also have the thread of a recurring character. If paranormal activity does happen, it must happen incredibly rarely. Otherwise scientists would have observed and recorded it and acknowledged its existence by now. So how does someone like Vance manage to defy all laws of probability and have eight full-blooded encounters with the supernatural in its different forms? William Hope Hodgson at least seemed aware of this credibility problem, for he interspersed his genuinely supernatural Carnacki stories with ones where the hauntings turn out to be hoaxes.

Vance writers Alice and Claude Askew, incidentally, were a husband-and-wife team who supposedly penned over 90 novels during a 14-year period in the early 20^th century. During World War One, they found themselves in Serbia and later in Greece, working at a British field hospital and then for the Serbian Red Cross and also writing war despatches for publications like the Daily Express. Like R. Murray Gilchrist, they died in 1917 but in a particularly tragic manner. Both were killed while they were travelling from Italy to Corfu, when their boat was torpedoed by a German submarine. Claude’s body was never found. However, Alice’s body was recovered and she’s buried on the Croatian island of Korčula.

October 14, 2022October 24, 2022

Wordsworth’s ghosts

© Wordsworth Editions

I’ve just realised that two-and-a-half weeks from now it’ll be Halloween. Therefore, as I usually do at this time of year, I’ll be posting a few entries on this blog about the dark, the spooky, the supernatural and the macabre. To begin with, here’s something I originally wrote in 2019 about three collections of ghostly tales by three forgotten writers of yesteryear.

I’ve read a lot of 19^th century ghost stories recently. These have featured in collections published by Wordsworth Editions in its series Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural, which I’ve picked up in various library clearance sales and second-hand bookshops. The last time I checked, Wordsworth’s Mystery and the Supernatural series consisted of 80 different titles and they’re an admirable balance between works by authors who are well-known, like H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Edgar Wallace, Edith Wharton and Henry James, and works by authors who aren’t – or, in some cases, were famous once but have now disappeared off the reading public’s radar. By acquainting modern readers with writers in the latter category, the series performs an invaluable service. It was through reading one of its books a few years ago, for instance, that I discovered the excellent but now neglected writer May Sinclair, about whom I wrote here.

Anyway, I’ve just finished reading Wordsworth collections by Amayas Northcote, Gertrude Atherton and J.H. Riddell. How do their ghost stories measure up?

Amayas Northcote is the most elusive figure of the three. His Wikipedia entry merely states that he was the seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, who was Benjamin Disraeli’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; he was a businessman in Chicago at one time and a Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire at another; and he “wrote ghost stories in the line of those of M.R. James, which were compiled in his only book, In Ghostly Company.” One likely reason why Company was Northcote’s only book was because it was published in 1921 and he died soon afterwards in 1923, before he had much chance to follow it with further fiction, ghostly or otherwise.

I have to admit that while I found Northcote’s stories enjoyable, most of them feel a bit run-of-the-mill. Often, as in the case of Mr Kershaw and Mr Wilcox, The Late Earl of D., The Steps and The Governess’s Story, they involve manifestations of the supernatural linked to murders, untimely deaths and disappearances. The two most interesting stories are those that stray furthest from the formula. The Downs deals with a secluded stretch of British countryside that, one night a year, becomes the scene of a haunting on a spectacular scale; while The Late Mrs Fowke strays unexpectedly into the realms of devil worship and reads like a prototype for the occult potboilers that Dennis Wheatley would start writing little more than a decade later.

© Wordsworth Editions

Considerably greater in range and ambition are the stories of American author Gertrude Atherton collected in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, originally published in 1905. These are tales that are by turns grisly (The Striding Place), phantasmagorical (The Dead and the Countess) and imbued with a psychological intensity reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe (Death and the Woman).

Some aren’t supernatural at all but are grim character studies. A Monarch of a Small Survey is about a sad and frumpy lady’s companion who suffers the double misfortune of being cut out of her employer’s will and becoming futilely besotted with a younger man. Similarly, The Tragedy of a Snob looks at the gulf between the haves and have nots, chronicling the efforts of a man of limited means to gain access to the world of high society. And The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number is about a physician who convinces himself that by eliminating the life of one worthless person he can improve the lives of all the decent people who’ve been blighted by her – but finds the execution of the deed harder than he’d expected. Simply but compellingly set up, The Greatest Good feels like a Roald Dahl story with a stern moral conscience.

I have to say, though, that my respect for Atherton was diminished by the inclusion of A Prologue, which is presented as the first part of an unfinished play. It’s a brooding, gothic piece set on a West Indian island about to be pulverised by a hurricane and is slightly reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It’s also racist, with a household’s black slaves cowering and wailing pathetically on the floor while their white owners stomp around, cursing them for their superstitious uselessness and trying to secure the premises without their help. Yes, I know the work simply reflects the attitudes of white people towards slaves and slavery back then and should be taken as being ‘of its time’. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’d been looking forward to J.H. Riddell’s Night Shivers, a volume that contains 14 short stories and is rounded off with a short novel, The Uninhabited House, which was first published in 1875. This was because Riddell originated in Northern Ireland, like I did. She was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1832 and lived there until 1855, when she and her mother moved to London. She remained in England until her death in 1906 and during the intervening years established herself as a prolific author. Her Wikipedia entry lists some 40 novels and a half-dozen short story collections.

I’d been hoping that Ms Riddell’s ghostly fiction would have a strong Irish flavour and, occasionally, it does – to good effect. The Last of Squire Ennismore sees a dissolute Irish landowner come to an infernal end for his misdeeds, through the agency of a mysterious stranger with ‘an ambling sort of gait, curious to look at’ who leaves cloven hoof-prints on the sand of the local beach. Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning features that most Irish of supernatural creature, the banshee, though in the incongruous (but effective) setting of a Victorian London hospital. And Conn Kilrea features another Irish family haunted by a spectral, though non-banshee, harbinger of death.

However, most of the stories take place in England and, because I’ve read countless other English ghost stories over the year, their scenarios seem very familiar and they have the same generic feel as Amyas Northcote’s work. Riddell enjoys presenting her ghosts and supernatural phenomena as puzzles that the living characters have to solve. Invariably, they turn out to be traces and echoes of nefarious incidents – usually murders – that once upon a time occurred in the ‘real’ world.

One thing I like about Riddell’s fiction is her depiction of unusually (for the era) feisty and unconventional female characters, even if they come across as somewhat grotesque. The most notable of these are Miss Gostock, the hard-working, hard-bargain-driving and hard-drinking landlady in Nut Bush Farm; and the formidable Miss Blake, ‘the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and a Connaught father’ who ‘had ingeniously contrived to combine in her person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both’, in The Uninhabited House.

Also, I like how she portrays the main character in Walnut-Tree House. He’s an unpretentious fellow who comes into possession of a haunted property in London after spending years as a ‘digger’ in the Australian goldfields. The snobby Londoners he has dealings with disdain him as ‘a rough sort of fellow’ who’s ‘boorish’ and has ‘never mixed with good society’. But when he encounters the ghost in his house, that of a child, he doesn’t react as characters normally do in these stories and cringe or flee in terror. Instead, he feels sorry for the poor child’s ghost and resolves to find a way to make it rest in peace.

© Wordsworth Editions

October 10, 2022November 1, 2022

Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

© Filmhouse Trading Limited

During the two decades since I last lived in Edinburgh, I’ve spent a lot of time bellyaching about the fact that, for a city that likes to advertise itself as home to the world’s biggest annual cultural festival, Edinburgh has seemed ridiculously determined to rid itself of its live-music venues and make itself about as musically vibrant as, say, Luton.

Those two decades have seen the demise of such venues, or part-time or occasional venues, as the Cas Rock, the Tap O’ Lauriston, the Venue, the HMV Picturehouse, Electric Circus, the Citrus Club and – one of my favourite Auld Reekie hangouts – Studio 24. At one point, I even felt compelled to write on this blog: “So, music lovers of Edinburgh… Your once proud city has fallen… into the hands of a bunch of suits, nimbies and money-chasing ghouls whose iPods are no doubt crammed with Ed Sheeran, James Blunt and Coldplay songs and whose idea of musical edginess is probably to tuck into a salad in the Hard Rock Café while a paunchy, balding cover band play Hotel California in the corner.”

Now, sadly, the blight that’s struck down Edinburgh’s live music scene seems to have infected its film scene too, for last Thursday the news broke that the charity Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) had filed for bankruptcy, with the result that the city’s Filmhouse Cinema, which the CMI has run since 2010, is closing immediately. This has also meant the abrupt end of the 75-year-old Edinburgh Film Festival, the oldest continually-running film festival in the world, and the closure of the Belmont, the Filmhouse’s sister cinema in Aberdeen.

The Filmhouse is, or was, what’s commonly known as an ‘arthouse’ cinema. ‘Arthouse’ is a label I hate, as it suggests a place showing pretentious movies made by pretentious people who consider themselves ‘artistes’ rather than mere filmmakers – incidentally, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) get my vote as the most up-their-own-arses films ever made. But it’s not about artiness. In reality, an ‘arthouse’ cinema is often the only place in your neighbourhood where films a little offbeat, non-Hollywood and daring to use a language that isn’t English have a chance of being seen. That’s while the multiplexes restrict themselves to showing movies about masked and / or caped vigilantes possessing superpowers, with lots of CGI and cameos by Stan Lee.

Unlike what’s happened to many of the music venues I mentioned above, the Filmhouse’s sad fate isn’t the result of corporate greed, gentrification, nimbyism and hostility or indifference on the part of the local authorities – although in these straitened times, I doubt if Edinburgh City Council will be swooping to the Filmhouse’s rescue. Rather, as this recent piece by Mark Cousins in the Guardian makes clear, the cinema’s demise was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of economic and cultural factors: the huge hike in energy bills that’s currently panicking everyone in the UK bar the super-rich (you know, those people whom Liz Truss wanted to give generous tax cuts to), the loss of custom incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and the slow return of custom afterwards, younger people preferring to watch movies on streaming services at home, and older people becoming, well, older and less likely to go out.

Besides offering you the opportunity to see certain films on a big screen that you wouldn’t otherwise see there, what makes cinemas like the Filmhouse precious is that they allow you to come out of the closet as a film nerd. They’re obviously run by folk with a genuine love for movies and, on their premises, you know you’re surrounded by like-minded punters too. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to live in several cities blessed with such establishments. I have happy memories of them and can still reel off the films I watched on their screens.

© Theater Kino

For example, in the Japanese city of Sapporo, there was the Theater Kino, which coincidentally must have been one of the smallest cinemas in the country. At it, I remember seeing David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog (1992), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and – yay! – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996). At Cinema City in Norwich, I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009), Tom Hooper’s The Damned United (2009) and Sasha Gervasi’s hilarious but gruelling heavy metal documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008). And at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon Tyne, I saw Kitano Takeshi’s Zatōishi (2003), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), and, before it went on general release, a special screening of 28 Days Later (2002) attended by director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland, who answered questions from the audience afterwards. (I wanted to ask them how, if the rage-infected zombies had become so angry that they stopped eating food and eventually died of hunger, they didn’t also stop drinking water and die of thirst first, which would have ended the zombie apocalypse much sooner. However, not wanting to rain on Danny and Alex’s parade, I didn’t.)

© Tyneside Cinema

I feel a bit hypocritical pontificating about the loss of the Filmhouse because it’s been a long time since I set foot there – as far as I can remember, the last movie I saw in it was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2016. But I have an excuse. For much of the last dozen years I’ve been living in Africa and Asia. Still, with the Filmhouse’s closure, as with the closure of many a lovely old pub or lovely old shop, I suspect there’s currently a lot of people expressing outrage and grief about it on social media and in below-the-line comments on news websites who actually haven’t bought a ticket and watched anything on its premises for many years. Unfortunately, there’s truth in the old capitalist adage: “If you don’t want to lose it… use it.”

Here’s a link to an online petition expressing support for the Filmhouse, Belmont and Edinburgh Film Festival and the 102 cinema and festival workers who have just lost their jobs. And if there is an unexpectedly happy ending, and someone with deep, movie-loving pockets steps in and pulls the Filmhouse back from the brink, let’s hope folk show their appreciation by going to it and putting their bums on its seats again.

October 3, 2022October 10, 2022

Lanka metal

One recurrent thought I’ve had during Sri Lanka’s recent slide into economic and political calamity is: “Christ, I hope all the heavy metal guys are okay.” Here’s an updated version of some material I put on this blog in the past about the Sri Lankan heavy metal scene, which helped keep me musically sane during my eight years in the country.

When I arrived in Sri Lanka in 2014, I accepted there’d be certain things I’d gain from the move and certain things I’d lose from it. Among the gains would be the following: sunshine, warmth, delicious spicy food, lots of interesting Buddhist and Hindu temples to explore, access to gorgeous beaches, access to the equally gorgeous Hill Country of the island’s interior, and a chance to see an occasional elephant. Among the losses… Well, I assumed one thing absent from my new life in Sri Lanka would be the opportunity to hear my favourite musical genre played live. No, I definitely didn’t expect to attend any heavy metal gigs there.

Indeed, I imagined the only live music I’d come across would be (1) traditional Sri Lankan music – absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course; and (2) cover versions of the Eagles, Bryan Adams and Lionel Ritchie played by hotel bands to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters in the country’s holiday resorts – absolutely everything wrong with that.

But one of the pleasantest surprises of my years in Sri Lanka was the discovery that the country has actually a thriving heavy metal scene. Lanka metal is really a thing. Here’s a quick round-up of my favourite headbangers on the island.

Let’s start with probably my favourite Sri Lankan band, Paranoid Earthling. Their Wikipedia entry describes them as a ‘grunge, experimental, psychedelic, stoner rock, heavy metal’ band from Kandy. They started life in 2001 and one of their assets is their spandex-wrapped vocalist Mirshad Buckman, who has the enviable double-advantage of looking a bit like the late, great Ronnie James Dio and sounding a bit like the equally late, great Bon Scott. Well, to me, anyway – admittedly after I’d downed a few pints.

I saw Paranoid Earthling several times and Buckman’s attitude was always entertaining. My first experience of them was in a Colombo pub called the Keg in 2017, when Buckman led the band onstage with a welcoming cry of “How ya motherfuckas doin’ tonight?” Whereas the last time I saw them was at a concert called Colombo Open Air 2019, held just before Christmas on the premises of the quaintly named Otter Aquatic Club (actually a private club with swimming and other sports facilities, just off Bauddhaloka Mawatha in Colombo 7). During Open Air 2019, Buckman was in a memorably grumpy mood and railed between songs against the Sri Lankan media and the low standards of its journalists. I’m glad he didn’t glance behind him. Otherwise, he’d have seen a flashing screen at the back of the stage, advertising the concert’s sponsors, who included the Ceylon Today newspaper.

Among Paranoid Earthling’s best songs are Open up the Gates with its twiddly, thumping guitar sound; the punky, foot-tapping Rock n’ Roll is my Anarchy; and Deaf Blind Dumb, which borrows its stompy bits from Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People but is still a blast played live.

Slightly older than Paranoid Earthling are Stigmata, on the go since 1998. I saw them perform a couple of small-scale gigs at the Floor by O bar, next to the grounds of Colombo Cricket Club, and at the 2017 Lanka Comic Con. (In these much-changed times, I wonder if Comic Con will ever happen again.) Stigmata are responsible for an impressive sound that, to me at least, combines the best of Iron Maiden and Sepultura, and their frontman Suresh de Silva is an intelligent, well-read and amusing chap – check out his twitter feed. Other current Stigmata members include the splendidly named Tennyson Napoleon.

That said, I should point out that at Stigmata gigs you may have to wait a while between songs – because the garrulous de Silva does like to talk. And talk, and talk… Well, Sri Lankans generally seem to enjoy a good blether. Totally unlike the Irish, of course.

For a heavier sound – death and black metal – check out the Genocide Shrines, whose ‘lyrical themes’ according the Metal Archives website include ‘tantra / spiritual warfare’, ‘death’ and, er, ‘arrack’. I suppose after you’ve spent all day waging tantra and spiritual warfare, and staring death in the face, you need to relax with a glass of arrack. Aside from their juggernaut sound, their most memorable feature is their fondness for wearing scary masks onstage, Slipknot-style. Though I have to say I was a bit disappointed when I saw them live one time and at their set’s end they ‘rewarded’ their fans by taking their masks off and revealing themselves to be ordinary-looking blokes. That spoiled the mystique somewhat.

Real old timers of the Lanka metal scene are Whirlwind, established in 1995. I own a copy of their 2003 album Pain, though in my opinion their recorded material doesn’t prepare you for the impressively intense, immersive, even hypnotic sound they conjure up live. I’ve seen them perform twice, at Shalika Hall – more on which in a moment – and at the afore-mentioned Colombo Open Air 2019. Due to scheduling issues at the latter event, they hadn’t had time to do a proper soundcheck beforehand and were forced to give ongoing instructions to the audio engineer between songs. They were understandably peeved, though I didn’t think this affected the quality of their music at all.

The other metal bands I saw during my time in Sri Lanka were Neurocracy, Mass Damnation, Abyss and a couple of young up-and-coming outfits who equally impressed and amused me with their boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them. In between their songs they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…” And then a minute later they were emitting blood-curdling throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F**k! F**k! F**k!”

Much of what I saw live was at the Shalika Hall on Park Road in Colombo 5, which wasn’t my favourite venue. For one thing, it didn’t really have sidewalls. Both sides of the auditorium opened onto small outside compounds with dilapidated toilets at their ends. This meant the acoustics weren’t great because a lot of the sound seeped out into the night. Conversely, and especially if you turned up at the wrong part of the evening, a great many mosquitoes got in. There were also surreal moments when big bats flapped in from one side, crossed above the heads of the audience and flapped out of the other side – sights that’d be more appropriate for a goth concert than a metal one. Needless to say, the place didn’t have a bar, though you could pop across the road and buy something at the liquor section of the local Food City supermarket.

The Otter Aquatic Club, which hosted the Colombo Open Air 2019 festival, my final experience of Sri Lankan metal, was a much better venue. It provided a pleasant open courtyard with a covered stage for the bands and some other roofed-over spaces (including a makeshift bar) where the audience could shelter if it started to rain. Meanwhile, the Club evidently made efforts to keep its premises mosquito-free because I didn’t see (or feel) one of the bitey wee bastards all night.

I was hoping more heavy metal events would be staged at the club but, of course, fate intervened a couple of months later with the arrival of Covid-19, which put the country’s live music scene into hibernation for two years… And after that came the Rajapaksa-engineered economic and political collapse of 2022, which nearly left the country comatose. Still, I’m seeing flickers of heavy metal life re-emerging now, with upcoming gigs advertised on a few of the above-mentioned bands’ Facebook pages. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, guys, thanks for leaving me with some fond, Sri Lankan live-music memories… and with an agreeable metallic buzz in my ears.

September 18, 2022October 24, 2022

It’s all gone J.G.

© Fay Godwin / The Paris Review

Recent events have inspired me to update and repost this, which first appeared on this blog in 2019, on the tenth anniversary of J.G. Ballard’s death.

The visionary writer James Graham Ballard, known to his readers as ‘J.G.’, officially succumbed to prostate cancer and ceased to be a presence in our universe in April 2009. However, the past 13 years have been so baroquely and surreally insane that at times I’ve had a troubling thought. In 2009, did Ballard cease to exist in the universe or did the reverse happen? Did the universe stop existing as a physical entity at that moment and, since then, has it continued only as a figment of J.G. Ballard’s imagination?

Could we be living now as ghosts in Ballard’s fiction without realising it?

Recent historical trends have suggested this is not merely a crazy hypothesis on my part. The fact that people are finally talking seriously about the dire threat to human civilisation posed by global warming – talking seriously but, alas, still doing very little about it – makes me think of Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World, where climate change has jacked up the temperatures, melted the ice caps, inundated London with water and turned the city into a balmy and hallucinogenic landscape of lagoons and tropical flora and fauna; or the following year’s novel with the self-explanatory title The Drought; or his 1961 short story Deep End, where ‘oxygen mining’ has drained the oceans and a few remaining humans skulk around their dried-out beds at night-time, when the heat and radiation levels aren’t as lethal as they are in the daytime.

Meanwhile, our ever-spiralling-out-of-control and ecologically suicidal dependency on the internal combustion engine, and the social maladies (like road rage) that go with it, make me think of 1973’s Crash – the initial manuscript of which caused one publisher’s reader to splutter, “This author is beyond psychiatric help.” Whereas the increasing fragmentation of society through the proliferation of social media platforms and devices brings to mind Ballard’s short story The Intensive Care Unit, which turned up in the 1982 collection Myths of the Near Future and contained the prophetic line, “All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.” And the tendency among the elite to shut themselves off in gated communities, where they not only relax, play and sleep but also, increasingly, work, evokes such novels as 1975’s High Rise and 2000’s Super-Cannes – where in both cases the set-up memorably ends in tears.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

More generally, spending a few minutes channel-surfing through TV’s 24/7 news outlets is enough to make you feel you’re inhabiting Ballard’s experimental, narrative-less collage of ‘condensed novels’, 1970’s aptly-titled The Atrocity Exhibition. And the sorry state of America, where the now openly authoritarian Republican Party could easily win the presidency in 2024 and return Donald Trump to the White House, reminds me of his 1981 novel Hello America, which has an ecologically devastated USA run by someone calling himself ‘President Charles Manson’.

And as I witness the madness of Brexit in the UK, facilitated by a cadre of rich, privately-educated posh-boys like Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson, I can think of half-a-dozen Ballard stories that have rich, privately-educated Britishers losing their marbles, becoming unhinged and embracing chaos and catastrophe.

Indeed, events in the UK at the moment, with all of its media, most of its politicians and a large part of its public indulging in near-deranged displays of grief over the death of a 96-year-old lady worth something between 370 and 500 million pounds while the country totters into a potentially disastrous cost-of-living crisis, are all very ‘Ballardian’. ‘The Queue’ – the term applied to the line of mourners spending 24 hours shuffling across ten kilometres of London in order to view the Queen’s coffin at Westminster Abbey – could easily have been the title, and plot-premise, of one of Ballard’s novels or short stories. Meanwhile, the much-publicised behaviour of the Centre Parcs holiday-villages company, which first tried to evict its vacationing residents on the day of the Queen’s funeral, then relented but warned them to stay inside their lodges on the day, prompted author Paul McAuley to send out a tweet slightly rephrasing Ballard’s most famous opening sentence, the one that kicked off High Rise: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this Centre Parcs village the previous three months.”

Occasionally, the idea that we could be living unawares in a giant virtual-reality system dreamed into existence by J.G. Ballard strikes me on a personal level. For example, while I was living in Tunisia just after the 2011 revolution and the advent of the so-called Arab Spring, I arranged one afternoon to meet up with friends in Carthage, the swankiest of Tunis’s suburbs. My friends hadn’t appeared yet when I got off at the TCM station, next door to Carthage’s branch of the French supermarket-chain Monoprix. So, I waited there and passed the time by reading a few pages of Ballard’s final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come. It took me a minute to notice that the Monoprix was closed. And not just closed. During the revolution, it’d been trashed and looted and left a razed shell. Its ruins looked sinisterly incongruous in the middle of this plush neighbourhood of high white walls and thick iron gates, four-by-fours and swimming pools, orange trees and jasmine plants. And what was Kingdom Come about? A community succumbing to dystopian chaos thanks to the arrival of a fancy new shopping centre.

It’s been claimed that Ballard’s writing wasn’t influenced so much by other fiction (except perhaps that of William S. Burroughs) as by visual forces like surrealism and Dadaism and the ‘media landscape’ of modern-day advertising and consumerism. But I have to say I find him a very traditional author in some ways. Reality may be crumbling around the edges of his scenarios, but at the same time he shows an admirable commitment to telling a gripping, old-fashioned yarn. Stiff-upper-lipped British types – emotionally-repressed, able only to address each other by their surnames as if they were still back at boarding school – have adventures in exotic locales while they try to do the right thing, though as some hallucinogenic apocalypse unfolds and madness leaks into their thought processes, they invariably end up doing the wrong thing.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

Ballard’s work calls to mind – my mind, anyway – the work of another storyteller not adverse to spicing his highbrow themes with derring-do and intrigue, Graham Greene. Indeed, I’ve sometimes thought of Greene as a mirror image of Ballard. That’s with Greene in the real world, though, posing before a fairground mirror and with Ballard as his warped, twisted reflection. While Greene’s characters are usually tortured by Catholicism, Ballard’s usually have to contend with creeping and finally overwhelming psychosis.

And besides Greene, another literary influence on Ballard is surely Joseph Conrad. I wouldn’t say Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) lurks in the DNA of every Ballard story, but a good many of them feature darkness of some form and, yes, a character who feels duty-bound to journey into the heart of it. When I was in my mid-teens, the first book by Ballard I ever read was his short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964) and its opening story, A Question of Re-entry, begins with these deliciously Conradian lines: “All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by two o’clock had covered some 75 miles… Now and then the channel would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic sky, the islands of rotten balsa logs refracted by the layers of haze like the drifting archipelagos of a dream. Then the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle darkness enveloped the launch.”

Those introductory lines so captivated me that, from that moment on, I was completely hooked on Ballard’s work.

Now, 40 years later, I still haven’t quite read everything by him. For the record, though, here are my favourite things among what I have read. Among his novels, The Drowned World, Crash, High Rise, Hello America, Empire of the Sun (1984) and Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Good though his novels are, I think his short fiction is even better. Picking a favourite dozen from his short stories is a near-impossible task, but I’ll have a go. Off the top of my head, I would nominate A Question of Re-entry, Deep End, The Illuminated Man – later expanded into the 1966 novel The Crystal World – and The Drowned Giant from The Terminal Beach; Chronopolis, The Garden of Time and The Watch Towers from the collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963); Concentration City and Now Wakes the Sea from The Disaster Area (1967); The Smile from Myths of the Near Future; and The Enormous Space and The Air Disaster from War Fever (1990).

Meanwhile, of his 19 novels, I have yet to read 1961’s The Wind from Nowhere, 1988’s Running Wild and 1996’s Cocaine Nights. And there’s at least one of his short story collections, 1976’s Low-Flying Aircraft, that I haven’t read either. Which is good. I might be an old git now, but I’m glad that reading some new stuff by J.G. Ballard is still one of the things I can look forward to in life.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

September 12, 2022

A second homecoming for Jim Mountfield

© The Horror Zine

A collection of scary short fiction entitled The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years has just gone on sale. Its 31 short stories first appeared in the ezine The Horror Zine between 2013 and 2020 and were picked for this collection by its editor and assistant editor, Jeani Rector and Dean H. Wild. The stories include Coming Home, something I wrote under my horror-writer pseudonym of Jim Mountfield and originally published in The Horror Zine in 2014.

Coming Home is basically an old-fashioned haunted house story, but with a dash of extra flavour in that it deals with parallel universes too. The story was inspired by an irrational fear I sometimes experienced when I was 11 or 12 years old. My family had just moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and we were living in a new – well, new for us, though technically the building was old – house that wasn’t yet fully renovated or furnished. Compared to our former house in Northern Ireland, for a while at least, it just didn’t feel homely. That’s ‘homely’ in the British sense of the word, meaning ‘cosy and comfortable’, not the American sense, meaning ‘unattractive in appearance’.

Meanwhile, my parents, no doubt feeling slightly dislocated and lonely, managed to track down a few other Northern Irish families who’d moved to Scotland over the years and were living within driving distance of us. It was customary to invite these folk to lunch, or to be invited to their houses for lunch, on Sundays. Northern Irish protocols of hospitality being what they are (think Mrs Doyle in Father Ted), and the Northern Irish propensity for blethering being what it is, these ‘lunches’ would invariably extend to tea in the late afternoon, and to dinner in the evening. If you were an adult and not the designated driver, a fair bit of whisky was consumed too. It was usually late when the visitors headed home and, if we were being entertained in somebody else’s house, we frequently didn’t get back until after midnight.

And as a kid, after we finally arrived home on those dark Sunday nights, I felt distinctly uneasy. My parents would unlock the front door and we’d enter a black, silent house that we hadn’t yet got accustomed to living in. Amid the darkness and silence, just before someone found the switches and the lights came on, I’d hear an internal voice telling me: “This is not our house!”

And if it wasn’t our house, whose was it? Who – or what – was already living there? That’s a childhood fear that, nearly 40 years later, I tried to explore in Coming Home.

The Best of the Horror Zine: The Middle Years can be obtained on kindle or as a paperback here.

September 11, 2022September 12, 2022

London Bridge is down

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

London Bridge is down. No, I’m not referring to a movie that stars Gerald Butler. I’m talking about the code-phrase used to communicate the news of the monarch’s death to the British government, police, armed forces and broadcasters, triggering the start of an elaborate and much-prepared plan that oversees the monarch’s funeral, the period of national mourning and the coronation of a successor. Those words were sent to the British establishment earlier this week, for September 8^th saw the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96.

Not long ago, at the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I expressed my thoughts about the British monarchy on this blog. Namely that, while monarchies might work for other European countries, slimmed-down monarchies in countries with fewer historical neuroses and fewer modern delusions than Britain, the British monarchy just seemed to epitomise and encourage so much stupidity, unfairness and obsequiousness that it wasn’t worth conserving.

That’s been my view for most of my life. Admittedly, for a few years around the 2012 London Olympics I took a slightly more benevolent view of the institution: “…my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect.” This was “partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run….”

Furthermore, Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics had temporarily fooled me into believing “that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.”

By the time of her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, however, and with the country infected by the jingoistic and backward-looking craziness of Brexit, which called to mind not Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony but Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002), my tune had changed. Britain had become such a basket-case that if it was to survive in any sane form, it needed drastic surgery carried out on its many, ridiculously-archaic institutions. This included the abolition of its monarchy.

And I’m afraid the Platinum Jubilee’s sequel to the Queen’s hook-up with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics, which featured her having tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear, didn’t work for me. Paddington, after all, was an immigrant who’d arrived undocumented from Peru and, in the rabid atmosphere of 2022 Britain, Priti Patel would probably have stuck him on a plane and flown him off to Rwanda for ‘processing’. Also, I thought it must have been terrifying for poor Paddington to find himself in a palace guarded by men wearing the skins of his relatives on top of their heads.

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

The next days – weeks, months – will showcase all the idiocies that afflict modern-but-monarchist Britain. The Queen’s funeral and the coronation of son Charles will be a never-ending ordeal of Ruritanian faff and ritualistic flummery. Many Britons, of course, approve of this and believe it represents threads of tradition that run back to the country’s distant past. Actually, much of this arcane pomp was devised by that randy old goat Edward VII at the start of the last century. I find it fascinating, incidentally, that one of Edward VII’s many mistresses was Alice Keppel, great-grandmother of a certain Camilla Parker-Bowles.

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

There will also be tsunamis of sanctimonious and sycophantic drivel written and broadcast about the Queen by the toadies, grovellers, cap-doffers, forelock-tuggers and brown-nosers that infest Britain’s mainstream media. One of life’s great ironies is that the media currently churning out drooling eulogies about the wonderfulness of the departed monarch was the same media that made life hell for many of her family’s members. Her ex-daughter-in-law wouldn’t have died in a car-crash in 1997 if there hadn’t been a fleet of paparazzi pursuing her, desperate for photos to sell to the tabloids. Incessant media hounding and tittle-tattle was a major reason why Prince Harry chose to bail out of the royal circus. And who can blame him? If British journalistic hacks thought they could accuse his wife Meghan Markle of murdering the Queen and get away with it, they would.

And inevitably, the Queen’s passing will add a tankerload of fuel to the culture-war fires that have burned across Britain since 2016 and Brexit. Already, social media has been overrun by people, swivel of eye and gammon-pink of complexion, desperate to weaponise her death against the woke, lefty snowflakes they hate so much. Spencer Morgan, son of the dreaded Piers Morgan and a supposed champion of free speech, opined the other day: “Sad thing is there will be people in this country celebrating this. They’re the ones we need to focus on deporting.” Correction: a champion only of free speech he agrees with. In his case, obviously, the blighted apple hasn’t fallen far from the twisted old tree.

Meanwhile, Henry Bolton, embarrassingly short-lived leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (he lasted less than five months), expressed his disgust that “most British schools no longer teach their pupils the National Anthem, or fly the Union flag” and called on Liz Truss to “issue an instruction to all schools to rectify this omission, and do so prior to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.” Funnily enough, I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s and I don’t remember being taught the National Anthem or seeing the Union Jack flying back then. And a couple of my schools were attended by Northern Irish Protestants, generally the most Queen-adoring, flag-respecting folk in the UK.

Meanwhile, at this moment, I’m sure social media accounts are being scoured the length and breadth of the country. This is as right-wing journalists, politicians and rabble-rousers search for any off-message disloyalty towards Her Majesty expressed by supporters of political parties they disapprove of (Labour, the Scottish National Party, the Greens), members of news outlets they disapprove of (Novara Media), fans of football clubs they disapprove of (Liverpool, Celtic), comedians they disapprove of (Joe Lycett), etc., intent on starting a holy war if they find something. Already on twitter, I’ve seen one right-wing gobshite fulminate at Jeremy Corbyn for, in a tweeted tribute to the Queen, reminiscing that he “enjoyed discussing our families, gardens and jam-making with her.” Clearly, it was okay for Paddington Bear to discuss marmalade with the recently deceased Her Majesty, but not okay for Jeremy Corbyn to discuss jam with her.

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

Thanks to all the patriotic breast-beating and blabber, this is a golden opportunity too for newly-anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss and her government, a government in which talent is not so much lacking as non-existent, to sweep under the carpet the multiple crises facing the country. Mind you, as those crises include skyrocketing energy bills and inflation, Brexit’s crippling of the economy, the war in Ukraine, the potential arrival of new, deadlier Covid variants and the climate-change emergency, the bulge created under the carpet will be pretty huge. The right-wing mainstream media will aid and abet this. Already, we’ve had the BBC’s Clive Myrie dismiss the energy-bill calamity as ‘insignificant’ compared to the royal news.

Personally, I won’t be grieving over the Queen’s departure, though I feel slightly sad to see her go. That’s mainly because I liked the fact that she’d been a living link with so much history. She was the last surviving world leader to have served (admittedly tenuously) during World War II – she’d been a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). She’d met 13 out of the 14 past US presidents, kicking off with Harry Truman, missing out on Lyndon B. Johnson for some reason, and surviving her encounter with the hideous, ignorant, orange-skinned one. She came face to face with Marilyn Monroe when, coincidentally, both of them were 30.

She also had to deal with 15 UK prime ministers, firstly Winston Churchill and finally Liz Truss, which doesn’t suggest there’s been any progress in intellect and ability in British politics during the last 70 years. Quite the reverse. By the way, I’m glad she managed to outlast Boris Johnson’s premiership by a couple of days. Perhaps it was her wish not to have that bloviating narcissist hogging the limelight as PM during her mourning and funeral that kept her going until September 8^th.

I should add that I feel that same sense of historical loss whenever someone very old passes away. When I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I knew an elderly lady who could recall the days when Victoria had been on the throne, and being around her when she reminisced was like being in the presence of a human time machine. (Despite being a Northern Irish Protestant, she’d hated ‘the Widow at Windsor‘.)

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the flesh once, back in 1999, when she attended the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I was among the crowds along the sides of the Royal Mile when she and Prince Philip scooted past in an open carriage with horsemen riding behind and in front of them. The crowd went, “Hurrah!” Then one of the horses discharged several big dollops of dung onto the street’s surface. While the royal cortege receded, two workers from the city council, a man and woman who looked near retirement-age, hurried onto the street and used brushes and shovels to scoop up the dung and put it in a binbag. The crowd promptly saluted the council workers by shouting “Hurrah!” again. Delighted, the workers accepted this with a gracious wave of their shovels.

Looking between those two humble council workers and the procession making its way up the Royal Mile, I knew where my sympathies lay.

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

Britain gets Trussed

In a just world, the folk belonging to Britain’s Conservative Party would have been forced into mass exile by now, after foisting upon us the morally rancid Boris Johnson and the three years of lies, corruption, incompetence, embarrassment and disaster he presided over as Prime Minster. They made him party leader and PM in 2019, long after his myriad character defects had become public knowledge.

But instead, the Tory Party members have just elected another leader who will govern Britain from No 10 Downing Street. This is the gimlet-eyed careerist, self-publicist, charisma-vacuum and fifth-rate Margaret Thatcher impersonator that is Liz Truss.

Truss’s ascent to the top has seen many, convenient swerves in policy, belief and principle. From being an atypically-radical Liberal Democrat (at the 1994 Lib Dem conference she called for the abolition of the monarchy, which turned Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown into Paddy Meltdown) to being a hard-right Tory (in 2012 she co-authored the notorious treatise Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as ‘the worst idlers in the world’). From being an enthusiastic pro-EU Remainer (before the 2016 Brexit referendum, it looked like the Remain side was heading for victory and Truss wanted to be on the winning side) to being an enthusiastic anti-EU Brexiteer (the Leave side won… Quick, Liz, get on that winning side!) I know it’s an old cliché, but Groucho Marx’s observation, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… Well, I have others,” has never been truer here.

Her victory comes after a summer-long leadership contest that felt as interminable and punishing as Johnson’s premiership did. The eight candidates confirmed on July 12^th were less than inspiring. They included far-right, culture-war-obsessed moon-howlers like Kemi Badenoch and the self-aggrandising Suella Braverman. There was Nadhim Zahawi, estimated to be worth between 30 and 100 million pounds, who once claimed nearly 6000 pounds in taxpayers’ money to light and heat the stables on his estate in Warwickshire. And there was Johnson’s former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who makes Zahawi look like a pauper. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty – reckoned, thanks to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – allegedly sit on a fortune of 730 million pounds. During the leadership race, a 2011 video was dug up wherein a young Rishi boasted about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…” Really, Rishi? “Well, not working class.”

Eventually, the field was whittled down to two competitors, Truss and Sunak, and on September 5^th, after a soul-destroying two months of never-ending hustings, debates and idiotic ‘I’m-more-anti-woke-than-you-are!’-type bickering, the results of the party-membership vote were announced. It worked against Sunak that, by resigning as chancellor in early July, he helped set off the events that led to Johnson’s downfall. Thus, he was regarded by many (obviously dementia-stricken) Tory members as the Judas who’d done for their beloved Boris. And while I’m absolutely not implying that anyone in the Conservative Party is racist, there’s a teensy-weensy possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Sunak’s ethnicity might not have worked in his favour either.

Mind you, Truss didn’t win by the landslide that many people had expected. She secured just 47% of the support of those eligible to vote. Amusingly, days earlier, there’d been speculation that as PM she’d change the rules of any future referendum on Scottish independence, making it compulsory for the pro-independence side to get the support of half of all eligible voters to win – anyone not bothering to vote would be automatically counted as a ‘no’. If she’d applied that goalpost-shifting rule to her own leadership election, she’d have lost.

Now Prime Minister Truss has announced her new cabinet. Looking at the, er, talent that’s featured in the cabinet, the future for Britain – beset by a cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, war-in-Ukraine crisis, Brexit crisis and climate change crisis – looks bleak indeed. Appointees include Braverman as Home Secretary, a post previously held by the demented Priti Patel, though Braverman has the potential to make Patel look like a bleeding-heart liberal in retrospect. She’s expected to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke snowflake Winston Churchill. Indulging in brazen, lefty virtue-signalling, Churchill declared, “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” This will enable Braverman to get on with the business started by Patel of sticking newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and flying them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’.

Elsewhere, getting the portfolio of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the cobwebbed, monocled, top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg, surely history’s most Dickensian villain not actually devised by Charles Dickens. In the past, Rees-Mogg, whose fund-management company Somerset Capital Investment puts money into oil extraction and coal mining, has vowed to squeeze ‘every last cubic inch of gas’ out of the North Sea; called fracking ‘an interesting opportunity’ and likened its damaging geological effects to ‘a rock fall in a disused coal mine’; deliberately misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to back his claims that efforts to combat climate change are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unaffordable’; and, yes, blamed offshore windfarms for the rising cost of fish and chips. With him in position, the likelihood of Britain honouring its pledge to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is about as great as the likelihood that the famously stuck-up, affected and pompous Rees-Mogg has ever tasted fish and chips.

Meanwhile, casting a rotund shadow over everything is Boris Johnson, who hasn’t gone away. It’s widely assumed that Johnson and his followers – in Trumpian feats of delusion and reality-denial – believe that the British public still love him. Also, they believe it’s only a matter of time before Truss slips up and Johnson, ‘a prince across the water’ like a not-so-bonnie Bonnie Prince Charlie, will return to the fray, become PM again, save the Conservative Party and save the country. I imagine Johnson and co. are already conspiring to facilitate Truss’s slipping-up, and sooner rather than later.

To conclude on a Scottish note… On September 5^th, in her painfully inept victory speech, Truss paid tribute to Johnson by claiming he was ‘admired from Kiev to Carlisle’. This was meant to elicit a round of applause from the audience, but Truss was so flat of tone and lifeless of gaze that the audience didn’t get their cue and several moments of tumbleweed-infested silence ensued. Carlisle is the most northerly town in England, which suggests that for once Truss had got something right. Beyond Carlisle is Scotland and no one there can stand the sight of Johnson – not even the Scottish Tories.

And the next morning, in Boris Johnson’s farewell speech as PM, when he wasn’t comparing himself to Cincinnatus (the Roman statesman who retired from office to lead a quiet life on his farm but then, when duty called, returned to Rome to lead again – as a dictator, though Johnson didn’t mention that bit), he compared himself to a booster rocket: “Let me say that I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.”

Boris Johnson calls himself a rocket? At last, he’s said something that people in Scotland would agree with. He’s a rocket.

September 2, 2022September 2, 2022

Rab Foster gets a book deal

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a new short story published in the ezine Swords and Sorcery Magazine. It’s entitled The Library of Vadargarn and is about a tough, unscrupulous swordsman – is there any other type in sword-and-sorcery stories? – who agrees to transport a strange book in a city where books, reading and libraries are banned.

I should say I’ve always been fascinated by stories involving imaginary, fantastical and / or sinister books, such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); The Book of Sand in Jorge Luis Borges’ 1975 short story of the same name; The King in Yellow in Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 short-story collection of the same name (okay, actually an imaginary play rather than an imaginary book); and the granddaddy of spooky made-up books, The Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, which was supposedly written by ‘the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ in the 8th century and translated into English in Elizabethan times by Dr John Dee, no less.

I’m also a sucker for fantastical or sinister libraries, like the one featured in the short story The Library of Babel (1962) by Jorge Luis Borges again; or the one that appears near the end of Umberto Eco’s medieval detective novel The Name of the Rose (1980) – Eco gently takes the piss out of Borges by having it run by a blind, malevolent librarian called Jorge of Burgos.

Not that any of the above works had any influence on The Library of Vadargarn. Weirdly enough, the only thing that might have influenced it was the novel I was reading at the time I wrote it, Still Midnight (2009) by the Scottish writer Denise Mina. This ‘tartan noir’ crime thriller is about a businessman getting kidnapped and, while his family try to put together the ransom money, being held prisoner in a disused furnace in an old Glaswegian factory… Which may have had some bearing on where the climax of my story takes place.

For the next few weeks, The Library of Vadargarn can be accessed here.

August 29, 2022September 2, 2022

Honour the Sabbath

I’m no fan of lengthy international sporting competitions – apart from the Rugby and Football World Cups – and I reacted with a weary shrug to the recent holding of the Commonwealth Games in the English Midlands city of Birmingham. However, I’d have willingly sat through the Games’ twelve days of sporting endeavour, bored out of my wits, just to be present at the occasion’s closing ceremony. For this offered a few minutes that, in my mind, were the musical highlight of August 2022, if not the year 2022. I’m talking about the sight of former Black Sabbath singer and famous Birmingham son Ozzy Osbourne coming up through a stage-trapdoor into a shroud of blood-red mist to sing the 1970 Sabbath classic Paranoid, with Ozzy’s old Sabbath comrade Tony Iommi thumping away on electric guitar.

Apparently, Ozzy had originally turned down an invitation to sing at the ceremony due to health issues. Quite a lot of health issues, in fact – Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain. But at the last minute, deciding the show must go on, he jumped on a flight from Los Angeles and made a surprise appearance in his old home city. And though I was no fan of the sporting stuff, I was delighted to see him perform at this, the biggest event in Birmingham for years. Long before anyone had heard of Peaky Blinders (2013-22), Ozzy – catchphrase: “Oi’m the Prince o’ Dawkness!” – had made it cool to be a Brum.

Anyway, this has inspired me to dust down and repost the following item. It was written in 2017, just after those mighty metallers Black Sabbath had played their last-ever gig.

The third commandment tells us to keep the Sabbath holy. Well, I believe in honouring the Sabbath but I’m not talking about the seventh day of the week. I’m talking about Black Sabbath, the 49-year-old heavy metal band who played their last-ever gig two nights ago.

Fittingly, Black Sabbath’s farewell performance took place at the Genting Arena in Birmingham, the city where it all started for them. Guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and incomparable – many would say incorrigible – singer Ozzy Osbourne grew up in Aston, one of Birmingham’s working-class suburbs. Prior to forming the band, they did a variety of unglamorous jobs there, including delivering coal, labouring on building sites and working in a sheet metal factory, car plant and abattoir. Iommi ended his time in the steelworks with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist. Osbourne, meanwhile, took up housebreaking and got jailed for six weeks.

Butler told the BBC recently, “It wasn’t a great place to be at that time. We were listening to songs about San Francisco. The hippies were all peace and love and everything. There we were in Aston. Ozzy was in prison from burgling houses, me and Tony were always in fights with somebody… we had quite a rough upbringing. Our music reflected the way we felt.”

If they felt miserable in Aston and channelled that misery into their music, I can only say the misery was worth it. The first, eponymously-named song on their first, eponymously-named album in 1970 sets the tone for Black Sabbath’s career of evil. It’s a gloriously dark and doom-laden affair, opening with rumbles of thunder, the sluicing of heavy rain and the clanging of altar bells. These give way to a funereal chug of heavy guitars and the eerie high-pitched squalls of Ozzy’s voice (“What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”), which later speed up for a tumultuous but still ominous climax. I imagine that if any of those peace-and-love hippies whom Butler referred to had gone to a Sabbath gig in 1970 (having ingested some psychedelic substances beforehand) and the gig had opened with this number, they’d have probably fled from the venue screaming in terror with their hands clamped over their ears.

Iommi and Butler were horror-movie fans and their music had a horror-movie vibe. Even the band’s name came from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the legendary Boris Karloff. Also horror-movie-esque is the cover of the first Sabbath album, showing a black-robed lady looming spectrally in the middle of a spooky autumnal landscape – the building in the background is actually Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire. I find it cool that nobody knows the identity of the woman, presumably a briefly-hired model or actress, who posed for the picture. Iommi has claimed that, later, she turned up at one Sabbath concert and said hello to the band. But I like to think she’d never been at the original photo-shoot at all. Rather, she was a ghost that haunted the watermill – and when they developed the cover-photo, her wraithlike image had somehow imposed itself on it.

Black Sabbath produced another album in 1970, Paranoid, which was choc-a-bloc with groovily heavy tunes – the famous title track, the skull-crushing Iron Man, the nihilistic War Pigs and the sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan, which has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’. The following year’s Master of Reality gave us the jaunty but provocative After Forever (“Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope / Do you think he’s a fool?”) and the apocalyptic Children of the Grave. Other classic songs included Supernaut, which turned up on the 1972 album Vol. 4; the exhilarating title track of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that’s perhaps my favourite Sabbath song ever; and the similarly exhilarating Symptom of the Universe on 1974’s Sabotage, which suggests (to me, anyway) Sabbath were secret forbearers of punk rock. 1976’s Technical Ecstasy and 1978’s Never Say Die are less acclaimed and lack a truly killer track, but I’m still partial to them both.

In 1980 we got Heaven and Hell which – shock! horror! – didn’t have Ozzy Osbourne doing vocals. The singer had been sacked from the band due to his massive substance abuse and consequent massive unreliability. While Ozzy maintains that he was no worse a wreck than the other three band-members were at the time, it was surely tough working with a man prone to such misfortunes as snorting a line of ants he’d mistaken for a line of cocaine or being caught by the San Antonio police urinating over the Alamo whilst dressed in a frock. Making a Black Sabbath album without Ozzy sounds as feasible as filming The Lord of the Rings without Gandalf, but Iommi, Butler and Ward wisely recruited the late, great Ronnie James Dio as a replacement. Dio gave Black Sabbath a new lease of life. He made them sound different – his operatic voice a contrast to the wailing alienness of Ozzy’s – but I have no complaints about the resulting album, full of spiffing tracks like Children of the Sea, Neon Knights and Die Young.

Dio sang on the next album for Black Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, and returned to sing on 1992’s Dehumanizer; but they were the only Sabbath albums for a long time that were any good. During the 1980s and 1990s Iommi was the sole founding member who stuck with the band and a succession of jobbing musicians contributed to the records. Singers included Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, two alumni of Sabbath’s more mainstream 1970s rivals Deep Purple. Meanwhile, the band seemed to get through drummers at a rate worthy of Spinal Tap, with the ELO’s Bev Bevan, the Clash’s Terry Chimes and the ubiquitous Cozy Powell banging the skins at various times. To be honest, the band’s output during this period – 1983’s Born Again, 1986’s Seventh Star, 1987’s The Eternal Idol, 1989’s Headless Cross, 1990’s Tyr, 1994’s Cross Purposes, 1995’s Forbidden – is pretty rubbish.

Happily, the original line-up had reconciled by the late 1990s and they’ve played together sporadically since then, at least when other work commitments (like Ozzy’s solo career), illness (Iommi was diagnosed as having lymphoma in 2012) and plain old quarrelling (Bill Ward fell out with everyone else and quit in 2012) didn’t get in the way. In 2013 they even managed to produce a new album, 13, which while not quite up to their old standards got some positive reviews and produced a decent single, God is Dead? Filling in for Ward on the drums was Brad Wilk from Rage Against the Machine. I imagine for Wilk getting this job must have been a dream come true.

Well, it seems they’ve finally called it a day. Maybe that’s just as well in Ozzy’s case, since the old boy’s 67 now and surely needs to take it easy after a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy. (At Christmas, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend said to me worriedly, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”)

They deserve to enjoy their retirement for their legacy is huge. Their weighty fingerprints are 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.