Author: MrM0untfield

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Nostalgic wallows 5: Gerry Anderson

 

From gerryanderson.com / © Anderson Entertainment

 

This entry in my Nostalgic Wallows series of blogposts was inspired by something I learned recently.  Earlier this month, on September 4th, 50 years exactly had passed since the first broadcast of the first episode of the science-fiction TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

 

Practically every week now, anniversaries of something or other pop up that serve as depressing reminders of how long ago my youth was and how long-in-the-tooth I’m getting.  But being reminded that the first time I watched Space: 1999 – and heard the opening chords of its urgent theme tune by composer Barry Gray, which went: “DUH…! DUH…! DUH-DUH…!” – was a whole half-century ago seemed to hit particularly hard.  Anyway, I guess this is an appropriate time to pay tribute to Gerry Anderson, who was responsible for Space: 1999 and was also, perhaps, the greatest producer of children’s shows in British TV history.

 

Gerry Anderson is, of course, remembered as ‘the puppet man’.  He and his wife Sylvia began making kids’ puppet TV shows such as The Adventures of Twizzle (1957-59) and Torchy the Battery Boy (1959) in the monochrome, still-austerity-affected 1950s.  Back then, every second children’s programme on British TV seemed to feature cheap-looking wooden figures jerking around in a jungle of marionette strings: Muffin the Mule (1946-55), Flower Pot Men (1952-53), The Woodentops (1955-56) and Pinky and Perky (1957).  What set the Andersons apart from their competitors, however, was their ambition.  Their audiences might have been children and their characters might have been puppets, but that didn’t mean their shows weren’t allowed to be spectacular.  Within a decade, the Andersons refined their puppetry to an art-form – they called their techniques ‘supermarionation’ and began each show with the proud declaration, Filmed in Supermarionation – and the result was Thunderbirds (1965-66).

 

The cast of Thunderbirds might’ve been marionettes, but in all other respects this show – about the adventures of International Rescue, a late-21st century organisation run by the heroic Tracy family who used their fabulous and futuristic vehicles and gadgets to save people from crashing airliners and burning skyscrapers – was like the James Bond movies tailored for children.  As well as gadgetry, explosions and skin-of-the-teeth escapes, it had a secret island hideaway (Tracy Island), an exotic villain (The Hood), a glamorous heroine (Lady Penelope) and a brash 1960s swagger, epitomised in Barry Gray’s strident theme music.  Children’s television had never seen the likes of this before.  No wonder Anderson’s boss at ITC Entertainment, the cigar-loving impresario Lord Lew Grade, informed Anderson after seeing the first rushes of Thunderbirds that he wasn’t making TV anymore, but feature films.  Grade knew showmanship when he saw it.

 

© Century 21 Television / Associated Television / United Artists

 

Another feature that Thunderbirds shared with the best Bond movies was that while it gave international audiences the spectacle they wanted, it retained a certain wry British-ness.  The Tracy family might’ve been Americans – indeed, voicing Anderson’s shows surely kept Britain’s small community of North American actors, like Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, in employment for years – but for British audiences the real stars of Thunderbirds were Lady Penelope and Parker, her butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce.

 

Lady Penelope and Parker represented opposite tiers of Britain’s class system.  She was a posh glamour-puss, he was a working-class Cockney and ex-convict.  Parker was loyal but sometimes downtrodden, though at least his employer tolerated his less socially acceptable talents, which included being light-fingered and knowing how to crack a safe.  Indeed, on occasion, Parker’s talents helped her to escape from a tight corner.  Lady Penelope was famously voiced by Sylvia Anderson and it’s significant that, following their divorce in the mid-1970s, Gerry Anderson claimed that among all his puppet characters Parker (“Yes, m’ lady”) was the one he identified with most.

 

Sure, Thunderbirds looks creaky when viewed today – what film or TV show from the 1960s doesn’t?  The special effects seem slightly dinky, the puppets’ heads are too big for them to be comfortably lifelike, and their manner of walking always elicits amusement.  Any drunkard having difficulty getting from the bar to the toilets in a British pub is invariably likened to a ‘Thunderbirds puppet’.  I can only testify that, as a kid, once each episode began with that famous countdown (“Five…  Four…  Three…  Two…  One!”), that famous catchphrase (“Thunderbirds are go!”) and that pulse-quickening theme music, even a real-life crashing airliner or burning skyscraper wouldn’t have diverted my attention from the television set.

 

Anderson also knew the value of merchandising tie-ins.  It wasn’t uncommon to find myself standing with my nose pressed against a toyshop window, wishing my pocket money was lavish enough to buy all the miniature Anderson spacecraft and air-and-land vehicles displayed in front of me – Thunderbirds 1, 2 and 3, plus items from other Anderson shows like the SPV vehicle, the Interceptors, the Mobiles, Skydiver and the Eagles.  The technicians who operated the models of those spacecraft and vehicles and brought them to life in Anderson’s shows, men like Derek Meddings and Brian Johnson, later became the backbone of Britain’s movie special-effects industry.  It was thanks to Anderson’s protégés that even after the indigenous British film industry died on its arse in the late 1970s, international studios at least kept coming to Britain to make movies like the Star Wars and Alien ones because of the technical expertise there.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / ATV / ITC Entertainment

 

Along the way from The Adventures of Twizzle to Thunderbirds, the Andersons had made Supercar (1961-62), Fireball XL-5 (1962-63) and underwater extravaganza Stingray (1964-65).  Stingray is probably the second-best remembered of Anderson’s shows, partly because it was the first British children’s programme to be filmed in colour and partly because of its camp value.  It was never more camp than at the close of each episode, when the ballad Aqua Marina was sung in honour of the mute and enigmatic mermaid Marina, who helped out the Stingray crew in their battles against the despicable Aquaphibians, and on whom hero Captain Troy Tempest obviously had something of a crush.  However, it’s Anderson’s post-Thunderbirds show that I like best.

 

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68) also served up spaceships, gadgets, explosions and general spectacle.  The tone was darker, however.  It had a high body-count – well, a high puppet body-count – and the Mars-based Mysterons whom Captain Scarlet and his gang fought off in every episode were, basically, terrorists.  Spookily, their habit of taunting the ‘Earthmen’ with messages threatening death and destruction seemed to prefigure Osama Bin Laden’s mode of operation decades later.  I suspect little Osama owned all the Gerry Anderson toys when he was a kid in Riyadh in the 1960s.

 

On the other hand, Joe 90 (1968-69) was a charming kids’ espionage show with a likeable juvenile hero.  It was just unfortunate that, on account of Joe’s oversized glasses, ‘Joe 90’ became the nickname of every bespectacled child in a British playground during the next few decades.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Century 21 Productions

 

In Captain Scarlet and Joe 90, the puppets had exact human proportions – Anderson’s puppet work had achieved perfection.  Accordingly, with nowhere else to go with puppetry, Anderson moved into live action.  His 1970 show UFO was basically a remake of Captain Scarlet with human actors.   Although UFO is fondly remembered for its kitsch notions of what future fashions would look like, such as Gabrielle Drake’s silver mini-skirt and outrageous purple bob, and although it tapped into every frustrated middle manager’s secret fantasy – Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) pretended to be a film producer, but at the touch of a button his office would descend a giant lift shaft into the huge underground headquarters of anti-alien defence force SHADO, of which he was the secret boss – the show was, like Captain Scarlet, pretty bleak.

 

The aliens who attacked the earth in UFO only did so because they wanted to harvest human organs, and there was frequently a high death-toll among the guest cast.  One episode, The Psychobombs, even had the aliens brainwashing a handful of ordinary human beings and turning them into superhuman suicide bombers to take out SHADO.  Elsewhere, the harrowing episode A Question of Priorities showed how Straker’s devotion to duty indirectly caused the death of his son.

 

For a little kid like me, the show was very scary at times.  For example, an episode called The Sound of Silence had a UFO concealed in the waters of a lake amid the bucolic English countryside and an alien stalking the surrounding woodland like a serial killer.  Even the whirring, pulsing sound that emanated from the UFOs while they were in flight was sinister.  Hilariously, Independent Television (ITV), which broadcast Anderson’s shows in the UK, assumed from his past record that UFO was a children’s series and broadcast repeats of it on weekday afternoons, when kids were arriving home from primary school.  That’s how I first saw UFO – I’d come home, switch on the TV and be traumatised by it.

 

From gerryanderson.com / © ITV Studios

 

By the mid-1970s Anderson was putting together Space: 1999, which at the time was the most expensive show in TV history.  It should have given him a franchise of Star Trek proportions and made him a fortune.  It didn’t, alas, and the show’s problems were mostly self-inflicted.  Though its special effects were the best yet – some compared them to the space scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – its scripts often strayed into the metaphysical and ended up muddled and impossible-to-understand.

 

Another issue was that its leads, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were unaccountably doleful and uninteresting.  That said, the supporting cast, consisting of Nick Tate, Prentis Hancock, Clifton Jones, Ziena Merton, Anton Philips and the excellent veteran character actor Barry Morse, were amiable.  (Sadly, Hancock and Jones died within a week of each other earlier this year.)  And the guest cast – which included Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Julian Glover, Anthony Valentine, Richard Johnson, Roy Dotrice, Ian McShane, Leo McKern and the loudest man on the planet, if not in the universe, Brian Blessed – was among the best ever featured in a TV series.

 

But Space: 1999’s worst problem was that, scientifically, it was rubbish.  Its premise was that a massive explosion on the moon’s surface in 1999 caused it to be blown out of the earth’s orbit, along with a moonbase and its 300-strong crew.  From there, the runaway satellite and its reluctant passengers careered across the galaxy, managing to encounter a new solar system, and an earth-like planet, and a usually unfriendly alien civilisation, in nearly every episode.  The scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov condemned the show for being preposterous, but even at ten years old I didn’t need Dr Asimov to tell me that.  I knew already that outer space was rather bigger than a fairground ride and a hurtling moon wasn’t going to encounter star-systems with habitable planets as frequently as dodgem cars bumping into one another.

 

Despite its faults – the pretentious claptrap, the dour leads, the scientific nonsensicality underpinning everything – there was something weirdly compelling about the first season of Space: 1999.  Daft and pompous though much of it was, it was at least unrepentantly so and it deserved kudos for serving up, occasionally, some of the trippiest moments ever seen on British TV.  And it sometimes scared the shit out of me, even more than UFO had.  See the episodes Force of Life, where, near the end, Ian McShane was gruesomely frazzled by a laser beam before coming back to life as a blackened, tattered zombie; or Death’s Other Dominion, which climaxed with Brian Blessed suddenly decaying into a revoltingly putrefied corpse.  Most terrifying, though, was Dragon’s Domain, where the moon blundered into a graveyard of derelict spaceships.  The graveyard was really a giant web, inhabited by a nightmarish spider – a shrieking, tentacled thing that swallowed its victims, drained them and spat them out again as lifeless, desiccated husks.

 

Unwisely, Anderson hired American producer Fred Freiberger to oversee Space: 1999’s second series.  Freiberger, who was known in American TV circles as ‘the Series Killer’ thanks to his habit of taking over shows shortly before they got cancelled – he produced the last and worst season of the original Star Trek (1966-69) – dumped the things that were good about Space 1999’s first season, including Barry Gray’s theme tune and poor old Barry Morse.  It turned into a tacky, embarrassing piece of juvenilia and was duly cancelled in 1977.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

 

After that, Anderson continued working but never quite captured the zeitgeist as he had in the 1960s.  Into Infinity was a 1976 special that was meant to launch another live-action science fiction series.  It had Brian Blessed, Nick Tate and Ed Bishop on board and was supposed to be based on proper astronomical knowledge of the universe – maybe Anderson was atoning for the scientific absurdities of Space 1999 – but it never got beyond the pilot stage.  In the 1980s he returned to making puppet shows and the result, Terrahawks (1983-86), was a fun but unoriginal rehash of his past glories.  Inevitably, ‘Zelda’, the intensely wrinkled villainess of Terrahawks, became another nickname in Britain, this time for ladies of a certain age who’d crumpled their skins by smoking too many cigarettes and spending too long on the sunbed.  In the 1990s he made the underwhelming live-action show Space Precinct (1994-95), while in 2005 a computer-generated version of Captain Scarlet failed to generate much interest, possibly because, at the time, it was lost amid the fuss made over the rebooting of another classic British science-fiction TV show, Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25).

 

During this period Anderson was financially as well as creatively unlucky.  He no longer held the rights to Thunderbirds when the BBC got around to rescreening it in the early 1990s.  Presumably, when yet another generation of British children went Thunderbirds-daft, and the country’s toyshops filled up again with Thunderbirds merchandising, he didn’t profit as much from it as he should have.  Similarly, Anderson was denied any participation when a live-action film version of Thunderbirds was made in 2004.  The resulting film was directed by an American (Jonathan Frakes) and was aimed only at young children – as opposed to older children and nostalgic adults.  It was, predictably, dreadful.

 

Hopefully, before his death in 2012, Anderson was at least aware of the great affection the British public had for him and his TV shows and of how his work was stamped on the DNA of modern popular culture.  For instance, you knew immediately what Nick Park was referencing in the opening scene of Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) when, accompanied by some rousing Barry Gray-type music, his titular heroes got to the seats of their pest-control van via a series of chutes, pulleys and lifts, just as the Tracy brothers had been transported to the cockpits of the International Rescue vehicles.  Even Wallace and Gromit’s garden gnomes parted before their van’s path like the palm trees on Tracy Island used to do when Thunderbird 2 rumbled into view.

 

And Team America – World Police, the scabrous 2004 puppet movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind South Park (1998-present), might have had as its heroes a bunch of gung-ho terrorist-blasting commandoes rather than the benign and upstanding Tracy family, and as its villain Kim Jong-Il rather than the Hood, but it was basically a grown-up version of Thunderbirds.  I just hope Gerry Anderson was able to see beyond the blood, vomit, swearing and graphic puppet-copulation scenes, get the joke and appreciate the love Parker and Stone obviously had for his work.

 

And I’ve just heard some news that also makes this post timely.  To mark the 60th anniversary of Thunderbirds, two of its 1965 episodes, Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City, have been remastered and released as a double-bill in British cinemas.  The Guardian review of them is here.

 

From wikipedia.org / © AP Films / Associated Television

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Street art in Little India

 

 

Little India straddles Serangoon Road in the Rochor area of central Singapore.  According to Google Maps, the neighbourhood begins at Bukit Timah Road to the south and extends west to Racecourse Road and east to Jalan Besar.  Northwards, it ends at Kinta Road west of Serangoon Road and at Hindoo Road east of it, though I’d say the South Asian vibe extends a fair bit above Hindoo Road – as far as Syed Alwi Road, after which the concrete malls, hotels and multistorey carparks take over.  In fact, the decorations currently hanging above Serangoon Road for 2025’s Deepavali – the Hindu festival of lights – extend north for many more blocks.

 

Back in colonial times, what is now Little India was once a district used by European cattle farmers and traders.  The presence of cattle created a demand for cattle-workers, and many of these workers came from India.  When the economic environment changed and the Europeans took their cattle elsewhere, the Indians remained and turned their hands to other trades.  Singapore recognized the district as a conservation area in 1989.

 

It’s a magnet for both tourists and shoppers.  The little shophouses lining Serangoon Road and its side-streets do a busy trade in souvenirs, jewelry, clothes, textiles, perfumes, phones, electrical appliances, homeware and kitchenware.  Lovers of tradition will appreciate the stalls where hands can be decorated with intricate henna art and the flower-shops festooned with flower-garlands for religious and other occasions.  And foodies will enjoy Little India’s many eateries – dishes and foodstuffs I’ve heard are particularly good there include biryani, chapati, chaat and fish-head curry.  Meanwhile, I was delighted to find down one side-street an establishment selling Indian beer for five dollars a pint, which, local beer-drinkers will tell you, is quite the bargain in Singapore.

 

But the thing I like best about Little India is how, where there’s an expanse of wall looking onto a street, an artist has frequently used it as a canvas and painted something.  These pieces of street-art might be big, bold murals covering the entire side of a building or something on a smaller, more intimate scale.

 

Often, the subjects of the art are the businesses that operate, or used to operate, in Little India.  These include merchants, tailors and the tiffin men who traditionally used their carts, loaded with metal containers, to deliver meals to and snacks to workers in the middle of shifts – they were the food-delivery folk of their day.

 

 

Meanwhile, Lembu Square has artwork depicting a whole street-front of facades, including a school, some of its pupils and one staff-member.  For a moment, I thought the bicycles were part of the picture – then I realised they’d just been propped there.

 

 

Other works lean away from the everyday world of work and commerce and instead celebrate nature or traditional Indian culture.

 

 

Finally, this building-side in Lembu Square doesn’t contain any artwork.  However, with its haphazard patchwork of colours, and its configurations of bins, doors, grills and aircon condenser units, it looked artistic to me.

 

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Farewell to the king

 

© Penguin Books

 

I’ve just finished Excalibur (1997), the third and final book in the Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell’s take on the King Arthur legend.  Reading it was a bittersweet experience.  On one hand, I was pleased it lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors in the trilogy, The Winter King (1995) and Enemy of God (1996).  On the other, I felt almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.

 

Still, not wanting to read the final book in the trilogy because you don’t want bad things to happen to its characters – that must show how captivating Cornwell’s Warlord books are.  And besides, as they say, all good things come to an end.

 

Once again, the story is narrated by Derfel, an elderly, one-handed Christian monk. He’s writing down – with his remaining hand, obviously – the details of Arthur’s life as it unfolded in post-Roman, fifth-and-sixth-century Britain, a time when the island and its Briton inhabitants were besieged by invading, land-hungry Saxons.  Derfel knows these details because despite being Christian and monkish now, he was in his youth (and, in Excalibur, his middle age) a pagan and one of Arthur’s warlords.  He’s recording the story at the request of Queen Igraine, who’s too young to have known Arthur but is besotted with his legend.  Derfel unhappily suspects that, when he’s finished, the queen will change the unromantic bits of his saga to make it more legend-friendly.  “Tales of men fighting can get very boring after a while,” she scolds the old monk, “and a love story makes it all a lot more interesting.”

 

Excalibur joins the dots and tells us how Derfel went from being a powerful pagan warrior to being a humble Christian monk in a monastery run by the contemptible Bishop Sansum – a recurring character in the trilogy, who constantly schemed and shit-stirred against Arthur and, in his furtive, cowardly way, tried to engineer his downfall.  We also learn how Derfel lost his hand.  And, all credit to Cornwell’s ingenious storyline, he certainly doesn’t lose it in any way I’d expected.

 

And we find out the fates of the characters who were still standing at the end of the second book.  We learn what happened to the wily and enigmatic druid Merlin; to King Cuneglas of Powys whom, alone among Britain’s powerful kings, Arthur could depend upon as an ally; and to Derfel’s fellow warriors, such as the Christian Galahad, and the Numidian Sagramor, and the coarse but likable Culhwch.  Also, with an ache, Derfel recalls what became of his partner Ceinwyn.  In this final volume, she has to endure a lot.

 

Of course, we get the final chapters in the life of Arthur himself.  At one point, Derfel sums up the thanklessness of Arthur’s task: “If only Arthur had remained in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him.  When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough.  The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings… were jealous of him…  Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down.  Britain let itself down.  Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled among itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault.  Arthur, who had given them victory!”

 

From wikimedia.org

 

No wonder that in Excalibur, after Arthur manages to beat off the Saxons, he retires from his role as the Lord Protector of the kingdom of Dumnonia and becomes ‘a mere landowner living in the peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his livestock and the state of his crops…’  He also, amusingly, tries to learn how to be a blacksmith, but he’s not very good at it.  When Derfel sees him working on ‘a shapeless piece of iron that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses’, it’s clear the iron is a metaphor for his futile attempts to fashion a unified and harmonious Britain out of its quarrelling kingdoms.

 

At the same time, the book provides endings for the remaining villains of the trilogy.  These include Arthur’s treacherous wife Guinevere, who at the end of the Enemy of God had joined forces with the dastardly Lancelot – the young Queen Igraine was dismayed to learn from Derfel that Guinevere and Lancelot were definitely not the noble characters of legend.  There’s also Arthur’s cruel and potentially despotic nephew Mordred whom, despite everyone’s misgivings, Arthur feels honour-bound to give the throne of Dumnonia to when Mordred reaches manhood, thanks to an oath sworn to Mordred’s grandfather Uther Pendragon.  There are the Saxon kings Aelle and Cerdic, whose forces are rapidly encroaching on the Britons’ western strongholds.  And perhaps most fearsome of all, there’s the priestess Nimue, once a childhood friend of Derfel and a protegee of Merlin, who in Excalibur’s final pages has transformed into the leader of a fanatical pagan force that’s as much of a threat to the heroes as Mordred and the Saxons.

 

Like all good writers, though, Cornwell doesn’t paint his characters as being simply good or evil.  They’re often nuanced.  Indeed, in Excalibur, a few people we’d written off as bad guys – or bad girls – achieve some redemption for themselves.

 

While the cast of Excalibur is mostly familiar from the previous two books, we get a couple of new characters too.  We’re introduced to the mystical bard Taliesin, who is something of a surrogate figure for Merlin – Merlin is absent from much of the book and it’s only near the end that we discover the tragic reason why.  Taliesin professes to be merely an observer, someone who records and later tells the stories that happen to other people.  At one point he informs Derfel, “It does not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you are my song…”  Yet he becomes proactive and saves the day on one important occasion.  A less welcome surrogate is Argante, a young pagan princess Arthur marries as a replacement for the disgraced Guinevere.  He has no interest in her but feels, lamely, that ‘a man should be married’.  Arthur’s lack of enthusiasm is soon reciprocated by the ambitious but bitter Argante, and she throws her lot in with Mordred.

 

Cornwell also drops Sir Gawain into the mix, as he did with Tristan and Isolde in Enemy of God, though Gawain’s appearance is even briefer than theirs was and it ends no more happily.  Here, poor Gawain certainly doesn’t get to meet a Green Knight and go off on a quest of his own.

 

From wikipedia.org / oldbookart.com

 

The plot of Enemy of God hinged around three events and, similarly, that of Excalibur can be divided into three main episodes.  Firstly, Merlin and Nimue attempt to summon back the old pagan gods and restore Britain to its former greatness.  This involves using the 13 ‘Treasures of Britain’ that they spent the previous two books retrieving – the Treasures include Arthur’s sword Excalibur – in an elaborate ceremony.  It also involves setting the summit of a hill called Mai Dun spectacularly on fire at Samain, the pagan predecessor to Halloween.  Secondly, the Britons engage in a long, desperate struggle against Aelle and Cerdic, whose allied forces have launched an assault on Dumnonia.  And lastly, there’s the final reckoning with the armies of Mordred and Nimue.  Mordred is intent on killing Arthur and his young son Gwydre, who has a claim on Dumnonia’s throne.  Nimue is intent on reclaiming Excalibur as a Treasure of Britain and making another attempt to bring back the ancient gods.

 

Enemy of God painted Christianity in a negative light – it concluded with a bloody revolt against Arthur by the Christians of Dumnonia, which Lancelot had fomented.  But in Excalibur the pagans come off badly too.  The ceremony that Merlin conducts on Mai Dun to summon the gods reveals a dark and hitherto-unseen side to his nature.  And by the book’s end, Nimue, who early in the trilogy had been portrayed as a heroine and even as a possible love-interest for Derfel, has degenerated into a crazed and bloodthirsty monster.

 

Regarding the magical powers that Merlin, Nimue, the other druids and the Saxons’ wizards claim to have, Cornwell continues the policy he established in the first two books – he keeps it ambiguous.  The people of the time certainly believe in it.  Magic is as much a part of life for them as warfare, court intrigue and the weather.  Modern-day readers are allowed to read between the lines and interpret some of that magic as fakery – its practitioners have no qualms about resorting to crafty conjuring tricks.  The rest of it can be attributed to coincidence.  However, in Excalibur, you’re forced to explain a lot of allegedly magic-inspired happenings – dream-prophecies, curses, enchantments – as coincidences.  You begin to wonder if, in the world Cornwell has created here, there might be substance in what Merlin and Nimue claim they can do.

 

Elsewhere, Cornwell’s description of fifth-and-sixth-century fighting is as gripping as ever.  It’s maybe even more gripping than in Excalibur’s two predecessors.  The central episode, wherein we get a Saxon invasion, a desperate flight and then a siege, and finally the Battle of Mynydd Baddon and its aftermath, lasts a good 140 pages and is enthralling from start to finish.  The climactic Battle of Camlann is on a much smaller scale but, because you know it’s Arthur’s last stand, it feels no less intense.

 

And despite the sadness that increasingly permeates the book, things are still leavened by humour.  Merlin, as ever, gets the wittiest lines.  Early on, he says about Arthur: “…he is a halfwit.  Think about it!  Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive!  If a soul wants to live forever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur.”

 

So, that’s Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy over for me.  At least I can console myself with the thought that there’s plenty of books by him I’ve still to read: two dozen Sharpe novels (1981-2025); the Grail Quest quartet (2000-2012), which sounds Arthurian but actually takes place during the Hundred Years’ War; 13 instalments of the Saxon Stories (2004-2020), set in ninth-and-tenth-century England; and four instalments of the Starbuck series (1993-96), set during the American Civil War.  Yes, there’s enough Cornwell goodness out there to keep me reading for a long time to come.

 

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

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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 like grown-ups.  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

Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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