Author: MrM0untfield

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We’ve lost the other Mr. Mountfield

 

From wikipedia.org / © Katherine Barton and Gaz Davidson

 

I was shocked and saddened to hear about the death on November 20th of Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield, bass player with the Stone Roses from 1987 to 1996 and 2011 to 2017 and with Primal Scream for the 15 years between his spells in the Roses.

 

Shocked because Mani seemed such an exuberant figure (in keeping with his exuberant bass sound) that he was the very last rock-and-roll-related personage I’d expect to die at the relatively young age of 63.  I’ve seen plenty of other rock-and-roll figures on stage who did look ready to kick the bucket because of their frailty, ravaged-ness and general air of vulnerability.  But not Mani, who was always ebullient.   In fact, just days before his passing, he’d announced dates for a speaking tour of the United Kingdom planned for next year, which doesn’t sound like someone on their last legs.

 

Hailing – of course – from Manchester, Mani first played in two bands that were prototypes for the Stone Roses, the Fireside Chaps (with future Roses guitarist John Squire) and the Waterfront (with future Roses singer Ian Brown joining in 1983).  The Roses’ definite line-up finally coalesced in 1987 with him, Brown, Squire and drummer Alan ‘Reni’ Wren.  During the 1980s he also found time to play in a band called the Mill alongside Clint Boon, who’d later furnish humble but durable ‘Madchester’ band the Inspiral Carpets with their quirky keyboard sound.

 

Along with the Happy Mondays – and, okay, the Inspiral Carpets – the Stone Roses were the leading lights of the late 1980s / early 1990s ‘Madchester’ movement, which irresistibly grafted the riffs of rock music onto the grooves of dance music and promoted a cheery, unpretentiously hedonistic vibe far removed from the posing and self-consciousness that’d plagued British popular music earlier in the 1980s.  It also paved away for the more internationally successful, but artistically less interesting, Britpop explosion of the mid-1990s.  Mani’s bass was an essential part of the formula.  For instance, it’s the first instrument you hear on I Want to be Adored, the opening track on the Stone Roses’ eponymous and massively acclaimed album of 1989.

 

Sadly, legal wrangles and musical procrastination meant it was a long time before a second Stone Roses album appeared.  Second Coming finally saw the light of day in 1994, five-and-a-half years later.  Inevitably, after the wait and all the attendant anticipation, it was deemed a big disappointment by the critics.  I have to say I think Second Coming is criminally underrated.  I fully understand why Simon Pegg, in Shaun of the Dead (2004), refuses to throw it along with the rest of his record collection at two advancing zombies.  “I like it,” he affirms.

 

I saw the Stone Roses for the first and last time during the tour they did on the back of Second Coming.  In 1995 they played a gig in the Japanese city of Sapporo, where I was living at the time.  It was not a particularly happy experience.  Ian Brown was in a foul mood and gave the impression of wanting to be somewhere else – anywhere else.  To be fair, a trio of Australian bodybuilders had beaten Brown up in a club in Tokyo a few days earlier, which gave him a credible reason for his lack of enthusiasm.  Mani and the rest of the band played perfectly well.

 

© Geffen Records

 

Also slightly unhappy was the next occasion I saw Mani perform, which was after he’d joined Scottish band Primal Scream, another outfit intent on exploring the overlap between rock music and dance music.  The band were on the bill of a one-day event on Glasgow Green that I attended in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, Mani cheerfully barked into a microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  For a large portion of the Glaswegian crowd, this comment went down like a cup of – appropriately – cold sick.  (By the way, this was before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘really good’.)   Later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only joking  and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  It’d been a bit of banter that some folk took the wrong way, but it impressed me that he was man enough to apologise for it.

 

I saw the Mani-era Primal Scream on two further occasions: at London’s Brixton Academy in 2003, when I thought they were pretty good; and at Norwich’s University of East Anglia in 2009, when they were on blistering form.  In fact, I’d include their 2009 Norwich show in my personal ‘Top Ten Gigs of All Time’.  With his jolly, everyman demeanour, Mani provided some balance to Primal Scream’s frontman Bobby Gillespie, whom I always found a bit too-cool-for-school when they played live.

 

Before joining the reformed Stone Roses in 2011, Mani found time to participate in another band, a ‘supergroup’ called Freebass whose gimmick was that it had three – three! – famous bass players, all from the Manchester area.  Its line-up also included Andy Rourke, former bassist with the Smiths, and Peter Hook, former bassist with Joy Division and New Order.  The project ended ignominiously, with Mani taking exception to what he saw as Hook unjustly exploiting the legacy of Joy Division and his late Joy Division bandmate Ian Curtis – Hook had also formed an outfit called Peter Hook and the Light that performed old Joy Division songs.  Hook’s wallet, Mani claimed on social media, was visible from space because it was ‘stuffed with Ian Curtis’s blood money.’  Needless to say, the two fell out, though – again – Mani apologised later and Hook accepted the apology.

 

Indeed, Hook has been one of the many musicians who’ve paid tribute to Mani since his death was announced a few days ago.  Other condolences have come from members of the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Happy Mondays, New Order, the Smiths, the Charlatans, the Verve, Echo and the Bunnymen, Elbow, the Courteneers, the Farm, Ocean Colour Scene, Kasabian, Shed Seven, Badly Drawn Boy…  I’m not a big fan of Oasis, but I thought it touching that, at their concert in Brazil the other night, Liam and Noel Gallagher projected Mani’s face onto the giant screen behind the stage whilst performing Live Forever (1994).  You get the impression you could go around everybody involved in the British music scene in the 1980s and 1990s and not find anyone with a bad word to say about the guy.

 

Finally, I owe Mani some gratitude.  Years ago – around 2010, I think – I was trying to think of a pseudonym to put on a horror short story I was about to submit to a magazine.  ‘Ian Smith’ seemed too dull a name to attach to a piece of short fiction that was meant to chill the blood.  At the time, I had a Primal Scream album playing in the background and I suddenly thought, “They’ve really had a second wind since Mani joined them.”  Then it occurred to me: Mani’s real name was Gary Mountfield.  ‘Mountfield’ sounded about right for a pseudonym – it wasn’t too exotic, but not too common either.  (Mountfield was also the name of a village in Country Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where I used to live, so it had a personal connection with me too.)  Thus, the penname Jim Mountfield was born.  It’s adorned nearly 70 published short stories since then.

 

So, thank you for the inspiration, Mani.

 

From wikipedia.org / © livepict.com

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Go west, young Scots (if you can)

 

From bellacaledonia.org.uk

 

Once upon a time, the misery involving Scotland and the FIFA World Cup hinged around the fact that, though the Scottish men’s football team usually qualified for the thing, they never, ever managed to progress beyond its first round.  This was irrespective of whether they played well (in 1974, managing a win and two draws, one of those draws with Brazil, but going out on goal difference); badly but with a flash of genius when it was too late (in 1978, getting beaten by Peru, drawing with Iran, finally finding their mojo and defeating the tournament’s eventual runners-up Holland, but going out on goal difference); or simply badly (most of the rest of the time).

 

My family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in 1977, in time for Scotland’s campaign in the 1978 World Cup.  As I noted above, that performance wasn’t all bad.  However, the team’s departure for Argentina, the host country, had been accompanied by a Scotland-wide tsunami of insane expectation and over-optimism.  The madness was caused by some witlessly hopeful predictions from Scotland manager, Ally MacLeod, which an irresponsible and headline-hungry Scottish press had amplified.  (The team had some good players, but not that good.)   When their country didn’t win the World Cup, as everyone had been braying they would, but flopped in the first round, the Scots treated it as a national humiliation.  And for years, if not decades, afterwards, they suffered from Post-Ally-MacLeod-Stress-Disorder.

 

During the 1982 World Cup, I was working in Northern Ireland.  I got caught up in the euphoria of Northern Ireland’s unexpected and brilliant run in it – they got past the first round and beat host nation Spain along the way – and, probably fortunately, I didn’t have to focus too much on Scotland.  By 1986, I was studying in Aberdeen.  For Scotland’s final first-round match of that competition, in Mexico, they needed to beat Uruguay by at least two goals.  A mate called Alan Kennedy invited me and a few others to his house to watch the game on TV.  For the occasion we ordered a keg of beer and tucked into it several hours before the kick-off.  Well lubricated, I dozed off in an armchair not long into the match.  What a lucky man I was.

 

Four years later, in 1990, I was working in Hokkaido in northern Japan.  This time, with the World Cup taking place in Italy, I invited a few of my friends to my apartment for Scotland’s final first-round game.  Their campaign had begun with another gut-wrenching, soul-destroying defeat – by Costa Rica – that added yet more scars to the nation’s psyche.  But then they’d beaten Sweden and now they needed to see off Brazil.  They didn’t.  The folk I invited to my apartment for the game consisted of some Japanese colleagues and a football-daft Glaswegian called Bill Quinn.  Afterwards, one Japanese colleague remarked, “I’ve never seen anyone look so sad as your friend Mr Quinn when the match finished.”

 

Scotland didn’t qualify for the 1994 World Cup in the USA but made it to the 1998 one in France.  By now the nation was well past any delusions that they might come near to winning the damned thing. They just prayed that their team would get past that f**king first round and into the second one.  Small wonder that for Scotland’s official 1998 World Cup anthem, the Scottish Football Association got Del Amitri to sing a wistful song called Don’t Come Home Too Soon.

 

From wikipedia.org / © A&M Records

 

During this competition I was at my family’s home in the Borders town of Peebles and I watched all three Scotland games in the town’s cosy Bridge Inn, known locally as ‘the Trust’.  After the third game, a three-goal humping by Morocco that ensured that, yes, Scotland were coming home too soon, I left the Trust and headed for the Green Tree Hotel at the far end of the High Street.  The public bar there was full of people who’d just been watching the game in full regalia – team shirts, tammy hats, tartan scarves and kilts – and whom I expected to be miserable beyond belief.  They weren’t.  Their team had taken an early bath for the umpteenth time, but what the hell?  They’d decided they might as well party.  The ensuing evening was one of the best I’ve ever had in a pub.  Someone behind the bar stuck on a compilation record called The Best Scottish Album in the World Ever (1997) and I couldn’t believe how many grown men around me knew all the words to Shang-a-Lang (1974) by the Bay City Rollers.

 

That evening in 1998 was symbolic of what’d happened regarding the Scottish football team and its supporters.  While the former seemed doomed to flounder at these big events, the latter had given up on any expectation of their team doing well and were simply determined to enjoy themselves, win, lose or draw.  In the process, their self-deprecating humour and dedication to good-natured partying earned them the reputation of being one of the best sets of football fans in the world.  For instance, the city council of Bordeaux, where Scotland had played two of their 1998 World Cup games, took out a full-page advert in Scottish newspaper the Daily Record to thank the fans for their behaviour: “We will never forget your ‘joie de vivre, the way you know how to have a good time and your sense of fair play.  Come back soon.  We miss you already!”  I’m sure those sentiments were shared by Bordeaux’s bar and off-licence industry.

 

Indeed, I felt sorry for bigger countries with a reputation for greater footballing prowess, whose fans did expect them to deliver the goods.  I’d see those countries’ fans gather to watch a make-or-break World Cup game…  And, when the final whistle blew and their country had messed up, lost the game and exited the competition, those fans immediately headed home with scowls on their faces.  Wait, I’d think, aren’t you at least going to hang around and party?  (Yes, I’m looking at you, England fans.)

 

We’re more than a quarter-century on from the 1998 World Cup.  The issue with Scotland since then is that they’ve failed to qualify for the competition at all.  Bellyaching about them never progressing beyond the first round of it seems like an unobtainable luxury now.  We didn’t know how lucky we were back in the late 20th century.

 

Happily, though, all that has changed.  November 18th saw Scotland clinch qualification for next year’s World Cup tournament in Mexico, Canada and the USA by beating Denmark 4-2 at Hampden Park in Glasgow.  Sure, Denmark had the lion’s share of the play, and John McGinn was perhaps not being too modest when he commented afterwards, “I thought we were pretty rubbish to be honest, but who cares?”  But three of Scotland’s four goals were amazing: Scott McTominay managing to backwards / overhead-kick the ball into the Danish net whilst seemingly levitating in the air; Kieran Tierney sending the ball scouring around the penalty area and just making it inside the Danes’ goalpost; and, with brilliant insouciance, Kenny McLean punting the ball in the final seconds from the halfway line – and seeing it go over the Danish goalie’s head and into the net.

 

Mads Mikkelsen, your boys took a hell of a beating.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Luca Faz

 

My excitement about Scotland being on their way to a World Cup for the first time in 28 years is tempered, though, by the fact that it’s being held in North America.  Under the FIFA presidency of Gianni Infantino – a man who’s managed the difficult feat of making Sepp Blatter look wholesome – the sale of tickets has been, in the words of the Guardian, ‘a late capitalist hellscape’ plagued by ‘dynamic pricing, crypto detritus and corporate doublespeak’.  How many ordinary Scotland fans, whose presence at past matches has created such a memorable atmosphere, can afford to attend a game?  Not so many, I imagine.  Plus, if Scotland’s games are played in the USA, the fans will have to get past that country’s increasingly autocratic rules on who gets allowed in.  Dare to criticize President Trump on social media and you get barred, apparently.  And I’d guess that, online, more than a few Scotland fans have referred to the American Commander-in-Chief as ‘a big orange bawbag’ at some point.

 

No, I have a horrible suspicion that the majority of Scotland’s support at any USA-held games would consist of well-heeled, conservative and sober Americans who happen to have a ‘Mac’ in their surnames thanks to some Scottish ancestor – folk who like to see a few kilts at their weddings but who quietly prefer American football and baseball to what they call ‘soccer’.  The atmosphere at those games could be terribly lame.

 

That’s on top of my horrible suspicion, based on past experience, that Scotland will screw up against some embarrassing opposition.  I have a bad feeling about the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, who have just become the smallest-ever country to qualify for a World Cup, under the management of none other than former Glasgow Rangers boss Dick Advocaat.  I can just imagine them ending up in Scotland’s first-round group.  And then Scotland making a giant hash of things against them…

 

Meanwhile, as the USA’s orange Commander-in-Chief loves bragging about his Scottish roots – his mother came from the Isle of Lewis – I bet he’d make a great show of turning up in person to watch any Scottish World Cup game that takes place on American soil.  Mind you, he might not survive the ordeal.

 

From the Daily Record / © Bordeaux City Council

 

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Christmas comes early for Steve Cashel

 

© Heavenly Flower Publishing

 

Belfast’s Heavenly Flower Publishing has just made available a new anthology called White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories, whose Amazon write-up describes it as “a collection of spooky seasonal stories by 21 authors just in time for the short days and long nights as the winter solstice draws ever nearer.”  The write-up also contains a proviso.  “Reader beware: this book will give you nightmares.  If you’re looking for chilling short stories that are more Krampus than Christmas, full of supernatural scares and denizens of dark nights, Yule not be disappointed.”  One of those spooky Christmas stories comes from my own pen and is entitled Southbound Traveller.

 

Although I usually write creepy fiction under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, Southbound Traveller bears a different nom de plume, Steve Cashel.  This is the one I commonly use for ‘non-scary, non-fantastical Scottish stuff’.

 

A long time ago, back in those naïve days when I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t become the literary equivalent of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney or James Kelman, I sent many Steve Cashel stories off to various Scottish mainstream-literature magazines.  But I only got two of them placed: one in a publication called Gutter, the other in a publication called Groundswell.  I will forever remember Groundswell, a modest journal based around Edinburgh University, because they replied to my submission with both a rejection letter and an acceptance letter – I didn’t know if they’d published my story or not until I found a copy of Groundswell in a shop and checked its contents.

 

Then I started to have more success with my horror and fantasy stories, written as Jim Mountfield and Rab Foster, and the Cashel pseudonym was shelved.  From 2023, however, I tried rewriting and submitting again a few of my old Steve Cashell stories and this time they got into print.  Thus, Mr Cashel had an unexpected resurrection.

 

Something weird and inexplicable happens in Southbound Traveller but, for the most part, it’s an un-supernatural Christmas story.  It tries to paint as realistic a picture of Christmas Day as possible – at least, as I remember Christmas Day in Scotland in the early 1990s, with lots of TV, such as the Queen’s speech, the big afternoon film and the Christmas editions of the popular soaps, and also with too much booze being quaffed and family members getting on each other’s nerves.  It felt more like a Steve Cashel story than a Jim Mountfield one, so I attributed it to the former.

 

I should add that Southbound Traveller owes something to Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 fairy story, The Little Match Girl.

 

Edited by Leilanie Stewart and Joseph Robert, and available as both a paperback and a kindle edition, White Witch’s Hat & Other Yuletide Ghost Stories can be purchased at Amazon US here and Amazon UK here.

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Beeb afraid… Beeb very afraid…

 

From pixabay.com / © TheOtherKev

 

“With the right, it’s always projection.”  That’s a sentiment I’ve frequently heard.  In other words, right-wingers love to accuse other people of sins that they’re guilty of perpetrating themselves.

 

For example, the Trump regime has been cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests in American universities, and threatening foreign students involved with deportation, in the name of ‘combatting antisemitism’.  But Trump has readily dog-whistled about George Soros conspiracy fantasies; has sat down to dinner with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes; and claimed that the neo-Nazi Unite the Right movement that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ contained among its number some ‘very fine people’.

 

Elsewhere, Trump’s evangelical-Christian support is always eager to label gay and trans people as a threat to children.  Yet by the end of October this year, the journalist Evan Hurst claimed to be following 188 news stories in 2025 whereby “Christian pastors / youth group leaders / priests / Christian school teachers, etc.,… had been accused / caught / arrested for / convicted of abusing kids in some way.”  Incidentally, Trump has been mysteriously reluctant to release the files about his former friend, the financier, paedophile and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.  Some believe this is because Trump features damningly in those files himself.

 

However, the current kerfuffle between Trump and the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, aka ‘the Beeb’, is surely the most blatant case of the kettle calling the pot black.  The BBC is in hot water because of an episode of its current-affairs programme Panorama, broadcast last year.  It contained a clip of Trump addressing his supporters in Washington DC on January 6th, 2021 – a crowd that subsequently became a mob and attacked the US Capitol, wanting to prevent Electoral College votes being counted and Joe Biden being confirmed as the new president.  Except that Panorama didn’t show one clip as insinuated, but two clips, from moments in Trump’s speech nearly an hour apart.  By splicing them together, it’s claimed, the BBC distorted his message and made him sound like he was inciting the crowd to violence.

 

Well, later, that crowd did behave violently.  But Panorama’s critics seem to imply this had nothing to do with Trump.  Oh no, sir.  No siree.

 

According to Trump, the BBC “actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.”  The corporation had ‘defrauded the public’.  It had lied.  Thus, it was Trump’s ‘obligation’ to take legal action against the network and sue them for… one billion dollars.

 

It’s hilarious to see Trump lose his rag and accuse someone else of lying because, when it comes to telling lies, Trump is the Master of Mendacity, the Pharaoh of Falsehood, the Divinity of Dishonesty, the Deity of Deceit.  The Washington Post catalogues him making ‘30,573 false or misleading claims’ during his first presidency alone.  By my calculations, if somebody had successfully sued him for a billion dollars for every ‘porkie pie’ he told between 2016 and 2020, he’d have had to shell out a sum of money in 14 digits.

 

No doubt the BBC was guilty of sloppy, even vindictive (if you can be that towards Trump) journalism with the Panorama episode.  But Trump did instigate the Capitol riot.  He was impeached for it a week later and would have been convicted if two-thirds of the Senate had voted for it the following month.  As it was, a majority of senators voted for his conviction, by 57 to 43, with seven Republican senators voting for it alongside the Democrats.  And Wikipedia’s account of the aftermath of the Capitol riot is a reminder of the revulsion just about everyone who wasn’t a diehard Trump supporter felt at the time – no matter how much these days Trump tries to rewrite history about what happened.

 

© CBS News

 

His culpability was obvious before January 6th too.  The mob was present in Washington DC that day because of Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 US presidential election being ‘stolen’ from him.  The journalist Howard Goodall has compiled the messages he sent out to his followers in the run-up to the gathering, including: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th.  Be there, will be wild…!”  “We will never give up.  We will never concede…”  “We’re going to fight like hell.  If you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”  If the Trump-BBC spat does end up in court, I’d love to hear his line of argument.  “The BBC twisted the truth about me inciting a bad thing that I really did incite.”

 

One great irony is that Trump has massively benefited from news companies editing his speeches, in that they usually pick out the bits where he sounds vaguely coherent and sane and ignore the lengthy stretches that suggest his brain is rapidly putrefying into a dollop of rancid mush.

 

For example, this is him havering to the American Business Forum in Miami on November 5th, seemingly unaware of the difference between South Africa and South America: “For generations. Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa.  I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa, look at South Africa, what’s going on.  Look at South America, what’s going on.  You know, I’m not going to — we have a G20 meeting in South Africa.  South Africa shouldn’t even be in the Gs anymore because what’s happened there is bad.  I’m not going. I told them, I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there.  It shouldn’t be there.  Take a look at what’s happening in different parts of South America….”

 

The furore erupted when right-wing British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked memo by Michael Prescott, a one-time political editor for another right-wing British newspaper the Sunday Times and, until recently, an advisor to the BBC’s Editorial Standards and Guidelines Board.  Prescott’s memo raised ‘concerns’ about the BBC’s impartiality and cited Panorama’s treatment of the January 6th speech as an example.  In the ensuing ruckus, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie and its chief executive Deborah Furness resigned.

 

It’s rich of the Telegraph to bang on about the BBC’s disingenuity too.  According to independent reporter Sam Bright, “in 2025 alone, the paper has been forced to publish over 100 corrections, clarifications, and formal regulatory apologies.”  Meanwhile, other right-wing British newspapers soon joined the anti-BBC feeding frenzy, including the Sun (‘BEEB’S BILLION DOLLAR BUNGLE’) and the Times (‘BBC IS TOLD: SAY SORRY OR TRUMP WILL SUE FOR $1BN’).  The Sun and the Times’ gaffer is Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News had to pay 785.5 million dollars in a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023.  This was after Murdoch’s network tried to propagate Trump’s big election lie by accusing Dominion’s voting machines of being rigged to steal the 2020 election from him.

 

Britain’s right-wing newspapers, of course, are always delighted to see the BBC in trouble.  They hate the corporation both out of principle – its publicly-funded existence is an affront to their hardline capitalist ethos – and because of the major competition the BBC’s news operation gives them.  No wonder they’re in seventh heaven about Trump bearing down on the Beeb with the threat of a billion-dollar lawsuit.

 

I also expect that, when the next British general election approaches, the BBC factor will play a part in those newspapers distancing themselves from the beleaguered Conservative Party, whom they’ve traditionally supported.  Instead, they’ll swing behind the hard-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, who coincidentally is Trump’s number one cheerleader in Britain.  If he gets into power, Farage is likely to be as ruthless with the BBC as Trump has been cutting funding for public broadcasting in the USA.  No doubt the Telegraph, the Sun and co. see Farage as their best bet for getting rid of their hated rival.

 

From wikipedia.org / © House of Commons / Laurie Noble

 

Though its drama, comedy and documentary TV shows were a big influence on me during my formative years, and though it’s Trump who’s persecuting them, I have to admit I find it hard to summon much sympathy for the BBC these days.  Its news reporting generally pisses me off for a number of reasons: its much-vaunted ‘impartiality’ (which too often feels like a lily-livered way of not causing offence), its unthinking support of the British establishment and, more recently, its kowtowing to right-wing politicians and opinion-formers.

 

The news stories on its website often give oxygen to right-wing cranks and extremists – climate-change deniers, anarcho-capitalists, bigots, Trump himself – who are allowed to express their opinions so long as someone else is quoted giving an opposing view.  This approach lets the BBC avoid upsetting the cranks and extremists whilst parroting its ‘impartiality’ principle.  But as the saying goes, when a journalist finds him or herself in a room with two people arguing about whether or not it’s raining outside, it’s not his or her job to simply write down what both are claiming.  The journalist should look out of the window and determine if it is raining or not.

 

Simultaneously, the BBC is depressingly pro-British establishment.  This is most clearly evidenced by the inordinate coverage it devotes to the Royal Family every time one of them dies.  Its over-the-top reporting of Prince Philip’s death in 2021 and its ‘perceived attempt to manufacture a largely absent national grief’ drew a record-breaking number of complaints: over 100,000.

 

Meanwhile, it gives short shrift to anyone threatening to rock that establishment.  These include Britain’s trade union movement (one nadir was its coverage of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ during the Miners’ Strike in 1984, when by reversing footage it suggested the strikers had thrown missiles first and then the police attacked them, when the events had been the other way around); supporters of Scottish independence (during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the former BBC journalist Paul Mason remarked, “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this.  So glad I’m out of there“); and left-wing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (when BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Corbyn in 2017, the interview was doctored to make it sound like he wouldn’t approve of police using shoot-to-kill tactics to deal with terrorists mounting a 2015 Paris / Bataclan-style attack in Britain).

 

And, presumably fearful of the future, the BBC has spent recent years grovelling to the right in the hope that it’ll curry favour with them.  It never does.  Grovelling to bullies simply results in them coming back to inflict more pain on you.

 

People have lost count of how many times Nigel Farage has been on the Beeb’s flagship political discussion show Question Time, but as of May 2024 it was put at 36.  Meanwhile, the BBC’s news agenda slavishly follows that set by the country’s predominantly right-wing press – starting with the round-up of the newspapers on its breakfast-time shows, where viewers are exposed to whatever grievances the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express are screaming about that morning.  If the corporation had a proper grasp of impartiality (and understood that newspapers with a physical presence on the newsstand aren’t people’s only sources of news), it’d try and balance those headlines with ones from more left-wing, online publications like the Byline Times and Novara Media.

 

But obviously, I find the BBC’s news coverage more palatable than the biased and often bilious garbage served up by the Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph.

 

Interestingly – and I think this is something people in England don’t appreciate – the BBC is possibly the last institution that encourages people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to feel ‘British’.  It’s still present in most people’s homes across the four nations of the United Kingdom.  It still gives them some sense of shared British community through its news programmes and its more popular entertainment shows like The Great British Bake-Off.  Should the BBC disappear, I don’t see what else, culturally and in the long term, will act as the glue holding the UK together.  (Certainly not the family of Mr. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.)  How ironic if the supposed super-British patriot Nigel Farage destroys this glue by abolishing the BBC or underfunding it to the point of irrelevancy.

 

That is, of course, if Trump doesn’t bankrupt it first.

 

From pixabay.com / © Ralf Genge

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Jim Mountfield hedges his bets

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

I’m pleased to say that at the end of last month – appropriately in time for Halloween – I had a new short story published in Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine.  Witch House is devoted to “the pulp fiction tradition of a modern gothic literature called ‘cosmic horror.’  Writers in this tradition include (but are not limited to) the following: Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and many more.  ‘Cosmic horror’ emphasizes helpless protagonists, unexplainable monstrous menaces, and fictional occult themes such as forbidden lore and evil conspiracy.”  My story is entitled The Bustle in the Hedgerow and, because it’s macabre in tone, it’s attributed to Jim Mountfield, the penname I use for such fiction.

 

Yes, the title was inspired by a lyric (“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now”) in Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (1971), a song that a very long time ago I thought was great but now, having heard it a million times, I’m heartily sick of.  Other songs that fall into this unfortunate category include the Beatles’ Hey Jude (1968), Derek and the Dominos’ Layla (1970) and the Eagles’ Hotel California (1977).  But that’s the only Zeppelin-esque influence on the story.  The Bustle in the Hedgerow owes its existence to three different ideas I had at three different times, which I duly recorded in my ideas notebook.  All published writers and aspiring writers of an elderly disposition, like me, carry a notebook into which they scribble the ideas that occur to them.  Though I suppose these days younger writers may record their ideas using a notes app on their smartphones.

 

The story’s main character was based on the historian, writer and poet Walter Elliot, who’s written extensively about the Scottish Borders, especially the lovely Ettrick and Yarrow part of it.  My family own a small farm near the Borders town of Peebles.  One day Walter showed up on our doorstep, asking if he could take a look around one of our fields in the cause of historical and archaeological research.  My dad happily told him to go ahead and, as a thank you, Walter presented him with free copies of couple of his books.  “A historian doing research in a remote farm field,” I thought.  “That’d make a good premise for a story.”  I wrote the idea down.

 

I should say that Walter Elliot is still on the go.  His work was acknowledged and lauded in the Scottish Parliament in 2021.  So please, don’t anyone tell him I’ve turned him into a character in a horror story.

 

© Deerpark Press

 

The second idea came when my dad got a grant from the European Union – oh, how long ago that seems now – to improve the natural environment of the farm and planted half-a-mile of hedgerow along the side of its biggest field.  One of the reasons why the hedge got approval was because it’d act as a ‘wildlife corridor’, allowing wild animals to move from habitat to habitat without having to cross roads or cultivated land.  Because the hedge started at a site where the local burn widened into a pool, and it ended at a shelterbelt of trees adjacent to our farmstead, I had a typically horror-writer-ish thought: “Hey, if something nasty lived in that pool, it could now use the hedge, the wildlife corridor, as a way of getting access to our house!”   And another idea was scribbled down.

 

Thirdly, I’d made notes about, and always wanted to write a story connected with, the Hexham Heads.  These were two little stone heads, alleged by some to be Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971.  They reputedly caused unwelcome and frightening paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them.  Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – a normally easy-going, family-friendly TV current-affairs programme that the BBC aired every weekday evening around six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976.  For some reason, the makers of the report saw fit to throw in images of severed human heads on tree-branches, screams and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed from 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf amid the creepy interviews, traumatising every young kid who happened to be watching.  It certainly scared the shit out of me.  (Long believed lost, footage of that legendary 1976 report has now been discovered and restored.  See here and here.)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

 

I don’t normally dispense advice to other writers.  For me, personally, this has always felt a bit pompous.  But based on my experiences here, I’d recommend them to (1) make notes of their ideas before they forget them, and (2) avoid regarding each idea as having a linear correlation with a story.  Rather than thinking ‘one idea equals one story’, they should keep studying all their ideas, however random, and keep looking for ways that two, three or more ideas could be combined in a single work.  This cross-fertilisation allowed me to come up with The Bustle in the Hedgerow.

 

Containing eleven pieces of fiction and five poems, Issue 5 of Witch House Magazine can be downloaded here.

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

 

 

It’s October 31st, the day of the spooky festival known in Ireland as Samhain and elsewhere as Halloween.  As is my custom each Halloween, I’ll celebrate the spirit of the occasion by posting on this blog ten of the creepiest or most unsettling pieces of artwork I’ve come across during the year.  By the way, the above photos are of a house in my immediate neighbourhood in Singapore.  Its inhabitants must really love Halloween.

 

Let’s begin with a great, old-school horror illustration where an unwary boatman has an encounter with a marsh-monster.  This was painted by the late Angus McBride, an artist who was born in London to Scottish parents but spent much of his professional career based in South Africa.  McBride’s resume included work for the educational magazines Look and Learn (1962-82) and Worlds of Wonder (1970-75), the Men-at-Arms series from Osprey Publishing and the tabletop game Middle-earth Role Playing inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  In fact, it’s from a collection of those last illustrations – Angus McBride’s Characters of Middle-earth (1990) – that this ghoulish picture comes.  The hideous beastie is actually a Mewlip, which The One Wiki to Rule Them All describes as ‘a fictional race, made up by Hobbits of the Shire, mentioned only in one poem.’

 

© Iron Crown Enterprises

 

Onto something more elegant.  I love old posters and illustrations advertising that most decadent of alcoholic drinks, absinthe.  These were often the work of Art Nouveau artists, most famously, Alphonse Mucha.  But away from the gentle curves and nymph-like belles dames of Art Nouveau, there’s a darker school of absinthe artwork, which suggests the drink’s more sinisterly seductive and ruinous side.  These feature green devils, black cats and, depicted in this painting from la Belle Epoque, a splendidly vaporous green lady-ghost.  It’s entitled Absinthe Drinker and is the work of the Czech artist Viktor Oliva, who reputedly quaffed much of the stuff in Paris in the late 19th century.  Absinthe Drinker now hangs in the Zlata Husa Gallery in Prague.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

You get the impression la Belle Epoque passed by the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose paintings – most famously The Scream (1893) – often suggest he lived in a state of perpetual, nerve-jangling anxiety.  During his childhood, he suffered the trauma of losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis and getting a bout of it himself when he was 13: “One Christmas Eve, when 13 years old, I lie in my bed,” he recalled. “The blood trickles from my mouth – the fever rages in my veins – fear cries out deep within me. Now, now, in just a moment, you will meet your Maker and be sentenced for eternity.”  In 1893, drawing on those experiences, he painted By the Death Bed (Fever) with pastels.  He would do further versions of it, with oils in 1895 and 1915 and as a lithograph in 1896.  It’s the 1915 By the Death Bed (Fever) that I find most disturbing. The white-skinned, almost skull-faced woman on the right could pass for the Angel of Death, while the appropriately diseased-looking wallpaper resembles a close-up of a yellow handkerchief, into which a TB victim has just coughed globs of blood.  Actually, the décor puts me in mind of one of the best horror short stories of all time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

 

From archive.com/artwork

 

Another all-time classic horror short story is M.R. James’ Casting the Runes (1911), which taps into the fear there’s something monstrous and nasty following you, and following you, and all the time getting closer…  The story was filmed as Night of the Demon in 1957, 21 years after James’ death.  I think James would have approved of the creepy atmosphere and build-up created by director Jacques Tourneur, but not of big, shonky-looking demon that’s doing the following and appears at the movie’s climax.  Apparently, it was shoehorned into the film by its producers, against Tourneur’s wishes.  Still, I really like this colourful poster for the movie, painted by Spanish artist Enrique Mataix.  Mataix produced movie posters for almost a half-century, from 1939 to 1988, including ones for Bringing Up Baby (1938), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Lust for Life (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).  Yes, his Night of the Demon poster gives prominence to that silly demon, but it’s slightly blurred, which hides its shonkiness.  And the surrounding, infernally psychedelic colours are striking.

 

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Columbia Pictures

 

This next work, Can You Show Me the Way Home by Californian artist Brandi Milne, feels like it could be an illustration from a movie poster.  Maybe one for a warped 1960s psychological thriller where children are imperiled, like Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Nanny (1965) or The Mad Room (1969).  Of course, it also echoes that hoary old 1958 sci-fi / horror movie The Fly, whose finale has a human / fly hybrid – David Hedison’s tiny head grafted onto a fly’s body – trapped in a spider’s web, while the humungous spider crawls hungrily towards it.  Rather than an attached-to-a-bug David-Hedison-head, Can You Show Me the Way Home artfully features a detached doll-head.  Also, it’s disarmingly presented in a child-like palette of black, white, grey, pink and straw-yellow.  Though going by the size of the doll-head, its spider must be pretty humungous too.

 

From dorothycircusgallery.com / © Brandi Milne

 

And there’s an obvious cinematic vibe – J-Horror this time – from this picture by Ohio-based concept artist David Sladek, aptly titled Waiting at the Wrong Bus Stop.  It strikes a particular chord with me.  During my misspent youth, I occasionally spent too long in a pub on a Friday or Saturday night and then found myself waiting for a late-night bus, in a decrepit and remote bus shelter, in the company of various unsavoury-looking characters.  Though none of them ever looked as unsavoury as the characters here.

 

From artstation.com / © David Sladek

 

And now for something completely different.  For depictions of the surreally ghoulish, you can’t beat Hieronymus Bosch.  Here’s a detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the legendary triptych the Dutchman painted between 1490 and 1510.  Its panels depict the paradise that’d been the Garden of Eden, the titular garden with its cavorting, amorous nudes and… hell.  Obviously, the hell-panel contains the images that everyone remembers.  This part of it shows a knight being devoured by what Wikipedia describes as ‘a pack of wolves’, though to me they look more that horror-story staple, rats – giant ones.  No doubt the thoughts flashing through the unfortunate knight’s brain are similar to the thoughts of the first victim in James Herbert’s 1974 paperback epic, The Rats: “Rats! His mind screamed the words.  Rats eating me alive!  God, God help me…”

 

From smarthistory.org

 

And keeping with rats, this gleeful-looking half-human, half-rat creature never fails to give me the creeps.  It’s the work of the American artist Brom, originally from Albany, Georgia.  His career has included illustrating the roleplaying worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and, more recently, providing pictures for as well as writing his own horror novels.  This illustration comes from his 2021 novel Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery.

 

From bromart.com / © Gerald Brom

 

Meanwhile, proper wolves – though perhaps they’re werewolves – feature in this beautifully evocative watercolour, ink and pencil work done by the Swiss artist Eugene Grasset in 1892, Three Women and Three Wolves.  I love everything about it: the trio of eerily floating women, who must be witches, or nymphs, or spirits, and the half-shocked, half-indignant way the nearest woman looks out of the picture at us; the three black wolves also looking, and laughing, out of the picture; the subtly-patterned russet trunks of the forest trees; the carpet of ferns.  And what’s that lying in the bottom left-hand corner?  A horn?  A hunting horn?  Have the wolves just been chomping on a huntsman?  No wonder they look so jolly.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

There aren’t any wolves, giant rats, giant spiders, J-Horror apparitions or any other monstrosities in this illustration by another Californian, Michael Whelan, described as ‘one of the world’s premier artists of imaginative realism’ and the most lauded artist in the history of science fiction.  (He has 15 Hugo Awards under his belt for a start.)  Done in acrylic, it’s an interior illustration for a Centipede Press edition of the famous H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931) which, as far as I can ascertain, hasn’t been published yet.  It’s the pictorial equivalent of a cinematic reaction shot.  But what a reaction.  The screaming explorer conveys all the cosmic horror that makes this particular story, set in the wastes of Antarctica, so claustrophobic.  Particularly clever are the margins of grey fur along the edges of the explorer’s garments.  They’re arranged so that they resemble that most Lovecraftian of motifs – a coiling tentacle.

 

From dmrbooks.com / © Michael Whelan / Centipede Press

 

And on the subject of H.P. Lovecraft…  I traditionally feature ten scary pictures in these annual Halloween posts.  But this year, here’s an extra one, an eleventh, in honour of the legendary New Jersey artist Stephen Fabian, who sadly died in May this year (admittedly at a grand old age of 95).  I admire the black-and-white interior designs he did for a 1998 volume entitled In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which is a collection of short stories not by Lovecraft but by his pen-friend and posthumous publisher August Derleth.  Unfortunately, reproducing an entire illustration on this page would mean reducing it and shedding some of its intricate detail.  So here’s part of an illustration for the 1948 Derleth short story Something in Wood.  It shows a statue of Lovecraft’s ghastliest and most famous deity, Cthulhu, looking tentacle-y and baleful, as ever.

 

© Mycroft & Moran / Stephen E. Fabian Sr

 

Happy Halloween!

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Ghosts of Fort Canning

 

 

Halloween is almost upon us, so this is an appropriate time to post an account of what happened when my partner and I, plus a friend, went on a ghost tour around Fort Canning.

 

Fort Canning is both a 48-metre-high hill in Singapore’s bustling Central Area and a park with a range of recreational facilities and historical landmarks and a lot of pleasant greenery.  To be honest, we didn’t go on a fully-fledged ghost tour.  It was advertised as The Fort Canning Conspiracy Tour.  Our guide also talked about rumours, reports and whisperings from the place’s past that concerned such Dan Brown-esque things as buried kings and treasure, curses – it was known at one point as the Forbidden Hill – and colonial-era secrecy and skullduggery involving the British.  But along the way, we also heard plenty of stories about ghosts, superstitions and the weird and unexplained.  And, generally, we had a great deal of fun.

 

The tour’s participants met up at 6.30 PM at the entrance of Singapore’s lovely Peranakan Museum on Armenia Street.  Our guide introduced himself as Eugene Tay, who’s an author (his book Supernatural Confessions: You are not Alone was published in 2015), the founder of the tourism group Haunting Heritage Tours, a YouTuber, a podcaster and, according to the online Singaporean / Malaysian publication Vulcan Post, ‘the only licenced tour guide in Singapore running ghost tours.’  For this evening’s tour he had five people in his party.  He began by asking each of us to introduce ourselves and say why we had an interest in the esoteric and paranormal.  No sooner had I mentioned my Irish roots than one of the other tour-members, a Singaporean, asked me about ‘leprechauns’.  I retorted that Ireland’s leprechaun industry is mainly aimed at gullible American tourists.  Five seconds after I said that, I remembered my beloved better-half, standing next to me, is American.

 

 

We kicked off by hearing some stories about the Tao Nan School building – the handsome old structure that houses the Peranakan Museum – and the Substation, the currently derelict building next door to it that, for a few decades, was home to ‘Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre’.  (A remnant of the Substation’s past glories is the message “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’, graffitied on a boarded-up window.)  These involved staff-members in both buildings having weird experiences and encountering inexplicable figures at times when there shouldn’t have been anyone there.

 

Standing outside the museum entrance are statues of a man and a little girl, the girl waving up at a balcony on the museum’s façade.  I got a jolt when I glanced up at the balcony and spotted a spectral figure there, standing within an archway.  Really, though, it was just another statue, of an old lady waving down at the girl.  It was still daylight, but Eugene’s tour was evidently starting to unsettle me.

 

 

Then we went around the corner onto Hill Street and into the grounds of the Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator.  This was consecrated in 1836 as a place of worship for Singapore’s members of the Armenian Apostolic Church and was designed by the architect George Drumgoole Coleman – responsible for many of Singapore’s early colonial buildings and a name that would crop up again on the tour.  From a ghost-tour point of view, its eeriest feature is the Memorial Garden at the rear of the grounds, where there are tombstones, graveyard monuments and ledger stones arranged in two semi-circles, one horizontal, one vertical.  They were moved here from the Christian Cemetery at Fort Canning when it was cleared to make a park, and also from the Bukit Timah-Cavenagh Road Cemetery.  (The human remains weren’t moved.)

 

As the dusk gathered, the elaborately sculpted headstones and stone statues gave the location an atmospheric vibe.  Supposedly, their arrival here inspired some creepy stories about taxi drivers picking up folk outside the church late at night, being asked to drive the passengers to certain disused cemeteries around Singapore… and, when they got to their destinations, discovering that those passengers had mysteriously vanished from the back of their cabs.  Though such tales obviously riff on the old urban myth of the ‘vanishing hitchhiker’.  Incidentally, it was nice that the church’s supervisor joined us at this point and answered our questions about the building and its history.

 

 

From there, we went around another corner into Canning Rise and ascended past Singapore’s Masonic Hall – Freemasonry was brought here by the British – and then the National Archives building, which was previously the site of Singapore’s prestigious Anglo-Chinese School.  At both places, we stopped and heard more tales.  We heard the first mention of conspiracies.  What had the Freemasons been up to in the the 19th century?  And, though their original number contained such prestigious figures as Stamford Raffles, founder of contemporary Singapore, and William Napier, its first lawyer, why wasn’t the architect who did so much to fashion the early city, George Drumgoole Coleman, invited to join them?  We’d hear more speculation about that later.  Then we entered the park itself – through the Spice Garden, to the edge of Fort Canning Green, and up to Cox Terrace behind the majestically floodlit Fort Canning Centre.  By now it was fully night-time.

 

 

Rather than do all the talking, Eugene handed out cards with printed testimonies by people who’d had frightening and baffling experiences in the vicinity and encouraged his tour-members to read them aloud.  Among the stories I read out was one from a person who, as a child, had encountered a strange Western figure at Fort Canning’s old cemetery.  The figure lamented, “I shouldn’t have brought her here!  I should never have trusted him!” and then disappeared by the grave of George Drumgoole Coleman.  In fact, Coleman married an Irishwoman in 1842, brought her to Singapore in late 1843 – and died just three months later from an alleged ‘fever.’  And within seven months of that, his wife had married the lawyer William Napier.  Which all sounds a bit fishy.

 

Meanwhile, the friend we’d brought with us, a sometime-actress, added to the mood by embellishing her readings with truly blood-curdling cackles.

 

 

Also in the park, we got a look at Kermat Iskandar Shah, a wooden pavilion with a tiled roof that was once a shrine.  It’s associated with Parameswara, who was supposedly the fifth and final king (Raja) of Singapura, the kingdom believed to have existed here during the 13th and 14th centuries.  At the very end of the 14th century, Parameswara had to flee when the Majapahit Empire launched an invasion.  He ended up further north along the Malay Peninsula, at the mouth of the Bertram River, and founded what is now Malacca.  Kermat Iskandar Shah has been claimed to be Parameswara’s burial place, but this doesn’t make sense if he really did escape the island and re-establish himself in the future Malacca.

 

Indeed, there are stories about all five kings of Singapura being buried under the hill, which raises questions about what treasures and riches might have been buried with them.  (Archaeological excavations have taken place near the pavilion, but according to Wikipedia they mainly uncovered Chinese coins and porcelain fragments from the Tang Dynasty.)  I wondered if this was why the place was once known as the Forbidden Hill where, supposedly, trespassers were cursed and would die.  Was it a strategy to frighten off potential tomb-robbers?

 

 

When Stamford Raffles arrived in 1819, he may have heard about the curse.  Rather than go up Fort Canning himself, he cannily sent Scotsman Major William Farquhar up it first, along with some Malays, to plant a gun and the Union Jack at its top.  When Farquhar arrived back in one piece, Raffles evidently decided it was safe and subsequently had Coleman design him a bungalow to live in atop the hill, which was completed in 1823.  Eugene observed that perhaps some bad karma from the place did rub off on Raffles because, back in England, he died when he was only 45.  (Farquhar, on the other hand, outlived his old boss by 20 years.)  He also noted that the British did a lot of mysterious digging on the hill.  Were they secretly trying to locate the treasures of Singapura’s former kings?

 

We got a look too at the outside of the Battlebox, officially known as the Fort Canning Bunker or the Headquarters Malaya Command Operations Bunker.  Here, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, Commander of the British Commonwealth forces, and 500 officers and men holed up after the Japanese attacked Singapore in 1942.  Percival ended up surrendering, an event Winston Churchill described as ‘the worst disaster and biggest capitulation in British history’.  Subsequently, the Japanese, the new, if temporary, masters of Singapore, took over the Battlebox.  However, they didn’t stay there long and vacated it again.  Could this have something to do with supernatural goings-on deep in the bunker?  No.  According to Eugene, the Japanese didn’t like it because the British had left it like a pigsty.

 

 

What I enjoyed most about this tour was its improvisational nature.  Tour-members and even passers-by were welcome to contribute.  At the National Archives building, the former Anglo-Chinese School, one of our party mentioned that he’d been a pupil there when it’d been a school… And he’d had a spooky experience on its third floor.  The building was still open, so Eugene took us in, we went up to the floor, and the man told us what’d happened to him at the actual location.  He’d been alone in a music room when the air around him had inexplicably turned cold.  Later, he’d heard that the room was supposed to be haunted.  Wonderfully, the building’s security guard, noticing us, insisted on telling us about a creepy, inexplicable experience he’d had there, doing his rounds, a few years earlier.

 

Later, when we were passing through the old Fort Canning Gate, an elderly gentleman out for a walk approached us.  He’d recognized Eugene from his YouTube videos and wanted to tell us about an evening when he’d seen a ghostly figure near that spot.

 

Many more stories later, we found ourselves descending the far side of the hill, towards Fort Canning MRT Station.  As Eugene finished up, we heard the eerie creaking of a swing in a nearby playground.  While it cranked back and forth, I nervously looked towards it.  First, I was relieved to see a human figure using the swing.  Then I realized it was a female figure whose face I couldn’t see, but who had long black hair – like a character from a Japanese horror movie.  And, momentarily, I was supremely spooked.

 

Another sure sign this tour had been a success.

 

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What a Sigh is there

 

 

It was my birthday a while ago and my lovely mother-in-law sent me a batch of rock-music-themed T-shirts as a present.  One was emblazoned with the striking cover-illustration of the 1998 album Cruelty and the Beast by County Suffolk gothic / symphonic heavy metal band Cradle of Filth.  Cruelty and the Beast was a concept album inspired by the legendary 16th / 17th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory, who supposedly bathed in the blood of slaughtered virgins in an attempt to keep herself young-looking.  (Fittingly, the album featured narration by the late, great horror-movie actress Ingrid Pitt, who played Bathory in the 1971 Hammer film Countess Dracula.)  Anyway, I’d been waiting for an opportunity to wear this new T-shirt in public.  The opportunity arrived on October 16th, when Japanese black metal band Sigh performed at Singapore’s Phil Studio.

 

 

Actually, my T-shirt matched the macabre vibe established by the second support act, the Singaporean Tok Yathraa.  (I couldn’t get away from work early enough to catch the first support act, which was N3M3515 – read the numbers as letters – described intriguingly as a “one-man ChipDoom Project from Singapore, armed with a Classic Gameboy, combining elements from Sludge Doom and Hardcore.”)  Tok Yathraa is a black-shrouded, hooded, white-faced, rather Bergmanesque figure who, when interviewed on the Filthy Gods of Metal website, described himself as “a one-man band which started on 16th May 2020… heavily influenced by King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, Black Sabbath, Immortal, S.M. Salim, Judas Priest and Wings.”  It might come as a shock for the classic Malay singer S.M. Salim or, indeed, Paul McCartney’s Wings to find themselves included in such illustriously metallic company.  In the same interview, he called his music “bomoh metal, a fusion of black metal plus heavy metal plus focusing on subjects of local / Asia ghosts.”

 

Now fronting a three-piece band with a drummer and bass-player, Tok Yathraa put on a show that was simultaneously spooky and good fun, with his references to the ghosts and folklore of the Malay Peninsula nicely anticipating Halloween at the end of this month.  He went down well with the small but enthusiastic crowd whom, at the beginning of his set, he encouraged to stand close to the stage so that things felt more intimate.

 

 

Headliners Sigh also have roots in the sub-genre of black metal, which values shrieking vocals, hectic and distorted guitars and copious allusions to occult, Satanic and pagan skulduggery, and is essayed by corpse-painted and pseudonym-laden musicians.  Indeed, historically, Sigh’s black metal credentials are impeccable.  They formed in 1989, heavily inspired by the black metal scene becoming popular – and soon notorious – in Scandinavia.  A few years later, they were signed to the Norwegian label Deathlike Silence Records by Euronymous, co-founder of the band Mayhem.  Yes, Euronymous was the bloke who’d be stabbed to death in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, of the band Burzum, during a period when the Norwegian black metal scene went down some very dark roads indeed.

 

 

But in the three decades since – during which time, vocalist, keyboardist and bassist Mirai Kawashima has been the band’s leading light and one, enduring member – Sigh have also distinguished themselves with their willingness to experiment.  Their sound has incorporated elements from classical music, traditional Japanese music and elsewhere, so that it’s earned such epithets as ‘avant-garde’ and ‘progressive’.  Their eclectic-ness was certainly on display tonight.  For example, their second singer and multi-instrumentalist Dr Mikannibal – according to Google AI, she’s actually a professor with ‘a doctorate in physics form the University of Tokyo’ – played a shamisen at one point and a saxophone at another.  That was when she wasn’t pouring fake blood over her face from a goblet and shrieking sepulchrally.  All good, ghoulish fun, by the way.

 

 

Their set – much of which was drawn from the 2007 album Hangman’s Hymn, which they re-recorded this year, and from the 2022 album Shiki – was a riot.  It contained enough of the band’s original black metal lodestone to keep headbangers in the audience happy but offered plenty of other elements to ensure the proceedings felt fresh and unpredictable.  The band’s look was great too.  It was obviously influenced by such Japanese things as manga, kabuki and ukiyo-e – the colourful woodblock prints from the Edo period – as well as by Tim Burton and the traditional corpse-paint and general gruesomeness of black metal.  I noticed how the guitarists had painted-on stitch-marks at the corners of their mouths, suggesting Kuchisake Onna, the fearsome slit-mouthed lady of Japanese urban myth.  Though I don’t know what the black mask (or was it black gunk?) covering the face of the drummer was meant to represent.  Anyway, he looked pretty fearsome too.

 

 

As I said, the crowd was relatively small, but the performers gave it their all.  There was a splendid vibe and I had a great night.  In my heavy metal live-music memories, this experience will be up there with seeing Megadeth (supported by Korn) in Chicago in 1995, or Motorhead (supported by Saxon) in Norwich in 2009.  It didn’t matter that the attendance wasn’t massive. I tried explaining this to Tok Yathraa, whom I encountered at the end of the evening, after Sigh had finished their set.  He looked slightly bemused by my enthusiasm.  Well, I’d had a few beers by then.

 

One thing did put a dampener on the evening, though.  Also after the gig’s end, I got talking to one of Phil Studio’s staff-members and learned from him that the venue will be closing down on November 2nd.  This is thanks to an economically lethal cocktail of ‘high operational costs, compliance burdens, regulatory red tape, and double standards’.  It comes in the wake of the closure two months ago of the Projector Cinema, a rare place in Singapore where you could get to see movies considered too niche to be shown in the city’s cineplexes.  Oh dear, Singapore.  If you keep on shedding your independent, alternative and idiosyncratic creative spaces like this, you’re going to end up as bland, corporate and culturally airless as Dubai…  Or indeed, Edinburgh (see here, here and here).

 

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Paul Thomas Anderson wins this battle

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

The critics have, almost universally, lavished praise on One Battle after Another (2025), the new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.  (Though he didn’t try to adapt it directly, Anderson’s script took some inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.)  The praise is richly deserved.  I went to see it in my local cinema a few days ago and, afterwards, I hadn’t felt so exhilarated by a film since watching Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) on a big screen a decade earlier.

 

Heading the movie’s cast is Leonard DiCaprio, who plays Pat, a bomb-maker involved in a revolutionary American group called the French 75.  The ’75 stick it to The Man by freeing recent Latin-American immigrants from detention centres and blowing up banks and the offices of right-wing politicians.  Surprisingly, the plodding, unshowy Pat has a relationship, then sires a child, with fellow-revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills.  Essayed by Teyana Taylor in a short but devastating performance, Perfidia is the opposite of DiCaprio’s character.  She’s a force of nature: loud, fearless and given to flamboyant gestures, like humiliating the sleazy commander of a detention centre by forcing him to jerk off in front of her.  It’s entirely in keeping with her character when she’s shown firing a machine gun whilst massively pregnant.

 

To put an end to the French 75, the authorities appoint the ruthless and immoral Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), coincidentally the detention-centre commander who was made to have that embarrassing, public wank.  Lockjaw captures Perfidia and compels her to rat on her colleagues, and thereafter it becomes open season on the ’75, with most of them being arrested or – more often – summarily executed.  Pat and his now-infant daughter manage to escape with new identities (‘Bob and Willa Ferguson’) and end up living a low-key, mostly off-grid existence in a Californian town called Baktan Cross.  Pat / Bob decays into a booze and dope-raddled paranoid, terrified the past will catch up with them.  Wilma (Chase Infiniti) grows up with no idea of her real origins and becomes a teenager bemused by, and frequently having to nursemaid, her eccentric old dad.

 

15 years later, Captain Lockjaw is invited to join an Illuminati-like organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club, whose members belong to the white American elite and are wealthy, powerful… and extremely racist.  Lockjaw’s relationship with Pefidia in the days of the French 75 was more than one of pursuer and quarry.  He came to fetishise her, his obsession triggered by that first, masturbatory encounter, and they were briefly intimate prior to her capture – which highlights what a wild, try-anything-once character Perfidia was.  Now Lockjaw fears that he might be Wilma’s father, not Pat / Bob, and having a mixed-race daughter would obviously torpedo his chances of joining the Christmas Adventurers.  So he launches a military crackdown on Baktan Cross, ostensibly to round up illegal immigrants, but really so he can find Pat / Bob and the inconvenient Wilma and erase them.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

That’s the set-up established during One Battle After Another’s first quarter and it’s all you need to know.  What follows is a cinematic rollercoaster ride as Pat / Bob and Wilma, in separate locations when Lockjaw and his uniformed, heavily-armed goons crash into Baktan Cross, flee, hide, fight back and try to find each other and escape.  Along the way, they  encounter Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s local karate teacher who’s much more than he seems; a bounty hunter with a conscience (Eric Schweig); an assassin sent by the Christmas Adventurers to clean up Lockjaw’s mess (John Hoogenakker); some skateboarding radicals; a nasty far-right militia who dispose of people for money; and a secret enclave of nuns with guns. 

 

As you’ll gather from the synopsis, One Battle After Another is a politically charged movie.  It regularly focuses on how how the USA reacts to immigrants,  often impoverished, frightened and vulnerable people, both mistreating them and unscrupulously using them as pawns in power games and culture wars.  This is timely considering what Trump and his minions are doing at the moment.  It has to be said, though, that Lockjaw and the police and troops under his command go about their business with much more precision, organization and efficiency than the masked, clumping thugs in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have managed so far.  Predictably, you don’t have to look far on the Internet before you find negative reviews of the movie posted by far-right frothers, incensed by what they see as its Marxist / communist / socialist / radical-leftist leanings.

 

But as well as being political, One Battle After Another is very funny.  DeCaprio’s Pat / Bob may have been a revolutionary once, but for most of the movie he’s an amusingly grumpy and befuddled middle-aged dad, showing zero patience, say, for his daughter’s insistence that he respects her schoolfriends’ preferred pronouns.  Particularly funny are the scenes where, on the run from Lockjaw, he tries to phone what’s left of the French 75 to beg them for help.  He’s far from impressed when they demand he reels off an array of code-phrases to prove he’s who he says he is – codes he’s mostly forgotten during the past 15 years.  DeCaprio’s subsequent meltdowns are hilarious, though these scenes will strike a chord with anyone who, in the days before voice-recognition, tried to phone their bank but failed to cite the right security numbers.

 

The film makes interesting parallels between the French 75 and the Christmas Adventurers Club.  Though they’re positioned at different ends of society, at the bottom and at the top, both are shrouded in secrecy and pompous security protocols and both believe they are doing great works and bending history to their wills.  Seen from outside, though, they seem like two groups of overgrown kids who’ve set up gangs with stroppy rules about who gets to be ‘in’ and who doesn’t.

 

One Battle After Another features, perhaps, Leonardo DeCaprio’s best-ever performance.  His Pat / Bob character is an extension of Rick Dalton, the frustrated over-the-hill movie star he played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).  But while Dalton had his loyal buddy and stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) to keep him from going off the rails, Pat / Bob has no one when the shit hits the fan.  His daughter Willa is elsewhere and he has to overcome his many insecurities and get his act together alone.  At the same time, DeCaprio convinces us that Pat / Bob, despite his chaotic nature, is a loving father.  It’s his desire to save her that keeps him going, no matter what fate throws at him.  And in this film, it throws a lot.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

 

He’s excellently partnered by Chase Infiniti as Willa.  Though in reality the actress is 25 years old, she convincingly plays a teenager – one who has her head well-screwed-on at the start of proceedings, but who still has to deal with a very steep learning curve.

 

Meanwhile, Sean Penn is splendidly villainous as Lockjaw.  He’s memorable both because of his grotesque physicality – with his contorted face, weird musculature and lurching gait, he looks like Popeye the Sailor Man rendered in human flesh – and because of his deeply screwed-up personality, which is simultaneously psychotic and pathetic and driven by a juvenile sense of entitlement.

 

Great though DeCaprio, Infiniti and Penn are, Benicio del Toro comes close to quietly stealing the show.  When he first appears, you see him as a character who’s popped up in DeCaprio’s movie.  But later, having learnt more about him – his character runs an extensive and meticulously-organised sanctuary and support-network for undocumented immigrants in the town – you begin to feel DeCaprio has strayed into his movie.

 

There’s also a lovely score courtesy of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and, late on, a car chase that could become as legendary as the one in the Steve McQueen classic Bullit (1968).  And Paul Thomas Anderson handles things at all times with aplomb.

 

One Battle After Another should win a slew of Oscars at next year’s Academy Awards.  By then, though, Donald Trump may have banned all opposition parties in the USA and put the country under martial law, enforced by real-life Steven Lockjaws in ICE, the National Guard and various far-right militias.  So it might not.

 

If that proves to be the case, I can only say, “Viva la revolution!”

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Ghoulardi Film Company

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The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

 

© Penguin Books

 

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969).  We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

 

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor.  At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all.  Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too.  Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas.  To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride.  Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

 

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies.  What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories.  The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops.  Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria.  Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him.  Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men.  Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh.  Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

 

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book.  In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc.  By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate.  Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too.  In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles.  Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’.  Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.”  One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls!  How could you ever say such a thing!”

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

 

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous.  Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows.  There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley.  In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77).  In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses.  In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

 

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty.  The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre.  The movie also plays up the humour of the situation.  Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients.  Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt.  This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.”  If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

 

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining.  Even 56 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time.  Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang.  In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid.  Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

 

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld.  In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again.  In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead.  When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake.  It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ.  Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

 

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair.  M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond.  However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking.  There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role.  For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

 

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter of the 1960s Bond-films.  Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time.  (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.)  Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film.  He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure.  I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

 

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series.  In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever.  Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die.  Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings.  Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

 

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).  When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced.  Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie.  (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

 

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek