Posts

Posted on

Lanka metal

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Posted on

It’s all gone J.G.

 

© Fay Godwin / The Paris Review

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

Posted on

A second homecoming for Jim Mountfield

 

© The Horror Zine

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Posted on

London Bridge is down

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From unsplash.com / © Anika Mikkelson

 

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

 

From wikipedia.org / © Udo Keppler 1901

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From twitter.com/jeremycorbyn

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From twitter.com/dalrymplewill

Posted on

Britain gets Trussed

 

From wikipedia.com / © gov.uk

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From wikipedia.com / © Cantab12

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

Posted on

Rab Foster gets a book deal

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Posted on

Honour the Sabbath

 

From wikipedia.com / © Vertigo Records

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Vertigo Records

 

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

 

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

 

© Vertigo Records

 

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

 

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

 

© Vertigo Records

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

They deserve to enjoy their retirement for their legacy is huge.  Their weighty fingerprints are all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk.  And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal.  Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.

 

From youtube.com / © BBC

Posted on

What kind of asshat stabs a writer?

 

From wikipedia.com / © ActuaLitté

 

During the fortnight since August 12th, when author Salman Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured before he was due to give a lecture in Chautaugua, New York, I’ve been trying to write something here about the incident.  But to be honest, I can’t express my reaction any more succinctly than Stephen King did when he tweeted a day afterwards: “What kind of asshat stabs a writer, anyway?  F*cker!”

 

The asshat and f*cker in question, a 24-year-old called Hadi Matar, was inspired by the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, and reaffirmed in 2017 by Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  Rushdie, of course, received the fatwa on account of his supposedly blasphemous-against-Islam novel The Satanic Verses (1988).

 

I have to admit that my knowledge of The Satanic Verses is limited.  When I tried reading it, I found the opening section, in which the two protagonists Farishta and Chamcha are thrown from an airplane as it explodes over the English Channel, pretentious and badly written and felt disinclined to read the rest of the book.  I remember Rushdie using the phrase ‘like titbits of cigar’ to describe how the two men fell from the fragmenting fuselage, and thinking to myself what a bloody horrible simile it was.

 

Still, I persevered with The Satanic Verses and thought the part that came next, describing Bollywood, was quite engaging.  But that dodgy opening section had fatally weakened my interest in it.  I was preparing to move to another country at the time and, unfinished, the book got stashed away in a box with some things I wasn’t taking with me.  Neither the box nor book have been opened since.  I’ve heard that the plot later on has Farishta and Chamcha transforming into an angel and a devil, which sounds intriguing, if a tad similar to what happens in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel Mr Pye (1953).

 

Still, I read 50 pages of the book, which is probably 50 pages more than 99.99% of those clamouring for Rushdie’s execution over the years have read of it.  One person I met who definitely had read The Satanic Verses was the CEO of an oil company in Tunisia whom, many years later, I was hired to give English lessons to every week.  As his English was already excellent, ours was hardly a teacher-student relationship and I suspect he just wanted a regular opportunity to blether with someone in English about whatever caught his fancy.  In addition to being a cerebral and erudite man, he was an observant Muslim.  Our lessons took place in the middle of Friday afternoons and were sometimes delayed by 10 or 15 minutes because he was slightly late getting back from Friday prayers at his mosque.

 

One afternoon, he wanted to talk to me about an incident at the Printemps des Art Fair in La Marsa, a few miles along the coast from Tunis.  A couple of the artworks displayed there had caused a riot by hard-line Islamic Salafists, who believed them to be ‘blasphemous’, and during the protests the venue had been looted.  My student was incensed by this and particularly incensed at how the Salafists had targeted a painting by the artist Mohamed Ben Slama.  This featured God’s name spelt out in configurations of tiny ants which, the Salafists claimed, sacrilegiously reduced Allah to the level of puny insects that scurried about in the dirt.  But in fact, my student pointed out, the Koran depicts ants as an intelligent and noble species, even in possession of their own language, and arguably the artist was trying to glorify God through the marvellous intricacies of His creations, even the smallest ones.  “Those people who attacked the painting,” he snorted, “haven’t read or understood the Koran properly.”

 

Then, not missing a beat, he continued, “It’s like Rushdie’s book.  Those people calling for him to be killed, they don’t know what they’re talking about.  They haven’t even read The Satanic Verses.  I have read it and I don’t think it’s blasphemous.”

 

Meanwhile, depressingly but predictably, the attack on Rushdie has been hijacked by a lot of extreme right-wing, GB News-watching, Enoch Powell-worshipping morons who are trying to peddle it as yet more evidence of the need to stand up against the woke mob.  Because apparently that’s what those hideous, Guardian-reading Wokerati will do if they’re not able to cancel your right to free speech – they’ll stab you instead.  Oh, and of course it provides them with another excuse to bash Muslims.

 

Never mind the fact that Rushdie finds their right-wing views abhorrent and indeed, in The Satanic Verses, referred to their heroine Margaret Thatcher as ‘Mrs Torture’.  And never mind the fact that their right-wing counterparts in the USA are currently getting onto school boards and purging the libraries and curriculums of the schools under their jurisdiction of books they don’t approve of, usually books that have non-white or gay people as characters, touch on issues such as racism and homophobia, and generally imply that life in the USA isn’t as hunky-dory as it’s supposed to be.  Those right-wing gits are as twisted and blinkered as Rushdie’s would-be assassin.

 

One consequence of this horribleness – I’m now planning to dig out that old copy of The Satanic Verses and give it a second try.  And apparently I’m not alone in my new-found desire to read it.  Reports say that, in the UK alone, sales of The Satanic Verses have surged so much that Rushdie’s publisher is currently rushing out a reprint.  So, Hadi Matar, not only did you fail in your attempt to kill Rushdie, but you’ve given a huge boost to the book you detest so much (though you’ve probably never read it) and more people than ever are being exposed to its blasphemous musings.  Well done.

 

© Viking Penguin

Posted on

Respect South Park’s authority

 

© South Park Studios

 

I remember the moment I fell in love with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV comedy show South Park, which first aired a quarter-century – yes, 25 years! – ago last weekend.

 

It was 1998 and I was watching episode twelve, entitled Mecha–Streisand, of the show’s first season.  Until then, South Park had seemed amusing enough.  Chronicling the adventures of four kids – ‘everyman’ Stan Marsh, sharp-tongued Jewish lad Kyle Broflovski, parka-shrouded, working-class Kenny McCormick (whose relationship with life, and death, is complicated) and the epically sociopathic Eric Cartman – in the Colorado town of the title, its low-fi animation had been enlivened by some moments of outrageous, by 1998 standards, bad taste.

 

But for me, with Mecha-Streisand, South Park seemed to become something altogether more audacious and surreal.  The episode has Barbra Streisand transforming into a giant Godzilla-style kaiju and stomping all over the town until Robert Smith of the Cure – referred to as ‘Robert Smith of the Cure’ – arrives and transforms too.  He becomes a giant moth and ejects the monster-Streisand into outer space.  No wonder Kyle cries out in gratitude, “Disintegration is the best album ever!”

 

© South Park Studios

 

Since then, I’ve been a big fan of the show, though it definitely enjoyed its glory years during the noughties, when over seven or eight seasons it went into overdrive and churned out magnificent episodes on a regular basis.  It’s never quite scaled the same heights afterwards.  One problem is that since 2016 American politics have been so insane and, well, South Park-like, that the country has existed beyond the show’s powers to satirise it.  Indeed, in a 2015 episode, while the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president still seemed a joke, the show killed off the orange-skinned tycoon.  When the real Trump ended up in the White House the following year, South Park had to run an unconvincing parallel-universe storyline where the kids’ unhinged teacher Mr Garrison becomes US president and behaves like Trump for four years.

 

That’s not to say it isn’t good these days.  Unlike other long-running cartoon shows I could mention, which have declined into weary irrelevance, the twenty-something South Park has nobly, if not always successfully, tried to experiment.  It’s had full-season story arcs and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, longer-length specials satirising America’s response to the virus. It’s spent much time exploring the topic of political correctness, with surprising depth considering how crudely the show started out in 1998.  In 2015, to increase its commentary on this, it introduced the character of PC Principal (“Watch your micro-aggressions, bro!”), who could have been portrayed as just a woke idiot but was rather more nuanced.

 

© South Park Studios

 

And it hasn’t been afraid to take much-loved characters off on dark tangents.  Witness Stan’s dad Randy, once a gormless but lovable dolt, now a ruthless, profit-obsessed dealer in marijuana.  In 2019, Randy even accepted the filthy lucre of the Disney Corporation and murdered Winne the Pooh, whose unfortunate resemblance to Xi Jinping had been holding back Disney’s fortunes in China.

 

Here, then, are my ten favourite episodes of South Park – though picking just ten has been an almost impossible task.

 

Scott Tenorman Must Die (2001)

Scott Tenorman Must Die is the first South Park episode to show the full, depraved depths of Cartman’s sociopathy.  Glib older kid Scott Tenorman humiliates Cartman, who then plots his revenge.   This culminates in Scott being tricked into eating the bodies of his dead parents, which Cartman has cunningly turned into chili.  To make things that bit worse, Scott’s favourite band Radiohead show up just as he discovers the truth and bursts into tears.  “You know, everyone has problems, but it doesn’t mean you have to be a little cry-baby about it,” snorts Thom Yorke before he and his bandmates walk off in disgust.

 

Casa Bonita (2003)

More top-notch Cartman sociopathy.  He convinces the sweet but idiotically naïve and gullible Butters Stotch – South Park’s unofficial ‘fifth Beatle’ to Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny – that a huge meteor is on a collision course with earth and hides him away in a secret bunker.  To keep him hiding there, he later convinces him that the post-collision earth has been overrun by ravenous, radioactive cannibals.  The reason?  Butters is on the guest list for Kyle’s birthday party at the kitschy Mexican-themed restaurant Casa Bonita and Cartman isn’t.  Casa Bonita is, weirdly, Cartman’s idea of heaven and he reasons his name will be added to that precious guest list if Butters disappears.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone actually bought the real-life Casa Bonita in 2021.

 

You Got F’d in the A (2004)

This is the perfect South Park episode if you felt you were the terminally uncool kid at school, forever overshadowed by much trendier schoolmates.  Stan is challenged to a ‘dance-off’ by a squad of obnoxiously hip kids from Orange County, California, and is humbled when the best he can do is shuffle his feet to Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart (1992).  Urged on by his dad Randy – back then hapless but good-hearted, rather than the out-and-out arsehole he is nowadays – Stan puts together a team to represent South Park and take on the Orange County kids at an official dance competition.  The team includes one of the town’s Goth Kids (catchphrase: “If you want to be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do”), a dancing chicken called Jeffy, and Butters, who’s been suffering from severe PTSD since a tap-dancing routine went wrong.  Therefore, hopes of success are not high.  The outcome is unexpected, brutal and gratifying.

 

© South Park Studios

 

AWESOM-O (2004)

Butters receives a mysterious present, a sentient robot called AWESOM-O.  It’s really Cartman in disguise, the little scumbag intent on digging up more dirt on Butters so that he can humiliate him further.  What he discovers, though, is that Butters has a secret video of Cartman, showing him cross-dressing as Britney Spears. Thus, Cartman has to remain in disguise for longer than planned, until he learns the location of the incriminating video.  During the episode, Butters and his new robot pal end up in LA, where AWESOM-Os remarkable artificial intelligence earns him the attention of, first, some Hollywood executives, and then the top brass in the military-industrial complex.  None of the adults seem to notice that AWESOM-O is, in fact, a portly kid wearing a couple of cardboard boxes.  AWESOM-O is another classic featuring the Cartman-Butters double-act.  As is…

 

The Death of Eric Cartman (2005)

Cartman does something even more reprehensible than tricking Scott Tenorman into eating his parents – he scoffs all the delicious, crispy chicken-skins on a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway when the other kids aren’t looking.  (Kenny is so upset when he finds out that he bursts into tears.)  The kids retaliate by totally ignoring Cartman the next day.  Cartman, trying to fathom why everybody appears not to see or hear him anymore, decides it must be because he died during the night.  For some reason, though, his spirit remains marooned on earth just like Patrick Swayze’s was in Ghost (1990).  However, the kids have forgotten to tell Butters that no one’s speaking to Cartman.  When he finds himself able to communicate with Cartman as usual, the duo conclude he’s the equivalent of the medium in Ghost played by Whoopi Goldberg.  Much hilarity / stupidity ensues as Butters and Cartman try to get the latter’s spirit to pass on to the great hereafter.

 

Erection Day (2005)

If The Death of Eric Cartman spoofs Ghost, the closing minutes of Erection Day provide a piss-take, both funny and gruelling, of the most famous scene in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982).  This episode centres on Jimmy Valmer, the crutch-using, stuttering kid in class whose catchphrase is, “I’m not handicapped, I’m handi-capable!” and whose ambition is become a stand-up comedian.  Obviously, Jimmy is determined to win the school’s annual talent contest – other contestants include Cartman doing an impersonation of Tony Montana from Scarface (1983) and the Goth Kids performing a synth number called Talent Shows are for Fags – but a strange affliction threatens to ruin his act.  He keeps suffering sudden, unprovoked and massive erections.  Some misguided advice leads him to believe that the only way to cure the affliction is to lose his virginity.  Then, venturing into South Park’s red-light district, he becomes involved with a decrepit prostitute called Nutgobbler and her ultra-violent pimp.

 

© South Park Studios

 

Tsst (2006)

One reliably depressing character in South Park is Eric Cartman’s spineless mother Liane, devoted to her hideous offspring while he bullies, manipulates and torments her.  In Tsst, Liane Cartman finally tries to tame her son by enlisting the help of some reality TV show hosts.  She brings in Jo Frost from Supernanny (2004-08), who ends up in an asylum eating her own faeces.  (“It’s from hell!”)  Then she tries Cesar Millan from Dog Whisperer (2004-12).  Millan’s approach, of treating Cartman like a badly-behaved canine, has better results.

 

Go God Go / Go God Go XII (2006)

An ambitious two-parter making fun of everything from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (2006) to hoary old sci-fi TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-81), Go God Go has Cartman unable to wait a few weeks until the new Nintendo Wii console appears in the shops.  Instead, he has himself cryogenically frozen until it goes on sale.  Inevitably, things go wrong and he overshoots his target-date by 500 years and wakes up in a strange future world where everyone is an atheist and Richard Dawkins is hailed as a prophet, yet different factions with different interpretations of Dawkins’ pronouncements fight their own ‘holy’ wars.  For funniness, though, nothing quite matches an early scene where Ms Garrison (who by this time has had a gender re-assignment) reluctantly teaches the kids the theory of evolution: “So there you go.  You’re the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel.  Congratulations!”

 

© South Park Studios

 

Breast Cancer Show Ever (2008)

The finest hour of Wendy Testaburger, Stan’s prim, pink-clad but formidable girlfriend.  One morning she gives a speech to her class about the threat breast cancer poses to women and gets heckled by Cartman, who’s greatly amused by her repeated use of the word ‘breast’.  Enraged, she challenges him to a fight after school.  Cartman agrees, then gets increasingly worried about what’s coming to him and tries increasingly desperate strategies to wheedle out of it.  Breast Cancer Show Ever ends the way it should, with Wendy beating the crap out of the evil little shit.

 

The Ungroundable (2008)

The Ungroundable uses a common South Park trope, that of the confusion caused when the kids interpret the grown-up (or more grown-up) world according to their own juvenile and fanciful logic.  Butters assumes that some older kids at the school, obsessed with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and modelling themselves on vampires, really are vampires.  To destroy them, he joins forces with the Goth Kids – who merely object to the Vampire Kids on the grounds of them being douchebags.  Before then, Butters mistakenly believes he’s been bitten and has become a vampire himself.  And whose blood must he drain?  Cartman’s, of course: “…if someone must die so that I can feed… I choose thee!”

 

© South Park Studios

 

I know – all the episodes I’ve listed are more than a decade old.  But give 2020s South Park a go.  It’s still pretty funny.  And it’s a hell of a lot funnier than The Simpsons is these days.

Posted on

Whatever happened to kids’ Euro-telly?

 

© Franco London Films / ZDF Television

 

What a melancholy coincidence…  A few weeks ago, for the first time in years, something got me thinking about the 1960s children’s TV show The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and I watched part of an episode of it on YouTube.  I wondered if its star, the Austrian actor Robert Hoffman, was still on the go, googled him and was pleased to find that he was.  Then, the other day, I read on social media that Hoffman had just passed away.

 

Anyway, here’s something I originally posted in 2012, which mentions Hoffman and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  It’s now been updated for 2022.   

 

Politics, the economy and, indeed, cultural attitudes in Britain in the last half-dozen years have been dominated by Brexit.  This, depending on your point-of-view, has either been a joyous and much-needed liberation of Britain from the stifling bureaucracy and political interference it’d had to put up while it was a member of the European Union; or the most disastrous decision Britain has made since the 1956 Suez Crisis, one that’ll doom the country to being a parochial, xenophobic wee dump that backpedals towards the 1950s while the other European nations get on with living in the 21st century.  Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know which view I subscribe to.  Namely, that if you believe there’s anything positive about Brexit, you must have one of those heads that proverbially ‘zip up the back’.

 

The Brexit vote in 2016 came 43 years after Britain joined the European Union, or the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then.  However, it’d be wrong to believe before 1973 Britons were wholly detached from the culture of continental Europe.  Indeed, though I was a mere mite before 1973, much of my headspace had already been colonised by the continent.  This was thanks to children’s television.

 

In the early 1970s, the BBC felt obliged not only to entertain kids after they’d arrived home from school and broadcast juvenile programmes from 4.00 to 5.45 PM, but also to broadcast such programmes during the mornings of school-holiday periods.  The morning schedules of the summer holidays in particular were a challenge for the BBC to fill with kiddie-related material.  As a result, the channel had to regularly raid its archives for old, dubbed children’s shows from France, Germany and elsewhere and broadcast those.

 

Let’s begin with my least favourite show.  Growing up on a Northern Irish farm where there weren’t many neighbours to mix with, I depended for company during the summer holidays on the elderly couple who lived a few hundred yards along the road from our farmhouse.  More precisely, I depended on their two granddaughters, who were around my age and usually came to spend much of the summer with them.  Luckily for me, the neighbours’ granddaughters were a pair of Tomboys who were dependable for games of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and other activities normally more associated with young males.  However, they had one weakness, a fondness for a show called White Horses.

 

This was a co-production between German and Yugoslavian TV that’d been made back in 1965 but that rarely seemed to be off the BBC’s children’s holiday schedules in the early-to-mid-1970s.   It followed the adventures of a girl from Belgrade, Julia, who was staying on her uncle’s horse ranch.  Populating the ranch were handsome white steeds that made my two female playmates swoon with adoration.

 

As a boy, and not a fan of horses (white or otherwise), I thought this was the dumbest programme ever.  And it constantly annoyed me that on those summer mornings the games of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians would abruptly stop and my two playmates would run indoors to sit goggle-eyed in front of their television the moment White Horses came on.  I have to say, though, that while I generally remember other kids’ TV programmes from then but not the details of individual episodes, two episodes of White Horses remain etched on my mind.

 

In one episode Julia found a metallic, saucer-shaped object on the grounds of the ranch and carried it to her uncle, who immediately screamed, “It’s a mine!” and flung it away as far as he could.  At which point it exploded.  In the other episode, the ranch’s dog was seen frothing at the mouth and in the ensuing pandemonium all the ranch-hands tore around on horseback, trying to hunt the rabid beast down.  Come to think of it, for a silly girls’ show, White Horses was actually quite dark.  It left me with the conviction that the European continent was a real danger zone, riddled with unexploded World War II landmines and overrun with rabid mammals.  That’s a message I’m sure Brexiters like Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg would approve of.

 

© Philips

 

One thing that really annoyed me about White Horses was the sickly theme song.  This wasn’t a feature of the original German-Yugoslavian show but had been recorded by the Dublin singer Jackie Lee and stuck onto the dubbed BBC version.  The lyrics went: “On my horses let me ride away, to my world of dreams so far away, let me run, to the sun, to a world my heart can understand, it’s a gentle warm and wonderland, faraway, stars away, where the clouds are made of candyfloss, as the day is born, when the stars are gone, we’ll race to meet the dawn…”  Despite my intense dislike for it, however, the song is now regarded as a kitsch classic and has been covered many times, usually by ‘knowing’ indie-pop bands like Kitchens of Distinction and the Trashcan Sinatras.  Even Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews has had a go at singing it.  Here, if you can stomach it, is the original version.

 

Now if you wanted a Euro-kids’ TV show with a seriously bad-ass theme song, you didn’t have to look any further than The Flashing Blade, a historical swashbuckler made by France’s Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF) in 1967.  Set in the early 17th century, during the War of Mantuan Succession between France and Spain, the show’s theme song was accompanied by footage at the start of each episode showing the principals racing manically across countryside on horseback.  Their manic-ness, of course, was increased by the fact that the film was wildly speeded up.  The singer implored: “You’ve got to fight for what you want, and all that you believe, it’s right to fight for what we want, to live the way we please, as long as we have done our best, then no one can do more, and life and love and happiness, are well worth fighting for.”  Here’s the show’s blood-stirring opening on YouTube.

 

Unlike White Horses, I don’t remember much about the story of The Flashing Blade, except that to my impressionable young mind it was very like The Three Musketeers.  For some reason, however, I’ve never forgotten a scene where two characters – one presumably villainous because he sported a pointed beard – were playing chess and the villain made a comment about the uselessness of pawns with regard to the outcome of the game.  The other player immediately came back with an observation along the lines of: “Even the smallest pebble can shatter the most beautiful of mirrors.”  As a seven-year-old, this seemed the profoundest thing I’d ever heard.

 

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française 

 

Also originating with France’s ORTF in 1967 was Les Chevaliers du Ciel, which ran on Gallic television for the next three years.  By the time it turned up in anglicised form on British TV it’d been retitled The Aeronauts and given a new, hard-rockin’, by BBC standards, English-language theme song by the Canadian musician and TV presenter Rick Jones.  His Aeronauts song went: “Better than best, boys, we pass every test, you’re ahead of the rest, when those crime-fighting Aeronauts are cutting those bounds, in a fury of sound, you’re a loser all round, against the crook-catching Aeronauts, so play in the wind, boys, you better give in, because your troubles begin when those two daring aeronauts fly!“  I can’t find the opening sequence for this one, only the song itself.

 

Incidentally, the memorably bearded, balding and intense-looking Rick Jones was no stranger to children’s TV programmes, as in 1972 he hosted Fingerbobs, which must’ve featured the cheapest and most low-fi puppets in the history of television.  Over seven years he also worked on the BBC’s long-running show for pre-school kids, Play School (1964-88), a stint that ended when, to quote his Wikipedia entry, he was ‘fired by the BBC, after a fan sent him two cannabis spliffs at the corporation’s address’.  Jones, alas, died in San Francisco last year.

 

Once again, though I remember the theme music well, I can’t recall much of what went on in The Aeronauts.  Maybe that was just as well, since the show was about two hunky young guys called Ernest and Michel who were pilots in the French Air Force.  As such, they might’ve spent the episodes bombing la merde out of insurgents in North Africa or Greenpeace activists in the South Pacific.

 

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française 

 

I’ve spoken ironically about the music on The Flashing Blade and The Aeronauts, but there’s no disputing the fact that the theme tune of Belle and Sebastian had a genuine haunting quality.  This was the Anglicised version of Belle et Sebastien, which ran on French television from 1965 to 1970 and was based on the novel by Cecile Aubrey about a boy and his big Pyrenean mountain dog.  It’s fitting that wistful Glaswegian indie-pop band Belle & Sebastian took their name from this show.  And apparently its theme song was covered by New Zealand singer-songwriter Bic Runga a few years ago.  Here’s the original version.

 

There are a number of things I remember about Belle and Sebastian, apart from its music and its obvious star, the hefty canine Belle.  I remember being awed by the sheer, bleak mountain landscapes that formed its backdrop – it’d been filmed around the village of Belvedere in the Alpes-Maritimes.  Indeed, years later, when I finally saw the Alps for real, the first association I made in my head was with that old French kids’ TV show.

 

I also remember how the voices in Belle and Sebastian puzzled me.  Not being aware of dubbing procedures or the fact that the BBC employed a small group of actors to do the English dialogue for these imported shows, I couldn’t figure out at the time why the adults in Belle and Sebastian sounded exactly like the adults in White Horses.  By the way, Sebastian in the show was played by Mehdi el Glaoui, who was Cecile Audrey’s son.  Little Mehdi’s father was Moroccan and indeed his grandfather had been the Pasha of Marrakech.

 

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française 

 

However, musically, the best Euro-kids’ programme of all was surely The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  Robinson Crusoe was of course a British cultural property, but this children’s drama version of the story had been made in 1964 by France’s Franco London Films (FLF) and starred Austrian actor Robert Hoffman in the title role.  The BBC got its hands on it, dubbed it and broadcast it regularly during its children’s TV schedules from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

 

The BBC added a lovely, mock-classical score composed by Robert Mellin and P. Reverberi, which managed to be both stirring and slightly desolate.  I’ve read somewhere that the spiralling opening chords were meant to represent the breakers striking the beach of Crusoe’s desert island.  It doesn’t surprise me that when electronica band The Orbital put together 19 of their favourite tracks in 2002 for the Back to Mine compilation series, they decided to close their compilation with this tune.

 

To be fair to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a lot more of the show has remained with me over the years than just its theme music.  For a long time, Hoffman’s youthful features formed my image of how the character should look – so that when I saw other versions of the story later on, such as a 1974 BBC adaptation with Stanley Baker and a more politically correct movie adaptation called Man Friday (1975) with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree, I couldn’t accept them.  The series took liberties with Daniel Dafoe’s novel, though.  For example, it climaxed with a shipload of pirates invading Crusoe’s island.  At which point, Man Friday took off and hid in the island’s jungle, and started killing the pirates off one by one.

 

Finally, for pure weirdness, you couldn’t beat The Singing Ringing Tree, which had started life as a film made by an East German studio, Das Singende Klingende Baumchen.  The BBC duly chopped it into TV-serial form.  Even by the standards of the other Euro-kids’ shows I saw at the time, The Singing Ringing Tree was particularly venerable, dating back to 1957.  It lingers in my mind because, although it was ostensibly a fairy tale, it spooked the hell out of me.

 

© Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft

 

With characters including an evil dwarf, a humanoid bear creature (who was actually a prince transformed by a magic spell) and a gigantic goldfish, the series resembled a Brothers Grimm story directed by David Lynch.  Reviewers, at least those who took the show seriously, noted an influence of German expressionism on how it looked and an influence of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) in particular.  To my seven-year-old sensibilities, the fate suffered by the dwarf at the end was especially traumatising.  He was last seen swooping around in the air and then plunging through the thin-crusted ground and vanishing in a belch of volcanic, sulphurous smoke.

 

If this makes me sound wimpish, I should point out that I wasn’t alone in being scared by the show.  The comedian and impersonator Paul Whitehouse said of The Singing Ringing Tree that it used to make him ‘pee his pants’ when he was a kid.  Perhaps as a way of exorcism, Whitehouse staged a spoof of it on his popular comedy programme The Fast Show (1994-97) called The Singing Ringing Binging Plinging Tinging Plinking Plonking Boinging Tree with, somewhat inevitably, the ubiquitous Warwick Davies in the role of the dwarf.  And in 2006, the show lent its name to a ‘wind powered sound sculpture’ in the Pennines in Lancashire.

 

And there ends my round-up of kids’ Euro-telly.  They might have been a set of old, cheap and badly-dubbed TV shows, but nonetheless they converted me into a good little European – even if at the time I still thought Brussels was something you were force-fed at Christmas, not the hub of one of the most important political and trading alliances in the world.

 

© Franco London Films / ZDF Television