No More Parades

As the summer goes into overdrive just as peoples' thoughts start to turn to going back to work, and the Olympics retreat into what already feels like distant memory, so the TV channels unveil their autumn line-ups.

The most eye-catching of what has been announced so far is undoubtedly the BBC's adaptation of the Parade's End tetralogy, which starts on BBC 2 on Friday.  The Sunday papers have pushed this heaily today, as the BBC's answer to the Downton Abbey behemoth, but I do hope that people aren't going to get too excited, as, unless Tom Stoppard has ripped tha heart out of it, Parade's End is a much more difficult and involving proposition than its ITV rival.  You can almost feel the slight anxiety that this adaptation has caused amongst the litterati in their pre-screening articles.  "Waugh we're ok with, we know where we are with Waugh - 500 words by tomorrow morning?" "Ah yes, Greene again - Catholicism, tortured soul, affairs" "Ford Madox Ford- ???"

Poor old Ford Madox Ford is little read these days, although he really deserves to be more mainstream.  In part, I think it's a question of style.  I've never really gone overboard on modernist writing, but his prose has a far greater clarity than Virginia Woolf, say, and his dialogue is better than Henry Green's (whom I think he probably most resembles). Persevere with the first 50 or so of the well over 800 pages of Parade's End, and once you "get" the narrative voice it's really absorbing stuff.

It would be unfair of me to blow the lid on the plot so I'll restrain myself, but I hope the cast are up to their roles.  Benedict Cumberbatch has a tricky job to pull of as the lead, Tietjens is quite a difficult hero for the early 21st century.  Even in the social milieu of pre Great War England his 18th century Tory attitudes mark him out from the crowd, and there are several occasions when you want to do nothing so much as give him a damn good shake.  The problem of course is that he tends to just roll with whatever punches life throws at him; which, given the scheming of his ludicrous wife, and his (chaste) love for the young suffragette Valentine Wannop, are legion.

Where Ford succeeds is in exposing the destructive effects of the war on the class system and the rigid certainties of the Edwardian age.  By offering Christopher Tietjens up as a saintly every man, we can observe the conflict as it deconstructs his personality and very sense of self, before rebuilding him anew.

I'll withold judgment for now (and the previews of the adaptation have been uniformly positive), but if they get Parade's End right, we could be looking at landmark television that can stand alongside Brideshead Revisited or The Jewel in the Crown.  If they miss the mark, then perhaps the book is truly, as I suspect it might be, unfilmable.

Watch this space.

Fun in the Sun - Or Cropredy for those who couldn't quite make it this year

Being the fine upstanding folk rock obsessive that I am, I thought I'd take myself off to the Cropredy Festival so that none of you had to go...

Blessed with astonishingly good weather this year, the scene was set for what I hoped was going to be 3 days of top quality folk. Was it? We'll come to Fairport in a bit. Read on....

The Highs:

Bellowhead - I've always been a bit ambivalent about them, but this was the weekend where I finally got the point. An absolutely storming set, and looked like they were enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the bill. Several albums purchased.

Calan - really good Welsh folk; sort of sound like 9/Jewel era Fairport (unsurprising maybe given the involvement of Maart), they even managed to work in a bit of clog dancing. Would have purchased the album, but it had sold out by the time I got to the tent.

Tarras - nice to see them back, after so nearly making it big round the turn of the last decade. Line-up's a bit different, but they make a good big sound!

Richard Thompson - he was a bit naughty really. It was billed as a solo set, second headlining on Friday, but then he brought on Mattacks, Pegg, Nicol, and blew the site away. We had some Bright Lights, a bit of Sandy, and the whole thing was a bit emotional.

The Middling:

Larkin Poe - just about got what they did, but they were probably a bit too "mainstream" for Cropredy.

Ellen and the Escapades - bland, inoffensive, nothing further to say...

Dead Flamingoes - I really wanted to like them, what with Kami Thompson being the singer (and sounding an awful lot like her mother), but even by the standards of folk the lyrics were bleak. If they cheer up a bit, they might be rather wonderful, but they're not there yet.

Big Country - sort of got it, but not my scene, and the new vocalist is a bit too different.

Legend - fun reggae covers band with some impressive session pedigree.

The Lows:

Joan Armatrading - I like her, I really do, but I'm not sure what she was doing at Cropredy. There was a hard core in front of the stage who were obviously enjoying themselves, but also a steady stream for the exits (she was the Friday headline), and lost me after about 20 minutes. In some ways I think it was through poor choice of material, but admittedly she wasn't helped by having to follow Richard Thompson.

Squeeze - why? Just why?

And so to Fairport, who came on at 2030 on Saturday night and played until midnight. Before we go any further, let me just list the personnel involved over the 3.5 hours so you get some idea of why this was one of the strongest Cropredy sets for a while:

Ashley Hutchings, Dave Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks, Dave Pegg, Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, Judy Dyble, Maartin Allcock, Gerry Conway, Jerry Donahue, Chris Leslie, Ric Sanders, Blair Dunlop, Kami Thompson, the excellent Kristina Donahue, and the two singers from Larkin Poe.

Given the above wouldn't it have been nice if they'd cobbled together the "Full House" era lineup and gone heavy on that? It would? Lucky they did then.

Set list (copied from Andy at talkawhile's post with due attribution as my own notes were illegible thanks to a combination of darkness, alcohol and emotion):

1. Mercy Bay  2. Albert & Ted 3. Fotheringay 4. I'll Keep It With Mine 5. Percy's Song 6. Lark In The Morning 7. Come All Ye 8. The Deserter 9. Walk Awhile 10. Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman 11. Sloth 12. Bring 'Em Down 13. White Dress 14. Night Time Girl 15. One More Chance 16. The Gas Almost Works, Cat On The Mixer, Three Left Feet (instr.) 17. Red Tide (by Rob Beattie) 18. Jewel In The Crown 19. Honor And Praise 20. Dangerous 21. Portmeirion 22. The Hiring Fair 23. The Brilliancy Method & The Cherokee Shuffle (instrumental) 24. The Hexamshire Lass 25. My Love Is In America 26. John Gaudie 27. Danny Jack's Reward 28. Farewell, Farewell 29. Matty Groves

Encore:
30. Meet On The Ledge

Well, where do you start? Swarb was excellent, stood up for most of it, and looked a lot better than he had at the Barbican during the Sandy tour earlier this year. Jerry D has always been one of my favourite guitarists and did little to disappoint here. Kami Thompson did a bit of a Sandy impression, Richard Thompson picked up where he'd left off the night before, and the whole field was singing bethankit (to horribly mangle PG Wodehouse).

Interesting use of the younger generation, which might point the future direction for the Fairport slot (at this rate, they'll have perfected the creation of a perpetual band!) Must stop rambling now, but Fairport alone made the festival one not to have missed - certainly the best set they've done for a decade I'd have said.

Oh, also enjoyed (and bought) the excellent 45th anniversary t-shirt they've produced which helpfully shows a lego character of each of the 25 people who have so far been member of the band!

Hopefully, if I can link the two for a moment, it's the start of an upswing for both Fairport and this blog.....

Like An Old Fashioned Waltzer

The other day the estimable Jonathan Calder over at Liberal England drew attention to the Homage to Sandy Denny that’s currently touring the UK, and posed the question as to whether she really was Britain’s greatest singer songwriter.  Last night, I took myself off to the Barbican to find out…

Sandy has certainly always been difficult to pigeonhole, not that that has ever stopped people.  Her early work with Strawbs and Fairport put her quite neatly into the folk category, but I think that to see her as a purveyor of folk whimsy would be to do her a great disservice.  Nowadays, she is frighteningly forgotten.  I don’t mean by the trad folk denizens of the Whitby or Sidmouth folk festivals, who still recognise her even though she had arguably outgrown them even before she joined Fairport Convention, or even by the attendees of the latter’s annual Cropredy Festival.  Mr Calder is absolutely right when he contrasts Sandy with Nick Drake – once united in their relative obscurity and unacknowledged genius, he has gone on to TV background music ubiquity, while poor old Sandy, outside the cognoscenti, continues to languish.

The current tour is a restaging of a one-off show put together for the 30^th anniversary of her death in 2008, and features a host of Sandy’s contemporaries, along with the best of a new generation of folkies.  Well, I say folkies, but it is still as you would expect drawn largely from the compromised electro-folk end of the scale, rather than the new-trad exponents like say the Young ‘Uns.  A quite extraordinary line-up has been assembled including Joan Wasser (Joan As Policewoman), Lavinia Blackwall from Trembling Bells, Thea Gilmore, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, coupled to PP Arnold, most of Bellowhead and three people who actually knew Sandy well – Maddy Prior, Jerry Donahue and the legend that is Dave Swarbrick. 

Before we get on to the meat of the show, a quick word about Swarb.  He’s announced his retirement in the near future, and to see him now is rather akin to seeing say Barry Cryer performing with I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – worth going a very great distance to be in on it.

The material spans the whole of Sandy’s career from the earliest days, through Fairport to the tragically short-lived Fotheringay, out the other side with the North Star Grassman and the Ravens album which was salvaged from the ruins of that band’s projected second album, and then onto the solo work which saw her increasingly spread her wings and move beyond folk through the course of the seventies.

Inevitably, some of the performances were stronger than others – Lavinia Blackwall stands out as perhaps the most Sandy-like of the cast, and her interpretation of A Sailor’s Life (accompanied by Swarb) was a great intro.  She then moved on to a perfect rendition of the eerily bleak Late November, a song whose lyrics sound traumatic enough before you know what the subject being obliquely treated is….  I did feel though that the evening was weirdly stop-start, and a lot of the enjoyment depended on sympathy or otherwise with the person who happened to be singing at the time.  I thought Green Gartside’s highly distinctive voice just about got through The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, but he murdered Nothing More.  I don’t think there’s anything he could have done differently, and it’s a shame because between songs he came across as possibly the most genuine fan, but it just wasn’t for me.

Thea Gilmore ran through a few numbers from last year’s Don’t Stop Singing, which confirmed Sandy’s status as a lyricist of the first rank I think, but the night seemed on surer ground when it was going through the back issues of the sandy songbook.  Maddy Prior got going with a slightly halting version of Fotheringay which had me fearing she had some sort of throat infection, but as her vocal chords warmed up over the evening she was on her usual transcendent form with a storming rendition of John the Gun – a track crying out for its own horror film.

My personal highlight of the evening was when Maddy, Thea and Lavinia combined with Swarb for a rendition of The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood so perfect that any record label with half a brain will get it released sooner rather than later – it really was joyous.

The male side of things was less satisfactory, I think because you just don’t associate Sandy’s songs with anything much below an alto.  Having said that, the Dennis Hopper Choppers’Ben Nicholls  pulled off a wonderful interpretation of Matty Groves (although I suppose, strictly speaking, that’s “trad. Arr.” In any case).  Blair Dunlop got through a competent take on It’ll Be A Long Time, but other than that, nothing else really stuck in my mind.

Joan Wasser, on the other hand, was a revelation.  She;s another one that really ought to get something from the night released because that woman was born to sing The Lady.  PP Arnold was extremely nervous, and had to start I’m A Dreamer three times before getting beyond the first verse, once she’d got over the hump though she was as good as you would expect.  Incidentally, for all Arnold’s fans namecheck her work with Nick Drake, Roger Waters and Ike and Tina Turner, I bet I was the only one there last night who first saw her onstage with Ocean Colour Scene at the NEC in 1998….

Last night in many ways was an opportunity to sit down and really put Sandy in context across the output of her career.  Consequently, it was possible to see how much she progressed as a writer, and experimented with different genres, whilst all the time managing to pull off the difficult trick of being life affirming whilst being very red wine at three am ( at trait she shares with early Barclay James Harvest in that respect).

I suspect globe spanning fame will continue to elude her for a while yet, although if enough of us keep the flame it can only be a matter of time.  Personally I think it went a long way towards answering the question posed on Liberal England at the beginning of the week:

“Up to a point, Lord Bonkers”

the head pokes up above the parapet

Blogging has somehow slipped back into hiatus - one thing after another seems to be conspiring to keep me away from the keyboard.  Actually, it keeps me at the keyboard, but on the revenue earning stuff rather than the pleasure writing.  Even the short stories have taken a bit of a back seat recently.

However, there is starting to be a light at the end of the tunnel again, and there's quite a bit to get through, so hopefully soon you'll be treated to my views on Sandy Denny, 10k road races, Loch Ness, and, if you believe the MOD rumour mill, catastrophic procurement U-turns that will render our new carriers what could euphemistically be termed "interesting"....

Who's escorting the escorts?

One of the knock ons of the great aircraft carrier saga, has been the decimation of the RN's surface fleet to pay for them.  A succession of First Sea Lords have been forced down the gruel today for jam tomorrow route, justifying ever greater cuts to capability on the basis that it will free up the funds to ensure that in the future we will have enormous great toys with nice planes to fly from them.

In the words of Blackadder, there was one small flaw with this plan.....

Let's consider the fleet as it was when I joined a decade ago:

3 x Invincible Class CVS

9 x T42 destroyers

4 x T22 frigates

and the finishing touches being put to 16 T23 frigates.  I'm pretty sure that there were actually a couple more T22s knocking around, although of the earlier Batch 2 so gunless (my guess would be SHEFFIELD and COVENTRY).  Regardless, this in itself was a massive drawdown from the fleet of 1992, and even more so from that of 1982 - and we should all be aware of what happened in 1982....

Now, it's more like:

1 x Invincible CVS in an LPH role

2 (as of Yesterday with the paying off of LIVERPOOL) Type 42 destroyers

2 (ish) Type 45 destroyers, with another 4 in various stages of completion

13 Type 23 frigates

The surface fleet has been pared to the bone.  Of course, there are bright spots amidst the gloom - for example, the arrival of Type 45.  However, even here, what was supposed to be an order for 12 ships has been reduced to 6.  The staff argument is of course that these new ships are so much more "capable" thn their predecessors that you don't need so many of them.  This is fine (and true, up to a point), but doesn't do much to challenge the fact that, unless DE&S has got some sort of multi-dimensional transporter in development, each one can only be in one place at a time....

However, whatever the shortcomings in terms of hull numbers, and weaponry (the hydra of fitted-for-but-not-with raises one of its many heads again - or rather it doesn't), the Type 45 does represent a quantum leap forward over the kit it replaces.

A certain hard core within the fleet will tell you that there is nothing to beat a batch 1 Type 42 to serve in, and in many ways I'd be minded to go along with that.  My first ship out of Dartmouth was a "stumpy," and frankly we had a whale of a time.  I'd happily go back tomorrow.  The advantage of the Type 42s were that they were pretty "agricultural," in that you could see a lot of what made them tick, and a lot of essential equipment could be maintained with the judicious application of a spanner.  However, there was no denying that by the first half of the last decade they were well and truly obsolescent.  It was just that they were forced to soldier on because MOD procurement was making its usual ham fisted job of getting their successor into service - notice a theme developing here?

Lewis Page would have us believe that there is no rationale for the RN's escorts.  They are expensive ways of showing the flag, and giving aspirant admirals nice shiny toys to play with.  In as much as fast attack craft seem to work well for the Germans and Swedes, I'd go along with us buying some; and there's something to be said for the sort of cheap and cheerful corvettes the French have forward based to protect their overseas territories; but the fact remains that places like the Falklands are a long way away from the home base.  I know the defensive posture down there is based on preventing an attack in the first place, rather than trying to retake them once an invasion has occured, but to properly defend them we do need organic air cover, so we need aircraft carriers.  If we're going to have carriers then they need to be escorted, so we need a good balanced force of frigates and destroyers that will allow us to do that while also maintaining our responsibilities elsewhere in the globe.

What we don't need, but what we could well be about to get, is the world's largest and most expensive LPH (QE), accompanied by a botched CVF (POW) with an airgroup of about 12, and enough escorts to be sure of nothing nasty happening to them while they're all in the Solent.  Which is certainly an interesting definition of "balanced and capable."

Back to the subject of spatial strategy (do try and stay awake...), or the coming sacrifice of Meriden on the altar of new city building

Interesting article in the MoS today (which must nearly be an oxymoron) about government plans to put 100,000 houses in the increasingly narrow gap between Birmingham and Coventry.  Is there any common sense left in the world.  The same article, in what we must hope is just typical Mail outrage/spin, suggests the rebranding of Birmingham International Airport to, wait for it, Birmingham London Airport....  You know those occasions when you truly think you are living in the end of days?

Actually there is some method in the airport madness, in as much as assuming HS2 gets built then it will be quicker to get into London from Birmingham airport than it is from Stanstead.  That having been said, it doesn't do much for the sense of Birmingham as a city in its own right, rather than some form of extremely northern dormitory suburb of the great metropolis - rather like a super-sized version of Acton...

The problem is that this answers part of the demand for expansion of the national housing stock, without really addressing what it is that all these new Brummies are going to do when they get there (other than commute to London).  The idea of a forty mile continuous urban sprawl from the rust belt of the Black Country through to Coventry is something that really ought to make people stop and think about what it is that they want from where they live.  I know the relaxation of the planning laws is going to create a presumption in favour of new development, but at what cost to the domestic environment, and the sanity of the inhabitants?

I'm going to write something in the next couple of days about the coming referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor, but it would be interesting to see where the putative contenders stand on the idea of annexing Coventry as a flagship policy....  Not quite local democracy all this, is it?

Aircraft Carriers - The Madness Continues

A month or two ago, I suggested here that the MOD might like to take another look at what aircraft it chooses to put on the new carriers.  If you believe the rumours currently swirling around in the national press, then they're not only doing just that, but the conclusion arrived at is not quite what I hoped for....

As someone in the comments thread pointed out, we're pretty much getting the F35 whether we want it or not, despite the compelling case that can be made for buying greater quantities of something a good bit cheaper.  However, one of the few gleams of common sense in the SDSR was the abandonment of the STOVL version in favour of the cat and trap version.  The conventional variant at least offers a greater payload, and enhanced interoperability with potential coalition partners.

What now seems to be mooted, thanks to cost overruns with the catapult technology, is a switch back to the JSF model the MOD had originally planned for, the short take-off variant.  So, it's back to the ghetto of ski-ramps, and very heavy aircraft that can't carry much in the way of weapons load. All this at a time when the international situation everywhere from Libya to the South Atlantic has been underlining for our unfortunately sea-blind government and public the importance of aircraft carriers and why they're a useful thing to have in the back pocket.

I'm not sure any government of recent years has got defence right, particularly, but this one certainly seems to have a special talent for getting it wrong.  I await the official announcement with bated breath.