July 2014 – That's How The Light Gets In (2024)

Blue light till dawn

When it’s Biennial time in Liverpool, all kinds of odditiesturn up in the most unlikely places. Walking down Park Lane by Liverpool Onethe other day with my daughter Sarah we encountered an avenue of trees wrapped in what can only be described as knitted woolly trunk-warmers. They were created byan army of knitters forYarn Bombing, part of‘a carnival of the built environment’ to celebrate ‘the hidden creativity of the argybargy in art’. Obvious really.

Leg-warmers for trees on Park Lane

Thenlast night the two of us were on High Park Street, a fairly desolate stretch of Liverpool 8, waiting to see a Biennial installation that had been recommended by friends. Behind the steel shutters rolled down over one of the empty shop-fronts that pepper this once-thriving street, there were jellyfish, and at ten pm the shutters were due to rise to reveal them.

Waiting for jellyfish on High Park Street

We had thought we would be the only ones mad enough to turn out at ten on a Saturdaynight to look at jellyfish in a derelict shop window. But when we arrived there was already a small crowd, and more people gathered as we waited for the magic moment. Clouds had rolled in off the river after another sweltering day, and rain began to fall. Umbrellas went up. The event was late. Then, by remote control, the shutters began to roll up, revealing a large fish tank filled with tiny jellyfish peacefully floating in gentle blue water.

The shutters go up

This installation, byWalter Hugo & Zoniel Burton, is called The Physical Possibility of Inspiring Imagination in the Mind of Somebody Living, though somebody alongside me muttered, ‘Where I come from, we call this an aquarium’. The blue light and the gently shifting jellyfish were undoubtedly soothing, and drewthe kids in close.

A ‘secret, magical window’

The installation is describedby the artist duo as a ‘secret magical window’ and as a ‘psychedelic display, intended to have a discordant presence within the building and to intrigue those in the surrounding area’. But what I found most intriguing – and what turned out to be the subject of nearly all the photos I took – was not the installation itself, or the jellyfish, but the incongruity of a crowd of people, adults and children, gatheredon a darkened street as warm rain fell, staring at an illuminated fish tank.

Gazelli Art House in London is supporting the project and live-streaming a video from within the tank into their gallery. They say, ‘The projection is viewable both from within the gallery but also from the street outside, creating a virtual corridor between the two cities’. I hope David Cameron drops by.

There are more images of the installation on Gazelli’swebsite.

High Park Street, Liverpool 8, 1982 (photo by Steve Howe)

Back in the 1970s, we lived in a top-floor flat on Princes Road where, from theback kitchen door that led to the wooden fire escape, we could look out along High Park Street. As now, this was a deprived area, butthen the broad street was always bustling. There were shops, pubs, a bakery – and the local social security office. Now it’s a desert. The controversial Pathfinder programmedepopulated the area,leaving the once-homely Welsh streets tinned-up and decaying (fellow-Liverpool blogger Ronnie Hughes keeps an eye on what’s happening there; his most recent report is here). Most shops have gone, a lonely chippy hangs on, along with one pub – Ringo Starr’s old local, The Empress, a local treasure that draws Beatles aficionados from all over.

At the top of the street is another treasure – thegrade II listed High Park Street reservoir. Built in 1845, it’s a rectangular structure half the size of a football pitch, with a tower at one corner. It’sone of the earliest examples of public health engineering in the world, andonce held 2 million gallons of water, serving thousands of homes in the area.

High Park Street reservoir: outside

But since 1997, the reservoir hasbeen redundant. Now it’s being managed by a social enterprise, Dingle 2000, which is looking at uses thatcould be made of itthat wouldbenefit the local community. Ideas include growing crops on the roof and selling the produce at a farmers’ market inside the building.

Because there is an inside. Theblank external walls conceal a spectacular piece of Victorian workmanship, with high vaulted ceilings, a grid of cast iron columns and a series of brick arches, reminiscent of the Albert Dock constructed just a few years earlier. At the moment it often servesas adramatic backdrop for scenes in films or TV dramas.

High Park Street reservoir: inside

I’ve never been inside the reservoir (it’s sometimes opened up to the public on annual Heritage Days) but next door is another historic building withwhose interiorI was once familiar – the High Park Social Security office.

High Park St Social Security office 1969 (www.liverpoolpicturebook.com)

Built in 1865, this used to be Toxteth Town Hall, and it has Grade Two listed status. Over the yearsit served asa register office, morgue, police cells, medical dispensary,Coroner’s court – as well as the local DHSS office forsocial security and unemployment benefit claimants.

Ringo Starr’slocal – featured on the cover of his album ‘Sentimental Journey’

We left a small crowd still peering at thejellyfish installation. On the next block the light from the open chippy door revealed that it was empty. A little further along, the door of Ringo Starr’s old pub, The Empress, had been leftopen to let in some air on this hot night. A few regulars stood,illuminated in the warm glow of the interior. Denizens of their own floating world.

We went to a register office wedding recently, and a joyous occasion it was: made so by dancing up the aisle,the children of the marrying couple joining in the fun, and the relaxed attitude of the registrar. The sense of an entirely different sort of Britain – more relaxed, more tolerant – to the one I grew up in was palpable. I mention this because I have recently read Labour politicianAlan Johnson’s memoirThis Boy which begins and ends with two different register office weddings.

Johnson begins his account of an impoverished upbringing in London’s Notting Hill with a him studying photograph – a black and white image taken in January 1945 with a box camera – of his father and mother outside Kensington Register Office. Theirs was not to be a happy marriage: indeed, Johnsonwrites of his father that ‘it could be said he helped to kill the woman beside him’.

Were they happy on their wedding day? Surely they must have been but the hand through his arm is curled and tense, not flat and caressing; almost a clenched fist.

‘On that day’, writes Johnson, Steve and Lily ‘must have been full of excitement and enthusiasm about the life that lay ahead of them’. But, ‘as things turned out, they spent it together yet apart – and then just apart’.

Johnson concludes his account with another register office wedding, and another photo: it’s the summer of 1968, and Alan Johnson, dapper in stylishMod clothes and haircut, is getting wed to Judy. With them is Linda, his sister. Linda and his mother Lily are the heroinesof the story that Alan Johnson narrates in this moving and beautifully-written book that avoids any traceof sentimentality or self-pity.

Alan Johnson’s mother Lily was the second of ten children born to a Scotsman and an Irishwoman in Anfield, Liverpool. During the Second World War she moved to London to work in the NAAFI. It was there that she met Steve, at a NAAFI dance in 1944. After they were married they moved into a room at 107Southam Street, Notting Hill – a street whose buildings had been condemned as unfit for human habitation in the 1930s. From that moment on, Lily’slife was a constant struggle against grinding poverty, loneliness (eventually abandoned bySteve), and poor health. Theyhadno electricity, shared a cooker on the landing, and peed in abucket in the bedroom rather than trek downat night to outside privy in the yard. But Johnson’s book is not simply a tale of hard times; it’sa tribute to Lily’slove and determination, telling how shemanaged, against great odds, to bring up her children decently.

When Lilydied, aged only 42, Alan was 13 and his sister Linda just 16. The second half ofthe book becomes a tribute to Linda who stoutly resisted moves to separate the siblings and place themin care, and who then worked tirelessly to to keep them fed and sheltered, and ensure that Alan continued his education. In the words of his dedication, she ‘kept me safe’.

Lindaheldthings together (even negotiating a council flat for the two of them) until Alan was old enough to make his own way in the world. Meanwhile, Alan worked in a number of routine jobs that took second place to his abiding ambition – tobe a pop star. Remarkably, he almost made it.

Once he was bringing in a wage packet of his own, Johnson could indulgethepassion for pop music which had taken hold before he was a teenager. Now he could buy, catalogue and carefully preserveprecious pop singles – especially those of his beloved Beatles. He had joinedhis firstband – The Vampires – when he was 13 years old. They played the Beatles’ Thank You Girl (very badly). He had learnt to play acheap Spanish guitar his mothergot him one Christmas, teaching himself via the classic route (in those days) of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day manual.

Later, doing a milk round for a young man from a tough Notting Hill family, he was offered an electric guitar of dubious provenance. Whenhe left school at15 hismusical ambitions remained strong andhe played with several bands, performingTamla and Stax soul alongside bythe Stones, Small Faces and the Troggs. The high point in his musical careercameperforming in front of 1,000 young people at Aylesbury College – and makinga record at Regent Sound in Denmark Street, a studio was where many great hits had beenrecorded. Though the resulting single wasofferedto several record labels, nothing came of it.

Irarely, if ever, read the memoirs of politicians, but thisis the biography of a politician like no other. It’s gained numerous accolades and has won theOrwellprize as well as theOndaatje award for the book that best evokes the ‘spirit of a place’. It’s the story of a hard upbringing, but remarkably it makes few political points, and, avoiding self-pity, is along way from being a misery memoir. Johnson is clearly a more rounded individual than the robotic clones whoseem to populate the political class these days – his love of music and football flows through the book, which is beautifully observed, funny, and uplifting.

Roger Mayne, Street Cricket, Clarendon Cresent, 1957

This is one of the photos which illustrates Alan Johnson’s account. It was taken around the corner from where Alan lived in Notting Hill byRoger Mayne, the renowned photographer who died in June aged 85. Johnson writes that he isconvinced that the blurred image of a child in the background of this photois Linda,his sister. Between 1956 and 1961, Roger Mayne photographed Johnson’s Southam Street many times, recording, in Johnson’s words, ‘both the squalor and the vibrancy of life there, the spirit of survivors inhabiting the uninhabitable’. In the Guardian’s obituary, Amanda Hopkinson wrote that Mayne ‘had a highly original eye for elusive detail’:

Self-taught, he was passionate about photographing what he knew – most famously, inner London. His skill in absorbing the radicalism of post-second world war “humanitarian photography” and interpreting it with artistic vision established him as one of the 20th century’s leading photographers. It also made him influential in the development of photojournalism.

His photographs of west London street scenes in the 1950s captured members of the first generation to be identified as “teenagers”. The W10 series, shot mainly around Paddington, contrasted young people’s exuberance with the urban dereliction they inhabited. For five years from 1956, Mayne focused obsessively on Southam Street, later to be demolished as part of a slum clearance programme. The street takes on a life of its own through its young residents: there is a kind of innocence in the scruffy juveniles fighting with wooden swords or tipping each other out of broken prams. It is hard to relate these youngsters, boys in shorts and unlaced leather shoes, girls with school-uniform gingham frocks and kirby grips pinning back their hair, to subsequent generations of teenagers.

Fashion burst suddenly upon Mayne’s subjects, with teddy boys in their satin lapels and teenage girls who still spent all day with hair in rollers under knotted turbans.

The Independent’s obituary stated that:

Roger Mayne was one of the outstanding British photographers of the postwar period. He is best known as the photographic poet of London’s dynamic street life in the then dilapidated area of Notting Dale in North Kensington. He photographed one street – Southam Street – from 1956 until it was demolished in 1961 to make way for Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. This loving and extended study embraces street football and other games, bright-faced kids with bikes and barely a car to be seen, Teddy Boys (and Girls), impromptu jiving, plus the arrival of West Indian immigrants and that new phenomenon, the teenager. Mayne’s Southam Street photographs now seem like a statement of solidarity with the working class and a hymn to Britain’s new welfare state.

Here’s agallery of some of the tremendous images which Roger Mayne captured in Southam Street as Alan Johnson grew up there.

See also

• Roger Mayne obituary (Telegraph)
• Roger Mayne: Photographer celebrated for his poetic and pioneering pictures of working-class life on the streets of London (obituary, Independent)
• Roger Mayne: work (website)

An engraving of aCaricature Shop, 1801

Recently I finished reading City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell’s exploration of thebawdy, scurrilous and totally disrespectful cultureofGeorgian London, vividly illustrated for us now throughthe popular prints of the time. Gatrell begins as he means to go on, with an examination of Lady Worsley’s bottom. The story provides a well-chosen introduction to the contrasts and contradictions of the period.

One view of 18th century Britain will emphasise the emergence of Enlightenment values as reflected inneo-classicism, rationality, moderation, and balance. Lady Worsley’s portrait, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1776 shortly afterher marriage to Sir Richard Worsley, reflects the image which polite, aristocratic society wished to project.

Lady Worsley, Joshua Reynolds, 1776

But there was something elsegoing on. Between the 1780s and the 1820s, Londonersgrew inordinatelyfond of ridicule and bawdiness, and of prints that revelled in satirising politics and international affairs or portraying scandal, debauchery and sexual goings-on in high places. The more scurrilous they were, and the moreobsessed with farts and bums, so much the better. It was a no-holds barred culture thatrejected the unwritten rule of early 18th century satire never to name names (such as in Hogarth’s engravings which ridiculed a type of person). By the 1780s, as Gatrell observes, this reticence was obsolescent. The boundary between public and private dissolved, as high-born sexually promiscuous adulterers or adultresses were explicitly lampooned – evenincluding the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales.

So, a mere six years after the Reynolds portrait,Lady Worsleywas rudely caricaturedby James Gillray. In one print heshows her taking a bath while her husband hoists one of her many lovers to peep at her naked behind. Remarkably, this incident was not a figment of Gillray’s imagination. All was revealed in open court when Sir Richard Worsley brought a suit against one Captain Bissett for ‘criminal conversation’ (ie, adultery) with his wife. Worsley had indeed hoisted Bissett onto his shoulders so that the captain could gaze through a bathhouse window on his wife’s nakedness.

James Gillray, ‘Sir Richard Worse-than-sly, exposing his wife’s bottom; – o fye!’, 1782

Gillray didn’t leave it there. Further revelations from the courtroom had toldthat ‘thirty-four young men of the first quality’ had enjoyed her favours. Gillray’s response was wicked, depicting nine impatient gentlemen queueing on a staircase, waiting for their turn with Lady Worsley in bed.

James Gillray, ‘A peep into Lady W!!!!!!y’s Seraglio’, 1782

The case made the married couple the laughing-stock of London, and Worsley refused to pay Reynolds for his wife’s elegant portrait (which now hangs in Harewood House in Yorkshire). For Gatrell, though, the caseprovides a perfect illustration of the bawdy, scurrilous, subversive humour that is the subject of hisbook.

Vic Gatrell is a serious historian (University of Cambridge) and though his subject may be lewd and comedic he sets out to probe some pretty serious questions. City of Laughter is a highly enjoyable, gloriouslyillustrated, but seriously academic study of the art of the print at the endof the18th and into the first two decades of the19th century. Gatrell seeks to understand why Londoners in the period from the1770sto the 1820swere so fond of ridicule and scurrility. The salacious images of Lady Worsley circulated widely among London’s upper-crust (the prints were not cheap). Aristocrats – even the endlessly-lampooned Prince of Wales – sent out their manservants to queue at the printshops and buy the latest scandalous engraving.

Gatrell is interested in how the refined Londoners who bought andenjoyed these engravings squared their taste with politeness. Around20,000 satirical prints were published between 1770 and 1830, reflecting a culture that laughed openly and heartily about sex, scandal, fashion and drink, suggesting to Gatrell that Gillray’s glimpse of Lady Worsley might reveal more about the times than paintings like Reynold’s portrait hanging on gallery walls. He quotes JH Plumb, historian of the period, who wrote:

An exceedingly frank acknowledgement, one might almost say a relish, of man’s animal functions was as much part of the age as the elegant furniture or delicate china.

Gatrell makes the claimthat in this period London, despite the disease, hunger and thievery that haunted its streets, was indeed a ‘city of laughter’. He makes the somewhat sweeping and difficult to substantiate claim that Londoners laughed a lot in those days, as they walked the streets assailed bythe oddities of life. I particularly relished this vignette from a contemporary observer which he quotes in support of his case:

Walking some time since in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, I followed a party of chimney-sweepers, who at the turning under a gateway, suddenly met three Chinese, apparently just arrived in London. It was clear that they had never before seen chimney-sweepers, and it seemed that the chimney-sweepers had never, till that moment seen such figures as the Chinese. Each party and every spectator was in a convulsion of laughter.

The laughter of Londoners was free in more senses than one: ‘No other city was so dynamic, free and uncensored, and nowhere else were the comedies of snobbery and emulation played out and ridiculed so determinedly, writes Gatrell. The excesses of the rich, the corruption of the political elite and the absurdities of fashion (did you know that in the 1790s fashionable women of the aristocracy went bare-breasted? I didn’t) provided rich material for the print culture that flourished in this ‘golden age of graphic satire’. The libel laws werevirtually non-existent, allowing artists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank to get away with outrageous depictions of a kind rarely seen since.Nothing was sacred, and no one was safe from satire and scorn, least of all the royal family.

James Gillray, ‘Fashionable Contrasts’, 1792

Take, for example, James Gillray’s print Fashionable Contrasts, or The duch*ess’s little Shoe yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Footpublished in January 1792, a few months after the marriage of Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia toGeorge III’s second son Frederick, Duke of York. The British press had beencharmed by the daintiness of her tiny feet,usually clad in exquisite footwear. Copies of her tiny shoes became all the rage and fashionable ladies wore their own little shoes in an attempt to emulate her. Gillray’s print,in whichthe tiny feet of the duch*ess of York in jewelled slippers are caught in a compromising position with the large and ungainly feet of her husband, the Duke, skewered the way in which the press and high society hadslavered overcelebrity. Sales of tiny shoes collapsed as a result.

Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Miseries of London’, 1808

London under George III and George IV was an economically and politically vibrantcity with a rapidly-growing population in which a chasm separated the upper classes, who enjoyed enormous luxury, from the lower classes who lived precariouslives in poverty and squalor. Nevertheless, in the first part of his book, Gatrellargues that the gulf that divided rich from poor was not unbridgeable. In a detailed analysis of the streets and avenues of the West End and Covent Garden – ‘worlds apart in terms of wealth, privilege and manners’ – he reveals how the boundaries between Londoners of differing sorts were regularly crossed:

If the journeyman settled disputes with punches, the gentleman settled his with duels. In the sexual or sporting demi-monde high and low met promiscuously. And both found the comedies of booze, sex and body funny.

This was reflected in ahunger for graphic, explicit imagery as the new print culture expanded rapidly, the result of rapidly growing demand from sophisticates as well as lower professionals and craftsmen. Anolder,tradition, rooted in classicism and epitomized by the work of William Hogarth gave way to ‘commercial products [rooted] in the realities their purchasers recognized’. Make way for the politically no-holds barred, scatological and sexually scandalous prints produced by artists like James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank.

Gatrell shows how the print culturegrew to be increasingly bawdy and unrestrained. Thomas Rowlandson’s series of London Miseries – each of which describes the vexations that a gentlemen might encounter on the streets of London – aregentle in their commentary on London’s disorder, compared to what would come towards the end of his chosen period. Soon there weredebauchery prints which depicted young aristocratic clubmen and prominent political figures in compromising circ*mstances at table or tearing up the town. These prints feature copious vomiting, urination, erotic play and bad behaviour of every conceivable description. As Gatrell points out, suchscenes were offered as comic spectacles rather than moral lessons, as they had been in Hogarth’s prints. Women were assumed to be just as hungry for sex as their male pursuers. Prostitution tended to be depicted in a comic or even sympathetic manner, rather than judgementally.

James Gillray, ‘The whor*’s Last Shift’, 1779

A good example is Gillray’s The whor*’s Last Shift in which a woman stands in a sordid and poverty-stricken room, naked butfor shoes and ragged stockings, washing her ‘last shift’ (pun intended) in a broken chamber-pot. A broadside ballad is pinned inthe window recess: The comforts of Single Life. An Old Song. On the wall is a torn print, Ariadne Forsaken. Gatrell questions whetherthe printis contemptuous of the woman, or whetherit seeks to disclose the poignancy of her plight? The answer, he suggests – as never in Hogarth – is left to the viewer.

Reading Gatrell’s account, you sense that he is describing a phenomenon that, although suppressed for long periods, has remained a rich undercurrent in English culture: a stream of satirical humour full of improprieties and bawdry. Gatrell argues that many if not all of Georgian England’s educated men – and not a fewof its fine ladies – relished the bums-and-farts, no-holds-barred satirical frankness of these prints, whether the subject was life’s great sexual comedy, fashions, scandals, French revolutionaries, or the political class.

James Gillray, ‘The French Invasion’, 1793

George Cruikshank, ‘Loyal Addresses and Radical Petitions’, 1819

Certainly, caricaturists like James Gillray and George Cruikshank took great pleasure inshowing George III defiantly defecating on the French in 1793, or the Prince of Wales farting at petitioners for reform in 1819. One print of 1785 with the inspired title His Highness in Fitz broadcast the latest royal scandal by depicting the Prince of Wales literally inside his beloved Mrs Fitzherbert. Although both are clothed and the penetration is concealed, the punning title makes it clear that they are enjoying org*smic fits. Gillray’s Fashionable Contrasts; – or – the duch*ess’s little Shoe yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot (1792) was another example.

Richard Newton, ‘Treason!!!’, 1798

An interesting question ariseswhen looking at daring prints such as Richard Newton’s Treason!!! or his The General Sentiment, both published at the height of ruling class fears of sedition and the spread of radical ideas from the French Revolution. Treason!!! depicts a plebian John Bull farting defiance at a poster of George III, while Prime Minister William Pitt warns him, ‘That is treason, Johnny’.The General Sentiment, from a few months earlier, shows Pitt being hanged by the neck watched by his Whig opponents, Charles Fox and Richard Sheridan who are wearing revolutionary red bonnets and gleefully wishing ‘May our heaven born minister be supported from above‘.

How did print makers get away with this sort of thing when radical groups were being suppressed, meetings raided and the participants jailed, and private conversations in taverns being spied upon, reported and prosecuted? (Within a week of Treason!!! being published, habeas corpus was suspended). Gatrell’sanswer is that as repression intensified the print satirists became skilful at presenting ambivalent messages:

Had Treason!!! been prosecuted, the court would have been obliged to debate whether Newton himself had the seditiously ‘wicked purpose of ridiculing the king and royal family’, or whether he was merely warning against that wickedness. […] He would also have been protected by the need to read out in court an indictment in pompous legalese that would have to describe a farting figure. This would have so punctured the law’s solemnity that prosecution would have been counterproductive.

Perhaps the most interesting question explored by Gatrell is why such irreverent and bawdy humour fall out of fashion so abruptly in the early 1820s, heralding the era of Victorian gentility and propriety. The savagery of the satirists hadgrownduring the Regency, reaching a climax during the divorce proceedings against Queen Caroline. Then thefizz suddenly went out of satire. Gatrell demonstrates how this was largelythe result of massive royal bribery of the print publishers, but also theresult ofthe rise of respectability. Changing cultural standardsstemmed from factors such as the rise of Christian Evangelicalism, the association of libertinism with Jacobinism, the beginnings of political reform, the increasing control of the poor (who ‘have no business to laugh’), and the spread of sensibility, especially among women with a ‘rampant passion for chastity’.

As a consequence, the satirical prints of the 1820s contained not a single fart or buttock. And they gave way to the insipid cartoons of Punch, whose comic muse, Thackeray noted, had been ‘washed, combed, clothed and taught… good manners’. In an article in the Telegraph,Gatrell observed:

Other nations think of us as an uptight people. Yet by and large our rude satirical tradition has beaten their equivalents hollow. Since the 18th century the British haven’t been as censored as most other peoples. You could and can say things here that you’d never get away with elsewhere. You could and can even mock royalty, up to a point. An American today would be hard put to it to lampoon a President as we lampoon Prince Charles, for instance.

Nowadays cartoonists self-consciously draw on Hogarth or Gillray as models. Steve Bell and Martin Rowson deploy scatology shamelessly. To be sure, the modern quest for celebrity has weakened the great tradition. Yet at its best, British satire can still blow raspberries at the powerful, censorious, and pontificating people who want to control us. By certain newspaper readers, John Major will never be thought of without his underpants outside his trousers, or David Cameron without a condom over his polished head.

Rudeness and mockery are subjects worth taking seriously. They have taught us cynicism, it’s true. But they have also taught us how to recognise and resist bullsh*t and cant.

Steve Bell on Michael Gove’s first day as chief whip,17 July 2014 (Guardian)

See also

• London and the Pleasure Principle: essay by Vic Gatrell for Tate Britain, 2007
• City of Laughter: Guardian review
• Rude Britannia: Britain’s history with the rude and subversive: article by Vic Gatrell (Telegraph)

Inthe last couple of weeks a surprising sight has materialised in the middle of Liverpool: a field of poppies, swathes of red flowers densely massedagainst a background of green. It’s a stunning sight, but also one that is, in this glorious summer overshadowed by the storm clouds of war in eastern Europe and the Middle East,inescapablysymbolic.

How did this poppy meadow, on derelict land below the Anglican cathedral, get here? Earlier this year,members of Liverpool’s Chinese community sowed native poppy and cornflower seeds on vacantland stretchingfromtheCathedral towards the Chinese Arch. The act was part of a project linking local business and community groups with partners in China. The land wassown with locally grown wildflowerseed from Landlife, the local environmental organisation that fifteen years ago establishedthe National Wildflower Centre located near to the Liverpool end of the M62.

The poppies have flourished in recent weeks, and after catching sight of them from the bus, the other evening I walked down and captured these shots on my phone’s camera .

Red poppies: symbol of hope and good fortune in China

It was a glorious evening (a group of us, old friends from university days, sat outside Camp and Furnace savouring the warmth as darkness fell); so why,asthis lovely summer stretches on, haveI felt a vague sense of foreboding?

Clearly, the feeling was reinforced bythe sight of those poppies with their inescapable associations (at least for the British). But, more than that, I couldn’t get out of my mind – as terrible news emerged from Gaza and eastern Ukraine – the feelingthat we might be living through a re-run of another glorious summer, exactly one hundred years ago. This is Paul Fussell writing about the summer of 1914 in The Great War and Modern Memory:

Although some memories of the benign last summer before the war can be discounted as standard romantic retrospection turned even rosier by egregious contrast with what followed, all agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral. One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees. You could leave your books out on the table all night without fear of rain. Siegfried Sassoon was busy fox hunting and playing serious county cricket. Robert Graves went climbing in the Welsh mountains. Edmund Blunden took country walks near Oxford, read Classics and English, and refined his pastoral diction. Wilfred Owen was teaching English to the boys of a French family living near Bordeaux. David Jones was studying illustration at Camberwell Art School. And for those like Strachey who preferred the pleasures of the West End, there were splendid evening parties, as well as a superb season for concerts, theatre, and the Russian ballet.

For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol ofor anything innocently but irrevocably lost. […] Out of the world of summer, 1914, marched a unique generation. It believed in Progress and Art and in no way doubted the benignity even of technology. The word machine was not yet invariably coupled with the word gun.

Never such innocence again. It appears that I’m not the only one sensing the parallel. In yesterday’s Guardian, Larry Elliott explained why he thinks the crisis following the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukrainewill not escalate into a full-scale economic war. Europe’s energy requirements and economies are too intertwined with Russia:

The European Union will talk tough but fall shy of imposing wide-ranging financial and trade sanctions as punishment for the Kremlin’s alleged role in the attack on the Malaysia Airlines jet. Meanwhile, hopes that Putin is putting pressure on the separatists in Ukraine boosted share prices.

And yet. Elliott, too recalls the idyllic summer of 1914, when a little local difficulty in Serbia seemed just a tiny cloud on the distant horizon:

Events of a century ago show that the optimism of markets is not always to be trusted. It was only in the last week of July 1914 – once Austria-Hungary had delivered its ultimatum to Serbia – that bourses woke up to the fact that the assassination in Sarajevo had the potential to lead to a war involving all the great European powers. Up until then, the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was seen as merely a local affair and nothing to worry about.

Still, life goes on, the weather is glorious, so we head off to the beach.

‘Hot town, summer in the city’: we head for the beach at Formby

The thing about poppies is, they will grow anywhere.

Ma Jian has long been a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities. His novels – including Beijing Coma, about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and Red Dust, anaccount of three years of hardtravelling through China’s most remote provinces one step ahead of thepolice – have all been banned in his home country, from which he is now exiled.

Last week I finished reading his most recent novel, The Dark Road. If you seek a dark and disturbing read, this is it: adevastating expose of the social and psychological impact ofChina’s one child policy that tears away the veil obscuringthe brutalisation andoppression of women under the policy. The novel is also a vivid portrayal and powerful critique of the human and environmental costs of the extractionoftoxic materials fromelectronic waste (such as discarded mobile phones and computers) exported from the West and worked on by impoverished migrant labourers and their children in China.

Writers,Ma Jian has said,should be the witnesses of their generation: ‘What totalitarian governments most want to destroy or erase, those are the facts that are the most important to write about.’ In pursuit of this duty, Ma JianresearchedThe Dark Roadentering Chinaposing as an official reporter andliving as a vagrant among the fugitives fromChina’s one-child policy. He gathered accounts of, and sometimeswitnessed, the horrors that he describes vividly in the novel– forced sterilisations, and brutal abortions carried out inmakeshift clinics, often at late stages in pregnancy. In an interviewforFoyles Bookshop he explained:

Before I write a book I need to travel, I need to go to the places that I write about, so for this book I went on a long journey, I visited the counties where riots against the one child policy broke out in 2007 and I also travelled down rivers and spent time with the families who had escaped the authorities in order to have as many children they wanted. So I spoke to these pregnant women and learnt stories that I could never have imagined myself. I visited unofficial back street clinics and although I didn’t see any of these abortions take place, just looking at the primitive surroundings I could imagine what dreadful procedures these would be.

Ma Jian

Like the earlier Red Dust, this novel takes the form of a journey through China as we followMeili, a young peasant woman pregnant with her second child, and her husband Kongzi, a villageschoolteacher and distant descendent ofConfucius, as they driftdown the Yangtze River withtheir daughter Nannan in a bid to stay one step ahead ofthe authorities. They are seeking their own utopia – ‘the one place in China where you can live in complete freedom’ – Heaven Township, where no-one checks how many children you have and it’s almost impossible to get pregnant because the of the toxic chemicals that pollute the air and waterof the town, killing men’s sperm.They join other ‘family-planning fugitives’ in rickety boats and makeshift waterside shelters as they journey down the ‘dark road’ of the Yangtze river.

In the first of many distressing scenes, the authorities catch up with the fugitives, seizing Meili on board the boat from which the couple have made a flimsy home:

A man in black sunglasses steps aboard. ‘Any woman pregnantwithout authorisation is both violating the family planning laws andendangering the economic development of our nation,’ he says. ‘Youthink you can turn up here and breed as you wish? This is the ThreeGorges Dam Project Special Economic Zone, don’t you know?’
‘If you cooperate with us, you won’t have to pay the fine,’ anotherman says. ‘But if you resist, we’ll get your village Party Secretary toarrest every member of your family.’

The fat man drops his empty can into the river. ‘We’ve been orderedto terminate every illegal pregnancy we discover. if we let any womanoff, our salaries will be docked.’

A female officer steps forward. ‘Humanity?’ she sneers. ‘If your babyturns out to be a girl, you’ll throw her into the river, so don’t talk tome about humanity! You migrant workers travel around the country,dumping baby girls ” you go. You’re the ones who have no shame!You think we wanted to come here and deal with you squalid boatpeople? No, the higher authorities sent us here because of all the filththat’s been washing up downstream.’

Meili remembers the dead baby she saw floating past the other day,and suspects that this is what the woman is referring to. She wishesshe could sink into the water and swim away.

What follows is a horrendous scene, described through the conciousness ofthe ‘infant spirit’ of this and later pregnancies of Meili, a device which Jian uses to comment on her plight as shenavigates anightmare course through forced abortions, baby-trading, child trafficking, abduction and corruption. These passages are identified in the bookby boldscript that alerts the reader that this is thevoice of an infant spirit observes events:

The infant spirit watches Mother being tied to the steel surgicaltable all those years ago, her hands bound in plastic and hemp ropes,her pale, exposed bulge resembling a pig on a butcher’s table.A man in a white coat rubs his nose, then plucks Mother’s knicker elasticand watches her flinch. ‘Give her another shot, to be safe,’ he says.

‘Don’t kill my baby, don’t kill my -‘ Mother splutters, whitefoam bubbling from her mouth. But the man slides his hands beneathMother’s bottom and pulls off her knickers. ‘Hooligan! ‘ Motherweeps. If my baby dies, its spirit will haunt you for eternity.’ Shetries to spit the foam covering her mouth onto his face, but it risesonly slightly then falls back on her lips.
The man begins to prod Mother’s belly.

‘Don’t do it, I beg you . . .’ she moans. ‘Let me keep this child ‘Iwon’t have another, I promise . . . It’s a Chinese citizen. It has a rightto live . . .’

The man is handed a second syringe with a much longer needle.He inserts the tip into Mother’s belly and pushes it all the way in.

‘Stop, stop! Don’t hurt my baby…’

The infant spirit observes its first incarnation writhe and squirm as the long needle enters its head. When the cold, astringent liquid is released into the brain, the spirit sees the cells shiver and contract, and the foetus flail about in the amniotic fluid, pounding Mother’s warm, uterine walls, then gradually grow weaker and weaker until all that moves is its quivering spine.

At the conclusion of this horrific scene,a weak and bleeding Meili, foetus dying in front of her, is informed that she has been given a half-price discount on the fees that the compulsory abortion would cost. Satire doesn’t come any bleaker.

Kongzi, Meili’s husband, aproud direct descendant of Confucius, rages:

If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates, but if a woman gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal. What kind of country is this?

For Ma Jian, it is Meili the peasant woman who is the heroine of his novel – resilient, determined to grab opportunities in a rapidly-modernising China, while herpatriarchal spouse looks backward to a past in which everyone knew their allotted place in society. Meili represents the situation in whichawoman’s body hasbecome a battle zone over which husbands and the state fight for control. The most successful scenes in the novel are those in which Jian portrays herdignity as sheattempts to evade the forces of the state whilst also resistingthe intimate domestic oppression of Kongzi. As the novelcontinues, Meilibecomes a symbolof the strength of the individual faced withharsh and oppressivecirc*mstances.

.

A worker salvages precious metals fromelectronic waste inGuiyu (the model for Heaven Township)

In a home workshop achild disassembles computer CD drives. Early exposure to heavy metals produces a disproportionate rate of infant mortality and unusually low IQs among Guiyu’s children.

For me, the scenes that worked particularly well in The Dark Road were those that described the nirvana of Heaven Township, where the air, water and land is heavily polluted by toxic poisons released by the recycling in Dickensian home workshops of cast-off computers and mobile phones from the UK and other western countries. In a series of passages, Ma Jian conjures up anightmarish vision:

A worker shuffles into the room, takes the empty circuit boards intothe yard and dunks them into basins of sulphuric acid to retrieve anyremaining scraps of gold. Immediately, acrid vapours drift into theworkshop causing everyone’s eyes and throat to burn. As duskapproaches, all the machines and bamboo baskets of sorted components are dragged back into the workshop and stacked up into tallpiles. Meili sorts the red, white, blue, black, green and grey plasticcasings at her feet into separate hemp sacks, then goes to help OldShao label some white boxes.

At this time every evening, in the final minutes before they clockoff, the women at the metal table stop chatting and concentrate ontheir work, their hands darting back and forth, tweezing out tiny square,circular, two-pronged, three-pronged components as though they wereplucking feathers from a duck. Through the haze of blue fumes, thehot circuit boards in their hands look like miniature demolition sites.

In the interview for Foyles, Jian spoke about the significance for thenovel of his portrayal ofHeaven Township:

The first half of the book describes the journey that this family take along the rivers, there is sense of continual flow, of rootlessness. It’s a journey through the channels of a women’s body. When they arrive at Heaven its as though they’ve arrived in the womb and there it is much more fixed in time, there is a feeling that is about gestation, about growth. They are like water reeds flowing in the current of the rivers. When I was in Guangxi by the rivers and living among these boat communities, Shanghai and Beijing seemed a million miles away, you could have been anywhere. It didn’t even feel particularly like China, it didn’t feel like the 21st century, there was a feeling of timelessness there. The only traces of the modern world you can see in these places is the trash they’re surrounded by.

Ma Jian researched everything he records in The Dark Road first-hand, and this gives the book a documentary feel. The nearest western equivalents to Jian’s determination to reveal the reality of (in his words) ‘a country that has lost its conscience’might be Dickens or Orwell. Jian reveals the one-child policy to be nothing more than amoney-making scam, just likedigital-scrap business. The stateearns huge revenues from fines,employing hordes of bureaucrats to enforce the policy. Central to Ma Jian’s novelis his belief that the policy also represents a means by which the Chinesestate asserts its power and retainsits control overindividuals.After Meili’s fourth pregnancy and the couple’s arrival in the fields of electronic waste and deadly pollution that constitute Heaven Township, the infant spirit resists being born into such a hostile terrain. Meiliremainspregnantfor five years.

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a watch-mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a photojournalist. At the age of thirty, he left his job and travelled for three years across China. In 1987 he published his first novel,Stick Out Your Tongue, which prompted the Chinese government to ban his work. Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, but continued to travel incognito inChina, He supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now liveswith his partner and translator Flora Drew.

In the Foyles interviw, Ma Jian was asked whether the bleak portrayal of down-trodden Chinese suggested there was no escape for them. He replied:

China has undergone huge social changes. One of these is the rise of women, they are the ones who have been pushing this economic miracle, who are leaving home and working in the factories of Shenzhen. Meili is one of these women. She aspires to have a better life, she wants freedom from the state but also her husband. Kungzi represents patriarchal society that’s trying to hold women back. Meili (achieves) some level of independence but when Nannan disappears its then that she realises just how dangerous it is to be a woman in China. The ten years of the book that follows Meili’s life are like an elastic band that’s she’s pushing forward and forward and she stretches to its limit and at the end it snaps and she bounces back and she returns to this level of hopelessness.

[…]

A far as I see it, the family planning system is integral to the totalitarian state. However much there is discussion for the need to get rid of it the government will be very unwilling to relinquish control. But there is also fear in the government. Family planning has now become a state secret. The records are not open to public access. So the government knows there is a dark side that needs to be hidden. They also know that in fact the whole premise of the this population policy is flawed. The experts now believe that (because of) the current economic developments the birthrate has decreased drastically and this would have happened without their doom laden projections of a population catastrophe.

The Dark Road is a tough read, but one that opens your eyes to the sordid reality behind that underpinsChina’s rapid economic development. It is, I think, a less impressive novel than eitherRed Dust or Beijing Coma– but an important work, nevertheless, that takesthe western reader on ajourney into the terrible heart of the Chinese economic miracle. What happens to my computer or mobile phone when I discard it for the latest model? Now I know.

See also

• Red Dust by Ma Jian
• Beijing Coma
• China’s barbaric one-child policy: article by Ma Jian, Guardian, May 2013
• Problems with the one-child policy: Fact and Details website (draws upon sources recognised as authoritative)
• The doctor and China’s evil baby trade: Telegraph, August 2013
• Where does e-waste end up? (Greenpeace)
• World’s discarded computers land in China’s digital scrap heap (San Jose Mercury News )
• 50m tonnes of e-waste generated every year – and it is increasing (Guardian)
• China’s E-Waste City (VQR – photographic essay)
• Wired for gold:migrant workers recyclee-waste in Guiyu , Guangdong province (China Daily USA)

Jeanette Winterson

She began with Dorothy Wordsworth walking the Lakeland fells in May 1800 and continued by way ofKarl Marx, prehistoric cave painting, James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Thomas Piketty’s Capitalin the 21st Century,John Maynard Keynes, Degas and the Arts Council, to arrive at the First World War and Wilfred Owen. All this inthe space of a brilliant fifteen minuteessay byJeanette Winterson broadcast on Radio 3 last week.

Winterson’s essay was one of a series in which writers from different countries were asked to reflect on the meaning of the First World War for them personally, and as a creative artist.Lavinia Greenlaw, who curated the series, gave the contributors only the loosest of frameworks, borrowing thetitle, Goodbye to All That, from Robert Graves’s famously ‘bitter leave-taking of England’ in which he wrote not only of the First World War but also of the questions it raises: how to live, how to live with each other, and how to write.

Jeanette Winterson used her fifteen minutes to sing a hymn of praise to creativity – ‘the heartbeat of who we are’ – and to indict the capitalist system and its drive to maximize profitfor fostering inequalities which eliminate for the great majority the opportunity to be creative or to enjoy the creative arts. ‘Underneath the endless, acute crises of our planet’, she argued, ‘is the chronic crisis of how we manage what it is to be human.’ For Winterson, the question posedby the First World War and all those that have followedis: ‘Why is it that no matter what shape we are in we can always afford a war?’

Winterson began with Dorothy Wordsworth in May 1800, walking in Ryedale and meeting a friend who observes that ‘soon there will only be too ranks of people, the very rich and the very poor’. She notes how Dorothy’s journals were alert to both‘the flow of beauty – and poverty’, and how her friend, at their meeting in 1800 – alert to the implications of the emerging industrial revolution – hadprophesied ‘the present state of our world in which the richest 85 people control more wealth than the poorest three and a half billion’.

A few decades later, Winterson continues, Marx envisaged a socialist future where our basic needs – food, water, shelter, health, rest and so on – couldbe met collectively, so thatpeople might have the means and the leisure to supply their human needs – education, books, music,art, friendship, and curiosity. In other words – creativity.

In a spell-binding section of her talk Winterson unpacks her understanding of ‘creativity’: she gives examples of daily activities which reveal its presence. Creativity is there ‘every day in everything we do’ (or at least, it should be, or could be, she insists). Creativity is revealed in cave paintings from prehistoric times – ‘the earliest expressions of what it means to be a human being’.

Hargreaves’ spinning jenny represented that creativity, too. But whereas the technology of the Industrial Revolution ought tohave been liberating, instead it ‘became a measure of what had been lost’. With all the technological advances since then, Winterson argues, ‘we should be working less, not more’. That we are not is because ‘profit is more important than people’.

In 2008, when the crisis happened, recalls Winterson, it seemed like a golden opportunity to act a basic question: ‘is the economy for human beings – or are human beings for the economy?’ Instead, as she crisply expresses it, ‘politicians talked about capitalism like a powerful car, stolen for a while by a few crazy teenagers and driven too fast and crashed. Fix the car, get decent drivers back behind the wheel, and off we go towards the sunshine.’

From there, it’s a short hop to Thomas Picketty, whoseCapital in the 21st Centurychallenged whole basis of modern capitalism bybringing economics back to the key question of inequality. Exploring the nature of inequality and deprivation, Winterson concludes:

I do not believe that the point of being human is for the majority to scrape a living with not a chance at the imaginative, open, ingenious, curious, playful, creative life that we see in every one of our children. How can we dream if we can’t sleep in safety? What chance to read a book, let alone write one, without a home? How can you buy even the cheapest theatre ticket when you need two jobs just to feed the kids?

Underneath the endless, acute crises of our planet, she argues, is ‘the chronic crisis of how we manage what it is to be human’. Which brings her, at last, to the significance of the First World War. ‘Why is it’, she questions, ‘that no matter what shape we are in we can always afford a war?’

Winterson concludes byreading Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Futility’, written in May 1918, not long before he was killed in a particularly futile effort in the last moments of the war:

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

At the end of the First World War, notes Winterson, the motto became ‘lest we forget’. Recalling that John Maynard Keynes, tasked with negotiating the French war debt to Britain, securedan agreement that a collection of paintings by Degas (modern art!) should be accepted in lieu of payment – and then displayed, free of charge, to the public in the National Gallery, Winterson incisively compares that act with the recent Arts Council cuts in support for the arts forced inconsequence of bailing out the collapsedbanks. That same Arts Council, she notes, that was established by Maynard Keynes. No Marxist, Keynes did believe, argues Winterson, that wealth should be in the service of human beings.

‘Lest we forget’:what it means to be human. Creativity, insists Winterson, is not ‘ornament or luxury’, but ‘the heartbeat of who we are’

Better to hearJeanette Winterson read the essay herself. It’s available for a year on iPlayeror permanently as a downloadable podcast. Or you can read it here on the 14-18 website.

Grizzled and jowled beneath the trademark black fedoraand wearing a baggy t-shirt emblazoned with ‘EARTH’, last night at Liverpool Arena Neil Young was on a mission. To save the world, no less.

Young came onstage at around 8:45with Crazy Horse – here comprising long-time collaborator in epic noise Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro (white-haired, tubby, wearing even baggier t-shirt) on guitar and keyboards and Ralph Molina on drums, with Rick Rosas on bass (standing in for Billy Talbot who recently suffered a stroke). To the rear of the stage, wereDorene Carter andYaDonna West whosebacking vocalsburnished the band’s fearsomely physical interpretations of numbers from the back catalogue, plus some surprises.

They began with‘Love And Only Love’ from one of my favourite Youngalbums,1990’s Ragged Glory. ‘Love and only lovewill endure’, Neil insisted.Two more songs from the samealbum, ‘Days That Used To Be’ and ‘Love To Burn’ seemed to reinforce the message:

People say don’t rock the boat,
let things go their own way
Ideas that once seem so right,
now have gotten hard to say

A theme was emerging, with Neil insisting thatthough we may be ‘just anotherhundred thousand miles away/From days that used to be’, the old values of sixties protest arestill valid. It’s not that simple, of course. Outside the Arena we had had to pass the flags and banners of theFriends of Palestine protestagainst the Israeli assault on Gaza and Neil’s planned appearance inTel Aviv (a concert now called off due to the security situation). Youngbeen under pressure to abandonthe gigby the increasingly influentialboycotts, divestment and sanctions movement. Pink Floyd guitaristRoger Waters had joined the pressure with an open letter to Young asking him to cancel the show – something which the otherwise politically-engaged, though often waywardartist had resisted.

It’s a debatable issue, but I wonder whether we are approaching a tipping point where artists will consider it as morally repugnant to perform in Israel as it once was to appear in South Africa during apartheid.

However. Young once said: ‘As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn’t see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more’. He has been associated with many causes, particularlyenvironmental issues and the rights of indigenous peoples. He campaigns against fracking and has toured Canada in support ofthe Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and its fight against oil companies determined to exploit the tar sands of northern Alberta.

It’s all marketing. It’s all big money. This oil is all going to China. It’s not for Canada. It’s not for the United States. It’s not ours – it belongs to the oil companies, and Canada’s government is behind making this happen. It’s truly a disaster.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse at the Arena (photos:Liverpool Echo)

So, three songs into the Liverpool set, we get ‘After the Goldrush’, his dream vision of environmental disaster from 1970 that seems more chilling as the years pass (and as Neil updates the signature line which now goes: ‘Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century’). Introducing his acoustic take on Dylan’s ‘Blowing in the Wind’ (‘a song that never ages’), Young observed that ‘this world is full of damage’. It’s a song that he memorably reinterpreted on Weldin 1991 at the time of the Gulf War. Then it was drenched in angry, Jimi Hendrix-style electric guitar; tonighthe returns to its original incarnation:

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

Questions that remain unanswered. Which is why it’s important thatsongcontinues to be sung.

As far as Neil was concerned, all this was leading to his new song, ‘Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?’, unveiledas one of the two encores. It’s a magnificent addition to the Young canon, a new ‘Ohio’. Like so many of Young’s songs, it states its position simply, even it might be said, simplistically. But what a shot of adrenaline it gives. It is magnificent, a powerful assertion of environmental values, challenging the policies of governments and multinationals:

Protect the wild
Tomorrow’s child
Protect the land, free the man.
Take out the dams
Stand up to oil
Protect the plants
Renew the soil.
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough.
Who’s gonna take on the big machine?
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?

The set, which lasted just over two hours, also featured more recent and some obscure material. ‘Separate Ways’ is a songfrom an unreleased 1970salbum Homegrown, while ‘Barstool Blues’ comes from from Zuma in the same period. Every now and again, Neil would wander over to the side of the stage to whisper in the ear of a tall wooden Indian that stood there, reminding me of Hank Williams’ ‘Kaw-Liga’ who ‘just stood there and never let it show’. Then there was‘Goin’ Home’ from 2002’s Are You Passionate? and the title track from 2012’s Psychedelic Pill. The latter was illuminated in a timely way by one of thoserotating light shows that were ubiquitous in the sixties in those places where you went ‘looking for a good time’.

Light show recreation during ‘Psychedelic Pill’

For me, these were the least engaging moments in a great concert. There were many highlights, though. The short acoustic interval in which Neil covered Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and only had to strum the first two chords of‘Heart Of Gold’ to be met with a roar of approval, was a high point, as was the finale– the great, ironic (and often misunderstood) anthem,‘Rockin’ In The Free World’.

The band returned to the stage for two encores –the first of them was the new song ‘Who’s Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth?’, an environmental battle cry that comes from the same place as ‘Mother Earth’ two decades ago. But while that took the form of a soaringhymn to gaia, this one is a pounding cry to arms, full of rage against the money men and the corporations exploiting the earth. It’s got the same elemental feel as ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, and could be a hit single (if there isstill such thing). That was followed by a spectacular rendition of ‘Hurricane’ which culminated in a ferocious storm of electric noise–splinteringmountains of bass rumble and feedback.

You are just a dreamer, and I am just a dream.
That perfect feeling when time just slips
Away.

Tectonic plates ground the world to smithereens as Sampredo manipulated a floating keyboard with great ferocity, Neil shredded every single string on his guitar, as he left the last lines shimmering and echoing around the arena:

I’m gettin’ blown away
To somewhere safer where the feeling stays.
I want to love you but I’m getting blown away.

It’s nearly 40 years since I last saw Young – at Wembley in 1974. I can’t honestly recallmuch about that, apart from the sense of a long autumn day in bright sunshine and fragments of Joni Mitchell’s set, though I have written about it in this post. That astonishing event (The Band, Joni Mitchell with Tom Scott’s LA Express, plus four hours of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on one bill) came at the end of CSN&Y’slegendary 1974 tour. This week I listened to the newly-releasedcollection of recordings from that tour (including somefrom the Wembley gig), curated by Graham Nash. On the whole, it’s Neil’s contributions which stand out, surviving the test of time.

It’s also 40 years since the release of On the Beach, an album I’ve always appreciated, even though it was panned when it first came out, its bleakness too much of a contrast to its predecessor, Harvest. The blog Johanna’s Visions has an excellent round-up of facts and opinions on the album:July 16: 40 year anniversary for On The Beach by Neil Young.

Now, nearly half a century later and a pensioner myself, I had spent an evening watching four grizzled pensioners deliver a performance of high-octane intensity. Young, the godfather of grunge, had confirmed that hisstar still burns brightly. With the extended solos of wailing, distortedguitar, the strong riffs and heavy drumming, Young, Sampredo and Molina demonstrated that age cannot wither them.

As we streamed out onto the Liverpool waterfront a hugefull moon hung in a cloudless sky: harvest moon (almost).

Setlist

Love and Only Love
Goin’ Home
Days That Used to Be
After the Gold Rush
Love to Burn
Separate Ways
Don’t Cry No Tears
Blowin’ in the Wind (acoustic)
Heart of Gold (acoustic)
Barstool Blues
Psychedelic Pill
Rockin’ in the Free World

Encore:
Who’s Gonna Stand Up and Save the Earth
Like A Hurricane

See also

• Neil Young and Crazy Horse top 5 performances Europe Summer 2014 (Johanna’s Visions)

Martin Hyder and Rina Fatina in ‘Dead Dog in a Suitcase’

Through all the Employments of Life
Each Neighbour abuses his Brother;
whor* and Rogue they call Husband and Wife:
All Professions be-rogue one another:
The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat,
The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine:
And the Statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.

Inthe 1720s, when John Gay wrote his timeless and fantastically successful The Beggar’s Opera,trust in politicians was almost non-existent, men had been ruined, and the national economy weakened, by the collapse of the South Sea Company. The parallels with our own time need little elaboration; asPaul Crewe, the producer of Dead Dog in a Suitcase, theLiverpoolEveryman and Kneehigh re-creation remarks in the production’s programme:

We’re still confronting a world in which there is no trust in politicians; where bankers wreck economies and lives, yet collect huge bonuses; in which the power of wealth and celebrity is celebrated, the law is often found to be corrupt, but where millions live in poverty and degradation.What is the world coming to?

An engraving by Hogarth shows actors wearing animal masksperforming a song from Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’.

Dead Dog, seen this week, is a kaleidoscopic rewrite and update of John Gay’s original in which writer Carl Grose has returned to the spirit, if not the text, of the source, ignoring Brecht’s better-known re-interpretation. The characters’ names have not, however, been changed to protect the innocent. We still have the contract killerMacheath (later transformed into Mack the Knife, inBrecht’s Threepenny Opera), hired by the Peachums to murder the town’s mayorastheprelude to a fixed mayoral election. It’s an old story ofpower, corruption and lies. Les Peachum is a businessman who fears that the incumbent mayor knows too much about his shady dealings (buildings made of his shoddy concrete, and a business selling pilchards poisoned by thetoxic waste poured into the bay by another of his operations.

Grose doesn’t use Peachum’s line from Gay’s original, though it fits:

No Gentleman is ever look’d upon the worse for killing a Man in his own Defence; and if Business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a Gentleman do?

Rina Fatania as Mrs Peachum

With the run drawing to its close, I don’t think I’m giving anything awayin revealing that thetruly evil Peachum is the missus (a standout performance by Rita Fatania as Les Peachum’sdomineering and scheming spouse). This Mrs Peachum has no need of Mr Peachum’s advice in the original; she knows it already:

But Money, Wife, is the true Fuller’s Earth for
Reputations, there is not a Spot or a Stain but what it can take out.
A rich Rogue now-a-days is fit Company for any Gentleman; and the
World, my Dear, hath not such a Contempt for Roguery as you imagine.

A lot of money changes hands – insuitcase-sized portions. Identical suitcases change hands, too: it’s a running gag throughout the show. There’s the one with the money, one with the mayor’s evidence that could ruin the Peachums – and the one with the dead dog (the unfortunate poochwasbeing taken for a walk by its owner, the mayor, when both were assassinated; ‘it was a witness’, remarksMacheath,the killer).

Suitcase mix-up:Patrycja Kujawska as the mayor’s widow

It’s hard to do justice in a few words to the energy and inventiveness of this production. Director Mike Shepherd has the tale unfold against the backdrop of a vast, scaffolded set across which characters clamber and leap. There is a Punch andJudy, there arehandpuppets, choreographed dance numbers, atmospheric lighting effects, a lot of physically-demanding performance – and lots of music, a great deal of it performed by the actors themselves, most notably by Patrycja Kujawska on violin.

Music director Charles Hazlewood has retained the sense of Gay’s original which subverted the popular operatic tradition of its day by incorporatingsongs and tunes that were familiar to ordinary people. His ebullient score embraces rap, disco, ska and dub, with set pieces that reference – amongst many sources -Ian Dury, Madness and Tom Waits, as well as incorporating, as did John Gay, variants on ‘Greensleeves’ and airs by Handel and Purcell. The Polly Peachum weddingscene, in whichthe entire cast restage aMadnessroutine wearing long, black overcoats and pork pie hats, is priceless.

Madness: the cast with Carly Bawden as Polly Peachum

The acting is uniformly strong in this ensemble performance, though Rina Fatania as Mrs Peachum and Dominic Marsh as Macheath deserve special mention. The whole thing works its way inexorably towards a truly stunning conclusion that brings home just how marvellous a box of tricks this theatre now has at its disposal. It’s an apocalyptic ending thatmust leave the Everyman staff with a lot of clearing up to do every night. If I have one criticism, though, it is that the show is too long and a little uneven. For example, there’s a scene towards the end where, with Macheath on the gallows awaiting execution, his two wives sing a song of devotion. It’s not a particularly good song, and the rest of the cast are left standing motionless, watching.

The Slammerkin

The production retains John Gay’s focus on ‘Gaming, Drinking and Whoring’. In the original, Macheathfrequentsa tavern where he is waited onby women of dubious virtue. In Dead Dog,writer and director have updated the concept with The Slammerkin, a nightclub staffed by gyrating pole dancers and transsexuals. There’s a hilarious scene (perhaps to be avoided by those of a nervous disposition who are uneasy around babies) in which the many babies fathered by Macheath surround him, bawling and crawling with menace.

Dead Dog: Kneehigh/Everymanpublicity

John Gay achieved his greatest success with The Beggar’s Operawhich had its debut in London in 1728 andbecamean immediate success, performed more than any other play during the 18th century.Alexander Pope wrote of the playthat its ‘vast success was unprecedented and almost incredible’. It was popular, not just in London, but in all the majortowns of Britain,and as far afield as Jamaica.

The play’spopularity was due in part to its satiric subversion of Italian opera, the passionate interest of the upper classes at the time – but mainly, perhaps, to the manner in which itlampooned politicians and commented excoriatingly on social inequity, primarily through Gay’scomparison of low-class thieves and whor*s with their aristocraticsuperiors:‘There is such a similitude of manners in high and low life that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen’.

Gaywasnot alone in making the comparison, as Vic Gatrell observes in City of Laughter, his superb history of sexual attitudes and satire in 18th century London which I read recently. At around the same time as Gay’s play was being premiered,Henry Fielding wrote:

Great whor*s in coaches gang,
Smaller misses
For their kisses,
Are in Bridewell hang’d;
Whilst in vogue
Lives the great rogue,
Small rogues are by dozens hang’d

While Daniel Defoe observed caustically, ‘How many honest gentlemen have we in England, of good estates and noble circ*mstances, that would be highway men, and come to the gallows, if they were poor?

The theatre programme features a number ofpertinent quotations along the same lines, including this one fromAesop some2500 years ago (confirming that nothing is new under the sun):

We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

While toEddie Vedder isattributed the observation:

Give a man a gun, he’ll rob a bank. Give a man a bank, he’ll rob the world.

Threepenny Opera: original German poster from Berlin, 1928

In 1928, on the 200th anniversary of the original production of Gay’s play, The Threepenny Opera, a collaboration between Bertolt Brecht (who wrote the words) and Kurt Weill (who devised the music) updated the story for the Depression years.By 1933, when Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany by Hitler’s policies, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performedacross Europe. Songs from The Threepenny Opera have become standards, most notably, of course, ‘Mack the Knife’. It is absent, however, from Dead Dog in a Suitcase.

The Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Youth Choir perform Nyman’s Hillsborough memorial in the Anglican Cathedral

On Saturday we joined the crowds pouring into Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral on a beautiful summer’s evening for the public première ofMichael Nyman’sHillsborough Memorial Symphonyperformed by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Youth Choir. It was an intensely moving experience which transcended the usual boundaries of a musical performance.

The programme cover

The Symphony consists of four movements. In the first, ‘The Singing of the Names’, mezzo-sopranoKathryn Rudge sings the name of each of the 96 who lost their lives at Hillsborough Stadiumon 15 April 1989. It took me a few moments, in the cavernous soundscape of the cathedral, to locate where Rudge’s voice was coming from (the pulpit to the left in the photo above) and to tune into the words she was singing as beingthe names of those who died. But, Isoon adjusted to the rhythm of her delivery as each name,carefully enunciated by Rudge as the orchestration shifted and eddied beneath her voice,soared to the cathedral vaults.

Pages from the programme: The Singing of the Names

It was intensely emotional, as Kathryn Rudge’s declamation shifted between tenderness and something that sounded close to anger. Listening I wondered how it must have felt for relatives of the dead, listening toit that afternoon whenand the Memorial was playedfor a private audience offamily members of Hillsborough victims.

I thought, too – perhaps because we’re at this historic juncture one hundred years on from the outbreak of World War One – of the parallel with thenaming the dead on First World War memorials, andthe biblical phrase, chosen by Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his own son in the war, inscribed on many British war memorials: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. I thought of Liverpool’sbeautiful memorial – outside St Georges Hall – to those who fell in World War One, and the inscription it carries: ‘The victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people’.This music, and the two memorials to the Hillsborough victims that now exist in Liverpool, will ensurethat the names of the 96 will not now be forgotten.

Beautiful detailing by Herbert Tyson Smithfrom Liverpool’smemorial to those who fellin the First World War

With the second movement, ‘Family Reflections’ we were in familiar Nyman territory: thesignature insistent pulse and repetition of slowly changing chords that gradual transform into long, arching phrases. Nyman coined the termminimalism for this kind of music, and it shares an affinity with works byTerry Riley or Philip Glass. The entry of theyouth choir, singing a wordless aria above the orchestration, liftedthe hairs on the back of my neck.

In the programme notes, Nyman explained how the third movement – entitled ‘The 96′ – drew on the numerical symbolism of ’96’, repeating a 4-bar phrase made up of three chords so that the piece consists of (96 times 3 divided by 4) bars. If that sounds coldly mathematical, it wasn’t. The movement built relentlessly to a heart-stopping point when theorchestration fell away and young voices of the choircame to the fore.

The final movement was simply titled ‘Memorial’, an upliftingrequiem in which I thought I could discern elements of the George Martin/Beatles arrangement on ‘All You Need Is Love’, with trumpet and horns superimposed above a repeating choral line. When the end came, the audience leapttheir feet to greetorchestra and choir, and conductor Josep Vicent with rapturous applause. The 70 year-old Nyman was in the audience, and was encouraged to comeforward to thunderous acclaim.

Michael Nyman

Earlier, Nyman had told the Liverpool Echo that he hadsounded out representatives from the family groups before taking on the commission. He added that he felt they had been ‘treated like scum and not given their voice. You might say they’re getting their voices back now. But it’s 25 years too late.’ Speaking of the Memorial Symphony, he said, ‘It’s a piece without any surface politics. There’s no text which deals with evidence.It’s basically a very human and warm and strongly emotional piece.For the first time in my life I will own up to writing a piece whose sole purpose is to have an emotional, cathartic, beneficial influence on a situation that is still unresolved and extremely painful.’

Nevertheless, in the programme Michael Nyman writes that ‘unspoken, unsung, beneath the surface of this Symphony is the history of family pain andmy personal anger with the corruption of the Thatcher government and her duplicitous police force.’Amen to that.

There’s a rather curious story involved in how Nyman came to compose the Memorial. At the time of the Heysel disaster in 1985, hewas part way throughcomposing a new work to be performed in a disused power station in Rouen. One evening hesat down in front of the TV to watch the Liverpool -Juventus match – and on seeing the events that unfolded he immediatelydecided that the piece he was writing should be a memorial piece.The finished work was performed – just once – in Rouen. He attempted to have it performed in Liverpool, without success.The last movement was later used by Peter Greenaway on the soundtrack for his film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

Then, on the afternoon of 15 April 1989. Nymanwas in the recording studio, coincidently revisiting his ‘Heysel Memorial’, when news of the disaster at Hillsborough began to unfold. In the weeks after Hillsborough, he decided to build a new memorial work around the piece he had originallydedicated to the Heysel Stadium disaster.

A recording of the Symphony will be played in Liverpool Cathedral at 15:06 on Wednesday 6 August, 3 September, and 17 September, and a CD will be released in September.

Meanwhile, up the road in Warrington, the inquests into the deaths of the 96 at Hillsborough continue. They began at the end of March and areexpected to conclude in July 2015.

TheHillsborough Memorial outside Anfield

We lie, under a lavender sky
Under a lavender sky we lie
Do you, do you remember the day?
Do you remember when we felt that way?

Four declaratory chords on electric guitar give way to strummed acoustic guitar, awhispered, percussive, ‘tchick-ahhh’ chorus and dreamy, swirling Mellotron, and electric harpsichord. This is ‘Lavender’, the opening track on Ray LaMontagne’s unapologetically retro album of blissed-out lyricsdressed up in sixtiespsychedelic colours, complete with phasing,echoeymulti-track vocals and catchy choruses that sweep this listener back to innocent times whenPink Floyd sang ‘Remember a Day’ and and the Zombies strummed ‘Time of the Season’. Even the title of the album – Supernova – harks back to the days when, uncharacteristically, the Stones dreamed of being2000 Light Years From Home. This is the perfect summer soundtrack, and through these last few weeks of midsummer sunshine I’vehad it on repeat.

It’s been years since I listened to Ray LaMontagne – after his2004 debut album Trouble, with its title track that epitomisedmelancholy Americana, I’d kind of lost touch. Now in his forties, LaMontagne has spent the last decade producing more of the same – four albums of folky, introspective songs. And now this – an albumthat draws heavily on thepsychedelic pop and country-rock of the late 1960s and early ’70s. A guy whose songs were renowned for their gruff melancholy now trips the light fantastic andsings about tripping over clover.

Sitting in the cool of the shadows under
Can you hear the laughter of the river, daughter?
Under water fish are flashing
In the sky a thunder crashing
– ‘Smashing’

On the title track, LaMontagne’s vocalscome wrapped deliciously in a sensualswirl of hand claps, cheesy organ, Mellotron and glockenspiel. ‘Supernova’ shares with many of the tracks in this collection a kind of wistful nostalgia:

Zoe you and me we’ve been hanging out now
Ever since we were kids, just kicking around,
this town
Zoe you know me and I don’t back down
When I know what I want, and I think I found it

I want you, be my girl
I want you, be my girl

Zoe, you’re so Supernova!

There are two great road songs here: the cool, jazzy ‘Airwaves’ which hasRusty James andPatty Sue ‘rolling out of east L.A.’ making theirway to Santa Fe:

She says “whatcha thinking?”
I’m coming with you
I’m coming with you

‘Ojai’ is shimmering country-rock that might have come via Neil Young circaEverybody Knows This Is Nowhere,a gorgeous track with a steady, jogging rhythm and exquisite slide guitar. Here’s that wistful sense of the years passing again:

I don’t know where the years have gone,
Just know I’m worse for hangin’ on
Maybe it’d be best if I just let things lie
Guess I’m never gonna get back to Ojai

The whole album is a reminder of how, once decades ago, simple songs could mean a lot. LaMontagne has recaptured the combination of well-craftedsongs, catchy choruses, terrific hooks, and clever gear changes that made the 1960s a golden era of deceptively simple music that spoke volumes.

The closing track on Supernova, ‘Drive-In Movies’, once again exudes the senseof wistful nostalgia and reminiscence that threads throughthe wholerecord. The funny thing is,it works (like so many American pop songs do) even for an English listener who has never attended a drive-in movie, or experienced any of the elements of small-town USA that LaMontagne vignettes in his lyric. It’s a daydream, a high summer tune for groovin’ the afternoon away:

I wanna be Brando in the Wild One
I wanna be somethin’ to someone
Cause nothin’ ever happens in this Town,
The same old crew, hangin’ around
Just waitin for some sh*t to go down
But we love our Drive-in Movies

Now I’m grown, kids of my own, I never thought I could be a Dad
Me and my girl, we’re going strong, still the best friend that I ever had

Now I know all the things that I didn’t know
I got smokes, but I buy em’ now, I guess I’m old
Drive-in’s just an empty lot that no one mows
I miss those Drive-in Movies

As the last notes of this last song fade out I press rewind and start all over again, listening to theperfect summer soundtrack.

Where’re you going Rusty James?
So rumble on miles and change
What you doing Betty Sue?
She says “whatcha thinking?”

I’m coming with you
I’m coming with you
I’m coming with you