Buzzcocks: Promises

Steve Diggle, Buzzcocks' guitarist, described the birth of this song in an interview he gave to Malcolm Wyatt:

"Promises was my song, but I left the verses at home! There’s a demo where we’re having a bit of fun and I’m making the verse up as I go along. As I was doing that, Pete was by the mixing desk, so it was just me, John (Maher, drums) and Steve (Garvey, bass). 

“We were working out which songs we had, and Pete [Shelley] said, 'I think I've got some verses for that melody.'

"The difference was that it was going to be a socio-political song about promises made by the Government. I said, 'You’ve turned it into a f***ing love song!'

"Having said that, it worked out well all round. That’s the thing with lots of the songwriting, particularly later on. We complement each other."

Promises, one of a great run of Buzzcocks singles, reached no. 20 in January 1979.

Cliff Richard and the Drifters: Move It

John Lennon once said: "I think the first English record that was anywhere near anything was Move It by Cliff Richard, and before that there'd been nothing."

It takes an American podcast to take Cliff and the Shadows (as they soon became) seriously: We Say Yeah!

Steve Winwood and Viv Stanshall: Boy in Darkness

"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies:

One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived.

They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English mores that was eventually made into a film starring Trevor Howard in the title role.

"Viv was hilarious," Winwood says, laughing. "He always sort of needed a straight man to do the musical things that he was wanting to do. And for a while I became that. We'd go into pubs and people's houses and start off some kind of act. I'd play some music, he'd play a bit on his euphonium, then try to do conjuring tricks."

A track said to be from their Gormenghast project, Boy in Darkness, was included on Dog Howl in Tune, an album put together from the confused archive Viv Stanshall left at his death by his son Rupert.

And then the other day I found this track. It too is called Boy in Darkness and it has much the same time as the Viv Stanshall one, though different words. But here Winwood, who presumably wrote that tune, is playing keyboards and Stanshall the euphonium. The band, the YouTube blurb speculates, may be filled out by Traffic members Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee on percussion and bass guitar respectively.

This video was posted there by Berkin Altınok, whose account is filled with Winwood rarities and covers of his songs.

Richard Dadd and Victorian treatment of lunatics

Jonathan Jones wrote about the painter Richard Dadd, who spent much of his life as a patient at Broadmoor Hospital, in the Guardian earlier this week:

You can’t escape the tragedy of a gifted artist who spent so much of his life locked up, albeit in more liberal conditions than our stereotype of Victorian asylums might lead you to expect.

When I went on my guided walk around Desford in May, the guide stopped at the top of hill above the village's railway station and told us that doctors would bring patients from a local asylum by train for picnics in a nearby field. She also remarked that this isn't how we usually think of the Victorians treating what they called lunatics.

Yes, I think I may have found another myth about the Victorians – or at least a partial myth.

As I've argued before, part of the trouble is that the Victorian age lasted for more than 60 years. There's a limit to the number of useful generalisations you can make about such a long period that saw so much change. And there was both kind and brutal treatment of mental patients in the 19th century, just as there was in the 20th. Frequently they occurred side by side in the same institutions.

What you can say, I think, is that there is no simple, Whiggish tale of progress to be told here. Some of the worst abuses of such patients – lobotomy, leucotomy, electroshock – date from the 20th century, not the 19th.

While Edward Elgar began his musical career in 1879 at Powick Lunatic Asylum near Worcester. There he rehearsed and conducted the staff orchestra that played at dances for the patients and also gave concerts for their entertainment.

Harry Chapin: W.O.L.D.

Being a DJ? Turns out it's a less than poptastic business.

Aided by heavy rotation on Radio 1, with whose DJs it must have struck a chord, this reached no. 34 in the UK singles chart in 1973.

Harry Chapin, a talented singer-songwriter, died in a car crash at the age of 38.

The Joy of Six 1551

 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

Embed from Getty Images

Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

Django Django: Cameos

This is perhaps typical of the sort of track I hear on BBC Radio 6 Music and like. It's a little bit retro, stronger on melody than rhythm and involves white boys and guitars. Could it be that I'm getting old?

Still, Song Bar likes it too:

A crisp, catchy, acoustic sound with orchestral strings and their distinctive vocal harmony style sees a welcome return from the  London-based art-rock quartet of David Maclean, Vincent Neff, James Dixon and Thomas Grace, heralding their upcoming sixth LP Doveland, out in November via Clouds Hill. 

Produced by Nick McCarthy (Franz Ferdinand), the title of the album takes its name from an online urban myth: a supposedly vanished midwest town that appears on no maps, yet some believe they once lived there, even holding souvenirs as proof. 

In answer to the question in my first paragraph... No, they won't get me. And there's more about the Doveland myth online.

Rock Family Trees: The British R&B boom of the Sixties

An old BBC documentary on a well-studied subject, but the talking heads here are of a high quality. I've not heard Manfred Mann interviewed before, for instance.

Val Doonican: Elusive Butterfly

I chose this as a Sunday music video when Val Doonican died in 2015. I wrote then:

Val Doonican is worth noticing for two reasons.

First, because younger generations will have no idea how popular a figure he was in his heyday. The Val Doonican Music Show ran on BBC1 for more than 20 years. And it was the characteristically named LP Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently that knocked Sergeant Pepper off the top of the album charts.

Second, because this is one of the first singles I remember – a cover of the American version by the song's writer Bob Lind, it reached no. 5 in 1966. I can recall being a little disturbed by the idea of someone outside my window when I woke up.

Listening to it today it is a good song, but far less rich and strange than it did in my six-year-old imagination. And Doonican seems unsure whether to be American or Irish.

Plans to bring Leicester's Il Rondo back to life

The Leicester Mercury has a story, but doesn't know the half of it:

New live music venue hopes for former board game cafe in Leicester city centre

An empty unit in Leicester city centre could be given a new lease of life as a late-night entertainment venue.

Generic Leisure Ltd has lodged an application seeking a licence for indoor sports events, plays, films, and live and recorded music at the site at 22 Silver Street.

Former board game cafe be damned. This was once Il Rondo, where some of the top Sixties bands played, naming it as their favourite venue in the city. 

It's the large red-brick building in the thumbnail above – play the video to hear more about its history. 

For many years it housed a branch of the Italian restaurant chain Prezzo. That occupied the ground floor: I'm told the stage and dancefloor are still in place upstairs.

The Malcolm Arcade stands on the site of what was once The Royal Opera House, Leicester.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Some Velvet Morning

The most 1967 track of all? More 1967 than David Hemmings Happens?

These random paragraphs from a Believer article by Madeleine Watts may explain what is going on:

Nancy Sinatra had, until the mid-sixties, been the favorite daughter of her famous father and a mediocre pop singer without a hit. Hazlewood changed that. He wrote “These Boots Are Made For Walking” for Nancy. He wrote “Sugar Town” for Nancy. And he wrote “Some Velvet Morning,” a song that Rolling Stone, The Daily Telegraph and other publications have called one of the greatest duets ever recorded.

Phaedra is a woman who loses her reason. In Euripides’ version of the story, Aphrodite compels her to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytus—but Hippolytus spurns her advances. When Phaedra can no longer bear the guilt and the force of her feelings, she takes her own life. Full of fury, Phaedra leaves behind a note telling her husband, Theseus, that Hippolytus, has raped her. But Hippolytus never touched her.

Before Nancy, Lee Hazlewood was a cowboy of sorts. Born in Oklahoma to an oil wildcatter and a housewife, he grew up in Arkansas, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas. After serving in the Korean War, Hazlewood landed a job as a late-night radio DJ in Phoenix, Arizona. There, he started the label Viv, signing the twangy instrumentalist Duane Eddy and writing and producing tracks like “The Fool” for Sanford Clark and Al Casey’s “Surfin’ Hootenany.” In 1963, Hazlewood moved to Los Angeles and recorded his first solo record at Western Studios, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town. It was a concept album that told the stories of the residents of Trouble, hard-bitten songs laden with all the misfit character and southern gothic ennui of a Carson McCullers novel, and all the cheap sentiment of bad Hollywood Westerns. It sounded, and sounds, like nothing else. 

The velvet morning that is promised in Hazlewood’s song is predicated on the male vocalist being “straight.” But straight can mean a great many things.

Straight: Not crooked, direct, undeviating, in unbroken sequence. Of a person, well-conducted, steady. Of a drug-user, high.

In his essay 'Old Songs in New Skins,' Greil Marcus suggests, “One of the ways songs survive is that they mutate…. Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves – but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as the soundtrack to our lives, when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change and so do soundtracks, even if they’re made up of the same songs.” 

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

Free: Wishing Well

The singles chart at the start of the Seventies, before glam rock's sparkly hands got around its throat, was an eclectic place and you sometimes found quite heavy bands like Free having hits.

And music moved on so quickly then that it's surprising to learn that Free's singer Paul Rodgers was in a school bond with Bruce Thomas of the Attractions. It feels like they should have come from different generations.

A Liberal England guest blogger shows us around Snailbeach Mine

Ginger Beard Mark and the musician Eric Loveland Heath visit the old lead mine at Snailbeach in Shropshire. In its heyday in the second half of the 19th century, it was the most productive lead mine in the country.

Eric Loveland once wrote a guest post for Liberal England about growing up in Snailbeach and his reaction to it today. 

And you can download his digital album Snailbeach Mines Trust.

See? It's not just me who's taken with the place.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Perpetuum Mobile

I can remember studying Penguin Cafe Orchestra CDs, intrigued by their artwork, but I never bought one. I wish I had.

Borderless explains what inspired the band's formation by the classically trained guitarist and composer Simon Jeffes:

In 1972, food poisoning confined Jeffes to bed where he dreamed of a Kafkaesque residential block full of people with empty lives. The following day a voice in his head said distinctly, "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random." Jeffes tried to imagine what the house band of that cafe might sound like. When he recovered, he transformed his dream into truth and invented the PCO.

Perpetuum Mobile comes from Signs of Life, the fourth of the PCO's five studio albums, and is one of their best-known tracks. I don't set out to impress you with my esoteric taste on this blog, but I may steal "I will tell you things at random" for its slogan.

Jeffes died in 1997, aged only 48. His legacy is two groups inspired by his work. Penguin Cafe is led by his son Arthur, while a loose group of old PCO hands play as The Orchestra That Fell To Earth.

The Joy of Six 1542

"Multiple sources inside the children’s home division said that, as they prepared for sale, they were pressed to rapidly open more homes and take on more children, even when they didn’t have the staff to keep up. They claim they were told this was so the company could be sold for the maximum amount of money." Jessica Murray says that when private equity takes over a UK care home it can mean the children are treated like cattle.

Ben Worthy argues that, if he is to succeed as a prime minister who takes over in mid-parliament, Andy Burnham will need to create a clear sense of change and offer new policy quickly.

"Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey." John Oxley mourns the Conservatives' loss of the Margot Leadbetter vote.

Danielle Williams on how the US lost its public swimming pools to racism: "When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the US."

Sintija Brence salutes the Queen Of Southern Gothic, Bobbie Gentry.

"About most of the rescues Gregory is brisk but particular. An elderly couple in a broken-down yacht press biscuits on the crew; a woman makes eyes at the coxswain ('the problem was an open seacock, swamping their bilge'); in failing light a small boy – 'my mum said I should stay with the boat' – is scooped from a flimsy inflatable dinghy just in time." Susannah Clapp meets a literary lifeboatman at Dungeness.

Reg Calvert, Oliver Smedley, Hayek and the nature of liberty

When Oliver Smedley shot Reg Calvert, more was at stake than a row over a radio transmitter. According to a 2011 blog post by Adam Curtis – thanks to a reader for putting me on to it – theirs was a dispute about the very nature of liberty:

A historian called Adrian Johns has written a brilliant book about Pirate Radio in the 1960s, called Death of a Pirate. In it he argues that Reg Calvert and Oliver Smedley represent two completely different kinds of "privateer".

Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. A real buccaneer who would ignore rules and the structure of class and power in Britain while merrily going his own way.

Smedley on the other hand was a "privateer" only to the extent that he wanted to bring the private sector back to power in Britain. Other than that he wanted the traditional power structure to remain the same. And to do this he (and his Think Tank) wanted to reinvent the free market as a managed system - managed by them, and any true "privateer" - like Reg - who challenged that power was doomed.

Johns writes about the killing of Calvert.

"At that instant late in Midsummer Night 1966 when Smedley took his fatal decision, two kinds of piracy came into collision. Reg Calvert represented one kind - a kind whose history can be traced back centuries. He was an ingenious and imaginative entrepreneur, opportunistic and ambitious. He spoke in grandiose terms, but his operations were undercapitalized, seat-of-the-pants adventures that might bloom or collapse - as so many radical ventures initially are. The outsider, resistant to all rules.

Calvert represented the kind of pirate that the Institute of Economic Affairs hailed as holding the key to social and cultural progress. But in reality Smedley stood for a different kind of pirate altogether. He was the rational capitalist, well versed in both the maxims of accountancy and the abstract principles of liberal ideology. Privately educated, metropolitan and professional, Smedley saw himself as an agent in the political and cultural affairs of the nation.

It was this that Calvert threatened in 1966 - and what made Calvert so appealing was therefore precisely what also made him so dangerous. And as in military and political life, so in financial and entrepreneurial: Smedley's instinct was to stand fast. Hold his ground."

And the same was true of the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. He wasn't really trying to bring back an old, unpredictable, turbulent laissez-faire system - he wanted to create a new, technocratic system of managed competition that didn't in anyway threaten the existing structure of power.

Before he gets to this argument, Curtis has plenty on Calvert and Smedley and their involvement with pirate radio.

The Joy of Six 1541

"Former MI6, counterterror, and police officials expressed disbelief at the refusal by the British authorities to countenance a full murder investigation into Perepilichnyy's death. 'It's so obvious that it’s an assassination,' said Chris Phillips, the former head of Britain’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office. 'There’s no way it wasn’t a hit. It’s ridiculous.'" In 2017, Heidi Blake and her BuzzFeed investigations team published a seven-part investigation of suspected assassinations on British soil by the Russians government.

Richard Kemp reposts a Byline Times article that condemns SLAPPs – strategic litigation against public participation – as a shocking abuse of the legal system where the rich try to bully the weak and poor into submission.

Guy Shrubsole argues that Andy Burnham's Manchesterism is ultimately a politics of land: "Burnham’s keen interest in regaining public control of housing and key utilities leads very quickly to questions of who owns land, and how the public sector might reverse decades of asset sales begun under Margaret Thatcher’s governments."

"For much of the 18th century, even though Number 10 (actually Number 5 for much of its early existence) remained the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, it was by no means always occupied by the Prime Minister." Robin Eagles finds that prime ministers once preferred to live in their own houses.

Adam Scovell goes to look for the London locations used in A Hard Day's Night, the first film featuring those lovable mop-tops The Beatles.

"Her national standing was confirmed with a damehood in 2000, an honour which she prized, though it didn’t make her decorous. She was shortlisted for the Booker five times without ever winning (no one forgets this). She remains a figure who is hard to place – widely appreciated, but not a member of any acknowledged group of writers, and without much discernible influence on those who came after." Dinah Birch on the work of the novelist Beryl Bainbridge.

David McWilliams: The Days of Pearly Spencer

Wikipedia says this is about "a homeless man McWilliams had encountered in Ballymena," but when I heard this in the Seventies, I saw Pearly Spencer as a criminal figure, like Pinkie in Brighton Rock or an associate of Violent Bonham Carter, whose time and luck are running out. 

It's odd the things you read into songs.