I grew up in Walthamstow, London listening to my Dad play finger-picking folk covers on the guitar and banjo and to my Mum’s very small record collection which we would play on repeat and dance around to in the lounge. I especially remember The Seven Drunken Nights by the Dubliners which me and my sister found an absolute gas to sing along to. I didn’t learn to play instruments as a child, I wasn’t allowed to play my Dad’s and he never taught me per se, but hearing him sing and play and look so happy put the music in my bones.
In 2002 I went to drama school and went on to sing in plenty of theatre shows during my acting career. One of the highlights was a cute children’s show for which Kerry Andrew wrote the music. She has been a dear friend and collaborator ever since.
In 2013 I went on a world tour of 1927’s production of The Animals and Children Took To The Streets. It was an amazing show, a fabulous experience as we toured twenty-one countries in eleven months. But I was bored creatively. I felt like a puppet performing someone else’s work and my soul was calling for more. So I decided to write a song in every country with no expectation of the outcome. At the end of that tour I decided to leave acting and focus on music. I took a three month songwriting sabbatical, picked up a guitar and taught myself how to play and went to release my first EP “Catch Me” in 2015 which contains five songs written on the world tour. This is the title track written in midsummer in St Petersburg.
I then went on to learn piano and built a band around the music and released my first album ‘Glenaphuca”, which spoke of my call to Ireland to embrace the Irish part of my heritage. This is the first song on that album.
Right now, on the first day of November 2023, I sit on the cusp of the launch of my sophomore album “HOME”, which is out in two weeks. It has been a deep dive into healing the legacy of pain and shame that I inherited from my female ancestors here in Cork. The album sheds light on a dark past of institutional incarceration, delicately transformed into a collection of beautiful songs. It is my intention that “HOME” holds the power to heal the wounds of the past and inspire future generations to live without fear.
The songs are a mixture of ethereal folk ballads, rousing anthemic tunes, traditional folk song from Ireland and the UK, a touch of blues and a stirring a-Capella choral finale called Ancestors. I was so lucky to have my pals Kerry Andrew, Ben See, Sarah Dacey, Essa Flett, Justin Ground, Brén Ó Rúaidh, Ellis Kerkhoven and MaJiKer sing this song with me.
I’m about to go on tour in Ireland with the album starting at Whelan’s in Dublin, which I am super excited about, then onto Cill Rialiagin Kerry, before returning home to Cork for two fabulous dates at Sirius Arts Centre and The Oar.
In the new year I will head back to my studio to start birthing the third album. I love winter. I find the stillness and darkness supportive of creative work. In my songwriting phases I like to section my day into little bursts of activity, something like; thirty minutes of songwriting, thirty minutes of classical guitar, fifteen minutes of piano scales, dance for three songs, fifteen minutes of clearing out old audio, then another thirty minutes of songwriting, play five songs, go for a walk, thirty minutes of songwriting and repeat.
If I have a song coming through, I could easily spend the whole day working on it and do nothing else, but a regular practice keeps me steady and in flow. And when a song is coming through I just have to honour that or else I may miss it. It is like catching a wave. So I could literally be swimming in the sea and a song lands in me, so I’d have to jump out and get it down on my voice memos.
Next year I hope to get a bit more independent and capable at recording my own material at home. I’m looking forward to that a lot. And I’ve just bought a lush Stratocaster which I’m gonna throw my fingers into next year.
The theme of ‘late art’ was recently explored by the art historian Carel Blotkamp in The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works(2019) focusing on the visual arts, but in an age nonspecific way.
Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ is central to the argument of the book. After Raphael’s death, the author notes his body was laid out beneath the painting in his studio. Vasari tells us that ‘the sight of his dead body and this living painting filled the soul of everyone looking on with grief.’
Raphael died aged just over thirty years of age. Picasso in a much later blasphemous parody had Raphael fucking. More on Picasso and indeed fucking later. This is an article about The Rolling Stones after all.
More representative of late art in literary terms is Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus 1947, which was written when he was nearly eighty years of age, and was his second to last work. The last being Felix Krull, both of which were discussed in a previous article for Cassandra Voices. In these works his style loosens and is fresher than his earlier work. I attribute this revitalisation to his hatred of fascism and fakery.
Both of these books were written in old age when the light was dimming, which is remarkable. Great art arrived against the odds, with physical and presumably mental powers failing. Like Michelangelo finishing off the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the Last Judgment or even more so the late sculptures.
Picasso approaching ninety, as the aforementioned book references, famously started working faster and faster, painting in a sketch-like figurative way: parodies, exhumations of the western tradition such as by Valazquez Los Meninas; in contextual or parodic form; painting as ideas with the clock against him. He famously said in this respect: ‘I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say.’
Well, what a drag it is getting old.
heatfield with Crows — oil on canvas 101×50 cm Auvers june 1890.
More commonly…
But Mann and Picasso are uncommon. More commonly, artists repeat earlier tropes or descend into sentimentality, commercial opportunism or simply kitsch as they age. The late works of Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí fall into these categories. Opera Designs or endless recycled Kitsch is very evident in the Dali Museum in his hometown of Figures.
The phrase ‘late style’ is also relevant in this context and is, in fact, culled from Theodor Adorno’s 1937 essay on Beethoven. Adorno – and, more recently, Edward Said, whose own last book was on late style – both suggest in a distinct echo of Picassos observations that regularity, precision, and tidiness no longer matter when an artist is faced with death. The writing and painting become more scabrous, irreverent with a lightness and incompleteness but also harrowed.
One thinks above all else of the finest achievement in the history of art the late paintings of Rembrandt, where the artist is merciless in self-portrait particularly his damaged and aged eyes. Though the formal precision is, remarkably, retained. Another notable achievement is in the late work of Goya, his Black Paintings In particular. These are visceral images of human torture, misery, cannibalism, and insanity.
Adorno wrote that late art or style ‘does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.’
Many great artists of course die young and without the necessary anticipation of doom. Egon Schiele tragically dies in the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic of 1919-1920. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned after a boat accident. So, the suddenness of a departure does not affect the art for good or ill.
Van Gogh hadn’t reached the age of forty, when he died, but the Wheatfield with Crows is one of his greatest works, the crows above providing a doom-laden portent. In contrast, the truly writer of The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead by forty-four having been dismissed as a burn out and a has been. He had felt compelled to hack for money, with the Pat Hobby stories. As he said there are no second acts in American life, although Donal Trump might disagree!
Some artists try and go out on top before retreating into isolation. Neither Harper Lee nor the reclusive J. D. Salinger published much after To Kill Mockingbird and The Catcher on the Rye.
We might tentatively say that generally the best work comes first or close to first, before decline sets in, often with coincident celebrity and accolades. The philosopherJürgen Habermasonce remarked that when they shower you with awards you know you are finished. Stressed vines make the best grapes by all accounts.
In this respect The Nobel Prize is often the kiss of death for creativity. Exceptions to that rule are of course Gabriel Marquez. He wrote as good if not a greater novel than One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) after the award with Love in The Time of Cholera (1985). And then there is the incomparable Samuel Beckett, about whom more later.
Kurosawa the great Japanese film director was effectively persecuted by the Japanese state by being snubbed at awards ceremony. Suicide attempt followed, and but for the intervention of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas he would not have gone on to produce a work as incandescently brilliant as Ran, his Samurai adaption of King Lear, which is one of the greatest films of all time that he completed at nearly eighty years of age.
Better to burn out…
In Rock music there is a discernible trend in late art achievements. Leonard Cohen’s late albums include Old Ideas (2012), which includes the sublime song, or poem, ‘Going Home’. And Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) is a continuous flow of genius.
But both Dylan and Cohen were geniuses and not a bunch of blues-thieving, decadent often priapic monsters with a not undeserved reputation for all sorts of destruction of many of those around them.
Giving them their begrudging due, the shows are of course truly spectacular, as anyone who had the privilege of witnessing them in Glastonbury would attest.
The youthful audience, and some bemused older curiosities, largely came to bury Caeser, or Satan, but Sir Michael will not be buried easily and strode on stage in red barbed devilish gown, 28-inch waste and barnstormed, not least with sympathy for the devil.
Well yes, a tour band par excellence re-threading their hits from the 60’s and early 70’s and producing nothing of note in over two decades of self-enrichment. Bigger and Bigger Bangs of the same thing. Outrageously reliving their satanic rebelliousness. Funding Keith Richards drugs, albeit no longer indulged in apparently, and Mr Jagger’s endless libido – growing old as disgracefully as possible. Aged eighty, he is married to a woman almost fifty years younger. The lucky sod.
But the artistic community could rest assured there would be nothing further. No further trouble.
And then it landed ‘Angry’, the opening song of their recent studio album, Hackney Diamonds, a better starter I think than ‘Start Me Up’ and a better song than ‘Shattered’. Propulsive not 1970’s but 60’s revitalised and pared down. And Mr J. certainly sounds angry.
And so, three well preserved and ostensibly vigorous elderly gentlemen in casual costume get in touch with their north London roots and step fearlessly into Hackney, which of course they never hailed from, to introduce a brilliantly named album Hackney Diamonds, with a glorious smash and grab cover.
By any reckoning it ought to have been a re-thread or a bombastic disaster. But is simply a great rock n’ roll album. In my view the best pure rock and roll album since The Clash’s London Calling with a not to dissimilar mining of styles. It even includes a punk song with Paul McCartney on bass, who seems like he was having a ball with the band he had recently described asa Blues cover band. But what a cover band!
Burst of Blues Energy
The bursts of blues energy with at most one longueur is sustained through its forty-five propulsive minutes. The best comparison in terms of form and antecedents is Exile on Main Street, with the odd ballad mitigating the relentless noise. There are many great or near great songs. There is a rose in Hackney and not just Spanish Harlem. OMG.
In ‘Sweet Smells of Heaven’ Jagger sounds as great as in ‘You Can’t Always Get Want’ and ‘Angie’. In short it is one of the greatest ever Rolling Stones songs. Whether it ranks in the top ten is a matter for debate. In my view very close to the absolute pantheon Sympathy For the Devil.
Notably Keith Richard’s is in flying form. I wonder is arthritis loosening his playing style?
Geoff Dyer has recently published a book called The Last Days of Roger Federer and it is not intrinsically about Federer though he was also an artist but is about the dying light augmenting the enormity of the achievement.
Sir Michael who prompted the album to stir the wild beasts from their slumber now suggest they are three quarters way through a new album. A sense of enormous anticipation should now prevail. One hopes though it is not a set of discards and out takes.
Hackney Diamonds would be an incomparable way to put a full stop, but what if the next album is even better? After all, The Beatles in their pomp followed Revolver with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but that is now almost fifty years ago. Let us be clear Hackney Diamonds is the greatest stones album in forty years.
They have ascended the charts in Britain and the USA In a way unprecedented since their heyday. And methinks Mr Richards will not be thinking about the money. One senses that old rubber lips thinks the best is yet to come and will force them back into the studios. No pressure then lads.
Love does keep a record of some things—
your solitary walks in Coln Saint Aldwyn’s,
a precise curl of Virginia Creeper tendrils,
vermillion in autumn, the way you carefully
smelled horses’ necks beneath the mane back home,
velveteen crushes of cornhusks lashed to lampposts
Love notes you’ve yet to find a Petoskey stone,
have not managed to secure passage
in a hot air balloon at dawn. Love traces
those scars left by its own sweeping hand, marks
your fevered night-sky relish, your strange enfolding
of language in language and the red-winged blackbirds
enfolding themselves in blue-green marsh
Love keeps a record of you singing to yourself,
tallies your tears. Love folded a page corner
the day your shoulders sank like the horizon,
from a grey-salt schooner, love knows how
you should be touched.
No seeker of wrongs will read
love’s record, nor ask for it
let love’s book be freely shown
The Empire Windrush sails tonight, she’s got a one-way ticket, and she’s half way home
In June 1948, The Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in England to the sound of a brass band and hundreds of cheering residents. On board were 802 people, the majority of whom were returning from the Caribbean. Returning, because earlier in the year John ‘Johnny’ Smythe – the father of Dubwiser’s Eddy and John – was charged with accompanying troops from the Caribbean back home after their fight in World War II.
When, on the outward journey, The Windrush arrived at Jamaica, due to severe unemployment and a struggling economy, hundreds of young men could not be given the jobs they richly deserved. The Jamaican Labour officer appealed to Britain for assistance and the Colonial Office contacted Johnny, the senior officer in charge, and asked for him to assess the situation, come up with recommendations and report back. He interviewed the men, categorised them according to their qualifications and abilities and recommend to the Colonial Office that they return to the UK and seek employment.
Anchored off Jamaica, it’s hard to know if Johnny had any awareness of being at the fulcrum of history. He probably just wanted to help the men under his charge out of a dilemma and seized the opportunity.
Two of our fathers sailed on this ship, at different times and in different directions, and they both agreed on two things. First, that it was a beaten-up old rust bucket. The engine regularly conked out and the anchor would have to be dropped for repairs. Secondly that the camaraderie on board was second to none.
The old German boat now acted as a colonial bus service, stopping at every port to take on and put off people, supplies and anything else that could be crammed in. Every corner of Britain’s crumbling empire was represented, every culture, food, language and philosophy. After the misery of the war, it was a chance for ordinary people from all over the world to meet, rejoice, and plan for a better future.
From the lion mountain he came like a storm, Johnny came from Sierra Leone, an African in uniform
Some years before becoming the unwitting catalyst of the Windrush generation. Johnny answered the call from the ‘motherland’ who, after taking a beating from the Luftwaffe, swallowed their pride and sent a call out to the colonies for help. As a ‘Krio’ (descendant of freed slaves) in Sierra Leone Johnny knew what it was like to be an outsider in his own country, so he coped better than some with a sudden immersion into Scotland in winter and RAF training.
Shot to the right, shot to the left from ‘Johnny’ by Dubwiser.
He ended up as a navigator on Stirling bombers. The only black man in his squadron, he became a talisman for the others. Life expectancy was very short and during the latter part of 1943. On average planes were shot down every five to seven missions.
In November 1943, Johnny was shot down, badly wounded, captured, brutally interrogated by his captors, hospitalised and further interrogated in Frankfurt before being sent to a POW camp.
There, he joined the escape committee, but never tried to escape, as he pointed out that a six foot four inch black man wouldn’t get very far in North Eastern Germany. After eighteen months in the camp, on a morning in 1945 he and the other inmates awoke to find the guards gone and the gates wide open. Russians appeared two days later and they were liberated.
340 years ago, Colston was a slaver-oh, they covered it up, but still we know, now the truth is rolling down the road
Like it or not, statues have power. They point in a direction, usually the one which the commissioners wanted to point in. Bristol was littered for hundreds of years with the name of it’s ‘greatest son’ Edward Colston. Known still in our lifetimes as ‘a great philanthropist’ who, childless, left a lot of his colossal wealth to the city of Bristol.
We aren’t interested in the argument that that was ‘a great gesture’, worthy, indeed of place names and a statue in the city centre. The money was not his to give. The wealth that he created came from the slavery of 80,000 souls. He made the people smugglers who ply their bloody trade across the Mediterranean and the English Channel, look like amateurs. This man was a mass murderer. He gained a fortune and a statue, and in return he reaped genocide.
On the June 7, 2020 Jonas’s son Josh received a message on his phone: There was a big protest happening down at Bristol city centre. He hurried down there in time to see a huge crowd dragging the statue of Colston down towards the cut. He sent his father a photo, who had the sense of a long loud cheer going up across the country. As in so many things, young people were leading the way. Resistance to everything Colston stood for had been building in Bristol over a long period. His time had come and now he lies, battered and bruised, in a museum where he belongs.
A gal from the Caribbean… What an amazing woman!
After the great and ignominious, it’s useful to return to the small. Alexandrine (Spider’s mum) was a small woman, but like so many of the Windrush generation, she was strong. Eight years after the Empire Windrush sank in the Mediterranean, she was invited to come to England after passing a test demonstrating her skills in sewing, cooking and auxiliary nursing.
She left everything, her whole life in Dominica and came half-way across the globe to a country that was becoming less and less welcoming to ‘her kind’. But she knew what she had to do and she saw something in London, a glimpse of a larger potential world, if not for her, then perhaps for her children?
So, she worked, raised her children, worked some more and she kept going, kept doing, through thick and thin. In Dominica her skills as a calligrapher were noticed by Catholic nuns and in England she also learned to type.
In time Alexandrine managed to get a post as a pastry chef at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As the years went by she ensured many others in her circle of family and friends could also get work there, each according to their abilities. She made it her mission to help those who were in turn helping others.
After a generation of work, play, child and grandchild rearing and making what was agreed to be the best curry goat and black pudding in East London, Alexandrine returned to Dominica at the age of forty-four.
From there she sent pictures of herself smiling broadly under a coconut or banana palm and returned to the U.K. every year in the Autumn (to avoid hurricane season) with bags of produce and stories from back home. The beauty of a life well lived is unparalleled. Across Britain, this story is being retold by mother after aunty after grandma. This is our small and unsung legacy, inspiring us to live our best life.
She did, she did, she did and she keep on doing From ‘Amazing’ by Dubwiser.
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast. William Shakespeare, Richard III
I anticipated the takeover of the vast majority of the publishing industry by fourth or fifth-wave feminism. It has been in the mix for five years or so, and it dominates this arena; and not just mainstream publishing, but most alternative avenues too, as far as I can see.
These mindsets want fluffiness. Cats. And Tote bags with witty slogans in an interesting font. There are writers whom they laud and publish; and their work, at best, to quote an agricultural analogy (Not just Beckett), is fair to middling.
Writers are reaffirmed by their agents et al and subsequently develop and own this logic of, ‘I am being published; therefore, I am good.’ But by whose metric? Your own? Qualitative? Profit and dross.
Many seem more interested in being revered as ‘a writer’ than creating Art. This is the cult of personality – a celebrity projection of the ultimate performer, different from the norm. They believe they are special. The core issue is, I believe, that the celebrity culture now at work in the book industry places an over-emphasis on persona and mythos as persona – a literary, bookish cult – whether it be hyped-up media or others, at the behest of Art.
One is reminded of the lines from Bukowski’s The Genuis of the Crowd, ‘Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone’; and ‘Not being able to create Art, they will not understand Art’.
Peering into some of these marketed texts, I do not see a lot of literary merit among the prose. Pallid, wane, and an emotionally-led, safe register is my takeaway. More like Young Adult books than adult fiction. The age of banality is upon us.
Charles Bukowski
Every sentence should fight for its place…
I suspect that this is part of a wider, individualistic desire, for fame, fortune, and glory. To be looked upon and admired. Put on a pedestal. To have the fine robes of a writer bestowed upon and wrapped around you. Speculated upon in your sartorial elegance.
I hear them on the radio and see them on the TV, these writers of ephemera, here one day, gone the next. Until the next one comes along.
It’s a Warholian, factory process of endless, emotionally-led drones pumping out emotionally-led, dry, grey mush. The sentences are short and adverbs are plentiful, John loves Trudie. Trudie really loathes John. Fred absolutely dislikes Stewart. Or, DCI Kelly DI Slater, investigates…
These novels are tumbling dice and have little or no truck with pushing the literary envelope. They lie prone on the racks and shelves in stores and in the minds of their reader. Would you not rather have something that inspires you to shout from the rooftops? I relate to this! This sentence here is bloody brilliant! Look, the prose is literally leaping off the page. It burns!
The reality that they fail to recognise this is disheartening.
When was the last time Middlemarch was talked about? Dickens? Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?
To quote Howard Jacobson, ‘The problem isn’t with the novel, it is with the reader.’ In an age of frenetic online activity and electronic meandering there is a distinct lack of originality. A absence of creative juice. And a dearth of creative reading.
Challenging books…
Aspersions cast on, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which many have not read, are immature, and rooted in a jealousy that the text holds a higher position in the literary pantheon than their offering(s). Disingenuous assaults are derived from manifest insecurity.
They scoff at bigger, therefore harder, and difficult – but they would not come it and say it – literary texts. Due to the social embarrassment that this may cause and what might be inferred. They do not like to be embarrassed socially. This has its roots in a more organic state of grace.
They do not desire to read ‘challenging’ books, preferring a certain reading homogeneity and inevitable selective stasis. They do not care for a rampant display of maleness. The kind of masculinity on show, say, in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is scorned and discredited. Man as Dog is the ravenously portrayed symbolism.
But freedom of expression should be allowed. Even in Miller’s canine-like, Parisian existence. If a man is de-fanged, de-barked, and thus emasculated, where is he to go? To be banished into exile? To become prohibited? Becoming chthonic beings like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Subterranean, knuckle-draggers whose jobs(s) are to fertilise and provide financial support. If that is even the case in these attitudes.
We are in an interesting meridian. I wonder would Tropic of Cancer be published today?
The demographic target for the marketers is predominately female, but it does not commandeer in totality and speak for all things literary.
Their mandate is revenue – at all costs. No matter if the book is well-written. If it has a plot, narration or thought-provoking, relatable characters. They are only interested in appeasing the god of Profit.
James Joyce 1882-1941.
Art and Persona
Entering a Joycean reverie of Leopold Bloom allowing ‘his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again.’
In the proverbial outhouse, we recognises our shit stinks, like everyone else’s. Are you a writer at all times? In bed, a writer? Asleep, a writer? At stool a writer? Walking down the street?
I have to inform you that, you are not a cut above. Your Art should be your Art and you should stay the hell out of it, if it’s Art you are creating. You deny your organic, biological self but continually project the ideal that you are indeed a writer, and all must lay down prostrate before you and worship at your altar.
That is the central tenet here, the separation of one’s Art and persona; both are not one and the same. They are mutually exclusive. They should be de-compartmentalised. Art is an exposition; a creative process and it emerges predominantly from, boffins say, the right hemisphereof the brain.
It comes down onto the page and then it’s gone; albeit it remains as text. Except the marketers wants to conflate the two. Look at this Kurtz-like, mysterious figure, look at the chatter around them. If there is none, we will create it ourselves.
Beat those jungle rhythms. Not letting the work speak for itself. The vehicle of the plot. An ensemble cast of characters. Dialogue. You know, the three basics of the novel. The holy trinity.
Writing as surrogacy: a biological denial forfeited into writing projects and projections of the writing, literary mother who gives birth to ingenuity and creativity.
There is a certain emotional naiveté at work here.
Being noted as special is an inherent part of being desired to be seen as a writer. It locks into an awakening narcissism so succinctly.
Gatekeepers
As agents, they behave like Amazonian women and gatekeepers. If you do not play into their modal form(s), you will be truncated below the waist and stung with arrows.
I recently undertook a couple of counselling courses. On a Level 4 Diploma, in-house, I was the only male left in a classroom of a dozen or so females including the two female tutors. One of them, I believe, was a feminist and was going to put the squeeze to get rid of me, a male. She succeeded.
I believe there are other feminist cabals that spring up in offices and colleges and publishing houses, and if you don’t like cats and cutesy stuff, and you’re a manly man, with a hint of aggression, possibly, towards them, or unconsciously dominate with your masculinity, in any way, you are a danger. And will be ostracised.
It’s a form of sexism of course – in, on, their own terms. They circle their wagons. They have vested interests – their own cultish mentalities. Dance by firelight.
But what they forget is that if it were not for men, as writer and academic, Camille Paglia relayed: ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.’
Paglia had it down too when she relayed that a lot of angry women who had been hurt by men were now in positions of power wanted revenge, and to make all men suffer because of their experiences.
A bit like Estella and Miss Havisham at the beginning of Great Expectations, who emasculate Pip and desire to see him become passive. They want masculinity to be humiliated, suffer, and become truncated below the belt. They want men to be their inferiors, servants, and in the end, inert eunuchs.
What a cadre of selfishness, rank hypocrisy, and flaccid tribalism.
This Jungian projection of man in the female mind as an unconscious symbol of taker, abuser, and destroyer is a possibility.
In Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions.
Men work in the dirt. They mix concrete. They lift and lay blocks. They raise buildings. They work on boats. Rigs. Implement dangerous jobs. Men write too. And some men write, craft, brilliantly. They should be respected. Not all men are dangerous predators. It is a dual thing. Let’s value compromise, equality and respect.
What do you pay attention to when you listen to music? The lyrics and melody? The instrumentation and timbre? I hear the bass and rhythm. It’s challenging for me to remember lyrics. A beautiful bass enchants me, and the queen of the bass, of course, is the double bass. Still, it took me more than thirty years of making and listening to music until I finally played it myself.
At the age of seven, I began to play the flute, and a year later, the clarinet in the local brass band in a southern German village right next to the River Rhine.
With my first notes, I became a clarinetist in the youth brass band, in preparation for joining the adult brass band from the village a year later. Until the age of thirteen, I spent my Friday nights playing Volksmusik and marching music, as well as soundtracks from famous American movies.
On weekends, we performed marches in other villages in the district, played music for birthdays, weddings, and funerals — all while wearing uniforms with badges on our chests. These events often involved a lot of alcohol, a repertoire of over one hundred pieces, and plenty of bonding time. I enjoyed it immensely; it felt like home!
I believe this is where my love for the bass began. In a way, I’ve remained attached to this genre. Twenty years later in Berlin, I played the bass clarinet in a brass band.
Sometimes More is Possible
When I was thirteen, my family moved to a small town in northern Germany, which marked a significant cultural shift for me.
It was also where my classical education began. I joined the youth symphony orchestra of the music school., and there I met Judith Retzlik, with whom I now play alongside Myriam Kammerlander in our band gerda vejle.
My new clarinet teacher supported and encouraged me at every available opportunity, while a conductor showed me that sometimes more is possible than I initially thought. I began to professionalize myself, and the dream of playing the double bass started to take shape.
However, another fifteen years passed by before the double bass finally entered my life: Driven by heartbreak, I bought a big and strong double bass with a heart in the bridge (thank you, Judith, for your encouragement), and since then, I’ve been the double bass player and sometimes a singer at gerda vejle.
Together with Myriam and Judith, we are gerda vejle: a space for creativity, a creative home, and friendship. If you want to learn more about gerda vejle, you should read Myriam‘s text; I couldn’t have said it better.
My role at gerda vejle is likely to provide a solid foundation for vocals, harp, and violin to rest upon. It’s wonderful to play multiple instruments that allow you to express different facets of yourself. The clarinet is my voice, and the bass is my body.
In the early years of gerda vejle, I listened to a lot of music, mainly because I was responsible for music booking at a new large venue called silent green in Berlin. This time was intense, and there was little time for my own creativity, besides the band.
Today I work as a systemic coach; and support individuals and groups usually from the creative industry in decision-making, change and search processes.
Music and Motherhood
Finding enough time for my own music-making has always been a challenge. It became even more demanding when I became a mother.
Time became the most valuable resource. Unfortunately, it’s still the case that women, in particular, struggle to balance family and music. Creative processes and working conditions are not often child-friendly: concerts and rehearsals frequently occur in the evenings and on weekends when childcare services have already closed.
Moreover, creative work demands full concentration and commitment, which can be challenging to maintain with children. This needs to change.
Gerda Vejle at Vico, Dublin.
The Oceanic Feeling and Baths in the Ocean!
Just a few years ago, I learned from a friend about the concept that describes the feeling I had always been searching for. When I discovered it, it made me the happiest person, not only in life but especially in music: the oceanic feeling. I yearn to lose myself, vibrate, connect, and resonate—a physical experience that I find when I play and listen to music.
In September, 2023, gerda vejle travelled to Ireland, and I became both an ocean swimmer and a resonating double bass player. The oceanic feeling was very close. Hopefully, there’s more of that to come in the future.
Looking ahead, I hope that we, gerda vejle, will finally manage to record our music. Do any of you know a talented female producer? If so, please get in touch with us.
The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’
Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in reciprocal exchanges of objects serving for daily consumption.’
The restaurant emerged as a distinctive forum for public consumption in eighteenth century France. Prior to that it was the simple table d’hôte, where a traiteur would present a large pot to the assembled diners, who arrived at the appointed hour.
This could present difficulties, however, if agreed conventions were lacking on how diners were to participate. On his travels in France, the agronomist Arthur Young bemoaned the greed of his dining companions in hostelries, saying, ‘the ducks were swept clean so quickly that I moved from the table without half a dinner’. In the wake of the French Revolution, an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie sought a more recherché experience.
Originally, restaurants (deriving from the verb restaurer ‘to restore to a former state’) sold medicinal broths. In her history, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000), Rebecca Spang recalls how the restaurants of eighteenth-century Paris differentiated themselves from other eateries by offering sustenance at any time of day. Eventually they began offering more solid fare, thereby encroaching on the traiteurs.
The strict laws regulating the division of business between the different food guilds in France at the time led to a landmark court case in which the restaurateurs carried the day. This allowed the restaurant-style of dining, ‘characterized not by commonwealth but by compartmentalization’, to emerge as the dominant form of eating out in the Western world.
Fine Dining,
Elitist Quality
Today, restaurants invariably ‘plate’ each dish before presentation to the individual customer a style known as service à la russe, which replaced the more medieval display of service à la Francaise during the mid-nineteenth century.
The elitist quality of the restaurant experience is part of its appeal. Indeed, according to Sprang, the ‘restaurant fantasy implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window’.
Thus, a restaurant is more than merely an establishment where food is served. It involves the division of diners into parties and, generally, serves separate portions to individuals. It remains synonymous with French food, and the dominance of French cuisine is apparent in the early history of Dublin restaurants, although this has changed radically in recent decades.
Apart from chefs, waiting staff and often indulgent investors, the most important person for a restaurant’s survival is the food critic. A bad review can sink a restaurant, while praise can bring customers flooding into the next big thing, although in recent times food criticism is being overtaken by online reviewers that are subject to manipulation.
Grimod de La Reynière
The First Gastronome
A food critic may also be referred to as a gastronome. The first of this kind was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière who wrote his Almanach des Gourmands in the wake of the Revolution.
He issued his pronouncements in the name of tradition as a member of the departed ancien regime. The son of a rich farmer-general, in his early life he displayed liberal tendencies but became disillusioned with the new order, condemning ‘everything that is despicable and vile; there in two words you have the Revolution’.
He asserts: ‘I will never be the friend of a democrat. It is atrocious that men of letters should think as the majority do today (MacDonogh,1997).’
According to his biographer MacDonogh, he began to write about food after being told to write about something harmless, or give up writing altogether. In this medium he ‘masked his vicious attacks behind harmless idioms’. Gastronomy became a vehicle for his reactionary views.
An awareness of ‘good’ food revealed the true aristocrat. After the Revolution he founded what he referred to as a Jury des Degustateurs, and between 1803 and 1812 set about writing his Almanach des Gourmands. The aristocratic display of pre-Revolutionary France could re-emerge in the new forum of the public restaurant.
De la Reynière was also alive to the possibility that he could be labelled a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’ Henceforth a glutton would be one who eats too much rather than a refined individual with an interest in talking about food.
The gastronome in his or her most evolved form is not a professional cook. He or she is a man of letters. His or her real table is not the one where he eats but where he or she writes. It is with the flourish of the pen that he or she achieves success rather than through their knowledge of the arcane culinary arts, as ultimately the gastronome is not the one who knows the most, but the one who speaks, and writes, best.
Garden café of the Hôtel Ritz Paris (1904), Pierre-Georges Jeanniot.
‘Lightning Sketches on the Table Cloth’
Curnonsky, the pen name of the great French food critic Maurice Edmond Sailland who was elected Prince Elect of Gastronomy by Le Soir magazine in 1927 describes the role as follows:
There are those who stare with gluttonous resentment, and those who snap impatient fingers at every passing waiter: those who flap huge newspapers in their companions’ faces, and those who shake defiant powder-puffs in their neighbours soup; those who devour bread to repletion, and those who chat so gaily, to the restaurant at large. But there are others, a chosen few who, having developed to a fine degree the study of physiognomy and, coupling this with a skilled pen or pencil, combine their talents in lightning sketches on the tablecloth.
Pascal Ory poses the question ‘Does the chef make the gastronome or vice versa?’. Culinary evolution is largely independent of gastronomic evaluation, but without a critical audience chefs may be insensitive to diners’ tastes.
Moreover, just as when we cook for ourselves we don’t tend to perform heroics, a cook without a responsive audience might take a more functional approach. But innovation and high standards become an imperative when the food critic is there to evaluate.
Even if they may claim to have nothing but contempt for the breed, virtuoso chefs usually seek the validation of critical approval, and boundaries are only broken when gastronomes are there to describe them as such. More to the point, the imprimatur of the critic brings great rewards. Perhaps unfairly, the pen is often mightier than the kitchen knife.
Notwithstanding increasing costs in a fraught business, the back breaking labour of chefing, improved takeaways, the strains of Covid and the distortion of food criticism through sites like TripAdvisor, restaurant dining endures as a sought after experience. After all, where else would anyone refer to me as “Sir”.
Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world began to shift – a tiny alteration sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river waters died. An iron frost persisted, all the spring, without a rain, the blooming yearly crop undone – in every rill and valley, sick. The factious common people roared in protestation; then dwindled down, masticating slowly, like a herd, on sour, curdled soup and sallow greens: a meal of nettle stems and charlock – the lush, green-leafed, light-golden-flowered thing that grows among the grass. The lark-lit summer moors were blank; the meadow-birds aghast. No longer having feed to give, the grieving poor death-rattled in the fields, as the little cows they tended fell. Like rotten sheep themselves, after supping dead potatoes in distress, whole parishes surrendered, passing out, in fever-thin delirium, to waste and bloody flux: a plague of desperation, day by day. Town and city quickly filled with remnants of the living. The census-takers floundered; swelling ditches overflowed. To put an end to expiration, the famous bishop brewed a broth: a medicine made up of milk and boiling water, with a sprinkling of chalk – to be dispensed among the stricken, till the ague settled down.
Feature Image: gravestone in Coolaghmore, county Kilkenny of the Lee family, of whom three members died in 1741–42.
The underlying theme of Canary is that of missed warnings and overcoming trauma. My mother lost her battle with cancer in 2016 and my son Noah was born asleep in 2020.
I’ve always been interested in the experience of extreme states of mind and body and even though these experiences were so painful, they were also deeply fascinating and have deepened my interest in the Big Questions, particularly what happens after this life ends; what is beyond the physical world that we experience through the senses.
Tracks such as Cascade evoke the terror and drama when the worst thing happens, and the trippy video that my friend Simon Blake gave me footage for – and Tom Schumann and I edited together – really convey something of the sense of being overwhelmed:
In a similar vein, How To Move Forward evokes a sense of the unfolding of a cataclysm, also with an undercurrent of war and conflict. The vocal samples are from ex-Navy Seal Jocko Willink and the video was cut together from authentic combat footage captured by Funker530 in Afghanistan:
In contrast, the album offers plenty of space for meditation and contemplation to explore the possibility of transcendence of the suffering of the world, with tracks such as Temple Gong drawing influence from my time spent in temples in Bangkok:
Similarly, Viññāṇa is inspired by meditation retreats in Sri Lanka and Wales, with hours spent ruminating on the fabric of reality as experienced through deep meditation and reflection; “what it means to be human” as podcaster and scientist Lex Fridman intones on the track.
Neuroscience has come a long way over the last hundred years, with the advent of brain scanning technologies such as fMRI and EEG etc, but the deepest questions still evade answering. The use of the combination of Thai traditional instruments alongside modern electronic production values is intended to musically capture a sense of the old and the new, Viññāṇa being the Pali Buddhist word typically translated as ‘consciousness’.
Album opener Sleeping Meadow sets the scene for a series of dreams with some echoing, sea like sounds and a quote from the Swiss godfather of psychoanalysis Carl Jung, “my relationship to reality was not particularly brilliant“. I’ve always been a dreamer and a bit away with the faeries, and Sleeping Meadow hints at a youthful, pastoral naivety.
Shortest Day is based on samples from an improvisation that I did back at the family home in 2013 when I was seeking to capture something of the strange ambience of our home. My mother was a computer engineer in the 1980s, so our house was full of strange computers that ran games on cassettes. It’s a paean to childhood and the dawn of the era of computing.
Vimutti and When I Leave My Body are collaborations with my dear friend, the German violinist and producer Alex Stolze.
The rest of the Canary tracks I self-produced in collaboration with Mike Bannard at Safehouse studios in Oxford and percussionist and producer Greig Stewart. I really value having their input, I think it can get very insular producing at home and I definitely have my weaknesses in terms of production, especially with drums and percussion.
So, having Greig and Mike to feed into the final refinement process was essential. Alex’s violin parts were taken from some recording that he did for a film project that I’m working on. I took the parts and cut them over a beat that I had in progress, Alex helped with the production and I’m really proud of the result.
Some of the wonky synth parts are taken from my Yamaha DX21 that I’ve had for around twenty years. I’m finally living somewhere where I can have my synths and toys set up and it’s a joy to reacquaint myself with these old friends. Thematically, When I Leave My Body is inspired by the notion of Out of Body Experiences and Robert Monroe was a pioneering researcher in the field. Again, I’m probing the question of what lies beyond this world:
Vimutti is the Pali Buddhist word for freedom. I was crafting the track for a few years, and it came out of the last couple of years before my mother passed away. On reflection her passing was inevitable but at the time we still clung on to some hope that she would beat the cancer that had taken hold. What does freedom really mean, in the face of the inevitable, cruel suffering of our existence?
Somewhere between the tumult and cacophony of tracks such as Cascade and the meditative calm of Temple Gong is Fetus. Also featuring the Thai Gong Circle, Fetus was directly inspired by Noah’s birth and passing, and was composed directly after it happened; art therapy in the true sense.
Balancing a sense of melodrama with deep contemplation, I’m really proud of it, and very grateful to Jonathan Ouin from the band Stornoway who beautifully replayed the main melody lines on cello and Cornish singer Sarah Tresidder who I sampled for the track. Adrienne from Neon Dance helped me put together this ace video for the track, which, similarly to the clip for Cascade, captures the feeling of being overwhelmed:
A reference to the canary in the coalmine as a warning of encroaching threat, the penultimate title track features an extract from a speech by John F. Kennedy where he outlines the dangers of secret societies, apt that within years Kennedy was allegedly murdered by the very institution charged with his protection.
This is also taken as symbolic for one’s own mind, the failure to perceive threats, and the fact that those threats can come from one’s own psychological systems designed for self-preservation.
Unlike the rest of the album tracks, which are Ableton Live productions with to the grid beats, Canary is a free-flowing ambient piece, based on the electronic part, with my friends Greig Stewart and clarinettist Rachel Coombes improvising in the studio. It’s a nice contrast to all the electronica tracks to have something that’s more fluid and organic. Having live musicians to work with in the studio is something that I’d like to explore more in future.
As referenced throughout the album, the final track The Afterlife optimistically gestures at the notion of peace and relief in the transcending of our mortal coil. Here’s hoping!
I spent four years teaching English in Changchun, a city of six million people in Jilin Province in the far north-east of China, about nine hundred kilometres south of China’s border with southern Siberia. Changchun literally means ‘long spring’, a misnomer. The months from November to April are a long cold winter, when daytime temperatures fall to -17 degrees Celsius if midday skies are blue, with midnight temperatures often plunging to -25.
Trudging along foot paths in freezing snow is an endurance test; an invitation too to slip on hardened ice and break a leg. I acclimatised, managing to avoid slipping, dressed in appropriate padded clothing and footwear.
During free days on the weekend, when not teaching TEFL classes in the university campus, I sometimes earned extra money by giving private tuition. Foreign TEFL teachers earn modest salaries, live in small free apartments and have their return airfares paid on satisfactory completion of a twelve-month contract.
Nanchang wedding bike, 2007.
One lady, referred to me by the Foreign Students office, came once a week for English-speaking sessions at my centrally heated apartment. I spoke about life in Ireland, Irish attitudes towards marriage and children, traditional music festivals, the arts, horse racing, football and the like.
It was either May, when early summer temperatures arrive, or October, when late autumn glows moderately before winter descends that she invited me in her small car to visit the World Sculpture Park about an hour away.
It seemed a grandiose name for a park in a provincial city, but when I got there I realized that the name was no exaggeration. Parking the car on a nearby street, we walked in through the main gate and proceeded along paved footpaths that went sometimes in straight lines and alternately in rambling directions around patches of planted trees and shrubs. The area, covering ninety-two hectares, contains 441 works of 397 sculptors from 212 countries and regions.
Changung Sculpture Park, 2013.
Along these paths were sculptures in stone, bronze, sheet metal and chemically treated wood. The works were by sculptors from around China and other parts of the world, notably Africa, the Caribbean and countries like Brazil. American, British, European and other sculptors had also contributed to the park display. A lake fed by a small stream stretches along centrally.
World Sculpture Park was officially opened in 2003, but since the mid-1970s there had been a simpler version, with less trees, of works by Chinese sculptors.
In a central raised area stood a tall monument dedicated to world peace – the kind of state-approved monument one might expect to find in a Communist country. I am, however, happy to relate that since the early 2000s the park has evolved in an eclectic and generally non-propagandist manner.
Changchun World Sculpture Park adopts both Chinese and foreign gardening styles. It now teems with individual sculptures in multiple styles and shapes. The long lake is a central focal feature, with green areas dotted around. In the background, outside the park railings, loom tall functional buildings of the expanding modern city. Within the park creative diversity seems to contend with the city’s high-rise architectural functionality.
Changung Sculpture Park, 2013.
Why African Sculptures?
The city authorities have invited sculptors from Africa, North America and elsewhere to visit the city and spend a few months designing and preparing their works before having them finished in bronze casting foundries and other buildings before returning, with ample financial rewards and certificates, to their home countries.
The visiting sculptors work during the warm periods of the year. It would be impossible to accomplish anything significant during the months of sub-zero temperatures.
Why African sculptors especially? The answer lies inside the sculpture museum beside the main park entrance. This museum is heated in winter and cooled by air conditioners when outside temperatures soar. In one room there is a shelved display of ebony woodcarvings from coastal towns of Southern Tanzania. These were brought back to Changchun city by citizens who had worked in that country and travelled during holiday time. They donated the artifacts to the park museum.
Having paid our modest entry fee, my female English learner escorted me around sections of the park and I took photos which I hope speak for themselves.
African dancers in dark bronze, a calypso band from the Caribbean, (only the sunny, rhythmic steel band sound is missing), football feet kicking, yes, a football, a giant red abstract done in sheet metal, and children playing. I only took a few photos and regret not taking more.
Changchun Sculpture Park, 2013.
In coastal Tanzania and along the north coast of Mozambique African wood carvings, known as Makonde carvings, are generally honed from ebony wood, with a deep brown and black colour. Many such carvings are actually carved from the African blackwood tree. Known locally as mpingo, it is found widely in East Africa. Carvings are made from a single block of wood in different sizes. Large pieces are sold for export at upmarket prices.
Today in my home I have a few woodcarvings from parts of Tanzania that are not in the expensive Makonde style. These and wood carvings from Zambia and Kenya are appropriate reminders of my African years.
Mashona stone sculpture in Zimbabwe is also spectacular. It is traditional in families and passed on from father to son – I don’t know if interested daughters can get involved too. Works in soapstone, marble and granite are highly prized. Some pieces are abstract while others portray human figures.
Today, commercial galleries in England, Germany, France and North America import Zimbabwean sculpture and sell them to high-end art buyers. My understanding is that Zimbabwean sculptors have worked in Changchun’s World Sculpture Park, but my few hours there did not enable me to find an example.
I think it would be interesting if one of the smaller Irish cities such as Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo or Derry, could embark on creating a World Sculpture Park along the non-political lines pursued since the early 2000s by Changchun.
With students and New Irish citizens from many countries and ethnic origins, Ireland has become a multicultural society. An Irish World Sculpture Park would be an inspiring tourist attraction. It might also inspire the New Irish to take an interest in the sculptural creativity of the countries from which they are descended.
