Belfast writer, and poet, Ciaran Carson carried a black flute with silver keys on its main body, which he would screw together to play sometimes. In class. At Queen’s University, Belfast.
He once asked me, “What would you have liked to become in life?”
I answered: “Either a master carpenter, a mathematician, or a pianist.”
“I agree with the master carpentry, I wanted to become one of those myself.” Ciaran replied earnestly.
Once in a writing group – the infamous Group – he gave me a lot of advice on a poem, which was inspired by the infamous Blackbird of Belfast Lough poem, putting his own literary stamp on it. To this I responded: “Ah, but Ciaran, that wouldn’t be my poem anymore, it would be yours.”
He considered this for a moment and said, “Maybe, maybe.” A couple of attendees came up to me afterwards and said: “You did well to challenge him there.”
You see, Ciaran, sometimes could get inside a person’s work, kick its rafters down and plant new foundations – his own. That didn’t really endear him to some participants. I think he resented my protestation, but on reflection probably thought I was correct. A person’s writing can become a surrogacy, so they can be precious about it. If someone wrestles that babe in arms from them it creates difficulties.
Ciaran was a dichotomy, like myself; as we all can be. Blowing warm one moment, cold the next. I recall him with his horn-rimmed glasses, tweed blazers, and pork pie hat. Like a detective from a 1950s novel, set in middle England; or possibly a character from Z-Cars.
He amused me. I suppose I amused him sometimes, when he wasn’t bewildered by my anxious nature at that time. I felt a lot of social anxiety which I was not in control of. He too stuttered and became nervous. It jammed him up. I was jammed up in my own head, so, I related to that. I empathised by nodding.
I thoroughly enjoyed read his interesting book Shamrock Tea.
His take on Dante was widely embraced and commended internationally. He spoke to me one day about when he was in Italy, where learned folk indulged him, calling him Professore or Maestro! But when he got back home he was still just a “specky bastard.”’ So he mused, with a smile on his face. Such is the iron-raw vernacular of back home.
In his poem Snowthe tic-tac-toe meter and the pat-pat of the table-tennis bat, of the flicking rhythm of the flakes at his window, was successfully achieved.
Ciaran’s mind was shaped by the conflict. How could it not be?
I recall one Presbyterian writer at the Seamus Heaney Group aligning Ciaran with Republicanism because he was from West Belfast – even though he had the same surname as one of the founders of Ulster Edward Carson. But West Belfast was a good enough reason for him. He thought Paisley was right, the IRA needed to go around in sackcloth and ashes to atone for their sins.
That barbaric violence, as he saw it, was only inflicted on the Unionist community. But there was little mention of redress for the Loyalist pogroms against the Nationalist community since the 1920s.
Ciaran didn’t respond too much, but I knew the association would have encroached on him. I once had read in an Irish newspaper piece that Ciaran was asked why didn’t he join the struggle. He answered honestly: “I was too scared.”
He had Protestants in his family background. Also, I am sure, some Republicans but that’s the dichotomy of Belfast. Grey areas. Not black and white. Not binary. Coded. Just a miasma of deeply ingrained historical decisions made, and mandated, by people who have long since passed on and probably don’t give a Frenchman’s fart now.
There was one which I have lost now about, well, it was my take on John Masefield’s Cargoes set in Latin America during the period of the Aztecs and Montezuma. At least that’s what one of his students on the Master’s course, a Brazilian lady, told me after class one day.
Inevitably I became persona non grata at Queen’s because I would not suck up to those with a modicum of power and who were established writers there.
I recall one senior person looking at me one day in a one-to-one like I was a piece of cake. I wondered about his heterosexuality, felt uncomfortable, excused myself, and left. It was confusing and I did not go back. Doubtless, he verbally discredited me to his peers.
Another established writer was angry that I got onto a post-grad course that they were running and more-or-less told me so in a sit down meeting: “There’s the door. You don’t belong here.” Because I did not worship them and their work. And I struggled with my English composition (Some change there, huh?).
That was hard to take. I was hurt by that. I was embittered for a while, but I had experienced a lot of rejection already by that stage in my life. In truth I was in the depths of alcoholism at the time, and found it a real strain to really buckle down and focus. But I still had a creative brain, and a universal beat.
I think Ciaran sensed that because it was his partial reference, and another’s, who got me on to that post-grad course, but that annoyed some people. Power struggles, ego, and insecurity all played a part in the mentality of the Seamus Heaney Centre.
The last time I met Ciaran was in 2017, I was homeless, again, and limping from out of the Industrial temps’ office in Shaftesbury Square, securing some work in a bakery in East Belfast, he looked at me, and I looked back, but we both headed on our separate paths.
I emailed him a while later but he did not respond. I had heard he was seriously ill by then. He was a heavy smoker and so was I.
When he passed away, I wondered about the fait accompli eulogies by those in the narrow academic world in Belfast. I wondered about his dichotomous way of being.
Ciaran wasn’t perfect – who is? But I am richer from the experience of meeting him, interacting with him, and learning from him. He was a very sound writer, read extensively, questioned, loved his music, and knew his literary onions.
The bed had been positioned deliberately near the window so the artist had a view of the sky. The sky embodied eternity. Our creations change with every era, each century brings a new art, but the sky, on a cloudless blue day or in the grey rain, appears as it did to our most remote ancestors. The wind on their skin feels the same to us. He lay there dying, looking up through the window with the eyes of his childhood self. The sky was a glimpse at something death cannot kill. On that day, the day of his death, the sun was shining over London and the artist was filled with joy.
His health was deteriorating and with each passing hour it seemed to his wife Catherine more rapid. Her hope of a recovery was fading. They had been married these past forty-five years and she knew him better than anyone, enough to know he was always capable of the unexpected, and for that, hope remained kindled as it waned. They had caused a stir walking around their garden in Lambeth naked together. They had shocked their neighbours, and the respectable people of the street thought them to be strange at least, others said they were patently mad. The Blakes had refused to bow to the outcry and continued with their nudism throughout the warm summer days. There was one neighbour in particular, a very old lady in the highest room of a nearby house that would sit there in her rocking chair and watch them dance among the azaleas and foxgloves with her long-ago youth flickering in her eyes. Seeing him lying there with his poorly head emerging from the blankets she smiled to remember it. He was a rebel by soul.
Then there was the time they ate in a soup those strange mushrooms that Flaxman had brought up from the West Country in a small wooden box decorated with golden flowers. They had a psychedelic effect. The artist ate the soup, enjoyed the evening and laughed until it was time for bed. The next morning he went for a walk and when he returned full of thoughtfulness he said to his wife over cups of tea and bread and butter that ‘he wouldn’t be doing it again’ as he ‘had no need for them.’ Some years later she remembered out of the blue that he recalled the experience to her and said matter-of-factly that whatever ‘grows on God’s earth must be God’s creation.’ She had no reason to argue with his logic. She herself had enjoyed that evening very much.
Catherine took the bowl of water and placed it on the bedside table before soaking the flannel and resting it on his forehead. The wet cold of the material opened the artist’s resting eyes and he smiled to see her and the sunshine flooding in behind her. Just the vision of her standing there, her face, filled him with happiness. She leant forward and he could see over her shoulder toward the window. He noticed a thousand colours in the dust particles in the air, each one with its own divinity, each one a galaxy. He watched carefully the movement of the dust in the beam of sunlight, slowly synchronising each angled manoeuvre until it became an entire day of his childhood. It was never difficult for him remembering being a child, how it actually felt, the lineaments of thought he once had and soaring of feeling he often experienced. And then his brother Robert died when he was still a boy which only served to intensify the clarity of his visions. He remembered everything. It was on Saturday mornings in the warm spring when his parents allowed him to go off roaming on his own that his relation with the eternal was born. Now this simple, sparse room in which he lay dying was to the artist a realm in itself. With his eyes closed he dreamt like all of us do, with his eyes open he saw worlds beyond worlds and time beyond time.
Blinking slowly he opened his eyes and looked at Catherine’s eyes for a while. When she noticed, she held his stare. With a slight croak in his voice he began to speak.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For my life.” She didn’t quite know what he meant but inferred the meaning ‘I love you.’ She had never doubted it. Tears welled in their eyes. And then suddenly, seeing him lying there so ill, made her deeply sad. It was like a void, an almost violent, unexpected misery that befell her. After all those many long years of marriage she would soon find herself alone. It was only then, on that bright sunny day, that she really felt it for the first time, the potential of loneliness, and when it fell on her it fell hard and pitiful. But he was determined her future happiness reigned over their parting.
The artist began to cough and splutter a little so she put a cup of water to his mouth which he drank from with difficulty. “Sit me up Catherine, I would like to see the river again.” There from the window he looked out at the Thames. Old father Thames was right, it had given birth, knowingly or unknowingly, to every Londoner there ever was or ever will be. “Look” he said “it shines like a bar of gold.”
“It does at that.’ Catherine answered. They both sat there a while looking at the sunlight playing on the water, brave, complete, magically alive. He looked at it for a time and knew for certain that the pangs and pains of death could never crush his spirit. There was just no chance. It seems perhaps unreasonable now, but it was true. Blindingly, obviously true. He, she, we, are nature. The sun beam glittering in the bough of the tree like the melody of the crashing waves on the shingle, or a full bellied peregrine falcon with nothing else to do but fly, make up one whole. The artist leant his head back on the pillow and smiled.
There was a wrap on the door. When Catherine opened it she saw it was one of the artist’s ‘disciples’ and a member of The Ancients, a young man named George Richmond. The Ancients were a group of painters that included Edward Calvert and Samuel Palmer, brought together in brotherly kinship by the love and admiration for the artist, whose life was now drawing to a sad close as he lay on the bed by the window at Fountain Court.
“How is he?” Asked Richmond as Catherine ushered him in from the street.
“He is gravely ill, and coming in and out of consciousness.” She began to cry. Richmond tried to give some kind words of consolation, but soon realised his words could not suffice. He rested his hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her, as he himself now feared the worse. As they entered the room, the drifting of a cloud let a sharp burst of sunlight in. The artist heard the footsteps and his head turned with open eyes as they both entered the room. He recognised the young man immediately.
“Ah. Richmond my boy! Welcome.”
“William. Mr. Blake.” The sight of the dying man made him tremble suddenly. Richmond was only eighteen at this time and death to him, quite rightly, was an abstraction, a fake. He sat down in a chair by the bedside and saw the artists almost pug-like face, frail, wan, and devoid of rosiness.
“How are you feeling Mr. Blake?”
“Ha!” The artist looked over at Richmond and smiled. “I am dying. But do not be troubled. I am travelling to that country I have always wanted to visit!” Then, surprisingly to those present, Blake began to sing. It wasn’t the singing voice of a dying man, but rather someone bursting with life. Catherine became full of delight as the artist went on singing psalms and hymns and for a time she forgot about death, and suffering. He sang ‘Jesus Christ the apple tree’ ‘Come, oh thou traveller unknown’ and ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ among others. He had always loved to sing. Always. Both Catherine and Richmond wept with joy when they sat witnessing these moments. These perhaps final moments.
Then, as one hymn ended, the artist took a sharp intake of breath. His head rocked gently on the pillow. “Quick Catherine, get me my drawing things. I will paint a picture of you! You have been an angel to me.” He looked up at the ceiling and his eyes widened to their fullest extent, dilating with ecstasy. His mouth opened slightly in a sigh of joy. “Behold! The angels!” His mind cried out, but no words came, the only thing audible was the rhythm of his last breaths. Above him he saw his brother Robert in angelic form, bathed in white light beckoning him on, for his spirit to rise, and he saw the archangel Gabriel, smiling as old friends do. He looked at Catherine and thought ‘We will meet again.”
And then, on that summer day, by the river of London, he died. A look of serenity came over his face, and his eyes were open, keen and eager at the last. The death mask that was made reminded The Ancient’s of one the good emperors, full of calm and wisdom. Richmond placed his thumb and middle finger on the artists eyes, and closed them gently. Catherine was still weeping as she showed Richmond out, and as a slight evening summer rain came down, Richmond himself began to cry and continued to cry through the streets and all the way home. Somewhere in those sad joyful tears with the rain wetting his head, he knew the words he would write to Palmer. So strange, in the eyes of the young man, how the artist had greeted death. The absence of fear. The way he sang.
Feature Image: Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786) by William Blake
When I was five, I made myself a paper flute. I played it sitting on a stone in the Danish summer. My parents later gave me a real flute and I played it fervently until my teacher said it was time I learned some more instruments. I didn‘t consider myself a musician. I just loved to play.
My main instrument today is the harp, but it took me a while. Living near the Alps, it should have been easy. Alpine music is full of string instruments. But I played the flute, and loved folk music which was not from Germany. I didn‘t know at that point how fine German folk music can be. I thought Volksmusik was a lot about brass, and yodeling, and mostly for loud men in leather pants.
Growing up in the Catholic Bavarian countryside can be an ambivalent experience. Like singing in the local church band while dreaming of travelling with a circus. My first idea for a future profession was to be a woodturner, or a carpenter, which earned me comments like, girls should not work as carpenters. This was in the 1990s.
One day, I learned about an instrument maker in the region who taught people how to build historical harps by themselves. I was thrilled. This is how it started. I participated without being able to play one note on my new harp. In my head, making it came first.
This self-made, improvised kind of doing things is a quality I like a lot about folk music. Generally, about this thing called Kleinkunst in German, small art. In the beginning, there often is just the longing to play. A tiny stage, a handful of people, you did‘t even plan it, and suddenly, there is magic in the air. Like in a song by the Portuguese band Deolinda:
He passed and smiled at me and all of a sudden, the ugly face of the town changed, everything was covered in flowers … what would happen if we talked to each other?
Passou por mim e sorriu (gerda vejle):
Travelling musician
What qualifies you to be an artist? If you make a living of it? Or is it a particular way to be in the world? If you manage to transform the ordinary into beauty? Tell a story in a manner that opens a new perspective on the world, which others can relate to?
For me, it has to do with connecting. Connecting people, places and perspectives. I play a harp model called Bohemian Harp. It is neither a Celtic nor a classical harp. It is an instrument of travelling people, linked to the tradition of travelling dance musicians. Especially in the nineteenth century, there were small orchestras of Bohemian harp players, often women, who though poor managed to make an autonomous living by playing music travelling from place to place.
I too had been travelling for some time when I arrived in Berlin, a place of many perspectives and travelling existences. Studying music therapy there and later with fantastic harp player and teacher Uschi Laar, I learned something important: That music is not something you show off. Music can be something that saves you. Sometimes it is the only continuity you have. It can give voice to the unspoken, transform depth into lightness. And it has a great inclusive power.
I then met a storyteller, Ana Rhukiz. We started a travelling duo project, performing barefoot under the open sky, in tiny villages, on smaller and bigger stages, for young and old, few and many. We connected composition and performance, art and nature. What I like about fairy tales is that they often transport a hidden wisdom over time. One piece was about making rain. Drought had fallen upon humanity because nature had been disrespected. During the piece we would say the rain spell together with the audience. Often, it would rain for real, even on a sunny day.
The Lucky Accident
One element of improvisation is accident. And, at the right moment, Kairos.
Do you know Kairos? The Greek God of the lucky accident. A harp maker in Berlin told me the story of Kairos: he has just one hair and is fast. When he passes your way, you have to be lucky to grasp him at his one hair before the moment is gone.
Meeting violinist Judith Retzlik might have been one such moment of Kairos: I had placed one single note on a black board at university saying I was a harp player looking for other musicians. Our band was completed by double bass player Anne Drees, who gave the warm grounding to our violin, harp and voices improvisation. We named ourselves gerda vejle.
In concerts, people ask: Who of you is Gerda? And we smile and say: all of us. Gerda is an imaginative woman. She is creative. She might change her identity now and then. She loves to try out new things, be it styles or genres. She certainly is a feminist.
Over time, gerda has grown. She was drawn to idyllic and disastrous moments at the beginning. Much of heartbreak and rebellion. More themes arouse over time. Less drama, more questions. More laughing also. We made and discovered more instruments. The nyckelharpa, the trumpet, the ukulele. We sing in many languages, merging songs, mostly unplugged. I moved to Austria for some time, the yodeling came back to me from childhood days. I am not a great yodelist. It is a fun way to give credit to something that belongs to me without taking it too seriously.
The Layers Beneath, and Beyond
Gerda vejle is also often asked: Are you a cover band? And in fact, we play mostly songs that already exist. In the beginning, I had the ethos that we should be making our own tunes. But nowadays I would say I proudly cover. In folk music, like in oral tradition, the origin of a tune cannot always be figured out. And many true stories have been truly told before you entered stage. What gerda vejle is doing is collecting them, retelling them, giving her own voices and character to them.
What I learned when I studied literature and ever more working with storytellers is that very text, be it written or spoken, is woven from other texts. Likewise, music is a texture of relations and worlds. It is a vibrant body with many layers under the surface. Folk pieces never get finished. You just keep on crafting them over and over again.
Making music feels like exploring these layers by time. I seldom seek for ideas with a plan. They are hidden in the music, and sometimes quite somewhere else.
With the pandemic and other crises, I am asking myself more questions. What is the role art should play in a time of transformation? Which responsibility falls upon artists when there is so much confusion, and where values are challenged and resources running scarce? Should art be more political, and if so, in which way? Or could artists become people you turn to in confusion, as they often have lived through confusion and hardship themselves? For me, art is not something you add to your life when everything else is fixed. Rather, it is something that can give you another perspective to look at during bumpy times, a bit like humour.
So, one idea I found so far: there should be lightness in the heaviness. Thus, never forget the playfulness. When I teach music, I try to remind people they can be playful. I don‘t believe in the unmusical child. I believe everyone can enjoy creativity. You have to find the language. And a way to play around the bumpiness. Make a song of it. Make it fly.
He had thousands of kodachromes
when he died. Nowadays they’d be snaps
stored on the cloud, given back
tritely as memories by some iphone.
Anyway, they went in the bin,
regardless of what they meant to him.
I have chameleon words, collections of notes,
playing the same role: tie it down —
capture it. What? You, me, the sound
it makes to live; not bringing old stuff close
again (that was bad enough back then),
but the dazzle of being able to comprehend.
Of course, insects don’t waste being alive
worrying about themselves;
they continue to batter themselves
against windows, the life of the hive
before their own; or fanatically nest
under stones, enslaving aphids and the rest.
And rabbits are the same, chewing and getting rattled.
All have better things to countenance
than their own permanance.
It’s baffling that we are so saddled,
knocked over by the whole picture.
What it says in the Scripture
at the start — about Adam and Eve:
it’s not really about sex and so on;
it’s about seeing yourself, alone.
Waking up. To what you may believe.
I glared that first night as she vaunted perks
And spoke in winding roads; uncouth she pried
About my grade and cut. Around her stride,
I feel as though I’m drunk. I miss her quirks.
The nights we stargaze drag on. I should work.
I see her down the bar, then on my floor.
Embracing tears outside her dawn-lit door,
I waste my time deciphering her smirk.
She trembles when I pet her hair,
She conceals what I have learned to love.
With every fight I lose her brazen flair,
Reveal a girl who claims life’s unfair.
But she’s a worrying one, a single dove,
A dress-up doll that yearns to care.
Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme
It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Druid’s production of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: ‘The Plough and The Stars’, ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ which opened recently at the Galway Arts’ Festivaland will tour Belfast before coming to The Abbey in September. But, with the publication of Timothy Murtagh’s new book Spectral Mansions on how the once graciously lofty Henrietta Street turned into tenements adding to the mountain of scholarship about Dublin tenement life, O’Casey’s plays, are, on that basis alone, destined for immortality.
As enduring testimonies of the unflinching reality of Dublin tenement life, no playwright evokes and captures the life of Dublin’s tenements as does O’Casey and that is the central theme of this tour-de-force of scholarship.
Sean O’Casey was born in 1880 into a lower middle class Protestant family – the youngest of eight children – and was raised in Lower Dorset Street, where the family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class life until after his father’s death in 1886. His father had been employed in the Irish Church Mission and his older brothers attended the Central Model School in Marlboro Street for which a small fee was required.
In reduced circumstances after his father death, and when O’Casey was nine, the family moved to the East Wall – a hot bed of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the ITGWU. His entire oeuvre dramatizes with unflinching realism and lack of sentimentality the grim realities of tenement life in Dublin, infusing his characters with compassion and humanity.
By the 1930s, Dublin’s tenements were among the worst slums in Europe with a very high mortality rate, rampant prostitution and disease reflected in ‘The Plough and The Stars’ in the character Mossler Gogan dying of TB and the prostitute Rosie Redmond. Indeed, according to O’Brien ‘[i]n 1914 it was believed that tenement dwellers had a better chance of survival on the Western Front than in the diseased-ridden hovels of Dublin.’ Thus, O’Casey became ‘a life-long activist for the preferment of dwellers of tenements, reflecting their lives with scrupulous realism and compassion, their humanity always shone through as did their heroism and their promise.’
Henrietta Street, Dublin.
Excruciating Detail
Paul O’Brien biography on O’Casey charts with intense and excruciating detail the development of O’Casey’s politics and how those politics fused and informed his writings, especially his dramatic works. In that sense, O’Brien’s book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach to O’Casey’s life.
While O’Casey’s older brothers attended the model school in Marlboro Street, Sean, a delicate child was largely home schooled, self-taught and, for a time, taught by his older sister, a teacher. Later, O’Casey was immersed in all the key political movements of his time, the ICA, the Gaelic League, the GAA and was a big admirer of, and influenced by, Parnell.
He mastered Irish, hence the change in his birth name from John to Sean and he studied the Classics. From early in his life, he was interested in the national movement but it was the emergent labour movement, gaining momentum under his life-long hero, James Larkin that really gripped him and the entire dynamic of his subsequent political and writing life revolved around his failure to find a synthesis between Irish Republicanism and the international struggle of the working classes.
In other words he never could accommodated the ‘green’ of Nationalism with the ‘red’ of Labour and this unreconciled tension remained the central dilemma of his entire life and, in exploring it in minute intensity, Paul O’Brien uncloaks it as both the triumph and tragedy of O’Casey’s life too. While Paul O’Brien clearly admires his subject, he is candid about the unjustified personal animosity of O’Casey towards James Connolly. O’Brien does not shirk from revealing any of O’Casey’s flaws in judgement and personality, while never losing sight of his overall genius.
Imbrications between the cause of the working classes in Dublin and accelerating nationalism were unavoidable after Parnell and were so fused as to often be indistinguishable; the overlaps were everywhere, not least in the Irish Citizen Army (ICS) of which O’Casey was a member until he finally severed all ties in 1914. He also derided the Irish Volunteers which emerged in the South, in parallel with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in response to the Home Rule Bill of 1912.
James Larkin.
James Larkin
James Larkin arrived in Dublin in 1907 and inspired O’Casey to use ‘words as weapons against exploiters of the Dublin poor.’ O’Casey first gave vent to his rage in Larkin’s paper The Irish Worker. Later, in his biographies, O’Casey lacerated the corruption of Dublin Corporation.
From an early age, O’Casey’s love of literature was manifest. The hope that Irish life would be transformed died with the early and tragic death of Parnell in October 1891. In the aftermath, the prospect of peaceful evolution along the lines of Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia receded.
O’Casey saw Larkin as the greatest Irishman since Parnell. ‘The Plough and The Stars’, O’Casey’s most controversial play premiered in the Abbey in 1926 and was well received on its first night. But on the second night, a combination of 1916 widows and Republicans escalated into full blown riots with added moral consternation at the prostitute Rosie Redmond awaiting clients and the un-named figure in the window, identifiably Patrick Pearse extolling the sanctity of bloodshed.
The first two acts of the play are set in 1915 looking forward to the liberation of Ireland, but the second two acts are set during the 1916 Easter Rising.
In the evolution of his political ideals, O’Casey had a number of influences aside from Parnell; the writings of James Fintan Lalor (1809-1849) and John Mitchell (1915-1875) influence him. The 1913 Lockout in Dublin was a watershed moment for O’Casey.
Parnell had provided a vision for Ireland with no conflict between the Protestant religion and the principles of freedom which had a democratic and libertarian pulse, rooted in Constitutionalism. But contemporary conditions would sweep O’Casey away from family and Protestant traditions.
A Dublin Tram conductor and an Abbey actor introduced him to rawer politics. This, combined with the ICA and the ITGWU provided different currents on O’Casey’s development. In terms of his literary work, Dion Boucicault remained a strong influence in how he used songs and comedy to lighten the tragedy of his own writings. (O’Casey wrote many, long forgotten, ballads) While Boucicault’s plays are traditional melodramas there is also a ‘political ambivalence that challenges the stereotypical image of the stage Irishman; ‘Arrah-Na-Pogue’ and ‘Peep O’Day’ are about the 1798 rebellion. Boucicault created a more trustworthy image of the Irish, replacing the racial stereotype in English literature which was finally killed off by George Bernard Shaw in Larry Doyle in ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland.’ O’Casey draws on the techniques of Boucicault, Shakespeare’s history plays and on Shaw to create a unique synthesis of his own. O’Brien argues that O’Casey’s conclusions are ‘open-ended.’
Dion Boucicault.
The Boer War
Defining nationhood was intensified by anti-British sentiments after the Boer War, the centenary celebrations of 1798 and the Jubilee celebrations in 1889.
O’Casey imbibed the sentiments of the Gaelic League like many other Protestants. The plough and the stars was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, and O’Brien identifies O’Casey’s problem was to ‘hitch the plough to the stars.’
He joined the Gaelic league in 1901 and took up hurling. He became an apprentice bricklayer and worked for a number of years on the Great Northern Railway Line. In 1908, he became secretary to the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League and spent ten years promoting Irish language and culture but increasingly he saw the chief enemy as the crushing force of capitalism, and, as he matured, he rejected romantic nationalism.
James Connolly was able to unite nationalism and socialism, but O’Casey could never fuse them into a cohesive theory remaining haunted by the voice of the urban poor. O’Casey resigned from the IRB in 1913 when they refused to take the workers’ side in the Great Lockout.
He ditched the Gaelic League for Larkin and the momentum behind Larkin radical labour movement became the driving force for his plays. This transition is reflected in his earlier plays The Harvest Festival, The Stars Turn Red and Red Roses For Me which deal with the labour history of the 1913-1914 Lockout. After the failure of the Great Lockout O’Casey’s views were crystallised into the view that the ‘struggle was not one of English Imperialism versus Irish Republicanism but between international capitalism and the workers of the world’ and this is reflected uncompromisingly in his plays.
In 1914, Larkin went to America to organise the international workers of the world and was jailed for criminal anarchy. The Ulster Covenant saw 4,000 Ulster volunteers sign up and the respondent Irish Volunteers were despised by O’Casey who saw it as dominated by ‘overfed aristocrats’.
He clashed with Tom Kettle and Pearse and wrongly accused them of not supporting workers. In 1914, along with Larkin, he drafted a new constitution for the ICA but the problems of aligning the red of Labour with the green of nationalism persisted for O’Casey.
Countess Constance Markiewicz.
‘a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’
When Connolly expressed his vision for the re-conquest of Ireland in a pamphlet in 1915, O’Casey saw it as Connolly lowering the red flag in favour of the green and made a sudden and final split with the ICA. The Countess Markievicz joined the Irish Volunteers and the ICA.
O’Casey was intensely hostile to her ‘hauteur’: ‘she whirled into a meeting and whirled out again a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’ His motion, however, to expel her from the ICA failed. According to O’Brien ‘he rushed headlong into one dispute after another, damaging himself and alienating his friends.’
O’Casey published a book on the ICA in 1919 but, according to O’Brien it lacks balance and is saturated with vitriol and opinions. His core argument was that nationalism gained and labour lost as a result of the ICA’s involvement with 1916. ‘O’Casey was alone is seeing Irish history from a working-class perspective when, after 1916, The Labour movement was subsumed into the struggle for independence.’
When Connolly joined the Volunteers in 1916 it completed the fusion with the ICA. 220 members of the ICA rose on Easter Monday 1916, but 1,200 Irish Volunteers did. As O’Brien points out, Connolly had little choice but to fight on nationalist terms in 1916.
Connolly had grasped the importance of a united front where O’Casey failed. O’Casey never acknowledged Connolly’s attempts to unite Labour and Nationalism but in later years he did acknowledge Connolly’s standing in the Labour movement but ‘he never lost an opportunity to denigrate Connolly in favour of Larkin.’
O’Casey became ‘a disgruntled outside, a hurler on the ditch, shouting the odds as history passed him by.’ Many critics put O’Casey’s vitriol against 1916 in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ down to ‘survivor’s guilt.’ The summary execution of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a socialist and passivist abhorred him. He felt successful revolution on nationalist terms only empowered the new Irish ruling classes – the very people who had reduced the Dublin poor to abject poverty.
O’Casey was in sympathy with the views of Ernie O’Malley who resented the legendary status that emerged in the aftermath of the 1916 martyrs as they were twisted and idealised by a new state to consolidate its position. O’Brien argues that ultimately O’Casey neither deified or vilified the 1916 heroes but rather projected the realities of the new Free State that emerged, and, in that, he saw it as advancing commerce over the plight of the poor.
In ‘The Plough and The Stars’ he ‘inverted the nationalist myth … and summoned his characters from the margins of history and placed them in the spotlight.’
‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was influenced by Ernie O’Malley’s views in the character of Davoren, an opportunistic carpetbagger who capitalised in the new Free State which the play mocks. The rhetoric of romantic nationalism is ridiculed and critiqued.
In all of O’Casey’s plays his characters are overwhelmed by events outside of their control. Unlike ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ his plays ‘The Cooing of the Doves’ and ‘Kathleen Listens In’ supports the pro-treaty side. Kathleen also counters the glorification of dead heroes and martyrdom.
Bertolt Brecht.
Influenced by Brecht
‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Abbey 1924) fuses tragedy and comedy: Captain Boyle, a figure broken by poverty and drink is still a sympathetic character. The life of the tenements is always pitched against the life outside and many saw the play as a condemnation of all war.
Juno too has been seen as an attack on the Republican movement. The character Juno is Brecht’s Mother Courage of Dublin with her strength and humanity. O’Casey was influenced by Brecht, Ibsen and other experimental dramatist. In common with Shaw and Joyce, he despised the cult of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as symbol of Ireland. In a feminist twist, Juno does leave her abusive husband and goes off to make a new life with her unwed pregnant daughter.
O’Casey moved to London in 1926 to receive the Hawthornden prize and produce the London production of Juno. He met and fell in love with actress Eileen Carey and he married her and the couple moved to Devon where they went on to have three children.
Yeats refused to produce The Silver Tassie at the Abbey in 1928 causing an irrevocable breach between the Abbey and its most successful playwright. When Juno opened in London O’Casey was a minor celebrity and controversially hobnobbed with a succession of high society grandees, especially with Lord and Lady Londonderry, even spending a week at their residence, Mount Stewart, on the Ards Peninsula in 1934.
They were the direct descendants of Lord Castlereagh, ruthless executioner of the United Irishmen in 1798. He rubbed shoulders with figures as controversial as Oswald Mosely. On the other hand, his Communist activities led him to clashes with George Orwell who, in 1949 supplied O’Casey’s name as part of a secret list of about a hundred writers, artists and intellectuals who should not become ‘cheerleaders in Britian’s fight against communism’ to British intelligence (see issue 3, History Ireland, Autumn 1998).
O’Casey’s was unable to deal objectively with the Stalinist pogroms and took the Russian side against Hungary in the uprising of 1956. For all his human lapses, O’Casey emerges largely as mostly being on the right side of history and was an ardent supporter of Noel Browne. His later plays too were polemics against Nazism and Fascism. He was bitterly disappointed by the failures of his expressionist plays, ‘The Silver Tassie’ and ‘Within the Gates’.
Dublin, 1916.
An Exhaustive Feat
Paul O’Brien’s book, with some occasional unavoidable repetition is an exhaustive feat of research and scholarship that should become an indispensable handbook to all aficionados, practitioners, academics and teachers of Irish drama. In addition to existing scholarship, O’Brien opens a new window of insight into O’Casey’s passion, commitment and motivations while never eschewing his human flaws.
This is also an indispensable history of the development of the Irish labour and nationalist movements and their fraught and intricate interface in the aftermath of Parnell and into the early twentieth century; through The Easter Rising, The War of Independence, The Civil War and its aftermath.
As a writer, O’Casey developed his own unique style and never failed to move with the modernism of Ibsen, the Expressionism of Ernst Toller – the German anti-Nazi playwright – Brecht and Shaw who were early influences. He disliked pessimistic theatre but made an exception with Beckett. Paul O’Brien makes a compelling case that O’Casey’s expressionist and modernist plays are overlooked. His book certainly inspires a fresh look at O’Casey overall oeuvre.
With ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ currently enjoying a successful run as part of the decade of centenaries his place in the pantheon of Irish dramatists seems assured, and, as the history of Dublin tenement life continues to burgeon, his plays are set to endure as visceral, dramatic slices of that life. Perhaps the most astute accolade O’Brien accords O’Casey is to observe that; ‘he was one of the most sensual writers of his era’ where ‘sexual love is always presented as positive, joyful and life affirming’ and that was the common humanity that placed the characters of Dublin’s tenements on a par, as O’Brien suggests, with ‘Maud Gonne, the Countess and their aristocratic circle.’
Paul O’Brien richly deserves the accolade of O’Casey’s biographer, Dr Christopher Murray, Emeritus Professor of Drama at UCD who greeted, ‘An extraordinary achievement bringing O’Casey centre-stage again with supreme skill. Bravo!’
Sean O’Casey Political Activist and Writer by Paul O’Brien is published by Cork University Press in hardback at €49. It is 297 pages with a Foreword by Shivaun O’Casey. There are an additional 100 pages of notes, bibliography and index.
Feature Image: Study of Seán O’Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for The New York Times (1966)
The leaves of Greenwich Park were the soul of Autumn as I walked slowly up the hill to the secret garden in the quiet rain. I opened the gate and entered to find there was no one there. Maybe there was nobody in the whole park. A red squirrel went on eating in the middle of the wet lawn, untroubled by my presence. Above me sat the Observatory on its perch, a great seat of learning. An opportunity for humankind to understand the universe. Once upon a time you could see the stars from here on a clear night, but not now. Not since industry. Not since work.
I opened a can of beer and lit up and made my way on through the drizzle wet, and felt lonely but not sad, this feeling of rain, delving sublime, richer than silk indigo was Inigo in ideas, deeper than feeling, in my own world almost auto stick, non-verbal, who are the same as us and yet not the same. One with everything, if only those little beauties could understand. I can’t. I went over and sat on the damp bench at the picnic table, content to be alone, for now at least. I had the plants and the trees and rain for company and that was all I needed. It’s a good time to think about people, when there’s no-one there.
I don’t remember how long I spent in the secret garden. The time pieces of Greenwich had all floated clocks among the rainclouds tick-tock until sun’s return. The great orange ball at the top of the Observatory was obscured by mist. I noticed the clouds after that and drank deeply and rolled the cherry on the edge of the wooden bench, the place was damp so nothing could set fire. I put my hood up and felt the unmistakeable tingling of comfort. My eyes were good, and ears, and legs and arms and heart, nothing appeared to be dying. Nothing at all, not even the hiding sun.
It felt good to finish the can of beer and crush the empty can in my fist. Especially as I had another one in my bag. Plenty I believe the word to be. It can be a good thing, better than drought. The trick to life is appreciation, in knowing when enough is enough, but knowing what enough is, has always been hard for me, because the memory of the shit never goes, so let the good times roll. There is a great beauty in this world of ours, remember, the world that created us, against all the naysayers. Yes, it’s beauty I made sure before I died.
The squirrel has gone and I am alone with the half Red Stripe. Keep on smoking, careful not to get it wet as the rain isn’t easing. Under the picnic table with the paper and the tobacco and then the filter and finally the lick and flip. The new lighter is a good feeling and works first time producing a burst of smoke in the downpour. Maybe shelter soon but not just yet. I can hear the rain on my rain proof hood like music. Sit a while.
I’ll leave this place before the rain lifts. I stand up and then rattle the can. I spy a bin and move towards it to leave my mark. I look around and think the place was worth visiting in all seasons, in all weathers. I am a little drunk, it was a long night, a good night, but genuinely, peaceful reader, nothing I can’t handle yet, my body holds out still as fifty approaches like an old friend I have fallen out with. The things that can’t be avoided must be confronted, who said that? Good mothers probably.
And so on up to the top of the park and the General Wolfe statue who must have defeated the French in Canada. Let’s build a statue to remember wars won. Then it will have meaning, if it is remembered. But only then. I can see the days of Nelson from where I stand, and the days of Raleigh on the riverbank and we can see what happened when we hear the toothpaste advert from the other side of oceans, in a different accent of course. Why all the war, all the carnage, all the misery and death? Something to do I suppose. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”
I can see all of London, but better to stay in the park and nature and rain. Different company. Maybe a teenager is being stabbed out there but maybe not, it doesn’t happen every second or every minute. Not enough for the politicians to get involved. Ten million people and a couple of hundred slaughtered youth on the street, lying in pools of their own blood. Nothing to see here, nothing to see here. Nothing to see.
I turn and make my way past the pavilion and into the Flower Garden. Good name. The Flower Garden. Rain is letting up now. They had a good drink today. Strange thing, that nature has no control over itself, it spreads where it can when it has a chance, and now beyond where was once impossible. I spy the Observatory again over the brow. Let’s build monuments to war and keep the deers in the enclosure, they’ll be safe there. Good idea. One of them looks over at me through the fence. Through the misty rain. It’s free in its own world. Like me. Maybe a prisoner could be free if he had the right mind. If he was in control of his imagination, then where would he be?
The Flower Garden is beautiful. The rain has returned so I put my hood back up. I remember I was here one hot summers day in nineteen eighty-five. Wouldn’t it be a thing to have dates for those childhood days of summer. They are now lost in time, they are time. The only time we know. The pinnacle of childhood, using imagination on everything. I look at the tree that has changed less than me since then. It is magnificent then and now. The tree, nature’s gifted form, blown about by the winds but always rooted. Only disaster and time can kill it. Like us. The rain is back for sure. I put my hood up and leave through the gate on Maze Hill. Back into the world, for now.
The boy was wretched. He sat on the bed in shorts and T-shirt his hair a tangled mess. I noticed they had put him in a single room, the last on the corridor beside the fire escape. I examined his chart, apart from the nurse’s hourly checks no one had spoken to him since he had been admitted three days ago. I introduced myself.
‘I’m Dr Peter Philips your doctor.’
The boy looked at me. He had piercing blue eyes and an odd way of tilting his head as if he was asking a question. There was no hostility, but it was obvious he was terrified.
‘Do you hear voices?’, I asked.
He looked puzzled.
‘I mean do you hear voices other than your own in your head?’
He still didn’t seem to understand what I was asking. I tried something else.
‘Your mother said you threw yourself from an upstairs window. Were you trying to kill yourself?’
‘No, I just wasn’t ready.’
I withdrew from this cryptic comment and closed the interview.
Later that day I looked through his case notes. He was involuntarily admitted, his mother had brought him in. The duty registrar had done the paperwork noting that the boy was unwashed, and he rambled on about a bird, a pet bird maybe? He was delusional with suicidal tendencies. Normally I would move on to treatment, but something about the boy bothered me. He obviously didn’t suffer from auditory hallucinations and there was something odd about his suicide attempt. I looked at the other entries on his file. He had never been in trouble with the Guards not even a scrap on the street. His mother had been interviewed separately. She was unwilling to say too much and appeared to be overwhelmed by what was going on. She did say her son had become obsessed by birds of prey. I didn’t draw any conclusions from this I was satisfied he was delusional.
Nightfall, a nurse came into the room with a tray of medication. The boy took the pills and turned to the wall.
‘Alright Pat?’
‘Yeah’, he muttered.
The night was windy, and a twig tapped on the window, a message tap, tap, tap. A message from the trees whipped by the wind. The boy listened curiously; he tapped his knee in time. Then there was a lull in the wind and the tapping stopped. In the morning there was porridge for breakfast. The dining room was full. Pat looked around at the other patients most of them were concentrating on eating. After breakfast there wasn’t very much to do, the day gaped like a long empty corridor.
We had a team meeting the morning after I interviewed the boy. I set out the psychopharmaceutical position to murmurs of assent. There was a girl at the conference table. She introduced herself as the new occupational therapist on the ward.
‘His mother said he’s quite good at drawing. Could we provide him with paper and pens and see what he comes up with?’
I was sceptical at first, the fact that he was suicidal created all sorts of problems, but then so far, my attempts to interview him had proved unproductive so I gave her the OK on the paper and pens.
The day was slipping past, it was already afternoon, the lunch things cleared away. A smell of boiled potatoes hung limply in the air. Sunlight streaked the floor tyles and Pat let it land on his T-shirt and his legs. He felt restless as if something was boiling away inside him. He could see the sky through the high windows and a bird only a speck above the city. For a moment he felt pure joy then behind him a nurse said:
‘Time for you medication Pat.’
It was almost time for the night shift to come on duty when she came through the door. She was wearing baggy black pants and she carried a bag. The doctor he had seen the first night was with her and they stood talking at the other end of the ward. Pat looked at her carefully. Her fine red hair was clipped back in a ponytail. Then she laughed a small nervous laugh, barely parting her lips. She put her hand on the man’s shoulder and said something Pat couldn’t hear. The man pointed towards Pat, and she came over to him. When she reached him, she held out her hand:
‘My name’s Anna, I’m the ward occupational therapist. I’m told you’re interested in birds.’
Pat mumbled something. She smelled sweet like honeysuckle and her eyes were the colour of morning sky. He wanted to tell her everything, the peace, the freedom, to be up there looking down. Instead, she opened her bag and took out paper and pens. She was saying something like draw what you see, put down what you feel. He hardly heard her; he was so happy.
At first it was a tremor, a flash of light a sweeping glance across the landscape. He was fifteen when it first came over him crouched at his window ready to fly. That time it only lasted minutes, but he was already caught willing it to happen again. In his sleep he dreamt of a huge black bird that soared above the fields. He became impatient and tried jumping from the windowsill, that landed him in hospital with a broken shoulder and a fractured knee. Remembering the first time, he imagined the bird and the wind beneath him, now he could see with the bird’s eyes. He sat still in his room focusing on the breath, waiting, waiting for the flash of light. Without knowing how he knew he was ready; he opened the window, and everything was there. With raised arms, the wind rushed past his face, and he could hear rustling feathers. Nothing could stop him, his feet lifted off the sill and effortlessly he cleared the treetops, the shifting breeze carried him into the clear blue sky. He wheeled around and headed back home gracefully landing again where he had left.
The drawings were spread out on my desk. Some were remarkable pictures of birds. Others were indecipherable. I picked one up.
‘What’s this supposed to be?’
‘Well,’ Anna said tentatively. ‘At first I thought it was some kind of pattern and then I came across drone footage, and I realised it was a drawing from the air.’
‘So, he can imagine what things look like from the air?’
‘Yes, it’s amazing, isn’t it?’
‘But you’re not suggesting he can actually fly?’
Anna sank back in her chair.
‘Look our job is to treat his symptoms. He needs to take his place in society, get a job, fit in. Maybe you’re too close to him someone else can take over.’
Pat hung around the ward pretending he wasn’t waiting for anything. By lunchtime he wondered why she hadn’t come. Then it was three in the afternoon and when the ward door opened it was his mother looking anxious and distracted. They sat in his room without speaking. Eventually she took out a bottle of fruit juice and put it on his bedside locker along with sixty euros in twenty euro notes. She was crying and took him in her arms:
‘Be a good boy,’ she said.
Pat waited the excruciating hours until bedtime and still she didn’t come. In the morning at breakfast a nurse said quietly to him:
‘Dr Philips wants to see you as soon as you’re ready.’
I saw him in my office first thing. He looked tired and hung his head as I went through his notes.
‘You’ve been doing some work with Anna. She’s been transferred to another ward, from now on you’ll be dealing with Carl,’.
The boy looked shocked, and I made a note that he should be monitored carefully.
When the nurse went into Pat’s room in the morning the small window over his bed was open. There was no sign of Pat. They never found him; he couldn’t have crawled out the opening the window afforded. Dr Philips maintained the door to the fire escape must have been left unlocked. Anna asked to see the room. She looked under the bed and lying there innocently waiting to be found was a glossy black feather. She held it up to the light and admired it, then she slipped it into her bag.
Julian Lloyd’s iconic portrait of Nick Drake now forms part of the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery’s photographic collection. Lloyd’s friendship with the archetypal singer-songwriter, who died, tragically, aged just twenty-six in 1974, permits a rare intimacy between photographer and an elusive subject.
In some photos Drake looks to be at peace with himself and his surroundings, but in others of the doomed troubadour – featuring in Lloyd’s new exhibition running in the Horse Gallery, Dublin 1, from July 6th to July 17th – we find a less playful figure, with Drake brooding beneath a heavy coat on a Welsh beach, inhaling urgently.
Lloyd says Drake was “a nice, easy going, companionable man, very private, but not particularly buttoned-up. Obviously he became ill – a cruel mental illness which locked him up and made him miserable. Nick was just one of the gang, but obviously he had a talent.” The budding artist, who only achieved posthumous fame, was “happy to play in front of a few of us in a room. Never anything boastful or show-offy about him.”
Lloyd claims that it was “pure luck and happenstance” that brought him into the same social circles as figures such as Drake, and later, after he moved to Ireland – to work with horses – musicians such as Ronnie Wood and Dolores O’Riordan, along with actors such as John Hurt.
Despite many of his subjects being celebrity figures, there is a lightness to the work. You really get the impression that Julian Lloyd was simply a photographer among friends.
Crystallising Memories
Julian Lloyd clearly possesses a keen eye for the poignancy of a fleeting moment in time, crystallising memories, whether at a carefree party or even outside a funeral, which is the hallmark of great photography, and art more broadly. Choosing when to take out the camera and start shooting is a fraught exercise, as a subject may recoil or put on a false persona before the lens. Lloyd seems to have a knack of timing this to perfection.
Lloyd is not in the least bit precious about his photography, confiding that on occasion he is not averse to having a few drinks at a party, and allowing auto-focus to prevent any mishaps. Nor does he feel threatened by the ubiquity of smart phone photography, recalling the insight of the American photographer David LaChapelle, who put it to an audience that while everybody in the world has access to pen and paper, few writers attain the level of Shakespeare.
He also dismisses the idea that photographers conform to a particular personality type, recalling meeting with “ebullient, chatty, noisy photographers, and also furtive ones, who creep around in corners.” His own work has been in “fits and starts”. He was pretty broke for periods, and had no camera to work with after a theft for some time.
Hippie Trail
Apart from the glamour of his rock ‘n’ roll and aristocratic subjects, we also find an abiding love for Ireland in the collection, especially the characters he encountered along the way, such as the parking attendant at the Cliffs of Moher who sold tin whistles on the side.
After leaving school he first plied his photographic trade for a local newspaper in Northumberland near the English-Scottish border, where ships would occasionally pull in undetonated World War II mines for him to photograph.
He then moved to ‘Swinging Sixties’ London, where he secured a job in a photographic studio, and met his future wife Victoria, whose sister was going out with Eric Clapton at the time. George Harrison was also on the scene.
There reached a point, however, when, like other hippie idealists, he wanted to move to the country. Back then “people would set off in barrel topped wagons.” He and Victoria followed suit, found one for themselves and purchased a mare to take it from Swindon to Somerset.
This proved a life-changing experience. Despite no family or other background with horses, he grew fond of the mare and “the whole relationship with horses.” Later he found a job with a horse dealer, learning the business “from the ground up.”
Lloyd’s unusual hippie trail eventually brought him to Ireland. This was he says “a very vivid experience.” He and Victoria found “a very different culture living in Ireland than it was in Britain. It was very, very attractive.”
In 1975 he came to work for Tim Rogers in Lucan in county Dublin, who had, he says “the best stallion operation in Europe at the time.” It would be over forty-five years before he finally returned to the U.K.. He has recently moved to live in Shropshire near the Welsh border, where Victoria’s family is from.
He recalls a friend, Sean Doyle saying to him that “to succeed in life you must have an unfair advantage.” But unlike the relatively easy world around his photography, Lloyd enjoyed no unfair advantage when it came to horses, making it “very, very difficult.” It was a seven day a week job, to which he “gave it everything” and possessed “the zeal of the convert”. Nonetheless, he spent “plenty of years skint” during a time when it was “very, very hard to make a living.” If photography was a playful mistress, the breeding and raising of horses was a demanding master.
Lloyd describes Ireland as “a safe haven” – away from a prying media – for many of the English musicians and other artists who took up residence here from the 1970s. Some like Marian Faithfull found a more receptive audience for their work.
Julian Lloyd’s photography captures that carefree world, which existed, unimpeded, alongside surviving remnants of a peasant society, which also features in his work. It was perhaps to his great advantage that he did not depend on photography for an income, but could instead indulge a passion in intimate settings, where he could blend in seamlessly with the crowd.
