Woe is us, woe, woe (and for once I’m a little more serious)

I’m not a born cassandra and tend to look on the bright side of things. I’m a ‘the glass is half-full’ guy. But for some years past, and again quite keenly a few months ago, I’ve felt that the good times were drawing to a close in a far more long-term way, that the ‘good life’ many — though certainly not most —have been living could not go on for ever.

Be honest: we might all have our petty troubles, our health concerns, trouble with children, but for many of us our lives and existences are demonstrably more comfortable than they were for our parents, our grandparents and their parents. But I feel and suspect that circumstances are slowly to change and we will have little control over it.

To be fair to myself, this was not and is not some ageing gent’s pessimism, the unobtrusive side-effects of still tiny but growing cataracts, dulling the colours of the world and making it look drabber and greyer; or the product of the mind and spirit of a body subjected to growing hypertension after a lifetime of smoking and boozing, feeling ever-so-slightly off-colour all the time with the impact that has on feelings and outlook. It is just what I believe history tells us.

In 2020, the vast majority of the nine billion-odd who live on Earth do not have to fear a early death or that half of our offspring will not survive until adulthood. In the Middle Ages the average life span was an astonishingly low 32 years (a figure which takes into account, of course, the huge infant mortality — it doesn’t mean that most people were dead by 32, though they were tens and hundreds of millennia ago). In 2020 it is over double that, at 73 years (again taking into account that the vast majority of our children reach adulthood).

In many parts of the world justice is no longer arbitrary and does not depend on the whims and moods of a ruler’s place men (though I’m sure everyone reading this will be able to cite exceptions). Broadly — and there are certainly exceptions to this — the rule of law does not favour ‘the authorities’ and ‘the rulers’, and justice of some kind can be achieved.

I am most certainly generalising: notions of ‘justice’ vary widely throughout the world, and arbitrary, sudden violence is still all to common. So, yes I am certainly writing from the vantage point of a white, now retired, man who exists on a smallish, but steady state income, but who also has savings to be used if times get hard. I don’t live in a Brazilian favela, or cheek by jowl with others in a refugee camp, I am not a woman living in the far north of Pakistan, I don’t live in rural China subject to the whims of the local party boss. You get the picture.

Those are the varying details of individual lives: my point is that history is amoral, it just doesn’t care: history takes no account of race, religion, age, health, lineage or any circumstance at all. Granted that in the present coronavirus crisis here in Britain statistics show that bame (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) Brits are more likely to die from covid-19 infection (and we don’t yet know why) and males are more likely to die than females (and we don’t know why), but my general point holds, I think.

All bame Brits and all men face the same danger. The virus doesn’t decide ‘well, this chappie went to a good school and is of standing in the community whereas this one is a jobless layabout, so I’ll kill him’. All are at risk from the virus, and all are equally subject to the whim of history (or to put it a little more sensibly, the whim of events).

. . .

I suppose any age taking a look around and trying to identify contemporary evils will have an easy time of it. But ‘history’ does seem to come in ‘waves’ (if that makes sense). As always context is important. So for us folk in Western Europe the past 75 years have broadly been peaceful. Folk in the Congo, China and parts of South America would not say the same.

Yet all of us, because of the impact of government lockdown measures in response to the virus pandemic which will have severely damaged nation’s economies, pretty much every corner of the world is said to be likely to suffer from a global recession that is forecast to be not just as bad as the Great Depression in the 1930s, but ‘the worst for 300 years’.

And even if for some reason one nation’s economy is in better shape than that of others, if that nation relies on global trade, it will be equally badly hit. You might have been lucky enough to be in a position to carry on and manufacture goods and services, but if you traditional clients are screwed and unable to buy those goods and services from you, it’s all a little pointless.

. . .

Also on the horizon is the uncertainty of what China is up to. It has long been irked by the freedoms the former British colony Hong Kong was granted when it reverted to Chinese control and it has been especially irked by the resistance to its rule in Hong Kong and has taken the time while the world’s focus was elsewhere because of the virus crisis to impost new laws bringing the former British colony much closer under its control. These are being resisted.

The question is if the situation in Hong Kong did get a lot worse, if something akin to a ‘civil war’ did break out, how would the world react? And if that reaction was only half-hearted, with a series of those ineffectual ‘strong warnings’ which mean even less than the paper they are written on and ‘red lines’ which are subsequently

forgotten about (©Barack Obama viz Syria), China might then finally cross a rubicon and try to take control of Taiwan (it claims Taiwan is part of China, Taiwan disagrees).

This prospect is all the more real in that whereas previously China has insisted one of its aims is ‘peaceful reunification’ with the island, in the past months it has dropped the word ‘peaceful’ whenever that aim is repeated. That is significant.

Taiwan would most certainly put up a far bigger fight than Hong Kong if it were invaded, and has the artillery to do so, but would the West come to its defence as it has long promised? Discuss.

. . .

That last question is all the more pertinent in that for the US the ‘Trump question’ is reaching crisis point. I shan’t here repeat the recital of the man’s almost incomprehensible stupidity which you either know about or have been asleep for the past four years, but ‘the US president’ is, like it or not, pivotal to the outcome of world events of magnitude, and a the moment (hopefully only for another eight months) Trump is that president. How he would react to Chinese military action to take control of China is anyone’s guess. On paper the US has promised to defend Taiwan. Would Trump?

Trump has vacillated on so many issues that it is impossible to predict what he might do. He was friends with North Korea’s Kim Jung-un as part of some cockeyed, ill-thought out plan to get Kim to get rid of his nuclear arsenal. Then he wasn’t. In 2015 China’s Xi Jinping visited the US (still under President Barack Obama), but when Trump took office relations between the US and China, not very good even then, worsened considerably.

Trump imposed trade restrictions and tariffs but his actions were not underpinned by any discernible strategy. Trump seems to rely on his bowel movements for inspiration and strategy on what to do next rather than rational thought. So how would he react if China did move on Hong Kong or Taiwain? Who knows.

One line of reasoning is that China is too concerned with keeping up trade with the rest of the world to risk damaging its trading relations. After the coronavirus outbreak in China, the ruling Communist Party became a little more unpopular with ‘the people’, and it knows that it must keep up living standards for the vast majority for its own sake.

A slump in trade and sales of its goods to the rest of the world could see a recession in China and a decline in those living standards, and even more unhappy people. As a rule, folk aren’t a much concerned with airy-fairy notions such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom of speech’ as with how full their stomach is. The emptier the stomach, the more concerned they become with airy-fairy notions.

On the other hand if, as we are told we are all in for the mother of all recessions, that, too, will hit China badly and Xi Jinping might reason that as times are bad, now might be a good time to invade Taiwan. That would, at least, work according to the principle that if a ruler has internal trouble, creating external trouble for his nation abroad is a good way uniting the nation and deflecting attention from domestic problems

Another line of reasoning is that while the ‘free world’ is concerned with the virus crisis and while the US gets ever more divided by the antics — there can be no other word — of an unstable president, now might be the best time to do the unthinkable: attempt to take over Hong Kong or, more to the point, Taiwan. This would not be, or even mainly be, to get control of those two islands, it would to underline so that there is no doubt on the matter that China is now the dominated world superpower. And that, Xi Jinping might believe, is worth the risk.

He, though, has problems of his own. We can’t know too much of what is going on in China but he does seem to have a great deal of internal Communist Party opposition. A few years ago he finagled himself into becoming more or less president for life. That has not gone down with many in his party (especially, I should think, those few slightly younger ones who would have been in a position to take over as party chairman when he retired. Well, dear hearts, choke on it: now he ain’t).

. . .

In the US things seem to be going from bad to worse for ‘The Donald’: after being caught out time and again spouting complete nonsense about how to tackle the coronavirus and insisting things were getting better when it was obvious to the rest of the US that they simply were not, he now has rioting and looting in more than 40 cities to deal with. And is dealing with it unbelievably badly. I mean if one were to sit down and work out how not to handle the situation, you couldn’t come out with a worse way than Trump’s.

The situation is complex. Many of the demonstrators are peaceful, protesting over what seems likely to have been, at best, the wilful homicide of a black man called George Floyd. Many demonstrators are not peaceful because they are so angry and so frustrated at how they and their fellow black Americans are treated day in, day out. It is also likely that there are several agitators in play, acting for their own particular reasons. And, bizarrely, it is even

possible that some of those agitators are undercover white supremacists who have long wanted a ‘race war’ in the US to get rid of all black and who feel now is the time to exacerbate the situation and start one. This morning’s papers carry a report that Twitter has closed down an allegedly ANTIFA account calling for violence when it discovered it was a fake account set up by a white supremacist group.

At the time of writing, just after 10.10 GMT + 1 on Tuesday, June 3, 2020, what will happen is all up in the air. Most likely the situation will peter out as have previous such violent protests over the murder of black folk by police (for the record Arthur McDuffie in 1979, Rodney King - 1992, Timothy Thomas - 2001, Michael Brown - 2014, Eric Garner - 2014, Freddie Gray - 2015, Keith Scott - 2016). But the anger and frustration will remain. And so, it would seem, will such police action. I must be fair: there will be any number of white US police officers are who good, honest men and women who would not discriminate against blacks. But we all know just a minority can do real harm and real harm is what it seems a minority in the US want.

Trump is worse than useless in handling the situation, just as he is worse than useless at handling the covid-19 crisis.

. . .

As for ‘the future’ it is always impossible to tell what ‘history’ has in store for us. But it is not looking good, for very tangible reasons. Once the virus pandemic has died down and if there is a second wave, once that, too, has died down, there is the economic fallout to deal with. And that will certainly involved unemployment on a scale unknown for decades and all that entails.

Happy Easter!

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 10 Blow By Blow by Jeff Beck

It would be dishonest of me to claim ‘I’m a Jeff Beck fan’ because I’ve only heard (checking his discography on Wikipedia) a lot less than half of his released recordings. And I’ve only ever bought four of his albums, and I really didn’t like one of them. Beck, Bogert & Appice were billed at the time as — it was all the rage for a while and most of us believed the bullshit — ‘a supergroup’. They released only two albums before disbanding.

I bought the first Beck, Bogert & Appice, and soon wished I hadn’t. It was curiously dull, and just now listening to the tracks on Spotify I can report that it’s still curiously dull. It seems I’m not the only one to think that because the band’s Wiki entry does claim the record baffled and disappointed fans because it didn’t capture the force and verve of their live performances. But, well, that was bugger all good to me.

All I knew was that the bloody record I had bought was curiously dull. It still is. Whether its follow-up, a live album, was any better I don’t know because on the strength of the debut album — their only studio album — I couldn’t be arsed to find out.

I first got to know Jeff Beck not with his work with The Yardbirds — I would be hard pushed to say what he did with that band and can’t even remember consciously listening to them — but from his singles Hi-ho Silver Lining and Beck’s Bolero.

Both were blasted out on Dundee University’s students’ union jukebox with monotonous regularity, along with Something In the Air by Thunderclap Newman, Say A Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin, In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry and several more. With such enforced repeated listening every last song on that jukebox except for Say A Little Prayer strayed very close to becoming bloody irritating, and Beck’s two tunes, which are really nothing special at all and verge on ‘novelty records’, were no exception.

Then at one point I heard Truth, the first album by The Jeff Group and liked it a lot and bought it. The line-up on that album and Beck-Ola, it’s follow-up, had Rod Stewart on vocals (never a bad thing) and Ronnie Wood on bass. It is still worth listening to, though Beck-Ola isn’t really that good, and so I didn’t bother with the final two albums.

Then came the band Beck, Bogert & Appice and their album of the same name, and why I bothered buying that, though I did, I really can’t think. More to the point after the disappointment of Beck-Ola and the ‘supergroup’ album, I can’t for the life of me think why I went on to buy Blow By Blow (today’s featured album) and it’s follow-up Wired (just as good). But I did, and I’m very glad I did.

To this day both stand out in my mind, and I can’t even — thank the Lord — trace a hint of kinship with the music on them and the close-on ( for me) dross of the ‘supergroup’ album. I mean it takes a certain gift to make Stevie Wonder’s song Superstition boring, but BB and A managed it.

Like all the other albums I’ve so far featured, Blow By Blow (and Wired, for that matter) doesn’t have one duff track. To ‘modern ears’, the funky clavinet (played by an uncredited Stevie Wonder) might date it a little, but hey-ho, any more complaints?

The track you can hear here, Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers, was written by Stevie Wonder and to my ears is beautiful. Beck had and has such total control over his guitar and playing that, like most such gifted players, he makes it sound easy. Easy? Try it.

Why I didn’t bother to check out any of his work after Wired I really don’t know, and I can’t even offer a plausible explanation. I did, though, once go to see Beck play live, but in the event I dind’t hear or see much of him at all. About 30 seconds, in fact.

It was early 1974 and the gig was in Edinburgh somewhere or other, in cinema or a former cinema* next to or behind which was a cemetery (which comes into the story). I was living in Dundee at the time, and I and my then girlfriend Shelagh hitched down to see Beck.

Before we went in we, as one does, had a couple of cans of McEwan’s extra strong lager each and a couple of spliffs (and, sssh, don’t tell my children who both think I’m a saint). Suitably high, we then went into the gig. Beck and his band were already playing and all I can remember his going up to the first floor balcony (presumably where our seats were) and then opening the door from the corridor to the balcony and being hit — quite literally (©P Bailey) — by a super, super-thick wall of sound. It was physical. Ever stuck your hand out of a car window travelling at more than 30mph and ‘feeling’ the ‘body’ of air? It was like that. It almost took an effort to push through it on to our seats.

Whether the booze and dope magnified the sensation I don’t know, but with a few short minutes (No! ©T Potter. A minute is a minute is a minute!) I felt very, very ill and ran outside to the cemetery where I spent next hour or so throwing up. No comment on Beck’s playing, of course.

*NB Courtesy of the net and how any number of nerds will record for posterity any amount of shite, I can report that the gig was by the ‘supergroup’, Beck, Bogert & Appice, and it was at the Caley Picture House, Lothian Rd., Edinburgh, on January 29, 1974 (a Tuesday, apparently and the Caley Picture House is now a Wetherspoons. Well, what isn’t these days?). The gig was recorded and released as a live two-CD set called The Last Live In Scotland 1974.

And if you listen very carefully to the first track, you can hear me puking violently in the next-door cemetery. Well!

And that is it, people. I hope you enjoyed my choices.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 9 Chimeradour by Jeff Lang

I like to claim ‘I like all music’, but that’s not really true. I draw the line at schmaltzy shite, ‘show toons’ and some classical music. That last would include the Bruckner I have so far heard and almost all of Wagner.

I can’t remember who said ‘A little Wagner goes a very long way’, but someone should if it hasn’t yet been said officially. Other gibes I like are one by Thomas Beecham — that’s right, of the cold and ’flu remedy Beecham’s though he decided on a different course in life — who observed that ‘Wagner has his moments, about one every 15 minutes’. And even Jim Naughtie (formerly of Radio 4’s Today) a keen Wagner fan once admitted that ‘you listen to 20 minutes of Wagner’s music, look at your watch and realise the piece started only five minutes ago’.

But enough bile.

I also thought I didn’t like folk and country music. My ears were eventually opened a little to the attractions of some country music by my guitar tutor; and once I realised there’s more to folk — a lot more as it happens — than all that finger-in-the-ear wailing about the past by Britain’s folk revivalists (who now insist we call it ‘roots’), I got to like much of it. A great deal of the folk I like comes from abroad and British folk is still a sore point for me, though I have mellowed.

But even then, when I was invited to go to a gig by the Australian ‘folkie’ Jeff Lang, I took some persuading. Actually, Lang who describes his music as ‘punk folk’ is about as far from the finger-in-the-ear wailing revivalist ‘roots’ crowd in their shapeless drab sweaters and straggly beards as you can get. And thank the Lord for that. And thank the Lord that I was finally persauded.

For many years commuting back home to Cornwall from London on a Wednesday night, I stopped off at a pub in the Somerset village of South Petherton to watch Champions League football, drink a glass of red or ten and smoke a few La Paz. And as you do, I got to know several folk there, one of whom was Paul.

Paul was a social worker in his early 60s who and a Labour supporter. I am unaligned politically (and prefer it that way because I like to be able to speak my mind and don’t like being obliged to talk shite and defend ‘my party right or wrong’) and pretty much in ‘the centre’, but it soon became apparent that I was to the left of Labour-supporting Paul. But that is another irrelevant detail.

Paul professed to be a fan of folk music and one day asked whether I might like to go to a Jeff Lang concert at the well-known Half-Moon, in Putney, West London. Don’t worry about the folk angle, he said, he’s a great guitarist. The gig was on a Wednesday night when I usually drove home, so the plan was that Paul would make his way to London and we would meet in Putney, and afterwards drive back out West and I would drop him of at South Petherton.

For the gig we were joined by another friend who likes music, and I’m so glad I went. Lang really is a one-off. Back in Australia he has his own band, but for his (I think) annual tour of Europe he performs on his own.

Well, I say ‘on his own’, but he uses an array of gadgets, mainly loopers, to produce a sound that really must be heard to be believed. Put baldly like that your heart might sink, but Lang is certainly not a slave to electronic gadgetry, but makes it work for him. The music and what he can produce comes first. And he is some guitarist. Quite apart from that he writes and sings some very interesting songs indeed and has a great voice.

The track here is one of my favourites from the album I am featuring, Chimeradour. But I particularly like the sinister quality he gets into the song and the sense of dread felt by a young lad who is not too sure what is going on and fears the worst. The other songs on the album are equally as good. Lang is worth checking out.

PS I wrote about Jeff Lang in this blog at the time.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 8 Amandala by Dave Fiuczynski

I came across Dave Fiuczynski by chance but I’m bloody glad I did. For once this might be touted as an album which, if it didn’t exactly change my life, did set me off on a new path and getting to know other performers and their music, simply by googling Fiuczynski’s sidemen and seeing what they were up to and who they played with.

OK, doing that still leaves you within quite a narrow field, but there is still good stuff to get to know.

I came across Fiuczynski quite by accident. When iPods were just getting going and becoming all the rage but commanding very high prices (as all Apple products do and were being bought by folk who work on the principle that if you’re being charged through the nose, it must be good! Er, not necessarily, sunshine, but that’s for another time) I got interested. What all my music in a small gadget like that and I can carry it all around? Bloody hell!

Well, after the hell of tape spooling out of your Sony Walkman (or it’s cheapo Saisho rip-off) once too often, it was a godsend. The downside was the price: I’m not one of those dicks who will pay £100 for a £5 pencil just because it’s good a sodding white apple printed on it. (The same is true of T shirts: three for £8 from Asda is good enough for me rather than one for £40 which is identical except for a tiny Ralph Lauren logo of a polo player on the upper left which informs your idiot peers that like them you have more money than sense.)

One day I was in North Devon on a National Trust ‘working holiday’ (i.e. you do hard work for nowt but earn the gratitude of the nation) for a travel piece for the Mail, when on the mini bus back to where we were staying I noticed one of the other guys wearing which led into a small gadget like an oversized USB stick. What’s that, I asked him. An MP3 player he told me. And that’s when discovered how you can listen to music on the go without taking out a mortgage because Apple are such shysters.

The first one I bought — and this was at least 20 years ago — was not very sophisticated, had little memory, and a bugger to use: lose your way in the various menus and you were there till next Christmas trying to get back out. Oh, you could change the ‘colour of the display’ but was that worth it? Yet it did the job and bonus was it came with a voucher to download several tracks for free.

I looked up jazz tracks and among them saw the name the guitarist Dave Fiuczynski. It was one of the ones I downloaded and I liked it. In fact, on the strength of it I decided to buy one of his CDs — and Amandala was the one I chance upon, chosen pretty much at random.

Ironically, though the music he produces as a rule was absolutely nothing like the track of conventional jazz I had downloaded with my voucher (and nothing by Fiuczynski I have since heard — I’ve bought about five more of his albums — is remotely like that track). But I loved it. In an odd sort of way it was music of a kind I’d been waiting for all my life.

Furthermore, if I was a better guitarist and formed a band, Fiuczynski’s music is exactly the kind of music I should like to play. Admittedly, it is marmite, but then you can’t win ’em all. If you like this, check out his other stuff, it’s just as good.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 7 Purple Rain by Prince

One morning, at about 7.30pm, at 45 Milner Road in Kings Heath, Birmingham, in the early 1980s I was woken by my clock radio to a song which grabbed me immediately.

Just as when in that station cafe in Rho I had heard the song Superstition from Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, I distinctly remember thinking: what IS this? Who IS this? Got to find out!

The song was When Doves Cry, and that memory is still as strong and powerful as though it happened yesterday. I can even still see the clock radio to the right of my bed.

The trouble is — as I have just found out while checking up on dates — its complete bollocks. My fond memory of first hearing When Doves Cry is what we bores call — and IF your luck is out will pontificate on at length — ‘a false memory’. It isn’t a memory. It couldn’t have happened. It is something I have made up.

In that memory (though this is not part of it, but what I deduce from my memory and my life at the time) I get up and go to work as usual in Colmore Circus at the Birmingham Evening Mail, no doubt that fabulous song still ringing in my ears, not to be forgotten for the rest of the day.

But it couldn’t have happened: in November 1982 I had left the Evening Mail and landed job (the most boring job in the world) on Power News, the staff newspaper of the then Central Electricity Generating Board.

When Doves Cry wasn’t released for another 20 months in July 1984. And by then I was living at 33, Norlan Drive, Kings Heath, Birmingham, after shacking up with girlfriend in Oxford Road, Moseley, Birmingham for a year. Where I certainly wasn’t — because I could not have been — when When Doves Cry was released was in Milner Road.

The memory is strong, still strong, but you can’t argue with time and the calendar,and quite why I created such a detailed false memory I don’t know and can’t guess.

Ah, the beauty and innocence of totally unnecessary detail. It features a lot in those long-winded, Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces upmarket US magazines are so fond of printing:

‘It was just after 5.45 on a dark and snowy Montana morning. The winged peskies nesting in the pines outside his cabin were still silent. He calmly slid two slugs into the stock of his favourite .85 404 Dietrich-Wurlitzer. He could taste that second Java blend cup of arabica which jacked him up every day. He lit up his third Philip Morris. He had just one thing on his mind: murder.’

You know the kind of thing. No doubt the taps in the bathroom of the Oxford Road bedsit were from the special B&Q Windsor range which even then were hard to find and thus had a certain cachet, but almost 30 years on, there’s no way I can check (and I feel even less inclined to do so than you feel inclined to hear all about it).

Anyhow.

That song was the first Prince song I heard, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It was from the album Purple Rain which features today, but is not the song I’m featuring. As I’ve said before about the other albums, there is not a single week track on Purple Rain, but Darling Nikki stands out and it’s the one you can hear here. Oddly it’s almost a musical hall song (if you get what I mean).

Purple Rain was the first album I bought, except I didn’t buy it as an album but as a cassette. I went on to buy many more Prince albums, although certainly not all of them. Those who don’t know Prince might think that he was just another funk merchant, but he actually produced music in many other genre, or used some of their characteristics.

There’s not much to say about Prince which hasn’t been said a million times before, so I won’t. Not all of his songs grab me as much as others do, but Prince a ‘just average’ is always streets ahead of most other people ‘being good’. He really was a one-off.

One last point I will make, merely because I haven’t yet heard it remarked about Prince pretty much ever, is that he had a great sense of humour. It was quiet an unobtrusive but it was there. And you get the feeling that however seriously he took his work and art — he must have been a perfectionist — you never get the feeling he took himself too seriously. And that is quite rare in folk at his level.

One finally irony of Prince’s life (and death) is that he didn’t ‘do’ drugs like pretty much the rest of the music industry (many of whom make a fetish out of it like that dickhead Lou Reed). ‘What you putting up your nose / is that where all your money goes’ he sings in Pop Life.

Yet he became addicted to the painkiller Vicodin which he had started taking because all the trolloping around on stage in platform soles had done his hips in. And according to a the Minnesota justice system he inadvertently been taking counterfeit Vicodin that was laced with fentanyl.

One of the greats. I like to think he’s now somewhere in the beyond chewing the fat with Mozart. Who knows?