Sketch of Freddy Mercury as Orpheus

I’m a great fan of Symbolist art. This was a 19th century European art movement, of which the Pre-Raphaelites were a part in Britain, which used painting to point to a higher, transcendent reality. It often depicted figures from Graeco-Roman myth. I was inspired in this sketch by Carlos Schwabe’s painting of Orpheus, which shows the head of the Greek hero on his lyre on a moonlit river. I wondered about updating it to the world of modern pop stars, and who the modern Orpheus would be. I’m also a fan of Queen, so I thought it would be Freddy Mercury. He was flamboyant, camp, but a massively talented, charismatic showman, who, in my opinion, is one of the great British rock gods. I’m sure you can think of other contenders to be a modern Orpheus – Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Lennon/ Macartney, David Bowie and so on. Bowie would be a good alternative, as he was influenced by the occult. Apparently his last album, Black Star, is full of occult imagery. Orphism was an ancient Greek cult that has been seen as a form of shamanism, and some Symbolists were very strongly into occultism and heterodox mysticism. But I preferred Mercury.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain Plays Silver Machine

This is a bit of fun for people who like classic British 70s rock. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are a group that plays rock and pop pieces on the ukulele. As you can see, they wear dinner dress, and their performances include more than a little humour. In their singular rendition of the theme from ‘Shaft’ they make a few punning references to Cecil Sharp, the folk music collector.

‘Silver Machine’ was one of Hawkwind’s hits. As two of the commenters to the video on the orchestra’s YouTube channel, UkuleleOrchestra, point out, it’s actually about a silver bicycle belonging to Hawkwind’s main man, David Brock. Steve Sneyd, the expert on science fiction poetry, in his little book on Hawkwind and their lyrics, Gnawing Medusa’s Flesh, says that it’s actually inspired by a piece by the French proto-Surrealist Alfred Jarry. This was How To Build A Time Machine, but was really a construction manual for building a bike. Which shows the band’s sense of humour, as well as their knowledge of French avant-garde literature.

There were a lot of rumours going around about Hawkwind when I was at school. One was that there was a particular chord or note they would play on their synthesizer, that would make the audience lose control of their bowels. This was just when people were becoming aware of infrasound and the effect certain ultra-high or low frequencies would have on people. But would any rock band actually use such a chord, even if it existed? After all, how many people, no matter how hard core their love of the band, would want to come back to hear them after they’d all collectively soiled themselves for that band’s amusement. Probably very few. It’s nonsense, but it’s part of the rock and pop rumour mill, like the stories that Paul McCartney is dead and has been replaced by a double, Elvis is serving burgers in a supermarket somewhere and various Heavy Metal bands really have sold their soul to Satan.

As for all the hoo-ha on social media about Sam Smith and the rest performing Satanic rituals at the Grammy’s, I’d far prefer it if they performed instead another Hawkwind hit, ‘Space Ritual’. That would be far more fun, but it’s a blast from the past and so would be out of place at an event celebrating contemporary pop. Unfortunately.

But back to the video: is it me, or is the singer deliberately trying to look like William Hartnell’s 1st Doctor?

A Happy Star Trek Christmas

Okay, it’s New Year’s Eve and the Christmas season is nearly at an end. I thought I’d post this jolly Christmas video up before it’s all over and those who still have jobs go back to work. It was posted by ‘Why, Mr Spock’ on his YouTube channel, and shows various festival scenes from the original Star Trek series while Paul McCartney sings ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time’. I suppose I could also run a quiz for Trekkers asking them to identity the individual episodes from which these clips are taken. Enjoy!

Two Fake Beatles’ Songs with the Title ‘Pink Litmus Paper Shirt’

I went to a brilliant Zoom meeting Thursday night. It was a talk about some of the weird myths surrounding the Beatles. This included the conspiracy theory that John Lennon was assassinated by the CIA, and that his killer had been brainwashed using MK-Ultra mind control techniques as a ‘Manchurian candidate’. Other myths are that Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and been replaced by a double. I can’t remember the double’s name, but he came third in a Beatles lookalike competition. There was a similar myth about George Harrison, which claimed that he had died in the early ’70s of cancer. The source from this was a mad American woman, who believed his spirit was still hanging around in the astral plane somewhere giving her telepathic messages. Like the Macca myths, there were also supposed to be clues in on the covers of his albums. One showed him as the only person in colour in a posed scene that strongly resembled Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper. Another had him as some kind of ascended being in the sky looking down on Earth. The myth appears to have gained some verisimilitude because Harrison’s musical style changed radically after he left the Beatles to the extent that he lost many of his former fans. Hence the belief that he had been died and been replaced by an imposter.

The speaker also presented a very strong argument for Ringo Starr being greatly underappreciated. Rather than a mediocre drummer, he’s actually a very skilful performer. He was deliberately headhunted and lured away from another band by McCartney and Lennon, who were also in competition with King Size Taylor and the Dominoes for his talents. The film Hard Day’s Night, made on a shoestring by Richard Lester, showed that he had real acting chops that were greater than the other Beatles. The film was instrumental in achieving the Beatles’ popularity in America. Starr has continued to make a number of movies, although Caveman, where he was constantly drunk on set due to alcoholism, does not redound to his credit. As a musician, he’s been more prolific than Paul McCartney. And then there is the pernicious rumour that he’s really Jewish. I think this is because of his surname, ‘Starr’, which is actually assumed. His original surname was ‘Starkey’. Nevertheless a website, Jew Or Not, devoted to discussing which celebs are really Jewish, gave him 80 per cent on the grounds that, although he was a gentile, he ticked the right boxes. The rumour resulted in Ringo being given police protection during a 1966 concert in Montreal with a detective squatting next to his drums because he’d received an anti-Semitic death threat.

Then there’s all the stories about backmasking and backward messages. But the speaker considered the best example of this to be on one of the songs by the 90s band the Boo Radleys. They really do have a bit of backwards music. When you play it backwards, however, what you hear is them singing the advertising jingle ‘If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club’. This may also be a deliberate link, as Jane Asher, a former girlfriend of Macca’s, appeared in the advert and the Boo Radleys were very much into the Beatles and would have been aware of this.

Then there are all the rumours that the Beatles never really split up, and have continued releasing songs under the guise of other bands. Some of these have sounded so much like the Beatles, that they appear in bootleg Beatles recordings. This happened to such an extent with one track that Yoko Ono, unable to find out who really made it, copyrighted it. These tracks are based on the myth that there are several unreleased Beatles’ tracks with titles like ‘Deckchair’ and ‘Pink Litmus Paper Shirt’. In fact this is based on a spoof article written in the early 1970s by a journo at the music magazine Disc. He made the songs up, which really didn’t exist, and then reviewed them as if they did. ‘Deckchair’ was supposed to be Macca, and ‘Pink Litmus Paper Shirt’ was a piece of psychedelia by John Lennon. But this has led to bands releasing tracks with those titles, such as a weird piece by the very weird band Strange Turn,and he played a couple of them. I’ve found them on YouTube. Have a listen for yourself. They’re actually good songs and so much in the Beatles’ style that it’s totally understandable how some people have come to believe that the first, at least, really was by the Fab Four.

First the fake song:

Now Strange Turn’s take on the title. A comment to the song by Secrettimewarp adds the following information: ”Pink Litmus Paper Shirt’ was a fake song title devised by Beatle fan Martin Lewis (along with “Colliding Circles”). This is just that old favorite ‘Peace of Mind’, a demo by the Pretty Things.’

Now for Strange Turn’s piece with the same title:

I actually like Strange Turn’s track and think it’s really good. And this is only a couple of the songs released by various artists with that title.

Cartoon: The Dead Thatchers – Eton Uber Alles

Hi, and here’s another of my cartoons satirising the Tories and their utterly reprehensible politicos and other members. In this case, the cartoon takes the form of a sleeve image for a non-existent punk band, the Dead Thatchers, and an equally non-existent song, ‘Eton Uber Alles’. It shows David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson and George Osborne in front of the gates of Auschwitz, which bears the infamous slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ and the cartoon’s punchline, as you can see, is ‘You will row for the master race’. It’s a reference to the Eton boating song,which itself got poached and revamped in the 1980s by Paul McCartney into the Frog Chorus.

The cartoon’s inspiration is the American punk outfit, The Dead Kennedys, and their song, ‘Kalifornia Uber Alles’. As punks, the Kennedys really hated hippies, and so the song’s just a rant about how California is some kind of hippy Third Reich. I was never a fan of the Dead Kennedys, but I do remember the song had the lines ‘Hippy Nazis will control you, you will jog for the master race!’ Which in the context of a Britain dominated by Eton would obviously be boating.

Now there’s a lot that can be said about hippies both pro and con, but they definitely weren’t Nazis. There was, apparently, a Hippy Nazi party, but they were in Florida, and from their name sound like a rather tasteless joke. They sound like an attempt to wind up the straights, rather than any serious Fascist organisation. Unfortunately, with the way so many of the British ruling class were initially very sympathetic towards Nazi Germany, flocking to organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship, it’s probably a fair bet that the fathers or grandfathers of many of the boys now at Eton really were Nazi sympathizers. Though I’m not, of course, claiming that those of the four depicted above were.

And there is a serious point for my placing them in front of the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, and it’s the same reason people have scrawled it on the walls of Jobcentres and put up photoshopped images of the same. The pro-Israel fanatics and Tories attacked those images and graffiti as anti-Semitic, claiming that they were somehow turning the Holocaust into a joke. However, as Mike explained in his piece last Saturday about the appearance of the slogan on another Jobcentre, this certainly isn’t a case. The phrase translates into English as ‘Work Makes (You) Free’. According to Tony Greenstein, the slogan was on the gates of all the Nazi camps, including those housing gentile prisoners. It was not used exclusively for the Jews, and first appeared on a concentration camp for non-Jews. It’s been applied to the Tories and their administration of the DWP, particularly by Iain Duncan Smith, because they really do seem to have a very Fascistic attitude to the poor and disabled.

The Tories have a mantra about ‘making work pay’, and have deliberately adopted a policy of ‘less eligibility’ towards the disabled and the unemployed in order to deter and punish them for claiming benefit. It takes five weeks after someone has signed on before they receive their first payment under Universal Credit. This is also less than the amount they would have received under the previous, benefit systems. There is an extensive system of sanctions, in which claimants can be thrown off their benefits on the flimsiest of excuses. The disabled are subjected to work capability tests, in which a certain percentage are always found fit work, even when the poor souls are severely disabled and even in several cases terminally ill. Grieving relatives and friends have even found their loved one’s receiving letters from the DWP informing them that they have been found fit for work, and so no longer liable for incapacity and related benefits after they’ve died. It has also been revealed that Maximus, the organisation responsible for administering the tests, like its predecessor Atos, has regularly falsified the results in order to get claimants thrown off benefits.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/14/firms-that-falsified-thousands-of-benefit-assessments-set-to-get-contracts-to-falsify-thousands-more/

Mike in his article on Sunday, 8th March 2020 put up this meme reminding everyone how IDS started an article for the online edition of one of the papers actually praising the slogan and defending it against its use by the Nazis. The offending paragraph disappeared soon after, but not before shocked and horrified people had taken screenshots of it and put them back up so everyone could see just how low Iain Duncan Smith is. Here’s the meme:

As one tweeter, Paula Peters, quoted by Mike in his article points out, the language used by the Tories about the disabled is very much the same the Nazis used in the Third Reich. They’re denounced as ‘useless eaters’ and scroungers. The term ‘workshy’, used to describe the long-term unemployed, is also taken from the Nazis. It’s the English translation of ‘arbeitscheu’. And the habitually or long-term unemployed were also branded ‘asocial’ and placed in the concentration camps.

The Tories do this because they have a fundamentally eugenicist view of the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. They are biologically inferior, ‘dysgenic’, who threaten the healthy purity of the rest of the human race and particularly the biologically superior. Who are naturally the rich, especially the heads of big business. Hence the Tory policy of forcing them off benefits, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands. It’s estimated that about 120,000 people have been killed by Tory austerity. But there is no apology nor any attempt to alter or improve conditions despite continuing revelations of the hardship inflicted on millions of people. Instead the Tories merely double down, repeated their lies about how, under them, the economy was booming and more people were in work than ever before. As for the deaths, they have done everything they can to hide the figures and prevent disability rights activists and carers, like Mike, from obtaining them. Hence putting the Tories in front of that slogan is very appropriate.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/08/hypocrisy-over-language-used-to-describe-dwp-oppression-of-benefit-claimants/

Here’s the cartoon. As always, I hope you enjoy it. And please, don’t have nightmares. It’s only Iain Duncan Smith!

 

Thinking the Unthinkable: Move Parliament out of London

From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us

-16th Century beggars’ prayer.

Last week The Economist recommended that the government cease trying to revive declining northern towns and leave them to die. The main example of such a town, where further intervention was deemed to be useless, was Hull, but the magazine also mentioned a number of others, including Burnley. The Economist is the magazine of capitalist economic orthodoxy in this country. Its stance is consistently Neo-Liberal, and the policies it has always demanded are those of welfare cuts and the privatisation of everything that isn’t nailed down. It has loudly supported the IMF’s recommendations of these policies to the developing world. Some left-wing magazines and organisation like Lobster have pointed out that the IMF’s policies effectively constitute American economic imperialism, citing the IMF’s proposals to several South and Meso-American nations. These were not only told to privatise their countries’ state assets, but to sell them to American multinationals so that they could be more efficiently managed.

The Economist’s advice that economically hit northern towns should be ‘closed down’ also reflects the almost exclusive concentration of the metropolitan establishment class on London and south-east, and their complete disinterest and indeed active hostility to everything beyond Birmingham. This possibly excludes the Scots Highlands, where they can go grouse shooting. It was revealed a little while ago that back in the 1980s one of Thatcher’s cabinet – I forgotten which one – recommended a similar policy towards Liverpool. Recent economic analyses have shown that London and the south-east have become increasingly prosperous, and have a higher quality of life, while that of the North has significantly declined. The London Olympics saw several extensive and prestigious construction projects set up in the Docklands area of London, intended both to build the infrastructure needed for the Olympics and promote the capital to the rest of the world. It’s also been predicted that the high-speed rail link proposed by the Coalition would not benefit Britain’s other cities, but would lead to their further decline as jobs and capital went to London. A report today estimated that 50 cities and regions, including Bristol, Cardiff, Aberdeen and Cambridge would £200 million + through the rail link. The Economist’s article also demonstrates the political class’ comprehensive lack of interest in manufacturing. From Mrs Thatcher onwards, successive administrations have favoured the financial sector, centred on the City of London. Lobster has run several articles over the years showing how the financial sector’s prosperity was bought at the expense of manufacturing industry. Despite claims that banking and financial industry would take over from manufacturing as the largest employer, and boost the British economy, this has not occurred. The manufacturing has indeed contracted, but still employs far more than banking, insurance and the rest of the financial sector. The financial sector, however, as we’ve seen, has enjoyed massively exorbitant profits. The Economist claims to represent the interests and attitudes of the financial class, and so its attitude tellingly reveals the neglectful and contemptuous attitude of the metropolitan financial elite towards the troubled economic conditions of industrial towns outside the capital.

Coupled with this is a condescending attitude that sees London exclusively as the centre of English arts and culture, while the provinces, particularly the North, represent its complete lack. They’re either full of clod-hopping yokels, or unwashed plebs from the factories. Several prominent Right-wingers have also made sneering or dismissive comments about the North and its fate. The art critic and contrarian, Brian Sewell, commented a few years ago that ‘all those dreadful Northern mill towns ought to be demolished’. Transatlantic Conservatism has also felt the need to adopt a defensive attitude towards such comments. The American Conservative, Mark Steyn, on his website declared that criticism of London was simply anti-London bias, but didn’t tell you why people were so critical of the metropolis or its fortunes. This situation isn’t new. At several times British history, London’s rising prosperity was marked by decline and poverty in the rest of the country. In the 17th century there was a recession, with many English ports suffering a sharp economic decline as London expanded to take 75 per cent of the country’s trade. The regional ports managed to survive by concentrating on local, coastal trade rather than international commerce, until trade revived later in the century.

It’s also unfair on the North and its cultural achievements. The North rightfully has a reputation for the excellence of its museum collections. The region’s museums tended to be founded by philanthropic and civic-minded industrialists, keen to show their public spirit and their interest in promoting culture. I can remember hearing from the director of one of the museum’s here in Bristol two decades ago in the 1990s how he was shocked by the state of the City’s museum when he came down here from one of the northern towns. It wasn’t of the same standard he was used to back home. What made this all the more surprising was that Bristol had a reputation for having a very good museum. Now I like Bristol Museum, and have always been fascinated by its collections and displays, including, naturally, those on archaeology. My point here isn’t to denigrate Bristol, but simply show just how high a standard there was in those of the industrial north. Liverpool City Museum and art gallery in particular has a very high reputation. In fact, Liverpool is a case in point in showing the very high standard of provincial culture in the 19th century, and its importance to Britain’s economic, technological and imperial dominance. Liverpool was a major centre in scientific advance and experiment through its philosophical and literary society, and its magazine. This tends to be forgotten, overshadowed as it has been by the city’s terrible decline in the 20th century and its setting for shows dealing with working-class hardship like Boys from the Black Stuff and the comedy, Bread. Nevertheless, its cultural achievements are real, quite apart from modern pop sensations like the Beatles, Cilla Black, Macca and comedians like Jimmy Tarbuck. The town also launched thousands of young engineers and inventors with the Meccano construction sets, while Hornby railways delighted model railway enthusiasts up and down the length of Britain. These two toys have been celebrated in a series of programmes exploring local history, like Coast. Hornby, the inventor of both Meccano and the model railway that bore his name, was duly celebrated by the science broadcaster, Adam Hart-Davis, as one of his Local Heroes.

And Liverpool is certainly not the only city north of London with a proud history. Think of Manchester. This was one of Britain’s major industrial centres, and the original hometown of the Guardian, before it moved to London. It was a major centre of the political debates and controversies that raged during the 19th century, with the Guardian under Feargus O’Connor the major voice of working class radicalism. It was in industrial towns like Manchester that working class culture emerged. Books like The Civilisation of the Crowd show how mass popular culture arose and developed in the 19th century, as people from working-class communities attempted to educate themselves and enjoy music. They formed choirs and brass bands. Working men, who worked long hours used their few spare hours to copy sheet music to sing or play with their fellows. The various mechanics institutes up and down the country were institutions, in which the working class attempted to educate itself and where contemporary issues were discussed. It’s an aspect of industrial, working class culture that needs to be remembered and celebrated, and which does show how strong and vibrant local culture could be in industrial towns outside London.

Back in the 1990s the magazine, Anxiety Culture, suggested a way of breaking this exclusive concentration on London and the interests of the metropolitan elite to the neglect of those in the provinces. This magazine was a small press publication, with a minuscule circulation, which mixed social and political criticism with Forteana and the esoteric, by which I mean alternative spirituality, like Gnosticism, rather than anything Tory prudes think should be banned from the internet, but don’t know quite what. In one of their articles they noted that when a politician said that ‘we should think the unthinkable’, they meant doing more of what they were already doing: cutting down on welfare benefits and hitting the poor. They recommended instead the adoption of a truly radical policy:

Move parliament out of London.

They listed a number of reasons for such a genuinely radical move. Firstly, it’s only been since the 18th century that parliament has been permanently fixed in London. Before then it often sat where the king was at the time. At various points in history it was at Winchester near the Anglo-Saxon and Norman kings’ treasury. It was in York during Edward I’s campaign against the Scots. In short, while parliament has mostly been resident in London, it hasn’t always been there, and so there is no absolutely compelling reason why it should remain so.

Secondly, London’s expensive. The sheer expensive of living in the capital was always so great that civil servants’ pay including ‘London weighting’ to bring it up to the amount they’d really need to live on in the capital, which was always higher than in the rest of the country. The same was true for other workers and employees. As we’ve seen, these inequalities are growing even more massive under the Tories, and there is talk of a demographic cleansing as poorer families are forced to move out of some of the most expensive boroughs in the capital. MPs and the very rich may now afford to live in luxury accommodation in the metropolis, but I wonder how long it will be before the capital’s infrastructure breaks down because so many of its workers simply cannot afford to live there. The government has declared that it is keen on cutting expenses, and public sector employees’ salaries have been particularly hard hit. The government could therefore solve a lot of its problems – such as those of expense, and the cost in time and money of negotiating the heavy London traffic – by relocating elsewhere.

Birmingham would be an excellent place to start. This has most of what London has to offer, including excellent universities and entertainment centres, such as the NEC, but would be much cheaper. Or York. During the Middle Ages, this was England’s Second City. It’s an historic town, with a history going back to the Romans. The excavations at Coppergate made York one of the major British sites for the archaeology of the Vikings. It also has an excellent university. One could also recommend Durham. When I was growing up in the 1980s, Durham University was considered the third best in the country, following Oxbridge. Manchester too would be an outstanding site for parliament. Apart from its historic associations with working class politics, it has also been a major centre of British scientific research and innovation. Fred Hoyle, the astronomer and maverick cosmologist, came from that fair city. While he was persistently wrong in supporting the steady-state theory against the Big Bang, he was one of Britain’s major astronomers and physicists, and Manchester University does have a very strong tradition of scientific research and innovation. British politicians are also keen to show that they are now tolerant with an inclusive attitude towards gays. Manchester’s Canal Street is one of the main centres of gay nightlife. If parliament really wanted to show how tolerant it was of those in same-sex relationship, it would make sense for it to move to Manchester.

Furthermore, relocating parliament to the north should have the effect of reinvigorating some of these cities and the north generally. The influx of civil servants and highly paid officials and ministers would stimulate the local economy. It would also break the myopic assumption that there is nothing of any value outside London. If the government and its servants continued to feel the same way, then they would have the option of actually passing reforms to improve their new homes by providing better road and rail links, improving local education, building or better funding theatres, orchestras and opera companies, investing in local businesses to support both the governmental infrastructure, but also to provide suitable work for themselves and their children, when they retire from the Civil Service. In short, moving parliament out of London to the midlands or the North would massively regenerate those part of England.

It won’t happen, because the current financial, political and business elite are very much tied to the metropolis as the absolute centre of English life and culture. They won’t want to leave its theatres, art galleries and museums, or move away from nearby sporting venues, like Ascot. They would find the idea of moving out of London absolutely unthinkable. But perhaps, as Anxiety Culture suggested twenty years ago, it is time that these ideas were thought, rather than the banal and all-too often ruminated policies of cutting benefits and penalising the poor.