Orgy of Bess

                 

Having observed the late Queen solely via television and the press since her coronation in 1953, (I was 2 at the time), I am convinced of one thing: she loathed ostentation. Ceremonial duties aside, she deplored extravagance in everything from breakfast to holidays. Her wardrobe, her interests, her activities and her instincts always inclined to the sensible, the humdrum, the dull, if you like. And this was her essential sanity. This was the harness that kept her on the throne for 70 years, the core that kept her level-headed and circumspect. There was no ‘I’, no ‘Me’, only ‘My husband and I’ or the evident duties of state.

So I doubt that in the 10 days since her passing, on the day of her burial she would be looking on with delight at the nation’s orgy of conspicuous mourning. Distaste, more likely. She served the nation, yes, in the stale cliché of headlines, but as her people, the ones whose loyalty en masse preserved her on the throne for so long. But the ceaseless torrent of emotional drainage harks back to Diana’s death and we know full well how much the late Queen liked parading her feelings in public.

None of those who lined the streets of London in September, 1997 knew the Princess of Wales other than via media hysteria. Very few could have met her even briefly. Synthetic emotion inexplicably took hold of the British, an emotion sedulously cultivated by the Prime Minister of the day to the point of coercing the Royal Family to abandon their private mourning at Balmoral and hasten to London to exhibit their complex feelings before the motley.

It is for this reason that the late Queen had a lasting abhorrence of Tony Blair. Not that he cared. He was more interested in ‘the people’s princess’ (cringe) and his own moral vanity and self-promotion. I watched the broadcast where he uttered that dreadful phrase. The calculated catch in his throat marked him as a ham actor, something that ran through his own life in politics and after. And presumption, of course.

So, what next? I don’t mean King Charles III or his Queen Consort but the media – the telly, the press. What on earth will they do now? I fear a re-run of the recent palaver is on its way. There’s nothing on the telly. Not now. And all the distraught, grief-stricken people? They’ll have to go to the doctor’s (if they’re open) and get a prescription or require a spell of furlough to get over the trauma. And who could refuse them?

Liz Truss?

Nadia Nadir Writes Wrongs

How right it was for her majesty to communicate from the undiscovered bourne from whose country no traveller returns (I’ve read ‘Hamlet, too Charlie  III) her wish that the whole country should close down on Monday as a show of respect for her much-lamented passing.

Why should doctors and nurses treat the same old patients in the same old place when we should all be standing in the streets, shoulder to shoulder, waving flags and sobbing symphonies in sympathy? Let our wonderful NHS lead the funeral procession, yes in their starched uniforms and caps and GPs in their white coats and stethoscopes, marching in step with the military in their full regalia.

What if thousands of operations and medical appointments are cancelled? It’s only one day. What happened to the Dunkirk spirit?

And why should council workers, our key workers, not have a day off? Why should they collect, refuse, empty wheelie bins and carry out the mundane tasks which we pay them for? And who said kids and teachers need to be in school? I thought lockdown had proved conclusively that a day not in school is not a day wasted. Or a year, come to that. Or two.

And what if funerals were cancelled? For heaven’s sake, her majesty is dead! Another day in the morgue won’t kill you. Climb back into your coffin and pipe down! Let’s face it, Monday is not a day for going to the cinema, sitting in a café, having a driving test, travelling by bus or train, or having a wedding.

And it’s no good driving around aimlessly because all the roadworks are on hold while the workers have another holiday. If you want someone to fix your road, matey, go to the pub, that’s where they’ll all be.

Of course, all these closures will have a knock-on effect. It may be that we don’t catch up with ourselves till Christmas but never forget:                      IT’S WHAT SHE WOULD HAVE WANTED!

So, which bright spark at the Palace came up with the ridiculous idea of closing down Great Britain plc on the day of the old queen’s funeral?

Name the guilty men! And then sack them! Or throw them in the Tower of London and throw away the key. I mean, why not close the NHS down altogether? Why not six months of mourning like the Old Vic had when Albert shuffled off the old mortal?

Blimey, it’s hard enough to see a GP anyway, never mind having a life-saving operation. It’s not as if doctors, nurses, consultants, Tom, Dick and Jerry want anything to do with us at all. Patients? Uuurgh! A dirty word in the NHS. Come off it, Liz, order these slackers back to work on pain of being struck off. Are they losing a day’s pay for this jolly? I don’t think so.

And as for refuse collection. It’s obvious that every council wants its towns and cities to be twinned with Glasgow: Rat Empire, the 3^rd World on your doorstep. Come back Nicola Sturgeon, all is forgiven.

So, contrary to what I read the Royal Family actually wished, the Great British public will be denied the amenities which they have paid for out of ‘respect’ for the old queen. Disrespect, I call it! So forget all about:

Going to the zoo

Gyms

Leisure Centres

Swimming

Local Markets

Theatres

Cinemas

Concerts

Safari parks

Stately Homes

Museums

Art Galleries

But you’ve paid for your ticket? Tough.

Write to Charles III, c/o Buckingham Palace and ask for a refund.

In the meantime, Stay Indoors, Stay Safe, Protect the NHS and watch another 24 hours of sycophantic twaddle until you go into a coma. Because that’s what I’ll be doing.

Next Time: The Day After: Tuesday, 20 September – the body count.

Nadia Nadir Writes

If you revere ‘em, don’t get near ‘em.

Watching the recent wall to wall coverage of her majesty’s death and in particular the six hour journey of the funeral cortege from the gates of Balmoral to the gates of Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh the old saw struck me as never before. Now I estimate that since the official announcement at 18-00 hours on Friday, 9 September and up to her majesty’s state funeral on Monday, 19 September, a total of 11 days, we will have watched a total of 132 hours of royal mourning across the United Kingdom coverage on the BBC alone. Throw in the 10 major broadcasters in the UK and you’ve got 1,320 hours. And if you add the world-wide media interest, at a conservative estimate 50 countries, you’ve got a grand total of  around 66,000 hours viewing time of the passing of the old queen. Is this enough? Are we short-changing her majesty?

Who hasn’t doted on an adorable ginger grandson, even he is a bit of a scamp? Or watched him grow into a man so unlike his father and brother? Who hasn’t chuckled at his little indiscretions? And what grandmother has not been appalled by the grand-daughter-in-law appearing on the scene with her wicked wiles to bewitch, bother and bewilder her cute little soldier boy? Isn’t it time everyone got off his or her high horse and made her majesty’s day by clasping this olive-skinned, doe-eyed princess of the Wild West into the Royal bosom? Surely if Charles has bagged Balmoral and Wills and Kate are moving lock, stock and barrel into Windsor they can at least give Sandringham to the young duke and his enchanting dusky duchess with their café au lait children! Does diversity count for nothing these days? If Liz Truss can pack her cabinet with every shade of political colours and an assortment of funny names that are a bit of a mouthful to say the least – Kwami Kwazi-Wotsit? Kami Kazebadenoch? Sue-Ellen Braver-Ewing? Nadhim (no relation) Swahili? – why not the House of Windsor?

I say Hooray for Hollywood and as soon as the Sussexes plant their feet and fly their flag at full mast the sooner this country will be back on its feet!

Next Week: Andrew gets the corgis?!?!?! Has the Palace taken leave of its senses? Would you leave your beloved moggy or doggy with Andy and Fergie? What if they go to Pizza Express?

Nadia Nadir Writes Again

I see some of the faint-hearted fannies are waffling about how dreadful it is for hundreds of thousands of her loyal subjects to be queuing for more than 30 hours to pay their respects to our beloved dead queen.

Poppycock! We are world-beaters in queuing! Why, the British invented queuing! And now some smarmy, wet-behind-the-nose jobsworth is telling us not to!

What does he think will happen to the 400,000 mourners queuing for her majesty? HER MAJESTY, not any old deadbeat who’s popped her clogs! What do these moaning minnies think is going to happen?

• Thousands of children abducted by sex traffickers?
• Tens of thousands of pensioners keeling over as ambulances cannot get anywhere near the stupendous queue?
• Terrorists running amok with knives and machetes or petrol bombs or flasks of acid?
• Hardened jihadists making a calculated and vicious plot to blow up all the foreign heads of state gathered in one place?
• The Embankment and Westminster Hall swimming in pensioners’ poo and rivers of ancient wee coursing along the Mall?
• The police mounting a mopping up operation lasting three days and rivalling Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables?
• Dozens of toddlers abandoned by parents as the queue runs amok?
• Riots as Portaloos are belatedly delivered to the Embankment running over many people old and young in the process

Come off it, you big girl’s blouse! Yes, Jonathan Haslam, I’m talking to you.

Now for goodness’ sake let the great British public do what they do best, making futile sacrifices!

Married to the Spare

Married to the Spare

This week Julia Hartley-Brewer nailed the Meghan Markle myth:

“You’re just a two-bit actress married to the spare!”

A great many of us have known this from the outset: Fake Fake Fake.

Another failing, ageing ‘actress’ from the colonies hitching her worn-out wagon to the British aristocracy. A relic of the 1890s. So much for the fresh face of the New Woman.

Traditionally a duke would do but she scooped the pot snatching up the ginger knob-head formerly known as Prince Harry and sucking the last few brain cells out of his numb-skull and turning him into a zombie. Not the most challenging task with a Royal, I agree, but Harry got brainwashed so fast it seemed like there was nothing to him at all, an empty uniform, a brain-dead brat.

Yoko. That’s how Harry’s one-time friends called her. Yoko, who sucked the life out of John Lennon and was clearly an inspiration for the po-faced, pious pretensions and hypocrisy of Meghan. She traduced and trashed her own family and as soon as she had Harry and the ring round her finger she got him to trash his. Saves on Christmas presents, I guess. Birthdays too.

The ‘beloved’ Duke and Duchess, ‘adored’ around the world for their humility, modesty, compassion and selflessness, required a security cordon like a ‘ring of steel’ for their arrival at the grandiose Youth Conference held in Manchester recently. Nonetheless, the pair were roundly booed by onlookers as they entered the conference hall.

The Duchess was to give a speech on ‘Gender Equality’. The seven minute speech contained 54 references to her, painting a portrait of the most sainted woman and mother since the Virgin Mary, peppered with coy looks and dimpled smiles at the Duke. He did not speak. He sat stiffly and awkwardly listening to her encomium of self-praise. Once he may have entertained the notion of being the leading man; now he knows he has been consigned to a bit part in The Meghan Markle Show. And as the poor, wretched man knows, The Show Must Go On.

All the reporters at the conference panned her speech. The self-adoration of the Meghan was a vanity too far. Once Netflix cancel their contract with the Markles and publishers quietly drop them and fancy magazines start saying ‘Harry who?’ the show will be over. Deep inside his woke-larded porridge that passes for his brain, Harry knows that. Alas, Meghan is so lost in the cobweb of delusions she has spun for so long that reality can never intrude. She is headed for Sunset Boulevard, if only she knew it. But one doubts that this self-styled ‘actress’ has ever heard of Billy Wilder’s masterpiece of Hollywood noir. Even if she did see it and the comparison with Norma Desmond sprang to mind she would again be deluded. She is playing the part of Wallis Simpson. What was it Marx said about history? It repeats itself first as tragedy, second as farce. It’s time to bring the curtain down on The Meghan Markle Show.

Gold-diggers of the Golden Age                                                  from history.com

When Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill announced their engagement in 1874, his parents were horrified. The couple had only known one another for three days, and Jerome—the tattooed daughter of a philandering financier and a social climber—was an American socialite, not a British noblewoman. Appalled, the Churchills tried to block the match…until they did the math. Jerome’s family might have humble origins, but they were outrageously wealthy. Lord Randolph’s parents were not, and Jerome’s father was willing to pay a dowry that equalled the equivalent of over $4.3 million dollars today. The marriage went forward with the grudging approval of Lord Randolph’s parents.

They could have no way of knowing that Jerome, who became Lady Randolph Churchill when she married in 1874, would be the mother of a future prime minister, Winston—or that by allowing their aristocratic son to barter his title for much-needed wealth, they had helped spark a trend. Between the late 19th century and World War II, a flood of “dollar princesses” flocked to England looking for love. In return for a coveted title, they offered their much-needed wealth to an aristocracy desperate for cash. And along the way, they helped change British royalty forever—including the lives of the modern-day heirs to Britain’s throne. Jerome was just one of hundreds of heiresses thought to have injected the equivalent of a billion pounds into the British economy. The exchange was worth it in their eyes; they knew that marriages to people with titles like Lord, Viscount and Duke would improve their family’s fortunes back in the United States and solidify their position on the American social circuit.

The interest was reciprocal. By the late 19th century, the British nobility was down on its luck. Though they owned extensive lands and massive homes, the Gilded Age was tough on the aristocracy. Their lives were financed by their agricultural holdings, but when the United States began cultivating grain on its prairies, England, which had been a worldwide leader in grain production, suffered. As rural populations fell, so did the fortunes of aristocrats.

This depression turned the landed gentry, which had once been the world’s wealthiest, into second-class citizens compared to America’s elite, who were becoming ever wealthier thanks to the United States’ rich natural resources. And since by default, the aristocracy didn’t work, all those newly cash-poor dukes and viscounts sat by as their fortunes fell even further. Meanwhile, American socialites coveted what they saw as the social status of members of the British aristocracy and royalty. Many of the heiresses of the up-and-coming Gilded Age magnates were daughters of self-made men who didn’t have the social standing of longtime members of high society, and they had trouble gaining acceptance among well-heeled New Yorkers who shunned what they saw as “new money.” A title was seen as a shortcut to social acceptance, and plenty of British aristocrats were willing to trade their titles for cash.

If the marriages sound like cold, hard contractual negotiations, they were. And many of the women who went to England to seek love exchanged their home ties and their comfort for their new titles. Most American heiresses had grown up with modern conveniences. But “after marriage, they found themselves chatelaines of houses where taking a bath involved a housemaid making five trips from the kitchen in the basement, carrying jugs of hot water to fill a hip bath,” author Daisy Goodwin writes in Newsweek. “The stately homes of England were all too often dark, dingy, and terribly cold.” In response, these new wives began to remodel the homes they now inhabited—and often faced snide judgment for doing so. They also faced dismissal and sometimes full-blown ostracism for their non-aristocratic roots. The aristocracy mocked the “dollar princesses” for their social pretensions and turned up their noses at American culture. But back in the United States, that seemed like a small price to pay for a title and entree into a circle so exclusive, no American woman could ever be born into it.

Their enterprising mothers, who helped broker the matches, weren’t their only allies: There was even a publication called Titled Americans that not only listed women who had snagged aristocratic titles, but still unmarried men, their titles, and their reputed fortunes. Armed with this information and introductions from wealthy friends, American girls descended on London every social season.They succeeded: In 1895 alone, nine heiresses married European men with noble titles. Notable matches included that of railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough and dry goods heiress Mary Leiter to Lord Curzon. “Though the British peerage has of late years yielded many titled husbands to American heiresses,” declared the San Francisco Call in 1904, “there is no danger of the supply running short.”

The trend only slowed once the newly rich women who had been shunned by American high society for so long began to be accepted. Now that the economy was all but controlled by wealthy men who had made their own fortunes, high society could hardly snub them or their daughters.By then, the idea of the “dollar princess” had become so ubiquitous that it was part of a pop culture trope. And traces of the trend can be found even in the British royal family: In 1880, stock and railway heiress Frances Ellen Work married the future Baron Fermoy. Like many “dollar princess” matches, it was an unhappy one, and the couple divorced in 1891. A mere baron might sound far from the throne, but not really: Just over a century after Work traded her money to the aristocracy, her great-granddaughter Diana became the Princess of Wales.

Over Gove

Over Gove

The current peaens of praise for Michael Gove, obsequies to all intents and appearances, are remarkable and wonderful. At least, they make me wonder where Fraser Nelson et al have been for the past ten years.

Never has there been such a puffed-up popinjay as Michael Gove, a parliamentary peacock whose sky-high opinion of himself he has barely tried to conceal. It seems to me at least that this itinerant courtier has floated from one cabinet post to another without ever leaving a lasting legacy.

Let us consider the remarkable praise for his tenure as Education Secretary.’ Michael took on the Blob – and Won!’ the received wisdom goes except that one or two facts run counter to this legend.

1. Gove sought to impose an English Baccalaureate composed of broadly academic subjects examined in traditional ways. Revolutionary? Reactionary more like. Presented with a golden opportunity to radically reshape education to provide the majority of students with fulfilling, exacting and rewarding technical, managerial, medical, or service courses leading to useful and employable young people, he fluffed it. He flew straight into the arms of academia and the mania for university started by the scoundrel Blair and directly ensured we would be in the catastrophic educational mess we have today. He even called his ‘new’ schools Academies. How posh. What a great step up from grammar schools. Except they were all still comprehensives and preserved the appalling comprehensive movement Labour via Anthony Crosland began in 1974. Well done, Mr Gove, you gave your full backing to the most disastrous experiment in social policy this country has ever known. (As is well known, Crosland and all his cabinet colleagues save Harold Wilson were all the products of private schools and Oxbridge. Another milestone for parliamentary hypocrisy.)

• The Great Betrayer: MICHAEL GOVE has finally admitted he was wrong to blow up Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2016, saying he bitterly regrets it.

He claims he has told the Prime Minister he is sorry for stabbing him in the back and added: “Everybody knows I made a mistake then.”

 “Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.”                                                                          Michael Gove publicly explodes Boris’s leadership campaign after Brexit success together. The most cold-blooded political betrayal in history. 

In stabbing Boris in the back, front and face, Gove committed his own hara kiri and yet . . .

Such is his brazen and unscrupulous effrontery he scurried back to Boris as soon as Johnson replaced Theresa May and won the General Election in 2019.

What integrity. What character. If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat . . .

• The Level Crossing Guard

After bobbing about the Johnson cabinet doing not very much as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (or CDL, as Gove preferred to be called) BoJo jumps on ‘levelling up’ as the Big Idea and promptly makes Gove the leveller upper Minister-in-Chief.. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, the Italians say, and this was a dish straight out of the freezer. What the precise brief Boris gave Gove will never be known, because the PM had no idea and Gove was stumped. Essentially to exchange Sunderland and Surrey would have done the trick but no-one in Whitehall knew how.

So what did Gove plan to do to level the UK up?

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced in November 2020 that he was changing the way that the benefit of investment was calculated to allow projects with big regional impacts to be prioritised. In October 2021, the government revealed the successful bids for the first round of the £4.8bn Levelling-Up Fund. A total of just under £1.7bn was shared between 105 towns, cities and areas.

In May 2022, BBC Panorama sent freedom-of-information requests to councils in the 100 most deprived areas in England.

It found that 28 councils had their bids rejected. This included 18 areas that were on the government’s top priority list, including Knowsley and Blackpool. Meanwhile, 38 councils won all, or some, of the money they requested, and 34 councils did not submit a bid in this round.

A report from the Public Accounts Committee in June 2022 criticised the process on the basis that ministers had only finalised the principles for awarding the money once they knew which bidders had been shortlisted. It expressed concern that some bidders were successful because they were too optimistic about how soon their projects could be delivered while more realistic bidders missed out.

BBC: Long-promised plans to close the gap between rich and poor parts of the country have been announced by the government.

The strategy, unveiled by Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, will take until 2030 and aims to improve services such as education, broadband and transport. Mr Gove said it would “shift both money and power into the hands of working people”. But Labour said the plans contained no new money and little fresh thinking.

Mr Gove told the BBC the strategy was not aimed at providing new funding but ensuring it is spent effectively on local priorities.

Let’s cut to the chase: Pure Govery, a re-heated stew of abandoned ideas and blue sky thinking blown apart by every think tank and Treasury report since 1979. Pure boloney, sliced wafer thin. With Magic Mike at the helm, seismic improvements are on the horizon toschools, colleges, universities, transport, communications and broadband, freeports, incentives for entrepreneurs and start-ups, a giddy whirl of frothy fantasy with not one thin dime to pay for it all. Pure Gove, 100% Bullshit.

• The Lockdowner General

And never let it be forgotten that Gove was the leading zealot in the cabinet from the outset. From 23 March, 2020, when Boris embarked on the most catastrophic usurpation of democracy, free will and human rights to establish totalitarian control over the public inspired by the likes of career psychotics, demented professors and charlatans like Dominic Cummings, Neil Ferguson and Matt Hancock, Gove was at hand constantly to keep the PM’s wavering hand firmly on the tiller of lockdown. Every single aspect of our welfare state and society, every pillar of what passes for western civilisation was cancelled at a stroke. Gove made an unholy alliance with the ‘fucking useless’ Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock to ensure that other views were silenced or marginalised. The cabal of Gove, Hancock and SAGE cornered Boris who, of course, capitulated at once. The bold libertarian left the building, the cowering, timorous beastie moved into Number 10. If you seek Gove’s monument, look around you.

• Economy –                            bankrupt
• Education –                          bankrupt
• Parliament –                         bankrupt
• Criminal Justice System –  bankrupt
• NHS –                                   bankrupt
• Police –                                 bankrupt
• Ambulance Service –           bankrupt
• Social Care –                        bankrupt

I could go on. Please add to this list. Let it be known that Boris et al did more to ruin this country in six months than Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich did in six years of total war.

Let this be his epitaph: All Bullshit, All Bollocks.

The Office. What Office?

In taking stock at this fin de siècle moment, it seems fair to say that Boris Johnson has proved to be the David Brent of British politics. As Brent regarded management as a branch of show-biz, so Boris showed supremely that the premiership is a stage for ever more brazen jokes at everyone else’s expense.

Dishonoured, shamed repeatedly and cast out by his own parliamentary party he uses his minions to foment discontent in the shires, drumming up deluded battalions wanting Boris on the ballot paper so unrivalled failure and corruption can be reward lavishly with the keys to Versailles once more. Not content with viciously and vindictively maligning his former Chancellor and damning his Foreign Secretary with faint praise, he leaves the ship of state on the high seas in a raging gale with ne’er a backward glance or a farewell to his crew and flies into the sunset with Carrie and co for several far from well-earned holidays.

To cap it all, while away arranges to abandon Number 10 and spend the dying days of his premiership in the grand grace and favour mansion at Chequers, complete with full retinue of armed guards, servants, chefs and sommeliers. If you want a symbol of abdication, look here. If not, look to Joe Biden who spends his 3 day weekends at his palatial home in Delaware only returning to the White House to snooze away the hours.

What dedication! What a stirring display of duty! What a supreme sacrifice!

What rotters. Biden is senile and knows no better but Boris? As Eddie Mair famously said to his face on air at the end of a lengthy TV interview: “You’re quite a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?”

Boris blinked his piggy little eyes, gave half a shrug and looked blankly into the camera.

Although Ricky Gervais and Johnson may seem miles apart, the next time you watch ‘The Office’ look closely: Boris has Brent under his skin.

The Hell of Celerity

                                 The Hell of Celerity

We live in an age that prizes celerity above all. An ever-increasing velocity of life seems to be our collective wish. Possibly our death-wish. We want our limitless labour-saving devices and our technologies to go ever faster and faster, our cars, trains, planes, everything from motorbikes to microwaves. When the internet fails to connect us in seconds we are aggrieved.

Faster and faster everything must go – food, travel, entertainment, the news cycle. As a result we have a greatly diminished capacity for concentration. One might say we have the attention span of gnats, mental may-flies flitting about, going nowhere. In 1966 my O-level set books included ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Twelfth Night’, texts which you would rarely encounter on a degree course today.

And all to extend our ‘free time’ for leisure and relaxation. What nonsense. Celerity has brought us lives more stressed, frenzied and frankly maddening than ever in human history. If we had a remote control to run our lives as we run our televisions, recordings, DVDs et al I am convinced we would fast-forward through all the boring bits (which take up a fair amount of our lives) and compress our whole life-span to five years or less.

We would wish our days away and saunter idly through our lives like a schoolboy tossing sweet wrappers over his shoulder. E-mails, texts, memes, FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter Twatter, Utter Gutter: human communication has never been faster or more forgettable.

The more re race through our lives via technology, the more isolated, empty and worthless they become. We are all millionaires in a bankrupt country. In the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s the deutschmark became worthless. In many countries today inflation is ravaging the economy, the polity and the society. In Venezuela today the inflation rate is 10 Million %. Yes, that’s correct, 10 Million. The Venezuelan bolivar is worthless as soon as it is produced. In Vietnam £100 gets you 1 Million Dongs. When I holidayed there five years ago I was a Dong Millionaire! I felt like a million dongs – for about five seconds. Reality always intrudes.

So what? Well, like all the money in the world the currency of our quality of life, our imaginations, our capacity to read, study, learn, think about everything besides us, our whole purpose and satisfaction as people are going bankrupt. And how that clock ticks faster and faster.

Tempus Fugit.    

                                               Ave Atque Vale.

The Byrds and the Beasts

The Byrds and the Beasts

It now seems beyond doubt that The Byrds were basically a Bob Dylan covers band. All in all they recorded 20 of his songs, an all-time record, more even than Joan Baez and she was briefly his lover from 1964-65.

1. “All I Really Want to Do” – 2:04
2. “Chimes of Freedom” – 3:51
3. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” [1965 Version] – 3:04
4. “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” – 3:31
5. “Lay Lady Lay” [Single Version] – 3:17
6. “Mr. Tambourine Man” – 2:31
7. “My Back Pages” – 3:08
8. “Nothing Was Delivered” – 3:24
9. “Positively 4th Street” [Live] – 3:10
10. “Spanish Harlem Incident” – 1:57
11. “The Times They Are a-Changin'” – 2:18
12. “This Wheel’s on Fire” (Bob Dylan, Rick Danko)  – 4:44
13. “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – 2:33
14. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” [Live] – 3:03
15. “Just Like a Woman” – 3:55
16. “Lay Lady Lay” [Alternate Version] – 3:18
17. “The Times They Are a-Changin'” [Early Version] – 1:54
18. “Mr. Tambourine Man” [Live] – 2:30
19. “Chimes of Freedom” [Live] – 3:24
20. “Paths of Victory” – 3:09

The list of The Byrds’ own songs is not so impressive. ‘Eight Miles High’ does not really stand up or pass the test of time. If you’re on some sorts of drugs it passes pleasantly but Roger McGuinn’s whiny vocals always get me down. So, what have we got?

So You Wanna be a Rock and Roll Star?                       Yes!

I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better                                       Yes! Yes!

Chestnut Mare                          Yes! Yes! Yes!    Whoa, hold on there, Hoss!

This last one is from their ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ country and western phase, the biggest about turn in music since Dylan moved from ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and ‘John Wesley Harding’ to ‘Nashville Skyline’.

Whoops! LA long-hairs and dope-smokers The Byrds go all-fire dang country. Next thing you know they’re everywhere on Sants Monica Boulevard, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, New Riders of the Purple Haze, you name ‘em and they’re a twangin’ and a hollerin’. Jeez.

My point is that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then The Byrds are the biggest arse-lickers outside of the Medici Court in 16^th century Florence.

‘Chestnut Mare’ contains another disturbing turn in the ever-turning Byrds. The lyrics tell their own tale of Roger McGuinn’s take on Country:

Always alone, never with a herd
Prettiest mare I’ve ever seen
You’ll have to take my word

I’m goin’ to catch that horse if I can
And when I do I’ll give her my brand

Well, I was up on Stony Ridge after this chestnut mare
Been chasin’ her for weeks
Oh, I’d catch a glimpse of her every once in a while
Takin’ her meal, or bathin
Fine lady
This one day, I happened to be real close to her
I saw her standin’ over there
So I snuck up on her nice and easy
Got my rope out
And I flung it in the air

I’m goin’ to catch that horse if I can
And when I do, I’ll give her my brand
And we’ll be friends for life
She’ll be just like a wife
I’m goin’ to catch that horse if I can

The song in fact goes on for another forty lines or so, all in McGuinn’s breathless, ecstatic reverie with the key chorus repeated four times.

Now come on, not even Roy Rogers treated Trigger like his wife. Did the Lone Ranger put Silver to bed in his stall at night and curl up next to him? Did any frontier preacher bless this human-equine union? I think not. What John Wayne made of it I cannot imagine.

So, The Byrds and the beasts. That’s All Folks!

(For the record, The Byrds also recorded over 50 covers NOT written by Bob Dylan. I wish I was surprised.)

Sappho on the Ball

Sappho on the Ball

Never have so many lesbians gathered in one place in history. Wembley: Sapphic Paradise.

 I’m joking! Los Angeles Women’s Beach Volleyball Olympics was probably bigger. More to the point, well done ladies! One in the eye for Gareth!

One fly in the ointment, though – if these football girls are so good, why are none of them playing for professional football teams (ie the clubs invariably fielding eleven men)?

And why are none of the successful England women’s team likely to be called up by Gareth Southgate for next Euros or World Cup? Neither tournament, of course, needs the prefix ‘Women’s’

The fatal flaw affecting women’s football, rugby, cricket and tennis is that none of these competitors would cut it in male professional or national sides. Women’s tennis, at least at all the Grand Slams, is utterly patronising. Three set matches. Women have to put in only 60% of the effort and talent men do. And if the women are so good, why have Women’s tennis at all? Let the women compete against the men in every match and let’s see who makes it through to and wins the final, singles, doubles, what you will. The allowances made for women in professional sport and athletics is much like the Paralympics: most heartening but what’s the point? Unless tokenism is your thing, the events are an exercise in condescension.

Watching the recent Euros where the Women’s England team emerged victorious was most instructive. We now know that women’s commentary on games is every bit as banal, repetitive, tedious, gushing, uncritical, inept and embarrassing as their male equivalents, Lineker, Shearer et al. Women have proved convincingly that in the field of sports commentary they can be every bit as vacuous and fatuous as men.

What’s to be done? Nothing. But let’s stop pretending there’s equality where there patently isn’t. The fact that Wimbledon caved in feebly and needlessly to the women’s clamour for equal prize money is a lingering injustice. The women who win at Wimbledon win the same prize money as the male champions without ever facing a man in open play on the court.

What nonsense.

Pop Goes the Whimsy

Whimsy is lethal in most art forms. It is particularly so where you least expect it: the classic pop music of the 60s (before it was christened ‘rock’ by the likes of ‘Rolling Stone’). The Rolling Stones (the group not the LA magazine) started out as pop stars. So did the Beatles. And the Who and the Kinks and the Small Faces and Manfred Mann and just about everyone who made great records at that time until . . . Whimsy stepped in. What counts as pop whimsy? I’ll tell you.

‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’  1967             Beatles

‘Their Satanic Majesties’  1967                                        Rolling Stones

‘The Village Green Preservation Society’  1968            Kinks

‘A Quick One’   1966                                                           Who

‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’  1968                                       Small Faces

The last-named is especially sad for me, painful, almost heart-breaking. From their first hit in 1965, ‘Watcha Gonna Do About It’, to the last rueful, mellow magic of ‘Afterglow of Your Love‘ in 1969, the Small Faces were brilliant masters of the three minute pop song, driving, storming, dancing machines with heart and soul. Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane, Kenny Jones and the superb Ian McLagan on keyboards matched the Beatles at their best, despite the burden of the music press cliché ‘Mods’.

To remind you:

Watcha Gonna Do About It   1965

Sha-la-la-la-lee                     

Hey Girl                                    

All or Nothing                             1966

My Mind’s Eye

I Can’t Make It

Here Come the Nice                 1967

Itchycoo Park

Tin Soldier

Lazy Sunday

The Universal                             1968

Afterglow of Your Love           1969

Four short years, 12 dynamic singles. What went wrong?

The Small Faces were never an album band like the Beatles, the Stones and the Who. The best Small Faces album you can buy will be a Greatest Hits compilation. The one truly excellent album of theirs, ‘The Autumn Stone’, 1969, was really a coda to their career, a farewell, elegiac in its own way.

Alas, the album they did invest their energies in, ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’ in 1968 was a stinker. Whimsy had leached into the mix and inspiration had leaked out. For some inconceivable reason they thought Stanley Unwin was the man to bear the marque of their most ambitious album. Oh dear.

Alas, for those readers born after 1970, Stanley Unwin was a terribly unfunny man who resembled the bald, boring indistinct old uncle whom no-one can remember. His ‘comic’ spiel was to talk gibberish. That was it. In a nutshell. He would appear on television and just start talking a mangled and impenetrable form of English, unsmiling as he peered at the camera through horn-rimmed glasses. He made Harry Worth appear riveting.

Inexplicably the Small Faces built their whimsical hippie and dire concept album around him. At the time it was terrible and age has only made it worse. Like Stonehenge, one can only ponder it and wonder Why? How? For Whom?

I can only imagine that the progression from hash to LSD really did soften their brains, as medical scientists warned at the time. There were tell-tale signs. ‘The Universal’ in 1968 had the tang of hippie-drippiness trhat the song sought to deplore but instead embodied. ‘Lazy Sunday’ in 1967 (a number to dread like 666) bore the marks of long-vanished music hall with cockney larkishness while Steve Marriott sang of khazis. Cannabis smoke was in the air but only prolonged exposure to LSD could have been the road to Stanley Unwin and ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’.

Thus whimsy and acid claimed another victim, one of the best bands of the 60s, the Small Faces. (Not to be confused with The Faces’, Rod Stewart’s vehicle to stardom in the 70s.) If only the Small Faces could have got bigger and found their true rock and roll swagger, how happier they and we would have been.

I Blame The Beatles

1967 witnessed a terrible confluence of marijuana and LSD in the elite pop circles. The result was a mushy melange of the old music hall variety show and the English tradition of whimsy dating back to the Edwardian Age. Surely it’s no coincidence that the principal offenders here started adopting the fashions of the Edwardian fop, the 1880s, the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, ‘Eddie’ et al.

And the first sprouting of this knotweed of classic pop? ‘Sgt Pepper’.

I have been a fanatic fan of The Beatles all my life. I turned 13 in 1963. I was born into a golden age of music, akin to the Romantic Revival, the Italian Renaissance and the Age of Shakespeare. I’m not joking. The music I listened to, danced to and went to hear live in concert at the Liverpool Empire and then at every major venue I felt then and believe now to be unrivalled. As Paul Simon observed, we were born at the right time.

So I too received ‘Sgt Pepper rapturously. I raced to Rushworth’s in Grange Road, Birkenhead with 32 s and 6 d in my hand on the day of release. It was glorious: a big vinyl LP in an extraordinary double sleeve as brilliant as a bird of paradise – the cover! The colours! The centre-fold of the Fab Four in their cod military regalia, all sunny smiles and moustaches in resplendent uniforms of different hues against a yellow background as glaring as the sun.

And inside a paper sleeve with a hippie pink pattern and a big card with cut-out ‘Pepper’ insignia. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven! Even Wordsworth felt it and he’d been dead since 1850.

Keith Richards observed not long ago:

“I understand—the Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles. But there’s not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties—’Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.’”

How right Keith was.

After my initial delirium wore off I had a nagging doubt about ‘Sgt Pepper’. Why include the dreary, dreadful ‘Within You and Without You’? Just because it’s George? Why leave out the remarkable ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’, the high-water mark of Lennon and McCartney’s inventiveness and sophistication? The blame for that lies with George Martin. They were the first tracks to be recorded for the album in March, 1967. By that time The Beatles hadn’t released a single since ‘Yellow Submarine’ in August 1966. Sir Joseph Lockwood, Chairman of EMI, was hounding Martin to release a single, a taster for the album. And to keep EMI shares going up. Kerchinggg!

Instead of waiting and then putting out ‘Getting Better/’Within You and Without You’ as a single in April, Martin persuaded the group to rush out in March the double A-side ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/’Penny Lane’. One of the most catastrophic misjudgements in the history of Western art. The single bombed (in Beatles standards), only making #2 in the charts. They were pipped to #1 by Engelbert Humperdinck with ‘Please Release Me’, one of the hoariest old C&W standards ever. The Ming vase that was the Beatles ascendancy was cracked. Martin should have held his head in his hands and begged the band for forgiveness. To make matters worse, they stubbornly stuck to their practice of not putting singles on albums. Thus was a potential masterpiece of the canon disfigured, as if Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watchmen’ had been ‘improved’ by Jackson Pollock riding a bike through various puddles of paint and over those dismayed Dutch Watchmen.

I eventually took action myself and through the miracle of modern technology re-mixed the original album to produce my own, ‘A Dream of Sgt Pepper.’

Side 1

1. Sgt Pepper intro
2. Good Morning
3. Fixing a Hole
4. Baby You’re a Rich Man
5. She’s Leaving Home
6. Strawberry Fields Forever

Side 2

1. Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite
2. Penny Lane
3. Lovely Rita
4. All You Need is Love
5. Getting Better
6. Sgt Pepper outro

• A Day in the Life

As you see, I’ve ditched the execrable ‘Within You and Without You’ as well as the maudlin ‘With A Little Help From My Friends, the twee ‘When I’m 64’ and the terrible ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. None of these would have appeared on any other Beatles album given John and Paul’s Quality Control over song-writing but they snuck onto ‘Sgt Pepper’ because of the over-riding ‘concept’ – which made no sense at all. By that stage the band’s critical judgement had gone out the window. As had George Martin’s.

So, in sanctifying the twee, the sentimental, the tedious and the tuneless the greatest band of all time released in June 1967 the template for every terrible ‘concept’ album since. And some were doubles! The Beatles should have known the folly of the double album when they recorded the White Album’ in 1968 but no, instead of the fabulous single album that could have been they banged out the bloated double blob, the diamonds stuck in the mud of second-rate songs, some not even songs. Revolution #9. I ask you. But enormous success breeds unassailable vanity and as Paul said in the 1995 ‘Anthology’ documentary series, “Look, ignore the complaints, it’s the Beatles ‘White Album’, fuck it.”

Whimsy. You just want to beat it to death with a club. As Keith Richards admits, this didn’t stop the Stones from copying ‘Sgt Pepper’ with the atrocious ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’. Miraculously the band realised their mistake at once and only a few months later banged out ‘Beggars Banquet’, beginning a run over the next five years of the greatest rock albums ever made: ‘Let It Bleed’, ‘Sticky Fingers’, and ‘Exile on Main Street. And they even managed four pretty good LPs after that before the rot set in round about the 1980s. How did they do that? By crushing whimsy out of the mix with unswerving, unflinching brutality.

Albums by The Who:

My Generation                     1965

A Quick One                          1966

The Who Sell Out                 1967

Tommy                                  1969

Live at Leeds                        1970

Who’s Next                           1971

Quadrophenia                     1973

Thereafter the band made several albums but their heyday had passed. More than any other band in the 60s their live shows were the core of their fan base and greatness. Only the Rolling Stones would come to surpass them as a live act and then not until 1972. What is interesting about the time-line here is how random and behind the curve they seem. They never succumbed to psychedelia or the ‘concept’ album as the Beatles did with ‘Sgt Pepper’, the Stones with ‘Satanic Majesties’ or the Kinks with ‘Village Preservation Society’ but with ‘Tommy’ and ‘Quadrophenia’ Pete Townshend invented the ‘rock opera’ (invariably a double album.) But, these operatic pretensions aside, they fell into the rabbit hole of whimsy and music hall faster than the other great 60s bands did. Apart from ‘Live at Leeds’ and ‘Who’s Next’, their albums are now, to this long-standing Who fan, unlistenable.

But to their credit, The Who made the seamless transition from pop group to rock band and became the stuff of legend on the back of their live work. The toll it took on Moon, Entwistle and Townshend is amply documented. Their epitaph is, for me, the late single ‘Long Live Rock’, even though it barely troubled the charts in 1974.

‘What is the point of this story?   What information pertains?

The thought that Pop could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.’       

 ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, Anthony Newley

Half a pound of tuppenny rice
Half a pound of treacle
That’s the way the money goes
Pop goes the weasel 

This was Britain’s idea of a hit single in 1963. Thank God for The Beatles!