Kevin Coyne

Kevin Coyne is the most intense and troubling performer I've ever seen. Here he is performing House on the Hill on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973, with guitarist Gordon Smith and percussionist Chilli Charles. Such a voice.

His British career was erratic and blighted by drink and mental illness until a move to Nuremberg in 1985 led to a wonderful creative and personal recovery - his late recordings are slowly being released. 

My favourite Coyne song is the grim two-minute epic Marjory Razorblade - you won't have heard anything like this before so keep the lights on. 

Marjory Razorblade has haunted me for forty years and there was a time when, in my cups and unhappy, I'd sing along like there was no tomorrow. If he has any counterparts they wouldn't be singers at all but Weimar-era actors such as Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt. 

Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road

Not sure who sings this beautifully mournful version of Knocked 'em in the Old Kent Road - Harry Champion, perhaps. The subtitles may come in handy.

Noël Coward taught Marlene Dietrich the same song. Imagine that. Or rather don't imagine that - hear her massacre the ditty here. Very unusual, this.

Had enough? You can find Shirley Temple performing this song on YouTube (but I can't be bothered to add the link. Please do so, if only to savour what follows in today's blog.)

It was Twentieth Century Fox lawyers who sued the English magazine Night and Day following its publication of Graham Greene's shrewd 1937 review of Wee Willie Winkie. The paragraph which caused all the fuss is worth repeating:

The owners of a child star are like leaseholders--their property diminishes in value every year.   
Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has a peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood that is only skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers--middle-aged men and clergymen--respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.

The trial was held on 22 March 1938. Greene had left for Mexico on 29 January and did not return to Britain until May. The judge fined the magazine a bankrupting £3,500. Greene went on to write one of his greatest novels, about a whiskey-priest in Mexico - The Power and the Glory.

Temple was the biggest child star of all time and there will never be another. She's still with us, aged 85 and living in Santa Monica, California. What an extraordinary life.

Extract © The Estate of Graham Greene

Rainbow Dance and A Colour Box

From 1936 here's Rainbow Dance, a very short advertising film by Len Lye, made for the General Post Office.

The dancer is Rupert Doone, partner of the theatre director Robert Medley. Together the two men ran the avant-garde Group Theatre which staged, among many other noteworthy plays. Auden's Dance of Death and the Auden / Isherwood collaboration The Ascent of F6. As a fellow Gresham's schoolboy it was Medley who, on a Sunday afternoon walk, had asked Auden whether he wrote poetry at all. As Auden later recalled in Letter to Lord Byron:


          I never had, and said so, but I knew
          That very moment what I wished to do.


Doone appears as a tennis player and hitchhiker (both quintessential 1930s activities) and Lye does extraordinary things with colour.

Len Lye was a prodigiously gifted artist from New Zealand who went on in later life to make the most extraordinary kinetic sculptures - look on the internet for his amazing Wind Wand and other constructions.

But back to Rainbow Dance. It's lovely, but not as lovely as the pure abstract films Lye made around the same time. One of these used to be screened on a loop in Tate Modern, although not in a suitably darkened room so the brilliant colours were washed out. These films were made without a camera, Lye painstakingly painting each frame by hand using a variety of techniques - twenty four frames per second. It's tempting always to freeze a Lye film and enjoy each frame as a unique (and highly desirable) abstract artwork. You'll see what I mean in A Colour Box (1935) with catchy music by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra.

Still © British Film Institute / The Estate of Len Lye

Breaking America

Now here's a thing. For the past month (and for the first time in this blog's short history) I have had more readers in the United States than here on my dim little island.  

This prompts two questions. Should this blog reflect such a this demographic shift, and if so how?

The Times Literary Supplement apparently sells more issues in the U.S. than the U.K. and this is to an extent reflected in the choice of books under consideration and the style and content of the reviews. So for instance, when writing in their pages about Gerald Kersh recently I avoided references that might baffle a non-British reader, while at the same time striving to write in a style that one admirer once described as 'readable'.

Perhaps any appeal this blog has for American readers, whoever you lovely people are, is that it's essentially British, like Monty Python or The Avengers or Downton Abbey - all those PSB series that attract small but discriminating Anglophile audiences and which have nothing whatever in common with Britain as experienced by those who live here. 

But here's another thing. Looking back over past blogs I see that the lowest-ever readership was for something I posted on (and indirectly about) the Fourth of July. I really hate to repeat myself (as I've said on countless occasions) but to mark this demographic watershed there's a three-minute clip here. Enjoy!

On Rube Goldberg

Almost 42,000,000 people have already seen this short film, and marvelled at it, and then watched it again and perhaps again. But it's new to me, and I expect many of my readers will be unaware of it.

So, here is an American (?) band called OK Go performing (or given the context presumably miming along to) their song This Too Shall Pass. The music is humdrum but the fabulously elaborate Rube Goldberg device synchronised to their performance is quite marvellous in its ramshackle kinetic ingenuity - it really beggars belief. Was it all done in one continuous take? I find that very hard to believe, but what the hell. Click here and wonder.

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer and inventor and the American equivalent to Britain's Heath Robinson.  Goldberg's forte was the design and construction of complex contraptions to perform simple, mundane tasks.

In 1987 the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss applied Goldberg's approach in the art film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), an epic thirty-minute chain reaction involving  tyres, chairs, tables ladders, soap, oil drums, old shoes, chemicals, fire and water. It's an hypnotically watchable study in causality (although it does appear to have multiple edits to create an illusion of continuity).  Unlike the OK Go video this has been seen by a few thousand viewers only. You can watch it here.

Favourite snatches (14)

Here's another favourite snatch - an extract from Experience, the biographical memoir by Martin Amis, in which he recalls his father Kingsley's extraordinary talent as a mimic:

This is my father doing Lord David Cecil, the handsome, theatrical, effortlessly affected and above all aristocratic English don (who among other distinctions failed Kingsley's B. Litt at Oxford):

"Laze . . . laze and gentlemen, when we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean  . . . looks like Chauthah . . . dough mean looks like Dryden  . . . dough mean  . . . looks like Theckthpyum [or something barely recognisable as 'Shakespeare']  . . .  Mean looks like Shelley [pronounced 'Thellem' or thereabouts]. Matthew Arnold [then prestissimo] called Shelley beautiful ineffectual angel. Matthew Arnold had face [rallentando] like a horth. But my subject this morning is not the poet Shelley. Jane . . . Austen . . ."

Matthew Arnold

Amis fils goes on to say that whenever he thinks of what a poet looks like, he thinks of Robert Graves, whom he met in Mallorca as a boy when the Amis family visited Deià, where Graves lived.

I saw Graves in person only once, at a poetry reading in the Royal Festival Hall in, I think, 1975. I was with a school group. He was almost completely gaga and looked terrific in a sand-coloured linen suit, yellow shirt and chocolate-brown suede shoes, his tanned and nobel head with a corona of snow-white hair. He hobbled suavely onto the stage with a sheaf of papers from which he began immediately, before reaching the microphone, to read. Once he'd worked through the sheaf he started again from the beginning, and got as far as the middle of the second poem for the second time when somebody gently ushered him off.

Here's a favourite Graves poem - one that I have read many times to my wide-eyed son. It's called Welsh Incident:

'But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.'
'What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?'
'Nothing at all of any things like that.'
'What were they, then?'
 'All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.'
'Describe just one of them.'
'I am unable.'
'What were their colours?'
'Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you'd like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.'
'Tell me, had they legs?'
'Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.'
'But did these things come out in any order?'
What o'clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?'
'I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thrity-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon's (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth's mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail's pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognisably a something.'
'Well, what?'
'It made a noise.'
'A frightening noise?'
'No, no.'
'A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?'
'No, but a very loud, respectable noise ---
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.'
'What did the mayor do?'
'I was coming to that.'

 I'll admit I'm not a great admirer of Graves's poetry in general, preferring the work of his wife Laura Riding. But Welsh Incident is wonderful. How many poems leave you, desperately, wanting more?

Welsh Incident © The Estate of Robert Graves / Faber and Faber Ltd

On Grayson Perry

The artist Grayson Perry is delivering the 2013 Reith Lectures, a series of radio talks that commemorates the stern and high-minded Director General of the BBC in the 1930s, Lord Reith. I listened to the first one yesterday.

Grayson is a likeable, accomplished and amusing speaker - informal, bright, eloquent and droll. His flamboyant transvestite alter ego is rather a tiresome distraction but that hardly matters on the radio. 

Anyway - the first lecture began with lots of gossipy insider-talk about the art world. The tone might best be described as 'debunking'. I particularly liked this extract (as it appeared in transcript in the Financial Times):

I did a bit of research myself and I think I have found the 21st-century version of the Venetian secret [the 19th century hoax that fooled Benjamin West, president of the Royal Academy] and it is a mathematical formula. What you do, you get a half-decent, non-offensive kind of idea, then you times it by the number of studio assistants, and then you divide it with an ambitious art dealer, and that equals the number of oligarchs and hedge fund managers in the world.

Nicely put. But elsewhere, if engagingly, Perry is only doing what everybody involved in public art has been doing for as long as I can remember. He sets out (with the best intentions) to "demystify" the subject (and the art world of curators and dealers and suchlike). Yet most contemporary art, and most curating, has been aggressively dedicated to this popularising agenda for as long as I can remember, or at least since the 1980s when the Victoria and Albert Museum branded itself as "an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached".

Demystification - making stuff more accessible - has been going on for so long (and to so little effect) that I'd like to call a moratorium.

What I'd like to see is a re-mystification of art. Not a move to obscurity and pretension but an end to the chirpy debunking and irreverent register that characterises most arts reporting and too much museum and gallery curating. I'd like to see a return to seriousness.

Kenneth Clarke set a high bar in his ground-breaking television series Civilisation - urbane, cultivated, judgemental and (needless to add) wholly assured in his value judgements (which are the only judgements of any value). His approach was high-minded and unashamedly (or unselfconsciously) elitist - though without a trace of condescension - and he made connoisseurs of us all.

Make it new, as Pound said. Make it strange. But what do we get?