“Empathise with the maelstrom,” he would cry through the tenement windows, flying down concrete steps five at a time, hammering on doors, howling through keyholes, careering through grim corridors dripping with garish sprayed on colour and tangled tricolour streamers. “Empathise with the maelstrom; we’re freemen of this city!”

Flashing blue lights, amid the dashing, dancing neon, reflected in broken glass windows, searchlights, lighting the grey concrete towers as hamstrung youths caught in the headlights wait to be rescued by a saviour in blue jeans. But he was more than a saviour, he would scream, “You want me! You can have me; we’ll charge the happy lot of us,” rallying his support in front of police lines.

Robert Catesby used to live for the glittery gentry, the kingfisher blue stripes over authentic black, garter stars plucked out of trees and woven over broken hearts, and all the ribaldry of the court. Cigarette always in hand, he was the kind of man who dressed in Savile Row but had tattoos on his arms. The often told tale which surrounded his name involved the evening when breezy through self-narcotizing and at the point when the pressures of the penalties lie softer on the conscience, he had walked through The Borough courtyard and spying The Protectors fabled sundial, had walked over to it, clasped its face to his chest and screamed “sceptre and crown must tumble down,” throwing it to the ground, smashing the workings to pieces, before lighting a cigarette and walking on. No one pointed a figure at him, an underling took the blame.

Robert was handsome certainly so, with dark looks, Stuart looks, thick black hair cropped on him of course, as was the fashion of his day, but he brought to mind still that royal prince who had sheltered in the oak all those many years ago. Black hair over dark eyes, shadows light, yet present, pencilled in below them. For all his thirty years his face was strangely unmarked, he had cried only once in his adolescence and early life and prolonged crying, prorogued for however long, does tend to crease the face prematurely, beginning the steady cauterisation of youth. There was in many ways something of the angel undefaced about him, accompanied with the necessary sense of feigned innocence, how long it would last was of course anybody’s guess, but it had already lasted longer than it should, or feasibly could, knowing that features have to give into indignity sooner or later.

Catesby stood for little, only himself and whoever merited his passing fancy at the time, that and the rising of the sun in the morning and the stretching of the early evening into the deepest, deepest night. He would, perhaps, have fought for everlasting night if he could have, but he would never have risked the unpopularity doing so could cause and the debate which would no doubt ensue, he did not like debate, nor the fracture necessary to provoke it. Robert did though strongly believe that beauty was made and not formed, sculpted and crafted, not forged and collected. He believed that love was a fuel, that better wisdom would always out do a worse kind, and that happiness, however pure, was always fleeting.

2

She had grown into putting her cigarettes out in empty beer cans and denounced embroidery as the skill which had stole away her childhood. Mescaline and chess pieces, ash trays and ravaged spoons, scattered over cloth and thread, half sowed scenes of sun-lit skies and mythical heroes would need blue thread to complete you would think, but she saw things differently, amid the thimbles and the coffee dregs, the needles and the spools. She thought of Catesby as little as she could, which means she never stopped. He had not treated her terribly, he loved women well, but he never had the wherewithal to stay in one place too long.

Emma thought of her aforementioned mutineer, before pushing the needle through the skin, knotted in the end, colours flowing over hands and up her arms, drifting over the sides of the chair and into the empty fireplace, darn given wings, her head being told that air was no longer her necessary element. The needle turned upwards and then u-turned in the flesh, then dug downwards again, and deeper this time, the colour transported within and released, layered down and knotted up. She fell backwards and laughed.

Nerves were her problem, Catesby could talk them away, but you had to get through the curtain first. She had once stood in front of him, torn in two with trepidation, feeling as if her entire front had been ripped clean off, bearing every bone and organ, every sinew, her heart beating too, valves and flesh, something so biologically crude, yet so complex in psychological and emotional worth, bared to all, with a white banner bearing his name pinned across it, like a sash over cupid.

She never considered them to be together, only ever together when they were together and that is all she could hope for. “I could write to you,” she would tell him, “but you’re never in the same place long enough, you are in my life when I see you, and when you’re not, you’re nowhere, no moments in passing, no seconds passed to me in a doorway. The only way I know you’re still alive is through the streamers hung from the windows, the coloured ribbons worn in hair and the hope in eyes that relief is near and the knowledge that that relief is vested in you.”

Colour had become the calling card of the Catesby troupe, in recognition of their patron’s erasable sense. Sometimes supporters would hang coloured ribbon from their balconies, over crumbling terracotta or scatter their paths with coloured confetti. Sometimes a person’s allegiance to Catesby was obvious, violently coloured dyed hair for example, or keeping the constant company of a retinue of garishly dressed dancers. Sometimes for political expediency and general safety, expressions of support would be expressed in tokens rather than statements and yet they were statements of intent nonetheless, a red coloured handkerchief folded in a top pocket for example, or the tip of a cigarette dipped in blue.

Catesby was aware of this, but he acted oblivious, he was the opaque but salient figurehead of a movement waiting for him to make a move. And at his signal, so they hoped, the masses, decked out in their colour, the bright shades of every colour imaginable, would rush from their homes gathering in union and assembly as they went, defacing every symbol of the present regime, destroying everything it had touched, or created, or moulded, for good or for ill.

3

The cabal, shadowy figures who held meetings at the riverside and in unused corridors, Dukes and Earls, blue bloods all, who despised usurpers who had climbed instead of appeared, looked upon Catesby’s empty flamboyance with disgust. The cabal had taken to wearing all black, puritan black, with thick black eye shadow and cloaks covered in black swan feathers, which gave the impression of silhouetted wings when the wearers walked. They celebrated the catholic mass, in a place where it was firmly banned and corresponded in broken Latin, at the risk of their own stations, but privacy was more important. Catesby was their target, his death the pre-occupation of their days.

Fighting against his own erratic disposition while trying to live up to the brash associations of his nom de plume, Catesby lived at an irrepressible speed. In the days before his fall he would run through the porticos and halls of the court screaming Latin mottos and shouting for her. Catesby tended to wear red,differing shades of course, with Garter blue strung across him tight, like the marker on a tail fin. He knew there was something special about her, the embroidery, the task which had become her obsession, motherly and tame to most, was for her a floral skin weaved over explosions and dirt.

Catesby touched her face and then withdrew, imams whispering in the early morning breeze from white and sculpted poles in the sky. She picked up a loaded needle lying across a blue china plate on the bedside table, china firmly stuck on the table top to sticky spilled drink and red wine rings, and passed it to him. Catesby took a line of chord and tightened it around his upper arm and dug the needle in deep.

He passed through a curtain of coloured streamers, gentleman atop poles screaming through megaphone mouth pieces, the backcloth yellow, like the sun at its strongest. He put his arm up across his face to shield him from the light, but it did no good. The air was laced with glass, tiny particles of glass, you could see them through the ether, the sun catching their sides, floating like chaff put up to pierce the skin. It hurt to breathe. It stung to breathe. But he walked on, his spurs clicking upon the blue painted ground.

As he walked on the glass turned to confetti, drifting through the air, falling on his shoulders and gathering in his hair. The men screaming atop their poles turned to angles and Icarus hit the sun like an airplane hitting a skyscraper, but the sun didn’t even whimper, no, it burned stronger on his fight. Coloured banners fell from rails, emboldened and embroidered, beautiful in their blues and greens and yellows, colourful and knitted banners thrown from window ledges and over trellises covered in poison ivy and flowers in something beyond bloom.

Catesby was being taunted by a revolution that was simply not his, not brokered or organised or conceived by him, but thrown upon his person by a populace, and figures of better power, intent on him being the man to deliver them from their present, to a better life. Everywhere and way he turned he saw colour, beautiful colours, colour so joyous to most, to Catesby became painful and hurtful to his beautiful eyes, sculpted, formed and created as they were to receive colour in all its young and gorgeous glory. “I want nothing more than peace and quiet,” Catesby yelled,” to hold my son by his hand and live out my life naturally.”

The cabal gathered in an ill lit corner, the blackness of their costume making them impossible to see in the darkness of the periphery, apart from the rising and falling of the bellowed red embers of their cigarettes, fed and sustained by the breath which failed so to do for them. Their garter stars sparkling in the sunlight as they stepped into the sunshine and approached Robert.

“You live on fresh air Catesby!” one shouted, “It’s the only thing which sustains you!” They formed a circle around him and a bell tolled for every Catesby heartbeat. The bell stayed steady and monotonous. “Breathe in the glass Catesby let it cut you up!” Another shouted “see any colours now Catesby?” “Just look at the Stuart looks crumble!”

“Look at you all!” Robert snapped back, “rampaging around Fort Belvedere for the abdicated crown!” He coughed, suddenly and violently, and struggled to catch his breath, but he went on, ”well, perhaps there are diamonds in the waterpipes gentlemen, perhaps there is oil in our fingertips and iron ore in these bricks!”

She cradled him in her arms, but she did not scream or cry out. He made no attempts to breathe and she made no attempts to make him. He had gone. Something had left him and it was more than life. His face seemed different, his strong features, once sculpted and brave, were now blunt and suppressed, his dying expression pained, like something had been ripped from him forcefully, and although he had tried to hold on, he had found, much to his surprise, that he couldn’t quite. She closed his staring eyes and cried finally, tears falling down her cheeks and onto his, “Sleep, my darling sleep,” she whispered, “you’re still going to be what we want you to be, empathise with maelstrom, make everybody free.”

The new record “The Old Magic” is reflective in nature and rather wistful in sound, is this something you planned or something that came together as the writing and recording progressed?

No, no, I didn’t plan it really. It’s so hard to write songs.

I know, I’ve tried, I got nowhere!

You would think that after a few years of doing it you would get the hang of it, but actually it gets more and more mysterious, the whole process. So if you’re sent something, without getting too wet about it, if you’re inspired to come up with an idea, to work away at it, you don’t really think about and try to mould it into anything. In that respect I’m kind of an old fashioned hack. I just try to hear what the ideas being transmitted are somehow, and try not to interfere too much with it myself, and if it comes out a certain way then so be it. But there is no doubt that the older one gets, it seems to be more credible, to sing something which has got some element of the blues in it somewhere. So if that’s what you mean by wistful, whether the blues can be described as wistful or not, I don’t know.

The blues are probably a little more desperate than wistful! In an interview I watched with you yesterday you said you find “hapless characters” endlessly fascinating.

Yeah, I do.

So the songs on this album are character portraits, rather than autobiographical?

Oh yes, I hardly ever write any songs about me at all, and again this is me being an old hack, but I’m not a putting one’s diary to music kind of guy at all. I know what I’m talking about, when I want to talk about having your heart broken, or about feeling like you’ve been misused, misunderstood or righteously indignant about something, or just being in love and feeling good, although it gets harder to write songs like that as you get older. So I know what I’m talking about, but generally I make the character up. There’s a couple of lines in this album that are autobiographical, I sing in one song Checkout Time, “I’m 61 and I never thought I’d see 30” that’s true, but after that it’s all a lot of guff about people thinking I’m marvellous after I’m dead, it’s just a catchy tune with some funny lyrics.

Say a song like “Stoplight Roses” did you see something which inspired that then?

Yes of course. One day, I was approached as you sometimes are by someone shoving one of these pathetic bundles of flowers through the window of my car, some Romanian bloke, and as I kind of shooed him away, I was suddenly stuck by why would anybody buy these things? I mean the traditional reason one buys some flowers is very often to apologise for something, or to express your admiration in some way towards somebody. And I thought that if you actually present one of these things, it means the total opposite, it’s like a frightful insult, that the best you could do is grab this shit of some street seller or the garage forecourt. And I thought, oh this is a great idea for a song, but my main problem with it, the song itself was written quite easily, but my problem with it was getting a title, because I didn’t know really what to call them, Traffic Light Roses is kind of wrong, then I thought, you buy them in the garage, so maybe Forecourt Roses, something that sounds a bit creepy, but it doesn’t really sing very well, it’s not a very swinging phrase. So then I thought the Americans, oh yes, they call traffic lights, stoplights, and I thought that sort of works.

Coming back to Checkout Time , you write quite a lot about getting older, as you age, does mortality and age over take love as the primary inspiration for your songs? I would imagine it doesn’t?

No, I don’t think it does. Yes, that is an interesting question. I think love is always the most interesting thing, love and the lack of it and how it affects people.

It’s the lack of love which often inspires under 30’s, but when you’re 60+ you have it, it’s more often than not secure, so does the impetus to write about it disappear?

What you think love is when you’re young certainly changes as you get older, and then of course when you get your heat broken. I mean, I didn’t get my heart broken seriously until I was quite old. I’d written songs about it, but when it actually happened, it was the most unbelievable feeling. It’s sort of glorious in its hideousness; you rise on this surge of righteous indignation, thinking (thumping the table) “I have been mistreated!” And then you plunge into this gloom, “Oh my God, how am I going to carry on? How am I going to live?” I mean at least you know you’re alive, that’s about the only thing you have, you know you’re a human being. But love is really the fundamentally most fascinating thing to ponder and try and find new ways of explaining.

How is the song writing process for you? I listen to song like “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day” and it sounds so effortless, like every word has just dropped into place, is it an easy process? Or months of re-writes?

It’s kind of you to say that. That one wasn’t too difficult; it’s a very good title. Obviously it’s a well known phrase or saying and I’ve not been averse to using them in the past. I saw it in a book one day and it just hit me, that’s a great title, I wondered if anyone had used it for a song before, of course they had, but there’s no copyright on titles. I mean, I would think if you wrote a song called Bridge Over Troubled Water, people would raise an eyebrow. But it does take a lot of work to make it sound effortless.

And the process, for you?

I get asked about the song writing process a lot and it’s fascinating because it so hard to know how it actually happens and how you make it happen, because sometimes it doesn’t and there’s nothing you can do about it, because if you force it, it sounds it, it sounds forced, and I’ve tried that, I’ve tried all sorts of things. I have two theories that I use to describe it. One is that I used to say that this bloke, who is a really fantastic songwriter, who has no interest in doing interviews or being on the telly, or hacking around the United States in a station wagon for month after month, he has no interest in that at all. But he writes these great songs, and he’s decided that you’re going to promote them for him. So he comes around to see you, you never know when he’s coming, sometimes he comes in the dead of night, shows you these great songs, one or two at a time and then disappears. And those are the really good songs. Then if he doesn’t come back for a while, because you’ve worked with him on a few occasions, you can do a pretty good impersonation. And that’s how I used to explain the process. It’s out of your control almost.

I had another explanation which came along, which is, if you imagine yourself in a flat, and there’s a radio next door tuned night and day to a really fantastic radio station, and you can just about hear it through the dividing wall. And then one day, and your always sort of aware of it, they start programming a new tune, it’s a really hot tune and it’s so good you think I’ve got to learn that song. You never know when it’s going to come on, but when it does you stop and you put your ear to the wall and you strain to hear it and you get a word here and a phrase there, and you put it together and then it’s gone, it’s drowned out, but bit by bit, you learn it. That’s another way of looking it at it.

So you don’t really have much to do with it, it’s just something that plants itself in the
back of your head and you just have to try and coax it out?

Yes, you don’t want to interfere with the idea yourself. I don’t like it when I hear myself at work. If I get a good idea for a song, I go into this trance like state, which poor Peta, my missus, gets very frustrated about, but she knows it’s the way it is. You’re not really here, people talk to you and you don’t really listen. But if I’ve got that going on, I’m trying to avoid making the song up myself, you have to really think, that’s why I’m talking about listening through a wall, you’ve got to think what the idea is and not squash it and do some clunky finish to hurry it along, which I’ve done many, many times. I tend to work at my songs until they don’t sound like I’ve had anything to do with them at all. I ponder and ponder and change a bit here and change a bit there, until I can’t hear any vestige of me at work and I think I’m singing a cover song. And it works the other way around as well, if I come across a cover song I want to do, I’ll work at it and work at it until I think that I’ve written it, so you kind of wind up at the same place. Then the new song can be played in any style, fast or slow, it can take any kind of abuse, when you’ve got it down solid and the words mean something, it’ll be totally fireproof.

So do you think that’s why so many people have been able to have hits with your songs, because you don’t write them with yourself especially in mind, you write them thinking and expecting that they are going to be sung by other people?

Yes, I think I do, I’ve always got one eye on the covers. In fact the reason why a lot of my records are rather under-produced is because I rather like that sound, unfortunately the general public doesn’t, the general public gets nervous when they hear something that they perceive as a little home made. Of course if you have ears to hear, then it sounds like a refreshing change, but if you haven’t, and most people don’t, it sounds a little “oh it’s not for me,” it sounds a little too unfinished and annoying. But part of my thinking is, because a lot of people listening to my records are other musicians and people in the music business, producers and people like that, they tend to go “oh blimey, old Nick’s got a good one there, oh but he hasn’t done it right, he hasn’t done it right, I could do it much better.” And then of course the old line goes taught, the rod bends and you’ve got one. So I make the songs like glorified demos. But yes, I don’t write them for me. I sometimes think that the kind of song writing I do is akin to knowing how to thatch a roof or build a dry stone wall; it’s like an old craft, which no one is going to have any interest in or use for in about fifty years time.

Really, you think it’s dying out?

Song writing the way I understand it, with verses chorus and a melody, I think that is dying out, I really do think it’s dying out.

In some of the songs on “The Old Magic” in the kind of country rock-a-billy stomp that appears now and again, you can hear echoes of Johnny Cash, a man you knew. Did he teach you anything, pass anything down from songwriter to songwriter?

Oh he was a fabulous bloke, a really, really fabulous bloke, I absolutely loved him and miss him, and June (Carter-Cash) as well, she was great. They were absolutely top people. The reason he was great is because he was sort of un-cool as well, he had this “man in black” thing, but he was just like a regular fabulous bloke, except that he had this tremendous talent. But he could make a goon of himself, just like all the best people can; he was by no means immune to that.

But yeah, he did, he said all sorts of things to me. I remember one thing, it came back to me quite recently, I’ve been doing interviews in the United States and somebody asked me about him. One thing he said to me, which I never used to understand, he used to say this thing which I’ve heard old-timers say loads of times, when they’re asked to give advice to youngsters coming up, they always say “all you’ve got to do is be yourself.” And I always thought this is the worst cliché, what the hell does that mean? Be yourself? No one wants to see some turkey get up there and be themselves, you want to see something magnificent. But the older I get the more I, sort of, understand that because if you’ve got a point of view, or something that you want to get across, the most naturalistic way of getting across is the most effective. It really is the most effective and its way easier said than done, of course you have to use a little stage craft, stuff that you’ve learnt, but if you can do it in the most naturalistic way possible, it is way more effective. You don’t have to cover your tracks either; you don’t have to cop an act, the less you have to cop an act the better. Of course when you’re young, that’s all you do, copping an act, trying to pretend you’re something you’re not, in a lot of cases anyway. But simply being yourself, in the entertainment business is a very nice trick, if you can pull it off and it’s taken me about fifty years to figure it out, but it does make it much easier. The penny dropped.

When people talk about Nick Lowe, the term “Pub Rock” is always mentioned, springing out of your album The Jesus of Cool, which is often considered to be the pinnacle of your early work. Tell me a little about Pub Rock, the sound is somewhere in between Punk and New Wave isn’t it? And something that grew out of Stiff Records, which you were a part of?

Yeah, it kind of pre-dated that, Stiff Records pre-dated punk, but they had the same attitude. The pub thing was only in London really, it was a London thing, they tried to get it going in other cities, but no one really got it.

I was in a band called Brinsley Schwarz, we had a disastrous publicity stunt. It was big news at the time, if anyone did a film about it, you wouldn’t believe it, it wouldn’t stand up. It came from a time then there were definitely two distinct halves of society, straight people and non-straight people, cool and un-cool, buttoned up and non-buttoned-up. Now everyone is hip, even Simon Cowell is hip. Everyone is hip, there are no straights now, even the stupid people are all hip, with it, know what’s going on. But back then there was an underground beneath straight society and it was pretty good fun.

Yeah, because there was someone to offend I suppose, now controversy is almost a difficult task!

Exactly, exactly, and it was pretty good when it was like that. So after the disaster, instead of us scuttling off and breaking up, we stayed together and got a house, we didn’t think it was a hippy commune, but it sort of was, we just thought it was cheaper to live together. It meant we listened to the same records, it was like going to school, we listened to the same records, we had a rehearsal room and we played and played and played, morning, noon and night. We didn’t have many jobs either because we were a laughing stock. So anyway, one night our manager went to The Marquee and he saw this group, Eggs Over Easy, open for someone and he liked the look of them, he got talking to them and they were American, and he invited them out to our house. They turned up at midnight, we were all still up, and we played for each other and they were way better than we were, but they liked the same kind of music as us and we became very good friends with these guys, still are to this day. Chas Chandler, who discovered Jimmy Hendrix and was a big cheese at the time, had got them over to do a record. In the mean time, before the sessions, he’d put them up in a house in Kentish Town and told them to wait, and they waited, and waited, and waited, nothing happened. Anyway there was a great big gin palace at the end of their row called the Talley-Ho, now it’s been knocked down, but then it was a huge lovely old Victorian pub. They used to go in there for a drink and one night they asked the governor if they could do a gig there, and he said, “oh no,no, we only do Irish music and jazz here.” So they said, “well, we can do both of those things, just give us your quietest night.” He said, “well, Monday.” And bit by bit they started building up this fantastic following, of very, very strange people, because in those days Kentish Town and Camden were not for the faint hearted, you just didn’t go up there, now it’s all coffee shops and beautiful, but back then it was rough and this pub in particular. So they had this very interesting clientele, their fans were almost Hogarthian, there were hookers and West Indian bus drivers in their uniforms dancing all over the place, it was fantastic. We started going up there and we really liked it, in fact we pinched half of their act and when they went back to America we took over their slot.

We took over their audience too and we thought that it was great and started to look for other pubs to play. And that’s what we did and by this time one or two other groups had come along, and really the bands played a kind of jukebox, yeah they were like live jukeboxes, all different kinds of music, as many as you could, plus whatever was in the top 10. It was really good fun and it became almost a term of abuse to call someone a “pub rocker” I even use it myself and it describes a kind of earnest boogie, that only guys seem to like, but back when it started it was really fresh, brilliant and fun. And all the bands were good, like Ian Dury, Kilburn and the High Roads, that was Ian’s group.

Oh yes, I read Ian Dury was part of that scene.

Yeah, they were really good some of the bands, very eccentric and quirky and the gigs were free, so they were packed; these places were absolutely packed as you might imagine. But it never caught on anywhere else, apart from strangely, Holland, they went nuts for it over there, they had pub rock everywhere.

And then with Stiff Records you started to produce records for people like Elvis Costello. Were you a very hands on producer?

Yes, I suppose so, I became the house producer at Stiff. My manager and myself and one other guy started Stiff Records. I didn’t really have too much to do with it, I was just the third one, but because I’d had more experience in the studio than the other two I became the house producer, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had a point of view and in those days anyone could be a record producer! You had to have listened to a lot of records and be able to encourage people. And then in the 1980’s there was a seismic change in the way records were made, that’s when everything went digital and I was never really interested in that, not that there hasn’t been some great records made like that.

Do you still find it quite easy if you want to put out a record, is that a fairly easy process for you, you don’t have to hunt around for labels?

No, I’m with Proper Records in this country and Yepp Records in America, who are small independent labels, which suits me much more than being on a big label. Big labels are absolutely useless to me, they wouldn’t know what I was up to and I don’t want the same things as they would want for me, I’m not interested in being a star, which is of course the only thing they’re are interested in. So no, I like being a big fish in a small pool and then I can make my own judgements and decisions.

So just to sum it all up, you said your career at the moment is in something of an “Indian summer.” Why do you think this is? I mean, you’ve gone the opposite way than many musicians of your ilk, in that a lot of your best stuff has been done in the last few years, thinking of The Brentford Trilogy albums for example. 

Well, when I was a pop star, in the 1970’s and did Jesus of Cool and I was on the telly all the time, it was almost as if someone had said, “right, it’s your turn now, step up, what have you got?” But I have always wanted to do something which I kind of felt I had to be a bit older to do. I wanted to make a mark back then. It’s very difficult for me to say because I didn’t work this out at the time. It’s only now in hindsight that I can look back and think, well, I was just marking time a bit. I was more interested in doing records with other people than I was in doing my own, my own records were silly stuff, so people would go “oh, that’s naughty!” I never really took it that seriously, I thought well, I’ll have a bit of fun here, and that’s really what I did, I had too much fun. But I was waiting until it was all over, because when my time in the sun came to an end, as it always does, unless you’re very unusual like Elton John or Cliff Richard.

Goodness knows how he’s still going, Cliff Richard, he had his day in the sun way back in the 1950s!

Well no! He actually didn’t, he does very, very well. Anyway, when it was all finished, and I knew it would because I’d been a record producer, so I had one foot down on the shop floor with the kids, but also I’d been yucking it up with the suits, I’d had a foot in both camps, and I’d heard how they talk about their artists, with great contempt in some instances, and I knew that sooner or later the public would get fed up with my schtick and move on. And when it came, I was sort of ready for it, but you do end up with very mixed feelings, I couldn’t get a table in a restaurant anymore, I didn’t have legions of exotic looking birds queuing up to go on dates with me just because I had been on TV, they wouldn’t look at me twice in the normal course of events. So when that all finished I was sorry to see that go, but on the other hand I was absolutely buggered! I was alcoholic pretty much, I was completely burnt out, my marriage hadn’t sort of broken up as disappeared and everything was in disarray, I was ill and filled with self loathing, it was awful. So I had a lie down basically, for at least a year and I started thinking to myself, well, I’ve done pretty well here, I’m on the scrapheap, but I’ve actually done pretty well, I’ve written some good songs, I’ve got a good reputation, just about, produced some good records, I haven’t got much money, but I’ve got a flat and a car, so if I’ve got to go back to the biscuit factory then I haven’t done too bad.

But, I began to think, well, I’ve been in pop land and it’s been pop-tastic, but I haven’t done anything really, really good.  So I started to think about how I could re-present myself, write myself, produce myself, record myself and use the fact that I was getting older, inevitably getting older, in a business which at that point had no interest in older people, and I was in my mid to late thirties, so I was kind of over the hill, nowadays its nothing, but then it was over the hill. So I thought I’d figure out a way where I could use the fact that I was getting older as an advantage, to the extent that people will think “oh I just can’t wait to be as old as Nick Lowe,” because I’ll imbue my thing with some lived in quality and if I can make it hip enough, so that I can interest a younger audience in it, without having to get down with the kids and do something really embarrassing and patronizing, and I won’t have to squeeze myself into tight jeans and trainers and do what I’m know for.

The last few records I’ve done from The Impossible Bird on-wards have all been very well received, they haven’t sold very much, but they’ve all been very well received and again I get covers, and when The Bodyguard doe came along (a cover of his song What’s so Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding was featured on the million selling film soundtrack), I almost fell to my knees and gave thanks! It couldn’t have come at a better time, because it meant I could tour the record in the US, were, frankly, most of my audience is, I could tour over there in reasonable comfort, pay my boys, and most importantly make another one, which basically took care of that money! And slowly I can spot now that it has come good. I can see in the audience that there is a wide range of people coming to see me now, instead of just old guys with grey pony tails, which used to be the predominant species. They are still welcome of course! But a lot of them have dropped away, because they think that I rock’th not, which in fact I do, but with a different attitude. I haven’t really got a terrific following in this country, I think they think I’m some old Country and Western singer, they don’t really get it, and it’s too bad.

Why do you think that is? Because the music has become more American in sound?

Yeah, I suppose it has, although I’m quite anxious to be not very reverential to that, I mean I love American music, but I love what happens to it when it comes over here as well, and people muck around with it. I like Italian pop music and even French pop music. I love the European sensibility and shove that into my music so it’s kind of gawking and not very slick. I love that. So I’m not by any means a contender for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Over here they can’t really be bothered with what I do, although that’s a little unkind, in London I play a big fancy place, but I’m sorry to say the last time I was in Manchester I could see the tumbleweed blowing through the aisles, they had no interest at all. Nonetheless, I’m going on tour there after Christmas, trying again!

Well, I’ll come!

Oh, please do, and bring about 400 hundred of your mates!

The Old Magic is available now.

‘A salute to a vanished world.’ 

Retro can be eccentric as well, it is to be found in the hunting down of some original Harris Tweed, hand sewed by the weavers of the Countess of Dunmore. It is to wear a dash of Jill Sanders No4 on your neck, because it was Jacqueline Kennedy’s last favoured fragrance, disregarding the fact that it may make you smell like a spinster librarian. It is woolly stockings over chiffon tights if a woman is trying to mirror the brash bravado of a 40’s land girl digging for victory, and chiffon over wool, if she is trying to summon the aura of Natalie Wood. Retro is often embraced momentarily, when the full force of the modern, and all the bravery and pluck it takes to tackle, briefly becomes a little too much to handle, and one gazes back, with rose tinted spectacles, to the comfortable supposed perfection of the past.

But enough about fashion, it is in music, that some of the earliest examples of retro creativity can be found. Let’s for a moment accept all the clichés of what one generally assumes turn of the century Paris was like, tea at Maxims, ladies with parasols, art nouveau and the Moulin Rouge, just for aesthetic purposes of course, just for a little bit of fun. And now imagine a Parisian concert hall in 1894, packed to the rafters for a premier of a new piece of music by that master of classical impressionism Claude Debussy. The piece being performed is Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune or Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. It is a beautiful and dreamy symphonic poem, in which the flute, free and buoyant, takes the part of a faun, day-dreaming his way through a sultry afternoon. He is inspired by nature and its bounteous warmth, like anyone who has lain in a field on a summers day and listened to the birdcalls, and felt the grass on your skin, and heard the sifting of moving air through summer leaves, and felt the heat of the sun on your face, and wished, just for a moment, to be swallowed up by the entire thing, to allow your senses and sense of being to be overthrown by nature. Bored by the limitations of his waking imagination, the faun drifts into sleep, his dreams, represented by the sounds of the flute, being borne upon a bed of swirling and intoxicating strings.

The piece at the time of its premier was ridiculed, booed at, and dismissed as “darkly crazy, modern music.” You might not think that to hear it now, to the untrained ear it sounds just like any other piece of period “classical” music, but this prelude arguably gives birth to the modern musical craft. Prior to Debussy and his peers and immediate predecessors, such as Wagner and the peer-less Gustav Mahler, music had been tonal in nature.  The notes had been hierarchical in organization, based around a particular key and often mainly focused around the white notes on a piano keyboard, highly organized and perfected music, growing out of building blocks of sound.  Wagner in particular and a little later Mahler and Debussy with un faun , sparked a musical revolution by throwing this out of the window and embracing chromaticism and musical ambiguity. Chromaticism offers a much wider palette of musicality to create with; indeed with chromaticism the palette widens three fold, four fold, indefinitely.  The chromatic scale mixes the white notes with the black notes; pitches are interspersed with other pitches and the combinations of chords, keys and harmonies became gradually more complicated, lush and convoluted, creating expressive, colourful soundscapes, which transported music from the black and white into the Technicolor.

Not that perfection cannot be found in black and white of course, like Casablanca or Now Voyager in comparison to their colour rich successors, tonal perfectionists like Beethoven or Mozart, often outdo their chromatic successors, even with simpler tools.

And so musical clarity melted into a hazy intoxicating smoke and Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune was only right at the start of this progression, there are still elements of tonal composition within its dreamy bars, but the canvas is notably smudged at the edges. Ultimately the tonal fences and walls, which restrained the experimentation of these early chromatic composers, would crumble, leaving music unchecked and able to run free in a jungle of unnatural sound and chromatic hallucinatory clouds and howls. This of course begs the question if and how music should be contained and is unconfined music too ambiguous to understand?

But, that question is not for now, this dramatic collapse of the tonal musical empire demanded a retro response and it came, wonderfully, in the form of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse. Of course the piece is about much more than musical revolution, it is about word-wide revolution, a riposte to a changing world. The form used is the waltz, which was, by 1920, the year of La Valse’s creation, unfashionable and outdated. Ravel grabs it by the scruff of the neck and breathes new life into it, before demolishing the old form waltz with the brashness of the new musical style, briefly forging new and old together. He uses the retro to highlight what he sees as the flaws in the changing early 20^th century landscape, both musically and politically.

La Valse grumbles and bounces and sways to begin with, bringing to mind a dusty troupe of aged fossilised aristocrats, in cobwebbed gowns and foisty dresses, who have been summoned from the tomb to waltz again in a gilt, but neglected ballroom. They are grouchy at first, afflicted, torn and broken, but then they get into it. Society beauties regain their finesse, marquises and counts, their gentrified polish. Marie Walewska arrives in a flourish of trumpets, walks over to the Duchess of Parma and slaps her across the face. She drops her champagne, the glass shatters on the floor and the attendees stop and turn and stare, the Duchess blushes and Marie whispers “nique ta mere” an inch away from her face, and a dowager countess faints. Then the orchestra kicks in, all powdered wigs and livery, the tonal boundaries have suddenly been rebuilt, complete with razor wire and watch towers, as the aristocracy rises and falls to the traditional waltz. But then the floor starts to shake, the walls crumble, debris fall to the floor and a chandelier whistles from ceiling to ground, in pieces.

The doors burst open and in pile hundreds of soldiers, Cossacks, bombardiers and Prussian cavalrymen. As artillery pounds, the waltz struggles to be heard, but it fights on, the old order still dances, dresses and shirts blooded. As shrapnel flies into the engines, and the chromatic engulfs the tonal, the waltz whirls around erratically like the rotors of a downed helicopter, fighting against slashing strings and blaring brass, bringing to mind blitzkrieg through Guernica. Then bombs fall and the floor cracks and a great dark abyss can be seen, the waltz has one final bristle, one last gust, one last gasp for survival over the din of war and pillage, and then the whole affair tumbles into immortality.

If retro can be a kitsch nod to the past or a fiery riposte to the state of the present, then Ravel’s La Valse is certainly the latter. The retro use of the waltz highlights not only the collapse of the musical conventions of earlier centuries, but also the disintegration of European high society after the First World War, and indeed in its thundering apocalyptic climax, predicts the complete fiery destruction of old Europe in the Second World War. La Valse is certainly not retro for the sake of the evolution of music; it is retro to highlight the dangers of unchecked and un-tempered revolution.  Change is fine, but change without boundaries and without a firm respect for the past will lead to mayhem, both culturally and politically. ‘A salute to a vanished world’ can be so much more than a thrift shop and a vinyl record.

Canary Wharf reeks of New York, but without the irrepressible intensity, it is strangely impotent of atmosphere, its atmosphere being only its distinct and obvious lack of one. The art adds something though, a little bit of post modern mystery, in a place which has had its real genetic make-up erased and forgotten. Outside Jubilee Place lies “Testa Addormentata”, a large bandaged bronze head, Grecian in style, with a proud but losing face, created by Polish artist Igor Mitoraj. Though impressive, it seems awfully small in comparison with its surroundings, like a topped and tailed colossus from antiquity, lacking its trunk to lend it stature. It probably felt bigger in the workshop, but now it lays cheek side down, gazing towards the glitzy giant of 1 Canada Square. Antiquity bettered.

In Cabot Square sits Lyn Chadwick’s bronze “Couple on a Seat”, two figures, sat aloof from the bustling square, the king and queen of Canary Wharf gazing out towards the docks. Though not particularly regal, instead pointy and frigid and cold, they are not without grace, the gentle angles at which their legs lie and the drift of their clothes are particularly effecting. Nobody seems much to notice them though, theirs is a subdued monarchy, their rule is constant, yet forgotten. A much more light-hearted, just as tragic figure, can be found to the right of Cabot Square on West India Avenue, a big man holding out for hugs, a rough hewn bronze figure, Giles Penny’s “Man with Arms Open.”  To be taken seriously around this part of town you have to be metallic to the core, no icon of the Wharf could be anything but, yet this man’s arms are stretched backwards, in anticipation of affection. It’s such a desperately sad moment to be stuck at, near an embrace, but not quite there, the ruffles in the bronze metal work lending a crumpled look, helping to create a rather hopeless aura around him.

But where is the lady who has escaped our man’s wasted embrace? She is probably waiting beneath Konstantin Grcic’s “Six Public Clocks”  for another metallic friend. The work comprises of six metal clock faces, based upon that icon of punctuality, the Swiss railway clock, the faces all sitting in Nash Court, atop six metallic lollypop sticks. It is such an excellent place to meet, in a place which runs to deadline and schedule. J.D Salinger said “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.” But stood under the clocks it would be obvious, six fold obvious that someone was late, and the aggrieved party could stand there with a knowing smile, glance upwards, brush off those lost minutes and rush into a grateful greeting. Embrace returned. How ironic it would be though if the clocks were all stopped? Timelessness brought to a place which simply could not stand it.

In nearby Columbus Courtyard there is another Mitoraj head, “Centurione I”, a mask really, half smashed and missing a piece, this one is much more ominous looking, much more desperate, fed by a slide of water which appears to sustain it. It is quite amazing that someone can craft such a haunting face, when the remaining eye is empty, but its shape alone screeches emotion. The courtyard is almost empty and the only thing which will stop lingering passers-by from imagining themselves as lost and wandering through an empty unrecognizable future city, running across a fragment of a lost civilisation they used to know, is the empty Pret a Manger to the left of the sculpture, which keeps imagination, very much, tied to earth.

At Westferry Circus the river can finally be seen again and all the sights of Central London upstream are welcome reminders that you haven’t left the city after all. The Circus is prim and un-British in its perfection and amid a flowerbed can be found a golden egg, a sasso cosmico, a cosmic stone. The Golden Egg of Canary Wharf, a sculpture by Do Vassilakis-König, not born out of the stock market or a dot com boom, but washed up from the Thames, perhaps, a mysterious link between the new and the original, the city and the river, because whatever outfit the Wharf wears, the river will always surround it.

The balloon was nothing more than an experiment to me. A ribald joke on the inhabitants of a town I never liked, nor trusted, nor felt a part of. I suppose that is what it was. It was a metaphysical something, a clichéd statement born out of amphetamine and tepid water. It was an empty folly and a hopeless gesture, loved in quarters and hated in others, held up for ridicule in Sussex and dismissed as hearsay in counties but a carriage ride away. I do not refute its ownership, I do not deny it belonged to me, but I do not speak of it with pride.

The notion came to me in the Fen Country, I was alone in a stone cottage, scoring verses and remembering better days. The night-times were truly black there and no oil lamp light or night nurses, measuring temperature and heartbeats, would convince you otherwise. Even with a bitch of a gale whistling down from some of the lesser known peaks, the evening stars were always visible. A free spectacle, a million tiny bulbs kept in order by a man with too much time on his hands. For him it used to be a case of getting out the creaky, ancient, step ladders when one of the filaments failed and a world went dark, but recently time had taken away the inclination and broken bulbs were left broken. This meant nothing to me yet, but it was a catastrophe for those it touched. The Great Bear and Pleiades, I could see those alignments, plotted beautifully, placed with concentration and consideration, like a course plotted by a celestial commodore to the other side of here and there. I dreamt of consistent spectacle, not spectacle dependent on the time of the day or paths of cloud,  but a spectacle pinned on me and remembered through me, brief though, like an eclipse, yet unbroken in its beauty. Something better than the heavens.

Once inflated, the balloon, twenty miles across, expanded eastwards from Tetbury towards the Norfolk coast, gently lifting off the slate rooftops on which it had rested for a good twenty-four hours, gathering in shape, taking breaths of the dewy morning air to power its ascent, diving and rising, leaping with greater confidence as its body was assumed, until, after an hour or so, it blocked out the new day’s sun. Then I ordered it stopped. And the Moroccan builders, who I had rounded up from a Calais seaport the previous Tuesday to assist with the logistics of the project, were happy to oblige. They had been paid several dinars each for their services and had been given permission to set up a small tent village near Valley Forge. Raucous frivolity and Moroccan music could be heard throughout the midnight hours, but there was nothing that could be done about it.

The balloon was kept in position by thirty iron chains, rooted in the ground at particular angles, so as to keep it tethered to the earth, but not to restrict its movements too much, or drag it downwards. From time to time I would walk around the edge of the balloon’s shadow and inspect the metalwork to ensure it was maintaining its grasp.  The chains would soon become attractions in their own right, as the people’s only connection to the balloon itself. Messages would be left pinned to them, with questions or prayers, or requests for heavenly intervention. Every now and then I would see a girl, all of twenty, or less, early in the mornings, blonde and lovely, barefoot and brave, dancing around a chain in the silence, a hand outstretched towards the metalwork, links she had decorated in ribbons and wild flowers, picked freshly, just minutes before from Sudeley Dell. A chain transformed into a post holocaust maypole. I stopped for a moment, wrapped by the beautiful turns of her body. I am not too sure of her circumstances, but I think she missed the balloon after its departure.

Every now and then, a man or a woman, desperate to see the sky again unblemished, would rush towards the metal chains and attempt to hack away at them with axes and mechanical cutters. In such a case I would dispatch a gang of my  Moroccan builders, still at camp in Valley Forge, to restrain the offenders and gently remind them that the spectacle they disapproved of so was done in love and nothing worse, and they were quickly returned to their senses.

2

The sun still shone through the balloon, giving a lovely grainy light, suspending the valley in a constant dusk. The street lights burned through the day and working hours were cut short by benevolent employers, so people could enjoy the refracted sunsets, the brilliant burning red, turned blue and green and vibrant turquoise by the differing shades of material sowed into the balloon’s fabric, reacting to the sunlight and the curvature of the earth.

The world went on, but the day seemed different, the clock meant as much to people as ever, if not more, but people looked up much more often and considered the mystery behind their existence a little more than usual. The sky was missed, the deep blue of a summer sky, like the ocean upturned, was missed, although shadows of clouds could still be picked out when the day was especially bright. Like silhouetted figures, their cut-outs passed across the skin, like ghostly witnesses.

Although the rain no longer fell, it still made itself heard, more so than usual, pounding upon the fabric and echoing through the helium filled chasm to the world beneath, as if some brazen farmer had taken to the roof and begun casting seeds across the cloth, in a vain attempt to sow a heavenly field. The rain would trickle down the skin, to the edges and sheet off, creating vast, glassy waterfalls, curtains of water, hemming in the covered land totally and creating flat, laser-like rainbows which darted through forests and towns, like colourful bars of seaside rock. Children would run through them and jump over them and stand in them and embrace all the colours and feel the coloured air and cup the colours in their hands, until the rain stopped and the rainbow bars receded to the edges again, and quietness was returned.

Bird song was constant, the one-time morning chorus stretching long into the late afternoon. Birds trailed the outline of the balloon, bristling their feathers against the material, as if to pay homage to the great lumbering creation, which had stayed so steady in the face of nature herself, and limited them, however briefly to the lower echelons of the atmosphere.

At night-time the balloon could appear unsettling, a dark mass hanging in the sky. So between the hours of seven and twelve I ordered it flood-lit, bathed in a creamy light, a moon-like light, a gentle warm light, which people could gather under and feel settled. And people did gather, to sing and to strum acoustic guitars and to hold each other and to eat and drink with each other, under the balloon, and feel enveloped in its temporary aura. On nights when it was warm but rainy, the balloon protected them, and on nights when it was cool, the balloon insulated the heat from the homes and the factories and places of business and kept the night time warm, despite the turning of the season from summer to autumn. Some would project pictures onto the skin, beautiful pictures of people and places that made them feel happy, and I would feel happy too.

Standing on Sudeley Hill I would look at the scene, outwards towards the shires and fells, the villages and farms which comprise this land of ours, and all the spires of England would seem to pierce it underneath and test its strength, yet still nothing broke the skin. “Oh rancid communion!” I would say to myself, “I will not tie my future grace to anyone man, nor to a distant kingdom, only to this green grass beneath my feet and to your sweet eyes, if ever they should return to me.” “And if they do,” I would say, “I will free the sunshine, free the sky, to anyone or any country seat who wishes to use it for a better purpose than I.”

I was never fundamentally disconnected when the balloon was out of my eye-line. The opinions of others mattered little. I was only interested in the health of the balloon and the report I received every morning about its current structural integrity. If a tear was spotted as the balloon aged, it was fixed quickly, by inflating a second smaller balloon, with two skilled “patchers” as they were labelled, occupying a wicker basket underneath it and reaching out with needles and thread, to fix the tear when they approached.

I accompanied them once on this trip. The balloon seemed to whimper at the cut, to shake and to cry out, yet the “patchers” rectified the problem with care. I reached out with them, the three of us leaning out of the wicker basket, hundreds of feet in the air, looking from afar, no doubt, like a half hearted suicide pact. I touched it, I reached my hand out and I touched it, and the balloon felt warm and alive and real. I pushed and I pushed and my hand stayed gently pressed against the flesh, palm out stretched, fingers pointing. We were connected again, the shadowed land below, the blocked out atmosphere above and us in between. I had created it, and put it there, and it had stayed there for me, out of loyalty and love, unproven in fact or word , but physically tested and certainly resilient. I wished it luck, silently of course, and a steady and solitary few days in the heavens. I pulled the cord and the flame burned harshly and we descended, and my eyes remained skywards and fixed as we did.

3

I told her this was all for her, a subversive manifestation, something more than sky, more than a mere statement or a token, but a literal and real reflection of the effect she had had on my emotional life. If the people under the balloon woke and thought first, and only, of the balloon in the opening seconds of consciousness, then the balloon was doing its job. If they cursed it for stealing the sunshine one moment and then confessed a secret adoration for it when seen in a particular light or on a particular day, then, the balloon was doing its job. The balloon was always there, in the eye line, in the back of the mind, just as she had been in my eye line and at the back of my mind, for years. If it provoked debate and the racking of brains and the emotional exhaustion which comes only with over thinking, when words begin to lose their meaning and confusion ensues, then the balloon was doing its job.

She was ill impressed, she was difficult to impress, she didn’t get it, and struggled with the concept. I took her to Sudeley Hill, to view it from the outside, in. There was a man there too, a painter, with an easel and a canvas and a jam jar full of cloudy blue water. He told me that what he saw was an oil painters dream, a principled and refined attempt at physical emotional articulation, but he had questions too. I remember, he wondered, “Who could it be for?” Before putting down his tools for a moment and taking the air. I broke into a wry smile and shouted to him, “it’s for her you know!” She didn’t even look up and the oil painter laughed, “I doubt it,” he yelled back “explanations just don’t offer themselves to old men on hillsides.” He was right, the answer was not that easily found, the balloon stopped being about her the moment it took to the sky, it defined its own personality and re-launched a heart on the back of a gusty day.

The painter told me that he had rode through every town under the balloon’s shadow and had not seen a single smashed window, a single sign of unrest, only people continuing with their lives in order and tranquillity. But, he added, the words on everyone’s lips were not the talk of the week or the talk of the town, but words only concerning the balloon and how they were going to spend an evening under its watch. Then he wondered aloud again, “but was this true love, or simply novelty?”

Sooner or later, he predicted, someone was going to raise the thought of bringing it down and the talk would spread, he claimed, and swell and wagers would be taken and books opened in country taprooms on how long the balloon would continue to live. And lonely men and fathers and people with gainful skills, would gather in workshops and garages and front rooms with paper and markers and start to plot their own attempt on the balloon’s existence, a public lynching in the crafting, in all but name. And the sorry days dawn would break, and with the rising sun would come a hundred, or more, homemade craft, crate paper airplanes and nautical vessels adapted with boosters and cranes, monstrosities of balsa wood and string, rented wings and military gliders, filled to the brim with men and boys, armed with pick axes and air rifles, lances and knifes, who would proceed to hack and pull and fight and scratch, until suddenly the balloon would give and a man would raise his arms in glee and claim he was the one who had killed the balloon. And then another, and then another and then another would do the same in similar triumph. The anecdotes would form and spread on the say-so of the so called tanked-up witnesses, the tales of heroism and grit, and the story would become the death and not the life, and the poetry and the beauty would dilute from the collective memory. The balloon would be hacked to pieces and people would walk around with snatches of its flesh hung around their necks on golden chains, like cherished handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of a dethroned monarch.    

I went around personally, alone, to cut every cord and free the balloon from its temporary berth. With one chain left it pointed upwards, as if half weighted down to earth, in two minds as to whether stationary death and something to hold onto would far outweigh eternity in the sky. I drew my arms back and began to hack away and as the final strands and coils of silvery metal tore in two, the balloon hovered a while and then, gracefully, began to rise upwards, slowly at first and then faster and faster as it was carried away on the wind, erasing the streams of jet planes as it rose. And suddenly the sunlight poured through and retook its rightful place, as if the particles of light were bearing the balloon upwards upon their glittery shoulders, upwards towards the sun, to face the fiery giant it had tempered for so long, to look it in the eye, to face down its strength, to be pulled in by its power and then finally melted down, after inevitable submission, as punishment for dulling its heavenly majesty.

The people cheered the balloon’s departure and yelled and launched fireworks and shouted abuse and celebrated long into the night, forgetting the momentary joys it had provided for some. I stood an hour or so and watched it disappear into the sky, and wished it free and wished it safe and wished it home.

In a prim and pretty nutshell, that link is what lies behind Damon Albarn’s new English Opera, Dr Dee, which received its world premiere last week at the Palace Theatre, as part of Manchester’s increasingly renowned International Festival. In many ways English opera is a little like English sparkling wine, it is an acquired taste and the stuff from the continent is much better. Nonetheless Albarn’s attempt at reinvigorating our operatic lustre is accomplished and beautiful.

The story is admittedly hard to fathom and the lead character John Dee, an English mathematician, astrologer and advisor to Queen Elizabeth, is largely mute. Instead we are presented with an excellently constructed dream-like sequence of colourful scenes and sharp symbolism, the key events of Elizabeth I’s reign from coronation to armada, anchoring the plot.

The Elizabethan court is skilfully recreated. Elizabeth appears dressed in a nightgown and steps into her ready royal regalia, set up like a fairground cut-out, before being hoisted above the stage, orb and sceptre in hand, the untouchable Virgin Queen, ever-present, yet out of reach. Robert Dudley never stood a chance. The all seeing Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster in chief struts around the stage too, on stilts, little escaping his glaring eye.

Albarn plays the post-modernist minstrel, perched above the stage on a separate level, with a gang of gifted musicians playing medieval instruments, backed by the slightly under used BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The music is traditionally English, folk filled and pretty and Albarn’s songs intermingle well with the libretto performed on the stage, offering perspective. The stand-out song “Apple Carts” is performed in the opening seconds of the opera and accompanies a parade of English characters from punk rocker to suffragette, from Horatio Nelson to city gent, as they sashay across the stage and drop backwards off a platform, shuffling into eternity, making for a particularly poignant spectacle, just one fine example of a sumptuous staging by director Rufus Norris.

The second half, which perhaps could benefit from a little more crafting, deals with Dee’s relationship with the rather roguish and incongruous Edward Kelley, who claimed he could communicate with angels, a subject which fascinated Dee. Kelley was a bit of a chancer, a bit of a slimy bastard, who told Dee that he had been in touch with “angels” and they had suggested, quite handily, that they share everything, including (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) their wives. Apparently, Dee went along with this and, in hindsight, quite rightly, quickly cottoned on to the fact that a dash of deception was at work and never spoke to Kelley again. Of course the comedic potential of this episode is not at all dwelt on in the performance. Thank God.

Many say that Dee was the first to conceive the notion of a “British Empire” with his advocacy of English expansion into the New World. This of course was during a time when our national characteristics were more swaggering than doubtful. We were a nation more sure of our importance and traditions, a cocksure attitude that would ultimately lead to the “Hurricanes, Spitfires and Tornadoes,” Albarn sings of here, darting through our skies, years of conflict, finally leading to our national collapse.  However different we are now though, our roots are still traceable to an older England and Dr Dee is a fine celebration of our common heritage and a poignant reminder that we are only the latest link in a very long chain.

The opera closes with Albarn, the narrator, following the pattern of the suffragette and the Tommy before him, falling backwards into oblivion, his story complete. We are all but articles of our day, as Elizabeth I said, “All my possessions for a moment of time.”

La Voix Humaine, a one act opera by Francis Poulenc, based on a monologue penned by that inimitable genius of the French avant garde, Jean Cocteau, must have been one of the first works to consider the effects of the telephone on love. The brisk, 55 minute piece, depicts a lonely woman recovering from taking an overdose of sleeping pills, making a phone call to a former lover, on the eve of his wedding. The distance and shelter that the telephone offers lulls the woman into believing she can alter an irrevocable situation from afar, she is of course mistaken. The way the telephone cord lingers around her neck during the final minutes of the performance and seems to twist like a constricting snake, suggests that the emotional trauma inflicted by their break-up is, most likely, irrevocably fatal. “Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime,” she whispers, as the music concludes. Everything rests on it, nobody is free.

A rare performance of La Voix Humaine made up the second part of Cocteau Voices, a recent double bill of new productions at The Royal Opera House Two, considering the monologues of the French genius. “The Royal Opera has never produced La Voix Humaine before,” says Aletta Collins, the choreographer extraordinaire behind this and other recent ROH productions, such as Anna Nicole Smith The Opera, “mainly because it is for a single woman, lasts for 50 minutes and has an orchestral score of almost fifty parts, so there is always the issue of what are you going to put on with it.”

This problem was solved by transporting the production to the cosy Linbury Theatre, which sits in the rather grand shadow of the Royal Opera House itself. The London Sinfonia (a much more compact 38 players) was drafted in and a new, purely dance work, for the first half, in support of  La Voix, was created, choreographed by Aletta, with a completely new score composed by none other than the irrepressibly mysterious former Walker Brother himself, Scott Walker.

Scott and Aletta’s working relationship stretches back to Drifting and Tilting, a Barbican production of Walker’s songs from his experimental and almost impenetrable recent albums Tilt and The Drift, which saw British pop luminaries Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker performing Walker’s oeuvre. Scott, renowned for being one of pop’s great absentees, got in touch with the show’s producer and suggested that a handful of the songs feature an element of choreographed dance. Aletta was of course recommended for the job, and the partnership was so successful that she turned to Scott when she was in need of a new soundtrack.

The new work would become Duet for one Voice, based on Le Bel Indifférent, a Cocteau play written for Edith Piaf, featuring a woman pleading for the attention of her lover, only to be met with constant and complete silence. The scenario is turned on its head here and features a man pleading for the affection of his lover, only for her to sit through his protestations and pleas in silence, her face covered by a morning edition of Le Monde.

Walker’s score is intimidating, as all of his recent work has proven. The multi-layered beauty found in Tilt and The Drift can only be discovered after repeat listens, and the same is no doubt the case here. The music is varied and often jarring, the dramatic and loud stops and starts which dominate The Drift return here, as does a musical experimentalism which sees, at one point, a chorus of barking dogs dominate the recording, followed by noisy industrial drones. A solo trumpet consistently returns throughout the work, playing some wonderfully melancholic jazzy tones, which brings to mind dark street corners and sultry neon tragedy.

But it is the text, says Aletta, which was the first port of call when devising the choreography. “It started with the text because that’s what we had and we pinpointed in it certain colours and emotions or mental states, which became the genesis of different sections of the music.” From these early discussions and reactions, Scott developed the score. “I didn’t want the dancers to visualise the music,” Aletta says, “I wanted an honest response physically to the themes and ideas of the text and then married them together with the music.”

The narrative of movement on the stage, seems to play out the different clauses and stages of sexuality, from rejection to acceptance, the ecstasy and passion of carnality, from connection to disintegration. What is presented is, of course, an opposing and imagined reality, it could be reality, quite easily, it all depends on the say so of the woman, who sits deaf to the simmering sexuality, engrossed in her newspaper, her foot turning clockwise, repetitively, maddeningly, inpatient and uninterested. Other opposing realities are explored by the dancers too, what if the lover responds, what if communication springs into life, does it end blissfully, or in the kind of despairing phone call seen in La Voix Humaine? And yet, as the opening scene of the production reminds us, which depicts a half naked man maniacally gyrating inside a large red ruby lipped mouth, everything begins with desire and often ends up in trouble.

If all this seems very far removed from the traditional operatic fare that one expects of the Royal Opera House, then this is because the production was commissioned by the Royal Opera House 2. ROH2 is the contemporary arm of the ROH, or as Alison Duthie, the head of ROH2 labels it, the Opera House’s “permeable skin,” because of its ability to work with different companies and commission new works. The aim of the organisation is to push new art forms and promote and commission new and contemporary opera and dance, in an attempt to widen the mediums audience.

Cocteau famously said “an artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.” And yet he was very adept at describing the themes running through his prose. “Mysterious accidents and heavenly calculations,” he said were his inspiration, the invisible undercurrents which run beneath the foundations of any relationship. These undercurrents can of course be highlighted in a text, but they are made much more evident when considered through the prism of music and movement, arts which themselves hold certain invisible and mysterious powers. “All my poetry is in that,” Cocteau said, “I trace what is invisible, invisible to you.”

Cleverly, choreographer Aletta Collins’s Duet for One Voice, a dance interpretation of Le Bel, commissioned especially for this occasion by the Royal Opera House, turns the scenario on its head and features a man pleading for the affection of his lover, only for her to sit through his protestations and pleas in silence, her face covered by a morning edition of Le Monde. 

The nearly thirty minutes of dance that ensued seemed to me to be impressive. I know little about the ins and outs of professional modern dance, but if the purpose is to showcase the beauty and contradictions of the human form, then this is exactly what I saw. The narrative of movement seemed to play out the different clauses and stages of sexuality, from rejection to acceptance, the ecstasy and passion of carnality, from connection to disintegration. It is of course an opposing and imagined reality, it could be reality, quite easily, it all depends on the say so of the woman, who sits deaf to the simmering sexuality, engrossed in her newspaper, her foot turning clockwise, repetitively, maddeningly, inpatient and uninterested. The emotion conjured on the faces of the dancers was really quite extraordinary and their energy and passion, seemingly limitless.

Scott Walker’s score is intimidating, as all of his recent work has proven. The multi-layered beauty found in Tilt and The Drift can only be discovered after repeat listens, and the same is no doubt the case here. Nevertheless the music was varied and often jarring, the dramatic and loud stops and starts that dominate The Drift return here, as does a musical experimentalism that sees, at one point, a chorus of barking dogs dominate the recording, followed by noisy industrial drones. And yet, there is much more to hang onto here, there are moments of real melody, something that has disappeared from Walker’s recent work. A solo trumpet consistently returns throughout the work, playing some wonderfully melancholic jazzy tones, which brings to mind dark street corners and sultry neon tragedy.

The second part of the evening features a performance of Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, a short opera, for one voice, which sets a woman’s telephone conversation to a departing lover to music. I’ve never seen anything quite like it and was impressed that one woman, on the phone, could hold the stage and the audience’s attention for so long.

The words sung belong to Cocteau and depict a woman who is trying to put a brave face of her emotional disintegration. She tells her partner she has just returned from a restaurant, a dinner date, dressed up to the nines, when in truth, she is in her nightgown, make-up stale, bed unmade and surrounded by plates and bottles. She puts her mind at rest by considering herself footloose and fancy free, but deep down she knows her heart is settled on a destination and failure to reach it would cause it to break.  All she thinks about is him she finally admits, and when he is going to ring and what life would be like without him. The ultimate fear of course is loneliness, dying alone, isolation, her friends, she admits, are settled, organised, while she still relies on hapless affairs and momentary passions.

It must have been one of the first works to consider the effects of a technological medium on love. Whereas today a similar piece would no doubt consider the art of breaking a heart via text message, here the telephone is studied as an instrument of torture. The line continuously breaks down and wires are crossed by confused telephone exchanges, a true reflection of the rudimentary Parisian communication system of the day. She jumps when the phone rings, she panics when it cuts out, she is held to ransom by its ring.

The way the telephone cord lingers around her neck during the final minutes of the performance and seems to twist like a constricting snake, suggests that the emotional trauma inflicted by the break-up is most likely irrevocably fatal. “Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime,” she whispers, as the music concludes. Everything rests on it, nobody is free.

The stage direction and designs by Tom Cairns are simple, yet effective. Deciding to conceal the Southbank Sinfonia backstage allows the set to be close to the audience, unbroken by an orchestra pit and allows for an exceptionally involving experience. Nuccia Focile, the Sicilian singer, is tasked with pulling off this one woman act and she does so with panache. Her first notes sounded slightly crushed by the weight of first night nerves and the thoughts of what she had to meander through for the next fifty minutes, but she quickly recovered and delivered an engrossing performance.

This is certainly not a night for everyone, I heard grumbles on the way out, and it may prove difficult to maintain an audience for two exceptionally different pieces of work following one after another. However, if you approach it willing to accept the “mysterious accidents and heavenly calculations,” which dominate Cocteau’s work and the invisible undercurrents which run beneath the surface of relationships, then there is a great deal to learn and revel in here.

Yes, floors around the world are scattered with the digits of significant guitarists. So, how did Tony Iommi bounce back from his lack of sculpted cuticles, in order to form one of the great Heavy Metal groups of all time? Well, cleverly, he crafted replacement plastic finger tips from washing up liquid bottles, tanned them in leather, tuned down his guitar and loosened the strings in order to adapt to the change, thus, or so the story goes, giving birth to that fabulously dirty, grinding, heavy metal drone.

The ominous shadow of industry also played its part, which hung over the youth of Birmingham in the 1970’s like the smoggy silhouette of Richard III. It was the factory or nothing for most. And long before the repetitive grind of machinery was eclipsed by the soft crinkle of office keyboards, the noise of industrial Birmingham it seems, proved oddly inspiring.

Now, years after Black Sabbath and Judas Priest swaggered through a decade from Henry’s Blues House to the rest of the world, Capsule, a Birmingham based arts group are to launch Home of Metal, a summer-long arts festival ruminating on Metal and its legacy. “We found there was very little held in museums, libraries and archives that looked at the history of the genre,” says Lisa Meyer, Capsule’s coordinator, “and we wanted to make up for this.”

To bypass the lack of materials, Capsule organised a series of “Antiques Roadshow” fairs for Metal fans, in which rockers of all ages brought in their dark trinkets and dusty vinyl collections for judgment and appraisal. One such fan was Bill Sneyd, a forty year old accounts manager and a lifelong Metal fan since his days at Walsall College of Technology. He discovered the music through the usual channels, a loaned cassette on a Spanish holiday and a rifle through a friend’s record collection. His friend “had the lot,” Bill remembers, “Priest, Purple, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Lizzy, Magnum, the list went on. It was 1988, he played me British Steel and Led Zeppelin IV and I was hooked.”

Metal fans are famously devoted to the genre, but they are also aware that much of the music’s affiliation with doom, gloom and the fiery occult should be approached with tongue firmly in cheek. The philosophy of the music says Bill, is to “turn it up to eleven, bang your head and have a good time.” There is a sense of escapism on offer to those who love the music, the heavy sound is all enveloping and can transport you to another place, if you are willing to let it. Bill believes Metal is best labelled as “music with teeth,” with lyrics that can be quite laughable one minute yet contain the ability to “move you to tears” the next.

It is hoped that the festival will appeal to a wider audience than just Metal fans though, and Lisa and her team at Capsule have gone to great lengths to ensure there is a wide palette of shows and exhibitions on offer, “which will make people in the region feel really proud of their heritage.” One of the events they are most proud of is an exhibition planned for the Leather Museum in Walsall, which will display a number of Judas Priest’s famous leather costumes. There will also be a display at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery called “You Should be Living” which will explore the language of Heavy Metal and an American called Ben Venom will display a host of patchwork vintage metal t-shirts, “kind of patchwork quilts,” as Lisa labels them , “but with sculls on.” Obviously.

The major art show of the festival will be “Be True to Your Oblivion” presented by Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner. “Metal is something that has cropped up in my work over the years,” Mark says, in a career that has focused on the visual potential of language. One of the newest works displayed will feature a video of Nic Bullen, one of the founding members of Napalm Death, a famous grind core band. “They are known for their extremely fast songs,” says Titchner, “but for also developing this style where the language becomes impossible to hear, the vocal becomes a grunt.” Many, like me, struggle to get past that particular element of Metal and start to sound a little like Pete Seeger standing, axe in hand, over the electrical cords powering Dylan’s amps at Newport, mumbling about how it’s impossible to hear the lyrics over the “distortion”. But I suppose you just have to get over that.

Bullen performs a work written especially for him by Mark in the video, with a very close camera shot bearing in on his mouth and throat in an attempt to “consider the actual mechanisms of sound making, separated from the background noise.” The sound of the voice is critical to other parts of the exhibition too, for example an exhibit called “Be Angry, Don’t Stop Breathing” which Mark labels as similar to group primal scream therapy, will encourage visitors to shout, scream and talk into a large microphone linked to the galleries PA system. “I’m interested in what happens when you give a person the opportunity to scream in a place where they shouldn’t,” he adds.

The power of the pithy epithet and the isolated lyric are also important to Mark. Much of his work consists of colourful banners and posters, embossed with a particular quote or lyrical line, such as “you should be living, but you only survive” or “we want answers to the questions of tomorrow.” A banner made especially for Home of Metal features the adamant “I’ll chose my own fate” taken from the lyrics of a Judas Priest song. The banners are the result of “disconnecting an idea from its original place,” says Mark, “so if you have something that is a Heavy Metal lyric or a Britney Spears lyric, it sounds like a philosophical text, when you take it away from the context of the music.”

Of course the existential can be found in anything if you are willing to look hard enough to see it, from the pages of scripture to the list of ingredients on the back of a Crème Brulee. The mysteries of life are not necessarily held and solved only within the holy or the sacred. Rather a simple isolated lyric from a Heavy Metal song penned by a bunch of Brummie rockers can, to some, offer the key to a happy life and a well anchored existence, if held up to a particular light. Answers are seen in the eyes of the beholder. Bill Sneyd’s favourite lyric is “hell bent, hell bent for leather,” from the Judas Priest song of the same name. He can see something in that, and you know, if I look hard enough, so can I.

6^th of July, 1952

Smokey London’s hapless night time feel and me were never one. Forty eight minutes to ten, Guinness time. Hold me up or hold me back, I’ll make it there in time for The Girl I Love.

The trams are finishing tonight. When you heard them fumbling their way through the morning, first thing, you knew you had survived another fiery night. The rattle, the clang and the sway and oh how snug it was to be on the inside, when it was raining on the outside. The trams and the rain and South London all seemed to go so well together then. And now what of these unused rails? The paths left abandoned, the streets never chosen. And what of that special section of thin air, reserved solely for those hardy souls, temporarily suspended between street and sky?

I never appreciated my position. I never gave it a second thought. The magic in the everyday, the mystery within the machine. Gliding through the kerosene strings of Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns, the filament eyes, tripped into life by the lamplighter’s touch, all the while sat side by side with the wishless old ladies who thought nothing of it.

I thought something of it though. Every single night. Like putting lighter to cigarette, I still love that sound. It’s nothing. The fizz, the sizzle, as flame meets paper and root catches light. Inhale and exhale smoke. Smoke is like a secret, the hazy wisp of a secret, breathed in for a moment, hidden inside, deep within the chest and breathed out when concealment becomes too much.

Now I’m demobbed, but I’m still feeling the Ardennes in the palms of my hands, in the soles of my feet, I’ve got its mud under my fingernails and its metal in my back. I held his hand as he melted into the dirt.  I took his pictures from his top pocket, took his letters given passage by BFPO and held them in trust near his St Christopher, until I could plead my way home.

The tram driver becomes a bus driver tomorrow and for the first time in forty years he will be able to sit down, but then again, I suppose bird song always does sound louder after any storm. I’m going to open all the windows on the top deck, I’m going to let the atmosphere flood in, I’m going to jump up on a seat and peer out and see over the edge of the world, and the old ladies are going to frown and I’m going to let them. I miss my father more than anyone else in the world, and if love is the absence of anxiety, then I’m as anxious as hell.