Latest photographs in the ArkAngel collection

ArkAngel has a small but perfectly formed collection of photographs and these are the latest additions. Three of these four come from Magnum photo agency which offers small signed or estate-stamped prints. The fourth is direct from the photographer (Danny Clifford) with whom I had a fascinating chat in Marlow, Buckinghamshire before the plague hit.  

Eve Arnold – Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce. Long Island, New York (1955)

‘Ulysses’ is my favourite book and Marilyn is an important name in our family (and our Marilyn is blonde too). I read a concise biography of Marilyn Monroe as a teenager and was struck by her intelligence and intellectual aspirations. This image, which was on a poster in Black Gull Books, East Finchley in recent times, says body and mind, natural beauty and artistic beauty, ‘low’ culture and ‘high’, adult and child.

Eve Arnold’s grandson Michael wrote: “This image was made by Eve during her first shoot with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had shown Eve her down-to-earth, relaxed personality as they worked together. But the photographer had yet to really witness the actress’s candour. The following is an excerpt from a passage in Eve’s book, In Retrospect, in which she recalled meeting with Marilyn a second time, in order to show her the photographs she had taken:

She met me at the door in a diaphanous black negligee. She had a hairbrush in her hand. Would I mind sitting through an interview for a European magazine—then we could talk? Almost immediately the reporter showed up. Marilyn greeted her, and while the woman had her head down, looking in her purse for notebook and pencil, Marilyn asked if she minded if she (Marilyn) brushed her hair during the interview. No, of course not. When the woman raised her head, Marilyn was brushing her pubic hair.

Due in no small part to Monroe’s laidback temperament, the two were to become close over the months that followed.”

Elliott Landy – Bob Dylan in Woodstock, NY (1968)

This is the second Elliott Landy shot of Dylan in the collection. This is the first:

Elliott Landy – Bob Dylan with son Jesse, Byrdcliffe home, Woodstock, NY (1968)

The collection has print 7/100 which is 50 x 35cm.

The new infrared shot is most striking of course for its colour. It derives from a Saturday Evening Post cover image assignment. Landy was just starting out but his work with The Band had impressed one of Dylan’s friends and that’s how they first connected. The connection and subsequent friendship eventually yielded an album cover (Nashville Skyline). The shot was taken outside Dylan’s home in Byrdcliffe, New York state, as was the shot with his young son, Jesse.

Danny Lyon – Bob Dylan behind the SNCC office. Greenwood, Mississippi (1963)

This shot is reminiscent of the brilliant 2019 creative documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan story by Martin Scorsese (to give it its full title) in which Bob takes his guitar out at times in a spirit of activism and solidarity. 

After giving a concert in a cotton field with folk singers Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel, Dylan played behind the office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC – pronounced “snick”). Bernice Reaon, one of the original Freedom Singers and later the lead singer of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is the woman listening intently in front of Dylan.

The Freedom Singers started in 1962 as a student quartet in Albany State College, Albany, Georgia. Their sound combined  black Baptist church singing with protest songs. They were big supporters of the SNCC during the emerging civil rights movement and they played a significant role in making communal song a key means of empowering and educating audiences about civil rights issues and combatting Jim Crow segregation.

Mendy Samstein is sitting behind Dylan and talking to Willie Blue. Samstein quit his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago to join the civil rights movement in the South as a full-time organiser for the SNCC. Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael (previously chairman of SNCC) said Samstein was “one in a million”.

Danny Clifford – Amy Winehouse backstage at 4th BBC Radio Jazz awards, Hammersmith Palais, London (2004)

Amy Winehouse was another one in a million. This July marks the 10th anniversary of her sad passing and I have been working on a documentary to mark the event.

The deliberate choice of such an early image comes down to the way this shot captures the youthful promise of Amy before other pressures intruded. It was exhibited in a church in Hampstead a couple of years ago as part of a Danny Clifford show. 

Danny had a studio set up backstage at these BBC jazz awards. Amy had just come off stage after performing some songs from her debut album Frank. She was reluctant to go over to the press wall and didn’t really give them what they wanted. Danny managed to steer her into his makeshift studio after and got much more relaxed shots including this beauty. Katie Melua came over a couple of minutes later and Danny suggested taking shots of the two of them together. Katie was well up for it but Amy said: “I ain’t having a picture with her. She’s shit. She doesn’t even write her own songs.” Danny thought she was joking at first but there was no sign of that. “I’ll take that as a No then” was his retort.

Openings – first lines of songs

In most creations with a time dimension (film, music, etc.), the opening is very important. This is particularly true of Short Form Video where the drop-off rates in the first minute on almost all platforms is very high (75%+). It’s all about grabbing attention and retaining interest. While it’s critical in this most modern of art forms, it’s pretty much as true of the positively ancient art of song writing.

Here are some favourites from a lively thread on our Facebook account…

God said to Abraham…

God said to Abraham “Kill me a son”

Abe said “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”

[Bob Dylan, Highway 61]

 

I don’t believe in an interventionist god

But I know, darling, that you do

[Nick Cave, Into My Arms]

 

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine

[Patti Smith, Gloria]

 

I wanted to change the world

But I could not even change my underwear

[Sinead O’Connor, written by John Grant – Queen of Denmark]

 

Some of us live like princes; some of us live like queens;

Some of us live just like you and me and don’t know what it means…

To take our place in one world; to make our peace in one world; to make our love in one world…

[John Martyn, One World]

 

If you kissed the sun right out of the sky for me

If you told me all the lies I might deserve

If you lay right down and you died for me

I could not love you more

[John Martyn, Couldn’t Love You More] perhaps the greatest in his simplicity

 

You curl around me, like a fern in the spring.

[John Martyn, Go Down Easy]

 

I can hear her heart beat for a thousand miles

And the heavens open every time she smiles

And when I come to her that’s where I belong

Yet I’m running to her like a river’s song

[Van Morrison, Crazy Love]

 

I am a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm

[Iggy and the Stooges,  Search and Destroy]

 

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey

[Beck]

 

Jeremiah was a bullfrog

Was a good friend of mine

[Three Dog Night, Joy to the World]

 

I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce.

[Elbow]

 

When me and Pam are hand in hand, we make a lovely pair.

But when we fight her awful spite is more than I can bear.

[Ian Dury, Pam’s Moods]

 

I guess I should’ve known

By the way you parked your car sideways

That it wouldn’t last

[Prince, Little Red Corvette]

 

Tumble out of bed stumble to the kitchen,

Pour myself a cup of ambition

[Dolly Parton, 9 to 5]

 

I may not always love you

But as long as there are stars above you

You never need to doubt it

[Beach Boys, God Only Knows] one of the most beautiful of songs

 

An old man turned 98…He won the lottery and died the next day

[Alanis Morissette, Ironic]

 

Son I am 30

I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty

[Happy Mondays, Kinky Afro]

 

I never thought it would happen

With me and the girl from Clapham

[squeeze, Up the Junction] a top rhyme

 

Abra Abra Cadabra

I wanna reach out and grab ya

[Steve Miller Band]

 

A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, A-lop-bam-boom

[Little Richard, Tutti Frutti]

 

I did you wrong my heart went out to play

But in the game I lost you

What a price to pay, hey I’m crying

[Smokey Robinson, Ooh Ooh Baby]

 

Oh, my land is like a wild goose

Wanders all around everywhere

Trembles and it shakes till every tree’s loose

It rolls the meadows and it rolls the nails

[Gram Parsons, A Song for You]

 

Hey Charlie I’m pregnant and living on 9th Street

Right above a dirty bookstore off Euclid Avenue

And I stopped takin dope and I quit drinkin whiskey

And my old man plays the trombone and works out at the track

[Tom Waits, Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis]

 

It’s four in the morning, the end of December

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better

New York is cold, but I like where I’m living

There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert

You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

[Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat]

 

No regrets Coyote

We just come from such different sets of circumstance

I’m up all night in the studios

And you’re up early on your ranch

You’ll be brushing out a brood mare’s tail

While the sun is ascending

And I’ll just be getting home with my reel to reel

There’s no comprehending

Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes

And the lips you can get

And still feel so alone

And still feel related

Like stations in some relay

You’re not a hit and run driver

No no

Racing away

[Joni Mitchell, Coyote]

 

They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot

[Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi]

 

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand

Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain

He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook’s

Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein

[Warren Zevon, Werewolves of London]

 

I met her in a club down in old Soho

Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca Cola

C-O-L-A, Cola

[The Kinks, Lola]

 

I’ve been loving you a long time

Down all the years, down all the days

And I’ve cried for all your troubles

Smiled at your funny little ways.

[The Pogues, a Rainy Night in Soho]

 

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs

Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know

And the people that come and go

Stop and say hello.

[The Beatles, Penny Lane]

 

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way,

[The Beatles, Help!]

 

I can feel the earth begin to move

I hear my needle hit the groove

And spiral through another day

I hear my song begin to say

Kiss me where the sun don’t shine

The past was yours

But the future’s mine

You’re all out of time.

[The Stone Roses, She Bangs the Drums]

 

Well you tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks.

But now you’ve found out that it’s a habit that sticks.

[Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict]

 

I’m a glum one, it’s explainable, I met someone unattainable

[Frank Sinatra, I Can’t Get Started]

 

Someone’s got it in for me they’re planting stories in the press.

[Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind]

 

Bless my cotton socks I’m in the news

[Teardrop Explodes, Reward]

 

Look out, mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river

With a big red beacon, and a flag, and a man on the rail

[Neil Young, Powderfinger]

 

Last week I attended a family affair,

and a few remarked upon my recent growth of facial hair

[Loudon Wainright III, Surviving Twin]

 

Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street

[Joe Jackson, Is she really going out with him?] 

 

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
But I say…
Oh Bondage! Up yours!

[X-Ray Spex, Oh Bondage! Up yours!]

 

Some people might say my life is in a rut
But I’m quite happy with what I got

[The Jam, Going Underground]

 

It’s a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling, “No”
And her daddy has told her to go

[David Bowie, Life on Mars?]

 

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy

[Nature Boy]

 

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to Heaven. 

[Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven]

 

If you are the dealer

I’m out of the game

If you are the healer it means

I’m broken and lame

[Leonard Cohen, You Want it Darker]

 

Me and Mrs. Jones

We got a thing, goin’ on

[Billy Paul, Me & Mrs Jones]

 

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.

Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.

[Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road]

 

I’ve got six things on my mind, you’re no longer one of them.

[Paddy McAloon, Desire As]

 

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

[Nina Simone, I wish I knew how it would feel to be free]

 

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste.

[Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil]

 

I am an antichrist

[Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK]

 

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days
Since you took your love away

[Nothing Compares 2U]

 

Hey ho, let’s go.

[Ramones, Blitzkrieg Bop]

 

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days
Since you took your love away

The definition of Success

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Bob Dylan

4 highlights from Duluth

Not The Usual Suspects

I gave a talk this week as part of the Catalyst Content Festival (formerly the ITVFest) in Duluth, Minnesota. All I knew about the town (which is actually a city) before I heard about the festival moving here from Vermont is that Bob Dylan was born here (and at six moved just north of the town to Hibbing). That’s why on the plane over I was listening to Blood on the Tracks, getting in the groove for a semi-mythical place. At sunset yesterday a train whistle worthy of Slow Train Coming cut through the freezing air and a four-coach train appeared on the lakeside tracks just below me as I returned from a long walk around the edge of Lake Superior. The lake, the best part of 400 miles lengthwise and 200 widthwise, contains 10% of the world’s accessible/surface fresh water. The coaches included a silver 50s-vintage one with bubble windows along the roof of AirStream-style silver panelling, matching the sides; two classic red carriages, and at the back a black Victorian-type one with one of those doors and platforms with railings from every Western ever.

1. Bob Dylan’s childhood home

On my first day I walked up the hill behind the hotel for a few blocks to an innocuous suburban duplex house – 519 North Third Avenue E – where Bob, who was born in 1941, lived on the 1st floor (UK; 2nd US) as an infant. The pilgrimage was done. There’s little to mark Duluth’s most famous son – a highway named Bob Dylan Way which I walked by chance the first evening at sundown and the air where a statue doesn’t stand, as the recent crowdfunding attempt failed. I understand there’s a small music festival annually. The city can certainly make more of their legend.

You can see Highway 61 from the porch

2. The journey over

My talk was entitled: Not The Usual Suspects and looked at getting competitive edge in TV and film through diversity of all kinds. It seems to have gone down well as people have been stopping me in the street and giving me lovely feedback. They say stuff like “your talk made me cry” and I have to check “For the right reasons I hope!” – I showed a couple of moving documentary clips including Mushi’s King’s Speech triumph in Educating Yorkshire, made at Channel 4 (UK) during my time there.

Bob’s next-door neighbor

“The Usual Suspects” phrase comes from Casablanca (made the year after Dylan’s birth). In the talk I showed the diversity of the people who made this ‘American classic’, from the Swede Ingrid Bergman to the Jewish scriptwriters, the Epstein brothers. By chance the movie was available on the plane over so I watched it for the first time in about five years. It brought me back of course to Robert McKee’s long-running Story course which includes a day dissecting the film from a story structure perspective. I remember that being riveting at the time, this was in the late 80s near the start of my career. John Cleese, sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss and nascent director Joanna Hogg were among my cohort of fellow students.

4 things I noticed this time out:

(i) the symbol of drinking/wine glasses knocked over and righted again
(ii) the ironic reference to how fast Nazis can kill

Victor Laszlo:

And what if you track down these men and kill them, what if you killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can’t kill that fast.

That was 1941-42 (when the Epstein brothers wrote the script) – little did they know of what would come to pass in the wake of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, seven months after the birth of little Jewish Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota (aka Bob Dylan). The Final Solution set in motion there could manage hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions.

(iii) the images of stripes in the film – on Bogart’s tie, on Bergman’s dress, the blinds in Rick’s office, all seem to suggest that life requires a choice between the black and white options before us. It’s resonant watching the film in a week where Trump’s isolationist withdrawal from Northern Syria has precipitated the attack of the Kurds by the Turks, sowing more chaos in the Middle East.

(iv) the theme of race and interracial relationships – the friendship and partnership between Rick and Sam must have been unusual and progressive in 1942. Sam gets 25% of the profits of Rick’s American Bar. There is a real, tangible mutual affection between the two which flies in the face of the Charlottesville era.

As I was watching the film, ironically I was filling in a form to get a German passport (my father and grandfather were born in Leipzig, German like Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser) and Ingrid Bergman’s mother). The movie is full of people seeking paperwork to escape oppressive regimes, nationalism, divisive ideas and narrow minds. There was a real resonance in the coincidence of art and life in this aeroplane seat.

Planes are central to ‘Casablanca’

3. Sight restored

One of my fellow speakers on the Storyworld part of the conference had a small eye treatment just under two weeks ago. It involved flashing lights, no surgery, took around 15 minutes. As a result the sight was restored to one of his eyes that had not seen in the half-century of his life – he had been living with monocular vision which was blurry and 2D. His bad eye it turned out was physically OK but not wired in right to the brain. This quick intervention, a doctor’s hunch,  jump-started the connection. The real highlight of this trip was to see this New Yorker revel in his new-found vision like a child. After the morning of our talks, we went out back of the old brewery which was the venue and he was struggling with the richness and dynamism of the scene – the expanse of Lake Superior, the biggest of the five Great Lakes, was too much to take in: the bright colours under the sun, the ever-moving waves, were making the ground beneath his feet move and blowing his mind. His brain is clearly still making adjustments to having two working eyes. Since the change, his lifelong OCD tendencies have disappeared overnight. The joy of his rediscovery of how the world looks, experiencing life anew in this way was an absolute privilege to witness. Like the innocent joy of infancy.

a superior lake for sure

4. Lake walks

I went for a long walk on Friday afternoon along the shore. Lake Superior appears more like a sea than a lake, it is so huge. First along the red stone beach, to the 1909 iron lighthouse on a long concrete jetty by the port entrance, over the massive metal lifting-bridge which is the emblem of the city, to the narrow white beaches beyond, which a fellow conference participant told me are the longest in the world for an inland body of water. It takes a freighter seven days to get from this most westerly port city to the Atlantic via the St Lawrence Seaway. I sat on a beach dune reading a Lew Archer and listening to the rhythm of the small lapping shoreline waves, grateful for such opportunities to travel and see the world afresh.

bridges not walls

Something Is Happening

Highway 61 Revisited photo session (New York 1965)

Just listened to a music podcast called ‘Is It Rolling, Bob? (talking Dylan)’ in which two actor blokes (Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare) talk to a journo bloke (David Hepworth) about a song & dance man, Bob Dylan.

It is a lot better than ‘Stalking Time for the Moon Boys’ in which two TV blokes (David Baddiel and Tim Hincks) talk to various other blokes and each other about a song & dance man, David Bowie. But it’s still not great. Entertaining enough if you’re keen on your Dylan.

One interesting fact I picked up was that Dylan named himself not after Welsh poet D. Thomas (which I’d believed) but after Marshall Dillon in some TV cowboy show (‘Gunsmoke’). Dylan as lifelong cowboy makes a lot of sense.

A question they asked David was how did you first come across Dylan. Got me thinking.

As a six year-old, just allowed to go by myself across one road to the newsagent (Eric & Mavis’s or perhaps it was the previous incarnation), I bought myself a fold-out poster magazine. I got it home expecting it to fold out to reveal a hippy rabbit (Dylan of ‘Magic Roundabout’ fame). Instead it was an unprepossessing bearded bloke with a guitar. A disappointing first encounter.

When I first fell under Dylan’s spell was having one of those Moments listening to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. I’d heard bits & pieces of Dylan during my childhood, listened to him a bit at uni through friends who were advocates (but I still had my Punk head on). But it was listening to this track on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ when the light went on. It was the Surrealism of the lyrics that really grabbed me – I’m not really a lyrics man but the words made their impact, above all the non-rational, dream-like nature of them. I was in.

This moment lead directly to my ending up with a son called Dylan (who looks at times a little like the Big Man of this vintage).

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Sometimes it’s really good not to know what it is – just let it sink in and brew up.

For the record

A relative in Ireland recently sent me one of those chain postings in Facebook – I don’t go for passing those on but since I did the thinking – about what my favourite records are – I’ll plop them in here for posterity.

My funeral record (last track)

My other funeral record (first track)

 

Sound & Vision: 4 of the best from Bowie’s art collection

I had a bit of an art blow-out earlier this week with three thoroughly enjoyable exhibitions in a day:

View from a beanbag

You Say You Want A Revolution? at the V&A which looks at “records and rebels” from 1966 to 1970 – I went with my friend Kathelin Gray who was present at many of the events showcased and knew many of the people referred to, including Allen Ginsberg who is the person who first brought us together when I was on sabbatical writing in 2013-14. Walking through this excellent display with her certainly added a special, personal dimension. For a while we kicked back on beanbags to watch highlights from the Woodstock movie, including Jimi Hendrix’s era-defining rendition of the Stars & Stripes, perfect for US election day.

Endless Highway off the beaten track

The Path Beaten at The Halcyon which for the second time in as many years brings together in London a collection of Bob Dylan’s paintings and sculpture. The images which most appealed were ones like ‘Endless Highway’ which seem of a piece with his songs and how they capture the essence of America. Also perfect for an election day when that could easily get lost.

Sandwiched between was a visit to Bowie / Collector at Sotheby’s, a last viewing of Bowie’s personal collection (minus the stuff of sentimental value) before it went under the auctioneer’s hammer on Thursday 10th and Friday 11th November (yesterday and the day before). I went with my friend Doug to whom I picked out a single painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat as The One. As it turned out that canvas went for £7.1M, the top price at an auction which raised double the expected revenue, in this case more than doubling its top estimate of £3.5M. So I reckon I’ve got a good eye. And what that good eye spied on the day were these…

ONE Lot 22: Jean-Michel Basquiat – Air Power (1984)

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Air Power (1984)

For all the bullshitWar(se)hol(e)hype around Basquiat, the young man was a really dynamic artist with a beautiful sense of colour. Bowie played Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s biographical movie. The canvas displays Basquiat’s usual mix of lively paint (acrylic) and fat chalky lines (oilstick) looking like the bastard offspring of a blueprint and a Brooklyn wall. The white ladder shape on the chest and body of the main figure reminds me at once of one of those bone breast decorations Red Indians wear and a railway line reaching westwards. In other words JMB seems to really capture that essence of America.

 

TWO Lot 4: Peter Lanyon – Trevalgan (1951)

Peter Lanyon – Trevalgan (1951)

Hot on the heals of the excellent Lanyon exhibition, Soaring Flight, at The Courtauld last Christmas, Bowie/Collector afforded an encounter with another group of Lanyon’s fresh, original landscapes, of which this stood out the most. Trevalgan is a landmark work in Lanyon’s journey of reinvention of landscape painting, tilting it up to become a fusion of map, aerial photo and abstract expressionist take on the Cornwall countryside, the horizon curved around the picture surface on which sea, fields, cliffs and sky are transformed into a gigantic emerald of England.

Peter Lanyon – Picture of the Month

THREE lot 43: Patrick Caulfield – Foyer (1973)

Patrick Caulfield – Foyer (1973)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Caulfield as one inclined to a very graphic style in my own drawing and painting. This large acrylic captures much about modern life in a bland space of the hotel lobby variety (which is not much variety) – to get to anything of interest or colour you have to penetrate to the bar, a small bejewelled space of coloured glass and decorated alcoves, tucked away small in the background distance of the image.

FOUR Lot 101: David Jones – Crucifixion (c.1922)

David Jones – Crucifixion (c.1922)

I suspect Bowie bought this one because the artist shares his real name, plus of course Jones was a highly accomplished religious artist in the vein of Eric Gill. This sparse, stripped down pencil and watercolour drawing captures the agony of the Crucifixion, remembering even to bloody the knees, not just the stigmata. He achieves something truly ancient and in touch with the roots of Christianity.

I felt two things as I left the exhibition. (i) There was so much of it. Too much for any one person to own. It made me feel a bit sick being amongst so much. It must have been a relief for Bowie and his family to offload All This Stuff. David Jones #1’s Christ departs with just a delicate blue loin cloth and a crown of thorns. (ii) Having gone to so much trouble assembling some very fine sub-collections among his overall Collection (mainly of the 20th Century British Art I really love) I wonder why he broke it all up again? Why didn’t he donate little groups to museums to keep them together? I suspect his family don’t really need all £33M of the proceeds.

What Bowie did give – from my little perspective – was an introduction to my ideal drawer and one of my favourite artists, Egon Schiele. I heard him talking about this artist (who I, like most people at the time, had never heard of) on Radio 1 around the time of his Lodger record, the last of the Berlin trilogy. From there a life-long love sprouted. If Bowie had any Schiele’s he kept them back from the sale. The nearest is a single Oskar Kokoschka litho and an Eric Heckel woodcut figure with long boney hands. He certainly had a heroic eye for art. (Though he could have gotten arrested by the design police for his taste in furniture.)

 

 

Passing the baton

I had the great honour and pleasure of explaining to Enfant Terrible No. 2 this afternoon how a record player works – and indeed how a record works. “So if you turn it over are there more songs on the other side?”

It reminded me of the time the four of us were in the car listening to a Sherlock Holmes story and I had to pause the tape to explain what a ‘typewriter’ was, as the mystery revolved around a typewriter with a dodgy E.

So I walked down to Alan’s record shop on our high street with the ETs and No. 2 bought his very first piece of vinyl, a Rolling Stones (later) hits LP – he was after the track Wild Horses. He asked me to show him how to play it in the shop. I demoed on the knackered old deck. “So the lines are different songs?”

I showed him how to check the record for blemishes, how to handle the disc, how to check the weight/thickness.

It’s interesting how they came to this place, to the point of being introduced to Alan as customers after one and a half decades of just being local kids. After years of wall-to-wall rap the younger one recently got into reggae, then Dylan and The Stones; the older one into The Doors and Dylan. When Snoop Dogg put out a reggae album as Snoop Lion he provided the bridge for ET2 into the rasta world. And Yelawolf’s Nashville connections prompted thoughts in the head of ET1 of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. After years of Mac Miller and Wiz Khalifa how amazing to get a text saying: “Just been listening to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Hurricane’ – the man’s a genius”.

What’s also interesting to see is how all the musical education/indoctrination did actually get in and get noticed. I used to make them tapes for their birthdays based on what they were interested in – so at 4 for example it was cops, robbers and superheroes – cue Police & Thieves, The Batman theme (The Jam), etc. Now tunes like Riders on the Storm (from the cowboys & Indians phase) are resurfacing in their consciousness.

This afternoon’s lads’ trip down the road was a real landmark and a deep pleasure.

A Perfect Day (Day 76)

Pretty much the best day so far. Started out from Terri Hooley’s house in the company of Stuart Bailie, radio presenter on BBC Ulster, head of the Oh Yeah music centre and expert on Van Morrison, having grown up in the same hood. The pair of them gave me a beautiful tour of Van’s East Belfast taking in not only his birthplace in Hyndford Street but all those mythically poetic names like Orangefield, Cyprus Avenue and the like. Stuart really knows his shit, he recently made a radio tour of the place and is making a longer programme along the same lines to be broadcast soon. That’s the pylon where Van arranged to meet, the third one over. That’s where he drunk alone under the bridge, chips in Terri. It was such an evocative way to experience the city.

a gift from my nephew repatriated – and signed by the ‘old puffin’

When we got to Oh Yeah in the Cathedral Quarter, all within spitting distance of Terri’s Northern Irish Punk hub at the old Harp Bar, I took my leave of Terri, a warm hug from a genuinely warm and charming personality, at the entrance to the former whiskey warehouse which is now one of the physical legacies of Terri’s activities over the years, Oh Yeah indeed, and Stuart gave me a really insightful interview, shedding light on some of the more mysterious parts of the Good Vibrations story.

From there I trotted round the corner along the alleyway where Wizard Studios used to be, where Teenage Kicks was recorded. At the end is a red door which marks the new home of Atto Partners, a digital and design agency I work with, having introduced them to the emerging world of multiplatform TV on 4thought.tv . They gave me a bag of Christmas tea – happy days!

KVLR says hi

Within a literal stone’s throw is the John Hewitt which seemed as good a place as any to hook up with my old friend KVLR, Kev Largey to dull mortals. He’s an artist who does a lot of top class work on the streets of Belfast and Dublin. One of his pieces opposite where we were seated happens to be on page 194 of Terri’s book Hooleygan. It’s beside the Art Deco arcade where Terri’s shop was immolated by the forces of darkness. [see Day 75 post for eejits and incendiary devices].

Kev took me on a splendid tour of the best of the top-notch street art around North Street where Good Vibrations currently resides. He gave me a bag of dried seaweed – happy days! It’s a Belfast favourite, which he picked up as we passed a greengrocer’s stall, to give me my first taste  – it brings the sea to you like nothing else, even shellfish and fishfish, the minute you start chewing. It brought back memories of the seaweed baths my beautiful young bride and I visited in Enniscrone, Co. Sligo on our honeymoon.

To round off a perfect day we popped in to the record shop below Kev’s studio where I found some of Malcolm Garrett’s finest work for Buzzcocks [more of him in the new year] and a bootleg or promo album entitled On The Road with, yes you’ve guessed it, Allen Ginsberg on the cover sitting with Bob Dylan beside Jack Kerouac’s grave.  Waiting for me or what?

Content incubation (Days 67 and 68)

I started Day 67 on non-book business in Marylebone to do with my main non-exec directorship – it was a nice change to be immersed in a thoroughly commercial world. I moseyed on though Mayfair in the direction of BAFTA in Piccadilly and briefly immersed myself in the art world courtesy of the Halcyon Gallery which has a big show of Bob Dylan’s iron sculptures and paintings which was fun. Once I got to BAFTA I dived back in to the Music chapter happily. Bumped into a couple of people who were helpful in making connections to interviewees (both for Music chapter). And set up some more interviews. Wandered across St James’s and through the dark park to Channel 4 HQ for Xmas drinks, my first visit to the building in several weeks, only my second since 1st September kick-off day, refreshing.

Day 68 began in the British Library with more tapping away about Tony Wilson. Had a lovely lunch round the corner in St Chad’s Place with Jesse Cleverly of the newly established Wildseed Studios, which he describes as “a content incubator looking to invest in great new ideas”. We talked Book, multiplatform, Royal Court (where he used to work), Nigella, creative process, etc.

Then bee-line home for more writing and to speak to the other protagonist of my Music chapter – Terri Hooley of Good Vibrations. He was totally charming and warm, and I really look forward to heading over to Belfast to hang with him in the next few days. He offered me a tour of Van’s East Belfast which will be a real kick.

And the day ends here in the Adam & Eve on Mill Hill’s Ridgeway – as much my home turf as Cyprus Avenue is Van’s. I’ve got mulled wine, crisps, seat by fire, Sinatra on the pub stereo, and my fresh little Air. Happy days.