In Maricourt, take the first road north to Montauban immediately beyond Péronne Road Cemetery. After 750m the road crosses the start-line for the 18th and 30th Divisions’ attack on 1 July 1916. About 1km to the west of the road Captain Wilfred ‘Billie’ Nevill kicked his football across no man’s land before he was killed close to the German barbed wire.
The 18th Division of which Nevill was part had been in the Somme for nearly a year. In May 1916 Nevill, made a Captain, went home to England on leave. He and his fellow officers concerned themselves about how their men would behave when finally called on to go ‘over the top’.
To provide his soldiers with a reassuringly familiar symbol, Nevill bought four footballs and took them back with him to France. His team would boot then dribble their way through the German ranks and into Montauban.
‘Over the top’ soon came…
At 07.27 on 1 July 1916, when the French artillery bombardment lifted, Nevill, along with another officer duly kicked two of the balls into no man’s land – and followed in pursuit. Captain Nev had promised a prize for the first ‘goal scored’ in crossing enemy lines.
Approaching the German barbed wire defence, the concerted attacking-line hesitated – yet Nevill dashed forward to dribble some more to move the attack on – and was killed instantly.
In total 60,000 British died in the first 90 minutes of battle.
The 18th Division was supported by the 30th Division, made up of four battalions each of Liverpool Pals, Manchester Pals and Regular battalions with the French allies in reserve… the attack was stepped up… Montauban was captured three hours after the advance had begun (although heavy fighting continued throughout the day).
A monument is there today in commemoration of the Pals. In total 420,000 British perished in the Somme in the 8 mile push that lasted 4 months. This figure made up nearly half the British casualties for the entire War.
That day in Montauban, two of the dribbled footballs were found and were hailed before the surviving members of the victorious Regiments reassembling the other side of the Montauban Trench which had been their goal. Immediately the story of these football-dribbling Brits was reported worldwide in the press. In Britain it stood for courage and strength of character. In Germany it was seen as a clear example of British madness.
A year ago today, in 2006, and a further 90 years on from the Somme debacles, Germany on home soil were preparing to take on Italy in the footballing World Cup. A World Cup where prejudices were slain and mankind revelled in exemplary human behaviour and bonhomie – save for France’s Zidane headbutting the chest of an Italian in the Final on the back of a racist insult.
Mankind is redeveloping himself at the Glastonbury Festival. That is why we are so attracted to it – we are seeing evolution in a known place and right before our eyes. In the mud. Mudman cometh.
I was kind of hoping I would see or even play in a mass game of football, at Glastonbury Festival. Large games had taken place before in the sunshine. Now there was too much mud for anyone to find a blade of grass to get a game together.
The portents had been good up at Rock Ness, on the bank of Loch Ness, a couple of weeks before. I made some friends during the second night of the Festival which was in truth the early morning and we wandered the site.
There behind the crew quarters, sitting very miserably were various guys who looked like they had come a long long way – indeed from overseas, and they were waiting around slighly disorientated as they were working in shifts, including in the middle of the night, clearing up after the natives. They were refugees, from African countries and from Eastern Europe.
Tara, a dancer from Orkney, Scotland, tried to get them to smile. It took a long while.
I helped when I asked them about ‘football’. Now they could talk and not just half-smile. Now they could find their feet.
Now it just so happened that after I had watched a decent band on stage called THELAW and saw them again in the production area, leant against their tour bus, the manager with a toy football in hand, I asked them if they were looking for a proper game. Indeed they were. All would play save for the lead singer who had gone missing.
At this I knocked up the various “Refugees” I had met – some had taken to their tents in tiredness or boredom.
All we needed now was a ball. At that a proper leather ball appeared as if from nowhere. And we needed a pitch. Looking up we noticed a proper grassy pitch with goals and nets situated between the campsite and the edge of the Lake, but metres away.
So the Internationals as I called the refugees (Sierra Leone, Algeria, Congo, Sudan…and Yorkshire) took on THELAW (manager, roadie, guitarist, guitarist, drummer). Me as a referee in the middle well placed for the occasional football photo and not foregetting Nessie should she pop her head up out of the water.
And what a game (5–3 to the Internationals against a very good Scottish team who supported Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Dundee, Dundee United and Celtic).
Back at Glastonbury, a biggish area cleared in the mud (during the musical tinkerings of Babyshambles) as a woman in purple ballgown readied to boot a ball. And with some skill, given the heavy conditions underfoot. Feet that could not be seen.
Time over a game threatened to erupt and this is a very good way to clear a crowd in the mud : prepare to kick a football.
A guy did throw himself full length to head the ball. The guy in brown with the brown eyes and brown hair and… brown smile.
Probably the man of the almost-match was that woman in the purple kit. She shall not be forgot.
England with Scotland is generally regarded as ‘the cradle of the game’. Mesopotamia (Iraq & Syria) is regarded the ‘cradle of civilisation’. Africa’s Rift Valley meanwhile, cutting through many countries, is regarded the ‘cradle of mankind’. It was from this giant fold, which is still unfolding, that man was thought to have developed.
Religions paint other pictures but I am staying on the side of science here…
Presaging football, and not getting into religious nor political territories, my basic instinct when I think of mankind developing is to think of and be drawn to water and the naked state.
I was going to talk about this incessantly for 2 weeks or more but as the weather in England is so bad, I am switching to talking about something slightly secretive , that goes on under cover, using a magical box…
I have discovered that in my Secret walled garden, there used to be a camera obscura. This for me is like finding the first human. What photographic invention and secret lay within my very own secret garden? The County records office held at Carlisle Castle turned up precious little on my patch. So it’s left to play tricks of light on my imagination.
Walking the glorious crumbling wall there is no sign of the ‘camera obscura’, but I am not sure what I am looking for…
The camera obscura (Latin for ‘dark room’) was the ancestor of the modern camera. The camera was actually a large room that would be entered by the user. Light entering a small hole in a darkened room produces an inverted image on the opposite wall. Used initially to view solar eclipses, by the seventeenth century the process was made portable by fitting a lens to one end of a box and using a sheet of glass at the opposite end to view the image. A mirror inserted inside at a 45 degree angle would reverse the image, giving the viewer corrected orientation.
Having read this I aim to rebuild or recreate the camera obscura somewhere within the walled garden. I might use sheets to create an enclosed space. I am not sure of the attraction at looking at the house and valley upside down but it may well be attractive. Perhaps it involves the viewer standing on one’s head, part of the ‘fun’.
THEHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY is of great relevance to English and French people because they perfected if not invented ‘photography’, partly because they were wealthy countries.
The nice thing about the Camera Obscura is that anyone can make it happen at almost no cost.
Wikipedia takes up the unfolding story of…
Photography as a useable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, the picture took eight hours to expose, so he went about trying to find a new process. Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development of the daguerreotype in 1839.
Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre’s invention, Talbot refined his process so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype process, now familiar as the “blueprint”. He was the first to use the terms “photography”, “negative” and “positive”. He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used to “fix” pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.
Many advances in photographic glass plates and printing were made in through the nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman developed the technology of film to replace photographic plates, leading to the technology used by film cameras today.
In actual fact not many people use film today – whereas everyone uses digital. I am still on film and I love the thrill of waiting to get the films back, and having the film (in my case a ‘positive transparency’) in my hand, holding it up to the light, projecting it. I feel in touch with my ancestors Niepce and the secretive Fox Talbot.
Back to the story, because we overlooked colour, which I use…
Color photography was explored beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
One of the early methods of taking color photos was to use three cameras. Each camera would have a color filter in front of the lens. This technique provides the photographer with the three basic channels required to recreate a color image in a darkroom or processing plant. Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii developed another technique, with three color plates taken in quick succession.
Practical application of the technique was held back by the very limited color response of early film; however, in the early 1900s, following the work of photo-chemists such as H. W. Vogel, emulsions with adequate sensitivity to green and red light at last became available.
The first color plate, Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 1907. It was based on a ‘screen-plate’ filter made of dyed dots of potato starch, and was the only color film on the market until German Agfa introduced the similar Agfacolor in 1932. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern (‘integrated tri-pack’) color film, Kodachrome, based on three colored emulsions. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa’s Agfacolor Neue. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process the color couplers in Agfacolor Neue were integral with the emulsion layers, which greatly simplified the film processing. Most modern color films, except Kodachrome, are based on the Agfacolor Neue technology. Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963.
Paul Simon with Art Garfunkel wrote a great tribute to Kodachrome… Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. who actually invented it were both accomplished musicians, related to famous musicians.
I am busy playing the piano in the hope that I discover something new in photography.
We learn that since time immemorial people have been noticing the effect of light on a surface. In a sense then photography was borne at the moment we first opened our eyes.
I always say when people start going on about photographic technique that it is all about light – you need light. Then you need the eye and then you need a box to capture it in.
I am sure that someone, well before ‘the inventor’ Schultz in 1724, had also looked upon a surface and noticed how it actually changed in composition and intensity – one only has to see how dirt darkens when rained upon. Schultz saw how the light actually changed something permanently, just as it can fade things left in a window.
My daughter, one and a half, has suddenly developed this thing about shadows. She was walking from the campsite to the Festival site – her first festival – her first time in the company of loads of people, when she suddenly stopped and kept pointing to something by her foot. It was the shadow of her foot.
She is since scared of the shadow that seemingly clings to her feet and echoes her move and can’t be shrugged off (a safe place might be in the Lake District as the cloud is sure to come across very soon and kill the harsh shadow).
Ava! is discovering something about her and the world beyond her. I have been reading up about shadows, because just as she was getting scared about them, I was having fun photographing them as a way of avoiding the detail of particular peoples faces.
But mostly I got into photography not to create silhouettes and shadows and blind spots, but to give detail to peoples faces and conditions, to throw light into the darkness, just as Lowry, a hero, denied photographic detail in his brushstrokes.
Photography is said to give a mirror-image of the subject.
In Japanese mythology, the mirror is significant. It is said to be the soul of a woman as a sword is to a samurai. A proverb says, “When the mirror is dim, the soul is unclean.” When the heart is free of evil thought and is clear, the mirror will reflect the purity of the soul. It’s like a conscience.
An ancient belief stated people or objects could be connected to their reflections. Put simply, when we look in the mirror (camera) we learn something about ourself. The mirror as with the camera can be our conscience.
The Japanese more than anyone, with their super-quality lenses and cameras have pushed the notion of the mirror-image to its limit.
The obsession of truth and beauty by a mirror’s reflection shows up in stories like Snow White and Narcissus… in some stories, the other side of the mirror gives the counter of a person, as the mirror reverses a reflection so figuratively the mirror can reverse a personality. Again, the camera can see through a subject to reveal a hidden truth and not the obvious truth of first sight. Certainly some photographs and perhaps these are portraits of people like the Richard Avedon series – you want to keep on looking at and you seem to be drawn into and even through the picture/face.
Just as it was an ancient belief that mirrors trapped a person’s soul, cameras do that today and it is often said of Arab peoples that they don’t like having their photograph ‘taken’ as if it steals something from them.
I like the way the photograph can capture the spirit of the place and the spirit of the moment – even a moment long gone. Imagination takes over. Tomorrow I return to the Glastonbury site where seemingly all of humanity waded in mud three weeks ago around the summer solstice and where I photographed certain people. They have recounted their stories to me since of how they came to be there and although they were complete strangers when I stopped them or bumped into them, these meetings and the subsequent photographs taken (the capturing of their souls) are to me legendary the very spots on which each was taken are ‘sacred’.
This is how people must feel when visiting Nazareth and viewing the place where Jesus was supposed to have been borne. And visiting Belsen to imagine where was the very spot where Ann Frank might have finally died and to imagine what was the final thought of the dying Ann, robbed of her power to pen. And battlegrounds must be like that for many, particularly relatives.
I return to Glastonbury with great hope – no one died here, it was humanity smiling smiling smiling through the miles and miles and miles and miles of mud – smiling, saying ‘we have come a long way that we can do this, we are along some path, this is out of the ordinary, we are connected at this time and place…
Learned people may talk about Shamens and ‘the healing’ and the Soul but in more simple terms I think they are referring to this Glastonbury shadow.
One day when she is older I will take Ava! back to that other festival, Cornbury, and stand her in the exact same place at where she first saw her shadow.
Indeed, I may make it a place of pilgrimage for the two of us.
On July 7th, in America, the father of modern photography, or at least in America, where photography is big and respected as an art form (they grew up with it – it was invented at the time America was being invented)... he has died.
If you know photography you will probably know the names of people he ‘fathered’ – Szarkowski championed Garry Winogrand (who took pictures of beautiful women in everyday places), Lee Friedlander (who stood behind a lampost or a tree stump to compose), Diane Arbus (who photographed freaks) ... and there were others.
What they had in common – and this should be interesting to those of you not interested – was that these photographers questioned the old social order to expose racism and alienation in mainstream society, and they looked again atwhat was valued in photography. Whether or not they liked the beautiful tones of an Ansel Adams mountain print and an Edward Weston nude (and they probably did) they nevertheless challenged the domination of the sharply focused print. They explored oblique framing, radical cropping and the use of the natural grain of the film, extreme close-ups and subject matter that ranged from the dispossessed to the freakish to the oddly normal in American society.
But it was not only the promotion of a young, radical group of photographers which established Szarkowski’s reputation as a curator and father figure, but his excitement at looking for a folk art, something TRULY American, on the back of the Second World War.
In the years and exhibitions that followed he took pride in placing one of the classic photographer’s photographs next to one plucked from any old collection taken by ‘you’. Provided that the picture was interesting.
“One does not,” he insisted, in an interview in Art in America, choose to write about photographers who illustrate one’s point of view. The process is almost the reverse: one’s point of view is formed by the work one chooses to write about, because it is challenging, mysterious, worthy of study, fun. One does not choose new friends because they exemplify virtues that one most admires; one chooses them because they are interestingly different than the friends one already has.
His belief was that “the basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the thing, you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window. And everything behind it has got to be organised as a space full of stuff, even if it’s only air.”
So remember this when you point the camera – when you tilt the mirror – when you angle yourself at the window frame to get a good view. It’s looking at you as much as you are looking through it.
I was asked in an interview why we particularly enjoy looking at photographs from the past…
All pictures are relations to and descendants of and understudies to family portraits on the mantlepiece. So we are looking at what our family, relations, friend’s family and relations look like and get up to, when we look at photographs. The reality shows play on this.
Old photographs have frozen time – new photographs do too – but the old photographs show something that is gone forever and can’t be recreated.
This concludes my period blogging about photography. I now want to go in search of something not so far removed from the idea of photography as family and as home and as rooted within with feelings for the past. For the coming weeks I am going in search of “Songs In The Backyard” (a chapter in my forthcoming music book) looking for the inspiration, lyrical qualities and vision behind the homespun song.
When one looks at a photograph, one can imagine all sorts of things. There is or was ‘a truth’, a set of circumstances in which the photo came to be made – but you may not know them, so you can guess, fantasise, install your own readings over the top.
The same goes for a song – even more so, because it’s less anchored to something you can touch and you are likely to hear it in many different situations when free to look up and at things around you.
I want in the next few weeks to go over a few songs that have caught my ear and imagination, and try and come up with some home truths about what they mean, even if I am making some of it up to suit me.
Let’s start with Ian Hunter and “Irene Wilde”.
One rainy day on holiday me and Bud listened to this song 63 times, repeatedly. Yes, for nearly four hours. And still it was raining on England’s south coast. I have listened to the song hundreds of times more, alone, and with friends – and even live in concert with Ian Hunter but metres from me, within touching distance.
As much as I allowed myself a hero, he was my hero when I grew up. He was a boy in the back bedroom, a backyard kind of hero. He talked and sung about a sort of repression – with him it wasn’t the slavery of a negro in the plantation fields finding a voice, although he liked ‘black music, it was rather as the son of a policeman growing up in a backwater town on the borders of England and Wales. Shrewsbury.
The jolly copper father of his did not like his song or much song of any sort and he made out he didn’t even like his son Ian.
Ian, with his mop of curly hair, awkward eyes and awkward confidence grew into the would-be rock singer and then the rock singer actual, hiding under a mass of curly hair, and shades. Whilst Roy Orbison and Ray Charles had more reason to wear black shades, Ian Hunter became synonomous with shades when emerging with Mott The Hoople, riding high in the charts with “All The Young Dudes (Carry the News)”, “All The Way From Memphis” as well as “Roll Away The Stone”.
Back then, a schoolboy in Shrewsbury, moved around by his policeman father’s jobs, Ian Hunter Patterson (his real name) found himself at the bus station (it is still there today, under the big town clock) waiting and waiting on a girl. More than once in his life he journeyed to and from Barker Street Bus Station whilst living in outlying Shropshire towns his father had been stationed at. Ian attended the town’s Grammar School, through most of these changes of address. The bus shelter became a constant, a dependable. There came a time when he was living within a stone’s throw of the bus shelter (more splendid to me even than the bus shelter of the Beatles Penny Lane) at Swan Hill. Indeed 23A Swan Hill, which became another of his best songs over 40 years on from his leaving there. Then he had no need to catch a bus from or to it.
But…
At 16 he met and doted on “Irene Wilde” whom he recognises later to have been barely more than a child. He had not a hope with her – actually that’s all he had. And a note, and another note – notes from an older boy for whom Ian ran errands. Errands to take the notes to Irene, as a go-between. But it gave him purpose and a chance to gaze upon if not speak to at close quarters this most beautiful of species.
Once he wrote a message from himself to her on his hand in the hope that she might see it when handed the note from the other. But it was upside down. He had written it to himself! I made this bit up, but it’s in the spirit of the song.
She was the measure of his failure by which he would make himself famous.
Recently I had the chance to walk my hero around his Shrewsbury, which he is still uncomfortable about, and could have had him on those very same benches on which sat he and Irene decades before. But I did not want to see him sat there now. I wanted it all still to be in the imagination, brought on by the song.
So I stood him up by the wall, near the railway station and the prison and took his picture there instead. Indeed for a moment he gazed upon me as he would have Irene Wilde all those years ago – with suspicion and hurt and curiosity – that he might get let down or by the evidence of the photo emerging, let himself down. He might look crap. But he had those shades to hide behind, and still the curls of hair. And something of the stance – he looked fine.
In the song he sings of unspeakable jealousy at having to watch Irene fall for another and his feeling of being ‘not good enough’. He speaks of the retaliation – his leaving a town not quite big enough for his own ambition and he being able to return all those years later to ask of what became of her when most would only know of what became of him, Shrewsbury’s Ian Hunter (Patterson) now famous.
“Wilde as your name I soon left that country town, I’ve been around , seen some fame, seen some ups and seen some downs”.
Dragged into the song is the put-down from the elders, rather his father than his mother, which made him more resolute when mixed with the put down of Irene’s disinterest “you ain’t no chain, you’re just a link, which made me think, I’m gonna be somebody someday”.
And that’s the sum of the song. I sit there on Barker Street now and imagine it all.
“Irene Wilde” can be found on Ian Hunter’s second solo album “All American Alien Boy”, and in various live versions and on compilations of the best of. But does not appear to be downloadable off the web. The photographs I took of him and Shrewsbury can be found on this my very own web under Music and then Songs In The Backyard, mixed with some Elton John stuff! Yes, Ian from Shrewsbury did get to be somebody someday, rubbing shoulders with the stars, and groupies. Here he is on You Tube in what looks like a Dutch Disco heaven…
Imagine my dismay when, years later, I got to meet my hero and he invited my wife to come up on stage during the bit where he “asks the girl out” at his gig at Newcastle. Come the night we argued and she didn’t come. I coul see Ian looking for her in the front row come the song – he had requested she be there to pull up. In the end he plumped for an ugly gruff roadie who thought he was adjusting Ian’s foot pedal. I sat in the balcony head in hand.
Catch him live in England this autumn : 20 Oct 07 Glasgow Scotland Fruitmarket 21 Oct 07 Newcastle England Carling Academy 23 Oct 07 Oxford England The Zodiac 24 Oct 07 Liverpool England Carling Academy 25 Oct 07 Bilston England The Robin 26 Oct 07 Southampton England The Brook 28 Oct 07 London England Sheperds Bush Empire 30 Oct 07 Brighton England Komedia
Take another song. to imagine over. This one is about a girl “as fine as a beeswing”.
And there is a place, Beeswing, in Dumfrieshire.
Let’s imagine, for the sake of my Songs in The Backyard story-telling, that Richard Thompson had been there once and thought it the most unlikely place from which his heroine could have come.
Or indeed the most likely place, since his songs are ‘eclectic’, unusual and heartfelt – from within.
Let’s imagine Richard Thompson had some roots in Dumfrieshire. An aunt or uncle or even a grandparent or parent who came from Beeswing. He would tried to have develop that feeling of roots and association by imagining a great love there. In the song the heroine, chased by the man til he gives up, travels far and wide and possibly to destruction when so very far from her starting place – the place that gave her such flight.
In my heading to Dalbeattie for a football match and to view again the graffiti I had taken in the town’s team’s mainstand some 10 years before carved out of the wood high up there at the back, smaller than I remembered, yet still there “Jonathan Paynter had Nicola Patterson Up Against The goalposts”, I paused at Beeswing and took some photographs.
I took one of the bus shelter which has a mural inside and it shows a jockey riding what could be a winner past the sign that says “Beeswing”. And there are blue skies and fluffy clouds above. In actual fact inside the shelter hanging on a peg is a macintosh, as if for anyone to put on when waiting should the rain be lashing in the open front.
Across the road precisely, without cover, is a bench with all the greenery bursting through the slats and gaps. I photographed this also and thought of someone travelling – or about to travel, or maybe never travelling, purposely missing the bus on the other side of the road.
Nearby, indeed over the wall was my third photo – the door entrance to the church that doubles as a community centre (I think). Possible venue for a female singer ? In actual fact yes – I read in a leaflet that a very beautiful fine female singer had played here recently as part of the Dumfrieshire Festival.
It is rumoured the heroine inspiration of Richard Thompson’s “Beewsing” was a singer herself.
The fourth picture I took in Beeswing-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, was of the caravan parked slap bang beneath the church’s main window. Whether it is or was lived in, is left to the imagination.
I came through again at the weekend and saw a girl I thought hitch-hiking – perhaps like us on her way to the Wickerman Festival? No, in actual fact she had just got off the bus and was going home. Back to Beeswing.
Van Morrison moved back home, to a small terraced house with his parents, to where he had grown up, having already tasted some musical stardom abroad.
As a boy and as a teenager, perhaps outside of his musical beliefs and loves – and certainly all the time leading up to his going abroad, he was not so sure of himself.
The fact that he was back, perhaps he was not so sure of himself – again. Still, during this ‘second’ stay I like to imagine Van The almost Man got the vision a second time, committed to paper and to verse and to song – and to a song sung a million times by countless semi-drunks and romantics… the vision of the Brown Eyed Girl.
In fact the hit of a song we hear on the radio was his second stab at it. The more successful version.
Anyway, whilst I was tracking down George Best (footballer) growing up in Northern Ireland, a short walk across Belfast’s south-east side from Van’s street (they were also born within months of one another in 1945), I visualized what Van saw in summonsing up “Brown Eyed Girl”. He recalled, indeed summonsed up again all those first-time feelings when love and first kisses and glances – and before that even being in the presence of a girl with some shape and look in her cheeks (and eyes) – was new.
Twenty something he strolled through Orangefield past the school gates and “the stadium” (an enclosed oval bicycle track with banking at either end), saw the thickets of trees where schoolchildren had lay, had cut through; the graffiti and messages on the benches and on the circular metal railings protecting sapling trees. He saw school uniforms and uniforms pulled slightly to one side, off centre. He saw the mist of an early morning and damp everywhere – this was Belfast. There beside the school was the Redwood Tree with its comforting arms (he later wrote about). And over up there, above all these trees, on the incline, near Reverend Paisley’s house of thunder, tree-tops signifying Cypress Avenue.
All songs of “Astral Weeks”, the album that shot him to fame, and so too Brown Eyed Girl, are borne of these overlays of childhood feelings and adult rationale (power to verse) – like feelings drawn from the man and boy both.
And George Best, whose genius is also mused upon by just about everyone, not in the least the many women who have waited on him, cited “Brown Eyed Girl” as his favourite ever song.
So unsuccessful is John Otway – he makes a living now out of being a glorious failure and a laugh and appears in the Circus tent at Glastonbury, I can’t find his lyrics nor downloadable “Josephine” anywhere on the web.
He was born near me. I saw him in the market square at Aylesbury. Heard the legend of him and girls and horses up Princes Risborough way.
Then one day more recently I heard he was coming my new way, well not far away – to Alston Village Hall, up there in the hills and wilds of Cumbria. Right sort of place for him. Indeed John Otway claims to be some sort of Lord Otway with a ‘seat’ in nearby Sedbergh area somewhere.
There he was, backstage of the hall, waiting to go on. Mary The Faerie in support. I bought Mary a pizza because she looked like she needed it – her set was terrible.
John was next and larking about to a packed hall. Alston loves music and being different. He was balancing on chairs on chairs crashing to the floor with microphone, remarkably uninjured.
Something was lacking in the performance – the serious, beautiful side. During his interval I asked him to play “Josephine”. He looked at me, slightly surprised. I started reciting even singing the lyrics – he joined in. Okay he said, Okay, I will sing it.
I heard he did sing it, beautifully. But I was gone before he did, on a 400 mile drive south to get married.
JOSEPHINE by JOHNOTWAY
“Get ready for the festival
for the festival is only once a year
raise your glasses in the air
and fill the barrels full of beer
Mother Nature weave a wand
Over this lady’s hand
May her reign mean a good year
On our land
And the legend Josephine
The blonde blue-eyed May Queen
Spent the night
In the arms of her lover
The day before the crown
Gifts and flowers by her bed
Tired eyes and sleepy head
Stay warm til the morning calls you in.
And the crowd scream Josephine
Our May Day eyes are on you
And the people sing and drown in wine
To crown the Queen of springtime…
…It’s a long song (seven minutes)
I will try and find out more about who was Josephine. And if there is a Josephine alive and well today.
John may play it live for you amidst the tomfoolery if you sneak round the back of the stage iron his shirt for him and remind him how it goes. Catch him at, amongst other places Fri 3rd August Chalgrove Festival Oxon 01993 201327 Sun 5th Rhythm Festival (OTWAY & BARRETT) Fri 10th Rattlinghope Farmer Phil’s Festival (Band) Sat 11th Blackpool Rebellion Festival Sun 19th Cambridge Rock Festival (Band) Sun 26th Midsomer Norton Music Festival Mon 27th – 1st Sept Arundel Festival (Six Nights)
