Archive for September, 2010

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

“Hands Off Our Eggs, Benedict!”

Here’s ITN footage of yours truly, about 21 seconds in, grey jacketed, close-cropped and sporting the serial killer reactolite glasses, mouthing along, if not actually singing aloud, the anti-Pope chants. Under a blue sky marred only by the waspish presence of three static police helicopters keeping watch above Trafalgar Square, some 10,000 of us marched against Ratzinger’s visit, his church’s policy on condoms particularly in AIDS-stricken countries, his attitude to gays, ordination of female priests, his more relaxed attitude towards holocaust deniers in the clergy, and, of course, the cover-up of countless cases of child abuse committed over decades in which he himself was arguably complicit, in order to protect what he laughingly regards as the “good name” of the church.

There were widespread fears in some quarters that the Pope’s visit to the UK would not go well. My Mother, a practising Catholic, told me that in her diocese, three coaches had been ordered to take pilgrims down to London for the Hyde Park mass but with just a fortnight to go, had only managed to sell three seats. Even her friend, the redoubtable Sister Nora, whose commitment to Catholicism can be taken as a byword, snorted that she would “certainly not” be making the trip herself, as she thought the Pope’s visit represented a shocking expense in times of economic hardship. Others were concerned that what loyal Papists still insist on describing as a media campaign full of “distortions and exaggerations” (as the Pope’s own brother had it), or to put it another way, the widespread and prolonged incidence of child rape on the Pope’s watch, might deter others from coming along to drink in his piety.

As it was, although numbers were down, the Pope’s visit could be said to have gone well. This was less due to the Pope and his people himself, preceded by aide Cardinal Walter Kasper, who described Britain as a “Third World country” in which “aggressive atheism” threatened to hold sway. The Vatican hasten to clarify that Kasper wasn’t conflating atheism with the Third World but that his remarks were an allusion to Britain’s multicultural society. No offence there, then. As for the Pope himself, all got up like a Christmas tree and sporting that rictus, senile leer of his, he wasn’t exactly putting his back into the charm offensive either. One imagined Mr Burns out of The Simpsons attempting to do a Jesus and turn over the tables in the temple. In his reedy, Teutonic monotone, he berated Britain for its culture of “aggressive secularism” (always with the aggressive – but more of that later), our celebrity-fixated culture, the apparent danger that we were on the point of doing away with Christmas and the greater danger that in turning our back on God we were scrunching along the gravel secular road to full-blown Naziism.

The visit went well not because of any of this. It went well because the Pope benefited from wall to wall media coverage, a pliant, mainstream media who go into a quiet, prolonged lather over any event they can train their cameras 24/7 upon, and goggling crowds who gawped and mobile phone snapped at the Pope as if he were Martine McCutcheon turning on the Christmas lights in Oxford Street. (If I had been the Pope, I really wouldn’t have had such a downer on UK celebrity culture – he has, after all, been a beneficiary of it these last few days). Corrections of the Pope’s factual errors were marginalised in mainstream coverage. As a former member of a Nazi organisation, he ought to have known better than most that the Nazis were anti-atheist and pro-God and Christianity. Yes, priests were persecuted, but only for speaking out against the church, not for practising their faith. As for the threat of Christmas being cancelled, it seemed that this eminent theologian and intellectual, master of the diamond sharp nuance, was simply parroting the annual, evidenceless scare stories trotted out by the Daily Express and taken them at face value. Still, I suppose in the Pope’s line of work, having a strong evidence base for your utterances is no big concern.

As for the Pope’s apologies, they were less than adequate – though in fairness, were he to apologies to the extent fully required, he’d be laying the Vatican open to countless lawsuits. And so, he continues to fail to address the point. It is not the abusers for whom he should apologise – abusers come from all walks of life. It is that the crimes of these abusers were covered up, treated as internal matters by an institution that still, in its heart of hearts, believes itself to be above the law, a state unto itself. Suppose this had been the Post Office. If it turned out that postmen had been guilty of serial rape against children but instead of being reported to the police, had simply had their rounds changed, or their crimes regarded as an internal Post Office matter, and when the police had taken it upon themselves to investigate the PO on the strong suspicion of concealing evidence, the Post Master General had openly protested at their interference, describing their actions as “surprising and deplorable”? (The Pope’s reaction to police raids on ecclesiastical premises in Belgium, following the exposure of the former Bishop of Bruges as guilty of child rape and incest).

Still, none of this was probed too sharply by a media paralysed by the traditional reverence afforded to churchfolk. It was presumably out of a similar reverence that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury extended a civil, ecumenical hand to Ratzinger, despite his having openly courted members of the C of E who felt their own lot were becoming too liberal to come join the ever reliably, ever-illiberal Catholic Church.

There were, however, the dissenters, led by those described as the “usual suspects” – Peter Tatchell and Richard Dawkins. It has been impossible to conceal the level of antipathy towards the Pope and his visit. However, it’s the wont of those who dissent against the dissenters not to address and refute the content of their arguments but to caricature the supposed temper in which they make them. The anti-Pope brigade are described in idly pejorative terms as invariably hotheaded. So, to grab a few phrases that have stuck from recent coverage at random, we have the “excitable” Richard Dawkins, the “frenzy” of the secularists who are “spitting venom” (The Daily Mail). “jumping up and down” in anger, and, of course, making their points in a manner that is markedly “aggressive”, as the Vatican complains, or elsewhere, “aggressive”, or, as they further describe the secularists, “aggressive”.

Why these ad hominem assaults? Often accompanied by the baseless and meaningless counter-accusation that the “new atheists” are somehow the mirror image of the “religious fundamentalists” they purport to describe? (Fair point, of course – the recent spate of atheist suicide bombers, plus the numerous, arbitrary strictures placed by atheists concerning how atheist women should dress and what they should, or should not be allowed to do with their own bodies are all proof of that). I suspect it’s because the established church is still in something of a daze at the assault they themselves have suffered at the so-called new atheists – they feel they’ve been knocked off the plinth of respectfulness traditionally afforded to the religious, by their own flocks and non-believers alike, one which has successfully hitherto inhibited unseemly inquiry into their internal goings on, their tax status, their grip on the UK educational system and so forth. This “atheists are as bad as fundamentalists” nonsense is a puerile, reflexive taunt, a provisional response mustered in a confused daze. The best they can come up with, sorrily.

I attended the demonstration on September 18 in London in protest at the Pope’s visit, as he said mass in Hyde Park, adding my body to the thousands who marched down Piccadilly and into Downing Street. I managed to work my way to the front, as it was all getting a little bit “Blessed are the cheesemakers” 50 yards from the truck where the demo leaders and speakers were doing their bit on the megaphone. There were chants. It was voluble. There was anger. There was also a great deal of laughter. I can confidently report that the mood was not “frenzied”, that if anything the demonstrators were under-excitable and there was markedly little in the way of jumping up and down – a slow, measured tread in the main. In the past, I’ve always shied away from demos because I’m not one of life’s natural chanters and I always fear that I’m going to be marching alongside the idiot fringe of whatever cause I might be espousing.

These, I now realise, are truly dumb reasons not to go on demos. Certainly would have been in this case. The crowd I marched with were a thoughtful, good humoured reflective lot. Granted, there was someone carrying a banner depicting the Pope as an out and out Nazi, which was eventually taken down when demonstrators themselves complained to the police about it. The demo leaders tried to get sing songs going but found us hard work, especially early on. We made the effort – a demonstrate should either be conducted in utter, reproachful silence or be a noisy affair, I reckon, no equivocal murmuring – but most of us found the call-and-response thing a bit unnatural – more than one person recalled the Life Of Brian scene and the “Yes! We are all individuals!” chant – and we took some warming up.

The scripted chants themselves were a mixed bunch, some of which went down less well than others, one or two of which even the demo leaders themselves baulked at; “Nah, that doesn’t make any sense!” said one, following a chant which, well, didn’t make any sense. Even as we joined in, or at least mouthed along, we were critiquing some of the wording. “Cut the Pope, not our services!” ran one. But what does “Cut the Pope” mean? A small incision in his right arm? A headwound? Then there was, “What do we want? A secular Europe!” Well, we did want a secular Europe, but as one or two wondered aloud, why stop there? It seemed to invite the follow up chant, “But keep Asia as it is as far as we’re concerned.” Why not a secular world? And, despite Peter Tatchell’s proper insistence that this demo included Catholics as well as non Catholics, the chant “Good Catholics are being let down” met with a less than hearty chorus, even the vague murmur of, well, they could save themselves a hell of a lot of kneeling and needless guilt by getting the hell out of the church.

However, the immortal “Get your rosaries off my ovaries” and “hands off my eggs, Benedict!” quite properly raised a hearty laugh, while the simple exhortation to “Arrest the Pope” was most lustily echoed, albeit laced with the recognition that it was a remote contingency.

Curious, to me, was the attitude of those who lined the streets to watch us file past, occasionally filming us as we went. I felt the need, almost a sarcastic one, to film them back. On the one hand, it is flattering to be the object of that sort of attention, on the other it was as if we were part of a circus parade to some. There was little hostility, apart from a grey suited claque of idiots braying from the safe distance of a pub door and one poor soul shaking a rosary at us as we went past. I thought I divined a gamut of emotions in the onlookers, ranging from consternation to amusement, from idle curiosity to sympathy, though largely a sort of bland, blank indifference. I wondered why they didn’t join in. Was our protest outlandishly unreasonable? Did they imagine that joining a demo requires some complex signing up procedure, days of pre-arrangement, as opposed to simply turning up? That it is the sort of thing other people do and that the issues we raised were of concern to other people? That sort of dead-eyed, inactive curiosity is a hard thing to pierce. Sad, because it keeps demos down to the just 10,000 and leaves Popes unmolested. Sad, also, because a demo is the wonderful, communal antidote to the lonely cry unheard, a point most poignantly made by Sue Cox, who in a speech described herself as a child, abused at the age of 10 but told by her Mother that it was all part of God’s plan. If she had been told then that some 50 years on she would be able to speak out about what had happened to her, her infant self, abandoned and alone, would never have believed it. The non-believers could believe today.

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Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Jimi Hendrix, 40 years on

(Originally delivered as a talk at the Gavin Martin-organised Talking Music Revolutions event at the Three Blind Mice bar, London, 2010)

I didn’t experience the 60s, I never had any idea who he was until the mid-70s but I finally got into Jimi Hendrix in 1978 when I came of age as a music lover. Polydor released a double album called The Essential Jimi Hendrix. Of course, one’s mid teen listening epiphanies tend to be lifelong – it was about this time I also first got into Can, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, Karlheinz Stockhausen among others and they’ve remained prominent on the mountainscape of my listening ever since. But maybe it was a good time to be introduced to Jimi Hendrix, a time when you could really begin to see him for the many things he truly was. In their own era, artists like Hendrix, much like The Sex Pistols later on, tend to be dismissed in a very cool blasé manner by even rock experts as gimmicky, flashes in the pan, seem it all before, rather than regarded with shock and awe. But by 1978, Hendrix was a legend. Clearly, he’d raised the volume and temperature of rock music forever, to the extent that no one could really take, say, the Caucasian twang of a George Harrison quite so seriously again. In Blakean terms, he represented rock’s transition from innocence to Experience. Punk had just happened but the likes of The Clash and The Damned sounded like so many firecrackers by comparison with the thermonuclear energy of a “Purple Haze” or a “House Burning Down”. In fact,  my Hendrix obsession delayed for two years my appreciation of the seismic events of my own teenage years, punk and post-punk.

Because punk had been seismic. It exploded old certainties, it brought the whole idea of progressive, mainly white rock as the only road ahead down from its plinth. In deprivileging white rock, it opened up a new cultural multiverse and incidentally, opened my eyes at least to the transcendent diversity of Jimi Hendrix – the way he touched, and was touched by, not just heavy rock, but soul, jazz, psychedelia, blues, electronics, funk even the nascent ambient genre. They all had a piece of him and he a piece of them.

Of course, Hendrix, like no other solo artist in rock, represented physical and sexual potency. He was way, way more than a cock rocker but he casually tossed off the index for cock rock. He was more than just a guitarist, but someone who worked in the medium of electricity, in his amps, in his sound board, and in the air, someone who had the capacity to bring down thunder and lightning from the sky. In some ways, his apotheosis was Electric Ladyland, for me still, the heaviest and greatest rock album ever recorded and ever likely to be recorded. The apotheosis of that apotheosis was “Voodoo Chile”, an 800 lb monster demonstration of wizardry, brimstone and infinite black capability, released in 1968 against a blazing background of conflagration and uprising, and also the Olympic year in which Tommie Smith and John Carlos delivered the black power salute and in which the long jumper Bob Beamon practically jumped out of the pit to record an unthinkable world record of 8 metres 90 centimetres. To think of Hendrix is to think of rock’s closest approximation to a superhuman, someone apparently capable of physically altering the atmosphere, the environment, the times.

And yet, the truth is, Hendrix as a human being was not a strong man. He was slight, physically unassuming, diffident in interviews. He wasn’t a wild man but passive, his destiny often in the hands of others, including his management. He cowed beneath the authority of his disciplinarian father, and acquired from his early childhood a lifelong habit of not saying “boo” to a goose. “A fish wouldn’t get into trouble if it kept its mouth shut,” he once said. He wasn’t a natural rebel – although seen as a key provider to the soundtrack of anti—Vietnam protest, as an ex-paratrooper he was actually pro-US involvement in the war until well into the 60s, and even provided music for an army recruitment campaign. What’s more, when the Black Panthers came knocking at his door, looking him to press him into service for their cause, he acquiesced but in a very qualified, reluctant and uncomfortable manner. He is regarded as a pioneer in his times, trailing clouds of glory and imitators but in fact felt profoundly lonely, and out of kilter with the 60s, the decade he in some ways is supposed to symbolise, but of course, in reality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. His sense of temporal displacement is best expressed on “I Don’t Live Today”, as a moan comes rearing out of the mix, “There ain’t no life nowhere.” And yet, all of this “weakness” somehow came to be Hendrix’s true strength.

Hendrix didn’t rise like a natural force through the ranks. He was 24 when he first made his impact proper, considered a great rock’n'roll age in the 1960s. Only a couple of years earlier, Melody Maker had run an editorial pondering the question, “Ringo Starr – too old to rock at 24?” Although impelled by his own curiosity to depart the Chitlin’ circuit, and providing backline accompaniment for touring soul bands like The Isley Brothers, there was no doubt that in America, that that was deemed his place. He was salvaged from this fate by the entrepreneurialism of Chas Chandler, and the dubious expedient of launching Hendrix in London, his genuine talents showcased under the pretext of frazzle-haired, Wild Man Of Borneo-type pop oddity. A stronger man might have resisted being paraded for the zoological fascination of a novelty-hungry, swinging London, still in the grip of appalling, racist assumptions about African-American men and their uncivilised proclivities. But Hendrix acquiesced, Hendrix went on tour with the Monkees, went along with the fabricated story of his being dropped at the behest of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Hendrix is one of the most identifiable figures in the rock firmament. Yet his own sense of identity in 1967, in 1968 was elusive and fluid, and he himself suffered a profound and inherited sense of displacement, coming as he did from a mixed ethnic background whose make up was Cherokee on his Mother’s side. What was he, this crossover figure at this time? African American? Native American? British American? American? A lack of certainly in his roots saw him casting and hankering about in all directions, in both past and future, flailing in an existential quandary. He was everywhere because he was nowhere.

By 1968, a sense of the general had overtaken the personal, and Hendrix was subsumed into a wider context. One of my favourite stories about Hendrix, which even it’s apocryphal is too true to be really untrue, concerns the day Martin Luther King died. He found himself in a bar. A group of white rednecks were laughing at the screen, loudly toasting Dr King’s assassination, perhaps looking to provoke a reaction out of Jimi. And a stronger man might have invited these guys outside. But Hendrix said nothing. Instead, later that evening, in concert, he offered a dedication to “a friend of mine” and unleashed a magnificently lachrymose improvised blues jam, an acid rainstorm of angry lamentation which no one who heard it could ever forget and which, sadly, no one had the presence of mind to bootleg.

This story, for me, speaks a great deal about Hendrix. Passive by nature, he absorbed, he internalised, in this instance as a black man individually but as black people had been forced to collectively. Rather than hit back or make some assertive show of manhood, he sublimated his feelings and, allowing them to sink into the prismatic, unfathomable depths and processes of his talent, returned to the surface with something far more powerful and stirring and harrowing than any reflexive show of angry agitation could ever have hoped to produce.

There are many Hendrixes – the bluesman on “Hear My Train A’ Comin’” summoning forth a coded message of civil rights in tandem with Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”, the jazz pioneer, who helped set electric Miles on his way, on a similar journey of curiosity and profound loneliness. Hendrix the funkster, retaining some of the Isleys’s spirit and inspiring that group’s 70s funk/rock renaissance. But this soundtrack here, now, is perhaps my own, favourite Hendrix, imagining escape from a broken world to which ultimately he doesn’t belong or to which he is made to feel he does not belong, descending into deeper shades of turquoise into an aqua-Utopia of his own imagining, straining every piece of technology available in 1968 to its utmost, flying around the soundboard in tandem with his sound engineer Eddie Kramer. He’s part of a tradition of what’s been termed Afro-Futurists, who include names as divergent as Sun Ra, A Guy Called Gerald and Asian Dub Foundation, who chafe at the benign contentment in the here and now, who are deeply impatient at the dominance of conservatism and especially nostalgia in rock, having no reason themselves as black people to feel very much affection for past times at all. It’s escapism, but of the most meaningful sort. Sublimation, truly sublime.

When Hendrix did depart from this world in 1970, there was, of course, a shared sense of tragedy. Melody Maker’s headline that week spoke for many when it said, “Coliseum To Reform”. Actually, I think he died at an inconvenient point in the week, music press deadlines-wise, so perhaps . . . I suppose, then and now you feel the lose more keenly because unlike a great many rock’n'roll deaths, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, you didn’t feel that here was a man in bloated decline or bent on a death wish. His death was a terrible accident, one of those terrible things. It’s also led to speculation as to what he might have done next. People have talked of him collaborating with various people, including Miles Davis or Stevie Wonder, or going on a jazz odyssey, or even forming his own big band to help realise his Aquarian visions. Others say he was a burnt out case. I personally feel he’d gone so far and covered so much ground that while his talent was undiminished, he’d left himself very little to do, few places left to go. I regard his as a potential fulfilled, and his early death as convenient in an awful way, preserving him in his youth and preserving us from his iconic decline.

But what of his legacy? Occasionally, this has been spoken of in rather simple terms, Initially, he was seen as merely the Godfather of white guitar virtuosity, with the likes of Robin Trower regarded as his inheritors – or even as the inaugurator of heavy metal. Later, he was credited with a revival of black rock, and even, God preserve us, for having paved the way for Lenny Kravitz. But truth be told, Living Colour and a handful of others apart, there hasn’t been a whole lot of black rock and I don’t particularly think it should register as any particular failure that that floodgate hasn’t exactly opened. Rather than draw such straight lines between blackness and rockness, I prefer to find shards of Hendrix and his roomful of mirrors scattered across the spectrum, across rock time and space, in Public Image Ltd, in James “Blood” Ulmer, in My Bloody Valentine, in Brian Eno and The Orb, in minimal Techno, or in those countless many who use electronics as a sound palette – a myriad range of reference points, reflecting the myriad multiverse that, despite his popular image, is Hendrix’s true bequest.

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